Reading the first chapter of Peter Rollins’ new book, Insurrection – which comes out this week; read the first chapter here – and his exploration of the way the church often uses the idea of God as nothing more than a deus ex machina, I was reminded of news I heard recently about the current pastor of the church I grew up in.

This church, in its heyday, was one of the biggest churches in the fundamentalist Baptist world. There’s a university associated with it, past its prime, like the church, and in recent years the pastor of the church and the president of the school have been one and the same. When it came to the attention of the school’s board of directors earlier this year that a chapter of his master’s thesis, a book some students were required to buy for their classes, had ben plagiarized – his excuse that he thought the pastor whose book he “borrowed” from was dead or the book was out of print and so it was okay to use it without giving credit, did not, funnily enough, prove to be a satisfactory explanation to everyone, even after he published an updated version – he resigned from his position at the university, claiming it was something he had already planned on doing. God wanted him to focus on his work as the pastor of the church, he said, and he’d decided it was too much responsibility to do both.

A couple of months after this pastor’s big announcement, God changed his mind (you know how fickle he can be). What God really wanted him to do, he said as he turned in his resignation letter to the church, was work for an evangelistic ministry, traveling around the country. “He felt like the Lord decided to move him,” one staff member said, claiming that his leaving had nothing to do with his resignation from the school. It was just time for him to move on.

In the first chapter of Insurrection, Pete critiques this view of religion, this way of thinking about God that uses God as nothing more than an excuse for why you’re leaving a church or starting a new church or quitting your job or ending a relationship, instead of giving the real reasons for your actions. Building off of the work of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he writes:

For Bonhoeffer, the Church approached God as a deus ex machina. God was merely an idea clumsily dropped into our world in order to fulfill a task. God was introduced into the world on our terms in order to resolve a problem rather than expressing a lived reality. The result is a God who simply justifies our beliefs and helps us sleep comfortably at night. God is brought into the picture only when we face a problem of some kind that doesn’t lend itself to solution by other means. In Bonhoeffer’s view, this God plays the same meager role as the supernatural beings in third-rate Greek plays.

While this way of using God, this use of the deus ex machina, can be fairly harmless, in can also lead, to name one example I’m personally acquainted with, to a father and husband deciding that God has told him to kill his wife and children. This, then, has become a position that I argue passionately against, a view of God, of the Other, that I think is, at best, rather perverse.

Toward the end of the first chapter, Pete gets into the way we talk about God with others if we believe in this way.

[T]he result is a faith that exists only at the very margins of our life, a faith that only has something to offer when we feel depressed, or scared, or when we face death. But what if someone actually enjoys life and embraces it? God as a psychological crutch would seem to have nothing to offer at all. The only option left for the apologist who is confronted by someone who actually enjoys life is to attempt to show that they are really in denial and crying out for this God in a disavowed way. If they cannot succeed in convincing the happy person that they are really unhappy, then they have nothing left to offer and must reject them as one caught up in rebellion, deception, and defiance.

I’m looking forward to engaging with the arguments Pete makes in Insurrection – the subtitle is “To believe is human. To doubt, divine.” – and hope it will be the catalyst for many good conversations. Download the first chapter here for free.

Those lines kept coming to mind as I read different reviews and excerpts of the new book from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. I first heard about the book via a column from Douthat summarizing his thesis and sketching out his arguments, where a couple of things caught my eye. Anyone familiar with the history of American religion will raise an eyebrow at several of the claims and reductions Douthat relies on for his arguments, but there’s one in particular that I want to focus on.

He attempts to argue that President Obama embodies the “uncentered spiritual landscape” that is central to his argument in a couple of ways, including in this: “[He was converted by a pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose highly politicized theology was self-consciously at odds with much of historic Christian practice and belief.”

It just so happened that I read Douthat’s column shortly after I’d listened to the three sermons Wright delivered at the revival services of a small church in Charleston, West Virginia, that took place the beginning of April. Before Wright spoke the second evening, he was introduced by one of his old friends, the Rev. Ron English, who held up a copy of the local newspaper with a headline announcing that “a divisive preacher is coming to town.” “I thank God for that divisive preacher,” he said. “Don’t you?” Situating Wright’s messages in the prophetic tradition, he continued: “Because you see, prophets don’t preach like priests. And the name is Jeremiah, y’all.”

Anytime the subject of Jeremiah Wright is broached, it is worth, I think, quoting again the statement Old Testament scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann made when Wright’s rhetoric was first brought into the national limelight, during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

“The current spasm of "righteous indignation" concerning Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama's pastor, smacks of embarrassing ignorance. Such a critique of Wright is ignorant of black preaching rhetoric and the practice of liberation interpretation. It is also disturbingly ignorant of the prophetic traditions of the Bible that regularly expose the failures of society in savage rhetoric. I am grateful for the ministry of Wright, a colleague of mine in the United Church of Christ, who for a very long time has been a faithful pastor and a daring prophetic figure. It is odd when right-wingers misconstrue this belated Jeremiah as they do the original Jeremiah, who knew about God's passion for truth-telling in risky places.” - Walter Brueggemann, professor emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary

Worth mentioning as well, in any discussion of American religion and Jeremiah Wright, is the connection between Martin Marty - whom Bill Moyers called "One of the great distinguished historians of religion in America" - and Jeremiah Wright. Wright told Moyers, in an interview in 2008, that he is the kind of preacher he is because of a challenge Marty issued to his students, Wright among them, at the University of Chicago around 1970 asking, "what do we do in ministry that speaks to the community and the world in which we sit?" Wright's career has been informed by that question and shaped by the prophetic tradition.

In his seminal book "Modern American Religion, Volume 1: The Irony of It All," Martin Marty explains "an aspect of method in narrative history" that Jacob Burckhardt laid out, where it is promised that the historian will "confine [themselves] to observation, taking transverse sections of history in as many directions as possible.” “Such sectioning across space and time,” writes Marty, “does not produce a story measured by a simple sequence of “and then’s.”

That desire, to “produce a story measured by a simple sequence of “and then’s” in service to one’s thesis, seems to be a primary problem of Douthat’s book, as evidenced by a sampling of reviews one finds online. Firstly, in a review for the New York Times, Randall Balmer, after classifying Bad Religion as a jeremiad, “one of the most durable literary forms throughout American history,” reminds the reader that “a jeremiad, almost by definition, will not let thorny details stand in the way of a good romp.”

He continues, further on in his review, to explain one alternative reading of a period Douthat dwells on:

But the glass-is-half-full approach, to borrow from the famous Peace Corps ad of this era, looks rather different. I’m not sure that the enervation of religion as institution since the 1950s is entirely a bad thing; institutions, in my experience, are remarkably poor vessels for piety. An alternative reading of the liberal “accommodationists” Douthat so reviles is that they have enough confidence in the relevance and integrity of the faith to confront, however imperfectly, such fraught issues as women’s ordination and homosexuality rather than allow them to fester as they have for centuries.

John Wilson, reviewing Bad Religion for Books and Culture, shares some of Balmer’s concerns:

The first [section], “Christianity in Crisis,” begins with a chapter entitled “The Lost World,” offering an idealized picture of American Christianity in the middle of the 20th century. (Late in the chapter, Douthat acknowledges that he has given us an oversimplified account, but then he proceeds with his thesis, altering nothing. He does the same thing at several other points in the narrative.)

… As you may have gathered from my summary of the book, I read Bad Religion with mounting exasperation. … Again and again in his narrative, Douthat skews the emphasis to fit his thesis rather than dealing with recalcitrant counter-evidence.

Lastly, Peter Steinfels, writing at Commonweal Magazine, concludes his review with this, echoing and expanding some of Balmer’s thoughts:

“What Douthat chooses to call the “locust years” were at least a decade and a half of intense social turmoil that probably suffered more than the usual quota of intellectual lockstep and hasty enthusiasms. That those years might also have involved honest, thoughtful, even painful, reconsiderations in the face of developments that could not be brushed aside, like the sometimes violent struggle for African-American equality, seemingly intractable warfare abroad, feminism, the sexual revolution, the appeal of Asian religions, and a quantum leap of historical consciousness among Catholics, escapes his and his sources’ imagination. One can run through issue after issue and discover serious debate, steps in one direction and then another, thinkers who confounded party lines, initiatives hesitant or bold and, yes, resistance. Was it simply accommodation? “Engagement” would be as good a term.

Bad Religion closes with Douthat’s hopes for “the recovery of Christianity.” A renewed Christianity, he argues, should be “political without being partisan”; “ecumenical but also confessional”; “moralistic but also holistic” (i.e., concerned with the Christian life as a whole rather than a narrow list of “thou shalt nots”); and finally “oriented toward sanctity and beauty.”

Well, Amen to that. Good advice, and capped with a movingly straightforward appeal to the reader to touch again the sources of Christian faith. But the capacity to be “political without being partisan” or “moralistic but also holistic” involves wisdom, empathy, prudence, courage, and imagination well beyond what is sketched in Douthat’s final nine pages of anecdotal examples and exhortative generalizations. Nurturing those capacities will not be done on the basis of a dichotomized, polemical history of the recent past.

Bad Religion is lively, provocative, informative, and useful as well as simplistic and misleading. It is a good book by a talented author. It could have been a lot better.”

According to one synopsis: “In Krapp’s Last Tape, which was written in English in 1958, an old man reviews his life and assesses his predicament. We learn about him not from the 69-year-old man on stage, but from his 39-year-old self on the tape he chooses to listen to. On the ‘awful occasion’ of his birthday, Krapp was then and is now in the habit of reviewing the past year and ‘separating the grain from the husks’. He isolates memories of value, fertility and nourishment to set against creeping death ‘when all my dust has settled’.”

Instead of going on and on attempting to describe the play and what I loved about it, or what it was like to watch someone at the top of their craft like John Hurt alone on a stage, commanding the full attention of everyone in the audience, I would encourage you to set aside an hour and watch this video, a recording of a performance Hurt did in London six years ago. (If you do want to read a succinct and articulate review, the New York Times, as usual, is a good place to turn.)

The next day, after wandering around the city for a while, I took refuge from the crowds in the main branch of the New York City public library. Exploring the reading rooms, a book of essays about Samuel Beckett caught my eye (by chance, it was on a shelf at the end of an isle), and pulling it out, I came across an essay taken from Steven Connor’s Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, on “Voice and Mechanical Reproduction” in Krapp’s Last Tape and a couple of his other plays. The editor of the book, whose name I forgot to record, introduces Connor’s essay with this:

Connor’s reading in ‘Voice and Mechanical Reproduction’ explores the pertinence to Beckett’s texts of ideas drawn from Jacques Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism in his writing on Rousseau and Saussure (Of Grammatology [De la grammatologie, 1967]). The recorded speech Beckett uses extensively in Krapp’s Last Tape, Ohio Impromptu, Rockaby and That Time differs from the full, palpable, self-present speech which the metaphysics of presence always associates with the theatre, and whose privilege over writing in logocentric thinking, as a source of reliable meaning, Derrida identifies and reformulates. The opposition of ‘live’ speech to ‘dead’ writing is deconstructed by recorded speech, whose capacity for repetition, citation and transfer from one temporal (or spatial) context to another gives it the ‘condition of iterability’ Derrida finds in writing. In his analysis of Krapp, Connor brings out both the materiality and consequent interruptibility of the acts of reading and listening in the play, and the parallelism and stark differences between the recorded and ‘present’ voices of Krapp. Temporal over layering ‘emphasized the citational nature of the original utterance’. All speech in the play can be played back and thus ‘grafted’ (the Derridean term) from one context to another.

Connor proceeds to explore this possibility of interruptibility, drawing out and giving greater meaning to what I found to be one of the more powerful moments in the play.

Beckett insists on the material facts involved in the process of reading, stressing the weight and inaccessibility of the ledger, with its entries difficult for Krapp to read with his failing eyesight and, especially, the necessity of breaking off reading to turn the page – ‘Farewell to – [he turns page] – love’. The effect of bathos is intensified by the splitting of the word in the French version – ‘Adieu à l’a … [il tourne la page] … mour’ – with the obvious hint that it gives of love turning to death. But Beckett exploits the simple physical fact of the turning of the page as well. Written language allows – one might almost say necessitates – gaps and interruptions, for its unchanging material form means that it can be broken off and resumed at the same point. The immediacy of speech, however, means that it cannot be suspended in this way without being lost for ever. In this play, the ability to break off, the possibility of introducing gaps, is evident both in the written and the spoken text – the ledger and the tape; and this ability is coincidental with the fact of the written text’s iterability. The awareness of the function of gaps gives a sense of other parallels between speech and writing. In particular, the hesitations in the younger Krapp’s voice, which punctuate his confidently continuous dialogue with moments of indecisive silence, open up possibilities of alteration or difference.

All of this was still in mind the next day as I finished the last pages of Insurrection, the newest book from Pete Rollins, while sitting on the train heading out to Greenwich, Connecticut, to meet Pete for lunch. The central thesis presented in Insurrection, as I’ve written about before (see this post on beliefnet), involves a critique of the idea of God as deus ex machina, God as that which provides justifications for our own actions and desires, no matter how base or harmful they may be to others.

Near the end, Pete reflects on the myth of eternal return, as explored in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, a question that has some relevance to Krapp’s Last Tape. Nietzsche asks:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more” … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

Nietzsche was not, Pete goes on to explain, attempting to present some Pollyannaish view of the world, or “some moral fairy tale about the beauty of existence.” “Rather,” he writes, “Nietzsche is asking whether one can truly affirm life as such, even in the very midst of all the suffering and pain. If we are able to say “yes” to life when confronted with the possibility of repeating everything, then such a demonic curse is robbed of its sting.”

A couple paragraphs on, Pete connects this back to his central thesis and the way we conceive of God. “It is here, amidst the ashes of the death of the deus ex machina, that a different understanding of God becomes visible. This God is affirmed where people are gathered together in love and is testified to where the sick are healed, the starving fed, and where those who dwell in death are raised into life.”

Reflecting further on this, on the eve of my 30th birthday, I’m reminded of an answer related by Cathleen Falsani in an article for Sojourners that Rob Bell gave when asked, at a New Year’s Eve party this past year, for his definition of evangelical: With a glass of champagne in one hand and a smile on his face, Rob answered, “An evangelical is someone who, when they leave the room, you have more hope than when they entered.”

These conversations, of course, are not new. Most of the rhetoric I hear today is indistinguishable from the way my great grandfather, the Fundamentalist evangelist and author John R. Rice, talked about these issues. His book Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives and Women Preachers, written in 1941 and perhaps his best-known title, carried this subtitle: Significant questions for honest Christian women settled by the Word of God – making it clear that anyone who disagreed with him wasn’t honest and certainly didn’t care about the Bible, allegations that are very much a part of the rhetoric today.

“The pulpit is a place for the strongest men that we have,” he wrote, building his argument. “The preacher in the pulpit should speak with an authority that is absolutely forbidden a woman to exercise.” In a sermon Rice preached on the 7th of December, 1964, he claimed that “man is in God’s image in a sense that women are not,” and so, “a man is nearer like God than a woman.”

As an argument against this way of thinking, this kind of idolatry, I turn to the work of Walter Brueggemann, who, in an interview last year with Krista Tippett for On Being, explained the reason for the abundance of metaphors we find for God in the scriptures this way: “The Biblical defense against idolatry is plural metaphors. If you reduce the metaphors too much, you will end with an idol. So more metaphors gives more access to God, and one can work one metaphor for a while, but you can’t treat that is though that’s the last word – you’ve got to move, and have another, and another.”

In that same sermon by John R. Rice, later published in the booklet “For Men and Women,” in 1979, by his Sword of the Lord Publishers, he expands on his argument about the proper place for women:

“God bless good women. I am not blaming them. I am blaming you sissy-men, you panty-waists who have no conviction, no backbone, no character, no principle, no standards. You don’t live for God. You don’t have the convictions necessary to live for God. You don’t stand. You don’t have manhood enough. What we need these days in the matter of religion is godly men to take the place God assigned them in the church. 
Men, do you see how serious is your responsibility? If God is going to win this country, He must do it through men. It is a strange thing that people have got more sense in matters of government and business than in matters of religion. We would not elect a woman president, nor follow a woman in business, but we leave church work to the women! No wonder the Bible said, “The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light” (Luke 16:8).

If one cares to try and place this kind of thinking in an historical context, I recommend Margaret Lamberts Bendroth’s Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present, as a good starting point. In it, she argues, in part, that “Dispensational premillennialism embedded the principle of masculine leadership and feminine subordination in salvation history itself and, perhaps more important, uplifted order as the highest principle of Christian life and thought.” Her thoughts and historical analysis are worth taking into consideration.

But as I said at the start, I’m tired. I’d prefer to focus on the good that is being done today, rather than rehash old arguments. To that end, let me turn your attention to another book, one that has some connection to this topic.

There are many reasons to commend Amy Frykholm’s new book, See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile in American Christianity, the exquisite writing and tender way she gives voice to stories from people who have been wounded by their childhood beliefs among them. The book is organized, rather brilliantly, I think, into three parts: Wilderness, Incarnation, and Resurrection, with Amy sharing three personal stories she has been told in each part, and ending with her conclusion, “An Alternative Ethic.”

I hope to devote more time in another blog post to some of the other stories she tells, but for now, I want to focus on what my reaction was to reaching the end of the book, particularly the last two stories. I happened to first read these stories the same week another evangelical pastor ignited a discussion after declaring that women are not allowed to take part in the public reading of scripture in a church service, because that would fall under the banner of teaching.

After reading the story Frykholm tells of Genevieve, a former prostitute rescued from the destructive path she was on through the work of Becca Stevens, an Episcopal priest here in Nashville, and the last story, that of Becca herself, recounting how the sexual abuse she experienced in her childhood at the hands of a church leader shaped her and informs her ministry today, I found myself challenged by a reflection from Amy, after Becca asked her what she was giving back, in exchange for being told all these stories. “While seeking our own healing is good and necessary work,” she writes, “there is much more to be done. In concrete and tangible ways, we must be extending hospitality and healing to others. Telling stories is wonderful, but working to heal the rift in our church and our society that daily damages precious human beings is better.” This is work that requires all of us, male and female, and leaves no room for petty arguments about who is allowed to do what. God is made manifest in our actions, in our caring for the least of these, the broken and hurting around us, without regard for the sex of the one extending a helping hand.

When I reached the end of Amy Frykholm’s book, moved by the work that Becca Stevens is doing, I resolved that, in the future, every time I hear another pastor claiming that Christianity has a God-given masculine feel, or opining about women staying silent and knowing their place, however explicitly they articulate those thoughts, I will make a donation to an organization like the one Becca runs (Magdalene/Thistle Farms), helping women like her to live out their God-given calling.

This, at least, is a step in the right direction.

When asked my favorite book of 2010, I’m tempted to say, the first 10 pages of Mary Karr’s Lit. The introduction. Nothing more. That’s all I’d read, until a few nights ago.

In the beginning of December, after I’d driven through the snow-covered mountains of North Carolina to attend a concert – a tribute to the 70‘s Memphis band Big Star, for which I’d done the music prep and a bit of orchestrating – I was waiting to meet my cousin, a Seminary student, for lunch one afternoon at a greasy pizza place when I wandered into the nearby Barnes and Noble. I noticed Lit prominently displayed near the front of the store, and, remembering my friend Jeffrey Overstreet’s enthusiastic endorsement, picked it up to find out what all the fuss was about.

Mary Karr is, first and foremost, a poet. She has four books of poetry to her name; the latest, from 2006, Sinners Welcome, includes poems ruminating on her recent conversion to Christianity. But she is probably best known for her three memoirs, with the first, 1995’s Liar’s Club, appearing on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. The blurb on the back of her newest book says: “Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr’s relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up – as only Mary Karr can tell it.”

The introduction, those first ten pages I read that afternoon sitting in an over-stuffed chair at Barnes and Noble, is written to her son. She remembers the way she has hurt him, the wounds he carries from childhood, writing that “just as my mother vanished from my young life into a madhouse, so did I vanish when you were a toddler. Having spent much of my life trying to plumb her psychic mysteries, I now find myself occupying her chair as a plumbee. Believe me. It’s a discomfiting sensation.”

“You’re disembarking now, I can see it,” is the way she ends the introduction. “Maybe by telling you my story, you can better tell yours, which is the only way to get home, by which I mean to get free of us.”

In a writing class I attended the end of last summer, at Image Journal’s Glen workshop, Lauren Winner, leading the class, directed our attention to the way one can communicate a world of meanings with just a few words. The way a pastor told her, after her divorce, that God could no longer use her (a passage from her follow-up to Girl Meets God, tentatively titled Still at the time, to be published sometime this year). My mention of a shot of Tennessee whiskey downed in a gulp before lunch after a sermon I once heard, in the essay I was workshopping. Passages that, in place of pages of description and explanation, communicate in just a few words something important about the narrator and the story.
Mary Karr, the poet, choosing each word with careful attentiveness, accomplishes this on almost every page of Lit. Look, for example, at the first paragraph of the first chapter.

“Age seventeen, stringy-haired and halter-topped, weighing in the high double digits and unhindered by a high school diploma, I showed up at the Pacific Ocean, ready to seek my fortune with a truck full of extremely stoned surfers. My family, I thought them to be, for such was my quest – a family I could stand alongside pondering the sea. We stood as the blue water surged toward us in six-foot coils.”

I read that paragraph several times in a row, amazed at how much I knew about the narrator from those seventy-three words, those three sentences. That feeling comes up again and again as one reads, an awe for the kind of writing that communicates so much so eloquently but never seems to get in the way, never seems to be about itself. I’m only on page 50, but I do know this much: run, don’t walk, to find yourself a copy of Mary Karr’s Lit. Take time to savor every sentence, every page. And enjoy.

In the meantime, check out the interview Kristin Russell did with her for the Art House America blog.

Dark dreams in the dead of night
And on the reckless brow
Bent to let chaos in,
Tell that they shall come down,
Be broken, and rise again.

History
Micheal O’Siadhail

And we keep beginning afresh
an endless history
as if this odyssey
had never happened before? Yes,

yes, ours was a spoiled generation
secure, even tepid
somehow untested —
no plague or war, torture or starvation.

Look how some were keeping faith
in a gulag while we
fumbled out our destiny,
walking our easy under-urban path.

So it wasn’t their route (wince
at the thought). Still,
freedom was a crucible,
blundering chalkless tour in labyrinths.

Maybe we grope the same journey
scooping the oracular
in scandals of the particular
light we throw on some greater story.

Why does the word keep taking flesh?
O nameless dream
wild stratagem
wanting to shape our venture. O Gilgamesh

forever traveller, your myth brooding
in us, we grapple
with redemption’s fable.
O Scheherazade healing a cuckolded king.

In January of 2007, Kevin Roose walked on to the campus of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, ready to join 25,000 other students for the start of the spring semester. But there was one thing that set Kevin apart from his classmates, something his new friends wouldn’t know about until after he left Liberty at the end of the semester. Kevin was a transfer student from Brown University, a school every bit as secular as Liberty was religious, and had decided to spend his “semester abroad” in Lynchburg, VA, instead of England or Italy. After spending a couple days on the campus of Liberty several months earlier, on a research trip with an author he was working for, he had realized he didn’t know anything, really, about evangelical Christians, and found that trying to carry on a conversations with “them,” even with his peers, was like trying to communicate with someone from a completely different culture, someone who didn’t even speak the same language. He wanted to get past the stereotypes, beyond what the culture wars tell us about who our enemies are, and so decided to spend a semester at an Evangelical university, with plans to write a book about his experience. The decision to attend Liberty, then, was an easy one: he couldn’t imagine a more conservative institution, and he wanted to get the full immersion experience.

When I read The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University, Kevin’s story of his time at Liberty, just after it was published a couple years ago, the first thing that struck me was how different our stories were. While Kevin chose Liberty because of how conservative and extreme he thought it was, I chose not to attend Liberty for the exact opposite reason.

When I started looking around at different schools as a junior in high school, I briefly considered attending Liberty, in part because of the friendship Jerry Falwell had with my great grandfather, John R. Rice. The one time Falwell preached at my childhood church, he spent several minutes of his sermon talking about my great grandfather and the way he looked up to him as an example. I remember this because the only other times Rice was mentioned at that church (a church he had his membership at for several years in the 70’s, due to his friendship with long-time pastor Lee Roberson, even thought he didn’t live in the same city), was to make sure that people knew that although John R. Rice was “a great man, he was wrong about storehouse tithing.”

I’ve read that Falwell was “called to preach” at the age of 18 while listening to Rice preach, although I haven’t been able to find the source of that quote. (A similar story involves a 26-year-old Rice counseling a 12-year-old boy, during a revival meeting he was leading with a friend, confirming what the boy thought was a calling to be a preacher. That boy, W.A. Criswell, went on to be a be a highly influential Southern Baptist preacher and two-time president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and he and Rice remained friends for the rest of their lives. And just to continue this line of thought a bit further, an example of why it helps to understand the history of Fundamentalism and see where our beliefs come from, there’s another story about a 19-year-old Bible College student, Rick Warren, who was “called to preach” after listening to a sermon from W.A. Criswell.) What I do know about Falwell is this: one of his first books, American Can Be Saved! (1979) was published by my great grandfather’s Sword of the Lord Publishers, a collection of sermons that had first appeared in the Sword of the Lord newspaper; they spoke at each other’s conferences; and Falwell was a member of the cooperating board of the newspaper, appointed in 1971 after Bob Jones, Jr. and Bob Jones III were dropped from the board due to the controversy over secondary separation. Rice also provided support for the founding of the Moral Majority, including giving Falwell access to his large mailing list of fundamentalist pastors to help spread the word about the new organization.

But all of that happened before I was born. By the time I graduated from high school in 2000 and was ready for college, things had changed. When I said earlier that I briefly considered attending Liberty, by “briefly,” I meant that I thought about it seriously for about thirty seconds before quickly deciding that there was no way I could attend a school that was so liberal. I knew that God wasn’t pleased with the way Jerry Falwell had led his school to abandon Biblical principles – the all-important principle of separation being a chief area where they had turned away from God – and their dangerous slide toward complete liberalism meant that no one who truly feared God and wanted to honor Him and grow closer to Him could participate in that kind of unrighteousness. (If someone needed more proof that Liberty had abandoned the path of righteousness, all one had to do was mention that the Christian rock group dc Talk had come from there, and their fate was sealed.)

With Liberty out of the picture, I found myself torn between two good fundamentalist schools, Pensacola Christian College and Bob Jones University, and leaning toward the latter, my mother’s alma mater, despite her forbiddance of my attending there because she didn’t want me to develop the kind of judgmental attitude she was sure I would leave there with. I’m more glad than I can say today that I didn’t end up at either of those schools.

Back to Kevin Roose’s book, The Unlikely Disciple. What I found most fascinating about his story – and I read the first 250 pages in one sitting, the first time I picked it up on a Sunday afternoon, finishing it the next morning – was that when Kevin described his bewilderment over some of the rules and attitudes he found at Liberty, or his surprise at the way certain unquestioned presuppositions shaped the way they viewed the world, I was a little surprised to find that I felt exactly the same way, that I shared his bewilderment. Several years after stepping out of that world, it can be hard to remember how sure I once was of the convictions I held and positions I advocated, and, more importantly, my forgetfulness can lead me to selectively apply what Jesus said was one of the two most important commands, the exhortation to love our neighbor, by excluding those who believe the way I was taught to believe growing up.

That leads me to the other book I want to talk about here, Andrew Himes’ The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family, which was published this week. (You can order it from Amazon here.) As I mentioned in an earlier post I wrote about my uncle Andrew’s book, it is filled with stories of many of the fundamentalist leaders of the 20th century, such as Falwell, J. Frank Norris, Jack Hyles, the Bob Jones family, and of course Billy Graham, documenting his friendship with Rice and what led to his split with fundamentalism. Andrew’s book is helpful, I would say, not only for those wanting to understand fundamentalism better, but also for those wanting to gain a better understanding of the role of religion in America. In his excellent work Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction: Christianity and the Battle for the Soul of a Nation, author Rodney Clapp suggests, “by way of broad and rough contrast,” that, “American democracy is composed of two dominant strains: the democracy of the parade, based predominantly in the North; and the democracy of the revival, predominantly of the South.” It doesn’t take much work on his part to go on and assert that America today speaks with a southern accent.

In an essay published earlier this week on the Huffington Post, Redefining Christian Fundamentalism: Following the Example and Teachings of Jesus, Andrew gives us a brief overview of his book and explains why he thought it was important to write it and how we can move forward today, living under the weight of history. “ As I try to follow the example and most fundamental teachings of Jesus,” he writes, “I come to better understand my grandfather’s motivations, his own all too human attempts to follow Jesus. I find myself having more compassion for my neighbor, and slower to condemn those who don’t understand the world exactly as I do. Following Jesus requires more than right belief. It requires right practice: placing Christ’s incarnation of love and justice at the center of your life and practice. Fundamentalism that recalls the unearned grace proclaimed by Jesus will be open-hearted, generous, kind, and hopeful, and will seek the Kindom (my intentional spelling) of God on earth.”

Link to buy book on Amazon.

From his work with his first band, The Normals, through the years he was with Caedmon’s Call – as Derek Webb’s replacement – to his five solo albums (and counting), I find something in Andy’s music that I need, lyrics that provide comfort and encouragement, words that give voice to unspoken yearnings, disappointments, and desires, confessions and promises. Lines that remind me of the kind of person I want to be, and how I might get there.

And then, of course, as anyone who knows Andy’s music will tell you, there are the guitar solos. At the 2008 Festival of Faith and Music at Calvin College, Andy sang one of my favorite songs he wrote (with frequent writing partner Randall Goodgame) while he was with Caedmon’s Call, Hold the Light, and after he sang everything that could be said, begging friends to walk alongside him, a plea for community, he played an extended solo on his electric guitar, a solo that expressed everything he wanted to communicate that couldn’t be put into words. That concert still ranks up there as one of the best concerts I’ve been to in my life.

One example of the kind of lyrics Andy writes: At a recent Square Peg Alliance house show here in Nashville, Andy played a song that will be on his upcoming project (more about that shortly). When he sang the first chorus, I was caught off guard by the first line, as it started off in a way that led me to think I knew what he would say. “God help the man who helps himself,” he sang. “He needs no other demons.” By leaving off one “s,” he changed the meaning of the phrase, asking the listener to rethink what they thought they knew and creating a space for him to tell a story, building off the presuppositions we bring to that grouping of words.

So about Andy’s new project: He’s going to space. And he needs your help.

By “going to space,” I mean he’s building a spaceship, or the interior of one, dressing up like an astronaut, and writing and recording a new album that tells that story of Leonard the Lonely Astronaut. As the biggest science fiction nerd that I know, Andy has been dreaming of this project for a couple of years, bringing it up in conversations with friends and hoping it would happen someday. He’s realized that if he doesn’t go ahead and make it now, “I’ll end up 75 years old muttering, “Dang it. I never built that spaceship.”’ He’s raising the funds for his space ship through Kickstarter, which is where you come in. Here’s a video he put together about the project, and I hope you’ll head over to Kickstarter to help him out after watching the video.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to know who you are without knowing where you came from, without knowing the history of your people, your place. For me, that story revolves around my great grandfather.

My mother’s grandfather, John R. Rice, was an Independent Baptist preacher and evangelist. Although he died fifteen months before I was born, his shadow loomed large over my childhood. My identity came from him, and he was, first and foremost, a Fundamentalist. From a sermon preached in 1928, early in his ministry, “Why I Am a Big F Fundamentalist,” to one of his last books, published in 1975, just five years before his death, “I Am a Fundamentalist,” that remained his most important identifier. With two hundred books and pamphlets to his credit (more than sixty million copies in print) and a biweekly newspaper he edited, the Sword of the Lord, that had a circulation topping out at over three hundred thousand, he was sometimes called “America’s Mightiest Pen.” His role as a principle player in two of the defining moments of 20th century American Fundamentalism – the 1957 split with Billy Graham over his ecumenical New York crusade, the end of a long friendship between the two, and the very public disagreement with Bob Jones, Jr., over the issue of secondary separation in the mid 70’s – cemented his role as an elder statesman of Fundamentalism. At his funeral service, one mentoree of his, Jerry Falwell, called his death the “passing of an era…He was God’s man for the hour. I looked on him as the guardian of fundamentalist truth for this generation. More than any other person, he was the most trusted man in fundamentalism…”

In the last couple of years, in an attempt to better understand my own history, the reasons why I grew up believing what I believed in childhood, beliefs that still shape me today, I’ve started reading through my great grandfather’s books – I currently own about 40 of them, I think – a process that is both difficult and often times frustrating, to put it mildly. I’ve read through the various Ph.D theses written about him, like Howard Edger Moore’s The Emergence of Moderate Fundamentalism: John R. Rice and The Sword of the Lord and Keith Bates’ Moving Fundamentalism Toward the Mainstream: John R. Rice and the Reengagement of America’s Religious and Political Cultures, as well as other books that focus on his role in shaping the beliefs of fundamentalists (and, consequently, evangelicals), like Margaret Lamberts Bendroth’s Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present, in an attempt to help me place his work in a larger framework, to better understand the context in which he spoke and wrote.

More importantly, though, for the past three or four years, I’ve walked with my uncle, Andrew Himes, through the process of his writing a book that is part memoir, part history of fundamentalism, viewed through the lens of our family. Drawing its name from the newspaper my great grandfather started, The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in One American Family, it is finally nearing publication, with a street date of May 15th.

The book opens with a story about my great grandfather’s funeral, where my uncle, at that time the “black sheep” of the family, was seated next to Jerry Falwell at the post-funeral dinner for family and friends. Falwell, one of the speakers at the funeral and fresh off the recent success of the newly-formed Moral Majority, spent most of the meal bragging to Andy about his friendship with Reagan, glad that “for the first time in a century we have a fundamentalist living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” My uncle did his best to avoid serious questions and actual conversation, content to let Falwell carry the conversation and stay on safe ground. “Fundamentalism was a difficult and painful topic for me, to say the least,” he writes, “and I had no idea how to talk about it without getting into an unseemly and angry debate with Jerry Falwell, with all my family as witnesses.”

The rest of the book is, among other things, his account of coming to terms with his story, coming to a place where he could talk about fundamentalism and his own history without solely reacting to the worst parts of the story, able to see the many facets that made up both his own history and the history of fundamenatlism. In the forward, Parker Palmer, author of Let Your Life Speak and The Courage to Teach, writes, “Andrew went from worshipping his grandfather to hating him to loving him. So the arc of this story has ancient and archetypal power: it moves from the neediness that leads us to cling to false gods, to the anger that fuels rebellion and individuation, to the love that strives for understanding and communion.”

That is where I see this story having value. Remembering Frederick Buechner’s oft-quoted observation that the story of any one of us is the story of us all, Andrew, by telling his story, creates a space for us to look at our own stories, maybe even pointing out the way for how we can arrive at that final stage Parker Palmer points out, a love that strives for understanding and communion.

Before the book officially releases on May 15th, we’re looking for bloggers interested in reviewing it, with a goal of having a strong push of people buying the book from Amazon on release day to help spread the word. If you’re interested in reviewing it for your blog, click here for more details. We’ll have more info when the book releases.

Here now is Andrew, telling one story that appears in the book.

When it came time to critique the piece I was workshopping at a writing class I took part in the end of last summer, Lauren Winner, the esteemed leader of our class, offered as one of her critiques that she thought I quoted Frederick Buechner too many times. When I attempted to explain that my quotations of Buechner were there because reading his books had helped me arrive at where I stand today, but that I was sure later drafts of the piece would rely less on Buechner’s words as I found my own, Lauren interrupted me, saying, “then write that. Write about how reading Buechner helped you become who you are today. That I would be interested in reading.”

So here it is: my attempt to explain something of what the writings of Frederick Buechner have meant to me. I have said elsewhere, and readily repeat it here, that I count myself among those are are still able to call themselves Christian, at least in part, because of the work of Buechner. When the voices of my fundamentalist religious upbringing threaten to drown out everything else, I have only to read something from Buechner to remember, once again, that maybe, just maybe, there is something to this whole thing.

I first heard about Frederick Buechner through the singer and author Michael Card, a few years before I started working for him as part of his road crew. Back in ’94, he recorded an album, Poiema, that he said in the liner notes was “inspired by the writings of Frederick Buechner, the C.S. Lewis of our time.” I bought Buechner’s first memoir, The Sacred Journey, not long after I discovered Poiema, along with a collection of his work organized for daily reading (Listening to Your Life), but aside from skimming the latter every now and then, they both sat untouched on my bookshelf for several years, through finishing high school and three and a half years working at a fundamentalist radio station, through a fifteen-month adventure at a Bible school in Argentina, and through a two-year stint working for a Pentecostal TV network. It wasn’t until a year or two after I moved to Nashville, Music City, U.S.A., that I finally picked up The Sacred Journey one cold evening, read it slowly over the next couple of weeks, and then quickly moved on to his next two memoirs, Telling Secrets and Now and Then, devouring both of them over the course of one week, feeling very much like a parched man stumbling onto an oasis. I like to think they were there waiting for me for the time when I needed them most.

Buechner has only released one book since that time – The Yellow Leaves, which I reviewed for the Rabbit Room – but every time I come across one of his books in a used bookstore that I don’t yet have, I immediately buy it to add it to my collection, knowing that at some point down the road, it will be there when I need it. I find a certain comfort in that.

Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale is the last book of his that I finished, and I was reading it one Sunday morning a couple weeks ago, a day that happened to mark the one-year anniversary of when I stopped going to church – a story too long to retell here except to repeat one of Buechner’s quotes that I’ve used countless times in the last year, that “the sermons that have the biggest impact on us are those that we preach to ourselves in between the lines of whatever is being said from the pulpit,” and what I was hearing “between the lines,” informed by twenty-eight years of being in church every Sunday – and more – was drowning out the possibility of hearing life-giving words in that context. So on that recent Sunday morn, here are the words I read when I picked up Telling the Truth, words found in the last chapter:

“[In the fairy-tale world] Joy happens, to use Tolkien’s word, and the fairy tale where it happens is not a world where everything is sweetness and light. It is not Disney Land where everything is kept spotless and all the garbage is trundled away through underground passages beneath the sunny streets. On the contrary, the world where this Joy happens is as full of darkness as our own world, and that is why when it happens it is as poignant as grief and can bring tears to our eyes…

If you still have something more than just eyes to see with, the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can – the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn’t even flicker…

The joy beyond the walls of the world more poignant than grief. Even in church you catch glimpses of it sometimes though church is apt to be the last place because you are looking too hard for it there. It is not apt to be so much in the sermon that you find it or the prayers or the liturgy but often in something quite incidental like the evening the choral society does the Mozart Requiem, and there is your friend Dr. X, who you know thinks the whole business of religion is for the birds, singing the Kyrie like a bird himself – Lord, have mercy, have mercy – as he stands there among the baritones in his wilted shirt and skimpy tux; and his workaday basset-hound face is so alive with if not the God he wouldn’t be caught dead believing in then at least with his twin brother that for a moment nothing in the whole world matters less than what he believes or doesn’t believe – Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison – and as at snow, dreams, certain memories, at fairy tales, the heart leaps, the eyes fill.”

There it is. That’s why I read Buechner, the reminder of the holy lurking under the commonplace, the reminder of what we maybe desire most – Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison – always present in our actions. If those words mean nothing to you now, if they don’t move you in some way, I ask you, please, remember his name, and if, somewhere down the road you’re struggling to believe in anything, much less the fantastical claims of Christianity, pick up one of his books. I recommend Telling Secrets or the collection of his sermons, Secrets in the Dark. For those of you already reading him, or those who’ve always meant to pick up something by him, treasure his work. Remember these words that he says sum up everything he’s tried to say, repeat them to your family, to your neighbor. And, most importantly, don’t stop repeating these words to yourself, maybe the person who needs to be reminded most of all: “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”