Stay Salty, Christians

When I was in the Navy, being salty referred to being experienced. It was an oft joked about phrase because the first few years I was on the USS Jimmy Carter, it was on blocks inside a building. We were concerned about knowing enough and being good enough so that it didn’t look like amateur night when we first went to see in a very expensive new vessel.

In some circles, salty is a term that refers to crassness. One may speak in salty language, which probably comes from sailors, too, who have been known to swear fluently. I can attest that I’ve known a few experienced sailors that could do so quite well, though that skill is far from exclusive to mariners.

Salt Shaker, by Rachel. Used by CC license. http://ow.ly/wFjH306d08S

Both of these uses of the term salt refer to a distinctiveness of the salty person of the salty language.

When the authors of Scripture use the term salt, they are also getting at distinctiveness. In Christian contexts, though, the distinctiveness of saltiness is viewed as a positive contrast to the sin of the world. According to Robert Stein, in the New Testament, "salt" refers to the characteristics of Christians as disciples. He affirms that in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:13-14, that is clearly the meaning of the term.

Christians are to be distinct from the world. We need to look no farther than Paul’s oft quoted command to the Roman church in Romans 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this world.” Being distinct is a good thing.

There is a paradox in being Christian in this world. We are to be in the world, but not of it. We are citizens of our nations, but ultimately owe a higher allegiance to God. We will use the accepted professional techniques in our work, but remain distinctly Christian in our motivation. We are to participate in the work of the world without succumbing to its temptations.

We are to utilize our regular lives to illuminate the distinctiveness of the gospel. This is what salt does. When you add salt to your food it doesn’t become a different sort of food, but it sure tastes better. I once ate with a family in which a member had had significant heart trouble. They cooked and ate without salt in their food. I decided that I liked salt a lot in that moment. But unsalted meatloaf is still nourishing. It may even be healthier.

Salt is useful when it is salty, but when it isn’t salty it is worthless. That’s what Jesus is talking about in the Sermon on the Mount.

As Matthew records, “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is not longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.” (Matt 5:13-14)

Christians risk so much of importance when they lose their distinction from the world. That’s part of the reason I reject the idea of America as a Christian nation. There are certainly strong Judeo-Christian influences in the culture in which our nation was founded, but it never has been a Christian nation. To argue that it has been a Christian nation is to accuse Christianity of the massacre of Native Americans and the sustenance of racially based chattel slavery. These are distinctly anti-Christian practices. Obviously, some Christians got sucked into them and even defended them. However, these violate the very principals of Christianity. They are evidences of occasions that people that claim Christ sacrificed their saltiness for political or material gain.

We are over-proud when we make the assumption that we are not swimming in a cultural sea of temptation to lose our saltiness. Those gross violations of Scripture may be in the past, but we face new errors today.

Faithful Christians must fight to retain their saltiness. We must work to avoid conformity to the incorrect practices of this world. A failure to do so may cost us, and the Church, a great deal more than we should be willing to risk. It may cost us the ability to freely proclaim the gospel. It may result in an environment in which the gospel is so buried with baggage that we have to debunk Christian-created myths before we can ever share the wonder of redemption with someone. We need to fight to be salty.

Danny Akin preached a powerful sermon a few weeks ago in the chapel at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. It expands on this topic and proclaims in light of a call to missions.

Against White Identity Politics and Religious Registration

For all of the tizzy that some people are in over the election and the counter finger-wagging from others, there are some signals of significant causes for concern. There have been a number of false reports that have come out about the transition team and, since they supported the prior assumptions of many, they have been run with. This is problematic. However, through the noise of exaggeration and misreporting of news, there are some signs that ought to concern people of good conscience.

Against the White Genocide Movement

This election has revealed that there are good people that are becoming attracted to a movement for white ethnic identity, which is often described as opposing “white genocide” or “cultural Marxism.” As a response to the perpetual hammering of identity politics on the left, it is an understandable development. However, as a strategy for unity and justice, it is doomed to failure. Any political system that seeks disunity over unity should be rejected. The United States has already tried separate but equal once. It failed. It was mostly separate, but hellishly unequal. We should not think about going there again.

As Christians, our identity is first in Christ. As Paul tells us clearly, in the church “there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.” (Col 3:11) The church is a fundamentally political institution. We have “immigration policies” in which we offer membership to believers who have participated in the initiation rite of baptism by immersion. (At least in the Baptist context.) We seek justice in our relationships toward one another. However, the church is doomed to fail in the pursuit of justice if it retains distinctions based on nationality or ethnicity.

Photo: Lighting Strike by Fabio Slongo. Used by CC License:  http://ow.ly/48DR306gJNI

The future of the church is unity across ethnic barriers. This is the image we see in Revelation 7, “I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the lamb, clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” This is not a vision that should fuel ethnic division or even permit us to countenance such as the body of Christ. While we are unlikely to attain to this vision while on earth, this is what we should pursue today.

Rejecting white nationalism or white genocide does not equal a call for an “open border” immigration policy. (A common accusation against many on the right and left by those supporting white identity politics.) The United States has the right to set immigration policies that take into account the good of its citizens—this is a function of nation-states in our day, and is not inherently unjust (although it may be pursued unjustly). However, the perception of some (and some that I’ve seen who claim to be Christian) is that we must build a movement of white ethnic solidarity and ban all immigration or risk being overcome. The second is implausible, despite ridiculous claims to the contrary. The first should be anathema to Christians given our eschatological hope in a supremely diverse chorus of voices joined in worship.

Against Religious Registries

Recently someone actually went onto national television to argue for a registry of Muslim believers. Or, at least, he argued there was precedent for it. Much news can be made of this person’s relation to the incoming administration. Of greater concern for me is that such a terrible idea should never have seen the light of day outside of a condemnation of our distant past.

The person speaking was correct to note that the U.S. has a precedent for registering people. He was also correct to note that during World War II we registered and interned ethnic Japanese, some of whom were immigrants. There is a precedent for such a registry.

However, the internment of ethnic minorities during World War II is an instance of protectionist government overreach. This is a black mark on our nation’s history, not the sort of historical event we should dust off and try to recreate in the present. We should not even consider it an option, though I will engage in a thought experiment for the sake of discussion.

Let’s assume we create a registry of everyone in religion X. To do so, we have to ask ourselves how we will determine whether someone is part of that religion. Is it attendance at a worship service? Is it being born into a family that has at some point attested to being part of religion X? Is it having grown up in a nation that is perceived to be predominately filled with religion X? What happens if someone converts to another religion? How do we determine whether that conversion is authentic?

All of a sudden, the government is trying to make decisions about things that it is simply not qualified to do. Religion isn’t ethnicity, where a family tree justifies inclusion. Even when dealing with ethnicity, how much is too much? One parent? One grandparent? A brother in law? For religion, the government would have to ask a different, more nebulous set of questions.

The obvious and necessary outcome is that the government steps into the role of religious authority. Person A has demonstrated sufficient effort to be considered Christian even though he grew up in a Muslim home. At the same time, since Person B simply stopped attending the Mosque and hasn’t picked up another active religion, should he be considered to still be Muslim? Unless he eats some bacon and draws a cartoon of Mohammed? Would open sacrilege be sufficient (or necessary) to change a classification?

Suddenly, I’m catching a whiff of the Inquisition. That’s not a high point in human history, much less in Christian history. I’m also hearing echoes of the persecution of the Jews under the Nazi regime. Certainly it wouldn’t start there and it might never get to that extent, but the echoes of that horror of the persecution of the Jews should be enough to steer us clear.

So what happens when the anti-theists get hold of the government? Now we can get parallel registries of Muslims and Christians. No worries, they will just be keeping tabs on people of faith. Why? Just to keep everyone safe and ensure the government knows what is going on. And then to perhaps ensure that we don’t have people of certain faiths in certain government positions. Does this sound like a dystopian fiction? Yes, but it’s only a step or two beyond registering Muslims, which someone felt comfortable bringing up as a possibility in a TV interview.

This is the sort of thing that Christians (and any reasonable people) should speak against. It’s not a good idea. It’s not going to make us safer. It’s not going to end well. If we’re for religious liberty for some (ourselves?), then we need to hold out the same rights for all. That needs to be the principle we stand on.

The government does not have the wherewithal to regulate religion. The common good is not enhanced by the government regulating religion. Making people register their religious affiliation is not simply information gathering, it is regulating. We must keep this power away from the government.

Just a Media Overreaction?

One of the tragedies of contemporary society is the 24-hour news cycle. This creates the problem of the proliferation of interviews of people who might know someone that knows something speaking authoritatively about stuff. There is such a need to fill the airwaves that they bring people that might float the idea of something like a Muslim registry on national television. This, then, fuels dozens of hot takes (like this one), replays, edits, and discussion panels. Sometimes the furor is over nothing.

I’ll be glad to find out that this suggestion is really nothing. Unfortunately, there are some that will hear it and begin to think that such a simple encroachment on civil liberties is really worth it to prevent the explosion of another IED or another religiously driven night-club shooting. Because of the protectionist stance some (particularly whites) are taking, this will begin to sound like a good idea. Reading Twitter and some of the Alt-Right propaganda sites provides evidence that this idea isn’t just nothing.

Sometimes there is an overreaction that deserves to be neglected. The media cries wolf too often, as a rule. However, we can’t let their failures in the past prevent us from seeing problems in the present. These are issues that have the potential to take root in the minds of some in our churches and we should be careful not to let sin get a foothold.

The purpose of this post, therefore, is not to fuel the overreaction, but to offer some consideration for the ideas that are actually being floated as plausible and to encourage Christians to think about how these ideas betray the gospel (as with white nationalism) and put impartial justice in jeopardy (as with the Muslim registry). People are actually talking about some of these things as if they are good ideas. They aren’t, and we should make sure that the church is clear in standing against them.

Lessons Learned from my Dissertation Defense

I still have that feeling of contentment in light of last Tuesday. Not because of the results of the election, but because I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation. I’ll leave the politics to others; frankly, I’m just glad this election cycle is over.

Photo: The Leeds Library. Public Domain: http://ow.ly/QmT0306bLEN

Seminary has been the best decade of my life. I started on my Master of Divinity in the Fall of 2005. It’s now the Fall of 2016 and I’ve finally completed the final step of the process. All that remains are a few typographical revisions and graduation. I’ve invested the arm and a leg that it costs to get regalia, so that’s out of the way.

For the handful of folks that read my blog and are interested, I’ve been summarizing some lessons learned from each stage of the game. Today I’m going to do the same for my dissertation defense.

Readers should recognize that some of this depends on your topic, discipline, and committee composition. However, in general, here are the lessons I learned:

1.         You really do know more about the topic than your committee. Most of my life, the person giving the examination knew the answer before asking the question. However, at my defense, there were multiple occasions that my examiners asked questions out of legitimate curiosity or simply because they weren’t aware that the literature pointed a different direction. Being able to cite specific examples and argue cogently why I wrote one thing and not another was important, and my argument was accepted because I was more current and more deeply read on my topic than the examiners.

2.         Sometimes the committee is asking questions just to see how you’ll answer. After spending years looking up to the professor, now the professors are asking you for your judgment. There were a few questions that they asked that seemed to be more concerned with the manner that I answered them than what I said. Confidence is important, but so is humility. I admitted my knowledge, but it was important to admit when we went beyond what I had researched.

3.         Part of the defense, at least at Southeastern, is an assessment of character. This was more than just a test of knowledge. The committee wanted to see what I had learned about myself from the process. For me, one of the most important lessons was to have a greater degree of compassion for the authors whose imperfect books I read. There were points in my dissertation that I knew were not as strong as others, but at some point I had to accept that was the best I could do right now and move on. Other authors are doing the same.

4.         The extra time I spent making the dissertation readable paid off. There is little doubt from the comments of my committee that working to make the prose as clear as possible encouraged them to give me grace in other areas. Readability does not replace good content, but it was worth the effort. I think that the work on the front end helped contributed to the positive outcome that includes no mandatory revisions. I have some typos to fix, but only a few hours of work.

5.         The best dissertation is still the done dissertation. Even with changing jobs and moving halfway across the country last year, the dissertation still took me only about a year and a half to write. It was much better to push through than to drag it out for two or three years. (This assumes that you aren’t waiting on research, etc.) It was worth it to write nearly every day, give up some family fun and push to completion even when taking a week off would have felt really good.

6.         I benefited greatly from choosing my general topic (environmental ethics) at the beginning of my program. That allowed me to read broadly, explore various tangential topics in seminars along the way, and finally find a good working thesis.

7.         The best way to prepare is to re-read your dissertation and review your bibliography and footnotes to refresh who the conversation partners are. I also made sure I checked the committee’s publication lists to see if there was something they were thinking about that I should be prepared to discuss.

All in all, I’m glad to be done. It was a long process; I learned a lot about my topic and about myself. Now I need to set out a research agenda for the next few years. There is a stack of books on my shelves and another set in my Amazon wish list that I have been putting off and want to catch up with. I have some kids to play with and a laundry list of small projects around the house to do. Oh, the places we can go.

Preparing my Defense

Today I defend my dissertation. I imagine it will be something like this video. I'll let you know when I'm done.

Celebrating Bibfeldt

Franz Bibfeldt was conceived in frustration on a Sunday afternoon by seminary students in Chicago many years ago. His conception was driven by the pernicious insistence on keeping the seminary library closed on weekends before Monday term papers. This led to students inventing their footnotes. One such footnote, fabricated and false, led to the birth of the infamous Franz Bibfeldt.

According to his biographers, "Franz Bibfeldt was born in the early morning hours of November 1, 1897, at Sage-Hast bei Groszenkneten, Oldenburg, Niedersaschsen, Germany, and was baptized the same day." His rapid baptism, of course, was to ensure all of the saints were appeased, which would set the course for Bibfeldt's life. "His birth was one day premature, since he was conceived on February 2 after a Candlemas party." There's just enough sex in his life story to make it interesting, but not enough to make it popular.

Like most of the great theologians of the 20th century, Bibfeldt was blessed with a funny name that starts with ‘B’. This has led many greater minds to stardom, like Brunner, Barth, Buber, Bultmann, and Bonhoeffer. In fact, according to some sources, one reason Kierkegaard felt it necessary to publish pseudonymously was because he experienced a feeling of sickness unto death in his name’s unfortunate inadequate first initial. Kierkegaard never hit on the secret to success in his search for a marketable pseudonym; however, hindsight is 20/20.

Similar to most jokes told by theologians, Bibfeldt’s life story has a few groan-worthy punchlines buried in paragraphs of torturous reasoning. (What can you expect from people whose idea of fun is listening to papers being read about immutability, moral agency, and the problem of evil?) At the same time, part of the value a figure like Bibfeldt brings to theology is a critique of the theological enterprise.

Unlike books such as Wildlife in the Kingdom Come, that I reviewed here, or articles like the one on “New Directions in Pooh Studies,” that someone included in an academic journal years ago, Bibfelt is a figure of greater potential.

As Martin Marty describes it in the satirical book, The Unrelieved Paradox, Bibfeldt is a figure who is malleable to the needs of the day: ‘The Bibfeldt ideology has changed after twenty-five years; he embodies the principle of responding-although-he-will-be-changed gone awry. His coat of arms displays the ever-changing god Proteus atop a weathervane, and his motto is the Spanish line, “I dance to the tune that is played.”’

One of Bibfeldt’s most profound, hopeful, and representative theological statement is the inscription he left on a bathroom stall at the University of Chicago Divinity School, “God grades on a curve.”

He wrote his dissertation on the so-called Year Zero problem. After all, we went from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D. What happened to the year in the middle? As a result of this confusion, Bibfeldt has very rarely been physically seen; he tends to show up exactly one year early or one year late. Though artifacts like the scrawl on the stall door described above tend to attest to his reality. Or, at least the possibility of his reality.

There is enough to the story of Bibfeldt (may he live forever) to encourage otherwise respected scholars to publish a book of essays about him. There is sufficient humor in the concept that a known publisher would print said book and even, to the surprise of literally everyone involved, publish a second edition of said book. Of course, it came out as the “18th perhaps 19th anniversary edition.” Whichever it is, it is worth the money. Maybe. If you need a joke.

The Unrelieved Paradox: Studies in the Theology of Franz Bibfeldt, 18th (or Perhaps 19th) Anniversary Revised Edition

$20.00

Eerdmans

Buy on Amazon

One of the things that makes Bibfeldt funny is that it is written by people who are making fun of themselves. Too much humor these days is focused on trying to shame people in the outgroup. Viewers only have to look at late night TV and the way that the left uses humor to express their hatred of the right to see this. The one line “gotcha” against the other side’s strawmen is the order of the day.

(Of course, there is some of that on the right, too. The Babylon Bee sometimes takes cheap shots. They also dig in pretty heartily to their own conservative, Reformed foibles, contrary to the complaints of offended liberals.)

Bibfeldt is a figure that is useful for lightly mocking one’s own camp and maybe the other guy, too. However, because Bibfeldt is written in a long form scholarly format, it lends itself to a bit more consideration given to actually being funny and actually presenting the position being critiqued more carefully.

While you’ve probably never heard of Bibfeldt, and probably shouldn’t have, you could stand to read (of) him if you do theology. He’s worthy of a late night guffaw among a group of professional theologians. He’s also worth resurrecting from time to time to highlight some of the errors of the Zeitgeist. The world would be a better place if Bibfeldt studies continue among both conservative and liberal scholars and, from time to time, if new manuscripts are discovered.

Bibfeldt is a man of all seasons and a master of none. He’s an ever present goat in times of trouble, though he tends to be regularly late to dinner when called. The world needs a little more Bibfeldt. Perhaps Bibfeldt, and not more cowbell, is the prescription for the fever of the world today.

There is No Second Order Guilt

There is no such thing as second order guilt.

This election, economic reasoning, and so many of our choices would be greatly simplified if more people were aware of this.

What is second order guilt? I’m glad you asked.

Freedom by Osajus, used by CC license. http://ow.ly/TL2U305uPoi

Second order guilt is a situation where you are morally culpable for the actions of someone else that led to your actions or resulted from your actions. It is the basis for many contemporary decisions, but it is not really a thing.

For example, some people argue that if you purchase clothing and that clothing was made by a slave somewhere that you are morally culpable for the person’s slavery. Or another example: some people argue that if the government funds abortions and you pay taxes that you are morally guilty of abortion.

If these sound compellingly familiar, it is because a great deal of argumentation in the public square is based on this sort of reasoning:

“Don’t use the Firefox browser because their CEO supports marriage.”

“You have to vote for X because if Y wins there are going to be more abortions in the US. Therefore, if you vote for Z and Y wins the blood of those babies is on your hands.”

“I buy fair trade coffee because I don’t want to be guilty of abusing poor Peruvian farmers who sell to non-fair trade companies.”

Where the Real Complexity Lies

There are two separate pieces to consider here. First, there are decisions that we make to leverage our economic or political power to bring about social change. Second, there is the actual assignment of guilt. It’s important to recognize the difference.

Boycotting a company over their policies is completely licit and ethically permissible. I think that evangelicals have gone off the rails and use it altogether too much as a blunt object, but people are free to leverage their money to bring about social change. The sugar boycotts that were implemented to help end slavery in Britain were useful both for raising awareness and for putting economic pressure on the plantation owners that used slave labor.

The risk in boycotting is that if it is used too much it loses its impact. Often, too, the products or companies that replace the banned product are nearly as bad or bad in other ways, so there is a great deal more moral ambiguity than people generally allow.

The second is the more significant issue. For many boycotters (or this year, political activists), in order to increase participation, they leap from making boycotting a power play to assigning moral guilt for a failure to participate.

Part of this, I think, is because for many people the ills that are driving the boycott are really that important. Also, there is the fact that no one wants to admit that they are really just making a power play and trying to beat someone else into submission. That’s what a boycott really is. It can be described in a more genteel way, but it is simply a legitimate means of coercion.

However, since the mushy middle, which is the vast majority of the population, is unlikely to take significant action based on a desire to reshape society through genteel economic pressure, activists often inspire commitment to their cause by claiming that someone who doesn’t participate in the boycott is participating in the evil that is driving the boycott.

Like sex outside of marriage, this idea sells, but it isn’t actually biblical. We aren’t guilty of unjust violence even if we pay taxes to a government funding an unjust war. We aren’t guilty of abortion simply because the federal government funds Planned Parenthood in lieu of health centers that provide health services and not abortion. We aren’t guilty of sexual assault because we vote for a particular candidate, nor necessarily for condoning it. (Now, if we minimize the actions...that is another story.)

Biblical Basis

I will provide one Old Testament example that there is no second order guilt, two examples from Paul, and one example from the life of Jesus. Other examples could likely be provided, however, these should be sufficient for this format.

In the Old Testament, in 2 Kings 5, after Naaman is healed, he expresses concern about bowing to an idol in the house of Rimmon while supporting his master. In reality, he was both bowing and facilitating the false worship of his master. However, his heart was not worshiping, he was merely fulfilling the terms of his employment and his patriotic duty. Elisha’s simple comment, “Go in peace,” provides evidence that Naaman was not going to be held accountable for false worship because he in some way helped his master honor a Rimmon. There is no second order guilt in that situation.

Second, Paul urges Christians to submit to a government in Romans 13:1-7. The reader should remember that the Roman government would kill Christians, commit what we would now call war crimes, and generally be barbaric by our contemporary standards. At the same time, Christians were to submit. They did not become guilty for the sins of the nation that they were submitting to. Paul didn’t indicate that by failing to protest or attempt a coup that they were guilty of the war crimes committed by the Romans. In fact, despite the fact that some of their taxes would pay for instruments of torture used against Christians, Paul tells the Christians to pay taxes (13:7).

Third, Jesus himself encourages people to pay tribute to the occupying nation that had desecrated the temple, slaughtered many of his countryman, and would someday kill him despite his absolute innocence. Despite these ills that such tax money would enable, Jesus did not hold himself or others guilty for paying such taxes. There is no second order guilt.

Fourth, dealing with the issue of conscience directly and commerce secondarily, Paul declares eating meat sacrificed to idols licit in 1 Corinthians 8. Buying meat from animals that had once been sacrificed to idols helped to finance the false worship. And yet Paul’s concern is with whether the eating the meat will violate someone’s conscience due to its having been sacrificed to idols. The purchase of the meat, which could support the false worship, is not considered. In fact, Paul makes it clear that it’s not the eating of the meat itself, but the individual’s sense that it is wrong; violating the individual's conscience is the problem. There is no second order guilt.

But My Conscience

The obvious rebuttal to the final example is that a person’s conscience can make the eating of temple meat a sin. This is correct. You can put yourself into a state of conscience over an otherwise good act that makes it a sin to do it. However, Paul calls the conscience that is thus violated weak. The reader is left to infer that mature Christians should not have concerns--at least that they should not make a practice of looking for concerns of conscience.

The upshot is that someone should not violate their conscience or encourage others to violate their conscience, but at the same time, Christians shouldn’t look for ways to create a labyrinth of conscience to navigate.

Synthesis

There is no second order guilt. Someone does not become guilty of abortion because they vote for someone who affirms revoking the Hyde Amendment. People do not become guilty of sexual assault because they vote for someone who has bragged about sexual exploits. Consumers do not sin by buying coffee that was produced under unjust circumstances. Property owners don’t become guilty of crimes committed on their property.

This does not free us from making wise decisions. We should look for proximate justice in our political and commercial activities. Christians will be wise to avoid supporting companies that force people to work in unsafe conditions. They will be wise to choose political candidates that on the whole affirm a biblical concept of holistic justice whenever possible. The Christian property owner should not be negligent in fencing his property or lighting it if crime is a significant problem.* However, these are matters of prudence.

Christians must pursue justice, but that is inevitably a messy affair in our world. For some Christians, advocating for a free market is equivalent to celebrating the moral evil of greed even when it can be shown to alleviate poverty in many cases. For other Christians, voting for a party that celebrates abortion at their national convention is reprehensible even though others view their redistributive economic policies as a moral necessity. In these cases, we are better off arguing the issues rather than binding each others’ consciences and repudiating one another.

What we must not do, however, is attempt to assign second order guilt to someone else because we don’t like their purchase, political party, or policies. That is simply unbiblical.

* (There may be laws that exceed the actual moral culpability regarding property use. In these cases, submission to the government entails following proper codes and local ordinances. To neglect these codes would be sin.)

Some Recent Research on Reading

I love reading. I love books.

Anyone who has been in my home will know that I love books, because I have several thousand on my shelves. The vast majority of them are cataloged online. (Sometimes new ones sneak in and don’t get cataloged right away.)

Reading is such a significant part of our household that we have to discipline our children for reading rather than coax them to do so. This is little surprise since my wife and I both grew up as readers and continue to read a lot.

A National Survey on the State of Reading

A recent Pew Research report on reading piqued my interest because, well, I’m a book nerd. They did a study to see what the state of reading in the US is.

On the side of being interesting and somewhat surprising, despite the proliferation of online media, approximately the same number of folks said they had read a book in the past 12 months. About 73% of respondents say they’ve read a book in any format and about 65% say they have read a real book (i.e., not a digital book). Only about 6% of people have transitioned away from real books to entirely reading on screens. This is comforting, since it promises that our local libraries likely won’t get phased out by publicly funded internet kiosks in the near future.

Much less surprising was that the correlation between income, education, and reading seems to support the value of reading. Correlation does not equal causation. Thus, it may be that higher incomes provide more time for reading. Or, it may be that advanced education inculcates improved ability to read books. The data isn’t clearly causal. However, the correlation between apparent material success (as customarily defined) and reading is striking. It may be that there is a correlation between the discipline of reading and other important, higher order skills.

Children and Reading Habits

Findings from another survey, biennial research done by Scholastic, talk about about reading for children. Given that there appears to be a correlation between material success and reading, and that reading is just a great way to improve your mind, the Scholastic study is important as it shows some factors that influence kids’ desire to read. Again, correlation isn’t causation, but it might give hits about what causes it.

Public Domain Photo of Leeds Central Library, taken by Michael Beckwith. http://ow.ly/PpWm304Gs9Y

As a bibliophile of the degree that some might describe as being a hoarder, the number of volumes in a library is significant to me. As it turns out, my library is way over the expected average. Of the survey respondents, those with children who were frequent readers indicated they had 205 books in the house; those with infrequently reading children had 129 books in their house.

These findings surprised me. First, I was surprised that the number of books for infrequent readers was not lower. I’ve been in the homes of some infrequent readers and usually they live in a book desert, with an occasional pamphlet, but very little in the way of real literature. 129 books in the home of non-readers is surprising to me; I would have expected many fewer.

Second, I was surprised to see the number of books in the homes of frequent readers at only 205. I have more than 200 books on several distinct subjects. I’ll admit that I have a bias toward owning books instead of borrowing them from the library, but that is because by offering a buffet of books to my children (and myself) I feel that I am encouraging them to read. Apparently the several hundred children’s books are overkill by contemporary standards.

Some other interesting data points that correlate with children being frequent readers are consistent with the usual suspects. Parents that read to their children frequently before kindergarten are much more likely to have frequent readers. School age children whose parents read to them presently are more likely to be frequent readers. Frequent computer use has a clear correlation to forming infrequent readers.

Some Thoughts on Reading and Quality Books

For the most part, the Scholastic survey is informative and interesting. However, there are a few items that might be cause for concern. The percentage of students who say they either like or love readings books has declined by about 10% since 2010. The number of children (about 47% of respondents) who say that the amount of reading they have to do in school discourages them from reading for pleasure is unfortunately high. Additionally, more than 60% of students report that they read less now than when younger because there are other things they enjoy doing. Given the large percentage of students that report spending significant time on electronic devices, this may indicate the distractification of our youth, which may influence later educational outcomes.

Another point of concern, which is admittedly more based on generalization and personal observations of the public library shelves, is that about 73% of children report that they would read more if they could find more books that they like. This is natural, but I think it is having a negative influence on the quality of children’s literature overall.

I’ve read plenty of fluff in my day. I still enjoy a good Louis L’Amour book, or a mystery by Ellis Peters or Alexander McCall Smith.

However, the shelves of the local library shelves are sagging under the weight of junk kiddie lit. I’m not basing that merely on grumpy observations of book covers, but on earlier study of children’s literature and attempting to read some of the stuff my kids bring home. The bulk of recently published stories seems more likely to smuggle attempts to justify restructuring traditional societal norms than to provide substantial benefits to the mind through reading. Sometimes good societal changes come through children’s lit, but surreptitiously sneaking various forms of social engineering into children’s fiction is a bit annoying. Even among the good clean fun kids’ books that I’ve read recently, there seemed to be an emotional and intellectual vacuousness; in many of the current offerings the story line is interesting, but the plot predictable and depth of character are flat.

Parents report that they think it is important for their kids to have strong reading skills and strong critical thinking skills in life. Reading is, arguably, supposed to support those things. Kids report being much more likely to prefer books they pick out themselves (90%) and to want more books that they like. But by providing quick, fun, easy to read stories, publishers and book buyers may be subverting benefits of reading.

This is not a dire warning against the library shelves or a call to ban fun books. There is likely some benefit in reading, even if the reading is light and fluffy. The caution should be in considering what we purchase (for home or the local library) and asking questions about the purpose of reading for children as we select the books to populate the common shelves. The best books both delight and instruct. We shouldn’t let the hope of making cotton candy literature becomes a gateway drug to better literature undermine a main purpose of forming readers, which is to help teach people to think better.

Beware the Sea Lion

I learned a new term recently. It can be a noun or a verb. One may encounter a "sea lion," or someone may "sea lion."

The term is drawn from a cartoon in the Wondermark series drawn by David Malki. I've included the image here for your interest.

When I encountered the cartoon, I knew that I had found an amazingly accurate description of a certain online persona.

This cartoon can be found at:  http://wondermark.com/1k62/ 

A sea lion is the sort of person who cannot allow a balloon to go unpricked. Seeing someone post something in public, the sea lion jumps into the conversation. However, the point is not to add anything to the conversation, it is to waste the time of the person who is making the comment.

To be clear, there are times that online conversations can be meaningful, but by definition, the sea lion is not interested in such conversations. Typically he is interested in a) proving himself smarter or more culturally enlightened than others, b) disrupting a conversation he disagrees with, without acknowledging that another person may simply have a different set of presuppositions, c) just generally being a nuisance all while pretending to be the truly mature and civil one, d) silencing speech that he disagrees with and which rely on a different worldview.

Sea lions are annoying, but they are simply a part of internet life. They can sometimes be confused with people who are legitimately asking questions about a topic that they know little about. Recognizing the difference (and avoiding being one) is important.

Some Characteristics of a Sea Lion

1. A sea lion typically recognizes that the comment was not necessarily about him, but chooses to engage it anyway. Some people simply have too much time on their hands, and being the vigilante of the Facebook wall or comments section seems to be their preferred disservice to the world. Never mind that the comment may have been made in jest, intended as a light hearted generalization, or be entirely tangential to the main point; the sea lion boldly goes where no one cares to hear his opinion.

2. A sea lion often plays dumb, attempting to get their victim to fall into a script that they have carefully crafted a rebuttal to. Online debates are often tedious and they tend to fall into certain patterns. College sophomores spend a great deal of time diagnosing those patterns and learning to rebut them so they can look smart in debates. Often the rebuttals are neither fair nor focused on the main point under debate. However, the sea lion is always ready for the unsuspecting fool to play along.

3. A sea lion is often characterized by attempting to move the argument back several steps or by refusing to accept an assumption the other parties have agreed upon. Rarely does the sea lion state that this is his tactic, but attempts to drag the conversation back to his own presuppositions. Often the sea lion is arguing about elementary level concepts when the conversation is on advanced topics that build on a common set of elementary assumptions already agreed upon.

4. Sometimes the sea lion is unaware he has presuppositions. There is an army of ignorant online warriors who seem to be unaware they have a worldview. All reasoning must be done on their terms, because they and only they have rightly reasoned from first principles to final conclusions. They represent truth and all difference in opinion represents a tainted deviation of their truth. This sort of sea lion asks the Christian to prove God when the Christian is debating theories of the atonement. (Let the Christian recognize that of course the atonement is silly and unnecessary if there is no God.) But the sea lion is oblivious that the faith assumption there is no God requires as much suspension of disbelief as any other faith assumption.

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5. A sea lion often takes being ignored or told off as "victory." The other parties couldn't face the crushing logic of the sea lion, therefore they banished him. More likely the sea lion is just a bore and was shushed or blocked for habitually trying to subvert conversations.

6. The sea lion assumes that if someone makes a comment, they must follow up if he replies. This is part of the narcissism of the sea lion. Being the sole mind in the universe and sole arbiter of truth, the sea lion assumes that justice entails dealing with his (often erroneous or ignorant) arguments.

7. The sea lion is usually prepared with links from friendly sources that support his position. (Often he selects his topics by the ones where he's found articles and studies that he can use as irrefutable support.) If the victim does not have rebutting sources at hand, then his argument can be dismissed as being unsupported (and likely unsupportable, of course). If the victim does have rebutting sources, these are dismissed as being hack science, paid for by the Koch brothers (or Soros, depending on the topic and side). The sea lion's sources are, of course, irrefutable because Science and Peer Review. If sources are used from a different field than the sea lion is prepared to defend, then these will be rejected as from a flawed discipline.

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Dealing with the Sea Lion

There is no perfect way to deal with the sea lion. Often ignoring them is the best way. Blocking Uncle Bob is probably going to lead to tense times at the Thanksgiving table.

Sometimes the sea lion has a point, your argument may be flawed or in an inappropriate venue. (At this point, the person may actually not be a sea lion, so it's important to evaluate the pattern of the person's interactions.)

However, often the true purpose of the sea lion is to silence dissenting opinions. Often this is perceived as a part of social justice on the part of the sea lion. At its best it is a form of annoying thought-policing, at its worst, sea lioning turns into a form of harassment or bullying.

Sea lions are often attempting to raise the social costs of online interactions by being persistent, argumentative (though in their minds always civil), and pedantic. They are typically off topic or in the wrong forum, but they typically aren't the vitriolic troll.

Unfortunately, there is no good way to avoid all sea lions, except by not engaging in online speech that disagrees with them. That is exactly what they want.

Therefore, the best thing to do, it seems, is to speak well, use evidence appropriately, and ignore the sea lions until they go away. Very seldom do people change their minds based on online arguments (I have no support for this, but I know it to be true). I will venture to suggest that no sea lion has ever changed his mind based on an online debate, however much time the victim has wasted.

However, if someone has a peer reviewed study to show me, I might just change my mind.

Some Lessons from Dissertation Writing

This week I turned in my dissertation. Now I wait for my defense. In the moment of euphoria before I find out everything that is wrong with the project I’ve been working on for a year, I decided to jot down some of the things that I’ve learned so far about the process.

Some of these lessons are based on advice and counsel that others gave me, but that I’ve since found to be wise. We’ll find out how well I did on the final product in a couple of months. Even if there are flaws (there are, trust me) in my dissertation, here are some things that I have learned through writing the longest academic work I’ve ever attempted.

1.         It’s never going to be perfect. – One of the hardest things to recognize just prior to my submittal of my dissertation was that there were still going to be some imperfections in the manuscript. I’ve read the completed manuscript multiple times. So has my wife. I have no doubt that there are still a few typos, missing words, extra spaces, or the like throughout. At some point you have to let it go.

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2.         You can’t read every possible source. – I wrote each of my chapters, referencing those volumes and thinkers that best related to my point in the text. However, as I was doing my final read through of the dissertation before submitting it, I kept on thinking of additional sources that could have bolstered my point or that I could have read. There are new books in the academic catalogs that are begging to be included in my bibliography and dozens of articles that I downloaded that I never got to read. I could have tried to read and cite more, but sooner or later you have to turn the project in.

3.         Having someone else read it is invaluable. – My amazingly patient wife also serves as my editor. She doesn’t do style manual stuff, but she does read for grammar, clarity, and typographical issues. Having her read my chapters to tell me where I made no sense or where I had errors made a huge difference in the end, I think. There were a number of places she called my attention to that were unclear and needed simple rewording to make the project better.

4.         This isn’t the best thing you will ever write. – Looking at the 358 pages of manuscript is pretty impressive. It’s the longest piece of scholarship I’ve ever written. In fact, most of the chapters are longer than any paper I’d previously written. What I had to continually fight back was the goal to make this my magnum opus. I will write something better later on, so I need to make a good effort but not think that this is the pinnacle of my scholarship. My scholarship and writing should get better in the future. That’s not a ding against my dissertation, it’s a reflection of academic maturation.

5.         Doing a read-through at the end is important. – Before I had the final proofreading done by my wife, I read through the dissertation from cover to cover in about two days. Since some of my chapters had been written about a year before, this was an important step in the editing process. By the end of the writing process I had developed some key phrases and learned to avoid others. I was able to edit the earlier chapters to reflect the language of the later chapters (chronologically) by the end. This step helps the project read more like a cohesive work of scholarship, instead of a collection of essays. I was also able to find some places where I could clarify my own explanations, which, I think, made the end product more readable for someone else.

6.         Creating a project plan with deadlines is vital. – The internet is flooded with “dissertation writing as project planning” sites. There is value in the approach. I only met a couple of my deadlines, so I had to keep revising and extending the project plan. However, by delineating the steps and what it would take to get there, I could focus on the next thing instead of getting overwhelmed by the size of the project. By having an internal deadline (with plenty of margin built in to the institutional deadline) I had something to keep me moving. Because I had looked at the institutional deadline and built my project plan based on that, I knew what I had to do to get the project in on time. This made it easier to prioritize so that I could know when I needed to lock myself away to write or when I could play another game of Monopoly with the kids.

7.         Stay on topic. – There were about a million times in the process of writing that I found interesting rabbit trails to go down. I even ventured down a few of them. I’ve got extensive notes and footnotes to prove it. However, when I was polishing my dissertation, most of the work of those rabbit trails ended up deleted from the final product. I may use some of the material for essays later on, but I sometimes spent a week on research that was interesting, but did little to support my final dissertation. A bit more discipline would have benefited me significantly.

8.         Keep notes on the side ideas. – I wasted some time along the way exploring rabbit trails. However, one of the things that I think will bear some fruit in the future is using some of that material and the ideas that I got while writing my dissertation to produce journal articles at a later date. I’ve got a list of potential topics with some sources that I can chase down now that I’ve finished my dissertation. These don’t all relate directly to my dissertation topic, but there is room for further research. I now have more ideas for the future than my life and schedule can possibly support.

There are probably more things that I’ve learned. Perhaps after my defense I’ll pick up the topic again. Or, I may discover that some of my lessons learned aren’t as helpful as I thought. I’ll let you know what the readers think.

Purveyors of Doubt

It’s become fairly common among some former evangelicals  to spend a great deal of capital feeding the general lack of confidence of the present age and encouraging currently faithful Christians to hop on the bandwagon of uncertainty.

Certainty is a modern notion born out of the Enlightenment. Or better yet, the Enlightenments, because there really were different streams of thought that appeared about the same time with different beginning points. Speaking of which, can we really say that there was such a thing as the Enlightenment since there appear to be such differences between thinkers and there is no absolute beginning point. Also, since the cultural movement that we once called the Enlightenment was largely a European endeavor and involved mainly males, it is likely that the entire enterprise was oppressively racist and sexist. Better not to study thought of the Enlightenment at all since pluriformity of thought prevents any sort of characterization of the era. At best we should have a high degree of confidence in our uncertainty.

Did I lose you? That’s the point of that paragraph, but it represents some of the sort of argumentation that passes for deep thought. It doesn’t need to be factually correct as long as its moved you to a place of doubt where real learning can take place.

The only thing we can be certain of is our uncertainty according to scholars in some circles. This certainly keeps them safe from criticism—Who can criticize what has no form?—but it does little to promote understanding or, when theology is involved, faithfulness.

Faith Amid Multiple Positions

The thinking in some circles appears to be that it is better to be expressively dubious than faithfully committed.

One of the popular ways to cast doubt on orthodoxy, for example, is to say that there have been people who have disagreed with orthodoxy throughout history. Since there is doubt among some thinkers in history, who are we to believe that we can know what is right belief?

Certainly there is room for humility in belief. We understand that different people have thought differently (and indeed, do think differently) about important doctrines. My faith is not undermined by some people having different opinions.

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For example, I have friends who are Presbyterian. They believe that the form of baptism is secondary to the meaning of it, so the evolved practice of sprinkling babies is as acceptable as believer's baptism by immersion. I’ve studied enough church history and read enough theology to know how they get there. However, I think they are wrong. In this case, there is a different set of presuppositions at work. But more important than the position are some simple realities about truth that are revealed by sincere, well-founded disagreement.

First of all, the simple existence of a difference in interpretation of Scripture on the subject of baptism does not imply that there isn’t a right answer. One of us may be right and the other wrong. Or, both of us may be wrong. However, plurality of positions doesn’t mean that there isn’t a correct position.

Second, while I recognize that I have a different position than my Presbyterian friends, I honor them when I acknowledge their positions and take them seriously. What would dishonor both them and everyone else at the table is flippantly saying that the existence of multiple perspectives indicates that none of us should believe anything.

In some ways, that is what the faithless Christian movement is doing. Some people deny objective truth (not just its knowability) to argue against confidence in historical Christian teaching. Sometimes these people argue that since a novel interpretation of a text has arisen within the past several decades from people who argue that they are intentionally rewriting Scripture, then we must reject confidence in orthodoxy.

The False Humility of Doubt

This sounds simplistic. In some cases it may be unfair. However, in many cases the line of argumentation isn’t far off this simplistic summary.[i] Doubt is possible because multiple positions exist. Doubt is preferable to being wrong, particularly when the social costs of being “wrong” are significant. Therefore, doubt is better than certainty. Doubt is humble and humility is biblical, therefore we must doubt.

Most of the time, the doubt that is portrayed as humble is anything but. Such doubt is a way of saying that a previously unthinkable position might be right because the old one might be wrong. In other words, it’s saying that someone’s new and better teaching is probably better than the old one, so those of you who don’t like the new one should be humbler and accept the new teaching. That used to be called heresy.

Think about it another way. The doubt sowers are not being very humble when they essentially call into question thousands of years of belief. “You know all of those people who believed something different than me and held to it despite threat of imprisonment, torture and death?,” they insinuate, “They are just arrogant in comparison to my humble doubt.” Why have faith when doubt is a safer, humbler option?

The thing is that some forms of doubt are a cancer to faith, such as the insatiable doubt that some contemporary marketers are promoting. In order to rewrite Christian ethics and avoid believing traditional doctrines, some people are sowing seeds of doubt in the minds of others. They do it because of “love” or because they are being “kind.” Sometimes they try to revise traditional orthodoxy because they love Jesus and really believe that Christianity has something to offer contemporary people; it just needs to have some of its rough edges shaved off that poke at the citizen of the contemporary world.

Whether the sowing of doubt is done for personal gain or to try to make Christianity fit the popular trends, teaching people to doubt is a bad thing. It’s a bad thing when the people in the church no longer have the ability to believe the traditional teachings of Christianity. It’s a bad thing when people have no trust in Scripture, because if it is wrong on one point, who is to argue that it gets the gospel right? These are significant problems that are exacerbated by the purveyors of doubt.

More significantly, sowing doubt will be a bad thing for some people when their actions are judged by a holy and righteous God. For the Jesus-only hermeneutics people, he alludes to that pretty clearly in Matthew 5:17-20. For those that accept all of Scripture as inspired (even when it disagrees with us), James 3:1 warns us to consider becoming teachers because they will be judged with greater strictness. The context seems to point toward that strictness being in God’s judgment, not just in people’s observations of our social media profiles. That should cause us to rethink how much doubt and discontent we desire to foment.

[i] I’m intentionally not providing specific examples here because: a. It’s unlikely anyone really doubts this point if they have spent any time reading theological blogs. b. The people who are most likely to be offended by this statement and demand an example are probably part of the problem and really know exactly what I’m talking about. c. I blog for fun, not to get into blog wars with people that have too much time on their hands. Many of the doubt bloggers are professional instructors and writers who have more time to wage endless war against belief than I have time to rebut. I’m simply making observations at this point.