A Time to Laugh

It always seemed like we lived across the street from dentists. In South Bend, it was Dr. Rosenbaum. In Tulsa, it was Dr. Hudson (who has since retired). They always had the scariest decorations for Halloween. Ghosts that moved across the porch on wires and loud music blaring. Both had the top houses in the neighborhood! My Dad would always instruct me in my cookie monster costume, “Now, a nice and loud ‘Trick or Treat.’ REMEMBER TO PROJECT!” I did fine with every other house but Dr. Hudson’s because at his house there was so much cool stuff to dodge.

But their treats were lame: toothbrushes and mini-tubes of Crest and stickers of smiling teeth. Who wants a sticker of a tooth? It wasn’t even scratch-n-sniff!

As we’d survey our booty late on Halloween night — with our parents dutifully checking for razor blades and unwrapped candy inevitably injected with cyanide. It was the 1970s after all. — I’d see those forlorn toothbrushes and dumb stickers and think, “Oh. Figures. It’s the dentist.” And I’d toss them aside in favor of Poprocks or Bottlecaps. Like every other kid, I’m sure.

It’s kind of funny in hindsight because I’m sure their business went up after all the Sugar-Daddy-inflicted broken fillings. Do they want more work or do they really want us to use these brushes and paste and send them to the Poor House?

So I’ve got to ask — what are Kim Weir and Pam McCune thinking in Redeeming Halloween: Celebrating without Selling Out? Granted, they do a genuinely good job of retelling the history of the early Church leading up to and including All Hallow’s Eve. And as a list of party ideas go, it’s okay, I guess. No different than a recent issue of Family Circle.

But between those two poles, it’s strange. Instead of holing up in a backroom of the house with the lights off to avoid the inevitable trick-er-treaters, they encourage Christians to have the “best treats” in the neighborhood to be a “good witness” (sounds sooo familiar), When you carve the pumpkin with your kids, quote Bible verses for each step such as “Let this mind be in you” when you lift off the stem (I tried this the other night when we were carving. Besides the fact that Grant glared daggers at me, it was clearly sacrilegious). For costume ideas, they suggest you brainstorm as a family about which people group they want to witness to. Like Astronauts.

Seriously? Is that any different than Dr. Hudson’s tooth stickers?

When I was done with the book, I thought about the artificial sweeteners I use in most of my cooking. I’ve got diabetes in my family history, and so I try to steer away from sugar and white flour. So if I can get away with it, I replace sugar with Splenda and flour with oatmeal.

But it’s obvious. It’s fake. And you can taste the fake.

Do we have to fake it at Halloween too? Does being a good Christian mean we have to give a saccharine nod to the holiday always holding back a full-fledged spooky scream?

It all boils down to what my friend Mollie said when I told her the title of the book I was reading, “What’s to redeem?”

They say that you either love him or hate him.

Well, put me in the love column. I know that Martin Luther has his warts, his intense prejudices, and his blind-spots. I think that’s what makes him even more appealing. He’s fully human, and he acts in faith in spite of it.

Thanks to Luther, none of us in the Western world will ever know what it’s like to stand so alone again. Imagine — he was the first cleric in his memory to be married! That’s why he looked at the so-called mundane but gracious gifts of God with such wonder.-

How can you not love a guy who could say this:

Although I know this [i.e., that I am to rejoice in the Lord and expect good of him], I am of a different mind ten times in the course of a day. But I resist the devil, and often it is with a fart that I chase him away. When he tempts me with silly sins I say, “Devil, yesterday I broke wind too. Have you written it down on your list?” When I say to him, “You have been put to shame,” he believes it, for he does not want to be despised.

Or who celebrated our humanity without the baggage of gnosticish pseudo-piety:

I have no use for cranks who despise music, because it is a gift of God. Music drives away the Devil and makes people happy; they forget thereby all wrath, unchastity, arrogance and the like. Next after theology, I give to music the highest place and the greatest honor.

He looked at simple things and saw God:

Oh, if I could only pray the way this dog watches the meat! All his thoughts are concentrated on the piece of meat. Otherwise he has no thought, wish, or hope.

God writes the gospel, not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.

Sure, Luther was no Philip Melanchthon whom, he said, “stabs, too, but only with pins and needles. The pricks are hard to heal and they hurt. But when I stab I do it with a heavy pike used to hunt boars.” He takes no prisoners when it comes to religiousity:

Human reason is like a drunken man on horseback; set it up on one side, and it tumbles over on the other.

Sin doesn’t harm us as much as our own righteousness.

Nothing good comes of violence.

I think I need a bigger dose of Luther in my life. For me, his words cut right through religious aristocracy.

The Gospel of grace is the end of religion, the final posting of the CLOSED sign on the sweatshop of the human race’s perpetual struggle to think well of itself. For that, at bottom, is what religion is: man’s well-meant but dim-witted attempt to approve of his unapprovable condition by doing odd jobs he thinks some important Something will thank him for. Religion, therefore, is a loser, a strictly fallen activity. It has a failed past and a bankrupt future. There was no religion in Eden and there won’t be any in heaven; and in the meantime Jesus has died and risen to persuade us to knock it all off right now. . . .

The Reformation was a time when men were blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late Medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred-proof grace — bottle after bottle of pure distillate Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel — after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps — suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started. . . . Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, nor the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.

Robert Capon as quoted in Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel

I’ve never actually celebrated Reformation Day before. Not formally or corporately, at least. Hearing the pipes this past Sunday actually made more sense than it has in years. Up until now, there’s been very little from the British Isles that is recognized in our home. Oh sure, we have a Westie. And somewhere in the world there’s a bolt of tartan with my (married) name on it (literally!). But I’ve never heard my own heritage in that drone. Now I get it. Now, as a Presbyterian.

I got called a “Neo” the other day. No, no, it’s not a super-cool Matrix reference (I wish!). It’s short for “Neo-Evangelical.” Evangelicals never actually call themselves “Neo-Evangelicals” anymore. Now it’s always a devil-term lobbed from a Fundy toward an Evangelical.

It’s an old term too. Like calling a Hillary Clinton a “libber.” At the very root, “Neos” are people who support Billy Graham. ::gasp::

I’ve never understood the Fundy fear and trepidation for Graham. My grandma listened to him back in the day. He does preach the Gospel — albeit a very Moody-esque, Keswickish, revivalistic Gospel which is identical to BJU’s, so that’s not the problem. As I read primary documents from his early days, it’s interesting to watch the falling out. I mean, my alma mater sent students to sing at his Hour of Power! But all of a sudden after 1952 (after he integrated his crusades maybe?), Graham is persona non grata.

Strange.

And because my current church supported Graham back in his 1966 Greenville Crusade — two years before I was born — it, too, is a persona non grata to my previous employer. So that now makes me a “Neo” too, I guess.

The practical difference between Fundies and Neos, according to the Fundies, is preferred Bible translation. Or a strict insistence that women wear modest clothes. Or music. For BJU fundamentalists, music is the big boundary marker that includes a continuous and mysterious harangue about how things over here are drastically different and superior to things over there.

So in my now-Neo church a scandalous NIV translation is the pew Bible. I wear “immodest” pants to worship. ::shudder::

But the music? It. is. exactly. the. same. In fact, some of the very same musicians accompany the congregational singing. And my darling hubby hums along with all the choir numbers. I love hearing the tenor part perfectly and quietly in my ear.

Well now, there are a couple of musical differences. Their corporate singing of “And Can It Be” sounds more like a dance than a march. And in all my years of singing “Amazing Grace,” neither my Masters-in-Church-Music husband nor I have ever learned this verse:

The Lord has promised good to me,
His Word my hope secures;
He will my Shield and Portion be,
As long as life endures.

Where has that been? That promise of God’s goodness? Why was it missing? I, like all my fellow Fundies, know very well how to change the words in Newton’s last verse. But why was this verse so easily dropped? We messed up Old Hundreth too!

The differences between my previous worship life and my current one really struck me Sunday as we celebrated the Reformation. For all the talk about Machen’s Warrior Children, these people don’t seem as jingoistic. Maybe their fight is older. Maybe they’ve moved on. Maybe I just can’t perceive it yet.

Maybe there’s a robust enough culture that the more irenic themes are still organic:

You cannot antagonize and influence at the same time.

John Knox

Either way, I’m going to have to get some Lewis plaid ties for my little Reformers for next year.

We just got this book from the library, and it was quickly my sons’ favorite. They love the pictures and that we can sing along with it. And they love the message. Gavin even repeats, “You [in] God Hand, Mommy!” It warms my heart and encourages my spirit.

I remember hearing a sermon in my indy-fundy Baptist church when I was around six-years-old about how this song was wrong: “If God’s got the whole world in His hands, then He’s got sin in His hands. And that’s just not possible.” I was disappointed because the song’s message comforted me even then.

I now see that critique of the spiritual for what it really is: a near-gnostic, dispensationalist grasp for control.

But in spite of our flailing and our eschatological fads, God is in control. He is sovereign. He’s got the whole world in His hands! You and me, brother!

It’s odd for me to digest the intense reaction to my speaking out about my politics. My Facebook wall is even more colorful. Because in my view, I really haven’t changed. I’m just able to express it publicly now.

For a long time, people have whispered, “That Camille Lewis has some strange ideas.” They’ve called me “dangerous.” They’ve passed along their conclusion that I “have trouble with authority.” And I’ve even lost some friends because they now know the whole me.

This isn’t some wide-eyed, bandwagon-jumping celebrity worship for me. This vote actually makes sense in light of the last forty years. I learned my politics from elementary school through graduate school. And I’ve grown from a nondescript grey to a unwavering scarlet and now to an vivid indigo.  I learned that the company line was often misguided. That quilting faith to politics was often an ugly mess. That by the 1980s all good conservative Evangelicals were Republicans. That paleo-neo-theo-cons have hefty amount of naiveté in their worldview. That even well-intentioned patriarchs need rules. That learning a new (cultural) language helps you understand your own better. That the Left isn’t evil and that the Right is often mistaken. That I am pretty much plumbed to live in a liminal life. That the Religious Right has calcified. That my voting for Barack Obama is probably the most active political thing I’ve ever done in my life.

And most importantly that the Gospel changes the way we treat our friends, our neighbors, and our enemies.

And that’s really what I’ve been getting at. Remembering that we’re all totally unable to save ourselves means that we ourselves are as vulnerable to error as the next guy. When we feel that vulnerability, the knee-jerk response to make the divisions clearer. In other words, we identify with our friends because we divide against our enemies. That makes us feel safe and proud. “Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory to division.” If we sense a friend going to “the dark side” (a.k.a. the Other(’s) side), we beg and plead for them to return to safety as if s/he’s going to run back into God’s hands. As if any of us can run in and out of God’s hands.

But muddling the lines is humbling. It points up that it’s not the human lines at all that matter because God’s taking care of His own as He always has.

That’s the comedy I’ve been talking about.

Christians keep repeating “God is sovereign!” during this campaign season. We’re all trying to see our way through the fog, the violent outbursts, the schmaltz, and the issues. It’s overwhelming.

But there’s more. And I really think that cover illustrates that “more.” It’s not that we just sit quivering in the fetal position in a dark corner repeating “God is sovereign” over and over until we pass out from exhaustion. It’s that we can smile in contentment. Knowing that God is in charge emboldens us and enlivens us. It’s confidence. It’s joy. We are at peace inside so we don’t have to pick fights on the outside.

Vote. Speak. Protest. Sing. Laugh. Stomp. Dance. Stick stickers. Don buttons. Stuff envelopes. Donate cash. Yell if you must.

Just act. Like a little kid who knows he’s safe because his dad is nearby. God will redeem what you do even if it is imperfect and full of sin (which it will be). Just like He has redeemed us.

God doesn’t stand back like a Great Watchmaker observing how the world moves. He doesn’t stand back and hold His “nose” because this world stinks with our sin. This is Immanuel’s Ground, my Father’s World. And God lovingly holds our hands because when He looks at us, He sees Christ.

So go. Act. It’s gonna be okay.

In Bloomington, Indiana right off the main drag is People’s Park. It’s a very bohemian place, as my Mom would say. I’ve heard Bloomington police officers quip that they like having the park because it keeps all the rabble-rousers in one place where they can be observed and controlled. It’s a way to keep the peace.

Randy Balmer describes American culture similarly. He argues that the reason American politics are generally so conservative (and European politics are so not) is that the Founders sectioned off all the zealous creativity to religion and the private sphere when they separated Church and State so that the government could operate rather uneventfully.

But the church has not been so separated from the state in the last forty years. At least, not the conservative Evangelical church and the political Right. Here’s how Balmer remembers it all:

Then, a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher, Jimmy Carter, began to lure evangelicals (Southerners especially) out of their apolitical torpor. Televangelist Pat Robertson, for instance, claimed to have “done everything this side of breaking FCC regulations” to elect Carter in 1976. Four years later, however, Robertson and many other evangelicals abandoned Carter in favor of Ronald Reagan. By then, the Religious Right, this loose federation of politically and religiously conservative organizations that coalesced as a political movement during the Carter administration, had taken on a life of its own.

Leaders of the Religious Right threw their considerable heft behind Reagan in the 1980 election. In so doing, they turned their backs on Carter…The fact that Reagan, as governor of California, had signed a bill legalizing abortion didn’t seem to bother the leaders of the Religious Right; nor did the fact that he was divorced and remarried, a circumstance that had disqualified Nelson Rockefeller from any hopes of evangelical support in the 1960s. Although Newsweek had pronounced 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical,” that declaration turned out to be four years premature; all three major candidates in the 1980 election claimed to be evangelical Christians.

In fairness, not all evangelicals jumped on the Reagan-Religious Right bandwagon. One evangelical publication cautioned that “more space in the Bible is devoted to calls for justice and care for the poor than the fact that human life is sacred.” The editorial warned of the dangers of single-issue politics. “Too narrow a front in battling for a moral crusade, or for a truly biblical involvement in politics, could be disastrous,” Christianity Today concluded. “It could lead to the election of a moron who holds the right view on abortion.”

Pollster Louis Field determined that, without evangelical support in the 1980 presidential election, Reagan would have lost to Carter by 1 percent of the popular vote. This is not the place to argue whether Reagan’s policies were good or bad, Christian or not Christian, but rapturous leaders of the Religious Right crawled into bed with the Republican Party in 1980 and heralded Reagan’s election as a harbinger of the Second Coming. Indeed, Reagan’s election in 1980 and his reelection four years later cemented the political alliance between the Religious Right and the Republican Party. Ever since, shamelessly exploiting the “abortion myth,” the fiction that the Religious Right mobilized in direct response to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, leaders of the Religious Right have preached that neoconservative ideology and Republican Party policies offer the most compelling representation of the evangelical faith.

As I’ve processed the intense reactions to my single, relatively insignificant, so-far-one-time vote for a Democrat, I’ve come to realize that fundamentalism is not a religious movement that spills over into politics. No, it’s a political movement that uses religious devotion to make it stick.

That’s why every statement is read as overtly persuasive and even coercive when it may be nothing more than expressive.

That’s why the predictably first response to an Evangelical voting for Obama is “You think it’s gonna be any different over there with them?” It’s a flip in politics that’s assumed, instead of an entirely different and nonpartisan construction of how our faith informs politics.

That’s why, I’m coming to believe, the reactions to our voting for Obama are eerily similar to the reactions to our not spanking our kids. Both acts are seen as deviant, dangerous, disloyal, and unbiblical. Both invite boundariless lectures. Both are really just outside the tradition of the Religious Right.

And that’s why, I guess, people are, to my utter shock, far less bugged by our leaving BJU — maybe because BJU is really not as much at the center of the Religious Right as the GOP and punitive discipline (a.k.a. James Dobson) are. I’m just not sure yet.

But this melding of Faith and Politics, this Titantic of the Religious Right is heading straight for the iceberg. We all see it coming. Some of us have jumped off long ago. Like David Kuo. Some of us are trying to throw life preservers to those still on board. Some are trying to play hymns of comfort for the inevitable demise. Some may even stubbornly go down with the ship.

We all know, of course, this will give us a chance to comically correct our own tragedy and dismantle our calcified integration of our Faith and our Politics.

We need something new.

I got a glimpse of this something new the other day. I was corrected on this very point — that I inadvertently assume that my Faith is the center of everyone’s political judgment — and by straight-up comedy no less. Aasif Mandvi appeared on the Daily Show to “comment” on McCain’s reaction to his poll worker who didn’t trust Obama because “he’s an Arab.” McCain responded with “No . . . He’s a decent family man.”

I personally was so relieved by McCain’s dispelling ugly rumors that I didn’t even see the obvious flaw in his reasoning. As soon as Mandvi appeared on screen though, I started to laugh . . . . and get the point — to ironically see my own blindness.

Colin Powell expanded on the same point but more deliberatively:

He’s right. It shouldn’t matter. In the United States, it doesn’t have to matter.

And it shouldn’t matter to those of us who passionately, whole-heartedly follow Christ either. This is not a plea for a can’t-we-all-just-get-along permissiveness that ignores obvious differences. It’s a plea to put aside the fear and act in power, love, and soberness like Paul advised Timothy.

If we follow Paul’s advice, if we work in our vocations like Luther advised, we’re not going to try to protect a movement or promote a party. We’re not going to get mad when someone steps outside of the cultural morés. And the government won’t have to worry about cordoning us off into a kind of “Preacher’s Park” where they can watch us, contain us, and check us off as supportive but irrelevant.

And our all-important faith in Christ won’t be reduced to the ghetto of civic life either — an ugly, amatuerish spray-painted scrawl that the world drives by at 70 mph.

I wrote my book to tell the Left they didn’t need to fear fundamentalism. So I’m writing now to tell the Religious Right to stop acting so scared and so scary.

This past weekend, we went to see a Civil War Re-enactment. Since Grant and I are living history junkies, we thought this would be a vivid way to learn about an earlier time. Isaac brought his powder horn and dummy rifle (while I was the one who accidentally clobbered a Confederate general standing on the sidelines!). Gavin brought his revolver. We were ready.

Now, I’m a Detroiter — a Yankee! ::gasp:: — living in South Carolina — that state with a proud rebellious streak of red clay pan. When Isaac found himself getting lost in the noisy amateur theater and asked me, “Mommy, which ones are the bad guys?” I struggled to answer as I stood among my dyed-in-the-wool Carolinians watching the faux fight. I snuggled him close and said, “Oh honey, it’s complicated. They are all Americans.”

We left the battle early when it ambled too far down the hill to see, and we wandered toward the camp. Three “confederates” played some old-timey music for us with their bass fiddle, guitar, and mandolin. We were all entranced by the smell of the wood smoke, the cold autumn bite in the air, the sight of those beautifully simple white tents in a row, and the sound of a century ago. In a low-country drawl, one gentleman told us about their infantry and this all-encompassing hobby: “Yeah, we all have to play Yankees some of the time. Everybody owns two uniforms — one for each side. And if anybody won’t play a Yankee, we show them the exit! It’s no fun if you don’t have two sides.”

Burke would be proud. To be able to don the vestments of the opposing side is just that kind of comedic irony that keeps you from taking yourself too seriously. The guy you’re fake-shooting at today might be your compatriot next weekend. To walk in the shoes of the other side even for play-acting keeps the fight from becoming tragic. Brother against brother is as easily brother with brother even in just a week.

In other words, you have to act in this week’s skirmish in a way that makes next week’s alignment still possible.

And this election season I’ve seen that kind of comedy very clearly in one candidate’s words.

I have never seen Burke’s tragedy and comedy play out so predictably in an election. Oh sure, there are extremes on all sides. Many of Obama’s supporters, for instance, have skewered Hillary Clinton and have made their candidate a tragic hero. Humans are bent toward tragedy.

But in the candidates’ words themselves you can see their dramatically different metanarratives. McCain’s is simple. There is evil and he alone will destroy it. It’s a stock morality tale — with clear-cut characters for who’s good and who’s evil. Of course, in his telling, good is us and ours and evil is them and theirs. And he’s the hero in his story, rescuing the damsel America from the evil terrorists/Democrats/economy/communists/media/intellectual urban elite. He portrays himself alone as the hero. No matter what antics he tries to pull, McCain-as-Hero has been the consistent trope.

Obama’s story is more complex. There is no clear-cut good and evil. And, no matter how his supporters are portraying him (and it is nauseating. Don’t get me wrong), in his own words he is not the hero. He will even say that he’s not fixing the problems. We are fixing the problems. “Yes, we can!” as the public-address-cum-music-video repeats.

All in all, McCain’s drama is tragic. Fear is the agency for destroying a clearly defined enemy of evil. Within Obama’s talk it’s us-vs.-the-problem.

There are many legit criticisms of Obama. I can understand doubting that the system can solve the problems that Obama claims it will. That’s fair enough.

But I can’t help but conclude that many have so internalized the black-and-white story of tragedy that they simply resist the complexity Obama dramatizes. They shrug it off as mere “eloquence.” They yell threats at crowded rallies. They hang him in effigy.

That’s why we were all relieved to see this recent comic relief — both candidates dressed like funny penguins and laughing at themselves. While some hacks were turning even that into a competition, it did help us all visualize a country post-November-4, after the battle, when we might be aligned with the person against whom we’re fighting now.

Isaac wanted a Civil War hat on Saturday. He chose a “blue coat hat” because “I like blue. And Gavin, you get a grey coat hat. Then we can switch!” . . . But Gavin didn’t want a hat. He wanted a chicken.

For the first time in my life this year, I’m not voting straight ticket for the Republican party. And boy! are people ticked about it. Judging by the intense reaction, you’d think that quitting my life’s ministry, changing churches, and leaving fundamentalism entirely is nuffin’ compared to my simple, generally-private, individual little vote for Barack Obama.

I’ve gotten a lot of questions — sincere ones, curious ones, flabbergasted ones, and peeved ones. I’ve put off answering them thoroughly because I’m slow and pedantic. My reasons needed time to stew.

Before I state my reasons, let me point out that there are many political conservatives who are also voting for and even endorsing Obama, and the reactions they’ve received have been even more vicious than mine. Kathleen Parker has become my newest hero. And her analysis of the Right stunned me this week because it’s so . . . familiar:

The truth few wish to utter is that the GOP has abandoned many conservatives, who mostly nurse their angst in private. Those chickens we keep hearing about have indeed come home to roost. Years of pandering to the extreme wing — the “kooks” the senior Buckley tried to separate from the right — have created a party no longer attentive to its principles.

But this isn’t about jumping on the conservative bandwagon. Especially a bandwagon I’m not sure I’m even on anymore.

I’ve had people accuse me of just wanting to vote for Obama because it’s an anti-establishment thing to do and that I’m just reacting to leaving BJU. ::shrug:: Grant and I both were impressed four years ago when we heard him speak at the DNC. We both looked at each other and said, “Why isn’t he running? I’d vote for him now!” And this is when we were still in the BJU-fundy camp.

Here are the issues that compel me to vote for Obama (in order of importance):

The War. We need to get out. Yes, we need to get out smoothly, but it needs to be sooner rather than later. McCain sounds all primed to start new conflicts, and I’m not supporting that.

Health Care. I do not trust McCain’s approach to health care and neither does the New England Journal of Medicine. They state it more clearly than I, but while I have my doubts about Obama’s plan, McCain’s sounds like a complete disaster.

Education. “No Child Left Behind” is a joke. McCain doesn’t think it’s too bad — “a great beginning.” That doesn’t bode well. Obama, at least, admits the problems.

Human Rights. I couldn’t agree more with Senator Obama on this one. And McCain, having a great moral reason to stand his ground on torture, seems to flip-flop.

Economy. This is a biggie. In fact, I believe it’s one of three really key criticisms conservatives have against Obama (the other two being experience — which McCain nullified when he chose Palin — and abortion). I understand that the Milton Friedman fans think that the freer the market the better the country. I don’t agree. I don’t passionately disagree either, but I think that only a naive view of history past the 20th-century will allow you to think capitalism is actually fair and wholly good.

I’m impious on this one. I don’t think the free market system is all that and I don’t think it’s more socialized opposite is the greatest evil. Both are riddled with problems — both moral and economic. I understand that in an economic ethic profit is the only value, but I do believe there are other ethical perspectives to consider.

What I do know is that the status quo is not working. But I know that life as we know it will not end if we take a different tactic.

If allopathic medicine is not working, sometimes you go to its homeopathic opposite.

The irony is not lost on me either that those who are crying the loudest about Obama’s plan for the economy make significantly more than our <$50K. Significantly more.

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My friends on the Christian Right insist that the two most important issues which should compel me to vote for McCain are same-sex marriage and abortion. I listened closely during all four debates, and the only time same-sex marriage came up was with the VP debate. And when it comes to policy, both Biden and Palin had the same conclusions. So that’s a toss-up and moot.

And now abortion — the Mother of all Christian Right issues.

I will state unequivocally that I have chosen to believe that life begins at conception. Now, technically we don’t know if life begins when a heart starts beating or at the quickening — when the ancient Hebrews believed it began. But I’ve chosen to give the benefit of the doubt to the Creator on this one and assume that life starts at conception. As a consequence I believe that I have four children waiting for me in Heaven.

Now, I have Christian mommy friends who disagree with me on that point. They believe that life begins sometime between conception and the quickening, and the losses that they’ve experienced were not real “people.” That’s fine. I don’t know. Christians have disagreed about this throughout the centuries. I just know what I’ve chosen to believe.

Thus, except when the life of the mother is in danger, I believe that abortion is an immoral choice. That is the position I was taught growing up, the position that I heard taught in Ethics class at BJU, and the position that I believe best reflects the ancient Biblical principles of always preserving life.

So when it comes to the bottom line on abortion, I am in agreement with most of my conservative Evangelical friends on the Right.

But I am not convinced that anything we’re doing now is working. I know conservative Evangelical women who have always voted “pro-life” but have had an abortion. It seems that our means to saving unborn lives has been ghettoized to the judicial branch alone. I don’t believe politics will solve this one. This problem rests squarely on the Church’s front door.

So I took the issue “off the table” as a voting issue. . . .

Until the last presidential debate. I actually cringed when Bob Schieffer brought it up. I didn’t want to hear Obama confirm all the horrible things I had heard about him on this issue.

I was genuinely surprised.

Obama explained the legislative two-step that was going on with that infamous born-alive bill. But then Obama actually repeated things — even exact phrases — that I had been saying for over 15 years.

But there surely is some common ground when both those who believe in choice and those who are opposed to abortion can come together and say, “We should try to prevent unintended pregnancies by providing appropriate education to our youth, communicating that sexuality is sacred and that they should not be engaged in cavalier activity, and providing options for adoption, and helping single mothers if they want to choose to keep the baby.”

Those are all things that we put in the Democratic platform for the first time this year, and I think that’s where we can find some common ground, because nobody’s pro-abortion. I think it’s always a tragic situation.

Wow. When my freshman speech students would come to me with their persuasive speech topics, abortion was always a “tired topic.” “We all agree in here,” I’d say. “So you have to think of a fresh angle on that issue. No one — even those who support abortion rights — wants more abortions. So that’s some common ground. What can we all do to reduce the number of abortions?”

No one ever took me up on that idea.

But Obama just said it himself. And I know where he got it. He got it from Tony Campolo who stuck his neck out on the issue — amidst a lot of flack — and was welcomed within the Democratic party to find a moral and practical common ground on reducing abortions.

I was impressed and surprised that I was impressed. I thought McCain would match that since that’s one issue he and I fundamentally agree on, right?

Oh dear. How did he blow that one? I was all set to agree with him on it, and then he belittled the one reason that old-school Christian Right agree that abortion should be considered. It was an oddly revealing and condescending moment that disappointed me greatly.

Jim Wallis found more optimism in McCain’s words highlighting this debate statement:

We have to change the culture of America. Those of us who are proudly pro-life understand that. And it’s got to be courage and compassion that we show to a young woman who’s facing this terribly difficult decision. … But that does not mean that we will cease to protect the rights of the unborn. Of course, we have to come together. Of course, we have to work together, and, of course, it’s vital that we do so and help these young women who are facing such a difficult decision, with a compassion, that we’ll help them with the adoptive services, with the courage to bring that child into this world and we’ll help take care of it.

I was stunned that even that grave issue could be handled with such care that my anticipatory cringing could be turned to surprised nodding within a few minutes.

===================

So my Campaign 2008 stock issues are the War, Health Care, Education, Human Rights, the Economy, and now after the last presidential debate Abortion as well. And for me the majority of those decidedly flow toward Obama.

I’m not trying to convince you to vote for Obama on November 4th. I’m only trying to convince you that I have my reasons for the way I’ll cast my vote. And those reasons are informed by facts, reason, and my religious beliefs.

Chickens can be taught that only one specific pitch [of a ringing bell] is a food-signal. . . . If one rings the bell next time, not to feed the chickens, but to assemble them for chopping off their heads, they come faithfully running, on the strength of the character which a ringing bell possesses for them. Chickens not so educated would have acted more wisely. Thus it will be seen that the devices by which we arrived at a correct orientation may be quite the same as those involved in an incorrect one.

Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change

Did you hear about the guy in NYC who was so closely following his car’s navigation system that he drove straight down a set of railroad tracks . . . right into an oncoming train? No kidding! He and the passenger barely escaped by jumping out of the car.

Piety can be a bad thing.

Burke called it the difference between motion and action. Breathing is motion; sighing is action. The former is involuntary. The latter is intentional and meaningful. Burke explained further that while evolution described the evolving force as simply moving, creation centered on active, intentional God.

You get the picture.

Burke wanted us to act like humans, not move like chickens. Don’t follow the talking box in your car to your certain demise!

And when it all comes down to it, I’m pretty positive that that’s why Republicans, specifically those on Christian Right, are so ticked right now. We had been going along, following what our pastors, Christian radio personalities, family, teachers were telling us: “Vote Republican. Don’t mess this up. Just vote Republican. They get us. They understand. They are fighting for us. Just do it.”

Don’t act. Just move.

And now we’re face-to-face with the realization that we got PWNED.

John Whitehead from the Rutherford Institute is as blunt and accurate as you can be:

Like moths flickering about a hot flame, the leaders of the Christian Right are eager to get close to political power. But as anyone who has played the game knows, politics is corrupt and manipulative. And the Christian Right was manipulated by the Bush Administration.

And we’re processing the grief. Deep down, nearly every reaction I’ve got to my recent and public less-than-loyal-to-the-GOP comments can be described as denial pure and simple. And to this participant in and student of American religious rhetoric, the reactions cluster around certain topoi, all variations on the red herring fallacy. So I give you:

The Top Ten Campaign 2008 Fallacies from the Religious Right

(Dog Latin gratis)

“What about them?” Formal Name: Tu Quoque.

• Let’s get this one out of the way. Because after my friends on the Religious Right read that header, they’re already muttering “You gonna give equal time to them, aren’t you?” under their breath. Let’s face it: I don’t know “them.” I haven’t spent my life with “them.” I don’t get vituperative reactions from “them” when I disagree with the standard GOP line. So this is all in the family right now.
• Potential Retort: “That’s not my project.” It worked in grad school. Might work here.

“They are all liars!” “They both do it!” Formal Name: also Tu Quoque.

• This is usually the first line of defense, and what it really reveals is severe undertow of cynicism. It’s the Republican version of “Yo Mama!” As an attempt to put the opponent on the defensive, it’s usually general and imprecise so an effective defense is impossible.
• Retort: You can’t respond with some Zen-like “Aren’t we all liars deep down?” No, you have to reflect feelings. “It is easier to be mad than sad.”

“What about Jeremiah Wright?” Formal Name: Religio est Freakium. It’s a combination of Ad Hominem and Guilt by Association with an extra dash of freak-out over weird religions.

• This is the response I get the most. And it irks me. Because it’s like asking a doctor on the sidewalk, “Hey, I’ve got a pain right here. What could that be?” Your doc isn’t gonna tell you without research and observation. And neither am I! I’m trained in studying religious discourse, and a clip shown ad nauseum on Fox News doesn’t cut it. I know enough about American-grown religion in the black community a la the Nation of Islam to know that we white people just don’t get it. And this white woman is not going to attempt to get it quickly.
• Secondly, HELLO? I spent 20 years within what was for all intents and purposes a pretty racist place. And I don’t buy their defense of racism. There was good there. A lot of good. And, like all human institutions, there was a lot of foolishness, even dangerous and hurtful foolishness. People in glass houses . . . .[/rant]
• The Left is doing it about Sarah Palin too. Everybody’s up in arms that she’s a Pentecostal. And yeah, she is. That doesn’t make her evil. It may reveal a part of her, but it doesn’t reveal all of her.
• Retort: “Can we get back to the issues?”

“How could you?” Formal Name: Argumentum ad Betrayalium. It’s the opposite of Argumentum ad Verecundiam. And it’s related Bandwagon.

• This response is more emotionally weighty than the flabbergasted and understandable “Can you explain this one to me?” It communicates that feeling of (unjustified) betrayal that you’re not voting for the Republican candidate instead of the justified betrayal that the GOP has delivered a real loser candidate. It’s a diversion because it’s easier to be mad at an unemployed goof like me than to get mad at someone powerful or out-of-reach. The real problem here is a lack of personal boundaries.
• Retort: “Thanks for your concern. Would you like some bean dip?”

“Terrorist!” Formal Name: Reductio ad Terroristum.

• There’s nothing you can say after that.
• It’s just like Reductio ad Hitlerum with a 21^st-century twist. Or Reductio ad Arabium: “He’s an Arab!” Or Reductio ad Abortum: “He kills babies with a hammer!”
• Retort: We need to update Godwin’s Law with Camille’s Corollary: “As the Religious Right’s candidate falls in the polls, the number of accusations that the opposing candidate is not a Christian will demonstrate an inversely proportional rise.”

“Polemic!” Formal Name: Reductio ad Spinum

• I believe this response is intended to mean “Quit stalling. Get to my point.” But in the grand scheme of things, it is expressing frustration at argumentative creativity. It means, “Quit dancing and stick to the talking points.” Personally, I don’t stick to the talking points. That’s not what I do. If you don’t like it, talk to someone who’ll respond like you want them to.
• Retort: “Huh?”

“How could you fall for all that celebrity/eloquence/schmaltz/rhetoric?” Formal Name: Reductio ad Gorgias

• Okay. I’ll ignore that slam on my academic discipline for now. . . . There has been a ton of schmaltz. No doubt. On all sides. And it is tiring. But who says I am falling for it? Do I buy Dr. Pepper because I like the jingle – even if it is a great jingle? Nope. I like the taste.
• Retort: “I’m not.”

“At least, vote for third party!” “Whatever you do — don’t vote for third party!” Formal Name: Reductio ad Authoritum est Rubberium et Tu est Glueium

• Talk about an argumentative tennis match. “Third party is the least of all evils;” “The third party is the biggest waste of your civic energy.” “At least be consistent with my values and vote for Bob Barr;” “You think Ralph Nader could actually win?” Whatever it is you’re planning to do is wrong and you must do the opposite. Which is also wrong so you must just vote for the GOP: it’s the only possible choice.
• Retort: “Vote your conscience. I’m voting mine. That’s all you have left after this campaign.”

“If you think you’re offended, well, I’m offended more.” Formal Name: Reductio ad Colbertum

• It is an attempt to pirate the usually left-wing trope of “political correctness.” It falls flat. It’s like when a rich friend complains that his boat needs a new whatever-it-is-that-boats-need while your dishwasher is broken, your credit cards are maxed out, and your goofy, incontinent dog is bald from all the obsessive licking.
• Retort: The only way to respond is to imagine the person is channeling Stephen Colbert. Then, with comic irony fully intact, you may move on. WristStrong!

“Either you’re for us or you’re against us.” Formal Name: Reductio ad Absurdum

• This is the most sacrilegious of the fallacies because it takes a Scriptural phrase and imposes that formal either-or bifurcation on anything and everything. “You’re either for McCain or you’re a communist.” “You either love America or you’re voting for Obama.” “You either are smart and agree with me or you’re an argula-eating, Huffington-reading loser.”
• Retort: “Says who?”

The Christian Right has been so painfully loyal to the GOP since the 1980s, and now we’re hearing the warning whistles and seeing the light coming closer and closer. And we’re bickering amongst ourselves about who jumped off the tracks first. Just ACT!

Be pious to the Gospel! Don’t be pious to the Party.

James Garner we’re not. But in the 1970s, Sage Publications capitalized on the “support your local _____” craze and distributed “Support your Local Rhetorician” buttons and bumper stickers at the National Speech Association convention. As a discipline, we rhetoricians are so needy for affirmation that we lapped it up. You’ll still see those old relics, but uh . . . . well, a reproduction is currently my favorite mug for my morning coffee.

Rhetoricians will never win any popularity contests. Corax and Tisias irritated the toga off their judge back in the day. Plato blamed our kind for encouraging Socrates’ death. Aristotle relegated our study to night classes. Ramus simply called what we did “stupid.” Locke figured it all was just some sneaky trick like those wacky feminine whiles.

So what’s new, right? The lawyers still think we’re pinko commies, the philosophers still think we’re liars, the hard sciences still think we’re fluff, the merchants still think we’re lazy, and other scholars think we’re too conservative.

Whatever.

None of those are true, of course. But we’re often too busy deconstructing those assumptions to take anything too personally.

You might say that we’re like the Texas rancher in the 1840s who didn’t brand his calves so, as a result, they wandered in and out of other herds. They had no label and they could fit-in anywhere temporarily.

You might say that, but I don’t want to encourage drinking by saying the M-word. ;)

What rhetoricians do is make judgments and solve problems. Or try to. We think that words are real and material, not “mere rhetoric” that masks and distracts. And that talk, we assume, offers fuzzy glimpses into future policies.

I’ve seen a lot genuine, palpable antagonism across political lines recently. When it all comes out in the wash, it’s often just a communication problem — two groups talking in different languages. That’s really not a problem as such. As people do talk, you can uncover the real disagreement and the real agreements and maybe even imagine a (rhetorical) solution. But when negative intent is applied — when we think our opponent is the enemy — it spins out of control and nothing is solved. Absolutely nothing. After lobbing mudballs over the fence at the enemy (not even looking to see if we hit any targets, but just feeling better for having thrown something), we go back to our lives behind the fence happily thinking we’ve conquered the mean ol’ enemy.

They say that the reason dogs bark at mail carriers is that they get positive reinforcement for their barking every single day. The strange person in a strange uniform comes every day, the dog barks ferociously, and the strange person leaves. It worked!

That’s what these political discussions amount to. Chance meetings, vicious barking, and routine partings. And the neighbors get tired of the yapping.

If any discussion intends to preserve the rhetorical boundary markers, it’s doomed. But in crossing the lines, you just might learn something. Maybe that postal carrier carries liv-a-snaps. Maybe he’s a prowler too, but you won’t know if you just stay behind the door barking indiscriminately at everything.

Rhetoricians are like the cat who sits in the window observing the whole dog-v.-mailman kerfuffle. We live on the borders. We’re all liminal. We’re stinkers. Nobody really likes us I’ve come to realize, but if you’re “lucky,” we might just hang around long enough to help. We want to help. We have wanted to help for millenia.

So go pet a cat. Go support your local rhetorician! A.K.A. Embrace your inner stinker!

I used to have a dachshund named Burke, and Kenneth Burke used to punningly refer to himself as Kennel Bark. Sometimes, visiting Burke the man, when I was accompanied by Burke the dog, I would yell at the dog and the man would answer. This marvelous self-irony is similar to Burke’s capacity to say that war is the disease of cooperation or that any system must provide the instruments for its own criticism. And that is what Burke the poet tells us–that he is not one, but many: that he is aphorist, comedian, dialectician, logologer, dramatist, and poet; that we must remember that the man who built the system is also the man who fought dandelions–fair and square.

William Howe Rueckert, Encounters with Kenneth Burke 27

Burke’s nearly impossible to reduce. “He has never made it into a book club,” they say. But if you had to simplify him, it would be that he insists that we humans are bent toward tragedy, but we need to — if even for a brief moment — live in comedy.

Remember in English lit when your teacher explained the difference between a Shakespearean tragedy and comedy? It’s the same in Aristotle, for that matter. In tragedy somebody dies to cleanse the community from its sin. One dude(tte) rises as the normative character to see the resolution through to the end. Comedies, however, always end with an engagement, wedding, or consumation — a joining together of disparate parts, not subsuming or killing each other, but embracing and improving each other.

It’s not that in comedy we just settle in for a drunken love-in (what a boring story!). It’s not just about accepting one another and ignoring problems. It’s not permissiveness.

No, in comedy, there’s critique. There’s argument. There’s foolishness. There’s irony. But there’s no killing.

In comedy, you don’t look down your aquiline nose at your inferiors chained to the dank cave walls while you enjoy a glimpse at the pretty tree outside. You don’t ignore the guard imprisoning you in your Panopticon. It’s something else entirely.

In comedy, you take your enemies and make them your adversaries. They are no longer evil, just mistaken. In other words, you talk with them, correct them, teach them, be taught by them, and laugh at the whole lot . . . including yourself.

In comedy, there’s no us-vs.-them. It’s us-vs.-the-problem.

In my opinion, Burke’s comedy is a shadow of the Gospel. Burke gets it wrong on many points, as I’ve said elsewhere. But when Christ said on the cross “it is finished,” He was declaring the sacrifice complete. It was done. Tragedy was no longer necessary. He’d taken it all.

And because of Christ, we can all be comedians. We can see our sins in others and not kill them off, but remember our failings and our undeserved forgiveness. That’s the Drama of Grace.

Look how in Life is Beautiful protagonist Guido Orefice tries to translate the worst tragedy into (literal) comedy for his son. About nine minutes in, Uncle Eliseo chivalrously helps the Nazi guard when she stumbles. He’s going to his death, and yet . . . for a moment he forgets that and is simply and gently human.

That’s the story I learned about from Burke, on the Left, from disbelieving agnostics. Even though I was raised in Bible-believing, God-fearing, sola-gratia conservative Protestantism, I never learned to look for it there. But I should have . . . because that’s the whole Gospel story: I love Him because He first loved me.