the sacred gaze & multimodality

[All: I'm painfully aware that using blogspot's template and URL could not be more uncool, but as a latecoming digital immigrant---I wrote my first email in 1997 when I was 22---I've been pretty lazy about learning how to trick out my online presence. Thanks for hanging out with me anyway.]

A few days ago my son Ben (9) and I went to the Carl Bloch exhibit at BYU's Museum of Art to see the four stunning altarpieces and the incredible in-house original of Bloch's "Christ Healing the Sick at Bethesda":



We rented i-Pads for the experience, so we were both throttled with a cable lanyard and both equally distracted from the paintings by the supplemental media. As we sat in front of the first altarpiece--a stunning rendition of Jesus in Gethsemane being comforted by an androgynous angel with white wings--Ben kept his head down, watching video commentary from the MOA's religion staff and a few female church leaders from the Danish Lutheran church that loaned out the paintings.

At first it frustrated me to see my boy sitting in front of a religious masterwork with his head down, swiping his finger across a screen that gave him an interactive panorama of the inside of the Skt. Nikolai Kirke Holbaek (check out the panoramas here). How can any art, let alone religious art, compete with the multimodality of the i-Pad? But then I caught myself staring down at the screen, swiping my greasy finger around, watching videos, ignoring the painting.

But we weren't really ignoring the painting. Our heads were tick-tocking back and forth from painting to Pod. And we were participating in a new kind of religious visual culture in which multiple modes collaborated with each other to "embolden and intensify inner or imaginative vision," as David Morgan writes in The Sacred Gaze. Until the moment I was captivated by my first use of an i-Pad, I had not thought much about how digital "iconicity" could create a new kind of experience with religious aesthetics. I understand how someone would resent having their aesthetics layered with multimodal mediation; after all, the folks on the screen essentially were telling me and Ben where, what, and how to look at these paintings. Our sacred gaze--which Morgan defines as "the particular configuration of ideas, attitudes, and customs that informs a religious act of seeing"--was tutored by a slick Mac product with a tactile interface. The tutoring, though, made my untrained eye more focused than it would have been. Without experience or expert knowledge, I invited the tutoring. We both assented to the MOA's efforts to catalyze a religious experience through 19th century art and 21st century technology.

At the end of the exhibit, Ben wrote on the comment blog that he'd expected the exhibit to be boring but had (really!) enjoyed himself. I suppose my resistance was a kind of digital iconophobia, a fear of what a digital interface would do to distract my son from the materiality of the art itself.

King's dream

Yesterday my daughter Lydia (7) asked me why she didn't have to go to school on Monday. I started with the "I Have a Dream Speech," but then found myself tracking back through Birmingham, then Rosa Parks and the bus boycott, then segregation after the Civil War, then the Civil War, then Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, and then I found myself explaining how Europeans sailed to the coasts of Africa, walked into people's homes, dragged them away from their families, and chained them on their backs in the dark sweaty bellies of ships where they writhed for months with little food or water only to be sold into slavery.

It was a depressing conversation, and I caught myself wondering, naively, how it could have happened like that, how many demonic decisions had to be made by so-called Christians to get to King's assassination in Memphis in 1968.

We study the "I Have a Dream" speech often in first-year writing and courses on rhetorical criticism. It's a fantastic speech, and students are unfortunately so acclimated to the acclamation of the speech that conversations about it rarely yield insights beyond the obvious. His histrionic delivery has not lost its savor over the last 60 years. The improv parts at the end are the most justifiably famous. Few of us, if asked, would think first to praise the check-cashing analogy, which cheapens (I think) the power of the Declaration's self-evident truths. The bank of justice does not write checks. It's not the most resonant analogy. (Do you disagree?)

The "dream" section, though, is so powerful. It rings with optimism in the work-in-progress that we call the American soul. King was pragmatic about the consequences of postponing racial justice, but he also had a prophet's foolish hope in the eventual redemption of the nation. We may never live in a post-racial nation, but with each generation we can at least hope we are advancing in recognizing the inalienable divine value of everyone. "No exceptions," as the bumper sticker goes.

Blood simpleton

Sigh. Sales of Glock pistols are up in Arizona.

In Sarah Palin's remarks in response to Rep. Giffords' shooting, she accused journalists and pundits of manufacturing "a blood libel" when they connected the shooting to her incendiary campaign rhetoric in 2010. In her defense, incendiary rhetoric is the name of the game these days. No matter how unfortunate or chilling or ugly it seems to us now to see those rifle cross-hairs over Rep. Giffords' congressional district, connecting the shooting to Palin is irresponsible---though, I'm sure, irresistible.

The "blood libel" comment, however, is downright bizarre. The NYT's Laurie Goodstein gives a brief summary of the phrase and its roots in anti-semitism. By using the phrase Palin creates a rhetorical liaison between herself and Jews accused of killing children and using their blood for Passover matzoh. Such accusations, for Palin, serve "only to incite the very hatred and violence" it condemns. If you missed the whole thing, here's a CBS sound bite from a YouTube vid (that CBS wouldn't let me embed).

So: Palin compares political action to gun violence and is accused of inciting violence when violence actually happens to a person Palin "targeted" politically. She responds by saying that accusing her of inciting violence incites violence. Not just any violence: the kind of violence directed at Jews over the centuries. This is rank hyperbole.

In other parts of the text, Palin shows her God strategy bona fides by combining Reagan (surprise!), the Founders (shocker!), the obligatory and appropriate call for prayers (for the grieved, the wounded, "our country"), and "God's guidance and the peace he provides." The word "peace" here seems oddly juxtaposed with the "locked and loaded" campaign rhetoric Palin made famous last year. Again, as she says herself in her speech, when politicians speak of taking up arms they're talking about voting, not shooting folks. And yet this event seems to evoke the old parenting saw that "it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt."

It is difficult to prove that political rhetoric "incites" anything, but it surely evokes something---powerful emotions, like anger, that help fashion dispositions, beliefs, actions. Perhaps it is naive and irresponsible to connect Palin's rhetoric to the shooting, but it is likewise naive and irresponsible to argue that violent tropes are harmless.

the call to civility

I just received a message from Jim Wallis. In my email box. He's calling me to sign a peace and civility pledge in the wake of the terrible shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Though I can get on board with the seven points of Wallis's pledge, I don't see this shooting as a result of incivility in public discourse, regardless of what Sarah Palin used as a graphic for "targeting" democrats (including Giffords).

Let's sign the pledge, but let's also acknowledge, with David Brooks, the role of mental illness, social isolation, and just plain old stupid senseless evil in the shooting.

Don't Stop Believin'

Either President Obama is one of the best communicators we've had in the Oval Office or one of the worst. His meteoric rise was marked by several speeches praised for their rhetorical power, starting with his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

But when he cuts taxes for 95% of American households, few even notice. For some reason, he can't get the word out; his speeches don't stick. Health care, stimulus packages, his place of birth---the more he talks about these topics, the less people seem to get it.

When Obama fights off falsehoods and accusations, he strengthens them. Selective exposure may be stronger than rhetoric.

A post-election American Values Survey by the Public Religion Research Institute finds that 60% of Americans feel their religious values differ from Obama's, even though Obama has taken great pains to make public confession of his faith as a mainline Christian who believes in "the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ," as he told Christianity Today in 2008. And still, between 2008 and 2010, the percent of U.S. citizens who think Obama is Muslim rose from 12% to 18%. (A Newsweek poll puts the number at 24%.)

We should be quick to argue that it doesn't matter whether Obama is Muslim or not, but that's not the point. The point is that we may be tempted to assume that Obama has a rhetorical challenge on his hands, one that he must address as we all make our (long . . . torturous . . . tedious . . . vitriolic . . . insipid . . . ) way to the 2012 presidential election. Because of the normative power of the God strategy (see this post), a president cannot afford to stray too far from the religious identity required of the commander in chief.

However, considering the research on cognitive dissonance, selection, and deflection, it could also be argued that those people who believe Obama is Muslim aren't really his rhetorical problem at all. If you're willing to keep on believing something that has been proven false---over and over and over again---then you're rhetoric-proof.

I was sorely tempted here to embed a YouTube video of Journey singing "Don't Stop Believin'," but I think I've made the point.

The Word . . . can be uncool

Like other religious institutions, but hecka bigger, the Vatican struggles with figuring out how to control its message in the Twitter ecology. The challenge top-down religious institutions face (like the one I belong to, for example) while trying to communicate online with people in and out of the faith could be called the "rhetoric of cool" problem, to nod to Jeff Rice's book. New new media has made it uncool for institutions to have a web presence devoid of user-generated interfaces or content. If you can't comment on something, the conversation is over.

Official digital monologuing is uncool. Then again, the Word has always been--as the hardcore band Minor Threat used to sing/scream--out of step with the world. Revealed religion, you could say, can be a conversation-stopper, as Richard Rorty said it was, because as speech act it purports to lay down divine standards for belonging, believing, and behaving. (I take the three B's from Putnam and Campbell's incredible new book, American Grace.) However prophetic the pronouncement, the message still needs to connect with the audience--the Iron Law of rhetoric?--and digital literacy transforms our expectations of how information flows and collective ethos is constituted. It will be fascinating to watch/analyze how or whether the Vatican listens to its more progressive officials and leans cool.

The God Strategy in contemporary politics

I'm reading David Domke and Kevin Coe's fantastic book The God Strategy (Oxford, 2010), which covers the historical development of the "four signals" we've grown accustomed to politicians giving when running for office:

1. Acting as political priests, by speaking the language of the faithful
2. Fusing God and country, by linking America with divine will
3. Offering acts of communion, by embracing iconic religious elements
4. Engaging in morality politics, by trumpeting bellwether issues. (19)

These signals work best when you have a politically-active evangelical base (30% in 2004) and a dizzying information glut that compels overwhelmed voters (I hear you, Lippmann!) to cling to concise short-hand public signaling, esp. on moral issues.

The God strategy (GS) is bi-partisan, though obviously skewed Right since, as Domke and Coe point out, it was used most heavily after Jerry Falwell brought the fundamentalists out of political hibernation in 1979. (Non-trivial trivia from the authors: From FDR to Carter, presidents invoked God in around 50% of their speeches, on average; Reagan invoked God in 96%. Quite a leap!)

Whether GS will be effective in the future is a mystery. Since 2008 there have been significant shifts in religious preferences, especially among young people, as a response to the hyper-religiosity of conservative politics on the Religious Right. The biggest sign of this change, according to Robert Putnam and David Campbell in American Grace (Simon and Schuster, 2010), is the "rise of the nones"--the 17%+ of the population who do not identify with any specific religion. It will be a relief, I argue, to cast aside some of the "taken-for-grantedness" of the GS in a pluralistic culture.