Cultural Christianity

“What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence — is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.” - Joss Whedon, “Let’s Watch a Girl Get Beaten to Death”

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” - John Donne, “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions”

“See it written on the grave; every woman has a name” - Alice Cooper, “Every Woman has a Name”

Two years ago today seventeen year old Du’a Khalil Aswad was murdered in Iraq in an “honor killing”.  The rationale behind such killings is that a family member, notably they are almost always female, has brought such shame to the family, that only their death will satisfy the need for “justice”.  In Du’a Khalil’s case her crime was to fall in love, allegedly, with someone of another faith.  It was about a month later when Whedon found out about the story, wrote a blog entry about it, and this article was e-mailed to me.  The next day, I wrote these words:

Are we so self-absorbed that we think we can’t do anything about those problems elsewhere and so we don’t try? Will the Republicans say that we should go in, take over, and covert them to Americanism? Will the Democrats say that it’s their culture and not our place to say anything about their own internal affairs?

Well I say that we are Christians, and the suffering of others, their oppression by government, family, or religion is.

Our.

Business.

Our support can be financial, it could be as simple as raising awareness and presenting a viable course of action, but we’ve been operating too long under two major false pretenses. The first being that those outside of Christ aren’t really our concern; that we need to worry about the affairs of the Church and the Church alone. How can we worry about a girl who committed no crime being brutally murdered by her own family when we’re fighting for the right to pray in our public schools? How indeed?

The other false pretense is that we need not worry so much about these social injustices, and simply convert the people to Christianity and then everything will be fine for them. (Actually, we don’t want them to become Christians so much as we want them to become 21st century American Protestants, but that’s another rant.) Christians have a long and violent history, and even the great heroes of the faith like Martin Luther and John Calvin have more than a little blood on their hands. And even if you don’t believe me about them, need I bring up the Crusades?

Today, many of us in the Church are beginning to realize that our great-great-grandchildren may not be alive to see the return of Christ, and that ideas like the one in the old song line that says “this world is not my home, I’m just passing through” may in fact have helped foster a mentality that keeps us from actually looking at this world as something worth saving?

I was angry then.  I’m angry now.

I’m angry at a world that’s so very broken.  I’m angry that so often things like these get ignored for smaller problems that are closer to home.  I’m angry because sometimes I go days or weeks and don’t think about this sort of thing at all.

Whedon wrote in his posting that “it’s no longer enough to be a decent person. It’s no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself”.  He’s on to something, but he’s not entirely right.  Of course, Whedon doesn’t believe in a loving, compassionate God, as I do.  That great God wants nothing more than to save us from ourselves.  He became one of us to do it and in the process He had a few pointed things to say about loving others, about going to the aid of the suffering and the oppressed.  That’s the real problem: it’s not enough to save us, God wants us to become more like Him.  If salvation were His only concern, then Christ wouldn’t have had to live a live with us and among us.  He would have simply had to come down, prick His finger, and say “My blood has saved you.  My grace is sufficient for you.”  But He didn’t do that.

Nope.  While we’re all in a titter about Jesus dying for us, He’s over there trying to tell us that we need to live for Him.  More than simply converting people, God wants us to go to them and act unto them as He would.  That’s a pretty tall order.  No wonder modern Christians are more concerned with passing oppressive legislation, getting music videos on MTV, and strong-arming biology teachers to teach questionable science than we are with actually following God’s path for our lives.  It’s easier to rail against the world, claiming to be the oppressed ones than it is to empathize with the oppressed and show them the compassion that God wishes us to show them.  But there is hope.  While Whedon was wrong about one conclusion in his article, he comes to another later that resonates with Truth: “I have never had any faith in humanity. But I will give us props on this: if we can evolve, invent and theorize our way into the technologically magical, culturally diverse and artistically magnificent race we are and still get people to buy the idiotic idea that half of us are inferior, we’re pretty amazing. Let our next sleight of hand be to make that myth disappear.”

Well I do have faith in humanity.  I have faith in it because Jesus thought it worth saving.  He thought it valuable enough to spend more than thirty years as a living, breathing mortal Who taught us that loving one another like we ought to love ourselves was a commandment second only to loving God.  The fact that we can fall so far and still recognize such evils for what they are is proof, in my mind anyway, that God isn’t done with us yet.  The first step in turning one’s life over to God’s grace is repentance, and the best definition of repentence that I’ve ever heard is this: to look at sin the way that God looks at it.  God looked at our sin, at our world, and then He went into it as humbly as He could have done.  He did this because He believed that not only were we worth saving for the hereafter, but like Whedon He believed that the here and now was also worth doing something about.  The Gospel of Christ is just as much sociological as it is spiritual.  Jesus went into the world to seek and to save the lost.

Let us go and do likewise.

“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither. ” - C.S. Lewis

“Another sleepy Sunday safe within the walls
Outside a dying world in desperation calls
But no one hears the cries or knows what they’re about
The doors are locked within, or is it from without
Looking through rose-colored stained glass windows
Never allowing the world to come in
Seeing no evil and feeling no pain
And making the light as it comes from within
So dim” - Petra, “Rose-Colored Stained Glass Windows”

Years ago, during the Jesus movement of the 1960’s musicians like Larry Norman stood on street corners and played rock music in an attempt to reach out to people who might otherwise ignore a Gospel Message.  Norman deliberately wrote many of his songs so that each verse contained a self-contained message so that if a person only stopped to listen for a minute or two, they’d still get the point.  In those days, most wester protestants still considered rock music to be inherently evil.  They believed that the beat itself somehow “fed the flesh” and awakened in people a greater propensity for sinning, so musicians like Norman almost never played thier music to audiences in churches.

This was in fact, more often that not, fine with them.  As Norman himself once said: “The churches weren’t going to accept me looking like a street person with long hair and faded jeans. They did not like the music I was recording. And I had no desire to preach the gospel to the converted.”  Fast forward to 2008 and it’s amazing how things have changed.

I don’t have an exact figure, and I’m not really interested in looking for one right now so if somebody wants to hunt it down and let me know, feel free, but I do know that the Contemporary Christian Music industry (that’s a key word, there) is a multi-billion dollar per year industry.  Where churches once wouldn’t allow people with certain hairstyles in the door for services, some are now designing facilities with the idea of holding rock concerts in them in mind.  What was once a tool to spread the message of Christ’s love to a disaffected generation is now a vehicle for Christians to entertain themselves.  Safely.

That’s the part that get’s me to wondering.  Safety.  I regularly attend a fundraiser for a ranch that takes in abused and neglected boys.  To raise funds, the ranch brings in comedians to a local church.  We get a couple of hours of entertainment and the boys get to keep eating and not get rained on.  Works out pretty good for everybody concerned.  A while back at one of these events, one of the promoters mentioned that since the comedians they bring in are always “clean” (i.e. no profanity, no explicit talk about sex, etc.) that their event was “safe” for the whole family.  I got to wondering just what is so dangerous about profanity and sex.  Why are Christians afraid of these things?  The last time I checked, the phrase “fear not” was in the Bible a lot, and yet we still treat sex and profanity as if they are somehow inherently harmful to us.  (Kind of like the beat of rock music.)

Well, if you’re in that crowd, then I have some good news for you.  Inspired by the success of the console games Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the people over at Digital Praise have come up with Guitar Praise, a game so similar in look and style to Guitar Hero that I wonder if there were any copyright issues that needed to be resolved.

Now, I do have a problem with the very concept of the game, and we’ll get to that in a bit, but what really bothers me is the is how the makers of the game seem to have chosen lyrical content (read cliched, spoon-fed spirituality) over musical substance.  Now, to be sure, as little as fifteen years ago the differences in production quality between Christain rock music and its mainstream counterpart were readily obvious.  These days, however, many Christian musicians spend just as much recording an album as any mainstream artist.  The videos, artwork, and live shows are all nearly indistinguishable from any other artist on the surface.  The difference, as proponents of Gospel themed rock told those disapproving church members of a few decades ago, was in the lyrics.

The musical line-up for Guitar Praise certainly makes no apologies for the beliefs of its contributors.  No, instead one could not help be be certain that they are playing a game with a distinclty Christian agenda.  And I’m not so sure that this is a good thing.

One thing that I am certain will be brought up is that you can/shoud/don’t-love-Jesus-enough-if-you-don’t invite your unchurched friends to play Guitar Praise with you.  Now, imagine the average junior high schooler, picking up a very familiar controller and expecting to get something cool, and instead getting “There You Go“  by Caedmon’s Call.  “There You Go” is not a bad song, lyrically or musically, but it is not one that I’d chose as an example in the best of guitar-driven rock in the Christian music field.  The part that bothers me here is not the songs and artists that were chosen, but rather the ones that have been left out.  Phil Keaggy is widely regarded by other guitarists as one of the best in the world, indeed one of the best in the last several decades.  Some of his songs are a bit blase musically, but his rock instrumentals are second to none.  (And if you don’t believe me, go get ahold of his album 220 and fire up the tracks “Animal”, “The Great Escape”, or “Stomp”.)  Yet there is not a single song by Keaggy on this list.  Nor is there anything by the 77’s, Lost Dogs, Betrayal, Angelica, Daniel Amos, Aleixa, Ghoti Hook, Johnny Q. Public, Grammatrain, Atomic Opera, Deliverance, One Bad Pig, Lanny Cordolla, Chasing Furies, MxPx, or even Third Day.  All of these bands have above average guitar work, and I dare say better guitar work that at least half of the songs included with the game, so why were they left off?  I honestly don’t know why.  I can’t fathom why the developers of this game would think that songs with strong guitar parts ought to be left off, while songs where the guitar isn’t even really the primary instrument should be included.

This is the problem when we let the message take precedence over the medium: if the medium is supposed to lower defensive barriers, to make the listener, who might otherwise be hostile to the message, take note of what is being said, then bringing the medium up to top-notch quality must be the primary concern.  If I convince a friend of mine to come with me to a concert because I want him to get kamikazeed by the Gospel, then I’d better make sure the music is up to snuff, or all he’ll be thinking all night is how lame the band is.  Likewise, if people, especially young people, are going to be playing this game with their friends, I think its important that the music be of such a high quality, that their main concern won’t be “what song is this, ive never heard it before”, but rather “this is one sweet song, how come I’ve never heard it before”.

This cannot happen so long as we insist that the message take precedence over the music.  That may be true from a theological perspective, but from a relational standpoint it is much easier to surprise somebody with the fact that the blistering guitar solo they just played was written by a Christian.

There’s still one more thing that I need to address.  I said earlier that I had a problem with this game in and of itself.  The problem is this: why do we need to make a Christian version of Guitar Hero just as we have done with with everything else?  Why is the modern church more content with hiding out within its own walls?  Why do we not remember the days when the local church was a cornerstone of the community?  This website is called Cultural Christianity for a reason.  It is because I believe that Jesus said “go therefore into the world” for a reason.  He doesn’t want us to bring people to Him, but instead asks us to take Him to people.  To do this we need to be members of society.  Not just residents, but people who are pillars of their communities.  People that others wave to when they pass by.  People live their lives in such a way that others begin to see Jesus in the mediocrity of the every day.

It’s a lot easier to tell people about Christianity than it is to show it to them, but I have a notion that God made it that way on purpose.

“You can’t minister to people at a distance, you need to get right down in the cheeseburgers with them. If you’re going to reach out to the homosexuals, you need to be there with them, making friends with them, loving them, without contributing or endorsing it. You’re just there. That’s where Jesus went. He would hang with people like that and be Himself. That was the difference. Rather than getting all absorbed, He always stood apart because He was Himself in that environment, in love. I think that’s what attracted all the sinners to Him. He was going to tell them the truth, He wasn’t going to insult or hurt them . . .

We just insult God’s intelligence to think that we’re the arbiters of all this good and bad taste. I think Christians in this country are really hung up on a lot of things, because it makes life easy and manageable.” - Michael Roe, “The Cream Rises”

News story, make sure you listen to the media file found in the middle of the article.

You listened to the file, right?  Because it’s the first line in there that really made me want to blog about this.  Using the appeal to fear is nothing new from the Religious Right which wants nothing less than freedom and equality for all, so long as it follows conservative Christian guidelines.  The article made me think that they were overreacting, using some purple prose, maybe, but nothing really out of the ordinary.  But then I went back, read it again, and this time I listened to that file.  And this time, I had also just finished listening to Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s short story Elites on Escape Pod.

I suppose that appealing to a mother’s protective instinct is likely nothing new either, especially for an organization so overtly manipulative as Focus on the Family, but still, it bothered me.  Aside from the fact that in our post-Columbine nation a grown man (in a dress or not) isn’t very likely to be able to simply walk into a school unchallenged, simply because a man does choose to wear women’s clothing does not make him a sexual predator and it is irresponsible of Focus on the Family to imply that it does.  The fact that most transvestites are heterosexual seems to have escaped Dr. Dobson and his organization.   The fact that most homosexuals are appalled at the actions of groups like NAMBLA seems to have escaped them as well.  In fact a lot seems to have escaped them.  Bruce Hausknecht, a judicial analyst for Focus on the Family, had this to say in the article:

“With SB 200, we no longer have two ’sexes’.  We enter a brave new world with a myriad of ’sexual orientations.’ This bill, unfortunately, is in keeping with a national effort by ‘transgender’ advocacy organizations to accomplish an open-bathroom policy.”

I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, Bruce, but we already have a myriad of sexual orientations.  Aside from heterosexuals, homosexuals and bisexuals, we also have transvestites, hermaphrodites, and transgenders.  Of course, the last of these is purely a societal view, and groups like Focus on the Family like to believe that anybody who does not fall strictly into the first has some sort of disease.  And then we wonder why people seem to despise Christians.

It is in that light that I wish to pose this question to Focus on the Family (though even if I e-mailed it directly to them I wouldn’t expect and actual answer): just what facilities would you expect a hermaphrodite to use?  If a person has genitalia from both sexes, which restroom should they then choose?  Should they simply hold it until they got home or explode since they don’t fall into one of two generally useful but not entirely inclusive categories?

A different and better question that needs to be asked is precisely how this “tramples religious freedoms”.  It’s a question I’ve asked of some of my more theologically conservative friends, and I’ve yet to come across a reasonable answer.  This fearful attitude that the world is only one bit of legislation away from crushing the Church needs to go away.  For good.  After all, more so than this law, that attitude is unbiblical.