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.

So Many Christians, So Few Lions: So Who’s Hostile?

About 12 years ago, I was hired by St. Louis Public Schools to be the director of communications. The district was in the throes of tsunami-like change, daily controversies, and protests. An outside management firm had been hired to do what no district administration could politically do on its own – downsize the district, close schools, outsource contracts, and lay a lot of people off.  

The year before this started, the communications department had 12 employees and a $1 million+ budget. When I was hired, it had one-and-a-half people (I was the “one” of the one-and-a-half) and a $20,000 budget, which had already been spent.  

What went on in my hiring process was a story by itself. I was told what went on sometime after I was hired. 

I was one of 10 candidates interviewed, the only male and the only one with corporate PR experience. I knew that, because all of the candidates were told to show up at the same time on the same day, and we sat together in a conference room until we were called out one by one. I was the last one to be interviewed. 

If that wasn’t unusual enough, it turned out that people outside the district had checked all of us out ahead of time, learning things that might have been illegal for the district to do. 

Like find out what religion we were, and what churches we attended. 

That I was a member of an evangelical Christian church turned out to be a point in my favor. The reason was that it was believed that an evangelical Christian would likely find it easier to talk with and work a school district whose administration and student body was majority African-American. Because religion and faith were very important to many of the teachers, staff and parents, someone thought that I would have an easier communications job. 

Set aside, for a moment, all the things that were wrong with that, and all of the biases and prejudices built into that assumption, not to mention the ice-cold calculation that went into it. As it turned out, the people making that assumption were largely correct.

I didn’t know any of this going into the job. I did the job the only way I knew how to do it, but something about me and what I did must have communicated, or telegraphed, something to the people I worked with. I was almost everything that employees in the district weren’t – I was white, male, and suburban, with experience working for two Fortune 500 companies. And yet we learned we had considerable common ground. 

This came to mind as I was reading So Many Christians, So Few Lions: Is There Christianophobia in the United States by George Yancey and David Williamson. The authors take a fairly in-depth look at the hostility directed toward conservative Christians, where this hostility seems to come from, and who exhibits it.  

One group that doesn’t exhibit Christianophobia is African-Americans. And it is likely because of the importance of faith and the historical role of churches in African-American communities. In fact, the authors say, the more religious faith (and related activities like church attendance) is important to you, the less likely are you to feel hostile toward conservative Christians.  

So who is who does exhibit this hostility?  

Surprisingly, this isn’t a red state / blue state thing, or a coastal-versus-flyover-country thing. This hostility is found in all regions of the United States, and the South (the Bible Belt!) is not much different that the rest of the country. 

Based on various surveys and research studies, the authors found that the people who tend to have and exhibit hostility toward conservative Christians are generally higher income, higher educated, and in positions of social influence. When they looked at what groups tended to find this pattern, they learned that at least one group was very similar in the demographics and degree of hostility – the people the authors called “cultural progressives.” 

The roots of their hostility were, or I should say are, in fears of a “takeover” by Christians, probably meaning a political takeover; the belief that Christians are “crazy” and intolerant, not to mention homophobic; a perception that the Christian Right is well organized and poised to move into government, forcing its way of life on everyone; and other factors.  

Interestingly enough, the hostility was less when those surveyed said they actually knew conservative Christians, even among the people who might be inclined to be hostile. Much like that work colleague I mentioned when I introduced this discussion. She said she was frightened by “those Christians,” but her head nearly exploded when she found out I was one of them. 

There’s a word for this behavior – objectifying. It means turn a person or a group into an object. It’s a form of stereotyping. It’s similar to me saying “all newspaper editorial writers are boneheads,” which I might conclude from reading what they write. But If I know an editorial writer, if one is a friend or neighbor, I’m less inclined to characterize them all as boneheads.  

Objectifying is not a good thing. At best, it prevents real communication. At its worst, well, consider people who’ve experienced it in its more extreme forms – the Jews in Nazi Europe, the Christians in ISIS-occupied lands, the untouchable class in India, African-Americans in the Jim Crow South, the native peoples of America and Australia. Turning people – any people – into objects is a despicable, destructive practice.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

So Many Christians, So Few Lions: Deconstruction

I’ve been reading in So Many Christians, So Few Lions: Is There Christianophobia in the United States? by George Yancey and David Williamson, and I need to make a detour –a related detour, but a detour nonetheless. 

In the mid-1980s, I had my first direct experience with “deconstruction” – a theory of literary criticism that emerged in the late 1960s in Europe (lots of strange things emerged in the 1960s). I was in a masters program at Washington University in St. Louis, and I took a number of English and history seminars. I didn’t hear anyone say “deconstruction;” instead, what I heard was "post-modernism," “story” and “storytelling” in ways I had never heard before. And the idea was that “story” could define and redefine reality.  

In other words, everything was relative. There were no “texts” – there were only interpretations of texts and interpreters of texts. If this sounds bewildering (if not suspect), it’s because it is. What it does in practice is wipe away any idea of “truth” – there was no truth except for whatever the current power structures said truth was.  

This seemed to be mostly a preoccupation of the English department, which was then in the process of jettisoning the notion of a canon in literature. (“Canon? What canon? Charles Dickens and Jane Austen are no better and no worse than James Patterson and Nora Roberts. The canon was just a bunch of old dead white males anyway.”) 

The seminars I was in were comprised almost entirely of adults who had been out of college for a while (I was the one of the youngest people on the program), so professors had to be careful. You couldn’t talk deconstruction with gainfully employed (or retired) adults with considerable life experience in the same way you could talk with undergraduates.  

But I suspected enough to know something was different from my own undergraduate days. So I started looking into it. Names kept coming up – Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, for example, were two of the leading lights of deconstruction. The more I looked into it, the more I understood that this wasn’t some little literary theory of interest only to a few English professors. This was having an impact on culture. 

One impact was in journalism and communication schools. It was in the 1980s that the idea of “story” and “narrative” began to displace “objectivity” in journalism schools. Deconstructionists argued there was no such thing as objectivity (a notion breathed into journalism by Walter Lippmann back in the 1910s and 1920s).  

Today we can watch, and experience, a event like Ferguson and not really know if we are seeing what is really happening or just following along with the “media narrative.” Media narratives begin with the idea of what the story is – and then come together to demonstrate and illustrate that point.  

Most journalists would likely object to this characterization. But the Justice Department report cited numerous examples of witnesses to the Michael Brown shooting last August who were afraid to contradict their neighbors or contradict the media reports. And these people turned out to be the most credible witnesses.  

This is one reason why most of believe in endemic media bias, which always seems to mystify reporters and editors (and especially editorial page editors). 

Open discussion of the problems and distortions of deconstruction is not common, especially in universities. I’ve seen a number of conservative commentators discuss it, but virtually none on the progressive or liberal side. And yet contemporary politics is shot through with this stuff.  

It was a surprise to hear that a novel had been published that used deconstruction and its problems as a central theme. Daniel Taylor’s Death Comes for the Decontructionist was published last year, and it is that novel. I’ll be posting my review on Friday, but I can I’ve been surprised in a number of ways – the open discussion, the clear explanation of what deconstruction is and isn’t, the artful way the theme is developed (a murder mystery, no less), and the full understanding of what deconstruction sets itself against.  

Indirectly, the novel also helps illustrate some of what’s behind the Christianophobia addressed by So Many Christians, So Few Lions. 

Ideas have consequences. Those media narratives have consequences. And we need to understand those ideas and those media narratives.

 

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

So Many Christians, So Few Lions: The Culture Wars

It’s difficult for anyone to see the violence perpetrated by ISIS and its various off-shoots and not be appalled and horrified. Enslavement, murder, people being burned alive, beheadings, mass rape and murder of women and children – this is the stuff of Blade Runner crossed with Mad Max. 

Our minds reach for an explanation, the why of this atrocity. And the why is important; we need to understand what has created this force for evil. And I use the word evil deliberately – it is a moral word, and its use is a moral judgment. 

The evil reality that is ISIS has it roots in religion, and it is that reality that secular governments in the United States and Europe are missing. They can understand political and economic realities; they can claim a lack of economic opportunity as a major contributing cause for the attraction of ISIS. What that doesn’t explain is why so many of ISIS’s adherents and supporters come from the middle and upper classes – people who have ample access to economic opportunity.  

Our government and the writers of our newspaper editorial pages wouldn’t consider asking, but it is those crazy right-wing fundamentalist Christians who likely better understand what motivates ISIS. ISIS is messianic religion without the loving, sacrificial Messiah. 

What the news media called the culture wars in the United States – Christians versus secularists or however else you might describe it – have long been over. The Christians lost. My own understanding tells me that the Christians lost because we confused speaking out in the public square – bearing witness – with political control of the public square. We aligned ourselves with one political party because the other was, well, embracing what we simply couldn’t accept. And we accomplished – not much. We were certainly used – our votes were crucial – but we were quickly abandoned. Read the late David Kuo’s Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.  

The public square was never ours to control. 

What was missed by so many – observers and opponents alike – was that the so-called Christian Right actually wasn’t trying to impose its views on American society. What it was trying to do was resist the relentless secularization of American society. It seemed, and often still seems, that the goal of progressives and secularists is nothing less than the complete eradication of any and all religion, and especially Christianity, from American soil. It was this sense that something important was being lost, and not only something Christian, that fueled so much of what poured out of churches and into the voting booths.  

The roots of the culture wars go back centuries, say George Yancey and David Williamson in So Many Christians, Do Few Lions: Is There Christianophobia in the United States? While they point to the philosophes of the Enlightenment and then the triumph of the scientific revolution in the 19^th century (including Darwin), the roots are actually much older than that, going back to the infancy of Christianity. Read the early church fathers. You will discover that the culture wars are some 2,000 years old. 

The fact is that Christianity always has been the counterpoint. Christians pay their taxes but they will not bow the knee to the emperor. Of course, that should also mean they’re not supposed to bow their knee to any political party, either. And the U.S. Constitution is not equivalent to the Bible. 

Born during our modern culture wars was what Yancey and Williamson call Christianophobia. Like the work colleague I mentioned last week, who genuinely feared that “those Christians” would stuff their religion down her throat, this is not a belief held by a only a tiny number of people. A large swath of our cultural elites actually believes this. Who they are and what they say will be covered here next week, as I continue the discussion of So Many Christians, So Few Lions. 

Photograph by David Lally via Public Domain Pictures: Torn-Out Hearts Memorial, Krakow, Poland. Used with permission.