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Distortion

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The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson has a column up on WorldNetDaily on the racism that infects some black churches. His analysis makes a certain amount of sense, and he may well be right that “since the exodus of men, black preachers have retooled their message to play to women’s egos”; certainly, one hears enough of that sort of complaint aimed at the white church. Where the Rev. Peterson goes wrong is in the next paragraph:

Bishop T.D. Jakes, for instance, has built an empire by targeting the emotional needs of women. His popular books include “Loose That Man & Let Him Go” and “The Lady, Her Lover, Her Lord.”

There are two main problems here, which are (predictably) interrelated. The first is that this is a gross oversimplification of Bishop Jakes’ ministry. Rev. Peterson’s statements would lead one to expect that Bishop Jakes has written a flood of books “targeting the emotional needs of women,” when even a cursory look will show the contrary. Second, Rev. Peterson writes so as to imply from context that Loose That Man & Let Him Go! is a book addressed to women encouraging them to dump the men in their lives, when nothing could be farther from the truth. In actual fact, the book is one of a number which Bishop Jakes has addressed to men urging men “to let Jesus take hold of their limitations and bondages and to come forth into the light of all God has planned for them”—a message I remember him preaching at Promise Keepers—and he’s been doing that rather longer than he’s been writing to women; the first of his books addressed to women, Woman, Thou Art Loosed!, wasn’t published until 1994. (Loose That Man & Let Him Go! came out in 1991; the title, incidentally, is addressed not to women but to the Devil.)All of which is to say that the Rev. Peterson appears to have an agenda, which he makes clear in the following paragraph:

Worse, Jakes has empowered women to assume leadership positions within the church, despite clear biblical admonitions against it.

It’s all well and good to speak of “clear biblical admonitions”; those of us who disagree with the Rev. Peterson’s school of interpretation on the role of women in the church don’t see anything of the sort, but it’s as appropriate for him to use such language as it is for me in return to say that his reading of the Bible is shallow, simplistic, and culturally bound. That’s well within the bounds of normal academic rhetoric. What isn’t, and what in fact is flat-out inappropriate, is to prop up his agenda by misrepresenting the facts. Whatever his faults and flaws (and no doubt he has many, just like all the rest of us), Bishop Jakes deserves better than that.

Cognitive surplus, Web 2.0, and the transformation of media

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Clay Shirky, author of the recent book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has a fascinating piece up on his blog called “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.” An edited transcript of a talk he gave at the Web 2.0 conference, it’s the most remarkable analysis of societal transformations I think I’ve ever run across. He begins with the insight of a British historian

that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. . . .And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. . . . It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

The key insight here is that major societal shifts, if they happen quickly, require some sort of lubricant to get people over the hump until they can adjust to the change of circumstances. (When that lubricant is missing, we get relapses; the case of the USSR after the fall of the Communist Party might be taken as an example.) And for us?

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened—rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before—free time.And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. . . .And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

He overstates the degree to which that free time went into TV; a lot of that time went into volunteer service organizations as well, especially among homemaking women. Still, the broader point holds, and I think his analysis of the current situation does as well. The shift we’re beginning to see, as he presents it, is this:

Media in the 20th century was run as a single race—consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this [cognitive] surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer.

Media as triathlon—as an interactive activity rather than merely a consumptive activity. I think he’s on to something here. For example, how many people these days get their news surfing the Web, following links, blogging, commenting on blogs, and the like, not simply absorbing the news but participating (even if only on the fringes) in a conversation about the news? And perhaps most crucially, how many of our children are growing up with this as part of their mental framework?

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing. It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing—and when I say “we” I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.

It’s a brilliant article, and I think offers a critical insight into what’s happening in Western culture, and what’s likely to happen next. I recommend you read the whole thing.HT: Heather McDougal

This is the ending of a beautiful friendship

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and from the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s perspective, Barack Obama started it; Barack Obama betrayed him first. That piece in the New York Post has to make Sen. Obama, David Axelrod, and the rest of the folks in that campaign break out in a cold sweat for what the Rev. Dr. Wright might say or do next. I criticized the Rev. Dr. Wright yesterday for betraying Sen. Obama’s friendship and the good of his country, and I still think his willingness to hurt this country in order to take down Sen. Obama is despicable; but what I wasn’t thinking about yesterday is, as a pastor, how would I feel if I were in his shoes? How would I react to being dumped, downplayed and disavowed by someone whom I’d pastored for twenty years, whom I’d mentored and supported and encouraged and poured my life into, and whom I considered a friend? I’ve seen that sort of thing happen to colleagues (admittedly for much lower stakes than a presidential race, and for much less provocation than the Rev. Dr. Wright has given), and I’ve seen how it devastated them; now that I’ve thought about it, I have a much easier time understanding where he’s coming from. I still think he’s in the wrong; I still think he should follow Jesus’ command to turn the other cheek (and that his tendency to preach that to white folk and not to himself and his own congregation captures much of what’s wrong with his understanding of Christianity); but his behavior makes more sense to me now. There but for the grace of God . . .

In the meantime, though, it’s interesting what this whole episode has revealed about Sen. Obama (and, as Hugh Hewitt notes, to wonder what more it might yet reveal; if someone sits down with the Rev. Dr. Wright to ask him a couple hours’ worth of questions about his twenty-year friendship with Sen. Obama, he may very well answer them fully). As more than a few people have noted, the Rev. Dr. Wright didn’t say anything about HIV, or 9/11, or Louis Farrakhan, that we hadn’t heard before—the only new material he had was aimed squarely at Sen. Obama; it was only when the Rev. Dr. Wright came after him that he felt the need to denounce his “former pastor.” Thus Anna Marie Cox asked on Time‘s blog,

Is it overly cynical of me to think that Wright diminishing Obama as a mere politician was the true tipping point? Because that seems to be one of the few new arguments (ideas? rants? conspiracy theories?) that Wright made. Sadly for Obama, it may also be the only correct one.

Perhaps even more telling is Scott Johnson’s comment on Power Line:

In Obama’s eyes, the most serious wrongdoing in Wright’s statements is their disrespect of Obama. From the revered father figure who could not be disowned, Wright has become the the father from whom separation must be achieved in favor of his own identity, or the boorish relative who cannot be tolerated. The adolescent grandiosity and adolescent pettiness of Obama’s remarks are perhaps the most shocking revelations of this entire episode.

The further Sen. Obama goes, the smaller he gets (and with him, his poll numbers). He’s even managing to make Hillary Clinton look good by comparison.

Ascension Day

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On this day on which the Western church celebrates the ascension of Jesus, I wanted to point you to the homily Fr. Richard John Neuhaus gave on the Feast of the Ascension last year at the annual Memorial Mass for Catholic military chaplains, “Bearing Witness in a Time of War.” It is, I think, a powerful reflection on the reality and significance of the divided sovereignty to which we as Christians in this world owe allegiance. “We bear witness to what is to be, and, for those who believe, already is. The Church—her ministers and her members—is the people ahead of time.”

Pretzelbyterianism

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Yesterday, the PC(USA)’s highest court, the Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly (GAPJC), issued the most befuddling court decision I’ve ever heard of (at least since Rose Bird last served on the California State Supreme Court). Faced with a disciplinary case against a Presbyterian pastor, Jane Adams Spahr, who had conducted same-sex marriage ceremonies and made no bones about having done so, and a denominational constitution that forbids doing so, they decided, essentially, this:

  • Presbyterian pastors cannot perform same-sex marriage ceremonies because this is forbidden by the church’s constitution
  • Therefore, what Rev. Spahr performed were not same-sex marriage ceremonies, because this is, by definition, impossible
  • Therefore, she cannot be guilty of the charge, because she was charged with “doing that which by definition cannot be done,” which, by definition, could not have happened
  • Therefore, she cannot be disciplined for doing something she couldn’t possibly have done

Never mind, of course, the fact that she did do it, or at least represent herself as having done it . . . The problem here is that the GAPJC confused a legal prohibition (it is not legally possible for you to do this) with an ontological prohibition (it is not intrinsically possible for you to do this), and thus concluded, essentially, that it’s impossible for human beings to break the law because the mere existence of the law makes breaking it impossible. If this logic applied in our courts, no one would ever be guilty of anything—this logic makes the very concept of guilt impossible by definition.Of course, they don’t really believe that themselves; and so they also made it clear that “a same sex ceremony is not and cannot be a marriage . . . Officers of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) who are authorized to perform marriages shall not state, imply, or represent that a same sex ceremony is a marriage because under W-4.9001 a same sex ceremony is not and cannot be a marriage.” Unfortunately, having said that, they then pretended to believe that the Rev. Spahr hadn’t done precisely what they said she “shall not” do, thus enabling them to avoid the question of whether she shouldn’t have been disciplined for that, at least; this, of course, leaves that question hanging wide open for the next case (and there will most certainly be a next case, if only to test whether GAPJC will have the stomach to discipline people for defying their “shall not”). For now, though, they’ve tied themselves into such knots to avoid having to discipline the Rev. Spahr, they aren’t really Presbyterians anymore—they’re Pretzelbyterians.(Update: with his usual critical acumen, Ed Koster, Stated Clerk of Detroit Presbytery, has identified a few more major kinks in those knots that hadn’t occurred to me.)All this reminds me of a song by the great Steve Scott, whose album I happen to have been listening to this afternoon; this one struck me quite forcefully, given the current situation.

Ship of FoolsSome have called us heroes;
Others say we’ve lost our mind.
Some have called us visionaries;
Others say that we’ve gone blind.
But we’re done with their traditions—
We don’t want to get trapped—
So we’ve thrown away the anchor
And we’ve thrown away the maps.Sail away (sail away) on the ship of fools;
Sail away (sail away) on the ship of fools.The city quotes the jungle,
And the jungle quotes the heart;
In this wilderness of references,
We’re lost before we start.
There’s an aching contradiction
At the center of the search;
We’re moving ’round in circles,
But getting closer to the edge.ChorusAre we prisoners of confusion,
Or are we masters of our fate?
Are we caught in this illusion?
Is it really all too late?
Shall we try at navigation,
Or are we victims of the tide?
Do we have a destination
Or are we just here for the ride?ChorusWords and music: Steve Scott
© 1990 Northern Sierra Music
From the album Lost Horizon, by Steve Scott

The God who speaks

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“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also.
From now on you do know him and have seen him.”—John 14:1-7 (ESV)These words are much loved and much quoted, and I’m sure have been for as long as there has been a church. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this passage, though, is the basis for Jesus’ promise: it isn’t based on what he’s taught them so far, or even on his crucifixion and resurrection, but on the fact that he’s going to leave them. It’s his going away that makes the fulfillment of his promise possible. There are various aspects to this, but perhaps the most reassuring is that when Jesus ascended, when he returned to heaven, he wasn’t leaving us, he was leading us; he was going ahead of us to prepare our way, to show us the way, to be our way. That’s why he says, “If I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am, there you may also be”; and that’s one reason why he sent us his Spirit, as the agent through whom he leads and guides us in this life, on the way toward the kingdom of his Father. Remember, “the earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it,” and he’s actively at work in and through all of it. Thus for us, the world is not silent, nor is God silent; rather, God is always speaking to us, and all of life is the medium through which he speaks.Most basically, of course, and most importantly, God speaks to us through the words he inspired, which include the record of the life he lived for us on this earth; it’s through the Bible first and foremost that Jesus leads us by his Spirit, as he continues to speak to us by his Spirit through these words, and he will not say anything that contradicts what he has already said. But that’s not the only way he speaks to us; it’s not the only way he guides us. He speaks through us sometimes as we talk with each other, making us agents of his wisdom; sometimes he may speak truth to us through people outside the church; he touches our minds and hearts through his creation, the natural world; and sometimes he speaks to us directly, in the back of our minds and the quiet of our hearts. I’ll never forget one time I was absolutely furious at someone—a couple someones, actually—and in my mind I heard Jesus say, “Show them grace.” I knew it was God, since it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, and I protested angrily, “They don’t deserve it.” To which he responded, “I know. That’s why it’s called grace.”Granted, most of the time God doesn’t speak to us quite that clearly; I suspect I was being unusually dense that day. But he does speak to us, and he does lead us, and we can trust that fact no matter what; what’s more, we can trust that he’s good enough at leading us to overcome how bad we often are at following him. We don’t need to worry or be anxious about that, for we can trust God for his grace; we simply need to do our part. We need to spend time with him, in reading his word (the main way we come to know him and recognize his voice) and in prayer—not just talking to him, though that’s important, but also being silent, listening for his voice—so that we learn to know him when he speaks; and we need to learn to expect him to speak, because he is at work leading us by his Spirit every day, in every moment. Christ came down to seek us out in our sin and rescue us from the power of death, and he’s busy right now bringing us home; and what he starts, he finishes. Period. End of sentence.(Note: those with a philosophical bent might find Edward Tingley’s article “Gadamer and the Light of the Word” a valuable reflection on this matter; though Gadamer was not a believer, he gives a better account of the Spirit’s work than many Christians, and Tingley has some excellent things to say on this.)

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

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When Steve Sailer wondered back in January if the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. was trying to submarine Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, I could see his logic, but I thought it was a classic case of logic subverting reason. When Michael Barone wondered the same thing a month ago, building on Sailer’s argument, I started to consider the idea, because Barone’s just too good an observer to dismiss—but still, the idea seemed crazy. Occam’s Razor seemed to suggest that the Rev. Dr. Wright was saying and doing the things he was saying and doing not out of any ulterior motive, but simply because this is who he is; this is what he preaches because this is what he believes. (He also believes, it appears, that black folks and white folks have different brains, which is a bit of racist crackpottery I’d normally expect out of the very KKK he attacks.) He might have been damaging Sen. Obama’s campaign, but it didn’t seem necessary to conclude he was doing so intentionally.After the Rev. Dr. Wright’s media offensive this past weekend, however (I use the term advisedly), I’m not at all so sure. Marc Ambinder says that “Wright is throwing Obama under the bus” (an ironic return for Sen. Obama’s attempt to save his pastor by throwing Granny under the bus), while Clive Crook, Dana Milbank and Joe Klein have now come to the same conclusion as Sailer and Barone. Indeed, Klein takes it a step further:

Wright’s purpose now seems quite clear: to aggrandize himself—the guy is going to be a go-to mainstream media source for racial extremist spew, the next iteration of Al Sharpton—and destroy Barack Obama.

Certainly it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than that the Rev. Dr. Wright deliberately “reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered—and added lighter fuel.” Some people are even wondering now if the Clintons put him up to it.The sad thing is, it may very well work—and I do truly believe it will be a sad, sad day for this country if it does. Granted, I had no intention whatsoever of voting for Sen. Obama, but I wanted to believe in his integrity and his vision even if I can’t accept his political ideas; I wanted to believe that win or lose, he could help America take another step or two away from the racism of the past. Now, after all we’ve seen of his friends, his view of the people of this country (which echoes his wife’s bitterness at America) and the way he plays politics, I can’t respect him anymore, and I definitely want him to lose on his merits. That said, if 15% of the electorate votes for John McCain simply because Barack Obama has dark skin, as some sharp observers think will happen, that would be a shameful thing, and I don’t want to see that. But that’s where the Rev. Dr. Wright is heading us—that’s where he’s driving the bus—and it seems, increasingly, that he’s doing so because he’d rather inflame and exacerbate our nation’s internal divisions than be proved wrong about them. If so, that’s despicable. Barack Obama should have exercised much better care in his choice of friends; he shouldn’t have wasted his time on a pastor who could betray him (and his country) like that.

“Winning” doesn’t mean “easy”

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Unfortunately, our quick-fix minute-rice instant-oatmeal fast-food culture has largely lost touch with the fact that some struggles take a long time, and that even tough, long-term fights may well be not only worth fighting but necessary to fight. I think most of our churches have lost the stomach for that, which is why the long victory of discipleship, with the lifelong struggle to put sin to death in our lives and replace it with trust in Christ, is foreign to so many who consider themselves Christians; and I’m quite sure we’ve largely lost the stomach for it in our politics. We may talk the talk of long-term effort, but we don’t often walk the walk. That I’m sure is at least part of the reason (along with partisan opportunism) why the war in Iraq became so unpopular: it stopped being easy. Once it no longer looked like a cakewalk, a lot of folks stopped supporting it.

I’m glad, though, to see President Bush (finally?) call that attitude out:

I have to wonder (not originally, I know) what that reporter, and our press corps as a whole, would have made of World War II, or the Civil War . . . (According to Wikipedia, the American death toll of the entire Iraq War through the end of this month stands at 4,058 deaths, 3,320 in combat. In World War II, the Battle of the Bulge alone claimed 19,000 American dead.)

HT: Ed Morissey

The relevance of liturgy

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I argued yesterday that rather than trying to stop being alien to the world and start looking normal on its terms, we need to be forthright about our alienness; rather than trying to tame the strange language of Christian faith, we need to actively teach it to those who don’t know it. This afternoon, I sat down to read Mark Galli’s article in the latest Christianity Today, “A Deeper Relevance,” and found this:

A closer look suggests that something more profound and paradoxical is going on in liturgy than the search for contemporary relevance. “The liturgy begins . . . as a real separation from the world,” writes Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann. He continues by saying that in the attempt to “make Christianity understandable to this mythical ‘modern’ man on the street,” we have forgotten this necessary separation.It is precisely the point of the liturgy to take people out of their worlds and usher them into a strange new world—to show them that, despite appearances, the last thing in the world they need is more of the world out of which they’ve come. The world the liturgy reveals does not seem relevant at first glance, but it turns out that the world it reveals is more real than the one we inhabit day by day. . . .In what’s now an old essay, F. H. Brabant put it this way: “All liturgical acts . . . have a double function: one directed Godwards, expressing in outward form the thoughts and feelings of the worshippers, the other directed manwards, teaching worshippers how they ought to think and feel by setting before them the Church’s standard of worship.”We have to pay attention to cultural context, no question. The history of liturgy has been in part about finding words and ritual that help people in a given culture express their thoughts and feelings to God in ways that make sense. The liturgy has always had freedom and variety within its basic structure.But it has steadfastly refused to let the culture determine its shape or meaning. Liturgical churches know that as profound a reality as is the surrounding culture, there is an even more profound reality waiting to be discovered. The liturgy gently and calmly gets us to open our eyes to the new reality, showing us the “necessary separation” from the old. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, we find our gaze directed away from ourselves and toward God and his kingdom. When we return to our homes, we are never the same.

That’s thick stuff, and profoundly important for the health of the church. I look forward to the article going up; what’s more, I look forward to reading the book from which the article was adapted, Beyond Smells & Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy. This is a message the American church needs to hear—and not only the “contemporary” churches that have stripped their liturgy down to the bare minimum, but also those churches being told they have to abandon their liturgy to be “relevant.” Relevance is not about coming to the world on its own terms; to the contrary, we are most relevant when we tell the world what it needs to know and does not, and when we give it what it needs to have and does not. May we have the courage to stick to that mission.