Category: Sociology

Reverend Captain AmeriTrump

5/30/2016

Around ten years ago, I realized something. American civil religion is the liberation theology of the liberated.

American civil religion - the ritual practice/s and theological discourse/s that attempt to connect the nation-state to God/"the sacred" and citizens to each other in a "sacred bond" (see Emile Durkheim, Robert Bellah, Martin Marty)
Liberation Theology - theological assertion that God is on the side of the oppressed

Recently, I had another realization. American civil religion is also a form of Prosperity Gospel. Essentially, the message is, if Americans have enough of the right kind of faith, the United States will be prosperous and successful. This realization came to me as I was reading Gutterman and Murphy's Political Religion and Religious Politics: Navigating Identities in the United States (Routledge, 2016). In describing the Prosperity Gospel Preacher, Gutterman and Murphy write (quoting Walton) that:

"...ministries are developed around the charismatic authority of a particular [leader] to the extent that the form and function of the ministry often reflects the personal narrative- real or constructed- of its leader." Preachers, in turn, are equally dependent on a receptive and enthusiastic audience. The flashy lifestyles and effusive self-confidence of the prosperity preachers are wholly crowd-dependent... Prosperity ministers often embody a kind of "great man" theory of Christian success... Not only do prosperity preachers offer models of the rewarded faithful person... they also reinforce the this-worldly and consumerist model of individual desire... Religious consumers want to invest themselves in and with winners.

When I started to see Trump as a Prosperity Gospel preacher, asking people to have faith in him and to demonstrate it by "sowing" their vote into his "ministry" in order to become prosperous, a lot of things fell into line. Civil Religion and Prosperity Gospel go together with Trump's rise. So, I did a little searching and found some pretty great resources for those who might be interested in this sort of thinking.

If you're a religion, politics AND superhero geek, then read Jeremy Biles' great article:
"Captain America: Civil Religion (And Why Donald Trump Thinks He's Batman)"

If you want a more straightforward account of Trump and American civil religion, check out these two:
Bonnie Kristian's "The Idolatry of the Donald" over at the American Conservative.
Shuck and Hitchcock's "Donald Trump and the Bully Pulpit of U.S. Civil Religion" at RealClearPolitics

If you're more interested in the Prosperity Gospel angle, check out these:
Jeff Sharlet's "Donald Trump: American Preacher" on NYTimes
Blair's article on a critique of Prosperity Gospel through lens of Trump at Christian Post
Sarah Posner's article for the Washington Post (one of many trying to explain the attraction of evangelical voters)
There are MANY more, including some that note the number of prosperity preachers in Trump's corner.

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How Religion Goes Right, and Wrong

2/25/2016

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image above from cinetropolis

A lot of ink has been spilled explaining how religion goes wrong, becomes evil or turns violent. Here's a whole bunch of religion-slamming memes, just for fun. Lately, pollsters and religious commentators have been tracking the "rise of the nones" (those with no religious affiliation in America, now as many as 20%) and religious leaders are writing a lot about why various demographics (mostly White 18-40 year olds) have left church behind, who is to blame (ie. what is wrong with the way people are "doing" religion) and what they can do to win them back.

The thing is, in my opinion, religion (and here I mean religious communities or people, because "religion" and "religions" don't really exist except as words or theoretical constructs) goes right and wrong along basically the same lines, and frequently people react to it from a personal perspective that corresponds to these basic lines.

First of all, "religion" is essentially communal, as are human beings. I'm not going to try to prove this. I like William James' Varieties of Religious Experience just fine, but everything we call "a religion" has a strong communal element and would not exist very long without it. Likewise for human beings.

Second, every functional community (religious or otherwise) has rules to inform and guide moral behavior, prevent its members from injuring each other and establish boundaries (what does it mean to be part of the community; and "insider" or an "outsider"?).

Third, most of the rules of most communities make some rational sense. I remember reading a book by Marvin Harris called Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, which explain how many cultural norms that seem strange to outsiders actually contribute to the survival and functionality of the communities that hold them. For an example of my own, is a prohibition on non-marital sex and a prescription for lifelong marital fidelity really a mysterious and irrational rule for a community? Every community that has experimented with "free love" in the past 200 years has been a failure. Human beings seem to have some innately possessive ideas about sex that cause huge relational strain when they are violated. If some community wants to try to reinvent the wheel on this, I guess they can try, but I'll be surprised if they are still a community in 20 years.

Fourth, human beings seem unavoidably drawn to the idea of transcendence, something beyond and bigger than themselves. It might just be "the community," whose values then also take on transcendent status ("freedom" "rationality" or what-have-you) but more often transcendence seems to have a divine-personal face, like God, gods or ancestral deities who also sanction (or provide) the community rules.

I think the short list of genuine complaints against religious communities comes down to lack of adaptation to context, and the use/abuse of violence and coercion. Of course these complaints and criticisms assume a set of foundational values that are also somewhat communal and absolute (transcendent in their own way). It's also reasonable to ask why (given their transcendent status) religious communities should adapt their rules or disavow the use of violence and coercion in support of such rules unless adapting rules and disavowing force is in fact part of the rules (Stephen L. Carter's article "The Free Exercise Thereof" in William & Mary Law review, Vol. 8, No. 5 is excellent on this point). It's also reasonable to point out that most existing religious communities have already adapted their rules to some greater or less extent. Sometimes "too little, too late;" other times "better late than never."

So religious communities basically go right and wrong at about the same point. They go right when they try to act like actual communities, which nurture and cultivate the human beings of the community into ways of behaving that honor the basic communal existence and individual honor of human beings. They go wrong when life gets more complicated. For instance, when it must relate as a community (charged with the care of its own) to other communities with competing interests, or when the genuine interest in the cultivation of a specific individual (or set of individuals) within the community competes with the genuine interest of another specific individual (or set of individuals). This is basically the argument of Niebuhr's Moral Man, Immoral Society (see Gushee's post here). Violence is not the only possible outcome. The "rules" are supposed to help work these things out, but sometimes new situations arise, and in a large pluralistic society (like the U.S.), sometimes it's a lot easier for an individual in question to jump ship (or be thrown overboard), than to really work it out.

In America, individualism combined with the "failure to adapt" criticism is probably 90+% responsible for the "nones." In other words, it's not that the religion has gone wrong, but the particular community-oriented rules of a religious community rub individuals (who have not been conditioned to community-oriented life) the wrong way. A national-community, with values of privacy and self-actualization and a gigantic legal code (ie. "rules") to support these individualistic values, is doing a better or more comprehensive job of forming the minds and assumptions of a large segment of the population than any traditionally religious community.

Then again, David Dark and David Foster Wallace would both say that there are no actual "nones."

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What makes us who we are? A fruitful class exercise.

11/20/2010

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What makes us who we are? This is one of the most fruitful questions I ask students in many of my classes.

This isn't St. Sebastian. It's each of us.

I draw a stick-figure on the blackboard. Inevitably, one student will say "our personality," to which I respond, "So where does our personality come from? What are the most basic building blocks of our humanity?" Then the answers start flowing.
"Genetics" "Physiology" "Biology" "Brain chemistry"
Me: Good. How many of those things do we choose?
Students: None.
Me: Right. What else influences us?
Students: Family. Schools. Neighborhood. Church. Culture. Geography.
Me: Good. How many of THOSE things do we choose?
Students: None.
Me: Good. We could also talk about nutritional habits, which are significantly cultural but we have a bit more "choice," our friendships, some of which seem to "just happen" while others seem more selective...
Other things come up. We discuss advertising and other media which no one wants to personally admit being influenced by but everyone thinks other people are influenced. I often ask how many of them seriously considered NOT going to college. It is usually very few. We talk about different kinds of experiences (positive and traumatic), teachers and youth ministers that they did not choose but who had significant influence.
At this point many of them are reeling and ready to become full blown socio-biological Calvinists.
Then I ask some version of this question:
"Do you think people decide to be (fill in the blank - racists, murderers, thieves, child-abusers)?"
Some students at this point might say: "Well no one MAKES them do it!" to which I reply, "So why do some people make those "decisions" and others don't?"
At this point, the exercise has a number of directions we can take it. The most basic is this:
"We all showed up in this classroom together having made very few (if any) real autonomous choices for ourselves. At best, we chose from a very particular and narrow range of options, given that the most determinative aspects of our decision making capacity AND the menu of options were NOT under our control. We are who we are, so let's try to be honest about our perspectives in here and give each other grace. Let's allow each other to try out new ideas and perspectives without labeling or feeling like we have to embrace a whole new identity. We are not fully formed, so we can challenge each other to think differently. You each are now an unchosen influence on the others."
I'll demonstrate some other directions to take this exercise in future posts.

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unChristian Biblical Worldview Part 2

10/24/2010

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In my last post, I described the recent attention to young adult faith and religiosity and The Barna Group's "Biblical Worldview" or BWV as I call it. So, what do I think this survey means exactly? Well, the reason I am calling these posts "unChristian Biblical Worldview" is because the set of items that Barna describes approvingly as the BWV seems likely to produce precisely the kinds of Christians that ultimately produce the kinds of responses to Christians described in unchristian. Yet, Barna is promoting their version of the BWV and producing materials designed to nurture and foster it.

unchristian respondents described Christians as hypocritical, insincere and only concerned with converting people, antihomosexual, sheltered, too political, and judgemental. If, as the article cited in my last post suggests, BWV actually results in strong disapproval of various behaviors, then judgemental and antihomosexual make sense. If, as I infer from the same article, BWV results in more disapproval than actual behavioral compliance (the article only lists behavioral compliance on gambling, getting drunk and viewing porn), then hypocritical makes sense too.

A more foundational consideration is the selection of items that constitute the BWV. For instance, why is sharing faith the only behavioral obligation on the BWV list, as opposed to say compassionate interaction with others? The latter has more frequent and consistent Biblical support and would likely result in more sincere interaction, while the former could more easily correlate to an offensive preoccupation with the conversion of others.  I'm not arguing that Christians don't have this obligation, but I question whether it is more foundational to a worldview shaped by the Bible than some other obligations. I would have similar questions about the BWV items about the reality of Satan and the sinlessness of Jesus, not because they aren't "Biblical" but because they don't seem as foundational, frequent or pervasive in the Bible itself as say... the sinfulness of human beings or the reality of angels for instance. I might also ask questions about the BWV's association of "truth" with "accuracy" (this is derived from Barna's book Think Like Jesus) but that is for the next post.

One other correlate is crucial to aligning the lists from the BWV and unchristian data. David Kinnaman spoke at a conference at Messiah College (my alma mater and current employer) this past summer. I found him refreshing and winsome.  I will say more about his presentation in the next post about the demographic gap and young adults. Kinnaman revealed one piece of data that I have not found anywhere else: He told the audience that 60% of Christians with a BWV also would support a federal amendment declaring Christianity the official religion of the United States!! I think I can safely say that this could be considered a contribution to the "too political" perception of non-Christians in unchristian. The question is whether this makes them (in my opinion) unchristian (supporting a kind of power-grab that seems very contra-Jesus) or un-American (rejecting a fundamental item of the First Amendment).

Since only 19% of those Barna described as "born-again Christians" had a BWV, and in another Barna release, only half of Protestant pastors had a BWV, the BWV clearly cannot be held responsible for the perceptions cited in unchristian, unless Christians with a BWV have a massively disproportionate influence on the general perception of all Christians. We certainly can't blame the Bible, since (it seems to me) the Barna BWV is an odd set of priorities Biblically speaking. What seems possible is: since significantly more pastors do have a BWV, they may be doing a better job at communicating an obligation to disapprove than inculcating the particular Barna BWV.

In my next post I will consider the generation gap in the BWV and the "truth" factor.

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unChristian Biblical Worldview Part 1

10/23/2010

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It seems that nothing is hotter these days than the faith and religious practices of youth and young adults, and maybe the 20-somethings in general. Young adults leaving church is occasionally front page news. Major studies have been published by sociologists Christian Smith and Robert Wuthnow, as well as Christian publisher Lifeway, and books about young adult ministry methodology abound (by ministers of all ages, and various locations in Christian tradition). The Barna Group has been at this longer than most. In 2007, Barna research commissioned by Gabe Lyons confirmed what most Americans already know; that non-Christians think that Christians are pretty unchristian (which resulted in the book by that title).

Another Barna research project has involved research into Americans’ adherence to “The Biblical Worldview” (BWV hereafter) and resulted in George Barna’s book Think Like Jesus. A 2003 article called A Biblical Worldview Has A Radical Affect On A Person’s Life, reported on some of the results of this research, which included levels of adherence to BWV (about 4% of the population in 2003, 9% in a 2009 article) as well as the implications for certain standards of behavioral compliance. Not surprisingly, Americans with a BWV were much more likely to adhere to the standards of morality affirmed by people with a BWV (which largely consists of disapproval of certain sexual behaviors, drunkenness and gambling). While it is highly unlikely that any American would possess a BWV under the Barna framework, it is much more likely if one is a White married Protestant, over 30 years of age who lives in Texas or North Carolina. Hm.
At this point, I suspect you’re wondering: What IS the BWV? I’ll tell you (although iterations vary from the 2003 to the 2009 article).

The Barna Group measures adherence to the BWV according to belief-agreement with 8 items:

Absolute moral truth exists; 34/46

- Such truth is defined by the Bible

The Bible is totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches. 50/79

Satan is considered to be a real being or force, not merely symbolic. 27/40

A person cannot earn their way into Heaven by trying to be good or do good works. 28/47

Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth. 40/62

God is the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the world who still rules the universe today. 70/93

Christians have an obligation to share their faith with others.

So, what does this mean and why is it important? What does it have to do with young adults?
And what are those numbers about? I’ll tell you what I think in my next post.

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Reverend Captain AmeriTrump

How Religion Goes Right, and Wrong

What makes us who we are? A fruitful class exercise.

unChristian Biblical Worldview Part 2

unChristian Biblical Worldview Part 1

Matt Hunter, Ph.D

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