The Chilling Reason Our Government Wants to Erase These Americans from History

  CIVIL LIBERTIES  

Creative Time Reports / By Molly Crabapple

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The Chilling Reason Our Government Wants to Erase These Americans from History

Most of those held in Communications Management Units, which imprison people linked to terrorist activity, are Muslims.

 

July 24, 2014  |  

Andy Stepanian is one of the kindest humans I’ve ever met.

An activist publicist, Andy draws attention to Americans imprisoned for their beliefs. He is straitlaced and gentle, and the only time he ever declined to buy me dinner was when I offended his veganism by eating chicken fingers. But Andy is also a felon. As one of the SHAC7, he spent three years locked in a cage for urging people to employ militant protest techniques against the animal-testing corporation Huntingdon Life Sciences. He spent his last six months in prison in a Communications Management Unit (CMU).

CMUs exist to cut off prisoners from the outside world. The prisoners’ every word is recorded. They are strip-searched before and after each visit from loved ones (in case they write messages on their body). Letters are severely restricted; phone calls are limited to two 15-minute calls a week. CMU prisoners may spend decades without hugging their wives or children.

Like Guantanamo Bay, the CMU is a child of the war on terror. In 2006 and 2008, respectively, the Bureau of Prisons, under the directorship of Harley Lappin, created two secret units: one in Terre Haute, IN, and the other in Marion, IL. The bureau’s stated purpose was “Limited Communication for Terrorist Inmates.” But as at Guantanamo, Muslims were the real targets. Muslims make up roughly 70 percent of the prisoners in CMUs but only 6 percent of the federal prison population. The CMUs are part of a philosophy that makes Muslim synonymous with terrorist, that views “terrorists” as both contagious and superhuman—so dangerous that they must be subject to ultimate control.

Andy was the rare white CMU prisoner. Guards told him he was there as a “balancer.” CMUs are another reflection of the double standard to which the United States holds Muslims. Acts of speech, travel or association that would be A-OK for a Christian are enough to get a Muslim branded a terrorist.

Shifa Sadequee, 2014.

Photo Credit: 

Molly Crabapple

Click to enlarge.

CMU prisoner Shifa Sadequee was kidnapped by U.S. forces in Bangladesh at the age of 19, allegedly tortured and rendered to the United States. He spent three years in solitary awaiting his trial for terrorism. His crimes? He played paintball and took video footage of U.S. monuments. The former activity was labeled “paramilitary training”; the latter, “casing videos” for an attack. The judge sentenced him to 17 years.

Pharmacist Tarek Mehanna should be called a dissident—but that’s not a label America allows Muslims. A scathing critic of U.S. foreign policy, Mehanna believed Muslims under attack in their own countries had the right to armed self-defense. He translated and subtitled some jihadi materials and briefly traveled to Yemen. Nothing he did would have been looked at askance if he were a Tea Party member speaking about fellow gun enthusiasts. But as a Muslim Mehanna was convicted of material support for terrorism. His sentence? Seventeen years.

At his sentencing, Mehanna delivered a chilling, eloquent statement about resisting oppression: “In your eyes, I’m a terrorist, I’m the only one standing here in an orange jumpsuit and it’s perfectly reasonable that I be standing here in an orange jumpsuit. But one day, America will change and people will recognize this day for what it is. They will look at how hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed and maimed by the U.S. military in foreign countries, yet somehow I’m the one going to prison for ‘conspiring to kill and maim’ in those countries…

“The government says that I was obsessed with violence, obsessed with ‘killing Americans.’ But, as a Muslim living in these times, I can think of a lie no more ironic.”

Tarek Mehanna, 2014.

Photo Credit: 

Molly Crabapple

Click to enlarge.

Mehanna is in a CMU for speech. Few American free speech defenders noticed.

While most Americans were rightly nauseated by the NSA programs revealed by Edward Snowden, they gave less thought to the brutal surveillance that Muslim communities have suffered since 9/11. Mosques, student associations and even restaurants were monitored throughout the country. Informants tried to rope the naive or the mentally ill into expressing support for jihad. If an agent was able to pressure an unstable young man into driving a car or buying some backpacks, he could arrest him for assisting terrorism. The agent would receive professional accolades for making the arrest; the young man, decades in jail. For the untold cash it poured into spying on Muslims, the FBI seldom discovered a plot that it did not concoct itself.

Shahawar Siraj, 2014.

Photo Credit: 

Molly Crabapple

Click to enlarge.

CMU prisoner Shahawar Matin Siraj had no explosives or concrete plan of attack, but that did not prevent a judge from sentencing him to 30 years for plotting to bomb New York’s Herald Square. The informant who befriended him, and then goaded him into the plan, was paid $100,000 by the NYPD.

Imprisonment is erasure. The state locks a person in a cage—without context, without community, without love. He becomes not human but a widget passing through a system of absolute control. The CMU enacts a double erasure: it represents the ultimate scission of the prisoner from his non-prison self. You are in a box. You are no one. You belong to us.

Andy is working on a documentary about CMUs. He asked me to draw pictures of some prisoners. Drawing is slow, deliberate. It is an antidote to forgetting men the state wants the world to forget.

One night I worked on a portrait of Ghassan Elashi. A former vice president of an internet company, Elashi was sentenced to 65 years in prison for running the Holy Land Foundation, which was the largest Muslim charity in the United States until the Bush administration shut it down in December 2001. Through charitable organizations in Gaza, Holy Land allegedly funneled money to Hamas, which the United States classifies as a terrorist organization.

Ghassan Elashi, 2014.

Photo Credit: 

Molly Crabapple

Click to enlarge.

Andy invited Elashi’s daughter, Noor, to my studio. She brought a photograph of her father. I was unable to draw him from life, as the USP Marion is not easy to visit. The three of us stayed up late into the night, me rendering Noor’s father’s eyes in careful watercolor, Andy filming us as she watched me draw.

Noor is a stylishly dressed young writer who sidelines as a baker of gluten-free cupcakes. But when she talks about her father, her voice grows cold with pain. She remembers how FBI agents threw him to the floor when they raided their home. She remembers prison guards screaming at her young brother, who has Down syndrome, when he tried to hug his dad (she and her brother were subsequently denied visits for months). She remembers how her father was barred from making phone calls for writing his name on a yoga mat.

She does not believe for a moment that her father deliberately funneled funds to Hamas.

Noor’s situation shows how CMUs rip apart not only prisoners’ lives but also the lives of their families and community. Noor is still fighting for her dad.

In “Counterpunch,” Noor wrote, “My father is my pillar, whose high spirits transcend all barbed-wire-topped fences, whose time in prison did not stifle his passion for human rights.”

Noor’s words point to one of the war on terror’s most insidious legacies. The war on terror flattened Muslims into bogeymen. They could no longer be troubled young men. Nor could they be political dissidents, heads of charities or defenders of human rights. Dissent was equated with terrorism.

In making a fetish of the word “freedom,” America revoked the freedom of so many within her borders. Civil liberties defenders must remember that Muslims are not a separate class of people. Attacks on Muslims’ rights are attacks on human rights.

On the suspension of belief and disbelief

Evolving Thoughts

November 9, 2011

On the suspension of belief and disbelief

I have often addressed the distinction between atheism and agnosticism but I haven’t said a lot about what agnosticism involves, apart from it being a suspension of judgement about belief claims. So a few remarks are in order, prompted (but probably misreading) a recent paper by Jane Friedman, “Rational Agnosticism and Degrees of Belief“, forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Volume 4.

What is agnosticism? I do not mean agnosticism about just gods, but all kinds of agnosticism? Graham Oppy (1994) distinguished between two kinds:

strong agnosticism, i.e. the view which is sustained by the thesis that it isobligatory for reasonable persons to suspend judgement on the question of God’s existence. And, on the other hand, there is weak agnosticism, i.e. the view which is sustained by the thesis that it is permissible for reasonable persons to suspend judgement on the question of God’s existence.

I’m not sure about this. Oppy’s view is that one is either forced or permitted to suspend belief (in God’s existence, which we can replace here with any general claimp). I would rather say that weak agnosticism is the view that one finds it more reasonable than not to suspend belief in p. It isn’t an arbitrary choice, but a choice that is based on our best (fallible) reading of the evidence. But we can accept the definition that agnosticism is sustained by a thesis that reasonable persons should suspend judgement on p, whether or not that is a forced choice.

Friedman takes a much more agreeable approach. She considers the widely held view that agnostics weigh the evidence and find the “credence” (a degree-of-belief value given to beliefs p that either leads you to adopting p or adopting not-p) to be equivalent; that is, it neither supports nor rejects p. She calls this the Straightforward Reduction Thesis (SRT): that all judgements including agnosticism are reducible to claims about the credence of their beliefs p.

With a fair degree of technical discussion, Friedman argues that agnosticism cannot be reduced to credence claims, including in a vague manner or in the cases where one has some Bayesian priors. To illustrate this, consider how Dawkins discusses agnosticism in his The God Delusion:

There is nothing wrong with being agnostic in cases where we lack evidence one way or the other. It is the reasonable position. [46]

I’ll begin by distinguishing two kinds of agnosticism. TAP, or Temporary Agnosticism in Practice, is the legitimate fence-sitting where there really is a definite answer, one way or the other, but we so far lack the evidence to reach it (or don’t understand the evidence, or haven’t time to read the evidence, etc.). …

But there is also a deeply inescapable kind of fence-sitting, which I shall call PAP (Permanent Agnosticism in Principle). … The PAP style of agnosticism is appropriate for questions that can never be answered, no matter how much evidence we gather, because the very idea of evidence is not applicable. [47]

Notice that for Dawkins, agnosticism is the taking of a position regarding the degree of evidence available to us. PAP is Oppy’s strong agnosticism. It was held, for example, by the coiner of the term, Thomas Huxley, who held that the p in question (God’s existence) was forever unknowable. But is TAP the same as weak agnosticism? Are agnostics merely temporarily suspending judgement until degrees of belief ramp up and decide the matter?

Friedman’s argument is that they are not. Instead she rejects what she calls the “middling” assumption: that one suspends disbelief and belief when the credence is within some middling interval (say, between ⅓ and ⅔). The argument is technical but concludes that a Straightforward Reductionist should conclude the middling interval is between, but not when equal to, 0 and 1. In short, we should be on the SRT agnostics about anything that is neither known with certainty nor known to be false with certainty (which is, let’s face it, pretty well every belief).

This view, by the way, was discussed and not very clearly dropped by Dawkins. I say “not very clearly” because it looks for all the world that he wanted his readers to think the middling assumption was in fact the right way to think of agnosticism – the evidence hovers at 50% – even though he disavows it.

Let us, then, take the idea of a spectrum of probabilities seriously, and place human judgements about the existence of God along it, between two extremes of opposite certainty. The spectrum is continuous, but it can be represented by the following seven milestones along the way.

1 Strong theist. 100 per cent probability of God. In the words of C. G. Jung, ‘I do not believe, I know.’

2 Very high probability but short of 100 per cent. De facto theist. ‘I cannot know for certain, but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there.’

3 Higher than 50 per cent but not very high. Technically agnostic but leaning towards theism. ‘I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God.’

4 Exactly 50 per cent. Completely impartial agnostic. ‘God’s existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.’

5 Lower than 50 per cent but not very low. Technically agnostic but leaning towards atheism. ‘I don’t know whether God exists but I’m inclined to be sceptical.’

6 Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. ‘I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is notthere.’

7 Strong atheist. ‘I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung “knows” there is one.’

…

The spectrum of probabilities works well for TAP (temporary agnosticism in practice). It is superficially tempting to place PAP (permanent agnosticism in principle) in the middle of the spectrum, with a 50 per cent probability of God’s existence, but this is not correct. PAP agnostics aver that we cannot say anything, one way or the other, on the question of whether or not God exists. The question, for PAP agnostics, is in principle unanswerable, and they should strictly refuse to place themselves anywhere on the spectrum of probabilities. The fact that I cannot know whether your red is the same as my green doesn’t make the probability 50 per cent. The proposition on offer is too meaningless to be dignified with a probability. Nevertheless, it is a common error, which we shall meet again, to leap from the premise that the question of God’s existence is in principle unanswerable to the conclusion that his existence and his non-existence are equiprobable.

In fact the middling assumption is not correct for his TAPs either. Dawkins assumes that there must be a credence for God’s existence, and that only in cases when the belief simply cannot have credence, that is, in his positivistic framework, when p is incapable of having meaning, can one be a PAP about it. But this cannot be the case, because it is simply not meaningless that you see green where I see red; at best it is false, and at worse it is something we cannot know for sure, but it isn’t meaningless (there is a fact of the matter). This kind of positivist view about meaning and verifiability was abandoned by philosophy some time ago for all kinds of reasons. I invite you to read up on the topic yourself.

Provisional agnostics hold that a question is not – yet – capable of being answered, not that the evidence is equivocal or evenly balanced. Friedman’s discussion is therefore of interest. If we are not, in being agnostics, attempting to find a middling credence, what is it we are doing?

We should at the outset note that there are cases like Dawkins’ nonsensical questions. For example, it makes no sense to ask whether green is red. It might make sense to ask if your experience of red is identical to my experience of green, but that is a question about experiences. Red is not green, and to ask if it can be known if red is green is nonsense. However, in the case of nonsense questions, one is not agnostic; one is simply bemused.

But if there simply are no credences, which is to say we cannot reduce the question that p to evidence for or against p, we should suspend any attempt to consider either p or not-p worth belief. In fact, as Rosenkranz (2007) notes, agnosticism is a third stance: there is belief that p is true, belief that p is false, and the opposition to both p and not-p. Rosenkranz analyses this in terms of realism and antirealism aboutp and out cognitive ability to discern which is correct. Agnosticism, as I have previously argued on this blog, is neither an existence claim that p (realism) nor the denial of an existence claim that p (antirealism), but the denial of the possibility of knowledge regarding p, either now (weak) or ever (strong).

What reasons for thinking that we do not know p might there be? I can think of a few possibilities; add more in the comments if you can think of any.

1. There is no evidence for p, nor evidence for not-p.

2. There are reasons for thinking there can not be evidence that bears on p.

3. There are reasons for thinking that, while there may be evidence bearing on p, it is inaccessible to us (now or always); for example, we may never have investigated pclaims. Strong agnosticism here might involve contingent or necessary claims that we can not get evidence bearing on p claims. Contingent reasons might include economic claims (there may be a lake of helium-3 on Pluto, but we’ll never be able to afford a probe to check), technical reasons (we can’t detect the Higgs boson because it would take a hadron collider bigger than one we could build), or conceptual (we can’t predict the fine grain behaviour of a cell because the mathematical simulations are not developed yet). Necessary reasons might include logical or metaphysical necessities.

4. We do not care about p. Someone might have no opinion or stance towards a claim because it is simply outside their sphere of interest. In such a case a reasonable person might decide to have no doxastic stance whatsoever. I feel that way, for example, about the doctrine of double predestination in Calvinist theology. You could say I am agnostic about any of the options simply because I feel no motivation to take an opinion (this could be understood as a denial of the Calvinist theological presumptions that do motivate the debate, but that is different to denying double predestination). Of course, once the question p? is put, if it is a question that I take to be serious, then I will find a solution or be agnostic for one of the other reasons. This apathetic agnosticism is, I put it, the kind of agnosticism we have about themajority of possible beliefs.

[Sidenote: this goes to the question of dialectic logic, sometimes called erotetic logic. We are not forced to take a stance on all possible questions, but only those that are put to us by our community and its traditions. If there are creatures with religions on Alderbaran V, I am not required to take a stance to their beliefs if they are not identical to any of those in my community.]

So these are the conditions under which a reasonable person suspends both belief and disbelief. One is agnostic when credence cannot be assigned, not even vaguely or in a Bayesian fashion. How does agnosticism relate to skepticism?

A skeptic assigns belief only when there is warrant for that belief’s content. In any other case, the skeptic will reject that belief. If one is skeptical of p claims, a failure to assign a credence of 1 means one assigns a credence of 0 to p. In ordinary terms, if you have no positive reason to accept a claim, you reject it. This underlies some of the rhetoric regarding atheism: arguments that God’s existence is a hypothesis, and that the hypothesis is unsupported and so one should not believe it and deny that it is reasonable to believe it, is skeptical, but not agnostic. Of course a skeptic on some matters can be agnostic on others, but to achieve this one needs to have reason to treat some claims differently from others. This is not something one has by intuition, or else it ends up being special pleading for those beliefs we most strongly feel about.

As Rosenkrantz notes, a reasonable* agnostic does not stop at the decision not to make a judgement, but, if there are avenues to investigate, will continue to try to make one. We should be skeptical of claims that are extraordinary, that are either making out some great cognitive novelty (like moving from a geocentric to a heliocentric model of astronomy) or run contrary to too much of our existing beliefs.

* You’ll note I don’t say “rational”. This is a concept that has been wrung to death by people trying to advance all kinds of philosophical agendas. A reasonable person is somebody who takes reasons seriously and accepts the conclusions they license.

References

Oppy, Graham. 1994. Weak agnosticism defended. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 36 (3):147 – 167.

Rosenkranz, Sven. 2007. Agnosticism as a Third Stance. Mind 116 (461):55-104.

The Scourge of History: The Religious Spirit Strikes Again

Defining Words

Looking for definition on what's happening in life

The Religious Spirit Strikes Again

Posted on December 29, 2013 by Melissa Flores

Pure religion exists, as does its perversion in many forms. Because of the baggage the wordreligion packs in our times, I have shied from defining it. Depending on the audience, the word takes on a plethora of meanings. For instance, when speaking with secular friends and acquaintances, religious is understood to encompass the lifestyle of one who dutifully serves God (or any god for that matter). Similarly, among some Christian believers, religious is a badge of honor worn to distinguish them from the non-practicing Christian or unbeliever. For many spiritually minded Christians, however, religious has become a derogatory term in our modern spiritual lexicon. Its usage is reserved to characterize the legalistic among the fold.

The Pentecostal/Charismatic move of the prior century can be credited for this linguistic development among the initiated. Teaching centered on the notorious “religious spirit” was made popular by wonderful voices like Jack Deere, Rick Joyner, Francis Frangipane, and Dr. C. Peter Wagner among others. What these teachers brought to light was the fact that modern-day pharisees continue to plague true Christianity. Just as in the day of Christ, there are those of an established order, who persecute and demonize any who defy their methodology. Some are confused or put off by this usage of “religious” and the many references made to it in Charismatic/Pentecostal conversations. The word religion is used only a handful of times in the scriptures, most famously in James 1:26-27 KJV.

“If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man’s religion is vain. Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.”

Religion in this passage is translated from the Greek word thrēskeia which is not pejorative in meaning. James uses the word religion to encapsulate the disciplines or public ceremonial exercises of one who worships God. Consider it a neutral word that describes the outward expressions of a worshipper. James suggests that the truly pious man demonstrates his piety by more than public worship. If he is sincere in his worship, he will keep his mouth in check and minister to the needs of others. Depending on the heart of the worshipper, his acts of worship can either be pure or defiled… true or false.  Simple, no?

Where the term religious becomes remarkably complex is in its modern interpretation among certain camps within Christianity. Some of those nuances I would like to touch on, giving air to some of my recent musings. While understanding and endorsing the aforementioned teachings on the religious spirit, I do not relish the element of strangeity that have evolved from them. As is the case with any catchy teaching, there is a propensity for it to be taken to the nth degree. Some will extrapolate and build entire schools of thought on a single revelation. That legalistic modern-day pharisees exist, is true. That they are deemed “religious spirits” is unfortunate somewhat due to the overall positive acceptance of the word “religious” in most circles. Since most who read Defining Words are among the Pentecostal/Charismatic fold, I will use the word “religious” in its derogatory sense for the remainder of this post. Savvy?

The Religious Spirit WeaponizedIt has taken me five years to muster the gumption to write about the religious spirit in its negative sense. Five years! For me, focusing on the negative elements of spiritual living is a downer. I’d much rather talk about things wonderful – but winds of late have incited me to break my personal rule. Negative truths must be acknowledged in order to gain a holistic perspective. Polarization is happening in the modern body of Christ and for two different reasons. A divide will always exist between those who hold to sound doctrine, and those who heap to themselves teachers of fanciful contrivances. The latter are always dangling off the edge of biblical reason. Second, working harder to polarize the body than any other force is the religious spirit, which drives away what it cannot control. (This earlier post may give further insight: 15 Signs of a Religious Spirit.)

Not necessarily demonic, the religious spirit is more a human spirit that seeks control of worshipful expression. Religious human spirits (or mindsets) plague every religion both true and false, with rigid and legalistic dogma. For the one bound to a religious mindset, it is either his way or the highway when it comes to how faith is expressed. The religious spirit will go so far as to weaponize their faith to attack those who fail to assimilate (hence the picture of the Borg for fellow Trekkies). Please don’t think me insensitive for this next statement. Whether it’s the Crusades of the Middle Ages, the Inquisitions, the modern War on Terror and radicalized Islam, or the internal culture war in the Christian World, religious spirits persist in shedding blood in the name of God. Most blood is shed, figuratively speaking, in the way of character assassination and the rending of the body of Christ. Disunity among Christians can almost always be linked to the divisive “religious spirit.”

What does the religious spirit want? It seeks total control over the definition of scripture, its teaching, application and worshipful expression. Since the religious spirit is human in nature, it requires a human arbitrator. This person, or human system determines what is acceptable and pleasing to God. Meanwhile, the role of the Holy Spirit is diminished in the life of a believer, to one who assists in implementing the preferred religious system. Holy Spirit is reduced to the one who helps the believer acquiesce to the chosen set of rules and demands. More dependence is placed on the dogma, doctrine, rules, etc… as described by the arbitrator, than on the necessity of hearing God for oneself. Little room is left for working out one’s own salvation as described in Philippians 2:12.

Personal expression or individuality is frowned on. Unless the individuality remains completely predictable, controllable or somehow enhances the “system” (by paying homage to it) it is deemed a threat. Anyone who willfully deviates from the preferred doctrines or prescribed code of conduct are in threat of dissociation and personal attack. It is not my desire to stir up ill sentiment with this post, or to feed rebellion among the disgruntled. Millennials, however, are falling by the religious sword in droves. Front lines for the cultural war in the body of Christ, have been arrayed on the division of generational perceptions.

If we are to end the bloodshed, we must put away the insistence on assimilation. Next-generation Christians are more individually expressive than ever before. While they seek the blessing of the prior generation, they will press on with or without it. As Solomon has stated, there is nothing new under the sun. Persecution from the religious spirit is as old as religion itself. Likewise, many who fought so diligently to free themselves from religious persecution in times past have become the chief pharisees of our day. No one is above weaponizing their faith, especially whenever their own personal dogma is challenged.

True spiritual believers recognize they are not fighting against humanity (flesh and blood), but against spiritual darkness. I fear the loss of progressive people from our churches is a bloodshed that has left us too weak to wage an effective warfare against the true enemy. Might we be willing to sit down with fellow believers and talk peaceably about our differences? Might we be willing to bless one another despite our religious cultural differences? Might we allow the Holy Spirit room to work individually as He may, to bring us each into maturity, in His own timing? The religious spirit would forbid such a coming together. Holy Spirit, however, would invite and host it.

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My Kind of Atheist Who Believes in God

• (A)theologies

• • REVIEW
  • June 3, 2014

• My Kind of Atheist

• By PETER LAARMAN
• • • 2 COMMENTS 
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• Peter Laarman
  Peter Laarman is a United Church of Christ minister and activist who recently retired as executive director of Progressive Christians Uniting in Los Angeles. He remains involved in numerous justice struggles, in particular a campaign known as Justice Not Jails that calls upon faith communities to critique and combat the system of racialized mass incarceration often referred to as The New Jim Crow.  
• • Why I Am an Atheist Who Believes in God: How to Give Love, Create Beauty and Find Peace
  • by Frank Schaeffer
  • CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform , 2014
  Take the moral law and make a nave of it
  And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
  The conscience is converted into palms,
  Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
  - Wallace Stevens, A High-Toned Old Christian Woman (1922)
  By now Frank Schaeffer’s critique of crazy right-wing Christianity is sufficiently well-known that he didn’t need to write that book again. We are much the richer for the book he chose to write instead: a book that expresses a very wise person’s irreducible double-mindedness in relation to things of the spirit.
  Schaeffer was once a shining star in the conservative Christian firmament—an iconic figure in part because of his late parents’ high standing in evangelical circles, and also because of his own contributions to the formation of “movement” Christianity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then he dropped out, turned his back on that kind of power and glory. He produced low-budget movies for a time, wrote some decent autobiographical fiction, and finally returned to writing about the thing he knows best: the damage wrought by hard, doctrinal religion.
  One senses from this book that Schaeffer is at last free of the need to strap on his sword and buckler in order to go out and do battle with the oh-so-smug conservative Christers. While he still lobs a few choice zingers (“religion is a neurological disorder for which faith is the only cure”), He is now very much a man at peace with his own past—and even at peace with his righteous despisers.
  Schaeffer is superb storyteller, and this is a good thing inasmuch as he believes that our stories are what most ennoble us as humans. (In one chapter deploring the reductionism of the New Atheists, Schaeffer writes: “I feel significant when I tell my stories, therefore I am.”)
  The book is thronged with revealing vignettes about persons who have touched Schaeffer deeply: his dear sweet mother most of all, but also a family friend who finally surrenders to a merciless cancer, and even an opera singer he meets and befriends on a transatlantic flight. Much of the book is centered on the small loving universe that is peopled by Schaeffer’s immediate family members—his two young grandchildren in particular, whose startlingly perceptive utterances put me in mind of that venerable line in the Bible (Jesus, but quoting Psalm 8): “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise.”
  The writing style is refreshingly blunt, even salty in places, and it’s very clear that if Schaeffer still struggles with anything in the last third of his life, it is the paradox of refusing to believe in any kind of traditional God and yet still perceiving what feels very much like God’s presence in beauty and in human love (hence the book’s title). He confesses candidly that his “brain is not evolved enough” to be able to reconcile a deep commitment to evolutionary biology and an equally deep feeling for the numinous in human experience.
  Schaeffer prays and goes to church because these practices provide comfort and structure and beauty, not because he’s able to say that anyone is listening to his prayers and certainly not because he expects to receive any transcendent “truth” inside of a church. He writes, “Liturgy is about providing a silent space inside me where words are replaced by an experience of another dimension where I may sense the love of God.” And again, “Church is one of the places I may offer my grandchildren a vision of life that is about more than status, stuff, education, and money.” And still again, “If there were no spiritual side to us, there would be no sense of loss when the material universe intrudes on our happiness.”
  Although this book is very much about Schaeffer’s own journey to freedom, there’s enough of the good theologian and good biblical scholar in him to delight those of us who can never get enough of that kind of thing. He does a lot with the figure of Jesus as the only lens through which to grasp what God might be like, if God existed (the key God-marker in Jesus, according to Schaeffer: “non-judgmental co-suffering empathy”). He notes that Jesus violated every religious taboo of his time and place: touching dead people, touching lepers, touching women and letting women touch him.
  Schaeffer teases out Jesus’s remarkable proto-feminism, noting that “the impact of Jesus’s feminism has yet to be fully realized” and that “Jesus built what I think of as an empathy time bomb.” From there he segues into a revealing consideration of the Enlightenment as a “blessed Christian heresy,” even quoting Voltaire to the effect that everything abhorrent about oppressive religion was likewise abhorrent to the Galilean prophet. And although he remains unsparingly contemptuous of the church and all its works, Schaeffer cannot resist observing that, in an odd and largely unrecognized way, Jesus values are slowly prevailing—albeit not so much among the self-proclaimed Jesus followers as among the secular saints working for human rights and for the full inclusion of the very kinds of people Jesus liked to hang out with: the outcasts and the reprobates, the broken in body and the wounded in spirit.
  The closest Schaeffer comes to issuing a clarion call reminiscent of the old “Fighting Frank” is this piece, coming near the book’s end:

  Those of us raised in the Christian tradition need to choose to either see God in Jesus or to continue to let the Bible define God. Our tradition says that Jesus is God. Maybe we should act as if we think he is instead of worshipping a book. Maybe we should also be brave enough to admit that we are compelled to either become ideologues or need to forthrightly pick and choose as to what we want to follow in the Bible. Most Christians do that anyway, many just don’t admit it.

  As I say, absolute candor is this book’s main calling card. Candor in openly embracing an apophatic theology (you can look it up). Candor plus deep good humor arising from a finely-wrought humanism. To quote Frank Schaeffer (quoting no one in particular), this is about as good as it gets.

• TAGS atheism, jesus, new atheists, nones, spiritual but not religious

Christians Should Give Up “Christianity”

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• • JUNE 3, 2014
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• (A)theologies

• • INTERVIEW
  • April 11, 2013
• Christians Should Give Up “Christianity”: An Interview with Peter Rollins
• By CANDACE CHELLEW-HODGE
• • • 51 COMMENTS 
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• Candace Chellew-Hodge
  Candace Chellew-Hodge is the founder/editor of Whosoever: An Online Magazine for GLBT Christians and currently serves as the pastor of Jubilee! Circle in Columbia, S.C. She is also the author of Bulletproof Faith: A Spiritual Survival Guide for Gay and Lesbian Christians(Jossey-Bass, 2008)
• • The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction
  • by
    Peter Rollins
  • Howard Books , 2013
  For Peter Rollins, Belfast native and leading writer and thinker in the Emergent Christian movement, “God” has fallen prey to our grasping, market-driven existence—just another shiny thing we acquire to make ourselves feel okay.
  Alfred Hitchcock called this (in another context entirely) the “MacGuffin,” or as Rollins explains it: “that X for which some or all of the main characters are willing to sacrifice everything, something that people want in some excessive way—the object that seems to promise fulfillment, satisfaction, and lasting pleasure.”
  And yet when we get our hands on the longed-for MacGuffin, it doesn’t do away with our feelings of emptiness or brokenness, and may well deepen them. Instead, Rollins argues, there is no cure for our brokenness, other than the full and complete acceptance of it.
  Rollins talked with RD’s Candace Chellew-Hodge about his new book and his radical ideas of what church looks like when Christians give up Christianity.
  
  
  The title of this book, “The Idolatry of God,” is immediately provocative. What do you mean by it?
  I’m very interested in taking on theological concepts like “idolatry” and “sin,” “original sin” and “salvation”—these terms that in some liberal circles are brushed under the carpet. I think there’s a real depth to these words and we just have to rob them of the religious jargon they’ve become.
  The word I’m most interested in is “idol.” I describe an idol in the book as any object that we treat as if it will make us whole and complete and satisfy us and rob the sense of loss in the core of our being. It could be money, going out with a certain person, looking a certain way or having a certain job or worshipping a certain God. It plays to something very deep in our psychology. We all want something that will make everything okay. Everywhere we turn, advertisements tell us “consume this,” or “buy this product,” or “look this way and you’ll be happy.”
  The world is like a huge vending machine and it’s filled with these idols.
  My argument is that when we reduce God to that object that will make us complete and whole and happy, we just put our own product in the vending machine. The church becomes the shop front, the clergy become the salespeople and the worship becomes the jingles.
  But what about certainty and satisfaction (which you call ‘addictions’ in the subtitle of the book)? We Americans are told that we can have both, especially in church. If we pray the right way, believe the right way, we can have all these things. Are we not entitled to them?
  They’re addictions for me because of the way they operate for most of us. They give a fantasy of wholeness whenever we’re really fractured. What I argue is that religious, cultural, and political beliefs give us a sense that we on this side of the river are right and those people on that side of the river are wrong. They hide our anxiety and brokenness. The reason it’s like an addiction is because deep down we know it.
  Some of my critics say I’m telling them to doubt, but that’s not it. I’m saying you’re already full of doubts. It acts the same way as alcohol abuse—the alcohol makes you feel better about yourself, but then you have this hangover where you realize you’re just covering over some sort of brokenness. I’m saying when you’re in church around people who believe the same thing and you’re reading all those books, it feels great, but then, at night over a drink with a friend in a bar, you feel like that there must be a better way. It prevents us from encountering our own brokenness and working through it.
  How do we confront ourselves, that brokenness, without being overwhelmed by it?
  It’s like Kierkegaard’s idea: I’m not trying to make you depressed, I’m saying you already aredepressed. We cover over that depression by pursuing something we think will make us whole and by grasping hold of beliefs that give us a sense of mastery, but the problem is symptoms. The brokenness and doubts comes out in other ways—in hatred of others, in hatred of yourself, in scapegoating… it always comes out.
  So wholeness is not really the goal?
  What happens can be structured like a magic trick. A vanishing trick has three parts. There’s the pledge, where you present an object, like a rabbit. Then there’s the turn, where the rabbit disappears. It’s put behind a curtain and then it’s gone when the curtain is pulled back. Then there is the prestige, which is the return of the rabbit. You pull it out of a hat or something—and, of course, it’s generally not the same rabbit. The other rabbit is somewhere else. What I’m arguing is that in life we have a similar structure. You see this in the Garden of Eden where you can basically eat any fruit, but a prohibition comes in that you can’t eat of that one tree. The question is: why is that tree magical? Because it’s prohibited. Everyone who has a kid knows that. As soon as you say you can’t have the puppy, then you really want the puppy.
  You’ve got the stage set—there’s the object, which is the tree. You’ve got the curtain, which is the prohibition that stops us from getting the tree, and you’ve got the audience in the garden. The trick doesn’t work though because it’s not completed. Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree and it all goes to pieces.
  What I argue is that this is reenacted, this primordial scene, in the crucifixion, where you have again the magic act. You’ve got the Holy of Holies, the object, you’ve got the curtain that obscures that, and you’ve got the court of the Gentiles in the temple where you can go to make your sacrifices—and Jesus is the divine illusionist who rips the curtain away and finishes the trick.
  We see the turn, there’s nothing in there, so that’s the death of the idol—the object we think will make us whole and complete is gone. But, then there’s the prestige—the return of God and the body of believers. You realize that God is in the midst of life, and where two or three are gathered together, and not out there to be grasped but rather in the depth of life itself.
  You see this in the eucharist. You’ve got the pledge, which is the bread and the wine. You’ve got the turn, the disappearance in the eating, and the prestige, where we now become the body of Christ. The trick is this—the pursuit of something that will make you whole is what makes us dissatisfied and unhappy. The strange move is by giving up the idea that there is whole and complete and embracing the brokenness of life, we actually find a form of wholeness, a form of satisfaction. But not a wholeness and satisfaction that lacks unknowing and that lacks brokenness—one that just robs them of their sting.
  How can we live that out?
  This is the problem for most of us. So many of us cannot find depth in our lives. People go to counseling not because they’ve lost something they desire, they’ve lost the ability to desire anything at all. If you lose someone you love all the other things you used to like—going out concerts, eating good food—no longer mean anything to you. Your world is drained of color and you don’t experience depth in life.
  What Christianity calls us into is an experience in which we cannot help but find beauty and meaning in our lives. I don’t mean intellectual meaning. If you believe the world is meaningful but you don’t love, you cannot help but experience the world as meaningless. If you think the world is meaningless, but you are in love with life or with a person, you can’t help but experience the world as utterly meaningful. That’s faith for me—a material enactment of the beauty and depth of life.
  In America, faith has come to mean cognitive belief in something that lacks sufficient evidence. So, I can say I have faith that there’s milk in the fridge. Somebody may have drunk it, but I’m making a commitment to that belief. What I’m arguing for is not faith as a mode of insufficient evidence, but faith as a mode of commitment to life and to existence itself.
  In the American church, and especially the evangelical church, faith has been about giving proper assent to a list of beliefs. How do you change the churches that emphasize money, marketing, and that modern experience? How do people in the pews find meaning anymore?
  Christianity has become an identity just like any other worldview or system. But, Christianity isn’t one more identity marker. It should be the experience of losing your identity and identifying with the one who lost his identity on the cross. Which, by the way, is the meaning of the crucifixion. You were no longer a political, cultural, or religious system. You were cursed of God. You were ripped of identity. So, when Paul says “there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, for all are made one in Christ,”
  I would add that it would say today, “there is no Christian or non-Christian for all are made one in Christ.” Christianity itself has to be rejected by the church in order, paradoxically, to get back to the radical scandal of Christianity.
  The Emergent Church movement that you’re part of puts these ideas out into an atmosphere in the American churches would be apostasy. How have you seen  these kind of ideas change the church, especially in America?
  Whenever I talk to churches I ask them, “Do we really think we’ve worked it all out? Let’s be honest with ourselves.” In very conservative settings, you can often feel a sigh of relief that they don’t have to pretend they know everything. That’s not universally true, but I have discovered that these ideas ring true to us.
  When people vehemently disagree with me it generally signals to me that they don’t really disagree with what I might be saying but something I said resonates with them in a way they can’t bring to the surface. It comes out in anger and frustration. It shows there is a crisis within that community of doubt and concern and questioning that they simply haven’t had a place to come to the surface. A lot of what we’re doing is trying to help bring to the surface what’s already there.
  In most liberal churches people don’t believe in this God-idol, that God is going to make everything better—but we liturgically enact that god in our prayers and our worship songs. So, we don’t have to be fundamentalist, because the structure is fundamentalist on our behalf.
  For instance, a parent obviously doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, but they don’t experience the trauma of not believing until the child stops believing. So, they get the pleasure of believing in Santa Claus without having to be stupid enough to believe in Santa Claus. Parts of the liberal church get to have their intellectual credulity while existentially experiencing a form of fundamentalism. My argument is the church needs to have a liturgical structure that enacts the death of the god-idol that brings us to a place of brokenness.
  There have been criticisms that the Emergent Church isn’t diverse enough—it isn’t open to women or gays and lesbians. How do you respond to that?
  It’s not so much about including other people, you have to do that. But, if you don’t break the scapegoat mechanism, we will always “other” somebody else. What we have to do is create collectives where the scapegoat mechanism is destroyed—then you’ll see increasing diversity. For me, it’s not so much looking at what particular group is being excluded—though that’s important to do—it’s looking at how that exclusion functions to create a community that has a sense of solidarity. If you get a community to embrace the fact of their own brokenness, hopefully more inclusion will happen.
  I hear you saying that in any group, liberal or conservative, if they create an “other” it lets them avoid dealing with their own brokenness.
  Yes. And it’s difficult for people to lay down their identity for a moment and see the other beyond their identity, but for me that’s the rule of the liturgical space. For one hour we create a place where there is no Jew or Gentile, no male or female, atheists or theists, gay or straight.
  What is your ultimate vision for the church?
  My broad critique of fundamentalist and conservative communities, is that in them we verbally affirm a God that is basically a guarantor that we’re right. The critique is more subtle than simply saying that we don’t really believe it. We say God takes care of everything, but still put a lightning rod on top of the steeple.
  If you have an argument with your partner and they say, “I want you to leave,” what they’re really saying is, “I want you to fight to stay.”  That allows them to say, “No, I want to stay because I care about you.” There’s always an underlying grammar to discourse.
  So, when the fundamentalists say, “If you have faith and don’t doubt, then God will heal,” everybody knows the subtext of that is, “unless it’s really serious, then you call an ambulance.” That’s why the radical move in fundamentalism is not to say they believe too much—that’s the liberal critique of fundamentalism—but no, the radical critique is they don’t believe enough. The reason you can have your belief is that you disbelieve in your belief. That’s why the psychotic is the most dangerous—the family where the kid does get sick and they don’t call an ambulance because they didn’t understand the subtext everybody else knew. That’s why, in some respects, the people who come out of fundamentalism are not the ones who didn’t really believe it. They’re the ones who really did. They took it completely seriously and experienced this impotence.
  The church needs a liturgical structure like the psalms that has the full range of human emotions, that confronts us with our brokenness, but not so that we despair. That’s the good news of Christianity for me. It’s not that you can be happy and whole, but rather that life is crap and you don’t know the answers. It’s good news to be freed from the oppression that there’s something that’s going to make it all better. When you’re free from that and begin to work through your brokenness and suffering with a set of rituals, practices and sacraments that help us encounter our humanity, I think we become more loving, more beautiful, more grace-filled people.

• TAGS christianity, diversity, emergent church, evangelical, fundamentalist, god, lgbt,liberal, peter rollins, sin, theology