Natalie's Narrative

Waving Bibles in each other's faces

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that the Bible has been used to both support and abolish slavery, oppress and liberate women, and promote and oppose war.  I shared how uncomfortable it makes me, as a progressive Christian, to read disturbing stories in the Bible and not know how to reconcile them.  I feel like I'm picking and choosing the parts of Scripture that appeal to me the most, while sweeping the dissonant parts under the rug.

This conflict becomes especially noticeable in American politics, and I'm sure we'll see more of it in the upcoming presidential election.  Sarah Posner, from Religion Dispatches, does an excellent job of pointing out how both sides of the political spectrum use the Bible, in her article, Paul Ryan’s Bible, Jim Wallis’, Or None of the Above?  Posner mentions that using the Bible for policy arguments has its limits and pitfalls, and, "When you wave a Bible in someone's face, just remember that someone can wave one in yours, too."

The 2012 election, unfortunately already being covered and re-covered in our 24-hour news cycles, will be my third presidential election as a "thinking Christian."  I know to watch for the code words that both sides use, and will be enthralled with the language, symbols, and other imagery that each candidate will invoke.  

But while I'm busy deconstructing phrases like "nanny state," "family values," or the scare words thrown around in the immigration debate, hopefully I can keep in mind that the Right isn't the only side who uses the Bible for their own gain.  The Left joins in the fun as well.  As Posner said, a representative from Catholics United tried to give Ayn-Rand-follower Paul Ryan a Bible with all of the verses supporting the poor bookmarked.

The cynical side of me sees both sides manipulating Scripture for their own purposes.  The idealistic side of me hopes we can transcend quoting Bible verses for political gain, and recognize this ancient collection of scrolls for the nuanced, polyvocal, confusing, and beautiful thing that it is.  I'm hoping my idealistic side wins out, but who has time for nuance in a 2-minute segment on CNN or in a televised presidential debate?

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Unmasking "availability"

In my recent critique of the church's complicity with perpetuating damaging ideas to women about their body image, I declined to unpack a word that Tim Challies used: "availability."  I was too incensed at the time to even try.  Last week I found that someone else has done it for me, and what do you know, it was a man!  

Jonathan Fitzgerald, at his Patheos blog, is spot-on in his unearthing of what the concept of availability really means.  Fitzgerald also echoes Dan at On Journeying with those in Exile, who points out that lust is usually framed as a male-centered issue.  This is why I wanted to share the most compelling parts of Fitzgerald's post, "Viewing Women through the Lens of their Availability."  

Challies refers to availability three times in his post.  He describes a woman letting herself go as one who "by dressing as she does...makes a statement to her husband about her regard for him and her unavailability to him."  He says that a woman's appearance should "display beauty, availability, respect."  And one of the internal beauty marks is, according to Challies, a wife's availability to her husband.

Fitzgerald points out:

Most men unconsciously (and sometimes consciously) view women through the lens of their own satisfaction. That is, because of our historically patriarchal society, the reach of which touches everything from popular culture to our interpretations of scripture, we have come to regard women—and particularly wives—in light of their utility and availability to men.

[...]

What Challies describes is not biblical, but cultural, yet so tied to common interpretations of scripture that skeptics and believers alike assume the Bible advocates for this kind of misogyny. But it is not biblical for men to see women through the lens of our own happiness and wellbeing. When we do this, beauty is actually defined by "availability" to meet the needs of men. 

Fitzgerald notes that the idea of "biblical womanhood" actually masks "the actual and harmful desires that they express. These terms say less about what it means for a girl to be 'godly,' or what the Bible says about womanhood, and more about the expectations that a particular cultural bias burdens women with."  I would add that, taken to the extreme, viewing women as "available" opens the door for intimate-partner violence and sexual assault.  

What an excellent critique of the fact that our harmful cultural biases have snuck their way into the church! 

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Tornadoes, Ricky Gervais, and that mansion just over the hilltop

I came across this article in the LA Times about a Joplin tornado victim, M. Dean Wells, and was touched by the struggle of Wells' pastor to come to terms with a tragedy like this.  What do you say at a funeral of a man who died while selflessly letting people in a Home Depot as a massive tornado hit, only to be crushed by the concrete walls of the giant warehouse store?  

Wells' pastor admitted that he wrestled with portraying the tornado as an act of God.  Thankfully, he instead read from John 14:2: "In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you."  The pastor remarked: "I would think that in this week in which so many homes have been smashed to smithereens, there ought to be some good news in that — that God is preparing a place for us."

photo © 2010 Duncan Harris | more info (via: Wylio)

Last week, I was presented another image of this idea that we get a place in heaven, this time in the movie The Invention of Lying.  Ricky Gervais, atheist and comedian, wrote and starred in the film.  I wasn't too impressed, because it had the potential to be funnier, and I wish Gervais would have focused more on advertising and movies as a big farcical lie.  

Warning: spoilers below.

However, Gervais' character, Mark, offers a blistering critique of Christianity, from which I think Christians can learn a lesson. Mark lives in a world where no one is capable of lying or even fathoming the concept of a lie.  But, Mark has discovered lying, which means that everyone else considers what he says to be truth.  Therefore, Mark can manipulate his world.  When Mark's mother passes away, he tells her that, instead of nothingness, she will go to the best place she can ever imagine.  

Mark then ends up as an accidental modern-day Moses, basically concocting an ontology and theology that resembles Christianity.  But this belief system is a gross mischaracterization of what the Christian faith should be, because its focus is solely to end up in a mansion that "The Man in the Sky" has promised everyone individually.  

Mark and his friends end up hanging out by a pool, when Mark asks them if they're happier since they've learned about The Man in the Sky.  A friend, played by Jonah Hill, replies:

Well, because I was thinking that if I get eternal happiness when I die, that will be really great. Because it's eternal, you know, so you can't really beat that. So I'm just really happy that that's going to happen, so until then I think I'm just going to stick with the alcohol and my little apartment and just kind of hang out by myself and drink and watch TV.

Mark doesn't think this sounds like a happy life, but the friend responds, "Well no, it won't be that long because the more I drink, the faster I'll die, and I'm just waiting for that mansion."

Leave it to an atheist to highlight how a solely heaven-ward faith can end up being so useless and unable to speak to the pain we have here and now, on this earth.  Also, the promise of John 14:2, even taken outside the exaggerated context of The Invention of Lying, can end up meaningless in a society that already has anything it could ever want, materially.

It's a shame that it takes something like a massive tornado to rip us up from our foundations to remind us relatively wealthy and comfortable Americans that we have a place being prepared for us.  I wonder what meaning that John 14:2 takes on for our fellow Christians, here and in other parts of the world, who struggle daily to find shelter and food.  Maybe these material blessings are a curse at times.  

That's why I strive for a faith like Wells', who, understanding that this present life matters, took the time to visit nursing homes and was so selfless that it led to his death.  That's why I hope to avoid a faith like Mark's friend, who has no qualms with simply waiting for his mansion, beer and remote control in hand...

Is lust natural? More thoughts on bodies and consumerism

Last week, I added my thoughts to the ongoing conversation about what it means to be a "biblical" woman, especially in the context of American consumerist culture.  

photo © 2009 Neal Fowler | more info (via: Wylio)

For some reason, a post from 2007 by Dan from On Journeying with those in Exile popped up in my RSS feed.  I'm not sure why, but am very glad it did.  Dan offers an explanation of "lust," which relates to my issues with Challies' exhortations to Christian women.

Many evangelicals have resigned themselves to the belief that lust is a natural thing that men must overcome.  However, Dan points out that lust is culturally rooted, shaped by powers like patriarchy, consumerism, and capitalism.  

Dan sees the book Every Young Man's Battle as an example of this view.  I read the women's version, so I know that Dan is on target with his characterization.  He notes:

[T]he thing that probably upset me the most from my skim through this book was found in the Section entitled “How We Got Here” in the Chapter entitled “Just By Being Male.” Basically this chapter argues that the reason why so many Christian men struggle with sexual issues is because it is natural for men to struggle with those things — it is a part of their maleness. Now, this argument is pretty common in Christian circles (even beyond Evangelical circles) and it’s about time we did away with it.

You see, struggling with sexual issues is not just part of being male. “Lust” is not anontological issue, it is a cultural one — it is not related to our being, but to the way in which we are shaped and formed by our society. The truth is that there have been cultures where lust and sexually related crimes hardly existed at all. I think, for example, of the early encounters of Christian missionaries with some of the tribes in the South Pacific. Very little, if any, clothes were worn by the members of these tribes but people were not viewed as objects to be lusted after, and so things like sexual crimes were basically nonexistent. It was only after the missionaries began demanding that these people wear clothes — thereby imposing the idea that the female body is ever always an object of male lust — that sexual crimes came into being.

As Dan points out, lust is not as universal as we think.  I don't know if I can 100% agree that a culture would be completely void of sexual crimes.  However, I do think it's worth examining what our specific North American context has done to our beliefs about bodies, sex, and lust.  Whether subtly or explicitly, men are culturally conditioned to the core to view women as objects of desire, to such an extent that these views are tied up with what it means to be masculine.  I would add that this cultural conditioning is also tied up with what it means to be feminine in our culture, which ends up being a damaging, destructive force.  

Simply believing that lust is natural, as Dan points out:

reinforce[s] the structures that perpetuate the sexual objectification of women. Basically, Christian men are fighting the wrong battle. Instead of learning how to deal with something that is said to be a part of who they are as men, they need to learn how to resist the Powers that have led them to believe that something so unnatural is natural.

Another great point that Dan makes is that lust, and attempts to "control" it, are very male-centered: "it is the purity of the male mind that is at stake."  Dan rightly notes that what is truly at stake is the wholeness of the female person, and females tend to pay the highest price in this "battle."  I think that both male and female, and both mind and person, are at stake.

Thoughts?  Disagreement with Dan's ideas?

Kindergartners shouldn't have to go through this...

 

Yesterday I heard about this kindergarten teacher who was honored by the government of Nuevo Leon, a northern Mexican state, for her bravery and composure when her classroom was caught in the crossfire of the ever-present drug-related violence in Monterrey.  If you skip to minute 1:12, the actual video begins.  I'm going to assume that even if you can't understand Spanish, this scene will break your heart.  This teacher's heroism transcends any language, as do the blasts of gunshots... I'm amazed that she managed to video this.

Here is a link to the transcript of NPR's (English) report.  Maybe if we see more actual human faces, especially terrified kindergarten-aged ones, the "war on drugs" that is ripping Mexico apart will become a more urgent issue here in the U.S., especially since Americans are the ones fueling this drug trade.