Category Archives: Current Events - Page 2

Eugene McCarraher at TOJ

Posted by on January 12, 2010 11 comments

Chris at The Other Journal has recently posted part 1 of a three-part interview with Eugene McCarraher that is definitely worth the read. So far there’s been some fascinating commentary on things ranging from evaluating the aughts to the presidency of Barack Obama and the Tiger Woods scandal.

Here’s just one quote, on conservative Christianity in the 2000s:

The 2000s was, sadly, the heyday of faith-based everything: faith-based wars (Iraq), faith-based science (“intelligent design” and global-warming denial), faith-based economics (the financial and housing bubbles, the extraordinary trust placed in a gnomic mediocrity like Alan Greenspan). And let’s be honest here: conservative Christianity, Protestant and Catholic, remains one of the leading service providers of credulity. You just can’t escape the fact that conservative religious culture leavened almost every instance of faith-based bunkum that characterized the last decade. Anyone who studies the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq knows that one of the reasons George W. Bush went to war was his belief—encouraged by neoconservatives who don’t give a damn about Christian or any other faith—that God wanted him to be some righteous warrior. Churches and synagogues around the nation sounded their tocsins for war, but the invasion received the most enthusiastic benedictions from conservative churches, all resounding with hosannahs and praise for God’s President. Even churches like the one I attend, which isn’t especially conservative, started draping the Stars and Stripes from their choir balconies. When I objected strongly to this, I was told that parishioners were demanding it. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson drooled with anticipation at the prospect of vengeance and assassination; John Hagee, Rod Parsley, and others reveled in blood-soaked eschatological visions; the Left Behind books sold millions of copies, filling the minds of readers with hateful, sanguinary orgasms of violence; theo-con journals like First Things, the religion supplement for the Wall Street Journal, ran articles about America’s providential mission in the world. Add to that the cavalier hostility to science that now makes a cretin like James Inhofe into a major player on climate policy. Very large swaths of American Christianity now compose a potent culture of resentment, bigotry, and militarism. Where, oh where, is H. L. Mencken when you need him? You can’t even begin to understand someone like Bush—or Sarah Palin, the true heir to this maelstrom of nuttery—without attending to this stew.

EP Responds to Obama’s Nobel Speech

Posted by on December 17, 2009 11 comments

The Ekklesia Project has launched a new blog in response to President Obama’s recent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I think this is a good thing. EP came into existence to call into question Christians’ complicity with violence as such and war in particular. That was something of an easy target during the Bush years and many Christians of the EP persuasion voted enthusiastically for Obama (including Stanley Hauerwas, who has a response to the speech up on the blog). At any rate, I appreciate that Obama is not being given a pass on his escalation of the war on terror by EP. He should not be given one.

Also does anyone else find it interesting that so many people like Hauerwas who built careers around taking down Niebuhrianism voted for Obama who is by far the most articulate exponent of Niebuhrianism to occupy the White House in decades? This came up in the comments on Hauerwas’s post and I think its quite an ironic point. But, that being said I’m glad EP is not letting go of their convictions on the basis of “Yeay, not Bush!”

Minarets and Crucifixes

Posted by on December 8, 2009 31 comments

Robert Wilken has a post arguing that the Swiss ban on minarets is not a curtailment of religious freedom since its really just about preserving culture and tradition:

For the Swiss, erection of minarets taller than church steeples would alter the skyline of cities and towns, visibly severing links to the past. The construction of minarets was seen as an assault on memory and memory is attached to things. Without memory a people have no sense of who they are. In Italy the assault on memory had to do with the central Christian symbol in the west. In a historic Christian culture wrote Barbieri, “the symbol of a naked, suffering, unjustly condemned man in whom all that is good and worthy of worship and respect . . . is centered, is buried deep in their souls.” In Italy even atheists and Communists respect the Crucifix “because it means so much about the condition and value of a man.”

The issue is not human rights or religious freedom, but respect for cultural traditions and fealty to those who have gone before. There is no reason to think that prohibiting the erection of minarets in Swiss cities will jeopardize the rights of Muslims to practice their religion. But if a society loses all memory of its Christian traditions, there is a real question whether those things that make western civilization unique, e.g. human rights, freedom of religion, will endure.

So presumably this would mean that if a historically Muslim country voted to band the construction of cathedrals that would also not be a matter of religious freedom and rights, but merely the preservation of a culture? Anyone else smell the bullshit?

This post strikes me as yet another display of a common presupposition among many of the First Thingers: that Christianity is inalienably tied to “Western culture” which should thus be propagated, maintained, and extended throughout the world without regard for other cultures or forms of peoplehood.

One Irish Priest

Posted by on December 6, 2009 5 comments

In response to the inquiries about the routine cover-ups of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, one Irish priest had this to say:

There is no good in saying other than the truth. The church at this state has no credibility, no standing and no moral authority. The issue is now one of trust, and that is why it will take the rest of my lifetime as a priest to build up that trust again, because the trust and confidence in the church has been broken on a fundamental level.

Truth-telling always deserves promotion. I will pray for Fr Michael Canny, of the Derry Diocese of Ireland that he will not grow wearing in speaking the truth and trying to do what is right on behalf of those who have suffered.

He is certainly right that there is no good in saying anything other than the truth. Ecclesial faithfulness can mean nothing less than this.

Accursed they were not here!

Posted by on December 1, 2009 38 comments

My post on the Manhatten Declaration has elicited the enthusaistic support of many, the ire of an angry few, and the well-deserved chastening of my much-beloved loyal opposition for whom I am more grateful than I can ever express.

Therefore, and nevertheless, this recent treatment deserves mention for its rhetorical brilliance and right-on-the-money beingness. Here’s just one snippet:

And at one level it’s impossible to view these pretentious peacocks, these Malvolios grimacing and strutting in their yellow stockings, without succumbing to the derisive laughter they deserve. Such self-inflation demands deflation. And anyway it can’t be helped. I mean, just listen to them:

We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.

The whole thing is like that — like a bad parody of the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. Except of course that Henry was outnumbered. Here instead we have a group of powerful elites, men at the center of political, cultural, academic and ecclesiastical privilege bemoaning their oppression at the hands of the homosexuals and religious minorities they claim run the world. They are overlords posing as underdogs. (It’s hard out there for a pope.)

And while that’s ridiculous, it’s not really funny. The claim of oppression is laughably bogus, but the blood on their hands is all too real. A parody of the St. Crispin’s Day speech has comic potential, but a parody of the St. Crispin’s Day speech as delivered by the pilot of the Enola Gay is too bitterly callous even for my bleak taste in comedy.

Mine too, hence my speech, as overly-incendiary and unwieldy as it may often be.

Why Conservatives Shouldn’t Make Manifestos

Posted by on November 20, 2009 76 comments

Today saw the release of the “Manhattan Declaration,” a sort of ecumenical conservative manifesto with 148 signatories from Roman, Eastern, and Evangelical denominations. Its a consolidated statement of the usual stuff super conservative Christians care about — abortion, gay marriage, and well, I guess the freedom to not perform abortions and gay marriages, they call this religious freedom.

On the one hand there’s really nothing that needs to be said about this. After all there is nothing really said here that hasn’t been utterly clear for some time. We all know that abortion and gay marriage, framed under the language of religious freedom are pretty much all the Christian political right cares about.

Naturally in the long tirades about a holistic ethic of life there’s no substantial discussion of poverty, let alone militarism and war. Likewise in the flowing praises of marriage as the bedrock of civilization and Christianity don’t see fit to mention any of the things Jesus or Paul actually had to say about marriage. This is standard sub-biblical conservative fare.

This is also precisely why stuff like this shouldn’t be considered a manifesto  in any realistic sense of the term. The document styles itself as standing in the line of Barmen and even MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. This is bullshit. Its simply a consolidation of widely-held conservative opinion. Hell, they even claim that their views represent the majority of Americans while they style it as a bold sort of minority courage against the powers that be. That’s the best thing about popular conservative Christianity. You can be an oppressed minority while still really representing pretty much all the real people.

Its actually painfully obvious what this is all about. Its simply another instance of the conservative Christian unrest that always gets shrilly trumpeted whenever there’s a democrat in the White House. As such this is actually a perfect example of the sort of anxiety I discussed yesterday. What animates this document is nothing more — and I really mean that, quite literally nothing more – than a gnawing fear about not being in a position of cultural power.

We are offered here a vision of Christianity completely and intentionally sold over to ideology. There is no proclamation of the living God, of the crucified and risen Christ here. All we are offered by this document and the movement it represents is a life ruled by the very powers Christ has freed us from. The desperation for control, domination, and security that this movement needs to be called what it is, a falling back into the elemental spirits of the cosmos, a return to the world system that Christ’s death and resurrection has made nothing. It is nothing less than the rejection of actual faith in the coming kingdom of the living God.

Homosexuality Trumps the Homeless

Posted by on November 13, 2009 47 comments

This is shocking, at least from the standpoint of the gospel. Apparently there is some legislation in DC that would require employers to not discriminate against same-sex couples (i.e. they’d have to give them medical benefits). In response to this the Catholic archdiocese has threatened to shut down their public social services to the homeless unless the legislation is changed.

The fear is that they would be forced to “extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples” which they feel is an unacceptable encroachment of the state into their religious freedom. Note however that they aren’t concerned that they’d be forced to employ homosexuals, only that they’d be forced to give medical benefits to current employees who are in same-sex relationships. So, apparently its ok to employ the gays as long as they don’t have to recognize them as such in some official sense.

Now, lets just bracket the issue of whether or not Christians should accept same-sex marriage or not on the basis of Scripture. What should be outrageous to all Christians, regardless of their perspective on that issue is the way in which the poor and the marginalized are simply a bargaining chip in an ideological game over homosexuality. Is it really more important to the church that it be able to not give medical benefits to those in gay relationships than that it care for the poor as Jesus commanded us? Because that’s what’s really be being said here. This is no heroic moral resoluteness that refuses compromise. Apparently, at least for this archdiocese, being able to keep their hands clean of “endorsing homosexuality” is more important than caring for those whom the powers are making nothing. All Christians should be horrified by this callous casting aside of the poor for the sake of ideological posturing. Truly disgraceful.

Ha!

Posted by on November 3, 2009 6 comments

Well, contrary to all the hubbub about an alleged uprising of the conservative masses (proletariat?) against the totalitarian rule of Barack Obama, it seems that things have gone differently in the over-discussed special election for one of New York’s congress members. It turns out that a district that has been held by Republicans since 1872 has now been won by a Democrat.

Yeah. The days of Barack Obama are clearly numbered. Thats obviously what this indicates.

Now, obviously all of this fascination with this obscure special election is massively insignificant. However, the one thing it has wound up showing is how utterly nonsensical, ideologically driven, and stupid the whole Beck-Palin cloud of noise is. And maybe it also seems to show that at least some of the electorate isn’t completely captive to these sorts of inane voices.

Dose of Sanity

Posted by on November 2, 2009 1 comment

Larison is very perceptive in cutting through the fog of triumphal pronouncements about the alleged resurgence of conservatism that the current NY special election for congress is supposed to indicate:

The GOP seems to be making what ought to be an easy win into a national Phyrrhic victory in which the relative strength of conservative activists inside the party becomes vastly exaggerated and identifies the flailing, failing party even more closely with its conservative members. This will make it very difficult for conservative activists to disassociate themselves from the outcome of the midterms next year. What I find strange in the fixation on NY-23 is that the off-year gubernatorial elections probably serve as a much better indicator of large-scale movements in public opinion. Larger, more diverse electorates in large states are involved in Virginia and New Jersey. If things go as I expect them to with a Republican pick-up in Virginia and a Democratic hold in New Jersey, the message will be rather muddled. It will mean that Virginia will have chosen a Northern Virginia moderate who successfully ran away from his earlier social conservatism while New Jersey re-elected an incumbent who was thought to be highly vulnerable and discredited by corruption. Those results could be explained by pointing to the nature of the electorates in both states, but this does not lend itself to a triumphant narrative of Republican resurgence fueled by true believers. The point here is not to write off conservative insurgents or reject protest candidacies provoked by the failures and mistakes of state and local party leaders. These are appropriate and sometimes necessary responses to elected and party officials’ blunders. What also matters is being willing to acknowledge that the political landscape is not necessary what we wish it is or think it ought to be. Hoffmania and its attendant privileging of ideology over actual local interests suggest that a great many conservatives cannot and will not acknowledge this.

This nice dose of sanity speaks volumes against some of the ridiculous claims that have been made — often by evangelicals — about how “real America” is somehow revolting against Obama. One pundit even claimed that this obscure special election somehow proved that “the Obama brand” will be dead in 2010 (2 months to go, folks!).

Doses of sanity such as Larison provides here are quite welcome these days.

Holy Water Under the Bridge

Posted by on October 28, 2009 6 comments

Stephen Colbert and Randall Balmer had a pretty entertaining discussion of the Anglican-Catholic developments yesterday:

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Holy Water Under the Bridge – Randall Balmer
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Religion

Film, Faith, and Justice 2009

Posted by on September 22, 2009 1 comment

To those in the Pacific Northwest or who are able to travel from elsewhere, you should really try to be at this year’s Film, Faith, and Justice conference, put on by The Other Journal. The event goes from the 15th through the 17th of October, and promises to be a great installment of a great conference.

The speakers this year include Kelly Johnson, Emmanuel Katongole, James K.A. Smith, Mark Russell, Rob Morris.

The movies and schedules are online and we’re looking forward to a really great event, where we’ll be looking at issues of Human Trafficking, Human Rights, Business as Mission, Reconciliation post-Genocide, and Facing Tragedy.

Hegel vs. Glenn Beck

Posted by on September 21, 2009 3 comments

Thanks to David for posting this:

“Since the man of common sense makes his appeal to feeling, to an oracle within his breast, he is finished and done with anyone who does not agree; he only has to explain that he has nothing more to say to anyone who does not find and feel the same in himself. In other words, he tramples underfoot the roots of humanity. For it is the nature of humanity to press onward to agreement with others; human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds. The anti-human, the merely animal, consists in staying within the sphere of feeling, and being able to communicate only at that level.”

—Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 43.

Too true!

One more on Racism

Posted by on September 17, 2009 13 comments

I swear this is the last quote I’ll post on the topic for a while:

I got a note from a good friend yesterday expressing shock, and anger, about Drudge and Malkin’s usage of that alleged racial beat-down on a school-bus [to attack Obama]. On some level, I wonder if something’s wrong with me. I’m neither shocked, nor angry. This is exactly how I expected these fools to respond to a black president.

If anything, I’m a little giddy. For black people, the clear benefit of Obama is that he is quietly exposing an ancient hatred that has simmered in this country for decades.  Rightly or wrongly, a lot of us grew tired of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, mostly because they presented easy foils for Limbaugh-land. Moreover, again rightly or wrongly, they were used to define all of us.

It’s intensely grating to live say, in Atlanta, and have some dude in Harlem crowned as your unelected leader. It’s even more grating if said dude’s agenda seems, in large measure, come down to standing in front of cameras and tweaking his opponents. It’s no mistake that O’Reilly and Sharpton would break bread together at Sylvia’s–they feed each other.

But Barack Obama, bourgeois in every way that bourgeois is right and just, will not dance. He tells kids to study–and they seethe. He accepts an apology for an immature act of rudeness–and they go hysterical. He takes his wife out for a date–and their veins bulge. His humanity, his ordinary blackness, is killing them. Dig the audio of his response to Kanye West–the way he says, “He’s a jackass.” He sounds like one of my brothers. And that’s the point, because that’s what he is. Barack Obama refuses to be their nigger. And it’s driving them crazy.

The Subtlety of Racism

Posted by on September 16, 2009 16 comments

Indeed:

You don’t have to wear a white hood to have views that are significantly animated by racist beliefs and fears–and saying that a lot of the hysterical protest on the right (stylized as a desire for ‘small government’) is significantly animated by racist beliefs and fears is most decidedly not to say that “limited government sentiment is automatically a form of subliminated racism.” Much of it is so animated, but that doesn’t mean that each person with such ‘limited government’ views is a racist, let alone has a penchant for white-hood wearing.

Here’s a question: what proportion of the people clamoring about ‘limited government’ at these rallies seem to have no problem with–indeed seem to much support–federal programs that they think benefit them and people like them (Medicare, Social Security, federal spending that provides jobs in their community, such as on defense, etc.), but are rabidly opposed to things that they think will go to people unlike them? I think an answer to that question would go a long way to answering how much of the protest is animated by racism.

Is Racism Just a Scare-Word?

Posted by on September 16, 2009 31 comments

According to First Things, it is. In fact, Elizabeth Scalia’s long and spirited rant on the topic insists that its no longer possible for anyone to dissent from Obama on anything without being called a racist. Conservatives are just all actually just victims getting tread on by the liberal race card police.

What I find funny is that it’s the populist neocons who are tossing around the racist label more than anyone else these days. Didn’t we hear recently that Obama’s a racist who hates all things white?

But more to the point, the idea that racial stuff isn’t playing a role in all this is just absurd. Rod Dreher nails the matter:

Let’s say that Democrat Joe Lieberman was the American president. And let’s say that Rush Limbaugh said this on his radio show:

It’s Lieberman’s America, is it not? Lieberman’s America, Gentiles getting ripped off by Jews on Wall Street. You invest your hard-earned money in a mutual fund, you expect safety but in Lieberman’s America the non-Jews now get stolen from…

What would that sound like to you? Would you be able to call it mere “sarcasm”? Or would you recognize that there was something more sinister at work in this language?

Exactly. If Obama was Jewish do you really think people could say stuff like this without getting rightly labeled as anti-Semites?

The problem is that rational and measured dissent from the current administration is just not all that forthcoming. Frankly, we really need that sort of dissent right now. The problem is not, as Scalia claims that all dissent is now brushed off as racism. Its that the vast majority of those claiming to be patriotic dissenters—at least the ones that are media savvy—are quite clearly acting out of a profoundly racially-charged posture of blind fear and rage. Articulate and rational dissent would be great. That would be helpful beyond belief. But all we get are conspiracy theories about Obama being a secret Muslim Communist Nazi and mad claims that in Obama’s America black men are going to round you up and beat the crap out of you for being white.

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