The Raven Foundation

 

 

"Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, 'Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.' But Jesus said to him, 'Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?'”

-Luke 12:13-14

 

I have great sympathy for this “someone in the crowd.” I make Jesus into my judge and arbitrator all the time – especially when it comes to justice issues. And the funny thing about those justice issues is that Jesus always, I mean always, agrees with me.

 

Take same-sex marriage, for example. I’ve written about my theological defense of same-sex marriage – and I know Jesus agrees with me, because Jesus and I are tight.

 

So, you’d think I’d be ecstatic over President Obama’s support of same-sex unions, but, I’m not. It feels cheap. It’s not just the criticism that Obama’s position over the years looks more like political waffling than thoughtful evolution. It feels cheap because it’s about power.

 

I’m all about social justice, including marriage equality. If same sex couples want to get married, I say go ahead. It’s not going to threaten my marriage, or any heterosexual marriage. But here’s my problem: The more passionately I feel about social justice issues, the more I dismiss another point of view. And soon a strange thing happens in our culture. Once we dismiss another’s point of view, they dismiss our point of view. Soon, our culture is trapped in a contagious cycle of dismissing other viewpoints, which soon leads to dismissing other people entirely. When we fall into this cycle, it’s no longer about the political issue, it’s about political power. And we seek the highest authority to make such claims to political power, which for liberal and conservative Christians alike, is Jesus.

 

Because, you know, Jesus and I are tight like that.

 

Historically, we’ve been very good at using Jesus to fight our political battles. But then Jesus comes and says stuff like, “Who set me to be judge or arbitrator over you?” Well, apparently, we did. Just like that “Someone in the crowd”, we resort to Jesus when we fall into political power struggles.

 

“Jesus never said anything about homosexuality.”

“Jesus was against homosexuality because he referred to marriage as being between a man and a woman.”

 

I want us to stop the Jesus talk. All this Jesus talk from the left and the right is about political power. And that’s the ugly, nasty rub of all this. It looks as though we want different things. But in reality, the left and the right desire the same thing: political power over and against the other. And then we Christians drag Jesus into this mess we created. When we turn Jesus into a political power figure, we turn the Prince of Peace into a weapon of political warfare as we beat our opponent over the head with our Jesus Stick. And then they beat us over the head with their Jesus Stick.

 

And then someone hears Jesus off in the distance saying,

 

Who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?

 

Now, do I think the Spirit of Jesus is guiding our culture into affirming same sex marriage? Yes. I do. And I believe that same Spirit is concerned with politics – with the way we structure our lives together. But when I affirm a position so fervently that I dismiss another person because of a conflicting point of view, I’m no longer guided by the reconciling Spirit of Jesus, but by a spirit of exclusion.

 

 

 

 

Have you ever wondered how mimetic theory changes lives? ME TOO! So, I decided to put together a top ten list. Here you go:

 

1. You will resent monkeys for the phrase “Monkey see, monkey do” because you know that we humans are by far the superior imitators.
2. You will see the destructive nature of religions.
3. You will see the constructive nature of religions.
4. You will understand the paradox of 2 & 3.
5. You will see how scapegoating works and that the goat you scape may be your own. (I don’t know what that means, but I think you get the picture.)
6. You will impress others as you boldly use words like “mimetic,” “interdividual,” and “internal/external mediation.”
7. You know you have to be bold with #6 to give the impression that you know what you are talking about.
8. You will find out that there is a wrathful divinity and it is us.
9. You will realize how bad it is to be good.
10. You will discover that the best way to scandalize someone is to forgive them.

 

That's my list.  Would you add anything?

 

Good people across our nation are trying to find answers to the following questions: Was Trayvon Martin’s death a racially motivated murder or something else, an act of self-defense or a tragic accident? Is George Zimmerman a racist or something else, a decent man or emotionally ill? Is President Obama’s response measured and appropriate or something else, too timid a challenge to racism or too dismissive of concerns for safety and security? Is this incident unique or something else, a symptom of culture-wide racism, of too many guns in civilian hands or not enough?

 

Strident voices are shouting at each other from all sides, confident that they are in the right and that anyone who disagrees with them is willfully, undeniably wrong. As the conflict polarizes and we are forced to take sides, it becomes harder and harder to believe in the goodness of those taking opposing views. Here is the eerie thing about all this for me: it is sadly reminiscent of old, tired patterns of debating moral issues that go back to the Civil War. Let me explain.

 

When an issue is morally charged, good people take sides. That’s what’s happening here – the death of a young person from gun violence is a moral issue, and this death has become even more morally complicated by the charge of racism. Racist violence, unarguably a moral wrong, has a long history in this country: the violence of slavery, of white race riots and lynch mobs, and the institutionalized racism of the Jim Crow South. One of the tragedies of the Civil War, and there are many, is the way in which the North was able to hide from its own racism both before and after the war by shifting all the blame onto the South. Christian rhetoric from North and South provided cover. Pro-union sermons claimed God’s divine support for the union; pro-secession sermons claimed God’s divine support for secession. Each side believed they were fighting for God, liberty, patriotism and to claim their place as the true heirs to the Revolution. As Abraham Lincoln said, God cannot be for and against the same thing, so at a minimum one side is wrong. As if that were not enough of a minority position, Lincoln nearly became a minority of one when he dared to suggest that God’s purposes might be something neither side had yet imagined.

 

But wasn’t there a clear right side, an assuredly Godly side, when it came to slavery just as there must be a clear right side with Trayvon and George? Some must think so, especially the ones wearing the “I am Trayvon” t-shirts or speaking publicly in defense of George. But what seems clear at first often gets blurred on closer examination. Take slavery – talk about a clear moral issue! How could it be possible not to condemn the side that would fight to preserve it? The problem with framing the Civil War that way is that the Civil War was not about slavery. Look at that list of causes mentioned in the sermons – nothing about slavery there at all. It is a deafening silence that casts shame on our entire nation. The moral issue that divided the nation was the idea of the nation itself, a sacred cause that justified the killing and the dying. That we did kill and die in unprecedented numbers was taken as proof of our nation’s goodness. Bloodletting always creates hallowed ground. When the war ended and slavery was abolished – a clear moral good – we swept aside the shameful truth that slavery was made possible by a deep-seated racism in the North as well as the South. War erupted, raged and ended without Americans ever openly acknowledging and repenting of racism as a national moral failing. This misunderstanding at the heart of our national memory about the war continues to force the issue of racism underground.

 

And then it resurfaces in Florida and we take sides again thinking for sure we know what the moral issue is and for sure we are on the right side of it. But what if the real moral issue is something else? What if it has to do with the moral failure of thinking we are right? We all know that feeling of righteous rage, or moral indignation when we are sure we have the devil by the tail. Both sides of the Trayvon case are feeling it passionately right now. Maybe that night Trayvon and George were both feeling right, sure the other was wrong. I don’t know, and I don’t want to shift blame from a truly guilty person, especially in a murder case. I think that it is vitally important that the investigation proceed to determine why Trayvon was killed. But I raised the example of the Civil War because the bloodshed was largely due to everyone thinking they were right. Racism continues to rear its ugly head because we have persisted in refusing to share responsibility for what was and continues to be wrong with our nation. Shared responsibility means sharing being wrong, not forcing all the wrong on someone else. The insistence on being right and on accusing others of being wrong allows us to justify our own hatred and violence, the very thing we denounce in others.

 

As we deal with the tragedy of Trayvon’s death, perhaps we might step back from our accusations and self-righteousness to ask some difficult questions: Can I find the grace to listen to, maybe even to learn from, the ones I think are wrong? Can I give up my need to be right and be honest with myself about where I am wrong? Am I strong enough to gaze upon everyone who is suffering, even the ones whose suffering I have ignored or even celebrated? Do I care more about being right than I do about ending racism and making our communities safe for all our members? Can I seek the good in a spirit of forgiveness?

 

I’d like to leave you with the thought that the real obstacle to ending racism may be our need to take sides. It is 150 years overdue, but maybe we can find the grace to stop needing so desperately to be right so that we can embrace both Trayvon and George, an embrace that is generous and large enough to include the good and the wicked, the innocent and the guilty, the right and the wrong. Perhaps peace will have a chance if we can say together, “I am Trayvon and I am George.”

 

Peace Building Opportunity: If you’d like to learn how to give peace a chance in our schools, speak directly with Ted Wachtel on Friday, March 30 on our web radio show, Playing for Keeps. Ted is the president of the world's first graduate school devoted entirely to the teaching, research and dissemination of restorative practices.

Are you wondering what to make of all the God talk in today’s politics? It seems we can’t decide if we want God nosing around our political decisions and anointing candidates for us. Remember the dove that descended on Jesus at his baptism and the voice from heaven booming for all to hear, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well-pleased”? It’s as if some of today’s politicians think they have a dove floating over their heads and they can’t understand why they are the only ones who hear the divine endorsement: I’m God and I approved this message. Republican candidates in particular like to dally in this double-edged delusion: that (1) God takes sides in American politics and (2) is keeping his divine fingers crossed for your victory.

 

Of course, God will only root for you if your position is the right one. You have to be on the right side of every issue from economics to immigration. Stray across into the grey middle ground and God will join the crowd in calling you weak or wishy washy. Stray all the way to the wrong side and you might as well admit you are siding with Satan. And don’t be fooled by Democratic candidates who don’t use God-talk because they are just as guilty of certainty in the sanctity of their positions. They just claim to be “right” instead of divinely chosen. I’m not sure whose voice they hope we hear, but the point is the same. Being on the right side of an issue, whether you think in religious or secular terms, naturally results in absolute, unwavering, uncompromising faith in your position and total condemnation of your opponent’s. When it comes to casting our votes, they want us to believe in their differences from one another, but the thing that is becoming more and more apparent to voters is how alike the candidates are, not only in their pre-election barnstorming, but in how they behave in office. Choosing one over another seems to be a futile exercise, like choosing which pair of blue socks I’ll wear today. Just reach in and grab one/ vote for one, because the differences don’t matter.

 

And that, folks, is where we are today. Oddly it is where we have been before and the result was an American tragedy. The American Civil War was fought by two sides (there were a slew of diverse positions which telescoped into two opposing armies when the war broke out) that each believed that God was on their side. It was all God talk back then, because religion was assumed to be part of political life. Everyone was more or less a Christian in name if not in practice, and the Bible was the go-to reference book for how to vote or who to support in an election. Folks on both sides of the slavery issue whole-heartedly believed that they had Biblical and therefore Godly support for their position. Did you get that? Both sides of the slavery issue believed that God was on their side and the proof was in the Bible. I won’t go into that here, but if you can attend our conference at Wheaton College on March 16-17 you will hear directly from Civil War historians about how even the pro-slavery South could feel divinely inspired.

 

The salient point for us today is that the abolitionists and pro-slavery folks were locked in a heated argument about their differences, differences so extreme that God was supporting one side and condemning the other. Which side you thought God supported depending on which side you were on, of course. But each side resembled the other in a critically important way: their confidence that they knew the mind of God. Today’s debates around moral issues have a bit more diversity because all sides aren’t making the God argument. But if you substitute “certainty that I’m right and you’re wrong” for “knowing the mind of God” then our debates on same-sex marriage and reproduction, immigration and terrorism, fall into the same pattern as the slavery debate. According to Mark Noll, the insistence of both sides on absolute certainty that you are reading the Bible and the mind of God correctly created a hostile environment leading up to the Civil War that “transformed the conclusions reached by opponents into willful perversions of sacred truth and natural reason.” (The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, page 20) In other words, both slavery and anti-slavery positions were called “perversions of truth” by their opponents so confidently that the truth itself, that both sides were guilty of blind racism, was hidden from view for the next 100 years.

 

But what’s the risk today for a politics of certainty? Politics has become a form of entertainment. No one thinks that all this certainty and God-talk will lead to violence, do we? I mean, we’ve come a long way since the 19^th century; we’d never let things go that far. But there is a place where God talk is part of an outbreak of violence: the fight against Islamic terrorism. Americans insist that we are completely different than terrorists whose conviction that God is on their side leads them to die for their cause and to murder civilians without ever doubting God’s favor. To prove how different we are, when we fight back we are careful to avoid God talk of any kind. But is that a difference that matters? Just like our adversaries, when we kill civilians, we don’t doubt our own goodness. When our soldiers die for our cause, our certainty does not waver. In a very real way, we are exporting our violence right now, allowing our combating certainties to play out in foreign wars. Our Civil War, four years of escalating violence in which over 850,000 Americans died, may be a warning to us that if our current wars end and we don’t start another one, all this certainty may find a violent outlet at home. We may be marching to the tune of our own infallibility toward a Sophie’s Choice of war abroad or the risk of war at home. I wonder which side God is on.

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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.

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This video is for parents looking for a positive way to connect Santa Claus to the Christmas story. If your child is young enough to believe in Santa Claus this video will help you handle Santa's naughty or nice list and your child's Christmas present wish list. Santa can be a wonderful example of what the love and joy of Christmas is all about.

 

 

 

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council in Washington, begins his recent article for CNN entitled My Take: Jesus was a free marketer, not an Occupier by stating that “One of the last instructions Jesus gave his disciples was ‘Occupy till I come.’”

 

The quote is from the Parable of the Ten Minas, found in Luke 19:22.  There are economic overtones in the parable – a mina was about a month’s wage in first century Palestine.  Perkins uses the parable to discuss modern economics.  Anachronistically, he claims that Jesus endorsed the free market.  The free market, of course, is a modern concept, so Jesus could not have been a “free marketer.”  Perkins then uses the parable to denounce the Occupy Wall Street movement, a movement that he claims, “take(s) over and trash(es) public property” and “engage(s) in antisocial behavior while denouncing a political and economic system that grants one the right and luxury to choose to be unproductive.”

 

Perkins explores the parable and the Occupy Wall Street movement from a spiritual perspective.  While I appreciate that perspective, his spiritual interpretation of the parable is false.  By their very nature, parables are mysterious.  Parables are like riddles that contrasts two worldviews.  One worldview could be described as the kingdom of violence; the other is the Kingdom of God.  Jesus confronts us with these worldviews and asks us to pick which worldview we will live by.

 

Jesus told the Parable of the Ten Minas near the end of his life.  He knew that the political and religious elite would soon kill him, and, in telling this parable, he tried to prepare his disciples for his death.  Jesus prepared his disciple for his death in parable and in straightforward teachings.  For example, in the previous chapter of Luke (18:31-33), he told his disciples that “the Son of Man” (a term he frequently used to describe himself) would be “handed over” and that his persecutors would “mock him, insult him, spit on him, flog him and kill him.”  Luke tells us that “The disciples did not understand any of this.  Its meaning was hidden from them, and they did not know what he was talking about.”

 

Two thousand years later, we need to ask ourselves, “Do we know what Jesus was talking about?”

 

Jesus starts the parable by saying, “A man of noble birth went to a distant country to have himself appointed king and then returns.” Perkins assumes that the king is Jesus, but is he correct?  While Jesus does refer to himself as “the Son of Man,” he never explicitly refers to himself as a king.  But we do claim that Jesus is king – a different kind of king.  Jesus transforms our understanding of “king.”  He is the true King who doesn’t lead his army in violence and warfare.  Jesus had nothing to do with the kingdom of violence.  Rather, according to Luke 6:27, Jesus is the true King who leads his disciples in the Spirit of love, a love that embraces even our enemies.

 

That changes everything, including our interpretation of parables.  Instead of Jesus referring to himself as a man of noble birth going to a distant country to have himself appointed king, could Jesus be talking about the actual king of Judea – Herod?  In fact, this is exactly how the Herodian Dynasty received power – from a distant country called the Roman Empire.  As Jesus continues the parable, the king behaves exactly as you’d expect.  He is good to the two servants who live up to his expectations by earning even more money for the already rich king, and he punishes the third servant who fails to earn the king more money.  In fact, Jesus ends his parable with this alarming, and prophetic, statement, “But those enemies of mine, who did not want me to be king over them – bring them here and kill them in front of me.”

 

Perkins is wrong to assume that Jesus is the king in the parable.  Jesus is not the king; rather, he is the third servant.  When Jesus teaches to “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those mistreat you,” he flips our violent worldview upside down.  It is not the kingdom of God that rewards those who are good and punishes those who are bad.  That reciprocity describes the kingdoms of violence, the kingdoms of this world.  Jesus was not enslaved to that violent reciprocity; rather, he freely loved all people.  Jesus did not kill his enemies who did not want him to be king over them.  It was Herod, Rome, and the religious elite who killed Jesus.  They killed him because after Jesus occupied the Temple (Luke 19:45-46) they thought his movement was antisocial as he denounced their political, economic, and religious systems.  Jesus responded to their violence with nonviolence and love: On the cross he prayed that his persecutors would be forgiven (Luke 23:34) and in the resurrection he offered peace to those who betrayed him (Luke 24:36).

 

What does this mean for the spirituality of the Occupy Wall Street movement?  The kingdom of violence infects every aspect of our world.  Jesus challenged that kingdom with the Kingdom of God’s Love – a love that embraces the cosmos, as the Gospel of John says.  There are certainly aspects of our economic and political systems that are spiritually destructive and exploitative.  The movement is right to critique those aspects.  The spiritual problem with the movement is that it has divided 99% of us “good people” against 1% of those “bad people,” who have not lived up to our economic and political expectations.  That division is the result of the spirit of violence that Jesus came to deliver us from.  If the OWS movement wants to be effective, it must seek to include its perceived enemies.  Because if we really want to make political and economic change, we need to be in this together.  All 100% of us.

 

A.C. Grayling (from left), Matthew Chapman, Rabbi David Wolpe and Dinesh D'Souza faced off on the notion "The World Would Be Better Off Without Religion."

 

A rabbi, a descendant of Charles Darwin, a philosopher and a scholar recently teamed up at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts to debate this motion: “The world would be better off without religion.” The live studio audience was polled before and after the debate and a winner was declared. Before I tell you the numbers, what do you think? Would the world be better off without religion?

 

Even more relevant – what do you think of the question? I had a hard time taking it seriously, especially after I started listening to the debate. I had hoped that before they jumped into arguing for or against the motion they would define what they meant by “religion”. They did not. For the sake of clarity, I hoped they also might have defined what “better off” meant since it requires a comparison to an imaginary world in which religion doesn’t or never did exist. They did not do that either.  Those arguing for the motion said the things you would expect – we’d be better off without religion because it is the cause of war, provides justification for violence, and is indicative of faulty reasoning. People who believe in God are irrational, hypocritical and violent. Those arguing against the motion said that more wars and genocides had been committed in the name of atheism than God, that religion is an organized system that encourages people to be better and to work for a better world.  They made the counteraccusation that those who said we’d be better off without religion were the ones guilty of faulty reasoning. Nothing either side said changed my opinion that the motion itself was flawed.

 

What the two opposing teams had in common was more telling than their so-called differences. For example, they both clearly got that there was a strong connection between religion and violence. One side thought religion made the world more violent and the other side thought less, but “less violent” was clearly what they meant by “better off”. What both sides failed to see, however, was that it isn’t the presence of religion in the world that’s the problem or the solution, but rather how successful religion is at any time or in any place at doing its job. In other words, the problem is not religion but violence itself. The job of religion is to respond to the problem of violence. Anyone familiar with anthropology knows that wherever human culture is found so is religion. The one does not exist without the other. A key idea of mimetic theory, which is the study of the connection between religion and violence, is that religion solved the problem of human violence, thus making human culture possible. Religion can be thought of as the mechanism that made the proto-human world less violent, putting the side arguing against the motion on the right side of the issue.

 

But to say that religion makes the world less violent misses a crucial point: If it was religion that controlled violence in the proto-human world, how did it do it? Ancient or archaic religion was a religion of sacrifice and it used violence to control violence. It involved rituals, prohibitions, myth and sacrifice: violence was controlled through sacrificial means, temple rituals in which humans and animals were killed often after ritual reenactments of wars or wild times in which all prohibitions were relaxed, kind of like Mardi Gras. The community discharged all its angers, resentments, little built up hurts and grudges in a ritual frenzy ending in the shedding of blood. Mel Gibson’s movie Apocalypto captured the pre-sacrificial frenzy and the calming effect of the sacrifice really well. A little bit of violence in a controlled (ritual) setting kept the violence outside of the community and life could flourish.

 

We no longer have ritual sacrifice per se, but archaic religion survives in a more subtle form. Anywhere violence is justified as a way to bring peace by invoking God’s name – or in the name of any supreme good like ethnic, racial, tribal or national identity – you have archaic or sacrificial religion. Today’s revealed religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism are the biggies) are still engaged with the problem of violence just as they were when they were revealed. The presence of violent passages in the sacred texts of these religions does not mean that they are advocating violence, but that solving the problem of violence is their main function.  To think that those texts are the cause of violence would be like concluding that hospitals cause people to become sick and die. Violence is in the texts for the same reason sick people are in hospitals: everyone is looking for a cure. Revealed religions, though, offer a different cure than archaic religions. Rather than using violence to control violence, they aim at building peaceful communities through practices of love, mercy and forgiveness. This is the non-sacrificial solution but not all their adherents get the message. Religious and non-religious people too easily revert to ancient sacrificial practices: we find all kinds of excuses for using violence, including invoking God’s name, despite the efforts of revealed religions. When Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus or any religious group claims God to be on their side, they are caught up in an old and dying paradigm. The long trajectory of human history is a religious journey away from the use of sacrificial violence toward a new way of achieving peace by peaceful means.

 

Here are the results of the audience survey: Before the debate 52 percent of the live audience thought the world would be better off without religion and 26 percent disagreed, with 22 percent undecided. Afterward, those in favor of a world without religion jumped to 59 percent and those against the idea rose to 31 percent — making the side arguing for a world without religion the winners of the debate. Ten percent of the audience remained undecided, maybe because they sensed the debate had been about the wrong question. The better motion would have been: The world would be better off without the justification of violence by anyone for any reason. Revealed religions are in favor of that motion. Which side are you on?

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I reflect on the 9/11 anniversary events I attended in the Chicago area: the Ground Zero 360 exhibit at the Field Museum and a conversation with community leaders at the WBEZ studio sponsored by the Project on Civic Reflection. When asked how we could recapture the unity of those early days after 9/11, one women I met at the Field said, "Turn to God". That got me thinking.