(Ir)religiosity

Today was supposed to be for another Diana Butler Bass post.

But then the gays had to go and cause a tornado in Minnesota.

Like a lot of people yesterday I read John Piper’s outrageous post claiming that God caused a tornado in Minneapolis to send a message to the ELCA:  God doesn’t like gays and doesn’t want them in His (yes, His) church.  And like a lot of people I was angered.

I left this comment on Piper’s post:

It is deeply disappointing to see such a prominent Christian leader yet again contributing to the narrative of fear. You’re peddling a poisonous and toxic theology Mr. Piper. And you join the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in doing so. Yours is a Christianity that betrays the heart of the gospel. I highly doubt you will, but I pray that you retract your words.

I was in a hurry so here’s a few more thoughts.  (My hope is that more people (people who, unlike me, have voice and influence) will call Piper out on this because the last thing we need is another excuse for people to write off Christians has gay-bashing, fanatical, wing nuts.)

The theology is ridiculous. I’m hesitant to even call this theology because Piper’s cutting and pasting of scripture tells me that he is more interested in justifying his own ideology with religious authority than he is in serious reflection.¹  It is very destructive and obviously raises some disturbing issues when it comes to theodicy and the nature of God.  The burden of proof is on Piper to explain every other natural disaster.  Who is being punished in all the other tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes?  And what kind of God dishes out punishment of that magnitude?  What of grace?  If God is in the business of unleashing holy hell on those God pleases then why does God only seems to care about who is having consensual sex with whom and who is marrying whom?   Aren’t there other issues that might seem at least a bit more pressing, like say, war or starvation or economic exploitation or disease?  If this is God’s way of dealing with things the why hasn’t the United States been wiped off the map for failing to care for its own as the wealthiest nation in the world or for starting bogus wars abroad in order to secure its “interests?”  What kind of hierarchy of sins is this that sex is at the top and other problems that directly affect persons livelihood don’t even seem to register?  Why doesn’t God give a damn about those?

When you push the thought to its inevitable conclusion, Piper’s God begins to look more in more like the mean kid killing insects with a magnifying glass.  God is a sadist who enjoys inflicting cosmic pain on others.  If that is true then I have no interest in God.  And if religion consists of me running scared for the rest of my life hoping that God isn’t out to get me then I’m out on that too.

Christianity is not a religion of fear.  From beginning to end, it’s narrative is one full of hope for the redemption and restoration of all things.  Piper, in his post, is more interested in a narrative of fear that dehumanizes the other, casting God as a cosmic antagonist, the ultimate mob boss who will kill you on a whim if you look at him the wrong way.  This is not the gospel, indeed it betrays the very heart of the gospel by opting for fear and hate instead of hope and love.  “Perfect love casts out fear.” Jesus modeled that perfect love and brought the narrative of hope to its apex.  He had a ton of opportunities to go postal on someone who didn’t get it or deserved to be punished, but he didn’t.  In fact, in the third act of the story Jesus shows us just how absurd the whole system of punishment and fear really is.  Is that not the clearest and most unambiguous embodiment of the very nature of God?

God does not create tornadoes to “send messages.”

God sent the best message God could 2000 years ago and the message is this: love, not hate wins; hope, not fear, has the final say.

You, John Piper, are on the wrong side of history.  Homosexuals pose no threat to the church nor does God hate, despise, or want to punish them.  We should be welcoming them with open arms to join us in participating in the restoration and renewal of all things.  Justice demands it.

1. To be sure, we’re all guilty of this to some extent, but there are good interpretations and bad interpretations. [↩]

Chris Hedges, one of my favorite journalists, describes it:

War comes wrapped in patriotic slogans, calls for sacrifice, honor and heroism and promises of glory. It comes wrapped in the claims of divine providence. It is what a grateful nation asks of its children. It is what is right and just. It is waged to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil. War is touted as the ultimate test of manhood, where the young can find out what they are made of. War, from a distance, seems noble. It gives us comrades and power and a chance to play a small bit in the great drama of history. It promises to give us an identity as a warrior, a patriot, as long as we go along with the myth, the one the war-makers need to wage wars and the defense contractors need to increase their profits.

But up close war is a soulless void. War is about barbarity, perversion and pain, an unchecked orgy of death. Human decency and tenderness are crushed. Those who make war work overtime to reduce love to smut, and all human beings become objects, pawns to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the scenes of eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded, all combine to spin those in combat into another universe. In this moral void, naively blessed by secular and religious institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions, our strict adherence to moral precepts, come unglued. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions that fill our days. It lets us see, although the cost is tremendous.

And then there are the words of Jesus, “I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly.”

And then there is this.

Does. Not. Compute.

I’m pretty sure when Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers he wasn’t referring to the Colt variety.

I love this song. It’s so demonstrative of our human condition, I think.

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgement day,
On the bloody morning after….
One tin soldier rides away.

Click image to enlarge.

(ht)

To say that the economy has become the dominant political issue over the last several months would be to state the obvious.  But even still there wasn’t a single mention — at least not that I know of — of an ‘anniversary’ that came and past last week.  Six years ago this month the long, arduous and costly (both in lives and money) war in Iraq began.  While the media pretended to be infuriated over the AIG bonuses and the rest of us marked our NCAA brackets the United States’ occupation of Iraq entered it’s seventh year.  Not a mention on the 24 hour news channels.  Even the blogosphere was silent.  I hope we haven’t forgotten.  I hope we haven’t moved on to the next trendy justice issue or the next big government mishap and neglected that one of the biggest justice issues and the worst government mishaps in recent memory continues on our watch.

I have hope that under President Obama this will end.  We shall see, but I have hope nonetheless. And until then I will — I hope we all will — continue to push and pressure my government to sever the tentacles of imperialism and put to death the attitude of exceptionalism.

Last year I organized and participated in war protest/peace demonstration in Oklahoma City and gave one of the speeches.  I’m re-posting it unedited (some of the language and statistics are now inflated) today as way of remembering that even in the midst of our economic crisis the war continues. Read the rest of this entry »

For easy access, here are all the links for this series.

Part I: Only Americans Matter
Part II: We Draw Our Circle Too Small
Part III: Patriotic Fixations
Part IV: Media Violence and the Ease of Abstraction
Part V: Final Thoughts

Part I: Only Americans Matter
Part II: We Draw Our Circle too Small
Part III: Patriotic Fixations
Part IV: Media Violence and the Ease of Abstraction

I suppose it’s time to wrap this series up.  It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted on this topic, so let’s revisit a few things.

In Part one, I introduced the overall thrust of my thought: in the western world — particularly in the US — nations tend to suppress, ignore, and even omit non-domestic acts of war, violence and terrorism.  The most obvious and visceral example for me as American — there are of course numerous such examples, too many to recount in a single post really — is the recent and ongoing lack of coverage and general unconcern en masse about the occupation of Iraq. Read the rest of this entry »

Part I: Only Americans Matter
Part II: We Draw Our Circle too Small
Part III: Patriotic Fixations

Last time, I mentioned the problem of patriotism and its synonymic relationship to nationalism and ethnocentrism the by-product of which is the arrogance of American exceptionalism not to mention the sorrows of empire itself.

The final reason for this cult of indifference and triumphalism — at least when related to non-domestic acts violence in the manner I have for this series — may be perhaps the least obvious of the three and its influence, while subtle, is very damaging.  This phenomenon as less to do with media coverage and national pride and more to do with our unconscious reaction to violence in the globalized information age.

The reality is that we have become desensitized to violence in general have little to no reaction when faced with actual violence perpetrated in acts of war. Read the rest of this entry »

Part I: Only Americans Matter
Part II: We Draw Our Circle too Small

Last time, I mentioned the first reason we as Americans tend to both individually and collectively — individually as preoccupied public population and collectively via the manufacturing of consent through the politically driven corporate media machine — suppress and ignore non-domestic acts of violence: the political symbolism of the current Bush regime and the reality of assumed indirect consequence.

I concluded by noting that we “draw our circle too small” only including in our spheres our care those who look and act like us; in short, those who remain “citizens” of the particular and arbitrarily created — usually as a result of geopolitics and social convenience — “nation-state” in which we live.

The second justification for our indifference stems from, and is the direct result of, the first.  It is the intense and deep-seated emotional feeling most of every American, of virtually every political stripe is overcome with this time of the year.  I am of course speaking of the feeling of many, rightly or wrongly, call patriotism. Read the rest of this entry »

Last time, I mentioned the blatant biases, omissions, and failings of the corporate media in the United States in regard to non-domestic acts of violence, and as of late, the war and occupation of Iraq.  I touched on the fact the in our minds, only Americans matter when it comes to international violence and I ended with the question: Why are we indifferent when it comes to this?

Over the next few posts, I want to unpack several reasons that I believe will help answer that question.  But before I do I want to make it clear that I don’t believe the blame to this phenomenon should be placed solely on the corporate media.  True, they are more culpable, they are in fact — at least in theory — obliged to report to us the viewers, and to speak the truth.  That is true and deserves attention because they have failed by all accounts. But I think this phenomenon is bigger and more widespread than just that.  Individual conditioning and indifference coupled with the fueling of the corporate media machine has ultimately led to our collective indifference in regard to non-American violence (e.g. the war in Iraq, the conflict(s) in Africa, etc.)

So, let’s look at the first reason and perhaps the most obvious, at least in terms of the current war Iraq, the most current and ignored example. Read the rest of this entry »