The Raven Foundation

This is a spiritual war.

-Rick Santorum

It’s Lent. For Christians, Lent is a time for spiritual warfare. Yup. I’m in a war. How do you wage spiritual warfare?

Christians have two models for spiritual warfare: Jesus and Satan.

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum warned us about one of those models in 2008 at a speech he made at Ave Maria University. The speech resurfaced this week on the Internet. Here are some highlights from the speech:

Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country - the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost 200 years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

When CNN asked Santorum about his 2008 comments, he defended himself stating, “I’m a person of faith. I believe in good and evil.” Spiritual warfare does involve good and evil. Santorum is right about that. But identifying good and evil is tricky business. It is easy to find evil “out there.” The difficulty is to find the evil that lies inside our own hearts. Satan, whose name refers to both Tempter and Accuser, tempts us to make accusations against others. Those accusations conveniently blind us to our own evils. In fact, we will begin to interpret our evil as good. Santorum, for example, claims that “America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.”  According to Santorum, our Founding Fathers only sowed the seeds of Spiritual Goodness. I’ll happily admit that there is plenty of good in the US Constitution and in American history, but, please. Our Founding Fathers sowed some satanic seeds, too. They refused to outlaw slavery in the US Constitution, which watered the seeds of America’s long and horrific history of racism. Under the banner of Manifest Destiny – a myth of our goodness with God on our side – we committed atrocities against native Americans, atrocities the likes of which we condemn in our enemies. We have waged wars and proxy wars, killing and destroying without ever doubting our own goodness.

I want Santorum, and all Americans, to be honest about our history. Otherwise, we are following in the footsteps of the Father of Lies. America has a beautiful and sordid history, full of good and evil. Good and evil don’t just exist somewhere out there. The truth about good and evil is that the line dividing them runs down each and every nation, and each and every person.

The spiritual warfare of Lent goes back to Jesus himself. Faithful Christians should be careful that their model for spiritual warfare is Jesus, and not Satan. Jesus himself had to choose between God and Satan – I’m sure you are familiar with the story, so I won’t go into detail. Pertinent for Santorum, as a person of faith, Jesus was tempted by Satan with the political power to rule the world … if only Jesus would worship Satan. If Jesus would have ruled the world through Satan, he would have done so through satanic principles. He would have accused his opponents of great evil and then he would have used those accusations to justify violence against them. In fact, many of his followers expected him to be that kind of king. But every time he was tempted by violence he refused.

Why did Jesus refuse? Because he rules the world through love and nonviolence. This is no wimpy love. This is true love. Jesus reveals the way to true humanity, which has nothing to do with violence, but everything to do with justice, mercy, and compassion. Satan leads us over and against one another in cycles of accusations. The spiritual warfare of Lent leads us to stop the accusations and challenges us to live into God’s reconciliation.

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To purchase On Beyond Zebra, click here.

Adam discusses Dr. Seuss's book, "On Beyond Zebra" and the Gospel. Dr. Seuss challenges us to look beyond our confidence in the "ABCs" of our world in order to see beyond Z and into the bigger picture. When we don't see beyond Z, we fall into power struggles with others.  For example, we often think that our religious, political, or economic perspective is the truth, which puts us in rivalry with others who are also grasping for "truth." Dr. Seuss claims that if we take a step back, we can see the bigger picture.  In Mark 9:2-13 Jesus invites his disciples to see the bigger picture when he take them up a mountain. They see Jesus trasfigured (or transformed) into white. Then the law giver Moses and the prophet Elijah join him. On the way down the mountain, Jesus gave his disciples the big picture by telling them that God was working through Elijah to bring about the restoration of all things (see verse 12). Early Christians said God that God restored all things through Jesus. So Paul says in 2nd Corinthians 19 that God was reconciling the world to himself through Jesus, not counting their sins against them. Dr. Seuss and the Gospel both invite us to take a step back and see the bigger picture of reconciliation and to participate in the reconciliation of all things.

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^{(Washington Representative Drew Hansen. Video discussed below.)}

Can faithful Christians support same-sex marriage?

The question is coming up quite a bit these days, as states throughout the U.S. are dealing with legislation concerning the hot button issue.

I’ll go a step further in answering the question – Not only can faithful Christians support same-sex marriage, faithful Christians should support same sex marriage.

First, the can.  The Bible is often a stumbling block when it comes to this issue.  Many feel that they can’t support same sex marriage because the Bible is against homosexuality.  But what if we’ve misunderstood the Bible?  That’s the case that James Alison makes in his lectures The Shape of God’s Affection.  Alison points out that heterosexuality and homosexuality are modern concepts.  The terms were coined around the 1860s and it’s only been during the last 60 years that we’ve come to a scientific understanding of sexual orientation in general, and homosexual orientation in particular.  Pre-modern people assumed all people were naturally attracted to members of the opposite gender.  We know now that about 4% of human beings are naturally attracted to members of the same gender.  Why does that matter?  There are 7 passages (yes, only 7!) in the Bible that we moderns use to discuss homosexuality.  The problem is that the people who wrote the Bible weren’t talking about our modern concept of homosexual orientation, because they didn’t know it.  To impose our modern concept of sexuality on the Bible is to misunderstand the very important critique the Bible makes in those 7 passages.  Indeed, those passages denounce sexual sins, but they are the sins of gang rape and cultic prostitution.  The ancient Hebrews and the authors of the New Testament were concerned about sexual abuse and believed the sexual humiliation of another was a very bad thing, but they were not commenting on homosexuality as we understand it today.

Let’s take the verse most often referred to in the New Testament: Romans 1:26.  Previously, Paul stated that many have “exchanged the truth about God for a lie.”   It is “For this reason,” Paul continues, that

God gave them up to degrading passions.  Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another.  Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

The New Testament scholar Neil Elliot wrote an essay called The Apostle Paul on Sexuality. The essay supports Alison’s argument that the biblical authors weren’t talking about homosexuality, but about sexual abuse.  Elliot claims that Romans 1 was principally about the Roman Emperor Nero, who led a very infamous and active sex life. Elliot quotes ancient historians and claims:

Nero's sexual passion for his own mother was “notorious,” … but then Nero “practiced every kind of obscenity,” defiling “almost every part of his body with men and women, usually under threat of force” … His cruelty and sexual predations paled, in the eyes of the Roman aristocracy, next to his profligacy with money: when he had devoured his personal fortune he turned to “robbing temples.”

In the Romans 1 passage, then, Paul is not against our modern understanding of homosexuality, but rather against sexual abuse and excessive sexual indulgence.

Now for the should.  The speech made by Washington State Representative Drew Hansen (above) provides an important theological account of what God is doing on this issue.  Representative Hansen is a Christian committed to the way of Christ who voted for Washington State’s same sex marriage bill. Hansen said, “What if God is doing a new thing in the church right now on this question?  I mean, remember, as Christians we believe that it is the stone the builder rejects that becomes the capstone.”

This is very profound and significant.  Hansen illuminating the “truth about God” that Paul referred to in Romans.  Jesus, the Son of God and the Son of Man, the One who reveals who God truly is and what it means to by truly Human, is the Stone that the builders rejected.  As the Son of God and the Son of Man, he is the capstone to our theology and to our anthropology.  By being rejected, Jesus radically identifies with those who are rejected by other human beings.  Theologian Walter Wink reflects on this principle in his essay Homosexuality and the Bible:

God sides with the powerless.  God liberates the oppressed.  God suffers with the suffering … In light of that supernal compassion, whatever our position on gays, the gospels imperative to love, care for, and be identified with their sufferings is unmistakably clear.

It is unmistakably clear because the particularly Jewish Jesus suffered in order to show us that God in Christ identifies with all who suffer.  In this way, African American theologians can say Jesus is Black.  In this way, GLBT theologians can say Jesus is Gay.  But here’s the next point: Jesus freely allowed himself to suffer and be rejected by his fellow human beings so that our pattern of rejecting others can be transformed into a pattern that loves and embraces others.  Refusing to allow GLBT people to participate in the joys and challenges of marriage is a way of rejecting them.  When it comes to same sex marriage, the authentic Christian response is not one of rejection, but one of love and affirmation.

And that’s why faithful Christians can and should support same-sex marriage.

That’s mimetic.

The “Tebowing” and now “Cruzing” and “Bradying” phenomena are evidence of humanity’s mimetic nature.  As René Girard has put forth in developing the “mimetic theory,” humans are the best imitators on the planet.  We are so good at imitating, most of the time we don’t even know we are doing it.  This non-conscious imitation is how we learn from others.  Girard calls the “others” we imitate our models – we admire our models and want to be like them.  We want their success, fame, prestige, or fortune.  For example, as the above video shows, our culture has begun to dance the salsa in imitation of Victor Cruz’s celebrations after scoring a touchdown.  As the announcer in the video says, “The salsa is spreading like an internet virus.”  Babies, teenagers, and adults (even a dog!) are imitating Cruz’s victory dance.  Not only are we imitating Cruz, but we are imitating others who are imitating Cruz – hence the baby and the dog.

Even Madonna isn’t immune from imitating Cruz.

According to Girard, this imitation is a positive thing because it’s how we learn, but he also claims there is a dark side to this imitation.  It can turn very negative.  As we imitate one another in the desire for success, fame prestige, or fortune, we can easily fall into rivalry with one another because we desire the same things.  Two football teams, let’s take the Giants and the Patriots for example, want the same thing – to win the Super Bowl.  After winning, the Giants can celebrate by dancing the salsa, but how do the Patriots feel?  Envious.  Why?  Because they want what the Giants have – success.  And here’s the scandal: If you are a Patriots fan, you have a secret admiration for Giants fans.  You admire them because they have what you want.  Sure you feel a sense of hatred, but behind every hatred is a sense of admiration.

When the other team has what we want, we get frustrated.  And frustration always finds an outlet.  If we don’t deal with frustration in a positive way, the need for an outlet will either cause internal strife within our community as we blame one another for a loss, or we will find an external outlet.  As the video shows, a group of frustrated Patriots’ fans were congregating in Boston after the game.  A Giants fan did a little salsa dance, and the group turned into a mob.  Its frustrations coalesced on the man and “as he continued to taunt the crowd, he got sucker punched.”

Yes.  It was a stupid thing to do.  But he was imitating his model, Victor Cruz.  Every celebration after a touchdown will be interpreted by the other team as a taunt.  As a bit of mockery.  In essence we’re saying, “I have what you want.”

And then the ultimate taunt – “Nananananana!”

We imitate winners, but we can also imitate “losers.”  Imitating losers can be a positive thing, if we imitate them in order to share in their pain.  But it can also be a negative thing, as I think is the case with the “Bradying” phenomenon.  Imitating losers is often a way of mocking them – but we only mock those we secretly admire.  We admire our models and our rivals.  In fact, our rival is also our model, for we want what our rival has.  Football fans admire Tom Brady because he has the success we all want.  Playing in five Super Bowls and winning three of them is an amazing career.  We envy Brady because we want the success he’s had.  And so when he fails we mock him.  We imitate one another in mocking him in order to keep him down.  For when our rival is down, we are up.

We admire both our models and our rivals.  We want what they have, which can lead to rivalry, and even to violence.  Now, you may be searching for an answer to all of this negative imitation that’s going on.  Fortunately, there is an answer – but, I’ll tell you up front, few people like it.  It’s not glamorous.  And it’s hard work.  If you want to transform this negative imitation into a positive imitation, the answer is in identifying with cultural “losers” in a way that feels their pain.  Few people want to do that.  We’d rather do a salsa dance – and keep others from dancing with us.

Giants and Patriots fans, after all, don’t dance together.

“World Peace” at a football game.  Did you find that ironic?  I mean, we just watched 30 minutes of hard hitting Super Bowl action.  It’s not peaceful.  It’s violent.  And we loved it!  Seriously.  Why did Madonna (or whomever it was) have to go and spoil my football fun by making me think about world peace.

It’s pretty easy to argue that football is not a peaceful sport.  Of course, few sports can be deemed “peaceful.”  If you ask someone what the definition of peace is, they are likely to respond, “The absence of conflict.”  If that definition is anywhere near the mark, then football is very un-peaceful.  It thrives on conflict, rivalry, and high impact collisions.  You may argue that football isn’t violent because players willingly sacrifice their bodies.  That, of course, is true, but NFL players sustain traumatic injuries that cause the average life expectancy of a player to be – depending on position – 53 to 59.

Indeed, football players are willing to subject themselves to a violent game.  And that’s part of the problem.  Football players and football fans are unanimous in this sacrifice.  As the anthropologist René Girard has taught us, this is how it must be, for the most effective sacrifice is a unanimous sacrifice, where even victims willingly participate in their own demise.

So thanks for destroying the sacrificial unanimity, Madonna.  Your message of “World Peace” ruined my Super Bowl experience.

On a related issue, have you heard about the Gisele Bundchen scandal?  Bundchen is a supermodel who began dating Tom Brady, the quarterback for the New England Patriots, in December of 2006.  Before their relationship, Brady and the Patriots were 3-0 at the Super Bowl; they were poised to become the dominant football dynasty for years to come.  But then, as The Business Insider.com states, “Gisele happened.  And now look at them: zilch in five years.”  Bill Simmons, a Boston sports reporter, claims that in Boston “There's an ‘Us Against Them’ mentality that's just part of the DNA. You grow up there, you live a full life there, you die there. That's how it's supposed to play out. There's been a local undercurrent for the past few years that Brady thinks he's too good for Boston (because he moved to New York, then California), that he cares too much about being a celebrity, that Gisele made him soft, that he's not really ‘one of us.’”

It’s been called “The Gisele Bundchen Curse” in Boston, but the animosity directed against her isn’t isolated to Boston.  As I watched the Today Show this morning, they had a segment on Bundchen from the Patriot’s Super Bowl loss in 2008. They showed a clip of Bundchen at that game, sitting in a private booth, “sipping red wine and looking uninterested.”  I wondered, why would the Today Show emphasize “red wine”?  Well, as one website claims, the red wine was a “Nice way for Gisele to mock American football fans who actually drink beer (not red wine) for the game.”

The accusation that she looked uninterested in the 2008 game is especially interesting, considering her reaction after Sunday’s Super Bowl.  When a Giants fan taunted her, saying, “Eli [Manning, the Giants quarterback] rules your husband!”  a video camera caught her responding, “My husband cannot  f****** throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time.”  Since the video’s release, Bundchen has been accused of betraying her husband’s teammates and throwing them under the bus.  Maybe she was too interested in this Super Bowl.

What does all of this have to do with “World Peace”?  The problem is with our definition of peace.  When we define peace in negative terms, as the absence of conflict, we will have problems.  Conflict is inevitable – as long as there are humans we will have conflict.  If we want conflict to be absent from our lives, then we have to expel those that we blame for starting conflicts.   So, I want to banish Madonna because she brought up “World Peace” during a football game and Patriots fans want to expel Bundchen because she single handedly brought the downfall of their beloved franchise.

Peace, at least a feeling of peace, often comes at the expense of others.  And when peace comes at the expense of others, we will have never have peace.

We will be closer to peace, both in our world and in our personal lives, when we think of peace as a way of life.  Peace is hard work.  It’s a way of life that seeks justice, healing, love, and reconciliation in a world where our relationships are inevitably infected with conflicts.

So, we need to ask ourselves a question – Do we really want “World Peace”?  If we do want peace, the advice of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton is worth heeding:

Instead of loving what you think is peace, love other [humans] and love God above all.  And instead of hating the people you think are war mongers, hate the appetites and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war.  If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another. (Passion for Peace, 38.  Italics in original.)

Julia M. Robinson, PhD, an Associate Professor of African American Religions in the Religious Studies Department of University of North Carolina at Charlotte, was the first guest. A teacher of courses in African American History, African American Religion and the Religions of the African Diaspora, Professor Robinson investigates the intersection of race, religion and gender within African and African American culture. Adam and Bob asked Dr. Robinson-Harmon about her research into lynching and the legacy of racism following the Civil War. Listen in on this compelling conversation.

The United States of America is under attack.  America has an enemy that will stop at nothing until it defeats our way of life.  If you are afraid of any possible threat to our way of life posed by Islamism, or China, or the European economic crisis, or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, well, those are all child’s play when compared to this threat.

You may be wondering, “Just who is attacking the United States?”  According to the conservative website Caucus for America, which is “dedicated to the preservation and promotion of the historic American civilization,” liberals are to blame.  Liberals are attacking the religious core at the heart of America’s way of life.  The secular Left, which, according to the website, has contaminated protestant Christianity, “knows that the only way to destroy the America we’ve known is by destroying the Christianity, the Judeo-Christian ethic, which has made it great.”  The Left is attacking America’s soul from the inside.  If this was an enemy from the outside our borders, “We would have raised our swords” against this threat.

That’s pretty serious.  But, there’s more.  According to the progressive website Common Dreams, it’s not the Left who is attacking America; it’s the Right.  And you should be very afraid of the policies those demons would legislate if they were to gain power.  “It’s very possible that Mr. XY Zombie Republican could seize power in November, with the backing of endlessly deep pockets like the Koch brothers, Big Energy, and Big Finance, and the blessing of the Supreme Court.”

As I read these equally hysterical but completely opposite viewpoints, I realized they had something in common that is more profound than their panic and fear.  Whether on the Right or the Left, the American way of life many of us are so eager to defend involves demonizing and shaming others so that you aren’t the one demonized and shamed.  Attack!  Attack so that the attention is on your opponent’s deficiencies and not on yours.  Seriously?  “Zombie Republican”?!?  Are you kidding me?  It’s sophomoric and certainly not progressive.  And the suggestion that we should raise our swords against the Left to protect our American way of life is an American way of life that I reject.

And so I’m attacking this American way of life.  Yes.  I’m attacking it because it’s pathetic.  It’s banal and I think it’s time for us to grow up.  The Left and the Right justify the demonization of one another in the name of protecting America.  And they both look pathetically similar.  The Left and the Right are caught up in a mimetic rivalry, where both sides assert differences where no difference exists.  They are exactly the same.  They both claim the mantle of righteousness while they demonize the other.  It is, apparently, what America is all about.

Indeed, it’s pathetic and weak.  It makes us into cowards because the American way of life that demonizes the other conveniently blinds us to our own faults.  It takes courage to look deep within ourselves and critique our own failings.  Under our current way of life, we will never have that kind of courage because we are possessed.  Make no mistake - when the bible talks about demon possession, it’s not talking about an archaic misunderstanding that our ancestors had about humanity.  No.  They had a much more powerful anthropology than we moderns do.  When we accuse others of being a demon (or a Zombie), when we blame the other for all of our cultural problems, we become instantly blind to our own demons.  You can be damn sure that you are possessed by a demon if are inciting fear of Liberals and accusing Republicans of being “Zombies.”

I’m attacking this American way of life because I demand better.  The American way of life that mimics accusations against one another needs to stop because it will destroy us.  I have little hope that politicians, the media, and bloggers have the power to change this pattern.  I do have hope, though.  I have hope that people like you and I can change.  We don’t have accuse one another.  We are not enslaved to a way of life that demonizes and shames our family members, our neighbors, our co-workers, or even those we call our enemies.  We must say no to that way of life, because only when we say no to that way of life can we be empowered to say yes to a way of life that respect opposing views and values dialogue over demonization.

When the American way of life emphasizes that spirit, I will stop my attack.

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Adam discusses a scene from Spiderman, where Uncle Ben says a proverb: "With great power comes great responsibility." This proverb guides Peter Parker as he fights crime in his role as Spiderman. The Bible has a book called Proverbs, in which parents are instructed to provide wisdom to their children. There are two paths, one of justice, compassion, and love, and another path of wickedness and violence. Which path will we go down? Paul picks this idea up when he talks about Jesus. According to Paul, God was reconciling the world to Godself through Jesus. We have the power to participate, or not participate, in God's work of reconciliation.

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Did Jesus come to abolish religion? Should we hate religion? In a video posted to youtube last week titled "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus" Jefferson Bethke argues Jesus did come to abolish religion and that we are justified to hate religion. But is that true? A close look at the life of Jesus says something very different.

To view Bethke's video, click here.