Glennalicious

Awesome, G.

Wow, great blogging. I think I might have to come here everyday for a good read 'n' opinion.

"Faith is meant to be questioned."

Simple yet strong statement. Utmost respect to what ya believe in.

When the Nazis arrested the Communists, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Communist.

When they locked up the Social Democrats, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Social Democrat.

When they arrested the trade unionists,I said nothing; after all, I was not a trade unionist.

When they arrested the Jews, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Jew.

When they arrested me, there was no longer anyone who could protest.

- Martin Niemoeller (1892--1984)

It's a very slippery slope we stand on, no?

Well said, G!
As you know, I recently moved back to my "home town" in N GA and to be nearer my 81 yo mom - alone after 59 yrs of marriage - after nearly 30 years in Northern California. I have always said that she will go to her grave praying for my salvation - so be it, at least she is praying FOR me. Now, most recently, we had a very similar dicusssion re: being gay and going to church where one is not accepted. Mom is a Southern Baptist - enough said. She truly does not get it. In her I can accept it - so long as she accepts that I will not be joining her church - my childhood one. Keep speaking your truth.
PEACE!

To really have statistical inference, we need the percentages of Americans who are born-again christians, as well as the sum of percentages of Americans who are fundamentalist or evangelical christian.

My issue with Homer is not just generalizations, but generalizations that are wildly inaccurate and deliberately insulting. His contention that "modern day religious folk forget" about other faith traditions past and present is totally bizarre, and wouldn't be accurate even if he'd said "most" or even "some."

A few weeks ago on Tin Man, Homer commented that "Religious folks always want to feel superior to other people." This was his explanation for why religious types are opposed to marriage equality for gay people. I guess Homer isn't aware that the Unitarian Church, Reform Judaism, the United Church of Christ and the Metropolitan Community Church currently offer marriage rites to same-sex couples, and some congregations from mainline churches like Lutherans, Methodists and Presbyterians will bless "unions," even if they're not presently calling it a marriage. And in the words of Bishop V. Gene Robinson, right now the Episcopal Church "is risking its life" for gay people. This is the third largest denomination in the United States, standing up to its global leadership, which recently asked us to refrain from nominating as a bishop anyone whose "manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church." The archdiocese of Newark promptly nominated a gay bishop candidate the very next week.

Are there valid criticisms to be leveled at the hypocrisy of some people of faith who selectively twist Scripture to further their own agenda of mindless prejudice? Yes, to quote Bishop Robinson himself, "Religion is the source of our oppression."

But the statements that Homer makes -- not just generalizations, but inaccurate and hurtful -- only contribute to the hostility. One cannot fight prejudice with prejudice. And this modern day gay religious person is calling Homer's spade a spade.

Andy, people are criticizing the Evangelical movement and you are holding up Episcopalianism as an example of why people should not do it. I don't think that that is really all that fair.

You know, I've never been involved in one of those dubious internet feuds before.

I left that comment on Tinman's site in reference to a preceding comment focusing on conservative Christianity (e.g., Baptists). Perhaps I should have been clearer in regards to this. Andy chose to highlight this comment on his blog, suggesting I felt this way about all Christianity and/or religions. Andy noted, about me, "My, don't we feel superior."

He has continued to attack my character. Please note that I have never personally attacked his character. I don't know Andy, and I generally do not judge people I have not met or been at least exposed to. I have not read his blog.

It is really unpleasant having someone you've never met, never emailed, never had any personal contact with writing about your character on the internet. According to Andy, I'm "superior," "mocking," "unenlightened," "prejudiced," and "insulting."

I wonder whether those of my gay friends who regularly attend church would describe me in similar terms.

Aaron makes a good point: the fundamentalists, aided and abetted by America's credulous corporate media who exploit shouting heads as infotainment, have successfully created an image of "The Christian" in the minds of many Americans: an intolerant, paranoid, anti-intellectual, politically predictable ideologue. I didn't intend to hold up the Episcopal Church as a defense of Evangelicalism, but merely to emphasize that religion in general, and Christianity specifically, is nowhere near as monolithic as the right-wingers would like for all of us to believe. I myself regularly attack the shallow thinking of Evangelicals on my own blog.

And as far as Homer goes, I don't know him and genuinely would like to give him the benefit of the doubt; but his reaction here is disingenous, as I have never attacked him personally, I merely deconstructed his statements. While he may here clarify that his intended target was only conservative Christians, that certainly could not have been gleaned from any of the broad-stroke statements about "religious folks" that -- incorrect conclusions aside -- would by implication include everyone from Sufis to Mormons. When he writes, "I personally could really care less about rules laid out in some 2000 year old book," what I sense is bald disdain for something that is very important to me (even though a '2000 year old book' of rules is quite possibly the least accurate description of the Bible one could muster). That some religious people might well be worthy of our disdain does not justify sweeping negative generalizations of millions of people. If I have inferred the wrong sentiments behind his comments, then I sincerely apologize, but would suggest that he be more circumspect in his condemnations in the future.

I hestitate to add to this discussion as it seems to be turning into a not very fruitful one, filled as it is with recrimination, projection, and generalizations in response to G's attempts to thread his way through the labyrinth of religion in America. But Andy's recent claims that only Evangelicals are closed minded vis-a-vis Christianity, while all other religious sects under this broad banner are not so much (a wild generalization, if ever there was one) needs to be, as he suggests, "deconstructed" (the philosopher in me has many problems with this use of a very specific term).

I can only do it by use of a little story, maybe even a parable, from my teaching experience. I teach a course on the masterpieces of western literature in an Ivy League university and we do study scripture, both Jewish and Christian. This university attracts liberal students from all denominations, races, creeds, genders (but not classes--a whole other story!). Every time I have taught scripture, particularly the gospels, the Christian students are--and I am putting it mildly--reactive. They insist that, individually, they know what this text means (and only their reading has validity), that students of other creeds (or, I suppose no creed at all) cannot comment on this text. I had one student raised by parents who lived in Communist China--a totally secular family--and she had never read any scripture at all, and had little exposure to people of any faith. Her assessment was that the books we read were deeply illogical, uninteresting, and filled with stultifying prose (on all these points I think she lacks nuance). But so what if she dimisses a text that others find edifying? I love reading scripture and I didn't take it personally, although later I did ask her to bring up one point of contradiction so we could examine it as a class. Before I could do that, numerous Christian students very loudly denounced her, telling her she had no right to comment on this text as she was an alien to the faith, a reaction that defeated any notion of sharing opposing viewpoints. Not once did the Christian students pause when condemning Greek literature, like the "Hymn to Demeter," an explicitly religious text, when they found it alien, uninteresting, or unengaging. It was hard for these students when I point out this obvious point of hypocrisy.

In another class, when a reading of Luke's gospel was not going the way one student wished, she began to loudly repeat over and over, "You just need to have faith," "You just need to have faith." Now, everyone reading this likely thinks these students were extremists, even fundamentalists. But they weren't. I knew all the students involved and I can say that they thought of themselves as open-minded, politically liberal, and knowledgeable of other faith traditions. It is worth noting that they were both Catholics and Protestants.

Obviously, their reactions to readers "not of the faith" created a teaching challenge for me (which I solved and continue to solve each time I teach scripture, something I love to do). Regardless, what I found most fascinating is that these normally very generous and open people rapidly hardened when faith became a question. Christianity was not an idea, or a system of beliefs, but an object, one they possessed; it was their property and for anyone to stray on it without permission could only be construed as criminal.

Lest anyone think my characterization is histrionic, let me affirm: these students often raised their voices, often repeated that it is faith and only faith over and over not to prove a point but to show that they no longer would listen to anyone else. And it was always behavior out of character. I found that most Christian students--of all sects--found it very difficult to be in a room in which their faith was subject to any kind of analysis, let alone outright criticism. Most of these students became "intolerant, paranoid, anti-intellectual, and ideological" when it was time to look at the texts that were the core of their religious belief system. But, that makes sense when I appreciated that their belief system was the dominant one, affirmed for them in many ways, both public and private.

What difference if Homer or anyone else thinks that the Judeo-Christian texts are simply a bunch of rule books? (To be clear, I don't know what of the Judeo-Chrisian texts Homer has read.) At worst, he could be judged as ignorant of their content, but is ignorance the same as "disdain"? If someone is not intimately acquainted with the details of certain books, has not ruminated over their meaning, then does that mean that he or she "disdains" those books? I don't think so.

Now, I am not doing justice to my students, of many faiths and no faith, who read these texts in new ways, challenging their own beliefs and finding truths. Sometimes, this did happen. Sometimes, Jewish students would work with Christian students, showing the Christian students how to translate the Hebrew of "Genesis" into English, demonstrating how difficult translating texts is and that no text is ever a perfect translation: words have many meanings and sometimes words resist transport to another language entirely. A lot of exciting readings came out of these classes and many of the Christian students taught me much about their different sects' strategy of reading certain texts.

In my opinion, no one needs to be circumspect in debating and discussing any faith; errors should be challenged with evidence, stories should be shared, differences should be honored, no matter how painful they might be to paricipants. If we are all circumspect, then no one will learn, differences will not be aired, and change, for all involved, will not be possible. And without change, without growth, human life, in my mind, would be greatly impoverished.

Derrick makes really excellent points. I did want to rebut the notion that I accused only Evangelicalism of closed-mindedness; I am sorry if my comments were unclear, but I wouldn't ever have said that in so many words: as much as I like to sing the praises of the Episcopal Church, we are presently being split by people who don't agree with the direction a majority of the American churches are taking. Also, it's an Evangelical minister named Jim Wallis who's currently rocking the establishment in DC, reminding politicians that the Bible makes thousands of explicit references to the necessity of caring for the poor and being good stewards of God's creation, and pointing out that Jesus urged peace and reconciliation, even and especially with those who have inflicted evil upon us, specifically rejecting the "eye for an eye" foreign policy that Bush and his supporters cherish.

Generalizations are sometimes necessary when making arguments; for example, one could fairly say that "Evangelicals oppose homosexuality" because, as the statistics G linked to show, 95% of them do. Fine. But Homer's generalizations were bizarre and biased -- and more importantly, incorrect -- and I think any sentence that begins "I could care less" (even if he actually meant, he couldn't care less) can safely be said to express disdain.

The problems you've encountered in class are real and the Christian community faces them every day. There has been a major problem with Christian education, in that the history of the Bible itself has just not been taught, and the myth that "The Bible" is a single book that is now in the same form it has been in for two thousand years continues to be perpetuated. Christian students are not often asked to discuss what they think a passage means, they are told. And many of them are taught that the Bible is, as Slacktivist recently, beautifully put it, "self-evident and unambiguous -- two things which scripture tends self-evidently and unambiguously not to be."

And so you are encountering people who behave closed-mindedly not necessarily because they are, but because you are attempting to suggest to them that there are alternative ways of understanding texts that they have been taught since childhood had only one reading. It's traumatic and scary for them to even consider new ideas about the Bible, and while that does not excuse their behavior, I hope it helps to illuminate the cause, and also give us reason to hope.

Hope, because you see, there is change afoot. Twenty years ago, even in secular America, the idea of legalized gay marriage was shocking. This year, a coalition of nearly 200 faith leaders and religious organizations wrote a Friend of the Court letter to the Supreme Court of New Jersey arguing in FAVOR of legalizing same-sex marriage. And whatever very valid criticisms we might level at the liberties Dan Brown took with history in The DaVinci Code, people are now widely learning for the first time that yes, in fact, the major doctrines of Christianity were approved by a vote in a committee headed by a pagan convert Roman emperor some 4 centuries after the death of Christ. The recent discovery of the Judas Gospel has blown the doors off the idea that Matthew, Mark, Luke & John were the only Gospel texts Christianity has ever known. The Bible was put together by a group of men who selected certain texts and discarded others and decided -- prayerfully, and with the best research that was available to them -- what the orthodoxy should be. But the idea that the Bible is some kind of authentic original document from God is beginning to die out.

Are there criticisms that can fairly be leveled at religion in general and Christianity in particular? Absolutely. But make them fairly, make them objectively, and don't go around saying things like "Religious folk just want to feel superior to everyone else," because when you do that you dismiss the real work of people like Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and millions of others who never achieved fame for their service but nonetheless humbled themselves and dedicated their lives to making our planet a better place for everyone.

Also, in the interests of objectivity, how do you know your students in that class weren't correct?

I had a professor in college once ask me to leave his class after the midterm because the essay question was basically, "Please regurgitate my lecture on why Elektra and Salome of Richard Strauss are terrible operas," and I responded with a prepared, point-by-point ass-ripping of his stupid criticisms. ; )