Exchanging the Truth for a Lie

The October 2021 issue of the evangelical monthly Christianity Today contains an article on fundamentalists' struggle to come to terms with the homosexuals in their midst.  The author, one Greg Johnson, is gay, which makes the article seem a bit different from similar writings I've seen on the subject; but I think it only seems so.  As usual in such cases, the open-minded stance is really just a facade for the same old crap.

Johnson begins with a reminiscence from 1997:

"You know, Mike, I used to be gay," I said.  Mike stopped moving as the words fell clumsily from my mouth...

He'd asked me about my schooling, and we got to talking about faith.  Mike had explained to me how he felt he could never go to church because he was gay.

"I know they say that's not supposed to happen," I went on, after dropping the bombshell.  "But that's my story."  Mike stared at me with interest as he set the paint can down, gently balancing his brush on its edge.

Johnson doesn't tell us what happened next; I picture some hot gay-to-ex-gay action myself.  (It just occurred to me that it would be fun to rewrite my account of my conversation with a local bartender in the manner of Christian testimonies like Johnson's.  But as in other evangelical writings I've seen, the intention is to tout the missionary's supposed courage in speaking to an unbeliever.)

But here Johnson surprised me.

To be clear, my sexual attractions at the moment were drawn as exclusively to other men as ever.  I was still at the top of the Kinsey scale that researchers since the 1940s have used to classify sexual orientation.  What made me ex-gay was that I used the ex-gay script. I was trying to convince myself that I was a straight man with a disease -- a curable one -- called homosexuality.  A condition that was being healed.

My terminological maneuver was an integral component of conversion therapy.  Alan Medinger, the first executive director of Exodus International, described it as "a change in self-perception in which the individual no longer identifies him- or herself as homosexual."  It was all about identity.  The testimony made the man.  And, within my ex-gay framework, I wasn't lying; I was claiming my new reality.

I was ex-gay.

The emergence of Exodus International in 1976 had set evangelicals on a hopeful path toward curing homosexuality.  Founder Frank Worthen explained, "When we started Exodus, the premise was that God could change you from gay to straight."  What followed was a decades-long experiment on hundreds of thousands of human test subjects.  The movement collapsed after Exodus president Alan Chambers's 2012 statement that more than 99 percent of Exodus clients had not experienced a change in their sexual orientation.

These might seem bold statements to make in a conservative evangelical publication, but they still drip with bad faith.  Johnson denies it, but his tortuous rhetoric can't conceal the fact that he was lying.  He was still gay, even if he managed to abstain from overt sexual activity with other males; and that's doubtful.  The ex-gay movement was wracked by scandal from the beginning, with its "clients" relapsing, with each other or with movement leaders. Those relapses, naturally, were blamed on the subjects' lack of faith, never on God's failure to cure them.

It was always strange that an ostensibly religious movement should have relied so heavily on secular psychiatry.  Christians from Jesus onward have used medical metaphors for sin, but the ex-gay movement didn't bother with metaphors.  Sin took a back seat to sickness in the ex-gay imaginary, and movement leaders adopted discredited psychiatric theories about "confused" gender identity caused by overbearing mothers and absent fathers.  The ex-gay movement took off just as secular psychiatry officially stopped regarding homosexuality as a sickness, and there was probably a connection.  But even clearly physical illnesses, up to and including death, were subject to Jesus' healing power; if God had wanted to change sexual orientation, it shouldn't have been beyond him.  As gay Christians have liked to say, maybe he didn't want to - though that's not necessarily a sign of divine approval, as we'll see.

Even more intriguing to me is Johnson's adoption of relativist identity language: if you adopt an "ex-gay script," if you identify as straight while continuing to burn with lust for persons of your own sex, then that's reality.  Of course this was never the rationale of the movement at its beginnings; at most it has been promoted after it collapsed.  Conservative Christian theology always claims, however falsely, to be about reality, and that it's only unbelievers who live in a fantasy world of their own making.  I'll be interested to see if CT publishes any letters from readers on this theme.  At a time when reactionaries are furiously denouncing airy-fairy postmodernist denial of reality by unbelievers, it's funny to see that Billy Graham's flagship journal has let the devil into its pages.

But speaking of Graham, Johnson goes on to shake the dust of the ex-gay movement from his feet and try to raise "an older orthodoxy that included a paradigm of caring for believers who aren't straight."  (The homosexual-movement rhetoric of gay/straight is still in there, you can see.  And seriously, are we not all -- gay and straight alike -- twisted and broken by sin?)

What follows is a lot more interesting and informative to me.  Johnson tells how numerous 20th-century Christian celebrities taught that "a homosexual orientation was part of the believer's identity -- a fallen part, but one that the gospel doesn't erase so much as it humbles."  He discusses Henri Nouwen, John R. W. Stott, C. S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and Billy Graham, all of whom exemplify this supposed "paradigm of caring."  They regarded homosexual orientation as something inborn, not sinful (though still "broken") so long as it isn't acted on.

Two points about this: one, it confirms my claim that belief in inborn homosexuality is not the get-out-of-jail-free most LGBTQ+ Americans assume it to be.  It's perfectly compatible with the demand for total sexual abstinence that antigay Christians like to make of gay people, though not of straight ones.  Johnson laments what he and fellow gay Christian Eve Tushnet call "a vocation of No": "No sex. No dating. No relationships. Often, no leadership roles."  Spoiler: Johnson never specifies what his paradigm of caring offers as an alternative; he's carefully vague on the matter, though he refers to "celibacy" as part of his prescription.

Second, almost none of the comforting pastoral counsel Johnson reports was made in public during these celebrities' lifetimes.  It comes mostly from private letters and conversations that most of their audiences were unaware of at the time.  In public they took uncompromising positions against homosexual "sin" and the "born this way" claims of the gay movement.  That includes gay Christians, who seem not to have been aware of this concession any more than I was.  (I was aware that the Roman Catholic church regards homosexual orientation as inborn, and of course that concession has never stopped it from practicing antigay bigotry.)  I'd be more impressed by these posthumous revelations if Johnson's heroes had spoken out boldly and publicly while they were alive, instead of jumping on the culture-war bandwagons, to say nothing of endorsing the ex-gay movement.  Johnson shows them privately rejecting vulgar bigotry of the Jerry Falwell variety, but not taking a positive stance in public.

Most of the rest of the four-page article is hot air about caring for the homosexual with specifics left out, but towards the end Johnson quotes a 1978 book, Homosexuality and the Church, by the Christian historian Richard Lovelace,

There is another approach to  homosexuality which would be healthier both for the church and gay believers, and which could be a very significant witness to the world.  This approach requires a double repentance, a repentance both for the church and for its gay membership.  First, it would require professing Christians who are gay to have the courage both to avow [acknowledge] their orientation openly and to obey the Bible's clear injunction to turn away from the active homosexual life-style. ... Second, it would require the church to accept, honor, and nurture nonpracticing gay believers in its membership, and ordain these to positions of leadership for ministry.

(The interpolation of "acknowledge" and the ellipsis before the last quoted sentence are Johnson's.  "Avow" and "acknowledge" have different connotations, it seems to me, with "avow" being a lot firmer.  Or did he think CT's readers wouldn't know what "avow" means?  By the way, Lovelace published another book on this topic in 2003; I don't know if his position changed in a quarter century, but it's fair to doubt it.)

"Tragically," Johnson says, "I write this as a lament for a road not traveled on this side of the Atlantic."  I've seen other American evangelical writers take the same tack in the past several years, though they don't assert the innateness of homosexual orientation, and they're no more impressive than Lovelace or Johnson.  Except for leadership roles, Lovelace offered the same vocation of No -- "No sex. No dating. No relationships" -- that Johnson had seemed to declare unacceptable a couple of pages earlier.

Lovelace also played a little game that nowadays is known as "both-sidesing."  The church must accept, honor, and nurture celibate gays (I don't really see any "repentance" there), and gays must declare themselves openly while embracing a vocation of No (I presume this includes "repentance" for any sodomitical acts they've already committed). This is lopsided, to put it nicely.  It's as if white evangelicals were to "repent" showily for their historical support for slavery and Jim Crow, while demanding that black evangelicals repent for their resistance to and criticism of white Christian racism.  Or as if Christians repented for historical anti-Semitism, while demanding that Jews reciprocate by repenting for killing Christ.

Lovelace continued: 

The church's sponsorship of openly avowed but repentant homosexuals in leadership positions would be a profound witness to the world concerning the power of the Gospel to free the church from homophobia and the homosexual from guilt and bondage.

Except that, as Johnson has acknowledged, the Gospel has no such power.  Lovelace's church is still homophobic, and a vocation of No is not freedom from bondage.

It's not for me to tell Christians what to do, only to criticize their mealy-mouthed paradigm of caring.  I agree that the Bible forbids sexual acts between persons of the same sex, but I don't see that's an obstacle for the church, which cheerfully ignores a great deal of explicit biblical teaching on any number of matters, from slavery to divorce and remarriage.  American evangelicals' embrace of divorced and remarried politicians from Ronald Reagan through Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump shows that the Bible is only as authoritative as they want it to be, which isn't very. I wouldn't criticize the churches for imposing the same official sexual ethic of monogamous marriage on gay believers that they impose on heterosexuals, though gays who slip into adultery and fornication should be extended the same latitude and indulgence straying heterosexual Christians, including clergy, enjoy.

Demanding total sexual abstinence of gays, but not of straights, is not going to witness the saving power of the Gospel to the world -- very much the opposite.  Gay believers will go on doing what they've always done: abstaining and feeling guilty for their desires until they finally give in to temptation, which will set in motion a new cycle of guilt and repentance.  Or alternatively, screwing around as much as they like but neglecting to mention it in church. In other words, exactly what the ex-gay movement produced.

Straights at least have a licit outlet, but there's no such thing for gays in traditional Christianity.  It's not the only reason Christianity has a bad reputation, but it's certainly part of it.  And Johnson's article is merely one more dishonest example of Christians being asked for bread, but offering a stone.  Its only novelty, that it was written by a gay man, is witness to the doublethink that religious belief fosters in all its adherents.  As the philosopher Walter Kaufmann put it, there but for the lack of grace of God go I.

By the way, the CT website has two new articles about denominations splitting over LGBT issues, the Brethren and the Reformed Church in America.  As the RCA article points out, other denominations verge on similar splits.  A book review is also relevant.  And the Southern Baptist Convention -- remember them? -- has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into an investigation of sexual abuse by clergy of their flocks.

Afterlife of Pi

Again, spoiler spoiler spoilers will probably appear in what follows.

After writing the previous post I allowed myself to read some reviews of Life of Pi.  One of the best I found was Tasha Robinson's at the Onion AV Club.

A central plot point in Life Of Pi—the film adaptation of Yann Martel’s bestselling book—centers on the philosophical question of whether animals have souls. The title character, a self-possessed Indian boy, believes they do, and that people can tell by looking deep into their eyes. His zookeeper father feels differently; in his opinion, any depth in an animal’s eyes is just human emotion reflected back at the viewer. This conundrum—essentially, the question of whether to interpret the world spiritually or cynically—becomes the backbone of the plot. But it also works into a choice that the characters present directly to the viewers, about whether they want to take that plot literally or metaphorically, whether to focus on the film’s body, or accept its soul.

The choice is harder than it was in Martel’s book, because here, the body is more compelling by far.

By "the body" Robinson means the glorious visuals of the movie's main story, Pi's voyage across the Pacific in a lifeboat accompanied only by an adult Bengal tiger.  The second story, the one Pi tells from his hospital bed to the Japanese investigators, doesn't get the full CGI treatment but simply Pi's talking head against a white background.  As Robinson argues in Spoiler Space, "the real story (if that’s what it is) only gets a flat verbal retelling ... It seems to be a conscious distancing effect, with Lee strongly stacking the deck in favor of the fantasy by making it so much more cinematically compelling."  Many people believe that the audience is expected to take this second story as the "true" one -- what actually happened after the freighter sank -- and that the story we've been watching for nearly two hours is a fantasy or hallucination.  Maybe so.  It's often a toss-up when one is expected to decide which of two fictional alternatives is "real," since neither of them is, yet both are.  In this case, there's a revealing bias involved in the assumption that the less edifying story is the "real" one, and the more colorful one the myth, except that it's supposed to be the true real one because reality is a drag.

Robinson's framing of the movie's central question shows just how inadequate that question is.  Is the second story, which involves a sociopathic ship's cook who kills and kills again before guiltily surrendering to Pi's justice, "cynical"?  It could be interpreted in "spiritual" terms just as easily.  Think of great religious stories like Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov, which take a dark view of human beings yet still find meaning in them.  "Spiritual" doesn't mean only cotton-candy primary-colors happy endings, but I suspect that's what many people who made Life of Pi a bestseller think it should mean.  As with the book of Job, being deprived of everything and then physically tortured isn't given meaning by having one's belongings and health restored -- even if Job had more children, that doesn't mean his first batch of children wasn't slaughtered unjustly with Yahweh's permission.  (The reviewer of Life of Pi for the Guardian does a terrible job, one example being his reference to "Pi, howling like Job into stormy skies."  The guy ought to try reading what Job said; he didn't howl, he eloquently read his god the Riot Act.  Pi howls, but unlike Job's, his god doesn't talk back.)

One commenter, I think on the remarks by Samuel Delany that I quoted in the previous post, lamented that we don't have a good spiritual writer like C. S. Lewis around.  Lewis was an interesting writer in many ways, but he nearly always let his thinking be hobbled by dogma.  But this might be a good time to recall some of his comments on suffering, from his 1940 book The Problem of Pain:

We are perplexed to see misfortune falling on decent, inoffensive, worthy people -- on capable, hard-working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty little trades-people, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right. How can I say with sufficient tenderness what here needs to be said? ... Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God who made these deserving people, may really be right when He says that their modest prosperity has not made them blessed; that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands before them and recognition of this need; He makes that life less sweet to them. ... The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered. ... And this illusion ... may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, on on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall [96-98].

Those who think only of the Narnia books when they hear Lewis's name must ignore his specifically Christian writings, which it must be remembered were intended as defenses of Christianity.  Lewis's justification of torture of the creature by its creator should be borne in mind when contemplating Life of Pi.  At least Lewis engaged the problem, however inadequately, instead of smiling benignly at it as the movie does.

Most modern Christians seem determined to ignore the less cutesy parts of the New Testament; many brush aside the Hebrew Bible as the domain of an "Old Testament God of wrath," but that's evasion since both Testaments are about the same god, and there's no shortage of wrath in the New Testament in any case.  (Those who do, like the people who made and liked The Passion of the Christ, with its CGI-enhanced torture scenes, are another can of worms.)  Many of the positive interpretations of Life of Pi try to turn it into a feel-good fable.  To its limited credit, the movie never anthropomorphizes the tiger.  If it has a soul, it's not a human soul but a tiger's; not Milne / Disney'sTigger nor Bill Watterson's Hobbes, but a tiger's.  What exactly is answered by claiming that animals have souls?  What is a soul, anyway?
 
This conundrum trips up a number of earnest reviewers.  Roger Ebert, for instance, writes that "wild animals are indeed wild and indeed animals," but human beings are also animals, and religions don't necessarily treat us as all nice inside, even if we do have "souls."  The Bible depicts bloodthirsty humans who will be justified by their bloodthirsty lord of armies.  The film shows young Pi grappling with the doctrine that Yahweh killed his own son for the sins of the world, but he only had to do it because his own "justice" required blood sacrifice to atone for sin.  If Pi had been stuck in the lifeboat with a herbivore, his voyage would have been a lot less fraught, and let's not forget the importance of cattle in Hinduism.  Yet a few sentences later Ebert writes:

The writer W.G. Sebold once wrote, "Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension." This is the case here, but during the course of 227 days, they come to a form of recognition. The tiger, in particular, becomes aware that he sees the boy not merely as victim or prey, or even as master, but as another being.

That's highly debatable even within the world of the movie.  Once safely onshore, the tiger disappears into the forest without looking back, and Pi cries disconsolately in the arms of his rescuers because the great cat did not grant him any "recognition."  Why should it have done?  I don't see any basis for Ebert's fine rhetoric about the tiger seeing the boy "not merely as victim or prey, or even as master, but as another being."  In the end the movie accepts the warning of Pi's father, that you may think you're seeing recognition in a tiger's eyes, but you're really only seeing your own reflection.  But it looks like many viewers will ignore this, trying to turn it into a parable of interspecies communication and love.  If so, the love is unrequited, but I don't consider that tragic, let alone "spiritual."

I agree with A. O. Scott, the New York Times reviewer:

The novelist and the older Pi are eager to impose interpretations on the tale of the boy and the beast, but also committed to keeping those interpretations as vague and general as possible. And also, more disturbingly, to repress the darker implications of the story, as if the presence of cruelty and senseless death might be too much for anyone to handle. Perhaps they are, but insisting on the benevolence of the universe in the way that “Life of Pi” does can feel more like a result of delusion or deceit than of earnest devotion.

But I repeat: there's nothing in "spirituality" itself -- which can be quite morbid, misanthropic, and even "cynical" -- which entails vagueness or repressing of the darker implications of life.  It's this underlying assumption of the movie that made it hard to watch despite its visual beauty and great performances.  And as an atheist, I believe that any worldview which claims to make sense of the world has to grapple with questions like those of suffering and evil.  Here again I part company somewhat with Samuel Delany when he wrote that the filmmakers "couldn't have come up with a better script promoting atheism if they had gotten Christopher Hitchens to write it."  Atheism isn't itself an answer or a solution to the problem of suffering.  I prefer the witch Granny Weatherwax in Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies:

"I don't hold with paddlin' with the occult," said Granny firmly. "Once you start paddlin' with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you're believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble."

"But all them things exist,” said Nanny Ogg.

"That's no call to go believing in them. It only encourages 'em."

The Magician's Book

I've been giving my grumpy side free rein lately, so I figured I should write about a book I really like: Laura Miller's The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia (Little, Brown, 2008). Though, as the title makes clear, Miller's focus is on C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, the subject of the book is reading -- what it means to be a reader, how one learns to read, and the complex relationship between the writer, the writing, and the reader.

Miller was handed a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by a teacher when she was in second grade. For a few years she read and reread the series, though she also read and loved other books too. But as she grew older, things changed.

Although I miss the childhood experience of being engulfed by a story, I would not willingly surrender my adult ability to recognize when a writer is taking me someplace I don't want to go. In my early teens, I discovered what is instantly obvious to any adult reader: that the Chronicles of Narnia are filled with Christian symbolism and that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe offers a parallel account of the Passion of Christ. I'd been raised as a Catholic, but what faith I'd had was never based on anything more than the fact that children tend to believe whatever adults tell them. As soon as I acquired any independence of thought, I drifted away from the Church and what I saw as its endless proscriptions and requirements, its guilt-mongering and tedious rituals. So I was horrified to discover that the Chronicles of Narnia, the joy of my childhood and the cornerstone of my imaginative life, were really just the doctrines of the church in disguise. I looked back at my favorite book and found it appallingly transfigured. Of course, the self-sacrifice of Aslan to compensate for the treachery of Edmund was exactly like the crucifixion of Christ to pay off the sins of mankind! How could I have missed that? I felt angry and humiliated because I have been fooled [6].

About ten years ago, Miller was assigned to write about the book that had meant the most to her, so she reread the Chronicles of Narnia to see how she responded to them as an adult.

When I finally came back to Narnia, I found that, for me, it had not lost its power or its beauty, or at least not entirely. Although I am a little bit abashed about this ... the radiant books of my youth still seem radiant to me. Yet there are aspects of Narnia I can no longer embrace with the childish credulousness that [Graham] Greene describes. ... Nevertheless, what I dislike about Narnia no longer eclipses what I love about it, and the contents of my own mind still have the capacity to surprise me when I study them carefully enough [8].

It's not easy to review a book. There's so much going in any text of any length that it's hard to keep track of it all. I was always nervous when I did book reviewing that I'd make some awful embarrassing mistake. Reviewers do this, as any fan of a book will know. The book editor of the Seattle Times, for example, smooshed together Miller's original encounter with Narnia with her disillusionment:

Literary critic Laura Miller first passed through the Narnia portal in the second grade. She was raised Catholic but had fallen away from what she calls the church's "guilt-mongering and tedious rituals." She writes, "I was horrified to discover that the Chronicles of Narnia, the joy of my childhood and the cornerstone of my imaginative life, were really just the doctrine of the Church in disguise."

If Miller could have read the Chronicles that way in the second grade, she probably would never have come to love them: her disillusionment was deepened by her earlier acceptance of the tale. She would also have been remarkably precocious, since few if any second-graders can spot multiple meanings in stories this way; many adults never manage to do it. The reviewer continues:

But Miller could never escape Narnia's spell, and in "The Magician's Book," she returns to the landscape of Narnia to search for its deeper meaning.

To her credit, the reviewer acknowledges, "It's a journey of great pleasure -- Miller is a wise, down-to-earth and often funny narrator. The result is one of the best books about stories and their power that I have ever read." Here I agree on every point; I'd only add that it is also a book about readers and their power, how we learn to understand stories in all their richness.

The Magician's Book contains a wealth of ideas and stories, partly the result of following up her original assignment. Miller interviewed many fans and critics of Narnia, starting with the teacher who first gave her the book.

Long before I learned of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, before it was even written, a twelve-year-old girl named Wilanne Belden walked two miles once a week to the library in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, to check out the maximum quantity of five books. It was the Depression, and buying any book was a luxury. The deal Wilanne's parents struck with her was that if she checked out the same title from the library three times, and read it from cover to cover, she could have a copy of her own. This arrangement worked well enough until Wilanne discovered what would become her favorite book, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (then in its first edition, before even Tolkien himself knew the significance of Bilbo Baggins's magic ring). The Hobbit is long for a children's book, and by the time she had read it three times, it had gone out of stock in bookstores. Buying a copy was no longer an option. So Wilanne decided to make her own, checking the book out of the library over and over again, typing up a couple dozen pages at a time using two fingers on the family's manual typewriter. She got as far as page 107 before the book returned to the stores [21].

This story won me over completely. I made my own handwritten copies of poems I liked in high school, copied from Louis Untermeyer's anthologies, not so much because I couldn't afford the books themselves (though I couldn't), but because copying them out by hand helped me to concentrate on the poems. And I recognize that craving to own a copy of a book one loves.

I'm lucky, because I still get immersed, lost, in books I'm reading. Not always, of course, but often enough. Sometimes it even happens with non-fiction, as it did with parts of The Magician's Book.

The Seattle Times reviewer concluded, "It will come as no surprise that the rift between Miller, a bright young girl grown older and wiser, and Lewis, a magician of stories and their power, ends in reconciliation." I don't think "reconciliation" is the right word, though of course it's the kind of thing many people like to believe. Miller remains a "skeptic," as her subtitle labels her, and she remains critical of Lewis as man and, more important, as writer. Though the books are still "radiant" for her, she probably dislikes more about Narnia than she did as a teenager, because she's older and more knowledgeable now. That, I think, is part of what it means to be an adult: to be able to love without blinding oneself to the shortcomings of the beloved, and perhaps also to separate the artist from the art.

One Amazon user complained that Miller didn't cut Lewis much slack, but I think that only an idolatrous fan could think so; Miller cuts him a great deal of slack, more than most of his Christian fans seem to be able to do. Because they can't admire him or his work while admitting any failings at all, they have to deny, excuse, explain them away. "C. S. Lewis’s most devoted Christian readers regard his writings as, if not quite sacred, then at least sacralized," Miller says. "For them, the temptation to deny that he held a lot of objectionable opinions is very strong" (171). Anyone who can see Lewis more or less whole must be wholly on the other side; there is no middle ground. It's odd, but not at all unusual, I think, that it's Christians -- who like to suppose that only they really grasp human imperfection (or "sinfulness") -- who refuse to see any imperfection in someone like Lewis, and a non-Christian like Miller who, because she doesn't see Lewis as a saint, doesn't need to deny that he had feet of clay.

There's more I'd like to write about The Magician's Book, but it'll keep until later. Happy Labor Day!

The Theory and Practice of Paradise

I haven't read any of C. S. Lewis's books on Christianity in a long time, so John Beversluis's book on Lewis takes me back. This passage from Lewis's book The Problem of Pain, for example, explaining why his God lets people suffer:

We are perplexed to see misfortune falling on decent, inoffensive, worthy people -- on capable, hard-working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty little trades-people, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right. How can I say with sufficient tenderness what here needs to be said? ... Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God who made these deserving people, may really be right when He says that their modest prosperity has not made them blessed; that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands before them and recognition of this need; He makes that life less sweet to them. ... The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered. ... And this illusion ... may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, on on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall [96-98, quoted by Beversluis 241-242].

There's a lot to be said about this, and Beversluis says it quite well, so if you want a detailed discussion read Chapter Ten of C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Prometheus, 2007).

But I have a few things to add, among them that suffering falls not on only the self-satisfied bourgeois but on the devout and self-abasing Christian. According to orthodox Christian doctrine of course (and Lewis was very orthodox), there is none good, not one, and everyone deserves the worst misery that Yahweh can inflict on them, because we have fallen short of his glory. The most devout Christian is still harboring pride, self-love, and all the other monstrous faults that God just has to gouge out, without anesthetic. It happened to Lewis too, twenty years after he wrote The Problem of Pain, when his wife died of cancer, and in the book he wrote after her death, A Grief Observed, he admitted that he had been smug and complacent in writing so lightly about the agony his god inflicts for the crime of "insufficiency." None of this proves, of course, that Lewis was not describing the way the universe is actually organized; it doesn't, however, establish that Yahweh is just.

Beversluis also quotes one of Lewis's defenders, one Thomas Talbott, who has objected to Beversluis's argument that the world would be improved if Yahweh simply removed cancer from it, and argued that

Any such world [that is, any world with less pain and suffering and without cancer] that God could have created would have contained a less favorable balance of good over evil than exists in the actual world [quoted in Beversluis, 244].

How Talbott knows this, he apparently doesn't say. He goes further:

To begin with ... we must delete from the world (in our imagination) all the pain and suffering caused by this terrible disease as well as all the psychological torment experienced by both those cancer victims and those who love such victims; then we must delete all those goods -- such as the courageous endurance of pain - for which the cancer is a logically necessary condition; then we must delete all the free choices -- that either would have been made at all or would have been made differently if our world had been devoid of cancer ... [W]e must also add in all the options, all the free choices, and all the consequences of such free choices that would have been different. ... If in the absence of cancer, more people would have become more vicious, more likely to engage in warfare or to inflict suffering on others, the total quality of suffering might have been increased by the elimination of cancer [quoted in Beversluis, 245].

Talbott's morals are wanting, but his clarity at least is admirable. The position he holds is quite common, even standard, among theists grappling with the Problem of Evil. "Everybody's doing it" is not an excuse, but it's important to remember that he's not a lone wacko. Consider Rabbi Harold Kushner, a cozily mainstream figure, who told Newsweek after the Haitian earthquake, "The will of God is not to send us the disaster, but to send us the disaster to overcome." That's what Lewis and Talbott are saying too. It's not that God wants to hurt us, but things would be so much worse if he didn't. (It's a common move in this discourse to blame a lot of human suffering on human agents, but shouldn't they simply be viewed as Yahweh's instruments? A person's complacency can be shattered just as effectively by a course of waterboarding, rape, or being run over by a tank as it can by cancer, earthquake, or drought.)

What no one seems to notice is the difficulty this presents to the Christian hope of Heaven, an eternal state free of suffering and full of joy. If Yahweh cannot create a world without suffering because suffering makes us better by shaking our illusions out of us until our teeth rattle, then he can't create a Paradise where there is no suffering. In that case, it might be that we're living in Paradise already -- except, perhaps, that our suffering does end, sooner or later, when we die. No doubt in Paradise that little oversight will be remedied, and Yahweh and his angels will ensure that we suffer eternally. For our own good, of course, and in a loving, caring way, until every last bit of rebellion and self-sufficiency is squeezed out of us.

Which reminds me irresistibly (and mischievously) of this bit from Noam Chomsky's elegant evisceration of B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity:

Elsewhere, we learn that freedom "waxes as visible control wanes" (p. 70). Therefore the situation just described is one of maximal freedom, since there is no visible control. Furthermore, since "our task" is simply "to make life less punishing" (p. 81), the situation just described would seem ideal. Since people behave well, there will be no punishing. In this way, we can progress "toward an environment in which men are automatically good" (p. 73).

Extending these thoughts, let us consider a well-run concentration camp with inmates spying on one another and the gas ovens smoking in the distance, and perhaps an occasional verbal hint as a reminder of the meaning of this reinforcer. It would appear to be an almost perfect world. Skinner claims that a totalitarian state is morally wrong because it has deferred aversive consequences (p. 174). But in the delightful culture we have just designed there should be no aversive consequences, immediate or deferred. Unwanted behavior would be eliminated from the start by the threat of the crematoria and the all-seeing spies. Thus all behavior would be automatically "good," as required. There would be no punishment. Everyone would be reinforced -- differentially, of course, in accordance with his ability to obey the rules.

Within Skinner's scheme there is no objection to this social order. Rather, it seems close to ideal. Perhaps we could improve it still further by noting that "the release from threat becomes more reinforcing the greater the threat" (as in mountain climbing -- p. 111). We can, then, enhance the total reinforcement and improve the culture by devising a still more intense threat, say, by introducing occasional screams, or by flashing pictures of hideous torture as we describe the crematoria to our fellow citizens. The culture might survive, perhaps for 1,000 years.

There you have it -- a little bit of Heaven right here on Earth, and a beautiful prefiguring of the bliss that awaits us (not all of us, of course!) when God calls us home.

On Obstinacy in Unbelief

I'm reading the revised edition of John Beversluis's C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Prometheus, 2007), and it occurred to me that much of Christian pastoral counseling -- which is a form of apologetic in itself: one of its functions is to reassure Christians that the problems they're having don't invalidate their commitment to Christian faith -- relies on convincing people that their God isn't God after all, that he's not even a very good human being.

As Lewis said in a piece called "On Obstinacy in Belief", one's trust in God should not depend on one's mood, or falter when things aren't going perfectly:

We believe that His intention is to create a certain personal relation between Himself and us, a relation really sui generis but analogically describable in terms of filial or of erotic love. Complete trust is an ingredient in that relation -- such trust as could have no room to grow except where there is also room for doubt. To love involves trusting the beloved beyond the evidence, even against much evidence. No man is our friend who believes in our good intentions only when they are proved. No man is our friend who will not be very slow to accept evidence against them. Such confidence, between one man and another, is in fact almost universally praised as a moral beauty, not blamed as a logical error. And the suspicious man is blamed for a meanness of character, not admired for the excellence of his logic [in The World's Last Night, Harcourt 1960, pp. 25-6].

Lewis properly declares the relation between the believer and God as sui generis, that is, unique and not comparable to any other relation. But it can, he allows, be described by analogy to relations we are familiar with, like parent/child, erotic love, or friendship. The trouble is that because the relation is sui generis, all analogies break down quickly. I'd say, myself, that better analogies are available -- they're just less flattering.

Take one of Lewis's own examples: "No man is our friend who will not be very slow to accept evidence against them." True. That's because we can't know any other person's inner self, appearances can be deceiving, evidence can be falsified and we have to wait until our friend can explain problems that arise. Our friend promised to meet us at our favorite restaurant at 2 p.m., but he didn't show. Only later do we learn that he was hit by a car and taken to the hospital unconscious with two broken legs and a smashed cell phone. If we stomp back and forth fuming about our friend's unreliability without knowing the facts, it's our friendship that in question, not our friend's.

Another example is one I read years ago. Suppose you are fighting in the Resistance against the Nazi occupation, and you meet a highly placed collaborator in a secret encounter, who assures you that he is really on your side and he will soon act to prove it, but in the meantime you must trust him. For some reason you do, although more of your comrades are rounded up and executed each day.

Another example of Lewis's, after his wife died of cancer. He compared his God to a surgeon, who must do terrible, painful things to us in order to make us better. It hurts him as much as it hurts us, but there is no other way to improve us. (This would be something like Rabbi Kushner's claim that God sends us disasters so that we can overcome them. The dead, who don't get to overcome anything, don't show up in the balance sheet.)

There's one other thing I should mention here, an example which seems to be Beversluis's: "'Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him,' says Job (Job 13:15), who surely was not unaware of the problem of apparently contrary evidence" (210). "Apparently"! Job, for those who've forgotten, lost his wealth, his family and his own health as the result of a bet between Yahweh and Satan. Satan bet that if Yahweh removed the fence of protection to which Job owed his fabled well-being, Job would lose his trust in him, and Yahweh gave Satan permission to do everything to Job but kill him. Tormented beyond measure, Job finally denied the justice of Yahweh. In context, Job is saying that he'll continue attacking Yahweh for mistreating him, even if Yahweh slays him. I suspect that Job 13:15 is mistranslated here (it's the King James Version, I believe, but the text of Job is notoriously "corrupt," which means that experts aren't always sure what the Hebrew is, let alone what it means. [An explanation here.] Walter Kaufmann, whose discussion of Job and the Problem of Evil in The Faith of a Heretic (Doubleday, 1961) is still the best I've encountered, translated the verse as "He will slay me? For that I hope. But my ways I will maintain to his face. And let this be my salvation that no hypocrite comes to face him." (This translation is found in Kaufmann's Critique of Religion and Philosophy [Harper, 1958], page 349; I don't know Hebrew, but Kaufmann did, and I think this rendering fits the context better than the AV.) And rightly so, since nowhere in the book is it claimed by anyone (except his false friends) that Job has done anything wrong. And as Kaufmann pointed out [151],

Nowhere else in the the Bible does shadday ['almighty'] appear so constantly as the name of God as in the book of Job. But the claim that God's omnipotence is not questioned in the book does not rest merely on the use of a word. Rather, the point is that it never occurs to anybody that God might simply be unable to prevent Job's suffering.

The trouble is that these sorts of excuses can't apply to relations with a god who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly benevolent. If such a god promises to meet you for lunch at 2 p.m., no auto accident can stop him, he can't be knocked unconscious, and his cell phone battery is always charged. If your friend who promised to meet you turns up later undamaged and breezily says, "Oh yeah, I was supposed to meet you; sorry, I just didn't feel like lunch, and I decided I didn't need to check in with you," then you would have a sound reason to begin doubting his friendship. If he's never behaved like this before, you'd give him a second and even a third chance. God needs a better excuse than this kind of analogy.

Similarly for the high-placed Nazi collaborator. Sure, he must move carefully, marshal his resources and allies, and strike when the moment is right, or he'll end up with a bullet in his brain too. But a god doesn't have this excuse. He's not vulnerable, he's in no danger from the Nazis and can act when it suits him -- indeed, to deny that is to deny his divine sovereignty. Nor does he need to sneak around at night, meeting his partisans by candlelight with secret handshakes and passwords, making portentous promises. (Christians sometimes like to talk as though the earth were in the hands of the devil and his forces, and so God must sneak around to escape detection as he prepares for his final victory. Um, no.) He can safely keep you informed without danger to you, let alone to himself. Doubting a god is not like doubting a mere human being. The standards for a god are higher than they are for us, yet to listen to Christian apologists, you'd think they were lower.

The same thing goes for the divine Surgeon. Surgeons cut you up, oncologists prescribe intensely unpleasant courses of chemotherapy or radiation, because they are not omnipotent or omniscient. A surgeon who insisted on vivisecting you when he or she could simply wave a hand and say, "Be healed," could reasonably be suspected of being a vicious sadist, and the burden of proof would be on him or her to give reasons why not. This applies to a god even more, and Lewis's argument isn't helped by the fact that his lord and savior didn't heal people by invasive procedures -- he simply said the word. If there's a reason why "spiritual" healing requires prolonged torture that may just as well destroy the patient's trust in the doctor as achieve its nominal end, the patient needs to know the reason. (Notice that if the patient loses faith, Christians see that as a failure of the patient, not of the doctor's abusive treatment.) If no such reason is given, it's time to look for a new doctor.

And so on. I've never yet encountered an analogical defense of God that didn't rely on excuses that might just barely excuse a human being, but not an all-powerful deity. This doesn't prove that the Christian god doesn't exist, of course; it only gives what I think is a plausible reason not to trust him. Considering that the Bible presents its god as an abusive husband, and in other unflattering ways, it's hard not to feel about suffering Christians who cling to their faith as I would about a human being who won't leave an abusive relationship, and keeps making the most extravagant excuses for the abuser. They have to find their own way out, but they need support when they're ready to leave. Otherwise the cycle of abuse will continue.