That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up — the harsh tide of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend.

Why, then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity?

Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the (servants) of your sex; regard us then as being placed by Providence under your protection, and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.

Abigail Adams to her husband, John Adams, 31 March 1776

So I’m a survivor who’s just now learning to make herself the subject of the sentence. A former ideological “battered wife” from a patriarchal Southern civil religion. A mom — the embodiment of all that is soft and nurturing and powerful and earthy and frightening. A writer-of-that-body who makes the myth-maker shake in his cuff links. A woman who’s taking an honest look at the facts.

The economic prospects for a mom in America aren’t great. But do you know where some researchers conclude she’s got a better chance of a loving life partner? You’ll never guess. . . .

Conservative Evangelicalism.

Studies of Christian women who actively embraced this ideal suggest that the ‘submission’ required of them was a minor concession for a divinely sanctioned domestication of their husbands. During its heyday in the early 1990s, the evangelical men’s organization Promise Keepers struck a bargain that may well have been the best offer for many women. By submitting, they were rewarded with ‘husbands and fathers who forswear drinking, drugs, smoking, and gambling, who lovingly support their families by steady work, and who even choose to go shopping with them as a form of Christian service.’

This was particularly attractive accord since ‘submission’ in practice boiled down to little more than a rhetorical gesture at the husband’s final say in major decisions. When asked how it played out in marriage, few conservative Christians seemed able to recall an example where husbands actually pulled rank in decision-making. Instead, the couples coded expressiveness — emotional labor — and family responsibilities — reproductive labor — as ‘leadership’ to make them newly palatable to men (113).

Abigail Adams said as much.

It’s sometimes called “soft patriarchy.” And it’s not just the ideology that offers a more mutual environment for mothers. It’s the devotion to the ideology. The men that attend such churches most regularly are the most attentive, the most appreciative, the most domesticated.

Through servant leadership, evangelical men made a measurable contribution to the ‘economy of gratitude.’ In this schema, the best predictor of domestic harmony was not an equal division of labor — that option has virtually never been on the table in American families — but rather husbands’ consistent expression of gratititude for the gift of domestic labor women made to them. Unlike their supposedly egalitarian male counterparts, conservative Christian men had at hand an ideology that allowed them to praise and acknowledge women’s work at home without thereby running the risk of being required to share it equally. In contrast, nonreligious men who paid lip service to formal sex-neutral rights had no alibi for their demonstrated failure to split the labor at home, and may have found it safer to ignore the work altogether. Between the two, many wives preferred the former — especially since they seemed to have little hope of achieving actual parity (115).

But if these “soft patriarchs” attend church sporadically, they are more likely to be abusive. In other words, if they are unlikely to submit themselves to a religious community, they are unlikely to (mutually) submit to their familial obligations.

That’s at least what the sociologists conclude from the statistics. Mind you, I’m not saying there’s not room for improvement or that this is perfection. But these are the facts.

Evangelical scholars offer a few more caveats. Soft patriarchy might domesticate muscular Christianity, but hard patriarchy is dangerous for women and children. And the lines between the two are too easily muddled.

Nearly all evangelical and fundamentalist leaders preach a hard patriarchy, but the nitty-gritty of daily life has permeated the evangelical culture and softened that hard edge. In other words, the evangelical marriage advice is often simply out of touch. But when fundamentalists emphasize separation and tout a life hermetically sealed from the culture at large, their patriarchy hardens and calcifies.

The scholars describe three family structures: 1) the wife/mother is on the same level with the children and the father is above all of them (hard patriarchy).

2) The children are below the wife/mother and the father is above her (soft patriarchy).

3) The woman is on an equal plane with her husband over the children (egalitarian).

The last option, researchers conclude, is the best because abuse is the least likely, and the second one is tolerable if the father does have regular external oversight.

But the first one is disastrous. It creates the greatest risk for incest since the wife/mother and the child are equals, so that either can be defined as a sexual “being” to the entitled patriarch.

The perpetrator of incest has been described as a man ‘who is devout, materialistic, and fundamentalist in his religious beliefs, coming from a background in which morality was preached in public and breached in private. In a large research study done on incarcerated sex offenders, more than half of all incest offenders were found to be devout in their religious practice (83).

In other words, while soft patriarchy might domesticate Evangelical men, hard patriarchy does nothing of the sort. Religion fixes nothing when there are no consequences for criminal behavior and when the woman and the children are not autonomous Image-Bearers.

And this isn’t just a theory. This is all too frequent and prevalent. And it’s happening right now.

Write. Let no one hold you back. Let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which the publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don’t like the true texts of women — female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.

Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”

I’ve rediscovered Hélène Cixous this week — that Jewish French feminist who encourages women to “write the body.” Since men have been writing their body into the logocentric language for millennia, the most assertive and powerful thing we women can do is write our own selves. The most assertive and powerful thing I can do is write my own self.

I read Cixous for the first time at IU and laughed out loud along with the rest of my female classmates. While the men just looked confused.

It’s nothing personal, gentlemen. While we adore you individually, we agree that as a group . . . well, there are some issues.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I always said that I would teach Cixous at BJU someday. With a class of all women — no men allowed. They have Preacher Boys class, right? Surely they’d let us do that, right?

Well, I never got that far, of course. Teaching Malcolm X as an exemplar rhetor at BJU still does give me some street cred, yes?

To write. An act which will not only “realize” the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal; it will tear her away from the superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty (guilty of everything, guilty at every turn: for having desires, for not having any; for being frigid, for being “too hot”; for not being both at once; for being too motherly and not enough; for having children and for not having any; for nursing and for not nursing . . . ) — tear her away by means of this research, this job of analysis and illumination, this emancipation of the marvelous text of her self that she must urgently learn to speak. A woman without a body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter. She is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow. We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing. Inscribe the breath of the whole woman.

It’s taken me this long to read the entirety of the documents leading to and following our forced resignations from our former employer. The three-year-old emails and letters from our pastor especially. I just read them for the first time.

And now I get it. The best explanation for my boot from our church comes from Cixous.

An act that will also be marked by woman’s seizing the occasion to speak, hence her shattering entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression. To write and thus to forge for herself the antilogos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system, in every political process. It is time for women to start scoring their feats in written and oral language.

Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away — that’s how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak — even just open her mouth — in public. A double distress, for even if she transgresses, her words fall almost always upon the deaf male ear, which hears in language only that which speaks in the masculine.

I’ll never forget that final meeting with our pastor. I insisted that I join them. Grant, of course, didn’t mind. He’s a thorough egalitarian. He respects me. Like my dad and brother too. And here lies one of my blindspots. Because I’ve been surrounded by strong, intelligent, respectful men my whole life, I assume the same about other men. But my men are rare. Very rare. I know that now.

We were in Starbucks, and during the discussion, Grant sat on his car’s key fob and his trunk popped open. So he went to fix it, and Danny and I sat there waiting.

And there it was. That face. That same face that the glad-handing politician had at my front door. That same face that the man had who stole my parking place when he saw my belly swollen with life. He was scared. Terrified. Of me.

That look has haunted me for three years. I took it personally. No more. Now I understand what he was afraid of and why he tried so desperately and so illogically to get me to stop writing. Cixous explained it.

She must write her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing which, when the moment of her liberation has come will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history, first two levels that cannot be separated.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Healing from intense and pervasive trauma — whether from cancer or rape or earthquake or war — comes as you learn to call yourself a “survivor.” It’s a rhetorical move away from “victim.” When a victim can describe herself as a “survivor,” she:

no longer feels possessed by her traumatic past; she is in possession of herself. She has some understanding of the person she used to be and of the damage done to that person by the traumatic event. Her task now is to become the person she used to be and of the damage done to that person she wants to be. In the process she draws upon those aspects of herself that she most values from the time before the trauma, from the experience of the trauma itself, and from the period of recovery. Integrating all of those elements, she creates a new self, both ideally and in actuality (202).

Judith Herman

“Survivor” identifies autonomy. Personhood. It fully acknowledges the past trauma as trauma. It highlights strength. Rather than things happening to you (scene/victim), you are an agent. You act. You have power. You do stuff.

And fundamentalists hate it. They would say that using “survivor” is a petulant, ungrateful response to the lousy things God has done to/for you. They would say that you shouldn’t just “survive” but “rejoice.” Which means, as usual, “shut up and get back to work.” In fundamentalism, you should only “move” in deference to the whole. You can only “be” in the group. That’s how the ideology becomes god.

Fundamentalists don’t like autonomy. When they say we must “deny the self,” they mean it. But not like Jesus meant it. They mean that we must erase the individual in lieu of the whole. There are no boundaries between persons, just recalcitrant boundaries between sects. We must deny that the self even exists. We can never put ourselves as the agent. “I” should never be the subject of the sentence.

Don’t get mixed up and think that’s the appropriate “grammar” of all Calvinism. I think that’s where this new breed of “Young, Restless, and Reformed” are just finding new duds for an old, mean fundamentalism. A hipster Kesiedispiecostalism. Even Jonathan Edwards in his “Resolutions” talks about what he does. How he acts. How we join God’s ongoing work. We work because He works.

I work because He works.

How does Steve Brown put it? “I’m a Calvinist, so I know it’s all about God. But it’s about me too.”

That’s salvation. God doesn’t save us to be nothing. We weren’t once alive and now we’re dead. We were dead in our trespasses and sins, and He lifted us up and made us His children. The Church Universal isn’t a Borg ship. It’s a city! A Kingdom. A bustling, colorful, dappled, productive, noisy community.

And for now, until the Bridegroom arrives, we persevere. We “keep on keeping on.” It’s a race. We’re running!

I’m running. So let me try this. . . . I have earned a Ph.D. from a Research 1 university with two unaccredited degrees putting a permanent black smudge on my record. I have buried four children — one I carried past term — and have birthed two screamers. I have breastfed those two children — one until he was nearly four and one until he was well past two — and yes, that means I did tandem-nursing. I co-slept, nursed, and wore my babies right through their toddlerhood. Despite ongoing disciplinary action from my employer, I chose gentle discipline for my sons. I am a published author and scholar. I have endured shunning, betrayal, threats, job loss, and emotional, mental, and spiritual abuse from people I considered my dearest friends. And I persevered. God has begun this work in me, and He will perform it until He calls me home. And I join Him.

And if you want to take out your cyber-red-pen and correct the “grammar” on the above paragraph, you’re probably a fundamentalist.

I bought myself that necklace several months ago — right around the time I took my blog “sabbath.” I am wearing it until I believe it. Until I believe that I’m a survivor.

Consider the imagery of seed. First of all, seeds are disproportionately small compared with what they eventually produce. In the case of herbs — which, for some reason, Jesus took special delight in — they are in fact almost ridiculously small. Anyone who has planted thyme or savory knows the strange sensation of practically losing sight of the seed after it has dropped into the furrow: you might as well have sown nothing, for all you can observe. And what does that say about the Word of God that the Sower sows? Well, it certainly does not say what we would have said. Left to our own devices we would probably have likened the Word’s advent to a thunderclap, or to a fireworks display, or to something else we judged sufficiently unmistakable to stand in for our notion of a pushy, totally right-handed God. Instead, this parable says that the true coming of the Word of God, even if you don’t see it, doesn’t look like very much — and that when it does finally get around to doing its real work, it is so mysterious that it can’t even be found at all (67).

I was never satisfied with the way this parable was used in my former life — dirt striving to be less rocky or straining to be more fertile. Interestingly enough, the Mormons interpret the parable similarly. But it doesn’t work that way. Dirt is made. It doesn’t make itself. It doesn’t till itself. It doesn’t improve itself.

I made dirt this last year. Yes, I did. We have the lousiest soil in our backyard — red clay so hard that it surprised the contractors who built our retaining wall. I don’t understand this clay. It’s ugly, stinky, impossible. I sigh at the Midwestern black dirt we pass on our way to Missouri. It’s gorgeous.

So I made dirt this last year. Or rather — compost. I collected carrot shavings and strawberry tops, used kleenexes and coffee grounds, egg shells and dead heads, and I just let it sit. And rot. ::drumming fingers::

And this Spring there it was — black dirt. I included a hand-trowel-full with every seedling and transplant. I sprinkled it on the old plants. I brought a shovel’s worth to Grant’s trees. We’ll see if it works. Ask me in a few months.

But compost is like grace for garbage — turning my forgotten failures and castoffs into the best fertilizer for flowers. That’s what Capon is getting at too — at the mysterious left-handed power of the Gardener rather than the forthright right-handed power we humans crave. We want ex nihilo. We want lightning strikes and fireworks. We want pushy and unmistakable. We want a pre-made Miracle Gro that we can sprinkle on the red pan to POOF! make it soft and fertile.

We want a commodified garden. We want to shove blue “silk” flowers bunches in our azaleas to force them to look like May. We want control.

Every one of us would rather choose the right-handed logicalities of theology over the left-handed mystery of faith. Any day of the week — and twice on Sundays, often enough — we will labor with might and main to take the only thing that can save anyone and reduce it to a set of theological club rules designed to exclude almost everyone (25).

It just doesn’t work like that. God as Gardener doesn’t work like that. The process is slow. It’s indirect. Intuitive. Imaginative.

But Capon is talking mostly about the Seed — the Word. And contrary to the interpretation from my previous life, he insists that in this parable the Word is not the Bible per se. It’s Jesus, a la John 1. The Word who disappears in the earth, sleeps and rises only to grow His Kingdom-Plant grander and stronger than we could imagine.

I found a pumpkin seedling growing in the compost pile. I didn’t see the seed there when I combed through my black dirt, and it’s gone now. The plant is growing stronger and bigger than the ones I deliberately planted in a tidy circle in the clay-amended-with-compost. And I may just get the pumpkin I’ve been struggling to grow for years . . . all in a very left-handed way.

Quite simply, Michael Pearl is not just a nut or a monster or a narcissist. He is a heretic. When in 2006 his advice pushed 4-year-old Sean Paddock’s foster parents to smother him to death, I vowed to God that I would not keep silent any longer. In a small way, I thought, I would speak out in my own little slice of the world. Not about Pearl’s parenting advice per se, but about his theology. Because, as I said then, “If there’s anyone in Christendom who’s good at sniffing out heresy, it’s the fundamentalist.”

I was incorrect about that. Not about the heresy, but about the fundamentalist. But that’s another discussion.

I spoke out on an attention-getting fundamentalist forum, Sharper Iron, in 2006. I tell more of the story here, but that, too, is another discussion.

Today, however, I want to highlight what I said back then because in viewing it this morning — especially in light of Lydia’s death — I realize how right I was about the dangers of Pearl’s heresy.

I strategically attempted to soften my argumentative blow by settling for “soft heresy” or “semi-Pelagianism.” But Pearl’s ideas are full-blown Pelagianism. He’s worse than Charles Finney. Way, way worse.

My former fellow fundamentalists concluded I was cherry-picking. They worked hard to discredit me. “Appeal to motive” is the fallacy. C.S. Lewis would call it Bulverism. But I can admit it to myself now that I’m proud of what I said. And I’ll say it again. Only louder now.

Semi-Pelagianism is often the problem we fundies have with Charles Finney. Our criticism of him runs pretty deep and has always surprised me until I studied it further. And Pearl doesn’t get a pass, I would contend, ’cause he’s quaint.

It means, among many things, that we are good enough to achieve salvation alone. And it denies Original Sin. And it makes Augustine spin in his grave.

As for Pearl, I’ll quote him.

From his statement of faith:

In the eating of the tree, the willful and direct disobedience to God resulted in legal estrangement from God and precipitated the curse of death on Adam and all his descendants. All men are born under the curse and totally estranged from God. When a descendant of Adam reaches a level of moral understanding (sometime in his youth) he becomes fully, personally accountable to God and has sin imputed to him, resulting in the peril of eternal damnation. No man is capable of rectifying this state of estrangement from God. Apart from the free gift of God through the substitutionary work of Christ there is no hope of salvation.
SALVATION
When man reaches his state of moral accountability, and, by virtue of his personal transgression, becomes blameworthy, his only hope is a work of grace by God alone.

Sounds like Original Sin. But one of his recordings on Romans 1 and again on Romans 5, he expands on that and claims that the “death” that Adam gave to all of us was physical death alone. “Death passed upon all men, and that’s talking about one thing and one thing only – physical death. It says nothing about sinfulness passing upon all men.”

Okay. That’s kinda vague. Let’s move on. . . .

To Pearl, we are born like blank slates — neither good nor bad, neither with God or against Him:

When a baby comes into the world the baby is separated from God, without the presence of God, without the Spirit of God, without the divine life of God inside the baby. It is disadvantaged in that it does not have the resources of spirit that comes from God to overcome these bodily drives.

Need more? Okay. . . . From Pearl again:

When a descendant of Adam reaches a level of moral understanding (sometime in his youth) he becomes fully, personally accountable to God and has sin imputed to him, resulting in the peril of eternal damnation. No man is capable of rectifying this state of estrangement from God. Apart from the free gift of God through the substitutionary work of Christ there is no hope of salvation.

On Romans 7, Pearl explains Paul’s would-not-could-not passage:

In his experience historically, at one point he was alive, he was not dead in trespasses and sins. He was probably 3 years old, maybe 4.

Putting it all together, he believes that we aren’t born dead in sin, but that we’re in a neutral state. And that sometime in our “youth” we become sinful. From the statement of faith, he states that sin doesn’t come to an unbeliever until a certain age and, thus, he needs no justification until that age.

Still too arcane? Okay — try this on for size. From his article “Living Parallel Lives in the Same Space” (No Greater Joy, Jan-Feb 2005) he says:

These messages are not motivational teachings or principles for you to apply. They are the wonderful good news that Christ has done everything to free you from all sin, all the time, from this day forward, to sin no more.
… We should and can sin no more!
… I have been preaching and living this gospel of sanctification for many years. It is not a theory.”[emphasis mine]

That’s exactly what raises our fur about Finney — and it should! This is classic Semi-Pelagianism or so-called “soft” heresy.

Michael Pearl will appear on CBS’s The Early Show on Friday, March 19. Watch and pray.

UPDATE at 7:47pm, Thursday, March 18, 2010 — According to Michael’s Pearl’s Facebook group, “the interview is canceled.” The saga continues.

• People who develop Greenville Syndrome often view the authority figure as giving success — vocational, spiritual, social — by simply not destroying it. Thus, the authority figure becomes in control of the person’s success.
• A person endures physical or ideological separation from outside people and groups so that only the authority figure’s perspective is available. Leaders routinely keep information from their people — specifically outsider’s views of the leader’s actions. This isolation keeps the person totally dependent on the leader for information.
• The authority figure threatens to cut-off the person from his approval, his property (“campus”), or his fellowship. That person judges it safer and easier to align with the authority, endure the difficulties of separation, and obey rather than to disagree and face utter failure.
• The person sees the authority figure as showing some degree of affection. A simple positive gesture of attention (“being gracious” or “being nice”) is the cornerstone of Greenville Syndrome; the condition will not develop unless the authority exhibits some affection toward the person. However, people often misinterpret a lack of negative attention as affection and may even develop feelings of appreciation for this perceived benevolence — “He’s always been nice to me.” If the authority figure were purely evil and abusive, a person would respond with hatred. But if the authority figure offers some positive attention — an emailed compliment, a “we really like you here” –  a person will submerge the anger s/he feels in response to the threat of failure and desperately concentrate on the authority figure’s “good side” to protect themselves.

While the difference between mortal and venial sin seems obvious, don’t be fooled. There is more to this than meets the eye. What is really bad and what isn’t? And who decides?

Here is a routine situation that every Catholic of my generation had to deal with: You are at a baseball game at Yankee Stadium on a Friday night in June 1950. Catholics are forbidden to eat meat under penalty of mortal sin. But you want a hot dog. Now, just considering eating meat on Friday is a venial sin; wanting to is another. You have not moved in your seat and you have already sinned twice. What if you actually ate one? Aside from the risk of choking on forbidden food and getting punished right on the spot, have you committed a mortal sin or a venial sin? Well, if you think it’s mortal, it may be mortal; and if you think it’s venial, it still may be mortal. After much thought, you decide it’s venial. You call the hot dog vendor, you take the money out of your pocket, and you buy a hot dog. This is clearly an act of free will. You figure you can go confess your sin to the priest on Saturday night. But wait! Does a venial sin become mortal when you commit it deliberately? That’s a chance you take. What if you’ve forgotten it’s Friday? In that case, eating the hot dog may not be a sin, but forgetting it’s Friday is. What if you remember it’s Friday halfway through the hot dog? Is it a venial sin to finish it? If you throw it away, is wasting food a sin? Within five minutes you have committed enough sins to land you in purgatory for a million years. The safest thing to do is not to take any chances–stay away from Yankee Stadium on Fridays.

The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning

It might be funny if it didn’t sound so familiar.

I’ve taken my own sort of vow of poverty. I’ve participated in endless cumin-dividing discussions about the fine arts (as if “fine” had more to do with its size than character). I’ve “done devotions” with every sort of program, cutesy name, and innovative strategy since early elementary school. I’ve been lured to strive for that “higher life” monastic upper-class known in my world as “full-time Christian service.” I’ve endured endless preaching where justification by faith is just a brusque bro-hug that gets you in the sanctification-by-works club. And we think we’re so different from the “Romish” church?

The crazy-making internal conversation cum tailspin that Manning describes is the life of a fundamentalist. That’s it.

What stuns me is how we do it together.

Just like the Shakers. Really. The Shakers’ individual (tail)spinning and twitching developed over time (due to outside criticism) into a full-fledged communal performance. I look at that picture and imagine how easy it is to get swooped away into the spin. The individual must persist with the dance because well . . . people are watching, and it’d be a bad testimony for . . . the group. You wouldn’t want to be “ungracious.”

I got shoved out of the spin. But I’m not sitting in the crowd watching on the left either. I don’t know yet where I am, but I’m kind of amazed at how many people keep calling me back to the dance. Or back to the prison, as Steve Brown would say.

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.

2009 NCA Standing Without And Within Apologia

This would be Ted Mercer’s final post to his blog (if he had one in the 1950s). But, of course, the story continues without him.

In his final “post,” Mercer is plainly exasperated. Bob Jones Sr. has called him more than just “inefficient” and “disloyal,” more than just “criminally insane” and “demon possessed.” In numerous private conversations with students, alumni, staff, and constituency, Jones has called Mercer a homosexual. And in this document, Mercer is trying to set the record straight (pun intended).

It’s hard to imagine the weight of this accusation today. I’m not going to deconstruct it anymore than to say that Jones’ “poisoning the well” for Mercer’s reputation is despicable and shameful.

A few people to note:

• Mr. James H. Price was “a member of the executive committee” and “attorney for Dr. Jones [Sr.].” He still resides in Greenville, and his son is a local attorney.
• Mrs. Keefer, Dean Keefer’s wife, worked at the Dining Common.
• Glen Lockwood told Mercer the exact numbers of enrollment (in contrast to the published numbers in the Sword) and was subsequently expelled for “[supplying] information to an enemy of the institution” (20). I believe he’s preached recently at Reformed Presbyterian Church, Southside in Indianapolis.
• Another faculty member is mentioned as resigning — Mr. Warwick.
• Matt and Millie Weld resigned because of BJSr.’s accusations against Mercer.

Alice Mercer, Ted Mercer’s wife, provides an honest and shoot-from-the-hip rebuke of Jones Sr. She clarifies what have been only fuzzy glimpses of the Family for those of us who followed her.

• She describes the more Pentecostal ethic in BJSr. with his “biblical discernment of spirits and of character” claim degenerating into a simple and blatant accusation of his argumentative opponents.
• She points up the double-standard on the “beverage use of alcohol” among the administrators — specifically that “little bottle” that BJSr. “[carries] around and take[s] sips from” (14).
• She draws the obvious connection (for the times) between BJU and the USSR.

Ted Mercer’s most startling and eerily-resonant statement in the whole document:

Your failure as individuals to support what I and hundreds of others believe is a reasonable request (for Dr. Jones to retract and apologize or to grant an open hearing to determine the guilty ones in this controversy) will only serve to prolong and intensify the controversy. The alumni have spoken. I have more than a thousand letters which the Board may inspect under the conditions of a hearing. These tell abundantly what many alumni think about these matters (5).

This explains much of the BJU official reaction to the Please-Reconcile movement a year ago. It was completely an alumni-driven effort to coax BJU to apologize for what was clearly institutional racism. While BJU did apologize, their spokesman, Gary Weier, went to great pains to explain that the alumni had nothing to do with their statement. No one, of course, believed him. So the question becomes why does BJU work so hard at proving that the alumni and faculty are irrelevant?

Habit may be one explanation.