The Distressing Mirror

Two men went up into the temple to pray, 

one a Pharisee, and the other a tax-gatherer.  

The Pharisee stood and was praying thus to himself, 

"God, I thank Thee that I am not like other people: 

swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax-gatherer. . ."

- Luke 18:10-11

Over the last week or so I downloaded an audio narration of another nonfiction book by Haruki Murakami.  (I already had his books Novelist as a Vocation and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.)  Murakami has achieved fame as a novelist due to his complex, dreamlike narratives and complex, multidimensional characters.  However, I personally am drawn more to some of his short stories and nonfiction.  Also, nowadays I like to consume my fiction and narrative nonfiction in the form of audiobooks, since I can listen to them while exercising or doing housework or yardwork.  

The book I downloaded last week was Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, and it deals with the March 1995 terrorist attack against Tokyo subway passengers which was perpetrated by members of Aum Shinrikyo (オウム真理教), a Japanese apocalyptic/doomsday cult founded by a certain Chizuo Matsumoto, known more widely as Shoko Asahara.  Over the years, Mr. Asahara had directed Aum followers to perpetrate a number of violent physical attacks against innocent Japanese citizens, including some who were critical of Aum activities and some who had been members of Aum but had since fled the cult.  (By the way, if you click on some of these links, you will be directed to webpages that are written in Japanese.  If you want to read them in English, simply copy the link address into Chrome or Chromium and right-click anywhere on the page.  An option will appear that says, "Translate to English."  Click on that option.)

The attack that occurred on March 20, 1995, used a liquid sarin solution that was stored in plastic bags.  The perpetrators boarded the Tokyo subway trains, dropped these plastic bags, then punctured them with the sharpened tips of umbrellas.  They then fled the trains at the next stop after the stop at which they boarded, while the liquid sarin solution spread over the floors of the subway cars and the sarin began to evaporate into the air.  As the sarin evaporated, it began to sicken and kill passengers.  It also sickened (and in some cases killed) Tokyo subway workers who were dispatched to clean up the liquid on the floors and who did not know that the liquid contained sarin.  This attack was entirely unprovoked.  None of the people riding those trains or working on those train platforms had done anything evil beforehand to Aum or to Shoko Asahara.

In writing Underground, Murakami sought to correct certain biases which he observed in Japanese media coverage of the gas incident.  In particular, there had been a tendency toward sensationalism which obscured the unavoidable grainy uniqueness of the individual stories of each of the victims and bystanders who had been riding the Tokyo subways on the day of the attack.  This is why there is a large number of interviews of victims in Murakami's account.  

But Murakami also attempted to challenge and correct certain biases in the Japanese societal and cultural perception of the meaning of the gas attack.  This attempt is captured in "Blind Nightmare: Where Are We Japanese Going?", a series of essays at the end of the original edition of the book.  In those essays, Murakami challenged the evolving narrative in which a "right," "sane," "good" Japanese society was juxtaposed against an "evil", "insane," "diseased" adversary.  As time passed, this narrative allowed the birth of a mindset in which "most Japanese [seemed] ready to pack up the whole incident in a trunk labeled things over and done with." (Murakami, ibid.)

What Murakami wanted to do instead was to ask, What kind of society have we Japanese (that is, all of us) become that something like Aum Shinrikyo could have arisen and that something like the Tokyo gas attack could have occurred?  To quote him again,

"In other words, the shock dealt to Japanese society by Aum and the gas attack has still to be effectively analyzed, the lessons have yet to be learned. Even now, having finished interviewing the victims, I can't simply file away the gas attack, saying: “After all, this was 

merely an extreme and exceptional crime committed by an isolated lunatic fringe.” And what am I to think when our collective memory of the affair is looking more and more like a bizarre comic strip or an urban myth? 

"If we are to learn anything from this tragic event, we must look at what happened all over again, from different angles, in different ways. Something tells me things will only get worse if we don't wash it out of our metabolism. It’s all too easy to say, “Aum was evil.” Nor does saying, “This had nothing to do with evil' or 'insanity'" prove anything either. Yet the spell cast by these phrases is almost impossible to break, the whole emotionally charged “Us” versus “Them" vocabulary has been done to death."

In his closing essays, Murakami cites the abortive attempt by Aum Shinrikyo to win seats in the Japanese Diet during the 1990 elections, mentioning in particular an encounter he had with Aum rallies in the Shibuya ward of Tokyo.  He speaks of the discomfort behind the revulsion he felt toward Aum and how he asked himself why he felt that revulsion, that horror.  His answer was that he saw in Aum a mirror of Japanese society itself at the time, and of himself as a Japanese man.  True, the mirror had distortions, yet it accurately reflected elements of the shadow self, the indwelling corruption which each of us must deal with on a daily basis in order not to descend into nihilistic destructiveness. 

I don't know whether other Japanese voices spoke up in the same way as Haruki Murakami in the months and years after the Tokyo gas attack.  But I do see a parallel between the gratuitous, unprovoked destruction of innocent people perpetrated by Aum and the gratuitous, unprovoked destruction of innocent people (especially the poor and the nonwhite) perpetrated by the Global Far Right over the last decade especially.  In particular, I am thinking of the murders of unarmed African-Americans, the abortive wall at the southern border of the U.S., and the many, many deaths of poor and nonwhite people in the United States, Brazil, Britain, and similar places due to COVID-19 in 2020.  I think of how these deaths were aided and cheered by a cohort of largely religious people with an apocalyptic/millenarian/doomsday mindset that justified in their minds their active attempts to murder their fellow human beings.  I think of the cults of celebrity/personality worship that have been created or attempted by people such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Elon Musk.

I also think of how in the West (particularly the United States), while there have been so many revelations of the existence of destructive cults in our midst over the decades, there have been so distressingly few voices calling us to a time of collective self-examination.  This is particularly true of those who claim to study and write about malignant narcissism.  I think of how the description of malignant narcissism found in the DSM-IV was modified in the DSM-V over the last decade.  The DSM-IV could be summarized thus: "This is what a wolf looks like - and by telling you all what a wolf looks like, hopefully we can keep you from getting bitten!" But the message of the DSM-V seems to me to be more sympathetic to wolves: "A wolf is not really a wolf unless he experiences suffering as a result of being a wolf..."  This obfuscation has helped to distort the discussion of narcissistic pathology among rich and powerful people such as national politicians and heads of big business.  And those who claim to write as the victims of narcissists hid their eyes from the realization that many of these "victims" in 2016 and 2020 had pledged their allegiance to the very narcissistic types against whom they claimed to be angry.  They tried to hide from the fact that their own narcissism was reflected in the political candidates whom they chose for themselves and the collective aspirations they embraced.

I too am a victim of cultic activity - as a person of color victimized by a society which claimed a religious mandate to Make Itself Great by trashing me and my ancestors - and as a former cult member myself - yet I too find that I must engage in a time of self-examination in light of the fact that I live in a society (namely, American society) which tends to form cults as prolifically as mangy dogs produce fleas.  For I must admit that during my days as a member of a particular cult I did damage to other people, because the cult appealed to a latent desire in me to dominate other people, to have power over other people.  To fulfill a latent desire within myself to be A Big Part of Something Great, I surrendered myself to someone else's prefabricated narrative.  My story became similar to that of the Aum devotees described by Murakami:

In order to take on the “self-determination” that Asahara provided, most of those who took refuge in the Aum cult appear to have deposited all their precious personal holdings of selfhood — lock and key — in that “spiritual bank" called Shoko Asahara. The faithful 

relinquished their freedom, renounced their possessions, disowned their families, discarded all secular judgment (common sense). "Normal" Japanese were aghast: How could anyone do such an insane thing? But conversely, to the cultists it was probably quite comforting. At last they had someone to watch over them, sparing them the anxiety of confronting each new situation on their own, and delivering them from any need to think for themselves.

A time of self-examination - both individual and collective - is urgently needed, both in the United States and throughout the West, particularly in those countries that have become "Murdochified."  This is because the 21st Century has already begun to bring urgent societal challenges that will require intelligent responses on both an individual and a collective level.  But if we are going to combine safely and equitably in order to craft collective responses, we need to be mentally healthy.  We must, as much as possible, eliminate our susceptibility to the voices of cult leaders who appeal to the darkness within each of us in an attempt to turn us into an embodiment of the darkness that exists in these cult leaders.  My concern is that achieving this may be a challenge in the United States.

A Failure Of Performance Art

 

A billboard I recently saw in my city

Lately I've been reminiscing about my years in the abusive church known as the Assembly, and some of the strange teachings and practices which were pushed by this church.  The church I was involved in was modeled in many ways after the Plymouth Brethren pattern, although our head honcho denied that we were an exact copy but he insisted that we were a new and improved model.  (Note to any rabid PB's out there: A. Don't sue me.  You won't get much out of me beside two middle-aged neutered cats.  B.  Don't sue me.  There's already plenty of scathing criticism of you all - including the criticisms voiced by Garrison Keillor, former host of A Prairie Home Companion.  C. Don't sue me.  If you do, the angels of God will put a massive hurt on you on the Day of Judgment!) 

In retrospect, one of the weirder elements of our doctrine and practice had to do with our attitude toward instrumental music in our Assembly meetings.  You see, we firmly believed that in our worship, Bible study, and prayer meetings, any and all hymns sung were to be sung a cappella.  That is, they were to be sung with voices only - with no other instruments allowed.  This was because of a rigid (and frankly erroneous) interpretation of Ephesians 5:19 pushed by one of the granddaddies of Brethrenism, a certain John Nelson Darby, who believed that the presence and use of musical instruments during group worship was a sign of "worldliness".  However, we did believe in the use of musical instruments as a tool of "Gospel outreach" - that is, our attempts to evangelize (or proselytize?) the lost, also known as the "unchurched" in modern evangelical-speak.

Here things get interesting.  Before I met this group, I had been in the military, and had attended a number of live band performances at various bars near my post.  Thus I had acquired a taste for live music.  So when I encountered one of the "outreach bands" of the Assembly at a college campus, I was intrigued.  That bloody band was one of the means by which the Assembly hooked me.  But after a while in the Assembly, I discovered that although the use of instrumental music as a tool of outreach was allowed and encouraged, there was a bit of contention among the leaders and wanna-be leaders about the styles of music that were allowable in our "outreach."  So the Assembly band which I first encountered evolved gradually from 70's acoustic-tinged folk rock (think CSNY, Joni Mitchell, the Eagles before Joe Walsh, or some of the lighter offerings of Jackson Browne or James Taylor), eventually settling on what can only be described as a form of soft country rock.  The countrified phase lasted until some teens from one of the Assemblies in the Midwest formed their own hard-driving high-energy rock group.  (Think of Creed as an example of what these teens sounded like.)  They managed to achieve something that our band had lost the ability to do - namely, that they were able to get passers-by to actually stop and listen to them.  This threatened the narcissism of the long-time leader of the outreach band in my home Assembly, so he responded by amping up his band's performances and pushing his teenage kids to form their own hard-rocking outreach band.  Naturally he made his son the leader of our teen band - an example of living vicariously through one's kids - and talked of them as if they were in the same league as such well-known CCM (Contemporary Christian music) bands as Jars of Clay.

Our music-making for heathen audiences largely came to an end when the Assemblies fell apart in 2003 after the revelations of the criminal activity of our head honcho and his family.  But it is interesting to consider the message we sought to communicate through our outreach, as well as the strategic assumptions behind that message and our delivery of it.  For that message and its strategic assumptions have a parallel among many of the thought leaders in the larger realm of American evangelicalism.

The Message: 

The message we ostensibly sought to communicate was the message of the claims of Christ, namely that He is the eternal Son of God and that God gave Him on the Cross as a sacrifice for our sins so that everyone who believes in Him might be justified from sin and receive eternal life.  We preached that this justification was to be obtained by faith alone, and not by any attempts of our own to do good works.  We preached that this message demanded a response from those who heard it, and that an acceptable response had the following two elements: repentance from sin and receiving Christ as Lord.  Now I must say that although I have said strong things against white American evangelicalism, I am yet a Christian.  Moreover, I would categorize myself largely (but not entirely) as a fundamentalist.  So I have no problem with the Gospel message as I have just now summarized it.  However, I must say that that Gospel has mutated over the last few decades in American society.  (The message has always seemed to suffer from certain distortions as it passed through the lens of American culture.)  For repentance has been confined to merely giving up certain fleshly indulgences, and not to changing the way we relate to each other on a societal level, or the way we relate to money and earthly power. And actually receiving Christ as Lord - as Someone whose words we actually intend to obey - has been replaced by mere assent to "Judeo-Christian (or American) values" as defined by mainstream evangelical preachers. 

Now there are many motives for preaching this message, but in the United States, the motive among evangelicals in recent decades has been threefold, namely, to "reclaim America for God", to "reclaim Christian cultural values", and to "re-establish America as a Christian nation."  This shifting of motive from spiritual transformation to the building of secular, earthly political and cultural power for a certain privileged group is one of the prime causes of the mutation of the Gospel message over time.  

The strategy of delivery:

One of the key strategic assumptions behind our delivery of the message was first and foremost that the Word of God has intrinsic power in itself, apart from any human input.  Therefore, it is necessary only to proclaim the Word in order to fulfill the duty of preaching the Gospel, for the Word is able to do its work all by itself.  Bible verses such as Jeremiah 23:29 ("Is not My word like fire?" declares the LORD ...) and Hebrews 4:12 were used as proof texts for this point of view.  (However, one danger of such a viewpoint is that it neglects those parts of the New Testament which speak of the power of a good example and proclaim that preachers of the Word need to practice what they preach!)

The outcome of this strategic assumption can be seen in the multitude of inventive means which evangelicals, fundamentalists, and similarly-minded Protestants devised for the proclamation of their message.  These means have included preaching (obviously), in churches, Gospel halls, city parks, street corners, circus tents, and other places where people congregate.  But they have also included Gospel tracts and other printed matter, bumper stickers, billboards, T-shirts, movies, music CD's (and later, MP3's), live musical performances, "inspirational" or "faith-based" fiction, and other examples of artistic expression.  The arts have especially attracted the interest of those who have sought to inject "Christian" or "Judeo-Christian" cultural values into our society, as exemplified by a book written in the 1990's by Bob Briner titled Roaring Lambs.  Briner's book challenged those who call themselves Christians in the U.S. to make their mark in the arenas of moviemaking, television, other visual arts, and literature.  (Indeed, I seem to remember reading somewhere that his book was one of the inspiring influences that led to the formation of the band Jars of Clay.  But I can't find the exact reference to this, so don't quote me.)  Thus the "Christian culture industry" has received a massive boost over the years because of this focus.

Another key strategic assumption has concerned the response of the hearers of the message.  It has been assumed that if these hearers reject the message delivered, it is because of a spiritual or intellectual defect.  The assumption of a spiritual defect is too frequently made by those evangelicals or fundamentalists who are too lazy to actually get to know and understand their audience.  Thus their knee-jerk reaction is to automatically say that those who reject their message do so because "they are in spiritual darkness!" Those who assume that the rejection is due to an intellectual failure on the part of their hearers assume that the hearers are held captive by deeply formulated philosophies such as secularism, Marxism, post-modernism, or similar doctrines.  Evangelicals who assume such motives in those of their hearers who reject the evangelical message fail to realize that most people don't usually have time to think hard about various secular philosophies in detail.  (After all, most of us are too busy working like dogs!  We don't have time to read books ;) )   

Such assumptions have not adequately equipped the mainstream white American evangelical/Protestant church for the present times, in which many, many people are abandoning evangelicalism and church attendance, and some are even abandoning faith altogether - a time which has seen the birth of a new term, namely, exvangelical - a time in which the ranks of these exvangelicals are swelling.  (For an example of this, please listen to a recent podcast interview of one of the former members of the Assemblies I used to belong to.)  So let's close with a brief consideration of these times and the reasons for the people who are rejecting evangelicalism in these times.

Flattening, Breakdown and Failure

As I mentioned earlier in this post, the Gospel message has undergone a certain "flattening" in American culture.  This is seen in the things that the Bible put into the message that modern conservative evangelical/fundamentalist preachers have chosen to leave out.  For instance, there's the fact that the fear of God is seen in the way we treat each other - Job 22:6-9; Job 31:16-28.  And that the love of God is seen in the way we treat each other - 1 John 3:16-20; 1 John 4:20-21.  And that racism is sin, because it is an act of murder - 1 John 3:14-15 ("Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.")  And that God is opposed to the rich - James 5:1-6; Luke 6:24 ("Woe to you who are rich ...").  These are the things which God put into His message which people like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. and John MacArthur and other ecclesiastical sycophant followers of Trump have left out.  Meanwhile they have condemned things which God never condemned - things such as critical race theory, "woke-ism", social justice, and every other admonition to them that they should treat other people the same way they themselves want to be treated.  

This has led to a certain unpalatability of both these messengers and their message.  Indeed, from 2016 onward, these messengers have become not only unpalatable but downright nauseating.  I mentioned earlier in this post the need for the messenger of the Gospel to practice what he preaches.  This reminds me of a certain part of the third book in Liu Cixin's Three Body (三体, "San Ti") trilogy in which the people of Earth were tasked with configuring their society in such a way that any alien observers from outer space would be able to see that Earth humans posed no threat to the rest of the universe. The nature of the problem was such that this message (a "cosmic safety notice") could not be delivered by words, but only by actions.  (That part of his third book was where I first encountered the term "performance art", by the way.  Also, I'm not going to tell you how things worked out for the humans.  You'll have to read the books.)   This plot twist was a clever way of pointing out that one can learn much more about what kind of people one is dealing with by looking at what they do than by listening to what they say.  

This point is amplified by another book to which I was recently exposed, namely Haruki Murakami's Novelist As A Vocation.  In his description of the violence which ultimately ruined the student protests in Japan in the 1960's, Murakami wrote, “Uplifting slogans and beautiful messages might stir the soul, but if they weren't accompanied by moral power, they amounted to no more than a litany of empty words... Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from those principles.”  This is obviously true not only of secular social movements, but of white American evangelicalism and Protestantism over the last several decades.

That the words of American evangelicals have largely proven to be empty can be seen in the racism of the white American evangelical church, its misogyny as seen by the staggering levels of spousal abuse (see this, this, and this for instance), its staggering levels of child abuse, its hypocrisy (as seen in its promotion of religious leaders and political candidates who claim to stand for morality yet wind up getting caught with their pants down), its violence (as seen in the "Christian nationalists" armed to the teeth who stormed state capitols during the COVID lockdowns in 2020 and who participated in the U.S. Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021), and its greed.  

Indeed, if we look at what evangelicals actually do instead of what they say, we see that white American evangelicals (and the sons of Gehenna whom they have spawned in places like Brazil and Australia) care only about amassing secular earthly power to themselves.  The only thing they want is dominion, domination, and control.  Their religious profession is merely a tool to achieve this goal.  Their lust for power over others is seen in the ways they treat everyone who falls into their clutches.  It is seen in their treatment of their own women and children.

And this is what will lead eventually to their downfall and eventual loss of all earthly power.  I am thinking of the power of shared stories to illuminate the true character and nature of abuse.  I am thinking of the power of sunlight to disinfect dirty laundry.  I am thinking especially of the power of exposes, of scandals revealed, of things like the Shiny Happy People documentary of the abuse that took place in the family of Rethuglicans Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar even as they paraded their family on national TV as an example of the perfect American family.  Truly, "...there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known." (Luke 12:2)

It will be interesting to see how evangelical power-holders react and respond to the dwindling of their power in the years to come.  Suffice it to say that I expect that their response will complicate our attempts as a society to deal with issues of encroaching limits and the erosion of economic, political and military power in general.  

Another Expose of An Evangelical Cult

Here is a link to a couple of interviews of another former member of the Assemblies of George Geftakys, who describes the horrible upbringing she experienced as a child of one of the main leaders in this group.  The interviewer is also a survivor of the Assemblies.  These interviews were very interesting to me because of my former involvement in this unhealthy group.  They are also interesting because of how they illustrate the influence of bad men from the toxic evangelical mainstream, men such as James Dobson.  As I said a while back, all the assertions of the American Religious Right are utter crap.  A caution about these interviews: they contain strong language and deal with triggering experiences.

Why Is Focus On The Family Sending Spam Email To People Who Don't Want It?

It's odd, but over the last two weeks I have received a number of spam emails from Focus On The Family, a right-wing, white evangelical organization whose leaders were vocal supporters of Donald Trump and whose leaders have also been friendly toward Vladimir Putin in the past.  I have tried to unsubscribe from their emails, but this does not seem to be doing any good.  So let me use this blog to send FOTF a message: I reject you and your toxic and false brand of religion.  Please stop sending emails to people who don't want to hear from you.  You'll never convince me to vote Republican.

Gantry Collapse

Gantry (noun): "...an overhead bridge-like structure supporting equipment such as a crane, signals, or cameras." - Wikipedia.

Gantry (as in Elmer Gantry): the surname of the protagonist in Elmer Gantry, a satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis concerning a Methodist minister of the American Midwest during the 1920's.

The threat of American white supremacist theocracy was pushed to the forefront of the consciousness of many people after the overturning of Roe V. Wade in June of this year.  But the roots of the threat have existed for a rather long time, as seen in the teachings and activities of Rousas Rushdoony, Abraham Kuyper, Gary North, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye, George Grant (one of whose buddies is a certain contemporary religious musician named Michael Card), and others of like character.  When seen from a historical perspective, 2022 is then simply the culmination of a long process.  I find it natural to want to consider, or even to make, predictions regarding its ultimate success or failure.  My personal prediction is that the white evangelical/Protestant supremacist experiment will eventually fail - not only in the United States, but elsewhere, in such places as Brazil under Bolsonaro for instance.  (Here I find myself at odds with the predictions contained in books like The Handmaid's Tale.)  Why do I say this?  Because according to the Good Book, white supremacist theocracy is evil in the sight of God, even the God Whom the white supremacists claim to worship.  Therefore, the outworkings of damnation are already propagating through white evangelical America and through those elements of white evangelicalism that are aligned with the Global Far Right.  The ultimate end state of white supremacist theocracy is therefore failure, regardless of the path taken to that ultimate end state - rather like the result of a line integral taken over a conservative vector field.  But let's see if we can explore and trace some possible paths for this failure, for these outworkings of damnation - not as wanna-be prophets, but as empiricists making educated guesses.  As always, take these guesses with a grain of salt.

First, the theological perspective.  As I have mentioned in previous posts (here, here, and here, for instance), the American Religious Right has declared that the United States is in great need of a spiritual change, and that the proof of this need is America's tolerance of certain sins which the preachers from the Right hold up as being worse than all other sins.  Therefore the American Religious Right has told all the rest of us that in order to save America from moral ruin, we must vote for "godly" politicians who will preserve America as a "Christian" nation by passing and enforcing "Christian" laws.  My previous writings on this subject have stated my belief that the political strategy of the American Religious Right is the wrong approach to trying to create spiritual change in society, and that the New Testament proves this approach to be wrong.  (Read the Epistle to the Galatians, for instance.)  I have also mentioned that spiritual change is not the actual goal of the American Religious Right, but rather, economic, military, and political supremacy for one group of people at the expense of all the other people on earth.  

So then it is natural to ask what actual spiritual change looks like according to the New Testament.  Let's look first at what this change looks like on a personal level, as illustrated in Luke 19:1-10.  This passage concerns Zacchaeus the Jewish tax-collector.  A bit of backstory: by the time of this incident, the nation of Israel had long since been conquered by the Roman Empire.  The custom of the Romans toward the subjects of their conquered territories was to delegate certain functions of the state to private contractors.  Thus the collection of taxes in the Roman provinces was contracted to wealthy private citizens who bid for the right to serve as official tax collectors.  These private individuals frequently cheated the people from whom taxes were collected, and got filthy rich in the process.  Thus when we first encounter Zacchaeus, the Scripture notes that he was rich.  The Scripture also says that he was a sinner.  But by the end of Zacchaeus' encounter with Christ, the Lord said of him, "Today salvation has come to this house, becaus he, too, is a son of Abraham..."  In other words, Zacchaeus had been converted from being a cheat and a rascal.  How do we know that he had truly repented and believed?  Because he gave back all the money he had taken by cheating.  The spiritual change in Zacchaeus was seen in what he did as a result of his encounter with Christ.  Spiritual change brings a change in the things people do and in the things they stop doing.  And this change covers much more than just repenting of sexual sin.  According to the Scriptures, God wants to deliver people from cheating, from greed, and from committing murder as well.  

How then do societies experience this change?  It happens as that change is propagated from one person to another.  It starts with people who have experienced that change as a result of an encounter with Christ, and it is propagated as these people encounter others who can see the incarnation of Christ in the behavior of the people who have experienced spiritual change.  In other words, the change is propagated through believers in Christ - servants of the New Testament - who practice what they preach.  As that change spreads, it changes the society.  But it does so by changing the people of the society.  That spiritual change results in a change in what societies do and what they don't do.  For an example of large groups of people choosing to stop doing things, we can look at Acts 19, where entire communities gave up practicing magic and praying to idols (thus provoking a bit of civil unrest from people who made money from making idol statues!).  But for an example of large groups of people choosing to do things they had never done before, we can look at Acts 2 and Acts 4, in which rich people who became believers in Christ began to sell all their possessions and share them with the poor and with anyone who might have need.  As Acts 4:32-36 says, "And the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and not one was saying that anything belonging to him was his own; but all things were common property to them...For there was not a needy person among them, for all who were owners of land or houses would sell them and bring the prices of the things being sold and lay them at the apostles' feet; and they would be distributed to each, as any had need."  However, these societal changes are but the result of an inward spiritual change.  The spiritual change must come first.

When we look at the radical nature of this spiritual change, at its radical end point of producing communities of people who truly and practically and radically love their fellow human beings as they love themselves, we can easily see that the American Religious Right (and its evangelical offshoots in places like Brazil) have no interest in this kind of change.  Indeed, if such change were to occur nowadays, the Right would accuse the instigators of such change of being "ssssocialistsssss!" and would bitterly fight against them.  Trying to produce spiritual change by political action and passing laws is completely backward from God's methods.  The white American evangelical/Protestant church should know this, yet they continue to try to seize political power under the pretext of promoting godly laws.  But the evidence of their own moral failure shows that they really don't care about morality or spirituality, but simply seek to use dirty tricks - including corrupting the Word of God - to obtain political, economic, and military supremacy.  Because the real aim and goal of the American Religious Right is to turn religion into a tool of earthly secular empire, the New Testament declares that they are under a curse (Galatians 1:8-9).  They are thus destined to fail.

Why this failure?  Or, to put it another way, what are the ways in which this failure may propagate? To answer that question. let's zoom out from the spiritual to consider historical and literary perspectives.  On its most basic big-picture level (even before we get to theology), those who want to use religion in any way as a tool of earthly empire are trying to get the rest of us to swallow a certain kind of belief.  The tenets of this belief could be described as a "sales value proposition" served up to us by the missionaries of such a religion.  What is the "sales value proposition" which the white church has historically offered to the rest of the world?  It can be summed up as follows:

• That we should believe in a god who has decreed that one group of people should rule and dominate the world, subjugating and/or dispossessing all other nations on earth because the favored nation is supposedly pure while all the rest of us are defective.  
• That we should believe that when this supposedly favored nation proves by its deeds that it is no more righteous, no more pure, no better than any of the rest of us, it should receive all of the forgiving grace of its supposed "jesus" who dispenses that grace in the form of "Mulligans" for bad behavior (see this also) which serve much the same function as the indulgences which the Catholic Church used to dispense to wealthy penitents.  
• That we should believe that the god whom the missionaries of the supposedly favored nation preach has decreed that all the rest of us should be punished forever for our imperfections, whether those perfections are real or only imagined by the members of the favored nation, and that this punishment should consist of enslavement and extermination of us by the members of the favored nation.  No grace, no "mulligans" for us!  Rather, zero-tolerance, three-strikes, let's-build-a-wall, etc.   
• That it is supposedly the "Christian" duty of us who are not of the favored people to submit to such a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose god and his missionaries, and that we should not complain about or attempt to resist our lot in life.  

Given the cultural invasion which we the nonwhite and non-Anglo peoples have experienced, and given the fact that this Kool-Aid was forced down the throats of many of us from childhood, it is understandable that many of us started out believing it.  But now many, many of us are awakening from our enforced intoxication.  How do the missionaries of the supposedly favored people think such a "sales value proposition" is viewed by us in this present day?  You may as well offer to put a full toilet bowl (or chamber pot, for those who want to be more portable and old-fashioned) on each of our doorsteps!  Who in his right mind would accept such a proposition?

In other words, sooner or later, people who have been victimized by religion used as a weapon of subjugation will reject that religion, or at least that presentation of religion.  Consider a purely fictional example of this rejection, as seen in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.  In the first book of the series, we see the use of a fictional religion to advance the political power of the Galactic Foundation - and we see how in this story, over a period of a hundred years, religion as a tool of empire ceases to be effective because the intended victims of the empire begin to see how religion is being used in the attempt to politically and economically subjugate them.  This is a purely fictitious example, although Asimov himself admitted that he wrote the Foundation books "with a little bit of cribbin' from the works of Edward Gibbon" who was a historian.  Yet it has been repeatedly played out in real life, as seen in the loss of the political power of the Church during the Renaissance and the Reformation.  

It is also seen in the novel Noli Me Tangere by Jose Rizal.  This novel describes how the Catholic Church in the Philippines began to lose its legitimacy due to its own corruption and oppression of the Philippine populace.  This loss of legitimacy was a key factor in the Philippine war of independence that shattered imperial Spanish control of that country.  Consider also the loss of legitimacy of the Catholic Church in Latin America during the 19th and 20th centuries, as Catholic clerics far too frequently sided with European oppressors against the Latin American poor.  Some of this loss of legitimacy shows up in the writings of Latin American novelists who used the literary device of "magic realism" in order to provide disturbing commentary on the role of the Church in the daily lives of poor people in Central and South America.  Consider lastly the documented experiences of missionaries like Pearl S. Buck, whose exposure to the arrogant nationalism of many white missionaries in early 20th century China turned her off to American evangelicalism and led to her writing essays that were sharply critical of American and European missionary efforts in China.  (As a result, she became so controversial that she earned the distinction of having J. Edgar Hoover's FBI create a file on her!)  

Let's zoom in a little more closely on China and India.  Both nations were subjugated and ruthlessly exploited by Anglo-European power.  Thus a "missionary door" was forcibly kicked open to both nations.  Through that door many white missionaries streamed.  What were their motives?  It is sometimes impossible to say directly, yet there is much evidence that many of these missionaries were moved by a narcissistic desire to establish themselves as mini-popes, big shots over the only people on whom they had any power to force themselves.  Thus they became shovers of things down other peoples' throats.  Consider the example of Mr. Beaver in Have We No Rights? by Mabel Williamson, as well as the literary example of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.  But even more, consider what George Orwell says in The Road to Wigan Pier about the reasons why many poor British young men of the "lower upper class" enlisted in the British Foreign Service in the early 20th century.  I suggest that perhaps some of these reasons carried over to those who volunteered for the mission field in those days.  Given such "ministers of the Gospel", it is no wonder that the struggle for liberation from Anglo-European rule in both China and India was led by men who disavowed Christianity.  It is also no surprise that now, in the 21st century, we see that those white missionary agencies which spent so much in labor and money in the previous centuries to establish missions in these countries have almost nothing to show for it.  For these missionary endeavors were but the expression of the neurosis of the dominators in response to the alarms of their conscience concerning the treatment of the dominated.

China and India are but two examples of the way in which peoples who have been oppressed liberate themselves by building their own internal power - both culturally, educationally, and technologically - as they learn to successfully navigate the world of "peer-polity interaction."  Their example is being imitated by nations, communities, and forward-thinking individuals throughout the African continent and other historically nonwhite locales.  These individuals are in the process of crafting their narrative according to their own calling and not the wishes of their would-be oppressors.  Thus in their examination of the Scriptures, they have accurately seen a call to a theology of liberation.  One consequence of this will be the emergence of a world in which peoples and nations will have to be polite toward each other in order to live decently.  In such a world, those who truly want to advance the Gospel will have to obey the dictum of James 3:13 - "Who among you is wise and understanding?  Let him show by his good behavior his deeds in the gentleness of wisdom."  But those who want to twist the Bible into a political tool of empire will find themselves increasingly thwarted, because the rest of the world will refuse to swallow any of that nonsense.  And those who want to dominate their fellow human beings will find that they can do so only at unbearable cost to themselves.

A Replacement for the "War On Drugs"?

I found out this week that two Georgia women have recently been charged with violations of newly enacted state statutes restricting abortion.  One of the women was the woman who had the abortion; the other was a nurse who allegedly provided an abortifacient drug to the woman who had the abortion.  In addition, a woman in Indiana was recently sentenced to 40 years in prison (see this also) for allegedly taking an abortifacient drug which resulted in the termination of her pregnancy.  This happened in spite of the fact that the toxicologist for the state where she was tried testified that he could not find evidence of abortion drugs in the woman's system.

Neither of the women charged with aborting their pregnancies is white.

I must confess that upon reading their stories, I was struck by mixed emotions.  In describing those emotions, I think I may wind up writing a post that will offend just about everyone who reads it.  First, however, let me say that as a Christian, I am obliged to follow the orders of my Boss.  His Word says that the unjust taking of a life is murder.  Therefore, I am opposed to abortion.

However, I see another side of the story in the case of Purvi Patel.  Whether you believe abortion is evil or not, if you're a decent human being, you must admit that convicting women of crimes they didn't commit and throwing them in prison for decades afterward is also evil.  The fact that women in certain states are now being threatened with such a prospect is unsettling.  The fact that two women who recently became showcases for this threat are nonwhite is more unsettling.  I am thinking that in the Midwest and the South, the "war on drugs" - currently being de-fanged by the passage of laws in various states which decriminalize drug use - may be replaced by a war on miscarrying women of color - oops, I mean, abortion.  Women of color who miscarry may thus find themselves targets regardless of the circumstances of the miscarriages.

It all makes me think of the following quote from People of the Lie: "[The narcissism of the evil]...is a brand of narcissism so total that they seem to lack, in whole or in part, [the] capacity for empathy...We can see, then, that their narcissism makes the evil dangerous not only because it motivates them to scapegoat others but also because it deprives them of the restraint that results from empathy and respect for others.  In addition to the fact that the evil need victims to sacrifice to their narcissism, their narcissism permits them to ignore the humanity of their victims as well.  As it gives them the motive for murder, so it also renders them insensitive to the act of killing.  The blindness of the narcissist to others can extend even beyond a lack of empathy; narcissists may not "see" others at all."  In quoting M. Scott Peck, I realize that I may turn the stomachs of some of those who are familiar with the failings of his private life.  To such I apologetically offer the following suggestion: Regard Mr. Peck in the same way that you might regard the prophet Balaam, or the donkey on which Balaam rode - flawed instruments whom God used to deliver a message that perhaps the messengers had not conceived.  In this quote, Mr. Peck hits it out of the ballpark in describing the role which scapegoats serve for the narcissist.

The current leadership of the American right wing is accurately characterized as narcissistic.  Unable to face their own evil, they look constantly for scapegoats on whom they can project their own dysfunction.  This is seen in the punishments meted out to the scapegoats for their "transgressions" - a kind of justice not meant to restore or to heal, but to destroy.  So if a woman of color has a miscarriage, or even an abortion, the aim of white supremacist justice is not to heal or to restore, but to destroy with draconian punishments - even as the supremacist leaders give themselves a pass for their own evil behavior. 

As they used the "War on Drugs," so the narcissistic elite may use a "war on abortion" as a means of continuing to scapegoat the nonwhite, the non-English, the foreign-born.  And in many parts of the United States, those doing the scapegoating won't even be that sophisticated; they'll simply continue to send the police to storm homes where people of color live, in order to shoot unarmed people of color without cause.  In this year alone, the body count has reached 506 people. In this year alone, an impressive number of murderers in police uniforms have escaped becoming victims of the criminal justice system of which they are a part.  Among them is Joseph Weekley, a Detroit SWAT officer who shot a 7 year old African American girl to death as she was sleeping in bed when he sprayed her house with submachine-gun fire. 

Military Service, Patriotism, Guns, and The Church From Hell

Yesterday, I went to attend a tutoring group where I've been helping immigrant children with math.  "Did you know," one of them said, "there was a shooting at our high school today?"

I already had some idea of the details of the shooter before this morning, even though I know almost no one at that high school.  I knew that the shooter was a white male whose learned pathological narcissism and monstrous sense of entitlement had been threatened by the presence in this world of other people - people different from and independent from him.  But I did not know until today that the shooter was a devout Mormon from a gun-packing right wing military family who had gotten upset a week before when his fellow students disagreed with him about a speech he had made concerning Adolf Hitler.

The shooter is typical of the sort of young people many right-wing Anglo-American families are producing nowadays - people who feel monstrously threatened by the emergence of a world which they no longer control, which they can no longer dominate, and in which they will have to exercise the sort of politeness that goes with an accurate estimation of their real place in the world.  In response to the loss of their imagined specialness, these people kill and destroy indiscriminately, proving that they are not special, but worthless. 

There's a lot that can be said about malignant Anglo-American narcissism at the tail end of the American empire,  but I don't have time to say it.  I'll just say this: Jared Michael Padgett - an all-American, a patriot, a gun nut, a Mormon! is dead of a self-inflicted wound after indiscriminately killing an innocent young man.  Now Jared knows how wrong he was about life, about his cult church, about his place in the world, about his relations with his fellow human beings.  Try as I might, I can't feel sorry for him right now.

On Reaping What We've Sown

It's been rather cold and rainy in the Portland metro area lately.  However, that wasn't the case at the beginning of May, when we were subjected to daytime temperatures that were 20 degrees above seasonal averages for several days.  That was also when carbon dioxide levels in the earth's atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per million for the first time in history.  The present Portland coldness and wetness can be viewed as a merciful yet extremely temporary respite from the consequences of our actions.

Yet other parts of the United States are not so lucky.  I am thinking of the recent massive Oklahoma tornado.  I am also thinking of the doofus responses to the tornado on the part of some of the elected officials and many of the citizens of Oklahoma, not to mention some of the media talking heads who remain constitutionally unable to see the link between atmospheric pollution and an increasingly menacing climate.  Republican Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin, who denies anthropogenic climate change, urged her citizens to pray to God for rain in 2011 in response to record heat and drought in her state.  Now she finds herself "praying" to Washington for federal dollars to rebuild some of the devastated parts of Oklahoma.  I wonder if she has given up on prayer to God.  Such a development wouldn't be surprising, as she is typical of a long list of Republican, conservative darlings of the political wing of American evangelicalism (which is really just Constantinianism): loudly proclaiming their commitment to Biblical morality, especially in sexual matters, yet unable to walk the talk in their own personal lives.  In this regard, she is rather like Mark Sanford.

Then there's Republican Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who opposed Federal aid for the victims of Hurricane Sandy, yet is appealing to President Obama for aid for the victims of the Oklahoma tornado, saying that their situation is "totally different" from that of the victims of Sandy.  How is that so?  In both cases, a big storm came with big winds which huffed and puffed and blew a bunch of houses down.  Senator Inhofe, what do you like about the Oklahoma victims that you don't like about the Sandy victims?  Inhofe is also a staunch climate change denier and a darling of American conservative Constantinians evangelicals .

I am thinking of all of this in the light of a book I recently received, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore The Obvious At Our Peril, by Margaret Heffernan.  (That book has been a good read, by the way.)  When people willfully blind themselves, perhaps there comes a point when they become irreversibly blind.  As the ruin starts to fall around us, let's all have an eye-gouging party; why not?  But before Mary Fallin gouges her eyes out, she should read the part in the Good Book where God promises that whatever a person sows, that he will also reap.

An Open Letter To The American Right and the Tea Party

I actually wanted to write a different post for this weekend. But that post involves uploading some video to the Internet, and every time I have tried it, the operation has been a bit like having one's teeth pulled without anesthesia. One of these days, I might just succeed... But in the meantime, I have some questions for the American right in general, and the Tea Party in particular. I am trying to understand you. If you read my blog, you'll doubtless pick up on my general views regarding you – but I'm willing to admit that maybe we don't understand each other, and that I've been unfair in my attitude toward you. So please help me out here, if you would.

Let me just say that it's been quite an experience to watch the rise of the Tea Party and its promoters – groups like Fox News and talk radio hosts, and people like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, and rich sponsors like Dick Armey and Steve Forbes. And I see all the books written by your spokespeople and sold in places like the Fred Meyer store just a few blocks away from my house. Moreover, I have met many people who seem to sympathize with you, from some of the people I know at work to some of the people I see on the streets of Portland waving signs. (I am thinking particularly of the sign wavers who want to recall Mayor Sam Adams.) Certainly you all have a lot of energy and zeal.

I must also say that I am more than a little unnerved by what I see of you. I know that both the world in general and our nation in particular are facing tough, uncertain times. However, it seems to me that you are responding to these times in ways that may not be beneficial to all groups of people in the world – especially those who are poor or who come from an ethnic background that is different than yours. It seems to me that many of you would like to take this country (along with the larger world) back to a condition that existed maybe 50 years ago, and that had only slowly begun to change by the 1970's. That condition was very hard on my parents (who are black, as I am), and was rather hard on me as I was growing up. Now I am a Christian, but I must warn you that I refuse to go willingly back to those days without a fight. Also, I perceive larger systemic, environmental, ecological and economic threats for which a return to the thinking of the 1950's and 1960's is just not the answer.

Take the global warming controversy for instance. I really liked science as a kid, and I used to want to be an astronaut. So I read a lot of books on astronomy and particularly the planets of our solar system. One planet, Venus, has an atmosphere that contains a lot of carbon dioxide. Both the U.S. and Russia have sent space probes to Venus, and the Russian probes have actually taken pictures of the surface. Those pictures look like something out of Hell. The surface temperature of Venus is high enough to melt lead. And all those science books, written 40 years ago and more, all said that this was due to the huge amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Venus. These books also taught me that carbon dioxide is transparent to visible light and short wave infrared radiation, but that it is opaque to long wave infrared radiation. In short, these books explained the greenhouse effect in a way that a little kid could understand (and they were backed up by lots of research done by trustworthy grown-ups). So why is it, now that big money is involved, that we're suddenly not supposed to trust the science behind global warming and manmade climate change?

Or take the subprime crisis (and race relations along with it). I remember the discrimination against minorities that was practiced by banks and realtors during the civil rights struggle. I also remember what it was like for the few minority families that escaped red-lining and were able to move into suburban, traditionally white neighborhoods. I remember the fights I got into almost daily when my dad bought a house in a white neighborhood. And I remember how one of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement was the passage of laws that outlawed discrimination in housing and lending.

But I also remember doing research for this very blog, The Well Run Dry, and finding out how Ronald Reagan and every president after him weakened and gutted those anti-discrimination laws. And I know what the actual causes of the subprime crisis were, and how minorities were deliberately “steered” into subprime loans by banks – against the law – even though many of us could have qualified for conventional loans. And now Fox News is saying that our present financial crisis was caused by the Federal Government outlawing lending discrimination against minorities?! Speaking of race, why is it that whenever there are disasters and people suffering from slow and incompetent responses to those disasters on the part of their government, they are always treated by the media (particularly Fox) as unfortunate sufferers bravely trying to cope as long as they are white, and they are called “looters” if they're not white?

Let's take health care. To me, the present health care debate seems to be about bailing out the health insurance industry. I don't like the Democratic proposal any more than you do. But I would have preferred single-payer health care. Your answer to that is to shout “That's socialism!!! Socialism is evil!!!” I don't get your response. To be sure, single-payer health care would prevent the masters of certain American “industries” from getting any richer – namely, the health care “industry”, the drug “industry,” and particularly, the health insurance “industry.” But you seem to think that preventing these people from getting any richer is the same as preventing you from getting rich.

To me it seems that you think that any restrictions placed on the prerogatives and powers of the rich would hinder anyone else from getting rich. Don't you remember the history of the United States over the last 150 years? Don't you remember that during the 1920's, when there were almost no Government restrictions on businesses, the result was that a few large monopolies emerged which effectively destroyed anyone who tried to compete with them, and that the rich became a club whose members effectively prevented most other people from becoming rich? Oh, sure, there was the stock market, but the stock market was nothing more than a sucker's game to fool the average working-class guy (or gal) that they were playing a rich man's game by which they could also become rich. And then the stock market crashed. Kind of looks like today, doesn't it?

You now seem to think you can play the same game and get rich yourselves, and you don't realize that your chances of scoring it big are about the same as your chances of winning the Lottery (which is to say that you don't have much of a chance). So you scream that you don't want socialized medicine, yet if you break an arm or a leg or have appendicitis and have to visit an emergency room, the health “industry” will bleed you dry. Do you want to be on the hook for a $20,000 emergency room visit?

And that leads to the question of whether or not people should even want to be rich in the first place. Wanting to be rich is an American value – as American as apple pie, blond haired children, NASCAR and “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers. Yet many of you on the right claim to be Christians. Have you never read in the Good Book that “the love of money is the root of all evil”? (1 Timothy 6:10 in case you don't believe me.) Have you ever looked at the lives of the rich and considered the things they did to get rich? Especially the things they did to other people? Do you want to be the kind of people that like doing those sorts of things? You might have Hell to pay afterward.

Or take morality. I think particularly of the “Recall Sam Adams” campaign. I asked a sign-waver why he wanted to recall Adams, and he repeated the true story that Mayor Sam had sex with an 17-year old male and lied about it. Now I have to agree that that's pretty sleazy. Sam Adams is a gross, immoral character. But there are two things to consider. First, the Republicans and the Right also have their share of gross characters – including Larry Craig, Mark Sanford, and Ted Haggard. In fact, there are whole websites dedicated to listing and chronicling the sexual sins of figures on the American Right and its politicians. (The list of sinners on the Right is very long.)

Secondly, for a long time I have believed that the calls on the Right to correct American morality were simply a ploy to rally people around a very different agenda. The candidates we were told to vote for all said that they were very concerned about American morality, yet when they got into office, their real agenda became evident – an agenda designed to promote American economic power at the expense of the rest of the world, and to promote the fortunes of wealthy American and European elites at the expense of ordinary working-class people in America and Europe. Think about it. If the American Religious Right, for instance, had really wanted to end abortion in this country through government action, they had a golden opportunity during the last two years of George W. Bush's presidency. Yet they didn't.

I have come to believe that the sexual morality of a nation can't be fixed by laws. (Anymore, when I vote at all, I vote for people whom I think are most willing to build social safety nets. That's my biggest value these days.) I have also come to believe that those of you on the Right who call yourselves Christians could do far more toward healing the morality of a nation by acting like Christ yourselves. One translation of 1 Peter 1:1 says, “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who reside as aliens, scattered...” We're not called to be earthly patriots or materialists, but to live as resident aliens – in the world, but not of it. Yet what I see especially in the American Religious Right is a bunch of jingoistic flag-wavers who are rabidly willing to send in the troops to kill people in countries that possess things we Americans happen to want.

In short, I see the American Right, both religious and secular, as mere greedy materialists. As has been documented on this blog and on many others, the well of Western and First World prosperity is running dry, due to ecological and energy constraints. One wise response would be to learn to live within limits and to learn to share. Yet the response of American Right seems to be a temper tantrum. This is why you scare me.

As I said at the start, however, I may be wrong about you. If any of you reading this are on the Right or associated with the Tea Party and you have read this far, thank you very much for reading. This entire post arose out of a conversation I had with someone after church today. Now I am reaching out to you all and I would like to know what you think. Correct me if I'm mistaken – please. Please do it calmly and rationally, however; I don't respond well to MESSAGES IN ALL CAPS, FULL OF RANT WORDS AND EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!, if you get my drift.

Global Warming for Evangelicals

On one of my final posts on my blog, TH in SoC, I promised to write a post on global warming. This subject is one which I am somewhat reluctant and ashamed to tackle. You see, when I accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior many years ago, He never forced me to have a prefrontal lobotomy or give up the use of my critical thinking skills as part of the bargain. This meant that I was free as a Christian to notice the events, trends and phenomena in the world around me, and to draw reasonable conclusions from them.

However, I noticed many years later the hijacking of the Faith to serve the ends of earthly economic and political power elites. One major way they accomplished this hijacking was by distorting Biblical Christianity so that it was turned into a justification for the actions of the elites. Thus there were such things as “Christian patriotism” as manifested in both England and the United States; the idea that certain nations were “Christian nations” because of their laws or constitutions; the notion that it was the right or duty of these so-called “Christian nations” to conquer and exploit all other nations and peoples on earth; the idea that God's only chosen economic system is laissez-faire capitalism and that all other economic arrangements are from the Devil; and the idea that it was the duty of Christians everywhere to support the elites (governments and corporations) in their actions and their wars, since it was by this that the world was becoming “safe for democracy and prosperity,” and the elites were ridding the world of people who “hate our freedoms and our faith!”

Those who teach such things say that it is the duty of Christians to unquestioningly believe all of these things, and to unquestioningly reject all other points of view, regardless of the evidence. Any notion or idea or teaching or observation which indicts the practices of Western elites is also to be dutifully rejected as well. Thus there are many parts of the Bible which are de-emphasized or glossed over or explained away by teachers of this point of view, people who are well-known as leaders in the American Religious Right. But the Bible has many things to say about the actions of the members of the Western elite class, and much of what it says is not good news for them. (In fact, they may want to take out fire insurance against the day of judgment.)

There is also strong evidence of the harm caused by the practices of these elites – evidence which proves the rightness of the Biblical condemnation of these elites. And just as the spokesmen for these elites have sought to gloss over the Biblical condemnation of their practices, they have sought to gloss over the evidence of the harm caused by their practices. Some of them, such as James Dobson and Tony Perkins, have gone to the extreme of saying that it is our Christian duty not to believe that harm is being done by these elites. The events of my personal life over the last several years have caused my eyes to be opened to the games being played in our society by economic, political and religious elites, and therefore I can see quite clearly the fallacies of those who have hijacked my faith. But I have noticed over the last several months that there are people who call themselves evangelicals and Christians who are still unquestioningly accepting the teaching which I have described above.

One example is a high school kid on my street who asked me if I believe in global warming (it was during an unusually hot day in the Pacific Northwest). When I asked him what he thought about it, he said, “Well, I'm religious – and that's why I don't believe in global warming. My pastor told us that man can't destroy the earth – only God can...” While I was outwardly polite and patient in listening to this kid, inwardly I was very angry. Why? Because it is the unquestioning promotion and acceptance of teachings such as this in the face of overwhelmingly contradictory evidence that makes Christianity look like the faith of village idiots. This is not the Christianity of the Bible, nor is it the Faith of such intelligent men as Dr. Paul Brand, C.S. Lewis, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Therefore I write now to set the record straight on at least one subject – global warming, also known as climate change – even though it is a shame to have to do so. (By the way, I like the kid I was talking to. I think he's a good kid, and bright. He's just a bit misinformed.)

Theological Arguments against Global Warming (and a Biblical rebuttal)

First, let's tackle the theological arguments against global warming. This section will be relatively short, because the job will be easy. (For those of you readers who are not Christians, I say welcome to my blog. I appreciate your readership. You may find this part to be informative, but if not, feel free to skip ahead to the scientific case for global warming.)

Spokespersons for the Religious Right use theological arguments to try to debunk global warming. Their arguments usually run thus: “People who believe in global warming say that it will cause polar ice caps to melt and flood the earth. But that can't happen, because God promised in Genesis 8:22 that He will never destroy the world by a flood again.” Or, as my teen-aged acquaintance said and as agencies like the Institute for Creation Research say, “Man can't destroy the earth; only God can.” Or if one wants to go to extremes, there is the late Jerry Falwell's statement that global warming is “Satan's attempt to redirect the church's primary focus from evangelism to environmentalism,” and that “the Bible teaches that God will maintain the earth until Christ's second coming.” (Source: “Falwell to Arms: Christians Being Duped By Global Warming,” Treehugger, 27 February 2007, http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/02/falwell_to_arms.php)

But the issue with anthropogenic global warming is that it is not about what God is doing to the earth. It's about what man is doing to the earth. Thus the first argument against global warming is a logical fallacy. It makes as much sense as saying that “God has promised in Psalm 121 to keep me from all evil. Therefore I can't be hurt if I play on the freeway!” The fact is that there is nowhere in the Bible that says that humankind cannot make a mess – even a mess of Biblical proportions. The Bible repeatedly states how the moral defilement of a people can pollute a land, and it also prohibits physical practices that can ruin a land. For instance, see what the Bible had to say about letting land lie fallow during sabbath years, and how Israelites were not to destroy all the trees of a land in which was a city being besieged by Israel. (It's in Deuteronomy.) Actually, the Old Testament has a fair amount to say about environmental stewardship.

The fact that humans can certainly make big messes is stated in Revelation 11:16-18, speaking of the Lord's final judgments at the end of this age. The passage reads, “The twenty-four elders, who sit on their thrones before God's throne, fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying: 'We give You thanks, Lord God, the Almighty, the One who is and who was, because You have taken Your great power and reigned. The nations were angry, and Your wrath came, as did the time for the dead to be judged, and to give Your bondservants the prophets their reward, as well as to the saints, and those who fear your name, to the small and the great; and to destroy those who destroy the earth.'” (Emphasis added.) Here we see the clear Biblical acknowledgment of the harm mankind can do to the earth, as well as the promise of God's judgment on those who deliberately do that harm.

When faced with such a rebuttal, the only thing the Religious Right can do is to somehow argue that modern industrial society – especially modern Western industrial society – is not destroying the earth. Their spokesmen claim that the anthropogenic nature of global warming is just a theory, and that no one can prove that industrially-produced CO2 emissions have anything to do with recent weather and climate shifts. I shall therefore talk about the scientific case for global warming. (By the way, regarding Jerry Falwell's statement, I can only say that he has made many such statements over the years. It's a funny coincidence how any position of conscience which threatens the richest members of our society must be “from Satan.” I wonder what Falwell thought of James 5:1-6, or what he thinks of it now.)

Global Warming – The Scientific Evidence (A very simple explanation)

The warming of objects – whether food, houses or planetary atmospheres – involves the transfer of energy. Heat energy is transmitted from one object to another by one of three processes: radiation, convection or conduction. When those objects are separated from one another by a large distance and both objects are in a vacuum, the only means of heat transfer is by radiation. Consider two such objects: the Sun and the earth.

The Sun is a yellow dwarf star (spectral class G2 V). The earth's surface receives most of its energy from the Sun in the form of visible light. Most of that energy is not absorbed by the atmosphere, since it is transparent to visible light, although clouds do reflect light back into space. (Other spectral components such as ultraviolet light are absorbed by ozone high in the stratosphere.) Once visible light strikes the earth's surface, it is absorbed to varying degrees by the earth's surface, causing the surface to heat and emit infrared radiation.

The major components of the earth's atmosphere are transparent to infrared radiation. But certain gases absorb infrared light. These are gases such as methane, water vapor and carbon dioxide. As these gases absorb infrared light, they become hot (increased molecular energy) and re-radiate that infrared light in all directions, in addition to transferring heat to the rest of the atmosphere by conduction and convection. This raises the temperature of the earth's surface and of the surrounding atmosphere. If there were no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the average surface temperature of the earth would be -0.4 degrees F (or -18 degrees C).

The earth's temperature is maintained by a balance between the energy absorbed by the earth-atmosphere system and the infrared energy re-radiated by the atmosphere into outer space. As the atmosphere is heated by greenhouse gases, its upper layers are heated by convection, and it is these layers which radiate infrared light back into space. As the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases, the zone of re-radiation moves higher in the atmosphere, because more heat is trapped and absorbed by the lower layers of the atmosphere. In addition, the earth's surface temperature increases, until an equilibrium state is once again reached where the heat gain from incoming solar radiation is balanced by the heat loss through re-radiation.

For the last 800,000 years, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have varied from 180 parts per million (ppm) to 270 ppm just prior to the Industrial Revolution. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, activities such as the burning of wood, coal and oil, the deforestation of land and the making of cement resulted in the liberation of large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Much of this CO2 was absorbed by the oceans, and much of it was turned into plant matter by photosynthesis, liberating oxygen in the process. However, as the Industrial Revolution quickened its pace and the burning of fossil fuels increased exponentially, the increase in atmospheric CO2 began to outpace the rate at which natural ecosystems could dispose of it. Thus atmospheric CO2 levels increased from about 313 ppm in 1960 to over 385 ppm today.

The effect of varying the amount of greenhouse gases in a planetary atmosphere can be modeled crudely by multivariable calculations involving multiple integrations and spherical coordinates. The math is relatively simple for those who know calculus, though it is somewhat involved. The effect of human-produced greenhouse gas emissions was first postulated by Svante August Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist, in 1896. Though his calculations were shown later to require refinement in order to match observed phenomena, his original conclusions were remarkably close to what is now being observed by climate scientists. The observed average temperature of the earth rose by 0.75 degrees C between 1860 and 1900, and temperatures in the lower atmosphere have increased by between 0.12 and 0.22 degrees C per decade since 1979, according to satellite temperature measurements. 1998 and 2005 were two of the warmest years on record, worldwide, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. According to the NASA GISS, the 14 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1990.

Effects of Global Warming

This is a complex subject; however, the effects of global warming are real and are already being felt, from the increasing size and severity of wildfires in the forested regions of the United States and other countries, to the increasing length and severity of heat waves experienced in populated areas. Other effects include increases in severity and number of storms, shifts in migratory patterns of birds and other animals, loss of plant and animal habitats, shifts in crop growing seasons and growing conditions leading to loss of harvests (such as in Australia), and melting of glaciers.

One particularly dangerous effect is the beginning of the thawing of Arctic permafrost. This permafrost contains billions of tons of trapped methane, and methane is a greenhouse gas several times more powerful than carbon dioxide. If thawing were to release large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect would be greatly amplified, leading to very destructive and chaotic changes in global climate. Evidence exists that in 2008, large releases of methane from the Siberian tundra had begun to occur.

Is global warming then a sign of the coming end of the world? I don't know. Nobody knows. After all, the Good Book says of that question, “But no one knows of that day and hour, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only.” – Matthew 24:36. It may be the end, or it may simply be the beginning of a really big mess that we will all have to live with for a very long time. (How many of you have ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz?) One thing I do know, however. Global warming is a sign that mankind is making a mess of this world. The perpetrators and perpetuators of this mess are the rich elites of the First World. Living responsibly and lightly upon the earth is required of those who would be good stewards of God's creation, yet this sort of life is an affront to the rich masters of our present system, because it endangers their bottom line.

These rich masters have done all they can to persuade most of us to continue our present lifestyle of dependence on the breaking system known as the “official” economy, and have even attempted to use religion to legitimize that dependence, by telling us that it is our God-given right and duty to live this way, and that “Christians must not believe in global warming!” Such propaganda may well serve to help people justify lifestyles of excessive and increasing consumption by persuading them that there are no earthly consequences to such a lifestyle. Yet believers in such propaganda may well find themselves one day being held accountable for helping to destroy the earth.

Sources:

• World English Bible, http://ebible.org/web/, a public domain translation, from which all Scriptures quoted herein have been taken, for which no royalties are owed, and which may be freely quoted in all settings, public and private.

• PhysicalGeography.net, a Fundamentals eBook, http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/7h.html

• “Scientists warn thawing Siberia may trigger global meltdown,” Wikinews, http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Scientists_warn_thawing_Siberia_may_trigger_global_meltdown

• “Effects of Global Warming,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming

• “2007 Was Tied As Earth's Second Warmest Year,” Science Daily, 17 January 2008, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080116114150.htm

• “NOAA: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, Methane Rise Sharply in 2007,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 23 April 2008, http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20080423_methane.html

For further information, read the publications of Dr. James E. Hansen, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Dr. Pushker A. Kharecha, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Their contact information is on the NASA GISS website. Also, feel free to visit the website of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And for more simple, understandable explanations, there is always Dr. Jason Bradford of Global Public Media at http://postcarbon.org/about/fellows.