Brand Name Faith

Gone are the faith conversations of my youth. Back then, we were all Christians. The questions were about "what brand?" Lots of jokes revolved around church denominations. Brand religion still hangs on among the less acquainted, who speak "church" to religious functionaries. The language is about being baptized Methodist or wed by the priest (shorthand for Roman Catholic). But in public conversation, brands are nearly dead. More accurately, Christian has become one of the brands among Hindu, Baha'i, Muslim, Hebrew, etc.

At a recent family reunion, one of my nieces took me aside. She asked me to explain to her the bewildering variety of Christians about which she had heard. What makes a Baptist different from a Methodist, from an Episcopalian was her line of inquiry. I was enormously uneasy about this. It offered no avenue into the heart of faith. Faith as brand ignores the questions of the heart. It concentrates instead on superficialities, church attire. Much later it dawned on me that she was asking about brands. What a wonderful reflective moment we might have shared, had we thought a bit about the purposes and effects of a brand name culture.

Since then, I have been looking at branding as a feature in itself. Brands began as a sign of ownership. Early on, they are about possession. One brands a property. My cow, My beer, My buggywhip were the sine qua non of branding. Only later, when mass communication appeared a brand identified me. It is no longer my beer, but it is me! I not only use Budweiser, I am Budweiser. This shift produced great profits for those who held the trusted brands. (Naomi Klein, the Canadian writer has done a wonderful job of tracing the history of branding in her book, Logo, so I won't repeat her efforts here.) What bridges the transition from "brand as owning" to "brand as identity" is the intense focus on me, my and mine. Branding is the source of the cultural habit that everything "it is all about me."

As branding matured in the television age, it became a way to squeeze out the competition. Folks would pay more and seek out a brand simply because they knew they could trust it. The seamy side of the story comes when this trust shifts to identity. Then a brand becomes a bludgeon with which to club the competition. Branding narrows the market choices. It also narrows the human identity. Of course, political operatives soon discovered that same power. Parties, policies and candidates began to become part of the brand. Ad man H. R. Haldeman pioneered this approach in Richard Nixon's White House. It was he who branded Nixon the candidate of the Silent Majority, a dubious demographic. To one degree or another political campaigns in the mass media have been about brands. (eg Morning In America, Where's the Beef?) Fatally, they also came be be about a synthetic reality.

As I noted above, branding is no stranger to American Christianity. We have been branding from the very beginning. Some say that the population of the colonies rested on the free exercise of brands. (as long as they were Christian) Of late, Christian brand competition have become so complex that folks have begun to check out. Worse yet, it has created a bumper sticker shorthand and identity religion. Happily the superficial language of "faith as brand" is beginning to lose its grip on the public mind. That is a good thing.

Branding in religions is about creating division, limiting competition and finally market domination. By no stretch of imagination can any of these be the core mission of any faith. They are not virtues. As brands are now showing themselves to be a diversions in the commercial and political realm, religious brands are faltering too. Amid the rubble, hucksters of brand speak about the "rebranding" of failing products and ideologies. But the public sees the emperor walking around without naked. At last some sanity.

But we will still need information about products, politics and faith. George Barna, the guru of the religious focus group, recently noted, "Faith is increasingly viral rather than pedagogical."* The adage of faith, that it is caught not taught, may open a way to a new conversation on the subject. (I say may, because branding has made the public intolerant of conversation in sentences longer than sound bites.)

But this opening has breathed new life into our congregations We now can offer frameworks, skeletons, within which a search receive and interpret their faith can thrive. I can hardly wait to replace the "medical model" of faith (something you have to do that makes you better) to faith as collaboration. Such a shift holds great promise not only for the faith communities, but also for all who live around those who practice faith. At the very least, we can use a little respite from all the alternate realities that religious marketers have piled upon us in recent decades.




*www.barna.org/barna-update/article/12-faithspirituality/15-christianity-is-no-longer-americans-default-faith

Taking Out the Trash

"Garbage in; garbage out." This warning to computer users is also a warning to theologians. Has God withdrawn favor from the American experiment?

In recent disasters, the implicit theology is implicated. The so called "war on terror" and the collapse of the global economy have deep and hidden theological roots. While these are complex phenomena, to begin on theological examination cannot happen too soon. Atop the list of offenders is the laser like focus on the personal over the collective. Theological discourse is popularly understood to be "all about me." This, in part, explains the explosive growth and recent sagging of evangelical congregations. There is a direct connection to the biases of the consumer culture. "Have it your way," Burger King exclaimed and the churches promptly produced a theology to match. There was a time when the "success gospel" was the butt of jokes. No more.

The focus on God and me is now the dominant arena for God talk in the west. "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so," the evangelical gospel proclaims. Economic policy is shaped by what is good for me. The "war on terror" is waged to keep me safe. It is all so personal, shaped by my Savior, my religion, my wants. First person singular.

Does theological discourse ever talk in the first person plural, about us? In fact, the biblical root of the judeo christian forms of faith admits to very little in the way of personal focus. It is written largely in the context of we. So, in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth he spoke of the divine life as we. The texts continue to address our dilemma, our culture, our society. In the context of we, the biblical text conveys some very different lessons than it does in the first person singular.

What might we be doing now, were we to consider that the good news was a collective sort of thing? I think that lessons about folks fending for themselves would be the central concern of congregations. We would bear our appropriate responsibility with the "least of these." Church membership would be understood as a shared enterprise, rather than just a personal choice. We might be more focused on mission than personal transformation. We would be much more careful about dividing the world into we and them. The experience one has in congregation as a part of something larger, introduces the futility of personal conformity. When our theology is no longer absorbed in "what will happen to me," we are able to mobilize the variety of us. We will also be able to see that the drawing lines of division is no simple matter. As a friend noted, "in the church, there is no them." The complex concern of the Gospel cannot be summoned by the sort of hats we wear. It is far deeper than that.

The garbage in the theological system is that "it is all about me." We will begin to clean up the theological and cultural mess when theologians can clarify that "its all about us." Perhaps then, and only then, can the theological disciplines begin to shed light on the dilemmas we face as a nation and as a culture.

It it time to take out the theological garbage.

Time It Was

My brother Michael and I have been talking about the old days. "Old when you gain as much pleasure from memory as from prospect," an old friend once told me. (He also said, "Old is when physicians become impotent.") I am not one who subscribes to Old in religion as an unquestioned virtue, as in "Gimme That Old Time Religion." But there is something to be said about having a firm grasp on the journey. Michael and I had a seminal conversation last Sunday evening as we remembered the year 1969. The first astronauts landed on the moon in July of that year. Woodstock happened. For me, a peraonsl event involved the March on Washington, when hundreds of thousands expressed themselves against the war in Vietnam. I shudder when I think back on those days, when one generation was willing to sacrifice the manhood of another, seemingly without question. It turns out that Michael and I we had both come to that march by different routes. We did not know the other was there. We marched.

I recall the trip from Northern Lower Michigan to Washington D.C. in Joe Sobel's battered Mercedes Benz. The car was a rolling wreck. Six of us packed on its bench seats. The car had no functioning brakes. As we motored east across the mountains, I can recall being terrified for the entire trip, so terrified that my digestive tract punished me for days to come. We made it there and back, by the grace of God. But the car became a metaphor for me of that moment in our national life. The nation careened ahead with no brakes. Vietnam did, in fact had crashed our armed services. The consequences of the crash still haunt us in the vaunted "all volunteer military."

Each age follows on the foundation of another. When the Greeks translated the Jesus stories, they did so in the familiar Greek. There, the word for time is rendered by two words, chronos and kairos. Chronos attends to marking the passage of time. It is the consciousness of the clock. Listening to the Naval Observatory's exact treatment of time in seconds, minutes, hours and days is the mesmerising sound of chronos. Each tick has its own sameness, but over the short wave it had a peculiar texture. Chronos is hypnotic. When Jesus spoke about time, "the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand," the word is kairos. This is a notion that time is like a vessel, as it fills up with events. This time is shaped by events. Old men talk about kairos. And by the time you reach my age, the impact of events on character becomes ever clearer. We were of a generation on a fools errand, a careening Mercedes, condemned to great suffering among the compliant and among the resistant. Some sacrificed their lives. Others watched as our brothers fell to their deaths. I am still amazed how this shared tragedy created an enmity within a generation. How could that have happened?

1969 was the year that imprinted a generation with conflict. We continue to live the tension between mistaken official world and the truth of our own consciences. The Bush administration's fantasy government is the direct heir to the Vietnam fantasy. When I see the sign, Support our Troops, my visceral response is suspicion. "Support Our Troops lacks context. It is meant only to line up sides in a bitter conflict. Support our troops in Abu Ghraib? Of course not. Support Our Troops is but an introductory phrase. It requires completion. Support our troops, bring them home. The machinery of death rolls on the wheels of Support Our Troops. The focus never seems to wander to those who bear the weight of responsibility.

Truth is that way. It is chronos. It must be talked about and requires stories. How might we learn the empathy that can help us to understand one another? How can we look at Vietnam in wasy that reflect what actually happened to us?

We are again writing the story of a nation at war. How badly we want it to have a happy ending. Yet we pay no attention to the way we have set out to create it. The world tells us that we are again officially misguided. But we are far from any awareness of that ourselves. This is no surprise to Vietnam era folks. But it seems slow to dawn on the body politic.

The time is fulfilled. I do not regret the marches and the Days of Rage. Many will trivialize the resistance born of official treachery. They will speak of hippies and free love and Haight Ashbury. But that will miss the point. The kairos that still shapes us must be understood if we are to avert future Iraq catastrophes. When will we understand that we are together in a car with no brakes. Decades ago over 50,000 of us paid with their lives. Again, a generation is being winnowed with maiming and death. And for what? That is why it is essential that old men talk.

Can the Dream be Silenced?

I am old enough to remember the delivery of the "I Have a Dream" Speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. I am also old enough to recall the backlash from that speech. In those days, Martin Luther King, jr's name was whispered as a rabble rouser, a troublemaker. And while his speeches were broadcast, they spoke of change to come. That change was, at first, mightily resisted. Happily, on this day before Barack Obama is made our President, we can see progress in the fulfillment of that dream.

The Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire invoked God's blessing upon the Inauguration Celebration, last evening. His speech was blacked out, by mistake some say. Whether or not it was an intentional oversight remains to be seen. But that it was not broadcast to the nation is an ugly fact of life. Already, the whispering voices of fear and hate can be heard in the background. (to the eternal shame of the community the leading voices are those of Christians) The whispers seem to have carried the day. It is all very unpleasant.

But the prophets remind us that change is coming. Christians in particular are called to resist legalized mistreatment and to speak out against vigilante violence. Will the dreams of gays and lesbians; bisexuals and transgendered citizens be silenced? If history is any guide, we will look back upon Bishop Robinson's muted prayers straining hard to recall the hate that so permeated this moment. Even as we are being urged to "see ourselves in one another," let us include the nation's GLBT citizens in that invitation.

Clearly, we have a ways to go along the gender road, before we can be said to have arrived. "Now is the time," Martin told us in his dream. "Now is the time" for our GLBT sisters and brothers.

A Prayer for the Nation and Our Next President, Barack Obama

By The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire

Opening Inaugural Event
Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC
January 18, 2009

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

AMEN.

Orwell in Winter

George Orwell's name has been a staple during the past eight years as the language has been twisted into a kind of magician's "sleight of hand." Orwell was a master of the word. There follows a snippett of reflection on the literary giant.

The evening's reading includes two of George Orwell's essays, "Down and Out in Paris," and "The Poor Die." They chronicle a sojourn in Paris shortly after World War I had ended. They are, at once, exotic and familiar. They pull the reader into the situation of the underclasses in postwar France, as if by the lapels. There, to find a world that is at once exotic and painfully familiar. The discovery of it is that poverty is not as awful as one might imagine. The insight is a flash of brilliance. It is simply the way of things. Sickness, on the other hand, is not so easily embraced. The hospital, invented as a refuge for the poor, became a dumping place for those who were unable to summon a physician to their homes. So sickness is poverty's younger sibling. Privation and illness are the constant companions of the poor. To Orwell, they are outrageous intruders.

But Orwellian is not the "end of the world" sort of vision. It is its polar opposite. In a curious way, he is a man of abiding faith. His loathing is a sort of hope. For these are things about which we can do something, were we to focus our attention on them. I admire his rapierlike penetration of the human condition. Like a finely tuned seismograph, he can magnify the most subtle of turnings of the soul. He can evoke in a nod of recognition the web of the human family.

The faithful one requires an Orwell, if for nothing more than a point of departure. His vivid sketche evoke what are our partners in compassion. It is a brilliant light shed on our condition. How contemporaty is the need for an Orwell. In a time when the condition of the poor approaches the great middle classes, increasing numbers of the world's citizens fall into its grip. We need to pay heed.

Reading Orwell is something to do in winter. I wonder what might have happened had his work included Christmas. Divine entry into the human condition is a natural counterpoint to his penetrating vision. Should the vivid chronicle of misery turn an eye to the redemptive power of love, Orwell's gift might have found its completion. As it is, his essays are fragments of reality.

Nonetheless, he shows the way. Would that the heart of love had the power to invite that does Orwell's practiced eye. I have seldom encountered such power to involve me in the situation of complete strangers. An Orwell essay is to literature what a stereoscope is to photography. They are provocative Advent reading.

-December 15-16, 1997

Orwell died on St. Agnes Day, 1950. Maybe it is the spirit of Agnes that inhabits his work. Who knows?

Turkey Day, 2008

National Holidays make me suspicious. It may be something Anglican in me that leads me to approach Thanksgiving and its noble Pilgrims with trepidation. An apocryphal story is told about the Bishop of South Carolina, Fitz Allison. Bishop Allison when confronted with his child dressed as a Pilgrim for the Thanksgiving Pageant is reported to have asked, "Why are you dressed like the enemy?" As a preacher, the annual Community Thanksgiving Commemoration (complete with the mayor's intonation of the presidential proclamation) gave me the creeps.

H. L. Menchen's definition of Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy," takes me to a place I would not rather go either. The problem with Thanksgiving is not gratitude, nor is it the pursuit of happiness. My problem with thanksgiving is empire. It is the same kind of avarice that has transformed Mother's Day from a lament over wholesale destruction in our own Civil War into a Sentimental Hallmark Day. It is that greed that makes of the end of the carnage of World War I in an Armistice into a happy little "support our troops" day. Empire does that. It takes the deeply painful and transforms it into a cartoon that serves its own ends.

Nowhere have I read work as keenly sensitive to the dynamics of American Empire than the new book, The Wordy Shipmates. Sarah Vowell uses Thanksgiving themes to explore what has happened to us in these days since the winter of 1620. She does it with depth and great good humor. What fascinates me most is the intentional meeting of politics and religion in the Pilgrm narrative, manipulating both our politics and our faith. That modern day t. v. evangelists and even Roman Catholics more resemble each other than those long ago renegade protestants is quite astonishing. As the groaning Thanksgiving table invites all to eat too much, the religious fare invites all to talk too much. Vowell's explorations give some important hints about all that religious yammering on the multiplying religious channels. Television, it turns out was not the first of the genre of overheated one way communication in American history. Pious New Englanders had mastered the craft fully three centuries before t. v. showed up. So, if you like to talk back to the one way politics and religion of our day, you'll love a day spent in Vowell's company.

On the subject of Empire, in an accidental juxtaposition of texts, brought unexpected insight during this past week. I had picked up copies of two books in one trip to the library, reading one right after the other, quite by accident. The first was a recent translation into English of Agnes Humbert's well know French Diary, Resistance. In it Humbert chronicled her days in the French resistance. Then she wrote in painful detail about her imprisonment and use as slave laborer in the Third Reich. These descriptions of life in first prisons, then camps were genuinely repulsive. I had thought I would read a book about the glories of a resistance group, successfully subverting its Nazi occupiers. I had no idea that I would be slogging from prison to camp to factory in a dismal tale of unimaginable human misery and degradation. Next on the book pile was My Guantanamo Diary, the story of Mahvish Khan's quest to provide legal representation to detainees housed at Gitmo under our supervision and flag.

My mind went back to an evening with the grandfather of a young German woman of our acquaintance. Sharon and I were visiting the woman's family when it was announced that grandpa was coming over for a chat with the Americans. As we talked, it unfolded that grandpa had spent a good part of World War 2 in a prison camp stateside. I was not sure what to think. Should we ask about it? Should we change the subject. It turned out that grandpa was treated very well in American Custody. He looked back on his imprisonment with fondness, with laughter and with admiration for his captors.

Hearing Khan tell it, a lot has happened in American internment camps in the 60+ years since WW2. The change is not the sort of thing one wants to look squarely in the eye. My little experience peeking inside Nazi interrment camps and then into Gitmo did our Empire no favor. I was astonished to find, in this little informal comparison, that resistance fighters in Nazi Germany, while suffering horribly, held not a candle to the horror inflicted on Gitmo detainees in Kandujar or Abu Ghraib or in the one of many of the Empire's sites of extraordinary rendition sites.

National Holidays make me suspicious because Empire never insists on National Days of Contrition. In the Empire, it is always Easter and never Ash Wednesday. C. S. Lewis described one such haunted land as "always winter, but never Christmas." We are living there on Thanksgiving, 2008.

This holiday, maybe we can be grateful for the distraction of a Detroit Lions game. Otherwise, we could drive ourselves batty in search of the contrition that is required of us. But, please do not blather on about how those Germans did not pay attention to what was happening in the Camps. Pay attention and tell someone you are watching.

What Words Can Make Holy

Ian Stavens wrote the book, "Dictionary Days," several years back. Like Maggie Jackson's book, "Distracted," it illuminates the journey of the spirit at least as brightly as it does its subject. Three points Stavens has made speak directly to the journey of the heart.

Language is not, first of all, about sounds. It is about the spaces between the sounds. What is so disorienting about computer speech is that it has no sense of the spaces. Like a paint by number painting, all the shadings are correct, but the spaces have it wrong. Languages have spaces. The neophyte and the native speaker are distinguished by their use of the spaces. A sentence has insight in relation to the openings it leaves between words. I am thinking that the public discourse in our time is increasingly hot, conducted without spaces. We are willing to sacrifice deep communication because we are worried about being interrupted.

Some clutures have supervisors for their language. Some grammar teachers of my youth tried to do that with English. They failed. English resists hegemony. Our greatest dictionary, the Oxford Etymological Dictionary, in a descriptive document. It tells us what has happened with language. It does not tell how language should be. It may be that the agendas of the language supervisors among the French and the Spanish are responsible for the poverty of expression of their tongues. In comparison, the English language spews out word forms at a riotous rate.

As any comedian knows, words and timing go together. The great punch line is a work of words and of counting. Jack Benny used to wait for a punch line. It was there that the laughing began. Steve Martin's genius was to never get to the punch line. He left us with our own laughs.

It seems to me that theologians can learn a lot from these three approaches to language. Dead faith talks too much. Dead faith is dominated by the agendas of supervisors. Dead faith has no sense of timing. I wonder what life in a congregation might be like were we to give attention to these dynamics of language. I wonder. . .