Liberals & Evangelicals - Part II

In my last post I wrote that religious and political liberals need to start taking the Christian evangelical movement seriously rather than just ridiculing them and hoping they will go away. So in this post I want to present the flip side. I am not comfortable any time people, including myself, make broad generalizations about groups of people. I want to make sure that I continue to view conservative Christians as people - people who have a very different philosophy than I do, but not necessarily uncaring, mindless bigots either.

It is easy to look at their positions and come to the conclusion this movement is made up of people who hate women and the poor, and anyone not just like them. Corporately, I believe their philosophy is dangerous to a free society and yes, I believe that unconscious or unexamined bigotries underscore part of their worldview. But I don't want to judge individuals based on the group as a whole.

The marriage between conservative Christianity and libertarianism & nationalistic jingoism makes it easy to view adherents as selfish and uncaring, but...

Some of the most generous, selfless, committed, and loving people I have ever known have been evangelical Christians.

The public hypocrisy of some makes it easy to view members as insincere, but...

Some of the most spiritually passionate people I have ever known have been evangelical Christians.

Their portrayal in the media and the lack of intellectual curiousity of certain politicians make it easy to view these true believers as ignorant or stupid, but...

Some of the most well-read and intelligent people I have ever known have been evangelical Christians.

As a child raised in the evangelical movement I was taught to, "love the sinner; hate the sin." Now, I want to translate that into my current belief structure. I want to separate my appreciate of the individuals' value from their philosophy. Work against the movement; love the movers. A woman at my fellowship said soemthing once regarding getting along with her ultra-conservative son, "our primary relationship is not political." I have carried this phrase with me ever since and remind myself when dealing with my evangelical colleagues and family members. My primary relationship with my family is neither political nor theological. It is familial and based on love. After all, connection is why I got into the whole spirituality search anyway, right?

Liberals & Evangelicals - Part 1

I am always astonished to see religious and political liberals who are just now noticing evangelical and fundamentalist Christians and their influence. Where have they been all these years? I am a big fan of Rachel Maddow, but I have to shake my head every time she covers evangelicals and asks, do they really believe this stuff? Yes, yes they do.

Following political news has been a strange experience lately as I feel like I view the media coverage of various evangelical political figures through two sets of eyes. Maybe a better analogy is that I have one foot in two different worlds: one in that of my conservative Christian upbringing, and one in the secular liberalism that I chose. Like my fellow liberals I am often appalled at the statements and opinions of prominent conservative Christians, but unlike them, I am not surprised by them. They have been saying these same things for years, but few have been paying attention. It is only now that some of them are gaining real political power that their beliefs are getting notice.

Some people want to dismiss evangelicals as ridiculous, or naïve, or un-serious. This is a mistake; these people are completely earnest and they are not dumb. Their views may seem extreme, but they really mean them. They truly believe The Rapture is likely to happen in their lifetime. They mean it when they say that God has anointed America as a Christian nation and they are called to save it from the forces of darkness – they aren’t kidding. Treating fundamentalists as a joke or a fad will have serious negative consequences for liberalism because there are a lot of them out there, and they vote. Right now, they are successfully framing the debates. They are not just going to go away any time soon.

Evangelicals’ earnestness and commitment is beginning to have an effect in national politics. Old school beltway pundits wonder why it is that the Republicans are no longer willing to compromise. Yeah, um evangelicals hate compromise. They believe they are called to do God’s work in the world and that God requires them to follow the scripture. Compromise is disappointing God. Compromise is putting something else ahead of God and His commands. They are called to be apart from the world, not work with the secular world towards solution both sides can live with. This being the case, we need to stop letting them define morality for the majority of Americans.

It is time to really start paying attention to the religious right. We can no longer afford to dismiss them as a lunatic fringe. Religious liberals need to become a lot louder in their claims a vibrant spiritual life can be found a different way. We have got to stop letting them define which are good and bad religions, and what Christianity means. My struggles with Christianity are no secret, but it is the dominant religion of the United States and we need people to show that there is a meaningful way to worship Jesus Christ and the Abrahamic God with a focus on love and without dangerous literal interpretations. My fellow agnostics and atheists should be more vocal about how their humanistic belief leads them to a meaningful and ethical life instead of continuing to bash any and all forms of religion.

Our mockery and scorn for fundamentalists does not hurt or hinder them; it feels into their worldview that “the world” is out to get them. If the mainstream media does not like what they are doing, then it MUST be pleasing to God. Disbelief in their seriousness and effectiveness will not make them go away. We need loud counter-arguments to their claims. The evangelical movement has spent the last two generations gearing up for this. I believe religious fundamentalism is dangerous. If liberals want to keep the liberties earned and fought for over the last century, we had better start to pay attention and to advocate for a better way. Otherwise we could lose this debate before we even know it’s on.

Mad Props for The Secret of Kells

I had never heard of The Secret of Kells until it was nominated for an Academy Award a few months ago, but I have been eagerly waiting for it to play here in town ever since. I just can’t recommend this film highly enough. Everyone in my group, ages 10 – 67, loved it.

It is so beautiful.

The hand drawn animation is based on Irish art, but also manages to remind me of Samurai Jack, of blessed memory. All I can say is vive la 2-D! I am pretty sure that if I saw this film in Greek without subtitles I still would have loved watching the images. It is fluid and graceful: no portion of the screen is boring and it is 100 times more entertaining than Avatar.

The film is about a boy named Brenden living in the monastery of Kells in the Middle Ages and the creation and preservation of the famous Book of Kells, but really, plot is not what compels this movie. In fact, a few of the plot points towards the end of the film felt a little rushed and I wished they had been developed a little more. This film, full of beautiful imagery, is about imagery and its power. It stresses the importance of beauty and imagination and faith in the most dreary and dangerous of worlds.

If you are at all interested in Irish history, celtic myth, the history of the medieval church, the role of art and faith, syncreticism, or pretty pictures than this film is for you. Maybe if you are a big fan of Vikings, not so much.

The portrayal of the rival religions in Ireland was balanced: neither one was the bad or the good faith. Both religious systems were given a point of view and both had sympathetic and scary/dictatorial aspects. Pagan magic is delightfully represented by the fey girl Aisling and is treated as no less real than anything else in the film, but Cromm Cruach shows a dark and scary aspect of the same pagan belief system. The Christian monks are shown as trying to hold onto the light of their civilization against a violent force who wants to wipe them out, but the Abbot is rigid and has forgotten the art and joy of his youth and tries to block out the outside world. Brother Aidan is an example of the Irish style of Christianity that stressed reverence of nature more than the fear of God.

My girls loved this movie enough to insist we buy the soundtrack as soon as we got home. They have never done that before. Though it chagrins their mother and grandmother, they are not in general fans of traditional Irish music, and yet we will be listening to the soundtrack tonight while I cook dinner.

The Secret of Kells would be a great film to show in RE, but it might be too scary for very little children. It could be a great spring board for discussing how religions effect and influence each other, when and why should be listen to authority, how to we respond to outside dangers while still preserving what is important about ourselves, the relative importance of symbols , what is worth dying for, and I’m sure other great topics that haven’t occurred to me.

I almost never buy DVD’s anymore, preferring to keep my collection in the Netflix cloud, but this one I will buy as soon as it available. Maybe we will make it our new St. Patrick’s Day tradition as it is much more thought provoking than Darby O’Gill. Slainte.

Keillor in a Teapot

I was going to post on Garrison Keillor's recent article, but I find that plenty has already been published. Paul Oakley's take on the subject is well worth reading.

Keillor should focus on his own church rather than worrying about what other people sing in theirs, but I still like him. I loved his book Homegrown Democrat. Right now, I am way too mad at members of the religious right for using the name of God to host a "prayer cast" against health care and taxes to get to riled up about Keillor. I didn't care for his article, but it is a pretty minor deal compared to people preaching that God Allmightly is calling on us to resist health care reform. I guess all those Christians in every other developed country in the world must feel pretty stupid now. Now we've shown them that the free health care they enjoy is the work of Satan.

Such a digusting and blatant abuse of religion is such a disgrace that I can't get worked up about the words to "Silent Night". I'm just going to continue to pay outrageous health premiums and sign Christmas carols however I please.

Gay Rights Ordinance in Anchorage & Fundamentalists

When did political discourse in this country descend to the level of one team wears red shirts and one team wears blue? Shouldn't matters of civil rights and freedoms be decided in a way that is a little more dignified than a high school football rivalry?

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Last night the Anchorage Assembly heard public testimony on a proposed municipal ordinance that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual preference, identity or perceived identity. I normally wouldn't expect you all to be interested in local Anchorage politics, but I think there are larger issues going on here. Expect this to be a long post so buckle up or bail out now. You were warned.

I went to the meeting, not to testify, but because I knew that the pastor of the local Baptist megachurch was going to be turning out a lot of members to protest. I wanted to make sure that they were not the only ones there so I went straight from work. The evening ended up being much more emotional than I anticipated. For a more detailed accounting of the testimony, see Mudflats as I intend to deal more with how it all affected me. When I walked up to the building, there was an army of people, mostly teens and young adults, all wearing red shirts and holding signs against the ordinance. I guess they meant for us to know that they are "red-blooded Americans" or Sarah Palin's "real Americans". Later me learned that some of them were bussed in from the Mat-Su Valley which includes the now-famous Wasilla and Palmer. They were civil and polite, but the effect was creepy.

While about 90% of the protesters wore red, once inside I discovered that about half of the people in support of the ordinance wore blue. At first this seemed really juvenile to me, but as the evening wore on it made me feel like I wasn't in America anymore, like I was a foreign country where you had to make sure you didn't wear the wrong color to the wrong part of town. I'm not used to the shirt I wear being a political statement. That is not the Anchorage I grew up in.

Most of the testimony on both sides was predictable, you can probably fill in the blanks, but I was totally unprepared for the vitriol of the crowd. Many speakers made the arguement that the ordinance prohibited the free practice of religion because it did not allow religious individuals to discriminate against gay and transgendered people. I disagree with them, bit at least I get their argument. This lofty rhetoric was at odds with the comments coming from the crowd of red shirts. The vitriol was palpable. I have been to political events before, but never one with this kind of tension in the room. When speakers would testify against the ordinance based on homosexuality being an obvious perversion, there was joy and passion in their calls and applause. It was like it felt so good for them to look down on other.

I finally left at 9:00 so I could get home to tuck in my girls. Once again, I has to work through a sea of red to reach the parking lot. That was uncomfortable for me, but I can only imagine how it must of felt for the LGBT people in attendance, especially the ones who had been called freaks. By this time hand made signs had cropped up that showed less of the love of Christ than the official ones. I asked a woman about one of them on my way out and our exchange left both of us frustrated. Determined to take the high road, I wished her a good evening and left. I had no idea how upset I would be by the time I made it to my car. I mean, totally unprepared.

I thought it was a release from all of the tension and ugliness, but as I drove I realized what it was: those agents of intolerance, they were my people. That is exactly the sub-culture in which I was raised. Those people who called my friends perverts, they could have set next to me in a pew. They could have been my teacher or classmate at my Christian school. They could have been members of my family.

I didn't think before that that is how I was raised. While I disagreed with their theology, I thought I was raised in a culture of love, of personal responsibility refore God, of not judging other people's hearts, because that was between them and God. I thought I was raised with tolerance and compassion, but maybe I was wrong.

I have left Christianity in general and evangelicalism in particular behind me, but I can't avoid the fact that they have shaped me. I know that in a way their teachings will always affect the way I think. I know how they think, and what makes them angry. I know their agenda because it was drilled into me. I know their codewords sometimes without even realising codewords are being used because they are ingrained in my thought patterns. I also know that most of those people who made me so sad last night are good people. They feed the poor and help single mothers and reach out to prisoners. They are not monsters. They are just like the people who taught me to sing, the people who cared enough to help me when I was a confused teenager. They are the kind and generous people I grew up with. They are also religious bigots.

It is very hard for me to find common ground with fundamentalists right now and that makes me sad. It means that I am cut off from my own history, from my own younger self. It means that I am cut off from coworkers and from members of my own family. Generally, we just don't talk about a lot of things, but that lack of communication is a huge hinderance to closeness that I don't know how to get past. So I feel like there is a hole where my past was. That is what hit me in the gut last night.

I have heard, but never felt before the similarity between Christian and Islamic fundamentalists. Those comparisons seemed like such exagerations. But now I see that, at least sometimes, the differences between the two groups are differences of scale and not of kind. I don't mean to sounds hyperbolic here and maybe I will feel more reasonable later, but right now I am more concerned than ever about the Christian Right.

Last night I comforted myself with the memory of a 14-year old little Strange Attractor who was the only one in her Bible class at school to support the idea that gay people had a right to a job in my hypethetical ice cream shop and they weren't worse than any other sinner. But I also remember a 15-year old Strange Attractor who went to the Pat Robertson for President rally to volunteer for his campaign. I held close that memory of my teenage defiance, that belief that being a Christian didn't mean you got to tell people how to live their lives. I treasured it because I know that that kid in red waiving those signs, cheering for bigotry, telling people that they don't count, that kid could have been me.

Why We Need Empathy

I've been reading Reading Lolita in Tehran and it's a fascinating look at how people who know better gradually succumb to tyranny. It is also an exploration of how literature affects us as readers. Maybe this resonates so strongly with me because I have always been such a rabid bibliovore. I have never been able to understand how some people don't like to read.

Empathy runs throughout the book. I can sometimes be too empathetic to the point that it becomes paralyzing, but we undervalue this trait. Empathy is what we learn in literature and it is what prevents us from creating an "us" and a "them". It allows us to see everyone as a complex person. Empathy won't allow you to de-humanize others. It insists that you try to understand or at least imagine their point of view. Without it, we can never really appreciate art.

Empathy makes it possible for me to respect someone else's choices. It is very easy to lump groups of people together and make assumptions about them based on that group affiliation. It is also very easy to judge them. But if we are really to respect the right of every person to seek spiritual truth on their own terms, we need empathy. Like I said, I tend to be very empathetic, but lately it has really difficult to respect the point of view of conservative Christians. I have been turning them into a "them" and you cannot love people when you think of them that way. If nothing else, I am going to have to remember to see the perspective of some of my relatives and not just view them as crazy people who are trying to make me miserable.

This would be much simpler if more of the Christians in my life showed respect and understanding for my choices, but I can't make them change their minds about my beliefs. I can, however, stop treating them like the enemy.