Well, my friends, Jeff Sharlet has done it again. Sharlet, who teaches journalism at NYU and edits The Revealer, a daily review of religion and the press, has written extensively about conservative Christianity in the United States. I have made a habit recently of recommending his work to my fellow religion/politics geeks, as he always seems to be examining organizations and trends in the evangelical church that fascinate me. His most recent article takes a look at the Battle Cry Campaign, an initiative of Teen Mania Ministries. The first few pages of the article are available online (see link below), but I still have to go buy the magazine to read the rest. I would be interested to hear people's gut reactions on a few counts:
http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_002836.php
1) For those of you who have a background in conservative evangelicalism, have you ever taken part an event like this? (At age 16, I did, although it didn't use the military motif as much. Perhaps our minds are more captivated by war in the post-9/11 world than we were in 1997...) Do you resonate with Sharlet's descriptions of Battle Cry, or do you suspect that, as a skeptic, he was unable to get inside his subjects' minds as deeply as he might have thought? Do you think he treats his subjects fairly?
2) From any and all faith perspectives, does anyone have reflections on the good and the harm that could potentially occur as a result of crusades such as these? Try to speak to both, unless you truly believe that Battle Cry is pure fascism or pure revelation.
3) For readers who have either an inordinate amount of time on your hands or an obscene fascination with the influence of the evangelical church in the U.S. political process, try comparing the following two Sharlet interviews: one from New York Public Radio this week commenting on his current Rolling Stone article...
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/04/06/05
...and the other from a 2003 chat with the Guerilla News Network, discussing his Harper's Magazine piece on the The Fellowship Foundation, the secretive evangelical organization that sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast each year.
http://www.alternet.org/story/16167
Here's a fun exercise. Sharlet concludes that one of these groups is a force for fascism and the other is not. Google search Battle Cry Campaign & Fellowship Foundation to dig up a little dirt on each, and then try to guess which one he thinks are fascists.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Jesus Camp
Has anyone out there seen this movie yet? Swing by your neighborhood video store & take a look; it is definitely worth watching for anyone interested in religion & public life in the U.S (click on the title of this post to see the trailer). I am glad to have seen it, although I must admit it was painful for me to watch for a couple different reasons:
1) Whenever I see groups of people frame the world in stark "us vs. them" terms, which is certainly the case for the protagonists in this film, I question their capacity to work together with anyone who does not share their views.
2) The film is peppered with clips from Mike Papantonio's Air America program, Ring of Fire. Papantonio's perspective on Christian fundamentalism is full of a fear and rancor that seems to have become more common for prominent voices on the political left (for a local example, see Lauren Sandler's article on Salon.com, Come As You Are). It seems to me that liberals who are afraid/suspicious of their Pentacostal neighbors, whom they have not been willing to get to know personally, are not choosing to form their worldviews all that differently than the Jesus Camp protagonists themselves. I think that the shrill voices on both sides of the debate at the climax of this movie would do well to learn to play better with others.
Is there anyone else who has seen the movie and would like to react? Or feel free to reflect on the red-blue divide that the film is seeking to explore...
1) Whenever I see groups of people frame the world in stark "us vs. them" terms, which is certainly the case for the protagonists in this film, I question their capacity to work together with anyone who does not share their views.
2) The film is peppered with clips from Mike Papantonio's Air America program, Ring of Fire. Papantonio's perspective on Christian fundamentalism is full of a fear and rancor that seems to have become more common for prominent voices on the political left (for a local example, see Lauren Sandler's article on Salon.com, Come As You Are). It seems to me that liberals who are afraid/suspicious of their Pentacostal neighbors, whom they have not been willing to get to know personally, are not choosing to form their worldviews all that differently than the Jesus Camp protagonists themselves. I think that the shrill voices on both sides of the debate at the climax of this movie would do well to learn to play better with others.
Is there anyone else who has seen the movie and would like to react? Or feel free to reflect on the red-blue divide that the film is seeking to explore...
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Welcome
No other topic is able to shut down a good conversation quite like religion. Especially here in my adopted home, the Pacific Northwest, and my native land, the San Francisco Bay Area, people seem to have difficulty talking honestly about religion, despite its enormous impact on the world in which we live. Some of us can't have an open dialogue about religion because we know we are right and we refuse to have our assumptions challenged. Others refuse to engage because of a disdain for those who use religion as a crutch, or from cynicism brought on by the legacies of destruction left by countless religious movements over the centuries. Still others feel that we need to understand religion better, but we shy away from being frank about our doubts and misunderstandings out of the fear of offending someone.
Bear with me for a moment as I digress. In Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Deep Thought, the second most powerful computer ever constructed, spends 7.5 million years contemplating the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. After this deliberation, Deep Thought reveals that the Answer is 42. The masses, as you might imagine, are not amused:
"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."
In many respects, I think this ludicrous little story carries an excellent critique of 21st century U.S. public life. Too often we cling to cut-and-dry answers without being willing to consider whether we are asking the right questions. This is true of believers and atheists, liberals and conservatives, politicians and their constituents. We want to feel that we are on the right track, but by valuing answers more than critical thinking, we often end up thinking that we know better than our neighbors without ever stopping to talk to them.
In our increasingly urbanizing society, people of myriad different faiths and cultures are living in closer proximity and greater interdependence than ever before. If we are going to live together effectively, I believe we owe it to each other to try to have authentic conversations. My goal in this blog is to provide a forum for a few exchanges that may not have otherwise occurred. We will discuss religion and politics in daily news, books, movies, and personal experiences. I hope that through these discussions we will have our assumptions challenged and our worldviews expanded.
The experiment begins today. I hope you will join the conversation.
Bear with me for a moment as I digress. In Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Deep Thought, the second most powerful computer ever constructed, spends 7.5 million years contemplating the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. After this deliberation, Deep Thought reveals that the Answer is 42. The masses, as you might imagine, are not amused:
"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."
In many respects, I think this ludicrous little story carries an excellent critique of 21st century U.S. public life. Too often we cling to cut-and-dry answers without being willing to consider whether we are asking the right questions. This is true of believers and atheists, liberals and conservatives, politicians and their constituents. We want to feel that we are on the right track, but by valuing answers more than critical thinking, we often end up thinking that we know better than our neighbors without ever stopping to talk to them.
In our increasingly urbanizing society, people of myriad different faiths and cultures are living in closer proximity and greater interdependence than ever before. If we are going to live together effectively, I believe we owe it to each other to try to have authentic conversations. My goal in this blog is to provide a forum for a few exchanges that may not have otherwise occurred. We will discuss religion and politics in daily news, books, movies, and personal experiences. I hope that through these discussions we will have our assumptions challenged and our worldviews expanded.
The experiment begins today. I hope you will join the conversation.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
