Our most interesting beginnings often only appear after a time of wandering; usually we end where we ought to begin. So at the end of a rather strange essay arguing for the death-of-patriarchy as the death-of-adulthood AO Scott offers a wonderful articulation of our present cultural moment:

A crisis of authority is not for the faint of heart. It can be scary and weird and ambiguous. But it can also be a lot of fun, too. The best and most authentic cultural products of our time manage to be all of those things. They imagine a world where no one is in charge and no one necessarily knows what’s going on, where identities are in perpetual flux. Mothers and fathers act like teenagers; little children are wise beyond their years. Girls light out for the territory and boys cloister themselves in secret gardens. We have more stories, pictures and arguments than we know what to do with, and each one of them presses on our attentions with a claim of uniqueness, a demand to be recognized as special. The world is our playground, without a dad or mom in sight. I’m all for it. Now get off my lawn.

Or, as Nietzsche had it a few years earlier:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

The argument Scott presents prior to this conclusion-as-more-interesting-beginning is, in many ways, an attempt to reconcile himself to the rather simple realization that culture, whatever else it may be, is an historical thing, that it is a heterogeneous becoming constantly in motion and as movement sometimes passes us by. And in being passed by, as Nietzsche also pointed out, we may find ourselves overcome in resentment; or as Scott might recognize in himself, if allowed a moment of self-reflexive retraction, we become invested by our own irrelevance (a subjection he quite rightly recognizes in others). In this irrelevance we are left to the whims of our own personal preferences masquerading as critical insight; which is to say, with Scott, that the “elevation of every individual’s inarguable likes and dislikes over formal critical discourse, the unassailable ascendancy of the fan has made children of us all.” At which point Scott becomes irretrievably implicated in his own argument; which isn’t to say the argument is wrong, just that it is a little confusing.

To consider our cultural moment as saturated with the death of God, especially in its Nietzschean variations, proposes that what is lost or has been lost and continues to be lost – or more properly what has been struggled against and partially overcome moving into our cultural past – is not patriarchy or adulthood per se but the hierarchy of being through which our world has been organized. That hierarchy functions according to an imago dei of imagined likeness and proximity to a creating-seeing god. This is a god who created through the word but judged through vision, a world spoken into being but seen to be good. This god whom Nietzsche declared murdered, saw all – and in seeing judged all, in life and in death – but could never be seen, or rather, could only be seen at the price of death. For Nietzsche there are always too many murders to keep track of. In its historical development, European-American patriarchy was organized around this imagination: drawn to a certain height by the transcendence of their god, white men projected themselves as mundane judges of the world, unseen seers and organizers of the world of their vision. We see this in practice when Scott admits to “feeling a twinge of disapproval when I see one of my peers clutching a volume of ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘The Hunger Games.’ I’m not necessarily proud of this reaction.” (Although, his loss of pride is not much of a deterrent.) “As cultural critique, it belongs in the same category as the sneer I can’t quite suppress when I see guys my age (pushing 50) riding skateboards or wearing shorts and flip-flops…” For Scott, the world presents itself before his gaze to be judged and in being judged put in its place. The patriarchy and adulthood-conflated-parenthood that concern Scott seem, in this sense, to be different if at times overlapping practices of this spectacular hierarchical judging imagination.

In this sense, the “best and most authentic cultural products of our time” are not, as Scott argues, simply those that manage to be invested by the scary, weird, ambiguous and fun condition of our day. This could be said of any day of any time, because abundant living is rather scary, weird, ambiguous, fun, and quite a bit more. The most interesting cultural – and we should add political here too – products of our time are those that are attempting to create worlds outside hierarchies of vision, worlds organized around being together on an immanent plane feeling ourselves in our worlds and in our relations other than as being on display to be judged.

Scott almost sees this in his recognition of a feminism that exists outside the world of post-patriarchal men, a world of irrelevant losers who can imagine nothing other than their being the center of their own narratives. But rather than being merely a passive concept for existing in wake of and absence of patriarchy, the cultural feminism that Scott sees (as that circumscribed by Beyoncé and pop-music and network and cable television) is also an active practice of imagining the world otherwise, a world organized around practices other than transcendent seeing and judging. These are worlds organized around finite relationships of friendship, work, sex, cultural production and participation, and maybe, even sometimes, love. This is of course a difficult world to see in; in a literal way, when meeting face-to-face, without the domineering privilege of transcendent height, I only ever see at best half of you. For our being in the world, our relations with and in the world, something, and usually many things are necessary beyond a mere seeing; a relational experience is necessary that cannot be reduced to a simple vision. This is in part why the casual nudity of Hannah Horvath/Lena Dunham is often so troubling for cultural critiques to understand: her body is not being presented for a gaze, anyone’s gaze, It is, as we learn almost immediately, a way of relating and of being together. This is also why it is sounds so strange for Scott to even worry about the sexualization of female pop-stars: most bodies simply aren’t for your viewing pleasure. It takes a special kind of hubris to think otherwise.

But this, of course, is not easy. As Nietzsche warned and worried, the announcement of God’s death may be a bit premature: we have not gotten rid of God because we have not gotten rid of His grammar. If patriarchy and parental adulthood are lost we still live in their shadow and their logic. Alongside Hannah/Lena’s casual nudity is a pervasive self-criticism of her appearance. But what makes these shows interesting, what makes feminism – and all those other movements that Scott ignores – interesting, is not that they are complicated but that they are trying to create a new world and begin new conversations that may make no sense in the grammars that we have been given. This, it would seem, is the proper work of adulthood in the wake of God’s death, a learning to live without.

By Alan R. Van Wyk | The post What We Lose When We Lose God appeared first on The Public Sphere.

The revolution”s generational consumption was completed in different stages. First, starting in June 1980, Marxists and political organizations with Marxist tendencies were massacred. Then the secular nationalists and moderate religious were banned and pressured. In 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini”s designated heir, Ayatollah Montazeri, was removed from power, and a few months after Khomeini”s death in the same year, the newly-elected government of Rafsanjani eradicated from parliament (the Majlis) those who were considered “leftist” inside the political establishment. During the 1990s there was a fight for power within the right wing of the Islamic Republic. For the first time elements of the traditional religious groups who had no revolutionary background found their way into the government and held key positions. The revolutionary left came to power again in June 1997, and the years between that date and today were the years of political struggle between the last of the revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s and the new generation of rulers trained not in the battle with the Shah”s regime but in the military camps of the Iranian Revolutionary Army. With the defeat of the Reformists in this recent “election,” and their arrest for supposedly inciting riots, the revolution is complete; all her children have been consumed.

In my Iranian childhood in the 1970s, the most memorable mouse and cat characters were not Tom and Jerry -whom I used to watch on the “American” channel- but the characters from a short story for children written by the fourteenth-century Iranian satirist poet, Ubaid Zakani. My sixteen-page book of “The Mice and the Cat” was a reproduction of an old lithograph print, which gave it a unique look among my other books.

Zakani, as is customary among the classics, began his story reminding the young readers that by the end of the book they should pay attention to the moral of the story: “Be smart and mind the story of the cat and the mice. You”ll be astonished about what the story might teach you. Even you, who are wise and prudent, listen to the tale and let it be like a jewel earring on your ear.” The playful language of the story and its funny unusual rhyme scheme made it easy to memorize and a joy to read. But the ending was not quite what one might expect from a children”s tale.

The story, as the name suggests, narrated the tale of mice, powerlessly oppressed before the paws of a brutal cat. At some point in the story, the cat”s conscience appears troubled by what he does to the mice. Taking refuge in a mosque, he prays, cries, regrets his viciousness towards the mice, and becomes a “man of god.” A mouse hidden under the “manbar” (pulpit) sees the repentant cat and takes the news to the other mice. The news about the cat”s spiritual change spreads among the mice. The joyful mice decide to show their appreciation by offering food to the cat. So they send their leaders to the cat to deliver him a message of friendship with trays of food. The message delivery, of course, gets interrupted; the new cat of god eats both the food and the messengers. This makes the mice extremely angry, unites them, and motivates them to change the course of their miserable life once and for all. They decide to fight back against the cat. The mice organize a revolution, defeat the army of the cats, and capture the cat that ate their leaders.

Up to this point, we have a regular Hollywood-style movie plot where the little guy rises up against an oppressive overlord and seemingly wins; the good and the meek defeat the evil and the cruel. The last few lines, though, undo such a happy ending. The mice take the cat to the stake to hang him. In the last minutes the cat frees himself from the ropes, kills the mice around him, and forces the army of mice to scatter. Brutality wins. Life goes back to “normal.” The “oppressed” remain powerless, and the winner is the one who uses hypocrisy, brutality, and ruthlessness.

I remember being nine years old and reading that story in 1977. Iran was pregnant with a revolution. The Shah was widely despised by the educated, secular intellectuals as well as many traditional Shiite clergy and their followers. For many members of the newly formed middle-class families of the 1960s and the 1970s, Islam was the alternative to reform Iran, a country supposedly corrupted by Western ideas. In those decades, many Iranian religious intellectuals tried to create a socialist and Marxist inspired Islam, a “modern” Islamic ideology. To many of them Shiite Islam was considered an authentic “Iranian” alternative to Western radical ideas. They believed a reinvigorated political Islam could be the revolutionary solution that makes Iranians independent of Marxism or any other Western ideology. Many of these intellectuals were more invested in the power of the idea than in their own faith in Islam. They believed political Islam would mobilize the masses against the Shah”s dictatorship. Others, perhaps more faithfully, viewed Islam as the true solution to any problem, even though they never could define how the religion would digest modern values. For the secular nationalists, liberals, and Marxists, it did not matter how Shiite Islam would become a modern political ideology.

The year 1978 began with the first serious anti-Shah demonstrations. Massive protests continued for the rest of the year. By January of 1979, the Shah left the country. In February of that same year the secular and Islamic revolutionaries, united under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, overthrew the Shah”s regime. The Shah”s army could not fight back.

On February 11, 1979, at the age eleven, I witnessed the collapse of one of the most brutal dictatorships of the century. I was elated that the mice had defeated the cat, that the oppressed could finally live free. The moral of Zakani’s story seemed to be wrong.

Things didn”t go the way the mice had intended. The next thirty years witnessed a Zakani-style victory of the cat. The king was gone but the kingdom reincarnated in the Islamic dictatorship called “Velayate Faqih.” In 1979 the first constitution of the newly-formed “Islamic” republic institutionalized a new position above the government and the president to overlook the acts of the republic and “guide” them according to Islamic Sharia: “Velayate Faqih,” meaning the Jurist Ruler, or as it is translated into English, the Supreme Leader. The story of post-revolutionary Iran became the struggle of a nation with its self-invented monster.

Today”s fight in Iran between the reformists and the hardliners is the result of a thirty-year struggle within the nation”s mind, a battle between those who finally recognize the face of the brutal cat in their self-made system and those who do not. No one knows if the story must ultimately end as Zakani would predict, the cat”s brutality triumphing, leaving a status quo of oppression on the mice. I still want to believe, as I did on February 11, 1979, that Zakani does not always have to be right.

By Mohammad Razi | The post On Iranian Cats, Mice, and Revolutions appeared first on The Public Sphere.

A group of well-meaning Christian students asked their mostly non-religious friends: “What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word ‘Christian’?” The answer: “Fear and hatred.” The non-religious friends did not hate Christians, but many of them did assume that Christians demand a litmus test of political, moral, and social beliefs and practices to reveal who deserves God’s love. These Christians’ non-religious friends view such a test as a gateway to bigotry. For their part, the Christians found that they, too, shared some of the same concerns about Christian litmus tests and bigotry. Their friends’ beliefs also raised another question for the Christian college students: what is the church doing that paints Christians as fearful and hateful? Perhaps, if they discovered the answer to this question, then they should apologize for 2,000 years of wrongs done by the church.

So, this group of mostly Protestant students decided to spend a year asking this question about millennia of church failures, a program that they jokingly called the “Mea Culpa campaign.” Their operation included a film series, focusing on “current church failures.” Fundamentalism topped their list of church failings, followed by anti-Semitism, racism and homophobia.

The campaign featured films for each topic, followed by an open-ended discussion, not contrived or controlled. The Christian college students were not interested in changing their friends’ minds. Rather, they wanted to give their non-religious friends a forum in which to express why they view Christians in such a negative light. And I, their college chaplain, watched as the conversation unfolded.

The students chose several films including Jesus Camp. One film they chose was Amen, which focused on a German SS officer and a Catholic priest, both of whom attempted to expose secret concentration camps to the Vatican. The Vatican, however, refused to speak out. The Protestant Christian students reacted with shock, horror, and grief to a part of church history of which most of them had never heard before that night. Also present at the film screening of Amen was a member of the newly formed Hillel chapter and members of the Catholic Newman club. These students nodded sadly at the Protestant students’ reaction, for they were aware of this particular church failure. “We had always blamed the Nazis,” said one Protestant, “but we did not understand the role the church played, or refused to play.”

The Jewish student talked a lot about how the Holocaust affected her family. At first, the others listened, and then the discussion went off on several tangents. The meeting ended on a positive note of shared horror and new friendships. At the end of the evening, I thought the viewing of Amen and the discussion was a success. But then, I realized that this film’s focus on genocide made it too easy to agree with the church’s failure. Clearly, the murder of six million people is wrong, whether the players were passive observers or active participants.

Overt evil is easy to discuss. It’s banal evil that is hard to acknowledge. And you can’t confess to a sin until that sin has been acknowledged. Churches spent the rest of the twentieth century acknowledging the sins of genocide. However, in her writings, Hannah Arendt, who witnessed the trials against the Nazis, wrote about how the Nazi war criminals resisted acknowledging that their boring, nine-to-five office jobs of record keeping or laboratory work on the use of chemicals in the gas chambers had actually been evil. In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt chronicles the wartime activities and trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, who claimed that he was only doing his bureaucratic job as a transportation logician. But his “job” led to the death of millions in the Shoah. Likewise, in a scene from the movie, Amen, the German SS officer explained the ratio between the amounts of chemicals needed and how the right combination of chemicals would quickly kill a certain number of people. In making this explanation, the SS officer was doing his job. However, the precision and efficiency required by his task masked the reality of how the ratio of chemicals he calculated meant the physical death of millions and the moral death of twentieth-century Christianity. While we know that gassing millions is wrong, the horrors of the genocide and the road to hell are often masked by dull organizational details like chemical ratios, and by the seemingly good intentions of clergy who look the other way to avoid the cargo trains and the stench from the gas chambers.

When I reflect on the sins of the church in events like the Shoah, sometimes I think we should apologize, not for being evil, but for being pathetically inert. The church leaders (not all, of course, but many) acted as if all were well while evil lurked beneath the surface of banal actions, like those of Nazi Christians. The church claims to represent love, but sometimes it does something in the name of love that seems evil (like baptizing slaves before they are sold). Even in the church’s exercise of evil, though, its greatest sin often occurs when it is simply being pathetic, being passive and complacent, unwilling to take action beyond a quiet moan.

The pathetic villains of the church are often not cast as passionate people with a cause. As in the case of Amen, Christian villains folded their hands, bowed gracefully, and looked in the other direction. Who would love the pathetic church member? Give us the passion-filled, albeit evil, witches of old! The recent success of the Broadway musical, Wicked, shows that society still loves the epic villains, like the wicked witch of the west, Drusilla, or Boris and Natasha. The obviously evil character is not pathetic—only passionate and misguided. The evil villain puts his or her entire heart and being into a cause, even if people get hurt in the process.

The pathetic villain, by contrast, follows orders, keeps the accounting straight, and does so with very little thought or passion. The evil villain accomplishes something intentionally. The pathetic villain accomplishes nothing on purpose. Perhaps by accident, the pathetic villain does some damage, like blowing the seeds off a dandelion, only to find, like in Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!, that a civilization could be destroyed by a simple puff. Except for his or her cause, the evil villain almost looks like a brave soul. The pathetic villain is ultimately a coward.

This cowardice of the church was explored in the third installment of the “Mea Culpa campaign,” an independent documentary, Traces of the Trade. It looked at how one family received its wealth and privilege from the nineteenth-century North-American slave trade. The lucrative slave trade strategy of rum traded for slaves who were used to harvest sugar to make molasses used to make rum to be traded for slaves was skilled and successful commerce in its era. The banal, but carefully executed trade of rum, slaves, and molasses, however, also led to the torture of millions of human beings, and undermined the long-term economic advancement of generations of African American families.

In the documentary, family members of the slave trader were horrified and heartbroken over the revelation of the sources of their family’s wealth. Many attempted to rectify the wrong of slavery through social action or consciousness-raising activities. While I admire them for this, I still have to get up every morning and sort through how much of this legacy of slavery still affects my family and me. I think of how many of my family members are still in poverty, even though they may have attended college. The dandelion seeds have been blow away, and generations of slavery cannot be undone, especially if present action is still undertaken with pathetic cowardice. At best, I have always viewed civil-rights advances, not so much as overcoming one of history’s greatest evils, but more as stripping away the illusion of white superiority from the emperor’s back and declaring him to be a naked, pathetic fool.

Although the family profiled in Traces of the Trade tried to discuss reparations, or compensation for slavery to the descendants of African American slaves, the old conversation faltered in the face of a staggeringly long legacy. In the film, the family members asked the lone African American who was in their midst, about her feelings. She was actually one of the filmmakers, and had not planned on appearing in the film. When the white family members asked her what she thought about racism, she said that she saw that many of her friends, including members of this privileged family, were good people. But many whites, she said, were cowards for not wanting to address the issue of racism.

While the film is less than two years old, the filmmaker’s thoughts about cowardice bear a striking similarity to US attorney general Eric Holder’s recent comments. “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards,” Holder said. “We, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.” His accusation seemed to have cleverly and thankfully stopped the old conversation on race, a conversation that has decayed from a struggle for gains in civil rights to the pathetic, self-congratulatory exercise it has been for the past twenty years. The old conversation on race has become an exercise in back-slapping, high-fiving, cheers against the racist white man and applause at liberal whites helping poor little brown children. We are in a new era; where majority culture advocates realize that justice must be more than just humanitarian aid. Perhaps Holder’s comment will move us away from the conversation on programs that put bandages on racism to a new dialogue about making real gains against racism in this twenty-first-century multicultural milieu.

I have spent years in discussions among Christians about the failures of the church to speak out against racism. Often, the participants in these conversations are well meaning. OK, now we all agree, racism is wrong, the emperor is naked. After that admission, however, nothing seems to change. I suspect this inertia is due to the fact that it’s more comfortable to call racism an overt evil; then, overt actions and overt villains can be blamed, but most of us never have to face the relationship between the minutiae of our daily lives and racism. Perhaps we will actually start rectifying the damage of racism if we address it as a banal or pathetic evil.

We all know evil when we see it, but pathetic-ness masquerades so well as quality, excellence, piety and holiness. Too often, some well-meaning person approaches us with a plan or a cause, and we even though we smell the scent of banality, we are convinced that the intent of the project is what makes it good. This allows us to ignore the damage that these pathetic actions cause to others. If racism is really going to be conquered, it will take more than a mantra of “we will overcome.” Perhaps we need a new mantra, something like “I will be transformed.”

To this end, the church will need a new confession. The church needs not to confess our sins as if we were as evil as Hitler, but to admit that our sins are as banal and cowardly as Eichmann’s. We should admit that, in our cowardice, we pass laws so that we can avoid the real change that should come to our hearts. We need to confess that all we do when we change laws in order to legislate being nice to everyone. Our conversations must pass beyond a mere gaping at racism’s damage. But before this happens, our nation’s collective heart needs to ache for the damage done by racism. Otherwise, we are doomed to do more damage while hiding behind the good liberal shield of acknowledging racism only when it is overt.

For the solution to racism, anti-Semitism, and all of the church’s failures is rooted in embracing the part of the Christian message that claims that love transforms the heart and makes it able to love one’s neighbor, family member, and enemy with the same passion. For if the church had been doing this, it would have avoided committing most of its sins over the past two millennia. And until the hearts of Christians are transformed through the process of confessing to racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, or whatever “ism” that is fueled by the passive sins of omission, all the church will ever be is a bunch of cowards. Until people’s hearts are transformed through the process of confessing and acknowledging racism, nothing will change.

By Valerie Bailey | The post The Church Needs a New Confession: Pathetic-ness as Moral Failing appeared first on The Public Sphere.

In the November 3, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, staff writer and New America Foundation Fellow, Margaret Talbot attempted to dispel some common misperceptions concerning evangelicals and sexuality. In her article, Talbot queries the evangelical reaction to Bristol Palin’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy, only to discover that the dilemma endeared the Republican base (read: evangelicals) to Governor Sarah Palin even further. Turns out, evangelicals are hardly shocked to discover their kids are having sex, even the ones who’ve made a commitment to sexual abstinence before marriage. Unlike their Blue-State counterparts, however, evangelicals are unlikely to supply their young women with either contraception or abortion procedures. And further unlike their cultural nemeses, they do not balk at the challenge of welcoming a new life into their fold.

Talbot touched briefly upon the seeming discrepancy between evangelical belief and practice when it comes to sex. As a journalist, Talbot relies upon the recent glut of social scientific studies that explain this discrepancy. Evangelicals are hands-down the strongest advocates of sexual abstinence before marriage, and their advocacy includes a strong suspicion of birth control, which many of them view as interfering with God’s plan for human reproduction. And yet, evangelical adolescents have sex at the same rate as their peers, sending concerned evangelical writers to their laptops in droves. Among these worried scribblers is Lauren Winner, whom Talbot references as one of the few “saavy” authors within the genre. Talbot hails Winner’s book, Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity as a rare exception in the field, one that neither demeans nor idealizes sex as degrading or ethereal. Instead, Winner acknowledges with chagrin that too many young evangelicals have grown ashamed of their bodies, and calls upon Christians to embrace the sensuality of food, play, and other embodied practices. While Winner’s views initially seem refreshing, she develops them with a particular view of Christian community. It seems that the idealism some authors reserve for the wedding night, Winner applies to her expectations of that community. Winner’s optimism is helpful for prescribing an ideal response to adolescent sexual desire; however, it does little to describe the realities most evangelical adolescents live.

Within socially conservative evangelical subcultures, the birth of a new child, no matter the age of its young mother, is always welcomed, as it reaffirms the community’s commitment to a pro-life agenda. Even more, like their predecessors, the Puritans of New England, contemporary evangelicals know that young people who become parents before adulthood are more likely to remain within the community and even more committed to the values that monitor said community. While children born out of wedlock are no doubt labeled a “mistake,” the benefits of such a situation far outweigh the deficits. In subcultures where family commitments overrule professional goals (for women in particular) and personal aspirations (also for women), the birth of a child only confirms the primacy of women’s roles as mother, caregiver, and homemaker. That’s not to say that evangelical women only serve their communities as child-bearers and caregivers. Many do still work “outside the home” while maintaining their primary role as child-caregiver. Like the discrepancy between evangelical belief and practice in regard to premarital sex, gender roles do not always conform to the ideal.

Outsiders often mistake this discrepancy between belief and practice as a form of hypocrisy. Talbot and others seem to suggest that evangelicals use sexual behavior as a litmus test for one’s authentic faith commitment. But the true test, for evangelicals, is not how sinless one can be, but how guilty one feels about the sins already committed. Even if one is not racked with guilt, evangelicals believe that unsanctioned sexual practice carries its own set of natural consequences, designed specifically to punish those who do not follow “God’s design for human sexuality.” Despite evidence that many of their own ranks engage in premarital sex without consequence, they depend upon STDs, emotional heartbreak, and pregnancy scares to provide adequate corrective measures. What’s a scarlet letter when you’ve got a raging case of the clap?

As individuals, evangelicals are especially good at self-monitoring. Students committed to sexual abstinence hesitate to call themselves “sexually pure” based on their struggles with impure thoughts or having engaged in sexual (though non-genital) play of some kind. The solution to the problem of sexual desire is not to lower behavioral standards, but to increase the believer’s dependence upon [G]od and the power of [H]is forgiveness. For evangelicals, the discrepancy between belief and practice is intentional. At their very core, they are idealists living with very realistic desires and temptations. Their fallen practices (i.e., those practices that most reflect those of their secular neighbors) of premarital sex, single parenthood and working motherhood, only affirm their ideals, for each of these risky behaviors increases their dependence on God and community.

Of course, sex, according to evangelicals, is not ultimately individualistic. Sex is not only everybody’s business, it is the mess that everyone is busy trying to keep neat and tidy. Sexual behavior is an entirely public enterprise. Lauren Winner refers to this as the Rotunda Principle. During her courtship with her now husband, Winner and her fiancé agreed that their sexual practices would be limited to those they felt comfortable doing on the steps of the campus rotunda. Believing that sex is inherently a public or communal endeavor, Winner and her partner agreed to stem their sexual practices according to the expectations of their religious community. Anyone who believes evangelicals are uncomfortable with sex can take a lesson from Winner. Evangelicals like their sex out in the open, where it’s easiest to adjudicate between pure/good sex and unsanctioned/bad sex. This is why they deal so well with unintended pregnancy. Not only does it confirm their belief that sex is meant primarily for procreation, but unintended pregnancy demonstrates their conviction that sexual practices require full disclosure, making the woman with-child in question open to both public support and public scrutiny, whether she welcome it or not.

Observers such as Talbot mark Winner as one of the few “saavy” writers on evangelical sex. Yet Winner’s suggestions for maintaining a chaste courtship are not based on her experiences as an evangelical teenager, but on her current status as a convert to the tradition. Unlike me, Winner was sexually active at an early age, free from adult scrutiny, and spent many years enjoying her sexuality in the context of significant relationships, encounters she found physically and emotionally gratifying. Only as an adult convert to evangelicalism and a married woman did Winner begin offering advice on premarital sexuality, based on her newfound belief in particular interpretations of the Bible that overly prioritize sexual purity. Perhaps she would offer different advice had she first undergone the Orwellian psychodrama I experienced as an evangelical adolescent.

As a high school student in a small, parent-run, Christian school, I learned of a school board meeting in which one concerned parent commented on a recent school-sponsored party where two young people were “making out in the closet.” First of all, it wasn’t a closet (though it certainly wasn’t a rotunda.) And it was the first time my boyfriend ever kissed me. It was exciting and warm, and I felt special, the way that any fourteen-year-old girl should when a boy kisses her for the first time. The next week, that lovely moment between two young people turned into a moment of personal shame when my locker-mate informed me of very public conversations regarding my very private activities. Even though I was never reprimanded, the experience of having a private, special moment turn into a cause for concern over my moral bearings served to remind me that I did not have the right to privacy, even as I negotiated the complicated desires of adolescent womanhood. At my school, most of my classmates had known each other since kindergarten, so school was not so much a place to encounter new people and new ideas, but an extended family stuck at a twelve-year reunion. So the crazy notion that two young people might have some stirrings that required privacy, or at least discretion, was not up for debate. Adolescent sexual desire was a problem that required monitoring, not a natural inclination that needed compassion, direct communication, and, yes, privacy.

Winner’s Rotunda Principle would not seem so invasive, I imagine, had I not come of age on the rotunda. I don’t dismiss Winner’s advice wholesale. I have good, feminist, Methodist friends who find her writing affirming of their own struggles to reclaim their sexuality from meaningless sexual encounters. But as a spokesperson for evangelicals and an advisor on sexual practices, Winner does not understand the weight of the Orwellian psychodrama I experienced as an evangelical adolescent. Perhaps if she did, perhaps if she recognized the limits of traditional Biblical interpretation to address adolescent sexual desire, she would welcome a diversity of premarital sexual experiences rather than adding to the mountainous list of evangelical authors attempting to justify the monitoring of adolescent sexuality. In an age when sex is regulated more than an out-of-control economy is, sexual ethics need to respect the right to privacy, teach sexual responsibility, and recognize the ability of adolescents to learn the distinction between sexual freedom and sexual shame. Only then will adolescents, and the adults they grow up to be, be free to experience sex, red, blue, or otherwise, as the joyful, exciting, mysterious encounter God created it to be.

* Image: A collage based on a poster for the silent movie The Scarlet Letter (1926) directed by Victor Seastrom.

By Sara Moslener | The post Red-State Sex Refugee appeared first on The Public Sphere.

It’s about that time again. Time for certain groups of people to make sure we all know whom we can thank for the Thanksgiving-to-New-Year’s orgy of shopping. I speak, of course of those ubiquitous buttons that remind us that “Jesus is the Reason for the Season!”

On some level, I appreciate the message that I want to read into this little declaration: chill out, for God’s sake (literally, I suppose), and ditch this assumption that a kid was brought into the world on angel song and with the adoration of foreign kings, so that we could get a great deal on that sweater for Uncle Fred. Even better, take that assertion one step further, and drop out of the present-buying frenzy altogether. Instead, if you’re of the religious persuasion that celebrates the story of Jesus, spend the day with your family, have a nice meal together, invite someone who needs it to share your warmth and your food and your conversation. If the cheery little mark of identity is worn to convey that sort of message, well then, more power to its bearer.

I’m guessing, however, that the accessory doesn’t really lead to such apparently unfashionable actions. In fact, when I catch a glimpse of this particular button, it usually sets my teeth on edge.

Multi-faceted reason number one. The occasions on which such campaign gear is sighted may be different for other people; for me, however, it normally comes into my field of vision when worn on the brand-new sweater of a thoroughly bourgeois lady or teen, who also displays make-up, hair, and nails so perfect that I never fail to feel slovenly in comparison. Appearance isn’t enough to convict anyone of anything; I’m willing to admit to that. But this well-dressed individual is also usually piling her cart high with merchandise unessential for daily living: action figures, GameBoys, fancy soap kits, a few Bratz dolls. Admittedly, I don’t get out much, and I try to do so even less during the holiday frenzy–so maybe I only run into the consumption-prone partisans of proper holiday ideology; maybe my polling practices are skewed, and the majority of button bearers are out ladling soup to hungry people at a half-way house.

I’m always tempted to ask this representative of Christian promotion, however, what the button means to her. Does it affect her daily life, especially during this particular season, whose celebration, if we take advertising as an indicator, seems to grow longer every year? It’s the same sort of question that begs to be vocalized every time an impatient driver bellows past, cuts me off, and finishes the maneuver with a less than friendly hand gesture and a head twisted back at me in eye-popping rage–all the while sporting a shiny Jesus fish on her bumper.

After the good consumer checks out, then, and wraps up her presents and goes about the rest of her business, what else does the fact of Jesus’ inauguration of this season encourage her to do? Even in the midst of the ample amounts of money she’s just spent, on things that will be forgotten in a matter of months, I’m willing to be less condemnatory if she also goes out, guided by enthusiasm for the Nazarene, and does her best to memorialize some of his more (in)famous actions undertaken in the Middle East. Feeding the homeless, lovingly touching some unwashed unfortunate with a skin disease, publicly inviting the scum of the earth to hang out: wouldn’t this weird behavior be great, especially if she threw in free health care, with no questions asked? She gets double bonus points if she’s willing to ignore the state of her lawn and to hop onto a ratty plebeian bus to accomplish all of this do-gooder activity.

Another series of concerns. How exactly does such a Jesus booster define “the season?” Early winter? Various pagans were already living it up for the solstice well in advance of Jesus’ appearance in a manger, so that can’t be right. The rededication of the temple that led to Chanukah came along well before Jesus did, and the celebration of Buddha’s enlightenment under the bodhi tree, as far as I know, contains no mention of the Nazarene. So, then, is “the season” limited to December 25–or are the button wearers just appropriating everyone else’s claims to the long period of lamp-lighting, party-giving, and clearance sale-ing, and declaring it all to be their indivisible property?

Is the donning of this accessory, in other words, more an assertion of what side this person is on–a back-up of the claims that trusty Jesus fish makes all year ‘round: that its bearer is on the winning side, and everyone else is damned? Is the button wearer saying that this holiday is mine, and not anyone else’s, that outsiders have no right to join in the carol singing or gift-giving that a large part of the non-Christian world has appropriated as its own? If so, then this partisan is drawing up battle lines that are worrisome enough in themselves.

When you combine this decidedly un-Jesus-like attitude, however, with the consumerist practices described above, the slogan’s claim of having it all figured out becomes even more dubious. You are not only participating in something about which I’m sure Christ would have had a great deal of criticism to offer. By supporting those multinational manufacturers, the sweatshops they run, the natural resources 0, HDMI, and best-data-recovery.com 8. they suck up, and the landfills to which their products contribute, you’re also buying (literally) into the structures of oppression, domination, and general cheapness against which the Nazarene battled. Instead, then, of being in the world, but not of its status quo, you’ve declared your acceptance of and participation in that very world’s governing structures. To make matters worse, you’ve somehow justified your worldly participation by sanctioning the whole farce with the stamp of a moral guy and his god–both of whom seemed, according to many of the accounts their followers have of them, to enjoy overturning power structures and the people who were comfortable inside of them. So you paradoxically engage in the same types of activity as do the heathen you disrespect, while slapping a label on yourself to differentiate you and your posse from them. You then tell those others that they have no right to, in this case, the consumerism they’ve always practiced, just because they aren’t wearing the button that you are.

It seems, then, that the badge-wearers want to celebrate Christmas as at best the remembrance of a biological event: the birth of a baby, neither the date nor the place of which, incidentally, we really know. If this is all that Jesus-is-the-reasoners are doing–even if not consciously defending the borders of their own clique–they’re hardly beginning to get at the much larger significance of the life and death into which this baby was said to have grown.

A weird observation. Oddly enough, it’s usually from non-Christians—or those who don’t advertise themselves as prone to a particular religious view—who seem keyed into that larger significance. In addition to efforts such as Democracy Now!, Doctors Without Borders, anti-globalization activism, and so on, one particular individual seems to work out of some of the same assumptions, aims, and, dare I say it, love for the world, that the itinerant Jewish preacher might also have claimed as his own. Now, I’m not saying that they’d agree on the same ultimate goals, the same god, or their understanding of just what was being worked out in the individual life of one or the other of them, for example. Jesus was about much more than getting people to stop shoring up the treasures of this world. But when I think of another notable person who ruffles the public and makes it irritated about having to face up to its comfortable complicity in structures of cheap meaninglessness and global harm, I keep coming back to Billy Talen. His entertainingly disruptive preaching and his demonstrations against the ills of consumerism bear an uncanny resemblance to Jesus’ throwing a horde of money-changers out of the temple and calling out the self-righteous on their unfriendly ways

Talen and his Church of Stop Shopping call attention to the oppressive working conditions and environmental degradation, not to mention the waste of our brain and soul power, we support when we purchase so much useless crap. Is that why passersby and shoppers of the Christian persuasion get huffy when they encounter him? Do police come in to slap on the cuffs because he’s not “preaching Jesus”? Or do the anger and annoyance boil up because, if we listen, we’d have to admit that Jesus might throw him a high-five on his way to tossing Joel Osteen out of the Compaq Center? And worse—does that exasperation cover up the fear that emerges when we recognize that, if we really hear what this guy is saying, we’ll have to back up our claims to love God and our neighbors by doing much more than wearing a button and singing a hymn in our expensively built churches? How scary! How unfashionable! How uncomfortable!

So I’ll repeat the question, then: What’s the purpose of this button? I’m hoping that the next good Christian I see wearing the little badge will show me what it all means: maybe we’ll bypass the clearance sales and take the stinky bus and go clean up a park, or demand some socially just policies from our representatives, or get involved in any number of other efforts that force us into some sort of responsible action with our world. One can always hope; after all, it’s the season for miracles.

By Katy Scrogin | The post Reasoning Through the Season appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Remember that really nice girl who greeted you warmly as a potential friend when you first arrived at college? Remember how she conscientiously invited you to dinner, or to study, or to her Christian fellowship activity? Remember the conversations about religion that you thought were a precursor to sharing secrets among friends? But then you expressed a different opinion, or you joined a liberal club, or you started to explore your sexuality, and suddenly, you felt a sharp pain in your back?   Betrayed by some evangelical whom you thought was a friend?

The night after Sarah Palin’s speech, I had nightmares. I kept dreaming of people like the many sweet, well-meaning evangelical Christians whom I had trusted in the past, only to find myself rejected for holding some “liberal” view. Days after the Republican convention, these memories kept one scene from a movie running through my mind.

That clip, from the 1999 film Dogma, starts with a ringing doorbell. A mild-mannered suburban woman opens her front door to see a man in a well-tailored white suit standing before her, holding a clipboard. He smiles and says, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Reynolds. I’m from the EPA. We’re checking on possible Freon leaks. Tell me, do you have air conditioning?”

Suspecting nothing extraordinary, our suburbanite answers easily, “Yes, we have central air.” The supposed EPA representative queries further, “In every room?” She nods her head, quizzically. “Except the bathroom, why?” He looks her directly in the eyes and says, “You know what that means, don’t you?” Before Mrs. Reynolds can possibly respond she is stabbed in the back with a hockey stick. Meanwhile, our EPA representative, now known to us as Azrael, enters the house to enjoy the air conditioning, and with a casual wave of the hand, orders the hockey-stick minion to get rid of the body.

Every time vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin describes herself or is described as a “hockey mom,” I remember that scene, and instead of Azrael, I see a train of sweet, smiling evangelical girls. All of their attempts to bring me into line with a “Christian America” ended with my being stabbed in the back.

As a college student, I was not unaware of evangelical theology. I was a born-again Christian who attended eight years of Christian school. However, growing up African American in the 1980s with Jim-Crow-era parents also formed my political views. My mother and father grew up in the segregated south of the 1940s and 50s. They told my siblings and me horrible stories, even describing attacks on black children who were attempting to get an education. The white school board denied my grandmother her right to attend high school. My parents and public school teachers from kindergarten through fourth grade reminded me over and over about how the freedoms we enjoyed were a result of good legislation, like the Voting Rights Act signed by President Johnson. I was born a Democrat and I saw no reason to change.

When I first arrived at college in the Reagan-Bush years, my political views were not initially an issue when I befriended several of these sweet white evangelical girls, smiling nicely and reaching out to me, bringing me into the fold. They were my first friends in college. They invited me to dinner, they helped me study for my exams, they prayed with me, and we went to spiritual retreats together. We stayed up late talking about our hopes and dreams for our futures. During my sophomore year, I became more vocal about my political views, discussing how excited I was about Geraldine Ferraro‘s vice-presidential candidacy. My friends were horrified. One pulled me aside and said, “I believe that God would vote Republican, and if you love God, you will too.” I was shaken by their claims. These people had been good friends.

After thinking about what these girls were saying about God and the Republican party, I doubted myself. So I called my dad. I asked him if as a Christian, I should vote Republican. He reminded me that I could return to my Democratic home even if I voted Republican, “but” he chided me, “the Democrats have always been on your side.” I then went to my friend and reminded her of Democratic support for civil rights legislation. She quipped back to me, “Well, that’s just a liberal agenda, that’s not God’s agenda.” I didn’t know it then, but at that moment, she turned on her heel and went to get her hockey stick. I voted Democrat that season, but, as my sophomore year turned into my junior year, the calls for dinner steadily declined.

During my junior year, I committed a grievous sin: I joined the school paper, otherwise known as the liberal, godless media. One of the articles I was assigned to write involved examining whether or not the pressure due to schools’ divestiture of their holdings in South African companies would be enough to compel that government to overturn apartheid. I had learned little about South Africa in high school. Most of my Christian-fellowship friends knew nothing about the country, except for the fact that “liberal” students were always protesting about the situation there. When I told those friends of my assignment for the college newspaper, they became even more distant. They did encourage me, though, to turn down the assignment; they said that, “We as Christians should not question the actions of another ally government, and perhaps South Africa’s choice to use apartheid has merits.”

So, I went to my editor and did the one thing reporters are told never to do: I turned down the assignment. I explained to her that I wasn’t sure I opposed apartheid.   My blond-haired, blue-eyed editor looked at me like I was insane. “Do you know what apartheid is?” she asked. She promptly explained to me that, “it’s like segregation in the Jim Crow South.”

Once I learned that, I immediately went to work on the piece. Most of the campus received my article well, and it supplied additional fuel for divestment. However, the coverage was not well received in my Christian fellowship. The campus minister from this conservative group met with me several times. I expressed my doubts, not about God or Christianity, but about how the Christian fellowship seemed more like a College Republican meeting than a community of prayer.

Finally, the campus minister asked to meet with me in the student union, which required me to cross a picket line, to run past those people demanding the school divest its holdings in South Africa. The conservative campus minister then asked me to make a choice, follow their way or leave the group. I felt a hockey stick hanging out of my back.

The college eventually rid itself of its holdings. And my friends disappeared. Sarah Palin reminds me of these friends who eventually distanced themselves as I became more vocal about my political beliefs. Palin is this sort of warm, loving person whom you adore when you are her friend, but whose hockey stick you never forget if you found yourself on the other side of her beliefs.

She is also the archetypal “˜80s woman, the early Gen X-er. Unlike the college students in the 1960s and “˜70s, who often banged their heads bloody on the glass ceiling of male-dominated fields, women of the “˜80s found that most gender restrictions had vanished, and that women were prominently featured in previously male-dominated fields. Many of us appreciated our debt to first- and second-wave feminists who had cracked so many glass ceilings. Those of us who respected those feminists followed their example from a distance, for there were few role models, very few women professors, almost no women’s studies programs, and the ones that existed were usually run by women so scarred by discrimination that they were more likely to attack the optimistic younger women for being too happy and not angry enough.

However, the conservative women leaders were there as role models in full force, running local pro-life movements off campus and recruiting among the Christian college students. I was surrounded by conservative women from local churches, usually not professional women, but stay-at-home moms who were associated with these churches and married to faculty or staff. The camaraderie and support was amazing. I thought that these people were my friends. I loved that Bible study. The women would meet with us, mentor us, and teach us how to be good Christian women. And they also taught us that the highest good a woman can do is to be a wife and mother-a role that was apparently incompatible with the pursuit of higher education and a professional degree. When I broke up with my college boyfriend, my Bible study leader urged me to go back to him because, in her view, the purpose of a college education was to meet my future husband.

Palin reminds me of this Bible study leader. As a proud hockey mom, she is the sort of woman who will offer you embracing love, but happily hockey-stick you in the back if you are not following the party line. I don’t know Palin, and I’m sure she’s a nice, charming person, just like the other women I met in college. They always try to follow the official position/dogma, because to fall out of line is to lose your community. Palin has no doubt been so trained into this fear that she doesn’t notice it, even if her beliefs would help to maintain apartheid in South Africa. Such women are formed in Christian communities of limited acceptance where, when you enter, you are welcomed with apparently total and embracing love. And the warmth of this love is a stark contrast to what is offered by secular society, the corporate environment, and yes, even liberal communities. In contrast to the solitude that confronts many of us in the world outside, this embracing community is comparable to an oasis in the desert. The problem is that once you have drunk from the well, you believe you have been safely welcomed, without ever realizing you must be on guard against violent hockey sticks.

That young, sweet hockey-stick-grabbing young woman sometimes grows up to be another conservative religious archetype. While taking a seminary course on world religions, I encountered this sort again. That semester, my class visited a mosque. The male students sat on the floor with more than a thousand other men who were praying. Though the mosque invited the women students to sit on the floor with the men, my female classmates decided to join the Muslim women upstairs.

Mostly, the Muslim women prayed in a serious manner. But once in a while, two of them would start talking. When this transpired, another woman came out of nowhere, running across the balcony, flailing her arms until she reached the talkative duo. She shushed them and hit them on the shoulders. Things were kept quiet and in a certain sort of order because this older woman policed the other Muslim women in the balcony, glaring at the others, keeping them in line with her piercing gaze, and threatening to expel them if they fell too far from accepted practice. When we returned to the classroom, the women of the class talked about what we had observed. We dubbed the guard with the flailing arms “the prayer Nazi.”

Sometimes, I wonder how Palin imagines her leadership. Is she a mentor for younger women? Or is she a prayer Nazi, who on the behalf of men, keeps other women in line by threatening expulsion? In the mosque, the prayer Nazi kept you in line by threatening removal from the balcony. In evangelical communities, the prayer Nazi threatens social excommunication, either as a way to convince you that you are wrong, or so she can avoid being soiled by your aberrant behavior.

As we try to figure out who Palin is, all we have are stories of how she’s charming and tough and conservative. On occasion, she’s kicked someone out of a community. Her own “Troopergate” case scares me, because those tactics are so reminiscent of the hockey stick stabbers I knew in college. This is not the kind of person I want to be leading our country. How would she guide a nation composed largely of people who hold different beliefs than she does? What will she do to the people who agree with her on some things but disagree with her on matters she considers fundamentally incontrovertible? For now, the Republicans are offering us Palin as the person who will be a heartbeat away from the presidency. But how does John McCain know he won’t end up with a hockey stick in his back?

A certain strain of evangelicalism, the strain to which Palin’s Pentecostalism belongs, considers its greatest task on this earth to be the enforcement of the Great Commission (Mt. 28: 16-20), where Jesus charges his followers to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” My fellow conservative college students believed that this command should be fulfilled by any means necessary. Think about having someone with that view in charge of nuclear weapons.

As I moved further from conservative circles and into mainline circles, I was challenged with what Jesus said was actually the greatest commandment, to love God and to love our neighbor (Mt. 22:34-40; Mk 12:28-34; and Lk 10:25-28; also see Deut. 6:5 and Lev. 19:18).   I can only hope that, win or lose, Palin realizes that her faith is more about loving her neighbors than impaling them when they don’t agree with her.

By Valerie Bailey | The post Hockey Moms, Prayer Nazis, and Why I Love But Fear People Like Sarah Palin appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Images of “Martyrdom” dominate Tehran’s urban space. State-sponsored and hand-painted by artists close to the regime, they provide an insider’s view of the Islamic Republic’s psyche at a time when Iran makes daily headlines. Thematically, the murals feature images of the fathers of the Islamic Revolution and martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war, as well as explicitly anti-U.S. and anti-Israel messages. The primary objective is to document and present images that are part of Tehranians’ daily visual experience and of which people in the U.S. are largely oblivious.

[Gallery=7]

By Sourena Parham | The post Photo Essay: Martyrdom in Tehran appeared first on The Public Sphere.

The promise of transformation lurks around many corners this election season. Even when I turn on my television, I watch a show like Eli Stone and find transformational mythology at play. The main character has a brain aneurism that causes visions, and these visions change him. In the third episode, he proclaims himself to be “the new Eli.” When I was a teenager, I used to wake up every morning and likewise believe I was somehow “the new Jackie.” I would perceive that ideas and experiences of the previous day had transformed me completely. I am obviously not alone in this aspirational imagination. I see myself in the premise of Eli Stone. So must many others since that concept, that a momentary experience can transform a life, make a person new, has appeared in a variety of television shows, movies, songs, novels, you name it.

One small viral video likewise typifies this longing for transformation, the will.i.am music video, Yes We Can. This musical alteration of Barack Obama’s speech, itself a riff on Dolores Huerta‘s classic “Sí se puede,” promises change in the moment that we move to the ballot box and vote for Senator Obama. Parts fascism and Internet youth culture, the video moves us to conflate the solitary moment of a vote cast with instantaneous transformation into the change we seek.

In the language of Western Christianity, the longing for transformation has focused itself upon moments of conversion and apocalypse. These stories are not original or unique to the Christian tradition, but those Christian tales are among the most familiar. The myth of transformation has been encoded into the evangelical Christian term of “born again,” a play on John 3:7. Practitioners have often turned to the model of Saul riding to Tarsus, repeated three times in Acts (9, 22, and 26), though Paul in his own letters does not describe this particular transformation, nor does Paul allude to a name change. In Acts, Saul, a persecutor of the early Jesus movement, finds himself surrounded by heavenly light, and he falls to the ground. A voice then speaks to him, and in that moment he ceases to be Saul. Paul rides on to Damascus a changed man, striving as ardently for the Jesus movement as he had once worked against it.

Many are we who also find ourselves drawn to apocalypse, whose original Greek meaning is “revelation,” and not “the end of the world.” Yet the end of the world is bound up with that earth-shattering moment of understanding that the concept of apocalypse embodies. In critical theory, thinkers like Alain Badiou have become fascinated by “the event,” somehow another term for the apocalypse, the transformational revelatory experience, the event that is, in which things are changed and the world sees itself anew. Scholars of the Book of Revelation, like Adela Yarbro Collins and Jean-Pierre Ruiz have signaled that the liturgical practice of reading Revelation was meant to draw people into a ritual experience of communal revelation. The transformational experience of conversion/revelation/apocalypse tracks from Left Behind in Christian circles to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, and through to Eli Stone in broader culture.

Contemporary sociologists and psychologists who study conversion and scholars who study the mysticism that grows out of apocalyptic thought in Western traditions have long noted the simplified narrative of events contained within our popular retellings of mystical conversion. When we tell our life stories, even to ourselves, we create a narrative arc deeply informed by both the audience of our story and the people with whom we have surrounded ourselves. We tell our own stories, looking back, picking on that moment when we most see the seeds of whom we have become. We focus upon that moment because it makes a better story. Yet, that moment is not the only moment that really mattered. Tat-Siong Benny Liew’s recent querying of Asian American biblical hermeneutics lifts up the relationship between apocalypse and the practice of everyday life, and Liew reminds us that the transformational moment and the continuous exchanges of the everyday are not mutually exclusive. While apocalypse may give a vision of transformation, only the practices of the everyday make transformation possible.

Saul’s moment of transformation cannot have been just one moment. When we change communities and networks of friends and colleagues, we may have a moment we look to that signals a shift. Yet such a change is a long-term practice of socialization into a new community, even if the new community is so closely connected to the one in which we started. The mystical practices that lead one to revelation are likewise long-term. A practitioner can often find one moment that signals conversion and one moment that typifies the revelation that directed her/his life, but the moment is only part of a larger practice of life.

I find important lessons in Liew’s reflection, that transformation can be typified in a moment but only truly experienced in the long haul. Like many others of my generation and social location, I found myself drawn to Senator Obama precisely because of the hope of transformation. But those, like my own brother, who struggled against Senator Obama and in support of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton often did so because the politics of the transformational moment can feel empty if one does not grasp the politics of daily life needed to carry it forward. I felt Senator Obama had both, but watching the will.i.am video, it is easy for me to see how people like my brother can be wary of the promises of the moment. The empty feeling of that video is part of why I’m so fond of the mocking done in “john.he.is,” not for its mocking of John McCain, but rather of the original “Yes We Can” video.

The moment of the primary season’s end leaves me contemplative. My main hope, however, is for people like my brother and I to share both the transformational moment and the daily practice it demands as we move out of the Bush administration and, yes, I also hope, into another chapter in this nation’s history.

By Jacqueline Hidalgo | The post “Yes We Can” and The Politics of Transformation appeared first on The Public Sphere.

I first learned about the Jericho Road in my church’s Sunday School. As a kid, I was more aware of the Jericho Road in Israel than the major interstate toll road that ran near my home. Since I couldn’t drive, I could not have cared less about I-76 through Pennsylvania. By contrast, the Jericho Road was the setting of “The Good Samaritan,” one of the most celebrated parables of Jesus. The parable of the Good Samaritan was told over and over to children at the end of the twentieth century first with finger puppets and skits. Twenty-first century children probably use mp3s, videos, and YouTube.

Regardless of the medium, the basics of the story remain the same. Someone asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus answered with the story of some unfortunate guy who was mugged on the Road to Jericho. Two different kinds of church leaders stepped over his body in their rush to services. The hero, however, was a kind outsider, disliked by the church leaders and known as the Good Samaritan. The Good Samaritan was the only one who stopped to help the wounded man. Because of the Good Samaritan’s righteous actions, the Jericho Road was the Christian “batcave” or “the stand-alone phone booth,” the place from which heroes like Batman and Superman emerge to help the helpless. For us Christian kids, the Jericho Road was a reminder that heroic action involved being kind to strangers, being nice to our annoying siblings, showing love to the person who makes us feel uncomfortable, being ready to help and to love everyone. This existential road to Jericho ran through our real playgrounds and offices, the places we needed to remember to be good neighbors.

This year, while serving as a chaperone for college students on a nearly two-week trip to the Holy Land, our Palestinian tour guide pointed out that our bus was now on the Road to Jericho. I sat up in shock; the Jericho Road had now become real and covered in asphalt. I looked at the road, stunned at how much it looked like the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Except, in the middle of the road was a huge concrete wall that seemed to stretch almost ten stories into the sky.

Photo by: Peter Mulligan. The Wall, Palestinian West Bank.

“This is the apartheid wall,” the guide said, with disgust and anger. “Or the segregation wall, or whatever you want to call it; the Israelis used the wall to keep the Palestinians away from their settlements¦This wall snakes throughout Israel, walling up places where Palestinians live. Sometimes the wall winds back around itself, capturing a Palestinian community in a bubble and cutting those residents off from everything, schools, stores, family. The Israelis say that this wall is to protect them from terrorists,” the guide explained.

The guide was careful in his use of the term Israelis. “It is not the Jewish people who are the problem,” repeated the guide many times, “but the Israelis”, The leaders of the nation of Israel, the Israelis, are descendants of Jewish people, the Jewish Diaspora who had lived through Europe and the Americas, and other lands,” he tried to explain diplomatically. “These Jewish people moved to Palestine after World War II and the Holocaust and became Israelis. These Jews had survived a horrible genocide orchestrated by Nazi Germany. But their ancestors had also experienced centuries of persecution and pogroms and mini-genocides. For centuries Jews had hoped to have a nation, situated on the land that geographically was known as Palestine, the location of the Kingdoms of the Hebrew people, the land where the Torah was established, where King David and the others lived. In 1948, the dream of an Israeli nation was fulfilled. The hope was that the creation of the nation of Israel would end the torture and persecution of the Jews. And in many ways, it did. But this fear appears to have fueled a new season of torture and persecution, this time, against the Palestinians.

The guide continued his explanation as the bus backed away and took a route along the wall. “While Israelis were celebrating in 1948, Palestinians were being forced from their homes, forced to live in refugee camps,” the guide said. There are Palestinians who still have the keys to the homes they were forced from in 1948. They are still hoping to return.

The trip consisted mostly of college students, all Christians, except for one American Jewish woman who was more aware of the political situation than the Christians and a few agnostics who were very aware of the political while being neutral about any religious connection to the land. A few of the students and chaperones had been on the trip before, but although they said the situation was bad, they never explained what they had seen on prior trips. Since their last visit, they might have signed occasional petitions and attended rallies in support of Palestinians, and they probably educated people in the best way they knew: with stories about the wall.

Two students I sat near were curious about the political situation, but they were, like most American Christians, much more interested in seeing the land where their favorite Bible stories took place. They wanted to see the Sea of Galilee, the Mount of Olives, the river Jordan, and the Road to Jericho. They thought they might accidentally see evidence of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but only between visits to Holy Land sights. They had not expected to confront a wall down the middle of one of their most treasured Bible Stories. One student opined against having a mystical/spiritual pilgrimage interrupted by a political reality with political commentary. Not that the plight of the Palestinians was unimportant, another student expressed, it’s just not what she had come to see.

The students also experienced a surprising number of White House personnel visiting the same religious sites they were. The White House personnel said they were preparing for the upcoming presidential visit to celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary. It was strange looking at the Sea of Galilee with young men and women in suits and American walking shoes, speaking in hushed whispers, surveying the land, wondering about security for when the president would visit Biblical sites he too probably learned about as a boy in Sunday School.

The White House personnel also reminded the students that their nation was in the last year of an unpopular presidential administration, which had launched a war in the same region where these students were trying to be tourists. The existential Road to Jericho was becoming crowded with lots of people, but not necessarily good Samaritans. These students had waited their entire young lives to travel this land as pilgrims had done for centuries. Some of these students would have said that Jesus lives in their hearts, but they also longed to see with their eyes some physical evidence of Jesus’ glory and majesty. They wanted to join the countless others who could call themselves eyewitnesses, to see with their own eyes these places where Jesus could once have walked, to see that these places were not just legend. But while looking for glory and majesty, they saw evidence of a complicated tale of suffering and grief.

We know something is happening, in relation to the Palestinians,” said one of the women who sat near me on the bus. She admitted that, at home, she avoided watching the news, except for excerpts from Entertainment Tonight. “We know it’s bad,” said the woman’s friend, “but we don’t know what’s going on and we can’t do anything about it.” When the topic about the political situation came up, they would shrug and appear irritated if I pressed them for more thoughts. So, when I saw the real road to Jericho blocked by a huge slab of concrete, designed to keep Palestinians and Israelis from contact with each other, it was as if the batcave had collapsed. A wall designed to separate neighbors blocked the Road to Jericho. If the idea of the good neighbor was invented on the Road to Jericho, it was on this same existential street that it became roadkill.

On tours around the Dome of the Rock and the Wailing Wall, we had another guide, a Palestinian scholar. “We are the Gentiles,” he explained. “And later in Acts,” the Palestinian scholar said, “when it said that Paul went first to those in Damascus, then in Jerusalem and throughout the countryside of Judea, and also to the Gentiles, Paul was talking about the Palestinians¦We are the keepers of the tradition,” he said, referring to Christianity. Later on the tour, we met another Palestinian tour guide who claimed members of his family as direct descendants of one of the first families to become Christians after the resurrection. “In the book of Acts, when it says, (Acts 11:18) ‘then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life, “they were talking about us, the Palestinians,” said one of the guides.

The students bonded quickly with the guides, gleefully asking them questions about the Holy Land sites, some questions they had held since their days as children in Sunday School. It was here that the students found the biggest surprise, the Holy Land site they had not expected to find. Among the first non-Jews to contemplate the teachings of Christ were the people who had lived in that region for centuries. And these are the Palestinians. The families of the students’ guides had been showing Christian pilgrims the Holy Land for centuries. And we met them. They were the physical evidence left behind to give witness to the events of 2000 years ago. They were the evidence of Jesus’ glory and majesty. And now, they were subject to systemic discrimination and persecution.

Occasionally, during the tour, our bus was stopped at a checkpoint. At most checkpoints, our Palestinian guide had to leave the bus and go through the checkpoint on foot while the Americans remained on the bus. At one checkpoint, while our USA passports were being reviewed, one of our Palestinian guides was stripped naked and searched. When the guide returned to the bus, the students discovered that the Israeli soldiers had taken our guide’s ornate belt buckle.

The students who were not as interested in the Palestinian political situation still found the lost belt buckle deeply disturbing. These students became sullen and stormy, and I suspect they did not have the language to explain why they felt this way. They kept repeating, “We knew things were bad, but¦” They still could not explain why the Palestinian plight was bad; they could barely explain why they were infuriated when someone who had been so kind to them lost his belt buckle. The facts on the ground seemed so small; it was just a belt buckle. Yet, after the belt buckle incident, students began to see more than just the geography.

For a few hours, we visited a refugee camp. The camp looked awful and was full of dilapidated buildings, some without walls. We visited an educational center where people from the camp talked about their ministry to children, who were being taught to tell their stories through photography. The refugee camp residents treated us well, people came out of their homes, waving and saying hello in Arabic and English. We were fed a good lunch, a simple chicken and rice dish, with salad and juice. After lunch, we walked around the camp. The people allowed us into their homes, which had little-to-no furniture and sometimes, no walls or roofs. I walked through the camp, occasionally meeting residents, who hospitably showed me their homes, ushering me past thresholds without doors, inviting me to peer out of windows without glass at a view of the roofs of the refugee camp and the children playing below on the dirt roads. In the distance was the wall, snaking through the landscape, winding and turning back on itself, and disappearing into the distance.

Two of the students I sat near on the bus seemed to be the happiest during this part of the trip. They gleefully purchased things made by the refugee camp children. They posed for pictures with the children in tattered clothes who spoke rapidly in Arabic and hugged the Americans without any sign of fear.

Near the entrance of the camp, we had seen pictures of young men. The posters were in Arabic. “Who are they, are they running for office,” we asked. “No,” said our Palestinian guides. “They are, activists¦freedom fighters.” The guide seemed to search for words in English to describe these young men. “They are heroes to the people in the camp.” The man paused. “You, in America, call them suicide bombers.

The tour continued. We were surprised at how safe we felt. We became witnesses to the kindness of a people who had been demonized by our national press. The students did not expect this feeling of safety, which did not come from the wall, but from the hospitality of the people. When the students were talking about their feeling of safety, the Palestinian guide pointed to the wall outside of the refugee camp and talked about how the Israeli soldiers atop the wall gunned down the children who came too close. The children had just been playing, the guide said, but the soldiers may have thought they were writing graffiti on the walls, he said.

The wall near the refugee camps was full of graffiti. The most prominent graffiti piece portrayed a figure that looked like the stature of liberty, but instead of a woman’s head, the graffiti had a ghoulish skull. Palestinians were angry with the United States of America, we were told by the refugee camp residents. They were angry because the US government helped fund the Israelis, to pay for weapons and to pay for the wall.

The students snapped pictures of the wall with their cameras and their cellphones, smiling and posing in front of the graffiti. The students said they would post these pictures on Facebook and MySpace and other communication networking software. These pictures would prove that they had come to Israel and Palestine, although they were never sure which geographical title to use for the captions of their snapshots. The pictures were their physical proof that they had gone to the Holy Land; yes pictures of smiling happy Americans beside a terrorizing Statue of Liberty.

* Photo by: Peter Mulligan. The Wall, Palestinian West Bank.

By Valerie Bailey | The post Missing the Good Samaritan on the Present-Day Road to Jericho appeared first on The Public Sphere.