jeff eaton

I've been all kinds of busy for the last several weeks, and haven't bothered posting much to any of the usual spots. Drupal 6's pre-beta cycle is rolling along, though it seems to be a little less purposeful than the last release cycle. It feels a little like the community is waiting for something to happen, without being sure what that something is.

Over the weekend, though, I did manage to put some of the finishing touches on Growing Up Goddy, a group blog for a circle of folks who spent serious time in the Evangelical Christian subculture. It's in the early experimental phase, but hopefully it can be an interesting place and perhaps a launching pad for some good research and commentary.

A net buddy of mine pointed out a fresh article on WorldNetDaily and solicited thoughts on it. I tend to shy away from WND; it's a bit like the Huffington Post, but without the rigorous fact-checking. Still, the article gathers together a lot of talking points in one place -- everything from "War On Christmas" huffiness to "I'm An Orthodox Jew, So Evangelicals Recognize Me As An Authority" exceptionalism to "We All Knew Islam Was Evil Back In The 80s" revisionism. It's worth taking a detailed look.

Writer Daniel Lapin starts off by invoking the name of Winston Churchill and discussing the grave consequences of England's failure to stop Hitler before German atrocities blossomed into WWII and the Holocaust. He then jumps to the 1980s, discussing Jean-Francois Revel's 1983 book, How Democracies Perish. It warned that Communism wanted to take over the world, and Lapin implies that it, too, was ignored by muddle-headed folks who played the 'Blame America' card.

I'll spend a little time as possible on that portion of the article -- it's not the meat of his argument, but it sets up his pattern of broad strokes and revisionism quite nicely. First, "Hitler could've been stopped" is always a tip-off that someone's about to snowball you. While it's true that earlier action would have changed the course of the conflict brewing in Europe, that doesn't magically justify a writer's views about what constitutes a grave threat. Society ignored early scientists when they talked about the danger of germs, but that doesn't mean being ignored by society makes you correct. This is basic logic, and Lapin seems to be hoping that readers overlook it.

Second, his comments about communism in the 80s are a telling. Decades after the Cuban Missile Crisis and years into the Reagan administration, there may have been disagreement in the political sphere over how bad the Soviet Union was. There may have been heated discussion about the idea that US realpolitik was just as morally bankrupt. But we were deep into a decades-long arms race with them, fighting wars around the world to keep them from expanding, and calling them The Evil Empire in speeches. I don't think anyone can really claim that Revel was a lone voice crying out in the wilderness when he warned that Communists wanted to take over other countries.

Here, though, is where it gets good:

Heaven knows there was enough warning during the 1980s of the intention of part of the Islamic world to take yet another crack at world domination. Yet instead of seeing each deadly assault on our interests around the world as a test of our resolve, we ignored it. We failed the test and lost 3,000 Americans in two unforgettable hours.

The whiplash-inducing jump here, from "We ignored communism in the 1980s" to "We ignored the dangers of radical Islam in the 1980s," is pretty awesome. Lapin needs to step back for a bit of history.

Islamic radicalism as we now think of them barely existed in the 1980s. They came onto the radar because our government funded them as part of the battle against communism. During the Reagan era, we were sending about half a billion dollars a year to the Muslim radicals in that country who were fighting the Soviets. We also put heavy pressure on the Saudis to match those funds, and one of the guys they got on that project was a member of the wealthy Bin Ladin family. You might have heard of him recently.

Two decades later, we can look back and realize that introducing Saudi funding to Islamic radicals, training them, and giving them crates full of surface-to-air-missiles was probably... not the best long-term move. At the time, though, the author's philosophical compatriots were talking about Islamic freedom fighters as great monotheistic buddies in the fight against Godless communists; it's pure revisionism to pretend otherwise. There are lessons to be learned from that adventure, obviously, but anyone who claims that we were both ignoring communism and dangers of radical Islam in the 80s is either ignorant of basic history or deliberately misleading his readers.

Lapin is only just warming up, though. Skipping quickly from WWII to the Cold War to 9/11, he hits the real topic of importance: the atheist war on American Christians.

Phase one of this war I describe is a propaganda blitzkrieg that is eerily reminiscent of how effectively the Goebbels propaganda machine softened up the German people for what was to come.

There is no better term than propaganda blitzkrieg to describe what has been unleashed against Christian conservatives recently.

So, let's get this straight. In America, 92% of the population believes in God and over 80% claim to be Christians. We spent the last 50 years or so pointing nuclear weapons at the people we called "Godless." Christians regularly publish books explaining that atheists are destroying the fabric of our civilization. We've had a president who's said -- on national television -- that he would not allow an atheist in public office. Heck, atheists are the most distrusted minority in our country. Despite all these things, it's the atheists who are gearing up for a campaign to persecute Christians. The evidence?

Consider the long list of anti-Christian books that have been published in recent months. Here are just a few samples of more than 30 similar titles, all from mainstream publishers...

Yep, that's right. Thirty books critical of conservative Christians. Nevermind that a number of the books listed were written by other Christians, and condemned not Christianity but specific theological and political stances taken by particular Christian sects. Nevermind that the books written by atheists in that reading list condemn Muslims just as strongly as Christians. It's all one big mix, this war on Christianity, and the author's just getting started.

First, would you be so sanguine if the target of this loathsome library were Jewish? Just try changing the titles in some of the books I mention above to reflect anti-Semitism instead of rampant anti-Christianism and you'll see what I mean.

This is an awesome game. It's easy to play, too: on my shelf, I have a Christian book titled Kingdom of the Cults. It's an interesting analysis of the beliefs and theological pitfalls of dozens of cults. Let's change that name to Kingdom of the Negro-Lovers, though, and see how innocent it sounds!

Conservative Christians have spent the last three decades actively, vigorously inserting their religious beliefs into the political sphere. I know -- I was one of them. It's reached the point where people who aren't conservative are often branded as 'weak on faith' and not serious about their religious beliefs. Hiding behind the banner of anti-semitism when their ideologies and political activities are criticized is a crass, ugly maneuver. Comparing it to German antisemitism in the 1930s is absurd and offensive.

Lapin hits a few segue-free talking points here, muttering about how books and other forms of entertainment have touched off negative changes in cultures before. Silent Spring, Atlas Shrugged, and the movie Borat are mentioned prominently -- I wish I were kidding.

He spends a few paragraphs, then, quoting controversial statements made by Richard Dawkins, "One of the generals in the anti-Christian army of the secular left." It's certainly true that Dawkins is an outspoken, controversial critic of religious belief. Ignoring for a moment the fact that even many atheists and agnostics find the scientist's rhetorical bomb-throwing troubling, Lapin can't even be bothered to stick to what Dawkins actually says:

He suggests that the state should intervene to protect children from their parents' religious beliefs. Needless to say, he means Christian beliefs, of course. Muslim beliefs add to England's charmingly diverse cultural landscape.

Anyone who's read or heard Dawkins knows that statement is a lie. The handful of 'radical' atheists out there, folks who actively 'preach' that religion is dangerous, cite radical Islam as proof of their thesis. One can only speculate about the intellectual laziness or outright dishonesty that might cause Lapin to make such a statement.

Having hand-waved his way through the propoganda phase of the "war," though, he delivers the shocker. What's the goal of this wave of anti-Christian literature that's flooding the nation?

Phase one in this war is to make Christianity, well, sort of socially unacceptable. Something only foolish, poor and ugly people could turn to.

I have news for you, sir. Richard Dawkins is not making it 'sort of socially unacceptable to be a Christian.' The lady who tours the country comparing God to an octopus is. The mega-church pastor who attacks homosexuals, then gets caught doing meth with a gay hooker? He is. The people who sell Testamints? They are. The church officials who protect child molesting priests? They are. The congressmen who demand that the Ten Commandments stay in courtrooms, but can't recite more than three of them? They are.

When it comes right down to it, being a hypocrite is going to get you mocked. Sadly, believing the same things that publicly revelaed hypocrites do is going to get you mocked. When it gets down to brass tacks, just believing in anything passionately is going to get you mocked. That's true whether you're a Christian, an atheist, a Tori Amos fan, a vegan, or a libertarian.

Considerably more intellectual energy is being pumped into the propaganda campaign against Christianity than was ever delivered to the anti-smoking or anti-drunk-driving campaigns.

This is where he veers into rabid weirdness and alternate-universe weirdness. Wake me up when government-sponsored Public Service Announcements hit the airwaves, telling people to refuse communion because only losers love Jesus, mmkay?

If they succeed, Christianity will be driven underground, and its benign influence on the character of America will be lost. In its place we shall see a sinister secularism that menaces Bible believers of all faiths. Once the voice of the Bible has been silenced, the war on Western Civilization can begin and we shall see a long night of barbarism descend on the West.

You heard it here first, folks. If those damn atheists keep writing books, who knows? A few of them might be elected to public office, where they can introduce legislation that the other several hundred self-professed Christians in Congress and Senate can vote against. The important thing to remember is that if people are allowed to say unflattering things about a particular politically active group of Christians, America has lost and western civilization will collapse.

No article like this would be complete without the rhetorical cherry on top:

Which is why I, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, devoted to Jewish survival, the Torah and Israel am so terrified of American Christianity caving in.

It's difficult to understand how this works for those outside the subculture, but Jews occupy a special place in the evangelical theological landscape. Yes, they will all go to hell unless they become Christians. But until that very moment of damnation, Christians must support and agree with them, because they are God's chosen people. Chosen people who will go to hell, yes. But chosen people nevertheless.

Ignore the fact that The Jews are individual people, with different views and a wide variety of positions on important political, cultural, and theological matters. Ignore the fact that liberal Jews are immediately grouped with those Hitler lovin' commie atheist ne'er do wells. The important part is that A Rabbi Says We're Right.

Conrad nodded me towards an interesting article today, a piece by a friend of his who used to be the LA Times' religion reporter. A profound and sincere conversion let him to pursue a dream of modeling authentic faith in the newsroom, but the day-in day-out task of working with the Church ground it out of him.

The judge ruled in the favor of Uribe, then pastor of a large parish in Whittier. After the hearing, when the priest's attorney discovered I had been there, she ran back into the courtroom and unsuccessfully tried to get the judge to seal the case. I could see why the priest's lawyer would try to cover it up. People would be shocked at how callously the church dealt with a priest's illegitimate son who needed money for food and medicine.

My problem was that none of that surprised me anymore.

As I walked into the long twilight of a Portland summer evening, I felt used up and numb.

My good friend Jeff Benson has recently stumbled into a frustratingly insular blog that fancies itself a watchdog" for the dangerous spiritual poison that is the "Emergent Church Movement." I'm skeptical of the branding of personal growth, which is what much of that movement feels like to me, but my concerns are nothing compared to the righteous anger that's splattered all over the blog.

Curiously, the blogger in question posted about Will Lobdell's slide from faith, and the results were kind of predictable. There was no real attempt to engage Will's questions, just an appeal to personal stories about a mother's answered prayer.

I can understand the power of personal experience, but such responses cheapen Will's own story. He's the first to say that he encountered profound and inspiring beauty, faith, and love while covering the religion beat. Those were matched, however, by just as monstrous sins and the willingness -- no, the eagerness -- of the body of Christ to cover them up.

My soul, for lack of a better term, had lost faith long ago — probably around the time I stopped going to church. My brain, which had been in denial, had finally caught up.

He's the opposite of the fundamentalist's platonic atheist: he didn't fight the gospel with his intellect and ignore the Holy Spirit's wooing. He held on with his head after his heart grew sick of it.

Will's story is real; to be unmoved and unaffected by it is to live in denial.

HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- About 2,000 Muslim volunteers helped victims of Hurricane Katrina at the city's downtown convention center Sunday, the fourth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

"We're not trying to prove anything, other than what our faith requires us to do," said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Muslim American Society. "What goes with our faith is to help others, to respond and show compassion when people need it, and I'm glad we can do it."

I remember sitting in my office at work on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Natalie had IM'd from London to see if I was okay, employees were clustered in the break room watching flames and horror on CNN, O'Hare airport was closing down a few minutes from my building, and the world stopped making sense for several hours.

In the days following the attacks, I remember the strange chill and the awareness that things were changing. Rumors spread about Muslims being beaten, mosques being defaced. Thankfully, there was no major backlask in the streets of American cities. Still, in the years since the attacks, the othering of Muslims has become a common thread. In many ways its easy: every day brings images of violence in Muslim countries, sometimes involving our military, sometimes involving Israel, sometimes between various factions of Muslim political groups... Sometimes, it's just inexplicable. We don't have time to sort it all out, but the message often comes through: When there's bad stuff going on, Muslims are often at the center of it.

The problem becomes more serious when it's combined with the minimal knowledge of Islam most Americans have. Most of Joe Average's knowledge about Islam's theology comes from two sources: terrorists and their extremist leaders, and Muslim apologists trying to patch up the PR damage. A word like 'Jihad' gets thrown around by a guy who blows up children. A talking head appears on TV, saying that 'jihad' really just means some sort of personal struggle to overcome evil, and it smells of excuse-making, neh? Then, compare and contrast assorted passages from the Koran that call for infidel-killing, and the case for Islam is starting to look pretty bad.

I know a number of people who've come to the conclusion that "real Muslims" are morally obligated -- compelled by their beliefs -- to reign death and destruction on anyone who doesn't convert. The folks who live peacefully with us -- the guy down the street who goes to his mosque and prays and fasts, or Amir, who volunteers for Habitat for Humanity, or the aid workers in the article cited above -- they might be a nice people, but only because they're willing to abandoned the true tenets of their faith.

The Quran certainly does say some grim things about those who don't follow Allah. So does the Bible about those who don't serve Yaweh. Our reasons for taking some commands quite literally while ignoring the command to, say, stone blasphemers to death, are certainly well developed. But we can't say that the Bible, taken as a free-standing work of literature, doesn't promote, advocate, and even command violence of believers.

Christianity has evolved a lot over the past 2000 years or so. We've left behind The Crusades, the Inquisitions, and so on. But doing so required -- at the time at least -- rethinking our understanding of Scripture and stepping out of a lot of preconceptions. I believe that Islam is also evolving in similar ways -- it's 700 years younger than Christianity, and unlike our faith, theirs doesn't have the luxury of a New World to colonize in its agressive teenage years.

I think it's fair to assume that the Muslims in the CNN article above aren't from the same theological camp as Bin Ladin -- as an outsider looking into Islam, I think it's tricky for me to say that Bin Ladin is 'the real thing.' After all, an outsider could say that I'm not a *real Christian* because I help friends when they are down, even if they're atheists, wiccans, or technopagans. People like those volunteers believe, honestly and truly, that their faith demands service, charity, and kindness of them rather than anger and murder. They act on this belief, and it's a good thing.

Islam has many different communities and theological 'schools.' The radical violent Islamic theologies, like those influential in Saudi Arabia, have shaped Bin Ladin and other terrorists considerably. The challenge for us in the coming years and decades is to learn how to combat those violent strains while embracing the less radical, less reactionary schools of theology.

America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox—more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese—illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture.

Harpers has a fascinating article on America's uniquely Christian Culture, discussing the core religious tension at the heart of our country's social engine. Seventy-five percent of the population, for example, mistakenly attributes Ben Franklin's proverb "God helps those who help themselves" to the Bible, even though it directly contradicts other Scriptural principles. Metafilter has a discussion gearing up on the article, but it's likely to devolve into "religion: pros and cons" within a few hours.

Meanwhile, over on Kierkegaard Lips, my friend Rachel is grappling with some genuinely profound questions about faith and love.

...I got to thinking about how hard it is to love. How hard it is for me to even think about loving my dad. How hard it is to love people that I think are stupid and mean, or on the other hand those who try too hard to flaunt their giant pulsating brains filled with logic and graphs and boxes and charts. I spoke with a few people lately who told me that their own faith is based largely in logic, and that the more "spiritual" aspect of their faith is virtually non-existant. Sometimes I feel like I have the opposite mentality; my faith largely supported by my dreams, visions, and strange conceptual leaps that I make between Biblical idealogy and manic delusional thought processes based in my own excessive existentialism...

I wonder if she might be talking around the edges of this great divide between our stated 'religion culture' and the way we as Americans tend to think and live and truly believe. But then, it's not just a head versus heart issue -- most Americans are as confused about the logical theology as they are about the 'heart' of Christianity. I've been pondering the country's Revivalist history for a while, partially inspired by Catherine's research about Emily Dickinson. I wonder if these sorts of cracks and inconsistencies in the American religious experience are part of our heritage as much as the First and Second Amendments, etc.

The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 is a bad piece of legislation that's floated around for years. It's a complete wet dream for the Credit Card Industry, and it raises the hackles of consumer advocates all over the country. Put simply, it makes it much much more difficult for individuals to file for bankruptcy when they're caught in the doom-spiral of debt.

The rationale for the bill (unchanged since the first versions were floated in 2003) is that lots of people, scandalous libertines that they are, enjoy lives of wanton excess. They run up bills with caviar and furs only to leave poor, overworked credit card companies with the check -- escaping the consequences of their actions via bankruptcy laws. Clearly, eliminating the loopholes and preventing these abuses is essential! *cough*welfarequeens*cough* This is horse shit, plain and simple. Others have dissected the flaws in the bill's various incarnations, and its record should speak for itself. While irresponsible spending is bad the recent increase in bankruptcies our country has seen since the 90's has little to do with irresponsible consumers and a lot to do with the credit industry's eagerness to extend credit to risky people, then hit them for exorbitant fees when they can't pay the debts back. This is generally known as "predatory lending" and as a Christian, I find it especially troubling. Scripture condemns the process (remember "usury?") and even the Old Testament, hardly a progressive document by today's standards, mandates regular economic redistribution to prevent cycles of poverty and indebtedness.

The Washington Post published an interesting little anecdote on Sunday that highlighted the problem:

For more than two years, special-education teacher Fatemeh Hosseini worked a second job to keep up with the $2,000 in monthly payments she collectively sent to five banks to try to pay $25,000 in credit card debt.

Even though she had not used the cards to buy anything more, her debt had nearly doubled to $49,574 by the time the Sunnyvale, Calif., resident filed for bankruptcy last June. That is because Hosseini's payments sometimes were tardy, triggering late fees ranging from $25 to $50 and doubling interest rates to nearly 30 percent. When the additional costs pushed her balance over her credit limit, the credit card companies added more penalties.

"I was really trying hard to make minimum payments," said Hosseini, whose financial problems began in the late 1990s when her husband left her and their three children. "All of my salary was going to the credit card companies, but there was no change in the balances because of that interest and those penalties."

Punitive charges -- penalty fees and sharply higher interest rates after a payment is late -- compound the problems of many financially strapped consumers, sometimes making it impossible for them to dig their way out of debt and pushing them into bankruptcy.

The industry makes its money on people who run up large balances and have trouble paying them off. Whether this is due to dumb spending patterns, emergency medical bills, a broken marriage, or identity theft is irrelevant: the industry wants to make a profit, and high-risk people are the best way to make a profit. Rather than changes its lending patterns, the industry has lobbied congress for years to make credit card debts unprotected -- in other words, they want credit card debt to be bankruptcy-proof, following debtors around until the sun burns out.

That's exactly what the ironically-named "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005" does.

The real beauty of it, though, is the bill's sponsor, Chuck Grassley. He's got a conservative voting record on moral issues like gay marriage, abortion, and sex education. He talks a strong game on this front -- he's a member in good standing of The Family, a creepily named Washington group that melds Christian language with conservative nationalism and hides itself behind a veil of media-hostile secrecy. With this strong moral foundation, Grassley should be very sensitive to concerns about Biblical standards, right? Not quite.

This gem just in from the Des Moines Register:

A national group of Christian lawyers is appealing to church leaders to join them in lobbying against the bankruptcy reform bill introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Ia.

The lawyers say the legislation runs contrary to the forgiveness of debt and charity required by the Bible.

"As Christian attorneys, we strongly believe that it was never God's intention to create a society where indebtedness was a crime or a badge of dishonor," Christian members of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys wrote in a letter sent Feb. 26 to hundreds of church leaders across the nation.

The lawyers note that in the Old Testament, God did not outlaw borrowing and lending, but provided that loans would become discharged every seven years.

In response, Grassley said Congress could not be bound by biblical mandates because "the Constitution does not provide for a theocracy."

"I can't listen to Christian lawyers because I would be imposing the Bible on a diverse population," Grassley said. "I'll bet those lawyers wouldn't want us to impose the principles of forgiving debt every seven years. If that were the law, nobody would loan them money."

This isn't shocking to me. Despite Grassley's moral fortitude on popular Christian hot-buttons, he's jumped at every chance to screw individuals since he was elected in 1980. He's voted against eliminating the "marriage penalty" for married taxpayers. He's voted to repeal safety standards for assembly-line workers. He's voted to limit appeals in death-penalty cases, even when new evidence may prove the innocence of those on death row. He voted against minimum wage increases. He... well. You get it.

Grassley is quite happy to demolish Church-state lines when it favors his political career. He's thrown his support behind new legislation that would allow churches to endorse political candidates without losing their tax-exempt status. But when it comes to bankruptcy legislation, he knows which side his bread is buttered on. The credit industry, and MNBA in particular, is one of the GOP's largest campaign donors, and when they come calling Grassley answers. When their exploitative business model is threatened, society's morality and compassion runs a distant second. "I can't listen to Christian lawyers," he says, "because I would be imposing the Bible on a diverse population."

Remember this, Christians. Remember this moment and remember it good.

You are tools in a political game, and you are fools if you believe otherwise.