Dr. James Emery White

When America’s second president, John Adams, and America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, both died on the same day in 1826 – and that day was none other than the Fourth of July – it was seen as a sign of God’s favor on the United States.  As historian David McCullough notes in his widely-acclaimed biography of Adams, it “could not be seen as mere coincidence.”  It was a ‘visible and palpable’ manifestation of ‘Divine favor,’ wrote John Quincy in his diary that night, “expressing,” McCullough adds, “what was felt and would be said again and again everywhere the news spread.”

The idea of “choseness” and “special blessing” from God has been a constant theme throughout the history of the United States, beginning with the Puritans and their “shining city on a hill.”  In more recent times, the vision of a Christian America was popularized in the late 1970’s by Evangelical authors Peter Marshall and David Manuel in The Light and the Glory.  Marshall and Manuel held that America was founded as a Christian nation and flourished under the benevolent hand of divine providence, arguing further that America's blessings will remain only as long as America is faithful to God as a nation.  In 1989 a team of Evangelical historians (Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden) attempted to lay this somewhat dubious thesis to rest, but it continued as a popular framework for viewing American history among contemporary American Evangelicals.

Whether we were founded as an explicitly Christian nation or not, to many, the idea of God’s favor being removed from our land seems prescient.

As a recent Associated Press article suggested, “everything seemingly is spinning out of control,” with the article going on to note how Midwestern levees are bursting; polar bears are adrift; gas prices are skyrocketing; home values are abysmal; air fares are beyond reach; wars without end rage in Iraq and Afghanistan.

An Associated Press poll reveals that only 17 percent of Americans believe the country is moving in the right direction (the lowest reading in history since their annual survey began).  An ABC News-Washington Post survey put that figure at 14 percent, tying the low in more than three decades of taking soundings of the American mood.

Whether the current national malaise can be attributed to God’s disfavor or not, I am more convinced than ever that American needs to turn to what Christian moorings it once maintained.  But not for America’s sake, per se, or even for the sake of Western culture.

But for the Kingdom’s sake.

America is not simply the leader of the modern world, but the principal carrier of globalization and exporter of culture.  The ideas which lie at the heart of the West, and particularly the United States, are Judeo-Christian.  Yet America is at great spiritual risk, and much of our current despondency is tied to our need for God far more than our need for economic relief.  The very values and ideas that shaped us as a nation, and could therefore shape the world, are being lost.  This has led some, such as Os Guinness, to call for a “third” mission to the West. 

The first mission, of course, was the apostolic mission that eventually resulted in the conversion of the Roman Empire.  The second mission followed the fall of Rome as missionaries refounded Western civilization and essentially reconverted the west back to Christianity from paganism, what Thomas Cahill referred to in the title of his book How the Irish Saved Civilization. 

A third mission would seek to restore America as the leader of the Western world to her Judeo-Christian roots, ensuring continued vibrancy and influence for years to come. 

Not to stave off “curse” and receive “blessing;” but instead to be a blessing to others for the sake of Christ.

And that would be another American Revolution worth fighting for.

James Emery White

Sources

David McCullough, John Adams (2001).

On the history of the idea of America as a chosen nation, see Conrad Cherry’s God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (1971).

David Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and the Glory (1977).

Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden, The Search for Christian America (1989).

“Everything seemingly is spinning out of control,” Alan Fram and Eileen Putnam, Associated Press, Saturday, June 21st, 2008.

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Each year around this time, through the Update, I offer ten titles - in no particular order – from the previous twelve months for your summer reading consideration, usually with an emphasis on cultural understanding.  Enjoy.

The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier by Tony Jones.  The “emergent church movement”:  whether you love it or hate it, feel attraction or fear, consider yourself “in the know” or feel bewildered – or all of the above – this may be the definitive work to date on all things “emergent” by one of its leading voices.  Jones, the national coordinator of Emergent Village and a doctoral fellow in practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, offers an in-depth view of this new “third way” of faith that attempts to stand between religious conservatism and religious liberalism. 

The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800 by Jay Winik.  As you can tell from this year’s list, I was taken by the number of excellent histories that give insight into our present day through the lens of the past.  The author of April 1865, Winik’s accomplishment is his global analysis, linking a new United States, the imperial power of Russia, Islamic peoples preparing for war, and the French revolution.  As Winik argues, their seemingly individual fates were actually a singular and deeply interconnected moment in time that changed the world and continues to shape the one in which we live.

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin.  Few would argue that the judicial system is one of the great epicenters of American culture.  Within the judicial system, the Supreme Court is the most important legal body in our country.  The Nine, referring to the Court’s nine members, explores an institution in transition as it adjusts to its new conservative majority and what it might hold for such issues as abortion, civil rights, presidential power, and church-state relations.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.  In what the New York Times called a “morbidly fascinating non-fiction eco-thriller,” Weisman explores humanity’s impact on the planet by asking us to envision our earth without us.  As the flyleaf to the book details, “Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence…how, just days after humans disappear, floods in New York’s subways would start eroding the city’s foundations, and how, as the world’s cities crumble, asphalt jungles would give way to real ones.  It describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds would flourish, and how cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us.”  Beyond the sheer fascination Weisman’s exploration brings, the work raises profound issues related to humanity’s relationship with creation.

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor.  Emerging from the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, Taylor delivers an 874-page magnum opus on secularism and its meaning from a historical perspective.  Central to his thesis is that secularism is not a single, continuous transformation but rather a series of departures.  Further, that secularism is not marked by an absence of religion as much as the multiplication of options available which may be seized in order to make sense of our lives and give shape to our spiritual inclinations.

Unchristian by Steve Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons.  The findings of a study which revealed that those outside of the Christian faith think Christians no longer represent what Jesus had in mind.  We’re seen as hyper-political, out of touch, pushy in our beliefs, and arrogant – and most of all, homophobic, hypocritical, and judgmental.   (Disclosure:  I was one of several “essay” contributors to the book, along with Chuck Colson, Andy Crouch, Louie Giglio, Dan Kimball, Brian McLaren, Chris Seay, Andy Stanley, John Stott, Jim Wallis, and Rick Warren).

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.  In this remarkable and highly readable new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who brought equal skill to their translations of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, one of the great works of world literature is brought to life for our day.  Easily destined to become the definitive English edition.

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross.  The music critic for The New Yorker explores modern music in all its forms, from Stravinsky to the Velvet Underground, and how it illumines the world in which we live.  Beginning in Vienna before the First World War, Ross’ sweeping narrative carries us to Paris in the twenties, on to Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, through to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies.  As the flyleaf promises, “the end result is not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century through music.”
 
American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic by Joseph Ellis.  The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Founding Brothers and His Excellency examines the founding years of our country.  Noting that both success and tragedy during the last quarter of the eighteenth century shaped our burgeoning nation, Ellis “guides us through the decisive issues of the nation’s founding, and illuminates the emerging philosophies, shifting alliances, and personal and political foibles of our now iconic leaders.”  Much that shaped those early years continues to shape us – this book helps us understand how, and why.

Modernism by Peter Gay.  The single best book for understanding the Enlightenment was penned by Peter Gay.  It can now be said that he has written the single best book for understanding modernism.  Originating in the middle of the nineteenth century, through such founding figures as Flaubert and Baudelaire, the history of modernism continued through such figures as Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Igor Stavinsky, T.S. Eliot, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles – down to our day, with the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.  Through its “ability to integrate the history of art and literature with the Western society it changed forever, Modernism informs our present like no other recent work of cultural history.” 

James Emery White

2007 List

To view last year’s list, visit:
http://www.serioustimes.com/Blog.asp?ID=37

Bonus Consideration from the Shameless Commerce Division:

Wrestling with God by James Emery White (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2008).  Originally published as Embracing the Mysterious God (2004 Award of Merit Winner from Christianity Today), now available in paperback (and now benefiting from the title given its release in the United Kingdom).  To explore, visit: http://www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=3363; to order, visit   http://www.amazon.com/Wrestling-God-Loving-Dont-Understand/dp/0830833633/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212792749&sr=1-10.

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One of the more disturbing films of late is Deliver Us from Evil, a 2006 documentary on pedophile priest Oliver O’Grady who was moved from parish to parish in Northern California during the 1970’s.  Church hierarchy, with knowledge of his attraction to children and evidence of actual misconduct, harbored him for thirty years, allowing him to abuse countless numbers of children.   Even more gripping than the interviews of some of the abused children, now adults, is the extended interview with O’Grady himself as he chillingly recounts his predatory past.

Or more to the point, the lack of response.

I watched this film with a graduate level class on cultural apologetics.  Specifically, I wanted them to see what we must grapple with in terms of the church’s tarnished reputation, and the impressions many have regarding church leadership and scandal.

Most, if not all, of my students had no idea how best to react to such evil, much less the world’s keen awareness of it. 

All the more reason to take note of the most recent scandal involving Joe Barron, a minister of adults at Prestonwood Baptist Church, a megachurch in the Dallas suburb of Plano, Texas.  Barron was arrested in a police sting operation as he attempted to solicit sex from an officer posing online as a 13-year-old girl. 

Within two days of learning of the arrest, Jack Graham – senior pastor of Prestonwood – addressed the scandal from the pulpit. 

As an editorial in the Dallas Morning News noted, he did not defend the disgraced minister; he did not speak of all the good things Rev. Barron had done in his ministry; he did not call for forgiveness; he did not say that the pastor was going off for counseling and would be back in ministry soon as a “wounded healer”’; he did not blame pop culture for Barron’s fall; he did not lash out at the news media.

In his address, he simply said that the facts had been weighed, and the accused pastor had been asked to resign and had done so.  He acknowledged the hurt and pain but thanked God for purifying the church.  He challenged his listeners to uphold Christian standards of morality.  He even thanked reporters for their coverage.

As the editorial marveled, “No excuses.  No cheap grace.  No breast-beating.  Just clear, firm, sober action.”

And what else?

"Because of this, it’s probably safe to say that the Prestonwood congregation has a lot more faith in its clergy today than it might have otherwise.”

As the editorial concluded, “In the end, the real scandal in cases like this comes not from the sins and crimes of sexual offenders.  No church will ever be free of that.  The truly damaging scandals arise when church leaders mishandle these crises by failing to treat them with the gravity they deserve.  Many in church authority have failed their calling and their congregations under similar conditions, through defensiveness, dissimulation and deferring hard decisions.”

Not this time.

And the world watched.

And instead of ridicule, gained respect.

James Emery White

Sources

For more on the film Deliver Us from Evil see the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) article at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0814075/

It can be purchased as a DVD through Amazon at

For news reports, including video footage, of the Joe Barron arrest, see http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/religion/stories/051708dnmetministerarrest

For an article, and video, of Jack Graham, senior pastor of Prestonwood, addressing the issue with his church, see http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/051808dnmetministersting.3464076.html

Editorial: Prestonwood Church does the right thing,” Dallas Morning News, Sunday, May 25, 2008.  Read online at http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/editorials/stories/DN-baptist_25edi.ART.State.Edition1.45f6053.html

For Prestonwood Baptist Church, see http://www.prestonwood.org/ 

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A new church had a trailer, full of church supplies and equipment, stolen.  In a unique reaction, they rented billboards throughout their city to communicate to the perpetrators.  I would assume the goal was a unique marketing opportunity, the chance for some sympathetic financial support, and the offer of forgiveness and reconciliation with the perpetrator.

But the church may have gotten more than they bargained for, particularly from one billboard in particular:

CHURCH TRAILER THIEF,
Stealing from God…Ballsy.

From this, the church received more attention for their vocabulary than their plight.

Which may, of course, been their intent.

Regardless of where you stand on the church’s chosen use of words, it would have been difficult to have imagined any church using such a word in its marketing even ten years ago - no matter how edgy or hip they may have attempted to be.

Yet it is surely part of a larger coarsening of language in general.  Consider the recent slip of Sue Simmons, a news anchor on WNBC-TV, who, while trying to get the attention of longtime partner, Chuck Scarborough, asked “What are you doing?”

Only she did not realize they were live on the air.

And she did not say “What are you doing?”

She inserted two words between “what” and “are” – and one of those was “the.”

I’ll let you do the math.

In commenting on the slip, Clyde Haberman of the New York Times writes that the most surprising thing about Simmons’ unbleeped blooper is that anyone even noticed.  “The reality is that this word has been tossed about with such abandon in public for so many years that…the word is no longer shocking, just tedious.”  The station certainly did not seem to mind.  “She’ll continue to be on the air,” said WNBC spokeswoman Susan Kiel.

It would seem, notes sociolinguist John V. Singler of New York University, that the only remaining taboo words “have to do…with race.”  And even those, he notes, depend on who’s saying them.

I don’t know that I’ve ever reflected on profanity, or even vulgar language, before.  At least in terms of what makes it vulgar or profane.  The words themselves have a wide variety of referents, many of them perfectly acceptable in the proper contexts, including place, religion, physical anatomy, and bodily functions.

The danger, of course, is what the use of such words – particularly to the point of numbness – does to our world. 

Haberman writes of a street argument between two men.  Finally, one of them shouted at the other, “I’ve only got two words to say to you.”  And then he said four.  Two of them were sandwiched between “shut” and “up.”  You can probably surmise the missing phrase. 

The point is that the man truly thought he was using only two words.  And that is the problem of vulgar language: 

We lose our sense of what it means to be vulgar.

James Emery White

Sources

For local television reports of the church billboard signs, see:  http://www.wcnc.com/news/topstories/stories/wcnc-040308-mw-churchbillboards.2b202ede.html as well as http://news14.com/Default.aspx?ArID=594581.  For the church itself, visit www.kineticchurch.com.

For the pastor’s defense of using the word “ballsy,” see http://www.davemilam.com/?p=212.

For the video of Sue Simmons cursing on “live” TV, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr4AaMEvNwY.

“Bad Words, Overused, Can Lose Their Sting, and Then They Become Just Impolite,” Clyde Habermann, The New York Times, Friday, May 16, 2008.  To access this story online:   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/nyregion/16nyc.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=haberman&st=nyt&oref=slogin

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