Speaking forcefully from the 'I'

I recently finished reading the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. Wow! It is quite the powerful book. One cannot help but respect and admire Douglass.

A quote stuck out that I would like to share:

This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free.... He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery. I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me (pp 82-83).

Hear in Douglass' voice how the brawl with Mr. Covey impacted the course of his life. It was an event that enabled Douglass to bring to life a Self he had been crafting in secret for some time. Douglass physically drew a line and declared--I go no further. The result was a fight. Douglass refused to submit to the racial hierarchy that Mr. Covey presupposed and asserted. In this resistance, in this moment of struggle, Douglass affirmed a sense of self worth, individuality and responsibility with regards to Mr. Covey in particular and the white man in general. He affirmed his agency in concrete terms, which helped him visualize and enact an emancipatory project.

Whose Gospel? Evangelical Orthodoxy and Heresy

Who is allowed in as a valued member of any community and who is kept out and marginalized is instructive.

The other night I saw an interview on ABC, it was with Barbara Walters and Joel Osteen. The conversation hung around the message that he is perhaps most famous for preaching, the "gospel of prosperity and wealth." He has a 35,000 member church and among many evangelical Christians he is a celebrated pastor. Although I am sure that he has many individual and associational critics, for the most part, he neatly fits into the evangelical community. Osteen is an Insider.

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to NPR's "This American Life." One of the interviews was with Carlton Pearson. He went to Oral Roberts University and at one time he had a 14,000 member church. At one time, like Osteen, Pearson too was an Insider. Then he started preaching what he called the "gospel of inclusion." Two points about this gospel were troublesome to orthodox interpretation.

1. He said that through Jesus Christ all people are saved. The emphasis is on all, because orthodox evangelicals preach a more exclusivist message that focuses on being individually "born again," on "personal salvation" and on "Bible believing." Without this personal response to Jesus that divides the saved believer from the unsaved masses destined to burn in hell eternal, then your status as a Christian is questionable.

2. He began preaching that hell was not a transcendent place. Hell was here on earth--we make our own hell here on earth. This was a revelation Pearson had--while holding his grand-daughter one afternoon he saw a documentary on the Rwandan genocide and all the death and destruction that man waged against man. After prayer, he understood that hell was man made.

Needless to say, the gospel of inclusion did not fit into the mainstream evangelical community's ideas. Pearson soon became an Outsider. Pearson said that when he started preaching the gospel of inclusion he rather quickly fell from grace among his evangelical colleagues. He was now hanging out with those people normally marginalized by evangelical communities.

What does this mean about the evangelical community in the United States when the gospel of prosperity is valorized by many and the gospel of inclusion is demonized by many? How did the gospel of prosperity become mainstream? And how did the gospel of inclusion become marginalized?

These seem like terribly important questions. For, they get at the contemporary constitution of the evangelical community--what is accepted as Orthodox and what is thought of as heresy, who can be accepted as members and leaders of the church and who cannot, what interpretations of the Bible are acceptable and which are not, and so on.

Culture Jamming

At the Woodly Park/National Zoo metro stop in DC, as you descend into the first sub-level, hung on either side of the tunnel walls are advertisements.

A few months back, one advertisement pictured an African-American man and women in an embrace. He was wearing a tuxedo and she had on a wedding dress. Under the picture, words read: "Marriage. It Works." Just below these words, in black marker, someone scribbled: "Yeah, let gays do it." It hung this way for several weeks.

A new series of advertisements have since been hung. Recently, one was advertising an aircraft manufacturer. The image was of a military plane--perhaps a C-130--flying high over a jagged moutian range. Words read: "We Make it Happen." In black marker, beneath the plan's belly, someone drew a line of bombs being dropped. The poster still hangs there.

Both of these instances can be seen as a kind of "culture jamming," where corporate sponsored advertisements are tactically turned, by some fast writing, into a counter-message. The counter-messages use the corporate sanctified images and their (often mystified) political positions, to make a subversive political statement that operates within a broader context. In the above examples, "Yeah, let gays do it" was written during the recent national debate over the meaning of marriage and the right of same sex partners to be legally joined. The bombs beneath the plane were scribbled there in the context of the Bush administration's current "war on terrorism." Together, these small acts of everyday resistance can be seen as attempts at prying open a rather closed interpretation. They probe at the predominate political and corporate arrangements that decorate the urban American landscape, and they attempt to reassert a marginalized reading of the events onto the public transcript.

The Responsibilization of Iraq

Bill Petti posted 'Blame America Last' on the Duck of Minerva blog spot. It inverts the all too often used, 'Blame America Last' phrase. As Pettie sees it:

Those who subscribe to [Blame America Last] this view go to great lengths to deny any responsibility when it comes to American action or inaction. American policy makers are seen as consistently noble and capable, doing what they can in a selfless attempt to make the world a better place—any negative outcomes cannot be assigned to our policy makers since a) their motives were noble and who, after all, can blame a noble man for trying, and b) the outcome was destined to be bad; the situation was determined by forces outside the control of American capabilities.

I would suggest that 'Blame America Last' is part of the responsibilization of Iraq, or the process of shifting responsibility for the mess in Iraq away from the Bush administration and toward the weak, unstable and hardly sovereign government of Iraq. Locating responsibility is a subject-crafting exercise that allows the Bush administration to constitute America as innocent of blame and at the same time, constitute Iraq as somehow a responsible and coherent actor.

Soul Winning with Tax Financed Evangelism

In "Religion for a Captive Audience, Paid for by Taxes," we learn about taxed-financed Christian evangelism in prisons.

Life was different in Unit E at the state prison outside Newton, Iowa.

The toilets and sinks — white porcelain ones, like at home — were in a separate bathroom with partitions for privacy. In many Iowa prisons, metal toilet-and-sink combinations squat beside the bunks, to be used without privacy, a few feet from cellmates.

The cells in Unit E had real wooden doors and doorknobs, with locks. More books and computers were available, and inmates were kept busy with classes, chores, music practice and discussions. There were occasional movies and events with live bands and real-world food, like pizza or sandwiches from Subway. Best of all, there were opportunities to see loved ones in an environment quieter and more intimate than the typical visiting rooms.

But the only way an inmate could qualify for this kinder mutation of prison life was to enter an intensely religious rehabilitation program and satisfy the evangelical Christians running it that he was making acceptable spiritual progress. The program — which grew from a project started in 1997 at a Texas prison with the support of George W. Bush, who was governor at the time — says on its Web site that it seeks “to ‘cure’ prisoners by identifying sin as the root of their problems” and showing inmates “how God can heal them permanently, if they turn from their sinful past.”

Sovereignty, the Citizen and the Foreigner

A couple of Washington Post articles caught my attention on Saturday morning. In "US Prosecuters Move to Block Padilla's Questioning of Pentagon," the reporter opens with these words:

Federal prosecutors asked a judge Thursday to prevent Jose Padilla's defense attorneys from questioning Defense Department officials or obtaining documents about his treatment during 3 1/2 years in military custody as an "enemy combatant."

And in "US Denies Liability in Torture Case," these opening words:

The Bush administration asserted in federal court yesterday that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and three former military officials cannot be held liable for the alleged torture of nine Afghans and Iraqis in U.S. military detention camps because the detainees have no standing to sue in U.S. courts.

If, as in the case of Jose Padilla, citizens have no legal recourse against the government that confines and subjects them to punishment, and if, as in the case of the nine Afghanies, foreigners have no legal recourse against the government that they assert tortured them, then what does that mean about the government under which we live today and our relationship to it?

Christmas, Christianity and America

Tom Gilson recently drew from David Limbaugh in a blog discussion about the shutting of the Nativity scene in Chicago. I commented on Gilson's blog and wish to follow up here.

Much hand wringing goes on over the place of Christmas in America. Over the past few years, the notion of a 'war on Christmas' has been raised by various commentators. There is a war, they suggest, aimed at the holiday and even the religion itself. It is waged around the country by 'secular humanists,' 'liberals,' and the usual lot of contemporary enemies of Christ. Usually, the story goes, Christians are the underdogs being shouted down by whatever counter-Christian force they happen to face.

Another way of seeing the situation is that the ruckus raised by many Christians over the status of Christmas in America, arises from the demise of the presupposition that Christmas, Christianity and America go hand in hand. They no longer do. The presupposition is no longer an unproblematic way of life today, as there are any number of different religious, ethical and metaphysical persuasions animating people in America.

Historically, one might see today as akin to the period of time after Jesus' death when Christianity was just forming as a movement. It was not hegemonic then and in America that hegemony is rapidly being challenged today.

Talking about a 'war on Christmas' is more than an empirical observation that reflects reality. It is a way of framing the situation, a metaphor that works to inscribe meaning to unfolding events and give them shape and order. A 'war on Christmas' functions to mobilize the troops, so to speak, as it neatly ties into the notion of 'spiritual warfare,' whereby Good and Evil are ultimately animating events on earth and the 'war on Christmas' is simply part of this broader battle. The articulation of a 'war on Christmas' is a way of effecting a divide between those that belong to the community (friends of Christ) and those that do not (enemies of Christ).

In other words, in a period of time when the dominance of the presumption of Christianity is waning in America, the 'war on Christmas' is a way of hardening symbolically important sites that anchor the Christian storyline to the sociopolitical context in the United States.

A Divine American Leadership?

Russel D. Moore wrote a pespective piece in the Baptist Press entitled: Nancy Pelosi is my Prayer Partner. The point that I want to comment on is Moore's claim that:

The news networks tell us that the new majority in the United States House and Senate is the result of a "wave" of Democratic Party voters. From a human and historical vantage point, that's true. But as those who believe in the providence of God, it is also true that "there is no authority except from God, and those that exist are instituted by God" (Romans 13:1). For whatever reason, on Election Day God decided that Nancy Pelosi will be sitting behind President Bush at next year's State of the Union address. And God decided that outgoing Speaker Dennis Hastert would not be seated there.

He says further that Christians can be critical of their leaders, that Christians should not acquiesce to their government, and that Christians should respect those leaders they politically differ from. But, and here is where this blog comes in, What does it mean/do to believe and act as if your leadership is somehow devinely linked?

A key effect of acting like American political leadership is divinly installed is that ultimately, whatever the leadership does and for whatever reasons and even if it is evil (as Moore says Pelosi's stance on abortion is), these leaders are still tight with God. This creates a tension for folks like Moore. How is that God installed someone in office that does evil works? What kind of God is that? And why should anyone praise and pray to this God that puts evildoers in office?

Moore doesn't account for these problems, which points to a broader problem of the Baptist sect that I have encountered before--there is a theological sloppiness that haunts their beliefs. It bugs me. Work it out! Think it out! Don't be complacent with blatantly contradictory positions. They don't help your cause.

But more than that, the belief that the political leadership is somehow linked with God is a mode of interpretation with deep historical roots. Moore, like a good trooper, taps into this discourse. He keeps it alive and performs it for us, an audience that is not familiar with this kind of interpretation. So, a second effect of Moore's claim that our political leadership is divine is to thrust an alternative interpretation of events onto the scene. In other words, Moore challenges the dominance of modern 'secular' politics by making the claim that the political leadership is linked to God.

Thirdly, what about the leadership of other countries? Are they also divinly inspired? Is Kim Jong Ill also annointed by God? Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran also divinely inspired? To follow Moore's logic, one might think so. But who knows? As a mentioned above, there is a certainly a bit of sloppiness to his case.

Sacrificing at the Alter of Self

This is the launching post for this blog. Please feel free to visit and comment as you choose.

So this show the "Biggest Loser" was on TV last night. I wasn't watching, but just happend to walk in near the end of this episode. The volume was low, almost inaudible. I saw this man standing there crying. He was in front of a life-sized image of himself that was on a small pedistool. The image showed him before he lost over 100 lbs. Between flashes of this crying man and the cardboard image of his old self, the camera kept flashing back to the exercise coach. The coach was cheering him on, praising him for his hard work, his dedication, his discipline and so on.

With the volume low and these various TV images being scrolled across the screen, the scene looked eirily religous. It looked as if this (formally overweigh) man was standing at an alter of the self. The new self, the better, leaner, fitter and body-focused man that exudes the values of liberal self-creation, stood before the old self, the shameful self that the coach had helped him exercise (in the physical and spiritual sense) out of existence.

What once would have been an image of a transcendent God had now been replaced by an image of an Old Self. The shaman was now a coach. And the weeping, new Self had sacrificed fat (rather than animals) in the name of becoming anew through a series of physical and dietery regimes imposed on the self.