In my last post, I wrote about how American society and the American Academy of Religion both reflect and don't reflect the demise of cultural-Christendom, which is seen in the resentment of Christians about their loss of power and status and in the resentment of non-religious people when religious people retain power and status. It honestly wasn't clear to me who might resent the new AAR VP David Gushee more: conservative Christians, because Gushee is now LGBT affirming, or nonreligious scholars, because their scholarly guild will be led by a "professional Christian" (Gushee is a Christian theologian and ethicist). But frankly, with the elections over, whatever resentment existed was not very palpable. However, I mentioned that I clearly saw resentment in one group of scholars.

Just for kicks, I stopped in at a session of the “God Seminar” of the Westar Institute. The “God Seminar” is like the famous Jesus Seminar (also a Westar project) that voted on which sayings of Jesus from the Gospels were authentic. Following this model, the God Seminar scholars (16 white males and 2 white females, overwhelmingly American philosophical theologians) tinkered around with and then voted on a few propositions about God. At one point, one of them expressed resentful bewilderment regarding why their theological hero, Paul Tillich, didn’t have the same kind of long-term influence as the more evangelical theologian Karl Barth. One member of the panel suggested that it was at least partly due to a well-endowed center for Barthian studies (I assume he meant Princeton), a speculation that met some approval. It reminded me of baseball’s resentful/envious Yankees-haters and made me think that in America, maybe religious people, non-religious people, theologians, scholars of religion and baseball fans are one big mutual-resentment society. In America, we compromise, and nobody gets everything they want.

So what does this all mean? I’m not sure I know, but resentment is ugly, whether you see it on the news or in the mirror and mutual encouragement, appreciation and understanding are beautiful. Confronting my cynicism about the state of society, at the Temple University Department of Religion breakfast, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, non-religious, straight-people and LGBT-folks all ate a great meal, encouraged each other in their endeavors and caught up on each others’ kids and families. 
 
“The times they are a changin’” – Bob Dylan
 
“There is nothing new under the sun.”  - Ecclesiastes

The stature of liberty inscription: "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free" used to be a point of American pride.

Stability is nearly always preferred to displacement; more so when children are involved. Survival is nearly always preferred to death. If people are choosing displacement for themselves and their families, they are desperate and deserve compassion.

Based on my wife's experiences as a elementary guidance counselor in two struggling school districts in the Philly area, it seems like refugees-as-immigrants are often relocated to low-income areas where the social services they need, including education (our traditional main-method of assimilating immigrant communities), are already over-utilized and under-resourced.

Concerns that terrorists would infiltrate the U.S. alongside genuine refugees seem legitimate to me, given ISIS attacks that I am aware of in at least 8 countries outside of Iraq and Syria.

A Quaker friend of mine sent an email to our governor Tom Wolfe (Dem - PA) applauding him for his commitment to accepting Syrian refugees. He received a mildly defensive email in response that could only be interpreted as an automatic reply to what must have been a flood of critical emails, but you know the old saying about the squeaky wheel and the grease? I think the flip side is also true. Greased wheels don't squeak and people that are pleased, content or satisfied with a decision never make as much noise as the displeased, so the knee-jerk response email just indicates who is making noise, not the will of a certain majority.

This post is about the State of the Union/s; our mutual society and my little guild of religion and theology geeks/scholars; The United States of America and the American Academy of Religion (AAR). 

Saturday, at the AAR annual conference in Atlanta, Baptist ethicist/theologian David Gushee gave the following overview of religion in America:

1. the Constitution officially dis-established Christianity (unlike England) in a country where Christianity remained “culturally established” (unlike post-Revolution France) and therefore still influenced legislation such that Christians didn’t feel threatened and weren't concerned to throw their weight around
2. In the 1960s, Christianity divided into Left/Right camps, immigration increased religious diversity and secularization weakened the power of cultural-Christendom
3. Today, roughly 70% of Americans still claim Christianity as their religion, but cultural-Christendom is fading and does not influence legislation in any pervasive sense (it still does in some regions on some issues). The government generally treats Christianity with “benevolent neutrality."
4. Christians with a cultural-Christendom mindset react to the loss of power and deference in a number of ways:   Emotionally - shock, fear and most of all resentment                                                                                   Politically – attempts to “take the country back” which mostly fail, or expansive religious liberty campaigns to     help them “opt-out” of secularization
5. We are now faced with a bewildering array of new religious liberty issues stemming from the collision of secular/liberal and traditional Christian convictions
6. This is all fairly obvious to lots of people, but many secular people can still identify all sorts of religious influence and (they would say) privilege, in American life that imposes on their desire to live purely secular. I personally, tend to see the Constitution and 1st Amendment as establishing a "pluralistic" society, not a secular one.

This is where the story gets interesting. David Gushee is the newly (and controversially) elected VP of the AAR.  In a Friday session of the AAR annual conference, Gushee essentially gave a “testimony” of change in his life: Gushee used to work at Union College in Tennessee and then at Southern Baptist Seminary. He has published numerous books about Christian ethics and global conflicts (I used one volume he edited for a class I taught at Messiah). He alluded to his work in these settings (denominational schools where professors have to agree with the school's statement of faith) in terms of being “captive to power-structures” that don’t really offer academic freedom and stated that it is very hard to think thoughts or come to conclusions that run against the grain of the institution because one's job is at stake, a claim echoed by some other Christian scholars.
 
 In 2007, he was hired at Mercer University in Georgia, which is historically Baptist, but no longer a confessional school. While teaching Sunday School at his local Baptist church, Gushee began to encounter, engage and befriend a number of LGBT people that started showing up there. He hadn’t thought deeply about LGBT issues in his previous 20+ years of teaching Christian social ethics, being mostly concerned with issues of war and racial, religious, and political conflicts. However, these relationships forced him to think, and change his mind. Last year, he published an account of how he came to the following conclusions:

1. Christians need to re-establish their commitment to covenantal unions as the proper context for sexual activity and expression, and:
2. Christians need to welcome LGBT folks into full involvement in every area of the church, including Christian covenantal unions, leadership, etc.

​This story isn’t about that, but regardless of what my readers think, I think it is fair to say that:
1. Gushee gave a calm, moving and provocative account of the suffering of LGBT people, the cruelty of the church, and the way he saw the Fruit of the Spirit in LGBT Christians.
2. If Gushee was not LGBT affirming, I doubt that he would have been elected VP of the AAR; not that he isn't qualified, but because he is an ethicist. If he was a historian, it's possible that no one would care about his personal position on this unless he was very vocal about it (also; I'm not at all  saying the change of mind was politically motivated for professional advancement. Gushee is nothing if not sincere.).

As it was, Gushee’s election was controversial because some people in the AAR think the organization should represent scholars who study religion using disciplines like history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. Theologians are “doing” religion, and therefore they don’t really belong in the leadership. This election was especially controversial because the VP will become the President and this year both nominees were theologians. So, for some people in AAR, this is like having a research-subject (psychiatric patient) as the head of a psychiatric research association. It’s okay for religious people to be scholars of religion as long as their scholarship is not itself a form of religious practice. Religious scholars can (and do) have their own guilds. This is where the State of the Union and the State of the AAR converge. Even though a LOT of Christian seminarians, theologians, biblical scholars and other religious people are members of AAR and many AAR sub-groups are “religious” in nature, AAR has recently tended to reflect a post-Christendom context (the last 3 Presidents were not theologians of any religious tradition). But does it now? Is this a "victory" in some sort of culture-war?
 
I don’t know how Gushee feels about the resistance to his election or if he feels any resentment coming at him. He seems like a very gentle, reasonable person who would not hold any grudges, but after all he was elected, and maybe that indicates that AAR isn’t as post-Christendom as some people think. I anticipate a movement of non-religious scholars to "take back the AAR" in future elections. For conservative Christians in the AAR, Gushee's stance on LGBT folks in the church (still a clear minority opinion in Christian institutions) is still indicative of post-Christendom society or even secular ideals of individualism creeping in to the church. I don't know if Gushee feels any resentment coming at him from that corner of the AAR either.

However, I did run across one group of scholars at AAR who clearly felt resentment about being slighted in the religious development of Western post(?)Christendom.  More about this in the next post.

The horrific events of this past weekend have more people looking for serious answers about ISIS. My point here is to offer a couple brief summary answers and mostly to direct people to some interesting resources for fuller answers.

First, at the most basic level, people need to know that ISIS arose in Iraq (or at least gained much of its momentum) in response to a paranoid crackdown on the majority Sunni population by the U.S.-backed Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Long story short: he created his worst nightmare. ISIS involvement in Syria is partly the result of similar Shia-leadership v. Sunni majority faultlines. In this sense, the conflict has vague similarities to the history of Catholic-Protestant violence in Ireland, and is part of the reason some commentators say the current conflict is "more political than religious."    Photo of IRA militants below is from dailymail.uk

However, and second, the rhetoric of ISIS is pervasively religious, a point made quite strongly by Graeme Woods article at the Atlantic, "What ISIS Really Wants" where he describes ISIS as "very Islamic." Tangential story: I remember a young couple who came over for dinner a few years ago and brought with them a delicious baking pan full of something they described as a "Lutheran dessert." I don't know if it was "very Lutheran" or not (or even what that would mean), but they clearly associated it with their Lutheran heritage. The question is, how would I, as an outsider, be able to judge the validity of this? In the case of 95+% of non-Muslims who are trying to figure ISIS out, here's what we've got: we know they are Muslims; we know they like to quote Islamic literature. Therefore, they are very Islamic. However, we have no idea about the contexts of the quotes we hear (textually, or historically) or the traditions of interpretations that surround or bracket such quotes in an Islamic cultural context. Have we ever considered the number of radical revolutionary groups who liked to quote the Declaration of Independence and admired George Washington? It's a lot. Would we therefore say that those groups are "very American" or even "very Republican"? Probably not. I think it is important to concede that ISIS is very "religious" and it seems logical to suggest that since their religion is Islam, that they are "very Islamic." But, once again, if we looked at various violent "Christian" armies throughout history that have done horrible things while flinging around Bible verses, singing hymns and having daily "church services" would we concede that those groups were "very Christian"? Very religious? Maybe. Very Christ-like? No. So, is ISIS very religious? Maybe. Very submitted to God? In any mainstream Islamic sense? I don't think so.

I recommend Woods' Atlantic article. Read it. It's helpful. But if you're willing to make that commitment, go the extra mile and read two more. I can't recommend Woods' article without recommending a couple of others.
First, read John A. Azumah's article "Challenging Radical Islam" from the Christian journal First Things. Azumah does a great job of placing ISIS in (or outside of, as the case may be) the very particular traditions of Sunni Islamic law. He indirectly raises a question for Christians: Do we WANT Islam to be fundamentally and uncontrollably violent because that makes us feel religiously superior? I often find that atheists dialoguing with Christians insist on maintaining the most literalistic fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible and Christianity and I think Christians do something similar with Islam sometimes.
Second, read "What is Islamic?" by Haqiqatjou and Qadhi over at MuslimMatters.org. I don't agree with everything they have to say (they have 21 points of response to Woods), but they expand on the details of Islamic jurisprudence, offer some helpful insights (and links) and ask additional helpful questions.

Yesterday, in my World Religions class, two students gave presentations about Satanism (one about the philosophy and one about the Church of Satan). Students had been given the assignment to make presentations about either a religion we had not covered in class OR an undiscussed aspect of a religion that we had covered ("covered" being used loosely here). For the record, the kinds of Satanism discussed here are not technically "devil-worshippers" and generally disdain those who are. The Church of Satan was founded in 1966 by Anton LaVey and is atheistic; using "Satan" in a symbolic/mythic fashion to stand for their own form of humanism. While it retains some ritual elements, these are interpreted psychologically for the most part, do not make sacrifices and are fairly strict about not harming children, consensual sexuality, personal responsibility and minding one's own business. Fairly libertarian stuff. And, while listening to these presentations, something struck a bell. It reminded me a great deal of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, which is so popular with political conservatives.

This is the Satanic statement (#4 out of 9) that caught my attention: "Satan represents kindness to those who deserve it instead of love wasted on ingrates!" In my mind, this resonated with the general tendency in contemporary conservative rhetoric to judge and distinguish between the "deserving poor" and some other class of poor that are viewed as societal parasites (Satanism refers to these kinds of people as vampires) that is the most dogmatic in Ayn Randian "Objectivism". As it turns out, Anton LaVey was greatly influenced by Ayn Rand, and I wasn't the first person to notice this (surprise).

Other similarities include: the aforementioned atheism; radical individualism or "egoism" and hedonism; a certain kind of rationalism/empiricism, and ruthlessness towards enemies.
If you want to learn more: Google it. Check out "What is Objectivism?" on The Objective Standard; The Nine Satanic Statements, Nine Satanic Sins and Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth on the website for The Church of Satan; or Google "Anton LaVey and Ayn Rand" and check out what turns up.