A couple of posts ago, John pointed us to a recent article in The Atlantic--Did Christianity Cause the Crash?--by Hanna Rosin. The article explores the rise and continued influence of the prosperity gospel (the belief that God will financially bless the faithful) in American Christianity. From Oral Roberts to Joel Osteen, it is a much wider phenomenon than one realizes. From Rosin's article:

Among mainstream, nondenominational megachurches, where much of American religious life takes place, “prosperity is proliferating” rapidly, says Kate Bowler, a doctoral candidate at Duke University and an expert in the gospel. Few, if any, of these churches have prosperity in their title or mission statement, but Bowler has analyzed their sermons and teachings. Of the nation’s 12 largest churches, she says, three are prosperity—Osteen’s, which dwarfs all the other megachurches; Tommy Barnett’s, in Phoenix; and T. D. Jakes’s, in Dallas. In second-tier churches—those with about 5,000 members—the prosperity gospel dominates. Overall, Bowler classifies 50 of the largest 260 churches in the U.S. as prosperity.

The issue that Rosin's article explores is the role of the prosperity gospel in bringing about the recent housing crisis in America. A bigger and better home is one of the common images in prosperity gospel sermons, a clear sign of God's Providence and blessing. More, the faithful should aspire to such houses. In short, did many congregants of prosperity gospel churches end up "stepping out in faith" right into a risky subprime mortgage? It's hard to tell if there is a direct link, but there is a circumstantial case linking the prosperity gospel and home foreclosures:

Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities—the exurban middle class and the urban poor. Many newer prosperity churches popped up around fringe suburban developments built in the 1990s and 2000s, says Walton. These are precisely the kinds of neighborhoods that have been decimated by foreclosures, according to Eric Halperin, of the Center for Responsible Lending.

Zooming out a bit, Kate Bowler found that most new prosperity-gospel churches were built along the Sun Belt, particularly in California, Florida, and Arizona—all areas that were hard-hit by the mortgage crisis.

The scariest part of the article is how shady loan officers would come to prosperity churches to do "wealth building seminars" for the membership. With the sanction of the church these loan officers would use the seminars to sign up a bunch of subprime mortgages:

The idea of reaching out to churches took off quickly, Jacobson recalls. The branch managers figured pastors had a lot of influence with their parishioners and could give the loan officers credibility and new customers. Jacobson remembers a conference call where sales managers discussed the new strategy. The plan was to send officers to guest-speak at church-sponsored “wealth-building seminars” like the ones Bowler attended, and dazzle the participants with the possibility of a new house. They would tell pastors that for every person who took out a mortgage, $350 would be donated to the church, or to a charity of the parishioner’s choice. “They wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, Mr. Minister. We want to give your people a bunch of subprime loans,” Jacobson told me. “They would say, ‘Your congregants will be homeowners! They will be able to live the American dream!’”

There are almost no words for this. What makes it all so sad is how the prosperity gospel manipulates the poor and middle-class. First by making them ashamed and then encouraging them to take financial risks. All in the name of Jesus.

Last week I got to thinking about demons. First of all, I went and saw Paranormal Activity. Second, some friends in a bible class at church were talking about Jesus casting out the demon Legion and sending it into the pigs. Some of them asked me about my take on that story. Since some of these same friends read this blog from time to time I thought I'd devote a few posts to try to answer that question.

To start, I'm calling these posts "notes" as I'm not going to be making an argument of any sort. Just a collection of observations. Plus, I'm mainly going to be summarizing material from theologians--Walter Wink, William Stringfellow and John Howard Yoder--who I find helpful in thinking about this topic. People with theology degrees will have read all this stuff already. These notes are aimed at a general church audience, someone unfamiliar with the literature on The Powers.

So, to start, how are we to think about demons? How are we to approach passages about The Powers, most notably Ephesians 6:11-13:

Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.

To start, let's describe two approaches at opposite ends of a spectrum. Let's call the first approach the Literalist position. The Literalist takes the passages in the bible about demons and spiritual powers literally. The Literalist, thus, has a robust notion of spiritual warfare and believes in the reality of demonic possession (although they might believe this to be a very rare and extreme event).

There are, however, a couple of problems and concerns about the Literalist position. I'll just name two.

First, there is the ontological problem. It's just hard to believe in demons in a modern, scientific age. As Walter Wink writes in his book Naming the Powers:

We moderns cannot bring ourselves by any feat of will or imagination to believe in the real existence of these mythological entities that traditionally have been lumped under the general category "principalities and powers." We naturally assume that the ancients conceived of them and believed in them the same way we conceive of and disbelieve them. We think they thought the Powers quite literally as a variety of invisible demonic beings flapping around in the sky, occasionally targeting some luckless mortal with their malignant payload of disease, lust, possession, or death...

When we read the ancient accounts of encounters with these Powers, we can only regard them as hallucinations, since they have no physical referent. Hence we cannot take seriously their own descriptions of these encounters...

It is as impossible for most of us to believe in the real existence of demonic or angelic powers as it is to believe in dragons, or elves, or a flat world...

I'm picking quotes around Wink's main point, that this disbelief isn't necessarily a good thing, but his point here is well-taken: It's hard for many of us to take the biblical accounts of demons very seriously.

But my deeper concern with the Literalist move isn't ontological (i.e., Do demons exist or not?), it's moral. The trouble with many spiritual warfare literalists is that they often end up seeing all non-Christians as demon possessed. Or at least under the influence or thrall of demons. Let's call this The Frank Peretti Problem, named for the author of the spiritual warfare blockbusters This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness. The Darkness books dramatically visualize spiritual warfare showing both angels and demons interacting and doing battle alongside their human counterparts. If you've not read This Present Darkness here's a taste:

As Sandy sat on the sofa in Langstrat’s apartment, her face full of joy and rapture, gleaming talons penetrated her skull as the black and gnarled hands of a hideous demon held her head in a viselike grip. The spirit leaned over her and whispered the words to her mind…

There were fifteen of them, packed into Carmen’s body like crawling, superimposed maggots, boiling, writhing, a tangle of hideous arms, legs, talons, and heads. They began to squirm. They moaned and cried out, and so did Carmen, her eyes turning glassy and staring blankly.

As fiction I don't mind this. But there is a moral problem in seeing your neighbors in cahoots with the devil, demons filling them like maggots or inserting talons into their heads. Ironically, by seeing demons everywhere you begin to demonize the people around you. In short, in the effort to fight demons our neighbors and coworkers end up as collateral damage in our spiritual warfare.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the Literalist position we have the Liberal position. The Liberal will follow Rudolf Bultmann and other liberal theologians in the process of demythologizing the New Testament. Specifically, Bultmann suggests that the mythological structure of the New Testament is irrelevant to its deeper meaning. The mythological world of the NT is characterized by the following (demon stuff is highlighted):

The cosmology of the New Testament is essentially mythical in character. The world is viewed as a three storied structure, with the earth in the center, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings -- the angels. The underworld is hell, the place of torment. Even the earth is more than the scene of natural, everyday events, of the trivial round and common task. It is the scene of the supernatural activity of God and his angels on the one hand, and of Satan and his demons on the other. These supernatural forces intervene in the course of nature and in all that men think and will and do. Miracles are by no means rare. Man is not in control of his own life. Evil spirits may take possession of him. Satan may inspire him with evil thoughts...History does not follow a smooth unbroken course; it is set in motion and controlled by these supernatural powers. This æon is held in bondage by Satan, sin, and death (for "powers" is precisely what they are)...

Modern Man, Bultmann continues, cannot accept this mythological structure. Some bits from Bultmann:

Can Christian preaching expect modern man to accept the mythical view of the world as true? To do so would be both senseless and impossible. It would be senseless, because there is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such. It is simply the cosmology of a pre-scientific age...

Man’s knowledge and mastery of the world have advanced to such an extent through science and technology that it is no longer possible for anyone seriously to hold the New Testament view of the world...

Now that the forces and the laws of nature have been discovered, we can no longer believe in spirits, whether good or evil...

It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.

Given that Modern Man cannot take the mythological world of the bible seriously, the goal for a modern reader of the bible is to focus on the existential aspects of the text, how the text speaks to our spiritual and moral condition:

Our task is to produce an existentialist interpretation of the dualistic mythology of the New Testament along similar lines. When, for instance, we read of demonic powers ruling the world and holding mankind in bondage, does the understanding of human existence which underlies such language offer a solution to the riddle of human life which will be acceptable even to the non-mythological mind of today?

Bultmann would answer yes to that question. The language of demons isn't speaking to a ontological situation (the "dualistic mythology" of physical and spiritual). Rather, demons are speaking to an existential situation, feeling enslaved to dehumanizing and violent forces. We understand demons existentially rather than literally.

So we have these two positions. On the one hand we have the Literalists who believe that malevolent spiritual forces--demons--affect day to day life. As Christians, our battle is against these spiritual forces. And, hopefully, our neighbors won't get hurt in the crossfire. At the other extreme is the Liberal position that interprets the word "demon" as an existential construct which points out the forces of dehumanization and violence in the modern world. Such a move escapes the intellectual scandal of reading the New Testament literally, but it can reduce Christianity to philosophy. Which isn't a bad trade-off for many. But for others this liberal move strips faith of its spiritual depth and significance.

So, given these two positions, let's return to the question: What are we to think about demons? Personally, I lean toward the Liberal position. And yet, I don't want to reduce the notion of "the demonic" to existential philosophy. I think the demonic is a real, even spiritual, force in the world. In this I resonate with the Literalist camp. This is why I gravitate toward the work of Wink, Stringfellow and Yoder. These thinkers help me thread the needle on this topic (as best as it can be threaded). They allow me to see demons as "real" in a way I find intellectually respectable. More on how they do this in the posts to come.

On to Part 2

I grew up in Pennsylvania before there were national Mexican food chains. So the first time I ever went to a Mexican restaurant was when I came to college in Texas. I found the menu completely baffling. I could order tamales, burritos, enchiladas, chimichangas, fajitas. I had no visual image what any of this even looked like. I didn't know what queso was, so the phrase con queso just flew right past me.

I eventually got my bearings.

After getting a handle on the menu I thought I was finished. But then I would hear people say things like, "I don't like Mexican. But I love Tex-Mex." Apparently, all this time I had been eating in two different kinds of restaurants. Some were Mexican. Some were Tex-Mex. But to my eyes the menus looked the same. How could I tell which restaurant was Tex-Mex and which was Mexican? "Well," people would say, "a Tex-Mex restaurant combines Mexican food with a Texas influence." That much seemed obvious to me. I'm not an idiot. So, I would ask, "And what, exactly, is the 'Texas influence' part? How is the 'Mexican' menu different due to the 'Texan' twist?" No one, you might be surprised, had an answer. Everyone around me was saying the word "Tex-Mex" with some even claiming they preferred "Tex-Mex" without, it seems, having any clear idea what they were talking about. Which, I guess, is not surprising as I think this is how 99% of the world operates: Just saying stuff without really knowing what you are talking about.

Finding this situation unsatisfactory I did what I like to do best: Research. So I began to hunt for the origins of Tex-Mex and the differences between it and Mexican food.

The story goes back to the Great Depression. Mexican food began to make big inroads into White culture in the decades before the Great Depression. Much of this was happening in Texas. However, during the Depression certain modifications happened to Mexican dishes that created the fusion we now call "Tex-Mex." Two of the most important were the following:

1. The Introduction of Chili
During the Great Depression meat quality dropped. So, to make meat edible chilies were made. This both softened tough meat and covered the flavor of poor meat with lots of spices. The proliferation of chili eventually lead to it becoming combined with Mexican dishes. One of the clearest differences between a Mexican restaurant and a Tex-Mex restaurant is seen in how they serve an enchilada. In a Mexican restaurant the enchilada comes with a red sauce on top. This is traditional. By contrast, a Tex-Mex restaurant will have chili on top of an enchilada. In short, when people say they prefer Tex-Mex what they are talking about, if they know it or not, is that they like chili on their dishes rather than red or green sauces.

2. Yellow Cheese
During the Depression the US government, to help with food shortages, would issue big blocks of American cheese. This yellow cheese was, because it was available, also incorporated into Mexican dishes. Traditional Mexican dishes use a white cheese. In short, another clear sign you are in a Tex-Mex restaurant is that all the cheese and queso are yellow rather than white.

Of course, over time Mexican and Tex-Mex dishes have been so blended that it's hard to tell sometimes if a given establishment is one or the other. Regardless, the cheese and chili markers are the best way I know of to distinguish between the two.

For some reason I was thinking about all this on the way to work today. (I'm a very strange person.) I was thinking about how the Depression affected family meals. The creation of Tex-Mex was driven by people mixing the food they had on hand. In that case, chili and yellow cheese. This made me think about other Depression-Era recipes in my family.

The best Depression-Era recipe in my family is The Beck Chocolate Cake. Of course, that's its name in our family. The cake is more commonly known as Poor Man's Cake. It's called Poor Man's Cake because the cake requires no dairy products. No eggs. No butter. No milk. Ingredients in short supply during the Depression. Surprisingly, the cake gets its body and lift from the chemical reaction between baking soda and vinegar. That's right. No eggs or milk but vinegar! You'd think such a cake would be horrible. But it's wonderful. When made right it is one of the moistest cakes you'll ever eat.

Here are two other Depression-Era recipes from my youth:

1. Cream & Peas Over Toast
Ever had this? I love it. It's just toast covered with a simple cream gravy with peas in it. I still love this dish. When I was a first year Assistant Professor Jana and I were broke. So we had this dish quite a bit. It was very cheap and I loved it.

2. Fried Bologna
This is more a childhood memory. Anyone ever have fried bologna as a kid? When meat was scarce or too expensive my mom would fry bologna for us. It is an attempt to make the bologna into a thin sort of steak or pork chop. It's not really the same of course, but I do remember liking it as a kid. I can still hear the bologna sizzling.

None of this has anything to do with psychology or theology. I was just musing today about making due, living simply and being creative with what you have.

Maybe, on second thought, there's some theology in here after all.



Postscript:
Please feel free to share any other Depression-Era or Hard Times recipes from your life or family.

I'm going to confess. I'm a Pelagian at heart. With Erasmus over Luther. And Joseph Arminius over Calvin.

Part of this is my religious heritage. The Churches of Christ are Arminian and we don't teach the doctrine of original sin (sorry Augustine!). But part of this is also my conviction that I think people, generally speaking, are pretty decent. I know it's easy to point to cases of total depravity and evil, but 99% of the people in the world today got along with their neighbors. They went to work, did their job, and went home to dinner. Note that I'm not claiming that any of these people were Mother Teresa. Most of these people gossiped, lusted, or acted on some prejudice or stereotype. So I guess it's a matter of standards. For the most part, I tend to think that most of what counts as human "sin" is the product of stupidity rather than vice. Folly and foibles rather than "total depravity."

I was reminded of this today while reading a great article in Slate about the psychology of subway behavior. The article, Underground Psychology, is by Tom Vanderbilt. The article surveys the quirky, surprising and illuminating research conducted by psychologists looking at how we behave in the mass transit "laboratory":

So it's no surprise that, over the years, subways have regularly been the scenes of applied psychology experiments. Indeed, for a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as theories of "personal space" percolated through sociology, Edward T. Hall's study of "proxemics" was having its heyday, and the field of environmental psychology was coming into its own, it seemed that any New York City subway rider might be some psychologist's "confederate" and everyone else a possible bellwether of la condition humane. A banal note from a 1969 article titled "Good Samaritanism: An Underground Phenomenon?" from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology captures the spirit: "About 4,450 men and women who traveled on the 8th Avenue IND in New York City, weekdays between the hours of 11:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. during the period from April 15 to June 26, 1968, were the unsolicited participants in this study."

One of the surprising things these studies reveal is that people are not as bad as we think they are. Two examples from Vanderbilt's article:

On Giving Up Your Seat for a Stranger:
In one of the most well-known studies, social psychologist Stanley Milgram had students spontaneously ask subway riders to give up their seats. As Thomas Blass recounts in The Man Who Shocked the World, this experiment arose from the seeming erosion of a subway norm. As Milgram's mother-in-law had posed it to him: "Why don't young people get up anymore in a bus or a subway train to give their seat to a gray-haired elderly woman?"

Milgram wanted to know: What if you simply asked them to? And so students in his experimental social psychology class took to the underground to ask for seats, under a number of conditions (either with no justification, or offering a rationale like "I can't read my book standing up"). People were surprisingly compliant—a total of 68 percent either got up or moved over in the "no justification" condition.

On Helping:
The crucial context for many of the 1970s studies was the Queens murder of Kitty Genovese, whose cries for help were purportedly ignored by her neighbors. The Genevose story became the ur-narrative of uncaring urban pathology (even if its details were later called into question). The subway offered a perfect testing ground for the emerging subfield of "bystander studies." The aforementioned "Good Samaritan" paper, for example, had a Columbia University student stagger and collapse on a subway train, "looking supine at the ceiling." In some trials, the subject acted drunk; in others, ill. (People were more likely to help in the latter condition.) Interestingly, that study found no support for the so-called "diffusion of responsibility" effect—the idea, per the Genovese murder, that the more bystanders were present, the less likely it was that any one person would help. In fact, the reverse was found.

Maybe humans are depraved. But if Saint Augustine collapsed on a New York subway people, complete strangers, would rush to help him.

A edited version of a recent essay of mine is up at The Jesus Manifesto. Please check out the site and their wonderful array of resources, essays, conversations and reflections. And a warm thanks to Mark for inquiring about and helping with the essay.

Over at The Happiness Project blog Gretchen Rubin posts Some Counter-Intuitive Facts about Loneliness.

Here's Rubin's take home point:

Without thinking it through, I’d assumed that being lonely would make people warmer, more eager for connection, and more accepting of differences in others. If you’re lonely, you’re going to be open to making friends and therefore more easy-going, right?

To the contrary! It turns out that being lonely has just the opposite effect...

Loneliness is often the product of failing to break into already formed social groups at work, church or school. When we fail to penetrate these groups we often become bitter and resentful. And, in many cases, for good reason. Cliques are awful.

We often think that churches are good places for people to make connections. But there are lots of lonely people at church. Pre-existing groups of friendship are hard to break into. Once people find a niche of community at church they stop looking around to welcome newcomers into their circle. Very often you find small groups at church fearful of adding new people because they worry that the comfortable vibe might change and that something will be lost (e.g., intimacy, rapport).

Thinking out loud about this, I also wonder if we are not making the problem worse by framing church life in social terms. Many people seem to think that deep friendship is the sine qua non of the church. I can't tell you how many times I've sat through sermons where the church has been called to "get into each others lives."

There is nothing wrong with this. But we are confusing means and ends. "Getting into each others lives" is not an end as it is so often framed. It's a means toward an end. What end? A moral end, to be a better person today than you were yesterday.

In short, we need to think of churches as moral rather than social communities. When I go to church I need to have ethics on the brain and not intimacy. This, I think, is a huge problem with many churches. People go to church to have their relational needs met. They don't go to get morally challenged or changed. Thus, if I have a good social time at church then church is great and fulfilling. Conversely, if church is a lonely affair I stop going and think it sucks.

The goal of church, to my mind, is to be better, not to be known. Of course, in the effort to become better I become known. I'll need to confess and ask forgiveness. I'll need to give an honest moral accounting of myself. And so on. These things promote community and camaraderie and even friendship.

Again, don't get me wrong. Relationships are important. Feeling known and connected is important. But if these things become the focal point then church is just a club and people will start evaluating it like a club. Worse, once you get "inside" the club there is little incentive to let new people into your church, clique or circle of friends. Once you find your "group" you relax. You are no longer lonely! You've finished the race. Won the price. And fought the good fight. Well done good and faithful servant!

And best of luck to those people left on the outside.

If you are like me you struggle with cynicism and misanthropy from time to time. People, man, are just the worst.

When I get in funks like this I turn to two places: Jesus and Walt Whitman.

As I've written about before, Jesus' ministry of table fellowship, of eating with "tax collectors and sinners," always lifts my spirits. I love how Jesus offends religious people by always hanging out with the wrong people. If you went looking for Jesus today and had two places to look, a bar or church on Sunday morning, where would you check first? I know my answer.

Whitman, for similar reasons, does the same thing for me. I love how Whitman absorbs and identifies with all of humanity. Male and female, slave and free, saint and sinner, rich and poor. Whitman, to use his words, embraces multitudes. And I want to embrace multitudes. Whitman embodies what the theologian Miroslav Volf calls a "catholic personality," making space within the self to accommodate others. And I think that is often missing in religious people. We fail to make space in our hearts and minds for other people.

Last night our church small group gathered as we do every Sunday evening. We are a mixed lot. We have homemakers, writers, social workers, computer scientists, musicians and, yours truly, a psychologist. Our task for the night was to bring a text outside of the bible that speaks to us. We read Bob Dylan lyrics, a bit from The Chronicles of Narnia, a passage from Uncle Tom's Cabin, and selections from G.K. Chesterton and Thomas Merton. My selection was from Whitman, these lines from the poem I Celebrate Myself:

This is the meal pleasantly set….this is the meal and drink for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as for the righteous….I make appointments with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The keptwoman and sponger and thief are hereby invited…the heavy-lipped slave is invited….the venerealee is invited,
There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

In light of the last post, George pointed me to this article in The Boston Globe by Michael Fitzgerald. The article is entitled Satan, the great motivator: The curious economic effects of religion.

The article discusses recent research linking religious belief with economic effectiveness. A particular focus in the article is on a recent research that showed that belief in hell to be predictive of economic success:

What makes economies grow? It’s a question that has occupied thinkers for centuries. Most of us would tick off things like education levels, openness to trade, natural resources, and political systems.

Here’s one you might not have considered: hell.

A pair of Harvard researchers recently examined 40 years of data from dozens of countries, trying to sort out the economic impact of religious beliefs or practices. They found that religion has a measurable effect on developing economies - and the most powerful influence relates to how strongly people believe in hell.

Why would there be a relationship between hell and economic success?

Hell is, at root, a behavioral regulator. The fear of hell keeps people on the straight and narrow. When this fear is coupled with a conflation of virtue and work--the Protestant Work ethic--you have a powerful cocktail, fear aiding capitalistic productivity. Fearing hell we strive to be a good person and this means, in America today, working hard, being punctual, and forming the "seven habits" that make us "highly effective."

The article also points to another link between hell and work ethic. Specifically, we want our kids to internalize the faith but we don't want them to become so religious that they hurt the economy. From the article:

Most strikingly, if belief in hell jumps up sharply while actual church attendance stays flat, it correlates with economic growth. Belief in heaven also has a similar effect, though less pronounced. Mere belief in God has no effect one way or the other. Meanwhile, if church attendance actually rises, it slows growth in developing economies.

In short, it seems that belief in hell is nicely portable. Hell regulates behavior outside of the church building and helps to keep us at work.

This is the final post surveying our research into the relationship of faith and torture endorsement. This final study was also done by the team of Alison, Whitney and Courtney.

Recall that our research was stimulated by the Pew Research that had found that Christians were more likely to endorse torture than non-Christians. Thinking through that trend the students and I had enough experience with Christianity to know that "Christian" is so broad a label as to be almost worthless. And yet many people, the media in particular, us the word "Christian" as if they are talking about a homogeneous and like-minded group of people. But nothing could be further from the truth. Christians are all over the map. Some are Republicans. Some are Democrats. Some are pacifists. Some serve in the military. Some are creationists. Some are evolutionists. Some are orthodox. Some are heterodox. Some are exclusivist. Some are inclusivist (or pluralists).

In short, there are many, many different kinds of Christians.

So when we saw the Pew Research we asked the question: What group within Christianity is driving this pro-torture trend? Because when you see a trend about Christians that is what is going on, some subgroup within the faith is pulling the "group" average in one direction or another. So we asked, which group was doing the pulling in this case?

In approaching this question we wanted to focus on theological issues rather than political affiliation. That is, we wanted to know if there was something within Christianity itself that promoted torture endorsement. We ended up focusing on three variables:

1. Fundamentalism/Dogmatism: Biblical literalism combined with a strong sense of certainty.
   
2. View of God: Is God primarily perceived as wrathful or loving?
3. Traditional View of Hell: Belief that non-believers will be tortured in hell forever without end
   

One of the measures used to assess fundamentalism/dogmatism was Batson's Quest scale. One of the things the Quest scale measures is how one feels about religious doubt and the value of questions in the faith journey. Sample items on the Quest scale include:

• I am constantly questioning my religious beliefs.
• For me, doubting is an important part of being religious.
• I find religious doubts upsetting. (reverse scored)

We predicted, like with all fundamentalisms, that Christian fundamentalism would be predictive of torture endorsement. That is, low Quest scores would predict pro-torture ratings.

We also felt that God Image would affect torture sentiment. Is God experienced as wrathful, vengeful and punishing? Or is God experienced as merciful, loving and forgiving? When one looks at Christian hate groups one finds their God to be as hate filled as they are. That is, was we saw in the When God Sanctions Killing research, God is often viewed at the source of violence or hate. Consequently, we predicted that a wrathful God image would predict pro-torture sentiment. We assessed this by asked participants to rate two items asking how wrathful and merciful they felt God to be.

Finally, we assessed beliefs about hell. Specifically, if God is going to horrifically torture people, even many good and decent people, for all eternity then why should we get squeamish about torturing bad people for a short time in this life? In short, we predicted that admitting torture into the life and nature of God would function as a tacit endorsement of torture in the name of justice (or God). We could find no measure of hell belief in the literature so the students created their own. The items were:

1. Hell is a real place.
2. The pain and suffering in Hell will be worse than anything experienced on Earth.
3. Hell is everlasting, it never ends.
4. Hell is an experience of extreme pain and torment.
5. If one is condemned to Hell they can never leave.
6. The biblical description of “burning in a fire” is an accurate description of Hell.
7. God created and controls Hell.

The items were drafted to assess the reality, duration, severity, never-endingness and God-sanctioned facets of hell belief. We predicted that high scores across these items would predict pro-torture sentiment.

What did we find?

Christians who were more fundamentalist and dogmatic were more likely to endorse torture. Conversely, Christian who entertain doubts and value questions were less likely to endorse torture.

Christians who saw God as wrathful were more likely to endorse torture. Christians who saw God as merciful were less likely to endorse torture.

And, finally, Christians who believed in a horrific and never-ending hell were more likely to endorse torture. As God tortures so we torture.

The Daily Dish pointed to an interesting article in the Boston Review by Tara McKelvey. The article is entitled God, the Army, and PTSD: Is religion an obstacle to treatment? and it discusses the effect of war upon faith and how faith affects the treatment of those suffering from the psychological consequences of war.

As you might expect, war can dramatically affect faith. McKelvey discusses a recent study of faith and Vietnam vets:

In a 2004 study of approximately 1,400 Vietnam veterans, almost 90 percent Christian, researchers at Yale found that nearly one-third said the war had shaken their faith in God and that their religion no longer provided comfort for them. The Yale study found that these soldiers were more likely than others to seek mental health treatment through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) when they came home. It was not that these veterans had unusually high confidence in government or especially good information about services at VA hospitals. Instead, they had fallen into a spiritual abyss and were desperate to find a way out. The trauma of war seems to be especially acute for men and women whose faith in a benevolent God is challenged by the carnage they have witnessed.

Unfortunately for veterans of our Gulf Wars, McKelvey reports that faith has gotten in the way of veterans receiving proper mental health treatment:

During the Iraq war, however, the great difficulty veterans experienced in getting psychiatric care—greater than before—was not a product of cost-cutting, but of conviction: many Bush administration officials believed that soldiers who supported the war would not face psychological problems, and if they did, they would find comfort in faith. In a resigned tone, one prominent researcher who worked for the VA, and asked that he not be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press, explained that high-ranking officials believed that “Jesus fixes everything.”

As you might expect, as a Christian psychologist, I wrestle with issues like this all the time. What is the relationship between faith and mental health? Can mental health issues be treated effectively with prayer, bible study and the spiritual disciplines? If you are a Christian are you, via your relationship with Jesus, more immune to mental illness? And, if you do experience mental health symptoms, is that a sign of a lack of faith?

First, I do think there is a connection between faith and mental health. The research bears this out. Faith, we all know, can be a great resource in dealing with loss, stress or trauma.

And yet, the correlation isn't perfect. And it's a weak association at best. Being a Christian doesn't grant you immunity. More, as McKelvey's article points out, the relationship between faith and mental health is interactive. Faith can support us in times of stress and trauma. But times of stress and trauma can also undermine faith. Given the interactive nature involved it would be silly to tell people to rely on faith to get them through tough times when those tough times are making belief very, very difficult. Your cure is actually a symptom of the disease.

I'm also not surprised at the "Jesus fixes everything" sentiment. It is widespread in many sectors of Christianity. Many churches are very suspicious of psychology. To these churches, psychology embodies the values of secular humanism, the very values these churches believe are destroying the world. You don't need to go to a therapist. You need to go to church. In fact, I've had bible faculty at my school look at my psychology majors and question their faith and career choice. So it is not surprising to me at all to hear about Christians in the Bush administration expressing similar sentiments.

2012 is now out. I haven't seen it yet, but plan to this week or next. In case you've been living in a hole, here's the theatrical trailer.

The date, 2012, comes from a misinterpretation of the Mayan calendar. As best I can tell, because of course you read this blog for all your Mayan calender questions, December 21 , 2012 will mark the end of a the longest unit of the Mayan Long Count calendar, the b'ak'tun. A b'ak'tun is 144,000 days, about 394 solar years. December 21, 2012 will mark the end of the 13th b'ak'tun in the cycle which started at the beginning of time, 4 Ahaw, 8 Kumk'u (August 11, 3114 BC). The 13th b'ak'tun began on September 18, 1618 and will end 144,000 days later on December 21, 2012. On January 1, 2013 the 14th b'ak'tun begins.

That, or it's the end of the world as we know it.

As a psychologist I'm kind of worried about all this. Millennial, end of the world, fevers make people crazy. I fear we'll have some zany stuff going on as we saw when we rung in January 1, 2000 and all the Y2K anxiety. To avoid this, I'm going to be doing my 2012 shopping early just to stay away from all the crazy people. Can you imagine what WalMart is going to be like the minutes before midnight December 21, 2012?

On second thought, as a psychologist, maybe I should be there, notebook in hand. Hey, if the world is ending I might as well be working and productive. On the other hand, I don't think I'd like to meet the End of Days in the Frozen Meat section of my local WalMart. So who knows where I'll be. Maybe I'll succumb and you'll find me, gun in hand, in a bunker I dug in my backyard. Seriously, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity already have me convinced that Obama is the Antichrist. Because, you know, this is what the Antichrist would do, seek ways to cover poor people with health care...

Back to the movie 2012.

At the last Summit at ACU my friend Stephen Johnson had a presentation about apocalypse and movies. In the presentation Stephen classified end of the world movies into types. I can't recall his taxonomy, but it was something like Nuclear, Natural Disaster, Extraterrestrial, etc. I can't recall if there was a Religious category. But you get the idea.

After creating the taxonomy Stephen tracked these types across decades, noting clusters that corresponded to the fears of the time. For example, the apocalyptic films of the 50s and 60s tended to feature Cold War or nuclear threats. In the 90s, as concerns were mounting about environmental catastrophes (e.g., global warming), we saw less nuclear apocalypse and more natural disaster apocalypse in the movies.

But what about 2012? What class of apocalypse is it? Why would the Mayan calender, of all calenders, be synced so precisely with the End of Time? Particularly given its fairly arbitrary (to our mind) and factually inaccurate starting point?

Here's my take. There is this feeling that the ancients were more in touch with the cosmos. That their time-keeping and rituals were somehow more synchronized with the cosmos. Their time feels more "real" than our time. Our time, or at least the rhythms of our day, are driven by the work time clock. Their time was synced with the moon, sun and stars. Our time, by contrast, has no spiritual or cosmic significance. Our time just tells us when when to start the commute home or that we are late picking our kids up from soccer practice. In short, movies like 2012 speak to our spiritual dryness. In this case, how that dryness manifests itself in our time keeping devices and our calenders. Another symptom of this dryness is how many Protestants, given their historical ties to the life of work (e.g., the Protestant work ethic), are increasingly attracted to the Liturgical Calender.

In short, my time is trivial, empty and myopic. The ancients, by contrast, well, their time is transcendent and takes in the entire vista: It starts with Creation and terminates, on December 21, 2012, with the End of Days.

I love visiting with my friend Dan, a professional artist and colleague in the Art Department at ACU. Dan and I have been collaborating on research regarding the psychology of Christian aesthetic judgments. I've written about some of this work before. Our current project involves examining how death anxiety affects judgments of crucifixion art.

Dan's been pulling stimuli--various artistic depictions of the crucifixion--for me to use in the study. Today he showed me the fruits of his labor. After looking over the pictures he had found for the project he showed me some other interesting depictions of the crucifixion. (Dan and I have a taste for the provocative and shocking.) I was particularly struck by the "Chocolate Jesus."

"Chocolate Jesus" is actually entitled Sweet Jesus. Sweet Jesus is a 2005 sculpture by Cosimo Cavallaro. The sculpture is a six foot tall, nude and anatomically correct Jesus. Made entirely from chocolate. In 2007 Sweet Jesus was a part of an Easter Week exhibit entitled My Sweet Lord. Beyond the Chocolate Jesus the exhibit also showed Cavallaro's "Sweet Saints", little chocolate saint sculptures. The My Sweet Lord exhibit in New York was greeted with a cry of outrage, mainly from Catholics. Here's a bit from the Boston Globe account of the show's cancellation:

A planned Holy Week exhibition of a nude, anatomically correct chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ was canceled yesterday amid a slew of complaints including those of Cardinal Edward Egan.

The "My Sweet Lord" exhibit was closed by the hotel that houses the Lab Gallery in midtown Manhattan, said Matt Semler, the gallery's creative director.

Semler said he submitted his resignation after officials at the Roger Smith Hotel shut down the show.

The 6-foot-tall sculpture was the victim of "a strong-arming from people who haven't seen the show, seen what we're doing," Semler said. "They jumped to conclusions completely contrary to our intentions."

But word of the confectionary Christ infuriated Catholics, including Egan, who described it as "a sickening display." Bill Donohue, head of the watchdog Catholic League, said it was "one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever."

You can surf to Cavallaro's Chocolate Jesus page on his website. His voiceover discusses a bit of the controversy which seemed to center mainly upon the nudity.

But the thing that strikes me about the work isn't the nudity. It's the medium. The chocolate and its Easter associations. What does the use of chocolate signify?

I have two thoughts about this.

First, is the use of chocolate a way to comment on the cheapening and commercialization of Easter? We all know Christmas has been captured by the retailers. Easter as well. All the chocolate bunnies and eggs and Easter baskets. Might a chocolate Jesus be a way to comment on how the cross has been transformed into candy? And might there be something scandalous about that? To me, the artwork speaks about that: The transformation of Easter into chocolate we buy at Walmart. Is that what Easter has become? And shouldn't I be shocked when I confront that fact in the artwork?

Second, there is something shocking about an edible Jesus. And yet, that is exactly what Jesus said during the Last Supper: I'm edible. You will eat my body. In short, the chocolate Jesus recovers the scandal of the Eucharist.

Dan also finds significance in the title "sweet," the biblical notion of that the Word of God is sweet to taste.

Love it or hate it, Dan and I agreed: Chocolate Jesus makes you think.

Hello Everyone,

You may have noticed lately that I've changed my blogging style. I had settled into a style of 2-3 posts a week, each reading like a chapter out of a doctoral dissertation. Long and technical. Lately, I've been experimenting with short, newsy, topical posts, linking to something of interest. I'm still doing the 2-3 longer posts each week (for example, I'm walking through the research I did with students about torture attitudes and there was my Veteran's Day post) but sprinkled between these are quick hit, quirky and topical posts. You may hate the change or like it. Let me know if you care to. I'm just playing around with all this.

Anyway, I didn't want you to think I was having some kind of manic episode or something. It's just an experiment I'm up to.
Best,
Richard

It looks like there might be water on the moon (H/T Huff Post). As a backyard astronomer (with my tiny 4.5 inch Dobsonian) I love stuff like this.

But there is a pinch with my religious faith in all this. Right? Jesus goes "up" into heaven? The creeds say he "descended" into hell?

This is why I've always been attracted to Bultmann's demythologizing approach and, recently thanks to Tracy, the work of Tillich.

From the beginning of Bultmann's Kerygma and Myth:

The cosmology of the New Testament is essentially mythical in character. The world is viewed as a three storied structure, with the earth in the center, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings -- the angels. The underworld is hell, the place of torment. Even the earth is more than the scene of natural, everyday events, of the trivial round and common task...

All this is the language of mythology, and the origin of the various themes can be easily traced in the contemporary mythology of Jewish Apocalyptic and in the redemption myths of Gnosticism. To this extent the kerygma is incredible to modern man, for he is convinced that the mythical view of the world is obsolete. We are therefore bound to ask whether, when we preach the Gospel today, we expect our converts to accept not only the Gospel message, but also the mythical view of the world in which it is set. If not, does the New Testament embody a truth which is quite independent of its mythical setting? If it does, theology must undertake the task of stripping the Kerygma from its mythical framework, of "demythologizing" it.