No. Pastor Mark Driscoll is wrong. That's the problem with GOP presidential candidates. Well, one of them anyhow. Also, the lead pastor of my church is most definitely not a sissy boy. She's a woman of God who can preach the hell out of some scriptures. You can check her out here. You might also listen to the sermon gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson recently preached at my church. He has some interesting things to say about how Jesus differs from the Terminator.
(Image via New York Times)
Martin Luther King, Jr., didn't think so (via Andrew Sullivan):
Don't let anybody make you think God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with justice and it seems I can hear God saying to America "you are too arrogant, and if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God. Men will beat their swords into plowshafts and their spears into pruning hooks, and nations shall not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore."
(Image to left: "Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares" sculpture, 1959 gift from Soviet Union to United Nations, quoting Isaiah 2:4)
You are if you pay federal income taxes. And if you haven't seen the tumblr devoted to the conservatives among us, check it out. It features dozens of photos of what appear to be decent people holding handwritten notes talking about how they work hard and haven't been handed anything and yet are somehow managing to get by, so everyone who isn't should just shut the fuck up and get a job. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney has just revealed he paid an effective federal tax rate of just 15% in 2011. Well, here's what I think of that:
That's the title of an op-ed in the New York Times by Kevin M. Kruse examining this remarkable claim made by Mitt Romney:
When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 percent versus 1 percent, you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.
Sadly, the political analysis of Romney - whose sprawling Massachusetts mansion is pictured to the right - is probably correct. Most Americans continue to speak of their personal wealth as a blessing, which implies it is something that God gave them. But when it comes to taxing that wealth, you'd never know it. Then, suddenly, people start to act an awful lot like they believe they are entitled to keep every cent. Why? Because, well, because they worked hard for it, dammit. But that only raises another question: Why go to the trouble of thanking God for something you really believe you deserve?
One possibility is that you're thanking God not so much for what you have, but for all the thousands and thousands of things outside your control that have contributed to where you are today. You might be thanking him, for example, that your parents raised you to have the values it takes to succeed. Or that you had the benefit of attending good schools, which, in turn, allowed you to enter the profession of your choice. Or that you recently managed to win an important client that will help your business thrive. Or that you happen to live in 21st century America rather than, say, 14th century Europe, a time and place when, statistically-speaking, you probably would have been a serf with few rights or prospects (not to mention the fact you would have had a one in three chance of dying from the Black Plague).
And so you thank God. You thank God because you realize that your hard work only tells half (and probably less than half) of the story of your success. And the natural reaction to that realization is gratitude. Gratitude that the Lord your God has given you - and continues to give to you every day - life and comfort and joy.
Which, of course, brings us back to the subject of taxes. And the question of how much of what the fantastically wealthy 1 percent "earn" should be contributed to feeding the poor, taking care of the aged and infirm, and building aircraft carriers so that oil continues to ship freely through the Strait of Hormuz. I doubt there's a single right answer to that question. But it strikes me as exactly the sort of thing a nation that has put itself "under God" should ask itself from time to time.
The New York Times’ Thomas Edsall has an interesting piece about what liberal activists and academics say conservatives get right. What’s remarkable is just how familiar it all sounds. I live in Washington, D.C., where almost everyone self-identifies as liberal. And yet I can’t count how many times I’ve heard my friends confess - often in hushed tones - how they wouldn’t mind if the left did more to emphasize individual responsibility, acknowledge the social importance of good parenting, or use policy to promote the “institutions and traditions that provide our moral exoskeletons (such as the family).” Actually, not even my friends, smart as they are, use the term "exoskeleton" in polite conversation. But that's one thing Jonathan Haidt, a liberal professor of psychology at UVA, is quoted as saying conservatives get right.
All of which led me to wonder what it is about fundamentalist Christianity that those of us on the so-called left side of the protestant-evangelical-catholic-orthodox spectrum of Christianity would praise. Here are my suggestions:
Though I am sometimes reluctant to admit it, there really is something “timeless” in the Tyndale/King James synthesis. For generations, it provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who acquired it only by listening. From the stricken beach of Dunkirk in 1940, faced with a devil’s choice between annihilation and surrender, a British officer sent a cable back home. It contained the three words “but if not … ” All of those who received it were at once aware of what it signified. In the Book of Daniel, the Babylonian tyrant Nebuchadnezzar tells the three Jewish heretics Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that if they refuse to bow to his sacred idol they will be flung into a “burning fiery furnace.” They made him an answer: “If it be so, our god whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thy hand, o King. / But if not, be it known unto thee, o king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”
If you were in the nation's capital last weekend, then you couldn't help but notice all the Leather Daddies, Bears, Cubs, Otters, Pups and sundry other gay creatures roaming the streets. What brought them here was Mid-Atlantic Leather (MAL) Weekend, an annual gay leather/fetish event that draws thousands of attendees from around the world. It goes without saying that most of them are involved in some aspect or another of BDSM, a subject that makes most Christians (and most "mainstream" LGBT folks, for that matter) uncomfortable.
As explained by Wikipedia:
BDSM is an erotic preference and a form of sexual expression involving the consensual use of restraint, intense sensory stimulation, and fantasy power role play. The compound initialism BDSM is derived from the terms bondage and discipline (B&D or B/D), dominance and submission (D&S or D/s), and sadism and masochism (S&M or S/M). BDSM includes a wide spectrum of activities, forms of interpersonal relationships, and distinct subcultures. Activities and relationships within a BDSM context are characterized by the participants usually taking on complementary, but unequal roles, thus the idea of consent of both the partners becomes essential.
One of the curious things about BDSM is that, even though it is associated with a sub-culture and continues to be derided as deviant, almost all of us enjoy some aspect of domination and submission when it comes to sex. Maybe we don’t want to tie up our sexual partners or be tied up by them. But as one of my good friends from law school – a woman who was a feminist leader on campus – once confided, she rather liked it when her boyfriend “threw her around a bit” in bed. The way she said it made me suspect she saw this as something of a contradiction of her feminist ideals, if not her Catholic faith. But the sly, almost playful smile on her told me this contradiction didn’t bother her enough for her to suppress her sexual preference.
Gay men, of course, have our own various and sundry preferences. And even the majority of us who are not involved in BDSM proper continue to define ourselves in terms of which role we play in bed – top or bottom – and the power dynamic this word choice implies cannot be denied. There’s a reason gay men insult one another with derogatory terms like “nelly bottom” and “bitchy queen,” while there is no corresponding term of abuse for those who take the top or “male” role in gay sex. And that, perhaps, is one salutary effect of events like MAL: If nothing else, they give those who take the bottom or submissive role in sex a chance to celebrate this fact about themselves openly and without shame.
But the more interesting question, I think, is what we are to make of BDSM at all. In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis - who privately confessed his own sadistic sexual fantasies (a fact Evangelicals rarely acknowledge) - discusses what he delicatedly calls that “certain attitude which Venus, in her intensity, evokes from most (I believe, not all) pairs of lovers”:
This act can invite the man to an extreme, though short-lived, masterfulness, to the dominance of a conqueror or a captor, and the woman to a correspondingly extreme subjection and surrender. Hence the roughness, even fierceness, of some erotic play; the ‘lover’s pinch which hurts and is desired.'
It's pretty clear to me that what Lewis is describing here is the same impulse behind BDSM. Lewis goes on to argue that this domination-and-submission element of sex can be "harmless and wholesome," but only if both lovers understand that it is only a form of "play." As he puts it:
We must recognize that we have here to do with what I called the ‘Pagan Sacrament’ in sex. In Friendship, as we noticed, each participant stands for precisely himself – the contingent individual he is. But in the act of love we are not merely ourselves. We are also representatives. It is here no impoverishment but an enrichment to be aware that forces older and less personal than we work through us. In us all the masculinity and femininity of the world, all that is assailant and responsive, are momentarily focused. The man does play the Sky-Father and the woman the Earth-Mother; he does play Form, and she Matter. But we must give full value to the word play. Of course neither “plays a part” in the sense of being a hypocrite. But each plays a part or role in – well, in something which is comparable to a mystery-play or ritual (at one extreme) and to a masque or even a charade (at the other).
A woman who accepted as literally her own this extreme self-surrender would be an idolatress offering to a man what belongs only to God. And a man would have to be the coxcomb [i.e., fool] of all coxcombs, and indeed a blasphemer, if he arrogated to himself, as the mere person he is, the sort of sovereignty to which Venus for a moment exalts him. But what cannot be lawfully yielded or claimed can be lawfully enacted. Outside this ritual or drama he and she are two immortal souls, two freeborn adults, two citizens…. But within the rite or drama they become a god and goddess between whom there is no equality – whose relationships are asymmetrical.
What do you think?
This excerpt from Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll sheds some light on this complicated question:
In Wilkinson County, Mississippi, an old slave gravedigger, accompanied by a young helper, asked a white stranger a question:
“Massa, may I ask you something?”
“Ask what you please.”
“Can you ‘splain how it happened in the fust place, that the white folks got the start of the black folks, so as to make dem slaves and do all de work?’
The younger helper, fearing the white man’s wrath, broke in: ‘Uncle Pete, it’s no use talking. It’s fo’ordained. The Bible tells you that the Lord fo-ordained the Nigger to work, and the white man to boss.”
“Dat’s so. Dat’s so. But if dat’s so, then God’s no fair man!”
Later on in the book, Genovese explores how the slaves came to view Christ in a way that ultimately subverted slavery, something we would do well to remember this MLK Day:
The slaves had a special and central place for Jesus, but a place that whites had difficulty recognizing. Julius Lester has given us, with a few short strokes, a convincing reading. The slaves, he writes, “fashioned their own kind of Christianity, which they turned to for strength in the constant times of need. In the Old Testament story of the enslavement of the Hebrews by the Egyptians, they found their own story. In the figure of Jesus Christ, they found someone who had suffered as they suffered, someone who understood, someone who offered them rest from their suffering.”
Moses had become Jesus, and Jesus, Moses; and with their union the two aspects of the slaves’ religious question – collective deliverance as a people and redemption from their personal sufferings – had become one through the mediation of that imaginative power so beautifully manifested in the spirituals.
