Even the occasional superb sermon—important topic, clear formulation, and engaging presentation—left me with a low-level vexation. It took years to focus on this ongoing annoying feeling and, then, even longer to identify its cause: not what was said, as I kept thinking, but the process shaping what was said. That, then, led to focusing on the different ways that scientists and ministers work, think, and articulate their views.

Minister’s sermons are, almost without exception, deductively shaped. Deductive reasoning works from the general to the specific, often called the ‘top-down’ approach. As a deductive endeavor, sermons follow the pattern of a Bible verse read, followed by an exposition, which often takes the form of three points. That deductive thinking process becomes ingrained both by listening to sermons and in seminary training.

In contrast, there is inductive thinking. I learned the difference in college philosophy; a difference, though, that never worked its way into my everyday consciousness. Inductive thinking moves from observations to generalizations, a ‘bottom-up approach.’ Inductive thinking is more the mode of scientists, and starting out to be a scientist, it is natural to me

Actually, I don’t think anyone is fully encased in either deductive or inductive thinking. Both types of thinking are used in the crucible of daily life. A child constantly lying will lead a parent to generalize about the cause (inductive). At the same time, a firm parental curfew is often imposed, with consequences, for disobedience (deductive). Parents engage in both kinds of behavior. Opinions and decisions in our daily lives are based both on gut feelings, intuitions, emotions, impulses and learned skills (inductive) and on the logic of reasoned conclusions, principles, and convictions (deductive).

Yet, I believe that for religious and scientific professionals, working in their respective fields, either deductive or inductive thinking dominates the habit of mind. It may be that the tendency to one or the other mode of thinking is a given in infancy, but each is honed in professional education and in professional work. Thus, inductive and deductive reasoning—having a marked impact on beliefs and values, decisions and actions—are so ingrained that someone speaking in the other mode can seem strange, foreign, or even wrong.

Acknowledging this difference in our mode of thinking is a way for religionists (predominantly deductive thinkers) and scientists (predominantly inductive thinkers) to begin a more fruitful dialogue. Attending to the truths that we derive from ancient texts expands our own wisdom. Attending to the truths that come from generalizing on our experiences and experiments leads us into important knowledge that adds to the ongoing wisdom of human life.

Reading a text of a new scientific discovery continues to be more satisfying for me than listening to a sermon. However, with my new understanding of why that is, I find I am more relaxed at sermon time. Now I wonder if the minister with whom I shake hands notices a difference.

Bob Tucker

September 2010

With ministers, conversations are rooted in the present, illuminated by the past; with scientists conversations draw the present into the future. The former has the solid, but static, quality of the tried and true; the latter contains the intriguing anticipatory question, ‘what’s new?’ Numerous subsequent listening-observations confirm this time zone divide.

The education of the scientist does not require the reading of Isaac Newton’s 1687 publication of the Principia, even though that book lays the groundwork for most of classical mechanics. Nor are mathematicians required to read the thirteen books of Euclid’s Elements. Yet, for the theologian, being immersed in ancient texts and the writings of past authors is an absolute requirement—the study of the Bible and the christological controversies sixteen centuries ago being just two examples.

The standard for truth is also wrapped up in different time zones. For something new in religion to be verified, it must meet the criteria in the ancient holy book or in the ancient formulations of doctrine. For science, truth is what is verified by observation and experimentation, activities found in the future.

When I walk into the office of a scientist or physician, there are often teetering stacks of journals with paper markers noting articles on current research; whereas on the library shelves in ministers’ offices, I find the theological tomes left over from student days and current literature on the practical tasks of church administration, church growth and sermonizing.

The theology of all three major western religions was formulated in a pre-Copernican world. Important Christian figures—the Pope, Martin Luther and John Calvin—all condemned Copernicus’ replacement of the earth with the sun in his 1543 book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. Although no one disputes the fact of our sun-centered planetary system, the heresy hunters will follow any person who advocates a theology forged in a post-Copernican sun-centered universe. I shudder to think of what the response of traditional believers would be if a theology, reflecting the quantum world, were articulated.

Religion offers many benefits—community, a belief system of ultimate meaning, comfort in life’s ills, and a path for  compassionate caring—but the difficulty in maintaining credibility with a theology rooted in an outmoded understanding of the universe will continue to erode Christian legitimacy. Moving into the future with one’s eyes unwaveringly fixed in the rearview mirror invariably leads to collisions with the future.

The judge in California has made his decision on the California law banning same-sex marriage. Now the decision will wend its way though the Court of Appeals and to the Supreme Court. One person, who has been a champion for homosexual rights has been Bishop Spong of the Episcopal Church. (I first heard him in the mid-80s, in a small, but packed, room in one of the colleges of Oxford, making the case for full acceptance and humane treatment.) Almost a year ago, October 15, 2009,he made this statement.

A Manifesto! The Time Has Come!

– John Shelby Spong

I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is “an abomination to God,” about how homosexuality is a “chosen lifestyle,” or about how through prayer and “spiritual counseling” homosexual persons can be “cured.” Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy. I will no longer dignify by listening to the thoughts of those who advocate “reparative therapy,” as if homosexual persons are somehow broken and need to be repaired. I will no longer talk to those who believe that the unity of the church can or should be achieved by rejecting the presence of, or at least at the expense of, gay and lesbian people. I will no longer take the time to refute the unlearned and undocumentable claims of certain world religious leaders who call homosexuality “deviant.” I will no longer listen to that pious sentimentality that certain Christian leaders continue to employ, which suggests some version of that strange and overtly dishonest phrase that “we love the sinner but hate the sin.” That statement is, I have concluded, nothing more than a self-serving lie designed to cover the fact that these people hate homosexual persons and fear homosexuality itself, but somehow know that hatred is incompatible with the Christ they claim to profess, so they adopt this face-saving and absolutely false statement. I will no longer temper my understanding of truth in order to pretend that I have even a tiny smidgen of respect for the appalling negativity that continues to emanate from religious circles where the church has for centuries conveniently perfumed its ongoing prejudices against blacks, Jews, women and homosexual persons with what it assumes is “high-sounding, pious rhetoric.” The day for that mentality has quite simply come to an end for me. I will personally neither tolerate it nor listen to it any longer. The world has moved on, leaving these elements of the Christian Church that cannot adjust to new knowledge or a new consciousness lost in a sea of their own irrelevance. They no longer talk to anyone but themselves. I will no longer seek to slow down the witness to inclusiveness by pretending that there is some middle ground between prejudice and oppression. There isn’t. Justice postponed is justice denied. That can be a resting place no longer for anyone. An old civil rights song proclaimed that the only choice awaiting those who cannot adjust to a new understanding was to “Roll on over or we’ll roll on over you!” Time waits for no one.

I will particularly ignore those members of my own Episcopal Church who seek to break away from this body to form a “new church,” claiming that this new and bigoted instrument alone now represents the Anglican Communion. Such a new ecclesiastical body is designed to allow these pathetic human beings, who are so deeply locked into a world that no longer exists, to form a community in which they can continue to hate gay people, distort gay people with their hopeless rhetoric and to be part of a religious fellowship in which they can continue to feel justified in their homophobic prejudices for the rest of their tortured lives. Church unity can never be a virtue that is preserved by allowing injustice, oppression and psychological tyranny to go unchallenged.

In my personal life, I will no longer listen to televised debates conducted by “fair-minded” channels that seek to give “both sides” of this issue “equal time.” I am aware that these stations no longer give equal time to the advocates of treating women as if they are the property of men or to the advocates of reinstating either segregation or slavery, despite the fact that when these evil institutions were coming to an end the Bible was still being quoted frequently on each of these subjects. It is time for the media to announce that there are no longer two sides to the issue of full humanity for gay and lesbian people. There is no way that justice for homosexual people can be compromised any longer.

I will no longer act as if the Papal office is to be respected if the present occupant of that office is either not willing or not able to inform and educate himself on public issues on which he dares to speak with embarrassing ineptitude. I will no longer be respectful of the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems to believe that rude behavior, intolerance and even killing prejudice is somehow acceptable, so long as it comes from third-world religious leaders, who more than anything else reveal in themselves the price that colonial oppression has required of the minds and hearts of so many of our world’s population. I see no way that ignorance and truth can be placed side by side, nor do I believe that evil is somehow less evil if the Bible is quoted to justify it. I will dismiss as unworthy of any more of my attention the wild, false and uninformed opinions of such would-be religious leaders as Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, Albert Mohler, and Robert Duncan. My country and my church have both already spent too much time, energy and money trying to accommodate these backward points of view when they are no longer even tolerable.

I make these statements because it is time to move on. The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us. Homosexual marriages will become legal, recognized by the state and pronounced holy by the church. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” will be dismantled as the policy of our armed forces. We will and we must learn that equality of citizenship is not something that should ever be submitted to a referendum. Equality under and before the law is a solemn promise conveyed to all our citizens in the Constitution itself. Can any of us imagine having a public referendum on whether slavery should continue, whether segregation should be dismantled, whether voting privileges should be offered to women? The time has come for politicians to stop hiding behind unjust laws that they themselves helped to enact, and to abandon that convenient shield of demanding a vote on the rights of full citizenship because they do not understand the difference between a constitutional democracy, which this nation has, and a “mobocracy,” which this nation rejected when it adopted its constitution. We do not put the civil rights of a minority to the vote of a plebiscite.

I will also no longer act as if I need a majority vote of some ecclesiastical body in order to bless, ordain, recognize and celebrate the lives and gifts of gay and lesbian people in the life of the church. No one should ever again be forced to submit the privilege of citizenship in this nation or membership in the Christian Church to the will of a majority vote.

The battle in both our culture and our church to rid our souls of this dying prejudice is finished. A new consciousness has arisen. A decision has quite clearly been made. Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. I do not tolerate racism or sexism any longer. From this moment on, I will no longer tolerate our culture’s various forms of homophobia. I do not care who it is who articulates these attitudes or who tries to make them sound holy with religious jargon.

I have been part of this debate for years, but things do get settled and this issue is now settled for me. I do not debate any longer with members of the “Flat Earth Society” either. I do not debate with people who think we should treat epilepsy by casting demons out of the epileptic person; I do not waste time engaging those medical opinions that suggest that bleeding the patient might release the infection. I do not converse with people who think that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as punishment for the sin of being the birthplace of Ellen DeGeneres or that the terrorists hit the United Sates on 9/11 because we tolerated homosexual people, abortions, feminism or the American Civil Liberties Union. I am tired of being embarrassed by so much of my church’s participation in causes that are quite unworthy of the Christ I serve or the God whose mystery and wonder I appreciate more each day. Indeed I feel the Christian Church should not only apologize, but do public penance for the way we have treated people of color, women, adherents of other religions and those we designated heretics, as well as gay and lesbian people.

Life moves on. As the poet James Russell Lowell once put it more than a century ago: “New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth.” I am ready now to claim the victory. I will from now on assume it and live into it. I am unwilling to argue about it or to discuss it as if there are two equally valid, competing positions any longer. The day for that mentality has simply gone forever.

This is my manifesto and my creed. I proclaim it today. I invite others to join me in this public declaration. I believe that such a public outpouring will help cleanse both the church and this nation of its own distorting past. It will restore integrity and honor to both church and state. It will signal that a new day has dawned and we are ready not just to embrace it, but also to rejoice in it and to celebrate it.

1. “For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.”

2. “As I said below, I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.” [17]

3. “My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn’t understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.”

The energy of her renunciation is felt both in her words and the three rapid postings. Her statement, “I refuse to be anti-life” is most telling.

Disturbing, for a person advocating a non-literal and non-dogmatic contemporary theology, is Anne Rice’s seemingly ignorance of a Christianity that is not ‘anti-life.’ There are numerous Christians and churches that are progressive and liberal dotting the landscape of America.

Such liberal and progressive churches are off the radar screen for most people since the media always portrays Christianity as the voice of the F-E-COTs (Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, Conservatives, Orthodox and Traditionalists). Pick an issue, and the spokesperson is invariably someone who espouses an adamant anti-life stance.

Anne Rice is reminiscent of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the most respected leaders of modern history. A Hindu, Gandhi nevertheless admired Jesus and often quoted from the Sermon on the Mount. Once when the missionary E. Stanley Jones met with Gandhi he asked him, “Mr. Gandhi, though you quote the words of Christ often, why is that you appear to so adamantly reject becoming his follower?” Gandhi replied, “Oh, I don’t reject your Christ. I love your Christ. It’s just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

For more information on Anne Rice see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Rice

Following 9/11 2001, Wright told his congregation:

We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

And then his incendiary words:

“The government gives (our children) the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ God bless America? No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people.”

This comment, repeated and repeated on TV in his passionate way, led Obama cut Jeremiah loose and ‘toss him under the bus.’

What was unfortunate, and probably intentional, given its use for political purposes, was that only half of Wright’s sentence was used. The full spoken sentence: “No, no, no, God damn America—that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people.”

As a Christian preacher, Jeremiah Wright was ‘preaching the Bible.’ Of course, America is not specifically mentioned in the Bible, but ancient Israel is, and it takes little imagination to substitute the God-blessed-and-righteous-America for the God-blessed-and-righteous-Israel. Preachers do that all the time with the Bible, or other readings from the past. Listen to the words of the ancient Hebrew prophet, Amos, preaching at a national and religious holiday—a day having the import similar to merging July Fourth and Easter—in the capital city, Bethel. [The following Bible passages are taken from Contemporary English Version, published by the American Bible Society]

The Lord said: “I will punish Israel for countless crimes, and I won’t change my mind. They sell honest people for money, and the needy are sold for the price of sandals. They smear the poor in the dirt and push aside those who are helpless. (2:6-7a).

Like us, the ancient Israelites also believed themselves special, perhaps their politicians were saying to them ‘we’re the greatest nation on the earth.’

People of Israel, … of all the nations on earth, you are the only one I have chosen. That’s why I will punish you because of your sins. (3:1-2)

To those self-satisfied religious folk who deliriously desire the Second Coming and the Rapture in which, of course, they will participate, while the rest of us wallow in agonizing deaths, have a different fate under Amos’s God.

You look foreword to the day when the Lord comes to judge. But you are in for trouble! It won’t be a time of sunshine, all will be darkness. You will run from a lion only to be met by a bear. You will escape to your house, rest your hand on the wall, and be bitten by a snake. The day when the Lord judges will be dark, very dark without a ray of light. (5:18-20)

Here comes the ‘hate’ word.

I, the Lord, hate and despise your religious celebrations and your times of worship. I won’t accept your offerings or animal sacrifices—not even your very best. No more of your noisy songs! But let justice roll down like a river and righteousness like an every flowing stream [KJV]. (5:21-24)

Can’t you hear a modern-day Amos (named Jeremiah) saying, “I hate and despise your pressing the poor into the dirt and killing the innocent with your drones. All this self-congratulatory chest-pounding and preening you do as a church and as a nation is worthless. Let justice and righteousness be your every-present companions.

What do you suppose was the official reaction to Amos’s preaching? Actually, it was not much different from what Jeremiah Wright received.

Amaziah, the priest of Bethel sent this message to King Jeroboam of Israel, Amos is plotting against you in the very heart of Israel; ou, nation cannot put up with his message for very long. Here is what he is saying,

(King) Jeroboam will be put to death, and the people will be taken to a foreign country.

Then Amaziah told me, ‘Amos, take your visions and get [the hell out of town]! Go back to Judah and earn your living there as a prophet. Don’t do any more preaching at Bethel. The king worships here at our national temple. (7:10-13)

Governmental and public  reaction, then as now, to such words in rooted in religion being a cheerleader for the nation.

Reading  Jeremiah Wright, side-by-side with the Prophet Amos, it is easy to see that, from a biblical point of view, ‘Wright was right.’

What was important, though, to Amos and to Wright, was not condemnation but the message: let justice roll down like a river and righteousness like an every flowing stream.

Perhaps we have a conflict in the family: God shaking a finger in disapproval while Jesus is giving his approval (Mark 3:1-6).
And Jesus entered again into the synagogue; and there was a man there which had a withered hand. And they watched him, whether he would heal him on the sabbath day; that they might accuse him. And he saith unto the man which had the withered hand, Stand forth. And he saith unto them, Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath days, or to do evil? To save life, or to kill? But they held their peace. And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts, he saith unto the man, Stretch forth thine hand. And he stretched it out: and his hand was restored whole as the other. And the Pharisees went forth, and straightway took counsel with the Herodians against him, how they might destroy him.

Lauren Ashley, self-proclaimed Miss Beverly Hills, now rejected by Hills officials, is drawing more media attention as an oracle than anyone else since another would-be Beauty Queen, Carrie Prejean, spoke.  Both commented on homosexuality.  We news-scanners find issues connected with it to be the most church-dividing since the Council of Nicea or the Protestant Reformation.  “Gay” could provide copy for every issue of Sightings, but we rarely notice it.  Hardly harpers on the subject, we obviously have to find some distinctive feature to justify commenting this time.  There is one.

While beauty queens usually merit being overlooked as oracles, Miss Ashley, now heaped on by “the liberal elites,” deserves credit for her integrity and consistency.  The trump card played by opponents of gay rights, gay ordination, and all the other gay things in church and often state is marked “Biblical Literalism.”  There are about six inches of print in their big fat Bibles that serve them as negative “proof texts.”  Even secular vote-seekers, when they do not make their cases on other grounds, trumpet “The Bible says…,” but rarely do any do as well as Miss Ashley at making her judgment on the basis of what the Bible actually does say.  Most of them quote parts of verses.  Not Miss Ashley:  “The Bible says that marriage is between a man and a woman,” she comments. “In Leviticus it says, ‘if man lies with mankind as he would lie with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.”  Most quoters stop there, but Ashley goes on: “They shall surely be put to death…The Bible is pretty black and white.”  So, she emphasizes, if a loving God says “that having sex with someone of your own gender is going to bring death upon you, that’s a pretty stern warning…”

Seriously: if the first half of that verse is divinely-inspired and authoritative, who are we moderns to decide that the second half is not, and that it can be shrugged off?  The same goes for other scriptural death penalty cases.  As every smart skeptic or New Atheist never tires of reminding us, Leviticus and Deuteronomy command capital punishment in numerous clear and specified instances:  when children curse their parents, when anyone blasphemes, and even when a son is persistently disobedient.  He should be put to death by divine, elder-ly, and parental authority backed by God’s law.

Contra the skeptics, New Atheists, and consistent humanists, let it be said that most Bible-believers, even the simplest and thus noblest people of faith, are sophisticated enough at exegesis and hermeneutics not to use the scriptures the way literalist Ashley does.  But does she not do us a favor by pressing the issue?  No Jews are Jews because God told their ancestors to commit omnicide against the Amalekites.  No Christians, whose book also includes Leviticus and Deuteronomy, use it to punish men who have intercourse with a menstruating wife.  No Christians in our cultures use the Bible, which never de-legitimizes slavery, to legitimize slavery.  Bible-folk pick and choose, seeing the Bible as a “book of salvation,” what Christians call “the gospel=the good news.”  It is harder to say why many pick just one command out of many hundreds and raise it above “salvation” and “gospel” or to justify “propositions” and “constitutional amendments” on grounds of biblical literalism.  Is the literal Bible really at issue?

Some anti-gay rights, anti-gay marriage, anti-et cetera folk try to make their case on the basis of psychology or sociology.  Thanks, Lauren Ashley, for relying on the Bible.  Literally.

Reference:

Sightings <ktobey@uchicago.edu>http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/02/24/Miss_Beverly_Hills_Cites_Antigay_Bible_Verse/

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?

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