the parish

Please Smoke Pot in the Name of Jesus, or The Fungibility of Biblical Authority

Yes, Pat Robertson is for the legalization of marijuana. He said it in a New York Times piece, and it was confirmed by his publicist for the Washington Post. There is no reason to take him seriously, but at least this time he's saying something sane. His reasons for being in favor of legalization have nothing to do with his desire to smoke it; rather, it's a pragmatic position based on the impact on the family and our nation's budget of the idiotic War on Drugs.

Robertson is better known as an erstwhile presidential candidate, jeremiad-spinning weather interpreter, and election predicter. (I guess it isn't really a prediction if God told him.) What is unique to this latest statement, though, is that it will likely cost him dearly in terms of viewers and support, assuming he has any of either left. What is "second verse, same as the first" about this is that yet another Christian celebrity feels very comfortable opining on what ought to be. Robertson's previous forays into Ezekiel-like fever dreams have been standard schlock among Pentecostal and Charismatic "prophets" since the days of David Wilkerson's The Vision: A Terrifying Prophecy of Doomsday that is Starting to Happen Now scared the shit out of this Pentecostal kid in 1977. I was unaware of Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth at the time, although it came out in 1970. I wasn't reading scary prophecy books when I was 6, but I sure as hell was at 13.  

Wilkerson's book wasn't particularly special, as there was nothing new about "interpreting the signs," but it did go farther than most inasmuch as he claimed to have a special revelation from God about what was to come. Most satisfied themselves with interpreting what had just happened—fire, flood, tornado, drought,etc.—only offering the occasional general prediction of more wrath to come. The Pentecostal movement produced a slew of Sister Sharon Falconers and Elmer Gantrys (Kathryn Kuhlman, Aimee Semple McPherson, Oral Roberts, William Branham, etc.), each equipped with some sort of tin cans and string contraption connecting them to God. The midwest has always been a perfect place to read weather signs, as tornados appear obediently every year like the fingers of Marduk scraping the sin off the Wheat Belt. 

I am probably too young to remember how political some of the sign reading was in those days. I'm sure some evangelist somewhere thought Goldwater or Humphrey was the antichrist. They certainly perceived the feminist movement as evil. The recent election cycle is likely to take sign reading to a new level. While Romney has largely stayed out of the faith wars (with good reason...Kolob, anyone?), Santorum has gone after Obama's "phony theology" with glee. When his speech at Ave Maria University in 2008 wherein he said, "Satan has his sights set on America," made the Drudge Report, Santorum quickly explained that the comments weren't relevant to this election. Um, of course not. That you believe in a diabolical creature with nearly unlimited power to thwart god's plan on the earth, and that you can interpret various political realities as part of Old Scratch's nefarious scheme to undermine America's virtue, and that you can do it while ignoring your own theological tradition simply to appeal to evangelical and fundamentalist voters has nothing to do with your fitness for the office of POTUS. Nope. Nothing at all.

I could toss in Mark Driscoll's freewheeling sexual exegetical method here, too, but that would be tedious. You get the point. The beauty of biblical authority is that it begins with a text that is assumed to be accurate. That sounds lovely. Here is the book; here is what it says; now we know the truth. Unfortunately, hermeneutics doesn't work that way. The words have to be interpreted as to what is actually meant. When an event occurs in the Bible, the immediate question is how to apply that to a current context. Is the passage descriptive, prescriptive, or proscriptive? Even if you assume the text to be accurate, which I typically don't, the true believer is left to answer the question of "is that something god does now?" If massacring an entire nation is a "god thing," why be opposed to genocide now? Does god no longer operate that way? Or are we just waiting for him to tell us which nation is next? And if he allegedly does, how will we test his words? What two or three witnesses will establish this as the kol YHWH?

Less inflammatory but still important, which ethical behaviors are important and how are they to be understood? Take "biblical marriage" for example. Santorum and the evangelicals he wants to reach use the term as if its meaning is clear. To substantiate the claim that biblical marriage is one man and one woman forever faithful, they cite Jesus and Genesis. How convenient. They ignore polygamy and concubinage. They even ignore Paul who will later say "husband of one wife," a passage that likely means polygamous Christians, not divorcees. When discussing war or capital punishment, they cite Genesis, Joshua, and Paul. Hmmm. Who is missing in that line-up? Oh yeah, the One who said "love your enemies."

Fungibility is the quality of exchangeability. If I can sub one Bible verse for another, then authority is established, because, well, it's still the Bible. Never mind that an exegetical and hermeneutical method ought to be consistent. Absent a consistent rubric, I'm free to interpret signs and passages as I see fit, which is to say, in concert with my own desires or preferences. Call it what you want, but I'm still going with idolatry, and I don't even practice the faith.

Celebrity Cognoscenti, or This is My Body, Offered for Me

Speak directly, or in this case, write with some satirical sense, and you're likely to be called angry. I reviewed Sacrilege! in the last post. It's not a good book. You can read the review for yourself if you haven't already. Reviewing books is something I do in my "spare" time. I don't get paid to do it, and typically, I don't take a great deal of joy in skewering a book. This is not to say that I won't engage in a certain gleeful mockery of what passes as good these days, but as with the case of Matt Mikalatos, I've learned that there are usually good people behind the efforts. 

Matt responded when I ass-raped Imaginary Jesus. Hugh Halter also responded when I gave a less vicious review of his book, the main weakness of which I thought was simply boring writing. Here's Matt's opening salvo after reading the review:

Yup, I'm nice. And no need to apologize for tirades. As it happens I'm a fan of well-written tirades and to be honest I enjoyed reading yours. Reading between the lines I gather that you did not enjoy my book, but I hope that you at least enjoyed disliking it.

And, now, here is Hugh's response:

Hey Greg Horton, after reading your colorful review of my book, I thought, 'that dude must have put some time in as a pastor of a church." Only ex. rev's get that pissed off. Looks like I was right. Well, thanks anyway for drawing some attention to the book. Peace out,

Matt and I began a conversation that lasts into the present. Hell, he even sent me a manuscript of his second book prior to publication to review and make suggestions. He even took some of them. Matt doesn't necessarily understand himself to be a celebrity. Hugh on the other hand thinks I'm angry. See, his book doesn't suck; I'm just pissed because I used to be a pastor. The fault is with me, not the writing. This is the tactic we most often find with two distinct types of spiritual leaders: the spiritually abusive (which I'm not saying Hugh is, as I don't know him wel) and the celebrity. We'll focus on the latter.

The rise of celebrity in Christianity isn't necessarily new. Evangelists have been packing stadiums and churches since well before John Wesley's time. John Chrysostom allegedly preached to overflow crowds in the 4th century C.E. What Chrysostom and Spurgeon and Wesley had though, was a commitment to the exposition of a text combined with a life that was committed to a holy praxis. Their celebrity was based on a life offered in sacrifice and the corresponding moral authority that comes with such a life. Billy Graham is the best modern equivalent, I suspect. In other words, it was a celebrity based on something substantive.

Modern celebrity is fundamentally different. It's manufactured via a marketing process, and it's largely based on subjective responses of audiences. I remember when Lifechurch.tv first started and people kept saying to me, "The pastor looks like Tom Cruise!" There was zero substance to his preaching, but an image that resonated within the swooning hearts of young women helped solidify him as a good speaker. The goal of most marketing efforts is some sort of bottom line: money or souls or both. Perhaps even something as ephemeral as a concept like success. To create a successful marketing strategy, at least two primary things must be known: a commodity and an audience.

I have no intention of revisiting all that has come of Church Growth, Willow Creek, Saddleback, and now multicampus movements, but suffice it to say that these movements borrowed heavily from business marketing. The first thing I have to know is what I'm selling. That is the commodity. The Church is full of answers to the question: Roman Road, Four Spiritual Laws, Prayer of Jabez, Fully Devoted Follower of Jesus, and a dozen other empty signifiers. The most pernicious is "the gospel message," some variation of creation, fall, incarnation, atonement, salvation, sanctification, usually with me as the focus of Jesus' sacrificial death, the complete individualization of the Christ event tailored to an audience of 7 billion unique individuals. Jesus came to save YOU.

Celebrity leaders are terrible leaders. I'm sorry. They are. The metric used to measure success has nothing to do with any metric that ought to measure success in a field not concerned with bottom lines but with faithfulness to an ethic and a person. Determining if I'm faithful to my wife does not require counting the number of people who listen to me tell them I'm faithful to my wife, nor is it in any way related to convincing other people that they too should be faithful to their wives. Ruminate on that a bit.

Celebrity leaders are also the worst about surrounding themselves with satans, those accusers of the brother who insist, like the Devil's Advocate in a canonization investigation, that we bring everything, beautiful and ugly, to the table. They are supposed to remind the leaders that they are not the incarnate Word of God, but are in fact, mere mortals who will conflate their sermons with God's Word if someone doesn't hold them accountable. (You know who I'm thinking of, right? Reverend Sex Freak!) They are supposed to say, "It doesn't matter how big your church is; the metric is faithfulness"—a modern way of saying, "What does it profit a man..."

The problem with celebrity in Christianity is twofold. First, Christianity ought not have a commodity. That megachurches and well-meaning "authors" and itinerant evangelists have made a commodity of the "gospel message," is shameful enough. If there must be a commodity, it probably ought to be Jesus. Unfortunately, that requires a whole different "gospel message" and one predicated on praxis, not marketing strategies. However, the second problem (and the larger one) with celebrity in the Church is that the celebrity becomes the commodity. This is clearly true in the multicampus movement, wherein egomaniacs decide that when Jesus said "shepherd," he obviously meant gigantic talking non-incarnate head on a video screen hundreds of miles from the shepherd. In the case of megachurches and multicampus churches, the commodity is the avatar of the senior pastor, broadcast weekly on video screens on campuses around the country. The leader is the commodity, thereby guaranteeing a ministry based completely on idolatry or blasphemy.

Sacrilege? No, not really. Or, Still the Emperor is Naked, Yet the Crowd Cheers His Wardrobe

Sacrilege! Love the word. It's powerful, if widely misunderstood. Most people, if asked to define it, would likely say something that actually means something closer to blasphemy. It's one of those nuance words we don't always get, especially if you're not big on the verbal sins: heresy, blasphemy, sacrilege, corrupt communication, etc. I should start with a quote from Brian McLaren's New Kind of Christian before I even begin to review a book called Sacrilege: Finding Life in the Unorthodox Ways of Jesus.

"I pick up most religious books, like the one you're holding, and know from somewhere midway through page one what the entire book will say, and I read on anyway and find out that I was right. I wonder: Doesn't the religious community see that the world is changing? Doesn't it have anything fresh and incisive to say? Is it even asking any new questions?"

The quote is from his introduction to a book that, even as an outsider to faith, I consider critically important in my development. I read the intro and bought the book on the spot. It was one of the most freeing things I've ever read. I use the quote because my experience with religious books has been similar to McLaren's. Even now with emergent and missional paradigms emerging (ha!) everywhere, the predictability factor is still very high in religious books. One need only think emergently or missionally or Driscolly to predict where the book is headed.

So it was with a great sense of doom that I received Sacrilege to review. In addition to the predictability equation, religious books possess a shock equation, such that: religious books are revolutionary or groundbreaking at an inversely proportional ratio to the titillation factor resident in the title. Any book called Blasphemy! will be anything but blasphemous. In fact, it will probably be a modern apologetic for the Four Spiritual Laws. Third, high praise from people who are the Christian equivalent of hipsters absolutely means a book is not terribly important or shocking. For example, if Len Sweet shows up on the jacket, you can rest assured it will shock no one, his effusive endorsement notwithstanding. To wit:

Hugh Halter has written a carefully constructed theological Molotov cocktail which explodes false myths while it fires up the Christian imagination for truth, beauty, and goodness.

Fuck me in the face.

This is no Molotov cocktail, and why Sweet has to drag the classic virtues into this is beyond me. Am I reading some new Neo-Platonist? Will there be an explication of Aristotle's Virtue Ethics? No. There will be a great deal of this, though:

Sacrilege is about removing religion from our faith.--pg. 32

I'm tempted to use profanity again. Really? Remove religion? See my previous post for my thoughts on this sort of trite nonsense. Here, Halter, makes the same mistake made by Bethke; they both believe Christianity in its purest form will be devoid of religion. Now, in addition to the errors pointed out in that thinking from the previous post, I'd like to point out that both also believe that religion as a term is interchangeable with legalism or rule-oriented faith. It's, of course, where Halter is headed.

Let me propose a crazy idea. Christianity (any faith) ought to have rules, and you ought to follow them. For one, it's how I know what faith you practice without you yammering about my eternal destiny. Two, it's how community formation happens. And three, and the very most important aspect, it's how you act non-dickishly in the world. Following good rules with consistency keeps me from calling you a hypocrite or asshat or douchebag or Republican. Enough of that. On to the substance of the book.

Halter's biggest problem is that he's thorough to the point of boring and trite. How many Bible verses and stories do I need to get the point? What are you offering that's new here? (Short answer: nothing.) Sacrilege for Halter means to "de-sacredize" something. What the reader gets is more of the same old "how to live like Jesus" bullshit without ever actually having to live like Jesus. He re-envisions old concepts like tithing, and suggests pastors encourage members to give 5% to the church and 5% to other charities, with the goal of moving them toward making 100% of their incomes available to Jesus. This is, of course, idiotic. No one does this. No one I've ever met trusts Jesus for 100% of their income distribution or income source. The most obvious thing that would happen to Christians who give away 100% of their income is that they would be broke. Halter surely means for us to be responsible, as in paying our bills first, but other than offering people a choice as to what to do with 5%, what revolutionary principle has he suggested? Wherefore art thou, Molotov?

He suggests different ways of being the Church. Sigh. Maybe community outreach on a fifth Sunday. Wow! This is so trite I can't believe anyone published it, until I saw that it was Baker, and then it makes sense. Innocuous ecclesiology from the boring middle dressed up to look like a real revolutionary text--the specialty of Baker Books. Yes, Halter's church is doing good things. Hell, he seems like he'd probably be a nice guy, except his bio says he's a consultant, but other than that, the photos in the book show all sorts of brown people his church has helped. I just don't know why he needs to write a book about it, especially a boring one. There is nothing revolutionary here, nothing new, nothing all that interesting. Keep doing the good deeds, and quit publishing how-to books, especially when the how-to has been happening for 2000 years.

Mark Driscoll's Penis (Tangentially); or, Wherefore art Thou, Moral Authority?

With apologies to the great bard...

The task for half of my freshmen this past two weeks is to explain the system of moral authority in their lives. The question is fairly simple: are you what you do, what you believe, or a combination of the two? By what you do I mean actions in the world, not a job. For the record, I'm pretty sure there's not a great answer to this question, but the point of the question isn't to find the solution; it's to track the decision making process, including moral justification, when confronted with a moral dilemma.

I started thinking along this track when reading through Driscoll's sex freak book (real title Real Marriage). In it, Driscoll uses the Bible to help his penis, and yours if you're a boy, find its way around the female form: hands, mouth, vagina, and rectum. And if you think I'm being needlessly crude, read Driscoll on oral sex based on Song of Songs. Driscoll's discussion of dangling fruit reminds me of Patton Oswalt's G-Rated Filth (and that is not for the faint of heart, folks. watch only if extremely graphic language gets you aroused...er...doesn't offend you). Driscoll uses the Bible as a moral authority by which he assesses the rightness and wrongness of particular sex acts, which is quite frankly hysterical, given that he thinks it's ok to bugger his wife but not to spank his aforementioned penis, neither of which the Bible mentions. This is, of course, as I said in the previous post, an exegetical model based on personal preference. I'll go ahead and say it now; all exegetical models are based at least partly on personal preference. That Mark Driscoll is a psychotic narcissist only makes his percentage of personal preference higher than someone who at least attempts to be honest about the complexities of interpreting an ancient and often ambiguous (if not silent on an issue) text.

Moral authority is always complex at the conceptual level. When I ask students the question about how they decide what is right and wrong, inevitably they give the standard answers: parents, pastors, peers, God. The first is easiest to dispense with; most humans have willfully disobeyed parents when the desire outweighed the fear of reprisal, or when they simply stopped believing as parents did. In the first case, did they really believe what they were doing was wrong, or did what they want to do really constitute what they believed about the action? Parse at your leisure. Pastors and peers we can ignore for now, as the first is seldom really heard and the latter work more as justification or consolation than character formation. The real problem is God.

When people say God is their moral authority, I'm absolutely certain they don't understand what they're saying. First, God is not immediately available to talk to them, and as for those (like one student) who said a relationship with Jesus was key to understanding the Bible, I simply ask why you have so many denominations and traditions if that relationship steers you the right direction. It's simply a way of avoiding the dilemma. God is not your authority because God is not telling you what to do. A book is. The authority people believe is resident in God is mediated through a text, and that text must be interpreted; God, over against Elijah's assertions, is not readily available to answer questions. That leaves a community, or in most cases, an individual to ascertain which portions of the Bible function as moral authority. All this to say, if an individual is making the assessment about particular texts, then the locus of moral authority is the individual's conscience and desires, not God and not the text. The text may give shape to the parameters, but it certainly doesn't dictate particular choices. 

An example. If I read that a man may not lie with another man as with a woman, and I take it as a moral command, then I create an exegetical model that dictates that all such plainly worded commands must be interpreted consistently throughout the text. There is a problem, though. When I turn over to Matthew 5-7, Jesus gives many plainly worded commands (Don't resist an evil person.) that Christians plainly ignore. The calculus seems to be how difficult the command actually is to carry out. If I don't want to have sex with a man, then that command is easy and can easily be read literally. If a man has broken into my home, the second command becomes radically difficult and must therefore be parsed. The parsing happens inside my own complex assemblage of emotion, desire, preference, will, and honesty. My personal preference becomes the moral authority. Over against the one I call Lord, I make a decision that is contrary to what he says, and to do that, I must justify it in such a way that I'm allowed to remain part of the group called Christian. At this point, I point out (hypocritically) the competing verses in the text, especially the ones about violence, to justify my decision. Hypocritical because if challenged on other issues, I'm likely to insist there is no conflict; gays can't have gay sex. Period.

The further complicating factor is the issue of forgiveness. That I am able to make decisions that allegedly go against what I actually believe is largely a function of the practice of so-called repentance. I can believe premarital sex is wrong and still engage in it as long as I make a show of saying I'm sorry to God. This, of course, allows me to do whatever it is I actually desire to do while making a feeble nod to God with faint promises of "trying harder." Once again, my own preference is the moral authority since it is what gives shape to what I actually do. That Christians have watered down the ideals of forgiveness and repentance has in fact made it harder for them to make disciples, and it has contributed a great degree to the dualism inherent in modern evangelicalism.

An example. I said, "Let's say I do everything Jesus tells me to do. I feed the poor, clothe the naked, visit the prisoners, obey the commandmentes, sell my goods and donate to homeless shelters, live generously, forgive easily, love sacrficially, all because I'm crazy about this Jesus guy.  I then tell you I don't believe in God. Am I a Christian?" At this point it's clear that it's a trap. Whatever they've said previously about how important actions are, it's clear now that they will disqualify all my actions based on one "false" belief. This is the heart of the problem. Belief, functionally, is the determining factor in moral authority. As long as I believe it's the authority, it doesn't matter what I do; I believe the right things. (The soteriological dilemma should be obvious here, too.) My belief insulates me from the demands of ethics and allows me to remain part of the group even as I behave in ways that are contrary to what the group says is vital to group identity. 

Back to Driscoll. Reverend Sex Freak begins with a desire: I would like to insert my penis into my wife's x. I now need moral authority to do so. I parse the Bible. Oh, how convenient--here's a verse about a woman sitting in front of low hanging fruit (ironically, the description is an apt one of Real Marriage). Clearly God wants my wife to pleasure my fruit. Where the Bible is clearly silent, as if it wasn't on that issue, Driscoll finds authority in different places. That's all fine, except that this is hermeneutics in reverse. I start with my desires and then find their justification--metaphorical, implied, or explicit--in the text. This makes the text functionally worthless, and it's not just worthless for people who misuse it as egregiously as Driscoll. Without a consistent rubric to direct the exegetical process, how do you avoid exegesis based on personal preference? No one will believe you if you don't do the hard stuff, and they shouldn't. Even if you do though, how can I know that your rubric isn't arbitrary?

Reverend Sex Freak, or Why Mark Driscoll is a Sign of the Eschaton

The beginning of the end of my tenure as pastor probably began the day I invited two of my staff members to play the "whom would I have sex with" game at the end of a staff meeting. We took out the church roster and went through it name by name. It was hands-down the stupidest thing I ever did intentionally as a pastor. Some (all) bells cannot be unrung. You see, I was playing with two women, and we came to the point where we had to answer the question about each other. Yeah. Stupid, right? 

I offer that for two reasons. One, nearly everyone I know likes sex in some form, especially if porn and strip clubs are a form. Second, I'm about to criticize Mark Driscoll for being a complete freak. I made fun of him a while back for writing this:

Masturbation can be a form of homosexuality because it is a sexual act that does not involve a woman. If a man were to masturbate while engaged in other forms of sexual intimacy with his wife then he would not be doing so in a homosexual way. However, any man who does so without his wife in the room is bordering on homosexuality activity, particularly if he's watching himself in a mirror and being turned on by his own male body.

Not only is this one of the most idiotic things a pastor has ever said, it's potentially destructive in terms of young men internalizing this horseshit and the accompanying guilt. (For more on Driscoll as non sex expert, read the amazingly insightful take by Rachel Held Evans. For an equally good assessment on Driscoll as the real reason people are buying an otherwise ordinary book, read Susan Wise Bauer.) However, what struck me as the most obvious problem with the quote is the way Driscoll approaches sex. It occurs to me that if I'd been writing about whether or not masturbation is a gay sex act (clearly it's not), I would never have put that last qualifier in. Who the hell gets turned on by his own body? Who the hell masturbates in front of a mirror in order to get turned on by his own body? These are the ideas deep inside the murky, freaky mind of Reverend Driscoll, aka Reverend Sex Freak. No idea if the twitter account is available, but if you get it before I do, give me a brief shout out.

I made the mistake of thinking that joking about sex with staff members would make me "more real" or would at least give me the opportunity to engage in some fantasies about one of them. Driscoll makes a similar mistake every day, it seems, but he's not learning from them. His arrogance is so huge right now that he conflates Biblical authority and his words in the intro to the book, encouraging readers not to ignore his "godly wisdom" in the form of an otherwise uninteresting piece of misogynistic nonsense. Bauer nails it in her assessment:

What Real Marriage has going for it, in the end, is the only thing it doesn't share with scores of other marriage books: Mark Driscoll. Driscoll has preached the book's content, he tells us, in "England, Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, Australia, India, and Turkey" and has talked personally to "hundreds of thousands of couples." The author's bio reminds us that he is "one of the world's most downloaded and quoted pastors." He pastors the "2nd most-innovative church in America." The hype in the press release isn't, ultimately, about Real Marriage; it's about Mark Driscoll.

The scandalous chapter 10, the one in which "real parishioners" are allowed to ask, "Hey, Pastor Mark, can we _______?" is where things get weird. First, let me say that if you're a grown up and are in a relationship with a consenting adult and you need to ask your pastor if you can bugger your wife, you might have bigger issues than sex will fix. Second, and Held Evans is so right about this, pastors are not sex experts. Third, trying to justify certain sex acts exegetically from a Hebrew text is so fucking weird and narcissistic that I can't wrap my head around why someone needs the Song of Songs to provide him the justification for liking a blow job. Know why people like 'em, Mark? 'Cause they feel good when done right. Absent the ability to find "thou shalt not suck pole" in Leviticus, a grown up should feel content being sucker or suckee if both are consenting. Pretty sure your concept of god doesn't really care who gets a hummer as long as no one gets hurt.

What's even more bizarre about this book is not our fascination with sex, and yes, people in church like sex too, even those who say they don't; the most "shaking my head not believing this shit" issue with the book is that Driscoll thinks he's qualified to write it. "Hey, I'm Mark Driscoll. I fucked my wife. Wanna read about it? What's that? Doggie style? Hell yeah, bro. Nailed it!" He's a frat boy in charge of one of the largest churches in the world, and he's so drunk on his own celebrity that he regularly excoriates other Christians for being too effeminate or too weak or too female. He has become the authority behind the exegesis in Mars Hill church and in the thousands of Mars Hill clones springing up everywhere that are pastored by equally grating erstwhile frat boys who can't believe God will only let them fuck one woman for the rest of their lives. Well, if that's the case, she might as well be my flexible gumby whore. I'll need some biblical justification for the anal, but hey, I am a man. This would be high satire if people weren't taking this freak seriously.

The problem with Driscoll is that his exegesis is based on Driscoll. It's the ultimate reading the Bible through the lens of my desires and preferences, and he's just smart enough not to see it but to sell others on it not being the case. Driscoll has become a sucking black hole of narcissism and in an irony of comedic proportion the men around him have been brow-beaten into submission by the man they're all afraid will call them fags or women. This is Christianity post-reasonableness with a big dose of machismo, celebrity worship, pop sex psychology, and misogyny. This is what happens when all those pro-male verses are read literally and then added to the aggressive nature of Western male misogynistic sex fantasies. I used to think megachurches were destroying the church; now I'm pretty sure it's the egos behind the megachurches that are doing the most damage, and in all Christendom the spirit of discernment is getting the shit kicked out of it MMA style.

The Magician King, or How to be a Hero (Except in Narnia)

In the second book in the Magicians series (?), Lev Grossman takes us on two versions of a hero's journey, the mythological genre that includes Gilgamesh, Jesus, Prometheus, and Osiris. Joseph Campbell called it the monomyth, and it's one of the most frequent themes in mythological literature. The monomyth is divided into stages. Campbell had 17. This interesting one is shortened to 12 to work in a 3-act play format. As with his previous novel, The Magicians, Grossman is not content to work within the rules of the genre. His intent always seems to be to subvert the genre, as he did so effectively in his first novel, a masterful takedown of Narnia and Middle Earth.

In the first novel, Grossman highlights the impossibility of fucked up people not fucking up an "ideal world." In The Magician King he deconstructs the hero's journey, with C.S. Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a backdrop. If you aren't familiar with the book, it's the third in Lewis's odious Chronicles of Narnia, a collection of theocratic, racist, sexist fantasy allegories for children. There's a good idea. That might be a bit strong, but as I revisit them more than 25 years after my first read of them, and 15 years since I read them in an undergrad lit class, I'm struck by how simplistic, formulaic, and offensive they really are. When I lived in the evangelical world, the offensive parts were merely the assumptions we lived with, and so not offensive to our sensibilities. 

Voyage was the most adult of the Narnia stories. All one had to do was reflect for a few minutes on The Island Where Dreams Come True to know how horrific, pornographic, hedonistic, and torturous such a place could be. It was truly Lewis channeling his own fascination with BDSM into a book for kids. Of course, he relied on them being afraid of the monster under the bed or the Nazis, not the sadistic monster inside us. The grandest fiction of Voyage was the method by which the Pevensie children and King Caspian came upon the necessary swords. Whichever island they landed on, well, there just happened to be a sword there. The plot hole is filled with a neat etiological tactic: the navigators "miraculously" know which island the seven lords must have visited. Grossman has great fun with this device in The Magician King. Quests are seen as simply questing and expecting to come upon what's necessary to complete the quest.

The primary character development in Voyage is worked on Eustace Clarence Scrubb, a boy so thoroughly annoying that his character flaws can only be explained by his attachment to science and materialism. (Insert sincere theistic tsks tsks here.) If you haven't read the book or seen the movie, here's the spoiler (it came out in 1952, so this hardly qualifies as a spoiler): Eustace is turned into a dragon and then converted and transformed by Aslan to be one of the heros of the book. Oddly enough, the transformation in King is worked on Julia.

Julia is a minor character in the first novel. She fails the exam to get into Brakebills, the magician school, and so becomes a hedge witch. We never know the full extent of her story until this novel, and Grossman is to be praised for the Julia narrative of the second novel. It's brutal, unflinching, and utterly compelling. This is the antihero's journey told in the story. Much of the novel feels fragmented and underdeveloped; it literally could have gone another hundred pages if he'd developed Quentin's or Eliot's storyline more effectively. That's a minor complaint, though. The story is worth the price when we get to Julia and her friends summoning the old gods. There is a spoiler here that I'll avoid. Suffice it to say that Julia endures much, and much darkness and violence, to earn her withcraft bona fides, and Grossman never flinches. The Julia narrative helps keep the novel sufficiently dark, as most of Quentin's story (he's the real hero of both novels) is too light and thin. 

The denouement is where Grossman really deconstructs the hero's journey. In Narnia, the kids needed seven swords. In Fillory, the magical world of Quentin and Eliot, the characters need seven keys. (There's a metaphor hiding there too, but I'll let you read the book.) When their task is complete, the remaining characters receive their reward. The hero's journey in mythology is always about the transformation of an individual to a different kind of person. This is accomplished through facing fears and limitations, overcoming obstacles, and entering (and exiting) the land of the dead. At the end of the journey, there is transformation and reward. Grossman prefers to talk about transformation and cost, though. It's a nice move. The Jesus story, for example, is brutal for a chapter, but the reward is massive. So for the Buddha. Only Prometheus bears the cost for his heroic success: he has his liver eaten by an eagle every day. Quentin becomes Prometheus. Without giving too much away, he takes from the old gods and gives to humanity. His "reward" isn't Promethean, but it's not what he'd hoped. Julia is tranformed too, but she loses her humanity in the process.

Grossman does an excellent job of constantly reminding readers that mythology is, well, mythology. Introduce a human to the narrative, and you get the problems of humanity: weakness, selfishness, greed, etc. Julia behaves like most of us would behave if we desperately wanted something. We'd exchange money, sex, and lies for the promise of something better. We'd literally sell our souls to gain power. We'd compromise our deepest beliefs, and ultimately, become enslaved to a god or goddess and think of it as blessing. Ugh. He also does a great job of lampooning the idea of an ideal world. What do kings and queens do when the earth is at peace? Most of the task of ruling has to do with judging between parties, keeping the peace domestically, fighting off foreign enemies, and producing civil ordinances to make life harmonious. What would we do when all is already done for us? Die of boredom, I suspect. The novel leaves off with a hint of what's to come, and although I first hoped Grossman wouldn't write a sequel to the first, I now look forward to a third, because that would hopefully mean a takedown of the third novel in Tolkien's series: The Return of the King. Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you that Quentin is left...

How to have Sex with Yourself, or Why Mark Driscoll is a Closeted Perv

Second subtitle would have been "Why not to Trust Pastors Who Speculate on what the Bible Means about Things it doesn't Mention." Driscoll got some (un)wanted press recently for his masturbation chapter in the laugh out loud funny Porn-Again Christian. The money shot...er...quote is:

First, masturbation can be a form of homosexuality because it is a sexual act that does not involve a woman. If a man were to masturbate while engaged in other forms of sexual intimacy with his wife then he would not be doing so in a homosexual way. However, any man who does so without his wife in the room is bordering on homosexuality activity, particularly if he's watching himself in a mirror and being turned on by his own male body.

This is only the first disturbing quote among many in this chapter. Here's the thing about qualifiers and examples; they're usually based on experience or common lexicon. If I'm illustrating something in class, I'm likely to draw on Eminem, Jay-Z, Family Guy, South Park, or a recent film. It's shared language and experience. Absent those options, I have to draw on common human experience, like initiating a new relationship before the old one is over, especially in the form of inappropriate texting, conversations at work, or flirtation that goes too far. Most students can identify with something in those examples. Driscoll offers a qualifier that is beyond bizarre, and quite frankly, probably drawn from his own bizarre experience. "...particularly if he's watching himself in a mirror..." Um, you know, in all honesty, most of us have tossed one off or rubbed one out from time to time, but watching in the mirror, well, that's just a special case. It seems Driscoll has reached into his own box of darkness here and found himself guilty of that common human error: everyone beats off like I do. Okay, maybe it's everyone thinks or does like I do, but still, it's hard not to see Driscoll (aka Maximus) in a pleated Roman skirty thing tossing one off in front of a cheval mirror. Helmet? Maybe. Sword? For sure. Ha! That's a Bible double entendre.

As for the assertion that masturbation borders on homosexual behavior, it's just idiocy. Homosexual behavior requires another person of the same sex to be present and participating (even voyeuristically) in the act. All Driscoll offers here is another reason (amongst the vast catalog) for young Christians to feel guilty about masturbating. Even after admitting that the Bible doesn't mention it, he goes on to offer "Practical and Theological Reasons not to Masturbate." Oh, little beater-offer, beware the pastor who uses theological as a euphemism for "it's not in the Bible but here's why God thinks it's important."

Another dead giveaway that Driscoll is both full of shit and a perv? His shitty interpretation of Song of Songs. Driscoll insists that Song of Songs 2:3 permits oral sex. Now, before we proceed, you should know that the Mosaic law expressly prohibits sodomy, and sodomy, dear beater-offers, can be oral or anal. Against all evidence to the contrary and all solid exegetical practices, Driscoll, because he likes blow jobs (and who doesn't?), is going to insist that this verse permits oral sex:

As an apple tree among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved among the young men. With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

Most Biblical scholars, especially of the Hebrew expert variety, will tell you that euphemisms, idioms, and figures of speech are critically important for understanding a text. The use of a word idiomatically in more than one location is critical to understanding it as an idiom elsewhere. Fruit is nowhere else in the Tanakh used to mean testicles, penis, dick, cock, trombone, skin flute, nuts, jewels, pecker, etc. That Driscoll believes fruit here means dick or balls only means he's relentlessly American and a huge fan of bjs (and who isn't?). If you want to plumb the depths of his weirdness, check out his justification for cunnilingus, and yes, he uses the word in the soon to be banned in 84 countries chapter.

The most egregious example of his hubris, though, is the list of questions and answers in their entirety. Just read through and see how freely he interprets the text while ignoring or fucking the text in the ass (that's bad, by the way). I've seldom seen sexual preferences and peccadillos so clearly writ in exegesis. Enjoy, kids, but take a tissue along for the ride...

Sex and Cancer, or How to Pick a Christian Spokesperson

California Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 499, a law that will go into effect on January 1, 2012, that gives girls as young as 12 access to the HPV vaccine (Gardasil) without parental consent. The bill also provides for them to receive the hepatitis B vaccine and any other future vaccines for STIs. There is plenty of room here for discussion about parental rights and government authority. Parents groups are rightly worried about a government arrogant and paternalistic enough to abrogate parental rights under the guise of protecting young women. However, the question is about whether or not public health outweighs parental rights in this situation. It's a topic that ought to be open to vigorous debate, and both sides have good points.

Enter Christian author and rising star of the "Bronze Age Sexual Ethics for Modern Women" speaking circuit Teresa Tomeo. Tomeo, a Catholic and former "secular media" journalist (yes, secular media...sigh), has risen to prominence recently because of her new book: Extreme Makeover: Women Transformed by Christ, Not Conformed to the Culture.

The subtitle should tell you most of what you need to know, but this isn't about her book. It's about the press release her managment company sent out this week. Hilariously named The Maximus Group—presumably because the owner has a hard-on for Gladiator or John Eldredge or both—this is the company that handled advertising for the sappy, crappy film Courageous. And I apologize for calling schlocky propaganda a film. Ominously titled New California Law Frightens Bestselling Author Teresa Tomeo, the press release included some choice quotes from our Catholic ethicist.

Bestselling author Teresa Tomeo finds it disquieting, to say the least. "It is frightening that some in our society continue to push parents out of the picture when it comes to major decisions involving their sons' and daughters' health and welfare," said Tomeo, author of the new book EXTREME MAKEOVER: WOMEN TRANSFORMED BY CHRIST NOT CONFORMED TO THE CULTURE.

First, please note the Gospel of Marketing 1:1. Never miss an opportunity to sell your shit. We are told that Ms. Tomeo is feeling disquieted because of the nebulous "some," but we're also told she has a new book. Awesome! So, is this a public service announcement or an ad? That's just quibbling, though. This gets really funny.

"Children can't sign up for athletics — or be given as much as an aspirin in school — without Mom's or Dad's approval; but now, 12-year-olds in California can get the HPV vaccine without parental consent?!

First, that semicolon is all wrong and the dashes don't belong. Did Gladiator guy hire an English major to edit this shit? Might give it some consideration, or, er...pray over it? And what's with the double punctuation?! Really? Anyway. I suspect part of the reason children can't sign up for athletics or get an aspirin at school has something to do with liability issues for the schools. Also, this has nothing to do with health providers giving vaccines, but let's not let that stop the histrionics. Ready?

"We don't pass out filtered cigarettes or light beer to our youth," Tomeo added. "Why would we give them more reason to engage in unsafe behavior?"

Um, do we pass out full-calorie beer? Was she going for the "I'm a hip, drinking Catholic" with the beer reference? And what of unfiltered cigarettes? Those bizarre semantics aside, this is just faulty thinking. Cigarettes cause cancer; Gardasil prevents it. The analogy is simply false and inflammatory, oh, and stupid. Tomeo is yet another voice warning girls that sex is unsafe, just like cigarettes and beer. It remains true that Christian spokespersons who are so based on celebrity rather than intelligence or expertise seemingly have nothing new or interesting to contribute to any public debate.

Scary Jesus Warriors, or When is a Fact not a Fact

The normally solid Religion News Service, for which I have occasionally freelanced in recent years, has a piece on Dominionism that was picked up by Huff Post, and that, as they say in prognostication and prophecy, is a bad sign. Titled 5 Facts About Dominionism, the piece is written by Daniel Burke, who, according to what I can tell, writes about religion more frequently than most. With a resumé like his, it's a wonder a story goes this far wrong, but I suspect that has to do with the obscurity of the topic, not the talent of the writer. In all fairness, I'm a huge Huff Post fan, but they do tend to skew slightly (completely) left in the area of politics, and in a season where religion can mean anything from burning a living woman on a funeral pyre to feeding homeless people (thanks, Leighton, for pointing out the absurdity of the word as a category marker), mixing the two can often serve the best interests of the obscurantists and conspiracy theorists.

The piece runs into trouble almost immediately by telling readers they'll be offered five "facts" to help them decide for themselves. Um, with all the gentleness I can muster, I should point out that the public is occasionally disqualified from "deciding for themselves" if what they want is accuracy. One cannot decide for herself about evolution, medicine, differential equations, or obscure theological concepts after reading five ostensible facts about those fields in a short news piece. The idea is silly at best and pandering at worst.

As to the facts, even the first is wrong, sort of. Burke writes: "'Dominionism' generally describes the belief that Christians are biblically mandated to control all earthly institutions until the second coming of Jesus." Well, not exactly. I suppose there are five or six Christians, including the lunatic Gary North and his now deceased father-in-law R.J. Rushdoony, who would define it thus, but to borrow an idea from Jon Stewart, if all their followers gathered in one place at one time, the fire marshall would say, "Yeah, that's fine." I read Rushdoony, North, Schlossberg, Colson, and others in the 80s and 90s. I even briefly embraced the idea that the Church needed to "influence" certain areas of culture. It never occurred to me that we were to "control" all earthly institutions, and how long is that list? Sanitation? Bakeries? Girl Scout Troops? Breweries? Whore houses? (Nope, that one would definitely be gone in Rushdoony-land.) There are even some in the Dominionist camp called preterists who don't believe there will not be a Second Coming. Oversimplifying often leads to simply being wrong.

Burke then cites "experts" who categorize Dominionists into two main camps: Reconstructionists and New Apostolic Reformation. The first group is clearly Dominionists. It includes Rushdoony and North. Schlossberg, especially in his best known work, Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, is closer to Edmund Burke in temperament than he is to Rushdoony, which is to say he's an old school conservative, not a Reconstructionist. This is not to say his later works in the Turning Point series weren't slightly deranged. They clearly were, and adding Marvin Olasky to the mix didn't help his credibility. For a while, he was to be the new Francis Schaeffer, like we need another one. More on the second group below.

Back to the experts. Who are the experts who categorize these groups? Journalists? Professors? If he interviewed Noll or Marsden, I might trust the response, but I have no idea who these alleged experts are. How does one get to be an expert on Dominionism, and if they are experts, why include C. Peter Wagner and the NAR in the same breath as Rushdoony? The two are so markedly different that their only similarities are Jesus, the Bible, and prayer, a list that makes all Christians dominionists, it seems. Again, in fairness, Wagner does have a book with a super scary title, Dominion!: How Kingdom Action Can Change the World, but to understand Wagner's dominion requires much more subtlety than lumping him in with people who have genuinely scary ideas.

For a brief period in 1999, I toyed with the idea of attending Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena so that I could study with Wagner and others on the Fuller faculty. I wanted a graduate degree in theology, so it seemed best to avoid ORU and go to a legitimate school where the Charismatic movement was taken seriously and studied in a scholarly manner. Yes, I was a little bit naive in those days, clearly. I liked much of what Wagner was doing because he practiced dominionism the way all amillenialists practiced dominionism: Jesus rules the world today, not in some future millenial kingdom, by means of His Body, the Church, and prayer is the principal means by which change happens, followed by good works, and a discernible lack of douchiness. I know, scary shit, right? Unbelievers, take heart, those scary Jesus warriors are just praying for you, and we all have evidence of how well that doesn't work, eh?

Burke lists a couple more in the movements, most notably Mike Bickle at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City. Yes, IHOP, like the pancake joint, and whereas the original IHOP can at least bring about change in terms of your waistline, the NAR's IHOP promises to do very little but irritate theologians churchwide as they pray against "demonic principalities" in the world. They even have a "war room" where these powers and principalities are tracked, but relax, their "battle is not against flesh and blood..." 

One thing Burke and his experts get right is that no one who matters in evangelical Chrisitainity is a Dominionist. No one. There are similarities between Dominionism and evangelicalism, but they are the "family resemblance" variety, not the "we believe the same things" variety. The difficulty will be to keep journalists and talking heads from exercising shallow variations of political and theological pareidolia, that psychological reflex to find patterns where none exist or which simply resemble a known quantity. That has already happened when the increasingly insane and apparently electable Rick Perry makes statements that sound "dominiony." Certain segments of press and public already hear him as a right wing jesus loon, so it's easy to hear him as a Dominionist. That he invited NAR representatives to his prayer meeting/ego masturbation event in Texas troubles me not at all in terms of its import for American politics (except the whole separation issue). Prayer has never changed anything, not that anyone can prove, anyway, so it's unlikely a bunch of guys praying demons away is going to affect anything other than the public's perception of Perry as an increasingly bizarre candidate.

Breaking Up with God: A Love Story, and an Interview

As promised, Jay Kelly finished editing the interview I did with Sarah Sentilles, the remarkably brilliant author of the best book I've read this year, Breaking Up with God: A Love Story. The interview is about 45 minutes, and as Jay told the hhdw, "Sarah must be smart because Horton is only doing 20 percent of the talking." She is smart, and funny, and charming, and smart. Thanks to Jay and Sarah, and to Julie Burton, Sarah's publicist at HarperOne.

 

'Breaking Up with God'_ An Interview with Sara Sentilles