A scrapbook of thoughts on arts, culture and the Christian life.
“Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.”
“Nation-states are imagined communities of relatively recent date, rather than eternal or inevitable realities.”
-Philip Jenkins paraphrasing Benedict Anderson
How entrenched in our minds is the idol of the government, replacing God? To answer this question, we have to try and imagine life without the modern state. Remarkably hard to do. That’s how deep a hold it has on us.
Jenkins often speaks about the influx of Latino immigrants to the United States and how, when their birth rate and inflow is taken into account, mean a dramatic rise in the number of Christians in the United States. Now, statistically that seems to make some sense, but my own experience suggest otherwise.
I spent half my childhood in a city with a high ratio of Mexican migrant workers, accounting for nearly 50% of the population. My impression though is that they were not particularly religious but had rather dove head-first into American secular materialism. They’re all supposed to be Catholic, but if that’s the case than few of them must have ever gone to church. The Catholic congregations remained relatively small. There were no Latino churches bursting at the seams, and their should have been if even a forth of the immigrants in a 10-mile radius attended any sort of worship service. I knew of a handful of Spanish-speaking Pentecostal churches in town, but they were small. I couldn’t observe any evidence that these southern immigrants were any less secular than anyone else.
Was this just my experience? Does anyone out there live in, say, Arizona among a huge community of faithful Latinos? I’m assuming they are out there, I just haven’t ever seen ’em where they (should?) be.
That’s the main problem I see with Jenkin’s projections throughout his book (The Next Christendom). He does not take seriously enough the power of wealth to squash faith. Rich Muslim countries lose their religious depth when they are covered in oil. Christian and Muslim migrants to Europe or the U.S. find they are more excited about cars and TVs than piety. In the southern strongholds where everyone is still poor, or at least everyone knows a lot of poor people, the effect from the secular outside is limited. But when you transplant someone to L.A. or London, they get distracted. Sometimes permanently so. Ultimately, for this (and some other reasons) I am not as optimistic about Jenkin’s projections of Christianity taking over much of the world. They need to have lots of kids (which they do) AND train them up well (easier said then done). Maybe they can. This could still be a LOT better though, across the board. We probably have a thousand things to learn form the Africans, but they could maybe learn a few things from us. How do you love God after you’re rich? Most of them haven’t had to answer that question – yet.
I really liked this anecdote about a foreign visitor being upset by the totem poles set up in a public park in the pacific northwest.
Also illustrating the cultural gulf that separates Northern and Southern churches is Moses Tay, formerly the Anglican archbishop of Southeast Asia, whose see was based in Singapore. Visiting the Canadian city of Vancouver, Archbishop Tay found himself in Stanley Park, where he encountered the totem poles that represent and important symbol of the city. He was deeply troubles. The archbishop concluded that as artifacts of an alien religion, these were idols possessed by evil spirits, and they required handling by prayer and exorcism. This behavior horrified the local Anglican church, which was committed to building good relationships with local native communities, and which regarded exorcism as absurd superstition. (Moreover, totem poles themselves should more properly be seen as symbols of status and power, rather than specifically religious objects.) Considering his own standards, though, it is difficult not to feel some sympathy with the archbishop. Considering the long span of Christian writings on exorcism and possession, he could summon many literary witnesses to support his position, far more than the Canadian church could produce in favor of tolerant multiculturalism.
-Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, p.151
I’m pretty familiar with this sort of thing. There was one about a half hour from my house. I barely notice them, but seriously, we can’t blame him if he does. We’ve swallowed a lot of nonsense here in the west. Why should we assume it’s the foreigners who don’t get it?
If Northerners worry that Southern churches have compromised with traditional paganism, then Southerners accuse Americans and Europeans of selling out Christianity to neo-paganism, in the form of humanistic secular liberalism.
-p.235
Indeed. They’re probably both right. I’ve had so much modernism/postmodernism pumped into me, it’s still hard to sort out. Every day.
Switching gears…
The secular western powers REALLY don’t get religion. They try to categorize it and such, but they might as well be on another planet. Relations with evangelicals in the U.S. and with Muslims abroad provides mounds of examples. Long term, this is really bad for global relations. Hmmmm.
Modern Western media generally do an awful job of reporting on religious realities, even within their own societies. Despite its immense popularity in North America, evangelical and fundamentalist religion often tends to be dismissed as merely a kind of reactionary ignorance. It would be singularly dangerous if such uncomprehending attitudes were applied on a global scale and aggravated by racial stereotyping. As Christianity comes to be sees as, in effect, jungle religion, the faith of one-third of the human race would increasingly be seen as alien and dangerous, even a pressing social problem. The North, in turn, would define itself against this unfortunate presence: the North would be secular, rational, and tolerant, the South primitive and fundamentalist. The North would define itself against Christianity.
-p.187
After explaining how huge parts of the world will be largely Christian or Muslim:
It is conceivable that within a few decades, the two faiths will have agreed on amicable terms of coexistence, but looking at matters as they stand today, that happy consummation seems unlikely. Issues of theocracy and religious law, toleration and minority rights, conversion and apostasy, should be among the most divisive in domestic and international politics for decades to come. it is quite possible to imagine a future Christendom not too different from the old, defined less by any ideological harmony than by its unity against a common outside threat. We must hope that the new Res Publica Christiana does not confront an equally militant Muslim world, Dar al-Islam, or else we really will have gone full circle back to the worst features of the thirteenth century.
-p.222
Jenkin’s book is very positive and does a good job of avoiding politics. He does very little preaching of doom and gloom. Nevertheless, he does mix in a little bit of it, as seen above. It’s hard not too. I wish I knew more Muslims. I only knew a couple in college and they were very quiet about it. While in Ethiopia, I talked several times to the cook at our guest house. She was a convert to Christianity from Islam. Her parents lived in the north of the country. She was very happy to make the change. She was also in demand as the only one in the house who could understand the Arabic soap operas on TV.
On immigration from the south:
We used to have a Belgian Congo, but what about a Congolese Belgium?
Again, a good question to ask if you are trying to expand your view of history. A good exercise!
Back in 1920, Hilaire Belloc not only proclaimed that “Europe is the Faith” but made his boast specifically Catholic: “The Church is Europe; and Europe is The Church.” If this was ever true, it has not been so for a good many years. Euro-American Catholics ceased to enjoy majority status a generation ago, and a bulk of the world’s Catholics now live in the global South.
-p.226
Belloc was an interesting guy, but every time I see that quote from him I have to shake my head. My catholic friends defend him saying “that’s not what he really meant”. Whatever. I’ll just let it stand. I’m OK with him being smart and clever and yet still myopic in his European-ness. We all are about something.
37% of all Catholic baptisms in Africa today are of adults. These are people making a deliberate decision to convert from some other faith. What could be more unheard of in the north/west?!
(Paraphrase from p.227)
That’s pretty cool. And different.
Finally, I really liked this passing comment on the book of Revelation and why it is popular in Africa and Latin America, especially among rural dwellers:
Making the biblical text sound even more relevant to modern Third World Christians, the evils described in Revelation are distinctively urban. Then as now, evil sets up its throne in cities. Brazilian scholar Gilberto da Silva Gorgulho remarks that “The Books of Revelation is the favorite book of our popular communities. Here they find the encouragement they need in their struggle and a criterion for the interpretation of official persecution in our society…The meaning of the church in history is rooted in the witness of the gospel before the state imperialism that destroys the people’s life, looming as an idol and caricature of the Holy Trinity.” To a Christian living in a Third World dictatorship, the image of the government as Antichrist is not a bizarre religious fantasy but a convincing piece of political analysis.
-p.259
Christians often lament the fact that Japan has almost no believers – less than 1% in fact. Except Japan used to have more Christians, as recent as 70 years ago. What happened? The bulk of them lived in Nagasaki. We killed them off with an atomic bomb. Oops. Strike one for American missions.
I’ve always hated Spanish. Really. I loathed the three years of Spanish that I had to take growing up for a while in public school; not because the teacher was bad (in fact, she was quite good), but because I just had zero interest in it. The only Spanish I ever heard was spoken by poor uneducated migrant workers. A few that I knew were members of the Crips gang, which was prominent in the next town over. I didn’t like the little bit of Latin music I had heard on the radio. I didn’t like how it had so many syllables. I thought it was stupid. I was glad when I didn’t have to study it any more. I forgot most of it.
Now, fifteen years later, I find myself today standing in the kitchen, reading the Spanish translation of an instruction manual and realizing that it’s actually pretty cool. I’m surprised at how much of it makes sense or how much of it I remember. I find the nuance in meaning from the different vocabulary to be a worthwhile mystery to solve. I find myself thinking it would be fun to learn. What changed? And why did I hate it so much the first time?
A few thoughts:
1. My only exposure, both in real life and in class was to spoken, conversational, colloquial Mexican Spanish. That was not (and still is not) interesting. But the world, it turns out, is a huge place and I only knew one little corner. There are all manner of countries and cultures that speak it. A multitude of religious and scholarly works are there too. Now we’re talkin’.
2. It turns out I do much better if I can see what’s going on. I think if I had been taught to read Spanish instead of being forced to conjugate verbs out loud in little role-playing scenarios, I might have taken in a lot more. I’m not saying other people would have, but I think *I* would have.
3. I may not have found Mexico particularly intriguing, but Spain, it turns out has a rich and fascinating history. As I read more history of Europe, the Church, and Latin America, I keep bumping into Spanish in new contexts.
4. By chance, four different books I’ve read in the past couple years have turned out to be English translations from Spanish authors. What are the odds of that? This includes The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Club Dumas and The Nautical Chart by Arturo Perez-Reverte, and even Raising Abel, a theology book by the very English Oxford-educated James Alison, who, nevertheless, wrote the book in Spanish while living in Chile.
5. At a brief workshop I attended last year given by the Boston Camerata, singer Anne Azema presented a wonderful piece of music in an old dialect of southern Spain. Very moving.
6. I remember sitting in a cafe a couple years ago and listening to two people talk in a beautiful-sounding tongue. It took me a while to realize it was, in fact, Spanish. How different it sounded from the accent of my childhood.
7. The difficulty of trying to learn some Amharic has made Spanish seem quite easy by comparison!
It appears that mainstream journalists are not the only ones to give disproportionate attention to the sensational. We must always remember that if the news were “fair and balanced” it would be, above all, boring. But the mundane is, by definition, not “news”. But it IS life. In academia, sociologists, anthropologists, and archeologists set out to find life. But where do their noses often lead them? To news!
Philip Jenkins, in his discussion of Christianity in post-colonial Africa, laments how many scholars have chosen to study small independent and unorthodox movements. These small groups often follow a local leader who reports dreams and prophecies. Even in the most inclusive estimates, these groups account for less than 10% of Christians in Africa. Where is the motherload of Africa’s now 400 million Christians? In “boring” churches: Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, etc. (though often charismatic flavours of these). Now what could be more mundane than interviewing some Catholics about what they believe? Isn’t that all written down somewhere already? But if we wish to understand the face of Christianity in the next half century, that’s exactly who we need to be talking to. Reform movements should focus their energy there, rather than cleaning up a few recent heretics that may have sprung up here and there in the power vacuum.
Another example: In my hometown, during the last election season, I saw hundreds of Obama bumper stickers. It seemed like every other car I passed had one pasted on the rear. I could count on perhaps two hands the number of (who was it?) McCain/Palin stickers I saw. But come election night, the Republican candidate carried the state without breakin’ a sweat. What gives? The progressives are noisy and the conservatives are, by nature, boring. That’s a big part of what being conservative is all about.
The news anchor interviews someone interesting, someone loud, down in the square occupying wall street or shouting something curious. He doesn’t interview the bloke that just walked past the camera on his way to the office, munching on a bagel from the little stand on the corner. That guy is totally boring. Forget him.
What Christians get all the “buzz”? Rob Bell and his velvet-covered books, Mark Driscoll with his macho-man antics, Ted Haggard and his gay lover, Robert Schuller and his bankrupt Cathedral, Jeremiah Wright and his liberation theology, Fred Phelps and his tiny group of outlandish protesters. Who will never get any airtime? Thousands of long-faithful priests, thousands of flawed, but loving, caring, and effective pastors and laymen.
Standing far above all of these men, who are the people most “boring” of all? Who are the ones utterly ignored by modernism? Stay-at-home mothers! Chances are, they are most often the boring Christians too. The guy walking to work with the bagel from earlier? Also a Christian. Faithful, flawed, boring. Makin’ the world go round even more than you can imagine.
Infant Christians are not apostate, but rather immature. Forgive them.
You do not whip a 7-year old child for their inability to drive a car. Instead, you teach them to read. You drive the car for now.
The idea that turning to Jesus Christ instantly flushes all sin and immaturity from your life is a revivalist myth. When you are born again, it is as an infant, not a fully formed adult. Do not despair when you continue to wrestle with destructive habits established over many years. To do so simply puts you in league with Saint Paul. Christ brings grace to you. His kindness leads you to repentance. His grace can and will motivate you to turn from your ways. The Holy Spirit sometimes affects us in quick and dramatic ways. Glory. But grace is secured before all this, by his work, not ours.
Once again, I can’t help thinking that Girard could have helped Leithart’s thesis about Constantine. In the end, he concludes that Rome’s baptism was an infant one – that Constantine was a Christian, just an immature one. Why conclude that his philosophy on slaveholding would immediately look as fully developed as something from James Madison? Other people are appalled that he didn’t lay down his sword or disband the army. Isn’t that what a REAL Christian would do? Seriously though, how could such a thing even enter his imagination? People argue about philosophies and ideologies and belief systems, but Girard says those aren’t the things that really drive people. People are driven by mimetic desire. So if Constantine wasn’t as good of Christian as we modern folk want him to be, it wasn’t for lack of faith, but for lack of a MODEL. What does running an empire in a non-brutal, non-pagan way even look like? Did anyone in AD 313 have much of a clue? Well, clues, absolutely, but a fully formed accurate vision? Good grief, no. So we got a mixed bag. So what?
George W. Bush was a contemporary evangelical head of a national super-power and he was DEFINITELY a mixed bag. And he had all of the best Christian reformers and saints of the last thousand years to look to. Perhaps he was just paralyzed by politics? The impression I often get from Bush is that he was well-meaning but confused. Perhaps he had too many advisors, too many options. Constantine, on the other hand, seems to have been well-meaning, but impulsive – trying to find his way and, when faced with a crisis would occasionally fall back into the old imperial ways of executing a few people here and there to seemingly patch things up.
I don’t deny that the Holy Spirit works in the hearts and minds of men. He does all the time. God has all the time in the world though. Over and over we see that He often performs his works over the course of many generations. Our lives are such tiny little puffs of smoke, we want him to heal us overnight! But He is telling a long story. People want Constantine to be so much better than he really was. But if he can’t be that, then they flip it around and use him as a handy scapegoat and the root of many of the Church’s very real problems during the middle ages.
As for Leithart’s book, one of the endorsements states that he “helpfully complicates Christian history”. That is accurate I think, even if he is misreading his critics, (as they argue he is) or if some of his conclusions seem strange or radical. Any time someone is being utterly dismissed, some complication is healthy. When skeptics seek to complicate everything, they are doing it to pull the world down into the void. When a Christian seeks to complicate things, it should be to ask “Can we try to extend grace to this flawed person?”
I’ve been reading two history books, one on the history of Christianity in Ethiopia, as well as Peter Leithart’s Defending Constantine. I’ve often wondered why so many folks seem to be enthusiastic about studying ancient Greek and Roman history. I have a friend who has read probably a hundred books on the subject and can name all the emperors, wars, bishops, dates, etc. My own education provided none of that and it is one area I’m attempting to patch up a bit. Next up is Eusebius.
As for the level of interest though, I think I have realized an important reason behind it. People study Rome because they CAN. Of all the hundreds of interesting cultures and civilizations in history, the Romans actually wrote everything down.
Constantine was converted to Christianity in 313 AD and we have tons of information about it – many volumes written by local historians, records of the laws he made, even quite a few of his own personal letters.
In parallel, the emperor of Ethiopia was also converted around 330 AD. What do we know about him though and what he did? Almost nothing. One of the few clues we have that it even happened is that he changed the pagan moon and star symbol on the local currency to that of a cross. Archeologists have also dug up some old churches from soon after. That’s about it though – barely even enough to start filling things in with your imagination. Contrast that with the mounds of primary data we have about Rome during the exact same century.
In the book on Rome I am reading, the bibliography is thick. In the book on Ethiopia, the “bibliography” is largely a list of 100+ names of people that were interviewed by the author. At least half of his task was to just to sort through the legends and come to some sort of consensus before he could begin to comment on the past.
What will people in the distant future have to study our age? 100,000 hours of CNN on archive? Will everyone’s old blog still be floating around the cloud? I’d still like to put something in print.