An unhealthy interest in heresy.

The publicity machine is ramping up for The Da Vinci Code. The movie will be out this weekend, and probably one of the biggest bits of genius involved in promoting it has been suckering nearly the entire Christian church into talking about it.

Either we’re “correcting its errors,” á la Josh McDowell (who, by the way, stands to make some pretty good coin if he can sucker enough pastors into buying enough of his anti-Da Vinci Code studies) or we’re suggesting a full-on boycott like Barbara Nicolosi (who recommends that we attend any other movie this weekend to show “Hollywood,” as if Hollywood is a person, that we’d rather watch crap than heresy. Okay, that’s not the way she puts it; that’s just the logical conclusion of her reasoning.)

Thanks to the worldwide Christian conniption fit, I have to read about this bloody movie every day in Christianity Today’s email newsletter; I had to read about it this weekend in the Assemblies of God’s weekly magazine, Today’s Pentecostal Evangel; and I keep running into Christians on a daily basis who go on and on and on about it. In fact I was speaking to someone today whose pastor has embarked on a THREE WEEK SERIES about the Da Vinci Code. From the pulpit. Including study guides. So, for three weeks, that church doesn’t get to hear about Jesus’s love and God’s grace; they get to hear a blow-by-blow refutation of the latest movie from the director of The Grinch, Splash, and Cocoon. Has anyone, by the way, come to believe in Whos, mermaids, and spaceships full of old people as a result of those movies? No? Okay then.

Part of me says see the movie and boycott the Christian bandwagon. I’d much rather watch heresy than listen to stupidity.

I don’t blame the movie for distracting the church from its responsibility to seek and save the lost. Anything will distract the church from its duty. The church has the attention span of, to quote a different movie, a ferret on crack. If it’s not abortion, it’s the latest financial scandal; if it’s not gay bishops, it’s an unaccredited Christian college that doesn’t believe in academic freedom. So much of the news about the church has nothing to do with Jesus’s mandate to make disciples. If it did, we’d see real change in this country and many others. Instead, it has to do with the same sort of problem Paul advised Timothy against:

I urged you to stay there in Ephesus and stop those who are teaching wrong doctrine. Don’t let people waste time in endless speculation over myths and spiritual pedigrees. For these things only cause arguments; they don’t help people live a life of faith in God. The purpose of my instruction is that all the Christians there would be filled with love that comes from a pure heart, a clear conscience, and sincere faith. But some teachers have missed this whole point. They have turned away from these things and spend their time arguing and talking foolishness. [1 Timothy 1.3-6 NLT]

I fail to see how instructing the church against heresy teaches it to love one’s neighbor. Teach the church the truth; let the error unravel itself.

Challenging through music.

I went to Vacaville over the weekend to visit Mom, partly for Mothers Day but mainly because Friday was her birthday… and now that I’m not in school and don’t have Saturday classes, I figured it’s good to visit her on a monthly basis. My family doesn’t tell me anything that’s going on, so in order to stay in the loop, as it were, I just have to visit. (In fact, it’s probably a conspiracy of theirs to deliberately keep me out of the loop so that I do visit.)

My allergies, in Vacaville, were just horrible. Sneezing, dripping, coughing… but in Santa Cruz, they don’t exist. So maybe I won’t visit in May again. I gotta time it for when the pollen isn’t around.

Whilst I was there I got to reading a back issue of Kerry’s Relevant magazine, which is a magazine for twentysomethings who don’t feel they can entirely reject secular culture, so they read things like Relevant in order to try to “engage it”—in other words, discuss and critique it. But in reality, that actually won’t ever happen. They’ll read Relevant and similar magazines in order to justify their continuing sell-out to pop culture, and so they can feel spiritual when they listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Flaming Lips and say to themselves, “True, the spiritual content of these CDs are wack, but I can now discuss these bands’ angst with non-Christians thanks to my new postmodern apologetic. Thanks, Relevant! You’ve made me relevant.”

No it hasn’t. But I already ranted about the hypocrisy of the emergent church here and here. It’s one of the bigger ironies of the emergent movement—so pomo of them!—to reject the traditional church as being full of hypocrites, and in so doing they’ve become new ’n improved hypocrities.

Side rant over. Relevant, though encouraging the problem, even so has some interesting articles. I was greatly amused by the interview with Derek Webb, former Caedmon's Call frontman who is apparently really controversial. Except he really isn't. The lyrics of his latest album, Mockingbird, aren’t anything critics of Evangelicalism haven’t been saying for decades. It’s just new to Christians who don’t read. The knee-jerk reaction of a lot of them will be that he’s gone liberal or apostate; many others will dismiss it as too radical to be practical; the rest will listen to it, agree with it, love it, share it with their friends, yet continue to behave the same way they always have, letting its message fall on the wayside for the ravens to eat.

I like the lyrics, and agree with a lot of them, but I’m not going to buy the album. I don’t like the music! I was never a Caedmon’s Call fan; and it wasn’t because they didn’t know how to pronounce Caedmon either. It’s the same problem that plagues a lot of Christian pop: Little musical ability combined with a big you’re-all-apostate attitude, or (conversely) catchy songs combined with a replace-“baby”-with-“Jesus”-so-they’ll-play-us-on-K-LOVE vibe.

I’d rather listen to U2; they’ll challenge me spiritually just as much, plus they rock, and unlike most other Christian bands they’re actually doing something to help the poor.

Yacht Rock.

Yes, I am a fan of the band Steely Dan, and own all their CDs. I started listening to them in the early ’80s and haven’t stopped. I think it’s the heavy jazz influence that I appreciate.

A friend of mine, knowing this, told me that I should therefore appreciate the Channel 101 show Yacht Rock. The show is not about Steely Dan; it’s actually about Steely Dan backup singer (and occasional Doobie Brother) Michael McDonald, and Kenny Loggins, who has never sung on anything the Dan produced. The show takes little bits of pop music history and extrapolates them into ridiculously funny episodes about McDonald, Loggins, and their fascination with “really smooth rock ’n roll” …although Loggins will occasionally sell out and do a hard rock song for a movie soundtrack.

I keep thinking as I watch it, “At some point, one of these guys they’re lampooning is gonna watch this and sue.” There was another Channel 101 show, House of Cosbys, about a fanboy-scientist who cloned Bill Cosby a few too many times; Cosby’s lawyers sent him a cease-and-desist order that resulted in a pretty stupid and foul final episode. But maybe Loggins and McDonald aren’t making Bill Cosby’s kind of money anymore. Or they blew it all in the ’70s on coke and yachting; I have no idea.

Steely Dan singer Donald Fagen is portrayed in one of the episodes; you can’t understand a bloody word “Fagen” says, which is supposed to be the running joke about him. I have no trouble understanding him, either in his songs or in interviews; in fact, I think he articulates a lot better than McDonald does. I still don’t know most of the lyrics to McDonald’s music… but then again, I was never really paying attention. To me, smooth rock is background music and not really meant to be taken all that seriously. But if you know anything about the genre, you’ll be amused by the show.

Midterm elections #5: Single-issue voters.

Stop voting for the hypocrites who pander to your cause!

Since Clark brought it up, I thought I’d rant about the single-issue voter.

Whenever we talk about single-issue voters, we’re pretty much talking about people who are against abortion. There aren’t many other single issues out there that get people so riled up. There are definitely environmentalists who only vote on that issue; I know a few. That’s about it.

In both cases, these folks concentrate on their one issue because they see it as absolutely important. The anti-abortion crowd see abortion as murder; they simply can’t vote for anyone who condones it. The pro-environment crowd likewise sees pollution as murder—not necessarily of humans, though we are “collateral damage,” so to speak—and they can’t vote for anyone who permits that. No other issue is as important or as urgent to them. Everything else must fall by the wayside in the pursuit of their goal.

You gotta admire their conviction, if not their brains.

I’ve seen the anti-abortion “voter’s guides” nearly every election; they keep sending them to churches, and I keep going to church. They endorse all the candidates who say they’re against abortion. (Some of them make an exception for candidates who are against abortion but are in favor of other “anti-family” things that the guides are against. One of the “anti-family” things, I notice, is being a Democrat.)

That sounds impressive, but if you do a little investigating, you’ll find that a lot of these anti-abortion candidates have voting records that don’t exactly match up with their public statements. In other words, they’ve done little or nothing to ban abortion; they’ve done little to nothing to stop funding for organizations that promote abortion; and they’ve done absolutely nothing to provide for the women who have opted out of abortion and want to try to raise children under the shadow of poverty and abuse.

Does the federal government financially support any crisis pregnancy centers? No. Why? They’re all faith-based. What about President Bush’s faith-based initiatives? Makes no difference. Congress does fund women’s shelters, but nothing specifically designed to provide alternatives to abortion. Unless you count abstinence programs.

It’s even harder for the environmentalists. Show me a politician who hasn’t politically backed a corporation that took a dump on the environment. You can’t find one above the state or local level. Who do you think funds these people’s elections?

That being the case, I think we first need to STOP VOTING FOR HYPOCRITES. Once the parties get it into their heads that hypocrites can’t win, especially among Christians, they’ll stop backing them, or at least stop sending them to the churches for their unofficial (’cause it’s illegal) backing.

We also need to recognize that we’re directing a lot of sound and fury at the wrong targets. The abortion debate will be decided by the state houses and the Supreme Court. Why, then, are we focusing so much angst on the House? The House members don’t confirm justices. They don’t ratify treaties. It’s not their job! And it’s already full of (supposedly) anti-abortion Republicans who would change the Constitution today if they could be guaranteed the Senate vote and the state house vote. But we tend to ignore the state house elections, because we mistakenly think Congress is more important.

Same with the environmentalists. And they need to work harder on the presidency; the Kyoto accords will be violated, and the EPA and Interior will be run by tools of the polluters, only so long as Bush is in office. Find a pro-environement candidate for 2008. Preferably someone who isn’t a hypocrite.

In the meanwhile, what about other pro-life activities? Is the death penalty murder? Is the war? We keep calling these things “justice” because the president does—is he right? Would Jesus execute a convicted felon in the name of justice? Would he go to war to stop terrorists or power-mad dictators? Would he condone any of his followers doing likewise?

What about the things that Jesus demonstrably found most important—the poor, the sick, the needy, the hungry, the children? What are we (and by extension, our elected representatives) doing about that? Jesus never spoke out against abortion, even though the Romans practiced child exposure, which is far worse. He did speak out against the rich oppressing the poor, something our government does nothing about every day that the gas prices stay above $3 a gallon. (And it doesn’t help the environment any that all the hybrid cars are actually only getting 26 miles per gallon.)

But work on the anti-hypocrite thing first. That’s more than enough of a task for everyone to follow. Just concentrating on that may take the next two lifetimes.

“My problem with Christianism.”

I liked Andrew Sullivan’s post on Time Magazine so much I stole it and posted it here.

My problem with Christianism: A believer spells out the difference between faith and a political agenda.

by Andrew Sullivan

Are you a Christian who doesn’t feel represented by the religious right? I know the feeling. When the discourse about faith is dominated by political fundamentalists and social conservatives, many others begin to feel as if their religion has been taken away from them.

The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is many. There are evangelical Protestants who believe strongly that Christianity should not get too close to the corrupting allure of government power. There are lay Catholics who, while personally devout, are socially liberal on issues like contraception, gay rights, women’s equality and a multi-faith society. There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is. They have no problem living next to an atheist or a gay couple or a single mother or people whose views on the meaning of life are utterly alien to them—and respecting their neighbors’ choices. That doesn’t threaten their faith. Sometimes the contrast helps them understand their own faith better.

And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God’s real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple? Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one’s beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else.

I would say a clear majority of Christians in the U.S. fall into one or many of those camps. Yet the term “people of faith” has been co-opted almost entirely in our discourse by those who see Christianity as compatible with only one political party, the Republicans, and believe that their religious doctrines should determine public policy for everyone. “Sides are being chosen,” Tom DeLay recently told his supporters, “and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will.” So Christ is a conservative Republican?

Rush Limbaugh recently called the Democrats the “party of death” because of many Democrats’ view that some moral decisions, like the choice to have a first-trimester abortion, should be left to the individual, not the cops. Ann Coulter, with her usual subtlety, simply calls her political opponents “godless,” the title of her new book. And the largely nonreligious media have taken the bait. The “Christian” vote has become shorthand in journalism for the Republican base.

What to do about it? The worst response, I think, would be to construct something called the religious left. Many of us who are Christians and not supportive of the religious right are not on the left either. In fact, we are opposed to any politicization of the Gospels by any party, Democratic or Republican, by partisan black churches or partisan white ones. “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus insisted. What part of that do we not understand?

So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

That’s what I dissent from, and I dissent from it as a Christian. I dissent from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and that the other doesn’t. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It’s time the quiet majority of believers took it back.

I should’ve thought of that. “Christianist” is a term I suppose I’ll be using now.

Flashback time.

Sixteen years ago, in 1990, I was on the staff of the CSU Sacramento State Hornet.

I was poking around the back issues, stealing ideas. Some of the best ideas come from things people have tried already; ask anyone who makes old TV shows into feature films. In the process I came across an old magazine entitled “Survival.” It was a survival guide to life at Sac State, written back in the ’70s—had to be, because the writers were bellyaching about how a one-bedroom apartment could cost you as much as $60.

“What a great idea,” I said, and talked the editor into producing one for the ’90s.

It was pretty much my project, so I gathered together a few writers and illustrators and connived them into writing articles for it. I wrote the bulk of it. In the end, we wound up calling it the “Campus Guide” because CSUS was publishing an “officlal” Survival Guide, and we didn’t want to confuse the names with one another.

But mine was much more popular. Mainly because it was written by me, and not in an official tone of voice either. The “official” guide pointed out how much it cost for a semester parking sticker, and the proper locations to park. My guide advised students to spray-paint their cars yellow and orange, slap a realistic-looking CSUS seal on the side, and park anywhere on campus that Facilities Management does.

The next semester we decided to take the title “Survival Guide” back. Admissions were asking for extra issues of the State Hornet's guide rather than a reprint of the “official” guide. And we got in trouble with one of the local pizzerias because the newspaper staff kept using the $2 personal pizza coupons from the back issues. (To be fair, we were buying about 20 personal pizzas a day, but this is what you get when you don’t put “One per customer” on the coupon.)

CSUS still has the Survival Guide, and to my astonishment someone pointed out to me it still contains one of my articles in it. I’m not credited, but it’s definitely mine. The copy, except for the date, hasn't changed in 16 years. Frightening.

Adding and dropping classes.

It is imperative that you go to the class on the first day. Try to get there early enough to steal a seat away from a student who is actually enrolled in the class. Some professors will tell everyone at the beginning of the class that the class is FULL, that there’s no more ROOM, and that they’re not accepting any add slips at ALL. PERIOD. Ignore this; it’s meant to drive away the faint of heart.

At that point, the instructor will probably go through the roll, and then ask if there’s anyone whose name wasn’t called. Of course, here’s the point where you will be told the class is FULL, there’s no more ROOM, and that they’re not accepting any add slips at ALL. PERIOD. Ignore this; it’s also meant to drive away people who can’t handle personal confrontations.

Ask these professors if you can at least sit in on the class. If they’re hesitant, tell them that you want to take this class eventually and that you at least want to see what it’s all about. Or appeal to their egos and tell them that you want to watch the best professor at Sac State do what he or she does so well.

Some professors will at this point relent, which means you can hang around long enough to get in just before the add/drop deadline (Feb. 12). After the first exam, students will drop the class at an alarming rate anyway. When this happens, you're home free.

Other professors—the ones with the souls sucked out of them long ago—will repeat that they’re not taking any more add slips and that’s it. Some will actually demand that you leave. In those cases, it’s probably best that you do leave before somebody pours water on them and melts them.

How much more old junk of mine is floating around out there on the internet? The mind reels.

Truthiness.

It’s not what you know; it’s what you feel.

Someone emailed me a copy of the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, held last Saturday, in which Stephen Colbert got to give the final speech. CSPAN posted Colbert’s segment online, and of course you can watch the whole thing if you’d rather.

If you’ve ever seen The Colbert Report, it’s a full-on parody of a typical right-wing talk show, and Stephen Colbert takes that know-it-all obnoxiousness and kicks it up another notch. Facts, Colbert claims, are not important. It’s what we feel that is. It’s things that are not so much truth as “truthiness,” a term he coined. (There’s some overhyped controversy about whether he really did coin it. Staying in character, Colbert says it doesn’t matter what the dictionary says. He feels he coined the word.)

Republicans are notorious for disregarding facts when they get in the way of the party line; just look at how they respond to global warming: “Not all the science is in yet.” Science is never definitive, but we have just enough of it to know there’s a problem… and why in hell are these idiots defending pollution anyway? Because polluters vote Republican?

To be fair, Democrats do it too. Privatization of Social Security is the only way the system will continue to viably exist in 25 years, but privatization is “greedy” and “short-sighted” because Democrats are afraid evil businessmen will take all their privately-controlled Social Security money and invest it in something like Enron, only worse. But whom would you rather have watch your money: Politicians who refuse to pass campaign finance reform laws and never get voted out of office for it, or businessmen who go to jail if they don’t follow the rules?

Okay, let me hit even closer to home: Pre-tribulation rapture. It’s not in the bible; I’ve looked extensively. The only way you could get the bible to support the idea of Jesus pulling the Christians off the earth before the really bad stuff at the End happens is by twisting scriptures—quoting half a verse and ignoring the other half, and flagrantly misinterpreting prophecies that aren’t about the End. It’s a viewpoint that appeared only a century ago, after the comfortable, overfed American Christian came on the scene and wanted to reconcile his comfortable lifestyle with Jesus’s warning that following him means persecution would happen, so the conclusion was to adopt the Pharisees’ attitude that riches meant blessings from God. Pretrib rapture is a very popular belief among these folks because they want it to be true, and don’t really care to do the research. I argue that it can’t be proven from the bible; they say they “know” it to be true regardless. Tim LaHaye says so.*

Anyway. At the dinner, Colbert went on about how facts are irrelevant, it’s what you feel in your gut that matters, and how he and the president are on the same page about this. The amusing thing is, it’s obvious the president doesn’t want to be on the same page about this. He looked noticeably uncomfortable throughout the speech, probably wondering if this guy was serious (and therefore insane) or kidding. Colbert, in essence, roasted the president, and it was fun to watch the entire audience get uncomfortable listening to it (although, to be fair, the video Colbert showed at the end was stupid). Say what you will about Colbert; that took balls.

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*Ever notice that the folks who are taking The Da Vinci Code way too seriously—in spite of it being fiction—are the same folks who take Left Behind way too seriously?