I admit to experiencing a sinking feeling today when I saw that the New York Times had decided to bring its investigative powers to bear on Biola University, an evangelical Christian school in Los Angeles. I count an uncle and cousin among the school's graduates, and my brother was the school's commencement speaker last year. As such, I feel some fondness for the school, and I know enough about it to recognize that its fundamentalist strain of Christianity would be prime fodder for the Times' unique brand of smarter-than-thou journalism. To my surprise, the Times did a fairly decent job of trying to engage the school on its own terms, letting students tell their stories and keeping the reporter's own right-thinking secularist subtitles to a minimum.
In the end, of course, the Times has to let it be known that all is not right with the Biola worldview, especially to the extent that the worldview presumes to have the answer to the world's questions. The article's concluding paragraph deconstructs two students' efforts to witness to Nicole, a cashier at the local Starbucks:
Brittany and Krista [the Biola students] hung on Nicole's every word as if they were lucky to be talking to her at all. They interrupted a story about her daughter's birthday party to ask exactly what kind of cake Nicole ordered. Although their purpose in getting to know Nicole was to save her soul, part of their motivation appeared more mundane: Nicole is simply different from anyone they know. The women's interest in her stories, the way they lingered over the details, seemed to express something about the world -- the unredeemed, unsaved, unchurched part -- that was not evident in their public prayers in church. Going off campus, even just a mile away, was interesting because it was unpredictable. Talking to the Starbucks bikers or Nicole was compelling on its own terms; Brittany and Krista, like many of the Biola students I met, enjoyed not knowing what would happen. On some level, they seemed already to know what . . . is evident in the often open-ended, messy tales of the Bible: that the most compelling stories unfold when you don't start out with the answer.
I don't regularly (ever) chat up area merchants for the purpose of saving their souls, and I'd be very hesitant to endorse that approach to evangelism. But my hesitation has nothing to do with whether or not I believe that life's deepest questions have an answer. And I'm not sure that the "open-ended, messy tales of the Bible" lead to the epistemological void suggested by the Times reporter. Admittedly, Paul's journey to Damascus begins without Paul having the answer, but the story is compelling, of course, because of the unmistakable terms with which he becomes familiar with the answer during the journey. And from that point on, Paul's life is driven by the certainty of his answer, making for pretty compelling adventures. The same can be said for the other New Testament followers of Christ, as well as Old Testament figures who received singular answers to their existential cries, such as Jonah (answer = whale), Abraham (ram), Job (God), Moses (burning bush), etc.
The Times' implicit suggestion seems to be that the most rewarding way to engage life is to affirm our mutual cluelessness as to its meaning. For those who reject the viability of divine revelation, perhaps this is an entirely sensible proposition. But don't drag the Bible in as support for that mindset.
Rob
On September 2, Fr. George Rutler presided over a prayer service at NYC's Church of Our Savior attended by President Bush. Here's an excerpt from his sermon, which was based on the Gospel account of Jesus calming the storm:
In Galilee there was a storm and the waves of the sea shook the fishermen's ship. What they called a sea was a lake and what they called a ship was a boat and what they called a storm was one of the countless storms that have rattled the world; but to die is to die, whether on a lake or a sea, whether in a boat or a ship, whether by one storm or all the tides and turnings of the universe. Through it all Jesus lay on a cushion asleep. The men woke him: "Master, don't you care that we are dying?" Jesus rose. The men had awakened eyes that never sleep. Jesus did not rebuke the men. He rebuked the wind. How does one rebuke the wind? Did he groan or shout or cry a language unknown to us? He stared at the violent waves like a mechanic looking at a noisy machine: "Peace. Be still." The sea became like glass.
Everyone here knows what storms are, and how many kinds there are. "Doesn't God care that we are dying?"
. . . .
There is a picture of Saint Thomas More, the "Man for All Seasons." There is a picture of courage. He coined two words: Utopia and Anarchy. There can be no Utopia in the storms of this world, and yet if the winds that blow are not rebuked there will be anarchy. Pope John Paul II declared Saint Thomas the patron saint of statesmen and politicians. . . . He said that Thomas More teaches that "government is above all an exercise of virtue. Unwavering in this rigorous moral stance, this English statesman placed his own public activity at the service of the person, especially if that person was weak or poor; he dealt with social controversies with a superb sense of fairness; he was vigorously committed to favoring and defending the family; he supported the all-round education of the young." With such courage, Thomas More joyfully declared at his execution: "I die the King's good servant, but God's first."
The first letter I ever received was sent to me by my father during the Second World War. He was sailing on a Liberty ship of the Merchant Marine on the Murmansk Run. His letter was addressed to me care of my mother because I was still in her womb. He told me to be good. He said his ship had gone through some storms and U-boats kept circling around, but "everything is fine."
Today stormy controversies attend questions of biotechnology on the micro level and world politics on the macro level. The answers are not easy but they are simple: everything will be fine so long as human rights respect the rights of God. The deepest question is, "Why did God make you?" The simplest answer that calms every storm is this: "God made me to know Him, to love Him and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in Heaven."
Rob
Thursday, September 2, 2004
The campus ministry of Catholic Relief Services has put together an effective website called Campus Connection to help students, faculty, and staff engage the world around them.
Rob
With the rise of the secularist/religious split on matters of culture, law and politics, sniping between evangelicals and Catholics has decreased remarkably in the last twenty years. There are still occasional signs of tension, however, especially when a vocally moral evangelical is pitted against a purportedly amoral Catholic in the race for President.
Marvin Olasky, the intellectual guru of compassionate conservatism, recently wrote a column in which he characterizes himself and Bush as not having had "to save ourselves: God alone saves sinners (and I can surely add, of whom I was the worst). Being born again, we don't have to justify ourselves. Being saved, we don't have to be saviors. John Kerry, once-born, has no such spiritual support, nor do most of his top admirers in the heavily secularized Democratic Party."
In his speech last night, Zell Miller indicated that he "can identify with someone [like Bush] who has lived that line in 'Amazing Grace,' 'Was blind, but now I see.'" Given that this line was delivered in the midst of a maelstrom of Kerry-bashing, the implication is clear: Kerry is still blind, or (more charitably) that he simply lacks such a "road to Damascus" moment.
Catholics are "born again" (born of the flesh and born of the spirit), but most lack the singular conversion experience of evangelicals, instead being gradually formed as Christians through a series of deliberate decisions. Why on earth would calling attention to this distinction be relevant in today's religious and political climate? Is there enough lingering anti-Catholic sentiment among the GOP's evangelical base that Olasky or Miler might think that an "us versus them" signal holds promise? Maybe these are just stray comments, but they struck me as holdovers from a thankfully bygone era.
Rob
Wednesday, September 1, 2004
Beliefnet's Steven Waldman has an interesting blog tracking religious themes at the GOP convention. Previously, he has argued that the purported "God gap" between the parties is simply a church attendance gap, pointing out that other measures of faith (e.g., daily prayer) do not vary too much between Dems and Republicans. He uses this thesis to put a different spin on the question that has been discussed endlessly by the politically and religiously minded among us:
At a panel discussion Tuesday morning, Michael Cromartie, head of Evangelical Studies at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, suggested that the gap exists because 15% of Democratic voters now are secular, and the party has avoided religious rhetoric and moved to the left on social issues in order to appease that voting block. That in turn has made the party less welcoming to religious voters. The two Democratic panel members disagreed with each other over whether that was true. Mike McCurry, Bill Clinton's former press secretary, felt there was a grain of truth to that theory, but his old friend John Podesta, the former White House chief of staff, said he couldn't recall a single meeting where any adjustments in rhetoric or policy were made to appeal to secularists. "I just have never heard that point made," he said.
This being the Republican convention, the focus was on what mistakes the two political parties have made. But it's also time we asked what this God gap says about religion. Conversely, the question is not why less-frequent attenders vote Democratic, but why Democrats are drawn to church less often. Why are progressive houses of worship unable to create an urgent reason for liberal people to show up on Sundays?
That's a good question, and undoubtedly many factors are implicated. Skeptics will say that attendance drops as the threat of eternal damnation recedes into the background. Let me offer one other possibility. I've attended conservative evangelical churches, Episcopal churches that fall squarely in the "progressive" column, and Catholic churches. In my experience, as churches become more suspicious of the "supernatural" elements of scripture and church tradition (a suspicion that pervades much of mainline Protestantism and provided the foundation for modern evangelicalism's rise), it becomes more difficult to maintain a communal conception of Christianity as a set of transcendent truth claims. Commitments to worthy social causes and fellowship must be central to any Christian congregation, but without an abiding belief that the faith tradition is more than a tradition, church involvement has the tendency to take its place among the ranks of worthwhile activities to be pursued as time permits, rather than a non-negotiable manifestation of a person's core convictions.
Rob
