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.    

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? 




  



   

a brief note on the craft of preaching

Here, from Rev. Mary Brown at HuffPo.

The main point jellies around a little, but the data she shares indicates that congregations want serious spiritual content related to contemporary life. The rhetorical challenge is to make the Olde Stuff relevant, new, transformative. It is implied that preachers must contextualize spiritual principles within current events, which is a challenge for preachers who want to avoid political commentary.

reason developed to help us win arguments

Or so say philosophers Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier, who last week had the good fortune of getting buzz from the NY Times (here, here, and here) and other sources (listed here) on an article they wrote for Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Contra the Enlightenment gloss of reasoning, or the Cartesian theory of reasoning, which states, in the words of Mercier, that "the role of reasoning is to critically examine our beliefs so as to discard wrong-headed ones and thus create more reliable beliefs—knowledge," Sperber and Mercier present the "argumentative theory of reasoning," which states that the evolutionary "function of reasoning would be to find and evaluate reasons in dialogic contexts—more plainly, to argue with others." Humans developed reasoning, in other words, to help us make and analyze arguments in rich contexts of talk.

Mercier presents two compelling predictions or outcomes of this theory: (1) Since it has an ostensibly evolutionary basis, (1) the argumentative theory of reasoning supports the conclusion that we reason better in groups, and (2) one of the most observed attributes of reasoning is confirmation bias (i.e., our relentless efforts to support our own conclusions and ignore evidence to the contrary, even when it seems irrefutable). For religion, these two predictions make me think that interfaith dialogue is one of the most important forms of American religious rhetoric we have.

I dig this theory. I like the idea that we evolved internal mechanisms of inference because we anticipate audiences for our convictions. That's the bottom line, right? For good or bad, we are the arguing animal. This is exciting research and it confirms the biases of all those rhetoricians out there who are over the moon about argumentation.

religious tests for Mormons, loyalty oaths for Muslims

According to the authors of American Grace, the three least-liked religious groups in the United States are Muslims, Mormons, and Buddhists--and I can't remember the order. Perhaps the respondents know these three groups least among religions, but considering the general religious illiteracy of the American population, it's gotta be something else, too (respectively: 9/11, polygamy, and the buzzkill doctrine that wanting stuff causes suffering, maybe?). Whatever the reason, I'm guessing we will hear more and more rhetoric about the first two groups over the next year of endless campaigning.

For example, Herman Cain--by far the most intriguing presidential candidate so far (Sarah P. hasn't "officially" jumped in yet)--just told Glenn Beck that he might appoint a Muslim to his cabinet, even if it made him "uncomfortable," as long as he/she took a loyalty oath to the U.S. Constitution. Would Catholics or Mormons be held to the same standard? asked Beck. "Nope," answered Cain. He actually said the word nope.

Then there's a new survey from Quinnipiac University reported by the WSJ and posted here purporting to discover that though Mitt Romney is the clear frontrunner among possible GOP candidates for 2012, only 60% of voters are "entirely or somewhat comfortable" with a Mormon in the White House, compared to 83% for a Catholic president. African Americans are the least comfortable with the idea of Mitt as president, with 54% being somewhat or entirely uncomfortable.

The WSJ article is about Romney & his Mormon challenge, but not much is made of the other dramatic numbers in the study. For example, 59% of Americans are uncomfortable with the idea of a Muslim president, and 60% would be uncomfortable--44% "entirely uncomfortable"--with an atheist as president. These percentages plummet when respondents are asked about how they feel about women, African Americans, Hispanics, Catholics, or Jews.

What this means is that regardless of what the Constitution says about religious tests for public figures, Americans can't stop themselves from applying them when they "honestly assess themselves," as the language of the Quinnipiac survey puts it.

Ayn Rand & the Christian GOP

A few months ago I wrote this article about how Ayn Rand's bloated opus (almost wrote corpus, because it sounded so good after the word bloated) Atlas Shrugged provides aid and comfort to conservative populists (i.e., Tea Partiers) who may be feeling like sacrificial victims of America's fiscal policies. One of the (like, three!) thoughtful commenters was a fan of Rand & took me to task for conflating Rand's philosophies with conservatism, since she isn't, by any stretch, a post-Fallwell-Reagan conservative. She was an atheist and a classical liberal in the same sense as Milton Friedman was a classical liberal: In being severely suspicious of government interposition of any kind beyond setting the ground rules for making money and living life.

If you read my article carefully, I never call her a conservative--I'm simply pointing out the obvious in saying that her writings (as well as Friedman's) have been embraced by those who are. Alas, the Atlas Society has me on their "perp walk" list, alongside Roger Ebert and Michael Gerson, for perpetuating the myth that she was conservative.

It seems to contradict no known law of physics to say that someone influences conservatives without being conservative.

I'm gonna let that debate float away for now, but the Ayn Rand/conservative discussion has picked up again during the recent political battles over the government budget. Only this time religion has been thrown into the mix. Liberal Christians have made the case that Christian leaders in the GOP have forsaken Jesus for Rand.

The American Values Network, for example, just produced this video for . . . well, it's hard to say who their audience is or what their purpose is:



It's fair to challenge what could be considered ideological inconsistency, but this video is corny.

RNS has reported that 6,000 progressive Christians have signed a petition calling for House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan to put down his Atlas and pick up his Bible. Considering the size of both books, Ryan would get pretty buff picking up one while putting down the other, over and over. (Perhaps that's how consistency is maintained if you want to be both a Christian and a Rand Fan.)

At any rate, the charge is incompatibility: The Christian left-leaners argue here that one cannot identify as Christian and legislate as Christian while at the same time embracing anti-Christian ideology. Continuity of identity is broken in the attempt, and the person loses credibility. Perhaps the GOP leaders like Ryan could counterargue that taking up Rand's opinions about fiscal policy and federal budgets doth not mean taking up her opinions on Jesus. What do you think about these arguments?

Mormons: loopy, but admirable

That's David Brooks' call, in a brilliant review of the Broadway musical, "The Book of Mormon."

Like most everyone else (except John Lahr, at the New Yorker), Brooks loved it. (Since I haven't seen a South Park episode that didn't make me laugh, I admit I'm interested in seeing it, even though I'm sure my prudish side will find some of it--maybe too much of it--revolting.) But in retrospective analysis, Brooks argues that its "vague humanism" vainly separates belief from practice when it comes to religion.

If the play has an argument, it is that religious belief is wingnut insane. "But religion itself can do enormous good," Brooks summarizes, "as long as people take religious teaching metaphorically and not literally."

Brooks rightly points out the problem with this argument:

Vague, uplifting, nondoctrinal religiosity doesn’t actually last. The religions that grow, succor and motivate people to perform heroic acts of service are usually theologically rigorous, arduous in practice and definite in their convictions about what is True and False.

I've wrassled with this belief/behavior split before, and here it is again in a critique of contemporary Broadway's smug and smutty, but ultimately gentle, treatment of my faith. Brooks's argument here invokes for me the astute title of rhetorician Richard Weaver's book: ideas have consequences. The question Brooks provokes is which ideas have (lasting) consequences when it comes to religion

In their popular study of the "churching of America," Finke and Stark demonstrate that when denominations shear themselves of "mystery, miracle, and mysticism," or when they turn deep commitments and convictions into "abstractions concerning virtue," they lose "market share" in the economy of belief. When there is nothing to believe, there is no reason to behave or belong in any meaningful, lasting way.