The Other Jesus

Photo courtesy of glennbeck.com

As we approach the ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Washington, D.C. and New York City, as we absorb the news that combat in Iraq is ending, at a time when some politicians and pundits condemn the building of an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, and in a season when broadcaster Glenn Beck proclaims a new March on Washington and speaks from the same Lincoln Memorial stairs as Martin Luther King, Jr. on the anniversary of the latter’s “I Have a Dream” speech, it seems that it’s an appropriate time to stop and reflect. Lots of things are in the air, lots of dissatisfaction, lots of fear. Christopher Hitchens, writing about Beck’s recent rally, noted “the two main fears of the old majority: that it will be submerged by an influx from beyond the borders and that it will be challenged in its traditional ways and faiths by an alien and largely Third World religion.” [1] 9/11 has created (or increased) worries about border control, Islam, foreign affairs, domestic freedoms, and so I think it important that we pause, take a breath, take stock.

The anniversary of 9/11 itself would be sufficient reason for reflection; in my faith tradition we live by a liturgical calendar on which we mark feast days and remembrances of those who have come before and shaped the way we live and believe. But with all these political and geo-political events (and others) that seem to be linked to 9/11 in the news, it’s an especially meaningful anniversary, and a time to consider the political and spiritual arenas and see what we might learn.

Islamophobia

When TIME asked on a recent cover if people in the United States had a negative reaction to Islam, they went on to answer their own question: Yes. Assuredly. The dust-up over the “Ground Zero Mosque” has revealed that our understandings of the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where we have fought against radical Muslims have calcified American attitudes into anger at and indignation toward Islam. While TIME’s poll suggested that many Americans don’t even know a Muslim, it also suggests that many Americans do not care to. In this (and, it seems, in every case where people see others as Other or alien) they assume the worst. [2]

A case in point: some good Christian Americans heard that the Six Flags amusement park chain would celebrate the end of the Islamic holy season of Ramadan by sponsoring “Muslim Family Day” at the parks on September 12, 2010. Some Tea Partiers assumed the selection of this date was a slap in the face because of its proximity to the anniversary of 9/11. They fumed on discussion boards and went public to condemn this travesty. They threatened a national boycott of the Six Flags parks: “STOP THE SILENCE. STOP THE NONSENCE. [sic] STOP THE MUSLIM DAY - THEY ARE NOT AMERICANS. THEY DO NOT ABIDE BY OUR CONSTITUTION - THEY ARE NOT ONE OF US - YOU ARE EITHER WITH US OR AGAINST US - MAKE YOUR DECISION.” ^[3]

Assuming the worst, they made accusations that the choice of this date was an example of Muslim extremists spitting on the memory of the 9/11 dead. What perhaps the protestors did not know is that the Muslim Family Day was not some new outrage; it had been celebrated at Six Flags for a decade. What perhaps they had not heard was that one of the Muslim organizers of the first event in 2000 was actually killed in the World Trade Center bombings in 2001; Muslims, Jews, Christians, and members of other faiths all lost their lives to the terrorists. What perhaps they were not aware was that in 2010, Ramadan ended on September 9, but in deference to those who had lost loved ones on 9/11, they had moved their celebration back two additional days, to September 12. And what they certainly did not seem to know is that the Muslim organization sponsoring the event, the Islamic Circle of North America, is not a terrorist front, as some Tea Partiers charged, but a grass roots organization attempting to teach about the roots of Islamic faith within a religiously diverse society, and headed by Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Many Christians are on record opposing both this Muslim Family Day and the construction of the Islamic center near the site of the World Trace Center collapse. While I sympathize with anyone who personally suffered loss on 9/11, I also believe we cannot allow fear and anger to reshape us into the image of our foe. Leaving aside for a moment the Christian ethical response, I note that the founding documents of America pronounce that we believe in freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech; to say we believe in these things only for those who act as we do, worship as we do, and live as we do is to completely negate the radical nature of the freedoms they promise.

We are a nation of immigrants, a nation of multiple faiths, and we are richer, happier, and healthier when we acknowledge that. Some years ago, Martin Luther King and a multi-racial, multi-faith group convened on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to gave us a vision of hope, faith, and reconciliation.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened when Glenn Beck brought his “Reclaiming Honor” show to the nation’s capital recently. While there was indeed attention paid to faith and to hope of a kind, reconciliation, I fear, was left wandering orphaned in the cold.

Mr. Beck Goes to Washington

I do not like Glenn Beck. I confess my bias, so that I can try from here on to be even-handed. Although I know that he intentionally works as a combative media personality like Ann Coulter, like Rush Limbaugh, like Keith Olbermann, and thus antagonism and conflict are at the heart of his appeal, in general I am these days looking for uniters, not dividers. I am rooting for people in the public eye who have a bit of humility, who are not absolutely convinced that they are absolutely right and their opponents absolutely wrong. To paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr, I am looking for those who can be open to the truth in their opponent’s error, and the error in their own truth.

Beck believes in individual initiative, and his own personal story convinces him that everyone should be able to make it in America if they work hard enough, save enough, work smart enough. I know that these are conservative creeds, and acknowledge the possibility of truth here, for I too believe in hard work and individual responsibility. I am financially responsible for myself and my two boys, I don’t ask the government for hand-outs, and I was raised to think that to ask for help was a sign of weakness.

But despite all the reversals and hard times I have overcome, with God’s help, I know that I began better off–and continue to be better off–than a huge number of people in our society. My family took education seriously, so I earned four college degrees. I have held the same job for over two decades, so I have health insurance and dental insurance, and a retirement account, sadly depleted as it is just now.

Thus, for me to imagine that my case should be illustrative for people who have lost their jobs in a one-industry town, for people whose homes are being foreclosed, for those without health insurance facing catastrophic illness, for all those Americans who are drowning while I manage to tread water is–at best–unfair.

Beck’s attacks on those Christians like Martin Luther King (and me) who believe that our faith calls us to work for social justice is a major difference between us. I believe that Christian faith is less about individual salvation than the salvation of the cosmos, inaugurated by Jesus’s life, faithful death, and miraculous resurrection. Thus the irony, intended or unintended, of Beck speaking from the same location where Dr. King called for a new attention to justice in American society, one of the most famous markers of that call in American history.

Mr. Beck is entitled to read the Bible using whatever filters he believes are faithful, and, as I was reminded by James Payton’s fine new book Getting the Reformation Wrong, disagreement about some details of faith can lead to good things. I am trying hard, as I said, to seek common ground rather than schism, and while I don’t know if Beck would extend the same courtesy to me, this disagreement over social justice might not be a deal breaker, the kind of thing worth creating schism over. It might actually force us both to refine and redefine our beliefs.

So I am unwilling to call Mr. Beck an unfaithful person just because we disagree, and I am reminded of Clement of Rome, who advised, “Be contentious and zealous, but only about the things that relate to salvation.” I don’t know that justice work is required for salvation, whatever that might be, and I have no wish to consign my opponents to hell, whatever that might mean.

Still, an inescapable observation is that thousands of verses in the Bible concern how we treat those who are on the margins–the poor, the widow, the alien. In the first centuries of the Church, before Christianity became the state religion of Rome and more closely tied to the interests of those in power, the Sermon on the Mount was one of the most-read and preached on of texts, focusing as it does on the blessing God intends for those who seem at first glance to be on the outside of blessing. And as I read the Bible–which I do as both a literary scholar and a trained theologian– the narrative of God moving in the world is a story that trends toward love, toward kindness, toward reconciliation, and toward charity.

Jesus healed, fed, comforted, and thus I believe we are called to do these things as well.

In his speech to a conservative action group earlier this year, Mr. Beck noted that Americans now give more than $300 billion to charities. I applaud this generosity and don’t want people to stop giving of their financial resources, but I know from experience that it is relatively easy to take money out of my wallet or write a check; it is much harder to live with charity.

In his recent encyclical (a letter to the faithful and all people of good will) , Pope Benedict XVI (a leader no one would describe as anything but conservative) wrote that “Love — caritas — is an extraordinary force which leads people to opt for courageous and generous engagement in the field of justice and peace.” Justice and peace, people. But the Pope went further, to argue that love and reconciliation are at the heart–or should be–of all we do and every relationship we hold:

Charity is at the heart of the Church’s social doctrine. Every responsibility and every commitment spelt out by that doctrine is derived from charity which, according to the teaching of Jesus, is the synthesis of the entire Law (cf. Mt 22:36- 40). It gives real substance to the personal relationship with God and with neighbour; it is the principle not only of micro-relationships (with friends, with family members or within small groups) but also of macro-relationships (social, economic and political ones). For the Church, instructed by the Gospel, charity is everything because, as Saint John teaches (cf. 1 Jn 4:8, 16) and as I recalled in my first Encyclical Letter, “God is love” (Deus Caritas Est): everything has its origin in God’s love, everything is shaped by it, everything is directed towards it. Love is God’s greatest gift to humanity, it is his promise and our hope. [4]

A World of Hurt

When our lives are shaped by fear, by moral certainty, by anger, by suspicion of those who don’t look, live, or believe exactly as we do, we are failing not only the dictates of Christian charity, but of American democracy, and that unfortunately describes the America we are living in now. The politics of division–and the religion of division–both turn us against our neighbors, against those in our own families, and certainly against those who are distant and different. We can’t see them as people bearing the imprint of God, and we can’t treat them as fellow Children of God.

I am starting to think that anything that we allow to divide us is an evil. As I read the Christian Testament–and as James Payton seems to understand it–“Christ’s accounting . . . is unmistakeable, and it clearly differs considerably from the bookkeeping practiced . . . for far too long.” [5] We are not to throw people away over simple disagreements and differences. We are not to divorce ourselves from them over anything less serious than matters of salvation, as Clement said–or, I would argue in secular terms, less than the survival of our nation.

The problem, of course, is that the dividers on both sides use rhetoric that suggests their opponents are actually destroying the country, that the nation’s soul is truly at stake, when the truth is I have met conservatives, moderates, and liberal Americans who love this country and that all of them want it to continue as a force of liberty in the world, and I have met conservative, moderate, and liberal Christians who love God and are seeking to serve God.

And I have met Jews, Muslims, and other people of faith about whom I could say the same thing.

The lessons of the Protestant Reformation and of the American Revolution are not mindless, endless division or random separation. The lessons which are truest to the best and most charitable spirit of those radical moments should be recovery or discovery of those things that truly matter.

We are a nation of immigrants, a nation of many faiths, and if we cannot–in the immortal words of Lost–live together, we will most certainly die alone.

On this ninth anniversary of an act of hate, surrounded by recurring acts of hate, I want to propose–along with Pope Benedict, and the Apostle Paul, and Jesus, and the Beatles, for that matter–that what really matters is love.

Now let’s see where that leads us.

[1] Christopher Hitchens, “White Fright,” Slate Aug. 30, 2010.  Accessed at http://www.slate.com/id/2265515/

[2] Bobby Ghosh, “Does America Have a Muslim Problem?” TIME Aug. 19, 2010. Accessed at http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2011798-2,00.html

[3] Stephanie Mencimer, “Tea Partiers Freak over Six Flag’s ‘Muslim Day,’” Mother Jones July 30, 2010.  Accessed at http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/07/muslim-day-six-flags

[4] Benedict XVI, “ENCYCLICAL LETTER?CARITAS IN VERITATE?OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF?BENEDICT XVI?TO THE BISHOPS?PRIESTS AND DEACONS?MEN AND WOMEN RELIGIOUS?THE LAY FAITHFUL?AND ALL PEOPLE OF GOOD WILL?ON INTEGRAL HUMAN DEVELOPMENT?IN CHARITY AND TRUTH.”  Accessed at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate_en.html

[5] James L. Payton, Getting the Restoration Wrong (Downer’s Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2010), 253.

 Photo Courtesy New York Daily News

William Ewart Gladstone, perhaps the greatest of British statesmen, stood to speak to the British House of Commons on March 3, 1857, over 150 years ago. It was another country and another century, but the things he had to say that day still resonate. Gladstone was a classic Liberal (which is to say he believed in property rights, individual rights, and limited government with real fiscal constraints–some might today call him a Conservative) who also believed ardently in what we would today call human rights. He came to the conclusion through political debate, theological study, and prayer that governments should safeguard these rights for their citizens–for all their citizens.

On this particular day in 1857, Gladstone turned his attention to the matter of the day, a rush to war on the far side of the globe in response to hysterical claims, and he condemned the appeal that had been made to the House based, he said on “fear, which is seldom a rightful and noble sentiment,” an appeal, in fact, based on “the worst kind of fear–the fear of being thought afraid.”

I sympathize with all those who are afraid of Muslim terrorists. I do not join them in that fear–statistically speaking, Americans are as likely to die in their bathtubs as they are to be killed by terrorists–but I am cursed by empathy, the writer’s ability to see how other people think, live, and love. If I were a New Yorker, perhaps I would also be upset by the news that Sufi Muslims want to build a spiritual center in lower Manhattan, not far from the site of the World Trade Center attacks. Maybe I would think that all Muslims were up to no good, and that their so-called rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of religion should not trump my fear that they might be training terrorists to take down the Chrysler Building.

Maybe. But I doubt it. Maybe I’d see neighbors instead of enemies. A Daily News poll actually indicated that New Yorkers approved of the building by a two to one margin. So does the city’s Republican mayor. And the state’s Republican governor.

It seems almost useless to interpose fact into political or religious debate any more. As Brad Hirschfield wrote today on FOXNews.com, Americans are increasingly drawn to the conclusions they wish to reach–even if they have little or no basis in fact.

But I was trained as a high school debater, damn it, and while I know fear is a more potent influence on people’s behavior than facts, I feel duty-bound to note a few actual facts about the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

First, it’s not a mosque. A mosque is a building set aside for prayer. There is a mosque in lower Manhattan, and there has been for many years. But this ain’t it.

This building will be a community center. It will have a basketball court. It will have a cooking school. And there will be space for prayer, and hooray for that, but the building is not oriented toward worship.

It is not a mosque.

Second, it is not at Ground Zero. As I understand it, the building will not even be visible to the crowds who make their pilgrimage to the former World Trade Center site, but will be several blocks away.

Third, this is not and will never be a home for domestic terrorists. The Muslims who want to build this community center  are Sufi, gentle, mystical people who are often persecuted by other Muslims. In July, in fact, a Sufi shrine in Pakistan was attacked by suicide bombers linked to the Taliban. The Taliban! The very people who want to destroy America also hate these Muslims for not being sufficiently something in their eyes.

I know and admire Sufi. They are generous, loving, and creative people. The great Persian poet Rumi was a Sufi. So was Kahlil Gibran. Sufi are Muslim moderates. They do not kill people who do not happen to share their Muslim faith. They are live-and-let-live people.

And yet, we do not seem willing to extend them the same courtesy.

Another 19^th Century interjection: on another occasion, Gladstone said that the rights of Muslims (he used the dated term “Mohamedan”) had just as much claim to respect as the rights of British Christians. This was a fairly radical statement at the time–and remains important, given the climate for American Muslims after 9/11. I don’t want to put Gladstone up for sainthood; he was a typical man of his day, and he probably considered Muslims to be both wrong in their faith and somehow beneath him. But even in his day and time, Gladstone recognized that all human beings are created by God, beloved by God, made in the image of God, and (as Thomas Jefferson once wrote) endowed by God with certain inalienable rights.

One of those rights is the right to practice their religion, unhindered by the state, unassailed by the general public. When Barack Obama spoke out in support of the right of these peaceful Muslims to build on land they had purchased, it was a rare but welcome courageous moment in his administration.

They do have every right–and it would be wrong of us to oppose it simply because they are Muslim.

And while Americans in general seem to oppose the building, Ted Olson, Solicitor General in the George W. Bush administration, agrees with Obama. Although he lost his wife in the 9/11 attacks and has more reason to be bitter or frightened than any of us, what he said was this: “We don’t want to turn an act of hate against us by extremists into an act of intolerance for people of religious faith.”

We are better than that. As Americans. As Christians. Without love and tolerance, we cannot live together.

Luke Mitchell wrote in the Atlantic back in 2004 that “if the American people are terrified the terrorists have won.”

The Islamic fundamentalists who destroyed the Twin Towers wanted to scare us, to change us, to make us more like them.

And, from the way we are treating the gentlest, most mystical of their fellow believers, it seems clear to me that they accomplished what they set out to do.

Shame on us.

History matters. It tells us how we got to where we are, and it can predict what will happen if things continue unchanged. But it doesn’t necessarily tell us what will happen if the equation is altered, if radical systemic change takes place. In the new interview with my Baylor University colleague Rodney Stark (“Are Evangelicals the New Mainline?”), Rodney has summarized with his customary verve and intelligence why mainline Protestant denominations in America have gone into decline, and spoken with passion about what is going well within evangelical churches.

I live in both these worlds. I was raised Southern Baptist, I also attended evangelical Methodist and charismatic Assembly of God Churches in my childhood, and I have taught for over twenty years at historically-Baptist Baylor; on the other hand, I am a seminary-trained Episcopal lay preacher in my current life after many years outside Christianity, and I often speak, teach, and preach in Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregational settings. When reading Rodney’s interview, for the most part, I can only nod, say he’s right, and look forward. If we accept as a given the formulation that bigger is better (that is, larger or growing churches and denominations are more successful and presumably more faithful than smaller or declining ones) then the numbers and the history certainly bear him out: Evangelicals 1; Mainline Protestants, 0.

Evangelicals now hold the same sort of cultural and political power Mainline Protestantism once monopolized. When people identify themselves as church-goers, they are much more likely to be evangelical, most of the nations largest churches are evangelical, and when people today think of Christians, most do not think of the Frozen Chosen in the Presbyterian Church on the corner, but of the active and vocal evangelical Christians demanding their say in the public square. However, there are cracks in this façade, and although I do not wish it, history, as Rodney has presented it, may also predict the decline of evangelical Christianity in America as well unless some things change.

It may in fact already be happening. Several studies have shown that Americans aged 18-49 are disconnected from Christianity in ways earlier generations have not been, and that they are largely turned off by their perceptions of the legalistic and political dimensions of conservative Christianity. Evangelical Christianity will not appeal to these unless one or the other changes. Lifeway, the publishing organ of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, released a study in April of this year that found that the denomination had lost tens of thousands of members over the last few years. And some surveys suggest that membership figures in evangelical churches are wildly inflated to begin with (they certainly were in my youth), so we may not know how many people we’re talking about in the first place.

Some of these are simply methodological questions. This much is true: evangelicals are the American mainstream these days, but I fear that evangelicals may join Catholics and mainline Protestants in decline unless they pay attention to the points that Rodney makes about the history of the Mainline.

Spirituality–not just church attendance–matters. Evangelical faith is often wide but not very deep; a nonspiritual Christianity does not sustain, and as Rodney says, there is little reason to worship or believe in a God who does not exist in one’s daily life. The evangelical Barna Group discovered that many evangelical churchgoers do not have a sustaining faith and practice in their everyday lives; they are religious, George Barna tells us, but not spiritual. This is a recipe for impending disaster.

Likewise, a passion for justice–whether one pickets for unborn babies or born babies–must draw from a well of authentic faith and belief to be sustaining. When churches make political issues–or moral issues–their defining characteristics, then they often fail, deservedly. If my evangelical brothers and sisters become political at the expense of their faith in the reconciling and transforming love of Jesus Christ, than we might be speaking of them fifty years hence as a part of the great Christian decline.

I hope not. There is much we can learn from each other.

Mainline churches need to learn (and are learning) to be evangelical, in the best sense of the word. They need to speak of the power of community in Christ, to speak of (not just demonstrate through charity or good works) the love of God to a world needing healing and wholeness. Episcopalians, I discovered when I became one, have no recent history of evangelism; no wonder we are in decline! When churches feature leaders who don’t speak the name of Jesus from the pulpit, when church members don’t speak about their churches or their faith to others, and when churches become merely union halls or political action centers, then the passion and the Spirit depart. The evangelical tradition can teach mainline Protestants how to be a lighthouse in a darkened sky–and those methods can be adapted to things with which we’re comfortable. I would not leave a Chick tract in a public restroom or ask my seat mate on a plane if they “know the Lord,” but I would invite people to experience a U2charist at my church, and I should. Good things happen when love and God are made manifest in people’s lives.

The mainline traditions, on the other hand, can help evangelicals with two things. First,  although justice and works do not save (whatever that means to you), they are actions that we perform in imitation of the Jesus who loved all human beings. Feeding the poor, advocating for a living wage, trying to improve environmental conditions, are actions that–if they grow out of our authentic faith–are a logical expression of that faith. I cannot simply rest happy in the fate of my saved eternal soul while my brother and sister starves–or chokes–next to me.

Second, in the liturgy, wisdom traditions, and fixed-hour prayer to be found in the mainline traditions (and, of course, in Catholicism and Orthodoxy), evangelicals might find an antidote to shallow spirituality, emotionalism, or church-only practice. The mainline churches making themselves over for the 21^st Century are creating communities of faithful people on a faith journey, not just saved people waiting for the Second Coming, and these traditions will offer strength for the journey, and hope for the future, for them and anyone else who wants to drink from these wells.

I pray for my brothers and sisters (and I have literal brothers and sisters, and aunts, cousins, and parents, for that matter) who are American evangelicals, just as I pray for all of God’s holy universal Church. All of us make up that marketplace Rodney describes in his interview, and I believe that marketplace exists not just because of human failure to reconcile, but perhaps because God is speaking in different ways to different people. However we wind up defining success or failure (and surely, isn’t success also, in the words of the old evangelical hymn, rescuing the perishing and caring for the dying, even if it is only one at a time?), God has moved, is moving, and will move through faithful churches and faithful people.

Or, at least, that has been, is, and will be my prayer.

Check out “Hope Yet for Mainline Denominations”

Part of the Patheos series on the Future of the Church. Great contributions on Mainline Protestantism from my friends Brian McLaren, David Lamotte, and David Wallace are there now. Thoughts on the future of Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity, and other religions also on Patheos now or forthcoming. If you aren’t familiar with this site, do visit–thoughtful discussions from varied perspectives.

Photo courtesy The Mirror. 

To commemorate the anniversary of the 7/7  terrorist attacks and celebrate my friends in the UK, another piece of the Terror book, in progress. (And yes, I already hear voices saying, if you think England’s so much better than the U S of A, why don’t you stay there. Not what I’m saying). This is from the early chapter on fear:

In a major policy speech on the approaching war with Iraq, President George W. Bush echoed previous statements by his national security advisor, Condoleeza Rice (and ideas we find in the television show 24) by arguing “We cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” These slightly mixed metaphors (Bush was originally responding to criticisms that we had no proof Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction) collapse into a single frightening martial threat to the United States. “Through its inaction,” the president said, “the United States would resign itself to a future of fear. That is not the America I know. That is not the America I serve. We refuse to live in fear.” [1]

What Bush was offering, simultaneously, was the fearful spectre of nuclear attack, and the hope that someday, by taking the actions he wanted to pursue, we might live without fear. It is a horrible thing to live in fear. Nothing in human existence is worse, Thomas Hobbes affirmed. So, in a very real sense, our fear of fear may drive us to any extremes in hopes of escaping a future of fear. That is why fear is our opening point in examining the culture and political climate following 9/11. The illogically-named War on Terror, is, on further reflection, perfectly-named; our battle is not, perhaps, first with mere humans who might attack us, but with the fear that, as President Bush said, would enslave us. Every action taken in the War on Terror—preventative war, torture, rendition, civil rights violations, stereotyping Muslims—grows out of the fear that sprouted from those fireballs on September 11.

It should be instructive that while the government of Britain acquiesced to many of the requests of the Bush administration related to war and the conduct of it, the people (if not necessarily the leaders) of Britain, a nation which has lived longer with the spectre of terror than the United States, can show us some different responses to the call of fear. On the morning of July 7, 2005, a group of Islamic extremists attacked the London transit system during rush hour, killing 52, injuring hundreds, and pushing hundreds of thousands into the city streets; “7/7” is as identifiable a date in Britain as 9/11 in the States. Although this event had obvious similarities to the 9/11 attacks, it was the latest in a serious of British bombings over the years from a series of terror groups, and the most serious on British soil.

Where terror attacks are concerned, people in the United Kingdom would seem to have more of which to be frightened than people in the United States, yet, paradoxically, they do not seem to manifest this fear. A few weeks ago, I stayed at the Hilton Metropole London, where victims of the 7/7 bombings had been carried for treatment; I walked past the St. Mary’s Hospital down the street, where more badly wounded had been rushed; I boarded the Underground at the Edgeware Road Station, site of one of the deadly explosions. And as I looked at the faces of my fellow commuters, I did not sense the sort of fear and irritation I sometimes find among my traveling counterparts in the States. “Why don’t we treat it the way the British deal with IRA bomb threats in London?” writer and professor Jay Parini asked. “It’s just become part of their lives, like bad weather.” [2]

This advice might serve us well. While George Bush’s grim response to the attacks of 7/7 was “the war on terror goes on,” not all British politicians seem to have pushed the terror aspect in the same way as their US counterparts have done (a factor, by the way, that may explain why US citizens were at first more compliant with their government’s policies than British citizens have been); in fact, although he later called for more draconian measures to prevent future attacks, Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a statement on the evening of the 7/7 bombings in which he encouraged his fellow Britons to refuse to give in to fear:

I think we all know what they are trying to do, they are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us, to frighten us out of doing the things we want to do, of trying to stop us going about our business as normal as we are entitled to do and they should not and must not succeed.

When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated, when they seek to change our country, our way of life by these methods, we will not be changed.

When they try to divide our people or weaken our resolve, we will not be divided and our resolve will hold firm.

We will show by our spirit and dignity and by a quiet and true strength that there is in the British people, that our values will long outlast theirs.

The purpose of terrorism is just that, it is to terrorise people and we will not be terrorised. [3]

            British friends, in fact, have told me that it simply is not in the British makeup to be terrorized; they survived bombing raids in World War Two, have lived with the possibility (and actuality) of IRA attacks for decades, have been menaced for being the United States’ closest ally in the War on Terror, and are thus unlikely to succumb to fear-mongering. For me, this attitude is best illustrated by a ubiquitous popular poster originally designed in case of German invasion in World War Two and now to be found everywhere, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” which has been described by the BBC as “the very model of British restraint and stiff upper lip.” [4] The design, rediscovered in 2000, has been widely reprinted and used on merchandise ranging from postcards to mugs to baby clothes to doormats. A slightly-altered version of the poster (“Keep Calm and Read On”) is an ad-campaign currently plastered throughout the Underground, reminding people in the very places where terrorists have attacked to go on about their business. Ironically, in language familiar from the speeches of George W. Bush, a Cambridge-educated clergyman told me, “If we let them throw us off our routines, then indeed the terrorists have won.” What the British demonstrate in this instance is how one can live in the face of fear without giving in to it. [5]

[1] “Bush: Don’t Wait for Mushroom Cloud,” CNN, October 8, 2002. Accessed at http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/10/07/bush.transcript/

[2] James Atlas, “The Fear this Time,” New York May 21, 2005.  Accessed at http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/9605/

[3] “London Rocked by Terror Attacks,” BBC News, 7 July 2005. Accessed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4659093.stm; “In Full: Blair on Bomb Blasts,” BBC News, 7 July 2005. Accessed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4659953.stm

[4] Stuart Hughes, “The best propaganda poster ever?” BBC News, 4 Feb. 2009. Accessed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7869458.stm

[5] Whether British institutions have used other issues as candidates for fear mongering may be up for discussion; my point is that the response to the terrorist threat seems to have been handled differently by the British government, and attempts to convince Britons of the threat of Saddam Hussein were largely ignored or disregarded, leading at last to the fall of the Blair government.

(Photo courtesy Detroit News)

I’ve been thinking this week about brokenness, about being chosen and set apart–and being rejected and cast aside–and the value we place on those things in church settings, where those who are chosen lead in a faith centered on healing all who have been left out. More particularly, I have been talking with a new friend who has been studying theology at Oxford, thinking about the possibility of ordination, and recognizing that there might be no place for him in the Church, despite sterling qualities and vast sincerity. And several old friends have learned recently that the positions in the Church to which they aspired will not be offered to them, despite sterling qualities and vast sincerity, and I am feeling sad and a bit pensive about all those told by the Church that they are not to be ordained or called to preach, all those who are not chosen for committees and commissions, all those who are told that they are not needed at this time, all God’s people whose sterling qualities and vast sincerity are not rewarded with the thing they sought and to which they felt called.

I know a bit about this, as some of you know, since a year back the Church told me at last that it did not want me either. After being removed from the ordination process by a past Bishop of Texas, I was encouraged by clergy and by a church that valued me to approach our new bishop, and after a long wait during which both of us thought and prayed, the new bishop and I sat down for a talk last fall which was difficult for both of us. And at the end, he had–with gentleness and considerable wisdom–told me that he did not believe I was called to ordination.

In church life–and in several other spheres of life, unfortunately–I fall into the easy to cast off category that might be headed Badly Mangled Personal Life. When someone like me has made mistakes or been profoundly unlucky in the past, it’s easy to suppose that she or he might experience the same in the future. It’s past performance by which we judge race horses, dairy cows, and, unfortunately, people. I know I proved a failure in marriage and at most of my personal life in past decades–and I think it unfair but not unexpected that people might continue to judge me based on those events of ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. Past performance: I know of several priests and pastors who have self-destructed badly in recent years, and whose self-immolation took forms that should have been familiar to any who knew them and their history.

So I understand past performance as a measure of future possibility. But what this fails to take into account are the deeply Christian concepts of grace, redemption, and rebirth. Christians are said to believe that, in the presence of forgiving love, failures of the past may be left in the past. If we have expressed remorse for the things we have done, learned from them, demonstrated that who we are now is not who we were then, then it seems uncharitable to exclude people because of who they have been, what they believed, what they have done.

Today is the feast day of Irenaeus, a second-century bishop who was one of the first theologians of the Christian Church; he is perhaps best known for his work “Adversus Haereses” (”Against Heresies”), a book in which he singled out the Gnostics of his day (deservedly, I suppose) as heretics, thus arguing that some are in, and some are out. But it is also Irenaeus (ironically) who first argued that although most people and faith communities of his day employed a single gospel witness, we actually required four distinct gospels to understand the nature of Jesus and God’s saving work through him. This insistence ultimately led to the inclusion of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John when the New or Christian Testament of the Bible was compiled, and Irenaeus had it right–if any of these narratives of God’s faithfulness had been excluded, the Church–and our knowledge of God–would be lessened.

So when someone is told by someone with authority to say so, “The Church does not want you for this thing at this time,” perhaps we could remember Irenaeus’ argument of diversity: each of us is necessary, and each of us has a story of God’s good news moving in our lives. In remembering this, perhaps we might also remember that God loves all, that even hurt and rejected as we may feel, God has great things for us, and that the Church is composed of imperfect human beings seeking the will of God the best they can.

I sit today in a residential library in Wales where I have been invited to read, think, and write, a fellowship that would not have been possible had I been accepted into parish ministry. The books I write and talks and teaching I do likewise would not be possible in a vocation where daily care for God’s people was my first responsibility. When my bishop Andy Doyle told me last fall that he would not return me to the ordination process, he told me two things that have been of lasting value. One, he said, he felt confident that this was all for the best, and that God had big plans for me regardless of whether the Church stamped me as its own and put a priestly collar around my neck.

And second–and perhaps most important when one is disappointed and rejected–he told me, “God calls people, not the Church. The Church tries to understand that call and what it means. Sometimes we get it wrong.”

And in my experience, sometimes that call is to something different, something that doesn’t fit into easy categories, something that messes with the heads of bureaucracies or gatekeepers, something that God will bless even if the Church doesn’t seem to.

So for all those who have been told “No” or “Not yet,” for all those who have been hurt by the Church, for all those wondering what’s next, I pray that the peace of God that passes all understanding might cover those hurts, the love of Christ Jesus bind those wounds, and the joy of the Spirit fill and move through you into a world that desperately needs healing and wholeness.

The Church may not choose you–but God has.

And, as always, there is work to do.

An early look at the book I’m writing in Wales on 9/11, religion, and culture:

“Terrible thing, to live in fear.  . . . All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won’t have to be afraid all the time.”

Red (Morgan Freeman), The Shawshank Redemption

“I wish I  wasn’t afraid all the time. But I am.”

Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), V for Vendetta

            They flew into lower Manhattan out of a brilliant blue sunlit sky, two jetliners, glinting in the sunlight. It was incongruous—and remains so, in the videos we still sometimes see—how something so familiar could cause so much damage, could become the source of so much terror. Before September 11, 2001, Americans had felt largely immune to the acts of terror that have afflicted other nations around the world. But after the fiery collapse of the Twin Towers and attack on the Pentagon, after the deaths of office workers and first responders, our shock and anger were also accompanied by—and perhaps, prompted by—a deeper, darker emotion: fear.

We live in the world’s lone remaining superpower, we told ourselves. We spend more on defense than all other nations—friends and rivals—combined. And yet we had been hurt. Humbled.

In a world where planes piloted by blade-wielding terrorists could fly into buildings, Americans asked ourselves, what else is now possible? What is to prevent future attacks? How can we keep ourselves, our families, our nation, safe?

We came to the sad if perhaps long overdue realization that perhaps, for all our military power and economic might, we could not protect ourselves from all harm.

And we were afraid.

In the Oscar-winning movie Crash, Jean (Sandra Bullock), the wife of the Los Angeles District Attorney, stands in for many of us. If anyone should be safe from attack, she should. And yet, when she and her husband are carjacked, she is startled to discover that her wealth and privilege do not protect her from even the most basic assault. They return home, Daniel, a Hispanic locksmith (Michael Peña), comes to change all the locks, but Jean now sees threat everywhere. She takes one look at Daniel and tells her husband they will need to change the locks again, because “your amigo in there is gonna sell our key to one of his homies.” And although Daniel is one of the movie’s moral centers, a gentle and generous man, Jean’s world has been knocked off its axis; although she is safe, what she sees is danger. What she sees is the need for better, more secure locks.

In that, she would not be so different from other Americans. After the 9/11 attacks, Americans were told our entire way of life would change. A major new agency, Homeland Security, was created; time-consuming screenings changed our travel habits; danger charts set (permanently, it seems) on Orange reminded us that the danger of another terrorist attack was always high; at occasional moments, officials would announce intelligence of a possible terrorist attack–or the foiling of one–and our fear would roil again.

Historian Ruth Rosen noted a year after 9/11 how the attack was a shattering of illusions of safety, and how, in the wake of it, we desperately wanted to trust our president and our government to keep us safe from further attacks. What happened, she said, was that “our leaders have taken advantage of our fear. The Bush administration has planted the seeds of a security state that can, without judicial oversight, congressional opposition, and popular resistance, grow into a repressive government.” Rosen quantified the possibilities in this way:

In the name of preventing terrorism, the Bush administration has employed a politics of fear to create the most extensive national security apparatus in our nation’s history.

Military tribunals. Mandatory registration. Mass detentions. Electronic surveillance. Government secrecy. Executive privilege. Office of Total Awareness. Perpetual war.” [1]

And fear had put all of these elements in the mix back in 2002 before we even knew of Abu Ghraib, renditions, spying on Americans, and squads of assassins.

Importantly, however, we should note that these are not partisan charges. Many of them continue under the Obama adminstration. Dan Gillmor is one of many commentators who notes that some of the most egregious examples of expanded presidential power from the Bush era are still in use by the Obama White House, and that civil libertarians continue to fear that we could slip into a police state. “Most depressing of all,” he writes, “the majority of the American people would probably welcome such a government. Our preference for the illusion of safety over the recognition and acceptance of risk has only grown. We are a society too afraid of our own shadows to confront reality.” [2]

Although encouraging a terror of terrorism was begun in the Bush White House, promotion of fear has not been limited to strictly official channels. What Corey Robin has called “Fear, American Style” demonstrates that once American elites have settled on the source or sources of fear they wish to foreground, that emotion can and will spread through both state power and through every institutional and incidental avenue. [3] Some examples of the pervasiveness of fear are instructive: though violent crime actually has fallen nationwide (it actually fell throughout the 1990s, and except for slight ticks in 2005 and 2006, continues to show declines), many Americans believe the opposite is true. [4] Public perceptions of crime, as the Wall Street Journal notes, have yet to square themselves with the facts. [5]

But the common media elements of our contemporary life militates against our putting fear in its proper place; around the clock news and local TV both inform us first about atrocities committed anywhere around the globe (as you may have heard, “If it bleeds, it leads,” is the credo of local TV journalism). If a child is snatched in another city or a bloody murder is committed in another state, it is committed to memory. If a bomb goes off in a square in Baghdad; if a terrorist group claims credit for an attack in Jakarta; even if some fundamentalist bonehead fails to blow up a plane with the bomb in his pants, it dominates news cycles and the diatribes of talking heads, and the grim sum of all of this is that we believe the world is a dangerous place, even as, for most of us, the chances of our being the victim of violent crime or terrorist attack are slim.

[1] Ruth Rosen, “Politics of Fear,” San Francisco Chronicle Dec. 30, 2002.  Accessed at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/12/30/ED192178.DTL&hw=Ruth+Rosen&sn=020&sc=240

[2] Dan Gillmor, “Dear Mr. President: Please abuse your powers,” Salon June 22, 2010. Accessed at http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/06/22/obama_abuse_civil_liberties

[3] Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),  163.

[4] Jerry Markon, “Violent crime in the US on the decline,” Washington Post May 25 2010. Accessed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/24/AR2010052402210.html

[5] Evan Perez, “Violent Crime Falls Sharply,” Wall Street Journal May 25, 2010. Accessed at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704113504575264432463469618.html 

I was environmental before environmental was cool. Seriously. I mean, I wasn’t at the first Earth Day, but I was into Reduce, Reuse, Recycle back in the days when you had to take your recyclables somewhere—and when a lot of things couldn’t be recycled.

Now it feels as though there’s been a sea-change in the way we think about trash and recycling. In Austin, where I live, recycling is a way of life, with bins that let us toss in virtually everything. In Waco, where I work, recycling bins on the Baylor campus invite contributions of paper, plastics, aluminum cans.

Exxon, the corporation I made a villain in my first novel, Free Bird, and have been boycotting for two decades over their Alaskan oil spill, has become one of the safest and most-responsible oil companies around. When you compare their number of major fines in recent years with BP, we should have realized something bad was looming. (I know for some calling an oil company safe is like saying someone is the most humanitarian Nazi concentration camp guard; but seriously—check the numbers: 760 OSHA fines for BP, 1 for Exxon).

 Most people have reached a point of accepting that the environment matters. And that’s what makes the BP oil spill and the damage to the Gulf that much more heartbreaking. Whatever your political persuasion, whether you’re drill, baby, drill, or tree-hugging Prius driver, it’s clear from the emerging facts that we should have known disaster was coming. The Houston Chronicle reports that “In the five years before the Deepwater Horizon exploded, federal investigators documented nearly 200 safety and environmental violations in accidents on platforms and rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, describing a stunning array of hazards that resulted in few penalties.”

 Despite their green branding and attempts to paint themselves as more than a petroleum company, BP was, is, and will be a company that drills for oil. And facts show they they’ve done so with little regard for their employees, consumers, or the environment.

Set aside all they did wrong and could have done differently before the spill; after, they’ve consistently tried to minimize the damage and their own culpability. The Guardian notes that BP originally told us that 1000 barrels a day were entering the Gulf; then they upped their estimate to 5000 barrels a day. Now we understand that it’s at least five times that, with some scientists estimating higher still.

All of this could have been prevented. Tragic.

But there was profit in drilling deep wells in the Gulf for oil, and BP was pursuing it.

And that profit is where our responsibility enters in.

Yesterday my friend Ken was telling me about the electric car he hopes to buy. It has a range of 100 miles between charges and a top speed of 90 mph. Someday, perhaps all of us will drive vehicles or ride trains powered by alternative sources of energy.

But in the meantime, the political, ethical, and even spiritual choices remain: Do we use fossil fuels? How do we use them? What costs are we willing to pay to use them?

And what kind of commitments should we make to the paradigm shift it will take to move from exploiting this one-time only gift of dirty energy the planet gave us to other forms of energy that won’t pollute our air and water, won’t fill our atmosphere with greenhouse gases?

Part of my environmentalism is theological. Like many of my opinions, my environmental ideas are informed by my belief that God loved the world enough to create, enter, and die for it. They’re also informed by my recognition that many of the choices we make about energy have a direct impact on “the least of these”—the poor around the world who are most likely to suffer asthma and respiratory distress, to use polluted water, to suffer from our choices.

I was environmental back in the days when it didn’t really matter, since no one else was environmental. Nothing I said or did would matter, because alone I was only reducing my own footprint on the earth.

But times have changed. People have learned. Coalitions have formed that once would have seemed impossible between conservatives and progressives, between evangelicals, Catholics, and Protestants.

And now it’s time for all of us who love the earth—and earth’s people—to learn that business as usual leads to disasters like the one in the Gulf.

We must do better, and I believe we can.

Let’s start talking.

Photo: ABC TV

A nice break from talking about U2: I’ve been giving interviews on the finale of Lost, which I frankly think is one of the greatest things ever on TV. Lost has engaged us with big stories, and taken us seriously as people capable of reading, thinking, and discussing. It’s wrestled with the post 9-11 world, with issues like torture and rendition and the use of violence to protect yourself and your tribe. It’s given us wonderful characters from a wide world of cultures and races to follow, boo, and cheer.

And Sunday, it’s over. Boo. Cheer.

My predictions for a California journalist this morning about the last show were fun. I love being an entertainment pundit. Here’s what I said:

Everything I’ve read suggests the ending is going to be hard for anyone to figure out beforehand, but I’d guess in broad terms the show will be true to its core–people who were lost will have the chance to become found, in space and in their own lives. I suspect that there may be redemption extended even to the villain, Smokey, and that Jack may do something sacrificial, although that’s not much of a stretch. It might be nice, in fact, to not have him be a martyr.

We’ll know more, of course, shortly. But in the interest of explaining Lost to folks who haven’t got it, or who have let it slide–or perhaps to open some more discussion, I want to offer two things: First, check out my buddy Chris Seay’s The Gospel according to Lost, a spiritual reading of the show’s first five seasons that will help you understand its sixth and final season.

And second, you might want to check out the lesson I did on Lost for The Thoughtful Christian, an excerpt of which I provide below: great possibility for group discussion, church lessons, what have you. A wonderful Father’s Day gift as well, I’m sure. (Disclosure: I was paid to write this lesson. But I don’t get paid any more if you buy it.)

Happy viewing to all my fellow Losties! And a few thoughts on the show:

Lost has been called (by the London Times) “the most maddening show on television” and (by TIME magazine) “the future of television,” but however you think about the show, this big-budget, high-concept series has changed the way we experience television—and has also, perhaps, changed some of those who experienced it. When we watch television or go to the movies, often we are seeking the opportunity to escape into a story—to laugh, to be frightened, to have our feelings engaged in some powerful and diverting way. But because they come to us in the shape of stories, even the most enthralling of dramatic entertainments will often connect us to real-world moral issues, to realistic ethical dilemmas, and to new ways of understanding our beliefs, since story is always how we make sense of our experiences and those of others.

Great television shows are powerful in this respect, because in serial drama we gain ongoing opportunities to observe the lives of characters. Diane Winston notes how in a long-running television series, viewers interact with the characters over an extended period of time, and “the experience of watching, and responding to, TV characters’ moral dilemmas, crises of faith, bouts of depression, and fits of exhilaration gives expression—as well as insight and resolution—to viewers’ own spiritual odysseys and ethical predicaments.”^[1] Thus, a show like Lost, which deals with both existential and topical issues over the course of its six seasons, offers us a prime opportunity to begin a journey of exploration alongside its characters.

Lost, created by J.J. Abrams (Alias, Star Trek), Jeffrey Lieber, and Damon Lindelof is one of the most honored—and discussed—television shows of recent memory. Since its premiere on September 22, 2004, Lost has attracted a huge and devoted fan community who watch episodes, debate questions and hints, and seek out additional information and interaction online. The show has won Emmy, Golden Globe, and many other awards, and been named by TIME magazine as one of the 100 best shows in TV history. TIME media critic James Poniewozik has called the show “a moving, literate popcorn thriller that weaves dozens of characters lives into a story of interconnection, redemption, and grace,” and certainly this mixture of entertainment, a large and multi-cultural cast, and powerful themes has led to huge viewing audiences, and to followers in new media such as online viewing, the iTunes store, and on DVD, where Lost’s first seasons were bestsellers. [2] Lost’s popularity has also been international; Lost-watching became a phenomenon in Britain after its introduction there, and in a recent worldwide study of television popularity in twenty countries, Lost was named the second most watched television show around the world. [3] 

Although Lost employs traditional narrative patterns (the stuck on a desert island motif, for example, has been used by shows as varied as Gilligan’s Island, Lost in Space, and Survivor), Lost goes well beyond the usual treatment in showing us the lives of people making a place and a community for themselves; it also suggests so many parallels with our everyday lives—and with the recent experiences of those of us in the post 9-11 world—that it is both fantastic wish-fulfillment and gritty chronicle of the world as it is.

Given the relevance of its topics, Lost can prompt powerful discussion about good and evil, conflict, faith, free will, and the importance—and difficulty—of doing the right thing. In this class session, we’ll be introduced to the characters and concerns of the series, watch scenes from the series, and discuss questions closely related to them. In the process, we’ll explore theological and ethical questions as well as social and political ones: What should be done to create a just and secure society? What is the nature of evil? What is the relationship between faith and free will? Can we ever be irretrievably lost? What does it mean to be righteous?

Lost is a great entertainment, offering powerful performances from attractive and engaging actors, beautiful sets and production values, mysteries to ponder, easter eggs to find. Still, to focus only on the entertainment and ignore the challenging questions would be to lose much of Lost’s appeal; as with other great dramatic works that discuss issues of faith and conscience, our own faith—and our consciences—should be engaged as we consider this show and the issues it raises.

[1] Diane Winston. “Introduction.” Small Screen, Big Picture: Television and Lived Religion. Ed. Diane Winston (Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2009), 6.

[2] James Poniewozik. “Why the Future of Television Is Lost.” TIME, Sept. 24, 2006.  Accessed at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1538635-2,00.html

[3] “CSI show “most popular in world.’” BBC News, July 31, 2006. Accessed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5231334.stm

I’m just off a weekend retreat and U2charist with the wonderful Trinity United Methodist Church, Austin, and this spring I’ve been talking about how we might find God moving in the music of U2, in movies, and in the Harry Potter story, among other things. We read Psalm 19 before my sermon yesterday, which talks about the heavens showing forth the glory of God, and I feel strongly that we can discern God in creation–which includes us, since we are part of creation–a creating part.

I’ll always have things to say about this, but it struck me that although religious people have sometimes worried that the culture tells stories that detract from the Christian message, and secular people have sometimes worried that trying to read culture through a Christian filter imposes Christian ideas upon it, the truth seems to me to be this: While not every piece of culture radiates obvious spiritual value, when we read with discernment, we can find spiritual value in movies, music, films, TV, and elsewhere.And that most people don’t need out permission to do this, since they already consciously or unconsciously draw their spiritual understandings from culture, not from organized religion.

This is both exciting–and daunting.

It’s exciting, because I know that in my own journey, culture was a big part of what kept me going even though I had no formal community of faith to fall back on for sustenance and meaning.

And it’s daunting, because while I knew when something was life-giving or soul-sucking for me, I couldn’t usually have told you why, so I think a great challenge for people of faith now is to help people read culture well, to let them know why these stories matter for good or ill, and that’s been a big part of my writing, speaking, and preaching work in recent years.

As I’m thinking about being the guest this week at Sunday Forum at the National Cathedral, I was revisiting one of the best things I’ve written about this, from the introduction to The Gospel according to Hollywood, and I want to share it with you now:        

    The first time I saw Pulp Fiction in the fall of 1994, I had the feeling that I was watching something miraculous. It wasn’t just that I was watching an entertaining and inventive work of art, which the movie certainly was, but as I sat there in the darkened theater, I had a strange and paradoxical thought: I felt that I was in the presence of something holy.    

       As I watched Quentin Tarantino’s violent and often vile film about gangsters, junkies, crooked boxers, armed robbers, and other folks who make up the unpleasant underbelly of the world, I was amazed to discover in each of the film’s major stories the light of something I could only call grace, and I was spiritually moved in a way I hadn’t been in a church since—well, maybe ever.      

     When the movie was over, I sat quietly through the closing credits, as is my practice, and then remained seated thinking long after the lights came up, which isn’t.            To paraphrase Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), one of the film’s gangsters: In the words, images, and action of Pulp Fiction, I felt the touch of God.God got involved.      

     Although the movie made its name in the world as a cleverly-written film about gunplay, drug use, profanity, and forced sodomy, what I took away from Pulp Fiction was not the violent action, dark humor, and crudity, but embedded themes of grace and redemption and the belief that God was real and powerful. For me, Pulp Fiction was a deeply spiritual film, and its use of theological language made it, despite its troublesome content, deeply religious as well.            About two thirds of the way through the film, for example, when Jules and his colleague Vincent (John Travolta) survive an attack at point-blank gunpoint, he rejects Vincent’s judgment that they were simply lucky. No, he says:

JULESThat was . . . divine intervention. You know what divine intervention is?

VINCENTYeah, I think so.  That means God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets.

JULESYeah, man, that’s what it means. That’s exactly what it means!  God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets. [1]

Whether Quentin Tarantino the writer and director of this scene believes that God came down and stopped the bullets is irrelevant. Despite Vincent’s skepticism, Jules does believe it, and the filmed scene creates an undeniable effect of awe and mystery. Jules is a character we like and respect, and his belief in the miraculous ultimately spills over onto the audience. Whatever Tarantino’s own take on the action, this is one of many spots in Pulp Fiction that offers us what Connie Neal, author of The Gospel According to Harry Potter, likes to call “glimmers of the gospel,” moments in popular culture narratives where we can find inspiration and spiritual illumination. [2]

Pulp Fiction is crammed full of these moments that illuminate Judeo-Christian teachings, whether in its story of Jules’ redemption, its account of Vincent first receiving the wages of sin and then experiencing a miraculous second birth, its depiction of people behaving with uncharacteristic kindness and generosity in difficult situations, or its use of an actual vehicle called “Grace” to convey some of its characters to a new life.

The first time I saw Pulp Fiction, I noticed some of these things, but I had no idea then that the movie would be discussed in books on the Bible and film, film and spirituality, or even film and prayer. I didn’t know that people were going to spend thousands of hours on the Internet and in coffee shops debating such topics as whether the briefcase Jules and Vincent had rescued contained the soul of Marcellus Wallace, the gang boss played by Ving Rhames. I didn’t know that I’d actually be opening my dust-covered King James Bible for the first time in years to examine Ezekiel 25:17 and see how much of that verse Jules was actually quoting to the people he was getting ready to ventilate. I didn’t know that the venerable American Academy of Religion, this country’s foremost organization of theologians, would devote a special session of their next annual conference to the discussion of Pulp Fiction.

All I knew was that when I left the theater, it was as a slightly different person than I went in—slightly more hopeful, slightly more open to the possibility that there might be a God (and to the possibility that he, she, or it might be moving in my life), and more than a little anxious to have that kind of experience with the holy again.

When Jules discusses the miracle they witnessed (“You witnessed,” the skeptical Vince says; “I witnessed a freak occurrence”), he uses those words I mentioned earlier, words I’ve co-opted over and over in the intervening years to explain the feeling I have gotten from Pulp Fiction, and from other works of popular culture that didn’t set out to witness to the Gospel but do so anyway: “What is significant is I felt God’s touch.”

I ultimately saw Pulp Fiction in the theater seven times, six times in the States, once in London. I bought the movie, first on videocassette and then on DVD, read and re-read the screenplay. Pulp Fiction became a touchstone in my growing faith, more meaningful than most sermons I’d heard and most church services I’d sat through.

Like many in church and even more outside it, I have found that God can speak to me as powerfully sometimes through elements of the culture as through a formal religious service or in a religious setting.I’ve learned lessons about my faith and about my life through the depiction of joy and beauty in musicals like Top Hat and Singin’ in the Rain, by witnessing a selfless messiah figure and a redeemed Barabbas in Casablanca, in the complicated interplay of guilt and justice in Rear Window, by following the chilling progress of a man losing his soul in The Godfather, in the paradigm of irrational and unshakable faith put into action in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, through the meditations on sin and violence in Unforgiven, in the sacrificial love displayed in Titanic, and in the scenes of divine intervention and inspired forgiveness that animate Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.

My spiritual journey has been marked by many cinematic rest stops, and I’m hardly alone in this.

When Chris Seay and I wrote The Gospel Reloaded about the religious elements in the Matrix films, we were partly inspired to do so because of 1000 websites and who knows how many people on the web discussing faith and philosophy in the original Matrix, a phenomenon unseen, perhaps, since the first Star Wars films. Many of those people so interested in learning what kind of savior Neo (Keanu Reeves) was and how the Biblical references helped explain the film’s conflict were “irreligious” or “unchurched.” But every human being is a spiritual being, and we all thirst for something beyond ourselves, however and wherever we can find it, and that book and others like it served a real and growing need.

These days, almost every mainline Protestant church with sufficient resources seems to do “popcorn theology” nights and teach classes on faith and film. In the past five years, secular and religious publishers alike have sent forth books examining the relationship between movies and faith, and popular websites like Hollywood Jesus and media sources like the radio shows hosted by Dick Staub and Bill Hogg likewise focus on the intersection of popular culture and Christianity. And in what would have seemed amazing twenty years ago, leaders in many churches now show Hollywood films during sermons and use them in video installations, and universities and seminaries alike offer wildly popular courses on film and theology.Not everyone is jumping on board this fast-accelerating bandwagon, of course.

While Pulp Fiction is a movie that was an essential part of the faith journey for me and for many others, it’s important to note that a vast number of Americans consider this movie not only un-Christian but sinful, both in itself and as the potential occasion of sin in others. The Office for Film & Broadcasting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which rates films for the millions of American Catholics, actually condemned Pulp Fiction when it came out in 1994, rating it as “morally offensive,” thus making it off-limits for Catholics to view.

In fact, the Office for Film and Broadcasting has given their condemnatory rating of “morally offensive” to a number of films that I’ve discussed with audiences in churches, universities, youth camps, and seminaries for their moral and religious content, among them American Beauty, Dogma, Kill Bill, and the Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby, which I have taught fruitfully for its main character’s active engagement with God, but which the OFB condemns as a “somber meditation on assisted suicide with a morally problematic ending.” [3]

This review points out a central distinction between what a spiritual reading of culture attempts and what many Christians seem to expect from Hollywood: while every year Hollywood releases movies than can fruitfully illuminate the life of faith and draw us closer to the divine, very very few commercial movies are ever intended as some sort of religious experience. They’re stories, some better told than others, and many of them are going to lack an easy moral or be “morally problematic.” That’s why they require interpretation and our own engagement in the problems they present if we’re to gain some sort of enlightenment.

Hollywood films, even in whatever Golden Age people imagine they remember, have always been an uneasy combination of art and commerce, of personal vision and corporate product, and while they can tell mythical stories that touch us deeply, with rare exceptions (like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ), our experience of the sacred in a film doesn’t come because the filmmakers have consciously devoted themselves to that proposition.Instead, as my Baylor colleague Ralph Wood writes in The Gospel According to Tolkien, a popular culture narrative approaches the sacred—if indeed it approaches it at all—through “its plot and characters, its images and tone, its landscape and point of view—not from any heavy-handed moralizing or preachifying.” [4]

That makes for good art but bad evangelism, which is why if you go to the movies looking for evangelism, you’re almost certain to be disappointed.Because of the tension between the surface content of a film and its possible deeper spiritual meanings, many movies that for me have strong moral and even religious content are off the shelf for many Christians, one of the things I hope to remedy; we Christians do ourselves few favors by refusing to engage the culture, especially when it regards culture that could help lead a broken world in the direction of faith and wholeness.

I’ll gladly admit that discernment is a necessary element in approaching popular culture for its sacred content, and movies like Starship Troopers or Pootie Tang may in fact have little or no value as anything but DVD Frisbees. But if we truly believe in incarnation—that is, the Judeo/Christian belief that God both created the world and willingly entered into creation as a human being—then the world is indeed, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “charged with the grandeur of God,” and with wisdom, prayer, and persistence we can discern God both in the works of God’s creation and in our creations as well.

[1] Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction, London: Faber & Faber, 1994, p. 139.

[2] Connie Neal, The Gospel According to Harry Potter: Spirituality in the Stories of the World’s Most Famous Seeker, Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002, p. xi.

[3] Accessed at http://www.usccb.org/movies

 [4] Ralph C. Wood, The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-Earth, Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003, p. 4.