Melissa Harris-Perry on the Intersection of Black and Gay Struggle for Justice, and Liberating Role of the Bible

Reading Dan Savage's remembrance of the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, and of the role the churches played in that struggle, alongside Peter Montgomery's analysis today at Religion Dispatches of the thought of Melissa Harris-Perry is instructive.  Montgomery focuses on a keynote address that Harris-Perry recently gave to the Clergy Call conference of Human Rights Campaign.

Melissa Harris-Perry is an African-American political scientist who directs Tulane University's Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South.  Though she is not gay, she stands with LGBT people in their struggle for justice, since she believes that this struggle is the most significant struggle for justice and rights occurring in our culture today--and her faith-based commitment to human rights compels her to speak out.

Harris-Perry told those gathered for the Clergy Call conference, 

"I believe that the struggle for equal human and civil rights for lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, same-sex-loving, gender-nonconforming and queer persons is the civil rights agenda of our time." And, she said, "faith must be part of the work we’re doing."

In Harris-Perry's view, progressives relinquish the bible to conservatives at their peril.  We live in a culture that, whether we like it or not, is saturated with appeals to scriptural texts, which radically and persistently inform political thinking in the United States.  (Both Ms. Palin and Ms. Bachmann have recently reassured the public that their bible-based politics has a direct pipeline to God, as they toy with the idea of a presidential run.  Rev. Harold Camping had a whole nation and its media superstructure at his beck and call for several weeks, as he kept us on our toes with his intricate biblical calculations of when the world would end.)

And so where does Harris-Perry turn for a sound progressive reading of the bible to counter the misappropriation of biblical texts by the religious and political right?  She grounds her appeal to the scriptures in the black liberationist reading of the bible.  As she notes, people of color have experienced savage, persistent biblically based oppression for centuries in the United States.  And as they have struggled against that oppression, they have learned to read the scriptures with an ear for their real message, their liberating central themes, and not for the tortuous, highly selective exegesis of religious and political conservatives intent on using the bible as a tool of oppression.

Harris-Perry notes that her great-great-great grandmother was sold as a slave in Richmond, Virginia, in a world in which, everywhere she turned, people used the bible to tell her that she was less than human, that God had made her chattel, that she had no rights and should expect no rights.  But her own experience of herself as a human being made in God's image and loved by God caused her to center her faith, instead, on the central liberating themes of the scriptures that overturn this misappropriation of the bible to support slavery and black subordination: 

When my great-great-great-grandmother was sold on a street corner in Church Hill, Richmond, Virginia, she had never known anything but slavery. When she bore children, she expected that they would never know anything but slavery. She lived in a world where every religious person she encountered could show her chapter and verse why she was unequal, who could quote back the reasons that God wanted her in bondage, and every bit of empirical evidence around her, every bit of it, said there either is no god and if there is God does not like you very much. And she had the undaunting audacity to believe that God loved her.

And, of course, Harris-Perry is telling this story to feed the faith and hope of those who struggle for justice for LGBT people today, since those who are gay and lesbian are susceptible to the same constant bombardment of carefully selected, highly manipulated "terror texts" designed to rob LGBT people of humanity, to turn them into despised objects, and to support the denial of their human rights.  In Harris-Perry's view, LGBT people and their allies can learn something valuable from the black struggle for liberation and its use of the scriptures, as this struggle deals with the anti-gay "terror texts."  

What they can learn, in particular, is that it's more important to lift up the "countering texts of liberation" than to try constantly to combat the "terror texts" through careful exegesis that exposes their many flaws.  As Harris-Perry points out, over the course of Christian history, one form of oppression after another--all once based in appeals to the bible--has been overturned, as we recognize that we misuse the scriptures when we use them to oppress and keep people in their places: 

"There are all sorts of things that we’ve decided we no longer read in the way they were once read" she says, citing verses instructing slaves to obey their masters. People are still wrestling with Pauline claims about wives submitting themselves to their husbands. She says people who don’t live by those verses haven’t rejected them because they learned something new about the texts, but because they learned, or came to appreciate, something about the greater whole. For example, enslaved African Americans focused not on the texts telling them to obey their masters, but on the God who sent Moses to set His people free. "Black liberation theology," she has written, "emerges from this tradition of rejecting scriptural evidence of a slavery-supporting God and roots itself in a biblical interpretation of God as an advocate for the oppressed."

What Harris-Perry has to say here is extremely important, and valuable for progressives fighting for justice on many fronts in our culture.  For readers who want to know more about Melissa Harris-Perry and her work: Alternet also features her today, with an essay of hers recently published in The Nation.

Melissa Harris-Perry is well worth reading.  She first came on my radar screen when I saw her carefully and helpfully commenting on Rachel Maddow's show about the ongoing resistance to gay and lesbian rights in some sectors of the African-American community, following the prop 8 debacle.  As she pointed out, this is not the whole story, since there are many African Americans who read the scriptures as their ancestors did, to support all of those struggling for justice, human dignity, and rights, and it is the latter with whom LGBT people need to build stronger ties of solidarity.

I'm happy to see her work receiving the attention it deserves.

Dan Savage on Using the Bible to Justify Bigotry: The Case of Segregation

I sometimes think people imagine I'm making things up, when I point out that not so long ago in American culture the bible was used to keep people of color "in their place" and to justify the subordination of black people to white people.  And so I'm intrigued (and encouraged) to see Dan Savage's splendid article at his blog site today, pointing out that using the bible to justify bigotry is nothing new in American culture.

Savage focuses specifically on the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s.  He notes that, in contrast to how Catholic leaders today deal with the civil rights struggle of LGBT persons, Catholic leaders at that point in American history fought for and not against (as today, in their approach to their gay brothers and sisters) the rights of an oppressed minority.  Archbishop Rummel, the archbishop of a leading Southern diocese, New Orleans, excommunicated a number of prominent Catholic opponents of integration.  

And, as Savage suggests, this produced a reaction among some Catholics of the New Orleans diocese who were adamantly certain that the bible mandates white supremacy, black subordination, and racial segregation.  Savage notes that a Time magazine article of April 1962 highlights the activities of Una Gaillot, whom Rummel eventually excommunicated when she refused to stop opposing his support for integration.  

As the Time article states, Gaillot based her opposition to integration on the bible.  Gaillot used the Genesis story of Abraham's wives Sarah and Hagar to argue that God opposes the mixing of white and black children in school, and that those promoting integration were doing the work of the devil.  Sarah offered her Egyptian slave Hagar to Abraham as a wife when Sarah was advanced in years and doubted that she could produce a son for Abraham.

But when Hagar proved fertile, Sarah turned against her and sent her packing: and don't you see, this is a parable of black-white relationships, and of the divinely ordained punishment uppity black folks who try to get out of their places inevitably receive in a holy society?  Plus, it establishes segregation, since Hagar and her son of color Ishmael were informed (in the truncated and highly selective bit of this story on which Gaillot bases her segregationist philosophy) that Ishmael could not be an heir on an equal footing with the "white" son Sarah eventually produced for Abraham, Isaac.

It all sounds far away and quaint, doesn't it?  But as Dan Savage points out, this far-fetched, dangerous exegesis was creating serious waves in a major American city with a Catholic majority in the 1960s, a mere half-century ago.  I myself remember these events as if they were yesterday, since, as I've noted on this blog, it was precisely the commitment of the Catholic church to racial healing (in contrast to the way almost all "white" churches in the South handled the Civil Rights struggle) that drew me to the Catholic church in that same decade.  

And I chose to go to college in New Orleans, where there was still a bitter aftermath of this struggle when I arrived at Loyola in the late 1960s.  The Una Gaillots of the Catholic culture of south Louisiana were still alive and kicking when I came to school there, still doing everything in their power to turn local Catholic churches into mean machines that kept black people in their place.

Dan Savage's interesting conclusion, as he compares then and now, the Catholic church in the American South in the 1960s with the Catholic church and its leaders today, vis-a-vis the LGBT struggle for justice and rights: 

In the 1960s the leaders of the Catholic church in the United States were out in front of the Catholic laity on the leading social justice issue of the day. Today the reverse is true: the Catholic hierarchy, led by a German-born priest, opposes civil equality for LGBT people while a broad and growing majority of the laity supports civil equality for LGBT people.

Savage is right.  And as a result, today the Catholic church does not attract young people inspired by the commitment of the church at an official level to human rights and to the struggle for justice for oppressed people everywhere in the world.  To the contrary: the younger Catholics of the John Paul II generation whom the current hierarchy are grooming to take over the church in the future are, to a great extent, actively opposed to gay and lesbian persons in their struggle for justice, and determined to keep women in the subordinate place that John Paul II's theology of the body mandates for them, in their connection to males, who are ordained to lead.  (I'm speaking here of the cadre of young true believers who identify themselves as JPII Catholics, and not the many younger Catholics who do support LGBT rights, but who do not receive the same welcome by the hierarchy that JPII Catholics receive.)

It's not a pretty picture.  And certainly not a heartening one.  And it's driven, deliberately and cynically, by Benedict and the bishops he and John Paul have appointed.  It's all about preserving their (male, pretend-heterosexist) clerical power and privilege and equating these with God's will for the entire church.  And the consequences for millions of Catholics who find this approach theologically dubious and morally outrageous be damned.

The graphic is Rudolf von Ems's illustration of the Sarah-Hagar-Isaac-Ishmael chronicle from his Weltchronik (1254) (the original is now at the New York Public Library).

End-of-World Predictions Revised: Stay Tuned

Well, darn.  It seems we haven't dodged the end of the world quite yet.  Christian talk-radio guru and end-of-the-world authority Harold Camping has now decided he was a wee bit off with his May 21 eschaton predictions.

The real end is going to be on October 21, it turns out.  What happened this past Saturday was a "spiritual judgment" of the world, in which we all got judged whether we realized it or not, while no one got physically raptured.  The real, entire, whole-shebang end of all things is going to happen on October 21, with a cataclysmic finale to history.

Darn.  And here I had girded my loins for the tribulation, when I discovered my feet were still inside my shoes and I hadn't been raptured.  I was absolutely certain the five months of tribulation had begun bright and early Sunday, when I happened to be in a public place seated beside a woman who took a call on her cell phone.

The horror of it!  The pain, like having needles stuck into my eyeballs!  And when her first words blared to the invisible person at the other end of the line were "Where are you at?"--not "Where are you?"--I knew.  I knew that God had designed specific tribulations for each of us, tribulations calculated to cause each of us the maximum pain possible in the five months left to us, based on our individuals needs, likes, dislikes.

My tribulation was to be a daily dicing of my nerves by one grammatical solecism after another, all delivered in trumpet-voices by people talking around me on cell phones as if I weren't there: sentences scattered with meretricious prepositions or adverbs--"Where you at?" "partnered up" "listen up"--or objective forms of pronouns used as subjects of clauses--"I hold whomever did this responsible"--by people who clearly never finished 8th-grade English, where the rule drilled into us over and over back in the days when schools really educated was that the case of the pronoun is governed by its use in the clause that is the object of a verb or preposition.

"Glee" last night was tribulation added to tribulation, as two characters said something like, "I'll always put you and I first."  And as one character after another licked his lips in that bizarre neo-macho exchange that has come to pass for acting in American television and movies: male lip-licking and tongue-protruding as studly self-declaration in lieu of language.

Yes, I just knew the tribulation was underway for me already, and am rather disappointed to discover that I'll now have to endure the linguistic solecisms and the grotesque substitutes for real acting without any purificatory end to the suffering.  Just plain old garden-variety suffering like the suffering we all court every day by drawing breath and living among other people.  And with our own sorry selves.

And as I listen to Harold Camping natter on about his now third absolutely fine-tuned prophecy of when the end of things will happen, I wonder what it says about us Americans, that this kind of pseudo-religious discourse occupies such a central place in our culture.  And clearly moves so many of us.  And engages so much mainstream media attention.  And can get people to quit their jobs and shlep around expensively produced pamphlets and carry expensively produced signs to try to frighten other folks into submission to God the Terrorist.  In huge media campaigns to promote biblical idiocy.

Biblical idiocy that infantilizes the American people, and makes us stand out in the global community for our gullibility, our ability to swallow the most ludicrous lies imaginable if those lies happen to carry a "bible-based" label.  So that we never quite grow up as human beings and take adult responsibility for our lives, and recognize our responsibility for and to the lives of others with whom we live in the human community.

Will a third wildly wrong prediction of the end finally convince us to stop paying any attention at all to these hucksters, and to their countless clones who employ the airwaves to inform us that God sends tornadoes to punish gay-friendly areas (please just ignore the recent horrific storms in the heartland),* or uses earthquakes to remind us of his (always "his," in the imagination of those promoting these ideas) power to swat us down when we cross the line?  

Will we grow up, one of these days?  Before the real end eventually arrives?

*Remember how, when the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America voted in 2009 to ordain openly gay ministry candidates in committed partnered relationships, detractors claimed a tornado brewed itself up instantly and plowed through Minneapolis right to the church in which the ELCA passed this resolution?  But this past Saturday, as the Minnesota legislature voted to give voters the right to amend the state constitution and enshrine anti-gay prejudice in the constitution, another tornado hit Minneapolis.  

What are the chances, do you imagine, that radio preachers are now going to announce that Minneapolis was being punished by God with a tornado for this legislative act of homophobia?  Or that those solidly Republican bible-belt areas of the nation being devastated by tornadoes and floods this spring are under divine punishment for opposing health-care coverage for all citizens and social safety nets for the poor?

Maybe it's time we grew up and stopped imagining God uses the weather to deliver wallops to those she likes and dislikes.  Reckon?

The graphic is from Doug Blanchard's wonderful blog Counterlight's Peculiars.  I'm naming this rapture picture  "White Flight."

Mothers' Day: Catholic Bishops Would Be Better Fathers If They Acted Like Good Mothers

As Mothers' Day arrives in many parts of the world, I'm thinking back to the following posting that I wrote in May 2009. It still seems pertinent to me, with its arguments that the bishops of the Catholic church would be far better bishops if they acted more like good mothers and less like bad fathers.  Here it is (with Mothers' Day wishes to readers):

After I posted yesterday about the inability of the U.S. Catholic bishops to convince either Catholics or society at large about their interpretation of what respect for life entails, my friend and fellow-blogger Colleen Kochivar-Baker left a comment. Colleen notes that my posting dovetailed with what she posted on her Enlightened Catholicism blog the same day.


Colleen’s posting focuses on the homily Pope Benedict gave this past Sunday at a Mass in Jordan. And she is absolutely right: her critique of that homily dovetails in a remarkable way with my analysis of why the U.S. bishops are failing to convince either their co-religionists or the wider public that the Catholic church really means what it teaches about the value of life.

Colleen notes that Benedict’s homily follows a well-trodden path in speaking of male-female complementarity and the “special” vocation of women. As Colleen notes, Benedict has been emphasizing this theme for some time now: in 2004, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the then Cardinal Ratzinger issued a “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World.”

That document enunciates the same themes Benedict highlighted this past Sunday: e.g., that women have a “particular dignity, vocation and mission” in church and world, a mission centered on “building peace and fostering love.” Benedict speaks of women as “bearers of love, teachers of mercy and artisans of peace, bringing warmth and humanity to a world that all too often judges the value of a person by the cold criteria of usefulness and profit.”

Benedict bases his theory of male-female complementarity in part on the Genesis creation narratives. But as Colleen notes, Benedict’s understanding of those narratives seems not to be informed by sound exegetical research, since

[w]hat Benedict usually leaves out in his references to Genesis is that biblical scholars see the first chapter of Genesis describing the creation of ha adam out of adamah. That is creating an 'earthling' (ha adam), from earth (adamah). There is no gender definition implied in the original Hebrew.

The Hebrew in which the Genesis creation narratives are written implies that God creates humanity first and foremost. The distinction of human being into gender is a secondary moment in the creation process. The calling to be human—fully human—transcends any biological calling to be male or female.

This is not merely a niggling observation about the need for exegetical accuracy as we interpret the bible. It is a profoundly important observation about what being human is all about, in the mind of the author(s) of the Genesis creation narratives. If we are called by these narratives to live our lives according to some divine purpose implanted in us by virtue of creation, that purpose is first and foremost about being a human being—a human being made in God’s image. It is only secondarily (and tangentially) about being a man or a woman.

In elevating the male-female distinction to the level of God’s divine plan for human beings and arguing that these stories lay down separate biologically-grounded roles for men and women, Benedict and many other Christians today are missing the point: they are turning into an idol something in the text that was not meant to have divine status. They are reading biological imperatives as divine commands, which then translate into commands about gender roles for faithful men and women.

There is no gender definition implied in the original Hebrew: Colleen’s analysis of the story is absolutely correct here. There is no gender definition implied, and to the extent that we now read these stories as stories about male-female complementarity (and separate male-female gender roles), we’re misinterpreting them by imposing on them preoccupations that were not part of the worldview of the authors of the text.

And how does this insight dovetail with what I posted yesterday? In yesterday’s posting, I argued that the U.S. Catholic bishops have failed to convince many of us with their ethic of life, because they ground that ethic in paternalistic example and a paternalistic worldview. I argued that to be convincing about life, the bishops would have to do what seems not to come naturally to them these days: they’d have to act maternal for a change.

They’d have to think like mothers. They’d have to think like what they keep insisting the church is to all of us, a mother. They’d have to start wrapping their arms around the world the way God does in the very first image of God we meet in scripture, in those very same Genesis creation stories, which speak of God creating the world by folding matter under her divine wings and brooding over it until it comes to life.

To convince us about life, the men wearing bright robes while brandishing big croziers need to begin acting like good mothers. As I wrote, if the bishops want to be convincing when they talk about life, they need to cultivate the maternal virtues that, as Benedict’s homily last Sunday rightly notes, are central to any profound ethic of life.

They’d need to begin nurturing the young and the weak, healing the sick, tending the earth and making it flourish, creating a safe and welcoming space for others, building a community of homes in which everyone has welcome places throughout the land. They’d need to start doing these things themselves and stop relegating them to some woman somewhere, or any woman anywhere (the paternalistic rhetoric of the magisterium assumes women are objects, generic care-providing things).

That noble-sounding rhetoric of the magisterium re: male-female complementarity and the “particular dignity and vocation” of women is a trap and a cop-out. It’s a trap for women and a cop-out for men. It entraps women because it allows men all over the globe to slough off responsibility to do what women are always expected to do and men need to do: care for the young and the elderly and the weak, cherish the earth and make it flourish, build welcoming homes across the globe, nurse the sick. The paternalistic rhetoric of male-female complementarity is a cop-out for men because it lets men off the hook when such necessary human tasks arise. It allows men to relegate the most significant tasks in the world to some woman somewhere, who is not even respected as she undertakes these tasks, and is regarded as interchangeable with all women in the rhetoric of paternalism.

Benedict's reading of Genesis allows men to be not who they were meant to be—full human beings capable of a wide range of emotions and responsibilities—but less human. Benedict twists Genesis to permit men to become something they were never meant to be, half-human beings with no instinct for care, nurture, tenderness. In being paternal without being maternal, in fulfilling their “God-given” role as real men, men end up being stunted human beings, even as men profess to be the lords and masters of creation under the divine imperative of Genesis.

Human beings who do not aim at being fully developed humans, who combine in their persons and lives male-female tasks, are incapable of effective leadership of communities of care centered on an ethic of respect for life. The bishops cannot and never will obtain buy-in for their life ethic until they begin to show that they themselves take the ethic of life seriously, in all its ramifications. As a start, they could begin to listen, for instance, as mothers listen carefully to their children, to hear the words inside the spoken words, the cries of the speaking heart hidden in the words.

One of the supremely ironic effects of the current papal regime’s call for a purge of gays in the priesthood and in seminaries is that this purge is likely to weed out precisely those men in ministry most competent at modeling the gender-complementarity that should be the goal of any balanced human psyche, and, in particular, of the psyche of any human being in ministry. The church’s current ugly, preposterous attempt to convince us that the only good priest is a manly man—a man modeling a macho, swaggering maleness that demeans women—will eventually starve the priesthood of candidates most gifted for pastoral ministry.

And it will also eventually undermine the church’s teaching about respect for life even more profoundly than it has already been undermined by a generation of bishops who have unthinkingly bought into the rhetoric of gender complementarity with its attendant presuppositions of the male's obligation to dominate and the female's calling to submit. If the bishops ever want to convince us that they really do respect life—all life, from cradle to grave—then they need to drop the act of the domineering papa and the gay-bashing that goes with that act, and act like good mothers for a change.

Thomas Reese on "Huge" Exodus of American Catholics, and My Conclusion: Catholic Church as Mean Machine

Another follow-up:

I blogged on the weekend about the record number of German Catholics who officially resigned from the Catholic church in 2010.  As I've noted in many previous postings, there's a parallel development in American Catholicism, where a Pew report in the spring of 2008 found that one in three adults in the U.S. who were raised Catholic have now left the Catholic church, and one in ten American adults is a former Catholic.

Jesuit Thomas Reese has just published an analysis of this "hidden exodus" of American Catholics in National Catholic Reporter.  And here's what Reese means in calling the exodus "hidden":

Any other institution that lost one-third of its members would want to know why. But the U.S. bishops have never devoted any time at their national meetings to discussing the exodus. Nor have they spent a dime trying to find out why it is happening.

The U.S. Catholic bishops have been eerily silent about the mass exodus of Catholics that is occurring on their watch, under their pastoral leadership--though the image of the good shepherd to which their pastoral office points is one intent on seeking every sheep who strays, to bring every straying sheep back to the fold. 

Reese notes that the data the bishops refuse to collect in order to understand why people are leaving have to be supplied by secular groups like Pew, who are finding that those who have walked away can be grouped, roughly speaking, into two large camps: those who are now unchurched, unaffiliated with any church; and those who have become Protestant.  Quite a bit of evidence suggests that a majority of those in the latter group have joined evangelical Protestant churches.

I'll leave it to readers who are interested in this topic to follow Reese's analysis and to read his recommendations about how the bishops might address the massive hemorrhaging of American Catholics--if they chose to care at all about what's taking place, that is.  I'm drawn, in particular, to his observation that what people are seeking from the church is authentic spirituality, liturgy that touches the heart, and viable Catholic exegesis of the scriptures in a culture inundated with simplistic soundbyte biblical interpretation of a fundamentalist bent.

Spirituality, heart, the Word of God: instead, the Catholic church in the U.S. (and globally) now strikes me, as an alienated Catholic shoved far to the margins, as increasingly a mean machine intent on doing harm to people, and, in many cases, to some of the most vulnerable among us.  When I read Joseph Palacios today about the disgusting defense the Vatican representative at the U.N. recently gave for the Vatican's refusal to endorse a U.N. statement deploring violence against LGBT persons; when I wade through Cardinal Wuerl's pre-Vatican II rationale for the U.S. bishops' condemnation of Elizabeth Johnson's work; when I read that, right on the heels of the grand jury report in Philadelphia that found 37 priests credibly accused of sexual abuse of minors still in ministry, Pope Benedict honors Cardinal Rigali: I see a mean machine in operation, which has little connection to anything I recognize as authentically spiritual, as capable of moving my heart towards God, or as skilled at breaking open the Word of God for me.

As the Vatican tinkers with new, theologically regressive translations of the liturgy regarding which the laity and even liturgical experts have had no say; as bishops reassert their right to control theological discourse and demand that theologians seek an imprimatur for any word they utter, and as they quench the Spirit by acting this way; as the Vatican depicts the Catholic hierarchy as the real victims in the struggle for human rights for LGBT persons while ignoring the actual violence to which LGBT persons are subject around the world; as a cardinal who has sheltered priests abusing minors is given an honor in the weeks before the beatification of John Paul II, who protected Marcial Maciel: I don't see spirituality at work.  I don't find my heart warmed.  I don't feel impelled to open the Word of God and read it.

Instead, I want in every way possible to distance myself from the mean machine the Catholic church has become at this point in history.  And I suspect a considerable proportion of those who have walked away and will continue to do so until these and the other significant ways in which the Catholic church now functions as a counter-sign to the gospels is addressed also share this perspective.

John Aravosis and Mark Jordan: A Debate about How to Approach the Role of the Bible in Gay Bashing

I agree with John Aravosis here.  When I linked several days ago to Mark Jordan's essay on which Aravosis is commenting (I linked to an earlier version at Religion Dispatches, while Aravosis is linking to it at the Alternet site), I did so to point to a problem that needs to be addressed in the American cultural and political discussion of homosexuality.  This is that many people talk about what "the bible says" without having a clue about what it actually says.

In the American political and cultural context, people speak about the Jewish and Christian scriptures with supreme confidence that the bible condemns homosexuality--and that supreme confidence is usually in direct proportion to their ignorance of what the scriptures actually say about anything at all.  Because I thought Jordan made that point well, and his call for educating ourselves (and the public at large) re: these issues seems on target, I linked to his essay.

At the same time, I did know, of course, that he was responding to John Aravosis on these points.  But my posting didn't mention that, because, to be honest, I thought Jordan had misunderstood Aravosis's primary point about how the bible is used to support gay-bashing in the U.S.  And so my references to Jordan's essay didn't mention Aravosis at all, since I didn't want to reinforce the critique of John Aravosis.

Now that Aravosis has reiterated his point--and I'm very glad he has done so--I want to address the debate between him and Jordan, and others who have also been criticizing John Aravosis re: how the bible is understood and used in American culture to lambast gays.  I think this criticism has been unfair.  The primary point I understand John Aravosis to be making--and it's an extremely important one--is this: regardless of whether the Jewish and Christian scriptures actually do condemn homosexuality, and regardless of what they really say about "homosexuality," the bible is constantly used in the American cultural and political context as a basis for discrimination and violence against those who are gay and lesbian.

And we have to acknowledge and deal with that fact if we hope to get anywhere with movements to combat anti-gay oppression and secure gay rights.  There's a double challenge in the American cultural context, vis-a-vis gay bashing and the bible, and Jordan and Aravosis are identifying two different facets of that challenge, it seems to me.

On the one hand, the persistent, serious challenge faced by anyone struggling for recognition of the human rights of gay persons in American culture is to face the fact that, for millions of Americans, the bible is an obvious and unquestioned source of anti-gay teaching.  And that uninformed, widespread cultural assumption is going to continue to be there, and to continue to be strongly persuasive for a large sector of the population, regardless of what scholars say about the biblical texts. 

On the other hand, for the last several decades, there has been significant scholarly discussion about the six clobber texts to which homophobic groups persistently return, which strongly refutes the widespread cultural belief that "the bible condemns homosexuality."  And it's important to educate ourselves and others about that biblical scholarship.  It's particularly important, I'd maintain, for people of faith committed to gay rights to begin to assure that this scholarship impacts what the churches say, think, and do about gay people and gay issues.

The role of the churches in challenging cultural misappropriation of the bible to attack gay people could, if the churches ever dared to do the work they claim they are about, be considerable.  And that correction of cultural misapplications of the scriptures needs to begin in the churches themselves, if communities of faith are to make a dent in the prevailing cultural norms.

Here's why I think John Aravosis's point is undeniable and important: no matter how wrong or misguided they are in thinking so, many Americans, whether churched or unchurched, take for granted that the bible instructs them to despise and marginalize those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered.  I cannot think of a single other minority group in this country right now that is routinely subject to violent attacks by people spouting bible verses.  I don't know of any other group of citizens we can point to, where someone still takes for granted that he or she has the right to fill a sock with stones and beat a man to death because the bible tells us to stone homosexuals.  Or where someone defending the savage beating of a gay man comes out to defend that action displaying a tattoo quoting the Leviticus verse that, as we all know, condemns "homosexuality" and calls for the stoning of gays.

Or where this kind of ugly hate speech, which is in the news today at the Box Turtle Bulletin site, pours out of the mouth of someone attacking a minority group, who repeatedly cites the bible as the source for his hatred--and for his right to attack.  We have a problem in American culture, and it is, to some degree, unique to our culture.

That problem is the taken-for-granted, casual belief that the bible supports hatred of those who are LGBT, and that those engaged in activities to demean and deny rights to gay people are doing a holy thing, something commanded by God--whether they themselves happen to be churchgoers or not, or whether they've even read the bible (and noticed how predominant its insistence on love, justice, and mercy is--and not on those six exegetically murky clobber texts).  In American culture, those working for gay and lesbian rights have a volatile combination of factors to contend with unique to American culture and politics: biblical literalism (undergirded by ignorance) runs throughout our cultural and political lives, whether people are churched or not; and because we are a nation with the soul of a church in which people, whether churched or unchurched, take for granted that the bible is the foundation of our unique city on a hill, ignorant biblical literalism wields enormous influence in our culture and political sphere.

My point in posting about these themes several days ago, as I cited Jordan's essay, was to note that this kind of biblical literalism is now affecting many American Catholics, too, despite the skepticism of traditional Catholic theology and teaching re: biblical literalism.  Listen again to those video clips of Fr. John Hollowell indoctrinating Catholic high school students in Indianapolis about their gay brothers and sisters, to which I linked several days back, and you'll hear the surprising claim that there are "multiple" bible passages condemning homosexuality, which see homosexuality as an "abomination" and "grave offense" against God, and if we question any one of these, the whole bible will become "completely useless."

These are not in the least traditional Catholic arguments.  They're not how Catholics do theology at all, including moral theology.  They're not how Catholics would approach any other moral issue today.

There's something unique about how contemporary Catholics have decided to deal with the issue of gay and lesbian people and rights, and, as I noted in my previous posting about this matter, that uniqueness begins with the 1986 letter of the current pope on the "pastoral" care of homosexual persons, which was roundly criticized by biblical exegetes and theologians when it was issued precisely because it adopts a fundamentalist approach, and pulls biblical proof texts out of context to insert into its argument, without grappling at all with the core meaning, the real meaning, of the scriptures to which it points.

The Catholic magisterium has made a calculated decision at this point in history to do, in the case of gay persons, what it refuses to do in the case of any other moral or theological issue.  The Catholic church has decided, in the case of the discussion of gay and lesbian people, to adopt a biblical literalist approach that is far more characteristic of Protestant fundamentalism than of traditional Catholicism.

To me, the reason for that calculated decision is obvious: it's a politically driven decision motivated by the desire of the leaders of the Catholic church at present to make common cause with the religious right, particularly in the United States, but also in developing parts of the world such as Africa where American-style religion has made huge inroads, to combat gay people and gay rights.  The price of this calculated decision and the coalition it forms is that Catholics are encouraged, in the single area of combating gay rights, to adopt a biblical literalism alien to traditional Catholic theology.

And this has proven to be effective.  As I've noted, I'm suspicious of the way in which the Catholics-promote-gay-rights story has gotten shopped around in recent weeks.  I'm suspicious about that story not because I doubt that an increasing number of Catholics in the U.S. do reject the politics of the hierarchy and endorse gay rights, nor because I doubt that this is a very positive development.

I'm suspicious because I think the growing meme about this development overlooks (and even masks) the very real and very powerful continued ability of some influential, highly placed, and well-funded Catholics in the U.S. to keep on doing serious damage to their gay brothers and sisters.  Anywhere that there are battles for gay rights underway in this nation, Maggie Gallagher and the National Organization of Marriage are there, with tons of money flowing their way from donors whose names they refuse to disclose, with expensive, slick videos pouring hateful disinformation into people's minds.

Anywhere there are struggles for the rights of gay and lesbian folks in the U.S. now, the Knights of Columbus are on the scene, funneling large sums of money that this organization used to give to the homeless and the hungry into the anti-gay cause, colluding with other religious groups, many of them fundamentalist ones, to block gay rights or remove rights from gay people.  And then there's the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops, Timothy Dolan, who went on national television recently to inform America--and he was speaking as head  of the USCCB, as the spokesman of all American Catholic bishops--that same-sex marriage is equivalent to incest, that it would be equivalent to his wanting to marry his mother (for more on this, see the link at the end of this posting).

The bishops, the Vatican, Maggie and the Knights: they know very well what they're doing when they make outrageous, incendiary statements like this.  They're playing to deep-rooted prejudice, prejudice fueled by misappropriation and misunderstanding of biblical texts--precisely the kind of misappropriation and misunderstanding these Catholic leaders now deliberately seek to foster as they attack gay and lesbian people in concert with religious groups used to biblical literalism.

The bishops, the Vatican, Maggie and the Knights know what they're doing and why they're doing it, why they have allied themselves with fundamentalists of the religious right and why they're adopting the tactic of biblical literalism exclusively against the gays: they're doing what they're doing because they intend to keep on bashing gays.  And the bible--the culturally deformed version of the bible that circulates through American political networks of the right--is a useful tool in this battle.  It's one of the most useful tools they have.

For that reason, we need to keep listening (I think) to what John Aravosis has to say on these points, even as we also listen to Mark Jordan when he encourages us to educate ourselves and others about how these cultural misuses of the scriptures misrepresent what the bible actually says.  And we need--I would also argue--to push back.

If you want to push back against Timothy Dolan and what the U.S. Catholic bishops are doing to their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters right now, here's one way you can do so: the Care2 site has a petition now underway calling on Dolan to apologize for his incendiary remarks equating gay marriage with incest.   I encourage readers to log in and sign this petition.

The hate-mongering needs to stop.

Presbyterian Minister Murray Richmond on How His Mind Changed re: Homosexuality: More on Misuse of the Bible to Attack Gays

When I blogged several days ago about the curious appeal of anti-gay biblical literalism for some contemporary American Catholics,  I concluded that people's ability to understand the radical injustice of many churches' attacks on gay folks depends to a great degree on whether people know and love someone who is gay.  Or whether they're gay themselves.

As I noted in the conclusion to that posting, some people will always take for granted the norms of their own culture, and will look for religious reinforcement for those norms--until they themselves or someone they love becomes the object of religious condemnation based on scripture texts that are twisted to provide a foundation for attacks on others.  And now I'm interested to hear a Presbyterian minister, Murray Richmond, making precisely these same points in an essay today at Salon about how he has changed his mind on the issue of homosexuality.  And on his understanding of what the bible says about homosexuality.

Richmond notes that when he first began his ministry in North Carolina in the late 1980s, he took for granted that the bible condemns homosexuality.  And he preached what he took for granted.  It even angered him that anyone wanted to raise questions about this moral issue and church teaching re: it, when, as a minister, he had signed on to feed the hungry, preach the gospel, comfort the afflicted, and effect racial reconciliation.

And then things began to change for him.  He began to know and correspond with gay people and those who loved gay people, and his eyes began to open to the real damage being done to gay lives by churches claiming to act on behalf of Christ as they inflicted pain.  And the biblical evidence itself became much less clear to him, particularly when he struggled through the breakdown of his own marriage.

Still, because Presbyterian congregations remained strongly divided over issues of gay acceptance and inclusion, he continued preaching on the topic--recognizing that if his and other churches began to be gay-inclusive, almost half of the members of many congregations would bolt, taking valuable economic resources away from the church.  And so, when a group of people in his church--all five of them divorced and remarried--demanded that he preach the "real" gospel about homosexuality to the church, he did so, noting to himself that if he had preached instead about what the gospels say about divorce and remarriage, these same folks would not have been the least bit pleased to hear the "real" gospel. 

And then he left parish ministry to do hospital chaplaincy work, and was able to start looking intensively at those six clobber texts on which the entire anti-gay industry in the churches is based.  And the scales began to fall from his eyes.  Here's what he saw:

With distance, I could see the mean-spirited nature of the anti-gay movement, and the naked way large Christian organizations used the "gay threat" to raise money. Free from the constraints of a congregation, I could spend more time actually looking at the biblical texts that deal with homosexuality, and I was surprised to find they were not as clear as I had supposed they were. At this point, I have done a 180 on the topic. And I believe it's a change for the good.

So why had we singled out homosexuality as a litmus test for True Christianity in the first place? Why had it become such a lightning rod for self-righteousness?

One reason, I think, is that it's easy to condemn homosexuality if you are not gay. It is much harder than condemning pride, or lust or greed, things that most practicing Christians have struggled with. It is all too easy to make homosexuality about "those people," and not me. If I were to judge someone for their inflated sense of pride, or their tendency to worship various cultural idols, I would feel some personal stake, some cringe of self-judgment. Not so with homosexuality. 



And, as I say, this confirms, I think, several points I made in my recent posting about the curious appeal of anti-gay biblical literalism for some American Catholics.  As I stressed in that posting, it's exceptionally strange that a handful of exegetically murky texts still seem foundational to some American Catholics, when they don't even come from a theological tradition based on biblical literalism.  While the huge weight of the bible--in the direction of love, justice, and mercy--receives far less emphasis among many otherwise literal-minded Christians, particularly in their dealings with their brothers and sisters who happen to be gay.

As Richmond points out, the current stance of the Presbyterian Church USA prohibits open, self-affirming gays and lesbians from being ordained to the ministry, unless they make a commitment to "chastity in singleness"--something that had never previously been demanded of unmarried heterosexual candidates for ministry until gays and lesbians began to request ordination.  And the former have the option to marry down the road.  As gay people do not have, under current PC USA regulations.

And yet (Richmond again), the PC USA has no regulations at all prohibiting the ordination of "a thief, a murderer, or an egotistical jerk."  And he has come to think that there's something radically awry in the decision of his and other churches to single out and attack gay and lesbian ministry candidates in loving, committed relationships, while it does not single out many other ministry candidates that, on the face of it, are far less suitable for ordination.

Everything depends in this debate, as he's come to see, on whether one actually knows and loves someone who is gay.  Or whether one is gay oneself.  Or on the ability of Christian churches and their members to begin to use their moral imaginations and place themselves in the shoes of those being singled out and attacked.

One of the things that troubles me most of all about the way in which the Catholic hierarchy deliberately targets those who are gay and lesbian, and asks lay Catholics to underwrite that targeting, is this: the business of pastoral leaders ought to be to teach us to be mature, reflective, adult moral agents.  And key to that teaching process is teaching us to imagine what it is like to live life in the skin of someone else--particularly the poor, downtrodden, oppressed.

In targeting their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters and expecting lay Catholics to do the same, the bishops are deliberately undermining the very process of moral insight on which Christian moral life depends.  It is not to their credit, at this point in history, that they have expended massive resources on trying to make people less morally aware and morally sensitive believers.  And I think--I am certain of this--that not far down the road, history will begin to judge their behavior at this point in the history towards a beleaguered minority group as not merely morally insensitive, but morally atrocious.

When the business all Christian pastors ought to be in is educating those they lead to understand life from the point of view of those on the margins . . . . 

More on the Appeal of Anti-Gay Biblical Literalism for Some Catholics: My Personal Struggle, Captured in Journal Entries

As a follow-up to what I posted yesterday about the surprising trend among some American Catholics to buy into the Protestant fundamentalist ploy of biblical literalism when it comes to gay and lesbian issues and gay and lesbian persons, I'd like to direct readers' attention back to two pieces I posted here some time ago.


That is, I'm pointing readers to these pieces if anyone reading these postings is interested to see how one particular gay Catholic theologian dealt with these scriptural arguments some time ago, as he struggled to come out of the closet.  In the summer of 2009, I posted two excerpts from my journal back in 1990.

In these journal entries, I was trying to deal with what it meant to be a gay Catholic theologian teaching in a Catholic university, as my sexual orientation and longstanding committed relationship with another gay Catholic theologian were becoming publicly known, despite our neither having said anything at all to anyone in any public setting about our identities and relationship.  Who we were was becoming public because, out of the blue, Steve happened to find a job teaching in New Orleans a year after I did, as we both finished graduate school.

And so--sheer grace, we thought, but also burdensome grace, since it meant we couldn't hide--we were able to continue living together, something we had not had any assurance of when we went off to do doctoral studies and then began looking for jobs.  And as our lives and identity became public knowledge, even though we had always walked that fine line that the Catholic church demands of gay folks working in its institutions--don't ask, don't tell; don't appear gay, don't talk gay--the troubles began.  The doors began to slam in our faces, one by one, with this denial of tenure despite a faculty and student vote to support tenure, with that unexplained one-year terminal contract, with this terminal contract on specious grounds of financial exigency, with that unrenewed contract to do adjunct work after one of us had given a poor grade to a student who wrote an essay that was a homophobic rant but wanted his work to be regarded as sound moral reasoning.

Through all of this, we had no choice except to think very carefully about what it means to be gay within the Catholic context, and gay theologians teaching theology in Catholic universities.  And the two journal entries to which I'm pointing any interested readers--here and here--are my own personal attempt to deal with the biblical evidence.  For myself, as a gay person.

As a gay person who would hope to find salvation, not to end up condemned to hell.  As a gay person for whom everything--not just my job and a salary and my future as an employee in a Catholic institution, but the fate of my soul--depended on struggling to understand and respond to the biblical evidence that, so many other Christians would have me believe, condemns "homosexuality" and me as a homosexual.

These two journal entries from 1990 show where I ended up after a number of years of difficult, exceedingly painful struggle with these biblical texts, and with those intent on using these texts to condemn, bash, exclude me.  And to be honest, once I came to terms with what I realize these texts are about, and once I found peace--a hallmark of the Spirit's presence--in coming to terms with who God has created me to be, I've never gone back.  What I mean to say is, my years of struggle to understand what's going on with the six biblical clobber texts--and, more importantly, with Christians intent on using them to bash me and my kind--have led to me to a recognition from which there is no turning back.

And that recognition is this: the scriptures decidedly do not condemn what we call homosexuality today.  They don't condemn homosexuals.  They can't do so, since they were written in a cultural context that had no concept of what we call homosexuality now.

And so those Christians now building their theological worldview around a handful--six verses!--of exegetically murky texts that have nothing at all to do with the current fixation of many believers on homosexuality are radically distorting the bible.  And what it's all about.

The scriptures point above all to love, justice, and mercy as core values for those who want to be in union with God.  Believers using six exegetically shaky texts as the foundation for a worldview built on harming and excluding some brothers and sisters they despise are missing the core message of the biblical text.

I can't go back from that recognition, because my own understanding of faith and everything that it comprises is built on that foundation.

And if anyone doubts that those carrying signs that blare out biblical quotes they imagine to be anti-gay are not primarily about love, justice, and mercy, but about doing harm to others, ask yourself for a moment if these same people would walk around carrying signs that say, "Slaves, obey your masters" (Ephesians 6:5);  or "Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip the edges of your beards" (Leviticus 19:27); or "Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of materials" (Leviticus 19:19); or "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery" (Mark 10:11 and Luke 16:18); or "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).

No.  Those carrying signs which say "Male and female he created them" are not doing so to make what the bible says more widely known, or to assure that we are faithful to the bible in our political life.  They're doing so for one reason and one reason alone: to demean a group of their brothers and sisters, and to use God as a warrant for their dehumanizing behavior towards those they despise, and those they wish to keep in their place as second-class citizens.

Once one's eyes are open to such misuse of the scriptures, there is no going back to a point at which one can entertain the idea that this misuse of scripture is holy and salvific.  It's the precise opposite.

P.S. The journal entries to which I link above date, as I have said, from 1990.  For any readers interested in tracking what I've written on these themes in recent years at this Bilgrimage site, click on the tags "Bible" and "scripture" below, and you should see a list of postings.

On the Curious Appeal of Anti-Gay Biblical Literalism for Some Contemporary Catholics

One of the fascinating aspects of some recent blog discussions I've tracked about the Catholic church's stance on gay issues is this: a certain segment of American Catholics today seems sold on the argument that the bible condemns homosexuals and homosexuality.  And so, these Catholics insist, anyone questioning Catholic teaching about gay and lesbian people and gay and lesbian issues has to contend with the clear-cut biblical evidence that homosexuality is wrong.

I recently noted one thread at the Commonweal blog site where at least one contributor was pushing this argument very hard.  I've also noted threads at America's "In All Things" blog (e.g., here) in which various contributors are arguing that the biblical evidence against homosexuality and homosexuals is hard.  And exceptionally clear.  

This development--this sudden surge of biblical certitude among some American Catholics when it comes to the issue of homosexuality--is surprising for a number of reasons.  It's surprising first of all because the Catholic way of thinking about theological and moral issues hasn't traditionally given primacy of place to scriptural quotations.  The Catholic approach to scripture has traditionally been to read the bible within the communal context of the people of God as they worship and live their faith in the world, and from the vantage point of tradition.

And so to hear some Catholics arguing like Protestant biblical literalists that theological reflection begins and ends with the scriptures, which bind us absolutely because what they say is literally true and inerrant, is novel.  It's a departure from the tradition--a departure that the current pope appears to have set into motion with regard to gay and lesbian issues with his 1986 document on the pastoral care of homosexual persons, which was widely criticized by theologians and scripture scholars when it was first issued, precisely because it employs scriptural texts in a naive proof-texting way alien to the Catholic tradition (and see this Bilgrimage posting, on the 1986 letter).

Hearing well-educated Catholics of the center spouting a biblical literalism that they do not apply to any issue other than homosexuality is surprising, as well, because even a cursory familiarity with contemporary biblical exegesis ought to have given these Catholics pause to think about their certainty that the bible condemns homosexuality.  It should have done so because it's obvious--and it doesn't require much reflection at all to recognize this--that a concept and term that did not appear until the latter part of the 19th century can't possibly appear in scriptures written many centuries before the 19th century.  In an entirely different cultural context.

And so it's exceptionally surprising to see some well-educated Catholics snatching at scripture passages which, they contend, clearly condemn "homosexuality," when they'd never dream of trying to prove Catholic claims about, say, birth control or nuclear war by snatching at similar scripture passages condemning contraception or nuclear war.  Because they know full well that the biblical authors could never have spoken or even thought about those issues, since they had no language or concepts to do so.

What makes homosexuality a special case, I wonder, re: which even some well-educated Catholics in the U.S. are so willing to suspend critical insight about exegetical accuracy that they'd apply without questioning to any issue other than homosexuality?  Because I've been pursuing that question on a number of blogs of the American Catholic center recently, I'm very happy to read Mark D. Jordan's current essay at Religion Dispatches, noting exactly what I've been noting in these discussions: namely, that the biblical writers can't have condemned homosexuality and homosexuals, when those terms and concepts were totally unknown to those who wrote the scriptures.  And that whatever the authors of the six clobber texts biblical literalists keep trotting out to bash gays meant by those texts, they obviously were not speaking of what we call homosexuality or homosexuals today.

Jordan writes,

There are no sexual orientations in Leviticus. As the Anglican theologian D.S. Bailey first argued more than fifty years ago, there is nothing in the texts of what Christian call the Old and New Testaments that corresponds with modern categories like homosexual or gay. The horrifying prescription of Leviticus 20:13 (and its correlate, 18:22) are not directed against classes of persons, but against acts committed by Israelite males (and males only). Moreover, it’s a matter of lively dispute even among fierce textual literalists exactly which acts are intended.

As he notes, a large number of theologians and exegetes who have worked hard to help us understand what the anti-gay clobber texts actually meant, what they were intended to say in the time and place in which they were crafted, were Jewish and Christian scholars intent on retrieving accurate notions of what the bible says, because they cherish the biblical text.  Not because they want to amend or ignore what it says.

Not because they're gay activists intent on blunting the edge of scriptural truth, as Christians quoting these clobber texts to bash gays insist.  But because they think it's blasphemous to misrepresent the scriptures for political applications like keeping gay and lesbian persons in their places as second-class citizens.

And so why are some Catholics, including well-educated ones, persuaded that the bible condemns homosexuality and homosexuals?  I'd argue that they are so persuaded because of sheer prejudice.  Just as Christians of the past once found the biblical passages supporting slavery and mandating the subordination of people of color to white Euro-Americans, or of women to men, clear.  Transparent.  Obvious.  Because of prejudice.

They say what they say, our prejudice led us to maintain over and over in the past, and only a fool would try to deny what they say.

This is the force driving contemporary attempts to keep on using the bible to bash gays.  And though it's surprising to find some Catholics, including some well-educated ones, buying into the biblical literalism, that surprise is perhaps not so pronounced when we look at the history of some Catholics' support in the past for slavery, segregation, women's subjugation to men--or for anti-semitism or "holy wars" or extermination of witches and heretics.

People--some people--will almost always buy into the presuppositions of the culture in which they live, even when those presuppositions involve suffering for a certain group of their fellow citizens.  Some people will almost always take for granted the rightness of the cultural presuppositions that have shaped them, and will gladly look for religious warrants to uphold those presuppositions.

Until it happens that they or people they love become the object of the prohibitions and the biblical taboos.  Until it happens that they or their family members become the ones clobbered by a sock full of stones, since the bible tells us to stone homosexuals.

Doesn't it?

The graphic shows protesters demonstrating in favor of the recent California court decision to keep the restriction of proposition 8 against same-sex marriage in place until the appeal of prop 8 has run its course.  It's difficult to imagine political protesters arriving at a political rally in the U.S. carrying signs quoting Mark 10:11, Luke 16:18, etc.

Apocalypse and Declining Empire: Reflections on a Persistent Theme of the American Religious Right

Yesterday I watched Cindy Jacobs of Generals International expound on the apocalyptic signs to be found in what's happening now in the Middle East (I learned of Jacobs's reflections at Right Wing Watch).   Something about a green rider in Egypt that took off into the sky that may or may not be supernatural in origin.  And how the pale horse of the Apocalypse is really pale green.*

Something like that.  Or, as Cindy says, "supposingly."

And how we're not yet at the Armageddon stage (Cindy intrigues me by pronouncing it with a stress on the first syllable), but at the wars and rumors of war (Matthew 24:6) stage.

And I keep thinking, after I listened to Jacobs, that if I were writing an apocalyptic analysis of a declining empire which has thought of itself as God's special city on a hill, even as it has often worked serious injustice around the world, I'd see very different signs of empire falling.  I'm inclined, in other words, to read the bible differently than Cindy Jacobs does.

Here's what I see as my nation's empire falls apart (as every empire throughout history has done), and as I pray and read scripture through the process of empire declining:

1. I see religious folks whose scriptures emphasize love, justice, and mercy standing with and blessing vile politicians whose sole goal is to enrich those who already have the bulk of the world's resources in their hands.

2. I see campaigns of disinformation and downright lies trying to divert the attention of a frightened and often ignorant citizenry away from the gross inequity in distribution of economic resources in their country, and towards brown-faced illegal immigrants, people practicing some religion other than the de facto religion of the land, imaginary welfare queens, the poor in general, women, and sexual minorities.

3. I see politicians whose moral lives in no shape, form, or fashion represent the "family values" they want to impose on others not hesitating to launch into attacks on others who, they claim, undermine family values and "traditional" marriage.

4. I see the self-professed "orthodox" of the religious traditions represented by these hypocritical politicians egging these politicians on, turning a blind eye to the way in which the lives of the messengers betray the message the messengers want to bring.

5. I see those with the bulk of the nation's (and the world's) resources in their hands launching attacks on those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, seeking to shift the burden of filling dwindling public treasuries to those who have least, while the rich try to grab even more for themselves.

6. I see these same folks targeting the poor by seeking to withhold health care services from them, by seeking to reduce them to the level of drones and automatons in the workplace, things with no human rights.

7. I see people of faith whose scriptures talk constantly about beating swords into plowshares and being peacemakers running around asking (as Cindy Jacobs says people are asking her) what they should pray for in a world rife with wars and rumors of wars.  I see people of faith whose scriptures tell them to pray for peace inexplicably asking whether they should pray for more war and more apocalypse, instead. 

8. I see people so intent on exploiting nature and adding more money to coffers already piled high that they knowingly and willingly stress the earth to the breaking point, destroying the very conditions of life for their own children and grandchildren.

9.  I see people talking on and on about the value of life while they live in a society that is, in profound respects, anti-life, antithetical to respect for life, while those who most loudly talk about respect for life collude in and turn a blind eye to the conditions that most militate against the value of life all around them.

10. I see, in other words, a fraying, declining, falling empire behaving exactly as the scriptures tell us fraying, declining, and falling empires constantly behaved in the period in which the scriptures were written: cranking up their abuse of the vulnerable, weak, and poor; giving even more perks and considerations to those who already have the bulk of the world's resources; abusing religion as a cover for the process by which the rich are being robbed by the poor; diverting attention from the growing and very glaring economic inequities through enervating and cruel battles about health care for everyone, about human rights for everyone.

I see an empire, the empire in which I live, falling apart.  At the same time, I see signs of hope in parts of the world that my own empire has long taken for granted and even exploited--signs pointing to the kind of viable democratic society my empire had hoped to be, but has failed to become.  

And, in contrast to Cindy Jacobs and many of my fellow Christians in the U.S., I'm not inclined to see the falling apart of my empire as an apocalyptic event that presages the end of civilization as we know it.  I'm inclined, instead, to see it as the necessary process that happens to all empires in history, as they overreach, blind themselves to their arrogance and injustice, and fall like Babylon so that something better, we hope, might be born in their place.

*For my take on Cindy Jacobs's analysis of the phenomenon of falling birds around the turning of the year, see here.

Promising New Popular Discussions of Bible and Its Cultural Use: Jay Michaelson and Laura Miller

Some years back, I remember Oprah interviewing several doughty defenders of the bible on her talk show.  Though it's entirely possible my memory has burnished this or that detail and so the story I'm about to recount is not exact in all particulars, this particular interview (along with the primary points it made, about which I trust my memory) has stuck in my mind for a number of reasons.  The bible's valiant defenders were all strapping men (who also happened to be African-American).  Oprah exhibited admirable feistiness in standing up to these oh-so-certain, oh-so-smug big men who overtowered her, several of them, by a foot or so.

And as these big men defending the bible informed her that the bible is most certainly "against" homosexuality and homosexuals and men "laying" with other men, Oprah replied, "You don't even read the bible, do you?  You don't even know what you're talking about.  You're just repeating words someone else has put into your mouth.  And you don't know any better, because you haven't read the book you're talking about."

The men laughed.  They weren't ashamed in the least to be exposed as frauds.  They didn't have to be ashamed, since hardly anyone at that time on the American pop-culture scene except people like Oprah Winfrey was standing up to this particular kind of abuse of biblical texts by biblically illterate men.  By men who assumed that the bible not only lambasts men "laying" with other men, but assures their dominance as heterosexual men.  Over Oprah and everyone else in the world.

I thought of that Oprah interview--and Oprah's courage in standing up to her opponents at a point in American cultural history in which this standing up required real courage on her part--all over again in the fall of 2009, when a gay man, Jack Price, was viciously beaten by Daniel Rodriguez and Daniel Aleman in Queens, New York.  And when one of their friends who defended the beating showed up proudly sporting a bible verse on his arm, the one from Leviticus 20 which condemns to death a man who lies with a man as with a woman.  

You know the one: it follows the four preceding verses, which call for the execution of 1) anyone who curses his/her parent, 2) men who commit adultery (both adulterer and adulteress to be killed), 3) men who have sex with one of their father's wives (ditto), and 4) men who sleep with their daughters-in-law (again, ditto--both to be executed).  And it's followed by a verse telling you that, as you choose your wives, you can't marry both a mother and a daughter--you have to choose between them (although you can definitely choose a mother of one family and a daughter of another).  And by verses instructing the Jewish community to cut off anyone who has sexual relations with a woman during her menstrual cycle--as well as the woman, of course, too.  And to stone to death anyone who consults a psychic.

Because most Americans who spout bible verses are woefully ignorant about the complex set of books spanning many centuries and many cultural arrangements from which they're grabbing those verses, and because the mainstream media have long colluded in keeping Americans selectively ignorant in this respect while feeding their easy impression that the bible is "against" homosexuality, I'm happy to see a shift recently towards a new and more honest grappling with the meaning of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, in mainstream media discussions of these topics.

Cases in point: at Religion Dispatches today, Jay Michaelson expertly deconstructs the widespread misreading of the biblical traditions about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, noting that, with their strong condemnation of inhospitality and exploitation of the poor, they more properly refer to Tea Partiers than those whom Christians of the right want to label sodomites.  And at Salon, Laura Miller comments on Timothy Beal's new book The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book.  Miller notes that though Americans own kaboodles and kaboodles of bibles, few of us know much at all about how the bible was compiled, about what biblical scholars say biblical texts mean, or about the texts themselves.  Because we don't read them.

Though we do so love to quote them.  Or, at least, to quote what we think they say, like, "God helps those who help themselves."  We're especially fond of those nifty, highly selective quotations when they seem to condemn someone else and to justify our unjustifiable behavior.

As I say, I think it's all to the good that there's new, more honest and more scholarly informed discussion of the popular pervasive use of the scriptures in American culture and politics these days.  And as I've also noted in comments on these threads recently, I really don't buy the argument that Catholics can be excluded from this discussion, since Catholics aren't and haven't ever been biblical literalists.

In my view, one of the most pernicious consequences of the U.S. Catholic bishops' alliance with the religious right in the last few decades has been the infusion of American Catholicism with a strong dose of old-fashioned American-style Protestant evangelical fundamentalism.  That strain is everywhere in American Catholicism today, and it's growing.

And Catholics are sitting ducks for it precisely because they haven't been very much schooled in bible reading or bible interpretation.  And as this culture of biblical literalism has grown in American Catholicism, at the very same time, the bishops have cracked down on theologians and have assured that many adult Catholics in the U.S. receive hardly any theologically sound religious education appropriate to adults (and to children being taught to memorize the catechsim).

As a result, when any bible huckster comes along who appears to be spouting a verse that appeals to the selective and ignorant reading of the magisterium in which many Catholics engage--say, "Male and female he created them"--Catholics uncritically make common cause with said huckster.  And are, in this way, every bit as susceptible as other Americans to the charge of using scripture selectively and ignorant to reinforce unexamined prejudices that cannot be upheld, if we read the scriptures carefully and grapple with what is first and foremost in them--love, justice, and mercy.