Facebook is a world of useless and categorizable information. It's especially valuable to casual ethnographers (college professors and gadflies) inasmuch as people (students) post the most amazing information about themselves, and no, I'm not talking about those regrettable photos from Spring Break. I mean instead, the profile information: favorite quote, favorite movie, political party, religious preference, etc. One of my favorite students this semester, a kind of female Oscar the Grouch, has her political preference as Republican party and her religious preference as Methodist. This may be a joke only a theology nerd gets, but the idea that the movement spawned by John Wesley would find a place in the hearts of fans of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh (and for the truly chic racist, Haley Barbour) is cataclysmically ironic. It would be funny, if it wasn't. I expect college students to have a convoluted identity; I expect better from denominational leaders.
Lunch with The Reverend last week (always a moment of grace in my life) introduced me to Radical, the book by David Platt—a kind of Southern Baptist Shane Claiborne. Seems the SBC isn't keen on Claiborne; he's too liberal—all that talk about helping the poor and sharing resources (redistributing wealth) sounds politically liberal. They're backing this book though. Why? Well, because Platt suggests that we've gone too far in pursuing the American dream, but not nearly far enough in pursuing the transformative, radical message of Jesus to sacrifice for the sake of the kingdom. Oh, shit. It is Claiborne. Um, no.
When he's not flying to conferences around the world, Claiborne lives in community. This is not about that kind of communist bullshit; this is radical Christianity for America, goddamnit. Platt recommends that we read our Bibles. He further radically suggests that we donate a small percentage of our time to "causes." The cause of single guys getting laid is probably not what he has in mind, but hey, any book that can be comfortably tucked under the arm of a Southern Baptist minister who makes 350k without causing an ironic twinge in the minister or his parishioners or the denomination in toto must be stupendously spiritual. How else do we explain rejecting Claiborne in favor of a book that calls American Christians to sacrifice so painfully that they must read the entire Bible in a year, including the notoriously shitty books of Leviticus, Deuteronomy, I and II Chronicles and Ezra? That alone should earn the serious reader a plenary indulgence for himself and three successive generations. I mean, shit, we have entire churches founded upon parishioners who have never actually read the entire Bible, but feel perfectly comfortable asserting what it says. Imagine the reward due the faithful man or woman who actually reads the damn thing! Golden streets, my ass. Break out the fuckin' platinum parkways, motherfucker!
Identity is a funny thing. I may be a little conservative (ha!), but it seems that what a person confesses ought to dictate how he behaves. Naive? Maybe. I suppose it's easy to redefine "radical" so that even that Florida pastor who makes 350k (and I'm not making him up) can carry the book around and feel radical for doing his damn job—reading the Bible and giving time to causes (other than getting laid). What I'd be more interested in seeing are people who, like my friend The Reverend, count their worth not in pages read or conferences attended or articles published or people in pews or baptisms (much could be said about this one, especially when rebaptisms are considered), but in people fed, families housed, seniors visited, and strangers befriended. That would be fucking radical. Measuring ministry in barely quantifiable ways and in ways that don't benefit the coffers of the denomination. The mind folds in on itself imagining the next SBC annual meeting wherein ministers compete to talk about how much they gave away to AIDS, malaria, fresh water, sex trafficking, and poverty abatement, rather than how many new members they baptized. "How many did you get wet?" seems far less important in terms of identity formation than "how much did you actually sacrifice to feed, clothe, and house the unnoticeable?"
If you missed the Eminem reference in the title of this post, you suck.
Aw man, I suck :-(
Posted by: Trevor Palen | March 24, 2011 at 01:59 AM
Me too, alas.
Posted by: Leighton the Hoover | March 24, 2011 at 11:07 AM