I’m just not convinced that the Protestant Evangelical Church can do art.  I’m not even sure what I mean by do in that sentence.  I’ve spent fifteen years studying religion and its relationship to the imaginative works of Western civilization, from art to literature to music.  I’ve read most of the Required Reading List of newer books about art and the Evangelical church: Rookmaker, Schaefer, Seerveld, Ryken, Wolterstoff, Veith, et alium.  I’m no art historian, and I’m no theologian, but I’ve written and taught on Christianity and the works of the imagination, and I’ve written a dissertation on how certain theological concepts can be found inside dramatic structures, and I’ve had lots and lots and lots of conversations with pastors and thinkers and writers and artists about the Evangelical church and art.  Based on all that, here seem to be the problems, stated roughly and generally (Below, P and E indicate Protestant and Evangelical, which are the only kinds of churches I feel comfortable addressing here, as a member and through my own experience.  Other churches have similar problems and solutions, but that’s not to be discussed here).

• Most PE churches are ugly.  Even the pretty (and old) ones tend to be iconoclastic.
• Most PE church members seem to enjoy very pedestrian works of art.  I say seem.  Maybe that’s okay.  Maybe that has more to do with our time in history and less to do with our intellectual lethargy as a church.
• Most PE preachers and thinkers and writers speak optimistically and positively of the church’s need to “embrace” and “celebrate” beauty, but there’s little exposition of A) how this is supposed to happen or B) what this means.
• The working worlds of quality art and quality literature and quality music happen quite independently of the PE church.  Perhaps this is how it should be, perhaps not.
• PE churches and organizations pay terrific lip-service to beauty and the imagination, but their literature, the writing and design of the publications they produce, the look and style of their facilities, etc., seem to indicate otherwise.
• Beauty and goodness and truth are proclaimed through the imaginative works of literature regardless of the PE church.  Great creators don’t worry about sanction or support from the church.  Are we in the PE church too consumed with talking about art, and should we concern ourselves with simply participating in it?  Which is to say, would the PE church’s “theology of art” work itself out if we would only learn and read and enjoy good art?
• How does an actual, physical church body “support” art?  By funding exhibitions in the fellowship hall?  By having groups attend good concerts and read good books?  Or does all that sound silly?

I could go on.  At this point, I am loathe to keep thinking about it.  As a writer, my preference at this point is to keep writing my book and making stories and let someone else worry about what it all means for the church.

As you may know, Obama recently announced that, if elected, he would revive Bush “faith-based” initiative, supporting religious organizations in their community work and involvement.  This was done surreptitiously (or not so much) to invite Christian voters from the right.  One problem with Obama’s faith-based revivification plan is that faith-based organizations would be forbidden to hire employees who do not have faith.  We might call it the Faith-or-Not-Faith-Based Initiative.  Lew Daly at Boston Review explains that this one weakness will ensure Obama’s plan would be as ineffectual as Bush’s.

By restricting religious hiring rights, Obama’s faith-based initiative attacks the very thing it claims to be supporting. That is, it attacks communities. The Supreme Court’s greatest advocate for the poor, Justice William Brennan, explained this better than anyone in his separate opinion in Corporation of Presiding Bishop v. Amos (1987), the case that established the constitutionality of faith-based hiring rights […] For government to restrict the criteria and discretion that religious communities use to define and maintain their identities threatens the very existence of religion, as Justice Brennan (correctly) understood it.

It’s nice to be reminded that the Supreme Court believes such things, and bad to be reminded that a presidential candidate doesn’t.

Leah Daughtry is on a mission, and part of that mission is preaching barefoot.

[She] slipped off her stiletto-heel shoes at the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn, stepped from a pastor’s chair to the pulpit and shouted, “I am on the rise!” She wore a long black tunic with gold buttons that ran from her high collar almost to the carpet. Her graying hair was shorn tight to her dark brown scalp. She always preaches in bare feet in order to “de-self,” she had told me, and to let God’s spirit and words rush through her unimpeded. “I am on the rise!” she erupted again.

The other part of that mission is being chief of staff to Howard Dean and chief executive of the Democratic convention next month.  So the Times wants to know, “Can Leah Daughtry bring faith to the Democratic party?”  I wonder, too.  The answer may be in statements like these, from Daughtry’s own mouth:

The right of self-determination is the concern. If I do all the right things, I will live a full and abundant life - this should be true. But it’s not. Something’s wrong with the equation. Americans may not call this liberation theology, but they have the sense that things aren’t fair.

I’ll agree with Daughtry that things aren’t fair and that something’s wrong with the equation.  What’s wrong is sin.  Not oppression of one class or race over another.  It’s oppression of ourselves by our very own selves.  What Daughtry is talking about - well, that’s faith, but it ain’t Biblical.  That’s faith in man, not God.  Faith that “if I do all the right things, I will live a full and abundant life” is to make the self divine.  Perhaps this is what most people think Christianity is, I don’t know.  But life is unfair.  It will always be unfair.

The lessons of Biblical faith would suggest that 1) nobody can do all the right things, and 2) having a full and abundant life comes from acknowledging #1, along with accepting on faith that God is who he says he is and that he has done and will do what he’s said he’s done and will do.  Oh, and the fact that “full” and “abundant” can only mean a life of full and abundant love and service.  Race might still be a problem in America, and in the world, and in human history, but it’s only a corollary to the Bigger Problem of sin and rebellion.  Can Leah Daughtry bring faith to the Democratic party?  Faith in something, but not God.  But perhaps that will be enough to give Obama a victory.

If you’re looking for something to watch during your office lunchbreak today, try this video debate between Dinesh D’Souza and Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine.  A perusal of the comments underneath the video suggest it was a fair debate and may be worth watching.  Among others, D’Souza also debated Christopher Hitchens last year at King’s College.

Yesterday, we posted on Right Wing, Wrong Bird by Dr. Joel Hunter, where he ponders the difference between being a Christian versus being Christ-like in politics.  Here’s a little more from him, via Relevant Magazine, where he offers six steps for Christ-like political engagement:

1. “Get Away from Confrontational Demonstration-to Think” (For me, this often happens in the presence of other believers, rather than pagans.  If you hang out with nothing but other believers all the time, you can stop thinking about your shared ideas, without knowing you’ve stopped thinking.  Spending time around a few decent pagans can keep you honest.)
2. “Overlook a Narrow Religious Perspective” - ” A true test of Christianity in politics is this: Are a great variety of people benefited by our political stance, even people who are not of our faith? We are following the footsteps of Christ when we work hard to assist others, even when their political stance is different from our own, and when we talk in terms that communicate to everyone.”
3. “Observe Deep Principles Rather than Shallow Politics” - “The great benefit Christians should bring to the American political process is one of depth. Those who see the world in more than one dimension, who think in terms of ages longer than this life, are valuable voices.”
4. “Decide from Prayer and Scriptural Principles” - “Whether God leads all praying Christians to vote the same is not the point. Living all of life like Jesus is the point.”
5. “Act!” - “God will call some people to unique service in government. He has done that historically with kings such as David, vice pharaohs such as Joseph, judges such as Samson and Deborah, queens such as Esther, and prophets such as Nathan. But how many Davids or Josephs or Nathans does God need?”
6. “Cooperate with Others and Encourage Understanding” - “Cooperation and tolerance are not twins: Cooperation ennobles while tolerance is likely to corrupt. Cooperation is active; tolerance is passive. Cooperation is neither afraid of nor destroyed by conflict. Many of us have failed to distinguish between the two.”

Of course, with a little tweaking, these are good principles for any reasonable person to follow in politics, not just believers. 

We recently blogged on the act of communion and how its abuse by an ignorant religion journalist might have warranted having her press pass taken away.  Here’s another communion controversy, but this one’s not about ignorance at all

In protest against student fees for religious services at the University of Central Florida, a student senator, Webster Cook, recently walked out of a campus Mass with the Eucharist.

Now, I might see how a rational man could have problems with funding the worship of a deity he might choose to ignore, even if I disagreed with him about the wisdom of ignoring that deity.  But this is ridiculous and profane.  Phi Beta Cons quotes the Catholic League: For a student to disrupt Mass by taking the Body of Christ hostage-regardless of the alleged nature of his grievance-is beyond hate speech.”  Now, in solidarity with the communion-desecrating Cook, a professor Paul Zachary Myers from the University of Minnesota has gone online to champion the cause:

Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? … if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some … I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare.

For the sake of our younger readers, I’ll ignore his next few sentences.

Correction: According to Phi Beta Cons, the source for this post, “Myers’s diatribe can be found at his faculty page on the university’s website.”  This is not the case, however, and so references to this supposition have been removed from the post.  HT: WMBloggers.

In this Times article, Ted Widmer, in a mode typical of liberals who realize they need to court Evangelicals to win the White House, seems to have found a historical connection between liberalism and Evangelicalism.

For most of American history, evangelicals were Democrats or their equivalents, profoundly uncomfortable near the temple of the moneychangers. Jefferson attracted huge numbers of voters simply because his running mate, Aaron Burr, was the grandson of the great evangelist Jonathan Edwards. In the 1920s, William Jennings Bryan was lampooned by H. L. Mencken as an ignoramus catching flies in a sweaty courthouse during the Scopes trial, but that snide dismissal overlooked Bryan’s long career as an advocate for progressive causes.

Wait, I’ve heard this before, right?  It goes something like this: Evangelicals used to be liberal and progressive, like when they marched with Dr. King and were for the abolition of slavery and women’s voting rights, but their ignorant (or is it cunning?) leaders duped them into voting Republican for the last thirty years. 

The problem, of course, is that “progressive” can mean many different things (it can men new, different, or simply the quality of things that I want to happen in the future).  Another problem is that many “liberals” during the last 300 years of American history believed very different things than “liberals” today.  Take the abortion issue.  At present, the established law looks at this as an issue of women’s rights.  And so, it seems “progressive” to be pro-choice, pro-abortion.  And it seems counter-progressive to be pro-life, pro-fetus.  But in 100 or 500 or 1,000 years, historians might (I say might) look back and see that it was really an issue of children’s rights.  And so it would seem much more “progressive,” historically, to be pro-life.

All that to say, these Democrats trying to find a kinship with Evangelicals by saying, “Hey, we love the same things!” is only half-true, just as half-true as it is when Republicans say it.  It may be true that a lot of Evangelicals may desire to be co-belligerents with Democrats, given certain ideas about global warming, poverty, etc.  Just like it’s true that, for the last three decades, Evangelicals have been co-belligerents with Republicans on issues of taxation, the family, and the like.  I suppose that when you’re co-belligerents for long enough, you start to adopt the philosophies of your comrades, for better or worse.  Usually for worse.

In the end, I think it’d be probably be best for believers to consider ourselves no more than co-belligerents with whomever we align ourselves, Republican or Democrat.  Once we start calling ourselves one or the other, we’ve ceased to be discerning about what’s most important, which is that our political decisions be based on God’s word, not man’s.

Melinda Henneberger writes about an unorthodox subject for Slate: the Lord’s supper, also known as communion.  For most Christians, communion is a pretty big deal, which is really a pretty enormous understatement.  It’s one of those few things that nearly every modestly confessional or doctrinal or biblical church takes seriously.  Despite differences in theology - specifically A) what it is (real body and blood, or a metaphor), and B) when it’s to be taken (every week, or every month, or every quarter, etc.) - most churches are careful to proclaim that it’s an exclusive meal open only to believers.  This exclusionary proposition isn’t welcome to contemporary ears, but that’s just how it is.  I won’t get into the meaning and purpose of communion here, but I will share this article with you, about how one person’s cavalier attitude toward communion made someone take note about their own cavalier attitude. 

Henneburger writes about how Sally Quinn - a writer at the Washington Post-Newsweek religion site “On Faith” - decided to take communion at Tim Russert’s funeral.  This quote is from Quinn’s own narrative about what she did.

Last Wednesday at Tim’s funeral mass at [Holy] Trinity Church in Georgetown (Jack Kennedy’s church), communion was offered. I had only taken communion once in my life, at an evangelical church. It was soon after I had started “On Faith” and I wanted to see what it was like. Oddly I had a slightly nauseated sensation after I took it, knowing that in some way it represented the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Last Wednesday I was determined to take it for Tim, transubstantiation notwithstanding. I’m so glad I did. It made me feel closer to him. And it was worth it just to imagine how he would have loved it.

Oh, this is wrong on so many levels.  First, Quinn has a prestigious platform for religious journalism, so doesn’t she know that Evangelicals don’t believe in transubstantiation?  One Jesuit writer said this:

[I]t is probably not too much to expect that the co-founder of a prestigious online blog about religion run by two of the nation’s premier journals would understand something about the most basic practices of the Catholic church. Most intelligent people know a few facts about the Catholic church: this is one of them. And even if one doesn’t know this, one would know to act with great care when in the midst of a worshiping community not your own.

Read the whole article.  It should offend anyone who takes communion seriously, not to mention anyone who takes journalistic professionalism seriously. 

And for a basic few points about the different Christian views on communion, read this.

Russell Moore, Dean of the School of Theology at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, says something quite unusual about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  He says, in short, that wealthy and white preachers sound quite a lot like Wright, preaching their own kind of liberation theology.

How many times have we heard conservative preachers use the Bible in exactly the same way that Jeremiah Wright uses it? Wright uses the Scripture as a background to get to what he thinks is the real issue, psychological or economic or political liberation from American oppression. Others use the Scripture as a background to get to what they think is the real issue, psychological or economic or political liberation through the American Dream.

We might call this white liberation theology.  Moore calls it the liberation theology of the right.

The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barrabas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah.

Maybe this is just another easy rip on your local megachurch preacher, but you have to admit that both the white preacher of the big church down the street and Jeremiah Wright often seem to be preaching Christ as a means to something else.  Of course, tell that to the people in the pews, and they might not believe you.  “I mean, come on,” they’d say.  “We’re at church.  Of course we’re talking about Jesus.”

When most people think of Iraq, they don’t really think of religious pluralism.  But the Middle East was pluralist before it was chic.  That’s what it was 2000 years ago and what it is now.  Of course, it’s always been a far more tenuous kind of pluralism than ours, but it’s there.  Take Mosul, also known, in other places, as Nineveh.  You may have heard of it.  Think Jonah.

For more than 1,000 years, northern Iraq has been shared by people who for the most part believe and worship differently: Turkmen, Kurds, Yazidis, Sunni and Shiite Arabs, and Assyrian Christians - of whom the Chaldeans are the largest denomination. (The Chaldean Church, an Eastern Rite church, is part of the Roman Catholic Church, but maintains its own customs and liturgy.)

This story is about Archbishop Paulo Faraj, head of the Chaldean Christians in Mosul, who was paying money to insurgents to keep them from killing his church members.  After the troop surge, things got more manageable around Mosul, and he publicly denounced the extortion, and he was kidnapped and found in a shallow grave.

Since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, Muslims in the Middle East permitted that diversity in part through a special tax on Jews and Christians. The tax was called a jizya - and that is the name with which the insurgents chose to cloak extortion, Mafia-style, from Christians.

Read his story here.