The same linguistic impulse of avoiding offense was extended even to furniture making, it seems, where some Victorians on our side of the Atlantic developed little skirts to attach to chairs to hide the upper parts of the chair legs, lest someone become tantalized by the carved shapes.  While this fashion artifact has come to some argument, there is ample attestation that the word “leg” was verboten, while the word “limb” was acceptable.  This quirky anxiety toward things carnal led to the rather infamous title of a BBC comedy in the 70’s, “No Sex Please, We’re British,” which has become a snowclone for loads of other cultural riffs.

The new anxiety over religion in the U.S. has reached a number of points of absurdity thanks to the new Victorianism of the secularists, who are afraid of the temptations that might strike the unwitting.  This is, at least partially, behind the rationale of the judge in New York who refused to allow a couple to change their surname  to “ChristIsLord,” because folks might be offended.  Worse yet, some persons might accidentally utter their name and find themselves among the redeemed; I am fairly certain that the afterlife will not be littered with miserable, unsuspecting folks who accidentally uttered such a phrase as mere appellation.

More disturbing, however, is LSU’s scrubbing of photos that included small crosses.   The editors, apparently, did not want to offend people by mixing sports and religion.  This is dumbfounding, of course, since LSU plays in the SEC and SEC football is easily the most followed sabbatarian religion of the American South.    Then again, big-time higher education has used Photoshop before in ways that reflect other anxieties in academe.

Trying to rid our culture of all references to religion out of deference to the secularists would fulfill the wildest fantasies of Orwellian NewSpeak I suppose, but it would be hopelessly invasive.  I am mindful of one of my graduate school professors, a Northerner who sniffed at all things religious in my home state of Mississippi.  Noting the presence of the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, he once asked me with a perfectly genuine curiosity about when and for what purpose Greek immigrants had arrived in Neshoba County.  I replied, dumbfounded, that the state was settled by Christians, not Greeks, and that he might wish to consult a New Testament to answer his own question. Scrubbing the map of all references to religion would leave us with an impoverished map indeed, but it would be the same sort of cultural cleansing that would be unthinkable for place names in Native American tongues.

I continue to be amazed to find that the so-called defenders of artistic and ideological transgressions are so onion-skinned when it comes to matters of faith.  Perhaps they are afraid that they cannot stand up to truth.  Or light.

I thought of that when I read about last spring’s meeting of the Jesus Seminar (yes, apparently they still meet), which discussed whether or not Jesus was literate.  The logical gymnastics they enjoyed while arriving at the decision that he was not are interesting in their own right, but what caught my eye was this nugget about re-imagining almost everything theological or scriptural: a leader, Bernard Scott of Phillips Theological Seminary,

at one point suggested to the audience of 40 mostly elderly participants to “make up your own canon” of scripture.  “I would trade the book of Revelation for Hamlet any day,” Scott announced, adding that he would swap the Pastoral Epistles for any two Emily Dickinson poems.  “We’d be way better off.”

As a literary critic myself, I tried to re-imagine myself standing before a Shakespeare Seminar and saying, “Re-imagine Shakespeare!  I would trade two Faulkner novels for Hamlet any day and I would swap the sonnets for a sheaf of Browning poems without hesitation.”  I suppose my comments would be thought a bit on the odd side and few would join me in such a quest.

According to the Jesus Seminar story, though, the leaders complained about the predominance of evangelical thought that held to the text and “the failure of liberal religious thought to gain widespread traction.”

I suppose it’s hard to gain such traction, however, when we pander to our own idiosyncratic imaginations and inclinations.  How do we create a movement of “one” when we have created theological vigilantes who stand not merely apart from but contrary to broader conversations and communities of faith that are defined by scriptural or doctrinal coherence?  How do we create a respectable theological movement when we have deleted “theo” and substituted “ego”, along with exchanging divine “logos” for literature?  It seems like it would be hard to get much momentum behind an egological literary movement.

Perhaps a reading of Romans 1:25 might be in order: “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served something created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever.  Amen.”  But such a view would subordinate human “logic” to divine revelation, and most of us at our hearts share the viewpoint of the infamous Duke in Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess”: “I choose never to stoop” (line 42).

I took a number of archeology courses in my undergraduate days (Indiana Jones being all the rage at the time), and I was trained to think about culture in terms of its material artifacts.  We learn a lot about people by what remains well after they are gone.  On the first day of class in the introductory course, our professor showed us a replica of the very ancient Venus of Willendorf.  The Venus is a classic archeological piece, a rotund female shape that is all bosom and thighs.

He asked us, “What is this?”

Classmates offered all sorts of ideas, including one cheeky fellow who said, “It’s the earliest piece of pornography known to man.  It’s pocket porn!”

The professor finally said, somewhat dismissively, “It’s a goddess.  We believe it’s a fertility totem based on the parts of the body that are emphasized.  Look at the way the female form has been objectified.  Male forms are common too in these cultures, by the way.  It was all about reproduction: children meant new workers and a new generation for the culture.  Agricultural success meant reproductive success.  Totems like this help us to know what was valued by this culture.  They worshipped through sex and their culture was sustained by sex.”

Something like that, anyway; we all nodded with “deep” understanding, ignoring, as freshmen, the fact that there was no way to corroborate the professor’s theological claim since the Willendorfian folks are all long-since dead.  Perhaps it really was merely a piece of pornography fashioned by a lonely huntsman.

The difference between the theological and the pornographic might be hard to discern in a fertility cult, where the two may merge into a strange sort of blurred reality.  After all, such a cult was obsessed with the notion that culture genuinely was extended through the passing on of that culture via childbirth and agricultural success.  Even human sacrifice, oddly, was typically viewed as a form of fertility.

When I teach excerpts from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I remind my students that “WWJD” would mean something entirely different if the “J” were “Jove” instead of “Jesus.”  When my campus (we’re an evangelical college that takes our mission quite seriously) ponders ways to improve our careful integration of faith and learning, it is quite different than the way that a campus in Ovid’s times might have thought of it.  For them, the integration of “sex and learning” might have been quite interchangeable terms for “faith and learning.”

Which brings me back to Hannon’s essay.  For the better part of academe, the emphasis is on the integration of sex and learning, from Freud to the various “liberated” viewpoints that detach behaviors from consequences.  In fact, higher education seems to have created an infertility cult, something history has not seen previously in large numbers, and for good reason.  Cults of infertility, such as the Shakers, ultimately extinguish themselves; it’s a classic failure to understand how the real world works.

The sewers of cultic temples in Roman culture were filled with the bones of infants, usually boys who were flushed because they were less valuable as cultic prostitutes.  The early Christian church, in fact, made a name for itself by adopting many of these children who were doomed for death; this was an incredibly powerful counter-cultural act that defied the objectification and commodification of human beings.  Now we have technologies for prevention, methodologies for remediation, and moral sensibilities that place us above any sort of reproach.  Indeed, we are significantly higher, morally, than either the fertility cults that objectified the female form or repressive cultures that closeted it.

At least that’s what we’d like to think.

Ideas, like actions, have consequences, regardless of what we might think.

As Christian apologists have noted, though, an entire library could be built that would be filled with the treatises, lectures, and books that attack the veracity of the Bible.  We would fill shelf after shelf, cabinet after cabinet, row after row, wing after wing, all radiating out from the central podium that could prop up the single book that has generated so much antagonism, all of the texts as a group seeking to overturn the truthfulness of that one rather slim text that stands alone in the central part of the library.

And still it stands.

For a group of thinkers who like to position themselves as intellectual elephants to the gnat of Christianity, their bazooka blasts never seem to hit much of a mark in terms of history.

And perhaps we could invert this image a bit.  If we began to build a library of books that were influenced by the Bible, and in the English tradition by the King James Bible, well, to quote what John 21:25 says about the life of Christ, “I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.”  An argument could be made, in fact, that virtually the entire Library of Congress is a collection of works inspired by, or reacting against, God’s revelation of Himself through the Scriptures and the created world.  We could say the same for the majority of drama, art, music, and other artistic expressions that transcend the literality of the material world and explore all of Creation and its relationship with both the human and the divine.

In some ways, secular writers and artists are like the bird that steals a thread of pure gold and weaves it into her nest, failing to distinguish between the richness of the gold and the commonness of the pine straw.  Or the biologist who reduces the value of the human body to a few dollars of protoplasm.  Or the botanist who studies the structures of a flower under a microscope but never sees the beauty of the entire blossom.  It is, perhaps, a uniquely human impulse that attempts to reduce things to their basest minutia, but in the process we end up circumscribing the transcendence that may be found in the things that the Creator not merely inspired but also created.  Like Simon the Magician, they demand that they also receive the power that is derived from the Holy Ghost, and in the process they miss out on the opportunity to admit the utterly awesome, supernatural nature of the Scriptures, and of the God of the Scriptures.

–Excerpted from my forthcoming essay, “Give Me Also This Power: Secular Writers’ Simultaneous Fascination with and Denial of the Power of the King James Bible,” in KJV 400: Legacy and Impact, ed. Ray Van Neste (Borderstone, exp. Fall 2012).

Non-Mississippians cannot fully understand how my home state feels about its writers.  It’s hard to swing a dead cat in most places without hitting a writer of some repute, which means there is a neighborliness toward local writers that does not exist in many other places.  Before her death, it was hardly newsworthy to stand behind Eudora Welty in line at the Jitney-Jungle (a grocery chain).  I was in line at the local dry cleaners once and realized that I was sandwiched between two bestselling mystery writers, Nevada Barr and Terri Blackstock; between the three of us, we had sold something like 10.001 million books.  ;-)

Noel was a fellow Mississippian, from the town of Picayune, where he had been raised in the local Baptist church and had believed that God was calling him to be a preacher.  He attended the flagship Baptist college in the state and soon discovered the siren call of literature.  One of his classmates was Barry Hannah, another prominent Mississippi writer whom I eulogized on this site  a few years ago.

Noel once told me that he started his walk away from Christianity in that context; graduate school finalized that journey and when I came to know him, he was a massively articulate, Bible-steeped skeptic with little taste for the cultural Christianity that characterized all too much of the deep South.  I highly recommend his memoir about growing up in Picayune, “Outside the Southern Myth” (Mississippi University Press) for those who wish to understand the unresolved nature of the era that “The Help” explored in an overly slick way.  For those of us from the deep South, it is easy to read Polk’s memoir and wonder how anyone from that era was able to stomach remaining in the faith after witnessing so much hatred and ignorance.

As a scholar, Polk had gained access to Faulkner’s carbon typescripts for the major works; these were, effectively, keystroke logs of the author’s original manuscripts, and Polk compared these with the published texts to return the prose to Faulkner’s original intentions (these are the “corrected text editions” published by Vintage).  As you can imagine, Polk’s attention to detail was a dominant characteristic of his work; this is ironic, given that the word “picayune” (his birthplace) means “tiny” or “trivial.”

The seminar was breathtaking; we read only two novels the entire term: The Sound and the Fury and Absalom! Absalom!   Yes, you read that correctly, two novels in an entire doctoral seminar.  But it was brutal.  Faulkner is dense with allusions and his language is among the most challenging of that period, as his mastery of minutia and regionalism combined to provide the text with pivotal moments that centered upon words that were obscure or ambiguous.  One day, Noel dragged in a two-volume Compact Oxford English Dictionary and forced us to look up words after shaming us for not having done so in the first place.  His former life as a youth revivalist had prepared him for close readings of text in ways that are rare among those who were not trained in exegesis.

We wrote two seminar papers that had to be pristine.  By pristine, I mean utterly perfect.  He read the papers in his office with us sitting in a hard chair next to him, shredding our prose, our word choices, and attention to details.  While he was silent, I sat in that chair praying that I would not cry.  He delighted in making doctoral students cry; I did not want to delight him.  At the end of the term he congratulated me on my final revisions (after umpteen sleepless nights) and told me to get them published.  Both papers were published in the next few years, one as a book chapter.  This is, to say the least, highly unusual for seminar papers, but I had been blessed with an unusual professor who was an incredible editor.

Students either adored him or despised him; it was a bi-modal distribution, with an utter vacuum in the middle range.  By the end of my graduate work, I dearly loved the man, sort of in a Stockholm Syndrome way (where hostages empathize with their captors) but also because despite his vibrant cynicism, he was such an incredibly encouraging person who had clearly learned something from his time in church, or perhaps in spite of it, if his memoir is to be considered.

I do not wish to overstate my relationship with Dr. Polk (after I graduated we exchanged emails every few years) but his influence over me, a fellow Mississippi Baptist by birth and a devotee of literature by choice, was significant.  One of my fondest memories of doctoral work was the day he ended our conference by saying, “Let’s go drive around, you drive,” and we drove around town and just shot the breeze on a particularly sunny day.  It was a pleasant, easy way to spend an afternoon.

On more than one occasion, Noel said to me, “You are too bright to remain a Christian, Gene.”  He meant this as a compliment, I was sure, even with the backhanded swipe at my faith, and I was glad to accept it as such.  I’ve thought about that a lot since I heard about his death.  All too often when we hear such things, we are without a ready response.  This morning I thought of the response I wish I had uttered back then: “And you, Dr. Polk, are too encouraging to remain a skeptic.”

Foreshadowing is particularly compelling when the reader re-reads a text (the same is true for other narrative formats, such as film), having then the ultimate knowledge of the story’s whole.  The second and subsequent times through the text, the reader finds all sorts of nuggets that can be very satisfying in terms of realizing just how carefully the story was crafted.

In my book on narrative, “God as Author: A Biblical Approach to Narrative” (B & H Academic), I propose that one of the reasons authors are so prone to addiction and depression is because they function as little gods in the worlds of their stories.  Authors can move events, generate conflicts, frustrate hope, create new characters, and even provide for rescue when all hope has been lost.  In tales with happy endings, the author is a kind of savior-facilitator who rescues the protagonist.  In sad tales, the author is a kind of despot-sadist who leaves us yearning for something more meaningful.  In the world of the story, the author is ultimately in control, to some extent anyway.  But then the pen must cease moving or the fingers typing, and authors must return to reality, where bills must be paid, garbage must be removed, and spouses attended to.  It’s hard to remain sober when you no longer are divine.

The quasi-divinity of the author is found most clearly in the element of foreshadowing.  Because the author is outside of the story, she can read over an event and then go back to the preceding chapters and drop in clues or accentuate the pathos of the characters.  The editorial process allows for a refinement of narrative that is like a surgeon’s scalpel, paring away extraneous information and laying bare the characters in the starkest of terms.

I thought about this on Sunday when my Bible study teacher was working through 2 Samuel 12, where Nathan confronts David over his sin with Bathsheba.  In verse 13, Nathan says, “The Lord has taken away your sin; you will not die,” but in the following verse, he says that the son born of this adulterous union will die.

I must admit that I have always struggled with the fact that the innocent son had to pay for his father’s sin with his infant life.  This is unfair, I want to offer, unjust in fact.  But then I re-read the verses by the light of the subsequent events of the Bible’s narrative and I realize that this infant son was not the only son to die for David’s sins.  The king had another son, born many generations later, the progeny that fulfilled the foreshadowing of the entirety of the Scriptures, and this son genuinely paid for the sins of that father, and all of the other sins of the world.  When John the Baptist declares in John 1:29, “Here is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” and when Christ Himself groans from the Cross (Mark 15:34) the opening lines of David’s lament in Psalm 22, the foreshadowing of the Nathan passage is made crystal clear.  Only in the case of the Scriptures, the author is not a petty demi-god but is, instead, the Spirit, who used not mere foreshadowing to enhance the story but rather prophecy to speak God’s mission through the ages into our minds.  An amazing Author indeed.

The jaw-dropping scandal at Penn State is a real-life example of this.  Today’s penalties from the NCAA indicate that the university’s liabilities will continue apace and I will not be surprised if the total lawsuits end up approaching the billion-dollar mark, especially if the early indications and evidences are accurate.

I feel terrible, however, for the players who knew nothing about this and for the students and alumni who have watched their alma mater emerge as the utter inversion of what everyone had thought about the institution’s reputation for near sterling character in a context that is worse than tarnished.  I love college sports but it’s clear that something has to change.  Those who are leaders must be vigilant and diligent, for the consequences are real and affect the futures of everyone attached to the institutions.

Because I am deeply committed to the life of the local church, I cannot help but draw parallels between the Penn State situation and that of many local churches / ministries and their leaders.  A pastor or two  allegedly decides to break into houses and the churches suffer.  A pastor pursues a sexual dalliance and a generation of members becomes cynical about the moral authority of the pulpit.  A leader succumbs to financial temptation and a ministry collapses.  What’s left in the wake of these things is a group of followers who pay the price.

For me, this is a humbling proposition: leaders carry particular burdens of responsibility.  If that doesn’t drive you to your knees, well, something must be amiss.  And if something is amiss, I share the words of Numbers 32:23, in the King James for added gravity: “behold, ye have sinned against the Lord: and be sure your sin will find you out.”

I noted that the character was singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” trying to sound out the notes to the ancient spiritual and he sang, “nobody knows my sorrows,” rather than “nobody knows but Jesus.”  From the bit of research I’ve done, it’s unclear which line is the original, but for Christians, the second version is much more consonant with the rest of the lyrics.  Without “but Jesus,” the song ceases to be a spiritual and becomes a solipsistic yawp at the universe not unlike much of modernist and naturalist art that complains that we are alone in an uncaring universe.  Stephen Crane, the novelist of “The Red Badge of Courage,” once wrote a brief poem that summarizes the thoughts that the pre-conversion T. S. Eliot expanded on in “The Wasteland”:

A man said to the universe:

“Sir I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

A quotation that often is attributed to C. S. Lewis is “We read to know that we are not alone.”  Lewis meant that art, particularly literature, connects us in ways that are an antidote to the loneliness of our times.  Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus once remarked, “Misery loves company,” which seemed to mean not only that misery is contagious but that miserable people tend to hang together and wallow in their troubles.  The reality, though, is that misery tends to lead individuals to become detached and isolated.  At some point, misery tends to eschew company, which leads to the most destructive form of egotism and self-isolation.  Perhaps this is what we should expect, though, when we decide that no one knows the troubles we’ve seen and that Jesus is not an option.  After all, if He is our friend, He might soon become our Lord, and then where will our misery be?

Typically, fiction makes no claim on historicity or journalistic probity, though there certainly are exceptions to this.  Some writers of historical fiction create imaginative characters who function in historically accurate settings (think Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sobering Uncle Tom’s Cabin), even as some fiction writers place actual historical persons into imaginative settings (think Seth Grahame-Smith’s surreal Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter).  Some writers arrange historical tidbits into fictional tales that masquerade as factual truth.  Perhaps the most notorious of these writers is Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code fame, who opened that novel with three assertions of fact, the third being that “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate” (1).

I often tell my students that they have only to shop at a bookstore (brick and mortar stores in particular) and inspect the non-fiction section to see that “non-fiction” emphatically does not mean “true.”  The inverse may be true as well: “fiction” does not mean “untrue.”

Not long ago I gave a lecture on citizen journalism to a course in media and everyone wanted to talk about Mike Daisey’s expose on NPR’s This American Life, which was a scathing indictment of the working conditions of Apple’s factories in China.  Daisey’s episode had, apparently, become the most downloaded in the show’s history.  The students were very interested in how this one man seemed poised to change corporate human rights perceptions among a generation of Westerners who were navigating their own culpability in Apple’s alleged abuses.  Since that lecture, however, Daisey’s report has unraveled and NPR has taken the unusual step of retracting the episode.

Daisey’s defense, however, has been that his report was not journalistically accurate but was “artistic truth.”  He says that the essence of the story, not the facts themselves, create a representation of truth that is, well, true.  Apparently, students in a journalism course at Seton Hall agreed with Daisey, with the instructor saying that for the students, “the idea that there might be different versions of the truth — a larger truth, or an emotional truth — . . . seemed OK.”

Troubling on so many levels.

Here’s my bottom line, though: when we allow truth to be mixed with error, we give quarter to those who would abuse the truth in service to self.  If the police trump up charges to press for a conviction of a man who is guilty of an actual crime, the criminal may escape his due punishment.  Worse, we may commit an atrocity of law that can only be viewed as some sort of karmic justice (see for instance, William Faulkner’s character Popeye in the brutal novel Sanctuary, who is hanged for a crime that he couldn’t have committed because at the time he was committing another capital crime, which he could not use as an alibi in the convicting court).

One of the most frustrating things that I have do deal with in my secular contexts is the ease with which Christians pass along rumors that masquerade as fact.  Yes, we may find a particular party or organization wicked, but we are not, then, entitled to mix truth with error in a vain quest for “ethical truth” or “virtual power.”  In doing this, we succeed not in destroying those who may be guilty of egregious wrong but rather of looking foolish and allowing the (other) wrong-doers to escape the veracity of their actual malfeasance.

When Pontius Pilate asked the iconic question “What is truth?” (John 18:38) he was voicing the overarching question of unbelievers everywhere.  If Christians are not clear in their use of both truth and Truth, we cannot overcome the eye-rolling response that occurs all too often.

One particular evening, a classmate sidled up to me and looked around as if to indicate that he had a secret to confide in me.  “Gene,” he whispered, “I have heard that you are a Christian.  Is that true?”  I looked around, matching his opening gesture and leaning to whisper back, “Yes, I’m a Christian.”  His eyes grew large and he said, “But honestly, you don’t seem mentally ill?  I’m just shocked that you even admit that you are a Christian.  I mean, you seem like a pretty bright guy.”

He was genuine in his inquiry, not hostile at all.  His reaction was that of one who had learned that the moon was not, in fact, made of cheese.  This was my third graduate degree and I was amply sure that his thoughts were the product of too much Freud (religion being a psychosis) fertilized with Marx (religion being an opiate) and not of a particular animus toward me whatsoever.  In fact, I’d had a similar conversation with a professor about that same time.

I couldn’t help but think about that incident this week as I read two bits of news.  First, in the Ninth Circuit’s ruling on California’s Proposition 8, the majority opinion ruled that the initiative failed the “rational basis standard,” meaning it was based on irrational thought, rooted, apparently, in religious irrationality in particular.  Second, in a transcript of an exchange at Vanderbilt, the chief academic officer of the institution scolded students who wished to allow their religious faith to influence their decision-making:

Now let me give you another example, and this would affect all of you. I’m Catholic. What if my faith beliefs guided all of the decisions I make from day to day?[At this point, the crowd applauds the idea that people should live according to their faith.]

No they shouldn’t! No they shouldn’t! No they shouldn’t! No they shouldn’t! [Disagreement from crowd.] Well, I know you do, but I’m telling you that as a Catholic I am very comfortable using my best judgment as a person to make decisions. As a Catholic, if I held that life begins at conception, I’d have a very big problem with our hospital. Right? Would I not? . . . I would, but I don’t. . . . We don’t want to have personal religious views intrude on good decisionmaking on this campus. They can guide your personal conduct, but I’m not going to let my faith life intrude.  We don’t want to have personal religious views intrude on good decision-making on this campus. They can guide your personal conduct, but I’m not going to let my faith life intrude.

The spirit of those views toward faith is the same spirit of my classmate, that faith and rationality are mutually exclusive terms.  The gravity of the articulations of the view, however, is stunningly different.  A classmate may look askance at me, but a federal appellate panel and an institution’s senior officer for intellectual pursuits have real teeth that can gobble up the rights of persons of faith (and not just Christians, I might add; such animus crosses all lines of belief).  For those of us who are devotees of both history and literature, we recognize, with a shudder, this line of thinking starts with the ad hominem retort, “Oh yeah?  Well, you’re crazy!” and ends by populating gulags (mental illness being a primary grounds for imprisonment by dictators) with candidates for sanity retraining  (i.e., one’s conformity with the dictator’s views).

Persons of faith know that the only path to true reason is that of faith, for the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, and without that canon standard, we are left to our own devices to account for right and wrong.  In the end, we choose whatever matches our covert desires to become tyrannical mini-gods.  Without the external standard of revealed faith and knowledge, we are left to create yardsticks that are based on the various lengths of our own individual feet and such a lack of objective measurements leads to a world that is filled with chaotic and conflicting architecture.

This is why, as an educator, I assert the marvels of the Christian Intellectual Tradition, for I stand with the rationality of those multitudes who have gone before me, the great cloud of scholar-witnesses who have sounded the world with the tools of rational faith and found it to be perfectly reasonable.  This is why it is no accident that abolition, Western science, modern medicine, and so many other marvelous developments arose with particular thunder in Christendom.

Persons of faith are not perfect.  We all are, after all, human and I can provide a cornucopia of examples of individuals who are, as my country friends would term it, “nuttier than squirrel spit.”  But those are individuals, not the Tradition as a whole.  As many an observer has noted about many a tradition, we are unwise to generalize about the nature of groups from the behaviors of a few individuals.  Such a pixelated view always distorts.  No, we are not perfect, but we also are not irrational, and the chronological snobbery and ignorance necessary to make such a claim is utterly breathtaking.

I was, pre-children, a pretty hard-core film buff.  One week in college I cut an entire week of classes for a science fiction film festival, something like 17 films in one week.  How I avoided becoming a film major is still something of a mystery to me.  Post-children, movies are a rare treat, especially ones that don’t involve talking animals or treacle-heavy plots.

I was looking forward to Sherlock Holmes because I love the character and I think Robert Downey Jr. is one of the great actors of our age.  The film was more like a video game than a movie, with undeveloped characters and a plot of little consequence to the movie itself.  The theater, moreover, was filthy and the previews were jaw-droppingly offensive; the screen that proclaimed that the following preview had been rated for all audiences was embarrassingly inaccurate. When I left the theater, I had been entertained somewhat but was less than satisfied.  At least I wasn’t mad or felt cheated, which has been my sense at the end of way too many movies over the past few years.  What passes for good in Hollywood these days is ennui and nihilism, neither of which is an emotion worthy of the magic of the silver screen.

Hugo, on the other hand, was more of an accidental pleasure.  The weather turned on a planned outdoor activity and we didn’t want something too vapid so we gave Hugo a chance.  None of us had seen commercials for it that made us want to go.  My twins are 13 and pretty sophisticated at this point.  The theater was, again, filthy and smelly, but when the film started, we were pulled into a completely different world.  I have no idea how to describe Hugo apart from saying that it is deliberately paced, carefully developed, and incredibly beautiful: a pristine piece of art.  It was, at every turn, the Anti-Sherlock Holmes.  The spiritual truths were salient, the acting (especially the two child leads) was a wonder, and the aesthetic marvels of the film are manifold.  It is, in many ways, a film about how our world has lost the wonder that allows art to transform and inform our lives.  It shames the ugliness of our world by reminding us that there is something magical possible in those darkened rooms that provide us with dreams, ideals, and friends who remain with us for lifetimes.

Let me put it this way: Sherlock Holmes was a bit like heading out to a fancy restaurant and ordering the fanciest entrée on the menu, which was served with a side order of sparklers and an extravagant floor show.  The food, though, was bland, canned stuff, with the experience designed to obscure that fact.  At the end of the evening, you talk about the experience, not the food.  Hugo, though, was a serving of my mom’s spaghetti: comforting, filling, and eminently satisfying, just the kind of experience that sustains one through times of loneliness or sadness.

My college’s theater showed art films on Sunday nights for free.  The price was right and I discovered a world from the early 20^th century that dazzled me.  During the times in my life when I have struggled spiritually and emotionally, film (like literature) has been one of the tools that God used to teach me, to humble me, and to repair me (one of the themes of Hugo).  I have to admit that there were times during the movie when I teared up at the beauty that resonated with the film dreams of my youth.  My children’s lives were edified by the experience as well and we talked long and deeply about the spiritual truths of calling and purpose that are foremost in the film, as well about the longing for Family and Father that the film portrays.

Ticket sales for movies in 2011 were the lowest in sixteen years, and I was hardly surprised by such news.  Indeed, John Nolte recently posted a marvelous piece on how Hollywood can win back its place in society that is dead smack on.  I hope that the Christian artisans who are out there can be at the forefront of this revival that can be a spiritual without being vapid.  More films like Hugo would be a start.

Kim’s creation of a bubble around his people has led them to poverty, starvation, and isolation.  His bubble has become rather famous for its ability to insulate visitors from the reality of the nation’s conditions, or, rather, for its ability to insulate its people from visitors who can point out the reality of the conditions.  The most visually stunning documentation of this is a snapshot of the Korean night sky from a satellite: bright in the South and dark in the North.

Havel, on the other hand, knew the power of the arts to demonstrate that the emperor (the Soviets) had no clothes (“power” over “the powerless,” as he called it).  While Havel was not per se a believer, his philosophy was laden with the fruits of Christian thought, from the dignity of all persons to the importance of balances that check the fallen nature of leaders.  His motto was, according to some sources, “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hate.”  James Sire, best known for the classic study in worldviews “The Universe Next Door,” produced one of the signature studies of Havel, “Vaclav Havel: the Intellectual Conscience of International Politics” (IVP 2001), which is helpful reading for anyone who travels in Eastern Europe or wants to understand post-Christian Europe.

We live in dizzying times.  The former dictators are passing at a startling clip: Gaddafi, Kim, and many others.  So too, however, are some of our other leaders like Havel who turned selflessless into an artform (literally in his case).  I am grateful, in such times, for passages such as Isaiah 6:1: “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, and His robe filled the temple.”  God is not an emperor who lacks for clothes, and we are not a people who lack for a loving King.

If loyalty is a virtue, it’s one that I relish.  Indeed, I’m trying to cultivate it in my children, because loyalty, rightly understood, is a form of grace.  It overlooks the flaws in others and allows us to sustain relationships in spite of our failings and those of others.

But, loyalty, like all of the other virtues, is not a thing unto itself.  It is always subordinate to an overarching integrity that is rooted in righteousness.  Once it becomes primary, it ceases to be a virtue.  Loyalty detached from justice is a particularly perverse vice; however, loyalty that sustains justice is demanding, in that it calls us to use our relationships to inspire confession and repentance in the pursuit of righteousness.

I interviewed for a job many years ago where I asked the prospective boss what virtue he valued most of all in his team.  He focused on loyalty: “I not only expect loyalty, I demand it.  Without utter loyalty, nothing progresses in this organization.”  A few years later, I found out that he had been embezzling funds from the company and that his assistant managers had been involved.  It’s amazing how quickly virtuous “loyalty” morphs into wicked “conspiracy.”

Charles Colson tells a story that is illustrative in How Now Shall We Live?  After addressing some two thousand Marines, Colson was asked by a master sergeant, “Which is more important—loyalty or integrity?”  The Marine creed is, of course, semper fi, “always faithful,” but Colson, understanding very personally the stakes of unfettered loyalty, responded, “’Integrity comes first.’  Loyalty, no matter how admirable, can be dangerous if it is invested in an unworthy cause.” (p. 379).

As a leader, I expect of my colleagues professional loyalty, but I expect it to be conditional loyalty: it goes only as far as my integrity and righteousness allow.  When I fail in either instance, I have broken whatever covenant for loyalty I have entered into with my colleagues.  To be loyal to me in such a circumstance would be to supplant loyalty with its perverted cousin, conspiracy.

Conspiracy goes way back in human history, all the way back to Eden, when Adam and Eve exchanged their righteousness for corrupted loyalty toward one another, entering into a thin conspiracy to cover their loss of righteousness.  Sinfulness never changes, does it?

I have to admit that I felt a bit like I was listening to a couple of Internet phishing experts planning out their next round of extortion of the kindly.  What the mother was doing was helping her child to expand the haul of graduation gifts by casting as large a net as possible.

This sort of crassness really plucks my nerves, though it hardly surprises me that these sorts of things happen.  They’ve been a part of human culture forever, as kinship always has included social obligations like gifts and material support.  What really drives me batty, though, is when Christians do the same thing, commodifying fellow persons as cash cows for financial support.

Perhaps the most extreme case I know of happened to a life-long friend.  She had fallen out of her church for a particular reason and had not attended in over twenty years.  While she still was on the mailing list and received her weekly newsletter, at no time had anyone from the church visited her to see what had happened.  There were no calls from the pastor or the deacons.  No calls from a Sunday school teacher.  Nothing.  Zip.  Nada.  She just fell off the earth as far as that congregation was concerned.

Until an ambitious building campaign came along.

Suddenly a team of deacons arrived at her door with a slick packet of information, asking her to fill out a pledge card and commit to gifts over and above her tithes.  You can imagine what her reaction was.  As a churchman, I was horrified and genuinely embarrassed.  They didn’t care about her soul, apparently, merely her checkbook.

I wish I could say that these occurrences were rare; however, I never cease to be amazed at how often I hear from people I haven’t seen in twenty years – not a call, an email, or a poke on Facebook – who have sent solicitations for their upcoming mission trip, shown up selling wrapping paper for their Christian school, or sent a form letter that offered up some sort of veiled threat to the eternal security of my soul if I did not support whatever cause they have taken on themselves.  It’s almost as though the guy who invented the chain letter had gotten into the fundraising business: ‘if you don’t give to us, calamities will happen to the entire world and it will be your fault, including the damnation of those souls who won’t be reached because you didn’t write a check.’

Please don’t misunderstand my point; nothing makes me want to whip out my checkbook and produce some financial fruit more than when a young lady who has been one of our babysitters needs help to go on a mission trip or when a missionary pastor I once taught lets me know of a need that they have.  We are called to be good stewards of God’s incredible generosity toward us and to make financial decisions on our household budgets so that we may give both liberally and joyfully.

There is something wrong, however, with debasing past relationships that have long been neglected with solicitations that reduce friendships to spiritual extortion.  It makes the Church look greedy at best and vacuous at worst when we do this to non-believers in order to support “righteous” causes.  Current requests without current relationships do not reflect a healthy view of our shared humanity.  We owe our “friends” more than that.

Rachel Toor has a fine essay at The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Problem Is: You Write Too Well” (full text for subscribers only), which outlines a complaint that is heard with amazing frequency: your writing is too easy to read.  As Toor states,

“People on my dissertation committee,” explained several young scholars, “said that I write too well.”

I personally had one of these experiences.  One of my professors met with me about a seminar paper and he gave me what I thought was going to be a compliment.  He complimented my writing and then told me to stop writing so well.  He said something like this:

 “Gene, your writing style is very clear and concise.  Very muscular.  But it is not academic writing.  It is popular writing.  If you persist in writing clear prose, you will never get far in academic writing.  Academic writing must be turgid and convoluted.  You must force your reader to read your sentences four and five times before she can understand what you are trying to say.  You must obscure the concepts that just anyone can understand.  You must, as literally as possible, grab your reader by the throat and pull her face into the text, holding her captive until she can escape by understanding the essay in full after struggling and wrestling with your words.”

You can imagine my thoughts as I received this comment.  This advice ran contrary to everything I had been taught by previous professors and contradicted the advice I gave to my own students in composition classes.  I was really confused and brought it up to someone else in the department who clued me in.

“Oh, he’s a total Marxist, through and through.  You have to understand, Marxists do not like consumerism.  And he believes that writing that is too easy to read is complicit in passive consumerism.  What he is doing is criticizing the larger culture of consumerism.  He wants your prose to fight passive consumption.   And if you write like that, you will signal to other Marxists that you are in their club. At their hearts, Marxists are actually elitists who thrive within a private club populated by self-referencing winkers.”

When my next paper came due, I anticipated his concerns and wrote a painfully complicated essay which he liked very much.  After all, I’m a big believer in the concept of audience and wanted to communicate effectively with him, my sole audience for that paper.  But after that course, I went back to what I believed to be a superior rhetorical style.  I believed, and still do, that effective communication is an attempt to overcome the brokenness of language that is the result of fallenness.  In this way, clear writing is a foretaste of grace, that wonderful concept that reminds us that something must bridge the gap between us and perfection, the gap that divides us from other persons as well as God.

Worldview affects everything, doesn’t it?  Even the way we approach our writing.