Journal - 172nd issue

The latest Journal takes readers on a time trip back to 1995 when In Transition published a critique of the drive for doctrinal change in the then Worldwide Church of God. Twenty years later it has been updated slightly. For those of us who were out of the loop at that time it promises to throw additional light on the period of turmoil that saw the dissolution of one of the twentieth century's more fascinating sectarian movements.

Elsewhere Mac Overton reprises a 1979 episode of the TV series Lou Grant which featured a thinly disguised version of the WCG in its plot. Already faithful adherents of the various Churches of God are planning for the "Fall Festival" (actually a Spring festival here in the Southern Hemisphere) we know as the Feast of Tabernacles, and The Journal has begun listing the sites. It also reports that some enthusiastic souls want to introduce an expanded version of the Days of Unleavened Bread as a kind of FOT parallel.

Graeme Marshall, the original Regional Director for the WCG in New Zealand, is listed in the obituaries section. I remember Marshall for a visit to my parents' home in Hamilton when, as a teenager, I was just a "prospective member" considering baptism. Marshall was well regarded by many Kiwi brethren. He died April 26.

You can access a PDF of this issue online.

Google vs Closeted Faiths

Hemant Mehta raises the issue of "digital transparency" and its effect on churches.

[It's] possible to fact-check your pastor with your smartphone while he’s giving a sermon. It’s possible to know when you’re being lied to because your church is no longer the ultimate source of information. And while church leaders might tell you to “just have faith” when you ask tough questions, Google won’t run away from your line of inquiry.

He's discussing an interview with Daniel Dennett at Religion Dispatches. Dennett is one of those bothersome atheists who says things that upset the more churchly among us. The trouble is, he's often both insightful and disturbingly accurate.

Funnily enough, there is a form of "fact checking" in certain biblicist sects. The brethren take along their bibles and turn up the preacher's texts to read along. Of course, that's playing with loaded dice. The minister has selected and cropped the passages ahead of time.

Dennett observes: It takes twenty years to grow a Baptist, and twenty minutes to lose one.

There's a certain truth to that, though some of us are obviously very slow learners. I count my disengagement from bad religion in long years, not minutes.

Dennett again:

Institutions—not just religions but also universities, armies, corporations—are now faced with how to change their fundamental structure and methods to deal with the fact that everybody’s living in a glass house now. 

Protecting your inner workings is becoming very difficult; it’s very hard to keep secrets. Religions have thrived in part because they were able to keep secrets. They were able to keep secrets about other religions from their parishioners, who were largely ignorant of what other people in the world believed, and also keep secrets about their own inner workings and their own histories, so that it was easy to have a sort of controlled message that went out to people. Those days are over. You can go on the Internet and access to all kinds of information. This is going to change everything.

What do you think?

PT now an eight page rag

Once upon a time there was a magazine called The Plain Truth.

It was a substantial free monthly publication with state of the art layout, design, photography. The content was rubbish, but it still had a massive international circulation (paid for by the tithe-paying members of the church behind it).

Today it's largely forgotten. Deservedly so. From the 32 page glossy some of us fondly (or not so fondly) remember it now looks more like an advertising mailer for a department store. Only eight pages, issued bi-monthly.

And Greg Albrecht, current publisher, owner, editor... or whatever, wants you to pay for it.

Even those high impact covers have gone.

The one thing that has remained constant is the quality of the content: it's still rubbish. Admittedly not exactly the same sort of rubbish. Fringe fundamentalism has been replaced with fringe evangelicalism.

Meanwhile GCI's official post-PT publication, Christian Odyssey (affectionately known by some as Oddity) seems to have stalled completely. The last issue is dated Summer 2014.

Oh dear, how sad, never mind! The world is probably better off without either.

How are the mighty fallen. Ironic too that the much maligned Bible Advocate is still going strong. Also fringe fundamentalism I suppose, but of a more benign variety - and with a staying power that has left the PT in the dust.

Happiness Is...

What makes us happy?

The question "what is happiness?" was asked of people living in Bolton, England... in 1938. These were days of the Great Depression.

The exercise was repeated again last year. A copy of the survey questions is online. Too late to submit your views - even if you live in Bolton - but the exercise itself is a thought-provoking activity.

Both similarities and differences between the two are enlightening.

More information on the outcome is available on PsyBlog.

Cultural Christians

Thanks to Reg Killingley for drawing attention to this article in the Washington Post.

In days gone by I would have viewed "cultural Christians" with a highly jaundiced eye. Indeed the very term would have seemed an oxymoron. To take Christianity seriously meant being very serious indeed. Serious about the Bible, moral issues (always personal moral concerns rather than systemic issues in the wider society) and those all important boundary markers (such as dietary and calendar issues) that separated one out from the great unwashed.

These days I'm not so sure. Alana Massey's op piece resonates with me in many ways, enough so that I don't so much want to take up stones to throw, but offer a quiet 'amen' to some of her statements.

Marquette University professor Daniel Maguire, a theologian and former Catholic priest, makes the case in his book “Christianity Without God” for reclaiming the Bible’s epic moral narrative and leaving behind its theistic elements in order to combat neoliberal economics and environmental destruction. “When believers and nonbelievers are working together, the God thing doesn't matter a bit,” he told me. “It is just a backdrop to the issues in the real world.” Cultural Christianity has already emerged in practice, even before it’s become a self-professed identity.

But why should cultural Christians bother trying to reconcile with churches? “People very understandably associate religious institutions with very real harm and danger,” Stedman says. “But institutions are also places where people share ideas and where they organize, and heal, and hold each other accountable.”

And

As Maguire points out, the biblical metaphor for society is a household, not an institution but a dwelling place for a family. Though families will quarrel over what they don’t have in common, they are meant to come together for what they do: an ancient story of a new family formed in a place most of us will never go and a call to peace in the world that none of us can ever entirely live up to. And that is worth keeping alive for its radical, enduring and miraculous love.

It's not a line that will go done well with literalistic Christians, and atheists of the monochromatic variety will simply dismiss it as a weak-kneed option. Maybe so.

But then again, maybe not. Here's how Maguire sets out his intentions in his latest book.

I think I feel another 'amen' coming on.

Bob Price on "The Isis Cult"

Bob Price has an insightful blog post on the attraction of ISIS to young Muslims living in the West. He draws parallels with the appeal of various cults to Western youth in the 1970s.

I believe the late fundamentalist Presbyterian Francis A. Schaeffer hit the bull’s eye in his 1972 booklet The New Super-Spirituality. He was discussing the earlier hyper-fundamentalist Christian groups like the Alamos and the Children of God. These groups made no secret of their contempt for mainstream evangelical churches and ministries. The COG, for example, would send into Sunday morning church services their own members clad in sackcloth and ashes, stamping wooden staves on the sanctuary floor, chanting verses of judgment and doom. It was a classic case of a repeating historical pattern described by sociologist Max Weber: sects begin by rejecting “worldly” religious institutions which have betrayed their founders’ radical, counter-cultural vision. But in a generation or so, as these Young Turks have children and assimilate to the societal norms they once repudiated, the sect becomes a church, and after a while the whole thing begins again.

Schaeffer was sectarian in one sense: at some of his lectures (I heard one of them at Princeton University chapel), he would stamp his feet and shout “We are the true Bolsheviks!” But in The New Super-Spirituality, he theorized that a new generation of Christian youth, raised on Sunday bombast about taking up one’s cross to follow Jesus, were disillusioned by the complacent piety of their pew-potato parents and decided to chuck the affluent American lifestyle and put their money where their mouths were. They sought out Christian communes (I visited some of them: Reba Place Fellowship, Sojourners, Jesus People USA, Christian World Liberation Front), pooled possessions, took Bible names, and spent hours each day witnessing, praying, and reading scripture. All in the advancing shadow of the Second Coming.

I think we are witnessing pretty much the same thing with young Muslims leaving the West and heading for the Islamic State. You have to understand that the whole Jihad movement is a reaction against centuries of theologically devastating Islamic humiliation. In the early centuries Islam ruled an empire larger than the Roman Empire was at its height. This success could not but be experienced by Muslims as living confirmation of their belief that they were pioneers and inheritors of the Kingdom of Allah on earth. Thus when their empire began to fade, to fragment, and ultimately to face defeat, even domination, by Christian and secular powers, it was Allah’s own reputation that was impeached. It was no mere frustration; it was an existential threat to the religion: “then your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14)... 

What they heard in their mosques about Muhammad and the past glories of Islam sounded antithetical to the pluralism and secularism of the society around them. Pluralism inevitably dissolves any master narrative that may once have given a more monolithic society its identity and sense of direction. For Muslims, their very existence as one more plant in a larger garden seems to contradict the ostensible raison d’être of Islam. The blandishments of radical Islam offer what a secular, pluralistic society cannot give: a jihad to conquer anomie.

The whole piece is well worth reading.

Biblical Topiary

"Finding one's own understanding of the Bible invariably involves creating biblical topiary. I used to live near the Ladew Topiary Gardens in Maryland where remarkable objects are sculpted out of shrubbery, including a fox hunt with dogs, horse and rider leaping a fence, and, of course, the fox. Although creating topiary is a complex art, it ultimately comes down to pruning away what is not wanted to leave only the desired object. And that is what people often do when they read the Bible. They select just what they want. But unlike topiary gardeners with their shears, practitioners of biblical topiary are often oblivious to what they are leaving out. And some of them become extremely hostile to anyone who calls their attention to parts of the Bible that they are ignoring to make its message fit their beliefs."

Richard Hagenston
Fabricating Faith: How Christianity Became a Religion Jesus Would Have Rejected
Polebridge Press, 2014