Elmer Gantry

Last weekend I saw the Tulsa Opera’s production of Elmer Gantry, based upon the famous novel by Sinclair Lewis. I read the novel decades ago, so my memory may not be clear. I have a copy of it in front of me, but not enough time to reread it. I also saw the classic Burt Lancaster movie decades ago.

The primary message of the novel is that religion is just a way of getting money from gullible people. (Lewis modeled Gantry after Billy Sunday who, despite the image created by Lewis, was apparently a sincere man, and who did not drink and dally.) Gantry’s principal launch to success in the opera was the generous support of local businessmen, who saw religion as a good source of black ink.

But the opera changes this message ever so slightly. The opera, as the novel, begins with Elmer Gantry (star football player for a Bible college in Missouri) drunk in a bar, in the company of his more level-headed roomie Jim Lefferts. Well, that’s the name in the novel. The opera changed it to Frank something. And changed the character. In the opera, Frank became a preacher, just like Elmer, only he was sincere. There is a long scene in the opera in which Reverend Frank struggles, with intense sincerity, with the fact that he cannot force himself to have the simple faith that his parishioners have. He sits alone at a piano, picking out the tune of “Take it to the Lord in prayer,” with harmony that starts falling apart. If there was such a scene in the novel, I cannot relocate it now. In a move that Sinclair Lewis—in his quest to prove that everyone who disagreed with him was evil—would presumably have never made, the opera presents an honest clergyman. Only he is an agnostic clergyman.

The opera also presents other religious figures as sincere, although deluded. First, consider the evil ones. The president of the Bible college, Quarles (changed in the opera to Baines), was deluded enough to overlook the obvious insincerity of Gantry in order to get him to become a preacher. In both the book and opera, Gantry’s arch-enemy is Eddie Fislinger, a sincere zealot. In the movie, Gantry is framed when he sincerely tries to help the prostitute Juanita with whom he had previously interacted; but in the opera, the bait is none other than Lulu Baines, the daughter of the college president and the wife of Eddie Fislinger. Baines and Fislinger and their women were sincerely religious, but blind to the fact that the ruse they designed to entrap Gantry (in the opera, Fislinger offering his wife as sexual bait to Gantry) was if anything more evil than anything Gantry did. The opera’s Lulu was so primly innocent; or was she more sinful than Juanita?

Second, consider other sincere but deluded religious figure, the evangelist Sharon Falconer, whom Lewis modeled after Aimee Semple McPherson. This character apparently believed herself chosen by God to spread the gospel of love. In the opera, Falconer finally gives in to the amorous advances of Gantry; but she remains sincere to the end about her vocation. The famous climax scene is when the tabernacle catches fire and everybody dies except Elmer Gantry. Sharon Falconer has the chance to flee with Gantry, but chooses to die with her parishioners.

In the movie, Gantry had been an insurance salesman before getting into the religion business, and he went back to selling insurance at the end. But in the opera, Gantry goes off to join an Eastern mystic and, we presume, to eventually turn faux Buddhism into a money-making venture. So the opera presents other religions, not just fundamentalist Christianity, as ways of making money. The novel, in contrast, ends with Gantry continuing to preach about morality from his pulpit, even while ogling the choir girls.

The opera did a good job of focusing on many important ideas. It had a great dramatic structure too: Act One ended with Eddie Fislinger’s rage and his vow to take revenge against Gantry, the perfect way to keep the audience in anticipation of Act Two. There were running gags, also: the sermon topic of “What is love?” kept resurfacing, much to the amusement of the audience; and Fislinger’s anger at the end of Act One took the form of writing a sermon about “What is rage?”

But the impression I came away with was that this was an opera I should have liked. It did everything right. But the music, dramatic at times, just seemed chaotic most of the time. And when it was over I was glad to leave; in the parking garage, where voices boom, I sang operatically and atonally, “What was I think—ing? To come to this opera?” The echoes gave me a feeling of relief. The climax fire scene could have had flames projected on the back screen but instead there were big red mounds that did not look like fire but rather like tubeworms along a deep sea volcanic fault.

During the intermission, I had a book to occupy me: Lame Deer Speaks, the biography of a Lakota medicine man, published in the 1970s. I read the part about how some diseases were caused by gophers shooting porcupine quills and blades of grass into people, and medicine men would cure the people by sucking the quills and blades out of them. I have seen documentaries of this practice, in which the medicine men sneak quills and grass blades in their hands and pretend to suck them out. It would appear that much of Native American religion is also psychological manipulation. But there is a difference. Lame Deer said that the medicine men got lots of gifts in return for their healing, but then they gave these things away, and continued to live in shacks. They were psychologically manipulating their people, but not to accumulate wealth. One could say that they were knowingly purveying placebos. But placebos sometimes work, so long as the patient does not know that they are placebos.

From this juxtaposition, I began to think that even if religion is a placebo, it can do some good. It is just that in many cases preachers use the placebo as a way of getting your money and controlling you. Caution advised.

The Ordeal of the Native Americans

I recently re-read Thomas Fall’s 1971 novel The Ordeal of Running Standing. As far as I can tell, it is the only novel Thomas Fall ever wrote, and it is unavailable in its original form. University of Oklahoma Press reissued it, with a new foreword, in 1993, and this edition is still available for purchase. I consider it to be one of the best novels I have read. As a Native American, I have a personal interest in this type of literature.

It begins on Indian reservation lands in western Oklahoma in the late nineteenth century, where numerous tribes with mutually incomprehensible languages have been thrown together. They have been demoralized by conquest, yearn for the glory days before the white man, and end up accomplishing just about nothing. The only way out seemed to be the Jesus Road: young Indians (such as the incipient lovers Running Standing, a Kiowa renamed Joe Standing, and Crosses-the-River, a Cheyenne renamed Sara Cross) go off to boarding school to become white.

And doesn’t Joe Standing become white! The oil tycoons are interested in hiring him. He does not realize it, but what they want him to do is to go back to Oklahoma and convince his tribe (and his wife Sara’s tribe) to sign the oil rights to them. Now why would Joe Standing want to do this? Because he thought he had figured out a way in which he could trick the whites at their own game, and end up controlling the oil companies in order to benefit, not exploit, the Oklahoma tribes. Of course, they have tricked him, something he learns only after he has used his good graces to steal his people’s land.

He wanted to be white in order to be Indian, and it didn’t work. This was his ordeal. After becoming a white Indian, he tried to reclaim his heritage, and discovered that he didn’t know the first thing about living in the woods, much less about meditating in them.

It is a beautifully-written book, with just enough romance to make us really care about the characters. The Indians aren’t all good nor are the whites all bad.

The climax begins when Joe accidentally kills one of the oil company representatives. A marshal convinces Joe to turn himself in for manslaughter, and when he does, the marshal decides instead to trap, torture, and kill him. This is when Joe realizes that almost all white people—except a neighborly white farmer’s family, and a white doctor—are vicious liars who have no concept of honor. This is when Joe has the opportunity to attack the president of the oil company, who happens to be in town, in a very dramatic and very Indian manner, just before his own death dance.

About the only way that Native peoples can have any sense of release in response to the overwhelming injustice done to them (to us) is to read things like this novel and fantasize about revenge. And part of the total conquest of Native peoples has been the internal conquest by what Fall calls the Jesus Road. By and large, Christianity over the years (in Oklahoma) has taught that God intended the white men to bring civilization to the childlike Indians. Some grade school teachers still take this approach. One of them, who became an Oklahoma state representative, was proud of teaching history the old-fashioned way, without this liberal hogwash of Native rights. She undoubtedly would not approve of the murder of Indians. But that is what happened during the Manifest Destiny of white conquest. This teacher’s creationism was inseparable from her belief in benign white supremacy.

I will close with some quotes. Joe was explaining the White Way to Sara. “The white way of life was a simple but well-made pattern…wherein rich and powerful people controlled the government by putting their own people into the law-making bodies. ‘And they use the Jesus Road as a smoke screen to hide it all from the common people. Haven’t you ever wondered why rich white men give so much money to the churches? We don’t need an Indian state, Sara. We need an Indian business. Business powerful enough to control politics. That’s what the white way of life is all about. That’s civilization…There’s a way. If we take a leaf from the white man’s book. His real book, and not the one with gold edges that he reads in church.’”

What I Remember about Pete Seeger

The famous folk singer Pete Seeger died today at age 94.

I met Pete Seeger about 1988 when my family and I lived in Ossining, New York. Pete, as I recall, lived in Beacon, just up the Hudson River from Ossining. At the time, I was a young faculty member at The King’s College, a Christian college in Briarcliff Manor. I suspect that I might have been the only faculty member at that college who did not worship the Republican Party. I was not an activist for progressive causes at the time, but I did accompany my wife to some meetings of the Beacon Sloop Club (a sloop is a kind of boat), where you could always see Pete and his wife Toshi.

I actually don’t know very much about Pete’s musical career, nor would it be on-topic for a science blog like this one. But I do remember that Pete was always involved in making life better for the people of his local community. One time, about 1989, he was invited to address a public meeting of a municipal agency responsible for recycling and energy efficiency. While other speakers talked about technical issues, Pete sang some of his songs. To him, music was just part of what it meant to live rightly upon the Earth.

At one of the meetings of the Sloop Club, I talked to him about an annual event that the club sponsored: the Weed Wallow. Members and friends would wade into the Hudson River and remove by hand as many invasive plants as they could. I do not remember what the primary invasive species of aquatic plant was, but Pete told me that it had been introduced by a well-meaning clergyman who thought it could be used as food.

My memories may be slightly inaccurate. But it is clear to me that here was a man with a worldwide reputation but who was contented, even excited, to wade out into the mud and pull weeds. He lived rightly on the Earth, by his music and by his good ecological work.

Religion and War, Again

I think we all realize that religion has been used to justify war for a long time, perhaps ever since the human species has existed. I just want to add a couple more examples to your mental list. Both examples come from medieval and early modern Europeans, who despite their protestations of advanced culture were more bloodthirsty than the people they called “savages,” who were plenty bloodthirsty themselves.

The first example is from the Crusades, in which the pope would give indulgences to the soldiers in advance for whatever rape and pillage they might undertake against Muslims. We are talking about more than one pope and more than one Crusade.

The second example comes from Martin Luther. In a 1526 essay, quoted in E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth, Luther wrote that it was God who instituted the holy practice of war.  He said that Romans 13:1 indicated that God invented war; it was not a human invention. “For the hand that wields this sword and kills with it is not man’s hand, but God’s; and it is not man, but God, who hangs, tortures, beheads, kills, and fights. These are all God’s works and judgments.”

Now, if a fundamentalist were to hear this in church today, he or she would simply nod his or her head in agreement with the preacher. But those of us who care about evidence would do as I just did and go read Romans 13:1. It says nothing at all like what Luther claimed. It says to be subject to government authorities, because God has instituted them. That is, from the Apostle Paul’s viewpoint, God created governments. This does NOT mean that God approves of everything that every government does. So if your government tells you to torture somebody, that does NOT mean that God wants you to torture that person. Luther was just making all that stuff up out of his prejudiced, evil, bloodthirsty mind. Protestants revere him, but he sounds like Pol Pot to me, with a little God-puppet added. Luther was so consumed by hatred that he deliberately made stuff up about the Bible. He wanted so badly for whatever government (in what is today Germany) was supporting him to go out and torture Catholics that he used his ecclesiastical position of power to blasphemously stick words in God’s mouth. If there is a hell, Luther is in it, along with the Crusaders. Luther certainly did not believe that God instituted the Muslim governments and that God ordered Muslims to torture Christian captives, unless maybe they were Catholics.

Look, I’ll try to cut Luther a little bit of slack here, but I’m afraid it won’t be very convincing. Luther once said that he did some of his best thinking “over porcelain,” that is, when he was sitting on the toilet. He must have been having a hard time of it, if he had enough time to think up his theology of God-inspired torture. I wonder how many acts of torture were inspired by Luther’s words, which emerged from a recalcitrant turd in Luther’s bowels. Might history have been just a little bit less violent if milk of magnesia had been invented earlier?

Sorry to all you Lutherans out there, but you’d better get yourself a different hero.

Wishing You a Quiet New Year

This past year, as every previous year, I have written a lot about loud, bloviating fundamentalism. I have tried to avoid discrediting all religion when I criticize fundamentalists. But I want to take a moment to indicate that the purpose of this blog is not to attack religion as a whole but just doctrinal religions that make people think they have the final answers to every question.

Fundamentalist religions tend to be loud. Their preachers are loud and relentless. They give you no time to think for yourself and to consider possibilities other than the stark black-and-white choices they have set before you: to agree with they say (Heaven) or to doubt it (Hell). Even during times of supposedly silent prayer in a conservative church, the organ plays melodies of hymns that tell you what to think. At least that is the way it is in fundamentalist Christianity, and I suspect (without direct knowledge) the same is true in Islam.

In this sense, fundamentalist religions resemble entertainment. Many modern movies consist of nearly continuous action. If you stop for a moment to think, you might get attacked by orcs, so you have to keep slashing with your sword. That is, these movies are like video games. And, as in video games, all of the characters are unchangeably good or bad. Genre fiction also never takes time for reflection. There are movies and literary novels in which you have to think about which direction the characters will choose and in which good vs. bad is not always very clear. But these reflective movies and books make a lot less money than action movies and genre fiction.

The big churches that sell religion and the big corporations that sell entertainment do not want you to take time for reflection. Fundamentalist religious leaders worry that, if you think for yourself, you might become a Quaker (if Christian) or Sufi (if Muslim). You might be less useful of a follower, less likely to give money to a church, less likely to take up arms when called to do so. And the corporations are afraid that you might have a good time by doing something that does not require you to make a purchase.

I wish for you, in this coming year, freedom. And you can find freedom by taking time to think carefully for yourself. Walk in the woods and notice things. Shut up and listen. Read the Bible, and think about what Jesus and the prophets said rather than what the big preachers say. Do not be afraid to be alone with your own thoughts.

Christmas Message 2013

It is the Sunday before Christmas. Doctrinal churches call it the last Sunday of Advent. It’s been a while since I’ve been to church, but this does not mean I am without religious feelings and sensibilities. And I would like to share some with you.

We recently had an ice storm, which deposited about three-quarters of an inch of ice on every exposed surface except for the ground. Streets remain clear, but everything else is glazed with a layer of crystal. It is not always symmetrical; a branch may have a half an inch of ice on one side and a quarter on the other.

There is not much that we can do about the ice except, on a Sunday morning, go out and appreciate its beauty: to notice such things as the asymmetry of ice on branches. The ice transforms everything into an object of beauty. Buds, already half-swollen for spring, are encased in it. Spheres of sycamore seeds become bizarre tree-ornaments, hanging from the trees by their loose stalks. Best of all, the ice magnifies and distorts beautiful colors, such as crimson holly berries and blue cedar berries. When the sun briefly emerges from behind thick gray clouds, the world becomes a crystal palace, like the one that Lara and Yuri walked through in Dr. Zhivago. Inevitably, the music of Journey through Snow Country and Dance of the Snowflakes from The Nutcracker filled my mind. I wonder if Tchaikovsky, who was depressed and who particularly despised the Nutcracker music that he himself wrote, could have imagined that someone almost 140 years later would me walking around in Oklahoma (which did not even exist at the time) thinking of his music. I consciously invited the beauty of ice and music to fill my mind.

We could, I suppose, have gone to church to sing about and listen to sermons about doctrines. But I believe we made the better choice, to go walking in the ice with hearts open to the beauty of the thin layer of cosmos that clings to our little path of Earth.

Back at a “Bible church” of which I was a member long ago, a former missionary related a story to me. An African tribal chief had said that he knew there was a God because he could see God’s tracks, just as he knew that certain animals were present, though unseen, because of their tracks. We might say, instead of tracks, God’s phenomena—the appearance (Greek phainen, to manifest) of the unseen in the world of the seen. The missionary meant, by this, that you could recognize the presence of God because of the evidences of creationism. While I consider creation-science to be ridiculous, I have to admit that, if there is some kind of God of love, I saw God’s phenomena this morning.

Whatever beliefs you may have or lack, I wish you a time of looking for, and finding, beauty.

Atonement

It is the Christmas season, which for most people just means materialism and religious rituals and images. But for some people, religious or not, it is a time to think about “peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.” One of the main ideas in traditional Christian belief is that Jesus brought “atonement” between God and humankind. According to this view, human sin had caused a rift between God and humankind, and Jesus’ incarnation and later his crucifixion atoned for that rift.

I wondered recently what “atonement” means to conservatives. They claim to believe in the atonement brought by Jesus Christ. But what do they mean by this? They think that they obtain atonement from God every day when they pray and every week when they go to church. But then they continue doing the same evil things as they did before, the same things that the Old Testament prophets denounced, such as grinding the poor into the dust. Apparently, to them, atonement means that God forgives them in advance for whatever they might do, sort of like the pope conferring indulgences in advance for whatever rape and pillage the Crusaders might do once they reach the Holy Land.

The conservative viewpoint is very male. Males seem to be like medieval knights: they enjoy jousting with one another, pennants and draperies waving in the air, while the people around them are sick and starving. Congress (which is mostly male) recently created an artificial budget crisis, not all that different from medieval jousting matches, so that they could joust while ignoring the real problems that bring suffering to the masses. And they fantasize that females drool over their jousting sticks. Male thinking, like male reproduction, is an ugly ramming, unlike the nourishing roundness of the female body and female thinking. Conservatives, whether Christian or Muslim, generally believe in the right of males to dominate females, which includes the primacy of male ramming over female nurture. Atonement, then, to their way of thinking, must mean to wash away female niceness and replace it with male ruthlessness.

This view of atonement is completely different from the original Christian meaning, back when Christians were a little socialistic altruistic band and before Christianity became a political force.