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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Selling Salvation

This article is a policy statement from the Church of the Orange Sky. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent Capitalist Jesus™ in his new SUV.

Several days ago I invented a fantastic solution to the problem of gay marriage in Canada, at least for people who favour small government solutions whenever feasible. As a lapsed socialist and current anarchist, I thought it was a brilliant idea, and I'm pleased to announce it has passed peer review in British Columbia and Ontario. However, the grand unveiling will have to wait a little while, for the anniversary of the last gay marriage vote in Canada. (For those counting, that was the third vote in the third Parliament, tabled by the third Prime Minister. It's oddly trinitarian.)

After the 2005 vote under Martin, back when I was still writing at Notes from the Abattoir, I predicted that we would not see a sustained campaign from the religious or secular right now that gay marriage had been effectively legalized. This was for several reasons: it's a lot more difficult to motivate support to overturn a law than to prevent one from being passed; a lot of people probably came to realize that the sky has not fallen; and, let's face it, the contemporary Western church is really not very good at real political opposition. Maybe that's for the best, since the church should never really be a political movement anyways. The church isn't the only one to fall prey to this problem; a lot of protests don't last long once the issue is cemented into law and fails to provoke mass civil disobedience.

I did a little reading on the Web and confirmed that many of the marriage-defence sites seem to have started to abandon the issue; DefendMarriage.ca has not moved on from its 2006 petition campaign yet (and in fact has lost its separate domain name), Restore Marriage Canada hasn't updated its site since 2006 either, etc, etc. Many of the organizations should be transitioning back to a general Focus on the Family type of approach, like the Institution of Marriage and Family Canada, which held a conference on "good economic policy in support of good family policy," which sounds a bit like "social conservatives" adopting social democrat approaches to social problems if you ask me.

Anyways, along the way I came across ChristianGovernment.ca, which revived my interest in another topic I've considered before. The site doesn't obviously sound like it's going to be an advertisement, and the main page even makes a token effort at raising some rhetorical points: "Christian civil government" is federalist, decentralist, and an "act of service" (to this end, it points out that senior politicians are called "ministers" in deference to "the Christian worldview," which teaches that politicians should be servants, not tyrants."

First off, this romantic myth of Christianity as the source of democracy and accountable government is getting very tiring. Historically, both the Jewish and Greek variants of early Christianity were explicitly dissenting movements with no great interest in political power. Political mechanisms were grafted on later, mostly borrowed from Greco-Roman political philosophy, which is where the actual concepts of political servant-leadership comes from. For every historic Christian source defending federalism, there are at least two more defending the divine right of kings and various other notions which don't fit our Christian democracy myth.

For the moment, however, I'm concerned with something else going on at the site, which is that it's really a gimmick intended to sell Timothy Bloedow's book on the subject, State vs. Church: What Christianity Can Do to Save Canada From Liberal Tyranny. You click on the "Buy!" link and Bloedow thanks you for visiing the web page, insists that "this book will be an encouragement and benefit" to readers fighting "Canada's culture war" (whatever the fuck that is), and offers the book for a fairly standard price of $20 (paperback).

We've all read this sort of article. Either on the Internet (as in this case) or in one of the countless Christian magazines out there, someone writes a column with some vaguely intriguing ideas about an important issue and closes with a couple paragraphs about how their book addresses the issue in more detail and everyone who's interested should buy said book. The "culture warriors" of the religious right make their pitch in militarist language, conveniently not-quite-mentioning the fact that, like arms manufacturers in every age, they stand to make big profits if you decide to join their culture war (in this case via the bookshop rather than the battlefield).

The intersection of business and religion is one that is inherently difficult to navigate. Churches have this problem, too; but the benefit of churches is that they are almost entirely donation-based. In most cases, people won't even look funny at you if you routinely receive the services of the church without actually contributing money in return. For the most part I don't really like the economic model of the Protestant church, but I have to admit one benefit: if you want to (or have to) free-ride, you can do so without too much difficulty. There's a fairly important theological rationale for this: most churches implicitly, and many churches explicitly, market their version of the truth as quite literally a matter of life and death. It would be deeply immoral, not to mention devastatingly unbiblical, to grant and withhold such truth on the basis of material wealth.

In the context of the church, the Biblical writings we have from the early church more or less bear out this argument, and to our credit this is something we've actually maintained, at least in part. James, from the Jewish side of the early church, wrote in his epistle that believers ought not to show favoritism to the wealthy by giving choice seats to "a man... wearing a gold ring and fine clothes," while directing a poor man "in shabby clothes" to sit on the floor. This was because, James reasoned, God has "chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith." Taken literally, this would seem to be going almost as far as liberation theology in specifically linking God with the poor, against the rich (who he later accuses of "exploiting" the church and "slandering the noble name" of Christ). A lot of evangelicals today would be uncomfortable with such an anti-materialist and anti-capitalist argument, but at least most of us have preserved the principle of free teaching in church.

Christian writing is a bit of a different story. Not that there's really an extreme shortage of reading material from pretty much any branch of the religion, available online. And if you time it right, you can often get a fair chunk of evangelical literature free of charge. I've known groups willing to hand out Lee Strobel's somewhat contrived Cases books, and I've also seen free attacks on The Da Vinci Code handed out by evangelical groups on campus. However, for the most part the Christian publishing industry operates the same way as its secular counterpart, with the twin exceptions of a more focused market and frequent claims that its books hold major significance for your life, in this world and maybe in the next as well. So my question is: why does written spiritual truth always come with a price tag?

There's a very good historical reason for books to cost money: they're expensive to produce. In past centuries, this cost was not merely inconvenient but truly extreme. Until the invention of the printing press, a single copy of any decent-sized book would require many months, and often years, of labour. Gutenberg's original printing press was derived from existing and predominantly East Asian woodblock printing, which did make printing easier - once you'd engraved the text, page by page, into a wood template. And that was only the writing bit - parchment required large amounts of hide, ideally (for the best quality vellum) from stillborn or unborn animals. Gutenberg's first Bible required 300 sheepskins - meaning that, even with movable type, Europe lacked the resources for mass book printing until paper was made from linen and hemp rags.

Even with the comparatively cheap ink and paper of today, books do still have to be printed, and as I understand it the publishing industry still takes the lion's share of the book price in compensation for providing this service. There are only a handful of books which one can easily get without paying someone for it, and for the most part they're religious texts like the Bible and Koran, purchased on your behalf by someone else willing to cover your costs.

Beyond covering production costs, however, books are copyrighted to preserve profitability, and here the Christian publishing industry could - but does not - provide any challenge to the prevailing capitalist model. At the moment, even most of our in-print Bible translations are under copyright protection - for example, the International Bible Society holds the text of the New International Version, and it is published exclusively by Zondervan, which is one-quarter of the Grand Rapids publishing cabal which holds a stranglehold on North American evangelical book publishing. The others are Eerdmans, Baker, and Kregel, and taken together they're the major partners of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, the Christian publishing lobby, which together does $2.3 billion in business each year. Since the 1980s, Zondervan has been mostly owned by Harper Collins, which serves the same general-purpose role in the secular world as Zondervan does in the religious one. HarperCollins is in turn owned by News Corporation, which means that every time you buy an NIV Bible, you're lining the pockets of Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News.

The NIV is a common translation and this network of intellectual property is also common. The New King James Version is "owned" and published by Thomas Nelson, a Scottish firm which, with its network of subsidiaries, has grown to include educational presses, Thomson Corporation, Nelson Thornes, etc. It also owned the American Standard Version once upon a time, but sold the rights to an NGO in 1928 and lost its exclusive publishing contract in 1962 after failing to meet the demand for new printings. The American Thomas Nelson later bought the Christian music label Word from ABC, spun it off to Gaylord Entertainment, then bought the Cool Springs, World Bible, and Rutledge Hill presses; and also founded the dubious conservative propaganda and "news" site, WorldNetDaily. Today it's owned by InterMedia Partners (which bought the company for $500 million last year) and manages a number of profitable conferences, like Women of Faith and Revolve.

Given these tie-ins, perhaps it's no surprise that Christian book publishers are indistinguishable from secular ones: in many cases, they're the same people. Kind of ironic, considering the things some of those books have to say about the evils of secular modernity. Some other Bible versions are owned by non-profits, like the New American Standard Bible (NASB), which is owned by the Lockman Foundation and published by that foundation's own Foundation press; or the English Standard Version, owned and distributed by Crossway Bibles (a subsidiary of Good News Publishers). However, even being a nonprofit evidently isn't enough to convince the Lockman Foundation or Good News Publishing that they ought to relinquish their ownership "rights" to the supposed words of God. Oxford and Cambridge university presses run a translation scheme too, which has produced the English Revised, New English, and Revised English translations.

Using the Bible as my example may be a bit extreme, and it's not generally too hard to find parts of any translation online in searchable databases, or even to find translations that are old enough to be in the public domain (like the King James Version). However, the absurd idea that one can "own" the text of 2000-year-old religious scriptures is one that need not be endorsed by the Christian community. There's no immediate need to rise up and seize these translations back from the publishing cabals, since for the most part anyone who wants an English-language Bible can get one, at least here in North America; but it should give us pause to consider where to draw the line between commercial interest and the dissemination of ideas about religious truth. At the very least, this could be easily carried over into the release of free online versions by some of the authors who currently spend so much time flogging their new books on Christianity in the 21st century, Christianity in the culture wars, or even Christianity with respect to some other more interesting topic I'd be seriously interested in reading about. If we're serious about promoting discussion amongst religious people, and also potentially religious people (i.e. converts with thick wallets), surely we are as wrong to tie up the discussion in potentially expensive legal protection as we would be to charge entrance fees to listen to pastors' sermons.

The standard capitalist response to what I'm suggesting is that there isn't going to be any more written innovation - i.e. more books - if there's no way to make a profit from them. This isn't a very good rationale among Christians, and it does suggest that we as the Christian consumers bear part of the blame. In theory there's no particular reason why we shouldn't think it natural and normal to give at least something back to the author with or without being legally required to do so. On the other hand, the dubious value of self-interest (our weak version of what would otherwise be called "greed") is hammered into us since childhood, inside and outside the church, and so except among friends we generally don't think about value except in terms of exchanging money. The only movie I've ever downloaded then considered sending some compensation for, for example, is The Corporation, and that one only because the producers took the innovative step of releasing a "shareware" version to the file-sharing networks, which is exactly the same as the standard version except for a brief spiel at the beginning encouraging viewers to send in donations if they enjoy the film.

There are conceivable compromises between the status quo on the one hand, and throwing everything into the public domain and trusting one's fickle readers on the other. The open source computing community, for example, has achieved growing success with free and copyleft licenses, which retain legal "ownership" while permitting people to copy and redistribute the book however they wish, including giving away copies for free. Many companies in the field offer free source versions downloadable over the Internet, but make their money selling hardcopies and customer support to consumers who need something more solid than an unsupported downloaded file.

In theory, many of the major writers in the evangelical field should be okay with these ideas. James Dobson, for example, says that, at least for his followers and listeners, he waives all royalties on his publications "to obtain the lowest possible price from the publisher." There's an even cheaper price - $0 - which could be obtained if Dobson were to post a PDF of his presumably very important books online. On the other hand, if this were done on a large scale, publishers might be less willing to publish the print versions, and that in turn would rob Dobson of his royalties from non-listeners, who (at least according to the link above) may not be eligible for the royalty-free book sales.

To see the future of Christian publishing, perhaps we can return once again to examining Bible translations. A handful of new versions, like the Updated King James Version (UKJV), literally are new works deliberately declared to be in the public domain. The World English Bible, which is still being prepared, is supervised by Rainbow Missions, which has waived its copyrights and will place the entire translation in the public domain. A Wiki-based translation, the Free Bible, is even underway here, which, if it ever goes anywhere, should prove very interesting. If worst comes to worst, Christian authors may even have to feed themselves by making tents during the day, like Paul did.

Once book publishing has been reformed a little perhaps people can start paying attention to the even worse state of the Christian music industry, which has managed to convince churches to pay annual "licensing fees," albeit minimal ones, for the privilege of having worship music available every Sunday (see, for example, Christian Copyright Licensing International). The big Christian record labels are also owned by the big record labels. ForeFront, Gotee, Sparrow, Tooth and Nail, Chordant and a few others are owned by EMI Christian Music Group, which, as the name suggests, is a subsidiary of EMI. Word Records and its various holdings (Myrrh, Canaan, DaySpring, Rejoice, etc.) followed a long and twisted path from ABC to Thomas Nelson, Gaylord, Time Warner, and finally Warner Music Group. Provident, which holds Brentwood, Essential, Flicker, Gray Matters, Reunion, and Praise Hymn Music Group, is actually Sony BMG's Christian music division. This corporate mega-structure isn't necessarily a problem if we want to see religious music as a major commercial venture - let's just not delude ourselves about what we're doing by coating it in charitable religious language.
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The Reverend Reads the Bible

The Praxis Institute, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Church of the Orange Sky, is pleased to present a revolutionary new perspective on the Christian Bible. The Church regrets that its authorized spokesman may have erred in representing one of the links in a previous post. Please be assured the individual in question will be stoned as soon as possible to preserve our honour.

An update to my previous post - The Sword of Gryffindor, which I linked to in the previous post, has prepared some lengthier reflections on the "culture war" with respect to Harry Potter. I think the suggestion of stepping away from the usual liberal-conservative categories has some merit. Kudos to the people who didn't see this as a big deal, and to the ones who used it to suggest a future beyond "culture wars." The religious right has begun to grumble a little, too - Laura Mallory thinks this is further "indoctrination" into "anti-Christian values," and people at the "Values Voters" summit think the injection of homosexuality into the series makes it too "political." I'm fascinated by how making a character gay makes him (or her) intrinsically "political," when him being implicitly heterosexual was politically irrelevant. In any event, this is hopefully the end of my present interest in Harry Potter and I will say no more about it, except perhaps to note that my frustration in this case applies in similar form to people hunting for homoeroticism in The Lord of the Rings or Fight Club.

A message from one of the Mad Reverends - I've found what could have been our blog's anthum, though sadly we had nothing to do with the production or distribution of it: WWJD? (A Music Video). Asinine, hilarious, and heretical, all at the same time - ideals to which I also aspire.

This blog has sort of a disturbing pattern: both of its mysterious authors both vanish for months on end, popping up only when their frustration with world events reaches a boiling point and they need to bitch about corruption, sexuality, school killings, and various other marginally depressing topics. This proposes a problem for the exaggerated hopes of the Church of the Orange Sky, which now finances this project in the belief that Jesus Drives an SUV is going to spearhead a revolution in North American Christian culture. A new Cultural Revolution, if you will, except without Red Guards or Maoist personality cults. At the very least, the Mad Reverends' Cultural Revolution will require more frequent blog posts.

Fortunately, as a semi-Christian writer, I can always resort to writing about the Bible. There's thousands of chapters in it and it's a constant subject of conversation on Sunday mornings (not so constant at other times of the week, mind you). Back when I first became a Christian, a well-meaning youth pastor gave me a free copy which I studiously read from cover to cover, trying along the way to convince myself of the absolute truth of the contents. Occasionally I suspect I should read it again, with the benefit of a little more maturity and ability to think critically, though I usually get rather bored after stumbling about in the Old Testament for a while. Nevertheless, while on one of my many periods of procrastination lately, I sat down and re-read the first few chapters of Genesis. I'll start there and see how far I get this time. In the meantime, you're welcome to my thoughts on the contents, some of which is even more difficult to accept than I remember it being.

The fact that the Judeo-Christian creation myth is the first story in the first book of the first Testament of the Bible creates considerable difficulties for me, since it means that I have to develop my view on the inerrancy of the Bible – as well as what the Bible really is, if it’s not the inerrant word of God – right off the bat. Of course, as a reminder of the fact that the Scriptures have been ineptly manipulated by human hands in the centuries following the original writing of them, here we’re also treated to a curious chapter placement: notice that the second chapter of Genesis begins in the middle of the first creation story, rather than a few sentences later, when we move to the second creation story.

For someone simply looking for Scriptural inconsistencies, it doesn't take long to hit paydirt. Genesis 2 is a very different story of the creation than Genesis 1, because this story has man created first, followed by plants, which are followed by animals. From a literal perspective, these accounts are probably irreconcileable. One of the more widely referenced contemporary evangelical propaganda websites, Answers in Genesis, argues that “Jewish scholars” understood verb tenses based on context, so the problem vanishes, apparently assuming that our own translaters are therefore incompetent at reading ancient Hebrew, which is very disappointing. In any event, this is irrelevant because Genesis 2 actually notes that “the Lord God formed the man” at a time when “no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth,” a statement which has nothing to do with verb-tense context. In Genesis 1, the “trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds,” and other plants, were created on the third day, before even the sun was created; in Genesis 2, the garden (with its trees) appears after the man. Answers in Genesis further explains that Genesis 2 is a “recap” which might not present events in “chronological sequence,” since it is “a more detailed account of the creation of Adam and Eve and day six of creation.”

My real problem with the six-day creation, however, is not that the Biblical account of it has some textual enigmas, but that the whole process really does not make a great deal of sense. The worldview which lays behind the creation myth, and almost certainly would have belonged to Moses himself even if modern young-earth (and even old-earth, to some extent) scientists are desperately trying to find an adequate reinterpretation, is clearly the work of a cosmology alien to our own. The Scriptures say that the Earth was initially “formless and empty.” God created “light” ex nihilo and then “separated” it from the darkness, so that there was light for part of the day but darkness for the rest of the day. He does not actually create the Sun until the fourth day. This would mean that God not only created the Earth before the Sun, but that in the absence of the Sun he created some other source of light, with the Sun existing only to provide order to the procession of day, season, and year.

Next, God creates an “expanse between the waters” above and the waters below, which is called the “sky.” Where the waters above eventually go I’m not sure, since the universe is not filled with water at present. After he creates the plants, he creates “lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night,” and to “mark seasons and days and years.” These are “governed” by two “great lights,” the sun and the moon. Of course, the moon is not really a light at all: it is a giant rock which serves us as a giant mirror. God created only one “great light.” Finally, once all this work is finished, he creates a large number of animals and plants which coexist with one another, despite the fact that they never do so again throughout our entire fossil record -- including primitive organisms, dinosaurs, and human beings.

What emerges from Genesis 1 is the creation account of a people who saw a flat Earth, surrounded by water hovering above the sky; an Earth-centered universe with an uncertain span beyond this solar system (beyond which there are billions of other stars and millions of other galaxies), in which the sun and moon were lights which “hung” in the sky above the Earth. It would be simplistic and somewhat immature to now rush forward with new scientific evidence that the Earth is not flat, and in fact revolves around the Sun, which is one of an uncounted number of stars in the universe with dubious claims to uniqueness. The most obvious method of discounting these differences is that Moses simply related the creation of the world as he saw it, which was from an imperfect human perspective we today do not share. To this, more traditional Christians have in the past responded to me: if that's true, how can we trust any other part of the Bible? Fair enough, if "trust" is earned through some sort of Enlightenment-inspired textual examination of the Bible as a single flawless unit.

It has to be said that, unsatisfying as this may seem, this is the point where old earth creationists and many of the current crop of young-earth creation "scientists" have to abandon pretensions about Biblical inerrancy. If they don't use the above argument, they have to instead argue that Moses didn't actually understand the real truth of the stories he was writing in Genesis. That's a disturbing argument given the questions it raises about the relationship between God and humanity (including the humans who wrote the Bible), and it's one which most people want to drop later on, when it becomes more convenient to say the author can be ignored because he was tied down by a particular cultural context (i.e. the argument we use to dismiss many of Paul's various statements about the subjection of women within the church).

Can we decide now, long after the fact, that Moses is dead and we can read into his words whatever "godly" meaning we wish? The Statement of Faith of the denomination in which I am currently nominally a member, the Canadian Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches, believes that “the Bible [is] the complete Word of God… as originally written… [and] verbally inspired by the Spirit of God and entirely free from error.” I’m not entirely certain what it means to “verbally inspire” a text, but it seems to imply that God determined the selection of the words used, as well as their meaning. The Biblical authors (so far referred to here as "Moses," though it could have been damned near anyone) thus become the unthinking channels through which God’s language is communicated. If this is true, then God has told humanity statements which appeared at times to be untrue. I should stress that I can’t disprove the fact that the earth was created in six days in the manner described in either Genesis 1 or Genesis 2: I simply have no reason to believe it. This, perhaps, is the root of the disagreement, and really there is no way past it. I simply do not believe that the creation event in Genesis 1 is what really happened, over the period of 144 hours at an unspecified point in history. I cannot “choose” to believe such a thing simply because it is in accordance with accepted doctrine, and frankly, I would look with suspicion on anyone who was able to accept something as truth simply because they were told to by an institution of the church.

It is possible that people such as myself are the targets of the “science” being practiced by members both of the old earth and the young earth creation camps. However, in many ways I find these even less useful. In my experience, neither a conversion nor a faith that is based on human interpretation of the geological past is likely to be deep or enduring. This is because ultimately my relationship with God is and always has been based on an experiential awareness of the presence of the Lord; what I consider “knowledge” has been subject to that awareness, rather than the other way around. I do not believe that Christianity is likely to win many converts by arguing that it has a scientific account of the history of the planet.

Speaking of science, that branch of human activity is normally the observation, identification, description, investigation, and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena. A scientific hypothesis is an inference which can never be proved; it may be supported by observation and evidence, and it may be disproved when this evidence contradicts the thesis. Today's creationists take the opposite approach, beginning with the creation of the world by God and then casting about for evidence to support a chain of events in keeping with their predetermined conclusion. Yet this ignores the fact that our religion is by definition a non-scientific thing: God is not a physical, natural phenomenon and thus should not fall within the jurisdiction of scientific investigation anyways, just as we would not attempt to share the gospel through the instructional manual for a toaster oven.

Particularly in the case of the Old Earth investigators, then, creationists tend to slide towards the seemingly more appealing alternative of simply arguing that the other options available to us – namely, the theory of evolution – are irreparably flawed and must be discarded, even if there is not a better theory currently available. Most such arguments derive from some variant of the notion of “irreducible complexity” – that is, that aspects of life and nature are so complex that they could not possibly have arisen without divine intervention in the form of some sort of creator, or at least intelligent designer. The fact that presentations of this theory usually require misrepresentations of what the actual theory of evolution is does us no credit with many of the audiences we are attempting to persuade, and even when it does, I do not believe that the Christian faith should ever be – or should ever need to be – spread through intellectual dishonesty. Neither did St. Augustine, incidentally, who, in similar circumstances, complained that

It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.

A little like Augustine's idiots, some of the young earth crowd go further by developing seemingly sophisticated theories to explain a scientific method of divine six-day creation. This is hardly new – some geological catastrophists used to argue that most of the Earth’s features were established in the Great Flood, and most young earth types still do – but it has expanded to include more smoke and mirrors. Barry Setterfield, for example, has amassed some frankly confusing arguments that the speed of light (and therefore time) declines over time, allowing more human history to happen in a year in 2000 B.C. than a year in 2000 A.D. Extremely conservative groups, such as Rapture Ready, frequently attribute their failures to the hardened anti-Christian attitude among scientists, and sometimes go so far as to claim that many scientists want to come forward with the evidence which disproves evolution but are being repressed by the atheist academic establishment. It is true that this establishment is and always has been reluctant to accept new ideas that fundamentally change existing theoretical frameworks, but there is more at work here: the “scientific” case for creation is largely limited to the claim that evolution does not work, and that the remaining “gaps” must be the result of divine intervention. This is not a scientific "theory" and we should not bother to pretend that it is: as I remarked before, the tools of science are inappropriate for the religious and spiritual task which we have set for ourselves.

Some of my brethren would doubtless respond that my conclusion about Genesis 1 and 2 is unacceptable from a Christian perspective because it casts doubt on the reliability of God’s Word. This is often coupled with the claim that dismissing parts of the Bible is the first step on a slippery slope leading to the rejection of the entire Bible. My answer to this is very simple: I first trusted the gospels through the influence of the Spirit of God, and I never felt compelled to believe in the accounts of Genesis 1 and 2 in the same way. I struggled to do so when instructed to by the church, and ultimately concluded that belief does not follow from obedience. Furthermore, I simply do not believe that the Bible is some sort of unitary machine made up of innumerable cogs and pulleys and belts; I do not believe, therefore, that pulling out one or two of these cogs is somehow going to “break” the Bible.

If I have dismissed their historical validity, is there still religious meaning in the accounts of creation in Genesis? Perhaps there is. A Jewish philosopher from the first century, Philo, argued that “it is quite foolish to think that the world was created in the space of six days or in a space of time at all”; to Philo, Moses’s creation account was an allegory of God’s perfection. Mind you, Philo also thought that the number of days were chosen to represent mathematical perfection. Three centuries later, the somewhat unconventional Christian theologian Origen of Alexandria, also rejecting a literal reading of creation, wrote that “I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance and not literally.” Many of the early Christians, too, saw the story of creation as an allegory for God's love for and salvation of humanity.

At the end of the day, though, I don't find much meaning in those statements either. The creation question has ceased to have any real meaning for me one way or the other. I hadn't really realized I would conclude with that somewhat nihilistic observation when I started writing this post. I suppose it means I will have to submit a resignation to my old church on the grounds that I no longer accept their statement of faith, though in fairness I should have done that quite some time ago, since this is hardly the first serious disagreement I've had with that silly little document. On the bright side, this liberation will bind me closer to the Church of the Orange Sky, which is the profitable postmodern future of all good religion.
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Oh, no! Dumbledore was Gay!

This message is brought to you by the Praxis Institute, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Church of the Orange Sky.

First off, an update on my last post, in which the Roberts dynasty totally lost the plot and went off in search of extravagant vacations, teenage sex toys, and political influence: God has issued new orders to Oral Roberts University and president Richard Roberts has departed on a "leave of absence." The Church of the Orange Sky welcomes God's intervention in worldly affairs but calls upon all parties involved to stop invoking God's name in vain.

I was going to write about the demise of TV-links, which I used to use to watch all of my favourite TV shows, and how the entertainment industry has forged a disturbing new link with state power in the West. (It's a bizarre alliance of state and entertainment which is much more interesting than Marx's alliance of state and capital.) In the last few years we've seen servers and individuals arrested and charged in various countries, and their property seized by the government, even in the complete absence of actual criminal activity: DVD Jon, the Pirate Bay, now TV-Links, and so on. But this is a religious blog rather than a political one, so you'll have to ponder the declining relevance of civil rights and habeas corpus elsewhere.

In the meantime, one of my friends has brought to my attention an even more exciting development: Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore was gay. This constitutes new post-canonical doctrine from Her Obscenely Wealthy Excellency, J.K. Rowling. Answering questions in Carnegie Hall, Rowling apparently earned great applause for a short, bald answer to a question about whether Dumbledore had ever fallen in love: "I always thought of Dumbledore as gay". Allegedly this helps explain Dumbledore's early friendship with the fictitious wizard doppelganger of Adolf Hitler - i.e. he fell in love with the guy and was blinded to just what was really going on. I expect this new twist will generate great excitement over the next five or six days before fading away again, so I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon of public commentary, though with what I anticipate will be a bit of a different slant.

First off, it's worth noting that I personally think Rowling is a bit of an ass. A few weeks ago, she wandered off the reservation and attempted to sue an Indian group for the heinous sin of building a replica Hogwarts castle at a Hindu religious festival. (The attempt failed, which gave me a little respect for the Indian courts system, but didn't alleviate my disgust with Rowling, who apparently now feels that she owns the exclusive use of non-existent magic castles.) Now, she's attempting to add some ex post facto wisdom to the Harry Potter series in order to seem a little edgier. Falling into obscurity with her billion well-earned dollars obviously isn't enough.

My quick Google search for "slash Dumbledore" indicates that plenty of fan fiction writers have already come to the conclusion that Dumbledore was gay - or at least that he indulged in sex with other men, which in the tawdry realm of Internet fanfic is a very important distinction. Rowling claims that she's always had this idea in her head and even insisted on edits to the movie scripts in order to prevent Dumbledore from being accidentally pinned down as a straight guy. She even claims that "if I'd know it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago." Uh-huh. I suspect either her publisher told her she wasn't allowed to say that publicly until after the seventh book was published, or she's only recently decided to experiment with generating more controversy. Rowling is an intelligent woman, I think, and not naive about the effects of her public comments.

The new statements were greeted with a wave of self-righteous and self-congratulatory remarks from what I suppose could be termed the liberal wing of the Harry Potter fan world. This blogger, for example, who may or may not be influential and widely read (my Google search for "dumbledore gay" isn't necessarily a reliable method of determining popularity), writes that the event "proves... to be correct once again, as we've always maintained that Rowlingw ould be, for lack of a better word, a 'liberal' Christian." The lengthy list of comments, which makes the following of our blog seem small and humble indeed, contain various references to expected great reactions from American right-wing Christians. A few otherwise sympathetic writers suggest that Rowling has caused them to doubt their support of her books (here).

The real conservative response has so far been muted, possibly because they're sharpening their pitchforks but more likely for a host of other reasons, one of which is that they just haven't had time to prepare a lengthy response yet. One blogger suggests that people who were pleased to hear Dumbledore was gay should be subjected to "intense psychological investigation," since evidently homosexuality is beyond the pale in a "children's fantasy book." In addition, this writer believes that "every scene involving Dumbledore... will unavoidably be colored by this revelation."

Personally, I don't see why anyone should care whether Rowling sees Dumbledore as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or anything else. My partial readings of the series suggests that his sexuality plays absolutely no meaningful role in any aspect of the story. Why it should matter, therefore, is completely beyond me, and in my mind anyone who is either elated or disgusted by the announcement has missed the point. The real message ought to be that we should stop trying to place sexuality at the center of our identity as human beings. I merely disagree with this in relation to gay pride and other like-minded groups. But I am totally confused when certain religious groups attempt to do the same, essentializing gay and lesbian people as sinister, inherently promiscuous hedonists on the one hand and, on the other, trumpeting the wondrous glory of monogamous heterosexuality as God's not only intended but expected and possibly required way for humans to enjoy themselves.

If indeed Dumbledore should be understood as a gay man, then the lesson is that we can understand and relate to people without first having to ponder the implications of their sexuality. I personally find that much more refreshing than this notion that we now need to revise our reading of a children's book series in order to celebrate - or condemn - the fact that the author thinks a school principal happened to be gay.
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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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Christ: A Discussion on Gender and Sex

I was in a women's studies course, and the discussion came up 'would Christianity been adopted if Christ had been a woman?'

To be honest, at first, I was slightly baffled that we were even having the discussion. Then I had to think about it. I don't know.

The relevence of gender and sex should not be of any importance when considering the importance of hearing God's word. Still..

I do have to admit I like the face of Christ as I have imagined him most of my life. I think it would be slightly unsettling to find out otherwise. I don't know why, other than the fact I don't give it much thought about Christ's appearance, and to do so is to take me out of a comfort zone I have not left in a while.

Anyways, nothing terribly enlightening today.. just some thoughts that I had to muse out loud about..

Shawn
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Pray for the fallen

In Virginia Tech today, they held a vigil for the fallen students from Monday's shooting. It was a terrible tradegy. As a student at a university here, it is scary to think the same thing could happen on our campus.

From the sounds of it, the man was a troubled loner. I often think about these individuals, and wonder ' would this been prevented if people tried to reach out to this person? '. I think it's easier for most of us to not think about the roles we play in other peoples lives, but sometimes our inaction can be just as powerful as our actions.

My scripture knowledge is bad.. I haven't been reading my bible as much as I should be lately.. but I believe there is a passage in Proverbs that talks about 'rescuing those who are unjustly sentenced to die..' I remember this because the Right to Life association I used to belong to quoted that all the time to explain why they were opposed to abortion.. but the quote seems more appropriate to me in this context now.. When we see someone dying inside, should our Christian compassion compel us to approach that individual and offer them our friendship, and our Christian love? I wonder if anyone tried to reach out to him..

I also happen to think that we live in a society where we are too easily comfortable with violence. Heaven help us if you see somebody in the body that God made us in, but seeing a serial killer hack up a bunch of people with blood and gore makes for good t.v.

I'm not comfortable with idea of gun control.. but I have decided to give it a second thought. If we must live in a society that will not curb violence on t.v. because censorship has become a bad word, then we must consider what other alternatives exist for us.

I am also troubled by the fact that the media seems to want to focus on the fact that he was a South Korean student, like his immigrant status would explain away the violence we are experiencing in society world wide.

None of these problems are solved with easy answers, but I think we as Christians should pray.. for those who have fallen, and for those who need our help..

Shawn
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