"I didn't mean that!"

So, William Bennett, education secretary under Ronald Reagan and author of "The Book of Virtues" has a radio program. And on that program this week, he got a caller who suggested that the kinds of people who get abortions are the kinds of people whose kids grow up to be criminals, so shouldn't we keep abortion around to keep crime down?

Bennett attempted to use the age-old device of taking an argument to it's extreme to show the caller the wrong-headedness of his argument. "If you wanted to use abortion to keep crime down, just abort all the black babies. But of course, we can't do that."

The hew and cry ensued, and today Bennet is saying, "My comments have been misconstrued! They've been taken out of context! I didn't mean that! It was a rhetorical device!"

Except, Mr. Bennett, your rhetorical device made an assumption. And that you can't see the assumption means it is so deeply held that we have to question your sanity. You said black babies make crime. And you may try to argue yourself out of the hole, say you have black friends, you know skin color doesn't matter to morality, but in a moment when you had to grab for an illustration of an extreme, you said "black babies make crime." You could have said green. You could have said poor. You could have said babies from parents who are convicts. You could have said babies from illiterate parents. You said "black".

You picked a minority people group with easily-distinguished physical features and blamed a social ill on them. Social ills do not come from physical features! Not from skin color or the shape of your nose, not from whether you eat garlic (Eastern and Western versions of this), or curry, not from the shape of your eyes or the curl of your hair.

I have been a minority a couple times. In elementary school, I was bused to a school that had a hispanic minority. I did not behave any differently there than I did earlier in preschool or later in high school, but I was sent to the office more than any other kid in my class. Why do you think that is? Perhaps because I am trusted in white environments and mistrusted in non-white ones? Perhaps because I didn't understand the cues of how to play nice with these people who'd grown up differently from me?

In college, I was hired by a Chinese church to run the youth program for a retreat. I was taller than most people there, I was white, but my most distiguishing feature was my curly hair. A boy in the 4th grade decided my hair indicated I was a witch.

We make grave mistakes when we conclude that we know what kind of person a person is based only on the apperance of their bodies. Deadly mistakes, Mr. Bennett.

It's time to stop defending and start being ashamed.

"Culture of Corruption"

Tom DeLay was indicted today by a Texas Grand Jury on a single charge related to money rasing in the 2002 state legislature races. DeLay has stepped down as majority leader, as Republican ethics rules require, but argues that this will turn out to be another "baseless" charge... evidently equating being punished by a slap on the hands -- as the House ethics committee has done three times -- with being "not guilty."

Howard Dean is using the opportunity to tour his "Culture of Corruption" frame around the block again, and it looks like this time more people are willing to pay attention.

I'm going to pencil in a B for this frame and reserve the right to see how it performs on the road test. Here's why:

Dean is treading on thin ice here. Just a scant decade ago, Republicans raised public ire over "dirty politics" and used that anger to fuel a coup, wresting the federal government away from 40 years of Democratic control. If Dean can steer this one carefully, he may be able to keep "Culture of Corruption" from applying to Dems as well as Republicans, but this is going to be a fast ride on a curvy track.

On the other hand, this may be the best encapsulation of a network of suspicious trends... no-bid contracts, secret energy meetings, crony appointments, buried reports, the outing of Valarie Plame, gaming on Indian lands, trumped up Iraqii intellegence, a military unprepared for the moral obligations of invasion and occupation, rewarding the incompetent, and all the rest. All these things exist, and they are outrageous, but they exist in isolation in the American mind. Since I don't care about ANWR, and I've been suspicious of Saddam for awhile, and lower oil prices would help me get through the month, I don't want to think about the whole thing.

The Whole Thing needs a name. "Crooks and Liars" hasn't stuck. Neither has "Lying Liars". "Yellow Elephants" is amusing, but not general enough for a national audience. "Who Let the Dogs In?" doesn't capture national attention. All of these stoke the passion of people who are on to the man behind the curtain, but we need a way to get enough people to care to raise the curtain.

I think "Culture of Corruption" is a promising start.

Francis Schaffer

I started bible college in 1986. Jerry Fallwell's "Moral Majority" was still a fringe group that sent out pins of baby feet. You still heard Tony Campolo's name as much as Pat Robertson's. Amy Grant released a song about committing adultery, but was still married. Leslie Phillips released a Christian album produced by T Bone Burnett. You could buy Charles Williams books at the Christian bookstore and the Bakers were still on TV.

Believe it or not, there was a time when the Christian subculture had room for diversity, for social progressives, and you could be a Democrat and teach at a Christian college.

In my freshman year at school I was required to take a class called "Developing a Christian Worldview." This was my introduction to the writings of Francis Schaffer. I'm not sure why he was presented at that school with such authority, or whether he was presented at other schoold with the same force. But I do know that everything the religious right is known for today is expressed in the writings of Francis Schaffer.

Schaffer wrote to systematically construct a Christian framework that would stand the challenges of Nihilism, epidomized by Kant and Nietzsche.

He characterized Nihilism as a system of thought that made the individual meaningless, making individual life meaningless, individual morality meaningless, and even individual speech and language meaningless.

He argued that this Nihilism had made its way into the common culture of Europe and, to a lesser degree, the U.S. The evidence for this was growing rates of abortion, euthenasia, suicide, and literature that was not classically constructed.

He argued that all faiths except evangelical Christianity are equivalent to nihilism. Because all non-Christian faiths are equal, disparaging terms may be used interchangeably. Buddihism, Communism, and Satanism are all equvalently "Godless". Family planning is choosing not to have children and therefore is equivalent to Nazis who killed people who weren't "good enough."

He therefore concluded that Nihilism was a direct threat to all human life, and Christianity is the only force that can win against it, since all other faiths least irrisitably to Nihilism.

Therefore, US Christians are engaged in an epic struggle against Nihilism and they must not lose the battle.

This struggle entailed the following specific actions:

• Resisting abortion and euthenasia at every turn.
• Defunding the federal government so that they could not fund abortions or euthenasia.
• Resisting following Europe into anything, because all Europe's actions are a decent into Nihilism.
• Disconnecting the US from the UN, NATO, and other treaties which might require cooperation with Europe.
• Resisting the slide into Nihilism in the US by raising up a Christian political presence.
• Using that Christian political presence to make the US a more specifically Christian nation -- defined as no abortion, euthenasia, or suicide and promenant Christian symbols in all branches of government.
• Pruning the Christian culture of nihilistic messages.

Looking at the culture today, we can see all these things happening. They become overwhelming because there are so many fronts, so many people fighting passionately, and all seemingly disconnected. They are, in fact connected.

But you cannot stem the tide by invoking or discrediting Francis Schaffer. The number of foot-soldiers involved in the battle who have read Schaffer is distressingly small. The number of those who have ever taken a philosophy, logic, or ethics course that presented another view of the same topics is even smaller. This means you can't argue the ideas because the people you want to change don't understand the foundation of the ideas they're fighting for.

"How then do we live?"

Schaffer's entire system is based on the idea that nihilism is a relentless force that is the end of mankind. Nihilism was a system of thought that attempted to make sense of a changing world around the industrial revolution. The more we understand that it expressed the anxieties of an age that could not imagine the future it was creating, the better we will be able to communicate with Christians that one can be modern and life-affirming. We must be relentless in communicating that every action we take is about providing the best possible life for all people in the midst of diversity and change.

• Family planning increases the value of children.
  
• Scientific research leads to longer, happier, healthier, more productive lives.
  
• Cooperation across cultures improves the lives of everyone.
  
• Happiness is not the result of debauchery, but connection to people and meaningful work.
  
• Education allows people to discover meaningful work.
  
• Religious systems that motivates people by guilt, fear, or the threat of exclusion does not honor God.
  
• Science and math do have room for the wonder of God.
  

For those of us who are Christians and who want to struggle against this hijacking of our faith, we have a couple more tasks:

• We must talk about Christianity loudly and often though the lens of the Gospels. We must talk about "inclusion" and "everybody" and "wholeness" and "compassion" and not get sidetracked by exclusion and end-time prophecies.
• We must raise the standard of Christian education. A person who is speaking for Christianity should be well-versed in the whole canon, not just energetically motivated and in command of some esoteric details.
  

Creationism Revisited

I spent some time last night with my concordance and a couple translations of the Bible in English looking up references for my "Creationism" post yesterday. They're still sitting on my bed at home, but I was really struck by something. There are hundreds of references to "foundations". Job 38 is the passage I was thinking of yesterday when I mentioned the "God as Architect" creation story, but throughout Psalms and the prophets, the imagery of God building the earth upon some firm bedrock is used. Mountains have foundations which shake.

It's definitely written from the perspective that the earth, the ground, is the stable common element in life and the heavens and events on the earth pass by. How profoundly unsettling the observations of Copernicus must have been in that world view!

Which recalls the emotional content of the struggle over creationism today. The story that most parallels evolution -- the progressive creation of the world -- is a kind of last bastion. No wonder the struggle is so intense.

Creationism

This isn't really a frame rating. It is the first in a sister set of articles that I plan to do allowing progressives who are interested in frames to understand the frames their opponents are using and address them. My working title is "frame-busting", but I'll have to kick that around a bit more.

I learned this weekend that graduates from my college have been running tours that feature "Biblically Correct" teaching about evolution. I am quite discouraged. I'm fairly sure they had the same teachers I did, though we didn't graduate in the same year. And I know that my Old Testament teacher was fairly honest about the fact that there are 4 creation stories in the bible, that each features a radically different mode of creation, and that each story parallels creation stories in use among the non-Israelite tribes in the area where the books that contain them were written.

Here are the 4 stories:

1.) Creation out of nothing - This is the Genesis 1 story. There wasn't anything, God spoke, and then there was something.
2.) Creation out of something - This is the Genesis 2 story featuring the 7 days. There is something, God divides darkness and light. God divides the light into the greater and lesser lights. God divides the waters, and then the animals. It is generally taught that these two are two faces of the same story, but the first one is relentlessly ex nihilo, and the second always presumes there was something before.

3.) God as architect - In Job, God is described as an architect, measuring out the world, setting firm foundations and building the world on top of that. We dismiss it today as figurative, but remember the problems Galileo and Copernicous had convincing people that Earth was a floating ball in space? This is the reason.

4.) The Rahab problem - So, Rahab was this good natured prostitute in the land of Canaan who hid the spies of the invading Israeli army when the cops came knocking. She's generally counted as one of the faithful. But that doesn't account for the half dozen or so verses that talk about God killing Rahab. It turns out there are two Rahabs. The other one... the one God killed... comes from a creation story in the ancient near east where the world is formed out of the body of a giant monster named Rahab.

So, guys? Which true Biblical creation story are you preaching? Are you preaching all of them? If not, how did you come to the decision that one was true truth above the others? Is there a chance you used scientific observation to rule out a couple of them? If so, how then do you justify ignoring scientific observation when it comes to your favorite?

Now, I do understand that Christian college makes you come to a decision on a lot of matters and they reward you if you come to the right decision and punish you if you come to the wrong one. In my science class, we were assigned a paper on creationism vs. evolution and the instructor expected us to pick. I didn't. What we get in the bible is a mythological representation of God creating. It was the best we had at the time. Evolution is the best sense we can make of what we have today. I believe that God was/is behind that. For me, evolution and my faith can coexist.

I got a B on that paper... and the teacher told me that it was because she knew I'd written a good paper but she didn't get what I was arguing. Oh well.

"Destruction of New Orleans"

This is to address the contention by certain elements that New Orleans was destroyed because of sin. It is a frame, but rather than critiquing a centrist message, I want to take this one apart because it's absurd.

First, this is intended to recall the God of the Old Testament. Christians are a New Testament people. This is important because the OT is about the faithfuls' relationship to land, and the NT is about relationship to God.

Second, even in the Old Testament, God did not destroy cities that housed faithful (Sodom) or repentant (Ninevah) people. God would have saved Sodom if anyone other than Lot could be found who was faithful, surely there were more than 10 righteous people in New Orleans.

Third, if every life is of equal value in the eyes of God, then we have to wonder at the capriciousness of killing thousands to save a couple hundred a year.

Centuries of common and religious thought have been dedicated to understanding why bad things happen to good people, and that's an area I'm not willing to weigh in on. But don't say God did this.