Kony 2012 and the Attack on Idealism

My experience with the Kony 2012 debacle started out as casual interest when the Kony 2012 video first began circulating, evolved into casual disgust when I began seeing the intensity of the criticism Invisible Children was receiving, and turned to utter horror when TMZ posted videos of Jason Russell’s breakdown and the criticism only intensified.

Invisible Children has been demonized for more reasons than I could list, but some of the main issues seem to be that Invisible Children does not have an external auditor and spends most of its money on marketing, it’s oversimplified the Joseph Kony narrative and has cast Uganda as a helpless child that the powerful United States needs to rescue, it monetarily supports the Ugandan military, and it’s convinced millions of uninformed young people that changing the world is easy and that they have the power to do it.

I’m mostly interested in the last point, because I believe it’s the key to the others (though I do want to mention that Invisible Children’s main strategy is marketing. Marketing is Invisible Children’s chosen vehicle of change. Criticizing a non-profit for spending the bulk of its money on its main purpose for existing is ridiculous). A leader in a Christian missions organization posted this meme on Facebook recently, and it pushed me over the edge on this issue:

The cynicism of this just kills me. The cynicism of all of this just kills me. The author of the anti-Invisible Children blog Visible Children wrote in a recent post that people shouldn’t support KONY 2012 “just because it’s something. Something isn’t always better than nothing. Sometimes it’s worse.” That’s an insightful comment, and it’s true. But this is clearly not one of those cases. Nothing is not better than something, when it comes to a man who has abducted thousands of children, forcing them into sex slavery and murder. This is just…so…not one of those cases. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that every one of the criticisms of Invisible Children that I’ve outlined above is valid. Let’s say Invisible Children wastes much of the money it raises, it’s exaggerated the atrocities or distorted the timeline of Joseph Kony’s actions, it’s imperialistic in its awareness-raising, it supports a Ugandan army that has its own problems with raping and looting, and it has convinced young people that changing the world is easy, when it is really very hard. Even if all of this is true, nothing is not better than something, in this case. A friend of mine wrote today, “There’s a quote floating around this world that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. But it seems that right now in our world, we would rather see evil triumph than see good men do something.” I couldn’t agree more.

It’s not that I think the basis of our disdain for Invisible Children is that we want to see children suffer at the hands of Joseph Kony. I think it’s that we feel above it all, above the impossible idealism that Invisible Children embodies. We are too world-wise, too afraid of being thought fools to have that kind of hope, so we latch onto anything the internet provides us with that can validate our sense of self-righteous condescension. I submit that many of us adopt the criticisms of the negative articles because of our inherent fear of looking foolish, because of the murderous intent we hold for idealism in our hearts, and not vice versa. We don’t move from reading the articles to being skeptical of movements like Invisible Children. We begin at that place of cynicism and adopt seemingly reasonable explanations for why we feel the way we do.

It is no easy thing to be an idealist. It takes a degree of bravery that I find increasingly rare. I wish every teenager would watch a thirty-minute video and become a social activist. I wish every human had Jason Russell’s activist, idealist heart. And I wish that every cynic could see that theirs is the path of the coward.

On Discernment and Love

I listened to a podcast last year about an LDS man, “Eric,” who suffered from a disorder called scrupulosity – a moral-based obsessive compulsive disorder found most frequently among highly religious populations, according to the podcast. Eric is a devout Mormon who became consumed during his teen years with the moral imperfections he perceived himself to have. As he was preparing for his mission, he became obsessive about being worthy to serve.

During his teenage years, his concern over his spiritual state resulted in his being praised for being so pious. Bishops, fellow ward members, and even members of his family mistook his scrupulosity for righteous concern. When he confessed things to his bishop like feeling that he had kissed his girlfriend for too long (his standard was one second), the feedback he kept getting was “Eric, you’re doing well…you’re going to be a right, pure missionary, and you’re on the right track.” His thoughts and actions were reinforced by those around him for years.

It wasn’t until he began confessing sins he’d never committed that people started realizing that Eric had a problem. On his mission, Eric confessed to sins that his mission president knew he hadn’t committed. He had a compulsion to confess and feel clean, and he became convinced of that, for example, if a part of him had merely brushed against a person or even an animal, he’d had some kind of sexual encounter with them. At one point, his elbow barely touched his mission president’s wife, and he became convinced that he had touched her inappropriately and confessed this to his mission president, out of concern that he wouldn’t make it to heaven if he didn’t.

A striking part of this podcast for me was the fact that because Eric’s behavior fit the picture that many people in his religious context had of someone who was living righteously, his thoughts and actions were reinforced by those around him for years. They say that one of the worst worst things people can do for someone with scrupulosity is reinforce his or her obsessive-compulsive worldview, but because his behavior fit a kind of cultural ideal, those around him remained unaware of its source.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this podcast over the past few weeks, because I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to be praised within evangelical culture if you know the right lingo and appear to be the evangelical cultural ideal. I used part of Eric’s story only as a jumping-off point; I wanted to give an (admittedly, extreme) example of what it can look like for a person to meet a cultural ideal while operating from a very unhealthy place. I’ve grown increasingly concerned both about our ideals within evangelicalism and about our lack of discernment–and our lack of value for discernment. Eric’s story is as good as any to show why discernment is so vital to the health of the church. His being LDS is inconsequential; his story could happen within any religious context. I believe someone with scrupulosity could flourish quite easily and be praised up one side and down the other within evangelicalism, and it would be both to their detriment and ours.

But people need not suffer from scrupulosity for similar situations to occur in the church. I’ve been involved in enough churches in my 28 years to have watched quite a few people show that their character cannot sustain the responsibility that was given to them because of their reputations. And it is both to their detriment and ours that we have so readily promoted them.

When people express opinions that we feel passionately about or behave in ways we approve of, we have a tendency to assume that it could only be because they are godly; and we think this because we believe that it is because we ourselves are godly that we have these opinions and behave this way. Our cultural conditioning can blind us to what’s beneath the surface of people’s culturally-affirming lifestyles. We fail to understand that evangelical culture is a culture, and that there are benefits, within the culture, of living according to the cultural mores.

I spent some time with the Westboro Baptist Church this summer, and because of that, I’ve had several conversations with fellow evangelicals about the WBC. One thing that consistently surprises me (but rarely fails to be the case) is that evangelicals talk about them as if they are a part of “us,” because they consider their beliefs to be Christian–even though they always denounce what they perceive to be Westboro’s downfall: they don’t feel that they’re loving. Because they consider the WBC’s doctrine to be orthodox, however, evangelicals tend not to question the church’s Christianity. I find it shocking that evangelicals can value love so little and doctrine so much that if they believe a church has the latter but not the former (but not vice versa), they consider it to be a Christian fellowship.

We seem to have forgotten Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13: If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

I don’t know how we’ve gotten so far away from this.

On Harold Camping

I’m not embarrassed by Harold Camping. I don’t find it ridiculous that he thought he’d be raptured on May 21 or that people believed him. And I don’t think the biggest lesson we have to learn from all this is not to trust people who say they know when the world will end.

Ever since Harold Camping and company gained national exposure, most evangelicals have been eager to distance ourselves from him and our faith from his. We use words like “embarrassment” to show that we recognize his wrongness and take no part in it. We speak of being concerned that Camping and his listeners will make Christianity look foolish, that he will give people one more reason to reject the faith that has, in recent years, not done so well in the American media.

But we can learn something much deeper from Harold Camping than to not be taken in, to shelter ourselves from the embarrassment of being wrong. Deeper than accepting at face value Jesus’ words that no one knows the day or the hour of his return. We can learn to flee the pride that threatens to destroy us in all our being right about Camping’s being wrong. We can learn to accept Harold Camping as one of our own without qualification, as a person who loves Jesus and who frankly just has a flawed approach to the Bible. We can learn that God is not interested in our saving face.

Christianity will not be destroyed by Christians looking foolish. Some will always find a crucified Christ foolish. But Christians will be destroyed by foolishly failing to name and reject the pride that keeps us in bondage to maintaining our public image. We are in far greater danger of failing to love one another—the love by which Jesus said we would be recognized—than we are of failing to appear wise and rational.

Image-wise, we have nothing to lose from embracing Harold Camping, because nothing–image-wise–is at stake that’s worth holding onto. To the extent that Christians value being accepted more than we value being holy, we are submitting ourselves to the bondage that will always, without fail, accompany the pride we are cradling in our scramble to create distance between us and those we fear will drag us down with them.

Hell

A few weeks ago, Rob Bell’s promotional video for his new book set off a series of responses from evangelicals who were upset about what they perceived to be his universalism. I am disturbed by a lot of the reactions he’s getting, and I’ve been trying to put my finger on why this is striking so many people at the core. Here are my thoughts.

I feel that evangelical culture is driven, in many ways, by a fear of hell–hell being a future state of complete separation from God. Much of our evangelism is centered around hell and trying to keep people from going there. “You have to tell people the bad news before the good news sounds good” is something I heard growing up. Translation, for non-evangelicals: “You have to tell people what their problem is (that they’re sinners and on their way to hell) before the good news, the solution (that Jesus can save them from sin and hell), will sound good to them.”

Sharing the gospel has become synonymous with telling people that without Jesus, they are hell-bound. If we didn’t have a hell to appeal to–if the stakes were not eternal damnation–we wouldn’t know how to talk to people about Jesus. Do we know Jesus as the good news who transcends where we will be after we die? Rob Bell’s alleged universalism strikes not just at the doctrine of hell and who we think will be there. It strikes, for many of us, at the gospel itself. At our fear-driven, hell-focused, afterlife-centered gospel.

The Appearance of Wisdom

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about squelching. Squelching (according to dictionary.com, “to put down, suppress, or silence, as with a crushing retort or argument”) is, in my opinion, one of the most detrimental habits people can adopt. But squelching usually sounds good–like wisdom–so it often isn’t recognized for what it is. It masquerades as common sense, as a voice of reason, or as the other side of the coin–as something as worthy of consideration as the side being presented. But it is none of these things.

Squelching rears its ugly head in all sorts of situations, and the people doing the squelching seem to be oblivious to their squelching ways, likely because their admonishments really sound like wisdom. Squelching often takes the form of warnings–warnings against perceived danger, against foolish choices, against heresy, or against any number of things. For example, if someone expressed her newfound appreciation for meditation to me, and I responded, “Well, you have to be careful about meditation–there’s a real spiritual world out there, and you’re opening yourself up to it by meditating,” I would be squelching. I believe there are healthy forms of meditation, just as there are unhealthy forms of it, but if my tendency is to jump immediately to warning about the possible negative effects, I’m killing her momentum and shutting her down. This is something that’s common to squelching–the person doing it may very well agree with what someone has just said, on some level; s/he just also feels that another perspective is needed, and it’s nearly always a negative one. But why do we think this? Why do we jump to the warning, rather than embracing what we can and allowing people their excitement? I haven’t been able to put my finger on exactly what the issue is, but I think it lies somewhere between fear and control.

When people squelch, it is common for others to join in with something like, “Oh, yes, that’s a good point too–you shouldn’t go overboard with that/you have to consider both sides of the issue.” Squelching is contagious, and it knocks the breath out of excitement and crushes the vulnerable. Squelching is the drug of the cynical and of people who operate out of fear.

My working hypothesis is that squelching resides as a nearly-unexamined (because it skates by nearly unnoticed) habit in the lives of those who practice it. The more we observe squelching, or the more we have been squelched ourselves, the more likely we are to pick up the practice. Squelching can be as culturally embedded as anything else, and it can quickly become one’s default way of interacting with the world. It is easy (it takes no thought), safe (for the squelcher), and almost always elicits a positive response from conversants besides the squelchee.

I’ve thought a lot about this passage of Colossians 2 with regard to squelching:

Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? These rules, which have to do with things that are all destined to perish with use, are based on merely human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.

“Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!” have “an appearance of wisdom,” but it is false wisdom, and squelching is just a variation on those themes. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom, and squelching’s goal is to shut that freedom down, to squeeze the breath of life out of every good thing that enters a person’s life. Squelching would like nothing more than to see people stagnate, so afraid of being thought foolish that we cease venturing into uncharted waters. Earlier in Colossians 2, Paul says, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.” Amen, Paul.

Glory

The mystery into which even the angels long to look, they say

Can be explained in five points

Exposited in a statement of faith

And posted on the church website

For others to taste and see that the Lord is good.

 

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter

And the glory of kings to search it out

But you are not a king, so just sit tight

I’ll be right back with the catechism or Josh McDowell

For his yoke is easy and his burden is light.

Reflections on Leaving Utah

After more than five years in Utah, I’ll soon be moving to Pasadena, CA to go to Fuller Seminary. It’s been so hard to wrap my mind around that change that until recently (yesterday), I avoided even thinking about it. I am allergic to planning (and also to bees, but I’d rather get stung than plan something), so finding housing and figuring out how I’m getting there (neither of which has yet felt necessary enough to undertake) have not been priorities. Also, I just didn’t want to move. I hate moving, and Utah feels like home now.

My sister moved to Pasadena a week ago and already has a good job–which is very exciting–but I feel that I need to turn the attention of all of our mutual friends back to me regarding our journeys to Pasadena. So this post is serving the dual function of reminding anyone who needs reminding that this move of ours to Pasadena is really more about me–though of course Anna’s a pretty good sidekick, so it’s alright for her to have a few days in the sun, but a week is feeling like overkill to all of us, I’m sure–and giving me a chance to begin processing the upcoming move.

I think the only thing more startling than moving into Utah may be moving out of Utah. I forget sometimes that I haven’t always lived here. It seems normal to me that women wear shorts to their knees and that people believe in three heavens and don’t drink coffee. I’m surprised when I hear anyone swear, and I sometimes catch myself gazing for an inappropriate amount of time at people with tattoos. I’ve nearly forgotten my mother tongue, Christianese; I now speak Mormon almost fluently. I think in terms of having testimonies of things, and I feel befuddled at evangelicals’ attachment to Enlightenment rationalism.

Theologically, Utah gave me space to breathe. Evangelicals tend to police orthodoxy with McCarthy-esque diligence, and the sheer lack of expectations Mormons had for my theology was freeing. Leaving that behind for a seminary environment, of all places, will be difficult.

But I’m also excited about the change. I enjoy learning most of all, and learning new things about Mormonism isn’t happening nearly as much as it used to these days, and I’m ready for a new something to immerse myself in. It’s not that I find Mormonism uninteresting; it will forever hold fascination for me as well as a soft spot in my heart. And it’s not that I think I’ve exhausted Mormonism. It’s just that as much as I’ll miss being surrounded by Mormon culture–and I will miss it–I’m ready for something else. I have the religious equivalent of wanderlust.

It seems like an appropriate thing to do would be to write about things I’m looking forward to about being at Fuller, but I’m a lot better at reflecting on the past than I am at thinking ahead, so I haven’t spent much time yet anticipating life in California. There are a few things, though…

I’m looking forward to being among people whose interests are similar to mine. I majored in philosophy at BYU, and I’m glad I did; I really enjoyed the classes, and I found community and camaraderie with philosophy students that I don’t feel I would have found in other majors. But philosophy isn’t where my heart lies. The intersection of religion and culture is a lot closer to it, and that’s what I’ll be studying at Fuller. I’m also looking forward to living somewhere as starkly different from both Minnesota and Utah as Southern California is. Its foreignness is a draw for me right now. And I just feel like Fuller is where I’m supposed to be, so going there feels a little like taking a drink when I’m thirsty, even though I have no idea how it will taste. Three more weeks!