Culture | Janie B. Cheaney

March 24, 2017

Happily Ever After for Real

Is it a coincidence that so many fairy tales and traditional stories in the western tradition end with a wedding? But they never continue with a marriage, beyond “and they lived happily ever after.”

It’s as if the wedding itself is what the story was reaching for, even though it may have looked like the story was about conquering fear or receiving one’s just reward o forgiving one’s enemies. The reward of the hero or heroine’s striving is consummation—literal, spiritual, and social. The marriage that follows the wedding is an induction into what we might call real life: establishment and responsibility. One life merges with another and produces new life—more individuals who will set off from safe homes on dangerous missions to become who they are and receive marriage as a reward, from which they will make homes for the next wave of individuals to set out and become . .

The marriage is not the story, because happily-ever-after is not an essential conflict. Marriage brackets the story; it’s the home-situation at the beginning and the fading horizon at the end. It’s what we came from and what we are going toward.

I wonder if one reason for the dissolution of the family in modern American society is that we’re trying to make marriage the story, instead of the launchpad and culmination of the story.

Here’s what I mean. Stories are about struggle. Every story has to have a conflict, and the essential conflict is how the individual makes peace with the world (or the situation). Stories are about individuals, not groups. Even those interminable James Michener sagas that unfold the history of an entire nation or a group of people could only work by zooming in on the experience of individuals throughout the centuries. In a story the individual is always at war—with social norms, with injustice, with rivals for glory, goods, or affection, with the darker or less admirable traits within, or any combination of these.

There’s no better visual illustration of conflict, perhaps, than distinctions between male and female. She is soft where he is tough; she relates while he competes; she nurtures while he protects, and so on. (I am aware that these are stereotypes, but stereotypes are built on fact.)

How can an individual man or woman be at peace? How can disparate personalities reconcile? That’s the question asked in all great fiction: Will Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy stop looking past each other? Will Belle recognize her love for the Beast before it’s too late? Will Anna silence her guilty conscience and find happiness with Vronsky?

And the greatest conflict of all, though not fictional: Can a holy God be reconciled with an unholy and rebellious people?

Classic stories—often, not always–ended in marriage, even if they’re weren’t primarily love stories, and even if it wasn’t the main character getting married. It’s only in modern times that stories have come to be about marriage. It’s easy to see why: two people striving for harmony, especially if they’re as different as male and female, is rich material for drama. Novels about marriage can be insightful and rewarding—as fiction. Making marriage your story in real life can be asking for trouble.

Making marriage your story in real life can be asking for trouble.

Because, remember, stories are all about fighting. If it ends in defeat, it’s a tragedy. If in victory (meaning reconciliation), it’s a comedy. A classic Christian marriage is mutual surrender where each says to the other: I’m no longer just me. I’m part of us. I’ve fought my fight and made my peace; I’ve figured out how to be us while still being me.

Past generations understood that, which is why divorce was so rare even if the union wasn’t happy.

I’m not saying that marriage was not a challenge in the past, or that the two individuals within a marriage had no more growing up to do. But moderns want to carry on the struggle. Instead of settling into boring old happily-ever-after and pouring their energies into the next generation, they (we?) want to continue the quest for self-fulfillment and discovery and drama. Marriage is part of our plot: Will Dan find happiness with Diana, or is his real future with Donald? One thing for sure: he will never settle for fading into the woodwork.

Instead of settling into boring old happily-ever-after and pouring their energies into the next generation, we want to continue the quest for self-fulfillment and drama.

Marriage is not supposed to be the plot: it’s supposed to be the woodwork—or the floor, or the scaffolding that will launch the stories of our children. That’s why fairy tales have to end with a wedding: the individual has found her place and joined hands with another to form a community. That was a reflection of real life. If we could examine all the monogamous marriages throughout history until today, we would find that some were heaven, some were hell, and the vast majority were good enough—all weaving together to build a platform for the next generation.

With ever more people acting out their conflicts within the marriage, or not bothering to marry at all, the platform is crumbling. New generations may not even know there supposed to be one—just an ocean of individuals bobbling up and down in a never- ending quest for happiness.

The Bible still ends with a wedding, though. The marriage will follow and will show us what marriage was supposed to be about, all along: all our struggles ended; finally me; finally us; fully Him.

March 17, 2017March 17, 2017

The Cult of Intersectionality

(If you don’t know what that is, don’t feel bad. I didn’t either until about three months ago. Chances are you do know what it is, just didn’t know the proper designation.)

To Charles Murray, it looks like the end of liberal education in America: “What happened last Thursday has the potential to be a disaster for American liberal education.” Maybe an overstatement, but cut the man some slack, after he was literally assaulted by students on a liberal-education campus.

If you have an ear to the news, you probably heard about this. Students involved with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), of which Murray is a fellow, set up the March 2 event well in advance and anticipated the usual protests for a controversial speaker. Charles Murray may be controversial but he’s also consequential: I first encountered him with Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980. His analysis of state welfare and its destructive effects on American society was philosophical mainspring of welfare reform in the mid-1990s. His latest book, Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960-2010, describes the failing family and social structures of the lower class, which keeps poor whites poor. What David Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy does with personal narrative Murray does with data in Coming Apart, which is the book he was supposed to talk about.

But to a sizable group of students at Middlebury, only one book mattered: The Bell Curve, co-written with Richard Herrnstein and published in 1996. The Bell Curve is a study of measured intelligence (such as IQ) as an indicator of future success. A small section of the book reported on lower levels of intelligence among African Americans and speculated on the reasons for it. Murray and Herrnstein never claimed that blacks were best suited to field labor, but rather than stimulating conversation fodder (such as how to improve learning situations for all) critics took one message: Murray thinks blacks are stupid.

That’s the setup; the drama played out like a horror movie. First the protest outside the lecture hall. Then the protests inside the lecture hall, where a large minority of students stood, turned their backs to the podium and chanted slogans about racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. After a solid 20 minutes of this, Murray and faculty moderator Allison Stanger adjourned to a nearby room where they broadcast a back-and-forth conversation of opposing views while protesters pounded on the windows and set off the fire alarm. Murray and Stanger then left the building to attend a scheduled dinner with students, but protesters with signs noisily blocked the way to their car. Burly security guards kept the more physical debaters from knocking Murray down, but someone grabbed Prof. Stanger by the hair while someone else pushed her sideways, twisting her neck. When they got in the car and locked the door, the protesters swarmed the vehicle, rocking it back and forth. The car nosed through the crowd and motored on to the dinner venue, but Stanger and Murray barely had time to remove their coats before being warned, “They’re coming this way!”—like a pitchfork-waving mob in a Frankenstein movie. Kill the monster! After a quick consultation, everyone mounted up again and drove to a restaurant off campus, where they fortified themselves with martinis before dinner.

Murray and Stanger conduct their discussion against wall-pounding and fire alarms.

“The worst day of my life,” Prof. Stanger wrote on her Facebook page, sometime after returning from the hospital with a neck brace and a concussion. She insisted that the mayhem did not justify accusations against the college. “We have got to do better by those who feel and are marginalized. Our 230-year constitutional democracy depends on it, especially when our current President is blind to the evils he has unleashed.” After a couple of weeks to think about it, she moderated but didn’t retreat from the “because Trump” rationale.

With all due respect, that particular evil did not emanate from the White House.

The day before the event, in The Middlebury Campus newspaper, senior Nic Valenti explained “Why I’m Declining AEI’s ‘Invitation to Argue’.” He described his own epiphany: “When I first arrived at Middlebury I was clueless to the systems of power constructed around race, gender, sexuality, class or ability.” His efforts to talk about issues before receiving the proper framework from which to talk about them were met with stony silence. “As a young bigot, I can recall thinking: ‘I thought at Middlebury I would get to have intellectual discussions, but instead it feels as though my views are being censored.’” In other words, when Nic arrived at Middlebury innocent of his own white male privilege, no one bothered to discuss issues with him until he got his head right–groveled at the altar, received the proper instruction, signed the statement of faith.

His point: Charles Murray’s head isn’t right, and therefore to debate him would only be granting him validity he doesn’t deserve.

His evidence: nothing Charles Murray wrote or said. The only source Valenti quotes is the Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy organization known for its slap-happy designations of extremist, hate group, white supremacy, etc. The SPLC’s classification of the Family Research Council as an anti-gay hate group (for its traditional definition of marriage) allegedly led to a shooting at FRC headquarters in which a guard was wounded. Not the most reliable organization for handing out labels, but Mr. Valenti accepts as gospel that Charles Murray is a eugenicist and white supremacist. Murray is no such thing, as a reading of The Bell Curve would have shown. You wouldn’t even have to read the whole book; just one chapter. Or an article. Or an interview. Anything where Charles Murray gets to speak for himself.

That didn’t happen at Middlebury. I wonder if Nic Valenti was in the chanting crowd at the lecture hall. Did he, caught up in the moment, join the jostling crowd on the sidewalk outside, where Mr. Murray was shoved and would have fallen if Prof. Stanger and a security guard weren’t supporting him? Think about that: Murray is 74 years old and a respected scholar with numerous books and degrees to his name. If he had fallen on the sidewalk among an emotional crowd of young people (granted, they might not all have been students) who had worked themselves up into a religious frenzy, what might have happened to him?

I’m not the first one to say it: some college campuses have become temples of the Cult of Intersectionality, where all truth claims are subjected to one standard: Who’s the while male bastion of privilege oppressing, and how? The storyline of oppression is so thin and boring (nobody will admit that, but it’s true), it’s bound to wear itself out sooner or later. The incident at Middlebury has been a wakeup call for some, so pray for sooner.

March 14, 2017March 15, 2017

A Relationship . . . AND a Religion

Look, I get it.

The Christian faith offers friendship,* partnership,* fellowship* and even kinship* with God the
Father through Jesus Christ our Lord. If you grew up in church and heard this all your life it may be difficult to grasp how mind-bending this is. But think about it: the Creator of the universe wants to be friends with you. Let that sink in for a minute.

But if you grew up in a church in the fifties and sixties, you may have been exposed to decades of denominational warfare as one True Church hurled detonated dogma and flaming proof texts at another. I was raised in One True Church and have been on the receiving end of doctrinal darts from another One True Church, so I understand how refreshing is the proposition that Jesus is all about relationship, not religion.

But what’s a religion? If we mean “rules whereby we set ourselves apart and gain God’s favor, unlike the ignorant, oblivious and stubborn crowd who don’t see it the way we do,” then yes. Jesus is not about that kind of religion. He had some hard words to say against what we might call dead orthodoxy.

However, when we don’t lean on our own understanding or experience but turn to an accepted authority (such as the dictionary), religion is “1.a. a belief in and reverence for a supernatural power; b. a system grounded in such belief and worship.” In that light, what strong conviction about life and purpose is not a religion?

The groundwork of relationship, the necessary actions taken to make that relationship possible, the need to take those actions and the form the relationship takes—that’s all religion, in the dictionary sense. Religion defines the relationship, like wedding vows define a marriage. Religion is the house where the relationship flourishes. The first Christ-followers, who should have something to tell us, followed a religion. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching (Acts 2:42) on which the church of Christ was built (Eph. 2:20).

Relationship without religion has its limits. You would think that the disciples who actually knew Jesus, who walked and talked and ate with him day by day, had a rock-solid relationship with him. Yet when he he expressed some strange and difficult doctrines, a number of them left (John 6:66). The ones who stayed heard him make some terrible predictions but dismissed them (Luke 18:31-34). When those terrible things came to pass they scattered like rats from a burning barn. But they had a relationship, didn’t they? They loved him. And yet it wasn’t until he revealed the scope of his mission through the scriptures (Luke 22:44-49) that love found a home, soon to illuminated by the Holy Spirit.

Why does this matter? Because I hear the relationship-not-religion theme more and more and I think it’s coming to mean I can believe what I want about Jesus as long as I love him and he loves me. What do you think he would say about that? What did he say about that?

If you love me you will keep my commandments.

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’ [or ‘friend, friend’?] and not do what I say?

In every believer, the relationship is going to look a little different. I’m not saying we all have to march in lock-step or bury love in religious observance. But what I hear out there is an abandonment of the very principle of religion as a body of incontrovertible truth that we live by. “This is my Son,” says the Father, “Listen to him.” If I’m only listening selectively, before long I’m mostly listening to me. That’s not good news (gospel) for anybody, least of all me.

_________________________________________

*You are my friends if you do what I command, John 15:14

Therefore we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us, II Cor. 5:20

. . . and truly our fellowship is with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ, I John 1:3

. . . in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers, Rom. 8:29

March 10, 2017

Family Inclusive, Part Two

They are wiggling in the pew. They’re grinning their sweet baby smiles at grownups across the aisle. They are head-butting mom (ouch!) and irritating dad (shh!). The whole church service takes place against a background of hisses that sound like a snake convention. You want them in the pews but it’s sweet temporary relief when someone has to be taken to the bathroom.

If Mom and Dad are in agreement it shouldn’t be too hard to plan some devotional time on Saturday (or sometime during the week) that will help prepare the kids for what we’ll be doing on Sunday morning. But there’s still that hour-long church service to get through without a meltdown. Granted that there will be some meltdowns (kids being volatile and all), if the church leadership makes a decision to move toward family-inclusive worship, they should also help parents carry it out. Such as

Children’s Sermons? Though sympathetic to the idea I’m not a fan, because children’s sermons tend to put the kids (and pastor) on display—rather than meditating on the Lord or feeding on his word, we’re chuckling about how cute they are, especially that moptop who’s trying to stand on his head. A possible alternative: at one church I visited, there was no special sermon, but the children came forward at the end of the service to lead the closing song. Each picked an item from a box of rhythm instruments and made a joyful noise with the congregation, all the more joyful because they could finally get up move. I like this idea–it didn’t break the focus on worship and it probably helped the kids feel a little more a part of things.

Set aside training rooms in lieu of a nursery. Imagine you’re three-and-a-half. Church is boring. You’ve figured out that if you crank it up to a certain decibel level, Mom or Dad will haul you off to the nursery, where there are snacks and toys and room to run around. This is not rocket science.

But what if, when you get to that level of decibels, Mom or Dad takes you firmly by the hand, walks you to a dark room, and sits down with you in a lap or in a chair beside, and you don’t get up. No matter how much you scream and cry, these are the options: in the sanctuary with all the folks or in here with Mom or Dad: your choice. No spanking, no swatting, just you and me and your screams. For most kids, it only takes a few weeks before they make the better choice (and if they forget down the road, back to the training room).

Of course it’s fine to have a nursery with toys and snacks for the toddlers. But once you’ve established a pretty reliable two-way communication with a child, usually at some age between two and four, he or she is old enough to sit still.

Establish singing classes. Once a quarter, or every couple of months, gather the kids for sing-alongs featuring favorite hymns or worship songs. If they’re regular attendees, they’ll already know these songs, but it means a lot more when they know the backstory or something about the lyricist or composer. Focus on two to three songs per session, share the story and teach a bit of music theory alongside, such as rhythms, note values, and basic sight-reading.

Alternatively, if there’s time, practice a song in Sunday school. If you know what the song selections are going to be ahead of time, use some of your pre-service Sunday school time to feature one of them: talk about the lyrics and make up hand motions or body actions to go along. Or look up American Sign Language (several online sources) for key words, and teach the children how to sign them. Use the time to stretch and jump while singing.

Get help from the pastor. Most pastors will have a sermon prepared by Friday evening. With a little encouragement, they might be willing to write a three-point outline, with the key text or texts and major illustrations, and email it out to all families with children by Saturday morning. That would make excellent devotional material: for instance, read the text and talk about the context, then speculate where Pastor will end up with the three points (or whatever). A creative pastor might even have suggestions for the family devotional, such as words to listen for, definitions or Bible characters to know, or specific questions that will be answered.

Children’s bulletins. You can buy books of reproducible bulletins at Lifeway and Mardel stores. Not a bad idea, but if the bulletin has no relation to the sermon topic or anything else, it’s just another distraction to keep them quiet. Another idea: if someone in the congregation is a creative educator with access to a simple publishing program, he or she might be willing to create customized children’s bulletins to copy and hand out on Sunday. My former pastor used to email a sermon outline on Friday (unless circumstances interfered), and I would separate the main points, write summaries, and assemble clip art illustrations. This took time, but for the most part—except when really crunched for the same—I thought it was fun. Obviously, not everyone can do it, but it’s something to consider.

Here’s a .pdf of one example, a Christmas bulletin from several years ago.

If we consider kids to be “Covenant Children” (part of God’s family), the church as a whole should take some part in worship training. This can be as simple as getting to know the children and sitting beside them in the pew, like a substitute “church grandma” or “church uncle.” At the very least, it means complementing the kids when they sit quietly and encouraging the parents when they don’t.

February 24, 2017

On to the Next Victim, or, Where’s Milo?

I started hearing of Milo Yiannopoulos a couple of years ago, probably on the Corner at National Review. Even then, I kept getting him confused with Matt Yglesias (same initials, different ethnicity and politics). The picture gradually came into focus: editor at Bretibart News; gay, outrageous, mean, flamboyant, opportunistic.

My first online encounter was this link: “WATCH: Milo visits Memories Pizza to apologize on behalf of normal gays.” Remember Memories Pizza? It was that mom-and-pop business in Somewhere, Indiana, that had to shut its doors after the co-proprietor innocently told a news reporter they wouldn’t want to cater a same-sex wedding. A hailstorm of disapproval almost forced the business to shut down entirely, but now they’re up and running and Milo paid them a visit. He was endearing and sweet, and even though I had heard he was a dispenser of vile tweets, and the pizza show was probably a stunt, I felt warmer toward him—not to mention more aware of him.

He was already making speeches on college campuses at the invitation of the Young Republicans or Conservative Action League. He didn’t call himself a conservative—or not always—but he delivered on conservative themes: pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, pro-free market, even pro-Christian. Search for “MILO: Catholics are right about everything” on YouTube and you’ll find a speech that, colorful language aside, sounds a bit like Frances Schaeffer.

Milo was fine as long as his sphere of influence didn’t extend much beyond Breitbart. Then his horse—I mean Donald Trump–won the Triple Crown: viable candidacy, nomination, presidency. Though he didn’t fit the Trump-supporter stereotype, Milo jumped that bandwagon early . . . and rode it right into the spotlight. Once a gadfly, now a target.

Last December, his star ascending, he signed a book contract with Simon & Schuster worth a reported quarter-million. Soon after, S&S authors started protesting, including over 150 children’s authors and illustrators who signed a letter. Then came the noisy, fiery campus protests. In one interview, Milo expressed amazement that someone as “silly and harmless” as himself could spark such rage. Maybe he really meant it. In any case the protests earned him enough street cred to be offered primetime exposure as keynote speaker at CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference, not the sleep device).

But then there was that other interview, revealed earlier this week, in which he apparently expressed support for pedophilia. He claimed the interview was deceptively edited; he’s never approved of sex with children; the conversation was about sex between older men and teenage boys (like in ancient Greece, you know?). But one by one, the rugs jerked out from under him: book cancelled, speech cancelled, even Breitbart cancelled. Where’s Milo?

I don’t mean where is he physically—he made a statement that included apologies and promises to stay in the spotlight. It might be better to take a nice long vacation by the lake with a Bible, but what I actually mean is, where is he politically, philosophically, and spiritually?

David French wrote a thoughtful piece at National Review outlining three conservative responses to the smug, dominant left-wing media “machine”: You can try Reasoning with (like Ross Douthat on the NYTimes editorial page), or Replacing with (producing parallel institutions like Christian schools, Christian movies, right-wing talk radio and news services), or Raging against (matching the left outrage for outrage). Yiannopoulos is a prime example of the rage angle, not that he’s angry. Until this week he appeared to be having the time of his life.

Simon & Schuster are in business to make money, and it’s their business who they sign and who they drop. CPAC shouldn’t have invited him in the first place—choosing a speaker because he outrages all the right people is like inviting a match to dynamite. As for Breitbart, they stuck with him while he insulted Jews and women and African American actresses, but sex with kids is off-limits. It’s good to know something is, but couldn’t someone have taken Milo aside earlier and put a grandfatherly word in his ear about standards and basic kindness?

Of course the left is showing selective outrage; links to Bill Maher and George Takei making similar statements–or jokes–have surfaced, but the scalp-takers are already looking for their next victim. Milo is hardly innocent, and even his friends acknowledge his mean streak, spiking up in what he chose to post and tweet. He gleefully collected enemies on both sides and clouded his true convictions with showmanship. By now he’s buried under so many pile-ons we can’t see him, but there’s a man in there. More to the point: there’s an immortal soul worth praying for.

February 17, 2017February 17, 2017

Shake It Up, Betsy!

Here’s the thing: Education is hard. But it’s not complicated.

Great thinkers, most of whom have never actually tried to educate a turnip, have proposed all kinds of theoretical education reforms: see Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, etc. From some of these theorists you get the idea that a child is a laboratory for experimentation. Actually, a child is a human being. With a soul. Human beings are personal, individual, quirky, susceptible, stubborn, challenging, frustrating, exciting, prone to failure, loaded with potential, and completely educable.

Education, since it’s all about human beings, is also a lot of things: It’s organic. It’s individual. It’s personal. It’s unexpected. It’s scattershot. It’s hit-or-miss. It’s discovery. It’s sometimes thrilling. It’s often boring. It’s emotional and spiritual, not just intellectual.

It’s not a phase of life. It is life.

The typical public school—that is, the facility, the schedule, the curriculum, and the administration—is none of those things in itself, but rather the structure that’s supposed to support those things.

I have nothing against public school. As a children’s author I’ve visited a lot of excellent public schools full of happy children taught by dedicated and creative teachers (the kind of teachers who believe it’s worthwhile to set aside time for author visits). But making education a bureaucratic matter, a policy matter, removes it farther and farther from the child and teacher. Complication ensues.

Education is hard. But it used to be simple. Layers of complication, especially since the late 19^th century, have tended to obscure the goal of education, which is raising up capable adults and responsible citizens. “Complications” come from

The “Prussian model” of graded levels, central buildings, age-sorted groups;
University education departments, which became the natural home of untested theory;
Textbook publishing, quickly growing into big business, with the usual big-business profit-margin concerns—to which we can now add evaluation, consultation, and testing services;
State BOE’s, which can’t help becoming political, because government is by definition political;
Federal Reforms, such as Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, Every Student Succeeds, etc., all of which were supposed to produce classroom-ready 5-year-olds and college-ready high school graduates. Instead they tangled teachers in layers of bureaucratic red tape and subjected students to days of standardized tests when they could have been learning something.

Is anyone really happy with the results? Why do we want more complication? Because that’s what we’re going to get with a standard-issue public-school-based Education Secretary.

Why do we want more complication?

Betsy DeVos is not standard issue. The two common complaints about her are 1), she and her husband contributed a lot of money to Republicans, and 2) she has no experience with public schools. As for #1, she is rich, and rich people are free to contribute money to political causes they care about: see Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. Education is something DeVos cares passionately about, even though she has not pursued that interest through public school reform, but by developing viable alternatives. The job description is Secretary of Education, not Secretary of Public Schools. The public school is not the only avenue for teaching our kids but we sometimes act as though it were—as if all our resources should flow in that direction and if we could only—really—dedicate ourselves to improving public schools, they would get better.

The problem is, when education is a political matter all our resources go to bulk up the bureaucracy, putting more space between teachers and kids.

I don’t blame individual teachers for this state of affairs (though teachers’ unions may be another matter). And I don’t blame individual teachers for being nervous about Betsy DeVos. But why, teachers, when you’re already stymied by standards and paperwork and evaluations and testing and top-heavy administration, would you want more of the same?

There is no standard model for education because there is no standard child.

It’s time to shake things up.

We can sanction and facilitate other options in addition to (not instead of) public school. We could remove a few layers of complexity from the public schools, giving teachers more space and freedom to do to do their jobs. We can make it possible for some children in very poor districts to go to a neighborhood academy that doesn’t have to jump through bureaucratic hoops There is no standard model for education because there is no standard child. Let a thousand options bloom, and if one doesn’t work, try something else. The very best teaching moments are mutual, spontaneous, open-ended–like life, they go by pretty fast. If you’re glued to your state-mandated lesson plan, you might miss them.

Shake it up. It could even be fun:

If you disagree, please do one thing for me: watch a documentary called The Lottery. Then let’s talk.

February 7, 2017February 7, 2017

Faith Like a Dollar General Knockoff

She goes to church, loves her parents and Jesus, posts appreciative Instagrams about the latest homily she heard from the pulpit.

She sings about Bad Romance, twerks onstage in skimpy outfits, performs anthems celebrating the LGBT spectrum and identifies as bisexual.

To her fans, especially the religiously inclined, she’s an icon of “provocative faith.” To me she seems pretty anodyne, even white-bread normal.

I have nothing against Lady Gaga and don’t presume to judge her inmost heart, or the heart of the writer of this piece in the Washington Post. It’s not my purpose to dump on anybody, only to address a few misperceptions. The article is about this year’s Super Bowl halftime headliner and how she exemplifies an open-hearted brand of Christianity not so far removed from that of Jesus himself. A lot of the content is not surprising: “She prays to an affirming God with expansive love, no a narrow-minded magician in the sky who damns nonbelievers to eternal conscious torment.” Her audience resembles “the group of outcasts and misfits who flocked to Jesus.” And finally, “She champions Christian values not of exclusion and discrimination but of empowerment, grace, and self-acceptance.”

Let’s unpack those values as they are understood in the culture at large.

Empowerment – I’m the one who knows me best and knows what’s best for me. So shut up and mind your own business.

Grace – That’s all. Just grace. Got a problem with that?

Self-acceptance – Of course! I mean, if you can’t accept yourself, who can you accept? And God accepts everybody, except for those who don’t accept everybody because they’re too busy not accepting to be accepted by God.

That’s what I’m picking up from the zeitgeist. The article says “Lady Gaga’s faith confounds a popular narrative of religion in America.” Um, don’t think so. Her faith is pretty much the most popular brand going. It’s flying off the shelves.

Christian faith as Jesus taught it was never popular, not even in goody-goody Victorian times or witch-burning Puritan times, much less today. Here’s a capsule version of it: Then he said to them all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). To unpack again:

Deny yourself – Don’t listen to your heart because it’s deceptive. Don’t assume that your deepest self is your best self because you’re inclined to rebellion. Look at me. Listen to me. Obey me.

Take up your cross – The life of self-denial is a struggle because you keep bumping up against your worst self. It can get discouraging, and sometimes not much fun.

Follow me – It’s a narrow road marked with bloody footprints. I know because I walked it first.

Grace – Yes, just grace. But if you knew what it cost me you might not be so glib.

Self-denial . . . Liberals don’t like it. Conservatives don’t like it. Mainstream Presbyterians don’t like it, nor Fundies either. What’s more, I don’t like it. And neither do you.

‘Cause baby, we’re born that way.

But that’s why Jesus came. And if it makes you feel any better, he denied himself first.

Because every self is different, self-denial won’t look the same in everybody. For the pious evangelical, as well as the progressive, it might mean giving up the checklist that makes you feel superior (they look very different, but they’re still checklists). For the exhibitionist, it could mean putting on some clothes and for the fundamentalist it may mean taking a few clothes off. For the conservative it could mean separating Christianity from Americanism and for the liberal, reconnecting God’s law to man’s law. For the ambitious writer (like me) it often means settling aside certain projects because I’m called to do something else. And much, much more.

But it’s worth it–because he is.