Memory and the Murder of Trayvon Martin

            It was during the mid-sixties.  Occasionally I worked for a church member who owned a gas station in west Nashville, Tennessee where I grew up.  His son was a friend of mine.  We were responsible for pumping gas, washing customers’ cars, changing wiper blades and other menial tasks.  One Saturday my friend and I were in the next bay changing the oil in a car while a notorious west Nashville local was regaling the mechanic with tales of what he would do to civil rights protestors if he got the chance.  This was, of course, at the height of the civil rights movement.  Nashville and its major African-American educational institutions, Tennessee A & I and Fisk College had been at the center of the protest. After visiting murder and mayhem on the heads of the protestors the man boasted that he had killed two black men in his time.  “Of course,” he grumbled, “that was back when it was still legal to kill a black man.”  He actually didn’t say “black man”.  He used an enduringly offensive term of diminishment and opprobrium.  I had always heard the phrase “my blood ran cold” but I did not know what it meant until that moment.

            This is not an incident I willingly recall.  But it came to mind when I heard of the murder of Trayvon.  In the south of my youth young black men could be beaten and lynched for looking at a white woman the wrong way.  They could be imprisoned for minor offenses and brutalized by prison guards.  Thousands went to their deaths at the hands of shotgun wielding “bulls” at hellholes like Louisiana’s  Angola Prison. We are naïve if we imagine that the fear and bile of those years has been drawn like poison out of our system.  When a young man is murdered and the authorities react with reasoned indifference we are reminded of those days in the South, and not only the South, when killing a black man or woman or child was legal.  And in different parts of the country it could be Mexicans or Chinese or Native Americans who were brutalized and murdered. And if a sheriff or police chief had the courage to charge a murderer, juries routinely acquitted them.

            In the giddy days after the nomination and then election of President Obama there was a great deal of loose talk about a “post racial society.”  But the vilification and misrepresentation of the President almost from day one should have put the lie to such optimistic posturing.  The attacks on President Obama have gone far beyond ordinary political differences.  To this day people doubt his religious affiliation and his citizenship—among other things.  Contrary evidence has no impact on the narrative they have constructed.  They see him as an alien, threatening presence, illegitimately occupying the Oval Office.  I do not say this to support the President’s policies or his re-election.  Those are separate matters.  I say this rather to illustrate the deep-seated antipathy to the “other” occupying the highest office in the land.  President Obama is like Trayvon Martin—he is in the “wrong neighborhood.”  I know there are many principled opponents of the President who on proper political and ideological grounds oppose his administration.  Fair enough.  In a democracy this is not only to be expected, but is required.  But his election, I contend, rather than signaling a post racial society, has stirred up some of the most fetid and ugly parts of our national identity.  This is what needs to be addressed with repentance, tears, and frank condemnation.  Too many bullets have killed too many of our children.  All of us, Democrats and Republicans, citizens of the North and the South, African American, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, and white (whatever that is), need to speak truth and pursue justice.  Wendell Berry called racism America’s “hidden wound.”  Today that wound is festering openly for all to see.  God have mercy upon the family of Trayvon Martin.  God have mercy on us all.

John E. Phelan, Jr.

The Problem with Biblical Scholarship

            I have labored in the vineyards of biblical scholarship most of my adult life.  I began serious study of the Bible at a fundamentalist Bible School, moved on to a conservative Evangelical theological seminary and earned my doctorate at a major research university.  I have preached, taught and written about the Bible as the pastor of a local church, the editor of a denominational magazine, and as a seminary professor.  I have a great deal of respect for the craft and skill of many of my colleagues in biblical scholarship.  But I also have problems with the way the field has done its business.  I was reminded of my difficulties while listening to a paper at the Society of Biblical Literature’s Annual Meeting last November.  While giving a paper on the gospels a young scholar complained bitterly about the incursion of “theology” into the study and interpretation of the gospels.  This is a far from uncommon complaint.  In fact, I am convinced that it would be as shocking for many at that giant academic nerd fest we call AAR/SBL for a speaker to draw an implication as it would be for him to disrobe on the platform.

            The problem with this is that it assumes a kind of scholarly objectivity that simply doesn’t exist.  Biblical scholarship (and it is not alone) has suffered from an illusion that religious, cultural, and scientific biases can be put aside for the sake of a disinterested reading of the text.  But this is as likely as my being disinterested when the Chicago Bears are playing a football game.  The scholar complaining about the incursions of “theology” into the interpretation of the text did nothing so much as indicate the depth of his naiveté.  Marilynne Robinson, in a pair of essays on Moses and the Torah in her wonderful book When I Was a Child I Read Books, reminds us that a good deal of 19^th century biblical scholarship was corrupted by (particularly) German nationalism, (mostly) atheistic rationalism, and pervasive anti-Semitism.  The popular division of the Pentateuch into documents JEDP by Julius Wellhausen, for example, was not rooted in scientific objectivity or literary expertise but in specious developmental views of the idea of God in ancient Judaism that amounted, in the end, to a denigration of Judaism itself.  Similarly, the atomistic approach to the historicity of sayings and incidents in the Gospels has very little either historically or literarily to recommend it.  All too often what is deemed “historical” is what is either congenial to the author or embarrassing to his or her opponents.  Modern Biblical scholarship has, in other words, frequently been a tool of the critics of both traditional Judaism and traditional Christianity. 

            This is not to say there are not thoroughly Christian scholars who are doing very careful and thoughtful work on historical questions related to the biblical text.  But their researches, for example, into the Gospels are not based on simplistic and contradictory “criteria” intended to make decisions on historicity easier.  Such criteria are designed, in the end, to produce as few authentic words and actions of Jesus as possible.  The founders of the Jesus Seminar, for example, were not simply engaging in dispassionate investigation of the gospels when they used such criteria.  They were quite openly using the criteria to attack “fundamentalist” Christian readings they found uncongenial.

            Having said this, I also have little use for Evangelical scholars who, having decided on the basis of their view of the Bible that all the sayings and stories in the Bible are accurate and historical, use the tools of critical research to “prove” their historicity.  They would be more honest to acknowledge their presupposition and leave off the specious “proofs”.  This approach is as dishonest in its own way as the tendentious decisions of the Jesus Seminar.  I, for one, am not convinced that everything in the Bible has to be historically accurate for it to be the Word of God.  But that is for another blog.  Responsible scholarship acknowledges its biases, blind spots, and commitments and does not pretend a nonexistent objectivity.  It submits its views to a diverse community for correction and assessment with humility and thankfulness.  Even when it does its scholarship for the church it does it with critical integrity as well as enduring love.

John E. Phelan, Jr.

Church and State

            Like many Americans I have followed the controversy over the federal government’s requiring Roman Catholic institutions like hospitals and schools to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives for their employees.  Roman Catholic bishops and many supporters from the Evangelical camp expressed outrage at their being required to provide a product they considered immoral.  The controversy was cast as a challenge to religious liberty and, perhaps ironically, the separation of church and state.  Now I don’t want to minimize the serious questions raised by the government’s actions.  But these are complex issues.  All of us, whether people of religious faith or more secular convictions find ourselves paying for things we would rather not support.  Many of us would rather have not seen our tax money go to the Iraq war or nuclear weapons.  I suspect that many atheists would rather not pay for military chaplains or vegans contribute to the salaries of meat inspectors.  

            Be that as it may, I had another problem.  I was concerned that the Roman Catholic Bishops and my (mostly) brothers in the Evangelical world were angling for a kind of de facto state church.  Certain parties within the Evangelical world have been pushing this agenda for a long time.  These are the folks who try to rewrite American history to make it seem that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson actually graduated from Moody Bible Institute.  The Roman Catholic Church well into the 20^th century was nervous about Democracy and generally in favor of freedom of religion only where the church was a threatened minority.  While that is certainly less true these days, I suspect there are many corners of the Vatican as there are in Colorado Springs that would prefer a kind of Christian monarch and the enforcement of one brand or the other of Christian morality.

            I am writing, however, to praise the secular state.  I have been convinced by Stanley Hauerwas on the one hand and Rodney Stark on the other that coziness with the state leads to the enervation of the church.  Hauerwas insists that when the church asks the state to do its work it suffers a fatal compromise.  Stark argues that privileged state churches become intellectually and spiritually flabby.  The church, he argues, requires vigorous competition from other faiths and philosophies to sustain its strength and promote its message.  The relative strength of the church in the United States is the result of such competition and pressure.  Even if Christians in the United States could agree on what constitutes “Christian morality” it would be disastrous for the task of enforcing that morality to be handed to the state.  The secular state, in other words, is good for the church.

            Besides all this like many, if not most Americans, I am deeply suspicious of hierarchical structures loudly telling me what I should or should not do and should or should not think.  Whether that hierarchy is in Washington, D. C., Vatican City, Colorado Springs, or Chicago I bristle when the voices from on high tell me how a Christian should think, vote, and believe.  I bristle not because I think there is no Christian way to think, vote, and believe but because I believe in the local church and what the Baptists call “soul competency.”  I am, after all, a Protestant.  Critical issues, I believe, are discerned together with brothers and sisters around the word of God and in service of the people of God.  They are discerned in humility and communicated with grace.  God’s people do not enforce, they persuade, they love, the bear witness.  So to the folks in Vatican City, Colorado Springs and Chicago—thanks but no thanks.  I’m doing OK with the Bible, the font and table, and my brothers and sisters at Resurrection Covenant Church.

John E. Phelan, Jr.

How?

How?

What do I do with my anger?
My beloved country is stained with cruel words, fractured by
jeering division and awash with impious posturing.
How do I love those who so eagerly hate?
How do I sustain those who so easily sneer?
How do I weep with those so indifferent to suffering and laugh with those so
ignorant of pain?
Do I gently point out latent racism?
Do I carefully question overt sexism?
Do I thoughtfully rebuke cursing of leaders?
Do I arch my eyebrows when the comfortably moneyed complain of taxes?

Or:

Do I remain silent for the sake of peace and smile for purposes of goodwill?
Do I silently curse their blindness and quietly rail at their ignorance?
Do I simply love that silent anger?
Do I fear to listen?
Am I cruel in my hiding and ugly in that silence?

How do I love them?  (These enemies who are not my enemies, but beloved of God.)

Do I seek love in hating?
Do I seek peace in cursing?
Do I seek hope in sneering?
Do I hang on them the horns of the scapegoat?

Fair Game?

Recently I have taken to sending emails to sports writers and political pundits.  I take the Chicago Tribune, a once proud newspaper fallen, like most other newspapers, on hard times.  Political columnists and sports writers are paid for their opinions.  And like most people I love to read the people I already agree with!  Now, having confessed my sins, I have been known to read people I frequently disagree with.  In the Tribune this is John Kass.  Sometimes I like what Kass has to say.  Sometimes he drives me crazy.  What troubles me about Kass and his brethren in the sports page, however, is not their opinions, but the way those opinions are frequently expressed.  I began emailing when I noticed that it was not enough to criticize the policy of a politician or the play of an athlete; the hapless individuals targeted by Kass et. al. were subject to degrading humiliation.  The attacks were frequently cruelly personal.  It was as if public figures by virtue of the fact that they held public office or started for the Chicago Bears were fair game for mockery and abuse.  Their failures, it seems, were not simply because they faced a recalcitrant economy or a good defense, but because they were bad people.

I have emailed Kass and at least three sports writers asking about this.  Is it really necessary to mock and humiliate your opponents?  Isn’t it enough to point out your disagreements and note their failures without sneering at them?  I have, of course, never received a reply.  I know that writers like Kass and his brethren on cable television are “entertainers.”  People on the left love to hear Colbert take down a bewildered conservative.  People on the right love to hear Glenn Beck mock a hapless liberal.  And so sportswriters and columnists are almost compelled to resort to nastiness to get and hold an audience.  I get that.  But there is something profoundly troubling about it all.  In spite of the fact that Kass is Greek Orthodox, Colbert is Roman Catholic and Beck a Mormon, they seem to have little regard for the words of the man they claim to follow: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your father in heaven” (Matthew 5:43).  It is hard for me to see how you can love your enemies and mock and humiliate them.  It is hard for me to see how you can love your enemies and distort what they say. 

I have determined during this election cycle that I will not join in the mockery and abuse.  I am going to pray for both candidates—even if I can’t stand the positions of one of them (as is likely to be the case).  I will feel free to criticize positions and raise questions about decisions.  But I will not join in the hurling of abuse, lies, and distortions.  While I am at it, I would suggest that the church world could stand to call a moratorium on this as well.  The left needs to stop sneering at the “fundamentalists.”  The right needs to stop excoriating the “liberals.”  Raise questions about theology and practice, but stop denigrating and insulting each other.  We can do this without the personal abuse and cruel assertions that come far too quickly to our lips.  I have written and said a lot of things over the years.  I have not always been charitable or kind and I regret that.  It behooves all of us who write or speak to consider more carefully how our words, when they become intimate and personal, wound individuals and persons who love them.  How can we use our words to challenge and encourage?  How can we use our words to love?

 John E. Phelan, Jr.

A Baby Boomer's Apology

It perhaps goes without saying that the Baby Boomers are not the most popular generation around.  No one will call us “The Greatest Generation”, at least without a well-developed sense of irony.  We have an unenviable record of self-indulgence, self-aggrandizement, and over the top narcissism that is obvious to all but ourselves.  In spite of our counter-cultural pieties we have sustained nearly unabated war, tolerated unprecedented destruction of our natural resources, and divorced our spouses and neglected our children at unforgivable rates.  We have, of course, wept crocodile tears over all this, but have not demonstrated the moral courage to face our unraveling the fabric of life’s very sustainability.  Many of us seem to face with indifference the very real possibility that our grandchildren will suffer the collapse of our consumerist economy, the exhaustion of our oil, the ruination of our agriculture, and the rise of demagogic politicians that will take advantage of their fears.  Whether we are liberal or conservative we seem to favor politicians who let us keep doing exactly what we want to do with varying levels of government support.  We want to live as we always have and leave the difficult challenge of cleaning up the mess we made to our heirs.

 All of this is bad enough and worthy of an abject apology.  But I want to apologize for something else entirely: what we have done to the church of Jesus Christ.  We have been every bit as narcissistic and self-aggrandizing in the ecclesiastical world as in the economic, political, and familial worlds.  The American church is a mess.  Whether you look at Mainline, Roman Catholic, or Evangelical churches, it would be hard to argue that any are characterized by Spiritual strength, moral integrity, and missional courage.  There are, of course, many notable exceptions and I am thankful for them.  But for the most part the culture looks upon the American church, justifiably I might add, with at best bemusement and at worst contempt.  When they think of the church they do not think of love, hope, and compassion but small-mindedness, arrogance, gnat straining and camel swallowing.  Sure the media looks for the worst, but it has little trouble finding it.  Having said this there are some specific things I want to apologize for:

1. The Mega-Church:  I am really sorry about this.  It is, of course, not surprising the Mega-Church rose among boomers.  We love the big deal and great entertainment.  We are the Woodstock generation and mega-churches are like Woodstock without the nudity and drug use.  We are the generation that believed if big is good massive is even better.  But the mega-church appealed to us for other reasons.  We liked the idea of its inhuman perfection.  We wanted every note perfect, every bathroom sparkling clean, every speech equally inspiring.  We liked the illusion that all was right with the world.  We were embarrassed by our parents’ churches.  We were doctors, lawyers, educators, CEOs and CFOs.  We didn’t want to listen to marginally competent choirs and shaky musicians.  We insisted that everything had to be perfect or we wanted nothing to do with it.  We also loved the anonymity.  The mega-church didn’t require much of us.  We could show up, enjoy the show, make a generous donation and go home to watch football.  We could pay someone else to take care of the kids and care for the hungry and hurting.  With Darwinian smugness we countenanced the destruction of many small neighborhood churches sneeringly insisting they obviously didn’t have what it took to keep up.  We insulted the competent pastors of such churches, humiliating those who evidently lacked the “leadership ability” to make it to a membership of 15,000.  Our best mega-church pastors have already figured out that things are off the rails, but the train will not soon be put back on the tracks.

2.     I am really sorry about the music.  My generation evidently believes that no decent music was written before about 1964 and after about 1975.  We are convinced that everything should sound like it was composed in ‘68 by the Rolling Stones even if it was written in 2012.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the Beatles and the Beach Boys.  I even love a good deal of what is called “contemporary” music (although some of it is about as contemporary as the television show Dragnet).  What I am distressed about is that we convinced ourselves and many others that what was sung and prayed by our parents and grandparents is only worthy of scorn.  We tossed out hundreds of years of Christian music, liturgy, and practice without noticing the baby flailing its chubby arms.  Some of the best of our younger generation of singers, liturgists, and pastors are discovering anew the riches of our Christian heritage, no thanks to us.  But many of us continue to cling to “praise choruses” composed in the 80s as if they were equivalent to Bach cantatas.  Others complain that the use of a prayer polished by generations of use is “too liturgical”, ignoring the blandness of our worship language and the poverty of our imaginations.

3. The boomers owe a big apology about what has happened with theology.  There is too much to say here so I will try to be succinct.  There seem to be two trends: one is a form of individualistic pietism that imagines I can choose my god or my theology like I choose pie over ice cream or the Packers over the Bears.  pietists select only the cream-filled and disdain the coconut-filled.  Not wanting to work all that hard, they select what appeals to them and ignore what is difficult or unpleasant to contemplate.  These people are found in every part of the Christian world.  They are our most ardent religious consumers, but they will only “buy” what they like.  They have trivialized the heritage of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth by seeking the lowest common denominator.  The second trend is the theologically rigorous.  They are the virulently traditional Roman Catholics, the snarky neo-Reformed Evangelicals, and the frantically hyper-conservative traditional Protestants.  They despise the idea of the religious cafeteria.  For them theology is a matter of eating your spinach whether you like it or not.  In their world all the questions worth answering were settled by Trent, or Calvin, or some synod or the other in the distant past.  They hurl anathemas with glee, sneer at anyone with the slightest disagreement or smallest question, and are, by my observation, generally unpleasant.  While they are an understandable reaction to the religious and moral indifference of their contemporaries, that doesn’t make them any more attractive.  I would argue that both forms of theologizing are the result of laziness.  Both refuse the challenge of rethinking and re-engaging the ancient faith in the modern world.  The first group imagines all the answers are the result of a merely personal decision.  The second imagines that all the answers were settled in the fourth or sixteenth or nineteenth century.  Both lack the humility, compassion, and hope to do the hard work of engaging the faith in this world.

4.  Perhaps the most inexcusable failure of the Baby Boomers and the church is our failure to promote justice for the oppressed and provide food for the hungry.  There are, thank God, many notable exceptions to this.  But for the most part it has been the generation that followed us that has raised this question most sharply.  We have no excuse for this since we grew up in the 60s with the Civil Rights movement.  Many of us marched for Voting Rights or protested the War in Vietnam.  But on the Mainline side we somehow imagined that electing Democrats was enough to promote justice and on the Evangelical side we agonized over whether evangelism and social justice belonged together.  We thought social justice was a “black issue” or a “liberal issue” or a “political issue” and so we left it to a handful of activists and politicians and made little effort to integrate such questions and concerns into the life of the church.  Even if we did it was an issue “out there”, not “in here.”  It was left to our kids to challenge us on this.  And so we salved our consciences by sending them on mission trips.

I could go on, but I am feeling bad enough already.  I know that many of my contemporaries will not agree with my list. Other readers will perhaps consider this column just one more example of Boomer arrogance.  If we can’t be the best, perhaps we can be the best at being the worst.  So be it.  But friends, we are leaving our children and grandchildren a huge mess to clean up.  Our self-indulgence will cost them dearly.  It seems the least we can do is say sorry.  But perhaps there is still time for us to begin helping them to clean it up.

John E. (Jay) Phelan

North Park Theological Seminary

Chicago, IL.

Failure of Empathy

Why would a college student secretly film his roommate having sex and post it on the internet? What was he thinking? He clearly was not concerned about the painful humiliation the roommate would experience—or he simply didn’t care. The outcome of his lack of empathy was a talented young man jumping to his death from a bridge. Why is it that people feel free to spew any kind of bile on the internet or Facebook? Do they imagine the disembodied other at the receiving end of their vituperation cannot be wounded—or do they simply not care? Why do people shrug their shoulders at environmental degradation, warnings of the effects of global warming or the growing misery of the declining middle class and the wretched poor? Are they genuinely unconcerned about the legacy they are leaving their children and grandchildren? Or are they motivated by their own comfort and pleasure above all? What is happening to us? Are we losing our capacity to identify with the other or to make any sacrifice for the common good? Are we growing so narcissistic, so inhumane, that we seek political and philosophical reasons to pander to our own petty indulgences?


I refuse to believe, for example, that anyone seriously believes the lunatic, ultra-individualistic, anti-democratic, self-indulgent “philosophy” of Ayn Rand. If her philosophy was actually followed there would be no human society. We would be reduced once again to what Rene Girard called “a war of all against all.” Only the most powerful, most vicious, least morally inhibited would prevail and that by brute force. Her vision approximates the world of Lord of the Flies. No. I can’t believe anyone takes her seriously. Her brash narcissism is touted up as a coherent vision of society and used by the greedy and powerful to justify what they were going to do anyway. It is an excuse for the powerful to keep the powerless in tow, for the already obscenely wealthy to become even more wealthy, and for adolescent fantasists to dream of life without moral limits.

What has happened to us? According to new studies by the University of Michigan this diminishment of empathy is not an illusion. Between 1979 and 2009 research on university students showed a significant decline in empathy. The studies of Sara Konrath, cited in the May-June issue of the Utne Reader, demonstrated that between those years “empathy plummeted.” The “greatest drop” was in “empathetic concern”—48%. “The second highest drop,” reports Konrath “was in “perspective taking, a measure of people’s innate tendency to imagine others’ point of view.” This fell 34%.

This speaks not only to the failure of society, but to the failure of the church. Are we helping members of Christian congregations to empathize with the struggles of others or are we rather enabling their narcissism by appealing to their already deeply ingrained consumerism and individualism? If we cannot address this in the church we will have difficulty addressing the growing viciousness of our indifference to and scorn for others in the wider society. The horrors of Ayn Rand’s vision may yet be realized.