Mark Driscoll tells some lies about science, and they're not even entertaining lies

Idly clicking through YouTube links last night, I happened upon this marvellous sermon by Mark Driscoll. It's part of the Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe series, the Mars Hill equivalent of an Alpha Course or Christianity Explored in the UK. I expected to disagree with Driscoll. What I didn't see coming, though, was his casual use of gross distortions and unequivocally false statements - what seemed, frankly, like barefaced lies.

Criticising Driscoll, of course, is shooting fish in a barrel. I'm more interested in the ways some of these arguments permeate evangelical culture in general, even outside the creationist minority. I've never been taught creationism, but the ideas of people like William Paley (he of the watchmaker analogy) and superficially more respectable varieties of creationism like the intelligent design of Michael Behe and William Dembski float around the subculture and inform the views of non-creationist evangelicals. Behind that is a desire to render the theory of evolution friendlier to an evangelical understanding of the Bible.

Driscoll, for example, says that it's acceptable for Christians to disagree on the subject of creation and evolution. He believes in a form of old-earth creationism in which God made the earth billions of years ago, but created human beings in six literal days about ten thousand years before the present. To argue for that perspective, Driscoll isn't entirely honest. Here are just some of the lyin' highlights of the 59-minute talk - by no means all, since like Driscoll himself I'm not keen on prattling on for twenty-five hours. Nor am I likely to notice all as a non-scientist; this was just the stuff I as an interested layman immediately picked up on:

23:49-26:00 Driscoll argues that while the earth may be old, human life on it is young. Homo sapiens, he says, is defined by agriculture and living in villages. Conflating the Neolithic Revolution (when humans who had previously been hunter-gatherers began to farm) and the rise of  Homo sapiens allows him to claim that science and his reading of the Bible agree: humankind is about 10,000 years old. This, of course, is desperately false. In reality anatomically modern humans appear in the fossil record as early as 195,000 years ago. Other species in the genus Homo go back further still, to a total of 2.3-2.4 million years before present. What does Driscoll propose to do with those guys - reclassify them as apes, as old-school creationists do, or perhaps as slightly weird-looking people? Either way, pretending they don't exist won't wash.

28:31-29:13 Driscoll cites the full title of Darwin's seminal book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. That 'races' bit, he says, refers to Darwin's belief that 'whites had out-evolved blacks and were superior'. And he gives a little smirk. Two points, then:

(a) The full text of the first edition is of course online. And hey, turns out that as you would expect in nineteenth-century usage, by 'race' Darwin means a variety within a species, not exclusively or even primarily human races in the sense of scientific racism. ('How many of those birds and insects in North America and Europe, which differ very slightly from each other, have been ranked by one eminent naturalist as undoubted species, and by another as varieties, or, as they are often called, as geographical races!... Several most experienced ornithologists consider our British red grouse as only a strongly-marked race of a Norwegian species, whereas the greater number rank it as an undoubted species peculiar to Great Britain.')

(b) The notion of 'whites... out-evolv[ing] blacks' simply makes no sense in a Darwinian framework. Evolution is not a teleological progression, as if an individual dutifully crossed evolutionary stages off a checklist on its way out of the primordial soup. You can't be 'more' or 'less' evolved in the abstract, only better or worse adapted to a particular environment - and that, too is a product of random mutation that may, if an individual is lucky, result in an improved chance of doing well in the environment. At times, mutations that render an individual bigger, more intelligent or faster may be advantageous; at other times - cold environments where there is little sustenance, say - being smaller, less intelligent and slower may prove favourable. Yes, we all enjoyed that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but evolution does not work that way.

29:50-30:09 Christians, Driscoll says, reject not science but naturalism. The distinction relies on conflating philosophical naturalism (which declares there are no supernatural causes) and methodological naturalism (which ignores supernatural causes in the pursuit of science, because they are untestable). Christians can agree with the latter but generally not the former.

30:28-39:10 Driscoll identifies ten problems with 'atheistic evolution' (i.e. an account of the history of the universe that does not posit a supernatural creator). The scientific points are various kinds of hogwash, and I'll skip most of them as I don't want to be here forever.

33:52-34:28 This, though, I'll pick on. It's the standard creationist claim that there are no transitional forms in the fossil record. It just isn't true. Creationists, of course, will move the goalposts whenever a transitional fossil is discovered and set up ever more stringent criteria.

34:35-36:13 'Atheistic evolution assumes that the earth is eternal', so evolution contradicts the Big Bang. I don't even know what to do with that. Evolutionary biologists, atheist or otherwise, do not assume that the earth is eternal (scientists agree it is roughly 4.5 billion years old, and that life on earth originated about 3.7 billion years ago), and I have no idea where Driscoll got this claim from. It's simply bizarre.

42:20-48:42 Here Driscoll lays out the dangerous alternative to biblical creation: pagan 'one-ism', the belief that everything is ultimately of one substance. This he blames explicitly for the LGBTQ movement, which he argues is about creating one gender rather than respecting distinctions inherent in creation. Driscoll has something of an obsession with pagan nature-worship, which he has previously detected in Avatar. As someone who's done postgraduate work on the medieval Christian theology of paganism, this is quite fascinating to me, but it doesn't make Driscoll's thoughts any less nonsensical. In queer theory the dissolution of the gender binary leads not to a single unified gender but to n genders. Similarly, I barely understand Driscoll's point about 'one religion', which I don't see anyone particularly striving for: isn't the trend, rather, away from Christian hegemony towards pluralism?

All in all, that's quite a lot of blatantly false statements from a man who, as a successful pastor, church planter and author, is clearly not stupid. Are we to assume Driscoll is simply lazy or ignorant, or is he lying? If these are good old-fashioned lies, they're feeble examples of the form. A visit to Wikipedia will disabuse anyone of most of Driscoll's notions. I'm not a scientist, but I've known several of the facts Driscoll gets wrong since I was about ten years old. How can he hope to convince adults?

But perhaps Driscoll isn't trying to tell carefully crafted lies. Early in the sermon, Driscoll 'explains' the fact that we have a two-day weekend instead of the Old Testament's single day of rest: '[W]hen it came to our nation's founding, they couldn't decide between the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday and the Christian Sabbath of Sunday..., so they gave you both.' I don't know if this myth is popular in the United States, but it's plainly untrue given union struggles for a shorter work week well into the twentieth century.

Why, then, does Driscoll get it wrong? Why does he speak ex cathedra on something he is plainly ignorant of, a mere footnote to his argument? Unless Driscoll enjoys deception, a lie is quite useless here. More likely he simply doesn't care, and opts not to do his research. Whether he's right on this point or not doesn't matter to him, or at least it matters far less than affecting an air of authority and bluffing his way through. He prefers making stuff up to the bother of reading up. And that seems to be the case for much of the sermon.

Driscoll fits Harry Frankfurt's definition of a bullshitter: 'He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.' Driscoll casually says things he knows are probably not true because he sees the big picture: exuding confidence, knowledge and love for 'biblical truth' to sell a form of Christianity constructed specifically against other faiths and liberation movements. Research isn't really necessary, and facts can be hammered into shape or simply made up to fit that goal.

There is of course a particular irony to this. Driscoll is one of those evangelicals who forever insist on objective standards and denounce the 'undermining' of truth by a legion of foes (relativism, postmodernism, modernism, 'atheistic evolution', inclusivism, etc.). But here we see that Driscoll is not even doing the truth the courtesy of lying, which would at least be making an effort. He's just ignoring it, content with poorly researched, logically flawed, often flat-out false claims. What does it matter, right?

Driscoll's embrace of bullshit, then, shows that far from standing against the collapse of metanarratives he is actually profoundly influenced by it. As is evangelical culture as a whole: 'One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity' (Frankfurt, emphasis in original). Sincerity as the next best thing to being right, the defence of one's views with appeals not to evidence but to the strength of one's belief: that helps explain a plethora of counterfactual narratives peddled by evangelicals. So Driscoll's fabrications are at least useful in understanding something of the subculture. But we don't need to let people like him claim they're 'standing up for truth'.

And these signs shall follow them that believe

In 1966-67, then-twentysomething filmmaker Peter Adair and his crew spent a year with a Pentecostal Holiness congregation in rural Scrabble Creek, West Virginia. Shot on a shoestring budget, the resulting 53-minute documentary Holy Ghost People (1967) was not released to cinemas* but made some critical waves and survived on the rental market. (Today it's in the public domain, so you are without excuse.)

Adair went on to carve out a career far from the mainstream with Word Is Out (1977), the first significant documentary to present LGBTQ people on their own terms. His later films, The AIDS Show: Artists Involved in Death and Survival (1986) and Absolutely Positive (1991), chronicled the impact of the disease on the gay community, as well as Adair's own life under the shadow of being HIV-positive. He died in 1996, aged fifty-two.

Holy Ghost People opens with decontextualised snapshots of a Pentecostal service: music is played, a girl dances frantically, someone holds a serpent, an old woman looks at the camera, a Bible reading is cut off mid-sentence by the editing. It's not too bold, I think, to call it a critique of the sort of sensationalist reporting on extreme religious phenomena that leaves us understanding less, not more. The rest of the film is a careful examination of the forces shaping the church's practices, an aetiology of Pentecostal worship in Appalachia as much as it is a record.

The film steps back, and Adair's narration sets the scene over footage of the area around Scrabble Creek shot from a moving car. The poverty of rural West Virginia in the sixties is frankly shocking: in the heart of the world's richest nation, these communities look more like the villages I've seen in the backwoods of Bolivia and Paraguay. Adair explains that while the church's raucous, unstructured worship practices are legal in West Virginia (but not in neighbouring states), adherents are often ostracised by their own communities. He stresses that snakebite, though common, is not usually fatal.

Most of the film is taken up by a lengthy service that unites the Scrabble Creek congregation with fellow believers who have travelled over sixty miles from Virginia. Adair starts us off slowly, showing most of the worship leader's somewhat rambling notices - tributes to those in attendance, prayer requests, and remarks on the film crew in attendance. (In classic cinéma vérité style, Adair draws attention to the presence of the camera.) From there, the service gradually escalates from singing and testimonies to wild dancing, speaking in tongues, convulsions, falling over ('being slain in the Spirit') and eventually snake-handling.

A key part of the film comes just before that, though, in the form of individual interviews with four congregants. One man first spoke in tongues at the age of thirteen, but grew up to be 'a very mean fellow' and spent a year praying in vain for the return of the gift after his release from prison, before finally receiving tongues again during a service. Another was dissatisfied with the evangelical churches he attended, and eventually found 'the Holiness way' through his father-in-law's influence and the powerful experience of a supernatural wind sweeping through his body at night. A woman talks about the happiness brought by the Holy Spirit, and her first experience drinking strychnine during a worship meeting. The last interviewee is a middle-aged woman who is wracked by convulsions and breaks into glossolalia in the middle of sentences she shouts with a preacher's cadence and inflection, rendering her all but incoherent.

Letting these people explain themselves in their own words, without interruption or cuts, is indispensable in setting out the background against which their worship takes place. It turns them from an incomprehensible - and, given their practices, possibly terrifying - Other into ordinary, sympathetic protagonists. As anthropologist Margaret Mead, who invited Adair to introduce the film to her students at Columbia, writes: 'The people in the film are work-worn and show the marks of malnutrition, poverty, and poor medical care, and yet, on a recent showing to a very sophisticated audience, someone on my right exclaimed: "What beautiful people!"' That's a privileged perspective, of course. But it reflects Adair's success in breaking through the liberal sneer at rural people preferred by the light entertainment that passes for public discourse.

In the face of their small number, legal trouble and hostility from neighbours, adherents resist by appealing to authenticity: the free, unfettered flow of God's spirit. In worship at least, the myriad hierarchies and restrictions on their lives disappear. In his testimony, one congregant lambastes people who 'think it's a disgrace to touch a serpent'. He is unashamed because 'I don't want to be highly esteemed among men. I gotta be just what I am, glory be to God.'

While Adair emphasises that serpent-handling only occurs when adherents feel led by the Spirit and far more time is dedicated to prayer and other charismatic manifestations, the congregation eventually do pick up venomous snakes, lifting them in the air, throwing them across the room and dancing with them. It's unsurprising that this requires hype, but it's still an astonishing display of faith (at least quantitatively). Near the end of the meeting the worship leader is bitten by a copperhead on camera. While he cleans the blood from his hand with a borrowed handkerchief he calmly declares: 'If I die with this snakebite, it's still God's word, just the same. God's word is just the same... Whether we die by it or live by it, it's still God's word.' Is that an impressive reliance on God's grace - whatever the folly of deliberately provoking venomous snakes - or a deeply problematic flirting with death?

Shot on the cheapest 16mm film stock known to man, Holy Ghost People's rough and ready look reinforces its down-to-earth setting. (The poor lighting and sound recording is inevitable in a low-budget documentary, but the awful digitisation isn't - what is this 'file size' you speak of?) Structured carefully and without sensationalism, Holy Ghost People nonetheless transports the wild atmosphere and sense of real danger to the screen (I challenge you not to squirm during the snake-handling scenes.)

The first charismatic service I went to ended with an altar call to come forward and receive the Holy Spirit. I stayed in my seat, not just because I was a firmer cessationist then than I am now but because I was frankly intimidated by the manifestations I'd just witnessed. Yes, they could easily be explained by appeal to religious euphoria, but it wasn't just implausibility. Charismatic worship requires an abandonment of self-control that is pretty alien to the bourgeois ideal of the individual (which is why it appeals to so many people). Holy Ghost People lays bare both why I find the charismatic movement fascinating and why it isn't for me.

*So far as I know, at least; I've been able to find woefully little information on the film online. Anyone who knows more, don't hesitate to pitch in.

I've got that old time religion in my hoard

Marjoe (1972) may have won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, but Cinema 5 did their damnedest to release the film as stealthily as possible, and all but buried it afterwards. There was a 1983 VHS release, but the film itself was thought lost until the negative was rediscovered in a vault, restored, screened and released on DVD in the 2000s. Which is obviously to the good: you won't watch a documentary like Marjoe this side of glory, so it'd be a shame if it was lost forever.

It's hardly surprising, though, that the distributor feared a backlash and virtually declined to release the film in the Bible Belt. Featuring an entirely faithless evangelist raking in the cash from Pentecostal congregations and casually sharing the tricks of the trade, Marjoe was sure to infuriate both the duped and the protagonist's, er, colleagues. But Marjoe wouldn't be very interesting if it was only an exposé. Its power comes from the real questions it asks about faith, showmanship, suffering and ethics.

Marjoe Gortner began preaching in tent revival meetings at the age of four, after his ambitious evangelist parents discovered his flair for the dramatic and confidence in front of crowds. Billed as 'the youngest ordained minister in history' and ruthlessly drilled in money-making tricks by his parents, Marjoe travelled the revival circuit and appeared on television until his mid-teens. When his father absconded with the family's money, a disillusioned Gortner drifted to the West Coast and immersed himself in hippie culture for several years. Lacking the education or formal training for a 'normal' job, in the mid-sixties Gortner went back to what he did best: he began working as a preacher again.

This time, though, he kept the money himself, and was able to work just six months a year thanks to donations and the sale of prayer cloths and other paraphernalia. It was a living, but Gortner was tired of it, and hoped to change careers to acting. So when he travelled the American South preaching, prophesying, and healing the sick one last time in 1971 he allowed a team of documentary filmmakers to follow him around, constantly sharing the tricks of the trade behind the scenes - unbeknownst to congregations, other preachers and even Gortner's own father, all of whom were given the impression of a straight documentary.

Certainly, Marjoe's greatest asset is its morally ambiguous protagonist. Gortner's transformation from his 'real self' to screaming revival preacher - complete with a totally different cadence and inflection - is astonishing. By showing off his acting chops and everyday persona, Marjoe doubles as an audition tape for Gortner's anticipated career in showbiz (his record, for which he exploited his renewed post-Marjoe fame, flopped but he was able to carve out a moderately successful career in genre films and television). So there's real doubt, I think, as to whether such an expert self-publicist ever lets us see the 'real' Gortner. But he's so darn likeable it hardly matters.

Gortner cheerfully admits that even as a child he never believed in God, but enjoyed the attention and did as he was told. (He still uses the story of his prophetic calling made up by his parents in later meetings.) Like many people who aren't required to subscribe to doctrinal statements, Gortner holds pretty vague beliefs in reality: he'd like people to love and forgive each other. He'd even be content to preach Jesus, he says, if he didn't have to go on about hell. He doesn't think he's a particularly moral person, but not actively malevolent either: 'I'm bad, but not evil'.

There's no denying, though, that Gortner is essentially a fraud, using mass psychology and carefully engineered religious ecstasy to persuade people to open their wallets. Asked point-blank if he is a conman late in the film, Gortner's girlfriend gets a little embarrassed. It's not just Marjoe who is living a double life, though. His preacher colleagues may genuinely believe in Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but they also know the importance of a well-executed meeting to their bottom line. I prefer Gortner's open lack of faith, in fact: after all, it's not the cold that Jesus warns, it's the lukewarm.

Fred Clark distinguishes between two types of Christian conservatives: true believers, who sincerely believe in the amalgamation of Christianity and conservatism peddled by the Religious Right, and hucksters, who are in it for the money and the power. Marjoe suggests a third type: the semi-true believer, who has faith in the work of the Holy Spirit but also in the power of emotional manipulation to fill the pews and his coffers. This type, surely, is found everywhere in modern evangelicalism and is the raison d'être of the church growth movement.

In Marjoe, itinerant preachers emerge as a community resembling magicians, sharing tricks of the trade. There's a lot of fascinating stuff. For example, Gortner mentions creating the illusion of a glowing cross on his forehead by smearing his skin with transparent dye that would react with his perspiration during the sermon. Then there are the movements he's adapted from Mick Jagger and his strategic use of repetition, shouting and surprise to induce religious trance and falling over ('being slain in the Spirit') when he lays hands on people coming up during the altar call. Similar tricks are in use today.

I've only been to a couple of charismatic worship services and they freaked me out, so, being unadventurous, I returned to what I liked best: silently judging people in a traditional church setting. There's no denying, though, that Gortner's servies fulfil real needs: joy, peace and healing, even if it is only for a few hours, for people who are otherwise downtrodden and sick. (Another preacher gives a nauseous sermon in which he thanks God for his brand-new Cadillac - go prosperity gospel!)

In that sense, perhaps Gortner can't be considered a fraud at all: don't attendees get the exact same experience with him as they would with a more sincere preacher? (And, theologically speaking, is not God's spirit quite independent of human machinations, and hardly frustrated in his work by a fraud?) Preying on people in the vulnerable state induced by religious ecstasy - however legitimate, even beneficial that experience may be in itself - is not improved morally by the sincerity of practitioners. Give me an honest fraud like Marjoe Gortner over a semi-true believer any day.

Adapt or batten down the hatches? Recent shifts in evangelicalism

In biology, punctuated equilibrium is the idea that a species can change little to not at all for a long time, then suddenly develop rapidly once a tipping point is reached. It's a useful concept in a number of fields (social history one of them). And I'd argue that it's a good way of understanding what's been happening in evangelicalism on both sides of the pond in the last couple of years. The relatively stable evangelical culture I was part of as a young Christian is shifting rapidly - because its mechanisms for suppressing or exiling dissent no longer work.

Go back, if you will, to the long-gone days of early 2011, when Rob Bell's alleged universalism (Bell's Love Wins had not been released yet) inspired an infamous three-word tweet from John Piper. That anathema from the man they call the Calvinist pope formed part of a by now pretty well-rehearsed script: declare someone 'controversial' for transgressing doctrinal boundaries, declare they're no longer an evangelical, and tell your flock to boycott their works. It's how the evangelical aristocracy excommunicates its discontents, and they've developed a taste for it.

But that strategy of marginalising dissent no longer works. Certainly, technological change plays a part in that, but there's another factor: increasingly, those evangelical leaders try to push out push back. They find allies. They get published. And they refuse to stop calling themselves evangelicals.

No-one illustrates this better than Rachel Held Evans. Growing up in the Bible Belt, Held Evans is no outsider to evangelicalism, and her writing is full of love for and commitment to the evangelical tradition. But she's also an egalitarian who rejects biblicism. In opening her blog to a huge variety of voices of different faith traditions, she applies a radical inclusiveness that conservative evangelicals find suspicious. And then there's the fact that she's a woman, so conservative leaders consider her unsuited to teaching and have to overcome scruples to engage with her at all.

But attempts to expel her from the evangelical fold have been unsuccessful. Christianity Today, the closest American evangelicalism has to a central publication, put her on their list of '50 Women You Should Know' (much to the chagrin of Denny Burk). Conservatives attacking her during the 2012 Imbroglio of the Two Wilsons ended up with egg on their faces - like Douglas Wilson's daughter Bekah, who described Held Evans as being in 'a fever of feminist fury', having 'transitioned into her squeaky voice, and we all know what happens when a woman gets squeaky' and 'stamping her little foot over there on her blog'. Bizarre, that, as Rachel Held Evans is gracious and level-headed in her writings.

She's representative of a much larger trend of openness and honesty. Singer Jennifer Knapp came out of the closet in a Christianity Today interview in 2010 (followed by a debate with a conservative pastor on national television). Justin Lee, founder of the Gay Christian Network - which unites LGBTQ Christians both celibate and in relationships - and author of Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate, is a prominent figure in the emergence of openly gay evangelicals. Writers like Pete Enns on evolution and Christian Smith on biblicism are challenging other evangelical shibboleths from within the tradition.

This opening up, along with wider cultural shifts on social issues, has created room for senior evangelical leaders to be honest about their own position even where it conflicts with dogma. Evangelicalism in Britain, the Christian subculture I'm a part of, may be tiny compared to its North American counterpart, but Steve Chalke's recent affirmation of LGBTQ couples in churches made waves on both sides of the pond. It's the bigger picture that fascinates me, though. Chalke's thoughtful and gracious article was published by Christianity, a far from liberal evangelical magazine, and the responses from conservatives were far more muted and respectful than one is used to.

Steve Clifford of the Evangelical Alliance disagreed with Chalke amid familiar phraseology of 'sadness and disappointment', but reminded Christians they should 'disagree without being disagreeable [and] listen honestly and carefully to one another'. Steve Holmes (battle of the Steves!) critiqued Chalke's hermeneutic, but entirely without the warnings of 'caving in to secular dogma' and the flames of hell that have tended to mark evangelicals' responses to dissent. It's an actual debate (which wouldn't have happened five or ten years ago), and I'm incredibly hopeful about it (please don't dash those hopes, guys).

In this new environment evangelical leaders, who used to judge the people - the gatekeepers, as Fred Clark aptly calls them -, are faced with a dilemma: engage change and perhaps change yourself or batten down the hatches and retreat into what Michael Clawson calls 'neo-fundamentalism'. The current paradigm shift in evangelical Christianity seems to be accelerating existing trends, leading to noticeable radicalisation.

That's certainly the case with John Piper, who is becoming more conservative as he's nearing retirement. In the above video, he argues that complementarianism - the soft patriarchy in which men and women are equal but 'gloriously suited' to different roles: that is, men should command ('biblical headship'), women should obey ('submission') - is a first-order, quasi-gospel issue. Traditionally, evangelicals treat it as a second-order issue like infant baptism, eschatology or spiritual gifts, i.e. something we can agree to disagree on - a privileged perspective, as women can't just walk away agreeing to disagree about their rights.

In recent podcasts, he seems to endorse young-earth creationism on the grounds that not accepting Adam or his descendants as historical would be to reject the Bible, and he's becoming more vocal about his anti-abortion activism. He's also begun to address criticism (which evangelical leaders tend to ignore) with an ill-advised follow-up post to a rightly criticised video on domestic violence. Culture warriors like Al Mohler are following similar trajectories.

The other possible response, of course, would be for evangelicals to reassess their position. Alas, so far it's mostly lip service of the 'I can't be racist because I have black friends' variety: quite literally, as when Rick Warren defended himself against accusations of homophobia by saying that 'I have many, many gay friends'. (Cue backlash from the Religious Right, who disapprove of being friends with gay people.) Tim Keller often appears more open than Piper or a shock jock like Mark Driscoll, yet there he sits with Piper and D.A. Carson, arguing that egalitarians pick and choose from their Bibles.

Fundamentalism is predicated on the hopeless proposition that you can fix a set of acceptable beliefs, social relations and behaviour once and for all, occasionally kicking out the discontents. But the evangelical tradition is much broader than that. It has welcomed change, realising that the man from Galilee is a living saviour, and that serving him in real, historical contexts means living in those contexts, in all the wonder, complexity and yes, uncertainty of real life. My hope is that evangelicals will test change, and hold on to what is good.

The propaganda screed as agreeable time-waster

If Google Trends is any indication, abortion as a hot-button issue is in decline in America. Searches still cluster faithfully around presidential elections, but each peak is less impressive than the one before it. 'Pro-life' and 'pro-choice' have suffered similar and closely aligned, albeit steadier declines. Despite the best effort of Republican lawmakers and Catholic bishops, attempts to curb reproductive rights have largely been defeated, and much like the larger Christian Right electoral coalition the pro-life movement seems unlikely to regain its place as a decisive force in American politics.

That may explain the tone of last year's October Baby, which - despite containing all the easy moralising, emotional appeals and casual misogyny that have caused even dedicated pro-lifers to turn their back on the movement - feels unexpectedly gentle, even elegiac. Unapologetically pandering to people who already agree with it, October Baby is not so much aimed at converting anyone to the cause as it is about patting activists on the back and telling them they had a good run.

After collapsing during a college play, Hannah (Rachel Hendrix) finds out why she has been sickly since infancy: she is the survivor of a failed abortion. Against the objections of her adoptive father (John Schneider), she joins her only friend and secret crush Jason (Jason Burkey) on a road trip to Mobile, Alabama, where she hopes to pick up the trail of her birth mother. With the help of a number of people who take pity on her, including not one but two police officers (Robert Amaya and Tracy Miller) and a nurse (Jasmine Guy), Hannah is finally able to find her mother and learn lessons about forgiveness, redemption and living life to the full.

In case that made it sound all right, let me state in no uncertain terms that October Baby is a bad film. It suffers first and foremost from a totally pedestrian script whose beats land all exactly where you expect them. The actors aren't particularly inspired by it, but they turn in reasonably effective performances: the real actors (John Schneider and Jasmine Guy) more so than others, but even the supporting actors essentially earn their keep, if no more. Hendrix, the nominal star, is the wobbliest of them all, genuinely nailing some of her scenes but flubbing lines in other places. She is, anyway, rather likeable, generally affecting and does not seem dead inside, which is pretty much all you can ask for in this sort of project.

That's the narrative, anyway: but o sweet Lord, the sheer artlessness of the thing! The mostly functional editing just falls apart in a few places, cutting off lines and introducing continuity errors; and the blocking is hardly any better, cutting off people's faces and producing entirely information-free frames. Flaws like that crop up only now and again, but from the look of the whole thing there is no escape.

For lo, even though I'm generally on board with the digital revolution in film October Baby offers a masterclass in how not to use the Red One and its cousins. In the hands of director Jon Erwin, acting as his own director of photography (a poor idea for those of us who are not Steven Soderbergh), high-definition video looks really damn awful, as if Erwin had heard of cinematography but wasn't quite sure what the term meant. I know the film's one-size-fits-all sheen and totally flat 'arty' aesthetic because I'm an evangelical Christian and that's what our more expensive videos look like. I'm sorry, everybody.

I may complain, but here it is: I actually kind of enjoyed October Baby. The G-rated teen shenanigans are endearing in a dorky fashion, and I honestly had fun with the budding romance between Hannah and Jason: they don't have any chemistry, I guess, but there's a certain pleasant atmosphere. The guilt-forgiveness-redemption arc several characters go through may be trite, but it can't be denied that October Baby achieves genuine poignancy and emotional release in places. You get the feeling that if the film wasn't totally in thrall to a censorious subculture, it might find something raw and real to say rather than just rattling off pro-life talking points. (Over the credits there is an interview with actress Shari Rigby, who has struggled with guilt over having an abortion. It's really quite moving.)

And yet there is quite a lot that is unpleasant and troubling in October Baby too, especially the treatment of the 'unredeemed' women who must be shown the error of their ways. At no point does the film suggest there's anything wrong with Hannah just showing up unannounced at her birth mother's office to confront her. The film wields forgiveness more as a weapon than a bridge to restoration: it's about vindication and vengeance rather than reconciliation. That's the big one, but the treatment of more marginal women is just as icky: there's Jason's girlfriend Alanna (Colleen Trusler), for example, whose unique personality trait is 'bitch' and who is shoved aside just as soon as possible.

With its unexpected endorsement of ecumenism, though, October Baby is still gentler than than the slew of anti-feminist organisations and Southern Poverty Law Center-certified hate groups endorsing it might indicate. It's not easy to create propaganda that's also good entertainment, and October Baby doesn't make the cut. Instead, it exposes the soullessness of the dying evangelical subculture. It's the cinematic equivalent of the insipid Christian pop-rock crowding the sountrack: slick, earnest and utterly empty.

Some soundbites from the Coalition for Marriage

Having recently come across the homepage of the Coalition for Marriage - a pressure group composed of representatives from conservative Christian institutions - I thought I'd dissect some of their soundbites. 'Soundbites', aye: I'll just tackle the stuff on the front page, the barely connected bits that are intended to sway casual visitors the campaigners' way. I'll take them in turn.

'Marriage is unique'

Throughout history and in virtually all human societies marriage has always been the union of a man and a woman.

Unless you count polygamy in all sorts of societies, including the elite of ancient Israel. Or same-sex unions of various kinds. Or concubinage. Or the profound changes marriage underwent in the sixties and seventies, from a system in which (very broadly) a woman was passed from her father's control to her husband's, to one of egalitarian partnership - arguably a more profound revolution than marriage equality. (This is a general problem for advocates of marriage discrimination: if marriage is about partnership not property, patriarchy and legitimate procreation, an essential argument against same-sex marriage falls.) Above all, though, it's an appeal to tradition: lots of institutions (slavery, absolute monarchy, religious intolerance, human sacrifice...) have been traditional without being good.

Marriage reflects the complementary natures of men and women.

Guys, you're not doing a great job of hiding the fact that your arguments come from Christian complementarianism, the hot & sexy new version of patriarchy that conservative churchmen cobbled together from the corpse of the old thing back in the seventies. In that view, men and women are separate but equal have different but equal roles: specifically, the man's role is to be in charge and the woman's is to obey. (How's that different from patriarchy, I hear you ask? Exactly.) The C4M sentence above is, anyway, an unsubstantiated assertion that does not follow logically from the previous statement. No-one has ever been able to explain to us what male and female nature consists of in a way that doesn't just retell nineteenth-century bourgeois European ideals.

Although death and divorce may prevent it, the evidence shows that children do best with a married mother and a father.

Sleight of hand, our old friend! Why, of course if you eliminate single parents and precarious family situations from the equation, you'll find that 'children do best with a married mother and father'. But comparing like with like, there is in fact no difference between opposite-sex and same-sex couples.

'No need to redefine'

Civil partnerships already provide all the legal benefits of marriage so there's no need to redefine marriage.

The right to be married and recognised as such is a legal benefit of opposite-sex marriage, although UK law is otherwise better than some countries'. But: if civil partnerships are equal to marriage in everything but name, why would anyone still push for marriage? Inventing a separate but equal institution for gay people is unfair and frankly mean-spirited, and viewing their state as somehow not marriage has real consequences. Making sure the separate school for black people is just as nice as that for white people does not remove white supremacy.

It's not discriminatory to support traditional marriage.

Another non sequitur, and palpable nonsense too. Declaring that only certain couples should be permitted to marry and others should be excluded is the very nature of discrimination. The C4M's website does nothing but ineffectually make the case for discrimination. If they're scared of being called discriminatory because it sounds nasty, well - doesn't that tell you something?

Same-sex couples may choose to have a civil partnership but no one has the right to redefine marriage for the rest of us.

This feeds into the next section and will be dealt with there. For now, I'll refer you to the dire consequences gay marriage will have on your freedom.

'Profound consequences'

If marriage is redefined, those who believe in traditional marriage will be sidelined. People's careers could be harmed, couples seeking to adopt or foster could be excluded, and schools would inevitably have to teach the new definition to children. 

Yes, indeed: this paragraph is nought but the guilty conscience of folks who realise that they've destroyed gay people's careers, stopped them from adopting and fostering children, and forced them to listen to offensive views. But, like the racist worried about white people becoming a minority, that guilty conscience turns to aggression: we must hold the gays down lest they do to us what we did to them.

If marriage is redefined once, what is to stop it being redefined to allow polygamy?

Sorry, but I'm all non-sequitured out.

'Speak up'

People should not feel pressurised [sic] to go along with same-sex marriage just because of political correctness. They should be free to express their views.

That doesn't actually mean anything. By 'political correctness', these respectable people mean the consensus that being a bigot is a bad thing. And people are free to express their views. Isn't that why C4M is able to broadcast their vitriol freely, rather than having to smuggle anti-gay tracts into the country in potato crates?

That's that, for now. It's a rancid mess of illogical soundbites indeed: the consequence of taking what is preached from conservative Christian pulpits and picking out all the Bible bits to make it more palatable to a religiously plural audience. Turns out that leaves only the flimsiest of non-arguments.

Let me close with the immortal words of Rev. W.A. Criswell, admittedly on the other side of the pond, on our inalienable right to not have to rub shoulders with gay people:

Don’t force me by law, by statute, by Supreme Court decision... to cross over in those intimate things where I don’t want to go. Let me build my life. Let me have my church. Let me have my school. Let me have my friends. Let me have my home. Let me have my family. And what you give to me, give to every man in America and keep it like our glorious forefathers made it—a land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oh, hang on. Turns out he was talking about racial segregation. Oh well.

The patriarchal imagination of Doug Wilson

Trigger warning: this post discusses rape, slavery and genocide apologia.

Last night over at The Gospel Coalition, Jared Wilson posted an excerpt from Doug Wilson's Fidelity: What It Means To Be A One-Woman Man. 'Outrage' is often used to describe the sort of reaction the post provoked, but 'hurt' is just as apt. The Wilsons wounded their brothers and sisters, and when people expressed their hurt they belittled them and told them to 'retake their ESL class'. It's worth quoting that Doug Wilson excerpt in full:

A final aspect of rape that should be briefly mentioned is perhaps closer to home. Because we have forgotten the biblical concepts of true authority and submission, or more accurately, have rebelled against them, we have created a climate in which caricatures of authority and submission intrude upon our lives with violence.

When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.

But we cannot make gravity disappear just because we dislike it, and in the same way we find that our banished authority and submission comes back to us in pathological forms. This is what lies behind sexual “bondage and submission games,” along with very common rape fantasies. Men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the “soon to be made willing” heroine. Those who deny they have any need for water at all will soon find themselves lusting after polluted water, but water nonetheless.

True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity. When authority is honored according to the word of God it serves and protects — and gives enormous pleasure. When it is denied, the result is not “no authority,” but an authority which devours.

– Douglas Wilson, Fidelity: What it Means to be a One-Woman Man (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 1999), 86-87.

Rachel Held Evans has done a beautiful job of unpacking why this is vile, overt misogyny that does not even bother to hide behind standard complementarian weasel words. J.R. Daniel Kirk, too, gets straight to the point:

[W]hen you sexually conquer someone, this is rape. The connection Wilson draws is too much on target: he has, in fact, described all sex as an act of rape. It is therefore not surprising that he sees such a connection between rape outside of marriage and not finding the sort of satisfaction that he suggests is coming to men in their exploits of power.

Wilson's argument is this: sex ought to consist of men penetrating, planting, conquering and colonising (i.e. rape) and women receiving, surrendering and accepting. When it does not - when it becomes an 'egalitarian pleasuring party' - then men will act out their God-given manhood in unacceptable forms of rape, and women will partake of perverted varieties of sexual submission. This is somewhat at odds with reality, of course. One of the major victories of the women's movement, after all, was the outlawing of marital rape.

The Wilsons' response to their critics is generally not worth the blog space it's written on. They insist that they've been misunderstood, but fail to explain what they mean. They accuse their critics, in the passive-aggressive 'Why do they hate us?' fashion of the faux martyr, of trying to twist their words. Jared, in fact, withdraws to affirming 'marital sex that is mutually submissive' while pretending not to have retreated.* Doug's 'explanation' of his choice of words takes the cake, though:

“Penetrates.” Is anyone maintaining that this is not a feature of intercourse? “Plants.” Is the biblical concept of seed misogynistic? “Conquer.” Her neck is like the tower of David, and her necklace is like a thousand bucklers. “Colonize.” A garden locked is my sister, my bride. C’mon, people, work with me here.

Here we have a response that ignores the existence of non-penetrative sex because it would throw Wilson's argument that sex is necessarily about domination into disarray; that attempts to shame critics by wielding the Bible as a sledgehammer; that makes two references to the Song of Songs which significantly distort the actual trajectory of mutual pursuit found in that wonderful erotic poem. And by feigning incomprehension, Wilson continues men's long and ignoble history of insisting that women who criticise them are irrational or 'emotional'.

It's not just women, however, that Wilson thinks are uppity. In the video at the top of this post, Wilson identifies with the values of the Confederacy, such as states' rights - as if those were more than an expedient to prevent the federal government from interfering with slavery; and he holds that slavery should have been abolished by parliamentary processes rather than war - as it might well have been had the Southern states not seceded and attacked the North precisely to preclude that possibility. Wilson reveals a blindness to really existing institutions of power and privilege, be they patriarchy or slavery, that is born of being a white Christian man and not listening to people who aren't.

What connects Wilson's neo-Confederate tendencies to his rabid pro-patriarchalism isn't just his evident desire to return to the good ol' days of c. 1850. As Grace at Are Women Human? points out, Wilson's apologia for both rape and slavery is linked by his vision of a society in which white men benevolently rule over everyone else. White male domination is thus at the heart of Wilson's belief system. This is not, I hardly need to stress, an orthodox view of Christianity - although some people who think like Wilson use the cross too, usually by setting it on fire.

Wilson's choice of words - penetration, planting, conquest, colonisation - is the naked language of imperialism. He projects the seizure of physical space from indigenous people onto female bodies. Here as there, violence is glorified as the expression of true manliness and justified by 'planting', which has excused occupation and genocide from the Americas to the West Bank. By casting women as a dark continent that must be subdued and made to flourish by white Christian men, Wilson doesn't just other women: he reveals his fear of them. If left unconquered, uncolonised and unpenetrated, they might run amok and threaten his privilege.

It works the other way round, too, for 'penetration' is a metaphor drawn from patriarchal sex that imperialism projects onto the places it wishes to consume and the people who live there. That actual, physical rape occurs in this context is hardly surprising. The language of 'penetration' that robs women of agency and humanity does the job just as well when dusted off and applied to indigenous people and their lands. In gendering to-be-conquered people feminine, imperialist discourse reveals its roots in patriarchal society.

This has, I fear, been something of a long, rambling post. It has not been temperate. It's hugely encouraging to see how many Christians have stood up to Wilson's rape fantasies. We can be confident, I think, that increasingly those who grant the views of Wilson and his ilk shelter - those like The Gospel Coalition - aren't just wrong. They're also in the minority.

*Jared Wilson mostly quoted Doug Wilson approvingly without adding much, and now he is out of this saga.

Jesus was a colonised person

In 'Song of the Magi', Anaïs Mitchell links Jesus' Bethlehem to today's West Bank town:

...a child is born
born in Bethlehem
born in a cattle pen
a child is born on the killing floor...
welcome home, my child
your home is a checkpoint now
your home is a border town
welcome to the brawl
life ain't fair, my child
put your hands in the air, my child
slowly now, single file, now
up against the wall

Jesus was a colonised person living under Roman occupation in first-century Palestine. Imperial rule shaped Jewish society. Tax collectors were ostracised as collaborators, revival preachers proclaimed the coming kingdom of heaven,  and zealots organised armed resistance. Occupation loomed large over Jesus' ministry too, from the discussion on paying taxes to the Romans to the expectation that Jesus would overthrow the occupiers by force and install himself as Israel's anointed king. Instead, he triumphed over Caesar by quietly submitting to the most gruesome public death the Empire could devise.

That matters.

Jesus came to lift up the poor, the hungry, the broken-hearted and the despised. He ushered in an upside-down kingdom in which the last was to be first. In his body he experienced the brutality and violence of Empire. His promise to oppressed, beaten, frightened, occupied people everywhere - a pledge whispered but never drowned out by Empire's heavy boots - is that things will not always be this way.

... wear we now our warmest coats
wear we now our walking shoes
open wide the gates of hope
and let us through

There was little love lost between Jesus and the wielders of power, especially if they used God's name to justify their violence. That hasn't changed in two thousand years.

It means that, far from propping up the empires supposedly built on 'Judaeo-Christian foundations', Jesus is with their victims, whispering with them sweet songs of freedom.

Of apes and men

A revolution is underway among scholars who study the settlement of the Americas. The old orthodoxy held that the first Americans, represented by the Clovis culture, crossed the Bering Strait from Asia about 13,100 years ago. Now, finds showing human activity all over the continent suggest that the settlers - likely a diverse bunch, leaving Asia in several periods of migration - may have come to America as early as 14,600 years ago.

I'm thrilled by all this. Who wouldn't be? But just a couple of years ago, my reaction to the news would likely have been an awkward smile and an attempt to change the subject.

I was never a creationist, but like many Christians I found the facts of human origins something of an embarrassment. I knew the earth was older than the six thousand years postulated by creationists, but I rather wished it wasn't. Wouldn't it be easier on the gospel if we could continue to believe in a literal Adam and Eve?

Unfortunately, the contortions required to hold on to creationism are too high a price to pay. The biblicist dogma of Ken Ham & Friends can only be sustained by jettisoning all attempts at knowledge. For people ostensibly committed to guarding truth, that's ironic.

Young-earth creationists advance many spurious arguments attacking particular pieces of evidence, but the core of Answers in Genesis's 'ministry' at least seems to be two attacks on the possibility of knowledge itself:

(1) 'Were you there?' This pseudo-argument holds that we cannot claim to know anything we have not personally witnessed. If true, this would invalidate all historical knowledge whatever, including of course the entirety of biblical history and the life of Jesus.

(2) 'Evolution is inferential, not observational science, and thus our opinions on it are governed not by facts but by our assumptions.' On top of discounting all history, this declares a change of beliefs on the grounds of evidence (the basis of all evangelism) an a priori impossibility.

I don't need to tell you why these arguments are foolish. They're not really intended to convince, but to create enough wiggle room to allow true believers to remain in the fundamentalist subculture rather than seek answers elsewhere.

Creationism sustains itself at the cost of destroying all categories of knowledge. To deny our specific knowledge of evolution, it must deny the possibility of knowing anything at all beyond what is written in the Bible - and its biblicism is fatally self-contradictory and destructive. Creationism cannot claim any legitimacy, and it richly deserves to be abandoned.

John Piper is wrong about women

American pastor John Piper has come under criticism for saying that God gave Christianity a 'masculine feel'. Piper's assertions (which gender important virtues male, among other things) have been thoroughly refuted all over the blogosphere. In the slightly older video above, Piper discusses the question of domestic abuse (beginning with an ill-advised chuckle). He ends up suggesting that women should endure verbal abuse 'for a season' and endure 'being smacked' for one night, before taking the problem to the church.

These remarks are, of course, despicable. The fact that Piper seems to mean nothing by them makes it worse: his ignorance suggests that he lives in a subculture so male-centred that he is insulated from listening to women at all. Most of all, Piper seems to be totally unaware of the strong association between patriarchy and abuse. As Women's Aid put it:

Domestic violence against women by men is "caused"* by the misuse of power and control within a context of male privilege. Male privilege operates on an individual and societal level to maintain a situation of male dominance, where men have power over women and children. Perpetrators of domestic violence choose to behave abusively to get what they want and gain control. Their behaviour often originates from a sense of entitlement which is often supported by sexist, racist, homophobic and other discriminatory attitudes. In this way, domestic violence by men against women can be seen as a consequence of the inequalities between men and women, rooted in patriarchal traditions that encourage men to believe they are entitled to power and control over their partners.

Violence is typically the assertion of male control, not the loss of it in a fit of rage. Male rule - for which 'godly male leadership' is but a euphemism; it's difficult to imagine what besides rule Piper means by 'leadership' in concrete situations - sets the context in which women suffer violence. The belief that Christianity is chiefly masculine relegates women to second-class status, appendages of their husbands whom they are obliged to obey. This puts women into the impossible situation of choosing between their own safety and well-being (by seeking help, which may involve leaving their husband) and obedience to Christ.

Short of situations in which we are ordered to disown Jesus, that dilemma is false. We follow a Lord who was and is eternally human, who mourns with those who mourn, who will not break a bruised reed or snuff out a smouldering wick. Never forget that He began his ministry like this (Luke 4:16-21):

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
    "The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
   because he has anointed me
   to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
   and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
    to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour."
  Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

It's horrifying that End Violence Against Women, for example, need to advise visitors how to cover their tracks to prevent their abuser from finding out they're seeking help. So much for the 'Christian foundations' of 'western civilisation' supposedly under threat: Piper's assertion that 'the fullest flourishing of women and men takes place in churches and families that have this masculine feel' is comprehensively refuted by two thousand years of church history.

Of course, as Piper says, the church can play a part in tackling abuse by running women's shelters or by excommunicating known abusers. But in its present form the church is ill-equipped for these tasks. It cannot honestly claim innocence from abuse until it abandons male rule. You cannot both deplore violence and argue for the continuing existence of contexts in which violence occurs: something has to give. Because white rule was the root cause of lynchings, the answer could not be a more benevolent form of white rule; it was and is the abolition of white rule itself. Isn't it time we said the same of patriarchy?

*The inverted commas signify the FAQ's insistence that it is ultimately the abuser who is responsible for violence, and that social context does not abolish responsibility.

If your neighbour worships twenty gods: a note on biblical law and religious toleration

Christians are used to seeing secular society - whose institutions favour no particular faith - as a dire threat. To John Piper, for example, '[t]he modern secular world... tries to remove God from his all-creating, all- sustaining, all-defining, all-governing place [and] has no choice but to make itself god'. In other words, a secular society is blasphemous by definition. Against this conservative appraisal, I'll suggest secularism is most fruitfully understood not as a menace destroying western civilisation from within, but as a blessing longed for by those who did not enjoy it, made possible by Jesus' death on the cross.

At the same time, I'll argue that the liberal understanding of secularism is ahistorical and impossible to square with biblical evidence. Here, for example, is the excellent blogger Fred Clark, arguing against the US Catholic bishops' attempt to stop contraceptive services for women:

'It does me no injury,' Thomas Jefferson wrote, 'for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.' The advocates of burka-logic [sic] disagree. They insist that the very presence of such irreligious neighbors does them an injury - the injury of constraining their freedom to live unperturbed by the constant reminder of such blasphemies.

This quintessentially liberal argument - my neighbour's religious predilections do me no harm, so I have no business constraining him - cannot survive an encounter with the God of the Old Testament. At Sinai God makes a covenant is with Israel as a community to ensure correct religious observance and moral behaviour in the land (Deuteronomy 1:1-14). The Mosaic Law does not offer any room for religious toleration. Indeed the Israelites are explicitly commanded to destroy all traces of Canaanite paganism if they wish to enjoy the land (Deuteronomy 12:1-4).

Contrary to Jefferson, under Old Testament law my neighbour's heterodox religious observance does pick my pocket and break my leg. The Religious Right's notion of 'individual responsibility' is quite absent in the Bible. God repeatedly threatens to punish people for sins they have not themselves committed, 'visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and fourth generation' (Exodus 20:5, Exodus 34:7, Numbers 14:18, Deuteronomy 5:9, and many more). Positively, God considers whole communities more kindly on account of a few righteous people (Genesis 18:22-32, Romans 11:28).

The insistence that Israel is judged as a whole for the actions committed in its midst rather than as individuals is perhaps best encapsulated by Deuteronomy 21:1-9:

If in the land that the LORD your God is giving you to possess someone is found slain, lying in the open country, and it is not known who killed him, then your elders and your judges shall come out, and they shall measure the distance to the surrounding cities. And the elders of the city that is nearest to the slain man shall take a heifer that has never been worked and that has not pulled in a yoke. And the elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to a valley with running water, which is neither ploughed nor sown, and shall break the heifer's neck there in the valley. Then the priests, the sons of Levi, shall come forward... And all the elders of that city nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley, and they shall testify, 'Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it shed. Accept atonement, o LORD, for your people Israel, whom you have redeemed, and do not set the guilt of innocent blood in the midst of your people Israel, so that their blood guilt be atoned for.' So you shall purge the guilt of innocent blood from your midst, when you do what is right in the sight of the LORD.

Here the murderer is unknown and unidentifiable, but the nearest settlement is required to offer a sacrifice in atonement for the sin committed lest it be visited upon their heads. The action, not the acting subject, is the primary term. Nor does the Bible consider the motives of offenders. Distinguishing murder from accidental killings, for example, is an innovation of the ninth century, when earnest scholars attempted to settle matters humanius (more humanely) than the often harsh Church Fathers. (So much, incidentally, for the notion that a concern for human welfare reveals a 'man-centred' world-view.)

We tend to take a modern legal understanding of individual responsibility for granted, but it can seriously distort our reading of the Bible. The concept of bloodguilt - that sin, if unatoned, will return to haunt even those who have not themselves committed it - is accepted by New Testament writers (Luke 11:50-51, Revelation 6:10). Augustine's notion that original sin is passed on through biological parenthood - logically consigning those who die in the womb to damnation - would also be impossible without bloodguilt.

But that isn't the whole story. In the New Testament, God's people are not told to enforce obedience among their nonbelieving neighbours. Indeed the New Testament is marked by disinterest in secular power at best, and outright hostility at worst (Revelation 17:1-6). The death of Jesus at the cross changes everything. From that point onwards, it is not biological descent from Abraham but faith that determines membership in the people of God (Romans 9:30). The ethno-religious boundaries of ancient Israel have been shattered. God's people are now of every nation and tongue, no longer identifiable with individual peoples or states.

Secularism - a society no longer compelled to enforce religious obedience among its subjects, on pain of judgment - is thus made possible by the death of Jesus. When an individual puts her faith in Christ she cannot become his without also becoming part of the people of God; God's covenant is made with his people as a whole. There is no salvation for the individual outside the collective salvation of God's people (which is why I continue to find Calvinism's emphasis on Christ's successful purchase of a definite people compelling). It is because of this ingrafting into the people of God that baptism - a public symbol of membership in God's family - is important. But it no longer coincides with membership in an earthly nation or obedience to a set of temporal laws.

If the potential for secularism was present from Jesus' death onwards, that potential had to remain unrealised in pre-modern societies, which functioned through personal relationships and localised hierarchies sealed and enforced through oaths. Public declarations of political and religious loyalty - which are quite superfluous in modern states - were vital to rulers who lacked the centralised bureaucracy necessary to enforce obedience among their subjects. (For example, a modern state knows who all its subjects are and where they live, something the ancients could not have imagined in their wildest dreams.)

Even the Roman state, often praised for its tolerance, could not solve the problem of religious diversity by becoming secular - atheist as a state - but only by being radically inclusivist, declaring all faiths valid and adding foreign deities to its pantheon. Still, it required that its subjects subordinate their loyalties to the imperial cult, and those who could not comply - Christians, most famously - had to suffer its wrath. Pre-modern societies that did not compel everyone's conversion (the political entities of the Islamic world, for example) nonetheless had to privilege one faith.

It was only with the vastly increased capacity of the state from the French Revolution onwards, and its sweeping aside of motley feudal ties and privileges, that overwhelmingly Christian societies could provide freedom of religion for their subjects without breaking down. Our nonconformist forebears - the very people from whom modern evangelicalism is descended - ardently campaigned and prayed for a secular state that would not exclude them on the basis of religion, and eventually obtained that sweet freedom.

Redemption day

There is a train that's heading straight
To heaven's gate, to heaven's gate
And on the way, child and man,
And woman wait, watch and wait
For redemption day

It's buried in the countryside
It's exploding in the shells at night
It's everywhere a baby cries
Freedom

Sheryl Crow's 'Redemption Day' is one of the most beautiful poetic summaries of Christianity I've ever encountered. Being a Christian is living in the hope that one day, every tear will be wiped from every eye; and that hope is confirmed by Jesus' resurrection, proving that he prevailed over darkness and set the captives free.

And that's a hope far better than that of the Religious Right, who merely expect that their super-buddy Christ will come and kill everyone they dislike with fire. Why be satisfied with that?

Let the little children come unto me

When I was seventeen, I spent three weeks serving as a 'senior camper' at a Christian summer camp. The purpose of Iwerne Holidays was to present the gospel to teenagers from independent schools in a fun environment including sports, excursions, and all sorts of activities. It was just like being a 'camp counselor' across the pond, except we weren't hacked to pieces by machete-wielding madmen.*

It was, however, nothing at all like Jesus Camp. Therein lies much of what makes the film so fascinating and irritating.

Jesus Camp, released in 2006, is an artifact of the culture wars of the 2000s, that appalling time in history when 'religion' (whatever that means) was at the forefront of public debate in the Anglo-Saxon world. The days of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, James Dobson and Pat Robertson, all of them thankfully increasingly irrelevant in an age where culture war has dissolved into the naked class struggle whose halo it was from the beginning.

Anyway! The film follows evangelical culture around a Pentecostal children's camp called 'Kids on Fire' in North Dakota. There, pastor Becky Fischer 'equips' children to be 'warriors for Christ' to 'take America back' by evangelism as well as fighting abortion and other forms of ungodliness in the public sphere. Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady focus on three of the children: twelve-year-old Levi, homeschooled by his mother, who teaches him that evolution is a hoax; nine-year-old Rachael, who regularly engages in evangelism towards strangers; and ten-year-old Tory, who breakdances to Christian metal.

At Kids on Fire, these and other children are taught to be wary because 'the devil goes after the young' and to distrust secular entertainment ('Had it been in the Old Testament, Harry Potter would've been put to death!'). Among themselves, the children discuss their feelings about films and books, revealing their struggles with what they're being taught. In a service that can in good conscience only be described as mass hysteria, the children break down weeping and pledge to end abortion by political activism and asking God for 'righteous judges'.

We meet Levi again at New Life Church in Colorado Springs. In an interview, Pastor Ted Haggard expresses his delight at evangelical Christians forming a decisive voting bloc against homosexuality, abortion and the teaching of evolution. This scene, of course, now has a potency the filmmakers couldn't be aware of at the time: just a few months later, Haggard fell from grace when it was revealed he'd indulged in adulterous gay sex and illegal drugs for years.

As you'll have guessed by now, Jesus Camp is a liberal message picture. Despite the lack of a narrator, Ewing and Grady clearly think the formation of a political evangelicalism focused on anti-abortion, anti-homosexual 'family values' is a very bad thing, and I agree with them. Even so, I didn't really need the constant scare music they lather on every scene of Pentecostal worship. The snippets of Mike Papantonio's radio show, in which he criticises the Religious Right, are editorialising I welcome: it's good to see a Christian offer an alternative view to the one pushed by the film's subjects.

Even while Jesus Camp sternly disapproves of its subject matter, it's a respectful, humane film. When Becky Fischer says, offhand, 'I get exhausted doing this' while preparing for another session, it's the rawest, truest moment in the film. While I don't think we learn enough about them (which isn't really excusable, given the film's short running time), the children are never treated as less than full human beings with dreams and ambitions. Levi's worldview may be a mess of cruel lies - if global warming is true, ye are yet in your sins - but we learn to rejoice and mourn with him.

As such, the film's ostensibly simple message constantly rebels against the much more complex response the film actually induces in the viewer - especially if that viewer, like me, is himself an evangelical Christian. Becky Fischer's ministry is horrifying: she's convinced children need to be indoctrinated because most people's Weltanschauung is fixed from a young age, so better get in early; and she's worried because 'the enemy' - Islam - is supposedly training young children to blow themselves up, an amount of dedication she seems to view with envy rather than horror. (It was 2006, remember.)

In Fischer's call that children should be 'warriors' the Christian concept of spiritual warfare thus comes worryingly close to real, physical warfare. The 'Christian pledge of allegiance' one of the families recites at home has nothing to do with the gospel but a lot with a brand of Christian nationalism - something I can't imagine Jesus approving of. Faith in radical, counter-cultural grace - following an executed criminal - does not sit comfortably with colonising the public sphere because 'our nation was founded on Judaeo-Christian values' (Fischer).

Although the film is unmistakeably a product of its time - witness the scene in which the children are invited to bless a cardboard cutout of George Bush by stretching out their hands towards it - it seems prescient in other ways. The language of 'taking back America', now secularised in the Republican Right's crusade against ostensible Marxists, socialists, and liberals, is used here in religious garb. This rhetoric of national rebirth in the face of an ungodly, totalitarian government - a narrative that is a pack of lies, remember, no matter what we might feel about Obama otherwise - has given rise to the uniquely American permutations of fascism that are now flourishing at the even-loonier end of the Tea Party.

Jesus Camp runs into problems in failing to notice that Fischer and her ilk are engaged in intra-evangelical point-scoring, too: Rachael believes that churches with ordered, sedate services are 'dead'. The raucous Pentecostal manifestations of Kids on Fire - dancing, weeping, speaking in tongues, the whole vocabulary of the charismatic movement - would be regarded with bemusement if not outright horror by many evangelicals; fundamentalists, who trace their tradition back to the Puritans and disapprove of both dancing and what Jonathan Edwards called 'enthusiasm', would be especially appalled.**

The filmmakers don't seem to realise that the Religious Right is less a terrifying monolith than a collection of increasingly disparate forces provisionally united around certain political issues: opposing homosexuality, abortion and secularism, championing the military and the death penalty. Just like Fischer herself, Ewing and Grady never investigate the loci of structural power and privilege among their subjects: the power of leaders over followers, adults over children, men over women. Jesus Camp would be a richer film for it, but it remains an eye-opening portrait of the Religious Right.

*What did you expect? Being a Christian summer camp, the experience lacked the weed-smoking and fornication necessary to enrage Norfolk's homicidal maniac population.
**Perhaps more embarrassingly, many evangelicals would not be comfortable with a female pastor.