Random Notes from the Religion Merry-Go-Round

Paul Harvey

The merry-go-round, or the tilt-a-whirl, of American religion keeps going. Just a little taste of it, from today's Times:

An entrepreneur follows in the model of JDate, the Jewish speed dating service, with his version of Muslim Speed-Dating:

At intermission, about half of the participants went to a back room to offer their prayers. A 29-year-old woman named Maria, who works as an art director for a major television channel, went to her parents to complain that some of her “dates” did not know what an art director was. “Some of the men are very removed from this culture, even though they live here,” she said. “I need a drink,” said one exhausted bachelor. He did not mean Kool-Aid.

Every college town (in this one it's Gainesville) is heaven for believers in The Gospel of Anarchy:

Taylor’s noble goal in “The Gospel of Anarchy” is to remind those of us long past our own difficult youths of the grace and beauty to be found even in a “bunch of drunkpunks in the armpit of Florida.

In House of Prayer No. 2, the southern writer Mark Richard goes all Apostle on us:

But maybe darkness is what Richard is after, the necessary prologue to the spiritual awakening that occupies the end of his book. Again, he is laconic about the epiphany; we learn simply that while he is walking alone in the Tennessee woods, he gets “the call to ministry.” After a few thwarted attempts to enroll in a seminary, he stumbles on an unexpected outlet for “this thing that has been placed on” his

heart: his Cajun, lapsed-Catholic mother has joined a black Pentecostal church in his hometown, and they need a new building. Richard finds himself deeply involved in making this a reality, holding regular consultations with the pastor, buying bricks and shingles and tools, ordering food for the convicts doing the construction. His story of how the House of Prayer No. 2 gets built — despite financial obstacles and legal setbacks, and with the help of multiple small miracles along the way — becomes his means of testifying, and it’s a powerful one. When the church is close to completion and the pastor’s elderly mother “lays her hand on your shoulder, and you, at last, are slain in the spirit,” I felt a shiver pass through my body, and suddenly the memoir’s reticence, its desultory movement, its use of second person, revealed their purpose to me. To understand the mystery of faith, you cannot be told it; you must experience it yourself.

And finally, there's a girl in New York City who calls herself a human trampoline, and of course there's a church specializing in the BOD4GOD:

New York may lag behind the rest of the country in the language of evangelical self-help, but when it comes to fitness obsession, surely few cities can touch us. Work out more rigorously, work out more gently; be proud of your body, be ashamed of your body. Whatever the message, New Yorkers have peddled it, consumed it, metabolized it and excreted it a thousand times over.

It’s surprising, then, that so few have thought to merge the discourse of God and the discourse of bod. Linking the two has a number of strategic advantages over the standard “look better in a bikini” sales pitch — most notably the chance for followers to outsource their motivation to a higher power.

It’s also an opportunity for the church to prove its value in something concrete — ounces and pounds — rather than the more intangible calculus of spiritual progress.

Ya'll be careful out there.

Cancer Cannot Kill Doggerel

Paul Harvey

I spent a lot of time growing up waiting in the hospital waiting room. This wasn't because I was ever ill when younger, or because I sustained any injuries more grievous than spraining my ankle about 10,000 times playing basketball for the last 40 years. Rather, my father, a family physician in a small town and one of just two doctors for one entire county in the Oklahoma Panhandle, got called in a lot -- and if my mother wasn't around, the hospital waiting room was my babysitter. For years, I stared down the mysterious hallway which had a sign reading something like (to the best of my recollection) "No One Under 13 admitted," waiting for the day I could walk freely down the ward and glimpse at the effects of the exotic diseases that must be lurking there.

In that waiting area, I read an awful lot of Boy's Life, Highlights, and pretty much the entire corpus (slight exaggeration, but it seems like it) of Reader's Digest, Field and Stream (weird, since I have always hated fishing, and have gone hunting exactly one time in my life), Guideposts, U. S. News and World Report, and other stuff that I can't even remember. Then there were the dermatology medical journals, my favorite since they showed all sorts of gross and disgusting skin diseases. They didn't stock National Geographic, presumably because those pictures of bare-breasted women out somewhere on the African savanna would shock the church ladies.

The waiting area was also replete with all manner of tracts, posters, and various transitory publications featuring a staggering amount of inspirational doggerel. I used to read that stuff (it was at least amusing, more than I could say for Field and Stream), and wonder who exactly it appealed to. But I was just a boy; who was I to say? Time to get back to the daily prescribed Bible reading, and wonder why exactly I was supposed to read the book of Leviticus, rather than (say) the autobiographies of Jerry Kramer and Bart Starr of my football heroes the Green Bay Packers.

Since then, inspirational doggerel has become a mega-industry. In "Doggerel Fails Me," a terrific piece up at Killing the Buddha, Mary Valle takes up a theme recently explored at fuller length in Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Ehrenreich's subtitle overstates the case, as it seems all subtitles of trade and popular non-fiction books (of the "How such and such Changed the World Forever" variety) do nowadays, but I appreciated the takedown of pink ribbon kitsch and feel-good maxims that seem to signify the death of tragedy.

Valle, a participant in a trial for cancer victims, knows whereof she speaks, and concludes that if doggerel of the "cancer cannot" variety helps some people, then fine. But the inspirational poem is a lie, because of course cancer can; it took my father, about as selfless and positive thinking a person as humanly possible to be. I'm still pissed off about that, and thinking about the words I read in that waiting room make me even angrier. I found Valle's conclusion much more potently comforting:

But I backed down from the ledge: people must like “Cancer Cannot” or you wouldn’t see it so much. It was time to do what I had come for. I took a seat and said a prayer for my new friend, and for the parents who donated the Meditation Room and their daughter, and decided that I’d contribute my own book to the Meditation Room collection, seeing as how there was no poetry on the shelf. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson: not a lie in the bunch.

On Illness Stories and Hospital Beds

Art Remillard

I’m blogging from a bed. It's supposed to look like a hospital bed. More on that later. For now, let’s talk about stories.

Whenever I do research, I’m not looking for sources. I’m looking for stories. Sometimes I find fragments of stories in letters and diaries. Other times I find more detailed stories in memoirs and autobiographies. In any case, since I write religious histories, I want stories that convey a certain essence—something that is reflective, insightful, unique, aesthetically compelling—something that gets to the heart of an issue, event, or idea.

But even when I do find that gem of a story, I worry that I’m just not getting everything. Recall Mike Pasquier’s post on this very point as it related to Hurricane Katrina. “The circumstances just seem too aberrant, too disjointed from ordinary time and space, to capture the religious experiences of the moment,” he laments. “Scholars of religious studies, myself included, tend to use phrases like ‘lived religion’ and ‘extraliturgical religion’ to describe religion outside the carefully scripted confines of ‘official religion’ or ‘institutional religion.’ But these categories seem only to get at the before and after the storm; the now remains elusive.”

Stories of the storm, filtered through memory, will always cast a veil of mystery. Is it even possible, I wonder, to find a “now” perspective? Probably not. But illness stories might come close. In At the Will of the Body, medical sociologist Arthur Frank chronicles his journey through two illnesses, a heart attack and cancer. Religion and storytelling play no small role in his account.

Stories we tell ourselves about what is happening to us are dangerous because they are powerful. Stories come to us from many sources: some we seek, many happen without our notice, others impose themselves on our lives. We have to choose carefully which stories to live with, which to use to answer the question of what is happening to us. Jacob’s wrestling became a story I lived with as part of my personal mythology of illness. This is what it is to be ill: to wrestle through the long night, injured, and if you prevail until the sun rises, to receive a blessing. Through Jacob’s story, illness became an adventure.

Frank elaborates on the significance of stories and spirituality in The Wounded Storyteller and The Renewal of Generosity. He emphasizes how a diagnosis wounds both a person's body and identity. Reconstructing both calls for a new story, one that accounts for the illness and all of its implications. Caregivers can play a significant role in this process, if they are truly caregivers. “I reserve the name ‘caregiver’ for the people who are willing to listen to ill persons and respond to their individual experiences,” he explains in At the Will of the Body.

Is Frank’s illness story—and others like it—“now” enough? “Cancer never disappears,” he affirms. Frank will always live with his illness, and tell his illness story. And this story's religious dimension might influence readers too. As Martin Marty put it in his review, “this short work can transform lives or at least ways of thinking about living.”

This brings me to my faux-hospital bed. It’s Relay for Life time at St. Francis University. Students from my “Narrative Medicine” course decided to set up 3 hospital beds, with 3 volunteers acting as cancer patients for 24 hours. Somehow, I ended up being one of the patients. I've assumed the identity of a 40-year-old brain cancer patient. I'm married, with two kids. I’m also angry, depressed, disoriented, and enveloped in pain. My motor skills are such that the “nurses” have to feed me.

So I have a story. It's a story of humility, mainly. I've ceded my freedom to move, sleep, and eat. It's nothing like the real thing, but maybe I'll leave with an improved sense of empathy. After all, throughout the day and night, survivors have stopped to share their illness stories. The depth and detail has been nothing short of astonishing. Every story resonates with spiritual force, causing me to reflect on the limits of life, and the reality of death.

I'm almost finished now. I have crossed over in to another identity, as well as another discipline, and will be resuming "normalcy" soon. I will bring back new insights. In particular, maybe on my next trip to the archives, I'll pay closer attention to stories of illness. They seem to make the “now” a bit less elusive.

Catholic Bishops Assail Health Plan

Paul Harvey

Just a quick addendum to the last post: Some Catholic Bishops Assail Health Plan, New York Times, August 28, answers some of the queries posed previously about the Catholic religious voice in the health care debate. Apparently a fair number of bishops have taken the Protestant conservative line, and the disjuncture between the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and these local voices is a familiar theme in the history of Protestant churches and social issues.

Why Don't Catholic Bishops (and lots of other religious leaders) Care About Healthcare?

Paul Harvey

Of course many do, but not all that effectively or cogently, as Frances Kissling explores in this article. (Update: Maybe more do than I had heard about, as a comment on this post points out; see http://www.usccb.org/healthcare/).

Have I missed something, or has the religious voice been notably muted in discussions of the

moral and financial trainwreck that increasingly looms for our health care system? T. R. Reid spanned the globe to survey health care systems, trying to figure out how and why we're the only place that doesn't guarantee some minimum standard of basic services for everyone (aside from the emergency room, where we all get to pay way more for less); it's coming out as the book The Healing of America. His conclusion: there are lots of ways, privately and publicly organized, to provide basic services for all. France does so through a fee-for-service scheme, and their pro-family maternal/paternal leave policies put ours to shame. Maybe the Family Research Council should send their folks over there to observe and learn.

Update: Apparently the Family Research Council won't be available for this outing, as they are instead organizing do-it-yourself town hall meetings for churches. They have put together a kit for churches, including a handy-dandy "sermon starter" with this suggested opening salvo by the pastor: "This morning I am going to take on a hot topic: the government takeover of health care." I'm glad to see they're going to get pastors to discuss this subject with accuracy and insight from the get-go. The sermon is to include material on how the public would be "compelled" to pay for abortions, even though this is in fact not correct -- "while the bills in Congress allow for coverage of abortions, they do not require taxpayers to finance them." On that government takeover thing -- since Michael Steele of the Republican Party now wants to pass a "Medicare Bill of Rights" even while he leads the party leading the charge against "government-run health care," will the FRC denounce this proposed Republican protection from any change or amendment to this government takeover of health care? Just askin'.

The Washington Post blog On Faith takes up the issue of the religious voice in health care reform, with reflections from multiple religious (and agnostic/atheist) perspectives. It's worthy, albeit frustrating, reading. Their views evidently haven't found their way to many, or any, town halls. Here locally in Christian land, our "debate" has consisted of loud monologues shouted at our House Rep. (Doug Lamborn, a 2nd-term Republican) from agitated citizens there to stop the "Communist" plans of Obama, and shouting down the few who show up at these things to raise any other view for consideration. Lamborn, a strong pro-lifer, feels that the problem of the un- and under-insured, the pre-existing conditions exclusions, and so on, are just figments of the imagination. Once again, "pro-life" stops at the womb. After that, you're on your own, baby.

As for those religious leaders who pronounce about family and morality -- mostly not a word, except to egg on the whoppers about death panels, about how the "uninsured" are all just nice healthy young people who choose not to have insurance, about how "the market" will magically solve everything, and so on. [Kenneth Arrow's classic and famous article on how and why health care systems do not form a "market" apparently has not come to their attention].

On the death panel subject, an authoritative word from Sherwin Nuland, Clinical Professor of Surgery at Yale and a member of Yale's Center for Bioethics: "H.R. 3200 would, for the first time, legislate that the physician receive a fee for these [end-of-life] discussions, making it more likely that they will take place and that they will be of real substance. From these provisions of the bill, the ignorant, the nefarious, and the just plain stupid have extrapolated that the purpose of the periodic consultations is really to determine life or death. . . The entire issue -- or non-issue, which it surely is -- contains the ingredients of travesty unworthy not only of the attention of the bioethics community, but of the general public as well." Yo Sarah Palin, on what planet do you spend most of your time anyway?

My family had this very end-of-life discussion through last summer, and almost exactly a year ago with some incredibly kind and articulate Hospice folks, concerning my father, then dying of cancer. These were some of the most amazing and moving hours of my life. My father was a family practice physician and a wonderfully intelligent, compassionate, and kind Southern Baptist. He also held thoughtful and well-informed conservative political views. I'm sure he would have opposed the present proposals. But, unlike the current shrill propagandists, he made his points with humor and humility derived from 50+ years of practicing medicine. His manner of looking at things often compelled me to change my mind, and I miss his insight into the present debate. I'm also very glad that, at the end of his life, the "government takeover" of health care known as Medicare covered an awful lot of his high-quality care, all done much more efficiently (in terms of transaction costs) than the private insurance system does it. And I know he felt frustrated that his calling of being a family practice doctor increasingly had been relegated to the role of the "gatekeeper," and that medicine increasingly had become a war of attrition between doctors who sought payment for services rendered, and private insurance companies who fought to keep from paying them.

God works in mysterious ways, and for all I know, God isn't necessarily too worried about the bogeyman of "socialized medicine."I'd wager God is much more concerned with our infant mortality rate, our overrun public hospitals, and our 9 million children (and rising) who have no health insurance. Billie Holiday best described our current system of health care rationing: God bless the child that's got his own.

Them thats got shall get
Them thats not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have, papa may have
But God bless the child thats got his own
Thats got his own

God's Stimulus Package

Paul Harvey

Rev. Ike's passing and the financial crash of 2008 notwithstanding, the prosperity gospel rolls along, thanks to the likes of Rev. Kenneth Copeland and numerous others. Laurie Goodstein reports on this American perennial in today's NY Times. The nice conclusion to the piece:

“Any time a worried thought about money pops up in your mind,” Mr. Savelle continued, “the next thing you do is sow”: drop money, like seeds, in “good ground” like the preachers’ ministries. “Stop worrying, start sowing,” he added, his voice rising. “That’s God’s stimulus package for you.” At that, hundreds streamed down the aisles to the stage, laying envelopes, cash and coins on the carpeted steps.

Jon Walton calls the subjects of the piece "spiritual pickpockets." He also, in a separate piece, reports on the role of Kenneth Copeland and numerous other properity preachers in battling health care reform and spreading the urban myths about death panels and the like (something I can confirm after a survey of local AM radio here in the heartland of the libertarian/religious right, where our system of paying more and getting less apparently must be preserved, and the uninsured are the equivalent of the undeserving). That's one way to go viral, I guess. Jon points out the financial stake Copeland et all have in keeping their followers away from quality affordable health care:

But, then again, maybe Copeland’s own personal wealth is dependent on his follower’s bad health. If some of his “financial partners” had the privilege of receiving medical care for their illnesses, maybe they wouldn’t be as quick to put money at Copeland’s altar in hopes of their healing.

Faith Healing, and Failed Healing

PAUL HARVEY

There'll be whole lot of faith healing going on in this blog entry. Recently I was asked to review Heather D. Curtis, Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860-1900, one of the most thoughtful historical explorations of the topic I've seen. A little piece of my review follows:

“How believers should comprehend and cope with pain is a perpetual question in the history of Christianity” (3), Curtis writes in her thoughtfully rendered study of Christianity and divine (or faith) healing through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She argues that divine healers led a substantial body of American Christians away from an older ideal of “sanctified suffering” to a newer notion of “victory over affliction,” by which believers were prepared for “active service” in the world. In this way, “advocates of faith healing endeavored to articulate and embody an alternative devotional ethic that uncoupled the longstanding link between corporeal suffering and spiritual holiness” (5). Rather than endure Job-like suffering, they sought to remake the “meaning and practice of pain” (52). For believers in divine healing, “passivity and physical frailty were symptoms of a disease that needed to be cured, . . . not characteristics of Christian holiness that ought to be cultivated” (16). The obvious gendered conceptions of overcoming “passivity and physical frailty” meant that women were especially prominent in the divine healing movement. . . . .

. . . However unwittingly, divine healers of this era did prepare the way for the contemporary “Word of Faith” movement, the latest iteration of the irrepressible “health and wealth” theology that seems a constant of American evangelical history. Ultimately, showmanship trumped suffering, but also has overshadowed the more serious theology of the healing advocates whom Curtis so usefully documents.

Curtis remains deliberately agnostic on the "reality" of healings, focusing instead on the cultural meanings imparted to them. Shawn Francis Peters takes a different tack in When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law. Peters graciously sent me a copy of his work a few months ago; my apologies for being slow to get to it here. This paragraph from the book's web page covers the basic issues detailed in the work:

When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law is the first book to fully examine the complex web of legal and ethical questions that arise when criminal prosecutions are mounted against parents whose children die as a result of what experts term religion-based medical neglect. Do constitutional protections for religious liberty shield parents who fail to provide adequate medical treatment for their sick children? Are parents likewise shielded by state child-neglect laws that seem to include exemptions for faith healing practices? What purpose do prosecutions serve when it's clear that many deeply religious parents harbor no fear of temporal punishment? Peters devotes special attention to cases involving Christian Science, the source of many religion-based medical neglect deaths, and also considers cases arising from the refusal of Jehovah's Witnesses to allow blood transfusions or inoculations.

Peters documents in excruciating detail the consequences of parental religiously-based refusal of medical care for children, many of whom in this book suffered from curable maladies or relatively minor medical emergencies.

Here are some of Peters's conclusions, from p. 212: "secular political forces, whatever the noble intentions of the individuals who marshal them, still face an awkward task when they endeavor to police religious conduct. . . It is a testament to Americans' longstanding and fierce attachment to the principle of religious liberty that public officials have wielded this police power so infrequently and so reluctantly. Even when it apparently has cost children their lives, prosecutors have been skittish -- sometimes to a fault -- about zealously and consistently applying manslaughter and abuse laws to parents who have spurned medicine for prayer in their treatment of children."

Legislators and judges, too, "have been diffident as well, imposing remarkably lenient sentences on religious parents convicted for their roles in the neglect-related deaths of their children. Their tentativeness, grounded in a sincere desire not to infringe on individuals' First Amendment freedoms, has typfied the overcautiousness evidenced by all three branches of gvernment in dealing with crimes related to prayer-based healing rituals."

Peters concludes by pointing out the complementary aims of religious individuals and the state here: "Neither group wants to see children get hurt." Yet religious individuals face the dilemma of reconciling "their devotion to God with their duties as citizens"; in these cases, sacred and secular responsibilities conflict in dramatic ways, and in ways that the faith healers discussed in Curtis's text well understood. As John Alexander Dowie expressed it, faith healing believers "are Christians first, citizens afterward."