New Book on the Second Amendment

The Second Amendment Doesn’t Say What You Think It Does | MotherJones: But when you actually go back and look at the debate that went into drafting of the amendment, you can squint and look really hard, but there’s simply no evidence of it being about individual gun ownership for self-protection or for hunting.

This has long been clear to those who are willing to sit down and do the research or, heck, even just read the text of the 2nd Amendment.

I’ll admit that I’m getting closer to supporting a repeal of all gun rights. Many will claim that to be “un-American,” but if “American” is synonymous with the rights of some (to own a gun for protection or to hunt) being more important than the rights of others (to live) or if “American” is synonymous with simply accepting the tens of thousands of gun-related deaths per year in our country, then I don’t want to be “American.”

One’s desire to hunt (it is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution) should not trump the right of every other citizen to not be shot. As President Obama said recently of our now-regular shootings,

The United States does not have a monopoly on crazy people. It’s not the only country that has psychosis. And yet we kill each other in these mass shootings at rates that are exponentially higher than anyone else. Well, what’s the difference? The difference is that these guys can stack up a bunch of ammunition in their houses, and that’s sort of par for the course. . . . There’s no advanced developed country on earth that would put up with this.

Except for us, of course, because some people have engaged in revisionist history and willful ignorance when it comes to the Second Amendment and because some people honestly believe that their right to own a gun should be more important than someone else’s dead kids, especially when these dead kids are black and brown.

As Michael Waldman’s new book, The Second Amendment: A Biography, points out Justice Scalia’s argument that he is an “originalist” – basing his decisions on the original intent of the framers of the Constitution – is fundamentally flawed. For it is impossible to know the original intent of an author. In my field, this question comes up time and again with reference to ancient texts, especially the Bible. Many argue for “authorial intent,” and base interpretations on what the author meant, but as has been made clear for centuries now, this is not something we can know, even when we are confident that we have gotten very close. In reality, it is our current circumstances, world-views, and various social and political leanings that most influence how we read old texts, the Constitution notwithstanding. This is why, for instance, Waldman is able to show how interpretations of the Second Amendment have changed so much over time.

This should be reason enough to abandon the fantasy that we can interpret the Constitution for today based on what it meant when it was first written. But I think that we should go beyond even this. We simply do not live in the same world as those who wrote this Amendment in 1791 lived in. We have no need of militia’s, we have no recent memory of a foreign power ruling over us. Since we are already interpreting the Constitution based on our place and circumstances, why not be honest about it and maybe try to do some good. It is not unheard of for us to realize that things needed to be changed. The Thirteenth Amendment did this, turning over the then-Constitutional Three-Fifths Compromise.

After George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin February 26, 2012 I heard a lot of people echoing the comment of NRA President Wayne LaPierre, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” (This is a myth, by the way) But I wonder why, if we have so many “good guys” in this country, they don’t care enough about those around them who are getting killed every day to do something about it. Maybe we could start by making it tougher to buy a gun than to vote or drive a car or purchase antihistamines.

Noah, Irenaeus, and Classification (Or, Look Mom My Research Does Matter)

Everyone, it seems, is weighing in on the new Noah movie that has just been released. My favorite “review” comes, unsurprisingly, from The Onion. By far, though, the vast majority of reviews of the film I have seen and read have come from evangelical Christians urging other Christians not to see the movie. This led me to stumbling upon one by previously-unknown-to-me Brian Mattson, Sympathy For The Devil. Mattson’s review is interesting for a host of reasons.

First, his review provides a stellar example of how classification works and why classification matters. For Mattson, Aronofsky was not making a movie based on the Bible, it was instead based on the Kabbalah and is highly “gnostic.” Here’s why this matters:

Darren Aronofsky has produced a retelling of the Noah story without reference to the Bible at all. This was not, as he claimed, just a storied tradition of run-of-the-mill Jewish “Midrash.” This was a thoroughly pagan retelling of the Noah story direct from Kabbalist and Gnostic sources. To my mind, there is simply no doubt about this.

You see, for Mattson Kabbalah and Gnosticism cannot equal anything close to Judaism or Christianity. Nevermind that many so-called “gnostics” likely self-identified as Jewish or Christian in some way, Mattson is now the one that gets to classify and they are not Jewish or Christian according to his classificatory scheme. (Aside: I will speak to “gnosticism” since that is squarely within my research and “expertise,” Kabbalah is not. Further, I say “many” and “likely” because we do have sources that survive from “gnostics” that allow us to know this, but many “gnostic” sources were intentionally destroyed or simply did not survive the accidents of history, so we must speculate about their means of identity formation.) Aronofsky, then, according to Mattson, has not told a Jewish story (or a Christian story) – regardless of the Jewish texts that contain many of these traditions like 1 Enoch, Jubilees, etc. – he has told a pagan story.

The next aspect of Mattson’s rewview that caught my eye was his use of the 2nd century heresiographer Irenaeus of Lyons. Irenaeus wrote Against the Heresies in which he identified “heresies” and “heretics.” Scholars have known for some time that Irenaeus is not the most reliable source, particularly in this text. For we should always be cautious about trusting one’s opponents to give an accurate view of a person or group. That would be like trusting Sarah Palin to accurately describe Democrats or trusting Chris Matthews to accurately describe Paul Ryan. Yet, this does not stop Mattson from accepting Irenaeus as gospel.

Here’s a 2nd century A.D. description about what a sect called the Ophites believed:

“Adam and Eve formerly had light, luminous, and so to speak spiritual bodies, as they had been fashioned. But when they came here, the bodies became dark, fat, and idle.” –Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, I, 30.9

Mattson does not question Irenaeus’ claims, though we know that Irenaeus and those who followed in his footsteps, like Epiphanius, often made up “heretical” groups whole cloth. Their project was about labeling those who were “in” and those who were “out.” They would list out the “heresies” and urge people to avoid them. Some descriptions were loosely based on historical groups with whom Irenaeus happened to disagree on some matters, others were simply straw men used to strengthen his position, to scare his readers about those numerous and crafty “heretics,” and to offer him a chance to denounce something that someone might come to think/believe or to denounce a group about which he had heard rumors. This is exactly the type of literature with which I work on a daily basis, which leads me to my last point.

I am in agreement with Mattson that more and more people should be reading Irenaeus.

In response, I have one simple suggestion:

Henceforth, not a single seminary degree is granted unless the student demonstrates that he has read, digested, and understood Irenaeus of Lyon’s Against Heresies.

Because it’s the 2nd century all over again.

Now, Mattson and I will clearly differ on what it means to have “read, digested, and understood” Against Heresies, but more people reading it can only mean a bigger audience for my work (right? right?!).

There is more that could be said about Mattson’s review: he rails against “Gnosticism” while apparently not recognizing the dualism and “gnostic” elements that are ever-present in his Bible (just a cursory reading of Paul or the gospel of John will reveal this); he went looking for Kabbalah, so he found Kabbalah; he legitimately believes that Aronofsky did all of this as one big, elaborate, expensive experiment to make fools of evangelical Christians; he derides the “elitism” and the prominence given to special knowledge in “gnosticism,” but advocates a clear hierarchy between “rank-and-file” Christian viewers and “Christian leaders: college and seminary professors, pastors, and Ph.Ds.”

But the most important point of all of this is that my research is relevant. The processes of identity formation are not new. Heresy and orthodoxy are both political creations of parties with something invested in who’s in and who’s out. Just as Hippolytus, Irenaeus, Augustine, Epiphanius, etc. drew boundary lines to demarcate “Christians” and “heretics,” people today are doing the same thing. The data set is different, but the process and the goals remain the same. Place arbitrary significance on some aspect of difference, put yourself in a position to name and classify, and you’ll end up in while your opponents end up out.

And God Bless The United States of America

The State of the Union address is tonight. For the first time in as long as I can remember I will not be watching it live, though I will read it or watch it tomorrow. I think these kinds of things are important. No, these speeches do not usually change poll numbers or have a huge effect of legislation, but I think it’s good to hear the vision that our President thinks is important to lay out for the next year(s).

President Obama’s vision for the next year is not all that will be on display tonight, though. No, we will see a great example of civil religion on display.

So, as you prepare to watch the SOTU, or after you have watched it, check out our latest episode of ThinkingReligion in which we take up the topic of America’s civil religion.

ThinkingReligion 21:  American Civil Spirituality | Thinking.FM:

Thomas and Sam continue last week’s conversation on canon and discuss whether America really is moving toward a new civil spirituality and whether an American civil religion can survive in a religiously pluralistic society.

God bless you and God bless the United States of America.

“Same Love” and Theology at the VMAs

This was originally posted on the ABPnews Blog on August 27th.

I watched the VMAs Sunday night, in their entirety, and I’m pretty sure that’s a first for me. The show created a significant amount of buzz on social media platforms for a myriad of reasons. There were the rumors of an *NSYNC reunion, which happened for a song and reminded everyone why an *NSYNC reunion would be a terrible idea. There was the repeated and continual tribute to Justin Timberlake. And there was whatever that was that Miley Cyrus did, which I’m sure had Billy Ray Cyrus once again singing “Achy Breaky Heart.”

But what most caught me was the performance by Macklemore, Ryan Lewis, and Mary Lambert of their song “Same Love.” The song won the award for Best Video with a Social Message. It’s a song many are familiar with, as it’s gotten a lot of radio play this year. But not everyone is a fan.

Many Christians have rebuked the song as not understanding God, or Christianity, or theology. I read one tweet last night that said Macklemore needed an “intro to theology,” implying that his understanding of God didn’t even meet the standards of an introductory Christian theology course. Let’s take a closer look.

In the first verse Macklemore says,

The right wing conservatives think it’s a decision
And you can be cured with some treatment and religion
Man-made rewiring of a predisposition
Playing God, aw nah here we go
America the brave still fears what we don’t know
God loves all his children, is somehow forgotten
But we paraphrase a book written thirty-five-hundred years ago

Reparative (or conversion) therapy enjoyed a few golden years, but as the recent apology and closing of Exodus International demonstrates, its days are quickly coming to an end. But the fact still remains that many conservative Christians do see one’s sexuality as a choice, at least when it’s not their’s that is under the microscope. Just as I do not wake up each morning and choose to be attracted to the opposite sex, my gay friends do not wake up each morning and choose to be attracted to the same sex.

Macklemore is offering a critique of the type of Christian message that  one minute claims “for God so loved the world” and then spews hate the next. He addresses the reality of a “canon within the canon,” which is the practice of elevating certain books and passages over the rest (I’ve written more about that here). Many Christians are quick to trot out Leviticus 20.13 but never seem to get as passionate about Deuteronomy 22.11 or Exodus 34.26.

Macklemore goes on to sing about the content of one’s Christian message:

When I was at church they taught me something else
If you preach hate at the service those words aren’t anointed
That holy water you soak in has been poisoned

The message of Jesus, as I recall it, was not to hate each other and hate your enemies, but to show love for one another and love your enemies.

And then later he sings what is probably his most controversial line:

Whatever God you believe in
We come from the same one

That this line would be controversial is not surprising, but it is not a new idea to Jewish or Christian theology. The Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament) offers ample evidence of YHWH overtaking the personalities and traits of various local deities such as El, Baal, and Asherah. Many psalms and hymns are at heart henotheistic and/or homogenizing. Henotheism is the belief that many deities exist, but that there is one high God. We see God among the divine council, for instance, in Genesis 1.26 and Psalm 82.1. Other passages and beliefs are homogenizing in the sense that they make the claim that while God may be called something else by someone else, it is really God that is being worshipped. This is the basic claim made by theologian Karl Rahner when he spoke of “anonymous Christians” (with which I do not agree for a host of reasons).

I do fully understand the backlash that “Same Love” is getting from the conservative political and religious arenas, but the dismissive attitude exhibited toward the song that is meant to convey the message that it possesses an “un-Christian” message and “infantile” theology is misguided, at best.

There is no doubt that Macklemore, with his song, and MTV with its introduction of the song by Jason Collins, are making political statements. Jason Collins said, “I knew that hating someone for their sexual orientation was the same thing as hating them for their skin color.” To be sure, not every one agrees with Jason Collins or with MTV’s move. That is to be expected. But the theology behind it? Well, we’ve been down this road before.

Just as many today claim that one’s sexual orientation is a legitimate reason to hate them or cast judgment, many of our baptist ancestors used the same arguments, only then with a racial motivation. The so-called “mark of Cain” or “curse of Cain” was used as justification for slavery by the Southern Baptist Convention. But just because we’ve made these mistakes in the past does not mean we must make them again. Just as we rejected the notion that one’s skin color was an adequate indication of his/her character or relationship with God, so too we must reject using sexual orientation as a litmus test for whether one can call themselves “Christian” or whether one understands God or theology or ecclesiology.

So today I am applauding both the song and its high-profile placement at the VMAs Sunday night. The song does line up in some ways with my theology of God, my understanding of love, and my belief in equality for all, though not nearly a hundred percent. But beyond that I celebrate that the song works to make gay students and gay teachers and gay cousins and gay neighbors know that they’re not alone. It fights for one less person to take his/her life because of the hate they have experienced. It fights for love and life in a way that not much else in popular culture does right now, including many Christians. And it offers a healthy critique of our “Christian” messaging. That’s something we need. And as for the message that God loves all of God’s children? Well, that’s a theology I’m not ashamed to espouse.

Fox News Doesn’t Understand How Academia Works

In one of the more bizarre interviews I’ve ever seen, a Fox News host interviews Reza Aslan, author of the new book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. In the interview the host – Lauren Green, who is a “religion correspondent” for Fox News Channel” – can’t seem to wrap her head around the fact that Aslan, a scholar who happens to be Muslim, has written an academic and historical book about Jesus.

The very first question of her interview is about this:

Now I want to be clear about, you’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?

This is an odd question to anyone who has spent any time around the academic study of religion, which this host clearly has not, as Aslan’s personal faith has absolutely zero relevance to his work as a scholar of religion. After Aslan explains that he has four degrees, one in New Testament, is fluent in biblical Greek, and has been studying Christianity for more than two decades, the host interrupts him to ask

It still begs the question, though, it begs the question, why would you be interested in the founder of Christianity?

For starters, no, it does not actually “beg the question;” that is a very specific logical fallacy and not simply another way of saying, “but it makes me wonder.” But pet peeves aside, I was continually amazed at the host’s inability to understand the very basic principals of how academia works. During the rest of the 10-minute interview, the host brings up Aslan’s Muslim faith at least 7 more times, every time dumbfounded that a Muslim could write an academic work about Jesus and there not be some secret Muslim plot afoot.

On Fox’s website where they have the video posted, the description of the video even hints at their disbelief that this is possible:

Reza Aslan, author of ‘Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,’ says he wrote the book as a historian, not as a Muslim. [Emphasis mine]

The persistence of the host to continuously bring up Aslan’s faith, which is still completely irrelevant to his work as a historian, is bad enough, but she then quotes critics of the book (who seem to not have actually read the book) as if she has dismantled his entire argument. The first critic of the book she quotes is John Dickerson, a journalist and political correspondent – i.e. not an academic, not a historian, not a scholar. Aslan then proceeds to tell her how scholarship works:

Of course in any scholarly discussion of Jesus, as with any scholarly discussion of any ancient figure, there are going to be widespread differences.

Anyone who has even taken an introductory course in religion in college understands full well that scholarship is a giant, centuries-long discussion. Scholars put forth arguments and other scholars either agree or disagree with those arguments. Step by step, the field moves forward based on the evidence at hand and the application of theories and methodologies to our material. The process is exactly the same as it is in the so-called hard science fields like biology and math. Again, I am baffled.

But this interview has done more than just baffle me. It has renewed my conviction that groups like the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion must get involved in efforts to educate the media and the general public. These organizations, both of which I am a member, should be acting like trade unions, of sorts, and like lobbying groups.When news breaks that relates to our field, SBL and AAR should be contacting news outlets and putting them in touch with actual experts.

It is sad and immature that news organizations think that quoting a journalist’s Op-Ed is a legitimate critique of an academic book, but I think that we too must bear some of the responsibility. News organizations, for the most part, wouldn’t know who to contact if they wanted to and likely wouldn’t even know where to start looking. We should bear the burden of pointing them in the right direction, or at least in a direction that is toward someone who actually has a PhD in the matter being discussed.

So, yes, we should be outraged and we should work diligently to shame Fox News and Lauren Green (as I know the academic community already is on Twitter and elsewhere). Yes, we as a general public and especially as scholars of religion should demand more from news organizations “religion correspondents.” But then we need to get to work taking our job as educators seriously and in some cases that will mean that we need to move outside the classroom and on to the airwaves.