A Basic Profiteer's Guide to Christianity

Steps for making Godly profit:

1. Locate a secular trend, program, or other profitable opportunity.

2. Insert appropriate Christian rhetoric about "bringing yourself closer to God," "improving your walk with God," avoiding "issues that can keep you from growing closer to God," and otherwise "surrendering yourself to God." Buttress with at least one additional inspirational Bible quotation that seems marginally relevant. More quotes are better, but only one is really necessary - look at what Wilkinson was able to do with capitalism via The Prayer of Jabez, for example.

3. Go to church, find a few susceptible assistants, and announce that you feel the Holy Spirit has been leading you towards something you think the church really needs in order to reach out to the lost.


An excellent case study can be found here, in an article from USA Today, published yesterday, about new Christian fitness programs. One of the group leaders, Kim Melchor, explains - à la Corinthians - that our bodies are "God's temples," and therefore we need to take care of them. Because, presumably, if you want to attract worshippers to your temple, you have to keep it in good condition.

Ironically, Paul was speaking against prostitution in that passage.

Unfortunately USA Today doesn't really explain what's especially Christian about the exercise involved. Maybe there's a special rhythm involved in jogging with Christ.
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Beware! Evil!

This post is sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

Years ago, Focus on the Family head James Dobson published Bringing Up Boys. Then he published a truly bizarre guide to preventing your male children from growing up gay. Among other elements, possible solutions included fathers taking the time to shower with their sons, and fathers teaching their sons to pound pegs into holes. Fun!

Ever since then, I've been eagerly awaiting Dobson's follow-up masterpiece, Bringing Up Girls. And at long last, he's finally delivering! This month, in his classic monthly newsletter, Dobson provided an excerpt from the manuscript of the new book. I eagerly linked to the letter in hopes of finding out how to prevent girls from becoming lesbians, but unfortunately the provided excerpt seems to have nothing to do with girls specifically, and more to do with the necessity of protecting all your children from the pedophiles lurking just outside your front door.

To summarize Dobson's argument in fifty words or less:

Be afraid! Fear! Fear! There are predators everywhere! The world is worse than it used to be! If you're not careful, your daughters might go out and have sex!

Dobson, of course, uses more colourful metapors. He explains that our kids are "little bunny rabbits running through the meadow." Parents are "their only defenders" in a world of evil "predators" and "ultimate killers." If you're not careful to "fill the void" in your children's lives, they might seek "the warm company of other bunnies." That is one kick-ass euphemism.
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Persecution!

This post is sponsored by the Secular Humanist Conspiracy Project of the Church of the Orange Sky.

Last year a Congressional committee in the U.S. began investigating various mega-churches for financial misdoings, hinting that ministers like the aptly-named Creflo Dollar were engaged in too much profiteerng and political activism to qualify for the tax-exempt status traditionally given to churches. At the time, I believe I suggested we drop the tax exemption altogether, since churches shouldn't need it and it would force us to think about alternative ways to build religious community and engage in charity projects than simply moving money through church bank accounts. It seems, however, that the publicity of the megachurches' corruption may be having an effect anyways, though, even without withdrawing their tax exemptions.

A couple of years ago, I went, with one of my friends back in Prince George, to a "non-denominational" charismatic church called the Overcoming Faith Christian Centre. This struck me, and always has, as a really dumb name for a church. Actually it sounds more like a recovery group for former Christians turned atheist. But that's not the point today. The "Christian centers" are spread out through cities in Canada and the U.S., ostensibly without denomination but in practice all sharing the name "Christian centre" and a focus on charismatic evangelicalism.

One of their counterparts in Minnesota is the Living Word Christian Center, which has a very nicely professional Website here. I tried to find out how big the church is and could only find out that ten years ago it had 7000 members. Presumably it has more now. This certainly qualifies it as a megachurch. The senior pastor is Mac Hammond, who last year claimed he'd "welcome" an IRS audit in order to clear the church's good name. This article on Hammond, from last year, explains the basic issues, including millions of dollars in "personal loans" given him by the church. It also contains some fabulous quotes from Hammond himself, like this one: "It takes wealth, folks, to establish God's covenant on Earth... It takes money to be influential. If you have no money, you can't even love, because love is about giving and not being a burden."

Bravo, Mr. Hammond. I don't think you could have subverted the message of Jesus any more effectively than you did with that statement there. Incidentally, he also explains later that God has given him a "Holy Ghost siphon" which funnels money from his congregation to his own pockets.

Unfortunately, Hammond has fallen on hard times. Church spokesman Rev. Brian Sullivan says this is because of all the bad publicity about the Prosperity Gospel over the past year, sparked by the government investigations. The church is so short of money that - God forbid! - they're going to have to sell their private jet.

Which leads to my next question: why do pastors need private jets in the first place?
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Bakker's Back!

The Church of the Orange Sky praises all religious leaders who have discovered ways to make absurd profits through modern telecommunications technology.

Older readers may remember Jim Bakker and Praise the Lord ministries from the 1980s. Back then, Bakker was quite a successful prophet for profit and raised an enormous amount of money to build a "luxury hotel" at his complex, Heritage USA. This was done through $1000 "memberships" entitling members to stay three nights every year at the hotel; far too many memberships were sold to actually leave rooms available if everyone took advantage of the "deal" on an annual basis. Bakker raised more than enough to build the necessary extensions, but most of it was siphoned off into the "operating expenses" of Heritage, and to himself through $3.4 million in righteous "bonus" payments. Another $300 000 was quietly funneled to church secretary Jessica Hahn, whom Bakker had sex with once in Clearwater, Florida. Interestingly, Clearwater is also the site of another religious point of significance: the Church of Scientology's primary "base," where construction on the "Superpower Building" is now underway.

Hahn claimed that she was raped; Bakker insisted it was consensual. Either way this was a little too much for a preacher, and he had to leave Praise the Lord ministries; his replacement was another member of America's pompous pious, Jerry "the Jackass" Falwell, better known for illegally spending millions in religious ministry dollars on political activism, funding the slanderous Clinton Chronicles, claiming that the Teletubbies were part of a gay conspiracy, and claiming that people who are pro-choice, gays and lesbians, and the ACLU were responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks. Bakker himself was sent to prison on various counts of fraud, initially for a total of 45 years. (That was reduced to 18 years on appeal, and he was released on parole after only five years.)

Anywho, Bakker's back after a long hiatus. He's actually been back for a few years, in the form of a new show on a Christian broadcasting network, but now his network of supporters have given him enough money to re-develop his theme park/resort, once Heritage USA, now relocated in Morningside. The "lifetime memberships" are out, but among other things, the project has its own brand of handcream that it's selling to raise money, and it's picked up some venture capital from an investor who was swindled by Bakker back in the 1980s but, like most of those attending the new opening, claims to have "forgiven" Bakker for his past transgressions.

Normally I'm critical of churches' willingness to crucify pastors who have broken the rules, especially when those are rules that others also break on a frequent basis. But why in the hell you'd want to trust a proven con artist is beyond me. The amount of faith these people have in Bakker is astonishing and disturbing, all at once; some proudly proclaim that when they received their small compensation cheques from the original swindling litigation against Bakker, they immediately sent the money back to him as a show of faith.
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"Comfort" Food for Bigots

Procrastinator's Link of the Day: Ray Comfort, half of the brains behind the asinine Way of the Master, actaully has his own blog, which he calls Comfort Food. The subtitle claims that this food "gives a sense of well-being," which unfortunately is not what Comfort's blog does. What the blog actually is, is an opportunity for Comfort to take potshots at every other religious group. The main page right now features a largely unnecessary observation that scientologists don't preach the love of Christ, repeated mockery of atheists, and criticism of what Comfort calls "Christianity Light." Coming from someone who apparently believes we can reduce Christianity to the Jewish Ten Commandments, this is a stunningly ironic post.

What's even better, though, is the part where Comfort claims that atheists are picking on Christians because if they picked on Muslims, the Muslims would come over and chop their heads off. Well done, Mr. Comfort. You've made atheists, Christians, and Muslims look like assholes all at once. It takes rare skill to pull that off. Here's a thought: most North American atheists are more concerned with Christianity than Islam because Christianity is a lot closer to home. Most of them also aren't, for example, very much concerned with countering the claims of Judaism, mostly because it's not predominantly Jewish or Muslim evangelists who are prancing around North America mocking atheists.

Comfort rationalizes being an ass on the grounds that he's doing it "in love." That doesn't make it better, sir, it makes it worse. The idea that your "love" for the atheists is so fluid that it justifies whatever you were going to do anyways basically makes it clear that you don't love them, at least not in any meaningful sense of the word. You're writing this so that like-minded Christians can read it and chuckle, I suspect.

If Comfort really wants to be a fantastic evangelist, he needs to consider humility. You're unlikely to sway people through childish mockery. Instead of parading into "dark" urban areas with your film crew, ditch the crew, ditch the fancy clothes, and actually try living with the people you're trying to "save." After all, if you really believe what you're preaching, you're going to be living with some of them for eternity, so you might as well get to know them better now.

In other news: The U.S. wants everyone to mourn the passing of former Indonesian president Suharto, who died this weekend, for his contributions to "economic and social development" in that country. Well, we ought to do that. Then we can also raise a glass to the half million "communists" murdered by his regime, and to other hundreds of thousands killed by massacres or subjected to mass rapes committed on East Timor by invading Indonesian troops while the Americans looked on approvingly.
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The Pitfalls of Professional Christians: Of Pastors and Pornography

Prophet: This is the word of the Orange Sky.
Congregation: Thanks be to God.

Another month, another news story about a pastor losing his position because of lust. This one because of online pornography, specifically, and I admit I missed this story by a month, because I'm not usually at the cutting edge of gossip about pulpits in Florida. In my defence, my source on the story is a more recent article at Church Central which defends the pastor in question on the grounds that there are "deeper emotional issues" which motivate "addiction" to pornography.

The original story is fairly familiar if the circumstances are somewhat specific. A pastor confesses to a leading committee at a church that he is dealing with a personal moral failure. The committee, in this case, consults others within its denomination before sending the pastor on an indefinite "leave of absence." Dubiously, it brings in "a computer firm under contract" to "investigate the computers" at the church, because even though the pastor hasn't committed a crime, his word can't be trusted anymore and it's time to investigate him like a criminal. Other than that, the Methodists have been fairly gracious here. Instead of running him out of town, Mr. Brian James is permitted to stay in his church-owned home "for up to three months," and gets a vague promise of "some support." What happens at the end of the three months, I'm not sure.

Church Central tries to be compassionate by noting that this is probably a common problem and that the church should consider the presence of "deeper emotional issues" underlying pornography "addicts." I suppose that's true, though I'm a bit skeptical of whether we can basically equate looking at porn with being a victim of sexual abuse or even being on par with other "sexual addicts," something the article does unquestioningly.

The main problem which concerns me is something Church Central only hints at, in noting that pastors likely feel unable to confess their sins to others at the church because doing so "can cost them their job."

Basically, the church creates in its leaders a new category of religious person - the professional Christian - who simultaneously becomes the model of Godly behaviour, a sort of stand-in for Christ, while also a scapegoat in the event anything goes too seriously wrong. Such professional Christians are expected to be able to relate to sinners but nevertheless float somewhere above sin, at least "serious" sins, an artificial category of sin we establish to separate the sins we think are "imortant" and socially disruptive from those which are "less important" and not socially disruptive. Pornography presumably fits into the first of the two categories.

This despite the fact that fully half of evangelical church-attending men in the U.S. struggle repeatedly with pornography, according to one claim. The group which conducted the survey doesn't seem to be fully active online anymore, so I can't verify the results of that survey, but based on similar numbers at sites like this and this, I think we can basically conclude that pastors are human, and generally fall on the low side of the porn-addiction spectrum at that, probably statistically lower than most of their congregations.

Projecting an image of moral superiority onto religious leaders may be convenient in churches but it can also create expectations that these people shouldn't reasonably be expected to meet. My point here isn't to legitimize porn - and in any event, that's a debate for another day. What's important here is that, even from an evangelical perspective, our current system encourages churchgoers to project an image as more than human, and pastors to do this even more so than others. It's unrealistic and harmful. If churches really want to tackle the clearly serious issue of porn use, it would probably be helpful not to pretend that some of the people involved are morally superhuman.
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Enjoying the End Times

This post incorporates research funded by a generous grant by the Eschatological Sciences Research Foundation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Church of the Orange Sky.

It's occurred to me recently that my undue focus on certain branches of Christianity has led me to ignore the wide variety of apocalyptic notions floating around elsewhere. I'm sad to say this didn't occur before now - indeed, I ought to have realized it a couple of years ago, before I was kicked off of the Rapture Ready bulletin boards by zealous administrators, at which time I'd been repeatedly lectured by the pompous pious on the supposedly apocalyptic views of Iran's president, Ahmedinejad. (At the time, this little corner of the evangelical right seemed convinced that Ahmadinejad believed it was his divinely appointed role to blow up Israel and thus provoke a world-destroying nuclear armageddon.)

A couple of months ago, I had an even more interesting conversation on the train in Ottawa with a fellow (unfortunately, I've forgotten his name) who'd done some very interesting research into the end of the world from a quite different perspective. He began with the rather often-repeated (even, hilariously, among futurist evangelicals, who ought to know better if only because of their delusions about Satanic inspiration) claim that the world is going to end in 2012, something the Mayans knew but none of the rest of us have been able to figure out in the intervening five hundred years. Wikipedia has a page on the Long Count calendar and, unsurprisingly, the 2012 story is largely a myth: this date marks the end of an era in world history, not the world as such. That doesn't stop people, though; 2012 figures significantly in everything from the New Age theories of José Arguelles to the alien conspiracies of The X-Files.

What was more interesting about this conversation, though, was not the date but the details. Among other things, the Earth's magnetic poles are going to begin fluctuating - after learning I was a university student, he nicely asked whether I knew much about whether such fluctuations had occurred before in world history - and there are going to be enormous floods, covering the vast majority of the world's surface with seawater. Fortunately, he and apparently some others had been able to figure out which mountain ranges would escape the flood relatively unharmed, and he was making a map of suitable escape locations. Unfortunately I can't remember which ones were favoured (after all, you don't want just high dry land but high dry land you can survive on), except that one of the optimum mountain ranges was located in sub-Saharan Africa. It was an interesting conversation and unfortunately the train ride only lasted ten minutes or so.

All of this pales, however, next to the latest eschatological pronouncement from the always-entertaining Church of the Subgenius, which has recently proclaimed via its High Weirdness Project, that the end of the world is coming a little early, in July of this year. Consequently, the Church is going to suspend new memberships beginning late on July 4 (the day before the end of the world - Armageddon's Eve, perhaps?) and is inviting all of its members to a nudist retreat at the Brushwood Folklore Center to celebrate their last days on Earth. (The end of the world, conveniently, coincides with the church's annual X-Day celebrations, which customarily invite "disbelievers, blasphemers, pranksters, rebels, hackers, pornographers, geeks, and outcasts" to explore the Church's concepts of enlightened "sexual freedom."

For those who are worried that this is starting to sound like a suicide cult, don't worry - the Church of the Subgenius, like all Discordians, tends to hover somewhere between peacefully psychotic and ironically humorous, sort of a long-winded cousin to Pastafarianism and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Actually, I kind of like the Discordian movement. Unimginatively named Christian deities like "God," and authority figures like "the Pope," seem downright dull when placed next to Bob Dobbs the divine equipment salesman, who escaped death Rasputin-style before finally being gunned down in San Francisco in 1984, after which he has subsequently returned from the dead on multiple occasions; or especially Malaclypse the Younger, Omnibenevolent Polyfather of Virginity in Gold, who once exchanged telegrams with God while vacationing in the Celestial Hotel.
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Miscellaneous Updates

One of my friends has complained that I'm too negative and cynical, and don't put forward solutions to the many problems identified on this blog. Fair enough. I'm actually preparing a more proactive series but in the meantime here are some updates on reactions to recent posts.

More Oral, Anyone?

Readers may remember Richard Roberts, the head of Oral Roberts University, whom God first called to remain at his post despite dubious scandals and abuses. After the Church of the Orange Sky made known its position on the matter, God relented and told Roberts to consider stepping aside. (Alternatively, Roberts, like most evangelical leaders, is habitually taking the Lord's name in vain by making the decision he wants to make and then invoking the G-word as extra justification.) That resignation has now been made permanent, in the wake of a faculty revolt. So long, Richard. Your family's antics were almost enough to earn you an official nickname, up there with Big Gay Ted and Gunrunner Pat, but with a father named Oral, I figured there are enough potential slurs out there already.

The reaction to the allegations among people at ORU is intriguing. One student confesses that the "corruption everywhere" makes the religious school "feel empty, like an elaborate masquerade party." Former regent Carleton Pearson admits that "people are asking questions and questioning answers, and we're not used to it." Well. Hopefully more people keep asking questions. It's a pretty sad university where student radicals don't cause trouble at least once in a while.

In the very latest news, it seems that ORU has fallen into considerable financial difficulties. (Whether this is a result of the huge sums of money squandered by the Roberts dynasty is not clear yet, although I doubt it could have helped.) But that's okay, because a knight in shining armor is already riding to the rescue: Mart Green, owner of the Mardel chain. That's a hilarious store that specializes in "Christian office and educational supplies," perhaps so that you don't have to buy pencils and paperclips from homosexuals who will use the proceeds to fund demonic rituals. I'm not sure what makes one binder Christian and another secular, but for ORU it really doesn't matter: Green is going to pay $70 million to bail out the flailing university, on the condition that it lets two of his family members join the board of regents and separates itself from the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association. Sounds like good conditions, actually. Score one for Christian big business.


Why not rather let yourselves be cheated?

So says the apostle Paul in his rambling First Letter to the Corinthians. Ironically, the evangelical Bible-believing Anglicans who've recently proclaimed schism in Canada don't agree with Paul, even though the stated rationale for leaving the Anglican church is that the liberal mainstream in Canada no longer takes the Bible seriously. I guess by Bible they meant "the parts we want to interpret literally," which, interestingly, is very much the same as the definition used by many of the liberals they claim to despise.

Anglican Essentials, the coalition at the centre of the new splinter faction, has released documents to the press pronouncing itself ready to rumble. Ready in the legal sense, that is: the group has retained a Bay Street law firm and is preparing itself for a protracted legal battle to gain control of the church properties owned in breakaway parishes. In true evangelical form, one of the documents notes the "possib[ility]" that church properties could be lost "at the end of the day" -- but this hardly matters, because "that day could be very long coming." In other words, it doesn't matter whether we're in the right or not because we can tangle this up in the judicial system for at least ten or fifteen years. Their boisterous lawyer-director, Cheryl Chang, claims that the Anglican faction is ready to go all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. Chang threatens that her clients will have to pay money, but so will the Anglican Church of Canada. In other words: if the Anglican Church doesn't back down, the Anglican rebels are going to take another big bite out of its already dwindling revenue.

Unfortunately, some anonymous idiot has given the new group $1 million to play with. (Under the circumstance, I can understand wanting to remain anonymous.) Like irresponsible children squabbling over their dead parents' estate, Anglican Essentials has decided it's prepared to squander the money playing games in court instead of taking care of some of the church's real missions in this world, like ministering to congregations or feeding the hungry. It's even decided to ask for a 10% tithe from all members in order to pay for its courtroom crusade.

We remember 1 Corinthians for a variety of different reasons - Paul's chapter on love and works (contrast that with James' faith and works) in chapter 13, his condemnation of denominations and factionalism in chapter 1, his cautions about marriage in chapter 7 (in which marriage is described not as the sacred cow most evangelicals make it out to be, but as a compromise for people who want to get laid but stay Christian). Today's reading, however, is from chapter 6, where Paul claims that it is better to be knowingly cheated by a fellow Christian than to bring shame upon oneself and upon the offending brother (or sister, I suppose) by kicking love and charity to the curb and hauling the case before a secular court. It didn't take long for the new Anglicans to decide paying attention to the Bible wasn't worthwhile after all.
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Big Gay Ted: Another One-Year Retrospective (Plus Money Laundering for Dummies!)

This message was commissioned by the official Canadian representative of the Church of the Orange Sky. The Church urges all followers and readers to consider donating to its Big Gay Ted support campaign, since at the moment the Church is dirt-poor on account of a current deficit of rich donors.

A year ago this month, Ted Haggard -- aka "Big Gay Ted" -- was unexpectedly outed by his prostitute and dealer, Mike Jones. To many, the fact that one of the national leaders of the anti-gay marriage movement was himself gay was proof positive of the repressed sexuality and blatant hypocrisy inherent to the modern Christian political movement (or maybe to the Christian religion more generally). Like many people caught in a lie, Haggard first denied everything, then issued a few qualified confessions, then let someone else admit publicly on his behalf that actually pretty much everything Jones alleged was actually true.

What makes Big Gay Ted's unfortunate situation even more ironic is that he played significant roles in a pair of Christian documentaries over the past two years, Jesus Camp and Friends of God. Both were filmed before the Jones incident, though the latter actually came out afterwards, and cheekily reminds viewers of this fact both at the beginning and the ending of the film (just in case you missed it the first time around). Haggard comes across as a little eery in Friends of God, waxing poetic about how Christians have lots of sex and how Christian women have more orgasms. He's genuinely disturbing in Jesus Camp, mugging for the camera in the middle of a sermon, expounding on his "ten year rule about dating" (i.e. if you marry older people, do it for the money), jokingly suggesting that he'll help cover up extramarital relationships for cash, and giggling like the jackass he is. Later he even explains to the documentary crew that he lives a "fabulous life," which I guess was more true than he was willing to admit at the time.

After being outed, Big Gay Ted resigned in semi-disgrace and promised to get his life back on track. He acknowledged that he had been struggling with homosexuality for his entire life. I think this was intended to win the sympathy of his evangelical listeners, who usually have a soft spot for stories about people who fight valiantly against sin and occasionally falter. On the other hand, it does raise the question of why Ted was so cavalier about condemning homosexuality in others if he knew just how difficult the struggle was within his own life. Oh, well. Nobody ever said Christianity had to be compassionate.

The solution to homosexuality, it turns out, is a three-week intensive course in reaffirming heterosexuality. I'm not going to go into detail on this, since it's been covered ad nauseam and I want to move on to current events before I go back to writing my thesis. However, I will note that a gay-to-straight counseling course is an interesting idea. I wonder whether there's a course that can accomplish the reverse, as well. And I also wonder whether there's some sort of final exam you have to pass.

A couple of months ago, it turns out, Haggard re-emerged on the religious scene with a new fundraising request. In late August, he sent an emailed request for money, saying that he was planning to work for the Phoenix Dream Center (a halfway house for homeless people and recovering addicts), while working towards a master's degree at the eminent University of Phoenix.

According to a recent article at Christianity Today, Haggard sent the request to "friends." This may be a very loose interpretation of the word, since when the request first went out in August, CT's blog declared shenanigans on this, saying it was probably "sent to a lot of people." Lots indeed; at least one included an ABC reporter, which might have been a bit of a tactical blunder on Haggard's part.

At this blog, readers are always encouraged to make their own judgement, so here's a copy of the letter, posted by ABC's subsidiary KRDO. The letter does start off as though it's on a first-name basis, but it does have most of the hallmarks of a standard form letter: a generic appeal for "people" to send money, a request to forward this on to anyone else who "might have an interest," and so on. Somewhat disturbingly, Haggard actually proposes that his would-be supporters send the money via the Families with a Mission charity in order to claim a tax deduction. Families with a Mission will deduct a 10% fee for playing the intermediary. In secular society, we call this "money laundering" - or, at the very least, tax evasion. Suddenly that "tax war on evangelicals" thing I mentioned a couple of posts ago is starting to sound like a good idea after all. Perhaps Big Gay Ted is looking forward to a new career in organized crime (or should I say, resuming his career in organized crime?).

Why Big Gay Ted needs money is not immediately apparent. His last job, according to Christianity Today, paid him $200 000 the year he left, plus a $140 000 severance package. Then there's the royalties from his book sales, though these have no doubt declined since Ted's fabulous double life was revealed to the world. He also owns a $700 000 home in Colorado. Even if Ted's been spending money like a drunken lord, he should still be in a lot better shape financially than I've been since I started grad school myself, even considering the fact that he has a family to look after. (Though it does raise the question of why, in a world full of poverty and misery and supposed gay conspiracies, any church has enough extra money to pay its pastors with six-figure salaries.)

In addition, according to CT, it turns out that Big Gay Ted has gone off the reservation with this latest request. His committee of "overseers," who are responsible for making sure he stays straight this time around, has condemned the money request as an "unacceptable" act, and the Phoenix charity, the Dream Center, apparently has no intention to employ Haggard. Instead, "he will be seeking secular employment to support himself and his family." Oops. So much for the laundering scheme.

On behalf of the Church of the Orange Sky, I have decided that I will financially support Big Gay Ted myself, by kicking off the Big Gay Ted Support Campaign. After Ted dismisses his overseers, apologizes for the harm he has caused during his years of anti-gay campaigning, acknowledges that he is in fact homosexual and admits that sexual orientation is not in fact a matter for national debate, I will personally write a cheque for $500 for Ted and his family. Sorry I couldn't sweeten the pot further, Ted, but I'm a student myself, see. After paying for the prostitutes and the crystal meth, there's not much left for charity cases. However, I am happy to forward donations from other interested parties through the Support Campaign. I can't promise the same tax benefits that Haggard did in his original letter, but on the bright side, I can guarantee none of us will get hauled away for tax fraud.
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Why Christians Should Embrace the "War on Christmas"

The Church of the Orange Sky defies Satan's imposition of secular humanism upon North American culture. People wishing to contribute to the Christmas wars may do so through donations to the Prophets for Profit Institute, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Church of the Orange Sky.

I've finally obtained my copy of Friends of God, last year's documentary on the evangelical movement from Alexandra Pelosi, and may write about it shortly. The movie is a bizarre montage of Christian cultural experiences from across the U.S. - "Christian" wrestling, children's songs about dinosaurs co-existing with man (but nothing from the Flintstones, unfortunately), the "Holy Land Experience" Christian amusement park, Pat Robertson (aka "Gunrunner Pat") calling on his university students to pimp Republican Party candidates, and one of my favorites, Ted Haggard (aka "Big Gay Ted"), just before his unexpected coming-out incident, expounding on the importance of the female orgasm. Amidst the unintentional hilarity, one of the common underlying themes was the sense of an ongoing war against secular liberal elements who were trying to destroy Christianity in America. It's a common theme in contemporary Christianity and it's come up a lot on this blog. Today's topic is a little more specific: the so-called "war on Christmas."

The war on Christmas, to many conservatives, is a microcosm of what's wrong with liberals. Every November and December the Christian forums light up with angry complaints that liberals are stealing Christmas, renaming it the "holiday season," and destroying our Christian heritage. Even non-Christians I know sometimes complain about the reduction of Christmas as a form of asinine political correction gone mad. A few years ago, I used to earn a few extra dollars playing the piano for schools and other groups who needed a pianist for background music, singing, or whatever else. I remember playing for one Christmas singalong at a school where the principal approached me and apologetically said we'd have to select the music in advance and make sure there was nothing offensive in it. At the time I was still going to a properly conservative Baptist church and thought this was great confirmation of the need for our war on secular culture. (Not great enough, though, to walk out on principle and proclaim myself a victim of persecution; after all, $50 is still $50.)

In the past I've always deplored the fact that the Christmas season - or the holiday season - now starts in November or even October, so it's kind of ironic that I'm bringing this topic up so early. However, I'm not the first. Bill O'Reilly started the game off early, and here's a summary (this version comes with convenient progressive commentary as a bonus). According to Oo'Reilly and his friend, Colorado radio host Dan Caplis, Colorado town Fort Collins is buying some first-class tickets to hell for their decision to use "white lights" rather than "colored lights" on their "holiday trees." Caplis, with O'Reilly nodding in approval, explains that the end of "colored lights" at Christmas is "something out of the old Soviet Union." Last year, O'Reilly apparently launched his war in late October, which moves the Christmas date even earlier than most of his secular "holiday season" foes. At the time, the target was the right's favourite whipping-boy, the American Civil Liberties Union, which rates highly on the growing list of targets whom the religious right believes exists in a state of exception. (That's a technical philosophical term from Giorgio Agamben; basically it refers to situations in which you claim to defend laws by breaking them, like fucking for virginity, fighting for peace, or showing the love of Christ by calling your enemies evil lesbian Satanists who eat babies.)

But that's enough about jumped-up talk show hosts cloaking their bigoted patriotism in a false cloak of religious grandeur. Today's topic is a microcosm of a microcosm: the war on the Christmas tree. I actually discovered this before discovering O'Reilly's latest ramblings. Lowe's home improvement chain was busted by the conservative propaganda outlet Cybercast News Service for publishing a Christmas catalog which referred to "family trees" instead of "Christmas trees." Actually, this is an interesting new development; usually they're called "holiday trees" by the politically correct, and I would have thought a renewed emphasis on the family would be welcomed by the religious right.

Obviously I was wrong. The American Family Association sent out an "Action Alert" by email denouncing Lowe's decision to "avoid the use of the term 'Christmas tree.'" As usual, the AFA claims this is an insult to Christians: "Lowe's evidently did not want to offend any non-Christians; therefore, they replaced 'Christmas tree' with 'family tree. Of course, if Christians are offended, that is evidently OK." Give me a break, you polemical jackasses. How in God's name are you actually "offended" by the fact that some large store is failing to make the logical link between small pine trees and Jesus Christ?

Maureen Rich, Lowe's spokeswoman, backtracked by calling the publication a "complete error" and a "breakdown in our creative process." Rich is lying, of course. Calling Christmas trees Christmas trees is not a function of "creativity" - if anything, the creativity involved was in coming up with a new name, not in misapplying an existing one. She added a preemptive defence for the catalog itself, which is called a "holiday catalog" rather than a Christmas catalog because it is intended to serve for all holidays between October and January.

Now, the fact that the Christmas tree has become a fixed point of the battle for Christmas is particularly interesting given that it's probably the only real aspect of our present holiday rituals that actually gets mentioned in the Bible. That's right, all you doubters: Jeremiah 10 speaks of the pagans cutting trees in the forest, bringing them home, and "adorn[ing them] with silver and gold. With nails and hammers they are fastened, that they may not totter." It's eery. In fairness, this is actually talking about the creation of idols by pagan societies, and this point is eagerly brought up by the Bible's eager defenders, like BibleInfo.com.

It's a legitimate point, and my argument here isn't that Christmas is a pagan holiday and Christians shouldn't celebrate it, although you can presumably find thousands of pages to that effect on the Web, some written by a minority of far-right Christian fundamentalists who think the King James Bible is the defining achievement of human civilization, and others written by an equally idiotic minority of neo-pagans who think the Catholic Church stole its religion wholesale from early European "old religions."

My real point is that Christians should think carefully about what part of Christmas they're willing to go to "war" to defend as "Christian." (I use war very loosely here, as do they; while "Gunrunner Pat" Robertson merrily uses Christian aid jets to help Liberian and Congolese warlords mine diamonds and buy AK-47s, the culture "war" in America involves a lot of ranting, a lot of condemnation, but no direct action to speak of. Hell, even Gandhi would be disappointed by what usually passes for evangelical "war"-fighting.)

In this case, we have religious groups claiming that Christianity is somehow threatened by the fact that Lowe's thinks trees aren't Christian. More broadly, though, we have Christians claiming that what's wrong with this country is the fact that people aren't willing to describe two and a half months of frantic consumerism -- most of which is conducted in the name of bourgeois icon "Santa Claus," about whom parents routinely lie to their young children -- as being "Christmas." Well, I say good for them. That's not "Christmas," at least not in any meaningful sense of what most evangelicals claim Christmas should be (i.e. reverence for the birth of Christ).

If Christians want Christmas to be about the celebration of the incarnation of the Lord in human form, then that's what they should make it about. It's really quite striking that so many Christians are so insecure and uncertain about their faith that they don't feel they would be able to celebrate Christmas without making sure everyone else in society is celebrating it along with them. I suggest that we let the vague new "Holiday Season" appropriate every aspect of modern consumerism that its proponents want it to. This doesn't make Christmas weaker: by contrast, it makes it stronger. The "Holiday Season" becomes defined by the selfish materialist obsessions of modern capitalism, in which the best way we can think of to show our love for other people is to shower them with unnecessary gifts. This makes our spiritual celebration of the Lord even more striking in its contrast. So I say let the evil secular humanists have their family trees. We never needed them anyways.
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Jesus Drives an SUV: A One-Year Retrospective, plus Dollar and his Dollars

The Church of the Orange Sky is happy to endorse this entry by one of the true authors of the third-best religious blog in Canada.

About a year ago the righteous authors of this blog, inspired by their ordination into one of the world's largest churches (at least if you count based on the number of ordained ministers), posed the question: What would Jesus drive? Our innovative answers came from an important interdisciplinary perspective backed by years of experience at the cutting edge of revolutionary politics and academic research.

A year later, this blog has earned massive international attention. We routinely get visitors from as far away as Europe, South America, and Japan. I used to be able to keep track of this when I had a stat counter on this blog, but then I modified the template and the stat counter vanished. Fortunately for you, the reader, that means we're no longer collecting personal information about you and your computer without covering our butts with a vague privacy policy.

Even better, last year we rocketed to the top of the famous Canadian Blog Awards, which sadly do not appear to have come round for another go this fall. In the end the fair and entirely incorruptible awards process voted us the third-best religious blog in Canada.

More importantly, though, we have answered the question posed by the marketing campaign which inspired the creation of this site, and according to Google, we've done it better than anybody else. The only person who outranks us on the subject of "Jesus drives", it turns out, is Leonard Sweet, who's flogging a book on how Jesus drives him crazy, which I suspect isn't actually true. (Dr. Sweet is cordially invited to consider contributing a free PDF of his book to the great electronic library proposed in a recent column from the Church of the Orange Sky). In the spirit of fairness, I should note another site, actually called What Would Jesus Drive?, which adopts a more literal approach to answering the question.

This blog has also contributed to the downfall of important individuals. For example, shortly after the Church of the Orange Sky denounced the ruling dynasty of Oral Roberts University for their flippant abuse of supporters' holy money, God took the almost-unprecedented step of reversing his own decree on the subject and calling away president Richard Roberts for an indefinite leave.

So, reader, you've probably observed by now that the authors of this blog are neither as prolific nor as consistent in their postings as you might like. But this is an important blog with global influence, and your loyal support has made it that way, so thank you for your support over the past year and please come back in the future for more long-winded monologues on important subjects relevant to everyone's lives.

Unfortunately, in the meantime, it seems that this blog's celestial calling - to smite the evil amongst us - remains just as relevant as ever. Some recent publicity-seeking hearings by secular humanist politicians in the U.S. has netted much new exciting information about prosperity theology salesman Creflo Dollar, who, along with his wife Taffi, heads up Creflo Dollar Ministries and World Changers Church International. My suspicions that the Dollars were in it for, well, the dollars were provoked by the many gifts Dollar has been given for his faith: two Rolls-Royces, three private jets, and expensive digs in Georgia and New York. Someone once said, "if you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people he gives it to." Well. Congratulations, Creflo. I'd say God-damn your prosperity theology, but I am somewhat impressed by your ability to take cynical sarcasm and turn it into real life.

The Senate investigation of Dollar is apparently part of a campaign by senator Chuck Grassley to investigate evangelical profiteering, which apparently might be tax fraud given that it's done through religious "non-profit" organizations. Also on the list of suspects are Kenneth Copeland, Bennie Hinn, Eddie Long, and others. I was very interested to learn that Dollar, Hinn and Copeland are all members of the Board of Regents at the decadent and disreputable Oral Roberts University. Other than all being members of the evangelical backbone cabal, I wonder what qualifies these fraudulent chuckleheads to rule an academic institution.

On the one hand, Grassley's neo-McCarthian witch-hunt will probably win him some votes, and he's very carefully insisting that he's not proposing any new laws, just enforcing existing ones (the ones that say you can't use a non-profit society to make a profit, or to fund a political movement, or a few other things that churches routinely do and routinely denounce). He's making that distinction, I suspect, in order to give him a defence against the religious right, which will soon be protesting persecution at the hands of the "secular humanists." However, as you may have guessed from the first sentence of this paragraph, I still think it's a terrible idea.

Don't get me wrong, I think Dollar and his ilk are a combination of hypcocritical, fraudulent, and pitiful. If Dollar really loved God, maybe he'd sell one of his Rolls Royces. (Perhaps he could sell the car, use the money to buy HIV medication for one of MSF's projects in sub-Saharan Africa, and then use one of his private jets to fly the medicine across the pond for them.) And Grassley, as a senator, certainly does have a right to insist that people follow the laws. But I really don't see this being very useful, for a couple of reasons.

First off, he's targeting religious organizations and it's going to be pretty tough to conclusively establish that religious leaders are making an illegal profit without stepping over a lot of sensitive boundaries in terms of government interference in religious practice. The implication is that Grassley is the people's hero, fighting for the little guy against the evil Dollar. But everyone donating to Dollar, or Copeland, or Hinn, already knows that those guys are taking out a fair amount of money for their religious "services." Those people who don't know, could easily find out, if it concerned them. And many of them, perhaps most of them, really don't care.

Last year the Toronto Star, up here in Canada, ran a similar exposé on a megachurch in Toronto, the idiotically named Prayer Palace, though without the added benefit of a Senate hearing with powers to subpoena witnesses. The Star described the largesse of the pastors, most of whom are part of a single father-and-sons team and all of whom have expensive cars, expensive houses, and vacation homes in Florida, which the paper suggested might have been partially paid for directy from church coffers. It also described the gripping poverty of some of the church members, many of whom have salaries far below the national average yet still put hundreds of hours of work and thousands of dollars of money into various church-related projects.

I honestly think the writers at the Star thought plenty of those people would be indignant at being manipulated. Whether or not that was what they expected, though, it definitely didn't happen. The pastors denounced the Toronto Star during the next church service and, while undercover reporters watched in stunned silence, encouraged willing parishioners to race up to the front and toss their savings onto huge piles of cash in order to "prove" their faith in the church's leadership.

Second, and related to the first, I suspect Grassley's actions are just as likely to incite retaliation from the religious right as it is to expose to the underlings of that movement the hypocrisy of its leadership. There's an intriguing siege mentality in the churches right now and people are quick to jump on each new instance of "growing persecution" of Western Christians, a notion which might seem unbelievably asinine but is readily accepted by millions of evangelicals. Grassley has picked some targets which might well fall easily - after all, plenty of conservative evangelicals hold people like Dollar and Hinn in great contempt, denouncing prosperity theology as liberal heresy. But getting the government involved in religion strikes me as a good way to bring the various conservative splinter denominations together against "secular persecution."

The notion of persecution through the tax laws isn't an original one, either. Last month, James Dobson spent almost all of his monthly Focus on the Family newsletter ranting about a "liberal attack" on his group. The IRS, you see, investigated Focus on the Family for violating the tax laws by claiming to be a nonprofit while engaging in partisan political activity. Showing that grace and compassion which Christians everywhere are well known for, Dobson seized the opportunity of being acquitted of wrongdoing to launch into an extended, vitriolic attack on Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Way to turn the other cheek, Dobson. We must repay the liberals eye for an eye or God might lose the culture wars!

I have a fantastic solution, which actually might suit Dobson too, since Focus on the Family is a nominally secular organization: let's revoke all tax-exempt status for religious organizations. This is something a few of my non-religious friends have been suggesting for a while, but I have a different reason for it.

Every organization which at some level sets itself against mainstream culture (realistically or just rhetorically) has to make decisions about how many compromises it's going to make in order to maintain a permanent institution. The church has made a lot of such compromises, in part because in the distant past it saw the surrounding society as being basically Christian, as opposed to the "culture war" mentality which has re-emerged over the last few decades. As a youth leader my actions were constrained by contracts signed in order to maintain insurance policies; as a church member we voted in accordance with sham bylaws in order to protect the church's legal status under the provincial Societies Act; as a collective body Christians demand various rights like tax-free church status, which there is really no reason for us to have.

I can conceive of a few rationalizations to protect the church's tax-free status, most of which relate to the argument that the church is providing a valuable social service (like other charities and non-profits) and therefore the money shouldn't be taxed by the government because we want to encourage donations to such socially valuable organizations. But that doesn't hold a lot of water. For one thing, the church might provide social services, but if we want to maintain any pretense of the separation of church and state, it has to go both ways: we shouldn't be taking benefits from the state any more than we should be accepting constraints from the state. There is no cooperative relationship between church and society in some grand project to heal our society. Or at least there shouldn't be according to me, Blaisteach the Anarchist. Religious projects with government backing will eventually want to make use of the core service of government - legal force - which is something Christianity as a basically dissenting, non-coercive religion, should never touch.

The obvious response to this is that if church money is taxed it will mean two things: people may be less willing to give money to the church for fear of loxing tax deductions, and churches (at least some of which will then decide to reorganize as for-profit corporations or some other type of taxable entity) may have to pay out taxes too, further shrinking the dwindling funding pool available to our churches. That's not really a very good argument, though. There is no inherent reason why almost any of our religious activities as Christians needs to be funneled through a legally separate organization with its own bank accounts, executive managers, and other apparatus. We could find other, more personal, more direct ways of serving Christ, I'm sure, and perhaps we'd be better it, as well. Tax-free status doesn't protect Christianity or Christians: it protects institutions.

Ultimately, though, what worries me as a Christian is what any real anxiety over the tax laws says about how we run our churches. The New Testament wasn't written in a society we would today think of as a democracy, and even within that society, none of its writers were in a position to exercise any political power. So none of them thought to give us advice on what to say about tax laws. However, we ought to recognize that money doesn't belong to us, it doesn't belong to the church, and it only "belongs" to God in the sense that we assign god ultimate authority over everything on earth. Money belongs to the government and to the social order that the religious right insists is evil and secular. If they really wanted to separate themselves from the evil secular materialist worldly order of things, they wouldn't care what money was taxed or at what rate.

So, my radical solution to this contrived battle over religious non-profits' right to tax exemptions is that we extend the notion of the separation of church and state. In innumerable discussions with (particularly) American Christians over the last several years, I've lost count of the number of times I've been told "well, that's not really in the Constitution, you know." I don't think it's in the Canadian one, either, come to think of it. And I don't really care. Something does not become justifiable or unjustifiable on the basis of being written down as a government law. In this case, in any event, freedom from paying taxes doesn't protect Christians, it protects one particular form of organized "Christian" institutions, and I don't think government ought to have any role in protecting a religious organization. The church could use a little revolution now and then.

Finally, I close with an inspirational Scriptural passage for the day: flip over to Numbers 22 to see God literally talk out of his ass.
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Oral's Not Moral

Whoever he is that, owing no man anything, and having food and raiment for himself and his household... seeks a still larger portion on earth; he lives in an open habitual denial of the Lord that bought him. - John Wesley

Prominent evangelicals are good at attracting three things: money, converts, and controversy (not necessarily in that order). Plenty of them have been tarred and feathered in the last few years and I decided a while ago to start giving them the benefit of the doubt when stories first broke, but this one's just plain weird.

The ruling dynasty of Oral Roberts University has run into trouble after a whole raft of allegations surfaced recently from some fired professors. On one occasion, the president's daughter and her friends flew the institution's jet to the Caribbean for a $30 000 vacation. The ministry picked up the tab on the grounds it was an "evangelistic function." I'm sure they just couldn't wait to spread the word to the beaches of the Bahamas. The Roberts' children also get exclusive use of a stable of horses owned by the school, as well as special tutoring time with university employees.

Many of the allegations feature the president's wife Lindsay, which ORU's website idiotically refers to as the "First Lady." For example, she billed in excess of $800 per month on her cell phone, in large part thanks to hundreds of late-night text messages to "underage males." She dropped $39 000 at Chico's in one year and later explained of her new clothing that "as long as I wear it once on TV, we can charge it off." She also has a red Mercedes and a white Lexus thanks to generous ministry donors.

This particular school has been weird from the beginning, though. The story goes that its founder, Oral Roberts himself, was approached directly by God with what seems to be a bizarre threat: raise $8 million to found a Christian university, or you will be "called home." Personally, I would have called God's bluff on that one. It would be a win-win situation, I'd think. Unfortunately, Oral took the coward's way out and raised the $8 million, which he wisely invested in building a corrupt but profitable estate for his descendants.

God recently proved he retains an interest in the academy by visiting the son, Richard Roberts, to deliver a new message: God wants him to publicly deny the accusations I've just recited above. Oh, good. I wonder whether Roberts would have felt confident in denying the accusations without divine instructions.

ORU is a charismatic university, which means we can expect it to be a little crazier. (By contrast, bible colleges like Pensacola College are non-charismatic, so they're still arrogant and self-righteous, but they don't speak in tongues.) It's home to some of the wickedest Christian architecture I've ever seen - for example, check out the enormous praying hands and the temple-like "learning centre", and other cool photographs on the Wikipedia page. The online tour here is a grand parade of self-absorbed largesse featuring the 60-foot-tall praying hands, a dormitory constructed in a style that supposedly "imitates" the trinity, a bunch of "Towers" modeled after the Star of David, a large geodesic dome symbolizing the "wholeness of man," the 200-foot-tall "Prayer Tower," a hideously large church supposedly representing the "shield of faith," and a three-level administration building. (Even this is significant: it's three levels because God is also three persons in one.)

With this amount of sheer idiocy, it's no wonder Christians get a bad rap sometimes. It may come as a surprise to many people, obviously including most of the students at ORU, that at one point in Christian history, all money and goods donated to the church were considered by sacred right to belong first to the poor and the oppressed. For the leadership of the church to take any of this collection to maintain buildings or to live on for themselves was, at best, a necessary evil; ideally, they would make their own living, or be provided for separately of money taken for the use of the church. I suspect we borrowed this tradition from the Jews, who didn't pay their rabbis out of the religious funds either, and, among the diaspora at least, saw giving to the poor as the appropriate substitute for sacrifice at the temple in Jerusalem.

On the other hand, if we spent money like that, we wouldn't have giant praying hands and enormous prayer towers. I'm sure God appreciates what we've done for him.

I re-read the ten commandments a while ago and it struck me that the interpretation of taking the Lord's name in vain that was drilled into me as a teenager is all wrong. I'm sure you're familiar with the idea: it's wrong to say "Oh, God" when you're having sex, or to say "God damn it" when you're upset with something -- for example, "God damn Oral Roberts University."

I don't think that's true. For one thing, asking God to damn something seems perfectly legitimate to me - provided it's something worth damning. More importantly, I believe that we take God's name in vain every time we falsely attribute something to him because we think it will sound more credible. "God has helped me get this job," for example - or, "I feel the Spirit is calling me to move on," which is what most pastors say when they leave one job and move to a better-paying one farther south. (In some parts of the world, it might not necessarily be farther south - but it always was for me, because I come from the pagan north.)

Bravo, Roberts family. You've founded a university, bilked hundreds of millions of dollars from people who put their trust in you, and made a mockery of your supposed faith. There's less you could do in a lifetime.
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The Second Zacchaeus Fellowship

Today's message was funded by a generous grant from the Church of the Orange Sky. Please consider a donation to the Church's authorized representative via his Paypal account or personal cheque.

I've spoken before about how North American Christianity seems subject to absurd fads, some of which stay for years, but most of which fade pretty quickly - small groups, Alpha, the Prayer of Jabez, the Purpose-Driven Life, Promise Keepers, Contagious Christians, The Passion of the Christ, and so on. In my dissent, it seems I have the agreement of the maniacs on the Christian far right, the ones who think the church hasn't kept up the tradition of strong, manly Christianity and that its feminine converts don't realize they're still going to hell. The last time I had this strange feeling in my stomach was when I realized the man next to me on a protest line, defying a police order to disperse, had come out to play largely because our right-wing provincial government wasn't jailing doctors who work at abortion clinics.

But complaining about evangelical foolishness only goes so far. I told a friend years ago that it was not worth complaining about a problem if you weren't willing to contribute to its solution. Today I've decided to make a half-step in that direction: I'm going to contribute to the problem and the solution, by coming up with a newer and better Christian fad. Usually, a new fad requires a megachurch for financial and PR support. I have the Church of the Orange Sky, which falls slightly short of the megachurch barrier, plus (hopefully) the support of MadReverends, which according to one recent and very scientific poll is the third most popular religious blog in Canada.

This post is motivated by two recent experiences: a conversation with a friend who's just moved to a new job and a new church, and an article on businessmen "experiencing" poverty in Lansing, Michigan. The name comes from the first, and the idea (mostly) from the second.

My friend, a grad student and now an itinerant sessional lecturer (which is the fate of most of us graduate humanities students these days), recently took up a new job in northern B.C. His new Anglican church there is, thanks to one of the most stridently anti-gay marriage ministers in the province, home to a branch of the "Zacchaeus Fellowship" (here).

This fellowship appears to be a sort of reincarnation of one of Christianity's past fads - conversation of gay sinners into proper heterosexuals. The website explains that members are in the process of transitioning from their "same-sex attractions" to "heterosexual wholeness." A key step appears to be overcoming "the brokenness that led to" homosexuality. If you fail in this purpose, there's a second-best alternative: you can "obey God's teachings by living in celibacy." I wonder if this means Jesus was the first member of the fellowship.

I hadn't realized Canada had an indigenous ex-gay movement; it's gratifying to know we haven't been spared the attention of good Christian sex police. I was a little confused about the name, though. Zacchaeus, as some might recall, was a man Jesus met in the Gospel of Luke. Zacchaeus was a tax collector - by implication of the story, a corrupt one - who met Jesus and immediately pronounced he would give away half his money to the poor. Jesus then blessed him for his faith. What this story has to do with overcoming homosexuality is beyond me; the Fellowship website claims that, like Zacchaeus, they have come to see Jesus's love for them and the need to confess their sins in exchange for his forgiveness. It's a pretty weak-like-tea argument. I think they're just looking for an excuse to adopt a cool first-century Greek name for their movement. It sounds better than "Canadian Ex-Gays for Christ." After my first reading of the website, I resolved to reclaim Zacchaeus, and now I've found a way to do so.

This article from a Michigan newspaper describes a "simulation" of urban poverty conducted for professionals from local businesses, government agencies, and some non-profits. "Could you take poverty for even one hour? asks the paper. The answer, apparently, was no. The lesson, so far as I can see, is that the poor are better at money management than the rich: only two of the thirteen families in the simulation were able to keep their children from starving to death. Over the course of an hour, the participants sat around counting their welfare money out of envelopes and pretending to go through all the work and financial decisions a single mother with kids would make over the course of a month. There are some inspiring quotes from various people who were "mind-boggled" and "will not be the same." Neither will the fake kids who starved to death in less than an hour.

Apparently the simulation accomplished its goals, but it's disturbing that the middle class in our society has become so divorced from the lower working class and the unemployed that they could gain anything from an hour in a conference room. Other than the fact it wasn't being done alone, this could have been a math problem in my grade 10 textbook. You and your two children get $670 a month in welfare money. Each of you eat three meals a day. If you spend $400 on rent, how much will you spend per person on each meal? Or, to take a British Columbian example: Quesnel and Prince George are 100 miles apart. A hobo leaves Prince George on a CN Rail train travelling at 25 miles per hour. A second hobo leaves Quesnel on another CN Rail train travelling at 15 miles per hour. How long will it be before the CN trains collide and both hoboes die in the inferno?

Reading about the simulation prompted one Lansing resident to see if he could live for a month on a dollar a day (here). He could - in fact, the total was more like $28. This was accomplished via copious amounts of rice, noodles, and frozen vegetables. At the end, he donated the money he would normally have spent on food - somewhere around $200 - to a local food bank. I'll bet I could do the same thing, once my pots arrive at my new apartment so that I can actually make more than sandwiches and salads.

This inspirational story has prompted me to propose a new Zacchaeus Fellowship. This one will actually bear some relation to the Zacchaeus story: people who join will either eat on a dollar a day and give away the rest of the money they would have spent on food (the Zacchaeus Lite® plan), or spend money as they normally would, but set aside one dollar for charity for ever dollar they spend on food (the Zacchaeus Faithful® plan). I suppose you could do both at the same time, which would be the best way to save money (call it the Zacchaeus Combo®). You could be like the other guy and give the money to the food bank. Or, if you're feeling adventurous, you could give it to something a little edgier and more anarchist, like Food Not Bombs or a local Catholic Worker house. That's what I think I'll do, personally. (Since returning to Ottawa, I've discovered that, as a real city, it also has real hippies - FNB gives away free food every Sunday afternoon, most of which it's "salvaged" from local businesses.)

This new fad will be even better than past ones because it won't require wealthy, idolized leadership (though I will cheerfully accept money from anyone who wants to enrich me), can be summarized in less than fifty words (which means it won't require believers to buy new books and go to expensive seminars to hear me speak via satellite), plus, most important, it gives true Christians a chance to proclaim the fact they're better and holier than the average, run-of-the-mill churchgoer. (These proclamations can be best made by my new Zacchaeus Fellowship T-shirts, which will soon be available for a nominal fee.)

Another bonus is that as a student I'm already pretty sure I know how to live on less than a dollar a day's worth of food. It does bear asking, though: does beer count as food?

Up next: I'm going to Christianize the GPL. With Biblical Quotations® for added persuasiveness.

Note: MadReverends does not endorse the views of the Church of the Orange Sky as represented in this article. We encourage you to consider investing the money in a savings account instead. WWJD? He would eat ramen, so that he could afford his SUV.
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Lines Composed a Few Feet from the Number 15 Bus Stop

Today's message is part of the Inspirational Messages from Inspirational People series, sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

It's late evening and I'm sitting at a bus stop in downtown Prince George. The town's bus stops are peculiar locations these days. A couple of years ago, a local realtor helped finance the purchase of new benches for almost the entire transit system, and in exchange, he got his name plastered all over town: Bob Zayonc, realtor. Zayonc is a former minister who left the church under peculiar circumstances, though his Remax website (here) proclaims that this experience made him "a practical, progressive-minded problem solver." But Zayonc's advertising is fine - he's a businessman now, sort of a Christian reconstructed capitalist.

Zayonc's being followed by some more exciting company, though. The bus stop nearest my house now features a queerly Christian evangelical quotation about the divinity of Jesus, attributed to Mohandas Gandhi. I'm not as familiar with Gandhi's written ramblings as I ought to be, but it's probably safe to assume this quote has been yanked as far out of context as, for example, the creative creationist "quotation" of Darwin acknowledging the complexity of the human eye. Hurray for quote mining.

The message is obviously from some sort of evangelical group, but it's oddly difficult to tell which one. In small print on the sign is a web address - "truthinadvertising.ca" - which, as you can see here, doesn't actually have any meaningful content on it at all. When the muse struck me with the inspiration for this blog entry, I thought I was going to enjoy poking my way through a "Christian advertising" site. Sadly, that won't be the case. However, it does seem bizarre to raise money from evangelicals - or other groups, for that matter, but I assume these are evangelicals - to put up signs with Gandhi quotes. He's the sort of person my Baptist church used to condemn - someone too concerned about earthly good and social justice that they didn't remember to save their own soul by coming to Jesus at a good young age (or even an old one, which wasn't perfect or even good, but was still acceptable, as moronic pseudo-prophet Timothy Lahaye explains in his tell-all non-self-help book).

Anyways, to the evening at hand. I'm in another bus stop, and this one has another Christian advertisement in it. In a way, it's convenient. It's one-stop shopping for transportation: $1.50 for a ride to my house, plus a free ticket to heaven, fine print not included. Downtown Prince George is full of such interesting juxtapositions. A few blocks from where I'm sitting, there's an intersection where you can quite literally, just by crossing the street between stops, take out a mortgage for your house, buy insurance for your car, gamble away what's left, then pray for God's forgiveness (and maybe some cash from heaven, mana-style) with some friendly if mostly elderly Anglicans. (I'm allowed to denigrate Anglicans because some of my best friends are Anglicans.)

Today's bus-stop advertisement is for "Alpha," a Christian evangelism program that is like a combination of Contagious Christians' absurd "Matthew party" concept in action (i.e. invite non-Christians to an event, then ambush them with the gospel), plus the last great fad in evangelical circles, the "small group." For Anglicans and atheists out there, a "small group" is when you go to a fellow churchgoer's house, sit in a circle, eat a few chips from a bag someone thought to bring, awkwardly try to explain to the group how you failed in your "walk with God" over the past week, then have a nice group prayer and engage in entirely non-religious small talk until it's time to go home.

Alpha's that, plus Pavlov. The way it works is that the churches get together and storm the town with ads about the grand new program where you can "discuss the meaning of life." In accordance with modern evangelical marketing standards, the fact that this is an explicitly Christian discussion of the meaning of life is something you might not notice at the outset. At least, the ads don't bother to mention that Alpha is Christian; on the other hand, there aren't many non-Christian groups that can afford to advertise the fact they want to talk to you about the "meaning of life." Either you don't realize Alpha is Christian or, using your brain (at this stage, whether that brain comes straight from God or took a detour via Australopithecus afarensis isn't really germane), you cleverly surmise it, and don't care. Either way, if you're still interested, you're shifted into stage two.

Now, you're drawn into the program by the prospect of free food. The first meeting is a free dinner. The dinners don't last, though - somewhat like Pavlov's dogs, eventually the bell rings but all you get is food for the soul. And not even chicken soup, at that, but Nicky Gumbel, who is apparently the Church of England's answer to Stephen R. Covey. (Yes, Gumbel is actually an ordained Anglican minister, which is a little surprising given the company Alpha now keeps.) Since we haven't yet perfected reliable storage and transmission of the disembodied voice that speaks to people like Neale Donald Walsch, Gumbel addresses Alpha attendees via their host's television set. At some point, there's a sermon along the lines of "does God cut it or bite it in today's secular world?", which is also, incidentally, the topic which suckered me into a Baptist church back when I was an impressionable youngster.

You might come for the free food, but the hope is that you'll stay for the religion. As Christian sermons go, Gumbel's inspirational speeches could be worse, though the spectacle of a bunch of adults sitting around receiving truth from their TV set conjures up all kinds of disturbing and depressing imagery. Fortunately, being a Mac user renders me immune to the danger of falling victim to such Orwellian oblivion, and has ever since a very hot Anya Major threw a very cool hammer through a very large Big Brother way back in 1984. (You too can become a chic nonconformist via a credit card and a visit to Apple's online store.)

It seems to me that religious organizations need only spend money on bus stop advertising if they have so much money they're beginning to see opportunities everywhere to spread their considerable largesse, or if they're growing desperate because they can't think of a better way to remind people they're still there, other than prancing about at election time decrying the trinity of modern evil (gays, liberals, and abortion clinics). Prince George's churches aren't particularly wealthy (even the Catholics have had to give up a decent chunk of their real estate holdings to Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire), so I'm going to go with unimaginative desperation. Perhaps they could spend the money on a new food bank instead. Prince George could use another one, it would be very similar to Alpha except for the videotaped lectures, and, if that weren't enough, there's already a long and honourable tradition of rice-Christians.

(Rice Christianity, incidentally, originated in Europe with the Edict of Milan, not in East Asia with rice. It's one of the few ancient concepts that Europe invented and then spread to Asia, rather than the other way around. I've always wondered why we forgot to take the credit for this one. We certainly didn't hesitate to appropriate the credit for most everything else.)
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Only Among Charismatic Evangelicals....

... could you not be fundamentally disturbed at hearing that the leader of an organization called "The Fire Center" sponsors an annual summer program entitled "Kids On Fire." Some readers may be familiar with this program, a summer camp which was recently the subject of a documentary called "Jesus Camp," the DVD release of which I am awaiting most eagerly. The camp was the brainchild of Pentecostal pastor Becky Fischer (of said "Fire Center") and was located, of all places, near Devils Lake, North Dakota. Before going further, I should note in fairness to Fischer and other "fiery" people involved that F.I.R.E. is actually an acronym for "Families Ignited for Revival and Evangelism," which in some ways sounds even more disturbing, since it's implying that the fathers and mothers of the children are going to be lit on fire as well. Nero would be pleased: after over a millennium and a half as the dominant religion of the West, now we're going to be doing his work for him. Or we're just going to be burning ourselves (and you can use whatever definition of "burn" that you like there). Or something. The Fire Center's webpage can be found here, and if you want their "spiritual vision" (which is Christianese for "business plan"; the two actually have very similar terminology), just click on the "About Us" tab.

This isn't a church so much as a children's ministry with some of the trappings of a family-friendly church, so we'll start with the youth, just the way church does. Indoctrination works better when you start at a younger age. Their "PowerClub" kids ministry (here) promises to explore "typical topics" like "hearing God's voice, giving prophetic words, being led by the Spirit of God, healing the sick, the blood of Jesus, intercessory prayer, radical worship, the gifts of the Spirit, missions, and so much more." The only ones on that list that don't disturb me are ones that don't sound entirely fit for teaching to six year olds, but I'm sure they know what they're doing. They add that "This is definitely not your "same old" children's ministry! Our mandate is simple--to raise up a generation that can openly display the raw power of God!" Once the kids have been Powered Up, video game style, they graduate to the "Club Ignite!" teens ministry, where "our teens are being filled with the Holy Spirit and stepping into beginning levels of the prophetic through seeing mini-visions and receiving simple words from God that have impacted and encouraged the group." Fantastic. Again, the goal is to display the "raw power of God!" I wonder how they're going to do that. Rain fire down on San Francisco? Among other things, it turns out that they wrap tiny fetus dolls in American flags and pray over them to end abortion in America (here). Isn't that nice. The last time there was a Children's Crusade, the kids were sold off into slavery. Hopefully that doesn't happen again.

Anywho, the Fire Center's leader headed up the Kids on Fire summer camp, which has some truly entertaining and disturbing video footage on the likes of YouTube. (Depending on your views of the copyright laws, I imagine you could also find some othe method of getting the film "Jesus Camp," though I don't necessarily recommend it.) Ninety minutes of chilling footage of children turned into religious zealots, twelve-year-old automatons for Christ. It's like Hamas for Jesus.

What really breaks my heart about the whole thing is that the next generation of activists is being raised "pledging allegiance to the Christian Flag" and being told that "there are two kinds of people in this world: people who love Jesus and people who don't," and believing that "we're being trained to be God's Army." It is time for an end to zealotry. If we must have movements going forth, it should be movements of people willing to think critically and challenge idiocy. Teaching your children that it is good that "Galileo gave up science for Christ" is not just asinine, it is horrifying and immoral.

Writer's postscript: I'd just about finished writing this when Shawn posted that he, too, used to be "on Fire for the Lord." I think it's time for a new organization: Christians Against Self-Immolation.
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Prophets for Profit

It was a bad week in American Christendom. First, a male prostitute in Colorado claimed that evangelical preacher and head of New Life Church Ted Haggard had paid him for a series of... um... appointments over the past several years. To add some fuel to the fire, it also surfaced - apparently from the same source - that Haggard had also purchased crystal meth. Just a few days later, another prominent evangelical, creationist Kent Hovind, was convicted of tax fraud in Florida after failing to pay about $850 000 in employee taxes at his creationist theme park, where, among other things, he provides evidence that dinosaurs and humans once walked the earth together. (Hovind's entertaining if scientifically dubious theory of creation is that Noah boarded his ark just before an ice meteor crashed into the earth, causing a shower of "super-cold snow" which buried the mammoths, shattered the canopy which protected the earth from the water beneath the crust, and resulted in an ice age lasting several hundred years.)

This isn't Hovind's first legal trouble, though presumably it is the most serious (we haven't heard what the sentences will be yet for either him or his wife, who was also convicted of 44 counts). In 2002, he was charged with assault by his former secretary, but the charges were dropped. The same year, he was charged with several local regulation violations at his Dinosaur Adventure Land (I'm sorry; I have to keep mentioning this park because it's just such an amusing concept). Hovind lost most of these cases and paid moderately small fines (but spent tens of thousands in legal expenses to protect his dinosaur-human propaganda center). In 1996, he tried to file for bankruptcy but was found to have lied about his possessions and income (he claimed that as a minister, everything he had belonged to God and therefore he was not subject to the American tax system). Two years later, he claimed to revoke all signatures he had ever written on government documents on the grounds they had been signed under duress. In 2002 he failed to pay his taxes again, and this time went on the offensive by suing the IRS for harassment. In 2004, they raided his home to confiscate financial records, eventually leading to his current difficulties. Apparently Hovind forgot about the "give to Caesar what is Caesar's" part when he was busy taking his Bible so literally that he convinced himself that mammoths were all buried standing up by a massive wave of cold, hard snow.

Haggard seems to have had a cleaner record, at least up to the present. He denied all of the allegations, and the prostitute subsequently failed a polygraph test he had volunteered for to verify the claims (although the administrator noted that the man was stressed and had not recently eaten or slept). However, Haggard resigned anyways, on the grounds that he would "seek both spiritual advice and guidance" while an "overseer process" could investigate the claims "with integrity." Senior officials from his mega-church promptly told the local TV that he had admitted to some of Jones's claims, and wrote to their parshioners that Haggard "confessed to the overseers that some of the accusations against him are true." The next day, Haggard admitted that he had purchased crystal meth but claimed he had only received a massage from Jones. To paraphrase Clinton, "I did not have sex with that man!" The overseer board concluded shortly afterwards that "our investigation... prove[s] without a doubt that he has committed sexually immoral conoduct," and they affirmed his removal from his job.

From our perspective outside the fishbowl, it seems almost inevitable that many major Christian leaders will be arrested for some sort of behaviour that they themselves have railed against as deviant. During the 1980s, there was a mass of televangelists exposed as in some way sinful - Swaggart screwed a prostitute, Bakker screwed his secretary, and Roberts, Whittington, and others ended up out of a job for various suspicions of fraud. Peter Popoff, distributor of miracle spring water (i.e. non-Catholic holy water) which apparently comes from Chernobyl (yum... radioactive water), was revealed to perform his miracles via planted audience members and an in-ear radio receiver through which he could hear prompts from his watchers in the crowd... I mean, from the Holy Spirit of God, of course.

I'm not really qualified to judge whether the entire Christian mass preaching industry is riddled with corruption or not, although certainly large sections of it are. I've just acquired an old documentary from the 1970s on the career of Marjoe Gortner, a travelling preacher of the time who spent six months preaching and the next six months smoking pot with his friends in San Francisco (he explained on his tours that he raised money for six months and then spent six months ministering to the youth and drug addicts of the inner city). He eventually decided he could no longer live with this tactic, but rather than just resign or come clean in a public press conference the way most would today, he decided to take a film crew along for his last revival tour. The documentary alternates between scenes of wild Christian merriment in revival tents and charismatic churches, and footage of Gortner back in the hotel explaining to the film crew the various aspects of his scam. (Among other things, Gortner explains how to prophecize, speak in tongues, and administer various other miracles.)

The fact that these individuals turn out to be grossly corrupt and in it for the money isn't really the part that disturbs me. People in the big church business are entrepeneurs, and like people in any other business, they're going where the money is. Issues of personal morality are not particularly relevant to this. Those who are genuinely honest, and there are probably at least a few, doubtless aren't having the same exciting sexual adventures, but because we never hear news like "Billy Graham did not have an affair this week" (for the simple fact that it's a non-event), we probably get a skewed picture of what's going on. Not every Republican congressman is attracted to his teen-aged interns, but occasionally one is, and the rest get tarred for it. (Of course, if they weren't so judgemental in the first place, it wouldn't be such big news that they were guilty of the same things they condemned others for. Perhaps this is one of the reasons the Bible says we should not judge others.) The rush to condemn the particular individuals involved can be a little unseemly too sometimes. The church either rallies around people they think could be innocent, or shoves out someone they realize is guilty, as though they're worried that he'll contaminate them if he's not cast out fast enough. A former pastor of mine used to say that the Christian army was the only one to shoot its own wounded. A few months after I met him, we shot him, too. The pursuit of collective holiness apparently requires that individuals occasionally be sacrificed for the greater good.
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