Does God have an e-mail address?

Jennifer Cobb's 'Cybergrace' seeks the spiritual dimension of technology but gets mired in the details.

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

The problem with trying to explain the meaning of the universe is that it’s easy to get lost in the existential void along the way. That Jennifer Cobb should set out in her new book, “Cybergrace: The Search for God in the Digital World,” to prove not just that there is a higher entity, but that his or her hand is at work in the realm of computer technology, is almost touching in its well-intentioned ambition. It doesn’t, however, make her book any less of a muddled wreck.

Cobb is a woman of impressive dueling credentials — a high-tech consultant who’s also a theological scholar. Her need to “reconcile technology and spirituality … to go inside, uncover the details of that connection,” gives her a healthy respect and skepticism for both worlds. She’s neither a rah-rah technophile nor a hair shirt-wearing hermit. But is that enough? The conundrum of the existence of a universal architect is one that history’s greatest minds haven’t been able to resolve. What hope then is there for someone like Cobb — of whom it may be charitably said that she remains an intellectual heavyweight in training?

More damning still, Cobb doesn’t even seem to be truly trying, substituting factoids for ingenuity. She bangs out truckloads of reference points — synthetic evolution and artificial intelligence and virtual reality — liberally smattering Eastern and Western lore throughout the prose along the way. Yet, ironically for a book about the melding of two disciplines, very little seems to tie together. What Cobb may have hoped would be an overwhelming body of diverse evidence amounts instead to a messy stew of unrelated information, drowning in a sauce of turgid jargon. The exhausted reader is left in the end not with the great “Aha!” of epiphany but with the stoned, 3 a.m.-in-the-dorm-room feeling of quiet bafflement. How else can one respond to declarations such as “Within a holoarchy, holons emerge holarchically” but with a resigned shrug and a maybe a doleful “Say what?”

And that’s a big part of the problem with “Cybergrace” — the head-scratching dryness of it. Cobb may have spent the better part of her career around words, but the double-threat disciplines of high tech and academia are rarely conducive to the development of a gripping writing style. At its best, the book is an ungimmicky, rational contemplation of a broad, serious subject. At worst, it’s a soporific foray into the world of superscripts and ibids.

Cobb’s logic is harder to follow than the trials of Lot: She just keeps throwing examples and theories against the wall, assuming something’s eventually got to stick. Is the fact that Big Blue’s ultimate triumph against Kasparov came not from a faultless, mechanical move but from an inventive, beatable one proof of the “hand of God”? Or is it just evidence that a machine can emulate the mind of man?

Perhaps the last person on earth to have a clear sense of who God is would be a divinity student, but Cobb’s lack of a coherent vision of the book’s title character ultimately makes her text look like so much mental pussyfooting. It’s as if someone tried to write “Moby Dick” without being reasonably solid on what a whale is. Maybe God isn’t so much a creator as a shaper of life, and we can prove it by this! Or maybe God is part of every living thing, and we can prove it by that! And here’s a story about robotics thrown in for good measure!

Cobb gamely strains to cover all the intellectual bases, going so far as to admit at one point her discomfort with using the very word “God” (she later half-jokingly refers to the “big transcendent computer in the sky”). Her anything-and-everything attitude may make her belief in a higher power more palatable to a variety of believers and non-believers, but it also washes out a good deal of the vitality from a provocative subject matter. And it’s pretty tough to know whether to agree or disagree with Cobb’s analysis when she won’t just strike her flag in the sand and say where she stands.

She does drop a few hints here and there. For example, while Cobb alludes to a strong if questioning Judeo-Christian bent, she still feels the need to give gentle nods to Eastern traditions. She uses the story of the Hindu god Indra as a metaphor for the Net and pats it on the head as a “lovely myth.” But she tells the parable of the seed and the good soil as a solid example of evolution in action, and doesn’t even feel the need to mention the story’s New Testament origins. She devotes a tenderly written subchapter to French cleric Jacques Gaillot’s online bishopric Partenia, but tempers her recollection of a Hindu ceremony in India with lip-biting resentment over the travails she had to endure in order to witness it.

Cobb, with her obviously sincere (if multitentacled) respect for the subject matter, may have her heart in the right place. Her brain and spirit may even be close behind. Early on, she speaks convincingly of her desire to fuse her two passions, to prove that the divine and the digital are more than just parallel worlds, running close together but never touching. Her belief may even have merit: When she points out that the word for religion comes from the Latin for “to connect,” it’s a reminder how interactive prayer and ritual are, and how creative and profound the world of technology can be. Unfortunately, her hopefulness translates itself here into a jittery academic eagerness that will never be mistaken for deep spiritual wisdom.

Whether God is in the computer is still anyone’s guess. But if he is, he probably won’t be discovered by such strenuous multitasking.

: Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams

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David Brooks: “I have heard of Jeremy Lin”

Is it an "anomaly" for a professional athlete to be religious? (No)

By Alex Pareene

David Brooks

Topics:David Brooks, New York Times, Sports, Basketball, Jeremy LIn, Religion

David Brooks had to write a column about something, and his deadline was fast approaching, so he glanced at the sports page and saw something about New York Knicks phenom Jeremy Lin, and he was like, yeah, that works. Next stop, most-emailed list!

Lin is a point guard who rocketed to near-instant celebrity when he came off the bench and had a series of monster games, dragging the Knicks to a .500 record while their two biggest superstars were sitting out games. His celebrity then became a “mania” in part because he’s Asian-American and a Harvard graduate, two rarities in the NBA. It also obviously doesn’t hurt that he plays for the dominant team in the nation’s biggest media market (also it’s the fallow period between football and baseball). That’s basically the whole deal, and if you’d like to learn more read Andrew Leonard’s account of the early social media explosion and Alexander Chee’s take on Lin and Asian-American identity. Whatever you do, don’t read David Brooks’ take on the Lin phenomenon, because David Brooks doesn’t understand basketball or social media or race or religion or American society in general.

Here is Brooks’ first paragraph:

Jeremy Lin is anomalous in all sorts of ways. He’s a Harvard grad in the N.B.A., an Asian-American man in professional sports. But we shouldn’t neglect the biggest anomaly. He’s a religious person in professional sports.

Here is the next sentence:

We’ve become accustomed to the faith-driven athlete and coach, from Billy Sunday to Tim Tebow.

Haha OK. This is the point where you hit “select all” and then “delete” and start your column again. Brooks must’ve started this thing like 10 minutes before his deadline. (No time to edit it!)

So, yes, a “religious person in professional sports” is like the least anomalous thing in the world, besides maybe “a racist comment under a YouTube video.” Or “an old white guy in political punditry.” (Also, minor note, but: I think there’s actually a decent number — enough to make Lin not particularly “anomalous” — of prominent Asians and Asian-Americans in professional sports, unless you’re only defining “Asian-American” as “of East Asian descent” and you’re only counting the “big four” leagues as “professional sports.” And you’re not really counting baseball.)

While Lin’s Christianity is obviously of great importance to Lin, it honestly has barely anything to do with what made him an instant superstar, except for when hacks want to compare him to Tim Tebow, which is dumb, because Lin is suddenly famous because he’s really good at his sport while Tebow’s whole shtick is succeeding despite being awful at being a quarterback. (If Lin had been a college superstar and high draft pick who was famously inept at the fundamentals of his position, the Tebow thing would be an accurate comparison, but Lin is in fact the opposite of that.)

Having contradicted his own faulty premise five sentences into his column, Brooks rambles on about how he has noticed that being good at sports and being pious is sort of contradictory, because being good at sports doesn’t involve much “humility” or “self-abnegation.” Then we have some boilerplate theological musings, about how sports is like modern society and how Abrahamic religious values contradict modern cultural values, especially regarding individual achievement. (YAWN.)

But even while grappling with the tension between religious values and contemporary cultural values, which is basically well within Brooks’ wheelhouse, he demonstrates a hilarious misunderstanding of sports, and what sports are “about,” because Mr. Brooks has been spending far too much time in his cloistered elite liberal media ivory tower munching on brie and arugula and not enough time among Real Americans in their “Sporting Taverns” watching “The Big Game” over a pint of mass-market domestic lager.

For many religious teachers, humility is the primary virtue. You achieve loftiness of spirit by performing the most menial services. (That’s why shepherds are perpetually becoming kings in the Bible.) You achieve your identity through self-effacement. You achieve strength by acknowledging your weaknesses. You lead most boldly when you consider yourself an instrument of a larger cause.

I could be wrong, but “consider yourself an instrument of a larger cause” is basically step three of “how to be good at team sports,” after “be gifted physically” and “practice a lot.” (And acknowledging your weaknesses? Like when Magic would spend the off-season practicing “the weakest part of his game” until he improved it?)

The “two moral universes” of religion and societal achievement may be “irreconcilable” — I am not a religious person and hence don’t care — but that has very little to do with Jeremy Lin, or basketball, or politics, which Brooks for some reason brings up in the last paragraph, because he wants to pretend this column has been about something other than extended free-associative riffing on the fact that a famous person is religious.

In conclusion, the New York Times should probably consider having someone take a quick glance at David Brooks’ columns before they publish them.

: Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene

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Santorum mangles the Founding Fathers

It's the GOP insurgent, not Obama, who is waging a war against religious freedom

By Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg

James Madison and Rick Santorum (Credit: Wikipedia/Reuters/Rick Wilking)

Topics:2012 Elections, Rick Santorum, Religion

Each time presidential candidate Rick Santorum rears his righteous head, it is to exploit a social issue that is of no import in a national election. But he knows that the way to keep the cameras pointed at him one more day is to manufacture a new bit of hysteria.

Last Thursday, Joan Walsh reported on Santorum as he clamored to punish non-Catholics by limiting their access to contraceptives if their workplace was in the hands of the Catholic Church. She rightly pointed out that he “absolutely mangles” what the founders said about religion. Raising the specter of the atheistic French Revolution and its notorious use of the guillotine, the former Pennsylvania senator planted a seed in the minds of his hearers: A left-driven tyranny was where the anti-Christian Obama administration would be heading next.

The fear-monger tosses out familial metaphors with devilish glee. At once subverting patriarchy within the home and turning the federal government into Big Brother, the sitting president stands in moral opposition to all that is good. And only the moral policeman Rick can stop him.

“They are taking faith and crushing it,” Santorum howls at the political left. “When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights then what’s left is the French Revolution…. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.”

This is a combination of really bad history and undisciplined demagoguery. What we’d like to focus on is not the fractured logic of the demagogue so much as the perversion of history by the two-term senator. We consider it quite sad that a presidential candidate in 2012 should be resurrecting the same dirty campaign tactic that accompanied the charge that Thomas Jefferson, for five years U.S. minister to France, would, if elected president, shut down churches and burn bibles.

Start with the fact that in his superficial evocation of the 1790s, Santorum was referring not to the French so much as he was unconsciously reviving the propaganda used by New England Federalists against the “atheist” Thomas Jefferson, who championed freedom of conscience and refused to wear his religion on his sleeve. From 1793 on, conservative Yankees predicted that the social chaos of Paris would wash ashore in America. Indeed, conservative academics of our own time view the French Revolution as the first step toward the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union–all of which fits neatly with the crack-brained Tea Party narrative in which President Obama is a sworn socialist and enemy of capitalism.

Mitt Romney is not beyond indulging in the same polemical game, associating Obama with European social programs. Yet Santorum does what the Mormon cannot, by playing the “Catholic card” in his effort to “other” the president. It is an especially bizarre move in historical relief, because the Federalist critics who most loudly warned of the French-tainted Jefferson were New England Calvinists who feared Catholics as much as they feared French anarchy.

Federalists termed the French Revolution a “contagion,” a violent, sickening, uncivilizing process. If Santorum sees the metaphorical blade of the guillotine hanging over the heads of the Catholic bishops, it is well worth noting that eighteenth-century conservatives were so carried away by their own outlandish predictions that their panicky congressional majority passed a series of repressive laws, the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which first targeted French émigrés and then U.S. citizens who needed to be silenced. The Sedition Act authorized the imprisonment of journalists and politicians who criticized the president. The main purpose of the legislation was, as James Madison observed, to shut down free and open political debate–to derail democracy. Cleverly drafted, the Sedition Act allowed the government to punish critics of the president, but not the vice president. Why the omission? Because in 1798, John Adams’s vice president was the unAmerican Thomas Jefferson.

It certainly seems that Rick Santorum reads the First Amendment just as the Federalist Congress of 1798 did. As we all know, though, the First Amendment was intended to uphold religious freedom, protect speech, and ensure liberty of conscience. Madison, who conceived the First Amendment, defended the last of these three principles as a deeply private, individual right shielding citizens from the coercive, invasive force of a church or state government.

It is Santorum, not President Obama, who is waging a war against religion. It is the fear-mongers who endanger religious freedom. Why should the Catholic Church impose its doctrines on employees who are not Catholic? Why should any who are not Catholic be deprived of access to a health insurance benefit solely because they are employed by a Catholic hospital or university? Why should the Church be permitted to impose its doctrines on an individual who not a member? The First Amendment does not grant any church the power to deprive individuals of rights.

Santorum is waging a war not only on religion but on all Americans who do not share his faith. The Catholic Church has every right to impart its doctrines; its members can accept or reject them. The majority of Catholic men and women have rejected the particular doctrine prohibiting the use of contraception. Employees possess the right to insurance and the right to adhere to their own religious beliefs.

As Madison argued in a 1788 letter to Jefferson, religious fanaticism was as serious a danger to religious liberty as excessive state authority. In his words, “rights of conscience” were undermined by “overbearing majorities” who were intent on advancing the interests of a particular “religious establishment.” In plain and simple terms, the founders meant to protect individuals against excessive encroachments by church as well as state.

We might all wish to heed Madison’s further warning: “It is a melancholy reflection that liberty should be equally exposed to danger whether the Government has too much or too little power.” Religious liberty required the protection of state authority, in creating a barrier around the individual and guarding against intrusions from religious institutions.

The fact remains that President Obama is no more a French Revolutionary Jacobin than Jefferson or Madison. It appears, in fact, that the president has a very clear understanding of religious liberty, appreciating the boundaries between church and state just as Madison intended. His promptly conceived compromise solution, respecting religion without restricting rights, fits the balanced, reasonable approach our founders prescribed when they fought, state by state, to eliminate state funding and sanctioning (i.e., disestablishment) of privileged sects.

If the last three years tell us anything, 2012 will not usher in a new Age of Reason. Fanaticism will continue to seize the news cycle. Rick Santorum has learned (perhaps from Donald Trump and birther mania) that the best way to grab the headlines is to ramp up the epithets, bark the loudest, and fantasize a history that never was.

: More Andrew Burstein
: More Nancy Isenberg

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Jesus versus the GOP

The man from Nazareth would have been appalled by the “Christian” Republican candidates

By Gary Kamiya

Find the Christian in this group (Credit: AP)

Topics:Religion, Republican Party

There has never been a more loudly Christian group of presidential candidates than this primary season’s GOP contenders. From the start, the campaign has been an exercise in Christian one-upmanship. Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann set the standard for religious fervor, boasting of setting her alarm clock at 5 a.m. so she could read the Bible and issuing born-again testimonials like “I radically abandoned myself to Jesus Christ.” Herman Cain said that he was inspired to run for president by the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. Rick Perry released a video in which he intoned, “I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian … As president, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion and I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage.”

Bachmann, Cain and Perry are no longer sharing their spiritual rectitude with a national audience, but the remaining candidates continue to flaunt their Christianity. Newt Gingrich, who has noisily proclaimed that his conversion to Catholicism saved his soul, repeated Perry’s charge, accusing President Obama of launching a “war on religion” by requiring that church-owned hospitals and universities provide insurance that covers birth control. “It’s a fundamental assault on the right of freedom of religion,” Gingrich said. “On the very first day I’m inaugurated I will sign an executive order repealing every Obama attack on religion.”

Gingrich has framed the election as a battle for America’s soul, warning that if Obama is not defeated, the United States is in danger of becoming a “secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists.” Such apocalyptic warnings, combined with statements like “I can’t imagine being comfortable with an atheist in the presidency,” insinuate that Obama is a fake Christian – a widespread belief among the religious right. (That’s actually a comparatively moderate view: The hardcore see him as the Antichrist.)

Rick Santorum went even further, essentially calling for America to become a theocracy. At the Thanksgiving Family Forum last year, Santorum said, “Our civil wars have to comport with the higher law … That’s why as long as abortion is ‘legal,’ according to the Supreme Court, we will never have rest, because that does not comport with God’s law … As long as there is discordance between the two there will be agitation.”

The Republican strategy — loudly proclaiming one’s Christian faith, while attacking Obama as an agent of secular evil, if not actually Satan himself – is right out of the Fox News playbook. As the voice of the American far right, the ultimate undeclared super-duper-GOP-PAC, Fox News has embraced the cracked “birther” movement and generally done everything within its latitudinous definition of “fair and balanced” to portray Obama as a fake-Christian, foreign-born, America-hating Muslim. (Fox’s “War on Christmas” rants appear with such clockwork regularity at Christmastime that I use them as reminders to open my Advent Calendar.)

The only GOP candidate who has not openly pursued this strategy is the front-runner, Mitt Romney. Romney has avoided the subject because as a Mormon, his own Christian credentials are suspect. But as the ultimate political panderer and opportunist, he would play the Christian card if he could. Like all the GOP candidates, Romney has tried to paint Obama as an alien Other, elite, mysterious, malevolent – in a word, slightly satanic. And also like them, Romney presents his free-market, anti-government ideology as more “American,” and by implication more “Christian,” than Obama’s.

As someone who has spent many happy hours studying Christian theology, from Origen to Hans Kung, as well as modern scholarship about Jesus, I supposed I should be pleased by this eruption of holy fervor among the Republican candidates for the highest office in the land. But there’s just one little problem.

Jesus would have been appalled by the whole pack of them.

We do not know very much about the historical Jesus. But everything we know indicates that the carpenter from Galilee would not have been pleased to learn that this pack of coldhearted, sanctimonious, wealth-exalting politicians were claiming to be his followers.

I’m not saying that Jesus would have been a Democrat. Anyone who pretends to find support for specific political policies or ideologies in the Bible is delusional. Scholars cannot agree if Jesus was a social revolutionary, a tortured mystic, or something altogether different. Even what Jesus himself believed about the most essential aspects of what was to become “Christianity’ – a religion founded not by him, but by his disciple Paul of Tarsus — is unclear. As leading biblical scholar Bart Ehrman noted in “Jesus, Interrupted,” some of the most important Christian doctrines, including the divinity of Christ, the Trinity and the concept of heaven and hell, were not held by Jesus himself: They were added later, when the church transformed itself into a new religion rather than a Jewish sect.

Ehrman told me that the authors of the four Gospels portray Jesus in such contradictory ways that there is no intellectually honest way to reconcile them. Mark, for example, depicts Jesus as doubting and despairing on the way to the cross, while Luke portrays him as calm. Ehrman argues that such contradictory accounts can only be reconciled by creating, in effect, a bogus “fifth Gospel” that does not exist.

But having said all that, we still have the evidence of the Bible itself. And one does not need to believe in the infallibility of that document to see that the Jesus who is depicted in it was implacably opposed to authoritarianism, warmongering, contempt for the poor, exaltation of wealth, conformity, and sanctimoniousness – in short, everything the contemporary Republican Party stands for.

In an ugly culmination of the successful, race-baiting “Southern strategy” that has essentially driven the GOP for decades, the Republican candidates have vied with each other to demonize poor people, especially if they’re black. That’s why Gingrich has repeatedly attacked Obama as the “food stamp president,” and why Mitt Romney went out of his way to say “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” contrasting his stance with that of the Democrats, of whom he disparagingly said, “We will hear from the Democrat Party (about) the plight of the poor.” (As Gail Collins wrote in a hilarious column, “It is interesting to hear a candidate directly attacking the opposition for being concerned about the destitute.”)

We have no idea what position Jesus would have taken on progressive taxation or whether he would have supported the Dodd-Frank Act. But we do know that Jesus, unlike Gingrich and Romney, was concerned about the poor. In fact, he made it clear that concern for the poor was an absolutely essential principle of his faith.

This is not surprising. For Jesus himself was completely destitute, and he insisted that his companions be as well. As they traveled around Palestine, they ate whatever they were given and slept in whatever house would take them. If no shelter was offered them they slept outdoors. As he told his 12 disciples in Luke 9:3, “Take nothing for your journey, neither staff, nor bag, nor bread, neither money, neither have two coats apiece. And whatever house ye enter into, there abide, and from there depart. And whoever will not receive you, when ye go out of that city, shake off the very dust from your feet for a testimony against them.”

Romney’s statement that he was “not concerned about the very poor” is telling. For Jesus explicitly stated that he was concerned not just about the poor, but about the poorest, the lowest and most despised members of society. Jesus’ famous saying in the Beatitudes in Luke 6:20 is usually translated as “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” But as biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan noted in “The Essential Jesus,” “Greek has two different words for ‘poor’ (penes) and ‘destitute’ (ptochos), so it should be ‘blessed are the destitute.’” Crossan argues that Jesus’ mission was revolutionary precisely because he proclaimed, against all tradition, that the Kingdom to come was not just for the respectable poor – the “deserving poor,” in Republican parlance – but for the destitute.

Jesus again makes this explicit in Luke 9:48: “And said unto them, Whosoever shall receive this child in my name receiveth me: and whosoever shall receive me receiveth him that sent me: for he that is least among you all, the same shall be great.”

Jesus demanded that his followers help the neediest. In Matthew 19:21 he says:, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.” But Jesus went further, warning that the mere possession of wealth, and the overvaluation of worldly possessions, stands in the path of salvation. From Matthew 19:24: “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

But Jesus’ most explicit repudiation of the GOP’s ethos is found in Luke 16:19, in his famous story of Lazarus and the rich man.

There was a certain rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. And there was a certain beggar, named Lazarus, who was laid at his gate, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table; moreover, the dogs came and licked his sores. And it came to pass that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom; the rich man also died and was buried. And in hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that they who would pass from here to you cannot, neither can they pass to us, that would come from there.

The Republican candidates all claim to be devout Christians. But between the compassionate teachings of Jesus and their coldhearted, mean-spirited ideology, there is a great gulf.

Whether Gingrich and Romney’s callous attitude toward the least among us will hurt them with the 78 percent of Americans who claim to be Christians is uncertain. From the 1925 publication of “The Man Nobody Knows,” a bestseller that depicted Jesus as a successful businessman, there is a long tradition of smug, self-serving Christianity in this country, a Christianity easily compatible with the harshest and most uncharitable values and beliefs. But in their zeal to win over the most resentful, hate-filled members of their party, the Republican candidates run a greater risk. They are turning before our eyes into archetypal villains, bad guys out of our collective cultural memory bank.

And fittingly, the villain they are becoming is associated with Fox News’ favorite holiday, Christmas.

For some devout Americans, Christmas is a primarily religious occasion. But for most, it is a secular holiday, a time to make children happy, see friends, and eat and drink too much. However, it also carries, in its own modest way, a deeper meaning, even for those who are not religious at all. That meaning is imparted by our culture, but it taps into our desire to rise above ourselves. The bell-ringing Santas collecting for charity on street corners, the heartwarming movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” create a small but real sense that Christmas is, or should be, about regeneration, kindness, a new start — what St. Augustine called “The enchiridion of faith, love and hope.”

The most powerful expression of this humanistic and moral approach to Christmas is Charles Dickens’
“A Christmas Carol.” In the beginning of Dickens’ tale, the wealthy businessman Ebenezer Scrooge is approached by some fellow businessmen, collecting for charity.

Scrooge’s reply tolls like a great, black bell.

‘Are there no prisons?’

‘Plenty of prisons,’ said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.’And the Union workhouses,’ demanded Scrooge. ‘Are they still in operation?’

‘Both very busy, sir.’

‘Oh. I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,’ said Scrooge. ‘I’m very glad to hear it.”

… “I help to support the establishments I have mentioned — they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.’

‘Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.’

‘If they would rather die,’ said Scrooge, ‘they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

It is one of the great indirect cries from the heart in all of literature.

“Are there no prisons?” may play well with the resentful Republican base. But Romney, or whoever runs against Obama, may discover that the American people are not going to vote for Scrooge.

: Gary Kamiya is a Salon contributing writer. More Gary Kamiya

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Praying to be skinny and straight

An expert explains what evangelical weight-loss and ex-gay movements say about America -- and us

By Hannah Tepper

Interview with the author of Skinny and Straight

(Credit: iStockphoto LincolnRogers)

Topics:LGBT, Religion, Editor's Picks

Fatness and gayness have a few things in common: They are both highly charged social issues that can anger people in ways few other things can. To many people, they both represent a sinful inability to control urges – in the case of fat folks, to eat food, and in the case of gay people, to have sex. In evangelical circles, however, fatness and gayness are not just stigmatized, they are actively fought.

In her eloquent new book, “Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America,” Lynne Gerber examines the ways these two separate issues interact in that most morally stringent segment of American culture. A University of California, Berkeley, scholar in residence whose work emphasizes intersections of sexuality, bodies and health in contemporary Christianity, Gerber spent more than three years documenting evangelical weight loss and ex-gay culture, primarily in two evangelical ministries, First Place, a weight loss group, and Exodus, an ex-gay ministry with aims to train gays into straightness. Along the way, Gerber unpacks the historical influence of evangelicalism on American society, while providing a thoughtful look at real people struggling to change.

Salon spoke with Gerber over the phone about her new book, out this week from University of Chicago Press. She was kind enough to share her opinion on everything from how fatness and gayness are valuable points of comparison, the often heartbreaking measures “ex-gays” take to curb same-sex urges, and how evangelicalism is a little bit queer sometimes.

In the book, you focus on two specific evangelical ministries: Exodus, a moderate ex-gay group organized around helping members overcome homosexuality, and First Place, a weight-loss ministry. Why were these important groups to compare and contrast?

I have often been interested in the intersection of fatness and homosexuality. They are both places where there is a lot of social energy, and social hatred toward people who represent fatness and gayness. If you think about what fatness and gayness represent, they are similar. One is a sort of excess; the idea that fat people have this excessive desire for food, and gay people are depicted as having this excessive sexual tendency. Excess is directly linked to social efforts to control those excesses, to get fat people down to size and gay people into the “correct” sexual orientation.

In ex-gay ministries, they have a somewhat psychoanalytic explanation for how homosexuality develops in childhood. What is their theory exactly?

They draw on some pretty psychoanalytic ideas to explain their theory. Basically the theory is that homosexuality is not a problem of sexual attraction to people of the same sex, it’s a problem of gender identification. So if I am a homosexual man, the issue is not so much that I want to sleep with other men, it’s that I don’t see myself as adequately masculine enough. The idea is that people are attracted to what they feel that they are not. So if I am a hypothetical gay man, that means that I think of myself as more female (because they frame it with only two genders). Their idea is that to shift sexual orientation one needs to shift one’s gender identity. A hypothetical gay male needs to start feeling more grounded in his masculinity in order to find his attraction toward women. They say that a homosexual person’s “gender deficiency” is the result of a breakage in the relationship between the same-sex parent during childhood. It’s interesting because this can be anything from abuse to perceived abuse to perceived neglect. It can be anything from the most intentional egregious violation on the part of the same-sex parent to the most unintentional slight that the child experienced.

In the book you explain that Exodus has to maintain this delicate balance; to make gay people feel accepted while at the same time attempting to fundamentally change who they are. How do they manage this?

What they want to do with these “strugglers” is give them a place. They really don’t want people with same-sex desire to leave the church, because their thinking is that once they leave the church, they go into the gay culture and they’re lost forever. They want to give them a place that feels like a home within the church. On the other hand, they believe that homosexuality is a sin, and they have to emphasize that homosexuality is a sin if they want their institutional allies. Ex-gay ministries have this paradoxical effect where people who are struggling with same-sex desires can be out about those desires, there is a place where they can talk about it without getting kicked out, there’s a place where they can acknowledge it, but they have to acknowledge it as “ex-gay.” So that’s the price.

There’s a chapter in the book that I found really compelling about the differences between change in theory and change in practice within the ministries.

In the book I argue that in evangelical culture there is a deep impulse to make a conscious initial choice about one’s faith. To choose God, recognize oneself as a sinner, and make a choice to become a disciple of Christ is a very strong value in evangelical culture. The notion is that this decision becomes a real place where all kinds of transformations can happen: The sinner becomes saved, the drunk becomes sober, and the gay becomes straight. Then the choice has to keep being made over and over again. In First Choice, the initial choice to lose weight brings this endless opportunity for choice where every time I eat I ask myself, is my eating in alignment with God’s will? Once you have been in either ministry for a long time and don’t become straight or lose weight, it shifts to this notion that change is a process. There is this balance between the initial, simple choice and this ongoing pathos to get further and closer to the goal. I think that is also a common polarity in therapeutic culture. There is a similar back and forth between making the first decision, and making a lifestyle change that is going to take a very long time.

In the beginning of the book, you talk about how evangelical Christianity is defined by paradox: the desire to identify with but also to distinguish itself from American culture.

There is a famous argument in academic circles that evangelical culture is a subculture. A subculture works by trying to distinguish itself from the mainstream culture. It does a lot of symbolic and discursive work in order to make that difference. What is interesting in evangelical culture is where they choose to accentuate difference. Clearly homosexuality is a place where they have really chosen that point of distinction.

And they are really proud of that.

They see it as a bold line in the sand that can’t be crossed. The extent to which evangelicalism has been willing to make their identity almost conterminous with their opposition to homosexuality is remarkable.

How does the weight loss ministry, First Place, differ?

Evangelicalism is very much part and parcel with the mainstream weight loss culture. I don’t know that they would consider it an intentional effort, but I think it’s a real reflection of how very deep the overlaps are. For example, Dr. Oz, the weight loss guru, just started working with Rick Warren, a pastor from one of the biggest evangelical churches in the country. They have a new weight loss plan called the Daniel Plan. Evangelicals have a proprietary sense — this deep identification with American culture. There is a notion that they do things just like the rest of Americans, just with more piety. First Place is like secular weight loss programs except the Bible is involved. It gives opportunities for Christians to explore a range of American culture within a Christian context.

Are both fatness and gayness considered sins?

Exodus, as part of its definition, believes homosexual sex, defined as genital acts between people of the same sex, is a sin. First Place is more vague about sin. They call weight a “fleshly problem with a spiritual solution.” They want to fall short of calling it a sin. In First Place, they are also not exactly sure what the sin even is. Is it being fat? Is it in excessive eating? In Exodus, they really limit the sin and say that only genital acts are sins because they want to make a breathable space for people who have same sex attraction to feel welcome.

And in the book you have some heartbreaking accounts about the extents to which some of these people would go in order to fight their urges and try to have this God-oriented agency.

The one that really sticks in my mind is this man I interviewed, an ex-gay man from a very cold state in New England. He wanted to stop fantasizing about men before he went to bed at night, so he would lie in bed and if he found himself veering into this realm of fantasy, he would get out of bed without a blanket and lie on the cold floor of his apartment and read the Bible until he fell asleep. That was his choice to do. That’s not a practice that Exodus necessarily endorses, but it definitely goes to show the extreme choices that people made in order to curb their desires.

What happens when people in these groups end up failing, either with weight loss or with their “struggle” to become heterosexual?

The goal post for success can be very porous. There’s a lot that counts for success. For example, at First Place, members have nine commitments that include things like following a certain eating plan, getting exercise, doing Bible study, showing up at meetings, encouraging others in between sessions, etc. If people aren’t necessarily losing weight, it becomes easy to call upon one of these other standards as success. In the case of the ex-gay ministry, they overtly say that the opposite of homosexuality isn’t heterosexuality, it’s holiness. Well, holiness may in fact be easier to achieve than heterosexuality for a lot of people in the ministry. When people actually fail, when they actually transgress, when a man goes and has sex with another man, for example, there is the opportunity to repent through confession. They tell the group what they did, they are adequately remorseful, and they return to the group’s good graces and submit themselves to the group’s discipline once again.

In the conclusion you note something really fascinating, which is that in American culture we tend to construct an opposing duality around the secular and the religious.

I have a good example of this. In terms of this secular/religious question, there is a common-sense understanding that American culture has become increasingly secular. Well, I would argue that certain forms of religious sensibilities have become secularized. They’ve become so common-sense that they are unmarked in American culture, or their underlying religious concerns have become obfuscated. The image that kept coming back to me is one that I saw at First Place. The first thing that folks do in the meetings is a weigh in, and at First Place, before you get on the scale you have to recite your Bible verse for the week. You go in, step on the scale, recite your Bible verse, and the group leader records whether or not you lost weight and whether or not you got your Bible verse right. It’s like the idea of putting your flag on the moon. Is it religion giving its deference to what is actually the moral authority in this culture, weight, or is it just making clear the compatibility between Christian ideals and the weight loss dogma?

Which do you think it is?

I tend to go back and forth, but I do think practices like that reveal the deep religious sensibilities underneath programs like weight loss and things that are addressed in scientific and health-related language. In some ways I think First Place just returns the explicit religious marks to something that seems to be secular, but actually has very deep moral concerns undergirding it.

At the end of the book, you make a really nice observation that evangelicalism can actually be really progressive and queer in certain unexpected ways.

One of the interesting things about the ex-gay ministries is, in a certain sense, how queer they are. I went to Exodus International’s 30th anniversary conference. Jerry Falwell was there to address Exodus, and he is quite controversial because of what he’s said in the past about gay people. The act that preceded Jerry Falwell was a skit from a Christian theater troupe about a former drag queen trying to join a church Bible study. At one point in the skit, the former drag queen talks about how he used to fantasize about a handsome hero taking him away. Eventually he realizes that Jesus is his real hero, and another character says, “That makes it sound like Jesus is your lover! That’s biblical!” So in front of Jerry Falwell, an ex-gay ministry said that it’s biblical for a man to call Jesus his lover! There is a certain kind of playfulness and queerness that is possible in their world to a degree that’s really surprising to me. And Jerry Falwell didn’t get up and leave.

: More Hannah Tepper

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I fell in love with a megachurch

I went to Joel Osteen's ministry on a lark. But after a heartbreak, I found something there I never expected: Hope

By Alexis Grant

Topics:Life stories, Religion, Christianity, Editor's Picks

The weekend my boyfriend began seeing another woman, I walked into a megachurch for the first time.

My girlfriends and I didn’t go to praise Jesus. We went for fun. (I didn’t know about the boyfriend yet.) My two friends, both 20-something journalists like me, were visiting me in Houston, and we considered Lakewood Church — the largest house of worship in the country and home to controversial superstar pastor Joel Osteen — a tourist attraction.

We parked in a crowded underground garage and followed a trail of people into a stadium built for the city’s basketball team. I’d rarely set foot in a church since growing up catholic in upstate New York, and yet I knew this religious gathering would be nothing like the one I’d attended at home. Everybody in Houston knew about Lakewood. You either went there every weekend — or rolled your eyes at people who did.

An usher guided us to seats up in the stadium’s second tier, practically the nosebleed section. Loud, upbeat music throbbed through the stadium. A woman not far from us clapped to the beat, tears streaming down her face. I stared at her like a child who’d seen the Amish for the first time. Was she really that moved by this song? I wondered whether her sister was sick with cancer or her husband had lost his job. Or maybe she simply felt alone.

When the throbbing music ended – a good half an hour into the service – Osteen didn’t read out of the gospel. Instead, he looked out over the packed stadium and told us, with a fist in the air, that we could accomplish anything we set our minds to. The future was full of hope, he said. “The best things in life are out in front of us!”

To my left, my girlfriends threw their hands in the air with everyone else. “C’mon!” they urged. But I felt awkward and out of place, worried the crowd would pin me for an imposter in this deep sea of believers. Wouldn’t they know I didn’t belong?

Two weeks later, my boyfriend dumped me. The woman he’d connected with the weekend my friends were in town understood him in a way I didn’t, he said. That night I heaved over the toilet, mad at myself for not seeing it coming.

The next Sunday, instead of spending the morning in my now ex-boyfriend’s bed, I went back to Lakewood. I wasn’t exactly sure why I went. I usually dealt with my emotions by running or lifting weights or throwing myself into work, not by praying to someone I wasn’t sure existed. But I felt pulled back toward that uplifting music, and I was too emotionally exhausted to resist.

As I stepped onto the escalator, a greeter handed me a pamphlet, the kind of literature my brother and I would’ve mocked as Jesus paraphernalia. “We’re happy you’re with us today,” she said, looking at me as though she really meant it. I faked a smile.

I could hear the music even before entering the stadium, just like during my first visit with my girlfriends. But this time I was the one alone – and on the verge of tears. Even more than being mad at my ex, I was mad at myself for wallowing over a man when life had something exciting in store for me: I was about to leave my job to go backpacking through Africa, a trip I’d dreamed about for years. Three more months and I’d be on the plane, out in the world, free. Why couldn’t I focus on that?

At the church I’d grown up in, crying would have caused a scene. I remembered kneeling next to my dad at Sunday Mass, just a few days after my grandfather’s funeral, and watching him lean back in his pew to wipe tears from his eyes, then kneel back in position. Catholics were stoic. We repeated the same words every Mass, pausing when we were supposed to pause, sparing our prayers the wrath of inflection, showing neither happiness nor sadness. We showed nothing.

But at Lakewood, emotion pulsed through the crowd. People sang loudly, with both hands outstretched, palms toward their God as if to receive whatever he offered. I put my hands out too, feeling sheepish, glancing around to see if anyone could tell I was a newbie. Soon the whole place was jumping up and down and belting the lyrics, “I’m Still Standing.” (Think worship lyrics; not the Elton John song.) As they waved their arms in the air, I hoped their strength would rub off on me.

Surrounded by people so full of faith and hope, I sensed an escape route for my ache. If I could just let that heaviness out of my chest, believers around me would absorb it, eat it up and digest even the tough parts.

So I let go. With my arms above my head, I let the tears stream down my cheeks just like the woman near me had done during my first trip to the stadium. It was freeing, crying in that crowd, anonymous yet part of something bigger than myself. I was among strangers, yet I felt less broken and alone than when I’d walked in.

I was used to leaving church feeling guilty for my sins from the previous week, for letting my mind wander to sex while Latin words rolled off an old priest’s tongue. But after Lakewood, I felt lighter, like I had handed some of my burden over to … God? Did that mean I believed in Him? Had the energy of this place pulled me here, or was it something bigger?

Maybe this was what it felt like to find God, I thought. In my heartbreak, had I discovered a different kind of love?

I went back to Lakewood the next week. And the next. But I didn’t tell anyone. My friends were still laughing over how a candidate for district attorney had struck a man from a jury pool because he went to the megachurch. “People who go to Lakewood are screwballs and nuts,” she’d told the judge.

Which meant Houston had an awful lot of screwballs and nuts. I was fascinated by the engine that was Lakewood, how the church organized parking for thousands of people, distributed the holy bread to every mouth in the stadium, and manned a bookstore that probably brought in more money on Sunday than most do in a month.

Yet Lakewood felt more motivational than religious – or maybe that was simply what I wanted it to be. Ironically, the secular spirit that drew me there was exactly why some religious folk criticized Osteen: They complained he wasn’t religious enough.

When Osteen did invoke religious images or drift into Jesus talk, I’d tweak his words so they worked for me. He said things were in God’s hands; I heard it as fate’s hands. He said God would send luck my way; I told myself to make my own luck. By performing this sort of calculus, I managed to convince myself that I wasn’t becoming one of those religious nuts.

Until, that is, Osteen mentioned something rather startling. “If you come to Lakewood three times,” he told the audience, pausing to flash his famous supersmile, “we consider you a member.”

My insides tense, I counted the number of times I’d attended. Was it four? Five? Definitely more than three. Oh my God, I muttered. Had I become one of them?

But my discovery was short-lived. Soon I would leave Houston for good, following through on my travel plans. On my last Sunday in the city, I took a break from packing to attend the church a final time. After the usual mix of uplifting songs, the pastor encouraged us to get out of our seats and join one of the prayer partners who were scattered around the stadium. For weeks I’d avoided this part of the service, remaining seated while people around me shuffled through the aisles to share their own personal pleas to God; a friend who’d attended Lakewood told me a prayer partner once spoke to her in tongues. But this was my last chance, and curiosity was on Lakewood’s side. Breathing deeply to shake my nerves, I got in line.

My prayer partner had middle-aged pudge around her middle and warm brown eyes. When it was my turn, she took my hands in hers and said, in perfectly comprehensible English, “What are we praying for today?”

My chin trembled as I contemplated asking her to help my heart heal or give me the strength say goodbye to Houston. But I wanted to look forward, not back. “I’m going on a long trip,” I told her, feeling comforted by her eyes. “A journey by myself. To Africa.”

She squeezed my hands, shut her eyes and prayed aloud to her God – my God? – to keep me safe during my travels. Around us, hundreds of people prayed aloud with their own partner, their words blanketing the stadium with murmurs, a presence that was palpable.

“Keep her safe and healthy and happy,” my partner finished, letting go of my sweaty palms.

As I walked back to my seat, I added my own little prayer, asking Whoever Was Up There to forgive me, knowing my fling with the megachurch, like all good love affairs, would be fleeting. And when the music began again, I lifted my palms to the sky.