Drinking, Culture, and Faith

When we moved to St. Louis from Houston, we had a difficult time finding a church. Houston had no dearth of good churches. St. Louis had a lot of churches, too, but they tended to be mainline Protestant or Catholic, and we tended to the more evangelical. (The four houses of worship closest to where we lived were Catholic, United Church of Christ, and two synagogues.)

We visited a lot of churches. We found one that seemed to have solid preaching and teaching, with friendly, welcoming people (more of a problem than you might imagine). A small group from the church came to visit us at our apartment, and in the course of the conversation the subject of drinking alcohol came up. To join the church, we were told, we would have to sign a no-alcohol pledge.

That would be a problem. We drank alcohol. Not much, and most days none. But we did consume alcohol.

We didn’t join the church. I later learned that the elders at the church occasionally had champagne breakfasts, that many people at the church signed the pledge but drank anyway. After all, this was west suburban St. Louis, one of the wealthiest parts of the metropolitan area.

None of that sat well with me. If you have a no-alcohol pledge, fine. But don’t have a pledge and then blatantly ignore it with champagne breakfasts, by the elders, no less.

What we encountered could be a story out of Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty. Author Brett McCracken, in the final three chapters of the book, focuses on drinking, and the attitudes of Christians about drinking alcohol. Over the years, I’ve heard all the arguments, pro and con, and I agree with McCracken – the Bible doesn’t teach against consuming alcohol, but it does teach consistently against drunkenness.

McCracken provides a good overview of the history of Christians and our attitudes about alcohol (the Puritan Pilgrims in the New World were “largely friendly to alcohol,” he notes, with the Mayflower well provisioned with beer and wine). And he finds five themes in the Bible concerning alcohol and its consumption:

·       Drunkenness is a sin.

·       It is part of the joy and blessing given by God.

·       It is an eschatological (last things) symbol of the bounty of the new creation.

·       Abstinence is a good option, but it’s not mandated

·       Moderation is the operative principle.

What he does point out is that we need to understand Christians’ historical opposition to alcohol within an American cultural context. Drunkenness was common in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and associated with family breakdown and crime in general. People could easily see the effects of drunkenness in their communities. We Americans still carry our historical baggage with us. “Ours is a culture,” McCracken points out, “of college binge drinking, keggers, underage drinking as rebellion, and Bud Light commercials.” And how many stories of drunken drivers killing people do we have to read before we say “Enough!”?

It’s easy to ridicule Christians’ historical antagonism to alcohol. But drunkenness wasn’t then and isn’t now simply a personal choice. It’s a personal choice with public ramifications.

Over at The High Calling, we’ve been discussing Gray Matters. Today concludes the discussion. You can read comments by others by visiting The High Calling.

My previous posts on the book:

Navigating the Gray

Food and Idolatry

Separate, Engaged, or Transformed?

Going to the Movies

Photograph by Holly Chaffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Going to the Movies

The first movie I can remember seeing is Walt Disney’s Bambi. My mother took me to the theater to see it, and I cried when Bambi’s mother was killed. I was about five.

That first movie experience contained two themes that affected the rest of my movie-going life. The first is that I cried; I am a schmuck when it comes to crying at movies. I have embarrassed myself countless times with dates in high school and college and my wife for the last 40 years. I cry at movies.

The second theme is “my mother took me.” From That first experience with Bambi until I was about 12, I was my mother’s movie partner. She loved movies (she called it “going to the show”); my father did not. The two movies that had shaped her adolescence and movie-going life were The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Consequently, they shaped mine as well.

The last movie I can recall her taking me to was Mary Poppins. I can still sing most of the lyrics from the movie’s songs. The same is true for the lyrics for The Sound of Music and Hello Dolly.

By the time I was in high school, movies were changing. The Sound of Music gave way to The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde. My college years brought Easy Rider and Deliverance, although I did manage to sneak in Man of La Mancha (Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren) and Cabaret.

Movies have helped shaped my life, as they have most of us alive today. I still go to the movies. My wife and I prefer “smaller” art house movies like Babette’s Feast and Chocolat; this past weekend we saw Philomena with Judy Dench and enjoyed it. But we also like the bigger blockbusters, too, like Chariots of Fire (perhaps my all-time favorite movie), Slumdog Millionaire (I love the Bollywood ending) and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

We’re both more discerning about movies now than we used to be. We’re more conscious of propaganda masquerading as art, although I think that’s more common to commercial television entertainment than to movies. I don’t like movies with violence, especially violence involving children (although that was certainly a theme of Slumdog Millionaire). I don’t generally like war movies, although The Lord of the Rings movies were filled with it, and I thoroughly enjoyed The Book Thief recently. But I pay attention to reviews and movie trailers, both of which help the decision-making process for what movies to see.

I don’t participate in movie boycotts. If something seems blasphemous or offensive or disgusting; I simply don’t go to it, no matter what the local and national critics might say. But I don’t sign petitions and all the rest of that stuff; they only serve to give publicity to what otherwise will likely sink out of sight into the pit of mediocrity and bad films.

In Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty, Brett McCracken truly shines in his three chapters devoted to movies. He loves the cinema; he’s been a movie critic since his college days; and the reader can sense his deep, profound engagement with film. But that doesn’t mean he embraces everything, regardless of content. In fact, he offers what he calls “five considerations for how far is too far” in choosing to watch a movie (or a TV program):

·       What is your own weakness, one that may be affected by what you see?

·       What are the weaknesses in your community?

·       Is it beneficial?

·       Has the filmmaker earned the right – does the content serve an aesthetic purpose?

·       Have you prayed about it?

Those are necessarily easy questions to answer, but they are good questions for determining what movies to see.

Over at The High Calling, we’re discussing Gray Matters. To see what the discussion is this week, and what others have to say about movies, please visit The High Calling.

Photograph by TaniaMaria Cabrera via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

Separate, Engaged or Transformed?

Every so often, a controversy about Christian fiction erupts online, that is, a controversy between Christians.

In one corner is the small but growing band of writers reaching to break through what is still a recognizable monolith of Christian fiction publishing. They seek to transcend it and engage the larger popular culture.

In the other corner, and it is a crowded and rather loud corner, are the traditionalists who are just fine, thank you, very much, with Christian fiction remaining a genre very separate from popular and literary fiction.

The arguments rage particularly over quality of the writing in Christian fiction. I read a lot of fiction, both Christian and “secular” (and by “secular” I mean both popular and literary). I don’t engage in the Christian fiction controversies, but I will say this: those who would transcend the Christian fiction genre have more of a point about quality than those who are adamant about saying within the genre’s boundaries and market. They’re not entirely correct, but they do have more of a point.

In Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty, Brett McCracken discusses three phases in the development of Christian attitudes toward art. He’s considering music specifically, but what he says applies across the board of all of the arts.

The separational phase was the original Christian arts ghetto – no involvement in and keeping at least two arms’ lengths from popular culture. Actually, it was likely less a ghetto and more the kingdom of No Involvement Whatsoever. The integrational phase started roughly in the 1970s – the broad adoption of secular arts forms by Christians, so we had our own Christian fiction, our own Christian music (including rock and heavy metal), and our own Christian movies.

The latest phase is what McCracken calls the transformational – and it’s the one gaining increasing acceptance among Christians today. It is the idea that we are to participate in culture, not to be taken over by it but to redeem it. This was articulated by Dutch Reformed theologian Abraham Kuyper more than a century ago, Francis Schaeffer in the 1960s and 1970s, and numerous artists and theologians today.

I have to ask – where does my own work fit in these three phases?

I’ve now authored three published books – two novels and a non-fiction work. With the first novel, I did what most if not all writers who happen to be Christian do: I sent the manuscript to the agents who specialize in Christian fiction for the Christian fiction market. I figured they were the best possibilities I had for the manuscript, which was about an Anglican priest falling in a love with a non-believer.

The agents for Christian fiction didn’t like it. It was uniformly if politely rejected with the impersonal form email rejection notices. Some of the agents’ requirements for submissions were extensive – and I’m not talking about two or three hours of work but more like 20 or 30 hours of work. A two-sentence form rejection notice after that kind of effort is, well, you probably know what my reaction was. One direct interaction with an editor at a Christian publishing house almost ended any interest I had in having anything to do with Christian fiction; the editor wasn’t being critical of my work but was offering one of the nastiest assessments I had ever heard anyone make of the Christian fiction market.

Let’s hope I caught the editor on a bad day.

Then I went to a general (not Christian) writer’s conference. I met with an editor who was unbelievably encouraging. I sat with 12 other writers in a seminar with an agent who had us read each other’s work, and the agent responded to mine with some surprising praise. She was short, gravel-voiced from likely too many years of smoking, tough as nails – the almost stereotyped picture of the New York agent – and she was indeed from New York City. “I don’t handle your kind of manuscript,” she said, “but it’s good; it’s powerful stuff.”

What I came away with was an understanding – I was not actually writing for a Christian reader or a Christian market. When the novel was finally published some three years after that conference, it appealed to non-Christians as much as it did to Christians, and perhaps even more so. “It’s a love story,” one said, “but I could read it to my kids without being embarrassed.” Another said “it appeals to the heroic in all of us; it makes us want to be that hero.” And that’s when I realized I had a problem – my fiction didn’t fit a preconceived genre. I was in a kind of literary No Man’s Land.

If you read my new non-fiction book, Poetry at Work, you will find virtually no references to faith or God (I can’t even recall any). And yet I would argue that faith is the belief system underpinning everything in it.

It sounds like, without planning it or even realizing it, I landed in the transformational camp.

Over at The HighCalling, we’re discussing Gray Matters. Today, Shawn Smucker considers what McCracken has to say about music. To see his post and the discussion, please visit The High Calling.

Photograph via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Food and Idolatry

In 2008, I had the opportunity to hear food author Michael Pollan speak at Washington University in St. Louis. He was receiving a literary award from the English Department. The venue was packed – the room haled 600 comfortably and it was standing room only. I was clearly out of my demographic – the vast majority of people in the audience was students and under 23 years old.

In the middle of telling an entertaining story about fighting a mole in his vegetable garden, Pollan was describing how he flooded the mole’s tunnel with gasoline and set it alight, hopefully to force the animal out or kill it. “I was,” he said, “the Westmoreland of the vegetable patch.”

The room roared with laughter.

I was surprised that so many people seemed to understand the joke. I got it, and the older faculty members got it, but almost 600 people under the age of 23? (If you don’t get the joke, William Westmoreland was the army general in charge of U.S. forces in Vietnam, and the one associated with the use of napalm against the enemy.

I leaned to the laughing19-year-old next to me and whispered, “Who’s Westmoreland?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “But isn’t Michael wonderful?”

That’s when I understood that Pollan wasn’t a journalism professor or author or food activist. He was a rock star, and what I was witnessing was popular culture at its most uncritically laudatory and undiscerning. It was cool to like Pollan. He was performing for his audience and they loved it, even if they didn’t get the jokes, allusions or examples.

In many ways, this is no different than Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus.

Last week, in the introduction to the book discussion on Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty by Brett McCracken, I mentioned how Christians have adopted many if not all of the various communication forms of popular culture – movies, television, and rock music, among others. This adoption isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we often don’t consider how the form of communication shapes the message we’re trying to communicate.

And over the past decade, one of the communication forms of popular culture has become food. Fifty years ago, sociologists talked about the phenomenon of conspicuous consumption (keeping up with the Joneses). Today, it’s conspicuous virtue, and food has become caught up within it.

So, for example, consider one of the main tenets of the food movement that Pollan is so much a part of is to eat local. When it first became popular, local was defined as no more than five miles from where you lived – you should eat only what was grown five miles or less from your home. It took no time for most people to realize that such a definition would not likely appeal to, say, a resident of New York City or Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco (Pollan’s hometown) or Los Angeles. The definition has changed over time, and is now 400 miles, which to my mind really stretches the idea of “local.” Even then, it means that if you live in New York City or San Francisco, you shouldn’t eat bananas. And no seafood for Denver or Des Moines. And none of us in the United States can have coffee or tea.

It’s an appealing notion – you should know who grows your food. And it’s possible for some of us. But what study after study has also shown is that “eat local” is not as environmentally sustainable as “eat globally.”

But “eat local” is a conspicuous virtue. It’s not enough to pursue it. We want people to know we are doing it. And that’s where the line can be crossed, especially for Christians.

This section of McCracken’s book was disappointing. He uncritically accepts much of what passes as popular wisdom today on food. He tries to make the case for how important food was to Jesus, but it falls flat – food in the Gospels was never about the food itself but about the relationships and the people Jesus was eating it with or miraculously providing it to. And it’s difficult for me to read a rather rapturous description of a ten-course meal (even in small portions) and consider how many people, and children, in the wealthiest nation on the planet go to bed hungry every night.

McCracken does warn of the danger of food snobbery, but it’s one small part of two lengthy chapters. And while he cites the need to know about where our food comes from, he doesn’t cite the need to be discerning about all of the people, including Christians, who tell us about the spirituality of food and how we should eat.

The problem isn’t food snobbery. It’s food idolatry.

Over at The High Calling, we’re discussing Gray Matters. I didn’t mean to go on a rip, but I think I was expecting something more insightful from these two chapters than what can be found in any secular popular magazine. To see what others are saying, please visit The High Calling.

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

Navigating the Gray

One of the movie critics in our local newspaper always provides guidance for us in how we approach movies.

If he likes a movie, we know the film will be generally edgy, with some violence and an “anti” kind of message, as in “anti-establishment” or what the critic (and the movie) had determined to be “anti-establishment.” Like Pulp Fiction.

If the movie is about values (family and otherwise) or is life-affirming, we know the critic will usually pan it. Like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.

In other words, his movie reviews often if not always reveal more about the critic than the movie, and that may be true of most criticism in the arts. It’s not that our local critic is always wrong, but I’ve read enough of his reviews to understand his worldview, and I know how and when it differs from my own.

What’s clear is that, in his writing his reviews and my reading them, we are both engaging in the business of culture.

In my own writing, and people’s reading and responding to it, we are all about the business of culture – making it, consuming it, understanding it, becoming part of it. We Christians, says Brett McCracken in Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty, tend to have one of two responses to culture. We see it as godless, heretical, blasphemous, and abominable. Or we saturate ourselves in it to get as far away from our Christian upbringing as possible.

Few of us, McCracken says, attempt to understand it. Discern what if anything is worthy, and celebrate the beauty of what is good in culture. Man is created in God’s image, and he made us to be creators, and that original impulse can be found across humanity.

What we have largely done is to wall ourselves off from popular culture, even as we embrace (and often unwittingly embrace) many of the forms that popular culture takes – art, rock music, radio, television, movies magazines, novels, self-help books. We have Christian versions of virtually every form of popular culture available.

What we have not done is to ask whether these forms of culture change what we try to say and communicate. The reality is that they do change the message, and often in profound ways; some messages are better suited to certain forms rather than others. And they change what we say in exactly the same way they changed what is said and communicated in the popular culture.

For the next four Mondays in December, TheHigh Calling will be discussing Gray Matters. McCracken examines four manifestations of how popular culture manifests itself – food, music, film, and drinking, and he considers each from the perspective of both creation and consumption. Each Monday the discussion will focus on a different manifestation. Check out The High Calling to see where the discussion is going. It promises to be lively.

Related:

Jonathan Merritt at Religion News Service interviewed Brett McCracken earlier this year.

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