Imagine driving on a city’s busy thoroughfare in the busy Christmas season, glancing up at a new colorful billboard, and then quickly gripping the steering wheel as your eyes check that you’re still in your lane. Finding you are, you take another quick glance to see if what you thought you saw you really did see.

This billboard appeared in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, and was placed there by an Anglican church, St. Matthew-in-the-City. It was clearly meant to provoke, as well as amuse. Provoke it did. The church’s website was flooded with 30,000 hits, a mixture of intrigued and critical. Twice in the first few days, there were attempts to deface and destroy the billboard, and by the end of the second week, the billboard was taken down. However, given the discussions generated about the birth of Jesus, church leaders felt satisfied.  By the time of its coming down, everyone in the nation had heard of the billboard, and the internet quickly made the picture a world-wide phenomenon. Opinions were instantly formed, from belly laughs to accusations of sacrilege.

My mind went immediately to the 1987 photograph by photographer Andres Serrano of a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the Artist’s urine. What added insult-to-injury, for some, was the fact that the picture won a contest partly sponsored by the National Endowment of the Arts. In other words, taxpayers paid for it. Others said that awarding money for this art-picture violated the separation of church and state. One person wrote that the work was “not blasphemous but a statement ‘on what we have done to Christ’—that is, the way contemporary society has come to regard Christ and the values he represents.”

I also thought of the twelve 2005 cartoons of Muhammad printed in a Danish newspaper. Danish Embassies were set on fire in three countries and an estimated 100 people died in riots. The publisher has been attacked.

Returning to the Auckland billboard, two additional factors were at work in the negative response of some people—the doctrine of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary and our society’s general dis-ease with matters of human sexuality.

Roman Catholicism, Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy, and a number of Protestant scholars believe that Mary was a virgin before, during and after giving birth—perpetual virginity. The doctrine of the Virgin Birth is only a part of this broader belief. (The dogma of the Immaculate Conception is a different doctrine, relating to the conception of the Virgin Mary without any stain of original sin.) Thus, it is easy to understand the trouble some traditional Christians would have with this billboard.

However, even some non-literal biblicists had difficulty. Although believing that Mary got pregnant the usual human way, they were a bit squeamish in thinking about the actual details, even in this day and age of more open sexuality. The program notes of the recent performance of Puccini’s opera, Tosca, while recording that the opera has two suicides, two murders, a torture scene, and an attempted rape, adds “opera companies never receive complaint letters about violence.” Although not stated, this lack of comment  is in decided contrast to mail received, and patrons departing, when opera scenes are sensual and risqué. Sex still is a bothersome topic for many.

Art calls forth a response, even billboard-art. What stirs inside you?

Name Calling

Labeling people is a normal human activity. Labeling gives us the ability to cluster our experiences and talk in generalities. As much as we might like to treat each person in her or his uniqueness or marvel at the beauty of each leaf, uncovering each uniqueness would exhaust our available time and fill our mind with excess detail. Both would cause reflection, reason and intelligent conversation to come to a grinding halt. So, placing people in categories is essential, even if such categorization squeezes individuals into narrower groupings than reality warrants.

However, there is a difference between labeling for description and for denigration. To denigrate, we label by identifying the characteristics people have in common—skin color, sexual orientation, religious identification, ethnicity, body shape—and then we assign other, more derogatory, characteristics. This we call prejudice—literally, the ‘pre-judging’ of others—so that we attribute identical characteristics to all individuals who belong to a particular group. Growing up in any society inculcates persons into thinking of categories such as us-them, men-women, Jew-Christian-Muslim, conservative-liberal, to mention some of the more familiar labels.

Working in the area of religion, I am aware of our own need to cluster and categorize. For example, the words fundamentalist/conservative and liberal are used to designate the two common sides of belief and practice. They also are used for self-identification and as a way of speaking pejoratively about others. It needs to be noted that a significant problem with the use of these designations is that they cast too wide a net, collecting a disparate variety of people and beliefs.

To acknowledge this and to be more descriptive, I have developed two acronyms for my own use—F-E-COTs and LAHRS. F-E-COTs (the dashes are for pronunciation) are a way of speaking about the diversity of believers on the religious right: fundamentalists-conservatives-orthodox-evangelicals-traditionalists. For those on the religious left, I use the acronym LAHRS: liberal-atheist-humanist-rationalist-secularist.

These acronyms are awkward, and they pull together individuals who might glare at being lumped with others in their category, but the classification does help me keep in mind the diversity that now goes under the overly-broad labels of fundamentalist/conservative and liberal. Of course, one drawback to these designations is that each time I mention F-E-COTs and LAHRS, I have to explain what I am talking about, and that diverts the conversation from the subject to the meaning and appropriateness of the labels. Nevertheless, even if not used by others, I find the acronyms helpful for my own thinking.

Already, though, I am finding the acronyms F-E-COTs and LAHRS inadequate in discovering a new phenomenon—individuals who encompass elements from both sides: the theology of F-E-COTS and the social concern of the LAHRS. These are individuals who believe in a literal Bible and adhere to a pre-Copernican theology while, at the same time, firmly working toward GLBT (gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender), abortion and environmental rights.  Now, by what name should I call them? A single word is needed to avoid speaking two-or-three descriptive sentences.

It may be a bit confusing to have individuals who do not fit into our easy categorization or ‘name calling.’ However, that is a reminder of the frailty of any generalization—no category can fully encompass the totality of even one human being, much less the bubbling, fermenting diversity of life itself.

Bob Tucker
February 2010

Non-Houstonians have such strange ideas about the City of Houston, if they have any ideas at all. Usually it is a surprise for them to find that Houston is the country’s fourth largest city, behind New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. By the end of this decade, it is expected to pass Chicago. Houston had a female mayor, for ten years, almost a third of a century ago and the city had an African-American police chief during that time, as well. Just recently, the city elected a lesbian mayor, Annise Parker. Houston may be a southern city, but it defies easy classification.

Houston’s ‘unusualness’ also was evident at the recent mayoral inauguration, when Joel Osteen (leader of Lakewood Church, claiming 47,000 attendees each week) gave the invocation. What made this unusual was not this mixture of religion and politics—placing one’s hand on a Bible (held by the mayor’s partner) and a ministerial invocation. The unusualness was Osteen’s clearly stated belief, made on TV’s The View, that lesbians, along with all homosexuals, aren’t “God’s best.”

Osteen blessed the new mayor, praying at her inauguration: “God, we just thank you for raising her up. We honor her today and other elected officials . . . We count it a joy and an honor to be here.”

Why would these two individuals team up for this event, when they obviously stand opposed on a deeply personal and political issue? The common wisdom is that ‘politics makes strange bedfellows (or better stated in this case, strange ‘stage-fellows’). Obviously, Mayor Parker’s choice was to have the most prominent Houston religious figure on stage with her, and Osteen had a public stage on which he could pray “in Jesus’ name.” Given Osteen’s positive-thinking ‘soft’ evangelism, perhaps he even thought that the Holy Spirit would have more room to convict and convert the Mayor’s heart.

I am not an enthusiastic proponent of prayers at public events. In spite of that and in spite of whatever calculated motivations brought these two together on the same stage, I celebrate the event, and the city, where a socially conservative evangelical leader and a progressive lesbian mayor could find some common ground, even if of self-interest.

For further information

Albert Mohler is the president of a southern baptist seminary and has a blog that I read regularly, even though I quite often disagree with him and always in the broad area of ‘sexuality’–abortion, stem cell research, cloning, family, etc, However, he writes in such a well-reasoned way that he causes me to sharpen my own thinking. This is from his most recent blog.

I arrived in New York City over the weekend and discovered that the Rev. Forrest Church had died on Thursday, September 24, after a battle against esophageal cancer.  Pastor of the Unitarian Church of All Souls on the Upper East Side for many years, Forrest Church was almost certainly the best-known and most influential Unitarian figure of the late twentieth century.
Forrest Church was in the public eye for most of his life.  His father was the late Senator Frank Church [D-Idaho], who chaired committees that investigated the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1970s.  Sen. Church also ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976.  After serving four terms in the Senate, Church was defeated for re-election in 1980.  Then, in 1984, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  He died just three months later.
Forrest Church was 61 when he died last Thursday.  He lived only two years longer than his father.  But Forrest Church did something that few people are able to do — he wrote extensively about his own (impending) death.  When told that his cancer was terminal, Forrest Church preached a sermon that was intended to help his congregation understand the process of death and dying.  In the month that followed, he wrote a book about death and the experience of approaching his own death.
In Love & Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, Church wrote of his understanding of death and its meaning.  At the end of it all, the Unitarian pastor and philosopher wrote of “my abiding belief in love after death.”
Significantly, Church wrote of his fascination with death.  As a younger person, he had romanticized death and contemplated various scenarios of a famous demise.  Later, though no longer believing himself to romanticize death, Church still seemed to see death in similar terms.  Writing as a pastor, he told of a terminally ill church member who had committed suicide with the assistance of the Hemlock Society.  Church wrote of his sympathy for her wish to remain in control of her life, even through her death.  “I could only admire her,” he wrote.
Forrest Church was a man of intelligence and culture — assets no doubt valued by his socially elite congregation at All Souls.  He was also a gifted writer.  In helpful sections of the book Church took on the “conspiracy of silence concerning death” and helpfully reminded his readers that all of us will surely die.  Church saw our modern obsession with health as a barely-disguised effort to postpone death, but to no avail.  Vegetarians and joggers die, the pastor reminds.
Church compared life to the voyage of the Titanic.  In the end, every life hits an iceberg and sinks.  His exhortation was for all people to “dare to live before you die.”
He also tied his understanding of religion to the knowledge that we shall surely die.  “I draw from a strong faith tradition which, if not orthodox, invites me to explore everything from the scriptures to ancient philosophy to current events,” Church wrote.  “But the object is always the same.  For me, religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.”
Therefore, “if religion is our human response to being alive and having to die, the purpose of life is to live in such as way that our lives will prove worth dying for.”

As is to be expected, Mohler then comments that missing from Church’s picture is any notion of life on the other side of death.  Church’s belief was in “love after death,” but not in life after death.

I admired Forrester Church, although I never met him. It surprises me that a person so theologically removed from Forrester Church has such kind words to say about him, especially in this contentious time in which we live.

For more, read http://www.albertmohler.com/2009/09/29/life-after-death-or-just-love-after-death/

I want to express my sorrow on the death of your husband. In listening to the spoken tributes at the Library, something happened to me that I want to share with you. For the first time I began to see your husband without the filter of the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. That incident had always epitomized for me the story of a rich kid who, because of family and political connections, walked away from the just consequences of his action.

This week, in hearing about a human being who, among other things, weekly read to young children in school, who was present to the families of all those Massachusetts citizens who died in Iraq or Afghanistan, and who maintained a genuine relationship with those of opposite political convictions, I was stunned.

I discovered that I had kept him encased in the mistake made so many years ago, while he had moved his life into a vitality for his family, for the Senate and for the nation. He exemplified what I call ‘the awesome tenacity of the human spirit.’

Death intrudes, leaving sorrow and grief in its wake. Yet death can also cause some to rework their priorities and to heal relationships. Teddy’s death has caused me to consider my thoughts about others, especially others of whom I am critical.

With the memories of your husband, the support of the family, and the gratitude of so many, I hope you find these days enticing you into them with anticipation and joy.

Robert Tucker
August 2009

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, 1878-1965, left Nazi Germany in 1938. Out of his experience, he came up with the word ‘eliminationism.’ At its heart eliminationism is the idea that by eliminating a person or group, those who are left can have a sane, secure and successful society. Eliminate the vile Jews and German society will be purified.

Unfortunately, a less violent form of eliminationism is now becoming mainstream in American life. Daniel Schultz, in an article “American Brokenness: A Lament,” writes:
Year upon year, starting with Rush Limbaugh and only accelerating with Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck and Michael Savage and Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin and many others, conservatives have been told by their thought leaders that the liberal perspective is illegitimate, that it is wrong and dangerous and un-American and evil.
More to the point, they have been told that liberals are not needed. They have been told that the nation would be better off without any to the left of Ronald Reagan, that an America with a particular construct of traditional social mores, an adventurous military, and an unfettered corporate capitalism could keep them safe and happy. Liberals, the story goes, only serve to disrupt the good life people could have with a free conservative hand.

As a liberal who does listen to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly—to glean whatever truths they express and to understand their thinking—I have been increasingly bothered by the constantly repetitive and insistent virulent onslaught against their liberal fellow Americans (one of whom happens to be me). Liberal is their ‘four-letter’ word, and beneath that word is the idea that elimination of liberals from any positions of power in the body politic is absolutely essential for our nation’s current health and future. This suggests that this country’s de facto motto. E pluribus unum, officially replaced in 1956 with In God We Trust, is to be reduced even further to a solitary unum.

Eliminationism is not foreign to Christians (and to the followers of other religions as well). Although there is still evidence of  eliminationism because of wrong belief, as evidenced in the Southern Baptist Convention over the past few decades,  the strongest form of eliminationism is found in the areas of abortion, same-sex marriage and religion in the public square (especially the public schools).

To me, the best of unum, politically, and fellowship, in churches, is a recognition of the value of a healthy balance shifting among the contending understandings of what is a good society, a good church. In other words, E pluribus unum.

For more, read <http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/1773/american_brokenness:_a_lament/?comments=view&cID=2578>.

Christians have been involved in health care for centuries. In the United States this often took the form of building hospitals. In the Houston Medical Center, touted as the largest in the world, there is Methodist Hospital, St. Luke’s Episcopal and the Baylor College of Medicine (Baptist Medical School). Several Baptist hospitals are spotted around the city, and a Roman Catholic hospital continues in the downtown area. What is true in one city is replicated in other cities. Other institutions instituted for the care of special groups, such as the elderly, dot the national landscape, often in small towns. The cost of care, the survival mode of churches, and the shift of focus from individual care to ‘justice’ issues in society has relegated the denominations’ health concerns to advocacy for legislative remedies.

Having been ordained in the Congregational church, the church of the Pilgrims and Puritans, their history became my history. This means I had to embrace their absurdities as well as their magnificent accomplishments. They get blamed for far more than they deserve, and I often find myself defending them from their detractors. One incident that is a blot on their record (though understandable in light of the time) is the expulsion of Anne Hutchinson and her family from the Plymouth colony.  Through the centuries Anne Hutchinson has been an icon for independent thinking, religious freedom. and standing up to authority.

Now, Anne Hutchinson may be expelled again—this time in the twenty-first century, by the Texas Board of Education.

The Board has the job of selecting textbooks for Texas schools. Board members keep trying to work ‘creation science’ into the science curriculum. Now they are focused on history, as well. One of the Board’s appointed academic experts, the Rev. Peter Marshall,  believes that America needs to be restored “to its Bible-based foundations through preaching, teaching, and writing on America’s Christian heritage and on Christian discipleship and revival.” (Apparently, he also believes that Hurricane Katrina, Watergate and the Vietnam War are the result of divine wrath.) After all, he says, Hutchinson didn’t ‘do anything’ except get herself expelled for “making trouble.” Is that any example we should be holding up for our children? The answer is obviously ‘No!’

But there is more. Anne Hutchinson has been seen as an important person in the development of the idea of a separation of church and state. Such separation, according to Peter Marshall, is a  ‘myth,’ for it promotes the false idea that America is not a Christian nation.

Junk history now joins junk science.

One could, see, if one wanted, other motives at work, since it is not just Anne Hutchinson who is banished. Also unsuitable models for students are César Chavez, labor organizer, and Thurgood Marshall, civil rights leader (head of the NAACP and the lawyer who argued the public school desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education) and this nation’s first black US Supreme Court justice.

If Anne Hutchinson is banished again, Texas students will suffer, as will students in other states. Because Texas is the second largest purchaser of textbooks, this state’s selection helps set the standard for textbooks used in other states. I don’t think Anne Hutchinson would believe that, almost four hundred years after her death, she would again be in danger of being expelled.

Bob Tucker
August 2009

An extended commentary on this issue can be found at

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/churchstate/1726/texas_board_of_education_wants_to_change_history?page=entire

A church in the Kansas City area is having a ‘Blessing of the Backpacks.’ At first, the idea startled me, but then I thought of other blessing ceremonies surrounding human activities. Certainly there are the traditional blessings of birth (baptism), coming of age (confirmation), marriage and death. Then there is the annual blessing of the shrimp boats in Galveston (and similar blessings of boats in other parts of the world). There is a time of the blessing of animals in some churches.

It may be all human activities deserve a blessing: the pencils a composer of music uses, as well as the writer’s computer.  Then there is the automobile of the realtor, the gun of the police officer and the pulpit of the preacher. Such blessings might invest a deeper significance in the tools with which we practice our trades, earn our livelihoods and provide services to others.

So, let’s hear it for backpacks.

One day I am reading that the United Church of Christ is losing churches at the rate of three each week (die or leave) and gaining churches at the rate of 0.7 each week (brand new or joining from other denominations) for a weekly loss of 2.3 churches (the UCC currently has 5,320 churches and 1,111,691 members). The next day day I am reading about the growth of Southern Baptist churches in Vermont where one out of three Vermonters claim no religious affiliation. In the six-state New England region, Southern Baptists find the growth unusually slow—in eight years in Vermont, from 17 to 37 churches. Yet, their goal is to settle 6,000 new churches in an are that has replaced the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region in our country.

Why these two items struck me is that my religious background is in the church of Colonial New England, Congregational, and I was an ordained minister in it, and its successor, the United Church of Christ, for 45 years. This year-by-year decline in my former denomination saddens me. Even more saddening is the extension of this distortion of Jesus’ message in a literal, dogmatic and exclusive Christianity.

More information is at <http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0731/p02s04-usgn.html>.