The Books of My Life: The Kingdom of God in America

H. Richard Niebuhr, the brother of prominent, well known, and influential historian, foreign policy commentator, and social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr, wrote three books that are now considered classics in the sociology, cultural history, ethography, theology, and social ethics of American Christianity. The first, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929), explores how region or geography, race, and class impacted American religion, particularly American Protestantism, and divided it. The second, Christ and Culture (1951), explores, by typologising how Christian groups conceptualised the relation between Jesus and the world (Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture), the relationship between the church and the world. The third, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1937), explores the key, central, or dominant cultural symbols at the heart of American Protestantism.

Taking what we would today call a symbolic anthropological approach with its emphasis on "going native" and key symbols,  Niebuhr argues that three key interrelated symbols, the sovereignty of God, the kingdom of Christ, and the coming kingdom, with varying emphases and in various permutations, have been at the centre of American Protestantism since the colonial era whether Puritan Protestantism, Quaker Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism, or the Protestant social gospel. Niebuhr also argues, in Durkheimian fashion, that over time these key symbols were secularised and, as a result, became central or key symbols in the American civil religion with its emphasis on American choseness,  whether as a result of divine grace or because America is nature's nation, American mission, and the coming utopian age that will arise out of American choseness and America's mission to the world.

The Kingdom of God in America is a classic for good reason. It should be essential reading for anyone interested in American history, American culture, American religion, Protestantism, and American Protestantism though not everyone will find its mix of history, ethnography, and reformed theology, its mix of descriptive and normative analysis, in other words, compelling. Highly recommended for its historical and ethnographic approach and analysis.

They're Killing Christian Babies: Living in a Mad Conspiracy Theory World

I have to admit, I am fascinated intellectually by the right wing demagogues and their quack, quack, quacking puppets who spin fantastical and fantasy laden conspiracy theories, amongst them some of an anti-Semitic variety, of hatred which negatively impact and demonise others. And, of course, when you return the favour, they whinge and whine and boo hoo hoo about the conspiracy theories spun against them in satirical and parodic form and how they are hurting someone they care about. There are several words that describe such people. Hypocrite certainly comes to mind. So does wink wink nudge nudge, pot, kettle, black, goose, gander, glass houses, and self proclaimed Christian.

The Devil and President Obama

So some people are upset that the History Channel “documentary” The Bible (2013)—I use this term advisedly since the “documentary” is clearly told from a Christian perspective—apparently has an Obama look alike playing Satan and are crying foul. Others, particularly those on the right, however, are urging calm, noting that the parodying of American presidents is hardly novel and that parodies of American presidents has a long pedigree, that the resemblance between Satan and Obama questionable anyway, and that we must ascertain the intent of Roma Downey of Touched by an Angel fame and Mark Burnett of Survivor fame (Survivor was the British and later American version of Swedish television network SVT's Expedition Robinson), the producers of The Bible for the History Channel, if we are to come to any conclusions about whether Downey and Burnett intended to link Obama and Satan in their “documentary”.

Those who raise this question of intent are right, we need to try to ascertain the intent of the “authors” of The Bible. Both Downey, who perhaps not unsurprisingly played Mary the mother of Jesus in the "documentary". and Burnett claim that it was not their intention to find an actor who resembled Obama to play Satan. Downey and Burnett claim that the charge that they hired an actor who looked like Obama to play Satan was intentional “…is utter nonsense. The actor who played Satan, Mehdi Ouazanni, is a highly acclaimed Moroccan actor…has previously played parts in several Biblical epics—including Satanic characters long before Barack Obama was elected as our President” and that they and the History Channel have the highest respect for President Obama.”

So should we take Downey and Burnett at their word? What would be interesting to explore with respect to the issue of intent is the politics of Downey and Burnett. So I did a little research. According to one source, Downey, a "devout [Irish] Catholic", supported Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness for president of Ireland in 2011. McGuinness, like Downey, is a devout Catholic and is an Irish nationalist. He was likely a high-ranking member of the IRA and was likely involved, in some way, shape, or form, in violence conducted by the IRA during the years of “the Troubles”. McGuinness later came to have a decent relationship with Unionist nationalist Ian Paisley, condemned recent IRA splinter group violence, and ran on an anti-EU austerity programme when he ran for Irish president in 2011. Burnett—who was born in Britain but is now a naturalised US citizen—though he has allied himself professionally with two of Obama’s most strident critics, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump (Sarah Palin’s Alaska and The Apprentice)—has a record of donating to democratic causes. Contradiction?

Beyond all this we know that Downey and Burnett promoted The Bible at mega-churches around the country, including Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Orange County, California and that the show had an advisory board that consisted in part of Rick Warren, Paul Eshleman of Campus Crusade for Christ, and Jim Daly of Focus on the Family, and has been endorsed by Bishop Michael Sheridan, Bishop T.D. Jakes, evangelical entertainer Pat Boone, and Christian Pastor Joel Osteen. And while evangelical radical Tony Campolo and noted poet Maya Angelou also endorsed The Bible as well it is hard not to see the fact that The Bible's advisory board is made up primarily of cultural conservatives and the fact that it is cultural conservatives who have, by and large made up most of those who have endorsed the programme, as very revealing about The Bible's substance and target audience.

One of the more interesting articles I ran across while I was doing a little quick research was one in the Daily Kos. The writer of the article, one caunceydevega, raises interesting questions about Downey’s and Burnett's representations of "race" and attempts at multiculturalism in the The Bible and rightly points out that representations don't come from thin air. The moral of the story, in other words, is that we mustn't forget that Obama has been portrayed over the last five years as a fascist, a Nazi, a clown, Mickey Mouse, an Uncle Tom, a shuffling lay about Black, and has been accused of everything from wanting to kill old people to not being a “real American” or an American at all.

If Downey and Burnett, despite their claims to the contrary, really did want to tie Obama and Satan together several questions come to mind: Why are Downey and Burnett doing a Bart "I didn't do it" Simpson? Do they simply not have the ovaries (Downey) and balls (Barnett) of their parodic "convictions"? Those in the past who did polemicise against American presidents did have the balls—the press of the past was a man’s game—of their convictions. There was some nasty stuff said about George Washington and even nastier stuff said about Washington’s big federalist "PM" Hamilton. There was some nasty stuff said Thomas Jefferson when he ran for president including references to his sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, and his anti-Christianity (grist for those who lack an understanding of early American deism and mistake Jeff for a fundamentalist or evangelical). Many on the left questioned George W. Bush’s intelligence and argued that he was a puppet on the Dick Cheney string. Why are Downey and Burnett, if it was their intention, so unwilling to take responsibility for their parody? Too sophomoric?

Oh one last thing before I end this short essay, I hope there is no hypocrisy here, no "right wingers", in other words, who blasted "left wingers" in the past for their nasty representations of Bush and how they demeaned the office of the president in these nasty representations who are now jumping with orgasmic over the Obama as Satan "parody of Downey and Burnett. I suspect, however, that hypocrisy is running amok. Humans are humans after all.

So anyway Americans, remember as you are sitting down for turkey or tofurkey and cranberries at your next Christmas (or Chrismukkah) meal your president is the devil. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA...

Revelation and Reason?

One of the things that really fascinates me about contemporary literalist Christianity, when one goes native, when one views literal Christianity from the standpoint of a literalist Xitan theological position, is the problem of revelation within literalist Christianity.

Talmudic Judaism, the Judaism that developed in the first century CE and afterwards in the diaspora, assumed, as did post-Solomonic Hebrew religion one surmises, that YHWH, with the Torah, the Law, had revealed a code of 613 laws or mitzvah that the faithful had to obey in all times and in all places (http://www.jewfaq.org/613.htm). The prophets (nevi'im) were those who called those who weren’t following the mitzvah of Torah, particularly those elites violating the social ethical precepts of the Torah related to the poor, to repentance, to return to the laws G-d had revealed. The prophets, in other words, aren’t so much prophets in the contemporary Xtian conception of the term, predicting the coming of the Christ or some other later event like the battle between Russia and Israel as a prelude to the second coming of Jesus, as they are those calling the faithful back to the mitzvah of the Torah, backto the revelations at the heart of the ancient Hebrew faith.

Christianity, of course, had a different conception of revelation. What Jesus was up to is unclear. The stories about Jesus in the gospels, after all, are often inconsistent and contradictory. Did Jesus come, as he once claimed, to change not one jot and title of the law, the Torah, (here is a link to one Xtian group that makes a similar claim, http://www.therefinersfire.org/original_commandments.htm), or did he, as Paul later claims, transform Judaism from a religion grounded in ancient “revelation” and its mitzvah to one in which that previous revelation was irrelevant and circumcision became a matter of the heart rather than a physical act of obedience? Christians have generally taken the latter position since Christian orthodoxy was manufactured with Nicaea in 325 BCE and after.

One, of course, can’t avoid historical and sociological issues here. Xy before Nicaea was diverse having Gnostics, Docetics, Arianites, Marcionites, and other variants, and, before the destruction of the second temple by the Romans had a Pharisaic variant, the Christian community led by Jesus' brother James, a group, in Weberian terms, dominated by patriarchal authority and which continued to live according to the law (mitzvh) of Moses. They continued, in other words to act much like Pharisees.

It was Paul, of course, as has been long understood, who transformed this Jewish sect into a “gentile” faith, Orthodox and Roman Catholic, that would come to dominate Roman and post-Roman Europe. One of the things that is transformed in this great transformation of Christianity is the notion of revelation. After Paul a notion that previous revelation can be surpassed by later revelation (dispensationalism) develops in Xy. The theological problem with this notion of revelation as unfolding, as continuing, is that it opens a theological can of worms that later Christians simply haven’t wanted to face up to. If revelation is continuing than what makes Christian revelation—-Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant—-superior to the revelations at the heart of Islam, the Baha’i Faith, or Mormonism???

Talmudic Judaism, the Judaism that developed as essentially an intellectual if increasingly ritualistic commentary or set of commentaries on Torah mitzvah, has its own set of problems. If G-d reveals himself through Torah why does he only reveal himself in the Torah and then, apparently, become tongue tied? Do new historical, social, and cultural circumstances not merit comment from YHWH? On another issue it is worth noting that many contemporary Talmudic Jews do not follow all of the 613 mitvah. Contemporary Talmudic Jews essentially ignore many of the more misogynistic mitzvah, the commandments to kill blasphemers and magicians, the commandment to genocide ones enemies, the commandments against usury, and the commandment to institute the law of Jubilee.

While it may be intellectually fun to play these going native theological games from the inside a more critical and empirical perspective on the issue of metaphysical revelation must inevitably come into play at least for those of us who don't simply accept things on the basis of "faith".

I am not a "believer". I have never really been "religious". I have never really believed in the existence of some personal God or some metaphysical teleological first principle in the Scholastic sense. The thing that really clinched that there is no G-d for me was and is the Holocaust. As those who know these issues better than me have said before me, how can anyone believe in G-d or a god after the Shoah? How can anyone believe in G-d or a god after all the horrors of the twentieth century: Armenians genocided. Jews genocided. Hiroshima nuked. Nagasaki nuked. Cambodia genocided. How can one believe in a God given the slave trade that enslaved Africans and justified it all through ideologies of superiority and inferiority? How can one believe in a god who would allow pogroms against Jews to occur? How can one believe in a god after all the human depravities, big and small, over the course of human history and particularly during the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? It seems impossible given the real circumstances of human existence to believe, at the very least, in a personal God who cares about human beings, even those he is supposed to have chosen as his special own

Reiigion as Peter Berger notes, functions to help people deal with questions of theodicy: why does bad stuff happen to me (the theodicy primarily of the poor and powerless)? Why am I so blessed (the theodicy primarily of the elite and powerful)? Why did g-d allow the Shoah?. Where was he as it was happening? What the Holocaust says to me and continues to say to me is that G-d is a fiction that allows some of us to deal with the pain of life. Religion in all its forms helps most humans to deal with that suffering and pain that is life. And life is, as Buddhism and the writer or writers of the wisdom Book of Job, long ago realised, all about suffering and pain. That is why we have meaning systems like that which we call religion that explain why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people, to explain the randomness that is real life.