How do you solve a problem like Maria? (Not the singing, the God thing.) Here’s an idea Rodgers and Hammerstein didn’t think of: You could wave a hot poker around in her temporal lobe. That, at least, is one inference to be drawn from Matthew Alper’s lively manifesto regarding the biological basis of religious experience, “The God Part of the Brain.”
As V.S. Ramachandran explained in his 1998 book “Phantoms in the Brain,” patients with temporal lobe epilepsy may experience a variety of symptoms that include an obsessive preoccupation with religion and the intensified and narrowed emotional responses that are characteristic of mystical experience. (St. Teresa of Avila, Dostoevski, van Gogh and St. Paul are believed by some historians and scientists to have suffered from the affliction.) Observing these symptoms, scientists have established that some circuits in the temporal lobe are involved in religious experience.
For now, that’s about as specific as neurologists can get regarding the biological basis of religion. No one can say whether these circuits have evolved primarily to evoke religious experience. No one can say whether religious impulses originate in some other part of the brain and then make their way to the temporal lobe. No one can solve the chicken-and-egg question of whether religious experience strengthens these circuits, or neural activity makes mystical vision possible. And no one can say whether or how the neurological activity associated with mystical experience is related to the everyday, earthbound experience of religious devotion.
For evolutionary biologists such as E.O. Wilson, however, the mere fact that “the emotions that accompany religious ecstasy clearly have a neurobiological source” helps to confirm that “much if not all religious behavior could have arisen from evolution by natural selection.” These observations come from 1998′s “Consilience,” which includes a brief discussion of religious experience in terms of evolutionary biology. For the discipline’s specific application to the matter at hand, however, I’ve seen nothing that matches the fury of “The God Part of the Brain,” which perhaps explains why it’s earned something of a cult following.
To be clear from the get-go: This book is a screed, full of bad writing, sloppy thinking and slipshod research. Yet some passages make for compelling reading, yielding the kind of pleasures often found in outsider art. Alper’s book is powerful not because of its truth, but because of its scope and ambition — which rival that of “Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nation’s Millennium General Assembly,” the massive altar, made of aluminum foil, light bulbs, pins and bottle caps and telling the story of the universe, found in the garage of a janitor for the General Services Adminstration in Washington after his death in 1964.
Although Alper does not provide details of his early life or his religious or educational background, he states that he has been on a spiritual quest at least since his “mid-teens, those years of which Wordsworth wrote, ‘bring upon the philosophic mind’” when “I realized that my life’s primary pursuit would be — if it were at all possible — to acquire clear and distinct knowledge of God.” Sometime between that period and his 21st birthday, Alpert had a bad LSD trip that mired him in anxiety and depression, which were alleviated by medication.
His suffering made him an empiricist: “The fact … that my conscious self had been so ravaged, scrambled and defiled in the past year and a half convinced me that there was no fixed or eternal essence in me.” This conviction led him to decide that “if spirits or souls truly existed, they should not be able to be affected by matter.” And his belief that the soul is a “manifestation of some strictly physical phenomenon” led logically to the idea that there must be a “God part of the brain.”
To prove this point, Alper embarked upon an odyssey of self-directed education —”like an Arthurian knight in search of his Holy Grail” — which he recounts in painstaking detail: “I now had to purchase a whole new set of texts that dealt exclusively with these complex carbon-based compounds.” Alper’s account of his arms-around-the-world education (one chapter is titled “A Very Brief History of Time, OR, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Universe But Were Afraid to Ask”; the next is called “Kant”) is both reckless and sweet. Even polymaths would shy from writing the kind of sentences that Alper casually tosses off: “Having catalogued Man’s universal spiritual beliefs and practices,” he writes, “there were still several other components to spiritual consciousness that I felt needed to be investigated.”
Of all this reading, Alper liked evolutionary biology best. The meat of his book is a loopy riff on that discipline’s standard explanation of religion: “Our species’ awareness of inevitable death placed such a strong pressure on our cognitive evolution that over the course of millions of years — during the emergence of the hominids — nature selected those members who had developed a physical consciousness, a built-in perception that there exists an alternate, transcendental reality that supersedes the limitations of the finite physical realm, one that can only offer us pain, anxiety, and inevitable death.” So, he concluded that “spiritual consciousness represents nature’s white lie, an inherited misperception selected into our species, for the purpose of alleviating us of some of the anxiety caused by our awareness of death.”
Alper’s evolutionary argument requires him to describe religion in universal terms, but his ideas about religion are strictly Western, monotheistic and personal; and his representation of religious worldviews is exclusively dualistic. “Since the dawn of our species, every culture has maintained a dualistic interpretation of reality. In other words, every culture — no matter how isolated — has perceived reality as consisting of two distinct substances or realms: the physical and the spiritual.” This argument is a clay pigeon, and could be blown away from any number of angles. The word “Asia” should suffice.
This one-dimensional definition of religion exemplifies the intellectual complacency of Alper’s earnest project — a hubristic, closed-minded certainty that the world can be fully understood in empirical terms. But this intellectual orientation is not the sole province of cranks. It’s shared by many legitimate scientists, including E.O. Wilson, though he pads his dismissal of religion (“self-deception” that gives our species an “adaptive edge”) with disingenuous humility: “And yes — lest I forget — I may be wrong”. (Incidentally, Wilson’s blurb for “The God Part of the Brain” reads, in full: “Excellent.”)
The trouble with empiricist criticisms of religion such as Wilson’s and Alper’s is that they are not criticisms of religion per se. Their actual targets are Christian ideologues (usually church leaders, the current pope being the supreme example) who believe that right doctrine is the essence of true religion, and who defend that position in an idiom that properly belongs to science. Religious doctrine cannot be empirically proven, nor can it be defended on empirical grounds, by invoking the transcendent God. A fundamentalist’s claim that he reads the “literal” truth of Scripture is shot through with test-tube envy. It’s his need to compete with the authority of modern science, not his attention to Christian tradition, that makes the religious ideologue claim to possess clear knowledge of the transcendent God’s will.
Most Christians, most of the time, experience religion’s power to explain the world in more modest and more glancing terms than those of a papal bull. For most of us, neither Maria nor God are problems to be solved. Faith may involve thought, but for most of us faith isn’t fundamentally an intellectual posture. It is something that we do, involving all of our faculties, all of our bodies. Faith is living in relationship to God, a relationship that manifests itself in love of the world.
This is a definition of faith that can engage the biological dimension of religious experience. It situates religious experience squarely in nature, without denying God’s transcendence, but without dwelling much on it either. Religion is a way of living, whose aspects may or may not include otherworldly, mystical visions. In the same spirit, Mark Salzman’s novel “Lying Awake” last year explored the connections between neural and religious impulses, in explicitly Christian terms.
“Lying Awake” concerns the quandry of Sister John, a nun who is diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy and fears that her inspiration for visionary religious poetry will depart if she undergoes brain surgery. Confounded by the choice between humdrum health and ecstatic disease, she seeks guidance from a priest: “Should I automatically assume that my mystical experiences have been false, or should I stand behind what my heart tells me? Is God asking me to let go of concerns for my health, or is he asking me to let go of my desire for his presence?”
In response, the priest gently chastises her: “You allowed yourself to think that loving God meant enjoying His company, having ecstasies. It was all about you, wasn’t it? But loving God is supposed to be all about Him. About trusting him, putting yourself in His hands completely.”
Sister John has the surgery and her raptures end, and her faith deepens as she discovers a new kind of love for God — “the doing kind, not the knowing kind.” Sooner or later, most Christians are faced with a less dramatic version of Sister John’s basic choice, between pursuing transcendent religiosity (our fantasies of saintliness, which would prove beyond doubt how special we are) and a more natural experience of devotion (in the disciplines of prayer and righteous action). That’s why, even though “Lying Awake” is less successful as a novel than as a statement about the nature of religious faith, it enjoys strong sales and great reviews. The book directly addresses a question that plagues contemporary believers, one that most Christian leaders fear to address. We wonder: How can we live as Christians, when nature seems more real than heaven?
Further research on the God part of the brain will press this question. Although it is highly doubtful that science will ever provide an exhaustive explanation of the religious impulse, it is inevitable that science will enlarge our understanding of the biological processes involved in religious experience. Over time, religious people will be forced to acknowledge that they are not special and separate; they are fully a part of the world.
Expect this to cause no shock waves in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism or most other Eastern and African religions. Their understandings of divine immanence and transcendence tend to be much more thoroughly integrated into everyday life than ours in the West. (They already know there’s a God part of a bamboo shoot, and they’re cool with that.) Christianity, however, will experience some healthy shrinking.
Fundamentalism will wither and ideologues will flee. Christians will have to stop using God as a deus ex machina to solve impossible problems, a rhetorical club with which to overpower those who disagree on points of doctrine. The Christian God will emerge more clearly as He revealed Himself in Jesus — as the suffering one whom Dietrich Bonhoeffer described in his “Letters and Papers From Prison” as He who “lets himself be pushed out of the world onto the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.”
Whatever in Christianity is threatened by neurological research ought to die anyway. Flipping back from the final pages of “The God Part of the Brain” to its first, I reread the dedication, “to the family of God,/…with all my condolences.” The first time through, I read this as the impertinent swipe of a smartass. The second time, I looked forward to the day when I will be able to accept his condolences, though not in the way he might hope.
Last month this city played host to a conspicuous little foreign-policy blunder by George W. Bush, when he failed local news reporter Andy Hiller’s pop-quiz game of “Name That World Leader.”
On Monday, Bill Bradley, no doubt intent on parading his much-more-impressive foreign-policy prowess, came to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University for what promised to be an invigorating question-and-answer session with some of this country’s smartest foreign-policy students.
The contrast between the candidates would hardly be lost on anyone who was paying attention.
This time, Andy Hiller stayed away — even his cameraman claimed to not know where he was — and, boy, was he missed! Petty as it may have been, Hiller’s gambit had added a snappy surprise to an otherwise boring news day when Bush visited.
Bradley’s appearance had no such snap.
The Democratic candidate for president delivered a 21-minute speech, punctuated by bullet points describing lessons learned from his foreign-relations work in the Senate. “Define the problem right … Seek bipartisan support … No appeasement,” and so forth.
Once finished, he opened himself up to a half hour of softball questions from the students. Bradley’s strongest statements in this part of the session concerned U.S.-Russian relations, as he proposed strategic-arms-reduction talks to cut the number of nuclear warheads deeper than President Clinton would like. He also expressed his intention to strike a diplomatic stance toward Russia that focuses less on Boris Yeltsin and more on the Russian people.
He also took a sidelong swipe at Gore and Clinton with his promise to “always be straight with” the American people regarding foreign affairs. And though he defended America’s moral obligation to intercede in foreign humanitarian disasters such as “genocide” in Bosnia and Kosovo, he emphasized that Americans “cannot give an open-ended humanitarian commitment to the world.”
None of this, of course, was news. More details of Bradley’s foreign-policy proclivities were articulated by James Dao’s preview piece about the Tufts event in Sunday’s New York Times than were revealed during the event itself. So, on to the real stuff: The auditorium was too hot. The Fletcher School’s final exams are coming up, so students were jumpy. Bradley had big bags under his eyes. Pushy white men hogged the pitifully short question-and-answer period, after which Bradley rushed off to a meeting with the editorial board of the Boston Globe. These were some of the factors to blame for the lack of excitement on Monday.
After Bradley was gone, Fletcher students crammed into the graduate program’s tiny cafeteria and engaged in some grumbling about the poor quality of the dialogue they’d just witnessed. Nevertheless, they said they liked Bradley — they really liked him.
On television, Bradley comes off as professorial, but in person, he’s more, well, paternal. Gazing over his half-moon glasses at the audience, he comes off like a richer, smarter Atticus Finch. “And he’s exactly the age that he could be our dad,” noted one 27-year-old student.
Sure, he was spinning us — with that ostentatiously correct pronunciation of “East Tee-moor,” the gratuitous list of Russian cities he’d visited and a multiculturally-hip story about an Indian government official — “Cha-bimba, or whatever,” clucked one otherwise-liberal Tufts student.
But Bradley moved with such self-assurance, and engaged his mind so fully with his own words that his mild pandering was quickly forgiven. Denouncing foreign policy that is “made through polling or focus groups to score domestic points,” he stated flatly, “I deplore that.” A perfectly elegant, strong, unambiguous judgment by a man who knows what he thinks.
The Fletcher students repeated that line like little kids rehashing the plays of last weekend’s big game.
Bradley also gave this audience glimpses of a vulnerability that served only to underscore his powerful presence. He told the students that as a 10-year-old, he had designed his own bomb shelter, with a place for his sporting equipment. “The premise was, even after nuclear holocaust there would be basketball.”
The only hint of profligacy to match Bradley’s recently unveiled, pie-in-the-sky health-care plan came in his remarks about the domestic impact of free trade. “Trade will benefit more people than it will hurt. But some people will lose their jobs.” He then reiterated his support for expanded health care, portable pensions and “transitional assistance” for people who are bumped down from high-wage to lower-wage sectors as the economy changes.
Margaret Sloan, studying for a master’s in diplomacy, came to the event with a list of questions she hoped to ask, and was next in line when the question period was cut short by the school’s dean, John Galvin. In the cafeteria, she described the direction in which she had hoped to steer the discussion: “[Bradley] talked too much about the easy topics — Israel, Colombia. He needs to address the situations that actually threaten us — Iraq and China.”
Answers to these hardest questions will have to come another day, and somewhere else. The feeling at Tufts was that even if Bradley hasn’t delivered the goods yet, he certainly has them in his possession. There’s something refreshing about a person of substance who does not yield intimacy too easily — even when given the chance. He gives you something to look forward to. Which may have been what Bradley’s spokesman Eric Hauser was trying to say, in an oblique way, when he explained ahead of time to reporters how the Q&A format of the event would work:
“It’s like Oprah. But not really.”
“The Best Spiritual Writing 1998″ makes you want to take a shower. The
essays and poems in this first volume of an annual series (modeled after
Houghton Mifflin’s “The Best American Short Stories”) describe ways of
living that make you long for greater cleanliness and simplicity of life.
They are also the products of a somewhat grubby business — the booming
niche market of spiritual publishing. Encountering “The Best Spiritual
Writing,” readers face a familiar dilemma. Believers, like the
contributors to this anthology, are, by and large, inspiring, radiant
people — they live big, lovingly, truthfully, openly. Yet their
collective presence (in churches, synagogues, yoga classes and
anthologies) often conveys a stifling orthodoxy, which can impart a
big-time case of the creeps.
The reigning orthodoxy of “The Best Spiritual Writing” is the business of
professional spiritual writing. The book is a hit parade of spiritual
bestsellers (Thomas Moore, Kathleen Norris) who pray for pay. Even the
three contributors whose biographical notes indicate involvement in
conventional ministries also contain long lists of publishing credits
that make clear where their first vocational loyalties lie. There’s
nothing nefarious about believers wanting to see their work in print. For
those of us who believe that religion is a central aspect of human
existence, it’s encouraging that some of the best new American books
consider spirituality to be an integral force in personal, political and
cultural struggles — in novels such as Robert Stone’s “Damascus Gate”
and Allegra Goodman’s “Kaaterskill Falls,” poetry such as Adam
Zagajewski’s “Mysticism for Beginners” and Edward Hirsch’s “On Love,” and
nonfiction such as Bruce Bawer’s “Stealing Jesus,” Stephen Dubner’s
“Turbulent Souls” and Marilynne Robinson’s “The Death of Adam.”
Yet the bestselling products of the religious publishing boom are books
like “Conversations With God,” “Tuesdays With Morrie” and now, “The Best
Spiritual Writing,” most of whose contributors write as if spiritual life
were an essentially self-centered enterprise, with only tangential
connections to communal religion. “The Best Spiritual Writing” contains
no straight sermons, academic essays or plain prayers; nothing that comes
directly from the life of a community of worship, seminary or yeshiva.
Also, there’s not one piece of third-person reportage. Martin Luther
King Jr., George Herbert, Howard Thurman and Wallace Stevens, had they
been eligible for inclusion this year, would probably not have made the
cut. The book’s editor, Philip Zaleski, seems to have a sweet tooth for
memoirs that have been mashed through the grinders of the magazine biz,
where inspiration can’t be published without a prewritten proposal. So,
heartfelt as much of the writing may be, it also reflects the commodified
notion of spiritual relevancy in a world whose appetite for autobiography
has made “I” the dominant character of American spiritual life.
Most of the memoirs in “The Best Spiritual Writing” find God in cozy,
universal formulations: “It is the journey not the destination that
matters” (Joseph Epstein); “Lush nature invites us to look upward to find
our spirituality” (Thomas Moore). There are a couple of
religion-and-pop-culture pieces as well, including a soft-hearted paean
to Princess Diana by Leonie Caldecott: “I feel that she is reaching out
especially to one very grief-stricken, courageous man, who like her has
spent his life searching for love, for the deeper meaning of life (are
not the two, after all, one and the same?). That person is her husband,
Prince Charles.” And there’s a kitschy essay by Marc Gellman on “the
literary and cultural angel explosion” (“I want you to write a letter to
your angels”). Even the volume’s least egoistic selection, an
explication of the Sabbath by Cynthia Ozick, is so lovely as to be
practically useless. “The Sabbath inspires us all to become the best that
we can be,” Ozick avers, without considering the ethical barriers that
contemporary life throws up between us created beings and “the Sabbath’s
focus on spiritual and moral elevation.”
Yet the swamp of sap sometimes stirs with wisdom: Andre Dubus’ vision of
Eucharist infusing the world; Anne Lamott’s humble suggestion that “right
behind the cliché is the original message;” Rick Moody’s two-sentence
indictment of postmodern linguists’ dismissal of God: “God is a
theoretical repository for the idea of meaning, nothing more, a
repository who reflects meaning back onto a scarily empty system of
signs. You can’t pray to that.”
If “The Best Spiritual Writing” falls short of its title, that’s to be
expected. We live in a fallen world — writers have to make a living,
and readers should be thankful that publishers, whether from motives
false or true, are making some bucks off goodness, truth and beauty.
Besides, seekers who truly want a Word that speaks to them probably know
they can’t buy it in paperback. A bedtime book like “The Best Spiritual
Writing” can offer vague and worthy inspiration, like the stars and sun
and moon. For most people, however, the really transforming words appear
in the harsher light of everyday life. The best spiritual writing comes
from writers who are writers incidentally, whose words are rooted
somewhere other than their word processors.
To the IMAX Corporation — purveyors of large-screen, high-resolution, high-tech cinema experiences — size really does matter. The company has big plans to expand its market beyond museums and amusement parks during the next few years, and bring the nation’s shopping malls a new generation of IMAX features that will be more Hollywood and less PBS.
“T-REX: Back to the Cretaceous,” an IMAX 3-D film directed by Brett Leonard (“Lawnmower Man,” “Virtuosity”) and starring Peter Horton of TV’s “thirtysomething,” is being hyped as the first IMAX movie with blockbuster potential. (It premiered in New York in October, and will open in wider release, on at least 40 screens nationwide, through January.) When you view them on the largest IMAX screens through 3-D glasses, the dinosaurs in “T-REX” will appear bigger and taller than they did in real life. But they’re not going to command nearly the amount of attention or respect that IMAX needs to make the huge transition from destination entertainment to mainstream commercial success.
Nobody expects a dinosaur movie to be clever; it just has to achieve one simple thing — create a world that lets us imagine what it would be like to live with our planet’s former tenants. The more realistic the special effects, the more successfully uncanny a dinosaur movie tends to be: The difference between “One Million Years B.C.” and “The Lost World” is like the difference between finding a cache of family photos left by the previous occupants of your house and having the whole clan show up one day at your kitchen door.
In its best moments, “T-REX: Back to the Cretaceous,” the first IMAX 3-D dinosaur movie, creates precisely the same eerie, thrilling, transporting effect that most of us experienced when we first saw that long shot of the Brontosaurus at the beginning of “Jurassic Park.” The computer-generated dinosaurs in “T-REX” have skin that shines with iridescent blues, greens, yellows and reds, following the latest trends in paleontologic research. They have the disconcerting habit of lunging to within spitting distance of the audience and shaking their heads furiously as they roar, open-mouthed, saliva strings stretched between their teeth, their tongues vibrating in the wind of their own breath.
Yet despite being able to brag of the most realistic dinosaurs ever to appear on-screen, “T-REX” is a terrible movie. The dinosaurs in “T-REX” romp for maybe 10 of the film’s 45 minutes, and their scenes are over so fast the audience can barely register the painstaking detail in which the creatures are rendered. (Technically, the resolution of the computer-generated graphics in “T-REX” exceeds anything that’s ever been seen on-screen; scientifically, the images are equally impeccable — director Leonard says he spent a full hour one day during production discussing the precise nostril slant of a Hadrosaur.)
Even worse, there’s no real mystery, awe or terror in the film’s interactions between contemporary and Cretaceous-period creatures. The dinosaurs in “T-REX” can’t inspire much emotion because they’re too busy illustrating a point — the screenplay’s preachy platitude that parental neglect is bad. This was, coincidentally, a central theme of “The Lost World” as well.
At the beginning of “T-REX,” a whiny teenager named Ally (Liz Stauber) wishes her famous paleontologist dad Donald Hayden (Peter Horton) would pay more attention to her. One day, while Donald is out digging for bones, Ally writes a transference-addled, cry-for-help science project about “The Parental Instincts of Dinosaurs.” This phrase, coincidentally, was also used by Julianne Moore in “The Lost World” to describe her interest in tyrannosaurus Rex.
When Ally shows her dad the project during a visit to his office in the Natural History Museum, he completely misses its autobiographical relevance and lectures Ally about her laxity in following the scientific method, before disappearing into a meeting with his tight-sweatered, Laura Dern look-alike assistant, Elizabeth (Kari Coleman).
Left alone in her dad’s office, Ally freaks out during a power failure and accidentally knocks a dinosaur egg off his desk. When the egg cracks, it emits orange smoke that nauseates Ally and sends her on a trip through time — first to the early 20th century, where she meets paleontologist Barnum Brown and dinosaur illustrator Charles Knight; then to a primeval forest, where she wanders around hollering, “Dad!” and eventually makes friends with a T. Rex, who lets her pet it on the nose just moments before an extinctive asteroid blazes overhead.
In the course of her travels, Ally learns that her conjectures about dinosaurs’ parental instincts are all true. So we’re not surprised that when Ally returns to the museum, Dad comes to his senses, praises her science project and even invites her along for his next dig. Oddly enough, a newfound appreciation of children was also the most important transformation wrought by “Jurassic Park” on the paleontologist character played by Sam Neill.
For director Leonard, “T-REX” is the latest in a string of films that suffer from an egregious overload of high-quality special effects and distractingly dull plots and characters. Like “Lawnmower Man” and “Virtuosity,” which put characters in cool-looking virtual environments and then mechanized their emotions in order to push facile messages about freedom and justice, “T-REX” will be an endurance test for all but the most forgiving technophiles. Although the movie occasionally exploits the strengths of IMAX 3-D in new ways — as in Leonard’s brief shots from the tyrannosaurus’s point of view, or his delightfully disorienting full-screen close-up of a tiny aquarium — its innovations are sufficiently spare and isolable that they don’t add up to any kind of vision.
The failure of “T-REX” is a problem not only for unsuspecting audiences, but also for the IMAX firm and its format. IMAX is pursuing an ambitious plan to become a player in the commercial theater industry: Last year, the company agreed to build dozens of screens for theater chains in the United States and Canada, and it’s still working to fill a backlog of orders (for clients such as Cineplex Odeon) to build almost 80 theaters — three-fourths of them commercial — within the next two years.
Theater chains are signing agreements with IMAX because they’ve been promised a new generation of Hollywood-style features that will add some flash to the IMAX image and expand the traditional IMAX audience of tourists and school groups to encompass mall rats and garden-variety adults as well. Paramount is developing a 40-minute 3-D “Star Trek” movie, Children’s Television Workshop is working on a feature starring Elmo (of “tickle me” fame) and IMAX is currently negotiating other deals with companies including SKG Dreamworks and Disney. IMAX hoped “T-REX” would be the first of many crossover hits.
But the first IMAX movie to garner serious ticket sales will have to be better grounded in the peculiar strengths of the IMAX medium than “T-REX.” With its vast screen size and all-encompassing sound, IMAX is the most immersive film experience available today: It’s about taking viewers to a place (as in “Antarctica” or “The Serengeti”) and showing how stories emerge from that setting. What makes “T-REX” a bad 3-D IMAX movie is what makes it a bad dinosaur movie: Instead of giving its eponymous protagonist center stage to strut and fret and sit in the audience’s laps, it spends its best energy throwing a watered-down, imitation-Spielberg story in your face.
For John Shelby Spong, Episcopal bishop of Newark, every week is Holy Week. Spong says he lives in “constant and almost mystical awareness of the divine presence,” and he believes his vocation is to exhume and resurrect the spiritual content of Christianity from its worldly internment in the Christian church. That’s the stated goal of his new book, “Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile.” But the title is false advertising, and maybe even false witness, because the presumption of this book is that Christianity is already dead.
Contemporary Christians, according to Spong, have entered a period of religious disorientation on par with the Jews’ Babylonian exile, when everything that had given meaning to their religion was destroyed. In the same way, Christians today “are exiled from the worldview in which [their] creed was formed.” We cannot repeat the Apostles’ Creed with integrity because it’s flush with misnomers such as “Father Almighty.” “Father” won’t fly because it’s “filled with limiting cultural definitions” that have been used to justify the oppression of women; and if God were truly “almighty,” he would cure leukemia upon request.
By most accounts, church attendance is thriving (especially in conservative and fundamentalist congregations), and the political clout of the Christian Right is still strong enough to drain some plausibility from Spong’s argument that Christianity is dead, at least as a spiritual or social force. However, Spong’s book engages conservative Christians only to dismiss the validity of their faith, which he does most forcefully by asserting that modern science is the foundation of any honest contemporary worldview. An early chapter of the book uses Galileo, Darwin, Freud and (believe it or not) Carl Sagan to argue that theism — any definition of God as “external, supernatural, and invasive” — is intellectually untenable because its literal interpretation cannot be proven by natural science.
Most of Spong’s book describes how Christianity might be re-invented in light of modern science and psychology, but most of his prescriptions float high above the reality of most Christians’ lives. He calls Jesus a “spirit person,” a being whose physical resurrection is pure fiction, but whose spiritual vitality is “discovered over and over in each of us as we open ourselves daily to new human heights.” His proposal for a new creed begins this way: “I believe that there is a transcending reality present in the very heart of life. I name that reality God. I believe that this reality has a bias toward life and wholeness and that its presence is experienced as that which calls us beyond all of our fearful and fragile human limits.”
Spong advocates trashing many of the richest assets of the Christian tradition. He wants to declare a moratorium on use of the word “God” (“Modern men and women have no working concept today of God as a supernatural heavenly being”). He wants to forget Eden, the fall and all notions of sin (“There is no such thing as a perfect creation. Thus, there was no fall into sin”) and therefore to shelve the idea that the events of Good Friday are in any sense redemptive (“pre-Darwinian superstition and post-Darwinian nonsense”). And he wants to banish liturgical practices such as the Communion Service (“caught up in the magical, supernatural power of the ages”).
Yet, abolishing so much of the imagery, stories and devotional practices of Christian tradition, as Spong proposes, would not liberate preachers to deliver the self-actualizing new message that Jesus is a “spirit person.” Instead, it would banish believers to a spiritually and imaginatively impoverished place, where we would have fewer resources for understanding how the God of the Bible is revealed in contemporary life.
If Spong were gay, he’d be one of the drag queens who screech that traditionally masculine gay men are wracked with “internalized homophobia,” and that all homosexuals should follow them in abandoning social norms. Only drag queens and ivory-tower intellectuals have time for the radical forms of self- and world-invention described by Spong’s book. Most gay men are perfectly happy wearing trousers; and most marginalized Christians actually love the Eucharist.
Reformation — having the ancient truths presented in a new way, but exactly as they always were — would be more than good enough for most of us. This kind of reformation is difficult or impossible for large church denominations, which derive much of their power from hierarchical authority and inflexible doctrine. But it can and does happen effectively in local congregations, like the many churches in this country that have decided to grant openly gay members full participation in their worshipping life.
These churches are gradually forcing their authorities to make incremental changes in their treatment of homosexual Christians, as shown by the recent Catholic bishops’ letter to parents of homosexual children, “Always Our Children.” These churches are adopting the methods of earlier Christian reform movements to abolish racist membership rules, for instance, or to let women lead worship. Most Christian churches still treat gay people, in deed if not in word, as something less than human. But the occasional successes gays have had in changing that demonstrate that reform is a job of which the Body of Christ, and the bodies that constitute it, are more than capable.
Many gay Christians want to get married; we want to be out and ordained; and we want to see the distinctive challenges of living as gay Christians explicitly acknowledged by our churches, preferably in some form other than a heresy trial. Homophobia is a big hurdle to reform, but it’s nothing compared to sexophobia. Sex not only makes the church nervous, it actually makes the Church lie. Too often, churches teach that people are spiritual “souls” contained in bodies that operate as mindless pleasure machines. Christians forget, or we never discover, what mysterious creatures scripture actually describes us to be, with physical and spiritual lives that intersect, overlap and are never even as separate as those two words imply. We rarely experience sex as the divine gift it is, in the context of lifelong commitment to another mind, body and soul. And therefore, we rarely learn to integrate sexual ethics with the rest of our ethical lives.
Although this situation isn’t unique to gay Christians, it’s probably more exaggerated for us than for our straight brothers and sisters. We are habitually ignored in the preaching and liturgy of mainstream churches, and the churches’ silence implies consent to the world’s preference that gay sexuality be isolated in an entirely private part of life — away from family, away from work, away from church and, in too many lives, away from love.
This silence casts many gay Christians into spiritual exile, the kind of exile that Spong describes as a place where “God must change or die.” When we start coming out, God grows increasingly insistent that we receive the gift of romantic love in a way that will glorify Him, but our religion offers precious little guidance in understanding how to square this revelation with the God we’ve always known.
I experienced this kind of exile when I first started coming out, as a student at Princeton Theological Seminary. I needed to learn how to live faithfully as a gay man, but Princeton wasn’t helping me do that, so I dropped out of school, moved to Boston and began looking for a church that would nourish both my love for Christ and my love for men.
I finally found that nourishment in a Catholic congregation, the Jesuit Urban Center in Boston’s South End. With a traditional Catholic liturgy, the Urban Center has built one of the largest predominantly gay congregations in Boston. What the Urban Center knows — and what Bishop Spong has forgotten — is that for exiled believers, genuine reform begins with the activity of remembrance. Believers must dig deeply in scripture, church history and their own religious experience to learn what made religion compelling for them in the past and why it doesn’t work anymore. If these explorations show the problem is not in themselves but in their tradition, they have to use the truths they’ve found to correct the lies their tradition teaches.
Worship at the Urban Center is grounded squarely in traditional Catholic theology. In those basic premises I rediscovered the power of a primary tenet of my faith: Christ’s incarnation proves that creation, although fallen, is good. In daily life, it can be hard to believe you are good when you’ve been taught to feel shame about your deepest physical and emotional desires. The Urban Center, merely by welcoming gay people into the church, overcomes that shame — and particularly, its religious manifestations — with the love of Christ. That welcome makes us realize that our bodies are a blessing, for no other reason than that we’re born. And it means worshipers at the Urban Center experience Christianity just as we always have, but also in an earth-shatteringly gracious and dignifying new way. Sometimes the priests use the lyrics from “Sunday in the Park with George” to clarify Christ’s parables; sometimes they use St. Thomas Aquinas. That mixture of innovation and remembrance is the only effective basis for meaningful religious reform.
“Why Christianity Must Change or Die,” by contrast, doesn’t offer much help for Christians who believe our religion needs reform. Bishop Spong is wrong to blame Freud for flatlining First Presbyterian and St. Mary’s of the Assumption, because people have not been exiled from the church by the power of modern science. They’ve been exiled by the weakness of clerics whose imagination isn’t supple enough to make sense of new social realities in traditional Christian terms — everyday stuff like corporate downsizing and exotic stuff like gay love.
The best counsel for Christians who seek revelation in such realities won’t be found in Spong’s book. To the extent that such counsel is available on the printed page, it will be found in scripture, when it’s read as the record of God’s negotiation and re-negotiation of His covenants with His people, and according to Paul’s admonition to “Test everything, and hold on to the good.” It will be found in the work of clerics, professors and writers who honestly engage the tension between traditional church doctrine and the vagaries of contemporary life: in Peter Gomes’ excellent introduction to the Bible, “The Good Book,” for instance, or Robert Wuthnow’s sociological studies of American Protestantism and capitalism, or Kathleen Norris’ new memoir about learning to use religious language, “Amazing Grace.”
But we’re almost always better off looking for churches that embody this tension than we are browsing our local bookstores in search of isolated epiphanies. It is our churches that will raise us, with Jesus, to new and eternal life. They’re the places where prodigal, exiled Christians find themselves truly at home. And everybody knows, be they friends of Dorothy or just friends of friends, there’s no place like home.
like most men who hang out in America Online’s gay chat rooms, Michael Patterson met a lot of guys who started conversations by asking his penis size, suffered the virtual folderol that followed (“where r u?” “what u in2?”), chatted with studs and simps who turned out to be the same people using different screen names and heard stories from friends who’d been stood up for dates by guys they’d met online. “People act like there’s not even a person on the other end of this thing,” he explains.
Unlike most gay chatters on AOL, Patterson decided to go countercultural: He appointed himself the conscience of the Boston gay chat rooms. He created a new screen name, STOODUP1, with a profile that promised to clean up “the M4M rooms and [make] them fun and safe for everyone.” (M4M is the AOL abbreviation of “men for men.”) He recruited a few other AOL users — none of whom he’d met face-to-face — to help in this crusade. He issued an online all-points bulletin for the men of Boston to e-mail him stories about being stood up for dates by guys they’d met online. Finally, after collecting these allegations, he sent them to the accused, then included both sides in a STOODUP newsletter he e-mailed to anyone who asked for it.
The STOODUP news reads like a college paper: It’s a collection of painfully earnest pieces of writing by people who are struggling to figure out what matters to them. An early editorial announced, “Those of us who use AOL as a means to meet people DESERVE the right to feel that we are safe in the encounters we are getting ourselves into and DESERVE to know the truth about a person, not just the fiction they create for us.” A letter from a reader named Clash2001 explains further: “We are the first generation to interact online and connect. The problem is that there are no rules … [However], behind every screen name there is a person. We should try to chat with that person in the same way we would if they were standing behind us.”
STOODUP’s voice is a hybrid of Dear Abby, Miss Manners, Sherry Turkle and Mike Royko, offering advice about online dating, guidance regarding real-world etiquette (e.g., Why Not to Ejaculate on Oriental Rugs) and broad analyses of quirky aspects of online culture. The newsletter’s editorial standard is simple: “I’m not going to include the things that I couldn’t show the people I’ve grown up with,” Patterson says. (His mom, who is in her 70s, is one of the newsletter’s biggest fans — which means no features on golden showers, and no announcements about spanking parties.) Yet STOODUP has boldly explored some of the most colorful aspects of “Gay-OL,” such as the chat-room marketing strategies of escort services.
The chatting class was initially hostile to STOODUP’s moral crusade. The first newsletter included an M4M chat log that reads like the report of a virtual stoning (“if you ever talk bout me or anyone i care for on this thing you can be very VERY ASSURED ill sue the friggin pants of you and anyone involved and ill win”).
Yet STOODUP deflected the slings and arrows, and Boston M4M’ers soon proved themselves to be gluttons for authority. Now, STOODUP has such a following that Patterson, a 29-year-old retail manager for Mikasa, spends most of his free time — about 40 hours a week — answering e-mail, lurking in chat rooms and writing the newsletter. Patterson says, “At first it was like, ‘Who gives you the right to judge?’ Now it’s like, ‘We’re gonna report you to the newsletter.’”
STOODUP’s mailing list skyrocketed from 50 to 1,000 in eight weeks, and for most of this summer, it’s been adding subscribers at the rate of 100 per week. In early June, STOODUP threw a party to kick off Gay Pride in Boston, and 300 people showed up. The next day, 50 of the party guests sent thank-you notes to STOODUP1, announcing they’d met something like the man of their dreams.
STOODUP’s popularity raises questions about the most oft-praised quality of online chat: the liberation that comes from assuming multiple identities. STOODUP’s philosophy holds that the fluidity of online identity makes it too easy to escape personal accountability; the newsletter seeks to create an atmosphere in gay men’s chat rooms that makes it harder to separate online ethics from real-world ethics. “Guys send me these e-mails like, ‘I can’t understand what’s happening,’” Patterson says. “I say, ‘Look! The truth isn’t happening.’”
Integrity is rare in any environment where anonymity is possible, and AOL’s policy of allowing individual users to select up to five different screen names is practically an invitation to flirt with multiple personality disorder. For example, a man who used several different screen names, claiming he ranged in age from 28 to 31 (a big difference, in a demographic where 30 is often considered over-the-hill), had his true age revealed in a recent STOODUP newsletter. On first being confronted with STOODUP’s questions regarding the inconsistencies in his profiles, the man was dismissive of STOODUP’s pretensions to moral authority, asking, “Don’t you have a life?”
Yet there’s a crying need for such moral authority on America Online, where users often learn the system in isolation, working from software acquired in mass mailings or from magazine subscriptions. Other online spaces provide more built-in cultural cues for users to evaluate the screen names they meet: With Internet Relay Chat, for instance, it’s technically difficult to gain access to the system in the first place, so newbies often learn the ropes from experienced chatters; on venerable for-pay conferencing systems like the Well and Echo, anonymity is almost impossible.
Still, America Online thinks its M4M rooms do fine without any oversight at all. AOL spokeswoman Robin Patton says the company monitors member-created People Connection rooms only when a guide is summoned. AOL users who have problems with other members can blow the whistle on them by hitting keyword “Guide pager,” “I need help” or “TOS” (for “Terms of Service”). AOL’s Community Action Team then determines whether the offending member has violated the Terms of Service and decides whether that member’s account should be terminated. Patton says AOL can’t take responsibility for members who fail to keep social commitments they’ve made online, however: “That’s kind of like not being home for a phone call. There’s nothing the phone company can do about that.”
STOODUP’s experience suggests that AOL isn’t wild about its users imposing oversight from below. According to Patterson, when STOODUP first started, AOL took steps to shut it down. His AOL account was frozen after a man who’d been branded with the cyberscarlet “A” — for asshole — complained that he’d been slandered in the newsletter. After some consideration, however, Patterson says AOL assured him that “you can’t be sued for slandering a screen name,” suggested he add a for-entertainment-purposes-only disclaimer to the newsletter and sent STOODUP on its merry way.
STOODUP has had only one other run-in with AOL brass, around the time of the group’s summer soiree. Patterson told the folks in AOL publicity he had 300 RSVPs and asked if they would donate party gifts. When they said the best they could do was to send a bag of AOL start-up disks, Patterson turned them down: “Yeah we’ll have a party with 300 of your customers, and the point is to get you more customers. Right.’”
Despite the resistance STOODUP has gotten from AOL headquarters, and despite the flak Patterson has taken from the users he’s hung out to dry, he’s sticking with it, because STOODUP is providing a salutary service to AOL’s gay cyberscene.
Urban gay culture provides an extraordinarily generous reprieve from responsibility for one’s social commitments, and because the anonymity of AOL’s gay chat enlarges this freedom immensely, the result is a ridiculously irresponsible kind of online society, where people are under no social pressure to be accountable for their words.
Gay chatters on AOL therefore have an especially strong need for some kind of moral authority — or at the very least, some pressure to make their online personalities square with their everyday personalities. Absent that pressure, AOL chat can still liberate long-suppressed aspects of users’ personalities, but it won’t provide any incentives for them to become better-integrated people. Providing those incentives is Patterson’s mission.
He has a less high-minded reason to stick with STOODUP, as well. For all his time cruising the chat rooms, Patterson still doesn’t have a boyfriend. Yet he has found a relationship he loves. “I am not single,” he says. “I am married to my computer. I can turn it on, and I can turn it off. It’s great.”
