Missouri Man, Angry About Bigotry, Apologizes

Controversy erupts in Springfield, MO:

A businessman has apologized for briefly posting a sign in the window of his Springfield gelato shop informing those in town for a convention of religious skeptics that they were not welcome at his Christian business.

Andy Drennen apologized in a letter posted Monday on the website Reddit. He said he posted the hastily drawn sign in his shop, Gelato Mio, on Saturday after seeing someone attending Skepticon delivering a mock sermon and cursing the Bible.

It is telling, as always, to see the way that the irreligious react to the offenses of the religious and ignore their own. After all, all the Pastafarians did was hold an entire convention themed around publicly degrading religion generally and Christianity specifically. That certainly doesn't warrant so heinous a response by a Christian as considering, for ten whole minutes, denying these faithful few their gelato. It is nice that Christians, unlike skeptics apparently, do not feel the need to swarm and combat with overwhelming force any perceived offense. I'd like to believe it is some healthy mixture of turning the other cheek and shaking the dust off our feet.

Episcopal Church Wins, Still Manages to Lose

Following the 2003 appointment of Gene Robinson by the Episcopal Church as its first openly gay bishop, there was understandable distress among congregants causing some to "flee" the jurisdiction of the American Episcopals for more conservative climes. To the congregation occupying the oldest Episcopal church building in Georgia, the church says "good riddance" and offers this legally upheld eviction notice as a parting gift:

An historic church building in the city of Savannah belongs to the national Episcopal Church, not a breakaway congregation that left the national church following the naming of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire, the Georgia Supreme Court said on Monday.

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution "allows (the local congregation) and its members to leave the Episcopal Church and worship as they please, like all other Americans. But it does not allow them to take with them property that has for generations been accumulated and held by a constituent church of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America," the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in a 6-1 vote.

In other news, the national leadership of the Epsicopal Church has also officially ordered all the faithful to cut 1 Corinthians 6 out of their Bibles.

Thanksgiving Family Forum

I track American politics in part because I think they are the most entertaining form of reality television and in part because, as someone who happens to live on American soil, they have a certain pragmatic relevance for me. Naturally, I have been watching the bevy of Republican debates and can honestly say that the Thanksgiving Family Forum, held in a church by a Christian organization, was by far the most painful to watch. For me, at least, the worst part isn't even difficult to isolate. It wasn't Rick Perry talking about the values "this country was based upon in Judeo-Christian founding fathers" (you remember, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Rabbi Goldberg). It wasn't even the extremely unsettling attempt by Rick Santorum to convert his infant daughter's struggle with almost certainly terminal Edwards Syndrome into politcal currency. It was this theologically disasterous thought by Michelle Bachmann:

I have a biblical worldview. And I think, going back to the Declaration of Independence, the fact that it’s God who created us—if He created us, He created government.

Let's forget for a moment that she claims a "biblical worldview" and immediately directs us to the Declaration of Independence and not the Bible and focus on what it means for theology to suggest that if God created us then He necessarily created human government. There are certainly theological systems (dreary, Calvinistic systems) which insist that it is appropriate to speak of God as the creator of everything we create because He created us. I wonder if Bachmann would be ready to endorse the implications of that theology (as so many of its more honest adherents are), that this makes God not only the author of civil government but also the author of various other sins like abortion, rape, nuclear war, and any other human malevolance imaginable. That logic paints a very scary picture, which is why so many of the rest of us are willing to accept a moral disconnect between what God has created and what we create as His creations.

The one bright moment in the whole affair is when Ron Paul contrasted the decentralized post-Exodus Israel and the centralized Israel of the kings, with the shift to the latter being (consistent with explicit biblical statements) perhaps the most destructive turn in Israelite history. His point, of course, was that human governments are nasty things that should be limited or avoided altogether when possible. The whole hermeneutical exercise had profound Lipscomb overtones--as Lipscomb would make a similar point in his works with the story of Samuel and Saul about the folly of civil government--though the two men arrive at very different ultimate conclusions. Delightfully, though Paul also endorsed the Augustinian view of just war (citing the saint by name), he admitted that just war theory is in tension with the experience of the early church and Christ's own emphasis on peace. For his own betterment (though perhaps not that of the American political landscape), I cannot help but hope that Paul will take that final ideological step and realize that government is so nasty that, as a Christian, he ought to just wash his hands of the whole endeavor.

Of course, then what would everyone be left with? Newt Gingrich and his profound answer to the worldwide Occupy Movement: "Go get a job, right after you take a bath."

The Skeleton of Christian Literacy

In his work Religious Literacy, Stephen Prothero offers what he calls a "Dictionary of Religious Literacy." It represents his attempt to ennumerate the bare minimum of what an American needs to know to qualify as religiously literate. What it amounts to in practice is a relatively short list of terms from the world religions and their definitions which are most relevant to civic life in the United States. It was interesting for me to peruse through that list, in part to learn new things that I supposedly should have known all along but also to evaluate just how well I stacked up against his minimum of religious knowledge.

My interest in religious literacy is somewhat different, however, from Prothero's. His concern is primarily with religious knowledge as a civic duty, as a way for all people to adequately navigate the social and political landscape of Christian-dominant but highly pluralistic America. For my part, I lament religious ignorance because it leads to religious excesses and abberations. To be a Christian and to not understand basic truths about the Bible or about the main contours of Christian theology is to invite disaster into your own thinking. The proliferation of ever more ridiculous sects and abominable ethical systems in American Christianity is, I believe, a direct result of the ongoing biblical and theological illiteracy of most American adherents.

With that in mind, I would like to offer what I believe are the core Christian facts which every American Christian ought to know by adulthood in order to successfully navigate the social, political, and theological landscape of America's Christian pluralism. I will divide my list into two fifty point sections: a primary literacy and a secondary literacy. They correspond roughly to what I believe a person should learn in from their earliest childhood and what should be built onto this base knowledge later, perhaps in high school. Let it be noted that some of these concepts may appear at first glance to be quite deep and complex. For example, if I list "Synoptic Gospels" as an area of knowledge of a literate Christian, I do not expect every Christian to be able to navigate the intricacies of two source theory versus four source theory versus the Farrer hypothesis or even to know what those are. It is enough to simply know what the term "Synoptic Gospels" means, i.e. which are the Synoptic Gospels and why, so as to know it if it should appear in an adult conversation about inspiration, canon, or higher criticism. With that disclaimer out of the way, here is my own skeletal outline of a literate Christian:

Primary Literacy

1) Name the books of the Bible in order.
2) Distinguish the Torah.
3) Distinguish the Gospels.
4) Distinguish the Epistles.
5) Identify Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel,
6) Noah,
7) Abraham,
8) Isaac,
9) Jacob,
10) Joseph,
11) Moses,
12) Joshua,
13) David,
14) Solomon,
15) Esther,
16) Daniel,
17) Jonah,
18) Mary and Joseph,
19) John the Baptist,
20) Jesus,
21) Peter, James, and John,
22) Judas Iscariot,
23) Pontius Pilate,
24) Stephen,
25) and Saul/Paul of Tarsus.
26) List the 7 days of creation,
27) the 10 plagues,
28) and the 10 Commandments.
29) Be familiar with the story of the Tower of Babel,
30) Sacrifice of Isaac,
31) Parting of the sea,
32) Giving of the Law and the golden calf,
33) Fall of Jericho,
34) Slaying of Goliath,
35) Fall of Jerusalem and exile,
36) Nativity,
37) Baptism of Jesus,
38) Temptation in the wilderness,
39) Feeding of the 5,000,
40) Clearing of the temple,
41) Passion, resurrection, and ascension,
42) Conversion of Saul,
43) and the conversion of Cornelius.
44) Be able to recite the Shema,
45) Psalm 23,
46) Lord's Prayer,
47) Golden Rule,
48) John 3:16,
49) Great Comission,
50) and either the Apostle's or the Nicene Creed.

Secondary Literacy

1) Name the Deuterocanonical books.
2) Distinguish the Prophets (Major and Minor).
3) Distinguish the Pauline and Johanine Epistles.
4) Distinguish Synoptic Gospels.
5) Identify Seth,
6) Ham, Shem, and Japheth,
7) Ishmael,
8) Aaron,
9) Gideon,
10) Samson,
11) Ruth,
12) Samuel,
13) Saul, King of Israel,
14) Jeroboam and Rehoboam,
15) Hezekiah,
16) Josiah,
17) Elijah and Elisha,
18) Isaiah,
19) Jeremiah,
20) Ezra and Nehemiah,
21) Job,
22) Lazarus,
23) Mary Magdalene,
24) Matthais,
25) Phillip,
26) and Barnabas, Silas, and Timothy.
27) Be able to list the Twelve Apostles.
28) Be familiar with some of the distinctive beliefs of Catholics,
29) Lutherans,
30) Presbyterians,
31) Baptists,
32) Methodists,
33) Pentecostals,
34) and Mormons.
35) Be able to identify Augustine,
36) Thomas Aquinas,
37) Martin Luther,
38) and John Calvin.
39) Distinguish between Pharisees and Sadducees.
40) Be familiar with Matthew 5-7,
41) John 1,
42) Acts 2,
43) Romans 1-6,
44) 1 Corinthians 15,
45) Ephesians 2:8-9 and James 2:14-26,
46) and the broad strokes of Revelation.
47) Be able to roughly explain a Christian understanding of Trinity,
48) Divinity of Jesus,
49) and sin and salvation.
50) Define the term "evangelical."

A Little Note About a Big Issue

The following represents the fortuitous collision of a personal pet peeve of mine with an ongoing discussion among a very limited circle of friends and family. For most, the information within will seem a little like reinventing the wheel or, perhaps more damningly, like toppling a strawman. For those of this mindset, let me just encourage you to ignore this or, at the very least, trust that it is necessary (if not to vindicate a theory that by no means needs my meager defense than at least as a means of personal, public catharsis).

It is tragic to me that certain outmoded theories of personality still exist, particularly those binary understandings of personality that want to lump large segments of society into one category or another. I have in mind particularly left-brain/right-brain (from here on, "LB-RB") theories of personality, though my calumny can be just as easily applied to other once serious psychological theories that now only persist in the bloated lexicon of pop psychology (e.g. type-A/type-B personalities). Rather than mounting an exhaustive critique of LB-RB theory, I think a more constructive approach might be to offer a positive alternative. Thus, I give you the Five Factor Model, a theory which attempt to measure personality along five personality continua: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Here are the reasons why I think the Five Factor Model is superior to other models, especially the LB-RB theory:

The Five Factor Model is grounded in serious, ongoing scientific research. Notably, so many of the theories which dominate in pop psychology are no longer current in the psychological or neuroscientific communities. LB-RB, for example, was a product of research in the 1960s on split brain patients, and its formulation was tied social theories about breaking away from "oppressive" traditional (linear, left-brain) ways of thinking. Similarly, type-A/type-B theory was part of medical research going on the in 1950s which has also since been exceeded. The Five Factor Model, in contrast, is the subject of ongoing psychological and scientific debate to determine its strengths and its limits. As one example, consider ongoing attempts to translate the theory into languages and culture other than English to test its universal applicability.

The Five Factor Model allows for a balance between heredity and environment. There is no denying that there is some genetics involved in personality. One need only look at children who grew up estranged from a parent but who nevertheless express many of his or her characteristic personality traits (i.e. sons of divorced parents who grow up just like their father's anyway). The LB-RB model, however, doesn't allow for much of anything beyond heredity to play a role. By claiming to tie personality directly to the anatomical make up of one's brain, it makes personality something static and intrinsic. In reality, our personalities are shaped by our experiences as much as our genetics; who you are is more than your DNA. Testing of the five traits that make up the Five Factor Model shows that each trait is influenced roughly equally by heredity and environment, reflecting a more balanced approach to the nature-nurture debate than you receive in LB-RB theories.

The Five Factor Model is first and foremost descriptive, not predictive. There is a temptation when we classify anything, but particularly something as abstract as personality, to take that classification and apply it like a hard-and-fast rule. This temptation is particularly pronounced with LB-RB theory because it so neatly claims to predict modes of thinking and therefore types of behavior. "Person X will never be an artist. He's too left-brained." That sort of thinking limits not only the ability of people to explore and excel and grow, but it limits the thinkers ability to interact authentically with people who are so surgically sorted into artificial categories. Proponents debate the degree to which the Five Factor Model can be used to predict behavior, but all agree that the five traits it offers are a useful tool in describing and understanding behaviors. It is more open to the question "why do you think you did that" than the prediction that, inescapably, "you will do that."

Finally, the Five Factor Model gives a more complex and thus more believable picture of human personalty. The biggest flaw in most forms of binary thinking is precisely that they are binary. As with Hegel's view of history and Zoroaster's view of deity, collapsing a complex reality into two broad categories is almost always erroneous. LB-RB theory tries to simplify reality and convince us that there are essentially only two kind of people. It is a tantalizing prospect, but our experience teaches us that there are millions of kinds of people. The Five Factor Model harmonizes better with our experience of people because it makes personality a combination of any number of five variables, each of which a given person can possess to varying degrees on a continuum. For example, why do we have two supremely organized women, both friendly toward people, thirsty for new ideas, and generally unfazed by problems in the world, one of whom becomes a big-time defense attorney and the other a mild-mannered suburban librarian. The LB-RB model has no answer for why two people who manifest the same kind of thinking would have radically different life paths. The Five Factor Model recognizes that people can be almost identical in numerous personality categories (four of the five in this example) and still have very different personalities and different paths in life based on small differences in certain personality features (in this case, degree of extraversion). That is only one rough analogy, but the point is simple: personality is a complex reality that requires a complex understanding that binary modes of thinking simply cannot satisfy.

Obviously, any attempt to quantify personality and to put people into categories (even five factored categories) is going to suffer from the same pitfall of oversimplifying and artificially labeling realities which we fundamentally do not understanding. Just because no theory is perfect, however, does not mean that all theories were created equal. It is time for serious-minded people to cast aside antiquated modes of thinking and convenient tools for ordering their world and advance into the messier but more useful methods presently endorsed by the psychological and scientific communities. Anyone interested in the Five Factor Model might consider a wonderful little book, very accessible in its writing style, written by a professor at the University of Newcastle and published by Oxford University: Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are?

Pope Kisses Man and Sues

When I read the other day about the new Benetton ads featuring manipulated images of world leaders kissing, I cannot say I was shocked. After all, this is the same company that brought us bloody babies and people dying of AIDS. Shock imagery is their standard operating procedure. So the picture of Obama kissing Chinese President Hu Jintao, which was the big controversy when I first saw the articles, was nauseating but not surprising. (Amusingly, the White House is pretending to be upset because of a "policy disapproving of the use of the president's name and likeness for commercial purposes" and not for the more obvious reason, that it looks like the Chinese president is totally dominating him in that picture.)

I apparently missed that, in addition to a host of political world leaders, the clothing company had included a pair of religious figures in its repertoire: the pope and Egyptian imam Sheik Ahmed el-Tayeb. The Vatican sprung into legal action almost immediately, claiming (rightly) that the advertisement was "offensive not only to the dignity of the pope and the Catholic Church, but also to the sensibilities of believers."

It didn't take long for Benetton to remove the ad from its website, but what's the point? The image (which I won't share here) has already gone viral. In fact, searching for the above image of Obama, you are likely to get more results featuring the pope's picture than the president's. The company's purpose was, as always, to generate controversy; it has done so with tremendous success. In an era so jaded that very little shocks us anymore, you have to credit Benetton for having the genius to imagine giant pictures of the pope kissing a Muslim man and the chutzpah to make that imagination a reality.

A Reading Recommendation for the Illiterate

Stephen Prothero's Religious Literacy undertakes in a brief span to quantify, explain, and propose corrections for the rampant religious illiteracy of Americans. In simpler terms, Prothero attempts to unravel the paradox that, while Europeans tend to be religiously knowledgeable and irreligious, Americans are pious and religiously ignorant. Religious Literacy is too short a work, at just under 150 pages of actual exposition, to argue any of its points substantially, but this is just as well because Prothero is not covering any radically new ground. Instead, the work functions as an interesting resource both as an introduction for those who, as part of their general religious ignorance, are unaware that there is a problem and as a synthesis for those who are already plagued by worry about our collective idiocy. The book is carefully organized along three lines of thought:

What is the problem?

This is by far the most gripping section of Prothero's work, not because he uncovers a problem which we are all startled to find exists but because he quantifies it in ways that highlight its embarrassing severity. It is here that Prothero shocks the reader with a rapid succession of ever more embarrassing facts: one in five evangelicals believes in reincarnation, most American adults cannot name even one of the four Gospels, most American adults cannot name the first book of the Bible, a significant percentage of high school seniors believe Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife, only one in three Americans can correctly identify Jesus as the person who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and one in ten Americans believes that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. These facts, gathered from scientific surveys, are interspersed with more anecdotal tributes to American religious ignorance: a woman who believes God created Eve out of an apple, another who thinks Matthew was swallowed by a whale, most Americans cannot name more than five of the Ten Commandments, and more. Worst of all, there are not statistically significant discrepancies between religious groups. Evangelical Protestants do marginally better in surveys than Catholics, for example, but they are nearer to one another than they are to getting right. In some cases, evangelicals do even worse, as with the 60% of evangelicals who believe that Jesus was born in Jerusalem compared to only 51% of Jews. The real force of all these statistics is to re-sensitize the reader to the claim that the religious ignorance in America is no trifling matter. It is easy to say that we should know more about the faith claimed by some 80% of Americans; it is something else to come face-to-face with the cold, hard statistical reality of our own shortcomings.

Why is there a problem?

Unless you suffer under the delusion, as is the case with much of the institutional religious right, that the ongoing march of aggressive secularity is the cause of religious illiteracy, Prothero's answer to the question of "why" will not be shocking. The rise of widespread religious ignorance, especially Christian ignorance, is tied by Prothero to the American process of religious democratization, à la Nathan Hatch. It was the anti-institutional, anti-clerical, anti-intellectual impulse of distinctively American revivalism--particularly in the Second Great Awakening, but also, according to Prothero, in the post-war revival of the fifties--that began the deemphasizing of religious knowledge. The unlikely and unwitting alliance of liberal Protestantism and evangelicalism resulted in a subordination of religious knowledge to religious feeling and of orthodoxy to orthopraxy. The onus of responsibility and thus of guilt falls not the deliberate atheist but on the amnesiac Christian who has forgotten his or her duty for pedagogy.

Notably, in a justifiable effort to stop Christians from shirking their guilt in the rise of a the religiously ignorant, I believe Prothero goes to far in exonerating secularity as such. I agree, certainly, that the religious right's attempt to blame active and self-aware secular pressure is misguided, perhaps even destructive as it encourages Christians to continue to ignore their need to be the front line in resurrecting religious knowledge. It is worth remembering, however, that democratization--with its anti-institutionalism and anti-clericalism--is itself a secular impulse of Western culture. It is a more pernicious form of secularity in so far as it has been quietly accepted as if a religious truth and erodes religious knowledge, among other things, from within. In Prothero's defense, however, his work is perhaps not the place to make such a subtle argument.

How do we fix the problem?

Here, Prothero's proposal is as bold as it is unlikely. He insists that, as a civic duty, every high school student should take a mandatory course in the Bible and world religions. He reasons, quoting Warren Nord: "How can anyone believe that a collegebound student should take twelve years of mathematics and no religion rather than eleven years of mathematics and one year of religion Why require the study of trigonometry or calculus, which the great majority of students will never use or need, and ignore religion, a matter of profound and universal significance?" While some might suggest that having a course dedicated to the Bible is somehow giving preferential treatment to one religion, Prothero insists that having such a specialized course is a logical, educational, and civic necessity. Without commenting on the validity of any religion or religion at all, he correctly notes that the Bible--not the Vedas or the Tao Te Ching or even the Quran--has been the most influential work in the history of Western culture. It is the Bible and the Christian religion which dominate the American political and social landscape like nothing else. Those ignorant of Christianity in America are intellectually anemic in ways they would not be if similarly ignorant of Sikhism. In Prothero's own words:

Some have argued against Bible courses in the public schools on the grounds that they somehow “establish” Judeo-Christianity. For these courses to be fair, this argument goes, teachers need to give equal time to all the world’s scriptures, treating the Bible as one sacred text among many. This is absurd and impractical. Of course, students can learn much from reading the Quran and the Tao Te Ching. But the Bible, which the Supreme Court has described as “the world’s all-time best seller,” is of sufficient importance in Western civilization to merit its own course. Treating it no differently from, say, the Zend Avesta of the Zoroastrians or Scientology’s Dianetics makes no educational sense. (And what teacher has the hours—or the training—to give “equal time” to all the world’s scriptures?)

The most intriguing part of his proposal is his examination of its legality. Showing a surprisingly broad knowledge of legal decisions regarding religious curricula, Prothero helps the reader to navigate constitutional issues surrounding his proposal (which, I should note, is by no mean peculiar to him but is being taken up in various forms on all sides of the political spectrum). His conclusion, which one struggles to disagree with, "Supreme Court justices are all but begging public schools to teach about religion."

In short, Religious Literacy is an intriguing little work which marches us through the morass of our own benightedness and, perhaps overly optimistically, proposes a way out for Americans. While I struggle to imagine a world in which Prothero's national proposals become a reality, his work has forced me to think about what might be done on a more local level, particularly by parents and churches. Many of the hallmarks of literacy according to Prothero I did not learn until I began formal education in religion. Looking back, I realize that they are facts that all Christians should know, not the least of which those of us who come from religious traditions which purport to give special place to the Scriptures.