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Frank Schaeffer on the Evangelical Regard for Human Life

2023-01-02T04:08:06Z

Context: Frank Schaeffer is the son of famed evangelical teacher Francis Schaeffer. The two of them helped bring abortion to the forefront of the American evangelical conscience in the 1980s. Frank has since repented of his conservatism. In May, 2022, after the leaked draft of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Schaeffer was interviewed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

In this excerpt Frank is responding to a statement by the National Association of Evangelicals that their pro-life beliefs stem from an understanding that “every human life from conception to death has inestimable worth” (14:05 in the video):

Yes, well, first of all, the evangelicals do not believe that, because if they did, they would be fighting for paid parental leave so fathers and mothers could go home and be with their children instead of women going back to work, three low-paid jobs, with a terrible minimum wage, while they’re still bleeding from a cesarean section. Evangelicals don’t care about that.

They would not have fought, as the Republicans did, against the child tax credit that for a brief shining moment lifted millions of American children out of poverty. But they’re not going to spend that money. They want to get rid of it. They call it socialism.

If this group of people was pro-life, and actually were consistent in their pro-life position, you could have some admiration for them, while disagreeing on the matter of choice. But they are an anti-family group of people who put the welfare of billionaires in this country ahead of children, ahead of women, ahead of poor people, ahead of families. They’re not even for paid parental leave. They’re not for the child tax credit. They do nothing for children in terms of schools and education. They have never raised the minimum wage. They believe in people working two, three jobs on the margin of poverty, and, tough luck, you’re on your own. So the minute that child is born, they are anti-life. They’re not just anti-choice.

And so this is a hypocritical movement.

Full transcript: Interview With Director Frank Schaeffer

For an interesting anti-parallel to Schaeffer’s trajectory, see the story of Norma McCorvey (AKA “Jane Roe”) who, after winning the right to abortion for Americans, became a Roman Catholic and a paid anti-abortion activist.

A Review of J.E.S.U.S.A.

2020-08-18T15:54:01Z

J.E.S.U.S.A. is a documentary film that attempts to counter naive, militarist, patriotic American Christianity with a version of Christianity that is more peaceful and transformative. I paid four bucks to watch it on Youtube. Unfortunately the rental only lasts 48 hours and it expired in the middle of my second viewing, so this review is written mostly without notes and remains incomplete. The entire movie is clips from interviews interspersed regularly with what appears to be (often only vaguely relevant) stock footage. The first 13 minutes of the film consists of proponents of violence giving various Biblical justifications for their religion. The next 80 minutes is dedicated to several authors and pastors who give their nonviolent understanding of Jesus. None of the dozen or so interviewees are given any sort of introduction other than, briefly, their name and occupation appearing once on the screen during their appearance (and not always during their first appearance).

The film suffers from poor framing in general. Members of the first group of interviews are proponents of gun ownership and violent policing, and they seem ready to kill their neighbors at a moment’s notice, but they rarely if ever even mention the military or war. The second group, the nonviolent Christians — including a former SEAL, a former Marine, and a war journalist — focus their denunciations of violence mostly against national militarism and war, and at least two of these advocates of nonviolence make explicit exceptions for police and gun ownership. It’s a confusing disconnect.

The selection of the ‘pro-violence’ representatives is also confusing. The movie opens with a clip of a service at Sanctuary Church in Newfoundland, PA. It then cuts to an interview with the pastor, identified as “Sean Moon,” explaining how Jesus taught his followers to manufacture “assault weapons.” What is never mentioned in the film is that Sean Moon is the youngest son of Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the “Moonies,” a religious sect most famous for their mass weddings. Moonies view the late elder Moon and his wife as the True Parents, messiahs, who are continuing the work Jesus meant to do before he unexpectedly died. After his father’s death and a family disagreement about succession, Sean Moon started his church (and his “Rod of Iron Ministry”) as a Moonie splinter group. The young Moon’s church is even more anticommunist than his father’s, and uses pro-Trump rhetoric and outright worship of rifles in order to appeal to the conspiracy- and fear-addled minds of American conservatives. If J.E.S.U.S.A. is out to investigate the relationship between mainstream American Christianity and empire, using a small offshoot of a South Korean cult is not a representative example.

The other pro-violence Christian speakers featured in the film are mostly just ex-police grifters trying to sell defense services and training to churches. This includes Dave Grossman who shares his groundbreaking juridical expert opinion that the Bible is against “murder” but not against “lawful killing.” Not mentioned in the film is that Grossman is most famous for his controversial training seminars where he helps American police officers get over their hesitation to kill.

I don’t think Kevin Miller, the film’s director/writer/producer, set out to create an intentional straw man through his selection of Moon, Grossman, et al. I suspect the motivation was rather a mixture of spectacle (he wanted shots of people holding AR-15’s in church) and laziness (finding actual representatives of mainstream or even evangelical Christianity’s entanglement with empire would have required more work and subtlety).

Fortunately for the film and its audience, despite the framing, the heart and redeeming aspect of the documentary has nothing to do with the first group of interviewers or the U.S.A. About halfway through, the film pieces together several interviews which give quite a decent summary of mythic Christianity. The documentary’s theology is much more interesting than its politics. With a focus on a Girardian/non-substitutionary theory of atonement, the film presents Christianity as an evolutionary road toward a nonviolent society. In this view, Christianity with its Abrahamic roots reverses other ancient religions in its recognition of the victims of violence at the foundation and maintenance of society, and founds a nonviolent counter-society, a kingdom of heaven.

But then, in conformance to the gospel form, betrayal: Brian Zahnd, a pastor who is one of the main interviewees throughout the film, states that being against violence doesn’t mean he is against police (??). Someone else cites Romans 13 to similar effect. After explaining for an hour how Christianity exposes and works against violence, they find a little whitewashed urn to sneak it all back in. (To be honest, I was so disgusted at this point in the documentary that I’m not even sure if I watched the last few minutes. It’s possible these comments were clarified in that time.)

If God’s refusal to accept human sacrifice from Abraham founded a religion that exposes and rejects radical violence, and if the execution of Jesus at the hands of political and religious leaders clarifies the subversive road to the kingdom of heaven, then J.E.S.U.S.A, true to its mismash of a title, is stuck somewhere between Isaac and the cross.

For a more positive and complete review of J.E.S.U.S.A. see Andrew Klager’s review for Orthodoxy In Dialog (April 22, 2020).

Book Review: Thou Shalt Not Believe by John Ubhal

2018-08-29T18:07:24Z

Ubhal, John. Thou Shalt Not Believe: A Refutation of the Basic Premises, Core Teachings, and Common Arguments in Defense of Christianity. Ecaiva Books, 2016. 312 pp. ISBN: 978-1539057727. $14.95.

Thou Shalt Not Believe by John Ubhal consists of an introduction, 29 standalone chapters (each of which broaches a reason why Christianity is false or not useful), a conclusion, a biographical postscript recounting the author’s own harrowing experience with Christianity, a Works Cited section, and a useful Index. The book doesn’t try to be the first or last word on any of its wide subject matter, but it does distill into short, readable chapters many topics and controversies which will likely be of interest to many people (especially doubters) investigating Christianity (from a decidedly non-Christian perspective, as the title suggests).

Disclaimer: I personally know the author and had some input into an early manuscript. I purchased the retail paperback copy reviewed here with my own money and was not asked to write a review.

I don’t believe in heaven but I do believe in hell

I am a christian who is somewhere outside of Ubhal’s intended audience, which seems to be fundamentalist Christians who are looking for reasons to no longer be fundamentalist Christians. Many of the chapters simply take a literalist approach to ‘reading’ the bible in order to refute such a reading of the bible, a somewhat frustrating exercise for anyone except maybe an already-doubting biblical literalist.

The heart of Ubhal’s logical case against Christianity is contained in the first chapter (“The Basic Premises and Core Teachings of Christianity”):

[I]f people do not need to be saved from sin, then they do not need a savior. If people do not need a savior, then they do not need Jesus. And if people do not need Jesus, Christianity has no relevance for humankind. (13)

According to Ubhal’s reading of the bible, the wages of sin are not merely death but eternal damnation (which he insists are quite different). And since eternal damnation is both cruel and has no basis in human experience, the premise in the above line of reasoning can be affirmed by anyone with a modicum of empathy or scientific rationality, thus: Christianity has no relevance for humankind. ∎

This formulation reduces Christianity to a mere mechanism of “salvation,” but what does it save people from? Ubhal presents a version of Christianity which begins with the concept of sin and its centuries of theological baggage and implicit assumptions, from which he deduces that Christianity offers a non-solution (Jesus as Savior) to a non-problem (eternal damnation). But this is not my understanding of christianity, which begins, in contrast, with the existential crisis of death and offers, or claims to offer, hope for meaning in a life guaranteed to end. Sin as a moral category is secondary, a flawed and awkward theological attempt at theorizing death. To Ubhal, “the Bible very specifically and vividly teaches that hell exists as an eternal fire of everlasting punishment.” (35) I can’t disagree, but I find in the descriptions of hell put forward by Jesus and his New Testament editors less the foundations for the cartoon hell of popular culture and more the expressions of anxiety about the immense permanence of death and the failure of all previous nationalist and religious attempts at ignoring or transcending its imminence.

Ubhal acknowledges that the biosphere, without any special regard for humanity, “features a constant struggle for survival for all things in the face of scarce resources and numerous calamities, and is full of suffering.” (76) And this is an author who is confident that humans, who exist nowhere but in the calamity of this fragile biosphere, don’t need saving from anything!

In his introduction to The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis presents a series of suspicious dichotomies in which first morality, then theism, and finally the mystic claims of Jesus are said to be either the result of madness or of divine revelation. (Ubhal addresses one version of the latter dichotomy in Chapter 17, “The Trilemma”.) Lewis thinks it is these divine revelations which illuminate and make humans aware of pain (including death):

In a sense, [Christianity] creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving.

— C.S. Lewis

Lewis credits human nature, with its consciousness of the moral, for producing Christianity; Ubhal blames Christianity, with its moralistic nonsense, for obscuring the natural plight of humans in a harsh biosphere. They both agree that Christianity is the cause of pain in the same way a magistrate is the cause of punishment. Lewis views the judge as acting according to a real code of law; Ubhal views the judge as acting to an arbitrary (and frankly harmful) code of law. In my view, both are mistaken. I recognize pain not because I have assurance of a better reality, as Lewis maintains, but because I can imagine a better reality however impossible. Ubhal, in particular, is so preoccupied with the idea that sin is “guilt” or death is “blame” that he mistakes christianity’s grappling for hope in the face of suffering as the source of suffering itself.

At times Ubhal’s literalist approach to the bible feels like it was designed to discover the most boring reading possible of some of the world’s most engaged-with texts. Chapter 10 (“Failed Prophecies”), for example, is a list of Biblical prophetic predictions which did not come to pass. But instead of engaging in the predictions, what their authors were trying to get across, why they were included in a religious canon in the first place, why they are still valued, what the significance of the prophecies have been over the millennia, how or if they can be salvaged and re-applied, etc., he simply notes that they are wrong and so the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy is wrong and so thou shalt not believe in the stodgy version of Christianity that he has decided is the most ‘honest’ version.

In Chapter 11 (“Empirical Arguments Against the Creation and the Flood”) he takes aim at the historicity of the Genesis accounts. “Unless the claims of such texts are literally true, they lose all their persuasive power, since they are then mere human creations that do not give any real information about the way things are.” (103) Or likewise in his conclusion:

Those who make the Bible say only what they want it to say tacitly acknowledge that they believe the Bible is unnecessary and that people only need their own experiences and reasoning skills to gain the understanding they need or want. Thus it is just as well to throw the Bible out altogether once one starts picking and choosing which passages to take seriously and which ones to dismiss or interpret away. (263-264)

But all works of art are “mere human creations”; it doesn’t follow that they have no value or no inherent meaning. To argue that books are unnecessary (to what end?) because people possess the capacity to reason is a backward and surprisingly anti-intellectual and anti-literate argument to make for someone who has written and published a book. In fact the reason books are useful is because people read them in light of their own experiences and ability to reason, including the ability to dismiss whatever they find to be untrue or unuseful. Test everything; hold fast to what is good.

'Til I return to the communism of the worms (without god or master there, six feet underneath the earth)

In a famous verse in Matthew 19 Jesus says that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. When his disciples interpret this to mean that nobody can be saved, Jesus reassures them that with god all things are possible. The lesson Ubhal draws from this passage is that “according to Jesus people can only be moral with the help of God.” (157) But like the disciples this ignores what Jesus said: that it would require a miracle for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (not ‘be moral’). In his haste to reduce Jesus’s teachings to an impossible moralistic system, Ubhal glosses over Jesus’s core message here: that christians seek a social order without rich people.

But I agree with and am glad to see his criticism of the authoritarian nature of early christian communism as described in Acts. (173-175) He briefly notes a distinction between early Christian communism and most socialisms today: The Christian communism did not seem to orient itself primarily as a class conflict. (Perhaps one of early Christianity’s failings came about because of the success it eventually found among the owning/aristocratic Roman classes, blurring whatever class conflict the first christians were motivated by). But it is wrong to say early christians completely lacked a conscious class antagonism. As examples see James' fiery diatribe against the rich (which is considered canon by all Christians) in James 5:1-6, and the emphasis by the author of Ephesians that the christian “struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:10-13).

Because at least in Hell there’s rock 'n' roll and ain’t no Jesus Christ

Disagreements over the interpretation of texts and basic premise of christianity aside, Ubhal raises many valid criticisms of the doctrines, defenses, hypocrisies, and understanding of science demonstrated by many varieties of Christianity. But so do scores of other books available in the ‘Why I Am Not a Christian and Neither Can You’ genre. There are two qualities for which Ubhal’s book stands out.

The first is the author’s background in comparative religions which is apparent in several sections. Readers interested in Christianity and its failings will also inadvertently learn how other world religions (and especially Buddhism) compare on several points.

The second is the autobiographical postscript in which the author shifts gears from attacking Christianity on rational grounds to subjectively describing the harmful effects a sincere belief in Christianity can (and has quite often) had on some people’s psyches. This personal account brings into focus the urgency of escaping the Christian obsessions with sin, guilt, and eternal damnation. Its potential to lead others who are similarly afflicted by Christianity to the freedom of disbelief makes it the most valuable chapter of the book.

Typography

The book was produced by CreateSpace, Amazon’s print-on-demand service (according to the date on the back page, my copy was printed the day after I placed my order). There is no colophon or statement of paper durability, but the book is easy to read, printed in relatively large serif type (with all-cap sans-serif headings) on opaque white paper. The perfect binding feels durable and has held up without wear to a full read through and much subsequent page flipping.

My only complaint is about the running headers which consist of the author’s name (verso) and title of the book (recto) throughout, providing no contextual information when navigating the book. It would be much more useful (especially while taking notes for a review) if at least the chapter title was included in one header. I only remember seeing one typographical error in the entire book, and it was minor.

A inexpensive Kindle version is available, as is a DRM-free ePub from Smashwords.

The author’s response (Septermber 12, 2018)

John Ubhal kindly took the time to respond to this review on his weblog: “Response to Chris Burkhardt’s Review of Thou Shalt Not Believe”

In Section 5 of his response he clarifies that he is “addressing the Bible as a book or collection of books that many people regard as containing factual claims about the universe and about history that are divinely revealed or inspired,” and that he is also arguing “against treating books, specifically the Bible, but others as well, as infallible/sacred.” That summarizes my initial frustrations with his reading of the Bible, which is that he first insists on reading the Bible as a divine list of facts and then denounces it for being read that way. But of course, as I wrote in my review, that reading and its refutation articulated in Thou Shalt Not Believe can be valuable to people who have already learned to read the Bible in such a rigid manner and who are now looking for reasons to reject it.

More interesting to me (since I’m not convinced the Bible is so important anyway) is Ubhal’s alternative to the christian narrative that people need saving from anything at all. To my insistence that christianity is at least hoping for a meaningful transformation, he writes, with cynical boldness, “Humans don’t need saving from the biosphere. And if they do, death works just fine, so long as there is no afterlife of agony or torment.” Not entirely satisfied with this Epicurean acceptance of impermanence (has anyone ever been?), he immediately also offers ethical living and technology as potential roads to salvation in peace-of-mind and material comfort.

While that is a step forward from the superstition and idolatry rampant in much of Christianity, it is still a ways, in my view, from adequately answering the existential critique which serves as christianity’s philosophic starting point in the radically pessimistic teachings of Qoheleth.

My Local Megachurch Hosted a Gigantic Funeral for a Cop

2018-02-05T14:29:59Z

Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.

— Jesus
Luke 9:60

Flatirons Community Church is the largest church in Colorado with close to 20,000 members, most of whom attend one of the weekly services at the church’s main campus in the town of Lafayette.

The other day Flatirons hosted the funeral for a sheriff’s deputy who was shot and killed while responding to a call in the Denver area. It was an extraordinary memorial service attended by thousands of law enforcement officers and citizens and preceded by a massive procession of hundreds of police and fire fighting vehicles. Miles of highway and city streets were closed to traffic as saluting spectators lined them with American and “thin blue line” flags.

Almost nobody in attendance worked directly with or ever met the deceased. But clearly what he stood for as a law enforcement officer meant something to these people, something that reverberated to the core of their own identities. The pomp of police worship became an opportunity for frightened [white] people to reassure themselves that the world is bad but they will prevail.

To someone more familiar with the New Testament than white evangelical American Christianity, it might seem somewhat contradictory for a nominally Christian church to put itself at the center of this ritual, especially at a time when the violence, racism, and corruption of American law enforcement has become so well documented that not even the most colorblind and self-absorbed liberal can feign ignorance to the white supremacist implications carried with the praise and defense of its institutions.

But white self-described ‘born-again’ Christians are by far the most adamant minority behind the rise of Trumpism in this country. Even during its regular services, giving reassurance to those blinded by ideology is what Flatirons and churches like it do. It is what they are for. In their auditoriums, “Christianity” is no longer about propertyless cynics proclaiming the radical transformation of society and becomes instead a counseling service for broken people who are desperate for ways to cope with their anxieties, alienation, and dysfunctional relationships without ever having to question the decaying foundations of their society.

I’ve personally attended several services at Flatirons and have listened to recordings of additional sermons by Lead Pastor Jim Burgen on the website. Despite frequently pronouncing what "Jesus says" or what "Jesus wants", very little attention is ever given by Burgen to the actual sayings of Jesus as recorded in any of the gospels. It’s easy to get the idea that neither Burgen nor his audience have much interest in what Jesus meant by his cryptic sayings. But the lessons at Flatirons do from time to time give an apt illustration of one or another of Jesus’s teachings. Most recently: what it looks like for the dead to bury the dead.

Joe Hill, the Preacher, and the Slave

2015-11-19T23:56:31Z

On November 19, 1915 (exactly one hundred years ago as I write this), a Utah State Prison deputy prepared his squad of riflemen, concealed in the prison’s blacksmith shed and taking aim through slits in the wall, to carry out the execution of a 36-year-old prisoner convicted of murder.

“Ready. Aim. —”

“Fire!” The deputy was preempted by the blindfolded man bound to a chair at the other end of the rifles.

The last words of a condemned man are sometimes afforded respect even when the man himself is deemed unworthy of life. Indeed, that day the firing squad obliged the request. Five bullets punctured Joe Hill's chest and pulverized his heart.

After immigrating to America from Sweden in his early 20’s, Hill joined the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, a radical union whose members are known as Wobblies for some reason which no one remembers). He bummed around the country both looking for work and singing about a world without bosses.

One day in January 1914, while living in a Swedish community near Salt Lake City, Hill was shot in the chest. He told the doctor who treated him that he was involved in a quarrel with another man over a girl. He would never say anything else about it. Earlier that same day a Salt Lake City grocer and his teenage son were murdered in their store by two gunmen. The son had returned fire and possibly hit one of the attackers before being killed. Because of the timing and his unwillingness to explain the hole through his chest, Hill became the prime suspect. Even after he was charged, then convicted (though the state presented no physical evidence, no motive, and never named the second shooter), then sentenced to death, he refused to say who shot him or why.

The theory among those who believe Hill was innocent is that he was shot by his friend Otto Appelquist who was, or had recently been, engaged to Hilda Erickson — who, by some accounts, was their mutual love interest. In 2011 one of Hill’s biographers discovered a letter written by Erickson decades after Hill’s execution (1949) in which she confirms that theory (“Otto shot him in a fit of anger”). By remaining silent he seized his chance to both protect his friends from state harassment and to become the martyr he thought the anti-capitalist working class needed.

A twelve by fifteen foot mural, which was located at the Catholic Worker Movement’s Joe Hill House in Salt Lake City, depicting Joe Hill and Jesus of Nazareth being executed together

Before he was shot, and then shot again, and before Billy Bragg drank a pinch of his cremated ashes in a glass of imported beer, Hill spent his spare time as a painter, musician, poet, and composer. Despite not learning English until he was an adult in America, he became well-known among Wobblies for his lyrics and witty rhymes. Many of his songs are preserved in the IWW’s “Little Red Song Book”. His first to be published is my favorite, a parody of the popular hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By” called “The Preacher and the Slave” (the full lyrics and chords are listed in the Wikipedia entry).

The first four verses put the lie to Christian “preachers,” “holy rollers,” and “the Starvation Army,” who pacify workers with promises of “pie in the sky when you die”.

But then in the last verse and modified chorus we meet Joe Hill the dialectician:

Working folks of all countries, unite
Side by side we for freedom shall fight
When this world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain:

You will eat (you will eat), by-and-by (by-and-by)
When you learned how to cook and how to fry (bake a pie!)
Chop some wood (chop some wood)
'Twill do you good ('twill do you good)
Then you’ll eat in that sweet by-and-by (that’s no lie!)

He negates his negation of a future “sweet by-and-by” and, like in Jesus’s famous prayer, resets it from heaven to earth. The first line of Hill’s last verse also happens to be the last line of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. It is tempting to read his anti-capitalist Marxian dialectics as an application of Christian theology.

To Marx, the history of all societies so far is the history of class struggles. Specifically, Marx wrote about how workers and capitalists are both slaves to the machinations of capitalism. Employees spend their working lives literally creating the means for their own exploitation, while an employer who does not constantly reinvest and keep up with technology and who does not exploit his workers as extensively and intensively as he can get away with will soon be out of business, because he can be sure that his competitors will. Capitalists and workers depend on each other, hate each other, and produce each other. It is an apparently unbreakable cycle which must be broken.

Like the Christian conception of humanity which is unable to save itself, but through which a savior is produced, the hope for transcendence can be found to be immanent in the damned system itself. To Marx, this immanent hope is the potential for rebellion among the working class, a potential which is produced by capitalism as it gives workers less to lose and more to gain by transcending capitalist relations.

To Jesus, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. It is impossible, in other words, for rich people and the kingdom Jesus spoke about to exist at the same time. But there is hope even for the rich, because “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”

In the terms of capitalist relations with which Marx wrote and Joe Hill sang, that miracle is realized when the working folks have gained the world, when the meek have inherited the world, when there is no more exploitation because the exploiters (“grafters”) have lost their slaves and learned to bake for themselves. Any pie consumed in such a world is then truly eaten in that sweet by-and-by: not by spirits in the sky but by those living on an earth without masters (and so with no one who needs to worry about the relative size of camels and needle eyes).

Sources and Further Reading

A web search will turn up many resources about Joe Hill and the mysteries which surround his life and death. In writing this I relied upon the information written and collected by The Salt Lake Tribune in their online exhibit “The Legacy of Joe Hill”. It contains a much more complete telling of his life, death, art, and legacy.

There is also a recent biography of Joe Hill which has received good reviews (I have not read it): Adler, William M. The Man who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2011.

Mischeif Brew’s “The Preacher and the Slave”

My favorite rendition of “The Preacher and the Slave” is this one by Erik Petersen and his folk punk band Mischief Brew:

Day Among Dogs (or A. Cynic Reads Matthew 7:6)

2015-09-28T17:00:52Z

I nuzzle the kind, bark at the greedy, and bite scoundrels.

— Diogenes

I am sure that God did not intend that there be so many poor. The class structure is of our making and our consent, not His. It is the way we have arranged it, and it is up to us to change it. So we are urging revolutionary change.

— Dorothy Day
"Poverty Is To Care And Not to Care"

A young Dorothy Day. I couldn’t find the date or original publication. The caption reads: ‘Dorothy Day, youthful author, discarding feminine frills and frivolities at her tiny Staten Island bungalow, where she keeps house and writes novels.’

My first thought upon reading that Pope Francis had praised by name several American anti-war activists, including Dorothy Day (1897 — 1980), in his address to a joint session of Congress was one of Jesus' cautionary metaphors in its naive meaning: “Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you.” (Matt. 7:6)

Evoking Dorothy Day in the halls of the Capitol seems so dissonant in part because Day was a life-long pacifist and anarchist who never paid income tax or voted (though the first time she was arrested, at age 19, was for picketing the White House in support of women’s suffrage). Abbie Hoffman once described her as ‘the first hippie’.

She eventually found in the Catholic tradition a love, meaning, and community which she failed to find among her secular socialist friends. But her conversion (perhaps like all conversions) to Catholicism was a synthesis which worked in both directions: she found her salvation in the Church, but the Church found a redemption of its own in her anti-capitalist corporeal works of mercy. Thomas Merton, for example, once wrote in a letter to Day that, “If there were no Catholic Worker and such forms of witness, I would never have joined the Catholic Church.”

Fifty years after her conversion she defended using the label anarchism to describe the tradition in which she worked by recalling that “Peter Maurin came to me with Kropotkin in one pocket and St. Francis in the other!” Day and Maurin founded the Catholic Worker on May Day, 1933, during the height of the Great Depression. The paper has been continuously published since, and today the movement it sparked consists of hundreds of communities and houses dedicated to nonviolence and hospitality for the homeless, exiled, hungry, and forsaken.

In an ancient Near Eastern metaphor, we might think of dogs as the uncouth, homeless who scavenge at the edges of society; and pigs might represent the socially and ritually impure who are capable of defiling what is established as clean and holy. Those are the sort of social groups which produced the Jesus Movement in the first century and the Catholic Worker Movement in the twentieth. St. Francis the dog denounced his father and rejected his wealth, even his clothes, to beg in the streets of Assisi; and Kropotkin the prince-turned-pig trampled with no regard for the sacredness of law and property on man’s love affair with authority.

So on second thought, I don’t read Jesus' words as a warning to the prudent but as a threat to the powerful:^[1] we reject what you hold as sacred and precious, and rather than accepting your offerings which are worthless to us we will trample them, turn on you, and create a new world where nothing is sacred: where gods can die, where mortals can have true life, and where the last will be first. This rejection of the holy extends, of course, to the chambers of parliament where members of the Pope’s audience plan wars and plot to rob the poor.

Dorothy Day is not a pearl to be offered as inspiration to the rich and their representatives; she was a dog and a pig whose works of love and mercy continue to bark at the greedy and trample under foot a society built on violence and inequality.

1. It is interesting to note that the Jesus Seminar scholars, in The Five Gospels, designated Matthew 7:6 as gray: “Jesus did not say this, but the ideas contained in it are close to his own.” The two reasons for its dubious rating are that it repeats the well-known metaphor of dogs and pigs as unclean, and that it is insulting in a manner uncharacteristic of Jesus. However, the discussion of the verse makes no mention of the possibility that Jesus meant to identify his followers with the dogs and pigs of the metaphor. Recognizing the possibility of this reversal, I think, brings the saying much closer to something Jesus probably said.

The 'Left Behind' Series is Evil, Anti-Christian Crap

2014-12-19T00:35:08Z

Fred Clark, who authors a popular liberal Christian weblog called Slacktivist, wrote an epic review of the Left Behind series of books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins which spans 300 of his weblog entries posted between 2003 and 2011:

I’ve sampled a few dozen of the posts (most aren’t long). And back in high school I read the first five (or six?) books in the series before I lost interest (there are 13 in total). I liked them. They remind me of those painfully unrealistic post-apocalyptic television miniseries (which I also like) — only better, because the surreal religious imagery in Left Behind makes up for some of the implausible bits. I did have to skip over pages of prayers and dialog in every book that were more alter call than plot developments, but those parts didn’t interrupt the action too much (I also skip the songs and verses when I read The Lord of the Rings).

Fred Clark is a better, more entertaining, and more insightful writer than LaHaye and Jenkins, so if you have some interest in the books and their themes I’d recommend reading some of his review series first (or instead). He didn’t like the books as much as I did, though. In fact, Clark (who is an evangelical Christian) thinks the books are evil.

One of Clark’s predominate complaints, other than the immorality of the characters and the poor telling of their story, is the sheer implausibility of it all (“The more you read, the more this book undermines the argument that our world and the world of the End Times are the same thing”). The relationships are shallow, the science isn’t sufficiently explained, and the political actors are irrational.

Oh, if you’re not familiar with the basic premise of the books, they are based on one of the more imaginative of modern Christian end-times theories (a form of dispensationalism) which reads some of the metaphorical language in the Bible as literal prophecies that will take place in the [perhaps near] future. In the novels those prophecies include a nuclear war between Russia and Israel, billions of people supernaturally disappearing from earth, and some of the people left behind fighting a guerrilla war against a new world government lead by a freshly incarnate Satan. There are also demon grasshoppers, fire breathing angels, as well as sundry other Bible-type plagues and creatures.

And Fred Clark thinks the story contains implausible elements. Pfft.

Of course not even a writer as motivated as Clark would write a 300-part review denouncing a popular post-apocalyptic religious thriller for not being realistic enough. There is a deeper, darker, more harmful aspect of the Left Behind books which Clark’s review attempts to counteract. You see, the books aren’t Christian enough.

Whereas I read the Left Behind books and thought they were fun (if too long) religious-themed action-thrillers with second-rate delivery based on an intriguing premise which borrows from some of the more colorful aspects of contemporary Christianity; Clark read the same books and thought they were dangerous heretical works that need refuting.

Unfortunately, the books aren’t like the old, boring heresies of monophysitism or whatnot. To Clark, Left Behind is popular heresy which is having a real, harmful effect in the world. Industrialists are destroying the earth because they believe Jesus will return to fix everything soon (“'Left Behind' is evil”), and fundamentalist Christians want to kill all Muslims in order to fulfill end times prophecy (“L.B.: Why this matters”). More succinctly, as Clark puts it, “These books are evil, anti-Christian crap.”

Clark’s idealistic worries that the heresies in Left Behind are a contributing cause to the worst excesses of capitalism and nationalism, I don’t find convincing. But I think he may be correct to worry that people will read those books and think they are representative of what Christians actually believe. Or worse, that Christians will read those books and think it is what they should believe.

Chief among the alleged doctrinal errors committed by LaHaye and Jenkins in their novels is what Clark calls the denial of death:

Even more disturbing is Irene Steele’s one-sentence summary of the gospel:

"Can you imagine, Rafe," she exulted. "Jesus coming back to get us before we die?"

This is the crux of the matter. This is the Gospel According to Tim & Jerry. But it is not the gospel of Christianity.

Christians, in the words of the Nicene Creed, "look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." We believe, in the words of the Apostle’s Creed, in "the resurrection of the body."

Can you imagine? A novel — a novel — that does not conform to the Creeds! But I understand Clark’s concerns. It is important to always emphasize the orthodox position that we die first and then Jesus brings us back to life later. Otherwise Christianity just seems silly.

On Camels, Liberal Myths, and Ferguson

2014-12-07T13:41:11Z

“In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.”

— Guy Debord
The Society of the Spectacle

Background: The Killing of Michael Brown

As far as I know, none of the following facts are disputed. On August 9, 2014, Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson City Police Department confronted Michael Brown, 18, and his acquaintance^[1] Dorian Johnson, 22, from his vehicle because they were walking in the middle of a residential street. The officer ordered them to move to the sidewalk. Instead of simply complying, Brown argued with the officer through the window of the police SUV. A scuffle ensued, Brown, who was unarmed, hit Wilson in the face with his hand, and according to Wilson’s testimony, made a grab for the officer’s firearm. In response, Wilson fired 2 shots at Brown who ran down the street for about 150 feet before turning around to face the officer (some witnesses reported he had turned around in surrender). Meanwhile Wilson had exited his vehicle and pursued on foot, firing at least 10 more times. Less than 90 seconds after initially contacting the jaywalker, Wilson had hit Brown with at least 6 bullets, including a fatal shot to his head.^[2]

Johnson later explained that Brown was in the midst of a some sort of mystical crises on the day he died. He had an earlier preminition that his stepmother and grandmother would be delivered from their illnesses through his prayer, and was experiencing what seemed like supernatural phenomena including that he was being protected from cars as he walked in the street. This state of mind may help explain both why Brown was walking in the middle of road and why he made the courageous but suicidal decision to turn and face the officer who was firing at him.^[3]

A grand jury was convened after the shooting, and it found the evidence to be insufficient to provide probable cause for bringing criminal charges against officer Wilson. He was never arrested in connection with the killing.

Both the shooting and the grand jury decision have been met with significant social unrest in Ferguson and in cities around the country including protest marches, riots, looting, and destruction of retail storefront property.

The sentiment behind some of the protesters' demands for “justice for Mike Brown” and the bewildered response of spectating [white] Americans trying to make sense of why the black residents of Ferguson (sometimes just “thugs”) would destroy “their own” neighborhoods both reveal something of the mystified nature of capitalism and the myths which sustain it.

Myths the Size of Camels

Frederich Engels used the term ‘false consciousness’ to describe beliefs about the world which obfuscate its actual workings and mislead people into accepting the current social structures as “natural” or even inevitable. And it was Karl Marx, an often unemployed theorist living under industrial capitalism, who taught us the importance of the economic basis in understanding the nature, ends, and ideologies of the dominate political structures in all times and places. But it was Jesus of Nazareth, a propertyless Jewish peasant subsisting under imperial Rome, who taught us how to see and see through the moral judgments which flow from such false consciousness, a morality which serves to protect and create the exploiting classes.

Among the sayings of Jesus which have been preserved, there are a handful of colorful and memorable quips employing exaggerated contrasts to illustrate the hypocritical judgments made by the dominant political and religious ideologies and leaders of his time. One of the most famous is his rhetorical question to those who fixate on the speck of sawdust in their brother’s eye, but don’t even notice the log sticking out of their own eye.^[4] Another is, “You blind leaders! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!”^[5]

What Jesus' sayings help to reveal, although it is counterintuitive, is that the most successful and stubborn ideas which make up a false consciousness do not operate on subtle misconceptions or minor deceptions. They are always complete reversals resulting in total hypocrisies.

Jesus' cynicism can be applied generally to see how the hypocrisy is borne out today (and a few specific examples of such reversals from Ferguson will be demonstrated in the next sections). Every stable mode of production has its own obfuscating myths which are accepted by a sufficient number of both the exploiting and exploited classes to maintain widespread complacency. And so in liberalism we can expect to find those myths which hide the horrors of capitalism from the citizens of republics:

Private Property, a ruthless process and legal institution which deprives millions of property, requiring armies of police and soldiers to maintain, is seen as a provider of prosperity and stability. The Rule of Law, which so impartially allows the rich and the starving poor to depend on the purchase of commodities for survival, is seen as an egalitarian force. Above all Progressivism — by which the current social organization is seen to be fundamentally good and always improving through the democratic mechanisms of elections, petition, and scientific enlightenment — condemns as criminal any attempt by the oppressed to assert their dignity or make actual improvements to their conditions.

‘Justice for Mike Brown’

If the pig who shot Mike Brown ever sees the courtroom
You’ll have mostly the looters to thank for it

— Pat The Bunny
"I Was A Teenage Anarchist"

Returning to the death of Michael Brown: arming oneself then confronting, fighting with, pursuing, and finally shooting to death an unarmed young man is behavior which should require significant extenuating circumstances to excuse. Even if Wilson were not a police officer, his actions would likely warrant a criminal trial to determine the facts more fully. But Wilson is a police officer who has been entrusted by the public (whom he is ostensibly protecting) with weapons, training, and legal authority. If anything, while acknowledging his work will tend to place him into conflicts, he should be held to a higher standard of behavior and legal culpability than an ordinary citizen in handling those confrontations. Instead, in accordance with the law, he has been granted extra leniency and the case against him will not even be examined in open court.

Given all of that, and not even considering pre-existing systemic injustices or the patterns of police abuse, it is plain why there is such widespread belief that an injustice was committed against Michael Brown and the Ferguson community. ‘Justice for Mike Brown’ has become a slogan for protests, and is taken as a demand by journalists looking to provide a motive for protesters. But what would such ‘justice’ look like? All too often the slogan is simply a demand that Darren Wilson be more fully subjected to the same criminal justice system which produced him. In such cases it is actually a demand of ‘justice for Darren Wilson’.

It’s a demand that reveals two divergent but both conservative reactions. The first, the ‘peaceful protesters,’ believe the justice system provides its own adequate channels of reform and view protest, insofar as it is legal or at least peaceful, as legitimate democratic petition of the government. The second, sharing the logic of a lynch mob, believes itself to be an extralegal corrective to a justice system gone so far astray that its own means of reform are no longer effective. Both accept at face value the necessity of the justice system as it promises to function.

On one of the riotous nights following the grand jury decision, CNN described a crowd of protesters who overturned and burned a police cruiser and then chanted across the street toward the lines of riot police and national guardsmen, “We are not your enemy. We just want justice.”^[6] The demand for justice, referring to criminal justice, shows how fully even some of the vandalizing protesters in Ferguson have internalized the liberal myths which legitimate capitalism and its political superstructures. Except to the grieving friends and family of Michael Brown who can’t be blamed for seeking whatever peace and closure they can find from a legal system which purports to provide it, the question of justice in the case of Darren Wilson is a symptom, a speck of dust, a gnat. Yet the Ferguson community leaders and many protesters strain at him while swallowing the murderous political system they believe can bring them justice.

Vandalism, even in the cause of liberalism, is clearly seen as a threat to the authorities and the image of control they’d like to maintain (hence the frenzied calls for peace among political leaders at all levels). But the split between the strictly peaceful and the extra-legal protesters also provides an opportunity to control the scope of debate during times of social unrest. For example, note what the highest ranking office of liberalism in the world has to say about rioting. During the 1992 LA Riots, President Bush acknowledged that while Americans have reason to be frustrated with the law, they should not actually unleash those frustrations on the legal system itself:

“In this highly controversial court case, a verdict was handed down by a California jury. To Americans of all races who were shocked by the verdict, let me say this: You must understand that our system of justice provides for the peaceful, orderly means of addressing this frustration. We must respect the process of law whether or not we agree with the outcome. There’s a difference between frustration with the law and direct assaults upon our legal system.” ^[7]

— George Bush

Similarly, president Obama in his address to the nation after the Ferguson grand jury decision pleaded for frustrations to be channeled “constructively”:

“First and foremost, we are a nation built on the rule of law. And so we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make. […] But what is also true is that there are still problems and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up. […] What we need to do is to understand them and figure out how do we make more progress. […] That won’t be done by throwing bottles. That won’t be done by smashing car windows. […] So, to those in Ferguson, there are ways of channeling your concerns constructively and there are ways of channeling your concerns destructively.”^[8]

— Barack Obama

Riots provide several benefits for the working class at the expense of the owning class. As such, there is an ideological benefit in dissuading those who can be persuaded by liberalism from rioting. The liberal kit outlined by Obama — foundation on a Rule of Law, Progress, the sanctity of Property, and proper Democratic channels — is so ingrained in the minds of Americans that such appeals may work at an almost instinctive level. But even if they are ineffective in that, appeals to the law serve at least two important roles in maintaining order:

By constantly making a distinction between lawful and non-lawful protest, the debate becomes centered on the morality and efficacy of extralegal reform. This has the effect of pushing radical change to the periphery, and completely out of view of most protesters and spectators.
By creating a sense of urgency in maintaining peaceful protests, politicians can induce protesters to police each other.

A darker theoretical speculation can be drawn about the role of murderous policing itself, including the double-standard seen in the indictment process. By deviating so obviously from the promise of justice the system purports, prosecutors and police have succeeded in prompting people to take to the streets in support of the criminal justice system.

Why Are They Looting Their Own Neighborhoods?

Meanwhile, much of the American populace suffers from a similar but different aspect of the liberal mystification. They read the reports of looting and see the pictures on TV of shops on fire, and they just can’t seem to figure out why those black people would destroy “their own” neighborhoods. As if the shopping centers in any American neighborhood, much less a black neighborhood, are collectively-owned cooperatives or in any way belong to the community rather than to petite bourgeois owners.

These Americans are so ensconced in liberal mythology that they are utterly unable to make sense of the world that confronts them on their cable news programs every night. It seems perfectly natural to think of people — especially the dark skinned and uneducated — as automatons who should spend their lives working and obeying (or begging and obeying), but any disruption of peace and order is a startling transgression. ‘Peace and order’ is paramount; it implies the ability to peaceably and orderly employ, tax, fine, and blame the poor… in Ferguson and everywhere.

As it is with gnats and camels, so it is with looting and capital. Businesses have stolen more from the working class — and most extensively from the black working class — than any practical amount of looting could ever recover. Yet the political leaders, news journalists, and the average American worker will strain all of their moral indignation at the tiny acts of re-appropriation like when a looter makes off with food or a television, but will swallow without question the entire impoverishing, alienating system of wage work which leaves so many with so little.

The wealth of the United States of America, from a British colony to an imperialist superpower, is the result of over four centuries of indentured servitude, chattel slavery, genocide, debt peonage, subjugation of women, plundering wars, and a system of wage labour which has no end in sight, all legally sanctioned and enforced by the established police forces. And what Americans cannot understand, the thing that is beyond acceptance, is when a liquor store is looted.

The Virtue of Rioting

Of course not all events that occur during times of rebellion are necessarily good. There is nothing useful or dignifying in opportunistic violence against individuals or theft of personal property committed under cover of social unrest, and such acts are properly crimes. It is also important to recognize that spontaneous uprisings like Ferguson are not organized revolutions in which targets are prioritized, goods are seized and distributed according to need, and capital is taken over to be run collectively — or whatever revolution might look like.

As much as some of us may wish to see such activity, and while some spontaneous rebellions have historically lead to more directed revolutionary efforts, it is not even possible without more preparations than currently exist. The national guard in Missouri is happy to guard only the highest value centers of capital during a couple of nights of light looting of consumer goods. But if any protesters had attempted to actually take control of and operate their own workplaces, it would have been SWAT raids, live rounds, and whatever carnage was deemed necessary to return property to its lawfully exploiting owners.

But why loot and riot at all? Earlier in this essay I claimed that riots provide benefits to the working class. What are they? Most obvious is the material benefits inherent in the act of looting. In addition to material gain, looting brings a flavour of what a post-capitalist economy will feel like. On every other day of their life, a looter’s needs rule over them in the form of money and commodities. For a few brief days during a riot, commodities are subordinated to the form of mere goods which satisfy needs.

Secondly, riots win political concessions. They signal to the ruling class that it is squeezing a tad tightly and needs to let up in order to keep its grip. The unrest in Ferguson has directly prompted the federal government to begin investigating the Ferguson Police Department for possible civil rights abuses,^[9] and President Obama has asked congress for $75 million to fund 50,000 body cameras to help reduce murder and other abuse by America’s police officers.^[10] Other reforms may follow, none of which would have happened if protesters in Ferguson and elsewhere had not forced the issue.

But most importantly, riots and the reactions to riots reveal the hypocrisy Jesus saw so clearly. The public judgment of rioters lays bare the false morality of the dominate ideology. Covert domination — including economic exploitation and racism — can be swallowed and transmitted to new generations without being noticed. But overt domination is noticed and generates its own resistance. It is when domination is exposed and individuals are freed of their false consciousness that Jesus' “kingdom of heaven,” the Wobblies' “new world in the shell of the old,” and the Marxist’s “whithering away” of classes is possible. There are Christians who don’t understand a word of what Jesus said, but who nevertheless believe with all of their strength that his words have the power to save their souls. I don’t think they are wrong.

Bill Nye and the Importance of Science Education

2014-02-10T16:29:39Z

Why should I embrace science education? Like most people, I’ve struggled with that question. I was on the verge of despair when fortunately Bill Nye “The Science Guy” engaged in a high-profile debate with Ken Ham in order to defend the usefulness of understanding the world through scientific theories as opposed to interpretations of ancient creation myths. Before the debate, Nye stated the reason he was debating was, “For the United States to maintain its leadership in technology, we need well-educated science students.” To bring that point home, he summarized his position during the debate with these concluding remarks:

If we stop driving forward, stop looking for the next answer to the next question, we in the United States will be out-competed by other countries, other economies. Now that would be okay, I guess. But I was born here. I’m a patriot. And so we have to embrace science education.

So there it is. If you ever find yourself puzzled, like I was, as to why you should embrace science education, just remember that Bill Nye was born in the U-S-A!

An apparent corollary to Nye’s emphasis on the importance of what “voters and taxpayers” compel their children to learn is that Christian creationism is such an appealing position that if it were taught in schools along with science, students would never develop a love for science. The Genesis account is so compelling, Nye seems to believe, that if the children who are taught it as Truth at home are also exposed to it in a classroom, “our economic engine will slow and eventually stop”. Don’t let it happen, America.

'Kung Fu Panda', 'South Park', and Cynicism

2012-11-04T15:21:19Z

I ran across this mini-interview with Slavoj Žižek (from 2008) where he gives his opinion of a couple of movies and a video game:

“If you ask me for really dangerous ideological films, for ideology at its purest, I’d say Kung Fu Panda. I saw it five times because my son likes it. The movie is extremely cynical in that you know they make fun of all this ideology, of Buddhism and these things, but the message is even though we know it is not true and we make fun, you have to believe in it. It’s this split of you know it’s not true but just make like you believe in it.”

— Slavoj Žižek

I agree with Zizek that an acceptance of beliefs because they’re beliefs is a frustrating attitude. It’s one thing I dislike about so many South Park episodes. For example, throughout the episode titled “All About Mormons?” the show mocks the dubious history of the Book of Mormon. But then at the very end of the episode, Gary, one of the Mormon boys, delivers a monologue in which it is suggested, essentially, that because Mormonism is a religion its members should make like they believe in it:

“Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life, and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don’t care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that’s stupid, I still choose to believe in it.”

That attitude, however, is not Cynical. While I see many congruences between the Cynic school of philosophy and the colloquial term cynic, in this case, in Zizek’s use of the term, they are opposites. The Cynics mock ideologies which derive their authority simply from being ideologies, even if those ideologies are the very foundation of the society they are living in.

Of course with South Park I’m never really sure if it’s just being cynical or is actually being Cynical.