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Not religious, not spiritual, not atheist—what’s left?

By Kate Blanchard, Religion Dispatches

I could very much relate to the recent NPR story about a Christian minister losing her faith. Like her, I once counted myself among the über-faithful but then “fell away” in my twenties. Despite marrying a clergyman and spending lots of time in theological school, I never made it back to the one true way.

But there is a major difference in my story and this minister’s story, which is that she has embraced the name “atheist,” while I cannot bring myself to do so.

This reluctance is not because I have anything obvious to lose. Being an atheist would not cause any new familial strife; and unlike the pastorate, my career does not demand any particular religious orthodoxy. The major issue for me is an aversion to militant secularism, akin to some people’s aversion to “organized religion.” The new atheism, of the sort that has celebrities, conventions, media outlets, or protest marches, is not simply about doubting the existence of traditional deities. It is more often about intellectual elitism, and sometimes even outright racism toward people whom Christopher Hitchens referred to as “semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions.” Orthodox secularism, it seems, is about feeling superior to those poor, deluded souls who still cling to religion—that weird little psycho-social appendix left over from some earlier stage in human evolution.

Other common categories don’t seem to fit well either. The ever-popular “spiritual but not religious” implies a particular type of interior life—one grounded in emotion and experience more than cognition. A Jewish friend of mine calls herself “religious but not spiritual,” but this doesn’t seem to work as well in a Protestant framework, where individual faith is emphasized over ethnicity or outward traditions. The “Emerging Church” is a possible refuge, but it still strikes me as vaguely imperialistic; and try as I might, I simply don’t see myself among the so-called “rise of the nones.” 

Thus, for folks who are unorthodox but aren’t atheists, who care about metaphysics but who aren’t mystics, perhaps the good old-fashioned term “heretic” will satisfy. The kind of heresy I’m talking about here is what Thomas Aquinas defined as “restricting belief to certain points of Christ’s doctrine [as determined by the Roman Catholic hierarchy] selected and fashioned at pleasure.” (I would question only the implication that heretics are unique in “selecting and fashioning” their beliefs “at pleasure.”)

I find this name appealing for multiple reasons, not least of which is that it allows me to claim some connection to Christianity. The more I’ve learned about the history of Christianity, the more I’ve come to accept its ongoing diversity. The earliest Christians, as evidenced by both the New Testament and ancient theological writings, did not agree on the nature of Jesus or his work. In the fourth and later centuries, Christians made valiant (if misguided) attempts to unify their beliefs and practices by stamping out what they saw as errors; but Jesus people haven’t agreed since then either, despite centuries of the religious elite claiming otherwise.

Embracing heresy is a way of asserting my place—however tenuous—in this ancient tradition, while acknowledging that most of what I think and do will not pass creedal litmus tests. In a religion of more than two billion adherents, this is hardly a surprise.

I also like “heretic” because it is different, at least in my mind, than secularism, atheism, or “none.” Heresy implies not rejection of or indifference toward religion and its objects, but rather curiosity and engagement. Just because I can’t see or make sense of God doesn’t mean I don’t want to, or that I hate believers; on the contrary, I respect—with fear and trembling—the powerful role that religious experience plays in the lives most humans. Heresy demands a particular religious vocabulary, though it also allows for unabashed syncretism (call it a salad bar if you must). I can be what one of my students called a “Chreaster” who looks to the Daodejing for wisdom, who reads my child Bible stories but also Zen parables, a biography of Muhammad, and Greek myths.

Yes, acknowledging our heresy might be just the thing for non-religious non-atheists. It’s certainly better than opting out altogether, ceding the sacred turf to those lucky enough to have found answers to all their questions. Indeed, we may even be doing them a favor. After all, where would orthodoxy be without heresy to remind it of what it’s not?

Religion Dispatches May 10, 2012

*************************

Kate Blanchard is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Alma College in central Michigan. She is the author of The Protestant Ethic or The Spirit of Capitalism: Christians, Freedom, and Free Markets (Cascade 2010).

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By Mark Chalifoux, Man Cave Daily

This Friday (May 4) is the official day for Star Wars fans to celebrate the franchise in all of its glory. The reasoning, much like everything associated with Star Wars in the past 15 years, is fairly contrived. It’s likely because of a translation error of a George Lucas interview on a German TV station (“May the Force be with you” was translated into “May 4 be with you”). Regardless, it gives nerds a chance to geek-out and walk around the office saying “May the Fourth be with you!” all day.

Star Wars Day has a different meaning to me, though, because I saw the dark side of fandom and obsession during a brief period in the last decade in which I was accidentally voted to the International Council of the Church of the Jedi. Or maybe it was the Jedi Church High Council. Either way, I was given a leadership position in a movement that was striving for international legitimacy.

I was always a Star Wars fan, first getting addicted to the franchise when they were rereleased in theaters in the mid-to-late 90s. Star Wars books were the first books I read as a kid that weren’t written by Matt Christopher. I even had a group of nerd-friends that helped me overtake a baseball card shop once a week for marathon sessions of the Star Wars version of Magic: The Gathering. My grandma never stopped getting me Star Wars stuff for Christmas, even long after I outgrew it (it was awesome as a kid, lame as a whiny high schooler, then awesome again as a college kid. My Luke Skywalker Lego pen was the highlight of my Philosophy 101 class).

I went through the same steps of grief every fan went through after George Lucas had his stroke and called it a prequel. That Star Wars love sat dormant in my soul for a few years. It was stirred somewhat five years ago when I got an email from an editor at a website I wrote for. Apparently, there was an ongoing movement to make the whole Jedi thing an officially recognized religion and it was gaining steam in New Zealand and in the U.K. Would I want to go through the process of becoming an official member of this Church to then become the website’s “religious” pundit?

How could I turn that down? I went through with the process, which consisted mainly of obtaining a certificate to become a “Jedi Master.” I saw that some people in the church took on a new name, so I wanted to become Master Pasvrai (French for “not true”) as a wink to the fact that my membership was on a lark. I also wanted to call myself Jedi Master P, for short. And as much as I was looking forward to becoming a religious pundit, I mainly wanted to be able to preside over marriages of drunk people at parties to freak them out the next day. Waking up and finding out that you married someone, even in the Jedi Church, has to make the Walk of Shame a little more interesting.

The assignment from the website sort of fizzled out and I did nothing with my newfound role. That should have been the end of it, but the Jedi Church was having elections to their international council a month later. There was so much infighting among the members that they all voted for the people they didn’t hate. And that’s how I became a part of the Jedi Church High Council. I wasn’t even aware they were holding elections until I won one of the slots.

The purpose of the High Council was to create some sort of uniform doctrine. Apparently, some chapters were forcing their members to wear robes while others were training their members in how to use a light saber (but since those aren’t real they probably trained with cardboard tubes).  This had to be settled to gain “legitimacy”, it was explained by someone who was trying to create a religion based off a popular kids movie.

What followed were a series of inane conversations on AOL’s Instant Messenger (remember that?) about what the Church would/wouldn’t allow. That was the first time I was exposed to fans so extreme in their devotion that they literally worshipped in accordance with a movie and lived their lives by its principles.  And it wasn’t just a few people, there were tens of thousands of people who were claiming Jedi as their official religion or joining the Church.

The high point of the council debates? When it was decided that The Force was not to be used for sexual pleasure. As if that was the one problem standing between this movement and legitimacy. Granted, one of the hallmarks of organized religion is making rules about what you can do in the bedroom, but being subjected to a debate this absurd was enough to make me regret getting my certificate in the first place.

We had no official stance of using force in the bedroom; you just couldn’t use The Force. So you could choke a lady (assuming she asked you to and you have a good safe word, like “Kung’urama’nuruodo”) but you just couldn’t Force Choke her, Vader-style.

That’s when I turned my back on the Jedi Church. I wanted to be able to enjoy the original movies for years to come without having to think about a world where people are interpreting scenes to find out how they should live their lives. For me, Star Wars Day is just a reminder that some people care so much they have opinions on people manipulating The Force to find their Dark Side in the bedroom.

Mark Chalifoux is a comedian and writer in NYC. He’s a regular contributor to ManCave Daily and you can catch him live May 5 at the Laughing Devil Comedy Club in NYC.

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By  Kenny Smith

As Lauri Lebo noted in her March 23, 2010 Religion Dispatch post, “although most Christians assume that the ideas and practices surrounding the Easter holiday are native to Christianity, Easter’s historical origins in fact lie in the pre-Christian, pagan religious worlds of Northern Europe. “The word ‘Easter,’”  Lebo explains, “is actually the name of an ancient, heathen goddess who represents fertility, springtime, and the dawn.”  Contemporary Pagans, Wiccans, Heathens, Druids, and other such communities working to re-create, preserve, and practice various pre-Christian traditions (whom I will group together here under the term “Neo-Pagan”) agree entirely! Popular websites such as Covenant of the Goddess, Witches Voice, and Witchology, discuss the ancient roots of the Easter holiday as grounded in Germanic goddess-figures alternately known as Eostre or Ostara.  Some have also begun to suggest that we “not forget the REAL reason for the season!,” and work to “Keep the Eostre in Easter.”

Now, we know that new and alternative movements, over time, typically grow more and more like the larger culture in which they live.  A good example of this process (which scholars refer to as “accommodation”), can be seen in the Unificationist Church (popularly known as the Moonies).  As Barbara Bradley Hagerty reported for NPR, with its membership “dwindling,” the Unificationist church has brought some of its teachings into greater alignment with the larger Western culture. For example, although marriages with the Unificationist community have been traditionally (and controversially) arranged by the movement’s founder, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, parents have now been granted the authority to arrange marriages for their own children. While past generations of converts were expected to sacrifice their careers and dedicate their lives to laboring on behalf of the church, personal achievement and financial success are now explicitly encouraged: “[t]oday, the church wants college valedictorians, not dropouts… [it] wants the second generation to fit into society — not fight it.”

This raises a very interesting question about the direction in which American Neo-Pagan traditions are headed. When we think about  Christian communities insisting that the Christmas holiday be configured in explicitly religious terms, rather than, a more secular holiday defined by bright and colorful lights, decorating a tree, giving gifts, the myth of Santa Claus, and spending celebratory time with fiends and family, images of a religious militancy seem as if they are not that far behind. Indeed, while I sometimes grow weary of Christmas shopping, I always dread the shrill religious voices demanding that I observe a Christmas defined along certain pre-approved, sectarian lines.

Are American Neo-Pagans taking on some of these characteristics in their gradual accommodation to the larger culture? Can we expect increasingly shrill Neo-Pagan voices demanding adherence to sectarian understandings of Eostre over and above all competing others?  I would argue that this is unlikely to be case, and that efforts to “keep the Eostre in Easter” differ significantly from those to “keep the Christ in Christmas.” This is so for at least two reasons.

Firstly, the positionality of Neo-Pagans within the broader culture differs radically from that of most Christians. While Christian communities often perceive themselves as a persecuted minority, as living in a time when all things Christian “are being discouraged and swept away,” this is a very difficult argument to sustain. As numerous sociological studies have shown, most Americans (72%) continue to self-identify as Christian, and most seats of political, economic, and social power are filled by those who see themselves as Christian. One suspects that, within some Christian communities, “being persecuted” has come to be mean “no longer enjoying an hegemonic presence” in American culture.  Neo-Pagans, however, occupy a very different position. While their numbers continue to grow at impressive rates, if grouped with all other “new movements,” they only represent approximately 1.2% of the adult population. (http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2009-03-09-american-religion-ARIS_N.htm) Consequently, they are much more likely to experience not only discrimination in various forms, but social invisibility.

Secondly, unlike most Christian communities, Neo-Pagan traditions are not at all evangelical. They do not assume a mandate to make their worldview everyone else’s worldview, and so they do not actively seek converts. To the contrary, many such groups rebuff those who seek to join them and require the completion of lengthy periods of study (a year and a day is not uncommon), tests of competency, initiations, and group consensus as to the appropriateness of applicants, prior to admittance. In such contexts, rates of attrition may run as high as 90%.  Neo-Pagan traditions, then, tend to regard their own teachings and practices as suitable only for a small number of persons with particular interests and temperaments.

Taken together, these differences suggest quite varied frames of reference for Christmas and Eostre purity concerns. Christians who seek to police the ways in which Christmas is conceptualized and lived are hoping to reestablish clear cultural control. For many, this is not simply a matter of preference, but a cosmological and eschatological necessity.

For Neo-Pagans, who are better understood as a religious species recently returned from the brink of extinction, and who practice a largely esoteric religious craft, Eostre purity concerns represent an act of resistance and a struggle to assert one’s cultural identity within a culture where such Neo-Pagan identities are often demonized or unrecognized.

Still, when we consider the sustained rates of growth with this community, the diffusion of its symbols into popular culture (e.g., in the Harry Potter novels and films), and the tendency towards accommodation over time, one wonders whether Neo-Pagan traditions might come to resemble more closely the dominant religion in ways that could shift Eostre purity concerns in a different direction. In my own research with Wiccans, more than a few have expressed concerns about precisely this issue. “I’m not sure I would be comfortable,” a Wiccan priestess remarked to me several years ago, “if Wicca became the dominant religion in our culture, the way Christianity is now. I’m not sure I would it would remain ‘Wicca’ anymore.”

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An intriguing excerpt from Gregory L. Reece’s upcoming book:  “Creatures of the Night: In Search of Ghosts, Vampires, Werewolves and Demons.” 

The sound began down deep in his chest, rose to a growl in his throat, and then forced its way between his lips as a snarl. The coarse silver hair on his neck bristled. His ears, covered with the same silver fur, twitched. There was a burst of air from his nostrils, a snort of warning and territorial claim. The muscles in his arm began to twitch. His head snapped quickly to the left, then to the right. Thrown back against my seat by a sudden change in direction and speed, I instinctively clutched at the door handle of the mini-van, my eyes darting between the oncoming traffic and the hairy form in the driver’s seat. His reactions to the traffic were quick and aggressive – canine reactions, lupine reactions. For just a moment I was terrorized, speeding down the highway with a werewolf at the wheel.

***

I had lunch with Wolf at a local “meat and three” restaurant.  Unlike Warren Zevon’s  London werewolf, we didn’t have beef chow mein or pina coladas (and Wolf’s unruly fur was far from “perfect”),  but instead ordered meat loaf, tomato pie, and iced tea. Throughout the meal Wolf was uncomfortable in his straight-backed chair which offered no place for his (invisible) tail. Other than that he seemed completely at ease in his own skin, more than happy to talk to me about his wolf-nature and the werewolf community of which he is a part. 

Werewolves, Wolf explained, are by their nature mostly solitary creatures, joining packs only occasionally for woodland gatherings known as Howls. Wolf is one of the elder weres in an annual gathering known as the Southeastern or SEHowl, billed as one of the largest and longest running Howls in the country. Mostly, however, the werewolf community is found online, in chatrooms like The Werewolf Café (werewolfcafe.com) and The Werelist (werelist.net).  Online, Wolf often plays the role of an expert, or at least as someone who has been around for a while, knows a lot of other werepeople, and is not afraid to state his mind and share his personal experiences. 

Wolf traces the origins of modern werewolves to the late twentieth century, when some people began realizing, as children, that there was something different about them. They lived life more intentionally, paid more attention to what was going on around them, were more empathic, and felt as though they did not quite fit in with the people around them. On the other hand, they identified very well with various nonhuman animals – often to the point of conceptualizing themselves as nonhuman. (thetheriantimeline.com)

These individuals should not be thought of dysfunctional misfits, however. According to wolf

On the average, they got along well with their families, they had friends, they succeeded in school, many worked for themselves, many worked for others, and they were happy and well adjusted. But they were unique, as far as they knew, and they kept their differences a secret.

Then, in the early 1990’s, with the birth of the internet, this diverse group of individuals began to find each other. An online group, alt.horror.werewolves, founded as a forum for fans of werewolf movies soon became a forum for the discussion of members’ personal lives and experiences.  As Wolf puts it, “The Weres had found each other.”

***

Though always careful to emphasize that his theories are his alone and that he does not speak for the therian community as a whole, Wolf does not hesitate in sharing his own personal understanding of the modern werewolf phenomenon. He believes, for example, that present-day therians are genetically linked to the European werewolf community of the middle ages and that population and environmental pressures may have resulted in the reawakening of this long-hidden hereditary strain.  

         Wolf writes,

Before the Werewolf Trials of the later Middle Ages when thousands of mentally ill or simply despised people were tortured to death by the Inquisition for being “werewolves”, there really were people known as “werewolves”. Far from being insane, they were respected in their communities. They even had a special position in the church – they were called the Dogs of God and Saint Peter’s Wolves.

Wolf finds evidence for the existence of these holy werewolves in some of the ancient legends themselves, but especially in the records of the Inquisition regarding the trial in 1692 of the Livonian werewolf Thiess as recorded by Carlo Ginzburg in his The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1983). 

According to Ginzburg, the elder Thiess confessed freely to the charge of being a werewolf.  He also claimed that he once suffered a broken nose during a battle with a peasant named Skeistan, who happened to have been deceased at the time. Skeistan was a witch and had risen from his grave along with other witches to carry seed grain into hell in order to curse the community’s crops. Thiess, as a werewolf, had battled to stop this travesty, and had been hit in the face with a broomstick by the witch. Thiess also claimed that such battles took place three times each year, on the night of St. Lucia before Christmas, at Pentecost, and on the night of St. John. On these nights

The werewolves proceeded on foot, in the form of wolves, to a place ‘beyond the sea’: hell. There they battled the devil and witches, striking them with long iron rods, and pursuing them like dogs. Werewolves, Thiess exclaimed, ‘cannot tolerate the devil.’ (29)

When the judges demanded to know why Thiess and the others would transform themselves into dogs and journey to hell, he explained that they went in order to bring back from hell those things that had been taken there by the witches, livestock, grain and other agriculture fruits. To fail in their task would mean a lean year for the harvest and hunger for the people.

The judges in this account seemed quite shaken by this strange testimony. They apparently had great difficulty in understanding werewolves as being on the side of God and opposed to the devil. Thiess kept insisting however, that

werewolves were anything but the servants of the devil. The devil was their enemy to the point that they, just like dogs – because werewolves were indeed the hounds of God – pursued him, tracked him down, and scourged him with whips of iron. They did all of this for the sake of mankind: without their good work the devil would carry off the fruits of the earth and everyone would be deprived as consequence. (29)

Ginzburg argues that judges’ understanding of werewolves as servants of the devil notorious for destroying livestock was incompatible with what seems to be an older concept of werewolves as servants of God. Thiess, he argues, represents an older understanding of werewolves in which the dogs of God battle witches and devils in defense of a bountiful harvest. In addition to the evidence of Thiess’s advanced age, and the assumption that he acquired his beliefs about werewolves at an early age, Ginzburg also notes a mid-sixteenth century tale of a young man of Riga who fell to the ground during a banquet. One of the witnesses recognized the man as a werewolf. When he revived the young man related that he had left his body to battle a witch that had been flying around in the shape of a red-hot butterfly. 

This was an ancient belief, then. But . . . under pressure from the judges, the original positive qualities of the werewolves began gradually to fade away and become corrupted into the execrable image of the man-wolf, ravager of the livestock. (31-32)

Wolf VanZandt believes that the ancient dogs of God, the hounds of St. Peter, are once again on the move, called for what purpose he is not yet sure. Modern therians may be the new hounds of God, when their struggling consciousness finally comes to shake off the false histories that they have been taught. Hundreds of years of false consciousness must fade away for the werewolf to once again hear the call to battle with the forces of evil. All the horrible tales of old were told from confused or sinister motives, but the truth remains, hidden even in the ancient legends and tales. The wholly other within the werewolf breast is the presence of the divine.

 **********************

About the author:  Gregory L. Reece, Ph.D

Greg holds a Ph.D in Religious Studies from the Claremont Graduate University with a specialty in philosophy of religion and theology, an M.Div. from the Vanderbilt University Divinity School, a B.A. from Samford University, and an A.A. from Martin Methodist College.

His studies in philosophy of religion, particularly his work on irony and religious belief, have led Greg to explore religion from its more idiosyncratic border regions rather than from its more stable centre. In pursuit of an understanding of religion, he has attended an Elvis Impersonator contest in Las Vegas, celebrated the birth of the King of Rock and Roll in Memphis, attended UFO and Tesla Technology conventions, had his molecules rejuvenated via the alien technology of the Integratron, visited Roswell and Area 51, had a close encounter with the extraterrestrials known as the Tall Whites, explored an underground cavern rumored to lead to a subterranean civilization, hunted Bigfoot outside of Paris, Texas, attended a Satanic mass, interviewed vampires, been trained in the art of exorcism, and gone hiking with a werewolf.

Greg’s fancy degrees and weird adventures, while incredibly interesting, have not provided him with steady employment. For that he works as a technical writer and consultant, providing human resources support to municipal governments and colleges. He occasionally teaches courses in philosophy and religion at Birmingham, Alabama colleges.

Greg lives at Brookehouse, a big, old home in the Montevallo, Alabama historic district, along with his wife Kristen, his son Sam, and his daughter Olivia. In his spare time, and when he is not making plumbing repairs, he likes to build robot, spaceship, and ray-gun sculptures from junk he finds at the thrift store.

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Kate Daley-Bailey, Religion Nerd

“TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The death toll from severe storms that punished five Southern U.S. states has jumped to 269.” 

This is the opening statement from Weather.com‘s article, “Tornadoes Cut Path of Destruction,” which documented the devastating tornadoes that hit Alabama on April 27^th, 2011. 

The article itself did not surprise me… but the comments from the website’s respondents most certainly did. What I found most intriguing was the theological language being used on this modern media site, one explaining scientifically natural weather phenomena and includes no reference to any theological agenda.  Here are just a few examples:

God loves us so much and He is trying to get our attention one more time before He judges the earth. He wants us to live and not die. Wake up, people.

I pray God’s protection during this difficult time. May He give us His peace, comfort, and strength.  Romans 12  

Many such comments were directed towards those affected by the storms, letting them know that people were praying for them and the affected region. However, there were a few indicating that those people spared from the wrath of the storms felt that God had spared them for a reason. Other remarks used thick theological language indicating that these disasters are signs from God, of the ‘End times,’ and have been sent by God to call Americans to repentance. 

Representing another audience entirely, some challenged these theodicies. Theodicies offer religious justification and explanation for why evil (deadly tornadoes) exists in the world: if God is all knowing (knows that innocents are being killed), all powerful (has the power to intervene to protect said innocents), and is all good (loves his human creations), then why doesn’t he intervene and stop such disasters, which often happen to good, God-fearing folk? Of course, some commentators anticipated this tough theological problem, and either worked to resolve it, or berate those who might raise it in the first place, insisting that:  

God is the only reason more weren’t killed.  Be thankful it wasn’t your family. 

Don’t get upset people. Just pray for this very lost person! 

I wonder if that was what the people thought when Noah built the ark?  I believe!:  D and I am so glad he is preparing a place for me.. Sure don’t want that smoking place, do you? 

Yes, hopefully [people] like you, low life ass crack scum, will go first……I’ll pray for that. 

Wake up in hell and I think u will change your mind. 

Dear Lord, Please bless the people who walk with the breath you gave them and down you with it in the same. These people need a guiding light as they have become lost in their path. Please protect their families as they are lead into Hell by the sinners of the lands. In your name we pray, Amen.

God does exist. He wants America to repent of their sins and turn to Him. John 14:6 Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” 

Satan has turned many against God, including many of the posters on here. Questioning the existence of God is EXACTLY what Satan wants you to do…Satan …causes all the bad in the world, not God. Stop blaming the one who gave you life and put the blame where it really belongs!

These responses seem to be drawing on various starting assumptions about the nature of God: 

• God does exist and He is using natural disasters to chastise certain people so they will repent and return to God;
• God is the source and catalyst of natural disasters, but is also the reason more people were saved;
• God is sending these disasters as signs of the ‘End times’;
• Satan (the originator of evil) challenged God’s authority and now stalks weak humans attempting to destroy their faith in God; those who pose non-religious explanations for such events are themselves lost sinners in the grip of Satan and are headed for Hell unless they repent and believe.

The source of my wonder here is the eagerness to assign these natural disasters to an all-loving supreme being, the loathing directed at nonbelievers, and the medium through which these ideas are being conveyed. While these views are as old as monotheistic belief itself, what I find surprising is the social platform through which commentators offer such a stark and uncompromising theology… The Weather Channel.

Weather Religion?  

The connection between religion and weather is actually not as unusual as it may appear at first glance.  Many of the earliest theorists have argued that the origin of religion lies in its relationship with the natural world. Max Muller, a 19^th century German linguist and one of the “founding fathers” of the comparative religion, argued that, “all religions, primitive or otherwise… have their origins in the personification of natural forces and objects and the ‘myths’ that arise from these personifications.” 

This view, Naturism, holds that, 

humans gain a sense of the divine from natural phenomena: sun, moon, stars, mountains, rivers, thunder and lightning, storms, the seasons, animals, and plants. Faced with such an inspiring, mysterious, frightening, and awesome natural world, humans endowed nature with supernatural qualities. (Rodney Stark, 24-5) 

Some scholars have supported sociological, anthropological, and psychological analysis of what they claim is the human creation of the supernatural and religious, via the personification of natural phenomena. Other scholars, however, have advocated for a view of ‘religion’ as a separate category all together. For these scholars, religion is separate, and human experience of the sacred is a ‘real’ experience, and not merely a byproduct of language, social construction, human anxieties, or psychological dysfunction. 

Mircea Eliade, an adamant supporter of the categorical separation of religion from other disciplines and oft labeled ‘high priest’ of the ‘history of religion’ model mentioned above, opens his hallmark work, The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion, by praising the work of a German scholar by the name of Rudolf Otto: 

Instead of studying the ideas of God and religion, Otto undertook to analyze the modalities of the religious experience… Passing over the rational and speculative side of religion he concentrated chiefly on its irrational aspect. For Otto had read Luther and had understood what the ‘living God’ meant to a believer. It was not the God of the philosophers- of Erasmus, for example; it was not an idea, an abstract notion, a mere moral allegory. It was a terrible power, manifested in divine wrath. (8-9) 

Otto rejected the idea that the ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’ is necessarily moral or rational.  For Otto, the ‘numen’, the ‘holy’ minus moral and rational aspects, is awe-inspiring, mysterious, terrifying and ‘wholly other.’ Due to the ‘wholly otherness” of Otto’s ‘numen,’ all language falls short to accurately express it in its totality.  

Despite the limitations of language, humankind has borrowed the imagery it has used to describe the most mysterious, terrifying, and ‘wholly other’ phenomenon humans have encountered—nature.  Otto’s description of the divine as terrifying and ‘wholly other’ and Muller’s view of religions as originating in the personification of natural forces, although hardly comforting, do seem to find some resonance in the Hebrew Bible’s description of the holy and powerful god of the Hebrews, Yahweh. 

The Jewish Weather-deity? 

Walter Gerhardt Jr. in his article, “The Hebrew/Israelite Weather-Deity,” presents a persuasive argument that the Hebrew God “is expressed in Biblical literature as an “allegorized idiom” of the weather phenomena” (130).  According to Gerhardt, the Hebrew God, known as YHWH, “is the personification of environmental forces and energies of weather indigenous to the Sinai/Edom and Syro-Palestinian geographic locales” and is often described using “the precipitive elements of the rainstorm” (130). Gerhardt presents Moses’ encounter with the deity on the holy mountain as an excellent example of this, emphasizing the dense cloud shrouding the mountain (133). Gerhardt highlights how YHWH thunders from heaven and “scatters lightning” (138). 

Indeed, the Hebrew Bible, known the TaNaKh to Jews and the Old Testament to Christians, is chock-full of disastrous natural events as well as sometimes contradictory explanations for them. One need look no further than Genesis to find stories where natural disasters are being attributed to the God: Noah and the flood, the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, are two of the most commonly referenced events. In Exodus, Moses encounters God via a startling viewing of a burning bush, represents Him before the Egyptian pharaoh, witnesses ten horrific plagues used to motivate the pharaoh to relent, experiences the parting of the ‘Red Sea’ which in turn “saves” the Hebrew slaves but wipes out pharaoh’s army, and negotiates the terms of the covenant with the Hebrew deity while on a holy mountain surrounded by a lightning storm. 

Luther’s God of Lightning 

The Hebrew Bible, noted above, is not just a sacred text for Jews but for Christians.  Christianity, historically, grew out of an apocalyptic and messianic sect of Judaism in the 1^st century, Common Era. The earliest followers of Jesus believed him to be the ‘messiah,’ a long anticipated political and religious savior meant to overthrow the Romans and restore the ancient kingdom of Israel. These earliest followers came to this conclusion about Jesus’ identity by finding what they interpreted to be prophetic statements in the Hebrew Scriptures. Early Christianity inherited the Hebrew Scriptures and added their own writings about Jesus and the early church to them to make their own Bible. So, it is worth asking whether the weather-deity of the Hebrew Bible persisted as Christianity developed out of Judaism. 

Christians inherited not only the scriptures of early Judaism but also many of the theodicies buried in the scriptures themselves which give various justifications for why ‘evil’ exists.  The book of Job itself provides numerous explanations, though none are conclusive, as to why disaster had befallen Job and his family, although the text states that Job was blameless in the sight of God.  The book of Job ends with the Hebrew God appearing to Job in a whirlwind, another destructive weather-related phenomenon. 

Such stories have not been lost on prominent Christian theologians, such as the architect of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther. Luther suggested that his own entrance into monastic life was driven by a terrifying experience he had during a violent thunderstorm. Protestant Christianity has been deeply marked by Luther’s description of how the Christian God used nature to His own ends. As Craig Martin writes on Luther’s perspective in an article titled “The Ends of Weather: Teleology in Renaissance Meteorology” found in The Journal of the History of Philosophy: 

… He also interpreted “fruitful weather” as proof of God’s love for humanity.63 Thus, in the Sermons on Luke 21, while rare events were ominous or apocalyptic, fair weather might signal God’s protection.”(275) 

Many Protestant Christians today, especially those of an Evangelical nature, like many Christians found in the South Eastern United States, still hold to this correlation between nature disasters and God’s will.

Evangelical Christians in the South

According to a survey given by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, regarding the “most religious states” in the U.S. (based on four criteria: “the importance of religion in people’s lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer and absolute certainty of belief in God”), Southern States consistently lead the states in self-claimed religiosity.  According to their data: 

“More than eight-in-ten people in Mississippi (82%) say religion is very important in their lives… In some other Southern states including Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and South Carolina, at least seven-in-ten people say religion is very important in their lives.”  

The U.S. Religious Landscape survey, also from The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, estimates that 50% of the U.S.’s Evangelical Protestant Christian population lives in the Southeastern region of the country.  

Not surprisingly, Evangelical Protestant Christians make up 49% of Alabama’s state population (the national average is 26%).  Mainline Protestants represent 15%, historically black Protestants make up 18% and Catholics only make up 6% of the states’ population (while nationally they represent 24% of the population).  Jews, Orthodox and other Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists, Hindus, separately, at most, represent 1% of the state’s population.  A group labeled “unaffiliated” make up 8% of the state’s population. 

An article in the Christian Century titled “Most don’t blame God for disasters,” presents the following statics based on a poll by Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with Religion News Service after the devastating earthquakes and tsunami in Japan: 

“Nearly six in ten evangelicals (59 percent) believe that God can use natural disasters to send messages—nearly twice the number of Catholics (31 percent) or mainline Protestants (34 percent) who so believe. Evangelicals (53 percent) are also more than twice as likely as the one in five Catholics or mainline Protestants to believe that God punishes nations for the sins of some citizens.”(14)

Why the Weather Channel?

Now, the most compelling question of all… why the Weather Channel.com?  Why are these comments showing up in an unlikely platform?  Why did these respondents feel the need to post such overtly religious comments on such a seemingly “secular” website?

 The reasons may be multifold. The Weather Channel’s website specifically does NOT offer theological reflections on natural events. While science is often credited with telling us how the world works, religion has often presented us with reasons, adequate or inadequate, for why the world works as it does. The desire of respondents to find meaning, and not just logistical analysis of how weather works, may be why they felt the need to provide meaning to these disasters. 

However, while the Weather Channel does not specifically offer theological explanations for natural disasters, this doesn’t mean that the site doesn’t attempt to capitalize off of the deep-seated desires of the population to feel “in control” over weather events. 

Monitoring the conditions which might lead to dangerous weather does not equate to controlling the weather but scientific analysis and advanced technological weather-monitoring equipment which result in weather ‘forecasting,’ may be feeding the same desires for control that religions have often offered to the population. 

Nicole Fleetwood, in her article “Failing Narratives, Initiating Technologies: Hurricane Katrina and the Production of a Weather Media Event”, explains how some viewers may be turning to various technologies to feel in control, which I would argue is one of the desirable characteristics institutionalized religion offers:

“On some level, meteorological technologies give the power to predict the future. We are able to witness the storm as weather media event from its inception as tropical storm to its naming to its levels of categorization to its arrival. The detailed sophistication afforded the viewer promises to lower our risk by increasing preparedness. Marita Sturken argues that computer visualization technologies, such as Doppler radar, ‘are used to convey the sense that weather-tracking technologies can actually help to control the weather itself.’” (772) 

Perhaps the reason the Weather Channel’s website has become a platform for commentators to process grief, send condolences and prayers, and work through theological concerns is due to the fact that the meteorological technologies, like religious and spiritual theodicies, provide some sense of control and order in times of chaos.

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By Joanna Brooks, Religion Dispatches

Patrick Mason is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and author of The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (Oxford University Press, 2011). He is the nation’s leading scholarly expert on anti-Mormonism. I spoke with him this morning about the controversy surrounding Mormonism at last weekend’s Values Voter Summit.

RD: Last weekend at the Values Voter Summit, Robert Jeffress, Senior Pastor at First Baptist Church of Dallas, introduced Rick Perry as a “genuine follower of Jesus Christ” and later characterized Mormonism as a “cult” to reporters. Help us understand the history behind anti-Mormon sentiment in the American South.

PM: Mormon missionaries were proselytizing in the American South from before the Civil War, and wherever Mormonism went, anti-Mormonism followed. Some of it was basic theological opposition to Mormon doctrine presented in tracts, books, pamphlets, and so forth. That’s reasonable in a free marketplace of ideas, and Mormons have certainly said that other churches were wrong. Theology is fair play.

But something changed around the Civil War. In 1857, LDS Apostle Parley P. Pratt was killed as retribution for alleged polygamy. And that’s the spark that motivated the rise of violent anti-Mormonism: the perception that Mormons were coming to steal women and corrupt Southern womanhood. After the Civil War especially, Southern manhood was defined in large part through the protection of Southern womanhood. This rationale helped whites in the South justify the lynching of African-Americans. It drove anti-Mormonism as well: not just theological difference, but the fear that they’re coming for our women.

That helps me understand the edge I hear in the contemporary caricaturing of Mormonism as a “cult.” It’s not just theological differentiation. There’s an edge to the accusation. It’s a residue of the anti-Mormon violence of the nineteenth century.

Yes. Once Mormons drop polygamy in the late nineteenth century, anti-Mormon violence stops. Violent anti-Mormonism disappears, whereas African-American lynching does not. But latent ideas of Mormons as polygamists continue to dominate the Southern imagination.

Usage of the word “cult” as a descriptor for Mormonism picks up steam in the 1960s as a reaction to new religious movements like the Moonies, Jonestown, Scientology, and so forth. It also indexes a feeling of eroding religious authority on the part of mainline and evangelical Protestants who have had a custodial relationship to culture in the American South. Beginning in the 1960s, with greater secularism, there comes a sense that this Protestant custodial relationship is under threat. “Cult” becomes a catch-all phrase to catch new and unrecognizable religious movements.

And then in the 1970s and 1980s comes the rise of what I describe as “organized anti-Mormonism”: people who make careers producing anti-Mormon print and video content and networking distribution of anti-Mormon content with other pastors and media figures.

In the early 1980s, Ed Decker produces a book and a video titled The Godmakers. In Salt Lake City, Jerald and Sandra Tanner in establish Lighthouse Ministries and produce sophisticated anti-Mormon literature based in historical research. Interestingly, it parallels the rise of the new Mormon history and new historical consciousness among Mormons, giving a historical gravitas to the anti-Mormon movement. People like the Tanners go back and look at nineteenth-century sources and find esoteric aspects of Mormon tradition—Anglo-American folk magic, temple ceremonies, esoteric teachings of Brigham Young—and they say, “That’s not recognizably Christian.” That’s where Jeffress is coming from. He comes out of a tradition that says there are so many things coming out of Mormonism that do not seem to fit within Christianity as it has been constructed over the past hundreds of years. Then, the LDS Church counters by asserting that we are, of course, Christian. The two camps largely talk past each other.

It’s comparable in some respects to what Catholics have experienced, then? The word “Christian” has been instrumentalized to mean Protestant, or perhaps even more specifically evangelical Protestant, and then used to convey or withhold legitimacy.

This was the language that was used against John F. Kennedy, too. And Mormons have a bit of an uphill climb. But there are people out there like Richard Mouw, who wrote a very nice post at CNN this weekend. Mouw is very careful in how he uses theological language. He says, effectively, let’s be rigorous and not just throw words at one another.

It should be noted that anti-Mormonism is also a term that gets used carelessly in Mormon communities. Folks who differ on one point or another, or criticize the tradition at all, sometimes get called “anti-Mormons” by very rigid LDS Church members, and the term has edge.

Yes, among Mormons, anyone that says anything a little different is subject to being called an “anti-Mormon.”

Final question. Jon Huntsman called the weekend’s controversy a “sideshow.” Mitt Romney responded to it all by maintaining his dignity and criticizing Bryan Fischer. Both candidates seem to be determined to avoid getting caught up in a century-old mess of misunderstanding. What advice would you have for Mitt Romney?

I think Romney is handling it about as well as he can. He learned lessons from 2008. He knows he can’t win by making religious arguments or trying to get up there and defend his faith as an apologist. What he’s doing is defending himself personally as a believer. He’s saying he believes in Jesus Christ and that his faith is central to his identity. That’s a message that people on the Christian right should be able to hear. For him to even attempt to get into an educated conversation about how Mormonism fits within historical Christianity—that’s not his job, and no one should expect him to do that. A certain hardcore element on the right is never going to accept him. He knows that. He needs to write those people off. There’s nothing he can say or do to convince them. Shrug it off. There are bigger issues that need attention.

***************

Joanna Brooks has been named one of “50 Politicos to Watch” for her coverage of Mormon life and politics. She’s also an award-winning religion scholar. Find more of her writings and podcasts here.

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By Heather Abraham

“Christmas Under Siege”, “War on Christmas”, “Defend Christmas“, “Stealing Christmas”, and “Somewhere Jesus is Weeping“, are just some of the provocative catch phrases that rear their ugly heads in the weeks leading up to the annual Christmas holiday season.  

For some, Bill O’Reilly, the late Jerry Falwell, and Sean Hannity to name a few, the use of terms such as Seasons Greetings or Happy Holidays are seen as an attempt to censor the religious aspects of the most celebrated of American holidays.  The annual first amendment battles involving government entities (public schools, capitals, courthouses…) displaying nativity scenes, are often described as dangerous liberal conspiracies hostile to the majority Christian population.  

In the last decade, mega retailers such as Walmart, Gap, Target, Sears, Home Depot, and Best Buy have come under attack by Christian organizations offended that these corporate giants prefer to use inclusive holiday language in their advertisements.  Others have organized boycotts of retailers who have had the audacity to recognize non-Christian holidays such as Kwanzaa or Hanukkah.  

In an attempt to counterattack these imaginary conspirators, the faith-based group Liberty Counsel continues their eight-year campaign against retailers who dare to use outrageously anti-Christian phrasing in their commercials and ads.  The wicked usage, by some retailers, of Happy Holidays and Seasons Greetings has inspired the creation of a “Naughty and Nice” list and campaign organized by Liberty Counsel for those who are “Friends of Christmas.”  

We are continuing our eighth annual “Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign,” pledging to be a “Friend” to those entities that recognize Christmas and a “Foe” to the Christmas censors.  We have just released an updated “Naughty and Nice” list, which catalogs retailers who either censor (“naughty”) or recognize (“nice”) Christmas. The list is compiled from information gathered by consumers and is updated whenever new information is received. Please print out the list and use it to decide which stores to patronize during the Christmas shopping season.  The list has been very influential in motivating retailers to acknowledge Christmas. So far this year, Best Buy has embraced Christmas and switched to the nice list, and Dick’s Sporting Goods has promised to change and include Christmas in their advertising. Liberty Counsel was the first organization to launch the “Naughty and Nice” list a number of years ago and since then other organizations have promoted similar programs.  We encourage you to report the naughty and the nice stores by sending an email to Liberty@LC.org and we also encourage shoppers to compliment the nice stores and tell the naughty ones that you will shop elsewhere.

Thankfully, this “you’re either with us or against us” attitude is not universally embraced by American Christians.  In an article entitled Rethinking Naughty and Nice, Tim Hoiland (a self- identified Christian) argues that the Liberty Counsel campaign “is a distraction at best, and destructive at worst.”  For Hoiland, the “Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign” is 

a distraction in that the real threat to Christmas is not that secular entities and non-Christian individuals prefer to use other, more inclusive terms for a season that does in fact include various holidays (Christian and otherwise), but that Christians have often and in many ways failed to embody the true meaning and the message of the season.

And, Hoiland insists, “it serves to further cement us in cycles of consumerism, which leads to all sorts of injustice.”        

As Christian groups continue to disagree on the “War on Christmas” issue, a recent survey by LifeWay Research, a Christian organization, may shed some light on this manufactured crisis that continues to capture so many headlines.  As reported in the USA Today article, For Many, Jesus isn’t the Reason for the Season, 74% of those polled ‘”told LifeWay many of the things they enjoy this season “have nothing to do with the birth of Jesus,”‘ and only 37% reported including Jesus in their Christmas celebrations.  

LifeWay’s survey is illuminating when you take into consideration the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS)  which reported that 76% of Americans self identify as Christian.  In other words, out of the more than 173,000,000 Christians in America (ARIS), only 37% (LifeWay) include Jesus in their Christmas festivities.  In 2005, Jerry Falwell claimed “secularists” “hate Christ” and want to “steal Christmas from America,” and yet the ARIS and LifeWay surveys reveal a story about the “War on Christmas” much different than the narrative told by Liberty Counsel and America’s fear mongering shock jocks.  It seems to me that IF there is a threat to Christmas, it is an intimate one.  So, what do you think?  Are Christians taking Christ out of Christmas?

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By James Dennis LoRusso, Emory University  

With all of the talk about the need for jobs and income inequality, the latest figure sitting in the front car of that roller coaster otherwise known as the Republican presidential race, Newt Gingrich, once again has invited the ire of Progressives with his remarks about the poor.  At a campaign stop in Des Moines, he made the following claim:

 Really poor children,” he claims, “in really poor neighborhoods, have no habits of working.  And have nobody around them who works.  So, they literally have no habit of showing up on Mondays.  They have no habit of staying all day.  They have no habit of ‘I do this, and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.

Besides citing the implicit racism here that paints poor inner-city youth as lazy or being driven to criminal lifestyles, Newt’s critics have charged him predictably with ignoring sociological data painting a very different picture.  Even I can attest to the fact that in my previous career as a retail manager, the working poor, particularly single mothers, comprised a significant portion of my staff.  Some of these held down more than one part-time job to support their children, and they may work seven days per week, putting in nearly eighty hours of labor.  To me, these mothers spend more time on the job than many of my middle class colleagues.

Still, my casual browsing of blogs and internet comment boards suggests that a substantial number of Americans agree with him.  Why, I wondered, is this the case?  Undoubtedly, most people in this country understand hard work to be a virtue, but in Newt’s statement resides a subtle assumption: Being poor is a sign of moral failure on the part of the individual and the poor community.  The mass appeal of this belief, that poverty itself is a sign of moral deficiency, results from the particular way the so-called “Protestant work ethic” is situated in American culture.  The root of this ethic comes out of the strict Calvinist tendencies of colonial New England. 

The Dissenting Puritans that settled Massachusetts in the seventeenth century held a view that hard work signified virtue.  Earlier thinkers of the Reformation like Martin Luther and John Calvin turned Catholic notions of work as penance for sin on their head and painted every individual’s “vocation” or “calling” as a contribution to God’s creation.  Throughout the modern period, America, West Europe, and now the world has embraced the idea that work, “getting your hands dirty,” is good for you, me, and the world.

Simply pointing out how American culture appreciates hard work doesn’t really move us any closer to understanding Newt’s portrayal of the poor.  As I have already suggested, the abundant literature reveals that the poor work quite diligently when opportunity permits.  Despite this evidence, Gingrich still maintains that the poor lack this ethic.  He can say this, I suggest, because his statements tap into a deeply seeded belief in American society that work should be an end in itself, not merely a way of meeting wants and desires.   Although we do work so that we can live comfortably, we also build our character when we punch the clock.  Work, thus, is a fundamentally moral project. 

A further look at the way Calvinism frames the work ethic within a larger system of belief reveals why American’s historically explain work as a moral practice.  First of all, in the strict Calvinist universe of the New England Puritans, moral authority rests privately within each individual.  When Luther and his successors urged Christians to take up the Bible and read it for themselves, they essentially removed the site of religious authority from the priesthood and placed it directly in the hands of the layperson.  Now, in the hands of each individual lay a responsibility to acquire and embody Biblical teachings.  Consequently, a prevailing Protestant notion persists that if you fail in some way, there’s no one to blame but yourself. 

Second, Calvinism teaches that “grace” comes freely from God, who decides every person’s fate at the dawn of creation.  Moreover, no series of actions will influence this fate; all a believer can do is look for evidence that he or she is among the elect.  Believers in colonial New England assessed their own spiritual state and that of their peers in a variety of ways.  For instance, full church membership was open only to those who could publically testify to a proper conversion.  Similarly, virtuous living, including hard work, could indicate a person’s place among the elect.  Of course, even upright living was no guarantee of salvation.  But, as colonial theologian, Jonathan Edwards, clamed in his piece, Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, worldly prosperity, when not ostentatious, surely implied the grace of God at work.  With this, the Puritan moral system ties the virtue of work to outward signs of grace in the form of worldly success. 

By erecting a culture that looked kindly upon hard work and the accumulation of wealth, these early American Protestants simultaneously prepared future generations to understand idleness, immodesty, and poverty as signs of low moral character.  Gingrich’s remarks resonate with the conservative base because they invoke this moral legacy.  Through the lens of these basic American values, poor children reflect a lack of moral strength.  Precisely because they live in poverty, this ethical deficit suggests an unwillingness to embrace hard work.  In short, the culture of poverty stems from indolence, itself evidence of individual moral failure. 

Moreover, even when Newt’s critics criticize him for ignoring evidence to the contrary, his supporters will continue to stand by his perspective.  Americans have inherited a belief that work must be done with the correct intentions, as an end, as a good in and of itself. Gingrich implies here that the poor only work as a means to an end, as a way of assuaging an insatiable appetite of desires.  Their penchant to resort to criminal activity illustrates what Gingrich’s poor truly care about.  They desire opulence and will stop at nothing to attain it.  According to this logic, hard work for its own sake remains an unknown ideal among the poor, because they are caught in a vicious cycle of immorality for which they can only blame themselves.   Such views cannot be overturned unless their specific histories are exposed.  Only when we acknowledge distinctively religious roots of the American work ethic do we get a better picture of why some conservative political views resonate so powerfully with the base.

*******************

James Dennis LoRusso is currently a PhD student of American Religious Cultures at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.  His work focuses broadly on the Religious Origins of American Capitalism, specifically on Spirituality in the Workplace and the intersection of advertising theory and the study of myth.

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By Kenny Smith 

In an intriguing piece written for the Sunday, June 27 New York Times, journalist David Segal traces out some of the early consequences of President Obama’s October 2009 announcement that federal law enforcement will no longer prosecute users and suppliers of medical marijuana, provided they are in compliance with state laws. In Colorado, where a November 2000 amendment to the state constitution legalized medical usage, the grass-roots response has been immediate and potent:   

hundreds of [marijuana] dispensaries popped up and a startling number of residents turned out to be in “severe pain,” the most popular of eight conditions that can be treated legally with the once-demonized weed. More than 80,000 people here now have medical marijuana certificates, which are essentially prescriptions, and for months new enrollees have signed up at a rate of roughly 1,000 a day…. [In] cities like Boulder, an affluent, whole-grain kind of college town… the number of [marijuana] dispensaries… is larger than the number of Starbucks and liquor stores combined.  

What should we make of such a state of affairs? Surely some of these 80,000 cases involve severe physical distress. But aren’t many simply a matter of Coloradoans wanting to get high, a lot? Of course, even if this is in fact the case, it does not rule out the possibility that there are important religious dimensions at play. Getting high a lot might well perform important religious work. 

As the great scholar of religion Huston Smith pointed out some four decades past, that consciousness-expanding substances become intimately bound up with the sacred should hardly surprise us. Psychoactive compounds, albeit in varied forms, are indigenous to nearly every geographic region in which human civilization has flourished. Accidental ingestion, he argued (not uncontroversially), may have given rise to humankind’s first religious visions, doctrines, and traditions! (Smith, “Do Drugs Have Religious Import?,” The Journal of Philosophy, 1964) Indeed, many indigenous peoples, such as the Native American Church, continue costly legal battles with federal and state governments in an effort to regain (or preserve) their right to make use of sacred substances such peyote and cannabis.  

But we need not look to indigenous traditions. A number of new religious movements have come to see the ritual use of cannabis products as central the religious quest. The Church of the Universe, founded in Ontario, Canada in the late 1960’s, teaches that marijuana provides a vital “calming influence,” helps to focus and “direct [one’s] thoughts without interference from negative forces,” allows for an experience of communion with the natural world, and overall “makes life worth living.” http://www.iamm.com/belief.htm Though this group is not specifically Christian, some who are have likewise produced interesting blends of biblical spirituality and cannabis use, yielding a religious path that emphasizes “getting high for Christ.” The Religion of Jesus Church, founded in Hawaii (also in the late 1960’s), holds that the sacred ingestion of cannabis, 

fosters the… personal experience in knowing and doing the will of God and serving the human brotherhood…. Through his indwelling spirit of truth and idealistic beauty, the Prince of Peace is able to be your personal spiritual life partner showing you the ideal way of living as you tread the pathway of spiritual growth…. Such is the religion of Jesus.  

More recently, in the 1990’s Reverend Roger Christie founded the THC Ministry: Hawaii Cannabis Ministry. In addition to helping congregants develop a biblically-grounded “Cannabis Spirituality,” this group also “helps to protect you from arrest, prosecution and/or conviction of ‘marijuana’ charges–wherever you live–starting as soon as you sign-up, become ordained and receive your ministry documents.” Membership is free. Applicants need only “be over 21 and sincere.” http://www.thc-ministry.org/  In the summer of 2010, Christie hopes to plant new Cannabis Christian Ministries across the U.S., beginning (of course) in Colorado Spring, Colorado.

Like all religious communities, these groups interpret their inherited religious resources in ways that reflect their most basic commitments, which in this case means the centrality of cannabis.  According to Christie, “what did Moses do after kneeling by the burning bush? He smoked it… Moses was healed by the burning bush,” which is said to be one of many biblical references to sacred weed.  As the scholar of Chinese religion, Jonathan Herman, has often remarked, “it does not matter so much what scripture says; what matters is how it is interpreted.” And our most important commitments typically constitute the lens through which we read scripture. This helps to explain why scriptures yield such varied interpretations, each of which seem self-evident to those who support them.

Setting aside for the moment admittedly unusual religious groups, could legalized cannabis come to function in ways comparable to other culturally sacred substances ritually consumed each day in the workaday world or with family and friends at dinner parties, picnics, baseball games, and holiday celebrations, such as Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Marlboro, MacDonalds, or Starbuck’s coffee? For at least some persons and communities, one suspects this is already the case, and that the economic dynamics of further legalization efforts will only serve to broaden the ways in which cannabis products manifest within the larger culture. As Segal explains,

Americans spend roughly $25 billion a year on marijuana… which gives some idea of the popularity of this drug. Eventually, we might be talking about a sizable sum of tax revenue from its sales as medicine, not to mention private investment and employment. A spokesman for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws says hedge fund investors and an assortment of financial service firms are starting to call around to sniff out opportunities.

Currently, thirteen other states (such as Rhode Island and New Jersey), as well as the District of Columbia, have already passed medicinal marijuana laws and are poised to initiate dispensary programs similar to that in Colorado. Given the longstanding connection between economics and the sacred within American cultural history, it is worth taking seriously the possibility that, with widespread economic success and increased availability on the horizon, cannabis may well become a sacred reality for a great many Americans, putting down roots alongside baseball, apple pie, Budweiser, Coca-Cola, Starbuck’s and (after a good case of the munchies) more apple pie.

See Religion Nerd article by Heather Abraham: Cannabis Cafes of Amsterdam

Sources

• David Segal’s article in NY Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/business/27pot.html?ref=todayspaper
• Religion of Jesus Church: http://www.hialoha.com/konagold/church/sacrament.html
• http://www.gazette.com/articles/expand-100645-burning-hopes.html
• http://www.gazette.com/articles/expand-100645-burning-hopes.html

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By Ben Brazil, Religion Bulletin

A month ago, when the Occupy movement was beginning to gain traction, Matt Stoller penned an influential response to criticism about the movement’s lack of a clear, concise message.  The critics, he wrote, had failed to notice the religious nature of what was going on in Zuccotti Park.  He explained: “What these people are doing is building, for lack of a better word, a church of dissent. It’s not a march, though marches are spinning off of the campground. It’s not even a protest, really. It is a group of people, gathered together, to create a public space seeking meaning in their culture. They are asserting, together, to each other and to themselves, ‘we matter’.”

The idea of a “church of dissent” did not only interest me – it positively attracted me.   So I was there on October 7, when Atlanta’s own occupation began in downtown’s Woodruff Park, which the group renamed Troy Davis park in honor of a quite-possibly-innocent man Georgia had executed weeks before.  Since then, I have not camped – family commitments prevented it – but I have helped in the small ways I could, donating camping equipment, spending an afternoon with the media committee, and using my Twitter stream (@bbrazil) to defend the group.  I have also attended multiple marches, visited in the evenings, and observed when police broke up the camp in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Just as importantly, I have also experienced what Nathan Schneider recently called a “secret extremity and transcendence” –  a sense that justice was, finally, on the march again and that I was part of it.  So if the Occupy movement is a church of dissent, I have worshiped at its altar.  I believe that growing economic injustice is the greatest issue of our time, and I believe that the Occupy movement is the first mass movement to confront the issue head on.  It gives me hope, and I continue support it.

At the same time, I worry that Stoller’s “Church of Dissent” risks becoming the Sect of the Politically Radical. I am referring to a sociological distinction between church and sect that found its most influential articulation in Ernst Troeltsch’s The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, first published in 1912.  Drawing on his colleague Max Weber, Troeltsch argued that churches’ engagements with the world depended on how they were organized:  as churches, as sects, or as loose collections of religious individualists, or “mystics.” At it relates to Occupy Wall Street, Troeltsch’s “church” has several salient features.  Most importantly, though,  it is broadly inclusive – a true big tent.  By church, in fact, Troeltsch primarily meant European state churches, which included everyone living in their territories. The Occupy movement makes a similar claim via income percentiles. To be part of the bottom 99 percent, the rhetoric suggets, is to hold a claim to membership in the Occupy movement. Troeltsch, however, also saw that a functioning church entailed something that some Occupiers resist: compromise.  For the medieval church and the state churches that grew from it, the compromise entailed an alliance with power in the name of an objective religious truth.  Occupiers, for their part, reject traditional notions of power in their consensus decision making process.  At some point, however, demands for reform are demands for the deployment of state power.  Likewise, if demands for economic justice don’t entail claims to absolute truth, they do entail – and should entail – a normative ethical vision.

On at least two levels, then, the “church of dissent” faces the need for compromise: with the workings of power, and with the need to maintain the “big tent” required to legitimately claim it. But, as Troeltsch knew, compromise sits uneasily with true believers and – I would add – with idealists.  Historically, it tends to generate the sects, smaller groups that recoil against the defilement of compromise and form narrower communities of the committed, pure, and pious.  They do not make claims on state power, seeking only tolerance for their own islands of purity. They favor principle over pragmatism, and purity over change. It’s not a perfect analogy, but my experiences at Occupy Atlanta suggest a group caught between an impulse to be a sect of the politically pure and the need to become a bigger church of dissent.  And I believe the issue, at this point, has less to do with substance than with tone, style, and aesthetics.  A couple of examples will show what I mean.

On the first night of the occupation, a crowd of 400-500 people from all walks of life came downtown to get a look at a movement many were thinking of joining.  Toward the end of the evening, I talked with a middle-aged white woman from a nearby suburb.  She was furious with exactly the same corporate power and economic inequality that motivated the protest.  Still, she was also flummoxed by the slow, consensus process of the governing General Assembly and it’s “human microphone” — the practice in which a crowd amplifies a speaker by repeating her clipped, half-phrases. Although I explained the process and its rationale, this woman told me in a later e-mail that she still found the process alienating. “Unfortunately I did feel like an outsider,” she wrote,  “I don’t feel confident they’re going to draw people that fall into my demographic but time will tell. Hopefully I’m wrong. I wish everyone the best!” This woman was an ally who, based on the visual and aural aesthetics of the process, decided she wasn’t welcome.

Of course, you can’t make everyone happy, and middle-class decorum will never sit easily with protest, much less with civil disobedience.  Still, some of the exclusion is as needless as it is unintentional.  On the night the police broke up the Atlanta camp, a friend tried to stop “F*@K the police” catcalls by chanting “Cops are the 99 percent.” A handful of other protesters overwhelmed his voice with a counter-chant of “Cops are class traitors.” Such language is not just inflammatory; it is the language of the sect.  And it has almost no constituency among the 99 percent they – we – claim to represent. More famously, the decision that effectively prevented civil rights hero and congressional representative John Lewis from speaking also involved a question of purity – this time, of violating the consensus process to allow Lewis to, effectively, jump to the front of the line.  To have allowed Lewis to speak immediately would have violated the pure, egalitarian, participatory democracy of the process, but effectively preventing him from speaking (he had to leave) alienated some supporters and opened the group to spurious, false, and opportunistic claims of racism.

In part, the radical flavor of the Atlanta camp simply reflects the realities of who can camp — students and single activists.  I stress that I am grateful to these idealists – they have faced arrest, worsening weather, and a lack of sleep in resistance to injustices that affect all of us.   At the same time, it is not surprising that the core Occupiers are somewhat more radical than the thousands of us that support from afar. I share other Occupier’s anger  – about pervasive economic injustice, about corporate domination of our wobbling democracy, about the unjust execution of Troy Davis, and more.  But I also wish that my allies would remember that their words, their style, and their tone can very effectively exclude people.  Although occupiers cannot cater to middle class tastes, they should also remember that the non-radical middle classes are part of the 99 percent.   Let me put this more bluntly:  Fighting for justice doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole every chance you get. I think they’re beginning to get this in Atlanta.  A push to include more African Americans has born fruit, and the Occupiers are working at outreach. It’s the right move. Martin Luther King, for example, engaged not only in physical nonviolence (as do the Occupiers) but in a verbal and emotional non-violence.  Rather than hate his oppressors, he viewed them as brothers and sisters in a Beloved Community he was trying to build.  Without compromising on justice, he understood that confronting injustice is more effective when your own dignity appears unimpeachable. At the same time, King famously excoriated moderates who refused to get involved in the fight for justice.

So let me close by turning the lens around on the academics and other sympathizers who read this site.  If you don’t like what the “Church of Dissent” looks like now, there is only one way to help:  join it.   The presence of our bodies and our voices broadens and grows a movement that is, in my view, overwhelmingly positive.  It is easy to critique a culture and protest subculture from afar.  It is harder – and better – to try to build a new movement, and a new culture, that remembers its ideals even as it eventually faces the necessity of compromise.  The ‘Church of Dissent: is what the 99 percent make it.

********************

This post originally posted on Religion Bulletin

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University 

In an essay I recently published at “Religion Dispatches,” I used Gary Laderman’s fascinating concept of “Republicanicity” as the launch-pad for the suggestion that what separates developments in the Republican Party from anything happening among the Democrats is simply this: the Republican Party is undergoing a battle to define its orthodoxy, a battle that has no direct parallel to arguments and power-struggles taking place on the political left. 

In short, a plurality of voices, sharing little more than a name in common, is currently in the process of sorting out a platform to which all bearers of the name might reasonably agree. 

I compared this to developments in the period of early Christian formation, since what we have learned in recent years is that orthodoxy doesn’t come first; heresy does. Put another way, the diversity of opinions all going by the same name, ‘Christian’, eventually created an untenable situation in which everyone recognized that all of the positions then bearing the name were no longer compatible. All Christians might refer to Jesus of Nazareth as “Christ” and as “Son of God,” or even as the Second Person in the Divine Trinity, but as for what those names meant and how they were to be imagined, opinions diverged wildly. 

The gospels were composed as one attempt to answer two burning questions lying at the heart of this new movement: Who was he? and Why did he die that way? Their answers differed as well, and in John’s case, his answers were put in such a way as to reject the other three gospel versions (Jesus never prayed in Gethsemane, according to John, because Jesus never doubted or wavered. He and the Father were one). 

It is important to keep in mind that these debates were never just debates about theology; they were political debates about who would control the movement, and that question always hinged on access to money, among other things. 

One of the most shocking examples of how wide a range of beliefs within a single movement can be may be found in the so-called Gospel of Judas.  In this gospel, we are informed not only that Judas never betrayed his Lord, but that he was actually the most favored disciple, deemed so trustworthy that he was called upon to perform the most difficult task of all: ensuring the death of his master.  In so doing, Jesus assures him, “you will release the man within me.” Jesus is apparently referring to the spirit that is housed a bit uneasily in a bodily frame. Hence Judas did not engage in an act of betrayal, but rather in an act of deliverance and liberation. 

Who was he? A Knowledge Savior, come to earth to show us the path to liberation. Why did he die that way? To illustrate the fact that death is the release into spirit, not a loss and not a tragedy. To render the most tragic kind of death imaginable as an anti-tragic triumph was the clearest symbolic way to make this point. Naturally, the other gospel writers (those who identified with other members of Jesus’s inner circle) had a hard time with that. Particularly because the people making this highly counter-intuitive argument were rich elites whose belief that they alone had access to secret knowledge made them the most obvious candidates for leadership positions in the movement.

Turn now to the fascinating attempts at defining party orthodoxy that we have witnessed at the last several Republican debates. 

All of the candidates share the name ‘Republican’, but that is about as far as their agreement extends. The two central questions around which this entire election cycle will pivot is, Who are we? And How did we let Obama take the White House? Answers to any given question seem ultimately to be addressed to one or both of those prime party directives. 

A fascinating moment in the Tea Party debate came when Governor Perry’s orthodoxy was challenged in light of an executive order he issued requiring all Texas schoolgirls to receive a vaccine for the sexually transmitted virus responsible for cervical cancer. The other candidates went through an orgy of recrimination, conniption after conniption all designed to call his orthodoxy (and his moral judgment) into question. 

His Abstinence Only credentials were questioned. His Libertarian credentials were questioned (especially by Michelle Bachmann’s sudden discovery of the importance of, well, a woman’s right to choose). And his medical judgment was questioned (in one of the true howlers to come out of that debate, Bachmann’s since-retracted claim that the vaccine caused mental retardation in at least one instance). 

Who are we? And how did we let Obama take the White House? With reckless sniping and self-serving Know-Nothingism such as this, one suspects. 

But none of this captures the essence of what is unfolding. Much as in the case of early Christian formation, arguments over orthodoxy were not just arguments about theology. They were arguments about money and power. Yes, Luke tells us that the early Christians pooled their resources and gave each according to his need. But the next thing Luke tells us is that some Christians kept their money in hiding and when this was discovered, Peter—through a terrifying exercise of power—called them out publicly and witnessed the couple drop dead as a stone. 

The real story of the executive order issued by a man who also appeared to revel in the 234 executions Texas has performed on his watch is a story about money, Merck money in this case. Yes, as the Governor insisted, the Merck corporation donated $5000 to his gubernatorial campaign (and he was offended, he sniped, that Sister Bachmann would suggest that he could be influenced by such a sum–he’s not that cheap, it would seem). 

Indeed he is not.  Merck donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Republican Governors group he chairs, and more besides.  And they produced the vaccine to which every child in Texas was required to submit. And so on: you line my pockets, I’ll line yours.  Despite his repeated poor performance sin these debates, Rick Perry continues to raise money like a juggernaut. And he is not lining his coffers with $100-200 contributions from the hoi polloi; no, he is after the big money.  His campaign is currently running on enormous infusions of cash from a select few corporate interests committed to his candidacy.  It is striking that his arguments and ideas have nothing to do with their support; his behavior in the state of Texas does. 

Judas is not only the most maligned figure in the New Testament; he is the disciple about whom there was always the greatest confusion.  In the New Testament itself (the Gospel of Matthew versus Acts of the Apostles), we see two very different views of the man.  In one version, he regretted what he had done, threw the money back in the faces of those who paid him for his betrayal, and committed suicide.  In the other, he took the money he was paid for his betrayal, bought himself a plot of land, then dropped dead as he walked through the fields surveying his profits.  Outside the New Testament, as we have seen, he was remembered not just as a disciple, but even as the favored disciple, the man with the most difficult job in the entire movement. 

I am suggesting that, while we have not quite reached the magic number 12 in the current Republican field (at least not yet), Rick Perry is currently playing the role of Judas to the tormented advocates of orthodoxy.  His latest problems—aligning himself with a minister who referred to Romney’s and Huntsman’s faith as a “cult”—seem to place him slightly at odds with other followers of the Lord. 

The name for the group that penned gospels like the Gospel of Judas was “Gnostic.” It derived from the Greek word for “knowledge,” and they got the reputation for being Christian know-it-alls.  But they were also notoriously among the wealthiest and well-connected of Christians. 

Taking the longer historical view, then, Rick Perry appears as the new Judas-figure in a movement uncertain about its path. As for whether his gospel will become the new Republican orthodoxy, I have my doubts. The Gnostics may have appeared to be in the ascendant for a time, but they lost their influence in the end and were eventually declared heretical. This much is certain, if Governor Perry manages to sell his heterodoxies, then the real story will be the money it took, not the theological arguments he expressed.

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By Kenny Smith

Dr. Kelly J. Baker is a lecturer in Religious Studies and Americanist Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Seemingly indefatigable, she has written for numerous academic and popular publications, has two additional books and several scholarly articles currently in the works, serves an editor for the award-winning American Religious History blog, oversees panels and groups within the American Academy of Religion and American Studies Association, all the while teaching a full-load of university-level courses each semester, raising a young daughter, and encouraging aspiring graduate students at other institutions.

A glance at her resume suggests a broad range of teaching and research interests: world religions in America, apocalyptic and Rapture-oriented movements, the figure of the zombie in contemporary culture, religious intolerance in the South Park series, and of course, the early 20^th century rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and its relationship to “mainstream” American religion and culture, precisely the focus of her new book, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930  (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011, 326 pages). 

Like all good historical work, this book complicates our understanding of the past, and thus also the present, by bringing to light previously overlooked and under-appreciated narratives. Specifically, Baker explores the print and material culture of the early 20^th century Klan: for instance, Klan newspapers such as the Imperial Night-Hawk and the Kourier Magazine, Klan robes and hoods, photographs of Klan initiations and gatherings, etc.. Most historical accounts, she explains, present the early 20^th century Klan as an extremist movement driven solely by concerns for racial and nationalistic purity, to the obvious and often brutal exclusion of African Americans, Catholics, and Jews. Thus the Klan appears as a paramilitary organization on the margins of mainstream American society, one that had little to do with the dominant religion of the time other than the coincidental affiliation of virtually all Klan participants with one Protestant denomination or another. When we take seriously what Klan leaders and spokespersons actually said, wrote, and did, however, a very different portrait emerges. 

The Klan’s political philosophies and practices, Baker argues, were inseparable from their Protestant Christianity. It is not simply the case that Klan leaders made use of Christian symbols and language, but rather that Klan philosophies and activities were predicated upon their understandings of the biblical text and the Protestant tradition. This is evident in what Klan leaders wrote (e.g., that “As the Star of Bethlehem guided the wise men to Christ, so it is that the Klan is expected more and more to guide men to the right life under Christi’s banner” 35), in what they wore (robes featuring crosses), and the rituals they enacted (e.g., erecting crosses, lining up in the form of a cross, reading the biblical text as a mandate for racial purity and superiority). 

More, Baker argues that the Klan is best understood not as vigilantes on the fringes of the social order, but as articulating (and implementing) what the majority of white Americans accepted as obviously the case.  As Baker demonstrates, the Klan was a broad, demographically and geographically diverse social, political, religious movement that competed, to some degree successfully, for a central position in the national consciousness and mainstream culture.

In helping to tease out this relationship, Baker points to the modern-day case of the Rev. Terry Jones, who in recent years garnered considerable media attention for threatening to burn (and then actually burning) a Qur’an in public. While a relatively small percentage of Americans will themselves publicly burn Qur’ans or join groups that do, studies consistently suggest that Jones’ attitudes toward Muslims reflect the opinions of large portions of the American public. Like Jones’ hatred of Islam, the Klan’s attitudes were mainstream, not marginal. 

Perhaps most controversially, the book’s final chapters explore the cultural legacy of the Klan as a “brand or style of religious nationalism,” and inquire as to its relationship to 21^st century forms of American conservativism, especially as it appears in the rhetoric of Glenn Beck and the Tea Party.  Baker acknowledges that “[b]inding people and movements to the Klan is an effective tool to showcase nefarious intentions and legacies,” and thus should be done with considerable caution. (263)  Still, there are important historical continuities. Beck and many in the Tea Party, she points out, express a distinctly Christian nationalism that seems bent upon the exclusion or marginalization of religious/cultural others, and the desire of much media coverage to paint Beck and the Tea Party as located on the fringes of American society recapitulates our long-standing assumptions about Klan history. 

I have called Gospel According to the Klan a brave new book. This is so for two important reasons. Firstly, Baker has exposed something about American cultural history that many of us may not wish to see: namely, that both religion and mainstream society participate in the ugly, even violent, side of American nationalism. To reveal this in a clear, detailed, and sustained argument can provoke precisely this ugliness.  As Baker explains in the book’s afterword,

I received my first death threat for [while writing for the American History Blog] simply suggesting that Americans need to recognize the place of Christianity and religion more generally in domestic terrorism and the larger hate movement. (252)

Secondly, Baker has also exposed something unpleasant about the rest of us, those who do not concur or sympathize with Terry Jones and feel repulsed by exclusionary religious nationalism (Christian or otherwise): namely, that we have a tendency towards forgetfulness, and towards imagining American history and the American mainstream in ways that reflect our own preferences.  

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University 

I suppose it was inevitable that the evangelical push-back within the Republican Party would eventually make Mormonism an issue, no matter how hard the Republican establishment tries to make it go away. 

And now it’s come at last–an entire week of Republican presidential hopefuls being asked point-blank if they think a Mormon (read: Mitt Romney) is a Christian. Only the fierce insistence that Tuesday’s debate be limited to economic questions kept this pot from boiling over again (though Jon Huntsman couldn’t resist one quick snipe at Rick Perry, who appeared befuddled all night anyway, and Michelle Bachman couldn’t resist the suggestion that Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, if turned upside down, becomes the number of the Beast). 

What’s been striking all week is, first, that presidential hopefuls like Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich have toed the traditional line of secular Liberalism: religion is a private matter, they say; no one knows the heart of another, and it’s not the business of politics to decide who is a Christian. One would find this most welcome line of reasoning more plausible if they’d said the same thing when the question of whether Barack Obama is a Christian was a front-page news story. 

Others who have flirted more openly with the fire that is right-leaning evangelical ire, and the belief that America is the Christian city on the hill–like Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman–will need to have more than a canned reply to this question, and that is why we haven’t heard more from them yet. They’ve got to figure out how to triangulate the Christian base they need with the Party establishment’s clear desire not to let this election get railroaded by religion.

Which leaves us with Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, two highly credible presidential possibilities who are self-identifying Mormons. Romney’s strategy for making this whole debate a winner for him is to seize the opportunity it provides to show evangelical Christians where their beliefs clearly coincide: in the view that America is indeed the biblical city on the hill, and that God has granted the US a unique destiny in world affairs. Our sacred duty, therefore, is to maintain the US’s singular status as a solitary military and economic superpower. Huntman’s views will be more nuanced; he has broad experience in China, after all, which complicates that simplistic aspiration a lot, and that is probably why we haven’t heard from him yet. 

But the Democrats have remained on the sidelines, by and large, content to watch what they hope will be another round in the Republican arena, where carnivorous presidential hopefuls eat each other’s young. This is a missed opportunity. 

Since the Republican hopefuls have opened the door on this question, Democrats should force them to walk through it. The question that is being asked when we wonder aloud if Mormons are Christians is whether other religious groups are allowed to staple their own beliefs and writings onto another religious community’s sacred scriptures. Is it enough if Mormons, with a new scripture they claim to be compatible with the Christian Bible, say that they are Christians? Do other Christian groups get to say that they are not?

Framed that way, it’s a far more unsettling, but also a far more interesting, question. After all, this is precisely what Christians did to the Hebrew scriptures and to Judaism. They stapled their own scriptures (which they called “New”), as well as their own strikingly un-Jewish values, upon them. 

Muslims did the same thing to Christians. And then Mormons did it again. 

So let us hear more from each Republican candidate as to what they think about some of their own supporters who claim that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is a “cult.” And let us not content ourselves with questions about whether a Mormon is a Christian. Let’s go all the way and ask the obvious follow-up: do they think a Muslim is a Christian? 

Presumably, the answer will be No.  Then the question becomes: how is a Mormon any different? 

What becomes clearer when the debate is framed this way is that the difference between Mormons and Muslims is that Mormons are home-grown; they are indubitably, recognizably American. And that is what this debate has really revealed: the fact that a new kind of religious nationalism has emerged in the United States in the past thirty years, and that the Republicans have embraced it even as the Democrats have resisted it. 

Let the debate be framed that way, and it is a winner for the Democrats, every time.

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By Kenny Smith

The Church of Scientology’s ($90 million) Super Power Building, which some describe as “a bizarre cross between a Mediterranean-style hotel and the Starship Enterprise,” offers some “889 rooms, an indoor running track and NASA-style training equipment,” where devotees will master super-human abilities, opens later this year.

Looking for Scientological romance? Check out the Scientology dating website that is said to speak especially to the sensibilities of Scientologists, which may not be so different after all.  Kristie Alley’s conversion to Scientology played a role in her weight-loss victory, and a new Scientology video urges a “crusade” of funding for new and improved Scientology centers worldwide!

A recent faculty hire in Cultural Anthropology at Auburn University specializes in UFOs, and most especially the International Raelian Religion.

While it’s unclear how Vampire Churches (yes, they exist) will react, apparently both John Travolta and Nicholas Cage are vampires dating back at least to the Civil War, and photographs (now for sale on EBay for some $50,000, though with free gift wrapping and shipping) prove it!

BTW, as some astute observers have pointed out, the photographs bear other explanations as well: Travolta and Cage may be time-travelers instead of, or as well as, vampires.

In a recent fundraiser, we learned that “Jesus Christ is Lord” and that “Obama is the anti-Christ.” The President himself agreed with the first assertion.

In Portland, Oregon, the “Oaks Amusement Park” will be hosting this year’s Pagan Pride Day.  In some libraries, it’s still difficult to keep books about Wicca and Witchcraft on the shelf.

In England, some Christian have complained (bitterly) over the BBC’s decision to use “BCE” and “CE” rather than “BC” and “AD” in making historical references.

All across America, the appeal of an Atheistic identity is flourishing, with or without highway billboard campaigns.

In Ohio, churches have purchased pro- and anti-homosexuality advertising space on numerous roadside billboards.

Was Steven Colbert correct? Are Americans Moneytheists?

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By Kenny Smith and Heather Abraham

Wiccans and Neo-Pagans of all sorts celebrate Mabon this September 23 (or there about), a celebration of the fall harvest and the Autumn Equinox, a day in which the hours of day and night are perfectly balanced, and just one day after the birthday of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins!  Looking for a primer on Wiccan/Pagan holidays?

Rob Bell, the controversial Christian minister whose book, Love Wins, published earlier this year questions some basic conservative ideas, for instance, that heaven is not a Christians-only club, strikes out on his own.  Elsewhere in Christendom, one Southern Baptist leader argues that state executions are “pro-life.”   Presidential candidate, Tea Party leader, and Evangelical, Michele Bachman, who now argues that the US government should have no tax revenues whatsoever, has self-identified as a Teavangelical.   Perhaps not surprisingly, the Southern Baptist Convention is considering a re-branding with a new and perhaps less insular… name.  

A federal judge has ruled that two film makers, who in 2005-2006 claimed that the Raelian International Religion  recruited members by virtue of pedophilia, in fact fabricated the story entirely.   

While Buddhist “flashmobs” gather for meditation in cities around the world, Jewish ones gather for shofar blowing. 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWaT90wjU4Q

The FBI has been criticized for it’s training materials that depicted the Prophet Muhammad as “a cult leader,”  and the Air Force Chief of Staff has warned officers to avoid promoting and expressing preferential treatment for their own personal religious beliefs. 

One fellow attempts an experiential comparison of demonic exorcism.  This is probably not your religious studies professors’ idea of a comparative study.

The Church of Scientology encounters yet more troubles, as mainstream media pick up recent accusations of the “violent and toxic” nature of its leader, David Miscavige. Elsewhere, Scientology Church schools receive far more positive coverage.  

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has announced that beginning in 2015, Saudi born women will be allowed to vote and run as candidates.  The announcement came just days before this year’s elections in which women are excluded.  Women can vote….just not yet.  

Actor Gerard Butler, a consummate warrior of film, takes on the lead role in “Machine Gun Preacher.” 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25sM_72wEBI

The film challenges American Christians get off their comfortable asses and to think globally while giving new meaning to gun carrying Christians.  “Apostle of Violence?”  

Another of God’s warriors, Andrew Marin, is working to bridge the gap between the conservative Christian right and the GLBT community.   

Bay Minette, Alabama judges are giving those convicted of misdemeanors the choice between serving jail time or attending church.  Christianity is the only option available to those who want to opt out of jail.  Christian and non Christian criminals, who choose to participate, will have to report to the local pastor and police for an entire year.  The ACLU is in an uproar calling Bay Minette’s Restore Our Community Program “blatantly unconstitutional.” 

“We’re not there to burn the Bible or desecrate,” said Bruce Gleason, director of Backyard Skeptics atheist group, who recently gathered in Huntington Beach to rip up pages of the bible they feel are immoral.    The self styled “Atheist Athlete” created a video to capture the event at which he had “a lot of fun” and where he “got hugs” from attendees.   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS5jmf5bav8

 Brad Hirschfield explores “When Atheism Turns Ugly,” in his Washington Post On Faith article.   While Christians and Atheists battle it out on the boardwalk, Jewish Atheists flock to welcoming Synagogues.   

The Jewish High Holy Days are upon us and some Synagogues are worrying about “The Hard Economics Of High Holy Days.”

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By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

If World War II-era warbler Kate Smith sang today, her anthem could be GodsBless America.

That’s one of the key findings in newly released research that reveals America’s drift from clearly defined religious denominations to faiths cut to fit personal preferences.

The folks who make up God as they go are side-by-side with self-proclaimed believers who claim the Christian label but shed their ties to traditional beliefs and practices. Religion statistics expert George Barna says, with a wry hint of exaggeration, America is headed for “310 million people with 310 million religions.”

“We are a designer society. We want everything customized to our personal needs — our clothing, our food, our education,” he says. Now it’s our religion.

Barna’s new book on U.S. Christians, Futurecast, tracks changes from 1991 to 2011, in annual national surveys of 1,000 to 1,600 U.S. adults. All the major trend lines of religious belief and behavior he measured ran downward — except two.

And more say they haven’t been to church in the past six months except for special occasions such as weddings or funerals. In 1991, 24% were “unchurched.” Today, it’s 37% .

Barna blames pastors for those oddly contradictory findings. Everyone hears, “Jesus is the answer.  Embrace him.  Say this little Sinners Prayer and keep coming back. It doesn’t work. People end up bored, burned out and empty,” he says. “They look at church and wonder, ‘Jesus died for this?’”

The consequence, Barna says, is that, for every subgroup of religion, race, gender, age and region of the country, the important markers of religious connection are fracturing.

When he measures people by their belief in seven essential doctrines, defined by the National Association of Evangelicals’ Statement of Faith, only 7% of those surveyed qualified.

Barna laments, “People say, ‘I believe in God. I believe the Bible is a good book. And then I believe whatever I want.’”

LifeWay Research reinforces those findings: A new survey of 900 U.S. Protestant pastors finds 62% predict the importance of being identified with a denomination will diminish over the next 10 years.

Exactly, says Carol Christoffel of Zion, Ill. She drifted through a few mainline Protestant denominations in her youth, found a home in the peace and unity message of the Baha’i tradition for several years, and then was drawn deeply into Native American traditional healing practices.

Yet, she also still calls herself Christian.

“I’m a kind of bridge person between cultures. I agree with the teachings of Jesus and … I know many Christians like me who keep the Bible’s social teachings and who care for the earth and for each other,” Christoffel says. “I support people who do good wherever they are.”

And it’s not only Christians sampling hopscotch spirituality. The Jewish magazine Moment has an “Ask the Rabbis” feature that consults 14 variations of Judaism, “and there are many,” says editor and publisher Nadine Epstein.

“The September edition of Moment asks ‘Can their be Judaism without God?’ And most say yes. It’s incredibly exciting. We live in an era where you pick and choose the part of the religion that makes sense to you. And you can connect through culture and history in a meaningful way without necessarily religiously practicing,” Epstein says.

Sociologist Robert Bellah first saw this phenomenon emerging in the 1980s. In a book he co-authored, Habits of the Heart, he introduces Sheila, a woman who represents this.

Sheila says: “I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice. … It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think God would want us to take care of each other.”

Bellah, now professor emeritus at University of California-Berkeley, says, “Sheila was a jolt to some at the time. But to a lot of people, it wasn’t a jolt at all, they had been living that way for a while. Don’t romanticize the past. Fervent religiosity was always in the minority. Just because people showed up in church didn’t always mean a deep personal conviction or commitment.”

Bellah sees two sides to the one-person-one-religion trend. On the positive: It’s harder to hold on to prejudices against groups — by religion or race or gender or sexuality — if everyone wants to be seen individually.

“The bad news is you lose the capacity to make connections. Everyone is pretty much on their own,” he says. And all this rampant individualism also fosters “hostility toward organized groups — government, industry, even organized religion.”

Today, even the godless disagree on how not to believe, says Rusty Steil of Denver.

He grew up Lutheran and retained his parents’ “strong moral code,” but, he says, he couldn’t stick with “ancient myths of people trying to make sense of the world.”

“I don’t find much comfort in imagining there’s an all-powerful God who would allow people starving and all the natural and man-made disasters,” Steil says.

Steil calls himself a “live-and-let-live atheist,” as apart from the virulently anti-religious variety such as Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, or “those who actively promote disbelief.”

Paul Morris, an Army medic at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and veteran of six tours in the Middle East, says he has seen Christianity, Judaism and Islam in action, for better and for worse, and, frankly, he’ll pass.

Morris grew up “old-style Italian Catholic,” but says he never felt like his spiritual questions were answered. So, he says, “I just wiped the slate clean. I studied every major religion on the face of the planet. Every one had parts that made sense, but there was no one specific dogma or tenet I could really follow,” Morris says.

“So now, I call myself an agnostic — one who just doesn’t know. What I believe is that if you can just do the right thing, it works everywhere.”

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By Diana Butler Bass, A Great Awakening

For weeks now, news programs, radio commentators, and blogs have encouraged people to share their memories about 9/11.  Some of it has been very moving, some trite, and no small amount divisive.  But all of it has reminded me of one thing: words often fail to express what is beyond emotional comprehension.  As poet Ardrienne Rich writes, “Tonight I think/no poetry/will serve.” More than anything, on this anniversary, I wish to be silent.

A few may protest saying that it is important to remember the events of a decade ago.  That is true.  A people must know their past.  But who alive has forgotten?  Indeed, the media will not let us forget.  The images of 9/11 are seared in our minds forever, replayed millions of times on television and across the Internet.

There is, however, a difference between memory—the snapshots that stay in our minds always—and remembering.  Remembering means to “put back together” the pieces of the past, to rearrange the pictures of memory in order to make meaning, to heal, to forgive, or to inspire.  Memory and remembering are related, but they are not the same thing.  Memory is simply not forgetting, the process in which we feel the power of events once again.  Remembering is the hard work of seeing, understanding, making sense of, and learning from the past.

In the decade since 9/11, we have not forgotten.  But we have treated the events of 9/11 rather like taking a video of a loved one’s death—and replaying the end over and over and over.  Anyone who has suffered the pain of death knows that endlessly playing a DVD of the last moments of that person’s life will never lead to healing.  Indeed, watching death do its worst repeatedly opens wounds and grief anew, imprinting the immediacy of suffering on the minds of the mournful.  In order to heal, to “move on,” as counselors say, one must do the hard work of death—to patiently remember the whole life of those who have died and to learn from the gifts that person left behind.  Remembering is a process, a spiritual one at that, by which we come to terms with mortality and flawed humanity, as well as the power of courage and abiding love.

We all have a memory of 9/11.  But have we remembered?

Silence makes room for remembering.  I don’t want to hear patriotic songs, jingoistic speeches, or even well-considered rehearsals of “what happened on that day.”  I want to see no pictures of burning towers or flags waving.  I wish for empty public space, a communal practice of quiet, to reflect on not only what happened on 9/11 but in the long, sad decade since.  For just a brief time, I long for, in the words of an ancient hymn, “all mortal flesh keep silence,” in the face of the fear and trembling that gripped us one September day ten years ago.

I wonder what we would find there—of our selves, our neighbors, and God—in that void of words?

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By Abbas Barzegar, Religion Dispatches

As millions of college students around the country begin the start of another school year most will encounter events, programming, and curriculum built around the tenth year anniversary of 9/11. Content will include paying honored respects to the victims and their families as well as interpreting the impact of the attacks on our nation’s history and identity. The events ten years ago will remain the defining moment of my generation and understanding how those events continue to shape the social and political landscape of our nation will be the responsibility of educators, politicians, and citizens alike.

As a professor of Islamic studies I will entertain a related (even if unwarranted) set of issues in the classroom because, whether we like it or not, Islam has become an indelible part of the culture and consciousness of 9/11. Ironically, the questions I regularly encounter have not actually changed much over the last ten years: Who was Muhammad, was he violent? What is Jihad? Why the scarves?

The problem isn’t about information. There is now a plethora of sophisticated resources available to educate the broader public about Islam. However, as the Center for American Progress has recently demonstrated, these resources are bettered by a sophisticated and well-financed misinformation campaign designed to singularly provoke fear and mistrust of Islam and Muslims. Even so, as I begin another semester teaching these subjects, I have come to accept that the limited capacity of public discourse to deal with Islam and the Muslim world isn’t about truths and untruths, media access, or political power. The problem is an epistemological one governed by what might be called the Dante/Deepak dichotomy and until we overcome this binary, I doubt a genuinely cosmopolitan and progressive post 9/11 America can be achieved.

The attacks on 9/11 unleashed a strain of anti-Muslim bigotry in this country that has roots not only in the classic structures of American racism and xenophobia but also in a centuries-old tradition of European anxiety with the Muslim world. Recall how the Italian poet Dante Alighieri depicted Muhammad suffering mutilation in the lowest depths of hell in his Divine Comedy. In the late 18th century such literary scenes were transformed into visual masterpieces by artists such as Gustave Dore. Dante and Dore were the inspiration, in turn, for the release of the first Italian feature length film, L’Inferno, in 1911 which became an outstanding success in the United States a year later. That the racist silent film The Birth of a Nation (which lionized the KKK and portrayed African Americans as unequivocally licentious) debuted at the White House just a few years later reminds us of an ever-looming undercurrent in American history.

While there is clearly much more to Dante’s epic poem than anti-Muslim angst, the embedded nature of such xenophobia into European and American national culture deserves recognition. Today, much of what manifests itself as anti-Shariah legislation, Muhammad cartoons, Quran burning, and the federally sanctioned policing of the Muslim community is a mere extension of these historic forces.

On the other hand the attacks of 9/11 have brought forth some of the best this nation has seen. I recall receiving flowers at the office door of our Muslim Student Association at the same time our members reported being spat on. Responding to such bigotry, civic leaders, faith-based coalitions, and academics charged the battle lines of public discourse in the best spirit of humanism to show that Islam, like all other religions, was at its core a force of good in the world corrupted by the ill-conceived actions of a few.

When opportunist authors and their presses released their provocations, Muslims and non-Muslim liberals launched their own visions of what Islam truly is. As universities around the country cut back hiring, departments in Islam and Arabic were funded enthusiastically.  New biographies of Muhammad and new translations of the Quran poured off the shelves. The minutest details of Islam’s origins and Muhammad’s life were the subject of documentaries and public forums. Even Deepak Chopra participated in the pluralist defense of Islam by writing a fictionalized account of Muhammad’s life and mission meant convey the humanism of Islam to a weary American audience. But as valiant as these efforts may be I am left wondering whether our society’s multicultural instincts are enough to get us out of the cultural quagmire 9/11 produced.

Between Dante and Deepak

Every Tuesday and Thursday morning this semester the product of this Dante/Deepak dichotomy sits before me in the form of 150 students. They are equipped with either their Dante-like prejudgments or their Deepak-like pluralist commitments looking for answers that will further their already hardened positions. For a swath in the middle the jury is still out and they look to me to answer, to level the playing field, to tell the truth: Who was Muhammad, was he violent? What is Jihad? and Why the scarves? It is precisely at this moment that all 150 of them turn on me…because, that is, I refuse to give them the cold hard answer they are looking for.

Islam is a religious tradition over fourteen centuries old that currently counts nearly a quarter of humanity among its adherents. As a civilizational force it has contributed to everything from water salinization and camera lenses to algorithms and medicine. I try to convey to my students that the first step to grasping the complexity of faith and history is precisely to forsake our quest for cold hard truths. Likewise, if America wants to deal with Islam after 9/11 we will have to let go of Dante and Deepak at the same time.

We will need to swallow the toughest parts of pluralism and see both the compatibility and contradiction of the Shariah with the Constitution, as we already do with countless other religious traditions. A post 9/11 America will need to know how and when to distinguish between the murderous acts of terror that mark the occasion of this anniversary and the spirited resistance of those choking under the heels of our empire. Our generation must be poised for a stout pragmatism that can manage gay marriage and Muslim face-veils in the same breath.

As an educator I am 100% certain that within six months 80% of my students will forget 90% of what they learn this semester. As a citizen I am sure that our society’s questions about Islam will not look much differently ten years from than they did ten years ago.

I am quite confident, though, that neither Dante nor Deepak will solve the problem.

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By Kenny Smith, Religion Bulletin

Towards the end of her fine essay in Mark C. Taylor’s Critical Terms for Religious Studies, Margaret R. Miles distinguishes between icons used in some Christian traditions (e.g., Eastern Orthodox) and the images of contemporary film. The latter, she argues, “function iconically” only when “viewers augment the image[s]… imagin[ing] how it would feel to be in the protagonist’s situation… the smells, the tastes, the touch the film character experiences… Moreover, Christians who use icons gaze at the same image again and again; most people see a film only once, though some people see a few films again and again.”

With respect to a great many Hollywood-generated images, Miles’ point is well taken: perhaps they typically do not “function iconically,” as her terminology would have it. But this situation may be shifting in important ways. As noted in a range of recent accounts, sites associated with contemporary films–such as the “life-size” statue of Jedi Master Yoda (pictured above) at Lucasfilm Studios beside the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco–are becoming important travel destinations for growing numbers. Increasingly, it seems, Americans (and folk from other nations as well) want to be in such places and to do those things that allow them to draw closer to beloved images.

Indeed, the range of (ritual?) performances at such sites is remarkable. Those who visit the Yoda statue may, for instance, bring their children who have “been raised on the Star Wars films,” hoping that they might “absorb Yoda’s teachings… through sheer proximity to the statue.” They may also visit other geographical locations where various scenes from the films were shot, such as Luke Skywalker’s childhood desert home (Tunesia), the salt flats over which R2D2 roamed (Death Valley), the forests through which Luke raced with Imperial Storm Troopers (Northern California), or be married where Padme and Anakin were married (Lake Como, Italy).

Nor is it exclusively images from the Star Wars genre that have received imitative performances. The Mansfield State Penitentiary and the surrounding town of Mansfield, Ohio, were Shawshank Redemption (1994) was filmed, have witnessed the emergence of a cottage industry catering to those who want to walk through Shawshank’s cells, be married in its courtyard, crawl through the faux sewage tunnel through which Tim Robbins’ character made his escape, or find the oak tree under which Morgan Friedman’s character discovered a secret message, map, and money left for him.

For someone interested in the emergence of new religious movements, this mode of social production becomes especially interesting when we think about how far might it come to extend.  Could the vast institutional (Christian and otherwise) religious mainstream (in America and elsewhere) come to explicitly incorporate transnationally-distributed Hollywood images that are already “functioning iconically”?  While this may strike many observers as entirely too “far out,” it is worth remembering -to return to Star Wars as one among many possible examples-that Jediist churches, orders, temples, academies, and so forth are flourishing in a variety of Western societies (e.g., Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the U.S.). We also have seen the explicit blending of Jedi-Christian and Jedi-Islamic traditions, and popular resources offering other possible syntheses (e.g. books like The Christian Wisdom of the Jedi Masters). The suggestion here is not that Jedi or other Hollywood images might come to dominate mainstream expressions as something imposed from without, but rather that they might come to infiltrate them from within, exerting a hermeneutical Force that could be with us religiously as well as cinematically.

******************

This article first published by  Religion Bulletin

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By J.F. Sullivan

While the 9/11 attacks are likely the dominant catalyst, it may be more appropriate to mark the mainstreaming of Islamaphobia with the emergence of Pamela Geller and the Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA) group in 2010.[1]  Their provocative ads, purported to protect Muslim converts to Christianity, read, “Leaving Islam? Fatwa on your head?  Is your family threatening you?”[2] 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q05Y5rlR8FQ

Their campaign was only a small part of what could be viewed as a larger response to the proposed Park 51 complex also known as Cordoba House and the Ground Zero Mosque.  Since this campaign, anti-Islamic actions, ideologies, and orientations—that should be considered Islamaphobic—have become increasingly more common and appear in startlingly diverse places. 

This mainstreaming is less about traditional purveyors of anti-Islamic rhetoric and Qur’an burning ministers, but is instead becoming a regular part of daily community life.  The true mystery is how little pushback there is America against this type of behavior.  So-called Islamic terrorists, extremists, jihadists, and others have long been the subject of anger, hate, and fear but this more recent activity is far less directed at a specific type of extremist, but rather at Islam in general and anyone or anything that seems to suggest something Islamic, no matter how tenuous or ridiculous the connection. 

A good term for this kind of thinking might be “freedom fries ideology” or maybe Voldemortizing.  In mainstreaming, the object of enmity is so scary or distasteful that none may speak its name or have anything to do with anything remotely connected to it.  The rub is that in their fear of the object of derision, they in turn often violate everything they claim to hold dear.

In recent months, an astounding number of Islamaphobic events have occurred with little more than a sotto voce “tsk tsk,” including a situation where a viable candidate for President of the United States (Herman Cain) freely made anti-Islamic comments and took an anti-Islamic position on national television—sadly without any discernible outrage. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsHZ1Z-qG2Y

This activity, combined with a host of other events ranging from numerous anti-Shari’a laws,  protestations against Mosque building,  and general protests of anything Islamic put a surprisingly significant number of our elected (and potentially elected) leaders in an ideological position to demean and discriminate against a segment of American citizens.  The real danger of this type of activity is that it is not directed at faceless “terrorists” in some foreign land, but right here at home with our neighbors and friends.  Teo Sagisman’s excellent essay, “The Day I was Called a ‘Sand Nigger’ by a Tea Party Follower“ is just one example of this.  More recently Whole Foods has come under fire for what some perceive as a pro-Islam position thanks to a supposed Ramadan marketing campaign that coincided with a halal-certified product line.

How this anti-Muslim sentiment has become so seemingly acceptable is largely the result of two elements – Russian Cold War villains and Religio-politics.  The first element is the easiest to understand.  Everyone needs an enemy; heroes can’t be heroic without an enemy of some sort.  For two generations, Russia played the role flawlessly before inconveniently falling.  Since that time, the search for a new Cold War like foe has been a particularly difficult bit of casting. 

Muslims were contenders for the role in the early 1990’s, but they didn’t gain the appropriate notoriety.  With no clear major player to cast, an ensemble of possible threats were assembled—jihadists, gays, liberals, conservatives and the Axis of Evil, to name a few.  Out of this mélange it seemed likely that gays could possibly fill the void left by the Cold War Russians.  After a great first season, gays proved to be far less scary than some had hoped, and the rhetoric which reached a fever pitch in 2004 devolved in something far less monolithic and became, what a majority of people seemed to feel was, mean-spirited.  Thus, a part of this mainstreaming of Islamaphobia may simply be the on-going search for new “Russians.”  However, the second element in this discussion may be far more illuminating. 

Culturally we tend not to tolerate deviance and bad language.  Many public figures can attest that their fall from grace resulted from a romantic indiscretion or public comment that seemed disparaging, marginalizing, anti-Semitic, or racist.  How is it then that Helen Thomas was basically fired for expressing an opinion that some considered anti-Semitic, while Herman Cain is free to state his intention to openly discriminate against Muslims in a nationally televised Republican Primary debate?[3]  NPR’s Juan Williams was held accountable for his anti-Islamic comments, but he simply moved his desk over to Fox News.  The case of anti-Semitic comments may reveal some answers to this issue of mainstream Islamaphobia.  Many of those who hold anti-Islamic ideology are ardent supporters of the nation of Israel, so the contradiction is particularly odd.  If however we re-imagine the debate about Islamaphobia in America in context with a cocktail of Religion, Politics, and Identity it begins to make sense. 

Individually these ingredients are perfectly capable of contributing to disharmony, but when combined and conflated, the composition drastically changes.  There have been growing concerns about the politicization of religion, and more recently the religionization of politics.  The concern arises when religious ideology and political ideology become conflated.  For example, Israel is a nation but it is also a Jewish state.  Therefore, anti-Israeli comments can be construed as anti-Semitic.  In this way, there is no difference between the Israeli national identity and the Jewish religious identity.  So too for perceptions of Islam and politics, which are often conflated by both Americans and Muslims.  Thus religious and political motivations, positions, and ideologies are seen as interchangeable.  With this mode of understanding, a political attack carried out by agents who happen to be Muslims is understood as an attack by Islam.  Conversely, an attack on Taliban political leadership is also an attack on Islam.  This same situation applies to nations like Iran, and potentially the United States as well. 

The perception of America as a Christian nation has been around for some time now, and has itself gone mainstream.  Take for example the recent dust-up over a Hindu statue of Ganesh in an Idaho art exhibit.  Although there is no perceived Hindu threat to America, the statue of Ganesh was seen by some as problematic specifically because it conflicted with the “Christian America narrative” by promoting a religion that was not Christianity. 

The conflation of politics and religion becomes especially flammable when identity is added to the mixture. [4]  As a result, political attacks become religious attacks and religious attacks become political attacks, and thanks to the politics of identity, those attacks become issues with potentially cosmic consequences.  Thus, what might be a simple political conflict escalates into a religious conflict that puts the eternal universe, or at the very least the fate of the free world, at stake. 

 

 In Terror in the Mind of God, Mark Juergensmeyer identifies this type of conflict a “Cosmic War.”  With this much at stake, it begs the question, what are you authorized to do to prevail in a conflict with potentially cosmic consequences?  If the answer is, “whatever you have to do,” then it authorizes any number of positions or activities that may have been unacceptable under any other circumstances.  As a result, perceived discriminatory positions or even hate-speech may be deemed acceptable in a fight for a Christian nation that is under attack by the forces of evil. Likewise, public figures cease to be common political entities and take on the role of “defenders of the faithful.”  And, if politics and religion have already been conflated, one who defends a political position is likewise defending a religious position.  Through this conflated lens, American patriotism can be identified as a Christian virtue just as preceived disloyalty to country can be viewed as un-Christian. 

Taken in this context, with the stakes amplified by identity, we can see why anti-Islamic rhetoric is allowed to continue and confrontations over mosques, Shari’a law, Ramadan, and halal-certified food become far more commonplace than anyone might expect.  After all, expressing too much outrage could have a host of negative consequences, not the least of which might be the association with and support of terrorists and terrorist ideology – “you are either with us or you are with the terrorists!”

The only way to remedy the mainstreaming of Islamaphobia is to make it as intolerable to American culture as any other form of inequality.  Unfortunately, this can only be accomplished through a combination of knowledge and applied critical thinking, both of which seem to be in increasingly short supply of late.

 

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