• Rick Warren and Saddleback Church will be hosting the first joint appearance of John McCain and Barack Obama. “They say that ‘the two-hour format will be held in a non-debate form, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. PDT (Saturday, August 16th). There will be commercial breaks every ten minutes, enabling Dr. Warren to have a separate long-term conversation with each candidate for 50 minutes.’ Rick will ask them both the same questions in areas like - stewardship, leadership, worldview and America’s role in the world.” The post also has a roundup of MSM articles about the non-debate. 08/15/2008
• David Fitch offers three issues to consider as you discern for yourself and your church as to whether to vote or not vote as act of Christian social justice. “Where is the recognition that abstaining from voting (refusing to participate) can be an even more aggressive activist (dare I say Biblical) stance for justice?” 07/21/2008

Obama and evangelicals: Summer of love

I’ve had this post sitting in “draft” status for a while, but when I saw Shane Claiborne on the front page of CNN.com (pictured above) with the headline Young Evangelicals not a lock for Republicans, I was pushed over the edge (HT: Aaron Alexander via Twitter).

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post called Are evangelicals abandoning their political agenda? (which was featured on Reuters) in which I said “Perhaps it’s getting harder to hear the rally cries [of the Right] because John McCain is a stupendously weak GOP candidate who doesn’t really push the traditional evangelical agenda. Or perhaps it’s because Barack Obama is really the uniter who he has promised to be, erasing generations-old lines in the sand.” Since publishing that post, it seems like that argument is all that I read about. Below you’ll find several articles that present a similar proposition.

Mr. Right?: The Rise of the Obamacons (The New Republic)

But you probably have not have heard of many of the Obamacons–and neither has the Obama campaign. When I checked with it to ask for a list of prominent conservative supporters, the campaign seemed genuinely unaware that such supporters even existed. But those of us on the right who pay attention to think tanks, blogs, and little magazines have watched Obama compile a coterie drawn from the movement’s most stalwart and impressive thinkers. It’s a group that will no doubt grow even larger in the coming months.

Evangelical flock strays from the Republican fold (The Observer)

Yet McCain’s problems have led to speculation about a narrowing ‘God gap’ between Republicans and Democrats. Some of Barack Obama’s aides believe they can move into the evangelical bloc and win over many of the voters that elected Bush. In Chicago last week Obama met 30 religious leaders, including the Rev TD Jakes, pastor of a Dallas mega-church. His staff also held the first fundraiser for Obama by a new group of evangelicals called the Matthew 25 Network.

Obama’s Evangelical Biographer (The New Republic)

“For Obama, faith is not simply political garb, something a focus group told him he ought to try. Instead, religion to him is transforming, lifelong, and real,” Mansfield writes.”

Obama’s Faithful (The American Conservative)

For years progressives have dreamed of getting Evangelicals to connect with anti-poverty and environmental programs. Obama may be the one to do it. As Ross says, he is just better than McCain at framing his progressive policies as part of a moral mission.

Evangelicals Are Crucial to Winning the 2008 Election (Newsweek)

Young evangelicals reflect their pastors’ diffidence. As conservative as their parents in most respects—and more conservative in opposing abortion—many young evangelicals are fatigued by the culture war (and have greater worries about $4 gas). They say they don’t want to be Republican just because that’s what’s expected.

Young Evangelicals Aim to Broaden Agenda (Washington Post)

With his tousled hair, sideburns and a scruffy “soul patch” beard, the 26-year-old New Yorker belongs to a growing minority of young evangelicals who want to broaden their political agenda beyond the traditional opposition to abortion and gay marriage. Evangelicals like Dunbar are eager to move on and tackle such hot topics as global warming and social justice.

You get the point.

A couple of observations: First, as more and more of the Obama/evangelical articles pop up, it’s beginning to all sound the same. No one is breaking any new ground. The original “Obama is attracting some evangelicals, and that’s ‘new’ in (recent) politics” is the hot election topic, so the story is being written and rewritten for myriad publications. Unfortunately, this probably means it’s all we’ll hear about for a while, and it’s all the analysts will talk about on November 4 — either way (”Are you surprised that Obama was able to pull in x% of the evangelical vote?” or “Why do you think Obama failed to bring in the evangelical vote tonight?”).

Second, although this is the hot topic, not everyone agrees with the argument. For example:

In the end, important changes surely have been afoot throughout wider evangelicalism, but neither are the most significant of these developments “recent” nor do they spell a collapse of traditional evangelical commitments in the social-political arena that equate to an exodus to the Democratic party.

What are your thought on the Obama/evangelical “summer of love”? Leave a comment and let me know. Did I miss any major stories anywhere?

• A new website has been set up to track the massive flooding in Iowa, complete with pictures, videos, and on-the-ground accounts. Head to IowaFlood.com to check it out. 06/11/2008

Are evangelicals abandoning their political agenda?

It’s a hard time to be a conservative evangelical, I imagine. Up until now, the objective has always been clear: as a Christian, the battles in politics are to be waged against abortion and gay rights/marriage. Yet it’s becoming difficult to hear the cries of “It’s a child, not a choice!” and “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!”¹ amidst all of current tumult in the United States — an unpopular, drawn-out war in Iraq, the spiraling economy, skyrocketing gas prices and unemployment rates,² global climate change, and so on.³

In other words, the non-abortion and non-gay-rights issues have now become the elephant in the room for evangelicals. So what to do? One choice is to rally the troops and become even more vocal and politically active in pushing the agenda. More lobbying, more outspoken leaders, whatever. Another choice is to step back, to understand the complexity of things, and to embrace the other issues.

And that’s exactly what’s happening.

A recent article in the Seattle Times called Young, evangelical… for Obama? discusses this trend within the context of the current presidential campaign.

“Polls have shown,” the article notes, “that young Christians aren’t any less concerned about the ‘family values’ issues that have traditionally driven [evangelical] Christians to the Republican camp… It’s just that they’re also concerned about issues such as social justice and immigration, issues traditionally associated with Democrats.”

Perhaps it’s getting harder to hear the rally cries because John McCain is a stupendously weak GOP candidate who doesn’t really push the traditional evangelical agenda. Or perhaps it’s because Barack Obama is really the uniter who he has promised to be, erasing generations-old lines in the sand.

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.

From the same article in the Seattle Times, Andy Crouch, editor of Christianity Today, says,

“This could turn out to be the election where both parties realize that the evangelical vote is so hopelessly split down the middle that it’s not worth courting them at all because what parties need are blocs that can be appealed to en masse. Paradoxically, evangelicals would become less relevant than ever before.”

Beliefnet’s God-o-Meter recently interviewed Mark DeMoss, the former chief of staff to Jerry Falwell and former chief liaison to evangelical leaders for Mitt Romney. In response to a question about Obama, DeMoss says,

“You’re seeing some movement among evangelicals as the term [evangelical] has become more pejorative. There’s a reaction among some evangelicals to swing out to the left in an effort to prove that evangelicals are really not that right wing. There’s some concern that maybe Republicans haven’t done that well. And there’s this fascination with Barack Obama. So I will not be surprised if he gets one third of the evangelical vote. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 40-percent.”

While I agree that Obama will get a large amount of votes from evangelicals in November — I can’t wait for the media to beat it to death — I disagree with DeMoss about why some evangelicals are shedding their right-wing skin; I don’t think it’s reactionary. What is the rationale for “swing[ing] out to the left in an effort to prove that evangelicals are really not that right-wing?” Evangelicals have never had a problem being right-wing, why change now? Because it’s not as popular to be conservative as it used to be? Not likely.

What’s more likely is that a new generation of evangelicals are confronting the reality of the situation we find ourselves in, and realizing that we’re not getting out of this mess by magically ending abortion or forestalling gay rights. It’s just not that simple.

1. Simple moral dichotomies make life so easy, don’t they? ↩
2. Job Losses and Oil Surge Spread Economic Gloom. New York Times, 06/07/08. ↩
3. Image: Jesus Army Rally - Clapham Common, London courtesy of cromacom. ↩

News bloat

The above image is from a recent TED talk in which Alisa Miller (CEO of Public Radio International) gives a presentation discussing Why we know less than ever about the world. The map shows “the number of seconds that American network and cable organizations dedicated to news stories by country in February of 2007.” You can clearly see that the United States and Iraq are totally bloated, and far outweigh the news coverage of all other countries.

At the conclusion of the presentation, Alisa says, “The real question: Is this distorted worldview what we want for Americans in our increasingly interconnected world?” I submit that it is not.

Click here to view the presentation (It’s only 4:30 long).

This begs the question: Where do you get your global news? I get mine from the BBC News website, and I occasionally watch the BBC World News on PBS.

Twitter & the Iowa caucuses

I participated in the Iowa caucuses tonight in support of Barack Obama, who blew away Edwards, Clinton, and the rest of the field.

I caucused for the first time in 2004 for Howard Dean, and both experiences were intriguing and fun. This time around I was “elected” (I use quotes because it’s no big deal, seriously) as a delegate for Obama to the county convention. The whole process is actually quite convoluted (At the county convention, delegates are chosen to attend the state-congressional-district convention, at which point delegates to the national convention are picked. You follow?)

Anyway, I live-twittered my time at the caucus, and below you’ll find a redacted timeline of my tweets. The folks at Townhall.com organized a cool citizen-journalism effort via twitter, e-mail, and text messaging to report caucus results, which I participated in as well. I digress.

6:25pm → This place is packed
6:51pm → All the young people I see are in the Obama camp
6:56pm → What if all these neighborhood people came to our church?
6:59pm → This would be fun if it was also a candidate look-alike contest. I found Hillary.
7:05pm → Overheard - “People over here [in the Obama camp] just look sensible.” [This is actually a quote from my brother]
7:06pm → Here we go…
7:14pm → 264 people here.
7:26pm → Obama has 97 out of 264 before any debating.
7:32pm → Richardson and Biden have disbanded… No Kuccinich support at all
7:35pm → This elementary school bathroom smells like cupcakes and urine
7:41pm → No surprise… It’s down to Obama, Clinton, and Edwards. People are trying to convert the leftovers
8:07pm → The results are in: Obama 4, Edwards 2, Clinton 2
8:08pm → I hear a lot of people talking about Obama dominating Iowa. I am excited to turn on the news.
8:10pm → Been talking with a student reporter for the Yale Daily News
8:15pm → I was just nominated as a county delegate for Obama
8:51pm → Wow… Obama won by 7%.

What are your reflections on the caucuses (Iowans), and/or reactions to the results (anyone)? Leave a comment and let me know!

• Bearing the Cross in the Global Economy analyzes a recent report about workers in China who make crucifixes and other religious items to be sold in the West. “The image of women toiling away in sweatshops while handling an icon of the suffering body of Christ is quite striking.” See also, The Consumptive Church: The Religious Industrial Complex. 12/03/2007

Back to Rosebud

I’d like to begin this post with a joke Tom told me:

Tom: You know how we know the indians were here first?
Jake: How?
Tom: They had reservations.

Kind of makes me miss the podcast (although there are talks of a summer episode).

On a serious note, I am heading back to Rosebud Indian Reservation for the fourth time in the last year on Saturday. I am going with four other leaders and fifteen high school students to the town of Parmeleee for a week.

The trip will be very much like last year, except this time we have fewer students and we’re not sleeping in a high school gymnasium.

When I think of the extremely poor state of the reservation and the horrible living conditions, it makes me sick. I just pray that our time there positively affects the community and that we bring a feeling of love and compassion.

Badiou on immigration

In my religion seminar class “Paul as Contemporary Cultural Theory,” we are reading the book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism by Alain Badiou. Badiou himself is French, and he speaks from his own vantage point, but I find what he says in the early pages of the book to be particularly relevant to current discussion regarding immigration in the US.

Badiou says:

Moreover, this is the norm that illuminates a paradox few have pointed out: in the hour of generalized circulation and the phantasm of instantaneious cultural communication, laws and regulations forbidding the circulation of persons are being multiplied everywhere.¹

In other words, in an era when global travel, trade, and communication is soaring, our need to stamp down on immigration becomes heightened. Badiou later says, “Deleuze put it perfectly: capitalist deterritorialization requires a constant reterritorialization.”² Now, here’s the kicker:

How clearly Paul’s statement rings out under these conditions! A genuinely stupefying statement when one knows the rules of the ancient world: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3.28)!³

And all of this from a self-proclaimed atheist.

1. Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: the Foundation of Universalism. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2003. 10. ↩
2. Ibid., 10. ↩
3. Ibid., 9. ↩

Conference Presentation(?)

I just sent an email to Mark over at Mission:Think regarding the Conference on Christianity in a Consumer Culture in April 2006 in Minneapolis.

I, along with Tom, proposed presenting a to-be-written paper within the topic of Christianity and globalization. Even if we don’t get accepted, it would still be a fantastic conference to attend and it already has some great speakers. I’ll let you know how things turn out.

Riots in Paris, Cont’d

Megan, who I mentioned in my earlier post about the riots in Paris, left an interesting comment about them. Here’s what she had to say:

The riots are a very interesting subject. Although, I am not in the area where the riots are happening…Parisians talk about the riots all the time. Basically, the issue is that the ghettos of Paris are found in the suburbs (whereas in the US the ghettos are usually in the inner city). The racially focused ghettos are getting pushed out of Paris and into the suburbs.

Recently, an important French Minister made a very nasty remark about these “groups” in the suburbs…This fueled with the terrible death of two teenagers being chased by police in the suburbs has caused a massive snowball affect in many suburbs all over France…and even all over Europe.

One huge difference between American thinking and European thinking is that Americans tend to talk more about racial differences. Issues like racial inequalities, college entrance issues with race, diversity in the schools/workplaces are commonly discussed. Now, there are pros and cons to this.

Well, in France NO ONE talks about race. It is like this huge elephant in the room that no one wants to point out. Well, there are exterior pros to this…France appears to be more accepting, not making issue of the race factor. Well, the second a race factor is brought up (like when the Minister made his comment) all h*ll breaks lose. The French racial minorities have all this burning anger inside of them…and they need a venue to vent this.

In the US, it seems that we over-analyze and over-debate the race issue…maybe a good open communication is a positive thing.

Don’t worry, she is okay. She’s living and going to school in the city and not the suburbs. For a while, though, I was a bit worried.

Riots in Paris

Have you heard about the riots in Paris and the rest of France? If not, get yourself caught up with this Wikipedia article.

Direland says that “far from losing steam, the rebellion is growing and spreading to cities in the south previously untouched. Sunday night in France saw 1408 vehicles burned, some 250 more than the previous night, while 34 policemen were injured by shotgun fire and stones when they were attacked by 200 rioters in Grigny, a suburb south of Paris. In the southern city of Toulouse, police fired tear gas grenades to push back club-wielding rioters. Violent attacks were also reported in Orleans, Rennes and Nantes.”

That was an update from Monday. But why all the rioting? Direland also has a very good post called Why is France Burning? The Rebellion of a Lost Generation.

Aside from all of the social, political, economic, religious and other themes involved, this issue brings up two things for me.

First, the idea of short attention span compassion, which I had been thinking about for a while and Eternal Revolution put into words. With this new crisis and the subsequent media frenzy which it has inevitably spawned, are we forgetting about the millions of people still affected by Katrina and Rita, among others?

Second, a dear friend of mine is studying abroad in Paris this semester. Megan, are you doing alright? How is this affecting you? It looks like they just mandated a curfew. You are in my prayers.

Katrina and God

I can’t get this off of my mind. Like a lot of people in the world, I am struggling with the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and trying to answer many difficult questions. In my previous post about Katrina, I simply offered up my prayer and pointed people to the Red Cross website. As things progressed, I updated the post and offered some links to what I believe to be interesting commentaries on the theology of Katrina.

I was going to leave the post at that, but it keeps coming back. Tonight, before evening worship, one of the campus pastors asked for our prayer regarding the message (about Katrina) he will be giving tomorrow for chapel. He said that he is struggling to find the right words - if there are any - for this situation.

There has been talk that Katrina is somehow God’s punishment (2) on the city of New Orleans. This idea is not new, we heard it immediately following the events of 9/11 [1]. I was going to devote this post to exploring my own thoughts and theology about Katrina, but I found an amazing commentary that I feel completely sums up my thoughts.

Rick Phillips, on the Reformation21 blog says[2],

A week ago I was interviewed by a local reporter, and he asked me if I would like to ask God why tragedies happen. I responded that I did not need to ask God, because the Bible tells me already. He was surprised, and followed up by saying I surely believed that God was not involved in such things. I responded that, no, I believe God is sovereign over all things and his providence is governed by holiness, wisdom, goodness, and love.

Well, what do I think now? Do I believe this of Hurricane Katrina? The answer is Yes. The Bible describes God’s sovereignty as comprehensive and complete. Jesus said that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without the Father’s will (Mt. 10:29). Paul stated that God has “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of [mankind’s] dwelling place” (Acts 17:26). Both of these statements make it impossible that God was ignorant of Hurricane Katrina and her destruction or unable to intervene to prevent the disaster. Therefore, God is necessarily sovereign over such events, which happen only with his knowledge and will.

But does this perspective shatter the Bible’s statements about God’s holiness, goodness, and love? The answer is No.

The first reason is that God’s sovereignty does not remove contingent causes. There are plenty of reasons for Katrina other than God’s supposed neglect or vindictiveness. Katrina resulted from natural causes having to do with the weather. Though I know little of this science, I gather that the El Nino and long-term weather patterns are responsible for Katrina. So is there is no moral cause for this disaster? Yes, it was our first parents’ sin that caused the original paradise world to be warped so that things like violent hurricanes happen. Paul explains, “The creation was subjected to futility… For we know that the whole creation has been groaning in the pains of childbirth until now” (Rom. 8:20-22). Paul’s point was that the creation itself longs for its rebirth in the new heavens and new earth, since the Fall has placed it under the curse of death. One aspect of that curse is the violence of nature, as seen in Hurricane Katrina.

What about the people of New Orleans? Was Katrina God’s swipe of judgment at “Sin City”? We do not have warrant to claim that this was a specific judgment like Sodom and Gomorrah. Moreover, if we think New Orleans was worthy of God’s judgment, we need to remember that we also are worthy of judgment. Indeed, in this sense, I am personally responsible for Katrina – just as is our whole sinful human race. I am reminded of G. K. Chesterton’s answer to an essay contest that asked, “What is wrong with this world?” He submitted the shortest answer: “I am.” So if Adam and Eve are responsible for Katrina, and if sinners in the path of Katrina are responsible, then so am I responsible for this being a cursed world under the bondage of death. In short, sin – Adam’s, yours, and mine – is responsible for the violent natural order that brought Hurricane Katrina.

The other reason Katrina does not disprove God’s holiness, goodness, and love is God’s purpose in even the worst events. I quoted Acts 17:26 as proving God’s comprehensive sovereignty. But Paul goes on to show God’s purpose in exercising his sovereignty: “that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him” (Acts 17:27). Because of sin, everyone is destined to die. But God works in the affairs of this world to draw already dying people towards life in him. God permits trials large and small to call our attention to what matters most: our eternal destiny. Without suffering, the truth is that we will go on ignoring God to our eternal destruction. God wants Hurricane Katrina to result in multitudes of otherwise dying people seeking him and finding him so as to gain eternal life – for this we should labor and pray.

Because God is sovereign over tragedies like this with a purpose of grace, we should respond not with anger at him but with abiding hope and praise. This is not a senseless tragedy, because God will bring good through it for those who trust in him (Rom. 8:28). The most horrific, wicked, and evil event ever to happen on the planet earth was the judicial murder of the holy Son of God, Jesus Christ – an event in which God was completely sovereign and man was completely guilty. But the cross was made by God the most blessed, glorious, and holy event ever to happen on the planet earth. Likewise, Katrina was a terrible event. But God will bring good from it. Through death he offers resurrection life, if we will turn through faith in Christ to the sovereign God of holiness and grace.

I will continue to pray for the victims and survivors.

What are your thoughts about Katrina? Feel free to leave a comment.

[1] I don’t agree with this at all. See commentary below.
[2] Phillips, Rick. Was God Responsible for Hurricane Katrina? September 4, 2005.

Hurricane Katrina

My thoughts and prayers are with all of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. If you haven’t heard yet, Katrina is the deadliest hurricane to hit the United States since 1969. The earlier link has lots of information.

The American Red Cross is organizing their biggest relief effort ever. For information on how you can get involved, visit their website.

Update:

I am very much interested in the theology of Hurricane Katrina. That is, where is God in all of this, and what (if any) is His role? I have begun to compile a list of commentaries that seek to answer these and other questions below. I will continue to update these as they become available.

Russell D. Moore, Christ and Katrina

John Piper, Was Katrina Intelligent Design?

Sam Storms, Katrina, Common Grace, and a Theory about the End of the Age

J. Grant Swank, Jr., Katrina: God’s Popular In A Hurricane

Rick Phillips, Was God Responsible for Hurricane Katrina?

Philip Ryken, Hurricane Katrina: What is the right way for a Christian to respond?

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