From the Minister

A Plague on Both Your Houses

This is from my colleague, Randy Becker. He is a minister at the Unitarian Universalist Community Church in Park Forest, Illinois. I did my field education at the church, which is just 50 yards inside Will County at the southern edge of Cook County.

When I pointed out to Randy that indeed, the world did revolve around the middle east, he replied, "As long as we focus on the 'energy' which is there in the middle east we may not be able to see the multiple alternatives which exist elsewhere."

********

I am upset.

I am upset how the belligerence of a region, fueled by millennia of injustices, tries to co-opt my energies, the energies of my nation, and the energies of the world.

The entire Semitic world, Arab and Jew alike, have long fashioned identities of victimhood as a means for attracting energy from other sources. In defining themselves as the divinely ordained but humanly deprived people of the earth, they manipulate others into patterns of allegiance and support. All sides in the middle east are also adept at using guilt ("Give guilt--the gift that keeps on giving!") to recruit others to acts of passion beyond any rationality. In the course of those millennia, such an identity has evolved into an almost manic dependency on the attention of others.

But then, we all play the game. We feel sorry for the poor, set-upon ________s (fill in the blank with your chosen identified group in the conflict) and vilify the "others." In doing so, we fall right into line with the attention/energy needs of these now heavily dependent groups. They wink, they flinch, they kidnap, they retaliate, they re-retaliate . . . and we energize the lot by keeping alive their dependence and their victimhood.

What if we were to say, "No more," and mean no more of this game playing? What if we were to see these nations and groups behaving like the worst of elementary school children ("I'll get you for that!" "If one of your group does that, you all are going to suffer!") and not do anything?

What if we chose a course of denying them the energy to keep this foolishness going?

What if we provided no financial support? No resolutions of support? No big attention to their bickering?

What if, instead of focusing on two soldiers (people already committed by their roles to acts of violence) who are kidnapped or on the dozens of civilians who are being injured or killed in retaliations, we were to focus on the thousands of children worldwide who will die today because of preventable hunger and disease?

What if we let two wannabe bullies in the middle east fight it out while we get on with the more important business of the world?

Hey, middle east - the world does not revolve around you! Maybe if we got over it, they could get over it.

Or, at least, it wouldn't be our energy (money, goods, commerce, psychic, spiritual, attention) fueling the conflict.

Vice or Virtue? You Decide.

This is from the Chicago Tribune. I'd be interested in reading your opinion. Send it to minister@uuc.org.

Vice or Virtue?
by Lisa Anderson

"Regrets, I've had a few," crooned Frank Sinatra in his signature, taking-stock-of-life ballad, My Way. He didn't give details, but new research indicates that, over time, one is likelier to have greater regrets about choosing virtue than lingering guilt over indulging vice.

Yes, you read that correctly.

In the short term, vice is regretted more than virtue. But in the long run, people tend less to regret guilty pleasures taken than those virtuously forsaken, according to a study of Americans by Ran Kivetz, an associate professor of business, and doctoral candidate Anat Keinan , both at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business.

"We really do believe that in day-to-day self-control dilemmas, people are better off choosing to indulge," said Kivetz, who has researched attitudes toward vice and virtue for a decade.

Doubtless appalling to some and delightful to others, the findings may have particular resonance for Baby Boomers, the first of whom turned 60 this year, an age at which some begin assessing their lives.

Slated for publication in the September issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, "Repenting Hyperopia: An Analysis of Self-Control Regrets" is among the first research papers to compare "indulgence regret" with "self-control regret," according to its authors.

They write, "While yielding to temptation can certainly be harmful, this article argues that over-control and excessive farsightedness [hyperopia] can also have negative long-term consequences."

They are not talking about the Seven Deadly Sins, Kivetz said. "There are catastrophic self-control failures. We're not talking about them. Such as, you drive recklessly if you're late or you drink if you know you're an alcoholic or eating that chocolate cake if you know that you're obese. Those are cases where indulging may have a catastrophic outcome," Kivetz said.

"Most of our decisions in life, on a day-to-day level, are not these kinds of decisions," he said, but rather self-control dilemmas in which the "right" answer is not always clear— such as working versus going to the movies, eating chocolate cake versus fruit salad or taking a vacation versus saving money.

The paper presents three different studies with three different groups of American participants. In the first, people were asked to recall regrets about work versus pleasure. The second examines regrets experienced by university students about recent and past winter breaks, and regrets by alumni from the same school reflecting on a winter break 40 years ago. In the final study, participants had to imagine choosing between a three-layer chocolate cake and a low-calorie fruit salad and to describe what they thought they would feel about their choice one day or 10 years into the future.

Results in all three cases, the paper said, "indicate that consumers repent hyperopia in the long-run, when the effect of indulgence guilt is diminished and feelings of missing out on the pleasures of life are stronger."

Peter Whybrow, a psychiatrist and director of the Jane and Terry Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, considers Kivetz's conclusions too broad and his treatment of the consequences of over-indulgence too narrow, particularly in a society where self-interest tips the scales.

"The real problem we have to understand socially and economically is: How does one manage in a society where there is extraordinary choice and the natural inclination of the individual is to the hedonistic," said Whybrow, who examined American materialism and over-consumption in his 2005 book, "American Mania: When More Is Not Enough."

Kivetz argues that the over-emphasis on virtue and prudence in American culture contributes to the impulse toward over-indulgence.

"I'm not saying, 'OK, be decadent' … but balance is important," he said. "I think people should strive to have a little more balance, and balance also means enjoying life more."

The sense of missing out can be powerful both as an engine for regret and a tool for marketing, said Richard Feinberg, a professor of consumer science and retailing and the director of the Center for Customer-Driven Quality at Indiana's Purdue University.

"I think it speaks very directly to the issue of guilt. I'll give you an example. I like the Tour de France. Trek Bicycles has a contest and you can win stuff. I have a very old bicycle, so I've been playing their game," said Feinberg, 56, who won a power bar and a key chain.

"I went to collect my bounty, and there was a $700 Trek bicycle that was calling my name," he said, noting he can afford the bike but would hesitate about telling his wife that he bought it. "I'm guilty about paying the price, about knowing how hard I work for the money we have, about how much she wants to fix the house and the vacation we didn't take this year because we're saving money for something else."

However, he said, there might have been a different outcome had the sales clerk been equipped with Kivetz's research.

"I think what the salesperson could have said to me is that it may seem like a lot of money now, but, three years from now, all the things you'll be able to do with this bicycle will outweigh the price. I might have said OK.

"Instead, what did the salesperson say? 'Here's a Trek bike for $700. Isn't it pretty,'" he said.

Of course, the ideal situation is one in which a person can indulge a relative vice as a reward for choosing a relative virtue.

That's where Kivetz's research has helped Ron Gonen, chief executive of Philadelphia's RecycleBank, which rewards households for the amount of plastic, paper, glass, metal and other waste they recycle with "dollars" to redeem at participating stores ranging from Starbuck's to ShopRite.

RecycleBank, 10 percent of which is owned by Columbia University, sought more effective incentives for people to recycle, said Gonen, 31. He said Kivetz suggested they also offer more indulgent prizes, such as iPods. Kivetz's research indicated that even if certain people can afford an iPod, they feel guilty about buying one outright. However, rich or poor, people feel differently if they "earn" it through hard work or by doing something virtuous.

"It's more OK with the person's conscience because they say, 'Hey, I deserve it because I did something good,'" said Gonen, who is implementing the new incentive strategy.

Judy Sierant, a production editor for a trade journal, said she can attest that choosing to "do the right thing" instead of choosing the more pleasurable alternative sometimes can leave a lingering sense of missing out in life.

"The main regret I have is that I never really went into a career I wanted. I always wanted to be an archeologist. But my parents talked me out of it because they said it was a rich man's hobby and I'd never be able to make a living. So, I do regret that," said Sierant, 53, with a rueful smile.

Guido Alvarez was not surprised by Kivetz's conclusions. As for regrets, at 83, the retired crystal and china wholesaler said, "If I have some, I don't remember."

Smoking a cigar in a Manhattan park on a recent afternoon, the silver-haired Cuban-American said what he does remember—and what he emphatically doesn't regret—is investing in all the wonderful trips he took over the years with his wife, who worked for American Airlines.

"Now, people are saving everything for when they retire. But, they don't realize that when they retire they can't do all the things that they want. You get old. You can't eat," he said, ticking off a litany of age-related infirmities.

"What I did, no one can take away from me. I did it at the right time and at the right moment," he said, with a broad grin. "Like Frank Sinatra, I did it my way."

Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune

Rating: PG

Here's the latest evidence that an all-or-nothing approach will divide your constiuentcy:

Parental Guidance in Matters of Faith
by James L. Evans

In the latest clash between fundamentalist Christianity and the rest of the world, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) recently assigned a PG rating to an explicitly Christian film. The movie, Facing the Giants, is the story of a football team with a losing record that suddenly gets turned around and starts winning when the coach finds God.

Even though it's a low-budget movie, produced for a mere $100,000, the film may find its way to a national audience. The producer needed to secure permission from Sony to use a Christian song as part of the theme music for the film. Sony indicated they wanted to see the movie first. After viewing the film, Sony agreed to distribute it in 400 theatres.

That's when the MPAA got involved, and that's when the fight broke out.

Don Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association, attacked the rating as a direct assault on the faith. Wildmon's group distributed an e-message under the headline, "MPAA places Christianity in same category as sex, violence, profanity." In this message, Wildmon accuses the MPAA of telling parents that the film is "objectionable."

Unfortunately, that's not the truth. The PG rating is designed to alert parents that certain themes or ideas may not be appropriate for children. It says nothing about teenagers over the age of thirteen (presumably a target audience for a film about high school football!). All the PG rating does is say to parents, "You might want to look at this before allowing your child to view it."

Isn't that what Christian groups are always telling parents to do? In fact, isn't that precisely what the American Family Association does every week with their bulletins about what's objectionable on television? The PG rating is not an indictment of Christianity. It is merely a flag for parents to be sure they know what's going on.

Of course, maybe Wildmon and his ilk expect us to accept anything with the label Christian on it without question. But if that's what they think, they're living in a fantasy world. I would not let my children attend a Bible school at a neighboring church without first finding out something about the church, and my guess is that most conscientious parents are the same way. Just because the package says Christian on the outside doesn't mean Jesus is on the inside.

This is not to say that Facing the Giants is not a faithful rendering of a Christian story. It may be. But alerting parents that a movie has a strong religious theme -- from any religion whatsoever -- is not an attack on faith.

We are left with two conclusions about this matter. First, it appears that a certain segment of Christianity in America has a big chip on its shoulder. Any sort of slight, any questioning of the faith -- or, in this case, any suggestion that parents should guide their children in matters of faith -- and the fight is on.

The other conclusion is more disturbing. It would seem that watchdog groups like Wildmon's American Family Association are capable of twisting even the most inconsequential issue into a national emergency. If they are doing this just to keep their base agitated for the purpose of raising money, then it reflects a level of cynicism that even the most hard-boiled politician does not practice.

This kind of thing makes me want to give the AFA a PG rating, or worse.

James L. Evans is pastor of Auburn First Baptist Church, Auburn, Alabama. He can be reached at .

Coulter-Itis

Here's a couple of articles that I thought you should see:

The Coulter Code
by Jerome Eric Copulsky

Ann Coulter has been much in the news lately. With her recent best-selling tome, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, it seems that the notorious bomb-throwing cover girl for conservatism has turned Grand Inquisitor. The subject matter of her book -- the idea that liberalism is a religion -- merits a sighting here, and not only because it demonstrates the increasingly "religiosecular" ambivalence of our world that Martin E. Marty wrote of two weeks ago ("Religiosecular Meditations," June 19).

"Liberalism," Coulter informs us, is a "church," complete with its own creation myth (Darwinism), priests (public school teachers), doctrines (infallibility of victims), sacraments (abortion), and so forth. Coulter's liberals subscribe to a pantheistic doctrine, renouncing the biblical distinction between human beings (made in the image of God) and the rest of creation, thus rendering biblical morality impossible -- which, she claims, is the liberals' true goal. Tossing aside any pretense to Christian charity, Coulter darkly warns that liberals (or Democrats, which are, for Coulter, one and the same) are Pagans (of the Druid denomination), science-hating Darwinists, and tree-hugging supporters of PETA, intent on killing their babies and their grandparents. Some of her invective, like proclaiming that Democrats make up "the opposition party to God," might make even a Carl Schmitt blush!

A stalwart defender of what she takes to be the Christian faith, Coulter emphatically denies the possibility of any liberal rapprochement with Christianity. Moreover, liberals are theo-political heretics, enemies of the state, "deny[ing] the biblical idea of dominion and progress, the most ringing affirmation of which is the United States of America." (Such statements, of course, raise serious questions concerning Coulter's understanding of orthodox Christian doctrine.) In Coulter's world, it is really the liberal pagans who cause all the trouble ("somehow it's always the godless doing the genocides"), while devout Christians are peaceful, moral, law-abiding folks. (Coulter conveniently omits the gloomy fact that Christians have managed to slaughter many other Christians and non-Christians well into modern times. Her memory returns, however, to attack "crazy Muslims.")

Coulter's inflammatory rhetoric, proclivity for constructing straw men, and reliance on specious and ad hominem argumentation obscures the fact that her convictions aren't new. In a sense, Coulter is merely reiterating the perennial quarrel between Reason and Revelation, Athens and Jerusalem, Enlightenment and faith -- but here in the age of mass media, and for big bucks. Given that the argument of the book is so derivative and so littered with malicious half-truths and insipid humor, the book's popularity might seem perplexing.

But then I considered the book's cover. The dust jacket of Godless features Coulter in a black dress with a plummeting neckline, sporting an apparently diamond-encrusted cross that dangles above the shadowy suggestion of cleavage. (One wonders whether the diamonds represent the indestructibility or the riches of her Church.) Her arm presses upon the final letters of the book's title, "less," as through she might crush them, a one-woman suppressor of the atheistic horde. She gazes at the viewer, wearing a sly half-smile reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa -- an impression further enhanced by the resemblance in pose and garb.

Ah-ha! I thought. This is no mere accident. Perhaps her book conceals a secret teaching, one more shocking than those encountered in a Dan Brown novel, and so inimical to the faithful that it could only be conveyed in winks and nods. Given the American obsession with codes and hidden meanings, I speculated that when Coulter writes of what "all liberals secretly believe," she just may well be hinting to the discerning reader that there is more to her text than what's on the surface.

As one who has studied with people who studied under Leo Strauss, and attuned to the art of esoteric writing, I searched. And I searched. And then I noticed, buried in a footnote, a "clue" to the entire work: Christians," Coulter writes, "include everyone who subscribes to the Bible of the God of Abraham, including Jews and others." How very gracious of her! But there is a catch: These "Christians" may not include members of the Episcopalian Church -- which, she writes a few pages later, "is barely even a church." Hmm.

Why does she go after the Episcopalian Church (aside, perhaps, from the fact that arch-liberal Howard Dean used to be a member)? Here's one conjecture arising from my esoteric reading. The Episcopalian Church developed from the Church of England -- an established Church, a state religion. Is Coulter, then, launching a cryptic attack on the unity of church and state? Given this, as well as her dismissal of the substance of theological differences (effacing, for instance, distinctions between Christians and Jews), and her claim that true Christians are peaceful and patriotic, one might think she is implicitly invoking the ideas propounded by the theological-political treatises of the seventeenth century, ideas like toleration and separation of religious and political authority -- you know, Liberal ideas.

This esoteric reading of Godless is, of course, preposterous, but no more so, in my opinion, than the book's actual argumentation -- and that's the point. I'm afraid that the big secret revealed in Godless is that when it comes to the depths and complexities of actual religion, Ann Coulter doesn't know what she's talking about.

Jerome Eric Copulsky is Assistant Professor and Director of Judaic Studies at Virginia Tech.

Jesusless: The Church of Conservatism
by Robert S. McElvaine

In Godless, her latest and most ill-tempered book-length rant, Ann Coulter asserts that liberalism is a "godless" religion. In fact, however, the most fundamental problem in Christianity in America and the world today is that the "fundamentalist" religion that most loudly proclaims itself to be "Christian" is Jesusless.

Coulter demonstrates how Jesusless she and her cohort who have co-opted the name of Christianity are when she identifies "Americans' Christian destiny" as "jet skis, steak on the electric grill, hot showers, and night skiing." For some reason, she fails to cite her source in the Gospels for her definition of Christian destiny, which amounts to: Jesus died for our jet skis.

Read the Gospels from beginning to end and nowhere will you find Jesus suggesting anything like what Coulter sees as the destiny of Christians. Quite the contrary. Indeed, there is no source in anything Jesus said for most of what the best-known "Christians" preach in his name these days. While Coulter fumes that "liberalism is the opposition party to God," the clear truth is that what passes for "Christianity" today is the opposition party to Jesus. She attacks "the liberal hostility to God-based religions" while exposing her own hostility to Jesus-based religion.

As has been widely reported, Coulter offers "Christian" sentiments about widows of 9/11 victims who are not on her side politically: "These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis," the millionaire TV celebrity and right-wing lioness Coulter hisses. "I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much." If Jesus had remained in his grave, surely he would be spinning in it to hear such evil venom being spit out in his name.

"Christians" of the sort who buy Coulter's books call themselves "fundamentalists," but their emphasis is entirely upon the word's first syllable; they're all about having fun. But when it comes to the fundamental teachings of Jesus, they take a pass. Turn the other cheek? Self-sacrifice? Help the poor? Nonviolence? That stuff's too hard. They replace the Gospel accounts of what Jesus said with the Gospel according to John and Paul (Lennon and McCartney, that is): "Give me money / That's what I want."

The Church of Coulter -- and that of the loudest "Christians" today -- should be called what it plainly is: Jesusless: The Church of Mammon. Coulter makes millions by calling others treasonous and Godless and saying, "We should invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Conversion should start at home, and Coulter first needs to convert herself from Mammonism to Christianity.

Like many others in the increasingly dominant and totally misnamed "Christian Right," Coulter has a persecution complex. Upon the publication of Godless, she used her syndicated column to write a self-review of her book, saying it would be ignored: "If you find Godless without asking for assistance, it's considered a minor miracle." This from a woman whose new Jesusless book was at that very moment rising to Number 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list. (That such a patently anti-Jesus book could become the best-selling book in America tells us just how far removed from being followers of Christ most of today's self-proclaimed Christians are.) She's lamenting all the way to the bank, her house of worship.

In my opinion, those who complain about a "War on Christianity" are right. The generals conducting that war include, in addition to Kill-a-Muslim-for-Christ Coulter, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, James Dobson, and the whole Unheavenly Host of televangelists and megachurch moneychangers and wolves in sheep's clothing who have expropriated the moral assets of Jesus and turned them to their own purposes. They never met a dollar they didn't like. They prefer profits to prophecy and pretend that Jesus did, too. They favor the rich over the poor and invert Jesus to contend that he did, too. They favor war over peace and lie by saying that Jesus did, too.

Coulter and millions of her fellow adherents to ChristianityLite -- a "religion" that is the equivalent of a "Lose weight without diet or exercise" scam ("Easy Jesus! Be saved without sacrifice or good works!") -- have aborted Jesus and rewritten his teachings to suit their own selfish desires. Their revision of the Beatitudes -- what we might call the Be-Ann-itudes -- goes something like this:

Blessed are the haughty in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who exult over others, for they shall be further rewarded.
Blessed are the arrogant, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for domination, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are those who show no mercy, for they shall obtain the wealth of others.
Blessed are the hard in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the war-makers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who persecute for their own sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when you revile others and persecute others and utter all sorts of evil against them falsely on my account.

Onward Jesusless "Christian" soldiers, marching others into war.

Robert S. McElvaine teaches history at Millsaps College and is the author of Eve's Seed (McGraw-Hill). He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Christianity Lite: Getting to Heaven without the Hassle.