A couple of weeks before the 2004 American presidential election, I checked out of a hotel in central Tehran in order to check into a friendlier one around the corner. The first was a towering block of featureless rooms, its lobby forever crowded with bored, shabby men who may or may not have worked there. Two men staffed the reception desk, and they seemed to track my every movement, whether out of professional obligation or to amuse themselves wasn’t clear. An Iranian friend who called for me complained that they gruffly questioned her: Who are you? What is your father’s name? Who is the American? How do you know her?
So it was that I stood impatiently before the window to check out while the receptionist took his sweet time to retrieve my American passport from the cubby behind him. He held it for a long, strange moment before he slid it my way.
Wistfully, he said: “How I wish I had a passport like that.”
Off we were, talking about the election. The receptionist hoped President George W. Bush would defeat Sen. John Kerry. He hated the Democrats, he professed. It wasn’t my first encounter with this Iranian enthusiasm for the Republican Party, as unfathomable as it was widespread. Under the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, after all, the United States toppled Iran’s popular nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953, consolidating power in the hands of the brutal and despised shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Under the Democratic President Bill Clinton, the United States finally apologized for engineering those events. I asked the receptionist to explain.
“Jimmy Carter,” he replied with disgust. “He could have stopped this Islamic Revolution, and he didn’t.”
When it comes to Iran, where revolutionaries identified Carter with every bad turn the United States had ever visited on their or any other third-world country, and where Americans would come to associate him with haplessness and defeat, somehow everything the president from Plains, Ga., did would always be wrong. His presidency, already a fragile vessel, shattered on the shoals of the Iranian hostage crisis — those 444 days at the end of his single term when the staff of the American embassy in Tehran was held captive by militant students. From then on, he would forever be linked in the American mind with the humiliation of seeing one’s countrymen blindfolded, helpless, surrounded by angry mobs of Shiites — believers in a religion most Americans only dimly apprehended, revolutionaries who hated the United States for having supported a regime most Americans were barely conscious existed. And now, 26 years later, this Iranian hotel worker in a single gesture renounced his country’s revolution and laid it at the feet of the very president whose likeness Iranian revolutionaries burned in effigy as they massed outside the seized embassy compound. It’s been a long quarter-century in Iran.
In “Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War With Militant Islam,” Mark Bowden, the celebrated author of “Black Hawk Down,” takes us back to the Iran of 1979 and the America of the Carter White House, painstakingly recounting the 444 days of the Iranian hostage crisis. It is an uneven but riveting book — history written as thriller, a suspenseful narration of one of the more bizarre and dramatic episodes in the annals of American diplomacy. It is doggedly reported, reconstructed with a detective’s eye for detail, and strangely, given the times, only tenuously tied to any larger frame of meaning.
The story opens on Nov. 4, 1979, when Bowden’s sweeping cast of characters reported for an ordinary day of work at the American embassy in Iran’s unstable capital. “Ordinary” was a relative term in the nine months after the fall of the shah; the embassy’s staff, nearly all of which had turned over since the revolution, was wholly aware that the buildings might be laid siege. Students had already attempted to take the compound in February and been expelled. But when President Carter admitted the ailing, exiled shah to the United States for medical treatment, despite ample warning that doing so would leave the American embassy staff vulnerable to reprisals, many of the diplomats regarded the demonstrators outside their compound with mounting apprehension.
Students poured over the walls that isolated the embassy compound from the city, encircling the buildings and heading straight for the least secure openings, which they’d evidently scoped out earlier. The Americans executed a plan the embassy’s Marine security force had devised after the February attack: They were to barricade themselves on the second floor of the chancery, and if that redoubt were breached, they’d retreat to the vault on the same floor, where they had reserves of food and water. Although the Marines were well armed, under no circumstances were they to shoot at Iranian interlopers. Anti-American fear and suspicion were so powerful in the Iranian capital that to open fire might ignite a spiral of violence. As a last resort, the embassy guards could lob tear gas grenades.
Bowden seems to have debriefed nearly every living hostage for untold hours, and he recounts the embassy siege with a battle historian’s zeal for minutiae. We know exactly who was where, doing what in what order. The Iranian students put a gun to the security chief’s head and threatened to shoot if the diplomats didn’t admit them to the second floor of the chancery. A small coterie of embassy staff members retreated to the vault, hastily destroying as many sensitive documents as they could find. Communications specialist Rick Kupke noticed that all the embassy’s firearms had also been loaded into the vault and worried that if he and his colleagues were found there with a cache of weapons, they would come under fire. So he crept up through a hatch onto the roof with armfuls of firearms, looking for places to hide them. When the Iranians breached the vault, Kupke hesitated on the roof: Should he surrender himself or risk being found, surrounded by weapons?
In the end all of the Americans surrendered. Those suspected of being CIA were threatened or beaten; so were those suspected of knowing the combinations to various office safes. The day finished with many of the American diplomats and Marines tied to chairs in the ambassador’s residence. From there, we follow the hostages’ movements from one part of the compound to another, through an array of holiday pageants and propaganda interviews staged for the Iranian and foreign press, and eventually into the Tehran prison system, where they were held following a brief dispersal to various Iranian cities after a botched American rescue attempt. We hear their thoughts, their most banal memories of captivity, their captors and each other; we follow the overgrowth of their hair and beards, their weight loss, the deterioration of their clothes, which some learn to wash by stepping into the shower fully dressed; we witness the humiliation of being issued too-small underwear.
At the book’s lesser moments, this thicket of detail can try a reader’s patience. We learn that on the day of the embassy’s seizure, the security chief, Al Golacinski, pulled on his cammies in a hurry and thought they looked ridiculous with his loafers; we learn that a political officer, John Limbert, was preoccupied with his need for a haircut. Near the end of the first 24 hours’ ordeal (recounted in some 180 of the book’s 680 pages), we learn that one hostage’s “butt hurt from sitting in the same position for so long.” Are we to conclude that if any one of these facts had been otherwise, things might have worked out differently? Or is it simply the odd trivia that has been emblazoned on the memories of the captives, such that 26 years later, they still think to tell a reporter how they felt that day about their shoes? One waits in vain for the significance to reveal itself; the details are recounted with a historian’s detachment but a novelist’s unfulfilled promise of resonance.
A little character development helps, and though it’s often hard to keep the 66 hostages straight, we manage to follow an impressive array of experiences over the sweep of Bowden’s tale. From the consulate, we get to know Richard Queen, who begins to suffer from a mysterious, frightening, degenerative illness in captivity. (Irritatingly, after building the reader’s concern and sympathy for Queen over hundreds of pages, Bowden never reveals what it was that ailed the vice consul; for those who wonder, it’s multiple sclerosis.) Bruce Laingen, the embassy’s chargé d’affaires, was the top American diplomat in Tehran following the revolution (no new American ambassador had yet been installed). On the day of the hostage-taking, Laingen had an appointment with the foreign minister, which he attended with one political officer, Vic Tomseth, and a Marine security guard, Michael Howland.
The three of them would become unofficial prisoners at the foreign ministry for the duration of the crisis, confined to an incongruously grand dining room that crawled with cockroaches after dark. If they left the ministry, they would fall into the hands of a waiting mob; if they sought refuge in allied embassies, they would expose those embassies to violence. At the foreign ministry, they tried fruitlessly to negotiate their own and their colleagues’ release. They read their way through the ministry’s library, occasionally making their bedraggled presence known to visiting dignitaries; Howland made mischief by disabling the guards’ weapons on the pretense of teaching them how to disassemble and maintain them and by prowling the ministry naked at night. Laingen kept a diary in which he could remain a statesman, recording political observations and reflections even as he felt himself fading to irrelevance as anything but a hostage.
The rest of the Americans were confined in various parts of the embassy compound, some in the notorious “Mushroom Inn,” as they dubbed a moist basement of cell-like cubicles. The interrogators and guards, too, got nicknames: Gap tooth, Hamid the Liar, Queenie, Bozo. Some of the hostages suffered mainly from confinement and boredom; others seethed with anger; still others were regularly beaten and interrogated. One of the book’s most oddly interesting passages details how each prisoner passed the long hours. One taught seminars on constitutional law in his head. Another painstakingly remodeled his family’s home in his mind’s eye. Yet another organized a library for all the hostages to use. Still another found God. Most attempted to exercise by doing calisthenics or running in place. Those who shared spaces tried to beautify their temporary homes. Those without roommates communicated with one another furtively, leaving notes in shared bathrooms or squeezing them into openings in the walls.
The embassy’s two top political officers were a study in contrasts. Mild-mannered John Limbert was the quintessential diplomat, conscious that his captors were very like the Iranian students he’d taught in Shiraz, forever seeking reasonable common ground. Michael Metrinko had been hard-drinking, chain-smoking, always a step ahead of his colleagues in local knowledge that he swiftly soaked up during long, late nights on the town and through an impressive network of well-connected insiders. He knew and loved Iranian culture and politics perhaps the best of anyone, and he would prove to be the most recalcitrant and worst treated of the captives. He never missed an opportunity to insult his jailers, something he could do floridly in Farsi; perhaps the only thing that gave him pleasure was to spite them, even if it meant rejecting a mouthwatering Christmas meal they delivered to him and which he desperately wanted to eat, or quitting his two-pack-a-day smoking habit cold turkey rather than accept a cigarette. Metrinko was viciously beaten and kept in solitary confinement for more than a year.
The Iranian captors, seen through the eyes of their hostages, remain cartoonish figures in Bowden’s telling. They are ill-educated, conspiracy-minded, cultish and cruel. They reportedly saw Americans as omnipotent and malevolent spies, whose very watches and wedding rings contained secret chips that allowed them to communicate with Washington. Bowden depicts them as pious bores, sincere believers in their revolution’s power to remake the world in the interests of its oppressed and in the image of their faith. To the militants’ vision of an all-seeing, all-powerful America, Bowden counterposes a CIA presence of three operatives, all new to their jobs, not one of whom spoke Farsi or ran a single useful agent in a country whose revolution had rendered it terra incognita. To the militants’ provincialism and starry-eyed utopianism, he counterposes an embassy staff of jaded and worldly foreign service bureaucrats, forced to listen to tiresome lectures about the coming betterment of the world.
From the point of view of the hostages, it was an absurd encounter, a case of mistaken identity. These were not even the same diplomats who staffed the American embassy under the reign of the shah; and though the Iranians claimed that the CIA sought to reverse the Islamic revolution, the Americans believed that their mission was to convince the Iranians that the United States accepted their new government, as well as to find a few friendly informants who might make the Islamic Republic’s inner workings less opaque. To the Americans, the hostage-taking was an unthinkable act of thuggery, inspired by collective delusion. To the Iranians, it was a triumphant invasion of a “den of spies.” The students maintained that they had not kidnapped a diplomatic mission so much as arrested a hive of scheming foreign subversives. At first Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini equivocated over the hostage-taking; when he endorsed it, moderate Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and his interim government resigned, leaving Washington without a real negotiating partner.
Never had the rules of international statesmanship been so manifestly and dramatically abrogated; and yet the world chose not to censure Iran, and the United States looked on helplessly. As Bowden depicts him, Carter was a deliberate leader, driven not by political calculation so much as by agonizing moral and strategic judgment. He feared that any hostile move would lead the hostages to be executed and could touch off a larger conflagration in a contested region on the Cold War battleground. But refraining from action cost the United States and its president dearly on the world stage as well as in domestic politics. The Carter administration undertook back-channel negotiations again and again. Each time, they foundered on Iranian factionalism, but to the outside world it simply appeared that the Iranians had wrung humiliating concessions from Washington and then failed to deliver the hostages.
Finally, Carter agreed to launch a rescue mission, using the recently founded Delta force, which specialized in highly skilled and secretive military operations. Bowden’s reporting on the rescue attempt is a tour de force. As a last-ditch effort, the United States military had grimly undertaken an operation with an unthinkably low probability of success — a leanly manned excursion into the heart of a hostile country, where many of the Delta force men were prepared to sacrifice themselves. The result was not just loss of American life, but yet another embarrassment before the eyes of Iranian militants and the world. It was not enough that the secret mission failed: It failed in a spectacular explosion that lit up Iran’s night sky and killed eight American military men.
Here Bowden’s cinematic detail pays off. When two agents scoping out the desert meeting point for American aircraft hear a truck on the nearby highway, they sprawl on the ground. Bowden knows what song one man sang to the other at that moment. He knows what the inside of an airplane smelled like as it perilously wove through Iranian airspace, avoiding the radar system the Americans knew because they had sold it to the shah. An incredible story unfolds in that desert in the dead of night. A bus of passing Iranian pilgrims was briefly held hostage, for fear the passengers would report the unmistakable presence of two American planes and six helicopters in a patch of desert off the road. The plan was to fly the bus passengers to Egypt until the rescue operation was complete. But the operation failed, in part because it was stunningly audacious; in part due to internecine battles and volatile leadership; and mainly because those who painstakingly planned the mission did not account for anomalous desert weather conditions that proved fatal to the helicopters. Bowden’s exhaustive reporting and fast-paced story-telling render to history an episode all but blocked out of American memory.
Bowden’s book is a page-turner, but its final chapters do not do justice to the epic story he has gone to great trouble to reconstruct. He has narrated the events of those 444 days from a bird’s-eye view, without interview quotes or attribution, but hewing closely to the experiences of each of the story’s great many characters. It’s an absorbing and effective technique — until it abruptly ends after the hostages board the plane that will take them to freedom. Then we get a chapter that tells us what became of each hostage in what feels like a brisk run-through of their résumés, one piled atop another.
Bowden then travels to Tehran, which, by his description, is colorless, dirty, smelly, bland and desolate, scarred by ugly architecture and choked with traffic — a suffocating place where nothing grows and Allah forbids every hue but Islamic green. It’s a superficial impression, guided by preconception, and not a surprising one from someone who has clearly spent countless hours immersed in the bitter memories of the hostages. But since he has gone to the trouble to take us back to Iran, one wishes Bowden evinced more feeling for the density and variegation of contemporary Iranian life, for its contradictions and lyricism, for the sophistication and dignity of its intellectual culture and politics, let alone the last decade’s striving for reform, however stymied.
Bowden might have rendered some of the country’s recent history through the hostage takers he went to see in Tehran. Instead, we get a catalog of their whereabouts and long, undigested quotes from their political diatribes. Some of the hostage takers have remained true to the hard line they championed in 1979, while others became leaders of the movement for incremental reform. But we don’t get much narrative or political context for these currents. Bowden has gone to the hostage takers essentially looking for a renunciation of the embassy takeover, which has become one of the founding myths of the Islamic Republic; and he only passingly acknowledges that “perhaps” this mea culpa might not be forthcoming in a country where dissidents are routinely jailed and tortured. (He has even told us that he traveled under the auspices of an Iranian agency that required him to turn over tapes of all his interviews before departing the country.)
What exactly is the significance of the hostage crisis today? Why, in the year 2006, as tensions mount between the United States and Iran, should we return to that fateful moment in the history of our relations, and what will be illuminated there?
The obvious answers are unsatisfying, and Bowden doesn’t really get us beyond them. His subtitle asserts that the hostage crisis was “America’s first encounter with militant Islam.” But then we are left to wonder exactly what this encounter touched off, and how, as well as what it might tell us about later encounters. Bowden informs us that militant Islamism is a traditionalist backlash against modernity — the “death throes of an ancient way of life.” The Iranian example, he writes, presents a pattern for the future of Islamism everywhere: A “fanatical fringe” will seize on popular discontent, offering a vision of paradise but leading only to corrupt and ineffectual dictatorship that the people will grow to hate.
There is nothing ancient about the way of life Iran adopted after its revolution, which introduced an entirely new vision of the state onto the world scene. And Bowden’s generalized musings on utopianism have little bearing on the American encounter with the hostage takers, let alone with militant Islam. Neither of these superficial arguments follows from the 600 preceding pages, which have addressed the Americans’ experiences almost exclusively. Bowden hasn’t really figured out what the significance might be of the events he recounts, and this thick tome threatens to float away without an anchor.
Reliving the hostage crisis outside any convincing matrix of meaning is sure to leave many American readers with nothing but outrage, especially considering that Iran’s current president is an anti-American hardliner whose rhetoric harks back to 1979. At a time when some in American political circles are calling for military strikes against Iran, rekindling that anger without purpose or context hardly seems a service. Between the present moment and the one Bowden narrates, there is a facile and dangerous parallel at hand. To make it is to pass over the last quarter century of Iranian politics, which has witnessed a unique fermentation of Islamist rule and democratic yearnings. It is also to misrepresent the meaning of the 2005 presidential election in Iran. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not ride to power on a wave of popular enthusiasm; he did so on a wave of despair. Bowden writes that no reformist candidates were permitted to run in that election, but in fact there were three, by some counts four. Their constituency was divided, demoralized and angry. Ahmadinejad’s ascendance reflected not a resurgence of revolutionary purism in Iran, but the political failure of the reform movement, as well as widespread frustration with economic hardship and government corruption. Iran remains, confoundingly, the country in the Muslim Middle East with the government most overtly hostile to American interests and the populace most open to democratic values. That’s partly why Iran is such a puzzle for American policymakers, more now than in 1979.
Today, the former American embassy compound crouches behind a wall daubed with the revolutionary murals many young Tehranis have come to regard as the kitsch of their parents’ youth. It is almost impossible to imagine American diplomats cruising through its gates and out into the clangorous Iranian capital. What might the world be like if they did? Bowden’s book captures a precarious moment, a final point of contact between an Islamic Republic of Iran that was, in that instant, bloody and new; and a United States that was a world-weary Goliath, little suspecting that the world it had grown weary of was shifting beneath its feet.
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
Why would any organization or social change movement want to ally itself with a community that’s energetic, excited about activism, highly motivated, increasingly visible, good at fundraising, good at getting into the news, increasingly populated by young people, and with a proven track record of mobilizing online in massive numbers on a moment’s notice?
If you need to ask that — maybe you shouldn’t be in political activism.
And if you don’t need to ask that — if reading that paragraph is making you clutch your chest and drool like a baby — maybe you should be paying attention to the atheist movement.
The so-called “new atheist” movement is definitely not so new. Atheists have been around for decades, and they’ve been organizing for decades. But something new, something big, has been happening in atheism in the last few years — atheism has become much more visible, more vocal, more activist, better organized, and more readily mobilized — especially online, but increasingly in the flesh as well. The recent Reason Rally in Washington, DC brought an estimated 20,000 attendees to the National Mall on March 24 — and that was in the rain. Twenty thousand atheists trucked in from around the country, indeed from around the world, and stood in the rain, all day: to mingle, network, listen to speakers and musicians and comedians, check out organizations, schmooze, celebrate, and show the world the face of happy, diverse, energetic, organized atheism.
Atheists are becoming a force to be reckoned with. Atheists are gaining clout. Atheists are becoming a powerful ally when we’re inspired to take action — and a powerful opponent when we get treated like dirt.
Case Study Number One, “Powerful Ally” Division: The million dollars currently being raised — and the goodness knows how many people being mobilized — for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s “Light the Night Walks,” by the non-theistic Foundation Beyond Beliefand the Todd Stiefel family.
The Stiefel Family and the Foundation Beyond Belief have wanted to make a large atheist contribution to the fight against cancer for some time. Like many people, Todd Stiefel has had many people in his life afflicted with cancer. His family has the resources to make a large financial donation to the fight against it. And as the largest non-theistic charitable organization in the world, the Foundation Beyond Belief was the perfect organization to channel and structure the Stiefel family’s matching offer — and to round up supporters for it.
But it was distressingly difficult to give this money away. If this whole “atheists donating pots of money to the fight against cancer” story seems familiar… you may be remembering theAmerican Cancer Society controversy, in which the ACS initially accepted a $250,000 matching offer from the Stiefel family and the Foundation Beyond Belief to participate as a national team in the ACS’s Relay for Life — and then, suddenly and mysteriously, turned it down. (And were then deluged with angry protests — and withdrawals of donations — when the story hit the Internet. More on that in a tic.)
That isn’t happening this time around. The Stiefel family and the Foundation Beyond Belief have found an organization that’s more than happy to partner with them in the fight against cancer. When Stiefel reached out to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, they cheerfully accepted his offer — a half million dollars in matching funds, as a “Special Friend” team partner in the LL&S’s “Light the Night” Walks, with the goal of uniting the freethought movement around the world to raise a million dollars for the fight against cancer. Andrea Greif, Director of Public Relations for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, says, “LLS is appreciative that Foundation Beyond Belief has set such a generous goal to help us beat blood cancer and we look forward to having their teams join LLS’s Light the Night Walk.” And Stiefel describes the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society as “enthusiastic at the prospect of working with us.” He went on to say, “We LOVE working with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. They have been very kind, supportive and helpful. They have made it very clear that cancer doesn’t discriminate and neither do they. LLS just wants to put the mission of fighting cancer first.”
This could easily have been a controversial effort. For one thing, the Honored Hero for the FBB in this year’s Light the Night Walk is the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens — a hero to many in the atheist movement, but a very controversial figure to many outside of it (and indeed, even to many atheists). But Hitchens’ status as the FBB’s Honored Hero is apparently not an issue. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society is accepting FBB’s partnership and generosity with open arms. And these efforts have been extremely effective. As of this writing, the Foundation Beyond Belief has already hit 50 LLS local teams — halfway to the 100 team minimum goal. (By the way: If you were ticked off about the American Cancer Society thing, and you want to translate that anger into action? Participating in the FBB’s Light the Night Walks in your area — or starting an FBB LTN team in your area– would be a great way to do that.)
And this isn’t an isolated incident. In recent months, the atheist community has proven to be extraordinarily good at raising money, visibility, and support for people and causes that capture their imagination. And they have exceptional skills when it comes to fundraising and hell-raising on the Internet.
When high school atheist Jessica Ahlquist was being harassed, bullied and threatened by her schoolmates and community for asking her public school to enforce the state/church separation laws and take down a prayer banner from the school auditorium, the atheist community rose to her aid, with an outpouring of love, admiration, and emotional support… and a college fund totaling over $62,000. When high school atheist Damon Fowler was being harassed, bullied, and threatened by his schoolmates and community for standing up against prayer at his public high school graduation — and was kicked out of his home by his parents — the atheist community rose to his aid, with an outpouring of sympathy and support… and a college fund totaling over $31,000. When Camp Quest, the summer camp for children of non-theist families, was engaged in a major fundraising drive last year, several atheist bloggers (conflict of interest alert — including me) teamed up in a fundraising contest involving a series of grandiose and increasingly ridiculous dares and forfeits, ultimately raising $30,074.80 for the cause.
Atheists aren’t just raising money for their own, either. On Kiva — the microlending organization working to alleviate poverty and empower people in need around the world — theAtheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and Non-Religious team is the #1 all-time leader in amount of money loaned… not just among religious affiliation teams, but among all the teams on Kiva. The Reddit atheist community raised over $200,000 for Doctors Without Borders last November, in a fundraising drive that came close to crashing Reddit with the traffic. The Foundation Beyond Belief has been supporting charitable and human rights projects for over two years — well before the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society project began — and to date has raised over a quarter of a million dollars to support human rights, the environment, education, child welfare, anti-poverty efforts, public health, and more.
And the power of atheist organizing extends beyond simple fundraising. To give just two recent examples: When preacher Sean Harris was caught on tape exhorting parents to beat their gay kids, the local atheist communities in the area immediately began sounding the alarm — and rounded up activists to protest at the church the following Sunday. According to Priscilla Parker, President of Military Atheists & Secular Humanists, 27 of the Sean Harris protestors last Sunday were from secular/atheist groups. That may not sound like much — but when you realize that there were a total of about 70 protestors at the event, the atheist presence suddenly looks a lot more significant. (Especially for an event in a highly religious, largely conservative town — and especially for an event that was organized on extremely short notice.) And when American Airlines was planning to air an anti-vaccination ad on their planes’ video systems and in their in-flight magazines, the atheist and skeptical communities dove into action: publicizing the Change.org petition against the Australian Vaccination Network’s ad, and slamming the decision all around the Internet. The story went viral, in large part because of the Internet power of atheists and skeptics — and the joint effort between heathens and other activists ultimately pressured the airline into rejecting the ad.
When a cause catches their hearts, the atheist community can be a powerful ally.
And when a cause catches their hearts in a different way, they can be a powerful opponent.
The American Cancer Society snafu is probably the most obvious example of this. When the ACS turned down the Foundation Beyond Belief’s offer to participate as a national team in the Relay for Life, they apparently didn’t expect much pushback. But when the story broke, it went viral — and made misery for the ACS. For weeks, the ACS was deluged with emails, letters, phone calls, and posts to their Facebook wall. For weeks, their Facebook wall was taken up almost entirely with angry posts about the story. Importantly, while the chief instigators of the rage-fest were atheists, they were quickly followed by a crowd of religious believers, who were just as outraged at the anti-atheist bigotry — and at the rejection of perfectly good money — as the heathens. And very importantly, a flood of people halted their donations to the ACS… including many people who had been regular donators for years.
But there are plenty of other examples as well. The abovementioned American Airlines anti-vaccination ad. The abovementioned Sean Harris protest. The sublimely ridiculousGelatogate, in which a local gelato merchant in Springfield, Missouri posted a sign in his store window reading, “Skepticon [a skeptical/ atheist conference] is NOT Welcomed To My Christian Business”… and then got a faceful of Internet fury when a photo of the sign was Facebooked, Tweeted, G-plussed, texted, blogged, emailed, and generally spread through the atheosphere like wildfire… and then backpedaled as fast as it is possible for a human being to backpedal. Like many social change movements, organizing atheists is like herding cats, and it’s not easy to predict which issues will catch their imaginations — but when it happens, the combination of passionate motivation and Internet savvy turns them into a powerhouse.
And very importantly, the atheist movement is increasingly becoming a youth movement. The Secular Student Alliance – an umbrella organization of non-theistic college and high school groups around the United States and the world — is growing at an astonishing rate. In 2009, they had 143 affiliates: in 2012, they had 351. Impressively, their high school rates are climbing at an even faster clip. In 2010, the organization had only four high school affiliates: this year, that number has climbed to 37. And as anyone knows who understands politics getting young people inspired and on board is enormously important for the long-term future of any social change movement. What’s more, many of these student groups are active in service projects and social change activism outside of atheism… and are eager to partner with other groups to get the job done. If you’re in any doubt about the power of atheism to help move political mountains, now and in the coming years — pay attention to those SSA affiliate numbers. And pay attention to how they keep growing… and growing… and growing.
So what’s the take-home message?
Atheists are your friend. Or they can be. And they can be a very powerful friend indeed.
Progressive and social-change organizers and organizations are having a hard time seeing the atheist movement as… well, as anything, really. Except maybe as a pain in the neck. Many progressives are undoubtedly aware of the existence of atheists: the atheist community’s efforts at visibility have been paying off, and atheism is being discussed in progressive circles as widely as it is everywhere else. But somehow, while the existence of atheists has become undeniable, the existence of atheism as a social change movement is still largely being ignored. To give just one example: In over 100 panels, training sessions, and other presentations at the upcoming 2012 Netroots Nation conference for online progressive activists, not one is about atheists or atheism. (Conflict of interest alert: I was one of the proposed panelists on a proposed atheism panel for Netroots Nation 2012.)
It’s hard to tell what this is about. Do social change organizations see atheists as toxic — too controversial, too likely to draw negative attention, more trouble than we’re worth? Or are these organizations simply unaware that atheists have formed into a serious social change movement — and are growing this movement at a rapid pace?
If it’s the former… then shame on you. In the early days of the LGBT movement, queers were far more controversial than they are now, and associating with queers was considered by many to be toxic. It was still the right thing to do. (Not to mention the smart thing to do.)
If it’s the latter… then sit up. Pay attention. Atheists are here. In just a few short years, the movement has gone from zero to sixty, in both visibility and mobilization. And the atheist movement is largely comprised of people who are passionate, compassionate, courageous, Internet savvy, skilled at seeing through bullshit, willing to defy the status quo, excited about activism… and dedicated to changing the world. After all, as far as they’re concerned, it’s the only world they’ve got.
You want these people on your side.
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
Progressives often marvel at how focused, coordinated and aggressive our conservative opposition is. They seem to fall into lockstep and march, building large organizations and executing complex strategies with an astonishing rate of success. We may be smarter, better educated and more reality-based — but they seem to have a cohesion and a discipline that eludes us. What’s going on here?
There are a lot of answers to that question. But I’d suggest that some intriguing answers might come from a close study of conservative religious paradigms, which play an essential role in giving conservatives a unique kind of emotional and social durability.
Conservative faiths — particularly evangelical Protestantism, but orthodox Catholicism and Judaism also include similar teachings – inculcate a worldview that equips people with extra tools to work with in face of large-scale change. The same qualities that lead non-believers to deride faith as a crutch also give believers very real psychological support in turbulent times — the kind of sure footing that makes organizing for political and social change easier, more effective, and more gratifying for those who are operating off this sturdy base.
What follows are just a few examples of advantages followers of conservative religions may enjoy when facing transformative change. I offer them not as an argument for belief — that’s not an option for many of us, and not even most religious liberals would agree with the theology at work in these systems — but rather in the hope that if we study these advantages closely, we might find authentic ways to cultivate similar strengths that are firmly rooted in our own worldview. There are lessons to be learned here.
Knowing you are on the side of right
The soul-deep certainty that God is on your side, and that you are fighting on the side of Eternal Truth, may be the biggest political and cultural confidence-builder there is. Conservatives know, beyond the shadow of doubt, that they are on the side of the angels, and this profound sense of spiritual assurance reduces hesitation, spurs action, and increases their willingness to take big risks for the sake of the ultimate victory they know in their bones is coming. They shake off defeat more easily, too, because they know it’s only a temporary setback on their way to that promised victory. After all, the Bible asks: if God is for us, who can be against us?
Progressives operate from a far more open-ended place. We’re suspicious of that kind of deep spiritual certainty, because we know how often it’s led people and nations into moral catastrophe. Instead, we prefer to operate out of our heads. We’re always questioning, taking in new data, re-analyzing, and re-deciding what we’ve already decided, triangulating and re-triangulating against our own moral lines. In our minds, the final outcome is never preordained; and what’s “right” is an ever-shifting target that we constantly need reorient ourselves toward. Chris Mooney documented these tendencies in his recent book, “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — And Reality.” He notes that this hyperflexibility can make it devilishly hard for liberals to settle on a plan of action — let alone actually act effectively together with confidence when the time comes.
Also: because we’re not buttressed by the reassuring conviction that the CEO of the Universe has our backs, we feel more acutely alone in the battle, and often doubt that our ultimate victory is anything but assured. Because of this, it’s much easier for us to feel overwhelmed, discouraged and burned out. When religious conservatives feel this way, they can resort to sanctuaries of prayer, fellowship and reconnection with their sense of larger purpose. Most secular progressives don’t have any kind of built-in weekly restoration-and-regeneration process — and the lack of safe healing space does take its toll.
I’d gently suggest that there are authentically progressive, non-theistic ways of tapping into that deep spiritual conviction, raising our own sense of trust in the righteousness of our vision, and finding regular sources of sanctuary and restoration. And that it would be good for us to start exploring ways to do this.
We might, for example, make telling pieces of our own glorious history a regular feature of all of our gatherings. We could make a bigger ritual out of invoking the achievements of our progressive forebears, the noble example of the lives they lived, and the ways in which they altered the course of American history. These stories ground us in our own progressive identity, forge us into a community, reaffirm our shared vision, and rouse our courage. We are capable of everything Mother Jones and Martin Luther King Jr. were. Our enemies are no more dangerous or implacable now than the segregationists, the robber barons, the slaveowners, or the royalists were back then. We don’t know for sure if God is for us or against us, but we do know, with certainty, that “the moral arc of the universe is long, and it bends toward justice.” And we are the ones in our generation who have been entrusted with the sacred task of bending it a little further. History, at least, is on our side.
Being accountable to God, and nobody else
Which brings us to another, closely related item: Religious conservatives are highly motivated by the sense that, today and every day until the end of time, they’re ultimately accountable to God for how things on earth turn out. The fear of failing the test before St. Peter — and again on Judgment Day — gives their temporal efforts a sense of urgency and commitment to the cause that we progressives sometimes have a very hard time mustering.
At the same time — perhaps paradoxically — believing that the only consequence that matters will be deferred until after death makes it easier to let go of the day-to-day ebb and flow of one’s fortunes here on earth. Conservative Christians believe that they are in this world, but not of it; and therefore, it’s a sin to worry too much about what goes on here. And they certainly don’t care much about what people outside their own tribe think about them. (Inside the tribe, they care very much.) God’s judgment is the only one that matters in the end; here on earth, persecution is just the clearest possible sign that you’re doing the right thing. This ability to disengage can be a profound source of peace and courage.
Progressives, on the other hand, worry a lot about this world. We have to: we believe that we are directly accountable to history and our grandkids for what happens on our watch. There is no mercy, no grace, no forgiveness or born-again do-overs if we screw it up. And that, frankly, makes us a little tense. We think we should control everything, and take it out on each other when we can’t. They know they can’t, and let God handle the rest. And that ability to let go of what they can’t control very often makes them easier to be around, and far less likely to take out their frustrations on each other.
Recognizing your special destiny in the eternal human story
All three major monotheisms have a linear view of human history as an ever-progressing struggle between the forces of Good and Evil. This narrative gives every succeeding generation an ever-more-important role on the front lines of the Ultimate Cosmic Battle (the final scene of which is always viewed as possibly happening Any Day Now).
Seeing your personal struggles as part of an eternal battle between Good and Evil locates you in time, and gives an epic quality to your very existence. No matter how ordinary your existence is, the notion that God Has A Plan For Your Life — and every life — lends a vivid sense that your everyday actions have tremendous potential to affect the ultimate fate of humanity. How you manage your family and raise your kids matters. How you allocate your resources, devote your talents, and spend your time matters. What your church congregation does matters. The entire world is fraught with meaning, because your existence is exquisitely precious in the sight of God. You matter.
Again, this sense of being a chosen warrior in a heroic and eternal struggle is a tremendous psychological confidence-booster. It encourages people to dream big — and to take concrete steps toward fulfilling those dreams. It justifies all kinds of risks. It stirs feelings of deep love and respect toward one’s fellow warriors, which in turn creates strong movement cohesion. It gives people a vast mental space in which to regain their perspective following setbacks.
And perhaps most importantly: it confers the long view required for high-quality foresight, and the ability and inspiration to make bold plans that span decades and even generations. If your sense of time takes in all of history, from the Creation to the Apocalypse, then it doesn’t really matter whether or not you’ll live to see the changes you’re working for. The battle is forever; your job is to fight it as well as you can while you can, while also raising the next generation to take over for you when their time comes. And the most important work isn’t about getting big wins today; rather, it’s the work that builds enduring institutions that will enforce the conservative worldview long after your generation is gone.
Progressives need to bear in mind that we have a long history, too. We are today’s heirs to the Enlightenment, the latest in a series of generations that have been upholding America’s founding values and worldview since before the nation began. The progressive argument for justice and freedom is a conversation that will not end in our lifetimes. We don’t have to win all the battles, but we were born to this fight, and must also write our own chapter in its history before handing it over to the next generation.
And, most importantly: we need to cultivate that same long foresight that leads conservatives to protect their existing institutions like they were prized forts on a battlefield (which they are), and seed new ones constantly to expand their capacity to dominate the future. Our progressive legacy includes the vast array of public and private amenities — universities, parks, transit systems, social organizations, hospitals, libraries, public programs, on and on — that were created by our forebears for the same purpose, and continue to add to the dignity, opportunity and enlightenment of every American. Protecting this inheritance is the first duty of every progressive. Expanding it to serve future generations is the way we pay the gift forward.
I once was lost, but now am found
Another huge strength of the conservative side is the Christian redemption narrative. We make fun of the way the right-wing’s fallen angels do penance and are accepted readily (often far too readily, in our view) back into respectability. Make the obligatory confession, do your ablutions, and you’re back in good graces in time for Sunday dinner. And the rest of the movement will have your back the whole way. They may hate the sin, but they do walk their talk when it comes to continuing to love the sinner.
Our way of handling disgrace is demonstrably much more damaging, both to our own fallen angels and to the movement as a whole. If someone on our side is tarred — even if we all know the smear is completely unjust and undeserved — we will not defend the accused. Instead, we’ll close ranks and jettison them before anybody else has a chance to. And over and over, we lose incredibly valuable and talented people this way — people we’ve invested a lot of capital in raising up to leadership, and whose future contributions to the movement are forever lost to us when this happens.
As long as we’re so willing to off our own disgraced members, the right wing will always have an edge on us. They can take shots at our leaders and organizations (ACORN? Van Jones? Anthony Weiner?), and consistently score fatal hits, because we will reliably join them in putting their targets out of our misery. But because they have a theology that enjoins them to protect and forgive their own, they get to redeem their own disgraced people (David Vitter? Newt Gingrich?), and keep their talent in circulation. On their side, these hits are seldom fatal. They don’t lose their stars very often.
We could do with our own universally accepted rituals of repentance and redemption — a known, established path that lets our good people make their amends and put their mistakes behind them, and enables us to acknowledge both flaws and growth in each other with grace and mercy. If someone has done their penance, there will be room again for them in our circle. And our refusal to turn on each other will also do wonders for our overall level of community trust.
A mistake should not be the end of the world — or even people’s otherwise brilliant careers. And it won’t be if we find our way back to a belief in the power of redemption.
Coming together for love and community, not just work
Religion is a potent social technology — and its greatest strength is not about theology, but rather in its ability to knit people together in tight, close communities of trust, commitment, care and meaning. And regular observance of shared rituals is central to this power. Religious conservatives attend services at least once a week (in some churches, they go twice) to affirm their commitment to their shared values, celebrate and mourn the passages of life, and connect with each other not as workers and warriors, but as human beings.
Those rituals are social superglue. They build trust that extends outward into everything else these communities do. They inspire and engage people’s hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits, offer incredible healing and solace when things go wrong, and provide a ready-made outlet for celebration and re-commitment to doing even more when things go right.
The rituals that make community are simple, powerful, essentially human, and independent of any theology. Sitting down together to share a good meal. (In my long experience, there’s far more likely to be large quantities of good food at a conservative gathering than a progressive one. Eating together is vastly big mojo, and we often shortchange this.) Raising voices together in song, poetry, or a shared creed. Being present with each other to mark the passages of life — birth, marriage, parenthood, retirement, and loss. Gatherings that are about joy, play, sensual pleasure, and relaxation. Other gatherings that give us safe places to struggle among trusted friends with the things that are hardest and darkest within ourselves.
Secular progressives might even consider keeping a Sabbath. How much more effective would we be if we set aside a day of personal downtime every week? Shut off the phone, turn off the computer, and re-focus on life’s deep essentials:, home, self, health, family, community, and our own sanity. It might be a day to make a real meal, have friends over, create something beautiful, linger in a hot bath with a book, take a long bike ride, watch old movies, or make a picnic with your kids. You don’t have to be a person of faith to appreciate and savor the gift of simply being human. And such days are a potent reminder of why we’re doing this work in the first place, and what this life is for.
Conservatives may think and believe differently than we do. But their sheer political durability is due to some specific strengths in their communities and characters — strengths that aren’t out of reach for us, even if we arrive at them by different routes. We may not believe in God; but we have every bit as deep a need to believe in our cause, our future, our prospects, ourselves, and each other. And anything we can do to deepen our confidence in those things makes our movement more effective going forward.
“Compassionate conservatism” may seem a relic of the Bush era, but one of its signatures — the so-called faith-based initiatives — quietly persist under President Obama.
The Obama administration’s Friday night news dump of recommendations for reforming faith-based initiatives was yet another frustrating disappointment in the sad history of the president’s faith-based effort. More than a year late, the recommendations were reportedly delayed because the administration wanted to avoid further inflaming the fevered imaginations of those who claim he’s waging a “war on religion.” Insurance coverage for contraception and guaranteeing constitutional rights for Americans who receive taxpayer-funded social services from faith-based organizations are apparently two great tastes that don’t taste great together.
A little history is in order. As a candidate, Obama pledged, “if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion. Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs.” Church-state separation advocates cheered; the center-right religious coalition Obama was assiduously courting objected mightily.
And yet, nearly four years after Obama’s campaign trail pledge to reform the faith-based office, beneficiaries of federally funded faith-based social services — people seeking drug treatment, mental health services, marriage counseling, pregnancy prevention services, prenatal care and more — have insufficient legal guarantees that their constitutional right to be free from government-funded, imposed religion will be protected. Today, your tax dollars can still fund, under a George W. Bush executive order, a religious organization that decides, for example, that it can fire the gay employee because its religion so dictates or that it will only hire people of the same faith. Its supporters call it “co-religionist hiring,” but that’s just a polite term for taxpayer-supported discrimination.
For three years the advocacy groups that make up the Coalition Against Religion Discrimination have prevailed on the administration to change this rule — after all, it would only take a stroke of the pen to undo the Bush executive order — and the president has done nothing. Obama has tried to claim the administration “has struck the right balance” by requiring a nebulous “case-by-case” review of instances of discrimination rather than prohibiting it altogether, an assertion the Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance (a CARD member) has called “misguided and untrue. There is no such thing as balance when it comes to discrimination supported by government funding.”
Instead of tasking administration lawyers to draft new regulations, shortly after taking office Obama appointed an Advisory Council of liberals and conservatives, which he dispatched to offer its own recommendations. Contentious issues, such as discriminatory hiring, were not part of its dossier. While the 2010 Advisory Council report addressed another contentious issue — whether religious organizations receiving federal grants should be required to form a separate nonprofit organization in order to segregate public and private funds — when Obama issued an executive order six months later, it was silent on that matter. Under the executive order, the Interagency Working Group, chaired by the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and the Office of Management and Budget, was formed to draft uniform model regulations across the 15 federal agencies with faith-based offices. Because Obama left that crucial question out of his executive order, the Working Group, which included representatives from each of those 15 agencies, did not address it in its mishmash of model guidance and regulations.
By offering model “guidance” in some areas and model regulations in others, the Interagency Working Group’s report, church-state separation advocates say, actually weakens some of the recommendations of the Advisory Council in some areas.
“For a year and a half’s worth of work,” said Maggie Garrett, legislative director at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, also a CARD member, “there’s nothing in there that says, ‘we’ve identified all the regulations that apply to faith-based social services. Here are all the regulations that actually conflict with the Obama executive order and what we need to do to conform.’
“Any time a difficult issue came up, or any time it seemed like there would be the slightest burden on faith-based groups in order to adhere to the Constitution, the issue was sort of dropped,” Garrett added. While the Advisory Council report said that beneficiaries must be given the option of an alternative provider, the model regulations in the Interagency Working Group report only require that the federally funded faith-based organization “undertake reasonable efforts to identify and refer the beneficiary to an alternative provider to which the prospective beneficiary has no objection.” That’s different, Garrett said, from saying, “You must have an alternative provider.” And what constitutes “reasonable” is left vague.
None of this, of course, is designed to accomplish anything before the election. Obama’s November 2010 executive order calls for another round of guidance from the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Justice after the Working Group report. “It seems like we’re never going to get to rule-making,” said ACLU legislative counsel Dena Sher. “Meanwhile beneficiaries are left without important protections — the right to be referred to an alternative service provider, and improved rules on prohibited uses of federal funds that clarifies they don’t have to pray before receiving government-funded services.”
On the whole, Sher added, because the Working Group proposed only non-binding model guidance, rather than regulations, on crucial issues, the “teeth seem to be missing” from the report.
In attempting to clarify some issues (although not by regulation), the report further muddied the waters on how scriptural materials can be used in federally funded programs. In one example, in a question and answer appendix intended to clarify prohibited uses of federal funds, the report states:
[S]taff in Federally-funded programs may not provide devotional religious instruction, but, where consistent with the purposes of the program, they may teach about religion, such as the history of religion, comparative religion, literary and other analysis of the Bible and other scripture, and the role of religion in the history of the United States and other countries. Such instruction may make use of the Bible or other scripture. Similarly, it is permissible for staff in Federally-funded programs to discuss any topics consistent with the program’s purposes, including religious influences on art, music, literature, and social studies.
Got that? I’m sure the line between “analysis of the Bible” and “devotional religious instruction” is abundantly clear to a faith-driven provider, and to a client who is in many cases in dire need of social services.
Those clients, it should be pointed out, are frequently seeking intensely personal services, such as a variety of counseling, and may be in distress or in desperate situations. A government employee, even if there were resources to staff such a thing, cannot exactly sit in on a counseling session to make sure that the counselor is merely analyzing the Bible rather than preaching to her.
The reason why church-state separation advocates have pressed for bright lines — a clear prohibition on hiring discrimination, and separate incorporation to ensure federal funding is not mixed private funding that can be used to proselytize — is that once you start to blur those lines, the rules become far less clear. And when faith-based providers insist that their essential religious character must be preserved even if they’re receiving federal funds, you start to wonder: Which is more important, bolstering the faith-based organization, or protecting the rights of the clients it serves?
While the Advisory Council’s report addressed many of these issues imperfectly, at least it did so with some clarity. The Interagency Working Group’s report is a muddle that fails to track the recommendations it was ordered to follow. It seems unlikely that federal agencies will be implementing regulations any time soon. And it’s starting to feel like it was intended to be that way.
If history is told by the winners, then Joel Osteen — the relentlessly upbeat spiritual caretaker of the national attitude — is history’s designated chaplain. In a marathon Sunday faith rally in the heart of the nation’s capital, Osteen, who presides over America’s largest megachurch congregation, the nondenominational Lakewood Church in Houston, exhorted the tens of thousands of believers amassed in Nationals Stadium to “live in victory,” to seize their “destiny moments,” and to fulfill God’s plan for their personal, financial and emotional success.
The Washington rally — billed as “America’s Night of Hope” — had gone a bit afoul of its own victory plan, however. It had originally been scheduled the night before, but as a persistent afternoon drizzle gave way to some spirited cloudbursts, the event’s organizers rescheduled it for the following afternoon. As I approached the centerfield box office outside Nationals Park on Saturday, the marquee overhead bore what had to be the glummest rainout announcement of the young 2012 baseball season: “Night of Hope postponed until 4 p.m. Sunday.” And since the Osteen message involves a lot of merchandising, the imposing tables hawking T-shirts and other commemorative swag seemed suddenly off-kilter. One prominent Night of Hope T-shirt was emblazoned with the inspirational divine message “I can do all things” — all things, that is, but summon the faithful to stand out in the rain.
But the Osteens were not about to let the intervention of the elements become any sort of setback. As the megachurch pastor — turned out in a blue suit and a beatific grin, looking for all the world like a fitter Tim Allen, fresh out of rehab — took his spot at the second-base perimeter of the infield, before the bank of TV cameras set up on the pitchers mound, he called out, “Isn’t it great to be here? It’s another great day the Lord has made!” He paused to note that, yes, “we had some rain last night,” but that the event’s reshuffled schedule could well mean that some people who couldn’t have made the evening version of the prayer gathering might well have turned up serendipitously today. In any event, Osteen declared his certitude that “God put the right people here right now.”
That confident assertion of — and indeed, identification with — the divine will is one of the calling cards of the Osteen faith. Amid all the spirited self-affirmations and folksy homilies that stud an Osteen sermon, it’s easy to miss the oddly deterministic invocations of divine prerogative summoned up by the preacher, who belongs to the “Word Faith” tradition of Pentecostal belief. Osteen’s serene depictions of God’s eternally uptending designs for the fates of individual believers are a sort of inverted Calvinism. Where the Puritan forebears of today’s Protestant scene beheld a terrible, impersonal Creator whose rigid system of eternal reward and punishment dispatched many an infant and solemn believer to the pit of damnation, Osteen’s God is an intensely personal presence, guiding believers out of pitfalls into inevitable glory and joy — not so much a raging Patriarch as a genial cruise director. “God’s dream for our own life is so much bigger than our own,” went one frequent refrain at the D.C. rally. “Let’s not put any limits on God.” Osteen characterized the Deity as a “running-over” and “abundant” God. “Have you ever been to a fast-food restaurant, and they ask you if you want to supersize this? Well, God is a supersizing God,” who is determined, Osteen assured the crowd, to “supersize your joy.”
It stands to reason, in this arrangement of cosmic fate, that the stubborn human weakness for anxious introspection and downbeat self-doubt is something of an affront to the author of being. “When you are criticizing yourself,” Osteen announced, “you are criticizing God’s creation. The next time you think something negative, turn that around, and say, ‘I am God’s masterpiece.’”
The talismanic faith in positive utterance is another key article of belief in the Word Faith tradition. Some Word Faith devotees are devout believers in faith-healing, and one of the key episodes Osteen cites in his own account of his faith journey is the miraculous recovery of his mother from an apparently terminal case of liver cancer in 1981. Faced with the prospect of losing his mother, the young Osteen — then a communications student at Oral Roberts University with no ministerial ambitions — turned to prayer, saying to God, as he now recounts, “I know you can do what doctors can’t do, what medical science can’t do.” Sure enough, Osteen’s mother, Dodie, went on to be cancer-free, and took to the podium on Sunday after her son’s testimonial. She reprised the story of how she fought off the specter of death by seeking out the “most healing” passages of scripture, which she assembled into a digest she still consults regularly: “Like American Express, I don’t leave home without it,” she said. Then she issued a disclaimer for her listeners contending with severe illness: “I don’t advise you not to seek treatment — get treatment any way you can.” Such cautions sounded a bit rushed and legalistic next to her own account of her recovery: When she and her preacher-husband both sensed the end was near, she recalled, “We lay on our faces … He said, ‘I need you, the church needs you, the children need you … And now, almost 31 years later, I won the battle and so will you!” God, after all, “delights in answering the prayers of his children,” and “loves everybody the same, but he can do for you what he did for me.”
The Word Faith image of the wonder-working, healing God is discomfiting to ponder, and not just because he might tempt desperately sick believers to go rogue beyond the dictates of medical science. The constant recitation of God’s transcendent goodness and the deference paid to his ironclad ability to lift believers magically out of suffering and woe both subtly downgrade the divine presence into a glorified lifestyle concierge. This God has no real way of accounting for the age-old paradoxes of theology, such as the tolerance of personal and historic evil, or the deeper ironies and unintended consequences of the believing life. Even less does the Osteen family’s success gospel encompass a sustained social ethic — even though the D.C. event featured an appeal on behalf of the World Vision ministries to adopt a needy child in the developing world. The believer’s chief task is to ratify the preexisting divine script of success in his or her individual life — and then to bear testimony to that joyous transformation in a community of like-minded success believers.
It’s a curiously childlike vision of faith — a point driven home in a homily offered up by Joel’s wife, Victoria, who serves as a kind of co-pastor of the separate domestic sphere at the couple’s revival meetings. When she finds herself assailed by cares, anxieties and negative thoughts, Victoria reported, “I visualize a bouquet of helium balloons in my hands, and I literally hold those balloons out and release them to the heavens … And as I release those balloons to Him, I say, ‘I may not have the power to change my circumstances, but God has that power to change our circumstances.’” In a later homily on the properties of unconditional love and forgiveness, Victoria delivered an extended gloss on what was apparently one of the few remotely traumatic moments in her suburban Texas upbringing — a time when, as a freshly licensed driver, she had taken out her dad’s car and negligently instructed a friend to roll down a passenger-side window that was malfunctioning, thereby breaking it once and for all. When she finally summoned the nerve to fess up to her dad, she found him to be disappointed but gloriously forgiving; he “didn’t judge my future from that one mistake” — and neither will the indulgent dad of the Osteen heavens. “You may not have been shown unconditional love in your life,” Victoria announced, “but God loves you unconditionally.” The problem, of course, is that even those of us who did survive unhappy childhoods are no longer 16 — and as a result, we need a God who can meet the challenges of the new responsibilities we’ve taken on as we’ve matured, not a figure of undifferentiated sentiment, handing our forgiveness and love like lottery tickets.
The other childlike quality of the Lakewood account of divine grace has to do with the past — which, together with negative thinking, represents the closest thing to evil in the Osteen’s scheme of salvation. The past is bad because it mires believers in remembered hurts and slights, and thereby obstructs God’s grander design for their lives. “When we hold on to the past, when we don’t go to God, that just puts more baggage in our suitcases,” Victoria exhorted, in a not-altogether-wieldy metaphor.
This spiritual hostility to the past was an all too frequent refrain in the event’s musical selections — a monotonous offering of anthemic, bombastic Christian rock, all composed without the benefit of a single minor chord or any discernible melody. “I’m moving forward,” went the lyrics to one of these intra-sermon studies in Journey-esque hymnody. “I’m not going back / I’m moving ahead / I’m here to declare to you that the past is over.” An American idol contestant named Danny Gokey also offered testimony about how the Osteens had helped him conquer his depression in the wake of the untimely passing of his wife. Gokey then performed a Christian rock number of his own, “My Best Days Are Ahead of Me,” which seemed to make short work of his once-debilitating grief: “I don’t get lost in the past or get stuck in some sad memories,” he sang, rather creepily; the song’s bridge announced that “Age isn’t nothing but a number,” and then resolved on a Successories-style upgrade of a well-known Army recruiting slogan: “If I keep getting better / I can be anything I want to be.”
There’s a term from the psychiatric clinics that neatly captures the outlook of someone possessed of grandiose fantasies about the imperial reach of the self, and a principled refusal to acknowledge anything poised to diminish such fantasies — such as the passage of time. That term is “narcissistic personality disorder,” and it does nothing to detract from the positive features of the Osteen gospel — the injunctions to persevere in the face of adversity, or the appeals for donations to World Vision — to note that this is a system of faith tailor-made to sustain narcissistic delusion. To grasp the overweening self-absorption of the Osteen faith, one need look no further than the frequent recourse Osteen makes to his own success story in sealing the case for God’s providential plan for the believer’s own life. Now, unlike other well-known evangelists, Osteen can’t lay much claim to a hardscrabble Horatio Alger-style life story. His 1920s forebear in Pentecostal media preaching, Aimee Semple McPherson, was a single-mother missionary before coming into fame and fortune as an evangelical celebrity in the Radio Age; Billy Graham was the son of a poor North Carolina dairy farmer. Osteen, by contrast, was a second-generation evangelical leader, who’d been working as a TV producer for his father John Osteen’s growing ministry before he succeeded to the elder Osteen’s pulpit after his father’s death. His personal biography tracks closer to fellow Pentecostal TV preacher Pat Robertson’s background: Robertson was the son of a U.S. senator before finding his own adult spiritual calling.
Nonetheless, Osteen repeatedly cites his own success presiding over the spiritual flock he inherited as the prime exhibit of God’s ready transposition of divine grace into worldly success. When he first acceded to the pulpit, he recalled from his riser above second base, he felt no special aptitude for ministering; he’d heard that Lakewood church leaders were raising doubts about his vocation, and the church needed to move into a bigger, upgraded new facility. “At one point,” Osteen preached, “it seemed like everything was coming against me. The enemy was fighting me not from where I was coming, but from where I was going … He didn’t want Lakewood to be in the Compaq Center” — the former home arena for the Houston Rockets, and now home to the Lakewood congregation of nearly 50,000 souls. The Compaq Center deal is a frequent touchstone in Osteen’s faith reminiscence; it occupies a good stretch of his blockbuster best-selling self-improvement tract, “Become a Better You,” which also finds evidence of divine favor in a home-flipping deal Joel and Victoria struck at the height of the housing bubble, as well as in such mundane votes of divine confidence as setting the pastor up with a premium parking space. Indeed, the steady parade of testimonials from the wider Osteen clan on the Night of Hope risers bespeaks a family-wide penchant for casting one’s commonplace personal biography as a sort of infomercial version of the Christian faith. (In addition to mother Dodie and wife Victoria, Osteen’s brother Paul, who runs a medical charity in Africa, took to the stage Sunday to relate a more responsible story of healing, in which due medical diligence properly preceded the broader appeal to faith; Joel’s two children, Alexandra and Jonathan, are respectively a vocalist and guitarist in the ministry’s Christian rock ensemble.)
Now, it may very well be that in a certain kind of conviction of grace, believers feel themselves suffused with the divine presence, and find their most quotidian activities reflect celestial favor; the 14th-century Saint Julian of Norwich recorded a vision in which she beheld the entirety of creation in an object no larger than a hazelnut, cupped in her hand. Perhaps, in this view of things, a converted sports arena or excellent parking spot is no great stretch when it comes to testifying on behalf of a God for whom all things are possible.
Still, the claustral feel of Osteen’s success gospel paradoxically works exactly the same effect that he warns believers to resist: It imposes limits on God, by largely confining his workings to the dominant American culture of success. If the Osteen-coached believer does not reap abundant and large reward in career, family life or creative pursuits, they are not necessarily going to curse their God, as Job’s comforters had counseled him to do amid his notorious personal setbacks. But neither are they going to make the key connections that earlier Protestant divines have preached, going back to Jonathan Edwards and John Calvin: that the divinity does not, in fact, have your own personal happiness occupying pride of place on his exhaustive to-do list. The universe is ultimately about a larger set of concerns, and faith concerns a much vaster striving toward justice than believers are wont to see in their personal affairs, their social conquests or their annual paychecks. This is why Edwards, for all of his better-known hell-and-brimstone sermons, urged onto believers a stoic “consent to being in general” — not a plan for individual life advancement.
This disjuncture between Protestantism’s more humbling counsel and the feel-good Word Faith gospel became most painfully evident during one of Osteen’s closing perorations. In chilling detail, he recounted the story of a young Tutsi Christian woman who’d hid out in the bathroom of her church pastor’s office at the height of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The machete-wielding Hutu killers who pursued her returned to the pastor’s office every day for 91 days, usually calling out for her by name. At one point, Osteen said, a Hutu militia man was poised to turn the knob on the door to the tiny bathroom where the woman was quartered alongside six other Tutsi believers — but at the last moment, he became distracted and walked away. Finally, when the genocide had been contained, the woman was free, and has been traveling with ministers ever since to testify to the amazing story of her survival. “Nearly 1 million Rwandans were killed in this genocide,” Osteen said as he wound up to the story’s larger moral. “It was very sad.”
Well, no. The Rwandan genocide was something far more than sad — it was a colossal failure of moral and political agency, going back to the German and Belgian colonial partition of the country that set up artificial power conflicts between the nation’s two main tribes. This horror also most certainly came about thanks to the wretched failures of the Clinton administration and other Western powers to arrest a well-documented string of massacres, even as senior U.N. officials such as Lt. Gen Romeo Dallaire, the leader of the agency’s Rwandan peacekeeping mission, implored them to.
For Osteen, of course, the story of this woman’s survival was a divine miracle. But if this one survivor was enjoying the loving favor of an omnipotent God, what are we to conclude that this same God thought of the more than 800,000 Rwandans murdered in the genocide? Was their faith wanting? Was God planning unparalleled new successes and joys for their surviving family members? Are these the people Osteen has in mind when he exhorts his listeners not to be victims, but victors?
It’s something of an obscenity even to frame such questions. Yet they are the inevitable outcome of a theology-free success gospel, pitched exclusively to tales of individual triumph. Osteen’s sermons all begin with a self-empowering chant from believers. “This is my Bible,” it goes in part; “I am what it says I am. I have what it says I have.” But there are legions of dead — now confined by definition, it’s true, in the hated past — who come bearing the testimony that the Bible is not actually about you.
When North Carolina voters head to the polls on May 8, they will be asked to decide on a constitutional amendment – known as “Amendment One” – that prohibits marriages between same-sex couples. Same-sex marriage is already illegal by statute, but N.C. is the only state left in the Southeast without a constitutional ban.
So this is quite a showdown. There’s much talk of liberty, lifestyle and family — and a whole lot of talk about God. As opponents and supporters target churches all the way from Appalachia to the Outer Banks, religious leaders are flooding the airwaves to share their views on a hot button issue that throws core values into stark relief.
Growing up, I attended a church in Raleigh that is deeply involved in the current debate. And I can tell you that the fault lines are deep – and often surprising – to folks in other parts of the country.
A Tale of Two Churches
The Upper Room Church of God in Christ, located in south Raleigh, is presided over by the Rev. Patrick Wooden, who describes homosexuality a “deathstyle” and presents himself as a zealous defender of traditional marriage. Rev. Wooden, an African American, launched his ministry career with a tent revival in a small rural town. Bringing a message infused with miracles and warnings of the devil’s influence, the pastor came to Raleigh to lead the Upper Room in 1987, where his congregation, by the reckoning of the church website, today numbers 3,000. Proudly describing himself as a businessman and his church as one of the largest employers of blacks in Raleigh, Rev. Wooden’s teachings carry a whiff of prosperity gospel that appeals to those striving for economic salvation as well as spiritual. And he champions social views that have made him a rising right-wing media star, complete with spots on “The O’Reilly Factor.”
A passage in Genesis forms the basis for Rev. Wooden’s view that God’s definition of marriage is strictly a male-and-female union. He rattled it off in a recent TV appearance: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
Rev. Wooden is particularly incensed with those who equate the battle for gay rights with the struggle for civil rights. His comments on homosexuality, sometimes graphic, push the notion that gays are aberrant both culturally and physically. Who, he demands, could support a practice that forces men “to wear a diaper or a butt plug just to be able to contain their bowels?” For him, comparing gays to blacks is denigrating.
Just a few miles away from Rev. Wooden’s church, just at the edge of the North Carolina State University, stands Pullen Memorial Baptist Church, where a different strain of righteousness prevails. The church is led by Rev. Jack McKinney and co-pastor Rev. Nancy Petty, a lesbian who has made history as the first openly gay minister to lead a Baptist church in the South. Pullen, with roots in the late 19th century, evolved a brand of progressive Christianity under the leadership of poet and scholar E. McNeill Poteat, Jr., whose preaching emphasized an inclusive spirit uncommon in Baptist churches. In 1956, the liberal firebrand W.W. Finlator was called to Pullen, and under his guidance, the church opened its doors to worshippers of all races in 1958. In the late 60s, it was this focus on inclusiveness and social justice that attracted my father and mother (an Episcopalian and a Methodist respectively) who both taught at local colleges.
Finlator’s legacy of tolerance continued after his retirement in 1982, when the issue of gay rights began to emerge on the national scene. In 1992 the Southern Baptist Convention cast Pullen out for blessing a same-sex union. Today the church serves as the headquarters for the North Carolina Religious Coalition for Marriage Equality, an interfaith same-sex marriage advocacy group composed of state religious leaders. Last year, Rev. Petty declared that until gay unions are legislatively permitted, she would no longer sign marriage licenses, stating her view that “every time I sign a marriage license for a heterosexual couple and act as an agent of the state, I am reminded of those couples who I marry that are denied the basic human right to legally marry the person of their choice.”
Squaring off against the Rev. Wooden in a recent forum on the same-sex marriage amendment, Rev. Petty expressed her view that the Bible doesn’t prescribe a single form of marriage. She has condemned Amendment One as “anti-family” and calls upon North Carolinians to stand together to “protect all people’s rights.”
Varieties of Religious Experience
That two churches of such dramatically divergent views could occupy a 10-mile radius underscores the complexity of religion in North Carolina, where clashes in the public square date all the way back to the 17th century, when Quakers and Anglicans struggled for control of the colony’s political leadership.
Allegiances break down along racial and class lines in ways that have long confounded and intrigued social scientists, who offer a variety of theories on why you’d have a predominately black church’s leader defending traditional marriage against gays while the head of a nearby, mostly white church frames the issue as an urgent question of civil rights.
Over the last century, the tradition of southern progressive Christianity, with its intellectual strain, was deeply entwined with the national political battle to secure support for Roosevelt’s New Deal. Aligned with northeastern churches like New York’s Riverside Church (built in 1930 with Rockefeller money as a cathedral to progressive Protestantism), congregations like Raleigh’s Pullen Memorial and Chapel Hill’s Binkley Baptist Church, along with divinity programs at institutions of learning like UNC, Chapel Hill, tended to foster openness to others’ beliefs, a tradition of combining faith and reason, and an emphasis on questioning dogma and viewing the Bible in historical context.
Meanwhile, the rise of fundamentalism and the so-called “newer sect” faiths like the Pentecostals tended to attract more rural, working-class Christians. Historian Ken Fones-Wolf of the University of West Virginia has pointed out that hard times of the Depression tended to reinforce rural-born Southerners’ strong beliefs in the importance of God’s grace, salvation through faith, the necessity of bearing witness, and the Bible as the sole religious authority. Ministers at these pulpits, along with those of most of the fast-rising Baptists, were suspicious of outsiders and reminded their flocks to be wary of associating with those – like labor unions, for example – who did not share their faith.
Which Side Are You On?
The primary election takes place Tuesday, May 8, but early voting is already underway. In addition to voting up or down on the gay marriage amendment, N.C. voters will make political party selections in a crowded race for governor. The hot button gay marriage issue appears to be driving people to the polls early.
The timing of the vote is thought by many to boost the chance of passage because of the Republican presidential primary — though Romney’s annointment may throw off that calculation. Over the past decade, the Democratic-controlled legislature successfully successfully blocked efforts by social conservatives to alter the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. But now, Republicans control both houses, and last September they found enough support to put the question to voters.
Polls and denominational stances reveal demographic trends that resist easy categories. In January, the Raleigh-based Public Policy Polling found that 56 percent of respondents to a poll favored the amendment, while 36 percent would vote against it. Ten percent were undecided. The most prominent Catholic leaders in the state, Bishops Peter Jugis of Charlotte and Michael Burbidge of Raleigh, support the amendment. On the other hand, the state’s Episcopal Diocese opposes it. Black Christians, among the most opposed to homosexuality, make up 13 percent of the state population (nearly twice as high as the national average). Yet the North Carolina NAACP, which includes thousands of African-American pastors across the state, is against the amendment.
When my dad was a kid in the small town of Winton, N.C., his Episcopalian family frowned on the idea of his bringing home a Presbyterian. The notion that the state’s churches are now divided on the issue of whether partners of the same sex can marry attests to an astonishing transformation in just one generation. The values voters express on May 8 will say a lot about the direction of southern Christianity. In a state where religion plays a central role, questions about inclusiveness, tradition and openness to change will send a powerful signal throughout the nation. There is an awful lot at stake — maybe even the soul of the South.
A billboard erected by atheists in Oklahoma City. (Credit: AP/Sue Ogrocki) 
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Joel Osteen 
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