This morning on the way home from church I listened, as is my custom, to This American Life on my local public radio station. This week's theme was darker than usual: "Godless America." Ira Glass and Company spent the entire hour discussing how Christian fundamentalists are not only making inroads into our government and legal and educational systems, but are actively engaged in rewriting history to create a revisionist myth of fundamentalist Christian Founding Fathers creating a "Christian America" that is now under attack by the "godless." The segments gave despressing example after example of this. The show also featured a piece by Julia Sweeney, in response to the ascendancy of "Bible-believing" Christian culture, cataloguing instance after instance of mutually contradictory, nonsensical and downright horrific Scripture texts; this last piece was, I thought, as untutored, leaden and unnuanced as fundamentalist exegesis and hermaneutics, only going in the other direction; but the point was well taken.
Coincidentally, this morning before church, while my mother was channel-surfing the TV, she came upon "The Coral Ridge Hour" with D. James Kennedy -- one of the most vile and in fact dangerous televangelists I can think of -- and my experience listening to his paid political rant disguised as a "sermon" only made me happier to hear the "This American Life" crew go after the movement Kennedy represents.
So...after having just spent a very happy hour in church, the taste of bread and wine still on my lips, now listening to "Godless America" and reeling from the cognitive dissonance between the Christianity that I live and experience in my own extended community of faith and the nationalist pseudo-Christianity being shoved down our collective throats by fundamentalist activists, I thought, "You go, Ira. Keep telling it like it is. Keep this issue in moderate and progressive people's faces, so we lose our damned middle-class 'above it all' complacency in the face of this assault on secular government."
I'm sure that public-radio program directors around the country are going to have their fannies handed to them on a plate by outraged listeners after today's broadcast. And be prepared to hear about outraged legislators, transcripts of this show in hand, demanding that funding for public broadcasting be cut.
My request to you: Support your local public broadcasting stations. Collect those empties; clean out the penny jars; send in a donation, even if it's not pledge week. And, maybe better yet, e-mail your local public radio station, right now -- you're already online, aren't you -- and tell them you apprecicate the scope of their programming and their willingness to broadcast edgy, controversial shows like this one.
That's what I'm doing as soon as I post this.
5 comments:
I heard the same broadcast, only on my way to church. I already give NPR a ton of money, so we're good on that front.
But the show was pretty frightening. Maybe I have an overactive imagination (well, yes, I do), but lately I've been having visions of myself 10 or 20 years from now, standing in front of my inquisitor, basically signing my own death warrant with Luther's words: "Hier stehe ich, ich can nicht anders." I'm beginning to think that Christians in the 21st century may be called to give their lives for their beliefs in much that same way that Christians in the 1st century were. The only difference being that this time, those doing the killing will be calling themselves Christians too. Who would have guessed?
Of course, this will just be a repeat of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe - precisely the thing that the founding fathers were trying to avoid. They managed it for at least 220 years, anyway. Not bad. The irony is that in the end, it may be the separation of church and state that will do us in. Compare the state of religion in Europe, where there is not nearly as much official separation as here. Again, who would have guessed?
I loved the final piece by Julia Sweeney, too. It was honest. It makes me think. I get the feeling she's not done yet. I'd like to see where she goes on her journey.
I hope "this too shall pass" but I'm not confident of it.
As gay man (who is a Canadian citizen) living in Texas, I'm finding myself struggling with when to pack it in and go back north.
In the past month, our legislature is passed a law to put a referendum before the people to ban gay marriage (which is already banned) and ban any legal recognition of domestic partnerships. The governor is going to sign this bill at press conference held a fundamentalist church in Ft Worth. An amendment was introduced to ban the state from allowing gays to be foster parents and to go into any homes where gays already have foster children and tear them away. This was removed by a parliamentary procedure but will undoubtedly come back. And the state has formed a committee to find a end run around the Supreme Court and recriminalise "sodomy".
I have lately thought of the frog in the frying pan image. If you put a frog in a frying pan that is hot it will jump out, but if you put a frog in a frying pan that is room temperature and then turn the heat up it will stay in the pan and fry.
Most Americans I talk to have faith that ultimately democracy will win out and the pendulum will swing back. I hope that this is true and I'm being alarmist. But IMHO democracy is very fragile and only works when all repect it. Democracy is pretty ineffective against a force that doesn't respect pluralism, whether it be the Nazis or fundamentalism, of any stripe. Deciding the rights of despised minorities through a vote is a misuse of democracy. Rights exist to protect minorites from the tyranny of the majority.
So now I am trying to figure out what has to happen to make me jump out of the frying pan.
Greg and Dan, I have to admit that I share your pessimism...I sometimes joke to my friends that it's a good thing that I live within reasonable driving distance of the Canadian border, in case "The Handmaid's Tale" becomes reality here; but now I'm not so sure it's joking.
Wayne: From your mouth to God's ear.
Dash: I know Sweeney was making a point about "Bible believers," but I hope that somewhere along the line she reads some Jewish and Christian Bible commentaries so she can develop a more contextual and nuanced understanding of even the "terrible tales" in Scripture. Actually, what her priest told her about the folkloric nature of the Pentateuch is quite accurate; I thought he gave her a pretty good answer.
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