The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part four.

Elicka Peterson Sparks, in her book The Devil You Know, draws links between conservative Christianity and crime. As a criminologist, she knows what she is talking about. The first link was that violence is part of Who God is, according to a long, long list of Bible passages. A Bible-based society, therefore, is one in which violence is one of the possible options in social interactions. The second is that fundamentalists like to pretend that the Bible demands harsh punishment, usually death, for a long list of perceived offenses, something that results in high incarceration rates and higher crime rates.

The third link is through Biblical oppression of women. Most crimes are committed by men, many of them against women, as with rape and domestic violence. The relatively small number of domestic violence cases of women against men are often, as in the infamous Lorena Bobbitt case, women taking revenge for abuse by men.

All of ancient society, in which the Bible was written, was misogynistic. The question of whether the Bible is more, or less, misogynistic than its social context is irrelevant. Fundamentalists pick out the passages that oppress women and hold them up as the will of God. In the Bible, as in the world at large, a woman has to marry whomever her father orders her to marry. Women are property.

The general attitude, enhanced by fundamentalism, that women are lesser creatures contributes to an atmosphere that contains rape and domestic violence. In the Old Testament, rape is a property offense. If a man rapes a woman, the rapist has to pay the woman’s father, then she is required to marry the rapist. Happy ending! Deuteronomy 21:11 permits conquering Israelite men to take captive women as their wives, plural. They are spoils of war.

My old fundamentalist self, like many modern Christians, tried to deny this. We emphasized the passage in which the Apostle Paul told husbands to love their wives. Clearly, according to conservative Christianity, a man is not supposed to viciously harm his wife; he is supposed to treat her nicely even while treating her as property.

Even though the Bible does not say it, many fundamentalist Christians believe that women want to be molested. President Trump said that women enjoy having their pussies grabbed by rich men. Many Christians believe everything Trump says as if it were in the Bible. Maybe they think it is. Most of them haven’t read the Bible.

In the next essay, I will present some final thoughts that came to me as I ready Sparks’s book.

The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part three.

Elicka Peterson Sparks, in her book The Devil You Know, draws links between conservative Christianity and crime. As a criminologist, she knows what she is talking about. The first link was that violence is part of Who God is, according to a long, long list of Bible passages. A Bible-based society, therefore, is one in which violence is one of the possible options in social interactions.

The second link is that the Bible, especially the Old Testament, prescribes punishment, often death, for a very, very, very long list of offenses.

A Biblical society, such as the one that Christian fundamentalists want to create, is one that punishes every perceived infraction. Sparks claims, with reason, that Christian fundamentalism is largely responsible for the harsh sentences for a long list of crimes—e.g., mandatory jail time for minor marijuana possession. It seems that, to a fundamentalist, the solution to any problem is, throw somebody in jail, unless it is a white supremacist. Any candidate who does not adopt a position of severe punishment will quickly have his or her reputation destroyed by Christian fundamentalists, who will not hesitate to resort to lies to accomplish this.

As a result of our harsh sentences, the United States, with five percent of the world population, has twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners.

Despite our outlandishly huge prison population, our crime rate is not lower than that of most other countries. Our prison as the first and only option approach is expensive and it doesn’t work.

As a matter of fact, so many people are in prison that prison has begun to lose its stigma. Of course, prison does not prevent a criminal from going back to a life of crime, if that criminal has millions of fellow ex-cons who constitute his or her set of peers. Our prisoner and ex-prisoner population is so large that they have their own society.

Another reason that prison does not work to prevent crime is that, if you have a criminal record, you cannot get public housing assistance. If you want to rent an apartment, you have to get the money from somewhere, and often the easiest place to get it is through the prisoner’s old criminal connections.

Today, bloodthirsty fundamentalists cannot force the death penalty for as long a list of crimes as they would like. But they can do the next best thing. They can make it nearly impossible for the criminal to ever change his or her life.

The way to force this interpretation out of the Bible is to studiously ignore all the passages, Old Testament and New, about forgiveness.

I will investigate yet another of Sparks’s links between fundamentalist religion and crime in the next essay.

The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part two.

I continue to explain some of my responses to Elicka Sparks’s book The Devil You Know.

Sparks claims there is a link between fundamentalism and a violent, crime-ridden society. What, exactly, is that link? Sparks points out components of the link. I will describe one of them here, and others in later essays.

The first link is this. From a fundamentalist viewpoint, Violence is frequently the godly thing to do. This principle contributes to a violent society in which crime is common.

The Bible, revered by fundamentalists, contains many very violent passages. Especially in the Old Testament, but also in the New, God commands violence, sometimes extreme forms of it. Sparks has page after page of Biblical quotes. When God led the Israelites to the Promised Land, as fundamentalists would say, or when the Israelites conquered it, as history would say, the Bible indicates that God commanded the Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child in the Canaanite cities, with a special emphasis on stabbing pregnant women to kill their fetuses. Except when, once in a while, God told the Israelites to take the young women for themselves, that is, the virgins who cannot possibly have evil fetuses in them. But there are also violent passages in the New Testament.

Some of these passages can be deeply disturbing. The prophet Isaiah (that is, one of the prophets by that name) predicted that God’s Army would utterly extinguish the Babylonians. One of the ways this would happen, according to chapter 13, verse 16: “Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives violated.”

It is not just during war that the Bible claims God commanded violence. The Old Testament also commands violence as part of normal jurisprudence. In Numbers chapter 5, a jealous husband can, without evidence, demand that his wife be subjected to a trial by ordeal to establish her guilt or innocence. She has to consume water containing dust from before the sacrificial altar—dust that may contain lots of bacteria, though they did not know this. It is referred to as “bitter water,” which may or may not refer to water that contains an abortifacient herbal extract. If the woman’s abdomen swells, and she has a miscarriage, then she was guilty. The intention was not to kill the woman, but of course this was a very great possibility. The main point, though, is that the woman may get sick or even die regardless of whether she had committed adultery or not: there is no connection between the outcome of the ordeal and the truth of the charge.

It is, as no one reading this essay will find surprising, extremely hypocritical for modern conservatives to claim that every embryo and fetus is precious when their Old Testament God commands a trial by ordeal in which an unborn baby is killed for the supposed sins of the mother or of the pagan society into which it might otherwise have been born.

The first link between conservative Christianity and crime, then, is this. Christians may say that God is love, but the Bible depicts a God who is at least sometimes very bloodthirsty. To the extent that Christianity influences our culture, then, it opens the collective national mind to violence as an option. Criminals know that violence is part of a Christian society, and as a result they feel free to embrace the option of violence. Violence is quickly and easily thinkable as a mode of social interaction, because violence is part of Who God Is.

Today, Trump Christians want us to go back to a frontier mentality of solving conflict through guns. And they can cite book, chapter, and verse to support this.

In the next essay, I will explore another link that Sparks makes between conservative Christianity and crime.

The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part one

The Devil You Know: The Surprising Link between Conservative Christianity and Crime was published in 2016 by Prometheus Books, which is also the publisher of two of my books. The author, Elicka Peterson Sparks, is a criminologist.

Her main point, as I interpret it, is that our American society is more violent and crime-ridden as a result of the influence of Christian fundamentalism than it would be under the influence of a more generalized humanitarian philosophy, whether founded in religion or not. She said that this significant negative influence of fundamentalism on society was occurring despite eight years of a progressive presidential administration. She could not have imagined that, with the election of Donald Trump, Christian fundamentalism would become the ruling force in America, which means that everything she said has become dangerously urgent.

I did not consider the link to be surprising. My own personal experiences with fundamentalism have long convinced me that Christian fundamentalists pick and choose the parts of the Bible they want to believe in order to oppress and destroy anyone who disagrees with them. I dared to teach about the science of evolution, from a Christian viewpoint, at a conservative church in 1982, only to have the fundamentalist members rise up and demand that I be silenced. They simply lied about what I said. The first two colleges at which I worked as a young faculty member were fundamentalist colleges—The King’s College in New York and Huntington College in Indiana—and in both places, quite literally, the Republican Party was God’s Presence on the Earth and God’s Work consisted of supporting the Republican Party. I never had the slightest doubt that Christian fundamentalists were powerful and dangerous. Eventually, I left conservative Christianity, largely because it was overwhelmingly populated by these negative, untruthful people. Fundamentalism, which has become more powerful over recent decades, picks and chooses the violent parts of the Bible and ignores the more positive parts.

Fundamentalists love, love, love the passages that prescribe violence and punishment. Atheists hate, hate, hate them and dismiss all religion as evil. Most of us, in between these extremes, see that the Bible was written during ancient times when slaughter was considered normal foreign policy, and when trial by ordeal was considered normal jurisprudence; and that we should dismiss those passages as outdated. We choose to focus on the positive and loving passages. In the Old Testament, we prefer to focus on passages such as Beat Your Swords into Plowshares and ignore the violent ones. In the New Testament, we prefer to dismiss the blood and gore of Revelation and focus on the Sermon on the Mount.

That is, in fact, what I do today. I am free to pick and choose the passages of the Bible I like because I consider the Bible to be a historical accumulation of mutually-contradictory writings, rather than a coherent Word of God. But here is what shocked me. I had been picking and choosing which parts of the Bible to believe even back when I was a fundamentalist. A true Bible Christian must believe that, at least in the past, God wanted His People to kill everyone who disagreed with them, and to subject women to trials by ordeal. I wasted years of my life trying to fit my humanist views into a fundamentalism that rejected them. I am now a Christian agnostic; but it appears that I have been for decades, without realizing it. It was something of a shock for me to discover that I have never really been a Bible Christian.

Maybe a generalized Christian humanism, one that is based on God Is Love, would make a society better. But this generalized Christianity is not fundamentalist Christianity.

A large part of Sparks’s book consists of long lists of Bible verses—not just references, but quotations—that condone violence. They are conveniently and alphabetically organized. It is difficult to plow through the Bible verses that Sparks assembles in her pages. But I did it, because these verses are, in fact, part of the Bible that I once revered as the Word of God.

Are Republicans the Only Legitimate American Citizens?

Republicans would not openly claim that they are the only American citizens. But this thought is lurking underneath the surface in their minds.

After the recent school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, a reporter interviewed a man, who claimed that “You can’t do anything about guns around here, because everyone has guns.”

Maybe every Republican has a gun, or lots of guns, but not every American has a gun. As a matter of fact, only about one in four Americans has a gun. This figure is based on dividing the number of guns by the number of people. Of course, there are a lot of children who do not own guns. So, it remains possible that all adult Republicans own guns. And some Democrats too.

“Everyone has guns” means that people who do not own guns are not part of “everyone,” that is, are not legitimate citizens of the United States.

On Failing to Change the World

I have been reading The Triumph of Human Empire by Rosalind Williams. The author ties the biographies of Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson around a common theme: Humanity has extended its dominion over every part of the globe, and while this may be inevitable, it results in great losses not only to wild nature but to human nature.

For example, in the writings of Jules Verne, Captain Nemo explores the vast unknown expanses of the oceans, in which he desires to leave behind the conflicts of the human race, which take place on land or on the surface of the sea; but he cannot leave behind his own conflict with the human race. He sees the oceans as the ultimate freedom, but he is not really free. And whether it is Captain Nemo revealing the secrets of the oceans, or riders in a balloon revealing what the unknown center of Africa is like, the very act of exploration brings these wild and unknown spaces into the range of human knowledge and therefore dominion. Verne wanted to explore the unknown world, but at the same time regretted the end of the frontier.

I would like to concentrate on William Morris, a writer about whom I knew literally nothing until I read Williams’ book. He was most famous as one of the leading British socialists of the late nineteenth century. He despised capitalism because it oppressed the poor workers, but also because it substituted cheapness for craftsmanship. He inherited a fortune and also ran a successful interior decorating business, for which he was criticized as being a socialist hypocrite. But he ran his business by artisinal, rather than industrial, standards; he particularly detested artificial dyes, and spent a lot of effort on improving natural dyes.

The triumph of cheapness in the economy was just part of the larger picture of ugliness that was gripping the world, in Morris’ view. He loved the Old Norse sagas, and mourned the loss of ancient heroism. He went to Iceland to see the places where the events in the sagas took place. While there, he was enraptured by the wildness of the volcanic landscape, and enchanted by the relative equality of all the people, country people without a rich class of capitalists. But he also loved sailing up the Thames from dirty London into the agrarian countryside. The countryside was ordered into woodlots and fields, and therefore conquered, but it was still filled with plants and animals. Morris despised the loss of the beauties of a farmed countryside.

So, what did Morris do? He spent a fair amount of time in socialist activism. But he knew that no matter how much he did, socialism would remain an elusive goal: the forces of money and power opposed it, so it didn’t matter whether socialism was better for the people or not. Instead, he spent most of his time writing poems and novels about heroic struggles in faraway or nonexistent lands. That is, he was one of the first prominent writers of fantasy. He was much revered by C. S. Lewis (Perelandra and Narnia) and J. R. R. Tolkein (Hobbit and Lord of the Rings). (Tolkein was also enraptured by the Old Norse sagas.)

This might seem like simple escape. The world is ugly and getting uglier, so we should like in our imaginations. But that is not how Morris saw it. He strongly objected to “escape” as a description of his writings. Instead, what he was doing was to create a vision of what the world could be like, how we could live, if we pursued beauty instead of ugliness. Morris could not convince very many people of socialism, but he got thousands of people to imagine a beautiful world, and many of these, in cumulative small ways, helped to partially reverse the slide toward ugliness. Morris stirred up a feeling of heroism in the minds of thousands; and, through his successor Tolkein, millions.

This is what I am devoting most of my time to, also. I do not spend very much time in political activism. Instead, my main activities are teaching and writing. This summer, my focus is on writing fiction. I have many novels that need to be refined and perfected, and a few that have not yet been written. Am I wasting my time on a dilettante activity while the masses of poor suffer violence and oppression? I hope not. I hope that my writings, about people real or imagined who pursue beauty and peace against massive opposition, will inspire thousands of other people, who will collectively do more to make the world better than I could ever do myself. My fiction is either historical (e.g. about the Cherokee leader Nancy Ward, or about the writer of Ecclesiastes, or about Heloïse and Abélard) or alternative-futures (What would happen if a new Confederacy arose in Oklahoma? What would happen if a man actually tried to quixotically live a life of altruism?) rather than fantasy like the writings of Morris, and I hope that my writings will have more impact than his did (most of which are forgotten today except by scholars).

William Morris failed to change the world. I expect to fail also. But he succeeded, and I hope to succeed, more by writing than would have been possible by a complete devotion to political action. Lots of people can participate in political action, but only I can write the books that are currently dormant on my computer drives. Now that I have finished this essay, that is what I am going to do right now.

Silent Struggles of Faith in the Novels of Shusaku Endo

I very much appreciate, and hope you get a chance to read, the thoughtful novels of the Japanese Christian writer Shusaku Endo, which include Silence (which Scorsese made into a movie) and The Samurai. Both of these novels are about Catholic missionaries in Japan right before, or during, the persecution of Christians in Japan after 1600. These are thoughtful novels, neither championing nor condemning Christianity. I consider Endo to have been Japan’s answer to Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory and Monseigneur Quixote), or the other way around.

In both of the Endo novels that I have read, European and Japanese Christians look to God for guidance, and receive only silence in response. Endo wrote, “In the thick darkness God is silent.” Many of us have had this experience.

The historical background of The Samurai was when the shogunate (military dictatorship) of Japan sent a delegation of minor samurai, with the Spanish Franciscan priest Luis Sotelo, to open up trade relations with New Spain, a trip that eventually took them to Spain and to the Vatican in 1613. Immediately thereafter, persecution nearly eradicated Christianity from Japan. The samurai from whose viewpoint much of the novel is written, Hasekura Rokuemon, was a real person. He kept a journal, but it has been last. Most of what we think we know about this delegation comes from Sotelo’s obviously self-centered and unreliable account of the journey. He thought he would be single-handedly responsible for the salvation of Japan. He was sure he would become the Bishop of Japan. Since Hasekura’s account has been lost, we have to fill in the details with imagination, which Endo did in this novel.

The one thing we know for sure is that neither the Catholic priests nor the Japanese had simple and clear motivations. The priest, as depicted by Endo in the character of Father Velasco, is sincere in his desire to serve the Japanese, even if it means losing his life, but he was also ambitious. The Japanese—the three samurai, their attendants, and the merchants—converted to Christianity by just going through the motions so that they could establish trade contacts with Christian countries, but at the end the Japanese wondered if maybe this Jesus, this ugly beat-up Jesus hanging from crucifixes, actually did love them, he who had died even more miserably than they. Jesus, they speculated, was a miserable dog who shares our miseries.

Here are some quotes that beautifully illustrate this last point. The samurai Nishi speaks to Hasekura: “I can believe in Him now because the life He lived in this world was more wretched than any other man’s. Because He was ugly and emaciated. He knew all there was to know about the sorrows of the world. He could not close His eyes to the grief and agony of mankind...Do you think He is to be found within those garish [European] cathedrals? He does not dwell there...I think He lives in the wretched homes of those [Native American] Indians...That is how He lived His life. He never visited the houses of those who were puffed up or contented. He sought out only the ugly, the wretched, the miserable, and the sorrowful. But now even the bishops and priests are complacent and swollen with pride. They are no longer the sort of people He sought after...Those who weep seek someone to lend an ear to their lamentations. No matter how much the world changes, those who weep and those who lament will always seek Him. That is His purpose in living.” [Chapter 9]

Endo also alerts us to the rivalry between Jesuits and Franciscans for access to Japan, before the shogunate shut them both out.

This novel is tragic (not unlike Silence and Scorsese’s adaptation of it). Toward the end, the Japanese samurai discover that their whole journey had been a trick on the part of their overlords, that not only was the failure of the journey but the execution of the samurai were planned from the very beginning. One of the feudal lords had tolerated Christianity, but the shogun hated Christianity, and the feudal lord had to do something to prove to the shogun that he was serious about eradicating Christianity from Japan—by executing a samurai who had, however insincerely, converted to Christianity.

The feeling I take away from the two Endo novels I have read is that no religious question has an easy and straightforward answer.