CBMW, A Coalition for Biblical Sexuality, released their Nashville Statement today, and it is exactly as anti-LGBTQ+ as you might expect. I’m not sure why they felt the need to articulate in a formal statement what they have been saying for years: that LGBTQ+ people are outside the fold, so to speak. According to Article 7 anyone who adopts a “homosexual or trangender self-conception is [in]consistent with God’s holy purposes in creation and redemption.” All of the signers have put it on record now if they hadn’t before.
But I was surprised (though maybe I shouldn’t be) by Article 10:
WE AFFIRM that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.
WE DENY that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.
Apparently I am also outside of the fold for affirming LGBTQ+ relationships. I haven’t identified as an evangelical for more than a decade, but I considered myself as still part of the Christian faith. I’ve found a home in the Episcopal church, a much different tradition than I was taught. But the signers say that we can’t merely agree to disagree on this issue. In fact, my approval of LGBTQ+ individuals “constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.” To them, I am out.
The list of signers consists of many familiar names. These are the leaders I have been told to follow, and read, and listen to for years from my evangelical friends and family. They include John Piper, D.A. Carson, Wayne Grudem, John MacArthur, Russell Moore, R. Albert Mohler Jr., Francis Chan, R.C. Sproul, J.I. Packer, James Dobson, Alistair Begg, Randy Alcorn, Karen Swallow Prior, and many other big names in the evangelical world. It makes me wonder if my friends and family agree with the signers of this statement and think I have departed Christian faithfulness. It makes me sad to think so.
It already makes me sad that many evangelicals consider Julie Rodgers or Matthew Vines or my friend David and countless others as outside the fold. Now I realize that they may see me that way, too.
The more I think about it, though, and I can see that it isn’t about me. It’s a re-affirmation of the same anti-LGBTQ+ stance they have consistently held, and those are the individuals hurt by this statement. And even Article 10 isn’t really about me. It’s an attempt to keep the evangelical flock in line.
According to Pew Research, white evangelical Protestant support for same sex marriage is growing, from 27% in 2016 to 35% this year. And the younger generation is much more likely to support same sex marriage than older generations, though support is growing in every age cohort.
This doubling down on a culture war issue is likely to backfire. The CBMW met last Friday, the same day President Trump was pardoning a racist sheriff in Arizona who tortured prisoners and a hurricane was starting to flood the 4th largest city in America. This focus on who is in and who is out of the Christian community instead of living the good news to the sick, downtrodden, hungry and thirsty, and those in prison has led many to leave the church for good.
The loving God that I believe in made me just the way I am. He filled me with desires for love and connection, some of which can come from friendship, and some of which can come only from a romantic relationship with a person to whom I’m wildly attracted, and who wants to be with me the way I want to be with him. If I believe that God is truly loving, I have to believe that he did make me exactly as I am, and I need to continue pursuing patience, kindness, humility, and the many other virtues of love in the way that best leads me towards these things. That way is love. So I will pursue love until I no longer can.
Two years ago I wrote about how I changed my mind about same sex relationships, and it was thinking about my friend David that began the change in my heart. In that post I wrote that I would be following it up with some posts about the Bible passages that are usually used to condemn homosexuality. I finally have one of those posts nearly finished so that should be up in the near future. But before I get into abstract theological debates, I wanted to highlight the very real human element.
Next is a piece about a Christian alternative rock band named The Violet Burning. Michial Farmer, a fellow alum from the same Bible college I attended (though we didn’t actually overlap), has been writing a series of primers on bands and artists in the 90s Christian alternative rock scene. I was in high school and college during the 90s and these were some of the bands that meant the most to me in those years. Farmer has been doing a meticulous job in listing, ranking, and commenting on the important albums from these bands; all of the entries are well worth a read if you know these bands or if by some chance would like to know them now.
I want to highlight this entry on The Violet Burning because their music intersects with some of my personal history with how I met my wife. I met her on an online message board that discussed Christian alternative music, and my very first post on that message board involved TVB’s song “Ilaria.” Farmer says about the song that “Despite the hermeneutic gymnastics of some of Pritzl’s more pious fans, it’s hard to hear “Ilaria” as about anything other than sex,” and sure enough, that’s what my first post on the message board argued as well: “I myself have had Plastic and Elastic since it came out in late 98 and, to be honest, I’ve always thought the song was about sex.” She noticed my post.
We got married a little over three years after that initial post, and we ended up including one of The Violet Burning’s more worship-y songs in our wedding ceremony. My wife’s older brothers played and sang a deeply meaningful version of “I Remember” during communion. (While I’m mentioning our wedding music, I would be remiss not to share David’s version of The Magnetic Fields’s “It’s Only Time”—it’s so beautiful.)
The last piece I want to share is about home health care workers by Sarah Jaffe. I’ve written a number of short snapshots I’ve called “Hospital Stories” about the year I worked taking care of difficult patients in a hospital as a constant observer. This particular piece of journalism follows the career of June Barrett who has worked in Florida as a home care worker since 2003, not long after she immigrated to the United States from Jamaica. It’s a hard, demanding job, but it doesn’t pay very well. I remember well that I didn’t make a whole lot more than minimum wage for my hospital job either. It’s especially relevant now with the current health care bills in Congress and the potential for Medicaid cuts. As the article points out, under the Affordable Care Act,
The expansion of Medicaid, which took effect in 2014, meant more funding for home care and more jobs for care workers. The bill also expanded healthcare for the workers themselves – Barrett had never had chicken pox as a child, and when she contracted it as an adult from a client with shingles, it aggravated her asthma.
The whole piece is worth reading to think about the value we put on the hard and sometimes menial work of taking care of sick people in their homes.
I might try this link format again if there is remotely any interest in it.
Yet again I’ve written a short piece over at the Rock & Sling blog about sleep patterns and adapting as a parent. Each kid is different and unique, and the circumstances change and development occurs so rapidly: I have to be ready for anything. I can never think I have it all figured out as a parent.
As I say in the essay, my wife reminds me again and again that “this too shall pass.” The evergreen saying comes from Abraham Lincoln, who was passing along ancient wisdom.
It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! — how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.”
No matter who you support in this 2016 election, there’s one thing everyone can agree on: Hillary Clinton is not very authentic. Her every move is focus-group-tested and she’ll say just about anything to get the power she’s always craved. We all know it.
Back in the 1990’s while I was in high school and college, I hardly followed politics at all. I was a Republican, of course. Everyone I knew was a Republican. I remember in 1992, when Bill Clinton won the first time, my changing voice cracking as I told my high school friends the results of the electoral college. One of my friends listened to Rush Limbaugh, and I remember how he would refer to Clinton as Slick Willy. Although I didn’t really follow the issues, I knew that Clinton was doing things I disagreed with and that the Democrats were despicable. My first vote for president was for a doomed Bob Dole in 1996 when I sent in my absentee ballot back home from my dorm room. Looking down the ticket, I didn’t know about any of the other candidates on the ballot, so I voted for all the Republicans.
As little as I knew of politics at the time, I did know this: I didn’t trust those Clintons, either of them.
So a few years later when Hillary decided to run for the open Senate seat in New York for the 2000 election, I agreed with those who thought it was rank opportunism. She and Bill bought a house in Chappaqua, and she engaged on her famous listening tour. But one detail of her pandering stood out to me: in June 1999, a month before she formally announced her candidacy, she put on a Yankees cap.
The problem with putting on a Yankees cap is that everyone knew that she, a native of Illinois, was a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan. Switching allegiance for the sole purpose of trying to win an election was clear evidence she was a faker. Rooting for a sports team, especially the local team from childhood, is a part one’s identity. To suddenly cheer for another team showed how inauthentic she really was. Oh sure, she tried to tell Katie Couric in an interview that she could be both: “I am a Cubs fan,” Clinton said. “But I needed an American League team…so as a young girl, I became very interested and enamored of the Yankees.” The front page of the Style section of the Washington Postnoted that “a sleepy-eyed nation collectively hurled,” at the obvious lie. No one bought it. And neither did I.
I knew Hillary Clinton was a fraud. She didn’t have any core beliefs. She would say whatever it took to win the election in New York. Her newfound love of the Yankees was one more piece of evidence that confirmed my thinking.
But what if I was wrong? I didn’t consider the possibility at the time. I didn’t consider it eight years later during the 2008 Democratic primary when I supported Barack Obama. Even though I had become a Democrat in the intervening years, I still didn’t trust Clinton. (The story of my switch from Republican to Democrat will have to wait for another day.)
I found out recently that I have been wrong all these years. Hillary Clinton genuinely did like the Cubs and the Yankees growing up. Clinton’s love for baseball and her lifelong Yankee fandom were documented in two Washington Post articles, in the same Style section, years before she even thought of running for the New York Senate seat, left open by a retiring Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
The first article, published right before she became First Lady in January of 1993, showed how she practiced with her dad and learned to hit a curveball as well as this key detail from a childhood friend: “‘We used to sit on the front porch and solve the world’s problems,’ said Rick Ricketts, her neighbor and friend since they were 8. ‘She also knew all the players and stats, batting averages—Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle—everything about baseball.’” Maris and Mantle, known as the M&M boys, were Hall of Famers who played for the Yankees during the years of Clinton’s childhood. In the ’61 season, when Clinton would have been 13, they both chased the single season home run record held by Babe Ruth with Maris eventually breaking the record on the last day of the season.
The second article was published the following year when the Ken Burns documentary about baseball came out. Burns admired Clinton’s swing of the bat when he asked,
“‘That was a great swing,’ Burns told her. ‘Did you get some batting practice before the screening, just to warm up?’ Mrs. Clinton, who as a kid was a ‘big-time’ fan of the Chicago Cubs and New York Yankees and ‘understudied’ Ernie Banks and Mickey Mantle, smiled.”
Banks played for the Cubs, and Mantle, of course, played for the Yankees. Both started their major league careers for their respective teams in the early 50s, when Clinton was a young child.
So all this time Hillary Clinton had been telling the truth about the Cubs and Yankees. The issue could have been easily cleared up in 1999, but it wasn’t. Instead, a narrative about her cravenness took hold and persisted in my mind until a few months ago. I’m sure I’m not alone.
This whole incident is a perfect example of my own confirmation bias. One psychologist defines it like this: “Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand.” I already knew Hillary Clinton was untrustworthy, so when this piece of evidence about her posing as a Yankees fan in 1999 came to light, it confirmed what I already knew.
Even if it had been true, claiming to like the local sports team is obviously a venial sin. But in my mind it represented a core truth about her. My entire conception of her was informed by this anecdote; it stood for something much larger. Believing such a falsehood tainted how I perceived Clinton for years. It was impossible not to see her as a calculating panderer who would do anything to get elected.
During the primaries of the 2016 presidential campaign, I tried to take an open-minded look at all of the candidates, including Hillary Clinton. But it was still hard to trust her. As I learned more about her, my perspective on her slowly shifted, until I now find myself nearly 180 degrees from my college self. My former self would have been shocked and incredulous to learn that factcheckers rated her one of the most truthful candidates.
So if I could be wrong for so many years on such a little matter that affected how I saw a prominent politician, what else could I be wrong about?
In the end, putting on a Yankees cap was a problem for Clinton, but not only because it falsely confirmed the narrative that she was a fraud. It was a problem because the Yankees aren’t the only baseball team in New York. Fans of the Mets had reason to be mad at her.
(I learned the truth about Clinton and the Yankees from Kevin Drum and Bob Somerby.)
Their main target of criticism is Jim Wallis of Sojourners because he has accepted money from George Soros, a liberal philanthropist. Multiple paragraphs denounce the nefarious Soro, all of them filled with links about the many ways he is undermining their conception of America. Wallis is presented as a stooge of the supposedly anti-Christian Soros, as are any other progressives who might agree with their political ideas about immigration reform or other social justice issues.
So who is the American Association of Evangelicals? They describe themselves this way: “Speaking truth to power, more than 100 evangelical and Catholic leaders urge Progressive “faith” groups to turn away from the liberal political funding and agenda that demoralizes and weakens the poor, the family, the Church and the nation.” I like the way they put “faith” in scare quotes in order to delegitimize progressive Christians. That’s what true friends do. I can tell that they’re really sincere when they say that “most believers mean well,” except they can’t accept that the faith of progressive Christians might lead towards a more liberal political agenda. So they can’t call it faith. It has to be placed in scare quotes.
I suspect, for a few reasons, that the author of the letter is Kelly Monroe Kullberg, founder of The Veritas Forum at Harvard. She is first on the list of signees. She is listed as the contact person for interviews. Because of those first two clues, I searched for more information about her and came across a guest blog post she had written against immigration reform in 2013. The writing style of that blog post has some similarities to the Open Letter¹. Also, just as the Open Letter does, her blog post from 2013 takes aim against Jim Wallis and George Soros for their involvement in organizing evangelicals for immigration reform. The same two targets for the Open Letter and the blog post from three years ago seems more than coincidental. She has it in for these two.
Of the signatories to the Open Letter, I recognized a few names: Eric Metaxas (author of a popular biography of Deitrich Bonhoeffer), Wayne Grudem (an evangelical theologian who has written a widely used Systematic Theology textbook, one that I used in some of my Bible classes in college), David Barton (a pseudo–historian), and John Morris (president emeritus of the Institute of Creation Research, a young earth creationist organization). Metaxas and Grudem have published articles urging their fellow Christians to vote for Donald Trump in November, claiming that it is the Christian thing to do. (Many other Christians, in turn, have writtenstronglywordedrebuttalsto Grudem.) [edited to add: In light of further revelations of ugly things Trump has said about women, Grudem has retracted his earlier statement of support. In his new statement, he condemns Trump and Clinton. He states that he refuses to vote for Clinton, but leaves open the possibility of still voting for Trump. His earlier article called “Why Voting for Donald Trump is a Morally Good Choice” is still available in archived form.][Another edit: Grudem is back to arguing that voting for Trump is necessary because of his policies.]
The letter has attracted an interesting cross section of evangelicalism. Of the remaining names I didn’t know on sight, I did recognize some of the organizations they were affiliated with: the executive director of Precept Ministries, the president of the American Family Association, the founder and president of Charisma Media, etc. There are also pastors, educators, elected officials, and other ministry leaders on the extensive list of 100. As of this writing, more than 800 people have added their signatures to the letter.
The letter claims that “We are not here endorsing or denouncing a political candidate but reminding you of basic Christian morality,” but it’s a little hard to believe (though I understand that they have to say that for legal purposes). For one thing, this letter was published on September 27, 2016, which is 43 days before the presidential election. Two prominent signers are vocal Trump supporters. Soon after this statement about not endorsing or denouncing candidates, the letter has a list of ten “consequences of Progressive political activism over the past eight years.” Hmm, I wonder who has been in office for the past eight years? Right after the list of consequences, most of them distortions or falsehoods, they ask “why would any religious leader ask Christians to embrace a Progressive political agenda that is clearly anti-Christian?” Immediately following this incendiary question, the letter impugns Hillary Clinton, who happens to be a political candidate at the moment. Here’s what the letter says about Hillary Clinton in its entirety.
“When Hillary Clinton stated during a 2015 speech at the Women in the World Summit that religious beliefs “have to be changed,” she was openly declaring war on Christian believers and the Church. And now Progressives claim that supporting such a view is the Christian thing to do? This is spiritual abuse of the family, the Church and the nation.”
There is a link to her speech, or rather a link to a short clip from the speech. I recognized this. I came across this same edited clip of her speech on Facebook a while back from a linked article that was even more wild-eyed and conspiratorial. It was written by Theodore Shoebat, who calls himself a “proud fascist,” and supports having the government execute gay people, and says that women who have abortions should be put before a firing squad. In his article, Shoebat claimed that “Hilary [sic] Clinton just said that Christians must deny their Faith through the enforcement of laws.” Then he misquotes her: “Notice that she says that the change of Christian beliefs is the ‘unfinished business of the 21st century,’ which means she wants to persecute Christians.” He caps it all off by calling her a “witch.”
Although the American Association of Evangelicals version is slightly more timid than Shoebat’s, they are both saying essentially the same thing. And they are completely distorting Hillary Clinton’s words and their meaning in order to make it falsely look like she is against Christian belief. They are bearing false witness. Let me show why.
Here is the clip of the speech.
And here’s the transcript provided on the YouTube video:
“Far too many women are denied access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth, and laws don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. Rights have to exist in practice — not just on paper. Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
The clip was uploaded by a conservative talk radio program called The Joe Walsh Show. Joe Walsh was a one term U.S. Representative from Illinois who was elected in the 2010 midterm Tea Party wave. He lost in 2012 to Tammy Duckworth, and soon afterwards started his radio program.
So is Hillary Clinton “openly declaring war on Christian believers and the Church” with these words as the Open Letter and Theodore Shoebat would have you believe? The answer is no.
The reason I know this is because the clip has been taken out of context. Anyone who has learned the fundamentals of biblical exegesis knows the importance of considering context rather than trying to interpret a statement in isolation. (Wayne Grudem, the systematic theologian who signed the Open Letter, points out that “the place of the statement in context” is one of four sources for interpreting biblical passages in a chapter he has written on Bible Interpretation.)
Clinton is not speaking about America or American laws. In this quote, she is actually talking about the worldwide maternal mortality rate, not that you would know that because the edited clip begins partway through a sentence and omits the first words. And the edited clip has had a much greater impact, having been viewed more than 600,000 times compared to the full speech, which has only been viewed slightly more than 150,000 times. (The edited clip, or a brief summary with the key words “religious beliefs have to be changed,” has made the rounds of Christian websites and conservative media sites. A partial list of Christian sites: LifeNews, CharismaNews, ChristianDaily, and Now the End Begins. A partial list of conservative media sites: The Blaze, National Review, The Daily Caller, and Fox Nation. Interestingly, the last two include the video of the entire speech, but only highlight the same portion about “religious beliefs have to be changed” as those who include the edited version.)
Here is the same quote with the fuller context. I’m going to provide more than the beginning of the sentence that was cut, going back even farther so that there can be no mistake what she is talking about. (Begin the video at 7:40)
“But the data leads to a second conclusion that despite all this progress, we’re just not there yet.
Yes, we’ve nearly closed the global gender gap in primary school, but secondary school remains out of reach for so many girls around the world.
Yes, we’ve increased the number of countries prohibiting domestic violence, but still more than half the nations in the world have no such laws on the books and an estimated one in three women still experience violence.
Yes, we’ve cut the maternal mortality rate in half, but far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth. All the laws we’ve passed don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. Rights have to exist in practice — not just on paper. Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed.”
I’ve provided the larger context so it is clear that when Clinton says, “far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth,” she is talking about the maternal mortality rate in the developing world. We can know this because of context and because of the facts about maternal mortality. First, she is giving the keynote address at the Women in the World conference. Of course her remarks are going to be global in nature. Second, the context of the first two examples in this list of three areas where more progress needs to be made—the gender gap in education and domestic violence—makes clear that she is referring to areas other than America (“global gender gap,” “girls around the world,” “number of countries,” and “half the nations in the world.”). And third, according to the World Health Organization, “99% of all maternal deaths occur in developing countries.” (All quotes from the World Health Organization come from their fact sheet on maternal mortality published in November 2015.)
So when Clinton says that “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed,” in order to further cut the maternal mortality rate, she means in other countries, specifically in the developing world. So what are the challenges with cutting the maternal mortality rate in these countries? Though the maternal mortality rate has been nearly cut in half in the past 25 years, as Clinton said, still around 300,000 women die each year for preventable reasons associated with pregnancy or childbirth. According to the WHO, greater than 50% of the deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa and nearly a third in South Asia.
Here are the reasons given by the World Health Organization:
“The major complications that account for nearly 75% of all maternal deaths are:
severe bleeding (mostly bleeding after childbirth)
infections (usually after childbirth)
high blood pressure during pregnancy (pre-eclampsia and eclampsia)
complications from delivery
unsafe abortion.
The remainder are caused by or associated with diseases such as malaria, and AIDS during pregnancy.”
The first four reasons the WHO lists require what Clinton said in the first part of her statement: “access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth.” So that leaves the issues of unsafe abortion and the prevention of the spread of HIV/AIDS.
According to WHO, “To avoid maternal deaths, it is also vital to prevent unwanted and too-early pregnancies. All women, including adolescents, need access to contraception, safe abortion services to the full extent of the law, and quality post-abortion care.”
There are two components here. First, there needs to be access to contraception. One reason is to “prevent unwanted and too-early pregnancies.” The other reason is to prevent the spread of AIDS. Consistent and proper condom use helps reduce the spread of STDs, and HIV/AIDS specifically. So widespread access to contraception would help reduce the maternal mortality rate by decreasing unsafe abortions and by helping curb the spread of AIDS.
One of the barriers to widespread access to contraception, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, is the belief that contraception is immoral. I think it is most likely that Clinton’s comment that “cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed” has to do with the use of contraception. If people changed their minds about contraceptives, then the maternal mortality rate would go down. Here is the only place where Clinton could be urging Christians to change their beliefs. The Catholic church still forbids the use of any contraceptives with the exception of natural family planning. However, while that is the official position of the church hierarchy, the vast majority of Catholics worldwide (78%) do not find contraceptives morally wrong. But Catholics in sub-Saharan Africa do agree with their church’s position on contraceptives at a higher percentage. I find the idea that this is Clinton waging war against Christians and their beliefs hard to take seriously when American Catholics also overwhelmingly do not think that contraceptive use is immoral.
The second component is “safe abortion services to the full extent of the law, and quality post-abortion care.” To a pro-life audience, which the AAE Open Letter clearly addresses, this is anathema, but please hear out my reasoning. Most countries in sub-Saharan Africa restrict abortion much more than in the United States. Only two countries, South Africa and Mozambique, allow abortion for any reason with gestational limits, the same as the U.S. All of the other countries restrict abortion to save the life of the mother or they ban it outright. The story is similar in the countries of South Asia. So between the countries of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, most of them restrict abortion heavily or completely ban it. The WHO and Hillary Clinton are calling for the laws in these countries that do allow some abortions in some cases to be enforced and for those abortions to be safe. How could it be the pro-life position to allow a woman who has a legal abortion to die from inadequate medical care during and after the abortion? These women need good and safe reproductive care—whether they choose an abortion or not—during pregnancy and afterwards.
So while pro-life Christians can certainly disagree with Hillary Clinton’s positions on abortion, Clinton’s comments in this speech are about following existing laws in other countries and saving the lives of women. She is not calling on Christians to change their beliefs on abortion or any other article of faith, aside from accepting the use of contraception.
So not only did the letter writers take Clinton’s words out of context to distort their meaning, they also charged that she is “openly declaring war on Christian believers and the Church.” This accusation seems to presume that Clinton herself is not a Christian. That is not true. Clinton is a Christian, and though she is fairly private about her faith, it has never been a secret. They are again bearing false witness.
So here’s my answer to the Open Letter calling me to repent:
I do have reason to repent. I need to repent of my selfishness and idleness. For harsh words spoken. My indifference to suffering. And my envy of others.
But I will not repent supporting liberal political policies that feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, and visit those in prison.
And I will not repent supporting a politician who works towards closing the global gender gap in education, prohibiting domestic violence, and cutting the maternal mortality rate.
Footnote
¹In her blog post, she also used a phrase that stood out to me when she called an evangelical group in favor of immigration reform “an ad hoc group.” The Open Letter also calls themselves “an ad hoc fellowship of evangelical, Catholic and Orthodox believers.” In 2013, in response to the evangelicals in favor of immigration reform, Kullberg formed “Evangelicals for Biblical Immigration (EBI) [which] is an ad hoc movement,” and more recently The America Conservancy, whose motto is “For America’s renewal. Because of love.” The line “because of love” can also be found on the Open Letter just after the author describes them as an ad hoc group, “We stand — because of love.”
I wrote another short piece for the Rock & Sling blog for their Remembered Sounds series. It’s about the first cassette tape I ever purchased: Michael W. Smith’s Go West Young Man. The name Remembered Sounds comes from a line in a Wallace Stevens poem: “The self is a cloister full of remembered sounds.” I like that, and I like it as a unifying theme for significant music in my life. A lot of my memories are bound up with music in a sort of soundtrack to my life.
At the end of the essay, itself a meditation on music and faith in my life, I listed five spiritual songs I listen to now. Whereas I used to expect explicit answers and easy messages, now I live with questions and doubt. I plan to write about these songs in the future, but I’ll put them down here so they can provide a soundtrack to the essay.
A few different times I’ve included a song with a post if it happened to be on topic, but for this post I want to share a few songs that I’ve been listening to a lot recently. All of them happen to be covers.
Cover songs are interesting when done well. They transform a song to a new context, give it a new shape and sound, and sometimes resuscitate life into it. But what I find most interesting is that no matter how transformed a song is by a cover version, there is still some core identity that remains. There’s a kernel of the song that the listener can recognize even when it changes clothes, speeds up, slows down, or completely metamorphosizes.
I’m thinking about this in part because my high school class’s 20th reunion is next month, and I’m not able to get back for it. I haven’t kept up with many of my classmates, and some I haven’t seen since graduation. I feel like I’ve changed a lot in the intervening years, but that there is something still distinctly me that is the same. I’m different versions of the same song.
I like to think of it in slightly different terms, something more like we go from one story to another story. We tell ourselves the story of our lives, with ourselves as the main characters. Sometimes it’s one long continuous narrative. But sometimes we revise and start a new story. We’re set free to find a new illusion.
The next song is Sturgill Simpson’s cover of “The Promise” by When In Rome. Mostly this is an excuse to share something from Simpson’s album Metamodern Sounds in Country Music which I recently discovered and have been listening to a bunch. When I heard this song I didn’t immediately know that it was a cover, but something about it sounded familiar. It felt like I should know it, though when I looked up the original, I couldn’t say for certain that I had known it (though I had definitely heard it before during the ending of Napoleon Dynamite). It’s a classic example of a one hit wonder.
Simpson turns what was originally a new wave synthpop driving melody into a plaintive cry. A gentle piano solo in the original becomes a soulful guitar in the cover. It’s a tremendous transformation all around. Though they are worlds apart, I really like both versions. And I like the song because I relate to the confession in the chorus of the speaker’s inability to communicate fully and completely what he desires: “I’m sorry, but I’m just thinking of the right words to say / I know they don’t sound the way I planned them to be.” Then, despite the shortcomings of the speaker, he overpromises that he will overcome everything to get his lover to fall for him. The grandiose feelings are over the top, but that’s what love can feel like sometimes.
The last cover is divisive. Max Richter took it upon himself to “recompose” one of the most famous pieces in classical music: Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. He thought it had become too familiar, almost like elevator music. So he wanted to “reclaim the piece, to fall in love with it again.”
And here are the originals if you want to compare.
The Velvet Underground “I’m Set Free”
When In Rome “The Promise”
“Spring” from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (The selection I picked featuring Anne Sophie Mutter doesn’t let me embed the video, so you’ll have to click on the link to hear/watch it.)
I wrote another piece for the Rock & Sling blog called “Expectations,” about the birth of our third child. He was nearly born at home, on the side of the road, or in the parking lot outside the Emergency Room. It was exciting and scary!
A year ago I began thinking about modern scholarship of the Bible, and how I had never seriously considered it. Up until then, whenever I cracked open the Good Book, I took everything at face value. I accepted whatever my evangelical Christian tradition held regarding the authorship or historicity of any given passage. Although I knew Christians who disagreed on specific theological issues (e.g. the role of free will, how to interpret the book of Revelation, what type of baptism should be used, the role of women, etc.) all of us agreed on certain bedrock assumptions including the authorship of the Torah or the factual nature of the historical books of the Old Testament. God inspired a small collection of men to write down these books, and they were without error.
Though I grew up reading the Bible as literally and factually true in all points, I began this blogdetailing how I changed my mind about the issue of creation and evolution. I learned what modern science had to say about origins and I adjusted my view of Genesis. Mostly that was a matter of reconciling science and faith, seeing them as compatible rather than opposed, though it also concerned the interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis (and other passages, too, but especially those ones). I first encountered scholars who explained that it was possible to interpret the days of Genesis as long periods of time. They allowed for an ancient universe, though they still rejected evolution, presumably because it meant that humans could not be sufficiently distinct from animals and thus couldn’t truly be in the image of God. Later I read Christians who accepted evolution and had synthesized views of science and the Bible.
Despite changing my views on Genesis and the creation account, I still never considered much of modern biblical scholarship. All I had been exposed to were those who would defend against the attacks of modernism that had tried to debunk the traditional readings of scripture. So while at Bible college I had learned about the documentary hypothesis concerning the Torah—sometimes referred to as the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis for its originators or other times referred to as JEDP for the sources that comprise the Torah (i.e. Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly)—I basically learned that it was an evil theory aimed at undermining belief in the Bible. We never spent time actually trying to learn why anyone would have come up with the theory in the first place.
So in a post I wrote more than a year ago, I explained that I wanted to be a modern day David Lurie, a character in a Chaim Potok novel who wrestles with modern scholarship on the Bible even as it shakes his faith. I began reading James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible to get a sense of what modern scholarship has to say about the Bible. It’s been eye-opening. I’m now more than halfway through the book, taking it real slow. It’s overwhelming at times to have the rug pulled out from under me. I have to sit on the floor for a while and think about it, then get back up, only to have it happen again with each new chapter I read. What follows are some of my thoughts so far, with some examples. I wrote portions of this post immediately after reading passages in Kugel so some of this records my real-time reactions to the book in an almost live-blog format.
Kugel’s book is very unsettling. Each new chapter spends some time looking at a passage first from the ancient interpreters’ viewpoint, and it feels mostly familiar. Much of my evangelical fundamentalist understanding is roughly the same on these points. I can at least see the connection from what they thought to the way I was taught. But then comes the modern scholarship on the passage. And it’s rationalist, and makes the passage come apart and mean something different than I ever thought.
To illustrate how Kugel organizes his chapters, let me give an extended example from the book on a passage that I had never really thought much about before. In Genesis 34 we get the story of Dinah, the lone daughter of Jacob amidst the 12 sons. This is the story known as “the rape of Dinah.” It comes after Jacob flees his uncle Laban with his wives, children, and livestock. Jacob wrestles with God and has his name changed to Israel. Then he meets up with his brother Esau who he had swindled out of blessing and birthright years earlier. Now Jacob and his household settle in the land of Canaan, outside the city of Shechem. A man from the city who also is named Shechem (same as the city) sees Dinah and rapes her. He falls in love with her and wants to marry her. Jacob and his sons aren’t too happy about this, but they agree to the marriage on one condition: Shechem, his father Hamor, and all the other men must get circumcised. They undergo the knife, and while they are recovering, two of Dinah’s brothers, Simeon and Levi, slaughter all the convalescing men with swords. It’s all pretty gruesome.
Kugel presents the various lines of thinking by the ancient interpreters on this passage. First, what is the moral of the story? At first glance, it doesn’t appear to have one. But looking closer, they were able to point to the statement in verse 7: “such a thing must not be done.” In context, it might be the implied response the brothers had upon hearing about what happened to Dinah. On the other hand, this might be the voice of the narrator of the story, which would in fact be God who divinely inspired the writing of the text. But if the point of the story is the retaliation for Dinah’s lost honor, why give the story a whole chapter? The ancients were bothered by the apparent lie that the brothers tell when agreeing to the marriage. Simeon and Levi kill the Shechemites even though they abided by their side of the agreement.
Some interpreters said the real reason for the story was the problem of intermarriage. Indeed, that was a problem for Israel’s sons for generations, including the troubling account in the book of Ezra where the men are commanded to divorce foreign wives, which they do. So the brothers did not lie when they said that the marriage was a disgrace and should not take place, and their scheme to slaughter the Shechemites was justified. Some other interpreters thought perhaps the brothers were divided on the idea of Dinah’s marriage to Shechem. Perhaps ten of them thought intermarriage would be okay if they were circumcised, but Simeon and Levi disagreed. So there was no lie because the offer was sincere if not unanimous.
When modern scholars approach the stories of Genesis, they often are looking for an etiological message (a just-so story that explains how something became the way it is). But there doesn’t appear to be anything that the Dinah story explains. For one thing, Dinah completely disappears from the biblical record. The entire incident is only referred to once more (apparently) when Jacob is dying and he gathers his sons together to give them blessings. Simeon and Levi get left out of the blessings because of their violent actions against the Shechemites.
It’s all rather strange for a few reasons. Though Simeon and Levi apparently slaughter all of the Shechemite men in Genesis 34, Jacob himself seems to refer to having conquered Shechem “with my sword and with my bow” (Genesis 48:22). The city of Shechem appears again in the book of Joshua and is apparently re-populated, but there is no reference to what had happened before. Then in Judges 9 there is another reference to a guy named Shechem who lives in the city of Shechem whose father’s name is Hamor, just like in the story back in Genesis 34. Quite the coincidence.
Kugel points out that perhaps there is something that the Dinah story might explain. Perhaps it makes sense of the blessing that Simeon and Levi do not get from their father Jacob in Genesis 49. But a careful reader will note that the curse the brothers receive does not in fact have much connection to the story of the rape and the subsequent slaughter of an entire city. Some modern interpreters conjecture that the story happened at some other time (perhaps the time of the Judges) and has been inserted and retrofitted into the Genesis account to make sense of the fate of Simeon and Levi. So by this theory, Jacob never even had a daughter named Dinah. She was added to the text later with a story of her lost honor in order to make sense of the two brothers who were cursed.
This chapter on Dinah kind of blew my mind. The more I thought about the passage, the less it made sense with a straight forward traditional reading. I no longer know what to do with it. I’m not sure I accept all of the theories of the modern scholars, but I can’t completely trust the ancient interpreters either at this point. It’s a quandary.
Kugel points out many other compelling reasons to take modern scholarship seriously on matters of authorship and sources when it comes to interpreting Genesis. Many of the stories in the primeval era are etiological (again, an explanatory story for why things are the way they are), so the story of Cain and Abel might be an explanation about the Kenites, nomadic neighbors of Israel or the story of the Tower of Babel might be an explanation about the spread of language and the evils of Babylon’s religion and culture.
So if things aren’t what I thought, like Adam and Eve are not literal people but types, or that the Flood story comes from ancient Mesopotamian sources, what am I left with? A belief that God still exists and reveals himself to humanity. The Biblical accounts are human attempts to chronicle those revelations. But will even this understanding stand up to scrutiny?
The primeval literature (Genesis chapters 1-11) seems less vital, somehow, that it be historically true. It’s mythic and explanatory, an attempt to understand the world and how it got to be the way it is. When it comes to Abraham, it seems more important that he be a real person with a real relationship with God. Scholarship has seesawed on the question of Abraham’s actual existence. But it seems plausible that he was a real man. As I was about to read about the covenant and I was almost scared. After I finished and read how cutting up animals was common practice for covenants, I was relieved that the Abraham story makes sense. Phew. It could be true.
The next chapter was very thought-provoking. Kugel pointed out that there are two very different portrayals of God in the OT. At times he is anthropomorphic, appearing as an angel or man, and does not seem omnipresent or omniscient. The people he appears to seem to “be in a fog” until they realize (if they do) and then they fall prostrate. It happens to Joshua, Samson’s parents, and even to Abraham. It’s hard to mesh this view of God with the more traditional view of an incorporeal, omniscient, etc. being. But the passages that portray God this way seem to be real experiences with the divine. Was it a matter of perception for these people in the OT?
Reading this book makes me feel like I’ve jumped off a cliff and I don’t know where I’ll land. Will it be a 2 foot drop or a 2,000 foot freefall? Will I get battered and bruised on the way down? Will I even land anywhere? There’s no going back. I want to know the truth and face modern scholarship squarely in the face and take it seriously. I don’t want to rest on what I was always taught and accept it blindly. I want the faith I retain to be my own. But I’m worried what this will do to my faith.
Is it possible for me to lose faith? Is there a point at which I could learn something that would make me give up on the Bible? I don’t know. I don’t think I would have been able to say that when I was younger. I was confident, even if I didn’t know everything. I had unshakeable faith. Now all I know is that I have more questions and doubts than ever. But that’s not to say that I’ve given up.
It’s quite a rollercoaster to think through all of these interpretations. While I feel most familiar with the ancient interpreters, even their suppositions are often about problems I never saw in the text. It reminds me of the Talmudic scholars in a Potok novel as they tease out a passage and look at it from all angles. But then the modern scholars come at it and it seems like they’re trying to debunk everything. Take God out of it. Make it entirely a human document. And I don’t know what to do with that. It’s so foreign to me to look at the Bible that way.
A few months into my reading of Kugel I started reading Robert Alter’s Ancient Israel, a translation of Joshua, Judges, the books of Samuel and Kings, with extensive commentary, especially on translation. I wanted to read this book after seeing the smaller version that focused solely on the life of David. Alter’s translations have been praised for their poetic plainness and fidelity to the original Hebrew. I read the first chapter of Joshua, which isn’t a book that holds a lot of interest for me. When I was younger the stories of the taking of the promised land seemed heroic and adventurous, but now they seem a bit more horrific.
What struck me was the literary composition of the first chapter. It’s basically four speeches with a few words in between as connective tissue. First God speaks to Joshua, then Joshua speaks to the overseers, then to the trans-Jordan tribes, and lastly those tribes reply to him. In their reply, they say the exact same phrase (“Be strong and stalwart”) to Joshua that God says to him twice earlier in the chapter. What are the odds? It seems clearly to be a literary element to repeat the same exhortation to the new leader, showing that he is in fact the new leader now that Moses is dead.
A little later, after the famous siege and capture of Jericho and the subsequent treaty with the scared Gibeonites, the king of Jerusalem organizes 5 other kings against those Gibeonites in chapter 10. Joshua and the Israelite army come to the rescue, as per the treaty agreement. They defeat the armies, kill the kings, and then proceed to take city after city. Curiously, they do not take Jerusalem, despite having killed its king and taken every other city of the instigators. Jerusalem, of course, was not conquered until the time of David two centuries later. Why is Jerusalem left out? Is it possible that the entire account is not exactly factual?
Based on his introduction and the notes, Alter is definitely in the modern scholars camp. I like reading his translation because it uses new rhythms and vocabulary to get me out of any ruts I get into when I read a familiar translation. Sometimes my eyes glaze over as I’m reading the NIV or ESV. I feel like I’m ten years old and back in Sunday School. Alter helps get me out of that and see it anew. But with the fresh eyes is a fresh perspective that pulls bricks out of my biblical foundation.
So a few days ago I started another book (someday I’ll finish one of these books) called Inspiration and Incarnation by Peter Enns that gives me some hope that I won’t have to fall off a cliff, or at least not so far down. Maybe some of my biblical foundation can be salvaged. He takes modern scholarship seriously while still taking the Bible seriously. His model for the Bible is incarnational, so just as Jesus is fully God and fully human, the Bible also is fully divine and fully human. Many of my previous assumptions about the Bible made me overlook its human dimension, overriding it in fact. The Bible had to be without any error straight from God or else it was a book like any other. But the evidence doesn’t support such a view. Instead, Enns argues that God speaks to humanity where they are, in their own language and culture, and even in multiple voices that don’t always agree.
So I’ve got more to chew on and consider. For now I’m stuck in the middle.
I discovered Mystery Science Theater 3000 at the right time. I was in junior high, and it hit the right funny sweet spot, weird and wacky and nerdy all at the same time, that made it irresistible to me. Plus, it came on right after American Gladiators on Saturday evening, so I didn’t have to miss beefed-up body builders smashing peons with foam pugil sticks. Win-win.
I loved many things about the show: the cheesy movies they skewered with hilarious one-liners and non sequiturs of course, but also the concept and characters. A mad scientist and his henchperson send a worker drone to outer space to see what the effect of bad movies will be on his psyche (it’s all explained in the theme song embedded above). The jumpsuited everyman creates some robots to keep himself company, and they riff on the bad movies together.
There was something about Joel, the guy in a jumpsuit with the bots, that endeared him to me. Maybe it was his sleepy eyes, or his laid back persona, or his seeming discomfort at being in front of the camera. I could relate to his awkwardness, but he seemed to take it all in stride. Whatever it was, I liked Joel. I liked him a lot.
And then suddenly, with no forewarning, he left the show in the middle of the fifth season. His character found a way to escape the Satellite of Love, and poof, no more Joel. He was replaced by another worker drone named Mike, but it wasn’t the same. After he left, I didn’t watch the show anymore, except reruns that starred Joel or, more likely, the beloved episodes I had taped to VHS. (In hindsight, my response was unfair to Mike. But, in my defense, I was a teenager at the time. I’ve been assured by a few trusted MSTies that the Mike seasons were also great.)
I wrote about it at the time in my journal in an over-the-top and melodramatic way with tons of references to the show, here reproduced exactly with a few comments sprinkled in (two things to note: for some reason I used to write in all caps, a weird stylistic choice, but it does convey the earnestness of my cri de coeur, though the journal entries before and after are also in all caps so that kind of diminishes the effect in context, and also Joel’s last episode, Mitchell, aired on 10/23/93).
10/24
IT’S TRUE. THE AWFUL RUMOR IS TRUE. WHEN I FIRST HEARD IT I THOUGHT “NO WAY,” AND I WENT INTO A STATE OF DENIAL. BUT NOW IT HAS COME TO PASS. THE PROPHECY OF DOOM AND UTTER MORONICY HAS COME TO PASS. JOEL IS GONE. HE LEFT. JUST LIKE THAT. GONE. IT WILL NEVER BE THE SAME WITHOUT HIM. SOME LOSER NAMED MIKE NELSON IS TAKING OVER. [Mike was the head writer on the show.] NO MATTER HOW FUNNY HE IS IT WILL NEVER BE THE SAME. JOEL, HOW COULD YOU? I WAS A MSTIE THROUGH AND THROUGH. I HAD MEMORIZED THE LOVE THEME THREE TIMES. I WAS THERE DURING CLASSICS SUCH AS THE SIDEHACKER AND CATALINA CAPER AND EEGAH AND DURING SHORTS LIKE HIRED AND JUNIOR RODEO DAREDEVILS AND THE PHANTOM CREEPS. WE LAUGHED TOGETHER, CRIED TOGETHER, PLAYED HIDE-AND-GO-SEEK WITH THE BOTS ON THE SATELLITE OF LOVE TOGETHER, ATE CHEESE BALLS TOGETHER , I COULD GO ON AND ON. YOU MEANT THE WORLD TO ME, I LOVED YOU LIKE A BROTHER AND NOW YOU GO AND TREAT ME LIKE THIS? [I wasn’t actually a creepy stalker; this is a paraphrase of lines from aforementioned MST3K classic “The Sidehacker.”] WHO’S GOING TO TAKE CARE OF GRETCHEN THE SLINKY? WHO’S GOING TO CARRY TOM? WHO’S GOING TO BE GYPSY’S BEST FRIEND? WHO’S GOING TO WASH THE WINDOWS DURING THE MOVIE? WHO’S GOING TO INITIATE HEALTH CARE REFORM? [It was 1993, and somehow I had absorbed something about what was in the political conversation of the day, though I didn’t know anything about health care reform or what I thought about it at the time. It was a joke, my own attempt at a non sequitur, which now that I’ve explained it, it’s not at all funny, if it ever was.] WHO’S ON FIRST? [The famous Abbott & Costello routine was also a favorite of mine.] JOEL, DON’T YOU SEE WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO ME? I THINK I’M GOING TO HAVE TO GET GAMERA [a kaiju turtle, sort of like a lovable Godzilla in shelled form] TO KNOCK SOME SENSE INTO YOU. YOU HAVE TO COME BACK. YOU JUST HAVE TO. YOU’RE FROM MINNESOTA, DOESN’T THAT MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU? [My parents are from Minnesota, and we traveled there every summer to see family. I was pulling out all the stops, even personal connections.] YOUR PLACE IS BETWEEN TOM AND CROW CRACKING QUIPS LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW. I BET YOUR SEAT IS STILL WARM. JOEL, I’M GOING TO LEAVE YOU WITH THE COLD TRUTH: A COW HAS FOUR STOMACHS.
P.S. MOUNTAIN CLIMBING. [A reference to the classic episode “Lost Continent,” though in that episode they said “rock climbing” over and over. Oops.]
I’ve been thinking about MST3K lately because Joel recently launched a Kickstarter to revive the show (it’s still ongoing, as of this writing, so if you’re a fan of the show and hadn’t heard yet, go ahead and contribute). I think it would be great if the show can continue with new characters filling the familiar roles having fun riffing on bad movies. A new generation could discover the joy it brought me, and the old fans could make more memories.
MST3K has a way of bringing people together; it’s not really a solitary experience, at least it wasn’t for me. Back in junior high when I first started watching it, I would trade all the best lines on Monday morning at school with a good friend who also liked the show. In college a friendship started my freshman year with another MSTie who had his own VHS tapes of episodes I hadn’t seen yet. We would get a whole group of friends together to watch the antics of Joel and the bots on a Friday night (it was at Bible college—there wasn’t a whole lot else happening on a Friday night in rural Georgia). Later, when I was in grad school, which was often an isolating and lonely experience, another friendship deepened over watching episodes of MST3K. That friend even made me copies of dozens of Joel episodes for me to take to North Dakota, where I started another grad program even though I knew no one there, so I wouldn’t be too lonely.
I hope it can continue to bring people together and make them laugh.
strangerextant 