THE CULTURAL CREED OF THE UNHOMED

If I’m honest, I’m not sure where I fit in anymore.

When I look around to see who is my political neighbor, I realize I’m in a land triangulated between the liberal Left, conservative Right, and those chaotic Libertarians. I didn’t feel like the 2016 presidential candidates from any of those three parties represented my moral universe adequately enough to get my vote. I cringe at CNN and Fox in equal measure. I increasingly feel that it is important for me not to be beholden to a “side” culturally or politically.

I’m just not the kind of guy who can say, “This party or person, do or die.” 

So I increasingly find myself wandering uneasily in the topography of a world that seems intent on filling in all the Valleys full of Gray Uncertainty and leveling all the Hills of Important Nuance.  

Don’t get me wrong - I like the Plains of Certainty and the Fields of Truth. I just want to acknowledge that those mountains and valleys of Uncertainty and Nuance exist. And I don’t want to climb them with cable news talking heads, youtube faux philosophers, conspiratorial bloggers, tweeting politicians or blindly partisan Christian leaders. 

I want fellow explorers who don’t mind the hard work, who know when and how to pick a philosophical fight full of grace and truth, and who will join me at The Brew afterwards at a table full of the laughter and tears of friends because, in the end, we are determined to love each other well in a world that is broken enough already.  

If we can do that with mutual thoughtfulness and respectfulness, that table might just feel a bit like home no matter what land I inhabit.

Here we go, in no particular order: The Cultural Creed Of The Unhomed.

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Black Panther

The new Black Panther movie has been a global phenomenon, poised to break a billion dollars worldwide. Its success is probably due to a combination of being well made and well timed. Hollywood is riding a wave of filmmaking that is bringing those who have been historically disenfranchised (women and minorities) into the spotlight, offering bigger-than-life tales of heroes with whom many can more directly connect than ever before (check out #WhatBlackPantherMeansToMe on Twitter).

Black Panther has much to offer that is worth celebrating*. As far as Marvel movies go, fan response is mixed. In some ways it still fits Marvel’s paint-by-number storytelling, but it has a more serious tone than the Avengers, and it deeply embeds itself within the beautiful tapestry of African culture and history (specifically Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa). It also avoids a lot of the moral ambiguity of other Marvel heroes (I’m talking to you, everybody but Captain America and Iron Fist) by offering a hero of virtue and nobility for whom we have good reason to cheer almost without reservation.

Here, in no particular order, are eight things that stood out to me.

"America's Blessings: How Religion Benefits Everyone, Including Atheists" (Rodney Stark)

“The French government has officially designated 173 religious groups (most of them Evangelical Protestants, including Baptists) as dangerous cults, imposing heavy tax burdens upon them and subjecting their members to official discrimination in such things as employment. Subsequently, Belgium has outdone the French, identifying 189 dangerous cults, including the Quakers, the YWCA (but not the YMCA), Hasidic Jews, Assemblies of God, the Amish, Buddhists, and Seventh-day Adventists.”

Christopher Hitchens claimed religion poisoned everything; Dawkins has compared a religious upbringing to child abuse. Are they right?  Are religious groups really such a threat that these kinds of measures should be taken? Sociologist Rodney Stark draws from an impressive range of studies to make the case that the opposite is true. Religion – specifically evangelicalism – helps everything it touches to flourish. 

Stark, a sociologist of religion, began his professional life as a research sociologist at the Survey Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. He has since worked at the University of Washington and more recently at Baylor University.  He has written over 30 books (two of which won the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion) and published over 140 scholarly articles.

He has described his early stance toward religion as that of an agnostic incapable of religious faith; in 2004, he claimed neither faith nor atheism; in2007, he described himself as an “independent Christian.” In other words, he spent years studying a worldview that he often did not support before aligning himself with the Christian faith. One would think that his long (and thoroughly researched) path from skepticism to belief at least affords him the dignity of being taken seriously. 

This book is not meant to be an apologetic for the Christian faith. It does not argue that Christianity is true. Mr. Stark merely makes a well-informed case that by multiple measures of what is popularly called ‘human flourishing,’ Christianity is the solution we’ve been looking for, not the problem we should be seeking to avoid.

The Raven Boys

"You're looking for a god...watch for the devil. When there's a god, there's always a legion of devils."

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      For those wanting to better understand the stories, worldviews, and messages shaping today's youth, I offer my latest review in a series of trending books, films, and TV shows effecting a Young Adult audience. My goal is not to critique the art form as much as to analyze how the story reflects and shapes the readers' worldview. There will be spoilers.

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Blue, her mother Marua, and her aunt Neeve  have a strong affinity for the supernatural, an awareness of the darker forces lurking behind the veil, and a pretty keen desire to explore realms best left hidden. As part of her magical heritage, Blue is under something of a curse: if she ever kisses her true love, he will die.

     
Gansey, Ronan, Declan and Adam are the Raven boys, students attending an exclusive prep academy during they day while following legend and magic at night. They are dedicated to finding the ley lines, ancient lines of power strapped into the world. The word is that the ancient Celtic heroes such as Llewellyn and Glendower aren't really dead at all. They are impatiently waiting, preserved in the magic of the lines until someone frees them through the power of reciprocity and sacrifice.
   
This is good news to the one Raven boy who actually is dead already (though nobody else knows). And now that Blue is falling for another one of them, finding the lines really is a matter of life and death.
 
Welcome to Maggie Steifvater's The Raven Boys.

Insurgent

“You said you were waiting?” says Caleb. “What were you waiting for, exactly?”

“For the world to fall apart,” Edward says, “And now it has.” 

For those wanting to better understand the stories, worldviews, and messages shaping today's youth, I offer my latest review of trending books, films, and TV shows effecting a YA audience (such as The Hunger Games, Divergent, Graceling, Bitterblue, The Road, The Wolves of Mercy Falls, Spiderman, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Project X, and The Walking Dead).

My goal is not to critique the art form as much as to analyze how the story reflects and shapes the readers' worldview. There will be spoilers.

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 Veronica Roth’s Divergent introduced us to a utopia gone terribly wrong. Society has been divided into factions, each focusing on a particular character quality or skill that humanity needs to flourish. Instead of bringing stability and unity, it ushered in pride and division. Tris is one of the Divergent, someone with the capacity to thrive in multiple factions. She and the few others like her have been targeted by those who profit from the broken social structures and fragmented families.

Divergent ended with the beginning of a bloody revolution; Insurgent enters fully into a society at war, and not just between the factions. “The battle we are fighting is against human nature itself – or at least what it has become.’

Lapsing into Chaos

     German social philosopher Arnold Gehlen talked about two parts of society: the foreground and the background. The foreground is the area of life in which people willingly and freely make choices.  The background is the area in which people automatically fulfill certain societal or communal expectations.

• When Kobe Bryant shoots, his form is background – he’s practiced that shot release ten thousand times, so he doesn’t have to figure out each time where his elbow should be.  His decision when to shoot, however, is foreground.
• When I leave my house, I wear clothes (background), but I choose to wear Ohio State colors (foreground).
• I buy presents at Christmas (background), but choose gifts to match the recipients (foreground).
• At a blinking red light, I stop (background), and I choose to go when there is an appropriate break in traffic (foreground).  

Modernity moves the background to the foreground.  In other words, it takes what we accept as normative and makes it subjective. Before, people went about their daily routine without too much reflection (self-aware choice) on particular issues, as the background institutions in society brought predictability and normalized structure to their lives. Not any more.

Modernity has given the power and heightened the desire of choice.  People have increasingly rejected the power of tradition and institutions and have begun to find their own way through life.

Since modernity has brought about an increasing amount of foreground reflection, we increasingly reject the power of institutions and embrace what Gehlen called secondary institutions, which “offer entire packages of beliefs, norms, and identities to individuals.”

If this is true, it would explain the rise of radical environmentalist and animal rights movements, the increasing polarization in politics, the increased belief in the sacredness of artistic expression, and the monomaniacal fixation on sports among middle and high school families (ever spent a weekend at a travel league soccer tournament?).

All of these things have their place, of course, but not as replacement background institutions which guide and shape every area of life. Based on my past 15 years of working with youth as a pastor and teacher, I believe there are three huge background shifts effecting American culture.

Cormac McCarthy's Secular Apocalypse

Andy Tuck, who currently heads up the University of Michigan's Philosophy Club, recently wrote a review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road for one of his classes; I thought it worthy of being read by others who are interested in how literature of the apocalypse reveals something about our views of the world.

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Morality and the Secular Apocalypse in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

The apocalypse as described in various religious traditions tends to reassert the sovereignty of the gods over the realm of morality. In the Christian tradition, for example, the second coming of Christ, in a final disambiguation of who is good and who is evil, will bring perfect justice to a fallen humanity. In the Oresteia, a long string of violence and death results in Athena setting a divine standard for human justice.  

In non-religious apocalyptic literature such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, though, an entirely separate strand of thought is observed: the apocalypse, rather than bringing justice into a world incapable of saving itself, undoes any preexisting order and morality and plunges the world into chaos.

In the post-apocalyptic world of The Road, any hints of human goodness are vestiges of the old world. Every item that alleviates human suffering, from a first-aid kit salvaged from a ship to a bottle of Coca Cola stripped from a dilapidated vending machine, is an artifact of the past. Since these things are the products of civilization, when the apocalypse ends civilization, human suffering resumes. The protagonists of The Road, a father and his son, spend most of their time rummaging through destroyed buildings and vehicles for anything from the old world. Virtually all food and tools they use are remnants civilization; they are completely dependent on the scraps of the pre-apocalyptic world for the necessities of survival.

This stands in contrast with the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic tradition, where the good are granted eternal paradise after the apocalypse, which undoes an unjust and fallen world. In The Road, the pre-apocalyptic world is not described as perfect (it was, after all, the same world that executed the nuclear war that turned the earth into the desolate wasteland portrayed in the novel), but as everything the father and son need to live comes from that time, civilization is inevitably and inherently characterized as being the solution to man’s suffering, rather than the cause of it.

Another item that especially reasserts the goodness of the pre-apocalyptic world is the pistol owned by the father and son. Even this symbol of death and destruction embodies the virtue of the old world: the only thing that gives the frail man and his young son a chance of surviving in a countryside dotted by bands of roving marauders is the pistol—as the adage goes, “God made man, but Colt made them equal.” The gun enables the weak to defend themselves in a world otherwise governed by strength, and in this sense, the gun becomes and emblem of justice.

Furthermore, in a phrase obviously picked up from his father, the boy repeatedly calls the ownership of the gun “carrying the fire” (83, 129, 278). This Promethean image reminds us that, like man’s discovery of fire, man makes life better for himself through his own devices, independent of (or even in spite of) the gods.

If the remnants of the pre-apocalyptic world repeatedly represent the relative righteousness of that time, then it follows that the post-apocalyptic world should be filled with wickedness. Indeed, this is the case; the depravity of humanity following the apocalypse is shown time and again. Early in the novel, the father is forced to shoot a man who is holding a knife to his boy’s throat (66), and has to “wash a dead man’s brains out of his [son’s] hair” (74). This disturbing image is compounded when they soon after run into a caravan of raiders with a dozen or so female sex slaves and “a supplementary consort of catamites ill-clothed against the cold and fitted in dog collars and yoked each to each” (92).

In this terrible new world, such scenes are common: with the restraints of civilization undone, man’s evil is unleashed, and the strong rule over the weak with utter cruelty. In perhaps the most disturbing scene of the novel, the boy and his father, searching for food, break open a locked cellar in a forgotten house only to discover that it is filled with naked, mutilated, people who cry to him for help (110). We later find out they are being kept alive by marauders for food, like cattle (127). Of course, such circumstances are products of the apocalypse: in the civilized world of the pre-apocalypse, not only was there no allowance of cannibalism, there was also no need for it to begin with.

Civilization was the only thing that prevented such degeneracy, and the apocalypse put an end to it. This stands in stark opposition to religious views of the apocalypse, where violence and injustice are human inventions and only undone through divine intervention. God and divinity is mentioned in The Road, but rarely positively. Early in the novel, the father wakes up and curses God, saying “Are you there? Will I see you at least? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally, have you a soul?” (11-12). The man is portrayed as agnostic throughout the novel, so he is likely just being rhetorical, yet this outcry does portray God as being unsympathetic and aloof in the wake of the apocalypse.

Any sympathetic mention of God describes him as an invention of civilization; he is good not because he is holy, just, or sovereign, but because he is product of human goodness. At the end of the novel, the father dies and the young boy is rescued by a small group of refugees—the first sympathetic characters in the novel besides the father and son. Among the refugees is a kind and motherly woman who takes care of the boy and “talks to him sometimes about God” (286). The boy prefers to pray to his father, and the woman says it’s okay, and that “the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.”

The woman, the first the boy meets in the post-apocalyptic world, is incredibly tender with him, and becomes a symbol of religion. Furthermore, by asserting the existence of a higher power, and therefore an outside source of morality, she opposes the unruly disorder and chaos of the marauders, whose highest value is strength. God is good here because he represents the order, morality, and love embodied by the woman; the positive qualities she ascribes to God are less a positive affirmation of his character than they are a positive affirmation of her own.

The apocalypse in secular literature such as The Road is not merely different from the apocalypse in the religious tradition; it is the perfect inverse of it. In the Oresteia and in Christian theology, mankind is flawed and, left to his own devices, will only increase his own suffering; human civilization is evil, because humans are evil.

But in The Road, human civilization is our only hope for lifting us out of our primal state of nature. Rather than ending human immorality in a nuclear reenactment of Sodom and Gomorrah, the apocalypse undoes our only chance at managing it. In the secular apocalypse, humanity is both responsible for and capable of his own redemption. The religious and secular views of the apocalypse, then, do not just differ in the details: they present two fundamentally different theories of human nature.

WORLDVIEWS IN MOVIES: IN TIME

As far as entertaining sci-fi goes, In Time is not bad in spite of some holes in the plot (for example, how is there not an entire industry that keeps track of peoples’ diminishing time and automatically deposits more?). However, I found the underlying worldview issues more interesting.

• This movie highlights the gift of life.  The idea that people control the lifespan of other people, charging exorbitant amounts of interest for every small life-giving injection, is appalling. Some people are Time Keepers – but the time of others is not ours to keep.  As one character notes, “No one should have to die before there time.”  Beneath the plot is an underlying promotion of inalienable rights, a claim that we as human beings deserve certain fundamental things – in this case, life.  In much the same way the previous movies from the team behind this movie wrestled with pretty serious questions  (The Truman Show and Gattaca), In Time at least attempts to address greed, exploitation, and the commodification of  human life. 

• Survival is apparently all that drives the majority of people in this film –families, relationships, and pleasure appear only on the periphery.  A scene early on introduces us to a world that values “Darwinian Capitalism” where “the strong survive.”  The movie makes clear (through that and another very specific scene near the end) that survival of the fittest is a brutal way to live.  The ending suggests there is a better way, but how exactly that will be accomplished seems unclear (see #4).

• There is an odd kind of whimsical lawlessness. Sure, somebody needed to crash the system, but never has playing Robin Hood looked so fun.  Justified rebellion is a serious and moral undertaking.  As the movie unfolds, we see good people trapped within the system, suggesting there might have been another way to fight the man.  In addition, chaos seems to follow the unleashing of time at the end, as factory workers walk away from their jobs and flood the neighboring rich time zones.  In some ways this film felt like V for Vendetta but with prettier people, cooler gadgets, more sunlight, and fewer explosions. Like V, it challenged the status quo, which is not necessarily a bad thing.  Like V, the solution is war.  Violent revolution by the proles, the fall of class divisions, a zero-sum economic game where the rich get richer only by abusing the poor, the shutting down of factories?  Hollywood, meet Marxism.

• Close to the end, the hero makes an interesting observation: “No one should live forever if even one person has to die.” On the one hand, I can appreciate the sentiment.  One person should not be required to sacrifice their life to extend the life of another. Movies like The Island have explored what life would be like in a world of true human commodification.   On the other hand,  I couldn't help but wonder if there was a deeper religious commentary here.  After all, the Christian believes the death of Christ has made eternal life possible for us all.  I'm not saying the filmmakers intended this meaning, but I imagine Dawkins noting that clip for future seminars.

• The movie gives no good foundation for hope.  Sure, the time zones crashed, but to what end?  Apparent economic chaos looms;. how many people will die before time gets fixed? Everybody in the world still needs time to live, and now the system that brought time to them doesn’t work.  Good luck.  Social stratum have been bridged, but will geographic equality really change people’s hearts?  The Marxist view of history requires a repetition of the clash between the haves and the have not’s for a long, long time before utopia.  Soon, another group will arise that has to be defeated. This might not make justice futile, but it does seem disheartening.   

The movie closes with our heroes, jobless and on the run, getting ready to continue to crash the system.  All will be well (we are to assume) because they are beautiful and love each other.  If only the world’s problems could be solved that easily.