Nathan Dickey's Blog

The Ethics of Undercover Journalism (Part 3): The Ron Schiller Video Sting

2012-07-06T14:30:00.000-07:00

III. THE RON SCHILLER VIDEO STING

One of the most-discussed news stories in March 2011 was a hidden-camera video released to the national news media by controversial filmmaker, conservative activist and self-described “journalist” James O’Keefe. This video, as we will see, carried weighty implications for National Public Radio (NPR), not least because it went public during the momentous time when the news organization was dealing with stressful funding issues at Capitol Hill. Starting in June 2010, Republicans on Capitol Hill and in the House of Representatives began to push for a bill that would strip public broadcasting of all federal funding, which they eventually succeeded in doing.

In fact, on March 7 - ironically just the day before the O’Keefe video was released - NPR chief executive and CEO Vivian Schiller spoke to the National Press Club at a Washington, D.C. conference to present (or plead) her case for continued public support for their organization. In that talk, she addressed and rebuffed accusations of liberal bias, emphasizing NPR’s commitment to transparency and its openness to being told by listeners when specific bias is perceived so that such complaints can be investigated and resolved. As Schiller put it, “For those that do criticize us for being liberal, you know, I ask them when I get that personally . . . to point to specific stories, and when they do, we take those very seriously. Have we erred? Absolutely we have erred in the past. But we make corrections and we always strive to do better [1].”

The undercover video has become a signature style of O’Keefe, whose favored technique is to create fictitious personas acting within fictitious events as a way to encourage subjects to make statements O’Keefe hopes is negatively revealing. This raises a number of questions. What is revealed by the people who are the unwitting subjects of hidden camera tactics? Were any ethical guidelines followed in the execution of an undercover project? And what role does the actual process of editing footage pieces from a hidden camera play in terms of ethical practice? If an undercover researcher is in possession of two hours of tape to present to the media, what is cut out in editing and what is retained? And how might that editing job affect the public’s interpretation or perception of a given story?

To O’Keefe’s credit, he has not kept secret the full two hours of nearly-raw video he collected, which was made available in its entirety on his “Project Veritas” web site. The more popularized and well-known version, however, is the heavily-edited and sensationally-dramatized 11-minute piece that was released to the media and around which a great deal of interest seemed to swarm [2].

The scenario was as follows: On February 22, 2011, two of O’Keefe’s citizen journalists posing as wealthy Muslim donors approached NPR, offering to make a generous donation to the organization. To discuss this donation, the men meet with two of the organization’s top senior executives, Ron Schiller (no relation to Vivian Schiller), president of the NPR Foundation, and Betsy Liley, Senior Vice President of Development for NPR and Director of NPR’s Institutional Giving. The two reporters said their names were Amir Malik and Ibrahim Kasaam, members of the fictional Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC), represented as a Muslim Brotherhood front group. According to the web site of the made-up organization, its members sought to “spread [the] acceptance of Sharia across the world [3].”

The four met at Georgetown’s Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C., where the reporters posing as Muslims explained that they were interested in making a five million dollar donation to publicly-run media outlets. “So we have set aside I believe something like five million, partly out of concern for the defunding process that the Republicans are trying to engage in,” claimed Ibrahim Kasaam [4].

The Muslim Brotherhood front group provided a stretch limo to the NPR senior executives as transportation, and while Malik and Kasaam further explained their connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, Ron Schiller proceeded to talk about why he personally felt NPR would be better off in the long run without federal funding. During the nearly two-hour conversation, Schiller also talked, at key points disparagingly, about the Tea Party movement, Christians, uneducated Americans, and even about the Juan Williams controversy. It was these disparaging statements that created a public relations nightmare for NPR when the tape of the lunch conversation was released, and which ultimately cost Schiller his job.

Aftermath

The day O’Keefe’s damning video was made public, NPR put out a brief, formal statement from its communications and external relations department, saying,

The fraudulent organization represented in this video repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept. We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for. Mr. Schiller announced last week that he is leaving NPR for another job [5].

But more heads at NPR were yet to roll as a result of this drama before the organization felt fully confident they had saved some face. On the morning of March 9, NPR’s Media Correspondent David Folkenflik publicized a surprising development in the story on his Twitter account:

BREAKING: The board for NPR NEWS has just ousted CEO Vivian Schiller in the wake of video sting by conservative activist of a top exec [6].

Later that day, Folkenflik was interviewed by Renee Montagne, co-host of NPR’s radio news program Morning Edition, to “sort this all out” as Montagne put it. According to Folkenflik, “[T]he board of directors of NPR have put out a statement saying they accepted Vivian Schiller's resignation. I'm told by sources that she was forced out — that this was, I guess, the final shoe dropping, you could say.” Going on to provide some contextual background to explain the rationale behind the ousting, Folkenflik said, “NPR executives including [Vivian] Schiller but also then-Senior Vice President for News Ellen Weiss, forced out Juan [Williams] as an analyst . . . it was one in a series of events in which he was making inappropriate comments. Uh, that blew up, as you may recall. It ultimately cost Ellen Weiss her job [7].”

In other words, while Vivian Schiller (unlike Weiss) managed to survive the Juan Williams debacle of October 2010, she was not able to survive the Ron Schiller episode. Ron Schiller was to Vivian Schiller as Juan Williams was to Ellen Weiss: a career-debilitating factor. As conservative blogger Jeff Dunetz put it, “Ms Schiller has been in the press too much lately, not only firing Juan Williams, but the way she fired him and the follow up comments about seeing a psychiatrist and the James O' Keefe sting video coming the day after her challenge to find incidents of bias was just the straw that broke the camel's back [8].”

Later that afternoon, NPR Ombudsman Lisa Shepard took live questions from readers on the Washington Post’s web site, questions on which she was “objective and honest, but pointed,” on the Ron Schiller incident, as Business Insider noted [9]. Below are some of the more illuminating samples:

“Certainly he wasn't fired for harboring negative views about conservatives. it [sic] was the unprofessional manner that cost him his job. Who blabs to total strangers in public about their personal biases? Who doesn't vet a prospective donor before meeting[?]. PBS got the same offer and turned it down.”
- March 09, 2011 1:33 PM
“. . . Ron Schiller wasn’t holdling [sic] a private conversation. he [sic] was meeting in public representing NPR. His personal views should be kept to himself. his [sic] job WAS to sell donors on NPR's commitment to fairness, accuracy, thoroughness, and diversity of voices. he hardly did that. Look, we all have personal views, but journalists and people at Mr. Schillers' level need to be professional, and he was anything but.”
- March 09, 2011 1:34 PM
“Of course, he was required to be objective. He knew what lines shoudln’t [sic] be crossed. I still can't believe you would divulge so much to a stranger. That's what I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around. He was a fundraiser at Univ. of Chicago and reputed to be excellent. He had to have known better. Makes you also wonder what else he said to potential donors. I hope nothing like this.”
- March 09, 2011 2:08 PM [10]

The conservative news media and blogosphere had a restless field day with this story, collectively expressing an ecstatic mixture of both gleeful vindication and anger at what they perceived as “left-wing bigotry.” The discussion of the line between content and donors was an area of the discussion the right was especially adamant about. Rush Limbaugh was particularly hard on NPR on this point, emphasizing the potential damage he hoped NPR would suffer from the situation: “Now, I don't know which of the things that Ron Schiller said will prove to be the most damaging. He trashes the Tea Party as racist, of course, he calls them bigoted Neanderthals, but that's only gonna help his career at NPR. The comment that's gonna get him into trouble is when he says that NPR could get by without federal funding. Okay, fine, then let's defund it [11].”

Juan Williams, who formed a central part of the backstory underlying this situation, delivered a strong indictment of NPR on Sean Hannity’s talk show, calling them “rude,” and “condescending”:

“These people are so rude and condescending, and they say that people like me are bigots, because I’ll tell you what I feel. These folks are not only attacking the Tea Party as anti-intellectual and racist and biased, they, they attack anybody that disagrees with their point of view, this elitist, this NPR point of view, that the rest of us are a buncha dummies and a buncha rubes and we’re from the country, we don’t understand what’s going on and he thinks that we lack education. And only him, only his group up there at the executive floor of NPR really understands. These folks are doing damage, Sean, to real, good journalists at NPR, the people who go out there and gather the news, because they’re destroying the brand! These people are just destroying NPR!” [12]

The conservative headlines that came out of this story almost constituted a psychological human interest story in and of themselves. The Drudge Report, a popular conservative-leaning news aggregation web site, featured a series of splashy headlines related to the story, which they kept pushing over as Matt Drudge apparently searched for the right words to use. His original headline read “NPR Presdient [sic]: ‘We Would Be Better Off Without Federal Funding’” [13]. This was then changed four minutes later (9:43 Eastern Standard Time) to read “NPR Exec: ‘We Would Be Better Off Without Federal Funding’” [14]. Six minutes after this, Drudge retained the last headline but inserted another directly below from The Washington Times, reading “NPR Officers Compare Deniers of ‘Climate Change’ to Birthers and Flat Earth Believers” [15]. The “Exec” headline finally won out as Drudge’s wording of choice.

However, at least one conservative-leaning news group, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, enjoyed the distinction of being one of the very few conservative news outfits to condemn O’Keefe’s methods as unscrupulous. The assessment of The Blaze’s Jonathon Seidl on the situation is a particularly good example of a fair and balanced treatment of the situation from a conservative outlook that does not shy away from criticizing both O’Keefe and Schiller in proportional ways. Seidl’s take is thus worth quoting at some length:

1. Schiller does try to distinguish (somewhat) his professional views from his personal views. He fails. In the end, he’s at a work-related event. Trying to qualify something as “this is my personal opinion” doesn’t give him a blank slate to say whatever he wants and have it not reflect on NPR. Ironically, in the video Schiller blasts Juan Williams for doing this very thing [16].

Seidl’s point here is that while Schiller should be applauded for saying that only his personal opinion was being voiced, he was nevertheless at an event representing NPR, a fact that should not warrant “taking his NPR hat off’ multiple times. Of course, the video makers are obviously doing their best to encourage him and lead him on (e.g., “I like it when you take your NPR hat off”) because they want him to be unguarded in his remarks. Seidl also makes a valid point in saying that if Juan Williams cannot express his anti-Muslim opinion on television as an NPR contributor without losing that job, and if this is the standard NPR has set forth, then by their definition Schiller is in fact representing NPR.

But was Schiller really representing NPR? Good, valid arguments can be made on both sides of this question. But Seidl continues:

2. Schiller does say that NPR is looking to feature Muslim voices. Guess what, Sean Hannity does the same thing. The Blaze does the same thing. All journalists and news organizations have a responsibility to present to the best of their ability all sides of the story. That’s why Hannity invited radical Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary on his program a few weeks ago. Even if you don’t agree with someone, they should still get a chance to say what they want. Glenn Beck has always said he’ll stand shoulder-to-shoulder with any MSNBC host for freedom of speech.
3. Some are pointing out that Schiller admits the station would be better off without federal funding, and use it as a “gotcha” moment. I‘m not sure that’s the case. I’ve worked in fundraising before, and it seems to me what Schiller is doing there is trying to remove a donation barrier. As he says, most “philanthropists” think NPR as almost fully-funded by the government, which certainly could prevent people from donating to the organization. If the government’s mainly funding NPR, why should donors?

This third point is an important one that was often completely overlooked by the conservative media. There was an unacknowledged and legitimate context behind Schiller’s comments about NPR being better off without federal funding. After all, any organization that receives federal funding in the first place has obviously already made their argument convincingly for why they need it, and must continue to do so. Schiller was merely saying that they have seen the handwriting on the wall, so to speak, nothing more. NPR revisits their budget every two years or so, and they were seeing that federal funding had simply constituted less and less of their overall budget as time went on. They knew that the “signs of the times” seemed to be showing public broadcasting heading in the direction of experiencing total defunding, and they accordingly made plans for what they viewed as an economic inevitability. He is sitting with two people he believes are wealthy donors offering NPR five million dollars, and therefore part of his conversation toward them is naturally going to be about NPR’s desire to be independent of a government budget.

Seidl continues with two final points:

4. It must be pointed out that Schiller does not overtly dignify the actor’s anti-Semitic comments. When the actor talks about Jews controlling the media, Schiller only gives a half-hearted head motion. In fact, Schiller goes out of his way to point out that there’s no such thing as “Jewish influence” at NPR. That’s huge, and Schiller should be commended for that.
Unfairly, O‘Keefe puts Schiller’s response under the heading, “Jews Own the Newspapers, Obviously.” That’s not what he said at all. He said that there is Jewish influence at papers that are owned by Jews. That’s a far cry from saying “Jews own the newspapers, obviously.” In fact, Schiller’s associate, Betsy Liley, even mentions that NPR is funded in part by a Jewish organization. That doesn’t seem to be placating anti-Semitism.
5. When the actor first begins talking of the Muslim Brotherhood, the video cuts. The actor says the organization was originally funded by a few members of the MB in America, and we do not see or hear Schiller’s unedited, immediate reaction. The video instead cuts to Schiller’s talk about Muslim voices. Maybe that is his immediate reaction, but we don‘t know since there’s a video cut. That could be important, or maybe it’s not. But it’s definitely worth pointing out.

Seidl then goes on to note the fact that just the day before the video was made public, the NPR president challenged critics of their organization to find and present specific examples of bias on their part, adding that it “doesn’t bode well for her that Ron Schiller’s comments about the Tea Party were made public today [17].”

Analysis

Although a great many commentators and activists in the conservative camp were glad to see spokespeople of NPR being exposed the way they were, as well as the subsequent chaotic fallout that followed within NPR’s infrastructure, it is important for media scholars and practitioners on both sides of the political fence (and everywhere in between, of course) to carefully and critically examine the methods by which the expose came about. Such a critical scrutiny should be carried out regardless of whether one’s personal parochial tendencies incline one to believe it was right that NPR be embarrassed in this way or not.

While all parties may very well agree to disagree, coming to a solid conclusion concerning the ethical status of O’Keefe’s undercover project is a process that requires a prolonged and meaningful dialogue, not uncritical and immediate condemnation or affirmation. Too often people fail to question their current understanding; when results fall in the favor of one’s personal beliefs, viewpoints or biases, people seem rarely to question as harshly the way in which those results came about, because there is no cognitive dissonance providing an urgent sense of the need for intellectual evaluation. Even for those who think poorly of NPR (the way they run their business, the content, the taxpayer funding that comes out of their pockets for NPR, etc.), it is important to study how the expose came about and thus come to a personal determination as to whether there is a problematic issue with how, say, the raw video was cut and edited, to take just one facet of our ethical analysis as an example.

As we begin to evaluate what happened, we should first take into consideration the fact that Ron Schiller had at this point worked for NPR for about a year. He is a professional fundraiser, and professional fundraisers tend to be very good at what they do. They have an easy manner, they meet with wealthy donors at prestigious foundations, and they go about their business in a very suave and self-possessed manner. There is reason to ask whether what they themselves do for a living on a regular basis is particularly ethical. The question of whether the executing of the video was ethical is quite separate from this consideration, and the answers one may arrive at for each does not cancel the other out.

What do we find if we apply Bob Steele’s criteria for ethical justification of undercover tactics (discussed in Part 2 of this series) to O’Keefe’s video sting? According to Steele's criteria, the subject must be (1) of “profound importance,” (2) the journalist must have ensured that no other alternatives are possible, (3) he or she must be willing to disclose the nature of the deception and the reason for it afterward, (4) the individuals and news organization involved must “apply excellence, through outstanding craftsmanship,” (5) the merits of the resulting story must outweigh any harm caused by the act of deception, (6) the journalists involved must have first “conducted a meaningful, collaborative, and deliberative decisionmaking process on the ethical and legal issues,” and finally the individuals involved in the news organization must apply all these standards, not leaving any out. Remember also that believing sincerely that the subject of the story (whether it is NPR, Planned Parenthood, teachers’ unions, etc.) is unethical in their practices does not, in and of itself at least, give one the right to be unethical in acting deceptively to expose them.

(Of course, it is one thing for other people to make assumptions about a writer. There is nothing ethically wrong or suspect with going to a liberal protest group, walking around with a camera, and asking tough, hardball questions. The potential ethical problem comes in when a conservative journalist attending the liberal protest event goes around saying, “My name is Carl the Marxist, let’s have a flip-cam Marxist share time.” That would constitute a different matter altogether, because now serious implications are introduced).

Certainly Schiller, who has been condemned by NPR, is responsible for what he says. But to whatever extent he may have laughed inappropriately or said anything that was actually overtly offensive in this fictional scenario, these will accrue to personal damage to him. Conservatives may say he justly deserves this damage. But have they really considered how many actors were involved in this situation? Was the scenario constructed in such a way as to provide Schiller any means of walking away from the situation with his head held high? I strongly suspect not.

A crucial part of correctly analyzing O’Keefe’s ethics is to reduce the role played by political bias in the analysis. This can perhaps best be accomplished by playing the reverse scenario in one’s mind. For example, imagine if Media Matters planted somebody to become an intern at Mercury Radio Arts or the Rush Limbaugh Show or at Fox News. Our undercover intern walks around with a hidden camera at all times (assuming this is happening in a state where it is legal), catches people in unguarded moments by asking them to “take your official hat off and tell me what you really feel,” then posts videos of their conversation. Is this ethical and right? If this is ethically justifiable, then O’Keefe’s project is ethically justifiable. A conservative supporter of O’Keefe cannot say that it is legitimate for people he or she likes to use deceptive tactics to expose groups and individuals that he or she disagrees with, but then not agree that the Left can use those same tactics to expose groups on the Right by complaining that the Left unfairly duped the people or individual under false pretenses. They would have to be happy about a popular right-leaning group being exposed. For instance, if Media Matters or the Daily Kos uncovered a connection between a popular right-leaning group and the Birthers, the people who now defend O’Keefe’s tactics in principle would be inconsistent if they criticized the left-leaning group for misrepresenting themselves in order to gain the scoop.

Therefore, if O’Keefe and his conservative allies are to avoid a display of cognitive dissonance, they must have no objections if Media Matters wants to sit down at a bar next to conservative news producers, buy them a few beers, and secretly record their privately-expressed thoughts to be shared with the world on YouTube. If Media Matters can ethically justify this technique, then O’Keefe and Project Veritas can do the same with theirs. However, if O’Keefe and Project Veritas have a problem with Media Matters in this hypothetical scenario, then they are obliged to harshly self-assess their own actions as equally unethical as well.

Let us revisit in a slightly different way the hypothetical scenario, put forward in Part 1 of this series, in light of this nonpartisan call to consistency. A journalist wishing to do an expose piece on an individual or organization must do more than simply follow someone around long enough. Let us instead imagine that the liberal Daily Kos writer opted to actually engage with his subjects at the bar for two hours, during which time the Fox producers are sharing drinks with the writer and are unaware they are being recorded (not that it is legal to do this in Manhattan, but for the sake of argument, we will assume that the two-party consent rule does not legally apply here). The Daily Kos writer and the Fox producers have a good, solid conversation, one or two times during which the producers say things which make them sound much less than unbiased producers of the news. Those two hours of video is then cut down into a four-minute video, half of which is footage of the producers saying things like, “Oh my God, you should see the kind of stuff I have to cut. It just turns my stomach!”

Is that a fair approach? Does a journalist, regardless of personal political leanings, have a right to crucify others and potentially wreck their lives? Even if our hypothetical Daily Kos writer sincerely believes that the Fox News channel is doing damage, it still may not be ethical to pretend to be someone he is not, or to try seducing his subjects into making incriminating comments (again, recall Steele's guage for judgment). This is why professional journalists rightly condemn as highly unprofessional the act of buying interview subjects drinks at a bar in the first place, for example.

But what if we are dealing with a much more prominent public figure, not just two producers? Does the ethical question qualitatively change if it is, say, Sean Hannity sitting at the bar? Imagine that for two hours, Hannity engages in a normal conversation with a few people. One of them happens to be a woman who is accompanied by two men. At one point in the conversation being followed, the woman leans in close to Hannity and says, “You know, you’re a lot cuter in person than you are on television.” Hannity looks at her a moment before responding, a slow smile playing across his face, “Well . . . thanks!” The reporter with the hidden camera takes that scene, even capturing Hannity’s suggestive facial expression, and cuts it with another moment in which he slowly places his hand on the back of her chair.

Again, O’Keefe would have to conclude that this is equivalently fair and also that the reporter may even be able to show details from this video that should give people some pause. Again, hypothetical reverse situations such as this help to demonstrate why these questions are enormously important to focus critically upon and not to simply embrace what your side is doing when results seem to be favorable to your causes and personal vendettas.

Was O’Keefe’s video sting project working toward a story of “profound importance”? The only issue of importance to O’Keefe and his allies is the question of taxpayer funding for programs they perceive as having a liberal bias and which they therefore do not like on a personal, purely partisan level. So we can ask: does the alleged elitist alienation of NPR and their alleged failure to treat conservatives fairly really constitute or cause a major moral catastrophe for the media and its consumers in this country? I would argue that it does not.

O’Keefe’s defenders may want to bring up the Muslim Brotherhood issue in this regard. However, O’Keefe has not produced any evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood and other similar groups are actually secretly funding public broadcasting in any way to justify creating that premise. O’Keefe’s undercover project would be more honestly-based if he actually had authentic information showing that the Muslim Brotherhood were even interested (let alone actualizing that interest) in generously funding NPR, which he did not. Instead, the Muslim Brotherhood connection was invented by O’Keefe in order to catch the NPR executives off guard, to surprise them and thereby coax them into saying something on camera that would make them look bad.

This is a more crucial point than it might at first appear. After all, how is one expected to react when all of a sudden the donors being met at lunch present themselves as members of the Muslim Brotherhood who strongly dislike the Zionists? Is it not conceivable that one could naturally react nervously? Could the person react in such a way that he says something off the top of his head to mollify the situation, to move on smoothly and find a way to get to the check in the least awkward manner possible? Ultimately, Schiller and Liley want the encounter to end on a friendly note, while at the same time not even thinking about taking their money. Anyone else in Schiller’s situation would likely have walked away from that meeting heaving a sigh of relief, perhaps recognizing that one or two comments were made that he is not happy about, but that at very least he was able to end the meeting smoothly.

We have all experienced, at one time or another, fringe ideas or convictions floated around in social situations that cause us no small level of discomfort. For example, if I am sitting eating a meal with a group of people and somebody in the group makes a comment that is either quite racist or otherwise outrageous to me, there is a judgment I have to make on the spot: Am I going to knock this person down physically? Am I going to pick a fight and start a verbal argument? Or am I going to attempt to simply laugh it off and change the subject, perhaps just wrap up the meeting? In making the judgment as to whether or not my hypothetical offender is in fact “crazy,” and then subsequently deciding whether to ignore him, engage him, or simply find a middle ground by saying something moderately mollifying, one is reminded of an actual incident in the news involving a “loaded” question directed toward Congressman Paul Broun (R-GA), in which granting the benefit of the doubt seemed the wisest course of action on the part of many commentators. At a town hall meeting speech delivered by Broun in Athens, Georgia on February 22, 2011, a startling question from one of the attendees made national headlines: “Who is going to shoot Obama?” Broun did not condemn the query immediately, instead attempting to assuage the weighty tension of the moment by responding, “The thing is, I know there’s a lot of frustration with this president. We’re going to have an election next year. Hopefully, we’ll elect somebody that’s going to be a conservative, limited-government president [18].”

What must have been going through Congressman Broun’s mind as this question was thrown at him? Only 45 days before this, former House of Representatives member Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords was the victim of an assassination attempt on her life. Now, here in front of Broun was a man talking about shooting the President! Should Broun have confronted the man, forcefully denouncing him as wrong and his question as abhorrent then and there (instead of three day later, when he did just that) for suggesting such a thing, and thereby possibly agitating whatever volatile part of the man’s character caused him to air the question in the first place? Would such a heroic confrontation be worth possibly having the man suddenly pull a gun on Broun and killing him? Stranger incidents have happened. An argument could be made that it was therefore wiser to sidestep the question or at least tread cautiously with words, to mollify the man by vaguely addressing the cause of his prejudices before delicately moving on to the next question. Every individual person has their own way of deflecting awkward or volatile moments, and most people have been in situations in which a statement made far out of left field made them want to escape the immediate situation as soon as possible.

In the case of the NPR executives, all the evidence indicates they had no intention whatsoever of accepting the five million dollars under any of the premises that were being offered. The MEAC representatives were clear in telling them that there were no strings attached, and they still did not express interest in the money after more than an hour with them. In fact, it is highly possible they were suspicious of the two men and the nature of their organization [19].

This is not to say that Ron Schiller should necessarily be excused from all criticism, because some highly unwarranted and unprofessional statements were indeed made by him (even though he did make clear he was not representing NPR in his statements, a fact which has been greatly underemphasized by Project Veritas). However, there is a clear difference between holding people accountable for off-color statements or remarks that they make on the one hand, and editing a two-hour video in such a way that something is made to appear more damning than it actually was. Project Veritas could have very easily included several of the positive, complimentary statements the executives make concerning conservatives. But the Project Veritas editing job did not bother to point these out.

In the end, James O’Keefe’s NPR video sting project was one in which an entire situation was fabricated, not to seek the truth and report it, but instead to perform a political hit job that was driven entirely by partisan motivations and foregone conclusions. The only social message sent by this sting operation is one that appeals solely to O’Keefe’s partisan allies, who hold to a set presupposition about “liberals” and their viewpoints.

In Figure 1 below, I compare and contrast O'Keefe's methods and approach to that of Dateline NBC’s television program “To Catch a Predator,” which was discussed in Part 2 of this series. On this show, only premises are fabricated (as opposed to entire situations and rigged circumstances), and this is done to catch and detain potentially dangerous criminals suspected to be so based on hard evidence, not partisan-based presuppositions. Also in contrast to O’Keefe’s project, “To Catch a Predator” sends strong societal messages about a real and present social issue in an enterprising and compelling manner, as opposed to an appeal to a cloistered community of ideologues with a vendetta against liberals and federally-funded public broadcasting. After all, was Ron Schiller really a moral evil in the way he encompassed his behavior, such that it is worth destroying his career (indirectly affecting his own well-being and that of his family) by exposing him on a national level for something that was not in fact a problem specific to NPR? James O’Keefe created a fictitious crime to serve his own interests, whereas real and ethical journalism investigates real crime, among a host of other issues, for societal benefit.

FIGURE 1 (Image by Nathan Dickey)

Of course, the way in which Ron Schiller handled himself in this situation was by turns admirable and questionable. He made some offensive statements, but he also said many things that have been cut out of the original two-hour video. It is safe to say that a viewing of the entire uncut video would very likely lead many who have condemned Schiller and written him off to come to a much different impression of Schiller’s character. While there are indeed several instances of both executives bad-mouthing conservatives, both of them also say many complimentary things concerning, for example, the principled loyalty that conservative Fox News viewers display toward people they consider to be speaking for them, figures like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.

The debate over the ethics of undercover journalism is culturally relevant as well as pertinent to the professional community. The more the techniques discussed in this essay continue to be practiced, the more sophisticated and sharpened the various responses back and forth are going to become. Moreover, as we see these unconventional techniques executed, we will see that it will inevitably spur more and more people, both media professionals and “citizen journalists,” to mimic them, whether the technique involves going undercover or being confrontational or anything that might fall in between, such as a combination of both styles that Hot Air’s Jason Mattera has pulled off [20]. A great many people who dabble in the media, journalists and non-journalists alike, are greatly interested in creating the next provocative video that is going to receive a large amount of viral traffic, and thereby establish a cultural niche for themselves. Our job as aspiring professional journalists is to learn to distinguish between the truly great pieces of profound muckraking in the name of quality truth-telling, and that which is merely sensationalistic “yellow journalism” carried out in the name of personal fame.

FIGURE 2 (Image by Nathan Dickey)

NOTES

1. PressClub1908, “NPC Luncheon with Vivian Schiller” (video, 59:02) March 11, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8b8Mt4iQnHY (accessed 6 July 2012).

2. VeritasVisuals, “NPR Muslim Brotherhood Investigation Part I” (video, 11:38) March 8, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd9OYJMX9t4 (accessed 6 July 2012). At the time of this writing, this video has received nearly 1.2 million views.

3. Muslim Education Action Center of America, “Home,” MEAC of America, http://www.meactrust.org/ (accessed 19 March 2012).

4. Project Veritas, “Full Unedited Footage of Conversation with NPR Foundation President Ron Schiller” (video, 1:58:53) March 8, 2011, http://vimeo.com/20786470 (accessed 6 July 2012).

5. Dana Davis Rehm, “NPR Statement: March 8, 2011,” http://www.npr.org/about/press/2011/030811.statement.html (accessed 6 July 2012). Schiller had actually already made arrangements to resign from NPR before the O’Keefe video was made public, having planned to take on a new job closer to his home as head of the arts program at the Aspen Institute in Colorado. NPR was not aware of the video until it was released on March 8, 2011, at which time Schiller’s already-pending resignation was made immediate. However, the NPR controversy prevented Schiller from getting the Aspen Institute job as well.

6. David Folkenflik, Tweet of March 9, 2011, 6:16 a.m., https://twitter.com/#!/davidfolkenflik/statuses/45488128512888833 (accessed 6 July 2012).

7. David Folkenflik, interview by Renee Montagne, NPR Morning Edition 89.1 KSMF-FM (Ashland, OR: KSMF, March 9, 2011).

8. Jeff Dunetz, “Audio Interview with NPR’s Media Reporter David Folkenflik – Vivian Schiller Didn’t Quit She Was Fired,” Yid with Lid: Exploring Theories of Political Relativity (blog), March 9, 2011, http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2011/03/vivian-schiller-didt-quit-she-was-fired.html (accessed 6 July 2012).

9. Noah Davis, “NPR’s Ombudsman Was in the Comments Section at WaPo Today Ripping Apart NPR Exec Schiller,” Business Insider March 9, 2011, http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-03-09/entertainment/30019311_1_juan-williams-npr-ombudsman-vivian-schiller (accessed 6 July 2012).

10. Lisa Shepard, “NPR Ombudsman Talked About Vivian Schiller’s Resignation and Ron Schiller’s Tea Party Remarks,” The Washington Post March 9, 2011, http://live.washingtonpost.com/npr-ombudsman.html (accessed 6 July 2012).

11. “NPR Executive Caught on Tape Being an Ignorant, Arrogant Liberal,” The Rush Limbaugh Show 1440 KMED-AM News Talk (Medford, OR: KMED, March 8, 2011).

12. Juan Williams, interview by Sean Hannity.

13. Drudge Report, “NPR Presdient [sic]: ‘We Would Be Better Off Without Federal Funding,’” Drudge Report March 8, 2011 (9:39:54 EST), http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2011/03/08/20110308_143954.htm (accessed 6 July 2012).

14. Drudge Report, “NPR Exec: ‘We Would Be Better Off Without Federal Funding,’” Drudge Report March 8, 2011 (9:43:55 EST), http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2011/03/08/20110308_144355.htm (accessed 6 July 2012).

15. Ibid. (9:49:58 EST), http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2011/03/08/20110308_144958.htm. Cf., Kerry Picket, “NPR Officers Compare Deniers of Climate Change to Birthers and Flat Earth Believers,” The Washington Times March 8, 2011, http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2011/mar/8/video-npr-sr-vp-climate-change-deniers-wont-be-cov/ (accessed 6 July 2012).

16. Jonathon M. Seidl, “Undercover: NPR Exec Talks ‘Racist’ Tea Party and ‘Anti-Intellectual’ GOP, But is He Kowtowing to Muslim Brotherhood?” The Blaze March 8, 2011, http://www.theblaze.com/stories/caught-on-video-npr-exec-bashes-racist-tea-party-and-anti-intellectual-gop/ (accessed 6 July 2012).

17. Ibid. It bears mentioning in this regard that The Blaze is not opposed in principle to watchdog journalism of the “gotcha” variety, as they demonstrated in May 2007 when they posted clips excerpted from the XM version of the talk radio program The Opie & Anthony Show to BreitbartTV, clips in which a homeless man making a guest appearance described wanting to violently and sexually force himself on then-United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the then-First Lady Laura Bush. This eventually led to the talk show being suspended for 30 days as well as an executive review.

18. Paul Broun, quoted in Jennifer Epstein, “Rep. Paul Broun Gets Town Hall Query: ‘Who is Going to Shoot Obama?’” Politico February 25, 2011, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/50180.html (accessed 6 July 2012).

19. One wonders what plan O’Keefe’s undercover agents had in mind if the NPR executives had agreed to accept the money. Where is the check? Are Malik and Kasaam simply going to write a check at lunch that bounces? Where would the plan have proceeded from there?

20. Michelle Malkin, “Hot Air TV: Jason Mattera Undercover at a Town Hall Meeting,” Hot Air (blog) September 1, 2009 (11:32 a.m.), http://hotair.com/archives/2009/09/01/hot-air-tv-jason-mattera-undercover-at-a-town-hall meeting/ (accessed 6 July 2012).

The Ethics of Undercover Journalism (Part 2): The Case for Legitimate Undercover Journalism

2012-07-05T19:44:00.001-07:00

II. The Case for Legitimate Undercover Journalism

Many professional media practitioners understandably have strong personal reservations about using lies in pursuit of the truth. Two wrongs do not make a right, the argument goes, and misrepresenting oneself as a way to find and expose a greater truth is a concept many find contrary to journalistic ethics. For example, Howard Kurtz, host of CNN’s Reliable Sources program, says that “no matter how good the story, lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as their subjects [1].” According to Tunku Varadarajan, Newsweek editor and a Fellow at the Hoover Institution, “Any piece of journalism which includes material obtained by a journalist misrepresenting himself to an interviewee, or by pretending to be a person that he is not, is, in my view, ethically suspect [2].”

However, actions and techniques considered by some to be ethically suspect may not in all cases and at all times be implicated as unethical in any legal sense. Undercover investigation is an art that federal authorities, for example, have honed well over the years. Effective sting operations have been in effect for almost half a decade in the United States, in many cases saving lives. The line thus becomes one of legality. If society broadly accepts undercover operations as ethical when carried out by police and other federal government agents, why is the same practice often considered wrong for reporters and journalists? Indeed, journalists are in an advantageous position to aid in these efforts by infiltrating the mob, shadowing white-collar criminals who are in the process of grafting large sums of money, or working with police operatives to track and catch pedophiles. Moreover, beyond simply aiding in the arrest of a single individual, undercover journalists in these situations are in a good position to popularize strong societal messages of awareness, of exposure and methods of deterrence.

One of the best examples one could point to in support of this popularizing and awareness-raising function of undercover journalism is Dateline NBC’s special series “To Catch a Predator” with correspondent Chris Hansen. In this “reality” program, premises are fabricated by undercover reporters to catch potentially dangerous criminals suspected to be so based on evidentiary standards. Suspects are then lured to various locations under false pretenses, where they are ambushed with hidden cameras for “good television” and arrested by police on film. The show’s technique itself raises some ethical questions, especially relating to entrapment. Hansen writes,

There have been critics who question whether our investigations constitute entrapment. You have to understand that when PJ [Perverted Justice, an online watchdog group] decoys go into chat rooms, they never make the first contact. The decoys merely sit there using a profile that includes a picture that is unmistakably of someone underage. The potential predator must make the first contact. Usually once that happens, the man initiates a sexual discussion and ultimately agrees to meet a young teen in person. There is a strict protocol that is reviewed by senior PJ members. Unless a man is okayed, he is not given the address to our undercover house.
However, clearly the decoy must create the opportunity for a meeting as a curious teen might do in a real-life situation. The decoys will tell the potential predators that they will be home alone. They are ultimately open to the idea of a sexual encounter with an adult. Some even express curiosity about sex [3].

What socially-beneficial purpose might this serve? One good answer is that the problem of pedophiles stalking and luring teenagers into sexually-intimate relationships is not only psychologically devastating, but also a great example of something that is extraordinarily difficult to expose without first going undercover:

Internet predation was a relatively new crime when we started investigating it and we had to be innovative in our methods. Some have questioned our extensive use of hidden cameras, saying that using them smacks of “gotcha” journalism. Often hidden cameras are the only way to capture a crime. It’s really no different than when we used them in Cambodia to expose the child sex tourism industry and the men from Europe and the United States traveling to sexually exploit young children, or in India to uncover child slave labor in the silk trade. We just turned these techniques toward the crime of child exploitation on the Web [4].

Dateline NBC is in effect providing a concretely beneficial service to society by teaming up with police operatives and using their expertise to create sting scenarios, while at the same time creating compelling programming which provides the viewer a cutting-edge glimpse into what pedophilia looks like. As Hansen writes, “We were not the first news show to discover that predators pursued kids online. But we did figure out how to expose it in an enterprising way [5].”

Programming such as this will receive a far greater audience of interested cultural consumers than any police report or court document ever will. Popular filmmaker David Schwimmer understood this cultural interest and the power of storytelling to illustrate the importance and in-your-face nature of social issues when he made his 2010 film Trust, which tells the story of a young teenage girl who becomes deeply involved in an online texting relationship with a stranger who seduces her. The film explores the development of emotional degradation and familial tension that then transpires, and how the young girl’s very life is nearly destroyed in the process [6].

Given these considerations, did 22 year-old pro-life activist Lila Rose wield a greater edge on this kind of moral argument when, in her firm if unfounded and misinformed belief that people on the Left are willing to force young girls into having abortions to please the wishes of their pimps, she was led in February 2011 to engage in her act of subterfuge and misrepresentation? Rose, founder of the pro-life non-profit organization Live Action, targeted Planned Parenthood employees in New Jersey with hidden cameras. The released videos contain footage in which staffers appear to display a willingness to aid a purported sex trafficker in acquiring abortions for his underage sex worker - both of whom were undercover actors sent by Rose [7]. If this is indeed happening, and Rose was (for the sake of argument) actually in a position to know things of this nature were taking place at Planned Parenthood (which is doubtful in this case), is her deception ethically valid as a way to expose such goings-on?

Arguments for the ethical validity of deceptive or undercover journalism need not content itself with merely legal considerations, however. In many cases, the question may be one of common sense. For example, writer and journalist John Darling of Oregon, who has worked for the Medford Mail Tribune, the Ashland Daily Tidings, the Oregonian and KOBI-TV (NBC5) in Medford, Oregon, pointed out to me that “most people know the rules. It’s all on the record unless we both agree it’s not. I very rarely agree to go off the record [8].” The implication of this commonsense reasoning for undercover investigation seems to be that journalists and reporters are constantly on record unless it is explicitly stated otherwise and then agreed to by both parties.

What if a journalist is faced with a situation in which not going the undercover route means not being able to seek out and report on the truth? How else are journalists expected to find out the facts of a socially-important story in those situations?

My Interview with Bob Steele

Bob Steele is the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at the reputable Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism school of which he is an affiliate. In the early 1990s, Bob Steele began developing a model of ethically-justifiable undercover investigation with a series of guidelines that describe which actions are out of bounds and which are not. His credentials are highly relevant here; he was a consultant on ethics for NPR last year during the Ron Schiller video sting controversy, the case study to be explored in Part 3 of this series (because of this, “it would be inappropriate for me to comment on this case,” Steele told me in our interview). Addressing when it might be appropriate to use deception, misrepresentation or hidden cameras in newsgathering, Steele gives the following six criteria on the Poynter Institution web site, all of which he argues must be fulfilled in order to justify one’s action:

• When the information obtained is of profound importance. It must be of vital public interest, such as revealing great “system failure” at the top levels,or [sic] it must prevent profound harm to individuals.
• When all other alternatives for obtaining the same information have been exhausted.
• When the journalists involved are willing to disclose the nature of the deception and the reason for it.
• When the individuals involved and their news organization apply excellence, through outstanding craftsmanship as well as the commitment of time and funding needed to pursue the story fully.
• When the harm prevented by the information revealed through deception outweighs any harm caused by the act of deception.
• When the journalists involved have conducted a meaningful, collaborative, and deliberative decisionmaking process on the ethical and legal issues [9].

In addition to these six guidelines, Steele gives five criteria that in his view do not justify deception in journalism. These include (1) winning a prize, (2) beating the competition, (3) getting the story with less expense of time and resources, (4) doing it because “others already did it,” and (5) the subjects of the story are themselves unethical [10].

“There were a lot of ethics issues surfacing in the 1980s and early 1990s related to the use of hidden cameras in investigative journalism by television reporters,” Steele told me in an interview, in answer to the question of whether his inspiration to formulate his set of guidelines was spurred by a crisis of ethics endemic to those who practiced that technique of journalism. “I felt it was important to explore the ethical decision-making process that individual journalists and newsrooms could use to make sound decisions [11].”

Of course, a rash of ethical issues and problems related directly to investigative journalism is suggestive of the rarity (or at least difficulty) of fulfilling all six of Steele’s criteria successfully. “It would be a guess as to the percentage of time [that undercover journalism succeeds in meeting all six criteria]. I would say it's well below half the time. Many journalists and many newsrooms just don't think these issues through very well. Usually it is in a legal challenge against them that prompts greater ethical reflection. My goal was to create more ‘front end’ ethical decision-making, to prompt folks to recognize the huge ethical issues involved in deception and dishonesty [12].”

Steele was quick to add that he was not opposed in principle to the use of deception to acquire the facts of the story. “As a television news producer, I supervised one or two cases of undercover reporting . . . I just believe we should set the bar very high in terms of when we can justify the use of deception and dishonesty, and we must have a deliberate and substantive decision-making process [13].”

Various ethical guidelines and models of particular interest to media practitioners were mentioned in the interview, including the Potter Box [14], John C. Merrill’s TUFF Formula [15], and the Society of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ) code of ethics. The latter has largely become the nearly-universal standard employed by news organizations with an interest in maintaining well-defined ethical principles. The SPJ code of ethics is made up of four basic principles indispensable to any ethical journalistic practice and professional lifestyle. They are (1) Seek Truth and Report It, (2) Minimize Harm, (3) Act Independently, and (4) Be Accountable [16].

I wondered if Steele had drawn from any organization's code of ethics or some moral system in formulating his more specialized undercover ethics checklist. “Since I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on journalism ethics, I was well-schooled in many different approaches to ethical decision-making, including codes of ethics and the Potter Box. I've certainly drawn upon those other resources in various ways to develop my guidelines and checklists for not only deception but other ethical issues [17].” According to Steele, these have run the gamut in his experience from interviewing children to covering tragedies, from using confidential sources and even to covering hostage situations. He certainly has great stories to tell.

With Steele’s eleven guidelines in mind, we are now in a position to consider and analyze a case study in undercover investigation.

NOTES

1. Howard Kurtz, “Undercover Journalism,” The Washington Post June 25, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/06/25/BL2007062500353.html (accessed 5 July 2012).

2. As quoted in Emily Esfahani Smith, “Ends vs. Means: The Ethics of Undercover Journalism,” The Blaze March 9, 2011, http://www.theblaze.com/stories/ends-vs-means-the-ethics-of-undercover-journalism/ (accessed 5 July 2012).

3. Chris Hansen, To Catch a Predator: Protecting Your Kids from Online Enemies Already in Your Home (New York: Dutton, 2007), pp. 5-6.

4. Ibid., pp. 3-4.

5. Ibid., p. 1.

6. Trust, directed by David Schwimmer (2010; Los Angeles, CA: Millennium Entertainment, 2011).

7. Web Team, “Planned Parenthood Aids Pimp’s Underage Sex Ring – Full Footage Released,” Live Action: News and Opinion Blog February 1, 2011, http://liveaction.org/blog/planned-parenthood-aids-sex-ring-full-footage/ (accessed 5 July 2012).

8. John Darling, e-mail message to author Nathan Dickey, March 11, 2012.

9. Bob Steele, "Deception/Hidden Cameras Checklist," Poynter.org (blog) July 05, 2002 (1:42 p.m.), http://www.poynter.org/uncategorized/744/deceptionhidden-cameras-checklist/ (accessed 5 July 2012).

10. Ibid.

11. Bob Steele, interview by author Nathan Dickey, March 21, 2012.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Clifford G. Christians, et. al., Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning 6th ed. (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 2001), p. 3.

15. John C. Merrill, Journalism Ethics: Philosophical Foundations for News Media (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).

16. Society of Professional Journalists, “SPJ Code of Ethics,” http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp (accessed 5 July, 2012).

17. Steele, interview by author Nathan Dickey, March 21, 2012.

The Ethics of Undercover Journalism (Part 1): Introduction

2012-07-04T15:28:00.002-07:00

“This is the problem with the country. We don’t understand anymore that truth has no agenda. It doesn’t have an agenda. It’s just the truth.” ~ Glenn Beck [1]

“In my view, the method‘s employed by O’Keefe are, so far as I know, legitimate. In effect, he conceals in order to reveal.” ~ Roger Kimball [2]

I. Introduction: Media Ethics, Undercover Journalism, and the Potter Box

Imagine yourself in the following hypothetical scenario: You are a liberal journalist working for the Daily Kos. One evening in Manhattan, you stealthily follow two Fox News producers, Megan Brown and Jay Wallace, into a fancy midtown bar. On the large television screen mounted on the wall across the bar, Nancy Pelosi is seen delivering a speech. You settle in at the bar counter near the two Fox producers as they watch. After a few drinks, you hear Wallace say, “Oh Christ, that Pelosi just makes me want to vomit!” Brown nods her head in agreement. The two of them then go on to make several comments that certainly make them seem like much less than unbiased producers of the news.

But you did not just hear and see this personally. Their reactions to Nancy Pelosi, as well as much of their subsequent conversation, have been captured on your cell phone’s video camera. Excited, you make your way outside the bar, where you begin writing a rough draft of the headline for the story you want to write tonight: “What Fox News Producers Really Think About the News.”

But on your drive home, you begin to consider your actions more deeply. Is what you are doing ethical? Would you go through with releasing your video and written story to the public? Why or why not?

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Of all the pressing ethical questions facing the field of journalism, the most controversial and discussed is arguably that of undercover journalism, sometimes referred to as immersion journalism (although it may be necessary to make a distinction). While a number of interesting questions come into play in this particular debate, the central driving one is whether it is ever ethically permissible to engage in an act of deception in order to arrive at the truth in the most optimal manner possible.

Throughout the long history of journalism, there have been a great many cases in which individual people, as well as members of news organizations as a collective group, have gone undercover in order to pursue many different kinds of stories and a wide array of political, social and even religious issues. One of the most interesting and unusual cases of undercover journalism in the latter category is that of Gina Welch, a Yale-trained atheist journalist who infiltrated the church and school (Thomas Road Baptist Church and Liberty University, respectively) of the late famous evangelist Jerry Falwell for one year, pretending to be a devout fundamentalist and evangelical Christian and befriending the churchgoers:

I wanted to know what my evangelical neighbors were like as people, unfiltered and off the record, not as the subjects of interviews conducted by the “liberal media.” I wanted to try to take them on their own terms . . . Going undercover seemed like the only way to access the truth about the other side. Evangelicals were so suspicious of the “liberal mainstream media,” so schooled in image management, branding, and talking points that I felt I needed to go unnoticed if I was going to get an authentic understanding. They needed to know the microphone was off. I’d do whatever it took to get the story [3].

During a question-and-answer session hosted by FORA TV in March 2010, Welch addressed what she felt were the ethical problems she struggled with before her investigation was complete: “I felt toxic . . . I felt like I physically couldn’t lie anymore. I was so upset about not only what I was doing but the fact that, you know, the revelation that it was morally problematic happened so late in the process [4].” Despite these ethical qualms, Welch not only completed her book, entitled In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church, but argued in the the same FORA lecture that her project satisfied two key ethical criteria: “There’s a history of undercover journalism, and I think the two questions that every undercover project raises is, are (1) do the merits of the resulting work justify the means by which the work was obtained, (2) could the work have been obtained any other way? And I think that my work, my book, satisfies both of those questions [5].”

(Image by Nathan Dickey)

Was the undercover project Gina Welch engaged in ethical or not? One can find professional journalists who would weigh in on both sides of this question, and, as is the case with almost all ethical questions, the answer does not reduce to a simple black-and-white resolution, or even a clear-cut distinction. Given the highly controversial nature of undercover journalism, it is worth exploring both sides of the argument fully before launching into a persuasive case for or against. There exist all manner of gray variations, as is to be expected when critically examining any ethical question worth asking.

A systematic process of reasoning about ethics involves several steps. Just such a process is provided in what media ethics experts call the “Potter Box,” a model of solidly-based moral decision-making that represents four sequential steps within a rectangular diagram that is conceptually easy to navigate. First formulated in the 1960s by Dr. Ralph Potter of the Harvard Divinity School [6], the Potter Box “introduces four dimensions of moral analysis to aid us in locating those places where most misunderstandings occur. Along these lines we can construct action guides [7].”

The first dimension is that of definition, the empirical evaluation of all the facts and/or issues arising in any given situation one is confronted with. This first step involves gaining an understanding of exactly what took place. The next step is to identify the specific values in operation that drive or aggravate the situation one has thus far only defined. There is not a single media/news story one can point to that does not involve a set of values (which run the gamut from aesthetic, professional, logical, moral and sociocultural) at work on the part of the characters involved.

For example, when Arthur Ashe - the African-American star tennis player who overcame racial barriers current at the time to win both the U.S. Open and Wimbledon championships - contracted HIV in 1988 arising from blood transfusions he had received while undergoing heart surgery five years earlier, he was understandably reluctant to go public with news of his disease. He had little choice in the matter, however, and in April 1992, USA Today reporter Doug Smith contacted Ashe regarding the tip he had picked up of his AIDS contraction, a tip Ashe did not want to confirm yet. “Believing that he had no choice but to confront the issue directly, he met again with a USA Today reporter and confirmed he had AIDS. The story was quickly provided to the paper’s international edition and circulated to other news organizations [8].” How should USA Today have treated the decision of whether or not to publish the story? Everybody has a stake in this situation, the two foremost being the reporter’s career and Ashe’s best interests. Whose stake was highest? Whose agendas are in operation, and what are the competing values?

The third step in the Potter Box’s moral reasoning process is to determine what moral principle one is going to choose to apply to the situation, that is, what ethical philosophies or modes of reasoning may be applicable to the facts of the case. Depending both on the case in question and on the values one advocates, some may choose to apply John Stuart Mill’s Principle of Utility, which is to seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number [9]. This principle is very similar to what might be called the “Spock Principle.” Most film enthusiasts will recall one of the greatest classic scenes in cinematic history when, in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Spock confines himself inside the engine room of the Enterprise starship to restore the damaged warp drive that will allow the ship and its crew to escape the reacting Genesis Device before it violently alters all matter in the nebula in which they are stranded. In the process of repairing the warp drive, Spock exposes himself to lethal levels of radiation and begins to die even as he succeeds in his efforts. When a distressed Kirk arrives and finds his comrade dying, Spock tells him not to mourn. “The good of the many,” Spock says, “. . . outweighs the good of the few . . . Or the one [10].” A hypothetical instance in which the Principle of Utility/Spock Principle might be of great, (indeed, urgent) relevance is one in which exposing the story of Arthur Ashe against his wishes saves many people from potentially unhealthy uses of the blood supply, at the cost of devastating the reputation of a single individual.

Other ethical principles and theories journalists may draw from in determining what action to take in a situation include John Rawls’ now-famous “Veil of Ignorance” thought experiment, which tackles the question of whose perspective should be favored in the designing of an ideal society. The thought experiment describes the hypothetical designer of the ideal society being in a state of complete ignorance as to what the society or the individuals comprising it are to be like. In fact, the designer does not even know who he is going to end up becoming. For all he knows, he could be a slave if this society features slaves as part of its infrastructure. He could be a peasant if there are peasants in this society. He could be a woman or an ethnic minority. With this veil of ignorance enshrouding the foresight of the designer, how should he go about designing a society that he would want to live and thrive in, no matter who he might end up being when he awakens in his world [11]? Or one could adopt Aristotle’s “Golden Mean,” which states that optimal moral virtue represents a middle state between excess and deficiency, to be determined by practical wisdom, or what Thomas Paine might call “common sense [12].” Then again, one may find appropriate the Judeo-Christian principle which views human beings as ends in themselves and not merely as means [13].

The fourth and final step in the Potter Box process is to decide what course of action one is going to take, given the considerations made in the previous three phases. A key part of this decisionmaking involves the journalist developing an active understanding (as opposed to a passive acknowledgment) of where his or her loyalties or allegiance lies, and why.

Nathan Dickey: Expert creepster, or legit undercover reporter?

NOTES

1. Glenn Beck TV, "The Truth Has No Agenda" (video, 4:32) February 18, 2011, http://www.glennbeck.com/content/videos/?uri=channels/451373/1189606 (accessed 22 March 2012).

3. Gina Welch, In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), p. 5.

4. Gina Welch, FORA.tv, "Land of the Believers: Evangelical America" (video, 1:07:16) March 23, 2010, http://fora.tv/2010/03/23/Land_of_the_Believers_Evangelical_America (accessed 4 July 2012).

5. Ibid.

6. Ralph B. Potter, “The Structure of Certain American Christian Responses to the Nuclear Dilemma, 1958-63” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1965).

7. Clifford G. Christians, et. al., Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning 6th ed. (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 2001), p. 3.

8. Louis Alvin Day, Ethics in Media Communications: Cases and Controversies 4th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Group, 2003), p. 138.

9. “[T]hat standard [utilitarianism] is not the agent’s own great happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether; and if it may possibly be doubted whether a noble character is always the happier for its nobleness, there can be no doubt that it makes other people happier, and that the world in general is immensely a gainer by it . . . the ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all other things are desirable – whether we are considering our own good or that of other people – is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of quantity and quality; the test of quality and the rule for measuring it against quantity being the preference felt by those who, in their opportunities of experience, to which must be added their habits of self-consciousness and self-observation, are best furnished with the means of comparison” (John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism [1861], ed. George Sher [Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1979], pp. 11-12).

10. Vonda N. McIntyre, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (New York: Pocket Books, 1982), p. 209. See also Judith Barad, Ph.D., and Ed Robertson, The Ethics of Star Trek (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), pp. 271-295.

11. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 118-130. While this approach is not entirely without its flaws, it is nevertheless an excellent starting point when thinking about how we collectively want society to work. For example, the designer working under the veil of ignorance could be a social conservative who might harbor fears that liberals in his society would want to take money away from the rich and evenly distribute it among everybody. This conservative designer might fear that a liberal society such as this would end up discouraging the more productive members of society. But under the veil of ignorance, this designer is forced to place himself in the shoes of those less fortunate than he, as he has no way of knowing if he might find himself in that lowly position. By the same token, if the designer under the veil of ignorance is a liberal, he must take into consideration that the rich (which he may or may not end up being once the veil of ignorance is lifted) want to enjoy the benefits of being rich as much as possible. But at some point both the conservative and the liberal designer under the veil of ignorance must take into account the possibility of being poor when the veil is lifted, and in that position, neither the conservative nor the liberal want to be a serf who is forever stuck in that situation with no hope of upward mobility.
This ties in well with the concept of the best solution for dividing up a metaphoric cake. The best solution is to oblige the one cutting the cake and dividing it into pieces to be the last one to select his or her piece. If I am in a position of power to cut the cake, everybody else around me receives first pickings. This strategy encourages the one in the greatest position of power to divide the cake as fairly as possible, so that he does not end up shortchanging himself (after all, as both conservatives and liberals can agree, the powerful elite also have basic rights).

12. “Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect; and again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while excellence both finds and chooses that which is intermediate” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. II, ch. 6. This is W.D. Ross’s translation in Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation – Volume Two [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984], p. 1748).

13. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:39b, King James Version). Quoted in William K. Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1963), p. 42.

The Golgotha Chainsaw Massacre: A Rambling Commentary on 'The Passion of the Christ'

2012-06-13T12:37:00.001-07:00

"’The Passion of the Christ’ is a thoroughly Satanic production . . . Satanists, who despise Jesus Christ, and their Dark Lord, who has fond memories of the Crucifixion, will no doubt love [the movie]. Everyone else, including Christians, should stay at home . . ." ~ from a review written by a fundamentalist Christian [1]

"I tell you, I may be playing Jesus, but I felt like Satan at that moment . . . a couple of expletives came out of my mouth." ~ James Caviezel [2]

There is a fountain filled with blood,
Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins ~ William Cowper, 1772 [3]

I. INTRODUCTION: BAD OMENS

During the filming of Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie The Passion of the Christ, the actor portraying the character of Jesus (Jim Caviezel) was struck by lightning twice, in two separate incidents and in two separate places. Apparently the filmmakers could not take the hint the first time or the second time, and the movie was finished and released to the public on Ash Wednesday, February 25, 2004.

Then, on the very first day of the movie’s release in theaters, a person in the audience of Warren Theatre East in Wichita, Kansas died while watching the damn thing. According to one news report, “A woman collapsed in an East Wichita theatre this morning, during [the showing of the movie]. Peggy Law apparently suffered a heart attack. She was pronounced dead a short time later at a Wichita medical center [4].” The story goes on to report that the woman, while watching the movie, collapsed during the portion that depicted the crucifixion of Jesus. A few off-duty nurses and doctors who were in the audience attempted to revive her. She was transported by ambulance to the hospital, where she passed away.

The filmmakers, of course, are not to be blamed for this unfortunate occurrence. Peggy Scott Law, who was in her 50s, could have just as easily suffered a heart attack walking through the supermarket. The moment of her death was simply a matter of bad timing and an inconvenient place. Still, this certainly was a head-scratcher of a story.

As an atheist, I am a thoroughgoing naturalist. I do not believe that an actor getting struck twice by lightning constitutes a supernatural sign or omen, even when that actor is portraying Jesus Christ. But as pious Catholics, most of the filmmakers and Caviezel himself should! As for the woman who suffered the heart attack, it is worth pointing out that if she had been revived with CPR while in the theatre, the story would have been treated as a divine miracle, the grace of God working through Mel Gibson’s movie (still, the selective reasoning among believers is such that many who look hard enough and desperately enough for a miracle are apt to claim that is a miracle that all those other hundreds of people in the same theatre audience did not die. We are all sinners, after all).

II. “TELL ME THE VIOLENT, BLOODY STORY OF JESUS AND HIS LOVE…”

The foregoing introduction is a very roundabout way of saying that The Passion of the Christ is not a children’s movie, in any way, shape or form, by any stretch of the human imagination. It is not a movie for many adults. The news media back in late 2003 made much of the fact that The Passion was going to be a very gory film with heavy amounts of violence. But connoisseurs of American entertainment are, I believe, so accustomed to the media creating much empty hype over movie violence and accustomed to people overreacting as a result. The collective, unspoken assumption on the part of the moviegoing public seems to have been that, with Christians doing most of the talking about the violence aspect, the movie could not be all that bad.

(Time for a tangent story: I remember watching Mel Gibson’s 1995 movie Braveheart for the very first time when I was sixteen years old. For the past eight years before this, I had heard many adults talking about the battle scenes as being some of the bloodiest, most gory scenes they had ever seen in a movie. I was therefore stoked to finally see it for myself, but was disappointed. Sure, people get their arms chopped off and there was some gore, but it was not nearly as over-the-top and beyond the pale as it was made out to be by my elders).

The Passion of the Christ is an altogether different kind of movie, and for this reason it is little wonder it shocked the moviegoing public and took them for surprise. The highlight of the movie is the scene in which Jesus gets scourged, a scene that is definitely one of the most difficult scenes in cinematic history to sit through, regardless of one’s beliefs. In the movie, the scourge is a great whip with small chunks of spikes, pieces of glass, and cat o’nine tails affixed to the its tip. These accouterments work over the body of Jesus in loving slow-motion detail as his flesh is literally ripped to shreds.

I am of the opinion that the use of violence or any sort of extreme content in entertainment should serve a larger point. And in a sense, Mel Gibson does have a larger point in mind; his intention was to make a movie that is supposed to disgust, horrify and sicken the audience, because his theology motivates in him a desire for others to feel the intensity of what their sin did to Jesus. Passion plays are a very old and time-honored tradition, and this is the very function they have always been intended to serve as well. In the final analysis, knowing when the point comes across becomes a matter of one’s own personal judgment (as opposed to an objective limit) to decide whether watching ten minutes of someone being flayed alive on screen gets the intended point across any more effectively than, say, four or five minutes of it. But for most people, 2 hours and 6 minutes of a bloody and violent theological guilt-trip is overkill.

How do these 126 minutes break down? Well, for about the first five minutes, Jesus is fine. For about the final five minutes, he is doing very well. Every single minute in between, he is constantly being beaten mercilessly into hamburger meat. It is amazing to imagine how many kegs and barrels of fake blood the effects department brought in for the filming. And what kind of continuity problems might the filmmakers have wrestled with? (Oh shit! Yesterday, Jim had a large scar here and a slightly smaller one there. And this ribbon of latex flesh is out of place, dammit!) Then again, Caviezel’s body is so bloody and so scarred throughout the film that very few if any moviegoers would take any notice of any continuity errors, no more than we notice breaks in continuity when grains of sand on a beach are filmed over several days. But I also like to imagine that Gibson had on hand a veritable army of continuity technicians armed with Polaroids, taking tens of thousands of photographs of the cobblestones at the end of every day, just to keep track of where all the blood splatters have landed.

III. THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST AS FILM NARRATIVE

This film is sure to take the wind out of anyone who watches it for the first time, and the viewing experience does not get any less unpleasant on multiple viewings. But does The Passion of the Christ work as a piece of film narrative? I for one am not convinced that it is, for two reasons. The first has to do with the purely ideological motive that drove the production. If anything is clear and obvious about this movie, it is that Mel Gibson was making this movie for Christians. Even months before it was released, the Evangelical Protestant Right – which is not a group usually seen allying themselves with “those Mary-worshippers” like Mel Gibson – were making their rounds in news editorials and reviews strongly rallying in support of the film and talking enthusiastically about what a powerful conversion tool they anticipated it would be for their cause. Some even compared it to Barnet Bain’s 1979 film Jesus, the evangelical blockbuster hit that was distributed worldwide upon its video release. For the past thirty years, missionaries have trundled the Jesus film off to obscure regions of the world and shown it to Bushmen in remote Africa, for example, in the hopes of converting them to Christianity.

“Just wait until the indigenous Bushmen get a load of this,” the Evangelical Protestants must have said concerning Mel Gibson’s Passion (frankly, we can be grateful the movie did not in fact gain any status as a missionary conversion tool. It may have only succeeded in instigating tribal warfare against missionaries . . .)

The second reason The Passion fails as meaningful narrative is that it is devoid of context. The movie begins in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus is arrested at night by Roman guards and hauled off in chains. Then the beatings begin. Now, while there is such a thing as too much exposition, this movie had none whatsoever. There is very little actual storytelling involved, and the viewer is not given any context whatsoever for all the violence. Those who go into the movie not knowing anything about Jesus or Peter or Mary will not understand it and will be completely lost from beginning to end.

Of course, the argument can be made that most of the people who walked into theatres to see this movie, especially in America, were quite familiar with the Jesus story already. Certainly all Christians are familiar with it (or should be), and most atheists know the Jesus story very well. Therefore, one might say, the lack of context perhaps should not be viewed as a big problem. However, if we examine The Passion strictly as a film narrative – that is, on its own internal merits and independent of external assumptions supplied by viewers – it is problematic that the movie provides no context for why a man is being beaten mercilessly to a bloody pulp for two straight hours. What the script does not do is establish Jesus Christ as a character, that is, establish who he is, what he does and why exactly it is that he angers both religious and secular authorities so much that they literally beat him to death.

Saying that most people going in are most likely going to know in the back of their minds at least a rudimentary knowledge of who Jesus was and what he taught about loving one’s fellow man does not save the film from the above criticism. In fact, if we assess the movie on its own merits, we find that its total lack of context and even explanation renders it nothing more than an exploitation movie. In fact, several negative reviews of the movie coined the term “Christploitation” to refer specifically to The Passion and movies like it, creating a distinct genre in the process. And Christploitation is indeed a very fitting word choice; the violence in The Passion is borderline pornographic in nature.

Gibson focuses on the scourging and crucifixion to the exclusion of (a) Christ’s teachings, except for very brief flashback scenes of the Last Supper in which he basically just tells his disciples to love people, and (b) the Resurrection. Most of the criticism Gibson has received from Christians is concerned with the fact that the Resurrection of Jesus, considered by the faithful to be the foundation and cornerstone of their religion, is for the most part glossed over in the movie’s finale. We are treated only to a very brief scene at the end that appears as nothing more than an epilogue in which Jesus walks out of his tomb with a portentous “it’s-payback-time” look on his face, almost as if we are being tempted to expect Passion of the Christ II: Judgment Day to be in the works (wouldn’t it be great to have a Gibson-produced movie based on the Book of Revelation, in which Jesus is made of liquid metal?) On this point, many Christians and I are in agreement: one of the strongest negative criticisms of this movie is the heavy and extreme violence thrown at the viewer without any context whatsoever, a context that should have consisted of giving us a bit more background on Jesus’ teachings and a fuller treatment of his resurrection.

But in a sense, there is also a part of me that sympathizes with and understands Mel Gibson’s motives for making a movie like this. It seems that what Gibson did not want was just another Jesus movie that adhered to the same old formula and motifs that have characterized all the other Jesus movies (i.e., Jesus is born in a manger, as a man he wanders about teaching and performing miracles for two hours or so, then finally comes the obligatory dramatic resurrection scene at the end, etc., *yawn*, etc.). Instead, Gibson’s intention was to focus on just the final twelve hours of Jesus’ life, highlighted by his scourging and his crucifixion. But then again, that is exactly what a passion play is. Thus, Gibson is not ultimately breaking new ground, because passion plays have been written and performed for centuries. The concept is simply new to many modern people in our day and age. Indeed, one might even say pious Catholics of many past generations have wanted very much to produce a passion play as bloody and violent as Gibson’s but that they simply did not have the technology to achieve such great “special effects,” so to speak.

Another interesting issue that jumps out at me about this movie has to do with the transition from source material to script. The general rule in scriptwriting is that one page translates into one minute of screen time. One minute of screen time per page of script means that a standard film script is about 120 pages. Now, the verses in the Bible that describe Jesus’s execution are much shorter than 120 pages. Even if a screenwriter were to combine the passion narratives of all four Gospels together, they still do not come anywhere close to 120 pages. Thus, The Passion of the Christ contains a great deal of filler, making it rather slow in parts. One of the longest continuous scenes in the movie, the 20-minute scourging sequence, is based entirely on a single verse: “Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him” (John 19:1).

Coming as I do from my atheist perspective, I am fairly confident that if I was a person who knew nothing about Christianity or even about the basic story behind the religion, seeing The Passion of the Christ would probably not win me over. In that respect alone, the movie is not a success in my estimation, because it serves no other purpose than preaching to the choir.

But on the other hand, the commercial success of The Passion of the Christ may have ironically contributed to the slow but sure spread of freethought and the rejection of religion in this country. This is because The Passion in many ways forced the American public to come face to face with the undeniable fact that Christianity undeniably has, as its foundation and basis, an extremely violent and bloody event. In fact, Christianity celebrates this central and defining human sacrifice. Hundreds of hymns are written specifically about the blood of Jesus, hymns with lyrics like “Are you washed in the blood / In the soul-cleansing blood of the lamb” [5]. This is rather revolting when one really thinks about what he or she is singing [6]. And is it not true that the believers who take seriously the bizarre Transubstantiation doctrine when they partake of communal bread and wine are actually engaging in cannibalism, if what they believe is really true?

IV. IS THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST ANTI-SEMITIC?

As most consumers and critics of popular culture are already aware, the biggest source of controversy surrounding The Passion of the Christ was (and is) the open question of whether it was anti-Semitic in tone and message. In the interest of being as fair and balanced as possible, my answer is that the movie is somewhat anti-Semitic.

On the one hand, the movie features a large cast of bad Jewish characters, with a few good Jewish characters thrown in here and there. On the other hand, there are plenty of bad Roman characters, including two particularly despicable human beings who glean a great deal of pleasure in their work of torturing and tormenting Jesus (reportedly, Gibson’s direction to these actors was to act as if they were throwing a baseball while bashing Caviezel). So the Romans for the most part are not let off the hook.

However, the high-ranking, important Romans do get off the hook in this movie. Pontius Pilate (Hristo Shopov), the Roman prefect character responsible for issuing the final order to crucify Jesus, is here portrayed as a very courteous and well-mannered man. He does everything within his power to avoid condemning Jesus to crucifixion, but his hand is forced by a rather bloodthirsty mob of Jews. And this portrayal is in fact quite Biblical. Chapter 19 of the Gospel of John has the Jewish mob crying out “Crucify him, crucify him” in unison, and also taking personal responsibility by declaring, “We have a law, and by our law he ought to die” (vv. 6, 7). This declaration comes right after Pilate tries to tell them that he can find no basis on which to condemn Jesus. Thus, The Passion does remain true to the original story, in this regard at least. But it is worse than that; Gibson goes out of his way to really focus on this angle. Not only are the important Roman characters portrayed in the best possible light, but a strong case can be made that the high-ranking Jewish characters are portrayed in the worst possible light, as a cruel and bloodthirsty lot. In fact, just about every horrendous thing that happens in the movie is the fault of Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest (played by Mattia Sbragia).

Again, the movie in this way mirrors the Bible’s description of how matters played out. In Chapter 18 of John, Jesus is arrested in the middle of the night and hauled away to Caiaphas, who proceeds to interrogate Jesus. What is described in the chapter reads just like a scene out of a mob movie. As Jesus is being questioned, a small number of Caiaphas’s henchmen stand around him. It is easy to imagine them snickering sinisterly, maybe wearing quaint fedora hats. Whenever Jesus spouts his signature smart-ass answer in response to the high priest’s questions (i.e., “Well, as a matter of fact, I am the son of God”), the priestly henchmen are there to rough him up.

Then Jesus is taken before Pilate, and immediately a stark contrast is presented. Pilate displays a very gentle disposition toward Jesus, and they even come very close to engaging in philosophical discourse! The overall impression we get of Pilate, both from reading the biblical account and from watching Gibson’s faithful movie adaptation, is that he is a misunderstood and tormented man who feels forced by external forces working against him to crucify a man he believes is innocent [7].

The Gospel of John is the only one of the four canonical gospels in the New Testament that goes out of its way to cast the Jews in a negative light. The vast majority of scholars agree that John was the also the latest of the four canonical gospels to appear, having been written between close to the year 100 CE – some 70 or 80 years after the events related – and the gospel did not begin to be circulated abroad in earnest until well into the second century. The other three gospels place little to no blame on the Jews (Matthew 27:25, the infamous “blood libel” verse, is the striking exception that proves the rule). But John’s Gospel even goes so far as to put words in the Jews’ own mouths to the effect that they personally want to see Jesus crucified and that their own law demands it – again, see John 19:6-7. By this point in late first-century history, Christianity was catching on with great success as a new religion. But with this success came pronounced embarrassment for the Christians when the vast majority of Jews were, to say the least, not wholeheartedly in favor of its message. As Thomas Whittaker writes,

As the orthodox Jews did not enthusiastically receive the new Gospel, or “glad tidings,” the responsibility for the death of the promised Redeemer began to be cast upon them, and withdrawn as much as possible from the Roman governor. Prophecies of the destruction of Jerusalem, and parables prefiguring the rejection of the unbelieving Jews from the promised kingdom, were put in the mouth of Jesus. The new sect turned more and more to the Gentiles. The feast is for all except those men who were first invited . . . [8].

Supposedly, Christ came to reveal himself as the “King of the Jews,” but the Jews responded with proper skepticism and doubt. Thus, the writer of the gospel attributed to John had ample political and theological motivation to portray the Jews as a villainous, murderous people, a portrayal that again is largely absent from the other three canonical books. A strong case can therefore be made that John approached his gospel-writing project with a very specific and heavily propagandistic perspective on the events he describes. That is, the author seems to have had a vested interest in providing his readers a reason not to consider the Jews to be credible in their well-founded refutations of Christianity: they were responsible for Jesus’ death, and were henceforth a fallen people.

Thus, by consciously focusing on the Gospel of John, Mel Gibson definitely committed himself to the direction in which his story was to come from. Still, several of Gibson’s defenders have argued that Gibson is not blaming “the Jews” specifically for Christ’s torment and death in this film, but rather pointing the finger at evil, nasty bureaucrats, i.e., people who are in charge or in positions of great political power, regardless of his status as a Jew or Roman or anything else. But the problem with this defense is that the movie clearly does soft pedal the extent of Pontius Pilate’s participation in Jesus’ death, as do the Gospels. Additionally, we can point to the Caiaphas character as a counter-argument to Gibson’s defenders. Caiaphas serves as something of a composite figure, representative of the group of Jewish elders in the Temple as a whole. And they are all unambiguously and unmistakably depicted as the main villains in Gibson’s movie.

Moreover, the movie’s script borrowed heavily from the writings of the nineteenth century stigmatic and mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich, who wrote a lengthy account of her visions of Jesus’ suffering and death in a work posthumously titled The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Throughout this book, Emmerich often refers to the Jews using epithets that are not flattering, to say the least. Very early in the planning and pre-production stages of the movie, many of the reports that began circulating claiming that The Passion was going to be a horribly anti-Semitic film were driven by concern that the early script drafts were drawing from Emmerich’s writings, not just standard traditional texts like the Gospel of John, which is anti-Semitic enough on its own. Abraham N. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, described Emmerich’s work as “an anti-Jewish account [which] distorts New Testament interpretation by selectively citing passages to weave a narrative that oversimplifies history, and is hostile to Jews and Judaism” [9].

(By the way, Emmerich’s influence largely accounts for the presence of several scenes in the final film which are not found anywhere in the Gospels, or anywhere else in Scripture. In one interview, Gibson said of Emmerich, “She supplied me with stuff I never would have thought of” [10]. A case in point is what is in my opinion by far the most off-the-wall and strange scene of the entire film, that being the sequence in which Judas is hounded by little demonic children who torment him all night and in the morning drive him out physically into the countryside [11]).

People interested in defending the movie from charges of anti-Semitism will want to point out the few Jewish characters that are presented in a positive way, isolated instances though they are. For example, Gibson’s apologists are quick to draw attention to the very poignant scene in which a Jewish bystander on the Via Dolorosa is ordered by the Roman soldiers to help Jesus carry his cross. This he does against his will at first, but then feels an unspoken bond to Jesus by the time they near the crucifixion site. But I cannot help but suspect, cynical as the suspicion may be, that the underlying message in this scene is this: Jews who are actually involved with promoting the Jewish religion are evil and villainous at heart. The “little people” – the Jewish peasantry who simply go about their daily lives and mind their own business – are certainly not evil. Not so with the people who are actively and diligently involved in spreading the Jewish faith. They of course are a very evil bunch!

Finally, it is highly significant that the self-directed curse uttered by the Jewish mob in Matthew 27:25 (“His blood be on us, and on our children”) is actually a line that is retained in the movie, although not in subtitles. Gibson had claimed that he removed the line out of the movie, but in reality the only thing he removed were the subtitles for the line. All viewers who understood Aramaic quickly caught on to this little tidbit of trivia, and Gibson’s disingenuousness could not be hidden for long.

Of course, it very well may be the case that Gibson was not being intentionally and overtly anti-Semitic in making his film the way he did. After all, as Gibson revealed in a 2004 interview with People magazine, the hands that are seen nailing Jesus to the cross during the crucifixion scene are Gibson’s own hands:

It's the director's left hand nailing Jesus to the cross. The cameo is more than a Hitchcockian gimmick. Gibson feels his telling of the Passion holds all humanity responsible for the death of Jesus. And, he has said, “I'm first on line for culpability. I did it” [12].

So perhaps the anti-Semitic overtones that do appear are due only to the fact that Gibson’s film takes many cues from the Gospel of John, which is at the very least latently anti-Semitic. In any event, those who are not anti-Semitic going in will most likely not end up becoming anti-Semitic going out. On the other hand, people who already harbor anti-Semitic feelings will certainly be able to garner a great deal of ammunition for their already-existing anti-Semitism by watching this film, which can easily be interpreted by them as an opportunity for another “see-I-told-you-so” moment.

In fact, Lovingway United Pentecostal Church in Denver, Colorado made headlines back in 2004 for a large outdoor marquee they displayed the day the movie was released which declared, “’Jews Killed the Lord Jesus’ 1 Thess. 2:14,15 ¡ Settled !” If nothing else, Mel Gibson's new movie emboldened this church to make this public pronouncement [13]. The pastor of the church, Maurice Gordon, was completely unapologetic about the sign, saying “The word of God is the final word.” The Bible passage referenced on the sign, 1 Thessalonians 2:14-15, reads, “For ye, brethren, became followers of the Churches of God, which in Judea are in Christ Jesus; for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews; who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own Prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men.”

Thus, anyone who wants to throw charges of anti-Semitism at Gibson should first realize that the anti-Semitism they are reacting to does not start with him. There is plenty of fuel for anti-Semitic sentiment in the pages of Scripture. The problem is that people who do not hold repugnant anti-Semitic views have nevertheless unthinkingly committed themselves to saying they believe every word of the Bible to be true. This they do not knowing that the Bible contains many ideas and viewpoints that most people in civilized society today would never want to associate with [14]. Most, if not all, of the people say they believe the whole Bible to be true are people who simply have not read the entire book. They have just heard from their preachers that they are supposed to accept the whole book as truth in order to avoid hellfire, so they say they do.

V. HISTORICAL ERRORS AND THEOLOGICAL EXTRAS

Pontius Pilate

As mentioned above, The Passion of the Christ closely follows the Gospels’ accounts as far as the anti-Semitism is concerned. But this also means that The Passion, like the Gospels, is not merely historically inaccurate [15], but is overtly and pointedly ahistorical. This is especially the case in the movie’s characterization of Pontius Pilate. Extra-biblical historical sources inform us that the Pilate of history was a bloodthirsty tyrant who was actually recalled from his post in Judea for being too forceful in putting down religious dissent and keeping the Judean populace under the yoke, and also for ordering the crucifixion of too many people. Pilate even managed to offend and alienate the Emperor Tiberius with his extreme ruthlessness. This is significant, because Tiberius himself had a reputation for overseeing mass murder, and he is infamous to this day for his statement, “Let them hate me, so long as they support my government” [16].

Barabbas

Most people are familiar with the passages in the Gospels that refer to the politically-conciliatory tradition, allegedly maintained by the Roman government, of releasing one prisoner every year at Passover as a way of keeping those “uppity Jews” from completely transforming their drunken religious revelry into an all-out uprising and insurrection. The Romans never did any such thing. This is a Gospel fiction (as is the part of the story in which Pilate “washes his hands” of Jesus’ crucifixion; this he never did, and certainly would never have either occasion or motivation to do even if a historical personage named Jesus was executed on his watch). In fact, Bible scholars and historians have not been able to make any sense of the Barabbas story. For one thing, the name does not even make any sense. “Barabbas ultimately derives from the Aramaic Bar-abbâ (בר-אבא), literally meaning “son of the father.” This appears to be just another of many Gospel contrivances. The Barabbas story, it should be mentioned, was the one and only bit of comic relief to be found in the entire Passion of the Christ movie – it is actually quite hilarious to see Barabbas (played by Pietro Sarubbi) strutting around the crowd upon being released and gloating in wild excitement over being let off the hook.

Claudia Procles

Gibson threw in a number of other miscellaneous bits of ahistorical embellishment in The Passion. At one point, Pilate’s wife Claudia Procles (played by Claudia Gerini) personally brings a handful of large linens to Jesus’ mother Mary and Mary Magdalene and joins the two of them in mopping up Jesus’ blood from the ground after his scourging. This particular scenario was invented by the stigmatic nun and mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich, whom we have mentioned above already, in the nineteenth century [17].

“That Old Serpent, Called the Devil and Satan…”

The appearance of Satan as a character in the movie is another very interesting spin that confirms the ahistorical and pro-mythological nature of the movie. Satan is here played by a woman (Rosalinda Celentano), who looks to the uninitiated viewer to be either a very effeminate man or a very butch woman. The physical appearance of Celentano’s Satan is indeed very gender-ambiguous, an effect that was enhanced by altering the actress’s voice (which she consciously made an effort to deepen) with a harmonizer to render the voice more metallic [18]. This gender-ambiguity applied to the Satan character holds underlying ideological significance; Catholic doctrine has traditionally taken an especially strict stance on gender roles, such that failure to fit into a well-defined gender category is condemned by the Catholic worldview as evil [19]. In fact, presenting Satan as an androgynous figure, whose closest approximation to any predefined gender is one of either effeminate male or butch female, may even have been a very subtle anti-homosexual commentary on particular gay marriage controversies current in the early 2000’s.

But subtle underlying politics aside, it was actually fascinating to visually experience the Devil as a presence throughout the movie, especially the scene near the end which has Satan screaming in rage from the pits of hell as a representation of the spiritual defeat he suffered when Jesus completed his self-sacrifice (on that note, the movie actually is worth seeing for the quality of its visual representations, if for nothing else).

Herod Antipas

I want here to point toward the movie’s portrayal of the Jewish King Herod Antipas (played by Luca De Dominicis) as a data point further supporting my thesis that The Passion has an underlying anti-gay message. Gibson has been accused of blatant homophobia ever since his 1995 movie Braveheart, which controversially depicted the Prince of Wales (who became King Edward II) as an effeminate homosexual whose male lover is thrown out of a high window by the prince’s father Edward I. This trend, if understated, continues in The Passion of the Christ, which clearly did not make any strides toward making the homophobia charges against Gibson go away. In The Passion, Herod is made up in a terrible wig and is depicted as one hell of a flamer. This characterization of Herod is taken from Anne Catherine Emmerich’s book of Passion visions, which describes him as a “luxuriant and effeminate prince” [20].

The Appearance of Jesus

Speaking of effeminate-looking characters, it is interesting to note that in Hollywood, Jesus is generally depicted as a fairly effeminate man. Very rarely is he butch, big or beefy (Willem Dafoe’s Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ is one of these rare exceptions, perhaps the only one). However, Jesus does have a beard in most every movie about him, probably to offset any unwanted impressions or interpretations from the viewing public.

But it appears I digress for the sake of segueing smoothly. My main point in commenting on the physical appearance of Jesus in a section about “Historical Errors and Theological Extras” is really to make the observation that the very fact that the Jesus Christ character actually does appear on screen as a physical person in the movie necessarily renders it a historically-embellished dramatization. This is because no record exists of what Jesus’ physical appearance might have been, whether he was a real historical figure or not. This seemingly straightforward observation is one I need to “flesh out” carefully (no pun intended):

Throughout history, it has been quite typical for passion plays to represent the Christ figure as being very European and even Anglo-Saxon in appearance. The “European Christ” is the most traditional rendering that originated, of course, with the Roman Catholic Church. It has remained a staple feature of most all passion plays for many centuries, and all the Hollywood portrayals of Jesus owe much to the Roman Catholic Church in this regard. There is hardly anything new about it.

The Passion of the Christ is certainly no exception and breaks no new ground in this area. There are indeed many white people in the movie. While actor Jim Caviezel in his role as Jesus looks somewhat Semitic, he does so only in the modern sense. In contrast, Jews in first century Palestine probably looked a specific way that was not achieved by the movie’s make-up artists. If Jesus existed historically, he would most likely appear to all eyes as a very typical Jewish peasant living in the Middle East at the time. Any attempt by dramatists to make the Jesus character stand out from the crowd or appear distinctive is thus highly inaccurate.

A common tactic that has often been used in passion plays throughout history (at least the plays that had some anti-Semitic bent) was to make Christ look almost Aryan, complete with blue eyes and beautifully-groomed blonde hair, as a point of contrast to the villainous and very Semitic-looking Jews. Such depictions belied either ignorance or apathy toward the fact that Jesus, assuming he existed, was himself a practicing Jew.

This prejudicial typecasting has a long history; even in paintings from a thousand years ago which depict crucifixion and other passion scenes show, we see a very Aryan Christ surrounded by people who are clearly made to appear very Jewish. And while some people will make more of it than others, there are indeed a lot of “hooked noses” so to speak among the shouting mobs in Passion of the Christ.

As a counterpoint, it is only fair that I come full circle and make certain concessions. As I pointed out already, Jesus’ physical appearance is not described anywhere in the Bible, and there is not even much detail to be found anywhere concerning his heritage. It is therefore not impossible that Jesus could have been white (Christians do believe that half of his genes came from God, which I presume can operate and manifest themselves however they want). But the fact of the matter is that even if we had good, solid rock-hard evidence that a man named Jesus Christ existed and that all the things claimed of him actually happened historically, no one knows what his appearance would have been. No one knows anything about Jesus Christ’s appearance, regardless of whether he is mythical or historical – and this includes the Nazarenes who believe they have special knowledge of Jesus’ hairdo.

The fact remains that virtually all visual representations of Jesus made throughout history were intended to serve the purposes of dramatic effect, not historical accuracy, and this is demonstrably true of Gibson’s movie (again, the entire 20-minute scourging scene in the movie is based on a single sentence in the Bible).

Judas Iscariot

Bible nerds who are bothered by the two opposing accounts we find in the New Testament of the manner in which Judas Iscariot dies may want very much to see The Passion of the Christ. The answer they are seeking, according to Gibson’s Gospel, is that Judas hangs himself, as related in Matthew 27:5: “And he [Judas] cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.” Gibson does not even attempt to harmonize this with the conflicting version found in Acts 1:16-19, which informs us that Judas threw himself off a cliff with the result that he “burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out” [21]. So thanks to Mel Gibson, we now know that the Acts passage is the one that is not divinely inspired.

However, given the over-the-top nature of the rest of the movie, I was actually a bit disappointed that the filmmakers opted for just a plain hanging, instead of the “human landmine” version where special effects would treat us the viewers to the spectacle of actor Luca Lionello literally exploding and spraying the screen. In fact, if it were up to me, I would definitely have chosen to use the variant version of Judas’s death preserved by the early church father Papias: “Judas walked about in this world a sad [literally translated ‘great’] example of impiety; for his body having swollen to such an extent that he could not pass where a chariot could pass easily, he was crushed by the chariot, so that his bowels gushed out [literally translated ‘were emptied out’]” [22].

Indeed, Gibson had a great many folkloric elements to choose from in portraying the character of Judas Iscariot. In fact, scholars are not even agreed on just how many legendary and mythical elements have found their way into the Judas cycles. A majority of scholars interpret the whole character of Judas, including the name itself, to be a metaphorical figure designed to symbolize the Jews as a whole [23]. The name “Iscariot” is thought by some scholars to be a Hellenized epithet identifying Judas as a member of the Sicarii (the plural form of the Latin word meaning “contract-killer” or “assassin”). The Sicarii, a band of Jewish Zealots, were one of many extremist rebel groups that existed at the time [24].

VI. CONCLUSION

Due to the copious amount of publicity and pre-release hype, The Passion of the Christ made $26.6 million on opening day. It pulled in $117.5 million in its first five days of release, making it the second-biggest five-day opening of all time (coming in behind 2003’s The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, which made a record $124 million in its first five days). Mel Gibson enjoyed a release screening before an audience of 3,000 for a movie that would have suffered an early death in art houses had it not been a movie about Jesus Christ. Not only is The Passion a foreign language film, it is a dead language film with subtitles, making it a movie accessible only to the literate. On top of this, the movie is hyper-violent and received an R-rating from the Motion Picture Association of America when it should have been given an NC-17 rating for its level of violence if the MPAA rating board had treated it impartially. Domestically, the film topped off at close to $371 million, half of which went directly into Gibson’s pocket.

All this goes to show that there is no better publicity for a movie than when great controversy surrounds it. But this is not necessarily an unfortunate fact when it comes to The Passion. In writing this lengthy negative review, my purpose is not to dissuade or prevent others from seeing this movie if they have not already. The movie is very interesting and culturally relevant, and every atheist should watch it. On top of this, I believe it actually works well as a potent antidote against conversion to Christianity for fence-sitting nonbelievers [25]. After all, the quote from the fundamentalist Christian reviewer in the epigraph at the opening of this essay must be indicative of something positive.

In the interest of being generous and balanced, I want to end on a conciliatory note. I wish to stress that I fully and completely support the efforts of any filmmaker in making any film they see fit to make. As a strong atheist as well as a strong supporter of freedom of speech and of expression, I will always come out foursquare against any movement that attempts either to inhibit a filmmaker from making a religiously-themed movie or to inhibit the release of a religious movie. I am passionate about artistic freedom, and I say more power to Gibson for managing to make off like a bandit with his Christploitation flick.

NOTES

1. Barbara Aho, “Mel Gibson’s ‘Passion of the Christ’: An International Hoax,” Watch Unto Prayer n.d. (last updated April 25, 2008), http://watch.pair.com/passion.html (accessed 13 June 2012).

2. Associated Press, “Role of Christ Lands Caviezel in Lion’s Den,” The Gadsden Times February 19, 2004, C1-C2.

3. William Cowper (1772), “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” in A Collection of Psalms and Hymns, from Various Authors: For the Use of Serious and Devout Christians of Every Denomination Eleventh Edition, ed. Richard Conyers (York: Thomas Wilson and Sons, High-Ousegate, 1824), p. 120-121.

4. KAKE News, “Woman Collapses During Showing of ‘The Passion of the Christ,’” KAKEland online Feb. 25, 2004, http://www.kake.com/home/headlines/653662.html (accessed 13 June 2012).

5. Elisha A. Hoffman and J.H. Tenney, eds., Spiritual Songs for Gospel Meetings and the Sunday School (Cleveland, OH: Barker & Smellie, 1878), Hymn # 15.

6. For my critical analysis of the violent and gory aesthetics of Christian hymnody, see Nathan Dickey, “Songs of Human Sacrifice: An Exploration of the Theme of Redemption in Christian Hymns,” The Journeyman Heretic (blog) 14 May 2010, http://journeymanheretic.blogspot.com/2010/05/songs-of-human-sacrifice-exploration-of.html (accessed 13 June 2012).

7. While Pontius Pilate himself did not control an appreciably large garrison of Roman soldiers, there was a very substantial garrison of Romans was maintained in Caesarea. This larger garrison had an established practice of bringing in reinforcements to Jerusalem every Passover, because that was a time when the Jewish populace tended to become particularly “uppity.” Thus, while Pilate’s political forces were sufficiently small enough that he sometimes had to placate others in charge with conflicting interests, the presence of this large Caesarean garrison of Roman soldiers completely invalidates any apologetic defense of Pilate’s actions, whether in reference to The Passion or to the Gospels.

8. Thomas Whittaker, The Origins of Christianity: with An Outline of Van Manen’s Analysis of the Pauline Literature Fourth Edition (London: Watts & Co., 1933), pp. 38-39.

9. Anti-Defamation League, “ADL Concerned Mel Gibson’s ‘Passion’ Could Fuel Anti-Semitism if Released in Present Form,” (ADL Press Release, August 11, 2003) http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ASUS_12/4291_12.htm (accessed 13 June 2012).

10. Peter J. Boyer, “The Jesus War: Mel Gibson’s Obsession,” The New Yorker September 15, 2003, 71.

11. However, it is an open question whether the movie’s demon-children sequence was drawn from Emmerich’s visions or just from Gibson’s own imagination. I quote from Emmerich’s narrative to show my point: “Then, but too late, anguish, despair, and remorse took possession of the mind of Judas. Satan instantly prompted him to fly. He fled as if a thousand furies were at his heel, and the bag which was hanging at his side struck him as he ran, and propelled him as a spur from hell; but he took it into his hand to prevent its blows . . . I again beheld him rushing to and fro like a madman in the valley of Hinnom: Satan was by his side in a hideous form, whispering in his ear, to endeavour to drive him to despair, all the curses which the prophets had hurled upon this valley, where the Jews formerly sacrificed their children to idols” (Anne Catherine Emmerich, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ [New York, NY: Cosimo Books, 1923], pp. 174, 175).

12. Allison Adato, “The Gospel of Mel,” People Vol. 61, No. 9 (March 8, 2004).

13. TheDenverChannel.com, "’Jews Killed Jesus’ Sign Causing Controversy," Denver News February 25, 2004, http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/2873395/detail.html (accessed 13 June 2012).

14. See Nathan Dickey, “The Unholy Bible: A Case Study in Obscene and Perverse Literature,” The Journeyman Heretic (blog) 25 March 2011, http://journeymanheretic.blogspot.com/2011/03/unholy-bible-case-study-in-obscene-and.html (accessed 13 June 2012).

15. Numerous minor historical inaccuracies find their way into the movie that many historians were quick to pick up on. To take just one example, the movie has Roman soldiers speaking a colloquial street Latin when (to be historically accurate) they should have been speaking Greek, the official language for administrative communication. See Dr. Andrea Berlin and Dr. Jodi Magness, “Two Archaeologists Comment on The Passion of the Christ," AIA Publications (March 2004). Posted at http://www.archaeological.org/pdfs/papers/Comments_on_The_Passion.pdf (accessed 13 June 2012).

16. W. Francis H. King, ed., Classical and Foreign Quotations: A Polyglot Manual of Historical and Literary Sayings, Noted Passages in Poetry and Prose Phrases, Proverbs, and Bons Mots Third Edition (London: J. Whitaker & Sons, Limited, 1904), p. 238.

17. Emmerich, The Dolorous Passion, p. 211.

18. Angela Baldassarre, “A Very Passionate Celentano,” Newswire March 21, 2004. Available from TandemNews.com online, http://www.tandemnews.com/printer.php?storyid=3772 (accessed 13 June 2012).

19. See, for example, Ronald L. Conte, Jr., “A Conservative Catholic Point of View,” Catholic Planet n.d. (last updated January 7, 2012), http://www.catholicplanet.com/articles/conservative1.htm (accessed 13 June 2012). Of course, this narrow view of gender roles has not been restricted only to Catholic Christians of late.

20. Emmerich, The Dolorous Passion, p. 195.

21. The fact that Gibson does not choose to harmonize the two different accounts of Judas’s death is quite surprising, since Emmerich, the stigmatic mystic upon whose passion visions the movie is based, did present an imaginative resolution to the discrepancy: “Overcome by despair Judas tore off his girdle, and hung himself on a tree which grew in a crevice of the rock, and after death his body burst asunder, and his bowels were scattered around” (Emmerich, The Dolorous Passion, p. 176).

22. Fragments of Papias, Fragment III, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of The Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, Volume I – The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenæus (American Reprint of the [1885] Edinburgh Edition), eds. Rev. Alexander Roberts, Sir James Donaldson and Arthur Cleveland Coxe (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1950-), p. 153.

23. Christianity’s depiction of Judas as a treacherous betrayer stems primarily from a deeply-rooted anti-Semitism. The English word “Jew” is derived from the Latin word Iudaeus. This root word in turn is very similar to the Greek Ιουδαίος (Ioudaios), usually translated to mean “Judaean.” In the Gospel of John, it is very possible and even highly probable that either the original writer or a later redactor/editor attempted to go out of his way to construct a parallel between Judas, Judaea, and the Judaeans (or Jews) in 6:70-71. This would strongly suggest that the similarity between the name “Judas” and the word for “Jew” in the various European languages has been instrumental in facilitating and encouraging anti-Semitism among the orthodox branches of Christianity. See Hyam Maccoby, Antisemitism and Modernity: Innovation and Continuity (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 14.

24. Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 179.

25. I argued that a very similar “conversion antidote” case can be made for the massively popular Christian end-times fiction series Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. See Nathan Dickey, “The Subcultural Apocalypse: A Critical Analysis of the ‘Left Behind' Series,’” The Journeyman Heretic (blog) 14 June 2011, http://journeymanheretic.blogspot.com/2011/06/subcultural-apocalypse-critical.html (accessed 13 June 2012).

Religion in American Popular Culture (Part 4): Christian Novels

2012-06-10T15:26:00.002-07:00

I shall become your apostle whether you like it or not. I shall construct you and your life and your teachings and your crucifixion and resurrection just as I wish [1].

In 1678, Reformed Baptist preacher John Bunyan published his famous allegorical work The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, a work which, despite its sectarian Protestant overtones, has nevertheless captivated readers across many wide-ranging branches of Christian denominations. One of the earliest known examples of the Christian Novel, Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegorical narrative illustrating through metaphor many aspects of the religious life of devotion (in essence a novelizing or dramatization of the New Testament epistles) by way of the story of Christian, an Everyman character who embarks on a perilous journey from his hometown, the City of Destruction, to the Celestial City where he seeks the culmination of the salvation and escape from judgment he found along the way. The narrative is notable for the way it takes abstract theological doctrines and issues and concretizes them for the reader, making abstract concepts more real by turning them into people and obstacles that the protagonist encounters within the confines of the secondary world. The story is related in the form of a dream experienced by a nameless wanderer who makes a brief appearance at the very beginning: “As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep, and as I slept I dreamed a dream [2].”

This allegorizing technique was used by the medievalist and novelist C.S. Lewis in his famous series of novels The Chronicles of Narnia [3], which followed in the tradition that was in many ways pioneered by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, illustrating key religious and theological concepts and teachings by way of creative storytelling whose plotlines, themes and characters parallel a number of items of Christian faith. Prior to Pilgrim’s Progress, the technique was utilized by poets rather than novelists, prominent instances being Dante’s Divine Comedy (1321) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)[4]. Both these epic poems dramatized, with creative license, doctrines relating to the afterlife (prime fodder for satiating peoples’ imaginations with added details) and the Fall of Adam and Eve, respectively [5].

The distinctive art form known as the Christian Novel represents the religious devotee’s desire to “dream,” to cognitively move beyond the “wilderness of this world” to experience a fuller and more complete narrative that goes beyond the familiar texts of canon scripture and satisfies gaps left in the imagination by that familiar canon. The “dream” of Bunyan can thus be viewed as a metaphor for religious escapism through the medium of fiction, an escapism for which there is a fine line between enhancement of a religious worldview and what many might lampoon as “spiritual pornography [6].” In this sense Dante’s Divine Comedy was not much different from Boccaccio’s bawdy Decameron.

The enhancement of traditional, over-familiar faith texts that religious fiction novels offer is analogous to the particular kind of enhancement known as etiology. Deriving from the Greek word aitiologia (“giving a reason for”), etiology refers to the study of why things occur, including the reasons underlying why things are as they are and behave as they do. For example, an etiological myth seeks to explain the rationale for names of places or peoples, and/or to create a mythic history for those places and peoples [7]. In other words, etiological supplements provide fodder for filling in gaps in knowledge and for satisfying conceptual difficulties in the process of imagination. A great deal of fan fiction falls easily into the category of etiological supplements. And of course, Christianity and the Bible hold a massive fan fiction base larger than any others combined (especially in America), and in fact have for centuries.

Dimestore Apocalypses

The more enigmatic and mysterious a particular portion of Scripture comes across, the more likely it is to receive fan fiction treatment in the interests of fleshing out tantalizing details not disclosed in canonical scripture. This explains the great popularity and success of Christian novels that deal with the “end-times” as described by the major prophetic books of the Bible, such as Daniel and Revelation. Take, for example, the Christian concept of the Antichrist, a figure who is mentioned in only one verse in the whole Bible (I John 2:18), but who nevertheless has utterly fascinated believers and nonbelievers alike for the last two thousand years, likely due to the equation of “Antichrist” to the “Beast” in Revelation and the “Man of Perdition” in Daniel. As religious historian Bernard McGinn remarks, “What is most significant about Antichrist’s appearance in literature has been the attempts to probe the motivation (and at times even the psychology) behind ultimate human evil . . . It is probably no accident that novels and novellas, where motivation and character development are so important, display the most interesting Antichrists [8].” A great deal of these fictional accounts, certainly the ones we are primarily concerned with here, are the brainchild of religious believers seeking to present a doctrine they view as theologically accurate in a compelling, contemporary way which will not only titillate believing readers, but also draw in potential converts who would not normally pick up a Bible or a Bible commentary.

The wave of Christian end-times novels that have flowed into the Christian subculture for the last fifty years serve a dual function: they are a way of making sense out of the failing of Jesus to return, and they feed off the certainty that he is still coming back. What believing connoisseurs of these novels are actually doing is the former. What they say they are doing is the latter. What seems to be clear upon reflection is that the function of these novels and movies about the Christian end of the world is to psychologically fill in glaring gaps; according to the beliefs which fundamentalists have hammered home to them in church every week, the Second Coming ought to be happening at any time now. In fact, it should have happened before now. Needless to say, it is not happening. So what is the next step? In their imagination, they are able to visualize the apocalypse happening, and this largely suffices. The imagination serves to soften and soothe the wound of disappointed expectation.

A striking example of this psychological function is seen on the back-cover blurb summary of evangelist Ernest W. Angley’s 1950 novel Raptured, a novel which is clearly and unambiguously fantastical in nature: “With God’s help, determine for yourself whether the days of rapture are fact or fairy tale! Read about real people, in real situations, in this remarkable, inspiring book [9].” One finds this technique again with Jim Grant’s novelization of the 1972 evangelical horror film A Thief in the Night: “After reading A Thief in the Night, there is only one question you need to answer: Whose place would I want to be in? – Patty’s or Jim’s?”[10] By way of background, Patty in this story is the hapless character who, due to her lack of salvation, “had discovered too late that the loving God, who had allowed the world to go on as He had just so that as many as would could come to Him, had finally called a halt and moved into the next phase. She had discovered that the straight way was the only way. And now she was straight in a crooked world [11].” This indulgence in blurring the lines between reality and fantasy is seen to an even greater extent in Salem Kirban’s 1970 novel 666, a novel in which photographs and actual newspaper clippings are interspersed throughout the text to lend it a subliminal realism. In the introduction to his novel, Kirban writes, “This book . . . is a novel. Therefore much of it is fiction. However, it is important to note that very much of it is also FACT [12].”

There have been enough failed predictions within most adults’ lifetimes that many of them must have experienced disappointment, but the power of fiction is such that it eases the frustration. Seeing the vicissitudes of the Tribulation play out on the page via the imagination may not be as good or satisfying as the real thing, but wounds of disappointment and yearning are salved nonetheless.

“The secularization of the sacred apocalyptic myths,” writes Conrad Ostwalt “has been completed in Left Behind [13].” The Left Behind series of novels, conceived in the early 1990s by evangelist Tim LaHaye and written by Jerry B. Jenkins, is arguably the most popular and influential set of Christian novels of the last hundred years [14]. Called “The great Christian apocalypse of our day” by Bible scholar Robert M. Price [15], the Left Behind series represents the culmination of a long, struggling (often awkwardly-handled) tradition among Christian writers to dramatize or novelize the apocalypse. Total sales of the books have surpassed 65 million copies, and since the release of the first book in 1995 [16], the venture has spawned a multimedia franchise that includes three movie adaptations (all starring popular evangelist Kirk Cameron), a spin-off series aimed at younger readers entitled Left Behind: The Kids, comic books based on the novels, three video games, and radio dramas that in many ways mimics George Orwell’s famous War of the Worlds radio drama.

The wild popularity of the series demonstrates that evangelical culture has become extremely proficient and competent in adopting secular standards to improve the Christian message. This is made all the more fascinating when one considers the extremely literalist standpoint with regard to theological doctrine that the authors of Left Behind assert and from which the storyline and concept is derived. As Robert Dreyfuss notes, “[LaHaye’s] books depict a fantastical, fictional version of what he and his followers think is in store for the human race . . . If the Bible (Revelation 9:1-11) says that billions of six-inch long scorpionlike monsters with the heads of men, ‘flowing hair like that of women’ and the teeth of lions, wearing crowns and helmets, will swarm across the globe gnawing on unbelievers – well, that’s exactly what LaHaye says will happen [17].”

Secular, mass-market novels in the horror genre that borrow elements from religious apocalypses adopt an ostensibly different approach than the material written primarily for Bible believers. For one thing, secular treatments of biblical themes in general display more flexibility, more comfort and ease at using creative and artistic license with sacred texts. The Omen series of novels and films, which appeared in the 1970s and marked the beginning of a tidal wave of secular novels that incorporated religious end-times elements, is a great example of this. Stephen King’s apocalyptic blockbuster The Stand (1978; revised, restored, expanded, 1991) was another significant contribution to this trend, one of the best examples of highly selective adaptation of scripture.

Interestingly enough, however, an analysis of these secular mainstream novels finds that there is not as great a divide between them and their more religiously-oriented counterparts as one might initially expect. For example, The Omen was originally conceived by evangelical Robert Boyd Munger, who intended the film to serve as an evangelistic scare. As Bible scholar Robert M. Price points out, “The producers even took on Hal Lindsey as a consultant, but he dropped out when he saw the project going off in what he deemed unscriptural directions [18].” Hal Lindsey, of course, is the infamous author of The Late Great Planet Earth , the single bestselling title of the 1970s [19]; his evangelical influence on the first stages of the film’s production is retained in a few isolated but still eye-raising bits of dialogues. For instance, in David Seltzer’s novelization of the screenplay, a Catholic priest frantically pleads with Ambassador Thorn, the story’s main protagonist and unwitting abettor of the child who will become the future Antichrist: “You must accept Christ as your Saviour. You must accept him now [20].” However, there exists a decidedly anti-Catholic bent among many Christian end-times prophesiers, and Lindsey is no exception. Catholics, of course, are portrayed as heroes in The Omen series. Thus, while one can still detect some evangelical influence, it is for the most part drowned out in the final product.

Another peculiarity worth pointing out is the fact that that in Gordon McGill’s novel version of The Final Conflict (the third installment in the series), Jesus is reborn just as the evil Antichrist character Damien Thorn expected and tried to plan for by attempting to kill every infant boy in Britain. Damien cannot get to his target, however, because Jesus is born without any birth records among Gypsies living in the countryside [21]. In the movie version of The Final Conflict, this premise is changed completely. As it turns out, Jesus returns miraculously to earth as an adult, just as the fundamentalists expect. It is rather apparent that an individual or group exerted religiously-motivated pressure on the screenwriter to alter the originally-planned ending.

The Stand by Stephen King is an example of an apocalyptic novel that delivers to readers real, genuine suspense. Unlike in LaHaye’s series, in which every jot and tittle of the Book of Revelation is dramatized, the characters here do not immediately understand what is happening to the world. Some only suspect that what is described in Revelation might be playing out, but they are not played out blow-by-blow, heightening the mystery:

The Antichrist, that’s what I think. We’re living out the Book of Revelation right in our own time . . . how can you doubt it? “And the seven vials were opened . . .” Sure sounds like the superflu to me.
Ah, balls, people said Hitler was the Antichrist [22].

By contrast, there is no real suspense element at work in LaHaye’s series, because he has simply mapped the biblical apocalypse out literally and invited his readers to grab their proverbial popcorn and watch it come to life. Additionally, because LaHaye and Jenkins attempt to track the Bible as accurately as they imagine the Bible is guiding them to, it becomes easier for their audience to accept their narrative in a literal way, subconsciously believing in its truth based on the Bible’s teaching that what they read is how events are going to unfold, while consciously recognizing the novels as fiction. This process of assimilation is prodded on by the authors’ incorporation of constant obtrusive preaching in the form of various characters explicating to each other exactly how they know what is in store for them based on their readings of biblical prophecy.

Of course, fundamentalist Christians are the primary audience LaHaye and Jenkins have in mind, but no doubt they are also interested in attempting to save the unconverted through the vehicle of a bestselling fiction novel series. The Left Behind series ostensibly serves the same intended function of Pastor Rick Warren’s massively popular book The Purpose-Driven Life [23]. Both were written for fundamentalist audiences for whom the dogma contained in both must have been familiar territory, and yet The Purpose-Driven Life was billed and heavily advertised as a book filled with great new insights, new and profound epiphanies that could be effectively employed as a convincing evangelistic tract. The same mindset underlined the emergence of the Left Behind franchise, which has developed into a full-blown example of pop culture “Wal-Mart evangelism” that seeks to scare general fiction readers into salvation in the checkout aisle.

NOTES

1. Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1960), 478.

2. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; reprint ed., New York: Signet Classics, 2002), 11.

3. C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: A Story for Children (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950); Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1951); The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952); The Silver Chair (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1953); The Horse and His Boy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1954); The Magician’s Nephew (London: The Bodley Head, 1955); The Last Battle (London: The Bodley Head, 1956).

4. John Milton, Paradise Lost & Paradise Regained (1667, 1671; reprint ed., New York: Signet Classics, 2001); Dante Alighieri (1321), The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso, trans. John Ciardi (New York: New American Library, 2003).

5. Modern Christian writers, in addition to writing novels, have also imitated the epic poem genre, most notably Calvin Miller’s blank-verse epic poem The Singer (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1975), an allegory of the life of Christ.

6. For example, see Fred Clark, “L.B.: Explicit Content,” The Slacktivist (blog) 6 June 2005. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2005/06/06/lb-explicit-content/ (accessed 10 June 2012).

7. See Hermann Gunkel, The Legends of Genesis: The Biblical Saga & History, trans. W.H. Carruth (1901; reprint ed., New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 25.

8. Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), 263. See also Nathan Dickey, “The Literate Antichrist: A Dilemma for Christian Eschatology,” The Journeyman Heretic (blog) 22 March 2011. http://journeymanheretic.blogspot.com/2011/03/literate-antichrist-dilemma-for.html (accessed 10 June 2012).

9. Ernest W. Angley, Raptured: A Novel on the Second Coming of the Lord (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1950), back cover blurb.

10. Jim Grant, A Thief in the Night (Chicago: Moody Press, 1974), back cover blurb.

11. Ibid., pp. 83-84.

12. Salem Kirban, 666 (Chattanooga, TN: AMG Publishers, 1970), 11.

13. Conrad Ostwalt, Secular Steeples: Popular Culture and the Religious Imagination (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), 96.

14. For my critical analysis of the series, see Nathan Dickey, "The Subcultural Apocalypse: A Critical Analysis of the 'Left Behind' Series," The Journeyman Heretic (blog) 14 June 2011. http://journeymanheretic.blogspot.com/2011/06/subcultural-apocalypse-critical.html (accessed 10 June 2012).

15. Robert M. Price, The Paperback Apocalypse: How the Christian Church Was Left Behind (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 271.

16. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1995).

17. Robert Dreyfuss, “Reverend Doomsday,” Rolling Stone 19 January 2004, 45.

18. Price, The Paperback Apocalypse, 241.

19. Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970).

20. David Seltzer, The Omen (New York: New American Library, 1976), 60.

21. Gordon McGill, The Final Conflict (New York: New American Library, 1980).

22. Stephen King, The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition (New York: Signet, 1991), 888.

23. Richard Warren, The Purpose-Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002).

Religion in American Popular Culture (Part 3): Contemporary Christian Music

2012-06-07T06:15:00.000-07:00

Coming into contact with outer entities / We could entertain each one with our theosophy ~ Blondie [1]

In 1974, Christian music composer and singer Ken Medema presented a song on his now-rare album Son Shiny Day that cleverly and subtly encapsulated the burgeoning new trends and inroads the Evangelical counterculture was creating in the entertainment industry. The lyrics of the song, entitled “You Can’t Go Back,” tells an imaginative, high-concept story that illustrates the importance and necessity of moving beyond the traditional, tried-and-true musical forms that conservative religion was accustomed to:

High in the towers of Ecclesia they heard it
They heard the wind blowing hard across the land
They saw the fire, it was burning down the statues
They tried to stop it but they did not understand
They sat in silence as they saw the disillusion
They looked for safety but safety wasn’t found
Within the walls of the fortress was confusion
Their mighty castles being burned down to the ground
I said you can’t go back
To the music of yesterday
You can’t go back
To the music of yesterday
You got to stop hiding
And you got to stop running away [2]

Despite its use of metaphor and allegory, the words of this song speak all too clearly about the growing recognition among young evangelical musicians in the early 1970s that they had the potential to express their faith in a far more culturally-relevant way than had hitherto been explored. This urge to break the barriers between sacred and profane was largely catalyzed by the general zeitgeist created by the music of the 1960s, a time when the Top 40 charts featured the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Henry Mancini, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Led Zeppelin. The war in Vietnam was raging, and many people, particularly college students, were much more exercised and angry about the war than their counterparts are in our day about the war in Iraq. Intense protests took place that created a flood of “protest music,” a completely new musical paradigm.

The contemporary Christian music subculture emerged almost seamlessly from this new musical paradigm from among members of the significant fraction known as the “Jesus Movement” that branched off from the hippie counterculture [3]. Most of the young people who came into the Jesus Movement upon their conversion to southern California-style Christianity were disillusioned with the culture they once called home, finding that “free love” was often not free, and perhaps not even love. Calvary Chapel, which gained a reputation as a radical, edgy church at the time for allowing its congregants to attend services in jeans and barefoot, drew them in with offers of “real love” through Jesus [4]. The new religious music style they gave birth to “began as a fledgling venture, with members of the youthful Jesus Movement using existing rock and folk music to communicate the gospel message to alienated youth of the Vietnam era [5].” Larry Norman, whose 1969 debut album Upon This Rock is widely considered to be the very first Christian rock album ever made, was a hippie who came to Christ. Barry McGuire, a former protest singer famous for his song “Eve of Destruction” (one of the prototype protest songs of the 1960s) became a Christian believer as a result of the Jesus Movement. He went on to create a Christian album entitled Seeds, released by Billy Ray Hearn’s Christian label Myrrh Records.

Given the emotionally-manipulative nature of music, it is no surprise that music was the major force that drew in disillusioned youth out of the hippie movement. When combined with religious themes and imagery, music becomes an especially potent tool for conversion and then subsequently for reinforcing faith through the emotional responses it elicits. Robert M. Price, a former evangelical and current Bible scholar, made an especially revealing comment on the power of contemporary Christian music on his Bible Geek podcast:

When I think back on the period in which being a born-again evangelical was the most exciting for me (around 1976), I remember how I was listening to “Contemporary Christian Music” like Love Song, Chuck Girard, Danny Taylor, Randy Matthews, The 2nd Chapter of Acts, Larry Norman, and others. This wasn’t merely compatible with spirituality. I realized later that this was my spirituality. Having these songs (and what they meant) running through my head all the time in the background really did paint the canvas of my thinking and feeling all the time . . . this really was the lifeblood of my Christian consciousness. Yeah, I was reading a lot of apologetics and reading the Bible and trying to pray and all of that. But more than anything else, I found that this Christian music was the breathable atmosphere of spirituality for me. I imagine Christians of an earlier generation had some of the great hymns of the faith running through their minds in the same way [6].

The “music of yesterday” mentioned in Ken Medema’s song is a reference to these “great hymns of the faith” that ran through the minds of earlier generations of believers. Even classical and traditional church music had an aggressive side stemming from its emotionally-manipulative power. “[H]ymn-singing is, as a matter of fact, the most insistent and clamorous of all the ways in which the Christian faith and worship makes impact on the world around it . . . You can close your eyes; you can stay away from the church and so neither taste nor see that the Lord is good. But you cannot close your ears, and if a group of Christian people chose to sing a hymn under your windows you are defenceless [7].” When one spoke of “Christian music” in the late 1960s and early Seventies, one immediately thought of inspirational choir music or classic hymns, material that was more in the vein of a George Beverly Shea type of artist at a Billy Graham Crusade. In the early Seventies, people found the utterly novel concept of “Christian rock” utterly fascinating.

But even the classical, traditional and hymnological “music of yesterday” was not elevated from the use of appropriation of popular culture for religious ends. “With the Gospel Hymns came a more popular tone and greater effort to reach the man in the street; and out of the social forces at work a little later a demand for a hymnody specially adapted to the needs of the new age [8].” To take a strong example, Charles Wesley, a prominent figure in the Methodist movement of the 18th century, wrote about 6,500 hymns during his lifetime “on hundreds of Scripture texts and on every conceivable phase of Christian experience and Methodist [9],” the tune of most of them being lifted directly from a great number of popular tunes current at that time. This was mainly due to the fact that Wesley lacked any formal musical training and ability.

Compare the pop-culture appropriations of Charles Wesley over 200 years ago to the modern Christian rock band ApologetiX, a parody group that rewrites the popular secular songs they cover with explicitly Christian lyrics. Within their lyrical canon, Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock’n’Roll” becomes “I Love Apostle Paul” (“I love Apostle Paul / He put a lotta lines in the Good Book baby / I love Apostle Paul / From Romans into Philemon yes indeed” 10). Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me” becomes “Learn Some Deuteronomy” (“Learn some Deuteronomy – can you name those laws / Learn from Deuteronomy – c'mon try because / Learn your Deuteronomy – you ain't good enough / God's Law – is tricky to keep – born again you must be, yeah” 11). Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” is transformed into “Smooth Grandmama,” a pious elderly woman who “karaokes to old tapes of Sandi Patty” and proselytizes the Christian faith to her grandson [12]. Even Eminem’s “Slim Shady” alter ego is given a pious reworking:

I've sinned greatly, but Christ's for real, baby
It's a wonder He saved me and just didn't hate me
So won't you tell Him "Save me," please stand up, please stand up, please stand up
Yes, I've been crazy, yes, I've been real shady
Always wanted Him to save me, but just didn't say it
So won't you tell Him "Save me," please stand up, please stand up, please stand up [13].

Music serves as an intertextual narrative to our lives, and when the story it serves as an enriching soundtrack for is a religious one, the modernized results can be very surprising and often humorous. But what about enriching or enhancing text itself?

NOTES

1. Blondie, “(I Am Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear,” from Plastic Letters (Chrysalis Records, 1978).

2. Ken Medema, “You Can’t Go Back,” from Son Shiny Day (Word Records, 1974). This song predates a much more well-known song by the progressive rock band Rush, which dealt with a very similar story theme involving a freethinking individual living in a future dystopian totalitarian society, who rediscovers the long-lost guitar and presents the newfound musical form to the totalitarian authorities in the hopes of ushering in a new musical paradigm (“I can’t wait to share this new wonder / The people will all see its light / Let them all make their own music / The priests praise my name on this night” (Rush, “2112,” from 2112 (Mercury Records, 1976).

3. William D. Romanowski, “Contemporary Christian Music: The Business of Music Ministry,” in Quentin J. Schultze, ed., American Evangelicals and the Mass Media (Grand Rapids, MI: Acadamie Books/Zondervan, 1990), 143-169.

4. As the Christian rock band dc Talk put it in one of their hit songs, “The word ‘love,’ well it was once overused / Back in the 70s the word was abused / But I refused to let love be diluted / We can’t allow physical lust to intrude it” (“Say the Words,” from Free At Last [ForeFront Records, 1992]).

5. William D. Romanowski, “Evangelicals and Popular Music: The Contemporary Christian Music Industry,” in Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan, eds., Religion and Popular Culture in America (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 105.

6. Robert M. Price, “December 23,” The Bible Geek Podcast 23 Dec. 2010 (TalkShoe Recordings [http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-20430/TS-431848.mp3], accessed 4 June 2012), 14:26 - 16:14.

7. Erik Routley, B.D., D.Phil., Hymns and Human Life (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952), 2-3.

8. Benjamin Brawley, History of the English Hymn (New York: The Abingdon Press, 1932), 234.

9. Albert Edward Bailey, The Gospel in Hymns: Backgrounds and Interpretations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), 84.

10. ApologetiX, “I Love Apostle Paul,” from Spoofernatural (Parodudes Records, 2001).

11. ApologetiX, “Learn Some Deuteronomy,” Spoofernatural.

12. ApologetiX, “Smooth Grandmama,” from Grace Period (Parodudes Records, 2006).

13. ApologetiX, “The Real Sin Savior,” from Keep the Change (Parodudes Records, 2001).

Religion in American Popular Culture (Part 2): Secular vs. Religious Use of Mass Media

2012-06-03T22:12:00.001-07:00

Religion in America, especially Christianity, has sought to transcend the superficiality of merely riding on the waves of popular culture and picking up its signals. Hence, a very distinct subculture of religious popular culture has emerged over the course of the last century, a subculture whose distinctiveness from secular counterparts in literature, music, film, radio and the press arises from religious adherents’ desire to conform to the scriptural teaching of being “in the world but not of the world.” As R. Laurence Moore observes, “To halt what they [clerics] viewed as a decline in moral and religious seriousness, they descended into the marketplace to erect some competition . . . In their own churches and in forums outside the regular market, they invented, and used as enticements, Christian forms of fun [1].” But Christian forms of popular culture have evolved into something much more than merely a pious imitation of the secular world for those who want a similar escapist experience without the “corrupting” influence (although, as we will see, that is indeed a significant aspect to study). It has also become an exercise in seeking out and maintaining relevance to the larger outside community. The message coming from culture-savvy ministers of religion, says Conrad Ostwalt, is hard to mistake: “[I]n order to grow, in order to reach a lost world, they must address the existential concerns of a secular society by adopting its language and customs to appear relevant to such a society [2].” The result has been the transformation of American religion into a marketplace commodity on the cultural shelves. Hence, one can today walk into a major bookstore chain or music store and find a special “Christian Fiction” section set apart from general fiction, and “Contemporary Christian Music” set apart from the sections of general music genres any one Christian artist or band might fit into. Then of course there are many store chains which are billed as specifically Christian, in which one can find literature, music, movies and recreational spaces and events that have found a home in this sequestered subcultural space.

The irony is that this subculture has created an environment whose effects, for those participating within its confines, is not qualitatively different from those of the larger secular media. Much of religion’s original meaning and context is lost in transmission to popularized vernacular mediums, and the process of assimilation and interpretation by its consumers is equivalent to that occurring in the larger secular media world, the only difference being that the religious subculture is a specialized, custom-made model, a portrait in miniature of its more diversified and universal parent.

Of course, religious themes and references are everywhere to be found in secular popular culture as well, and comparing secular uses of religious ideas to those within subcultures explicitly marketed as religious yields a number of highly interesting insights to the culturally-aware critic. The primary difference is often one of nuance and subtlety versus a straightforward rendering that is self-evident in its second-handedness and in its creative appropriations. Secular culture is replete with unspoken homages to religious themes. The figure of Christ, for example, is an “archetype [that] assumes innumerable dramatic forms [3].” Motifs and themes that reflect religious imagery and ideas, when utilized creatively by secular culture, very often assume universalistic characteristics. As Moseley remarks, “The correlative of Christ is the something through which the Western writer frequently gets at everything [4].” Countercultures, on the other hand, by their very nature take the elements of whatever they are reacting to and bring them to the forefront. In the case of the religious counterculture in America, this process is especially noticeable. In many cases it is a process of reclaiming, as evangelists who have a finger on the pulse of popular culture take the universal aspects that secular society has recognized and found compelling and convert these aspects into narrowly-construed and specialized art forms that mimic and imitate secular narratives that have seen huge success. Witness, for instance, Christian novelist Ted Dekker’s The Circle series, a sci-fi/fantasy epic that purports to be a more Christianized version of the immensely influential Matrix trilogy of movies [5]. Or take a look at Tim LaHaye’s Babylon Rising fiction series [6], which basically asks and fleshes out the question, “What if Indiana Jones was a devout Christian?”

Examples of such imitation in the interests of providing a more “virtuous” alternative are everywhere to be found. One Christian organization has created “JesusWeen,” an outreach that offers a more pious alternative way for people of faith to celebrate Halloween [7]. In Orlando, Florida, a Christian-targeted theme park called “The Holy Land Experience” recreates the sights and sounds of ancient Jerusalem, including replicas of famous biblical scenes and live reenactments of the Passion ordeal of Christ. In the category of “Christ-honoring products,” the Christian cartoon series Veggie Tales achieved success partly as a result of Disney boycotts [8], and videos featuring Bibleman, an evangelical action hero who quotes Scripture as he battles evildoers and is protected by a literal “helmet of salvation” and “breastplate of righteousness,” present a pious alternative to heroes like Superman or Batman (who display more humanistic values) while also incorporating video game tropes and popular music [9]. The secular DC Comics’ series Infinite Crisis has been imitated by Archangels: The Saga, a comic book series dealing with spiritual warfare in which warrior angel superheroes seek help from a superior power. For Christian teens who take offense at raunchy and irreverent teen comedies such as Road Trip and American Pie, director Eric Hannah offered a more wholesome alternative with 2001’s Extreme Days, a road-trip comedy about five college students who manage to live morally-upright lives but still be hip and cool.

These trends extend even to the text of the Bible itself. Most people are aware of new Bible translations such as The Living Bible, The Way and The Message which rewrite the Bible in completely modern language and vernacular, but a relatively new phenomenon in the Christian publishing industry is Transit Books’ Revolve: The Complete New Testament [10], billed as the first Bible designed to look just like a teenage fashion magazine for girls, and Refuel: The Complete New Testament [11], the same concept as Revolve only this time with teenage boys as the target audience. There is even Metal Bible on the market, a Bible edition specially designed and geared for fans of heavy metal. The publishing company responsible for this product, Bible for the Nations, has also released many other Bible editions, including a Biker Bible, Trucker Bible and Football Bible.

NOTES

1. R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 268.

2. Conrad Ostwalt, Secular Steeples: Popular Culture and the Religious Imagination (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003), 60.

3. Edwin M. Moseley, Pseudonyms of Christ in the Modern Novel: Motifs and Methods (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), 34.

4. Ibid., p. 35.

5. Ted Dekker, Black (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2004); Red (Nasville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2004); White (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2004); Green (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2009).

6. Tim LaHaye and Greg Dinallo, Babylon Rising (New York: Bantam Dell, 2003); Tim LaHaye and Bob Phillips, Babylon Rising: The Secret on Ararat (New York: Bantam Dell, 2004); LaHaye and Phillips, Babylon Rising: The Europa Conspiracy (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005); LaHaye and Phillips, Babylon Rising: The Edge of Darkness (New York: Bantam Dell, 2006).

7. Sonia Van Gilder Cooke, “The Latest Christian Halloween Protest: JesusWeen,” Time NewsFeed 10 October 2011. http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/10/10/the-latest-christian-halloween-protest-jesusween/ (accessed 3 June 2012).

8. Hillary Warren, There’s Never Been a Show Like Veggie Tales: Sacred Messages in a Secular Market (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2005).

9. Richard W. Santana and Gregory Erickson, Religion and Popular Culture: Rescripting the Sacred (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2008), 12.

10. Thomas Nelson, Inc., Revolve: The Complete New Testament (Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 2003).

11. Thomas Nelson, Inc., Refuel: The Complete New Testament (Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 2004).

12. Johannes Jonsson, coord., Metal Bible English Version (Howell, MI: Starve The Flesh, 2011). A preview of this product can be viewed at http://bible-for-the-nations.com/index.php?option=com_flippingbook&view=book&id=33&page=1&Itemid=472&lang=sv.

Religion in American Popular Culture (Part 1): Introduction

2012-06-01T20:12:00.000-07:00

One of the most interesting ironies of our time is the fact that, despite the proliferation of commercialized religion in retail store chains labeled as explicitly Christian and in megachurches, very few of the pious consumers of religiously-based popular culture have considered the “what-if” question of how Jesus himself (assuming he existed as a real historical figure) would respond upon walking into one of these Christian retail outlets. This question was recently explored by way of a humorous experiment filmed in a short online video by Phil Mason, a popular video blogger personality and an outspoken atheist who goes by the handle “Thunderf00t” on YouTube.com. In the video, entitled “Jesus Christ and the House of Merchandise,” Mason enters a Family Christian Bookstore outlet dressed as Jesus Christ. After briefly perusing the merchandise on sale, he walks up to the woman at the counter. After some humorous small talk, Mason softly exclaims, “I can’t but help feel that I remember something about ‘make not my house an house of merchandise.’ Do you not recall something like that?” After a brief, awkward pause, he continues, “I think a guy who you might have heard might have said it once or twice [1]."

The seeming contradiction in terms noted by satirists like Thunderf00t and many others, a contradiction evoked by witnessing a religion like Christianity immerse itself in the consumer’s world of mass media and “profane” popular culture, is not so much an inconsistency on religion’s part as it is an adaptation to a rapidly-changing world. One might argue it is even an adaptation sanctioned by sacred writ itself. After all, what better way to “Go . . . and teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19a) than to avail oneself of the latest in cutting-edge communication technologies? What better way to be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16) than to be culturally aware and savvy and to adopt and appropriate the trends that succeed in popular culture, especially when “To the pure all things are pure” (Titus 1:15)? Speaking of doves, “A sizable portion of the Protestant evangelical community,” writes R. Laurence Moore, “has made its peace with commercial culture . . . If that requires arranging church services to accommodate televised sports on Sunday, building Christian massage parlors and nightclubs atop space needles, or equipping churches with skating rinks and bowling alleys, then so be it [2].”

This merging of religion with a popular culture and mass media mentality is not a recent social phenomenon. It has a rich and multi-layered history behind it. The historical legacy of American revivalism, for example, has testified to the fact that “American Protestantism has always had a dynamic edge that vigorously adapted the gospel message to the common folk of the day [3].” Revivalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was instrumental in shoving American religion into the cultural marketplace; in the eighteenth century, evangelist George Whitefield’s oratorical talents and persuasive, charismatic rhetoric were largely responsible for triggering the Great Awakening. In fact, Whitefield’s critics in his day attacked him with the same points they leveled against actors, and much of what they said and wrote of Whitefield could seamlessly be transposed in our day and age to refer to televangelists. “Whitefield was turning preaching into a performance, a performance as carefully timed and calculated as one by his famous contemporary David Garrick . . . His religious presentations transformed church services into entertainment, and the money paid for the spectacle went to enrich Whitefield [4].” Whitefield was instrumental in creating a new paradigm of exploration for the art of proselytization, leading Walt Whitman in the 1830s to call the churches “the most important of our amusements . . . especially the Methodist ones, with their frequent ‘revivals’ [5].” The new sermon styles that emerged among preachers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were laboratory experiments in reapplications of religious imagery within secular mediums. As David S. Reynolds writes,

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, American sermon style, which in Puritan times had been characterized by restraint and theological rigor, came to be dominated by entertaining pulpit illustrations, stories, and even humor. The new sermon style was particularly lively among the fiery urban evangelists of Whitman’s New York. During the 1830s and 40s, the evangelical denominations had to compete against each other, against the rising popular press, and against popular entertainments like stage melodramas and Barnum’s Museum for the attention of a working-class population increasingly made up of rowdies and roughs [6].

The religious vision and perceptions of preceding generations of Americans, perhaps more so than either politics or economics and going all the way back to the early centuries of the Common Era, are almost as embedded and ingrained in the psyche of the general public as is the mass media industry that churns out novels, music, movies and all the attendant merchandise that accompanies the most successful of these mediums’ products. The consequence for mainstream religion and (on an individual level) for those who practice its rituals and claim its beliefs is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, the presentation and expression of religious faith in a world significantly shaped by modern mass media has the potential to enjoy a level of effectiveness and versatility unavailable to previous generations. On the other hand, the same widespread use of communication technologies will inevitably change and alter the message being voiced by modern generations of churchgoers. If we are to take seriously (and it is the argument of this author that we must) the famous aphorism of media theorist Marshall McLuhan that “The medium is the message,” then we can expect the different and ever-changing ways in which mainstream religion communicates its message to obtain towards a change in the worldview being expressed from generation to generation.

The purpose of this six-part study will be to examine the ways in which traditional religious movements (particularly Christianity) have availed themselves of secular communication mediums. In particular, I focus on the role played by three different types of popular media (film, music, and fiction novels) in changing and/or altering the essential nature of the religious message being communicated. The ways in which religion adapts to changing cultural trends in order to remain afloat (read relevant) and attempt to continue providing coherent answers to modern challenges to traditional faith is the unifying theme of this research. Religious fiction novels are treated as non-canonical etiological supplements to traditional faith texts, contemporary religious music is explored as a tool to reinforce faith by way of emotional responses elicited, and religious films are analyzed as actualizing tools that aid the faithful in visualizing the ancient accounts that form the basis of their worldview. The importance of this research can be seen by noting the prevalent influence religious ideas and concepts have had on all aspects of social, political and economic life in this country. Religious themes have become so embedded in the popular culture, whose mediums reflect them constantly, to the extent that religions’ most iconic symbols, imagery, and mythos are at times resilient to easy dissection and critique. There is much relevance to be found in attempting, as this research project does, to determine whether religion informs and influences popular culture communication, or whether popular culture informs and influences religion in modern times.

NOTES

1. Thunderf00t, “Jesus Christ and the House of Merchandise,” YouTube 28 October 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UaIRZghoYs (accessed 1 June 2012).

2. R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 255.

3. Quentin J. Schultze, Televangelism and American Culture: The Business of Popular Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991), 98.

4. Moore, Selling God, p. 42.

5. Emory Holloway, ed., The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1972), 255.

6. David S. Reynolds, “Whitman’s America: A Revaluation of the Cultural Backgrounds of ‘Leaves of Grass,’” Mickle Street Review 9.2 (1988): 7.

The Life and Death of Protestantism: A Damning Tale of Denominational Division

2012-05-24T02:27:00.000-07:00

The Protestant Reformation marked the beginning of what will eventually and inevitably be the end of religion’s cohesion in – and thus effective influence upon – secular society in Western cultures.

A paradigm-shattering movement started by Martin Luther in the 16th century, the Reformation criticized the Roman Catholic Church and led to Luther’s excommunication therefrom. Luther did not intend to give birth to a new church, but that midwifing role was ultimately thrust upon him.

Technically, there existed three branches of the Reformation, but two of these three can be lumped under the term “Magisterial Reformation.” This aspect of the movement was embraced by the Church of England, which was primarily interested only in establishing a jurisdictional difference. That is, the Church of England did not want to be under the leadership of a Pope any longer, and they therefore took advantage of Henry VIII’s split with the Vatican, a move he made in order to be able to legally divorce his wife (Henry VIII was somewhat like the Herod Antipas of Christianity).

It is not entirely true that Protestantism in England only existed and thrived because of Henry VIII, although a great many people who were pressing for Protestant-style reforms did have to swallow hard to realize their goals because of him. Henry VIII’s split from the Catholic Church simply represented an opportunity for many to get on board and actually reform the church, albeit this opportunity came for an unintelligent and asinine reason. And reform they did; out of the woodwork appeared both Anglo-Catholic reformers (whose practices and beliefs were very similar to Catholicism) and of course those who were more concerned about more radically Protestant values.

Eventually, the Anglo-Catholics and Protestant-oriented groups divided permanently when the Congregationalists split off from the Church of England. Still later, the Methodists also split off, although they never intended to. They were instead thrust out against their will during the American Revolution. Charles and John Wesley and George Whitefield initiated a pietistic revival movement all over England, a revival movement that later spilled over into the American colonies where some key theology was changed. Most importantly, the Wesleys and Whitefield learned and incorporated much from the Moravian Pietists the value of what they called a “heartwarming conversion experience.” To this we turn first.

I. THE MAGISTERIAL REFORMATION: FIRST WING

Methodism

The concept of a “heartwarming conversion experience,” while somewhat novel, was not entirely unknown before the American colonial experiment. The Puritans, who were Congregationalists, believed in a pronounced experience of grace that one could definitively point to as the exact moment of personal salvation. However, the Methodists (as their name implies) started out as advocates of very intense and rigorous devotional exercises. The emotionally-charged concept of “conversion piety” did not enter into Methodist theology until the later reforms. While it certainly was an early development in Methodist history, it was nonetheless a subsequent development. They succeeded very well, but it was viewed as much too emotional by the staid Anglican hierarchs who kicked them out. Thus, Methodism proper was born.

John Wesley taught a doctrine of “entire sanctification,” also known as “Christian perfection.” Between 1725 and 1777, he penned a very intriguing book on this subject, entitled A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. This short work is an eye-opening and illuminating glimpse into the downright bizarre psychology of a worship-obsessed mentality. However, it is not only interesting for its content; perhaps surprisingly, the style and mode of expression utilized by Wesley demonstrates that this book is actually the work of a rather skilled mind. Wesley was certainly not a hack, as we are accustomed to seeing of Christian writers today. Wesley was both extremely sharp with his prose and quite modest in his claims.

The theory set forth by Wesley was that just as initial justification comes through faith (calling in faith upon Christ as Redeemer and not upon one’s own actions), so the sanctification of the believer comes from calling upon Christ as one’s Sanctifier. In other words, Wesley taught sanctification by faith, not by works. This was a dramatic departure from original Methodism, because the radical idea here was that sanctification ought to extinguish the sinful nature entirely from the Christian. Part of this extinguishing of sin was thought to come from the role played by accountability between fellow believers. One might ask another if he or she thinks a certain behavior is consistent with a Christian lifestyle, thereby convicting that brother or sister to shape up and never engage in the behavior again. For the Wesleyan Methodists, sanctification means that the believer will naturally want nothing more or less than to please God. There should be no struggle whatsoever, they believed. An apt analogy would be someone offering me a choice between old stale bread and a fresh five-course meal. Like most people, I do not need to be persuaded to choose the latter, which I will do without the slightest hesitancy. I love the one and hate the other, and for Wesleyan Methodists, the same will certainly be true with the choice between sinning and pleasing God. The Christian is not going to be the least bit interested in or tempted by sin, because for Wesley, nothing is as good as pleasing God and doing what the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant called the “holy will” of the divine.

Wesley himself admitted that he had not attained Christian perfection. This was puzzling to him, because he certainly had the level of faith required. This is frequent in claims of mystical enlightenment: the believer can work out on paper how perfection (or some other form of enlightenment) can happen and when and why it ought to, but for the vast majority of people such perfection does not seem to come about. A second, harder look is often deemed necessary, and the believer will often sense that some kind of trigger needs to be pulled. While we cannot know if Wesley ever found and pulled such a trigger, he did admit he had not attained Christian perfection, and that he only knew perhaps one old lady who ever did. However, Wesley did argue eloquently that perfection through sanctification is what the Christian experience should lead to.

Holiness Movement

The foregoing doctrinal background bears mentioning, because it has long been a historical artifact. Methodism as a whole eventually left the doctrine of Christian perfection behind because it was eminently unworkable. They opted instead for a more staid view of gradual sanctification with more modest expectations. However, there were also a number of hardy Methodists who never let it go. These were the Methodists who believed in and embraced the “holiness” lifestyle. The focus here shifted in a noticeable way from the “Christ within” to the Holy Spirit; the Holiness sects became less Christological and more Pneumatological in emphasis. But the same basic idea remained intact, and thus was born the Holiness denominations which in the mid-19th century branched off from the sensibly-modified Methodism. The Holiness denominations today include the Church of the Nazarene, the Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A. and the Church of God (Holiness), among several others.

Adherents of the Holiness movement believed in what they called a “second crisis” experience. The New Birth came first, followed afterward by sanctification. While it may not have been viewed as impossible for the two to occur simultaneously, it was envisioned by Holiness adherents as usually happening one after the other. Theirs was a very gradual approach to complete salvation, something many other Protestants did not like at all.

Pentecostalism

The Pentecostal denomination had its origins in the Holiness movement. More specifically, the Pentecostal movement started in early 1901 at a Bible study retreat in Topeka, Kansas organized by Charles Fox Parham, a preacher and evangelist who hosted a small Bible school at his house. At this retreat, Parham’s students spent their time trying to decide what, if anything, was the token of actually being filled with the Spirit and sanctified, or (as Holiness people had already termed it) “receiving the baptism of the Holy Spirit.” For Parham and his fellow Holiness believers, it was a given that one received the Spirit when he or she was “born of the Spirit.” But what about the baptism or the filling of the Holy Spirit, they wondered? They knew that they prayed for it regularly, but they wanted to determine whether or not there was any way to know they had received it, beyond merely waiting and hoping for confirmation or just feeling differently. Was there any tangible token?

One of Parham’s students, a young woman by the name of Agnes Ozman, suggested that the answer was found in the New Testament’s Acts of the Apostles. Ozman and other students noted that in Acts 2, the believers spoke in tongues upon being filled with the Spirit and that this type of event was mentioned a total of three times in the book, forming a pattern (Acts 2:4; 10:46; 19:6). They decided that this must be the answer they sought: the tangible evidence of having been baptized in the Spirit is a manifestation of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. Pentecostalism was thus born.

However, the Pentecostals immediately fractured along racial lines. To this day, the largest black Pentecostal group is the Church of God and Christ. The largest white Pentecostal group is the Assemblies of God. There was also, unsurprisingly enough, a theological split occasioned by an influx of denominational diversity. All the early Pentecostals came out of the Holiness movement, but as they grew they were joined by people from Methodist and Baptist churches who had either been forced out of these churches or quit voluntarily to join the Pentecostals.

As they grew, the Assemblies of God recruited a large number of Baptists to join their ranks, mainly because the AG’s sanctification doctrine was very similar to that of the Baptists. Both groups believed in gradual sanctification as a maturing process, but also believed in the “second crisis” or “second blessing” doctrine, which they understood to be the “baptism of the Holy Spirit.” In the Baptists’ circles, an analogous movement had already been under way for some time, that being the spiritual Keswick Movement (so called because it was most often preached at the Keswick Conference Center in England).

The AG/Baptist view on sanctification was theologically nuanced and more akin to Wesley’s original idea than anything else: they believed one cannot hope to truly lead the Christ-like sanctified life unless that person allows Christ to completely take over his or her being, and allows Christ to live through him or her. This belief and commitment is reflected in the phrase “Let go and let God.” For the AG and their Baptist comrades, this meant that believers must ask Christ personally for the baptism of the Spirit for the purpose of empowerment in the Christian life, the emphasis here being on Christian service (witnessing, vibrant prayer life, etc.). This is not much different from the Wesleyan view of holiness, the only real difference being in its emphasis on sanctification instead of perfection. Nevertheless, the “second blessing” was described slightly differently by the Assemblies of God and from there proceeded in the sanctification direction, adding in the practice of speaking in tongues as it went (R.A. Torrey, one of the editors of the famous pamphlet series The Fundamentals, believed in this subtle doctrinal synthesis and provided a succinct and straightforward explanation of the often-convoluted subject in his very interesting booklet The Baptism with the Holy Spirit).

The AG split internally in 1913 when, at a Pentecostal camp meeting in Arroyo Seco, California, a man by the name of John G. Scheppe claimed to experience a prophetic revelation which told him that Trinitarianism was a flawed and heretical belief. Thus was born “Oneness Pentecostalism” or the “Jesus Only” doctrine, representing something of a rebirth of Modalism and Dynamic Monarchianism. According to these views, there exists but one divine being, whose title is the Great Monarch, or God, but his name (at least for now) is Jesus Christ. Jesus the Man was not God, but was rather the unique expression of God on Earth. The Oneness Pentecostals thus ended up embracing a synthesized mixture of Adoptionism, Dynamic Monarchianism and Modalism.

This controversy led the mainline AG to establish “doctrinal standards,” something which they had long hoped to avoid but which was deemed necessary because Oneness Pentecostalism was seen by the AG leadership as much too heretical to be taken lightly. This is a characteristic trait of nearly all prophetic movements; people become a little too prophetic for others’ comfort, and the more orthodox leadership begins to clamp down the proverbial lid on them, the lid they in their turn had to pry open in their still more “orthodox” parent denominations.

The “Jesus Only” group eventually became officially known as the United Pentecostal Church. As this new identity came into its own, they modified the glossolalia doctrine. Like their Trinitarian parents, they believed that speaking in tongues was solid evidence of salvation, but they carried the idea farther to a more radical conclusion. If a person does not speak in tongues or is simply unable to, they said, he or she cannot have the Holy Spirit within them. And of course, if a person does not have the Holy Spirit within him or her, that person is not saved. Being “born again” and speaking in tongues are two sides of the same coin. In other words, the nontrinitarian United Pentecostal Church ended up agreeing with the Baptists’ view that there is no “second crisis” or “second blessing” experience. To them, there is only one blessing, that being the New Birth or justification. Subsequent sanctification and empowerment are part and parcel of the one blessing, and that one experience is ultimately manifested and confirmed by speaking in tongues.

As an older friend of mine once heard a radio preacher say, “If you ain’t got tongues, you ain’t got nothin’!”

The Charismatics

In the 1960s and 1970s in America, people in all manner of denominations (Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, etc.) collectively caught the bug of speaking in tongues and fervently seeking baptism in the Holy Spirit. This time around, they were not forced out of their respective denominations but instead formed subgroups within them.

The Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement is the most important of these subgroups, as well as the most interesting on a sociological level. On one hand, they have been somewhat assimilated back into the Catholic mainstream, but on the other hand they have caused Roman Catholicism in America generally to become strikingly similar to Evangelicalism in their impassioned preaching of a “personal relationship with Christ.” This is something many sociologists of religion never expected to see.

It is interesting in this regard to note that televangelist Pat Robertson is not a Pentecostal, as most understandably seem to assume. He is in fact a Baptist, and also a prime example of a Charismatic (also known as “Neo-Pentecostals” in some circles).

The Baptists

The most important of the various non-conformist groups that split off from the Church of England was the Baptists. They were forced to flee England because of their strong belief in church-state separation. They did not accept the idea that a national church was viable or legitimate, and this disapproval earned them many enemies in high places. They were also pointedly anti-sacramental in their religious practice.

In fleeing England, the Baptists made their way across the Channel and settled in the Netherlands for a good while. There they fell in among the Anabaptists, who were still more radical than they were. But the Baptists nevertheless borrowed a great deal of theology and practice from the Anabaptists, including the principled rejection of infant baptism and the lack of choice the practice implies. They believed people were obliged to consciously choose, to make their own decision before getting baptized in water as an outward symbol of commitment to Christ (hence the tag “Baptist”; “Anabaptist” simply means “re-baptizer,” a title referencing the re-baptizing of converts who had been baptized as infants, in protest against the Catholic Church). The Baptist movement became popular first in England before catching on with great success in America.

The theology of the Baptists is somewhat general and comprises a spectrum in several areas. For instance, there are both Calvinist and Arminian Baptists; this means that some Baptists believe a Christian can lose his or her salvation through backsliding, and others think salvation cannot possibly be lost in any way. In the end, there is little to no practical difference. The Calvinist Baptist looks at the apostate and says he or she was never really a true Christian at all, but only looked like one, whereas the Arminian Baptist view is that the apostate was in fact a true Christian in the past, but is not any longer.

There are areas of strong and historical uniformity of belief among Baptists, however. Throughout their history, Baptists have traditionally believed in (1) the separation of church and state, (2) the individual freedom of conscience of the believer as he or she reads the Bible, no one having the right to dictate to him or her what any given passage means, (3) the Believer’s Baptism, (4) congregational autonomy and (5) the observance of the Lord’s Supper as a remembrance, not as a sacramental means of attaining grace.

II. THE MAGISTERIAL REFORMATION: SECOND WING

The Pietist Movement

The second wing of the two-pronged Magisterial Reformation is made up of the Reformed churches (by which is meant Lutheranism proper). From this root eventually sprang the Pietist Movement, which started in the 17th century with the efforts of Zinzendorf, Francke, Tersteegen and others in Germany and Scandinavia. These prominent figures did not dissent from Lutheran theology, but they nevertheless found it to be much too scholarly and dryly intellectual. They were certainly not anti-intellectual, but they insisted that there must be more to the Christian experience than a rigorous mind game. They argued that the central point of Christianity was a heartfelt experience with Jesus Christ as a living saviour. The Pietists were extremely devotional, a lifestyle which helped introduce the strange concept of the “personal relationship with Christ.”

A variety of different Pietist denominations thrived in Germany and Czechoslovakia. In Moravia they were especially influential; the Pietists there became known simply as the “Moravians.” In Scandinavia, the Evangelical Free Church of Norway and the Evangelical Covenant Church of Sweden prospered. Both these churches exist in America today as well, as a result of the arrival of immigrants from both countries. And other Pietist groups besides these were and are alive and well.

Calvinism

The root of the Magisterial Reformation’s second wing was formed by major Reformers in Switzerland, France and Germany in the 16th century, the most notable of these being John Calvin, Martin Bucer and Johannes Oecolampadius (the latter being a stage name derived from a Greek phrase meaning “lamp in the house,” as in the parable related in Luke 8:16-18). These three figures preached pure Augustinianism, which in its Protestant form became broadly known as Calvinism.

St. Augustine (A.D. 354-430), who was prominent in the Catholic Church, taught a ruthlessly logical doctrine of grace, election and predestination. According to Augustinian teachings, all people are predestined either to be saved or to be damned (double predestination). When did God predestine all people, and why? According to Augustine, God did not wait to find out what course any one member of the human race would take; in fact, his predestination of all individuals was not even based on foreknowledge of what any one person would do in his or her life. Instead, God determined before time even began that humanity would fall and that some individuals would be saved and some damned. He then sent his Son to the earth to save those who were his Elect, and nobody else. Christ in this view did not come to save the entire human race. Calvinists today believe in the following famous five points represented by the acronym TULIP (Calvin himself believed in four of the five points):

1) Total Depravity: However the terminology may come across, this tenet of Calvinism does not assert that everybody is like Jeffrey Dahmer or Osama bin Laden. Rather, it has a distinctly Buddhist or Freudian flavor; according to this tenet, everything is tainted by selfish willful sin (which admittedly is not too difficult to believe). Calvinists are not saying that all people actually possess the characteristics of The Joker or Lex Luthor. This is a common caricature of their view.

Nevertheless, Calvinists have historically been quite severe in affirming the doctrine of Total Depravity. Calvin himself described newborn babies (presumably the ones who were reprobate and non-elect or, by extension, elect for hell) as follows: “[E]ven infants bringing their condemnation with them from their mother’s womb, suffer not for another’s, but for their own defect. For although they have not yet produced the fruits of their own unrighteousness, they have the seed implanted in them. Nay, their whole nature is, as it were, a seed-bed of sin, and therefore cannot but be odious and abominable to God” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book II, chap. 1, sec. 8). It is safe to assume that one will never find this passage quoted in Parents magazine.

2) Unconditional Election: According to this tenet, God in the beginning chose all future individual members of the human race to head in one of two directions (salvation or damnation, heaven or hell), and we humans do not know why God made this determination for us. Indeed, there is no why to be found, there is simply Grace (which carries more than a hint of arbitrariness).

3) Limited Atonement: If in fact God predestined some for damnation, then Christ cannot have died for them. If Christ died for the non-elect as well as for the Elect, that would imply he tried futilely to save those he knew could not possibly be saved. And so, according to Limited Atonement, Christ died only for the Elect.

This has a distinctly Gnostic ring to it, and this was the one tenet out of the classic five that Calvin himself did not believe. Instead, he believed that the separation of the Wheat and the Tares occurred concurrently with the preaching of the Gospel. The Elect hear the effectual call of the Gospel and the reprobates do not. Thus, Christ’s death is not predicated on the separation of the saved from the unsaved, because that division takes place after Christ’s sacrifice and during the subsequent spreading of the message.

This is not entirely consistent with the other four tenets of the TULIP, which Calvin did accept. Later Calvinists discerned this inconsistency and tightened up the system by adding in the doctrine of Limited Atonement (some Calvinists today call it “Definite Atonement,” because they cringe from the implications of the word “limited” when applied to a work of Christ; this of course is a butt-covering spin-job).

4) Irresistible Grace: If a person is among the Elect, he or she will surely become regenerate, will be saved and will make the decision to commit to Christ, no matter what. Most Calvinists who affirm this tenet also firmly believe that the conscious decision is made by the individual, even though it is somehow already God’s decision on their behalf and always has been. This is the issue at the heart of what has become a heated theological debate between those who say free will and divine election are compatible and those who argue that they are an antinomy. But Calvinists traditionally do not believe that human beings are mere robots. Somehow, the Elect individual makes their own decision on their own level, but at the same time God has also made the decision from eternity past.

Francis Schaeffer is credited with popularizing the following explanatory allegory: “Imagine a man walking down the street and arriving at a temple with the words, ‘Whosoever will may come’ written above the doorway. The man walks through the door but upon reaching the sanctuary begins to question whether he really belongs. He is then taken down to the basement, where he is shown the foundation stones. His fears are put to rest by the comforting words inscribed on one of the stones: ‘Chosen before the foundation of the world.’ His election is sure.” (Scott R. Burson and Jerry L. Walls, C.S. Lewis & Francis Schaeffer: Lessons for a New Century from the Most Influential Apologists of Our Time, 1998, p. 71). The real takeaway message of this story is that metaphor usually works much better than logic when it comes to discussing paradoxical and complicated subjects such as this.

5) Perseverance of the Saints: If a person is one of the pre-chosen for salvation, the trait of perseverance belongs to him or her, and the “Once-Saved-Always-Saved” idea obtains. After all, Calvinists reason, if one’s salvation is ultimately dependent on God’s decision, that person is never going to fall away from the faith. If God predestined me for salvation, nothing I do can in any way confute his purposes in the end, even if I wanted to reject him.

The Remonstrants and the Predestination/Free Will Debate

Half a century after Calvin’s death, a man named Jakob Hermanszoon (better known as Jacobus Arminius, the Latinized form of his name) led the Remonstrant movement in Holland starting in 1610, a reformation movement which rejected Calvinism.

They were not alone in this rejection. The Catholic Church, in most other respects their rivals, also did not accept the tenets of Calvinism, even though Calvin was simply reproducing Augustinianism. The latter system was controversial enough even within its native Catholicism, for its leadership tried hard in the past to mediate the heated debate that raged between Augustine and Pelagius on this subject. Pelagius denied predestination and insisted that free will was the whole picture. Augustine on the other hand honed a ruthlessly consistent argument in favor of double predestination in this debate, but the Church as a whole could not bring itself to accept Augustine’s view, at least not in its entirety.

Then a man named John Cassian (A.D. 360-435) stepped into the fray and proposed a middle ground: Human beings do have free will and can choose their own path, but we humans are nevertheless so far sunk in sin that we can only bring ourselves to choose God when the Holy Spirit enlightens us sufficiently for that choosing to happen. The Holy Spirit removes from us the blinders of sin, Cassian suggested, but he does not force us to make a choice either way. Rather, the Holy Spirit enables us to make our choice, and from that point on it is our sole responsibility to choose. Such was the compromise the Catholic Church accepted.

Arminius introduced a similar compromise for the Protestants. His solution to the debate was to posit that God does not predestine individuals, but simply lays down the decree from eternity past that he is going to send his Son into the world, and also decrees that those who join him will be saved from damnation. By way of analogy, it is like a conductor scheduling a train to travel to a particular destination, but not dictating to anyone that they must buy tickets, that choice being their own prerogative. And any person who does get on the salvation train does so based on his or her choice, which the individual can volitionally make because of the prevenient grace of the Holy Spirit. Also, once the choice for salvation is made, nobody can hold a gun to any passenger’s head; the passenger could be foolish enough to jump off or fall off the train and let salvation slip away, much like in the parable in the Gospel of Thomas (Saying 97) of the woman who brings home a jar of meal from the market, a jar whose handle is cracked. The meal leaks out of the jar behind her, and the woman does not realize this until she arrives home and finds the jar completely empty. This could happen to any believer, Arminius preached. This was a total rejection of Calvinism down the line, and an affirmation of what one might call “Semi-Pelagianism.”

This doctrine spread quickly among the Baptists, among whom both views were represented. There is an amusing anecdote related by chronicler John H. Spencer concerning some 19th century Baptists in Kentucky. A new pastor named David Thurman was preaching one day at a church that was experiencing a dry spell, a dearth of successful spiritual labor that caused Thurman to be despondent and depressed. An elderly woman, the widow of the church’s former pastor, stood up in the pews and declared, “Brother Thurman, I’ll tell you what the matter is – Stop preaching John Calvin and James Arminius, and preach Jesus Christ” (J.H. Spencer, A History of Kentucky Baptists: From 1769 to 1885, Including More Than 1800 Biographical Sketches, Volume 1, 1886, p. 335).

Presbyterianism and Congregationalism

John Knox (c. 1514-1572) taught a doctrine more or less identical to Calvinism in Scotland, where it was known as Presbyterianism. It later invaded the Church of England and developed into Congregationalism, a denomination recognized in Switzerland and various other places as simply the “Reformed Church.”

The Zwinglians and the Communion Controversy

The next movement in our survey of the second wing of the Magisterial Reformation is that of the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531). He was for all intents and purposes a Protestant warlord, and a fascinating character (at the time he was making waves, Switzerland was plagued with Protestant-Catholic battles, and not just in word).

Zwingli believed and affirmed everything Luther did and engaged in many dialogues with mainline Lutherans, with one exception: they split over the doctrine of communion. The mainline Lutherans believed in consubstantiation, a view very close to that of the Catholics. Consubstantiation is the notion that the bread and wine partaken of during communion retain the inner essence of physical bread and wine (as well as the outward qualities), but that they also take on the inward essence of the body and blood of Christ. The bread and wine of communion was thus believed to be composed of two natures, just as Jesus himself was.

Luther wrote that he could not conceptually circumvent the straightforwardness of Christ’s words in the Last Supper account when he takes up bread and says, “This is my body which is given for you” (Luke 22:19, cf. Matthew 26:26). Zwingli begged to differ, and responded to this by essentially asking the mainline Lutherans if they had ever heard of something called a metaphor. He said that the bread and wine only stands for the body and blood of Christ, that the communion is only established in the New Testament to cause followers of Christ to remember his sacrifice symbolically.

This, of course, is the view that went on to become the standard view in most of Protestantism to this day, and Zwingli thus prevented the union of the two wings of the Magisterial Reformation we have considered as separate categories. There are still Zwinglian Christians in Europe today, who stand with one foot in Lutheranism proper and one foot in its alienated Protestant 2.0 counterpart (this is a metaphor, by the way).

III. THE RADICAL REFORMATION

The Anabaptists

The third wing of the Protestant Reformation, the Radical Reformation, saw the emergence of the Anabaptists. There were a great many of them; some were simply called “Anabaptists,” but the Mennonites, Hutterites, Amish and others were (and are) Anabaptists as well. Like the Baptists, they placed a great deal of importance on church-state separation, on believer’s baptism, and on freedom of conscience. They also heavily emphasized discipleship. Theirs was a determination to live out the Gospel message, especially the Sermon on the Mount, and this meant all Anabaptists were Pacifists. Many of them voluntarily lived in isolated communities and practiced voluntary poverty. They were also fiercely persecuted.

Parallel to the Anabaptists were the Socinians, a nontrinitarian sect that came on the scene later. The Socinians constituted one of the early roots that eventually developed into Unitarianism.

IV. NOVELTIES ABOUND: THE MORE DISTINCTIVE BRANCHES

Dispensationalism and the Plymouth Brethren

John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), a priest in the Church of Ireland (a local branch of the Church of England) was seriously injured in a horse-riding accident one fall day in 1827 and was shut in for some months as a result. During this time of recovery, he decided to revisit the Bible and study it more closely. This ultimately led him to write his own translation of the Bible (Darby was certainly not dim-witted, that much can be said for him). Darby invented out of wholecloth the peculiar and idiosyncratic theology of Dispensationalism, and came to believe firmly that the elaborate system of clergy and other signature characteristics of the Anglican Church was a huge mistake that was far from scriptural.

Darby then founded the Plymouth Brethren, which have since split up into innumerable smaller sub-sects. The Dispensationalist Plymouth Brethren were composed mainly of Baptists who strongly opposed the modern practice of speaking in tongues and who were greatly in favor of church-state separation. They also took very seriously the concept of closed communion, the belief that those who receive communion unworthily are imperiling their soul. If the congregation allows such people to partake of communion, they share in the blame. The Brethren therefore required a person to have in hand a letter of recommendation from somebody they knew if the person wanted to join the chapel (they were not churches; to the Brethren, churches were a part of the system they opposed).

The Mormons

Joseph Smith (1805-1844) grew up in the “burned-over district” of western New York early in the 19th century. A wide variety of revivalists and religious recruiters travelled through the area and preached as they went, and as a young teenager Joseph Smith found himself very confused. Which one of all the diversified and competing groups he encountered was the real and true church? According to Smith’s claims, an angel appeared to him when he was fourteen years old and informed the young man that none of the current denominations had the right understanding. The angel reportedly told Smith that God had chosen him to rekindle the real and true church that had been lost, and directed him to find and unearth a set of Golden Plates containing the lost revelation. According to his own report, Smith followed the angel’s directions and later received his own prophecies. Together with a group of loyal followers, Smith proceeded to establish the new Mormon church, which has now become a world religion in its own right, called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

The Campbellites

The catalyst out of which the Mormons were churned was the American Restoration Movement of the Campbellites. The Scots-Irish revival leader Alexander Campbell (1788-1866) argued that Christians should not engage in any activity that is not explicitly mentioned in the Bible. Martin Luther had said that additional developments are allowable, as long as they do not contradict the Bible. But Campbell insisted that if any given activity or lifestyle is not found in the Bible, believers cannot engage in it and to do so is to sin. On this basis, Campbellites rejected instrumental music and still do not have any instrumental music in their churches to this day (this despite the fact that the word “psalm” derives from the Greek word Psalmoi (Ψαλμοί) which means “music of the lyre” or “songs sung to a harp,” i.e., an instrumentally-accompanied song).

The most distinctive doctrinal feature of the Campbellites is baptismal regeneration, the belief that a person must be baptized in water as a prerequisite to salvation. Admittedly, they are in a position to make a strong case for that doctrine from the New Testament, especially the dubious verse at the end of the Gospel of Mark that reads “He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved, but he that believeth not, shall be damned” (16:16).

The Campbellites eventually split off into a number of different branches, including the Church of God, the Disciples of Christ, the Christian Church, and finally the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which in its own turn split off into a number of other groups (i.e., the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and, more recently, the Christian Community; there is no shortage of other small Mormon offshoots besides these).

The Adventists

The Adventists were part of an end-of-the-world movement in 1843-44 that was started on the basis of the teaching of the preacher William Miller (1782-1849). Exactly like Harold Camping in our day, Miller had through his own study carefully computed the date of Christ’s return and the concurrent end of the world. A great many people took Miller’s teachings very seriously and lived in constant repentance as a result of their desire to be ready for the coming judgment.

Needless to say, the promised apocalypse did not happen. Some of Miller’s disappointed followers fell away from his teachings, but many persevered and started their own churches. These included not only the Advent Christian Church (which constitutes standard-brand Evangelicalism), but also the Seventh-Day Adventist denomination. The latter was founded by Ellen G. White (1827-1915) on the basis of a vision she allegedly received in 1847 in which she saw Jesus standing beside the tables of the Law and provocatively pointing out the Sabbath commandment by way of a bright light with which the commandment glowed brighter than the other nine. When White related her vision, other Adventists realized they should not be worshipping on Sunday, but instead should worship on Saturday, the Sabbath. The Seventh-Day Adventists then began in earnest to adopt and enforce various taboos and prohibitions found in the Old Testament, such as the forbidding of the eating of ham and the like.

Christian Science

In the latter half of the 19th century, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) founded Christian Science, a church movement that broke away from her Congregationalist roots and upbringing. In many ways, Eddy was in fact a very orthodox Protestant (Trinitarian, etc.), but she was influenced by the mesmerist and magnetic healer Phineas Quimby and learned from him the idea of “mind cure,” the Gnostic-leaning idea that all perceivable matter is an illusion. In her studies of the Bible, Eddy took special note of, for example, the words “Thy faith hath made thee whole” (Mark 5:34) spoken by Jesus when he healed the sick woman with the “issue of blood.” Perhaps, thought Eddy, Jesus understood that physical illnesses were falsehoods and that if one understands that this is all they are, such understanding would have the power to dispel the perceived illness.

From Eddy’s original church, many other so-called “New Thought” groups have split off. These include the Unity School of Christianity, the Church of Religious Science, Science of Mind, Church of Metaphysics, and the Universal Foundation for Better Living, to name just a few.

Jehovah’s Witnesses

The Jehovah’s Witnesses sect was the brainchild of one Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916). As a young adult, Russell departed from his Presbyterian upbringing as a result of a systematic and analytical study of the Bible which he and his father, Joseph Lytel Russell, undertook with a group of their acquaintances who were heavily influenced by Millerite Adventists.

Charles, who as a teenager had preached hellfire in chalk messages he left on city sidewalks and fence boards, eventually came to reject his belief in eternal punishment. He found upon careful reflection that he simply could not bring himself to believe that an all-good and all-merciful God could subject his loved creations to such a fate. His reexamination of biblical teaching led him to come up with the doctrine of Annihilationism, the idea that the wicked will upon their death simply be dropped into the flames and consumed, their consciousness extinguished permanently. While the experience of the wicked dead will surely be excruciatingly painful for but a moment, such a fate is certainly better than eternal torment in hell.

While engaged in this doctrinal reexamination, Charles Taze Russell decided to be consistent and reexamine all the other doctrines he was raised with as well. He found there was not much to commend Trinitarianism, and so he became an Arian (that is, he believed the Son of God was a created being, like an archangel). Just like Harold Camping in recent years, Russell believed he was able to accurately compute the date of the soon-coming end of the world. Thus began a long series of butt-covering explanations and rationalizations (à la Camping) for why each of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ date-setting predictions of the end failed (in the 1990s, the Jehovah’s Witnesses finally decided that they had learned their lesson the hard way, and declared that while they knew the end was coming soon, they were no longer going to attempt to set deadlines for the apocalypse).

Today the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a worldwide movement, whose closest point-of-contact to other more orthodox (by comparison) branches of Protestantism is probably their belief in Believer’s Baptism.

The Unification Church

Reverend Sun Myung Moon (b. 1920) was once a Presbyterian and Pentecostal in his native North Korea, where he taught at a Presbyterian Sunday school in his youth. He later went on to influence other Presbyterians with his new Unification message in the very syncretistic environment that was South Korea at the time.

When Moon was 16 years old, as his story goes, Jesus Christ appeared to him on Easter Day and informed him that somebody spiritually-competent was needed to carry on Christ’s struggling mission and bring it to fulfillment. Moon was that chosen person, Jesus told him. From that time on, Moon trained with other aspiring messiahs.

Eventually, in March 2004, the 84 year-old Moon declared at a Senate meeting on Capitol Hill that he had finally been officially confirmed by God as the Lord of the Second Advent whose purpose is to help renew the human race. Sun Myung Moon, now still alive and active in his leadership of the worldwide Unification Church at the age of 92, is a fascinating character, as all such figures are.

V. CONCLUSION

All of the fascinating theological diversity discussed above is headed inexorably for its collective demise in the postmodern era. When one examines modern churches, one finds that today’s mainstream churches are for the most part only interested in social activity and social reform. This is largely due to the influence of the Social Gospel movement in the early 20th century, started by the Baptist minister Walter Rauschenbusch. The legacy of this movement includes such movements as Liberation Theology, Gay Theology, Feminist Theology and Black Theology. All these sociological theologies are quite fascinating to study. But they also contribute to the politicization of churches, a politicization which ironically fits hand-in-glove with the churches’ increasing identity as mere social clubs.

Today’s Evangelical churches are becoming less and less separated ideologically, because for the past thirty years they have been closing ranks against the perceived “secular humanist” bogeyman on the outside. In fact, the Evangelical Protestant churches have even been closing ranks with the Catholics. The doctrinal differences that have historically separated and divided them are no longer seen as important, and there is consequently much less fighting and debate over theology and doctrine between denominations.

However, there is also a great deal more individualism today within the denominations overviewed in this essay than in the past. People in these churches are beginning to feel freer to educate themselves about the history and character of their own doctrines as well as other doctrines outside their own denominations. A modern churchgoer for this reason may not have an issue with what her pastor says about Dispensationalism or Pretribulationism, for example, but will decide for herself what she believes about the subjects. Most churchgoers who disagree with their pastor on a particular issue feel comfortable with legitimately enjoying a flexibility of options; they might remain in the church, might leave, or just might not consider a small point of division a trying issue at all.

Indeed, if a single word can adequately describe the church scene in the Western world today, that word is diversity. Despite the frantic efforts to close ranks, we are even seeing people and groups in the more liberal denominations combining their heritage with things like reincarnationism, channeling, or whatever other novelty appeals to them. The old theological and doctrinal debates of yesteryear have simply ceased to be pressing matters of concern. This means that a great deal of the religious heritage of the various denominations are bound to become relegated to the status of museum exhibits soon, whether for good or for ill.

In his 1793 book Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that religious difference is dangerous and unhealthy when and if it leads to strife (which it always and consistently did in those days and in the centuries before). But it is my contention that religious differences can actually be good whenever they do not lead to strife, whenever it is possible that an amicable coexistence through friendly debate can be realized. All reasonable religious believers know full well that, no matter what particular revelation they claim, they can only see it in a glass darkly. It is therefore potentially instructive and edifying for religious believers to engage in debate, and theological differences do not necessarily have to divide people on a personal or even political level.

However, divide people they consistently do, and herein is the catch-22 modern religion must face: To close ranks one with another to form a more or less monolithic entity for the purpose of drawing strength in numbers is to effectively dilute the individual identities and heritage of each of the many different and unique branches of Christianity, and the sum making up the whole will be something new and unrecognizable to any one of the many of its single denominational components. On the other hand, if the wide diversity and highly fragmented nature of Christian denominations is maintained, there will be no cohesion, no meaningful communication between sects, and modern Christianity will therefore no longer be able to maintain any relevance in the modern world. Christianity is facing an internal battle between integrity borne of diversity and blossoming individualism, but regardless of who comes out on top, the aftermath will be equally disastrous to the continued effective influence of the religion in today’s world.

We can thank Martin Luther and the 16th century Protestant Reformation for first tipping the proverbial dominoes whose eventual end is surely the inevitable collapsing of Christianity upon itself – perhaps not in our lifetime, but still relatively very soon on the timetable of societal evolution and the rate at which it progresses.

H.P. Lovecraft’s Self-Portraits: Wilbur Whateley and the Retard Christ

2012-05-22T22:50:00.000-07:00

H.P. Lovecraft was a master storyteller adept at seamlessly blending elements of weird fiction together with autobiography, rendering several of his downright Freudian tales all the more eerie. My favorite instance of Lovecraft incorporating his own life story into the account of certain characters occurs in his 1929 story “The Dunwich Horror.” Wilbur Whateley, the central character of the story, is both a parody of Christ and a representation of Lovecraft himself. The following four points of comparison and similarity are I think the most significant:

1. Due to his father’s mental illness, hospitalization and early death, Lovecraft can be said to have grown up without his biological father in his life, much as Wilbur Whateley does in the story.

2. Lovecraft and Wilbur were both the sons of old, sickly mothers, both of whom died around the end of their only son’s adolescence (I define “adolescence” liberally in Wilbur’s case, because while he was chronologically a young teenager, he was much further developed physically, a consequence of Wilbur possessing a share of the “outside” in him).

3. The education of both Lovecraft and Wilbur was provided by a doting maternal grandfather, himself the scion of a family whose reputation had been much more respectable in the past.

4. Finally, we see a more direct comparison between Lovecraft and his character Wilbur Whateley in the fact that both were child prodigies isolated from society and other children. Other examples can be found.

This is all very well-known and accepted in the world of Lovecraft scholarship. S.T. Joshi, Dirk W. Mosig, Peter H. Cannon [1], Donald R. Burleson [2], David E. Schultz and many other Lovecraft scholars have pointed out these and other autobiographical aspects within “The Dunwich Horror.” And there are a number of other autobiographical stories by Lovecraft. These include “The Tomb” (1917) whose character Jervas Dudley is a clear instance of Lovecraft writing himself into the story, as is the narrator of “The Outsider” (1921), though the latter to a slightly lesser extent.

Returning to Wilbur Whateley, it is fascinating to note that this highly autobiographical character is also a parody of Jesus Christ. In “The Dunwich Horror,” Wilbur is begotten of demonic parentage and a continuity is developed between Wilbur and his invisible twin brother who together play out the role of Christ. As Burleson has pointed out [3], Wilbur heads off to the hilltop of Sentinel Hill, a locale equivalent in the story to the biblical Golgotha. There Wilbur cries out to his ethereal father:

“Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah – e’yayayayaaaa . . . ngh’aaaaa . . . ngh’aaaa . . . h’yuh . . . h’yuh . . . HELP! HELP! . . . ff-ff-ff – FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH! . . .” [4].

This is clearly a dark satire of Christianity, and there is independent attestation of the validity of this literary comparison. For example, James Egan made the same argument, possibly in ignorance of the work already done by Burleson [5]. But Wilbur Whateley is also an autobiographical portrait of his author, and it is this combination that fascinates me. Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price draws this same comparison between Wilbur Whateley and Jesus Christ in his introduction to Richard L. Tierney’s The Scroll of Thoth: Simon Magus and the Great Old Ones (a fascinating collection of sword-and-sorcery horror stories)[6], as well as in his own short story, “Acute Spiritual Fear.” In this story, a young Christian believer named Philip Brown attends a divinity school in Miskatonic where he is training for the ministry. He stumbles across a secretive and clandestine cult on the campus within the seminary which believes that Wilbur Whateley was the Second Coming of Christ, who is soon returning to earth yet again. Philip finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into the cult, and by the end of the story he comes to realize that while the Whateley cult is evil and something to be opposed, its beliefs are nevertheless completely true:

“At first, given what I saw that night in the chapel, and then what happened in the dorm, I decided I had been lured into a cult. I'd seen the same thing happen to friends of mine who joined the Children of God cult, Guru Maharaj Ji, you know the type. I prayed and asked Christ to forgive me. Especially when I realized what almost happened to you...
“But then I remembered the dream, and what I read in that biblical manuscript. Even now it makes too much sense. It all fits together too well!”
“Phil!” she gasped, “You don't still believe it's true, do you?” He could sense her body stiffening, reflexively withdrawing from him as if he'd just confided he had a communicable plague.
Philip laughed bitterly. “I do, Sue! I do believe it's true! But I don't want anything to do with it! It's like having God appear to you and hearing him tell you his name is Satan. In fact, it's not like it--that is what happened! The 'real' Christianity: I wanted it and I got it. But I don't want it anymore. You see the irony of old Hoadley's position. Poor fool! To think the name of Christ would protect him. He needed to be protected from it!” [7].

If “The Dunwich Horror” does constitute a parody of the Gospels (and I believe it does), this simply reflects Lovecraft’s creative understanding of the mythological character of the Gospels. Richard Tierney recognized the same power of mythology and incorporated it in a fashion similar to Lovecraft’s technique. In Tierney’s great novel The Drums of Chaos, Jesus appears on the scene as a Wilbur Whateley-type spawn of the Old Ones who, in his compassion, desires to destroy the earth and put all humans out of their misery [8]. Robert M. Price’s aforementioned short story “Acute Spiritual Fear” is a much more succinct but equally compelling salute to that chilling premise, a creative homage that finds brief self-serving mention in Price’s introduction to Tierney’s The Drums of Chaos novel [9].

But is it at all plausible to read even more into Lovecraft’s blending of both autobiographical details and the Gospel Jesus character? Might Lovecraft have entertained a reverse-messianic, antichrist complex?

There is more to unpack in pursuing these speculations: it is my understanding (and that of most Lovecraft scholars) that Wilbur Whateley’s biological father and grandfather are one and the same character. This chilling interpretation places an even deeper layer on the already deliciously dark and irreverent Gospel parody the story represents on a surface level alone. But how is this reading reached? In the story, Wilbur’s biological mother was Lavinia Whateley, who was Old Wizard Whateley’s own daughter. Wilbur’s ultimate father is the inter-dimensional being Yog-Sothoth, one of the Old Ones. So how did this entity, which is not even made of matter as we earthly mortals know it, manage to impregnate the woman Lavinia? As Stanley C. Sargent suggests, this was probably accomplished through the body of Wizard Whateley [10]. Those who have read “The Dunwich Horror” will recall when, at the story’s end, Curtis Whateley sees Wilbur’s invisible twin made suddenly visible for a brief moment when the powder of Ibn Ghazi is sprinkled on him. He describes the sight as “That terrible haff face.” For looming above the veritable jungle gym of whipping tentacles and gaping fanged mouth-holes, Curtis saw what appeared to be Wizard Whateley’s face. This scene for the most part confirms many first-time readers’ suspicions up to this point: this is a story whose central theme is horrible incestuous intercourse.

I mention this aspect of the story to demonstrate its achievement as a truly revolting and horrifying tale, something all authors of narratives marketed as “horror fiction” should strive for. H.P. Lovecraft was very fond of his own grandfather, and my mind instinctively wants to recoil at the speculative thought of Lovecraft crafting a tale which depicts the mother of his autobiographical stand-in being raped by her father, Lovecraft’s/Wilbur’s beloved grandfather. But given the sheer amount of subtle sexual undertones to much of Lovecraft’s stories, in addition to the autobiographical themes he often incorporated in them, one can only speculate on just how disturbed Lovecraft may have been. Childhood wounds do indeed run deep. But the fact that Lovecraft found a way to channel whatever dark experience plagued him into unforgettable masterpieces of storytelling constitutes compelling evidence that horror literature, approached with the cautious steps appropriate to the stalking of a malign spirit, can contain an element of the sublime with the power to edify the reader.

NOTES

1. Peter H. Cannon, H.P. Lovecraft (Farmington Hills, MI: Twayne Publishers, 1989), 87.

2. Donald R. Burleson, “The Mythic Hero Archetype in ‘The Dunwich Horror’,” Lovecraft Studies 4 (Spring 1981).

3. Donald R. Burleson, H.P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 145-46.

4. H.P. Lovecraft (1929), “The Dunwich Horror,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, eds. August Derleth and S.T. Joshi (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House Publishers, Inc., 1963), 196.

5. James Egan, “Dark Apocalyptic: Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos as a Parody of Traditional Christianity,” Extrapolation 23.4 (Winter 1982).

6. Robert M. Price, “Introduction: Sword of the Avatar,” in The Scroll of Thoth: Simon Magus and the Great Old Ones – Twelve Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos by Richard L. Tierney, ed. Robert M. Price (Oakland, CA: Chaosium Books, 1997), ix – xxv.

7. Robert M. Price, “Acute Spiritual Fear,” in The Disciples of Cthulhu II: Blasphemous Tales of the Followers, ed. Edward P. Berglund (Oakland, CA: Chaosium Books, 2003), 171.

8. Richard L. Tierney, The Drums of Chaos (Poplar Bluff, MO: Mythos Books LLC, 2008).

9. Ibid., p. ix.

10. Stanley C. Sargent, “Howard Phillips Whateley?” in The Fantastic Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft, ed. James Van Hise (Yucca Valley, CA: James Van Hise, January 1999), Ch. 9; see also Sargent, “The Black Brat of Dunwich,” in Cthulhu Codex # 10, ed. Robert M. Price (West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1997), 23-35.

Thoughts on Nietzsche: Christianity's "Kung Pao Defense"

2012-04-25T17:21:00.000-07:00

In his 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche offered the following critique of the deceptive and weak approach to life that motivates the Christian value system:

“ – and powerlessness which does not retaliate is being falsified into ‘goodness,’ anxious baseness into ‘humility,’ submission before those one hates to ‘obedience’ (of course, obedience to the one who, they say, commands this submission – they call him God). The inoffensiveness of the weak man, even cowardice, in which he is rich, his standing at the door, his inevitable need to wait around – here these acquire good names, like ‘patience’ and are called virtue. That incapacity for revenge is called the lack of desire for revenge, perhaps even forgiveness (‘for they know not what they do – only we know what they do!’). And people are talking about ‘love for one`s enemy’ – and sweating as they say it” (First Treatise, Section 14).

I have been thinking much about that last line: “– and sweating as they say it.” What does Nietzsche mean by this phrase? Two possible interpretations occurred to me when I first read it. One, the Christian is “sweating” because he or she hates another person, but is trying hard to suppress that hatred. Two, the Christian is lying about loving the person, but is nervous and fearful he or she may be found out as one who secretly hates.

Upon some thought, the latter meaning strikes me as the correct reading. Consider what David Ellington says to Brother Jerome in “The Howling Man,” one of my favorite episodes of The Twilight Zone: “Honest men make unconvincing liars.”

In an excellent 1990 lecture entitled “Nietzsche: Knowledge and Belief,” the late Duke University philosophy professor Rick Roderick explored Nietzsche’s harsh scrutiny and assessment of Christian values with a number of thought-provoking points that are worth quoting at length:

Nietzsche is not trying to argue demonstratively, or to prove a syllogism, but rather to raise suspicions. To raise the kinds of suspicions that, as I say, I think many of us have when we look at the content of the values that have come up to us . . . ah, you know . . . through our traditions. That’s what Nietzsche is powerfully and importantly good for. Not to deny – again, not to say “All is relative” – but to try to remind us of something of the origins of what we call “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong” and so on.
Ah, by the way these values have come out in other contexts. I remember in an earlier war General Westmoreland saying “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” But it was not an irony. He meant it. I mean, so did the early Christian communities that settled in this country mean it. That for a witch’s own good, one had to dunk her repeatedly in water. Now we’ve come a long way since then haven’t we, because now we lock people away in prisons and in institutions, torment them with drugs, lock them up in the most dangerous environments, have more people in prison in this country per capita than any country in the world except South Africa . . . But we haven’t gotten as far ahead in this regard as we think, and this argument has been updated by people like Michel Foucault.
We still have… the idea that we would send someone to prison in order to rehabilitate them. Now we’re getting to be more honest about that. We’re getting a little more barbaric, and for Nietzsche that would be better. That’d be a little more honest. We’re sending them to prison because we’re scared of them and that we know if they go there really bad things will happen to them and it will ruin their lives and that will make us happy. That’s what we should say when we send one to prison, if you have to be honest. And as Nietzsche said, “In the name of minimal honesty,” don’t send them to prison and go “Ah, that was the best thing for them.” You know, you were spanked by your father, maybe once, and he just beat the hell out of you, and he went, “That hurt me worse than it did you,” and you go “I guess…”
Reading the text of Nietzsche makes us suspicious of people who do things for our own good. It makes us suspicious of people who “love” us – you know – in a kind of abstract way especially.

I feel the very suspicion Roderick speaks of whenever I hear of special-interest groups attempting to use the force of government to ban high-fructose corn syrup, “for our own good.” This suspicion is potently present when I hear that the United States went to war to liberate the people of Iraq with bombs and bullets “for their own good.” And I feel this suspicion whenever I hear Christians arguing that preventing homosexuals from marrying is “good for the homosexuals.”

Most, if not all, of what people generally call “Christian morality” is nothing more than the result of cowardice and of lame, pathetic self-justification. The Christian approach to faux forgiveness, for example, is perfectly exemplified in the New Testament saying, “For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man also be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38). In other words, as many modern Christians have said to me on many occasions, “You can mock what I say, and I cannot do much about it. But that’s okay. My Savior can kick your ass, and he is going to do so very, very soon!”

When I hear Christians tell me and others this canard, I get the distinct impression they are being extremely dishonest; that is, they would much rather just slug me themselves, even wage a holy war against all unbelievers and skeptics, and doing so would make them honest.

Nietzsche would very likely also say that the Christian can and should aim to become a Superman, because then any carping from unbelievers at his or her faith would not bother such a Christian in the least. But nonetheless, as Roderick points out, the element of at least being honest about one’s values must still be taken into careful account. Christians who threaten me and other atheists with eternal damnation for not believing as they do should openly say “We hate you bastards,” not “I forgive you and love you, but my God ain’t forgivin' you when your time is up” or “I don’t want you to go to burn in hell for all eternity, but these are God’s rules, not mine.” Get the fuck out of here, is my proudly abrasive response. What a load of fakery and cowardice that argument is!

Another common Christian claim I hate to hear and with which I have less and less patience the more I hear it is the charge that atheists are on a level with Hitler, Stalin and other brutal dictators. When are such Christians going to see the asinine absurdity of comparing secular and freethinking individuals, who value reason and free inquiry, with racist genocide practitioners? To such Christians I say: if you think you can iron out all differences so that all intellectual and cultural “combatants” to your worldview are equally villainous - so that you can excuse your own cowardice - go right ahead, you lily-liver!

We ought always to foster this hermeneutic of suspicion about everybody, not least of all our own selves. This is part of being a healthy skeptic and a true freethinker. Brother Nietzsche (as I like to refer to him) is a great philosopher to consult to inspire us to remain honest.

Nietzsche’s image of Christians “sweating” as they speak of love for sinners is an image that succinctly represents to my mind a summation of my own thoughts on the nature of the façade erected by Christians when they speak of how very forgiving and how very loving they are toward all people. Whenever they speak of themselves in this way, my mind’s eye immediately conjures an image of such Christians letting slip nervous laughter accompanied by nervous sweat.

I also think of the following dialogue from the show Seinfeld:

Wilhelm: “Are you feeling all right George?”
George: “*Hemmm!* . . . Fine!”
Wilhelm: “You look a little warm.”
George: “. . . It's the chicken.”
Wilhelm: “You're a terrible liar, George. Look at you, you're a wreck! You're sweating bullets.”
George: “It’s the Kung Pao. George likes his chicken spicy.”

Christians certainly are adept at using the “Kung Pao Defense," are they not?

Confessions of a Sword & Sorcery Lover

2012-04-23T20:22:00.000-07:00

The Sword & Sorcery subgenre of fantasy fiction has entered my literary life in a big way over the past year. The invention of Robert E. Howard (the creator of Conan the Cimmerian) the Sword & Sorcery literature is comprised of noir-esque, gritty, dark, rough-and-tumble fiction full of bloodshed. As a subgenre of fantasy, it sits a significant notch over from the likes of Tolkien (whose work I also love). Tolkien’s fiction is characterized mainly by themes of chivalry and High Middle Ages-era settings, whereas the Conan stories combine the sensibilities of a detective novel with a fantastic pre-Industrial world.

The late science-fiction/fantasy author L. Sprague de Camp is listed among my personal heroes for rescuing the Conan character out of obscurity and inaccessibility. It was under the direction of de Camp that several Conan books were published by Lancer Books in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. Howard, of course, wrote his many original Conan stories back in the early 1930s, when they were first published in Weird Tales magazine. In the 1950s, before Lancer Books took up the cause, Gnome Press finally released a seven-volume collection of Conan stories in hardback. Today, it is very easy to find cheap copies of Conan books. Howard truly invented an entirely new subgenre of fiction, and its rapid growth in popularity and demand within the space of only about 40 years is one reason I find the hardy subgenre impressive.

I am also a fan of most of the imitators who have written in the same vein, such as John Jakes, who wrote the Brak the Barbarian series, and Lin Carter, creator of the Thongor of Lemuria character, whose adventures I have begun to write in the form of fan fiction (something I thought I would never find myself compelled to do).

There are many others: Karl Edward Wagner’s “Kane,” Richard L. Tierney’s “Simon of Gitta” (yes indeed, Simon Magus made into a sword-and-sorcery hero) and Gardner Fox’s novels about Kothar the Barbarian Swordsman come immediately to mind. And there are yet more . . .

Why are there so many, one might ask? As John Jakes reportedly said, there simply were not enough of those good ole’ stories around to fully satisfy him, so he decided to write more. The feeling must have been mutual among the other authors mentioned in this brief overview.

For readers of fiction who are new to the Sword & Sorcery subgenre but want to know a good place to begin, I highly recommend starting with two terrific (but unfortunately out-of-print) anthologies compiled by Hans Stefan Santesson: The Mighty Barbarians: Great Sword and Sorcery Heroes (Lancer, 1969) and The Mighty Swordsmen (Lancer, 1970).

Thoughts on Nietzsche: Suicidal Ideation as Consolation

2012-04-21T03:03:00.003-07:00

“The sword of time will pierce our skins / It doesn't hurt when it begins / But as it works its way on in the pain grows stronger . . . watch it grin, but . . . Suicide is painless / It brings on many changes / And I can take or leave it if I please.” ~ Marilyn Manson, ‘Suicide Is Painless’

I came across a line in Friedrich Nietzsche’s great book Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (first published in 1886) that I found morbid but, strangely, at the same time not at all disheartening:

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night” (Chapter IV, Aphorism 157).

It does not take a Nietzsche scholar to infer and understand that Nietzsche must have been very depressed when he penned this. But what exactly is the sense he is trying to convey? Is he saying that if life becomes unbearable, at least we each have a way out? Or is he saying that his life is unbearable and that he could commit suicide, but that he does not and is therefore in a position to see his clinging to life as a sign of great strength?

Readers could interpret Nietzsche’s words either way, but my sense is that it would be very difficult to take comfort or consolation from the latter interpretation. Nietzsche must be arguing the first idea, i.e., I do have an out. Life looks and feels supremely bad, but there is an escape hatch available to me at all times: suicide. This is the thought that immediately strikes me when I read these words. And I must admit to feeling slightly disturbed when I found it rather encouraging.

It is interesting in this regard to note a surprisingly similar line of thought (expressed of course from the perspective of a theist, which I am not) found in the New Testament epistle of 1 Corinthians: “There hath no temptation taken you, but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that you are able: but will with the temptation also make a way of escape, that ye may be able to bear it” (10:13). This is the verse that reinforced the Stoics’ firm belief that the best, God-given way out of protracted misery is suicide.

I find I share Nietzsche’s depressing but true conviction. Is it not preferable for somebody about to experience excruciating torture to end their own ill-fated life? The force of this reasoning is powerfully demonstrated in the 2003 remake of the classic horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. At one point in the story, Leatherface hangs victimized character Andy from a meat hook in the basement, leaving the foot from his one remaining leg dangling above a piano, planning to wreak unspeakable depredations upon him later. His friend Erin later discovers him when she is also captured and thrown into the basement, which Leatherface has momentarily vacated. Erin is unable to do anything to relieve her friend’s pain and suffering, let alone rescue him, since lifting him off the meat hook would alert Leatherface upon the body’s contact with the piano keys below his foot. Knowing this to be the case, Andy begs her to kill him herself, insisting she provide him with a clean and quick death now since he is very soon going to die horribly anyway. Erin does mercifully kill her friend, though she experiences severe emotional trauma as a result which nearly debilitates her.

Better it is indeed to die quickly at the hands of one’s friend at one’s own request than to be hideously tortured and maimed first before death, similar to the gruesome description of torture related in the seventh chapter of 2 Maccabees .

Death is certainly not fun to contemplate, nor is it a rosy prospect. But as Bram Stoker’s famous vampire says in the 1931 film version of Dracula, “There are far worse things awaiting man than death.” I strongly suspect Brother Nietzsche thought the same, and so do I.

Superman, Jesus and Anakin Skywalker: Nietzschean Bodhisattvas and Tragic Heroes in Epic Fiction

2012-04-17T23:06:00.011-07:00

Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go . . . Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must be a sea to be able to receive a polluted stream without becoming unclean. Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this sea; in him your great contempt can go under ~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1].

When one examines Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch (German for “Overman” or “Superman”) alongside the Bodhisattva ideal of Mahāyāna Buddhism, an immediate linkage becomes apparent. Originally, the Bodhisattva or “enlightenment-being” was the title given to Gautama Buddha, as well as to the eight figures believed to be his previous incarnations up until the time Gautama himself was suddenly enlightened as he sat beneath the Bodhi tree. Later on, Buddhists came to believe that anybody could and should become an Awakened One or Buddha (even though for any given individual it might take many many many many many many many many many many many many lifetimes to accomplish). Such a person was also called a Bodhisattva because he too was on the path to Buddhahood for the good of other beings. Eventually, all selfishness would be put aside, along with all attachments and all partisanship. The Bodhisattva’s ultimate goal was to attain complete disinterestedness, in the sense of impartiality and a lack of any particular attachments. This would confer upon him karuṇā, total compassion for all beings equally, a position conducive to the disposition of the enlightened man since the limiting concept of “preference” is rendered foreign to him upon being enlightened (and I do say him because the bias dominant at the time prevented females from being able to apply to Bodhisattva status; this restriction is brought up at the end of the Saddharma-Puṇḍarīka in the form of a very strange exception that proves the rule) [2].

The Bodhisattva is a Superman being in every respect. Even when he comes down to Earth, or appears to come to Earth in a docetic fashion, he does not despise mere humans but instead seeks to serve them in karuṇā. This is a distinctly Nietzschean concept; despite popular misapprehension, the Nietzschean Superman is not at all like Hitler. Nor is he indifferent to human affairs because he sees himself as too far above them, like Doctor Manhattan from the Watchmen graphic novel. Rather, he is characterized by compassion. For this reason, the Protestant philosopher Max Scheler, in his fascinating book Ressentiment, interpreted Jesus as a type of Nietzschean Superman [3].

Jesus (a.k.a. The Christ)

It is of course very difficult to interpret the Jesus character from the New Testament, but some interesting patterns can nevertheless be detected. Why is it, for example, that Jesus turns the other cheek and bears with ordinary mortals?

Granted, Jesus is at times rather weary of living among mortals. The story told in Mark 9 is a great example. After the Transfiguration, Jesus descends the mountain with the gnostic elite, and a weird scene greets them upon their return. The rest of his disciples have been attempting unsuccessfully to exorcise a demon out of a man’s son, and the father of the demoniac is a complaining customer. It is easy to picture Jesus rolling his eyes as he says (verse 19), “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?” In the Gospel stories, Jesus’ nature is far above that of mere mortals, and yet his attitude throughout his life is summed up in the words attributed to him in Luke 22:27: “For which is the greater, one who sits at table, or one who serves? Is it not the one who sits at table? But I am among you as one who serves.”

This attitude and approach toward other beings underlies the central idea of the Übermensch. As a type of Superman, Jesus does not feel inclined towards haughtiness and does not attempt to salve his own insecurities by claiming to be better than everybody else. It is precisely because he is better than all other mortals according to the story that he looks upon them with total compassion.

Clark Kent (a.k.a. Superman)

Superman, the comic book character created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, is quite obviously and explicitly a combination of three figures: a Nietzschean Übermensch, a Christ-figure, and a Bodhisattva figure. Superman’s earthly life as Clark Kent is devoted to serving others without question. Serving others constitutes his entire purpose as well as his joy; no external influence forces him to do take the many burdens he bears on behalf of ordinary humans.

One is reminded of the famous words given to Peter Parker (a.k.a. Spider-Man, another Nietzschean Bodhisattva ) from the mouth of his Uncle Ben: “You’re feeling this great power, and with great power comes great responsibility” [4]. Clark Kent in his role as Superman actually rejoices more in this great responsibility to serve and save humanity than he does in the concomitant power.

Anakin Skywalker: The Flawed Christ

Anakin Skywalker, the central character of George Lucas’s Star Wars saga, is the embodiment of innocence and borderline angelic goodness when we first meet him as a nine year-old boy of lowly origins in The Phantom Menace (indeed, if Buddhists were to encounter young Anakin in Lucas’s universe, they would doubtless consider him a prime candidate for the Bodhisattva path, perhaps even a reincarnation of the Buddha). But beginning in Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Anakin begins to develop into a flawed Christ-figure in his late teen years. By the end of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Anakin has fully transformed into a full-fledged Antichrist as he embarks upon his career of power and evil until he is ultimately redeemed at the end of his life in Return of the Jedi.

Anakin Skywalker is a very fascinating character who at first embodies striking parallels to the biblical King Saul and to the medieval hero King Arthur. That is, he is a character who at first shows promise of fulfilling a Messianic role, but who then develops subtle flaws that eventually grow to strike at the heart of his inner character and undo everything good that he has done.

King Arthur, according to the medieval legends first compiled by Sir Thomas Malory, was the son of Uther Pendragon and Igraine, Queen of Cornwall. The manner in which Arthur is begotten is a foreshadowing of the ill-fated life he is to lead: the wizard Merlin uses his powers to conjure an illusory situation in which Uther magically takes on the appearance of Igraine’s husband, the Duke of Tintagil in Cornwall, who is killed before the king reaches Igraine in the duke’s castle. Uther, in the appearance of the fallen duke, goes in to Igraine by night and has sexual intercourse with her. He proceeds to assume his place as her husband under his rightful appearance, and Arthur is born of Uther’s near-rape of Igraine soon thereafter [5].

In his teen years and young adulthood, Arthur has to overcome his own cocksure immaturity, but he soon becomes a Christ-figure with the promise of future greatness. But as Arthur grows older, the shenanigans pulled by Merlin in the past come home to roost. The primary threat is Morgan le Fay, Igraine’s daughter by her first husband Gorlois and Arthur’s older half-sister. Being a “great clerk of necromancy,” Morgan le Fay possesses powers of sorcery and magic herself, which she learned as a child in a nunnery [6]. Because of her powers, she is privy to what Uther Pendragon did to her mother in the past with the help of her fellow-sorcerer Merlin. She makes it her life purpose to arrange for Arthur’s downfall because of the dark legacy he represents to her. As a result of all this underlying instability, this poison seeded at the very beginning, Arthur’s life and legacy starts to fall apart at the seams. What unravels is a powerfully tragic saga.

This same theme of personal downfall is handled very well in the story of Anakin Skywalker. In The Phantom Menace, the stranded Jedi travelers who meet the nine year-old slave boy on the desert planet Tattooine can tell right from the outset that this child is the Force Messiah. They are convinced he will grow to become a legendary Jedi Knight unlike any that ever preceded him – and they are right on that account. But there are personal problems that rear their ugly head in Anakin’s life. In early adulthood, he develops a ruthless disposition and a passionate temper he struggles to control. He is subject to abrupt, unrelenting anger and harnesses a short temper that negatively affects both himself and those around him. Anakin possesses what Aristotle called hamartia (ἁμαρτία), or a “tragic flaw”:

There remains, then, the intermediate kind of personage, a man not preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some fault, of the number of those in the enjoyment of great reputation and prosperity; e.g. Oedipus, Thyestes, and the men of note of similar families. The perfect plot, accordingly, must have a single, and not (as some tell us) a double issue; the change in the subject’s fortunes must be not from bad fortune to good, but on the contrary from good to bad; and the cause of it must lie not in any depravity, but in some great fault on his part; the man himself being either such as we have described, or better, not worse, than that [7].

Everyone familiar with Star Wars knows what happens, of course: the Jedi Council is at a loss for how they are to go about dealing with Anakin. They know he has greatness in him, that he is a powerful fighter and ally for the Jedi cause. But Anakin’s problematic nature persists in manifesting itself in increasingly disturbing ways, causing the Council to deny Anakin the rank of Jedi Master (even though the Emperor has already manipulated for him a position on the Council). Anakin is understandably angry about this reservation on the part of his superiors, and quickly grows weary and impatient with the political shenanigans he sees the Jedi Council dabbling in.

But then Anakin heads into the arms of a worse evil, namely the influence of the Emperor Palpatine who succeeds in seducing Anakin to the “Dark Side,” the Sith order. Anakin’s first act as a Sith devotee is to butcher a group of young children at a Jedi daycare center (while there is much for which George Lucas can be taken to task in the way he handled the prequel story arc, I must give credit where credit is due and hand it to Lucas for not “wimping out” and watering down the darkness prevalent in this scene). From that moment on, Anakin Skywalker becomes the Ideal Villain, that is, a villain who is paradoxically more of a hero than the heroes themselves, even though he has allied himself with the wrong side.

In the Star Wars saga, viewed as a unitary whole, the Christ (Anakin Skywalker) becomes the Antichrist (Darth Vader) and is then brought back to his original goodness at the end of his life by his own son, Luke Skywalker, who just barely resists the temptation to become Darth Vader II and carry on his father’s evil career. I must admit that this is the stuff of which truly great stories are made, despite how I might feel about Lucas’s poor decisions in executing certain elements of the story, especially in the prequels.

Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader is a qualitatively different sort of character from the other Christ-figures and Superman archetypes discussed above, and this difference is a very fascinating one. Anakin Skywalker is not only a thought-provoking amalgamation of several past literary figures, but an amalgamation of warring human conditions as well. He is the central messianic figure of the story and the central antagonist. In this sense, Anakin Skywalker’s story has a theologically heretical nature to it, as it explores the question, “What if the warring psychologies of Satan and Christ belonged to one and the same character at different stages of personal evolution?” The inner psychological warfare between Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader, between the character’s good nature and evil nature, constitutes the central war in the Star Wars story.

Notes

1. Friedrich Nietzsche (1885), Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1966), 13.

2. “Great will be the pious merit, Nakshatrarâgasankusumitâbhigña, to be produced by a young man of good family or a young lady striving to reach the goal in the Bodhisattva-vehicle, who shall keep this chapter of the Ancient Devotion of Bhaishagyarâga, who shall read and learn it. And, Nakshatrarâga, should a female, after hearing this Dharmaparyâya, grasp and keep it, then this existence will be her last existence as a woman. Any female, Nakshatrarâgasankusumitâbhigña, who in the last five hundred years of the millennium shall hear and penetrate this chapter of the Ancient Devotion of Bhaishagyarâga, will after disappearing from earth be (re)born in the world Sukhâvatî, where the Lord Amitâyus, the Tathâgata, &c., dwells, exists, lives surrounded by a host of Bodhisattvas. There will he (who formerly was a female) appear seated on a throne consisting of the interior of a lotus; no affection, no hatred, no infatuation, no pride, no envy, no wrath, no malignity will vex him” (F. Max Müller, ed., Saddharma-Puṇḍarīka, or The Lotus of the True Law, trans. H. Kern [New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1963], 389).

3. Max Scheler, Ressentiment (New Edition), trans. Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1998), 63-89.

4. Peter David, Spider-Man (New York: The Ballantine Publishing Group, 2002), 119.

5. Sir Thomas Malory, Knt. (1485), Le Morte d’Arthur: The Book of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, Book I, Ch. II (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, Inc., 1961), 3-4.

6. Ibid., 4.

7. Aristotle, Poetics, Ch. 13, sec. 1453a. This is Ingram Bywater’s translation in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Volume 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2325.

Meeting the Shadow: The Ethical Psychology of Horror Fiction

2012-04-13T03:36:00.007-07:00

In his book The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, the late great literary critic Wayne C. Booth (a devout Mormon) warned about the psychological self-defilement we as readers and viewers may easily find ourselves risking as we assume the viewpoint of the narrator in certain works of fiction:

Reading can produce . . . obsessive and (perhaps) regrettable memories, even though the images we construct in reading are usually less graphic than those we construct with the more explicit aid of the visual arts. When I ask people whether they can remember stories from childhood that were horrifying beyond endurance, they almost always respond with an example and a shudder. As adults we are much less likely to experience such unendurable shock while reading, especially now that we have all become toughened by the richer resources of filmed horror. But if you search your mind you may be surprised at what you find lurking there (“lurking” is of course the right metaphor) . . .

The point here is . . . to underline once again the reflexive trap that none of us can escape: when we try to think about these images, we do it with equipment built of the very stuff that we are now trying to judge. Whatever regrets we feel come always in some sense too late. The image that I deplore will neither disappear for the wishing nor retire to some corner of my mind labeled “entertainment only” or “other people’s viciousness.” If I have revelled in Rocky’s battering of the brutish Soviet slugger, as I did for a few moments watching a movie on a recent trans-atlantic flight, the physical pleasure in the images of bloody bashing has become not just some “implied reader’s” but mine. On the other hand, the approved images, the ones that I repeat and dwell on admiringly in memory, are even more tenacious and thus also potentially destructive. After all, “they have helped make me what I am today,” and how can I wholly repudiate that? They will thus affect my present judgment, just as my present approval is likely to reinforce their effects. When one’s natural egoism is supported by the fashionable belief that all “broadening,” every encounter with “otherness,” no matter how base, is good for us, how can one fail to think that even the vilest stuff has done splendid work? If, like Emma Bovary, I have mistaken shoddy for silk, what am I to do? [1].

Booth makes a number of good points here that my own cultural experience resonates with, to an extent. I recently watched two of Rob Zombie’s horror films, House of 1000 Corpses and its sequel, The Devil’s Rejects. While one certainly cannot deny the skill that went into the making of these movies, I personally found them to be too loathsome even for my dark tastes in film. I do not care to give either one a second viewing in the future. In the case of The Devil’s Rejects, all four main protagonists are vicious serial killers. This can mean that to relate and sympathize with the protagonists is to actually rejoice, even if at a very subtle or subconscious level, at the numerous atrocities committed by them throughout the course of the film. This, I suggest, is psychologically unhealthy, as is any form of rejoicing in evil (I personally found myself cheering for Sheriff John Wydell, the character that eventually captures the Devil’s Rejects clan, and was disappointed when his attempts to kill them failed at the last minute).

It is important to guard one’s mind and what it is exposed to in this regard, and this guarding of the mind need have nothing at all to do with the moral pretention of religion or the dogmatically-motivated pious prudishness it fosters.

However, there is another dimension to these considerations that Booth did not fully explore or take into account. In fact, as an avid fan and connoisseur of horror movies and novels, my feeling about Rob Zombie’s films is not the way I feel about most horror movies, which is easily my favorite genre of the medium. I love the Saw series of films (the first installment was especially good). These movies are truly horrifying and gruesome in a number of ways, and should not be watched right before or after a meal. But the story the Saw movies tell makes a profound point about vengeance and the ways in which even justice can be taken to an evil extreme (much like in EC Comics’ horror library circa 1950s). The Final Destination series of movies are admittedly a “guilty pleasure” of mine, but they do explore in a highly creative and genuinely frightening way the fierce struggle on the part of ordinary people to transcend the cruel inevitability of sudden death that they know lurks for them around even the most seemingly innocuous of corners.

Similarly and for much the same reasons, I hold the Hostel movies in high regard. They are not merely horrifying (though horrifying they certainly are) but also come packed with potential food for thought. As Robert M. Price points out in his review of the film, Hostel is in many ways something of a Baudrillardian sequel to or updating of the 1973 film The Wicker Man: “Hostel . . . takes aim at a different sort of paganism [from that of The Wicker Man], the amoral, hedonistic nihilism of decadent Europe . . . The point of Hostel is that there is a direct continuum: where everything has been rendered a commodity, as Baudrillard says, even human life becomes mere merchandise (the eternal story of the still-thriving slave trade after all)” [2].

Thus, even the movies that seem the most nihilistic and existentially depressing on the surface level, such as the Saw, Hostel and Final Destination series, are actually real thought-provokers upon close scrutiny. I do not view these particular films to be examples of mere “torture porn,” as many have classified them. Even some of the most gratuitous and campy and downright silly movies (Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror comes to mind) have some redeeming elements that render them interesting and worth indulging in.

In his great book Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, the late psychologist Erich Neumann, a student and disciple of the famous Carl Jung, explained the inner workings of the process Freud termed the “return of the repressed” [3]. There exists in each one of us a dark side (what Jung called the “shadow”), and the more one denies that this dark side exists, the more this “shadow” is going to build up within our unconscious. If the denial and subsequent repression of our own dark side persists long enough, the repressed shadow is liable to finally explode forth under pressure, a release which manifests itself in the form of the reading of one’s own temptations and darker instincts (felt and detected by way of “guilt-feeling”) onto others. Neumann writes,

This guilt-feeling based on the existence of the shadow is discharged from the system . . . by both the individual and the collective – that is to say, by the phenomenon of the projection of the shadow. The shadow, which is in conflict with the acknowledged values, cannot be accepted as a negative part of one’s own psyche and is therefore projected – that is, it is transferred to the outside world and experienced as an outside object. It is combated, punished, and exterminated as “the alien out there” instead of being dealt with as “one’s own inner problem” [4].

This is likely what transpired under the surface in the case of the evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, when in 1986 he loudly condemned fellow televangelist Jim Bakker for his adulterous affair. Swaggart, of course, was engaging in the same kind of adulterous indiscretions himself. If we apply Neumann’s psychological analysis to this situation, it seems Swaggart simply could not stand to face directly what he was doing. It was so intolerable to his normative side (his “persona”), that he eventually reached the point of splitting his “darker” side off completely and projecting it onto Bakker. Why, one might ask, did Jimmy Swaggart not see the same weakness within himself? Was he simply a hypocrite?

Well, not exactly; consider the paradox presented in the Gospels when, in Matthew 23, Jesus refers to the religious authorities of his day as both hypocrites and as blind guides. There is a pronounced psychological contradiction in this juxtaposition; Jesus was accusing the religious leaders of not being able to self-recognize what they themselves were doing. Jung would say this is symptomatic of what happens in the life of the mind when we do not “give the devil his due,” so to speak. We have to judiciously balance the good and the evil, in other words. We must keep the evil sides of our nature at bay, not deny its presence.

It is my contention that reading horror fiction and watching horror movies are a way of indulging in that balanced perspective on evil in a safe and even wholesome and fantastic manner, rather than allowing whatever dark instincts an individual may possess to lead one to actually abuse other people. Of course, some unstable people may be led by the influence of horror fiction to commit acts of real abuse, but this is extremely rare, and almost all cases involve individuals who were already unstable prior to any exposure to horror stories. If one is entertaining horrifying fiction as nothing more than an imaginary world, one is far less likely to actualize in the real world what is seen or read in fictional narratives.

In addition, I believe there is even an element of the sublime to be found in much horror fiction, so that strangely enough, horror movies and novels can contain a strong edification factor. Of course, after a long and sustained diet of watching malevolent spirits, maniacal killers, gory images of people getting dismembered, the terrorizing of helpless victims and endings in which evil wins, these and other horror elements are at some point no longer going to affect the avid connoisseur. He or she becomes like a surgeon who does not recoil in disgust at what he or she sees. This is why seeing too much of the same thing eventually renders the experience completely vacuous [5]. However, humor is also an element of many horror films that serves to balance out darker themes, as well as a certain amount of built-in gamesmanship the director plays upon the audience. This often translates into an unstated understanding that a game is being played in which twist endings, the pushing of boundaries, and the reappearance of common tropes play a big role.

There is additionally a fair amount of subtle, nuanced and deeply thought-provoking material to be found in the horror genre. This is especially true in the case of horror literature, more so than in film. Authors such as Stephen King [6], H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron, Michael Cisco and so forth are master storytellers whose fiction compellingly fosters in the mind of the reader what Lovecraft called “acute spiritual fear” [7]. Even if one rejects, as I myself do, the idea that a spiritual realm actually exists, acute spiritual fear is still good for people. Aristotle spoke of this benefit when he wrote about “catharsis,” the term he used to describe the cleansing of one’s mind of pity and terror by means of inducing pity and terror: “A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself . . . with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions” [8].

My own experience as an avid horror fan attests to these edifying benefits. Thanks to horror fiction, my imagination has been stretched and my horizons have been broadened. I will even go so far as to say that horror novels and movies have contributed to the development of my own maturity, both emotionally and in character. The horror genre has not hampered but instead actually advanced my own individuation, as Jung would call it [9]. This process of maturation, according to Jungian psychology, is achieved by the balancing of the shadow and the persona (the conscious ego ideal), and horror fiction aids this balancing act very effectively when the genre is approached in the manner of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the poetic faith of the temporary “willing suspension of disbelief”:

[I]t was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith [10].

The temporary suspension of disbelief is what we do whenever we are reading a novel, watching a movie, and yes, even going to church. For instance, when I went to the cinema theater last weekend to watch the new Wrath of the Titans movie, I imaginatively entered into a secondary world in which the gods of ancient Greek mythology and the Titans exist and are actively engaged with the world. I am of course fully aware that no such beings actually exist now and that they never did exist, but this fact did not prevent me from immersing myself into the experience as I watched it and engaged in the temporary willing suspension of disbelief.

Likewise, the temporary willing suspension of disbelief is one major reason The Omen series of movies are among my most favorite horror films of the genre (I have even collected all five novels based on the screenplays and tolerated the 2006 remake). The fact that I am a strong atheist and do not believe in Satan, the Antichrist or Christian end-times theology does not prevent me from getting chills every time I watch the devil conquer the world through his son Damien Thorn in these stories. These movies "represent a new lease on life for myths otherwise doomed to oblivion in a scientific age" [11]. The creepy sensation that comes over me as I immerse myself in the story, which occasions a feeling of relief afterward that the story is not and cannot be true, is an experience I highly value and would not be without.

This act of willing suspension for the sake of full immersion in the experience of a narrative operates in the opposite direction as well. That is, one can engage in the temporary willing suspension of belief. This is why I feel that Christians, for example, are being far too hard on themselves and on others when they try to put forth principled arguments as to why horror films and novels should be avoided based on their religious convictions. But their convictions are misplaced, even within the context of their own belief system. A Christian can allow himself or herself to fully enjoy horror stories in which evil or the devil ultimately wins in the end, because the point of these stories is to offer a counter to what one may believe is true and to subject the reader/viewer to the stimulation of emotions and feelings which he or she would not otherwise experience in mundane life. If the religious believer is made to run the gauntlet of a horror story, at the end of the experience he or she simply closes the book and can then feel free to thank their God that the story is not true. Religious believers can of course enjoy horror movies in a similar fashion, without risking any incompatibility with or destruction of their particular faith (not that ridding oneself of religious faith is a bad thing, but delving into that argument here is to digress from the point).

In the New Testament epistle of Philippians, St. Paul advises, “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report: if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things” (4:8). Even within a wholly secular and non-religious point-of-view, this is not necessarily bad admonition, and can in many cases be a good philosophy to heed. However, St. Paul in this verse does not provide us the full picture. We must also dwell on the shadows, the dark side that lies repressed within our psyches and concealed behind the wall of the old, normative ethics we erect as we conform to dominant standards external to us and superimposed upon us. If we fail to acquaint ourselves with our own darkness, to meet our own shadow where it lies neglected, we miss out on truly knowing ourselves and unlocking any unrealized potential that lies dormant.

Those who foster a principled, piously-based aversion to horror stories would do well to take into consideration the words of the Christian existentialist philosopher Paul Tillich (1886-1965):

Anxiety turns us toward courage, because the other alternative is despair. Courage resists despair by taking anxiety into itself . . . He who does not succeed in taking his anxiety courageously upon himself can succeed in avoiding the extreme situation of despair by escaping into neurosis. He still affirms himself but on a limited scale. Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being. In the neurotic state self-affirmation is not lacking; it can indeed be very strong and emphasized. But the self which is affirmed is a reduced one. Some or many of its potentialities are not admitted to actualization, because actualization of being implies the acceptance of nonbeing and its anxiety. He who is not capable of a powerful self-affirmation in spite of the anxiety of nonbeing is forced into a weak, reduced self-affirmation. He affirms something which is less than his essential or potential being. He surrenders a part of his potentialities in order to save what is left [12].

In other words, the more that being can take upon itself nonbeing, the stronger it becomes. In this sense, developing courage is like tempering a sword. Courage does not remove one of anxiety, but instead takes the anxiety of nonbeing into itself with self-affirmation, in spite of (and indeed occasioned by) the “acute spiritual fear” or horror of nonbeing and the terror of the unknown.

Notes

1. Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, Ltd., 1988), 294-95.

2. Robert M. Price, “Honeymoon in the Charnel House,” Zarathustra Speaks, July 2006, http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/zara/july__2006.htm.

3. Sigmund Freud (1915), “Repression,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press Limited, 1957), 154.

4. Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, trans. Hodder & Stoughton Ltd. and the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology (Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1969), 50.

5. Perfect examples of vacuous repetition in horror filmmaking are the slasher movies of the late 1970s and the 1980s, such as the Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween series franchises. These movies, I am sorry to report, are not frightening in the least. They are not even suspenseful. They are instead rather unimaginative, and it is nothing short of amazing to me how these film series made such a huge cultural impact. They are somewhat amusing to indulge in at times, but increasingly tedious as one progresses through each installment.

Exceptions to this general rule are to be found in the slasher genre, however, like Ronny Yu’s absolutely hilarious 2003 film Freddy vs. Jason. This movie is black comedy at its best, as well as a terrific homage to the old-time monster battle movies it invokes, like 1943’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman .

6. For a terrific Stephen King story to get those new to the author properly introduced, I recommend Frank Darabont’s 2007 film The Mist, based on King’s 1980 novella of the same name. Darabont’s movie interpretation is even better than King’s original, a compelling and truly haunting vision of the terrifying unknown encroaching suddenly on the mundane and the familiar.

7. H.P. Lovecraft (1929), “The Dunwich Horror,” in The Dunwich Horror and Others, eds. August Derleth and S.T. Joshi (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House Publishers, Inc., 1963), 172.

8. Aristotle, Poetics, Ch. 6. This is Ingram Bywater’s translation in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Volume 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2320.

9. “In general, [individuation] is the process of forming and specializing the individual nature; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a differentiated being from the general, collective psychology. Individuation, therefore, is a process of differentiation, having for its goal the development of the individual personality” (C.G. Jung, Psychological Types, trans. H. Godwin Baynes, M.B., B.C. Cantab. [New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, Inc., 1924), 561]).

10. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1817), Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1962), 168-69.

11. Robert M. Price, The Paperback Apocalypse: How the Christian Church Was Left Behind, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 269.

12. Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1952), 66.

The Scientific Verdict on God (Part 2): Supernaturalism as a Scientifically Testable Model

2012-01-20T23:52:00.000-08:00

In order to arrive at any justifiable conclusion on what verdict science can lay upon the claim that a god exists, we must first make the case that science is in a position to weigh in on the supernatural, and that it violates no jurisdiction by doing so. On one level, establishing the truth of this argument is very simple: If a claim concerning God or other supernatural entities contains testable elements, then the validity of the supernatural can be scientifically tested. For example, if the claim is made that any two Christians who pray to their God can physically move a mountain from its place and cast it into the sea, then we have before us an obvious empirical test that can be performed (Matthew 18:19-20; 21:21-22; Mark 11:22-24).

On the other hand, the complications that arise when making the above argument are usually grounded in traditionalism, that is, how scientists traditionally approach concepts of the supernatural. The most important problem we encounter is the common assertion that science has nothing and can say nothing about God. I strongly dispute that common belief; the God most people worship is a God that supposedly plays a very important role in every single event in the universe, from atomic transitions in some far-off galaxy to a leaf falling on the ground here on Earth, and who actively listens to every human thought. Such a God as this should therefore be detectable by his effects, by the ways in which he makes his presence known within the natural world. While it is true to say that science deals strictly with natural phenomena, the kind of God most people believe in should exert observable effects upon and within those natural phenomena. Any God who interacts in any conceivable way with the material, physical reality we experience should provide us with actions that can actually be tested for.

The Irrelevancy of Deism

The only kind of God that would most likely lie beyond any possibility of scientific investigation is the non-falsifiable deistic god, one who started the universe but no longer interferes with it in any way. The deist god was the God of the Enlightenment, one might say. It was the god that most of the founders of the United States actually believed in, and this includes Thomas Jefferson, creator of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s god was not the Christian God. The “Creator” mentioned in the Declaration of Independence is instead a clear reference to the deist god.

At that time in history (the late eighteenth century) physics was a highly successful enterprise. Science had attained an impressive level of success with Newtonian physics, and most people then believed that everything that happened was completely determined by the laws of physics. It was therefore quite natural for reasonable people at the time to propose that the only god that is necessary is one that created the universe and established its physical laws. If that god is perfect, they reasoned, he should have simply left the universe alone indefinitely after creating it. That deistic, non-interventionist god was a possible god at that time, given the range of scientific knowledge then available.

However, in our current age, we have at our disposal a great deal more knowledge of the universe and of physics than people at that time had, and quite a different picture now emerges which poses a strong threat to theistic belief. Based upon our best knowledge in the area of cosmology, it appears that the universe began in a state of maximum chaos (what physicists call “maximum entropy”). If this was indeed the case, then the universe had no structure and no laws at the point of its inception; it was essentially nothing at that early moment in the universe’s history. This means that if there had been a Creator God (the deist god, for example), no memory or trace of that god would be preserved in the current universe. Therefore, even the deist god of the Enlightenment, while not completely ruled out, is ruled irrelevant by the mere fact that maximum chaos dominated at the moment the universe was born (in fact, the only Creator that remains a possibility under current scientific scrutiny is the kind of creator that Einstein famously objected to, namely the creator that throws dice).

There may indeed have been a Creator. After all, an all-powerful being could have created the Singularity in ultimate chaos and allowed the result to proceed on its own, watching in a non-participatory manner to see what happens. But if there was such a Creator, the facts of science tell us that this being created only maximum chaos, leaving us no memory of him/her/it (and this includes any Creator God of any culture). If a god created the universe, he/she/it subjected it to a state that is entirely opaque to any memory of what its intentions may have been. While this is completely possible, this would again point to an irrelevant god, one that may as well be non-existent. There would certainly be no point in praying to such a being, because that being has nothing whatsoever to do with the current universe, with which he/she/it is not a part.

The Tinkering God

But of course, that is not the kind of god worshipped by the majority of people today. The God most people worship today is one who is a participant in the universe, and an extremely active one at that. Thus, while I argue that we can confidently dismiss any scientifically-tenable Creator as one who would be reduced to utter irrelevancy, we still need to discuss the God who is claimed, against all scientific reason, to have stepped in after the creation, the God who takes actions and tinkers with the universe and who is claimed to have an effect on our lives. If that tinkering God exists, he should be eminently detectable by the actions he takes following the creation.

The National Academy of Sciences, however, missed this point entirely when they published the following statement: “Science is a way of knowing about the natural world. It is limited to explaining the natural world through natural causes. Science can say nothing about the supernatural. Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral” [1]. What is bitterly amusing about this statement is that it seems to only comes from scientists or laypeople. Perhaps surprisingly (and definitely ironically), one very rarely hears statements to this effect from theologians. They routinely claim the opposite, insisting that science can and should be used to demonstrate the existence of God. A great number of books have been written by theists claiming scientific evidence for the existence of God, demonstrating that theists clearly want to believe that the evidence is out there [2]. By far, the people who most insist that science should have nothing to say about God tend to be scientists.

In 1998, a very revealing survey was conducted by researchers Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham. This survey indicated that only a mere seven percent of the members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, those representing the elite of American scientists, believed in a personal God [3]. This demographic of belief within the NAS is close to being the exact opposite, or inverse, of the belief demographic among the general populace of the United States. Here we have a significant number of atheist scientists who make various pronouncements to the public from time to time. And in one of these pronouncements regarding evolution and creationism, as we have seen already from the quote given above, they state that science has nothing to say about the supernatural, and can say nothing about God. This pronouncement is plainly wrong; it is clear that science can indeed comment on God, because the God most people worship is the God that should manifest empirical effects on the world, such as prayer efficacy.

How do we explain this tendency among predominantly atheist scientists to refrain from exposing religious claims as scientifically untenable? I would argue that this tendency is by and large a protective measure, for two reasons. First, it is within the scientific community’s perceived interest to avoid making religious people angry at them or angry at science in general. That would cause the worst thing that could possibly happen to any scientist: the loss of their funding. Second, the nature of the cultural war between evolution and creationism poses certain pragmatic barriers to public scientific criticisms of religious assertions. Many scientists believe that the best policy is to avoid attacking religion directly on the issue of evolution versus creationism, despite the fact that the entire motivation for creationism is 100 percent religious in nature. Various science groups, such as the National Center for Science Education, which does excellent work in trying to keep evolution taught in schools, issue statements to the effect that they are not going to criticize religion in any way. Their reasoning is that they want and need the support of more moderate forms of religion which allow for the possibility of evolution within their theologies and are willing to accept it as real science (the Catholic Church is one prominent example of a religious entity that supposedly supports evolution, although the current Pope Benedict XVI clearly holds different ideas than the previous, more progressively-oriented Pope).

In the meantime, science groups who have begun to back off from criticizing religion directly want desperately to keep and maintain any support they can garner. This is completely understandable on one level. But it is my contention that at some point, public support for science is going to start falling apart if this reluctance to engage the claims of religion is continued and prolonged. In the past decade, we have already witnessed the first signs of this disintegration of public support in this country, especially in social issues that bear directly on the conflict between science and religion. One need look no further than the many documented ways in which the Bush Administration suppressed science [4], and also made and acted on decisions that were based entirely on faith rather than evidence, including the war in Iraq. Indeed, it is inarguable at this point that the United States’ initiation of and heavy involvement in the disastrous Iraq War was based on blind faith. Numerous other terrible events transpired that were directly sanctioned in the name of religion and made possible by its machinations.

This is one reason why scientists in this country must start to speak out strongly against the thinking process that goes into religious beliefs. In fact, the time for scientists to begin speaking out against religious pseudoscience is long overdue. Several prominent and reputable scientists from a number of disciplines have done just this over the past decade, and their books have demonstrated that science is not only able to make definitive critical assessments of religion and the supernatural, but that it is obliged to do so. These scientists include zoologist/biologist Richard Dawkins [5], neuroscientist Sam Harris [6], and particle physicist Victor Stenger [7] among several others. The movement looks promising, having influenced prominent nonscientists such as the late, great journalist Christopher Hitchens to join them in unapologetically speaking out, in an empirical manner characteristic of scientists, against the type of religious thinking that has been at the root of all manner of social ills (which obviously includes much more than pseudoscience, with which scientists can and should deal) in this country and abroad [8].

A second reason the scientific community as a whole must start speaking out against the tenets of religion is because to refrain from doing so is dogmatic, even if unwittingly so. Those scientists who say that science has nothing to say about the supernatural, that science should stay out of assessments and analysis of religion altogether, end up playing right into the hands of people like Phillip Johnson, the Christian lawyer who is largely responsible for initiating the Intelligent Design movement with his series of anti-Darwin books published in the 1990s [9]. Johnson has asserted time and time again throughout these books that a "bias of naturalism" exists in the scientific community. Johnson charges that the modern scientific establishment assumes everything is material and natural, and that this is an assumption to which scientists are dogmatically attached. Thus, every time a scientist states that science has nothing to do with the supernatural, only with the natural, they are playing right into the hands of people like Johnson.

One eminent scientist who fell for what I call the Johnson Trap is the late great paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. In his 1999 book Rocks of Ages, Gould put forth the idea that science and religion constitute two “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” [10]. He proposed that science and religion occupy completely separate spheres of knowledge (or magisteria). Science concerns itself with the understanding of the natural world, while religion is associated with tackling issues of morality. Most academics who reviewed the book agreed that in it Gould was attempting to redefine religion as moral philosophy [11]. The fact of the matter is that most religions are not content with merely being moral philosophies. All religions have something to say about the natural world, the most ubiquitous being that a supreme entity designed and created it and interacts with it in a tangible way.

Moreover, there is no reason why science should not be able to weigh in on morality as well [12]. Morality is often touted as something that science can say nothing about. While science perhaps may not be able to inform us as to what is right and wrong, science can certainly examine human behavior, which is an observable phenomenon. And science has every right to study everything that is observable, and to construct models that describe these observations. In the final analysis, science at its most basic is involved with observing the world, the universe, human beings, and anything that causes some kind of signal to enter one’s sensory apparatus. As I detailed in Part 1 of this series, the Scientific Method then proceeds to create models to describe what is seen and to aid in the investigators’ understanding. This means making these models as universal as possible so they do not rely on any one particular point of view. Scientific models that describe reality must be objective, and the process toward that end is a smooth, natural procedure when properly carried out.

On July 20, 1998, Newsweek magazine featured a cover story entitled “Science Finds God,” a story which credulously promulgated the view that modern science provides support for the notion that God exists [13]. This prompted physicist Victor Stenger to write Has Science Found God? in response. In this book, Stenger examines all the major arguments that people have used in favor of the claim that science had stumbled upon God, including the Intelligent Design argument, the terrestrial and cosmological Fine-Tuning Arguments, the Kalam Cosmological Argument, etc. After thoroughly investigating these arguments, Stenger concludes that there is in fact an absence of evidence for the existence of God [14]. And he is certainly not the only scientist to make this conclusion.

Even the most pious believer must admit up front (because this is a fact) that there is no sufficient empirical evidence for the existence of any god that has satisfied scientific consensus. God is simply not a part of modern science. If we had such evidence in hand, if God was accepted by an overall consensus within modern science, then that evidence would surely have a prominent place in the textbooks, right alongside the textbook evidence for quarks, for electrons, for atoms, etc. But there is currently no good evidence for God that has stood up under the normal scrutiny of science, let alone hard scrutiny, and this is a matter of fact, not opinion.

The reader will likely already be familiar with the common rejoinder to this conclusion. In the words of the famed astronomer Carl Sagan, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” [15]. But upon reflection, this reasoning amounts to little more than a clever play on words. Absence of evidence really is evidence of absence, and good evidence at that. Most of us do not believe in the Loch Ness Monster or in Bigfoot precisely because we do not have any evidence indicating their existence. Why should anyone believe in the reality of anything for which there is no evidence and thus no reason to believe?

The Failure of Prayer

Not only is there an absence of evidence (which is already by itself a good argument against God, and at the very least a good argument to reserve belief), but there is also positive evidence that God does not exist, evidence that allows one to falsify the God Hypothesis whenever a God is specifically defined [16]. One of my favorite examples of this positive evidence that works actively against the notion of a participant God is the failure of prayer. Consider what we should expect to see if there was a God who answered prayer in a significant way (that is, not just once every ten million years, for example). At what rate are prayers being said, say, every second? This number must be in the billions [17]. If any of these billions of prayers were worthwhile, if there was any real purpose behind praying, then we should see at least some tangible results of prayer on a regular basis. And this is something that can (and, as we shall see, has been) tested by scientific means. It is possible to perform carefully controlled experiments on intercessory prayer, for example, taking all the best techniques that we know of from other fields of science, especially blinded studies, and applying them to a study on prayer’s effects.

Let us entertain a hypothetical situation: suppose that a series of such rigorous and robust experiments were performed on intercessory prayer, and the result created unanimous agreement on the part of all scientists involved that Catholic prayers really are effective. The results show conclusively and beyond a reasonable doubt that Catholic prayers work in healing the sick. Furthermore, the results show that Catholic prayers are the only prayers that work. Hindu prayers do not work, Buddhist prayers do not work, Protestant Christian prayers do not work, and Jewish and Muslim prayers do not work. Only Catholic prayers are demonstrated to work. Given a result like this, I would be hard-pressed to think of any plausible natural explanation for it. If atheists such as myself were to observe such a phenomenon, most of us would find ourselves conceding that perhaps a God exists after all, and more, a God who answers prayers. Furthermore, we would have to concede that the Catholics had it right all along; the God demonstrated to exist by such experiments is the Catholic God. I can only speak for myself when I say that a result of this kind would lead me to become a believing theist once again.

But of course, this hypothetical situation has not played out in reality. We do not see any evidence that prayer is efficacious in any way, shape or form. And in fact, there have actually been a series of very good experiments, done by reputable scientists associated with reputable institutions (Mayo Clinic, Harvard and Duke University) and published in reputable scientific journals, which utilized standard scientific methods to empirically and rigorously test the efficacy of prayer [18].

My favorite of the major scientific prayer studies is the one that came from Duke University. In 2001, physicians from that institution began a clinical trial that spanned three years to study the effects of intercessory prayer, along with other so-called noetic therapies such as music, imagery and touch therapy. The subjects of the trial consisted of 748 patients awaiting angioplasty for obstruction of the coronary artery in nine U.S. hospitals, and the trial involved the intercessions of twelve prayer groups from around the world. These included a representative number of religious persuasions, including lay and monastic Christians, Sufi Muslims, Buddhist monks and Jews.

The protocols of this study were straightforward and highly competent: the 748 patients were selected at random by computer, divided into two groups, and their names sent to the twelve prayer groups, who prayed for the complete recovery of selected patients. The clinical trials were performed in a double-blind fashion; it was unknown to both the patients and the hospital staff which group was being prayed for and which was not. According to the final test results published in the journal Lancet in 2005, no significant differences were observed between the two groups’ recovery and health: “Neither masked prayer nor MIT [music, imagery, touch] therapy significantly improved clinical outcome after elective catheterisation or percutaneous coronary intervention” [19].

It is instructive to note that these experiments were not undertaken by atheists or skeptics. These experiments were performed by believing scientists who wanted to find evidence for the efficacy of prayer. But they were good scientists who allowed the data to decide the results rather than their own desires, and going only where the data leads is always the proper methodology in science. While one might be tempted to conclude that the scientists involved in the Duke study, for example, were initially looking underhandedly for a Templeton Prize, the fact of the matter is that they were good enough scientists to have the integrity to publish the results, even when the results failed to produce the conclusion they were searching for. And what have the results of these experiments on prayer shown? They have uniformly found that there are no visible effects to prayer.

Such scientific tests give the lie to the notion that science can have no say on the supernatural. The studies I have cited serve as illustrative examples demonstrating that science can legitimately comment on God. Experiments have been done (and will continue to be done) that directly address the question of the supernatural.

But we need not even point to these studies to convince theists of this truth. Theists who have written books and articles (of which there are hundreds) purporting to validate the god hypothesis through scientific evidence have already implicitly ceded this point. Thus, when unbiased scientists respond in kind and proceed to put supernatural claims to the tests with proper protocol, such theists are in no position to lodge objections on the basis of a “non-overlapping magisteria” argument.

When Theism Flirts With Science

In May 2007, physicist Frank Tipler of Tulane University was highlighted in a CBS Channel 5 news report for his announcement that he had come up with an equation that he claimed proved the existence of God. Invoking the idea that physics forces the continual existence of the universe, Tipler boldly stated that "as long as you're using . . . general relativity, and quantum mechanics, you are forced to conclude that God exists” [20]. This announcement came shortly before the release of his 2007 book The Physics of Christianity, in which Tipler attempts to tie his God equation into additional scientific demonstrations of the divinity of Jesus and a variety of other metaphysical claims specific to Christianity. He came monumentally short of persuading any of his colleagues in the fields of physics, cosmology and mathematics, and the promised “equation” was never released. Instead, interested followers of his announcement were left with a vague and gibberish-laden summary:

Tipler then concludes that life must be present to the end, using a string of complex and partly circular arguments: black holes evaporate, this would violate 'unitarity, a fundamental law of quantum mechanics' (nowhere in books on quantum theory, not even in Tipler's book, do I find 'unitarity' mentioned), so universe must collapse, but 'event horizons' would force information and entropy to approach zero, this contradicts second law, thus event horizons do not exist, thus information goes to infinity, thus the universe is closed and goes to final singularity, but without life this would yield an infinitely improbable state, this contradicts second law, thus life must be present to guide universe to final singularity, thus event horizons are absent [21].

If nothing else, a supernatural being that participates in and interferes constantly with the physical universe should at least leave a straightforward statistical trace, not a string of incomprehensible gobbledygook sprung from the imaginative mind of a physicist with too much time on his hands. In fact, statistical evidences are among the strongest kind of evidences one could hope to secure in science, and a number of theists recognize this. Physicist and theist Stephen Unwin favors this statistical approach in his 2003 book The Probability of God, in which he purports to prove, to a high probability, that God exists by using Bayesian mathematical methods and analysis. Unwin’s calculations yield a probability of 67 percent in favor of God:

Through systematic analysis of the evidence, I assess the final truth probability of Proposition G to be 67 percent. This means that the balance of probability – that is 33 percent (100 percent less 67 percent) – attaches to Proposition G*, which is that God does not exist. So comparing 67 percent to 33 percent, we have in effect assessed the odds at 2 to 1 in favor of God.

Your assessment of the evidence may differ. So now that you have the hang of the process, you may wish to adjust the numbers as you see fit and see what results you derive. You may even have new evidentiary areas to add [22].

Unwin does not stop there, though. In a bizarre move, he ends up boosting his initial calculation of 67 percent up to 95 percent by the end of his book, the balance of 28 percent originating in a last-minute injection of “faith.” In the process of justifying this probability-boosting, Unwin fully reveals the highly subjective and arbitrary nature of what is only ostensibly a mathematical proof. He writes, for example, “[A] faith factor of 28 percent is necessary to account for the discrepancy between my reasoned, calculated probability of God and my actual degree of belief in his existence. So this 28 percent factor is my trust in God’s existence: the experiential component of my belief” [23].

In response to Unwin’s venture, Tufts University physicist Larry Ford acted upon Unwin’s encouragement to assess the evidence and adjust the numbers to his satisfaction. He recalculated the Bayesian probability of God and came up with his own estimate: 10-17 [24].

The lesson to be drawn from this is that if one wishes hard enough to find God in mathematics, he will be found. It all depends on how one reads the numbers. With Bayesian analysis specifically, results depend entirely on what numbers are subjectively inserted by the individual assessor. As Unwin himself admits in his book, “Life thrusts too much information at us. It is therefore a vacuous exercise in my view to speculate on whether access to the same evidence should always lead two people to produce the same probabilities” [25]. He goes on to acknowledge that “It is certainly the case that Bayesian probabilities have a subjective element. A degree of belief is a subjective notion . . . partial subjectivity is an inevitable attribute of probabilities” [26].

Therefore, we should dispute, at the outset, anybody who claims that he or she can construct a mathematical test of God’s existence. We are obliged to rely on strictly objective observations to the best of our ability and as much and often as we possibly can. Unfortunately, however, most objective observations tend to manifest qualitatively, rather than quantitatively. In fact, it is highly doubtful that it is even possible to make an argument for God’s existence a quantitative one.

Because both theists and atheists can look at the same data, the same mathematics, and come up with entirely different results, the burden of proof lies squarely on the shoulders of those making the positive claim, which would be the theist in this case.

Notes

1. National Academy of Sciences, Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science. (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1998), 58.

2. See Victor J. Stenger, Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003) for an excellent examination of these claims that conclusively finds they do not hold up under careful critical scrutiny.

3. Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham, “Leading Scientists Still Reject God,” Nature 394 (1998): 313.

4. See Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2005) for documentation of many examples of this concerted suppression of science by Republican politics and the resultant emergence of socially-harmful policies.

5. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

6. Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason(New York: Norton, 2004); Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010).

7. Victor J. Stenger, Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003); God: The Failed Hypothesis – How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007); Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009); The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009); The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe is Not Designed for Us(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011).

8. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve Books, 2007); Hitchens (ed.), The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007).

9. Phillip E. Johnson, Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism (Dallas, TX: Haughton Publishing Co., 1990); Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991); Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law and Education (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995); Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997); The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001).

10. Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002).

11. Ursula Goodenough, “The Holes in Gould’s Semipermeable Membrane Between Science and Religion,” American Scientist May/June 1999; H. Allen Orr, “Gould on God: Can Religion and Science Be Happily Reconciled?” Boston Review Oct./Nov. 1999; Kenak Malik, “Inventing Allies in the Sky.” New Statesman 19 Feb. 2001, 49-50.

12. See Harris, The Moral Landscape.

13. Sharon Begley, “Science Finds God,” Newsweek 20 July 1998.

14. Stenger, Has Science Found God? pp. 219-260.

15. Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), 213.

16. Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis.

17. As a side note, I find it rather amusing that many Christians insist on making grand public shows of their praying, which is contrary to what Jesus instructed his followers to do. According to Matthew 6:5-6, Jesus says, “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.” Most Christians obviously do not follow this instruction, which they would do well to look up (yes, please read your Bible, Christians; the more Christians actually read the Bible, the less Christians we would end up with). What we find instead is many Christians attempting to force prayer into as many aspects of public life that they can.

18. M.W. Krucoff, et al., “Music, Imagery, Touch, and Prayer as Adjuncts to Interventional Cardiac Care: The Monitoring and Actualisation of Noetic Trainings (MANTRA) II Randomised Study,” Lancet 366 (16 July 2005): 211-17; H. Benson, et al., “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in Cardiac Bypass Patients: A Multicenter Randomized Trial of Uncertainty and Certainty of Receiving Intercessory Prayer,” American Heart Journal 151, no. 4 (2006): 934-42.

19. Krucoff, et al., p. 211; for a media report on the Duke MANTRA study, see Jonathan Petre, “Power of Prayer Found Wanting in Hospital Trial,” The Telegraph 15 Oct. 2003.

20. Quoted in Salman Hameed, “The Proof of God: Tipler and His Pseudoscience,” Irtiqa: A Science & Religion Blog 10 May 2007.

21. Quoted in PZ Myers, “Is This What We Can Expect from Comfort/Cameron?” Pharyngula 5 May 2007.

22. Stephen D. Unwin, The Probability of God: A Simple Calculation That Proves the Ultimate Truth (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), 128-129.

23. Ibid., p. 189.

24. Victor J. Stenger, “God and Rev. Bayes,” Skeptical Briefs 17.2 (June 2007); The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning, pp. 249-252.

25. Unwin, The Probability of God, p. 67.

26. Ibid., p. 68.

Unorthodox Thoughts on Genesis (Part 9): Noah Was Not a Preacher of Righteousness

2012-01-05T08:19:00.000-08:00

By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith. ~ Hebrews 11:7

The strict literalness with which fundamentalists approach the Bible dictates that they believe in the literal and historical veracity of Genesis’ flood myth as represented in the text. And yet, even fundamentalists unwittingly incorporate elements into the story that are extrabiblical in origin, elements that come from outside what they view as the inspired text. I mention this to point out the irony that emerges when one considers the many instances in which fundamentalists lambast portrayals or representations in popular culture (and even so-called “high” culture) of their revered texts for not sticking woodenly to the straight literal reading of biblical passages.

Consider the story one often hears from pastors and Bible cartoons that the other people living in Noah’s day mocked the patriarch for constructing his ark. But where does this part of the story come from? Various preachers and cartoons depict the other inhabitants of Noah’s town being derisive and mocking toward his project [1], yet nowhere can this be found in the actual Flood narrative. In fact, the narrative tells us that Noah was blameless among all men then alive. If interpreted one way, this could imply that even the sinners among whom Noah dwelt had at least a decent opinion of the patriarch. Then again, it is also possible to assume that the reaction of the people to Noah would approximate the kind of reaction we read of in the second chapter of the Book of Wisdom (Wisdom 2):

"Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. We are considered by him as something base, and he avoids our ways as unclean; he calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father. Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life; for if the righteous man is God's son, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture, that we may find out how gentle he is, and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected" (Wisdom 2:12-20).

In other words, “Look at that bastard! He is showing up the rest of us like the rats we are! Let us get rid of him!” This would make sense to apply to the story of Noah. But still, it is an extrabiblical source.

But the tradition of Noah’s peers mocking and ridiculing his venture actually derives from various rabbinic comments on the Scriptures that spun this motif out to what eventually became its present incarnation [2]. These rabbinic comments aver that not only was Noah preaching righteousness (as 2 Peter 2:5 also says), but that he was getting heckled mercilessly for it. A paraphrase follows:

Hecklers: Hey, idiot! What are you building this thing for?

Noah: Hey, ever heard of rain and flood? Oh, I guess you have not, because there has not been a flood yet!

Then, of course, the hecklers notice too late when the rain starts coming down and Noah cries out “So long, suckers!” from the ark.

This creates an interesting problem for the notion that Noah was a “preacher of righteousness.” For even if Noah was a preacher of vengeance, what was the ultimate point of his preaching? What was he planning on doing in the event that mass crowds of people repented? Build another ark? After all, it is obvious that the only ones investing in the creation of the saving ark are Noah and his three sons, so what we have with the “preacher of righteousness” aspect is a somewhat stupid embellishment of the story.

Some fundamentalists’ feathers may be ruffled if they knew that they have been privy to and have incorporated an extrabiblical story that makes a bit more sense of the overall premise than any later canonical passage concerning Noah. The rabbinic commentaries are just a bit more sober, portraying Noah’s peers as being astounded by his apparent lunacy. Consider what happens in our own day, when people lock themselves into large buildings saying that the Second Coming is imminent and warning us to be ready for it, like they are. All sane people respond by saying such doomsayers are crazy. This type of assessment would have been the prototype, rabbinic scholars reasoned. They thus figured that the people in Noah’s day would have thought Noah was out of his mind. Doubly so, considering that, according to the story, Noah’s hecklers may not even have known what a boat was (unless they were used on rivers or some such thing).

Regardless, the story of Noah being ridiculed and mocked is a later addition to the flood myth, an addition that rabbinic redactors thought offered the basis of a satisfying denouement in which Noah prevails and all the people get sucked down the universal toilet. The late embellishment makes the story a homiletical one.

Notes

1. My personal favorite cartoon depiction of this extrabiblical feature is the “Noah’s Ark” episode of Hanna-Barbera’s 1980s television cartoon series The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible, the script of which contains some great one-liners from the hecklers (“Awfully big; must be a barn. Right, a barn! And Noah is the biggest donkey of them all.” “All bow down to the King of Sawdust!” “Please sire, we’re only poor, ignorant farmers. Tell us again what you’re going to float that barn on. The dew?” “You won’t need a boat, Noah. Your head’s hollow enough to keep you afloat”).

2. Sanhedrin 108a, b; Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer xxii; Genesis Rabba 30.7; Leviticus Rabba 27.5; Sefer haYashar, l.c.

The Scientific Verdict on God (Part 1): Models

2011-12-27T16:59:00.000-08:00

“The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.”~ John von Neumann [1].

One of the greatest misperceptions about science among the general public today is that science is a noun. Most people tend to erroneously think of science as something that is meant to provide proofs, instead of looking at science as a model that describes reality and how to build it. The viability of a given model is based entirely on (1) how reliable it is, (2) how usable it is, and (3) whether or not it is consistently reproved and continually open to revision by the evidence we have found or may yet find.

It is important to recognize the word “model” in science-based discussions, because many people very often use the word “theory” when they should be using the word “model.” "Theory” is a much misunderstood word. The practice of science, at its most basic, involves making observations of the physical world. The set of basic assumptions that all scientists start with must always be based on observations. Consider, for example, the concept of time. A scientific investigator is certainly going to start with time when trying to describe almost anything. But how does one go about defining “time”? After all, philosophers have never been able to define time. The definition that Einstein came up with is that time is what one reads on a clock. All the other various observational qualities should follow on the heels of this pragmatic approach: Distance is what you read with a meter stick. Temperature is what you read on a thermometer.

These are known as operational definitions, and establishing them is the first step in the study of physics. Physicists make a series of operational definitions based on well-prescribed measuring procedure, informed by observations, and only then proceed to carry out those measurements. Physicists are highly concerned with making their measurements quantitative. If physicists can be quantitative in their approach, they are 90% home-free, because of the much sought-after quality of precision that is then achieved. The quantitatively-oriented physicist is then ready to build models to describe her observations. If the models work, then they are useful. If they do not work, they are not useful. As long as a given model is useful, it does not matter whether it has any correspondence with ultimate reality. In other words, whether or not an electron exists, one can still use the electron model to calculate to a high degree of accuracy the current flows in electronic circuits. Never does metaphysics enter the issue at all.

Another illustrative example of a model is the Sun. We usually subconsciously think of the sun as an orb travelling across the sky. If you are a traveler journeying from east to west, you can use the sun to guide your direction; by heading in the direction of the sunset, you know you are heading generally west. Although you must correct just slightly for longitude, you can successfully use the model of the sun as an orb moving across the sky. The ancient Greeks believed that the sun was Apollo pulling a chariot across the sky. That understanding constituted the dominant metaphysics of the time. The Chinese, meanwhile, understood the sun to be a golden bird flying across the sky.

Does it really matter which of these metaphysics was correct, if any? Obviously, we know today that neither of them was true. But the instructive point here is that it does not matter what the particular metaphysics happens to be. Both the ancient Greek traveler and the ancient Chinese traveler could still use the sun in the exact same way as a traveling guide.

Scientific models are the same way. We use them to more fully grasp, and apply to, practical needs. The better the model becomes and the more universal its application grows, the closer the model comes to being called a “theory.” A wide application is crucial to the life of any model; the model must apply not just to small, isolated situations, but instead apply to many different situations. The more general a model is, the more universal it becomes. And the more universal the model is, the more universal the theory therefore is, and the more widely it can then be applied. But through this whole process of maturation, what we have is still merely a pragmatic model, a human invention. For example, we know full well that the earth is not flat. But the Flat Earth Model is still useful, because it is employed all the time when we construct buildings. Locally speaking, it does not matter at all that the earth is actually a sphere. In some cases, we even go out of our way to make the earth flat where it is not in order to apply the model to practical situations.

Scientific Models vs. Religious Models

Scientific arguments about the sun necessarily remove intent from the hypothesis of who or what is hauling it across the sky, if indeed it is being hauled at all. The hypothesis that the sun is a chariot flying across the sky, on the other hand, inherently involves intent. The god responsible for the sun’s movement could arise the next morning and arbitrarily decide that he is not going to haul the sun across the sky. As anyone who has read The Iliad or The Odyssey knows, the Greek gods were very uncertain beings to rely on. When working at the level of deities, science becomes an exercise in second-guessing the supernatural. You could wake up one day to find that the sun did not go across the sky. In fact, such a thing is bound to happen in this scenario; every once in a while at least, the god would decide that he just does not want to fulfill his role. Thus, the fact that the sun has never failed to appear every morning should constitute evidence that the original model of a chariot being pulled along is dead wrong. After all, does Apollo never get sick? Does he not have to take a vacation at some point? Is he going to pull the sun around forever just because he likes us humans so very much?

Science provides the ability to consistently recreate one’s worldview, because science can recreate from scratch, through observation and experimentation, the models it previously built up. The models may not be exactly the same after reconstruction; there may be something else in the place of the electron, for example. But whatever does stand in its place will have the exact same function as an electron and behave the same way. On the other hand, imagine the drastic differences that would obtain if one tried to reconstruct a religion from scratch. What emerges is never going to be the same as what we now have. The models of science change, or are dismissed entirely, in the face of new scientific discoveries. This is how good science works. Religion, on the other hand, possesses its models and nothing else. There is no discovery in religion; everything must be forced to fit into the given model at hand. Religionists must wedge all outside discoveries into their existing, supposedly changeless model, but they also cannot allow such discoveries to alter the religious model too much, or else their model ceases to be definable as a religion.

A perfect example of this practice of forcing data into a given religious model is found in the work of religious scientists like William Dembski, Michael Behe and Francis Collins, each of whom are notorious for placing the proverbial cart firmly before the horse in their approach to reconciling science and religion. It is somewhat difficult at times to believe that mathematician Dembski and biochemist Behe, the main representatives of the “Intelligent Design” movement, actually believe their own words. It seems they are both knowledgeable enough, that they both have access to the same information that all other mathematicians and biochemists have managed to understand. Yet they both sit with crossed arms and staunchly deny this readily-accessible information.

To wit: During Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (the 2005 legal battle over the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design in public schools that was waged in Dover, Pennsylvania), Michael Behe testified under oath that he had never seen any studies or papers that provide answers to his challenge that the immune system is “irreducibly complex” and therefore could not be the product of evolution. The response from his cross-examiner was very telling and damning to Behe’s credibility. As Judge John E. Jones III noted in his decision,

Between 1996 and 2002, various studies confirmed each element of the evolutionary hypothesis explaining the origin of the immune system. [2:31 (Miller)] In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system [2].

Having personally read Behe’s famous book Darwin’s Black Box (New York: Free Press, 1996), it seems to me that Behe genuinely believed that he had hit upon something compelling, that he was not consciously lying. In Darwin’s Black Box, he makes several statements to the effect that no explanation, deriving from gradual evolutionary changes over time, exists for the examples of “irreducible complexity” that he lists, when in fact there were an abundance of explanations he could have easily found had he looked. Behe, who is a biochemist and not an evolutionary biologist by training, was simply unaware of the scientific literature that documents numerous robust examples in nature of organic systems undergoing functional changes during its evolution [3]. He was even unaware that the evolutionary biologist Hermann Joseph Muller, who in 1946 won the Nobel Prize for his work in biology, had already provided an evolutionary mechanism for so-called “irreducibly complex” systems six decades earlier [4].

The only thing to which we are justified in attributing this is ignorance on Behe’s part, the same sort of ignorance that religious scientist Francis Collins displays [5]. Collins, a geneticist and proponent of a theistic framework through which to understand evolution, is simply unaware of all the scientific as well as theological work that refutes or disputes his claims. But while it may seem as though it is not possible they should be unaware of all this literature any longer, part of the blame lies on other academics in the pertinent fields, academics who do not bother to criticize the likes of Behe and Collins because of the mistaken impression that the Behes and Collins of the world are promoting their cause. More evolutionary biologists, biochemists and geneticists need to read Behe’s and Collins’ books, and they need to criticize and refute them in a mainstream capacity. They need to publicly point out that they are obviously not aware of the literature on the subject. Whereas many theistic apologists very often make arguments from ignorance, Behe and Collins seem to be making arguments from voluntary ignorance, because they have not bothered to investigate the literature that bears on their subjects.

William Dembski, on the other hand, knows his business much better than Behe. In his books and articles [6], Dembski really is knowingly cooking up claims that suit his preconceived and very dubious ideas [7]. Ultimately, the preconceived end the religious apologist wants to reach constitutes their entire motive, not a genuine regard for science and investigative honesty.

Of course, one can try to get people to imagine a wholly new religious model, to make up a religion of their own from scratch. Doing so may even result in something better than any religion we now have (then again, it is somewhat difficult to come up with something worse). When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in early 2006 to allow the religious use of hallucinogens for a small religious group (the União do Vegetal, a fringe Christian sect) in New Mexico, they may have helped make that particular brand of religion much more popular than it previously was [8]. After all, prospective members knew they can legally get high if they came in to that church. But nevertheless, the point remains that the models of science, in their ability to consistently arrive at the same conclusions even after reconstruction of lost data, is demonstrated to be superior to the fickle models of religion.

Notes

1. Quoted in J. Tinsley Oden, Acceptance Remarks, 1993 John von Neumann Award Winner, United States Association of Computational Mechanics Bulletin 6, no. 3 (September 1993).

2. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, Federal Case No. 4:04-cv-02688-JEJ Document 342, Judge John E. Jones III presiding, filed Dec. 20, 2005. Decision, 78.

3. See Robert Dorit, review of Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe, American Scientist (September-October 1997); Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for a Common Ground between God and Evolution (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); Mark Perakh, Unintelligent Design (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003); David Ussery, “Darwin’s Transparent Box: The Biochemical Evidence for Evolution,” in Matt Young and Taner Edis, eds., Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).

4. H.J. Muller, “Reversibility in Evolution Considered from the Standpoint of Genetics,” Biological Reviews 14 (1939): 261-80.

5. Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2007). For a thorough and comprehensive refutation of Collins’ book, see George C. Cunningham, Decoding the Language of God: Can a Scientist Really Be a Believer? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009).

6. William A. Dembski, The Design Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999); No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

7. For refutations of Dembski’s work, see Brandon Fitelson, Christopher Stephens, and Elliott Sober, “How Not to Detect Design – Critical Notice: William A Dembski, ‘The Design Inference,’” Philosophy of Science 66, no. 3 (1999): 472-88; James Rachels and David Roche, “A Bit Confused: Creationism and Information Theory,” Skeptical Inquirer 25, no. 2 (2001): 40-42; Jeffery Shallit, review of No Free Lunch by William Dembski, Biosystems 66, nos. 1-2 (2002): 93-99; Victor J. Stenger, Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), chap. 4.

8. Religion News Blog, “High Court Sides with Church in Hallucinogenic Tea Dispute,” ReligionNewsBlog.com 21 Feb. 2006.

Unorthodox Thoughts on Genesis (Part 8): The Nephilim

2011-12-27T05:05:00.000-08:00

Many modern readers of the Genesis Flood story come to the text with a false impression of just why Yahweh is said to have flooded the world. In Sunday school, the flooding is said to be a response to man’s wickedness, originating from the Original Sin of the Fall described in Genesis’ third chapter. Sunday school readings of the Flood account seem always to start the story at Genesis 6:6. But the first five verses of this chapter read as follows:

When men began to increase on earth and daughters were born to them, the divine beings [Others “the sons of God”], saw how beautiful the daughters of men were and took wives from among those that pleased them. –The LORD said, “My breath shall not abide [Meaning of Heb. uncertain] in man forever, since he too is flesh; let the days allowed him be one hundred and twenty years.” – It was then, and later too, that the Nephilim appeared on earth – when the divine beings cohabited with the daughters of men, who bore them offspring. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.

The LORD saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. And the LORD regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened. The LORD said, “I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created – men together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky; for I regret that I made them” (Genesis 6:1-7, The Jewish Study Bible).

Notice that nowhere does Yahweh mention Original Sin in this passage. These verses seem to imply instead that Yahweh’s goal in the Flood was to clean up the mess made by these “Sons of God” interbreeding with the daughters of men, to “cut them down” as Johnny Cash might say and send them to a supernatural equivalent of Folsom Prison (which in this case would be Tartaros).

These verses do indeed give us the answer to “Original Sin” according to the Old Testament [1]. It seems that the writers of the Old Testament did not view the story of Adam and Eve as revealing the origin of sin. While the story was considered a description of the origin of alienation between God and human beings, this does not mean that human beings were considered to be in the wrong or to have sinned in any way. This is especially true of the interpretations of the early Gnostics, who were possibly the only ones who could see clearly what was happening in the Fall. Theirs was a heavily mythic, unflattering, unsympathetic view of the Creator, whom they viewed as being jealous of his prerogatives. Human beings won out against that peevishness, though at a hell of a price.

Thus, the Garden of Eden story contains nothing pertaining to sin. Edenic sin does come into prominence in the larger story of Christian theology, in which the whole matter is implicitly rewritten. But this is not the case in terms of the Old Testament writers.

While one could legitimately translate “Sons of God” to mean “divine beings” (if the point is that “sons” means “people of this category,” i.e., divine people or divine beings), this translation somewhat masks or obscures the underlying polytheism that was originally assumed, the assumption that said Elohim had sons, lesser gods such as Apollo the son of Zeus. Interpreting the “Sons of God” to mean angels is a still later reinterpretation, a rationalizing and monotheizing demotion of these people that is discussed at length in such works as The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, 1 Enoch, and the Book of Jubilees. This monotheistically-driven demotion to angel-status was later melded into the Fall of Satan myth (which of course is never explicitly stated in the Old Testament). But before the monotheistic framework obtained, the story implied nothing bad or evil about the Sons of God. Originally, the story was not designed to account for the presence of sin, nor is there anything about a Fall in the original version, though that might be suggested by the obscure word “Nephilim,” which can be taken by way of a loose pun to mean “fallen ones” (from the Aramaic naphal, meaning “to fall”). Scholars, however, are still divided and uncertain about what the hell the word actually means.

Still, the original idea was indeed that these god-people mated with mortal women. Originally, this was what the German Old Testament scholar Hermann Gunkel called an “ethnological legend” [2]. As the core of the surviving story makes very clear, it was an attempt to explain the origin of a particular ethnic group, namely Canaanite and Philistine “giants” that Israel had supposedly met in battle on various occasions (Goliath of Gath, the great Philistine champion said to be descended from the Anakim, is one example of this. He was one of the “mighty men of renown,” an epic hero). After Caleb and Joshua and the gang journeyed in to spy out the land of Canaan, they returned with the report that the inhabitants were giants, and that the Israelite men were like grasshoppers compared to them (Numbers 13:31-33). The writer claims that these giants were descended from the Anak, “which come of the giants,” among whom the Rephaim (often translated to mean "ghosts of the dead," interestingly) are also counted [3]. At any rate, the Israelites thereafter harbored beliefs that people existed who were gigantic compared to themselves.

The majority of people in the ancient world were naturally small, due to the fact that they did not have much meat in their diet. This is attested by suits of armor that can be seen in museums, which a person of average build today would have difficulty fitting into. To average people in ancient times, a person six and a half feet tall was considered gigantic. Six and a half feet tall is in fact the figure given for Goliath of Gath in the original text (the Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint), a figure that is not found in the King James Version of the Bible, in which Goliath becomes the Jolly Green Giant at "six cubits and a span," or nine and a half feet tall (1 Samuel 17:4).

Six and a half feet is still pretty damn tall, even by today’s standards (think of how anomalous the horns of the Ankole-Watusis seem to us today). But by ancient standards, this was really tall. Ancient Hebrew writers decided they had to account for this phenomenon somehow, and in an attempt to provide an explanation, they theorized that they must be demigods, or at least descended from demigods. They must have some divine blood in them. This was an entirely understandable hypothesis given what the ancients knew at the time.

Thus, the story of the Sons of God in Genesis 6 is explicitly a product of the writers trying to explain the origins of these great heroic mighty men who came to be known as the Nephilim, epic heroes like Hercules, Gilgamesh and Nimrod [4]. An ancient tradition exists that posits Nimrod in the Bible and Orion in Greek mythology as being one and the same person. A strong case can be made that Hercules, Samson, and even Thor were the same mythic god-character dispersed through different settings and contexts. Goliath, of course, would be another one. They were part and parcel of the cooked-up solution, developed among the ancient Hebrews, that posited some of the male gods, sons of Elohim, came down to earth and fathered children. In fact, this idea was maintained later on to apply to characters like Samson and Samuel, and even Jesus and John the Baptist. When the Angel of Yahve (or the Angel of God) visits a so-called “barren woman,” after which she is suddenly able to bear children, the idea hidden between the lines is that a god has impregnated the woman during the theophany. The passage in Genesis 6 especially encapsulates all the stories of various Greek gods impregnating human women, with superhuman children resulting from such unions. This motif can be found throughout the Bible, and in the mind of the ancient writers, there was never anything wrong or evil about it.

However, our Bible has been edited, as any fool knows, and the editing of the Pentateuch is late enough for the editors to already conceive of the Sons of God as transgressing the bounds of nature (as discussed in the New Testament letter of Jude), and that it was morally wrong. According to this redaction, these Sons of God somehow injected evil into the human gene pool, as we would now call it, although the ancients understood the transmission to occur primarily via the use of superior knowledge which was believed to have been given by the Nephilim to humans who could not handle it. It was believed they taught women the arts of using cosmetics and of seducing men, and that they taught men the use of weapons, thereby helping in a pivotal way to introduce sin. Sin in this conception was introduced from without; it was not technically the fault of the human race [5].

We find the passage about the Nephilim in Genesis 6:1-7 where we do now simply because the editor wants to explain how the entire population of the earth became corrupt. The editors read in verse 5 that “great was man’s wickedness on earth, and . . . every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time,” and must have wondered when and how all this happened. Somebody then plugged in the old story about the demigod heroes, a story that originally assigned no blame to anyone. But it was reinterpreted as the poisoning of the human race, and inserted in a place in the text convenient for explaining the Flood.

All this becomes very clear once all the redactional layers are peeled away. In fact, even the limiting of the human race’s lifespan to 120 years in Genesis 6:3 originally had nothing to do with the rest of the story. It was simply tacked onto the story as a way of explaining what the editors knew to be the case: that there are no longer going to be people like Methuselah living 969 years. Therefore, a divinely-imposed 120-year limit for humankind is jammed into the text; it does not fit the context, and it has no relevance to the surrounding verses, but the ancient editors did not view that as a problem. This interpolation serves as the thumb tack that makes it fit the context by virtue of its mere presence in the text. Of course, we do not read texts the same way anymore today [6].

Notes

1. I wish to stress here that I say “Old Testament” rather than “Hebrew Scripture,” because I feel that if I were to adopt the latter, I would overshoot the mark. Saying “Hebrew Scripture” would sound as if I intend to discuss scripture as religious Jews understand it, which I do not. I am discussing it here from the standpoint of the Protestant-secularist Old Testament critics, such as Gunkel, Wellhausen, Kuhnen, Robertson Smith, and so on, and therefore I continue to refer to “Old Testament.”

2. Hermann Gunkel, The Legends of Genesis, trans. W.H. Carruth (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), pp. 25-27. [First ed. 1901].

3. The Rephaim and Anakim are mentioned in several other Old Testament passages: Genesis 14:5, 15:20; Deuteronomy 1:28, 2:10-11, 21, 9:2; Joshua 11:21-22, 14:12, 15.

4. How Nimrod came to be synonymous in modern language with “stupid idiot” is beyond me. It could just be chalked up to ignorant Americans thinking the word sounds funny, but the association is ludicrous, given Nimrod’s status in legend as the great city-founder and warrior.

5. This was of a piece with the Greek myths. Rather than being a rejoinder to them, these legends were cut from the selfsame cloth as Greek mythology. It is simply more of the same. For example, the reference made in 2 Peter 2:4 to God throwing fallen angels into Tartaros is borrowed directly from Greek mythology, Tartaros being where Zeus imprisons the Titans. Uranus, Greek god of the sky, is also said to have imprisoned a number of giants. And so on and so forth. It is difficult, however, to determine who borrowed what from whom, because the motifs of these mythologies represented common belief at the time.

6. The 120-year limit is additionally an attempt to make room for Moses’ alleged 120 years of life. Many scholars would argue that the work of the Genesis editor is that late, that he was already combining the Moses stories with Genesis, and that he avoided getting into trouble. In this scenario, the editor would know damn well that most of his other characters were not going to be depicted as living that long, even though Moses is. Genesis 6:3 helps leave room for that realization.

Unorthodox Thoughts on Genesis (Part 7): Cain's Mystery Wife

2011-12-16T21:42:00.000-08:00

And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived. ~ Genesis 4:17a

If God created Adam and Eve, and they produced Cain and Abel, with whom did Cain create children? Now that is the ₯65,000 question . . .

There are a few possibilities a believer in the myths of Genesis might pursue. As the character Henry Drummond (based on the historical Clarence Darrow) says in Stanley Kramer’s 1960 film Inherit the Wind, “Where the hell did she [Cain’s wife] come from? . . . Figure somebody pulled off another creation, over in the next county?” One could in fact posit this scenario. Or one could also propose that the same deity, Jehovah, created other people that the reader simply has not heard of until Genesis 4:17. While I do not find myself too impatient with that kind of apologetic, one does get the distinct impression that the writers of Genesis are attempting to relate a series of events that explains how humanity appeared on earth and how their society evolved and changed over time. That being the case, it would be very odd to omit something like simultaneous creations of other people.

Of course, a large part of the problem stems from the two contradictory creation accounts in the first two chapters of Genesis. If all we had as far as creation narratives was Genesis 1, the question of where Cain found a wife would not come up at all, for in that first chapter God creates many males and females copying their own maleness and femaleness. Thus, one human marries a descendant of another one of the humans that God created at the same time, and the conundrum involving the origin and identity of Cain’s wife disappears.

But of course, the question becomes a difficult one for believers because of the inclusion of the J creation account (Genesis 2) in the text of Genesis, in which we read that God creates one man and one woman. Then suddenly we are introduced to their son Cain, who “knew his wife” a mere sixteen verses after we meet him. Who is this wife? Was it his sister? That does not seem to be implied in the story. Instead, my contention would be that either we are dealing with very sloppy storytelling, or (in a slightly different version of the same ultimate point) it is an indication that the Cain stories are a largely dissociated patchwork, as so much else of Genesis is.

Cain is in this sense analogous to a character like Xena the Warrior Princess or Prince Valiant. All that is required for chaotic, disorganized and contradictory chronologies to obtain for such characters is to know nothing more than that they lived way back in unspecified days of antiquity. Xena, for instance, is placed all over the ancient world from one show episode to the next, a thousand years apart in many cases. In several, Xena meets with Julius Caesar. In another, she is present at the birth of Jesus (Season 2, Episode 9). She is also a participant in the Trojan War (Season 1, Episode 12), and she also meets Galen the Roman physician in the second century C.E. (Season 1, Episode 24). Any nerdy assimilator (people like myself) attempting to organize the body of Xena material into a cohesive whole must ask, “When did this gal live?! How long did she live?” (the period of time from the siege of Troy to the lifetime of Galen alone is well over 1300 years, after all). The same problems plague the mythos of the Prince Valiant character: his many adventures take place in the fifth century C.E., and yet he encounters Muslims and other anachronisms. Again, if storytellers maintain no more than a vague and general sense that their character lived sometime back in antiquity without bothering to correlate any contributions to the secondary universe, then the emergence of contradictory patchwork quilts is easily explained and understandable.

Likewise, Cain is indeed depicted in various different and incompatible time periods, simply because there were a great many legends about him, and nobody attempted to harmonize them. In one legend, he is the first man ever born of human beings. According to another, he founds a great city for many people. According to yet another, he founds a nomad tribe and is worried that anybody who catches him will kill him. Now, who the hell could he be worried about? A harmonizer might think he was worried that Mother Eve will seek him out to kill him (“You little bastard, you had this coming ever since you murdered my favorite little Abel!” In actuality, this comes from a Cain story in which he is not pictured as the first man born to the human race, but rather is pictured as a later hero or rogue in a time when the world is populated). The source of such wide-ranging and contradictory traditions is simply bad editing, which is largely occasioned by the ancients’ desire to preserve as much as they could possibly scrape up, even though the material clearly does not fit together. Luckily for scholars and critics, the Bible was not thoroughly and consistently harmonized by its redactors. If it had been, we would be missing a significant amount of material.

Because there is a huge range of materials about Cain, there are even competing definitions of his name in the Hebrew language. Does “Cain” mean “gotten” (“she bare Qanah, and said, ‘I have gotten a man from Yahve’”)? Or might that passage suggest that Cain was a demigod? If that is the case, perhaps the name refers to qamah, a stalk of grain (indeed, a story preserved in the Talmud states that the infant Cain found a stalk of grain and brought it to his parents). Or was Cain perhaps the same as Tubal-Cain, because qayin (Hebrew for “Cain,” meaning “spear”) does seem to suggest a blacksmith or metallurgist trade? Sure enough, the people of the tribe of Tubal are identified in Genesis 4:22 not only as bronze workers and coppersmiths, but also as Cain’s descendants.

A surprisingly large number of believers in the Genesis mythos prefer to imagine that Cain’s wife was indeed his sister (or perhaps not so surprising, since alternative explanations strike such believers as rather unorthodox), but go on to add that God miraculously intervened to prevent any genetic funny business from transpiring as a result of this union. I have to admit that, as a cynic and occasional misanthrope, I like this explanation. While this solution is imported from without and is extra-biblical, it implies something very much like what we all know is clearly implied by the story of Lot and his daughters in Genesis 19, a real howler of a story that thinly veils an ethnic joke aimed at the Moabites and Ammonites, the Canaanite cousins of ancient Israel with whom they were situated cheek-by-jowl geographically and with whom Israel did not get along at all. And so, in order to perpetuate the claim that the Moabites and Ammonites were a bunch of misbegotten bastards, the ancient Israelite mythmakers portrayed the two daughters of old Lot as apparently thinking that they were living in the aftermath of a world-encompassing nuclear holocaust, and that the three of them were the only human beings left alive after Sodom’s destruction. They live in a mountainside cave with their old father, and soon feel the urge to produce offspring to propagate the race. What are they to do, they wonder? There are no other men around as far as they are concerned (this begins to sound like an episode of Sex and the City). What is their solution? Seeing as they are under the impression that their father is the only person with a penis in their island universe of a neighborhood, they decide to get him drunk and seduce him. Now there is one great idea! The text even says that Lot was totally oblivious to all this; he was not even aware of when his daughters came in to have sex with him. I have to hand it to Lot for possessing one hell of a libido! He is not even awake, and he is able to impregnate the two women, one right after the other, one try each.

Needless to say, this story is obviously fiction. And I have little patience with the pious liberals who recognize this and who proceed to demythologize the story: “Oh yes, we certainly cannot take this story literally, but the underlying point of the story is . . .” Yes, as if anybody wants to hear a sermon on that underlying symbolic message. This story is nothing but an ethnic slur against those Moabite and Ammonite bastards. In fact, the pun inherent in the narrative is contained in the names of the children conceived through the incestuous union: “Ben-Ammi” is Hebrew for “son of my people” (*ahem*) and the name of the other child, “Moab,” derives from the Hebrew meh-Ab, meaning “from the father” (ouch).

The same situation is called to mind if one posits that Cain married his sister. One can only wonder if the redactor of Genesis was not a cynic who had in mind what I myself would have in mind if I wrote the story: “Do you want to know why the human race is so stupid and so screwed up? Well, here is your answer: the first man ever born married his sister, for Fuck’s sake!”

Who knows? Maybe that was the intended point. Maybe the myth-mongering Biblical answer to the fascinating truth that “We are all Africans” (a phrase popularized by Richard Dawkins) is to say that “We are all Moabites and Ammonites.”

Do Atheists Exercise Faith in Unbelief?

2011-10-25T15:50:00.000-07:00

One of the most popular apologetic responses theists direct towards atheists, especially when they have been painted into a corner and have exhausted all arguments from reason and logic, is the assertion that everyone is religious, even atheists. They argue that we atheists evangelize often, and that we even have our own “prophets,” such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Robert M. Price. The argument is often hinged on the assertion that because one cannot prove there is no god, and because faith is belief without evidence (which they have at this point admitted if they are making this argument), then atheists therefore must have faith and are therefore religious. I have even heard several Christian apologists declare that “I could only be an atheist if I had more faith than I already do.” In 2004, Crossway Books published a book by Christian apologists Norman Geisler and Frank Turek entitled I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be An Atheist. This line of reasoning follows a grander theme that is usually pushed by the mainstream and prominent apologists, such as pastor Douglas Wilson of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson, who embarked on a debate tour with Christopher Hitchens in 2008 (excerpts of which became the 2009 documentary film Collision), actually confronted Hitchens with the following arguments:

There’s no such thing as a standard-less worldview. Every worldview has standards, express or implied, and you can’t function without appealing to those standards constantly. I want to base everything on the Bible. And if you were to say, “Why do you do that?” and I said, “Well, as it says here in Romans . . .” right? You’d say, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, I’m challenging, I’m challenging your authority; you can’t just flip to a verse,” right? Because you’d say I’m begging the question, reasoning in a circle. Well, I would say the same thing here. If a person says, “I’m going to base everything, my whole worldview, on reason,” and I would say, “Why do you want to, why do you do that,” when he turns to give me a reason, what’s he doing? He’s flipping open his Bible.

Every finite creature has to start somewhere. All of us have certain fixed axioms, and we reason from those axioms. My axioms are Christian.

This is a bizarre argument, but the motivation of those putting it forth is easily understandable. If the definition of “religious” applies equally well to believer and unbeliever alike, then who can criticize the faithful without taking on equal damage? According to Douglas Wilson, the foundations of all belief systems are chosen arbitrarily, without exception. But then we must ask: If we are all religious no matter what we believe or do not believe, then what is the designation of “religious” really supposed to mean? It would seem that, in their last-ditch effort to deflect criticism, advocates of this argument have effectively diluted their own position to the point of being meaningless. After all, if I can choose my axioms arbitrarily, then all I need do is simply choose whatever conclusion I want to arrive at, and then subsequently select the specific axioms that will get me to that desired conclusion. A case can therefore be made that such postmodern arguments are not even proposing anything of substance at all.

Apologists with this kind of postmodern bent have thus saved the village by destroying it. They are in essence admitting that their worldview is completely arbitrary. When this thinly-veiled concession is exposed, one is obliged to ask them why they are even debating atheists and agnostics in the first place. The line that “atheists exercise religious faith too” is the apologists’ way of saying: “Do not bother me. Every belief is an arbitrary positing, and every worldview grows out of that arbitrary starting point. All ideas contain their own criteria of plausibility.” This of course means that, according to them, a so-called “explanation” can be made available for everything that derives from any relative standpoint, explanations that seem plausible and probable insofar as they accord well with a given premise and reinforce it. But again, if there is in fact no objective criterion for both sides to appeal to, why are the two sides even debating? Religious apologists who take this approach (e.g., “You atheists are just doing the same thing we are, so get off our case”) only demonstrate that they rejoice to live in a bubble reality that is self-contained.

I find this apologetic approach very suicidal. Are religious believers really willing to say, “Yes, I am standing in mid-air”? Shouldn’t this concession alarm believers at least a little? Perhaps the reason alarm or caution is rarely expressed by such apologists is because most of the time they do not fully realize just what they are saying, which is: “I have made up my mind; do not confuse me with the facts. You do not have any right to try to confuse me with the facts, because you have just made up your mind arbitrarily as well.”

I hope to show clearly in this essay that this charge against atheists (and unbelievers generally) is not true. To begin, let us take as a concrete example the debate between those who criticize the authenticity and reliability of the Bible and those who affirm it as authentic and reliable. The fact of the matter is that both sides have only one thing in common, namely the spoken, working hypothesis that in order to understand the Bible, we must interpret its contents with the aid of historical background, cultural background, ancient grammar conventions, etc. Apologists for the reliability and truth of the Bible generally do not resort to allegorizing (except when they attempt to harmonize discordant and contradictory texts in the Bible). They claim to be restricting themselves to the evidence presented by the text, just as the critics are doing. There, I would contend, we do have legitimate grounds for debate. But what do the apologists actually do when we go beyond claims and examine their practice? They very often attempt to short-circuit the entire critical process and, by dragging their presuppositions into the discussion, fail to appeal to any real historical method. It is my contention that it is merely a pretense on the apologists’ part when they express interest in studying biblical texts with controllable and objective methods.

It must be emphasized that this is not what us critics of Christianity and religious theism in general are doing. This issue almost never fails to surface in debates surrounding Thomas Kuhn’s great book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, rev. eds. 1970, 1996), in which Kuhn makes the point that all revolutions in scientific thinking are not so much matters of discovering new data (though, of course, this does happen), as they are matters of creating new paradigms, new heuristic hypotheses that are imposed upon the data to see what sense these hypotheses can make of the data, to see if they will render hitherto anomalous and puzzling data newly intelligible. This is very similar to the concept of the hermeneutical circle which was developed and formulated by philosopher Martin Heidegger and which the prominent German theologian Rudolf Bultmann adopted in his interpretations of the Bible. The “hermeneutical circle” describes a process by which a text is approached with a series of questions that the one studying it wants the text to answer. As one reads and interacts with the text, the questions may have to be adjusted. The student of the text may realize that she is barking up the wrong tree, that the author was not interested in what she is asking of the text. What is the author writing about? Once expectations are adjusted, that which the author is actually saying starts to make much more sense.

This is the way historical texts are always approached by scholars who know what they are doing. The late philosopher-historian R.G. Collingwood argued that this must be the precedent in all historical methods [1]. A fact is only a fact given a particular frame of reference, and this frame of reference is defined as an initial sketch of what is historically plausible in the situation that is being studied, whether we are studying the Civil War, Genghis Khan or Jesus Christ. The historian develops a tentative sketch to see what sense it will make out of the data at hand. If the tentative sketch makes no sense of the data, then the historian must go back to the drawing board. This method is always being applied at all steps in the study of history.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn eventually begins to compare paradigm shifts to religious conversion, since the data that occasions paradigm shifts is construed from within:

The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by problem-solving. He must, that is, have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few. A decision of that kind can only be made on faith.

. . . But crisis alone is not enough. There must also be a basis, though it need be neither rational nor ultimately correct, for faith in the particular candidate chosen. Something must make at least a few scientists feel that the new proposal is on the right track, and sometimes it is only personal and inarticulate aesthetic considerations that can do that. Men have been converted by them at times when most of the articulable technical arguments pointed the other way. When first introduced, neither Copernicus’ astronomical theory nor De Broglie’s theory of matter had many other significant grounds of appeal. Even today Einstein’s general theory attracts men principally on aesthetic grounds, an appeal that few people outside of mathematics have been able to feel [2].

But Kuhn is jumping to unwarranted conclusions on this point; his own argument implies that paradigm-switching involves much more than what can be reduced to the concept of religious conversion. Paradigms are in fact preferable if we can show that a paradigm interprets the data in question in a more economical manner, without adding unnecessary epicycles (a term drawn from Ptolemaic astronomy). We should not cringe in embarrassment to embrace a given paradigm, if that paradigm involves less multiplying of ancillary hypotheses and reduces the addition of ad-hoc factors, e.g., My interpretation would work if x was true or if y was true. What reason is there to think that x is true or y is true? Answering that “The reason for thinking they are true is the help they would be to my paradigm” is unacceptable. A good paradigm must make simple and economical sense of the data, and as much sense as possible without reading in hidden assumptions and variables. Whoever supplies such a paradigm is the current winner, and the hope of the current winner should be that if there exists any data that does not fit within it, someone will revise or replace his paradigm. Thus, the point of bringing into focus a successful new paradigm is not to claim credit for it and copyright it. The point is to advance the discussion. Competent historians and scientists cannot have hobbyhorse favorites. Some do, but they are being bad scientists, bad historians, bad literary critics, etc. Favoritism towards particular paradigms does not even help anybody’s agenda. It cannot be emphasized enough that the correct question to ask is “What would make most sense of the data?”

This is precisely why Creationism, for example, is not science. From the very get-go, it cannot be science, because Creationists are not simply looking at the data and inductively trying to construe it in such a way that it makes sense. Rather, they are insisting that the data be forced to fit within an alien paradigm, namely Biblical Cosmology. The late independent scholar Immanuel Velikovsky is famous for committing this fallacy with other ancient writings [3].

Thus, there is an objective and over-arching criterion to attain to; there is no point whatsoever in simply believing anything arbitrarily, because the criteria do exist. Of course, all these criteria are probabilistic. The ultimate truth might possibly be something that is wildly improbable, as well as something that cannot be arrived at by any means. But this possibility should lead us to agnosticism, not fideism. The probabilistic nature of all objective criteria does not entitle us to assert that since we cannot really ascertain deep questions empirically, we are justified in just choosing to believe x.

The approach of the religious apologist who is committed to defending the texts of the New Testament as a reliable record of truth can usually be summed up as follows: “We cannot really be sure that the original New Testament manuscripts, the autographs, read the same way then as we read them now, because there is no real evidence that goes back that early. Therefore, let us just assume that our copies are accurate and proceed from there.” The fact that this apologetic approach is widely used is indication that religious faith has replaced a proper agnosticism, which is understandable from a psychological point of view. After all, nothing can be done with agnosticism in the picture. The jig is up, and we cannot play the game anymore.

And if the game cannot be played anymore for certain issues, it is time the apologists concede that we just cannot play it. Apologists have been abusing postmodernism for far too long, using it as an excuse to say, “Do not confuse me with the facts” in a way that is disguised by what might seem to be clever and sophisticated language.

Faith as Ultimate Concern

Having established all this, I will say that there is a point to the claim that atheists can be religious, but only within a very specific context that evades traditional definitions of “faith.” I refer especially to faith as defined by the late Paul Tillich, the Christian existentialist philosopher who is considered one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century. In his book Dynamics of Faith (1957), Tillich argues that “faith” should not be understood as meaning belief in a certain list of items, such as historical claims that cannot be corroborated. Credulity, says Tillich, should be distinguished from faith, as should the attempt to force oneself to believe something. Deep down, the one forcing belief in uncorroborated claims knows at some level that they are acting arbitrarily. Besides this, such people are brainwashing themselves whether they realize it or not at any subconscious level. Tillich insists that this is not faith.

Faith, according to Tillich, is being grasped at the deepest level by a particular question or concern:

Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned: the dynamics of faith are the dynamics of man’s ultimate concern. Man, like every living being, is concerned about many things, above all about those which condition his very existence, such as food and shelter. But man, in contrast to other living beings, has spiritual concerns – cognitive, aesthetic, social, political. Some of them are urgent, often extremely urgent, and each of them as well as the vital concerns can claim ultimacy for a human life or the life of a social group. If it claims ultimacy it demands the total surrender of him who accepts this claim, and it promises total fulfillment even if all other claims have to be subjected to it or rejected in its name [4].

This ultimate concern can be the historical Jesus, for example. Having ultimate concern for the subject of Jesus’ historicity does not necessitate having a positive opinion on the matter (i.e., that Jesus was a real historical figure). This ultimate concern can also be concentrated on the question of the existence of God. It is difficult to think of anyone who was more exercised over the question of God than Madalyn Murray O’Hair. That was her ultimate concern, yet she did not believe God exists. Her ultimate concern, her Tillichian faith object, was to combat the delusion that God is real, a concern that I personally applaud.

Tillich is claiming that only the apathetic hedonist (whose sole response to the question of God’s existence is a shrug and a “whatever”) has no ultimate concern. Such a person is an atheist, if only implicitly, and really does lack faith of any kind. But if one is concerned about anything, even if it is unworthy of concern, that state of being ultimately concerned with it is faith. Tillich was not trying to get away with anything by sly apologetic maneuvers with this argument. He is simply interested in cutting the pie differently. He has often been accused of being an atheist himself! He is not attempting to claim that unbelievers are or have the potential to become some sort of Anonymous Christian, as the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner argued [5]. Rahner’s point was a very different sort of claim, one that is liable to be confused as being similar or identical to Tillich’s points.

On the other hand, there is at least some justification in saying that militant atheists who are overzealous to deconvert religious people are displaying a kind of quasi-religious zeal. I concede this point with some reservation and a few caveats, since “militant atheism” can only be designated as such if the militant atheist is interested in much more than simply provoking religious believers to question their worldview, which is all I as an atheist am “militantly” interested in. Still, there are atheists who heavily politicize their unbelief, and it is this camp that can arguably be said to be playing the same game as the devoutly religious, and that they have merely switched teams. There is an irony in that which I personally would like to avoid, as much as I would love to see people reject the delusion that is theistic religion.

Do Atheists Exercise Faith?

Finally, let us address directly the question of whether “faith” in the conventional, traditional sense of the word is required in order to be an atheist (e.g., Bertrand Russell said it, I believe it, that settles it!). I do not doubt that there are indeed nuts like this out there. But atheism, properly construed and understood, cannot accurately be caricatured in this way. Atheists such as myself generally approach the God debate by saying that, on a strictly theoretical basis, there could be a God. But we also understand that on the same theoretical basis, there could be four-armed Tharks living on Mars outside the range of our telescopes. Having granted this, I do not see any reason to take that possibility seriously.

I approach the question of God in the same way. My working hypothesis is that no god exists. Likewise, I do not see any reason to take the existence of Zeus seriously, either. Why should I? This is what atheism properly defined implies. Technically, what I am describing is agnosticism. But when the term “agnostic” is used as a qualifier by us atheists, we almost always use it to mean, as the late 19th century philosopher William James put it, that belief in God remains a live option:

Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed . . .

A living option [the decision between two hypotheses] is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: “Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,” it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: “Be an agnostic or be a Christian,” it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief [6].

In the case of the God Hypothesis, the rational appeal is very small, but it remains a live option nevertheless. If there is indeed any reason to believe in God, it simply has not been made definitive, and we are therefore stuck where we are. As an atheist, I do not claim to know what the case is, only that there is currently insufficient evidence to suggest that any god exists.

The 19th century English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (who is credited with first coining the term “agnostic”) understood agnosticism in much the same way:

Agnosticism . . . is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle . . . Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable [7].

This is a principle that gives much credit to the possibility of God, nothing more. The atheist therefore does not exercise faith. Speaking for myself, I find that I simply cannot take the concept of god seriously; again, I have not been able to find any reason to believe that any god exists. Technically, a god may really exist. But on a theoretical level, who really knows? We are all agnostic whether we admit it or not, whether we be agnostic atheists or agnostic theists. Nobody can sanely claim to know everything about the universe, but does this mean that I as an atheist have any reason, pragmatic or otherwise, to think a god exists? The answer is no, and I am currently in no position to be able to give any credit to the God hypothesis.

This is not a faith posture on my part. Any apologist who tries to construe it as such is just a spin doctor. Not only that, but once again they will find themselves cutting off the limb they are sitting on by their implication that all beliefs are equally and completely arbitrary. In fact, I am indebted to the apologist who wants to move forward with that argument, because he or she will only win the debate for me.

Notes

1. R.G. Collingwood. The Idea of History. Revised Edition. Ed. Jan Van Der Dussen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

2. Thomas S. Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Third Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 158.

3. Immanuel Velikovsky. Worlds in Collision. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1950.

4. Paul Tillich. Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1957, p. 1.

5. “Anonymous Christianity means that a person lives in the grace of God and attains salvation outside of explicitly constituted Christianity . . . Let us say, a Buddhist monk . . . who, because he follows his conscience, attains salvation and lives in the grace of God; of him I must say that he is an anonymous Christian; if not, I would have to presuppose that there is a genuine path to salvation that really attains that goal, but that simply has nothing to do with Jesus Christ. But I cannot do that. And so, if I hold if everyone depends upon Jesus Christ for salvation, and if at the same time I hold that many live in the world who have not expressly recognized Jesus Christ, then there remains in my opinion nothing else but to take up this postulate of an anonymous Christianity” (Karl Rahner, Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews 1965 – 1982. Eds. Paul Imhof and Hubert Biallowons. Trans. Harvey D. Egans. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1986, p. 135).

6. William James (1896). “The Will to Believe.” Essays on Faith and Morals. Ed. Ralph Barton Perry. Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, 1962, pp. 33-34.

7. Thomas H. Huxley, F.R.S. (1889). “Agnosticism.” Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions. London: Macmillan and Co., 1892, p. 362. The complete text of this essay is also available online at http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_huxley/huxley_wace/part_02.html.

Book Review: "Behold the Man" by Michael Moorcock

2011-09-27T18:37:00.000-07:00

Michael Moorcock is fast becoming one of my favorite fantasy writers. He is perhaps best known for chronicling the exploits of Elric of Melniboné, first in a series of old DAW paperbacks that kicked off with Stormbringer and The Sleeping Sorceress (1965 and 1971, respectively). He then broadened the saga out with six new Elric novels, starting in 2008 with Elric: The Stealer of Souls. He is also the creator of a series entitled The History of the Runestaff, which recounts the adventures of Dorian Hawkmoon set in a neo-medieval Europe after a nuclear holocaust. These books were followed up with The Chronicles of Castle Brass, a three-book-long sequel. Another memorable novel by Moorcock is The Eternal Champion (1970), which sets out the premise that all of the protagonists in his various series (such as Prince Corum, Jerry Cornelius, and the protagonist of the novel I am about to review, among others) are all different incarnations of the same character, called Erekosë, the Eternal Champion, who finally appears as himself in this novel set in the far-future. A fantastic writer, Moorcock is adept at incorporating religious ideas into brilliantly original and deliciously heretical high-concept stories, as in his 1981 novel The War Hound and the World’s Pain, wherein a warrior living during the late Middle Ages is sent by Satan on a mission to discover the Holy Grail, which Satan wishes to use in order to get back into God’s good graces.

Behold the Man is a somewhat atypical entry in Moorcock’s canon, but it is nevertheless a great novel that is unfortunately obscure and relatively little-known. Behold the Man made its original debut as a novella in a 1966 issue of New Worlds magazine, and the longer novel, published in 1969, now stands as the definitive version.

Behold the Man tells the story of Karl Glogauer, a twentieth-century man who struggles with many personal demons. He fluctuates between spells of deep depression and narcissistic complexes, and experiences overall existential despair. The son of a lapsed Christian father and a Jewish mother, he becomes obsessed with religion and the philosophy of Carl Jung and in many ways typifies Jung’s “Modern Man in Search of a Soul.” Glogauer’s search for meaning culminates with him contriving to travel back in time with the help of a reclusive and eccentric physicist who shares his interest in Jung. His destination is Palestine in the year A.D. 28, and his goal is to meet the historical Jesus (which a great many people would very much like to do).

After arriving in the year A.D. 28, Glogauer eventually manages to make his way out of the desert (where he meets John the Baptist and falls in with an Essene community) and into the town of Nazareth, where he presumes the holy family lives, and immediately begins to seek out Jesus there. What he discovers shocks and depresses him. Jesus turns out to be a deeply disturbed and mentally retarded child who must be shut away and closely monitored by his parents.

After seeing this disturbing spectacle, Glogauer begins to feel the burden of destiny. He decides that he must take the place of Jesus. He knows the Gospels (and the ancient Aramaic language) like the back of his hand, and he knows all the important details that a surrogate Jesus would need to know. He is also a man obsessed with Jungian philosophy and psychology, which allows him to perform what are perceived by many credulous crowds to be “miracles”; he helps many people with easily remediable psychosomatic conditions, people who believe more strongly in his supposed powers than in their sickness. He applies his knowledge of psychiatry to heal people of their more debilitating neuroses, thereby “casting out demons.” He deftly harnesses psychological mind tricks and hypnotism to teach people how to pretend to eat and take their minds off hunger. Devoted crowds experience mass hallucinations as they see what they want to see, and thus Glogauer at one point appears to them to be walking on water. Glogauer also uses his knowledge of the Gospels to give the many teachings of Jesus to the people, and to choose who would comprise his inner circle of twelve. Eventually, after amassing a huge following, Glogauer finds himself in deep trouble with the Jewish scribes and the Romans, trouble that comes to a head in Jerusalem during the Passover. In the end, Glogauer is tortured and crucified on charges of blasphemy (by the Jewish leaders) and rebellion against Rome (by the Roman procurator). In his final moments on the cross, Glogauer cries out in English, “It’s a lie – it’s a lie – it’s a lie . . .,” which becomes mistranslated as the famous cry of “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani.”

Moorcock and Schonfield

This is an utterly fascinating premise, and it works well as a mythic allegory of the actual Gospels themselves, specifically in the way the late Bible scholar Hugh J. Schonfield interpreted them in his highly controversial 1965 book The Passover Plot [1]. In this book, Schonfield reasons that Jesus must have scoured the Scriptures and thereby become aware that he was the one called upon to be the Messiah; he deduced from Scripture what the Messiah was supposed to do, and he discerned a revolutionary vision culminating in his death as the Suffering Servant. Armed with this Oracular use of Scripture, Schonfield argues, Jesus set about to arrange the fulfillment of the various prophecies. This is exactly what Karl Glogauer does in Behold the Man.

Now, any fundamentalist you ask will say that the Jesus they believe in did exactly what Schonfield says he did when, for example, he rose into Jerusalem on a donkey: It is now time for me to do what the prophet Zechariah predicted I would do. Thus, I personally do not see what the fundamentalists’ big problem with Schonfield was. He only figured that Jesus knew from Scripture (or one can say surmised from Scripture) what he had to do, then set about doing it. Does the orthodox Christian somehow think that Jesus accidentally fulfilled these things? Of course not.

What Moorcock has his character Karl Glogauer do in Behold the Man is to take the Gospels as his “prophesied” job description of what he must do as Jesus, which he sets about to fulfill. This premise is made all the more intriguing and fascinating, since the ancient texts he works from are accounts of his own exploits and actions that he experienced in the first century, which became the Gospel tradition he was familiar with and obsessed by in his life back in the twentieth century. His guide as to what he should work to bring about is based upon and informed by what he himself did in that time period as the historical Jesus.

I strongly recommend this novel to everyone reading. It is one of the most interesting and original stories I have come across [2]. It is a great story, well worth reading. I hope some capable and competent filmmaker or screenwriter discovers this novel. It would make for a terrific movie.

Notes

1. Hugh J. Schonfield, The Passover Plot: New Light on the History of Jesus (The Netherlands: Bernard Geis Associates, 1965). Many conservative religionists were outraged by Schonfield’s work, accusing him of believing in a “scheming Jesus,” an imposter attempting to manufacture circumstances in order to make himself into the Messiah. But this is a huge misunderstanding on the conservatives’ part, most of who apparently did not read past the title. Schonfield was in fact a devout Jewish Christian (or Messianic Jew) having been an Executive Committee member of the International Hebrew Christian Alliance from 1925 to 1937.

2. There are a few other science fiction stories in which time travel to the time of Jesus is a central theme, which were written before Moorcock’s novel and which those who enjoy Behold the Man are sure to be interested in. These include Richard Matheson’s short story The Traveller (1954), John Brunner’s novel Times Without Number (1962), and Arthur Porges’s short story The Rescuer (1962).

Unorthodox Thoughts on Genesis (Part 6): Enoch's Rapture

2011-09-19T15:41:00.000-07:00

And all the days of Enoch, were three hundred sixty and five years. And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him. ~ Genesis 5:23-24

What does it mean that Enoch “walked with God” for 365 years, and that God then “took him”? This seems very odd on a surface reading, because while both phrases can be treated as natural metaphors for life and death, none of the lifespans of the other patriarchs are spoken of in this language.

The explanation for this is that Enoch was originally conceived to be a Sun-God, just like Moses, Samson, Elijah and various other characters in the Bible were. Enoch “walks with God” around the firmament (the heavens) for 365 years, a number representing the solar year. His is a story told in behalf of a partisanship for the solar calendar, as opposed to the lunar calendar. The tension between these two calendars was a significant issue in ancient Judaism. In more natural terms, Enoch is the sun itself.

One day, Enoch is suddenly gone, just like what happened to Elijah. God snatches him away off the surface of the earth and into the sky for the same reason he snatched Elijah away. How did God do this? The rising of the sun to its zenith at noon was most likely understood to be the mechanism of choice. Consider the case of Elijah, who hops aboard a flaming chariot and rides away into the sky, just like Apollo (2 Kings 2:11). It does not get much clearer than that. The Greek/Roman story of Apollo is a remnant; a myth made into a legend, as mythographers say. Originally, it was simply the sun that was personified. But here, we have passed from raw myth to legend, to a stage where the protagonist has become a humanized superhero. In exactly the same manner, the biblical Samson, who was originally just a personification of the sun, eventually became the Israelite Hercules. Both Elijah and Samson were originally sun-gods who evolved into demi-gods.

The apocryphal Enoch stories, such as those found in 1 Enoch, make use of Enoch’s status as a sun-god as a convenient vehicle with which to expound on the subject of astronomy. The ancient sages and wise men, in addition to being scribes of the scriptures, were also fortune-tellers who observed the motions of the heavens. They were astrologers, dream interpreters, etc. As such, they did their best to understand how the heavens were organized. Enoch’s journey to heaven is accordingly described; he is given a tour during which he is shown where all the stars are kept, where snowflakes are stored until the next snow is going to come, and a great many other things of this nature. Enoch is also shown the fallen angels.

These passages are representative of the ancients’ best guess as to how the universe should be mapped out. The premise that they latched onto, pursuant to this end, was to portray Enoch himself as a scribe who was transported to heaven, shown all these wonders, and then sent back down to the terrestrial plane to write down what was revealed to him for his descendants before finally being taken back up again for good.

This is a clever premise, but we detect a tip of the hat to the original conception of Enoch as the sun in the books of 2nd and 3rd Enoch (Slavonic and Hebrew Enoch, respectively). In these writings, there are key scenes in which Enoch is transfigured into a fiery angel when he is snatched up from the earth:

And the Lord said to Michael, Take Enoch and take off his earthly garments, and anoint him with good oil, and clothe him in glorious garments. And Michael took off from me my garments and anointed me with good oil. And the appearance of the oil was more resplendent than a great light, and its richness like sweet dew, and its fragrance like myrrh, shining like a ray of the sun. And I looked at myself, and I was like one of the glorious ones, and there was no apparent difference (2 Enoch 9:17-19).

After all these things the Holy One, blessed be He, put His hand upon me and blessed me with 536O blessings. And I was raised and enlarged to the size of the length and width of the world. And He caused 72 wings to grow on me, 36 on each side. And each wing was as the whole world. And He fixed on me 365 eyes: each eye was as the great luminary. And He left no kind of splendour, brilliance, radiance, beauty in (of) all the lights of the universe that He did not fix on me (3 Enoch 9:1-5).

As soon as the Holy One, blessed be he, took me in (His) service to attend the Throne of Glory and the Wheels (Galgallim) of the Merkaba and the needs of Shekina, forthwith my flesh was changed into flames, my sinews into flaming fire, my bones into coals of burning juniper, the light of my eyelids into splendour of lightnings, my eyeballs into fire-brands, the hair of my head into dot flames, all my limbs into wings of burning fire and the whole of my body into glowing fire. And on my right were divisions 6 of fiery flames, on my left fire-brands were burning, round about me stormwind and tempest were blowing and in front of me and behind me was roaring of thunder with earthquake (3 Enoch 15:1-2).

And there we have it. The writers of the Slavonic and Hebrew versions of Enoch remembered that he was the Sun.

Unorthodox Thoughts on Genesis (Part 5): Cain, Abel, and Structural Depth

2011-09-13T17:37:00.000-07:00

And she [Eve] again bare his [Cain's] brother Abel, and Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground, an offering unto the LORD. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock, and of the fat thereof: and the LORD had respect unto Abel, and to his offering. But unto Cain, and to his offering he had no respect: and Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell. ~ Genesis 4:2-5

In this essay, we address why it is that God favors Abel’s offering and not Cain’s offering. Is there some significance behind God’s preference, or is God simply a big fan of lamb? I personally like to think that the Almighty, if he exists, has similar tastes to mine. But this is in fact the way the vast majority of religious people view matters: I said it, God believes it, that settles it! In this view, God is reduced to a divine ventriloquist dummy.

However, there is a lot more to this story than meets the eye. In this story, Cain is symbolic of the Canaanites, who were known as farmers and who worshipped Ba’al and enjoyed sacred prostitutes. Farmer Brown the Canaanite would go in to the temple and have sex with the priestitute, which would magically (some might say sacramentally) cause Father Ba’al to ejaculate from his perch in the heavens. The resulting rain (Ba’al’s sperm) would then fertilize the womb of Anat or Asherah (or whoever the goddess of choice happened to be). The Old Testament prophet Hosea and others did not like this at all. The Canaanite religion gained a reputation as a corrupt one, despite the fact that the Israelites as a whole shared the religion because they were Canaanites. It was only from a later standpoint that the Israelites attempted to repudiate their whole Canaanite heritage and blame its influence on somebody who introduced it from the outside to corrupt them.

The character of Cain was thus born; he was supposed to play the role of the evil Canaanite who offended God by offering vegetables. Cain is a farmer, while Abel is a shepherd like the noble Israelites were, during what the prophet Jeremiah called the “honeymoon period” of the wilderness wanderings (Jeremiah 2:2-3). Yahve is a mountain god from the mountains of Midian in this conception, unlike Farmer Ba’al. What this story is trying to convey is that God loves the pure desert Wahhabi-type worship of the Israelites and is markedly against the corruptive agricultural religion of Ba’al, which the Israelites notoriously practiced. Take a lesson: God does not like agriculture.

It should be emphasized that there is no moral implication in the story of Cain and Abel. There is no suggestion that either the Canaanites or Cain are the villain. Rather, the thing that is vilified is the lifestyle that agricultural offerings reflected, embodied and exemplified.

However, there is something still deeper to be unraveled in this story, related to what the late French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss would call the “deep structure of the narrative.” Just as in the story of Oedipus, there is a strange wrestling going on in this story between two ancient beliefs: One is a naïve, pre-sexual belief that was prevalent before people understood how sex worked, which amounted to the idea that babies were found under cabbage patches. According to this belief, which is documented by statements made to this effect by ancient writers, human beings were born directly from the earth. But then of course, as time went on, people gained a better understanding and realized that humans are actually born from fellow humans through sex, something humans do with each other rather than the mother being simply the conduit for the Earth Mother. But while this fact of life could not be denied, it was nevertheless not easy to deny the fairy tale everyone had been brought up with for ages. In his book Structural Anthropology (1958), Lévi-Strauss brilliantly elucidated the symbolic meaning of the names of characters in the Oedipus myth, and showed that the more one tries to deny one’s earthly origin and nature, the more independent of that origin that person becomes. And the more independent one becomes in this way, the more he or she strives to exalt himself or herself as existing over nature and not as a product of it (as if he or she were an alien). This striving to establish one’s independence over nature leads inevitably to great difficulty in dealing with the earth and its products, leading to more and more trouble from one’s kinsmen, fellow humans whose company is preferred. At this point, people start murdering each other, engaging in incest, and a range of other activities not conducive to a society’s health [1].

How does this relate to the story of Cain and Abel? There are several passages in Genesis which say that God creates a number of things “from the ground” (animals, plants, Adam). But then the creation account says that the woman was made from the man (Genesis 2:21-22), and later that Cain was made from both the man and the woman (Genesis 4:1). Here we have the same opposition set up in the narrative: Are people born directly from the ground, and therefore one with the created earth? Or are they the spawn of fellow human beings who have dominion over the earth and are not part of it? Do all humans have a common Earth Mother? Hell no, the ancient Hebrews said; God just created the earth by his word, but the same concept remains, and with it the same opposition. That which comes from the ground (including agriculture) will take its revenge against those humans who believe themselves to be self-contained within humanity, independent of the earth and dominant over it, like the shepherd Abel. Thus, Abel is preferred, yet ends up getting murdered by the one who was passed over.

This is a classic Lévi-Straussian structuralism whose roots go very deep. One could even say that no longer is the narrative only about rival explanations for where humans come from, but that the narrative also undergirds and reinforces the Israelite animosity directed toward the Canaanite agricultural lifestyle, a lifestyle that was in fact the Israelites’ own lifestyle that they deny from a later Deuteronomic viewpoint that sets up an us-and-them distinction and makes Canaanites out to be “those other people.” In fact, the Israelites were Canaanites. Israel perpetually and habitually worshipped Ba’al at this time. The prophet Hosea longs for the day when, as he has God say, “thou shalt call me Ishi [meaning ‘my husband’]; and shalt call me no more Baali” (Hosea 2:16).

Later on in Israelite history, there were laws concerning the offering of vegetables to God; it was a mandatory offering, which contradicts the Torah. Something big must be going on, and I argue that it is these two things (rival explanations for human origins and the self-inflicted animosity towards Canaanites), two factors which finally amount to one.

Lamech and His Sons: Another Version of Cain and Abel

In Genesis 4:23-24, we read, “And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, ‘Hear my voice, ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt. If Cain shall be avenged seven fold, truly Lamech seventy and seven fold.’”

This passage is apparently unrelated to the rest of the text and is never followed up on. Lamech declares that he will kill any man who wounds him with seventy-seven fold vengeance, and in fact has done this already. Yet the reader is provided no context or story with which to make sense of this, and Lamech afterwards ceases to exist in a narrative sense.

The explanation lies in understanding these verses as relating just another version of the Cain and Abel story. Look at the names given in verses 20-22. Lamech has three sons: Jubal the musician, Jabal the shepherd and Tubal-Cain, the forger of metal instruments and weapons. These weapons are implicitly what enables Lamech to boast of delivering seventy-seven fold vengeance. He must first acquire the capability for such vengeance, and now he does, because his son has given him an arsenal like none anyone had ever known. These three sons are culture heroes; they are the mythical founders of different pursuits, professions and arts. Tubal-Cain is a version of Cain, and must have killed Jabal (another version of Abel), using the weapons he created. The use of these weapons to kill has shown Lamech their utility, which inspires him to declare that people would be wise not to mess with him. If it was said that old Cain would kill seven of any tribe who killed one of his tribe, Lamech warns, then he will now take vengeance by killing seventy-seven, so hands off! Now that Tubal-Cain has invented metallurgy, the weapons race is on.

There is another, separate tradition associated with Lamech, in which one of his sons is named Noah (Genesis 5:28-30). This is just one example of the character variants that exist between the Priestly and J sources.

In terms of the story not fitting, by the way, the Lamech passage presupposes that there was no Flood. After all, the whole point of a culture hero is to say that these people invented the arts and sciences known in our day. They are the fathers of those who practice metallurgy or make their living as shepherds or musicians. This cannot be the case if the Flood destroyed everything and all had to be recreated. Thus, whoever wrote the Lamech passage did not include or anticipate the inclusion of a Flood in the story.

Notes

1. Claude Lévi-Strauss. Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1963, pp. 213-218.

Unorthodox Thoughts on Genesis (Part 1): Adam the Taxonomist

2011-09-06T03:23:00.000-07:00

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto Adam, to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. ~ Genesis 2:19

In Genesis 2:19, God brings all the animals before Adam to have them named by him. Considering the vast size of the animal kingdom, are we to suppose that God put Adam through thousands of years of tedium to name all the disparate insects and reptiles? How specific was God in bringing each animal before him? Did he make the process more economical by limiting the naming to general types, such as “multi-legged bugs” or “scaled animals”? Or was Adam assigned the role of first entomologist, naming off every single one of the approximately 400,000 species of beetle, to take just one example? Did Adam name the vast plethora of animals contained in the pre-Cambrian explosion, or did God simply leave those out, seeing as they would all be turned to stone and secretly planted by the devil soon anyway?

The most reasonable answer is that the ancients just did not take these things into consideration. And while some scholars might say that the story was not intended to be about all animals, the fact that we find ourselves in the neighborhood of etiology (the study of explanatory origination myths) seems to indicate otherwise. Like the ancients, the faithful today have an interest in saying that the Primordial Man gave all animals the names we use today. To the child who asks who decided Mr. Ed ought to be called a “horse,” pious literalists find an easy answer in saying that it was Adam, the first man.

But, as I say, the ancients who wrote the Book of Genesis seem not to have thought much beyond this etiology, an etiology that was simplistic even by ancient standards. Even the Bible recognizes that there exist a vast number of different types of “creeping things,” along with sub-types. Read, for example, the priestly code regarding eating in Leviticus 11, which prescribes which animals and insects adherents can eat, and which they cannot (not that they were concerned with a great deal of detail or accuracy, since the writers of this priestly code wrongly thought that insects have four legs in Leviticus 11:20-23). The Book of Joel also describes an unprecedented invasion of a swarm of different kinds of locusts (1:1-2:11), and if the writer of Joel knew about the many different kinds of locusts, the priestly writers certainly did. Their penchant for pedantic statistics and numbers does invite the question of what the author(s) of Genesis had in mind for Adam, because it was not as if the ancient writers failed to draw distinctions.

It is hard to estimate how long it would have taken Adam to complete his naming project. Maybe it was thought to have taken many years, but who did he have to tell? Why did Adam even need the names, considering that this is before the woman is even created? This is how we know the naming business is all for the sake of the reader: “Do you wonder where all these names came from? Well, they came from old Father Adam.” The narrative is a myth aimed at the reader, not contemporary characters interested in documenting historical fact, since of course there were no contemporaries within the timeframe of the story, only Adam.