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The Political Theology of Theodore Nuge

18 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by danielwalldammit in Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Character, life, Music, Sarcasm, Satire, Souls, Spirit, Spirituality, Ted Nugent

Not believing in souls myself, perhaps I am a bit naive about the subject. I tend to assume that ensoulment is a pretty sweeping kind of project. Everyone either has one, or they don’t. That’s my usual sense of the issue anyhow.

Lately, though, I’ve been reading up on this thing, exploring the works of an obscure theologian (Theodore Nuge) who has a great deal to contribute to our understanding of the matter. You see, it turns out that although people in general may be thought to carry something along the lines of a soul, it turns out that many people are actually without a soul. Seriously! Soullessness, would seem to be a big thing. It’s actually rather common. Just who laks a soul and how they came to lose it, now that is indeed a very interesting question. I’m still learning this subject, though, and the Nuge seems to understand it much better than I do. So, let me share with you just a few of his insights into the nature of souls and soullessness.

***

On the subject of soullessness, Nuge’s most accessible work would seem to have been about a musical exposition once scheduled at a Native American business venture. When the exposition was called off, Nuge is said to have remarked that those responsible lacked proper hygiene, and that they were in fact people without souls. Just how to account for their lack of souls remains a matter of some dispute. Nuge was thought originally to have ascribed this status to them on account of their indigenous nature, though he later suggested the individuals in question had become soullessness on account of political activities. It is possible that Mr. Nuge’s later comments reflected something of a shift in his thinking, however, as the intent of his first comments on the subject would seem to be less than clear. Not everyone agrees with Nuge;s self-exegesis. Subsequent attempts to clarify Nuge’s relationship to the Native American community has been preserved in obscure digital source material.

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Some scholars find Nuge’s proclamations of affinity for indigenous peoples a bit hollow, given the ease with which he dismissed Native American activists, but we must consider the intersection of indigineity and disensoulment carefully before moving on to the rest of his work. Far from a flippant comment, it would appear that Nuge’s appropriation of indigeneity is actually part of a much larger theme in his works. Even Theodore’s musical performances are said to have incorporated native, or at least faux-native themes. Nuge’s interest in Native American themes would seem to contain a number of clues into his thoughts about disensoulment. Let us consider one of the most interesting features of Nuge’s work, his ideas about spiritual hygiene!

It is not simply the case that can souls be lost, according to Nuge, they can also become quite dirty. Indeed, a soul according to Nuge is in constant need of a bath, except that a literal bath doesn’t seem to do much to cleanse a soul. No, to cleanse one’s soul, a person must go into nature, preferably with the intent of killing something. Consider the following texts:

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QED?

Having established that souls can indeed be cleansed by nature, we should perhaps add that they can be be healed by nature as well. So, we might be inclined to think of Nuge’s comments as indicative of a state which is generally inimical to good spiritual well-being, one which is akin to sickness as well as lack of hygiene. Although Nuge himself never committed this notion to a single lexical item, it may be productive for us to adopt a technical term for this state. Let us call it the state of being ‘yucky’!

Now let us move on to the importance of hunting practices. Although Nuge does seem to attribute soul-cleansing and healing power to nature in general, he ascribes its full healing power to the pursuit and killing of animals. Consider the following passages:

Screenshot 2017-06-12 16.48.46Screenshot 2017-06-12 16.51.14.2Screenshot 2017-06-12 16.51.14Screenshot 2017-06-12 16.58.30.2

Last but not least…

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So, you can see, there is special cleansing power in the hunting and killing of animals. It’s like the super-soap of soul-cleansing wilderness spirituality. Indeed the very moment of killing an animal would seem to be the best agent for eliminating any yuckiness that has attached to the soul.

With all this attention to hunting, it should be said that there is at least one other soul-cleansing agent in life, at least according to Nuge.  He also finds the power to cleanse a soul in one other thing, music.

Screenshot 2017-06-12 16.49.51

Near as I can tell, these two sources constitute an exhaustive list of soul-cleansing/healing agents in the work of Nuge. If he acknowledges this power in any other activities, I have yet to find a discussion of it in Nuge’s work.

So, what does all this have to do with Native Americans? Well, to answer this we must consider some of the Nuge’s experiments with Native American dress and neo-primitivism! Nuge seems to credit Native Americans (along with sundry friends) with guiding him through the soul-cleansing process. Often, he suggests, they are there with him when the Nuge cleanses his soul by killing animals and/or playing music.

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All of this would seem to add up to a kind of neo-primitive shamanism. Whether hunting or playing his music, the Nuge is connecting with the spiritual power of primitive people, and with the souls of loved ones lost. It is this connection to primitivity which cleanses the soul, either by releasing an arrow in the direction of Bambi, or by whaling away on a guitar. In each case, the sould-cleansing power stems from the return to primitive nature, the escape from civilization into a more basic form of existence.

All of this is quite fascinating, to me anyway, but of course it is merely one half of the coin in Nuge’s work on souls. You could think of it as the heads side of having a soul. The tails side is that you can lose it.

Who doesn’t have a soul? Well,Pimps, whores, and wellfare brats, for one.

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Now that might seem like kind of a random list, but it would seem the Nuge assumes these people share a common political agenda.

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Indeed, Nuge would seem to suggest the success of that political agenda, namely the campaign to elect Barack Obama as President of the U.S. had dire implications for the soul of America itself.

Screenshot 2017-06-12 16.53.21Screenshot 2017-06-12 16.50.21

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…and of course, this trend only got worse in more recent elections!

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Journalists, it would seem, have no souls.

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During the last election, even Fox News seems to have suffered a loss of its soul.

Screenshot 2017-06-12 16.49.28Screenshot 2017-06-12 17.04.38

Some might find it odd to think of a news station as something that could possess a soul in the first place, but this should really come as no surprise. Corporations are people, according to SCOTUS. It shouldn’t really be all that interesting to find out that one of them has a soul.

…or that it lost it.

Other candidates for soullessness?

The Southern Poverty Law Center.

Screenshot 2017-06-12 17.08.15

Those who oppose voter identification.

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People who disarm citizens and cops.

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Critics of the Nuge.

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And of course, animal rights activists.

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In one of his more ideosyncratic passages, the Nuge even suggests that anyone who doesn’t think Theodore supports ‘allthings LGBT‘. Some might consider this an odd basis for disensoulment as it’s tough to imagine how the very existence of one’s soul could be contingent upon recognition of another person’s, but the more difficult theological questions here probably have to do with the unusual construction of LGBT rights. It way well be that Theodore’s rather ideosyncratic construction of G in particular is the key to the addition of creepery to the status those disensouled on account of their agnosticism regarding Nuge’s political stance on LGBT issues. It’s a very difficult thing. Some say God works in mysteries ways. Nuge talks in them.

So, as you can see the list of people lacking a soul is rather long, according to Theodore Nuge. The list may seem rather haphazard, but a few common themes can certainly be found in his work. Democrats and liberals are two overlapping-but-not-quite-synonymous groups that lack souls, according to Nuge. Also, Media. Given the importance of hunting for spiritual hygiene, it probably makes sense to find that those opposed to hunting lack a soul.

Also, those who don’t Like the Nuge’s music.

Screenshot 2017-06-12 17.09.11

So, what to make of it? As I mentioned before, I am new to the subject of soulology, but on a more serious note, I do think talk of souls can be very meaningful. The question I would ask is what are the metaphors? What does all this talk of souls really mean to those producing it? maybe, we can’t get far if we expect a literal answer, but we get a lot further if we ask what personal values are expressed in such talk.

Nugent’s talk of the soul-cleansing power of nature would make sense to a lot of people. Hell, it makes sense to me. While some might object to the role of hunting in this approach to life, it does express something found in few modern means of interacting with the natural environment. It provides someone with a definite role in nature. A tourist hiking a nature trail is, at best, someone who will take nothing but pictures and leave nothing but footprints. He doesn’t belong in nature and he knows it. A hunter, on the other hand, is part of it. He is, for that purpose anyway, as much a part of nature as the game he tracks. More to the point, he knows it. So, Nugent’s comments on the cleansing of the soul during a hunt may not square with some people’s thoughts about animals, but they certainly do strike me as an authentic description of his personal experience.

What seems most objectionable in all this is the growing sense of personal pettiness in all this talk of souls. How quickly the profundity of nature turns into a spiteful outburst against those who could interfere with it! How easily, Nugent’s personal associations with Native Americans turns to license taken against other Native Americans. Nugent’s talk of soullessness enables him to dismiss an awful lot of people. I don’t believe in a soul myself, but I have to wonder at the soul of someone who does believe in such a thing but seems so ready to say that others don’t have one. It’s a metaphor, of course, but a rather double-edged one at that. Can someone who so often finds no meaningful life in others really find much meaning in his own?

I’m old enough to remember when Ted Nugent was mostly a guitar sound coming through my speakers. Tastes vary, of course, and some of his lyrics are more than a little questionable, but I really did like the sound of that guitar. Listening to it now, I can almost sense that soul-cleansing power Nugent locates in nature and in his music. (Many will disagree, I know) The thing is, after listening to him talk about the soullessness of others, I usually feel like I need some of that power. I just wish he’s produce less of the one and more of the other.

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Let Us Not Praise the Prosperity Gospel With Faint Damn: It’s Worse than its Theology!

05 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Religion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Christianity, God, Jesus, Joel Osteen, Matt Walsh, Prosperity Gospel, religion, Spirituality, Televangelism

2016-08-05 (3)“Joel Osteen’s Fake, Heretical ‘Christianity’ Isn’t Any Better Than Atheism.”

That’s the title of an article from blogger Matt Walsh published yesterday on The Blaze. If Matt Walsh ever does have a thought worthy of publication, he will no mistake it for a bad cold, and there is certainly no chance The Blaze would publish anything that challenges the grade-school level reading skills of its founder, Glenn Beck. Still, sometimes even soft-heads and soft-targets merit a response of some kind.

I can think of all kinds of criticisms that Joel Osteen deserves, but this is a case of praising with faint damn. No better than atheists? It’s amusing to be the on the as end of a justazzy equation for a change, but one could do worse than to do no better than an atheism. The problem here is of course that Osteen certainly does worse than we generally do in at least one very significant respect. Just as every other televangelist I can think of, Osteen rakes in millions off the gullibility of his followers. There is no telling how many elderly couples are going right now without basic comforts or even important medication because they choose to contribute to Osteen’s cause or those like it. I know of no comparable movement within atheism, certainly none with anywhere near the impact of the many financial empires sailing under the banner of Christianity. So, it’s damned odd to find out that what’s really wrong with this Huxter is that his message is just like ours, which it simply isn’t. We have our faults, to be sure, but this doesn’t seem like one of them. Hell, it’s not even close.

But let’s be clear. I would find his message would be no less disturbing if Walsh’s title didn’t involve a swipe at people like me. Once again, people like Osteen consistently make their money off the backs of people who cannot afford it. But Walsh’s problem with Osteen isn’t the exploitation of people of others in the name of God; it’s his theology. Ironically enough, what Walsh takes issue with is Osteen’s advocacy of something called “the Prosperity Gospel.” Loosely speaking, this is the notion that God may convey blessings in the form of material wealth on his faithful. So, you can see that questions about the relationship between money and spirituality are at the heart of Osteen’s ministry, but Walsh’s never seems to address just how serious these questions really are.

Walsh  is concerned that Prosperity Gospel  is teaching people to value wealth in this life too much. Indeed, Walsh suggests people would be better off hungry if that’s what it took to get them to the right message of Christianity. What Walsh misses is the fact that doctrines like the Prosperity Gospel can get people to hungry status just as effectively as any doctrine he imagines to be more scripturally sound. Osteen’s message of wealth is lost in one very important sense on Osteen’s own followers, they aren’t going to get wealthy  off his message. Indeed, a good number of them are going to lose a portion of whatever they do have buy pouring it into his empire. Far from being ‘no better than atheism’, this is a problem that resides almost entirely within the halls of big business evangelism.

Walsh begins his criticisms by pressing Osteen’s ambiguous use of language. He thinks Osteen’s blend of self-help nonsense if largely meaningless. Walsh likens it to a kind of ‘verbal smoothie’ filled with meaningless cliches. Fair enough on that account (I do not disagree in the slightest) but what would make things better? Walsh wants to hear more about Jesus:

But there are some words that never seem to make it into the smoothie. If you listen closely to all the self-help mumbo jumbo spewed by these heretics, you may notice the glaring absence of certain crucial terms; terms that any pastor ought to be shouting proudly and with great regularity. For one thing, you won’t hear ”Christ.” Neither will you hear “sin.” Or redemption, sacrifice, atonement, repentance, Bible, etc. Prosperity preachers are notoriously hesitant to share the spotlight with Jesus. They’d rather keep all the attention centered on the self — their own selves, specifically – and some vague “god” character, who, according to their mythology, is a genie-like figure who shows up to grant wishes before returning to his magic lamp.

This is really fascinating, actually. The Prosperity Gospel is a message calculated to present donations to the church as a means to financial success. It enables preachers to imply a quid pro quo without stating it outright, and that makes it a highly effective tool for con artists. One con-artist after anotherhas used it to separate people from their money, even from their life-savings. With all that could be said about this particular message, what Walsh thinks is bad about this is that they don’t mention Jesus enough.

But what if they did?

More importantly, what about when they actually do?

The Prosperity Gospel was all over the ministries of Jan and Paul Crouch, and it never crowded the name of Jesus out of their conniving mouths. There is a good deal of Prosperity Gospel in the messages of Pat Robertson as well, and that doesn’t stop him from invoking Jesus. Jim and Tammy Fae Baker never had any trouble mixing Jesus into their own version of the Prosperity Gospel. I could go on of course, but the point is obvious enough. The name of ‘Jesus’ is all over the Prosperity Gospel. In fact, the connection between devotion to Jesus and hopes for material blessings are at least as old as the Puritans. Contemporary New Age spokesmen and countless motivational speakers (even some secular ones) are merely a minor variation on this old theme, but few have had more success with that theme than those who kept Jesus front and center in the message. The Prosperity Gospel is a message that flourished in Christian churches long before it ever escaped the pews for more ambiguous theological settings.

Walsh has his own scriptures, to be sure, scriptures he thinks will refute the interest in wealth, but of course the Prosperity crowd has their own. They can go back and forth all they like, but neither will resolve anything to anyone except themselves. And here is where atheism may well matter after all in this equation, because I for one don’t give a damn what the scriptures have to say about it. What I see when I look at someone like Osteen is a con artist depriving countless people of essential financial resources so that he can enjoy wealth they can only imagine. That the Prosperity Gospel uses the image of wealth to part people from what little they have is the problem with people like Osteen. I have known many Christians who could see that problem. There is little evidence that Walsh does.

Simply put,the problem with the Prosperity Gospel is NOT one of theology; it is one of economics. I’ve known many community pastors and priests worthy of respect, but I’d be hard pressed to think of a televangelist who struck me as anything else but a thief. The former deal with real people and their problems, some wonderfully and some disastrously. Televangelists provide the face of money-making machines. These people are in business, and unfortunately they are in business with the full benefits of non-profit status. It simply should not be an option to sell false hope, and we ought not as a nation to sit idly by as people like Osteen and countless other huxters make themselves filthy rich off the waning judgement of people heading into retirement.

It is the cover of spirituality that makes Osteen’s con possible. His message may no better than atheism to the likes of Walsh, but it is not atheism that empowers his exploitation of others. To find the source of that empowerment, we have only to look at those who quibble over matters of theology while saying little to nothing about the outright larceny that is modern televangelism.

 

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The Spirit Always Grows Deeper On the Other Side of the Fence

23 Wednesday May 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Native American Themes, Religion

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

American Indian, Indian, Native American, Navajo, New Age, religion, Spirituality, Tourism

Canyon de Chelly national Monument (Chinle)

It had been a very long drive into work that week, not the least of reasons being a heavy snow storm that descended upon the central Navajo Nation just as I got into the area. I didn’t expect to see my landlady in the office, but there she was. She and I normally passed each other going both ways of our weekly commutes, and upon seeing her I assumed she had been trapped in town by the snowstorm. Would I be on the floor that night? …or asleep in the office? Not to worry, my landlady and her 4-wheel drive were on the way out of town, but she wanted me to know that I would have company that night after all.

I cocked an eyebrow and waited to learn more.

It turns out she had picked up a guy on the side of the road near Chinle. She didn’t know much about him, except that he was a bilagáana (a white guy) and he had come out to the reservation looking for native wisdom. She had blessed him with his first taste of that wisdom by getting him in out of the cold. She added that she thought he was sick. So, I taught my class that evening and headed over to the house wondering what (or rather whom) I would find.

I’ve long since forgotten the man’s name, but he was indeed sick. A doctor had apparently told my guest that his Prostate Cancer could not be treated. So, he had come to Navajo country in the hopes that a Medicine Man could accomplish something that modern science could not. My guest didn’t elaborate much on his condition, though his frequent trips to the bathroom might have testified in some sense to the diagnosis. He was French, as I recall. I don’t think he ate at all that night, nor did he accept an invitation to breakfast.

The house contained two quite decent beds, but no central heating. So, my guest slept on the floor that night and I slept on the couch, thus putting us both near the coal-burning stove. In the morning, he pulled out his tarot cards and tried to get a sense of what the day had in store for him. The man offered to do a reading for me, but I declined. It had been a long time since I had left that sort of thing behind, and I didn’t want it back in my life, not even as a sort of social experiment. Instead, the man explained what each card meant as he drew it during his own reading. There was some good and some bad, and as one might expect, a lot of wiggle room on the particulars.

Although I asked, the man never really told me whether or not he was looking for someone in particular. I suspect he thought the practical problem of finding a Medicine Man willing to help him would resolve itself, perhaps with the aid of his cards or some comparable means of divination.

I don’t think my guest ever asked me for anything, nor did he accept anything I offered. The storm had broken late that evening, and his reading had been promising. So, the man opened the door to find a truly beautiful morning. Soon, he was on his way.

***

It is hard to explain just how out-of-place my guest for the evening had been. The man would have had far more luck turning south and heading into Sedona. Perhaps one of the more shady medicine-men would have sold him a quick Blessing-Way, but the real thing, so to speak, is a family affair. It would take friends and relatives to put together the resources, to aid in the ceremonies, and to help in the long rites. The proper healing from a local perspective might have taken several nights on end with several participants needed to make all this work. The logic of the system is as much social as it is metaphysical. Repayment for all of this effort would take the form of similar service when those same people needed help in various forms over the course of their lives.

This man didn’t really fit into the scenario he was trying to bring about. It wasn’t just the clumsy eclecticism of tarot cards and native healers that seemed off to me. On a much more profound level, my guest had come seeking a personal experience; its social implications were simply beyond him. With enough goodwill, folks could of course devise a work-around, but how likely was it that anyone would give him the chance? To say nothing of the odds that any of it would work!

Who knows?

I could easily hope that my guest for that evening found what he was looking for and flourishes today, living evidence that my sense of both metaphysics and indigenous culture are dead wrong on all counts.

It was desperation, not malice, that brought this man to Navajo country, and yet his failure to appreciate the social setting was part of a much larger problem. I often wonder just what is it about other people’s rituals and beliefs that makes them so attractive to those on a spiritual quest, even with personal health hanging in the balance? Among other things, this question always comes to mind when I think of that particular night in Chinle. Once that question takes hold of my thoughts, I cannot help but to want to follow it down a few similar paths.

***

I’m not altogether unfamiliar with the sort of thinking my guest brought with him that night. I remember reading about the ascended spiritual masters (Kuthumi, Maitreya, St. Germaine, etc.) in my grandmother’s old Theosophy books. The masters dwelt on this earth, at least when they wanted to, or so I read. The home of the masters, so the story goes, rested in the remotest parts of Tibet. I suppose that when the books had been written, this seemed an adequate explanation for the seeming impossibility of finding the masters by normal means. It took meditation to bridge the distance.

I remember sitting in on a séance as a child in the early 70s, one in which I and several family members received the names of our spirit guides. I remember the name of my “Indian guide.” It was “White Thumb.” With the name of “Wee One,” my “Joy Guide” also seemed to bring to mind an Indian, albeit a little one, perhaps an invisible playmate, …very useful to a kid living on a ranch inconveniently far from my classmates. I wasn’t half as interested in any of my other guides as I was in these two.

I also remember that the name of my father’s Indian guide had been of the South Asian variety. I cringe at the explanation, …this was a higher form of Indian guide, so he was told. I cringed again many years later when a family friend dismissed questions about the authenticity of sweat baths run by non-Indian practitioners. She assured me that she and her spiritual mentors were engaged in practices far more advanced than anything Native Americans had actually done. And of course I thought about all of this when I learned about the tragedy of a sweat bath lead by James Arther Ray. I wonder if he too was engaged in practices far more advanced than those of the Indian peoples from whom he borrowed piecemeal?

I remember a woman at a Native American Studies conference who once asked me if I was following the “Red Road,” a question so loaded with cultural baggage I couldn’t begin to unpack it in time to give an adequate response. I expect the woman must have found me quite a disappointment.

But Spiritual appropriation isn’t just limited to Native American traditions. I recall with great pleasure reading Karma Cola long before I headed out to the rez. Gita Mehta’s brutal observations on the antics of spiritual tourists in India touch upon issues quite familiar to those observing how Native traditions fare in New Age circles. Many of the characters she describes in Karma Cola appear quite as hapless as my guest sitting there reading tarot cards on his way to find a Medicine Man. Few seem quite so innocent or nearly as sympathetic.

Mehta has been rightly criticized for focusing on the negatives. So many claim to have found something of value in Eastern traditions. What personal pettiness it must take to deny or to minimize this! And yet the specter of people on a personal quest, proceeding oblivious to the social context in which they operate rings true for me. Whatever folks may have found in these strange, foreign, traditions, it seems a safe bet to suggest that they commonly miss much more.

What bothers me most is that the part spiritual tourists miss may well be the most important piece of the story, the part which anchors all that spiritual talk to an established community. I cannot help but wonder if the quest to learn someone else’s spirituality isn’t rather commonly an effort to escape that very thing!

Those traveling (literally or metaphorically) through another people universe are freed from much of the social context in which the symbols and ideas they seek to learn acquire meaning. They can learn how to perform a ritual, or even what it’s iconography means in some idealized sense, but they are freed from the tedium by which that ritual is connected to countless aspects of daily existence. Most importantly, spiritual tourists are free to fill in the gaps of their understanding as they see fit, unencumbered by multiple sources of information, some of which will surely disagree. What spiritual tourists acquire is a radically simplified version of some other world view, all the easier to tweak it to their own tastes. Perhaps some people need this; perhaps some even do great things with the opportunity. Either way, the point stands. Something highly important is lost in translation.

For some at least, the chance to strip a practice of its social context and rebuild it as they see fit is precisely the pay-off for embarking on a trip into unknown spiritual territory. There may be good reasons for doing that, but how often do people even realize that is what they are doing?

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Jesus and Religion: A Distinction in Search of a Difference

21 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Religion

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Circular Reasoning, Distinction, Faith, Jesus, Jesus versus Religion, religion, Spirituality

This poet (whose name is apparently Jefferson Bethke) loves Jesus and hates religion. In fact, he literally resents it.

(Sigh!)

Okay, so how do you tell the two apart, Jesus and religion? That is a tricky question, all the more so because the terms normally seem to travel in each others’ company, so to speak.

Luckily, the poet offers the helpful suggestion that:

One is the work of God, the one is a man-made invention.

One is the cure, the other is the infection.

Religion says “do.” Jesus says “done.”

Religion says “slave.” Jesus says “son.”

Religion puts you in bondage, but Jesus sets you free.

Religion makes you blind, but Jesus makes you see.

And that is why religion and Jesus are two different clans.

Religion is man searching for God, Christianity is God searching for man.

Listening to the poet rattle through these distinctions, one cannot help but think that a lot is riding on the matter. But of course all of these individual distinctions assume we already know the difference between the two; they comment on the difference as though it were already clear.

The poet is talking about things that seem to go together in the collective understanding of “religion.” One might, for example, describe as religious some of the arguments once made in favor of slavery as well as those advanced by Abolitionists against it, thus putting the “religion” of common parlance on both sides of the poets juxtaposition. Likewise, talk of Jesus is normally expected from those engaged in one particular religion.

But of course the poet here assures us that these are really two different things, even that talk of Jesus is (or at least should be) wholly different from religion. He divvies up a range of themes normally associated with religion, carefully placing them in different piles, so to speak. All the good themes that make us smile go in the “Jesus” pile and the bad ones end up in the “religion” pile. Yet, he provides no independent means of telling us which goes where. At the end of the day, the difference between the two is little more than the collective contents of the two piles.

To say that this is circular reasoning is putting it mildly. Who wouldn’t prefer the Jesus of this video to the religion?

Seriously, who would not prefer freedom to bondage, son to slave, sight to blindness, or a cure to an infection?

And if the answer is “no-one” or even “almost no-one,” then who keeps producing all the bad things, the ones that seem to go in the “religion” pile? Does the poet in this video imagine that it is people who have consciously chosen them?

Or is it just possible that it is people who thought they were actually choosing Jesus?

The internal logic of this kind of rhetoric always fascinates me. Some of the poets distinctions (such as that between man looking for God and God looking for man) are too fantastic to construe in terms of a specific moral choice. Others are downright intuitive. The notion for example that religion makes you blind whereas Jesus makes you see is wonderfully vivid.

On hearing the claim that religion makes you blind, one cannot help but to imagine some form of religiously motivated bigotry. We want to say, “Yes, I know exactly what you mean!” The second phrase must arouse similarly vivid thoughts for most believers. How easily might one imagine a moment when thoughts of Jesus could have inspired one to overcome a prejudice! That particular pair of options must arouse thoughts of a real difference.But of course the important question is whether or not there is anything about Jesus (or more importantly references to, thoughts about, belief or faith in…Jesus) that guarantee the one and precludes the other.

It’s a valiant effort.

It is tempting to go along with the poet on all of this. When I see him separating the good from the bad, I could almost choose to join in, to help sort everything into the right piles. It would be lovely to affirm the wisdom of this poet and all the others who assure us that “religion” is distinct from faith in God or a personal relationship with Jesus. I could almost stand with those who say they are “spiritual but not religious.” Hell, even without faith in God I can affirm the value of many things associated with Jesus’ name. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if those good things really were of a wholly different order than those bad ones. …if the difference between Martin Luther King and Fred Phelps were as easy as telling the difference between which of two words to use, “religion” or any of its better dressed counter-parts.

And yet the question remains, when people talk of Jesus, what distinguishes the good from the bad?

This poet offers no answer to that question, though he seems to think otherwise. And in that respect, he has one foot firmly planted in the “religion” pile.

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