Cain, Bork, Thomas, Hill--a Plea for Civility!!

Max Lindeman has a good post over at Patheos' Catholic portal about Herman Cain and the concerted effort by some in the conservative media to present media attention to charges of Cain's sexual harassment as "high-tech lynching", ala Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill. This brought to mind a post I did a while back at my old blog site on "the borking of Barack Obama". In that post, which I have reposted below, I try to point out that in order for there to be a common good, people of good will need to be able to recognize errors and distortions by people on "their side", no matter how politically inconvenient it might seem. I repost that blog here in the (vain?) attempt to promote responsible speech on both sides of the aisle. Yes, Cain deserves fairness, but so do the woman who are involved in this sad story. Maybe a bit of historical perspective will help.

The Borking of Barack Obama

In 1987 President Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. The reaction to that pick was so unique and so extreme that a new verb entered the English language—Borking. To this day a true political junky will use that word as shorthand for over the top rhetoric, character assassination and no holds barred political discourse. While the resistance to the pick succeeded in stopping Bork’s nomination it also stained the body politic. Any fair telling of the story acknowledges that the way Judge Bork was treated set a precedent for future Supreme Court nominations that has damaged the common good. I say this as someone who generally leans Left on national politics. To this day I am uncomfortable thinking about Ted Kennedy because I so associate him with his vicious attacks on Bork. I believe that my party, the Democratic Party, hurt not only itself but the good of our country by unleashing a new type of political attack on judicial nominees.

I raise this story now because I feel that the shoe is on the other foot. Now it is the Republican Party that has so demonized and diminished President Obama that they have made genuine compromise with him something to be feared within their party. And yet I still hear Republicans try to claim that the way Obama has been treated is just politics as usual, just the kind of cute rhetoric that all politicians use. They would like to go on as if the last 30 months of verbal assaults against the president has no bearing on their party’s ability to reach a meaningful compromise on the debt crisis. They sound like Democrats in the 1980s trying to live with themselves after the crushing of Robert Bork. They so want to believe that their consciences are clear that they ignore the obvious. After creating a picture of Obama as a socialist, Muslim, terrorist pal, unnatural citizen they would have us believe that this rhetoric has no connection to their unwillingness to compromise in the debt ceiling negotiations. Why can’t they just face the reality that they upped the anty, they pushed the envelope, they went beyond the norm, and now they are living with the consequences.

Here is what I would like to hear, just once, from a Christian conservative Republican—“We went too far. In our zeal to defeat Obama we delegitimized him to a large chunk of our base. We should not have done this. We did to him what Democrats did to Bork. We were wrong and if we are going to work for the common good we have to acknowledge that.”

If I could just hear something like that, instead of what always sounds like minimizing or justifying or excusing away or trying to make moral equivalence, it would be nice, it would be Christian. 

TheCall Detroit and the Muslim Community’s Samuel Rodriguez Problem

Over a month ago I wrote a letter to Samuel Rodriguez that I can only assume will never be answered. In that letter I proposed to him the perfect way to clear up any confusion about the “resignation” from Oak Initiative that I had reported him having made: he could clearly and unequivocally condemn the Oak Initiative’s ongoing demonization of Muslims in connection with their cosponsorship of CallDetroit. I posed this to Rodriguez because Ricky Joyner, the president of the Oak Initiative, was on the record saying that Samuel resigned from Oak not because of disagreement with the Oak Initiative but in order to spend more time editing the Spanish language edition of Charisma magazine. Besides Ricky’s statement, further evidence of Samuel’s ongoing support of the Oak Initiative’s goals was demonstrated by these four facts:

1. The other sponsor with Oak Initiative of CallDetroit, Lou Engle’s organization TheCall, remained a sponsor of Rodriguez’s NHCLC organization.

2. All of Samuel’s videos in support of Oak Initiative remained up at a variety of Ricky Joyner’s sites.

3.  The Oak Initiative’s most well-known board member, Cindy Jacobs, remained a part of Rodriguez’s NHCLC leadership team.

4. Video and audio evidence of Samuel’s own participation in Muslim bigotry had emerged.

Since I sent that letter giving those reasons for why I doubted the sincerity of Samuel’s resignation, as well as the sincerity of his pledge to me that he had nothing to do with the New Apostolic Reformation, more reasons have emerged:

1. Samuel’s brazen participation in Cindy Jacobs’ New Apostolic Reformation internet event “Reformation Day”.  At this event, which featured in addition to Rodriguez and lead NAR apostle Jacobs, C. Peter Wagner himself and Wagner’s right hand man Chuck Pierce, Rodriguez went so far as to call Cindy Jacobs affectionately “Mama Cindy” and embrace the unique theology of the event embodied at its announcement page: "We really believe that recent weather reports of hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes are signs that the earth is groaning for the revelation of the sons of God."

2. Samuel’s failure to heed the call of Faith and Public Life to publicly denounce the anti-Muslim agenda of the Oak Initiative.

3. Samuel’s refusal to speak out about the CallDetroit’s commitment to Oak Initiative and its agenda of anti-Muslim bigotry.

The third point in particular is urgent. With CallDetroit’s 11-11-11 event less than a week away the sizable Muslim community of Detroit is reacting with understandable alarm to those aspects of the rally that have specifically demonized and provoked their community. As was all too predictable, CallDetroit and the Oak Initiative are now trying to deny the all-too-public record of their anti-Muslim bigotry and agenda and portray the Muslim community as paranoid. Into this swamp of lies and extremism, one would expect that if Samuel Rodriguez really meant what he said to me about his opposition to anti-Muslim extremism being the reason for his resignation from the Oak Initiative, then he would seize this moment to explain to the Detroit area media and religious communities that Muslims have every reason to be offended by the Oak Initiative’s agenda in general and its participation in the CallDetroit specifically. But instead of hearing Rodriguez’s clear voice of solidarity with the Muslim community in the face of CallDetroit’s lies and misinformation, we see Rodriguez’s website highlighting its partnership with TheCall and linking NHCLC members to CallDetroit registration.  

What we see, in other words, is that Samuel Rodriguez has not followed through on his commitment to oppose anti-Muslim extremism and remains what he was the day I first confronted him: a man who wraps himself in the language of religious tolerance at one moment and the language of religious intolerance at another. Those who continue to elevate this man are complicit in his hypocrisy and are likely to join the inevitable conservative Christian backlash against Detroit’s Muslims for viewing the Oak Initiative exactly the way the religiously tolerant version of Samuel Rodriguez once did himself.

The Harry Jackson I have Come to Know

It is interesting to see Bishop Harry Jackson slamming President Obama's religious heritage in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The Harry Jackson I know ought to spend a bit more time getting his own house in order. Here are three of the more telling stories running on Bishop Jackson's views about the environment, money and Christian civility.

Harry's attacks on the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) and other groups supporting environmental regulation:

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/10/7/1788/93949

Harry's characterization of progressive evangelicals like Jim Wallis' views of money as "doctrine of devils":

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-king/harry-jackson-jim-wallis_b_1021802.html

CNN report featuring Jackson and his views on preaching about money:

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/01/preachers-confront-the-last-taboo-condemning-greed-amid-great-recession/

EEN's response to attacks like Jackson's:

http://creationcare.org/view.php?id=428

Responding to Bacevich's "History, Hope and Iphones"

The August 12, 2011 issue of Commonweal magazine had as its cover story an extraordinary meditation by my mentor at Boston University, Andrew Bacevich. As much as anything he has written, "Selling Our Souls: Of Idolatry and Iphones" shows Bacevich to be profoundly troubled by the direction of American culture. In fact, his final paragraph leaves no doubt about what he thinks is the state of the modern world:

"Either humankind’s quest for freedom in the here and now, achieved through human effort and ingenuity, represents the ultimate heresy and offense against God—in which case we invite his continuing punishment. Or belief in God’s existence represents the ultimate illusion—in which case the chaos humanity has inflicted on itself as it careens from one dynamo to the next may be merely a foretaste of what is to come."

When I read the article I wondered what the reaction to its bleak tone would be. It didn’t take long to find out. In a subsequent issue Commonweal published an eloquent reply to Bacevich written Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York and an associate professor of theology at Boston College. In addition, Commonweal included a lengthy, candid reply by Bacevich to Imbelli. It is precisely the kind of thoughtful exchange we need more of and in the hope of advancing the conversation still further, I posted the following reflection at Commonweal’s website tonight:

I consider myself fortunate beyond words to have been mentored by Andrew Bacevich when I was a part-time graduate student at Boston University from 1999-2002. The masters I received in international relations was an honor, but the highest honor of my time there was working as Dr. Bacevich’s graduate assistant while he was working on his landmark book American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of American Power. I believe that book, and others by him since, are necessary and urgent correctives to American culture. His 2008 book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism is as genuinely prophetic and insightful a book as has been written in the post Cold War world. Though written before the financial crisis of August 2008, it remains the best explanation for that crisis and the resulting political and economic convulsions that have come in its wake.

Having said all of that, I must agree with what I see as the genuine thrust of Robert Imbelli and ask Dr. Bacevich to consider whether or not his prophetic voice in laying bear American idolatry and America’s all too visible embrace of power at the expense of principle has limited his sense of what God is doing in the global Christian community. In other words, I affirm Bacevich’s insight into the judgment that American culture may be said to be under by God, but I am concerned that he is confusing that judgment with the whole of God’s actions in this time. When he says that Christianity “survives in the so-called West…[only] on the margins, having long since been supplanted by more alluring forces” he is right, but when he equates that with evidence that “the Christian enterprise has failed” I fear he falls into the same American-centric attitude that he so regularly exposes in others.

The Holy Spirit is at work in the Church, a Church far wider and deeper than the cultural calamity that is the American Catholic Church. As he continues to cry out as a voice in the wilderness of America, I hope Dr. Bacevich will see that the Christianity he longs to see here is coming alive in places around the world. I think for instance of the extraordinary witness of Ryan Boyette and the Nuba Mountain Christians in Sudan, whose story Nicholas Kristof so eloquently told in the New York Times last Sunday and continues to tell at his blog. In these people and countless others around the global South we see not  “a path of accommodation and compromise”, but rather the life of a Church that is always “ever young” and coming alive to a “new evangelization”. Its leading edge is not in the so-called West, but where it is flourishing and finding cultural and institutional expression it is anything but a Christianity that “has become largely ornamental”. For those who have eyes to see, stories like Ryan’s are the Church as sacrament, the Church in whom “the crucified and risen Savior has won the victory and led death itself captive.” We can not let the corruption and cowardice of American Christianity blind us to that enduring truth.

Why are the Vatican and Elizabeth Warren Blaming the Banks? Ask Gramm and Schumer

Just a couple weeks ago I posted this quote from Elizabeth Warren on my facebook page: "The people on Wall Street broke this country, and they did it one lousy mortgage at a time. It happened more than three years ago, and there has been no real accountability, and there has been no real effort to fix it.” I was challenged by a friend who claimed that the banking system should not be singled out for the economic collapse. I explained that I agreed there were multiple causes, but that part of the reason I appreciate Warren’s language is that the bank’s role in this has been downplayed, and in fact the bank’s have managed to right their ship with massive taxpayer funding and are now back making enormous profit. In light of all that, I support Warren’s focus on the banks.

I thought of that exchange when I read this portion of the Vatican’s new statement on the global financial crisis that I blogged about last night:

In recent decades, it was the banks that extended credit, which generated money, which in turn sought a further expansion of credit. In this way, the economic system was driven towards an inflationary spiral that inevitably encountered a limit in the risk that credit institutions could accept. They faced the ultimate danger of bankruptcy, with negative consequences for the entire economic and financial system…A liberalist approach, unsympathetic towards public intervention in the markets, chose to allow an important international financial institution to fall into bankruptcy, on the assumption that this would contain the crisis and its effects. Unfortunately, this spawned a widespread lack of confidence and a sudden change in attitudes. Various public interventions of enormous scope (more than 20% of gross national product) were urgently requested in order to stem the negative effects that could have overwhelmed the entire international financial system.

The consequences for the real economy, what with grave difficulties in some sectors – first of all, construction – and wide distribution of unfavourable forecasts, have generated a negative trend in production and international trade with very serious repercussions for employment as well as other effects that have probably not yet had their full impact. The costs are extremely onerous for millions in the developed countries, but also and above all for billions in the developing ones.

The Vatican’s analysis, rooted in over a century of Catholic Social Teaching, was released by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace at a press conference given by the Council’s President, Cardinal Peter Turkson, and its Secretary Bishop Mario Toso.

Before people dismiss Warren and Cardinal Turkson as simplistic, consider the way in which two of America’s leading politicians over the last 20 years, one a Republican and one a Democrat, have operated with regards to banks and the broader financial sector.

First the Republican, former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas:

Back in 1950 in Columbus, Ga., a young nurse working double shifts to support her three children and disabled husband managed to buy a modest bungalow on a street called Dogwood Avenue.

Phil Gramm, the former United States senator, often told that story of how his mother acquired his childhood home. Considered something of a risk, she took out a mortgage with relatively high interest rates that he likened to today’s subprime loans.

A fierce opponent of government intervention in the marketplace, Mr. Gramm, a Republican from Texas, recalled the episode during a 2001 Senate debate over a measure to curb predatory lending. What some view as exploitive, he argued, others see as a gift.

“Some people look at subprime lending and see evil. I look at subprime lending and I see the American dream in action,” he said. “My mother lived it as a result of a finance company making a mortgage loan that a bank would not make.”

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Gramm became the most effective proponent of deregulation in a generation, by dint of his expertise (a Ph.D in economics), free-market ideology, perch on the Senate banking committee and force of personality (a writer in Texas once called him “a snapping turtle”). And in one remarkable stretch from 1999 to 2001, he pushed laws and promoted policies that he says unshackled businesses from needless restraints but his critics charge significantly contributed to the financial crisis that has rattled the nation.

Second, Senator Charles Schumer, New York:

As New York’s senior senator, Schumer has represented lower Manhattan, the Mount Olympus of the nation’s finance sector, since 1999, and has had a say in every major piece of legislation affecting the industry over the past decade, say Senate sources.

Contributions from securities and investment firms to the DSCC nearly tripled during Schumer’s tenure as chairman.

Securities and investment firms gave $5.7 million to the DSCC when it was headed by former Sen. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) in the 2004 election cycle.

These firms gave nearly $15 million last cycle under Schumer’s watch. In 2007 and 2008, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Fortress Investment Group and Citigroup ranked among the DSCC’s top 20 donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Three of those firms, Goldman, JPMorgan and Citigroup, have accepted TARP funds. (From The Hill.)

Over the course of his career, Schumer has raised half a million dollars from Goldman Sachs – and nearly as much from Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase. Between 1989 and 2010, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, Schumer took in nearly $9 million from the entire securities and investment industry, a haul that helped him become one of the most powerful politicians in America, a deep-pocketed kingmaker with unrivalled connections among the wealthiest players on Wall Street.

The seeming contradiction between Schumer’s public posture and his closed-door fundraising efforts had gone little-noticed by the general public before the financial crisis. But when the securities and investment industry was thrust into chaos – and the spotlight – in 2008, Schumer’s Wall Street ties suddenly became a political liability.

After all, Schumer’s biggest donors were the very folks who President Obama would later, in response to public anger, deem “fat cat bankers.” In the years leading up to the crisis, Schumer had been pushed hard to deregulate the financial industry; as the New York Times documented in the wake of the crisis, he had repeatedly protected the industry from oversight and helped companies avoid billions of dollars in taxes and fees. Schumer didn’t turn his back on his allies. He was one of the major drivers behind passage of the $700 billion bank bailout approved by Congress in the midst of the crisis. The bailout, which spawned the conservative Tea Party movement and was hugely unpopular with the left, was a literal lifesaver for the financial services industry. (CBS News story)

The powerful interests that Warren and the Vatican rail against are reflected in the senatorial careers of Gramm and Schumer. The picture of the Senate under a cozy bipartisan agreement to favor the financial sector is confirmed by one of the few Senators honest enough to confront it, Jim Webb the Virginia Democrat.

Webb has pushed for a onetime windfall profits tax on Wall Street's record bonuses..."I couldn't even get a vote," Webb says. "And it wasn't because of the Republicans. I mean they obviously weren't going to vote for it. But I got so much froth from Democrats saying that any vote like that was going to screw up fundraising. People look up say, what's the difference between these two parties? Neither of them is really going to take on Wall Street. If they don't have the guts to take them on, and they've got all these other programs that exclude me, well to hell with them. I'm going to vote for the other people who can at least satisfy me on other issues, like abortion. Screw you guys. I understand that mindset." (Real Clear Politics)

"This is Our City" launches

Hard to find a more encouraging sign of Christian media/community engaging productively with culture than the new "This is Our City" website and project. Under the leadership of Andy Crouch, this work represents Christianity Today's strongest step yet into the wonderful, wacky, dynamic, multicultural, ecumenical world of urban culture. I see it as a perfect compliment to CT's Books & Culture and hope that it does for the profile of urban ministry what Books & Culture has done for Christian academic engagement. Together these two projects show the culture-shaping/engaging/loving vision of CT's editor-in-chief David Neff.

The vision of this new project is summarized at the website like this:

A new generation of Christians believes God calls them to seek shalom in their cities. These Christians are using their gifts and energies in all sectors of public life—commerce, government, technology, the arts, media, and education—to bring systemic renewal to the cultural "upstream" and to bless their neighbors in the process. No longer on the sidelines of influence, emboldened by the belief that Jesus loves cities, they model a distinctly evangelical civic engagement for the 21st century.

This Is Our City, a multiyear project of Christianity Today, seeks to spotlight in reporting, essays, and documentary video how these Christians are responding to their cities' particular challenges with excellence, biblical faith, and hope. The six cities we are profiling differ dramatically from one another in size, economic climate, ethnic and racial composition, and in their history of Christian presence, leadership or abdication, at crucial moments. But they all have stories worth telling. Wherever we live, we can learn something from these cities about faithfulness to our own place.

This is precisely the kind of evangelical engagement with urban life that all of us, whether evangelical or not, should hope to see and stands in sharp contrast to the disturbing vision outlined in the Call Detroit. Where NAR-style dominionism seeks to carry for a vision for urban life explicitly modeled after the Renaissance hating style of the infamous Girolamo Savonarola, ring-leader of the infamous Florentine “Bonfire of the Vanities”, This is Our City explicitly endorses the "common good" and profiles people engaging respectuflly and faithfully in the pluralistic world that defines modern cities like Portland, Oregon. I hope you will check out this great new project and follow it as their coverage expands from Portland and Richmond to Detroit, New York City and more. 

Tony Jones on C. Peter Wagner

Glad to see the Christian leader Tony Jones' blog has a post up about C. Peter Wagner. It is really striking to me how Jones places Wagner's practice of mapping "territorial spirits" all the way back to the 1980s. Given that Wagner left Fuller in 2001, that means that there was over a decade in which one of the leading evangelical seminaries in the world had as one of its lead professors (arguably its most well-known at that time) a man who was pushing what I view as one of the three key novelties of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The more you consider stories like this the more difficult it becomes to condemn those of us who are concerned that NAR beliefs and practices are impacting the mainstream of evangelicalism.

"Wagner was a professor at Fuller when I was a student there.  I never took a class from him, as I am highly dubious of his brand of Christianity, but many of my peers did.  Wagner’s classes were rife with healings (usually leg-lengthenings) and maps showing the “territorial demons” that had carved up Los Angeles County for their dominions.  He played audio tapes in his class that he had recorded during exorcisms." (emphasis in the original)


The comment section on Jones' post is also very interesting to read. One writer defends Wagner saying "I think if you had a personal conversation with Peter Wagner you might find him to be a nice, gentle and warmhearted guy, who also has an intellectual side to his personality.We don’t have to agree with all of his theology, especially his politics, but we love the 'multiple streams' and perspectives that characterize the Body of Christ." In response, the researcher Bruce Wilson replies "The point, for me at least, concerns not Peter Wagner as a personality but, rather, Wagner’s ideas...I grew up in a Christian tradition which emphasized that the message of Jesus, and the way to follow him, was to work for peace. C. Peter Wagner’s sense of Christianity is very, very, different. He seems to view the church at war–both with entire geographic regions (and the people therein, it would seem) and with whole world religious traditions. There is nothing wrong with evangelizing. But there is a difference, I would submit, between evangelizing and the eradication of all competing belief systems."


These are the kinds of exchanges and discussions we need to have if we are going to really come to grips with this key question: Is Wagner's NAR something Christians should view as "just another stream" or is it something to be resisted as a dangerous trend for both the church and state?