It was only a matter of time before someone--and that someone, in this case, is David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network--neologized the relationship between the Tea Party and the evangelical base. Michele Bachmann in this video identifies herself as a teavangelical, a politician who carries Milton Friedman in one hand and the Bible in the other. We've already seen here how hard it is for overtly-Christian politicians to explain how the latter supports the former, but at least now we are seeing how the ideology of the conservative base is constituting itself, identifying itself, in this election cycle.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Friday, September 16, 2011
prophecy comin' atcha, frat boys!
A group of Christian ministers crashed a few tailgating parties at Vanderbilt recently. Check out the video. I'm surprised the preachers didn't get the beat down from these flip-floppin' frat guys who came to heckle, paper cups in hand, tanking up for the big game.
Prophetic rhetoric in the literature often trends left. I'm thinking here of Jim Wallis and Cornel West who emphasize a prophetic vision more in line with liberal-to-left ideologies about poverty, tolerance, and war. Isaiah, it is said, spoke truth to power, and the truth was that power was sinning by grinding the face of the powerless and grinding the plowshares into swords. This is one popular understanding of prophecy.
Another, though, would open the genre to any ideological critique, any calling on an audience to repent and return to God or the forgotten divine principle. In The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America, James Darsey argues that prophecy brings crisis and judgment on a people who have lost a common faith. Prophetic rhetoric is not civil; it rudely interrupts the amnesiac reveling of the culture to throw down transcendent mandates. Though Darsey isn't concerned with religion in his book, his framework is completely appropriate for analyzing what's going on in that video clip of the Vanderbilt Isaiahs.
And of course this kind of bold repent-shouting happens all over College America. Every spring at the state university where I went to graduate school, Pastor Jim would blow into town from somewhere in Missouri and set up shop next to a large grassy hill to tell the undergrads how swiftly and surely they were truckin' to hell. The crowds gathered. He put on quite a show for the bemused students who saw him as an extraterrestrial circus, spouting passionately in a language they did not understand.
Prophecy is always a few short steps away from crazy. That's what gives it its power and also its inappropriateness--and I mean inappropriate in a rhetorical sense (te prepon): ill-fitting for the situation. The prophet refuses to play nicely with other children. No one wants their house party interrupted by a sermon. And yet the prophet is motivated by an intense concern for the souls he/she preaches to, or maybe we could say an intense concern for the collective soul. Frat boys included.
Prophetic rhetoric in the literature often trends left. I'm thinking here of Jim Wallis and Cornel West who emphasize a prophetic vision more in line with liberal-to-left ideologies about poverty, tolerance, and war. Isaiah, it is said, spoke truth to power, and the truth was that power was sinning by grinding the face of the powerless and grinding the plowshares into swords. This is one popular understanding of prophecy.
Another, though, would open the genre to any ideological critique, any calling on an audience to repent and return to God or the forgotten divine principle. In The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America, James Darsey argues that prophecy brings crisis and judgment on a people who have lost a common faith. Prophetic rhetoric is not civil; it rudely interrupts the amnesiac reveling of the culture to throw down transcendent mandates. Though Darsey isn't concerned with religion in his book, his framework is completely appropriate for analyzing what's going on in that video clip of the Vanderbilt Isaiahs.
And of course this kind of bold repent-shouting happens all over College America. Every spring at the state university where I went to graduate school, Pastor Jim would blow into town from somewhere in Missouri and set up shop next to a large grassy hill to tell the undergrads how swiftly and surely they were truckin' to hell. The crowds gathered. He put on quite a show for the bemused students who saw him as an extraterrestrial circus, spouting passionately in a language they did not understand.
Prophecy is always a few short steps away from crazy. That's what gives it its power and also its inappropriateness--and I mean inappropriate in a rhetorical sense (te prepon): ill-fitting for the situation. The prophet refuses to play nicely with other children. No one wants their house party interrupted by a sermon. And yet the prophet is motivated by an intense concern for the souls he/she preaches to, or maybe we could say an intense concern for the collective soul. Frat boys included.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Jesus on facebook
And it's more popular than even that one singer who hatched herself from an egg at the Grammy's and wore a machine gun bra for Rolling Stone. (Nope, not Susan Boyle.)
FB's "Jesus Daily" page is the work of Aaron Tabor, a gene therapy researcher who, according to his own fb page, likes jet skiing and has been "Saved by the Blood." Several times a day he posts scriptures from the Bible or artwork featuring Jesus, doves, and cats wearing chain mail. (Really. Look in the photo section.) The outpouring on the post is pretty amazing--amazing enough to get picked up by the Old Gray Lady. "Likes" ranging between 30-200,000 and thousands of comments, some of them comprised of nothing more than a praise shout-out of "YES!". The comment threads cascade in a swell of testimony, prayer, and hallelujahs from all over the world, from people of all ages. It's fascinating to see how faith aggregates and magnifies itself online.
The comments aren't just comments but religious speech acts meant to express devotion, benediction, witnessing, amens, and direct petitions to God. Plenty of exclamation marks and all-caps. The stychomythia of online commenting has created a stream of language more like speech. Last month Juanita Bynum, the Pentacostal televangelist, busted out in spiritual exuberance on her facebook page in the middle of praying:
Surely we are waaaaaaay outside the realm of I Corinthians 14 on this one. The media have had their fun with Bynum (typing in tongues? typing in fingers? speaking in keystrokes?), but I think it's a fascinating example of what I call "rhetoric of the invisible"--when in addition to speaker, audience, and topic you have the assumption of invisible forces at work in the rhetoric, motivating, confirming, inspiring, and even (in the case of glossalalia or holy laughter) animating the participants.
Does Jesus Daily trivialize religious language (e.g., witnessing) by making it so abundant, so prosaic, and so easy?
FB's "Jesus Daily" page is the work of Aaron Tabor, a gene therapy researcher who, according to his own fb page, likes jet skiing and has been "Saved by the Blood." Several times a day he posts scriptures from the Bible or artwork featuring Jesus, doves, and cats wearing chain mail. (Really. Look in the photo section.) The outpouring on the post is pretty amazing--amazing enough to get picked up by the Old Gray Lady. "Likes" ranging between 30-200,000 and thousands of comments, some of them comprised of nothing more than a praise shout-out of "YES!". The comment threads cascade in a swell of testimony, prayer, and hallelujahs from all over the world, from people of all ages. It's fascinating to see how faith aggregates and magnifies itself online.
The comments aren't just comments but religious speech acts meant to express devotion, benediction, witnessing, amens, and direct petitions to God. Plenty of exclamation marks and all-caps. The stychomythia of online commenting has created a stream of language more like speech. Last month Juanita Bynum, the Pentacostal televangelist, busted out in spiritual exuberance on her facebook page in the middle of praying:
Surely we are waaaaaaay outside the realm of I Corinthians 14 on this one. The media have had their fun with Bynum (typing in tongues? typing in fingers? speaking in keystrokes?), but I think it's a fascinating example of what I call "rhetoric of the invisible"--when in addition to speaker, audience, and topic you have the assumption of invisible forces at work in the rhetoric, motivating, confirming, inspiring, and even (in the case of glossalalia or holy laughter) animating the participants.
Does Jesus Daily trivialize religious language (e.g., witnessing) by making it so abundant, so prosaic, and so easy?
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