Why the Christian Right is Going to Lose the Culture War

It's been a busy couple of weeks for culture warriors.

The figurative war became a literal one when a white supremacist terrorist shot and killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, SC. We've seen Confederate flags coming down and rainbow flags going up. And we've seen a lot of grandstanding by local politicians.

I think Pat Buchanan was the first person I heard use the term "culture war," though certainly Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority thought of themselves in much the same way. These are people who believe it is a divine mandate to seize the culture from humanists, atheists, and other non-Christians so as to enact laws based upon the morality of the Bible, as interpreted by their leaders.

But they're going to lose.

They are going to lose and they already have. Many times.

As Neil Carter pointed out in a brilliant post last week, modern evangelicals like to pretend that they were on the cutting edge of the Civil Rights Movement. But a careful examination of source materials of the era does not bear this out. The most conservative evangelical denominations were those that defended the practice of slavery and it is no surprise that most of these fought against desegregation. Bob Jones University did not admit black students until 1970 and then continued a policy of prohibiting interracial dating.

The movement gained much steam in the years following Roe v. Wade, although many evangelical leaders were initially rather lukewarm on the issue of abortion. There was rock and rap music, women's rights, evolution v. intelligent design, marijuana, and gay rights . . . And there's something interesting about that list.

In every single case, it is clear that the culture has moved progressively toward secular values. Yes, we have Tipper Gore stickers on our CDs, but it's pretty rare to hear of anyone trying to ban a record. Women still make just 78 cents on every dollar a man makes, but very few Americans think this state of affairs is preferable. We are woefully behind other industrialized nations in accepting evolution as a fact, but more Americans do now than ever before. Marijuana is being legalized in more and more states and we will probably see a change in federal policy in the next few years. And now there is last week's SCOTUS ruling legalizing gay marriage in every state of the union.

The extreme right sees nefarious forces at work. There is a vast communist conspiracy, it is the liberal media, or Satan is at work. Given the energy and money spent to defeat these causes, it seems only reasonable to imagine that your enemies have dark and unimaginable tools to work with.

I think the truth is more mundane.

The Christian Right is going to lose because most of them actually like the world they live in. And who could blame them? One article floating around social media this week listed companies that were celebrating gay marriage, including Visa and Mastercard, Coke and Pepsi, Facebook and Twitter. Jesus may have told his followers to take up their crosses, but most evangelicals I know would have a hard time giving up Coca-Cola.

Witness the Texas pastor who announced that he was "ready to burn" to protest gay marriage, only to clarify after the court's decision that it was, of course, meant figuratively. And can you blame him? I mean, I'm sure living in Texas is no picnic, but he probably hasn't even had a chance to see Jurassic World and he still hasn't gotten the iPhone 6 yet.

Contrast this with civil rights leaders who endured beatings, dogs, and lynchings to secure liberties for people of every color. Can you really imagine hundreds of thousands of evangelicals ready to die just to keep two guys from registering at Macy's?

I eschew the term "liberal" (a topic for another time) but I like the word "progressive," for this very reason. "Progressive" values are the ones that lead to real progress in our culture. They are the values that lead us from superstition to the scientific method, from feudalism to equity, from oppression to liberty. They are the values that gave us vaccination and the moon landing. But they are also the values that gave us rock and roll and cable television.

Because conservative evangelicals are first and foremost human beings, they still value progress. They may not believe in evolution, but they certainly enjoy the benefits that evolutionary biology has given us. They may not value gay marriage, but they do not want a return to marriage as it was in the first century, no matter how much they protest otherwise. 

100 years ago the foremost social cause among evangelicals was the temperance movement. Today, a large number of them are social drinkers and it is unthinkable that they would support prohibition. The Coors family, one of the largest beer producers in the U.S., supports organizations like the Heritage Foundation. As important as that cause was to a large part of the American population, it was no competition with the great taste of beer. It tastes good even to fundamentalists. 

100 years from now there will probably still be those who identify as conservative evangelicals. But many of them will claim that evangelicals have always supported gay marriage. Others will privately oppose it, but will agree that the rule of law is what is best for living in a pluralistic culture. They will alter their understanding of what the Bible says about it, without so much as a nod to their critics of yesteryear.

Progress is too great a temptation to resist.

Leaving the Garden (Religious Thoughts, Part Three)

The book of Genesis in the Bible is something of a touchstone in the culture wars that continue to rage in this country. There are 66 books in the Protestant Bible, but this one contains many of the stories that have become emblematic of particular values. This one book has Noah and his ark, Abraham and Isaac, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. But if you say, "Genesis," most people are going to think of Adam and Eve.

In our day, the story is connected to what people think about the origins of life. To the conservative evangelical who takes the passage literally, the Genesis creation story tells us that everything there is was created in a span of six days, and that each form of life was created separately. To many, the story represents all that is wrong with religion, especially a denial of science and what we have come to learn about our own world.

For me, there is a third way to read this story.

But first, a brief re-telling:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

And the earth was formless and void, but God's spirit moved about the water.

Then God said, "Let there be light!" and there was light. And God saw that it was good.

So He called the light day and the darkness night, and that was the first day.

On the second day, God separated the heavens from the watery earth. Then He called forth dry land and separated the seas, and made all sorts of plants and trees to grow. This was the third day, and He saw it was good. On the fourth and fifth day, God called forth creatures of all sorts in the water and on the land, and made them to fill the earth. And He saw that this was good, too.

Then on the sixth day, God said, "Let us make man in our own image." So he formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed His own breath into him, giving him life. So God made man after His own likeness and gave him the abundance of the earth and made him above the other creatures, and gave all the plants for his food. And He told him to be fruitful and multiply. God named the man Adam.

On the seventh day, God rested from all His labors. And He saw that all He had created was good.

Then God made a garden in a place called Eden and put Adam there. A river ran through the garden and became the head of four rivers: Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel, and the Euphrates. 

God filled the garden with trees that were beautiful and full of fruit for the man. In the midst of these were the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. "Do not eat of the Tree of Knowledge," God told Adam, "or you will surely die."

God saw that though the garden was filled with creatures the man had named, Adam was still alone. So He put him into a deep sleep and took a rib from his side and made the first woman. Then Adam said: "This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She will be called 'woman.'"

The woman, who was named Eve, went walking one day in the garden, when she came across a serpent, the most cunning of all of God's creatures. The serpent said, "Why has God not let you eat of every tree of the garden?"

And Eve answered, "He has, only we are not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, or we will surely die."

Then the serpent said, "You will not die, but God knows that if you eat of the Tree of Knowledge, you will become like a god, knowing good from evil."

So Eve took the fruit, which was very pleasing, and ate it. Then she gave it to Adam. After eating it, they looked and saw that they were naked, so they took leaves from a fig tree and sewed them and made clothes.

Then God went walking in the garden, in the cool of the day, and the two hid themselves. So God called out, "Where are you?"

Adam answered, "We hid ourselves when we heard you coming, because we were naked."

God said, "Who told you you were naked? Did you eat of the Tree of Knowledge?"

So Adam answered, "The woman you gave me gave me the fruit and I ate it."

"What have you done?" God asked Eve.

Eve answered, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."

Then God said, "Because you've done this thing, Eve, you will labor greatly when the time comes to give birth. And you, Adam, will only have food by the sweat of your brow."

Then God killed an animal and covered the pair in animal skins.

Then God said to Himself, "They have eaten of the Tree and become like Us, knowing good from evil. Now, lest they take of the Tree of Life and live forever . . ." So God drove them from the garden to a place east of Eden, putting a cherubim as guard at the garden gate with a flaming sword that turned every direction.

Reading it again (and if you have not read the entire story from the Bible, I would encourage you to do so) it seems strange that anyone living in 2015 would obsess about the portions of the story having to do with the literal creation. The ancient culture whose story this was simply had no way of ascertaining how all things came into being. And they are spoken of in the most poetic and ambiguous terms. There is light and dark before there is a sun. The animals all reproduce in a single day, filling the oceans and land. It seems impossible to imagine that this was meant literally.

Even so, such an emphasis would seem to miss the point.

As I read this narrative, two ideas seem to come off the page.

The first is that there is something of the divine in us.

The narrative is very specific that these first parents of ours were made to resemble God (Or is it "the gods"? Who is He talking to anyway?), that God breathed life into them, and that knowledge made them more like God. I'd like to unpack that a bit.

The idea that man (i.e., humanity) is made in the image of God is central to Hebrew and Christian faith. Medieval theologians called this the imago Dei (the "image of God") that is stamped upon every man, woman, and child. The implications of this are rather obvious, though one might not guess so based upon the actions of the church throughout the ages. Everyone you meet, this passage is saying, carries divinity within them.

Breath is associated directly with life in this scripture and again, the message seems rather clear: life is sacred. While anti-abortion groups might rally around that motto, that would seem to muddy the waters. Life is sacred, it is like the breath of the gods, and we should live every moment as if that were true. For those of us who have seen that breath leave someone we love, that understanding is even clearer.

When one comes to the passage where God admits that he lied (Oh — did you miss that?), it is startling. Adam and Eve will not die after eating from the Tree of Knowledge. No, sir. The serpent was right. They will become like gods. God says so Himself. How is it that I heard dozens of sermons on this passage but no one ever pointed that out?!  When God acknowledges this, He does something particularly cruel: he drives them from their garden home, condemning them to mortality. They will now die — not because the fruit has killed them, but because God keeps them from eating of the Tree of Life.

Which brings me to the second big thing that jumps off the page: all of us are fallen and mortal.

This awareness, one that we slowly come to realize as children, can be overwhelming at times. I'm not sure which was worse for me — learning of my parents' fallibility or learning of their mortality. I remember crying bitterly about both.

Closely tied to this idea is that this knowledge leads to a loss of innocence. It certainly did for me. There is a price to be paid for wisdom. "If ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise," someone said, but a later Biblical author answered, "Wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness."

We might all imagine living in a garden, blissfully, eternally, without a care in the world. But we have lost our innocence. "When I became a man, I put away childish things," the Apostle Paul wrote, and we must all come to terms with our own mortality in this sometimes very dark world.

Yet knowledge is not to be shunned. To learn and to grow is to become more divine — whatever the cost. We now know more than we once did. We know our world and our universe are much older than imagined and that it took much more than six days for them to come into being. We know that we are all headed to a dark oblivion trillions of years from now. We cannot return to the garden of innocence and ignorance. But we should live here, east of Eden, with our fellow mortals, cherishing every sacred breath we take.

I do not believe there was a literal Adam and Eve and I would be lying if I told you I believed in God either. I do believe in the timeless truths of this story though. And I believe you and I are both made in a divine image. I can live with that.

A Memorial for Dora Leigh Bassham Deskins

Good morning. My name is Jack Deskins and I am Dora Leigh’s youngest son.

I want to thank my brother Mark and my sisters for coordinating the events today. And I want to thank all of you for being here to share in the memories of my mother. She was important to all of us in so many ways.

My mom called me one Thursday last November to tell me she had decided, at age 75, to quit teaching. I was driving to Point Pleasant for my work and we talked for about an hour on the phone. She was tired and she really hadn’t felt well since my father’s death the previous January. She was going to see her doctor, take a short medical leave while she got things settled with the retirement board, then figure out what was next. She had talked about moving away from the home we grew up in. It was big and she didn’t want to be left with its upkeep.

She called me again at work on Monday to apologize that she wouldn’t be able to come to my son’s 1st birthday party. Her doctor insisted that she come to the emergency room. They’d discovered irregularities in some tests.

Later that day she told me the x-ray revealed a mass on her liver. “And a spot on the pancreas,” she said. I remember the sinking feeling in my chest at those last words. I’d known others with pancreatic cancer. I’d never heard of survivors.

She was dead within a month.

I think we all took it very, very hard. For reasons that I need not go into right now, my siblings and I all developed a pretty dark sense of humor growing up. It was never so much on display as it was when my father died last year. But it was different with my mother. When we gathered at their house after she died, it was grim. There were lots of tears and few laughs.

There were few laughs, but there were some.

Mark and I drove to the funeral home to make arrangements for her body. Her wish was to be cremated and there was some confusion about this initially. Finally a form was brought to us and we were asked to read it carefully. Across the top we read in bold print, “Cremation is final and irreversible.” Cremation is final and irreversible. Anyone who knows us will understand why this sentence led to fits of laughter, as we imagined the circumstances that had led to the inclusion of this important caveat on the document we were reading.

I think my mom would have appreciated that. I know my dad would have.

I took a great deal of pride in telling others that my mom was still working at 75. She was a teacher, a career she didn’t begin until she was almost 50.

She taught me a great number of things.

She taught me to love books. She took me to the library constantly as a child and once, when the librarian refused to check out more than three books to me, she argued with her that I should be allowed as many as I wanted. Whenever we talked, she would always ask, “What are you reading?”

She taught me that things that have value usually require a great deal of work. I can remember sitting on the piano bench with the kitchen timer ticking away the minutes until I’d finished my practice time.

She taught me to defend the things I believed. This meant arguing with her sometimes and we had lots of heated discussions about religion, politics, and education. It also meant arguing with teachers and Sunday School teachers and anyone else who made unsupported assertions.

She taught me that you can have a successful second chapter in your life, something I’m thankful to have learned in the last few years.

She taught me about love and how fierce love can be. Although I think I was a reasonably well-behaved child, I got my very first disciplinary referral in this very room for calling a teacher stupid. Because it was so hard for her to see any wrong in me, she argued with the principal that I shouldn’t be disciplined because the teacher was, in fact, stupid.

If she had a weakness, this was it. She believed her own children, and later her grandchildren, set the moon. I sensed this, even from a young age. We had a book at the house called Best Loved Poems of the American People and when I was seven-years-old, I memorized poem in it for my mother. It goes like this:

While walking down a crowded
City street the other day,
I heard a little urchin
To a comrade turn and say,
‘Say, Chimmey, lemme tell youse,
I’d be happy as a clam
If only I was de feller dat
Me mudder t’inks I am.’ 

‘She t’inks I am a wonder,
An’ she knows her little lad
Could never mix wit’ nuttin’
Dat was ugly, mean or bad.
Oh, lot o’ times I sit and t’ink
How nice, ’twould be, gee whiz!
If a feller was de feller
Dat his mudder t’inks he is.’ 

My friends, be yours a life of toil
Or undiluted joy,
You can learn a wholesome lesson
From that small, untutored boy.
Don’t aim to be an earthly saint
With eyes fixed on a star:
Just try to be the fellow that
Your mother thinks you are.

It’s sentimental and saccharine, but it still captures so much how I feel. In her mind I was the smartest, most handsome, most well-behaved, most talented young man there was. For anyone to suggest otherwise was to question the reality that she knew.

For some time, I really did just wish I was the fellow that my mother thought I was. But I wasn’t and I’m not. No one ever could be.

This week I’ve been wondering if she aspired to the same, that is, did she wish she was the person her mother thought she was? I don’t think that was how she thought at all.

What I think she aspired to more was to be someone her children would admire.

My mother came from a time and place that would lead others to narrow-mindedness and bigotry. But she read, all the time, and the things she read led her to become someone else entirely. I don’t mean to suggest that she was particularly progressive or liberal in her opinions; she wasn’t. But she wasn’t close-minded either and I watched her change her opinion on several occasions because of things she had learned.

She wasn’t the type of person who wished the world would have stopped turning when she was young. She looked into the faces of her children and grandchildren and wanted a world that was better for them. Even as she was dying she made plans and bought books for her grandchildren -- even one who hadn’t been born.

I’ve stopped wishing I was the fellow that my mother thinks I am. She is not here and though we may all disagree about what that means exactly, I think it is a fair thing to say that whatever obligations we felt toward her are no longer. Instead, I look into four young faces at my dinner table every night and try to be person they will one day admire.

What that means exactly, I’m still figuring out, but it does mean that I continue to learn, to destroy my own bigotry wherever I find it, and to fight for a better world for them. A lot of you have children, a lot of you will have children, and certainly all of you know children. If you would honor my mother -- and if you would honor your own mother -- then try to be the person those children will one day admire, even as I admire her today.