Wherefore Religious Fundamentalism?

By now it should be obvious from this blog and two others of mine, Beyond Darwin and Old-Style Liberal Blog, that I'm a religious liberal, and, politically, I'm a center-left moderate: an "old-style liberal" who thinks a lot of the doctrine of the secular left today — e.g. arrant multiculturalism, knee-jerk political correctness, unlimited support for abortion rights — is wrong.

In other words, I have a worldview which, though it evolves over time, keeps me at odds with both leftists and rightists. Even so, what I seek most of all is a sense of solidarity with the rest of the world, taken in toto. Yes, indeed, I admit it ... it's a contradiction! Being at odds with those I disagree with is a strange way to promote solidarity.

At any rate ... in the religious sphere, I'd say, the leftists are the atheists, the agnostics, and to a certain extent the apathetic ones who simply wish religion would fade into the background. The rightists are the fundamentalists, many evangelicals, many religious conservatives, the creationists. (I'm speaking of these categories in Christian terms, though of course similar categories exist in other religions.)

In politics and secular ideology, the leftists and rightists are not as easy to label, except with reference to their positions on specific topics. We no longer can speak of leftists as communists, socialists, or fellow travelers, to be sure, and there are so many versions of political conservatism, so-called "neo-conservatism" being just one of them.

A simple rule, then, is this: in secular ideology, a leftist or "liberal" is anyone whom a self-styled "conservative" excoriates. And a rightist or "conservative" is anyone whom a self-styled "progressive" (the L-word now being a dirty one) excoriates.

Perhaps uncoincidentally, there seems to be a strong correlation between where one is on the religious spectrum and where one is on the political/ideological spectrum. There aren't a whole lot of atheists on the political right, nor do many religious conservatives flock to the political left.


The way I see it, there seems to be, in both the religious sphere and the secular one, a dynamic in which the leftists and rightists who manifestly abhor one another still manage through their respective shows of assertiveness and counterassertiveness to keep the other side in business. They feed off each other. They alienate the middle.

If I had my druthers, I'd like both wings to go away, in both religious and secular versions, leaving people in the middle to debate whether to be center-left or center-right.

But the wing the I find most offensive is, I admit, the religious-conservative one. In particular, it is "the face of evangelical Christianity," which Timothy K. Beal, in Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith, says he has "come to distrust" (p. 68).

Beal, raised as a conservative evangelical in (I believe) the Southern Baptist tradition, is now alienated from his childhood faith. As a professor of religion at a major university — and a religious liberal — he still wrestles with what he does and does not believe. This was why he took himself and his family on an extended road trip to visit places like Holy Land USA and Golgotha Fun Park, travel destinations that appeal mostly to that face of American religion that he is now skeptical of. He wants to understand their appeal, even if he can't fully get with the program anymore.

Evangelical Christianity, he says, "always inclines itself toward theological fundamentalism. It's the face that is turned on by the dream of an ideological system that is total, lock-tight, free of all logical contradiction. In this sort of theological answer machine, there is no room for doubts, uncertainties, questions" (p. 68). Beal finds that unwillingness to entertain doubts and tensions frankly repellent. So do I.


Another way to put it is that I like a big tent. I'd like to get us all into the same huge tent, in fact, where we can carry on our remaining conversations and debates with civility.

I'm a Catholic by choice and conversion, though I was raised by a mother who was a lapsed Southern Baptist and a father who was a lapsed Methodist. I spent my youth unchurched, at best only a token believer in God. In midlife I found that I was a believing Christian after all, and so I found my way to the style of Episcopalian faith termed Anglo-Catholicism ... which is akin to what Anglicans in the Church of England call the "high church."

Next, the Anglo-Catholic emphasis on elaborate liturgies and sacraments as signs of divine grace made it just a hop, skip, and jump for me to shift to Roman Catholicism, when certain aspects of Episcopalianism began to grate. It certainly helped, also, that I had many Catholic friends, and that I had been (and still am) quite enthusiastic about the Jesuit education I received as a youth at Georgetown University.

Clearly, the Catholic Church aims (with how much success is a matter of debate) to be a big tent; the word "catholic" means "universal."

The Church of England and its around-the-world projection, the Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church in this country is a part, is another would-be big-tent faith. It houses "high church" people who call themselves Catholics — though not Roman Catholics — and "low church" people who pride themselves on their Protestantism, as well as "broad church" folks who (I gather) are somewhere in between.

If I may gloss rather improbably over the tension that has existed historically between Roman Catholics and Anglicans — thanks to you, Henry VIII — I must say I think of these two flavors of Christian belief as being much more truly "conservative" than anything we tend to speak of as "conservative" today.

Which means, roughly speaking, that their general outlook (though one is Protestant and the other Catholic) precedes the fundamentalism that in the early 20th century grew out of an adverse reaction to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, first appearing some decades prior to the fin de siècle but becoming scientific orthodoxy only at about that time.


Protestant fundamentalism is historically separatist in outlook, according to a recent Peter J. Boyer article in The New Yorker: "The Big Tent: Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, and the transformation of American evangelicalism" (not available online?) in the August 22, 2005, issue.

"The Fundamentals," says Boyer, was "an influential series of books ... published between 1910 and 1915 [that] laid out the case for Christian orthodoxy." It strongly opposed the "modernist" theology that held that, in view of Darwinian evolution, "the divine will of God could be seen in the progress of man on earth [inasmuch as] mankind was essentially good and wholly perfectible, and would eventually progress to the achievement of God's kingdom on earth."

That liberal, progressive, modernist outlook tended to look upon the founder of the Christian faith as the "historical Jesus." The Bible was said to be the work of men, not God. That update to traditional theology was found patently offensive by such Protestant luminaries as J. Gresham Machen, who "argued that a theology that denied Christ's divinity and doubted the Bible wasn't Christianity at all but, rather, a distinct and separate religion."

Thus was born a tendency to separatism which splintered American Evangelical Protestantism until the advent of Billy Graham in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The slightest deviation from fundamentalist orthodoxy was met with tar and feathers. Billy Graham changed all that over the course of many decades, as he promoted a unique sort of big-tent salvation, but now the torch has been passed to his son Franklin, who shows signs of reinstating the old orthodoxy:

... Franklin [writes Boyer] is quite willing to voice what he deems harsh truths. Just that morning, he had told me that the United Nations will fail, because it is a godless enterprise. Abortion is murder, he said, and homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God. After the attacks of September 11th, Franklin declared that as a relgion Islam was "wicked, violent, and not of the same God" — an assertion from which he has hardly retreated.


How sad, say I. It is exactly the opposite of what Jesus preached, when he railed against the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, and all the other "parties" which splintered the Jewish people in his day, making it virtually certain, Jesus prophesied, that Rome would crush the life out of Israel and destroy the Jerusalem Temple, if Jews did not repent of their internal separatism and come together in faith.

The history books show Jesus was right. Israel did not heal its internal wounds, and the Temple in Jerusalem was lost only a few decades after the crucifixion.

How's that for the "historical Jesus"?

Today, in America, the ideological heirs of the Jewish "parties" of Jesus's day are — in the name of Jesus! — sowing the same kind of calumny as did the Pharisees and Sadducees. Take the subject of abortion. If abortion is "murder," then how does the woman who has one different from the adulteress who appears in John, chapter 8:

The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."

Stoning to death was, of course, a ritual form of execution performed by Jewish scribes or "teachers of the law" in Jesus's day.

No, I don't think most abortions are moral ... but there's no need to call them "murder" and thereby tar-and-feather (or, metaphorically, stone to death, since being cast out of community is effectively a spiritual death sentence) anyone who has one.

Nor is there any constructive value in calling the U.N. "godless." Nor in saying homosexuality is "a sin in the eyes of God" — presumably, even if it's just an orientation and not an actual practice.


It all leads me to ask the possibly unanswerable question, wherefore religious fundamentalism? Where does the conviction that God wants us to dissociate ourselves from those who don't believe as we do come from?

I am put in mind of something that happened to me when I was 13. Though I had spent precious little time in church until then, I was spending the summer with relatives who were regular attendees at the local Southern Baptist church. My cousin Susan took me to Sunday School one time, where as a guest I was given first crack at the question of the day: Now that you are getting old enough to go out on dates, should you have dates with members of other faiths?

I said, "Yes, since it's a good way to learn about other kinds of people."

Wrong!

The teacher asked the others in the class to set me straight: No dates with Methodists or Presbyterians, much less Catholics or Jews, because what would happen if you fell in love and wanted to get married?

That was when I decided at a tender age that I didn't want to have anything to do with religion!

If religion drives people apart, I knew almost instinctively, then what good is it? We need to be brought together more, not driven further apart.


But fundamentalists, obviously, disagree ... as do a lot of evangelicals, even post-Billy Graham.

In fact, I would posit a rule: the more a religious system of thought is "total, lock-tight, free of all logical contradiction" (in Timothy Beal's words above), the more fundamentalist it is, and the more it promotes splintering and separatism ... which is exactly the opposite of the true Christian message.

The New Chastity

In Color Me Confused ... I opined that we ought to be teaching our kids not just abstinence but good old-fashioned chastity. My commitment to chastity, however, was tempered by my intuition that the old-fashioned rules of sexual morality as set forth in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (which I am a proud member of) overly glorify, idolize, and even fetishize women's unique capacity to conceive and bear children.

That traditional estimation, in turn, paves the way for what has been called a "new Catholic feminism." It seems to be based on the postulate of a "unique dignity and vocation of women." (See my comments on this topic, as brought up in a recent column by George Weigel, in Confronting Theological and Ideological Tensions.)

I am suspicious of this thrust among today's conservative Catholics. I don't want to give up on the "old feminism," which holds that women's dignity and vocation is not radically distinct from men's. And so this idea has just occurred to me: we ought to endorse gay marriage as a way around linking chastity too firmly to the mystique of female reproductive capacity.

When I say "gay marriage," I mean, of course, same-sex unions, whether between two men or two women.

Now, I am not gay, and as my previous post reveals I am not terribly happy about the recent finding of the National Survey of Family Growth that almost 11% of girls 15 to 19 admit to at least one same-sex encounter. But I consider that statistic revealing not so much of an inclination toward being gay as one toward being unchaste.

Gay sex does not necessarily equal unchaste sex ... but it too often does. I'd say the rules of chastity are, or ought to be, the same for gays and lesbians as for heterosexuals. But "no sex outside marriage" can't be the rule for gays if gays can't marry.

If gays and lesbians were allowed to practice chastity within holy wedlock, we could teach our kids a form of chastity that does not turn female childbearing capacity back into a mystique and women accordingly back into slaves to their own reproductive selves. Such a framework for the "new chastity" would put the brakes on rates of unwanted pregnancy and abortion ... just as would the "old chastity" framework, I readily admit. But the "new chastity" would actually be feminism-friendly, and it would open the door to tolerance for gays and lesbians.

I like the sound of that.

Color Me Confused ...

OK, I'll admit it. I'm confused about what I ought to believe as a human being and as a practicing Catholic about the morality of sex in all its ramifications.

My confusion surfaced again this past week when I read "Parents need to dispel kids' myths about sex habits," a column by Susan Reimer that appeared in my local newspaper, The Baltimore Sun. Then I read "A Teen Twist on Sex" in TIME Magazine.

Both articles were about the just-released National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), a survey made by a U.S government agency (the National Center for Health Statistics) in 2002 of the sexual habits of over 15,000 Americans ages 15 to 44 ... including over 2,200 teenage boys and girls ages 15 to 19.

The NSFG found, per TIME:

More than half the adolescents surveyed ... said they had engaged in oral sex ... That proportion was about the same among boys and girls. And although you may assume that girls mostly perform and boys receive, the numbers show the give and take is again about equal.

And this:

... about 11% of girls 15 to 19 say they have had at least one same-sex encounter — the same percentage that was found in women 18 to 44.

In other words, over one in 10 teenage girls 15 or older has presumably had oral sex with another girl!

Susan Reimer is alarmed about these statistics mainly because engaging in practices of oral gratification carries risks of sexually transmitted disease. Her article and the one in TIME both suggest this is happening because teens have heard the message that they'd better abstain from sexual intercourse, at least when unprotected by birth control ... so (they reason) why not avoid the issue of STDs and unwanted pregnancies entirely by resorting to oral sex.

That STDs can be passed also through oral sex has apparently not been impressed on them.


I find all this troubling because I have grave doubts about those who, like Susan Reimer, advocate teaching teens anything more permissive than good old-fashioned chastity. I don't think they can iron out all the internal inconsistencies in their position.

I say "chastity," not "abstinence," because the latter word suggests going against the presumed norm of teens having sexual partners at a young age and outside marriage. In other words, to tell a teen to "abstain" is to admit that most of his or her fellow teens are having sex, and then to say, in effect, "Be an exception." Chastity, on the other hand, purports to be the norm per se, such that those who have too-young or premarital relations are cast as the exception to the rule.

As for the inconsistencies, I feel it is contradictory to advocate strong parental input into teens' choices on sex, on the one hand, and to oppose parental notification laws on the other. Again, I have doubts about urging teens to choose condoms over abstinence. Even if condoms are OK for married couples, that doesn't mean parents ought to acquiesce in their children's sexual activity by recommending condoms to high-schoolers. That invites the response, "If condoms are OK, why not oral sex?" After all, condoms sometimes fail and leave users exposed to STDs.


Whether you call it chastity or abstinence, it pretty much means having a sex life of the type recommended in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Basically, no sex outside heterosexual marriage. No abortion. No gay or lesbian sex.

No artificial birth control is another mandate ... though it's one I'm really dubious about, personally. (Read one Catholic theologian's argument against the church position on birth control here.)

As far as I can tell, the Catechism is not down on oral sex in the marital boudoir, somewhat surprisingly, as long as it is not done as a clever way to skirt intercourse and possible pregnancy.


I find myself strangely drawn to this old-fashioned, now-countercultural view of sex and marriage ... with one major reservation.

The reservation stems from my (admittedly intuitive) belief that the central organizing principle of all Catholic sexual morality is the glorification of a woman's fertility — of her ability to conceive and bear children.

As I wrote in Confronting Theological and Ideological Tensions, conservative Catholics extol a "new Catholic feminism" based on "the unique dignity and vocation of women." What is the basis for this "unique dignity and vocation" if not the fact that women, but not men, can conceive?

Conceiving, bearing, and raising children is the core idea of our much-vaunted family values. Since sex is traditionally required to initiate pregnancy, sexual relations must be confined to heterosexual marriage. Whatever the husband and wife do in the bedroom must be open to conception. And so on. Just about every Catholic teaching on sex, marriage, and reproduction derives from an urge to glorify — idolize? fetishize? — women's unique reproductive status.


Imagine an alternate world where all people are hermaphroditic beings with male and female reproductive parts. Any person of the proper age could impregnate any other. Marriages might not exist at all, or they might not be restricted to precisely two adults. The concept of separate gender roles would be meaningless. So would the concept of same-sex sex ... since, in a way, all sex would be same-sex sex.

Would such a world even care about "the sancity of marriage"? The rules for creating and nurturing succeeding generations would be wholly practical and entirely utilitarian.

Furthermore, it would be hard to imagine any basis whatever for designating one class of beings as having "unique dignity and vocation."


In other words, I don't see any coherent basis in our world for recovering old-fashioned values of chastity and sexual abstinence while still upholding feminist assertions of a woman's vocation as identical to a man's. The "unique dignity and vocation" view and the pro-chastity view seem joined at the hip, in our non-hermaphroditic world.

That's why you can color me confused. I don't want to acquiesce in a "new feminism" which validates women's "unique dignity and vocation" and thereby undercuts "old feminism." Yet I feel in my bones that, if we want to avoid taking internally contradictory positions about sexuality, we need to be teaching our kids good old-fashioned chastity.

Confronting Theological and Ideological Tensions

Father Ron Rolheiser's recent column "On Carrying Ecclesial Tension" was carried in my local Catholic newspaper, The Catholic Review, as "Accepting tensions within the church." It struck a chord with me. The column took up the difficult question of how conservatives and liberals within the church ought to conceptualize their differences.

Before concluding that "we need to carry both, the conservative and the liberal understanding of things," Rolheiser anatomizes the conflict this way:

... if I'm a conservative, my sense will be that things are clear, but get confused because false freedom sets itself against truth and community. My itch will be to resolve tension and differences by appealing to authority, dogma, tradition, law, and rubrics, but without an equal appeal to the complexity of life and individual freedom.

Conversely, if I'm a liberal, my approach to understanding things will be to start from life's ambiguity rather than from its clarity. My worry will be that complexity and private conscience are not being sufficiently respected and my itch (suffered in the name of conscience, freedom, and the spirit) will be to resolve issues without an equal appeal to tradition, dogma, authority, and law.

To me, that's profound. In this corner, wearing red trunks, says Rolheiser, are tradition, authority, law, dogma, rubrics, community values etched in bedrock certainties ... and the generally conservative worldview which enshrines them all. In the other corner, wearing blue trunks, are complexity, private conscience, an itch for freedom which is potentially but not necessarily false, and a spirit of truth-seeking which begins, relativistically, by holding "life's ambiguity" up for inspection, and not with a statement of clear and certain absolutes.


Coincidentally, on the same page in The Catholic Review as Rolheiser's column is one by well-known conservative voice George Weigel, "How a nun built global TV empire," available online under a different title here. Weigel views the example of Mother Angelica, founder of the Eternal Word Television Network, through the lens of Raymond Arroyo's recent biography of her.

In something of an understatement Weigel says, "EWTN's style of Catholic piety may not be universally appreciated." Got that right, George! I for one would rather spend time viewing a test pattern than watching EWTN. Part of the reason is that, to me, the "extreme" reverence on view at ETWN patterns with what seems an outmoded view of women ... even if, though a woman, Mother Angelica has become something of a media mogul in her own inimitable "dumpling" way.

As Weigel puts it:

There’s ... food for thought here [in Mother Angelica's story] as Catholics of both sexes ponder the meaning of John Paul the Great’s [i.e., Pope John Paul II's] Catholic feminism. The most beloved figure in contemporary Catholicism was a woman — Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The most powerful and successful Catholic media mogul of our time is a woman — Mother Angelica. What does it mean for the future that neither Mother Teresa nor Mother Angelica had much use for “Catholic feminism” as it’s usually defined, and that both were completely devoted to John Paul II’s understanding of the unique dignity and vocation of women?

"The unique dignity and vocation of women": if that phrase means anything, it means a lot. It means that women are called to radically different lives than men are, and so they must be radically different. There must accordingly be an ontological, metaphysical distinction between how God "sees" men and how God "sees" women — since the Creator's "sight" establishes what things (and people) really are.

The people who insist that women and men have fundamentally different dignities and vocations are, in my analogy, the ones wearing the red trunks. The boxers in the blue trunks insist that there's no good reason why, for instance, women can't be priests.


Some days I wear blue trunks, and on other days my boxing trunks are red. I really can't decide about what women, if radically distinct from men, fundamentally are. Nor can I decide once and for all about whether there's anything basically wrong with (say) gay and lesbian love, or premarital sex, or masturbation, or birth control. These are among the many theologically hot-button issues which vex me.

At a much deeper level, I am truly torn between honoring complexity and kowtowing to certainty ... between extolling insouciant creativity and insisting on rigid order ... between wanting to move forward toward progressive desiderata and wishing to move backward to shore up old values, now crumbling like a levee in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

I think my dedication of this blog to "solidarity" must be a way of externalizing and then trying to heal the inner tension in my own gut.


The one thing I can say with great certainty is that I want and need to understand these issues, these tensions, much more deeply than I do now.

Here, I'm taking my cue from something I have just read in Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling book Blink. It's a book about harnessing the "adaptive unconscious" to make spot-on-target snap judgments.

Gladwell shows that we each have a vast potential for looking at new information or a new situation which we feel called on to judge and within the blink of an eye intuiting what is most important, most telling about the situation. We derive therefrom what is very often a spot-on evaluation before we've even had time to clear our throats to say why.

And that's the funny thing about what Gladwell calls "thin-slicing," this ability to instantly detect the essence of something — what really counts about that something — without pausing for reflection. To wit, if we do pause to analyze, reflect, and try to say why we think what we do think, we're apt to mess up our thin-slicing. We're likely to screw up our spur-of-the-moment judgment-making capacity super-royally.

For, Gladwell shows, that capacity exists in our unconscious mind, and when we try to make its declarations conscious, they get garbled. Except — and here's the key thing — if we have studied with diligence and passion, for a very long time, the field of knowledge which provides the context for our snap judgments. Then and only then can we claim to be experts ... experts being folks whose vast store of "knowledge gives their first impressions resiliency" (p. 322, large-print edition). In other words, experts are people whose intense study of a field allows their conscious rationales to mirror and explain their unconscious snap judgments in that field.


More quotes from Gladwell on this subject include:

" ... it is really only experts who are able to reliably account for their reactions." (p. 310)

"... with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret — and decode — what lies behind our snap judgments and first impresssions." (p. 316)

"This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and expertise, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren't grounded in real understanding." (p. 318)

This last quote points up the idea that even experts in field A are prone to shallow reactions in field B, an area they haven't studied intensively.

I suspect I'm in that very position of having shallow reactions with respect to the hot-button issues that confront my church and society today and divide conservatives and liberals. When one of these issues pops into view, I immediately climb into either my blue boxing trunks or my red boxing trunks, depending (I suppose) on how I'm feeling that day. But I admit that my gut reactions — whether they happen to be right or wrong — are shallow and easily disrupted. Next time the same issue comes up, you may well find me wearing a different set of trunks.


So I would say to Ron Rolheiser that we have to do more than simply accept the tensions within our church, and by extension within the larger society. We have to go deeper than that. We have to do what all experts do: tunnel through the "locked door" behind which Malcolm Gladwell says our adaptive unconscious carries out its functions. We must learn to justify our reflexes, not just to ourselves but to one another.

If we prefer (to take a quotidian analogy Gladwell employs) Coke to Pepsi, we must discover how the reasons for our judgments relate to objectively discernible aspects of the reality we are judging. We each have to get our reasoning mind and our adaptive unconscious singing from the same hymn book. Only then can we begin to have meaningful discussions amongst ourselves by means of which to heal the tensions we are dutifully accepting.

Embracing Society's Most Vulnerable

John Crabtree-Ireland, a writer, actor and documentary filmmaker who lives in Los Angeles, writes in "Tightening the noose on young American gays," that the campaign on the part of many American parents to extirpate gayness when it shows up in their children is having disastrous consequences. Such strategies as "reparative therapy" and "transformational ministry," Crabtree-Ireland writes in this opinion column appearing in The Baltimore Sun of Sept. 1, 2005, have destroyed many gay adolescents' self-esteem to the point where "gay kids constitute nearly one-third of successful youth suicides."

If that weren't bad enough, Crabtree-Ireland continues, "Religiously affiliated groups in California recently drafted a ballot initiative that the state's attorney general has titled 'Elimination of Domestic Partner Rights.' ... Under such a law, even the lesser protection afforded by current domestic partner status would be stripped away: no rights to hospital visitation, adoption of children, insurance benefits or inheritance."

Despite the openness of their assault on gays and lesbians in America, Crabtree-Ireland says the promulgators of such strategies as "reparative therapy" and such public laws as the "Elimination of Domestic Partner Rights" ballot initiative are just as bad as the "hooded officials" in Iran who in the name of religious purity recently hanged a 14-year-old boy and a 16-year-old boy for having consensual gay sex.

Crabtree-Ireland closes:

As the pendulum swings further toward eroding civil liberties in our country, we should all take a moment to assess how much we have lost and where we are heading. If gay people are legislated into second-class citizen status, those who would do them harm will surely take it as a cue.

Only when we extract religious dogma from all three branches of government can we begin to reclaim the promise of our democracy for all, embracing society's most vulnerable. By doing so, we can gently loosen the noose that imperils their future.



But, wait! Embracing society's most vulnerable is exactly the message Jesus preached, is it not?

At least, so says Albert Nolan in Jesus before Christianity. Jesus was confronted with a situation in which the various parties of "haves" in 1st-century Israel — the Pharisees, Sadducees, etc. — tried to outdo one another in their punctilious observance of "the law and the prophets," forgetting the most important thing of all, compassion for the poor, the demon-afflicted, and the so-called sinners — all of whom constituted the "have nots."

The people who would vote yes on an "Elimination of Domestic Partner Rights" ballot initiative are the Pharisees of our day.

The problem is not that we need to "extract religious dogma from all three branches of government."

The problem is that what so many of us religious believers erroneously take to be "correct" dogma goes 180° against what Jesus taught!

"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone ... " (John 8:7). That ought to be the starting point for any dogma we might call truly Christian.

If God Is Love ...

... as I believe, then why do we argue about him (or her) so much?

It seems like Jesus's admonition to love thy neighbor has, in many Christians' view, a loophole exempting neighbors with whom those Christians happen to quarrel theologically.

I've just come across two Peter J. Boyer articles in The New Yorker: "A Hard Faith" in the May 16, 2005, issue, and "The Big Tent" (not available online?) in the August 22, 2005, issue. The first is subtitled, "How the new pope and his predecessor redefined Vatican II"; the second, "Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, and the transformation of American evangelicalism." Both are about divisions within, respectively, the American Catholic Church and Protestantism in America.


American Catholics, at least some of them, are flirting with a new devotion to orthodoxy, says Boyer in "A Hard Faith." Not that Catholic liberals have disappeared from the scene. Leading liberals of the faith, however, have been brought somewhat to heel during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, and can expect no more latitude under Benedict XVI. (Full disclosure: I myself am a practicing American Catholic. I think of myself as a liberal.)

Meanwhile, there is a whole new generation of seminarians and priests who, led by higher-ups such as Denver's Archbishop Charles Chaput (pronounced "sha PEW"), want to continue John Paul's hard line against the likes of "masturbation, premarital sex, birth control (including condoms used to prevent the spread of AIDS), abortion, divorce, homosexual relations, married priests, female priests, and [if it matters any more] any hint of Marxism."

Out of this orthodox approach to the faith came, in 2004, the suggestion by Archbishop Chaput and other bishops that Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry, a Catholic who supports legal abortion, ought not be allowed to take Holy Eucharist at the Mass.

Of course, the other name for the sacrament is Holy Communion, implying the importance of the community of the faithful. Chaput and others would have barred Kerry and other pro-choice Catholic politicians from participating in the most sacred rite performed by faithful Catholics as a community ... without actually "excommunicating" those politicians!

Fortunately, though, a direct confrontation was averted, as other prelates in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — Washington's Cardinal Theodore McCarrick prominent among them — decried the politicization of the sacrament.

Still, battle lines were drawn at home and abroad. Conservatives were increasingly prepared to insist that all Catholic politicians — and all Catholic voters — place their souls in mortal peril if they don't take a firm, consistent, single-minded anti-abortion stance in exercising their public duties. Liberals, for their part, continued to insist on a "seamless garment" approach to public policy: "Those who defend the right to life of the weakest among us must be equally visible in support of the quality of life of the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker."

Catholics, or so "seamless garment" liberals say, should "concern themselves with the entire 'spectrum of life from womb to tomb'." Translation: no single-issue politics, pro-life or no, will satisfy God ... or the church, thank you very much.


The conservatives of the American Catholic Church think of themselves as "evangelicals" who respond to the late pope's call to evangelize the world. "The eternal mission of the Church, [John Paul] wrote [in his 1990 encyclical, Redemptoris Missio], was Christian evangelism to the world," Boyer points out.

Of course, there are millions of Protestants in America who have long thought of themselves as evangelicals, and they form the topic of Boyer's other article, "The Big Tent." The article discusses the passing of the torch from the star evangelical preacher of the 20th century, Billy Graham, to his son Franklin, whose theological line is considerably harder and more orthodox than Billy's ever was.

In describing what Billy Graham's ministry has meant to Americans for a half century or more, Boyer first recounts its backdrop. In the early 20th century, the leadership of American Protestantism, the mainline variety especially, went modern and liberal. The leaders took a leaf from Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution and tried to show that God works his will through worldly progress. They interpreted the Bible metaphorically in ways to bolster that view.

In reaction, dissenting theologians urged upon their fellow Protestants what they called "The Fundamentals," the title of "an influential series of books ... published between 1910 and 1915 [laying] out the case for Christian orthodoxy." The whole idea was based on a strictly literal reading of scripture, which was posited to be the divinely inspired word of God.

These "fundamentalists" found a lot of sympathy among rank-and-file churchgoers in the Sunday-morning pews and built a movement which continues to this day. It quickly became a schismatic, separatist movement, pulling itself away from those other American evangelicals who continued to wish to engage with those having more progressive points of view.

Fundametalists' ongoing antagonism to the general culture of modernism was expressed in the present day in Boyer's article by Bob Jones III, "the president of the university founded by his grandfather, [who] suggested in 2002 that fundamentalism drop the name" to avoid confusion with Islamic fundamentalism.

But Jones, who calls himself a "preservationist," conspicuously refers to his brethren as "separated unto Christ." I find that choice of words significant. In other words, fundamentalists, by whatever name, have long gloried in being separate from more liberal Christians, not to mention all non-Christians.

But the Reverend Billy Graham, when he came along in the late 1940s and hit it big in the early 1950s, would have none of such fastidious separatism. He would not draw lines between one Christian and another. He said that Christianity is more a matter of faith than it is of theology. He accordingly, says Boyer, "liked the New Evangelical program of engaging the culture, and, especially, of ecumenical fellowship with Christians with whose doctrines he disagreed — even including Catholics."

Now Billy Graham is old, and his son is stepping into his shoes. Franklin Graham, whose "stongest trait is certitude, which extends to the divisive issues that Billy chose to avoid," has shown himself to be a hardliner for orthodox doctrine. Abortion and homosexuality are sins against God, pure and simple. The global war on terrorism is a war on Islam, make no bones about it. It's a black-and-white world.


What's my take on this? I would have to be a first-class dodo to think anything other than that there is a strong resurgence of "hardlinerism" among both Catholics and Protestants in America. And, clearly, there is a strong resistance to that movement among liberals of the faith.

My own inclination is, first of all, to think that the various "litmus tests" hardliners want to impose are bogus. I agree with Billy Graham more than I do with Franklin Graham: anything which promotes schism and separation is bad.

To wit, consider how hardliners might respond to "Keeping Our Loved Ones Connected to the Body of Christ," an August 7, 2005, column by Fr. Ron Rolheiser, whose weekly essays can be found in leading Catholic newspapers and also at his web site. Fr. Rolheiser writes of the concerns expressed by a friend of his who has grave doubts about religion: "I guess if there's a heaven, I won't be part of it."

But, no, Fr. Rolheiser says to his agnostic friend: "Don't worry about heaven. You'll be there. Too many of us love you. A lot of us church people, including me, won't accept a heaven that doesn't have you in it."

As the Body of Christ on Earth, says this priest, we "are meant to do all the things [Jesus] did, including the forgiveness of sins and the binding of each other, through love, to the family of God. ... We can say to God, 'My heaven includes those I love'."

"Anyone who is sincere" — anyone who is "a wonderful gift ... to so many people" — can be bound to the family of God in this way, says Rolheiser.

Is this too good to be true? Rolheiser counters that sentiment with: "That's simply a description of the Incarnation."

So, if Rolheiser is right ... whither litmus tests?


There's yet another partto my take on this. People like Bob Jones III and Franklin Graham are equally "sincere," there can be no doubt — and the same is true of John Kerry and all whose souls' salvation is supposedly gravely endangered by their pro-choice politics. Who is to say these folks are not "wonderful gifts" to a great many people. They, too, are members of "The Club," by which I mean not just the family of God but the family of all those who were born of mothers who loved them ... which pretty much means everybody in the human race, doesn't it?

Some people are just born "litmus testers." That's all there is to it. They're in The Club, too. Who am I to suggest that earthly schismatics and separatists, assuming they are sincere, don't qualify for the kingdom of heaven?

They probably serve a vital social function, even, these latter-day Jeremiahs. True, I personally don't get it ... but never mind. My point is that, even if such tendencies are (in Rolheiser's term) "shortcomings," as I tend to believe they are, Jesus is bigger than the theological conservatives and I are — along with all my fellow liberals — combined.

Christ weaves even people whom you'd never suspect of being worthy of it into the family of God. That's because God is love ... and if we really believed that, maybe we could stop arguing so vociferously amongst ourselves about our different takes on religion.

Time, the Bible, and the Kingdom of God

Can there be any support for religion in the theory of evolution? From my unabashedly odd perspective, the answer is yes.

Evolution has to do with, first of all, events in time. Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity says time, in the Bible and in Jesus's understanding of it, is quite different from our modern concept. In Chapter 11, "A New Time," Nolan says we think of time as a quantitative measuring tool, a yardstick for events. That's anything but biblical. In the Bible, time can't be separated from events.

Nolan quotes Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad: "Today one of the few things of which we can be quite sure is that [our] concept of absolute time, independent of events, and, like blanks on a questionnaire, only needing to be filled up with data which will give it content, was unknown to Israel." (pp. 89-90).

To Jesus and the Hebrew culture of his day, time was not quantitative and absolute, but qualitative. It was knowable only in relation to the intentions of God, which could change, and the events which reflect those intentions. This was what Jesus meant by reading "the signs of the times." For Jesus, his Jewish contemporaries, and their forebears "time" was anything but the abstraction we take it to be. Rather, time was synonymous with expressions we use such as "what a time it was" or "considering the times."

We read in the Old Testament:

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace. (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, NIV)

We think of time as consisting of fixed points along an abstract time line to which events attach. We locate ourselves at a fixed point in the exact middle of this imaginary time line. To Jews of Jesus's time, though, the fixed points were the events themselves:

The Jews of ancient times did not locate themselves anywhere, they located events, places and times and saw themselves as on a journey past these fixed points. Sacred events like Creation, Exodus, and the Covenant with Moses, places like Jerusalem, Sinai, Bethel and times like the festivals and times for fasting were fixed points. The individual travelled through or past these fixed points. (p. 91)

What's more, we think of the future as lying ahead of us. Jesus and the ancient Jews did not think of the future in the same abstract terms as we do, but as actual events that are coming up behind us as we experience our present day lives — just as the later finishers in a foot race finish behind the earlier ones.


Those are just some of the ways in which our understanding of time ill prepares us to read the Bible. Here's a yet more important one. Crucially, we think of events in the future as having no power to determine events in the present.

Jesus had a radically different view. To him, the meaning of his times was qualified and even determined by "a real future event which will be qualitatively different from all future events" (p. 92). The Greek word for such a determinative future event was eschaton, from which we derive eschatology. The "signs of the times," properly read, Jesus said, tell us of this future event.

The future event or eschaton Jesus expected was the coming of the "kingdom of God," also called the "kingdom of heaven." In this "kingdom," God in his compassion would forgive the world's sinners, just as the father in Jesus's parable rushed out to embrace his prodigal son, no questions asked, when the son finally returned home.

To Jesus, "the 'kingdom-power' of the future was already influencing the present situation," writes Nolan (p. 95). Accordingly, Jesus's times were ones for rejoicing — "a time to dance," in the words of Ecclesiastes.


This was a truly radical idea. Something had changed, and in a big way, between the "time" of John the Baptist, who baptized Jesus in the Jordan River, and Jesus's own "time," when it came:

John's mood is like the mournful mood of a funeral dirge; Jesus' mood is like the joyful tune of a wedding dance. John's behavior was characterized by fasting; Jesus' behavior was characterized by feasting. And yet they are not contradicting one another. Both John and Jesus represent the actions of Wisdom (that is to say, of God), but they speak to different times and different circumstances. John's time was in fact a time for mourning, and Jesus' time was in fact a time for rejoicing. ... The time of John and the time of Jesus are radically different because they are determined by two radically different future events. John prophesied the judgment of God; Jesus prophesied the salvation of God. John lived off the prospect of a great catastrophe; Jesus lived off the prospect of a great "kingdom." John was the prophet of doom and Jesus was the herald of good news. (pp. 94-95)

This, despite the fact that John and Jesus were basically contemporaries! What had so radically changed?

Nolan says that "as Jesus would have thought of it, God had changed. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was doing something totally new and unprecedented" (p. 96, italics mine).

When Jesus says, in Matthew 11:4-5, "Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor" (NIV), it's to be read a sign, says Nolan, that "goodness is triumphing over evil. God has relented and is no longer intent upon punishing the people. God now wants to save them. The implication of Jesus' praxis [his customary practice or conduct] and his words is that God has changed. One can see it in the signs of the times" (p. 95, italics in the original).


What? God change? God relent? (The Revised Standard Version even, in several places speaks of God "repenting from evil.") Isn't God supposed to be eternal and unchanging? Aren't his intentions supposed never to vary? How can it make sense to speak of a good God as "repenting from evil"?

No punches are pulled by Nolan in this regard: "The God of Jesus is totally different [in terms of God's "image," to use our modern word] from the God of the Old Testament or the God of the Pharisees — indeed the God of Jesus is quite unlike the God which most Christians worship" (p. 96).

In an endnote (#17, p. 179), Nolan lists several Old Testament passages which show that, as he phrases it, "Nothing was more typical of the Hebrew's Creator God than to do new and unprecedented things, to create means to do something new and unprecedented." Among these passages:

Isaiah 65:17: "Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind" (NIV).

Isaiah 66:22: "As the new heavens and the new earth that I make will endure before me," declares the LORD, "so will your name and descendants endure" (NIV).

Habakkuk 1:5: "Look at the nations and watch — and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told" (NIV).

When God switches from intending to punish sinners to intending to save them — when he repents from evil," in the sense of no longer intending to cause us woe — that clearly qualifies as "doing something in your days that you would not believe."

So God's intentions change, and when they do, we can look forward to a wholly unprecedented future event, an eschaton, which will determine what our experience is like now.

To Jesus, the looked-for event was not a simple one. Rather, it was an either-or proposition. Either the kingdom of God would come, and soon ... or else there would be a catastrophe instead.

Jesus called for faith: specifically, the faith of men and women in believing that a new, widespread reign of heartfelt human-to-human compassion would usher in the kingdom of heaven. If that very brand of faith itself simply became strong enough and widespread enough, it would avert the catastrophic judgment which God would otherwise render upon us humans for our lack of humility toward and service to our fellow humans. That was the essence of Jesus's either-or prophecy (see p. 105 of Nolan for more on the either-or nature of it).

So the eschaton as Jesus saw it was conditioned upon our choice: we could choose compassion and faith — or we could choose their opposites, which we might call ... what? Oppression and self-righteousness? Narrow-mindedness and selfishness?

To Jesus, the coming of the kingdom was recognized as a miracle, says Nolan (p. 99). It would represent a utopia in which all humankind would be liberated from oppression, including oppression by those internal forces of the psyche which keep us as individuals from releasing our built-in potential for freedom (p. 100). This internal capacity for compassion, faith, and the liberation of others and ourselves is within each of us, but nonetheless beyond us; it is God, called by whatever name one chooses.

The kingdom could not come if there is no God, if God doesn't exist. Nolan: "Anyone who thinks that evil will have the last word or that good and evil have a fifty-fifty chance is an atheist " (p. 103).

On the other hand, the truth that there is a God guarantees that the kingdom will come someday. It could come suddenly and immediately if people have enough love, compassion, hope, and faith. Otherwise, Jesus taught, we are in for not just one catastrophe, but possibly many, many wars, disasters, and other sufferings. Still, at the end of the day, goodness will win out over evil, simply because there is a God, and God is good. This is Jesus's teaching in a nutshell.

I see parallels between this teaching and my understanding of the earth's evolutionary history as discussed by Stuart Kauffman (author of At Home in the Universe) and others who study the science of so-called "self-organized complexity."

Kauffman believes, according to Roger Lewin's Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, that life evolves in a mathematical domain which is not chaos per se but which has the same caapacity for producing novelty. This "edge of chaos" is also capable of allowing the novel beings which do arise to persist without being immediately superseded by vast new novelty; chaos can't do that. Chaos, in fact, is inimical to life.

But living systems, evolving at the edge of chaos, are occasionally plunged into chaos per se. They experience, in other words, catastrophes. Sometimes the catastrophe stems from an unfortunate external perturbation, but sometimes the internal dynamics of the system can get so far out of whack that they provoke an equally disastrous catastrophe of chaotic system behavior.

What can rescue them then? Rescue can come from the very habit their constituents have of working together, checking up on one another's current states, adjusting their own states and behaviors accordingly. No elemental constituent is any other's slave; all units are autonomous and equal. Yet there is a sort of system-wide web of cooperation going on, a network of interdependence whose result is the ability of the system as a whole to recover from chaotic catastrophe and wind up even stronger than before.

Chaos and catastrophe — and the re-emergence therefrom, stronger and better — can happen simply because the units of which such a system is built are, albeit indirectly, in touch with all the other units. No units are ostracized. No units are shunned.

Neither are there any "elites" who boss the "non-elite" units around. Furthermore, no one unit is directly connected to more than a handful of others. There are no true "kings" in such a system — if the system may be metaphorically thought of as a "kingdom"— no actual monarchs to which all the other units are connected and owe direct obligations of fealty as "vassals."

Such "kingdoms" do develop "order for free," though. Out of bottom-up interactions among units that are autonomous and equal emerge top-down regularities. The "kingdom" as a whole turns out to be far greater than the sum of its parts.

This sounds like the "kingdom" of God preached by Jesus, described by Nolan.

That ideal "kingdom" will come someday without fail, Jesus said. He said it would even come right away and suddenly, if only we would immediately establish compassionate, non-stigmatizing, supportive relationships amongst ourselves — among all of us, not just the so-called "children of light."

But if we wouldn't do that, there would be a catastrophe instead. "In the event, as we know," writes Nolan, "it was the catastrophe which came and not the 'kingdom'" (p. 108).

The Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70.

Then the Jewish nation was expelled from Palestine in A.D. 135.

By that time, Christianity had for some time been busily establishing itself as a religion separate from Judaism. It had originally been a Jewish sect. The new Christians needed a way to re-interpret Jesus's prophecy of a Jewish catastrophe so that the same prophecy would continue to mean something to them.

One of the ways in which that happened, according to Nolan, was this:

The early Christians simply adapted Jesus' prophecy to the new set of circumstances in which they found themselves.

Jesus' message, like the message of any prophet, was not timeless. Nevertheless it did point to something about humanity and God that was so fundamentally and definitively true that it could be re-interpreted in relation to other times and other places. Once the message had been taken outside Palestine with its particular political crisis, and more especially once the Romans had destroyed the Jewish nation, it was felt that the message had to be adapted to other situations or indeed to any and every situation. (p. 108)

As things actually happened, the early Christians, including the evangelists who wrote the Gospels, "apocalyptized" the message, says Nolan. By that he means this:

The eschaton becomes a supra-historical event distinguishable from the historical and political catastrophe [the fall of the Jewish Temple and nation] which was just about to take place [from the point of view of the Gospel of Mark] ... . The supra-historical judgment on the last day is then used, in typical apocalyptic fashion, for moralizing purposes and as a threat concerning the individual [i.e., the state of his or her soul] rather than society. Matthew takes the process very much further, laying great emphasis upon the judgment day and upon the apportioning of reward and punishment. (pp. 108-109)

It is clear to me at this point (subject to my reading further) that Nolan prefers to dissociate himself from this apocalyptizing, moralizing strand in Christian history, "by 'de-apocalyptizing' the gospels," as he puts it (p. 109). He wishes to revive our ability to respond to Jesus's teachings as prophetic, not apocalyptic. (And note that in his lexicon, "catastrophe" and "judgment" are virtual synonyms.)

In other words, Nolan wants us to recover an understanding of the Gospel message as being more social than individual. Theough we must each personally choose to commit to a life of compassion and faith, the thrust thereof is necessarily outward, toward others, toward humankind as a whole.

I think of that as being theologically progressive. By that I mean Nolan rues any tendency Christians today may have to look only to the salvation of souls, their own first and then perhaps those of wayward others. Such an otherworldly focus tends to turn religion conservative, even fundamentalist. (I'm now intruding my own thoughts among Nolan's.)

Social justice is not a priority among Christians of that stripe. From Nolan's point of view, any sort of Christianity that doesn't emphasize social justice is completely missing the point. (Again, that's my understanding of his position.)

Perhaps not coincidentally, I'd say, conservative, fundamentalist Christians tend to be creationists, or at least they are typically opposed to Darwin's theory of evolution, in all its guises.

But I find (see above) that the "self-organized complexity" branch of Darwinian science today can give us a way to re-interpret the prophecy of Jesus in the Gospels and adapt it "to other situations or indeed to any and every situation," without apocalyptizing it.

Or, depending on exactly how you define "apocalyptizing," it may permit apocalyptizing the message without then going on to use it "in typical apocalyptic fashion, for moralizing purposes and as a threat concerning the individual rather than society."

Either way you define "apocalyptizing," applying certain lessons of the "self-organized complexity" branch of Darwinian science today can serve to re-orient Christianity in a more progressive, social justice-oriented direction, based on faith and compassion as Nolan understands the original Gospel meaning of those terms.

"Evolution supports religion!" the headlines might read.

Pain, Chaos, and the Evolutionary Blues

I continue to make my way through Professor Arnold Weinstein's book on how literature and art reveal to us a fundamental, if hidden, human unity. A Scream Goes Through the House has it that "the generosity of art" is that it "tells our collective story" as it "brings at last out into language and life the buried history of our hurt" (pp. 29-30).

Weinstein makes this point in the context of his discussion of James Baldwin's short story about two brothers born in Harlem, "Sonny's Blues" (pp. 25-31). One of the brothers, the narrator, "escapes" and "goes straight," while the younger brother, Sonny, stays and is busted for drugs. The elder brother comes to Sonny's rescue and, in so doing, learns about the blues.

Specifically, he learns "that the blues are pain and suffering set to music, transformed into music." They are, in words Baldwin places in the mouth of his character Creole, "the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph. . . . There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness." (p. 28)

Weinstein says it's too facile to think of art, as we often do, as "little more than opening up one's mouth and unloading . . . as narrowly confessional." In fact, he goes on, "Baldwin blows this concept right out of the water. Making music is a cosmic event, on the order of a reverse hurricane where you tame nature's chaos. You don't just emote or emit; there is indeed an explosion, but you shape it's very elements into song: [here Weinstein quotes Baldwin] 'the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air'."

There is accordingly a congruence between private pain and everyone's pain — and, furthermore, between pain and chaos. By imposing musical or artful order on "the roar rising from the void," we perform "an act of domestication, of yoking suffering into personal style" (p. 28).

But since the "narrowly confessional" is not what art is all about, the blues — and in Weinstein's view, all art is blues — restore our solidarity, our sense of connectedness and community, too. Art/music/blues "resurrects the ghost's of the family's and community's past [as] one fuses with one's loved ones, feels their pain, feels the calvary some suffered . . . recovers one's own walled-off, living deaths . . . repossesses the emotional plenitude of one's existence, extended long back into time and space, preceding even one's birth." (p. 30)


I find the twin idea of taking shared pain (or, more generally, shared feeling) as being congruent with "nature's chaos" and as being the taproot of human solidarity appealing for several reasons. One is fairly personal: over the course of several years, in the not too distant past, I spent a good deal of time pondering, in writing, what might be the religious or spiritual significance of recent investigations into the scientific field of "complexity." Some of these inquiries have turned up an unsuspected domain of dynamical systems' behavior: in addition to order (two types of it) and chaos, there is also the "edge of chaos."

Dynamical systems are, admittedly, mathematical abstractions, but life on Earth apparently bears many of such systems' characteristics. There seem to be reasons to believe — subject to further empirical confirmation — that life evolves at the edge of chaos. When systems have too much order, they cannot evolve at all. When they are in chaos, nothing new can survive for long.

It seemed to me that there was something profound to be apprehended here, something that ought to inform our religion. But I spent a lot of time and energy worrying that our traditional religious insistence on commandment following and pious rectitude was at odds with an edge-of-chaos theology.

Put simply, it looked to me as if evolution, which I, a Christian, do believe in, tells us that divine creation in our world — "ongoing genesis" in an evolving world — takes place by virtue of laws a lot less rigid than some Christians would accept. Many Christians, it seems, are wedded to the idea that God is entirely for order and wholly against chaos. But if that's so, how could an edge of chaos figure so prominently in the process that brought humankind into being?

At some point, my cogitations bogged down, being unable to cut through that Gordian knot. Now, Professor Weinstein provides me with the sword I've been searching for. Just as "the man who creates music . . . is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air," so too does nature do just that, as it evolves.

Testifying to the notion that this is the right sword is the above-mentioned congruence of the chaotic void with the commonality of pain and suffering embodied in art/music/blues. I have suggested in other recent posts that Jesus's teachings of universal brotherhood and societal solidarity were primarily a response to the pain, suffering, and oppression felt by the vast majority of his fellow Jews in 1st-century Palestine (see Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity). His blues — the original Calvary — were thus the definitive blues, if you will.

The blues as a metaphor for life emerging at the edge of chaos amid considerable labor pains patterns strongly with a view of Christ as preeminently a teacher of universal compassion and communal solidarity. We all, in such a world, share in the anguish of the ongoing birth of the new and different, and in the ubiquitous death of the old and outdated. We ought not to add to the misery by despising, marginalizing, and mistreating one another.


Put another way, the "evolutionary blues" are our common heritage, in a world in which we all can hear "the roar rising from the void" — that roar is chaos — and we all are tasked to do our part in "imposing order on it as it hits the air." We each thereby make our own kind of music, an alchemy that can turn our personal hurt into some semblance of societal health.

It has been suggested by such proponents of edge-of-chaos dynamics as theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman — see Roger Lewin's Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos — that all complex adaptive systems, living and otherwise, experience occasional catastrophes. Something untoward happens, and they are plunged into the dynamical domain labeled "chaos." If they don't perish, they modify their behavior, thus to make their dynamical way back out to the fecund edge of chaos. As they do, they learn tricks that will help them survive future catastrophes. They get stronger in the broken places.

I'm sugesting that woe is the way we humans experience such a process, when it happens to us.

When our lives are bumped over into the chaotic regime, as is apt to happen from time to time, we are traumatized. Though we may survive to get back on an even keel again, the trauma continues to reverberate in the depths of our soul.


This is the point Professor Weinstein makes in his discussion of Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey into Night. All of the play's major characters, a father and mother and two grown sons, have trauma locked in their past. Try as they might to dodge the repercussions, thoughm the echoes of those earlier individual traumas roil their present familial relations:

All of the Tyrones are scarred and formed by their pasts, and in the course of the play the occulted material moves from echo and refrain, a foghorn in the distance, to overt utterance, reaching its operatic crescendo in the final scene where each Tyrone confronts his or her ghosts and demons, and shares this confrontation with the others. ... Such a scheme announces that the individual actor is always/already permeated with the life of the others, not merely their contemporary existence, but the whold dreadful sweep of their transactions over time. Long Day's Journey into Night reveals the sticky glue that joins me to you, as if life in the family were a form of flypaper, a morass of sorts in which each figure is stuck, where your skin is attached to me, so that all the desired hegemony I claim for myself turns out to be a mirage. (pp. 38-39)

In computer models of complex dynamical systems poised at the edge of chaos, one of the key features is always the interconnectedness and interdependence of the various (shall we say) "actors" that make up the system. It is as if the system were a family, in Weinstein's/O'Neill's sense of the word. The actors' "transactions over time" include past traumas to themselves and to the system as a whole. The learning done by the system as it recovers from chaos translates into ongoing reverberations of pain and woe for the individual (but not truly separate) actors.

Along similar lines, Jesus's essential message, per Albert Nolan's reading of the Gospels, could also be put as "the individual actor is always/already permeated with the life of the others." We have no business isolating some of us from the rest of us by stigmatizing the "others" as "sinners."

Habits of the Heart

I'm probably a gonzo individualist trying to repent of his weak community values, a confirmed loner trying to escape from his loner-ishness. So everything I say against entrenched individualism needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, I think, entrenched, gonzo, unencumbered individualism is one of the main things that's "wrong with us" today.

By individualism I mean not so much a high-falutin' political and social philosophy — "belief in the primary importance of the individual and in the virtues of self-reliance and personal independence," Wikipedia puts it — as an attitude. If transmuted into a philosophy of the self, it might become solipsism, the "belief that one's self is the only thing that can be known with certainty and verified." If transmuted into the realm of psychology, it could be narcissism, "the pattern of thinking and behaving which involves infatuation and obsession with one's self to the exclusion of others."

In other words, the assumption I wish to question is the one which says, "It's all about me."


Of course, I live about 99% of my life in it's-all-about-me mode, so this is definitely a case of the pot calling the kettle black. What I'm really trying to do, I suspect, is make some inroads into my own self-absorption.

I see my religion, Roman Catholic Christianity, as an ally in that cause. And never more so than when I read in Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity that Jesus preached mainly against the anti-communitarian, narrow-minded Jewish elites of his day, the scribes and Pharisees in 1st-century Palestine.

Yet I also realize that the problem Jesus confronted was, if anything, the opposite of the one we face today. In his world, the claims of individual human beings to life, health, sustenance, and personal dignity were subsumed under a rigid social and political hierarchy. That hierarchy was confirmed, supposedly, by the "law" handed down from Moses. Under the "law," as Nolan describes the situation, the majority of Jews were maligned and oppressed by their "betters."

The atmosphere was so anti-individualistic partly because of the Roman hegemony in Palestine. Jews in Palestine had any number of approaches to understanding their enslavement, but most believed God was punishing them for their sins. And who were the worst "sinners"? The masses of poor, demon-ridden, illiterate slobs who were too ignorant to observe the textured nuances of the "law." They were the ones responsible for bringing woe to Israel.

To that sort of attitude Jesus said, basically, "No! The real problem with Israel is that attitude itself. It, the opposite of compassion for and solidarity with the poor and the weak, is what will seal Israel's doom, unless there is repentance, and soon."

(I guess I'd better hastily add that this is in no way intended as a polemic against Jews and Judaism. It's merely a comment on the social scene in Jesus's time and place.)

So Jesus, in saying things like "the law is made for men, not men for the law," tried to move his society leftward on the individualism scale. He tried to show that each human life, no matter how poor or ignorant or disease-ridden or "sinful" the individual may be, is equally precious in God's eyes. In fact, those in the well-off elites who scorn such "little ones" will one day find themselves behind others in God's pecking order.


Many centuries later, in northern Europe, circumstances arose which would move society yet further leftward on the individualism scale. In the late Middle Ages, the rise of well-to-do artisans and burghers in places like today's Germany and the Low Countries — these were self-made individuals whose money and status had not been inherited — started the West on a path toward the multifarious institutions of liberty all Americans cherish.

Until very recently, however, liberty was circumscribed for most Americans by various strictures. Much of the constraint was economic. Well-off as I personally happen to be by historical standards, both my parents grew up in families that were, periodically, downright poor. Not living-in-tenements poor, but certainly having-to-pull-up-stakes-and-move-on poor.

Something happened in the middle of the 20th century that made such brushes with poverty unlikely to beset the lives of the greater number of Americans. Economic wealth and financial independence were democratized. Everybody and his brother became, in effect, a "burgher" — the French word for which is bourgeois. And the American bourgeoisie ballooned in size.

As people cast off economic want, they also burst the bonds of all sorts of other strictures formerly confining their behavior — church and religion prominent among them. Not only long-established church communities and parishes vanished, but also social and political institutions which once held people together in some sort of secular community disappeared, as people migrated from cities and farming villes to the wide open spaces of the suburbs. By the mid-1980s, social scientist Robert Bellah and others published Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, saying, in effect, something is out of whack.


Specifically, there has been a decline of true community. There are many reasons for the decline, but an important one is the search for the "unencumbered" self (see p. 152). Bellah and his co-authors suggest that this is not good — that the wholly unencumbered self actually turns out to be an empty self.

The search for the unencumbered self, in turn, is an outgrowth of "radical" individualism. Bellah speaks of . . .

. . . the process by which a primary emphasis on self-reliance has led to the notion of pure, undetermined choice, free of tradition, obligation, or commitment, as the essence of the self . . .

. . . and also of . . .

. . . the radical individualist's sincere desire to "reconnect" with others [as being] inhibited by the emptiness of such an "unencumbered" self . . .

. . . and goes on to say . . .

It is now time to consider what a self that is not empty would be like — one that is constituted rather than unencumbered, one that has, let us admit it, encumbrances, but whose encumbrances make connections to others easier and more natural. Just as the empty self makes sense in a particular institutional context — that of the upward mobility of the middle-class individual who must leave home and church in order to succeed in an impersonal world of rationality and competition — so a constituted self makes sense in terms of another institutional context, what we would call, in the full sense of the word, community. (pp. 152-3)


Radical individualism can be both utilitarian and expressive. It can be utilitarian when seen as a pragmatic means toward maximizing self-interest. It can be expressive — or self-expressive — when it seems the only way an individual can express his or her "unique core of feeling and intuition" (p. 334).

The former mode of radical individualism, the utilitarian, stems from the philosophy of John Locke and others in 17th-century England, which fed into the ideas Jefferson, Madison, et al. incorporated into our founding documents in the 18th century. Locke held that the individual self is fundamentally "prior to society" (p. 143). Civilization is but a byproduct of individual selves coming together in mutual self-interest to form a "social contract."

The latter, expressive mode of radical individualism was originally a romantic reaction against Locke and others. The reason the self should be unfettered, romantics said, was not rational and pragmatic at all. It was that each of us has a sacrosanct core of sentience which can best flourish only under circumstances of radical freedom.

However, both modes, utilitarian and expressive, have been mingled together in American experience. Both assert the primacy of the self over the community; both seek to make the individual person radically unencumbered by history or tradition.


There are also two other forms of individualism, historically speaking, that contribute to the American way of life: republican, or civic, individualism, and biblical individualism.

We inherit our republican or civic tradition of individualism from classical Greece and Rome. This tradition puts "civic virtue" on a par with self-interest as a proper motivator of human action (see p. 335).

The biblical tradition was, until the early to mid-20th century, republican individualism's ally in shaping American thought and practice. Judeo-Christian values emphasize our moral and ethical obligations to one another.

The civic/biblical tradition came unglued from our American attitude toward individualism during the 20th century, in favor of a more radical form using mingled utilitarian and expressive modes of individualism to the exclusion of more tradition-bound approaches. We demoted religion in particular into a purely "private" choice.


In Democracy in America, as far back as the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that we were in danger of (in Bellah's words) "undermining these traditions." Such an unencumbered individualism (again, in Bellah's words) "weakens the very meanings that give content and substance to the idea of individual diginity" (p. 144).

And in the end, paradoxically, unencumbered individualism is empty unless it is set in a context which informs us how to express our freedom. More than anything else, the individual self needs to be constituted within a "community of memory" (pp. 152 ff.). The stories told within such a community are fundamentally necessary because they alone "contain conceptions of character, of what a good person is like, and of the virtues that define such character" (p. 153).


The "older civic and biblical traditions" are our semi-abandoned vessels for these stories, conceptions, and virtues. That's too bad. Yet "a return to traditional forms would be to return to intolerable discrimination and oppression," Bellah writes (p. 144). For example, in Plato's Republic the ideal state was constituted as a strict social hierarchy. And, supposedly, the Bible furnishes scant justification for universal tolerance, seeming to set "God's people" above all others.

"The question is, then," writes Bellah, "whether the older civic and biblical traditions have the capacity to reformulate themselves while simultaneously remaining faithful to their own deepest insights" (p. 144).

I admittedly have given little thought as yet to the republican/civic reformulation — sorry about that. But it seems to me that the sought for reformulation of the biblical tradition flows immediately from Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity. Nolan says that Jesus's preaching was all about compassion and societal solidarity. Somehow we have lost sight of this crucial fact, Nolan says, but Jesus's original idea was that inclusiveness, even of so-called "sinners," was, is, and always will be the sine qua non of godliness. (I can think of no better definition of true community, by the way.)

If that teaching of Jesus's were more widely appreciated today, I'd say, a restoration of the biblical tradition of individualism in American could never return us to "intolerable discrimination and oppression"!

A Scream Goes Through the House

A Scream Goes Through the House is professor Arnold Weinstein's title for the 2003 book whose subtitle, "What Literature Teaches Us About Life," might more aptly be changed to "What Literature Teaches Us About Life's Connections."

I bought the book a year and a half ago and got bogged down after reading the preface, introduction, and first chapter. The author's premise attracted me: "literature and art are pathways of feeling, and our encounter with them is social, inscribing us in a larger community. . . . Through art we discover that we are not alone." But, according to his approach, the feelings which predominate are pain and suffering. Joy and delight take a back seat. I wasn't ready for that then.

I seem to be ready for it now, though explaining what has changed is a bit difficult. In Jesus before Christianity, another book which I never finished and which I have lately been rereading, Albert Nolan makes the point that Jesus was motivated primarily by compassion for those who suffer — that's point number one. Point number two is the effect Martin Scorsese has had on me as I've immersed myself in his documentary My Voyage to Italy, a retrospective look at the Italian cinema of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s.

The films of Rossellini, de Sica, Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni, et al. which Scorsese extols were never the type I would, in my younger days, seek out for diversion or grand amusement. But Scorsese now shows me how — if I can just barely manage to identify myself with the wideness of his personal mercy — to draw spiritual sustenance from even those characters and situations the puritan in me finds repellant.

So here's what I'm thinking. All this time as a human being and as a Christian, I've been blind to what Christianity is really all about. I'd like here and now to suggest what I mean by that.


To begin doing so, let me first lay out a few choice quotes from Weinstein's book:

Literature and art provide intercourse of a unique sort. Through art we discover that we are not alone. . . . That picture of connectedness, of a universe that is umbilical and strange — a picture no camera can take — takes the measure of our true lives. (pp. ix-x)

. . . the bloodstream of feeling that carries us into others and others into us . . . . (p. x)

. . . time avails not, and their plaint enters me, through this dream, with sweet and brutal force. A scream goes through the house, one person's pain becomes another's, across time and space; there are no borders separating us. (pp. x-xi)

[Art is] the yearned-for picture that would render our true arrangements in time and space, in body and mind, in heart and soul. . . . a new geography, indeed a new cosmography . . . to represent our actual plenitude and reach. (p. xi)

Art reveals and expresses our real but hidden story: that which lies under the surface, in the realm of feeling, unavailable to the naked eye; that which still resonates, though long past, through memories and fantasies . . . . [Art] quite simply reconceives our place in the world, and thereby redraws our own contours, showing us to be porous and connected. . . . The scream that goes through the house is the heartbeat that makes audible, at last, who we are, how resonant we are, how connected we are. (pp. xi-xii)

Those words from Weinstein's preface should be enough to make it clear that (if we agree with the author) there is a hidden connectedness among us that is most readily seen in the universality of our secret suffering. Art exposes that universality.


Following the book's preface, a James Baldwin quote from his character Creole in the story "Sonny's Blues" expresses the theme of Weinstein's introduction in a nutshell:

Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness. (pp. xx-xxi)

Of "the sheer excitement I see generated in students by the encounter with art," Weinstein goes on to say:

I think of this excitement as a kind of creatural nourishment, on the order of a transcendent meal, even of a blood transfusion, so that reading literature and looking at painting become a life-giving exercise. . . . Art is sustenance. Art is transformation. Such transactions are properly inspiriting, not unlike the project of the cannibals of old: to ingest the body of warriors they revered was to take into themselves the spirit of those warriors. (p. xxxvii)

As a Catholic, I couldn't help thinking of the Eucharist at the Mass, when I read that. We get spiritual sustenance from ingesting the body and blood of Jesus, do we not? At the same time, we imagine that all of us communicants are ourselves members of the One Body, of the mystical corpus of Christ.


Of course, I need hastily to add, theologically we are to do more than simply imagine these things. They are as real as real can be.

The question is, how can we make this "fact" more than theologically true? How can we make it (to use a word Weinstein adores) existentially true? How can we experience it?

I experience it when I read in Nolan's book that the spirit of God, as revealed in Jesus, is one preeminently of compassion with all who suffer and whose suffering is spat upon.

I experience it when I hear Scorsese talk lovingly about wayward movie characters who are so "lost," they would never be welcomed (and would never appear) at a church social.

I experience it when I read in Weinstein's book of Shakespeare's Hamlet and William Faulkner's Quentin Compson and many other characters who are "fatally incapacitated" (p. xxxv), and I realize that I am, too, in my likeness to them, one of the "sinners" or "little ones" whom Jesus forgave.