The case against revival

When I was entering high school, I was invited to come with a select number of fellow youth group members to go to Pensacola, Florida to experience the Brownsville revival. At that point, it was into its second year, had gained national attention by church folk and non- alike, and some, including one globally-prominent minister claimed that it was the beginning of the final outpouring before the rapture.

Indeed, the revival drew a global audience. These were the years before the critical mass of satellite television and the interwebs, so the hubbub was largely church to church, and the response for that time was impressive. Considering the historical revivals, the Great Awakenings, Cane Ridge, Wales, Azusa Street, it’s a marvelous thing that with such limited communication they drew such attention. Of course, these events are sensational, not unlike riots or protests, and sensational events garner the attention of the public and media.

I would deny neither the sincerity of the seekers, nor the fact that they have encountered something spiritual. In the same breath, though, sincerity does not make something legitimate, nor does the spiritual encounter justify the end or means. Revival is not only overrated, but dangerous.

The information age has done a service in view of revival: We can explore from afar what is happening, and investigate to see exactly what is going on. The Lakeland revival generated buzz not too long ago, but then we saw exactly who Todd Bentley was and could then disregard it. Benny Hinn’s popularity took a nosedive after the folks at the Trinity Foundation exposed the varied shenanigans in and around the company. The veneer of revival isn’t necessarily that perfect, either: while I was at Brownsville, they were knocking down houses next door during the evening services. The already burgeoning church campus there had undercut their neighbors to make room for more sanctuary. I found this odd. Shortly after I returned from Florida that summer, I had found out that Brownsville had refused a request to be audited, and that members of the pastoral staff were building beachside villas.

All that, and Pensacola remained a really crusty, dirty place. The revival, aside from the chatter of Evangelicals, didn’t really seem to do much to the plethora of strip clubs down the street. And Pensacola remains a popular destination for the “Cops” crew.

All that said, it would be a strawman to kick revivals in the balls because there was some shady activity behind the scenes (or, sometimes, in the scenes themselves.) My beef with those who tend to lead revivals is separate from my problems with revival itself.

First, revival implies that the subject is dead or anemic. Neither, in any instance, is the case. When Evangelicals refer to “dead churches” it would be improper to say that a church has ceased to be animate. And, in the cases where such a pejorative term is used, it is highly inappropriate. No one holds the corner on theological truth. A more apropos term would be a sedentary church, a church inactive in the community or the world, motivated only by self-interest. Ironically, we have many churches that are sedentary, including charismatic churches that would prefer to be defined by their revivals!

Excitement is a poor trade-off for spiritual health. Consider revival to be a new year’s resolution: many say that they will lose weight. They will buy health club memberships, equipment, clothes, workout videos, and few will find that they keep on keepin’ on past January 15. Even fewer make it to February. The entire health club industry is predicated on the notion that people will sign up for contracts and never keep their end of the commitment other than monthly dues. The corollary for churches is disturbingly close to parallel.

Second to consider is the law of diminishing returns: for one to return to an established level of fervor or excitement, it takes a little more to get there. If God wanted his people to live in a revival state, wouldn’t the path be more consistent (not to be confused with easier) than it has historically been? Furthermore, what if Christians were in a constant revival mode? Would there not then be a claim for a higher yet level of excitement and zeal? Would revival then be the new status quo against which sympathetic believers would rebel?

Consider also the self-congratulating nature of revival: if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery–and this was especially true with Pensacola, where they actually encouraged people to mimic what was happening in the Florida panhandle back home–then what we have is not a people re-centered on being Christ’s ambassadors to the world, but a people who want to live in the thrill of what they experienced somewhere else, irrespective of whatever it is the Spirit may be speaking to a particular community of faith regarding the community surrounding them. This is the most troubling aspect to me, this revivolatry. The symptoms of revival have been observed in other cultures in other religious practices unfamiliar with charismatic Christianity. This does not delegitimize the charismata, but rather offers credence for it, though with a caveat: the manifestations are not spiritual, but human responses to the spiritual other. Revival’s tendency toward self-indulgence is self-indicting.

Finally, fire requires fuel. What was amazing about Moses’ encounter with God in Exodus was that the bush was on fire, yet completely intact. Nearly everyone who went to Brownsville burned out, most of them are no longer believers. Excitement fades. Honeymoons end. The soreness of exercise turns people away from exercise. Revivals create people who desire burnout, in order that they may try to get the feeling back. When we seek revival, we seek the absolute wrong thing. When we seek God for revival, I imagine God is mildly offended by such backhanded prayers.

The problem with revivals is that they provide no real commitment. It is lust rather than love, catering to our senses rather than our inner being; not even an affair, but a one night stand or a booty call.

The other problem with revival is that it stands in direct contradistinction to the covenental command of God: to walk humbly, to love justice and to be obedient to God’s leading. (Deuteronomy 10, rephrased in Micah 6, renewed tacitly in the teaching of Jesus to love God and others.) God calls us not to be undignified like David, a reference many revival-seekers improperly hide behind to justify their actions, but to welcome the sojourner and hold others in higher regard than ourselves, which would presumably preclude flopping around on the floor, making animal sounds under the power of “the spirit”, or holding meetings that regular people generally hold with distaste and disregard.

Consistency may be blase to our senses, but it is what God demands of his people. There may not be anything less congruent with his demands than what charismatics consider the high watermark of spiritual experience.

In our sincere desire to worship, could it be that we make for ourselves an abomination?

trading faith for faith: a critique of reasons for unbelief

A battle has raged for years between Evangelical Christians and those who claim skepticism/agnosticism/atheism on the grounds of critical thinking. The accusations are of garden variety: Christians allegedly aren’t able to think for themselves or keep an open mind. The charges are usually levelled by those who used to be believers, charges lobbed with all the zeal of a fresh convert.

One website I have become familiar with is manned by a former Christian trying to figure out “what it means to be an unbeliever and a skeptic.” I don’t mind that people choose to abandon their faith, that is, it does not offend me. Perhaps it should, but that’s not the point. That said, it does profoundly bother me when they proclaim their new gospel with little intellectual integrity or currency. To be clever or witty is not to be mistaken with being thoughtful or reasonable. It makes for good punditry, but awful, imbalanced rhetoric. (I’m looking at you, Mencken.) In other words, politicians ought not be mistaken for intellectuals; whether one wants to admit it or not, the battle for a dominant particular cultural theistic paradigm is more political posturing than anything else.

Plainly, there is no such thing as open-mindedness. To be open-minded does not say as much about a person as it does contrast from someone else. If someone claims to be open-minded, she says nothing about herself as much as she does those who she assumes are supposedly closed-minded. Ironically, the claim of open-mindedness actually is closed-minded, but under the pretense of relativism, she can claim nothing about herself as much as she can fling an under-the-radar ad hominem at someone else. It’s no different than a politician claiming to be ‘progressive’. What is that, anyway? What constitutes your progress? Without an assumption of something that is either status quo or regressive, the progressive has no leg on which to stand.

The issue here is assumption, particularly epistemic assumption. No one lacks epistemic assumptions, every person has a set of parameters by which he or she understands the world. So, the recently-converted unbeliever claims on the grounds of thinking for himself, presuming that believers do not think for themselves. Or that they have developed critical thinking capacities that preclude religious belief, presuming that religious believers are intellectual neanderthals.

In the interest of full disclosure, it comes as no surprise to many of you that I hold a particular disdain for the subcultural foolishness and accidental hubris of pop Christianity, I lament the general lack of theological development in our churches from clergy and laity alike, stupidity drives me batty and I generally have a low view of humanity. If that were all there was to it, I’d be a pretty miserable person. That said, I am moved by nobility and goodness, extraordinary acts of valor and beauty, celebrate in communities that have found a way to eschew mediocrity spiritual and social and am unafraid to act in sacrificial compassion for those around me. I refuse to be defined by the things that would keep me merely a cynic and nothing more.

It seems that our defiant agnostic friends would, in a great and terrible kicking against the goads, rather that they were simply not those people. Critical thinking, then, is a cop out, if for no other reason than the truth: critical thinking itself cannot and does not automatically render religious faith to be false. Critical thinking is not designed to deny the existence of things, but to affirm, leaving the a-theist, a-gnostic, un-believer in a most undesirable position: if the point of the aforementioned is to carve out a position that refutes supernatural or religious activity, why all the bluster? As has been said elsewhere, if there is nothing, from a purely materialist perspective, why (again, causally, not metaphysically) is there anything at all?

In sum, perhaps the time has come to doubt doubt, a point Michael Polanyi makes in his tacit epistemology. This falsification-run-amok has caused much harm to the intellectual cause. It’s easy to negate, it’s more difficult to affirm. Negation comes in the critique of something already presented, while the task of epistemic affirmation requires the enterprising and courageous mind to construct a case for something. The epistemic affirmation process requires, at its core a + b = c. The negation is a parasite to the affirming host. Rather than building a case for a-theism, the process ought to be a case for something else, for example, nihilism.

The absurdity of arguing against something that, in the mind of the skeptic, doesn’t exist reaches epic proportions. In a post next week on sailerb, I shall demonstrate why the Pfeffergorgles should have nothing to do with northwestern Iowa.

This is not to say that there is no place for critical thinking: clearly, there have been varying levels of crappy arguments for different things, from Xeno’s paradox to the earth-centered universe to the existence of God. The philosophical task involves the critique of substandard arguments, and standard arguments ought to withstand criticism. There is a level of quality control involved here, let there be no doubt. In fact, this work is an exercise in critique. I digress.

If critical thinking isn’t enough, there’s always science. Indeed, our friend also claims that reading science books (“with an open mind”, he proudly proclaims) helped to “[remove] layer after layer of propaganda”. Now, what exactly about science delivered him to salvation? Old-earth and (presumably Darwinian) evolution. This is a circumstantial ad hominem: the inference here is that young-earth creationism and intelligent design are non-negotiable aspects of Christian faith. This is patently false, moreover, they have nothing to do with Christian soteriology. Like much of what one will see coming from people like our unbeliever, it is a red herring.

I would agree that there is far too much happy, thoughtless chugging of the kool-aid in Evangelical church circles; our response to Darwin has been tepid at best. That said, there are two major points that have been deliberately left out of the general conversation. First, the line of thinking that faith and science are at odds with one another is a philosophical fiction, and actually couldn’t be further from the truth. Religion is often the strawman by which those who hold to naturalism (atheism repackaged) create their aire of dominance. Second, the acceptance of evolution does not, by any means, delegitimize Christianity. The head gasket of a car engine does not blow because someone purchases a car.  When it is also considered that a hyper-literal interpretation of Genesis is fundamentally improper, then the idea that evolution ruins faith is almost laughable. I am willing to concede, again, the fact that our churches have by and large abandoned the scientific conversation, but in the same way, science has generally abandoned faith. It’s a two-way street, paved not by science, but by philosophy.

Science is an extension of empiricism. For centuries, it was natural philosophy, a way of understanding the world around us. Today, it lurches toward scientism, the idea that science is the only way to properly interpret reality. There is one glaring problem, though: science, the process of understanding the empirical world, is reliant on epistemic assumptions, if for no other reason than everything can be reduced to one fundamentally unjustifiable premise. Science not only has its limits, it is, by definition, limited. Science cannot affirm or deny the existence of anything beyond the observable world, which makes Dawkins’ task, amongst others, utterly vain.

What can science do? It can provide powerful explanatory ability, help us understand and harness the capabilities of the world and its resources, provide us a means by which we can use technology as a tool to help (or sometimes, harm) humanity. It is reliant upon the observer or participant. It is not designed to provide us with a why, particularly, a why that is there is no why. And, in the process of understanding the world, it, like critical thinking, is designed to affirm truth and refute error. It also has been the means by which scientists for centuries until late have found a place of worship.

Science is always philosophical, but philosophy is seldom, if ever, scientific. That which is more limited has less explanatory power.

Even in these two instances, it is clear that the idea of science and critical thought somehow negates Christian faith is little more than a red herring, a diversion from the affirming task naturalism consistently fails to undertake. Through circumstantial ad hominem and a lot of clever sound and fury, there is little beyond the presentation that would constitute serious reflection on a very serious matter of personal worldview.

I grant that some of these matters cause serious questions for the theist, and we ought to consider them: if evolution has taken place, what do we do with Christian salvation? Is evolution a legitimate way to understand the creation of the world? If so, why is it that so many other fields of science have moved past the 19th century, while the origins of the universe have apparently been settled for nearly 200 years? Or could it be that Darwin’s work was a product of the times, a work fueled with the spirit of the Enlightenment? Could it be that Darwin, who clearly was inspired by/borrowed from Hegel, Lyell and LaPlace, simply applied a philosophical paradigm to the observable world? Even Newton got trumped. Why not Darwin?

This is what we have by the very pen (or, in this instance, fingers) of our friend: “I was an evangelical Christian for over a decade, completely convinced that God was real and Jesus was alive today. I attended Bible college to train to be a pastor. I worked at a Christian church for many years. I have ‘led people to Christ.’ I have left tracts in bathrooms. I have knocked on hundreds of doors asking people to repent and believe in Jesus. . . . I no longer believe in a personal God or that Jesus was born of a virgin, worked miracles, and rose from the dead. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, angels or demons, holy books or prophecy. I don’t believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago, or that God intelligently designed every species.”

What does he believe? As a self-professed “unbeliever” and “skeptic”, he believes that Christian faith is false, and that there is no way to know anything with certainty.

Problem one: faith cannot be false, a faith claim is a belief claim. Truth and falsehood are terms reserved for facts, not beliefs. Problem two: he is certain that nothing can be certain. However, he is certain that critical thinking works and that Darwinian evolution is factual. He is also certain with regard to probability. (Never mind that Pascal was certain about probability, and yet held firmly to his Christian beliefs.) A skeptic, by definition, doubts the possibility of real knowledge. Why science? Why logic? In spinning himself out of one alleged delusion, he has strangled himself with another.

So, what we have is a person who simply no longer wants to be a Christian, and believes he is warranted in doing so. And that would be fine: he is welcome to find his own way. I have no relationship to him and have no way to provide insight or investment into his life. That said, his reasoning for abandoning faith is little more than one watery excuse after another. He is not interested in declaring what actually happened to change his mind, or in building a case for a better worldview. He is only interested in differentiating himself from his subjective cultural experiences in a setting that affirmed young-earth, literal six-day creation and demanded that he and his friends go door-to-door with tracts and win the lost for Jesus. And in his attempts to say “I’m not one of them anymore,” all he has are generalities: Christians don’t think for themselves, believe in science or probability, ask tough questions, can’t imagine the Bible as anything but literally written by God, and are closed-minded anti-intellectual bigots who believe that God literally created the universe in six days about six to ten-thousand years ago. He may as well be campaigning against bleeding heart liberals or tax cuts for the rich.

In all honesty, I pity him; that his experience in Christian faith was so intellectually vapid that he felt the need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But I have no pity for his reasons, as they are insulting to anyone who is interested in thoughtful discourse. He is entitled to his reasons for walking away, but he ought not presume to insult the intelligence of his audience, many of whom simply accept his conclusions as true. Preach it, brother!

In reality, his new-found faith is no more reasonable than the faith he left. His new faith is, also, quite unreasonable. He just doesn’t realize it yet.

http:// unreasonablefaith [dot] com [slash] about

The end draws near for us here in Central Wisconsin, and while we are excited to be moving and facing new challenges and opportunities down in the middle-west, there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to see everyone we would like to see, or do some of the things we’d like to do.

Stevens Point has been home for me for 22 years. I grew up here, graduated high school and college here. Built a non-profit here. Loved here, hated here, met incredible people, enjoyed great success and failure, felt like a prince and an outcast. Joy and suffering. And, for all the experiences I’ve had, people I’ve met and trouble I in all likelihood should have gotten in to, here I am with less than five days left and feeling like there is much I have yet to do.

When I stop to think about it, though, I notice two things: the pond has gotten too small, and I have grown too big, in the most non-narcissistic way possible.

Thanks to a story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, I have become absolutely hooked on deadmalls.com and labelscar.org. In fact, when wife and I were recently visiting Kansas City prior to our impending move on a scouting trip, I took her through Blue Ridge Crossing. Only a few years ago, I had experienced KC as an adult for the first time and remember the shell of Blue Ridge Mall. It looked crusty even then, a recent addition to the plethora of industrial-commercial wasteland (which, ironically, makes Kansas City endearing and even appealing) only to be re-imagined as a big box retail outlet, home to a Wal-Mart and Lowe’s, amongst other outparcel properties. The extra-crusty cineplex is still sitting there, a creepy capitalist mausoleum, fenced in.

These kinds of places bother me, creep me out, fascinate me. Knowing that thousands of people spent millions of dollars there, and it sits on the south of I-70, a relic of a bygone day. I read about Bannister Mall, and the video footage of an urban explorer sifting through what was left after fire department exercises was downright heartbreaking.

I was a wreck when the Minnesota North Stars left Minnesota for a land that had no naturally-occuring ice. Though we had moved to Central Wisconsin from the south TC suburbs six years prior, we were there in Minneapolis the day after their fate was sealed. It was like an entire metropolitan area had its heart ripped out. My brother, along with Mom, did campus visits, and Dad and I drove around town. We listened to WCCO, callers crying and upset that a team that was the ideal image of American hockey would be wrested from the unquestioned hotbed of American hockey.

Later, when it was clear that the North Stars’ arena, the Met Center, would not be solvent without a permanent tenant, they gave the go ahead to blow it up. My family was again in the area when they blew it up, and we went to the Mall of America the day after. There I was, staring at the imploded wreckage of a hockey arena, a place that was indelibly etched into my earliest memories. My brother’s caustic sense of humor manifested itself weeks later when he sent me a postcard from college, a four-frame series of the demolition. On the back, “Just thinking of you. [R.]” I stared at it the entire next day in junior high.

And for the record; yes, Norm Green still sucks.

So I get the general idea the folks at labelscar are trying to convey: these malls aren’t just the hubs of capitalism, but connecting places for entire communities. When they die, they take childhood, often mistaken with youthful innocence, with it. I’ve seen some of the places that made the dubious lists of both places: I saw Apache Plaza in St. Anthony, lived near Knollwood in St. Louis Park, thought Festival Bay in Orlando looked too new to be so empty. I walked through the empty corridors of Port Plaza and Park Plaza as a bored young person during church conferences. Most recently, I saw movies at the Tallahassee Mall, which was alive and kicking when I lived down yonder for an academic year.

And then, there’s my own hometown, with its own dead mall: the CenterPoint MarketPlace. Like Port and Park Plazas, it was developed as a proactive reaction to sprawl. Unsubstantiated rumor persists that an idea much like Appleton’s Fox River Mall was proposed for Stevens Point, but the downtown businesses caused an uproar, and the city responded by slapping a mall downtown, damaging the integrity of the central city infrastructure and, most notably, gutting the backs of the old storefronts, not the least of which was the Main Street Opera House, a landmark on the national record, and converted into a classic American storefront cinema. “The Fox” sits there, dormant. It was dilapidated for years of neglect and disrepair, thanks in part to short-sighted city planners and a jilted property owner. In recent years, the city tried to mend fences and was able to procure funds to restore the old theater marquee, and though much idle chatter has come and gone about bringing it back to life, it sits there. Perhaps someday.

In any case, the mall was a hit at first: boasting a Sears hardware and appliances specialty store, a JCPenney and a ShopKo held down the anchors, and the inner spaces were well-occupied. It worked for a while, (unlike The Avenue in downtown Appleton, which was DOA and is shockingly left off the registers at both labelscar and deadmalls) the mall and downtown businesses made for a team that worked in the 80s. I remember doing “Crazy Days” in the summer, a giant downtown sidewalk sale that was actually worth the while. And, of course, I remember Kay-Bee Toy and Hobby. Though overpriced, it was a little slice of childhood bliss.

I also remember when it closed. And I always will remember that as being the beginning of the end of the CenterPoint Mall.

Later, when I worked downtown at a sub shop, I took count of the vacant spaces during delivery runs through the mall to ShopKo. (It was more convenient to walk than anything else, those of you who are from here or around here will understand.) 70+% vacancy, and that was five years ago. In an attempt to revitalize, planners added another anchor in the late 90s, Stage. Stage was a crappy store with a crap-pile selection and when word got out that they targeted mid-sized cities like Stevens Point because they could exploit the huddled, unwashed working class yokels, they may as well have taken hemlock. Stage shuttered its doors, and eventually (that is, over a year had passed before) a Dunham’s Sports took over the space. Even then, mom-and-pop joints have come and gone, the boutique extension that led out to Main Street turned out to be a colossal bust, the jewelry stores finally gave up, and there may not be realistically more than three inner tenants left.

The citizens, finally fed up with the utter failure of the mall, began to cry out for action. The Downtown Business Association, long since organized after the days of the threat of sprawl, in thug, mob-boss like action refused to let anything happen to the mall, for fear of other, more successful developments on the east side and in Plover to the south. (Also not helping the state of affairs was the truly forward-thinking and bold strategies of downtown Wausau, where the mall not only survives, but has actually reenergized downtown business while also embracing development to the south of them, but that’s another matter. A matter called basic economics, a matter apparently not taught in these ‘progressive’ parts. The current, overblown state of the economy has dealt a blow to our friends up north, but let’s face it: Stevens Point’s retail life was put on a respirator when practically every other part of the country was booming in the 80s and early 90s.)

So, when Wausau and Appleton were viable options, and Madison, Milwaukee and Minneapolis not that far off, why would anyone go to a little mall in the most difficult-to-navigate part of a small city in Central Wisconsin? I mourn the loss of those shopping centers where memories were made, but I feel none of that same affinity toward our own dead mall. Frankly, it was never important enough, or relevant long enough, to people in these parts to leave an indelible impression.

And, in the inevitable introspection that comes with seeing the death of other people’s collective childhood, I see that this area never really deserved what it had. K-B, jewelry stores and record shops are for people with disposable income. A person can buy a toy anywhere, or a ring. For an indiscriminate consumer, these things can be picked up at a ShopKo or a K-Mart. Why would we need a toy store? There are jewelers on Main St., why should I go in the mall? What the mall did was give the area a false sense of retail entitlement: malls thrive when anchor stores lure people in and the specialty stores inside keep them in. When K-B hit its first of many fiscal potholes, they shuttered the Stevens Point location in the first wave. Same with Sears, which reappeared in the same format years later on the south side. As other retail destinations grew in size, stature and appeal, ours did precisely the opposite. Good intentions disappear or are broken under the weight of harsh financial reality.

In Stevens Point, it was a mixture of both: clearly, the strategy was little better than suicidal over the long-term: the mall dried up and now the downtown runs the risk of becoming all bars, tattoo/piercing joints and seedy, as though there weren’t enough bars and seediness. What was for a short time a set of gemini stars is now nearly a black hole of retail (and cultural) blight.

I get the sentimentality that comes with seeing people and places undone, but this area is too culturally practical and hardy for that kind of emotional nonsense. They’d rather gut a historic building and make room for something shiny and new, only to complain about it later when it doesn’t work out as hoped and, mind-bogglingly have the audacity to refuse to do anything to attempt to undo the damage done.

And that’s why people drive to Appleton (or further) to shop. It’s also an auxiliary reason why people like wife and me choose to move elsewhere.

I had dinner downtown with one of my very closest friends last night. It’s a bit of a tradition for us when we haven’t connected for a while. As we left, we looked around and saw how many kids were out, hanging out with nothing to do. The Fox sat there, empty with a nice, shiny sign that wasn’t even lit as it should be. Empty (or closed) storefronts greeted the eyes, and yet everyone was there.

You see, on that end of downtown is the vast majority of parking for the bars on the opposite end. At first blush, you’d think downtown was the place to be, vibrant and alive and full of people; in reality, they’re there because there is nowhere else to go. Thankfully, the world still has places that connect people in ways that don’t have to explicitly involve ennui. Or beer goggles.

Through it all, thank you, Stevens Point. I hope you’ll grow up someday.

[exit stage southwest]

thoughts on a resurrection sunday from a believer who won’t be in church

On Good Friday, I left a status update out there that said “rethinking Good Friday”, with a quote from Acts 15. As the [holy] week has crescendo-ed into the passion weekend, I’ve seen more and more status updates about everything from Passover to Good Friday, and now as we’ve officially crossed over into resurrection Sunday, the resurrection. I find the entirety of the passion to be entirely profound; the cross (and, more importantly, the empty tomb) are symbols and realities that literally changed everything we thought we understood about our metaphysical framework. And it it because of its raw power that I find myself wholly irritated by the status updates. And I’m willing to admit that I’m being a curmudgeon about it all, but hear me out.

First, Jesus did not die for you. That’ll rub some people the wrong way, but if we’re taking Paul (a second-hand, after-the-fact witness) as the authority on the matter, then we’re missing the point. Jesus dying for us is, plainly, miscontextualizing the matter. A crucified Jewish peasant passed off as a incendiary zealot means nothing for us. They were a dime a dozen in antiquity, and they all came and went as often as clouds and corrupt politicians. What is it that John (John who, if he did actually write the eponymous gospel, was there firsthand for it all) encourages us to do with his story at the conclusion of it? Paraphrased, but sticking to the truth of the text, it is an exhortation to believe and find life in his authority. A Jewish zealot has no authority, even one who performed miracles and amazed crowds regardless of their standing on the social spectrum. The guy was betrayed, framed as a revolutionary and criminal, and executed with cold and ruthless Roman efficiency. If you want to celebrate that, fine. Just understand that you do so, wittingly or otherwise, for the reasons the religious leaders did: to get what you want out of the deal.

Jesus went into Jerusalem not knowing what to expect. God-man, for all of his God-ness, did not know if he was going to be accepted or rejected, much less crucified. And, when faced with the anxieties of a man anticipating death, God-man looked a lot like man. I’ve argued elsewhere that it was necessary for God to become man because, for all that God knows, he could not fully understand the human condition until he became a part of it, hence, Jesus was an absolutely necessary development. Jesus did the best he could, but don’t think for a moment that, in the garden, the sweating drops of blood was for an amusing literary flourish; these are signs of a man not knowing what is to come. How does the human manifestation of a being who only knows being because that being is being itself deal with the absence of being? Like anybody else. This is a huge, but forgotten part of the power of the gospel; Jesus’ humanity. When his humanity is taken from him wrongfully, what do you expect?

Remember the garden: to disobey God is to begin to die. The wages of sin stuff is not exclusive to Romans or Paul, this is axiomatic going back to the beginning. So what happens when God dies? Or a man who never earned a death paycheck?

Empty tomb.

We believe in the saving power of the gospel not because of Jesus’ death, but because his resurrection has (and rightfully ought to have) serious ramifications on the way we do things. Too often, it seems that we like to relish the fact that someone died so that we don’t have to, instead of staring at the empty tomb and realizing that they way we conduct day-to-day business doesn’t line up with the resurrected Christ. We like being saved, but ignore or hate living as though these things actually happened.

This is why I get frustrated with all the status updates: if you need a reminder about the thing that is of your ultimate concern, and your ultimate concern is in what you get out of the passion deal, that trivializes Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection. The resurrection is not about what Jesus did for us, it is about God’s ultimate victory over his enemies, and the expiration of the old order. We are not to be a people governed by the crucifixion, but the resurrection precisely because the resurrection shows us how ridiculous it is to be beholden to institutions and systems of control that are well-intended but futile in terms of efficacy.

The Jewish Messiah died at the hands of the Romans, was buried in a Jewish tomb and guarded by Roman soldiers. The resurrection tells us that it is for everyone while making everything else irrelevant, even the crucifixion, defying even cause and effect. Jesus Christ, the living and victorious God-man, is a subject without a clause, whose resurrection invites us to become subjects without clauses, in so doing deliberately choosing to be reconciled to full relationship with God. And yet here we are, Christians in the West, incapable of transcending the clauses of Christian culture, still living as though we are, like those referred to in Acts 15, to take on the yoke of tradition, forgetting that no one could hack it. Not to pick on anyone, but what exactly is the point of celebrating Passover, 21st century Evangelical Christians? We are so bound to the constructs that we forget that the work of Christ and the mandate for those who hold faith in the authority of Christ is fundamentally supracultural and is as such ill-suited for our programmatic tendencies. So we pick and choose, thankful for what God has done for us and still unable to share that dynamic reality without resorting to our clauses.

The rest of the world isn’t stupid. They’re wise to our game. And yet we won’t stop playing by our defined rules! The same rules that keep many from ever seeing a legitimate representation of the resurrected Christ, the same rules that demanded the life of an innocent man. History is repeating itself, and yet we’d rather complain about the current state of affairs and hide in 24-7 prayer bomb shelters than face the simple fact that history repeats for those who forget, i.e., us. We may as well the conspirators of John 11 than the people of post-ascension Acts.

Other people matter more than we do. While churches all over America will be full of people who feel obligated to do their twice-a-year duty and those who are overly excited to feel good about themselves and their salvation and those relatively few who are sincere, there are lots of people who won’t set foot anywhere near a community of faith, or a church building. All the cantatas and bait-and-switch in the world won’t get everyone, much less those who need it most. Now more than ever, we need a restored vision of the resurrected Christ, unencumbered by our crappy contexts and exercises in futility. People don’t need church, and they certainly don’t need musicals. They need to see that subjects don’t need clauses, they need to see a people dominated by nothing more or less than the resurrection.

This is why I’m rethinking Good Friday. My salvation means nothing if it does not translate into the language of those who need it most, that is, those who refuse to come to us on our terms. In the case where I have to choose between being a Christian or being Christ to those who need it, even at the cost of not appearing Christian-like, I’ll take the latter every time.

Though this is largely heavy-handed and cynical, it is Resurrection Sunday. But it’s also a day. People will be born today, people will die. And there is still much work to be done, in house and out.

Part of growing up is screwing up. Many times, people are defined and refined by their foibles and pratfalls. Sometimes those mistakes are chalked up as learning experiences, sometimes there is no grading curve and people are marked forever by their mistakes. A basic lesson in moral philosophy is that without the bad, there is no way to determine what is good; Eastern philosophy talks about this in terms of yin and yang, equilibrium.

Could it be that the converse is also true: without good, we would not understand what is bad, evil, wrong?

I would like to take this in two directions: first, in an ethical consideration of the need of an arbiter of good; and second, a consideration of the nature of the God-man, that is, Christ.

Democracy does not lend itself well to ethical principle. The concept of critical mass bears this out: if a good or service (and, for the sake of this conversation, societal actions) attains a level of popularity, that product or action ceases being new or innovative and entrenches itself into the cultural status quo. Things start out innovative or cutting edge and, for its survival, strive toward mediocrity. Ten years ago, the concept of Facebook or MySpace was virtually unheard of: today, Facebook or MySpace has exploded from its entrenchment in young adults into the middle-aged crowd. Those of us who are online check our accounts multiple times a day; going without it long enough creates abnormalcy, leaves unfulfillment. 20 years ago, cell phones were a luxury afforded by the elite and upper-middle class, now cells are not only ubitquitous, but people are texting (or checking Facebook.)

Societal trends and behaviors are no different: something can explode onto the scene and be labeled innovative, dangerous, revolutionary or whatever, and after time be de rigueur. Thomas Kuhn (and Michael Polanyi before him) talked about this kind of thing in terms of paradigm shifts, perhaps what I’m talking about here is paradigm integration. The construct does not necessarily collapse–though it can–but is at least added on to or renovated. Or, more caustically, the frog dies from the slow boil of cultural hegemony.

The rise of the naturalistic, atomistic West and the devolution of ethics and philosophy from sources of wisdom to deconstruction of language and situational ethics are not unrelated.

Ethics may not necessarily require God, but it is certainly hard to derive ethics from something like Darwinian naturalism or semiotics. That, and while people may disagree about original sin or total depravity, we can all agree that people are generally prone to stupidity. Dan Quayle can get ripped for his unorthodox spelling of ‘tomato’, while companies spend gift money on lavish junkets and bonuses. There’s stupid and then there’s stupid, but they’re both stupid.

If things, moments, behaviors are or they aren’t, then those things by default are either good or not good. Hegemony and critical mass–both democratic patterns of behavior–act in a way that blurs and then paints over the line. The reality of the matter, though, is that the very inception of any noun is, by default, the moment it is open to scrutiny. And what is open to scrutiny is subject to unintended consequences.

The struggle I’m working through is the nature of Christ: how is a man who knows no sin defined? What can refine that? If Jesus was, during his time here, fully man–and I believe he was–does it really matter that he was sinless pre-crucifixion? What defined Jesus in that context was that he was falsely accused and wrongfully executed, but he was sinless, hence the resurrection. Sin and death are inextricably linked; the resurrection is, in no small part, a paradigm implosion.

How could a person like that relate with anyone? Goody-goodies are precisely that for a reason. We can’t stand them. Maybe that’s why he needed to be put down. And perhaps that is why he could live with such profound compassion, and so much prophetic authority against the religious. Jesus, the incarnation of the God who is, is the envoy of a God who has no definition other than being. Being and rightness (or, righteousness) then have to be linked somehow. Bonhoeffer says as much in his ethical musings, and I think he’s right. Creation ought to reflect creator, any disunion is separation; Jesus then is the creation-creator: his life means more because of the attempt of fallen man to define him than anything before. Sinlessness doesn’t mean anything until then, Jesus is a good guy until faced with death, at which point he becomes the Christ.

The question that extends from this understanding, though, is somewhat disconcerting: what is it that Jesus taught while he was with us? Clearly, doing good doesn’t cut it. Repentance from sin is an aspect, but no one could claim Jesus as their salvation pre-resurrection. Our soteriology is utterly reliant on the death and resurrection of Christ; the Christ-event is a unifying portal between creation and creator. But the kingdom of God Jesus preached was not his atoning sacrifice; that would be senseless.

I do not intend to minimize the Christ-event, but want to understand what Christ’s work was prior to the Christ-event, especially as we approach passion week. The crucifixion and resurrection change everything, this much is obvious, but it is only obvious contextually, that is, to us in the [post-]Christian West. Could it be that the Christian ethic, that is, union with God and walking in repentance, is all there is to it? Are we to model Christ and his teachings, or live in the resurrection? Am I the only one who sees these as not necessarily entangled?

This obviosuly lends itself to the “what about those who have never heard?” conversation, but I don’t find that germane to this conversation. Your feedback is welcomed.

Audit ramblings

So, those of you who are aware know that wife and I have begun to transition ourselves out of full-time ministry. Right now, we volunteer with Beta and are beginning to groom our students to take the reigns of the community full-time.

Because part of the process included (or perhaps was induced by) the disembowelment of our finances, I scrambled to find work. Place after place rejected me outright (the graduate school thing scares people out of their minds, apparently), until I landed in a Hampton Inn here last fall. Younger, naive, hyper-idealistic, stupid Brent (feel free to select your preferred adjective) would have looked at this situation and screamed.

You see, I was raised with the notion that I am a child of promise, that I was destined to be somebody of note. Often the refrain would come from others, and I believed that God had some kind of special plan for my life. So when realistic Brent is doing laundry because the guy working the previous shift decided to camp out on his laptop and quite seriously do next to nothing, the internal squabble rages anew between “Why the [expletive] are you folding towels?!” and “Um…so I can help support my family, moron.”

The only reason you’re seeing this published at some point in the five o’clock hour is because I’m winding down my overnight shift. Wife doesn’t like it when I’m not in bed when she’s in bed. She says she can’t sleep well when I’m not there. I wish I could say the same, but, when it comes down to it, I prefer waking up at 3 AM because she decided to burrito herself and leave me with the corner of a sheet. We read to know we’re not alone; obviously we get married under similar pretenses. Turns out, I love my job. It doesn’t pay well, but I am insured; the hours aren’t that great but I was fortunate to find a job in a down climate; be trained by one of the best managers I’ve had; work under a great boss and great second-in-command and generally be surrounded by good people I enjoy calling colleagues, that is, if colleagues is kosher in the grey-collar hospitality sector.

As an added bonus, as I wrestled with this thought folding towels and muttering under my breath about the aforementioned chump who left me with three commercial-grade loads of towels to wash, dry and fold, this job has taught me much about leadership and humility, far more than I ever learned in Bible college, my internship in Tallahassee or in ministry on my own. I fundamentally and skeptical of leadership classes and gurus and have been for some time. During my time at the gulag, I was inundated with tripe from John Maxwell and his array of Cosby sweaters, and even then it made no sense: how can someone teach leadership, when what they do, in essence, is create a market that needs guidance? Hence, John Maxwell is full of crap. You don’t teach leaders in some macro-economic model, you create acolytes, followers.

And followers there are a-plenty in the church world. It bothered me so much that I ended up walking away from church life and developing a personal philosophy of ministry that emphasized people over process, even if it means person, as in, there aren’t enough people here to call them people. Working in a hotel, though, has only reinforced my initial notions of investing in people over fitting them into programs. We have regulars here, they’re miles from loved ones and home. I know more than a few of them by name, and over time, they’ve opened up a little; not too much, but enough to let you know that they’re glad for a friendly face.

I never liked airports for the simple fact that I would see so many people that I would never see again. Each person had a story, loved ones, homes, lives and we were all penned into this stale government-controlled holding bay, waiting for a flight to take us back to a context. Hotel life really isn’t that different, but being on this end of it, I want to share in that person’s story, even if it’s a check-in or getting them a bottle of water. I’m not interested in proselytizing, most people here didn’t even know what I did before I donned the business casual garb. I just want to be helpful.

Not too long ago, I wrote about divine calling and how I don’t exactly believe in full-time vocational ministry anymore. Perhaps there are those out there who look at my situation now and say that I was never supposed to be in ministry in the first place. Perhaps others who think I’ve put my tail between my legs and slunk away from the scene. And to both of you I would gladly extend both middle fingers, because you would both be insulting and wrong. That child of promise stuff may well still be valid, but I guarantee you it won’t be in the way you think it will come to pass. Primarily because it’s not how I thought it would come to pass, and even more obviously because that’s not how God works in the least. And I’m still alive, though there are those who would rather that I weren’t, particularly those who were more than delighted to join in on slapping me on the disavowed list. Just saying.

But hey, I could be bitter, but why? I have been well taken care of, though it hasn’t always felt like a down comforter or a cold drink on a hot day. I have a wife who loves me, a job that, though is tedious at times, I find rewarding, our finances are stable (mostly) and I’m going to school to pursue my education and work toward long-term goals: teaching, investing in students, continuing to challenge convention and fight for truth and justice in the Christian world. Because once I have my Ph.D., I can start writing books and hosting seminars and creating a niche market only I can satisfy. And then you will have to listen to me…and put up with my God-awful sweater collection.

Hotel theology, Gideons notwithstanding. Who knew?

And I’m back!

So I went on the high-anus again.

As soon as Thanksgiving hit, my world went haywire and didn’t come back to any semblance of reality until, um, now? And even then, not really. I caught the nuclear flu one day into our trip to Missouri for Christmas, was knocked out for three days, two recovery days and then home, only to pick up a nuclear cold bug one day into being home, making my voice virtually inoperable for four days, and have now spent the past three days in drain mode, which means hacking up disgustingness from my lungs and feeling like my ears had a bowl of Rice Krispies dumped in them.

This was originally going to be my inaugural sailerb post, but I never got around to it; with the recent news that the Paramount in Grafton closed its doors, I decided to give it another go. Here goes.

In recent years, I have fallen in love with the blues. Early, crusty, pre-war blues up to Buddy Guy and some of those other 60s bluesmasters not named BB King. So when I finally got around to Son House, and discovered that he (amongst others) had recorded in Grafton, Wisconsin (!), it became a mild hajj of sorts to get down to the land of Oz to see the site and see what’s left.

[Naturally, I was about 10-12 years too late. Or 70.]

So, with friend and soon-to-be-wedlocked friend Andy as co-pilot, we set out for Grafton last fall. After doing some brief prep and research courtesy the online presences of the Grafton Blues Association and Alex van der Tuuk’s paramountshome.org, I figured the burg would be a little nexus of blues history. After all, that’s how it was played up. Surely they would not be lying!

Aside from a small, easily ignored revitalization of its downtown and the addition of some blue notes on their lamp-post banners, Grafton has done next to nothing to honor a rich, unexpected heritage of some of the most important and influential artists of the 20th Century. It seems like no one in the town really cares.

So we went to an antique shop near the revitalization, and aside from having a rack of blues CDs (we ended up feasting on that), it seemed a lot like your garden variety Wisconsin antique shop. Not that we were expecting ot find a trove of Paramount 78s or anything (most of those, according to urban legend, were snatched up in the early 90s, found in an abandoned warehouse, became target practice in Port Washington or dumped into the Milwaukee River), but what we found was a town quickly morphing into suburbia (as the land of Oz has rapidly become, particularly Cedarburg and Grafton) from being a sleepy-eyed river town that the railroads forgot then the interstate remembered.

Then we went in search of the Wisconsin Chair Factory site, the hallowed ground where blues men and women recorded some of the earliest mass production blues records in America. What we found (by accident), was a plaque at the corner of a road and a bridge over the Milwaukee, a concrete foundation and some old bricks. The area had become a neighborhood in the 70s (the factory itself, which spanned the river, had burned much earlier), and one property’s boundary quite literally met the brick and mortar.

Such is how history is forgotten.

I recently read of a dispute in Virginia between Civil War battlefield preservationists and Wal-Mart, which wanted to drop a new store a mile or so from the site. To be fair, most of the war was fought in Virginia, most of her soil has Union and Confederate blood in her sediment. If we were to preserve history, we would probably still be in thatched huts in a still-barbarian Europe, dying from the plague and speaking in unknown tongues without the utterance or enabling of spirit. Naturally, there’s a tug-of-war between the preservation of history and the inevitability of progress. The Muslim stewards of the Temple Mount are allegedly busy destroying relics of ancient Israel, peasants in Egypt burned much of what we know as the Nag Hammadi library papyri to keep warm at night. Ebbets Field was blown up to make way for government housing. The Met Center was blown up to expand the drab Mall of America; when those plans were scrapped, it became the site of an Ikea. (And Norm Green still sucks.) When my grandmother died almost three years ago, it wasn’t long after she was put in the ground that her lifetime of obsessive hoarding began to make its way to the curb. What is made is to be unmade, what is created ends up destroyed. Whomever is born is doomed to die.

And the Wisconsin Chair Factory is–in quintessentially Midwestern fashion, a cultural relic from a pragmatic, pioneer past–a retaining wall for some yuppie’s waterfront property.

Heritage has a strange, Darwinian way about it.

So we set out to spend a day in Wisconsin’s unlikely capital for the blues. What we got was about two hours’ worth of actual time exploring. The Grafton Public Library had nothing, not even the walking tour material touted on van der Tuuk’s website. And the restaurant conceived in a brief fad of music appreciation, Paramount, didn’t open until 5 PM. When we went in to see a menu, they looked at us like we were crazy. That, and the joint didn’t even resemble a blues-inspired haunt, save for an old phonograph player and, yes, a handful of Paramount 78s. It was high-brow, upscale, more jazz lounge than juke joint. They opened a restaurant trying to honor the blues, and had no idea how to pull it off. The hours on the door said they were open all day, and did not actually open until the evening.

So, when the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s dining blog reported that Paramount had shut its doors for good, I nodded to myself and accepted it. They said they fell prey to the economy. In reality, they serve as a metaphor for a community without a sense of temporal, spatial or historical place. People live there when they don’t commute into Milwaukee or head north to a family cabin for the weekend. Strangers who wander a little too far from the interstate get looks from the locals. After all, there is nothing to see here.

One gets the feeling that blues folk 70+ years ago could identify all too well.

In praise of spirit over letter

With all the hubbub surrounding politics regarding deregulation and oversight, it seems a good time to mention a few related things.

One of the things that makes Christian theology beautiful is its spiritual revolution over the letter of the law. It is this philosophical shift that inspired American limited, restricted government, enshrined as a constitutional democratic republic. (For the record, I choose my words carefully: I do not advocate that this is a Christian nation founded by Christians, however, we do see a clear influence of, amongst other motivations, the scriptures in the formation of America.) As we see a concept of Christian liberty as taught in the New Testament (a proper reading of the New Testament proclaims what we should or can do, rather than what we cannot), we see in the Constitution clearly defined limitations on government, not citizens. Sadly, that concept has been routinely ignored, particularly in recent years by all parties and branches in government.

With the controversial bailout package passed by Congress came much discussion about the sources of our recent economic meltdown. Typically, Democrats blamed deregulation while Republicans blamed lack of oversight.

Constitutionally-limited government is predicated upon the decency or goodness of a nation’s citizenry. Tocqueville said it thus: When America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great; noting that the concept of American liberty was so intertwined with fervent preaching of the Gospel that it was clear the source of goodness was in the churches and places of worship from city to countryside.

Decent people need not be placed under the thumb of excessive stipulations or legalities. Decent people accept people who will preside over and defend constitutionally-limited government, which is why we have presidents and not kings, premiers, chancellors or tyrants, as well as a Congress that has specifically enumerated powers. When decent people preside over the halls of government, there is no concern for trespassing on those powers because their role is clear, defined and accepted: service, not dominion.

Again, an axiom found in scripture that has lasting repercussions beyond spiritual affairs: Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint.

People who need strict boundaries and black and white rules are people with no sense of responsibility or self-control. Because they lack a basic inner sense of right and wrong, and have never been exposed to the concept of natural law, they are hardly more than animals: selfish creatures constantly starved by the insatiable hunger for self-gratification. People who are dangers to themselves because of their reckless self-interest are people who need straitjackets and restraints.

Self-interest, and a good dose of deception, caused the fall. Self-interest is the antithesis of liberty.

Federal codex and regulations now exceed 25,000 pages of legal mumbo-jumbo, while the Constitution has been replaced with the US Legal Code, full of enough thou shalt nots to make even the most embittered wayward soul, having a propensity toward complaining about faith-based legalism, cringe. Clearly, we are a people who are a danger to ourselves governed by people whose self-interest is political ideology instead of the vigorous defense of the Constitution and their fellow Americans.

Clearly, we are a people who necessitate tyranny. As Tarkin aptly put it: Fear will keep them in line.

Which brings us to the current economic meltdown. Things were allowed to get this bad by everyone:

-Government which held mortgage lenders hostage in the name of politically-correct egalitarianism and then got into the debt management business with high risk mortgages via government-sponsored entities. The same party that advocated the destruction of black neighborhoods in the name of public housing projects passed the original Community Reinvestment Act and its modification, which is directly to blame for the mess we’re in right now;

-Banks and other financial entities that offered variable and adjustable rate mortgages with impunity and disregard for their own well being (see also: Countryside, amongst others), as well as buying up bad debt portfolios from others (see also, Brothers, Lehman, amongst others);

-Those who borrowed without consulting an attorney or doing due diligence before signing the paperwork for their own inevitable execution;

-Government again, for failing to do anything until there was no choice but to engage in socialism the likes of which may completely destroy free enterprise in America;

-And finally, taxpayers for not throwing a second Boston Tea Party over such a blatantly risky, taxpayer-funded, Yuan-funded potential fiscal apocalypse.

The reality of the matter is that this mess is neither the Democrats’ nor Republicans’ responsibility. It is not because of regulation, deregulation or oversight. It is because we are a nation of irresponsible, nihilistic sub-humans, by irresponsible, nihilistic sub-humans and for irresponsible. nihilistic sub-humans. ‘People’ hardly suffices to adequately explain who we have become in ‘civilized’ society.

Corporate lawyers pour over legislation in order to find loopholes, so they can do what is wrong without breaking the law. McCain and Feingold were able to get campaign finance reform from dream to reality, only to see the 527 nightmare, while a certain presidential campaign is living high off the hog thanks in part to donations amounting to just underneath the disclosure threshold. In a culture poisoned by power and greed (in no particular order), what do you expect? 501 tax exemption, a perfectly-decent allowance for charitable organizations, has allowed a whole bumper crop of crisis cult health-and-wealth ‘churches’ that live apart from the burden of taxation, only to line the pockets of sleazy snake oil salesmen preaching their offensive and heretical doctrines, while well-intentioned organizations trying to attain 501 status to do meaningful religious or charitable work need to go through miles of red tape to the status so many others appear to abuse.

[EDITORIAL ASIDE: Given the cultural climate we have now, further given that we will be facing up to a trillion-dollar deficit in the upcoming months, rest assured that balancing the budget will include finding fresh manflesh for the Uru-khai. Churches and synagogues, the cross hairs are upon you, your property and your income, I mean, donations, irrespective of who heads the next administration. The sun is setting on you because of those who abuse the privilege of exemption. Indeed, night cometh, when no man can work.]

I advocate neither morality nor Christianity as the solution, mainly because mob rule is already entrenched within our borders. The only stability that will come will be by force and not from the goodwill within us as people. It has already begun, and while I do not hold any particular eschatological stance, mostly because there is so much work yet to be done that it is utterly presumptuous and absurd to look to the stars, we can see the foundations of [potentially friendly, potentially not] totalitarianism laid in our civic and federal halls.

When America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

The principles of American liberty are beautiful, yet nothing compared to the liberty of following the way of Christ. Reason, charity, faith and self-government are ideals nearly lost in the throes of those blindly following Hegel’s dialectic (on both sides). As a philosopher, a Christian, a theologian, husband, brother, son and human, existence without these core tenets is existence bound first by chains of the soul, then by chains of the body.

We spent decades fighting for the full liberty of our human brothers because of the color of their skin. We spend millions of dollars fighting for the liberty of oppressed people in the Middle East. Why are we not vigorously defending the liberty of America? How can we assail tyrannous ideology overseas and ignore the rising tyrant(s) within our own borders? Or overturn the death-inducing letter of the law there, but to return to the death-inducing letter here?

Where is the spirit of the law in American society today?