Against the Stream

Right Wing Role Playing

One of my favorite lines about Dungeons & Dragons came from an episode of The X-Files. In the episode, an author is interviewing a young man about a case Mulder and Scully were investigating. After he relates his story, the author asks him if he's frightened to come forward. The man responds by saying "Well hey, I didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons & Dragons without learning a little something about courage."

 

I thought of that scene when I read Russell Moore's article in Christianity Today, "Fantasy Role-Playing is Hurting America." In a clever bit of reversal, he suggests that maybe the evangelical pastors who cautioned him against playing D&D when he was a kid had a point: "maybe there’s another form of fantasy role-playing that might be occultic and pagan in the truest sense of those words."

Paganism, after all, demands the sort of significance that is heroic, in which one’s virtues of strength and power are celebrated in story and song. Joseph Campbell famously popularized Jung’s idea of the “hero’s journey” a half century ago, but the quest for an imagined heroism is even stronger now—and often much, much darker.

Moore's real target, however, isn't really Dungeons & Dragons or other actual fantasy role-playing games. Rather, it's the form of right-wing self-mythologization that has metastasized on the American right and within the Republican Party since the advent of Donald Trump as a credible political figure, aided and abetted by not-really-all-that-crypto-fascists like Steve Bannon. Moore jumps off from a recent Atlantic article by Jennifer Senior, in which she describes the January 6th insurrectionists as "angry, howling hordes" who "arrived as real-life avatars, cosplaying the role of rebels in face paint and fur. They stormed the Capitol while an enemy army tried to beat them away."

Senior ties this into Steve Bannon's background in video game design, and the idea that, for gamers, one's identity as "Dave from accounts payable" is less a reflection of that person's real identity than Dave's online gaming persona, Ajax. He contrasts the occasion of Dave's death with that of Ajax:

Some preacher from a church or some guy from a funeral home who’s never met him does a 10-minute eulogy, says a few prayers. And that’s Dave,” Bannon says. He contrasts this boring, real-life Dave from accounts payable with Dave’s online gaming persona: Ajax. Ajax is tough and warlike. When he dies in the fantasy, there’s a funeral pyre and thousands of people come to mourn Ajax the Warrior.

Bannon concludes that "some people—particularly disaffected men—actively prefer and better identify with the online versions of themselves.”

Whether this provides an adequate account of the motives of the January 6th rioters, I can't say. I suspect not. Disaffection? Sure. But it would be a mistake to assume, as Senior puts it, that they were "cosplaying" as revolutionaries any more than the Jacobins were cosplaying in 1789. They weren't pretending to foment a revolution. They were fomenting it. And their motives, at least as far as I can discern them, were not based on some kind of video game reflection of themselves as heroic avatars. They were whipped into a violent frenzy by a genuine, if delusional belief that their actual democracy was being stolen from them. They weren't role-playing as a violent right-wing mob. They were an actual, bone fide right wing mob!

Which brings me back to that quote from The X-Files and Moore's clever, though ultimately misplaced critique of role-playing. There is, in my experience, always a level of ironic self-parody among role-players. We know better than to take ourselves too seriously, or to believe that we are really learning lessons about courage from rolling dice and pretending to be elves and wizards. We are engaged in a sort of escapism that enables us to recharge our batteries for the challenges of our real lives -- kids, jobs, bills, traffic -- the unheroic and inglorious aspects of our merely human lives. What distinguishes role-players from adherents of Q-Anon or from the Proud Boys is that we're not delusional.

That said, there is something true about Moore's invocation of a certain kind of pagan ideology in his critique, though again, laying at the feet of role-playing games is misplaced. Rather, it is the paganism of nationalism, the paganism of place, and ethnicity and culture that is at the heart of every right wing movement. It is what H. Richard Niebuhr saw as the danger of the worship of merely tribal gods rather than the kind of radical monotheism to which Christians are called.

One can critique that form of paganism without trivializing it as a form of fantasy role-playing. It's not. And while someone like the Q-Anon shaman may seem, at first blush, to be a deeply ironic and unserious figure, make no mistake. He wasn't role-playing or cos-playing. The assault that he and his compatriots launched on American democracy was very real. It was not a game.

Who Are the Leaders of Progressive Christianity

Rev. Sekou rocking out on NPR

Over at Patheos, Kieth Giles has compiled a list of who, in his estimation, qualify as the leaders of Progressive Christianity. The list includes a number of very prominent figures in the movement. At the same time, a number of commenters in the list, including me, noted with some dismay that many of the entrants were white, straight, cis, male, and in some cases, dead.

Now, in fairness to Keith, he was upfront in noting the subjectivity of the list, and he made his criteria clear: "How often do these people get quoted, shared, name-dropped or referenced in Progressive Christian posts, books, interviews or on social media?" And this is a pretty good standard for establishing leadership in the movement. So, without trying to deny the validity of Keith's list, I thought it might be worthwhile to expand the list to include a few additional names that Kieth overlooked, with an emphasis on picking folks who are non-white, non-hetero, and/or insofar as possible, non-dead.

I will qualify this the same way Kieth did: My list is to some degree subjective. And I'm not sure that I have better metrics than Kieth has in order to determine what makes a person a "leader" as a progressive Christian. But in the interests of expanding the circle of discourse, these are some names worth including:

Cornel West: Cornel West's form of radical and pragmatic Christian activism has inspired progressive faith for decades now. For many of us, Race Matters was a watershed text in discussing American racism. But his earlier work, from Prophesy Deliverance to Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times laid the intellectual foundation for a politically radical and yet loving approach to Christian faith that continues to yield fruit. I go back time and time again to his reminder that "justice is what love looks like in public."

Robin Henderson-Espinoza: A self-described "trans-queer activist scholar" and "politicized theologian," Robin Henderson-Espinoza challenges the colonialized Christianity that is so much a part of dominant American culture and stands up for those marginalized by that cultural hegemony.

Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou: Rev. Sekou has been organizing and working as an activist in progressive Christianity for many years. He's a pastor, a writer, and a musician who brings a Pentecostalist energy to progressive faith.

William Barber: A founder and leader of the Moral Mondays movement, William Barber has been a prominent voice in Progressive Christian activism for the past decade, and an important voice for justice and progressive Christian action.

Miguel de la Torre: In fairness, I'm not sure Miguel de la Torre would necessarily identify as Christian at this point. However, his work on Latin American theology and ethics has been deeply influential across the progressive Christian landscape.

To be clear, these are only some of the leaders that came to me with a few moments of thought and research. There are many others that I could name, given a bit more time and thought, and there are many other beyond these that represent a wide array of Christian communities. But in the interests of widening the circle, these were the ones that I thought it important to mention up front. I probably could have gone on at length about each of these names as well. But I've provided links in case you want to learn more about each of them.

However, all of this has given me reason to think about the deeper question of just want progressive Christianity is in the first place, never mind what it means for someone to be a "leader" in it. Is it a movement? A set of institutions? A vibe? I want to return to this question in my next post and think about some basic touchstones of progressive Christian faith, and a bit of my own history with it as well.

The Cult of Guns and Christian Nationalism

Thomas Lacaque writes about the intersection of gun cultism and religious nationalism in Religion Dispatches, noting that the AR-15 in particular is marketed to apocalyptic Christians with specifically biblical imagery.

This is a screenshot from a now hidden tweet from Daniel Defense, the maker of the assault rifle the Uvalde shooter used in his massacre at Robb Elementary.

It uses the photo of a small child and a Bible verse to sell weapons of war. pic.twitter.com/2CmckN4A6X

— Ashton Pittman (@ashtonpittman) May 27, 2022

Lacaque goes on to note other examples of explicit marketing of mass murder weapons to evangelical Christians:

If Daniel Defense sells their guns using Bible verses, other companies have a much closer affiliation. A Florida gunmaker, Spike’s Tactical, makes an AR-15-style rifle they call the “Crusader.” The name is chosen deliberately and with care, and the company knows exactly what they’re selling. ...

The rifle—which is popular with the far right—features an engraved Templar shield logo opposite the Psalm, and has three settings on it, presumably safety, single fire and semi-auto, but named, “Pax Pacis, Bellum, & Deus Vult,” or “Peace, War, and God Wills It,” the First Crusade battle cry popular with contemporary white supremacists. And as a company spokesperson said in 2015, “This ensures that no Muslim terrorist will ever pick up this weapon and use it to bring harm against another person. That’s actually my favorite part of the rifle.” 

He goes on to note the intimate connection between far right Christian rhetoric and political violence, which has been increasingly prevalent in recent years.

None of this, sadly, is surprising. The intersection of apocalyptic Christianity and political violence is baked into the kind of dominionist theology that has become so central to evangelicalism over the past half-century. And of course, Christianity's history of violence extends to back to its embrace by the Roman Empire, when support for the violent maintenance of power supplanted the ethic of nonviolence that had been at the heart of Jesus' teaching. But the fact that this is a long-standing perversion of the gospel does not render it any less obscene. And as I have noted before -- since it seems that these mass shootings are common enough that I have written on this topic multiple times -- for gun cultists, the embrace of guns is not a second amendment issue, it is a first amendment issue. It is not that they have a constitutional right to bear arms, it is that they have a first amendment right to worship them.

James Baldwin and Reinhold Niebuhr in Conversation

A few days ago, Fred Clark at Slacktivist posted a video of James Baldwin and Reinhold Niebuhr being interviewed in the wake of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing.

Fred also points to a Commonweal interview where Niebuhr comments on the white evangelicals of his own day, in words that are equally germane today:

One of the ironic facts of American history is that both slavery and post-slavery injustice prospered in the states that were formed by two kinds of idealism — a Jeffersonian idealism and evangelistic Protestantism. All the horrible racial cruelties that are practiced in Alabama and Mississippi are done by people who have been “converted” five, six, seven, or eight times. …

Then along comes Billy Graham for his great evangelistic meeting. His manner is bland and he’s a great biblicist. He speaks in a convincing way and, while the choir sings softly, he tells the people to pray and to give their heart to Christ and sign the decision card. He tells them in the words of St. Paul that “if any man be in Christ, he will be a new creature.”

This is fantastic, because it shows the weakness of Protestantism — individualism. It deals with collective sin, particularly the race question, in purely individualistic terms. You can’t overcome race prejudice by simply signing a decision card. Yet Billy Graham tells them that if they sign the decision card they will become “color-blind.” Why is it that we see no evidence of the color-blindness when these people leave the evangelistic meetings?

Fred comments: "What Niebuhr condemns here as “individualism” is the idea of religion — of “salvation” — without justice. He was as unconvinced of the possibility of such a thing as the prophet Isaiah was. ... Evangelical individualism, he believed, divorced love from justice, turning it into something sentimental and gormless and vapid."

Jurgen Moltmann and the Problem of Authority

Cameron Coombe, a doctoral student at the University of Otago in New Zealand draws our attention to this passage from Moltmann:

I grew up during the German dictatorship and as a young man spent five years in barracks and prison camps (1943-1948). I have therefore personally experienced authority and power as not especially healing—in fact, the reverse. Quite early, I believe it was in 1947, a sentence from Abraham Lincoln fascinated me: ‘I do not want to be any lord’s slave nor any slave’s lord.’ As a theological student, I was hesitant and mistrusting of the then-dominating theological schools of Bultmann and Barth, of Gogarten and Althaus. I felt myself oppressed by the pressure for ideological consent that was placed on one if one wanted to ‘belong.’ I could not march well in step with others, and so I became a divergent thinker, a nonconformist in that theological school to which I owe the most: the Barth school

A few things strike me about this passage.

First, the linkage, which is always there in Moltmann, between his biography and his theology. While many theologians (and here I think of Pannenberg in particular) like to pretend to be doing theology at 1000 feet, concerning themselves little with the concrete setting in which their own theology is formed and takes place, Moltmann has always been forthright about the dependence of his theology on his own personal story, particularly his experience in World War II and as a prisoner of war. Given the role that those experiences played in his conversion, it would be hard for him to be theologically honest without reference to those points, but he's never been shy about it.

Second, his general view of authority as that which should be viewed with suspicion. I'm particularly struck by the idea that "authority and power" were "not especially healing" in his experience. And certainly the kind of top-down authority structure that the Germany in which he grew up represented could and should give anyone a healthy suspicion of authority.

Third, the connection he makes between that and his own theological formation, in particular his desire not to be a metaphorical "slave" to anyone else's theological program. And that nevertheless, his affinities lie closest to the Barthian approach. This conforms well with what Douglas Meeks once told me, that he thought the best way to understand Moltmann was as a "liberal Barthian." It's certainly true that even insofar as his affinity is for the Barthain school he's definitely a "divergent thinker," and the battles between Moltmann and the Princeton Barthains to which I was a witness were at times impressive.

St. Hereticus and the Gospel of Americanism

Travis McMacken (of the excellent Helmut Gollwitzer book), reminds us of Robert McAffee Brown's alter ego St. Hereticus. For many years, St. Hereticus was a regular contributor to Christianity and Crisis, lampooning American Christianity and the peculiarities of modern theology.

In particular, Travis notes Hereticus's article on "Americanity" which seems very current these days:

Although this is a religion of fairly recent origins as world religions go (it is less than two hundred years old as I count time), it has in recent years become, so its adherents would claim, the most important. It cannot with total accuracy be called a world religion, since there are still a great many people in such colonies as Europe, Asia, Africa, the Far East, the Near East, and the Arctic and Antarctic regions who have not yet been converted by its missionaries, though in the last named region there have been some indications recently of a shift in sentiment among the Penguins.*

Of particular note is Hereticus's description of Americanity's understanding of monotheism and idolatry. He writes:

Wherein lies the great appeal of this religion? Most significantly perhaps in (1) the assurance with which it can claim to be the final hope of mankind; (2) the exclusiveness with which it can assert in the name of its deity, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” which in a briefly and more up-to-date translation goes, “America First”; (3) the wisdom of its benevolence program and almsgiving, which demands only that the recipients subscribe 100 percent to the creed of Americanity; and (4) the dedication of its priest-group, all of whom are prepared that heaven and earth should quite literally pass away before one jot or tittle of their creed be modified.

Hereticus (and Brown) were often prophetic, but at the time that he was writing, this was no great revelation of some future state of American religion. The first religion of America has always been America. And the unique theology of America has always been as it was described by H. Richard Niebuhr:

A God without wrath brought a people without sin to a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.

Thus has it ever been. The challenge of Christianity in America is always to distinguish itself from American Christianity.

Of Gods and Guns

What follows is the text of the sermon I preached on February 18, 2018 at Edgebrook Community Church in Chicago, IL.

I venture to say that most preachers, if given a crystal ball and a chance to pick the days on which they were to preach, would select very carefully which days would be the “easiest” for them, the ones without controversy, without heartbreak, without tragedy. If you knew in advance what the world would throw at your Congregation, most preachers would strive to preach on what for lack of a better term we could call “quiet” weeks. Alas, I was not granted such a crystal ball, and so I find myself standing before you on this Sunday in the wake of another horror, another tragedy, and I am impelled to speak on it.

However, it is important, before doing so, to speak of who we are, what we as a community are here to do, and most particularly, what this time in the liturgical year signifies for us as a congregation, and more broadly as the people of Christ.

A lot of quips were made on Wednesday about the convergence of Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s day, including by me. It is a bit amusing, for certain values of “amusing” that a day dedicated in our culture to the celebration of a sort of indulgent form of romantic love — with chocolate, wine, flowers, and fancy dinners — converged with the beginning of the great fast of the Christian tradition. In the morning, when it was still possible to laugh, I posted to Facebook: “Welcome to your 40 days of fasting and self-denial. Here, have some chocolate.” And culturally speaking, Ash Wednesday was almost totally ignored in the flood of feel good valentine’s day stories. But as a Christian, even as I looked over those stories, I was aware of the fact that for me Ash Wednesday had to predominate. And so later on in the day I wrote: “Remember, you can’t spell “Valentine without Lent.” 

Other Christian friends of mine would post memes about how Saint Valentine was actually beaten and beheaded for the gospel so, you know, happy Valentine’s day! This is the equivalent of the memes I sometimes see around Christmas time pointing out that Saint Nicholas was known as much for punching heretics as he was for distributing gifts to children. It’s a good and worthwhile thing to deconstruct our cultural myths surrounding these holidays, and to remind ourselves of the degree to which Christian figures and symbols are so often culturally appropriated and misused for secular purposes. Catch me the Sunday after March 17th to hear all of my thoughts on Saint Patrick.

Yet there is an innate contradiction between the way we culturally celebrate the idea of Romantic Love on February 14th, and the reality that Ash Wednesday calls us to contemplate. As the ashes are imposed upon us and the celebrant intones “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.” Romantic love is in a very real sense gnostic. Our modern conception of it is rooted in medieval traditions of courtly love, in which romantic desire was intended to be sublimated to higher pursuits like poetry, and where physical beauty was celebrated, but only as something not to be touched. Young courtiers would woo (usually) married women, but not with the intent of seducing them (in theory), but rather with the intent of simply celebrating their beauty through art.

Ash Wednesday, by contrast, calls on us to remember our total physicality, to remember that we are flesh, blood, and bone. That we are, in a real sense, dust. Dirt. That to be human is to come from humus — the ground. And that is where we are destined. Our beauty will fade, which the medieval courtiers chose not to reflect upon. Our bodies will fail us, and ultimately we will die. And we have constructed an entire culture around the desire to forget that fact. We idolize — in the real sense of idolatry — youth, physical prowess (just look at the Olympic), physical beauty, really everything physical except that which is the most salient fact of all about our physicality, that we are made of meat.

There is a science fiction story by Terry Bisson that reflects on this fact. It is simply a dialogue between two aliens who are considering whether to make first contact with humanity. They are taken up short, however, when they realize that we’re made of meat.

"Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat.”

Once they realize the truth of the matter though, they opt to move on without making contact with us. After all, they reflect. Who wants to meet meat.

The story is funny because we don’t usually think of ourselves as meat. But we are in fact meat. All the way through. The first time that I taught this story in one of my classes, in order to get them to reflect on the reality of our own mortality as well as the sheer wonder of the fact that in Jesus Christ God became human, God became meat, for our sakes, one of my students shouted at me “Stop calling us meat!”

But meat we are, and meat we shall be. And what today’s Gospel story serves to remind us is that God did indeed become meat for us. Jesus Christ was God in flesh, God con carne, God in meat form. And that God became meat for us and for our salvation. And so while Valentine’s day tries to get us to forget that at the end of the day we are dust, we are matter, we are meat. The lesson of Ash Wednesday — and the entirety of Lent — pulls us in the opposite direction.

In today’s passage what we find is an all too human Jesus, impelled to John in order to be baptized. In Mark’s telling of the story we get few flourishes, unlike in Mathew and Luke. Jesus comes to be baptized, and rising out of the water has an experience of the Holy Spirit and hears a voice telling him that he is the Son of God. It’s striking that all of this is, in a way, subjective. Jesus sees and hears these things, but they are not, in a sense public declarations of Jesus messianic role. Unlike the other gospels, where an actual dove appears, and where a voice speaks to the crowed telling them that Jesus is the Son of God, here the only one who receives this message is Jesus, and it is he, not the crowd, who is addressed by the voice. This is not the moment of Jesus’ public ministry. Rather, this is the moment of Jesus own self-identification as the messiah.

And so he does what one might expect in the wake of such a revelation — he flees into the desert. Whether to get away from the reality of the revelation, or to reflect upon its meaning, or to seek some higher wisdom, the story does not report. Rather we are just told that the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness. The Greek word which we translate here at Spirit is pneuma, which is the same root from which we get words like “pneumatic.” It can indicate both the concept of “breath” and the concept of “wind.” In Hebrew the word “ruach” serves the same function, indicating wind and breath as well as Spirit. So in a real sense we can say that Jesus is blown into the desert by the wind of God, and there we learn three things in Mark’s telling: He’s tempted by Satan, he’s “with the wild beasts,” and he is attended by angels. Given how little Mark gives us to work with, all three of these are evocative without actually being substantive. They give us food for our imaginations, but nothing by way of detail. We do not get the classic scene of Satan bringing Jesus to a mountain top and offering him all the kingdoms of the world if he will bow down before Satan. We’re only told that there was a temptation.

But then there is the idea that he was “among the wild beasts.” Often when we think of the fleshly aspects of our humanity, the non-spiritual, non-intellectual aspects of our existence — which is to say things like indulgence in food, indulgence in sex, indulgence in luxury of any kind — it is referred to as “beastial,” that which makes us more like animals. So one way to parse this is that Jesus comes to grip with the reality of his humanity — the fact that he is both God’s son and that he is made of meat. And yet in the end, he is “attended by angels,” which is to say, having rejected Satan’s temptations (whatever they were), and come to grips with his messianic identity as the all too human Son of God, Jesus is given comfort by the messengers of God.

However, the story continues, and crucially, it concludes on Jesus embrace of his ministry and his proclamation of the Gospel: The Kingdom of God has come near. The time is at hand. Turn around and here the good news!

The Sunday after a school shooting is a strange time to be talking about good news, of any sort. It would seem that the reality of the bad news that we have been grappling with since Wednesday should overwhelm the good news to which Jesus calls us to attend. How can we celebrate the Kingdom which has come near to us when it seems so far away? How can we lift up our voices in praise of God in the face of such radical evil? There is no easy answer to that question. But here are some things that I do know.

First, there is a sense in which this school shooting is a tragedy, but not in the way most people think. I am always wary when I hear the word tragedy used to describe these kinds of events. It suggests the idea that we are helpless before it, that we could have done nothing to prevent it. That it is the mere capriciousness of fate that put those children in the way of a maniac’s bullet. There is a way of telling this story in which it is a tragedy of that kind, and like the classical Greek tragedies, any attempts to avoid the preordained outcome only serve to hasten its arrival. Like Oedipus’s father seeking to evade the prophecy that he will be killed by his son, only to have his very acts lead to that very outcome. In this telling of the story we are passive in the face of an unavoidable destiny, and so all we can do is allow history to take its course and sweep us along with it. This, sadly, or rather infuriatingly, seems to be the path taken by many of our political leaders in the past few days. 

But there is another sense in which it is a genuine tragedy, which is in that to the degree that it was inevitable, it was so because of our own hubris, our own pride, and our own belief as a nation that we are in some sense special, unique, exceptional. It is precisely our own elevated sense of self-importance as a nation that leads us inevitably into this cul de sac again, and again, and again. We refuse to believe that we have anything to learn from other nations. We refuse to believe that we have anything as a nation to repent of. We refuse to forthrightly face our own history and its present effects and make amends because far, far too many of us, including our political leaders, believe we do not have to. It is this hubris that is what makes the repeated reality of these shootings genuinely tragic. The tragedy, however, is not simply that something terrible has happened to innocent children. The tragedy is not that it was inevitable. The tragedy was that it was eminently preventable but that we in our pride and self-concern refused to do anything.

Second, and relatedly, I know that these crimes are preventable. Far too often in the wake of these attacks we hear that “nothing could have been done to prevent this.” And of course, again lacking a crystal ball, I cannot say for certain whether stricter gun laws would have prevented this particular crime. But I can tell you with moral certainty that stricter gun laws would prevent many crimes. That there is common sense gun legislation that could have made it much, much harder for this young man, who was not even old enough to legally buy alcohol, who was barely old enough to join the military, to obtain a weapon capable of massacring 17 people, most of whom were children in cold blood, in a school.

When we hear rhetoric about the impossibility of preventing shootings of this kind, we should be outraged at the passivity and defeatism it represents. As though the lives of our children, of our friends and neighbors are precious enough for us to at least try! I’m reminded of the line from an episode of the Simpsons where a parent complains of the difficulty of disciplining his unruly son — “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas.” This line perfectly encapsulates the attitude of our political leaders. Having tried nothing and found it to have been ineffective, they’ve concluded that these kinds of killings are simply something we must accept.

But I do not accept it, be cause it is unacceptable. It was unacceptable when it happened in Columbine, 19 years ago. It was unacceptable when it happened in Newtown, six years ago. It was unacceptable when it happened, at a concert rather than a school, in Las Vegas mere months ago, and it is unacceptable now. I don’t need to go into the details of the kinds of legislation that may be able to make a difference in preventing future shootings. That information is widely available and I encourage each of you to go and research it thoroughly. What I do know is that these crimes are preventable, and as a Christian community, we have an obligation to strive to work to prevent any such crime happening in the future.

Third, I know that there is a deep idolatry that lies at the heart of the American obsession with guns. I mean this in a strictly religious sense. We have displaced our faith in the God of Jesus Christ and sought security in Moloch, the destroyer. We have placed our faith in a God who does not full with life, but who brings only death, who calls for human sacrifice, and to whom we repeatedly offer up our children. Until we truly repent and turn away from this idolatry of gun worship, we will be incapable of seeking the kingdom which Christ preaches in our reading for today. Yet as a culture, we have once again appropriated Christian language and put it to the service of our own cultural obsession. In this case though, instead of glomming onto a Christian saint and using him to sell flowers and chocolate, we have taken the name of Jesus Christ himself, and laid that name over the idolatrous worship of the God of guns, the God of death.

This was vividly illustrated in last years TV adaptation of the book American Gods, in a scene in which Jesus, among a group of Mexican immigrants crossing the Rio Grande, is killed by a militia firing bullets with biblical slogans engraved on them. We mistake the gods of death and destruction, guns and bullets with the God of Christianity. But “mistake” is the wrong word. We do it intentionally, because the Gospel is a much harder path to follow than one that congratulates us as a nation for our own worst excesses. And so, we offer sacrifices to the God of guns. We offer our children.

However, Fourth, I also know this: The gods of death and destruction do not have the last word. Rather, in Jesus Christ we know that the Kingdom is in fact near. We know that death is overcome in the flood of new life. That we are in fact made for a destiny beyond the tawdry idolatries of Valentine’s day and the cult of guns. We know that the last word in the Christian lexicon is hope. And that our hope is not that we might escape our flesh, that we my transcends matter, that we might leave our bodies for a heavenly realm. Rather, our hope is that we may dwell within God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, in the flesh, not merely in the spirit, and that every bodily aspect of our lives can be and will be redeemed in the Kingdom that has come near to us. Near enough to us that we can almost see it, if we squint, and if we know where to look, and if we look, not to the violent and the defeated for signs of the kingdom, but to those who imagine a different world, a peaceful world, a world in which the violence to which we are subject has been overcome and love has come to reign among us.

And I know that we are currently wandering in the wilderness. That we are in the season where repentance is at the forefront of our consciousness. Along the way we may be tempted by Satan — tempted by indulgence, tempted by power, tempted by despair. But as we wander in the wilderness of Lenten reflection, we should remember in faith that our destiny is in the hands of one who desires not to sacrifice our children on behalf of a God of violence and warfare, but in the hands of a God who chose rather to sacrifice himself on our behalf. That this God intercedes for us in Jesus Christ, and that in Jesus Christ this God overcomes even the greatest of evils, even the most despicable of crimes. And let us remember in our lenten reflection that our history is not, ultimately, a tragedy, but rather a comedy — a divine comedy, in which the final act is the promise that we will dwell with God and in God’s kingdom forever.

A Statement from Christian Ethicists Without Borders on White Supremacy and Racism

I am one of the signatories of the statement below. If you are a Christian ethicist, I urge you to follow the links at the bottom of the page and add your name.

A Statement from Christian Ethicists Without Borders
on White Supremacy and Racism

August 14, 2017

As followers of Jesus Christ and as Christian ethicists representing a range of denominations and schools of thought, we stand in resolute agreement in firmly condemning racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and neo-Nazi ideology as a sin against God that divides the human family created in God’s image.

In January of 2017, white nationalist groups emboldened by the 2016 election planned an armed march against the Jews of Whitefish, Montana. On August 11th and 12th, hundreds of armed neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. As we mourn the deaths of 32-year old counter-protester Heather Heyer and state troopers H. Jay Cullen and Berke Bates from this most recent incident, we unequivocally denounce racist speech and actions against people of any race, religion, or national origin.

White supremacy and racism deny the dignity of each human being revealed through the Incarnation. The evil of white supremacy and racism must be brought face-to-face before the figure of Jesus Christ, who cannot be confined to any one culture or nationality. Through faith we proclaim that God the Creator is the origin of all human persons. In the words of Frederick Douglass, “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”

The greatest commandments, as Jesus taught and exemplified, are to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves; and so as children of God, and sisters and brothers to all, we hold the following:

• We reject racism and anti-Semitism, which are radical evils that Christianity must actively resist.
• We reject the sinful white supremacy at the heart of the “Alt Right” movement as Christian heresy.
• We reject the idolatrous notion of a national god. God cannot be reduced to “America’s god.”
• We reject the “America First” doctrine, which is a pernicious and idolatrous error. It foolishly asks Americans to replace the worship of God with the worship of the nation, poisons both our religious traditions and virtuous American patriotism, and isolates this country from the community of nations. Such nationalism erodes our civic and religious life, and fuels xenophobic and racist attacks against immigrants and religious minorities, including our Jewish and Muslim neighbors.
• We confess that all human beings possess God-given dignity and are members of one human family, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or country of origin.
• We proclaim that the gospel of Jesus Christ has social and political implications. Those who claim salvation in Jesus Christ, therefore, must publicly name evil, actively resist it, and demonstrate a world of harmony and justice in the midst of racial, religious and indeed all forms of human diversity.

Therefore, we call upon leaders of every Christian denomination, especially pastors, to condemn white supremacy, white nationalism, and racism.

• Contemplate and respect the image of God imprinted on each human being.
• Work across religious traditions to reflect on the ways we have been complicit in upholding and benefiting from the sins of racism and white supremacy.
• Pray for the strength and courage to stand emphatically against racism, white supremacy, and nationalism in all its forms.
• Participate in acts of peaceful protest, including rallies, marches, and at times, even civil disobedience. Do not remain passive bystanders in the face of the heresies of racism, white supremacy, and white nationalism.
• Engage in political action to oppose structural racism.

We will bring the best of our traditions to an ecclesial and societal examination of conscience where rhetoric and acts of hatred against particular groups can be publicly named as grave sins and injustices.

Finally, as ethicists, we commit—through our teaching, writing, and service—to the ongoing, hard work of building bridges and restoring wholeness where racist and xenophobic ideologies have brought brokenness and pain.

(If you are a Christian ethicist or teach Christian ethics and wish to add your name, please email Tobias Winright at [email protected] or Matthew Tapie at [email protected] or Anna Floerke Scheid at [email protected] or MT Dávila at [email protected] with your name, highest degree, title, and institution. Institutions are named for identification purposes only and this does not necessarily represent their support of this statement, although we hope they do, too.)

For a full updated list of signatories, please click here:

Captain Kirk, the Bible, and Hell

Fred Clark at Slacktivist makes an interesting analogy between Captain Kirk's love life and the way we read the Bible:

We remember it wrong because we see that green woman in the opening credits through the filter of our idea of James T. Kirk, Womanizer and that filter reshapes what we see, reinforcing the mistake.

Horáková calls this dismembered remembering “Kirk Drift,” and dives deep into the sources, mechanics, and repercussions of this pernicious, pervasive form of self-deception. It’s a long, twisting exploration of this phenomenon, full of wild tangents and asides that later turn out to be connections back to this central idea. I’m sure it will be read by Star Trek fans, but it also should be read by history students.

And by seminarians. Because, of course, this same dynamic of “Kirk Drift” is also at work whenever we read, and mis-read, the Bible. That text, perhaps more than any other, is colored by fans who read it full of certainty about what we imagine we know for sure, but just ain’t so.

Fred then connects this to the Christian conception of Hell, which, as it turns out, is not really in the Bible any more than Kirk seduced a green alien on Star Trek:

Maybe the biggest example of this for me, personally, had to do with the doctrine of Hell. I was sure that must be in there, in the text. It had to be, right? I mean, this is something I’d learned and absorbed for my entire life growing up in the church. Everybody knows it’s there in the Bible. Everybody knows that’s where it comes from, right?

Except it doesn’t. The word is in there, but the doctrine we’ve constructed out of and around that word just can’t be found in the text itself. That doctrine is something we carry to the text and then imagine we find there whenever we encounter the word — just the same way that our preconceptions and misconceptions about Captain Kirk get mistakenly reinforced every time we see that image of the green woman in the opening credits.

This is a common problem with the way we construct theology on "Biblical" grounds. Fred notes later in the article that even when he accepted a view of the Bible as infallible, he still recognized the human limitations in interpreting it. I'd go farther (and perhaps Fred would these days as well), and say that the text themselves are subject to that same fallibility. They weren't written by God, and they weren't preserved from error through any supernatural intercession. They are human testimonies to the presence and action of God in their lives, subject to all of the human limitations that those witnesses were burdened with.

And this is certainly the case when it comes to the idea of Hell. What is actually a mishmash of different terms and ideas got squeezed together into a theological monstrosity that then got taken for granted as the Biblical view of the issue. Of course, it may still be the case that there is some form of eternal separation from God. But the "fire and brimstone" view of Hell that has become the predominant view, and remains central to the theology of many evangelicals, is simply not there in the Bible. It is a construct, and not a very good one at that. What's more, I would argue strongly that it is a construct which undermines and diminishes precisely what is most central to Christian faith -- the centrality of God's grace as manifested in Jesus Christ.

Mike Pence and the Billy Graham Rule

By now the story of how Mike Pence refuses to dine with women other than his wife has been covered extensively. I was struck, however, by this passage explaining the origin of the "Billy Graham Rule" at the blog Ain't I A Woman:

Originating during a conversation between Graham, the well-known evangelist, and three of his male ministerial friends, they decided the things that tempted them the most were money and sexual immorality. Because they wanted to avoid falling into temptation, they decided to avoid situations where they might succumb to the latter. Hence, don’t eat alone with women.

What struck me about this in particular was how studious Graham and his colleagues were about setting up a rule to save them from sexual temptation, but not from the temptation of money. I mean, sure they're both temptations, but let's get our priorities straight, right?

And that, I think, is how we wound up with decade upon decade of evangelical preachers rolling around in huge piles of cash while lauding their own Christian virtue. And of course, they still wound up in sex scandal after sex scandal!

Ultimately though, this is what it comes down to:

The reason evangelicals are surprised by the pushback over this revelation is that chivalry toward women is regularly confused with treating women with respect. Many evangelicals think that “protecting” women from the harsh realities of the world demonstrates how much they value women. Of course underlying this assumption is that this is entirely a male perspective. Much like the meeting between Graham and his friends, they extrapolate from their experience, a rule that in their minds applies to all people, regardless of the fact that women are not included except as people to be acted upon. In other words, women are objects, mostly sexual ones.

For my part, I've always thought the way to show respect to women is to treat them like human beings, equals with autonomy.