Researching the “Black-Robed Regiment”
September 23rd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
I would normally post an essay today, but I am taking more time. I’m looking into Glenn Beck’s troop of pastors, and I want the piece to be, as they say, fair and balanced. Look for it next week, and thanks for your patience.
The Father Who Went to Jail
October 30th, 2008 § 4 Comments
Sermon audio (10-26-08): Aggression Against Christ In You
Last week, I received an email with a video claiming that a Massachusetts man went to jail for protesting pro-gay material that his son was given in public kindergarten. The video was produced by the Family Research Council (FRC), and was sent up and down California by the American Family Association (AFA). It interested me because of the defiant beggar we are studying at our church these days (audio above).
Let’s score it.
First, I’ll make a distinction. I am discussing the way this story is told by the video’s producers, the FRC. The Parkers, the couple featured in the video, will have said many things in the process of making it, only a few of which the producers kept in the presentation. So I am focused on the decisions made by the producers, and by those who distributed the video.
Start with the email that went out from the AFA. The subject line was, “A father goes to jail to protect his son.” That was written to be scary. The implicit claim is that if one father is arrested then others will be too. The explicit claim is that the father was arrested was “to protect his son.” If those claims are true, then the subject line is scary for a good reason. If not …
Move to the video’s music. The sad and scary sound of the introductory music sets an ominous atmosphere for the story. It’s a not very subtle technique that lowers the video’s tone to that of a tabloid piece or a negative political ad.
The narration of the story is calm. For the beginning, the producers seem to have made the sensible decision to let the facts of what the Parkers’ son encountered speak for themselves. He was given a book making a positive portrayal of a homosexual household. The producers show the Parkers expressing shock that they were not informed about this book in advance, but their point of view comes across without melodrama.
So far, while I am bothered by the tabloid gimmick telling me what to feel, the video lays out its case in a defensible way. It asserts that if same-sex marriage is legal then teaching about it will come in public schools, regardless of parents’ views. This is a reasonable assertion, and the tone and content of the video up to this point are consistent with it.
But the story abruptly lurches toward a shocker ending, as the subject line of the email and the tabloid gimmick announced it would do. Mr. Parker demanded an assurance from a school administrator that he would be notified before any more teaching about homosexuality, adding that until he received such an assurance he would not leave the school.
The producers show Mr. Parker saying that he was arrested, and they juxtapose comments from Mr. and Mrs. Parker making the clear assertion that he was arrested for demanding his parental rights. The producers show Mr. Parker describing the small filthy cell, and they show him breaking down. Then they switch to a voice-over of Mr. Parker giving a call to arms.
The video, in other words, tips from a reasonable assertion to a shocking one, an assertion that totalitarians run Massachusetts. If indeed a school administrator had Mr. Parker arrested for demanding parental rights — for using his rights to free speech – then we have a clear case of tyranny.
So what about that claim?
Here is the Boston Globe story on the incident. “David Parker was arrested for trespassing … when he refused to leave the building until school officials promised to give him prior notification of their use of books that include homosexual characters.” Arrested for trespassing.
Contrast the story on WorldNetDaily. “The dispute grabbed headlines when Parker, on April 27, 2005, was arrested and thrown in jail by school officials over his insistence on being notified regarding his son in kindergarten being taught about homosexual relationships by adults.” Thrown in jail because of the gay agenda.
You’re the administrator. The guy in your office escalates a disagreement by saying that he will not leave the facility until you give him what he demands. At this moment, what’s the issue? And what’s your decision? In an era of random school violence that has been the subject of planning and training at all levels for at least a decade, your decision is open-and-shut. He does not have the right to make that threat.
The score is: Boston Globe – 1, FRC/AFA/WND – 0. Whatever value the video might’ve had in warning Californians about the probable consequences of the failure of Prop 8 is undermined by the producers’ fatal overreach. This was not a case of state aggression, but of civil disobedience. If you are a victim of state aggression, you get thrown in jail against your will. If you protest through civil disobedience, you have announced that going to jail is your intention.
Mr. Parker may make this clear when he speaks without producers editing his statements. (He comes close to doing so at one point in the video itself.) What dismays me about this video is the willingness of the producers and the activists to exploit such an incident for no other purpose than fear-mongering.
When did Christian leaders decide that propaganda was okay?
Tough Questions 2008: Do Evangelicals Portray Jesus Accurately?
September 18th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Sermon audio: Do Evangelicals Portray Jesus Accurately?
This question from the community invites me to do what some believe I do best: criticize my own subculture. Of course, I will answer, “Evangelicals often do not portray Jesus accurately.” And, of course, I will try to specify which evangelical qualities are misleading. By merely asking this question, someone has presumed a negative answer.
There is a larger issue. What attitude should we have toward the deepening problems of evangelical churches?
The criticisms from emergents that American evangelicals are Christianized consumers, that they lack authentic community, that their worship is stilted, and that they are not on the side of the poor all have merit. The doctrinal criticisms from the reformed movement (MacArthur, Piper, et al.) rightly indict the lack of biblical integrity among many evangelicals. Even the criticisms that the church growth movement has made over the past thirty years — that churches are not reaching non-Christians — are accurate. (The criticisms just happen to be accurate of the church growth movement itself, as well.)
Put all of these criticisms together, and the picture is dire. A movement that is not growing, not intellectually coherent, and not engaged with other cultures is a movement near death.
James Stockdale, one of the most famous American POWs in North Vietnam, has been used as an example of how to survive dire situations by business author Jim Collins. (The book is Good To Great.) What kind of man did not survive the POW experience? Stockdale said the optimist, the man who was sure he’d be home by Christmas, but whose steadily retreating target dates for release were never kept. The positive thinkers died.
The survivors, said Stockdale, had two things. They had faith that they would survive, and discipline to confront the brutal facts of their environment. Collins tagged this the “Stockdale paradox,” the irony that unstinting honesty about dire situations can actually bolster the faith one needs to survive.
I want to see evangelicals eschew optimism about their predicament.
Let’s take, as an example, their recent explosion of support for Gov. Sarah Palin. Personally, I like her. She gives a great speech. I admire her decision not to abort her baby boy, and I respect the way she and her husband have handled the appalling media abuse of their 17-year-old daughter. I think the clash of the classes her nomination has provoked is good old-fashioned political fun.
But the adulation of her by evangelicals is in one important respect delusional. She will not change Washington from the vice president’s mansion — populists to the contrary. She will not change American culture. She will not even change the culture of evangelical churches — though she reflects and represents them well. Her presence on the national stage simply does not address the spiritual issues we face.
We won’t be freed from the dire evangelical crisis by Christmas.
A brutal honesty about our future says:
- Our compromise with America’s consumer society has been a disaster. Consumerism will have to be rooted out of our churches soul by soul.
- Our transformation of churches into entertainment platforms has been a disaster. Devout worship of the living God will have to be rediscovered soul by soul.
- Our financial selfishness will have to be corrected by the good hand of God soul by soul, until we are once again the people who stand with the poor.
- Our doctrinal ignorance and folly has turned our brains to mud. Knowledge of the truth will have to be taught soul by soul.
- Our fear of the cultures around us, and our refusal to interact meaningfully with them — that is, interact beyond marketing ploys — has left us unable to articulate the gospel in our own time. Soul by soul, we will have to rebuild a vigorous way of life and witness in hostile territory.
I believe that, once we are honest about these things, we will have ground for a strong faith that Christianity will survive and prosper in the future. The moment we look at these five realities, harsh though they are, we realize that the tool for teaching soul by soul is everywhere in this country: the local church. The body of Christ in its many meetings has been doing this job for centuries. We just need to start doing the job again.
Our ultimate ground for faith is our Lord and his plan. As we follow him afresh, Jesus is well able to portray himself accurately in his churches.
McLaren the Intellectual Defines Orthodoxy
July 24th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Intellectuals thrive on complexity. They regard certainty and simplicity as signs of immaturity, and they have some good reasons. Take Brian McLaren’s critique of mainstream evangelicalism.
McLaren has identified an attitude that is a hindrance to everything from effective persuasion to loving fellowship. The attitude is the us v. them, chip-on-the-shoulder, we’re-right-they’re-wrong impatience with which evangelicals tend to deal with the wide surrounding world. From his writings, one gathers that McLaren has had enough.
The problem with evangelical pomposity is that it has preempted learning. If we’re right and they’re wrong, then all we have to do is stay right. Tell the unbelievers one more time why their views on abortion, education, government, and values are heinous. Our fidelity to the truth can reduce to repeated talking points — say it again, this time with feeling! — a tactic that shuts out feedback and degrades relationships to mere exchanges of rhetorical bullets.
McLaren wants to change this attitude, and he is right. I have devoted many posts to the cultural backwater that is evangelical populism, where applications of truth are stagnant.
But McLaren’s desire for greater openness seems to have led him to oversimplifications of his own, and ultimately to a redefinition of truth itself. The book is, of course, A Generous Orthodoxy.
His now-famous modification of orthodoxy with generous suggests that orthodoxy by itself is petty. When he comes to defining what orthodoxy is, McLaren starts this way (p 28): “For most people, orthodoxy means right thinking or right opinions, or in other words, ‘what we think,’ as opposed to ‘what they think.’” For McLaren, orthodoxy tends to be petty because most people view it in adversarial terms.
The sentence is an early bit of slippage. I know many self-satisfied Christians who like few things better than to hear the us v. them story again and call it Christianity. But their pettiness does not determine what orthodoxy is. McLaren is building up to his redefinition by implying a simple choice between orthodoxy alone (petty) and orthodoxy plus generosity (loving).
His alternative definition comes in the next sentence. “In contrast, orthodoxy in this book may mean something like ‘what God knows, some of which we believe a little, some of which they believe a little, and about which we all have a whole lot to learn.’” The truth is beyond our reach, in God’s mind, and the various factions of human spirituality each have pieces of it. To follow orthodoxy, according to this definition, is to be generous to the other factions and to learn from them.
Orthodoxy may mean that. It may mean something like that. In this book.
The care with which McLaren poses as tentative and playful is necessary to disguise the enormity of what he puts over in that definition. Orthodoxy is inaccessible. It’s “what God knows.” This is a romanticist punt, even transcendentalist. Emerson could’ve written it, irony and all. Intellectuals may feed on such continually evolving knowledge, but the gruel is too thin for simple believers.
Actual Christian orthodoxy teaches that God himself is incomprehensible, but that he has given us a revelation of his nature and will by which he is knowable. Orthodoxy is not in God’s mind. It’s in his Word, both written and incarnate. It’s accessible. The distinction between the living God and the doctrines about him –the distinction that ought to keep us humble — already thrives where theology is a scholarly discipline rather than a grass-roots rallying point.
But I just ran smack into another sentence closing McLaren’s paragraph on orthodoxy. McLaren says, “Most people are too serious, knowledgeable, and busy for such an unorthodox definition of orthodoxy.” So he makes an intriguing definition tentatively and then bluffs his way out of being examined, an escape-hatch from accountability that he seems to open pretty often.
The definition I’ve analyzed comes in a chapter titled, “For Mature Audiences Only.” How would McLaren define mature? I’ll venture a definition for him: “For most people, maturity means being accountable for what you say. In contrast, maturity in this book may mean something like being comfortable with irony.”
I hope we can learn and grow as human beings without intellectual games.
A 1989 Bull Session and Intellectualism
July 10th, 2008 § 5 Comments
One night during my first year of college, I was riding with some fellow believers, all from the same InterVarsity group at Willamette University, and we were talking about the megachurch we attended.
Willamette is a secular liberal arts school (its historical connection to Methodism is now purely notional). It’s the oldest on the left coast, and has the ivy of the Ivy League without the pedigree. It is not the preserve of the wealthy, necessarily, but let’s just say I was only there because of a scholarship. And, at that time, Willamette had little interaction with the surrounding community of Salem, Oregon.
The megachurch we all attended had a dynamic preacher and up-tempo music. It was known as a relatively wealthy church, the cars in the parking lots being a major indicator. Because of its youth group and extensive children’s ministry, it was also the place in town for families, especially white ones.
My friends and I went there for the preacher, who was smart, likable, and passionate. But the wealth of the congregation, or maybe the display of it, was somewhat embarrassing. And the music was irritating. In all, my friends in the car were conflicted about the church, frustrated with it.
At last, one guy said, “It’s just so middle class!” The rest laughed bitterly.
I was taken aback by the hostility in his voice, and by the others’ identification with it. Even though I felt the same frustrations with that church as the others, I couldn’t understand the contempt they were expressing for being bourgeois. It hadn’t occurred to me to think of myself as having risen beyond my origins. My thought was, “All of you are middle class.”
In that year of 1989, there wasn’t a name for young evangelicals who went to liberal arts schools, took books, cinema, and ideas seriously, and explored such exotica as liberation theology. There wasn’t a name for graduates who followed their passion for the poor into work with Habitat For Humanity. There wasn’t enough momentum for politically liberal evangelicals at the start of Reagan’s third term to gain a label. Nor was the suburban megachurch the object of scorn that it is now.
But today my friends would be called emergents.
I have spent time on this blog exploring the barren flats of evangelical populism. Now it is time to take a look at the swamp of evangelical intellectualism.
I should be clear about my use of the term. I’m not using intellectual as a synonym for scholar. A scholar is removed from ordinary life and work to pursue an academic discipline. An intellectual is not so much removed from ordinary life as disaffected from it. He is embittered by the lives other people lead, contemptuous of their lack of sophistication, and resentful of their lack of attention to his accomplishments. The intellectual class sees itself as society’s critic, wrote Robert Bork in 1996 (Slouching Toward Gomorrah, p 83):
Its members are generally critical of, if not actively hostile to, bourgeois society and culture. They are, moreover, susceptible to utopian fantasies.
Not all farmers are populists. So, too, not all scholars are intellectuals in the sense I am describing. And, truth be told, very few intellectuals are scholars. Most are merely glib with general knowledge.
Think Al Gore. Tortured, complicated, afflicted by a sensitive conscience — and proud of all three. He is not trained deeply in any academic field. He studies science not for knowledge but for advocacy. His career trajectory is typical of an intellectual: liberal arts training, journalism, politics. His intellectualism, at least in many people’s eyes, redeems him from grubbiness. He’s more than an advocate, more than a politician, because he’s about ideas.
Some of intellectualism’s cultural characteristics:
1. Urban, not rural.
2. Scornful of business and money. Money is corrupt, and the businesspeople who pursue it are all animated by greed — all of them.
3. Contemptuous of patrimony. Wherever an intellectual came from, whatever class or location or religion, that is the seat of hypocrisy and sick living.
4. Patronizing toward the middle class. All those poor, narrow people who just work, work, work in their office cubicles and then go to Applebees, all those parents with massive strollers and screaming children, who’ve never even met a poor person, who’ve never gone to Guatemala, who only care about money and their 401Ks and the prohibitive cost of filling their SUVs …
5. Able to evoke positive emotions only with abstractions. Obama.
I see all of these characteristics among emergents. Now, the emergent phenomenon is about many things — theology, history, abuse by authority figures. Emergents target many legitimate evils: consumerism, a mistaken identification of Christ with the Republican party, the neglect of the arts. Many stories are coming together to make the emergent stream. But it’s intellectualism that I am finding over and over again. Many emergents are about class.
Here’s a funny thing. Both evangelical populism and intellectualism, even though they have the opposite cultural characteristics, lead us to the same place: grievance. I doubt that resentment is going to advance the Kingdom of Christ, whether it comes from self-satisfied middle class Americans or self-hating middle class Americans. So why do so many evangelicals seem to seethe with it?
My friend’s outburst that night in 1989 showed me early signs of the splintering of evangelicalism, and nearly twenty years later I’m still trying to figure out what it means.
A.W. Tozer, the Anti-Populist
May 22nd, 2008 § 2 Comments
Three weeks ago, my dad gave me a book, which the old man almost never does. From the early seventies, when he devoured The Lord of the Rings, to the mid-nineties, when he discovered that Calvin and Luther agreed with him about predestination, Dad was not a reader. Even now that he has books going much of the time, he doesn’t talk about them much. So, for him to haul off and give me The Root of the Righteous by A.W. Tozer — not just recommend it, but hand me a copy — was urgent enough that I started it immediately.
That night, I sat in the orchestra pit during the dialog of the Sondheim show I was playing, and devoured page after page — only putting the book down when the conductor insinuated that a downbeat was headed my way.
I have been writing in a meandering, bloggish sort of way about evangelical populism. I have described it as a mindset of suspicion and resentment, of “us versus them,” that has shut down cultural interaction between evangelicals and other Americans. I have also noted populism’s emotional shallowness, as well as its conformism and corruption.
To close this theme (and the blog’s readers sighed with relief), I sum up my problem with evangelical populism: it has fostered a damning self-complacency.
When we present Christianity as a social program, as one side in a protracted culture war, we commit several crimes simultaneously. We mistake the cultural legacy of biblical faith, Judeo-Christian civilization, for the gospel itself. It is a well-worn heresy, though wrapped now in the old red, white, and blue. We also take a rhetorical posture that is alien to the New Testament, that of the debater who scores points off the gaffs and weaknesses of his opponent. This vandalizes the office of preacher.
But most alarmingly, we teach ourselves by rote, election after election, that we stand for the truth, that we defend God’s holiness, that we are the Lord’s people doing the Lord’s work. That is to say, we teach ourselves a lie. A mere glance into the family lives of church-going people these days confirms their utter lack of spiritual power.
To foster such self-complacency is to freeze souls against the grace of God.
Which brings me back to Tozer’s book. The Root of the Righteous is a collection of editorials he wrote for his denominational magazine during the 1950s, and their dated quality as artifacts gives them, for me, a kind of prophetic unction, as if the Spirit makes the dust of the decades say amen.
Take the very first sentence of the book:
One marked difference between the faith of our fathers as conceived by the fathers and the same faith as understood and lived by their children is that the fathers were concerned with the root of the matter, while their present-day descendants seem concerned only with the fruit. (p 3)
That alone is a lot to ponder. Tozer meant that, in the 1950s, believers regarded a “serious-minded approach to sacred things” as something to smile at. He said, “Much that passes for Christianity today is the brief, bright effort of the severed branch to bring forth its fruit in its season.” (p 4)
Take this blunt assessment: “Probably the most widespread and persistent problem to be found among Christians is the problem of retarded spiritual progress.” (p 7) Or this observation about “the inordinate attachment to every form of entertainment” in the 1950s:
The average man has no central core of moral assurance, no spring within his own breast, no inner strength to place him above the need for repeated psychological shots to give him the courage to go on living. He has become a parasite on the world, drawing his life from his environment, unable to live a day apart from the stimulation which society affords him. (p 31)
Churches in the 1950s surrendered to the consumer mindset. Tozer says (p 33) that they “have become little more than poor theaters where fifth-rate ‘producers’ peddle their shoddy wares with the full approval of evangelical leaders who can even quote a holy text in defense of their delinquency.”
Tozer also makes the striking observation that religious life in the 1950s showed “a lack of integration in the religious personality. There seems to be no vital connection between the emotional and volitional departments of the life. The mind can approve and the emotions enjoy while the will drags its feet and refuses to go along.” (p 56)
Tozer fed people with an exalted view of Christ that nurtured reverent fear, not prim judgmentalism. He wrote and spoke with authority about the God who had won his submission.
Imagine strong words like his in a denominational magazine today. It’s impossible: such publications have become mere public relations pieces. They would never warn Christians against dead spirituality, or its specific symptoms. That would be way too preachy.
This is a measure of how much leaders flatter us, and how deeply we need their flattery.
It’s also a measure of my old man’s good taste. Calvin, Luther, Tolkien, Tozer.
