Ideas.aeon.com was a great idea. People could post questions and long answers so the best stuff would be cherry-picked for Aeon itself. The founders were explicitly hoping to attract intelligent and informed people who would comment on the reconciliation of science and religion. Instead it is sliding into the same old flame war about the nature of god. The real irreconcilability is between the educated and the opinionated, with the idea of god becoming a marker for one’s tribe. I’ve stopped even reading the “ideas” website, with some regret, though still enjoying Aeon.com, the online magazine with videos, balanced and searching.
Two stories about religion caught my eye this week, neither on Aeon. One was about Quaker oats and the other involved Teddy Roosevelt. First let’s consider Teddy Roosevelt because he’s one of my favs. He’s like me: red-headed, four-eyes, same birthday on October 27 which makes us Scorpios. I’m going to quote a lot.
“The strength of America’s faith in football can be traced back to its origin in the Muscular Christian movement of the 1800s. The Muscular Christians strongly believed in the formative power of athletic competition, that by participating in games and sports young men would be instilled with positive character traits. The Muscular Christians had particular concerns that America’s men were becoming “soft” and thus placed higher value on games that created a few bruises in the process. In 1868, a year before Rutgers beat Princeton in the first ever college football contest, one American Muscular Christian wrote, “there is a precious discipline in danger ... I consider no man educated who is not educated to meet danger, grapple with it, and conquer it. And any system of gymnastics which leaves out danger is an emasculated system.”
The most prominent of the American Muscular Christians was Theodore Roosevelt. . .”
More Victorian gender-based mischief trying to base life on strife and conflict -- and the domination of women. Gorilla politics, though gorillas don’t go out there to get concussions that will destroy the parts of the brain behind the forehead that make us human. They don’t have pre-frontal orbital lobes on their brains anyway. And they do more roaring and chest-pounding than violence.
Here’s another sub-category of Chistianity from the 19th century that still hanging on: “Old Time Religion” which is a song, sure enough, but actually also the invention and commodification of a world view. I’m drawing on an article in Religiondispatches.org. http://religiondispatches.org/how-marketers-invented-old-time-religion/ In turn, the article is responding to one of a set of books from the University of North Carolina Press.
The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism
“. . . corporate evangelicals reimagined themselves as savvy religious consumers and reformulated their beliefs. Their consumer-oriented "orthodoxy" displaced traditional creeds and undermined denominational authority, forever altering the American religious landscape. Guaranteed pure of both liberal theology and Populist excesses, this was a new form of old-time religion not simply compatible with modern consumer capitalism but uniquely dependent on it.
Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past
The struggle of the religious heirs to New England's first founders.
Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century
Working-class Pentecostals change traditional ways of practicing the faith
These books are efforts to get at the roots of denominations in America. Denomination means “name” -- all of them Christians but each with their own key metaphor, often more to do with “tribe” than the Bible. In summary of what’s in this post, the first idea of “muscular Christianity” is not represented by a specific book but the anonymous Wikipedia entry is helpful. The idea is that religion is a matter of teamwork, that it is a matter of strong bodies and competitive strategy.
The second, “Guaranteed Pure.” is the notion that “fundamentalism” is a way of getting at virtue demonstrated by being a good consumer. It is “pure” as in the liberal’s love of “Whole Foods” and best practices, but more often seen as the conservative world of good shop-keeping.
Third, “The Last Puritans,” is the idea that one’s ancestors and their rigorous ideas were the key to the United States patriotism and deserving hegemony. Fourth, “Migrating Faith,” is emotional religion, celebrated in a setting that compensates for poverty with direct ecstasy.
There are other denominations with other defining metaphors, like the Unitarian Universalist fantasy that a few basic principles can hold together a radical plurality. Each of these ideas, the “fit” person or the business-savvy person or the jubilant person, is at large in our general culture, influencing what we do. Sometimes I think the institutions we call “religions” are like one of those black “party balls” that you can ask questions and then wait to see what floats up to the little window. If the word fits the dilemma of the time -- which these days seems to be about control and wealth -- then the movement of the organization will be a success.
It’s not only religious denominations that respond this way. It’s just that we’re used to considering any concept that includes the metaphor of a big male “God” as religious. So the secular “denominations” might include science, technology, engineering, feminism, sustainability. Each has its kind of education, often it’s spatial location (urban/rural, north/south, east/west, prosperity/struggle). The markers are not necessarily political, but often emotional and even physical, a matter of what to eat, what work, housing, marriage patterns -- all justified by the circumstances of the people in that place.
BUT a new idea can change how the people respond to their circumstances, escape from the box of assumptions that has trapped them. That’s what the great prophets do, and also the great artists and politicians. It’s not that they’re geniuses or inspired. It’s that they’re paying attention to the parameters of existence. Global suffering demands practical compassion. The Hubble telescope and star nurseries impose humility. Disease requires attention to careful practices and relationships: cleanliness, vaccination, nutrition, habituation to schedules, caring for each other.
Muscular Christianity was useful in the 19th century because so many people made their livings with labor on farms or in industry. Strength and skill were central. “Old Time Religion” was reassuring in a time when the terms of life were shifting to the small towns, away from the field to the shop. There was a time when awareness of history, especially the period of separating from the British Empire but preserving the Anglican terms of respect. In other times it was the emotional celebration of life itself that came bursting from more earthy cultures, like slaves or peasants or Indians.
Love as magic.
These days the cat among the pigeons, the dragon among the doves, is sex. What we know and what we have begun to act out is entirely different from the past, but we try to hang onto the ideas of inheritance, generations, entitlement, binary genders, fertility as an obligation or blessing, state records and certifications, responsibility for assets and taxation. I’m seeing that the confusion in this small town and the area around it, including the rez, is creating hardship and destruction of families as they have existed until now. I’ll come back in a later post. Also, I want to revisit the abandoned sons.
What is the best concept that can guide us? Sustainability? Will the Golden Rule still work if we are so different from each other? Surely arguing about the nature and primacy of God is useless. It’s just more inflated anthro stuff. What about our obsession with military interventions, even in our own cities? Are megacities equivalent to foreign countries? Are cats part of families?
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