Varieties of Christian Right sloganeering

Sarah Posner has an column on the efforts by some Christian Right leaders to put a kinder-gentler face on their cause for the 2016 election, Evangelicals Looking for Walker to "Do Nothing" in 2016 Election Religion Dispatches 03/09/2015.

She talks in particular about Scott Walker's approach to signalling the fundamentalist base voters that he's One Of Them:

Speaking in 2012 to a teleconference with activists from Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, Walker said his faith has enabled him to rise above the “vitriol, and the constant, ongoing hatred” during the recall election he faced in the wake of his anti-union legislation, which has crippled the state’s once-iconic labor movement. Along with the unmistakable contrast of his church-going family with the profane and progressive activists, Walker cited two Bible verses. He didn’t recite them, but for anyone who knows their Bible—as Walker, the son of a Baptist pastor, does—the meaning was clear. The verses that helped him withstand the hatred were Romans 16:20 (“The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you”) and Isaiah 54:17 (“no weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you.”)

Should he run for president, Walker may very well turn out to be the 2016 cycle’s evangelical favorite—not because he ticks off a laundry list of culture war talking points, pledges fealty to a “Christian nation,” or because he’s made a show of praying publicly to curry political favor. Although by no means universal, some conservative evangelicals—those who eschew the fever swamps of talk radio, yet share the same political stances of the religious right—are weary of the old style of campaigning. They’re turned off by the culture war red meat, the dutiful but insincere orations of piety.

But she also reminds us that the "religious liberty" slogan currently so popular with the Christianists is also it's own kind of red meat:

The religious liberty issue is, for evangelicals, a “four-alarm fire,” said Denny Burk, Professor of Biblical Studies at Boyce College, part of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He said evangelicals expect the candidates “to have the courage of their convictions to persuade people about what’s going on.”

From the Hobby Lobby litigation to cases involving florists, bakers, and photographers refusing to provide services for same-sex ceremonies, the issue has been percolating in the evangelical community for years. In recent weeks, conservative Christians have talked and written prolifically about Barronelle Stutzman, a Washington state florist found liable under the state’s anti-discrimination laws for refusing to provide flowers for a long-time gay customer’s wedding, and Kelvin Cochran, the Atlanta fire chief fired after revelations about anti-gay comments he wrote in a book. ...

Given the level of division over these issues, it’s not clear that voters who aren’t conservative Christians would view the change in emphasis as a tamping down of the culture wars. Legal exemptions to permit florists, caterers, social service providers, or other businesses to refuse service to LGBT people are hotly contested, both in legal circles and in the court of public opinion. In another context, the Hobby Lobby litigation, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the contraception coverage requirement under the Affordable Care Act violated a closely-held corporation’s rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, was one of the most scrutinized and debated religious freedom cases in recent memory.

Franklin Graham says cops are God's enforcers and must be obeyed

Why do I think that this "advice" from Franklin Graham on his Facebook page from March 12 sounds like standard segregationist justification for white cops shooting unarmed black people for no good reason?

Well, probably because he's offering the kind of advice in dealing with the police that I guess white people in America have been offering to blacks since forever, i.e., do whatever a white cop says no matter what:

Listen up--Blacks, Whites, Latinos, and everybody else. Most police shootings can be avoided. It comes down to respect for authority and obedience. If a police officer tells you to stop, you stop. If a police officer tells you to put your hands in the air, you put your hands in the air. If a police officer tells you to lay down face first with your hands behind your back, you lay down face first with your hands behind your back. It’s as simple as that. Even if you think the police officer is wrong—YOU OBEY. Parents, teach your children to respect and obey those in authority. Mr. President, this is a message our nation needs to hear, and they need to hear it from you. Some of the unnecessary shootings we have seen recently might have been avoided. The Bible says to submit to your leaders and those in authority “because they keep watch over you as those who must give an account.”

For anyone of any race who wants to both (1) survive potentially hostile encounters with police and (2) not do things that may get you railroaded on some false charge (or for that matter, undermine your legal position if you're doing something not legal), the ACLU has a real-world guide online, Know Your Rights: What To Do If You're Stopped By Police, Immigration Agents or the FBI n/d; accessed 03/26/2015).

I'm pretty sure there are cops who aren't acting on Divine authority every moment they're dressed in their uniform: Iris Carrabers, CBS News 11/25/2013; Mark Wilson, $10M lawsuit filed for alleged SAPD traffic stop rape MySA 03/26/2014.

The ACLU's advice on the kind of situation in which Franklin Graham pretty much explicitly advises that you should treat the police officer as God's personal representative (bolding in original):

IF YOU ARE STOPPED FOR QUESTIONING
Stay calm. Don't run. Don't argue, resist or obstruct the police, even if you are innocent or police are violating your rights. Keep your hands where police can see them.
Ask if you are free to leave. If the officer says yes, calmly and silently walk away. If you are under arrest, you have a right to know why.
You have the right to remain silent and cannot be punished for refusing to answer questions. If you wish to remain silent, tell the officer out loud. In some states, you must give your name if asked to identify yourself.
You do not have to consent to a search of yourself or your belongings, but police may "pat down" your clothing if they suspect a weapon. You should not physically resist, but you have the right to refuse consent for any further search. If you do consent, it can affect you later in court."

The liberal-evangelical Protestant journal Sojourners has prrinted the text of An Open Letter to Franklin Graham (03/19/2015 with commentary) prepared by several pastors:

As your brothers and sisters in Christ, who are also called to lead the body, we are disappointed and grieved by your abuse of the Holy Scriptures. You lifted Hebrews 13:17 out of its biblical context and misappropriated it in a way that encourages believers to acquiesce to an injustice that God hates. That text refers to church leadership, not the secular leadership of Caesar.

Are you also aware that your commentary resonates with the types of misinterpretations and rhetoric echoed by many in the antebellum church? Are you aware that the southern slavocracy validated the systematic subjugation of human beings made in the image of God by instructing these enslaved human beings to “obey their masters because the Bible instructed them to do so?”

Your blanket insistence on obedience in every situation exposes an ignorance of church history. God called Moses to resist and disobey unjust authority. Joseph and Mary were led by the Spirit to seek asylum in Egypt, disobeying the unjust decrees passed down by authority figures in order to ensure the safety of Jesus. And Paul himself resisted authority and ultimately wrote Romans 13 from jail.

And they remind Graham that being an apologist for arbitrary authority isn't unquestionably Christian, either:

As one who understands human depravity, your statement demonstrates a profound disregard for the impact of sinful individuals when given power to craft systems and structures that govern millions. The outcome is oppression and impoverishment — in a word, injustice.

Finally, if you insist on blind obedience, then you must also insist that officers of the justice system obey the U.S. Constitution, which protects the right of all to equal protection under the law. Yet, reports confirm unconscious racial biases in policing, booking, sentencing, and in return produce racially disparate outcomes within our broken justice system.

Likewise, you must also call on officers to honor their sworn duty to protect and serve without partiality. The Federal Bureau of Investigations director, James B. Comey, acknowledges that law enforcement has fallen short of this mandate: “First, all of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty. At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.”

Although, I have to say that quoting James Comey to make a point about Christian obligations to promote justice isn't necessarily the ideal choice, either!

But that's not the only way that Franklin Graham is making himself into an ugly piece of work (Stoyan Zaimov, Franklin Graham Says Obama's 'Sympathy to Islam' Will Lead to Christian and Jewish Persecution in America Christian Post 03/03/2015):

The Rev. Franklin Graham has warned in an interview that President Barack Obama is "very sympathetic to Islam" and that America's foreign policy is influenced by Muslims. He added that this influence could lead to Christians and Jewish people being persecuted in the United States.

"There are Muslims that have access to him in the White House. Our foreign policy has a lot of influence now, from Muslims. We see the prime minister of Israel being snubbed by the president and by the White House and by the Democrats and it's because of the influence of Islam. They hate Israel and they hate Christians, and so the storm is coming, I believe," Graham told Gordon Robertson, host of CBN's "The 700 Club" interactive program.

Graham further pointed out that Obama had a Muslim father, and that as a child the president went to school in Indonesia, which has the largest Islamic population in the world.

"So, growing up his frame of reference and his influence as a young man was Islam. It wasn't Christianity, it was Islam," the evangelist said.

Aside from treating "Islam" as inherently evil and threatening to the freedom of Christian and Jews, his premise is just stock rightwing fantasy.

And this by Sami Martin, Franklin Graham Warns Christians in America 'Persecution Is Coming' Christian Post 03/09/2015:

"I believe we're going to see persecution in this country," Graham said during an interview on "Fox and Friends Weekend" on Sunday. "We've already seen many laws that have been passed that restrict our freedom as Christians. I believe it's going to get worse, and we see no question gaining influence in Washington by those that represent the Islamic faith. We do have a problem in this country and we are losing our religious freedom and we're losing it a little bit day by day."

It's not the first time that Graham, the son of renowned evangelist Billy Graham, has issued a warning for Christian Americans. He previously warned that America's morality was crumbling because President Obama "defends Islam and chastises Christians, rebukes our allies and befriends our enemies, and fully supports gay marriage and abortion but denies the religious freedoms of those who don't agree," in a post on Facebook.

This is a typical white Christian fundamentalist persecution fantasy. And it's based on a reversal of intelligible meanings of words and concepts. To Graham and the Christian Right, laws that allow gays and lesbians to live and marry freely are restricting the freedom of Christians because Christians are then no longer "free" to persecute gays and lesbians.

And he says that police, even those who are rapists and murderers, are people we have to obey without question because "they keep watch over" us on behalf of God.

This is ugly fanaticism, not any kind of sensible or honorable version of Christianity.

Religious persecution in the US?

Robert Boston in The ultimate guide to debunking right-wingers’ insane persecution fantasies Salon 03/16/2014 addresses an issue I'm finding increasingly disturbing, the false claims by fundamentalists Christians that Christians are being persecuted in the United States on a widespread and official basis.

Boston makes a number of good points on this. Like these on the very favorable tax treatment religious groups get:

• Religious groups enjoy complete tax exemption, a very powerful and sought-after benefit.
• Unlike secular nonprofit groups, houses of worship are not required to apply for tax-exempt status. They receive it by mere dint of their existence. Houses of worship are assumed to be tax exempt as soon as they form. This exemption is rarely examined again and is revoked only in cases of extreme fraud (such as someone claiming that the entity he or she has formed is a church when it’s really a for-profit business).
• Houses of worship are free from the mandatory reporting obligations that are imposed on secular nonprofit groups. For example, secular groups that are tax-exempt must fill out a detailed financial form and submit it to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) every year. This document, called a Form 990, must be made available for public inspection. Houses of worship and ministries are not required to fill out and submit these forms.
• Religious entities are not required to report their wealth to any government agency. The question often comes up about how much money houses of worship raise every year or what the value of the land they hold is. There is no way of knowing this because they are not required to tell anyone.
• The IRS has the power to audit individuals and secular groups at the merest suspicion of wrongdoing or financial irregularities. Houses of worship, by contrast, are very difficult for the IRS to audit. This is so because Congress passed a special law governing church audits that requires the IRS to show heightened scrutiny before initiating such procedures. In addition, church audits must be approved by highly placed IRS officials.

These are tax treatments that in practical fact constitute a discrimination in favor of religious organizations, though not in favor of particular religions. They have a long tradition and, as far as I'm aware, are well-established in law.

I have concerns about some of that favorable treatment. The Clinton Administration, for instance, was willing to recognize Scientology as a church for purposes of federal tax treatment. There are real concerns about the cult aspects of Scientology. And there is a substantive policy concern about whether the tax code should subsidize practices that are demonstratively dangerous and abusive. And, yes, that might also affect churches that are irresponsible in how they treat sex abuse by their clergy.

I'm personally in favor of the basic tax treatment of churches as non-profit entities. Boston may be overstating the case a bit on profit-making operations that are part of churches. My understanding is that there the tax code does make distinctions between profit-making business and other church operations. There are also some limits on overt political activity. Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition group lost out a number of years ago in a dispute with the IRS about its activities devoted to political advocacy being treated as non-profit church activities.

But it's also important to recognize that even if all special tax treatment for religious institutions were eliminated, that in itself would not be discrimination against religion, much less persecution. It would be doing away with the current discriminatory tax treatment in favor of religious institutions.

Here are a couple of pieces from mainstream (non-fundamentalist) Christian perspectives that put this discrimination-against-Christians claim into some more realistic context:

Steve Thorngate, Whose views on religious freedom changed? Christian Century 03/13/2014:

Religious freedom may be the rallying cry of much of the right, but only recently. People used to talk about religious freedom less, and when they did they were often liberals. ...

the larger point is that this whole affair isn't just about competing claims of nondiscrimination vs. religious freedom. It's also about the fact that religion freedom seems to mean different things to different people at different times. And while the law may treat religious liberty the same whether the religion in question is large and powerful or small and marginal, the social and political implications can be quite different.

Mark Silk, The conservative shift on religious liberty Religion News Service 03/13/2014 (which Thorngate also cites):

This is not to say that conservative religious bodies didn’t support the original RFRA [Religious Freedom Restoration Act]. But they didn’t see religious freedom threatened then the way they claim it is today. The Catholic bishops conference, for example, only reluctantly joined the pro-RFRA coalition, fearing that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, someone would claim a religious right to abortion. Now that that their ox is being gored, religious liberty has become so important a cause they've mounted an annual Fortnight for Freedom on its behalf.

for more on the RFRA, see Religious Freedom Restoration Act: 20 years of protecting our first freedom from the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

Now that segregationists are using religious exemption arguments to challenge antidiscrimination laws and concepts, claims of religious persecution of Christians coming from predominately white Christian fundamentalists groups and outlets deserved especially critical scrutiny.

Challenges to birth control coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA/Obamacare) are the cutting edge of this approach right now. Marty Lederman has posted a helpful Compendium of posts on Hobby Lobby and related cases from the Balkinization legal blog (currently dated 03/17/2014).

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right

Christian fundamentalism, women's sexuality and rape

Amanda Marcotte has a good essay on how Christian fundamentalist views of women is based on a model of female submissiveness and the problems that can cause women in that environment when it comes to sexual assault (How the Christian Right's Bizarre Sex Obsessions Let Rapists Off the Hook AlterNet 02/20/2014):

Fundamentalist Christianity is positively obsessed with the idea that female sexuality is the source most of the nation’s woes, and that the world is going to hell because women dress immodestly and have sex for their own reasons instead of just for baby-making and husband-placating. When you see sex as the problem, it becomes hard to see rape as anything but another sexual sin. If you see women as the controllers of sex and the people who have the responsibility of enforcing chastity, then the natural conclusion is that rape is caused by women, and that it’s as much, if not more, a woman’s fault for tempting a man to rape her as it is the man’s for violently assaulting a woman.

... From Ross Douthat in the New York Times arguing that women have the power to convert men from cads to good guys merely through the power of not having sex with them, to all the endless sermons about modesty and not causing men to "stumble," the message in the Christian right is clear: Men’s choices, especially men’s sexual choices, are the responsibility of women. So if a man chooses to rape you, it’s understood not as him asserting dominance over you, but as the man taking the liberties you must have extended to him. ...

Built into the very core of the religious right is the idea that female autonomy is a threat to be stomped out, and not just in its attacks on women who choose abortion or premarital sex or, gasp, to live as lesbians. The entire model of proper female behavior for the Christian right is built on submission. It’s evident in the adherence to the belief that husbands are the head of their wives. Recently, Christian right icons Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar explained their belief that wives are obliged to have sex with their husbands whenever they want and on their terms. Fundamentalist Christians deeply distrust and are hostile to the idea that the proper owner of a woman's body is the woman. If rape is a violation of female autonomy, but you believe female autonomy is sinful, then it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to take rape seriously as a crime. [my emphasis]

Tags: christian fundamentalism, women's rights

Complications of creationism and anti-pseudoscience skepticism

The recent Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate over Young Earth Creationism highlighted for me a couple of wrinkles in the decades-long debate over creationism and its variants.

There are actually several variants of creationism. There are excellent descriptions available. I found Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism (1999) by Robert Pennock helpful. If creationism were science, I might worry that a 15-year-old book could be seriously out of date. But that's only partially true. Tower of Babel discusses the Intelligent Design (ID) scam, which does represent the, uh, evolution of the creationist theory.

The creationists have as a major goal to have creationism taught in science classes in public schools as science. And to do so, they have adapted their approach to get around successive court decisions that have ruled against public schools teaching a religious theory as science. Intelligent Design has been the major variant aiming at that goal for years now.

One of the best descriptions of how ID fits into the fundamentalist Christian creationist pictures is that of Judge John E. Jones III of the Pennsylvania federal district court in the key 2005 Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District case, a challenge to the required teaching of ID as science, Memorandum Opinion 12/20/05, US District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania:

The history of the intelligent design movement (hereinafter "IDM") and the development of the strategy to weaken education of evolution by focusing students on alleged gaps in the theory of evolution is the historical and cultural background against which the Dover School Board acted in adopting the challenged ID Policy. ...

The concept of intelligent design (hereinafter “ID”), in its current form, came into existence after the Edwards case was decided in 1987. For the reasons that follow, we conclude that the religious nature of ID would be readily apparent to an objective observer, adult or child.

We initially note that John Haught, a theologian who testified as an expert witness for Plaintiffs and who has written extensively on the subject of evolution and religion, succinctly explained to the Court that the argument for ID is not a new scientific argument, but is rather an old religious argument for the existence of God. He traced this argument back to at least Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, who framed the argument as a syllogism: Wherever complex design exists, there must have been a designer; nature is complex; therefore nature must have had an intelligent designer. (Trial Tr. vol. 9, Haught Test., 7-8, Sept. 30, 2005). Dr. Haught testified that Aquinas was explicit that this intelligent designer "everyone understands to be God." Id. The syllogism described by Dr. Haught is essentially the same argument for ID as presented by defense expert witnesses Professors Behe and Minnich who employ the phrase "purposeful arrangement of parts."

Although proponents of the IDM occasionally suggest that the designer could be a space alien or a time-traveling cell biologist, no serious alternative to God as the designer has been proposed by members of the IDM, including Defendants’ expert witnesses. (20:102-03 (Behe)). In fact, an explicit concession that the intelligent designer works outside the laws of nature and science and a direct reference to religion is Pandas' rhetorical statement, "what kind of intelligent agent was it [the designer]" and answer: "On its own science cannot answer this question. It must leave it to religion and philosophy." (P-11 at 7; 9:13-14 (Haught)).

Conservative Protestantism is particularly subject to schismatic differences. And the intertwining of fundamentalist Christian anti-science attitudes and arguments with the politics of the present-day Republican Party have likely increased the temptation for people to construct variants of the theory that may seem small to those outside the creationist social environment of Christian fundamentalism.

Massimo Pigliucci in "The Hopeless War against Intelligent Design" Skeptical Inquirer 35:6 (Nov/Dec 2011) finds something to praise about the ID version of creationism. He cites an article by Jeremy Shearmur, "Why the ‘Hopeless War’?: Approaching Intelligent Design" 12/04/2010 (Sophia 49, 2010):

The question [posed by Shearmur] is then, what would ID proponents have to do in order to be taken seriously and avoid being dismissed as simply a bunch of conservative Christian ideologues looking
for any excuse to impose their theistic views on the rest of us?

I realize that it is hard to let go of the latter-tempting, and somewhat empirically justified-assumption. But let us try for a moment and see where Shearmur manages to go. First off, Shearmur
gives ID proponents credit over their main intellectual rival within the Christian tradition, theological modernism - and rightly so, I think. Shearmur argues that the theological modernist position, which somewhat lackadaisically reconciles science and faith, fails in two major ways: first, because it keeps remaking God into whatever image happens to be compatible with the latest science, i.e., it succeeds through a theological copout; second, because it does so without the intellectual courage to acknowledge its marked retreat from the historical Christian tradition. In other words, [ID advocates] Dembski and Co. are theologically braver than their almost-anything-goes mainstream colleagues within Christian apologetics. [my emphasis]

It's ironic, and a little disturbing, to see a pro-science, anti-creationist skeptic take the side of Christian fundamentalists against what the fundis call theological liberals, "the theological modernist position" in Pigliucci's formulation.

He eventually gets around to explaining that he understands even ID as a "theologically inspired scientific research program" and that he regards it as an oxymoron. So Pigliucci doesn't wind up playing the creationist game of treating their claims as purely scientific claims that can be understood without reference to their religious basis.

But I also want to unpack his comment that mainstream (non-fundamentalist) Christians that have no problem with evolution as indulging in "a theological copout" and more cowardly (less brave) than the ID scamsters.

He doesn't elaborate on the point. But as a long-time reader of Skeptical Inquirer, my reading of it is that he's looking at this from a philosophically materialistic viewpoint that seems to be common among scientific debunkers of pseudoscience, and in particular has generally been reflected in Skeptical Inquirer. This attitude sometimes manifests itself in atheism or strong agnosticism in religious matters. And sometimes in a "vulgar materialism" that regards religion in general as opposed to science. And that's how I read that particular passage of Pigliucci's essay.

The late Stephen Jay Gould regarded religion and science as custodians of "non-overlapping magisteria," a concept he elaborated in his book Rocks of Ages (1999). To summarize and inevitably oversimplify, he argued that science and religion don't have to conflict. Because the Deity (dieties) assumed by religion can be taken as spiritual being outside the material realm and religious teachings used in real life without requiring the believer to reject physical science. And since science can neither prove not disprove the existence of God as such, the two don't have to conflict.

And in his book, Gould explains that the model of what I would call vulgar materialism that presents religion as the great barrier to scientific progress in European history owes much to rationalist polemics during the Enlightenment and since, particularly polemics against the Catholic Church, whichin many cases greatly exaggerated that alleged conflict.

What Pigliucci seems to be saying here is that any Christian who being logically consistent in his faith must take something like a creationist view.

In practice, most Christians take something like the view Gould described in his "overlapping magisteria" argument. And the modern creationist argument is largely a product of the 19th century conservative freakouts over Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. St. Augustine is credited with the reminder that the Scriptures are meant to teach us how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go. And that has generally been the position of the Catholic Church, despite the occasional wobbly statement on the subject by Popes or other senior Church officials. The empirical fact that the largest and oldest Christian body, the Catholic Church, has not regarded evolution or natural selection as a threat to the Christian faith or Christian theology should serve to temper Pigliucci's criticism quoted above.

He's suggesting there the fundamentalist "literalism" as interpreted by creationists is the only legitimate reading of Christian Scripture, at least as it applies to evolution. And therefore those who don't read it that way are practicing bad Christian theology. Even the theologians that for centuries managed to regard the Bible as something other than what we would consider a modern science text. Maybe it's Pigliucci who doesn't understand theology so well as he seems to imagine.

Jason Rosenhouse, who fights the good fight against creationism at Evolution Blog, posts in The DI In Damage Control Mode 02/06/2014:

... I devote a chapter of Among the Creationists to comparing YEC [Young Earth Creationism] to ID. On the one hand, the cultural differences between them are real. The people I met at ID conferences were nearly always hostile towards YEC. The YEC's, for their part, were generally ambivalent toward ID. They liked the anti-evolution part, but didn’t like the part where they refused to identify the designer.

But for all of that, Klinghoffer is full of it when he says it’s a dishonest tactic to compare ID to creationism. The proper analogy is that they are different dialects of the same language. As much as they try to be relentlessly on message in their public forums, their isn’t enough slick rhetoric in the world to disguise their religious motivations. This was also manifestly obvious at the ID conferences I attended.

In short, wherever you find anti-evolutionism, you can be sure that religion is not far behind. The main difference between YEC and ID is the honesty of its practitioners in acknowledging that.

However, in It’s Not Just Fundamentalist Religion That Has A Problem With Evolution 02/07/2014, he makes a comment about the IDists that I find more questionable, "Nearly all of the people I met at ID conferences were quite religious, but they were also contemptuous of YEC. They were not fundamentalists, and on many occasions they lamented the fact that YEC makes Christianity look foolish. Plainly, there is a large contingent of people who are not fundamentalists, but who also have a problem with evolution." I doubt this. He doesn't expand on it there. But I suspect he's identifying Christian fundamentalists a bit too closely with crass Bible-bangers. Some fundamentalists can come off pretty slick in brief conversations. But I doubt you'll find many people who claim to be committed to ID creationism who aren't actually fundamentalists. The very fact that they're running a scam like ID indicates they are willing to be mealy-mouthed about their beliefs. The antiabortion movement has long since accustomed US Christian fundamentalists of the virtue of lying for Jesus.

Judge Jones cites a number of statements from leading ID advocates displaying their religious considerations for ID in terms that confirm Rosenhouse's "different dialects of the same language" comparison between Young Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design:

Phillip Johnson, considered to be the father of the IDM, developer of ID’s “Wedge Strategy,” which will be discussed below, and author of the 1991 book entitled Darwin on Trial, has written that “theistic realism” or “mere creation” are defining concepts of the IDM. This means “that God is objectively real as Creator and recorded in the biological evidence . . .” (Trial Tr. vol. 10, Forrest Test., 80-81, Oct. 5, 2005; P-328). In addition, Phillip Johnson states that the “Darwinian theory of evolution contradicts not just the Book of Genesis, but every word in the Bible from beginning to end. It contradicts the idea that we are here because a creator brought about our existence for a purpose.” (11:16-17 (Forrest); P-524 at 1). ID proponents Johnson, William Dembski, and Charles Thaxton, one of the editors of Pandas, situate ID in the Book of John in the New Testament of the Bible, which begins, “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.” (11:18-20, 54-55 (Forrest); P-524; P-355; P-357). Dembski has written that ID is a “ground clearing operation” to allow Christianity to receive serious consideration, and “Christ is never an addendum to a scientific theory but always a completion.” (11:50-53 (Forrest); P-386; P-390). Moreover, in turning to Defendants’ lead expert, Professor Behe, his testimony at trial indicated that ID is only a scientific, as opposed to a religious, project for him; however, considerable evidence was introduced to refute this claim. Consider, to illustrate, that Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God. (P-718 at 705) (emphasis added). As no evidence in the record indicates that any other scientific proposition’s validity rests on belief in God, nor is the Court aware of any such scientific propositions, Professor Behe’s assertion constitutes substantial evidence that in his view, as is commensurate with other prominent ID leaders, ID is a religious and not a scientific proposition.

Dramatic evidence of ID’s religious nature and aspirations is found in what is referred to as the “Wedge Document.” The Wedge Document, developed by the Discovery Institute’s Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (hereinafter “CRSC”), represents from an institutional standpoint, the IDM’s goals and objectives, much as writings from the Institute for Creation Research did for the earlier creation-science movement, as discussed in McLean. (11:26-28 (Forrest)); McLean, 529 F. Supp. at 1255. The Wedge Document states in its “Five Year Strategic Plan Summary” that the IDM’s goal is to replace science as currently practiced with “theistic and Christian science.” (P-140 at 6). As posited in the Wedge Document, the IDM’s “Governing Goals” are to “defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies” and “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.” Id. at 4. The CSRC expressly announces, in the Wedge Document, a program of Christian apologetics to promote ID. A careful review of the Wedge Document’s goals and language throughout the document reveals cultural and religious goals, as opposed to scientific ones. (11:26-48 (Forrest); P-140). ID aspires to change the ground rules of science to make room for religion, specifically, beliefs consonant with a particular version of Christianity. [my emphasis in bold]

Tags: christian fundamentalism, creationism

More Bill Nye/Ken Ham evolution presentation fallout

Bill Nye's decision to debate creationist advocate Ken Ham over the science of creationism may or may not have been a good move. But certainly much of the reaction suggests that he gave unnecessary credibility to a crackpot pseudoscience theory by doing so.

Lord Saletan was prompted to Deep Thoughts by the debate, which he shares in The Impotence of Creationism Slate 02/06/2014:

Nye dismissed [Ham's creationist] belief, correctly, as "magical."

But that magical premise is what keeps Ham sane. It lets him cling to a mythical past while accepting today's realities. The core of Ham's worldview, which Nye attacked again and again, is a distinction between "origins or historical science" (the fictional stuff) and "experimental or observational science" (the real stuff). "Bill and I all have the same observational science," said Ham. He spoke with perfectly modern delight about satellites, mobile phones, and vaccines.

Ham presented videos from several scientists who espoused young-Earth creationism. One said he had invented the MRI scanner. Another said he had designed major components of spacecraft launched by NASA and the European Space Agency. If the spacecraft guy had botched his work, said Ham, you’d have heard about it. That’s true. In fact, it’s a perfectly scientific way of testing the perils of creationism. Can creationists function in science and technology? Manifestly, some can.

Saletan doesn't seem to have much of a clue about the creationist/fundamentalist territory.

On the political side, science educators are consistently worried about the endless push of the creationists to dumb down science taught in public schools to accommodate creationism being taught as science in science classes. Good basic science education in the public schools is vital to the economic future of the country, which certainly includes the ability of individuals to be able to master the tasks increasingly technologically complex jobs will demand of them.

Lord S, as we see above, doesn't worry much about that. I mean, as long as we have people who can read the instruction manual about which knobs to turn on those satellite machines, who needs to have more people who can actually do the math and the metallurgy and that thar rocket science required to build the machines and write the manuals?

Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995):

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

But, hey, Lord S replies, it makes the rubes happy, so why worry?

Those of us who occasionally wade through the swamps of pseudoscience and esoteric woo are likely to notice something in Saletan's statement, "Can creationists function in science and technology? Manifestly, some can." Saletan took the video testimonies from the creationist scamster on their face according to his own account. I'm still nostalgic for the old days when you could expect professional journalists to, you know, actually check that stuff for truthfulness. If Lord S doesn't think creationists would make stuff like that up, then he really doesn't know enough about the field to write about it for public consumption.

Yes, there are creationists who work as doctors and engineers, neither of which are scientists as such, though they do require some scientific training. They may be highly qualified for their professional fields and well compensated for their work, but the practice of medicine and engineering involve skilled techniques, not scientific research as such. Now, there are doctors and engineers who do actual scientific research. Paleontologists, biologists, physicists, geologists are more likely to be the real experts in the field. A technician doing a job on a satellite launch does not necessarily need to understand the physics of the Big Bang to do so. If he wants to go into theoretical physics, though, he probably won't do too well if he is checking every line of his textbooks for possible challenges to creationist theory.

Lord S assures us that creationism is harmless as long as it is restricted to being "a compartmentalized fetish." In the real world, creationism is also embedded in the political world of today's Republican Party, which promotes anti-science policies in many ways, including trying to dumb down science teaching with creationism. Creationism, for which Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan found supportive words for in his 1980 Presidential campaign, has been and is a major way of promoting pseudoscience in the world of politics and governmental policy. Along with the Tobacco Institute industry-friendly pseudoscience to protect the tobacco industry from lawsuits by casting doubt on the health dangers of smoking, creationism paved the way for the climate denial that is now established wisdom and policy in today's Republican Party.

The antiabortion movement and anti-women's-rights movement to which the Republican Party is linked at the hip promote deliberate falsehoods about women's health, pregnancy, sexuality and biology. (See Akin, Todd and "legitimate rape.") Even the firearms lobby gets into the act, pushing to prohibit research on the effects of gun violence. They also seem to be generally vague on the physical nature of their favorite fetish, insisting as they do that guns don't kill people.

Maybe Lord S can write a follow-up column explaining to us how climate deniers are charmingly eccentric rubes who believe silly but harmless ideas. I mean, he can probably find YouTube videos of people who deny global warming who can still tell when it's raining outside. So there! You see? Climate denial doesn't prevent people from functioning normally at all!

Saletan's breezy comment on how harmless creationism is also misses how creationism affects people over their whole life-cycle, being as it is very much a part of Christian fundamentalist culture. I don't know of a particular study that tried to isolate the effect of creationism on kids' career choices and lifetime earnings prospects. It would be difficult to single out that factor in a sociological study because it is so interwoven with other aspects of fundamentalist culture. So if a girl growing up in a family devoutly committed to creationism as part of Christian fundamentalist faith chooses a non-scientific education and career path, is it because creationism made her anti-science? Because her family and circle of friends thought science wasn't a proper fit for her future role as an obedient wife devoted to domestic pursuits? Because her family idolized preachers, sports figures, businessmen and the military to the exclusion of more intellectual or scholarly pursuits? Because she was educated to be leery of intellectual curiosity in general? All those aspects are found in fundamentalist culture.

But I'm confident that any study that was properly constructed and done with good methodology would find that kids coming from families with a strong emotional commitment to creationism would have a notably less-than-average percentage going into science and heavily science-related fields.

Our friend Bro. Wade Sword-of-Vengeance Burleson weighs in on the subject with his characteristic mealy-mouthed defense of hardline fundamentalism in Bill Nye and the Devolution of Man Istoria Ministries 02/05/2014. His considered scholarly opinion of the Nye-Ham debate: "I would enjoy a debate between two Christians who disagree over six-day Creationism more than I enjoyed last night's debate because at least those debaters would be sparring in the same stadium."

Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance makes an argument that I don't plan on spending any time trying to understand where it comes from: "... man is devolving, not evolving. Sure, technological advances occur at a greater rate than ever, but the nature of man is such that mankind is devolving intellectually and spiritually. Had the ancient Egyptians had our base of scientific knowledge, their stunningly engineered pyramids would have orbited the earth." (emphasis his) I'm pretty sure this has to do with one of the creationists' crank science arguments they claimed to be based on Isaac Newton's Laws of Thermodynamics that tries to argue that natural systems become less complex over time. Who knows what other Birchite notions may be wrapped up in Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance's formulation?

It's also safe to assume he wasn't trying to make some feminist point by saying man is devolving.

He makes some linguistic-like argument about languages getting less complex over time: "The languages of mankind have devolved over the centuries. Where are the Hebrew Solomon's [sic] of today? Where are the Greek Homer's  [sic] of today? Where are the English Chaucers and Shakespeares of today?"

Two words, dude: William Faulkner.

Such is the strange world one winds up stumbling through when we try to conjure up the harmless world of nice rubes that Lord Saletan fantasizes for us. Which brings us back to this paragraph of his quoted above, which bears closer inspection:

But that magical premise is what keeps Ham sane.

Does Saletan have any actual reason to think this? Let's leave aside whether he has personally interviewed Ham, much less psychoanalyzed him professionally. Is there any reason to believe creationism is in any meaningful sense useful in keeping people "sane"? I would suggest it is more likely to create problems with reality-testing in the physical world we actually live in.

It lets him cling to a mythical past while accepting today's realities.

Really? Does Ham accept man-made climate change as a reality? Does he have a view of female human biology more reality-based than Todd Akin's? Is he a debunker of the conspiracy theories that are otherwise common as dirt among other fundamentalists strongly emotionally committed to creationism?

The core of Ham's worldview, which Nye attacked again and again, is a distinction between "origins or historical science" (the fictional stuff) and "experimental or observational science" (the real stuff). "Bill and I all have the same observational science," said Ham. He spoke with perfectly modern delight about satellites, mobile phones, and vaccines.

No. Lord Saletan has missed the basis of the creationist worldview, which is reading the Bible as though it were a science text. Or, more precisely, substituting a modern "literalist" view of the Bible for both actual science and any kind of sensible Scriptural exegesis. The creationists miss the best stuff in Genesis with their crackpot pseudoscience reading of it.

It's worth noting here some observations of two writers who actually do know something about Christian fundamentalism and look at the doctrines and the culture from a critical but engaged and compassionate perspective, Fisher Humphreys and Philip Wise in Fundamentalism (2004). They note that a feelings of suspicion is often marked among fundamentalists, particularly suspicion toward "liberals," a term which in fundamentalist culture makes little distinction between theological liberals and political ones:

This suspicion can and often does escalate to a kind of paranoia. Fundamentalists tend to subscribe to the domino theory: if you surrender one idea, eventually you will surrender all the others as well. If people hold a liberal position on one issue, then they are suspected of holding other liberal views. This causes Fundamentalists to feel that they must be constantly diligent in assessing the beliefs of others.

People processing creationism as a matter of religious faith - as essentially all who hold to that belief do in US Christianity - are essentially inaccessible to scientific arguments like the kind Bill Nye makes. To address the creationist belief on its own terms, its theology has to be challenged.

Not that creationists are much more open to that than to scientific arguments. But Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance has a point: "The starting point for both men (and their supporters) was too far apart. It's like two runners who enter a race that is to be run in two separate stadiums. The start line, the race itself, and the finish line are so far from the other runner, that the spectators aren't exactly sure where to look."

Humphreys and Wise also note the role that fear so often plays in the real communities of Christian fundamentalists:

Fundamentalism was born from the fear that aspects of the modern world were threatening the faith of the Christian community, and many Fundamentalists continue to live their lives in an elevated state of fear. That fear is predicated on the idea that the world is evil and that true believers must be constantly vigilant in order to avoid secularism.

This fear is heightened by exposure to higher education. One of the reasons many Fundamentalists became anti-intellectuals was their fear of the influence of intellectuals. It is not uncommon for Fundamentalist students to be urged not to allow themselves to be changed by their education in secular, or even in religious, colleges and universities. [my emphasis]

In other words, to those committed emotionally to creationism, the arguments of some intellectual-sounding guy with a bow tie like Bill Nye that Science the Handmaid of the Devil opposes creationism not only won't sound convincing. They can just as well feed the fear. On the other hand, an argument that you won't go to Hell if you pay serious attention to science may at least alleviate a bit of the fear. But no one debate is likely to be a turning point for any of them.

The basis of Ham's professed worldview is modern Christian fundamentalism. But he managed to baffle Lord S about that. And Bill Nye seems to have helped Ham sell his patent medicine by lending that debate the pretense of being over different scientific views of the early history of the Earth and the human race.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, creationism

Bill Nye the Science Guy ... debates evolution? Or gives a crackpot undue credibility?

I haven't watched The video of Bill Nye's debate with fundamentalist Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis, a "Young Earth Creationist" group.

Mixed opinions are coming in. But I'm inclined even before seeing the video to agree with Michael Schulson in The Bill Nye-Ken Ham Debate Was a Nightmare for Science Daily Beast 02.05.14: "Ham won this debate months ago, when Nye agreed to participate."

Because it's part of the fundamentalist anti-science scam to try to get scientists to debate creationism as science. It's not science, it's Christian fundamentalism dressed up in pseudoscientific trappings.

Not only has that been a characteristic of Christian fundamentalism science it developed in its current form in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to try to make beliefs founded on a "literalist" interpretation of the Christian Scriptures sound more scientific than science. But they've been working for decades to get around laws and court decisions banning the teaching of religion in public schools by trying to present creationism as an alternative scientific explanation of the origins of the Earth.

Judge John E. Jones III of the Pennsylvania federal district court int he 2005 Kitzmiller vs Dover Area School District case, a challenge to the required teaching of "intelligent design" (ID) as science, explained the creationist pseudoscience scam in his opinion, Memorandum Opinion 12/20/05, US District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

I discussed that ruling in "Intelligent design" scam loses big-time in federal court 12/21/2005.

Ana Kasparian and John Iadarola of The Young Turks report on it in Creationist Signs at the Bill Nye/ Ken Ham Debate 02/05/2014:

John makes a good point there about how creationists deliberately blur the meanings of "theory" in English as a scientific theory (a systematic description explaining empirically verified facts) and the colloquial meaning of "just a theory" (a vague guess).

Stoyan Zaimov reports in the conservative Christian Post, Bill Nye, Ken Ham Discuss Humans and Dinosaurs With Piers Morgan; Reactions to Creationist Debate 02/05/2014 on how our friend Bro. Al, considered the leading theologian of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the US, reacted:

Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and who supports young earth creationism, was present at Tuesday's event. He saw the debate as being "about the central worldview clash of our times, and of any time: the clash between the worldview of the self-declared 'reasonable man' and the worldview of the sinner saved by grace."

Mohler pointed out that Nye, who identifies as an agnostic and as a "reasonable man," has failed to acknowledge that man's reasoning has been corrupted by the fall (of man), as described in Genesis and other passages in the Bible.

"This is what theologians refer to as the 'noetic effects of the fall.' We have not lost the ability to know all things, but we have lost the ability to know them on our own authority and power," the theologian argued. "We are completely dependent upon divine revelation for the answers to the most important questions of life. Our sin keeps us from seeing what is right before our eyes in nature."

Not all Christians believe in young earth creationism. Protestant pastors are split on the age of the earth. A LifeWay Research survey conducted in 2011 found that 43 percent don't believe the earth is approximately 6,000 years old while 46 percent believe it is.

In practice in most conservative churches, "we have lost the ability to know them on our own authority and power" means: just trust what the preacher tells you. Even about scientific questions on which he has no special knowledge whatsoever.

Josh Rosenau (How Bill Nye Won the Debate 02/04/2014) on the blog of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) notes that Nye did gesture toward the religious nature of the creationist story. (Rosenau to his credit notes in his post that he was part of the teamed that prepped Nye for the debate.) But it sounds like he largely played into the setup that creationism is a scientific theory to be debated as science:

Nye prepared well. On the way to the venue, he picked up a piece of limestone from the roadside, with a fossil in it, to show how the rocks beneath the auditorium themselves show the evidence of evolution. He opened by undercutting the core of Ken Ham's claim to authority, emphasizing that Ken Ham bases his claims not on the empirical evidence, but on a very particular reading of Genesis. And that way of reading Genesis is very specific to Ken Ham, not to most of the world’s religious people, or even Ham’s fellow evangelicals. He never stopped emphasizing that Ham’s theology is an outlier, and that he doesn’t speak for religious people, Christians, evangelicals, or even all creationists.

Throughout, Nye did a great job keeping the focus on the failures of Ken Ham's creation model, and the key ways in which it fails to provide any sort of viable explanation for the world around us. A good, viable model has to make real predictions, he emphasized; those predictions can't be wrong, and a viable model has to be of practical value. In various ways, Ken Ham's creation model fails on all three prongs.

Schulson took a much dimmer view of Nye's performance:

Ham had nothing to lose. When you exist on the cultural fringe and make your living by antagonizing established authority, there’s no form of media attention you don't love. All Ham had to do was sit still for two-and-a-half hours, sound vaguely professional, and pander occasionally to his base. Sure, if you listened closely, what Ham was saying made absolutely no scientific sense. But debate is a format of impressions, not facts. Ham sounded like a reasonable human being, loosely speaking, and that’s what mattered.

Nye, meanwhile, spent three-quarters of the debate sounding like a clueless geek, even if his points were scientifically valid. He went on strange asides and make awkward appeals to the obviously hostile audience, which he at one point referred to as "my Kentucky friends." He spent 10 minutes delivering a dry lecture on geological sediments and biogeography, using the kind of PowerPoint slides that a high school junior might make for his AP Biology class. Ham, seemingly aware that debate is a form of entertainment, and that entertainment thrives on human stories, presented testimonial videos from engineers and biology PhDs who hold creationist views. Nye, on the other hand, spent a lot of time talking about the "billions of people" who "are religious, and who accept science and embrace it" — because God knows that Americans love nothing more than conforming to the religious opinions of foreign nations.

Another post of mine on creationism: Creationism, quack medicine and the solidarity of the conmen, the gullible and the superstitious 11/02/2012.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, creationism

Religious paranoia over limits on proselytizing in the military

The Pentagon is finally going through the motions, at least, of formally consulting with Michael Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) on the problem of unethical and coercive religious proselytizing in the military. Various conservative media outlets and Christian Right groups and individuals are using the occasion to say that them thar evil atheists and Jews is trying to wipe out Christianity in the US armed forces.

Basically, this the whiny-white-people, we-are-the-victims posture that Christian Right groups favor. This is in a way where it began with the organized Christian Right as we know it today. It was the Carter Administration's decision to deny federal tax breaks to private colleges like Bob Jones University that practiced racial segregation that was the cause that brought the leaders of today's Christian Right together to organize politically for the Republicans. (See: Randall Balmer, Rush, Race, and the Religious Right Huffington Post 03/10/2009; and, Randall Balmer on the formation of the religious right 07/09/2006)

As one can guess from my characterization of it, I don't have a lot of sympathy for that posture. That's especially because I associate it with segregationist attitudes. And it's an unfortunately reality that fundamentalist Christians and white people who were prefer not to have anything to do with blacks except as servants are two heavily overlapping groups. A somewhat more generous way to view would be to say that American fundamentalists put special emphasis see themselves as a Christian sub-culture, a minority that is privileged and burdened with the task of being witnesses to God's truth in a fallen world. Even with the best intentions, self-righteousness and active hostility to out-groups are constant risks with this posture.

This Christian Post article on the Weinstein story tells us in its opening paragraph, "The Pentagon has hired a Jewish activist who has been outspoken in his opposition to conservative Christianity to serve as a consultant and develop new policies on religious tolerance." (Stoyan Zaimov, Pentagon Hires Anti-Conservative Activist Who Branded Fundamentalists as 'Christian Monsters' 05/01/2013) His article largely recycles the rhetoric from a Breitbart.com article to which he links and which reflects the standard sleazy, misleading style of "journalism" that is Breitbart.com's trademark. And in case you might have lost the thread in reading the full article, Zaimov concludes his piece by noting that Weinstein "has been named by Forward Magazine as one of the most influential Jewish people in America."

At CitizensLink, the "news" arm of the Focus on the Family, Bruce Hausknecht, Secular Crusader Advises Pentagon: Christians are 'Monsters.' 04/30/2013 lays out a similar polemic against Weinstein, though without the anti-Semitic overtones.

The "monsters" label comes from this recent Huffington Post article by Weinstein, Fundamentalist Christian Monsters: Papa's Got A Brand New Bag 04/16/2013. He's melodramatic in that piece. But he's pretty explicit about to whom he directing his criticisms:

These bandits coagulate their stenchful substances in organizations such as the American Family Association (AFA), the ultra-fundamentalist Family Research Council (FRC), and the Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty (CARL). The basis of their ruinous unity is the bane of human existence and progress: horrific hatred and blinding bigotry. However, when the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and others correctly characterize them as "hate groups," they all too predictably raise a deafening hue and disingenuously bellow mournfully like the world class cowards they are.

I had a Facebook discussion with someone who posted a Breitbart.com piece on this. The discussion mainly served to remind me how attractive the victim posture can be. And how resistant those attracted to it can be to what are quaintly known as "facts," must less judgment outside the narrow confines of fundamentalist victimhood.

Most of what I said in that discussion is the following. Whether Weinstein distinguishes sufficiently between the many shades of opinion among Christian groups on the issues he addresses in that piece is a judgment call. But that's a couple of orders of magnitude less of a criticism than what the Breitbart.com piece does. I can say for myself that I didn't feel criticized as a Christian by what he said in that piece. And I'm pretty sure none of the priests at my local parish would, either.

I doubt that Weinstein has said explicitly that he wants to "exterminate" anyone from the military based on their personal religious beliefs, a word my Facebook friend used. Points of contention over what is legitimate proselytizing in the military have to be judged on their individual merits, of course. But I would think that most Christians could agree that officers abusing their authority to coerce adherence to Christianity or a particular brand of it is unethical (not to mention against law and regulations).

And it's a sad thing but true that groups like Westboro Baptist Church do use Christianity to promote hatred and fanaticism around homosexuality, the issue he's addressing in that column. Westboro bases their protests at soldiers' funerals around their beliefs on homosexuality and the view that God is punishing America because of it. Their *theological* beliefs on that aren't basically different than that of many other conservative Christians. But I don't assume every time I see a criticism of Westboro that it applies to every single other group that shares that broader view. Apparently, neither does much of anyone else. Check every time you see someone post something against Westboro on Facebook to see whether they even mention Westboro's views on gays and lesbians, much less specify all the groups with broadly similar beliefs that they are not criticizing.

On the issue of chaplains not being able to share their faith, I don't know what if anything that complaint addresses. I'm going to have to ask him about that the next time I see him. I do know that the position of a military chaplain is a different calling from being a civilian pastor, not least because that ministry requires them to deal with people not always of their particular denomination or religion in a way a civilian pastor doesn't have to.

I've done a bit more web research, and the complaint that chaplains aren't allowed to share their faith is pushed by a seemingly fundamentalist/Pentecostal group, the Chaplain Alliance, which elaborates as the first item in its list of "common faith": "The Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God in the original languages and the absolute standard for moral conduct." You can quickly get lost in the endless hair-splitting of fundamentalism. But the "original languages" part caught my eye. The more familiar formulation of the "inerrant" position is that the books of the Bible were inerrant in their original autographs, meaning their original written versions. That allows a tiny amount of theoretical wiggle-room since none of the original "autographs" are extant.

A Facebook friend of a Facebook friend, whose name I won't use here in case they later realize that what they were saying is, well, what they're saying, wrote the following (paragraph breaks added).

I find it humorous that they keep pointing to Christians when they talk about 'religious intolerance' When's the last time you watched a news story about a bunch of people being beaten or murdered in the name of Jesus Christ? I see posts and articles all the time written or shared by atheists and agnostics filled with hate and innuendo toward Christian believers, but rarely do I see the faithful followers of Christ posting venomous attacks or cutely worded retorts directed towards those who don't believe.

Really? I see them all the time. But for those familiar with this thought-world, "faithful followers of Christ" is an open-ended alibi. An antiabortion fanatic shooting Dr. George Tiller in the head at his church? Rightwing fanatics heavily influenced by Christian Identity doctrines? Not "faithful followers."

well [sic], get ready, cause here it comes. This Christian IS becoming 'intolerant'. Intolerant of the arrogance being spewed forth by those who are ignorant of the true practice of Christianity. That intolerance wraps around and includes those who call themselves Christians but do nothing more than walk around and give our Lord, and His followers, a bad name. Romans 2:24 says 'the name of God will be blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you' well you went and did it, didn't you?

Here, we get into cultish redefinition of common concepts. In the most basic political theory sense, tolerance means you don't shoot people or put them in jail for having or expressing a different opinion. But fundamentalists use "tolerance" to mean deference to Christian fundamentalists, including their political and legal preferences in everything from evangelizing by military chaplains to banning the teaching of post-1850 biology in public schools. This person here uses "tolerance" and "intolerance" as synonyms for agreeing or disagree with fundamentalist positions. (I don't follow exactly who they're saying is responsible for the blasphemy among the Gentiles, or who they think the "Gentiles" are in this situation.)

This whole thing is asinine to me. We all know, our Bill of Rights states: 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof' They even deemed it important enough to put it as the number one thing to address, Top on the 'to do list', even above our right to bear arms. I just don't understand it. How in the world, can you expect to take one of our RIGHTS away from the very people who sacrifice the most to ensure them? I don't understand the wisdom in calling this man in to talk about religious tolerance when he HAS NONE.

Again, when "tolerance" means deference to fundamentalist preferences across the board, anyone who questions them or insists on enforcing laws and regulations on ethical proselytizing they are by definition intolerant. There's also an element of projection in this discourse: No, we're not intolerant, its the libruls that are intolerant of us; and so we have to be intolerant to them and it's still all the libruls' fault!

To say that a warrior sharing his or her faith with another should be counted as treason, yet talk of cutting out a piece of our Bill of Rights isn't? It's foolishness to me. We need to get this article out and get it read. Let the people know what's being kicked around at the Pentagon and in the Oval Office before it's too late. Everyone should be appalled by this. Believer and non believer alike. If this doesn't infuriate you, then guess what, you're part of the problem. It wont be long until the rights that are near and dear to you will start being whittled away at and taken from you.

This last mood of impending doom is a dominant mood in the apocalyptic thinking that is so prevalent in American fundamentalism. It's actually a common characteristic of various kinds of religious fundamentalism.

Do I even need to ask how the folks at Breitbart.com would react to reports that Muslim chaplains in the service were pressuring Christian soldiers to convert to Islam?

Despite the fog of fundi victimization and melodramatic self-pity, when Weinstein and the MRFF advocate for following the law and military regulations on proselytizing in the military, we're talking about the armed forces of the United States, not of Christianity or Islam or any other religion.

ags: christian fundamentalism, mikey weinstein, military religious freedom foundation

Catholic neo-Confederates

Hey, Scarlett O'Hara and her family were Catholic. I guess it shouldn't be terribly surprising there are neo-Confederate Catholic fundamantalists. Frank Cocozzelli gives some background on them in Thomas E. Woods, Jr. and the Neo-Confederate Catholic Right Talk to Action 05/01/2013:

Over the years, this column has looked at the many facets of the Catholic Right, including neo-cons, paleo-cons, Bill Donohue, Opus Dei, and more. We now come to the Neo-Confederate Catholic Right, a peculiar variation of libertarianism, which focuses almost exclusively on economics while maintaining most, if not all of the social conservative culture war issues such as opposition to reproductive rights and marriage equality. Indeed, this movement employs the long discredited states' rights theory of nullification -- the notion that any state has the right to ignore any federal court order or law which that state has deemed unconstitutional.

Among the Catholic Rightists beating the drum for nullification are Pat Buchanan, Thomas DiLorenzo, Thomas Fleming and Thomas E. Woods, Jr. All four advocate states' rights, a seething resentment of Abraham Lincoln, and as Rachel Tabachnick recently highlighted, Woods is a key member of the pro-secession League of the South, Traditional Catholicism (save possibly DiLorenzo) and Austrian-school, libertarian economics.

Woods is a convert to the type of Catholicism sought by many on the Catholic Right. As such, he is a vocal proponent for a return to a pre-Vatican II mindset. He is extreme in his economic libertarianism as well as secession and nullification. While nullification has a long and dark history on matters of race in the U.S., it is also looming as an issue for reproductive rights and marriage equality.

ags: christian dominionism, christian fundamentalism, christian right, neo-confederate

Conservative Christians and stigma around mental health issues

The famous conservative evangelical pastor Rick Warren's song Matthew committed suicide recently. (Joseph Serna, Rick Warren son 'probably not' owner of gun in suicide, cops say Los Angeles Times 04/10/2013)

This news brought to public light the reality that many conservative Christians retain a sense of deep shame and denial in relation to mental illness and other clinical psychological problems.

This article from a site called A Holy Experience, What Christians Need to Know about Mental Health 04/08/2013, by Ann Voskamp, who identifies herself as "a plain Ann without even the fanciful 'e', wife to The Farmer, mama to six, and honestly, I'm a bit of a mess."

Her article is about a family, presumably her own, in which the mother suffered severe depression in connection with cancer. She starts off with a "Dear Church" introduction saying, "Cancer can be deadly and so can depression. So can the dark and the shame and the crush of a thousand skeletons, a thousand millstones, a thousand internal infernos."

The mother required in-patient treatment for depression. She writes, "My Dad, he had told me that if I told, it'd slit us all." I really did a double-take on that line. I came up with a benign interpretation that it's probably a typo, and that she meant to say her father was warning that if the kids told people Mom was in a psychiatric ward, it would "split" up the family.

She does reflect how such a charge from a parent can feel to a child:

So much for believing the Truth will set you free. So much weight for a wide-eyed nine-year-old.

So I locked lips and heart hard so no one knew about the locked wards and the psychiatric doctors and why my mama was gone and it’s crazy how the stigma around mental health can drive you right insane."

Her post is apparently to tell people it's all right to recognize that people have psychiatric problems that has nothing to do with some spiritual state of sin:

There are some who take communion and anti-depressants and there are those who think both are a crutch.

Come in close — I'd rather walk tall with a crutch than crawl around insisting like a proud and bloody fool that I didn’t need one. [emphasis in original]

But in that formulation and in the rest of the post, what comes through is a remaining heavy sense of stigma. "the dark and the shame" that she speaks of in his introduction.

Are there things going on in religious communities that promote such attitudes above and beyond ordinary fear and lack of medical understanding?

There are a few obvious things. One is that Christian fundamentalists are by definition anti-science in some important sense, although one of the characteristics of fundamentalism is to argue against science in terms that mimic the techniques of science. Another is that fundamentalist Christianity has a mystical core related to the Pietist tradition that assumes that people can have a direct interaction with God that is in theory is not different than material, "real-world" experience. And that mystical union of the believer with God is generally assumed to produce general happiness in the believer's life, making any chronic disturbance of the kind represented by depression or other clinical conditions a sign of inadequate faith or a damaged relationship with God.

Third, there is a belief in faith-healing. The faith-healing services are particularly associated with the Pentecostal tradition, but Catholics also have faith healers and faith-healing services, which depending on the parish can lean more to the superstitious or to the abstract-spiritual side. But non-Pentecostal fundamentalists and even more mainstream of liberals church-goers generally have some sense that praying for the sick at least may result in a more-or-less supernatural recovery.

Finally, there the Pentecostal (or neo-Pentecostal if you prefer) practice of deliverance, i.e, exorcism of demons. Which can be especially potent in promoting denial and shame when it comes to mental illness. This is largely but not exclusively the province of neo-Pentecostals in the Christian world. The Catholic Church has a relatively discrete but active deliverance ministry, although there are Church rules that put formal constraints on how its practiced. (Though it's not particularly relevant here, the encouragement of exorcism is associated with hardline reactionaries in the Catholic Church.)

Stephen Hunt in Managing the demonic: Some aspects of the neo‐Pentecostal deliverance ministry Journal of Contemporary Religion 13:2 (1998) addressed the deliverance ministries as they were practiced at that time, with particular reference to the British context. (You probably need access to a library database for the link to work.) He does a good job of explaining how in some contexts, "deliverance" can be a relatively benign ritual that owes such to the "encounter group therapy" and he notes that "early exponents were influenced by Carl Roger's work." In a well-managed small group therapy of more of a workshop type, "This can be quite cathartic in the sense that deliverance appears to sometimes marry confession with a rigourous self-directing therapy." And he cites one such example:

For instance, on one occasion at a healing centre, I witnessed Paul (not his real name), a young middle-class Anglican charismatic, stand up before some 70 people and admit to pre-marital sex with his wife. He was subsequently delivered of a spirit of 'guilt' and supported by a long period of counselling.

Leaving aside for a moment whether its really healthy to encourage a sense of guilt about boinking your partner before marriage, that does sound benign and kind of sweet. If he had confessed to have been sleeping with her best friend before their marriage, that might have had more upsetting consequences, I'm guessing. He also mentions that in the deliverance ceremonies, "The concern with the previous sexual behaviour of believers by those advancing deliverance reaches almost the point of obsession."

But then there's the full-blown holy-roller, Linda Blair-in-The Exorcist type of ceremonies. And those are considerably less benign. Where the encounter group context may use the notion of evil spirits mainly as a kind of metaphor for the frustrations and problems of life, the holy-roller version treats demons as kind of parasitic infections in the body and soul of the victim.

No, this is not what a virus or a mental health problem looks like

It's interesting to note here that while non-Pentecostal fundamentalists tend to regard exorcism as something to stay the hell away from - sorry, I couldn't resist! - the "literalist" reading of Scripture to which they adhere, i.e., reading the Christian Bible as though it were a history and science text, pretty much leaves them stuck believing in the reality of demonic possession in some way. That is, as a literal infection by some kind of foreign body, not as a metaphor.

I'll just mention in passing here that the early Christians came to regard the gods of "pagan" religions as evil spirits. The Greek word "daimon" (demon) in the New Testament derived from a Greek word for "divine"; the transformation is a case of a word taking on an opposite meaning, and probably reflects in part the notion of regarding foreign gods as not just foreign and unfriendly but actively evil. More mainstream Christians don't have much trouble in regarding the demon stories in the New Testament as meant to describe a religious outlook rather than as medical texts.

As Hunt describes, in the Pentecostal or "charismatic" religious world, demons are not only viewed as causing mental illness like some kind of germ. He notes that "in the hands of charismatic" there is an emphasis also on "demons as representing negative emotions." And in the fundamentalist/Pentecostal world, all sorts of emotions, including very normal and healthy responses to real conditions, are stigmatized as sinful

If the belief in literal demons seems superstitious, which it certainly is, it may seem that such a belief in itself is a sign of some clinical problem. But presumably for most people who believe it it, it's something that seems creepy and scary and they would shy away from deliverance ceremonies of the more extreme type. However, the literal belief that demons can cause mental illness almost certainly makes it much easier for such believers to fear mental illness as something uniquely evil and frightening. And if you do hold such beliefs and find yourself having serious emotional/mental problems, you not only have to worry about the clinical problems. You have to worry that your body and soul are being inhabited by a malignant spirit that is trying to drag you down to Hell.

These fearful associations are encouraged by the holy-roller deliverance ceremonies, which Hunt notes "can be extremely violent with a great deal of shaking or involve lying on the floor with limbs thrashing about," and also "a great deal of weeping." The ceremonies may also involve those seeking deliverance "screaming, crying, sobbing, belching, laughing, and screeching." Kind of like an episode of American Horror Story Asylum. Hunt observes dryly, "This is particularly unnerving for the outsider to witness." And it undoubtedly has similar effects even though they assimilate the experience in a different way.

Which brings me to this article by Frank Viola, 3 Christian Responses to Mental Illness; Which One Is Most Biblical? Christian Post 04/11/2013, addressing concerns among conservative Christians raised by Matthew Warren's suicide:

Throughout my years of being involved in various and sundry Christian movements and denominations, it seems that Christians understand mental disorders in one of three chief ways:

1. Mental illness is demonic in origin. So the antidote is to cast out the demons that are causing it.
2. Mental illness is psychobabble. There's no such thing as a "mental disorder." All so-called mental illnesses are just sinful behaviors. So the antidote is for person to repent and get right with God.
3. Mental illness is a physiological disorder. The brain is a physical organ just like the heart, the thyroid, the joints, etc. Thus if someone has panic attacks or bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or chronic depression or ADHD, they have a chemical imbalance in the brain, not dissimilar to a hyperthyroidism or high blood pressure or arthritis.

I cut my teeth on a movement that promoted #1. I've met many people who believed #2. But I believe #3 is often the case.

The tone of his article is telling. Instead of telling his readers, look, people, don't be conned by some exorcist who wants to hear lurid stories about your sex life and who may be looking to get some nookie out it somehow, recognize that it's the 21st century and there are ways to get help for clinical psychological and psychiatric problems. And if your fellow church members thinks there's something shameful about that, then you can forgive them for their stupidity and superstition after you or your family member get treatment for depression, or alcoholism, or drug addiction, or bulimia, or whatever it is. If your local exorcist drives out a common-cold demon, the cold will probably magically go away in a week or two. But you also might want to get some cough drops and be careful not to let it develop into a pneumonia demon while you're waiting.

But alcoholism or schizophrenia, hey, don't be a fool about it!

Viola doesn't tell his readers that. In fact, he even says explicitly, "Sometimes demons are involved in mental illness, but not always."

No, demons are not involved in mental illness. And you're doing no one but exorcist hucksters any good by promoting that view.

Viola's article is revealing, though, in that he seems to actually be encouraging his readers to recognize that mental health problems are health problems that require medical treatment. Yet he seems to have believed that the conservative Christian audience that the Christian Post serves needed a reassurance that he was down with the fundamentalist belief that demons cause health problems like some kind of virus or germ.

Fundis are always whining that somebody is persecuting them for their Christian beliefs. The truth is in America that people are pretty much free to believe any dang fool thing they want about religion or anything else. But when religious beliefs lead people to neglect real healthy problems out of fear or superstition or shame, that can do real harm. And American Christians who promote such beliefs should expect other Christians to call them on it, both for promoting something dangerous and for giving the religion and bad name in doing so.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, exorcism, pentecostalism

The theology of distraction and the Newtown mass gun murders

I've resisted trying to speculate about some of the more subjective aspects of gun violence in the US political culture because of the very reason Charlie Pierce mentions in his The Night Before The President Came To Newtown Esquire Politics Blog 12/17/2012: "One pastor got on TV and blamed "the evil in the heart of man." (Unless you adopt his particular interpretation of monotheism, there is something inherent in you that might put seven bullets into a seven-year old.) This is convenient, because this is something against which we cannot legislate." (my emphasis)

A lot of the pet theories that Christian fundamentalists in particular like to throw out there on these all-too-frequent occasions of mass gun massacres are just that: a cover for the gun lobby to focus people's attention on anything and everything but better gun regulations.

For example, Franklin Graham - who apparently is more interested in being a new Jerry Falwell than a new Billy Graham - invoked video games and the Mystery of Evil as excuses not to regulate assault weapons any better. (Why the shock and awe? Washington Post 12/15/2012) Mike Huckabee first blamed the public schools not forcing Jewish and Muslim and non-believing kids to pray rote Christian prayers for the deaths of the 20 kids and six adults in Newtown. He later went on to clarify he remarks and spread the blame to other favorite fundamentalist gripes about the decline of his version of "family," etc. (Mary Elizabeth Williams, Huckabee blames gays for the Newtown massacre Salon 12/17/2012), in the process presenting his God in a very mean, astonishingly cruel and petty light.

For evangelical Christian denominations that stress proselytizing as a central duty, it's normal to suggest, "This nation needs the gospel now more than ever. We need to reach everyone with the hope of Jesus Christ," as Greg Stier does in Another Tragic School Shooting; How Should We React? Christian Post 12/15/2012. How appropriate that might be face-to-face with a non-Christian parent whose child had just been murdered is another question. But if their "witness" for their faith includes trying to be a responsible citizen, this kind of perspective doesn't have to turn into a way to distract from policy discussion that actually address the problem of gun violence.

I have some sympathy for the platitudes that people, including ministers, may wind up producing when they try to provide comfort or orientation to people affected in some way by an horrible event like the Newtown mass gun murders. Jim Denison in God on Trial in Newtown Christian Post 12/17/2012 gives what might initially look like a serious attempt to deal with the issues that often occur to religious people confronted with such situations. But he winds up reducing the complex theological question of theodicy to cartoon charactures. Satan did it. The killer made bad choices. Then he "answers" four questions he posed on theodicy (without using that term) by basically just restating the question. He ends up with the ever-reliable it's-a-mystery answer. Declaring that God ultimately makes everything right, he explains, "This assertion does not guarantee that you and I will experience or even understand God's greater good on this side of glory." It's a mystery! He probably would have been better off citing the Book of Job and it conclusion that human being in the end don't know the ways of God. That way you end up at least with some sense of humility instead of making a bunch of village atheist arguments without answering them.

But his presentation does keep the whole matter safely in the realm of "something against which we cannot legislate." And therefore of no direct practical relevance. Not that a message of comfort needs to. But it shouldn't be an excuse to oppose or ignore practical matters relating to the problem of mass gun massacres.

And what does our reliably mealy-mouthed friend Dr. Al Mohler have to say about the Newtown shooting? In Rachel Weeping for Her Children — The Massacre in Connecticut 12/14/2012, he explains that The Fall (of Adam and that temptress bitch Eve) is to blame. Then there's this: "the Christian must affirm the grace of moral restraint, knowing that the real question is not why some isolated persons commit such crimes, but why such massacres are not more common." Which read to me as, what are you moaning about, it's not as bad as what you should expect! It's apparently also our Christian duties to indulge murderous fantasies about the shooter, and sneer at any suggestion that mental health issues might have some relevance: "Even if executed for his crimes, he could die only once. Even if sentenced to scores of life sentences to prison, he could forfeit only one human lifespan. ... No human court can hand down an adequate sentence for such a crime." Oh, a remember, if you're an adult and get murdered without believing in God according to Bro. Al's prescriptions, you're going to Hail! I doubt anyone is going to be terribly comforted by Bro. Al's message. I'm much more confident that they aren't going to take any decent Christian theology from it.

And what about Bro. Wade "Sword of Vengeance" Burleson, who takes his divine guidance from sources like the John Birch Society? In Gun Control and the Tragedy at Sandy Hook Istoria Ministries Blog 12/15/2012. He says the Newtown mass gun murder happened because, apparently, citizens need guns so they can execute criminals after they are convicted. And there's too many of them thar' gun laws around that prevent that. So God decided to bump off 20 little kids and six adults in Newtown as a message that we need more guns to be killing more people. Or something. I'm thinking Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance might want to cut down on the time he spends on Bircher websites. He seriously argues that this whole business of criminals being judged to have committed crimes against the state is wrong and instead individuals should just be able to gun down wrongdoers, sort of Hatfields-and-McCoys style, I guess. This whole rule-of-law nonsense just doesn't seem right somehow to Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, second subject, third subject, fourth subject, fifth subject