If I am reading the signs correctly, what is called “capitulation” on Wall Street–an overwhelming urge to get out–is something that now also infects the spirits of many Republicans from coast to coast. These traditional GOP voters are so resigned to losing, and/or so disgusted with their candidates, that many won’t even bother to vote. Meanwhile, an open rift is developing over the future of the Grand Old Party, with Palinesque culture conservatives attempting to push out other views. Also good news for the Democrats, and possibly for the country as a whole. Not yet time to break out the Champagne, but maybe time to ice it down.
But here’s why it’s possible I will find myself in a funk around midnight next Tuesday even if there’s a whole lot of new blue on the electoral map in places we thought we’d never see blue again. It might not be possible for me to celebrate if a big part of who I am what I stand for is left waiting on the platform as the freedom train rolls out.
You know where there is going. As a gay Christian, gay Democrat, and gay taxpayer here in California, it’s quite possible this state’s voters will deliver a punch in the face to me and “my kind” even as they drink and dance their way into Obama time.
Does this sound whiny and self-centered? Does it sound prematurely despairing? Quite possibly it does. But I feel that the very possibility of such a split outcome should have progressives really worried, and not just LGBT progressives. Recall that Prop 8 is the first plebiscite anywhere that, if passed by the voters, would take away an established constitutional right. And yes, I know: Prop 8 supporters will answer that equal marriage has only been “established” in California since May of this year. But what if California voters had immediately overturned the state supreme court’s 1948 ruling establishing the right of people of different races to marry? The issue should not be how long a constitutional right has been honored but whether there is in fact a clear constitutional principle that must be honored.
And yes, I also know that change on hard issues comes slowly. But if Prop 8 is passed, don’t expect me to shut up and suck it up without complaint. I will refuse to play the Democratic equivalent of a Log Cabin Republican.
There’s something wrong with celebrating Change You Can Believe In if, in fact, nothing is going to change regarding the second-class status of LGBT people. When, in fact, there may be a silent or not-so-silent consensus among non-gay progressives to leave sexual/gender justice by the wayside. I can understand the overwhelming urge to win after the long dark night of W and Cheney. I can even understand why the Democrats would want to try out some Congressional candidates whose positions on reproductive choice are, shall we say, a bit cautious. What I can’t understand and can’t accept is a Democratic Party in power that imagines it can jettison the equal rights and women’s rights agenda and still claim respect of people here and around the world. South Africa, to take one example, put full equal rights squarely into its constitution as a bedrock component of its new multi-racial democracy. Is it possible that the world’s oldest political party in its oldest functioning democracy will do less?
One more thing. I’m no one-issue person. I realize that we could also be badly shaken on election night in California if criminal justice reform is set back yet again. I also realize that immigrants’ rights advocates have serious ground for complaint that their issue has been sidelined nationally. The difference is that no one is saying that criminal justice reform and immigration reform could be permanently sidelined if Democrats take firm control of both Congress and the White House.
It’s Halloween as I write this. Let’s hope that my anxiety today is just the maleficent work of some goblin or other that’s got hold of my spirit. Truth be told, I fully expect to rejoice and rejoice greatly along with everyone else on Tuesday night. I fully expect to see Prop 8 dumped into the ash bin of history. But if that does NOT happen, I see big trouble ahead…and not just for me.
- Peter Laarman
Like millions of other young girls in America, my seven-year old daughter’s bedroom is filled with artwork, toys and clothes reflecting her obsession with Disney Princesses, such as Cinderella and Belle from “Beauty and the Beast”. For years, these characters were for her not merely the stars of animated movies, but role models for how to look and perceive the world around her.
But in the past week, Vanessa announced that she longer wants anything to do with the princesses (with the exception of Ariel from “The Little Mermaid”, who like my daughter is a good swimmer). Vanessa gave a succinct reason for her break with the princesses: “I’m growing up.”
In the new documentary Religulous, stand-up comedian Bill Maher and director Larry Charles argue that people of faith around the world are all like Vanessa: they’re children – if not morons – who need to acknowledge that God, Allah, Jesus, etc. are little more than outmoded plastic dolls that should be thrown away.
Religulous features Maher crossing the United States, Europe and the Holy Land to conduct interviews – most of the “gotcha” variety – with true believers and a few doubters from a variety of faiths (mostly Christian and Islamic) and take in sites ranging from a Biblical theme park in Orlando to Megiddo in Israel, the alleged site of Armageddon.
It should be no surprise to observers of Maher from his TV talk show hosting duties (most recently on HBO) that he is at best irreverent and at worst openly hostile toward religion, and that his goals in the documentary are to be funny and provocative. (Being genuinely informative isn’t a particularly big concern, and being “fair and balanced” means about as much as it does on Fox News.)
Charles (who directed the TV shows Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm and the quasi-documentary Borat) knows how to stage a joke, with much of the humor leaning toward shtick like an interviewee proclaiming religions to be peaceful followed by a shot of a car bombing in Israel.
But Charles’ previous work featured characters who may spend their time humorously abusing others but whom themselves are also butts of the jokes. Here, Charles allows Maher to share a problematic trait with political radio talk show hosts: he’s always right.
A possible exception comes in a scene where Maher allows himself to be ridiculed as he spouts the tenets of Scientology in a free speech area of Hyde Park in London. But Maher is clearly “in character” in this scene; he dresses like and has the pinwheeling eyes of a wacko. The Maher we normally see isn’t allowed to look bad and doesn’t react well when (as in the case of an “anti-Zionist rabbi”) an interviewee challenges him.
It’s something of a misconception to say that Maher intends this to be truly provocative, because Religulous so often manipulates the presentation of issues to fit Maher and Charles’s thesis that all religions are a crock.
For instance, Maher delves at one point into comparative religion, claiming that figures such as Horus in Egyptian mythology and the Zoroastrian deity Mithra predate Jesus and provide parallels to the Gospels. It would be nice to report that Maher interviewed a historian (or even a Progressive Christian theologian) who might have explored these assertions in more detail. Instead, Maher (serving as the sole authority) immediately jumps to the conclusion that the earlier stories prove that Christ didn’t exist at all.
There’s something to be said for challenging religious worldviews, even in the context of a movie that doesn’t allow people of faith to fairly and fully express their beliefs. But it becomes difficult to stomach Maher’s perspective near the end of Religulous when (at an excavation in Megiddo) he launches into a tirade filled with lines such as “Religion must die so that mankind may live” and implies that the very existence of spirituality will cause Armageddon or its non-Biblical equivalent.
Maher’s sneering countenance and superior tone of voice in this sermon sound like nothing so much as the judgmental fire-and-brimstone preachers he mocks earlier in the movie. It’s difficult to imagine anyone whose social conscience has been inspired by religious figures such as King and Gandhi, or who has grown as an individual through faith, taking seriously Maher’s broad assertions such as “The solace religion brings comes at a terrible price.”
Through the first half of Religulous, Maher is seen driving through various parts of America as he tells the camera the tale of his religious upbringing. It seems at times that the shots of Maher driving are meant to suggest that he’s searching for something, but it’s ultimately clear that Maher’s faith journey has, in his eyes, reached a dead end. However, one can definitely question why Maher finds it so hard to accept that some rational, good people feel the need to keep traveling hopefully.
Summary: Eliminates the existing right of same-sex couples to be legally married in the State of California. Effectively voids the 2008 California Supreme Court ruling affirming marriage equality under the equal protection provisions of the state constitution.
Commentary: As everyone knows, the Republican-appointed justices on the California Supreme Court issued a very carefully-reasoned decision earlier this year in which they explained why denying same sex couples the right to marry violates the state constitution’sequal rights guarantee. In the words of Chief Justice Ronald George: “An individual’s sexual orientation—like a person’s race or gender—does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold rights.” The justices took special care to point out how their affirmation of equal marriage for same-sex couples in no way violates the freedom of religion. No clergyperson and no house of worship would ever be obligated to perform or host a same-sex marriage service.
In fact, Prop 8 itself would violate religious freedom by allowing one religious viewpoint concerning marriage to trump every other viewpoint. In a way that is reminiscent of the worst of human history, Prop 8 would single out just one group within the population—LGBT people—as specifically “less than” by denying them the many civil benefits that are conferred by a valid marriage license.
Prop 8 would trash the California Constitution’s bedrock principle of equal protection for the sake of gratifying the anti-gay prejudice of just one subset of state voters. Pushing a constitutional amendment to deny equal rights is reckless beyond belief. Americans were not asked to vote for or against the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision forty years ago to overturn vicious anti-miscegenation laws. But because we are being asked to vote now to uphold or reject the single best-reasoned anti-discrimination ruling of any court in recent memory, we must answer history’s call and decisively reject Prop 8’s legalized bigotry.
I begin with the obvious, based on the economic news of recent days. The ground beneath our feet is starting to shake mightily. Fear leaches into our spirits. Confidence, the true underlying currency of any functioning marketplace, is rapidly being shattered. The questions on everyone’s lips: “Now what?” and “How much worse can it get?”
Harsh as it sounds, from a Christian perspective this isn’t all bad. It isn’t all bad IF it means that some of our false gods might now finally be exposed and rejected.
False gods and misplaced reverence. As in our reverencing of wealth, and (worse) our worship of the wealth-y. As in acquisitive individualism as the real functional creed of most Americans, regardless of the ostensible faiths we may claim. As in our culture’s obsession with personal and national security. As in the imperial presumption almost all Americans tend to make: the presumption that the rest of the world is meant to work and do our bidding in order to ensure our comfort. And behind that: as in the very-much-alive notion that God intends a special destiny, a special providence, for the U.S. of A.
With the markets melting down and with all that we assumed to be solid now melting into air, we arrive at last at a moment of truth. But it only becomes a moment of truth if some truth tellers are willing to step up. If those required truthtellers do NOT appear (and this is always a possibility) we then find ourselves in the murky world of Isaiah 59—a world where “we grope like the blind along a wall,” a world where “justice is turned back, and righteousness stands at a distance”; where “truth stumbles in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter.”
We should certainly not expect very much truthtelling from the corporate media. For some years now their job has been to keep the circus going, to conceal large and small inconvenient truths and distract us from sensing what is profoundly amiss.
Let us not look either to what I sometimes call the priestly church, to the well-meaning moderates who have already begun to call for an exclusively pastoral response to the economic turmoil. These pastoral types get one part of it right. They get the mercy part right. But it’s the truth part that escapes them, in part because they cannot or will not see that the system itself is broken.
What we need, of course, is a prophetic response—a response that decodes and deconstructs the signs of these times and points toward a human future beyond these ruins. That points toward the still-undimmed promise of community and solidarity available to us after this deluge—that points to the rainbow sign, if you will.
In an authentic prophetic moment, mercy and truth do finally meet, and new growth can begin. New hope can take root, even from badly scorched earth.
So, for example, in relation to the tens of millions now losing their savings, their homes, their college loans, their retirement dreams. A prophetic response to this would acknowledge the hurt, acknowledge the pain, but also say very clearly (and even rudely, if necessary): This is not just the normal ebb and flow of the market mechanism. This mechanism was rigged to the advantage of a few; this system was jiggered to set the rest of us up for disaster. And the people who rigged it, the thieves who jiggered it, are now preparing to do the same thing all over again in the guise of the rescue squad. And yes, righteous anger is an appropriate response. Righteous anger is actually required if the temple is to be cleansed and if an economy that serves ordinary people is to be properly imagined and actively developed and pursued for the sake of those who will come after.
I said I would talk about what it takes to be a movement that matters. In my own organization, we are trying out a kind of mantra to guide the next phase of our life. We say, “As our movement succeeds, individuals and communities grow in faith, find strength in one another, see the world clearly, and liberate themselves and others for social transformation.”
Let me break these elements down to see whether a movement that enables all of theses things to happen does, in fact, have what it takes to be a movement that matters.
The “grow in faith” part and the “see the world clearly” part go together. We need to get our theology right, no doubt about it. But we will never get our theology right unless we are also engaged in mortal and moral combat with the powers and principalities out there. We’ll never get our theology right unless we see the world clearly through the lens of a powerful social critique.
Some examples. I spoke a little while ago about the greedheads who jiggered the system. But what about all the rest of us dutiful workers and dutiful investors for whom the phrase, “like sheep to the slaughter,” now seems eerily appropriate? Why have we behaved that way? What’s that about?
With the benefit of some analysis and social critique, I think we can see how passivity and resignation have been nurtured by an iron triangle of consumerism, debt, and overwork that for the past quarter-century have increasingly characterized life in these United States. What might it then take to begin to break this iron triangle? Here we need to shift to the theological side and rediscover the hugely important but largely neglected teachings of what is appropriately called “Sabbath economics”—the biblical motifs of Sabbath and jubilee, where rest and re-distribution and restoration of community all converge, and where exploitation and overwork and intimidation are exposed and rejected in favor of a more godly and more human way.
Now let me suggest a second example of social critique and good theology in fruitful interaction. We have all these wonderful high-minded church folk out there who can see that overt homophobia is wrong. But as yet they don’t have a critique OR a theological frame to help them change the story and change the conversation.
First, the social critique: go search out the connection—or rather, the many connections—between persistent patriarchal thinking and the fear and loathing of same-gender relations. Then to a possible theological frame: go search out biblical images and examples of equal-justice love, of non-exploitative and non-procreative love—the kind of love celebrated in First Corinthians 13, a passage that is often read at straight weddings but not routinely practiced in straight patriarchal marriage. But it is the kind of love that the partners in a successful same-sex marriage know how to model for the rest of us.
In both of these examples I hope you can see how seeing the world clearly and growing in faith can begin to reinforce each other in movement building.
The other elements I mentioned are less about engendering awareness than they are about engendering a movement ethic. Recall what those other elements are: finding strength in each other and liberating ourselves and others for the sake of social transformation. Of course, neither set of elements can really be separated from the other set. Finding strength in each other is theologically significant, just as liberating ourselves and liberating others for the sake of social transformation might be seen as the cutting edge of a growing social critique.
My immediate point, however, is this: Take any powerful social movement and you will certainly find a coherent social vision and set of ideas, but you will also find a sustaining culture underpinning that vision and those ideas.You will find a precious social interaction, a higher everyday conversation that challenges people to give of their best selves. You will find real friendship and solidarity. You will find singing and sharing and “testifying.”
And here I have to say, and I say this partly in the confessional mode: We really have created nothing like that kind of sustaining culture in our progressive Christian circles today, which is why we are not yet a movement. (I hope y’all down here in Atlanta will put some of the needed community and conversation and solidarity and celebration into the mix and show us frozen chosen how it’s done.)
In a word, we need to mix it up and interact with each other a whole lot more than we do. We need to meet and greet one another along the highways and byways and shout encouragement to sisters and brothers united in struggle in every part of the country.
The great Quaker teacher-activist Parker Palmer once said that “we don’t think ourselves into a new way of acting; we live into a new way of thinking.” Bill Coffin said much the same thing. Liberal Christianity, or what we today call progressive Christianity and what some call “seminar room Christianity,” has until now had a really unhelpful taint of elitism around it. We need to change that.
And lest I sound too much like Sarah Palin in my use of that word “elitism,” let me be clear that it is not our progressive theology as such that poses a problem. The problem is in what we do with it; the problem is in how we use it.
Again, I will give an example. Progressive theology understands that vital Christian faith is a verb, not a noun. But then how pointless, even counterproductive, it becomes to proclaim this important insight from an ivory tower or from an immaculate high-end pulpit rather than in the way we live our lives.
Saint Francis said long ago that “it is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.”
All right, then. Some final practical observations about how we might organize ourselves for real movement work. And here I will use some organic images that don’t need too much unpacking.
It seems to me that we should create lots of hives and incubators. By “hives” I mean busy arenas of focused activities. These arenas can shift depending on what’s going on in society at any given time. But we also need some more stable leadership training centers and idea-generating centers. These are the incubators. For our younger activists in particular, we need to create intentional communities in a number of cities that will help sustain these activists against the siren song of conventional careerism as they move into their late twenties. Dorothee Soelle tried to teach us about the relation between mysticism and social resistance, but it’s a lesson we still haven’t really absorbed. We need better ways of grounding people deeply for lifelong radical discipleship.
As part of this, we need to see that seminaries as we once knew them, and even congregations as we once understood them, are today rather like that famous grass in Psalm 90: “in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers.” Our seminaries and congregations are now fading into their evening time, and we had better be thinking about what comes after.
We also need to propagate lots of filaments and networks. That is to say, we need to create the means, online and elsewhere, to keep talking and keep disseminating what is coming out of our idea shops once we get those up and running.
Finally, it does seem to me that we need to work toward some consensus on a limited set of public issues in respect to which bringing to bear a strong progressive Christian voice and witness could make a measurable difference. Equality and inclusion for LGBT people is clearly one. Banning torture is another. Stopping the blanket criminalization and demonization of our youth of color is another. And I feel strongly that taking a prophetic stance against all aspects of modern day debt peonage should be another: I mean organizing to shut down the payday loan operators that prey on poor communities and really challenging a system that now says undergraduates should routinely take on $100,000 in debt before walking forward to receive their degree.
But now I’m getting ahead of myself. And I’m precluding conversation by prescribing what the program should be.
So let’s just agree to get the conversation started. Let’s begin to grow in faith. Find strength in one another. See the world more clearly. And in and through all this, liberate ourselves and liberate one another for the sake of social transformation.
If we ourselves canbecome the first fruits of the change we seek, then change itself—real change—cannot be far behind.
May God speed this change.
And may God bless the work of our hands and hearts and voices on this day, and in all the days that come after.
Observing what Kevin Phillips has called the “financialization” of the U.S. economy over the past quarter-century-a period during which the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) rose to nearly 30% of the whole economy-PCU Executive Director Peter Laarman wonders whether there is more to this change than normal economic evolution: whether a form of bad religion might also be implicated. On the same day that the Dow index dropped by nearly 800 points, Peter was asked by “Religion Dispatches,” a national on-line resource, to offer his reflection. Read what Peter has to say by clicking this link:
Enactment of Prop 5 is especially important to PCU in view of PCU’s long advocacy of treatment instead of jail for nonviolent drug offenders in California. We worked hard in the past to win full funding and proper implementation of Proposition 36, which was overwhelmingly passed by state voters in 2000. This year’s Prop 5 continues and expands Prop 36’s diversion approach but it also tackles other serious problems in California’s criminal justice system. Specifically, Prop 5 creates a three-track system of probation with drug treatment, provides for dismissal and/or sealing of records following probation, shortens parole for most drug offenses, and limits a court’s authority to jail offenders who violate their probation.
PCU is well aware that our friend Martin Sheen is lending his celebrity power to the forces seeking to defeat this measure. We are saddened by the difficult personal family history that prompted Sheen to take this stand. We must point out, however, that Sheen also opposed Prop 36, claiming that it wouldn’t help our friends and neighbors who struggle with addiction. Seven years later, the documented outcomes of Prop 36-84,000 people successfully completing treatment and $2 billion in taxpayer funds not spent on incarceration-show that Martin Sheen was way off base in opposing Prop 36. He is equally off base in opposition Prop 5, especially because he wants to support parents who would do anything to spare their children from dependence on drugs or alcohol. For the first time in California history, Prop 5 would allow parents, doctors, or teachers to refer at-risk young people directly to the treatment and support services they need, outside of the law enforcement system. Parents would no longer have to call the police to get help for their kids. Surely this is a compassionate and rational advance that merits our support.
