Blue Like Jazz

Almost twenty years ago, Steve Taylor wrote a song called “Sock Heaven” that made a lasting impression on me. It was at least partially about his experience in a Christian band called Chagall Guevera that wanted to make music non-Christians would listen to. And seriously, their stuff was awesome. But their music sort of fell through the cracks. Christians didn’t want to listen to it because it wasn’t praise music, and non-Christians didn’t want to listen to it because it got sold in Christian bookstores. The band produced only one album before they broke up, much to the disappointment of their small but loyal group of fans.

After Chagall Guevara disbanded, Steve Taylor wrote the song “Sock Heaven” to describe his experience of trying to live in-between the Christian and secular worlds:

One pile waits with their god in a box
The other pile nervously mocks heaven
Misfits lost in the dryer, take heart
Maybe there's a place up in sock heaven

Sock Heaven

The first time I heard that song, I broke down in tears, because it so perfectly described my own experience. And I was thinking about that song while watching Steve Taylor’s movie Blue Like Jazz, which opens today.

I suppose I need to start by saying that although I’ve been going to church all my life, and indeed spent six years studying theology, I don’t generally listen to Christian music, and I almost never watch Christian films. I find movies like Fireproof and Courageous practically unwatchable, despite the fact that I agree quite strongly with their underlying message. I’m a huge (huge) C. S. Lewis fan, but I didn’t really care for the three Narnia movies they’ve released so far. Their message is fine; the books were great; but as movies, they just don’t work. Flannery O’Connor believed that any work of art needed to start by being true to its own medium. If a novel doesn’t work as a novel, it’s not worth reading, even if you agree with the message. In the same way, if a film doesn’t work as a film, if it doesn’t have the requisite production values, if it doesn’t have good actors and a good story and engaging characters with believable challenges, it doesn’t really matter whether it encourages good morals or makes a strong argument for faith. The medium for preaching is a sermon; cinema can only be the medium for a good story, well told.

The next thing I need to say is that I don’t know how I can really be an impartial observer of the movie. I’ve been a fan of Steve Taylor’s music since his first album back in 1982 (there are two artists I listened to in high school that I can still enjoy: Steve Taylor and Daniel Amos). I thought Donald Miller’s book Blue Like Jazz was quite good: it was well written, thoughtful, and made me want to be a better Christian. And I was one of the 4500 people who kicked in some cash to help it get made. So I can hardly go into the movie without any biases. Indeed, I was hoping beyond hope that it would be decent; but I was practically terrified that it wouldn’t be. And of course, the fact that the professional reviews have been mediocre at best added to my anxiety.

But all that said, after watching the movie, those same mediocre reviews have really got me scratching my head. Because here’s the thing: putting aside any bias as much as I can, I really think it’s an amazing little film. The production values are fine – you’d never guess that it was made for $1.3 MM – but more to the point, it has a funny, moving story to tell. It’s not perfect: one or two of the characters fall a bit flat, one or two of the scenes drag on a bit too long, and occasionally a line or two of dialogue will sound a bit wooden. But those are small faults, and within the context of a movie that is fresh, funny, tightly plotted, theologically sophisticated, and above all moving, they’re easy to forgive. Marshall Allman does a wonderful job as the young Don Miller, trying to walk a precarious line between his Southern Baptist childhood and his mind-expanding education at Reed College. Justin Welborn’s snarling and snarky turn as “The Pope” is spot-on. Ben Pearson’s cinematography is beautiful. And the last scene – especially the very last line – made the movie. Like reading the book, watching the movie made me want to be a better Christian.

So like I said, the mediocre reviews have had me puzzled. I know what a bad movie looks like, and I know that this isn’t one. So why don’t more of the professionals like it?

My best guess is that like Chagall Guevara, it’s stuck in sock heaven. It’s a misfit. It’s too earnest for folks who make their living as professional cynics. It may turn out to be too edgy for Christians who don’t like their movies to acknowledge that lesbians exist, let alone that they can be smart or funny or have their hearts broken. It’s a misfit, made for misfits. Neither those who prefer to keep their god in a box, nor those who nervously mock heaven, have been able to find much to appreciate in it. But those of us who know we don’t really fit anywhere, who know we are strangers and aliens, who know the Church is both an infernal bureaucracy and the Body of Christ, may end up falling just a little bit in love.

Didn't want a platform to build a new church
Didn't want a mansion in rock heaven
Didn't want more than to be understood
Maybe there's a place up in sock heaven

 

The Trailer

Reluctant Confirmation

I was called tonight by someone associated with Olivet. I don’t want to pick on him too much, so I’ll leave him anonymous for now. Not surprisingly, they’re a little unhappy with some of the things I’ve been saying about them (both here, and on the Bethany Alumni Facebook forums), and he wanted to ask me to be as balanced and fair as I could. Of course, I hope I’m doing that already, but he had a specific request, which I was happy to oblige. (It had to do with posting a link to Hokuto Ide’s yamayamakotowatcher blog to the Bethany FB group, to even up an earlier link I’d posted to the pseudonymous Davidian Watcher blog. Background: DW is convinced David Jang is a dangerous heretic; Hokuto Ide is convinced that DW is a malicious nutcase; and so it goes.)

During the course of our conversation, I asked the Olivet representative about one of the charges I leveled in my last blog post, namely, that the EAPCA had been engaging in dishonest and unethical promotional practices by hiring an offshore company to generate fake “Likes” for their Facebook page. It’s always possible that there’s a reasonable explanation for the evidence I’d found, and I was curious to see if I’d missed something. After all, I suppose it’s possible that the Romanian company ran the fake “Like” campaign without authorization, or maybe some overzealous SEO guy from Deographics (one of their web design firms) ordered it up and has since been smacked down. So I wanted to know if Olivet could offer some explanation beyond, “We’re slimy weasels.”

Our conversation went something like this (abbreviated somewhat, but pretty close):

Me: “Did you know about the fraudulent ‘Likes’ before you read about them in my blog?”
Him: “Fraudulent implies something criminal. That word is too strong for what you describe.”
Me: “Maybe you’re right. Did you know about the unethical and dishonest ‘Likes’ before you read about them?”
Him: “You’re talking about the EAPCA. I don’t work for them.”
Me: “You work right next to them, in the same office, for Pete’s sake. Did you know about those dishonest ‘Likes’?”
Him: “What’s wrong with working in the same office? You seem to think there’s something sinister about it.”
Me: “Nah, of course there’s nothing wrong with it. But did you know about those dishonest ‘Likes’? Yes or no.”
Him: “I can’t answer that.”

I learned two things from this exchange. The first is that obviously, yes, he must have known about them. Without belaboring the point, otherwise why all the evasion? Why not just answer the question with a straightforward denial? “No, I don’t know anything about it, but we’re looking into it, and I’ll let you know what we find.” That would have settled me down just fine (for the moment).

The second thing is that, to his credit, he didn’t want to lie outright, and was rightly embarrassed they got caught. I’ve worked with plenty of folks in my day who would have lied, and wouldn’t have been embarrassed. The fact that he insisted on telling the truth, if not precisely the whole truth, indicates that whatever I may think about David Jang’s organizations in general, my interlocutor was not just a slimy weasel. I was glad to see that. He still has a sense of shame; and that means there’s hope.

Still Wondering What’s Up With Olivet University

It’s coming up on a year now since Bethany University, my alma mater, finally ran out of money and was forced to close its doors. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Bethany alumni were initially quite excited to hear that another Christian school, David Jang’s Olivet University, had agreed to buy the campus and continue our school’s mission. But then we started noticing weird things about how the transition was being managed, and started hearing even weirder things. In the first place, it was a little odd that Olivet wanted to purchase the Bethany name along with the campus. I loved Bethany, but it’s not as if a tiny denominational school that shares a Biblical name with half-a-dozen other Christian colleges had any particular value as a brand. We’re not talking Harvard here, or even Wheaton. So that had the alumni scratching our heads. But then, when Olivet first put up their new Bethany.edu website, they baldly mischaracterized their acquisition of the campus, stating inaccurately that they had been around for 90 some years, and that they were Bethany. Not to put too fine a point on it, that was a lie, and it made nearly everyone associated with Bethany pretty uncomfortable. Eventually, after it became clear that they weren’t going to be able to make this claim without being challenged, Olivet agreed to change the language on the Bethany website; and now if you read the site carefully, you can tell that it’s not actually the same school (though it still has things like “Since 1919” on the home page – which, I hasten to say, is not true).

OK, so that’s some of the background. But it’s worth noting that while I was doing my research into Olivet last September, I kept turning up all sorts of weird little facts that I had trouble putting into a coherent picture. For starters, one of the Bethany alumni noticed one day that the new Bethany website had a “policies and procedures” page with this text on it:

Non-Constructive Negative Statements about University of Phoenix Faculty or Administrators: Comments or forum posts that make libelous statements or aggressively attack faculty or administrators, in general or by name, are not permitted.

Commercial Posts and Solicitations: Posts containing commercial content or solicitations are not permitted. This extends to students seeking to drive traffic to their own, non-University of Phoenix -affiliated websites and/or commercial ventures.

Note the references to the “University of Phoenix”. In other words, this page was lifted straight from the corresponding page on the University of Phoenix website, and whoever brought it across forgot to do a search-and-replace.

This faux-pas got discussed at length in the Bethany Alumni Facebook forums, and apparently someone from Olivet was paying attention, because by late that afternoon, all references to the “University of Phoenix” had been replaced by “Bethany University”. (And by now, six months later, they seem to have been removed altogether.)

I’ve thought a lot since then about whether there was anything significant about this particular misstep. Some folks on the Bethany forums were indignant, saying that it seemed to violate Olivet’s own honor code. Maybe; but at the same time, I’m a big fan of not doing more work than you have to, and if I was putting together a set of policies for a university, I can’t imagine a better place to start than with a set of tried and tested policies from a similar institution. It’s not as if this was being submitted to an instructor for academic credit, or to a journal to be published. Furthermore, as I’ve acknowledged earlier, Olivet was under significant pressure to get this deal closed, and closed quickly. In the process, they did, in fact, manage to get a great deal accomplished in a brief period of time, and it would be surprising if they hadn’t made some mistakes along the way.

But there does seem to be a different sort of significance to the mistake. In most academic institutions, policies like this, even if they're initially borrowed from somewhere else, go through a long process of review, argument, debate, revision, and finally, approval. And only after that process would it get posted to the website. The fact that "University of Phoenix" was still in the text shows that the process for creating this particular policy was rather different. A reasonable assumption is that an Olivet manager told some poor web designer, "We need some text to throw up in this particular slot, and fast. Go find something."

So is there anything wrong with that? Well, I think there might be, but it lies less in the details of this particular mistake than in an overall pattern that I’ve noticed on the websites of Olivet and especially its sponsor, the Evangelical Assembly of Presbyterian Churches in America. I don’t so much mind the fact that Olivet copied its policies from somewhere else (I've done that for internal policies before), but it seems rather odd that their process for coming up with them was so clearly disconnected from the organic life of the institution. They didn't create a policy because the university needed a policy. It looks very much like they created (well, copied) a policy because they wanted people on the outside to think, "Oh, Olivet has a policy for this."

And I’ve found evidence of that approach in all sorts of different places. The EAPCA website is an interesting case study in this regard. It repeatedly portrays the EAPCA denomination as a dynamic, thriving institution, with a rich, vibrant life. It has resources for congregations. It talks about planting churches. It describes a thriving “I Love Jesus Youth Ministry”. It advertises speakers who can come visit your church. It talks about a wide range of publications available for folks to access.

But when you dig just a little deeper, it all gets a mite strange. As I’ve been perusing the EAPCA website, I keep having the nagging feeling that a Stepford Wife is peering over my shoulder. The thing you realize pretty quickly is that nobody would ever actually use this site. For instance, there’s no place to actually order the periodicals that the site advertises. There are a couple of email addresses which you can supposedly use to order these magazines – but emails to at least some of those addresses bounce, and the rest go unanswered. The page that describes the speakers who can come to your church is very vague and general, and gives no way to actually request a speaker. The resources on the “I Love Jesus Youth Ministry” lead either to dead pages, or to sites that don’t have anything to do with the EAPC. And most astonishingly of all, there’s no phone number anywhere on the site, even on the “Contact Us” page.

And there are other weird things beyond that. For starters, every one of their position papers was explicitly lifted from other denominations (usually the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, but one from the Assemblies of God). The description of their “Presbyterian Heritage” is puzzlingly vague, and manages to avoid the obvious question, “In what sense is the EAPC actually connected to this heritage?” I haven’t been able to find any of the periodicals they describe referenced anywhere else.

Now, most small, new denominations that I’m familiar with got started organically, when a particular pastor has a particular vision or style or message, and over a decade or two, that vision spreads informally via the planting of new churches and the growth of existing ones. Eventually, the problems and possibilities inherent in any large, dynamic movement come to the fore, and the churches in question decide – often quite reluctantly – to organize themselves more formally. This was certainly what happened with the Assemblies of God, and more recently has been the case with groups like The Vineyard and Calvary Chapel. You can also see it in its incipient phases in the variety of churches that have sprung out from Mars Hill or Applegate Christian Fellowship. The life and growth come first; the denomination comes next; and the website, if any, comes last of all, in service to the pre-existing life of the denomination.

But that doesn’t appear to be what’s happened with the EAPCA. On the contrary, I get the overpowering impression from the EAPCA website that the ordo websitis was something like this: “We really ought to have a denomination. Denominations should have a website. Let’s get working on that website.”As a result, the website mostly seems to be a large and rather clumsy advertisement for a denomination that someone was hoping would spring magically into existence. That’s why the website seems to have very little connection to any actual denominational life: the website is more real than the denomination it describes.

But there’s more. So next, take a look at the EAPCA’s Facebook page, and more specifically, at the statistics page that summarizes its “Likes”. As of 4/10/12, this is what it looked like:

Notice how it has almost precisely 1500 likes each day, lasting for precisely seven days, and then stopping? And almost nobody talking about them? That particular pattern is a sure sign of what is sometimes called a “Like Farm”. In other words, by far the most likely explanation is that somebody at the EAPCA paid a company (presumably in Romania) to generate 1500 fake “Likes”, so that the EAPCA would look like it was bigger and more important than it was. (Probably only 1500 total "Likes" are listed, rather than, ~10,500, because Facebook caught them at it and trimmed all the rest from some of their stats, though not all.) For a good comparison, check out the stats page for my old denomination, the PCUSA, which is at least 100 times larger than the EAPC, maybe more. It has fewer clicks per day, but the pattern indicates that they’re clearly organic. (Edit 4/12/12 – I also found that another domain associated with David Jang, http://ibplace.com/, has an identical pattern of fake “likes” on Facebook: 1500 a day for one week, with Romania as their primary source.)

Now, this is disturbing, right? Granted, this technique is de rigeur for slimy companies trying to cheat Google and Facebook, but it’s pretty surprising to find a Christian denomination engaging in outright click fraud. Perhaps we should be grateful that they were so clumsy about it. But it confirms the impression I gathered from the EAPCA and Olivet websites, that they’re trying very hard to make themselves look bigger and more important than they really are. And apparently they’re willing to go so far as to engage in unethical methods to create that impression.

[Edit 4/14/12 – It looks like both the EAPCA and IBPlace Facebook pages have been taken down. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this was done out of embarrassment at having been caught cheating.]

OK, well, that’s interesting. But there’s more.

One of the things that you realize pretty quickly when you talk to folks at Olivet is that they’re very proud of the fact that they’ve been accepted for membership into the World Evangelical Alliance. And, indeed, that’s nothing to sneeze at. The WEA has been around in one form or another since the 1840’s, and can count among its past leaders such Evangelical luminaries as Harold J. Ockenga and John Stott. When the Assemblies of God leadership first presented the offer from Olivet to assume Bethany’s campus and brand, they trumpeted the fact that Olivet was a member of the WEA (presumably this had been pointed out to them). And Olivet prominently displays their membership in the WEA on their website. The Christian Post (one of the numerous media organizations associated with Olivet) has a big story on the initial acceptance of the Chancellor and former President of Olivet, David Jang, onto the WEA board back in 2007. And there’s lots more, but suffice to say, Olivet’s membership in the WEA has been a big deal for them.

But then the story gets just a little odd. It turns out that the WEA hasn’t just accepted the EAPCA as a member organization; it looks like it may have practically become an Olivet subsidiary. For instance, the WEA website shows that they have three different US offices. But it turns out that two of these offices actually share mailing addresses with one or more Olivet-affiliated institutions, and the third office is less than half a mile from the EAPCA headquarters.

WEA Office	Olivet/EAPCA Office	Map
74 Trinity Place Suite 1400 New York, NY 10006	EAPCA 6 Barclay Street 4th Floor New York, NY 10279
1605 US Route 11 Kirkwood, NY 13795	Olivet World Assembly 1605 US Route 11 Kirkwood, NY 13795
125 Bethany Drive Scotts Valley, CA 95066 (You can read about the opening of this last office here.)	Bethany University  800 Bethany Drive Scotts Valley, CA 95066

And if you check around, you can see that new Chief of Staff at the WEA is a man named Chris Chou; he also happens to be the ex-director of the Jubilee College of Music (another Olivet-associated institution) and a member of the leadership at Olivet University New York.  Less obvious, but still interesting: the CEO of IBTimes, a business connected to David Jang, is a man named Etienne Uzac; he is presumably connected in some way with the Marion Uzac who is (or was) the press secretary of the WEA.

On top of that, it appears as if the WEA website is now actually controlled and managed by the Olivet family. David Jang’s organization apparently has leased some rackspace at an XO communications hosting site in Fremont, CA, which is where all of their web servers are located. They’ve got hundreds of domains hosted there from their dozens of media companies; and it turns out that this same subnet is exactly where the worldea.org website is hosted as well.

And I have one more detail to add. I was recently contacted by someone inside Olivet whom I’m going to try to keep confidential. This person told me that David Jang actually funded the WEA’s move from Canada to their conveniently close New York offices, and continues to provide a significant portion of the WEA’s operating budget. My source also tells me that David Jang has stated that he intends to take over the WEA and to merge it into his organization. Apparently, like Bethany, the WEA had been in financial difficulties for some time (you can get a sense of that here), before David Jang stepped in to rescue them, so it looks like he may have the leverage to accomplish this.

So as it turns out, then, the WEA isn’t really an independent organization which can independently vouch for David Jang and Olivet and the EAPCA. Rather, it looks to be yet another mainstream evangelical organization which David Jang is in the process of, well, taking over. He’s funding them. He’s put one of his lieutenants in charge of day-to-day operations. He now runs their website. He’s moved their offices right next to his. It’s maybe even a little creepy.

So what’s going on here?

Well, that’s hard to say. If I had to give my considered impression, it would be that these guys are trying very hard to do something, and they think that that something would be easier if they had the respectability that came from being a denomination. And from owning the oldest Pentecostal university in the United States. And from controlling the oldest Evangelical organization in the world. But it’s the something that all this is about which still eludes me. Perhaps they’re just trying very hard to carry out the Great Commission, and all this stuff which looks so strange from the outside is just their way of doing it. But I can’t quite shake the feeling that maybe there’s something more sinister going on. I’m still just asking questions, not making accusations, and my intuition might very well be wrong. But I have to say, all this continues to feel weird to me. These guys are trying too hard.

And that leads me to the topic of my next blog post. As I mentioned above, I was recently contacted by someone inside David Jang’s organization. What this individual had to say was pretty fascinating – among other things, our conversations confirmed that my take on the EAPCA website was spot-on – and if it’s true, it’s also pretty worrying. I’ll try to write up some of it over the next day or two.

P.S. A journalist by the name of Ann Brocklehurst has an interesting theory about what the folks at the IBTimes might be up to, namely, using early press access to “locked-up” government data to manipulate markets. I think she’s pretty clearly discounting the Christian angle too much – reporters in general don’t get religion – but her theory is interesting as far as it goes, though I should be clear that all she has so far are just suspicions.

Dr. Seuss and the Decline of Western Civilization

I gave the following brief talk recently at my morning men’s group:

I’ve been asked to talk this morning about pride, and this seems like a terribly relevant topic for folks like us, who live in 21st century America. Sometimes I think that no civilization in history has ever fussed quite so much about self-esteem as ours has, or has ever encouraged such a frankly individualistic and self-centered worldview.

Still, it’s worth noting that it was nearly 2500 years ago that Aristotle said, “Pride is the crown of the virtues.” Aristotle’s model for this assertion were mythic heroes like Hector and Achilles, but we can see the fruit of his ethical position all too clearly in violence and brutality of his pupil, Alexander the Great. Christianity for a time curbed these tendencies, but they have more recently begun to roar back.  In the 19th century, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche went even further than Aristotle when he said, “Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.” This perspective, that the primary goal of a human life is to assert ones own claims, is thus neither new nor entirely unique to our culture. Nevertheless, I do believe that both the extent and the rapidity with which it has come to dominate our society is worthy of comment.

I think we can make clear just how quickly and how firmly our culture has adopted a philosophy of self-centeredness by comparing two well-known books by Theodore Geisel - better known, perhaps, as Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss began writing children’s books back in the late 1930’s, in the run-up to World War II. In 1940, he wrote Horton Hatches the Egg, about the resolute and humble Horton, an elephant tricked into hatching an egg by a lazy and faithless “Mayzie Bird”. Expressing his determination to fulfill his promise, Horton also expressed our society’s then-dominant moral outlook with these words:

I meant what I said, and I said what I meant:
an elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent.

This is stern stuff, full of honesty, loyalty, and self-sacrificial love, and it’s not surprising that the Greatest Generation was raised on it. You don’t survive the Great Depression and World War II without a reasonably stiff backbone.

But shortly before his death in 1991, Dr. Seuss published another book that expresses a quite different perspective. The book is called Oh the Places You’ll Go!, and on every page it reflects the dramatic cultural changes that had taken place since World War II. The book is clever and witty, and I won’t deny that there’s some wisdom in it, but at its heart it seems to endorse a disconcerting self-centeredness. Instead of encouraging faithfulness and loyalty, its theme can be reduced to these words from its opening pages:

You're on your own. And you know what you know.
And you are the guy who'll decide where to go.

Nietszche and the Mayzie Bird would have nodded and approved, of course, but you have to imagine that poor faithful Horton would hardly have hardly known what to make of such an amoral egoism.
Regrettably, this perspective isn’t limited to children’s books. Try reading a typical advice column and note how much of its advice assumes that we need to think both more often and more highly of ourselves. Take a couple dozen newspaper editorials on controversial social issues, such as abortion or gay marriage, and see how rarely they advocate for an increased sense of personal humility, or commend a course of greater self-sacrifice and discipline. How many movies or TV shows have you seen in the last year which said, in effect, “You need to express yourself, be your own person, stop conforming to what other people want you to be”?

But like I said, this emphasis on claiming our own rights is hardly new. It didn’t start with Aristotle or Nietszsche, and it won’t end with either Dr. Seuss or Dear Abby. It started, in fact, in the Garden of Eden, when the serpent suggested to Eve that she might know her own good better than God.

According to Augustine, pride is “the craving for undue exaltation”. In other words, it is the desire to put ourselves first, not just before others, but most especially, before God. Now, it’s critical to remember that God created us for Himself, and that our hearts will always be restless unless they rest in Him. Our chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever; and the enjoyment and the glorification go hand in hand. The rest when we serve Him, the restlessness when we abandon Him and exalt ourselves, are not outcomes that God could change if He wanted, but are fundamental expressions of ultimate reality. To know God is to know Him as immeasurably greater than ourselves. God doesn’t demand loyalty to Himself out of any desire for self-aggrandization, as if God Himself were proud, but rather, because that is who He is, and that is who we are. God can’t make us happy without Himself anymore than water can cease to be wet.

Thus, when we become proud, we are by definition separating ourselves from God. We are refusing to know God as God, and when we refuse to acknowledge this fundamental reality, the rest of our faculties degrade in lock step. We don’t see reality as well as we did before; we don’t understand the world as well as we ought. We take things that ought to be first and make them last. We exchange the glory of the incorruptible God for corruptible images and pale imitations.

This, then, was the sin of Adam; and this was the sin of Eve. That it was an apple or some other fruit is almost incidental: the key is that they chose to know good and evil, that is, they chose to decide for themselves what would be good and what would be evil. For whatever unimaginable reason, they placed themselves in the place of God. The serpent spoke as truly as the serpent could: after eating the fruit, they were as gods: they became their own end and desire and satisfaction. This end, of course, was neither desirable nor satisfactory, for when they moved the true God out of His place, the false gods moved in.

And in this sense, as in so many others, we are the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve. We’re on our own; we know what we know; we are the ones who’ll decide where to go. Or in other words, “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”. But when we affirm this creed, when we refuse to be ruled by the one true God, we discover that we are ruled instead by the false gods of sex, ambition, and money. We desire to serve only ourselves, and serve instead every intellectual or moral fashion that blows our way. And the result is the sad, tragic history of humanity that we know so well. All the wars and nearly all the famines, all the divorces and affairs, all the rapes and genocides, every terrible crime and every tawdry scandal has its origin in this ineluctable turn toward ourselves and away from God.
There is, of course, only one rescue from this fate, and that is the cross. For our pride can only be moved from its seat at the center of our souls when we know God for who He truly is. And it is in the cross that we see God most truly and most completely. George MacDonald said,

When he died on the cross, he did that, in the wild weather of his outlying provinces, in the torture of the body of his revelation, which he had done at home in glory and gladness.

The only and final cure for our pride is to constantly remind ourselves that the God who dwells in unapproachable light became a human being so that He could light our way for us; that the author of life suffered death out of love for us; that the Creator let His creation crucify Him. If pride, by definition, cuts us off from knowing God, then knowing God, by definition, will begin to heal us of our pride. And to know God, we must know Jesus; and to know Jesus, we must pass under the shadow of the cross.

I wish I had better advice; and if I were less proud myself, I suspect I would. One of the side-effects of humility is that you can understand the world better. But in the meantime, I can only point you - I can only point myself - towards the cross. And given all the pressure we encounter in our culture to move in exactly the opposite direction, we can hardly do this too early or too often.

Evangelicals and Global Warming (Part 1)

I visited my parent’s church today. It’s a very Pentecostal church, and while I haven’t been particularly Pentecostal for many years now, there are many things about the church that I admire. First among these is its well established and effective ministry with recovering alcoholics and drug users. It brings a smile to my face when I think about how many folks once sitting in jail cells are now sitting in pews and shouting hallelujah. I can imagine that first century Christians once nudged each other and said, “See her? She was possessed by seven demons before Jesus cast them out.” I’ll often hear similar comments in my parents’ church: as folks pass by, they’ll say something like, “See him? Before he got saved, he was sleeping under a van down by the river.” Or, “That guy over there? He was selling drugs out of a drive-through window.” If comments like these strike you as condescending, I’d venture to say that you probably don’t know Evangelicals very well.

The sermon this morning was solid, and gave me a lot to chew on. It took Romans 12:1-2 as its text, which says, “Do not conformed to this world, but instead be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” That seemed especially relevant in light of my renewed skepticism of the mainstream media’s portrayal of social and religious issues. As I mentioned in my last post, recent events have driven home to me the importance of a pretty strong filter when the media tries to cover social conservatives.

Still, I was taken aback when the pastor said (I’m paraphrasing from memory, but this is pretty close):

You’ve probably heard a lot about global warming. But that’s just another example of how the media doesn’t tell us the truth. Global warming is just one more big hoax that the media has tried to pull over on us.

My wife and I looked at each other, to make sure we’d actually heard what we thought. I was pretty surprised, both that this pastor (whom I like and respect) would believe this, but even more that he’d choose to bring it up in a sermon. It had nothing to do with the Gospel, and worse, he made it seem like it did. It sent the unmistakable message that if you want to be a good Christian, you ought to believe that global warming is a scam. And that’s a shame, for more reasons than I can begin to count.

Still, because I’ve recently expressed my extreme disappointment with liberals on the matter of religious liberty, it seemed an appropriate time to blog about how frustrated I am with conservative positions on the environment, particularly with respect to global warming. I know lots of folks conservatives who would agree with my parent’s pastor, that climate change is a hoax. And I’m really, really curious about why this is this so.

I’ll start by saying that it’s clearly not because they’ve made an independent and sufficient evaluation of the evidence, and have rejected it as inadequate.  The plain fact of the matter is that nobody I know personally (and this obviously includes me) is anything like qualified enough to offer an authoritative opinion on the science behind scientists’ claims regarding climate change. Yes, I suppose most of us have a cursory understanding of the physics of global warming: CO2 and methane act as “greenhouse gases”, trapping more warmth in the atmosphere, thus raising temperatures worldwide. Some of us may have observed the retreat of glaciers with our own eyes, most of us have read about the increased rate of polar ice melting, and probably a good number have read mainstream summaries of the science behind it (this piece by The Economist is probably the best). But the fact remains that the earth’s climate is composed of innumerable systems whose interactions are mind-bogglingly complex, and the measurements, the math, and the models that real climate scientists use to predict their behavior are only slightly less so. I could spend the next four or five years doing nothing but studying climate change, and I’d barely be qualified to comment on the quality of a few journal articles, and still less on any overarching conclusions that real scientists might reach after having critically digested thousands of them. I simply don’t know enough; and neither does anybody else that I know. There are roughly 7 billion humans on this planet, and maybe a thousand of them possess the knowledge and experience that I freely admit I lack. (This study, for instance, was able to identify 1,372 individuals actively publishing in the field of climate change.) In other words, folks qualified to comment authoritatively on climate science are not just one in a million: they’re quite literally one in seven million. The vast majority of folks who reject global warming, as well as the vast majority of folks who accept it, are doing it for other reasons entirely.

And here’s another red herring. Your typical climate change skeptic doesn’t reject the idea of global warming because the folks who are qualified to judge haven’t made up their minds. If you want to know how convincing the evidence is for climate change, don’t start with this Wikipedia article (on the physics), but with this one (on the consensus opinion among scientists). There’s a lot of data in there, but this gives you a feel for its conclusions:

The predominant scientific opinion on climate change is that the Earth's climate system is unequivocally warming and it is more than 90% certain that humans are causing it . . . No scientific body of national or international standing has maintained a dissenting opinion . . . 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC (Anthropogenic Climate Change) outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In other words, there’s a consensus. I have some reasonable idea of what a consensus looks like, and trust me, that looks like one. And yet some 50% of Americans reject it. Why?

Well, I’ve got a theory about that, but it’ll have to wait until my next post.

Discovering What It’s Like To Be a Partisan

Most of my life, I’ve been a political moderate. My father is a Rush Limbaugh Dittohead, his father before him was a Yellow Dog Democrat, but I’ve never felt particularly comfortable in either strongly liberal or strongly conservative circles. I’m a registered Democrat mostly because, back in college, the guy doing the voter registration drive was pushing very hard for me to register as a Republican. But since then, on both issues and candidates, I’ve sometimes favored the Republicans, sometimes the Democrats. And in political discussions, I’ve generally found that it’s easier for those discussions to be interesting and productive when the person on the other side isn’t swayed by party politics, and isn’t trying to ascribe unworthy motives to the other side while trying to pretend that they themselves are pure as the driven snow. My default position when it comes to controversies is to be fairly sober-minded, to try to see both sides of the picture, to be realistic about my own and others’ motives, and not to claim more for an argument than it really warrants. As you can imagine, this makes me a pretty bad Democrat, and probably an even worse Republican. My glee at the rise and ungainly fall of Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachmann, and Rick Perry has been anything but seemly. I’m annoyed at the inability of our congressional representatives to work together, and if there were an intelligent candidate somewhere in the political middle, ready both to cut spending and raise taxes to fix our fiscal woes, he or she would find it difficult to not get my vote.

However, several recent events have upended a great deal of my self-satisfied centrism. First, in what could only have been a cynical election year ploy to excite his base, Obama decided to make the Catholic Church pay for contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients, in an obvious violation of several hundred years of American jurisprudence, along with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, not to mention the First Amendment. (And of course, it turns out that this did excite the base: but the wrong one.) Second, the Susan G. Komen Foundation first dropped their support of Planned Parenthood, and in the ensuing uproar, re-established it, their hand having been forced by the media’s blatantly one-sided coverage of the move.  And finally, when I pointed these things out to friends, and expressed my astonishment, I was repeatedly met with either blank stares or outright hostility. Folks simply didn’t get why I found these two things – the Obama administration’s trampling of the First Amendment, and the news media’s blatantly biased reporting on Susan G. Komen – so objectionable. And that shocked me. After all, if someone thought that it was wrong for the government to force a particular moral viewpoint on a woman carrying a child, shouldn’t they mutatis mutandis think that it was wrong for the government to force a particular moral viewpoint on Roman Catholics? But apparently they didn’t see any problem with that sort of government intrusion.

More than that, though, my arguments with them put me in a very odd position. I dislike the smell of partisan politics intensely. Nothing is so likely to turn me off in a debate as the realization that the other person not just thinks he’s right, but is convinced that that anyone with a different perspective is operating in bad faith and with impure motives. But that’s exactly what I’m convinced has happened in these two instances. Obama is an expert on Constitutional law: there’s no way that he couldn’t have realized that the HHS decision was a blatant violation the First Amendment (especially after taking a 9-0 shellacking from the Supreme Court on a closely related issue in Hosanna-Tabor just two weeks prior). The media prides itself on its objectivity: but take a look at this interview by Andrea Mitchell, and see if you think there’s any reasonable way you could describe it as fair and balanced.

The result is that I’ve started to feel quite differently about the Republicans, and all the nasty things they’ve been saying about the Obama administration. The strong emotions animating the Tea Party have been even more of a turn-off to me than the actual positions for which they’re advocating. But now that I’ve found myself backed into a political corner, it turns out that I’m suddenly as angry as, well, a Tea Party conservative. I’m unbelievably pissed-off that the Obama administration has decided that the ideology of secularism gets to operate from a privileged position: that our country is no longer pluralist, but actively and specifically secular: that I’m welcome to my religious beliefs only so long as they extend no further than the door of my church. The logic of the Obama administration and its defenders, that public expressions of religious beliefs must always give way to the power of the state, is astonishingly similar to that of the Chinese government. This is a big hairy deal, in other words, and it represents a breathtaking invasion by the federal government into the realm of ultimate truth. It makes me angry to think about it. It’s not right, and Obama should have known better. The realization that he actually thinks this way has revealed a yawning, probably unbridgeable gap between his worldview and mine. He can talk about his respect for religion all he wants: but when it comes right down to it, it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t respect any religion so long as it insists upon actual truth claims about the fundamental nature of God, humanity and the world (in other words, all of them). I will not vote for any president who thinks that way, and I’m going to be a damned sight more suspicious of anything he says going forward.

As a side note, I was gratified to hear that as of this morning, Obama has more-or-less backed down, and is offering a compromise. But in the spirit of my newfound hermeneutic of suspicion, it’s worth pointing out that in his press conference, he baldly lied about the state of the rule-making process. The proposed compromise was not, as he portrayed it, a “speeding up” of a process already under way, but an actual change in the actual rule, a political volte-face after realizing that he’d just managed to push a whole bunch of fence-sitters like myself firmly into the waiting arms of his conservative opponents. And it’s also worth noting that the changes he has proposed seem to be purely verbal: see this analysis, which calls it “economic nonsense”; or this one, or this, which wonder how insurance companies could possibly avoid using premiums from their Catholic clients to pay for contraceptive coverage. As Robert Miller puts it:

Under the old rule, the employer had to pay for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilizations, and contraception. Under the new rule, the employer has to pay for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilizations, and contraception, but President Obama will say that it doesn’t, and we’ll believe him. That fixes everything. And to think, some people accuse President Obama of empty rhetoric.

That’s the sort of wonderfully snarky comment that would have gotten my dander up in the old days (i.e., two weeks ago), but sounds pretty good to me right now.

Moving on, when you layer the Susan G. Komen debacle onto the contraception controversy, it’s made me increasingly suspicious of anything the media has to say as well. I’ve found myself reading a variety of conservative blogs that critique the media’s portrayal of religion, and I’m a little astonished at how much sense they make. You can make the case (as liberals often do) that the mass media is owned by corporations, and hence are likely to present a conservative slant on economic issues. That may or may not be the case: but there’s no remaining doubt in my mind which direction the media leans when covering social and religious issues. This bias shows up in a thousand subtle and blatant ways, and ranges from the scare quotes around “religious liberty” in the third paragraph of this article, to the numerous mistakes of fact in this article, and the decision by the Dallas Morning News to feature a dozen protesters of Susan G. Komen’s decision on the front page, after having completely ignored an 8000-person March for Life the previous month.

So here’s the first thing. Like I said, I’m angry at Obama, and I’m newly suspicious of the news media. I’m in no mood to compromise, and right now, I’d love to see Obama filing for unemployment because of his attempted betrayal of the First Amendment. And I guess that makes me a conservative.

But here’s the other thing. For perhaps the first time in my life, I understand what a political partisan feels like. I now know what it means to be angry and frustrated, because you’re so convinced that you’re right and that your opponents are mulish and stubborn miscreants. And I know that folks on both sides feel like that. I’m able to understand a great deal of why folks on both the right and the left respond the way they do to each other. I sympathize with the partisans. I get it now. I feel their pain. And I guess that makes me a liberal.

The Joys of Parenting

It started Thursday night. I've been fighting off the same chest cold that sent Calista to the doctor's office New Year’s Day, so before I went to bed, I took a couple NyQuil to help me sleep. About 1:00 am, I woke out of a drug-fogged sleep to find our four-year-old son Caedmon crawling into our bed. That wasn't unprecedented, but it's not normal either. I was groggy enough that I decided to cut him some slack, so I put up with him squirming and kicking me for 15 minutes or so before finally deciding that no, he had to go back to his own bed. So I picked him up and carried him back to his room. I was setting him down into his bunk bed when I noticed a strong sour smell in the air, and simultaneously felt my hands plunge into a wet, sticky substance covering his blankets. My brain took a few seconds to put it all together and draw some conclusions. Then I sighed and picked him up and carried him back into our room. We made a bed for him on the floor, got a bowl from the kitchen, and put him down, hoping that would be the end of it.

About 20 minutes later, we were awoken again, to the sound of Caedmon gagging. Most of it made it in the bowl, but by no means all of it. More cleanup and consoling. Then something like sleep, more gagging, more cleanup, more consoling. This repeated itself all night long, every 20 minutes or so, until about 5:00 am, when Caedmon finally managed to get to sleep and stay asleep. About the same time, I removed myself to the couch downstairs, and got an hour or so of rest.

When we woke up, we let Caedmon continue to sleep in our bed, and Galena began cleaning his room. Our one-year-old daughter Calista wasn't making any noise, so we let her sleep, while I tried to entertain our two-year-old son, Brendan. By 8:30 or so, though, Galena decided that she really needed to check on Calista. When she opened the door, she got a full whiff: turns out Calista had been having the same troubles, but had suffered them all in complete silence. (We even had the baby monitor on!) So her crib, her blankets, and her hair was encrusted with not-quite-dried puke. Calista herself was surprisingly calm about the whole thing, and gave us a big grin as we gingerly tried to extract her from the Crib of Dried Vomit.

After that, Friday and Friday night passed more-or-less without event. On Saturday morning, we thought we'd seen the worst of it, and since the kids were begging to go outside and play in the snow, we got them dressed and spent some time outdoors. (Caedmon discovered that it's painfully tricky to ride your bike in the snow; Brendan and Calista discovered, once again, that your hands get cold and hurt when you play in the snow and refuse to wear gloves.)

But Saturday afternoon, Calista started having a variety of diarrhea episodes, including at least one "Level 3 Containment Failure" (I'll leave the exact definition of that to your imagination). And then Galena started looking green around the gills. And then she threw up. And then the other end as well. Rinse and repeat.

So Galena took herself to bed, while I did my best to entertain the kids. Caedmon and Calista were definitely feeling better, but were still a little stunned after their run-in with the Stomach Bug That's Going Around. Brendan seemed to have a stainless steel immune system, however, and wasn't going to let anything slow him down. (And you have to remember, through all this, that I've got a cold too, and periodically feel like I'm about to hack up a lung.) When evening rolled around, I finally got the kids fed and down to bed, and all seemed quiet. So I checked in with Galena, who was still in bed, and then left for Bellevue, for a movie night with some friends that had been long planned (and for which I was supposed to supply the movie).

I got a call from a groggy-sounding Galena around 8:30. "Brendan just threw up," she said, sounding on the verge of tears. "Can you come home?" By 9:00 pm or so, I was thus available to make myself the target for Brendan's third heave of the evening. After several more abortive attempts to get Brendan to sleep, I gave up, and for an hour or two, he sat on my lap with a bowl in his hands. We passed the time by watching extreme skiing videos off of YouTube (at Brendan's request). We'd pause the video - or sometimes not - whenever Brendan started heaving, then I'd wipe his mouth, and we'd start watching the video again. It was oddly bonding. By midnight, the worst had passed, and I put him to bed.

I should note that during all this, my side of the bed had gotten nailed with at least one round, so I elected to spend the rest of the night in the guest bed in the library. Galena's side was relatively clean, and more than that, she was too tired to care.

I got up around 7:30 this morning to find Brendan and Caedmon in great spirits: they weren't up to the Running and Chasing Game, precisely, but they were quarreling normally and demanding books and juice and videos. But by 9:00 am, when Calista still hadn't made any noise, I decided to check on her. Turns out that (once again) she'd been having the same trouble as everyone else, but (also once again) hadn't complained to let anyone know about it. The carpet around her crib, her bedding, her hair, and the outside of her pajamas were covered with one particularly noxious substance; the inside of her pajamas, and most of her body, was covered with a different one, surprisingly similar in texture and smell, and equally objectionable. Even after I gave Calista a shower, Galena was still combing unidentified chunks out of her hair.

That brings us up to the present. I'm the only one who hasn't gotten the bug yet, but I can feel it circling warily at a distance, like a pack of wolves preparing for the attack. We've basically decided that all the normal household rules and routines are out the window. The kids are watching videos and drinking juice and eating pretty much whenever and whatever they want. Galena informs me that Calista has just fallen asleep in the hallway. Brendan and Caedmon have scattered a box of paper clips around my office, and I can barely bring myself to care. Civilization and discipline has given way to raw survival.

Wish us luck.