"Secularists" bashing atheists

by David Heim

The claim is often made that media and intellectual elites in the U.S. are thoroughly secular and are uncomprehending when it comes to religion. How many times have you heard someone cite Peter Berger’s witticism “If India is the most religious country in the world, and Sweden the least religious, then America is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes”?

It’s a great line, but the reality is more complicated, both in the media and the university.

The evidence? The chilly reception secular opinion journals have given to Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion.

Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, dismisses arguments for God’s existence as “infantile” and “vacuous,” and he regards faith an evolutionary accident–“a misfiring of something useful”—that has caused more harm than good. He thinks atheism is the sign of a healthy mind. His book, which has been on the bestseller list for months, apparently taps into some widespread interest in expunging religion.

But Dawkins is severely pummeled for his views in the Atlantic, where novelist Marilynne Robinson skewers him for being stuck in Victorian-era science and for having a naïve confidence in evolutionary progress.

In the New York Review of Books H. Allen Orr, a biologist at the University of Rochester, notes that Dawkins never “squarely faces” Jewish or Christian theology and that his arguments resemble “those of any bright student who has thumbed through Bertrand Russell’s more popular books and who has, horrified, watched videos of holy rollers.” Neither Robinson nor Orr thinks Dawkins knows much about history or is any good at philosophical argument—or even at fair argument. New York Times reviewer Jim Holt isn’t quite as harsh, but he too points out Dawkins’s “scattershot reasoning” and “rhetorical excess.”

Media elites in the U.S. may not be demonstratively religious, but judging from these reviews they are not instinctively secular either. At least they exhibit a healthy skepticism about the world’s most famous champion of atheism.

Is blended worship possible?

by Debra Bendis

A comment that I overheard after worship Sunday made me wonder if my 350-member Midwestern small-town congregation is the last church still experiencing skirmishes over music styles. Have other churches broken through the contemporary/traditional impasse and come out of it with a music program of integrity characterized by a variety of styles? Or are most, like us, still floating in an unhappy purgatory between musical poles?

At our church, we offer a spare 8 a.m. service (spare in both attendance and in length), and a 10:30 a.m. “blended” service weekly, except for one Sunday a month, when that time slot is filled by a contemporary praise service. The 8 a.m. service has very little music. (That’s one solution to the music problems!) In my mind the blended service is, ideally, a mix of many genres, but in reality is strongly influenced by a music director who recycles a set of standard anthems, and tends towards old gospel hymns with lots of “cross references” and sentimental tunes. The contemporary group also likes salvific themes, but in their minds the tunes must come from Christian radio or cds.

As someone who helps lead music in both styles, I’ve been proud of laity-led efforts to add other types of music—musical numbers that don’t fit either stereotype. We have tried to introduce Taizé songs accompanied by guitar, global tunes sung a cappella, and John Bell-type refrains taught by a new girls’ choir.

There are signs that the congregation likes these additions, and that worshipers find the music balance satisfactory—many people attend both blended and contemporary services—and the contemporary worship too has been a compromise, trying duets without amps, or a women’s chorus on a hymn. Given these pluses, I’ve been glad for our new, if precarious, balance. So I was discouraged Sunday when two of the contemporary music singers turned to me and said: “Why do we call the 10:30 service blended? There’s no contemporary stuff in it at all—only traditional.”

Will a true “blend” ever succeed with worshipers? Can we develop a rich, participatory match of music and liturgy that engages us all? Can we jar those at the far extremes out of their bipolar view of church music and into a more eclectic but still worshipful mix of music? That’s been my goal, but on some days, I’m not sure we’ll succeed.

True blue blogger

by Richard A. Kauffman

Theolog readers might like to check out Warren Goldstein's relatively new blog. Goldstein is the chair of the history department at the University of Hartford. He's written an excellent book about baseball in American and a fine biography of William Sloane Coffin. Goldstein is committed to blogging about the liberal arts, liberal politics, liberal religion and, of course, baseball. His recent piece in defense of Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, will certainly kick up some dust.

U.S. Muslims and "terrorists"

by John Dart

I was surprised when California Senator Barbara Boxer, a liberal Democrat, rescinded an award she’d given to Basim Elkarra, executive director of the Sacramento chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). After awarding Elkarra with a “certificate of achievement” in November, Boxer announced that she’d “made a mistake.”

Apparently right-wing critics of CAIR maintained that no elected leader should have anything to do with the Washington, D.C.-based civil liberties organization. They contend that the council actively encourages terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. CAIR denies ties to any terrorist groups.

As the nation’s largest Muslim rights advocacy organization with 32 chapters, CAIR has criticized Israel’s military actions against Lebanon and its treatment of Palestinian civilians. Many Protestant and Catholic leaders conversant with Middle East issues have shared in that criticism.

But CAIR also condemns suicide bombers and radical terrorists in the Middle East who claim to speak for Islam. Some CAIR members visited the U.S. Holocaust Museum recently to signify the organization’s rebuke of Iran’s international conference denying the Nazi World War II atrocities.

When CAIR board chairman Parvez Ahmed wrote that Boxer’s pullback was contrary to her office’s previous positive interactions with CAIR, Boxer agreed to meet with CAIR on January 24. The two groups reported that they had resolved the rift. But the senator did not reinstate the award, saying that the Islamic group refused to label Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups. CAIR condemns all acts of terrorism no matter who the perpetrator is, said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR’s southern California chapter. The reluctance of U.S. Muslim groups to use only “terrorist” as a word to describe groups like Hamas appears to be one sticking point in the U.S. debate.

A similar brouhaha ensued last fall when the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission almost withdrew its plan to honor Maher Hathout, a retired physician and Muslim leader long active in inter-religious affairs.

I cannot vouch personally for Basim Elkarra, but I’ve known Hathout for years. He was the Islamic representative who greeted John Paul II on his first papal visit to Los Angeles in 1987. He has served in the past as a national vice-president of the liberal Interfaith Alliance and is currently senior adviser to the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), an important U.S. Muslim civil rights group that repeatedly condemns terrorist acts. With support from progressive clergy and rabbis, Hathout eventually did receive the county commission award. But opposition was strong; even some mainstream Jewish organizations objected. Only four of the 14 commission members voted to reaffirm Hathout as honoree, with the majority abstaining or absent from the meeting.

Neither CAIR nor MPAC operate in the shadows. A visit to their Web sites (www.cair-net.org and www.mpac.org) reveals their approach to public issues. CAIR’s daily e-newsletter “American Muslim News Briefs” links to news stories in mainstream media reporting both the struggles and successes of U.S. Muslims.

Is gentrification racist?

by Meg Cox

I live in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, one of the most ethnically and socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods in the country. Lately hundreds of families are being forced out by gentrification: rents go up, then people are evicted so the buildings can be redeveloped as condos. The condo buyers as a group are much whiter and wealthier than the residents who preceded them.

The other day, Walter, a 50-something black man in our congregation, was in front of our youth pastor’s house because he was helping him move some boxes. While he was waiting, he was talking to a white woman who was out walking her dog. Plain-clothes police officers whistled to Walter and told him to come over, then slammed him up against the car to search him. They checked his ID and saw that he has a perfectly clean record. Before they left, they told him, “We don’t want to see you around here.” Walter explained that he lived in the neighborhood and that he was helping a friend move some things. “We don’t care,” the officers said. “Unless you’re actually carrying boxes while you help someone move, we don’t want to see you here.”

Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that Walter is soft-spoken and clean-cut. Of course that shouldn’t matter; I certainly don’t have to dress nicely and speak softly outside of my home to avoid unpleasant encounters with the police. Walter told me that he’s endured four or five such incidents since he moved to the neighborhood two years ago.

Meanwhile, when we meet people moving into the new condos and they learn that we’ve lived here for nine years, they invariably say, “You must be so relieved that the neighborhood is changing!”

Meg E. Cox is a freelance writer and editor in Chicago.

Epistolatory theology

by Timothy Larsen

Is it just because I’m an evangelical, or is the letter an undervalued theological genre?

No book of modern theology has had a greater impact on my thought than Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. If only one work of Bonhoeffer’s could be saved for posterity, I would vote for it. If he had lived to send it to a publisher, however, I can easily imagine a catalogue of complaints and recommendations for re-thinking the project.

I can see the attraction of letters for evangelicals. The Epistles, after all, are our community’s favorite part of the Bible. There is something more explicitly relational and practical about letters—both traits that evangelicals value. I am currently reading the four-volume Victorian life of the eminent Anglo-Catholic leader E. B. Pusey. I have found myself enthralled by the letters. Theological ideas that I had not really understood or taken very serious before have become compelling for me when he explains them in his correspondence. Full disclosure, however, means that I must say that I am also enjoying reading them for all the academic politics they contain. Pusey, it seems, was involved in an endless succession of schemes to get his friends in the faculty into key posts and to thwart plans to have their theological statements condemned.

Evangelicals have always had a special fondness for C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, as well as for Lewis’s actual letters. It would certainly be the wrong choice for posterity, but if I were going to be stranded on a desert island with only one text by Luther, I would take the delightful volume from the Library of Christian Classics of his Letters of Spiritual Counsel. Although I have plowed through hefty works by American theologians from Jonathan Edwards to living writers, few works of American theology have formed me more than Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. (I remember a Christian leader questioning the closing of the canon by boasting that he thought he could write something more theologically significant than the second and third epistles of John!)

Ever since we were in high school, I have corresponded with a friend who teaches philosophy at a university. Like Pusey’s, our letters range freely from the nature of divine revelation to petty institutional plots and back again. I have always saved them as a courtesy to my biographer. I recognize that this habit represents an exaggerated sense of my own self-importance. Colleagues talk to me about this tendency of mine as if it were a violation of certain Christian virtues, but if it is, I never learned about these virtues in my charismatic spiritual formation. Anyway, I wonder to what degree those in other Christian traditions also value collections of letters.

Timothy Larsen teaches at Wheaton College.

Blogstorm on Levine

by Jason Byassee

One of the reasons we began Theolog was to have a venue in which to respond when blogstorms erupted over material in the Christian Century. A ministorm indeed erupted over “Misusing Jesus: How the church divorces Jesus from Judaism” in the December 26 issue, our excerpt of Amy-Jill Levine’s new book The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco).

Levine’s piece is unique in the way it shows Christians on the theological and political left are not immune from the old, anti-Semitic habits that we pride ourselves for having left behind. Anyone who’s preached the sermon from Mark 6 will know what she means: Jesus is kind to the hemorrhaging woman and the dead girl, unlike the misogynist Judaism that kept women isolated and repressed. When I preach such passages in the future I will work to be clear that whatever is good in Jesus is also Jewish, and not anything he invented. “Jesus does not have to be unique in all cases in order to be profound,” Levine writes.

Several bloggers were displeased. Verbum ipsum complained that it is “not clear what ”mandating respect” for that practice [of Jesus’ wearing of tzitzit in keeping with Numbers 15] would entail within the Christian community, apart from respecting the practices of our Jewish elder brothers and sisters in the faith.” Well, that would be a start, wouldn’t it?

He continues, remarking on Levine’s commentary on the drowning of the pigs in Mark 5: “Does this mean that Christians, to take one of my personal hobbyhorses, are free to treat pigs and other unkosher animals as having no dignity as creatures of God?” Quite clearly it does not, and nothing Levine suggests it does. It is her vocation as a New Testament professor to teach us to hear the text with ears as sensitive to first-century resonances as possible.

Here I Stand laments “narrow” opinion that “lumps all Christians into the same category, one that is contrary to Judaism.” Levine actually does nothing of the sort. The thrust of the piece is to say that institutions of the theological left forget themselves with regard to their rhetoric on Judaism. Three specific organizations she takes on—the World Council of Churches press in Geneva, the Lutherans’ Fortress Press, and the Maryknoll Catholics’ Orbis Books—“are all affiliated with groups that have splendid statements on Jewish-Christian relations.” He was “left with a feeling that she had a chip on her shoulder.” The difficulty here may be that we excerpted from a book in which her personal experience is detailed lovingly elsewhere, especially growing up among gracious Portuguese Catholic friends, and wanting to be pope. It is hard to see how a Jewish woman who loves the New Testament enough to devote her life to seeing it taught well can be described this way—unless we are unwittingly falling back into the sort of stereotyping Levine is decrying. Christian theologians making bold, prophetic pronouncements are not usually dismissed this way. They are, or should be, evaluated on their merits.

The Lutheran Zephyr has the most troubling post. He speaks of Paul “unabashedly” taking Jesus’ “message in a new direction.” This would be news to Paul, who insists upon and maintains his own Jewishness throughout his life. He simply thinks that with the coming of Israel’s messiah biblical prophecy about the gentiles streaming to Zion to worship Israel’s God is now fulfilled (see Richard Hays’s book Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul on this). But if this is a renunciation of his Judaism then Marcion has won. LZ asks whether Levine thinks “Christians [should] follow Jewish law because Jesus did,” even though Levine herself wrote clearly that “respect for Jewish custom must be maintained and . . . Jesus’ own Jewish practices [must] be honored, even by the gentile church, which does not follow those customs” (emphasis added).

LZ asks rhetorically whether Levine would “suggest that this movement of the Jesus-tradition to the Gentile world is inherently anti-semitic or insulting to Jews?” In a subsequent comment he wonders “if she thinks that Christianity is itself anti-Semitic.” Levine has nowhere suggested anything inviting either question. In fact, the comments fall into precisely the trap Levine is counseling us to avoid. It is a sort of binary logic, to borrow Peter Ochs’s terminology, which says that for Jesus or the church to be praised Judaism or the synagogue must be criticized. Levine wants to remove the either/or; Zephyr implicitly wants it maintained.

Several of these bloggers criticize Levine for attempting to get at the “historical Jesus” without reference to the tradition Jesus spawned in the church, often using Luke Timothy Johnson’s work. LZ again: Levine’s work uses “textual and cultural analysis without engaging later Christian traditions.” Verbum Ipsum says: “Christians aren’t committed to slavishly imitating all the detail of Jesus’ life, even the religious details” (my italics—another term with which we Christians have often derided Jews). A certain Dr. Platypus is the worst: “We can’t leave Jesus bound to his Jewish roots. This is especially so for those of us who worship him as the eternal Son of God. Derek (that is, Derek the Aenglican, whom I think Platypus misinterprets) proposes that driving that kind of wedge between the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith is to embrace a fundamentally Nestorian attitude.”

Nestorius taught that Jesus not only has two natures (as Cyril taught), but also two persons. The Council of Ephesus condemned Nestorius in 431. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 split the difference between him and Cyril (one nature, one person) by teaching that Christ had two natures in his one person. What this cannot mean for orthodox Christianity is that Jesus leaves his humanity (or his Jewishness) behind. Luke Johnson himself would be aghast that his work is being used here to shear Jesus of his Jewishness. We gentile Christians certainly do not follow Jewish practices, as the Council of Jerusalem makes clear. We must, however, respect them, as we often have not. And we must recognize them in our Jewish savior, whose Jewishness is inscribed into his very Jewish flesh, now seated at the right hand of the Father.

Science and religion without ID

What happens when a grant foundation works both to integrate science and religion, and also to address each in depth? The Templeton Foundation has tried hard to do just that, and has poured enormous resources into the effort. But as John Dart reports, some have called the foundation an advocate for Intelligent Design—and Templeton is not happy about it.

Against organic

by Jason Byassee

Shannon Jung’s Sharing Food: Christian Practices for Enjoyment (Fortress) reminds me anew of the importance of eating in a sustainable way. The U.S. produces 500 unnecessary calories for every man, woman and child in this country every day, yet we have some 35 million people who are "food-insecure," that is, hungry.

In the first ten hours of 2004 the U.S. spent more on weaponry than it would on food aid to the global poor all year. Americans’ insistence on having out-of-season produce is one of our biggest causes of dependence on Middle Eastern oil—driving those enormous tankers from the southern hemisphere helps keep geopolitics in the Middle East nasty. Organic food can be a worse offender energy-wise than the ordinary, chemically-dependent stuff. Clearly something is wrong with how we eat.

Jung’s quite right with his answer: Christians need to take a more sensuous approach to food—feast more, delight in eating, slow down, share with friends and strangers and pray prayers like this: “Blest be God, who is our bread! Let all the world be clothed and fed!” Hit the farmer’s market, avoid Wal-Mart’s groceries, and feast well.

So why am I hesitant to go from agreeing intellectually to changing the way our house eats practically? It has something to do with the crowd that shops in places where healthier fare is on offer. The health food store is just out of the question: even if I could stand the country club liberals munching on sushi and foie gras (even if it weren’t banned in Chicago) the cash register makes it impossible. The local farmer’s market is better: farmers selling their own produce is hard to beat. It’s just that everyone there is so proud of being there—so superior to Wal-Mart, so much better than the store, so local and healthy, only a pinch more money and you’re saving the world. It’s the earnestness, the zeal, the moral rectitude that can feel insufferable. I prefer the workaday lot at the local bargain store, shoppers who’re just trying to stretch a dime to the company of those convinced of their own righteousness—all the while sipping Starbucks.

I’m perfectly willing to admit this is lame moral and practical reasoning! Food locally grown and in-season certainly tastes better, and I’m occasionally worried about the meat I eat from the bargain place, not only because of important recent books and movies (like Fast Food Nation and Supersize Me), but because I occasionally find myself munching on bone amidst the ground beef. I’m also aware that many foods are “cheap” only because of government policy that heavily subsidizes products like beef and corn (which makes for plentiful corn syrup for junk food), and that such foods are costly in other ways, like our obesity epidemic. It’s all true, intellectually.

It just seems to me that eating more sustainably has an image problem, and until Bubba does it too, it’s going to stay in the rarefied air of baked brie and latte, and fail to save the world.

Potluck gourmet

by Lillian Daniel

Why it is that people eat food in church that they wouldn’t eat anywhere else? My ecclesiastical food habits go back to early childhood, when I wasn’t allowed to drink Kool-Aid at home, except during my birthday parties. On those occasions I waited eagerly as my mother combined cupfuls of pure sugar and one tiny slim packet of neon-colored flavoring to make a pitcher of that utterly nonnutritious cocktail.

One summer, at vacation Bible school in South Carolina, we kids ran up and down the blazing hot tarmac of the Baptist church’s basketball court, working up a thirst—girls chasing boys, boys chasing girls, and then all of us pretending that we had not been playing “kiss catch” in between lessons on Godly living. When we crashed, exhausted and out of breath, into the chain link fence, the teacher emerged with a pitcher of Kool-Aid, one icy cold cup apiece. The sweat from that perfect drink made droplets on the waxy surface of the Dixie cup. That cup would tempt any little Episcopalian girl after a hot day chasing Baptist boys fired up for the Lord.

These days, I obsess over canned mushroom soup—the secret delicious ingredient in our Congregational church’s casseroles. In the Midwest, we love baked concoctions of rice and noodles, cheese and mayonnaise (who knew you could bake mayonnaise?), with a few bites of chicken added if there’s room in the $4-per-person budget. But all these ingredients are nothing until they have spent 45 minutes of quality time in a hot oven with that magical can of soup. What you don’t want to do is ask for the recipe. Then you realize that with all that MSG and fat, you may be cooking like a god, but wishing you didn’t know the truth about your ingredients. To paraphrase Paul on sin: at church, I do not eat what I want to eat, but I eat the very thing I hate. And it sure was good.

As a child I moved with my family from one Anglican congregation to another, usually in former Asian colonies of the British Empire. At church, I found consistency, not only in the liturgy, but also in the food. There was always luke-warm tea with cream or lemon. I chose the cream—as surely as I chose that cup of cold Baptist Kool-Aid. Unlike the lemon, the cream would not counteract the delicious taste of the thinly spread butter on white bread ham sandwiches with crusts tidily cut off. Now that I am grown, I can’t imagine spreading butter over ham, any more than I can imagine having the time to cut the crusts off sandwiches.

But when I get to heaven, I know what I want my first meal to be—a Midwestern Congregationalist casserole, with a slim Anglican ham sandwich on the side and an ice cold Baptist Kool-Aid chaser. And the beauty of the meal? We will all be eating it together, with a dessert as yet to be imagined.

Lillian Daniel is the senior minister of the First Congregational Church (United Church of Christ) in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.