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By James Dennis LoRusso, Religion Bulletin

Were you to travel one segment of the Eisenhower Expressway in Illinois this morning, you might discover a curious billboard.  The display features a mugshot of Ted Kaczynski, the self-confessed “Unabomber,” coupled with the question, “I still believe in Global Warming.  Do You?”  The new billboard campaign lining various commuter routes is the latest initiative of the Chicago-based conservative think tank, the Heartland Foundation, to call into question prevailing scientific consensus around climate change.

Predictably, progressives have responded virulently, claiming that Heartland has sunk to a new low in its effort to undermine and politicize “mainstream” science.  In a scathing response, Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Beast characterizes the strategy as “a brutalist style of public propaganda that focuses on guilt by the most extreme association.”  In other words, by linking belief in global warming to the likes of Kaczynski, Castro, and Charles Manson, all of whom presumably agree with the thesis of climate change, Heartland implies that anyone subscribing to such views must also be degenerate.

While Sullivan’s critique is warranted, it also reveals something significant about the shape of American political discourse more generally.  To borrow a notion from Roland Barthes, esteemed scholar of twentieth-century myth, American political discourse has becomedepoliticized.  Barthes writes: “Myth is depoliticized speech… Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact.” (Mythologies, 143) Barthes wishes for us to see how myths transform historically situated and contested knowledge into concepts beyond the pale of critique.

At first glance, the billboard appears to perform precisely the opposite function of myth; After all, isn’t it calling into question something which “mainstream” science simply acknowledges as “a statement of fact?” Well, yes… and no.  Barthes also reminds us that all is not as it appears in myth.  He writes, “myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.”  Similarly, these billboards clearly intend to question global warming, and to associate this view with various serial killers, dictators, and cult leaders.  Nothing is hidden here.  The mythic component, however, operates at a higher order: It is the underlying assumption, as Barthes suggests, which inflects the meaning of the billboard for the passerby.

By including Kaczynski, the billboard presents global warming as pathological rather than political.  At least in American popular discourse, his actions represent those of a sick and demented mind, rather than a politically motivated individual (despite the vast amount of evidence that the “Unabomber” saw himself as utterly political).  By extension, then, anyone who subscribes to the idea of man-made climate change must also be experiencing some form of mental illness.

Curiously, in his critique of the billboard campaign, Andrew Sullivan merely inverts the main characters, reproducing the same myth.  After carefully pointing out how the Heartland Foundation has rendered “the left” as some monolithic bloc of mentally deranged psychopaths for believing in global warming, Sullivan concludes: “Large sections of the American right are now close to insane as well as depraved.  And there is no Buckley to reign them in.  Just countless Jonah Golbergs seeking to cash in.” Here, he reduces the conservative audience towards whom these billboards are aimed to a mob of mentally deranged subjects.

What, then, does this analysis of political squabbling accomplish? Well, employing Barthes’ lens exposes contemporary American politics as pathological, even bipolar.  Each side deploys the language of pathology in order to construct an “other” that is neither political nor rational (perhaps not even human), but ill or evil.  This strategy insulates one’s position from critique, as it simultaneously depoliticizes the issue (in this case global warming).  “Something must be wrong with those people,” we say.

Taking the attitude that “you can’t reason with a crazy person,” however, seems troubling to me, as I look out on a world filled with violence, suffering, and increasingly concentrated undemocratic power in the form of transnational corporations. Democracy, I was always taught, requires that we accord human dignity to others, even those with whom we disagree politically.  It demands that we take our adversaries as thinking individuals; it asks that we assume that they, despite our differences, believe that they have the best interests of society at hand, and finally, it challenges us to engage in reasoned debate with one another to establish the grounds for practical solutions. Contemporary political actors on all sides instead engage in competing forms of myth-making, designed to dehumanize the opposition and depoliticize the issues.

Of course, Barthes might claim that I am merely constructing a myth of my own, one that naturalizes all humans as reasonable and well-intentioned.  But as he states, “the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology.”

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University  

President Obama’s Press Secretary, Jay Carney, put it this way: “The President believes that everyone who serves the American people by working for this government needs to hold themselves to the highest standards of public service.” 

Mitt Romney was pithier; he said he’d “clean house.” 

A thoughtful US citizen might well wonder what they were referring to, sadly enough, because there are so many scandals to choose from. 

There is the GSA scandal, first of all: Hundreds of thousands of dollars squandered by a federal bureaucracy for lavish entertaining in Las Vegas and the Napa Valley. The outrage expressed for this one is already bipartisan and utterly emotive. 

But there is also the Secret Service scandal, involving (at present counting) twelve Secret Service officers who engaged in some lavish entertaining of their own, in Cartagena, Columbia, several short days prior to the President’s visit. Here the enquiry had less to do with the expense, and more to do with the sex. Apparently, a number of Secret Service officers had hired escorts—prostitutes, thank you very much—for a late night party at their hotel. 

Conspicuously absent from this list of potential scandals is the report printed by the Los Angeles Times that US service personnel in Afghanistan have been at it again, this time photographing themselves with severed body parts they claim belong to Taliban suicide bombers. 

So we’ve got a choice here, and we’ve got it all: money, sex, and violent disregard. 

My concern has to do with the sinking sense that I know exactly which one of these stories has legs. The military story is already half-forgotten 24 hours later. Apparently those people “who serve the American people by working for the government” get a pass. 

The GSA story has legs, especially as we learn more about what exactly transpired in Vegas and Napa Valley. The money can’t all have been for psychics and for clowns. 

The story that is sure to last is the Secret Service scandal. Because there’s sex involved. Sure, it’s sex somebody allegedly paid for, but nobody is alleging that a US government agency paid for it. These boys paid for their own party. It’s not a violation of public funds that’s at issue here; it’s sex, pure and simple. 

It is dismaying that the sexual obsessions of contemporary US culture could so completely stack the deck against caring about what, by any reasonable moral accounting, is the worst of these three. 

Ever since Homer first channeled his Muse, the mutilation of the enemy corpse has been a symbol of the very worst of which humanity is capable. And such violations almost always carried consequences, immediate ones. As we continue to turn a blind eye to what our own moral callousness vis-à-vis a perceived enemy, alive or dead, implies, invocations of “the highest standards of public service” will continue to appear to be as hollow and hypocritical as our enemies take them to be.

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Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University

One of the dangers in reporting on the Republican presidential primaries, and now the looming presidential election season, is that national issues and agendas drown out any real connection to more local issues and concerns. I was reminded of this again last week as I drove through heavily wooded back roads of Alabama, and saw signage on trees relating to the primary election they held in back mid-March. Over and over again, I saw the name: Roy Moore. 

It was a familiar name but it took a moment to recall why. Roy Moore was elected as the Alabama State Supreme Court Justice in 2000. He infamously arranged to have a two-ton granite display of the Ten Commandments placed in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building the next year. He did this in the middle of the night on July 31, 2001, without consulting the other Supreme Court justices. Moore was ordered by a US District Court to remove the monument and refused to do so. His eight colleagues overruled him, and the Ten Commandments monument was removed from the rotunda and taken on a nationwide fund-raising tour. Meanwhile, Alabama’s Judicial Ethics panel voted unanimously to remove Moore from his position on November 13, 2003. 

Moore ran unsuccessfully as a Republican candidate for state governor in 2006, losing by a 2 to 1 majority to the incumbent governor, Bob Riley. He tried again in 2010, but came in fourth with only 19% of the Republican vote. In 2011, Moore formed an exploratory committee to consider a run for the White House, but decided the odds were long, even by his risk taker’s standards. 

And now Moore is back, running for his old job as Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court. And while he has promised not to try to restore the monument, his views on the very tenuous separation between the Christian religion and the southern states is very clear. 

This time, Moore won his bid, and so now he will be on the ballot as the Republican candidate for State Supreme Court Justice in November. Moore has indicated that he does not wish to pick this fight a second time, and that the centerpiece of his understanding of judicial responsibility is how to adjudicate fairly and efficiently in a time of massive cuts in state spending in all social sectors, but especially for courts and policing. 

Fair enough, but his re-election website  tells a very different story, a story that makes the Ten Commandments monument, the subsequent debate it generated, and his eventual dismissal all central to his entire judicial philosophy. Moore’s own providential career, as he suggests quite clearly, has always hinged on the Ten Commandments. As the six-and-one-half minute video on his website makes clear, when God brought his future wife into his life in 1985, and shortly after they married, she was given the responsibility for decorating their new home. She placed a copy of the Ten Commandments prominently on the wall of that home. 

Later, when Moore took up his duties as Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice, he elected to bring that wall hanging into his courthouse. That decision prompted an immediate push-back from the ACLU, and the video suggests that this was what inspired Moore to up the ante by placing a much larger display in the rotunda in a manner that would be literally impossible to miss. His martyrdom to the cause of an inseparable church and state serves, he suggests, as “a reminder of our nation’s Godly heritage,” as well as of “the divine foundation of this nation.” Moore himself points to the real unity of his judicial career as a “long battle to recognize the sovereignty of God,” and to call the country back to its true identity as “one nation under God.” It is striking that the very next phrase of that pledge of allegiance—”indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”—is omitted from the video on his website. 

It really almost has to be that way. For Roy Moore is divisive, intentionally so. And he speaks far more of God and religious rights than he does of liberty and justice for the non-Christian citizens in our midst. That seems a distinctly backward set of priorities for the chief justice in any state to possess in the twenty-first century. 

Make no mistake about this; this is a big election with real legal and cultural and religious consequence. And it serves as a reminder of why we need to pay attention to more than just the presidential entries on the ballots, come November.

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By Kenny Smith, Religion Bulletin

In his recent comments on the Fox News Channel’s FOX & Friends morning show, Geraldo Rivera claimed that the shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was equally the result of (i) an “overzealous and irrational” neighborhood watchman (George Zimmerman) as well as (ii) Treyvon Martin’s ethnicity, gender, and attire. By appearing in public as a dark-skinned and hoodie-cloaked male, Rivera suggests, Trayvon unwittingly (and unwisely) presented the neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, with a highly ambiguous object. On one hand, Trayvon was merely a boy (age 17, though in fact he appeared considerably younger) eating Skittles while walking home; on the other hand, he was a black male donning garb associated “with robberies, muggings, and confrontations,” which sensible others (read middle-class whites) seek to avoid. 

For Rivera, the latter reading of Trayvon is clearly the most compelling: if black and Hispanic males wish to “stylize themselves as gangsta wannabes,” then they should expectto be “perceived as a menace,” as such perceptions represent “an instant, reflexive action” on the part of others (again, read whites). “Trayvon Martin,” Rivera passionately concludes, “was an innocent and wonderful kid,” who “did not deserve to die,” and “if he did not have that hoodie on… that nutty, irrational guy would not have responded in that violent and aggressive way.” 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTMyb15bfAE

There is of course a great deal to be said about this utterly horrific event, and this post in no way seeks to trivialize its moral, legal, and cultural significance; quite the opposite, in fact. For the Trayvon Martin case brings to light one of the ways in which American culture has come to imagine (and in this case, violently respond to) some perceived embodied identities. 

In thinking about this case, my attention is drawn back to our recent spate of posts regarding the symbolic function of zombies in contemporary American culture, and to the popular TV series, The Walking Dead (TWD), especially. Over the course of two seasons, the show’s characters, as well as audiences, have gradually transitioned from intense revulsion at seeing zombies (who appear to be people but no longer are) summarily executed (often shot in the head at point blank range), to a sense of empowerment and celebration as “walkers” are “put down” by heroes and heroines who narrowly escape being torn apart and consumed. More, the show’s characters have increasingly come to deal with perceived ambiguities as to who is a zombie and who is still a human being by means of lethal force, evident in Andrea’s overly hasty shooting of an injured Darrell limping back to the farm (whom she mistakes for a zombie), and who is a threat as opposed to a viable community member, evident in the group’s willingness to summarily execute other human beings deemed to be dangerous. 

My point here, obviously, is not to compare Trayvon Martin to zombies or George Zimmerman to television heroes. But rather to suggest that the progression of character (and audience?) sensibilities evident in TWD powerfully mirrors American attitudes as to how identities are decoded, categorized, and reacted to. What Rivera implicitly frames and defends as understandable–the “instant, reflexive” perception of a dark-skinned, hoodie-wearing, male, walking through an affluent, gated, residential neighborhood as a “menace” that “allows” the “irrational and overzealous” neighborhood watchman to shoot him–is disturbingly close to the brink TWD characters approach, one in which the world is comprised of true human beings (those like us) and “zombies” (those not like us). 

Was Trayvon Zimmerman’s imaginary zombie, that which only appears to be a full human being, but is in fact a subhuman being intent upon violence and brutality against others, that ultimately ought to be “put down,” shot at point-blank range? Does the hoodie transform the smiling dark-skinned teenager into a “walker” in Rivera’s conceptual world? Again, such comparisons are disturbingly close to the mark and, given the misanthropy, racism, bigotry, and misogyny obvious in many popular appropriations of the “killing zombies” motif, they are chilling indeed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TceD2Il3QFA

 ***************

Originally posted at Religion Bulletin, March 26, 2012.  Follow Religion Bulletin on Facebook. 

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By Louis A. Ruprecht, Religion Dispatches

On November 2, 1984, Velma Barfield became the first woman to be executed in the U.S. since 1962, and the first to be executed in the State of North Carolina after the nationwide moratorium on the death penalty was lifted in 1976. She was 52 years old.

For those of us who had worked on her clemency petition, it was a devastating blow. Then-Governor Jim Hunt was running for a seat in the US Senate against arch-conservative Jesse Helms. Inexplicably, Barfield’s clemency hearing had been scheduled just six days prior to the election. Helms made it a campaign issue, of course, suggesting that, were the Governor to grant Barfield clemency, then his true liberal stripes would be clear to everyone.

By contrast, even the staff at the Women’s Prison in Raleigh had written in support of Barfield’s petition; her work in counseling and religious instruction behind bars even earned her praise from the likes of Billy Graham. Everyone agreed there was no stronger clemency case on death row in the state.

But the governor’s peremptory meeting with those who presented the clemency petition lasted little more than half an hour, and it was clear to us that his mind was already made up.

The Barfield execution came back to life in the following spring, in the form of a letter from an eloquent if quirky citizen of the State of North Carolina; one who was opposed to the death penalty for religious reasons. He had calculated the approximate cost of executing Velma Barfield—not just the lethal injection, but the years of legal wrangling as well. According to his calculations, and given the current population of the state, exactly one cent of his own tax payment had been used to execute Velma Barfield—so he enclosed a check to the North Carolina State Tax Commissioner for 1984, in which he had withheld that suspect penny.

As you might imagine, the state took a different view, taking issue especially with this self-imposed tax break. Their point was that you do not get to pick and choose which state services you are willing to pay for, not even for religious reasons.

Especially not for religious reasons, since there are so very many of them.

The cash-strapped State of North Carolina spent a lot more than one cent to get that penny back. As they should have done, though this citizen’s symbolic point had been made quite eloquently by then.

No Picking and Choosing

I have returned many times to that story as I have listened to Catholic churches, Catholic institutions from hospitals to universities, and two Catholic presidential candidates all insist on what that poor guy from North Carolina was asking for: a religious exemption from paying for state services to which he was opposed on moral and religious grounds.

The state’s answer was simple in the spring of 1985: you don’t get to pick and choose the services you pay for, regardless of the reason.

This case raises an issue of considerably sharper interest, I think, given the Catholic Church’s consistent opposition to the death penalty, to preemptive wars (especially those conducted primarily through interdiction), to abortion, and now, we are told, to contraception.

So why has there never been a similar stink about Catholic exemptions from death penalty provisions? Why no such tax withholding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? And why is the state bending over backwards to accommodate these religious sentiments about contraception, rather than some others?

One explanation might be historical: what a difference a generation makes. After thirty years of hammering away at the need for the secular state to accommodate religious objections to virtually every damn thing it does, the state is backpedaling and the Church is on the offensive. From 1979 to 2012, politicized Christianity isn’t just taking its place at the table, it’s trying to rewrite the menu. Anti-feminism has loomed large in that effort.

Clerical Hysteria

Which brings me to a second explanation, one that is not historical so much as it is hysterical. I mean that quite literally.

Hysteria is a term that derives from the Greek word for the uterus, and this is indeed a battle over women’s uteruses: over what goes in them and what stays out. The death penalty and international warfare simply do not energize the sex-obsessed American electorate the way that women’s sexual autonomy does.

What is the problem with contraception? It enables women to be sexually active without paying the price, as it were; the massive biological and sociological and personal costs that may come with unwanted pregnancy and bringing such pregnancies to term.

The end of the sexual act is procreation, from the Catholic perspective; sexual pleasure or expressions of love and affection are not legitimate ends if they are detached from the procreative intention. Contraception enacts that detachment. Moreover, by separating the sexual act from the intention of conception, contraception encourages women’s sexual promiscuity—so goes the Catholic thinking.

Rush Limbaugh’s tirade to this effect, for all of its bile, well describes what is at stake in this debate, for some people. The fact that men’s sexual promiscuity does not register as a concern of equal standing for such persons is itself quite telling.

To my eye, the most significant thing that has happened between 1979 and 2012 has been the significant and at times studied erosion of feminist achievements in mandatory, state-sanctioned equality. I’m talking about the basics here, the principal First and Second Wave achievements:

political equality, symbolized by a woman’s right to vote and to hold political office; and

economic equality, symbolized by the ideal, if not the reality, of equal pay for equal work.

But when the sexual equality of men and women is at issue—not sexual sameness, let’s be clear about that, just sexual equality—then the howling starts, and churches start withholding their money and support.

The debate is, in this sense, hysterical. And there’s a pretty simple solution to it. If you want to run as a Catholic hospital or a Catholic university and not offer the full array of health care services to women as mandated by the state, then don’t implicate yourself in any federal or state funding. Not one penny.

All the World a Stage

Now, I admit that this argument must seem overdrawn at first glance. There seems to be a fundamental difference between a citizen and/or organization withholding taxes for state services with which they do not wish to be identified, and a citizen and/or organization being asked to provide those services themselves.

The problem is that this creates a false distinction between the state as an actor and people as actors. State services are, all of them, provided by organizations and by people. Catholic institutions are claiming an exemption from the obligation to provide such services because they are religiously opposed to them. They are engaging in a selective opt-out, just like the guy from North Carolina.

I am not convinced that any of the charities, hospitals or universities involved in this debate are truly independent religious institutions that receive no federal dollars. An institution’s tax exempt status alone casts that into grave doubt. And these institutions seem not to recognize that one way for the state to insist on its way, and for them to gain their administrative freedom, would be to abrogate that curious tax exemption for an institution as wealthy as the Catholic Church in a time of real fiscal crisis. But clearly, this would lend itself to the very Big Brother vision of the federal government that created this controversy in the first place.

Instead, President Obama, ever the patient compromiser, attempted to create a new distinction, one of limited practical usefulness but great symbolic value, suggesting that insurance providers would be paying for these services, not the institutions themselves.

And that is when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, sensing weakness, intensified its position, indicating that it is not just opposed to being asked to pay for such services, but that any of the Catholics for whom they speak would be asked to provide them. This is fascinating; the Catholic Bishops now appear to be claiming the right to opt out of anyprograms with which they disagree. Here is their response to the president’s proposed compromise, in their words:

[this] continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions.

It’s not just about the money; it’s about Big Brother. And so:

We will therefore continue—with no less vigor, no less sense of urgency—our efforts to correct this problem through the other two branches of government.

So the problem is not with government per se, just with the president. This is why it is so rhetorically critical for them to refer to “Obamacare” rather than the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” thereby conveniently forgetting that this was a law passed by the Legislative branch of the US Government, not an Executive Order.

Now, it is perfectly within the Bishops’ rights to petition the US Congress to change a law, or even to vacate it and to start over, as it is their right to question the constitutionality of a law in the courts.

But that is why I began with the story from North Carolina. The question that should be asked is why the US Catholic Bishops are exerting so much energy and money and time on the matter of contraception, with no similarly public cries of outrage against the death penalty, state-sponsored torture, or the two preemptive wars in which the U.S. has involved itself for fully a decade.

Clearly there is a lot more to this debate than the First Amendment. It has to do with one of the most powerful patriarchal religious organizations in the world—be sure to recall that the bishops are all men, every last one of them—placing itself squarely in opposition to women’s sexual equality and autonomy.

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Maureen Dempsey, RNC-OB

Friday morning, on the Huffington Post, the first story to catch my eye was this: “David Albo, Virginia Lawmaker, Says Wife Wouldn’t Have Sex Because Of Transvaginal Ultrasound Bill.”  As I clicked on the headline, I thought, this is going to be good.  And the gentleman from Fairfax didn’t disappoint me.  I watched a three-minute video of Mr. Albo describing to his fellow delegates how he tried to seduce his wife with a combination of red wine and the Redskins on big screen television.  They were on the sofa, he was snuggling up to her while changing the channel, things were heating up…when he inadvertently stopped on MSNBC and saw his name plastered across the 46-inch screen and heard his colleague, David Englin, repeatedly using the term “trans-vaginal.”  After a few minutes of this, his wife excused herself and went to bed alone. 

Mr. Albo obviously went to some effort to plan the description of this failed seduction.  He set the stage visually.  At an appropriate time in the story, he played some sexy music.  However, when the moment came for him to describe what he and his wife saw and heard on the TV, his story telling technique fell apart.  He couldn’t bring himself to say the word, “trans-vaginal.”  He got part of the word out and then the rest of the sentence dissolved into incoherent gibberish.  “Trans-V this and Trans-V that,” he said next, using a guttural tone of voice – the kind of voice people use when they think they’re saying something dirty.  

Now I was confused.  What had turned off Mr. Albo’s wife?  Originally, I had thought it was her solidarity with other women – her disgust at the thought that the state might require this unnecessary, uncomfortable, and invasive procedure.  But now I wondered if she wasn’t just disgusted at the blatant use of the word, “vagina.”  I decided to see if I could find any other information about this story online.  The first retelling of the story I found, at www.dailycaller.com, referred to “the unfortunately named, ‘trans-vaginal ultrasound.’”  Apparently the Albos aren’t the only people uncomfortable with the word vagina. 

Why is vagina so hard to say?  Why is it “unfortunate” to use the term vaginal to describe a medical procedure that occurs in the vagina?  Why does the gentleman from Fairfax use a special, bawdy tone of voice when he refers to “trans-V this and trans-V that?”  Why is this story even funny?  I have a theory.  I do not know Mr. Albo personally.  But he and I attended high school in Virginia at roughly the same time.  I think I knew guys like him.  A smart guy, a funny guy, a mostly proper guy.  He couldn’t say vagina because what he was really talking about was pussy.  He was telling a story – an ironic story, a bawdy story – about how he didn’t get any pussy because of his involvement in some notorious pussy-related legislation.   

This is important because when men who can’t say the word, “vagina,” get together with other likeminded men to discuss contraception, the discussion ends up being about sex, about pussy, rather than about women’s health.  I encourage all men, but particularly those involved in the legislative process, to practice saying the word, “vagina,” every day.

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Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University  

Riding through some winter-soaked mountain villages in the hills of Corfu with a friend, I passed a gorgeous and surprisingly large Byzantine church, surprising to me because we were in the middle of comparative nowhere. 

 “What church is that?” I asked her.

 “The Church of Saint George,” she replied. 

And it suddenly hit me: these people invoke saint’s names the way Protestants invoke denominations. The Church of Saint George, the Church of Saint Spyridon, the Church of Saint Stephen, the Church of Saint Catherine, the Church of the All Holy Mother of God… all Orthodox churches, and all different too. 

On a casual drive through any major American metropolis, you’ll see a similar string of various and varying Christian churches. I’ll take my home city of Atlanta as an example. If you drive down the central section of Ponce de Leon Avenue, a Lutheran Church is followed by a Mormon Church, then a Melkite Church, then a Presbyterian Church, and then an Antiochene Church, all within under a mile. On Peachtree Street closer to downtown, the situation is even more dramatic: two Methodist churches, one Episcopalian, one Lutheran, one Presbyterian, one Catholic, one Baptist and one non-denominational, all within one city mile. 

This is actually a fascinating situation, the significance of which is easy to miss. Every one of these “denominations”—even ones like the Catholic and Orthodox churches that technically claim to be the church universal and not a denomination—is believed to have the right to a place on that public street. They belong on the street. That doesn’t mean that I, in my church on Sunday morning, have to believe that your church’s doctrines are legitimate; clearly, what is preached in these various pulpits on Sunday morning are incompatibles. But I believe in the legitimacy of the church’s presence on the street, whatever I may think of what goes on inside. We are neighbors, after all, and that’s just being neighborly. 

We tend to take this form of denominational pluralism for granted, and hence we often fail to realize historically how it came to pass, and politically what it means. Historically speaking, English and American (and other) streets began to look like this in the 1700s, after 150 years of seething religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics had burned a lot of the older streets to ash. By the early 1700s, it had become clear to most people that the fact of religious pluralism was not going to go away. Protestants and Catholics, most of them at any rate, no longer held onto the hope that one more argument, or one more pitched battle, was going to turn the tide in their favor. No more once-and-for-alls. Religious differences were here to stay. And the new political challenge was how to allow for and accommodate that pluralism, not to deny it or try to make it disappear. 

To see the power and the novelty of the religious rapprochement symbolized by the new  denominationalism, we need look no farther than that most eloquent spokesperson for the European Enlightenment, Voltaire. Exiled from France to England between 1726 and 1728, they were English streets like Peachtree that grabbed the philosopher’s attention. Here is how he described it in his Sixth Philosophical Letter: 

If there were only one religion in England, one would have to fear despotism; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but they have thirty, and they live happy and in peace. 

“Happy and in peace”… that’s the dream of an effective secular politics that takes religious pluralism for granted. 

But now comes the twist. Something else had happened to England between the early 1500s, when the trouble and the beheading began, and the early 1700s when thirty different religions seemed like a happy compromise. Namely, England got richer. A lot richer. 

The British Empire and British Navy, sure. But think the East India Company. Think the global commerce that empires are designed to protect. To the eye of many a wealthy British burgher, religious wars were simply bad for business. 

I’d like to suggest that we see something similar happening in the United States in this election season. Until fairly recently, the field of Republican presidential hopefuls looked a lot like Peachtree Street in Atlanta: an evangelical Protestant who used to be Lutheran, who was born in Iowa and lives in Minnesota; a lukewarm Mormon who was born in California and recently returned from China; a lukewarm Baptist who was born in Tennessee and lives in Atlanta; a fiery Roman Catholic who was born in Virginia and lives in Pennsylvania; an evangelical “born-again” Protestant who was born and raised in Texas; a Mormon who was born in Michigan but who has lived and worked all over the place; a former Baptist who used to be Lutheran and later converted to Roman Catholicism, who was born in Pennsylvania but also lives near Atlanta now; and a nominal Baptist who was born in Pennsylvania, lives in Texas, and almost has to be an atheist to be consistent with his Libertarian philosophy. What power could be more absolute and unchecked than God’s, after all? 

Now that is one complicated American street. And sure, we’re down to just four candidates now, but the situation is no less complicated for the reduction: one lifelong Roman Catholic; one Roman Catholic convert; one Mormon; and one quasi-Baptist Libertarian. And let’s face it, we’re really down to two: a lifelong Mormon and a Roman Catholic convert. So who represents the religious mainstream of the United States? The point is, there isn’t one. There never really was. Because religious wars are bad for business. 

None of this is to say that religion does not matter, deeply so, to some of these candidates and to some of their constituencies. There are a great many evangelical and fundamentalist churches in which the idea that the Pope is Antichrist is preached on a regular basis, and these tend to be the same churches that argue forcefully for the view that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is an heretical Christian offshoot. But precious few of these churches argue that a Catholic or Mormon church does not belong on an American street. Their right to exist is fairly settled. 

Can a Mormon or a Catholic run for president? Of course they can. In this election cycle, they are being asked to run against a US President who was born in Hawai’i and lived in Chicago, who was not raised religiously, but who came to a fairly loose and undefined Christian faith that is Protestant in its basic tenets, and whose middle name (Hussein) leaves some still confused about his true religious identity. 

(Mitt, Newt, Barack… they’ve all got funny names this time around.) 

There is a lot more to this campaign than religion and a lot more to North American religious pluralism than doctrine. It’s about the right to happiness and the quest for peace. Both of which are good for business. 

In 1980, Ronald Reagan presided over a powerful new coalition that linked long-entrenched business interests with a conservative Christian social agenda. That coalition proved formidable for a decade. Since then, the Christian conservative members of the Republican coalition—those who are honest with themselves, at any rate—have begun to wonder if they weren’t being played all along. Whenever the chips are down (as they are now) and a choice between economic conservatism or religious conservatism is demanded, then the Party goes with business. 

Saint George or Saint Spyridon doesn’t really matter here. What we have learned since the South Carolina primary, and re-learned in Florida and Nevada, is what matters most in this moment of deep economic unsettlement. Mitt Romney declared an income of $21 million last year, the vast majority of it from investments. Newt Gingrich declared an income in excess of $3 million, the vast majority of it suspicious-sounding. 

In other words, these are very wealthy men who are very political and very, very well-connected. And this is what their Party represents.

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By Joanna Brooks, Religion Dispatches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Heather Abraham

Fighting Monks?  Roman Catholic, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox Monks battle each other with brooms.   Why are they fighting?  For the ultimate prize: Sacred Space!  The 1500 year old Church of the Nativity, built over the spot believed to be the birthplace of Jesus, is a hot bed of contestation with the three Christian denominations vying for control of space within the church. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsT-iOiO4HM

 Powerful and controversial poem  by Chris Tse:  ”I’m Sorry I’m a Christian”

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

Robert Watson, Professor of American Studies at Lynn University, addresses the paranoid ranting of those claiming that President Obama has forbidden Christmas Trees  in the White House.  BTW, according to Barbara Walters, who toured the White House recently, there are 37 Christmas trees in the White House this year.   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JsO8SEGBiA

 Rick Perry promises an end to “Obama’s War on Religion.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PAJNntoRgA

 JESUS responds to Rick Perry.        

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxyEkrxsWP8

 Religious People are nerds! 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNtnN_DiP3o

Banned Super Bowl commercial, “Jesus Hates Obama” 

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

The “Fuck it Way,” a break off NRM which finds its roots in the cult classic “The Big Lebowski,” released a Christmas video.   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BXLpHNPW84

For those of you wondering what the hell ”The Fuck it Way” is, here is an introductory video.   ”The Ultimate Spiritual Way:  Say, Fuck It!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVdKQ0I35qo

What connects spirituality, poetry, and fashion?  Levi’s Jeans, of course.  “The God’s wait to delight in you….”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT16DcHcjRA

Pole Fitness for Jesus!  Christian women embrace the stripper pole to get fit while listening to upbeat Christian pop music.  Apparently pole dancing empowers women and 4 inch+ hooker shoes are good for the legs!  Who knew!  Now don’t judge, “It’s all about being spiritual.” 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tplfas9OIFI

Raelian Swastika Rehabilitation Day.  An interesting walk through the history of the swastika before it became the Nazi symbol.   The Swastika, a Coca Cola symbol?

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

Bill Maher talks about Apatheism—apathetic atheist.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=momdjeHgBy4

Australia’s John Safran explores religion and pop culture in his homeland and beyond:  Islamic Jedi?, Matrix Messiah?, Juggalo Minister? 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPZ77_vORPY

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has unleashed an “I’m a Mormon” commercial blitz on America.  Their goal?  To introduce Mormons to mainstream America. 

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

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By James Dennis LoRusso, Emory University  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Kate Daley-Bailey

American Nazis support the Occupy Wall Street Movement?

This headline ripped through the conservative news outlets like wildfire.  Christmas came early for Fox News.  My curiosity was peaked… I am a fence sitter regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement… primarily because I refuse to join a movement which will not outline its agenda and even then I am leery.  I have to know specifically what and who I am protesting.  My fence-sitting is engendered by my recent research into how the Nazis gained power in Germany and were backed surprisingly by many high standing church leaders, scholars, and much of the German population.  

You can imagine my surprise when I read the above headlines.  Was this yet another example of propaganda generated by the Fox News-types of the American media to damn the liberals of the Occupy movement?  Yes… but it was also something more for me.  Just as I cannot fathom how the general German population could have endorsed a megalomaniac and demagogic murderer like Hitler… I could not see how or why the American Nazi movement would endorse the Occupy Movement.  The agendas of these groups seem counter to one another.  So I went to the American Nazi website (and am, subsequently, on every FBI watch list).  I had to see why this fervently anti-Semitic hate group was endorsing a movement whose views were so seemingly antithetical to their own movement.  Here are two links to their websites … so you too can get on an FBI watch list

Upon reading the American Nazi endorsement of the OWS movement, I was struck by the common rhetorical devices utilized by these movements.  Of course the Occupy Wall Street movement is not homogenous and champions itself as representing the so-called ‘99%’.  The Occupy movement heralds itself as a people’s movement… much like the movement’s more politically conservative sibling- the Tea Party.

While the Occupy and Tea Party movements seem radically disparate on the surface, there are some common denominators shared between them… anger, vague slogans, fears over economic ruin and growing unemployment, outrage over a corrupt political system, untenable or nonexistent health care policies, and challenges to civil liberties.  Both groups are disgusted with corporate greed and financial manipulation.  While similar lists of grievances can be found in most modern social revolutions, these same critiques also arose during the most sinister time in modern European history.

The discourse put forth by the Tea Partiers and Occupiers show a semblance in content and tenor with the notorious 25 Point Program  put forward by the NSDAP (the Nazi Party of Germany) in the 1920s.  Published in the Nazi Party’s premier newspaper the Volkischer Beobachter  (which roughly translates as the People’s Observer) the 25 point program states that all citizens should have the right to vote and have equal rights and duties.  The state, according to this document, is required to create and maintain a healthy middle class, to dismantle large corporate entities and lease these facilities at cheap rates to small businesses, to “ruthlessly fight against those whose activities are damaging to the common interest” (profiteers and usurers were to be punished by death), to promote an education system focused on practical life skills, and to “break the slavery of interest.” The 25 point program was an attempt by the nascent Nazi party to construct a Weltanschauung, a systematic worldview or ideology, for the German Volk.

Some of the points enumerated would be more likely embraced by the politically right leaning Tea Party supporters—others might be more consistent with an Occupier mentality.  According to the Nazi’s 25 point program all non-German immigration was to be prevented, all non-Germans were to be seen as aliens, given ‘guest status,’ and could be forcefully expelled from Germany at any time.  Point 15 supports “an expansion of old age welfare” and point 17 demands “abolition of taxes on land.” Point 21 requires that the state protect the health of mothers and children and mandates physical fitness instruction of children.  Point 24 supports a freedom of religion, of sorts.  It reads as follows:

We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race. The Party as such advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination.  It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the framework: common utility precedes individual utility.

The last phrase of this point is sometimes translated as “common need before private greed.”

While the earlier points may not have been particularly troubling… point 24 brings home why we should be skeptical of all political movements which use ambiguous slogans and feed off of general discontent of the populous.  One group inevitably gets saddled with the blame…which often results in devastating outcomes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWwK5TBcoUY

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

Further Reading 

• Concern in Israel over #OWS (Occupy Wall Street) anti-Semitism, Israel Matzav 

• Cries of Anti-Semitism, but Not at Zuccotti Park, NY Times

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Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., Georgia State University 

I suppose it was inevitable. Since nature and the military both abhor a vacuum, the recent announcement of the military draw-down in Iraq almost inevitably meant that we’d soon be re-deploying our military forces somewhere else.

Still, the northern coast of Australia came as something of a surprise. President Obama announced yesterday that 250 US Marines will soon be shipping off for rotating six-month tours at an Australian military base on the north central coast of the island, near a city called Darwin. Their numbers are expected to escalate to 2500 in fairly short order, along with military equipment and long-range aircraft.

Since they’re headed to Darwin, it was also probably inevitable that this announcement, something of a curiosity on the evening news cycle, would be read as an exercise in the geopolitics of “survival the fittest.” In this case, the new troop deployment is seen as a symbolic check on growing Chinese influence in the region, especially noteworthy after several recent incidents prompted by the Chinese Navy’s intrusion upon the territorial waters of several neighboring states.

So the whole thing has been read as a check on Chinese power.

Perhaps it is that, but it is surprising that no one consulting the map has noticed what stands in between Darwin, Australia and the Chinese mainland… namely, the most populous Muslim country in the world, Indonesia. 

It is unclear that the Australians would accepted a deployment that had been framed for them in anti-Chinese terms. China is one of Australia’s biggest trading partners and they seem far less worried about an emergent China than American pubic officials have been of late.

But the Australians have been active and enthusiastic supporters of the War on Terror, and this deployment–assuming it is aimed at Indonesian-backed South Pacific terrorist networks more than the Chinese Navy–serves that purpose nicely.

This is not about a new threat but an old one. It is not about an emerging Chinese threat, whether miliary or economic at all.

No, this is about al-Qaeda and Islam.

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By Ben Brazil, Religion Bulletin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post originally posted on Religion Bulletin

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Georgia State University

At the same time that the US Supreme Court issued a second stay of execution in one week in the state of Texas, it permitted the execution of Troy Davis to go forward in the state of Georgia. And at 11:08pm on Wednesday, September 21^st, some four hours after his scheduled 7:00pm execution time, Troy Davis was indeed killed by a state-administered lethal injection. 

The range of emotions and the swirl of debates generated by this confusing juxtaposition are layered and complex: a white Army recruiter accused of rape and murder is spared, at least for now, while a black man accused of killing a police officer is not.  Both men insisted on their innocence throughout their circuit of appeals. 

I mention skin color because it is a part of the story of state-administered death no matter how we try to discuss the thing. The very fact that our system is organized to ensure that race is not a factor speaks eloquently to the fact of race’s inescapability in our judicial system, especially for the young black man. 

Yet I am less concerned with racial justice than I am with procedural justice. The manner in which Troy Davis met his end raises new and different questions about the death penalty in the United States. 

On September 21^st, Troy Davis had his second purported his last meal.  He elected to have the same meal that his fellow death row inmates had–not because he did not expect to be executed, but rather as an expression of solidarity with them. The execution of a person with a strong case for clemency is, as one can imagine, an emotionally devastating event for that state’s death row population. There is a hopelessness in the air for weeks after. 

Troy Davis was permitted to spend six hours with his family on the day of his scheduled death, a final private conversation.  He was then given some private time to himself and even permitted unusual access to music. He had his final meal between 4:00 and 5:00pm, then was prepared for death. 

But at the eleventh hour, and for the second time in his life, Davis’s execution was put on hold as the US Supreme Court asked to review the evidence one more time.  No doubt his hopes soared; certainly the hopes of the crowds gathered in vigil in Atlanta and Jackson, Georgia did. Those hopes were dashed just a few hours later when the High Court decided not to intervene in Davis’s case, and so he died just a few hours after he had expected to die when he awoke Wednesday morning. 

This is all very unusual. 

The fact that Troy Davis was convicted and sentenced to death twenty years ago in 1991, the fact that he suffered the double jeopardy of two last meals in his strange life behind bars, and the fact that his execution was once again delayed at the very last moment are all facts to which the vast majority of Americans across the political spectrum are opposed.

Supporters of the death penalty consider this endless round of appellate review excessive, almost as if we care more for the rights of the accused than we do the victim. Opponents of the death penalty consider this cruel as well as unusual, and thus a violation of the 8th Amendment to the US Constitution. No one can be happy with the manner in which we administer the ultimate penalty in this country. 

But the fact is that we will never be able to administer it any other way. The US Supreme Court has consistently held that the penalty of death is qualitatively different than any other kind of penalty and therefore subject to review unlike any other kind. Any prisoner sentenced to death has automatic rights to appellate review at multiple levels. Any prisoner sentenced to death in this country will languish on death row for a decade or more; will experience the surreal days and nights in which scheduled death dates come, are postponed, and return. As unusual as Troy Davis’s case may seem to us, it is in fact rather normal. 

The simple fact is that, given the constitutional commitments to individual liberty and due process of law—commitments for which we are justly proud—we will never be able to administer the penalty of death in the way other countries that have it—like China, Iran and North Korea—can. They do it fast, with little if any subsequent review. 

When I first became interested in the death penalty some decades ago, a famous case of serial execution took place in China. As a way to deal with the escalating problem of highway robbery, the government took 6000 men accused of the crime and shot them all together in a single morning. Highway robbery decreased dramatically. 

The point is that we can never administer the death penalty in that way. That is a very good thing; it is what makes us modern. It represents what is best and noblest in our system of justice. And it is in this sense that the death penalty is practically incompatible with the norms and the systems of justice that have emerged in Europe and the US in modern times. 

The only reason Socrates had time to talk with his friends while awaiting execution was the fact that Athens was celebrating a religious ritual during which the city was not permitted to kill anyone.  Had he been sentenced to death at any other time, he would have been killed immediately.  When Jesus was brought before the Roman civil administration in Palestine, he was tried, sentenced, tortured and killed all in a single afternoon. That pre-modern form of state-sponsored killing is no longer our own. 

We are trying, then, and failing, to administer a penalty that made sense in other times and makes sense in other parts of the world, as if still made sense in our own. The indignities and inhumanities that are born of those paradoxes and contradictions came into very sharp focus under some very harsh light last week. 

And it is in this sense that some of us may hope, however cautiously, that Troy Davis did not die in vain.

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By Diana Butler Bass, A Great Awakening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Abbas Barzegar, Religion Dispatches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Between Dante and Deepak

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

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

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

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

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

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By Kenny Smith

While they presently remain at the level of fandom and  “just for fun,” elements from the Sci-Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica series have been re-crafted and re-presented in religious terms. See, for instance, the Church of the Cylon God Facebook page,  or the Church St. Gaius Baltar.   

“Pray at the Pump” founder warns President Obama, create jobs or face more earthquakes, a claim which God then quickly refuted.  Others have suggested that the divine reprimand said to be implied in recent earthquakes and historic hurricanes was in fact aimed at Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor, in whose district a major quake’s epicenter was located, perhaps in response to the steep cuts Cantor proposed to the U.S. Geological Service.  So, is God an angry geologist?

Moderate and liberal Christians are in fact Vampire Satanists sent to infiltrate churches, one Christian conspiracy theorist thinks so. 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMAjdW-xinE

A recent mathematical model predicts traditional institutional forms of religion will soon be extinct in nine Western countries.  

Lesbian Pagans, a fundamentalist’s worst nightmare.   An African American Pagan priestess reflects on her experience in Christian and Pagan traditions and the lack of cultural resources she found in both.

A severe case of gender confusion seems to have baffled Islamic police in Indonesia.

Flash meditation mobs, sending peaceful vibes through the world’s cities, are increasingly common.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDTybVK76sg

The complexities of Scientology and celebrity continue, this time for Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith.  

Former Fox News personality Glenn Beck wrapped up his “Restoring Courage” campaign in Israel, an event which seems to have been of interest mostly to American Evangelicals, Jews and Israelis not so much.   Evangelical Michelle Bachman may already be “obsolete” as a 2012 Presidential candidate.  

For would-be Dudeists fallen on hard economic times, some free copies of the forthcoming Dudeist Bible, The Abide Guide, are available!  

After a very well-attended Go Topless day in Venice Beach, Ca. last week, the city of Toronto has denied GoTopless.org and members of the International Raelian Religion a permit for a public demonstration in a downtown park, though some plan to do so regardless.

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By J.F. Sullivan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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