Anger as entertainment

March 26th, 2009 | Comments (1) |

I came across this quote the other day, and thought it too good not to post:

If you want to be angry about something, get pissed at a media culture that goes beserk [sic] about bonuses one week and forgets all about them the next. And be worried, quite worried, about a society for whom anger is a form of entertainment.

It’s from Time political columnist Joe Klein’s blog post Populist Rage? …Never Mind, and for some reason it struck a nerve.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been listening to disproportionate amounts of public radio lately (my iPod died a while back… R.I.P.), but all I heard about last week was the AIG bonuses. Interestingly, the news was originally about the bonuses and how unbelievable/absurd/ludicrous/etc. they were, but then the news subtly shifted from the bonuses themselves to the anger about the bonuses. As I was driving one afternoon, I listened to a debate between two seemingly well-informed people about “how mad” people should be about the bonuses. All I came away with was knowing how mad I was that I had just listened to that segment.

We need to be careful to not take the bait and accept anger as a form of entertainment. Anger can be turned into something useful if it is handled appropriately, but when anger becomes a steady flow of fleeting fads, we become conditioned to be angry at something all the time. Finding this week’s scapegoat won’t make you feel any better, I promise.

| Categories Politics/Current Events | Comments 1 comment »

The Pledge of Allegiance

December 1st, 2008 | Comments (13) |

American flag

This past weekend, the pastor who helped get the phrase “under God” inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance, The Rev. George M. Docherty, died. According to this AP article,

Docherty delivered a sermon saying the pledge should acknowledge God in 1952 at Washington’s New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, just blocks from the White House.

On Feb. 7, 1954, he delivered it again after learning that President Dwight Eisenhower would be at the church.

Congress inserted the words a few months later.

Additionally, Rassmussen just released a report saying that 77% of U.S. voters believe school children should say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning at school. Of those surveyed, 82% say that “under God” should remain in the Pledge, even though it’s use, the report says, “has been challenged in the courts in recent years.”

Personally, I don’t really have any beef with the Pledge of Allegiance, but I DO think that “under God” should be removed. Apparently I’m in the minority. Now, I’m no Constitutional scholar, but “under God” has no business in a pledge of patriotism to the United States.

Why? Because it blatantly ignores the religious plurality that exists in the United States — a plurality which shapes its very nature. Even though lots of reports overwhelmingly declare a majority of Americans believe in God (between 80 and 95 percent), there are plenty of people who fall in the 5 to 20 percent who don’t believe in God (which is at least 15 million people, and as much as 60 million). Furthermore, to which “God” is the Pledge referring? Is it the God of Judaism? Christianity? Mormonism? Islam? Most people probably assume that “under God” is indeed referring to the God found in the Bible of Christianity (it was advocated by a Christian pastor, after all), and that’s just fine by them.

But here’s the thing: There is no such thing as a “Christian” nation. In fact, the United States — as a cultural and political force — is in many ways an embodiment of the very sort of entity Jesus (and Paul) was trying to subvert. That the United States is the richest nation does not mean it is specially “blessed” by God. It is the poor who are blessed, remember?

In the end, I’m with David Waters:

It isn’t our belief in God that makes us different. It’s our belief in the liberties (religious and other) enshrined in the Constitution. The American creed is faith in liberty for all, not the religion of most.

| Categories Faith/Theology, Politics/Current Events | Comments 15 comments »

The 2008 evangelical vote: A retrospective

November 6th, 2008 | Comments (11) |

Back in June, I wrote a post entitled Are evangelicals abandoning their political agenda? in which I argued that there was a shift happening in the American religio-political scene. I said:

Either way, the evangelical agenda of old doesn’t carry the same weight as it used to. The reign of the Religious Right is coming to an end, and young evangelicals are thinking for themselves. And when that happens, politics begin to look a little more messy than the easy-solution, tried-and-true dichotomies would have you believe.

I’m not, by any means, claiming that I discovered this trend. In fact, I wrote follow-up post called Obama and evangelicals: Summer of love which pointed to articles popping all over the media that all said essentially the same thing.

Now that the election is over, I figured I’d take a look at how the evangelical vote turned out. Thankfully, most of the analytical work has already been done. Sure, I could have compared CNN’s 2004 and 2008 exit polls, or used the New York Times’ fancy exit poll slider, but there’s no need.

Obama and Religious Voters is a great overview of how things turned out. The verdict? Obama made some headway, but not as much as was expected:

Even though Obama was not successful nationally in breaking the Republican hold on white evangelicals, he did make modest gains on Kerry’s percentages in North Carolina, Ohio, and Colorado. Although many evangelicals say they are embracing an agenda beyond the culture wars, Obama’s position on abortion rights is still a deal breaker for many white evangelicals who were considering voting for him, said David Gushee, a professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University.

I guess we shouldn’t really be surprised. The numbers:

According to exit-polling data analyzed by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Obama improved his performance among every religious group over John Kerry’s performance in 2004, although his gains among white evangelicals (a 3 percent to 5 percent increase, depending on how you measure it) and white Catholics (a 4 percent gain) were far more modest, and McCain maintained a majority of both those groups and white mainline Protestants. (McCain won white evangelicals 74 percent to 24 percent; white mainline Protestants 65 percent to 34 percent, and white Catholics 52 percent to 47 percent.)

But among nonwhite Christians, a growing part of the electorate, Obama’s increases were “dramatic,” said Pew senior fellow John Green. He also noted that the important story of Obama’s win among religious voters was “what happened to minority Christians,” including black Protestants (Obama got 95 percent of the black vote, up from 88 percent for Kerry), Latinos, most of whom are Christian (66 percent, up from 53 percent for Kerry), and Asians (61 percent, up from 56 percent for Kerry).

If this interests you at all, I recommend reading the whole article. What are your thoughts? Has anyone come across other post-election articles analyzing the evangelical vote?

| Categories Faith/Theology, Politics/Current Events | Comments 12 comments »

Foreclosure from a repo point of view

October 4th, 2008 | Comments (4) |

Watching this made me feel sick to my stomach. It’s a long video, but it’s worth the time… it really drives home the gravity of our country’s foreclosure mess.

After watching: Should local churches step up and perform the job that the charities mentioned in the video can’t do? It might be a logistical nightmare, but it reeks of ministry possibility.

How does the video make you feel? Is there a ministry opportunity in here somewhere?

| Categories Politics/Current Events | Comments 4 comments »
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