By Tuesday night this North Carolina pastor was showing up all over Facebook and Twitter. By Wednesday morning he was the ‘most popular’ link on all of Yahoo! world homepage.

If you have not seen this video, be warned. It is in no way understated. Here is the link:  NC Pastor 

 I have 3 main thoughts about this:

1. I know tons of people who are not for ‘same sex marriage’ who would not speak of electric fences. Anytime you are suggesting some tactic that the Germans used in WWII you may want to take note.
2. This is a different TYPE of Christianity – one that is the concerned with governing morals. We going to have to address why the church is even doing State sanctioned marriage in the first place. So often we try to have the second conversation without the first – no wonder it doesn’t go anywhere.
3. My church and 50 others that I know of and communicate with on a regular basis do kind things and say loving words all the time and no one press covers it. That is the nature of the modern media. Deal with it.

Nothing thus far is that surprising – save the actual sermon by the NC Pastor. Here is my concern:

• At what point is some pastor so deep in the Constantinian compromise that he is more Roman than Christ-like? At some point do we say ‘that is not even Christian’ ?
• OR is this just one branch of Christianity and it is our obligation to treat this man as a brother who has simply lost his way?
• OR is this Preacher doing more harm than good and actually crippling the gospel message – and in that sense he is an enemy of our cause?  And at that point, what do we do with Jesus’ admonition to love our enemy?

Admission: I have been re-reading Stuart Murray’s Post-Christendom and … while that is admittedly probably not the best idea … I have to admit that this whole ‘legislating civil unions and marriages’ thing in North Carolina could not come at a worse time for me.

For what it is worth, here is my 2 cents.

1. This is not Christianity. Well, it might be Christendom but it is not whatever Jesus was after.
2. This guy is my brother (in humanity even if not christianity) and has simply lost his way.
3. Whether he is my crazy cousin or my enemy – Christ compels me to love and respect him as a person even as I wholly (and holy) disagree with his inhuman and immoral speech.

I’m not really sure what other course of action I have in this situation. I spent last week in the woods with no technology and unless I want to perpetually retreat away from all this ugliness, I have got to address this kind of craziness at some level. What else is there in the face of hate except to love?

I’d like to follow up on the claim of Žižek and others that the God revealed in Jesus is not a God of tidy prose logic but a God who celebrates reality’s “loose ends.” Last time I suggested that this lesson of so-called “Christian atheism” should dispossess us of the proverb that “everything happens for a reason,” a proverb that turns out to be more evasive of suffering than it is truly consoling.

This time I’d like to suggest that the appeal to a God of “reasons” is at work not only in common Christian responses to grief, but also in contemporary Christian objections to environmental ethics. One of the guiding questions here, then, is whether a shift away from the idea of a God who secures life’s “logic” can open us up to a properly ethical embrace of non-human nature.

Recently the Cornwall Alliance, a conservative Christian group, produced a DVD series urging their fellow Christians to object mightily to any agenda remotely smacking of environmentalism. Earth care, they argue in the videos, is fundamentally opposed to the Gospel of Christ, and the promotion of such care is a most insidious threat to our children, whose supple minds are especially susceptible to the temptations of idols. Not surprisingly, the Cornwall Alliance titled its series “Resisting the Green Dragon.”

Similar sentiments to those expressed in this series surfaced in a more broadly palatable form during Rick Santorum‘s recent campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. One of the things that made Santorum so attractive to evangelical Christians was the character of his opposition to government-enforced environmental protections. All the candidates shared this opposition, of course, but what Santorum added to the requisite I’ll-cut-all-government-agencies pitch was a theological justification. Barack Obama’s environmental policies, Santorum said, are not only fiscally unsound and politically overreaching, they are based on a “phony theology.”

Immediately Santorum came under fire for intimating that Obama is not really a Christian, and thus appearing to support those unfounded but still-popular claims that he is a secret Muslim. This, Santorum assured us, was far from his intention, whether such a suggestion played well with his base or not (it did). What he really meant, as he told CBS News the next morning, was that Obama doesn’t seem to have a Biblical understanding of human beings’ unique status in the universe. He meant that Obama’s policies don’t appear to respect the Biblical idea that human beings have “dominion” over the rest of creation.

What dominion means, Santorum stated confidently, is that human beings ought never to be “subservient” to non-human nature. In other words, in the (commonplace) event of a conflict between human economic goals and the continued thriving of non-human ecosystems (read: Alberta tar sands), the Bible says human considerations always hold the trump card. On this understanding, to “care” for the environment apart from the weighing of potential human costs and benefits is to subscribe to a “phony theology.”

On the surface, the shared concern in these examples of Christian resistance to environmentalism is that of avoiding idolatry (worshipping the creature instead of the creator). Yet their common effect is the aggrandizement of the human, to the point where their appeals to “dominion” seem out of step with any lordship discernibly modeled on Christ, who was among us “as one who serves.” What is at the root of this need to be so emphatic about human dominion that one all but ignores concrete Biblical models of authority? Is it possible that we try to assert a monarchical dominion over non-human nature because we have discovered something true but also troubling about creation? Have we perhaps discovered that creation is less tidily explicable than the human need for reasons can handle? By extension, do we dominate the non-human other because it’s our Biblically-justified, “God-given right,” or because we don’t like the idea that meeting God in his good creation might require developing a love for wilderness of all kinds?

Consider what Annie Dillard writes, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, about what the “second book” of revelation (nature) reveals about its maker:

The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork—for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl—but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz. (139)

The question is, do we love pizzazz? Is the world’s wild freedom, its extravagant perpetuation of the new, is all this given to us that we might “master” it? Does living up to our dominion mean straightening nature’s tangles, turning an apparently personal, albeit wild, power into something humanly profitable?

Francis Bacon certainly thought so. He justified the violence of his new scientific method by appealing to his contemporaries’ interest in dominion, rooted in fear of nature’s extravagance and “femininity” (which for patriarchy amount to the same thing):

For like as a man’s disposition is never well known or proved till he be crossed, nor Proteus ever changed shapes till he was straitened and held fast, so nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of art than when left to herself. (Bacon, “De Dignitate,” Works vol. 4, 298.)

In other words, if you want to relate to non-human nature in the way God intended, you cannot respect its (chaotic) agency, but must transform it, even violently, into an instrument of the human will. Thus do boreal forests become “oil reserves.”

Is there a warranted Christian response to the discovery that non-human nature is characterized more by extravagance than by efficiency which is not so Baconian? In other words, does Christianity encourage us toward a more sympathetic relationship with nature’s wildness than the fear which leads to oppressive dominion?

In Ecology at the Heart of Faith, Catholic theologian Denis Edwards offers a helpful summary of how Christian conceptions of the Holy Spirit have always pushed in the direction of hospitality toward creation’s extravagance, instead of fear of the same. The Spirit of God is depicted in the Bible as the life-giving breath which animates all creatures. Thus Edwards suggests that in the ongoing process of creation, the Spirit is the agent of the radical newness (the baffling pizzazz) that we can see all around us in an emergent universe. God as Trinity so loves communion among differences that in the person of the Spirit he creates ever more surprising differences to mediate in what amounts to a wildly extravagant love.

It seems appropriate, then, that in the Bible the Spirit is not given a human face: “the Biblical images for the Spirit tend to come from the natural world. . . . These images preserve the otherness of the Spirit of God and resist the human tendency to domesticate the Spirit” (45). And yet, Edwards goes on, this refusal of domestication, this critique of anthropocentrism, does not make God as Spirit remote, for “it points to the otherness of nonhuman creatures as a place of God.” The breath of God in the world is a wild wind, and yet this ought not to lead us to fearful tactics of domination, but instead “to a new respect for what is wild and beyond human domestication” (46).

The imperative resulting from this view seems to be this: don’t imagine you can love or serve only where you see a human face, or that you forsake your properly human role when you transgress that boundary. For the Trinitarian God’s creative love does not wish to establish you as a static sovereign, safe within your border as “human” against the “non-human.” Instead, the Spirit’s love seeks to form you according to the model of “ecstatic” personhood that is the very life of God. To prefer self-possessed anthropocentrism is to reject the personhood/life at the core of reality. If we seek our true dominion, if we seek to model the only truly “authoritative” form of life in the universe, then we must seek to be initiated into this way of personhood; we must seek to be inspired to hospitality rather than fear by the excesses of creaturely difference. This would not mean inviting tigers into our homes, but it should mean resisting political decisions whose preservation of human “benefits” at the expense of non-human nature is really to our detriment as persons being formed by the wildly hospitable Spirit.

Justin D. Klassen is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theology at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the
author of the recent book, The Paradox of Hope: Theology and the Problem of Nihilism (Cascade, 2011), and co-editor of a forthcoming volume on Charles Taylor’s account of modern secularity. He lives in Louisville with his wife, Melissa, their two daughters, Clara and Gracie, and their dog, Eloise.

Discussions of debt quickly turn into moral arguments and because we have forgotten that interest was a technology created by humans, we forget that there is nothing natural about it. Other cultures have rejected the idea of interest, as shown by the following funny story of the Sufi philosopher Nasruddin:

One day Nasruddin’s neighbor, a notorious miser, came by to announce he was throwing a party for some friends. Could he borrow some of Nasruddin’s pots? Nasruddin didn’t have many but said he was happy to lend whatever he had. The next day the miser returned, carry Nasruddin’s three pots, and one tiny additional one. “What’s that? asked Nasruddin. “Oh, that’s the offspring of the pots. They reproduced during the time they were with me.” Nasruddin shrugged and accepted them, and the miser left happy that he had established a principle of interest. A month later, Nasruddin was throwing a party, and he went over to borrow a dozen pieces of his neighbor’s much more luxurious crockery.  The miser complied. Then he waited a day. And then another… On the third day, the miser came by and asked what had happened to his pots. “Oh, them?” Nasurddin said sadly. “It was a terrible tragedy. They died.” ~Quoted from Debt

Why does the morality of debt repayment focus solely on the debtor? Graeber argues that we have a double theology of debt, one for the creditors and one for the debtors. The proponents of this double theology use the economic term “supply-side economics.” This theology/economic theory was taught to me in my Economics 101 class in college and is championed by the religious right. You may balk at the linking of economic theory and theology, but examine this stunning example summarized from George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty:

Gilder’s argument was that those who felt that money could not simply be created were mired in an old-fashioned, godless materialism that did not realize that just as God could create something out of nothing, His greatest gift to humanity was creativity itself, which proceeded in exactly the same way. Investors can indeed create value out of nothing by their willingness to accept the risk entailed in placing their faith in others’ creativity. Rather than seeing the imitation of God’s powers of creation ex nihilo as hubris, Gilder argued that it was precisely what God intended: the creation of money was a gift, a blessing, a channeling of grace; a promise, yes, but not one that can be fulfilled, even if the bonds are contually rolled over, because through faith (in “God we trust” again) their value becomes reality.

With reflections like these, supply-side economics became the de facto theological ideology of the religious right, with Pat Robertson going so far as to declare it as “the first truly divine theory of money-creation.” Within this theology, it is imperative that the debtors must always repay. While the creditors are lauded as God’s instrument for the ex nihilo creation of endless wealth. The “job creators/risk takers” are the saints, while those in debt are the wretched sinners. This theology is so widespread that it has been naturalized in our thinking. It doesn’t even occur to the new atheists to challenge it.

But how did we get to here? This perverse reversal of theology into a means of perpetual bondage for debtors could not be any farther from the liberative texts of the bible. They are unanimous and univocal in their condemnation of all forms interest and differentiating wealth. Jose Porofino Miranda, in Communism and the Bible, says the condemnation of differentiating wealth in the Bible is “so obvious and abundant that it will show us the prodigies of tergiversation (the evasion of clarity) and voluntary blindness that the theologians and exegetes, and even the translators of the Bible, have had to deploy in order to muffle a book whose solitary intent was the change the world and eliminate injustice.”

In that book, Miranda undertakes a detailed examination of the texts, but I want to highlight one important point. Without a single exception, every time that the word for interest is used in the Bible, it is condemned. Deuteronomy 23:19 condemns it three times “You shall not charge interest on loans to another Israelite, interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on anything that is lent.” The universal condemnation of usury is not isolated to Liberation Theologians, but was well-known to the early church. Take for example this excerpt from a sermon by St. Basil from 365 CE:

The Lord gave His own injunction quite plainly in the words, “from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.” But what of the money lover? He sees before him a man under stress of necessity bent to the ground in supplication. He sees him hesitating at no act, no words, of humiliation. He sees him suffering undeserved misfortune, but he is merciless. He does not reckon that he is a fellow-creature. He does not give in to his entreaties. He stands stiff and sour. He is moved by no prayers; his resolution is broken by no tears. He persists in refusal. Then the suppliant mentions interest, and utters the word security. All is changed. The frown is relaxed; with a genial smile he recalls old family connection. Now it is “my friend.” (emphasis added)

Notice how Basil’s moralizing is the direct opposite of today’s, he condemns the one who lends. It only took a short while after the cross-bearers became allied with the cross-builders for the theology to change. The theology of the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, and the rest of the bible is one-way: the way of liberation. Interest isn’t natural. It’s evil.

This is the testimony of a young woman I met last week on my trip to Tijuana with Centro Romero. She was extremely courageous to share her story with us. The transcript below is translated from her Spanish:

“I was sold to a gentleman from the U.S. by my sister when I was 13 years old. I already had a baby. In the exchange, I was sold under the agreement that he would help me out with my kid because my baby was ill. I ended up being trafficked to Anchorage, Alaska. He basically kidnapped my baby away from me and didn’t allow me to see him. I was in prison, not able to see anyone for a long, long time. At that time, I was forced to have sex with men and women. Obviously, I was aware that my baby was not getting the care that we were promised. Our diet was basically rice and beans and nothing else. At the main market, at least in my case, I was 14, about to be 15, I was sold to have sex with other women.

“So, unfortunately my baby’s condition got worse. He never allowed me to see my baby and my baby was never provided with the medical care he needed, even when he was in the process of dying, he never thought about providing care for my baby. My baby had leukemia at the time, but of course I didn’t know that.

“Probably because of my mothering instinct, one day I decided that I didn’t care what happened, I needed to take care of my baby. So I found a way to escape and to take my baby to a place in which I was pretty sure that he would get the care that he needed. But the problem was that I didn’t know where I was going, I didn’t know the area or the town or even where I was. And unfortunately my baby passed away.

“When I ended up getting to a place, before my baby passed away, the people that received me didn’t want to take care of my baby. After the baby passed away, due to the lack of care, I noticed that I suddenly started receiving gifts. As I think about it now, I think they were probably trying to keep my mouth shut because they didn’t want me to denounce them or anything like that.

“After my baby passed away, instead of burying him, they invited me to cremate my baby. It was a tough situation for me because I was only 15, so I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. After my baby was cremated, the only thing that I had to be in touch with what I felt was a part of me was the ashes. Unfortunately, he basically kidnapped the ashes and I was recaptured and put out to have sex once again. I used to cry, just asking him to allow me to touch the ashes of my baby, but he never allowed me to do that.

“One time, after the cremation of my baby, I was forced to have sex with a woman and him, and he was so involved with what was happening that I was able to escape through a window. I was able to make contact with a policeman and they took me to a place where they used to take minors who are in trouble. Because I didn’t know any English, they kept asking me where I was from. They kept me in the shelter for minors for a few months.

“I found out that the man who bought me was 33 years-old, that he had a criminal record as a sex offender, and had been involved with minors in the past. But he, as a predator, kept looking for me. After a few months in the care of the police department, I realized that I was once again pregnant.

“He showed up, presenting himself as a relative. He promised me that he would be gentle with me if I came back to his place. Without the support of the police department, being 15, I didn’t have any option other than to believe in him again. At least during my pregnancy he was very loving. But, after the birth of my baby, as soon as my baby was born, he put me under the “care” of the immigration officers. He told them that I didn’t have the capacity to care for my baby and that my first baby had passed away because I physically abused him.

“I was deported from Anchorage to Tijuana. Even under those conditions, I started working at a bar in Tijuana because I wanted to put some money together for airfare in order to go back to Alaska for my baby. And I ended up going back to Alaska. I was looking for my baby and then my abuser kept telling me not to leave him because he was finally in love with me. He was getting government support because he was a single father. He asked the government to facilitate the process of getting a house for the family in San Diego county. Two months after that, we got a house in San Diego and he moved himself to San Diego, but without me because I had to come back to Tijuana. He promised that he would bring my baby girl to Tijuana so I could see my daughter. But, if I wanted to see her, I had to pay him $100.

“My pain and suffering was just too much, so I decided to give up and think that my baby was dead in the same way that I lost my first child. I decided to stay away from him. Even though being apart from him would hurt me a lot because of my child, I knew that it was the best thing that I could do for me and for her.”

At this point she was overcome and unable to continue the story.

I’ve struggled with what to say to close this post. The hell on earth that this precious young woman experienced is devastating. Unfortunately, there is no simple solution to the problem of sex trafficking. It is a global and complex problem. But I want to issue a challenge to men: We are the primary source of the demand for sex trafficking and we must begin to challenge the male-culture that says that putting others down makes us feel better about ourselves. Every single time that we make a joke about rape, call a girl a slut or a whore, or objectify women through pornography, we contribute to a culture that makes possible the stories like the one above. The fact that we are unaware that there are literally millions of stories like the one above shows how desperately we try to suppress them. If we want to end sex trafficking, we must start with ourselves.

* This is a guest post from Stephen Keating who is covering this sex trafficking conference for HBC.  Thanks to Stephen for sharing what he’s learning with us!

Any way, my home state of North Carolina is being completely ridiculous and attempting to coerce people though the power of the state to comply with a particular religious vision for the home.  That vision isn’t normative in scripture but don’t tell hetrosexist Christians it’s not, they got hermenutical skills no one can match.  I use to think I had heard every contrived way of explaining the Bible failing to speak consistently on behalf of God’s favorite relation math equation, One Man + One Woman = Marriage, BUT THEN I posted a link to Protect All NC Families on my facebook wall saying that I wished I was still in North Carolina to vote against it.

I got a few negative comments, a number of HBC Deacons saying they would vote on my behalf, and then this masterpiece of Biblical exegesis.  One of my former youth dropped a Bible verse and all hermenutical hilarity broke loose.  I learned something.  The patriarchs like Abraham should have just married and reproduced with one woman.  Because Abraham failed to live up to Biblical marriage God cursed him and so Islam was born. That is disgusting.  I hope this isn’t an idea gaining popularity. I had no idea what to say but a College Friend did.  Check out this conversation and see some masterful facebook hermenutics in action.

• FORMER YOUTH Genesis 2:23-24

• COLLEGE FRIEND Former Youth – Unfortunately, The Bible is not an ally in the fight for such legislation, but rather a liability. If “one man & one woman” is the only definition of a legal marriage then – without venturing out of the book (Genesis) you’ve chosen to cite – the following men were breaking the law: Abram/Abraham (16:3), Esau (26:34), Jacob (29:23, 28; 30:4, 9), and Nahor (22:20-24). There are plenty more examples outside of Genesis that refute the notion that 1 Man + 1 Woman = “Biblical Marriage.”

• FORMER YOUTH You are correct in saying that those men broke the law, and they suffered serious consequences because of it. Because of Abraham’s actions, it distorted his image of God, eventually leading to the creation of Islam.Just because men did these things in the Bible does not mean they were following God’s will in doing so. Judas was one of Jesus disciples, yet he betrayed him. Just because Judas had been a follower of Jesus does not mean he was doing God’s will in this instance. Jesus supported the Law of Moses (Lev 18:22 & Lev 20:13). Also, in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, Paul says “Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
• COLLEGE FRIEND It’s interesting that you have no evidence to back up your claim that these four men “suffered serious consequences” other than the fact that one of them was used as the foundation of an alternate religion, which is – in your opinion only – the serious consequence 1 of the 4 listed suffered (centuries after his death). I see nothing regarding polygamy in any of the verses you cited, and yet I see polygamists in the Bible who, unless you can show me evidence to the contrary, suffered no rebuke from God for living a polygamist lifestyle. What was Davids punishment? Moses’? Saul’s? Solomon’s? Caleb’s?

• FORMER YOUTH Although Romans 6:23 says “For the wages of sin is death” I would say that Isiah 59:2 is also is a pretty severe consequence of sin of which we all suffer: “But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear.” I am not as well knowlegded about the Old Testament as I would like to be and I am sorry that I do not have answers to all of your questions. But I do pray that in time the Lord will answer them. I therefore encourage you: that the power of prayer is enormous: Matthew 7:7 ”Ask, and it will be given to you seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.”
• COLLEGE FRIEND Former Youth, it appears now you’ve taken to simply firing off Scripture that has no application here. The wages of sin may, in fact, be death, but we’ve yet to establish that polygamy is a sin. To the contrary, I’ve provided several unchallenged Biblical examples of Godly men who had multiple wives and God never chose to chide them for it. In closing, two things…

  Firstly, and with all due respect, if you are admittedly ignorant of the Old Testament (OT) (and I give you tremendous credit for your humble admission of this), yet choose to use select passages from it to inform your decisions regarding your political voice, then I would encourage you to become more familiar with it. In doing so, you will find that the many commands regarding how to treat one’s slave(s) are not being put to their full use in today’s America and perhaps could spearhead a petition or legislation to re-introduce OT-based slavery in NC/America… or any one of the other categories of OT laws that are currently being ignored by our government: dietary, parenting, haircuts, clothing, etc.

  Secondly, do pray that the Lord will clear up for you the confusion between “Love your [heterosexual, monogamous] neighbor as yourself,” and “the wages of [what I perceive to be] sin is death [and legislation to deny you man-made government/legal benefits].” Also, while we’re on prayer, I would encourage you, if you truly feel that “the power of prayer is enormous,” to act on that conviction (and encourage others to do likewise), by staying home from the polls on May 8th and, instead of voting against the Marriage Amendment, do something much more powerful: pray against it.

  Tripp – apologies for rambling on your page; much love and respect to you for standing up for love & equality in this world. Peace.

• SARCASTIC MINISTER These comments have been such a blessing in my life, thank you! I always knew Islam was a lie! May the Truth of Jess Christ win the hearts of those who are under the devils grip.

• SARCASTIC PHD STUDENT If there was such a thing as biblical marriage, it would include sexual hospitality, i.e. giving one’s wife/wives or daughters to establish social and political connections. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it would be good to read the bible.
• NICE MINISTER LADY Former Youth, the Corinthians verse you quote above is also talking about having sex as a form of worship to a plethora of Roman deities. In this case, it was about the Corinthian cult of Venus who required worshippers to participate in orgies and things to supply worship. The scriptures have a long history of saying that sex in order to please God is a no-no. Sex as a worship and appreciation of what God made, on the other hand, is the subject of an entire Book (Song of Songs) and is lauded! Whenever Paul forbids LGBT stuff, he’s usually either talking about ritual sex or prostitution (usually boys prostituting themselves to men). There aren’t a lot of words to translate this super well, as the context of the culture the verse was written in is what makes it important. We’re not dealing with many of these issues today, so the verse is irrelevant. Also, Paul’s words are not the words of Jesus, and so many seem to forget that. Jesus doesn’t talk about LGBT stuff… except for that verse when he talks about how being transgendered is totally fine (Matt 19:12) and he DOES forbid divorce. We seem to have a narrow minded definition of what defends families in NC.

  
  

A large number of victims are taken from communities of extreme poverty in places like Honduras and Guatemala. Traffickers go down into these communities and identify potential children. They approach the mother of the child and say “That’s a beautiful daughter, can I buy her for $100?” Because of the extreme poverty, lack of education, and the dire needs of their large families, the mothers often agree to sell their children (often with the added incentive of violence). Once the traffickers have purchsed the children, they are moved to port towns and then on to warehouses in Chiapas (southern Mexico). In these huge warehouses, there are rows and rows of children with signs hung around their neck with prices. Brothel owners, pimps, and other traffickers go to the warehouse to purchase the children for approximately $200-500. They are then moved from southern Mexico up to border towns like Tijuana. At this point, the children are sold again for $500-2000. In Tijuana, a girl on the street can be propositioned by U.S. “sex tourists” for 10 minutes for $40. A very young girl will go for $200-500, virgins for even higher. Pratically anything you want, if you have the money, you can get. The girls are sold to 10-15 times a day.

Some of the girls are moved from town to town to keep their profits high. Others are moved across the border. Traffickers may connect with Americans and pay them to use their children’s birth certificates to move the trafficked child into America. Once in America, they are sold for approximately $15,000.

This whole process can occur in 15-30 days. Throughout the process, the children are raped and their spirits are broken. They are manipulated into believing that they are worthless. Pictures of their brothers and sisters are shown to them and they are told that If they ever speak out to anyone, their family will be attacked.

The Mexican government estimates that 137,000 children, women, and men are currently caught in this chain. In reality, that number is probably much, much higher.

* This is a guest post from Stephen Keating who is covering this sex trafficking conference for HBC.  Thanks to Stephen for sharing what he’s learning with us!

If you’re like me, sex trafficking is something that you may have heard of but are not aware of the extent of the problem. The immersion program at the Romero Center focuses on sexual exploitation on both the Mexican and U.S. sides of the border. We learned today about how the problem of trafficking is shockingly huge. Estimates vary, but anywhere from 12-45 million people are victims of human trafficking each year worldwide. That’s almost 1 person in modern-day slavery for every 1,000 people on the planet. Women, men, and children are trafficked from or within almost every country.

So what is human trafficking? In short, it is the recruiting, harboring, and/or moving of people. Traffickers use force, fraud, or violence to obtain their victims. There are a number of purposes that people are trafficked for, including: involuntary servitude, debt bondage, slavery, and sex. Human trafficking is the third most profitable illegal industry behind the trafficking of drugs and weapons. This is not just a problem “out there” in the ‘third-world’ but it is something that we are tied up in. After Germany, the U.S. is the second largest destination/market for sex slavery in the world. But it’s not just sex, many of the products that we buy in our stories are the result of slave labor (take the slavery footprint quiz).

We have a hard time imagining that there could be such a huge problem, especially within our own borders. Partly, this is because we have bought into the ideology of progress which says that our system is the most efficient that the world has ever seen and things are better than they have ever been. These ideas have been shaken a bit in recent years by the economic downturn, but regardless of how true or untrue our belief in progress is, it makes it very difficult to recognize that slavery is not over. We have a culture-wide denial of the real problems that vulnerable people in our world face.

As people of faith, this should be deeply troubling to us. The book of Amos, one of the prophets in the Hebrew scriptures, begins with a list of nations that God will soon judge, all enemies of the Israelites. It is easy to imagine myself in the crowd as the prophet proclaimed the message. “Yeah God, go get those evil people! All of our enemies are going down!” I cry as Amos lists off offence after offence. As the crowd moves into a frenzy of judgment and condemnation of the pagans, Amos turns the tables: “God says: For the sins of Israel, I will not hold back punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.” (2:6) With our insatiable desire for cheap food, cheap clothes, and cheap sex, we have sold the needy for a pair of sandals. How long must the victims wait for us to change our ways?

———-

Tomorrow we’ll be heading into Tijuana to meet and speak to both victims and local activists. Check back in to the blog for more updates and tweet me @stephenmk if you have any questions.  This is a guest post from Stephen Keating who is covering this sex trafficking conference for HBC.  Thanks to Stephen for sharing what he’s learning with us!

As for Noah, Bill Leonard asks a bunch of questions – good ones.  Be wise.  Listen to his awesome visit to the podcast & go check out his post on Noah.

When did the people of Noah’s day finally realize that what was happening to them was more than just a stationary front? Why do some religious folks take the Noah story literally but resist the possibility of a contemporary global catastrophe, one essentially of human creation?

Is biblical literalism clearer for the past than the present? How many glaciers must collapse and heat waves smolder before we literally read the “signs of the times?”

Wouldn’t it be weird if “secularists” turned out to be the ones who discerned earth’s impending judgment on our lives and lifestyles? What if global warming is true and we don’t have sense enough to see the planet itself as ark?

Like Noah, we still could labor together to find “grace in the eyes of the Lord.” Or just turn up the church air conditioning.

If you wondered exactly what our modern day Noah has to say check out Paul Gilding’s recent TED talk ‘the earth is full.’

Laurel Schneider is Professor of Theology, Ethics, and Culture at the Chicago School of Theology.  If you are wise you have surely gotten yourself a copy of Laurel’s edited volume Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation since both Catherine Keller and John Thatamanil have discussed it on previous episodes.  Now you just got check out Laurel’s Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity.

Check out Lauerl’s “It Gets Better” video here.

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The “Inverse Theology” that is referenced is from Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno.

Also referenced is the popular blog from last month “Undercover Boss” by Stephen Keating 

Here’s what happened in this week’s episode: The CEO of Diamond Resorts puts on a (really bad) disguise and pretends to be a new hire at various jobs in the company. He works alongside receptionists, plumbers, etc. At the end of the show, he reveals to the people he worked with that he’s the CEO and then he gives the workers that he worked alongside a big bonus, like paying off their mortgage or a new truck. Super generous of him right!? I don’t think so, and here’s how Karl Marx showed me why:

Ok, let’s look at the idea of work more generally first. If we look around we can see that in every society there are people that work and people that don’t work (this isn’t necessarily bad, some of the people that don’t work are children, the elderly, etc.). In order to take care of the people that don’t work, the workers have to produce more than they need for themselves. The word that Marx used for that “more” is “surplus.” Surplus is the extra stuff that the workers produce that goes to take care of needs/wants that are not their own. 

For example: let’s say I have a small shoemaking business and at home I have a baby. In order to take care of the baby (who obviously can’t work), I have to make some shoes to sell to take care of myself and I have to keep making more shoes so that I can take care of my baby. Part of the money that I make from my labor of making shoes goes to me and part of it goes to my baby. Any of the money that comes from my labor that doesn’t go to me is called surplus (obviously, the surplus that goes to my baby is good!).

In the shoemaker example, I make the shoes and I choose to make extra shoes (in Marxist terms: I choose to produce surplus) so that I can take care of my baby. Notice, and this is key: As self-employed person, I’m in charge of my own surplus. 

Now, let’s say that I apply for a job at McDonald’s. Like everyone else, I want to “get paid what I’m worth!” But here’s the rub: we all know that McDonald’s will only pay me $10/hour as long as I am producing more than $10/hour worth of Big Macs to sell. If McDonald’s doesn’t make more than $10 off of my labor, then I’ll get laid off. This is true in all businesses that are organized in what Marx called a capitalist business structure. In other words: in a capitalist business, the worker does not get all the surplus from their labor. Capitalism is not a way of organizing government, it’s a way of organizing labor relationships in a business.

So McDonald’s makes money off of my labor, i.e., they get to keep part of my surplus and I have no say in what happens to it. Marx called this “exploitation.” Now, stick with me because it sounds inflammatory, but all it means is that in capitalism, the worker does not have control of their surplus. The caplitalist business keeps the worker’s surplus. It doesn’t matter if the worker is aware of this, or if you have a really nice boss with good intentions that pays you the “market rate.” It simply means that the worker doesn’t have any say over the surplus of their labor. In US corporations, it is the board of directors who decide what happens to the surplus (keep in mind the workers have no say in electing the board!). Thus, in capitalism, there is a built-in tension between the workers and the people who get the surplus. They must continually argue about how much or how little of the worker’s surplus that the owners keep. For example, every time you ask for a raise, you’re in essence asking to keep more of the surplus from your labor.

“The poll, published Wednesday, found that while Americans overall tend to oppose socialism by a strong margin — 60 percent say they have a negative view of it, versus just 31 percent who say they have a positive view — socialism has more fans than opponents among the 18-29 crowd. Forty-nine percent of people in that age bracket say they have a positive view of socialism; only 43 percent say they have a negative view.”

So ‘socialism’ being popular among young Americans doesn’t mean they have any clue what it means.  Surely some do but I think it may be the fact that for most young Americans we know our lives – regardless of our hard work – will not as a whole be as good or better than our parents.  So if ‘socialism’ is the word for a different way of organizing our economic relationships as a country why not say ‘positive’ when asked because ‘capitalism’ has broken the promise of the American dream.

 Perhaps another reason ‘socialism’ is growing in popularity is thanks to our growing outlandish political Right in the country.  I thought of this when a high school student told me he was a socialist and I said “What? Do you have any idea what that means or would mean for your family?”  He said, “Yeah, you want college to be affordable, healthcare available to all, and to go back to Clinton era taxes.  I mean that’s why everyone is upset at Obama and he’s a socialist.”  What if our hyper-polarizing rhetoric in America and in particular the socialist name calling on the Right is actually making an audience for the very idea they abhor?

Two theological asides.

1) If you look at just the poor and non-white stats our country is significantly critical of capitalism.  Should those on the underside of our system get a hearing from the church about the effects of our system on their lives and family?

2) ‘Progressive‘ is way more popular than ‘Liberal.’

Public reactions to the word progressive are far more favorable than to the word liberal; two-thirds have a positive reaction to the former compared with just half for the latter. There is very little difference among Democrats – who view both terms favorably.  The largest difference is among Republicans most (55%) of whom have a positive reaction to the word progressive, and a negative (70%) reaction to the word liberal. (link)

Does that mean liberal Christians should use progressive?  And why didn’t they ask about ‘Incarnational Christians?’

Marc Ellis is widely regarded as a prophetic voice and an original thinker. He is a Professor of History at Baylor University and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies. He has authored many books including:

• Encountering the Jewish Future
• Judiasm does not equal Israel: the Rebirth of the Jewish Prophetic  
• Toward a Jewish Liberation Theology
• Practicing Exile 

He is also under a cloud of controversy right now! Please go to this website:  https://www.change.org/petitions/ken-starr-president-of-baylor-university-stop-persecution-against-prof-marc-ellis and sign the petition to protect his job and his right to speak freely! 

 A few weeks ago Joerg Rieger cautioned about a type of Christianity that was a cheerleader for the system, that reinforced the status quo, and participated in society in way that strengthened Empire.

I have said before I come from a background where this type of thinking is not just disorienting but alienating. The focus is on individuals – with little mention of anything systemic. The goal is the salvation of souls for the afterlife – with no address of collective issues.

It was reading Walter Wink  “the Powers the Be” that radically impacted the way I could see this. I have since encountered other writings and teachers who have opened the subject even further.

Now, it is odd to look at the central figure of our faith and ask how did Jesus ever get portrayed as a guy who basically told people to be nice and obey the rules? Cornell West would talk about him be sanitized, deodorized, and neutralized. Someone else might call this being a chaplain to the empire.

Tripp and I have a theme that shows up in our personal conversations on a fairly regular basis. It revolves around the idea that variable X or Y may be changed or tweaked, but the outcome of the equation is never in doubt. A specific issue may be protested, but the machine itself in never in danger. Certain areas can be challenged or  even overhauled, but the system itself is never in jeopardy.

This is not limited to Empire. It goes beyond hegemony. It is not limited to Capitalism.

The powers that be, or the system, or the machine (as you prefer) is an omnibus. It can absorb – incorporate – and co-op any variation, deviation, or even challenge … and in the end the structure is nearly unchanged. The system is never in danger. The machine doesn’t even slow down. The Powers are never in jeopardy. It eats new ideas with barely a burp – let alone beginning to buckle.

 We could talk about an anarchist musical band that signs a record contract, or a retail store that sells Buddhist trinkets from ‘the far east’, or a seminar on Native American spirituality that meets in a university classroom… but I don’t want to get sidelined.  

Benjamin Barber in his book Jihad vs. McWorld talks about the market in such a way that sketched a picture (for me) of a machine that needs to be fueled by new authentic-indigenous expressions, otherwise it runs dry and burns out on it’s own the boredom of its generic repetitions and knock-offs.

“McWorld cannot then do without Jihad: it needs cultural parochialism to feed its endless appetites. Yet neither can Jihad do without that world: for where would culture be without a commercial producers who market it and the information and communication systems that make it known?”  

We have talked with Joerge Rieger (ep. 116) about a theological look at global economics. We have talked with Graham E. Fuller (ep. 117) about a historical perspective on East-West relations.

I am curious about the theological address of some revolutionary response to the machine. We talk about Jesus and Empire. We talk about the Constantinian compromise. We have the Hauerwasian response that gets interpreted as withdrawal & testimony. Cornell West wants us to be Prophetic.

What is the theological answer to the question that the machine is asking? Certainly, like Tripp is fond of saying, we have to be about more than a slightly kinder gentler empire. Jesus challenged the status quo of his day – economic, militaristic, racial, gender, and religious. How does a follower of Jesus address a system of oppression, domination, invasion and economic disparity?  Thoughts?

Rieger is the Wendland-Cook Endowed Professor of Constructive Theology at Perkins School of Theology (SMU), prolific author, regular speaker, motorcycle enthusiast, and just plain awesome dude.  In the podcast we discuss the relationship of politics, power, the economy, and our present crisis from a theological and biblical perspective.  We move from the abstract to the practical and along the way I hope it’s clear we both had a good bit of fun.

 Join Us @Soularize Oct 18-20!

Rieger is author of many books including:

No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future  (Kindle $9.99)

Christ & Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times

and Globalization and Theology ($8.80 Kindle, $9.80 paperback)

Check out his amazing website for great resources!

Thanks to Ellie Haugsby at the Chautauquan Daily for the sweet pic of Rieger in action.

The New York Times just published a storyabout a cadre of Bishops  in Alabama suing the state over the passage of a new and tough immigration law. They (rightly) claim that this law is so ambiguously written that it could disallow them the right to act toward immigrants as they claim Christians are commanded: as good Samaritans. I don’t pretend to know what the right answer for immigration reform is in the US; I tend to think that the way that each side often looks at the current issue is, on the right, xenophobic and, on the left, unsustainable. However, I’m not trying to conjure another simplistic debate one way or the other in this post. (I’m implicating my above views in this st

atement.) What I would like to say is that I’m in complete solidarity with my own Episcopal Church, the Methodist Church, and the Roman Catholic Church of Alabama on this matter and that they and their suit will be in my prayers.

Perhaps more importantly from a theological-political level, however, the issue raises for me the importance of the separation of Church and State in the U.S. and the tension that exists between the ultimate allegences of each institution. On the one hand, the Church stands always and forever for a Kingdom that we cannot bring but must do our best to imitate in the here and now; they are right to see this as a “Kingdom issue,” for lack of a better term. In this Kingdom, there is neither Jew or Greek, man or woman. All tribalisms die. On the other hand, the State necessarily stands for the collective interests of its people, protecting them and their material and legal well-being first. (I’m not claiming that’s what the State of Alabama is actually doing, by the way; I’d probably believe just the opposite. I won’t doubt that the State is trying to protect its citizens, however.) This means the state is a tribal formation grounded in the idea of common-law and heritage.

However these tensions between Church and State ought to play themselves out within individuals and institutions, the beauty of this particular issue is how it exemplifies the impossibility of the situation: that these two institutions do and will butt heads. If they don’t, one of the two institutions is doing something wrong!

Over the last few years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important and dangerous issue we face as a society is education. There are multiple reasons for this, but perhaps the most compelling is that there is no difference between education and democracy.  What I mean by that is the same thing that educational philosopher John Dewey argued in his seminal work ‘Democracy and Education’ – which is that the major aim of education should be to promote self-aware, critical thinkers who understand their interdependence with and responsibility to the society in which they live.

If you believe the major premise of Dewey’s argument – that democracy and education are so intertwined they literally cannot be separated – then it is immediately obvious why a vibrant education is the most important thing in the country. More important, even, than national defense, the economic outlook, etc…

Now the tragedy is that our current educational discourse presents two equally terrible options: either our legislators are silent on the issue of education (i.e. they just don’t care), or they are vocal and hold a terribly mistaken understanding of what education is, and its goals. I believe that, unless the current trajectory of education is changed, it will ultimately collapse our already thinning democracy. I’m quite serious about this.

In a nutshell, neoliberalism is the idea that everything in society should be measured by a market-driven approach. It assumes not only are those with ‘business experience’ more capable and qualified to oversee any system of policymaking or administration, but that all things essentially boil down to business analytics and standards.

I don’t want to harp on this point too much, but the short version of the story is this: this assumption is not only dead wrong, it going to end up destroying our democracy and our way of life. It is fueled by a McCarthy-era fear of economic globalization, meaning that the US will no longer be the economic bully it once was. It is grounded in a number of hugely mistaken philosophical ideas about the nature of human existence, knowing and learning (which I don’t bore you with, but will happy to discuss at a later date). It has made itself manifest across all sectors of society, but the one I, personally, most interested in is education for the aforementioned reasons.

What it’s meant in terms of education is the absolutely ludicrous claim that the ultimate aim of education is economics. It extends this premise into the argument that business methods and mindsets (based on a completely naive understanding of knowing, teaching and learning) are best suited to the education system: training models, comparable performance measures, efficiencies of scale, standardization. Viola! Education has now become big business.(FYI: Obama’s policies on education are more destructive and terrifying than George W. Bush’s)

This neoliberal disease has reached near fever pitch. Here’s a good example: the Wake County School System (traditionally considered a model of public education in moderately urban environments) hired retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Tata to run its system. His credentials? A 12-month training program at a big business education training facility. In any other field, this would be considered absolute lunacy. Could you imagine taking a one-year course in medicine and then being hired to run Duke Medical Center? Well, the people of Wake County decided that was not only acceptable, it was preferable to alternatives like, say, taking the best a brightest in the field of education as a leader for the system.

“The Market As God” by Harvey Cox

I personally think, however, that the whole debate is smitten with a series of category mistakes, which I’d like to  address. I’ll begin by  briefly reconstructing two of the more audacious positions on the matter. First via atheistic evolutionary-biologists, evolution is taken not only to be a true account of human biology, but it is taken to absolutely negate the factual existence of God based on the fact that God is not necessary for evolution. Second, and via creationists, evolution is taken to be untrue precisely because it negates the factual existence of God, the Bibilical accounts of which must be given precedence as that are incommensurate with a evolutionary world. These debates, then, make two category mistakes.

First, God is not, I don’t think, an object among other objects or a “fact” among other “facts,” as I use the term above. That is, if one looks around the room, one has an experience of different objects in the room; one experiences the chairs, knowing in these experiences the functionality and usefulness of the chairs; one experiences the cushions under one’s bottoms, understanding that without them, one would sit on something far more hard. But one does not have an experience of God in this way precisely because God’s being is absolutely distinct from those empirical objects that give themselves over to our perceptions in their uses and qualities.

God, rather, is “invisible,” as the old term goes, which cannot be taken to mean, again, an object in the room that’s unseen, but something utterly different than objects that surround us. That is, when we talk of God, I don’t believe we talk about a direct experience but about what could be called a re-orientation of our experiences. That is, we are addressed by that which is completely other than ourselves in such a way that our previous ways of experiencing are brought into question and formed anew. Paul calls this new experience of the world given by God an experience of the world in terms of faith, hope, and love. I take this to mean that we can no longer experience the world solely in terms of its usefulness for us, especially other people, but in terms of what God intended and intends for it—that what is now the case need not always be so!

In this way, it is silly to try and attest to God’s being by way of factuality and as a fact among other facts. This is a categorically mistaken way of thinking about God’s being, which cannot be proved or disproved as such.

Second, what evolution has more precisely to do with God depends entirely on whether one already stands conscientiously re-oriented within the being of God and, thus, how one interprets the meaning of any worldly fact, including evolution. That is, both sides are wrong to think that evolution says anything necessary about God prior to a belief in God. Rather, one can only interpret the meaning of evolution based on one’s assumption that there is or is not a God. Thus, Christians, for instance, can and do not only affirm the factuality of evolution but can also very specifically interpret evolution as God’s working out of salvation history! Atheists, likewise, can see that, by means of evolution, we do not need to posit a God, which they are absolutely right about even in Christian terms; after all, God is always a gift and never a necessity, which is why the language of emanation has been dropped for the language of grace.

The truth of the matter, then, is that evolution can (and does) stand as a factually demonstrable way to interpret the so called natural history of humanity and the earth while, at the same time, saying absolutely nothing necessary about God, especially in terms of God being interpreted as a fact among other facts. Either way, one can rightly affirm the factuality of evolutionary processes, which really shouldn’t be up for debate.

The only matters that ought to be up for debate are evolution’s interpretive possibilities.

I was talking to an adult member of my church yesterday about the fight over the debt limit.  At some point I said “well God has already taken sides and I am not sure it is being voiced.”  I went on to say I have no divinely ordained policy prescriptions but scripture is clear descriptively about what God celebrates and abhors in a nation.  The conversation was a bunch of fun and at the end of my Baptist Bible-flippin tour of justice she said, “Wow I had no idea. You should preach that sometime.”  After that I decided I should at least post a blog and say explicitly….God takes sides.

God takes the side of the oppressed, marginalized, impoverished and excluded. God is for them.  God is also against the oppressors, violators, full and power wielders.  Pharaoh knows this to be the case, the Prophets proclaimed, and Jesus’ Mom put it to song.  A little attention to scripture and one quickly sees that the actual material reality of people is a preoccupation of God.  In fact God did not mind legislating the redistribution of land, forgiveness of debt, and imposing upon Israel’s elite the necessity of a social safety net.  There was even this dude named Jesus who told a crazy parable about God judging nations for failing to take these national obligations seriously while getting the religious vocabulary correct.

I know we don’t like the idea of God taking sides.  It gets most people who go to most churches mad, at least in America, because we know we are likely among the most full, wealthy, and powerful people this planet has ever seen.  Yet the church and its leaders often edit, soft pedal, and nuance their way around these divine calls for material transformation.  People like me are scared to say something because we know we usually suck at changing our own patterns and feel powerless to change the suicidal system we were born into but for those who spend their life studying the Christian faith this call is pretty clear.

Now I could go on a good rant now about how the present economic showdown demonstrates how economism has become the one true religion of the state that binds both political parties together or how the American church is so impotent that demonstrating less regard for the poor is a means to securing their support….but then I might get out of hand fast. So instead here are two quotes from the 20th century’s most famous orthodox theologians….not progressive, liberal, social gospelers, feminist, or liberation theologians….Barth and Bonhoeffer were not interested in those games, loved some Trinity, didn’t need to put a word between Jesus Christ (ex. Jesus as the Christ), and had no trouble lecturing on eschatology.  Hope you get the idea – the 20th century’s orthodox articulators knew the God of Israel who was incarnate in Jesus took sides and I think they could help us out today…..and of course they can’t get run out of town.

God always takes His stand unconditionally and passionately on this side and on this side alone: against the lofty and on behalf of the lowly; against those who already enjoy right and privilege and on behalf of those who are denied it and deprived of it….The Command of God is a call for the championing of the weak against every kind of encroachment on the part of the strong. – Karl Barth

Bonhoeffer here describes the place from which the church should examine and assess a situation, the place from which one can come to see reality as a Christian…

It remains an experience of unmatched value that we have learned to see the great events of history from the underside, from the perspective of the eliminated, the suspect, the abused, the powerless, the oppressed, and the ridiculed, in short, from the perspective of the suffering.

How would our present economic impasse and the conflict and conversations around it be different if this divine command was on our hearts?  How would the budget negotiations, taxes, spending, and debt appear from the perspective of America’s underside?

What would it take for the church and its leaders to admit we really to suck at being faithful both in our own material existence and in our fidelity to God’s dream for the world in our church leadership?

Really, the only part that lost me was Stewart’s concluding speech. It wasn’t bad, and I had no particular problem with what he said, except maybe that I think he and a lot of left-leaning individuals tend to underestimate a lot of peoples’ motivations for being “unreasonable” in the first place. Rather, it was the fact that he gave the speech at all. I kind of imagined it like this: Maya Angelou recites one of her beautiful poems as only she can do, only to be immediately followed on stage by an interpreter who then tries to explain the poem. They had already accomplished what they needed to accomplish…which was what?

To join the swaths of pundits, what I thought and hoped Stewart and Colbert needed to accomplish was a break in contemporary political discourse; they needed to offer a stop, like a dam to a river, to the torrent of commentators that keep mouthing and jawing in the 24 hour news cycle. In this regard, I thought comedy a perfect apparatus to do such; comedy can take people off guard, allow what is seemingly sensible to be seen as less sensible under a new light. Take, for instance, the late Mitch Hedberg’s line, “Fettucini alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults.” The statement takes a perfectly normal (and delicious) food and just sort of sees through it, breaks our previous relationship with it. I think that’s what I wanted and partially received from Stewart and Colbert.

This idea, however, got me thinking that maybe what I expected of Stewart and Colbert was not necessarily their job at all. I say this because I wonder if such explicit disruption isn’t one of jobs of the Church? As a Christian, I take it as a given that Jesus of Nazareth was united to God as God’s revelatory self-expression, enough so that Jesus as a person was definitively divine—nothing particularly new, here. I also take it that, in the New Testament witness of Jesus, we can, among other things, understand Jesus as a moral example without reducing him to one—again, nothing new here. Among the seemingly infinite lessons to learn from this God-man, then, was that he was constantly disruptive: from reinterpreting his own scriptures, telling his mother whom his “real” brothers and sisters are, expressing parabolic ideas about the kingdom of God, performing miracles, driving the money-changers from the Temple, to his taking on the cross and resurrecting. In fact, these latter two disruptions (the cross and the resurrection), Paul interprets as having disrupted the greatest scourge of creation death itself. The Gospel is at least, then, a Gospel of God’s disruption in this world, in almost all aspects of what it means to be a world.

To push this point further, it seems to me, in fact, that many influential church leaders have taken just such a clue from the Gospel. Martin Luther-King Jr. comes immediately to mind, whose disruptive voice helped to usher in civil rights legislation in the U.S., for instance. Or, take again, Martin Luther who, love him or hate him, ushered a poignant critique against the corruption of the Church of his day while reinterpreting one of the core tenants of Christian belief, Justification; or take again Thomas Aquinas, whose brilliant synthesis of Aristotle and Augustine made the church leaders of his day definitively uncomfortable, to the point that he was accused of and had to defend himself against heresy; the list could go on.

Perhaps we can take something from both the original disruption and the exemplary repetitions of this disruption, even if only imperfectly, as each situation demands, and without having to believe that any disruption we enact is even as terribly effective or as important as our predecessors’. In other words, if God has broken into and interrupted our lives for the better, couldn’t we at least attempt, even if we utterly failure, to do the same in any number of our contemporary situations and regarding any number of contemporary issues?

Maybe, then, the U.S. Church could stand on the coattails of Stewart and Colbert, who, attempting to explicitly do so or not, have brought at least a partial disruption to U.S. political dialogue, especially the provocateurs who inhibit if not only from developing but beginning at all. The Church need not address or stand for any particular standpoint in this case; it really might need to just stand as the Church at all, disrupting the situation as it stands

At any rate, taking a cue from Stewart and Colbert, I’d love for churches from around the U.S. to also hold a rally in D.C. at the mall under a banner of something like “Rally to Eat Nachos.” It’s neither overtly Christian nor particularly political, but it need not be; as Saint Francis tells us in what I think are mutually interpreting statements: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love” and “Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.” Even if such a rally didn’t directly do terribly much, it would be both funny and very disruptive in its own Christian way. By offering, if not for only a couple hours, what is basically a big church picnic on the steps of the capital (one where we eat the greatest food that God offers to creation), such a rally might continue to offer just enough of a break in the current political situation to ripple its way through the political atmosphere. It would be a subtle but perhaps poignant protest against the altogether absurdity of our current political climate. Such a rally doesn’t fix the economic outlook or directly help the many individuals and families currently in despair (which, of course, we ought to be doing, too), but maybe it’s a piece of a larger pie that can help instigate dialogue that can more definitively help.

At the American Academy of Religion I was able to join LeRon Shults, Philip Clayton, and Stephen Knapp for a discussion about how theology finds traction in the world.  Other than being slightly out of place being paired with these three theological super stars, I believe something happened that was worth sharing.  Enjoy!

HT: Transforming Theology

On ‘townhall.com’ Chuck posted a little editorial on the health care debate titled ‘What if Mother Mary Had Obamacare?’  Now that is an interesting question.  I am sure that Chuck, a public figure very forward about his Christian faith, would not use the pregnancy of Mary, the Mother of God, as a political tool… I might be wrong.  Chucky writes,

Lastly, as we near the eve of another Christmas, I wonder: What would have happened if Mother Mary had been covered by Obamacare? What if that young, poor and uninsured teenage woman had been provided the federal funds (via Obamacare) and facilities (via Planned Parenthood, etc.) to avoid the ridicule, ostracizing, persecution and possible stoning because of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy? Imagine all the great souls who could have been erased from history and the influence of mankind if their parents had been as progressive as Washington’s wise men and women! Will Obamacare morph into Herodcare for the unborn?

Here’s my guess about what would have happened.  Mary would still have been ‘highly favored by God.’  This is a statement about Mary’s character. So I imagine upon hearing that she was to be the Mother of one who would ‘reign over the house of Jacob for ever,  whose kingdom there will be no end, be born Holy, and be called Son of God,’ she would not say ‘that sounds nice Gabriel but this doesn’t really fit my life plan.’  I bet she would still respond by saying ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’ God didn’t pick Mary randomly.  God didn’t force her into the deal.  Christians have long affirmed that God gifted her with a singularly unique role in God’s redemptive work in history and is to be an example of the faith for us today.

I know the Texas Ranger is scared of Obama’s political power, but I don’t think he needs to worry about Obama orchestrating the abortion of God. What concerns me the most is that it was OK for him to be so haphazard with Mary, her character, and the Bible just to score a point for his ‘townhall’ team.  I am not saying Mary does not do things that can have political consequences, but this application seems ridiculous.  Mary was the type of woman, like her Son, who remains faithful to God regardless of the situation.  To suggest otherwise is to go against the Bible’s testimony to her character.

Now as for Mary’s real political statement, her song for God’s justice (Luke 1:45-55).  This one was applicable for Herod and calls Obama and the rest of us to respond today.  Scot McKnight comments on this passage….

What was God about to do through Mary’s son? Here are the five main points:
*    Scatter the proud
*    Strip rulers from their unjust thrones
*    Stand the humble up with confidence
*    Satisfy the hungry with food
*    Send the rich away empty

Which means these are the problems:
*    Pride
*    Unjust rulers and injustice
*    Oppression of the humble
*    Hunger
*    Oppression by the rich through accumulation

You can all draw your own conclusions, but for me I can’t imagine Mary loosing her faithfulness because more people are getting health care.

* Check out this related post over at 220 South ‘Chuck Norris Kicks Logic in the Face’

I’d like to eventually add some commentary on the whole conference, especially Taylor and Habermas’ ideas.  Other than a couple introductory comments below, I’d say simply listen to these people for yourself.  I personally think that, as always, Charles Taylor and Cornel West are the most immediately accessible speakers, so perhaps listen to them first.

With regard to Taylor (always my favorite on this subject), he especially is interested in re-defining secularization.  He wants to forget about that understanding of the concept that holds that secularization is an, if not the, anti-religion.  Rather, as a good Democratic ethicist, he’s interested in breaking the external control of any power-structure, including anti-religions, and trying to give persons the rights and abilities to think by themselves for the common good.  This last point is especially important, not necessarily for this particular conversation, but for Taylor in general; his dedication to the common good and what it means to live the good life separate him always from the rest of the Democratic pack.

‘Is capitalism a sin?’ I go on to ask, ‘Would Jesus be a capitalist?’ Would he belong to a hedge fund? Would he sell short? Would he approve of a system that has allowed the richest 1 percent to have more financial wealth than the 95 percent under them combined?

All the great religions are clear about one thing: It is evil to take the majority of the pie and leave what’s left for everyone to fight over. Jesus said that the rich man would have a very hard time getting into heaven. He told us that we had to be our brother’s and sister’s keepers and that the riches that did exist were to be divided fairly. He said that if you failed to house the homeless and feed the hungry, you’d have a hard time finding the pin code to the pearly gates.

Here’s an interview where Moore discusses his own religious convictions a bit more.  Personally I am not sure that ‘capitalism’ in general should be the target, but the particular form we currently have.  Well I’ll talk about that more later.  Any one seen the movie?  What did you think of the article?

healthcare.’

The demise of the functionalist understanding of religiosity has undermined the notion of state churches, which are mostly cultural museums for the culture at large in the states who still have them (France and England, for instance); and it has also undermined the notion of the American denominations, all which used to have some sort of preferenced say on moral…not legal…issues in the U.S. (again, I wrote about this in the previous blog).  This latter point is especially pertinent for us.  As I already talked about, persons such as Reinhold Niebuhr…who was once a pastor in Detroit, president of Union Theological Seminary, and in many ways a national Christian theologian and commentator…had moral authority within the United States really up through the 60s; and these “public theologians” had a say not merely within a specific church demographic, such as a Rick Warren does, but in the society as a whole…as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. points out in this article.

What I have said this demise of functionalism (and thus denominationalism) has caused is a sense that the church is no longer necessary to the social order.  Whether the churched readers like this statement or not, the social order as it stands no longer recognizes the church as having a genuine role in the moral governance of the country.  And because the general social order lacks this recognition, there is, metaphorically speaking, no room for the church to speak up as a church in the contemporary debates. In many parts of this country (certainly not all), to speak as a church, as a Christian, means nothing whatsoever; it’s about the equivalent of standing up at a town hall meeting and saying, just prior to speaking one’s mind on the issue at hand, that “I prefer to wear only one sock to bed at night.”  While this person might find their single-sockedness an important point of identification thought ought to buy them public respect, no one else cares.  In the same way, no matter how dear the church holds its own identity, it no longer holds any moral authority in the public eye.

I need to briefly take a step back here in order to, perhaps, more clearly define just what this social order is that I’m talking about.  In the U.S. and in other countries that have sought with varying degrees of success to promote civil rights, there exists, in many ways, no direct “common good.” In other words, there is no direct economic, political, or moral goal that the government seeks except the civil liberties of the people.  This statement is no doubt an ideal statement.  Of course the government gets involved in issues beyond the protection of civil liberties and often oversteps the bounds it set for itself, but usually only justifiably for the sake of the preservation of the conditions that allow its population to flourish as free individuals, that is, as individuals with civil liberties.  So there are city, state, and federal highways that allow us to visit one another and provide an economic infrastructure for us to create materials through which we live; there is a military to protect our way of living; and there ought (in my not so humble opinion) to be health care to protect our common health.  What the government does and does not get involved in is decided, however, not by the governing bodies and politicians themselves (another ideal statement), but by the people (or lobbying groups) whom they represent.  This means that the direction of the country’s governance is supposedly defined by the people, legislated by the politicians, and promulgated by the courts.

The U.S. democracy is supposed to be one for, by, and of the people.  Being “of” the people and what that means is important.  What it means is that there is a general sphere of civil dialogue (and I mean “civil” legally, not morally, as recent town hall protestors have shown) in the country.  There is a public debate taking place through newspapers, town hall meetings, and now the internet through which a series of public opinions are formed and developed , helping to set the trajectory of our legislative priorities as a country. This dialogue is, in many ways, a negotiating table at which many corporations, think tanks, unions, etc. have a say (it’s something like the U.N.’s Security Council, only more dysfunctional).  These various groups hammer out their agreements and disagreements, trying to sway public opinion to their side, and thus political actors to their side.

It is in this context that I say the moral authority of the church is gone. In other words, I am saying that our seat at the negotiating table has been taken away by the public at large, and that we’re now left in the waiting room.  And this is the precise reason we not only don’t, but really can’t, say anything about contemporary debates as a church and be taken seriously by our secular contemporaries.  So it is good that the UCC stands for single-payer health care, and (in my opinion) it should; but no one in the populace beyond the church cares.  I should also add as a bit of an aside for now that we may not like this status, but we ought not feel too terrible about it either.  Not only might it be a good thing at the end of the day, but also we’re not the only “organization” that has suffered this loss of prestige.  Without trying to figure out the previous century’s political players, what I can say is that economic pseudo-prophets (also known as economists) and “scientists” (a term that unfortunately has very little definite meaning anymore) have begun to hog most of the seats at the moral and legal negotiating table, making for one of the many issues that I will soon try to deal with in future blog posts.

So what can the church do?  I will not try to say what the mission of the church is other than to say that the church is, religiously speaking, Christ’s breath in the Holy Spirit into this world.  So, whatever we believe that means, we must first acknowledge that we gain our value-systems from precisely this point.  Our faith very much defines who we are, the diversity of questions and concerns that we have, and the various ways our respective churches see them through and act on them.  We ought to continue to let this sense of divine breath drive our value-systems while simultaneously acknowledging that most of the rest of the social order thinks we’re pointless, at least for now. And, in light of the loss of our place of moral preeminence, we might think of reengaging the world on two points.

For one,  like Chevy and Chrysler, we need to rebrand. We need to show (to use somewhat crass terms) that the product we purport to give is as good if not better than any competitor’s.  Thus, in the long term, we ought to stand as the church as a loving example of Christ, whatever that might be interpreted to mean; we ought to stand  in such a way that we might at least buy back a place of prophetic significance with some of the negotiators at the negotiating table.  Whether we will ever again have a seat at the table itself may neither be possible nor desired.  But that’s a question for a different day.

Secondly, and in the short term (which I’m more interested in right now) we ought to allow our value structures to inform our beliefs, but translate those beliefs into the most rationally and rhetorically compelling arguments that we can. We ought to try to influence public opinion in its own terminology while finding the core of our values in the breath of Christ.  Thus by “rationally and rhetorically compelling,” I think we must acknowledge that the language of the church does not hold; rather, the values issuing forth from the faith must be argued for in such a way that the public at large might see them as good.  I will try to provide some examples in the blogs to come as to how we might do this, precisely through the socio-economic and political terms generated in the modern secularizing movements.  In other words, for all the hurt secularization might be perceived to have cause the church, I will show why it might be a good thing and how certain trends in it might be used by the church to the social-order’s advantage, even on issues such as the contemporary health care debate.

We just sent out a national alert today. The American Clean Energy and Security Act, introduced by Reps. Waxman and Markey, will put a cap on carbon dioxide emissions and create millions of green jobs here in the U.S. It is a crucial step toward an environmentally and financially sustainable economy. We will not be able to prevent global warming and protect life on the planet unless we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. We can’t accomplish this dramatic feat by only making changes in our personal lives, as important as these changes are. We need this bill. We’ve got to put pressure on Congress to pass it. Especially those of us in the religious community who support it need to be heard, because you can believe that they are hearing from the opposition.

How do we make our voices heard?

You can go to Interfaith Power & Light’s Action Center right now and spend a few seconds sending a message directly to your representative. Also, you can sign up for our action alerts to get updates on this legislation.

Here is the message that we sent out from IPL’s founder, the Rev. Canon Sally Bingham:

Dear Supporter,

With the introduction of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) in the House of Representatives, we are very close to the clean energy revolution that we have been working and praying for. In order to get to the finish line we need to increase our efforts to push this legislation through in its strongest form.

The bill has faced an onslaught of attacks by interest groups trying to weaken it at every turn. But the faith community has been calling on Congress to do the right thing. On May 6, 50 IPL state leaders descended on the Capitol to deliver our message of support for strong and fair climate legislation. In addition, IPLs in five key states ran ads in local newspapers urging fence-sitting Congressmembers to pass the bill out of committee.

The bill is now almost to the House floor, and we are inviting you to contact your representatives. We know they are hearing from the opposition, which is generating thousands of calls and letters. Now more than ever, we must make sure the voice of the faith community is heard loud and clear! Don’t forget to mention the moral obligation that every one of us has to leave a healthy future for the least among us and the people that come after us.

Yes, I will tell my representative that global warming is a moral issue and we must pass effective and equitable climate policy this year!

Keep the Faith,

The Rev. Canon Sally G. Bingham

P.S. Please forward this message to your friends!

Want to do more to help? Post this on Facebook and use the ‘Tweet This’ link below to help get the word out.