(…or, you know, “no” women.)

Many times in the past I was under the impression that the evangelical Christian subculture had reached its nadir. And yet, just when I think it’s as bad as it gets, along comes something like white guys rapping about how you should only hug from the side:

Now I have heard Christians favour the side hug so that crotches don’t touch or whatever. How these people stand riding the subway at rush hour is beyond me, but anyway, it’s not the sort of thing that you’d rap about. But these guys did anyway.

Why is it so hard for people in Christian culture to say “no” to anything other Christians claim to be doing in the name of Jesus? If you question why another Christian is doing something that you think is dubious the answer is “Why are you criticizing what God is blessing?” This is of course a code for “Why are you criticizing something that I personally like or that my friends are working on?”

Bullshit.

If something is looks like a bad idea, then it should not be above criticism. This seems obvious enough yet Christians (particularly evangelicals) circle the wagons when someone says something negative about anything in Christianity that they like. People in far too many churches irrationally defend the most wicked (Benny Hinn), the most banal (Joel Osteen), the most kitschy (those guys above), or the most crude (Mark Driscoll) from any criticism whatsoever because they believe that “God is blessing what they are doing.” Whether or not that’s true in every case, it still doesn’t preclude criticism.

Actually that argument doesn’t even make sense. If I was doing something that God was blessing then that’s all the more reason that I’d want to be doing it with excellence. If you ever think that God is actually blessing something I’m doing, please, please, please tell me if I’m screwing it up. Paul even had to go rebuke Peter, was God not blessing what Peter was doing in the early years of the church?

Churches need more people to say “no” to things that are stupid. We should not conclude that because some new thing (or some old thing) a church is doing is mildly popular at the moment that therefore God is blessing it. If popularity is a sign that God has blessed something is anything more blessed these days than insipid teenie-bopper vampire flicks? By guarding against stupid ideas in ministry, we are not “criticizing what God is blessing” but actually guarding the ministry’s integrity. Continuing to do something stupid usually catches up with you and wrecks the program or church or ministry that you were babying from criticism in the first place.

Some links (I almost typed “kinks” instead):

The Saddam school of management: “For an economist, some of Saddam’s strategies are reminiscent of themes in the economics of organizations…promotion of dumb managers, though for quite different reasons, the difficulties of coordinating across divisions…“

I missed this as it was unfolding, but Christian publisher Zondervan learned a lesson about racism – I hope.

First we take Manhattan: Joe Carter on the Manhattan Declaration an ecumenical sort of political platform. Halden, Bene D and John Stackhouse dissent.

More harm than good? David Fitch on video-venue megachurches.

What’s wrong with Sunday morning?

Since at least Bill liked my QI installment last week, here’s more QI, this time on rabbits:

And spaghetti:

Friday links, get them while they’re hot:

The Bible is on Xbox – don’t know how it will stack up against killing Nazi zombies.

The worst attempt at compiling the greatest songs.

Staying with music: listening to the whole song is so last century.

Is yoga an exercise program or a spiritual practice? The tax authorities want to know.

The imonk defends his use of the term “post-evangelical” against the usual suspects.

Kester Brewin has a post about a new campaign brought to you by the “atheist bus” people. In this effort they pick up on a complaint made by Richard Dawkins that labeling children as belonging to any particular religious, political, or ideological group is somehow tantamount to child abuse. Of course we can all see the extreme examples of this, the kids of Westboro Baptist come to my mind as horribly mistreated props in Fred Phelps insane efforts. It seems easy enough to spot the dangers of the extremes.

A brief aside: I want to make it clear that I went to public schools and I fully intend to send any children that I have to public schools – what I am about to say is not any sort of pitch for homeschooling or Christian private schools. That said, it is impossible not impress one’s values on one’s children – and yes, this is an observation that homeschoolers and private religious institutions frequently make. Even if I differ with their solution, their analysis is fundamentally correct. The very value of religious choice – a characteristic of neo-Durkheimian and post-Durkheimian societies – arose out of the Westphalian system and its aftermath. Prior to this turn, one’s church was embedded in one’s identity with community, social order, and nation – Durkheim’s opponents after all were French Catholic Royalists. (Some more in-depth discussion here.) Thus religion was part of a broader construction of identity that could not – or ought not – be disentangled.

Insofar as evangelicals are, by definition, always trying to add to their numbers, both from non-Christians and Christians disaffected by their own church, it can be argued that contemporary evangelicalism is a product of neo-Durkheimian society itself. Nonetheless, giving individuals unfettered religious choice is a sort of late-Western value. (One that might have some ancient antecedents, but I haven’t the time to go into that right here and now.) At any rate, a commitment to at least some form of neo-Durkheimianism is something that the British Humanist Association (creators of the new campaign) and Western evangelicals share – whether or not either group is aware of it. Kester Brewin himself expresses his support for some kind of neo- or post-Durkheimianism stance towards religion by saying,

“Parents do not and should not see their children as blank canvases that they should not make any mark on. If they did there would be no education. It is the responsibility of every parent – and every society – to do its best to pass on the history and story of the family or culture they have come from – as long as this is then followed by an invitation to freedom beyond it.”

What the British Humanist Association is trying here is a classic trick that Žižek is often fond of pointing out: the effort to appear non-ideological or post-ideological as a way to smuggle some a priori ideology into an argument. For Žižek everything is ideological (on YouTube you can find his explanation of the ideological underpinnings of toilet design – I’m serious) and any attempt to appear non-ideological should be greeted with a great deal of suspicion as the “non-ideological” rhetorical trick often works since it allows one to accuse one’s opponents thusly: “Why are you being ideological about this?! I’m just proposing something here and now you’ve put your ideology in it.”

This ad campaign is an excellent example of the process: there is an advocacy for a particular sort of meta-religious attitude that at first appears to be non-ideological since is appears to be against imposing any sort of religious labels on children. As I’ve demonstrated above though this is an expression of a particular ideological stance – that religious choice – previously delegated to adults, should be extended to children as well. By saying that there should be no religious/political/ideological label on children, one creates and new sort of meaning for the word “children” that now means not only “younger persons” but also “pre-ideological.” Of course “pre-ideological” is a label that concerns ideology.

By saying that children should not be labelled by their parent’s ideology one is both applying a new label and making a statement about what said parents ideology should be.

Start the week off right, with some more links!

Carl Raschke untangles post-modernity, relativism, and hermeneutics.

Ben Witherington laments what has been lost in the format change to Mp3s.

Are evangelicals forming a circular firing squad?

Does the church allow for change?

Are filmmakers eventually going to try to find a way to market every film to Christian audiences?

The show QI (short for Quite Interesting) is the sort of thing that could probably only come from Britain. Stephen Fry asks bizarre and obscure questions to a group of comedians. Here’s one of my favourite exchanges:

Reading Eye Weekly I came across this article about the disappearance of manliness. It appears to have been spawned by a film based on the exploits of a loutish sort of blogger named Tucker Max who freely admits that he is an irresponsible, mocking drunk whose sexual habits are a recipe for STIs. Writer Edward Keenan  points out that Tucker Max is a hero to a cadre of young men and that is a symptom of, “the slow, steady disappearance of manliness — and with it a popularly accepted, socially worthwhile role for men — in North American culture.”

Now being written in an alt-weekly, you know that this article is not going to be a simple pining for the “good old days” of yore. Keenan recognizes (rightly, in my opinion) that the old-time patriarchy had plenty wrong with it as well. I commend to you Mad Men or the UK version of Life on Mars if you start getting nostalgic for a time when women “knew their place” and so on. What happened though is that as women broke out their old roles confined to homemaking and child-rearing, men have sort of given up. Says Keenan:

“[M]en in increasing numbers have just decided to kind of drop out of the whole battle of the sexes thing and play videogames (or beer pong, or fantasy football, or Dungeons and Dragons, or just their iPods) instead. When women decided to stop taking orders from The Man, men decided to stop being The Man and focus on being The Dude. As women have realized that with great freedom comes even greater and more frustrating responsibility, men have increasingly realized that they can chase their bliss and reach self-actualization without owning up to any responsibilities at all.”

Keenan goes on to suggest that this isn’t because men have stopped being men, they’ve just continued to be men but in a more useless way:

“It’s not as if men have dropped many of the old annoying characteristics of manhood. They are as competitive as ever, they are as lustful as ever, they still shun emotionalism and embrace codes and statistics and structures. It’s just that all the socially redeeming things that used to accompany those easy-to-spot external characteristics — things like a sense of honour and a feeling of responsibility to something greater than oneself, be it family or society at large — have been shrugged off like so much paternalistic baggage.”

This is true in virtually every expression of 21st C. North American masculinity – video games along could be a case study: There’s competition, gratuitous cleavage, dispassionate killing, and of course any good first-person shooter game will break down the numbers after each round – how many kills with each type of weapon, how many head shots, accuracy and so on. Blogs, ahem, aren’t much better, WordPress, like any good blogging platform has all manner of statistics, many of which can be published to the actual home page of one’s blog so that one might boast about them.

It might be worth noting at this juncture that Keenan is careful to point out that these are of course tendencies and not universal truths, but that tendencies, like how men tend to be taller than women are not to be overlooked. There are of course slacker women and career-climbing men out there, but increasingly it seems like both of these are exceptional cases. Keenan has numbers: Women are more likely to attend university, more likely to graduate, and more likely to go into professional schools like law or medicine.

Keenan argues that we have our definitions wrong, that when we today speak of masculinity, we think of “shallow displays of toughness and vulgarity, of an obsession with balls (of various kinds) and breasts and booze and brawn” while earlier generations would have probably associated masculinity with responsibility to their families and communities. Moreover, one should not contrast masculinity and femininity: “Men haven’t avoided manliness to become more like women — if they had, we’d have no problem, really. They’ve avoided it to become more like children.”

Some Theses About All This:

• We cannot go back – even if we would want to. Young women – even many of those who I encounter in evangelical church settings often have solid careers that I do not see them forsaking for 1950s family roles. Moreover, there’s a reason I put Don Draper up at the top of this post – there was lots to dislike about the “good old days” and certainly lots of men were reprehensible cads. No nostalgia, please.
• Traditionally masculine values such as courage or responsibility have been subject to all kinds of abuse. My great-grandfather returned from Passchendaele physically (and likely psychologically) wounded – and for what? To protect the lands of Belgium’s monarchy? To stop Germany from threatening British naval hegemony? World War I was a complete waste of blood and treasure at the behest of incompetent upper class twits like Douglas Haig. Men were often just as exploited by the old patriarchy as women. If I had to choose, I’d rather my generation of men and our sons grow up as video gamers than as imperial cannon fodder.
• The recent past is not the whole history of gender relations: for most of human history most men and women worked side-by-side in predominantly agrarian societies. That is not to say that gender didn’t serve as a means for the division of labour, but it would have been incoherent to say that one sex “stayed home” and the other “went off to work.” Even with the advent of industrialization, many women worked in factories (mainly in textiles). As the nature of work continues to change it is anachronistic to suggest that there are fixed gender roles regarding work. Who does what work is always up for negotiation.
• Men dropping out and women picking up the slack goes a long way in explaining the so-called happiness gap. I am referring to the fact that since the 1960s women have reported being less and less happy with their lives while men’s happiness has generally increased. Obviously if men are focused video games/bands/the internet while women work on their careers while still doing the bulk of the household chores/child-rearing it’s no secret who will, in the short term at least, be happier.
• The cohort of boys born in the late ’70s and onward and who had grown up in North America probably had, on average, the best material childhood and adolescence in human history. We enjoyed the best toys, games, and gadgets ever. Boys playing with the tin or wooden toys of yesteryear had mediocre simulations of real trucks or real soldiers or whatever. We had Nintendo, we had toy cars that became robots, we had, in short, playthings that were better than “real life.” It’s no wonder we don’t like the idea of growing up, it’s a downgrade from childhood. Girls meanwhile were still being exposed to the intense pressure to be physically attractive while simultaneously being expected to run for student council, play sports, and get into a good university. For girls growing up didn’t remove those pressures, but at least it afforded them a sense of autonomy.
• If men are afraid to compete with women when women are on an equal footing, well, it should be obvious which is the weaker sex. Men were not defeated or victimized by feminism, rather we appear to have unilaterally surrendered – you can have the perfect kids and the great career – but we just unlocked the bonus level on this game. Is it any wonder, given the way we behave, that women want daughters more than sons? While some cultural conservatives want to depict men and boys as victims of feminists or something, my generation – men now in their 20s and 30s – did this to ourselves.

Friday the 13th, time for some lucky links:

The Roman Catholic Church in America is Protestantized?

Is Benedict conducting a “witch hunt” among nuns?

If you haven’t heard of ACTA, you may want to start paying attention to this proposed treaty that threatens to ruin the internet.

Apparently “hell houses” used to scare teenagers to Jesus are a North American thing, Pete Rollins is fascinated.

Lastly: Don’t try to steal from these guys.

One of the things that I keep coming back in our recent discussion of the essentials of Christianity is the story of the thief on the cross with Jesus. Here is a man who admits to having not led an exemplary life, and who knows nothing of anything that we would consider correct doctrine or practice in the church today. Did he know that Jesus was fully man and fully God? Did he know anything about the Trinity? What about atonement? This man could not have known about any such things. The value of doctrine to the follower of Christ – at the moment that they enter into a community of believers – is likely next to nothing.