Elliot Ritzema

Category: Culture

  • An Evangelical Manifesto

    Last week, a document called the “Evangelical Manifesto” was released (you can read it here). It is, as the Web site states, an “open declaration of who Evangelicals are and what they stand for.” The Steering Committee for the manifesto includes Timothy George, Os Guinness, Richard Mouw and David Neff. Signatories include Leith Anderson (president of the National Association of Evangelicals), Stuart Briscoe, Leighton Ford, Justo Gonzalez, Max Lucado, Mark Noll, Alvin Plantinga, Ron Sider, Kevin Vanhoozer, Miroslav Volf, and lots of other Evangelicals you may or may not have heard of.

    There are three headings to the document: We Must Reaffirm Our Identity, We Must Reform Our Own Behavior, and We Must Rethink Our Place in Public Life. Each section contains some things that are, to my mind, both controversial and uncontroversial. An example of the uncontroversial, from the first section, is: “Evangelicals are Christians who define themselves, their faith, and their lives according to the Good News Jesus of Nazareth.” All right. But then, the document continues:

    Evangelicalism must be defined theologically and not politically; confessionally and not culturally. Above all else, it is a commitment and devotion to the person and work of Jesus Christ, his teaching and way of life, and an enduring dedication to his lordship above all other earthly powers, allegiances and loyalties. As such, it should not be limited to tribal or national boundaries, or be confused with, or reduced to political categories such as “conservative” and “liberal,” or to psychological categories such as “reactionary” or “progressive.”

    (more…)

  • Time to Take a Break

    Turns out taking a Sabbath is a good idea, even if you are not religious. This article, from the NY Times, does not give the results of a scientific study. It is just the reflection of a guy who decided that he needed to turn off everything one day a week: computer, TV, phone, PDA…

    If you happen to think, as I do, that people were designed to take Sabbaths, there can only be one response to this: Duh.

    But I don’t mean to be dismissive of this guy and his decision to take time off. More people should be doing this. People weren’t made to work as hard as we do most of the time.

  • Yes, Hungary is a Country

    This is former American Idol contestant Kellie Pickler on the show, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? The question she was asked was, “Budapest is the capital of what European country?” Her response is funny and, well, kind of sad.

  • A Political Post

    There have been quite a few articles out there in the last day talking about Mitt Romney’s withdrawal from the presidential race. After I heard the news, I took a look at some opinion pieces to see what people were saying about it. One of the ones I found most interesting was this one, by Timothy Egan of the New York Times.

    Here’s how it opens:

    Mitt Romney is gone, having suspended his campaign in the face of delegate math that cannot work in his favor, no matter how he crunches the numbers. But before he leaves the stage, the record should show who – or what – did him in.

    Blame Christians. By significant margins, in poll after poll, in vote after vote a solid block of evangelical Christians said they would never vote for a Mormon. Since evangelicals made up nearly half of the Republican primary vote in some states, Romney was up against a deep well of distrust of a religion that many evangelicals still label a cult.

    He states later,

    It’s tempting to call these voters anti-Mormon bigots. Polls show evangelicals are three times as likely to vote for a black candidate as a Mormon. In the late 1960s, the percentage of Americans who said they would not vote for a Jew was in the teens. By 2000, that number was down to the low single digits. A similar tolerance opened up for Catholics.

    But on Mormons, the numbers never moved. About 17 percent of Americans say they have qualms about voting for a Mormon – the same number as in 1967.

    “Bigot” is a strong word, especially to use when you’re writing an op-ed piece in a national newspaper. Before taking issue with this word, let’s find out what it means, from dictionary.com: “–noun: a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion.”

    But is not wanting to vote for someone because of their religious beliefs intolerant? It is one thing to not want to vote for someone because of the way they were born: Obama did not choose to enter the world as a black man, and Sen. Clinton did not choose to be born a white woman. Discriminating against them for these reasons would be without justification. And I don’t want to deny the fact that there are some nutty Christians out there who have an ax to grind against Mormons, and are extremely un-loving in their speech.

    But honestly, I don’t think that Mr. Egan ought to fault evangelical Christians for “having qualms” about voting for Romney because of his beliefs. Evangelical Christians (and I am one of them) are adamant that there are significant differences between what Mormons believe and what orthodox Christians believe – significant enough that we think it is misleading when Mormons call themselves “Christians,” since they don’t believe what all the other denominations who use that term believe (but that’s a topic for another post).

    Mr. Egan seems to think that it is perfectly fine to vote for or against people based on issues (even issues such as abortion, which are usually linked to beliefs about the nature of the human person), but not fine to vote for or against someone based on their view of the cause, nature and purpose of the universe. He doesn’t understand that theological issues can be extremely important to some people – important enough to have a major impact on how they vote, or do not vote. Mr. Egan’s view amounts to secularism, which seeks to banish religion to the private sphere and expects everyone to act in public as if their beliefs about the nature and purpose of human beings and the world are not important.

    I think it’s OK for all people (not just evangelical Christians) to prefer voting for someone who shares their view of the world to voting for someone who does not, if they have the option. And in fact, it seems to me that this is exactly what most people do. This is not being “utterly intolerant;” it’s only being more comfortable with someone who sees the world the way you do (or more closely to the way you do). It’s tempting to turn the tables and use the word “bigot” to describe Mr. Egan. After all, he is the one who is utterly intolerant of evangelical Christians for not sharing his secularist views.

  • Like Kissing Everyone in the Room, or Licking the Floor

    As a fan of Seinfeld, I thought that this study was entertaining and informative. It turns out that double-dipping a chip really IS like putting your whole mouth in the dip.

    The Seinfeld reference comes from an episode in which George goes to a funeral, and one of the other people there is aghast that George dips a chip, takes a bite, and then dips it again. This study found that “sporadic double dipping in a cup of dip would transfer at least 50 to 100 bacteria from one mouth to another with every bite.”

    So there you go. In related news, this same researcher, who works at Clemson University and apparently has made a bit of a hobby of exploding popular myths, published a study last year on the five-second rule. The results? I wouldn’t eat anything off the ground, if I were you. Especially if it is a large piece of meat that drops out of your gyro late at night while you are standing at one of the most heavily-trafficked tram and metro stops in Prague. This may sound hypothetical, but it has already happened once. So if you find yourself in that position, you know what to do.

  • Airport Security

    I’ve not enjoyed flying much for the last several years, largely because I think that airport security is invasive, depersonalizing and not very effective.  Since most people I know tend to dislike being treated like objects, I have wondered for a while why more people don’t complain about having to take their shoes off, take out their laptops, make sure they’re not wearing anything made of metal, and having their toothpaste thrown away. I think that perhaps people tolerate the de-humanizing nature of going through security because it helps them to control fear. We can handle being objectified if it means that we don’t have to worry about anything going wrong.

    I also think that an important Christian witness to our culture can consist in naming our culture’s fear and calling people to turn to Christ and heed his call, “Do not be afraid.” – “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. But even the hairs of your head are all counted. Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows” (Lk 12:6-7).

    I just read an op-ed piece in the New York Times that thinks the same thing, only in a more articulate way, but without the explicit Christian tone.  Here is the last paragraph:

    How we got to this point is an interesting study in reactionary
    politics, fear-mongering and a disconcerting willingness of the
    American public to accept almost anything in the name of “security.”
    Conned and frightened, our nation demands not actual security, but
    security spectacle. And although a reasonable percentage of passengers,
    along with most security experts, would concur such theater serves no
    useful purpose, there has been surprisingly little outrage. In that
    regard, maybe we’ve gotten exactly the system we deserve.

    Read the whole thing here.

  • The Golden Compass and Misunderstanding Christianity

    So The Golden Compass (a movie based on the first book of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy) opened yesterday, and there has been a lot of controversy about it. There is an article in this month’s Atlantic Monthly about it (and also an accompanying article online), and also one in this month’s Christianity Today. Matt Barber has also written critically about it in the Examiner.

    Many Christians have been critical of the books because Pullman is an atheist who has told interviewers that his books are about killing God. The gist of the Atlantic articles is that Hollywood, now aware of conservative Christians, has toned down the explicitly atheistic tone in the movie. But some Christians (and I must admit, I’m one of them) are not interested in seeing the movie because they don’t want to see the next two books made into movies, and don’t want to give Pullman any more money or success or encouragement than he already has (You may notice, however, that off to the right-hand side of this page it says that I am reading The Golden Compass. This is true. I checked it out of the library. Because while I am not interested in supporting Pullman, I am not against reading books that are popular both for entertainment and to see why they are popular).

    Some Christians, though (some quoted in the Christianity Today article and others, I am told, which include Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams), have a more positive view of the series. They see in Pullman’s books a criticism of things that should never have become part of Christianity, or are Pullman’s own misunderstandings of Christian doctrine. An example is Pullman’s caricature of the Christian understanding of sexuality, which he talks about in the first Atlantic article:

    This is exactly what happens in the Garden of Eden,” Pullman told me. “They become aware of sexuality, of the power the body has to attract attention from someone else. This is not only natural, but a wonderful thing! To be celebrated! Why the Christian Church has spent 2,000 years condemning this glorious moment, well, that’s a mystery. I want to confront that, I suppose, by telling a story that this so-called original sin is anything but. It’s the thing that makes us fully human.

    It is true that some stripes of Christianity have viewed sexuality as something bad. It might even be true that some stripes of Christianity have equated original sin with sexuality (though I have gone to church all my life, and the first time I ever heard of such a thing was when I was talking with a group of Moonies). But if this is true, it is not because they got this from the Bible.

    The events that Pullman refers to occur in Genesis 3, when the serpent tricks Eve into eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which God had told Adam and Eve not to eat. Eve gave the fruit to Adam and “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths” (Gen 3:7).

    But the fruit can’t represent sexuality, as Pullman thinks, because sexuality came about before these events occurred: “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth’” (1:28). And also, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” (2:24-25). If these two verses don’t refer to pre-sin sexuality, then I would like to know what they DO refer to.

    From reading Genesis, it is hard to believe that sexuality and sin could ever be equated. Yet, sometimes in the history of Christianity, it has been. So I thank God for people like Philip Pullman who criticize ridiculous ideas like this, because they’re not Christian (or Jewish, for that matter). I only wish Pullman knew that.

  • The Way of the (Modern) World: Introduction

    Golly!  Apologies!  It’s been a busy last few days in the life of Elliot.  What with grading hermeneutics papers, and reading for class, and drinking lots of egg nog (’tis the season. . .), the days have been plumb full.

    But speaking of reading for class, I’ve just started to read a book by Craig Gay called The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It’s Tempting to Live As If God Doesn’t Exist.  Snappy, eh?  Here is a quote from the Introduction: “We are concerned to discover how and why it is that the practically atheistic outlook has become so uniquely plausible even for Christians in the modern context.  Along this line, our focus will not be on traditions of explicit philosophical secularity as such, but rather on the secularity that is carried out implicitly – one is tempted to say innocently – in institutional arrangements that we probably take largely for granted” (14).

    Basically, Gay is arguing that all people in modern society – Christians, atheists, followers of any religion or none – live in an environment of practical atheism.  Even for those who believe that God exists, he is irrelevant to the business of real life.  The purpose of the book is to examine the roots of that phenomenon.

    Gay is writing from an explicitly Christian standpoint, and he is well aware that Christians are called to be “in but not of the world” (John 17:13ff).  I’ve been a Christian for several years, and just about all the times I’ve heard other Christians use this phrase, they have been referring to resisting temptation of some kind.  Gay, to his credit, defines “worldliness” in a different way: “What if the essence of ‘the world’ – and hence of ‘worldliness’ – is not personal immorality and/or social injustice as such, but is instead an interpretation of reality that essentially excludes the reality of God from the business of life?” (4)  Especially given the New Testament usage of the word “kosmos,” Gay’s proposal makes a lot of sense.

    So why is this practical atheism such a bad thing?  Well, among other things, it leaves us vulnerable to the “terror of history” – the necessity of “having to create our own meanings and purposes in the world,” and having to “make sense of who we are only on the basis of our own accomplishments” (11).  We can never really understand who we are, or why we are here.  There is another problem as well – one that is less existential but more frightening on a societal level: “[W]hen we lose sight of God, we also lose sight of ourselves.  It is the thought of God, after all, that gives substance to words like ‘truth,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘persons’: words which lend substance and meaning to human life.  Without the thought of God such notions are empty or, at best, only convenient fictions.  A completely secular society is, therefore, not simply ‘godless,’ but impersonal and inhumane as well” (2-3).

    I am personally glad that there is such an interest in human rights at this moment in world history, as evidenced by such organizations as Amnesty International.  But I’ve always wondered what sort of basis thoroughly secular people have for an idea like “human rights.”  It’s easy to insist on a right; anybody can do that.  But one person’s rights imply that another person has a duty to them.  I don’t hear a lot of talk about that side of the coin.  One of the tactics of organizations like Amnesty International is to shame people and governments committing human rights abuses into shaping up.  This only works as long as the rest of the world is outraged by what is going on.  I wonder what will happen if that is no longer the case?

    I’ll be reading the rest of this book over the next few weeks, and I’ll post the rest of my reflections on it periodically.

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  • Gang of Monkeys Kills Politician

    Seriously.

    This is what happens, eventually, when people let the monkey population in their city get out of control because they regard monkeys as sacred. I’m not saying this is some sort of divine judgment; I won’t speak for God. I’m just saying that if your religious beliefs keep you from controlling an animal that has become a menace to humans, there is no doubt in my mind that those beliefs have to be changed.

    And yes, this means I’m going on record as saying that humans are more important than monkeys.

  • “Nation” Schmation

    After watching the Red Sox defeat the Colorado Rockies Sunday night to become World Series champs, I came to this realization: I can’t stand it when people refer to a team’s fan base as “_________ Nation.” I must have heard the phrase “Red Sox Nation” a dozen times during the celebration after the game.

    I know that the phrase “Red Sox Nation” has been around for a long time (according to an article about it on the always-reliable Wikipedia, it was coined by a Boston Globe reporter in 1986). I also believe that “Raider Nation” – fans of the Oakland-Los Angeles-Oakland Raiders – has been around for a long time, maybe longer. But lately, things have just gotten ridiculous. Every team has their own nation now.

    Why do I hate it when people refer to a team’s fans as “_____ Nation”? Well, here are a few reasons:

    1. First, I hate it simply because it is so widespread. If only one or two teams did it, perhaps it would be tolerable. But a few quick Google searches today have turned up the following:

    A. “Hokie Nation” – a documentary about fans of Virginia Tech.
    B. “Volunteer Nation” – a phrase found in a book title about Tennessee football
    C. “Packers Nation” – a blog about the Green Bay Packers
    D. “Tiger Nation” a phrase that could refer to the fans of, among others: LSU,
    Clemson, Massillon High School or Fort Hays State University.

    2. In my experience, teams whose fans like to use this phrase the most often have the most obnoxious fans. The Boston Red Sox, to take the most obvious example, are the biggest road attraction in baseball. That is, more fans go to see the Red Sox play outside of Boston than any other team, even the Yankees. This is probably in large part because it is so hard to get tickets for their home games. I saw the Red Sox play the Mariners in Seattle this summer, and a few Boston fans (who had flown out from New England) were seated right behind me. It’s OK, if you grew up in Boston but have since moved to a new city, to go to the park when the Red Sox are in town to cheer them on. But flying across the country from Boston for the series, and in some cases outnumbering the hometown fans is, in my opinion, obnoxious. The only exception to this rule of calling yourself “nation” and being obnoxious is the Yankees, whose fans (though still obnoxious) don’t refer to themselves as “Yankee Nation,” but instead as “Yankee Universe.” I think this helps make my point.

    3. Finally, Why the need to be part of a nation? Isn’t the United States good enough? And why define yourself against others in such an absolute-sounding way? Isn’t the United Stated divided enough on more political issues? On the one hand, this complaint might seem kind of silly. But on the other hand, I think that there has to be something more fundamental lurking behind this tendency, since it is both so recent and so widespread. Are people just looking for a place to belong? Something to be part of that is larger than themselves? If this is so, is “Burnt Orange Nation” really the best they can do when it comes to shaping their identity?

    I was watching a little college football this past weekend and was particularly struck, when watching the Georgia-Florida game, by how similar college football is to a religion – the rituals, the reverence for coaches and players who have reached godlike status, the codes of conduct, etc. Now, with every fan base calling itself “Nation,” it is starting to appear like not just a religion, but a civil religion.