http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_002500.phpNOTE: the entire article is important for insight into what is going on in the world of the religious wrong.
Notes from the War Room
05 April 2006
A historian of Christian martyrdom attends a Christian Right strategy session in the "War on Christians.”
By Elizabeth A. Castelli
....
“The gay sensibility,” one speaker informed the audience, is ironic and characterized by the excessively performative use of “air quotes.” Indeed, irony itself is a gay invention, a coping mechanism for gay people who recognize that they don’t really fit in with normal society. Moreover, Chris Carmouche of Grasstops.com, the moderator of the Hollywood panel, singled out academic programs in theatre, film, and performance studies as hotbeds of secular and sexual deviance: Students in such programs, he asserted, “want to attack your values.”
Conference presenters and audience members seemed convinced that a well-organized, well-financed cabal of homosexual elites are plotting a cultural takeover. Marshalling a wide array of arguments against homosexuality (“it’s unhealthy,” “it’s all lust and perversion,” “it’s disgusting”) and gay marriage (“it’s an attack on the family because that’s where faith is passed on -- the goal is simply the destruction of religion” or “it’s an attack on biblical truth and therefore on God”), some speakers advocated for the reintroduction of the concept of “shame” into the culture. Meanwhile, Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition urged the abandonment of the terms “homosexual” and “gay” in favor of adopting terms such as “sodomites” and “the perverted ones.” Some speakers read graphically explicit material found on gay websites to the conference, apologizing profusely for the shock and disgust they knew they would be generating but insisting that it was necessary for the participants to confront this material. By the end, one was left with the distinct impression that the organizers and participants in the conference spend far more time than the average gay person thinking about, talking about, and fantasizing about gayness.
Striking for anyone with some knowledge of the history of Christianity are the remarkable parallels between the rhetoric of contemporary conservative Christians and that of their second- and third-century predecessors. Making connections between religious deviance, sexual deviance, and cultural spectacle is nothing new in Christian rhetoric: Such arguments are the legacy of Christian apology going back to Tertullian, Justin Martyr, Tatian, and others. (Jennifer Wright Knust, a historian of early Christianity, documents this rhetorical legacy engagingly in her recent book, Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity) In ancient Christianity, as now, the efforts to connect religious deviance (idolatry, paganism, heresy) to sexual deviance (whether non-procreative sex or, in more extreme versions, any sexual practice at all) and to the dominant forms of entertainment and media (theatre, the circus, arena games) were aimed at producing an idealized and sanitized portrait of Christian orthodoxy. The sex panic of contemporary culture wars is a clear echo of a centuries-old Christian rhetorical strategy.
....
Lock and Load
Beginning with the premise that there is a war on Christianity, conference organizers and participants were eager to issue calls to arms in response. “We are under spiritual invasion!” intoned Rod Parsley, an evangelist from Ohio. “Man your battle stations! Ready your weapons! LOCK AND LOAD!” (The audience responded to these imperatives with a raucous and exuberant standing ovation.) Parsley also claimed that those Christian churches not sharing the perspective of the Christians represented at the conference constitute “the devil’s demilitarized zone,” naïvely and fatally embracing “peace at any price.” Meanwhile, Laurence Wright, a Lutheran pastor and co-president of Vision America, announced that the time of a peaceful and contemplative Christianity is over; that Christians have been AWOL (“absent without Lord”) in the battle; and that “We must attack the evil now where it is strongest” in order to restore America, the city high on a hill.
But what of the biblical Jesus and his message of nonviolence and nonresistance? As Rick Scarborough explained it at the end of the panel on persecution, all of those demanding gospel values -- submission, tolerance, turning the other cheek -- are fine in one’s private life, but they have nothing to do with the public mission of the church. As for those who draw attention to the gospel’s message of nonviolence, this is simply a matter of “the Left using our own tradition against us.” (Such hermeneutical maneuvers, which produce a biblical message that is inevitably and completely in tune with conservative political convictions, later came to be exercised by one speaker who interpreted Jesus’s “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” by lifting it out of its gospel context in a story about paying taxes and repositioning it in contemporary American society as a positive prooftext for Christian involvement in politics. But I digress…)
....
From Demonization to Condescension
To a person, the conference speakers and panelists divided the world up into simple binary oppositions, and most were content to demonize everyone who does not stand with them in this “with us or against us” war. The occasional invocations of Christian love, offered usually as a conciliatory afterthought, echoed dimly in a room reverberating with loud and unwavering bellicose righteousness. One speaker offered condescension instead of simple demonization: Janet Parshall, a Christian broadcaster who called herself a “war correspondent in Babylon” and who declared that there has been a war against Christians “since the garden,” modulated the rhetoric slightly in two different ways. First, she upped the ante, arguing that the war is not against Christians per se but “against absolute truth and God.” Then, she sought to complicate the identification of the enemy by suggesting that people who possess “opposing worldviews” are not themselves “the enemy” but rather “they have been captured by the enemy.” What was implied here was that all holders of “opposing worldviews” -- secularists, non-Christians of all stripes, gay men and lesbians, feminists, among others -- are best understood as prisoners of war, captives in thrall to their captor, victims of an epistemological Stockholm syndrome and in need of liberation and deprogramming.
more....
Elizabeth A. Castelli, an associate professor of religious studies at Barnard College, is author of Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture-Making, and co-editor of Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence. She was a 2003-4 visiting fellow at NYU's Center for Religion and Media, where she researched “The Persecuted Church: Towards a Genealogy of a Political Program.” Her last article for The Revealer was "Shockwave!"
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
