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Keeping the Eostre in Easter

religionnerd — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:45:40 +0000

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.”

Easter – Christian, Jewish, Pagan? By: Heather Abraham Easter (Pascha in Greek and Latin) is arguably the most important feast in the Christian liturgical year yet the modern Easter celebration is often associated with Jewish Passover as well as pagan imagery and deities. Is the modern ...
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Cannabis: The American Sacrament

religionnerd — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:00:44 +0000

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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

Cannabis Cafes of Amsterdam By Heather Abraham In an intriguing Religion Nerd article entitled Cannabis: The American Sacrament Kenny Smith examined America’s passion for cannabis and suggests that cannabis, if legalized in the United States, may come to function in ways comparable to other culturally ...
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Midsummer Day: A Once and Future Holy-Day?

religionnerd — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 03:00:05 +0000

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By Kenny Smith

In Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays, Leigh Eric Schmidt (Professor of American religious history at Harvard University) traces out some of the economic forces that have shaped the American understanding and experience of sacred time over the past three centuries. In 17^th century Puritan New England, he notes, holy-days were carefully segregated from the economic pursuits of the workaday world. The weekly Sabbath stood at the center of Puritan sacred time–they did not celebrate Christmas, Easter, or other traditional Christian holidays that smacked of Catholicism or Anglicanism–and represented an interruption of economic markets and the labors of ordinary life, directing the community toward prayer, personal reflection, religious education, and thanksgiving.

By the early 19^th century, Puritan understandings of holidays had given way to something quite different. In the wake of the industrial revolution, a vast array of commodities had become available for consumption, “from pottery to pets, from clocks to cutlery, from leisure and entertainment, to shaving and soap.” Alongside expanding inventories, “ever-expanding forms of advertising” emerged in order to match increased supply with increased demand. This larger economic context, Schmidt argues, exerted a powerful influence upon the ways in which holidays were culturally constructed and lived. Instead of representing a break with commercial endeavors, holidays offered heightened opportunities to move merchandise and maximize profits. More, national holidays that were celebrated in a uniform and predictable manner (e.g., Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Valentines Day, Independence Day, etc.), provided a reliable source of annual revenue for merchandisers, and thus became preferable to those that varied according to regional or ethnic affiliations. So strong did the link between holidays and commercial markets become that, by the early 20^th century, a number of still more holy-days (such as Candy Day, Sweetness Day, Poppy Day, Baby Week, Teacher’s Day, to name but a handful) had been proposed by industry advocates specifically to increase demand for related commercial products. To get a sense for how these dynamics play out today, one need only visit the local grocery and note the many “4^th of July” cakes, cookies, pies, napkins, drinking cups, hamburger patties, table clothes, party decorations, candles, T-shirts, and so forth, conveniently available for maximizing one’s enjoyment of the upcoming Independence Day celebrations.

That our modern-day holidays have been shaped by economic forces can prove a rather unsettling notion. We might find ourselves wondering not only about the new holidays we gained, but those we may have lost, in the commodification process. At the same time, it is worth acknowledging that cultural institutions are, like Heraclitus’ river, always in flux, always changing, and subject to any number of forces, economic, political, theological, astronomical, and even meteorological.

As British historian Ronald Hutton points out, ancient Northern European cultures celebrated, albeit in varied ways, the culmination of the summer months as sacred time. For many such peoples, divination, healing, and fertility practices (on both personal and collective levels), were rendered maximally productive during this time. Midsummer, Hutton writes,

represented the end of a solstice, the period in which the sun… [was] at the height of its strength, light at its longest… just before the days began to shorten again as the sun moved southward. In response to the swelling of heat and light, foliage and grasses were now likewise at their fullness… No wonder that it seemed to be a magical time to ancient Europeans (The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain).

While it is impossible to determine precisely when Midsummer was first marked as sacred time, it is almost certainly of distant pre-Christian origins. What is also virtually certain is that the early church developed its own liturgical calendar in ways that self-consciously appropriated and redefined (or usurped and distorted, depending upon one’s point of view) pagan Midsummer practices. Interestingly, both pagan and later Christian Midsummer rites included the lighting of festive fires and feasting as a popular custom, suggesting some manner of continuity. In any case, in the early centuries of Christian history (no later than the early 6^th century), pagan Midsummer was recast as The Feast of St. John, or St. John’s Day (although it continued to be known as Midsummer Day). The new Midsummer celebrated the birth of the biblical figure John the Baptist, said to have been born six months prior to Jesus of Nazareth (whose birthday was also set by the early church as falling on the winter solstice in December).

Although Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and some Protestant churches celebrate St. John’s Day, a Midsummer holiday has not gained widespread purchase within mainstream American culture. Wiccan and other Neo-Pagan communities are, of course, actively engaged in re-creating pre-Christian, pagan practices, cosmologies, and ways of being-in-the-world, which include Midsummer celebrations. For such communities, Midsummer (or Litha, as it is often called) is an exceptionally festive and mystical time. As one Wiccan website explains,

it celebrates the arrival of Summer, when the hours of daylight are longest… [and the] Sun is now at the highest point… The joyous rituals of Litha celebrate the verdant Earth in high summer, abundance, fertility, and all the riches of Nature in full bloom. This is a madcap time of strong magic and empowerment, traditionally the time for handfasting or weddings and for communication with the spirits of Nature. At Litha, the veils between the worlds are thin; the portals between “the fields we know” and the worlds beyond stand open. This is an excellent time for rites of divination. http://twopagans.com/holiday/Litha.html

It is interesting to note the ways in which contemporary Litha mirrors the scholarly account of ancient Midsummer offered above by historian Ronald Hutton. This is hardly accidental, as Neo-Pagans commonly look to the work of specialist scholars in re-creating ancient pagan traditions. To think comparatively, imagine a group of contemporary Christians who, rather than insisting that their own practices must surely have been those of Jesus of Nazareth and the early church (usually accomplished by a highly selective reading of the biblical text), actually looked to the work of scholars who possessed the requisite historical and linguistic skills to really know something about the early Christian world (such as Elaine Pagels, to cite but one stellar example) in attempting first to re-construct, from empirically grounded historical studies, how early Christians actually thought and practiced and lived, and then built their Christianities upon that.

This is not to suggest that all Wiccan and Neo-Pagan groups have carved out a privileged place for academic work, much less conflated the sacred and the academic. Most include the use of spiritually-guided intuition in their re-creative efforts, and emphasize the need to adapt ancient ways to the modern world in which they live. Some engage in what journalist Margot Adler has called “The Myth of Wicca,” the belief that the Wicca (or some other Neo-Pagan tradition) practiced today represents an unbroken religious tradition stretching back to Paleolithic times, about 35,000 years ago. Virtually all of the Wiccans and Neo-Pagans I have spoken with over the past decade, however, think about their traditions in a more sophisticated manner, recognizing that no religious tradition remains unchanged as the decades, much less the centuries or millennia, pass by. More, they are typically not frightened by scholarly studies that document the tremendous diversity within the ancient pagan world, or those elements that have been introduced into their traditions by modern founders such as Gerald Gardner (all of which of course suggests that what pagans do today is different than what was done in the past). Most start with the assumption (which is also argued by scholars such as Hutton) that their tradition represents something like what the ancients did, but surely differs in important ways as well.

I would like to press this point further still. Consider, for a moment, the further description of Midsummer rites offered below.

Those who celebrated Litha did so wearing garlands or crowns of flowers, and of course, their millinery always included the yellow blossoms of St. John’s Wort. The Litha rites of the ancients were boisterous communal festivities with… dancing, singing, storytelling, pageantry and feasting taking place by the village bonfire and torch lit processions through the villages after dark. People believed that the Litha fires possessed great power, and that prosperity and protection for oneself and one’s clan could be earned merely by jumping over the Litha bonfire. It was also common for courting couples joined hands and jump over the embers of the Litha fire three times to ensure a long and happy marriage, financial prosperity and many children. Even the charred embers from the Litha bonfire possessed protective powers – they were charms against injury and bad weather in harvest time, and embers were commonly placed around fields of grain and orchards to protect the crops and ensure an abundant reaping. Other Litha customs included carrying an ember of the Litha fire home and placing it on one’s hearth and decking one’s home with birch, fennel, St. John’s Wort… and white lilies for blessing and protection. http://twopagans.com/holiday/Litha.html

While this account displays nice continuities with Hutton’s description of ancient pagan practices, it also contains elements suggestive of Christian associations (e.g., references to St. John). My point here is that, in attempting to revive elements of an ancient paganism that was long ago blended with Christianity, might such re-creations inevitably contain some Christian elements? One suspects that they would. Of course, this need not pose a religious problem for Wiccans and Neo-Pagans (no more than Christian acknowledgements that ancient paganisms contributed much to their own spiritual path). Most acknowledge that history is a messy affair, and that it would be naïve to present one’s reconstructed tradition as “precisely how the ancients lived in pre-Christian times.”

So, what might be the likely future of Midsummer celebrations in America? While Neo-Pagan traditions are among the fastest growing in America over the past thirty years, and are currently estimated at 1.2% of the population (comparable to other sizable religious minorities, such as Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Jews), last week’s Midsummer was largely invisible to the broader culture. Still, given (as I have argued elsewhere) the longstanding American interest in pragmatic forms of religious-magic, and its ability to blend religious and cultural resources of different kinds, it seems at least plausible to imagine a Midsummer American holiday dedicated to personal and national prosperity, abundance, and fertility of various kinds. Thinking historically, perhaps the deciding factor will be its capacity to market and move merchandise: cakes, cookies, pies, napkins, drinking cups, hamburger patties, table clothes, party decorations, candles, T-shirts, and so forth, conveniently made available for maximizing one’s enjoyment of the Midsummer celebration.

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Keeping the Eostre in Easter 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, ...

Westboro Baptist Church And The Problematic Practice of Proof-Texting

religionnerd — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:55:30 +0000

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By: Heather Abraham

Last year I attended one of Westboro Baptist Church’s notorious demonstrations. The focus of this particular demonstration was not the funeral of a fallen soldier but a Jewish news organization located just north of Atlanta. Wanting to observe the dynamics of a Westboro demonstration, I attended this event with the intention of interviewing representatives of Westboro, as well as other attendees, in the hopes of gleaning information about Westboro’s movement that would expand on the seemingly mindless ranting that one finds on their website.

Although Fred Phelps, founder and leader of Westboro, was not in attendance, the Phelps family was represented by Fred’s grandson, Ben Phelps who arrived at the appointed time with two other adults and a child about 7 years of age. The demonstrators quickly exited their vehicles and made their way to an area the Sandy Springs police had earlier sectioned off for their use during the demonstration. The Westboro clan, including the young boy, mechanically held up their many signs in a curiously dispassionate and detached manner. As each demonstrator had more than one sign, they would automatically rotate signs seemingly trying to locate the sign that would elicit the most reaction from the passing vehicles. The young boy, holding an anti-Semitic sign, woodenly stood with an American flag under his right foot and a gay flag under his left.

Michael G.

In addition to the Westboro demonstrators, there were three other groups who contributed to the awkward dynamics of the event. Across from the Westboro clan, stood a solitary counter-protestor named Michael. Wearing a Marine t-shirt and holding a “Jesus was Jewish” sign, Michael, a local 17 year old high school junior, attended the demonstration to protest against Westboro’s hate filled anti-Semitic rant and to represent “mainstream Christians who support and embrace the Jewish community.” Michael related that he first became aware of Westboro through their “heartless demonstrations at the funerals of fallen soldiers who died protecting their country and the 1^st Amendment which provides Westboro’s right to put on these disgraceful demonstrations.” Standing at a “safe” distance from the fray a small group of onlookers, comprised of workers from surrounding buildings, representatives of the property owners, and a few who claimed they were there to “represent real Christians,” took up their post to observe anonymously. The final group in this seemingly benign drama consisted of the numerous, nameless, and boisterously verbal rush hour commuters who, caught off guard, reacted most vocally to the demonstrator’s signs. Throughout the 30 odd minute event, the otherwise quiet affair was peppered with honking horns and profanity bombs shouted from passing cars. Passing commuters, not prepared for a confrontation with Westboro’s notoriously offensive signs, reacted with a passionate indignation and a creative mixture of crude expressions appreciated by some onlookers.

After spending some time with several small groups of onlookers, I joined the Westboro demonstrators; speaking with Ben Phelps about Westboro’s presence in Atlanta. Unfortunately, I was quickly “treated” to a summary of Westboro’s anti-Semitic, anti-homosexual, and anti-American propaganda. Phelps’ robotic regurgitation of carefully chosen and horrifically distorted scriptural verses left me more than a little troubled. His mindless rant, devoid of any semblance of rational thinking, left me to ponder how this experience could possibly be an informing one.

After wrestling with my personal response to this troublesome spectacle, I determined that if I wrote a Religion Nerd article about the event, I would not give an account of Phelps’ hateful tirade (which can be found verbatim on the Westboro website) but would use this opportunity to introduce a new topic to Religion Nerd readers; the often problematic practice of proof-texting.

Proof –texting is a method by which a person or group utilizes specific text (in this instance biblical text), taken out of context, to justify or authenticate a specific religious claim or view. Although understood primarily as Protestant practice, some would argue that proof-texting was used by early Christian leaders to read into the Hebrew bible the foretelling of the advent of Jesus; locating verses that would support and authenticate the evolving Christ narrative.

Although a media savvy organization, Westboro’s “message” rests exclusively on specific cherry picked biblical verses that can, radically taken out of context, be construed to support their religious and political worldview. In the hands of the Westboro clan, proof-texting is a manipulative process in which fragmented verses, void of the meaning of the whole, are used to construct “biblical” grounds for attacking any group that comes under Fred Phelps’ angry gaze. For the Westboro propaganda machine, the holy bible becomes a holy weapon used to harass, humiliate, and dehumanize.

This brings me to the questions of the day: How has proof-texting (religiously based or not) entered mainstream American politics, culture, or how is it used by corporations? What impact does it have on our daily lives?

For more on Phelps and Westboro Baptist Church check out Heather’s article “Westboro Baptist Church: Religion Gone Wrong.” (See link below)

Special Thanks to the Sandy Springs Police Department who so graciously provided me with total access to the event

Westboro Baptist Church: Religion Gone Wrong By: Heather Abaham I am sure most Religion Nerd readers have, by now, heard of the infamous Fred Phelps, founder and leader of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas. If not, you will be briefed and up to speed on Phelps’ ...
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The Religious Theft of Sacred Culture?

religionnerd — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 10:05:53 +0000

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By Kenny Smith

In her Religion Nerd piece, Rise of the Jedi Religion, Heather Abraham introduced us to a new religious movement grounded in the mythic figure of the Jedi Knight, a central component of George Lucas’ famously popular Stars Wars saga. Jediism, she tells us, “is the fourth largest religion in the UK,” and is likewise “thriving in many other English speaking countries,” numbering in the tens of thousands in New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and the United States.

Dudeism Symbol

This is clearly a remarkable state of affairs, that a series of commercial films should serve as the foundation for a religious tradition that resonates with impressive numbers across a diverse landscape! For observers of contemporary religion and culture, the return of the Jedi (this time in explicitly religious guise) leaves us with an intriguing puzzle. Has the transition from a series of Hollywood blockbusters to a popular religious pathway rendered the figure of the Jedi (and perhaps other elements of the Star Wars universe) sacred? That is, is the emergence of Jediism a matter of something secular being made into something sacred? Or, was the image of the Jedi Knight able to serve as the basis for a religious movement precisely because it already functioned as sacred within the broader culture? This essay explores these questions by looking at a range of religious communities, both old and new, that seem to have borrowed from popular culture in important ways.

Take, for instance, the new religious movement known as Dudeism, or more formally, The Church of the Latter-Day Dude. Based upon the teachings and example of the character Jeffrey Lebowski (played by Jeff Bridges) in the Coen Brothers’ 1998 classic film, The Big Lebowski, Dudeism teaches a largely passive, hedonistic approach to life emphasizing personal authenticity and the cultivation of pleasures that can be enjoyed without engaging in exhaustive levels of work, competition, and anxieties about the future. As one Dudeist website explains:

Life is short and complicated and nobody knows what to do about it. So don’t do anything about it. Just take it easy, man. Stop worrying so much whether you’ll make it into the finals. Kick back with some friends and some oat soda and whether you roll strikes or gutters, do your best to be true to yourself and others–that is to say, abide.” (http://www.dudeism.com/whatisdudeism.html)

While Dudeists seem quite clear that their tradition is grounded in a fictional narrative, that fact has done little to undermine its attractiveness as a path of spiritual liberation from what is perceived as an overly complex and deeply troubled society. As of 2009, this tradition claimed some 60,000 Dudeist ministers worldwide, an online newspaper, a range of texts and articles linking Dudeism to the great sages of world history (such as Lao-tzu, Heraclitus, Buddha, Jesus, and Jerry Garcia), and a soon-to-open Dudeist University. Perhaps paradoxically, Dudeists seem to have worked rather diligently to present their tradition as an authentic spiritual path maximally relevant to our times. While it is difficult to predict what the future will hold for this tradition, the philosophy, ethos, and good news of The Big Lebowski seem to offer a coherent, and fulfilling, religious worldview to significant numbers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYUD6vs0pg4

In the case of both Jediism and Dudeism, entirely new religious traditions have been created wholesale from the cloth of popular culture. In other cases, key elements are borrowed from popular culture and grafted onto pre-existing religious traditions, resulting in equally innovative and to some degree “new” versions of these traditions, which their critics typically regard as humorous or horrifying.

One superb example are the Klingons for Christ. Founded by Michael James Oetting from a desire to “share the Gospel with non-believers” and “to clear up any misconceptions about Christians or Christianity,” the Klingons for Christ hope to evangelize those “who take the time to dress, look, act, and even speak the language of the mythical aliens,” that is, those attending Star Trek conventions as Klingons. This however is not a superficial sales-pitch in which evangelical Christianity is merely dressed up to appeal to Star Trek fans. Oetting perceives real and important theological affinities connecting evangelical Christianity and the teachings of “Kahless,” an originary Klingon hero who, after slaying the first Klingon deities, established Klingon society according to a set of ruthless (though honorable, it is said) warrior codes, and departed the Klingon world to return (in messianic form) at some future point. “After a thorough examination of the Bible,” Oetting writes, any Klingon would see that “the message of [Jesus] is the same as that of [Kahless], it is all about honor, duty, and obedience.”

A growing community seems to find a Klingon/Christian synthesis compelling, as a range of websites that further develop Oetting’s theological insights attests. The Klingons for Christ Jesus, for example, teaches that,

Klingons accept the teachings of Christ as part of a warrior tradition. Christ brings not peace, but a sword… [He] did not run from pain; he welcomed it…. He defeated his enemies…. Christianity is a warrior’s religion. It offers the Klingon enemies worth fighting: Sin, Death, Satan and his legions. (http://clancmsf.tripod.com/KlingonsForChrist.html)

Such websites also offer a range of passages that are considered central to the biblical message, typically emphasizing war, violence, and the military domination of one’s perceived foes. Some of these passages have even been transliterated into the Klingon language, though a complete effort to render the entire Bible in Klingon is yet to be achieved.

Interestingly, some mainstream Christian commentators have begun to make cognitive room for this highly imaginative version of their tradition. In “Good News for the Klingon Race,” Glen F. Proechel notes that, while some may feel that such movements represent “a monumental waste of time,” for those who watch Star Trek “it will be reassuring to have God’s Word in a medium that speaks to them.” {Bible Collectors’ World, Oct./Dec. 1994, http://www.biblecollectors.org/articles/klingon_bible.htm}

Pagano

We need not look to religious movements inspired by science fiction to find evidence of borrowing from popular culture. On June 27, 2009 Ken Pagano, pastor of New Bethel Church in Louisville, Kentucky, held an Open Carry Celebration “in which visitors and parishioners were invited to bring their firearms to church.” Pagano rejects what he considers “a maudlin, sentimental view of Jesus Christ… a limp-wristed preacher” who refuses to stand up for the right of individuals to protect themselves by use of lethal force if necessary. Instead, Pagano teaches that Jesus is best understood as “a navy seal, a force recon marine, or a green beret.” Consequently, the right to bear (and use) firearms becomes, in Pagano’s view, a fundamental Christian value. (Joseph Laycock, Understanding the Open Carry Celebration, Sightings, July 9, 2009).

While it is perhaps easier to see what Oetting has borrowed from popular culture and sewn into his evangelical Christianity, I would argue that Pagano has also appropriated an enormously popular symbol from the broader culture. In fact, Pagano has brought into his Christianity something that, for significant portions of Americans, was already and independently deeply sacred: guns. As Emory scholar Gary Laderman points out, for many Americans (both now and in past generations) guns have been sacred “because they are intimately linked with the redemptive power to confront fundamental dangers that are perceived to be constantly present in American life, like individual crimes, which may require self-defense, or government tyranny, that may require revolutionary actions from armed citizens” (Sacred Matters: Celebrity Worship, Sexual Ecstasies, the Living Dead, and Other Signs of Religious Life in the United States, p. 133). As with the Klingon movement, it is worth noting the ways in which Pagano’s theology and ethics develop in new ways when notions from the broader culture–be they Klingons or handguns–are incorporated.

Similar dynamics are evident in the teachings of Marc Driscoll, founder of Mars Hill church, a Seattle-based mega-church with nearly 7,600 members, that is currently “planting” hundreds of new churches nationwide.

Driscoll’s teachings include a return to a Predestinationist theology (i.e., the view, popular among early Protestants in the 16^th-19^th centuries, that God has determined from the very beginnings of time who will enter heaven and who will be damned forever to hell), but also elements expressly drawn from popular culture, such as the wildly popular film, Fight Club. To be clear, unlike the characters in Fight Club, church members do not engage strangers in fist fights, nor do they live communally in abandoned houses, planting explosives in public buildings. What is taken from Fight Club, however, is an aggressive, “hyper-masculinized” sense of Christian identity. From Driscoll’s perspective, the mainstream church “has transformed Jesus into ‘a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ,’ a ‘neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell.’” What is needed to correct this “feminization” of Christianity, he teaches, is precisely the kind of confrontational ethos exemplified in Fight Club.

Driscoll

A Fight Club-Christianity is, apparently, lived at Mars Hill in a variety of ways. Driscoll is known for his especially frank, adult-only sermons on topics such as “Biblical Oral Sex” and “Pleasing Your Spouse,” his tolerance for typically unorthodox behaviors such as swearing, smoking tobacco, and body piercings, as well as his highly authoritarian style of leadership. In her article, Who Would Jesus Smack Down?, for instance, journalist Molly Worthen relates the following narrative:

In 2007, two elders protested a plan to reorganize the church that, according to critics, consolidated power in the hands of Driscoll and his closest aides. Driscoll told the congregation that he asked advice on how to handle stubborn subordinates from a ‘mixed martial artist and Ultimate Fighter, good guy’ who attends Mars Hill. ‘His answer was brilliant,’ Driscoll reported. ‘He said, ‘I break their nose.’

Again, this is not to suggest that pastor Driscoll physically batters church members who question his way of thinking. Nor is it the case that Driscoll’s Christianity can be reduced in some simplistic way to nothing more than the influence of the Fight Club film, which is clearly only one of many different influences upon Driscoll’s religious teachings. At the same time, that the Mars Hill community understands itself as a Christian reflection of the Fight Club universe suggests that, in incorporating this element of popular culture, this community’s sense of what it means to live a proper Christian life has shifted in significant ways, ways that incorporate the brusque, hyper-masculinized sense of identity, ethos, and behavior, so prevalent in the Fight Club film. Borrowing form popular culture always has consequences.

Concluding Thoughts

Each of these examples can be seen as pointing back to the question with which we began. Are these instances in which something secular has simply been made into something sacred, whether that be Jedi Knights, the Dude, Klingons, guns, or ethos of Fight Club? Or is something more going on here? Could it be the case that each of these cultural icons was already functioning as sacred within the broader culture and that this is precisely why they were either made into formal religions or appropriated by pre-existing religious communities?

I believe that the evidence points in the direction of the latter. While The Big Lebowski was relatively unsuccessful in terms of box-office returns and monetary gains, it quickly developed “cult” status within a dedicated subculture (see, for instance, The Big Lebowski Fest website). Klingons, as part of Gene Roddenberry’s imaginary Star Trek universe, represent a paradigm example of a subculture demarked by distinctive styles of dress and behavior, and also its own language (see the Klingon Language Institute). The sacred nature of guns in the American imagination, of course, needs little additional argument. And even a casual on-line search for “Fight Clubs near you” will, in fact, turn up numerous sites for fight-clubbing.

If these cultural elements were already functioning as sacred prior to their being “made into” something explicitly religious, it becomes rather clear why they were appropriated in the first place. It may well be that religious institutions need to take new elements from popular culture in order to remain relevant to changing historical conditions. Hence, new religions rather naturally emerge out of important cultural ideas and practices. This is certainly what happened with reports of “flying saucers” that first emerged en mass in the late 1940’s; by the early 1950’s, explicitly religious movements offering spiritual teachings from space visitors were on the scene. More subtly, pre-existing religious traditions take in and re-contextualize key elements from popular culture, and then quickly forget that this transition has occurred; Klingons, guns, and a Fight Club ethos become obviously Christian.

This, by the way, explains why we are not seeing “MacGyver for Christ,” or “Carry Your Broom to Church” celebrations. I suspect it is precisely because these things do not already and independently function as sacred within the broader culture (though the broom might for some playful Wiccan communities!) that they are not attractive symbols to creative religious thinkers. They do not seem like cultural resources that could, or should, be incorporated.

In any case, if my analysis is correct, we should expect to see continued and creative appropriations of sacred cultural resources across a wide range of religious traditions and communities. “Vampires for Christ,” anyone?

Rise of the Jedi Religion By Heather Abraham Did you know that Jediism is the fourth largest religion in the UK? That’s right, adherents to the Jedi religion followed Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in the 2001 census ranking fourth with 0.79% of the population. The Jedi ...
Rise of the Jedi By: Heather Abraham Did you know that Jediism is the fourth largest religion in the UK? That’s right, adherents to the Jedi religion followed Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in the 2001 census ranking fourth with 0.79% of the population. The Jedi Knight ...

Battle of the Burqa

religionnerd — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 09:26:09 +0000

Get Shareaholic

By Heather Abraham

Recent news reports and articles concerning France’s attempt to ban the wearing of certain modes of Islamic “veiling” in public is more than just the latest example of Western anti- Islamic sentiment. As John Sullivan wrote in his Religion Nerd article entitled The Muslims are Coming, this

anti-Muslim sentiment has fallen in with the same “we’re losing the country” mentality that led to the [U.S.] Arizona anti-immigration laws. The issue at the heart of these challenges is identity. (http://wp.me/pTCyD-eW )

I agree with John that identity is at the heart of the matter; the identity of the immigrants as well as the identity of the adoptive parent nation. The veil, Islam’s most controversial symbol, is not the primary issue but has come to symbolize the clash between western secular society and the determined attempt of Muslims to push back against secular cultures that are uncomfortable with public and political displays of religious devotion. Let’s face it, the veil makes many of us uncomfortable; especially for those from secular societies.

Today, the veil, in all its forms, represents Muslim identity and solidarity. In many western countries the veil identifies the wearer as the other, separate and not equal in the eyes of frightened westerners who fear for their homogeneous cultural and secular identity. For Europe, these others are seen as a threat to their cultural, political, and secular identity and many European countries including, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Germany have miserably failed (if not refused) to assimilate their Muslim populations and are now paying a heavy price.

Germany for example, home to the largest population of Muslim Turks outside of Turkey, denied its Turkish “workers” any semblance of belonging for generations. In the years following the catastrophic events of WWII, Germany was in desperate need of able bodied male workers and extended an open invitation to Turkish citizens to come to Germany as guest workers and help rebuild the German infrastructure and economy. Tens of thousands of mostly rural Turks flooded into Germany attracted by the promise of economic prosperity. Generations later, the children and grandchildren of these guest workers were still denied German citizenship and full citizen rights. Like immigrants in the United States today, Germany’s Turks faced opposition and anti-immigrant attitudes for decades. It was only recently, in 2000, that Germany finally began the process of assimilating their ethnic Turkish population by allowing children born in Germany to become German citizens as long as one parent was a legal resident for a minimum of eight years.

For forty years, Germany denied German born Turks and their Turkish parents citizenship; keeping the German Turks in a liminal state for decades. Not fully accepted as Turkish by the Turks nor fully accepted by their country of birth, many of these “German Turks” embraced an exaggerated sense of Muslim identity; the only stable identity available to them. In failing to assimilate their Muslim populations, many European nations have created a divisive atmosphere of suspicion and fear.

Veiling, more specifically, the burqa is an extreme version of a cultural practice which has been embraced by some Muslims as a symbol of defiance to western domination and secularism. As an American, I am uncomfortable with any country targeting a specific group or limiting personal freedom but I can understand the security concerns that the burqa presents. Throughout Europe and the Middle East, there have been more than a few instances where criminals have used the burqa to elude authorities and god forbid that a burqa wearing woman get behind the wheel of a car. Contrary to popular belief, the burqa is a garment worn by few Islamic women and is a relatively new and radicalized addition to the various modes of Islamic veiling. Although the majority of Muslim women do not practice any form of veiling, the veil has become the symbol of resistance of those who reject secularism and a feared if not hated symbol to those who fear radical Islamic political power.

Sadly and most ironically, it is the women who have to wear or should I say endure this strangely shapeless mode of clothing that not only disguises one’s individuality but additionally dehumanizes the wearer. How many times have I used the term burqa and yet never mentioned the woman beneath it? Food for thought, the primary issue at hand is identity and yet the burqa obliterates any personal identity of the wearer who, nameless and faceless, becomes an anonymous casualty in a politicized clash of cultures.

This brings me to the questions of the day: Do we really need to construct reasons to hate one another in order to feel comfortable with our own identity and how much of our own identity rests with our placement or categorization of the other?

Europe’s Battle of the Burqa By Heather Abraham Last week's numerous news reports and articles concerning France's attempt to ban the wearing of certain modes of Islamic "veiling" in public is more than just the latest example of Western anti- Islamic sentiment. As John Sullivan wrote ...
To Veil or Not to Veil? By: Heather Abraham This posting was inspired by a Religion Nerd subscriber who posed the following question: Approximately what percentage of Muslims wear the full burka? In attempting to answer this challenging and complex question I will first give a brief ...

Slot Machines as Spiritual Teachers and Supernatural Investment Strategies: When Religion Waxes Magical

religionnerd — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:26:04 +0000

Get Shareaholic

By: Kenny Smith

Not far from our house is a Baptist church known for its entertaining roadside marquee, offering such spiritual chestnuts as, “THIS YEAR, WE WILL NOT BE UNDER-SOULED!,” weekend workshops in “HOW TO SURVIVE THE END TIMES,” and, during the dog-days of summer, admonishments like, “YOU THINK IT’S HOT HERE?” In truth, sign-designers in our community frequently stumble over their advertisements, yielding hysterical faux pas such as the car wash offering “30-minute hand jobs $40,” and the automobile repair shop with a religious message placed just a bit too close to its commercial identity:

MR. TRANSMISSION

IF YOU ACKNOWLEDGE HIM, HE WILL GUIDE YOU

More recently, this same church billboard exhorted drivers-by to “P.U.S.H.,” that is, “PRAY UNTIL SOMETHING HAPPENS!” This seemed an appropriation of the images and ideas offered in the recent and popular film Push (2009), which featured a host of characters sporting paranormal abilities to move and control physical objects with their minds. More, I found it reminiscent of the many church signs I noticed in my travels in northern Virginia several years ago during a period of terrible drought. These often read something like, “PRAYER MEETING WEDNESDAY NIGHT: LET’S MAKE IT RAIN!”

This kind of religious language raises some interesting questions about the relationship between religion and what has typically been referred to as “magic.” In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, scholars believed that religion and magic represented two quite different forms of human behavior. For George James Frazier, author of The Golden Bough (1890) and still today one of the most familiar names in comparative mythology, religion involved the supplication of divine forces, magic was their compulsion. Devout religious souls pleaded with and patiently waited for God to intervene, while wielders of occult crafts pressed divine energies into their service. In the work of French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, religion was considered to be collective in nature, bringing communities together and reinforcing societal bonds, while magic was the domain of the lone practitioner. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski saw religion as answering fundamental questions of existence, whereas magic resolved concrete and practical issues in the lives of its users.

Though contemporary scholars tend to be suspicious of such sweeping generalizations, magical beliefs and practices continue to be perceived as set apart from mainstream religion and culture. But might it be the case that magical beliefs and practices are intimately interwoven within mainstream religion and culture? In exploring this possibility, I look beyond church advertisements to two quite popular religious/spiritual teachers, Tolly Burkan (the founder of the American firewalking movement), and Pat Robertson, the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and its most popular and long-running daily television show, The 700 Club.

Slot Machines as Spiritual Teachers

In Extreme Spirituality: Radical Journeys for the Inward Bound, Tolly Burkan describes a wide range of practices he has found to be spiritually efficacious. In addition to walking barefoot on red-hot coals and shards of broken glass, these include: breaking boards and bricks with bare hands, passing sewing needles through the physical body, smelling highly disagreeable odors, snapping pointed arrows with one’s throat, and using slot machines as biofeedback devices. Yes, he’s serious.

Of his spiritual explorations with slots machines, Burkan writes, “[t]oday, slot machines are controlled by a computer chip known as a Random Event Generator,” and these chips have been shown to respond to the power of human thought. “By paying attention to our thoughts while sitting in front of a slot machine, we can find out what it is that we do with our minds that keeps us cut off from receiving grace and love.” Thus, he explains,

I experimented, visualizing angels, calling upon Jesus, even imagining I was Jesus. I practiced forgiveness, offered gratitude for grace, sang silent hymns, laughed, and cried. At the moment I thought my heart was open, I would put a coin in the slot machine and pull the handle. If money came out, that indicated my heart was indeed open…. If nothing came out, that was a signal to work a little more. (p. 42-3)

Having begun to master this spiritual discipline, Burkan continues, “I decided to process my relationship with my former wife. I began forgiving her for all the incidents that I had been holding onto for so long…. I began to appreciate those qualities in her that are extraordinary.” Determined to have his heart “open completely,” he promised to give ten percent of all his winnings to his former wife. When winnings were not immediately forthcoming, this in turn prompted him “to go deeper and deeper” into his own psyche, provoking a series of insights.

A part of me was still competing with her… still trapped in jealousy, and so of course the machine paid nothing…. In a subtle way, I discovered that I really didn’t want to give her the money I had promised… I could fool myself, but I couldn’t fool the slot machine. It, like everything else in the universe, was an expression of God…. an empty mirror reflecting everything within myself…. I finally was able to ferret out every obstacle keeping me from opening my heart completely to my ex-wife. If she wasn’t winning, then our daughter, Amber, wouldn’t win. And if Amber didn’t win, I couldn’t win…. I took out my checkbook and wrote her a large check. Regardless of what happened with the slot machine, I would give it to her. In went a coin, down went the handle, and of course, out came a jackpot! (pp. 42-45)

Burkan’s narrative reflects a number of ideas typically associated with New Age thought, the belief that everything in the universe is comprised of divinity, mirrors back to us our own inner psychological dynamics, and thereby empowers us to create our own realities by altering what we think, feel, and believe. God wants all of us to win, this view teaches, experiencing precisely the life we choose to experience, and the path to so doing involves clearing out any psychological and emotional obstacles that bar the way.

As mainstream media coverage attests, this intermingling of the spiritual, the psychological, and the economic, resonates with a significant portion of Americans. Burkan’s workshops, for which participants pay hundreds, even thousands of dollars, are typically full to overflowing.

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

A Supernatural Investment Strategy

In The Secret Kingdom: Your Path to Peace, Love, and Financial Security, and in numerous programs and materials available on CBN and its premier television show, The 700 Club, evangelist Pat Robertson presents what he takes as a fundamental principle for personal transformation, the “law of reciprocity.” This principle,

is quite evident in the physical world: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Smile at another person, and he’ll probably smile back at you. Be critical of others, and they’ll respond in kind. As you give, you will receive. Give generously, and you’ll receive in like measure. (p. 114)

Robertson grounds this “law” not only in everyday reasoning, but in the history and authority of western scientific discovery, as a “basic law of physics” built into the universe and eventually discovered by pragmatically oriented human beings to marvelous effect. Early scientists, he explains, must have noticed that, “‘[i]f we can push a jet of hot air out the back end of an engine, there has to be an equal and opposite reaction going forward,” and thus they “produced rocket engines able to generate enough backward thrust to provide forward speeds necessary to break the hold of gravity and send machines and men into outer space.” (p. 114)

When applied to one’s personal life, the law of reciprocity has far reaching consequences. If we want a higher salary in our jobs, we must start by giving generously of our own resources. Like the backward thrust that propels jet engines forward, our own giving naturally produces a series of beneficial results, whereas failure to do so results in a failure to receive what we desire. “Those with good salaries are not people who sit back and scheme and spend all their time thinking of ways to promote themselves. The people who are recognized in an organization are those who work harder, think more creatively, and act more forcefully in behalf of the enterprise. They give.” (p. 116) Importantly, for Robertson, we must not merely give, but do so freely and with a proper attitude. “Those who give in meanness or anger or trouble will get it back…. Anyone who is critical, constantly faulting others and cutting associates, will not rise to the top. He will get back what he gives. The one who makes his department look good, including his boss, is the one who will get the salary increase he needs. ‘The way you give to others is the way God will give to you.’ That’s a law.” (p. 117)

It is at this point that Robertson recommends the related practice of tithing, which he defines as the consistent “giving to the Lord” of at least ten percent of all the wealth that one receives. This includes one’s weekly paycheck, inheritances, returns on stocks and bonds, profits from the sale of property, and so forth. Citing a range of biblical passages, he argues that tithing is something the Lord takes very seriously. For,

He has gone to great lengths to teach us how things work. If we want to release the superabundance of the kingdom of heaven, we must first give… tithes and offerings to the Lord…. Your return, poured into your lap, will be great, pressed down, and running over.

Tithing, then, is not only biblically required, but an investment strategy yielding miraculous results. Whereas investing in human financial systems yields dividends of five to twenty percent, tithing is said to see returns of “3,000 percent, 6,000 percent, and 10,000 percent.” (p. 118) Robertson’s book, the CBN website, and The 700 Club, offer numerous testimonials from those whose finances and careers have been transformed (as they see it) by way of their tithing. These stories tell not only of vastly increased personal finances, but also of physical diseases, families, and inner mental and emotional selves, that have been set as ease.

American Religious Magic

Given the individualism, perfectionism, optimism, and pragmatism historically so prevalent within American culture, it is hardly surprising that even those religious teachers that would seem to have little in common would develop along lines that reflected these traits. Both Burkan and Robertson offer a highly democratic conception of the divine. It is easily accessible to everyone through straightforward, common sense means. It always and reliably returns to us “what we put out there,” whether this be positive thoughts and emotions or eagerly given tithes. Precisely because it is reliable, both thinkers make use of the divine order in much the same way that scientists make use of other cause and effect relationships. For both Burkan and Robertson, then, the universe is largely mechanical in nature: if we put X in, pull the right levers in the right way, we should get X_xback!

Such observations shred the theories of Frazier, Durkheim, Malinowski, and other scholars who have tried to drive a wedge between religion and magic. The teachings of Burkan and Robertson involve both: asking for divine intervention and actively making use of divine powers for our own purposes (and to miraculous effect, apparently!); bringing communities together (e.g., in workshops and churches, as book readers and website viewers) and the work of lone individuals; addressing fundamental questions of human existence and the particular and concrete needs of individuals. Lastly, taken together, teachings like those of Burkan and Robertson reach, and resonate with, very large portions of Americans, some of whom see themselves as religious, others as spiritual seekers, and some as neither.

Slot Machines as Spiritual Teachers and Supernatural Investment Strategies: When Religion Waxes Magical By: Kenny Smith Not far from our house is a Baptist church known for its entertaining roadside marquee, offering such spiritual chestnuts as, “THIS YEAR, WE WILL NOT BE UNDER-SOULED!,” weekend workshops in “HOW TO SURVIVE THE END TIMES,” and, during ...
Firewalking as Spiritual Transformation In addition to our regular academic explorations, commentaries, and news articles, Religion Nerd also offers a forum for the "Religious Insider.” Insider accounts offer RN readers an intimate opportunity to "hear" the voice of those within a particular tradition or practice. ...

Vatican Smokescreen Maneuver: The Dreaded Delicta Graviora

religionnerd — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 05:05:40 +0000

Get Shareaholic

By Heather Abraham

While Vatican watchers and the Catholic faithful have been expecting a preview of the updated procedural “norms” that are expected to be officially released later this summer, many were shocked at the Vatican’s latest stance on the subject of women’s ordination. According to the Catholic News Service, many of the anticipated procedural revisions center on issues relating to the decades-long sexual abuse scandals that have been periodically erupting in parishes worldwide.

Although the Vatican declared the sexual abuse of minors to be “delicta graviora” in 2001, victims and Vatican watchers were hoping that the Church would make progressive changes in official guidelines in regards to holding both offenders and Church officials who abetted the crimes responsible. The announced revisions include subtle expansion of the current norms to include:

An extension of the church’s statute of limitations for penal actions against those accused of sexual abuse of minors—allowing victims to come forth up to 20 years after their 18^th birthdays.
Child pornography will be included under the category of sexual abuse of minors.
The sexual abuse of mentally disabled adults is analogous to the sexual abuse of minors.

Interestingly, the Vatican is silent on the issue of holding bishops, who participate in cover ups, accountable to victims and the law. David Gibson of Politics Daily reported that “the changes are seen as fairly minor concessions in a decades-long battle to push Rome to act forcefully against abusers.” Considering the fierce fire the Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI have come under since the most recent sexual abuse scandals hit mainstream media, many are disappointed, but not surprised, with the Vatican’s modest gestures.

What is surprising to many, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, is the Vatican’s renewed and intensified condemnation of the ordination of women. The new norms will declare any attempted ordination of women to be comparable to sexual abuse of children or delicta graviora. This decision is more than a little suspicious given its timing and the fact that excommunication is already automatic for any woman who attempts ordination and any priest who may assist in said ordination. Could the Vatican be that removed from reality? Is it possible that the “good old boys” from Vatican City actually believe that an attempted ordination of a woman is on par with the raping of a child?

Bryan Cones, of U.S. Catholic Magazine, argues that the Vatican’s latest proclamation against the ordination of women, at a time when it should have been sculpting more stringent and forceful penalties for sexual offences by church officials,

conflates two completely separate issues, and in effect, or at least in the minds of many people who will read the news, seems to equate the “attempted ordination of women” with the rape and torture of children. Quite frankly, it is an outrage to pair the two, a complete injustice to connect the aspirations of some women among the baptized to ordained ministry with what are some of the worst crimes that can be committed against the least of Christ’s members.

Instead of fully concentrating on the issue at hand, sexual abuse, the Vatican seems out of touch and more interested in prohibiting women from gaining any place of authority within the Catholic Church. Although there are tens of thousands of victims living with the betrayal and trauma of sexual abuse perpetrated by the trusted local parish priest; the Vatican is more concerned with the possible “threat” posed by women who are simply motivated by a deep and abiding love for their religious tradition.

This nonsensical aligning of the ordination of women with the crimes of sexual abuse, in my mind, illustrates not only that the “good old boys” are out of touch but that the Church desperately needs the presence of women in positions of power to counterbalance the archaic traditions and mindset eating away at the heart of the church. Victims and advocates demanded accountability and responsible action but in turn were presented with a half hearted effort on the part of the Vatican which is more concerned with maintaining their exclusive all male fraternity. I predict this latest smokescreen maneuver may stimulate even more support for women desiring ordination. Stay tuned for updates!

Sources:

Catholic News Service: www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1002827.htm
Politics Daily: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/07/07/vaticans-new-rules-against-child-sex-abusers-to-maintain-status/
U.S. Catholic Magazine: www.uscatholic.org/blog/2010/07/sex-abuse-and-womens-ordination

Mary Magdalene and Female Authority in the Early Church By Kate Daley-Bailey
Mary Magdalene
In her article Vatican Smokescreen Maneuver: The Dreaded Delicta Graviora, Heather Abraham writes compellingly about the unusual pairing of the ordination of women with sexual abuse of children under “delicta graviora” in the ...
Conservative Belgian Archbishop in Eye of Storm By Robert Wielaard, Associated Press via USA Today BRUSSELS — He calls AIDS a form of "justice" for homosexuals and wants retired pedophile priests to go unpunished. He says women who have an abortion will be greeted in the afterlife by ...

Europe’s Battle of the Burqa

religionnerd — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:04:47 +0000

Get Shareaholic

By Heather Abraham

Last week’s numerous news reports and articles concerning France’s attempt to ban the wearing of certain modes of Islamic “veiling” in public is more than just the latest example of Western anti- Islamic sentiment. As John Sullivan wrote in his Religion Nerd article of yesterday entitled The Muslims are Coming, this

Battle of the Burqa By Heather Abraham Recent news reports and articles concerning France's attempt to ban the wearing of certain modes of Islamic "veiling" in public is more than just the latest example of Western anti- Islamic sentiment. As John Sullivan wrote in his Religion ...
To Veil or Not to Veil? By: Heather Abraham This posting was inspired by a Religion Nerd subscriber who posed the following question: Approximately what percentage of Muslims wear the full burka? In attempting to answer this challenging and complex question I will first give a brief ...

What Do Americans Really Know About Islam?

religionnerd — Tue, 25 May 2010 12:00:19 +0000

Get Shareaholic

By: Heather Abraham

At a recent gathering of intelligent and progressive women I was reminded how little Americans know about Islam. The atmosphere of the meeting was creative and the conversation clever until the word Islam was uttered—floating like a poison balloon above our heads. Immediately, a women sitting to my right grimaced and said “I don’t like how Arabs treat their wives.” Islam=Arab=misogynism? Although I often encounter this type of reflexive response on the topic of Islam, I was startled. I did not expect such an uninformed statement coming from this group.

For the thousandth time, I asked myself–how much do Americans really know about Islam? Let’s face it; Americans know more about the sex lives of Tiger Woods and Jesse James than they do about Islam. Unfortunately, most Americans learn about Islam primarily through various media outlets which have miserably failed to provide a balanced view of the world’s second largest religion. Islam is here to stay and Americans need to begin to question the media’s agenda and they need to take initiative and do some investigation on their own.

I have several problems with the above statement but for brevity’s sake, I will take on Islam=Arab and save the rest for a later article. At the mere mention of Islam, many Americans conjure up images of Bedouin Arab men with numerous unfortunate, anonymous, and powerless wives or they imagine the feared dark haired-crazy eyed Islamist (whatever that means) mentioned so incessantly on Fox News and CBN. In reality, ethnic Arabs comprise a relatively small group within Islam’s 1.57 billion adherents.

If Arabs do not make up the majority of Muslims—who does? According to the Pew Research Center’s informative report, Mapping the Muslim World, “more than 60% of the global Muslim population is in Asia and about 20% in the Middle East and Northern Africa.” The ten largest Muslim populations by country are as follows:

Indonesia 202 million
Pakistan 174 million
India 160 million
Bangladesh 145 million
Egypt 78.5 million
Nigeria 78 million
Iran 74 million
Turkey 73 million
Algeria 34 million
Morocco 32 million

It is interesting to note that none of the top ten countries are ethnically Arab. Muslims, like Christians, cannot be confined to one continent or people. Islam is not a monolithic religion but is, in actuality, fantastically diverse. It may further surprise you to find that “China has more Muslims than Syria; Russia is home to more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined; and Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon.”

What does all this mean? It means that many Americans wouldn’t know a Muslim if one dropped on their head. Like Christians, Muslims are an extraordinarily diverse people who are unified by their religion. So the next time you think you have identified a Muslim because they looked like an “Arab”—keep in mind that you probably missed a couple dozen who didn’t.

For a complete look at the Pew Research Center’s Mapping the Muslim World click here: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1370/mapping-size-distribution-worlds-muslim-population

Article first published on March 28, 2010

What The Frack Do Americans Know About Islam? By: Heather Abraham At a recent gathering of intelligent and progressive women I was reminded how little Americans know about Islam. The atmosphere of the meeting was creative and the conversation clever until the word Islam was uttered—floating like a poison balloon ...
To Veil or Not to Veil? By: Heather Abraham This posting was inspired by a Religion Nerd subscriber who posed the following question: Approximately what percentage of Muslims wear the full burka? In attempting to answer this challenging and complex question I will first give a brief ...

Home Shrines for American War Dead: Are They Just About Remembering?

religionnerd — Mon, 24 May 2010 12:25:09 +0000

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By: Kenny Smith

In a recent series of photographs and essays for the New York Times Magazine entitled, “The Shrine Down the Hall,” Ashley Gilbertson, Dexter Filkins, and Miki Meek, offer “a look at some of the bedrooms America’s young war dead left behind.” The photograph above, for instance, comes from the childhood home of U.S. Army First Lieutenant Brian N. Bradshaw, age twenty-four, from Steilacoom, Washington, who was killed June 25, 2009, in Kheyl, Afghanistan by a roadside bomb. In all, the article shows nineteen of these “war memorials with neatly made beds.”

Gilbertson

Gilbertson began this project in 2007. While his coverage of the war in Iraq has received numerous accolades over the past seven years, “he has stopped photographing combat zones because the American public isn’t responding anymore… [He] is now concentrating on showing the aftereffects of war, including post-traumatic stress disorder… [and] looks at bedrooms as a way of memorializing the lives–rather than the deaths–of young combatants.” As Gilbertson himself explains, “[y]ou walk into these rooms… and you feel like these are the kids you used to hang out with…. It’s powerful to look at where these kids lived, to see who they were as living, breathing human beings.”

A number of families have chosen to preserve, virtually untouched, these highly personal spaces, “to which young American service members will never return.” The bedroom of U.S. Army Pfc. Karina Lau, for example,

has not changed. A stuffed teddy bear and floppy-eared rabbit sit on top of her floral bedspread. Angel figurines and framed family photos line her bookshelf and dresser. The only thing missing is her. Private Lau was killed seven years ago when insurgents shot down her helicopter in Fallujah, Iraq. She was 20 years old. Her mother, Ruth, usually keeps the bedroom door closed and the window shades drawn, but when Mr. Gilbertson came to her home in Livingston, Calif., she opened them up.

Nor has the bedroom of Pfc. Jack Sweet (Alexandria Bay, N.Y. ), who was killed by a roadside bomb in Jawwalah, Iraq, on Feb. 8, 2008. This practice extends also to items returned to families by the military. “In Private Sweet’s bedroom are two trunks that the Army sent back from Iraq. Next to them is his laundry hamper. The clothes inside, still carrying his scent, have never been washed.”

The authors interpret these actions as attempts on the part of family members to “resist” and “wrestle with” what has happened; this is “how they will cope and how they will remember.” No doubt this is the case. Still, this view has trouble explaining why so much personal space, and so many personal possessions, remain intact and untouched, even to the point of clothing, still “carrying the scent” of the person who was killed, remains unwashed. If we think about these sacred spaces as if they really are shrines, what else might we learn about them? More, what might we learn about the larger culture in which they take place, or about the war in which these persons died?

In the Western sense of the word, shrines (from the Latin scrinium, meaning a box or receptacle) serve as “places or containers of religious presence.” As Paul Cartwright, writing for the Encyclopedia of Religion, explains,

One of the distinctive features of religion is that its objects do not “exist” in the ordinary sense of the word. Deity, spirit, soul, afterlife, and other familiar categories of religion lie outside the realms of everyday objects in time and space. However, human beings across multiple cultures experience the presence of these religious realities at particular times and places and in relation to material objects. Much of the work of shrines is to provide habitations for sacred presences within the everyday world. As places having a particular shape and materiality, shrines give particular density to complex sets of religious associations, memories, moods, expectations, and communities. Shrines may be seen as sites of condensation of more dispersed religious realities, places where meanings take on specific, tangible, and tactile presence. (p. 8376)

A shrine, then, is a very special kind of sacred space, in which we can experience heightened forms of intimacy and relationship with those who exist only in religious worlds. Bob Orsi defines religion itself in similar terms. Religion, he argues, is best understood not as an intellectual model of reality, but “as a network of relationships between heaven and earth involving humans of all ages and many different sacred figures… I can think of no religious world,” he writes, “that does not offer practitioners opportunities to form deep ties with saints, ancestors, demons, gods, ghosts, and other special beings”(2005).

Borrowing from both Cartwright and Orsi, what do we see in home war shrines that we did not see previously? To begin with, these carefully preserved bedrooms offer far more than an aid for remembering. They offer a sacred space in which family members may experience heightened physical intimacy with those “who will never return” in any tangible manner. Relationships sundered by violent and untimely death may be at least partially and fleetingly re-constituted and re-experienced. The home shrine, replete with the “neatly made beds,” other furniture, posters, pictures, pillows, blankets, televisions, stereos, books, CDs, DVDs, weights, religious iconography, sports trophies and sports-team memorabilia, and numerous other mundane items favored by the lost son or daughter, afford a plethora of concrete emotional touchstones that may well evoke a sense of being present with those who, like gods, goddesses, and spirits, now exist only in religious worlds. This view finds support in Gilbertson’s description of the intensity of presence these home shrines evoke. “Sometimes, you look at these rooms and it’s like they are going to come home.”

But the practice of maintaining home war shrines also suggests something about the larger cultural context in which they are found, namely, the considerable moral ambiguity that continues to loom over the wars that drag on in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of us, it seems, have responded with a sustained silent acquiescence. This approach may reduce cognitive dissonance, but also promotes minimal collective interest in creating a public space that richly memorializes those who have died in these wars. As Gilbertson observes, though received wisdom has it that we “shouldn’t talk to military families about death… in reality, all these families want to do is talk about their kids. If they are not being talked about, they’re not being remembered.” This is especially so if the larger culture is ambivalent about why precisely it is that these young people were asked to sacrifice their lives, and hence reluctant to provide public spaces that allow for intimate connections and continued relationships with the war dead. It is telling to remember that it took quite some time for a rich, intimate, sacred public space for American war dead from Vietnam to be built.

Some, of course, may argue that in nearly every war (and not just in our more recent ones), parents and families have maintained home shrines for those who are killed, especially when the war dead are young. World War II, generally considered to have rested upon more firm moral footing, might serve as a good example here. But it may well be that, in truth, there is no war capable of entirely reconciling parents and family to the process of brutal and untimely loss that the cultural practice of war entails. It is just that some wars, particularly those clouded by political malfeasance and ineptitude, make the act of reconciliation more difficult still, and thus require heightened religious responses, in this case carefully preserved and highly intimate home shrines, “war memorials with neatly made beds.”

To view the 19 bedrooms featured in Ashley Gilbertson’s essay go to: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/showcase-140/

This article was first published on April 9, 2010.

Home Shrines for American War Dead By: Kenny Smith In a recent series of photographs and essays for the New York Times Magazine entitled, “The Shrine Down the Hall,” Ashley Gilbertson, Dexter Filkins, and Miki Meek, offer “a look at some of the bedrooms America’s young war dead ...
Wisconsin on the Map to Pray With Mary By Erik Eckholm, New York Times CHAMPION, Wis. — In France, the shrine at Lourdes is surrounded by hundreds of hotels and has received as many as 45,000 pilgrims in a single day. Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Mexico, draws ...

Rise of the Jedi Religion

religionnerd — Fri, 21 May 2010 12:30:36 +0000

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By Heather Abraham

Did you know that Jediism is the fourth largest religion in the UK? That’s right, adherents to the Jedi religion followed Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in the 2001 census ranking fourth with 0.79% of the population. The Jedi Knight is not only alive and well in the UK but is also thriving in many other English speaking countries including the United States. According to the most recent census records, adherents to the Jedi religion number 400,000 in England, 53,000 in New Zealand, 55,000 in Canada and 70,000 in Australia. In the United States, Jedi Churches have been founded in Maryland, Kentucky, New York, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and Florida.

Jedi adherents are coming out of their cosmic closets and proudly claiming their commitment to the Jedi way of life. In April 2009 the BBC reported that the Strathclyde police force had no less than ten members of the Jedi religion. During an interview with BBC, Chris Herbert, editor for the Jane’s Police Review remarked, “The Force appears to be strong in Strathclyde with their Jedi police officers and staff. Far from living a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, some members of the noble Jedi order have now chosen Glasgow and its surrounding streets as their home.”

Before continuing to explore this way cool new religious movement let’s briefly explore the meaning of the term new religious movement (NRM). In New Religions A Guide, J. Gordon Melton argues, “the ‘new’ in new religions most often refers to the seeker rather than the religion itself. That is to say, most new religions are presenting old religions in a new context and to a new audience.” Thus, many new NRM’s are often a complex reimagining of a single or a blending of several existing religious traditions. However, not all NRM’s arise from existing religious worldviews. Some movements, like Scientology or Eckankar emerge independently and challenge the very manner in which we define religion. For some, new religious movements can be construed as “challenging the older religious structures” and thus can be viewed “by many as destructive of the very fabric of society.” It is important to understand that all religions begin as new religious movements. Both Christianity and Islam, for example, began as radical new movements whose ideas threatened the existing religious worldview. Now, let’s get back to the Jedi.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGQ_eZDcSu4

What is the Jedi Religion? Jediism is a non-theistic new religious movement based on the philosophical teachings of the Jedi in George Lucas’ mega hit series, Star Wars. According to the Temple of The Jedi Force,

Jediism is a modern religion which was born as the result of the Star Wars mythology. George Lucas, when he created the Star Wars saga, used various aspects of Taoism, Shintoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Mysticism, and many other religious universal truths as well as a combination of different martial arts and the code of chivalry, in order to create the Jedi and the philosophies behind the Force. The Jedi are modern versions of the Shao Lin Monk, the European Knight, and the Samurai warrior all mixed together. The Jedi path has become an inspiration and way of life for many people throughout the world who take on the mantle of the Jedi. Even though Jediism is a new faith, it is just as real as the ancient faiths and philosophies that it came from…..

Followers of the Jedi religion/philosophy follow the way of the Jedi and live by the Jedi Code. Like all other religions, established or new, Jediism is complex and extremely diverse. Having no central authority, each Jedi organization is independent and therefore has differing philosophical and theological beliefs. For the most part, Jedi organizations are democratic in nature and majority vote is necessary to implement any changes in church structure or doctrine. Although tremendously diverse, most Jedi organizations profess commitment to the following Jedi Creed.

Jedi are the guardians of civilization and justice.
Jedi use their knowledge and talents to defend and protect.
Jedi respect all life, in any form.
Jedi serve others rather than serving themselves, for the greater good.
Jedi seek to improve themselves through knowledge and training.

Some Jedi churches embrace an ecumenical approach by promoting Jediism as a complimentary philosophical path that can co-exist with other religious belief systems. Other churches encourage total commitment to the Jedi path and find other religious beliefs to run contrary to the Jedi way of life. All Jedi organizations are devoted to and believe in the power of The Force. According to the Oklahoma Temple of the Jedi, the Force is

an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.” The Force, in part, is the energy associated with life, and life is associated with the Force. Most Jedi adhere to the ideology that the Force has a Will of it’s own, and it guides those who would listen to it’s subtle whispers. The Force is primarily made up of the “light side” and the “dark side”. These are concerned with the moral compass of the Force in its various manifestations of Balance. The light side of the Force is the facet of the Force aligned with good, benevolence, compassion, and healing. The dark side of the Force is aligned with fear, hatred, aggression, and malevolence [...] These “sides” of the Force are tied directly to the eternal Balance of the Universe… “Without Darkness, there can be no Light”. By the same token, the “side” of the Force one chooses to follow depends on that individual’s true intent within their heart.

Although many Jedi members devote much of their time for training in the Jedi arts they also recognize the importance of serving others. The Maryland Jedi Order promotes public service as an important undertaking inherent in the Jedi path. “Jedi are peacemakers, protectors, and respecters of life in the world/universe. We strive to serve rather than rule. Self and societal improvement are our cause.”

New religious movements are constantly emerging, evolving, and contributing to the religious diversity in which we live. It will be interesting to observe how this intriguing new religious movement develops and what contributions it makes to our understanding of the religious landscape. I look forward to exploring different aspects of Jediism with you in the future. For more information on Jediism visit the sites below.

Fun Find: To discover your Jedi name check out the Jedi Name Generator at: http://www.xach.com/misc/jedi-name.php. My Jedi name is Abrhe Dejea and my husband’s is Sagte Deist!

The Oklahoma Temple of the Jedi: http://jedipraxeum.forumwise.com/jedipraxeum-thread369.html
BBC Article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8003067.stm
Temple of the Force: http://templeofthejediforce.org/
Maryland Jedi Order: http://www.marylandjedi.org/

This article first published on April 11, 2010

Rise of the Jedi By: Heather Abraham Did you know that Jediism is the fourth largest religion in the UK? That’s right, adherents to the Jedi religion followed Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in the 2001 census ranking fourth with 0.79% of the population. The Jedi Knight ...
True Story: How I Became a Jedi Council Master 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 ...

Slot Machines as Spiritual Teachers and Supernatural Investment Strategies: When Religion Waxes Magical

religionnerd — Mon, 10 May 2010 12:21:47 +0000

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By: Kenny Smith

Slot Machines as Spiritual Teachers

Tolly Burkan

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

A Supernatural Investment Strategy

American Religious Magic

Slot Machines as Spiritual Teachers and Supernatural Investment Strategies: When Religion Waxes Magical By: Kenny Smith Not far from our house is a Baptist church known for its entertaining roadside marquee, offering such spiritual chestnuts as, “THIS YEAR, WE WILL NOT BE UNDER-SOULED!,” weekend workshops in “HOW TO SURVIVE THE END TIMES,” and, during ...
Firewalking as Spiritual Transformation In addition to our regular academic explorations, commentaries, and news articles, Religion Nerd also offers a forum for the "Religious Insider.” Insider accounts offer RN readers an intimate opportunity to "hear" the voice of those within a particular tradition or practice. ...

Beltane in the Context of American Religious History

religionnerd — Mon, 03 May 2010 12:09:57 +0000

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By: Kenny Smith

While popular imagination tends to think of colonial America (e.g., 17^th and 18^th centuries) as a land in which universal religious freedom reigned, the early America religious landscape was in fact quite the opposite. “In all but the largest cities,” James Hudnut-Beumler, Dean of Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School, writes in his recent an quite excellent book, In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism (2007), “there was no choice in the matter of which church to attend. There [was] but one church for [each] settlement, [and] citizens were taxed to support the official faiths.” In Massachusetts, this meant the Congregational church, in Virginia and other southern colonies, the Anglican church, and in Maryland, the Catholic church. Frequently, citizens were legally required not only to support “state churches” financially, but to attend them regularly. Religious dissenters (that is, those offering brands of Christianity at odds with the official churches), were subject to social, and sometimes even legal, censure, fines, and punishments.

The state-church system ultimately failed in America; by 1830 or so, the last of the state-church monopolies (in Massachusetts) had been swept away, and over the ensuing two centuries the concept of “freedom of religious expression” has come to be understood in progressively broader terms, including not only different brands of Christianity (e.g., Mormonism, Christian Science, 7^th Day Adventist, New Thought) but religious traditions that look to other sources of inspiration beyond the biblical text (e.g., Scientology, Wicca, New Age). Today, one may “be religious” in an enormous number of ways, and scholars have even begun to wonder whether the most staunch atheists are, in fundamental ways, likewise “religious.”

Scholars who study American religion have also wondered why, exactly, American history played out in ways that have emphasized a philosophy of personal religious liberty. Some point to theology, noting the individualism implicit in Protestant understandings of Christianity, which emphasizes an individual’s relationship with God, to some degree unmediated by religious institutions and authority figures. Others look to geography, arguing that, as colonial Americans explored and “settled” an endlessly wide-open frontier (though one suspects native American peoples saw the matter somewhat differently), they were forced to think and live along more ruggedly individualistic lines. Still others have insisted that, from its earlier years, the colonial American landscape was, as Jon Butler tells us, far more “complex and bumptious” than has been previously acknowledged, and thus the enshrining of religious freedom in constitutional principles was simply a pragmatic acknowledgment of this basic social reality.

Butler, who teaches at Yale and is a giant in the field of American religion, overturns some widespread assumptions about the American religious past. The colonies certainly had their share of pious Puritans (New England), Anglicans (the southern states), Quakers (Pennsylvania), and Catholics (Maryland), as well as raucous “upstarts” like the Baptists (Rhode Island), Methodists, and Presbyterians (some of the “dissenters” frowned upon by state churches). They also, however, had atheists and agnostics, and less philosophically inclined others who were simply indifferent to religion and more deeply invested in trying to carve out a livelihood for themselves and their families in the uncertain and often treacherous New World.

Perhaps even more surprising, Butler argues, colonial America was filled with “magical” beliefs and practices. These were entertained and practiced by people of every class, age, race, and gender, and included such things as: astrological lore and the casting of horoscopes; use of charms or enchantments in influencing people, animals, weather, and good fortune; conjuring of angels or spirits of the dead; banishment of evil spirits or forces; communication with animal “familiars”; foretelling the future through prophetic dreams, visions, and the reading of omens in the natural world; the use of amulets for healing or protection; the finding of lost items or persons. As Catherine Albanese (another giant in this field, and who teaches at UC Santa Barbara), it is a “virtual certainty, given the geographical sources of immigration to New England, that cunning folk, witches and wizards were disembarking from English ships in Massachusetts Bay along with everyone else.”

Albanese, in fact, traces four different waves of British immigration to the American colonies between 1629-1775, each of which brought distinctive magical beliefs and practices to different colonies. The first of these was the English Puritan immigration to Massachusetts between 1629-1640. These folk hailed from Suffolk, Essex and Cambridge counties in eastern England, a region known for its central role in English witch-hunting. Thus, alongside Puritans, into colonial New England came “the rural and village metaphysics” of “cunning folk” who could see signs of the future in the present, manipulate the weather, discern the truth of hidden matters, heal illness, ease childbirth, and so forth. The second wave, a Royalist gentry class from southern England (with large numbers of indentured servants in tow) came to Virginia between 1649-1675. These possessed an “educated Hermetic inheritance,” one preoccupied with reading one’s personal fortune in the stars and in games of chance. With the third wave, hailing from the North Midlands regions of England and Wales and settling in the Delaware Valley from 1657-1725, “[f]olk magic came to Pennsylvania and West Jersey…even if the Quaker leadership discouraged it in favor of the doctrine of the inner light.” Here, witchcraft beliefs became common, as did “prophecy, divination, geomancy, chiromancy and astrology.” The fourth wave, from the north of Britain and Ireland, came to the Appalachian backcountry between 1718-1775. Among these peoples it was believed that “the signs that came to ordinary folk came from nature…in impersonal and unfailing ways and a source of wisdom, guidance, and, especially, warning in everyday life.” Of course, many of these practices were illegal up into modern times, and those who engaged in them would necessarily do so discreetly. At the same time, they were often deeply interwoven with Christianity and the popular culture of the time, an issue which scholars are really just beginning to address.

The latter half of the 20^th century has seen a number of attempts to revive these, and still older, magical pre-Christian traditions. Typically these traditions go by names such as Wicca, Paganism, Druidism, Heathenism, often grouped together under the label Neo-Pagan. Taken together, they constitute one of the fastest growing religious communities in America over the past two decades, conservatively estimated as representing at least 1% of the American population. This places them in a virtual tie in numerical significance with a great many other groups, such as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, each of which represents somewhere between 1-2% of Americans (the largest groups are Protestants at 50%, Catholics at 25%, and those professing “no religion” at 15%).

For many Neo-Pagan persons and communities, this past Saturday night saw the celebration of a major holiday, Beltane. The Neo-Pagan calendar is quite distinctive, varying from the dominant western calendar in a number of important ways. For Neo-Pagans generally, the year does not come to a close in late December, but rather in the last days of October, when the agricultural cycle is winding down (after the harvest of fruits, grains, and animals). The course of eight major holidays (Sabbats) that follow (about every six weeks or so) trace out not just seasons and the changes in weather, but the ways in which sunlight and darkness change in relation to one another as the year progresses. Neo-Pagan calendars tend to be oriented around winter and summer solstices (the shortest and longest days of the year), and spring and autumn equinoxes (days in which light and dark are perfectly balanced). More, they are linked to the ways in which the Goddess and God (female and male aspects of divinity, or divinities), grow, mature, and develop, as the seasons pass. Beltane is a celebration of the coming of summer, a time at which the Goddess and God are young, filled with creative, loving, life-giving energy. Beltane is considered a very powerful, indeed fertile, time.

The Neo-Pagan “Wheel of the Year” is clearly a different way of experiencing time. Interestingly, as religious minorities that choose (and often need) to remain quiet about their religious identities (staying “in the broom closet,” as it were) Neo-Pagans learn to live in two calendars simultaneously, that of the dominant culture, and that of the sacred.

Midsummer Day: A Once and Future Holy-Day? By Kenny Smith In Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays, Leigh Eric Schmidt (Professor of American religious history at Harvard University) traces out some of the economic forces that have shaped the American understanding and experience of sacred ...
Keeping the Eostre in Easter 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, ...

Home Shrines for American War Dead

religionnerd — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:00:30 +0000

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By: Kenny Smith

In a recent series of photographs and essays for the New York Times Magazine entitled, “The Shrine Down the Hall,” Ashley Gilbertson, Dexter Filkins, and Miki Meek, offer “a look at some of the bedrooms America’s young war dead left behind.” The photograph above, for instance, comes from the childhood home of U.S. Army First Lieutenant Brian N. Bradshaw, age twenty-four, from Steilacoom, Washington, who was killed June 25, 2009, in Kheyl, Afghanistan by a roadside bomb. In all, the article shows nineteen of these “war memorials with neatly made beds.”

To view the 19 bedrooms featured in Ashley Gilbertson’s essay go to: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/showcase-140/

Home Shrines for American War Dead: Are They Just About Remembering? By: Kenny Smith In a recent series of photographs and essays for the New York Times Magazine entitled, “The Shrine Down the Hall,” Ashley Gilbertson, Dexter Filkins, and Miki Meek, offer “a look at some of the bedrooms America’s young war ...
Easter – Christian, Jewish, Pagan? By: Heather Abraham Easter (Pascha in Greek and Latin) is arguably the most important feast in the Christian liturgical year yet the modern Easter celebration is often associated with Jewish Passover as well as pagan imagery and deities. Is the modern ...

“Christian Militias” and the Unpredictable Nature of Religious Diversity

religionnerd — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 14:11:43 +0000

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By: Kenny Smith

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus is said to have taught that, “you cannot step into the same river twice,” because a river (like everything in the physical world) is continually changing and hence never the same. The implication of this insight for the study of religion can be profound: religions are also constantly changing, developing, becoming something new, and, to some degree, one can never step twice into the same church, synagogue, mosque, or temple, or religious tradition.

It is especially difficult for Westerners to think in these terms about religion. Religions tend to have a great deal invested in the view that they represent unchanging truths, and so pointing to evidence of historical change may well be interpreted as an assault. Protestant ideas about a coming Rapture in which faithful Christians are plucked up and out of a hostile secular society, for example, are relatively new, arising in the late 19^th century. Though many Rapturists read this theology back into the Bible and conclude that such teachings can be traced to the days of Jesus of Nazareth. Also, as a culture, for the past three centuries or so we have tended to imagine the religious landscape in terms of distinct, walled-off religious institutions, such as “Christianity,” “Islam,” Buddhism,” “Judaism,” and so forth. Taken together, these factors lead us to expect unchanging and uniform religious traditions where none in fact exist.

Take, for example, what we call “Christianity.” There are currently some 2.5 billion Christians worldwide. About 1.1 billion are Catholic, 800-900 million are Eastern Orthodox, and 500-600 million are Protestant. There are enormous theological differences separating these three branches (to say nothing of the many differences in language, culture, ethnicity, economics, politics, and history). For many Catholics and Protestants, it is Jesus’ death that makes salvation possible. In this view, he is thought to have “paid the price” for all human sin, thus wiping away even the “original sins” of Adam and Eve. In many Eastern Orthodox Christianities, however, notions of “original sin,” which first emerged in the 4^th century in Western Europe, never caught on. Eastern Orthodox traditions tend to place much greater emphasis upon the birth of Jesus, in which God is thought to have taken physical form, and thus seriously “upgraded” human nature in important ways.

Catholics and Protestants, of course, differ profoundly as well. In traditional Catholic teachings, the ideal (if not the only) path to God is through the religious institution that God Himself created and ordained, the Catholic (or “universal”) church, whereas for most Protestants one can go directly to God for forgiveness, atonement, understanding the Bible, knowing how best to live, rather than relying upon an institution. This may seem superficial, but it’s actually a very important difference about where religious authority (to determine what the Bible says, how to relate to God, how to live, how society should be structured, etc.) resides. There is of course a great deal of diversity within each of these three branches. Protestantism, for instance, is comprised of virtually thousands of denominations, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Pentecostals, being some of the largest and most well-known. The concept Protestant” (like “river”) may lead us to expect a unity of belief and practice, but there are in fact enormously important differences here as well, differences so profound that one kind of Protestant might have serious doubts about whether other kinds are really Christian at all! In many Pentecostal churches, for instance, one cannot be certain that one is “saved” (going to heaven after this life) unless one displays the “charismata,” (“gifts of the Holy Spirit”) such as publicly speaking in tongues (usually in a church setting). The very loud, frenetic, highly emotional, and seemingly out of control behaviors associated with this religious experience, however, would for many other Protestants be regarded as a sign of mental illness, or even demonic influence, certainly not the salvific power of the divine.

Within Baptist denominations, one debate that has been going on for centuries involves fundamental notions about God’s power and human free will. Some (often called Predestinationists) argue that, because God is in full control of everything that happens, he must have already determined, from the very beginnings of time, who will be saved and who will be damned. Others, however, argue that because God is infinitely good, he would surely leave human beings free to decide for themselves, rather than determining in advance everyone’s fate. My purpose here is not to resolve such disputes, but only to point out why one kind of Protestant might fail to recognize other kinds as not properly Christian.

At this point, some may want to argue that, if we think on a very general level, we will find things that are universal to all forms of Christianity, such as the belief that the Bible is the world of God, or that Jesus is the son of God. But even these generalizations do not really hold up. There are Christian groups, now and in past centuries, that did not see the Bible in this way, that look(ed) to other religious books and teachings, and had very different views of Jesus, for instance, seeing Jesus as primarily a moral teacher rather than a sacrificial victim whose blood “washed sin away.” Typically, attempts to find a clear unity within “Christianity: (or any religious tradition, for that matter) dissolve utterly when we push on them just a bit and look into the ways different Christian groups have thought about their tradition. This realization, which has lead scholars to think in terms of Christianities, can be overwhelming to those within the popular culture, and students new to the study of religion, who are not expecting it.

But intra-religious diversity can also play out in other ways as well. In an article for the New York Times, Kirk Johnson notes that, while Hutaree militia members in Adrian, Michigan (recently arrested for allegedly plotting an attack on local police officers), “were best known by their neighbors for their active use of guns and their increasingly heated talk about fighting back violently against the

government… their biggest and most surprising adversary was practically next door: the local branch of the Michigan Militia.” While both groups “wear fatigues or camouflage, train in the woods with heavy weaponry and believe in threats to liberty from Washington… [the] Michigan Militia, which in past years had links to extremist groups with neo-Nazi flavorings, has moderated over the years, according to members and experts who track the organizations. Meanwhile, the Hutaree (pronounced Hu-TAR-ay)… was going in the other direction, with increasing talk of violence.” Apparently, these differences became so pronounced that when Hutaree members were fleeing arrest and asked Michigan Militia members for assistance, they were refused and turned in to the Michigan State Police, who passed the information on to the FBI. Such an unexpected turn of events suggests that even far-right Christian militias are not monolithic structures. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/us/01michigan.html?hp

Let me take this argument one step further. The data above suggests that various Christian militias may differ considerably in fundamental ways. It may also be the case that there is considerable diversity within individual militias. The Michigan Militia, for instance, contains one member who “converted to Islam in the late 1990s after a soul-searching separation from the Lutheran faith he had grown up with, and that he believed that he was the only Muslim in the militia.” Frankly, when I read this I was stunned: surely, I thought, the world of Christian Militias was limited to Christians, or at least excluded Muslims. Apparently not, at least in this case. It’s difficult to imagine an instance that more clearly illustrates the highly diverse, and hence unpredictable, nature of our times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/us/01michigan.html?hp

Religion Lately: Jedi Training Camps and Marian Visions in Texas, Gay-ing Dead Mormons, & St. Valentine was a Pagan Too? By Kenny Smith, Emory University In Austin, Texas, yet another “Jedi Camp”offers training for youngsters. In San Francisco, adult Jedi demonstrate advanced light-saber fighting skills. Exactly how much Jedi-based social production does it take to constitute a “religious movement,” anyway?
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Rise of the Jedi By: Heather Abraham Did you know that Jediism is the fourth largest religion in the UK? That’s right, adherents to the Jedi religion followed Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in the 2001 census ranking fourth with 0.79% of the population. The Jedi Knight ...

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