Absurdities and Atrocities

One hears, not infrequently, a remark to the effect that "one who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." It came up this very evening, as we were preparing a sermon, and we wanted to ascertain the authentic form of the the phrase.

Turns out to be a loose translation of Voltaire. He admits that there are things a person may believe by faith, and then proposes that a wise person will not "make the sacrifice of reason in the conduct of our lives." At which point, he admits:

Il y a eu des gens qui ont dit autrefois : Vous croyez des choses incompréhensibles, contradictoires, impossibles, parce que nous vous l’avons ordonné ; faites donc des choses injustes parce que nous vous l’ordonnons. Ces gens-là raisonnaient à merveille. 

Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste. Si vous n’opposez point aux ordres de croire l’impossible l’intelligence que Dieu a mise dans votre esprit, vous ne devez point opposer aux ordres de malfaire la justice que Dieu a mise dans votre cœur. (Questions sur les Miracles, 11ieme Lettre)

In English, that is something to this effect. 

"There have been people who thought otherwise [saying]: You believe incomprehensible, contradictory, impossible things, because we have commanded you believe them; so do unjust things because we command do you now." These people reason marvelously!

Certainly, whoever has the right to make you act absurdly has the right to make you act unjustly. If you do not oppose the command to believe the impossible with the intelligence God has placed in your mind, then you ought not to oppose the command to do evil with the sense of justice God has placed in your heart.

Walter Olson credits the more familiar phrasing, about absurdities and atrocities, to Norman Lewis Torrey in Les Philosophes (1961). I cannot find it there. In any case, the translation may be loose, but it is not wrong.

How did this figure in our sermon, preached on the Fourth of July in this semi-quincentenary year. Well, we were mixing up a number of images -- Zechariah calling the Judahites "prisoners of hope;" Paul escaping Damascus in a basket; Jesus promising that his "burden" of Tarah interpretation is "lighter" than that imposed upon their disciples by the Pharisees. There may have been something in there from Philippians, as well, about our true commonwealth.

Bit of a stewpot, to be honest. But that's not the point.

I was thinking about the peculiar role of religion in American history, and in America today. In particular, I was thinking about the strange phenomenon that these days calls itself "American Evangelicalism."  The name is, of course, misleading; the people of whom I am thinking are far more deeply invested in law than in gospel, and the law in question is by no means always God's.  In fact, "American Evangelicalis" often seem to use Christian language and imagery to tell an entirely different story, one more like an ethno-nationalist Gnosticism.

But they certainly do impose absurdities upon their followers, don't they? Has there ever been a time in American history when science -- the method and the results alike -- was held in such disrepute? Flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, and their ilk are having a field day. Never mind the measles outbreak and the soldiers sidelined by flu. In place of observation, experiment, and hypothesis, the order of the day is to proceed based upon appeals to the leader's "gut," or to the undocumented (and unexpressed) will of "the American people." Neither of these is an effective antiseptic.

Those who have begun espousing the absurdities then commit, if not outright atrocities, acts of staggering folly -- Voltaire's choses injustes. These sycophants gut the senior military leadership, shrivel the diplomatic corps, abandon the combination of soft power and military alliances that were linchpins of American influence, and on and on. All the while, they punch downward, hard, often and publicly, at the most vulnerable people they can find -- Haitians, the transgendered, pregnant women, and black voters in the South.

Most surprising is that many of the people doing these things do them in service to a man who has publicly humiliated them, personally, along with their families.  He insults their fathers and their wives, he calls them names in public, and yet they stand by, offering him and endless string of effusive compliments, as he violates the law over and over, sets criminals free in almost-certain exchange for cash, and starts an utterly pointless war with a major strategic adversary, which reveals American weakness and leaves us in a weaker tactical position afterward.

Obviously, these are difficult times for America, and especially for the ideals of the Founders.  But they are especially difficult times for classical Christianity, of the sort represented by creeds and confessions, by ecumenical dialogues and collaboration on works of mercy. The Christianity represented by, say, the World Council of Churches scarcely registers with the politicians, the press or even its own members as a vital force in public affairs. Even Roman Catholicism, barring a scandal, a schism, or a creative misappropriation of its theology by the Vice President, gets shoved to the side in the public square.

In place of anything recognizable as historic Christianity, we get the Prosperity Gospel, the New Apostolic Reformation, and Trump-as-Jesus memes. 

Perhaps I was mistaken, when I allowed that our leaders have not yet committed "atrocities." There are certainly some dead Iranian schoolchildren whose corpses argue against me. And although far less grave, I wonder whether history may not see the setting aside of Christianity and the lifting up of a vile pretender as an atrocity of its own kind.

Good Sermons, Warm Welcome, and Maybe a Maniple

Legend has it that 70% of the new members at an average American church are there because they were invited by a friend.

For thirty years or more, this factoid has been passed around among the clergy like a joint at a hippie gathering, which is to say that it has been held reverentially, spoken of in hushed but appreciative tones, breathed in and then put aside until it is needed again -- all while, quite possibly, creating mild hallucinations.

The truth is that the supposed study behind this figure is hard to track down, and even if it exists it is very old.  American church life has changed dramatically in the past 50 years, and especially in the last 5.  Moreover, standards of privacy and sociability have also changed.  What was once genial may now seem intrusive -- ask any pastor who still drops in unannounced, or at least the people upon whom that pastor drops in.

The most recent information we can find that might support the old 70%-invited-by-a-friend comes from Pew Research, which is generally pretty creditable (as opposed to, say, Barna).  It also places that number in an important context.

In 2026, Pew released a report called "Choosing a New Church or House of Worship," based on data from a 2014 study.  This wouldn't be so very old, had not COVID intervened, but COVID did intervened, and so the results must be looked at skeptically indeed. Still, it will be a while before anything newer covers the same territory in as much detail.

The overall conclusion of the report may be the least surprising thing ever said on the subject, summed up in a headline:  "Americans look for good sermons, warm welcome."  (The report also ranks "worship style" almost as high as homiletics and how-d'ya-do, so don't forget your maniple, because nothing says style like a ceremonial hand-towel.) 

Location also matters, so choose yours wisely, as do programs for the wee ones.  All of these things -- sermons, welcome, style, location, programs -- seem to be ranked more highly on the list of reasons that worshipers choose a new church than personal connections.  But those connections do play a role.  The report offers this useful chart:

There it is in the second column: 69% of people seeking a new church have talked to members of the congregation.  That is not far at all from our 70% story.  And the numbers also back up an important corollary of the legend -- conversation with lay members appears to be more important than conversation with the clergy.

But where the legend is framed to highlight the urgency of personal invitation, the wording of the study implies that the person seeking a church may be more active, and the church member more passive.  More important still is the addition of "friends and colleagues," a category which is apparently separate from church members.   

Our conclusion is something like this:  The legend is spun to encourage congregants to invite people to church, and to make them feel a little bit guilty if their church isn't growing.  The numbers presented by Pew suggest that in fact a person looking for a place to worship will ask around rather broadly, and compile a sort of "local reputation score" consisting of what impression of a church they get from different sources, including but not limited to its members.  This seems natural.

It should be obvious that, since 2014, the internet has continued to take over every aspect of our lives, including our spiritual affiliations. How many of us live-streamed a decade ago?  How many of us even considered the possibility of what is politely called "virtual communion"?  In that spirit, it seems natural to assume that, were this study to be repeated in 2025, the "looked for information online" category would have eaten up numbers from the others, and probably swallowed the quaint old-fashioned "made a phone call" bones and all.

Anyway, it seems to us that the basics are unlikely to have changed.  A church that hopes to grow should certainly have good preaching, welcome new people with love, worship with zeal, and be located in an accessible place.  A good website doesn't hurt, and neither does a favorable reputation. 

To all these things we add:  Many churches possess all these attributes and do not grow.  Some possess most of them and still shrink. Such are the times in which we live.  Don't beat up on yourself, whether you are a pastor or a lay member.  And don't beat up on each other, either.  Ultimately, it is in God's hands, not ours.

Alas, Babylon

America is doomed.

We at the Egg know as well as anybody that this is an ancient refrain, as old as the Republic or even older.  From the very beginning of our national experiment, we Americans have worried that we were past our prime.  From the later 1600s, the "jeremiad," a lament that the present generation did not live up to the piety and goodness of its predecessors, was a distinctive style of New England sermon.

Oswald Spengler's 1918 Decline of the West was translated into English in the late 1920s, and set off a new explosion of American self-doubt.  John Lardas, in a study of Beat spirituality called The Bob Apocalypse, briefly traces Spengler's influence, and the development of what Alfred Kazin called "an aristocratic pessimism" among intellectuals.  Ezra Pound read Spengler, and famously denounced Western civilization as "an old bitch gone at the teeth."  A generation later, Kerouac and Ginsberg read him, and came to similar conclusions.

In 1987, British historian Paul Kennedy made a neo-Spenglerian argument in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, predicting that the United States would soon go the way of the British Empire. He garnered a great deal of attention (and criticism).

And of course, Donald Trump has spent much of the past two years inviting his followers to "make America great again," a proposition sensible only if we accept that America has declined from its former greatness.

So we know that this is old news.  America has been in decline, at least rhetorically, since a century before the Revolution.  America was in decline, rhetorically, when it won its freedom from Britain; in decline when it set free its slaves; in decline when it swung the course to of two world wars; in decline when it rebuilt Europe and Japan; in decline when it stared down the Soviets.

But this time it's serious.

Not because our gridlocked Congress or hobbled Supreme Court, nor of Trump and Clinton, dismal candidates as they may both be, but rather because of the forces at work around them.

The unembarrassed, all-but-overt efforts of Putin's Russia to influence the election are one problem. We do not doubt that Russia has tried to influence our elections in the past, but its role has always been shadowy, secretive, easily dismissed.  Now, between the appearances of ranking Trump advisor Michael Flynn on RT (the modern equivalent of Pravda), the Russian Bears both Fancy and Cozy who have been hacking Democratic data and providing it to Wikileaks, and the mysterious servers in Trump Tower and Moscow's Alfa Bank, the Russians are barely bothering to maintain the pretense that they are not pulling dirty tricks on behalf of their favored candidate.

Russia is, in other words, treating America much as America is accustomed to treating other nations.  And this, rather than Trump's racism, sexism, boorishness or difficulty with impulse control, is the sign of a real problem.  Another nation's security apparatus is treating us the way we treat the second- and third-rate powers of the world, a clear suggestion that we have descended to those ranks.

A second problem is the FBI. In the past week or so, it has begun to appear that director James Comey's inflammatory letter to Congress about Clinton-related emails found on a porn addict's computer was not in itself an aggression, so much as a bumbling effort to pre-empt leaks from a militantly anti-Clinton faction of the Bureau's New York field field office.  It has failed, since those leaks (and a curiously-timed reminder of the Marc Rich fiasco) continue.

But Comey's failure is not merely a matter of bumbled bureaucratic infighting.  It is a failure to control rogue elements with America's premier law-enforcement agency, and to prevent them from meddling in the outcome of an election.

Think about that.  For years, as we have waged an unsuccessful war against Central Asian jihadists, we have heard that Pakistan is an unreliable partner because, whatever good intentions its elected officials may have, they cannot control the schemers in the intelligence service.  And now our FBI, for all the professionalism it has reclaimed since the bad old Hoover years, seems little better than Pakistan's ISI. Both appear to be controlled by partisans who place their own ideology above the chain of command, or even the law.

In other words, the Russians are treating us like a third-rate power because in some ways we have become a third-rate power.  One by one, the central institutions of our government are failing.  Should this election result in another Bush v. Gore, our crippled Supreme Court will be unable to decide it.  A difficult Election Day outcome is made more likely both by one candidate's declared doubt about the legitimacy of the electoral system, and by the partisan meddling of our most respected security service.

Most terrifying of all is the prospect of where this sort of dysfunction leads in a truly third-rate power.

A relatively stable second-rate nation, such as Italy, can withstand the messiness of, say, a Berlusconi administration.  It comes through the experience having lost much of its international stature and its economic security, but with most of its civic institutions intact.  But a less stable nation, one teetering into third-raterdom, will often throw all its eggs into a single basket, and rely for stability on a single trusted institution:  the military.

In Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Argentina -- as well as many other countries, to greater or lesser degrees -- the military has long been the authority of final appeal, vested both by its own self-esteem and by the esteem, however grudging, of the people with the maintenance of the state in times of extreme distress. That is to say that when the government simply can't handle its tasks, the military steps in.

How long do you think, dear reader, before the American military does likewise?  At a certain point, some generals will surely see it as their duty to to "protect" us both from enemies without (Russia, China, even ISIS) and from enemies within (political parties that prize ideological purity above actual function).  It will be hard for them to maneuver so vast and diverse an organism as the US military, so perhaps they will find a workaround.  Could they do it with just the Army?  Or just the infantry?  Surely they will find political cover from handful of desperate elected leaders.  They could even install a nominal civilian as president, "elected" in voting supervised by soldiers because the state systems have proven untrustworthy.  That pitiful figurehead might even be allowed to name a cabinet, just for old times' sake, while the generals make the trains run on time.

It is a terrifying proposition, and one that seems laughably improbable.  But so, a year or two ago, was the current state of affairs.  And if some or even any of the modern-day jeremiads are on target -- if we really are in the sort of imperial decline our intellectuals have so long prophesied and which now our most strident anti-intellectuals declare to be realized -- then a military  coup is not merely the next logical step, it is all but inevitable.

Eliminate the Undergraduate Degree

A common question with regard to preparation for ordained ministry is "How much can we live without?"  Several emergent circumstances prompt this question -- decline in seminary enrollment, the difficulty of church bodies to subsidize their seminaries, the crushing burden of academic debt on people who have been painstakingly prepared for a profession in which full-time work is becoming scarce.  Naturally, churches ask how to control the cost of preparing their ministers, a question which leads just as naturally to the follow-on: which aspects of the present preparatory routine are dispensable?

For those who do not know, the preparation of a Protestant minister, in the United States, typically looks like this:

• a four-year undergraduate degree in any subject, although the humanities are preferred; 
• a three-year graduate program in "divinity," which quaint word indicates a combination of Biblical, historical and theological studies; 
• practical work, normally taking the form of field work while in seminary, Clinical Pastoral Education and (for all Lutherans, at least) a year or so of (very lightly paid) parish internship.  
• Lutheran students who have  graduated at a non-Lutheran school may also be required to complete a year of residential study at one of their own denomination's seminaries.

It amounts to nine or ten years of study, the last few of them 12-month years during which postulants have no vacation time in which to earn any money.  They are all but guaranteed to graduate penniless, hungry and in debt.

In fairness, churches have not mindlessly insisted upon adherence to this general program.  For years, they have experimented with variations.  Especially popular these days are "terminal internships," in which a candidate completes the entire classroom course of study, and is then placed in a parish as "vicar," under the periodic (but not daily) supervision of a neighboring pastor.  The expectation is that after ordination the vicar will became pastor to the same parish.  Other less popular variations include distance learning, which allows the student to continue working and avoid the costs of residential study,  and programs that simply waive some academic requirements for older postulants from "emerging ministries," meaning especially minority communities.

None of these is bad, but none of them is a magic bullet, either.  Terminal internships may place new pastors in difficult situations without adequate mentoring, and in any case save them only the costs of the internship year.  TEEM and similar programs save a lot more money, but create the very serious risk of burdening congregations with pastors who are not intellectually adequate to the task, or whose adequacy is limited to the very specific location to which they were ordained, and do not transfer well to other parishes.

Over and over, it comes back to "What can we cut?"  Is a decent grounding in Biblical languages more or less important than a summer of hospital chaplaincy or a year of daily supervision?  Is a grasp of Reformation history more or less important than an a third semester of homiletics?  All of these things matter; all of them are important to the effective conduct of pastoral work.

But do you know what is not important?  A degree in biology.  Or aeronautics, or even "religion" as that discipline is understood by the modern academy.  These are undergraduate studies, of great interest by themselves and in some cases of direct value to potential employers.  They are not, however, subjects absolutely required for pastors and theologians.

So let's make studies in divinity an undergraduate subject.  

By which I mean: let us agree upon a course of study which can, in four years, prepare a capable high school graduate to carry out the duties of a parish pastor.  Teach them, in the course of four years, the things we now teach them in three, and add to that a smattering of "elective" subjects -- music and art would be the most professionally useful, but such matters could be negotiated. So might an optional fifth year of study, in which an advanced degree (rather like the Th.M. or S.T.M.) could be granted.

Such a plan might give new life and purpose to our moribund seminaries.  The course of study could not be as diffuse as those which lead to the typical BA and BS degrees -- and this degree would be neither of those.  It would have to focus more narrowly on theological subjects, which most colleges are unprepared to teach, but at which seminaries excel.  Therefore, a seminary is the natural institution to offer such a degree, perhaps  after enlarging its faculty a bit or in conjunction with a larger school.

But the chief virtue of such a plan is that it could potentially save a fortune for those with an early vocation.  Of all the costs incurred in the "typical"process, the undergraduate education is surely the greatest for most people, and yet paradoxically it is the one with the least obvious practical value.

Oh, downsides are obvious.  Pastors prepared this way would be less mature in years, and likely emotions, than those to which parishes are accustomed.  Moreover, they might lack exposure to fields of study -- especially sciences both natural and social -- with genuine, if secondary value for a theologian. Second-career pastors gain nothing from this plan, although they do not lose anything either.  There are no doubt other difficulties as well.  But still:  It. Saves. A. Fortune.

What do you think, readers?

Damning Brooks

Here at the Egg, we have often mocked David Brooks, a mysteriously-still-employed op-ed writer at the Times.  Our mockery has usually been restricted to snarky side comments and the observation that he is the sort of talking head who wears bowties.

If you've ever wondered just what makes Brooks so bad -- worse than Tom Friedman, not quite so heinous as Peggy Noonan -- read Tim Marchman's takedown at Deadspin.  It's mean-spirited, and therefore appropriate to the task.  

To be honest, our main objection to Brooks is that he is, as Marchman says, "a propaganzizer of discredited ideas," namely neonconservatism.  Marchman, however, goes deeper, picking on the contrast between Brooks' obvious rich-boy sense of privilege and his carefully-erected facade of modesty (he teaches a course in "humility" at Yale, for crying out loud).

Here's the best paragraph:

Brooks was a sheltered twit from his earliest years. He attended a fancy day school in New York, a fancy high school in the wealthy Philadelphia suburbs, and the University of Chicago. From there he moved on to comfortable sinecures at propaganda mills like National Review, the Hoover Institution, and the Washington Times. After a stint at the Wall Street Journal, he moved on to the Weekly Standard, where he worked under editor William Kristol, who damaged whatever chances Brooks had of becoming a normal human being.

Nice, huh?  There's more where that came from.

Jingle Bells, Iron Man Smells

We've been waiting since 1968 to direct that kindergarten barb against somebody else's favorite superhero, and at last our long and lonely vigil has come to an end.  Shellhead stinks!

Per Wired, the film Iron Man 3 will be released in smell-o-vision, at least in Japan.  Of course, it's not called that anymore -- "that's so last century" -- but you get the idea.  Apparently, there is a new wave of "fourth dimension" theaters emerging worldwide, which offer such dubious pleasures as fog, tilting seats and, well, odor enhancements.  (As if our typical multiplex weren't already stinky enough.)

Wired proposes that Tont Stark, being a billionarire, probably smells pretty good, what with all the expensive cologne.  We're thinking it's more about sweat and engine grease, though.  Sounds ... ducky. (But maybe he'll just smell like the official fragrance from IM2.  There actually was one.)

In Rome last summer, we took our kid to a tourist trap that offered a special "history" of the city, with some of these features.  The seats rocked and at some point, for reasons that made sense at the time,  water was sprayed in our faces.  Huzzah. He liked it, but he was five years old.

For our own part, we dislike 3-D movies with a passion, and can only imagine that adding aromas will make the whole thing worse.  Not to mention more expensive.

All of which is why we are sticking to Netflix.

Why Multiple Choice Tests Are Good For Everyone

In high school, young Longhair Anonymous volunteered to take part in a classroom debate.  The topic was simple:  apartheid, pro or con.  Students were allowed to choose which side they would argue and yours truly, ever the contrarian, chose to argue in favor of apartheid.

He lost, and was happy to lose.  It meant that his classmates, who judged the debate and voted, were not idiots.  Ot, if they were idiots, that they were at least decent and humane ones.

We remember this, when we hear about a situation in an Albany, New York, high school this week.  Per the Times, a teacher assigned students to write an essay, using the classical rhetorical forms of pathos, ethos or logos to argue persuasively in favor of an unpopular idea:

The students were instructed to imagine that their teacher was a Nazi and to construct an argument that Jews were “the source of our problems” using historical propaganda and, of course, a traditional high school essay structure.

“Your essay must be five paragraphs long, with an introduction, three body paragraphs containing your strongest arguments, and a conclusion,” the assignment read. “You do not have a choice in your position: you must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!”

This was a mistake.

The teacher is going to face discipline, which may include termination.  The principal spent what were no doubt some unhappy hours meeting with leaders of the capital district's Jewish community.  The Times quotes a number of very reasonable voices, students, parents and community leaders alike, all basically saying "the teacher isn't an anti-semite, just a dope."  This seems very likely to us.

Hint for next time:  give the kids a choice.  If you want to put defending Nazis on the table, okay, but give your students some other options, like pretending they are Churchill denouncing Neville Chamberlain, or FDR making the case against American isolationism.  Or, hell, throw some Commies into the mix:  it is 1940, and you are trying to convince anybody that an alliance with Stalin is the most morally defensible route.

Yes, trying to defend the indefensible can be a valuable learning experience.  We've done it.  But for some students, it can be just as valuable a lesson in rhetoric, philosophy and life to practice defending the good, the true and the beautiful.

Under a Bushel

Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger is promoting a book called Contagious:  Why Things Catch On.  Here's a morsel that we heard him share on NPR, and now at HuffPo:

New York City is a tough place to open a bar. Competition is fierce and it's hard to cut through the clutter. ...

But a few years ago Brian Shebairo launched a place that's been packed since the day it opened. In fact, it's one of the most sought after drink reservations in the city. Bookings are only available day-of and people frantically hit redial again and again hoping to snag a spot. Yet he's never advertised the bar. Never spent a dollar on marketing.

How did Shebairo do it?

He hid his bar inside a hot dog restaurant.

Walk into Crif Dogs in the East Village, and you'll find the most amazing hot dog menu you've ever seen. ...

In one corner off to the side is an old-school phone booth. One of those rectangular numbers that Clark Kent used to morph into Superman. Walk inside and you'll see a rotary dial phone on the wall. Pick up the phone, and just for fun, dial the number 1. Someone will pick-up the other line and ask you if you have a reservation. And if you do, the back of the phone booth will open and you'll be let into a secret bar called, of all things, Please Don't Tell.

Has Please Don't Tell violated traditional "laws of marketing?" Sure. There is no sign on the street and no mention of it in the hot dog place. In fact, they've worked hard to make themselves a secret.

If it were that simple, the ELCA would be the hottest, hippest, fastest-growingest church body in America, if not the world.  Because no group of human beings on earth is better at keeping itself a secret than we are.  Compared to Lutherans, the Illuminati are as zealous for fame as the Kardashians.

We build ugly churches on out-of-the-way streets; we greet visitors with a handshake (maybe) and a "bulletin" full of paper that falls all over their laps and confuses more than it clarifies; we offer serious inquirers a confusing mishmash of doctrine and worship, usually filtered through the accumulated mini-traditions of the particular congregation or, worse yet, through the personal sensibilities of the pastor.  Nobody knows who we are or what we are, much less where to find us.

Sadly, mere self-effacement is not the whole of Berger's strategy for spreading the word.  The real secret, he says, is something called Social Currency, and which sounds a lot like old-fashioned bragging rights:

People talk about things that make them look good. Sharp and in-the-know. Smart and funny rather than behind the times. If people go to a place like Please Don't Tell ... they tell others because it gives them status.

Social Currency isn't just about hidden bars. It's why people brag about their thousands of Twitter followers or their kids' SAT scores. Why golfers boast about their handicaps and frequent fliers tell others when they get upgraded. ... 

Ouch.  That's a big problem for the ELCA, and for many of our sister churches:  we don't like to brag.  It isn't merely a matter of Scandinavian reserve, either.  We are wary, theologically, of the pride that goeth before a fall, and of the hypocrites who pray to be seen by others.  The thought that we should ourselves be something about which our members boast is problematic, both culturally and doctrinally.

Of course, there have always been churches that manage to make members feel special because they are members, while still maintaining at least a semblance of personal humility.   Episcopalians used to be geniuses at it, although in recent years they have seemed showier and correspondingly more desperate.  Likewise Presbyterians.

The worst case scenario, of course, is that you create a cult:  a community which makes its members feel special because they are not like Them -- not, in other words, like the aliens, the outsiders, the impure, however broadly or narrowly defined.  In the form of exaggerated claims to doctrinal purity over against the rest of world Lutheranism, this has been the Missouri Synod's strategy from the beginning.  It worked well enough, up until recently, but has certainly left them with few friends outside the kraal.

We in the ELCA, however, have no gift for this.  Making, or even allowing, people to feel special is unsettling to us.  The closest we can come, and this on our best day, is to offer them coffee and some green jello after an otherwise unremarkable hour of worship.  Coffee and jello are lovely things, but they offer no cachet, no bragging rights, no sense of having discovered a rare and marvelous treasure.

Most painful of all is this:  we at the Egg believe that Lutheranism, particularly as represented by the ELCA and its LWF partners, is indeed a rare and marvelous treasure.  It holds, deep inside, gems both spiritual and intellectual, tools which, properly understood, can critique modernity without denying it, and lead the soul toward God without compelling it.  But, at least if Berger is right, we have no real hope of ever going viral.

Maybe we should ask the Methodists if they have a phone booth we can hide behind.

A Reminder

If you are preaching Sunday, it may be helpful to remember that (as is so often the case), the place where some of our Biblical story occurs is today the site of a terrifying and bloody war.

Although the two-year battle for Syria has largely been kept out of Damascus, bombings are common enough and over the last week rebel artillery has succeeded in striking the city.

There are no simple answers here.  The government is tyrannical and unpopular; the Islamist insurgents are not likely to be much better, at least over time.  Just ask the Iranians, or anybody who has lived under the Taliban.

The Syrian government provides some protection for the Christian minority, a fact that hardly justifies its continued rule but which may at least give us pause.  Long before Damascus was a Muslim city, it was a Christian one.  Even today, the city is full of churches, not merely signs of an ancient heritage but also homes to living and faithful Christians.  But that heritage is not insignificant, either.  We still sing songs by St. John Damascene.    And it is, of course, the place where Saul became Paul, and the course of Christian history began its epochal shift from Messianic Judaism to a universal, Gentile-inclusive, community.

There may not be much that we can do for Damascus on Sunday, either as Americans or as Christians. But we can, at the very least, remember its importance, and pray for its people.

"The Carnival is Over"

That is what Pope Francis is reported to have said when he declined to sport a mozzetta in his first public appearance.  "The carnival is over":  a nasty slap at Benedict XVI's use of historic papal attire, a rallying cry for those who never liked Benedict and have been longing for a dramatic change in the Chair of Peter, and a clear signal to the hard-core traddies that their time has past.

"The carnival is over."  In other words, no more making nice with the Society of Saint Pius X, no more poaching from Canterbury's forest, no more randomly insulting Muslims.  Hey, maybe Hans Kung even gets rehabilitated.

"The carnival is over."  A pivotal moment in the history of the Roman church, a moment of clarity that turns the ship in a new direction.  Aggiornamento in miniature.

It never happened.

Francis never said it.  At most, it appears, he said "I prefer not to," which is hardly the same thing.

Nor, according to John L. Allen, is Francis planning to smack the the already-disgraced Cardinal Law around by casting him out of the Lateran and off to a secluded monastery.  Nor is his use of the open-air popemobile somehow a dramatic change from Benedict's practice -- Benedict often used the very same vehicle for tooling around the piazza.

As we've said before, there are a lot of horse hockey pucks circulating in the papal infosphere these days, many of them generated by the fact-averse Italian press and picked up by a strange mixture of dreamy liberals, paranoid conservatives, and bloggers who just don't know any better.  They are hard to avoid stumbling over, but easy enough to avoid repeating.  Just stick to the big guns -- Allen, first and foremost; then John Thavis and Rocco Palmo.  These guys seem to have the best inside sources, not to mention the best hockey puck detectors.

However, blogger Meredith Gould makes another point about these urban legends, which is that they are "signifiers."  That is to say that, to somebody less interested in their factuality than in their cultural meaning, they can open a window on all sorts of hopes and fears abroad in the society which nurtures them.  Or, as sociologists Joel Best and Gerard Horiuchi put it,

Urban legends, like collective behavior and social problems construction, are responses to social strain,  shaped by the perception of the threat and social organization.

In this case, it's pretty simple.  Vatican II remains an apple of discord within Roman Catholicism, and indeed well beyond.  The argument over its "meaning" -- its intentions, its relationship to a nebulous Great Tradition and a host of very specific lesser traditions -- remains unresolved half a century later.  This argument, in turn, reflects in microcosm the far wider and deeper anxiety felt by the rapid restructuring of social consensus which began in the North Atlantic nations and has now spread worldwide.  Fifty years ago, it was hard enough to come to grips with the end of colonialism and the beginnings of Second Wave feminism.  It would have been impossible for all but the most extreme thinkers to talk about gay marriage, global jihad, or the Internet.  Never mind the brave new world promised by biotechnology, or the advance of what Ray Kurzweil calls "the Singularity."  The old order, established at the end of the 17th century and largely unchanged but for the replacement of British hegemony by American, has disappeared.  It is no longer clear to all viewers that there is a "West," culturally speaking, much less Western values, ideals or traditions.  And if those things do exist, then it seems to many people that they are under siege.

And nobody -- nobody -- so clearly bears the standard of western cultural tradition (however that term is understood) as the Bishop of Rome.

No wonder then, that many people, and by no means only the obvious ones, focus their anxiety upon the person of the pope.  The militant atheist, the cynical reporter, the fundamentalist struggling in his own way against modernity -- each of them has a stake in the emerging idea of what it means to be Westerner living in a global village.  That is why they fantasize (as their predecessors did, too, and often no less creatively) about a person who might otherwise seem irrelevant to any of their own pursuits.

All that being said, it is best to stick to verifiable facts.  For the moment, Law lives in the Lateran, and the carnival appears to continue, even if in a more muted fashion.

Don't Blame the Lutherans!

Perhaps you've been following the Cypriot debt crisis, which is only the latest chapter in the European Union's fiscal car-crash.  If so, you know that it is generally reported this way:  "Germans are sick of paying other people's debts, and certainly don't want to bail out the wealthy Russians who have parked their rubles in the shaky banks of Cyprus."

Meanwhile Cypriots, who are being asked to pay a tax on their own bank accounts as the condition for a partial bailout, complain that the Germans are abusing them.  Mean, mean Germans.  And yes, odious comparisons to Nazis are routinely thrown around.

Timothy Spyrou, writing in the Cyprus Mail, argues -- in broad strokes, but to our mind convincingly -- for another view.  Cypriots, and most southern Europeans, have one view of "solidarity;" Germans, and most northern Europeans, have another.  He roots these in the difference between a Catholic/Orthodox worldview and a Lutheran one.

In fact, Spyrou says, southerners ought to take notice of Germany's great generosity during the crisis, and remember that when Germany was shown similar generosity by the US after Word War II, it responded in a very specific way:

West Germany’s new democratic leadership, its industrialists, small businesses, workers and society as a whole used this opportunity in true civic Lutheran fashion-they fashioned an economic miracle....

It was returning the interest back in spades by becoming a pillar of the free world. Germany’s civic responsibility towards Europe did not end there. As part of its efforts to atone for the past, and lay the groundwork for a mutually prosperous future of a union of European nation states with strong market economies and healthy welfare states, it was ready to put its financial muscle-essentially the money of German voters and taxpayers, towards achieving that goal.

The Germans, says Spyrou, expect southern Europeans to do likewise.   They are nonplussed when this does not happen, because of that quite different understanding of "solidarity."

We are deeply suspicious of the Max Weber thesis, which is either too simple or plain wrong, depending on how you look at it.  And Spyrou is certainly jumping off of Weber here.  Protestant theology is not the root of all hard work and thriftiness, much less capitalism.  Still, darn it, his argument fits with what we have seen and heard ourselves in the relationships between southern and northern Europeans.  (Nota bene: we have seen this difference of worldviews in the relationship between the Lutheran churches in Germany/Scandinavia and Romania.)

So if the Germans are not the cause of Cyprus's problems, then who?  Spyrou names several villains:  the Cypriots themselves, the feckless Greeks and Italians, the City of London.  But first and foremost he mentions the people who have mishandled the US economy, specifically the Bush Administration and

... the radical fringe of the Republican Party, who, because they could never accept a liberal African-American president, let alone the son of a Muslim Kenyan immigrant, did everything possible to throttle the economic recovery during Obama’s first term. 

This guy may be on to something.

Fides Quae Creditur

Trust is a funny thing.  Nobody much trusts the clergy these days, and it's not hard to see why; smart people never trusted Congress, and rightly not.

But do you know who people do trust?  The TV news channels.  For reasons that frankly escape us, people watch 'em and talk about 'em and act on what they see and hear.  We suppose this is some sort of atavism, a vestigial reflex from the old days when Walter Cronkite and the New York Times were accorded a cultural standing second only to, well, to your government and your minister.

Those, of course, were the days when the news media made a great show of parading their even-handed probity, their -- in a word that seems positively quaint -- "objectivity."  Cue the nostalgic violins.  We live in different times now.

And so even America's brief for talking heads is in decline, according to a recent poll by something called the Public Policy Polling Center.  The most fascinating result of the poll, though, is how the trust breaks down along partisan lines:

We find once again this year that Democrats trust everything except Fox, and Republicans don't trust anything other than Fox. Democrats put the most faith in PBS (+61 at 72/11), followed by NBC (+45 at 61/16), MSNBC (+39 at 58/19), CBS (+38 at 54/16), CNN (+36 at 57/21), ABC (+35 at 51/16), and Comedy Central (+10 at 38/28). Out of the non-Fox channels Republicans have the most faith in PBS at -21 (27/48),  followed by NBC (-48 at 18/66), CNN (-49 at 17/66), ABC (-56 at 14/70), MSNBC (-56 at 12/68), CBS (-57 at 15/72), and Comedy Central (-58 at 8/66).

It is hardly surprising that Republicans place so much trust in Fox, nor that others decline to do likewise.  But -- and this is important to note -- among Americans overall, as well as Democrats, it is PBS that is most trusted. (And Fox, by far, is the least trusted overall.)  Please do remember this the next time some GOP congressman (or presidential candidate) starts to make noise about defunding public broadcasting, and ask yourself why.

We regret that this poll restricts itself to television news, as we would very much like to see where National Public Radio falls on the scale of trust.

But, parenthetically, do you know how old Father Anonymous is?  Forget the grey hair, potbelly, and reading glasses; there's a better marker of superannuation these days.  He is old enough to be genuinely shocked that the poll treats  Comedy Central as a source on par with, say, ABC News.

License Guns Like Cars

Police in Trinidad and Tobago were recently sent to investigate the sound of gunshots.  They found a security guard sitting in his car, doubled over in pain, having just shot off his own penis by accident.  With an unregistered handgun.  (Via Gawker).

This is just one among the dozens of ugly gun-related stories that have been in the news lately.  It is not, so far as we can tell, that mass shootings, murders, accidents and stupid failures of basic gun safety are actually on the increase, so much as that, post-Sandy Hook, we are all a little more interested in talking about them.  So many, after all, would have been prevented if guns were harder to obtain, and so few actually involve a guns actually being sued to prevent a crime.

The recent observance of Gun Appreciation Day in the US has made for all sorts of giddy headlines. David Waldman, at The Daily Kos, came up with a list of "104 separate incidents" in the course of the day, "killing 39 people and wounding 69 more."  He doesn't pretend the list is all-inclusive.

Ardent gun-lovers are quick to point out that, while gun-related violence is higher in the US than in any other prosperous nation, guns still do not kill nearly as many Americans as heart disease, car accidents or even the flu.  They are correct, which is one more reason to take the subway, go vegan, and wash your hands a lot.  On the other hand, guns have the distinction of being among the only consumer items made for the express purpose of killing. (They are easily the most efficient of such items; even a highly skilled crossbowman can't do as much damage as a kid with his mother's Bushmaster.)  Sure, you can kill somebody with a can-opener; but a gun is designed to do it fast and more efficiently, and not to do anything else.  This alone is a reason to separate them out for particular legal scrutiny.

What is more striking to us, though, is how many of these incidents reflect sheer stupidity and incompetence on the part of the gun owners.  Three people were wounded at a gun show, when security asked an attendee to remove his shotgun from its case, and it discharged accidentally -- because, in other words, its owner was carrying around a loaded shotgun.  At another show, a man bought himself a new automatic pistol, and "accidentally pulled the trigger," putting a bullet into the guy next to him.  How did this happen?  Because the moron didn't check the chamber.

We are still not over the boy in Pennsylvania who was killed last month, climbing into the booster seat in his family's truck, because Dad was closing the door with one hand, while with the other he placed a handgun on the console.  The handgun "accidentally went off," a dubious proposition with modern handguns, but which wouldn't have been a problem except that, again, the moron hadn't checked the chamber.  And now his son is dead.

These are not the skilled, responsible sportsmen of NRA propaganda.  These are idiots, playing with with dangerous toys.

Now, these displays of ineptitude are not, on their own, arguments against the sale, much less the existence, of  these firearms.  But they do argue, very strongly, for some regulation. There is no reason that gun owners should not be required to pass a safety course, as drivers are, and to periodically renew their licenses.  There is no good reason that guns -- all guns, not just those styled after military weapons -- should not be registered, just as cars are registered, with careful records kept when they are sold or traded.  There are many good reasons that manufacturers should be required to place RFID tags in all new weapons, as the state of Connecticut once proposed (and as Italian manufacturers now do), and these should not just be used for inventory control, but for identification by the police.

Of course, many gun owners object to these ideas.  Their objections need to be considered carefully, not because they are sensible (they are not), but because of what they reveal about the minds of the owners.  A person whose only interest in in hunting has no reason to object to these things, except perhaps for the extra red tape; a collector has every reason to support them, since they will simplify theft recovery and insurance claims.   Who has the greatest reason to object to the idea of licensing owners and tracking guns?  Two classes of person:  first, the career criminal, whose work is made easier by the ready availability of untraceable guns.  And second, the person who nourishes, whether actively or in the secret recesses of his heart, secret dreams of taking up arms against the government.  Neither person's life should be made easier.

It's Not Justice, But ....

According to the lawsuit, one former inmate said he was forced to drink water until he vomited blood. Other allegations include rape, beatings, being slammed into a wall, and one man alleged he was subject to a mock execution at gunpoint. Many reportedly said they were forced to stand naked for long periods.

Yeah, that was Abu Ghraib.  Remember the good old days of the Bush Administration?

Military contractor L-3 does, if only barely.  As this Danger Room post reveals, L-3 contract employees were an active part of the highest-profile torture scandal in American history.  Some of them were named in the eventual Pentagon report, right alongside the soldiers they worked with.  But, while 11 soldiers were court-martialed (and we assume there were consequences for others), no civilian contractors were fired, fined, arrested, imprisoned or otherwise punished.

Nor have they yet.  But, in rather than continue defending itself against continuing legal action by 71 former inmates of Abu Ghraib, L-3 has paid out $5.28 million.

It's not a lot of money, when you consider how much these guys earn.  And a payment by the company  is not a legal judgment -- much less a conviction of the criminals our government paid to torture people.

But it's something, and we're glad it is.

Guns Don't Kill People

A friend has drawn our attention to a recent case in Georgia which, says our friend, needs more publicity.  To be brief:  a woman used her handgun to effectively deter a home invader, quite possibly saving herself and her children.  (Read stories here, here, here.)

The story is indeed gripping.  It takes place in the small city of Loganville, where a woman was at home with her two children when the doorbell rang.  She did not answer, and so the person who had rung it -- a career criminal named Paul Slater -- went to his car and returned with a crowbar.  He entered the house, and began a room-to-room search, presumably for things to steal.  The woman and her children retreated to an upstairs room.

When Slater entered their room, the woman shot him,  six times, emptying her weapon. Five of the bullets hit him.  She then told him to stay down, threatening to shoot him again, as she and the children escaped to a neighbor's house.

Slater, badly wounded, got up, left the house under his own power, and attempted to drive away.  He crashed his car, and was apprehended.  He is badly injured, and may still die.

So, yes, this is by any reasonable standard a case in which a handgun is used for legitimate self-defense.   Although laws vary, the so-called Castle Doctrine generally permits the use of deadly force for just this sort of situation, and one is hard pressed to argue that it should not.

Our friend's feeling is that this story should be considered as a counter-balance to the heavy media coverage of gun crimes.  Although he doesn't put it quite this way, he seems to believe that he story vindicates the logic behind DC v. Heller, and the general contention that guns in the home lead to safer homes.

Maybe it does, but we have a couple of reservations.  

The first is moral:  an armed woman shot an (apparently) unarmed man.  This is not to argue that he did not pose a mortal threat to her and to her children -- he could certainly have killed them barehanded, or with the crowbar, had that been his goal.  Still, she might have tried telling him to leave the house before she shot. We're not sure we would have, though, and we don't fault her for a moment.

Our second qualm is practical.  She shot him five times, at point blank, and yet he was able to leave the house and drive away.  This suggests that she needs marksmanship training and/or a bigger gun.  (Hit the sumbitch five times with a 9-mil, he ain't walking away, amiright?)

Unfortunately, Slater's survival also adds a bit of nuance to the pro-Heller argument.  If Slater had been carrying a gun of his own, it seems very likely that he would have been able to return fire, quite possibly killing the mother and children.

So why was Slater unarmed?  Even though he is a convicted felon, we doubt that it would have been difficult for him to obtain a gun in Georgia.  That, more or less, is what guns shows are for.  Or pawn brokers, or a guy in your neighborhood.  We expect that Slater carried no gun for fear of laws which provide more severe punishments for a crime committed with a weapon than for the same crime committed without one.  But it isn't logical to expect most hardened criminals to be so scrupulous about the law; they are criminals, after all.

In other words, this story does give some comfort to those who regard guns as defensive weapons, but only because the person who got shot had no gun of his own.  In its own way, this makes a good case for reducing the number of guns in circulation, and making it more difficult to buy them.

It certainly makes a case for training gun owners to shoot.

We Are Beyond Thunderdome

Thunderdome's simple. Get to the weapons, use them any way you can. I know you won't break the rules, because there aren't any. 

--Dr. Dealgood, explaining things to Mad Max and Blaster

Earlier today, NRA executive and longtime spokesman Wayne LaPierre gave a press conference, laying out his team's talking points.  Basically, they blame the news media and video game industry, and think that the solution to gun violence in schools is to arm teachers and security guards.  He argued, in so many words, that "the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." ( Reuters has the story here.)

New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg summed it up succinctly: "[LaPierre] offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe."

This is not an extreme characterization of the NRA's vision.  Their central idea -- which is also the Supreme Court's idea in D.C. vs. Heller -- is that guns enhance personal security, so more of them will create a more secure nation.  This is a little like arguing that, since when a truck hits a sports car, the truck driver is more likely to survive, therefore the key to highway safety is for everybody to drive trucks.  Who needs traffic laws?  Just buy bigger trucks.

While LaPierre was talking, a man in Pennsylvania walked into the Juniata Valley Gospel Church and killed a woman who was putting up Christmas decorations. Then he shot three more civilians, and three state troopers.  The crime scene extends for several miles.  Yes, the good guys with guns did stop him -- eventually.  That won't be much comfort to any of the people he has harmed.

In related news, the store where Nancy Lanza bought her guns has been raided by police.  Not because Lanza shopped there, nor even because Omar Thornton went there to buy the handguns he would use in 2010 to kill eight people at a berr distributorship, but because a third man, Jordan Marsh, stole a Bushmaster rifle like Lanza's, apparently intending to use it much as Adam Lanza had used his.  The store has apparently had a lot of trouble with inventory control in the past; Marsh was still on probation after an earlier theft, and in 2007, the store's owners contacted ATF because they couldn't account for 33 different guns.

None of this means that hunters, collectors and other enthusiasts shouldn't be allowed to own guns.  But it most certainly does mean that we, as a nation, have to make a choice.  The Wayne LaPierres of our nation think that, in the interest of safety, everybody ought to be armed, including elementary school principals and ladies decorating churches.  We could choose that route if we want; but the alternative -- the only alternative, were it even politically feasible -- is to tighten up the system in a way that is common in other nations, but without precedent in America.  Gun dealerships need to be heavily regulated and supervised by law enforcement agencies, and gun owners need -- at the very least -- to meet education and licensing requirements comparable to automobile drivers.  There's also got to be a serious discussion about whether any automatic or semiautomatic weapons belong in the hands of civilians.

Absent that level of regulation -- at a minimum -- LaPierre is right.  We should all start packing heat and wearing body armor and standing our ground, because otherwise we are just targets for the crazy people who can get guns so easily.  That may sound like a paranoid, dystopian vision, but it's also where the country is right now.

Cliff-Divers

Although he has traveled a bit in Mexico, Fr. A. has never seen the famous Acapulco cliff-divers.  He regrets this for many reasons, and is therefore delighted that Acapulco seems to be his new home.

No, we haven't taken a(nother) exotic parish call.  It seems that Acapulco has come to us, as Washington's leaders gather in conclave to work out an agreement regarding tax and spending policies.  The nation is sliding toward what Ben Bernanke once -- and the mass media ever afterward -- called "the fiscal cliff."

And while most people expect a last-minute deal to be struck, we at the Egg do not.  We think these crazy-arsed sumbitches are going to run straight over the edge.  It will be like the last scene in Thelma and Louise, which is a pretty funny way to think of  Boehner and Obama.  (Still easier to think of them that way than as than Butch and Sundance, though).

The bottom line is that we don't think either side will be able to stomach, or sell to its constituents, the level of  change that is necessary.  The modern Republican party is held together by two things: fighting  abortion and lowering taxes.  Violate either of these commitments, and a national GOP candidate is doomed.  If the Democratic party is held together by anything -- a debatable proposition -- it is by a general commitment to the ideals of the Great Society, extrapolated considerably.  On one hand, the President has no future election to contest; on the other, he needs to govern for another quadrennium. Not to mention that neither Mr Reid nor Ms Pelosi has imminent plans to retire from public life.

So, yes, many Republicans in Congress have begun to repent their vow to the pagan deity that is Grover Norquist.  But we would be surprised indeed if they were willing to do what must be done -- which, in our opinion, begins with letting the Bush tax cuts expire, continues with a return of the top marginal rate to a Reagan-era 40% or so, and continues with the destruction of another golden calf, as the last decade's massive increases in military spending are rolled sharply back.

Likewise, we'd be surprised if Democrats, despite their customary spinelessness, could bring themselves to do their bit.  Government programs need to be cut, including Medicare.  And more than a little.

Fortunately, there is a way for our fearful leaders to make all this happen, and still take no personal (or electoral) responsibility.  And that is to jump right off the damned cliff.

If they do not come to an agreement, then the policy designed by the late "supercommittee" will automatically come into force.  Taxes will go up, spending (half of it military) will come down, the the US budget will slowly begin to move toward balance.  This is called "austerity," and although it's not a particularly wise or effective policy during an economic crisis, it is the policy that the IMF and other rich-world agencies have imposed upon struggling nations for decades.  So at last we Americans get to put our money where our mouth is.

Mind you, nobody will be happy.  The faithful of both parties will cry bloody murder, and not only they.  Taxes on the middle class will go up so much -- around $2,000 for a typical family -- that people will buy less stuff, and the recession will return (or deepen, if you don't think it ever went away).  If you're jobless now, you'll more-or-less certainly be jobless in July, too.

But here's the thing:  we'll have some resolution.  The government won't be paralyzed every few months by debt-ceiling negotiations that fail anyway.  Our bonds won't keep losing value.  Everybody will lose, but posterity will (probably, maybe) win.  And the key point is that the people doing the negotiating don't have to do anything, least of all negotiate.  They can stand by their guns, keep their doctrinal purity, and still even out the spending-to-revenue balance.

Once upon a time, politics was called "the art of the possible."  In America, at least, those days seem to be gone.  Our government, particularly at the federal level, is so hopelessly divided that it seems incapable of any meaningful action.  Politics is no longer about getting things done; it is about posturing in public, and scoring points for your own party -- but it is not about making deals or, bless you, actually governing.

So, since politics has failed, we only have one alternative.  Next month, we are jumping off the cliff.  Hold on to your birettas.

Evangelical Atheist Medical Missionaries

There was Father A., his insides packed full of that foul fluid they make you drink, lying on the doctor's     couch in anxious anticipation of his first colonoscopy.  It wasn't a banner day by any means.  Nobody, we expect, relishes the idea of having a camera stuck up his tuchis.  Moreover, a failed sigmoidoscopy some years earlier, performed by a different physician, had been one of the memorably unpleasant medical procedures of Fr. A.'s adult life.

This promised to be a better day.  The environment was tranquil, the doctor seemed calm and undistracted, and -- best of all -- colonoscopies are performed upon fully narcotized patients, a fact which by itself made this day sunnier than that of the infamous Flexible Sig.  Fr. A. calmed his anxieties and tried not to think about the gallon of antifreeze distending his tummy.

Then the anaesthetist sat down, and introduced himself.  "I'm Dr. So-and-So," he said, flipping through the papers on a clipboard.  "And you're Mr. ... Anonymous ... and it says here that you're ... oh, look at this.  A member of the clergy?  Is that right?"

"Uh-huh."

"How interesting," Dr. So-and-So continued.  "I'm an atheist myself."

"Ah."

"I was raised Catholic," he said.  Or maybe Presbyterian, or Methodist; we don't remember, because we didn't care the least little bit.  Our attention was entirely taken up by thoughts of antifreeze and miniature cameras.  So far from prepared for a theological discussion were we then that we could likely not have distinguished between the variata and invariata, much less parsed a Greek verb.  Our god was, for the moment, quite literally in the belly.

So we responded to Dr. S&S's remarks with no more than the merest of polite grunts and murmurs, of the kind meant to show as little interest as possible.  The doctor continued, however, as though we had been rapt with fascination.

He had rejected Christianity, he said, because he was a man of Science; faith had no answers for him; the Scriptures seemed to contradict themselves; believers seemed to him like desperate children -- we're sure there was more but, as he performed his duty, we fell into the blessed respite of unconsciousness.

We awoke with a clear head and a clear intestine; both doctors had done admirable work.  But the memory lingered, of the anaesthetist offering his unsolicited arguments against religion -- witnessing, in evangelical jargon -- to an anxious and incapacitated patient.

This was not an isolated experience.  Not too long before, we had paid several visits to a cardiologist who did the same thing.  He was jolly and well-read and possibly a little bored with his work, but he was also very keen to make sure that we knew just how contemptible he found religion in all its forms, and how laughable he found a belief in God.

Mind you, we do not show up to the doctor's office in a cassock.  Not so much as a cross or WWJD bracelet (the initials, of course, for Wow-Wee it's John Donne).  We don't distribute tracts or recite the Angelus.  All we do is fill in the little space on the forms they give us.  And yet a surprising number of physicians, over the past few years, have seemed to feel that the moment of a medical procedure is just the right time to promote their opposition to Christianity.

It's not, if only for practical reasons -- patients have other things to think about, and wish that their doctors did as well.  The place for religious arguments, if there must be a place, is a cocktail party, or a lecture hall.  Or perhaps one's memoirs.  Or, if they wanted, they could team up with their fellow anti-religionists and spend Saturday ringing doorbells and passing out newsletters.  It seems to work for the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Still, this is a sign of the times.  We have reached a point in history when, like Christian missionaries in Africa handing out medicine along with their Bibles, atheist missionaries in America now witness to their unfaith as they distribute medicine.

Chuck Colson, RI [not too much] P

So Chuck Colson kicked off, at the age of 80.  The guy was living proof that, when F. Scott Fitzgerald said that thing about there being no second acts in American lives, he was full of pretentious malarkey.  (Drinking with Hemingway again, weren't you Scottie?).  Colson's second act was long and influential.

Needless to say, the press was quick to remind us all about the first act, as the guy who volunteered to walk over his own grannie if it would re-elect Nixon, and who served time for same.  And needless to say, our friends at GetReligion were quick to jump on the press for being stuck in the 70s, so deeply enthralled by the glamorous tale of Woodward and Bernstein that it couldn't see past Watergate to admire Colson's second act, as the pious prison reformer, the "towering figure" who "shaped the state" of modern evangelicalism.  Such and injustice!

They actually had us going for a while there.

Fortunately, Gawker just responded with a blistering diatribe by pseudonymous blogger "Mobuto Sese Seko."  It's not really journalism, in the conventional sense of the word; there's no pretense of balance or objectivity.  We can't even call it a think piece or an editorial.  It's pure, snarling, savage catharsis.  And it's just what we needed.

Calling Colson by a name we can't use in a family blog -- okay, fine, twist our arm:  God's Own Ratf*****r -- Seko speaks as much ill of the dead as we have ever seen.  As for the "towering figure" reshaping evangelicalism, he snorts:

His anti-gay, anti-liberal rhetoric—and unscientific and ahistorical demonization and smears—never veered from the toxic and odious, but one could hear it lustily reaffirmed by almost every GOP primary candidate this season. His Manhattan Declaration, that devout Christians should reject laws at odds with the Bible, is merely the most prominent articulation of unconstitutional Dominionist hogwash. Further, this kind of personal rejection of the rule of law is overwhelmed by a current GOP climate where it's been translated into a war on birth control for women, while public officials muse unapologetically about secession and nullification.

So there.

Is Seko reaching when he draws a line from Colson to Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer?  Probably.  Okay, definitely.  But Colson was a key figure in the development of modern conservative politics, as well as of modern politically-active evangelicalism.  So if you aren't wild about either of those things, or the antics of their advocates, consider Seko's curt analysis:

Colson left a snowball on a hill, and there were no shortage of people willing to help push it down.

Forest and Trees

Dear Amnesty International:

That big green thing in front of you?  The one with some brown lines running up and down, and the furry animals moving in and out?  Yeah, that's the forest.  The one you seem to have a little trouble seeing through the trees.

In your recent report, Choice and Prejudice, you presented a strong case that some Muslims in Europe are discriminated against on the basis of their religion.  Some countries have laws against headscarves, one doesn't want mosques with onion domes.  All true; and all, as you rightly point out, a violation of the right to a free exercise of religion, and of any number of European Union standards for human rights.

So you're right.  As far as you go.

But can we be serious here?  Three things need to be said, loud and clear:

1.  The discrimination against Muslims in Western Europe pales by comparison to the discrimination against non-Muslims in virtually all of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.  Some Spaniards won't build a prayer room in a public school?  How does that compare to, say, the death penalty for a religious conversion?

2.  Some of the discrimination you complain about is aimed at people of all faiths, and not only Muslims.  The French and Belgian laws which ban headscarves in school also ban crucifixes.  We Americans may think that Gallic laicism is misguided but, in its own cultural context, it makes an important kind of sense. Britain and Europe were devastated by two centuries of bloodthirsty religious warfare, and in response they have developed systems to limit the direct influence of religious institutions in the public square.  Given the current state of affairs in Africa and the Middle East, in which religious warfare is often presented as an acceptable and even desirable state of affairs, it is quite reasonable for them to strengthen those systems.

3.  Your report only makes sense -- indeed, it is only possible -- because of the extraordinary religious tolerance of the Western legal tradition and of modern Western societies.  You judge the West against its own standards, and find it wanting, which is certainly fair.  But those standards have rarely been lived out, and indeed rarely even been held up as valuable, outside the West.  The very idea of human rights that you promote developed in the countries you criticize, and to this day has little currency outside their cultural family.

So, sure, you're right.  Many European countries could treat Muslims better.  Incidentally, many European countries could treat their other religious minorities better; this includes, for what it's worth, Protestants in Romania.  For that matter, many officially Muslim countries could treat their Muslims better, too.  And let's not even talk about China.

On the other hand -- and this is the forest that we would like to make out through the trees -- Muslims in Europe don't do so badly.  A lot of them seem to like the place; some could probably make more money in Bahrain, but choose to stay in Berlin or even Brighton.  And why?  Because nobody in Europe (except other Muslims) cares if they are Shiite or Sunni.  Because in Europe, they can grow their beard or cut their beard without being assigned to a political party.  Because even with a little discrimination in the workplace and some skinheads in the next neighborhood, their lives and incomes are more stable in England than Egypt.  Because the countries you beat up in your report are among the very small number anywhere on earth that believe a right to religious freedom exists, or should exist.

Oh, Amnesty.  We love you, and we love your work.  But ... seriously.  This is like picking on the Pope because he isn't Catholic enough.  The guy should at least get credit for trying.