Positive Liberty

PL commentator Laurel suggested that I write a review of www.shipoffools.com. I thought it was a great idea. I’ve also gotten a few other ideas over the last day, and I plan to get to them all eventually, so please, don’t be shy. If you’re a regular, then you know what I like–Send it in, and I’ll comment!

Ship of Fools is a site with a simple mission:

“We’re here for people who prefer disorganized religion to the organized kind,” says ship-of-fools.com editor Simon Jenkins. “From a position of commitment, we try to look objectively at religious trends in an accessible rather than cynical way. We commend as well as debunk. But we are not a campaign, we’re a conversation.”

Debunking sometimes takes the form of Gadgets for God, a section of the site that’s best summed up in the description of one of the gadgets itself. It’s a knitting pattern to crochet the entire Last Supper. Says the description,

A true gadget for God has to pass two critical tests.

Firstly, two cultures must clash,– amply demonstrated here as the Last Supper of Jesus Christ, Son of God, meets size 9 knitting needles. Secondly, we need to imagine someone, somewhere, delighting in the gadget’s creation. Can’t you just picture it? A sweet old lady, sitting in front of a TV soap, calling out to a relative: “When I’ve finished Judas I’ll be right with you, dear. Now then, knit one, purl one…”

Pat’s Patterns offers you, “Jesus, the 12 disciples, the bread, the plates, the wine goblets and wine jug… the full colour pattern for just £3.99.” Amen. Knit this in remembrance of me.

I found one product that delighted even me: the Leprechaun Bible (no link available; it’s under “devotional”). It’s the entire bible, printed so small that it fits onto a single poster-sized sheet. “Each letter is 100th of an inch high and can be read when magnified 12 times.” Brilliant! A professor of mine had the entire Oxford English Dictionary printed similarly. It ran to five volumes, quite compact for the unabridged OED. I could see both being useful in my office.

Several Gadgets for God had descriptions that made me laugh out loud. This comes from a baptismal garment for adults:

Wet t-shirt competitions and baptismal services have something in common: wearing clothes soaked in lots of water. But that, quite definitely, is where the similarity ends. JDM (’Jesus Demands Modesty!’) are only too well aware of those unfortunate see-through moments, when adult baptism takes on an entirely different meaning.

Ship of Fools isn’t all fun and games, though. There are also serious commentaries about religion from the perspective of a group of people who care about religion tremendously–and are worried that it’s going to the dogs these days. For example, there is a piece about missionizing on university campuses in the UK. Here’s a taste:

Ten years ago, you’d try and hand a copy of a Gospel to someone and they’d likely snarl at you for pushing your beliefs onto them. Now, everyone’s fine with it – if it makes you happy.

Ten years ago, doing a mission really pissed people off. You were forcing your beliefs on them. You were a religious thug. It was kind of a thrill, really. It was persecution. People then would at least assert their right to be apathetic. Now, they’re OK with whatever you say, if it makes you happy. Now, people listen politely, and then go away and forget it. This fascinated me… while every argument is nowadays given an equal and fair hearing, fewer converts are made every year. This is because hardly anyone cares enough about religious issues any more, beyond an almost academic interest.

Obviously, he wasn’t writing about the United States, where we all take religion in dead earnest, even if some of us aren’t religious. Nonbelievers here are passionate about religion just like anyone else. To borrow a phrase from Garrison Keillor, American atheists are evangelicals too: It’s the Evangelical God that we don’t believe in.

Ship of Fools recently launched what it bills as “the UK’s first web-based, 3D church,” a VR experience that has to be seen to be believed. Or wait. Aren’t they more blessed who believe without seeing?

Church of Fools is an attempt to create holy ground on the net, where people can worship, pray and talk about faith.

The church is partly intended for people on the edges (and beyond) of faith, so please be aware that the language and behaviour in church is often colourful and occasionally offensive. Please bear with us – this is an experiment and we’re working on creative solutions to the problem of mischievous visitors. Church of Fools is currently not suitable for children.

Not suitable for children? It was enough to make me download the shockwave plugins and see what the fuss was about. Sadly, Mozilla Firefox crashed repeatedly as I tried to enter the Church. It’s the first problem I’ve yet encountered with the new browser, but a tremendously disappointing one. I plan to try it later on Scott’s computer, after I’ve got a couple of martinis in me. Until then, here are the rules for the Church, rules that really ought to apply everywhere:

1. Treat others with respect. Do not use the sanctuary or crypt to be abusive to others, try out your chat-up lines, swear gratuitously or harass other people.

2. Treat other traditions with respect. People come to Church of Fools from all sorts of backgrounds and church traditions. That means they may act differently in church from the way you would. We expect you to be tolerant of difference, but that doesn’t mean tolerating bad behaviour.

3. Don’t become a distraction. Church historians confirm that church has always been home to a little whispering, but if you only want to chat, there are better places and times for it than during worship.

4. Don’t put on a floor show. During services don’t walk around at the front, wander behind the altar or climb into the pulpit. Outside of services you are welcome to explore the building as much as you like.

5. Don’t bring your arguments to worship. We aren’t saying don’t ever argue, but please conduct debate and disagreements elsewhere. You can use the discussion boards on shipoffools.com for this purpose.

6. Take the consequences. If you break the house rules, you will attract the attention of the Church Wardens. They may ask you to stop your behaviour and/or remove you from the Church of Fools environment.

In any event, Ship of Fools reminds me of an idea I had several weeks ago that wasn’t quite developed enough to be a blog essay on its own. It runs like this.

Evangelical Christianity can be separated into three parts. There is a style of worship, a theology of grace, and a political/cultural program. Each of these parts is independent of the others, no matter how much Evangelicals would like to package them together.

The style of worship draws people in. There’s an evangelical church practically next door to me. When they were building the place, they held their services outdoors. On Sunday mornings the parking lot would fill with the sound of motorcycles, passionate preaching, and rock ‘n roll. These people got into it, in a way that Catholics, mainstream Episcopals, and Unitarians basically never do. Worship style is one of the big reasons why Evangelical Christianity is winning in the United States. People want to go to a Church that happens, one where they participate, they sing and shout and feel. No one else is giving them that chance.

There is a great stress placed on the personal relationship with God, and I find that this close, personal relationship is directly related to the style of worship. Being close, even intimate with God, is a major part of the Evangelical appeal. It’s not enough merely to say that God is real; He’s also right freakin’ here, with me, at this very moment. This probably produces a lot of the unease that non-Evangelicals feel when they’re around Evangelicals: How dare these Evangelicals claim a closer relationship with God than the one I have? Don’t they know that God is abstract, and universal, and everywhere? It’s not like you can keep God in your pocket or something…

The theology of grace is a different matter. It goes back to the earliest days of Protestantism and has little to do with the emotive worship in itself. As I understand it, Evangelicals discount the doing of good works as a way to get to heaven. Faith is the key, faith and the divine election of God. We cannot know who is predestined to Heaven or Hell; in justice, all humans are so depraved that we deserve the latter. Only God can change that, and he rewards only those who have faith in him. Salvation is interior, not dependent on what we do.

A lot of people like to say that this is the plain message of the Bible, but I disagree. The commandments obviously exist for a reason, and I can’t make myself believe that God would give them to us just as a way of proving that we’re unworthy. Also, when people asked Jesus what they needed to do to win eternal life, he often replied to the effect of “sell all your possessions and give to the poor.” He didn’t say “Works are useless. Have faith instead.” No, he commanded a very specific, very difficult good work. For example, Matthew 19:21:

Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

The passage is echoed in Mark and Luke as well. In any event, there have been many different interpretations of the Christian message over time, and the Evangelical one–that faith is the only thing necessary–is just one of them.

It strikes me that at times, this theology of grace can conflict with the close personal relationship to God described above. It’s hard to imagine a close friendship with someone who has decided your fate before you were born. It’s hard to imagine a close friendship with someone who does not care about your good works, but sees only the evil in your soul. It’s hard to imagine a close friendship with anyone who would send you to Hell for crossing him.

These are not problems that I often see among Evangelicals, though. One way that they get around such troubles is by an emphasis on being Born Again. To those who have been Born Again, all sins are washed away. God has seen them, but forgiven them–and the Born Again all know it. Before being Born Again, the believer was on the road to Hell. Now he’s going in the opposite direction.

Being Born Again often comes late in life, though, and I can’t help but wonder: What about people who die too soon? What about kids cut down when they’re nine or ten? They’ve had time to commit a few sins, and they also share the original sin that we all supposedly have. But they’ve not had time enough for the mind-altering Born Again experience, which (oddly) seems to strike only when people are adolescents or older.

(”Could it be that brain chemistry has something to do with it?” “Shh… You’re missing the atheist giving a sermon!”)

So it still seems there is a tension between the close, intimate, and emotive worship style of Evangelicals and their theology of grace. Being Born Again is a patch that goes between them, but it doesn’t convince me. Lots of other religions have similar experiences, and the ecstatic state in itself does not prove the truth of any one of them.

It’s also worth pointing out that the first modern predestinarians, the Calvinists of Geneva, were remarkably cold and austere compared to the Evangelical worship styles of today. Calvinism in its early days was a religion of the head, not one of the heart. It stressed simplicity, strict discipline, and a deep gravity about all facets of life. This tension–between the “heart” of emotive worship and the “head” of predestinarian theology–suggests to me that Evangelicalism in the United States could easily split down these lines as well.

Finally, there is the political/cultural program of American Evangelical Christianity. In a way, it’s utterly consistent with early Calvinism: Jean Calvin himself set up a near-totalitarian theocracy where Church and state operated virtually as one, and where sin and crime were perfectly indistinguishable. But there is a contradiction here too, because we are not to believe that any good work of ours will be pleasing to God, and that ought to include remaking the state in His image. Absolutely no good works are pleasing to Him, not even amending the Constitution to stop same-sex marriage.

Sin is abominable to God, of course, and it should be avoided: Thus anyone who thinks marrying gay people is wrong should abstain from doing it. But they should not then expect that they’ll get bonus points by prohibiting another from sinning. Predestinarian religion isn’t about accumulating points. It’s about having faith.

What I would like to see most is a liberal Evangelical movement. Quite simply, there needs to be something for liberal Christians to feel. Right now, it seems as though liberals usually get a “head” religion with very little “heart.” They don’t dance in the aisles, or fall into ecstasies, or talk in tongues. If they did, they might get more converts, because, there are a lot of people who find these religious expressions deeply and personally satisfying. For the moment, they’re being shunted into the conservative Evangelical camp whether they like it or not, and from there it’s only a matter of time until they start agreeing with the political program. Peer pressure is never so strong as in a Church.

A liberal Evangelical movement would cater to people who want an emotive religion, but who find a lot of the current Evangelical politicking petty and unbefitting a religion. Liberal Evangelicals would take parts one and two from the three-part Evangelical scheme above, and then adopt a politics of tolerance and patient admonition. Maybe they’d exclude homosexuals–but maybe not. After all, it’s not our place to determine whom God has chosen to save. We are called to have faith, to accept a deep, emotive relationship with God–and to shun the bean-count of works and sins, punishments and rewards. Liberal Evangelicals could still have a personal friendship with God. They could still be Born Again. What those experiences mean, though, would probably be more diverse–and possibly more fulfilling–than the current, narrowly political Evangelism that predominates in the United States today.

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