Link: Kinnon TV: Why do we allow toxic leaders

http://www.kinnon.tv/2011/03/why-do-we-allow-toxic-leaders.html


Bill Kinnon puts some things better than I could ever manage to do.


Hero worship will always be with us and toxic leaders stay in power because, well, they're heroes to somebody. A hero is someone who by dint of accomplishment, charisma, and power attains glory. The hero is valuable to us because in exchange for service and loyalty the hero promises explicitly or tacitly to share some of his glory with us. Now we can tell ourselves, "Oh, I would never fall for that." We do, all the time. I've fallen for the sales pitch in numerous ways.

The thing is the appeal of the hero and his/her glory works because we need it. We tell ourselves otherwise but usually all this means is we think other people have picked heroes who aren't glorious enough. A fan of Ayn Rand will admire her and look down on those who admire communists. The same hero worship process for Rand is at work in the worship of Mao or, let's just say it, Jesus. Let's consider that Richard Dawkins has been busy declaring religion to be positively harmful and superstition is bad and we'd all be better off and there'd be less war without any relgion. None of that is provably true.

What is arguably provable is that even an atheist like Richard Dawkins promotes a form of hero worship. How? Simple, he minted the term "brights". "Atheist" is accurate but seems too negative. Dawkins came up with "bright" as a way for atheists to self-identify in a self-affirming way. You see, there it is. A hero becomes a hero by dint of great accomplishment, renown, and by making an offer of loyalty and allegiance to his cause in exchange for sharing in his glory. Even atheists do this while detesting that religious people do this with their gods. Christopher Hitchens is perfectly willing to invoke a moral connection between himself as a dissident and a dissident like Solzhenitsyn or maybe even a Bonhoeffer. When unbelievers are willing to assimilate people of faith into their lexicon of heroes (even if these men and women of faith don't pass muster with American conservative evangelicals) they show that the impulse to hero worship is irresistable even among those who claim they are too sophisticated to be duped by old-fashioned heroism.

So whether we ally ourselves to healthy leadership or toxic leadership the dynamic of hero worship and its process is fairly steady. As a Christian, of course, I must continually remind myself that my hero is Yahweh, revealed as Father, Son and Spirit. There are other heroes and scripture urges us to consider the saints of the land to be heroes worth emulating. That many toxic leaders abuse this does not mean that 1) we should never admire heroes or still less 2) that we won't have them anyway.

One of the things that may help, that I try to keep in mind is that Jesus said of teachers "By their fruit you will know them." This doesn't seem to refer to how many seats they can fill in a stadium, though wisdom will be justified by her children, I suppose. It seems to refer to the character of the teacher himself and of his disciples. There may well be many more evangelists and "apostles" than there are teachers who make disciples. We need evangelists and those who continue the work of the apostles but shepherds are also needed. I have found it useful to keep in mind an observation made by one of my pastors, that the measure of a shepherd is how he deals with the sheep he can't get anything out of. The difference between a shepherd and a hired hand is that the shepherd will care even for the sheep that isn't useful to him.

That was an epiphany for me when I heard it because, frankly, I feel like I have seen a few pastors who are shepherds in title but hired hands in heart or, at least (to avoid speaking too confidently) in their actions. We can be convinced of the rightness of our motives but God looks upon our heart, the heart that is a secret even from ourselves. I hope I have no illusions about whether or not I am a good man or a good Christian, neither is true but my hope is that Christ's goodness is more than sufficient.

Even if we speak about the dangers of toxic leaders let's not forget that the capacity to be a toxic leader or follower resides within us. A friend of mine recently joked that it is easy to be a dissident in Seattle. If you don't know what I mean just roll with me on this one. When you're in a town as left/liberal as Seattle being a dissident requires nothing of you, not even actually being a dissident. It's merely enough to strike the pose and words of a dissident to convince yourself you're not the same kind of consumeristic materialist as the rest of the allegedly benighted middle America idiots in red states. Well, that's not the same thing as being an actual dissident in the Soviet Union, is it" A dissident who isn't imperiled by dissidence isn't dissenting so much as conforming through a different means.

We need to be cautious, careful, and considerate. Not for nothing does the scripture tell us to beware lest we ourselves should fail. I could write more about toxic leaders but I believe it's enough to say that our thirst for glory that we can share with someone who has glory, however we define it, is why we must continually renounce the things we secretly and not-so-secretly take glory in our hope for and remind ourselves that Jesus is better than those, better than them, better than these. Whether our hero is toxic or not won't matter if our hero isn't Christ, will it? A toxic fan can corrupt even a righteous hero if the hero gets wind of their hero worship.

Link: The New Global Village Priests

http://michaelkrahn.com/writing/2011/03/the-new-global-village-priests/

link: NY Times book review: A Philosophy of Genocide's Roots

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/books/review/Berreby-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/books/review/Berreby-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2

Came across this set of links thanks to Mockingbird. The critique of the proposal that genocide is based on nature rather than nature is a salient one, that proposing that we are all inclined to reduce people to essential immutable essence is simply wrong both on historical and conceptual grounds. In religious terms a concept like conversion, let alone sanctification, works on the assumption that it both is possible and positively verifiable that humans can and do change. It is also possible for someone to be considered less than human, then more than human, then less than human based on criteria selected which define what truly human means.

Link: The First Post: Dull musicians have helped kill the music press

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/75907,news-comment,news-politics,johnny-dee-dull-musicians-have-helped-kill-nme-and-the-music-press

...
Perhaps people don't like reading about music any more because musicians themselves are a bit dull? For every Lady Gaga there are thousands of Justin Biebers (above) who, despite making music that people like, don't really have anything of note to communicate beyond their hair product preferences. Within NME's rock 'n' roll world that ratio's even higher (just substitute drugs for hair products).

The thing is, musicians have always been a bit dull. It's just that, in the past, journalists were given more of a license to make things up, to prod them a bit harder until they said something properly revealing. Now they wouldn't dare - through fear of upsetting Artist A so much that they refuse to attend their awards ceremony.

In the days before the internet, journalists could make a new band's music sound far more interesting than it actually was (an arrangement that worked well for both parties). Now everyone can head straight to MySpace, YouTube or Hype Machine and find out the grim reality for themselves.

I don't know if the music press has been dying at all but it has been changing and I would agree that as mainstream publications integrate arts and culture reporting into their roster of regular sections you won't be as beholden to getting Rolling Stone or a specialty magazine if there are local papers covering the actually local music scene.

I do agree that musicians as a whole can be very boring people. Music is not necessarily boring but it can be challenging to know how to write about it and in what way. This does not mean, contrary to the overused axiom, that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. That's just silly elitist snobbery. It's possible and beneficial to write about music. Pop stars and rock stars have every incentive to keep music as mysterious as possible so the average person doesn't have to wonder how mathematical all music is to one degree or another.

The best and most useful observation in this piece is that in earlier days music journalists were capable of making a band sound far more interesting than they actually were. When Musician magazine devoted an article to the band Jesus Jones twenty years ago the article was (take my word for it) vastly more interesting than anything the band actually did themselves. As for the song "Right Here, Right Now" it was, once I heard it, a fairly simple execution of a I, II, IV progression with obnoxiously breathy and weak singing. Then there were the ridiculous lyrics that spouted "Bob Dylan didn't have this to sing about." Earth to Jesus Jones, Bob Dylan was not dead at the time and disavowed being a social protest or political singer decades earlier. Bob Dylan didn't "didn't have this to sing about" but Bob Dylan is still selling albums. When last did Jesus Jones release an album again? Some twenty years later the Jesus Jones song may still be a favorite for some people but as a sentiment it's a more badly dated version of something Paul Simon expressed on Graceland years earlier--these are the days of miracles and wonders so don't cry, baby, don't cry ...

But Musician's coverage of Jesus Jones, as I recall, was interesting reading. They really made the band sound like something you might even want to listen to. After reading an interesting and well-written article about the band Jesus Jones I actually heard their stuff on the radio and wondered, "Is that it!? But that's some of the most pedestrian self-congratulatory pop I've heard in my life?" Bear with me, I guess I have to admit I could be an insufferable music snob twenty years ago, too. If you adore the music of Jesus Jones I'm not trying to be a jerk by saying they weren't even a third as good as the coverage Musician magazine gave them twenty years ago.

In fact even to write this blog entry I had to go Google the song title and rummage through some Youtube videos just to figure out what band wrote the song "Right Here, Right Now". I could only remember not liking the song and not remember who wrote it. So on the one hand if boring musicians are killing the music press maybe the music press has forgotten how good it was at promoting middling (not to say bad) bands since the dawn of the modern music press.

On the other hand, coming at all this from the perspective of a hobbyist composer and a former journalism student most people who write about music aren't really writing about the music. They are, instead, writing about what the music evokes for them or for others. It's one thing to write about the emotional content of a song as though that were writing about music and another thing entirely for Frank Zappa to comment that too many jazz players are content to play II-V-I progressions and bebop themselves into a frenzy and that there are, then, people who actually like to LISTEN to that stuff but he couldn't hold it against some people that they're easy to please. As Zappa said about Prince, his not liking anything Prince was doing didn't mean he begrudged the man making a living doing his thing.

A lot of music coverage that isn't classical music never gets to much analysis. We find it easier to talk about "what" the music evokes rather than what the music actually does. The music theory can reveal the how and why of a song that works. I spent time years ago expounding this in "Counterpoint According to Stevie Wonder" but I will take a detour here into another favorite of mine, Bob Dylan. Being able to talk about the theoretical and formal building blocks of a piece of music does not demystify it or rob it of it's musical value. If you know how Mahalia Jackson changed "His Eye Is On the Sparrow" from a theoretical standpoint that doesn't make her rendition of the song any less awe-inspiring. But permit me a return to Dylan.

Take Bob Dylan's "Most of the Time". There's a song about regret and arguing with one's self about the failure of a long-lost relationship. That's the emotional core of the song but we can also discuss the song as about six minutes of tonic and subdominant alternations with a couple of function substitutions. Now for someone dead set on the idea that music has to be about feeling and emotional meaning there's no interest in dissecting what is supposed to be mysterious.

Except that the ancient Greeks and medieval philosophy could see music as a form of applied mathematics and science. That oscillation between the tonic and dominant chords (or F major and C major, if you will) creates a musically static harmonic structure. The reason that static harmonic oscillation makes the song so effective is because Dylan's lyrics reflect ambivalence, even a double-mindedness that tries to accentuate the idea that Dylan's speaker is over the woman.

But the static chords reveal an element the lyrics avoid affirming except through the words "Most of the time" by using harmonic inertia and ambivalence in the weak, recursive harmony to reveal that even though "most of the time, she ain't on my mind. I wouldn't know her if I saw her, she's that far behind." THIS moment where he's actually singing the song is NOT one of those times. That's what makes the song effective, a combination of carefully chosen words with musical textures and substance creates a song that perfectly expresses ambivalence revealing itself in a curiously defiant form of regret where the speaker realizes that most of the time he's sold himself on an idea he knows isn't really true. Ergo the song.

If dull musicians have helped kill the music press the music press itself doesn't always do itself any favors. As the jazz critic and author Eric Nisenson pointed out, most music criticism but especially music criticism about popular styles is written not by actual music students or music historians but by English lit and writing majors. Now I ultimately couldn't buy the idea that jazz was being murdered by the neoclassical jazz impulse and of course I wouldn't since I come at the whole subject as someone interested in "classical composition".

But I agree with Nisenson's polemical observation that most people writing about music are not writing about it from the perspective of people who analyze music as music, still less from the perspective of someone who performs, composes or arranges music. If people who don't know how to talk about music with musicians as a craft attempt to write about music that may not hurt their career for quite some time ... but then again, perhaps what the internet has demonstrated is that if a person wants to write about music without actually having a command of music as a language, a craft or even (horrors) a kind of science then the internet has plenty of people blogging about music for free.

It's not just as simple as that the Justin Biebers of the world can be written about without any reference to things beyond his personality or persona (whatever those are), it's that the internet makes it easier for bands and artists to brand themselves (for better and worse) and, as the article points out, this eliminates the mediating role that music journalism used to play. A band or artist can often write as eloquently about themselves as a journalist at least while none of them are famous enough to get much coverage. So maybe dull musicians have helped to kill the music press but even the most interesting ones may not help as much as we might think. The most interesting music may be written by the most interesting people but it isn't always the case. Sometimes the men and women who have written things that have changed the course of an art form didn't live lives in such a way that we have any clear idea what made their lives even as interesting as ours.

there's therapeutic moral deism and then there's "competitive deism".

http://blog.mbird.com/2011/02/indiana-gaga-and-temple-of-superstardom.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704858404576134601105583860.html

Learned of this piece through Mockingbird (always an enjoyable blog to read), which in trun picked it up from the Wall Street Journal. Some salient segments:

Before they were famous, many of the biggest pop stars in the world believed that God wanted them to be famous, that this was his plan for them, just as it was his plan for the rest of us not to be famous. Conversely, many equally talented but slightly less famous musicians I've interviewed felt their success was accidental or undeserved—and soon after fell out of the limelight.

As I compiled and analyzed these interviews for my new book, I reached a surprising conclusion: Believing that God wants you to be famous actually improves your chances of being famous. Of course, from the standpoint of traditional theology, even in the Calvinistic world of predestination, God is much more concerned with the fate of an individual's soul than his or her secular success, and one's destiny is unknowable. So what's helping these stars is not so much religion as belief—specifically, the belief that God favors their own personal, temporal success over that of almost everyone else.

Intriguingly enough Strauss observes early in the piece that after years of interviewing pop stars who give God credit for their success (even adult movie stars) what can seem like humility the first few dozen times turns out to be something else. Perhaps like Marshall Cogburn we'll believe it the first thirty-two times we hear a Texas Ranger talking about lapping water from a mud puddle ... but we stop believing it the more times we hear it. The same thing can go with people who thank God for things in public settings. Strauss goes on to say:

Let's call it competitive theism, a self-styled spirituality that can be overlaid on any religion and has nothing to do with personal morality. This faith gap, I've noticed in the interviews I've done, is often what sets the merely famous apart from the ridiculously famous. It can make the difference between achieving what's possible and accomplishing what seems impossible.

If you THINK God has called you to change the world and be a superstar of some kind then you're more likely to become one. You can convince other people that you're humble or other people can imagine that you're humble but there is a point where if you are certain the divine entity/force/being that brought about the cosmos has appointed YOU to accomplish something big that hasn't been done you are going to be, it virtually goes without saying, mightily handicapped in the humility department. It would be difficult to find a closing thought more apt than Strauss' own:

The meek may indeed inherit the Earth, but until then, stars who are presumptuous enough to see themselves as God's chosen ones are likely to dominate the pop charts, award shows and sports championships. Talent counts for a lot, but so too does the motivating power of divine conviction.

sigh of relief about one project that is partly done

Okay, one of the four to five essays I have been tackling in my Mockingbird project is done. Truth to tell this is much less an essay series and more like a small book. It's going to include a number of polemics and observations about 1980s nostalgia of various kinds but I want to merely say that I have finished, mostly to my satisfaction, the first major chunk in the series.

I still feel there are all sorts of things that could have been better but I may have to settle for the reality that if I can spend a decade working on a sonata allegro form for a piano sonata that I can be hard on myself and a perfectionist about thematic exploration and arguments in essays. Or maybe I just have this impression about myself and I'm not that much of a stickler for words or phrases. :)

sublimating numerous writing projects

There's a lot I mean to write here that I don't write. It's not for lack of interest in writing in the abstract but I realize I have other priorities a lot of the time and the ideas I want to write about are absurdly messy and wide-ranging. I haven't finished the Hell series, obviously. I haven't tackled new material in the stuff I was working on for City of God, which turns out to be okay since they're revamping and relaunching their format. Plus Mockingbird is covering some of the material I was planning on touching upon anyway.

And, speaking of Mockingbird, I have been writing and rewriting a bunch of stuff in a big project for them. My worry now has been that, as ever, I aspire to do to much with a project that could be fairly small. This was just going to be a simple overview of a few shows I like and it has mutated into a meditation on the ethical worlds of pop narratives, an examination of the self-deceiving nature of nostalgia, the pragmatic ways in which what we lionize from our past often had blatantly mundane or craven origins, and a deliberately polemical take-down of a lot of what my generation considers pop culture mythology. Most of what passes for "mythology" or pop culture iconography isn't really that at all and while I am tempted to expound upon this at length here I'm working very hard to save all of that stuff for Mockingbird!

"You deserve Hell. Everything else is a gift"

I won't need to advertise who tweeted this. This is an example of a theological statement that is true but can be pastorally useless. Apart from the salvation given to us by the Father through Christ and the work of the Spirit we are all doomed to continual death. All Christians can agree on this. The fact there is even such a thing as infant baptism at least suggests this in part. And I have already tipped my hand to alert readers who wonder where I might be going with this.

As folks at the BHT have been discussing, there are some simple, simply observed shortcomings to this simple theological statement, the universal proclamation that "you" deserve Hell and that everything else (whatever that may be in your life), is a gift.

If it is true (and it is) that all people apart from saving faith in Christ deserve Hell then what about aborted or miscarried babies? What about babies who die in miscarriage? If one holds to a staunch credobaptist position as Driscoll does, and if one holds that baptism is symbolic entry into the Church rather than having any baptismal regenerative effect then a baby who dies as the result of miscarriage has not had the time to make the intellectual assent necessary to be said to have believed the Gospel. Furthermore if one affirms both natural and federal headship as the means through which Adam's sin is imputed to each generation of sinners this means that babies who die apart from Christ cook like scrambled eggs in Hell (as my brother Toroto Man decided to so inelegantly put it).

So Driscoll can affirm that it is true that we all deserve Hell and everything else is a gift. Does this then mean he told his wife Grace after she miscarried that the dead babies deserved Hell? No, pretty obviously he did NOT tell his wife that, just as he wouldn't tell women who have aborted babies that those babies have been doomed to Hell because they weren't able to make a sufficiently articulate profession of faith in the substitutionary atoning work of the second person of the Trinity on the Cross.

If someone has been raped or physically abused by a parent; if someone has been defrauded by an employer; if someone has been murdered; if someone has been physically wrecked in some way by the limitations of medical practice then these things, however harmful, are still better than a person deserves. Notice I'm not contesting the universal applicability of the statement, just pointing out that it can make a hash of the practical application of a substrata of Christian teaching, particularly for staunch credobaptists who hold that the purpose of baptism is symbolic and public recognition of an existing faith in Christ. I do hold that is one of the things required for baptism but I'm less about sacramentology here than the gap between universal affirmation and personal pastoral or Christian conduct.

I strongly doubt that Driscoll told his wife her lost babies were probably in Hell but that they can hope the Lord in His kindness has preserved them. In fact I would affirm there is nothing wrong with, as it were, hoping against hope on this issue. From the standpoint of pastoral care and public Christian profession the tension is not in affirming the paradox that the babies you lost "deserve to go to Hell while hoping Christ will preserve them, it's the gap between the universal declaration with respect to everyone while privately living in a way that tends to assume that the Lord "will" be merciful. In other words, we can declare confidently what everyone deserves on the basis of our being sinners in public but privately we will still feel there are things that have happened to us that are terrible and should not have happened.

Driscoll, for instance, has often spoken about how the death of his grandfather angered him and that he didn't think that the world ought to be the kind of one where grandsons lose their grandparents to death. But so what? The best Driscoll's grandfather deserved was Hell and everything else was just a gift right? Driscoll and I can both affirm that abstraction but that won't make either of us feel less miserable when people we love die, will it?

Now of course a tweet is going to be nothing more than a pithy statement meant to provoke thought and that far Driscoll's tweet cannot but succeed. Well done stirring up conversation, Mark. And as I have said repeatedly, I don't even contest the basic truth of the assertion given some ten years of context in which to understand what Mark does and doesn't mean by the tweet! I have made no real effort to hide my identity and Mark himself knows I have vouched for him in numerous contexts and even fielded theological questions on his behalf. So the last thing I want anyone to surmise is that I'm just looking to take him down. What I'm trying to do is to fairly grant what I understand the intent behind his tweet to be while granting the legitimacy of concerns some people have about how this kind of theology would play out in pastoral counseling settings.

I am, however, not very interested in explaining the nuts and bolts of how a truncated hamartiology actually has played itself out in pastoral counseling settings, if you get my meaning! I certainly won't do it in this blog. It will suffice to say that I have written elsewhere on this blog about my concerns about the truncated hamartiology that pervades the teaching and culture at Mars Hill. Perhaps the best example of the tension between the formal observation and practice is with aborted and miscarried children. I have not seen any married person or parent at Mars Hill seriously propose that without baptism and an articulated faith in Christ that dead babies go to Hell. I know one single guy who has but even he made that point at least half in polemical jest. Still, the jest has a certain truth to it, if one were consistent about total depravity, credobaptism, and imputation then it would be necessary to suppose by default that all miscarried or aborted babies end up in Hell estranged from Christ.

If it's fair to declare categorically that even rape victims have gotten better than they deserved because they deserve Hell or that aborted babies deserve Hell then it's fair to point out that if there be any gap between the universality of this proclamation and how we treat the people we actually live with here and now then there's a "tension" at work and that resolving that "tension" into one extreme or the other may be a sign of a weakness in our doctrine, our lives with respect to the doctrine we profess, or potentially both.

That said, it's not a weakness I personally feel is necessary to hammer on any time I think I see it. Pointing out the paradox of not wanting to live out the implications of doctrines we affirm in the abstract is just one of the challenges of Christian living. If you're unwilling to say that family members or friends are not even Christians because they don't hold to your church's doctrines then you're human enough to realize that you don't want to embrace something that would preclude you from loving your neighbor. Our hope is in the kindness of Christ extended to us by the Father and at work in us through the Spirit more than in our ability to always and only consistently live in light of what we say about that. I.e. Lord Jesus, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. [Just because I'm a Presbyterian doesn't mean I can't appreciate a prayer with Orthodox roots]

link: Publisher sues Benny Hinn for moral turpitude

http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/antheabutler/4290/publisher_sues_televangelist_benny_hinn_for_

One commenter asked whether it was biblical for a publisher to sue Hinn about moral failings. The question seemed rhetorical with an assumption that the answer is "no" the publisher shouldn't be able to sue Hinn. Hinn admitted to a relationship with White and then agreed to pay back the advance given to him by the publisher for a few books which, to date, he has not done. In this case telling the publisher "Why not rather be wronged?" is to say Hinn is allowed to not keep his word and pay back money he was given on the trust that he was acting in good character. Sure, I don't know all the facts involved but if it's verifiable that Hinn promised X in response to Y and then has not fulfilled his promise its his breach of contract.

Or, as Mark Driscoll put it a few years ago, an awful lot of Christians like to say Christians shouldn't sue each other as a way to give themselves a biblically quoted loophole for doing shoddy and unprofessional work and that he'd seen a few Christians abuse the no lawsuits teaching to defraud fellow believers. Unsurprisingly, Driscoll has posted a link to this over on his twitter. Obviously I have had my differences with Driscoll on a few key issues over the last few years but on the subject of Hinn my hunch is Mark and I are in basic agreement.

your anger destroys, Christ's anger raises the dead

Do not be quick to be angry for anger lodges in the bosom of fools.

Ecclesiastes 7:9 is a verse that I hope I do not forget for a long time. There is a wealth of beautiful, if grim, observations in Ecclesiastes but one of the highest concentrations of these observations surely lays in chapter 7. yet these grim observations are reasons for hope if in a paradoxical way. To know that anger lodges in the heart of a fool is to recognize a path toa void, a path many have seen embraced but have seen end in ruin.

What makes the melancholy observations of Ecclesiastes a bit more "meta" if you will is that I have seen people who have touted the wisdom and beauty and realism of Ecclesiastes while flagrantly ignoring its advice, particularly the advice of THIS passage. I've seen people not only be quick to be angry but to lionize it as a demonstration of God-approved behavior. I have seen others embrace wrath as a way to powerfully motivate action. I now cannot help but consider, having long since heard Tim Keller's sermon "The Furious Love of Jesus" that the wrath of Christ raised Lazarus from the dead while the synoptics do not actually tell us Jesus cleansed the temple in anger.

I know a few too many Christians who would attempt to say that when Jesus cleared teh Temple He was angry. I know why people may wish it to be so but the biblical text does not actually say Christ was angry. We have to infer that from thetext. Yet John tells us plainly that Christ at Lazarus' toom was quaking with rage. Still, it is easier (as I blogged earlier) for Christians who want to justify their own actions taken in wrath to cite Jesus cleansing the Temple because it's easier to invoke our Lord acting in a way that destroys a small evil than to invoke our Lord's wrath that leads Him to raise a man from the dead. Arguably money-changers ripping people off is not as great a terror or evil in the universe as death itself.

Atanas Ourkouzounov has a new website up

http://falseclassic.com/Falseclassic/Welcome.html

Go look at it NOW if you have any interest in classical guitar music, especially in chamber music. Go!

Link, by way of Fearsome Tycoon: Priestly Rants: Wal-Mart Jesus

http://priestlyrant.com/wal-mart-jesus/1458.html#more-1458

I discovered this blog by way of Fearsome Tycoon linking to another entry in it and so I have decided, since I'm in a linky mood this week, to link to an entry I found intriguing.

A lion dies on Broadway

As the lion's eyes grew dim
and life withered in his bones
he felt his lungs burdened by
the weight of too many years.
His claws were dull, but his ears
could hear the panting of dogs
revolving around him,
ebbing and flowing,
like the rustling of the grass.

The last thing he felt
was the close of jaws upon him
and the scuffling on his flesh
of claws that could not retract.
He felt his life bursting forth
like opened floodgates--
Dull but insistent pain,
every victory and pleasure draining
as he felt dogs cleaning his ribs.

And in the moment before darkness
swallowed him, at last, whole,
he thought to himself,
"At least I was no dog."

First draft, just riffing on a passage in Ecclesiastes. Don't judge it too harshly or consider it, er, too meaty.

Not every revolution that succeeds is a success and not every revolution that fails is a failure

http://www.slate.com/id/2285696/

I have often found myself interested in the things Anne Applebaum has written in the last decade about international politics. She has written recently about revolutions that have been afoot in the Middle East and has pointed out that not all revolutions that fail in the short term fail in the long run. Not all revolutions that succeed in the short term bring about lasting change.
Want to take a wild guess where I might go with this? Yes, to the young, restless and Reformed. After a decade of being connected to and observing the YRR's the older I get the more convinced I am that what was once the emergent/emerging muddle is redistributing itself back into, you guessed it, the standard conservative and liberal Protestant streams that the emerging/emergent movement was supposedly going to differentiate itself from. For a few short years I genuinely believe it was possible this was not going to be the case but as far back as 2002 if people asked me what Mars Hill was theologically I would say, without hesitation, "basically we're Reformed Baptists". I don't think any0ne who looks at the ecclesiological and sociological data would disagree if he or she were honest. The young Calvinist bucks from ten and fifteen years ago are reinventing the wheel and the wheel is the Calvinist Baptist tradition or the Presbyterian tradition. I have thrown my hat into the ring of the Presbyterian tradition because compared to the Calvinist Baptist crowd there's less wheel reinvention going on.

I could feel bad or cranky that this seems to happen in each generation in the Reformation but that's how it is. It's also how it is in each generation of life within the Church. We are called to rediscover the wheel. Our reinvention of the wheel might be better described as discovering for ourselves what the apostles and saints have passed on to us. There will inevitably be things that we succeed and fail in apprehending. As God permitted the kingdom of Israel, His people, suffer division and schism prior to the coming of Christ in the first Advent I am less shocked, now that I'm in my somewhat later thirties, to realize that God is perfectly content to let schisms and disruptions happen in the Church even though He has disapproved of it. God permits many, many terrible things He doesn't approve of but nevertheless permits.

J. I . Packer once gave a lecture series in which he points out that if we look at the lives and work of the Puritans we will see that they all failed to achieve the reforms and changes they aspired to for the Church of England. Those of us who arrived at adulthood in the last fifteen years have seen a few church movements come and go and have begun to settle into more old school stuff. Do we all regret that we were part of that emerging/emergent/young restlesst Reformed thing? Probably not, probably not even most of us, excepting maybe the resentful ex-Christians and that's another matter.

But I suppose what sticks with me is that we must remember not to make the prosperity gospel mistake of equating success and influence with godliness. For every First Great Awakening we can cite there's always a Second Great Awakening. We can talk ourselves into believing we're on the train that is the next first great awakening but people have been doing that in America for centuries. I don't wish to get into all the rigamarolle about Americans, revivalism, and those cultural and historical currents. Just as every generation of premillenial dispensationalists has been tempted to believe Jesus would have to come back in their lifetimes so every generation of revivalist-influenced Americans hopes that THIS generation will be the one that transforms the world for Jesus. Despite any premillenial dispensationalist stuff everyone ends up being as giddy as an ambitious post-millenial historicist at the idea that we can make the world a better place and hand it to Jesus on a silver platter.

Maybe that's why the Lord has allowed things like World War 1 to happen, to take the wind out of the sails of a generation of Christians eager to congratulate themselves in the name of the Lord for their faithfulness and obedience, and talking about how they would usher in a new great age in the history of God's people that would be remembered for generations like the great saints of old.

If memory serves there is a whole wonderful, bewildering and terrifying genre of iterature in the canon for those kinds of people. I hear rumors that some people refer to this as prophetic literature. Did the prophets ever successfully convince God's people to turn from their path back to the Lord? Yet the failures of the prophets were not merely immortalized, they were canonized. Something to consider when we wish to see the success of a ministry or movement as a sign of the Lord's blessing and favor and, worse yet, of our own faithfulness and obedience.

Link:The Misnomer of Righteous Anger--human fallability and biblical authors

http://www.theologyforwomen.org/2011/02/misnomer-righteous-anger.html#comments


One of the things Wendy pointed out in her post about righteous anger as a misnomer among Christians is that it is popular to point out that Jesus got angry and cleansed the Temple. This can often be cited as a rationalization that Christians can and should be angry. I suppose that if a Christian wants to rationalize acting in wrath the Temple cleansing is substantially easier than Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead! It's easier to have our wrath motivate us to destroy someone's property than to raise someone from the dead! Don't believe me? Well, go get yourself Tim Keller's sermon "The Furious Love of Jesus" and listen to that sermon (head over to Redeemer Presbyterian's website in case you don't know who Tim Keller is or have ever heard of him before).

But I propose that there is a simple reason a Christian may prefer to invoke the wrath of Jesus rather than other biblical authors. Most other biblical authors reveal their profound fallability. How many men have I heard in the realm of the young, restless and Reformed who talk about king David being some whiny emo boy? You would think these theo-bloggers with beards and toddlers were manlier than a person who by his own account killed a bear when he was a child and who figured out how to protect his father's sheep from lions and won a substantial victory for his country in single combat against a neighboring army. Oh, but, well, David was a whiny emo boy, eh?

But we get stuck because David wrote psalms that are prophecies and in scripture. Nehemiah wrote a book. Daniel wrote a book. Jeremiah wrote a book. One of the things Christians have to wrestle with is that we affirm that no one is righteous, not even one. All people are sinners being saved by grace and yet we also affirm the truth and reliability of the scriptures. This confronts us with an awkward paradox which, I believe, is part of what makes it so easy for Christians to misappropriate and abuse the scriptures. We want to conflate the words of men through which the Word of God has been given us so that we can eliminate the human voice (which I admit has been my big hang up over much of my life). Or if we don't fall prey to that temptation we do what most theological liberals do, which is to assume an equivalency between any claim of divine origination with the presumption of such by human authors which allows us to screen out whatever we dislike in the scriptures to not rock our own boats too much.

Now Docetism proper is a heretical teaching regarding the nature of Christ but there can be a sort of scriptural docetism which posits that not only is the whole of scripture infallable and inerrant but of necessity the vessels through whom the word of the Lord came can be taken as prescriptive in example. To put it most simply, it's the mistake of assuming that what did happen in the biblical narrative is what the Lord "wanted" to happen by way of prescriptive rather than permissive will. Just because Solomon came into power the way he did does not mean God desire that that was the way it happened. Conflating what are often called the decretive and permissive wills of God is the fastest path to a form of ontological monism regarding the divine. In other words, the hyper-Calvinist (and all other practicing Christians would say Calvinists as a whole are guilty of this) comes off as essentially a kind of pantheist in which EVERYTHING must be taken as a manifestation of the divine will.

One of the points Wendy made that I believe will at some point warrant a separate blog entry (which, I guess, I'm writing now) is that simply because something is described in scripture does not mean we should emulate. Wendy, by referring to Nehemiah's wrath, is going so far as to point out that not only are we to avoid emulating certain behaviors described in the scripture we are also required to discern character flaws in the biblical authors themselves that we must avoid. It is interesting that in the neo-Calvinist realms I have been in that there is a definite set of prejudices and preferences with respect to this challenging task. The verdict has been to conspicuously cite David's whiny emo nature, self-aggrandizing, capacity for deceit, and his sexual ethics as flaws to avoid. Solomon's henotheistic bent and polyamory are held in proper disdain. Samson's being a stupid horndog is also held as something to avoid.

But what about Samuel's shameless nepotism and self-pity when he was confronted about the wickedness of his children? What about David's timidity in tackling the wickedness of his most powerful military and political allies? What about David's striking up pacts with pagan empires as a way to create military and financial security? What about Jehoshephat's clinging to traditions and attempting to forge alliances with the wicked? What about Amaziah's righteousness that lasted only as long as he obtained political and financial victories, after which he simply appropriated the gods of the very people against whom Yahweh had given him victory? What about Nehemiah's wrath? What about the possibility that at least some biblical scholars have proposed that Ezekiel may have been, well, insane? I don't really need to get into the various things theologians and commentators have said about the weeping prophet, do I?

All o fthis is to say is that if we take seriously that all are fallible save the Lord then we must reckon with the reality that there will be manifestations of human sin and failure even within the scriptures that, paradoxically, does not mean we are not reading the word of the Lord and least of all does not mean we cannot benefit from it.

I can't really begin to broach all of these issues since it would entail the entirety of scripture. I do have a few haphazard suggestions off the top of my head having read the scriptures almost my whole life.

1) First and foremost recognize that the character flaws of a biblical author are real but that this does not nullify the importance of their contribution to scripture.

Samuel had an even worse problem with nepotism as a way of choosing leaders than Eli did and Eli was explicitly punished by God for his nepotism allowing him and his sons to get fat off of the sacrifices of His people. We don't know in detail why Samuel ended up having the same leadership failings as Eli because Eli was basically his functional father figure. It doesn't require a lot of explanation but it does require that we remember this failure being passed on. Samuel may have been right to point out that Israel was asking for a king sinfully because they didn't trust the Lord but it is equally true that Samuel wasn't above self-pity and reproach based on resentment because he felt rejected by the people and because he wanted to justify himself even in his failures over against a people he believed owed him more respect.

But Samuel is still a man of God we can respect and emulate for his willingness to share difficult messages at difficult times. At his best he did what propets were supposed to do, share the worst possible news without sugar-coating it any way in an attempt to warn people away from a path they were travelling that would only end in death.

2) We must recognize that, strangely, God can actually use the worst character traits of a person to accomplish a purpose we may never know about.

It's easy to talk smack about Samson but Samson is mentioned as a hero of the faith. Why? He was a stupid bloodthirsty horndog who wasn't even that bright. He had no problem pursuing foreign women as wives and ignoring the advice of his parents. Yet scripture makes it plain that God intended to use all of these things as a way to punish the Phillistines. God can even use the worst character flaws of a person to accomplish His purposes. At no point are we ever told that Samson himself was ever aware of this.

3) The massive character defects of those whom Yahweh has chosen to use do not necessarily disqualify them from the role for which He has appointed them.

Too many Christians seem to assume that this or that character flaw automatically and permanently disqualifies a man or a woman from having this or that role. To get pointy about this, the president of the united states is providentially placed there by the Lord regardless of how fit or unfit you think he/she is for the position. Same goes for your dad and mom. In any event you can't control those circumstances anyway so even if you aren't religious you know full well that crying over spilled milk won't change anything. As a certain author put it, memoirs about childhoods full of frustration does not merit writing yet another memoir about an unremarkable or pedestrian life. That is another thought for another time.

All of this is to say that God seems to rejoice in using people not merely despite their sins and weaknesses but, perhaps this is going too far, even because of those sins and weaknesses.

4) [As Wendy's own blog entry and subsequent comments reveals] One role of prescriptive passages in scripture is to help shed light on descriptive passages in scripture. If in the psalms or the apostolic epistles we are told that human anger never brings about the righteousness or jusitce of God we must bear this in mind when reading Nehemiah's frequently self-justifying narrative. What this does not mean is that we, say, ignore passages of Proverbs that say things we don't like on the basis of character flaws ascribed to Solomon. The first reason for this I have already explained but the second reason is because Solomon clearly authorized the compilation of the book of Proverbs and did not actually come up with all that material himself.

Second of all, since the authorship of Ecclesiastes is not universally agreed upon even by conservative scholars we must recognize that the way ancient patronage in the arts worked was that the patron could and did accept authorship or ownership of works created on his behalf by others. In other words, dear reader, by ancient standards you can't dismiss the wisdom shared in the scriptures attributed to Solomon because it's frequently his presenting material he has collected to begin with, which means his character flaws described in Kings and Chronicles can't be held against him if there's something in Proverbs you don't like.

That's about all I feel like writing on the subject for now. My aim is merely to broach a broader subject that Wendy's recent post on Practical Theology for Women opens up. We should neither denigrate biblical authors and consider them unuseful once we have discovered they were sinners like us. Nor should we attempt to exonerate them in the midst of their failures because we feel we must do so in order to see to it that the scriptures are still seen as the inspired word of God. They will still be this even after we recognize in biblical authors some of the sins we ourselves struggle with.

In fact, now that I think of it, one of the bad habits in the young, restless and Reformed crowd has often been to pass judgment on the weakness of biblical figures who possessed character flaws the speaker in question believes he does NOT have. A guy who is a music pastor or a preacher or a blogger who laments David's whiny emo boy status probably does not see himself as being capable of David's self-pity or deceit or pragmatism or susceptibility to the physical charms of an attractive woman. We in our Christian walk can find it most easy to criticize those flaws we can't even conceive we would ever have ourselves. But the apostles warned us about that. If anyone thinks he stands take heed lest he fall! Just as we should not forget that biblical authors struggled with sins we should be cautious in citing a biblical author's virtues (as we see them) as mirroring our own. That becomes a terribly surreptitious way in which we place ourselves above the scriptures having convinced ourselves that what we're really doing is submitting ourselves to the scriptures.

At a personal, devotional level I end up studying commentaries. I end up reading and rereading. I end up discussing the scriptures with any and all friends and family interested in discussing the scriptures. I don't say this merely as a pious platitude. I need to discuss the scriptures because it is often in discussing and debating what a passage refers to that I can gain some insight both into the scriptures and myself, particularly blind spots about myself or about the ways in which the Lord works and the Lord's character. There are points where I have to confess I don't understand what a biblical author is getting at or why they express certain emotions or ideas in the way they do and want to know how and why that is the case. Conceding the possibility that in some cases some of the most interesting or frustrating figures in scripture are those people who have similar or dissimilar character flaws helps me better understand what the Spirit has seen fit to give us in the scriptures for our benefit.

Link: Internet Monk: "The Real Prosperity Gospel"

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/imonk-classic-the-real-prosperity-gospel

Chaplain Mike resposted this as an iMonk classic, and it is a classic. For that reason I'm posting a link to it again because Michael's writing has been a staple in my life over the last ... has it really been nine years?

sometimes one good troll deserves another

Social networking tools are curious things. It is through them that I became familiar with the term "troll". It probably goes without saying that if you are even able to read this you have, at some point, probably learned what a troll is. I was born in the generation that had my teen years virtually behind me by the time the internet was invented so the term "troll" was coined, in all likelihood by someone in my generation. We know that the troll is someone who will, like the of-synonymous flame-baiter, seek out making incendiary and controversial statements, pull back, and then watch the fireworks. He or she has more fun being the center of negative attention than not getting any attention at all.

Well, a curious quality many (though not all) trolls have is a self-righteous capacity to play the game and not necessarily want to be on the receiving end of it. The troll has no problem going to someone else's page, whatever it may be, and making a comment about how stupid or liberal or conservative or terrible a person is by virtue of professing an unfeigned affection for something. Turn things around and tell the troll he or she is a troll and protests ensue. Trolls have, at least sometimes, a pronounced preference for dishing out rather than taking the treatment they traffic in.

One person in particular who increasing seems to me to have a weakness for trolling can troll merrily along in his own page. That's what personal pages are for. But he got upset that someone showed up from his past and told him he was wrong. It's too bad that happens but this guy himself, a few years ago, went to another person's personal page and declared the guy was a fan of ignorance and racism on the guy's own page. When the guy said they could disagree and still be friends the troll said they were not even friends and wouldn't be and that if this kind of reply to him went any further he was going to report harrassment. The troll didn't seem to put together that if the people who oversaw those kinds of things actually looked at the situation they would say HE was the one making harrassing remarks on other people's pages.

So while I sort of sympathize with the reality that it feels aggravating to have people show up on something you worked on and posting flaming remarks or calling you an idiot or what have you that's just how web pages are. Anonymous flame-baiting is just part of the internet and if there's anything social networking tools and discussion forums have revealed it's that even when you have to use your real name to participate in a discussion the internet can bring out the worst in people because your "self" on the internet is always a persona even when you are being most honest and most yourself.

The problem isn't so much that "you" aren't real it's that like any constructed mediated reality (I just revealed I was a communications major, eh?) the message is never the whole thing. The perception of you will be still another thing than your presentation of yourself to others as perceived by yourself. You can think you are a correctly-thinking person who is put-upon by the ignorance and evil of lesser people and the rest of the world, without much error, will possibly perceive you as a touchy, self-righteous jerk excepting those people who are already disposed to think everything you say is right and true and awesome and you could STILL be a jerk precisely because of who your fan club is. As the old axiom has it, birds of a feather flock together.

I am at a stage in my life where having looked for work for a bit more than a year and using social networking tools to stay in touch with people I rarely get to see I notice that, well, some of the people I used to hang out with a lot are frequently trolls. I don't say that to suggest they don't have many qualities I can respect and even admire. It would be wrong to dismiss the troll as merely a troll because trollish behavior invites that. Indeed, it does invite that and it may well be an adult variation of the old proverb that some children would rather have negative attention than be ignored.

But the thing is that to merely dismiss the troll as just a troll is to do to the troll what the troll does to everyone else, which is to judge and dismiss entire categories of humanity on the basis of pre-established types. I have seen this all the time between liberals and conservatives, radicals and reactionaries, the religious and non-religious. A man who hates all people from the American South is no better than the racist Republican inbred hicks he or she thinks are worthy of his contempt.

On the other hand, there is a time to not respond to a fool according to his folly or you become a fool like him, but there is also a time to respond to a fool according to his folly. Answer a fool according to his folly or he shall become wise in his own eyes. Of course with some fools it's far too late to hope that responding to a fool according to his folly will prevent him from becoming wise in his own eyes. And by extension even the fool has more hope than someone who is wise in his own eyes. It is best to consider, above all else, that it is better to actually be a fool than to c0nsider yourself smarter than the average bear (even if you ARE smarter than average the race is not to the swift, nor victory to the strong, nor riches to the wise but time and chance happen to them all).

Sometimes a troll deserves the posts of a troll but I would rather not be a troll at all. Still, I must say that at times I have been a troll and that everyone will be a troll to someone at some point. This is why in the big picture of the internet it is necessary to at some level not condemn trolls by the measure trolls condemn others as trolls. It is also necessary, at times, to reply to trolls in such a way as to lead them to reveal the trollish nature of their enterprise. If you want to troll all you want on your own space that's what it is. It isn't even technically trolling. :) Trolling is, so to speak, when you take your trollish disposition and share it as a gift that keeps on giving in someone else's space. So don't be a troll but if you find that you are a troll then bear with more equanimity those that troll you. Do not take to heart everything that people say or you will hear your servant cursing you and you know that you have yourself many times cursed others.

See, trolls existed even in the times of biblical authors before the internet was ever invented. As Ecclesiastes put it at the outset, there is nothing new under the sun? Do you see trolls on the internet? Oh, well, they were in existence long ago!

and that other writing project continues

One of the problems of being a perfectionist and insecure in one's abilities as a writer is constantlys crapping and rewriting stuff. Well, no, that's what writers SHOULD do but it means that I have been taking longer than I intended to to get more work done on a big writing project. Well, news about the substantial trouble with my mother's health while in my sixteenth month of employment played a role, too. I can admit that. There has been enough family health drama in pretty much my whole family in tandem with my job search and uncertainties about whether I'd keep a roof over my head that almost anyone could appreciate that writing a big treatise on ethics in the narrative world of cartoons would be, uh, an optional project compared to making rent. That and I didn't anticipate that my glasses would literally fall apart at the start of 2011. Lots of things have gone wrong that I never thought would go wrong or was already afraid was going wrong that confirmed my fears.

BUT, God willing, and mustering up more will and mental discipline I hope to finish a hefty project for some blogging friends of mine. That's all I plan to say about it hear but regular readers of the blog won't have to guess TOO hard what the project is. I have made what I consider to be some important breakthroughs both in terms of the structure and concepts of the work as a whole. Along the way I have formulated some polemical ideas about the role of nostalgia in revisiting 1980s properties not in the revisitations of late but in the hostility toward those reboots and the nostalgia associated with the hostility. To remain cryptic, it connects to some of the bitter rants from unmarried guys in their thirties who loathe certain reboots and pine for the allegedly unsullied purity of the stuff they grew up with. I have a great deal more to say about that but I'm saving it for the writing project itself.

Link: Internet Monk: The Bad News of Self Righteousness

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/the-bad-news-of-self-righteousness#more-17202

Chaplain Mike over at Internet Monk has a piece about how Joyce Meyer was able to turn the death of her brother into an opportunity to talk about how he made bad choices and died while she made good choices and has lived. Might not be the real intent of what Meyer actually said and I have to note that I have never listened to anything Meyer has ever taught and have never had use for it.

I can grant Meyer's point about "personal effects" is not about material possessions but a goofy pun on what effects you leave in your wake after you have died. I am not thereby more amused or persuaded that that whole lien of thinking is beneficial but I am at least going to grant the benefit of a doubt that "effects" was intended as the sum of the lived life and not as a reference to possessions. A cheesy pun from a preacher is not something new. I DID listen to a decade of Driscoll sermons and hear songs by Team Strike Force after all! Much as I dislike puns personally I grant that the substance of the pun rather than the style of punning itself ought to be the primary concern. :)

As to seed principles of faith I can take that as being as unhelpful as the "reverse engineering your life" idea. Both are forms of using a modicum of Christian teaching to tell people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, map out the life they want, and to go pursue that. Yahweh told Abraham to pack up his stuff and to go to the land that He would show him. God is a God who makes His children wander in the wilderness.

Even though Christ is risen if we fail to understand the nature of being aliens to this world it may be because we fail to understand that in a profound and broad level we are all like exiles, all like Israelites who have received teh promise of deliverance but have not yet seen the parting of the Red Sea. As I wrote earlier in the week the central struggle in Christian life is recognizing that we know in part, we prophecy in part, and we have received the promises of God in Christ in part. I realize how easy it is to be distracted by the full delivery of the promises that come through temptation and may the Lord grant that I am better able to resist these lures.

A seed principle of faith may have some kernel of truth to it but as Dostoevsky famously quoted from John, unless a kernal of wheat dies it will yield no fruit. Perhaps the seed of your faith that you think would yield a bountiful harvest for God actually needs to die before it will bear any crop. No, I'm not attempting to make some analogy to Meyer's dead brother. I'm talking about the whole seed faith concept itself. The partial truth is that we are invited to trust in a God who has said "I go to prepare a place for you". That place is still in the process of being prepared. We are invited to trust that the "not yet" is much better than any "already" we can imagine or even any "not yet" we would procure for ourselves even through the avenue of some "seed faith principle". But this kindness comes unbidden and unsought for and perhaps because of that it is all too easy to not be grateful for it.

The appeal of ideology and the disposable (single) male

Many better authors and thinkers have written on this matter before but as I nudge past the middle of my thirties I begin to notice that by now many men have paired off in one form or another or have made pairing off the conspicuous goal of their lives. It is the holy grail of manhood, more or less, to be paired off. In the eyes of many such men (and women) to have not have been significantly othered is a sign of failure.

There are, however, people who consider the act of becoming significantly othered, or rather the process of pairing off, is ultimately and irrevocably a sign of a problem. I am not disposed to either position but I notice that a few guys have decided that marriage and epecially childrearing i s symptomatic of all that is wrong with specifically American culture. In my crankier moments I am inclined to suppose that the men for whom this doctrine appeals (since it is a doctrine, in its own way) are those who couldn't convince anyone else to stick with them in the significant other category or who have, to be more fair, bitterly struggled within the constraints of the conviction that they are unable to pair off due either to inherent weaknesses of character in themselves or perhaps due to systemic evils that precluded their consideration in the mating pool.

Roy Baumeister gave a lecture years ago in which he pointed out that society and culture depends on the reality that men are, not to overstate the case, expendable. This cannot be more true than it is for the unmarried man. The unmarried man can be spent in the service of a cause or an idea and literally or metaphorically die and society is no worse off for his absence. Any man who thinks this through will quickly realize it and this in some sense explains the radicalizing tendency in young men (and old men, too, I suppose). If coupling ends up being one of the base-line social behaviorzs in the human species then those who do not couple must draw their social meaning from some other source.

In earlier ages of human history there were two ways of doing this, joining a religious organization or joining the military. In our time these have tended to be rejected by most people. even a lot of pro-military people will not actually join the military or would admit they remember their military days with a mixture of anger, disdain or frustration but will salute the uniform anyway because, well, someone does have to do the job, after all. There is no society which must not at some point consider the necessities of its own defense. Be that as it may, most people will look neither to the armed services nor a church for a social identity in our time to go by statistics. And it may be that for the churches and armed forces the number of people with at least a passing interest may not be physically or doctrinally strong enough in constitution to pass msuter for membership in either.

What fills the gap of social identity for a man in lieu of church or army? Particularly one who has consistently failed at the mating game, however the mating game was hoped to get played out? Ideology. This is not at all surprising. It is one of the surest ways that cults form, whether cults of personality, cults of cause, or cults of aesthetics. The two most popular ideological cults in the West might well by derivatives of Marxist and Randian thought. Of course there are religious conservatives and secular old-school conservative, too, but what seems to happen for those who find they are not considered fit to mate is to embrace an identity of social commentary and self-established dissidence.

In my more cynical moments I say to myself that it's no surprise that men who, upon discovering how superfluous and useless to society they are, decide that it is necessary to criticize society as both unjust and unvaluable. Either the society is guilty of wanton materialistic consumerism or a lack of productivity and free thought. The idea that society itself produces goods and services that the dissident consumes need not be considered. The problem with this reflexive critique is that the would-be protesting unmarried person participates in the same kinds of things that the society he protests does. Does he consider America to be a land of oppression and greed? Does he spend his weekend playing video games? Does he spend it brewing beer as a hobby or riding a bike or attending concerts? Then he is just convincing himself he is a rebel or a dissident as a way to paper over the reality that his life does not matter in any way he finds meaningful.

Clinging to an ideology as a way to look down on others ensures that, despite the man's own failures to embody the highest ideals of his own ideology, he can still look down on the married and reproducing as living lives of stupid wastefulness. In his own heart and mind he can convince himself that his failures to integrate into statistically normal human behavior, which he may at one point have coveted intensely, are signs of the inherent failure of the indiscriminate herd instead. A man may decide that the problem was not his acrimonius personality because that couldn't be the problem. Instead the problem is the shallowness of women or the unrealistic expectations of society.

Embracing an ideology allows the man to simultaneously build up himself and tear down whatever he may have once desired as not only being not worthy of effort but also worthy of condemnation. He may go from having wanted marriage to being against both marriage and childrearing. He can tell himself he is in favor of sustainable living but if you take that position seriously then simply being an American who enjoys concerts and recreational outdoor activities or old cars makes you inextricably part of the problem of being an American. If he laments the averageness of the ordinary person and spends his days playing video games he is simply another average American who is attempting to sell himself on the idea that he is better than average by dint of will power rather than productive activity.

But here's the thing, I don't see it as inherently wrong for unmarried people to long for social meaning. I am pretty happy to find my social meaning among friends and family and, yeah, life in a church. In fact there are various advantages to having a life connected to a shared faith, particularly a faith which holds that this life is not the only life there is. You might suppose that such a belief system would devalue this life and make it easier for one to be, ay, a suicide bomber. Well, that's not necessarily the case. In religious traditions where suicide is considered an affront to both the divine image in humanity and to the divine suicide is not a viable option. If we are enjoined by the apostles to give thanks in everything this forces us to recognize that to be a living dog is better than being a dead lion even if society in so many ways would rather we all be dead lions than living dogs.

This is, at its core, the temptation for any man who would embrace an ideology from which he can condemn his neighbor, because a man (or woman, really) who has not paired off and is fully confronted with how superfluous he or she is as a non-breeder to society as a whole and has not yet found a productive and emotionally satisfying role to play feels there is no other option.

The reason I can't just cynically dismiss these concerns or the appeals of ideology to the unmarried is because I'm not married. I've never even dated and have never seriously tried. I have been unemployed for sixteen months and thanks to having been laid off by a 501(c)3 I can't collect unemployment. In a strange irony my politically conservative friends are more shocked than my liberal friends that I am not eligible for unemployment. I have had plenty of time to realize that I often feel superfluous to the lives of many of my friends.

I have also seen that even the most rudimentary social life involves money I realize I can't really afford to spend most of the time. This is one of the reasons I can't take leftist ideologues seriously if they do the same consumeristic things for fun that right-wing ideologues do. People do need ways to play and socialize and relax. And as ideologues against breeding, whether intentional or recreational, have to consistently ignore that the sex drive has an often annoying persistence to it with respect to what they consider rational or beneficial. Men and women will horse around, look in each others eyes, and decide they want to spend their lives together and make babies. Men and men will horse around, look into each others eyes, and decide they want to be together. Ditto women.

To the ideologue who is convinced breeding is bad or that the frivolous however he defines it must be avoided, only the gays (maybe) have any business pairing off if only because they can't breed. But at some point the ideologue must condemn the normal attempts to enjoy life. Solzhenitsyn ruined a marriage by being so determined to not be a consumeristic fellow he was a stick in the mud and drove his wife to fury by refusing to let them do anything fun or frivolous like going to the movies.

What an ideology lets you do, if you decide to make it your purpose in life, is to ensure that even if you're not in a crowd you can act toward anyone in such a way that you have a kind of herd mentality all your own. You treat people as classes and not individuals. This is a necessary intelletual and social shorthand, I admit, but it can make you decide that all homeless panhandlers are categorically good or evil and that's not how you should approach that issue at all. I certainly don't give to panhandlers now because I have no job! What the ideology lets you do is to identify or condemn the individual on the basis of the ideology. Christians do this all the time but I trust you know that everyone is capable of this. Someone who hates Southern people on the assumption that they are all racist Republican rednecks is still working in the same spirit as a Klan member in terms of his or her heart.

I can understand why a man or woman who has never had any success in the mating game would decide to embrace an ideology. It is, in essence, what you could say I have done in terms of reflecting on what it means to follow Jesus. It is a belief that guides my life even though I often believe that I am a pretty big failure at it. What I try to remind myself of as often as I can is that Jesus' teaching does not permit me to decide who is and isn't my neighbor so even though rabidly ideological people on both the right and left drive me up the wall I remind myself that they are my neighbors, too, and that I am called by Jesus to love them however I can.

And I can appreciate that in lieu of having a social relationship that affirms your value (i.e. the healthy coupled relationship that "most" people end up having) you have to get your value somewhere. So while I don't especially agree with either the Marxists I know or the Randians I know those that aren't paired off I have some empathy for because the ideology is, so to speak, the spouse of that person. They don't know it or see it in those terms but in terms of social meaning that's where it comes from.

I've also seen this happen at, yes, Mars Hill. Mars Hill involvement becomes the "spouse" equivalent of a social life that involves meaning. It was pretty much my entire anchoring point for several years in my social life. I had almost no friends who weren't outside that church and the friends and family I had were pretty much my whole life. I didn't consider it cultish in any way. Others would say it is indisputably a cult. I would say that both views are immature and inaccurate due to being incomplete.

What I began to notice was that the people who were most bitter about 2007 tended to be idealogues who once had gotten behind the church. I also began to notice a striking difference between how married and unmarried people handled the debacles of 2007. The married people, who on a daily basis have a social relationship that defined them, had complaints but often stuck around (unless BOTH of them were upset and in which cases they eventually left).

For the unmarried, however, there were no degrees of gray. Either it was all right or all wrong. Why? Well, perhaps because if you held at the back of your mind that this might be the place where God would send you your future spouse you weren't going to badmouth or tolerate badmouthing of the place that forms your social identity. Think of it as a case in which an individual can, thanks to things like the internet and social media, become a self-contained instance of deindividuation. For those of us who weren't already coupled off the debacle was more of a debacle because the stronger the tie of your identity is to the social unit the more disastrous a controversy or scandal in the social unit becomes. In this respect all those married people may have failed to appreciate the real level of the problems of 2007. I speak rather broadly, of course.

But this gets to the core of ideology and the unmarried person and why societal critique becomes so essential and formative. If ideology obliges you to critique society as a form of self-identification then you have to speak up against whatever you consider wrong in society based on the ideology. You not only have to do this because the chosen ideology requires it but also because you don't have a relationship intimate or stable enough or a network of such relationships stable enough from which to derive any other meaning.

The Marxist or Randian or Democrat or Republican has something that plays the role a god does for the religious person not merely because that's true at a general level but for the unmarried or uncommitted person that is the anchor in lieu of a partner or a close family member. In this respect to say that secularism is "a religious belief" is not remotely accurate with respect to proposed truthclaims but it is socially true if only in the sense that it describes a metaphysical view which informs or motivates social action. In other words, a lonely atheist and a lonely Christian can both attempt to use their ideological and metaphysical committments as compensation for the fact that they are both really lonely. What ideology permits the unmarried man to do is to use the ideology as a kind of social drug to ensure that whatever has fallen short in his social life is less a function of bad luck or possible problems in himself and more a function of the problems that are in society. The problem isn't himself but everyone else and ideology becomes the means through which to reason that this is so.

Then again, it depends on how he measures himself by his ideology. If I were to use my Christian faith as a way to measure others and find them wanting I'd do that well but my understanding of the teaching of Christ is that I don't get to do that. It's tempting but the strength of the temptation is all the more reason to be aware that it is a temptation. It is in some ways more of a relief to admit that I feel like as an unmarried male I am completely disposable so far as society is concerned than to take refuge in an ideology that would condemn a society that in the grand flow of things has no real use for me.

This is what I believe is ultimately the problem with unmarried ideologues regardless of whether they flow right or left, they feel obliged to measure the entirety of humanity as having value or not based on that ideology. The leftist and the rightest alike are able to shut their eyes and ears to any flicker of compassion or empathy on the basis of that ideology. Sure, there are radicalized Islamist suicide bombers but people who are against "breeding" have the same hate and resentment, too. A Randian who believes that productive work is the highest good who isn't paired off really has only that as a measure of self-worth because it's not going to come from someone who loves you even if you stink and forgot to do the dishes yesterday and of whom you can say that love is reciprocal. We also live in a culture which has so elevated the value of romantic coupling as defining either adulthood or fulfillment that it becomes easy to reflexively condemn this. In many ways I can sympathize with the often resentful or bitter unmarrieds who, seeing they are not paired off and at various times desperately wanted to be, decide to transform their old longing into loathing. Ideology is the catalyst through which this process can be expedited.

Trouble is that the biological urges that drive coupling are so strong they won't go away and the unmarried ideologue who chooses to look down on those who have successfully paired off is looking down on a biological impulse within himself (or herself) and saying that this is prima facie bad. Overpopulation means that one of the most basic and rudimentary impulses in humanity is essentially evil. I either don't have to explain why this presents a moral and social problem both in the individual or for a group, or no amount of explanation could possibly convince you that it is one.

HT: You Are Not So Smart: Deindividuation, how reasonable people follow herds

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/02/10/deindividuation/

And another linky link from You Are Not So Smart. Anyone who assumes he or she must be in the minority of the Milgram experiment had best take a few extra doses of reality. You, too, can be a herd-following monster who destroys the lives of others to satisfy your sense of individual and/or group identification.

conservative Protestants and the gift of celibacy, the non-love that dare not be mentioned?

I have read enough Reformed blogs and bloggers and heard enough Reformed theologians to pretty well know that they all agree there is no gift of singleness, by and large. Singleness is not a gift, marriage is. When Paul says "not all have this gift" he isn't talking about singleness but celibacy. For sake of conversation I can grant this but, now, what I'd like to know is "What is the gift of celibacy?"

More to the point, what do Protestants imagine the gift of celibacy to be? I don't have wonder too much what the Orthodox think the gift of celibacy is because patristics is patristics and the church fathers and monastics were obviously celibate long enough to write a fair amount about it. Catholics, too, have covered that waterfront. The only evangelical Protestant I've ever come across who seemed to even try to gift celibacy/singleness a fair shake was John Piper and in mainstream Protestant and liberal Protestant churches I guess I have to assume everyone is so busy boinking each other and thinking it's all good as long as there is "love" that celibacy is simply a non-starter and a throwback to medieval thought.

Now here is the big E on the eye chart regarding celibacy, nobody talks about the celibate calling with respect to the sex drive. The tacit belief amongst Protestants about celibacy would seem to be that the celibate man or woman just doesn't have much of a struggle with celibacy because he or she is so immersed in the work of the Lord or ministry that they are happy all the time. A person who is called to celibacy must be completely content with that calling and with whatever ministry to which the Lord has called that man or woman, so the reasoning goes. Earth to Christians! Go back and read the Bible and you will that this isn't even remotely true.

Sure, cite Paul saying that he wished everyone was as he was and able to go without being married. Bear in mind a few things, Paul was either a widower or a man whose wife abandoned him after he converted ... or that he was simply an old guy who knew he was likely to die in the service of God. Cite that people with the gift of celibacy or singleness tend to only be people who are called to some dangerous ministry like smuggling Bibles to China (because we all know all the life-threatening and life-draining work is evangelizing non-whites, huh?) Yet Paul also urged Timothy to flee from youthful lusts and there's no evidence Timothy was called to marriage and he was a bishop!

Since we Protestants appreciate the weight and value of the scriptures let me break this one down for my fellow Protestants regarding a famous biblical figure who was called to a celibate lifestyle and apparently hated it. In Jeremiah 16 we read that the Lord told him to not take a wife or have children because of the devastation that was coming upon Judah. Jeremiah is not only to not marry himself but to not even attend weddings or funerals! What do we find in Jeremiah 20, a mere four chapters later? The sentiment "God, you tricked me! This job sucks! All my friends are waiting for me to screw up so they can kill me! I hate my job and I wish I had never been born!" Oh, yes, there's a man of God who was totally at peace and content with his call to celibacy and singleness!

But wait, he wasn't in a dangerous ministry smuggling Bibles to China, was he? He was in a dangerous mission telling his own people who were busy assuming Yahweh was on their side that Yahweh WASN'T on their side because they were worshipping a bunch of other gods while assuming the Lord's favor was still with them. He was declaring that they were guilty of defiling the land with their wickedness and that the land itself would vomit them up. He was considered a traitor to his country and a false prophet. His was left to die in a clay pit and was saved by an Ethiopian eunuch.

Jeremiah goes so far as to curse the day of his birth. He was called to live a celibate life and apparently hated it a great deal, considered a traitor to his nation by friends and probably family alike. He was accused of prophesying lies against God's people and against the Temple. The people of his time might well have supposed that since all these things were nonsense that he was saying Jeremiah should have settled down and gotten married and done something useful to be on mission with what God was doing through Israel. Israel, after all, was Yahweh's chosen people who were going to be a light of hope and be the nation through which the whole world would be blessed. All this punk prophet was saying was junk like that Israel was just a total failure at all of that.

We don't see Jeremiah writing that he had no struggle with any kind of sexual drive. David Plotz, in his blogging the Bible series over on Slate (which is great, by the way) wrote that Jeremiah's problem was not that he was wrong (oh boy was he ever right about pending military destruction) it was that he had major personality and communication handicaps in getting his message across. Now the perspective of a secular Jewish author (if memory serves me) may not meet with the agreement of Christians but we can sometimes be stoked on the scriptures as the word of God we forget that human personalities play a major, major role in that. Plots sums up his complaint about Jeremiah as a person in the following way:

http://www.slate.com/id/2157587/entry/2158374/

C'mon, Jeremiah! You must be kidding! You show up at capital city, tell everyone they're going to be cannibalizing their kids in a couple years and that there's nothing—nothing­—they can do to prevent it. And then you're surprised that they don't like you!

...
But this doesn't comfort me! I am not strong enough in my faith to set aside family and country for God. And I don't want to be. Jeremiah is a righteous prophet, but I can't help feeling that he's also a terrible traitor.

I could go into an entirely different post about how many Christians are like this and that many Christians who have a persecution complex about themselves or their Christian communities do this. Jeremiah, however, got words from the Lord and since Israel and Judea were decimated by conquering empires even Plotz grants that the weeping prophet was totally right about what was going to go wrong.

And he's got a point, if you're a prophet of the Lord who in a time of relative prosperity declares that military conquest in your land will get so bad people will be eating their own babies you are not going to be hot stuff on the singles market!

Plotz also points out that Jeremiah never avoids a sexual metaphor or image when it is available. How saturated the book of Jeremiah is with sexual imagery is not something I see any need to catalog stastically but Plotz' observation itself may be telling. Jesus said there are those who make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom and that indicates that this is something people do by choice. Nehemiah was probably a eunuch because of royal court policy and Isaiah spoke to the eunuchs who served in the royal court saying that they should not consider themselves a dry tree and bereft of legacy.

With all due respect to serious-minded and well-meaning Christians in the Reformed blogosphere and outside it in the Protestant world at large, doesn't it seem as though we often have a church culture that tells people that being a dry tree totally sucks? Don't we tell people who aren't married that they are rejecting God's design? God's design for us is marriage so anyone who doesn't go that path and walk that walk is postponing adolescence and not growing up. Really? And the only exceptions are cases of smuggling Bibles to non-whites in some foreign country or doing some dangerous ministry even though the Bible itself attests that the most life-threatening work one can do is calling God's own people on the carpet fo rtheir own stupidity and idolatry?

So here's the thing, if there are Protestants who hold that there is even such a thing as a gift of celibacy what does that look like in the real world? Does it include no struggle with sexual desires at all? That is impossible. Plenty of unmarried men (more so than women) will say that they don't have the gift of singleness or the gift of celibacy because they really, really, really struggle with sexual temptation (should I really add another really?). So in their minds having sexual desire at all automatically means that they are not "gifted" with celibacy.

But what about people with a same-sex attraction? Wouldn't this be a sign that THEY ought to marry, too? Well, uh, no, evangelicals swiftly point out, because that's a disordered sexual desire. Okay then, you have to grant that sexual desire in itself can't be invoked as a reason that a Christian should be married. Just because your sexual desires are hetero doesn't prove that your desire to be married indicates any kind of calling or gifting in itself, does it?

And in both cases does that gift of celibacy indicate a lack of sexual desire? Well, let's revisit Jeremiah 16. Do we suppose Jeremiah saw celibacy/singleness as a gift from the Lord if he hated that everyone hated him and wished he hadn't been born? That doesn't much look like a celibate rejoicing in his celibacy to me.

The essential, goofy, and probable lie in Christian teaching about celibacy in Protestantism, if indeed there is any such teaching at all, is that if you have that gift (and we all secretly suspect you simultaneously don't and/or shouldn't) it's that you will be so busy doing stuff for Jesus you just won't ever have time to have any kind of sexual desire of any kind. Supposing I were called to celibacy this does not for a second mean I won't notice a beautiful woman. It also does not mean that what can often occur as a physiological response to noticing said beautiful women won't happen. None of this would by itself prove that I do not have the gift or calling of celibacy, should I have it. For that matter having exceptionally beautiful friends of the opposite sex (or the same sex if you're in that direction) does not oblige one to think or feel about them "in that way".

If evangelical Protestants tell gays that their sexual desires are not proof that they should consummate those desires that alone compells us to rethink our basis for simultaneously not talking about what a life of celibacy would entail and what connection it has to how the unmarried deal with sexual desires that often show up, as C. S. Lewis put it, unbidden and without warning or even at undesirable times.

So in a Protestant setting how do you "really" establish that someone has the "gift of marriage" or the "gift of celibacy"? If we have a culture that presupposes nobody "really" has the gift of celibacy and that if they did they would have no struggle with sexual desire how can we meaningfully address that the sexual desire someone may struggle with is same-sex attraction. As a Catholic blogger put it, what good is it to tell gays they should deny their sexual desires when all the straight people assume their desire is prima facie evidence they are NOT called to any kind of celibacy?

There is a sense in which despite all our Prostetant evangelical lip service to Augustine and carrying on his legacy none of us want to really explain his most famous, shortest, and amusing prayer--God grant me chastity, but not yet. We're too busy building whole sermon series around how Augustine had a terrible attitude about sex and sexuality. On the other hand, "should" we question his conviction that celibacy was what he believed God ultimately required of him? We can apparently let him write City of God and dispute with Pelagius but in our effort to correct against the perceived mistakes of Church fathers it would appear that we have gotten ourselves stuck.

As evangelical Protestants, especially in the Reformed branch, we often say no one has the "gift" of singleness. We sternly or happily declare that God's "design" for us is marriage and that we should pursue that. We also say that those called to celibacy/singleness are those who must be called to life-threatening work and/or those who must be totally content with their unmarried state. We love to take an apostle like Paul and extrapolate from his life some universal observation that scripture itself precludes. We look at Paul's life and imagine that because of his life any celibate Christian must be so because of a lack of sexual desire or a dangerous life.

We conveniently ignore that one of the most famous celibates in scripture seemed to be miserable and did not actually die as a martyr but probably died in Egypt after the exile, having never married, having been denounced and reviled by his people for prophesying against them in the name of the Lord, and who was told by the Lord, "never take a wife." Jeremiah does not seem to have ever been "happy" that he was told he could never marry. "The weeping prophet" is not someone who backs up the idea that those the Lord calls to celibacy are those at peace with that aspect of their walk with the Lord. Just because Paul was content in his station with respect to that does not mean all the other saints led into a celibate lifestyle had the same experience.

It is not as though the subject of celibacy as an alternative to married life has never been discussed by Christians. It does seem over the last ten years that not too many evangelical Protestants have discussed it, save maybe a few people like John Piper but most discussions of celibacy seem to come these days from conspicuously, almost ostentatiously married people. Some of the pastors most eager to tell people to be chaste before marriage were fornicators. They have no on the ground observations or experiences from which to exhort the unmarried to flee youthful lusts because while they were on the ground they were guided by them. For those of us in the mid-thirties hearing yet another sermon or reading yet another blog post about how God's design for us is marriage or about adultescence is useless. I know all that.

What I don't know is something evangelicals don't seem to broach, which is whether or not it can be reasoned from anything, let alone scripture, that if a person is called to celibacy that one will not ever struggle with any sexual desire. We know that gays would be told they have to live a celibate life and if their orientation never changes it must ever be so but if that's the case then isn't there a rather massive double standard involved? Doesn't that mean that straights are basically told something like, "If you ever tingle down there at all you don't have the gift of celibacy"? We live in a culture in which, unlike ancient societies, your coupling is on you. You're simultaneously a loser if you don't and probably an idolator if you do.

There's been a weird, weird double bind in the conservative Protestant circles I've been in over the last ten years where if you don't want to be married or don't have thoughts or anxieties about it then you're probably disobeying God but if you do want that and are worried about it then you are probably disobeying God, too, by not trusting Him. It would appear to go by the sermons and tacit assumptions of some of the preachers I've heard that the only people who aren't in this bind are, I guess, the people who are already married and don't have anything going wrong. I'm tired of getting this vibe of you're damned if you don't want it and damned if you do want it but just fine if you got it approach that I've picked up over the years.

The idea that you're not even really an adult or someone who cares about the welfare of others or knows anything about sacrifice unless you've married alternately puzzles, saddens, and angers me. To borrow Lutheran dialectical terms it frequently ends up seeming like a Law in which there is no Gospel. Since more and more people are not marrying what if an evangelical response to this was not merely to bemoan the "epidemic of singleness" could we try discussing not merely how the large number of unmarried people is some kind of disease that must be cured so all those people can become "real" adults and get married, but also attempt to seriously address what a life of celibacy would actually?

And don't just say "Oh, it's hard." Tell us something we don't already know. I already know what it feels like to hear the Emerson String Quartet in concert by myself and wonder if maybe I could share that experience not just with a friend but maybe a "special" friend, a spouse. Much of the blather about the difficulty is about as useless as Phil Hartman's character in the sex-ed video from an early season of The Simpsons where he says greasily, "There kids, and now that we've shown you how it's done, don't do it."

Is it so surprising that abstinence programs frequently fail to do more than delay sexual activity? Is it so surprising that out of wedlock births tend to happen in red states even more than blue states? Is it so surprising that so many people settle for whatever outlets they can find rather than rein in their desires? As Lewis put it, in our age it may well be that eros is the love that most needs to be taken down several pegs and today's conservative Protestants not only seem least qualified to tackle this project they may be the worst offenders in promoting the value and necessity of it to forming resposnible adulthood. It may even establish a church culture in which a guy who is on his second marriage may be considered to have found "redemption" more so than someone who has never actually been in a "relationship".

I have absolutely no answers whatsoever and while I'll be the first to admit I'd like to say the folks in my branch of Christianity have them I don't see much evidence for it.