Whose Christianity Today?

     Let us note and pass by the presumption in calling a factional journal Christianity Today.
     Meanwhile, we can scarcely avoid noting the fuss over the magazine's assertion that President Trump should be removed from office.
     In the high dudgeon he favors as a public posture, Billy Graham's graceless son Franklin struggled to grasp the apostasy: "Unfathomable," he said, for the evangelical organ to "side with the Democrat Party."
     Graham had already been known to mingle earthly opinion with spiritual precept. About government sanction of gay marriage, he once said that people who differed with his opposition were shaking a fist at God. No sign indicates that he has since resolved his confusion about who is Who.
      In the mendacity he seems unable to control, President Trump called Christianity Today a "far left magazine." This is simply silly. Billy Graham founded the publication in 1956 as a centrist evangelical voice. Its editorial comments on secular matters have been moderate.
     The magazine's comment on Trump was incisive:
 " ...this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone -- his habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies and slanders -- is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused. ...
     "The impeachment hearings have illuminated the president's moral deficiencies for all to see. This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and the future of our people. None of the president's positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character."
     Positives?
     The magazine nods toward these:
     "Trump's evangelical supporters have pointed to his Supreme Court nominees, his defense of religious liberty, and his stewardship of the economy, among other things, as achievements that justify their support of the president."
     Some of these assertions are debatable in phrasing and in fact. But, taken at face value for the moment, they may be heard to imply that an evangelical agenda in public policy would be proper if only it were championed by a moral man.
     The notion that American secular law could appropriately serve one faction of one faith is inimical to the principles on which this country was founded. It is inimical to basic concepts of right and wrong. It is, at best, foolishly naive. Stated plainly, the proposition mocks itself: Empower the lawmakers of today to enforce our doctrines, and never mind whose doctrines might be chosen for enforcement by the lawmakers of tomorrow.
     In attempting to inject faith into politics, the Christian right has recklessly ignored the obvious risk that the injection would flow in the other direction. And so it lamentably has. The attempt to dance with the devil has stained the name of evangelical Christianity; it has enabled sectarian leaders who are palpably covetous of political power, as much for themselves as for faith; and it has exalted intolerance in our national discourse .
   
   

Biblical Literalism

     When the boy brought up the Bible, my friend Harry was ready for it.
     Harry is a man of many parts, all of them nourished by restless curiosity. If a subject pops up on his radar, he's going to penetrate it. Given an opportunity, he may declaim about anything from fudge-making to ancient Greek philosophy.  And when he declaims, he reliably knows what he's talking about.
     A while back, Harry became interested in the Bible. He was fed up with sectarian rule-mongering; with hucksters who'll save your soul and accept your check in a single transaction; with opportunists who claim that God wants them to have political power. Harry says you  don't have to be an expert to recognize the smell of claptrap,  and nowadays the air is full of it, like second-hand smoke.
    Harry decided to get to the bottom of things. He dove into Bible study.
     The boy is a favorite nephew. He was home on a college break.  Harry invited him for an avuncular visit over beer and burgers, and he invited me to come along.  You'll like the boy, Harry said, he's a good kid.
     Harry asked the boy: Good to be home?
     The boy said: Mostly
     Harry said: Problems?
     The boy said: Grandma keeps pushing me to go to church. It's awkward. I don't buy all that Bible stuff.
     Harry said: Why not?
     The boy said: Well, what about that creation story? How can you buy that? The talking snake and that stuff?
     Harry said: Which creation story? There are two or three. The seven-day creation story is one. The Adam and Eve story is another. They were written by different authors at different times. Later, some editor shoved them together in the book of Genesis that we have now. Then farther on in Genesis there are some other stories -- about divine beings having children with humans.
     The boy said: But Grandma says the Bible is literally true.
     Harry said: Well, I would never want to belittle someone's beliefs, but some parts of the Bible are not meant to be taken literally. They use symbolism to help with theological teachings.  The teachings are what matter, not the symbols.
     Looking down at the table, the boy said: Huh.
     Harry said: There's something else bothering you, isn't there?
     The boy said: Yes.
     Harry said: What?
     The boy said: There's this guy at school. He's a super guy. His dad died young, so he worked part-time to help support his family. He helped his mom raise a little sister. Now he's putting himself through college.  He works hard, he's honest, he's kind to other people. He's a fine man.
     Harry said: But??
     The boy said: He's gay, so the Bible says he's a sinner.
     Harry said: That's not exactly true.
     The boy said: But there are passages in the Bible. I've seen them.
     Harry said: Well, the Bible is a wonderful book, and there's a lot of good guidance in it. But when you're considering any given passage, you need to be careful to consider it as it would have been meant and heard in its original time and place.
     The boy said: I don't understand.
      Harry said: On homosexuality, the Old Testament passages that often get quoted are part of a code with a specific purpose. It was to protect the integrity of the ancient Jewish theocracy against the pagan cultures surrounding. It was not meant to be a general moral code for all people everywhere for all time.
     The boy said: OK, but there's some stuff in the new testament, too. In the letters of that guy Paul.
     Harry said: Yes, but again it's important to be aware of the time and place and context. Paul was a devout Jew elaborating on Jewish scriptural traditions. He would have been familiar with two kinds of homosexual behavior. One was when pagans went to male and female temple prostitutes as a form of cult worship.
     The boy said: What was the other?
     Harry said: Wealthy Greeks would buy young boys as slaves and prey upon them sexually.
     The boy said: So Paul was against paganism and the exploitation of children.
     Harry said: Yes. Nowhere does the Bible condemn mutual love between adults of the same gender. God does not condemn love. And the Bible consistently says that God does condemn something else: Judging your neighbor.
     At this the boy sat up. He said: You said God does not condemn love. So for you, all this is not just about Biblical history. You believe in God.
     Now, Harry is one of those guys who can talk a lot without revealing much of himself. He prefers it that way. But he loves the boy, so he decided to go ahead and lift his veil.
     Harry said: The short answer is, yes.  But the short answer usually provokes more questions -- certainly more than we have time for here. So let me just add this. Someone else said it: I find it a lot easier to believe in God than to believe that my capacity for love is exuded in through the cellular chemistry of meat.
     The boy was quiet for a bit after this. Then he said: Well, thanks. I feel better about a few things now.  But I still don't want to go to church.
     Harry said: I guess your Grandma want you to go with her to her church.
     The boy said: Yes.
     Harry said: Pretty dull, is it?
     The boy said:  Dull isn't even half of it.
     Harry said: Well, your Grandma is a very fine person, so I have three requests for you.
     The boy said: And they are ...?
     Harry said: Don't hurt her feelings;  don't be too sure the church and the Bible have nothing to teach you ...
     Harry paused.
     The boy said: What's the third?
     Harry grinned and said: Don't tell her I bought you beer.
   

   
   
   

Apostasy

     I cannot eat okra.  As a descendant of hardscrabble Carolina farmers, I am thus a cultural apostate. Imagine a Dutchman phobic of herring, or an Italian scorning pasta e fagiole. Imagine an Irish teetotaler.
     Reference sources say that the geographic origin of okra was in Asia or Africa. This in an error of startling magnitude. The geographic origin of okra was the far back corner of my grandparents' vegetable plot, just beyond the snap beans.
     As a boy I feared being sent there to fetch it in for supper. The burden in this mission wasn't distance. It wasn't far to go, if you cut through the corn. The burden was dread of what my grandmother would do after I returned. An angel in every other particular, she had but one merciless method with vegetables. She boiled the very identity out of them. From okra this process produced a pot of glutinous slime.
     I have a close friend with whom I lunch occasionally. He is a fellow Carolinian, a man of cultured sensibilities and generous nature. I enjoy his conversation and value his observations on life.
     However there is one pebble in the shoe of our friendship: He eats okra.  Admitting that I may be emotionally encumbered by cultural shame,  I think nonetheless that I do not wholly imagine him eating it with a certain glint in his eye, as a schoolboy might eat worms in a wordless combination of boast and dare.
     He does have it fried. This piece of culinary camouflage affords a small reprieve to me. Somewhere, sometime, a sensible cook wanted an alternative to mucilaginous goo. I am not alone in seeing the merit of it.
     Frying also has permitted okra to emerge into the larger world of food styles. It is among the kinds of dishes that may be eaten by people who refer to movies as "film," or by northern emigres who use "y'all" in singular reference. In a list of trendy recipes I found fried okra just above okra parmigiana. Enough said.
     My family viewed my okra problem with affectionate forbearance, as a family may gamely love a child who keeps dubious friends. Perhaps they appreciated my effort to make amends by braving collard greens.  In any case, although they might urge  me to eat my vegetables, they never insisted on okra. I did refrain on okra days from asking for an extra biscuit. Even at grandma's house, forbearance had its limits.
     It would be too much to say that okra has scarred me, but it has made me unsure of myself. My lapse from the ways of forebears has led me to question the purity of my Carolina lineage. I speculate on the possibility that somewhere in the yesteryears of my gene pool there was a black sheep. A New Yorker or some such.
      And so, even in my later years, okra remains on my mind. I have random episodes of wondering about it, as one might wonder who was the first person desperate enough to eat an oyster. I've never told my luncheon companion about all this. Perhaps I should. Perhaps, in deference to the afflictions of another, he would consider ordering something else. Perhaps collard greens.
   
     

Sin And Mike Pence

     The word is obscure, but no other will do the job. The dictionary says this:
     Ethnocentrism -- Evaluating other cultures according to preconceptions originating in the standards and customs of one's own culture.
     When this attitude shows in rural and small-town folks, it is said to be provincial. When it shows in big-city people, it is said to be cosmopolitan. Beneath the labels it is one thing only: An instinctive preference for familiar norms.
      And it nourishes stereotypes. In personal life they spare us the work of dealing forthrightly with people unlike ourselves. In the public forum they facilitate a shorthand of insinuation. When the first President Bush realized that Bill Clinton was about to unseat him, he began denigrating Clinton as the governor of a small, southern state. Translation: Rube. When Mike Pence first moved to the national stage as a vice-presidential ticket, he was tagged with  a twofold label. He was a Midwesterner. Translation: Dullard. And he was a fundamentalist Christian. Translation: Fool.
     The knee-jerk laziness of stereotyping has obscured the sharper point that he is a charlatan. Here is Pence in a commencement address at Liberty University:
     (Be prepared to be) "shunned or ridiculed for defending the teachings of the Bible. ... As you go about your daily life, just be ready because you're going to be asked not just to tolerate things that violate your faith, you're going to be asked to endorse them. ... You're going to be asked to bow down to the idols of popular culture."
         It is said that a certain kind of politician would cut down a redwood tree to stand on the stump and make a speech about protecting the environment.  Here we have a speech about Christian morality from an eager acolyte of a president whose personal and official corruption challenge the capacity of words to describe.
     Pence is a disgrace to his office, of course -- a full partner in the demagoguery ("they" are out to get you) and corruption of the administration. But he does another kind of wrong in demeaning faith for political gain with the techniques of a revival-tent bunco artist.
     When he throws red meat to his core audience, they are not the only ones listening. The listening is a hard thing for those of us who try to observe a Christian faith and find in it nothing like the shaming and fear-mongering that echoes in Pence's blather.
      Others are  listening, too. Organized religion walks a precarious line in the world it hopes to redeem. It functions at risk of putting words in the mouth of God, and of being guilty of the common charge that it doesn't practice the virtues it preaches. The difference between dogma and grace is a matter for constant search. Moral gnomes who use the megaphone of high office to deliberately confuse the two are rendering a disservice that reaches far beyond mere politics.

Pete Buttigieg

     The server is a fixture at our favorite restaurant, and we have established a friendly  acquaintance with him over the years.
     He is in his '60s; retired from a career in business; engaged in both the joys and the challenges of growing older; head-over-heels with a brand new granddaughter.
     On one visit, business was slow and he paused at our table to chat. Breaking a workplace rule, he broached politics: "What do you think of Pete Buttigieg?"
     He said it with warmth and a tone of hope. To my ear, the tone is common when people (of all sorts, apparently) speak of the young Hoosier mayor who has declared for the presidency. And many do speak of him.
     What has so quickly elevated him among the throng of Democrats in the race? In these early days, impressions are necessarily superficial.
     Nevertheless, these few:
     People see in Buttigieg intimations that our politics and our politicians need not make decent people recoil. Behind his wholesome demeanor, apparently, is a wholesome man: Bright. Well informed. Thoughtfully interested in public service, and aware that the term should connote service to all citizens, not merely to partisan supporters.
     If he survives the early skirmishes and still appears to be genuine, his campaign will bring the country to familiar crossroads from a new direction.
     His open homosexuality will energize single-issue voters, who were catalytic enablers of the serial travesty proceeding in Washington. They embraced incompetence and corruption for the promise of prevailing on pet social issues.
     But Buttigieg presents the question in the obverse: Should a qualified candidate be denied office solely because one aspect of his private life violates what some people consider to be a religious norm?
     Thus the corollary issue: Today's mixture of religion and politics.  Politicians bowing -- I would say pandering -- to the so-called  Christian right, have in effect offered to write selected religious precepts into civil law. This transaction is noxious to politics, to governance and to a decent respect for the varied spiritual lives of Americans. It amounts to a claim that one faction of one faith has a legally enforceable monopoly on access to God.
     Buttigieg is an observant Christian and an engaged churchman (the two not always being the same thing.) Taken at face value, his faith is loving and inclusive. This puts it a far cry from the hard-hearted caricature of Christianity perpetrated on the right -- what one writer has called judgement without mercy and legalism without grace.
     The error of imputing moral superiority to political opinions is not an exclusively conservative temptation. But the error is vividly demonstrated by public and private leaders of the moment. They have done an especially ugly job of making public policy a tool of division and faith an excuse for intolerance. They have turned our own institutions against us.
     Can Buttigieg really transcend the cut and slash of today's self-interested politics? It seems a hopeful notion to an interesting variety of people.  Win or lose,  he is offering  a therapeutic example -- a breath of fresh air. And fresh air matters.

Cohen, Trump, Truth And Lies

       You don't find swans in a sewer.
                                    Variously attributed


       With scattered exceptions over the years, congressional hearings have earned a reputation for combining bad theater and bad government. Nowhere among the exceptions was the hearing of the House Oversight Committee with turncoat Trump lieutenant Michael Cohen.
      The show was a show indeed.  Political hams pitched televised woo to voter blocs they favor or fear. On the Republican side, a good deal of effort was aimed at making Cohen look venal. Given his undisputed corruption, this could be called the defamatory equivalent of trying to gild a lily, but politicians famously relish license in their use of air time.
       Cohen's debatable veracity is a valid concern, of course. Also valid is this essential: Criminal informants necessarily will have moved in the world of criminality. It's inherent the transaction. Cohen's world of criminality was the Donald Trump orbit. He functioned there for years, and found the environment hospitable to his values.
       In the hearing, Republican Congressman Mark Meadows returned a performance that charity would call colorful in the extreme.  His North Carolina district went for Trump by nearly 30 points in the 2016 election.  Giving Meadows generous benefit of the doubt, we can imagine him saying that voters are entitled to get what they want, and that the voters of his district have said they want Trump.
      This formulation has a measure of merit if voters are voicing informed choices. But their prospect of doing so is dimmed by shills who peddle claptrap in support of Trump's audacious lies.
       Case in point: The border-wall wrangle, where the crisis is phony, the remedy specious and the emerging governance constitutionally grotesque. There is no genuine need for any of it -- only Trump's need to lather up loyalist support against the wave of political and legal trouble rolling his way. The president is willing to go to ultimate extremes to save his skin, and he knows that he likely must.
       Thus the Republican vision of leadership: Major policy based on calculations of how much double-talk the public will believe. Within this contempt for principle is a telling contempt for the voters themselves.  Today's Republican leaders will not be counted among the class of their party's history. They display their individual reasons for embracing  deceit as a core ethic of governance: Lack of character, lack of judgment, lack of talent. They are together in displaying a lack of due respect for the people they supposedly serve.





   

Warsh Rags

     I've run across a relic from my childhood: warsh rags.

     A friend arranged it. He sent me a magazine article on Appalachian vernacular and its Celtic origins.

     My mother's family were not mountain people. They were hard-scrabble farmers in the sandy flats of eastern North Carolina. But folks out there shared in the Celtic coloring of language and attitudes in the mid-South.

     Curdled milk was clabber (and it made fantastic biscuits).  Objects at a certain distance were yonder.  An uncle who sometimes was afeared shared the word with Shakespeare. Whiskey was -- well, whiskey.  And in one strong Celtic tradition, a fellow might defiantly make his own in a far corner of the woods.
     The manners, language and rich accents of the region were the norms of my first years. Then, life journeys took me elsewhere.
      In the industrial Northeast, speech seemed a form of aggression. In the upper Midwest it was, to my ear, plain as a washed-out shirt.
     In New England, the personality of language once again had charm. I did have to learn that bring meant take, and rob meant steal. If I wanted a milkshake, I had to order a frappe. If I wanted to offer someone a soft drink, I'd suggest a tonic.
       But as travel for work and play took me to the west coast, the great plains and more,  it often seemed that other parts of the country were tone deaf to the music of English.
        Some of this attitude is mere prejudice, of course -- a preference for my own traditions.  Another part is the regret of loss. On the streets of my town nowadays you'll hear as much California and New York as Carolina. You'll also hear colorless, homeless hybrids.
     The loss has other tokens, too. Up in the hills, ski resorts and golf courses pock slopes of rhododendron and mountain laurel. Down in the flatlands, my grandparents' modest farm has become a small suburban office park.
     Deeper thinkers might here elaborate on cycles of change. They would note that, in homogenizing language, time dims memories of cultural heritage.  In the matter of language at hand, time steadily removes a living artifact of our country's inheritance from  Elizabethans and their forebears. One day, the record will exist only in libraries.
     But we don't need deep thinking to know that we can regret the loss imposed by change without imagining to avoid it.  For my own part, I even get a little chuckle when I wonder how long it would take me these days to find someone who still knows that a croker sack is a burlap bag, or that a stob is a wooden stake.
     And tomorrow morning, when I wash my face, I will remember all the years when I would have called the cloth a warsh rag.
      Knowing that time works upon everyone, I'll also be aware that a day will come when that image won't recur, even to me.
   
     

Who's On Mars?

   

       
          Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally 
terrifying. ...
              Arthur C. Clarke

          A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.
          Sir Francis Bacon

        On the mysterious: It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.
          Albert Einstein

        Imagination is the highest form of research.
          Albert Einstein



     As soon as the server brought our beer, I saw that my friend Harry was in one of his reflective moods.
     "Tell me this," he said before taking so much as a sip. "What is the evolutionary function of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony?"
     "What?" I said.
     "Or Shakespeare's sonnets?"
     "Uh?" I said.
     "Or the Mona Lisa?"
      Harry is a man of many parts. Day-to-day, he is like most of us. He thinks about earning a wage, paying the mortgage, loving his family and having from time to time a bit of fun. But Harry has another side. Actually, Harry has several other sides.
     Harry is a reader. His tastes are catholic. He may take an interest in football strategy or ancient religions. In fudge recipes or particle physics. When Harry takes a new interest, he goes all-in. If a thing catches his eye,  it's worth a long look. And he's likely to think that you should feel the same.
     "You've been reading again," I said when Harry lifted his beer.
     "Yes."
     "What is it this time?"
     "John Polkinghorne, among others."
     "Who is he?"
     "He is a theoretical physicist and an Anglican priest."
     "Odd combination," I said.
     "Actually it's not. Lot's of scientists are religious. Always have been. Francis Bacon was. He's been called the father of modern scientific method."
     "You started talking about evolution. So, where does Polkinghorne land on that one? With science or with religion?"
      "Both," Harry said. "He says it's not at all an either-or question. He's got a quote that sticks in my head: 'As a Christian believer I am of course a creationist in the proper sense of the term, for I believe that the mind and purpose of a divine Creator lie behind the fruitful history and remarkable order of the universe which science explores. But I am certainly not a creationist in that curious North American sense, which implies interpreting Genesis 1 in a flat-footed literal way and supposing that evolution is wrong.' "
       "Curious North American sense?" I said.
       "Yes," Harry said. "If you look around a little, you find that our fundamentalist neighbors have ginned up some screwy notions about the Bible."
       "You said you'd been reading Polkinghorne among others. Who else?"
       "Dorothy Sayers, for one."
       "I thought she was a mystery writer."
       "She was. But she also wrote about theology."
       "And ... ?"
       "She says that the creative impulse in humans is our little share of divinity."
       "Heavy stuff," I said. "So is this conversation. What got you started in this direction?"
       "That kind of thing, actually." Harry nodded toward a muted television set above the bar, where a commentator was silently narrating a documentary on Mars exploration.
       "You lost me there."
       "Why do we do it?  What's it for?"
       "A lot of useful stuff has come out of space exploration."
       "Yes. But we don't know that before we start. We don't know before we go up there that we will discover anything more useful than dirt. In particular, speaking of evolution, it has no logical connection to the survival of our species. We do it because of some other kind of inner impulse."
       "I guess we're just curious, and daring."
       "Yes, and you could say 'reckless,' as well."
       "Pardon?"
       "Sometimes science lets us know more than we understand."
       "Meaning?"
       "Lots of stuff. Thalidomide, DDT, asbestos, nuclear fission, gene editing."
       "So, it's reckless to check out the dirt on mars?"
       "Dirt is only one possibility." Harry nodded toward a television picture of the Mars lander.  "Suppose a Martian walked up to that thing and gestured a greeting."
       "Yes," I said. "Would it be 'hello' or 'en garde' ?"
       "That's not what I wonder about," Harry said.  "I don't wonder what Martians would say. I wonder what we would say."
       "You're losing me again."
       "If we encountered alien life, how would our world react? Would we finally decide we couldn't afford to war with each other any more, or would we fight over access?"
       I hid behind a sip of beer.
       "Have you thought about it?" Harry said. "How you would personally react?"
       "No," I said. "I guess I haven't.  I guess most people haven't.  Probably it would make good fodder for a combined course in science and ethics."
       "Yes," Harry said. "And maybe for a sermon as well."
       Harry is truly a man of parts.