The Sunday Times and Being Thankful

Although I had much to be thankful about over this Thanksgiving Day weekend - not the least of which is the good health of all of my immediate and extended family members - the Sunday New York Times brought home some unpleasant realities. In addition to the terrorism underway in Mumbai and the harrowing economic news, I was reminded of the Bush Administration’s recent attempt to make yet another big gift to big business - this time largely at the expense of occupational safety and the environment - by ramming through about 20 highly contentious rules (that had been opposed by then Senator Obama and others) which would: (1) make it much harder for the government to regulate toxic substances and hazardous chemicals to which workers are exposed on the job; (2) make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas; (3) reduce the role of federal and wildlife scientists in deciding whether dams, highways and other projects pose a threat to endangered species; and finally (4) make it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion. See Robert Pear, “Bush Aides Rush to Enact A Rule Obama Opposes,” New York Times, Nov. 30 at 22. (As to some of the Bush Administration’s recent cash gifts, see Joseph E. Stiglitz, “A $1 Trillion Answer,” New York Times, Nov. 30, Week in Review, at 9).

Maureen Dowd’s tongue and cheek look at one man’s attempt to outsource local news coverage to India in her column (“A Penny for my Thoughts?”) and James Gleick’s piece describing Google’s ongoing effort to create an on-line library of every book ever published (“How to Publish Without Perishing”) highlighted the gloom that has descended upon writers and those who publish newspapers and books these days.

On the bright side, Gleick’s piece made a point about reading which should be of some comfort to serious writers and their publishers. While admitting that the future is not long for some kinds of books, which are better read on line - such as encyclopedias, dictionaries and telephone books - he believes that other books will survive the digital age and that’s because, as Gleick notes:
“There’s reading and then there’s reading. There is gleaning or browsing or cherry picking of information and then there is the deep immersion of constructed textual words: novels and biographies and the various forms of narrative non-fiction – genres that could not be born until someone invented the codex, the book as we know it, pages inscribed on both sides and bound together. These are the books that possess one and the books one wants to possess.”
New York Times, Nov. 30, Week in Review, at 10.

As far as timely biographies are concerned, I have two Christmas recommendations for the history buff in your family: (1) “Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer,” by Fred Kaplan (HarperCollins 2008); and (2) “Traitor to his Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt” by H.W. Brands (Doubleday 2008). The Lincoln book is notable for the way it focuses on Lincoln’s language and uses heretofore under-emphasized biographical detail to illuminate Lincoln’s intellectual development and emerging style of writing. The Roosevelt book, which got and deserved rave reviews, is a perfect blend of the personal and the political and simply one of the best and most readable books of its kind I’ve read. It should be put alongside Arthur Schlesinger’s classic trilogy on the FDR era.

After reading the Times, my mood was brightened by time spent at my local Episcopal Church, beginning at 9 a.m. with the small group which meets to discuss the bible readings assigned for the Sunday prior to the 10 a.m. service. (For me, the bible, and especially the New Testament, although admittedly chock full of “factual” errors and inconsistencies, is one of the books which, in Gleick’s words “possesses me and I want to possess”). This Sunday, the readings all referred in one way or another to “Judgment Day,” or Christ’s Second Coming, when, according to some, Christ will arrive on the scene to dispatch justice, hurling some into hell and placing others in more desirable venues.

Nobody in our group was particularly comfortable with the concept of a fiery Judgment Day with Jesus hurling people here and there amongst much gnashing of teeth although we did recognize that the reader’s comfort, never mind our modern sensibilities, may not have been foremost in the mind of whomever did the writing. Somebody in the group mentioned that the concept of such a Judgment Day was part and parcel of the rewards and punishment theology of the Old Testament, of the legalisms of the Old Testament Temple, where salvation hinged upon the performance of certain rites and the compliance with detailed rules of conduct. But nobody in the group, or at least nobody who spoke up on the issue, had experienced Jesus, or thought his words, lent support to such a theology.

A few weeks ago our church book group, which reads and discusses a jointly-selected book each month, considered “Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity,” by Bruce Bawer (Crown Publishers, 1997), which was written by a gay man and talented writer and scholar. In “Stealing Jesus,” Bawer wittily dispatches the “mainstream” American fundamentalism espoused by the likes of Pat Robertson, et al., by showing that the set of beliefs upon which it is premised were derived, not from some ancient but recently-abandoned Christian tradition, but from the delusional meanderings of nineteenth-century crackpots like John Nelson Darby and the hugely popular Scofield Reference Bible, which was assembled in 1909 by C.I. Scofield (arguably another crackpot). (Two of the most prominent fundamentalist doctrines are the doctrine of “biblical inerrancy” (which William Jennings Bryan didn’t have much luck with during the Scopes Monkey Trial) and a set of beliefs known as dispensational premillennialism, the hoary details of which need not detain us here (for the doctrine’s later incarnation, see (at your peril) Hal Lindsey, “The Late Great Planet Earth” (1970), a book which, despite not appearing on official best-seller lists, was, according to someone quoted by Bawer, “the number-one best-selling book in the ‘70s”).

Bawer shows how these recent notions were grafted upon “Christianity” by men who were petrified that anthropological work casting doubt upon some Biblical “facts” together with Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” would “prove” that God did not exist. These men also found the fact that many of our Founding Fathers were deists incompatible with their notions of American exceptionalism and fantasies of a Christian nation on a hill. (Jefferson, for example, created his own version of the bible by removing any event that was not scientifically plausible). Early fundamentalists seemed not to have noticed that Darwin himself and other public intellectuals like William James did not conclude that science and God were incompatible. (They also apparently cut class when the subject turned to metaphor or mysticism).

As an aside, the recent diatribes against religion penned by some very brilliant men - like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens (well, O.K., at least Richard Dawkins is brilliant) - all essentially do what Bawer does in “Stealing Jesus” - they poke fun at the expense of crazy fundamentalists - and then just omit to consider or even mention the thought of people like William James, Rheinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tilllich, or, more recently, John Shelby Spong. This puts them all on a par with comedian Bill Maher, who constantly repeats that Christians can’t be trusted because he doesn’t trust anybody who believes that Jesus rose bodily from the tomb through the clouds to “heaven,” or who believes in any other of a number of Biblical miracles he is fond of reciting. Well, I’m one of many people who calls himself a Christian, and yet I don’t believe in any of that stuff, at least literally. (Maher and his lot evidently were cutting class along with the fundamentalists when the subjects of metaphor and mysticism were covered). In any event, as Bawer points out, the widespread popularity of fundamentalism, while obviously working to the detriment of gays and women (and arguably also to the detriment of the poor and victims of American militarism), also has driven many thoughtful people as far away from organized religion as is possible, which is too bad. (The cause and effect relationship between certain prevailing yet toxic forms of bigotry and this brand of fundamentalism is a more interesting question).

The point of this extended aside is that I was the only one in my church reading group who liked Bawer’s book. The rest of the group was offended by his overly-judgmental tone. Bawer, they all said, wasn’t being very nice to these fundamentalists and they grew weary of his sarcasm. Although the group didn’t adopt or agree with the fundamentalist point of view, they stressed that many fundamentalists were good people and articulate and smart and shouldn’t be the subject of ridicule. In fact, one member of the group had recently belonged to a fundamentalist church.

I was surprised by the group’s reaction. To me, this was a classic example of a false equivalency, i.e., the fallacy that the truth lies between two points, which of course only is the case if the two opposing points are of precisely equivalent merit, and to me the fundamentalists were laughably off the mark. I also have spent a lot of time angry at the bigotry and the “backwards” politics of the religious right and its habit of passing off its “crackpot” version of Christianity as the “real” Christianity and of using its erroneous view of the Founding Fathers to support its offensive claim that the “real” America is Christian and was founded by Christians.

But getting back to the pre-service bible study last Sunday, that’s a different group of people and we all seemed to agree that the Jesus described in the New Testament didn’t seem to be the kind of guy who would have been a fan of the lurid Judgment Day painted in The Revelation. One of the readings under discussion was attributed to Paul, which caused us to wonder what texts Paul had relied upon in framing his definitive advice to the early Christians, advice which enabled Christianity to survive in a form that was politically useful, a few hundred years later, to a Roman emperor.

Reason and some knowledge had thus led us back to why we thought the Jesus actually portrayed in the New Testament wouldn’t be too comfortable presiding over the fiery Judgment Day portrayed in The Revelation and in innumerable works of art. And then someone said something very simple. Jesus was not much for “rules.” He often made a point of breaking them. And he never seemed to be overly concerned about theological doctrine, per se. His “rules,” to the extent that he professed “rules,” were concerned not with the correctness of any particular dogma, but with the state of mind (or rather, heart) of the believer. Thus, to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” to “turn the other cheek,” and “not noticing the splinter in your brother’s eye before removing the beam from your own,” are directed not at a specific doctrinal point or rite, but at one’s interior (or motivation, or psychology, or heart) or, in Christian terms, one’s soul.

It was only then that I “got” the point that was being made by the book group a few weeks earlier. It’s a simple point, intellectually, and it will not and should not prevent me from pointing out what I see as the fallacy of fundamentalism. But until I “got it” on a deeper level, I didn’t appreciate the extent of my anger. Without knowing it, I was in a place which, although perhaps looking different from medieval paintings of The Revelation, is nonetheless a little like my own conception of hell. And why “getting it” makes me less angry I’ll leave for greater minds to ponder. (For an interesting consideration of when and why Jesus got angry and other things, see Elaine Pagels, “The Origin of Satan” (Randhom House, 1995).

All I know is that after the bible study, the choir sounded a little better than usual, the sermon sounded slightly more brilliant than I expected and I had an especially nice afternoon with my daughter. Despite the contents of the Sunday New York Times, I had reason to be very thankful.

Copyright @ 2008 Anthony F. Cottone.