Brian McLaren on The Da Vinci Code (Part 2)

Lisa Ann Cockrel: So you think The Da Vinci Code taps into dissatisfaction with Jesus as we know him?

McLaren: For all the flaws of Brown's book, I think what he's doing is suggesting that the dominant religious institutions have created their own caricature of Jesus. And I think people have a sense that that's true. It's my honest feeling that anyone trying to share their faith in America today has to realize that the Religious Right has polluted the air. The name "Jesus" and the word "Christianity" are associated with something judgmental, hostile, hypocritical, angry, negative, defensive, anti-homosexual, etc. Many of our churches, even though they feel they represent the truth, actually are upholding something that's distorted and false.

I also think that the whole issue of male domination is huge and that Brown's suggestion that the real Jesus was not as misogynist or anti-woman as the Christian religion often has been is very attractive. Brown's book is about exposing hypocrisy and cover-up in organized religion, and it is exposing organized religion's grasping for power. Again, there's something in that that people resonate with in the age of pedophilia scandals, televangelists, and religious political alliances. As a follower of Jesus I resonate with their concerns as well.

Brian McLaren on The Da Vinci Code (Part 1)

Lisa Ann Cockrel: What do you think the popularity of The Da Vinci Code reveals about pop culture attitudes toward Christianity and the church?

Brian McLaren: I think a lot of people have read the book, not just as a popular page-turner but also as an experience in shared frustration with status-quo, male-dominated, power-oriented, cover-up-prone organized Christian religion. We need to ask ourselves why the vision of Jesus hinted at in Dan Brown's book is more interesting, attractive, and intriguing to these people than the standard vision of Jesus they hear about in church. Why would so many people be disappointed to find that Brown's version of Jesus has been largely discredited as fanciful and inaccurate, leaving only the church's conventional version? Is it possible that, even though Brown's fictional version misleads in many ways, it at least serves to open up the possibility that the church's conventional version of Jesus may not do him justice?

War in the Middle East

by Jim Rice

The violence of Hezbollah and Hamas should be unequivocally condemned and opposed. It cannot be ignored or underestimated that the two terrorist organizations have as their goal the eradication of Israel. However, much U.S. media coverage of this new Middle East war paints a misleading picture of a tit-for-tat equivalency between the two sides: Hezbollah explodes a bomb in Israel, Israel responds in kind. While their intentions are indeed malevolent, the two terrorist groups have nowhere near the military capability of Israel, which wields one of the most powerful military forces in the world (with the aid, of course, of more than $3 billion per year from the United States). The death toll in Lebanon in the first six days of the war has been tenfold that in Israel - according to The New York Times, 310 people, most of them civilians, have died in Lebanon while Israel has suffered 27 casualties, 15 of them civilians, since Israel began its attacks. (Similarly, 4,064 Palestinians and 1,084 Israelis have been killed since Sept. 29, 2000, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society and the Israel Defense Forces, respectively.)

One of the most difficult aspects of trying to be a peacemaker in the Middle East context is the "separation wall" of understanding between the two peoples. The very definition of what is happening is understood in vastly different ways by the two sides. Supporters of Israel see the country attacked by its sworn enemies, and see in its response a necessary and justified act of national self-defense. Others see the region's most powerful military force (supported by the world's most powerful military force) illegally occupying Palestinian land and engaging in massive, disproportionate attacks on innocent civilians.

As Christians committed to the cause of peace, our role is not to "take sides" in the struggle, in the traditional sense, but rather to constantly stand for the "side" of a just and secure peace. We can ignore neither the horror of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians (including direct attacks on school children) nor the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories (with all its "collateral damage" to Palestinian children). We must have the vision and courage to stand against the acts of violence by terrorist organizations, as well as the massive state violence by the region's military superpower, while avoiding the trap of positing a false "equivalency" between actions that are not equal.

We cannot allow ourselves to be paralyzed by the political, strategic, and moral complexity of the situation to stand back and do nothing. A first step toward a more comprehensive resolution is an immediate operational cease-fire. But that must be followed by a new way of thinking because, as a U.N. official put it yesterday, "The Middle East is littered with the results of people believing there are military solutions to political problems in the region."

America's Hammer Habit

by Jim Wallis

The best line I heard in the period leading up to the war in Iraq was, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." It was quoted by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, when we were on a panel together in England about the best response to terrorism.

The premise of the panel was that the threat of terrorism is real, that there are real dangers prowling about in our world, and that the problem of evil is a very serious one. The question we were addressing was what the best response to real threats should be.

I now call this the American hammer habit. If we don't know how to solve a problem, we just fight. Diplomacy has become a weak word to those who run our foreign policy and, in the House debate on Iraq in June, Republicans made numerous references to those who are "afraid to fight." Right on cue, Fox News Sunday's Brit Hume accused Democrats of being a party that just doesn't like to fight. And according to the neo-conservatives masquerading as journalists, such as Hume and William Kristol, continuous fighting is the only foreign policy that makes any sense.

Even more frightening is how much their friends such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have the same strong preference for fighting over talking. If they had their way, we would have fought or would still be fighting several wars by now - all at the same time - in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Iran at least, and probably against North Korea, too, if they thought we could win the war. They act as if talking and negotiating with potential adversaries is just a waste of time. It is truly astonishing and even shocking how people who simply question the efficacy and morality of the continuing American occupation in Iraq - including long-time military supporters such as Rep. John Murtha - are so quickly and viciously accused of "cutting and running" or not having the "courage" to fight.

A Fresher Wind

The first believers experienced the kingdom of God—the revolution of all things and the revaluation of all values. They experienced the complete transformation of all conditions and all possibilities, the re-ordering of all relationships in business, state, society, and everywhere. An utterly new scale of values took effect, quite different from what had existed so far. Christ replaced all other sovereignties; he swept away the power of lying, of impurity, and of murder—and instead of them, the peace of God took hold and held sway.

This was the expectation and experience of the original church-community, and it stands in sharp contrast to our Christianity today. Anyone can sense that at that time a fresher wind blew and purer water flowed, a stronger power and a more fiery warmth ruled.

--Eberhard Arnold

Be Salt

Jesus did not get into trouble with the powers of his day simply by challenging his individual hearers. He challenged the very systems of his society--the cornerstones. Just as the values of Madison Avenue, Wall Street, and the Pentagon conflict with the gospel, so too with Jesus and the institutions of his time: he took on the power structures of his own day, religious and civil alike.

Confrontation was not popular in first-century Palestine. It is not popular anywhere in the twenty-first. To bring gospel values to bear on labor practices, governmental decisions, and even religious traditions and policies is no more popular for a follower of Jesus than it was for him. He was told that they had their laws. Those who dare to bring his values to today’s world are told the same thing.

Yes, discipleship does have its cost--anyone who has dared to bring the gospel to bear on his or her own life knows that. Whether we feel it may be a good litmus test for discerning if we are truly following on his path, or pursuing a false trail.

--Jeanne de Celles

Mass Media Values

by David Batstone

Dr. David Walsh, author of Selling Out America's Children: How America Puts Profits before Values and What Parents Can Do, identifies six key values that dominate mass media. It is hard to argue with his list:

1. Happiness is found in having things.
2. Get all you can for yourself.
3. Get it all as quickly as you can.
4. Win at all costs.
5. Violence is entertaining.
6. Always seek pleasure and avoid boredom.

While individual parents may teach strong values, they are contradicted and drowned out by enticing and technologically alluring counter-voices. "When faced with these odds, parents' messages have difficulty competing," contends Walsh.

The Earth As It Is

Is it possible to live in peace and happiness when you know that two-thirds of human beings are suffering, hungry and poor? To be human we have to have compassion. This solidarity is really the defining factor of our humanity and is gradually being lost in a culture of material values. It’s not only the cry of the poor we must listen to but also the cry of the earth. The earth and human beings are both threatened. We must do something to change the situation... There won’t be a Noah’s Ark to save only some of us. To meet people’s fundamental concerns change is needed. The world as it is does not offer the majority of humanity life but rather hell. I believe that change is possible, because I cannot accept a God who could remain indifferent to this world, but only one who cares about the poor and the suffering.

--Leonardo Boff

An Anecdote

Admonished for his lack of familiarity with modern science, the Indian mystic Sundar Singh asked, “What is science?”

“Natural selection, you know, and the survival of the fittest,” he was told.

“Ah,” Sundar Singh replied, “but I am more interested in divine selection, and the survival of the unfit.”

A Long Way From Revolt

Even the blind can see that economic progress entails the oppression and murder of thousands--that big business rules by sheer power and deceit... A capitalistic society can be maintained only by lies. But we are a long way from revolt. Most pious and even many working people think, “Rich and poor have to be.” They ignore the fact that it is impossible to amass any kind of fortune without cheating, without depriving and hurting others and destroying their lives. They fail to realize that, concentrated in a few hands, big business can steer hundreds of thousands toward certain ruin through unemployment. Why do these facts remain hidden from us? Only because we ourselves are also under the rule of the god who blinds us, which is mammon.

--Eberhard Arnold

Killing of Kids a Problem for Whole Nation

by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

We begin with the obvious: Florida is an American state. Miami is an American city. And Sherdavia Jenkins, who died in Miami, Florida, just over two weeks ago after being struck by random bullets, was an American child.

So I would have thought it uncontroversial to observe, as I recently did in this column, that her death and the indiscriminate slaughter of American children -- in Miami or anywhere else -- qualified as ''an American problem.'' Apparently, I was wrong. That is, at least, the feeling of dozens of folks who've written in correction and rebuke.

True enough, they say, Florida is an American state and Miami an American city, but Sherdavia was an African-American child. Her suspected killers were also black. Therefore, her murder was not an American problem. It was, rather, a black problem, and only a black problem, born of black dysfunctions for which black people, as Bill Cosby has recently said, bear the onus.

To call me appalled is to understate.

I suppose the first thing that needs saying is that these individuals are wrong on the facts. Like it or not, we live interconnected lives on a small planet. Take the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as illustration: They grew out of grievances half a world away to which most Americans would have told you on Sept. 10 they had no connection. We now know better.

Similarly, even those who live on the good side of town far from the grimy inner city where Sherdavia died are affected by conditions there, if only through higher police costs, the loss of businesses from the inner city, the disintegration of families, the decimation of the tax base, the failure of schools and the resultant proliferation upon our streets of undereducated, poorly socialized young women and men who have known little but privation and violence all their lives. You think that proliferation doesn't endanger you? You're living in fantasy land.

For all that, though, what appalls me most isn't the inaccuracy of what people said, but the niggardly coldness of it.

A few years ago, this nation suffered a spate of random school shootings in places like Conyers, Ga., West Paducah, Ky., Pearl, Miss., Santee, Calif. and Littleton, Colo. Virtually all the shooters were white, as were the majority of the victims. The anguished reporting of news magazines, newspapers and cable news anchors clearly identified this as an American crisis. I don't recall anyone contradicting them, don't remember any black activist, preacher or columnist arguing that since it was white boys doing the killing and white kids doing the dying, it was white people who had the problem.

How callous such a statement would have been.

Apparently, there is a different standard where black children are concerned. Then, some of us feel free to disclaim involvement, concern or simple human empathy and to preach to people sick with grief from the Gospel of Cosby.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: I'm not mad at Bill Cosby. Not only do I support much of what he has said in recent years about the need for African Americans to take ownership of their own problems, but I was saying it publicly before he was. It is painfully obvious to me that many black folk have failed to pick up the gauntlet of the civil rights movement, failed to confront the myriad dysfunctions of our communities.

But here's the thing: As culpable as we are for failing to confront those dysfunctions, we did not create them. They were created for us by our white countrymen. For criminy sake, read a history book! I'm sorry, but black poverty didn't just happen. Black unemployment didn't just happen. Black self-loathing didn't just happen. Black urban misery didn't just happen. The murder of Sherdavia Jenkins didn't just happen.

No, the roots of these obscenities go deep. And wide.

So yes, people, the indiscriminate murder of black children is an American problem.

Too bad ignorance is, too.

A Circle of Compassion

A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. And yet we experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.

--Albert Einstein

The War as Wedge Issue

by Anna Quindlen

Every war develops its own rhetoric, its own catchphrases—especially, in our modern world, its own sound bites. The war in Iraq is no exception, and its mantra, once you get past "bringing freedom" and "cut and run," is "chaos." As the calls for withdrawal have grown more persistent, various elected officials have warned that chaos would be the result of ending military engagement. A descent into chaos, chaotic conditions, widespread chaos. The conclusion is clear: if American troops leave, all hell will break loose.

The problem with that argument is that American troops are in Iraq, but chaos already reigns. Seven civilians shot to death on a bus. Two bombs in a Shiite neighborhood, killing 10 and injuring dozens more. The execution of perhaps as many as 40 Sunnis by Shiite militiamen. And on and on and on. Iraq is in the midst of a sectarian civil war, although that's one phrase you won't hear because it sounds suspiciously like American failure.

Supporters insist it would be worse if the troops were not there. Try telling that to what's left of the family of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl allegedly raped and murdered by five U.S. soldiers who are also accused of killing her parents and little sister. Atrocities may be the inevitable result of a military so strapped that it is increasingly accepting recruits with criminal records.

So if the chaos and civil war that proponents of prolonged engagement predicted are already here, what's the mission in Iraq? With much of the Middle East in tumult, this would be a good time for an honest discussion of the complexities of the future and the mistakes of the recent past. But Americans won't hear one. As long as a year ending in an even number looms, the war will be massaged into simple slogans and bumper stickers, advertisements for warring parties and their candidates.

Optimists might argue that there is something bracing about a superpower that believes it can right the bitter historical divisions of centuries in the space of a few years. Realists would counter that it is an act of hubris, plain and simple. Onlookers, including the American people, don't know quite what to make of the entire enterprise. In the most recent Gallup poll they were all over the map on the Iraq war. Nearly a third want to pull out immediately. But the rest embraced a variety of strategies, including staying the course and finishing what we started—two slogans that suggest, despite evidence to the contrary, that the course was ever clear and that what we started bears much relationship to what we'll end up with.

But perhaps the most significant figure in the poll quantifies how well informed the respondents feel about the war. Only 25 percent believe they are completely up to speed. How could it be otherwise? This is a conflict that began with misinformation, muddled messages and the Panglossian suggestion that a country whose history has been bathed in blood could be transformed into a little Nebraska. The administration pumped up intelligence it didn't have or knew to be suspect, like weapons of mass destruction (someone owes Hans Blix an apology) and yellowcake uranium. Reporters have done their level best to get the facts out while being kidnapped, blown up, even killed. They've also become accustomed to dodging darts from the White House, which has used the demonization of the press as a cover for its own shortcomings.

A president who leads his country into war has a special responsibility to forgo oversimplification and partisan politics. The Bush administration has gone the other way, beginning with the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner that seems now like a particularly pathetic boast. Last month there was a specious congressional debate on withdrawal. Much of it was a series of position statements, looking not toward bloodshed in Baghdad but the ballot box in the midterm elections.

So our elected officials find themselves threading their way among the opinions of American voters, who tell pollsters they haven't really been told enough to have an informed opinion: as in "Ring Around the Rosy," there are no leaders, just a circle of followers. We all fall down. Last week the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan congressional watchdog group, released a report saying the war strategy was murky, the effort poorly planned and the $1.5 billion pumped into Iraq each week by the United States chronically mismanaged. In other words, the U.S. government has its own chaos to deal with.

The sad thing is that everyone now knows how this is going to end: little by little, acknowledging a stupendous error in tactics and judgment without ever acknowledging it at all, the United States will pull its troops from Iraq, leaving advisers and aid workers. The civil war will continue. So will the killings. There will be chaos no matter when we leave. But the Republicans will find a way to claim victory, and the Democrats will do the same. Iraq may even be better off. But will the United States? The deaths of nearly 3,000 American women and men have been turned into a wedge issue, used for purposes of posturing and politicking. For shame.

Time to Begin

Blogs serve numerous purposes, but my intention is to point others toward wiser voices and generate dialogue on important issues. Maybe even some of my own insight and analysis will appear along the way.

Time to begin, and enjoy, the journey.