Jesus--the perfect conservative?

With the surprise popularity of The Pizza Man Who Could Be President Who Isn't Mitt Romney, the media turns its big ol' fat ol' Sauron-like eye on Herman Cain's rhetorical archive, where recently this gem was exhumed from RedState by the folks at Religious News. Cain's Christmas message--that Christ is the world's "perfect conservative"--is another example of how historical figures are put to work for contemporary ideologies.

Here's the support Cain provides for considering Jesus a perfect conservative:

• He never condemned what others believed – just sin, evil and corruption.
• He helped the poor without one government program. He healed the sick without a government health care system. He feed the hungry without food stamps.
• For three years He was unemployed, and never collected an unemployment check. Nevertheless, he completed all the work He needed to get done. He didn’t travel by private jet. 
• The liberal court found Him guilty of false offences and sentenced Him to death, all because He changed the hearts and minds of men with an army of 12.

This is the first time I have seen Jesus's behavior and attitudes about the poor used by conservatives to promote politically-conservative values. It seems to be an attempt to challenge the other side's attempts to dress up Jesus as a liberal. (I'm thinking of Jim Wallis, these guys, and Stephen Colbert.)

These analogies--on both sides--end up sounding reductive, not because there is no relation between the teachings of the New Testament and contemporary political life but because they attempt to "own" God, exclusively, for a political ideology. Once God joins the ranks of your party, the other side ends up looking godless.

Teavangelicals!

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.   

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.