A Time to Laugh

We read:

• John 1:1-18
• Isaiah 9:1-7

We remember:

• Genesis 1-2
• A sunshine

And we sing:

But when you hear and accept this it is not your power, but God’s grace, that renders the Gospel fruitful in you, so that you believe that you and your works are nothing. For you see how few there are who accept it, so that Christ weeps over Jerusalem and, as now the Papists are doing, not only refuse it, but condemn such doctrine, for they will not have all their works to be sin, they desire to lay the first stone and rage and fume against the Gospel.

Luther’s First Sunday of Advent Sermon

I wish you could see what I see sitting here. In my reading nook. Next to me a sweet schnauzer warms my legs. In the next room, a gentle husband snoozes. Upstairs the sleepy preschooler has conked out for his Sunday afternoon coma, and the silly kindergartner tries his best to keep quiet in his own room. But I hear the leaping off the bed and the happy dancing directly above me.

I see our Christmas tree. Lit. A miracle in itself since just last night the sentimentally appointed pinester was dark due to a malfunction somewhere in its dozen strands of light. From my point of view, the Hubby divined the exact problem (blown light fuse) and fixed it effortlessly. Yesterday’s dead car battery, however, needed Geico’s help. And the vintage Lionel that usually circles the tree couldn’t be fixed without parts, so it waits for us next year. We were electrical Schleprocks yesterday.

But between me and the tree, I see, for the first time in our home, a single advent candle burning brightly. The Candle of Hope. I cobbled together a wreath of velvet leaves I made for Elise’s birth nine years ago and some wool leaves I cut from my old felted sweater. An evergreen of a different sort. All leaves intended for another purpose, resurrected for celebration.

We sang Christmas songs this morning at church. Imagine that — singing Christmas songs during the Christmas season. If you’ve never been a independent, fundamental Baptist, you have no idea what a gift that is. You see, Advent is a big no-no. And you don’t sing Christmas songs until the week of Christmas. Or maybe the two weeks before. And even then, the truly spiritual sing them almost grudgingly. Because Christmas is Catholic (i.e. pagan) and extending the Christmas season is commercial, we really should just ignore it altogether. The pious do!

I can’t even tell you how many Christians I know who refuse to celebrate the holiday at all. I think, in fact, Charles Dickens wrote a novel about just such a person.

But deep down, we want to anticipate and celebrate. We want an old ritual that connects us all to a Story grander than just our own. We want to sing!

Last night, we watched an old Ken Burns special on the Shakers – the mostly 19th-century agrarian sect which took in orphans and made the most simplistically elegant furniture imaginable. Burns’ hagiography brushed past all their ideological problems — that Mother Ann taught that Original Sin was sexual intercourse (and so they were celibate) and that God was both male and female with Jesus being the male manifestation and Mother Ann being the final female manifestation and Christ’s Bride. And, of course, that they must discipline their evil Body in order to let the wholly good Spirit reign.

Instead Burns highlighted their seemingly beautiful straining, struggling, and striving toward perfection. And in 1840 it looked like they had made it. They were booming. They were taking in the poor and homeless. Their industry and craftsmanship was admired and profitable. Their ethic, however, was tailored to a 19th-century agrarianism and could not survive life in the industrialized 20th century. And now in the 21st century, there are only three living Shakers left.

Sound familiar? It’s eerily familiar to me. Scarily familiar. In grad school, I read all about the Shakers and all the utopian sects born out of the Second Great Awakening (most of whom came from the Burned-Over District). And I empathize with all of them. I understand the appeal of perfection — that if I make my work pristine enough and sincere enough, I’ll build an American ziggurat to God. I understand the appeal of the bifurcated thinking — that the world is evil and that my industrious piety is righteous. I understand the appeal of defining sin as out there instead of in here – that my containing evil makes my perfection attainable. I understand the appeal of being peculiar — that doing the hard thing and the unexpected thing will woo people to me/us/God. Whether the hard thing is celibacy or modesty or Scroogery.

What a different Story I heard this morning! That God comes to me and I don’t work my way toward Him. That His love is greater than my sin. That doing good comes because Jesus has made us good. That the first Advent guarantees the second. That Jesus is King. Now!

There’s no room for the curmudgeon in that Story!

The kindergartner has just been freed from his quietness. Daddy bounded down the stairs carrying him piggyback. And the preschooler followed with a big case of bed head. We all have the evening to rest together (and fix the lights on the tree again because another fuse just blew). Three years ago on this day we would have already been headed to a church service or a rehearsal or some such duty. Straining, struggling, and striving toward some illusion of perfection.

I laugh at the irony. Our reactionary anti-Catholic shunning of all things Advent has still duplicated the identical medieval religious feudalism. And our dispensationalist adventism won’t touch an extended celebration of the first Advent.

But I’ll light my Candle of Irony on another day. Today is the Candle of Hope.

This is what is meant by “Thy king cometh.” You do not seek him, but he seeks you. You do not find him, he finds you. For the preachers come from him, not from you; their sermons come from him, not from you; your faith comes from him, not from you; everything that faith works in you comes from him, not from you; and where he does not come, you remain outside; and where there is no Gospel there is no God, but only sin and damnation, free will may do, suffer, work and live as it may and can. Therefore you should not ask, where to begin to be godly; there is no beginning, except where the king enters and is proclaimed.

We read:

• I John 4:7-19
• Zephaniah 3:14-17
• Luther’s Sermon

We remember:

• I Samuel 16:1-13
• The Tree itself

We sing:

God’s command to love each other is required of every man.
Showing mercy to a brother mirrors his redemptive plan.
In compassion He has given of His love that is divine;
On the cross sins were forgiven; joy and peace are fully thine.

Come in praise and adoration, all who on Christ’s name believe.
Worship Him with consecration, grace and love will you receive.
For His grace give Him the glory, for the Spririt and the Word,
And repeat the gospel story till all men His name have heard.

I am presenting this paper at the annual National Communication Association Convention today. Check it out!

2009 NCA Standing Without And Within Apologia

My paper presents BJU’s apologia on race before and after November 2008 as well as the Please-Reconcile’s plea for BJU’s racial reconciliation. BJU’s statements are strange. To be quite blunt, they make no sense to a Yankee. But I’ve discovered that within the Old South ethic of the Lost Cause, the so-called apology makes perfect sense.

The best resource for understanding the Lost Cause rhetoric is an old friend to rhetoricians and a particularly familiar annoyance to Burkeans—Richard Weaver. In his 1943 LSU dissertation renamed Southern Tradition at Bay, Weaver surveys and appreciates Lost Cause literature post-Appomattox and includes a long discussion of Southern apologia.

Bob Jones University’s statements on race parallel Weaver’s Lost Cause apologia. The drama that Weaver both records and continues is a romance caught at a potentially tragic crisis point. The old rules of chivalry drive the action or rather reaction. Weaver’s hero, the southern Cavalier, moves more than acts. He is a man of leisure and good birth who simply is, until a moment of deadly crisis. When he is challenged, as if in a duel, his duty is to “serve the eternal verities” of the established order. Destruction, ruin, bankruptcy, injury are all irrelevant to preserving truth and maintaining “good form.” Guiding him is an unspoken code duello.

Even nearly one hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, the rhetorical drama of the Old South still persists in tiny provincial cultural pockets like Bob Jones University. Within the enduring rhetorical romance of sectarian religion, the code duello informs and contains conflict.  Intersecting Richard Weaver’s Old South drama with my previous description of rhetorical romance is a productive critical project. Each analysis rounds out the other and might provide a more organic explanation for the persisting romance in a micro-culture like southern fundamentalism.

Such an intersection also broadens BJU’s connection with the “segregationist ethos” of its founding family. Agrarianism, provincialism, populism, commerce, societal hierarchy, religion, nativism, and racism all goaded the Confederacy in their Romance-turned-tragedy. In our critical sweep, we, too, must avoid containing our cultural sin of racism in the South, in fundamentalism, or in Bob Jones University. The arcane mask these romantics don to distract their Other’s gaze from their own ugliness tempts us to our own form of tragedy. The Please-Reconcile effort was a comic attempt at removing their mask and correcting that sin without killing off the humanity underneath.

Further study intersecting southern fundamentalism with the Lost Cause drama would expose the salience and endurance possible (or not) in newer Lost Cause movements like Doug Wilson’s Federal Vision, southern secessionism, and identity Christianity. At the root of the problem within Southern romantic apologia is a juggling of the usual mystical purpose with the pragmatic agency. That is, by relegating the divine to the means of propping up a societal hierarchy, participants in the rhetorical drama are distracted from the essentially preservationist motive in their micro-culture. Further contrasting southern with northern fundamentalism, tracing how Weaver’s agrarianism found resonance in mid-century northern conservatism, and mapping the dramatistic similarities between the Civil War and current culture wars would productively assist scholars in deconstructing tragedy and creating a comic corrective.

A revealing moment in this interaction was the P-R’s admittance that they were shocked at their alma mater’s pervasively racist reputation. They offer one explanation that BJU is really not as racist as it seems, giving their alma mater a face-saving “out.” Another possible explanation is that the legal confrontation of BJU’s interracial dating prohibition sent the “segregationist ethos” far underground. The presumed inequality of the races remained in behind-closed-doors meetings. The students from both the North and the South who attended and graduated after 1983 Supreme Court case—which includes every member of the Please-Reconcile team—were witless about the racist foundation. They had been raised in the prevailing notion of “color-blindness” which made them deaf to the coded racism. They were literal-minded, morally earnest, personally outspoken, and driven to “do right.” Perhaps, by shedding the Old South rhetoric that was so prominent in BJU’s pre-1964 days and by generalizing for a larger audience, BJU was forging the tools for its own first homegrown public confrontation.

This intersection of the North with the Old South, of integrationist with separatist, of post-1983 students with pre-1964 administrators, of a second-generation Pollack with an Old South morality play — by putting together these two disparate “terms” we have our last place of freedom, Burke would say. In the end, such perspective by incongruity is our best source of comic correction keeping us from being too hopelessly ourselves.

When the Old South brushes up against this 2^nd-generation Pollack like that, I can’t ignore it. It’s what Burke would call Perspective by Incongruity — two dissimilar “terms” shoved together that each change the other simply by proximity. And that’s what happened a year ago when Bob Jones University produced a “Statement on Race” to say it was “profoundly sorry” for past racist policies.

I’m no stranger to Bob Jones University and so-called fundamentalism. Not only have I studied the rhetoric of American religious separatism formally, I’ve lived it. Having spent 20 years at BJU as a student, grad student, and faculty member, I am especially sensitive to their public discourse. Now that they fired me for being more scholarly than separatist, I’m looking anew at their public texts. While I was still inside the movement, I described their frame of acceptance as less tragic or comic and more romantic. My purpose then was descriptive as well as prescriptive—to explain to them, as an insider, how best to craft their message.

We all see how that turned out. So I am honing a new critical voice—one that’s still within a Burkean comic corrective, but without the apologist bent. I no longer need to prescribe to fundamentalists. And I’ve never sensed more strongly how incongruous it is to be a 2^nd-generation Pollack stuck in an Old South morality play.

The most recent example of a public text from Bob Jones University is this “Statement on Race.” BJU is infamous for its 1983 Supreme Court battle to maintain its policy forbidding “interracial dating.” The problems with their policy are so numerous and complex that we’d be here for weeks discussing them. Not only is their definition of “race” problematic—they limited their scope to only three races—but the definition of a “date” comes into play too. They lost that fight with the IRS, lost their tax-exemption status, but maintained this unseemly remnant of the Old South.

And not until Campaign 2000 did BJU’s racism rise again into public view. George W. Bush’s rather routine visit to an old Republican haunt in South Carolina didn’t seem too interesting until John McCain made it interesting. The media firestorm was so intense that BJU’s president went on Larry King Live to lift the interracial dating ban.

Alumni who had attended the school since 1983, however, didn’t think that was sufficient. One particular 1998 alum, Jon Henry, was so irritated by the continuing defense of racism among BJU constituency that he started, of all things, a Facebook group to force BJU to apologize for past racism. That on-a-whim action snowballed into a full-fledged alumni effort garnering 506 signatures attempting to move Bob Jones University one step closer to reconciliation and culminating in BJU’s 2008 “Statement on Race.”

Another distraction. . . .

I’m a Yankee living south of the Mason-Dixon line. A granddaughter of working class Polish immigrants. A Detroiter. Life’s different down here. I’ve adjusted to the fact that the peanuts are boiled, not roasted. And I actually like my BBQ as pulled pork and tangy instead of whole cuts of beef and sweet.

But when we visit Stone Mountain—that Mount Rushmore of the Confederacy—I honestly don’t know how to explain to my sons what happened there as we walk past the secessionist memorials alongside our African-American neighbors. We take our boys to living museums—something my family did every weekend at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village. But these war re-enactments are almost always from the Civil War.

And when my sons ask during the battle, “Who are the good guys, Mommy?” I can only sigh. I saw all those confederate bumper stickers when we walked in. I hear the lilt in the accent around me. So, like the good Burkean, I whisper very quietly, “It’s complicated, honey. They are all Americans.”