News Flash: we follow in our parents’ footsteps, often even in the way we reject our parents.

I really want to read this book: Unser Kampf: 1968—Ein Irritierter Blick Zurück, by German historian Götz Aly, but I can’t access it, because I don’t want to fork over € 40 to buy it from Europe. But it seems to be a particularly juicy book of recent history, one that has triggered quite the brouhaha in Germany (link in German-sorry).

Unser Kampf means “our struggle” and refers to Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf (“my struggle”). The title alone is the first punch: it’s hard for North Americans to understand the feelings such a title can arouse. Germany is a modern liberal democracy, yet one which has made exceptions to freedom of speech in matters of the Nazi past: Mein Kampf is banned; holocaust denial is illegal; the Neo-Nazi party is illegal, and so on.

A major public debate in recent decades has focused on situating the Nazi moment in German History. Put crudely, the question is: was Hitler the exception or the rule? With “our struggle”, (again, which I haven’t yet read), Aly seems to be pushing those buttons and more.

The book is about the “68 Generation,” or those young people involved in revolutionary (leftist) movements of 1968. Aly, as a young man, was a leading participant at the time. Forty years later, as a scholar of the Nazi period, he looks back to his own youth and concludes: we too had totalitarian tendencies.

As the 1968 protests were part political rebellion and part generational struggle between those born before and after World War 2, it is particularly belligerent of Aly to highlight the similarities between the camps. As one reviewer has put it, Aly is far from disinterested here; with many of his fellow 68ers, he’s writing through a bullhorn.

And, writing forty years later, this bullhorn says: the seduction of belonging to mass movements; the thrill of believing that the solution to most of the world’s problems may be at hand; the intoxicating feeling of being on the correct side of progress—all these are shared by both the 68er youth and their Nazi youth parents.

What does all this mean for North America? 1968 here was more fragmented. After Martin Luther King’s murder that spring, all hope for a revolutionary coalition between black and white youth withered away; plus the anti-Vietnam element here drew attention away from a leftist social transformation as envisioned by the Port Huron crowd.

But generational battles are always new, and full of mutual incriminations. It’s tempting to Monday-morning quarterback the mistakes of one’s parents’ youth. It’s a lot harder to admit we were wrong.

Many readers of this blog, I assume, are of student age. We too will one day have to swallow withering critique from our children. Some of it will be ignorant; some of it deserved. How will we face that moment? More importantly, how will we handle the bullhorn of our own youth, as we speak to our own parents?

San Antonio, Texas: The Public Library

Here’s a good time for a book (and what a title): Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America by Gregory Rodriguez.

It's a panoramic history of the 500 years of cross-cultural mingling, encounters, marriages, and quarrels, leading from the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire through to today’s debates about Mexican Americans in the US.

Rodriguez focuses mainly on the emergence of two new peoples—first Mexicans, arising from the conflation of dozens of formerly distinct native tribes under the conquerors’ caste system (along with generous servings of Spanish and African DNA)—and later Mexican Americans, an indefinite but very big subset of the US-American population.

Rodriguez has one overarching goal here: to demonstrate what he calls the mongrel nature of Mexican America—these are children of many nations, created largely by mixed marriages, and held together by family ties, rather than any racial, linguistic, religious, national or social glue.

The Spanish language doesn’t seem to hold after a few generations; race never made sense anyway; the rise of Pentecostalism has brought an end to religious homogeneity among Mexicans and Mexican Americans alike—it’s family relationships that define these millions of Americans.

And as with all extended families, the boundaries are extremely fuzzy. This is mongrel America, and this is the case Rodriguez is brilliantly building: Mexican Americans, by their very mixed nature, have a hugely important gift to give the US at large: the gift of becoming a mixed people.

Mexican American history, he argues, has developed a few tools that could be put to use in overcoming American racial problems. The most basic and radical of these is intermarriage (as distinct from loveless interracial procreation: he’s talking about homes and families). Left unspoken but implied here is the idea that the US at large can become a mongrel people, for whom race is not significant.

What’s not unspoken is Rodriguez’ contempt for Mexican American race-making projects, like Aztlan and Chicanismo. These, he argues, are misguided attempts to pound the square plug of Mexican America into the round hole of the American racial hierarchies. Rodriguez sympathizes with college students looking for their roots, but has no time for Chicano Studies departments, which he calls all range of dismissive names.

What Rodriguez fails to adequately address is classism. Class predates race by millennia, and will probably outlast it, as a means of social status. Strategic marriage-making has been a pastime of parents around the world and for many a generation. Intermarriage may be a means for overcoming race, but it won’t solve our fundamental human problems of human divisiveness.

But this is petty, because Rodriguez isn’t out to solve the world’s problems. He is convincing in his primary goal, and his prose is great. Look up this book if you can. It's worth the time.

[photo credit: flickr user teachandlearn, under a creative commons licence]

In your experience, how real is drunken joy?

[photo credit: flickr user whatdavesees]

Too often as action-minded young Christians, who see a problem and want to immediately solve it, we fail to acknowledge Christ's presence. We rush to shut out the cries.

Wise evangelical leaders, including one of my heroes, Scott Bessenecker (who once again has beat me to the point here), have pointed out the profound spiritual power in solidarity, in grieving with those who are in grief.

“This is not how things are supposed to be” is a refrain I’ve heard from students learning to grieve with the grieving, rather than simply taking the reins and getting busy.

There is truth there: things are indeed not the way God wants the world to be. And furthermore, just as Jesus lingered at his friend’s tomb, weeping even as he knew he was about to raise him from the dead—lingering in grief for this dying world is good.

But, as I’ve just been reminded by Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice in their new book Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing, grief without hope is only part of the Christian story: Things can and must get better. Or, as Katongole and Rice put it, “things are not the way they have to be.”

Not the way they should be … Not the way they have to be. Two slightly different ways of expressing discontent with the world, but two very different solutions. The first expresses grief alone; the second expresses grief informed by hope in God’s restoration.

We ought to welcome the growing evangelical willingness to once again enter the dark corners of the world. But let’s be clear: Grief without hope is easily perverted into catharsis, navel-gazing, and withdrawal.

One of the important findings in the American Religious Identification Survey, which I criticized yesterday for misleadingly counting disgruntled believers as non-religious, is just that: there are in fact many Christian believers who refuse to be counted among the faithful.

They come in two categories:

• Those who claim no religion at all. As I said yesterday, a close reading of lead author Barry Kosmin’s statements hints that in the neighborhood of half of the “nones” may in fact be anti-clerically-minded believers. While the ARIS authors ought to be taken to task for allowing the media to interpret this number as a doubling of unbelievers, we Christians must take this number seriously.
  
  It looks like most of these anti-clerical Christians are by heritage Catholics in the Northeast. Some are lapsed Catholics, and others are merely angry at the Church hierarchy.
  
  There are also a number of active evangelicals who proudly claim no religion, claiming rather to be followers of Christ. A characteristic statement here is: “Christianity is a relationship, not a religion”. I have no idea how ARIS treated these people.
   
• Those who claim to be Christians but claim no relationship with a church. Most of these seem to be people who in previous years claimed ties to a mainline denomination.

My Question, then: why are so many people who are obviously “religious” by any standard definition of the word (in beliefs, associations, and behaviors) reluctant to claim a religion?

[photo: Easter service in Spain by flickr user stvcr, under a creative commons licence]

Above: thousands of students at Urbana 03 considering God's reign in their lives. Below: Communion service at Urbana 06.

The United States is rapidly growing more secular, according to breathless news stories over the last week, reporting on a new study measuring changes in American religious identification over the last decade.

But the actual report is far less impressive, even a little deceptive. The authors have doubled the number of secular Americans by a sleight of hand, and buried the evidence. Let's take a look.

The main story making the news is the American Religious Identification Survey, or ARIS, published by Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar of Trinity College in Connecticut. Kosmin and Keysar report a doubling in the number of “Nones,” or people who claim no religion at all, between 1990 and 2008. This number corresponds with relative declines among Christian denominations, especially Roman Catholics. Relative because, according to the ARIS, all American religious identifications have increased in absolute numbers; the change is in percentage of the population.

Close inspection of the numbers, however, and the story doesn’t hold. As the ARIS itself points out, most of the decline in Christian identification is actually movement from denominational identification toward generic “Christian” identity: people who once called themselves Lutherans, for example, are now calling themselves Christians, with no other modifier. More below.

But much more importantly, as Kosmin said on a radio show in December, "up to 50-60%" of the non-religious people may in fact be "anti-clerical" believers, disgruntled with their church, and who decline to identify as religious. That means over half.

The interview with the Center for Inquiry, a federation of diverse skeptical and secular organizations, came in December, after the data had been tallied, and the money quote is around 20:00. Yet come March, Kosmin's 26-page report makes no mention of this 60%. The category is merely defined as "the non-religious, irreligious and anti-religious bloc."

The actual ARIS question was: “what is your religion, if any?” “Anti-Clerical” Christians, as they are called in the report, include those who may believe, but distrust their local branch of faith, for whatever reasons. These Christians the surveyors conflate with non-religious, irreligious, and anti-religious.

This is dishonest and irresponsible science. By quietly moving hundreds of thousands of Christians into the category of non-religious, Kosmin and Keysar have effectively more than doubled the ranks of unbelievers in America. And since, according to the report's introduction, the US Census bureau incorporates ARIS findings in the Statistical Abstract of the United States, this is dishonest research becoming foundational to public policy.

Combine the ARIS numbers across the board, there has been relatively little numeric change in American faith over the last ten years. What changes have emerged are largely in-house Christian conversations: growing instinctive Christian populist unity and anti-authoritarianism, on the one hand and widespread Catholic anger at Catholic leadership on the other. These trends are not at all surprising to followers of American faith.

They are nevertheless significant, especially because there seems to be a foggy line between believers claiming a generic Christian identity, and those disavowing religion altogether. Both are part of a larger trend of individualism in faith.

But this is not mass conversion to secularism. The study's authors have worked hard to confuse this issue, and most news sources have bought the message at face value.

Why would the authors bury this data? What is the benefit? As usual, it pays to follow the money, and listen to the authors' worldview:

The ARIS survey was released by the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture (ISSSC); Barry Kosmin, is also in charge of the ISSSC. Elsewhere in the Center for Inquiry interview, Kosmin explains what “secular values” means:

“I don’t believe that [religious people believe in progress]. The ultimate place for many in the Judeo-Christian tradition, I assume, is Heaven—which is not here and now. What I’m int…—the secularist is interested in the here and now. It’s a matter of attention deficit. I’ve you’ve got your eye on another place, you’re not the same as a person who’s a hundred percent concerned with what’s happening at this moment.”

Secularism, on the other hand is "about how we learn from others,” while “most religions are about revelation, so you’re not learning from others, you’re learning from an other." Kosmin proceeds to dismiss religious charity as trying to play basketball and tennis at the same time.

A few years ago, Kosmin published an essay entitled The Salience of Secular Values and Scientific Literacy for American Democracy, in which he summarizes his hope:

(...) To achieve a prosperous society and a healthy, participatory democratic order based on secular values.

The only world that is safe for democracy, he argues, is a largely secular one. Religious belief is most compatible with human progress if that belief is lukewarm. This statement and similar help fill in the picture: the motivation here is not hatred, but fear. It's about the very credible fear, given the bloody stories of history, that faith can very easily become a bludgeon for suppressing religious minorities.

And what about the money? ARIS was funded in part by the Posen Foundation, a group that sponsors “educational initiatives on modern Jewish culture and the process of Jewish secularization.” 

I don't want to accuse ARIS of fudging the results to please donors. But it's pretty clear that the researchers share a few core desires with their donors, including seeing democracy made safe for a threatened secular minority.

But back to the "Generic Christian" bit:

It seems to me, speaking as an insider who watches American faith, that the Christian disavowal of religion is a trend in semantics, as opposed to substance. Christians themselves are being a little dishonest here.

Here, for instance, is an ad in an evangelical youth magazine, for a Bible College that “defies religion”.

Or here: proclaiming that “Religion Kills”, a church in Georgia, with a ministry to skaters and punks.

Religion Kills? It's a little disingenuous, because everyone knows that a church is religious. But these people are certainly Christians. They quibble with the term “religion,” but, relative to the parameters of ARIS, they are anything but non-religious.

Similarly, a trend in evangelical life over the last decade has been declining commitment to denominations, in favor of the more generic “Christian” identification.

What would seem to be a move toward Christian unity, however, frustrated the ARIS surveyors, who called it a “tide of preference for self-identification as a plain ‘Christian’”.

In order to try to get some specificity to the answers if an ARIS respondent offers the answer “Christian” or Protestant” there is then a filter question which asks “What denomination is that?” (…) Over time this further probing has been successful in refining the “Protestant” response category. However, it has not succeeded in curbing the tide of preference for self-identification as a plain “Christian,” the numbers of which have doubled since 1990. This trend suggests that among those we categorize as “Other Christian” both personal preferences and collective religious labeling is in flux.

Fewer than 200,000 people favored [the “non-denominational Christian” response] in 1990 but in 2008 it accounts for over eight million Americans. Another notable finding is the rise in the preference to self-identify as “Born Again” or “Evangelical” rather than with any Christian tradition, church or denomination. (ARIS, p. 6)

To wrap up: the authors of this nationally significant, and internationally reported survey have misrepresented important changes in American religious life, and misunderstood others.

The American church is facing great challenges, to be sure, but plummeting rates of belief are not among them. More salient are soaring numbers of disaffected believers, for whom religion is a curse word. Christians who love the church have their work cut out for them: not to defend faith against atheism, but to heal the doubts among believers who've been hurt by other believers.

What is it about basketball that has made it the second-biggest sport in the world? Is it the association with American pop (read: black) culture? Is it its embrace by Communist governments?

Where have you seen basketball’s reach?

This is from rural Poland, courtesy of sxc.hu member mzacha.

It’s early spring in Wisconsin. The forest floor is beginning to show through the snow, and in the cities, the snow is almost entirely gone. Open water is appearing on the lakes. I heard a Sandhill Crane the other day.

Looks like we made it through another long winter. People in mild climates often have a hard time understanding the true spiritual weight of spring in the north. The nearest analogy I can think of is the onset of monsoon rains in the tropics: we’ve survived the harsh season—now comes the time for living.

I love the winter—probably more than most of my friends and neighbors. But in the north, long-term survival hinges on the return of spring. Which means the procession of the earth around the sun. It’s humbling. It’s a memento mori—a reminder of our mortality, our limits.

God has preserved us. Thanks be to God.

As peacekeeping—ever a slippery concept, involving a volatile mix of force, human rights, rule of law, reconciliation and restoration—plays an increasing role in military operations around the world, the role of the chaplain is taking on an external mission.

Chaplains have long had a support role, tending to the spiritual needs of soldiers, but war itself is growing more complicated. As compared with, say, World War 2, today’s soldiers come into much more intimate contact with locals and enemies than in the recent past.

Last month the South African Navy hosted the International Military Chief of Chaplains Conference, with the theme of "The Role of the Chaplain in Reconciliation and Healing in Post-Conflict Reconstruction".

Yale Theology Professor Miroslav Volf gave the keynote address, Agents of Peace in Theaters of War (pdf). The problem is fairly easy to state:

Given the classical account of the purpose of armies, then, it seems that military chaplains, in their official role, cannot be agents of peace. If they have a ministry of reconciliation, it will be an internal one of helping to ease the tensions and conflicts that undoubtedly rage among soldiers in stressful situations, as well as within their individual souls. But externally, military chaplains would either serve the cause of violent injustice or of justice violently enforced.

How, then, can military chaplains have an external operational ministry of reconciliation?

Drawing heavily on a recent doctoral dissertation by Canadian Forces chaplain Major S. K. Moore titled Military Chaplains as Agents of Peace, Volf proceeds to examine why Chaplains are finding themselves thrust forward: they are the military’s top experts at peace and human flourishing.

To the extent that force is insufficient to keep peace in a world in which human rights and democratic ideals matter, and to the extent that religion plays a role in defining peoples’ communal identities and in fomenting conflict, chaplains’ external ministry of reconciliation may be an essential component of the success of an army’s peacekeeping mission.

Acknowledging the potential for contradiction here, as chaplains are by definition close to power, and in particular the power of force, Volf, who has served in the Yugoslavian army (and was subjected to a military trial for espousing faith in an officially atheist force, a story recounted in his newest book, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World), then suggests some parameters:

There seems to be a tension, possibly even a contradiction, between the mission of an army and its chaplains to defend a sovereign state and their mission to keep and make peace. The first is guided by justice, and the second by love. Can we bring these two missions under the same moral umbrella? I think that we can. Here is roughly how.

…

If this relation between defense and reconciliation as well as between justice and love is correct, then it may be possible for an army and its chaplains to maintain a single overarching goal in their dual missions of defending sovereign states and of peacekeeping. That overarching goal is the goal of establishing peace. Is it possible for soldiers and military chaplains to engage all their missions as peacemakers? From the perspective of the Christian faith, this question is the most important one for soldiers and military chaplains to answer.

[photo credit: navy.mil. caption: Religious Program Specialist 3rd Class Thia Pham of Minneapolis, Minn., lights candles prior to the beginning of Catholic Mass aboard USS John F Kennedy]

What does is mean for our faith to acknowledge that vast territories of Christian presence are gone? The Iraqi Church, for instance, 5% of the population a half century ago, is now around 0.5%—and dropping quickly.

Most of this decline has come from persecution. It’s too early to tell in Iraq, but there are other places, Libya, for instance, where the original Christian church is dead. Does it mean that God has grown weary of those believers?

Philip Jenkins, one of my favorite thinkers on the global church, has given a great interview to Christianity Today on the subject of his new book, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died.

From the perspective of missions, here’s the key exchange with CT editor Stan Guthrie:

Why does persecution sometimes strengthen a church and other times wipe it out?

The difference is how far the church establishes itself among the mass of people and doesn't just become the church of a particular segment, a class or ethnic group. In North Africa, it's basically the church of Romans and Latin-speakers, as opposed to the church of peasants, with whom the Romans don't have much connection. When the Romans go, Christianity goes with them.

But Christianity establishes itself very early as a religion of the ordinary, everyday people in Egypt as things get translated into Coptic. As a result, after almost 1,400 years under Muslim rule, there is still a thriving Coptic church that represents [perhaps] 10 percent of the Egyptian people—which I would personally put forward as the greatest example of Christian survival in history.

In other words, missions plays an extremely important role in anchoring the faith. Jenkins is thinking deeply here, and asks us to develop a theology of Church death, to balance our progressive vision of the church’s forever global growth. The point is: churches can die, and a lot has to do with how we love our neighbors, or how deeply we've reached our cultures.

On a side note, the Global Urban Trek's Cairo-Mokattam project works among the Coptic Christians in Egyptian slums. Here's Scott Bessenecker's story My Encounter with Osama.