Archive for March, 2010

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” “Why kill the Buddha?” “Because the Buddha you meet on the road is not the true Buddha but an expression of your longing.” Thus begins Jeff Sharlet’s Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible. If quirky Buddhist fables work as theological slants for religion journalists, this one would be Sharlet’s. The fable expresses what he sees as the phenomenon of religion in modern America: a land full of Buddhas masquerading as the Buddha, a nation full of different Christianities with different Jesuses to match. One need only replace Buddha with Jesus and vistas of fascinating American religious groups emerge—often falling under his description as ‘conservative,’ ‘fundamentalist,’ or ‘evangelical,’ (or some combination thereof).

As a contributing editor for both Harper’s and Rolling Stone and the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of America Power, it seems natural to assume that Jeff Sharlet would be less than sympathetic toward religious groups who consider themselves politically ‘right’ or theologically ‘evangelical.’ Yet his other work with the online publications, The Revealer and Killing the Buddha, captures Sharlet’s more subtle vision of the American religious landscape, something he considers complex and worthy of serious engagement.

These publications reveal something else about Sharlet—he’s a heretic. And he writes for heretics, a notion he picked up from John Milbank, of all people. Milbank explained to Sharlet, during an interview in 2000, that to be a heretic meant one at least valued something in the old tradition enough to disagree with it. The old faith is worth critiquing, and the heretic, by definition, could not exist without it. Sharlet embraces the title, signifying he is a writer who both “believe[s] there’s something worth paying attention to within tradition and scripture, even as there’s much to critique,” and that no one story has the whole story. Put heresy “to a tune,” Sharlet writes, “and you get cacophony, not harmony, a song that’s part punk, part country, part gospel, part death metal.”

Sharlet’s own religious background reflects this theological posture. He describes himself as “a Jew raised by a Pentecostal Hindu Buddhist” mother who asked “Charismatic Christians to pray over her as she lay dying.” Sharlet confesses that growing up his mother encouraged him to explore other churches and temples, collecting people’s stories. “In my family, that’s just how you did religion.” This he believes contributes to the kind of religion writer he is—someone who “gravitates towards stories about what people believe and don’t believe and how that affects their lives.”

For such a mixed religious heritage, Sharlet’s work tends to focus on America’s Christian Right, albeit, in all its variety, as he insists. He writes on topics such as megachurch pastors and their relationship with political leaders, sexuality in evangelical youth culture, male ‘headship’ in conservative Christian marital literature, and Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri. To name a few.

Although these topics might seem like ploys for bashing fundamentalists, Sharlet displays some degree of restraint and deftness. His article, “Soldiers of Christ: Inside America’s Most Powerful Megachurch” is a good example. The article is about New Life Church in Colorado Springs, at the time pastored by Ted Haggard (prior to his public scandal). Sharlet portrays New Life as one might imagine—a church selling Christianity as a suburban lifestyle in a market economy of spiritual consumerism. To Sharlet, Ted Haggard isn’t shepherding the flock, he is selling Jesus and a lot of people are buying. But not everyone. A section of the article details a home-visit he had with a small group of the church. There he discovered a hidden texture to the Christianity he encountered—a group of folks in their 20s and 30s caught between strong disagreements with Haggard and their nagging sense of loyalty to the church community. His experience with the group did not alter his overall thesis, but it certainly added to the article a refreshing air of complication.

Sharlet’s ability to capture the gray shades of America’s Christian Right comes from a keen theological acumen (quite impressive for someone with no formal theological education) and a talent for solid, bold reporting. Research for Killing the Buddha took him and his co-author, Peter Manseau, all over the country meeting people, eating with them, praying with them, participating in their worship services, small groups, and unique communal practices. His work on The Family is no different. The Family, Sharlet’s most popular work to date, exposes an elite group of ‘Christian’ politicians and world leaders supported by a young ‘brotherhood’ being groomed for positions of leadership. Sharlet managed to live for several months with the brotherhood at their estate, Ivanwald, on the false premise that they “had mistaken my interest in Jesus for belief.” Over the course of several years, he rummaged through thousands of documents discarded by ‘The Family’ at the Billy Graham Center in Wheaton, IL.

Although the popularity of his stories arise from a knack to write about fundamentalism with nuance, scrappy reporting, and a resistance to stereotype, eventually they all begin to run together as one large meta-narrative. The setting, characters, and conflict may change, but almost every story ends the same: this is dark and scary and happening right under our noses.

Sharlet’s writing becomes more interesting once his topics branch away from the Christian Right. Which they do and with a fair degree of variety. Whether he is interviewing John Milbank at a coffee shop in Charlottesville, chatting about postsecularism with Rowan Williams over the phone, or talking the blues-like nature of theology with the ever-so-cool Cornel West in a basement pub in Princeton, Sharlet’s prose give the impression he is equally at ease with each. He has a gift for translating sophisticated theological projects (like Radical Orthodoxy) into language that someone with an undergraduate course in Western Philosophy 101 could handle. He even manages to draw connections between the sweet falsettos of Al Green and the possibility of the transcendent.

But what makes Sharlet’s writing laudatory also warrants criticism. His flare for the sacrilegious tends to cloud his judgment and shape his descriptions, both of people and institutions. In his article, “Holy Fools,” he piggy-backs on Frank Schaeffer’s (Francis’ son) portrayal of L’Abri in the ’60s and ’70s as “a place of blasting music at all hours, drugs, sex and rock’n'roll.” The comment sparked a slew of responses from previous L’Abri residents and most notably, Os Guinness (Christian writer and long time friend of Francis Schaeffer’s), decrying the description as a ’tissue of falseness.’ The L’Abri article earned Sharlet other enemies as well. Regular Books & Culture contributor, Alan Jacobs, has made Sharlet an object of criticism in several articles, resulting in a public exchange of words between the two, where Sharlet felt the need to defend himself, protesting that he is not “some fanged enemy of Christendom.”

Yet for a writer who makes a career as a heretic killing Buddhas, Jeff Sharlet should expect, on occasion, that someone will want to burn him at the stake.

You’re Going to Hell, Boy

It’s two a.m. and I open my email to find the word “REPENT” in all capital letters in the body of the first message I open. Not only am I told to repent, I’m also told I’m going to hell. This is the third time in a week I’ve been threatened with eternal damnation via email. Emails from the occasional backwards Christian kook are entertaining, as well as depressing: some members of the Christian faith are truly ridiculous. My email attackers generally don’t offer real critiques and rarely explain why they’re writing. I slouch in my desk chair and pray, “Lord, save me from your followers.”

Why do I get these hateful emails? In February 2010, I co-founded a website called Churchrater.com, which lets users write reviews of churches, much like they’d review restaurants on Yelp.com. You might think, “This is a great idea! I’ve been waiting for someone to do this for years.” Or, like the libelous emailer, you think: “This is the final straw. This monster is turning church into Wal-Mart with free crackers.” Either way, I’m pushing forward. This is my charge of the light brigade: I’m going to take flak, but I believe Churchrater.com can be a positive tool for religious democracy.

Church Rating Has Been Going On For Awhile

The basic premise of Churchrater is nothing new. People have been “rating churches” for centuries.  As a Roman Catholic–dare I say it?–what the heck do you think Martin Luther was trying to do?  Go back to the first century; the majority of the New Testament is made up of letters from one party to another that included critiques, instructions, rebukes, compliments and evaluations.  Look at ancient Israel: Amos and Isaiah are harsh critics of God’s children. And if you’re under the delusion that those prophets, especially Amos, wouldn’t rail against the current state of the church, it’s time to reflect on what you think Bible is really about.

‘The times they are a changin.’ Like many other 22-year-old students, I don’t own a phone book. Who needs paper when I have Google on my smart phone? Young people are going to use sites like Churchrater.com to find essential services for the rest of their lives. Churchrater.com does a better job helping people get useful information on church services, because, let’s face it: Church websites are more like advertisements than accurate explanations. I wouldn’t trust a salesman to give me a balanced review of his product in same way I wouldn’t trust a churchgoer to give me a fair description of her church’s services.

Handing Over The Power

Churchrater.com gives underrepresented followers a voice. The Christian church has historically been patriarchal. The democracy brought by the Internet can shake the very foundations of these patriarchal structures. With Churchrater.com, women and the poor can voice their opinions in a truly democratic forum that social structures within their churches may not allow.  Christians don’t preach the Gospel: they bludgeon with it. The Gospel doesn’t preach “Stop abortion and gay marriage,” as the Religious Right over the last few decades would have us believe. If there’s one thing outsiders like about Christianity, it’s our service for the downtrodden. When I read the Gospel, I see “preach the Gospel, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and house the homeless.” The message of loving service has been subsumed by a message of hate. Churchrater.com is a soapbox for Christians and outsiders to tell the world how they feel about church and what they think Church should be about. For centuries, Christians have been issuing vague threats of hellfire to outsiders and telling them what to think about church. It’s time for Christians to stop shouting and start listening. Christians need to evangelize with their ears: Churchrater.com gives insiders and outsiders the ability to engage in open and constructive dialogue about the essence of church and Christianity.

The Courage To Listen

What makes this environment so special? Churchrater.com is a seam state: it’s not church, and it’s not “the world;” it’s a place where insiders and outsiders can be comfortable discussing their hopes, concerns, and ideas about the church. I like to think of Churchrater.com as a type of demilitarized zone for Christianity where dialogue, not invective and recrimination, is the mainstay of insider-outsider discourse. This is why Churchrater.com is not a Christian ministry: I started the site with an Evangelical and an atheist in order to have this kind of broad conversation.

During my undergrad years, I came to an impasse: I could write books my whole life about how to do church, or I couldcreate a democratic tool where everyone could work toward changing church. The latter struck me as a much better course of action after I read Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. He says the three basic concepts of social media and crowdsourcing are making a promise, offering a tool and striking a bargain. Churchrater promises users the ability to rate and find churches, and we created a tool (the site) that allows users to do just that. But the reality of the Internet is such that we can’t control how our audience chooses to use this tool. I can’t use Churchrater to drive people to my “radically liberal,” Catholic Worker approach to ecclesiology. I have to give the power away. Because people have different criteria for what a “good church” is, I’ve promoted this tool with the hope that people are going to change their churches for the better. I don’t expect or even want homogeneity: I want to have a national conversation about how we do church.

Join me–it’s Parishioner Power!

W. David O. Taylor, ed., For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts (Grand Rapids: BakerBooks, 2010).

In 2008 pastors and artists converged on Austin, Texas for a symposium called “Transforming Culture: A Vision for the Church and the Arts” organized by David Taylor—then Arts Pastor of Hope Chapel in Austin, and now Duke ThD student. Happily, Taylor has just published an edited volume of essays by speakers at the symposium (plus contributions from two who were not, and ample illustrations) so the rest of us can engage with its vision. For the Beauty of the Church is a remarkable collection of essays from academics, pastors and artists aiming, as Taylor puts it in the introduction, to “inspire the church, in its life and mission, with an expansive vision of the arts.” These essays provide an inspiring vision, always framed theologically and made concrete through practical stories and suggestions. Rather than offering a summary of the book’s contents (Taylor provides a nice overview on pages 23–26), here I want to consider a few questions the book raises in order encourage you to read it yourself.

One question is the utility of art. What purpose does art serve that might justify its place in a world of scarcity? Some writers argue that this misses the point of art. In the opening essay Andy Crouch argues “art and worship stand together on the common ground of the unuseful.” His point is that both art and worship are ultimately tied to our view of human nature. If the final explanation of human culture is in terms of biological or economic utility, then ultimately humans themselves are only useful (which has chilling implications for those deemed to lack usefulness). The challenge for the church, Crouch concludes, is to “bend our lives toward the recognition of Christ’s body, beautiful and broken, at play and in pain….to discover Christ taking, blessing, breaking, giving.” (Note here the emphasis on honest engagement with the brokenness of the world, a theme that pervades these essays, and is tonic to those weary of overly sentimental “Christian art.”) Similarly, Barbara Nicolosi, a Catholic screenwriter in Hollywood, says in her essay that art “is useless—except as a vehicle for the beautiful.” By which she means that art is about responding thankfully to God’s gratuitous gift of the cosmos. Thus, following Pope John Paul II, she writes that artists function in a sort of “priestly” role insofar as their being and work leads to praise of God. For both Crouch and Nicolosi art, like Creation itself, is not reducible to utility.

On the other hand, Lauren Winner—in the creatively titled essay, “The Art Patron: Someone Who Can’t Draw a Straight Line Tries to Defend Her Art-Buying Habit”—traces the function of art in North American Christianity and concludes that art is useful. “A Christian understanding of art involves a recognition that art does things,” she writes. “In our Christian history, art mattered. For good and for ill, it was a key part of the Christian experience. Art had a purpose. It taught children to love the Bible. It schooled viewers in theological stories. Sometimes it incited violence. Sometimes it directed Sunday worshipers’ attention heavenward.” Winner does not disagree with the types of arguments for the uselessness of beauty that Crouch and Nicolosi advance, but she points out what such arguments tend to obscure: the uses to which art has been put.

For the Beauty of the Church is made more compelling by the inclusion of pastoral voices, all of which speak frankly of his or her failures and successes with engaging the arts in the churches. These pastoral voices add a where-rubber-meets-the-road legitimacy to the collection. For example, Eugene Peterson discusses how he learned more about what it is to be a pastor from his interactions with artists than he did from his seminary professors, primarily because the artists he met upheld a distinction between their vocation as artist and whatever job they were doing to pay the bills. Joshua Banner, the Minister of Music and Art at hope College, offers a fecund metaphor of the pastor as farmer, patiently and carefully nurturing those in his or her charge. “As patient, careful stewards,” he writes, “we, as pastors and leaders, can nourish the soil of our culture by the way we love artist intentionally—loving not only their artwork, but who they are as persons in process.” Like farmers with land, pastors must nurture artists, he says, not exploit them.

In the last essay in the collection, Jeremy Begbie gives the richest theological account of the future of arts and the Church, by beginning with God’s future. “The Spirit arrives with a vision of the future already assured,” he writes, “and invites us to share in his work of re-creating the present in the light of that future.” His depiction of a vision for the arts and the Church “when the Spirit comes from the future” is hopeful, subversive, and challenging.

Hopeful is perhaps the best adjective to describe For the Beauty of the Church. As even the brief, selective sampling presented here shows, the compelling vision these essays put forward just might engender fuller engagement of the arts by the churches. Let us hope that it helps contribute to a more beautiful Church.

Sometimes
I almost see it
A tremor of inspiration
A gossamer descent
A dove?
Reaction to unseen action
Dancing amidst stillness
Falling cloth?
Clarity of new sunshine
Light tickled by water
Holy spirit?
Promise at vision’s edge
Sometimes

“Can you teach us to memorize something?”  It was a question I never expected. My questioners were two fourteen-year-old boys who earlier that morning had been jumping off large rocks with sharp sticks in their hands and antagonizing a bees’ nest.  This was my summer field ed placement, a camp in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, leading backpacking trips.  The boys had been acting exactly as one would expect fourteen-year-olds to act, but the next minute they were asking questions about the Trinity and the Incarnation and then to memorize Scripture.  Perplexed but elated I spent the next three miles of the day’s hike doing a call-and-response memorization of the prologue of John.  And they loved every bit of it.

It was a teaching moment I could never have predicted, could never even have imagined in my wildest dreams—especially in upstate New York, where the Bible is not particularly taught, known, or appreciated.  But it was also a learning moment.  The paradox that these boys embodied—that of both jumping off rocks and crying out to the Rock—struck me then and now as nothing short of beautiful. Is this what it means to be truly human?  To engage our physicality and also our noetic capacities? To be abundantly silly and deeply serious?  To play in utter exuberance and joy in this life God has created, stretching our muscles and expanding our lungs in exuberant, jovial shouts as well as to embrace the One who created our muscles and lungs and the whole of us?

It seems to me that this is the kind of life, the kind of humanity, that we were created for.  More importantly, this is the kind of life Jesus has redeemed us for.  Many of the church fathers spoke of salvation as being recreated and restored to our original glory as humans made in the image of God, and I imagine that original glory meant a wholeness I glimpsed in these two boys. Jesus’ taking care of all the most significant movements of history frees us to play and revel in what he has given us.  His command to love God with all of our heart, soul, strength, and mind calls us to engage our minds as well as the rest of us. It strikes me, then, that when we aren’t living this kind of life, we aren’t really living. If we’re neglecting the jumping and playing, or the asking of big questions, or the silliness, or the wonder and praise of God, then we’re not being fully human. If we’re not taking time to enjoy one another’s company over a cup of conversation while we also spend good time reading the church fathers, or if we fail to work hard and write good papers while we also take time to stretch our legs and play, or if we forget to laugh deeply while we live deeply, we’re not living into our salvation.

It also strikes me that these boys could do all of these things at once.  They didn’t have to jump for a while and then ask questions or memorize Scripture; I watched them run and jump while asking questions about the Incarnation and salvation and hike and play hacky sack while reciting John’s prologue.  To them, there wasn’t such a thing as a “secular” part of life and a “spiritual” part of life.  To them, it was all just life. What if we understood that more often?  Could spiritual formation be something that happens in our classes, and not merely something we attend an hour a week for our first year of divinity school?  Can we worship while playing basketball or Frisbee? Can we laugh and be silly while studying atonement theories and looking up words like “extracalvinisticum”?  I am inclined to think that we can, and indeed, that we should.

As I reflect on the paradox of my campers, I think of something Fredrick Buechner wrote: “We are moved also by those precious moments when something holy seems to break through into our lives both to heal us and to summon us to pilgrimage” (Longing for Home). That morning on the trail through the Siamese Ponds Wilderness Area in the Adirondacks I saw something holy break into my life in the most unexpected place, and it called me to pilgrimage. God called me to follow the way of these crazy fourteen-year-old boys, which is in fact the way of his Son, who himself was once a fourteen-year-old boy. Christ has made it possible for us to live this way, desires for us to live this way. So let us find some rocks, call out to the Rock, and begin to live.