Ex-Gays?

Richard Land's second radio program, For Faith and Family, recently broadcast a two-part interview with Stanton Jones, co-author with Mark Yarhouse of Ex-Gays? : A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation.

I found the second part (December 5) of the interview fascinating: Jones, who is among other things Provost of Wheaton College (the first part of the interview is devoted mostly to establishing his evangelical and academic bona fides) takes a rather more nuanced tack on the question of homosexuality as a sin/lifestyle/choice/identity/etc. than I expected from a guest on Richard Land's show.

As counterpoint I'd offer This American Life episode 204: 81 Words, a story by the amazing Alix Spiegel's grandfather's role in the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association to consider homosexuality no longer a mental illness.

I guess all I'd say about all of this is that it seems really foreign to me as a mathematician/scientist; the whole discussion of homosexuality seems much more like a social construct than a dispassionate discussion of e.g. lab results.

Oh and: I'll predict that Stanton and Yarhouse's book will more or less vanish without a trace.

Update: Google Books has a preview here.

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in Tokyo this week

Image via WikipediaI'm in Tokyo this week on business, visiting a customer for a project where I have been the slow, under-delivering sandbagger due mostly to commitments to other projects. I hate letting people down, especially when their expectations are reasonable.

I love visiting Japan. I forget between visits how much I love being here.

As a Christian I find that this orderly, clean, relatively crime-free, almost entirely Christian-free nation gives me pause. Especially given the population density, and the tiny spaces individual Japanese people live in. And the expectations society has of the average individual: achievement, conformity, and self-sacrifice.

Frankly any Christian religious professional who goes on about "individualism" and "consumerism" would do well to visit Japan; Japanese people tend to believe in a corporate or communal identity constituted in a federal head that would put a "man of God" and his "sheep" to shame, and apart from their wedding days and Christmas average Japanese people betray no evidence of cultural Christian influences at all.

I'm not saying. I'm just saying.

brain candy today

Image via WikipediaToday's just awash in interesting things to read. These three stand out:

Love-Hate: Why iPod chief Tony Fadell is really leaving Apple

Steve Jobs believes the key to his success is in finding, hiring, retaining, then firing the best talent in the world.

Mark Galli nails the biggest problem facing the American Church today in an article titled The Leadership Cult. It's high time somebody called out "servant leadership" for the double-talk it is.

Today, it is the rare pastor who does not think of himself first and foremost as a leader who must employ leadership skills to lead his people. Gone are the days when pastors thought of themselves as, well, ministers — those who "attend to the wants and needs of others" (American Heritage Dictionary).

And finally, from Asia Times, an analysis by someone named David P Goldman of the economic options the Obama Administration will face. Hint: Obama has fewer options than Reagan had.

Richard Land again

Image via WikipediaI'm listening to an old episode of Richard Land Live! in which he discusses the bailout bill; the first rhetorical question he asks himself is "if I were in Congress would I vote for this bill?" and I have to admit it makes me shudder.

Richard Land is a former pastor, and is currently (as he has been for the last twenty years) president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, and when he takes the rhetorical position of being a Congressman I wonder how much of what he's saying is evidence of ambition and how much is just a rhetorical device anyone is entitled to.

Ed Dobson, formerly of Moral Majority, is one of my spiritual heroes, and in Blinded By Might, a book he co-authored with columnist Cal Thomas he describes the moment he decided to leave that organization: he was on his way back from taping an episode of Donahue where he defended the Boy Scouts against some special-interest group when he met Harold Wilmington in the Charlotte airport. He enthused to Wilmington about how he was fighting the good fight, etc. and Wilmington told him in no uncertain terms that if he had been called by God to be a pastor he had no business, as Wilmington put it, casting pearls before swine.

I don't entirely understand what Jesus meant when he said "don't give what is holy to dogs, and don't cast pearls before swine," as part of the Sermon on the Mount, but Wilmington interpreted it to mean that getting involved in the so-called culture war, Dobson was getting off-track and was seconding his calling to something not worthwhile.

That one little anecdote did a lot to frame how I think about pastors in politics: they've got a calling already, and they really should be tending to it, rather than helping one politician or another aggregate and exercise power, much less coveting power themselves.

I wonder if Richard Land knows Harold Wilmington.

See also: Media Matters: Who Is Reverend Richard Land?

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Paul Washer's 10 indictments, etc.

Image via WikipediaPaul Washer is one of the stars of a segment of very conservative Christianity right now. I have mostly ignored him, for good and bad reasons: I don't know him, he isn't as far as I can tell accountable to anyone, he preaches a small Gospel, and he's loved by people I disagree with and to some degree dislike.

One of his recent sermons, which clocks in at 1:57:15, is entitled Ten Indictments Against the Modern "Church" {A Historical 21st Century Message} and is available in a variety of formats, including MP3 and YouTube video. I haven't listened to the message, but I'm curious what his ten indictments are, and whether they include e.g. superstar preachers. I've got the MP3 on my iPod, and if I can stand to listen to it all the way through I'll post an update with the list; I haven't found the list online anywhere.

I was surprised and disturbed by the reaction in various weblogs to the sermon. I first heard about it at Slice of Laodicea, where the text of an entry from another weblog post was copied with the annotation "Sermons are not for dissection." The original, from Thoughts On The Way, takes the following position:

Then the thought came to me-- why do we respond this way to a word from God through a sermon? Is it proper and right? Is it what the Lord Himself would have us do immediately after hearing His word come forth? Should we be dialoguing, blogging, commenting, and playing intellectual verbal ping-pong with each other over a sermon just heard? Or is there a better way?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what the author is saying here, but he appears to be confusing the medium (sermons) with the message (whatever it is God might or might not be saying). And it's complicated: conservative Christians believe that the Bible they read is more or less the Word of God (details of declarations regarding inerrancy notwithstanding), but in practice many don't distinguish between what God would say if He were speaking directly to him and what the speaker is saying. And frankly that's a leap.

progressives vs. conservatives

Image via WikipediaI'm listening to Krista Tippett's interview with Rod Dreher;

Dreher says:

Religious progressives find the search and find seeking to be so important. Religious conservatives put their emphasis on the finding.

I don't know if progressives really see things that way or not, but religious conservatives definitely value affirmation of accepted truth and have little interest in struggle, pilgrimage, or whatever. Maybe that's why so few religious conservatives publish their journals.

reasonable questions, unreasonable questions

Image via WikipediaToday's GetReligion asks about the spiritual and/or moral framework of the James Bond novels.

Libby Purves, a Times columnist, novelist and radio broadcaster, asks the question that most people probably think when they consider whether Bond ever knelt at church: “Does James Bond have faith in anything but himself?”

I guess this is a reasonable question to ask for any "world" or "universe" that is sufficiently large, and I'm not sure when that threshold is reached. There's probably no hard and fast rule. I guess there are also reasonable questions about whether the movies would be included or not, etc.

Lord of the Rings certainly has a moral framework; on bad days it's nothing but. Does Remembrance of Things Past? The Harry Potter series? Left Behind? I'm not sure. If and when I ever read them I'll have that question not quite foremost in my mind.

I can't answer regarding the Bond novels; I only read Goldfinger (Anthony Burgess recommended it in 99 Novels) and honestly I thought it was mostly about brand names and action.

co-opting a counterculture, one product at a time

Image by beedubz via FlickrI've got mixed feelings about Christianity Today, but I still subscribe to their RSS feeds and occasionally read their articles (everything that isn't political or involve a movie review, basically). I suspect I do this mostly out of habit; they occasionally do a good job of handling a news story, for example, but I get the impression that by and large they represent their publisher and its interests, along with the viewpoints of people who were young and vibrant in the mid-Seventies but are now well past their prime. I guess I'm thinking of Chuck Colson and Philip Yancey, but frankly I don't look very closely at the by-lines of their articles.

Anyway, today they're offering a review of Brand Jesus by Tyler Wigg Stevenson. The eye-catching quote is this:

What would you think if you were in a modern auditorium and heard the presenter make "The wild claim that the messiah had arrived sometime in the mid-seventies; that he had been an undocumented Filipino migrant worker who spoke about the inbreaking kingdom of God; that, while working in Guam, he had been brought in by the local ecclesiastical authorities on trumped up civil charges; that the local governor had caved to their demands and executed him for treason; and that his life and death changed everything we thought we knew about God, the world, and ourselves"?

That would be no more bizarre than what Paul said in his letter to the Romans. But the gospel isn't strange or shocking to modern Westerners. Brand Jesus argues that the fact that Jesus seems normal to us is one of our biggest problems.

How did Americans normalize Jesus? The short answer is "consumerism." In a free-market, Jesus has become virtually indistinguishable from any other brand or consumer choice — hence, "Brand Jesus."

I'm not going to parse his use of Filipino-Guam-America as Jew-Palestine-Rome here; doing so doesn't really speak to his central point, which is to say that we as American Christians have domesticated the radical, counter-cultural message of Christianity, not least by wrapping it in a subculture complete with its own national anthem and Gross Domestic Product.

I'm curious to see what else Stevenson has to say, because I suspect he doesn't go far enough. I honestly believe that Christianity is not well served by even the scholarly Jesus junk we surround ourselves with:

• Megachurches
• Christian celebrities
• Study Bibles
• Theologians
• Conferences
• Revivals
• "Leadership" generally

But of course I'm faced with the problem of how to deal with what is essentially a counter-consumerist product: do I buy it? Buy it used? Steal it? I'm not sure.

Tyler Wigg Stevenson links: [1] [2].

Cedarville, etc.

I'm currently listening to Justice and Mercy episode 32: Cedarville. It's an interview with Bannerman, author of a weblog that takes up, as best I can tell, the Administration side of a discussion regarding the dismissal of two faculty members at Cedarville University. This caused a sizable ruckus in evangelical circles a few months ago, but as fas as I can tell has died down.

The podcast episode is fascinating: Bannerman's voice has been treated to protect his identity; he doesn't really say anything helpful to an outsider like myself. The interview is of such low quality I'm surprised the folks at CRN.Info bothered to release it.

The cultural shift going on within evangelicalism is a deep, rich story, and I wish I had the time, patience, and perspective to dissect the whole thing. There's a heavy pre-Enlightenment vs. post-Enlightenment angle, questions of whether truth is discovered or received, whether Christianity is a system of thought or a way of life, and of questions of whether one should live a life of fear and hide one's faults or not.

Maybe I'll pick at one or two of these threads someday. Maybe not.

Oh yeah: Bannerman takes his name from a Steve Taylor song (video), as he does for the titles of several of his weblog posts. All of us (myself included) who consider ourselves "Christian, but not one of those Christians" love and/or are nostalgic for Steve Taylor.

blurbs

I am not a blurb reader. On the rare occasion that I look at anything other than the title and price when deciding whether to buy a book in a bookstore I look for a summary of the book, not a blurb. I realize that sometimes the blurbs are written by people who have read the book carefully, but those are rare: the blurbs are usually chosen for the value the blurb-writer's name lends the book, and that the blurb writer is often offered a pick list of candidate blurbs and asked to pick and possibly modify one of the candidates.

Often the blurb doesn't refer to the book itself, but rather to another book by the same author; I don't know if this is a warning sign (didn't anyone take the time to read the book I'm holding in my hand?) or a suggestion that the author is giving me more of the same (e.g. Gone With The Wind II: Even Goner, or Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance II: Phaedrus Freaks Out).

What brings this to mind is a review of a children's book here that quotes four of the blurbs. I guess I'd come to believe that nobody over the age of twenty-five or so reads blurbs, much less believed them.

This sort of ties into the theme I'm working on about celebrity Christians and the question of what it means to be (or not be) "one of those" Christians. Justin Taylor, whose article I've linked above, mostly links to articles by various celebrity Christians and offers little comment: in the crassest terms, they're pushing product and he's a popularizer. In Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point terminology, he's a connector. Or might be.

I don't mean to suggest that R. C. Sproul endorsed this book without reading it; I'm just surprised to see someone take his blurb seriously, much less parse it.

And maybe this is because I'm not one of those kinds of Christians, by which I mean the ones that take something seriously just because it's said by a celebrity Christian they trust.

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why I link to Scott Williams

Within modern evangelical Christianity there are three broad classes of people: ordinary sinners, professional Christians, and celebrity Christians. The last two categories typically overlap with each other, but rarely do you find someone who is in the first and also in either of the others.

Scott Williams may be one of those people. I'm not entirely sure, since I think he considers himself post-evangelical. Regardless, his month-old posts train wrecks (about his drug use) and grind (about his days as a church planter) certainly secure his position in the first category with hints of the second.

I'm grateful for his example, not as a former church planter, nor as a former drug user, but as somebody who has the humility and the honesty to own up to being both. One of the cliches of contemporary Christianity is to pat ones self on the back, saying "yes but I'm not one of those Christians (I'm one of the good/safe/reasonable ones)." People like Scott, who apparently have emerged from a terrible life experience broken but not ruined make it more difficult to resort to that cliche; so I'm doubly grateful.