Inspired by a True Story

The National Day of Consumption: Black Friday and Our Empty Hearts

Some had been there since 2 a.m. just to make sure their spot was secure.

I picked up this bit of news early this morning in a last week by news report broadcast live from a nearby Toys R Us.

The parking lot at the mall was packed at 6, the reporter chirped. This was going to be a big day.

The day after Thanksgiving, now known as last week by “Black Friday,” has become almost a holiday of its own. It's the day when people all over the country begin to celebrate the coming of Our Lord through an orgy of conspicuous consumption just the way Jesus wants us to.

When a culture rejects its traditional faith, it creates ways to celebrate the values it does embrace. A culture’s celebrations are windows on its heart. “Black Friday” reveals the heart of ours. Unlike Thanksgiving, Easter, or most other holidays that arise from historical or religious events, “Black Friday” is a grassroots thing. It came from the people and their contemporary habits.

Though “Black Friday” doesn’t have roots in any established religious tradition, its observance makes plain the spiritual state of our culture. A secular culture like ours continues to observe religious holidays like Christmas, but replaces their religious meaning. In this case, Christmas has ceased to be about the Incarnation, about the miracle of God made man, and becomes instead about shopping.

The excitement in the reporter’s voice this morning as she described the crowds, the lines waiting to get in and start spending, the expectation of free-flowing cash, was evidence of despair, not joy. In this secular age, the only thing we have left to believe in is the god of commerce, and most of us are only to happy to submit to his cruel demands. Just ask the crowds standing in the dark and the cold.

Without God, many people cannot tell the difference between joy and despair. They mistake the shining neon signs of the mall for true Light. In this secular age, there is more that is black than just this day.

Divorce in the Church: Exploring the Epidemic, Part One

No one denies there's too much divorce in evangelical churches. Few though seem to know exactly what to do about it.

Well, I have a suggestion: let's stop treating people who desire to leave their spouses for no legitimate reason as if what they most need is therapy rather than discipline.

When a man (or woman) in a church body announces his intention to set off down the road to divorce in spite of clear teaching from Scripture, he ought to find it a rocky one. In this case, it is the duty of his Christian family to put up as many obstacles as possible between him and his sinful end. This man should know he is not simply rejecting his wife, but Christ and His church as well. And the church need not make it easy for him.

Divorce is as prevalent in the church as in the world because too often the church has conformed her thinking about this issue to that of the dominant culture. So, when a man announces his intention to divorce, he is seen as someone in great pain. The attitude on the part of many seems simply to say, "Well, they're both hurting right now."

No doubt both are. There is, however, a significant difference. The wife's pain is a result of her husband's sin against her. She is hurting because she is a victim. God's heart breaks for her. He is on her side.

The guy is hurting because God is full of grace and, sometimes, he allows us to suffer great pain in hopes of deterring us from the sin we have planned. The pain suffered by a man who intends to divorce is there for his own good. To soothe it is to fail him.

When the church looks at these situations and pretends God is neutral, we lie. God is not neutral. He is for marriages staying together and for wives not being abandoned. The man who abandons his family takes God as his enemy.

If we truly desire to see the number of divorces in our churches reduced, we must declare this truth in both words and deeds. Any man who, in spite of the counsel of Scripture and the church, pursues a plan to unjustly divorce his wife should be treated as an unbeliever.

That means that he should continue to be welcomed to hear the Word; he should be the object of our friendship. However, he should be excluded from those activities that are the privilege of believers, especially from sharing in the Eucharist.

In the next few days, I will be posting a series of further theological reflections on why the church must take divorce among her people much more seriously. I will also be looking for suggestions on how we might institute this kind of discipline practically. I'm eager to hear your ideas.

Megan Meier and the Law, Civil and Moral

A common theme in the comment threads on the previous Megan Meier posts has been the desire to see legal action taken against the adults who perpetrated this cruel hoax.

While I sympathize with the desire to see these people punished, I don’t think it’s a travesty that they are not liable for legal prosecution.

People do many wicked things. The solution to this problem is not to be forever enacting laws. Too often after a tragedy like this, citizens demand legislatures take action even though any policy change would come only after the fact and would, at most, only serve to make it possible to prosecute those who undertake similar deeds.

With regard to the Meier case, do we really want to enact a law that makes it illegal to create a MySpace page for someone who doesn’t exist? I don’t. Nor do I want to make it illegal to send unkind text messages, or to be online under a name other than the one on your birth certificate.

The solution to human depravity is not always to limit human freedom. The law is limited in its power. It can not prevent evil, and it cannot reform the human heart. I don’t deny that what was done to Megan Meier was evil, but the law is a meager tool. Some wicked acts need to be made illegal because they are inherently heinous and the sacrifice of freedom is worthwhile. Other acts, like creating a false online identity, can be wicked or legitimate, and in light of that ambiguity, we must err on the side of freedom.

The impulse to legislate is particularly strong in a secularized society such as ours. Without a transcendent moral base from which to condemn certain behaviors, we are driven to take refuge in the house of the law. And though it is a necessary house, it is a flimsy one.

What these people did to Megan Meier was inhuman. They should repent now. They should do whatever is in their power to demonstrate their sincere desire to be forgiven. All this, the law cannot compel. We need something more. We need a culture in which life is precious and the weak are protected. We need a coherent morality from which we can name evil when we see it. We need to be able to hold people accountable for breaking more than our civil code. We need to be able to hold them accountable for breaking hearts, and that the law cannot do.

Here's a CNN segment that sums up the story so far:

Serious Comics and Our Times

   

This post last week by S.T. Karnick got me thinking about my summer.

S.T. linked to this article about Milton Caniff, a cartoonist who contributed greatly to advancing the art form. Caniff is particularly well known for his work on newspaper comic strips.

As a child, I read newspaper comic strips regulary, but hadn't paid them much attention in a long while.

Last summer, I was in a position to read our regional newspaper, including the comics, every day. I was amazed to find that some of the old-school, long-form narrative strips were still running.

As a kid, these tales never grabbed my attention, but over the summer, I got hooked on the soap-opera antics of Apartment 3-G and Rex Morgan. Events unfold quickly in those strips. I missed one day of "Apartment 3-G" to find the protagonist, who when I left off was issuing a heartfelt apology, suddenly fighting for his life after having been a victim of a car bombing. Now that's drama!

I was surprised to find these strips' continued presence in the paper. In the days of downloadable iPod video, who still reads these stories that come in puny three-panel installments, I wondered. I found the tiny snippets in which their stories unfold relaxing and a real part of the pleasure of following them. I fear that I am one of the few.

Comics like this, those that try to tell a serious story through months and years of three-panel revelations, seem like a vestige of the past. They don't deliver an instant laugh. Some days they offer no real gratification at all, just explication necessary for understanding what's coming next.

The joy comes in sticking with them. I doubt many people have the tenacity. With the declines in both newspaper circulation and our national attention span, I suspect these strips will soon become a casualty in our ongoing cultural transformation. It will be a sad day when these artists have to stop drawing lines and instead draw the curtain on these archaic but loveable creations.

The Making of a Conservative, Part One: The Dot and The Line

I can see clearly now the trajectory that brought me here. Ever since I can remember, there has been in me a strain of the traditionalist, a penchant for the lasting, a tendency to be, in the emotional and intellectual sense of the word, a conservative.

Even as an elementary student, I didn't know what to do with it. Most of the voices in my life were telling me to pursue a different path. To be conservative, to cling to stuffy old ideas about nobility of character and right action, was so passe. It was obvious I was out of step with my teachers, my schoolmates, my culture.

The struggle shaped me emotionally. By the time I was a teenager, I was trying to deny my inclination. I pretended to be on board with the thinking around me. I was confused. I wouldn't even have been able to tell a traditional or conservative idea from a radical one. I was lost, but not without landmarks to help me plot my whereabouts.

I found my way out eventually. From time to time now, I'm able to look backward and identify some item or object or idea that sustained me, that pointed me where I was meant to go.

Over the weekend, this cartoon came to mind. I loved it when I was a kid. The Line wins the day because, in spite of his misery, he is disciplined, serious, and deliberate. These traits, he finds, allow him to create beauty wherever he goes. In the end, he wins the day over the indulgent, self-involved Squiggle.

For most of my early years, I knew I secretly aspired to be a Line, and even at my most perplexed this simple parable gave me hope.

More on the Megan Meier MySpace Suicide

Tragedy compounds tragedy.

A sentence from this Boston Herald story says everything that needs to be said about how these terrible circumstances have affected this young girl's parents.

"Megan’s parents are now separated and plan to divorce," the story says.

We could have seen it coming. I'm sure trauma of this magnitude is tough on a marriage. Still, I pray, somehow, they will be able to hold it together.

Megan Meier's MySpace Suicide and the Death of the Grown Up

Anthony Bradley links to this astonishing story.

Megan Meier was a thirteen-year-old girl who had struggled with depression and a host of other emotional problems. Through MySpace.com, she met a boy who seemed to like her. They corresponded for a while. Then, one day he was inexplicably cruel to her.

Or maybe he wasn't. See, the boy never existed. His account was created by the parents of another girl who lived down the street from the Meiers. They played the trick because they wanted to know what Megan might have been writing online about their daughter.

These parents' behavior would have been appalling and juvenile and shameful, but not deadly had they not had such dire consequences. After her last MySpace conversation with "Josh", Megan Meier went up to her room and hanged herself in her closet.

Don't believe me? Read the story here.

The terror of this story reveals much about where our culture is. Obviously, no single experience causes a teenage girl to commit suicide. Her parents admit she was troubled. Something had to be going on with her. It's curious that, according to the story, her mother allowed her to enter into the online romance with "Josh". I think most American mothers would have. Allowing your 13-year-old daughter to flirt with boys online is considered normal. The Meiers were probably doing the best they could to follow the culture's parenting advice. The problem is that the culture's parenting advice is awful and this time did unrecoverable damage to a family who believed it.

As for the people who created "Josh"? What can we say? Our consumerist culture has created grown people who remain children, who think like children. They concocted this plot to find out if Meier was writing snide things about their daughter. Rather than rise above this kind of adolescent bickering, they sank into the drama. They aren't that different from many parents. The difference is this time someone paid for their immaturity with her life.

UPDATE: Here's a link to Diana West's new book about the disappearance of the adult from American culture.

Music Lessons

These last few months, I have been trying to teach myself a thing or two about jazz. I've always loved it, but I've been endeavoring to understand why. 

I've discovered there are lots of great old clips of jazz performances on YouTube. Here's one on them.

If any of you have any experience with this kind of music and think you can enlighten me as to what makes it so great, have at it.

Further Down the Rode

I received the following comment tonight in response to this post from a few days ago about Sarah Rode, a young woman currently training in the Marine Corps' officer candidate school. Once a week or so she recounts her experiences in the new WORLD magazine site. 

In the comment thread on my earlier post, Mike wrote:

I found this blog--because as a friend of Sara's I wanted to see her blog with World Magazine. I know for a fact that she has been disappointed by the personal attacks. To suggest she is not being faithful to God's plan by being an officer (which is different from leading them into combat) is ludicrous. Instead of attacking Sara, why not pray for her?

Mike says Sara has been disappointed by "personal attacks". Well, I can only assume he is accusing me of engaging in those attacks. This couldn't be further from the truth. I did, however, do more than "suggest" that she is not being faithful to God's plan for how men and women should behave. I said it clearly.

Apparently, in Mike's eyes, criticizing a woman's choice to undergo marine combat training as being out of line with God's design for women is a "personal attack". I never called this young woman names. I never said she was stupid or evil. Instead, I criticized a choice she has made as being counter to the clear instructions of Scripture. That is what Mike considers a personal attack, simply pointing out how her behavior violates Scriptural norms.

I also fail to see how pointing out that her behavior contradicts scripture is somehow "ludicrous". I can only assume Mike believes that calling something "ludicrous" makes it so, since he offered no other evidence as to why my assertion should qualify under that label.

Sara may never see combat, but from her dispatches it is clear that she is being trained for it. It seems reasonable to assume that if the corps is training her for combat, they believe there is at least some chance she will see it. Reading her reports, it becomes clear the military expects her to suppress her God-given femininity. She is expected to act exactly like her male counterparts. The military has been so influenced by feminist thinking, it refuses to acknowledge that men and women are different. Sara, perhaps from naivete,  seems fine with that.

And that is the crux of the issue. God created us male and female. Sara's reports detail her involvement in a process that demands she disregard that reality and pretend there are no men or women, only marines. She may be willing to do so, but for some of us, that is too tough an order to follow.

TIME Magazine Cheers for More Divorce

A TIME Magazine article out today gives terrible coverage of terrible exegesis featured in an article run by Christianity Today, a magazine with a recent record of terrible decisions.

The TIME article, "An Evangelical Rethink on Divorce" by David Van Biema, recounts the argument of David Instone-Brewer, a British scholar who claims:

for most of 2,000 years Christians have viewed divorce through two scriptural citations. In Matthew, the pharisees ask Christ, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?" Jesus refers to the Old Testament and then replies, "Whoever divorces a wife, except for sexual indecency, commits adultery." The apostle Paul adds in the book First Corinthians that a Christian is "not bound" to a non-Christian spouse who abandons him. Simple, right?

Instone-Brewer radically reinterprets the first passage using, of all things, quotation marks. The Greek of the New Testament didn't always contain them, and scholars agree that sometimes they must be added in to make sense of it. Instone-Brewer, an expert in Jewish thought during Jesus's era, writes that Christ's interlocutors were not asking him whether there was any cause at all for divorce, but whether he supported something called "any-cause" divorce, a term a little bit like "no-fault" that allowed husbands to divorce wives for any reason at all. Instone-Brewer claims Jesus's "no" was a response to this idea, and that his "except for sexual indecency" condition was not a statement of the sole exemption from God's blanket prohibition, but merely Christ's reiteration of one of several divorce permissions in the Old Testament--one he felt the "any-time" advocates had exaggerated. Finally, Instone-Brewer tallies four grounds for divorce he finds affirmed in both Old and New Testaments: adultery, emotional and sexual neglect, abandonment (by anyone) and abuse.

From time to time, we see these kinds of arguments. They focus narrowly on a particular passage and seek to undermine its traditional reading by claiming to have discovered some bit of data the church has historically overlooked. In this case, the church is said to have missed those quotation marks.

What these arguments deny is that with many topics, marriage among them, Scripture paints a broader picture. This argument, for example, fails to encompass passages like Ephesians 5 where Paul tells husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the church. The implication is that husbands may divorce their wives only on the day Christ abandons the Church.

Van Biema's article veers off into some hazy editorializing which, though it proves to be bad journalism, doesn't yield bad insights.

He writes:

Each branch of Christianity deals with divorce in its own way: Catholicism bans it entirely, but many divorced and remarried couples nonetheless find that their conscience permits them to take Communion. Liberal Protestantism accepted divorce some decades ago without much engagement of the scriptural issue. Evangelicals define themselves as being tightly bound by scripture. But besides the humanitarian problem, there are some uncomfortable facts on the ground: The divorce rate among Evangelicals, which first became news after polls released by the Barna Research Group in 2001, has been as high or higher than the national average.

The Evangelical movement has actually made tremendous accommodations given the strictures it lives under. Ministries for the newly divorced are common at megachurches; and on the historically less-rigid Pentecostal side of the spectrum, celebrity preachers Juanita Bynum and Paula White both recently announced their intention to divorce. Most experts interviewed for this story attested that whereas 30 years ago, a pastor might well order a battered woman home to return her husband, that is rare today.

and:

The controversy suggests that even the country's most rule-bound Christians will search for a fresh understanding of scripture when it seems unjust to them.

Van Biema hits again and again in the article his conviction that prohibitions on divorce are "cruel". Here, he points out how many evangelicals will look for a way to justify their own behavior when what they want to do is at odds with scriptural imperatives. He's right about that.

The church is in dire need of a bath. She has conformed herself to the world in ways she cannot even see. The prevelance of divorce among her members is evidence of this. She struggles to listen to two guides, Christ and the World. I think it is obvious which she now finds most persuasive.