So Many Christians, So Few Lions: So Where is This Taking Us?

Last week, in my discussion of So Many Christians, So Few Lions: Is There Christianophobia in the United States by George Yancey and David Williamson, I mentioned “objectifying,” the process by which people hostile to Christians essentially dehumanize them. This is not a theoretical issue; virtually every genocide has it roots in dehumanizing groups or culture. Hitler and Goebbels did this with the Jews; it happened in Rwanda and Bosnia; one could even argue it happened with the American Indians, with the Australian aborigines, and with African-Americans from slavery times onward.  

Objectifying people can have deadly consequences.

This doesn’t mean I think that journalists, movie stars, executives at the Ford Foundation, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and George Soros are ready to herd conservative Christians into concentration camps. That sentiment would be objectifying people hostile to Christians.

What is clear, however, is this: the (largely successful) attempts to push Christian influence to the very margins of society, and preferably to eliminate it from the public sphere altogether, will continue and probably intensify. In certain areas, like the universities, people with view contrary to the prevailing ones will find themselves more and more isolated and cut off. Students with conservative Christian views will be stigmatized. Parents who object to their public school children being propagandized will find themselves suspect, talked about, and marginalized, usually in some condescending manner.

These things are happening now.

Politics isn’t much better. The Republican Party needs the votes of conservative Christians, but many party leaders want nothing to do with what conservative Christians care about. The Democratic Party is not interested in those votes.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it may be a good thing. Our Christian faith is not defined by politics or parties, or by whom we vote for. At least it shouldn’t be. It’s also not defined by who wins elections, or by the next boneheaded editorial in the newspaper, or by Hollywood glorifying some behavior that is wrong (Hollywood has been doing that for a very long time).

What the culture doesn’t understand is that it’s become “the culture.” And it’s conservative Christians who have become “the counter-culture.”

Whenever and wherever Christianity has worked best, it has always been countercultural. That’s how Christianity started – as a countercultural influence against first the established Jewish religion in Judea and Galilee and eventually against the Roman Empire. Jesus did not lead an armed rebellion against the Jewish rulers, and the early Christians did not lead an armed rebellion against Rome. Instead of armed rebellions, the tactics involved ministering to people.

The two areas that seem to me to hold the most promise are the inner city and the arts.

Fifty years after the United States embarked upon a quest to eradicate poverty, we have the disaster zones known as the inner cities.  When I worked for St. Louis Public Schools, I spent a lot of time in areas of the inner city that I hadn’t even known existed, like an elementary school with security doors and video surveillance, and barbed wire and bars on the windows through the second story. It sat by itself in a sea of empty lots, houses and community long destroyed. The student turnover rate was 110 percent annually.

Opportunity abounds in this place, in all kinds of ways.

The second area is the arts, but not if we keep them in the Christian ghetto. Initiatives are happening all over, like the International Arts Movement championed by Makoto Fujimura. It reaches into a number of cities, and it can reach into even more. The online poetry site I work with, Tweetspeak Poetry, is staffed largely by people of the Christian faith but who focus on things of beauty, value, and worth.

And we pray. We pray for our communities, and we pray for the people who are hostile to us. Regularly praying for people is a good way to avoid objectifying them.

And we can do that.

Start by reading this book. It’s important.

Related: Yesterday, So Many Christians co-author George Yancey posted an article in online Christianity Today entitled “What Christianophobia Looks Like in America.”

Illustration: Golden Sea by Makoto Fujimura (2011), mineral pigments and gold on kumohada, collection of Roberta and Howard Ahmanson.

"The Supper of the Lamb"

Robert Farrar Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection is not like any cookbook I have ever come across. At least, I think it’s a cookbook. Or it might be a book of theology. And it is funny. And perhaps that’s what describes it the best.

A funny, theological cookbook.

First published in 1969, Supper of the Lamb is about as different a cookbook as you can imagine. It’s about the preparation of one recipe, lamb for eight persons four times. The reader is warned early on: “Lamb for eight persons four times is not a recipe. It is a way of life.” Capon does eventually arrive at the completion of the recipe, but it is one wild ride along the way.

But during the journey to complete the meal, you discover, among a lot of other things, one entire chapter on onions and one on kitchen tools, especially knives; a discussion about tin fiddles (poor, pale substitutes of the real thing); the need to avoid diet foods (no margarine for Capon; it must be butter); the art of soup stock; how to make a good dough; the delights of real bread; the critical role of the amateur; and the importance of hosting dinners, including the blow-by-blow description of the preparations for a dinner that only narrowly avoided disaster.

Capon, now 85, is an Episcopal priest, or was, since he retired from the priesthood to devote himself to full-time writing. And he was a “High Church” Episcopal, which meant his theology was far more common in the Episcopal Church of the 1960s than it would be today. But, even today, it’s easily recognizable for a Christian who’s a theological conservative.

And his preparation of this supper is infused with his theology. Good food, prepared well, is part of the creation that God pronounced “good.” Here, for example, is what he says about cheese: “Cheese is at once a testament to the Creator’s ingenuity in providing enzymes and bacteria that will do fearful and wonderful things for milk and to man’s audacity in the face of some pretty forbidding stuff.” It might take a thesis to unpack that statement which is at once a description of cheese and some formidable theology.

And it is this combination of insights into food and its preparation and theology that structure this book into a thing of joy.


Supper of the Lamb is the February selection of the Readers Guild of the International Arts Movement. If you’re interested, you can download a discussion guide. (I did, because I wanted to see what discussion questions they had.) For March, the selection is The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor.

Replay of “InsideOut” and Music

In case you missed the live performance, there’s a replay available of L.L. Barkat’s poetry reading with Brooke Campbell’s singing at an International Arts Movement program last night in New York City.

The replay can be found here. L.L. is reading selections from her InsideOut: Poems, which was featured here in our poetry and wine giveaway earlier this month.

The replay offers you a chance to listen to the real deal. And you still have this weekend to order InsideOut at the January special price of $6.03.

Joy at Memoria Arts talks about her response to last night's webcast: A time for...

“Silence:” Is Anybody There?

You pray. You pray a lot. You pray for a long time. The need is great. You pray some more. People are being tortured and dying horrible deaths. You pray more, and harder. And then you get…

Nothing. Silence.

That "nothing" is the heart of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, the story of two Portuguese priests in Japan in the 1600s during a time of great Christian persecution. Published in 1969, the novel is based on a true story. One of the priests, Father Sebastian Rodrigues, is imprisoned and gets to listen to the moans and cries of native Japanese Christians being tortured. The other priest, Father Christovao Ferreira, has already apostatized and abandoned his faith, convinced that Christianity does not apply to Japan.

Endo, himself a Catholic, explores this silence of God. How can God be silent, as in “do nothing,” as his people are persecuted, tortured and killed? How can God allow such awful suffering and remain silent, even as His people earnestly and sincerely seek His face and His answers?

Agnostics and atheists often ask the same question. If there is a God, then how could He allow such injustice, destruction, depravity and suffering? How could he allow an impoverished country like Haiti be destroyed, with 150,000 dead and untold misery? How?

I’d like to let agnostics and atheists in on a secret. Christians struggle with the same question. It is as hard for us to comprehend this as it is for others who reject any notion of God. The difference is, we struggle and pray through the question, and we keep struggling and praying even when the answer appears to be silence.

Pat Robertson’s statement notwithstanding, I don’t believe that earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters are by definition God’s judgment being meted out. But I do know that when these events happen, God expects his people to respond.

And when they do, there is no silence.

Previous posts on Shusaku Endo’s Silence:

Shusaku Endo’s “Silence”
“Silence:” How Do You Betray Your Faith?
“Silence:” Is Christianity True or “Cultural?”

Silence is the first book to be discussed this year by the Reader’s Guild of the International Arts Movement. For the month of February, the book is The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by Robert Farrar Capon.

"Silence:" Is Christianity True or “Cultural”?

Is Christianity true for all humanity, or it is “cultural” or “geographic”? Another way of asking the question is, is Christianity universal or specific to Western culture (and in serious danger even there, especially in Europe generally and among the elites in United States)?

That’s one of the two questions posed by Shusaku Endo in his novel Silence, the story of two Portuguese priests in Japan in the 1600s during a time of Great Christian persecution. The novel was published in 1969, and is based on a true story, but the questions it poses seem even more contemporary and important today. (I’ll discuss the second question, what is the “silence” of the title, next Monday, the final of four posts on the novel.)

Knowing a persecution of Christians is underway, Father Sebastian Rodrigues goes to Japan for two reasons – to provide pastoral care for the Christians who are left and to verify the rumors that the former head of the mission to Japan, Rodrigues’ own former seminary teacher Father Christovao Ferreira, has apostatized and abandoned the faith. Rodrigues is eventually found by authorities, imprisoned but not (in the novel, at least) tortured. Instead, the local authorities attempt an array of intellectual gambits to convince Rodrigues to abandon his Catholic faith. These include conversations with the local ruler and the torture of native Japanese Christians.

The most dramatic and persuasive of these attempts is to bring Rodrigues to the former Father Ferreira, who now dresses in Japanese style, has a wife and has become something of an agent for the Japanese authorities (he at least does what he’s told to do). Ferreira attempts to convince his former student that Christianity simply will not work in Japan; it will not take root in the country’s culture. It may work in Europe, but Europe is not Japan.

Rodrigues fully understands the importance of the argument. If it is true that Christianity does not apply to Japan and can flourish only in a more hospitable culture, then it is a fraud, and a fraud everywhere, because its claims are indeed universal. It is not just a “religion for Europeans” but a faith for all humanity. And while Rodrigues finds himself slipping under the influence of his former teacher and fellow priest, there’s a more formidable question looming.

Can you renounce your faith in name only to save the lives of others? Isn’t that a kind of Christ-like sacrifice?

Silence is a provocative read, and it’s meant to be.


Shusaku Endo’s Silence is the book under discussion in the month of January by the Reader’s Guild of the International Arts Movement.

The book is also being filmed as a movie by Martin Scorsese and stars Daniel Day-Lewis, and is set for release late in 2010. For more information about the book, visit its entry on Wikipedia. And artist Makoto Fujimura talks about the book in an IAM podcast.

“Silence:” How Do You Betray Your Faith?

Shusaku Endo’s Silence is the book under discussion for the month of January by the Reader’s Guild of the International Arts Movement. (And check IAM out -- it doing some important things in the areas of art, culture and faith.) Discussion groups have actually formed in various places and there’s a discussion guide you can download. The guild will be posting various reports from the discussions. There’s no discussion group in St. Louis, and I would be hard-pressed to attend even if there were, so I’m participating via blog posts.

In Silence, the story of two priests who travel to Japan in the 1600s at a time when Christians were being relentlessly persecuted, one character plays the role of traitor. Kichijiro is something of a ne’er-do-well the priests meet in Macao while they wait for a ship to take them to Japan. He is the only Japanese in Macao, and when the priests find him, he’s drunk and dressed in rags. His eyes are described as “dirty yellow” and he has a crafty look about him. Kichijiro is obviously going to be a problem and cause problems; he’s set up that way from the beginning. But he’s the only Japanese the priests have, and they taken him on as guide, even understanding that he will be a problem.

When they ask him if he’s a Christian, he says no, repeatedly. Eventually they learn that he is, or actually was, a Christian but apostatized. His apostasy doesn’t prevent him, however, from asking Father Rodrigues to hear his confession, even after he betrays the priest and the priest is imprisoned. Betrayal, apostasy, then a desperation to have his confession heard – this is the repeated cycle of actions that is the character Kichijiro.

Identifying strongly with Christ, Father Rodrigues sees Kichijiro as a kind of Judas, but the character and his role in the novel is more complex, and Rodrigues gradually comes to understand that. Kichijiro moves back and forth between Christianity and apostasy so many times that it becomes clear he has become neither Christian nor Buddhist; he is both and neither at the same time. In that sense, he stands for something larger for the author – the practical results of the clash of Western, Christian culture and Japanese, Buddhist culture. And the clash is played out in a time of terrible persecution, when one’s faith can and often does lead to torture and death.

It would have been almost too easy, and too much like a caricature, had Endo drawn his characters like Christ and Judas. But he reached for something beyond caricature, and one of the things the novel does is to explore the “traitor” in all of the characters, not just Kichijiro. One of the primary reasons Father Rodrigues traveled to Japan in the first place was to find Father Christovao Ferreira, the priest who had led the Christian mission in Japan and who had reportedly apostatized. Ferreira was also Rodrigues’ teacher, and so this mission to find him carried both theological and personal purposes for Rodrigues.

Father Rodrigues will find his former teacher, and his teacher will attempt to teach him a new lesson. The question becomes, will Rodrigues learn it, and become the Judas he sees in Kichijiro? Or is this the “traitor” that is in all of us, the betrayal most quickly exposed in a time of stress and trial?

Makoto Fujimura’s “Refractions”

Makoto Fujimura is an artist, a writer and the founder of the International Arts Movement, and has been a member of the National Council on the Arts. And what he has written in Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art and Culture has led me to understand that my job is like a work of art, a partially finished canvas, and the artist's brush is in my hand.

This is a surprise, because Refractions isn’t about work or the workplace, at least directly. It’s a series of essays about faith, art and culture, and the subjects range from living and working near Ground Zero in New York City when it became Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2001, to the death of an artist friend, an exhibit of the works of Fra Angelico and even rating college tour guides with his soon-to-be college freshman.

But Refractions is most of all about art, because Fujimura is an artist and art is indeed about life. All of life, because life is a creative act. “Art,” Fujimura writes, “is an inherently hopeful act, an act that echoes the creativity of the Creator.” And that idea of hope applies to the artist, the architect, the poet, the choreographer and all the other creators who reach out “in hope to call the world into that creation.”

The essays, and the faith and mind that shape them, are quietly and profoundly stunning.

Nowhere is that more evident than in Fujimura’s writings on Sept. 11. The evil that led to the destruction of the Twin Towers and the deaths of thousands of people is juxtaposed against the good of the firefighters climbing up the stairs because saving lives was important, an affirmation of good. The ash that covered the trees and bushes, and his own then-10-year-old son, whose school was four blocks from Ground Zero, is set against the beauty of a night sky and the canvas upon which Fujimura would seek to affirm life and faith. As he says, it’s not sufficient to run from evil; one must run toward something good, toward “the tower of Jesus, which stands beyond and through our own ground zero experience.”

Each essay is a kind of meditation, and needs to be read slowly and carefully, with pen in hand for notes, because there is so much to absorb and ponder in each. More than once I was brought near tears, not any less so when I understood that I could consider my work, my day-to-day job, as a canvas, a canvas for me to create and paint an affirmation of life.

What an incredibly fine thing Makoto Fujimura has done here.

Shusaku Endo’s “Silence”

I’ve followed artist Makota Fujimara through his web site and blog. His art is stunning, and he has heaps of well-deserved accolades and accomplishments, including having served on the National Council on the Arts. He is also an author, a founding elder of his church in New York City, and the founder of the International Arts Movement (IAM).

IAM has a mission: to “gather artists and creative catalysts to wrestle with the deep questions of art, faith and humanity in order to inspire the creative community to engage the culture that is and create the world that ought to be.”

I became much more familiar with IAM when my friend L.L. Barkat told me that IAM was publishing her book of poems, InsideOut. I immersed myself in IAM’s web site, and found myself in a world of art, faith and culture, a world I felt immediately at home in. And I discovered that IAM has a Reader’s Guild, and it would be hosting book discussions on selected books each month of 2010, including works by Flannery O’Connor, Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson, C.S. Lewis, Italo Calvino, Annie Dillard and – Shusaku Endo.

I was not familiar with Endo. OK, so I’m part cretin. But I learned. He’s considered one of Japan’s finest novelists, if not the finest, a member of the so-called “Third Generation” of writers who emerged in Japan after World War II. He was born in 1923 and died in 1996, and he was a lifelong Catholic. He wrote numerous novels, but his most famous work was Silence. And it is Silence that is the first book the IAM Readers Guild will be discussing.

These discussions are generally being hosted in small groups in different locations; there isn’t one listed for St. Louis but I was intrigued enough to buy the book and read it, and I’ll be “participating” by blog posts here for the Mondays in January. If this works, I’ll continue this for the succeeding months.

Silence is the story, based largely on historical events and people, of two Portuguese priests who slip into Japan in the 17th century during a time of persecution of Christians. They have determined to go to Japan to minister to the faithful and to learn if the stories of the apostasy of the leading missionary – and their former teacher in seminary – are true.

The story is told by one of the two priests, Father Sebastian Rodrigues. And it is a story about faith and apostasy, how thin a line there is between the two, and whether one can remain true to faith even through apostasy. I found myself challenged on almost every page. Would I respond this way? Would I do this? Do I really understand what my faith is and isn’t? Is the difference that clear?

It’s an astonishing read.

The Ninth Day of Christmas: A Book

So I veer off a bit from what we’ve been doing at High Calling Blogs to celebrate Christmas – celebrating 12 days of community by pointing to favorite writers, bloggers, tweeters – “others” besides ourselves.

For this ninth day, I want to talk about a book. And not just any book, but one for which I can’t really give a dispassionate review. Several of us were “there at the creation” of one part of this book – we actually saw it unfold online. We were there when the first news of the book-to-come was eked out in barely contained excitement via Twitter and email. (To be truthful, there was no “barely contained excitement” about it – it was more like squeals of euphoria, and we joined in.)

I had the privilege to read a partially completed manuscript (Word) version of the book. The author asked, hesitantly, what parts I liked best. I said it was easier to say what parts I didn’t like – because they weren’t any. And then to see the first reports of “it’s arrived on my doorstep,” followed by “it’s up on Amazon,” well, that was excitement of the first order.

The book is InsideOut: Poems. The author is the friend I’ve never met but talked on the phone with once, L.L. Barkat. The book's web site is here.

I first met L.L. through her memoir Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places, published in 2008 by IVP. I’ve told the story here about how I read it straight through one night, actually one morning in the wee hours, while I was in the hospital for broken ribs and a partially collapsed lung. And I told the story again here as well, with a little more information about what happened when I read it. Books can have big impacts, and some books can have profound impacts, and Stone Crossings had a profound impact on me.

And now the poems.

The one several of us saw being created was “In Your Dream,” because it happened during one of Twitter poetry jams (plug here for TweetSpeak Poetry, our online journal for the poems created on Twitter). Here’s one of the poem’s stanzas:

I was the story
in the burning book,
leading you beyond
frost and fields
lapped by time
towards a clearing.

The poems of InsideOut are about life and death, about family and brokenness, about color and lushness, about children and art and love. They’re arranged in seasons bit they transcend that arrangement. Just when you think you understand one, your eye catches a word or phrase you missed the first two times and the meaning changes again.

I’ve read the volume twice in its bound form, three times if you count the manuscript stage. I’ve gone back to read portions again. And I will do that again, and then give it another full reading. It’s that good.

InsideOut is published by the International Arts Movement, an organization that does some pretty cool stuff.

(Over at the High Calling Blogs, we’re celebrating the 12 days of Christmas by highlighting a blog or web site of someone besides ourselves during this season of Advent and Christmas.) (Which is what we should also be doing the other 353 days of the year.)