Long Pauses

Tag: Evangelicalism

  • Calls to Conscience and Action

    Calls to Conscience and Action

    Jeffrey Overstreet, who’s writing a book about his experiences as a film critic in/to Evangelical America, has posed the question, “What would you show in a film festival about ‘Calls to Conscience and Action’?” Specifically, he’s looking for “works of art that make us want to put our hands to the plow.”

    Frankly, his question makes me uncomfortable. I say that, in part, because I’m having trouble coming up with one or two specific titles (a topic I’ll come back to later) but mostly because it’s been so long since my hand last touched a plow, metaphorical or otherwise. I’m more the “righteous indignation” type — the guy who carefully positions himself above the fray while the “Red States,” on the one side, react against liberal America’s progressive agendas, and the “Hollywood Elite,” on the other, try to decide which is the bigger evil: racism, homophobia, or, um, Joe McCarthy. I prefer to strike the pose of the humanist aesthete, sniping soldiers on both sides from the satisfied comfort of my expensive home theater. It’s so much easier than, you know, doing something. (Have you ever tried to plow? That shit is hard.)

    Sarcasm aside, I’ll admit to feeling a bit shamed by Jeffrey’s question. That it would arise from a book project addressed to Evangelical readers should come as little surprise. Whatever frustrations I feel toward that world’s cultural and ideological assumptions are always tempered by my genuine love and respect for so many people who have found their spiritual home there. Color me ambivalent. When, a few years ago, I suggested to some friends that we temporarily set aside our Bibles and study art instead, I first had to convince them that the questions we’d been trained to ask would remain essentially unchanged: What does this text (whether Scripture, a painting, or a film) teach us about truth, beauty, and grace? What aspects of God’s character are revealed here? And how do we apply these lessons to our daily lives? Say what you will about Evangelical America’s failure to meet Christ’s standards (and I’ve said more than my share), but that question of application — of putting hand to plow — is more prominent there than in any other American sub-culture I’ve inhabited.

    And so it pains me to review my life as a critic (for lack of a better word) and find so little evidence of my faith/politics/aesthetics translated into practical action. Maybe this hypocrisy (too strong?) is partly to blame for the ferocity of the public debate surrounding the Oscars this year. High-minded talk, whether from the Right or the Left, divorced from sympathy and service will inevitably come off as smug.

    I’m deliberately overstating the case here. Of course my sense of the world, of right action, of human tragedy and grace have been radically transformed by an immersion in the arts. At the heart of the matter, I think, is the simple idea of empathy. (Slacktivist, by the way, has written two great posts on the subject this week.) I wonder, for example, how I would view the war in Iraq if, instead of watching regional, humanist filmmakers like Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, and Majidi, I was learning about righteous vengeance, sadism, and “freedom” from Hollywood. The creative imagination, as expressed through great art, can be an empathy-making wonder. Christ, after all, was a prophet and a storyteller.

    But to answer Jeffrey’s question: If offered the chance to program a “Calls to Conscience and Action” festival, my opening night film would be The Gleaners and I (2000), Agnes Varda’s documentary about the long-standing tradition of gathering up leftover crops (“gleaning”) after the fields have been harvested. Varda, as much an essayist as filmmaker, explores gleaning as a hypertext of ideas: gleaning is an alternate economy; at times it’s a moral choice, at others a lamentable necessity; it’s both transgressive and communal; and, finally, it’s a metaphor for the artistic process itself. As Jonathon Rosenbaum points out, Varda expresses the ambiguities of gleaning even in the title of the film, though her point is lost in translation:

    There’s a suggestive discrepancy between the French and English titles of this wonderful essay film completed by Agnes Varda last year. It’s a distinction that tells us something about the French sense of community and the Anglo-American sense of individuality — concepts that are virtually built into the two languages. Les glaneurs et la glaneuse can be roughly translated as “the gleaners and the female gleaner,” with the plural noun masculine only in the sense that all French nouns are either masculine or feminine. The Gleaners and I sets up an implicit opposition between “people who glean” and the filmmaker, whereas Les glaneurs et la glaneuse links them, asserting that she’s one of them.

    Regardless of what would follow on the festival program, The Gleaners and I would properly frame the central question of conscience and action, making it a matter of community (or, to satisfy the pomo Christians in the audience, we could call it “kingdom” instead) and foregrounding art as an underutilized means of consciousness-raising, community-building, and (dare I say it) worship.

    I would also program The Gleaners and I for personal reasons. For a large number of viewers, the most memorable sequences in the film involve a young man who, despite having earned a Masters degree in Biology, has chosen to glean his food from a Paris market and to live in a shelter, side-by-side with the newly-arrived immigrants to whom he voluntarily teaches French most nights of the week. I can’t imagine that I would have become an English as a Second Language teacher myself had I not first met so many non-Americans through the literatures and cinema of their countries. My ESL work is as close as I’ve come, I suppose, to pushing a plow, though that metaphor distorts the actual experience. It implies calloused hands, sweat, and sacrifice.

  • Five Spiritually Significant Films

    Five Spiritually Significant Films

    The fine folks at the Arts and Faith discussion forum have cast their votes, crunched the numbers, and released their second annual list of the Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films. I’ve been an on-again, off-again participant at the forum for several years now and was excited to check my virtual ballot. The results, I have to say, are pretty darned impressive.

    I’m especially glad that the main criterion was left intentionally vague. In the weeks leading up to the votes, there was some debate over the precise meaning of “spiritually significant,” but the only consensus reached was that there was little chance of us reaching any kind of consensus, and that that was probably for the best. It brings me great satisfaction (and even a bit of hope) to know that a group consisting largely of American evangelical Christians would include The Gospel According the Matthew, Ikiru, Stalker, and Sunrise among the Top 20.

    In honor of their fine work, I offer my own obvious and predictable Top 5 list:

    My Top Five Spiritually Significant Films

    5. Through a Glass Darkly (Bergman, 1961) — A few years ago I would have gone with the more obvious choice, Winter Light, but Through a Glass Darkly, I think, is the most potent and concentrated expression of Bergman’s agnostic horror. I still think the final scene is a bit out of tune with the rest of the film, but David’s speech to Minus isn’t what we remember, right? It’s Karin’s final lines and that image of her putting on her sunglasses. Devastating.

    4. The Son (The Dardennes, 2002) — I’ve been told that Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne are more interested in the Old Testament than the New. The Son is like a story from Genesis, like Abraham and Isaac. It makes all of those Christian catchwords like “grace” and “vengeance” and “Father” suddenly as strange and ambiguous as the world I live in.

    3. Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson, 1951) — Again, a few years ago I probably would have gone with Au Hasard Balthazar (and I might change my mind tomorrow), but for now the story of this well-intentioned priest is, for me, the more “spiritually significant” of the two. It’s the final scenes that get me. Every time.

    2. Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky, 1969) — Any of Tarkovsky’s film would fit comfortably in this spot, but I chose Rublev because it is actually about an Orthodox icon painter, and what most moves me in his films is their icon-like mysticism. At the end of the day, Tarkovsky’s film are about artistic creation, but the truecreative act here is always committed in a spirit of idealized surrender and sacrifice.

    1. Ordet (Dreyer, 1955) — I’m a Christian by faith, not just by name or birth or culture, and faith is utterly irrational. I can’t recall at the moment who said it, but I agree that “Ordet is the only filmed miracle.”

  • One of Those Political Posts

    A few days ago I watched the episode of The West Wing in which President Bartlet is inaugurated for his second term in office, and it reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about in years. On January 20, 2001, I was at a hotel in Pigeon Forge, TN, attending a retreat with other men from my church. I remember the date because that morning, during one of the small-group sessions, someone interrupted to turn on a TV. We all watched as Bush took the oath of office. Several men in the room began to pray. Others smiled and offered “Hallelujah”s. I muttered under my breath, “Thank God. Finally an end to eight years of peace and prosperity,” and my friend poked me in the ribs. I was the “liberal” of our group. He’d learned to expect and even appreciate my snark.

    In the years since, I’ve come to feel increasingly alienated from evangelical culture, and politics is an important reason. I used to write about this a lot more on Long Pauses, but I grew tired of my own voice and my own hypocrisies. Too much finger-pointing. Plus, the results of the 2004 election broke my heart. I’ve felt more than a bit defeated and hopelessly cynical ever since. It didn’t help when, a few months ago, I ran into one of those old friends and noticed the “W: Still the President” sticker on the back window of his car. I just don’t get it.

    Bush was elected on the promise of restoring “honor and dignity” to the White House, which, let’s face it, wasn’t an unappealing idea. I was as disgusted as anyone by Clinton’s personal behavior, by the 24-hour media shitstorm, and by the very real political fallout. So I wasn’t all surprised when Bush’s call to do away with the lying and the scandals that had disgraced the last few years of Clinton’s second term struck a chord with most evangelicals I know, particularly because that call was coming from someone who spoke their language, who had a bona-fide Christian testimony, and who promised to protect the “sanctity of human life.” (That Bush had an unimpressive pre-Presidency track record when it came to eliminating scandal was a point I soon gave up arguing with friends who supported him.)

    I’ve always had a begrudging respect for the political skills of the Bush administration. They play the game so well. They say they’re fiscal conservatives, then, with a Republican Congress in their back pocket, they explode the size of the federal government and deficit. “Support me on my big issues,” he seems to have promised House and Senate leaders, “and I won’t even threaten to veto a spending bill.” And he hasn’t. Not surprisingly, the amount of pork has more than tripled under his watch.

    Congress was more than willing to return the favor when Bush asked them for the right to declare war. With one eye on their home states and the upcoming midterm elections, they grabbed his cooked intelligence with both hands, hoisted it up onto the stump, and sounded a few more cheers for fear-mongering. “Mushroom cloud, you say? Mushroom cloud! We must do something! And do it today!” To hell with his campaign promise to never “nation-build.” Bush and his boys wanted this war, wanted to reshape the Middle East, wanted to re-engage America’s permanent war economy, and, boy, if you got in their way — if you questioned their motives or diverted from the War on Terror narrative they were writing — boy, you were fucked.

    Even though today’s announcement had been predicted for most of the week, I was still stunned when the indictments were read. I had to watch for five or ten minutes before I could accept what was happening. I’m not crazy. What a sad and pathetic week in the life of a sad and pathetic presidency.

  • On the Newsstand

    So this is kind of exciting. My first magazine piece hits the newsstands today. It’s also available online.

    When I was contacted by an editor at Sojourners a couple months ago and invited to contribute to their Culture Watch section, I  felt some ambivalence about the offer. Mostly I worried I would be asked to review mainstream films. I have no interest in mainstream films, and, to be perfectly blunt, I don’t like “reviews.” They seem unnecessary to me. In this age of Rotten Tomatoes, when critical consensus can be compiled, tabulated, and spewed forth in real-time, reviewing has become boring and formulaic — a catchy lead, a plot summary, a tip of the hat to the performances and direction, and, finally, a recommendation. Whether it’s a positive or negative recommendation is almost beside the point. With very few exceptions, popular reviews, along with the requisite celebrity profiles and interviews, are indistinguishable from the general din of marketing noise.

    I’ve always considered my film responses here to be, well, “long pauses” — that is, a somewhat disciplined attempt to sit quietly and meditate on my experience with a particular text. Doing so has freed me to write only about films that, for any number of reasons, “justify” the time, energy, and contemplation that I devote to them. I’ll even go a step further and admit that, by most standards, I’m not even a movie buff. I don’t have much of an attention span these days, and sitting down for two hours often feels like a chore.

    What I do love, though, is to be engaged in good conversation. Conversation that values beauty and curiosity and empathy and intelligence. Conversation that is genuinely interested in the strangeness of human emotion and faith and culture and experience. And that, I think, is where criticism should find its voice. That’s my goal, at least. To be in conversation with artists whose creative imaginations are large and complex and varied. And I consider it the great responsibility of the critic to be up to that challenge. Work, brother. Work.

    Which brings me to the other source of my ambivalence about writing for Sojourners, which is simply this: What does it mean to be a Christian cultural critic? And, more to the point: What does it mean to so publicly out oneself as a Christian in “moral values” America, where religion and political ideology have spawned such head-shaking horrors? (Notice my shift to the formal third person there? It’s easier that way. Less inflammatory.)

    Most of my doubts were lifted when I saw Jim Wallis on The Daily Show. Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, has been out pushing his new book, God’s Politics, and seeing him was a much-needed reminder of what evangelical Christianity can look like. The rest of my doubts faded when it occurred to me that being a Christian cultural critic means taking long pauses and that this site has, from the very start, been some kind of an attempt to answer those very questions.

    Oddly enough, the editor and I were in total agreement, and I’m pleased to say that my first piece for Sojourners, a 1,000-word introduction to the films of John Cassavetes, would not be at all out of place here on Long Pauses. Hopefully they’ll let me do it again someday.

  • Presidential Referendum

    The Choice 2004, Frontline’s documentary overview of the lives of John Kerry and George W. Bush, foregrounded two key moments from the President’s career, moments that are by now familiar to all who have followed his development. The first was his road to Damascus conversion — the moment when he turned his life over to God and gave up drinking. The second was his father’s primary loss to Pat Robertson in 1988 — the moment when George, Jr. recognized the power of the evangelical vote and thought to himself, “I can do this.” He would become an asset for his father in that regard and would later rely on heavy appeals to the Religious Right in his own successful campaigns against Ann Richards and Al Gore.

    Not surprisingly, President Bush was at his best last night when asked about his faith and family. Ignoring for a moment the relevance of such questions in a supposed domestic policy debate that never addressed the environment, the Patriot Act, or stem cell research, those two questions allowed Bush to put aside policy (which is awfully complicated) to talk instead about feelings and relationships. They allowed him to slip into the comfortable rhetoric of evangelicalism. And Bush, to his credit, hit those softballs out of the park. Bush speaks eloquently — yes, I said it — about his faith because it is clearly important to him and because it has a language all its own. But this leads me to wonder: To whom exactly was he speaking?

    The significance of Bush’s insight in 1988 was that by speaking directly to the Religious Right in a language that they understood — by hitting hard on “moral issues” like abortion, marriage, and public displays of faith; by using the coded language of “stewardship,” “devotion,” and “providence” — he could accomplish three main goals:

    1. Transform a single position (on, say, abortion) into a fixed political identification and, in so doing, make of that position an objective barometer of a candidate’s moral fitness to lead (Clinton’s whoreishness played directly into the Right’s hands in that regard). Abortion, the argument goes, is objectively wrong; therefore candidates who support abortion are objectively unworthy of office.
    2. Solidify the Republican base by offering them a moral imperative to get out and vote. The large (and growing) network of evangelical churches in America, then, becomes a grassroots movement of its own, fostered by everyone from James Dobson and Billy Graham to Tim LaHaye and Thomas Kinkade.
    3. Nail shut the coffin on those strains of New Deal Democratic politics in the South that had been dying slowly since before Carter left office, and, in the process, grab control of the House.

    And so I ask again: To whom was Bush speaking last night? Every poll confirms that Bush and Kerry have solidified their bases. There are many, many Americans who will vote to re-elect President Bush solely because of his pro-life stance or because they see in him a reflection of themselves — someone whose life was radically changed by an encounter with God and who exercises daily the rituals of evangelical life: quiet times, prayers of confession, small group Bible studies. (That, after a decade of steady declines, the number of abortions has, in fact, increased under Bush is a subject for another day.) Bush’s genuine confession of faith last night was, I’m sure, one of the few moments of grace and honesty that many voters (most of whom are understandably cynical and apathetic about politics at large) recognized in an otherwise contentious campaign season.

    And so, for the millions of voters who are comforted by the language of evangelicalism, I’m sure that Bush’s performance last night reinforced all of the values that they had already projected onto him. But what about the rest of us? What about Christians (like me) who are deeply troubled by Bush’s conflation of regressive and immoral tax restructurings and arrogant imperialism with Divine Providence? What about Christians (like me) who also believe in liberal democracy and who see a clear separation between the purposes of the State and the Church? To be frank, we see in President Bush a man of faith who is not competent to lead. We see a man who, even after four years in the White House, has great difficulty articulating even the most fundamental of his policy decisions, even when those policies are valid. We see a man who, like the kings of old, is dangerously close to turning religion into a justification for despotism.

    And what about those undecided voters in the middle who don’t understand the coded messages in Bush’s religious rhetoric, who in fact feel excluded by it? I promise that they saw a very different debate last night. They saw a man who, incapable (and even suspect) of reason, turns instead to fancy and dogma for guidance. Which leads me to believe that this election will, in a very real way, be a referendum on Bush’s 1988 insight. Granted, there are millionaires who like his tax cuts and neocons who like his foreign policy and gun owners who will vote for whomever the NRA endorses, but Bush seems to be putting his fate in the hands of his apostles. And it scares the hell out of me to think that it might work.

  • More Church Stuff

    My recent rambling on “relevance” is far and away the most-read, most-linked-to, most-commented-upon post in Long Pauses history, which is both strange and strangely comforting. The more I search, the more fellow travelers I find. Along those lines, a friend just sent me a link to Charles Moore’s article, “Why I Stopped Going to Church, And Other Acts of Christian Disobedience,” which continues that conversation. Moore’s argument makes me uncomfortable at times. In particular, I think he has too casually ignored the importance of ritual and the sacraments in shaping “Ekklesia”:

    Take away the pulpit and the pews, the audio-visual system, the pastor’s salary, the praise band, the bulletin, the tithes and offerings and Sunday school, and what is left of the modern church? Jesus told his critics that the temple would be destroyed, only to be raised up again. But was he thinking in terms of steeples and stadiums, or of a people in whom the Spirit dwells? If the Spirit gives birth to the church, and if genuine worship is “in spirit and in truth”(John 4:24), then where are the edifices, vestments, rituals, and hymnals on that first Pentecost? We won’t find any. Instead we read about fire, wind, power, food, joy, unanimity and sharing — in short, a communism of love (Acts 2 and 4).

    I understand and appreciate his point here, but surely the “fire, wind, power, [and] food” of Pentecost are something like the “Ideal” that our contemporary rituals hope to signify. As a lover and defender of the arts as a kind of natural theology, I greatly appreciate the real value of ritual. In fact, as it’s now been several weeks since I last attended a Sunday morning service, I find that I’m most craving those rituals — communion, in particular, but also the creeds and doxologies and ceremonies that bind my particular neighborhood church, with its particular congregation and particular values (both spoken and unspoken), to two thousands years of human history.

  • Relevance

    Relevant, the magazine devoted to “God, Life, and Progressive Culture,” is a new voice of American evangelicalism — one that targets college students and young professionals who are turned off by their parents’ brand of stodgy conservatism. “Sight, sound, experience — that’s what my generation is about,” says Cameron Strang, Relevant‘s 28-year-old founder. A quick glance at the Relevant Web presence will give you some sense of what Strang means exactly. Its recent list of “The Top Ten Most Profound Films,” for example, includes such gems as Braveheart, Forrest Gump, and The Count of Monte Cristo. The comments are even more revealing [my italics]:

    thanks for mentioning “high fidelity”, one of my favorites

    I agree with your list for the most part, and I think a lot of them would be on my top ten list.

    I am glad high fidelity made the list its one of my top 5 favorite movies

    Way to be relevant. All good flicks with which everyone is familiar. I think you did a fine job.

    Granted, I’ve cherry-picked comments here, but “relevance,” it seems to me, has become evangelical slang for “familiar comfort.” And, to be blunt, I can’t think of a more damning critique of the church. It’s the type of relevance that leads to books like The Maker’s Diet and Wild at Heart, books that capitalize on “secular” trends (the Atkins craze or Mars/Venus pop philosophy) by refinishing them with a sanctified varnish. I mean, do I need Relevant magazine to tell me The Da Vinci Code “meets all the expectations of a great suspense novel without being formulaic or predictable”? Can’t I learn the same thing from a quick glance at the Best Sellers list?

    So, now in an effort to be a relevant Christian, I’m going to quote from one of Relevant‘s favorite artists, Bono [again, my italics]:

    I think our whole idea of who we are is at stake. I think Judeo-Christian culture is at stake. If the church doesn’t respond to [the African AIDS crisis], the church will be made irrelevant. It will look like the way you heard stories about people watching Jews being put on the trains. We will be that generation that watched our African brothers and sisters being put on trains….

    As I’ve mentioned before, the tragedy of Africa is so great as to be incomprehensible to me. I wasn’t able even to finish reading Nicholas Kristof’s recent series of editorials from Sudan. I prefer to ignore completely the millions of dead and dying and, instead, to vent my frustrations at other targets. It’s easier that way. Safer. But over the last year or so I’ve been shamed repeatedly by Bono’s use of the word “relevance” when describing the church in relation to Africa.

    I say all of that to say this: my experience of church for the last few years has been marked by a growing dissatisfaction with its “familiar comforts” — its familiar language, familiar lessons, familiar social interactions, familiar rituals — and I think I’m at something of a crossroads. I wouldn’t call it a crisis of faith, exactly, but something more akin to growing pains. These lines from Thomas Merton have long been a comfort:

    The worst of it is that even apparently holy conceptions are consumed along with the rest. It is a terrible breaking and burning of idols, a purification of the sanctuary, so that no graven thing may occupy the place that God has commanded to be left empty: the center, the existential altar which simply “is.” In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is.

    I don’t, by any stretch of the imagination, claim to be a Merton-like contemplative, but I am suffering the realization that I no longer know what relevance the evangelical church has for me. If I leave, I want it to be a considered decision rather than the slow consequence of atrophy. And, also, my decision must be complemented by the finding of another community of sacred worship, perhaps in a non-evangelical protestant church, perhaps…

  • Christian Entertainment

    No, sadly the popularity of Bad Christian Art is not the result of a lack of Good Christian Art. It is a result of the rejection of metaphor.

    That’s two slacktivist links in one week. Time to add him to the daily reads, I guess.

  • The Great Divide

    For a useful snapshot of the problems facing anyone who wants to talk seriously today about the arts and spirituality, check out the reader feedback at Christianity Today. CT recently expanded its movie coverage — wisely, I think — and, having been engaged in an ongoing electronic conversation with many of their writers for the past few years, I’m confident that the decision to expand was made for all the right reasons.

    Two weeks ago, Jeffrey Overstreet published an interesting piece in which he defends his appreciation of many films that feature profanity. The piece is well-informed, it’s delivered in a voice familiar to his readers (and maddening to non-evangelicals, I would imagine), and it is patient to a fault. He makes a very convincing argument, too, and it’s one that I hope his readers refer to during conversations with friends. I genuinely admire Jeffrey for his willingness to write this stuff. I’m glad that someone is doing it. I’m even more glad that that someone ain’t me.

    Just look at this stuff. To Jeffrey’s claim that art should accurately reflect the world around us, profanity and all, one reader responds:

    I don’t work with people who speak that way and I’m not around them away from work. If someone attempts to use this kind of language around me, I will quickly point out that I don’t like it and then remove myself from the situation.

    How perfectly awful it must be to live in a bubble containing only other people whose experience of life is exactly the same as yours. I’m having difficulty finding a New Testament precedent for that one. And even when Jeffrey’s critics make a valid point, they undercut it with evangelical jargon and biased assumptions:

    Today’s movies are not so much an art form as they are a means to generate wealth. It is big business, and godliness does not sell tickets. When you recommend these movies, you are encouraging the people of God to use their resources to support an industry that shamelessly glorifies sinful behavior. . . . Giving a rebuke to another is not being judgmental. Rather it is an act of love attempting to pull another back from evil.

    That this reader has raised the issue of commerce and profit is a pleasant surprise. Unfortunately, rather than using his soapbox as an opportunity to discuss the influence of capitalism on real evangelical values — a complex issue, no doubt — he instead relies on gross generalizations and Sunday School sentiment. All movies are “a means to generate wealth,” he writes, never for a minute considering any film made outside of Hollywood. By the way, I’ve never heard the words “giving a rebuke” or “acting out of love” outside the strange confines of the American evangelical sub-culture.

    I can’t even find the energy to respond to Bettie Phillips Tyree, who writes:

    I do not attend movies because I am a Christian, and the junk that Hollywood turns out is trashy and unfit for our children. Most of today’s movies and television shows only teach children bad language, how to sass their parents or any other adult figure, how to kill, maim, how to rob and steal, how to perform sexual activity at early ages and a lot of other bad habits. I will not help to finance an industry that supports blatant sin!

    (Okay, one quick and obvious comment: Why then, Miss Tyree, were you reading CT‘s movie section? To protect us from ourselves?)

    The most interesting comment, though, comes from Anthony Kaufman, a self-described “non-believing Jewish-born film writer, critic, die-hard liberal and leftist.” In response to Jeffrey’s review of Dogville, Mr. Kaufman writes:

    When I think of Christian media outlets, I usually imagine cantankerous, close-minded conservatives who are too prude to appreciate art, especially groundbreaking and provocative art like the work of Lars von Trier. I found your review even-handed and extremely thoughtful and perhaps unlike I was expecting, braving von Trier’s themes with respect and maturity. I’m a reader of the New York Times, the Village Voice, the New Yorker, and I have to say your comments were as insightful and intelligent as anything that I read in those publications. For me, this is a huge deal. You have given me faith—at least in the quality and sophistication of the movie coverage at Christianity Today.

    Knowing Jeffrey the little that I do, I’m guessing that that last comment will linger much longer than the others, and not because it’s a compliment. Rather, it’s evidence that the hard work of criticism occasionally pays off. Occasionally a reader finds a writer, and somewhere, somehow in that exchange there is a moment of recognition.

  • Shit Happens

    Yesterday at 4:06 pm, I pulled onto the campus of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC — the end of my four hour, 265 mile drive. I know it was 4:06 because that was also the moment that the local NPR station announced that, because of weather-related travel difficulties, Tony Kushner had been forced to cancel his scheduled speech and book-signing. I did the only thing I could do. I drove over to my motel and cancelled my reservation, called my wife to tell her the news, then headed west on I-40. 265 miles later I was back home.

    I don’t get upset about things over which I have no control. I just don’t. It’s not in me. I am deeply disappointed, though — and for several reasons that I won’t go into here. The good news is that, during my nine hours in the car, I was able to listen to several evangelical preachers, evangelical money managers, and evangelical counselors on the radio. Things I learned:

    • Meditating on God’s splendor will sustain me in the hard times. Also, meditating on God’s splendor will sustain me in the trying times and in the darkest times. (It was a 3-point sermon.)
    • Once I have saved three months’ living expenses, I should glorfiy God by putting 10% of my monthly income into IRAs and high-yield bonds.
    • Even if it’s painful and boring, I should listen to my wife talk for 10 minutes every night. (Don’t worry, guys, once she realizes that it’s ten minutes every night, your wife won’t need to talk your ear off all in one excruciating sitting.)

  • This is Persecution?

    So, while driving to and from Atlanta this week we heard two interviews with David Limbaugh, who is out promoting his latest book, Persecution: How Liberals are Waging War Against Christianity. With a title like that, and with the vocal support of people like Ann Coulter, you can probably guess the gist of Limbaugh’s argument: 21st century America is fast devolving into 1st century Rome, where upstanding, Patriotic Christians (who just happen to vote Republican) are being thrown daily to the lions of liberalism. Here, as in most recent discourse of the like, “liberalism” has nothing to do with traditional notions of freedom and equality; it is, instead, shorthand for secularism or atheism or civil libertarianism or socialism or feminism or political correctness or multiculturalism or any number of other, often mutually exclusive political positions. Whatever.

    I only bring this up here because I found it so interesting that I heard Limbaugh level these charges on two different radio stations, one Christian, the other secular, during a three hour drive. In fact, while Limbaugh, the talk show hosts, and outraged listeners railed against those liberals who were limiting their ability to publicly express their faith, we were driving through Chattanooga, where (no exaggeration) one-third of all FM stations broadcast explicitly Christian content. I know that’s not the case everywhere, but come on . . .

    I won’t deny that I’m, at best, ambivalent about the wholesale purging of Christianity from, say, public schools. When more than 80% of Americans identify themselves as Christian, it seems unnecessary to me to systematically remove the word “Christmas” from our calendars. But to call this “persecution” — even after acknowledging the inflated rhetoric that is part and parcel of this type of book — is a disgrace. Has the Church in America become so thoroughly synonymous with middle class comfort that we have to seek out charges of persecution in straw man arguments like Limbaugh’s? Is this our proof that we’re “salt and light”? Disgusting.

    And speaking of straw men, did you catch Bill O’Reilly on Fresh Air? Be sure to listen to the entire interview. The last few minutes are priceless.

  • A Dangerous Admission

    “You are a living mockery of your own ideals: either that, or your ideals are too low.”
    — Charles Ludlam, The Theater of the Ridiculous

    I’m slowly waking to the realization that I’m a socialist. Talk about a word that carries some impressive baggage. Tony Kushner has said in a number of interviews that he has found the label “gay playwright” to be less confrontational for most Americans than “socialist playwright.” In America today, alternative sexualities are less transgressive, less unthinkable than alternative economics. How odd.

    I say I’m a “socialist” fully aware of the problems, both practical and theoretical, inherent in the term. Not to mention the problems of the term itself: In our murky, ideologically informed, sound-bite political discourse, socialism is Communism is Stalinism is (someone explain this last one to me) liberalism. So, with apologies to any political scientists who might be reading (doubtful), here is what I mean when I say that I’m a socialist (in 90 words or less):

    • Although many of his specific predictions have yet to materialize (and likely won’t), Marx was absolutely correct when he demanded that our current situation always be understood in hard historical and economic terms.
    • Capitalism is, by necessity and by design, exploitive. (I say that with the realization that market competition has resulted in obvious and radical societal benefits as well.)
    • The championing of individualism over collective action and social justice is (in a word that I use with some trepidation) anti-Christian.

    An example. Today Nike announced that the shoemaker will be paying LeBron James — the teen phenom who has yet to play a single basketball game in either college or the NBA — $90 million over the next seven years. We’ve become deadened to figures like this, learning to expect that top athletes are entitled to top salaries. It’s capitalism at its finest. James is, after all, only exploiting an existing, highly competitive market. That he is able to do so is, in a very real and very sad sense, the American Dream. But read coverage of the story and you’ll stumble upon passages like this:

    The “marquee” basketball category — hoops shoes that sell for more than $100 at retail — is home to perhaps the sexiest battle in all of footwear. It brings massive margins, approaching 50 percent, as these cheaply made shoes fetch prices up to $140. (Nike tried to get $200 for a recent Air Jordan model, but kids balked at forking out that much.) Nike has traditionally owned this category, due in large part to the phenomenal sales of Air Jordans, but with MJ retiring this year there seems to be a chink in the armor.

    So competitors have lined up young guns. Reebok has Allen Iverson; Adidas has Tracy McGrady (and, until last year, Kobe). And Nike has tried to turn Toronto Raptors guard Vince Carter into its new Michael Jordan. Carter at first seemed the real deal, but he’s lost luster over the years as he has been felled by numerous injuries, and it doesn’t help that he plays up in Canada. Right now, Iverson, McGrady, and Jordan are the only guys who really move product, and Jordan’s on the way out. In short, Nike’s desperately searching for a new Michael.

    Is LeBron James the one? That’s up to the market, but Nike clearly thinks that LeBron is its cup of tea. Marquee shoes are aimed at black, inner-city kids who are willing to spend huge amounts of money every time the new, hot shoe hits shelves. An Adidas exec once told me that “the day after payday” is the biggest sales day in this category (the way he said it, you could tell that exploitation was not really an issue for him). To ring these kids’ consumer bells, endorsers need to be just a little bit flashy and a little bit dangerous. Iverson fits the bill, with his tats and his slightly sketchy past; Kobe does not, with his squeaky clean demeanor (he speaks fluent Italian, for goodness’ sake). McGrady’s athletic, street-ball moves on the court do the trick; Shaq’s oafish approach to the game, though perhaps the most dominant in the NBA, doesn’t sell shoes. What about LeBron? Already put under investigation for receiving “throwback jerseys” (stylish, vintage team wear) and a Hummer SUV while still an amateur, he has the controversy angle sewn up, and anyone who’s seen him dunk knows he’s got all the moves.

    There’s so much to marvel at here — that a single product will routinely return a 50% margin (at whose expense and to whose benefit?); that having a “slightly sketchy past” is now an asset to a company spokesperson (what cultural and economic forces are responsible for this change?); that executives deliberately target already impoverished “demographics” (how are profit motives complicit in the maintenance of that poverty?); and, most damning of all, that we’ve come to accept this as not only the “best we can do” but as the only system imaginable (even waging wars so that we might impose the “freedoms” of capitalism on other cultures).

    The deep, deep cynicism that marks my generation is, I think, the inevitable by-product of this distorted value system. Here’s a haunting snippet from an interview with Susan Sontag. Leading into this paragraph, she had been talking about the value of art, whose job, she feels, is “keeping alive people’s capacity for feeling, feeling in a responsible rather than a facile way.” Sound familiar? It reminds me of a certain poem: “The poets must give us / imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar / imagination of disaster.” Anyway, here’s the snippet:

    After all, if advertising works, and it does, then so does art, and in the same way. These images and stories influence us; they create legitimacy and credibility. They make things which used to be central marginal, difficult to defend. I’d go back to an earlier point I was making: That though many people I know actually are capable of acting on principle, most of them could not defend what they’re doing as acting on principle. They no longer have a language of ethical action. It’s collapsed, it’s dropped away. Whereas new forms of cynicism and cruelty, of indifference to violence, have become central in the culture. And that’s a change. I think that’s a big change.

    “They no longer have a language of ethical action.” That line has lingered with me for more than a month now. I think of it whenever I hear good people (good Christians, in particular) talking about money or taxes or politics, in general. And good Christians talk about these things a lot, often in Wall Street’s terms. Is it any wonder that a growing number of us are feeling increasingly alienated from a church that is, by most measures, indistinguishable from the culture in which it exists and from which it adopts so many of its values? As I told my parents last week, the question that plagues me is: How much of my worldview is shaped by Christ’s radical theology, and how much of it is simply a reflection and reinforcement of middle class America’s chief values — the worship of comfort, conspicuous consumption, and prosperity? Imagine for a moment what it might look like if America and its churches “stood united” behind something that matters instead of something like this.

    Along those lines, I’ve recently begun studying the Rule of the Order of Saint Benedict — this rich, 1,500 year old tradition that is so remarkably and beautifully counter to our culture. Elevating selfless community over individualism, sacrifice over comfort, contemplation over distraction, the Rule captures something of the grace of the Sermon on the Mount, reminding us that a “language of ethical action” certainly exists and must be reclaimed. My friend Karen describes it like this:

    I know what your saying about the Benedictines. My first book was The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris, which was like a breath of fresh air after the hype of evangelicalism. For once, my attraction to learning about them didn’t seem to be a reactionary swing…you know, I was charismatic and I hated it so now I’m Anglican, or vice-versa. And it wasn’t nostalgic because one recognizes the very human side in the rule – the warnings against authoritarianism and laziness and such. Of course, it is also inspired by Scripture so it was another way of breaking crusts off of verses I had been overexposed to. It was just something that seemed to land home for me and still does.

    I’m working my way through Joan Chittister’s The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages and can’t recommend it highly enough.

  • Christian Nation

    “A man cannot be a perfect Christian . . . unless he is also a communist.”
    — Thomas Merton

    “God helps those who help themselves.” When you teach freshman composition at a southern public university, you get used to hearing that expression. It’s usually prefaced with, “Like the Bible says . . .” I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, mostly because I’ve also been thinking about the words “Christian nation” and how I have no idea what they mean.

    My students’ favorite proverb, of course, isn’t in the Bible. (You won’t find it there because it’s a base degradation of Christ’s teachings and sacrifice.) The exact source of the phrase is a bit murky, but variants appear in the literatures of many cultures, including Aesop’s fables, a play by Aeschylus, and — most significantly for us Americans — a 1736 edition of Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. Which is just perfect.

    I’m no Colonial-era scholar, but I’ve read most of the significant founding documents — enough of them, at least, to know that, contrary to much of public opinion, America has never been a “Christian nation,” or, not the one reimagined by contemporary American evangelicals. (Googling “Christian Nation” and America turns up no shortage of opinions on this question and from a variety of, um, interesting perspectives that span the political and theological spectra.) Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Paine, like so many of their compatriots, were typical Enlightenment intellectuals. Which means that they were Deists whose faith was reserved largely for Reason rather than God. It also explains why they so deliberately eschewed dogma in their noble pursuit of democracy.

    I say all of that to say this: there’s something in this expression — “God helps those who help themselves” — that offers us, I think, a usable model for understanding the Right and the evangelical church’s devotion to it. It’s Manifest Destiny, rugged individualism, and vaguely-Biblical-sounding rhetoric all rolled into one. It’s pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps jingoism stripped of all historical, political, and economic context. It’s nostalgic and proud and intellectually lazy. It is decidedly not, in any shape or form, Christian.

    Jordon Cooper recently posted a blog along somewhat similar lines. He’s done us all a favor by transcribing a passage from a book by Tony Campolo (which I’m totally stealing, by the way, so go visit Jordon’s site):

    While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, I became good friends with a young Jewish student who eventually made a commitment to Christ. As I tried to mentor him and give him a direction as to how to live the Christian life, I advised him to go to a particular church that was well known for its biblically based preaching, to help him get a better handle on what the Bible is all about.

    When I met my friend several weeks later, he said to me, “You know, if you put together a committee and asked them to take the Beatitudes and create a religion that contradicted every one of them, you could come pretty close to what I’m hearing down there at that church.

    “Whereas Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the poor,’ down there they make it clear it is the rich who are blessed. Jesus said, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ but the people at that church have a religion that promises happiness with no crucifixions. Whereas Jesus talked about the meek being blessed, they talk as if they took assertiveness-training courses. Jesus may have talked about the merciful and peacemakers, but those people are the most enthusiastic supporters of American militarism and capital punishment I have ever met. Jesus may have lifted up those who endured persecution because they dared to embrace a radical gospel, but that church declares a gospel that espouses middle-class success and affirms a lifestyle marked by social prestige.”

    As I listened to my friend’s accusing words about the church, I realized it could just as well be aimed at me. Since that conversation, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on whether or not my lifestyle is really Christian. Soren Kierkegaard once said, “If you mean by Christian what the Sermon on the Mount says about being a Christian, then in any given time in history, there might be four or five such persons who would have the right to call themselves Christians.”

    And I say all of that to say this: Kierkegaard was right. “Christian” — if you mean by Christian what the Sermon on the Mount says — is a weighty word, and it’s serious, and, most remarkable of all, it’s full of grace. Please don’t affix that word to this country, which, for some reason, has been blessed with the delicate gift of democracy but will never deserve it. That, also, is grace.

  • The Agenda

    At the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me begin by saying that, within the strange confines of my personal experience, many of the “Regular Joes” who support President Bush and his agenda seem to do so because he is pro-life and because he evidences publicly the recognizable signs of a “committed walk with God.” Within this community — this large, evangelical sub-culture — voting Republican is a “moral” act, a single gesture by which evangelicals hope to restore America to its Christian foundations (whatever that means — and, of course, it doesn’t mean anything, which is the beauty of empty, historically-blind rhetoric, but that’s another rant entirely).

    So with that out of the way — along with the obligatory acknowledgement that there are, of course, notable exceptions to my rule — I want to dig into William Grieder’s recent piece for The Nation, “Rolling Back the 20th Century,” which does a nice job, I think, of summarizing the Neoconservative agenda. The thesis of his argument, as implied by the title of the article, is that, since Reagan’s election in 1980, the Right has moved slowly but steadily toward a dismantling of New Deal America with the ultimate goal of returning us to the “lost Eden” of the McKinley Era. This is the line that really grabbed by attention:

    Many opponents and critics (myself included) have found the right’s historic vision so improbable that we tend to guffaw and misjudge the political potency of what it has put together. We might ask ourselves: If these ideas are so self-evidently cockeyed and reactionary, why do they keep advancing?

    If you’re a regular reader of Long Pauses, then you know that I’m plagued by the word “praxis” — the symbiotic relationship of theory and action. I was reminded of it again last night as I finished reading Radical Chic, Tom Wolfe’s 1970 account of a fund-raising party held at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein in honor of the Black Panthers. At one point, the trio of Bernstein, Otto Preminger, and Barbara Walters (!) assail Don Cox with pointed questions concerning the risks of violent revolution, and the leather-clad, afro-ed Panther is able only to regurgitate the Maoist jargon of “petty bourgeois oppression” and “individual freedoms.” He isn’t very convincing.

    But the Neocons are. I keep thinking of a line from Angels in America, when Joe, the mostly-closeted Mormon, Republican lawyer, asks Louis, his Jewish, progressive lover: “Do you want to be pure or do you want to be effective?” The Neocons seem to have discovered praxis in spades, though it’s praxis built upon grossly immoral theories of capital. Grieder summarizes the main points of that agenda, each of which is explained in much greater detail in the article:

    • Eliminate federal taxation of private capital, as the essential predicate for dismantling the progressive income tax.
    • Gradually phase out the pension-fund retirement system as we know it, starting with Social Security privatization but moving eventually to breaking up the other large pools of retirement savings, even huge public-employee funds, and converting them into individualized accounts.
    • Withdraw the federal government from a direct role in housing, healthcare, assistance to the poor and many other long-established social priorities, first by dispersing program management to local and state governments or private operators, then by steadily paring down the federal government’s financial commitment.
    • Restore churches, families and private education to a more influential role in the nation’s cultural life by giving them a significant new base of income — public money.
    • Strengthen the hand of business enterprise against burdensome regulatory obligations, especially environmental protection, by introducing voluntary goals and “market-driven” solutions.
    • Smash organized labor.

    Later in the piece, Grieder boils it down even further: “Dismantle the common assets of society, give people back their tax money and let everyone fend for himself.” It’s an oversimplification, obviously, but it’s also a frighteningly accurate summary of Bush’s domestic policy. I guess the question that plagues me is: How did this agenda become the guiding light for America’s evangelicals? How did a Church founded on Christ’s ministry become united behind a political ideology that elevates market forces over justice and mercy? Do we so completely lack imagination and understanding of history that we’ve concluded that this is the best we can do?

    Grieder concludes:

    I do not believe that most Americans want what the right wants. But I also think many cannot see the choices clearly or grasp the long-term implications for the country. This is a failure of left-liberal politics. Constructing an effective response requires a politics that goes right at the ideology, translates the meaning of Bush’s governing agenda, lays out the implications for society and argues unabashedly for a more positive, inclusive, forward-looking vision.

    Perhaps it could be modified slightly and still retain some of its weight:

    I do not believe that most Christians want what the right wants. But I also think many cannot see the choices clearly or grasp the long-term implications for the country. This is a failure of the evangelical church. Constructing an effective response requires a theology that goes right at the ideology, translates the meaning of Bush’s governing agenda, lays out the implications for society and argues unabashedly for a more graceful, just, and merciful vision.

    Just doing my part for the cause.

  • American Triumphalism

    First, read Ashes to Alvin by Ann Lamott, whose name has come up so often in my life recently that I feel downright compelled to go get some of her books.

    Hats off to Rev. Fritz Ritsch, pastor of Bethesda Presbyterian Church, for his wonderful op-ed piece in Sunday’s Washington Post. Taking to task both President Bush — who has consistently and brazenly appropriated bad theology in an effort to forward his agenda — and those portions of the American church that have graciously accepted that agenda without criticism, Ritsch likens Bush’s self-image to that longed-for “Davidic ruler — a political leader like the Bible’s David, who will unite [the American church’s] secular vision of the nation with their spiritual aspirations. All indications are that they believe they have found their David in Bush — and that the president believes it, too.” Ritsch distinguishes between this attitude of “American triumphalism” and the alternative message that should be emanating from our churches: “grace, hope and redemption — the truth of Biblical faith.”

    For months now, as I’ve grown increasingly concerned by the administration’s evocations of Providence as a justification for war, I have often accused Bush of a type of Fundamentalism that is difficult for me to distinguish from the “Evil” that he is so determined to eradicate. Ritsch echoes these concerns, but does so more eloquently than I’ve been able to manage:

    In the aftermath of 9/11, people came to church in droves, looking for larger meaning, and then they left again, frustrated. That’s a problem churches need to address, not least because our failure to give them what they were looking for may have lent potency to presidential theology. When people were searching for meaning, the president was able to frame that meaning. In a nation of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In a secular society, a president who can confidently quote scripture is that man.

    The president confidently (dare I say “religiously”?) asserts a worldview that most Christian denominations reject outright as heresy: the myth of redemptive violence, which posits a war between good and evil, with God on the side of good and Satan on the side of evil and the battle lines pretty clearly drawn.

    War is essential in this line of thinking. For God to win, evil needs to be defined and destroyed by God’s faithful followers, thus proving their faithfulness. Christians have held this view to be heretical since at least the third century. It is the bread-and-butter theology of fundamentalists, whether Muslim, Jewish or Christian.

    In contrast, the Judeo-Christian worldview is that of redemption. Redemption starts from the assumption that all of humanity is flawed and must approach God with humility. No good person is totally good, and no evil person is irredeemable. God’s purpose is to redeem all people. Good and evil, while critical, become secondary to redemption.

    I can’t seem to get that “one-eyed man is king” line out of my head. It occurred to me again and again as I read the cover story in this week’s Newsweek, “Bush and God.” Everything about that article rings so true to me — its portrait of evangelical training (weekly Bible studies, “quiet times”) and “personal relationships” with God. There’s the sense that fluency in the lingo — “laying-on of hands,” being “called” to service, having a “walk” — is no longer an inevitable by-product of the contemplative life, but an end in and of itself. Somewhere along the line, American Christian “culture” seems to have superseded Christianity, diluting its call for humility and forgiveness and replacing them with strict codes of acceptable behavior (which, it seems to me, are decidedly white, suburban, middle class, and Protestant). It’s all so terribly frustrating and confusing.

    I so want Bush to be the Christian President that many of my friends claim him to be, but then I read articles like this, in which he makes such ridiculous comments. Asked about the 30 million marchers who protested against his policies a few weeks ago, he responded:

    “Of course, I care what they believe. And I’ve listened carefully. I’ve thought long and hard about what needs to be done,” he said. “And obviously some people in Northern California do not see there’s a true risk to the United States posed by Saddam Hussein. And we just have a difference of opinion.”

    As if “California liberals” were the only Americans upset right now. It’s difficult for me to believe that he has “listened carefully” when he has refused to even meet with leaders of his own church, who were counted among the protesters.

  • The State of the Union

    Thoughts on the State of the Union.

    To lift the standards of our public schools, we achieved historic education reform — which must now be carried out in every school and in every classroom, so that every child in America can read and learn and succeed in life. To protect our country, we reorganized our government and created the Department of Homeland Security, which is mobilizing against the threats of a new era. To bring our economy out of recession, we delivered the largest tax relief in a generation. To insist on integrity in American business we passed tough reforms, and we are holding corporate criminals to account.

    I realize that Bush is fiercely pro-life and that he has an inspirational Christian testimony, so I understand why he has garnered blind support from certain portions of the Right. What I don’t get is his claims of conservatism. When I think conservative, I think fiscal responsibility, small government, states’ rights, and isolationism. The Bush administration is none of the above. After deriding Gore as a “nation-builder” during the 2000 debates and promising to never use our military for such purposes, Bush has ushered in a new age of American imperialism, even winning from Congress the right to launch unilateral pre-emptive strikes on sovereign nations.

    Bush’s “education reforms” have likewise helped to grow the Federal government to its largest size ever and have mandated unprecedented Federal control over local school systems. His Department of Homeland Security now exercises the authority to monitor our private lives with near complete abandon. And his mismanagement of the economy has cost us billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. (Before you claim that he inherited a bloated economy from Clinton, which is partly true, explain to me why Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and most of Bush’s other chief economic advisors were ushered out in the closing weeks of 2002.) If we can’t count on a Republican President for fiscal conservatism, what’s the point?

    A friend and I were discussing all of this last night, trying, as objectively as possible, to understand what is so conservative about Bush’s brand of “compassionate conservatism.” (Don’t get me started on the “compassionate” part.) This morning he sent me this link, writing, “Someone’s reading your mind.”

    To boost investor confidence, and to help the nearly 10 million senior who receive dividend income, I ask you to end the unfair double taxation of dividends.

    New rule: No one is allowed to play the “senior” card unless they’re discussing, well, seniors. To spin the dividend cut as a compassionate move in the interest of seniors is just dishonest. I can only imagine what kind of lightbulbs went off when someone coined the phrase “double taxation.” Mark my words, we’ll be hearing a lot more of that one in the coming weeks.

    Join me in this important innovation to make our air significantly cleaner, and our country much less dependent on foreign sources of energy.

    Environment-friendly Bush? I wonder if you can buy that in a two-pack with the “Pro-Affirmative-Action Lott” doll?

    I urge you to pass both my faith-based initiative and the Citizen Service Act, to encourage acts of compassion that can transform America, one heart and one soul at a time.

    See, now I actually like this idea in theory, but there is no way it will have legs if it ever squeaks through Congress. The other day, I flipped on an episode of “Random People Arguing” on CNNMSNBCFOX and caught a remarkable exchange between Jerry Falwell and Strawman Liberal Methodist Minister. SLMM did his very best to pin Falwell down with the following question: “Do you support the government’s use of your tax money for the funding of Muslim charities?” Falwell absolutely refused to answer the question, doing his best to maintain that tattooed grin. But SLMM continued to press until the two men regressed to adolescence right before my eyes. Honestly, Falwell threatened him. It was surreal. Dada, even.

    And that’s exactly what we’re going to get in Congress when politicians begin trying to divvy up Federal monies for distribution to “faith-based” initiatives. Again, I can’t imagine why any conservative would support this.

    Too many Americans in search of [drug] treatment cannot get it. So tonight I propose a new $600-million program to help an additional 300,000 Americans receive treatment over the next three years.

    Can you imagine if Clinton had tried this? Lott, Robertson, and Buchanan would have called him a Socialist.

    I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.

    Well I’ll be damned. You know who’s responsible for this, don’t you? Bono, and God bless him for it. If Bush gets half of that amount out of Congress, I’ll be the first person to thank him. I can only imagine what kinds of “reproduction-related” measures will be attached to this one.

    Whatever the duration of this struggle, and whatever the difficulties, we will not permit the triumph of violence in the affairs of men — free people will set the course of history.

    This one is probably too obvious to even be worth mentioning, but with “we will not permit the triumph of violence in the affairs of men,” Bush has secured his place in the Meaningless Double-Speak Hall of Fame.

    In each case, the ambitions of Hitlerism, militarism, and communism were defeated by the will of free peoples, by the strength of great alliances, and by the might of the United States of America.

    Note to self: use this line in the conclusion of your dissertation. I couldn’t possibly imagine what “militarism” means in this context, but if this isn’t proof that the Cold War is alive and well, nothing is. How much do you want to bet that an earlier draft of this speech used “fascism” instead of “Hitlerism”? I guarantee it. Probably something like this:

    Bush: “What’s fascism again?”
    Rove: “Yeah, good point. Let’s change that to, uh, How ’bout Hitlerism?”
    Speechwriter: “Hmmm, I don’t think that’s a word.”
    silent stares from Bush and Rove
    Speechwriter: “Hitlerism works for me.”

    Tonight I have a message for the men and women who will keep the peace, members of the American Armed Forces. . . .

    If war is forced upon us, we will fight in a just cause and by just means — sparing, in every way we can, the innocent. And if war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force and might of the United States military — and we will prevail.

    Note: I’m praying that we will somehow avoid this war because I don’t feel it is theologically just (despite Bush’s deliberate efforts to work that word into his rhetoric). Because I don’t think this war is justified, I feel that any casualties, any casualties, would be tragic and senseless wastes of lives that were created by God for more meaningful purposes. So please don’t take this as knee-jerk anti-Americanism, a phrase that, in recent weeks, has been thrown around much too casually and ignorantly by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk:

    This and this is how our forces will “keep the peace.”

    Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity. We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know — we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history. May He guide us now. And may God continue to bless the United States of America.

    This will be my most carefully measured comment. The histories of nations that have exercised imperial force under the guise of Providence should be telling to all but the most blindly ill-informed and arrogant.

  • Tarkovsky and Sandwiches

    Tarkovsky and Sandwiches

    I spent my lunch hour (and then some) sitting around a table with the senior pastor of a Presbyterian church, the priest of a local Orthodox congregation, and three other laymen (for lack of a better word). We were brought together by several strokes of remarkably good fortune, the intricacies of which would take much too long to explain here. The long and short of it, though, is that we got together to talk about a movie.

    Not just any movie, mind you, but one of the best, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev — that poetic, mystical, transcendant biopic of the 15th century Russian icon painter. Rublev was the first Tarkovsky film that I saw, and I’m still feeling the consequences. That I’m even posting to Long Pauses can be attributed directly to that viewing and to the awakening that it inspired in me.

    Last fall I spent nearly three months preparing and leading discussions of the arts with a group of friends from my church. The experience was at times frustrating, at times beautiful. What I soon realized was how muddied the discourse of faith/religion and art/creativity is. I’m not sure what exactly I mean by “muddied,” except that it seems to get at some of the dogmatic biases that hinder productive communication between peoples of differing theological bents. I honestly believe that art — or any medium, really, through which God reveals His presence in immediate, often non-verbal ways — can serve the reconciliation of His church. But until I led those discussions, I never knew how tricky a proposition it could be.

    What I found most gratifying about today’s meeting was the generosity of all involved, the obvious sense that we were gathering for a communal and (I use this word with some hesitation) sacred experience. Perhaps that is ultimately testament to Tarkovsky’s genius. He strove throughout his career to capture on film images that would force viewers to experience complex and contradictory emotions and, in the process, to be rendered capable of spiritual improvement. As we spoke — and we certainly spoke more about God than about the film — I was reminded often of how well he had succeeded. Instead of debating the particulars of plot developments or performances or special effects, as is often the case when Americans gather to talk movies, we struggled to make sense of the lingering emotions and longings that Rublev had wrestled from us. A friend calls this “creational theology” — the desire to better understand the mysteries of God by studying his revelation.

    I hope to have a full response to Rublev up by the end of the week. After being online for just over a year now, I guess it’s about time that I tried to write about the site’s inspiration.

  • Evangelical Fallacy

    This morning I received one of those e-mails that tend to make the rounds every week or two. This one concerns an address to Congress delivered by a man whose daughter was killed in a school shooting. I googled the first line of his speech and found that it has since been appropriated as a prayer of sorts by certain gun rights activists. (I don’t feel like reproducing the speech here. If you’re curious, follow the Google link.) Both Snopes and Urban Legends confirm that, on May 27, 1999, Darrell Scott did, in fact, testify before a House judiciary sub-committee, but they also debunk the hyperbolic claims often added to the e-mail, claims that the liberal media prevented “the nation from hearing this man’s speech.”

    To be honest, I responded to this e-mail the same way I respond to all of its ilk: I read the first line, then deleted it. I didn’t give it another thought until a friend — a friend who happens to be on the same person’s forward list — sent me this fascinating analysis, which I’m posting here with his permission:

    It’s the typical evangelical fallacy: it’s true that the most fundamental problem is not guns and their availability (or poverty, or whatever) but people’s fallenness and sinfulness; but the mistake is in thinking that we should only attempt to treat — that is, pray for — the fallenness and sinfulness without dealing with their symptoms. In this line of thought the problem’s not poverty but people’s immorality, so we shouldn’t have welfare because until people’s hearts are changed it won’t do any good, etc.

    The parent says that metal detectors wouldn’t have stopped the shooters — but, um, why not? Does their sinfulness act as some kind of cloaking device? As far as I can tell, the only exception to this logic in the sphere of evangelical political thought, is, of course, abortion — according to the standard logic, we shouldn’t attempt to stop people from having abortions, but should rather pray that their hearts would be changed (in school, I suppose). But no one’s advocating that…

    The “evangelical fallacy” — I like that.