Ross Douthat's "Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics": Book Review

No, the venerable (and atheist) L.A. punk band does not figure in this learned recounting of how accommodationalists of both major Christian versions, evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and Mainline Protestants have multiplied and dwindled over the past few decades in America. But Ross Douthat strives for a punchy presentation of data which threaten to weigh down his pages. As the token Catholic/ conservative New York Times pundit, his columns benefit from his pithy remarks.

How does Douthat manage the shift to a long-form format? I felt very early on that this unfolded as if a dutiful, well-researched, but rather by-the-numbers tallying of the bull and bear markets as applied to Christian America's gains and losses, among the varying denominations and recent "para-church" endeavors. While I admit I was being educated, as a reader, I wondered if the pace would pick up.

Bad Religion begins with Douthat's refinement of his subtitle. He's not celebrating the demise of faith. His title refers to "the slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place." (3) The past fifty years finds the orthodox Catholic and Protestant bulwarks eroding, having "entered a state of near-terminal decline." The churches connected most to the past fade; the elite abandons its at least measured sympathy for Christian ideas. Hostility or indifference, as surely this former editor of The Atlantic knows, characterizes this culture.

While the U.S. remains an outlier in its high rates of reported belief among the "advanced" nations, a growing segment of its Christian majority, as it weakens overall in numbers, waters down traditional theology. Conservative or liberal, these factions appeal to the political and pop-cultural marketers. Often "spiritual" without being "religious," some seek a wider set of options for faith. Others distort, in Douthat's estimation, what has been the accepted dogmas and doctrines of conventional churches.

Neither conservatives nor "their secular antagonists" (4) recognize this drift. The religious right blames all flaws on explicitly anti-Christian elements. Secular stalwarts denigrate every form of belief as equally foolish or fanatical. Douthat explores those enclaves of our nation where teachings of Christ "have been warped into justifications for solipsism and anti-intellectualism, jingoism and utopianism, selfishness and greed." (4) Here, neither papal encyclicals nor New Atheists are perused.

For a hundred pages, Douthat takes us through a vanished world of post-war confidence in religion, which fifty-or-so years ago began to implode as accommodationists hastened reforms which wound up, for many believers, leaving them to wonder "why show up on Sunday after all" if the ecumenical denominations earnestly insisted that deep down they were all the same, and that divisive details overcome were all that was needed to satisfy and stimulate the faithful. Yet the accommodationists in Mainline Protestant and Vatican II Catholicism almost immediately found their pews emptying, as the disaffected rejected religion, preferred spirituality, or most tellingly, defected to the evangelicals.

Douthat, writing in 2012, reminds those keen to denigrate evangelical and Catholic voters that now there is no "Catholic bloc." That broke up under Bill Clinton. Both Catholics and evangelicals span the range of income and professions as Americans on average. They both edged ahead, by the 1990s, when it comes to income and education. Long derided as the backward bullies of the rural heartland in the Midwest and South, evangelicals now are likely to fill the megachurches of Sun Belt and Mountain West suburbs and exurbs. While Catholics have only Latino immigration to thank that their totals have not dipped more, a tenth of all Americans have left that Church; these departed would be the country's second-largest faith cohort, if definitions were tinkered with. Evangelicals hold at about 20%. Douthat does not harp on his fact: evangelicals accept "limited inerrancy" rather than slavishly literal readings of the bible which fundamentalists cling to. This means that while science in scripture may be accepted as outdated, that the transcendent truth of God's will remains forever without fault.

"He who marries the spirit of the age is soon left a widower." Douthat quotes Anglican Ralph Inge (106) aptly. As one who grew up in the very first batch of post-Vatican II Catholic children indoctrinated in the "Kumbayah" mindset, I can attest even among kids raised on The Monkees as we watched hippies delay adulthood, that the novelty of guitar mass for hand-holding congregants wore off fast for many with whom I was raised; few of them sustained this fervor well into their maturity.

Given his talent for cultural critique, Douthat documents well this transitional period when the counterculture strove to become the ecclesiastical norm. When he turns to the deconstruction of the Gospels by scholars who prefer the rabbi rebel Jesus to the Pauline redeemer Christ, I feared that Douthat would fumble. This tricky terrain challenges any to keep up. But he remains steady. I liked his comparison of the Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan, Elaine Pagels and Jesus Seminar crowd's "historical Jesus" shorn of his halo to those dogged claimants who assert they've found the "real" Shakespeare. Both "turn out to be masters of detection and geniuses at code breaking, capable of seeing through every cover-up and unpacking every con." (171) No wonder we wind up with conspiratorial Dan Brown. The power of magical thinking and the relativism of po-mo profs blur.

Resisters dig in and strike back against the humanists and their Christian fifth column. Whereas mainstream seminaries diminish, a parallel evangelical and conservative Catholic set of colleges, institutions, and scholars emerge. The alliance between those once damned as papists and their former "holy rollers" foes looms larger, as the fight against abortion and for 'values' rallies both.

As the chronology catches up with recent events, the analysis sharpens. In the wake of the bursting of the 2007 housing bubble, Douthat notes in passing a telling truth. Hispanic, black, and white working class adherents of a prosperity gospel were most likely to have been swept up and over by the burst.

His chapter on this "name it to claim it" proposition, as filtered through Joel Osteen's lucrative ministry, makes God "seem less like a savior and more like a college buddy with really good stock tips." (189) Yet, the author cautions, the "crudeness" of the wealth-theology rhetoric "can obscure the subtlety of its appeal,"for it reassures followers that the sin of avarice can be assuaged by overcoming with stock phrases of credulous tit-for-tat "a simple failure of piety." (191) Rather than send down angels to prove His love for you, Douthat paraphrases, "He can just send you a raise." Similarly, Douthat delves into "financial ministries" and remains nuanced on the suitability of capitalism and its good works undertaken with the donations funding charitable endeavors. I wanted to read more on the megachurch entrepreneurial "outreach" and franchising, but this gets passed over perfunctorily.

Still, he's clever on seguing into the related New Thought-derived business empire. For it shares with the prosperity preachers an emphasis on "the social utility" of belief, an eagerness to define spiritual success in worldly terms, a hint of utopianism, and an abiding naïveté about human nature." (205)

Theodicy nestles not only within the wealth-faith, but in "the God within" predilection inherited from similar concepts of exchange with the powers above. Deepak, Oprah, Sam Harris, Eat Pray Love, Avatar, and even earnest apologist Karen Armstrong demonstrate the profitability of such pitches. Both affirm that humans figured out how the universe works, and how the spiritual forces respond. The "quest for God as the ultimate therapy" dominates. Not "I believe" but "one feels," to paraphrase prescient 1966 psychologist Philip Reiff, cited by Douthat. (230) This generates narcissism, infidelity, and a lack of empathy. The results can be tracked over the permissive period evolving in this purview. We wind up with a "spirituality of niceness" (234) Charting this among youth, as he does, is sobering.

Another congenial solution arrives with a universal God which outlasts petty local deities and clans. Drawing on Franz Rosenzweig and George Steiner, employing promised lands to polarized if both favored tribes, shows Douthat's erudition applied intelligently. Lacking the European penchant for blood-and-soil ties, Americans worship the exceptionalist, "city on a hill" civic religion of patriotism. Messianic, apocalyptic, reactionary crusades such as Glenn Beck's conflate populists with patricians. Paranoia, conspiracy theories, jeremiads of doom invigorate both extremes on the political spectrum. Angst, backlash, hubris, and adulation for whomever occupies the Oval Office produce craven American kitsch peddled for both parties and their anointed leaders ready to rescue despairing flocks.

That penultimate section of the book I found agreeable if not surprising, having lived under Reagan-through-Obama regimes. It's what you'd expect Douthat to expand upon from his columns. I do applaud his "heresy of nationalism" and his distrust of "religious faith" married to "political action."

He concludes with four "potential touchstones for a recovery of Christianity." Global, rootless life may seek an antidote to power plays and exhausted ideologies. Douthat suggests separatists offer a second route, withdrawing from the arena so as to regroup and reflect. Or, the massive movements bringing immigrant churches and missionary zeal back to America from the Third World might energize more at home. Diminished expectations, finally, might restore humility along with rigor.

Being political but non-partisan, ecumenical but also confessional, moralistic but also holistic, and last of all, oriented toward sanctity and beauty. I aver this final aspect may inspire a "saving remnant," regardless of creed, to appreciate the "great wellspring of aesthetic achievement" that unfortunately persists more as relics and canons rejected by most in schools and nearly all in culture.

Literature, architecture, film and television certainly display a dearth of Christian creative achievement. Douthat chides, correctly, that "many Christians are either indifferent to beauty or suspicious of its snares, content to worship in tacky churches and amuse themselves with cultural products that are well-meaning but distinctly second-rate." (291) This muffles the impact of a legacy.

While naysayers will dismiss Bad Religion as stale superstition or sinister priestcraft, open-minded audiences concerned with the stability of a post-Christian polity will benefit from this balanced judgement from within the Christian intelligentsia, and they may concur that those two terms are not oxymorons. Douthat backs his side, but he's poised, professional and alert to all in the faith game.

P.S. Pp. 152-3 collect a deft summation of the paradoxical models of Jesus that believers affirm and scholars may debate. This exemplifies journalist Douthat's knack for mediating scholarship for a wider readership. I admit that many who'd benefit from his book will never hear its timely message.

Sure, there are places I'd have preferred more elaboration. For instance, the tacit influence of Teilhard de Chardin on Vatican II, to me at least, is a fascinating aside begging for more. But on key topics as how evangelicals adopted the pro-life campaigns of Catholicism even as its own members dissented, or how the excesses of flower-power liturgy hold up, if in retrospect to those of us who as youngsters barely recall them (like me) or weren't around yet (like the author), are worthwhile. Certainly his judgment that those who chased reform wound up a half century on looking as if graying curators of  dated curios, overseeing a little attended museum (I extend his metaphor) rings true, when one does the math on the evaporation of vocations to those very orders that figured the only thing holding them back from really appealing to more young men and women was more Bob Dylan, far fewer hymns. (Amazon US 11/3/17 a bit altered)

Donald S. Lopez, Jr.'s "Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol": Book Review

Look around an Eastern-themed gift shop or Asian-inspired garden and you may see a benevolent, rotund and inevitably smiling Buddha. Imported into Western culture, the familiar icon enters popular culture as a good luck symbol and a self-satisfied sage. What today's viewers of such images forget is that, less than two centuries ago, whatever was known or rumored about this wisdom teacher emanated more often from demonic or pagan connotations, rather than cheerful or chubby depictions.

This shift in representation has taken nearly two thousand years to spread, far from the homeland near the Himalayan foothills and Indian plains of the historical Buddha. An expert scholar on Buddhist culture at the University of Michigan provides readers with a compendium excerpting over eighty accounts of what the Buddha meant to the forebears of Christians (and, now and then, Muslims and Jews) who attempted to fit this acclaimed personage into their worldviews. Donald S. Lopez, Jr.'s {Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol: An Anthology of Early European Portrayals of the Buddha} takes up the conversion of the Buddha "from stone to flesh." That is, the statues and the portraits of this venerable personage filtered into the imagination of travelers and scholars. They might be mystified or terrified of what they heard or guessed about this fabled or feared entity, and they regarded him or it with "profound suspicion." Simply put, until 1801, the Buddha was not recognized as the founder of what the West invented as Buddhism. For previous tale-tellers, he was known only as an idol.

Lopez records over three hundred names for the Buddha between 200 and 1850. The litany stretches back to Clement of Alexandria around that first date. This Church Father distinguishes the Hindu Brahmin priests from non-Hindu followers of the "Boutta, whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours." Not bad for the first attempt at defining the change from Gautama to Sakyamuni, from a pampered prince to a wise deity bestowing favors on his worshipers.

The professor's introduction sums up the intricate patterns of information about the Buddha as they were transmitted from the Indian subcontinent into the Middle East and across the many Christian and Islamic empires. Tellingly, for nearly a millennium, few reports of the Buddha found their way west. Marco Polo's celebrated chronicle ranks sixth among eighty-odd entries, for instance. After this report, however, versions multiplied along the trade routes set up by Christian missionaries and traders with China. Emissaries at the Great Khan's court linked with Armenian, Persian and papal contacts visiting Mongol rulers. These East-West ties tightened in the 1600s after the Reformation.

Among these, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci epitomizes the ambition of the Catholic Church to win over the Chinese. Fr. Ricci also speaks for the dismissal of the Buddhist teachings brought to China from India as a "disaster." Neither a "genuine record of the history of this religion" nor "any real principle upon which one can rely" exists within this faith. For it "lacks the arts of civilization and has no standards of moral conduct to bequeath to posterity." Ricci credits the lack of knowledge of Buddhism abroad with a rationale for denigrating its doctrines. The Jesuits may have adapted Chinese customs as their own to win over the rulers, but they persisted, as with Ippolito Desideri in Tibet, to oppose Buddhism

Other Westerners added their own reactions. These tended to be negative. They offered many adaptations of the Buddha, often without recognizing the true roots of the idol in a historical figure. Yet, Lopez cautions, no single Buddha biography is accepted across Asia. No canonical text exists.

Rather than posit a true Asian vs. false Western dichotomy, Lopez asks "whether the Buddha, then and now, here and there, is the product of a more complex and interesting process of influence." Therefore, Lopez allows many texts to nestle and jostle against each other, refusing to rate them. This approach fits into Lopez' career, spent producing learned works demystifying Buddhist tropes. While the collection of polyglot voices may daunt, he offers cogent introductions for each diverse inclusion.

For then as now, knowledge of languages varied. Motivations multiplied. Conversion of the "pagans" led to negative attitudes, such as Ricci articulates. Catholics encountering monasteries eerily like their own recoiled as if they walked into the haunts of devils. Gradually, spurred by archaeological, linguistic and military exponents, interest in what became defined as Buddhism supplanted a terror of its teachings. Ethnographic enthusiasm grew in the 1700s and 1800s. This anthology concludes, fittingly, with the 1844 monograph of Eugène Burnouf. This scholar of Old Persian and Sanskrit pioneered the presentation of a human Buddha, rather than a stone idol. And from that juncture, Western sympathy began for the founding figure of a world religion and/or an appealing philosophy.

"The myriad idols coalesced into a single figure, who then became a historical figure, a founder of a religion, and a superstition became a philosophy." So Lopez sums up the transformation. Textually-based Buddhism remains dominant in the West, parallel to the quest in the 19th century for an historical Jesus. Whether such pursuits have resulted in reform or regression is left up to the adept. (Spectrum Culture 4/4/17; Amazon US with slight changes 4/20/17)

Terry Eagleton's "Culture and the Death of God": Book Review

I figured, despite the difficult content, that hearing these lectures on audiobook might ease their delivery. I like Terry Eagleton's work, and I always mean to read more. The Meaning of Life, for instance, is on my Kindle, where I am saving it up still, having already studied its final chapter.

But the subject matter is challenging. Eagleton's wit is subdued, after early on a joke at the expense of Birmingham. He hones in on not the "death of God" so much as his replacement, high European culture. The kind of thinking that George Steiner represents the last generation to have espoused.

This arose earlier than the Enlightenment, but that period, for the French and the Germans, gave it its fullest diffusion. Many Germans crowd these pages, along with the sometimes somewhat more familiar French. Eagleton looks down on the likes of Diderot and Voltaire, for they suffer the hypocrisy of many of their peers. For they speak a 'double-truth': they claim the masses need religion for its calming messages and social utility. The elite, of course, can rise to a higher worship of reason.

Yet, as Eagleton astutely notes, Deism roused no martyrs. He constantly defers to, or better still champions, the Gospel message as liberation theology (even if he steps aside from this phrasing). His Christ comes to afflict the comfortable and to condemn the authorities, taking up the side of the poor.

If one wonders if this is a selective interpretation of biblical verses, one will end this book unenlightened. Eagleton employs these talks to promulgate his own insistent reading of Jesus as a revolutionary. As the modern times impinge, and Nietzsche's own shameful (in Eagleton's view) capitulation to the 'double-think' standard proves that even he is not worthy of acclaim, the book shifts into a rapid look at those such as T.S. Eliot who attempted to make the aesthetic the norm. But, being Christian, that cohort also falls short for Eagleton. He wedges into our own age, divided between a secularized and educated class and many billions (some with degrees and high incomes, surely, a factor he skims past) who continue to integrate, however irrationally to this professor's rigorous if somewhat numinous preferences for his own Christ-figure, faith with achievement.

Eagleton nods to the resurgence of Islam and Christianity in many poorer parts of the world, not so much again as forces calling for the kind of radical overthrow of the power system, but more as a way to live in a complicated world more simply. I reckon more on Marx might have helped his explication, but his promotion of Nietzsche as the central figure in this short study leaves us moderns somewhat imbalanced. After a lively if brief look at earlier Irish dissident (if renegade Protestant convert) thinker John Toland, the reader wants more such figures to energize these dense chapters.

Instead, it's less intoxicating. Eagleton crams a lot into these sections, but he often does not explain who the figures are beyond their dates of birth and death, leaving a reader (and even more a listener) curious or confused. Some transfer of lofty content to a common if smart reader was necessary, but these lectures, transcribed as I suppose they originated, go over the heads of many who could have benefitted from a more streamlined, listener-friendly, version of what remain engaging ideas and an intellectual history on a topic that an audience needs to hear, as believers, skeptics, or seculars. 
(Amazon US 10-30-15. P.S. 2012 interview at the Oxonian Review with Eagleton on this book)

Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age": Book Review

The first half of this massive 2007 study by a Canadian philosopher has appeared as Gifford Lectures, the prestigious Scottish series which since 1888 has featured leading thinkers discussing "natural theology." In the third and fourth paragraphs of his preface, Taylor admits the sketchiness of much of what follows, and his determination nonetheless to map out a vast intellectual terrain, in hopes others will fill in the blanks. While the results may frustrate those who find his habitual enumeration and his tendency to go two steps forward and one step at least back, as he zig-zags across the past five centuries, and while the prose leaves one wishing for the grace of his predecessor at the Lectures, William James, it nonetheless represents a formidable achievement that kept me thinking, annotating, and reacting.

As Taylor does often, one must sum up his argument by his own numbers.
David Ewart paraphrases Taylor's three stages of secularism thus:

1. "The first stage is characterized by the withdrawal of the religious world-view from the public sphere. This is the result of much more than just the rise of scientific world-view. This is the disenchantment of the cosmos. Secularism is the move from the enchanted reality to the de-enchanted reality - this freed science to follow its own trajectory. In an enchanted worldview science, politics and religion all shared the same world view. When that enchanted world-view disappeared science became free to follow its own rationale.
2. The second stage is seen in the decline in personal religious practice and commitment. This is a individual's withdrawal from the community. People shift the source of meaning away from external 'eternal' sources to more personal choices.
3. The third stage is the most recent development, which has caused a fragmentation of our ideas of social order. This is the shift in the culture away from assuming Religious Faith is the norm, or the default expectation of how to live your life. Faith is now one option among many. This is society living in a universe which has no central point around which it revolves."                 

Some of this, of course, is familiar. Max Weber's theory of "disenchantment" as driving secularism inspires Taylor's first parts of his schema. But he denies "subtraction theory" as the fullest explanation for why people don't believe like they used to. Simply saying religion retreated as science advanced leaves us wondering about the contested turf, for the same pre-modern landscape did not exist, for two worldviews to fight over. Instead, since 1500 or so, Taylor accounts in part three of his stages for the key difference making his analysis fresh. He shows how a "buffered" sensibility in modern people supplanted the "porous" reception of impacts and influences which characterized our forebears. They saw themselves as open to the spirits for better and worse; the divine bulwark of intercession and protection helped people withstand trouble and attain reward. A "buffered" identity keeps us at a distance; we can no longer be "naive," whether believers or skeptics, in a system where the "cosmos" ordered by God or gods becomes a "universe" which includes us, but removes most contemporary adherents from the nearby intercession and interference of an intimate divine presence.

This hefty narrative stumbles along. Taylor keeps glancing ahead and then looking back as he tries to progress. He does not translate all of the French and German he cites. Some thinkers or scholars are not credited except by surnames. Taylor presumes erudition on his audience's part, so academic references may lack context or introduction. Quotes may not be integrated or identified clearly. Endnotes are uneven: they can provide valuable insight, or they can be terse and formulaic; the reader of the text proper, from that alone, may have no idea which without checking out each enumeration. Sharper editing would have improved this. This thesis did not need a hesitant, repetitive elaboration.

However, it gets easier halfway in. The Victorian doubters (even before Darwin, and this is Taylor's point proven, for it was not as if one day evolution shoved aside faith for believers) such as Carlyle, Arnold, and his niece, novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward (the last in a novel about a clergyman's unease with his creed and his replacement of a messianic Jesus-as-God with an ethical figure as a model) emerged on behalf of those unable to countenance childlike faith. This era's gradual slip, starting with these intellectuals, from confidence in religion to grudging or fuller conviction in modernism means that the Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment and Romanticism, and political- economic changes in the "North Atlantic" (his term for "the West") had to precede "science" as we know it. That transition and reorientation sets us in a universe edging on darkness, rather than an ordered cosmos full of light.

The conditions for "human flourishing" alter any modern believer or non-believer's reception of the religious messages we inherit. Taylor in his later chapters considers the difficulties of the therapeutic (human-potential movement, therapy, transformation from within) and transgressive (anti-humanist, Nietzschean, revolutionary) responses to religious hegemony, as neither to him satisfy the yearning. This inner longing persists no matter if the conditions for religion fade, and while Taylor never appears to question his own Catholicism or the reality of the Incarnation, he examines how the opposite, an "excarnation," has weakened the ability of many believers or skeptics to handle the needs of the body, from which we have become detached, dismissive, or destructive. He looks with caution at regarding only what Jesus taught and not what Christ did, and while Taylor's faith persists a priori, I would have liked the professor's insight into why this is so for him; this appears to limit the applicability of his lessons to non-Christians. Whatever one's identity, Taylor locates the loss of the "equilibrium" most of us need between fervor and denial; if not religion as we've known it, he reckons desire for the transcendent beyond existential limits or hedonistic immersion may endure.

He suggests that poetry, as in Jeffers, Hopkins, or Péguy, might heal the divided contemporary consciousness. He applauds church reform, but he also sympathizes with those who find, whether they themselves believe, in a weaker cultural impact for this force. Younger people are losing "some of the great languages of transcendance," and "massive unlearning is taking place" in consumerism.

In conclusion, neither "exclusive humanism" nor the Nietzschean revolt against restrictions convince Taylor. His drifting final section passes intriguing terrain. Part 5:17 has a great survey of how Christianity incorporated violence into its purportedly peaceful preaching, and death and sexuality earn attention in this chapter. But that ends not with a bang but some whispers about two stories we share. "Intellectual Deviation" tracks our cultural evolution away from medieval religious conformity imposed by a clerical elite and then upon a post-1500 community freed from "priestcraft" but a regimen insisting on communal piety, into "the rise of a culturally hegemonic notion of a closed immanent order". "Reform Master Narrative" required all to be 100% Christian, but this discipline discouraged many. The elite looked to Providential Deism as a halfway point to a mechanical model that broke away from the need for a Creator, and by the Victorians, this began to spread into the middle classes. While many adhere to fundamentalism and obedience today (an aspect under-examined in what is admittedly a rambling study and one far too long as it is), Taylor combines the theoretical ID with the RMN mass phenomenon explanations as two influences making up the "social imaginary" we all agree has replaced in the North Atlantic civilization the state-clerical polity. This prepared the way for Darwin (Marx and Freud are barely mentioned!) and the massive shifts in contemporary mindsets. Out of this two-track path, we emerge. So, we can "explain religion today."

(The above appeared with my reduced summation of the Ewart enumeration at Amazon US 1-2-15.) P.S. The Divine Conspiracy provides a pdf (search at the site) of Taylor's introduction and of Chapter 10 "The Expanding Universe of Unbelief."

"Worse than the pagans"

Cardinal Raymond Burke may not have used the exact phrase "worse than the pagans," yet that is how the media have headlined their reporting on his disappointment with most Irish voters. As a child, my sympathies lay with the pagans, for I felt the zeal of Patrick and his followers destroyed much that was good in ancient Ireland. I may be accused of romanticizing the serfs and slaves who more likely than kings and lords are my ancestors, but I hated to see Druidry damned.

The Tablet reports on May 28, in the week after Ireland's 62% yes vote. Katherine Backler and Liz Dodd explain, in an article I reproduce here to capture Burke's address and anguish best:

Ireland has gone further than paganism and “defied God” by legalising gay marriage, one of the Church’s most senior cardinals has said.

Cardinal Raymond Burke, who was recently moved from a senior role in the Vatican to be patron of the Order of Malta, told the Newman Society, Oxford University’s Catholic Society, last night that he struggled to understand “any nation redefining marriage”.

Visibly moved, he went on: “I mean, this is a defiance of God. It’s just incredible. Pagans may have tolerated homosexual behaviours, they never dared to say this was marriage.”
 
A total of 1.2 million people voted in favour of amending the constitution to allow same-sex couples to marry, with 734,300 against the proposal, making Ireland the first country to introduce gay marriage by popular vote.

The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, told RTE afterwards that “the Church needs a reality check right across the board [and to ask] have we drifted away completely from young people?”
Cardinal Burke, who speaking on the intellectual heritage of Pope Benedict XVI, went on to say “liturgical abuses” had taken place after the Second Vatican Council, after which he said there had been “a radical, even violent approach to liturgical reform”. Quoting Pope Benedict, he said that the desire among some of the faithful for the old form of the liturgy arose because the new missal was “actually understood as authorising, or even requiring, creativity, which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear.”

On Tuesday Cardinal Burke presided over Mass at the Oxford Oratory, and on Wednesday he led Vespers and Benediction for the intentions of the Order of Malta.

Speaking at the lecture afterwards Cardinal Burke stressed the continuity between liturgical forms before and after the council. “The life of the Church is organic; it is a living tradition handed down in an unbroken line from the apostles,” he said. “It does not admit of discontinuity, of revolutions.”

Paraphrasing Pope Benedict, Cardinal Burke said that after the council, there had been a battle between a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture, and the hermeneutic of reform. This was because the nature and authority of the council had been “basically misunderstood.” Apparently departing from his script, the Cardinal voiced his own concern about similar misunderstandings around the upcoming Synod. “There seems to be a certain element who think that the Synod has the capacity to create some totally new teaching in the Church, which is simply false.” He went on to speak of the damage caused by “an antinomianism which is inherent in the hermeneutic of discontinuity.”

Though the talk consisted primarily in an overview of Pope Benedict XVI's chiefest intellectual contributions, Cardinal Burke adopted a more personal note in his answers to questions at the end. Responding to a question about the marginalisation of faith in the public sphere, he stressed the primary importance of fortifying the family in its understanding of how faith “illumines daily living”. ‘The culture is thoroughly corrupted, if I may say so, and the children are being exposed to this, especially through the internet.’
 
He told the audience that he was “constantly” telling his nieces and nephews to keep their family computers in public areas of the house so that their children would not “imbibe this poison that’s out there.”

Irish Central expands the way such influences affect Catholics. I cite this verbatim for its catechetical language and chastising tone. Dara Kelly on May 30 reports in her lead that: "a prominent American canon lawyer has branded all Yes voters in the recent marriage referendum potential 'heretics.'

Dr. Edward Peters, who was appointed a Referendary of the Apostolic Signatura by Pope Benedict in 2010, has described the outcome of the constitutional referendum on marriage in Ireland as 'a disaster.'

'Any Catholic who directly helped to bring about Ireland’s decision to treat as marriage unions of two persons of the same sex has, at a minimum, arrayed himself against the infallible doctrine of the Church and, quite possibly, has committed an act of heresy,' Dr Peters wrote on his Canon Law Blog this week.

The technical term for voting to allow same sex marriage is 'sin', wrote Dr. Peters, 'and the consequences of sin are always spiritual and sometimes canonical; and the solution for sin is repentance and Confession.'

Dr. Peter's [sic] counsels his readers not to pursue potential excommunications for the political leaders who led the nation toward the referendum, instead he suggests they focus their efforts on 'righting' the result 'as soon as possible.'"

The image I chose for me captures the Church's predicament, Looking at the tired faces of the feeble nuns, you can see that the traditions of Irish fidelity to the Magisterium may remain, but among fewer, and likely many elderly, congregants and clergy. My relationship to how I was raised is nuanced, as I lack the feral hatred a lot of my peers have for Catholicism. I teach comparative religion and meditate over two comments I have from online students about my critical approach. "They should hire a Christian so the course is not biased." "He compared consulting the Bible to a Ouija board." The truth might be more subtle, after all. Many resist any challenge to long-held belief.

I hold respect for certain elements of the Church, for I do counter that it did lead many people to care more about the needs of the less fortunate more than their own wants and desires. It reminded people of their limits within a short and difficult life. It encouraged a degree of intellectual exploration, and it curbed the excesses some of us had, in many directions, which led to the harm of ourselves and others. Many clergy as well as laity gave up careers and success in the secular world to give us a solid schooling, and in dark times, priests and those under their guidance assisted me. I doubt if a working-class kid could have received for so little money such a preparation for the life of the mind. 

My parents and family were devoted, and made sacrifices for me to attend such institutions. But I don't miss the shame, repression, and guilt that still haunt me in middle age, after such a traditional upbringing, even in the decade after Vatican II, a confused time for many Catholics. The future, as I blogged last week, seems to be with those who, rejecting the "reality check" called for by Archbishop Martin, find its dogma and doctrine wanting. This recalls Dan Savage, sex columnist, ex-Catholic, and gay rights advocate, back in 2013 as he reviewed Jeff Chu's "Does Jesus Really Love Me?":

"Chu worries that gay people like Mr. Byers have been ;pushed out of the church.' That’s not true for all of us. My father was a Catholic deacon, my mother was a lay minister and I thought about becoming a priest. I was in church every Sunday for the first 15 years of my life. Now I spend my Sundays on my bike, on my snowboard or on my husband. I haven’t spent my post-Catholic decades in a sulk, wishing the church would come around on the issue of homosexuality so that I could start attending Mass again. I didn’t abandon my faith. I saw through it. The conflict between my faith and my sexuality set that process in motion, but the conclusions I reached at the end of that process — there are no gods, religion is man-made, faith can be a force for good or evil — improved my life. I’m grateful that my sexuality prompted me to think critically about faith. Pushed out? No. I walked out." My own nation has now 13% ex-Catholics. For every convert, six others leave. The U.S. since 2007 has 8% fewer Christians. Change may be rapid for other nations too, like a thief in the night. 

Photo caption: Carmelite sisters leave a polling station in Malahide, County Dublin, Ireland, Friday, May 22, 2015

Reality Check

After the historic Irish vote, the first where a nation (or 3/4 of one) and not a legislature approved same-sex marriage, Diarmuid Martin, Dublin's archbishop, called for a reality check amid this "social revolution." According to today's Irish Examiner:

“We have to stop and have a reality check, not move into denial of the realities. We won’t begin again with a sense of renewal with a sense of denial,” he said.
“I ask myself, most of these young people who voted yes are products of our Catholic school system for 12 years. I’m saying there’s a big challenge there to see how we get across the message of the Church.”

As a product of more than that time spent in the school system one nation removed from Ireland, and who started in kindergarten with Mexican Poor Clare nuns a year after the conclusion of Vatican II, I watched as IHM sisters gave up their habits, in more ways than one, and then left, as priests suddenly disappeared, as women took off mantillas, as altars turned around. My mom wept when the new design, stripped of decoration, appeared. "It looks like a Protestant church." Not long after, despite Dylan or Simon and Garfunkel replacing hymns in my denuded parish sanctuary, many of my classmates and friends drifted off from Church. We are the last to recall, outside of traditionalist enclaves, an American practice, derived often from Ireland, of indulgences, spiritual bouquets, novenas, rosaries, Mary Day, benediction, going to confession behind a screen in the dark, and lighting real candles. Many of my teachers were Irish, direct or a generation or so distant, and the ties were strong and lasting to this ancient way of life, where we identified ourselves by what parish we were from, and Mass going was as automatic on Sundays as was crossing ourselves, or praying to so many saints, or a Marian litany.

Sure, sometimes I miss that, but do I miss the fear I still wrestle with in the dark, middle-aged, about sin, about my mortality, about death? That was all instilled in me at a formative age, and even if I was born as Vatican II commenced, I am old enough to carry the pre-conciliar, Tridentine legacy of doom. I carry a lot of guilt, inhibition, and difficulty with speaking up on my own behalf. Was this instilled? I inherited the cultural patterns of the Irish, one generation removed. I share many of these attitudes. The Irish, as with many of us across the world, seem now starting to break out, to think and act freely.

So, I wish my Irish friends well. It's a sign of how in my own lifespan, the leap from a blinkered to a bright acceptance of gays and lesbians in partnership and equality has happened in a country that still in the Nineties was bound, far more stronger, to the Church. I do wonder, however, if the lurch to secularization and massive consumerism, as the boom years showed to Ireland's weakness, reveal that whatever has replaced the Faith of Our Fathers leaves many with their own search, amid the gap opened by the loss of trust in the clerical establishment and its dogma, for meaning that can reward us without pointing to supernatural intervention, clerical suppression of thought, and a cowed laity. Blessed with more liberty and abundance than our forebears, how do we conduct ourselves wisely?

That, to me, is the struggle that we confront. The Pew survey, as I blogged this week, shows an 8% drop between 2007 and 2014 in Christian identification in the U.S. That is massive. As in much of the developed world, the decline in faith is balanced, all the same, by the upsurge in poorer regions. So, we will face a richer North, and a poorer but more pious South, it seems, in the century ahead. And, I suspect that many of us, and our children from whatever arrangement biology and the law allow from now on, will ask the same Big Questions as me and my ancestors. But at least now, we have choices.

Fewer believers, more consumers?

The recent Pew survey on American religion shows a rapid decline, from around 78% to 70% in Christian identification since 2007. Catholics are dropping, as are evangelicals. While 10% of all Americans were ex-Catholic then, now it's 13%. Tim Rutten wonders how much evangelical and right-wing politics may be to blame for this decline. Unaffiliated respondents have increased by 6.7% the past period, to nearly 30% After all, independent-leaning, alienated, skeptical voters (like me) are often repulsed by pious rhetoric and cant. "Well over one-third of all Americans under 49 now are unaffiliated and a substantial number of them profess a complete disinterest in religion or its values."

This surge transcends the usual ethnic, class, regional, or traditional boundaries. If not for relentless immigration and concomitant population growth, the Catholic and probably some Pentecostal and fundamentalist churches would show deeper drops. The tilt of the Church in my region tips now about 70% Latino, for instance, with large Filipino and Vietnamese contingents. Sure, the South does still boast more believers, and cities more their cohort of "spiritual but not religious," a phenomenon now spreading beyond the privileged pockets on the East and West Coasts and I suppose college towns. The report sums up: "People who self-identify as atheists or agnostics (about 7% of all U.S. adults), as well as those who say their religion is 'nothing in particular,' now account for a combined 22.8% of U.S. adults – up from 16.1% in 2007. The growth of the 'nones' has been powered in part by religious switching. Nearly one-in-five U.S. adults (18%) were raised as Christians or members of some other religion, but now say they have no religious affiliation." This cheers me, if oddly for me.

For I study religion, I value its contributions, I suspect its assertions, and I analyze its functions. I teach a course in its comparative aspects, open to students online nationwide whom I will never likely meet. I ask them to discuss their own orientation. Most do so happily, revealing usually about one or two articulate but disenfranchised voices, maybe half who are more or less observant of some form, and the rest divided between those who have been raised Catholic, Baptist, or Methodist but who have a wavering or flexible attitude towards the tenets with which they were inculcated. Sometimes I get a pagan or two, a Jewish or Muslim student, too. A Buddhist, too, but so far all who blend a vague sort of aspiration with New Age, from a Christian background. So, they match Pew data above.

But some often bristle, being mainly mainline Christians still, when I challenge them about the growth of "nones," or when I confront them to move out of a comfort zone and critically respond to those who address the drawbacks of, well, every religious system we study over the eight weeks. I offer the positive and the negative aspects of the major faiths--even if the textbook and lectures on the online shell try to be very neutral, I cannot be so as a teacher who wants students to stretch their limits. Therefore, the new data I will have to offer my next class will continue to push their boundaries. As we turn a less religious nation, however, as Rutten concludes, we must all question another transformation: autonomic absorption of so many Americans into the consumer society, as we face a consumerist, capitalist force "that so often seems more powerful than any religion."

Rutten asks: "If you live in a world that begs you to choose from among 600 types of potato chips and 400 brands of hummus, why not faith? Whether a society that idolizes that kind of choice really is a better place than the one we’re struggling with now, will be something we’ll all discover." Amen.

"The vision of blind sleepers such as I"

As readers of this blog know, William T. Vollmann, as a hunt with that search term here will verify, remains one of my favorite authors. Although I find his fiction and essays sometimes too sprawling, and as his fierce determination to remain free of editorial control or publication fends off brevity, Vollmann reveals a restless mind, a vast range, and confident erudition seasoned with moral humility and wise insight.

He begins an essay in the New York Times about the Gnostic scriptures in his typically direct voice: "Have you ever wondered whether this world is wrong for you? A death, a lover’s unabashed indifference, the sufferings of innocents and the absence of definitive answers — don’t these imply some hollowness or deficiency? For my part, the wrongness struck when I was 4 years old. I was at my grandmother’s house, and I saw a cat torture a baby bird." He also, in other accounts, has narrated his failure as he sees it to take care of his younger sister when he was a boy, and how she then drowned. As with me, death haunts him always.

As one who has roamed into Afghanistan before the rise of the Taliban, who has investigated the plight of the poor in Asia and in Latin America, who has roamed the rails of America, and retraced the steps of the natives into the Arctic, the Maritimes, the Virginia estuaries, and the Western plains, Vollmann counters the cant or easy pieties of many of his writing contemporaries with observation.

Similarly, although many of his many books find him not taking on belief directly, he acknowledges here its hold on him. "Hoping to understand the purpose of our situation, I visit possessors of maxims and scriptures. Most of them are kind to me. I love the ritualistic gorgeousness of Catholic cathedrals, the matter-of-fact sincerity with which strangers pray together at roadsides throughout the Muslim world, the studied bravery and compassion in the texts of medieval Jewish responsa, the jovial humility of the Buddhist precept that enlightenment is no reward and lack of enlightenment no loss, the nobility of atheists who do whatever good they do without expectation of celestial candy — not to mention pantheists’ glorifications of everything from elephants to oceans. All these other ways that I have glimpsed from my own lonely road allure me; I come to each as a guest, then continue on to I know not where." His writings strive for compassion, cultivating one's patience for poverty and pain.

I understand his search. "Somewhere beyond us is the true God, or Goddess, who calls us to come home. She is calling me now. As I walk my own many-curving way toward death, I can’t help wondering how awake I am. Hence certain Gnostic lines haunt me. Someone beyond this world has named herself or himself the vision of blind sleepers such as I. This voice calls itself the real voice and insists that it is crying out in all of us. I wish I could hear its cry." He, like me, continues to wonder and wander and study scriptures and listen to accounts, even as he feels distant from many.

He is mature enough to acknowledge the weakness of those before us who have insisted that they channel the divine through themselves. "As a corpus, the scriptures are nearly incoherent, like a crowd of sages, mystics and madmen all speaking at once. But always they call upon us to know ourselves." And, Vollmann is perceptive enough to recognize their appeal, no matter our rationality.

(Image: Fra Angelico, Predella of San Marco Altarpiece, The Healing of Justinian by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian, Museo di San Marco, Florence. I first saw this illustration in this fine book.)

Elijah's Chair

 On April First, after Alex Gibney's HBO documentary on my hometown's most famous "tax-exempt religion" founded by a pulp novelist aired, noted atheist Neil DeGrasse Tyson dismissed scare claims. “But why aren’t they a religion?” he asked. “If you attend a Seder, there’s an empty chair sitting right there and the door is unlocked because Elijah might walk in. OK. These are educated people who do this. Now, some will say it’s ritual, some will say it could literally happen… It looks like the older those thoughts have been around, the likelier it is to be declared a religion. If you’ve been around 1,000 years you’re a religion, and if you’ve been around 100 years, you’re a cult.” I have some hesitation with Tyson's glib argument, as critiqued since by Steve Neumann. However, as I listened last summer to an audiobook, Janet Reitman's similarly thorough expose that confirms much of what Lawrence Wright's study has uncovered, I wondered about Mormons, and Jesus, Mohammed, and Moses in the same way. Or this documentary on one of my hometown's more recent, odd, spiritual set of seekers, The Source Family. If a cult survives a decade it's on way  to being a sect, and after a century, a religion. As the founders fade and memories get mythologized, in the past, invention replaces oral history with either more of the same or, as in Buddhism, belated compilation and codifications. (Yes, we keep two traditions defying logic: kosher and Elijah's Chair.)

The trouble with the Exodus, like those tablets Joseph Smith claimed to have translated before they vanished, or the historicity of Jesus, the veracity of Mohammed, or what the Buddha really said, all fall into the abyss, lacking first-hand testimony. As I wrote last year, the Exodus may not have happened, at least as we celebrate it with 600,000 fleeing Pharoah's hardened heart and actions. There might have been a small slave revolt, and few hanger-ons, the borderers called "ivrit" could have well hung out with the fugitive rabble.

Two nights ago, we held our seder. My wife narrated her version, complete with a prank she and my older son engineered well on me. But, tired of the triumphal "they tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat" storyline, we decided to host our older son, his college friends, and two older, secular Jews with a different take. We've evolved over a quarter-century of this, and so we shared this activity, I post it as it may inspire others out there, who approach with not a fixed identity but an evolving imagination how we tell this story commanded to repeat each year for thousands of them, relevantly:

"The Seder is the annual Jewish celebration commemorating the Exodus from Egypt, which freed the Jewish people from slavery. The story is that God subjected the Egyptian people to plagues which grew more brutal, culminating in the death of the first born son. The tears of thousand mothers finally softened the Pharaoh’s heart. 

We look forward each year to taking a breath, dining together and reveling in the freedom we enjoy.  Jews are commanded to tell the tale, not once, but twice. We have done so dutifully for a quarter of a century. We clean the house and get rid of bread and noodles and cookies in order to simulate the Jews hurried Exodus from Egypt. We do this though because we've always done it. We are proud that at this time Jews all over the world are reflecting on their freedom but the story we're commanded to tell might as well be Cinderella or Hansel and Gretel. The fairy tale trivializes our wonder at our own blessings and brushes the struggle of those less fortunate than we are under the rug. We long for something more real and meaningful and we come to you." (So my wife wrote, and proposed for us to fill out in Comic Sans below. I did so as an example, trying to keep my guest list limited, hint-hint.)

My Seder

My name is:

I would have my Seder at: under the redwoods where my friends Bob + Chris live

The living or not living people I would invite are: 7 Living: Bob, Chris, my wife and sons and girlfriends as applicable; 7 Not-living: Hypatia of Alexandria, "La Malinche," Emma Goldman, Hans + Sophie Scholl, Michael Dillon, Thomas Merton. 

We would eat: a vegetarian meal but a delicious one, cooked by my wife (with help!)

We would celebrate our freedom by: playing music we could all agree on in the background, while discussing ways to advance justice, equality, tolerance, and other genteel values while taking into account our own earnestness and blinkered minds

We would acknowledge those who are not free by: gathering our funds and actions to support the righteous cause of our choice, but neither for profit nor for a politician.

Instead of matzoh for affikomen we would hide: a dog's chew toy as one will be nearby.

Whoever finds the affikomen will get: to donate the amount to a favorite charity

Robert M. Price's "Killing History": Book Review

This New Testament scholar dismantles the quasi-historical claims asserted in Killing Jesus, by pundit Bill O'Reilly and co-author Martin Dugard. Robert M. Price, with considerable learning and abundant snark, demonstrates O'Reilly and Dugard's credulous acceptance of the myths, legends, and contradictory accounts filling Acts and the four Gospels. Countering with a lively argument based on biblical Higher Criticism, he encourages readers to accept the pair's take on the last days of Jesus as speculation rather than any testimony derived from dubious fact. Their bestseller may edify, but it has no place on the shelf alongside the criticism Price and his academic colleagues assemble against it. Grounded in reason, they defend skepticism.

Price begins by wondering why O'Reilly does not take the same cautious approach to assertions in the Bible as he would to provocative guests whom he interviews. In their 2013 bestseller, following books on the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, O'Reilly and Dugard fall for whoppers. If the veracity of the motives for assassination and the identities of those responsible in Kennedy's death remain contested, and if distance from Lincoln's demise muddies research today, all the more to be cautious when going back two millennia. But the pair accept unsubstantiated sources as true, and they stitch together an imperfect quilt, a narrative seeming to be woven at first glance as smooth and solid, but when examined closely reveals itself to be poorly assembled, with loose ends fraying all around.

Basing his critique on Burton Mack's proofs that much of the Gospels have been back-dated, incorporating early into the first century when Jesus is asserted to have lived many anachronisms from later in that same century, or even later, after the Temple had fallen to the Romans and Jerusalem had fallen, Price reveals much of the Jesus story as inconsistent and unsubstantiated. It is a "scissors-and-paste" fabrication, crammed with illogical testimony and awkward dramatization.

Disputes about rabbinical Judaism, which consolidated and codified itself after the Temple's destruction in the year 70, creep back into the New Testament, as in Acts and the Gospels. For instance, the Gospel of John promotes Jesus speaking as the divine Son of God, while, as Adolf Harnack reminds us as cited by Price, the Gospel message of the Father remains the message taught by the itinerant preacher. Followers "retroject" later disputes with Jews into "eyewitness" accounts.

What happens over and over is that disputes between sarcastic Jesus and the stubborn Jews caricature ongoing contentions from the subsequent period when Jewish Christians debated with gentile converts as to which sect merited favor. Rabbinical authority continually struts into Gospel accounts as unstable, undermined by a prickly Jesus, who lashes out at his apostles, propped up as dunces or dupes for their incomprehension of their leader's bold challenges. Set-pieces, as Price documents, keep trotting out dumb disciples and recalcitrant elders, even if the latter contingent in fact had debated many of the same conundrums that Jesus, in the Gospels, is shown falsely to have originated.

Price keeps up the pressure, dismantling O'Reilly and Dugard's many logical fallacies. He compares the duo's attempt to make coherent sense out of the conflicting motivations cobbled together to serve as Judas' rationales for betrayal to a jigsaw puzzle. The authors try to force its mismatched pieces to fit, even if some must be sawn off and others thrown off of the table. Such metaphors help readers enjoy the blend of scholarship and silliness which certainly help distinguish this take on this old tale.

For instance, a Mad TV skit, Dana Carvey's Church Lady from Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Life of Brian, the storytelling tricks of H.P. Lovecraft, an R.E.M. song, and a recent polemic from David Mamet feature among the more stolid sources he cites. He even finishes, satirically, the tale left off at the Resurrection by O'Reilly and Dugard, channeling their own awkward style with clumsy asides and attempts at wit. All of this does rush past, and some weighty or learned assertions needed clarification. Price addresses this at the general reader, but as with many academics, now and then he forgets to slow down to explain. Context on the "two-headed dragon" from the I Love Lucy episode Price alludes to was needed, and what Herod's soldiers bent on "frog-gigging babies" must mean may be faulted to the galleys this reviewer was provided. All the same, this delivers a spirited study, from which a reader less informed about biblical scholarship can emerge educated and entertained.

Surprisingly, the account of the time on the Cross passes rapidly, for the emphasis wisely chosen by Price focuses on the contorted reasoning marshaled to invite Caiphas and Pilate as walk-ons and stage villains in the various Gospel versions. These all trot out a very clunky premiere of a Passion Play. Price shows how these distortions of true history shove us to a foregone conclusion of this unbelievable storyline, as a wobbly wheel forces a shopping cart into one direction. For the Gospels, this turns out to be the Resurrection, and acclaim given a Messiah who does not match Jewish ideals.

It creates a memorable story, but not an historical narrative. Price concludes with two appendices, to strengthen some of the counter-arguments raised earlier in the text. These deserve attention, for they cement what earlier chapters may have left slightly shaky. The first appendix sides with very delayed dates for the Gospels, much later than many earlier scholars have suggested. The second appendix clarifies what impacts delay may have had, once Christian texts are compared with classical sources.

Tacitus gives no proof of the historical Jesus, recounting instead only what Christians promulgated in the early second century. Josephus, with his own particular agenda to promote or muddle, may have inspired elements in the gospels attributed to Mark and Matthew. That Jewish survivor turned Roman apologist after his nation's defeat is vague as to who "Jesus called Christ" may be, given that a Greek form of Yeshua as an "anointed" priest may not be that uncommon an identifier for more than one candidate after all. Price reminds readers, in wrapping up his cautionary tale, that classical writers were not "front-line reporting" but rather passing along accounts long after the fact--or the fiction.

Readers are left, then, to face the results of their own post-apocalyptic encounter. When the Gospels and Acts are shown to rest on shaky ground, and when proof-texts trotted out by apologists and advocates in recent times who attempted to reconcile history with the Bible are shown themselves to be flimsy support for messianic claims and divine incarnations, pseudo-history itself, in Price's book, crumbles into its own ruins. What remains, in Killing History: Jesus in the No-Spin Zone, may make readers' heads spin. Freed from pundits or preachers, sober examination uncovers not history, but, fittingly or frustratingly depending on the reader's reaction, some gospel tales that beg to be believed.
(NYJB 9-2-14;  P.S. I later found this excerpt: "5 Reasons to Suspect That Jesus Never Existed".)

Joshua Dubler's "Down in the Chapel": Book Review

While academic articles have scrutinized the range of religious observance behind bars, and while popular culture capitalizing on this milieu treats these activities with passing or prurient interest, few in-depth treatments aimed at a wider audience have appeared. Adapting his Princeton dissertation, a professor of religion at the University of Rochester, Joshua Dubler, guides readers through a prison week in early 2006. He uses a week's chronology to intersperse summaries from ethnography and sociology on prison religion, mingling these with a year of sacred and profane discussions among those who gravitate towards one prison chapel, which can be a bleak or comforting "cellular edifice". Combining scholarly distance with first-hand reports as a participant-observer, he introduces us to 15 chapel workers chosen from a general population of 3,500, their five chaplains, and a pair of officers enlisted to keep order in this quiet corner of Pennsylvania's Graterford State Correctional Institution.

The inmates reflect the racial and ethnic demographics of this prison, thirty-odd miles northwest of Philadelphia. About a quarter of those locked up there identify as Muslim, often drawn from the same South Philly neighborhoods which claim the allegiance of inmates at Graterford, about two-thirds of whom are African-American. Trusting those who they knew outside before they all wound up on the inside, many stick together to attend a particular service among the Islamic options. Three include Warith Deen as the successor to the disbanded Nation of Islam, the Nation of Islam itself as revived under Louis Farrakhan, or an enduring manifestation of earlier Islam in black America, the Moorish Science Temple. Dubler explores this trio; he elaborates how tensions in this prison had once worsened between factions of black Muslim observance. These sparked resentment among staff and politicians who suppressed what they perceived as subversion in a more permissive atmosphere. In a 1995 crackdown on drugs and smuggling, tough-on-crime authorities gained control over Graterford.

Dubler "as a Jew and a pluralist" sides with these expressions of black identity. As a counter to the "expansionist universalism" of Sunni Muslims, fervent Catholics, or fundamentalist Protestants, he admits his soft spot for a "living genealogy of black religion". This heritage, however, seems increasingly an urban African-American legacy within a globalizing community, open to religious competition. Reverend Keita is a Bible-based Protestant from Sierra Leone; the prison imam is from Nigeria. This pair ministering to Philly-loyal inmates stands out, as immigrants into black America.

Today, many African-American Muslims opt for an increasingly appealing take on fundamentalism, imported from the Salafi sect in Saudi Arabia. The selection of that imam from Africa may reflect a wish among supervisors to inculcate a more traditional, less politically charged, style of supervision through conducting services and monitoring inmate activity. Whatever the denomination, Dubler reveals the tensions chaplains share. They soon are "burned" by the appeals and scams of inmates conniving to use their phones or computers (rare instances of such devices accessible at Graterford, at least legally), so chaplains can "burn out", caught between the strategies of staff who use chaplains for surveillance and the scams of inmates who seek to manipulate those assigned to care for them.

Nevertheless, a "palliative" quality of religion, in one common explanation for its ubiquity (which Dubler diminishes as he does any neat formula to shrink down human experience to theory), sedates. At least according to the conventional wisdom, which justifies a widespread practice of prisoner faith. As the liberal Lutheran, Reverend Baumgartner (some names are changed in this narrative), avers, the jaded staff regards chaplains as "as affable opiate peddlers", in Dubler's memorable phrase.

This book peppers such phrases into its style. Prisoner Teddy and Officer Watkins debate the truth of the Bible, as Dubler judges them "nothing if not readers of outrageous confidence". He then segues into a rundown of the Second Great Awakening nearly two hundred years ago. As a Muslim, Sayyid may deny evolution and assert God's control, but "his claims to lockjaw epistemological modesty are belied by his exuberance". A Jewish inmate, the rabbi's clerk, enters: "Fastidious in his appearance, with pressed browns, sculpted hair, shadowless cheeks, and, in summer, the uniformly bronze hue of an intentional tan, Brian carries himself with the harried air of a corporate professional." Neshawn rises during a Nation of Islam gathering to talk about an incident "on the block"; his "appetite for unpolished provocation" hints to Dubler of "a mind run amok". Such vivid details humanize those Dubler introduces, and they enliven the gist of a book which can wander off into professorial prose.

This tone, drifting between character studies and theoretical rumination (nearly thirty pages of dense footnotes attest to the origins of this project), creates frequent shifts. Dubler as an Ivy League-trained professor incorporates ten theses, in self-aware, suggestive language, which highlight his attempts at applying theory to the situations he studies. This can disconcert, for the range of this study is vast and despite lots of documentation, he can assume his reader is as smart as he is as to certain allusions or scholars. However, he alters this density by varying narrative voices to highlight his own predicament, listening to those on the inside, but always knowing he possesses the freedom denied his informants and confidants. He stays cautious of the staff and cameras watching his moves.

He reports in long conversations the tensions of the body and the spirit, the restless minds and the stifled desires. These he dramatizes, from inmates, chaplains, and guards. (I wondered how often he took notes, took liberties with dialogue, and/or if he transcribed tapes but I cannot ascertain--except for one mention of him transcribing a brief sermon--the precise methods by which he recalls so much, given this hefty expansion of his dissertation.) He blends academic discussions with hip-hop lyrics, trash talk, debates, and his hyper-aware sensibility. After all, he does not fit into this regimentation.

Raised well-off in Manhattan, he reveals how he descends from "agnostic observant Jews" who don't believe in God anymore but who take comfort in belonging to a set of values, a community, and a family. This key insight emerges late on, for it's not until Friday of the dramatized week when we hear it, by way of Dubler at Shabbat service. He then opens up, badgered by Brian, to account for his own Jewish identity, and the merits of his dissertation. How can this one prison stand for millions incarcerated? How can a single study account for unprecedented religious variety among inmates?

Dubler accepts the narrow limits of his project on practical grounds, but he rejects expansion of his observations to create a heady, sweeping statement about religious life in all American prisons. He admits its small scope. He strives to follow academic convention in methodology. Yet, he rejects rigidity as to theory. Earlier, he dismisses both the "bad man" trope where those incarcerated use religion as part of a con and the "poor man" stance where those convicted turn to religion as solace: humbled, beaten down, or too weak to react in other than a pitiful submission to life's hardships.

Investigating the marked "do-or-die certitude" habitually if not totally asserted by most of the six Muslims, four Protestants, two Catholics, as well as the one atheist who works in the chapel, Dubler notes the necessity for prisoners to adapt such a stubborn line of defense for survival. It's rare to hear irony when they proclaim their beliefs, for Graterford like any prison is a place "where men tend to bind themselves to the masts of their convictions and tenaciously hold on to those revolutionary moments in time when they first become what they continue to resolutely become". This subtle phrasing typifies Dubler's preference for a flexible expression of religion, rooted in his preference for postmodern lack of resolution and his professed tendency to act out, rather than mull over, ideas. He suspects those locked into a warped, defensive pose, who cannot flex or bend to save themselves.

Among his Jewish fellows, Dubler lets down his academic guard. He has opposed the liberal Protestant position which courts have adopted. This criterion aligns the sincerity of what is professed "interiorly" with what is indicative of truth through an exterior manifestation. This limits the expression of a sanctioned faith to a denomination demanding a material representation of belief. Dubler resists any judgement which promotes religion by a particular legal or academic label. He responds to Brian's challenge: "As I see it, rather than in the discreetly mapped forest, it is in the territorial mess of trees and shrubs, undergrowth and earth, where the stuff of religion takes place."

In such a thicket, he orients himself, given a wavering reaction towards his ancestral Judaism. Rejecting facile scholarly definitions, Dubler affirms that religion is a convivial activity, but it need not be profession of a creed or a ritual enacted as in scripture. It can be what is joyfully, intuitively shared. He equates religion with eating and drinking at a meal "with one's friends, with one's people".

Among others, too, he seeks to understand varieties of religious experience. At a Spanish-language revival service, he wonders if the preacher's fulminations against "the Jews" are meant symbolically, practically, or personally. He sits gingerly on the frozen ground as part of a Native American circle. He follows Father Gorski to the death row block. He talks with a Catholic inmate applying Franciscan principles of restorative justice to ease relations with the family of his victim. Dubler attends what he confesses to be a dispiriting Mass on a dreary Saturday night. The surge of emotional relief he feels, he and the priest confide when they leave prison confines for the parking lot, testifies to the pressures built up within the forbidding place they both choose to work at, but from which they both can walk away each night. This freedom divides those who care for these inmates from those inmates. Still, as the book nears its conclusion and the year reaches its end, Dubler lets readers glimpse his growing sadness at departure. He assures those he has spoken to he will treat them fairly.

Within Graterford, neither jailhouse terrorists radicalized by Islam nor crazed prophets railing at the their carceral confines materialize. Dubler concedes long-term prisoners learn to endure as ascetics rather than revolutionaries during harsh sentences. "Not system shatterers, today's religious prisoners are, in their own quiet and righteous way--much like the majority of us--system sustainers." Demonstrating devotion to a system, even in its "messy and putatively noncoercive assemblage of music, altar patter, and Bible readings", the "anticlerical, antiliturgical" Protestant Sunday service led by Reverend Baumgartner rouses gratitude at God's call. Joy sustains its appeal into the rest of the congregants' week. Certainly, Dubler enjoys it much more than the Catholic Mass the previous night.

This book educates with references to Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and Feuerbach, along with casual nods to The Wire, Dungeons and Dragons, and pro football. Dubler diligently navigates between his privileged status as an academic and his trusted role as an interviewer in an unpredictable environment. He may never shake off his own protective garb, that scholarly, liberal, idealistic mindset which drives him to spend a year at Graterford for his doctoral fieldwork, but he lets down his guard long enough to learn lessons from a formidable cadre of teachers and mentors on the inside.
(Edited for Amazon US 8-1-14; PopMatters 8-11-14. See also Karl Woolf at NYJB, same day.)