the parish

Where All the White Folks at? or, Church Planting for Fun and Profit

Edmond, Okla., is a suburb of Oklahoma City at the metro's northernmost limit. After Edmond, it's I35 North, and you start to hit increasingly smaller towns on the way to Kansas and Mssouri. The 2010 census counted just over 81,000 humans in Edmond, of whom 82 percent were white folks. The next largest demographic was African American, coming in at a whopping 5.5 percent. Mixed race, presumably some of whom are at least partly cracker, was over 4 percent of the population.

Why all the demographics about Edmond? You should know that the median household income in Edmond is a little more than $70k. Some of you from major American cities might not be all that impressed with that figure, but it's roughly 75 percent higher than Oklahoma City, and that kind of money goes a hell of a long way in Oklahoma's economy. Edmond is not the wealthiest community in the metro; that distinction goes to Nichols Hills, a small municipality just north of midtown where most of the city's old money lives. The nouveau riche live in and around Edmond in gated communities with names that sound like erstwhile sex tape-famous faux celebrities chose them in the midst of Cristal fugues: Gaillardia, Esperanta, Crackertown.

Why all this analysis of one of Oklahoma City's whitest, wealthiest areas? Many years ago when I was a staff pastor, our senior had deep roots in the Edmond community. He lived in Edmond and marveled that I did not choose to move "up there"—Jeffersons anyone? It would be north instead of east, though—but more on this later. At the time, OKC's northwest quadrant was experiencing tremendous Caucasian, upper middle class growth, but everyone knew that it would be far more sensible to move north than west, and that's where the development money went, facilitating a bizarre white flight in the late 90s and early 00s.

I say white flight, because OKC went through a strange period before downtown and midtown were gentrified. Prior to the improvements that came as a result of three downtown/midtown funding plans (called MAPS, for Metropolitan Area Projects), most of the white folk were escaping the rapid expansion of suburban sprawl by moving to bedroom communities north and west of the city, or they moved to new developments in west and north Edmond. The gentrification of downtown/midtown has created an interesting effect around town in that the formerly "important" communities where the wealthy whites congregated are now so far from the prosperous and rapidly-developing city center that they are basically marginalized. Nice businesses that rely on more than local traffic have no hope of surviving in those communities. The money and nightlife and food culture and the NBA and arts are all moving toward the center of the city or they are already there.

However, the property values in downtown, Midtown, Mesta Park, and other areas near the center are escalating rapidly and no one wants to issue a new permit for a church because there is no tax revenue in churches, even if they could afford the location. The bizarre anomaly of shifting regions of geographical importance has made Edmond important once again, and this time it's important specifically for churches. Because the property values in Edmond proper are nowhere near as expensive as comparable areas of the city's center, churches are making their way to Edmond to "reach the city."

Remember that senior pastor I mentioned. He was brazen enough to say, "Jesus loves rich people, too," aloud. After he nearly destroyed the church, he took a "core group"—the phrase still makes me slightly nauseous—north to start a church in Edmond. We had been meeting in the city's NW quadrant, and I pastored there for another two years before closing the church in an all too familiar and all too well-known personal/moral failure. That sort of brazenness is not likely to happen these days, though. Gone, almost, are the days when anyone took the prosperity gospel seriously, if we mean a statistically significant sample of people who call on the name of Jesus.

What is not gone is the idea that Edmond represents money, lots of it. A recent video announcing that an Acts 29 church will be planting their fourth Oklahoma campus in Edmond said that Edmond has good churches, but that the city needs more. According to ChurchFinder.com, there are 89 churches in this "city" of 80,000. I have no idea if that number is correct, but I assumed the number was close to 100. Either way, what that city does not need is another church. The only churches that thrive in that area are churches that practice what David Fitch calls cannibalistic practices. They take members from other churches, and the most egregious offender has been LifeChurch.tv. We now have four large churches with active plants in and around the Edmond area.

The newest LCTV plant is just a few miles south of Edmond on the main north/south corridor between OKC and Edmond in an area with scant residential property, and please don't even try to tell me if you're a local that they mean to reach the black community just east of Broadway Extension. That is laughably naive or just an outright lie. Crossings Community Church, already located in Edmond in a facility that cost more than 18 million dollars to build about 15 years ago, will be planting another church in Edmond. Yes, in the same town where they currently occupy a Six Flags Over Jesus-sized facility. At least one Methodist church has a plant going on in Edmond. Finally, Frontline, the Acts 29 church, has likely staked their financial future on an Edmond plant. There are likely other churches headed that way that just haven't hit my radar yet.

Frontline produced the video in which soon to be campus pastor David Adair opines that Edmond needs more churches. Edmond needs more churches like it needs more white people. These churches, especially LCTV, have done a fantastic job of planting churches in the most obviously white places around town: Norman, Mustang, Yukon, NW OKC, Shawnee (taking advantage of Oklahoma Baptist University's student population?). LCTV has specialized in planting in areas that are notoriously white, even planting near thriving congregations, some of which are little clones of LCTV, which is itself a weird hybrid of evangelical, fundamentalist, and revivalist traditions (Hybels, Warren, Graham, etc.).

Oklahoma already has one of the highest church attendance rates in the country, maybe the damn world. Outside of the former slave-holding states, we beat nearly every state, with more than half our citizens attending worship services at least once a month, and I think that’s a conservative estimate. That doesn't even come close to taking into account those who don't attend but call themselves Christian (a subset of the pesky nones). The idea that Oklahoma needs more churches is ludicrous. We have thriving churches, healthy churches, growing churches, churches that are nearly defunct, some with minimal attendance, some with bivocational pastors who can't scrape together a real salary, some in houses (who is counting those in these polls?), some in shopping centers, some borrowing space from another church, and some renting from a school. We have hundreds of churches, maybe more than a thousand. No way to really know. Those numbers aside, the idea that any church is going to plant in a wealthy, predominantly white area for the sake of evangelism is the worst sort of lie, especially when the numbers clearly indicate that they are growing, not through conversion growth, but through cannibalizing smaller, more traditional churches.

The next LCTV plant will be in Mustang, a 36,000 square foot facility that will only serve to pull white folks out of traditional churches in the Mustang and Tuttle area west and south of Oklahoma City. There is absolutely no reason to plant another church in Mustang. Mustang is so white that I lack the bona fides to be allowed into the city, and I’m the crackeriest cracker I know.

In the 2010 census, there were 17,000 people in Mustang, of whom 88 percent were white. The next largest demographic was two or more races at 4 percent. Again, some of those folks are presumably part white. Less than one percent of the population is African American. It also functions as a bedroom community for Oklahoma City, and it is the closest thing we have to a country-ass suburb. In fact, much of the town proper is country. ChurchFinder.com lists more than 20 churches in the area, and I know that number is way too small. Ask yourself a very simple questions: why the hell would a megachurch with more than 20 campuses in 5 states want to plant in a community of 17,000? If it was a standalone community thirty miles from OKC, would they plant there? The idea is absurd.

The primary reason these churches plant in these areas is to create a revenue stream. (It’s also entirely possible that the expansions meet some ego-driven need of the senior pastor and leadership team.) I don’t know how any reasonable person denies this. Dressing it up in the language of evangelism only serves to the make the lie respectable to the current membership, most of whom want to believe their church is doing great things. No one outside the particular tribe believes the bullshit.

Just once I’d like to see a pastor stand up and say, “We’re planting another church in the next year. We figured out where the upper middle class white folks are clustering, so we’re going to plant along one of their main commuting corridors. We’ll need some of you white folks to join us so that we can attract other white folks. However, we need the rest of you to stay here and keep giving while we create this new revenue stream. By the way, all programs, especially benevolence, will suffer during this expansion. We regret that. Well, not really, but we feel like we ought to say that. Amen.”

Rise Up Pussified Nation! or Acts 29 and Humpty Dumpty Methodology

It is impossible at this point to find a good guy in the Acts 29 dispute with Mark Driscoll. The organization has now separated from their founder and erstwhile rockstar preacher. The man who became an icon thanks to the dreadfully unoriginal Blue Like Jazz, has now become a parody of maleness, which is the final, hysterical irony since he thought to reimagine masculinity for this "pussified nation," a nation that included churches and pastors with whom he disagreed. "They will know you are my disciples by your love." Silly, Jesus. They'll know it because I write books about sex, all kinds of sex, and I yell at men for not having Mars Hill DNA, which is to say they must believe leadership is about having literal and metaphorical testicles.

Before proceeding, it's fair to inform readers that I am not criticizing from a pristine history. I was a staff pastor at a church in the 90s that was, by any definition, spiritually abusive. I, too, participated in behaviors I later regretted, primarily because I did substantial harm to some people who trusted the leadership of our church, a leadership team that included me. I have apologized to some, but not all; many of them I will probably never see again. This critique, then, comes not as a jeremiad, but as a lesson learned at the expense of others.

Driscoll has always been Driscoll. He did not suddenly become the abrasive, abusive, misogynist whom Acts 29 now conveniently repudiates. That his own board responded to the Acts 29 decision with the dubious claim that, "There is clear evidence that the attitudes and behaviors attributed to Mark in the charges are not a part and have not been a part of Mark’s life for some time now," only highlights how aware they were of the behaviors going back many years. Driscoll has been verbally abusing people in a multitude of ways, and according to charges filed by his own network of pastors, actively working to destroy lives and reputations for years.

Those are hideous charges against someone in any field, but for a pastor to engage in those behaviors only shows that he knows some perverse form of the message but ignores Jesus, "You read the Scriptures because in them you believe you have eternal life, but they testify about me." And it's painfully clear that Driscoll and many of his followers never met Jesus, and I say that as someone who believes the idea of relationship with Jesus is absurd, but I believe it's possible to be transformed by an ideal or a persistent belief in a relationship with a god, just as I believe a commitent to the 12 Steps can change an addict's life. The 12 Steps have to be followed, much like the Noble Eightfold Path in Buddhism, but Mars Hill and Driscoll seem to practice a Christianity devoid of actual practice. It's the most bizarrely cultural expression of faux Christianity I've seen. Liberal churches, which are often accused of being cultural compromisers, actually do something besides believe a 500 year old strain of European theology, one that is tainted with an American Psycho style masculinity and obsession with image. 

No one at this point should be surprised by Driscoll's long-overdue fall from rockstar status. There will be defenders; that is the nature of celebrity. Many will be compelled to defend this man for reasons we have discussed before, but the board of Mars Hill and the board of Acts 29 are both actors in bad faith in this situation, even as the board of Acts 29 put out an exasperated-sounding letter divorcing Driscoll and Mars Hill. They sought to seize the moral high ground, but it's been unavailable to leaders in Acts 29 since they signed on for Driscoll's methods and signed those idiotic, clearly-meant-to-hide-ugly-shit nondisclosure agreements. Seriously, how could they not see what was coming? A business has you sign a non-disclosure agreement to protect proprietary products, processes, recipes, etc., and parties in a lawsuit will sign them to protect plaintiff or defendant or both (and, yes, I know they can be sketchy, too), but why in hell would a church ask a minister to sign one? Why not just put an explanation at the top: "We do bizarrely bad shit here that is completely antithetical to the faith we claim, so sign this just in case you find your conscience; we'll help you find your balls."

The problem with Acts 29 is not going to be solved by removing Driscoll. His DNA is the grammar of Acts 29, as in his methods, his haranguing, his taunts, his mockery, his misogyny, his abusive tactics, his obvious sexual pathologies, all are built ino the system, and the DNA won't be removed by removing its creator. He's already replicated himself and his model hundreds of times in young men who wanted to be just like the "Cussing Pastor." He is obsessed with power and control, and why not? Acts 29 believes in a God who is equally obsessed; they simply give it a theological term, sovereignty, and then add it to "grace" to create one of the most untenable theological phrases of all time. The desire for power and control have been passed onto the leadership; indeed, the whole model attracted insecure males with power and control issues. All that was left was to convince the wives that they needed to open their uteruses and close their mouths, unless the latter was necessary for other things, and no, I don't know which chapter that was in How to Have Reformed Sex Like Your Favorite MMA Star, or whatever his book was called.

Two questions remain. First, why did Acts 29 wait so long to make this move? You don't get to pat yourself on the back for being patient and gracious with Driscoll if you knew all along he was hurting people. You don't help an abuser get better by working with him to be incrementally less abusive. That just allows the abuse to continue, and the ones who suffer are supposed to be the ones this message of grace is helping. It's perverse by any standard, and to call it graciousness is to get the Bible wrong yet again: "Woe to them who call evil good." Seriously, read the book. 

Second, is this smackdown of Driscoll because the others are tired of taking his shit and now want to be the ones who dispense it? I hear good things about some of the leadership of Acts 29, but I've also seen mini Driscolls right here in Oklahoma City. One local church is basically an homage to his methods. Clearly, several pastors in the Acts 29 network in Oklahoma City understood what Driscoll was saying. How is it not inevitable that this is true in every city? Acts 29 is not a church network; it's very bad, very destructive viral theology and praxis. Getting rid of Driscoll just cleared the way for mutations of this virus. 

The Divine Conspiracy Continued, or How to Repair the World?

I had lunch with another reverend today, not the Reverend of record, mind you, but another remarkably bright pastor committed to a tradition and a place, in this case a Holiness tradition that I'll leave unnamed for now. We were discussing the idea of a non-material Christianity, which is to say, the ability for people like myself to practice redeeming the world without being beholden to a particular narrative. Four and a half years ago, I wrote this little parable because I was frustrated at the lack of cooperation between theists and non-theists, primarily from the resistance generated by theists. Many seemed more concerned with a form of theism tied to a particular narrative than in actually repairing the world. 

I understand that much of fundangelical theology is not concerned with repairing the world; instead, they opt for a wait until the end approach to eschatology that is borderline triumphalist and despondent at the same time. "We can't fix it, but Jesus will really fix it when He comes back." It is this sort of despondency that gets a full critique in Dallas Willard's Divine Conspiracy, and now, even more so, in the continuation of that work, co-authored after Willard's death by Gary Black, Jr., The Divine Conspiracy Continued: Fullfilling God's Kingdom on Earth. 

I read Willard "religiously" as a young minister, but it wasn't the theology that attracted me to him. Rather, it was his role as professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, an unapologeticaly secular school, that helped me choose to pursue my love of philosophy. Willard's thesis in the first Divine Conspiracy was that "God's 'divine conspiracy' is to overcome the human kingdoms of this world with love, justice, and truth." It's clearly more detailed than that, and for my non-theist friends, it is not a theocratic call to arms. Willard was no theocrat, and though I have zero experience of Black, I assume if he and Willard were friends, he is no theocrat either.

The thesis behind the new work is that this divine conspiracy must be carried out by (unfortunately) Christian leaders. I say unfortunately because the task of healing the world need not be limited to one sect of theists, but I don't fault the authors for extending their own narrative into additional arenas of life, specifically "government, education, business or commerce, the professions, and ethics." The authors flesh out the thesis a little on the same page (34):

When leaders, spokespersons, and professionals...become organized with the critical institutions of our society to most positively influence contemporary life for the common good, blessing, goodness, and grace will flow over the land as the waters fill the seas (Hab. 2:14).

Much of the book is concerned with delineating these professions and their attendant responsibilities to help bring about God's divine conspiracy in the world, but not before the authors touch on something that the reverend and I discussed today: moral authority. Willard and Black rightly point out that leaders without moral authority cannot lead; unfortunately, the Church as a whole is flagging in the area of moral authority. Witness the recent plagiarism scandals that caused the celebrity pastors' congregations to simply shrug their shoulders. How does an institution founded on the importance of ethical witness not call leaders to account in those situations? 

When the Church has been the de facto hegemony for generations in this country, identity formation ceases to be important. In fact, only the churches that work with minorities and the marginalized will develop a solid Christian identity, and as segregation and slavery taught us in the South, that identity will often be necessary in the face of the hegemonic forces of cultural Christianity so as not to be robbed of moral authority or effective witness. In short, identity formation in fundangelical circles, especially the predominantly white church, will not take place because their identity as the dominant culture combined with their inability to recognize privilege will carry them wherever they want to go, and it's a very short step to relegating ethics to textbooks so that the insitution can survive even as its witness dies a gasping, wheezing, powerless death. 

Willard is at his best when discussing ethics, and the chapters on authority are worth the price of the book, especially for leaders in any field. Black mentions that Willard's class on business and professional ethics was always popular and full at USC, and that is a credit to his clarity and honesty when dicussing ethics. If the narrative you are shaping your life around does not produce practices consistent with that narrative, what use is the narrative?

On the other side of that, though, is the idea that if the narrative leads you to focus on the narrative as important above praxis, as in you insist on basic beliefs before repairing the world, then you might just as well put your narrative on a pole like the bronze serpent and worship it. Repairing the world is the task of all, not just theists, and it is at particularly this point that I have to disagree with Willard and Black. I don't care about the theological justification for tikkun olam, I care about the repairing of what is broken. The creation was good, is good, and can be good, and that requires the work of all of us.

Progressives get no pass here, either. It's no good to fashion new progressive theologies while deconstructing the text when it's convenient, and then quoting the text when useful from the other side of the coin of convenience. You are constructing a theology in midair. Why hold onto the narrative at all?

The narrative, if it's to be useful at all, must generate practices based on a particular identity, and in this case, Willard and Black at least understand that Christian narrative ought to form Christian character. That is more than the multicampus purveyors of spiritual McReligion understand, and the authors rightly call them out near the end, especially those who run their churches like a business. The "kingdom of God" is not a business, and one will look long and hard to find Jesus making any such reference to it in his parables. But if the narrative creates a special class of leaders whose task it is to bring about the kingdom, then it will miss the larger possibility that a non-material form of the same desire, which is to say those of us outside the narrative who care about redemption, can be an effective ally in the task of tikkun olam. 

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.

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.

To Catch an (Intellectual) Predator, or Jesus in College

Two people contributed to the idea behind this post. The first is "Dr." Frank Turek. He has a doctorate in apologetics. That shouldn't be a thing, but that's a different post. The other is a gentleman, Rich, who commented on an old post, and in the response he said he'd like me to comment on what's likely wrong with my own hermeneutic (not sure what that means in the context of someone who doesn't believe sacred texts are authoritative, but...). He then changed gears and said:

"...actually, it would be cool to see a whole post about that... about what are you worried you've got it [sic] wrong? Is there anything that troubles you about the Biblical narrative (I believe there really is one - that is the "low-lying fruit" btw, I really like Scott McKnight, Dallas Willard, and NT Wright ' s work on the Biblical narrative) that makes you think maybe some of it might be true or reveal a God behind it all?"

First, I'm not writing a whole post about it, unless you want a three-sentence post. Second, Turek. He'll be speaking at Oklahoma's annual theocracy event: Reclaiming America For Christ. I took issue with the blurb about him because he called professors like me, I assume, "intellectual predators." Bearing in mind that this guy got his doctorate at a school founded by Norman Geisler, which is now presidented by plagiarist Richard Land, the phrase is likely not going to mean anything other than I don't tell Christian students what Turek would prefer I tell them. This, according to me, is because I prefer a full and frank discussion that adheres as closely to knowable truth as possible and that involves the possibility that all of us are wrong, at least about things that clearly can't be known.

So, to answer Rich, nothing about the Biblical narrative convinces me I'm missing anything. You mention three men that I have varying levels of respect for, but none of whom I would agree with about the substance of the Biblical narrative. The phrase is deceptive in the first place. There is no "Biblical narrative." There are several; even the evangelists disagree with each other. Paul and James are implacable enemies, with Paul going out of his way to discredit the Jerusalem leaders. There is literally nothing in the Gospels that anyone can point to and say, "That definitely happened." That doesn't mean I don't believe any of it happened, but it does mean that I find the Bible to be fascinating and utterly devoid of authority. Any argument for its authority is an argument based on faith, primarily in Church Councils, and nothing more.

As to its historicity, was there a Jesus? Yes, I'm content to say there was one. Was he the Messiah? No. Clearly not (nor do I believe any such thing exists). This is the entire reason Jews didn't accept him and the entire reason Paul was required to invent a new faith, a faith that irritated James and Peter. It's also the reason the evangelists and apostles redefined "messianic prophecies," ignoring those that were actually unfulfilled prophecies and choosing others that sort of pointed to Jesus. See Reza Aslan on these points, by the way. Hard to argue with his analysis unless you have a vested interest in there being a univocal Biblical narrative. Was Jesus God incarnate? No. Not a chance. We can know little about the historical Jesus, and the cosmic Christ is a fabrication of Paul, with some help from the writer of John's gospel. This is a complex argument where its best to say we are going to disagree. Does the Bible point to a God revealed in Jesus or its pages? No more than any other sacred text does. How do you decide between them? Which text is right? Which God should I choose? Pluralism has destroyed any coherent apologetic for theism. Most anti-atheist screeds I see these days can only argue for a form of deism, if they mean to be intellectually honest, that is.

All that to say, I'm sure there are holes in my "worldview," as I agree with Rich that none of us have access to a perfect one, but that doesn't mean flaws in my worldview lead inexorably to theism, nor to theism in the Christian tradition. This is so clearly a bias in the minds of theists that I'm amazed they don't see it. Just because a system doesn't answer all questions put to it (and I didn't hear any good ones from Rich) does not mean that I'm forced to accept whatever theist system you offer in its place. Might as well accept Islam or Judaism at that point. Might as well make up a new one, or create a lovely syncretistic option. Why would I prefer Christianity? Friend Jay Kelly puts it better than I, and I think he'd refer to himself as a believer of sorts, though likely not a theist. He replied to the first draft of this with:

"You address what I take to be the biggest terrible-assumption in Rich's comment: That if your worldview is wrong, you should default back to Christianity. Christianity doesn't hold a place of epistemological preeminence such that competing religions have to unseat it, and if they don't, Chrisitianity wins. But in a culture that is predominantly Christian (in professed belief if not actual practice), it's an easy terrible-assumption to make, I suppose."

I'm content not having answers because I have no idea what God is supposed to do for me in terms of how I live my life. And if I have something wrong, it's not affecting how I live my life in the present, and quite frankly, students can't answer the question about God's activity in any coherent fashion either, and not just the young ones. I'm not sure what kind of worldview flaws Rich thinks I have, other than not worshipping his version of god, but if they exist, and they surely do, they aren't keeping me awake at night. The best worldview option I know is that of the Rabbis: tikkun olam. I can get behind that one, but I don't have to be a theist to practice it.

I don't push students to a particular belief—except to say "don't be a dick"—but I do ask difficult questions that they struggle to answer. Does that make me an intellectual predator? No. It makes me a professor of philosophy and humanities, and students who aren't equipped to deal with my classes should ask "Dr." Turek why the hell he didn't tell them the truth about faith, scripture, metaphysics, competing narratives, etc. A young man told me this week that if the Bible isn't true in terms of a harmony of the Gospels, then it's not true at all. Who offered him this demonic false dichotomy? It wasn't me. My exact response was, "If you hold onto those categories and move forward in investigating your faith, you will reach a fork in the road and that fork will ruin you. You will abandon what you've learned and hide in simplistic faith, or you will abandon faith. The evangelists weren't modern people. They were not working with the same categories."

This is a catastrophic failure of Christian education, yet again. There is simply no way that everything in the Bible that purports to be true or to be a narrative or to be a historical account is true according to modern, historical/referential categories. Try teaching kids that before they get to my class. You'll find they keep their faith in higher numbers, but it won't be the kind of faith you prefer. For the record, very few students abandon faith in my classes, whereas nearly 25% of the students (at least) I knew at Southern Nazarene University stopped believing while in the religion program. Looks like religious instruction is worse for faith than non-theist professors in humanities classes.

This is largely because faith isn't a matter of apologetics or facts or answers. I've said this before and it remains true: faith is a tribal marker, a matter of affiliation and allegiance, not a comprehensive set of beliefs and practices. I find the persistence of belief in a god to be one of the great mysteries of being human. How is it that people believe a being they have never seen in the flesh, so to speak, is real? Even as someone who is comfortable as a person of no faith, I still find myself intrigued by the varieties of belief and the ways in which people explain why they believe or what belief (god) does for them. To be clear, I used to be a pastor, and I grew up in a family of mixed faith: Pentecostal mother and skeptic father—I don't recall him ever using the word atheist to describe himself. Because he had no apparent strong feelings about the gods, he allowed my mother to dictate the spiritual upbringing of her three sons, of whom I was the middle. I believed because my mother believed, and I trusted her. There were no rational arguments, t-graph charts of pros and cons, miracles, epiphanies, or theophanies; I simply grew into belief because my mother believed and took me to church every week.

I left the faith in 2006, and I have never regretted the choice. There has been not a day since that I woke up and pined for a community of faith or a set of beliefs in god. Because of my obsession with questions of faith, particularly how faith impacts culture, morals, and public policy, I have tried to remember what it feels like to be a person of faith, to genuinely remember what I thought God did for me. After all, what role did faith play in my life such that I don't miss it at all? What questions did it allegedly answer? What benefits did it provide?

The absence of solid answers makes me believe that, to paraphrase my friend John Cheek, any reasons for belief are probably impenetrable. In other words, people believe for a variety of complex reasons and almost no one can articulate the actual reasons. Let's be clear, God does nothing concrete in the world that I can see; it's one of the primary reasons I don't believe. I grew up in a tradition that believes miracles happen and I never saw a single one. Prayer is so utterly ineffective that the practice of it is nonsensical outside personal benefits like peace of mind and catharsis.

When these things are demonstrably true, why do people persist in belief? My task is not to disabuse students of their ideas about faith, but to help them articulate what they believe and why, all the while assuring them that I don't know the answers either, and that sometimes, there really are no answers. That makes me a gadfly, for sure, and even a professor; it does not make me an intellectual predator. Pastors and professors who lie to students, who under-equip them, who fail to disclose important details, who obfuscate and engage in sophistry, who offer straw man arguments for questions that "atheist professors" like me never ask—they are the intellectual predators.