the parish

Flannery O'Connor in the Real World, or Somebody Save Me (Apologies to Cinderella, the Hair Band)

A friend recently started reading about Flannery O'Connor, and she asked me for a recommendation. She is a Christian, at least in terms of belief, and so, being a bit perverse, I recommended Wise Blood. Honestly, with O'Connor, it's a toss-up in terms of which of her two novels to recommend to the uninitiated: Wise Blood or The Violent Bear it Away.

O'Connor was a savant in the area of the grotesque (the literary form, not just gross), so Christians who read her without proper orientation or explanation are often lost as to how to categorize her writing. O'Connor was unapologetically Catholic, but being from early 20th century Georgia meant she encountered the worst of Southern Christianity in its postbellum varieties.

For students, I have assigned O'Connor's brilliant and timeless short story A Good Man is Hard to Find since I started teaching English, even in high school. She's a darkly witty, insightful writer whose imminent death from lupus only added to the biting nature of her wisdom. In an American evangelical Christianity eaten up with therapeutic notions of God's preference for their own happiness, O'Connor is a much-needed tonic that adds a requisite bitterness and somber tone to an otherwise Pollyanna evangelical soteriology: God likes me and wants me to be happy, here and in Heaven.

If you haven't read Wise Blood, just know that it's one of the most bizarrely dark comic novels of all time, and it's not comedy in the Classical sense of the term. The comedy is hard to spot if you're too close to the narrative of salvation, and I'm sure what I'm about to write would be widely contested by Catholic and Protestant fans of O'Connor, but the whole narrative is based on an assumption I find to be fairly common for practitioners of theistic faiths.

O'Connor's protagonist, and I use the term loosely, Hazel Motes, ultimately tries in vain to redeem himself. The plot is an extension of the idea that those of us who have given up on theism will find alternate roads to redemption since the quest for redemption is hard-wired into the human condition. It's a more sophisticated version of the "god-shaped hole" trope, but it's not really sophisticated. The position asserts a preference that is related to enculturation and indoctrination, not a state that actually exists outside of a particular tribe.

Having grown up in church, I was taught that we all yearn for salvation, but that particular yearning is often hard to identify outside of a community that makes clear the point of our dissatisfaction. In other words, the human tendency to be dissatisfied or bored with the familiar is defined as a desire for salvation, even if the person lacks the proper vocabulary to explain her angst. Post-salvation, angst is explained as an inability to understand who I am "in Christ," or as a struggle with the spirit/flesh dichotomy. Honestly, there are a dozen different explanations, but all fail to take into account the simplest explanation: we are easily dissatisfied, with no metaphysical reason. The human condition is imperfect, so angst and ennui are part of it, as are joy and hate and love and lust.

This assumption that we all crave redemption is actually inculcated from the very earliest age in church circles. This is a particularly Christian idea since other theistic faiths don't posit some state of fallenness from which God must save us. More than a few sects of Christianity, including the Orthodox, depart from this Catholic/Protestant doctrine, too, by the way. Basically, we who grew up in church were taught that we desire salvation, and then we're taught that outside of church, any unfulfilled longing we have will be a result of not embracing salvation that is only available through Jesus.

Imagine teaching young people that they are fine just like they are, but that they need to work on certain character deficincies like selfishness, vanity, gluttony, cruelty, etc. They don't have a metaphysical problem that can only be solved by the most dubious of actions (God dies to propitiate God); rather, they have character issues that are solved by working hard on being better people. Those young people would not have a "god-shaped hole." They would have an understanding that virtue must be practiced, and that the angst or ennui or dissatisfaction they feel is part of being human, and those are best combatted with friendship, purpose, discipline, and a realistic sensibility of what it is to be human.

The need for salvation is taught; it's not a default condition that all humans recognize. The inability of faith communities to recognize how language shapes our experience of reality is frustrating, and the tendency to accept communicated traditions without deconstructing those traditions has led to no small amount of human suffering. O'Connor's novel worked for Christian audiences because the pathos generated by Hazel Motes as he suffered for his own redemption was a metaphorical reinforcement of a preferred dogma. It worked for outsiders because the grotesque managed to reveal the absurdity of believing dogmas that had no shred of proof in the world, especially in a world so reflexively crude, violent, cruel, and stupid. O'Connor got that part very right; she lived in the South, after all. Believe in salvation if you must, but let's not pretend it's yet made the world a better place.

Jesus in the New World, or Preference as Doctrine

We started talking about the Church of Jesus Christ of Later-Day Saints (the Mormons) in class last week. In the last unit of World Religions, after I've covered the Big Five (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism), I try to focus on new and emerging movements. Typically, I cover Wicca, LDS, Scientology (because Xenu, obviously), Afro-Caribbean religions, and Santa Muerte. Students are typically more interested in these faiths than the other five, at least partly because they are sensationalized in pop culture, but also because they have nearly zero relationships with people who actually practice any of them.

Mormons have helped move their faith from the fringe to the mainstream in the past decade—and as I'm typing, Brandon Flowers is overhead on Pandora at the bar—and because the faith is similar to traditional Christianity, certain sects of Christians respond quite negatively to points of Mormon doctrine if not to Mormons as people, and because the faith is growing rapidly, the fundangelical Christian response has been predictably bad.

Christian, the well-meaning youth group graduate whom I’ve quoted here before, isn’t sure which Christian narrative he believes—Baptist, neo-Reformed, Pentecostal, etc.—but, helpfully, they are all fundamentalist in character. I was talking about Mormon doctrines after tracing the development of the religion, beginning with Joseph Smith. After a brief overview of what the Book of Mormon teaches, I mentioned Jesus’ appearance to the Nephites in North America. It was more than Christian could endure.

“That’s ridiculous,” he offered.

“What is ridiculous?” I asked.

“It doesn’t even make sense.”

“How does it not?” I asked.

“That Jesus would show up in America and talk to people after the Resurrection. It makes no sense.”

He was absolutely convinced his point was obvious. This is one of those places where "makes sense" is learned phraseology and not an actual assessment of the words just uttered. Why would the Savior of the world come to North America to talk to a lost group of Israelites? It boggled the imagination. He has been taught that his story is correct and all other versions of absurd, so in comparison, his story seems plausible, even with talking snakes and donkeys, bears that maul children on God's command, the murder by flood of thousands of infants, people raised from the dead, and a god that becomes human so as to save humans. So, I asked him a couple questions.

“What you seem to be saying is that the traditional Christian story of God becoming a human and kicking it around Idumea and Judea in the first century C.E. and being crucified for the sins of the world and then resurrected is perfectly reasonable, but the resurrected Jesus appearing to people in another place is absolutely absurd. Is that your position?”

He already looked trapped, but he persisted. “They have no evidence of it, do they?” The question was not sincere or rhetorical; it was triumphant. Sigh. I’m not even going to mention again how Christian has been cheated in terms of Christian education, but please imagine a good youth group kid as a freshman in college arriving at that point in a conversation with me and ask yourself how that happened.

Pentecostals, Baptists, and other evangelizing denominations have developed a well-earned reputation for mustering arguments to deconstruct other faiths so that the superiority of Christianity can be demonstrated. (I realize Christians by definition should be proselytizers, but not all sects are as aggressive as the aforementioned.) The approach has suffered from three common errors, one an obvious blind spot, one a matter of misunderstanding praxis versus doctrine, and one a preference for one's own narrative.

The obvious blind spot is the idea that faiths don't have to answer to Christianity to demonstrate the truth of their own claims. Christianity has failed to demonstrate its own truth claims, so to insist that faiths that depart from the Christian narrative and metaphysics are somehow falling short of the truth is to give epistemological superiority to Christianity without even bothering to do the hard work of demonstrating its own claims. It's a lovely presumptive position, but it relies on cultural and political superiority, two factors that are fading in the post-Christendom era.

The second is the way Christians discuss doctrines of other faiths as if knowing doctrine is the same thing as practicing faith. This is largely due to the fact that fundangelical Christianity gives priority to belief over praxis in order to do away with the necessity of actually living out a faith. But people in faith traditions ignore particular stories, doctrines, commands, etc., all the time in order to practice a faith that integrates into their lives. The list of things Muslim, Christian, Mormon, and Jewish students don't know that they are supposed to know would fill volumes. In another religion class, a Turkish student was making note of the Arabic terms I was using to discuss Islam because she, a woman who speaks four languages, did not know the Arabic terms even though the only official Qur'an is in Arabic. They are practicing an enculturated and necessarily truncated version of a faith, not the fullness of the faith itself. No one, literally, can do that.

Finally, and this is best illustrated by the conversation with Christian, people of all faiths prefer their own narrative to other narratives. It's absolutely a matter of preference, not justification of belief or proof. I can find no coherent way to sort one faith from another in terms of their metaphysical claims. Why would I prefer Islam to Christianity or vice versa? Once the difficulty of justifying one faith over against another faith is realized, the task is finally and really understood to be pointless. The inability to see preference at work is one of the most poisonous things in religion because it asserts the superiority of one tribe's narrative over another's, but it does so without contending with its own absurdities, weaknesses, gaps, and errors. Offer me a way of demonstrating the truth of one narrative over another on a consistent basis, and I might be able to believe a faith again.

A Half Century Less One Day, or Some (un)Profound Thoughts on Turning 50

I turn 50 tomorrow. I'm not even worried about the number; I am amazed by it. Here's the good news for younger readers: I don't feel old. At all. No, I can't play basketball for seven straight hours like I could at 25, but I'm not exactly sedentary either. No tubes sticking out of my lungs or ass. No cancer. No heart disease. I have resisted the impulse to be one of those members of the aging masses who speaks incessantly about health and wellness and Medicare and the constant accumulation of minor aches and pains that become a chorus on cold or wet days. That is part of the process, and so I'm happy to say I feel fantastic. The Ritalin helps, and I believe everyone should have bubbles every day. They create an aesthetic and an orientation around a day and a mood, such that even the most mundane of days becomes a mini celebration, because today I'm alive and drinking wine.

I have zero understanding of what I'm supposed to know at 50. There are no secret societies passing out esoteric knowledge about the real meaning of life, but I fully expect mailers from AARP within the week. I am about to be part of the largest voting bloc in the country, and as such, I'm supposed to help add to the clamor about geriatric issues, and while I'm aware I'm going to keep aging and die, I just don't care about those things. Maybe because I work with 18- and 19-year olds every day.

Sitting down to reflect on a half century of being alive would take more time than I have available this week. That's because I have packed my week with friends and family and wine and food and everything that I love about my life at every age. I've never been a good intentional reflecter; it's just contrary to my nature. If someone asks me to comment or reflect, I can, but I don't do it as a habit of life. Suffice it to say I've caused more than my share of chaos, suffering, and shittiness in 50 years, but I like to think the last ten years of the first half century have been far better than the second decade, wherein I caused no small amount of consternation and shame and suffering for my family and friends. Things that make good stories aren't always good stories at the time; they are sources of pain and confusion and selfishness.

That sounds kind of profound, and I think that is what I believe 50 was suppposed to represent, a kind of hard-earned profundity, the kind that comes from a punch in the face, not knowing the rules. When I was a young pastor, not quite 30, my congregants would occasionally tell me how wise I was "for my age." Really, though, I wasn't. I just knew what to say. Having read the Bible through more than a dozen times in a five-year period, I was well-versed (ha!) in the vocabulary of the community of reference, and always having been outstanding at persuasion, people believed me because I knew the text and spoke authoritatively. That isn't wisdom; that's a skill in communication.

The same principle can be applied in the wine business, the writing about of which occupies a good bit of my time these days and for the past seven or so years. Know enough of the vocabulary, speak authoritatively enough, and you can convince people with less knowledge that they want what you say they want. They want the process to be demystified, to be made safer, to make them feel less ignorant, and the best way to go about it is by not being a dick about sharing information.

That may be the theme I have decided really matters after a half century. I tell my students that my theology (or atheology, Mr. Rollins) can be reduced to "don't be a dick." I like to believe that religion, if it should do anything at all, should prepare people to be redemptive in this life, and I don't give a single shit about the next life. So much of religion now is preparation for a reality that may or may not exist, and if it does, no one has a clue as to what it will be like. Practice redemption—not being a dick—for this life.

Teachers are teachers because we like a few things: attention, students, learning, a job with nearly zero physical labor, books, and the process of teaching. When we are honest, we say we want our students to change their minds about stuff when they are in our classes. Why wouldn't we? Why else teach? No, I don't want to create little mes, but I don't want racists and fundamentalists to leave my class with that toxic worldview intact either. I want them to be smarter, kinder, more open-minded, more interesting, to have been transformed even a little bit into better humans. I want them to give a shit, lots of shits about things that matter, things like other people, other people's feelings and narratives, justice, equality, race, gender, and a whole huge list of shit that only sounds sappy by its listing.

I am an idealist with a narcissitic streak. I have learned that. I like me. Other people should, too, and I'm confused when they don't. It took me decades not to take that personally, though, so now I spread the blame between my sometimes unfiltered intensity and mouth and their misunderstanding of how I use words, humor, laughter, and silence. The world is an unkind place for idealists, so we find ways to medicate ourselves, through booze or drugs or love or other people's admiration, or worst of all, a sort of poisonous orientation toward criticism and judgment that finds fault with those who don't share our idealism. (So many in the business of professional ministry suffer from this affliction.) It took me decades to temper that as well. Idealists are good at envisioning a world, but we suck at actually building it, so the judgment is equally directed at me, because I want to live in a world where there are no hungry people, but I also want other people to take care of it. I have just enough hypocrisy in me to accuse others of not working for justice while making the mistake that talking about justice is somehow working for justice.

All that to say I have learned in a half century that I'm just me, and some of the insecurities I had at 20 and 30 and 40 are still with me at 49 and 364 days. It's like the zit outbreak when you were 13—you remember the first time you woke in the morning with what looked like a massive wound on your face. Your body betrayed you. After several of those moments over the years, your parents said they would go away one day. But they don't, but knowing that at the time would have been a grievous wound on our developing psyches, so wise parents put off the truth until a zit wasn't such a source of despair. We believe we get better as we get older, and we do in some ways, but in others we are still the awkward kid at the dance or the one picked last or the one made fun of or the one who could've should've and didn't.

Friends help. Family helps (sometimes). We are constantly becoming and we are always the same, and in 50 years I'll be damned if I know who I'm supposed to become, but I kind of know who I am. That is a gift in itself. It is one of the motions of grace of aging. There are curses aplenty, but to know who you are, to be confident in your worth, to know your skills and your limitations—that is grace. To know that love is transient and friendship doesn't have to be—that, too, is grace. To understand that other people tell us who we are when they speak the truth...grace. To be content with all that is right and wrong with me so long as others aren't wounded in the wrongness, grace. I've been out of the faith for eight years, and I still love that concept. Religion is most practical when it's actually practiced without a worry for the metaphysical justifications, so I feel free to use words like sin and grace because they make sense in this life, and they make sense because they do what they are supposed to do: draw us close to others or fracture relationships.

When you turn 50, I thought when I was a youngish minister, you are supposed to say profound stuff all the time. Profundity is almost always accidental, though, so deciding to be profound is a sure path to learning the words and the rules and not actually being profound. Wisdom can be intentional, though, and a punch in the face is still more effective than memorizing the rules and possible consequences.

That's enough. Friends are implementing some secret plan to celebrate my birthday eve, and at this point in my life, nothing gives me more joy. I am alive because I have friends, and daughters, and wine, and a good life. I get to do the two things I always wanted to do, teach and write, and getting to do what you want with your life is grace, and when you can actually do those things well, it's a good, grace-filled life.

Keeping Jesus Quiet Unless We Need Him to Speak, or Eisegesis for the Rest of Us

No one was shocked when Dallas First Baptist pastor and professional theopolitician Robert Jeffress suggested that Jesus would build a fence to keep immigrant children out of the U.S.--at least no one who tracks religion in the U.S. That a Southern Baptist pastor has aligned himself with civil religionistas is not surprising, because the SBC has become the most obvious and frequent example of alleged Christians mixing Christianity with conservative politics. It's so frequent and so egregious that I am forced to believe they have not actually read the New Testament, because the text is bookended by a "savior" executed by empire and an appeal to Christians to be faithful over against empire. That the U.S. is a prime example of current empire seems so obvious that to miss it indicates willful ignorance, intentional deceitfulness, or substandard intelligence.

I have no desire to parse the legal issues related to President Obama enforcing a law that President George W. Bush signed. In fact, the ways in which Americans regularly indulge their own confirmation biases related to politics is exhausting, and while the psychology of it is obvious to outsiders, no amount of words strung together would begin to penetrate the web of preferences and biases that shapes American political affiliations. Americans have long ago surrendered a quest for truth in favor of a quest for being right, and that has been catastrophic for the common good and civil discourse.

I am more concerned here with the ways in which "rules" of interpretation and application are applied. Jeffress is clearly guilty of an ages-old heuristic whereby Jesus can be applied as the solution to nearly any problem, and always in such a way that the speaker benefits from "what Jesus would have done or believed." While Jesus actually speaking about a particular situation, such as divorce, makes it a little more complicated but not impossible to apply the heuristic to concrete situations, Jeffress benefits from the best iteration of this technique: Jesus never spoke about immigrant children on the U.S. border, so he can be made to believe or say anything.

Jeffress is a pastor and a Christian, but his political narrative has not been formed by the Jesus of the Gospels. Outside of liberal Christians and Anabaptists, finding a tribe whose political narrative has been shaped by that Jesus has become analogous to a unicorn sighting. (This is not to say that individual Christians in various traditions are not more conscientious, but the tribe in toto is hard to find.) I'm not sure this criticism is all that damning from an "inside the tribe" perspective, quite frankly, since evangelicals and fundamentalists know and care far more about Jesus the savior than Jesus the political revolutionary, and while they shy away from politicizing Jesus in his own context, they jubilantly and zealously allow him to "comment" on modern politics. Again, the disconnect between Jesus not being presented as a political person in his own context versus the Jesus as apologetic for cherished American political positions is so egregiously dishonest that I'm left to wonder if evangelicals are oblivious, deceptive, or just not smart.

It is also entirely possible that they assume that Jesus was apolitical, but that his principles or values "speak" to current cultural and political issues. The only way that the Jesus of the Gospels can be made apolitical is if the text is intentionally read as if it is somehow separate from the political climate of Romans, Sadducees, Pharisees, and lestai (insurrectionists) of the time, a reading which ignores that Jesus was crucified along with insurrectionists and that the "King of the Jews" above his head on the cross was a charge of insurrection, not an accidental proclamation of his messiahship. This apolitical reading has done much to drain Jesus of his political aims, most of which involved freeing Israel from the Romans, a topic that is covered exhaustively for a populist audience in Reza Aslan's excellent book Zealot, and by eviscerating his political positions, he is left as an effigy that can be reified with whatever current political position requires buttressing by appeals to "God's Word."

This simplistic appropriation of Jesus clearly makes of him an idol, so they might just as well build a bust, bronze it, shove incense in his ears, and chant talking points around this neocon golden calf but for their reservations about idol worship. The inability to recognize idol worship in its obvious instantiations only further solidifies my belief that evangelicals and fundamentalists flatten the metaphors such that they can't recognize real idolatry unless it involves a statue and temple prostitutes. The rigid, contextual literalism allows them to enforce the letter of the law and ignore the spirit. How these modern exegetes don't understand straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel is also befuddling at a profound level. Again, do they actually read this text they say shapes their faith? Maybe for a few Sundays the fundangelicals should leave Paul on the shelf and pick up the Hebrew prophets so that "hearing they will hear."

Jeffress applied that heuristic to immigration, but it's used regularly by conservatives (liberals, too, quite frankly) on a number of issues about which the Bible and Jesus are clearly silent. This is made worse by the staunch refusal of fundangelicals to actually allow Jesus to speak clearly where he clearly speaks clearly: accumulation of wealth, divorce, loving enemies (not killing them with drones, for example)...just read the Sermon on the Mount, and then read how fundangelicals explain away the rather clear admonitions under the rubric of "these rules are meant to show us we must rely on God's grace to be saved." Oddly enough, Jesus delivers this list without ever using those words, but, eisegesis is the dominant rubric in fundangelical churches, especially when applying the Jesus/American politics heuristic. I'm happy to let Leighton address this in closing:

"I argue that any communication, whether text, image, or utterance, is interpreted in the context of at least one reference community. I'll go further and claim that unless 'Don't use eisegesis' is one of the community's rules of interpretation, eisegesis trumps exegesis always and everywhere. Taking social cues from people and from group dynamics is hardwired in [most of] our brains; absorbing competing information from a text is difficult by itself, and asserting that content over against a group dynamic is nigh impossible without training that rarely exists. This helps explain why Church of Christ members who read the entire bible frequently and can recite biblical text better than many professors who teach the OT and NT texts still arrive at the same anti-biblical interpretations as flag-worshippers who may only have cracked the spine of a bible two or three times in their lives."

The Gods Like Virginity, but No One Seems to Know Why, or Education is Education

This is the drum I've been beating lately: religious education. The podcasts with Tripp Fuller clearly helped move the conversation along, but I teach world religions every summer, and every summer I encounter students for whom I feel genuinely concerned, not because they have the life struggles with which many students struggle, but because they are under-equipped to handle a religion class, and the looks on their faces as we work through the material are genuinely distressing to me as an instructor, because my task is never to break someone down. It's best to start with a fresh example.

We started covering Hinduism today, and I always use The Ramayana as one of the points of entry to the faith. It's a fantastic and awful story. If there is a national story of India, it's probably this story of Vishnu/Rama and Lakshmi/Sita, Sita's abduction, and subsequent purity tests. For good reasons, Hindu feminists have been pretty clear since the horrific gang rapes in the past two years in tying the story to the status of women in India/Hinduism, and they are saying that India need to find a new story.

Part of the story is Sita's capture at the hands of the rakshasa Ravana, basically an unrighteous spirit in human form, and her rescue with the help of Hanuman, the monkey god. After she is safe, she is forced to prove her purity by walking through fire. Like many ancient cultures, early Hindu culture had a test of female purity, but not a test for male purity. (See Numbers 5 for the Jewish/Christian version of this test, also for females only.) Sita passes the first test, and when Rama asks her to do it again much later, she says that her mother (earth) will take her if she innocent. In fact, the earth opens and takes her, testifying to her purity. 

In the context of Hinduism, dharma—sacred duty—is clearly the issue here, but to talk about this with a Western audience requires using different categories, the most important of which is purity. I asked a very simple question: why does purity matter? At this point, we can abandon (sort of) gender issues, because the Christian tradition considers purity important for men and women, and youth groups around America are subjected to an emphasis on remaining pure until marriage.

Before getting to student responses, it's important to point out that purity rules were always related to the exchange of females for money. Deliver a daughter with hymen intact, or you get no money. It's an ugly truth, but a truth nonetheless. Modern American evangelicals are long divorced from a tradition that makes these rules sensible (thankfully), but the rule remains in effect, at least as far as catechetical purposes are concerned. (In practice, all that is necessary is forgiveness for a transgression of the rule, but various traditions treat the psychological and relational fallout differently.)

The primary question is how to treat the rule in scriptures. The victory of conservatives in the rationalist/traditionalist debate in Islam and the literalist/progressive debate in Christianity has meant that the religions interpret sacred texts as the "words of God," not words mediated through culture and time. In other words, the rule is binding because God said it. God didn't say it to a culture where girls were marriageable at the onset of menstruation, which would make a no sex before marriage rule at least understandable; God said it for all time, and that means in a culture where women marry at 25, if they marry at all, the women are compelled to practice the rule.

This leads to the question I asked today: why does purity matter? I assume Christians and Muslims (and Hindus) aren't so cynical as to believe their god(s) cares about dowries or bride prices. Why, then, does purity matter? I'm going to insist you put aside physiological answers like disease and pregnancy. If those were the reasons purity mattered, they are easily addressed without such a strong prohibition, and, if those were the reasons, surely some mention in the text would have been helpful. Additionally, if those were the reasons, why not amend the rule as technology makes female sexual independence a reality? No, god(s) seems to care about purity.

The first student who answered has been referenced here before; he said he would give priority to the words of Jesus over Paul and Moses. For the record, only Anabaptists and those who have read the Anabaptists actually do that, and he ended up not being able to follow through with that promise. In honor of Bunyan, let's call him Christian. Christian offered that he had been taught that the first time should be special. Full stop.

Special. I can be a bit of a dick, and undefined, poorly defined, and hard to define words bring out the worst in me. My first time should be special. Will there be a marching band? If a guy is playing cymbals, will I be able to perform? What the hell does special mean? Not to make fun of Christian, as this is what he was told in youth group, but what does that word even mean? It clearly doesn't mean the sex will be good the first time, and it's not typically good the first time for people in and out of the faith, so what does special mean? The question completely flummoxed him. Completely, like head in hands, staring into space, don't know how to answer that question flummoxed. It's an awkward moment for students and professors, because he has just realized he's believed something for a long time that essentially has no real meaning. It's another of Zizek's empty signifiers, another affiliation creed, another boundary marker for his tribe, but it means nothing. He might as well have said it will be cooler the first time.

Jay Kelly read the first draft, and responded to "special." I'll quote him at length.

What I don't take you to mean is that his claim that the first time should be special was nonsensical simpliciter. He could have rolled out a fairly robust response about sex being intimate and that intimacy is typically intensified when the people experiencing the intimate moment are experiencing it for the first time. For example, U2 is my favorite band. I've seen them twice. The first time was otherworldly and nigh-unto-transcendent. The second was fantastic, but not as profound as the first. My dear friend Thomas has 6 kids. The first time his oldest walked, it was over the top amazing. The first time his sixth walked, he was disappointed because it meant there was now another feral animal who could cause trouble because of its newfound ambulatory capacity.

I agree with Jay about the nature of special here, but I find it hard to believe god(s) would tell us no sex before marriage just to ensure a special, in the experiential sense, moment. Purity must matter for a different reason. Christian wasn't the only student to offer an answer, though.

Here's the summary: not a single student who grew up in church could tell me why purity mattered. (I'm pretty sure it doesn't, but this was about The Ramayana so we had to talk about it.) Not a single student who believed purity mattered could explain it. One woman who is now LDS but grew up Pentecostal offered that Creflo Dollar said it was a blood covenant. First, the ick factor is really high there, but more importantly, many women don't arrive at their honeymoon with hymen intact. Is their blood covenant with the four-wheeler or gymnastics mat that "took their virginity?" It's bafflingly stupid and a clear indication that conservative Christians who are supposed to be leaders can't even answer the question. (Dear Christian minister friends, I am not comparing you to Creflo. Promise.) 

Back to Christian. He was raised in church. From birth to college, he's been in church. He's a good kid. He thinks he's analytical because he questions his pastor's sermons based on his own reading of the Bible. He's flirted with neo-Reformed theology, so he thinks he understands logic. He's the poster child for an evangelical youth group success story. He is getting killed in my class. Killed. As in confused, scared, and catatonic. His categories are failing; his answers, so well rehearsed before he ventured into the scary world of college, are getting gutted, and it's not just me doing it. A skeptic student gently asked several questions today. I was impressed with her tone. She asked good questions, and in a classroom where all sacred texts are on the table, he got killed. Because all sacred texts are on the table. He's not allowed to pretend his text is the best, most reliable source, unless he can offer good arguments. He can't. ("Fulfilled prophecies" are not a good argument, by the way.)

Again, this is a catastrophic failure of Christian education. Please understand that I don't mean that churches should teach apologetics courses to buttress their young people's faith; that's just lying of a different sort. They should just tell them the truth. The complex, multifaceted, polyvocal, faith-challenging, doubt-creating truth. There is no better way to prepare your students for college than by helping them understand that much of life and truth flies in the face of the faith they have constructed. They will be required to repeatedly face truths that destroy, or at least challenge, cherished beliefs and doctrines. My job as a professor is not to spare them those truths, so I refuse to take responsibility for the Church's failure to adequately equip their young people—not to defend their faith, but to contextualize truth in the context of their faith. I am not hostile to faith; I am hostile to a system that presents itself as "the truth" while it lies to students about the world, or worse, distracts them with entertainment out of fear that real religious education would drive them away.

Top 10 not so Surprising Things You Learn in Religion 101, Part 2: Podcast Edition

This is the second and final part of the conversation Tripp Fuller and I had about some issues related to teaching religion courses at state colleges, although, to be fair, it was different and in some ways worse teaching Bible at a private university. The idea here was that students show up in my class woefully unprepared for some stuff that is pretty basic if you study religion, which is to say, someone in their church should have told them these things before they turned 18 and wandered into my class. If you haven't listened to part one or if you're new here, you should know that these conversations aren't anti-religious or specifically anti-Christian. Honestly, I'm probably more irritated at the complete breakdown of education nationwide than at any religion, god, or spiritual person; it's private schools, public schools, and houses of worship all in this disaster together.

We hit on the final six topics here, including the non-maleness of god and how that language shapes ideas, the human element in the Bible and all sacred texts, what it actually means to do what Jesus did, American anti-intellectualism, and finally, whether or not Word of God actually means anything as used by evangelicals and fundamentalists.

The Language of Faith, or Why it's Impossible to Say Anything Clearly about Hobby Lobby

If you want to read about the Hobby Lobby decision, I'm going to suggest you go elsewhere. I have very little to say about it until the rhetorical, hyperbolic, slippery-slope-generating dust settles. I only need to talk about the Hobby Lobby details as illustrative of a larger problem within certain forms of theism, especially American evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

A few observers have noted that the entire Hobby Lobby case rests on the conflict between science and religion, specifically the tendency to distrust science as somehow antithetical or at least hostile to faith. That topic is best covered in a different post, and I, quite frankly, have no interest in writing one about it. It is clear that the mistrust of science led to some of the stronger rhetoric, and certainly in the triumphalism evident in some circles after the decision.

To be clear, the case rested on the Green family being allowed to define pregnancy in a way that is counter to how medical professionals define pregnancy. I have no idea why I should take the word of business owners who specialize in selling imported crap for display in middle class homes around evangelicaldom when the American Medical Association seems a far more reliable source of information about medicine, but it's America, and as my students regularly inform me with scalable—depending on their level of offense at my cultural blasphemy—levels of indignation, "Everyone has a right to their own opinion."

Indeed, even if those opinions are wrong. At least once in my career I have wished that a student would test scientific opinions with real world experiments, like the theory of gravitation from the roof of the library, or energy exchanges in collisions by standing in front of a speeding truck. It's not one of my better moments, but I can only be expected to explain "scientific theory" to college students so many times before I lose patience with the systems that work against science education in this country. (Science educators, I feel your pain, and I sincerely hope that you get your own shopping-mall-sized particle collider in science heaven.) More informed writers than I have lamented at length the ways in which science education is deficient in this country, and fundangelical Christianity bears a substantial portion of the blame for this unhappy circumstance. This, however, is also not the subject of this post.

The Hobby Lobby decision is a hydra-headed clusterfuck, and we'll be sorting out the implications for a long time. That the SCOTUS majority opinion specifically said the decision could not be used for precedential purposes related to blood transfusions and other medical realities about which different faith traditions have differing beliefs is a strong indication that they know this was a perilously bad decision. Either the principle applies or it doesn't, and in this case, they treated a comprehensive application of principle as an ad hoc application of principle, but the box is still open and the five justices in the majority will be living with their decision in the form of litigation for years to come.

As for how this relates to religion and public life, my favorite topic for you newbies, this is an excellent (for illustrative purposes, I mean) example of the tendency of confusing the purpose, nature, and object of faith with a clearer task of language and a more testable version of truth. Faith, at least in a theological framework, is likely best defined as trust. Like many terms related to metaphysics, the edges of the definition are blurry, so precising definitions are always necessary in discussions of faith. Trust, I think, comes closest in a comprehensive sense.

Trust in god is the proper application of faith, and the possible permutations of that phrase, while possibly hard to quantify, at least offer a hint about the purpose and object of faith. Faith is trust directed at god, and it relies on believing things that can't be known. This is contra Reformed theology, especially Calvin, which sees faith as "firm and certain knowledge" about particular revelations that come from God and that are testified to by the Holy Spirit, whose task is to reveal them to our minds and seal them on our hearts (ugh, useless metaphor there). This is metaphysical magic talk for "we know things that there is no way to actually know."

Since I think of Reformed and neo-Reformed theology (except Barth) as synonymous with logically consistent insanity, you will forgive me for saying Calvin is explaining a reality that he can only agree to if his god is THE god. Extend that definition to Hinduism or Santeria, and he would argue that reason is the means to prove the superiority of Christianity over those other religions, and not faith as a mode of knowledge. How, after all, do you argue for the superiority of one sacred text over another without using reason, especially when both religions rely on revelation as a means to knowledge of god?

So, to the issue at hand. Faith in god does not imply the ability to define non-theological terms, like pregnancy, so that they are consistent with a particular brand of theism. The object of faith is not definitions or meanings that are only tangentially related to words in a sacred text; the object of faith is god. This will necessitate that theists believe certain things are true or false, but extracting categories from the text and then insisting testable truths be understood in light of those categories is not helpful in communicating with members of various tribes who do not share those categories. Pregnant means, for all tribes, a fertilized egg is implanted in the wall of the uterus. To equate faith with the belief in definitions that are contrary to known scientific realities is to impose an anti-intellectual burden on believers that makes meaningful, intertribal communication impossible.