Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Mardi Gras: the last drink without ashes in it

If you're from the Caribbean, today is Mardi Gras, the last day of a weeklong celebration known as Carnival, which leads into Ash Wednesday and Lent. If you're from New Orleans or otherwise follow the lead of the Big Easy, today is the last day of Mardi Gras, a weeklong celebration that leads into Ash Wednesday and Lent.

Either way, tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.

The cynic might look at the Mardi Gras celebration as an attempt by the faithful to squeeze in as much last-minute fun and debauchery as possible. After this, it's off to the confessional and time to put on an appropriately penitent show to satisfy the sad-sack priests during Lent.

This misses the point. While God surely does want us to keep ourselves free of wrongdoing, let's not forget that God wants us to enjoy ourselves and one another. Read the Hebrew Scriptures honestly and one thing you'll keep seeing is one festival after another, with both eating and drinking. Jesus' first miracle was even to provide a better wine for the wedding at Cana than what the groom's family had provided. People might overdo it getting Bourbon-faced on Shit Street, but Mardi Gras falls into that category. (There's even an entire book of the Bible about the unmitigated joys of having sex.) Enjoy yourself, God tells us. Live a little.

Lent is the 40-day period that leads up to the events of Good Friday, when Christians of all stripes traditionally mark the Crucifixion. It's a liturgical marker of the time between when first Jesus and then his disciples realized that things were not going to go the way they had first hoped, and when things got as absolutely bad as they possibly could.

Carnival is a time for wine and celebration, a season for living large and loving life for all that it gives us. Mardi Gras marks the end of that season.

Tonight is the night we celebrate. It is the last bottle, the last cup, the last drink we will have before we find that there are ashes in our wine.



Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


Who is my neighbor? Terrorism in America

Trigger warning: This entry contains graphic descriptions of lynching.

They say that when the train pulled out of Texarkana, Henry Smith begged the lawmen accompanying him for protection.

Smith had reason to be scared. Only 18 years old, he had fled Paris, Texas, four days earlier, when he was accused of sexually assaulting and murdering the 4-year-old daughter of a sheriff's deputy who had beaten him on the head earlier in the week. The manhunt for him swiftly grew nationwide, with rail companies offering free passage to anyone involved in the hunt.

By the time the train arrived in Texarkana, there was a mob of 5,000 people waiting for him. A committee from Paris, where he was headed, prevailed upon the mob to let them pass so that Smith could face justice there.

Did I mention that Smith was also black?

Smith was never formally charged with a crime, never tried, and never allowed counsel. As for the sexual assault, that never even happened.

None of that mattered. When the train arrived in Paris, a reported 5,000 to 15,000 people were waiting for him. They marched Smith through town to a scaffold they had built, and there they burned him with red-hot iron brands, beginning with the soles of his feet and moving up his body until they finally gouged out his eyes. A writer for the New York Sun reported that every time Smith groaned or screamed, a cheer went up from the crowd.

After 40 minutes, the mob poured oil on Smith and set him alight. Reportedly he ran screaming off the scaffolding and only then did he die. Afterward, the people sifted through the ashes for souvenirs, including charred fragments of bone and pieces of the scaffolding.

This was a scene of horror worthy of ISIS. The perpetrators, it should be noted, were Christians.

Terrorism. That is the only word that adequately describes the scene that unfolded in Paris on Feb. 1, 1893. The horror visited upon Smith is more fitting for a scene from Dante's “Inferno” than it is for anything resembling justice.

If the concern had been for justice, Smith would have been tried and convicted first, or at least charged. But this wasn't justice. There was a message in Smith's execution for the rest of the black community, that the same could happen to them, and the law would do nothing to intervene.

Terror was the message on May 16, 1918, when a mob in Lowndes County, Ga., lynched Hayes Turner and a dozen other black men after a white landowner was shot through his living room window. Their bodies were riddled with bullets and left hanging on trees for days.

When Turner's wife, eight months pregnant at the time, decried her husband's murder, the mob caught up with her, hanged her upside-down from a tree and set her on fire. Most horrifyingly, a member of the mob cut the baby from her belly and stomped it to death. A 1918 report by the NAACP, titled “The Crisis,” notes that the people involved in the lynching wanted to teach her “a lesson.”

Between 1882 and 1964, there were nearly 5,000 recorded lynchings committed across the South, in a region of the country where the people prided themselves on a culture of grace and gentility, to say nothing of religious piety. The persecution of blacks by the larger white culture was so severe that thousands upon thousands of families fled North to Chicago, Cleveland and other major cities not just in search of work, as we commonly are taught, but in an effort to survive.

This was a concerted reign of terror, and the force driving the terrorism wasn't a maladjusted social view of race that led otherwise decent people to look askance at darker-skinned neighbors and to view them with suspicion.

The terrorism that struck in the South from Reconstruction down through the Civil Rights Era didn't have to hide from religious scrutiny that would have ended it. It flourished in the pews. Particularly in the view of those committing the acts of terror, but also in the eyes of their supporters, these were profoundly religious acts.

It has always been this way. Frederick Douglass, a 19th-century abolitionist who grew up on plantations in the South, had a special and well-earned contempt for the piety of the white Christians he knew. In his autobiography, “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” Douglass noted that the cruelest slave owners and overseers invariably were the ones who enjoyed the greatest reputations among white church-goers.

“Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me,” he wrote. “For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.”

Fires burning along Archer and Greenwood
during the Tulsa race riot of 1921.
On May 31, 1921, spurred on by a fallacious report that a male black teen had assaulted a white teen girl in a department store where they both worked, the people of Tulsa, Okla., embarked on a race riot that lasted two days. When it ended, there were 300 people dead, and the Greenwood community was destroyed. Until that point Greenwood had been a center of black commerce and wealth known as the Black Wall Street.

Actions like that, or the Aug. 7, 1930, lynchings of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Ind., weren't just terrorism. They were specifically Christian terrorism. That is a bold and even offensive assertion, but it's one I stand by. Let's break it down.

First, like much else in the South, segregation itself was profoundly religious in nature. As late as 1960, radio preacher Bob Jones Sr. took to the airwaves to argue that segregation was both biblical and essential for a well-functional society.

In his sermon "Is Segregation Scriptural?" which he delivered on Easter Sunday, Jones rooted his argument almost entirely on Acts 17:26, where the Apostle Paul declares “From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries” (RSV).

Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, which worked to uphold this separation of the races by driving out blacks who ventured too far into white society or into positions deemed more appropriate for whites than blacks to hold, held themselves as definitively Protestant Christian organizations. Cross-burning was considered a religious gesture of positioning the light of the Cross against the darkness, and Klan rallies often were (and still are) treated as religious services, with prayers and hymns.

In this religion, every virtue accumulated to the white and every vice to the black. These views linger to this day, with unwarranted stereotypes of the black man who is lazy, predatory and angry; and the wanton black woman who tempts the virtue of white men and boys.

That's one reason why, when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, discussion quickly shifted from Zimmerman's actions to Trayvon's. Allegations of drug use immediately surfaced, along with claims that he brutally had attacked Zimmerman, and other details that served to define him as the aggressor rather than as a teen who was headed back to the home of his father's girlfriend after buying Skittles and iced tea. All this served to justify what essentially was an extrajudicial lynching.

At its essence, segregation was about protecting the purity of the white race, and particularly the purity of white women from black men. A segregationist like Strom Thurmond could — and did — have children with a black woman, and that was no shame to him; but a white woman who had a child with a black man was shamed for the rest of her life. Her children and her grandchildren forever would be viewed as black and tainted, as less than pure white. Lynchings were a way to avenge the stain brought upon the white victim, and a way to warn the rest of the black community to stay within their God-ordained borders.

And that is the reason why, when Henry Smith was lynched, it wasn't enough to accuse him of killing a child. It was necessary to invent the fiction that he also had sexually assaulted her. It wasn't enough for him to be accused of strangling 4-year-old Myrtle Vance; his crime had to be so horrible that murderous outrage was the only acceptable response.

A month after Smith's lynching, the Paris Daily News published a 184-page account of the event, called "The Facts in the Case of the Horrible Murder of Little Myrtle Vance and the Fearful Expiation at Paris, Texas February 1st, 1893,” with the intent of setting the record against Smith for all time.

To read this account, Myrtle Vance could not have been more angelic, nor Smith more demonic. No adjective was too pure to apply to the one, and none to foul too fit the second. Clearly, his lynching had divine sanction.

I know what some will say to all this. Some are going to argue that while lynching and race riots are horrible and inexcusable, they don't rise to the level of terrorism. Others will say that members of the Ku Klux Klan or other such organizations in America, Uganda or anywhere else, have no legitimate claim to a basis in the Christian faith for what they do and stand for.

The 16th Street Baptist Church
in Birmingham, Ala., was bombed
by terrorists on Sept. 15, 1963
Still others will say that terrorist actions like bombing churches, threatening people's lives to force them to convert, blowing up abortion clinics and murdering people are so contrary to the way of Christ, that those who engage in them cannot possibly be Christians.

A few may allow a wider dispensation and agree that the offender still could be a Christian, but one who has been horribly misled and deceived about what it means to follow Christ.

I'd agree with all those people on this one point. Christianity is a religion of love, not hatred. It's a perversion of the Christian faith to engage in actions like the ones I've just recounted.

Can anyone think of another religion, besides Christianity, that's been perverted by a small faction for spreading hatred and terror?



Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Who is my Neighbor? Understand the Narrative

Imagine a world where everyone but you knows for a fact that hamsters are vicious monsters.

It's not something that's up for debate. Every time your child goes to school, she has to sit next to someone whose father everyone knows died in a hamster attack. At work, the woman in the next cubicle tells you of the horrible experience she had at the park when a hamster attacked her without warning, sinking its teeth into her face over and over again until her boyfriend was able to drive it away.

You might not want to believe her, but the scars are on her face. You noticed them the first day, and although you didn't want to ask what had happened, she saw you staring and answered your unasked question.

“A hamster did this,” she said.

All around you people live in fear of hamsters. Pet stores have been banned from carrying them, ever since a father yielded to his daughter's pleading and bought her one. One night when the little girl accidentally left the cage door unlatched after feeding her little pet, the hamster left its wheel, climbed out of the cage and attacked the girl in her bed while she slept.

“Hamsters aren't like that,” you would argue. “They're herbivores and don't eat meat!”

A few zoologists would agree with you, but who's going to listen to them? Everyone knows that hamsters are a menace. It's a fact. Hamsters constantly gnaw at anything they can because their teeth, which can chew right through the shell of a peanut, never stop growing. Imagine what teeth like that can do if the hamster starts gnawing on your throat.

“They're tiny rodents,” you try to tell people. “They're no more dangerous than gerbils.” (You will give up that argument once people start viewing gerbils with suspicion as well.)

You watch helplessly every day as anti-hamster views spread. Signs appear in parks warning of wild hamster populations and advising hikers to avoid certain trails, to minimize the risk of being mauled. News commentators on Fox and CNN start talking about the threat hamsters pose to the security of America's wildlife and ecosystems, and before long there's talk of efforts to eradicate the hamster menace once and for all.

What no one knows is that you have a hamster of your own. He's a small puffball named Hooper and he weighs only a few ounces. After sleeping all day, Hooper runs around on his wheel at night, drinks from a water bottle and eats seed from a small plastic dish that you fill every night.

Hooper is your little secret, one you haven't told anyone about, because you know how your neighbors and your friends are going to react if they find out you have been harboring a hamster.

It's crazy. There's no basis to it, but this is the narrative that has stuck to hamsters, and nothing you say or do can alter that narrative. Hamsters are a menace to our children, and to our very way of life. Everyone knows this.

One day, you go to put Hooper in his exercise ball while you change the litter in his cage, and he bites you. How do you think you're likely to react?

That's the danger of narratives. They don't allow facts to shape them; they force the facts to fit them. The more we repeat them, the stronger those narratives become, until they become unassailable. These narratives influence our actions and our attitudes, even when we know better.

It's not just hamsters. We hear and we tell misleading narratives all the time, about other people, other races and other religions.

It's possible to replace the narrative with one more accurate, but more information isn't enough for that. For us to really change the story, we need to get to know the people in it.



Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Who hates Jesus? The answer may surprise you

I usually like "Coffee with Jesus," but today's strip is one that I feel misses the mark and misunderstands the essential appeal of Jesus.

Produced by Radio Free Babylon, "Coffee with Jesus" is a webcomic about prayer that appears on the Facebook page of its creators. The strip features a regular cast of characters as they talk with Jesus over a cup of coffee. The strips aren't funny as much as they are thoughtful, occasionally poignant, and more often thought-provoking.

Today's strip features Kevin, who until recently was the strip's skeptic, a fellow who spoke with Jesus honestly and pointed out the problems he had with Christians, with the church and with belief. His prayer brings up a topic I've noticed a lot in the churches I've attended: that people are okay with spirituality and spiritualism, but intolerant of any mention of Jesus.

I've always found this complaint a little odd. People don't appreciate being prosyletized, but that's true whether you're pushing them to accept Jesus, to become a vegetarian, or to pull up their roots and move to Alaska with you because there's supposed to be good fishing in Skagway.

But once it's clear that you're not pushing, people are by and large fine with hearing about what you've found in Jesus, Buddha or Shintoism; they're generally impressed that you decided to become a pescetarian, a vegetarian or a raw vegan; and they're downright excited to hear your plans to move to Skagway, Sitka or Haines -- just as long as you're not going to Kake.

It's a popular theme in evangelical circles especially that people hate Christians and that everyone had it in for Jesus, but that's not what the Bible shows. The gospel account is that Jesus was arrested and tried in secret, and then crucified, not because he was unpopular but because he was insanely popular with the people and the priests feared a riot.

And why wouldn't they? Jesus' message of justice and renewal is one that should and does resonate with many people. When it doesn't, I think it says more about the audience (too comfortable) or the messenger (the church) than it does about the message.

The crowd that picked the release of Barabbas over Jesus on Good Friday wasn't doing this because they hated Jesus. They were demanding the release of a popular hero against Roman rule, one whose followers knew he had been arrested and who had time to organize a group to petition Pilate for his release. Jesus was arrested late at night in secrecy and sentenced that morning. In other words, the crowd was stacked, and not the fickle, flip-flopping capricious mob of Good Friday sermons.

But doesn't the Bible say that the world hated Jesus? Doesn't Jesus himself warn his disciples and the church that they will be hated on his account? Well, yes, it does. It's right there in John 15: “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you."

But let's make sure we understand what Jesus is saying. The Bible was written in Greek, not in English; and as anyone who speaks more than language will attest, not everything translates perfectly. In this case, the Greek word we translate as "world" in John 15:18 is kosmos. Kosmos doesn't mean "everyone," it means "everything"; more specifically, the way everything is arranged.

A man like Jesus, someone who disregards social conventions for who is in and who is out; whose presence ends disease and the finality of death, and who threatens social hierarchy by treating outcasts with the utmost respect, is someone the kosmos will hate. He's a threat to the way things are, now just as much as then.

How individual people respond to him often depends on where they stand in the structure of the kosmos. The powerful feared Jesus would lead a popular uprising, and doubtless some zealots and others thought he would as well, but for all the emphasis we place on that view, it was hardly the only one at work. There were many others with different understandings of who Jesus was and what he was about, including prophet, teacher and holy man, and not political revolutionary.

It's pretty evident that the people loved Jesus because of the kind of guy he was. He healed the sick, talked to outcasts, and treated the poor with the same respect he afforded the wealthy. The common people approached him with appeals to his compassion for healing, not from an anti-Roman bent asking him to drive out the local garrison.

Jesus isn't trendy the way the latest pop artist is, or in the same way as the hot new show on Netflix. But his message of radical acceptance, and apocalyptic restructuring so that justice breaks forth right now, is a message that billions have responded to in faith since it was first proclaimed in the desert of Galilee.

It's a message with universal relevance and appeal to the weary and the discarded, and it doesn't get cooler than that.


Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.