Give God __, and __ will bless you

The WSJ has an interesting longer reported piece about tithing.

I grew up in an evangelical context, in which tithing was taken literally. The "give God what's rightfully God's his, and he will bless you with even more" line was used liberally--an argument that's manipulative at the least and can easily lead to the nightmare of the prosperity gospel world (though, thankfully and to my home church's credit, this hasn't happened there).

The thing that makes me mad is when a church combines this sort of God-will-bless-you line w/ an insistence that God's blessing and care is purely a spiritual and/or miraculous thing, and not the role of the church itself (aka "Christ's feet and hands"). Individual congregations' handling of this seems to be all over the map.

"These days many evangelicals talk like premillennialists but act like postmillennialists"

Collin Hansen predicts a shift in evangelical eschatology.

"It was in fact the grinch himself who believed that Christmas came in a box"

Bill McKibben on Christmas gift giving.

"Well, Jesus didn't get it quite right."

Scripps Howard has a good piece by Terry Mattingly about the re-purposing of a Christian bumper sticker with an (originally) anti-consumption message.

(Thanks, Get Religion.)

McCain and evangelicals

World magazine--my favorite quite-conservative-but-generally-not-reactionary evangelical publication--has a cover story on John McCain's overtures to evangelical voters. It's essentially a news piece, w/o a lot of commentary, although the multiple "Some evangelicals think..."-type statements always ring oddly coming from such an ideologically movtivated pub.

Anyway, the fact that he's on the cover of this sort of magazine and in a neutral-to-positive piece inside is itself significant, given how coolly the religious right has received his candidacy (despite his tough-on-terror and anti-abortion bona fides).

Defining the most confusing word in the cultural-religious lexicon

Touchstone has an informative scholarly forum on evangelicalism--what it is, how it's changed, etc. They plan to do similar forums on the mainline, Catholic, and Orthodox churches in the next year.

Joel Stein on going out for Mexican food with Rep. Tancredo

Pretty funny stuff.

I do, however, take issue with Stein's suggestion that there is good Mexican food in Washington, DC. Or, if he's right, I'd really, really like to know where.

Buy Nothing Day

Also: Don't forget that today is Buy Nothing Day. Not even a hybrid car, super-greenwashed-whatever-kind-of-junk, or indulgences carbon offsets.

I'm never able to observe the day too strictly, as it's traditional in my family to go out for dinner the night after Thanksgiving. Maybe I'll observe it tomorrow, instead--I just learned that, outside the States, it's observed Saturday instead of Friday.

Hymns of harvest and gratitude

When I lived in Chicago, I had a church music position. We always did a Thanksgiving Eve service, which I've come to miss. It tended to function largely as a hymn sing, with a bunch of songs focused on gratitude.

It's a bit odd in our present-day culture that, in our Christian hymnody, the themes of gratitude and harvest tend to be weaved together. The sad truth is that this connection means a lot less to most people now than it did years ago. "Come You Thankful People, Come," "We Gather Together," "Great is Thy Faithfulness," "Praise and Thanskgiving"...to mitigate this oddness, I tended to choose also general-use hymns such as "Now Thank We All Our God" and "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing."

I can think of few things that would do more for our collective spirituality (not to mention our local economies and the natural world) than a general reconnection with ideas of gratitude and harvest and the relationship between the two. Personally, perhaps a more immediate goal will be to write some music for worship that somehow resonates with contemporary experiences of trying to treat food with more reverence, mindfulness, and gratitude.

Hope you're enjoying your food-coma Friday as much as I'm enjoying mine. Happy Thanksgiving.

Farm bill fails to get 60 votes

Meaning the Democrats can't cut off debate.

AP Story

Which makes a better lede? "Bishops address citizenship" or "Bishops: You might end up in hell"?

RNS piece on the Catholic Bishops' statement leads with the most incendiary part of the statement. So does Cathy Lynn Grossman in USA Today, though she also details the process that led to the relatively tame statement in question.

Some good responses from Melissa Rogers and Beth Dahlman.

"Pretty much everything is natural, including this sentence."

Good piece over at McSweeney's about Whole Foods and labeling.

More on the GOP candidates

Matt Taibbi has a lively but fairly stupid piece about Mike Huckabee. He thinks Huckabee's quite electable; his social conservatism and economic populism make him appealing in much the same way as the blue dog Democrats who got elected last year, an apt comparison to...a Republican primary situation... Anyway, for Taibbi, the downside of Huckabee is not electability or the difficulty in acquiring widespread conservative support. Instead, it's the fact that he's a conservative evangelical, and thus crazy.

Also, a very telling post over at World on the Web: Clint Rainey raises the much-rehearsed question as to "the merits of any GOP candidate [on abortion], since three of the top four have previously or still do support abortion." Three of the top four? Any outside observer would immediately ask, "well...what about the fourth?" To which there's no very satisfying answer: just "he once said some mean things about some really extreme, mean people who don't really represent most evangelicals anymore; and he backed a law that made it harder for interest groups--including but by no means limited to the anti-abortion lobby and its allies--to bully lawmakers with money."

The post ends with this: "The only candidate who’s been pro-life his entire 25 years in politics? John McCain." But just this--no explanation/exploration of why evangelicals refuse, based largely on flimsy grudges, to give Sen. McCain the time of day.

The historical fear of a "writers' soviet"

Sean Mitchell has a very interesting piece in the LAT about the history behind the very different ways writers are treated in Hollywood vs. the theater.

A nostalgic music post w/ nary a faith angle

When it comes to technology, I've always been a bit of a late adopter. (Did I mention that I recently started one of those crazy new BLOGS?) But as a music nut and stereotypically male obsessive list-maker, I was thrilled with the computer-based-music-collection thing and got in relatively (not extremely) early. It was just like always for people like me, except instead of a database file with a numerical code referenced to a CD on a huge shelf (yes, really), you could just CLICK ON THE SONG AND IT PLAYED. Incredible.

Anyway, whenever I take a road trip, I end up listening to CDs instead of mp3s. The byproduct of this is that I end up listening to older music, from back when I used to buy CDs--making a drive halfway across the country in a rented minivan full of everything I own to begin a new chapter of my life also function as a trip down memory lane. It's hard to drive safely through the tears...

Anyway, while I fear turning into the nostalgic-for-the-music-of-my-youth type that people pushing 30 tend to start turning into, I sure enjoyed the music during my move last week. A couple highlights:

Vigilantes of Love. Used to be one of my very favorite bands. Influenced my early songwriting, in which I tended to cram in an awful lot of dense ideas and hundreds of (often multisyllabic) words. I listened to their two least country/folk, most hard-rocking albums--the early, polished, hotshot-band Welcome to Struggleville and the middle-period, shoestring-budget-scrappy Slow, Dark Train. My two favorites--each is dark and brooding, each is clever, each features a reference to Salome's weight problem in the first track (!). I've since burned out on long-form confessional songwriting, but these albums still sound great.

U2. I've always been ambivalent to their wider catalog, but I love the 90s stuff, in which they're more playful and less anthemic, in terms of both production and lyrics (more silly wordplay, less political browbeating--have you heard that Bono's an activist, too?). Anyway, I rocked Achtung Baby and sang along w/ every word in order to stay awake from Chicago to Wisconsin.

The Innocence Mission. An enduring favorite, possibly my favorite band by now. But the older, more upbeat stuff still holds up well, too--sounds like the Sundays, but better.

Tom Waits. Hardly a timepiece and still my very favorite songwriter. Most Waits fans seem to fall into one of a few categories:

• "Closing Time is so tender and wonderful; why did he have to get so weird and start singing like Howlin' Wolf instead of Springsteen?"
• "Mule Variations is the best album of any kind in history."
  
• "All of the albums are wonderful, even the loungey 70s stuff and especially the angular 80s stuff. Mule Variations is fine, but its partisans are lightweights and dabblers."

I've alternated between the second and third options over the years. But I'm also among a minority of folks who think that Alice and Blood Money--the two very different albums he released on the same day in 2002 and two of the last CDs I ever bought--are as good as anything he's ever done. One is gorgeous and lush; the other dark and sinister. Both channel his jazz interests into something not loungey but chamber-ish and his circus fascination into something quieter than the old carnival-barker stuff he used to do. Great arrangements and some really astonishing songs.

For the second leg of the trip--from SE Wisconsin to St. Paul--I didn't have a CD player. So I listened to a lot of Wisconsin Public Radio, with its endless local talk shows and their socially-conservative-economically-moderate callers in, and I welcomed the familiar accents. But I missed the rock.

"If I have to choose between having the leader or all their followers, I'll take their followers any day."

Michael Sherer has one of the better of the many Huckabee interviews of late.

Popcak on abortion

Gregory Popcak has a more-insightful-than-average defense of faith-based opposition to abortion, written in response to this Gary Wills book excerpt. Both pieces are pretty much intellectual abortion boilerplate; they don't break a lot of new ground but do provide a nice summary of some of the more thoughtful (i.e., less reactionary and screamy) arguments out there. (The two aren't neatly opposed, either: Popcak writes from a Catholic perspective, while Wills focuses his criticism on evangelicals, and they do have some points of agreement.)

Popcak situates the epistles historically to connect a couple passages to the common Roman practice of abortion. He also cites more explicit condemnation in not only the church fathers but also non-canonical early church writings. All of this is interesting but also begs the question why the New Testament doesn't include explicit condemnation of abortion. (This is, or should be, especially problematic in an evangelical context, which tends to deny the influence of the fathers and other non-scriptural sources--even as it endorses, say, trinitarian doctrine.) People often try to argue that Paul and others were addressing their own culture and not ours--tellingly, one of the only times you'll hear such talk from conservative evangelicals--but that dog won't hunt: abortion was as common in the wider culture then as it is now.

Anyway, Popcak offers a good summary of how anti-abortion Christians can do a lot better than "it's murder and God hates murder but liberals love it."

Gov. Ryan reports to prison

My former governor started serving his six-and-a-half-year sentence for racketeering and fraud yesterday.

It was exciting to be in Illinois while he--a Republican!--was creating what is now an increasingly popular model for aggressive gubernatorial action against the numerous problems of the death penalty. He had plans to try to take this work to the international level after leaving office, but instead some of the less-impressive parts of his tenure as governor caught up with him. Here's hoping he's got some energy left when he gets out.

Letter I'd like to send to Obama

Dear Sen. Obama,

I am extremely excited about your campaign. I lived in Chicago in 2004, and it was thrilling to for once watch the underdog, inspiring candidate actually rise to the top and win. It's incredible that the Democrats right now have the opportunity to nominate a single candidate who has arguably the best liberal bona fides of the frontrunners AND the best crossover appeal to Republicans--along with being a person of color. I strongly believe that you have the potential to bring the country together, not by merely endorsing centrist-consensus sort of stuff but by showing genuine respect to people who disagree with you while providing bold moral leadership at home and abroad.

I also understand that, however bold and pure some of your goals might be, you won't make it through a national election without the occasional strategic compromise. So, here is my promise: if you will unequivocably revoke this shameless pandering and nonsensical attack on Sen. Clinton's slightly-less-shameless triangulating by, say January 4, I might actually show up at the polls to vote for you.

Or maybe I'll calm down in a day or so. Not like energy policy matters that much these days.

Best,
Steve

I'm back in blog-action, with a long-winded post about evangelicals and politics to prove it

Long time, no blsee. In the last week, I've completed my move from Washington, DC to Saint Paul, MN, with time in between to spend a few day with my brothers in Wisconsin and to meet a beautiful new baby born to friends in Chicago.

Meanwhile, looks like the non-third-party-threatening religious right leaders disagree about which GOP frontrunner is least bad but, Rick Scarborough excepted, agree that a long-shot SOUTHERN BAPTIST PASTOR somehow Sucksabee.

"Long shot?" you may ask. "Huckabee's polling second in Iowa. Why aren't these guys supporting him?" In particular, you might question, as Gail Collins does, why Pat Robertson--who holds more-lunatic-than-Jerry-Falwell unusual views on, among other things, 9/11--is supporting Rudy Giuliani. Collins:

Now this is the part that I have never been able to get. When did government spending become part of the divine agenda? Is there something in the Bible about smiting down federal bureaucrats?

Oh, Gail. How quaint to assume that religious right heavyweights look primarily to the Bible for guidance! They don't NEED to read it; they've long since memorized the verses that matter.

The reason Mike may be out of Luckabee with God's Bullies has nothing to do with the Bible and everything to do with their unholy alliances with the neocon establishment, and, especially, the free-market and small-government fundamendalists. Huckabee may talk a pretty good tough-on-terror game, but I'm pretty sure he's never...happened to be the mayor of a city on the day it was attacked. But it's especially his populist streak that makes these guys keep their distance.

The WSJ and the Dallas Morning News each have fairly predictable gosh-this-means-there's-a-split-among-evangelicals pieces (I think these are written by computer software by now, like Bob Herbert's columns). But as Amy Sullivan and others have been saying for awhile, the evangelical split that will matter in the election is not between conservatives and moderates or even between hardliners and pragmatists. It's between the religious right big shots--the people who endorse and anti-endorse candidates but most (not all) of whom don't have and have never had formal, church-based authority--and the people in the pews.

Why should average evangelicals be beholden to the fiscal conservatives if they don't want to be? They know how to read their Bibles. In fact, they're the theological inheritors of the most reductive distilled version of the Reformation values of local autonomy and sola scriptura. If they disagree with those who claim to speak for them, most of them don't need to go through a long and painful process of re-aligning themselves with different leaders, perhaps thousands of miles away. All they have to do cancel their Focus on the Family subscription, stop responding to Family Research Council action alerts, and practice that great and terrible evangelical tradition of reading the Bible for themselves.

Richard Land--of the SBC and thus an exception to the rule of non-church-based religious right leadership--understands this. The otherwise dull Morning News piece includes this great bit:

Mr. Land has not endorsed anyone.

"No one can deliver evangelical voters to the candidate but the candidate," he said. "They have a way of deciding for themselves."

I've long been skeptical of the evangelical-crackup narrative, as I don't feel we've seen much significant evidence of the reach of various moderating/broadening influences. But I'm more hopeful about this than I've been in the past. And, while this is about far more than electoral politics, I do think that some of the evidence will be in the future fortunes of the Huckabee campaign after losing some major endorsements (though, importantly, not all to the same rival). It's a blow that he didn't get Brownback's and Weyrich's endorsements--the value of Robertson's is at this point debatable, a subject I won't take up in this already-too-long post--but it's too soon to say that Huckabee's chances with evangelical voters are Hucked.