On November 12, 2010, you lashed out at American citizens who dared to protest your totalitarian rent-a-cop “security” tactics at U.S. airports. “It is irresponsible,” you said, “for a group to suggest travelers opt out of the very screening that could prevent an attack using non-metallic explosives.”

To which I respond: YOU, sir, are irresponsible.

It is irresponsible for you to suggest that by opting out of the full-body scanner (as is my right), I am endangering my country. Just because you can’t tell the difference between me and a terrorist, doesn’t mean I can’t.

It is irresponsible for you to opt out of the very screening that really could prevent a terrorist attack: explosives-sniffing dogs, basic investigative profiling methods, and a little common sense.

It is irresponsible for you to wait until now to implement the “enhanced pat downs” you claim are necessary to stop terrorism, when you could have done so shortly after the terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center.

It is irresponsible for you to steamroll over the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Does the term “unreasonable search” mean anything to you?

It is irresponsible for you to expose children, pregnant women, and medical patients to unnecessary doses of radiation, the effects of which are still being debated.

It is irresponsible for you to require airline employees to expose themselves to the full-body scanner on a daily basis, knowing full well that radiation has a cumulative effect on a person’s health.

It is irresponsible for you to subject innocent Americans to a virtual strip-search and to the danger that the images will be saved and stored somewhere for the viewing pleasure of your rent-a-cops.

It is irresponsible for you to respond to the statistically small risk of a terrorist attack by imposing the statistically greater risk of skin cancer.

It is irresponsible for you to ignore the corruption of the sweetheart deal that was made with former Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff, who benefited financially from the sale of the full-body scanners.

It is irresponsible for you to bully us into submission to your scanner by making the alternative unendurable.

It is irresponsible for you to use the genital groping of men, women, children, and sex assault victims as a means of humiliation to force us into compliance. There’s a legal term for this strategy: sexual assault.

It is irresponsible for you to threaten exorbitant fines against Americans who don’t want their genitals to be seen or touched. If you were truly interested in stopping terrorists, rather than controlling the innocent, you would realize you can’t slap a fine on Mohammed Akbar’s blown up bits.

It is irresponsible for you to treat innocent Americans like criminals, while HS overlord Janet Napolitano considers a religious exemption for Muslims. That’s right – FOR MUSLIMS, the very people who made your tyrannical policies “necessary” in the first place! Thus I ask: Who is the target of your scanners? Who are you here to protect? Why would those most likely to commit terrorism on a plane be exempt from the molestation to which the rest of us are compelled by threat of fines and arrest?

No, sir, it is not I who put personal preferences above the safety of this nation. It is not I who put political correctness above proper procedure. It is not I who, for a decade, and with billions of dollars in federal funding at my disposal, has failed to catch a single terrorist.

No, my good sir, that would be the TSA.

And so I ask: Why should I give a rip what you think about national security? Even a zombie wouldn’t buy your lies.

While standing at a public urinal in my friendly neighborhood Walmart, my eyes drifted to a framed poster of a country road winding into the sunset — a simple metaphor that even Homer Simpson and his radioactive co-workers could understand, thanks to the caption emblazoned in wide-spaced capital letters across the bottom: “CHALLENGE.”

Not until I finished my present business and then discovered two similar posters near the sink did it hit me that something was wrong. Unspeakably, unnaturally, unfathomably wrong. Chuck-Norris-in-a-cheerleading-miniskirt wrong. The revelation passed before my eyes in wide-spaced caps:

“THERE ARE MOTIVATIONAL POSTERS IN THE RESTROOM.”

The first step to recovery is admitting the problem, and this was a problem. Not once in my digestive system’s 29-year history had it ever required a motivational pep talk to get through a visit to the urinal. Had I been trying to pass a stone, I would have been more needful of privacy than an inspiring word.

Maybe the truth was nothing more sinister than that the manager wanted to decorate the restrooms and just happened to possess a surplus of motivational posters (which Santa’s elves have a habit of sneaking into the inventories of any and all businesses). Or maybe the posters were intended to offset the pain of looking in the mirror and finding another gray hair.

Yet, I had to wonder: could this be the work of a disgruntled employee subverting his manager’s authority by banishing tacky propaganda to a room of dishonor? We are the most cynical generation in American history — a generation whose most common reaction to inspirational slogans is to mock them (for instance, by producing a competing line of “demotivator” posters). By join two things that don’t belong, a rogue artist had transformed an otherwise mundane restroom into a thought-provoking piece of functional post-modern anti-propaganda propaganda.

While art displayed out of context may not be the scandal it once was, my restroom encounter illustrates that it is still just as tricky to interpret. This is especially so when it comes to religious symbolism. At the same Wal-mart, I came upon a display of tee shirts with familiar pop-culture logos that were altered to give Christian messages. What first appeared to be a wearable advertisement for Coca-Cola or Harley Davidson turned out to be a shout out to the most wearable wonder of all — Jesus Christ.

After two decades (at least) of cranking out these mass-marketing parodies, I think the designers owe an explanation of what the shirts are supposed to mean. Is the message that God is like a soft drink? That we consume Jesus like a commercial product? That you can be a Christian and still be a part of pop culture? That God is cool enough to be represented by a trendy tee shirt design? Or is it simply meant to surprise? For a religion that has always been so dependent upon symbols (as all religions are), the post-modern habit of mixing dissonant ideas is as helpful as tossing Schrödinger’s cat in a blender before it has a chance to smell the poison.

The same might be said of Christian music. Often, the styles, attitudes, and conventions of the secular rock culture are embraced as a package deal with a tacked-on Gospel message that just seems out of place. I say this, not as a person who equates rock and roll with El Diablo, but as an ardent fan who sometimes has difficulty distinguishing between Christian bands and secular bands. Artistic conventions that make perfect sense in the hands of Marilyn Manson or the Backstreet Boys are borrowed by Tooth ‘n Nail Records or the Nashville CCM scene without any obvious purpose. I remember an acquaintance from middle school complaining to me that Christian rock music was self-contradictory, because rock music is by definition anti-Christian. He was so accustomed to associating drum beats with the devil that he could not separate the medium from his own worldly way of life. The context made no sense to him. While I would challenge this person’s narrow understanding of music, I sympathize with his confusion. The sexual energy, the materialism, the self-centered, Bacchanalian attitude, the alternately vapid and disturbing lyrics, and yes, even the “devil ears” hand sign … all these things somehow manage to cross over.

The point of all this is not to make a judgment so much as to ask a question: How can the church speak to the culture without embodying the absurdity of a motivational poster on a bathroom wall?

As it turns out, however, the writers may need to go back to the drawing board, because the doom-and-gloom futurists have got the story backward. Oh, there’s still plenty of doom and gloom, but the evil corporations are not swallowing up government. Instead, the government is slowly, methodically, and with sweet words of mercy, swallowing up free enterprise. And it is happening with the full support of corporate executives, who would love nothing better than to enjoy the job security of adoption into the state.

Yes, our nation’s financial crisis is scaring us into surrendering more freedoms, by letting Congress transform Wall Street into a welfare state for the rich. Whether or not you believe that Bush’s big fat bailout bill is necessary, the implications for the future are grim. Rather than taking from the rich and giving to the poor, we are taking from the middle class and giving their earnings to greedy, incompetent millionaires, thus enabling their bad behavior and keeping unprofitable companies in power.

It is certainly true that big business benefits many people – in this case, the middle class workers who have invested in the stock market for their retirement. But this view is short-sighted. In capitalism, even the biggest corporations of all, if they are bad businesses, must be allowed to die, so that more profitable and better managed corporations can take their place and benefit the whole economy. By artificially keeping the big boys in power, we are not solving the problem but extending it into the generations to come.

Even more frightening is what this bailout will mean for the role of government. The Supreme Court has held that when the federal government gives money to something, it has the right to regulate that thing. By investing in these failing businesses, the government is eroding the private sector and increasing its own power and authority. It is buying us out, and we are running with arms wide open to our destruction. Before we realize what we’ve done, our Constitutional rights will have withered away, as they always do wither when a thing is deemed “public” rather than private. The interests of legislators and CEOs will become inextricably intertwined, and success will be monopolized by those who rub shoulders with the feds.

Make no mistake. This is not capitalism. This is fascism—a marriage of big government and big business, with government as the undisputed senior partner. I fear that one day we will regret having turned a blind eye when the United States of America embraced a command economy. If the bailout is necessary to the survival of our economy (and I don’t believe it is), then the situation is far worse than even the doomsayers imgine.

I’ve always wondered why Christian culture tries so hard to mimic the art of the world around it, as if Christianity lacks enough passion and tradition of its own from which to draw. Imitation is not always wrong (if anything, it is largely inescapable), but if the gospel is truly an alternative to the philosophies of the world, the difference should announce itself loud and clear in the work of its artists, whatever the medium. A Fujimura painting reveals a very different human soul than does a Picasso, a Dali, or, if I may be more obvious, the grotesque cover art for a Cannibal Corpse death metal album. The product of a man’s hands bears the fingerprints of those hands.

History has taught us that when an artist imitates nature, he reveals less about the natural world than he does about himself. The graceful gobs and splashes of paint may bear the image of Mount Everest in all its towering, dizzying glory; or in our silicone age, the eagle’s pixellated wings may seem to fly free of the digital screen and whisk the viewer to the heavens. But the image of Mount Everest will never declare the cold angles of a mountain so loudly as it declares the mannish-ness of the man who shaped them; and the illusion of the eagle will never expose the mystery of flight so wondrously as it exposes the observer of flight, who, by some primordial impulse, dared to transform motion into art.

G.K. Chesterton expressed very nearly the same idea when he said that “art is the signature of man.” For him, art was the empirical evidence of man’s uniqueness – the proof that we are not animals. The popular notion that humans and apes are variations of one colossal (and colossally boring) theme ignores the strangeness of this bipedal primate who, alone of all living creatures, thought to make meaningful scratches in a rock. Since Chesterton’s time, it has been discovered that some animals can be trained to splash paint on a canvas, and perhaps even trained to communicate through the paint. But to our knowledge, no non-human creature, fossilized or living, has ever come up with the idea on its own.

Whatever the differences between man and beast, I will take Chesterton’s metaphor further. Art is the signature of God, the memory of a Creator, the shrill insistence of the good. The reason some brilliant works of art (and some very horribly awful ones) fall like a suffocating weight upon the audience’s soul, is that art and purpose fit together like color and light. Art by its nature seeks meaning. And meaning leads inevitably to God – whether the myriad grotesque impostors who dominate the history of graven images, or the one true Being whose eternal glory cannot be contained in wood or stone.

But what if the spiritual activity of mimicking mountains and eagles is attempted by an artist whose spirit is dead, who has given up on meaning? The history of modern and post-modern art is the history of men trying to divorce art from purpose and make it the property of beasts. The empty feeling in the gut that a walk through a Warhol exhibit elicits is the same feeling that discourages me from watching certain movies or reading certain books. Even when the hijacked art of contemporary heathendom evolves into a desperate cry for help, as it does in the movie Requiem for a Dream, the cry brings hunger without hope, critique without conviction, brilliance without wisdom. The art of the world is an incomplete child, at war with itself, panting with exhaustion as it tries to tear apart what God has joined together. Before the crayons of the atheists can begin to refute God, they’ve already refuted the atheist.

But of course, I am not just like you—as is plainly evident by the fact that I am president and you are not. Let me explain why this is so.

The statistics prove that the majority of the American people share values and beliefs in common with the majority of the American people. This surprising fact is accepted with near-unanimity by mathematicians, sociologists, and political scientists. What, then, do we conclude from this? Quite simply, that the similarities between myself and the average American should not be regarded as exceptional, but as expected. Yet, my similarities with my supporters cannot be the sole explanation for why I, and not any one of my millions of supporters, have the key to the Oval Office.

I, unlike you, was born to privilege, wealth, and an Ivy League education. I have friends in high places who were willing to fork over millions upon millions of dollars, so that my name could litter billboards and computer screens across this fine country and be subliminally pumped into your less-than-vigilant brains. My natural good looks and public speaking skills give me an advantage over other members of my party, and assure that I will accomplish whatever I set my mind to accomplish in the game of diplomacy.

When a president shares his people’s values, his rhetorical skills are considered an asset to the nation. But my policy of naked honesty forces me to warn the American people that this is not always so. You see, when society as a whole is self-centered and cruel, the statistical probability is quite high that its leaders will be similarly self-centered and cruel. At first glance, this may seem a mutually beneficial situation; yet, as we learn from experience, such cruelty is rarely appreciated by the cruel voters who must endure it. Let us hope, then, that the American voters who elected me are not cruel. I do not say that you are, but the evidence fails to convince me that you are not.

As I begin my four years at the helm of this mighty nation, do not forgot that 39 percent of voters chose my opponent. This means that any claim on my part to be doing the will of the American people is at best a claim to be doing what the larger percentage of the American people want. The nature of democracy is to strip the minority of everything it desires, in every possible way.

Do not misunderstand. I do not claim to be the champion of minorities. Another word for minority is “special interest,” and the nature of special interests is to strip the majority of everything it desires, in every possible way. Clever politicians prefer the term “minority” when their policies are supported by the few, and “special interest” when their policies are supported by the many. Worse, on some occasions they intentionally mis-label their supporters as minorities and their enemies as special interests, even though their “minority” may be the majority and their “special interest” a disconnected hodgepodge of barely interested voters who happen to share a single opinion. Politicians do this because they are wizards of rhetoric, and they know that Americans associate good things with the first word and bad things with the second.

Nevertheless, there is a way for government to rule with integrity, and that is because truth does not depend upon the will of the people, or even upon the will of the ruling elites. There is right and there is wrong. There is good and there is evil. The framers of our Constitution, if not the most devout religious believers, at least retained a memory of absolute principles, which they, in their Enlightenment era thinking, interpreted as a Lockean system of universal rights and liberties. For better or worse, that is our nation’s heritage, and Constitutional interpretation depends upon that heritage, not the whims of Supreme Court judges. Only when we too believe in absolute truth can we faithfully separate the good parts of our heritage from the bad, and only then can we make appropriate adjustments to our nation’s highest document through the legal and Constitutionally implemented process of amendment.

My critics will take what I have said as evidence that I seek to “legislate morality.” To them I answer, yes, I do indeed intend to legislate morality. For if I do not legislate morality, then what, I ask, am I legislating? The alternative to moral law is immoral law. The alternative to legislating morality is legislating for selfish personal gain, or legislating to achieve some particular goal which the legislators do not believe is either right or wrong but merely desired.

Do not be deceived, America. All politicians legislate morality. Even those who are not themselves moral do regularly justify their policies on the basis of morality. We punish murder because it is wrong. We raise taxes because it is good to fund a military to defend the people. We forbid slavery because the idea of a human being as property offends our moral sensibilities. We fine those who litter, because we feel an obligation to care for the earth.

Heed my warning, America. On the day the most powerful nation on earth ceases to legislate morality and instead legislates power; on the day that the will of the people is entirely divorced from the moral compass of the people; on the day that human responsibility is supplanted by human ambition – be very afraid.

But there is another, less obvious, threat, and that is the rhetorical ruse of those who seem to endorse a kind of truth, when in fact their principles are meaningless. For instance, there are those who live by the law that they have the right to do anything they want to do, so long as their behavior does not violate the rights of others. As a fundamental principle, this claim is meaningless, because the rights themselves are not fundamentally defined. Therefore the decision as to which behaviors infringe upon rights is an arbitrary one. Unpopular though it may be to admit it, every man’s freedom is an infringement upon another person’s choice.

For another example, there are those who define morality as the opposite of “extremism.” The use of a scale with polar extremes and a center can be a helpful tool for describing possibilities; but again, the anti-extremists make the same mistake of endorsing an empty principle, for an extreme can be defined in any way we so choose. Only so long as the specific truth that is the balance is already known, any discussion of extremes is meaningless. For one person, Pentecostal Christianity might be extreme. For another, atheistic secularism is extreme. For yet another, all that is not socialist is extreme.

As your president, I will never speak the empty language of extremes or rights, because I see how it has been abused by politicians who prefer to say very little while appearing to say much. My extremes will be defined by the balance, and the balance will be a metaphor for acknowledged truths, and those truths will be specific and absolute and have their origin in Truth himself, who is God the maker of all, without whom morality can be nothing more than a convenient illusion.

Such is not to say that absolute truths do not interact with each other in complex ways. Nor is it to say that I, as your president, will never compromise. A representative government such as ours, with all its checks and balances, cannot function unless those who comprise it are willing to compromise for the sake of the greater good. But while most politicians pretend to believe in everything they vote for, I vow to always be honest when I put my weight behind a bill for purely political purposes, or when I endorse a less-than-ideal bill because the better bill could not have gotten enough votes to pass. My honesty will shame your leaders as they have never been shamed before.

Thank you, America, for voting for me. You have no idea what you are getting yourself into.

]]> http://bratcave.wordpress.com/2008/09/07/presidential-acceptance-speech-that-will-never-be-given/feed/ 0 maddminstrel http://bratcave.wordpress.com/2008/09/07/banning-gender/ http://bratcave.wordpress.com/2008/09/07/banning-gender/#comments Sun, 07 Sep 2008 02:44:00 +0000 maddminstrel http://bratcave.wordpress.com/?p=68 ]]> Good news for the politically correct across the Atlantic. Some E.U. officials want to protect women’s rights by removing more of them. These officials, with the blessing of the E.U.’s women’s rights committee, propose a ban on all commercial advertisements that present women as sex objects or portray gender in “stereotypical ways.”

For those of you who don’t speak the language of political correctness, “stereotypical” apparently includes such things as big burly construction workers selling soda or graceful models hawking perfume. No wonder Islam is fast becoming the dominant monotheistic religion in Europe, if its leaders are more worried about protecting their children from the horrors of gender than the violence of jihad.
No doubt, many of the banned commercials are ones I would find personally offensive. And no doubt such a law would be well received by jealous ugly people everywhere. But has Europe truly devolved to a level where it refuses to recognize that males are different from females; or worse, where it forces reality to conform to the delusion by banning all natural expressions of human gender identity?

In the beginning, God created us male and female. This statement was, is, and will always be true, regardless of cultural presuppositions and regardless of censorship. How odd that the war for equality always inevitably becomes a war for authoritarian control over the human experience.

With or without the Ninth Commandment, we will not soon forget the lesson of the past few weeks. And the lesson is that Communists lie. Gratuitously. Unashamedly.

Whatever China’s hopes for the 2008 Olympics, the debacle has not helped the Communist government’s international reputation. From fake fireworks to a fake singer to underage gymnasts, the spectacle serves as a warning to the increasingly bureaucratic governments of the West of how an authoritarian state censors truth and confuses information with propaganda. One blogger goes so far as to say that cheating has become an epidemic in Chinese culture. At any rate, honesty has never been the easy road to success, post-Cultural Revolution. If the Communist Party forbids visiting Olympic athletes from speaking their opinions, imagine the rolls of duct tape it must be using on its own people.

To the north, the Russians have been telling some fibs of their own. Though officially no longer Communists, Putin and Co. might as well have painted U.S.S.R. on the tanks rolling deep into Georgia, the warpath paved with lie after lie and broken treaty after broken treaty. The crisis felt like a George Orwell novel, as Moscow sent its solders onward to force a Georgian ceasefire the Georgians had already commenced. That the alleged “ethnic cleansing” of separatists never occurred hardly came as a surprise, as Moscow’s true ambition—the restoration of empire—was painfully clear to every nation crouching in the shadow of Russia’s borders. Old habits die hard. And now, to add insult to injury, Putin is making the groundless accusation that the U.S. incited the Georgian war to help a candidate win the presidential election.

As America wrestles with opinion-stifling euphemisms such as the “fairness doctrine” and “hate speech,” we dare not forget the lie-deterring benefits of a free press. In liberty as in bondage, lies will be told, but where there is freedom, the chance exists that the lies will be exposed for what they are. I make no philosophical claim to an innate human right of expression. My point is more practical. And the point is that Communists lie. Or to put it broadly, governments that control the flow of information have scant incentive to tell the truth.

When word hit the presses that Russian tanks were rolling into Georgia, every Johnny Reb south of the Mason-Dixon line grabbed his rifle and marched to Atlanta.

Ok, so you know that didn’t happen. But I almost wish it had. As it stands, Comrade Stalin…I mean Medvedev…is getting away with murder, as he sends his Russian horde deep into neighboring Georgia–supposedly to force a ceasefire, but continuing to bomb and slaughter even as the miniscule Georgian army has ceased retaliation.

On one side, a former Soviet satellite seeks to reclaim its own breakaway province of South Ossetia. On the other, a corrupt Russian government dreams of reclaiming its Soviet empire, and has sided with Ossetian rebels and even granted them Russian citizenship, as it does everything in its power to prevent Georgia from joining NATO.

Let’s be clear. The Russians have never had the respect for human life that the west does (shallow though ours may be). When Americans bomb enemies, civilian deaths are a regrettable consequence we try to avoid. When Russians bomb enemies, they don’t care who dies. In its Communist days, Russia slaughtered its own people by the thousands, because if there is anything we’ve learned from the global Marxist experiment, it is that Communism preserves the system at the expense of the people. Two decades after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the U.S.S.R., the Russian people have not entirely overcome their grim legacy.

Let’s also be clear that Russia considers Georgia her own. Unlike other breakaway nations, Georgia belonged to Russia for three centuries and is the birthplace of Joseph Stalin. For this reason, it’s safe to say that things will only get worse before they get better. Russia has no intention of conceding anything. The cold war has returned.

Or has it?

When crises strike, we know which country always comes to the rescue. No, not France. Not Mexico either. Not even the good people of Tibet. Yes, you guessed it: the hero is none other than the Great Carbon-Producing Satan, the United States of America. But with our military already strained by prolonged commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an election season upon us, Bush won’t want to stir things up by getting involved in a small dispute on the other side of the globe. And if Bush won’t do it, Europe certainly won’t. Russia knows this, and that is why they will do as much damage as they can for as long as the opportunity lasts.

One wonders how different the relations between Russia and the West would be today, had the unruly medieval Crusaders not sacked Constantinople. The failure of eastern and western Christians to unite against Muslim aggression resulted in a de-Christianized Middle East and the creation of Turkey. Now, a post-Christian Russia is increasingly siding with Muslims against the West, and, like her Muslim allies, using the oil market to control us.

One has to wonder whether the cold war ever really ended.

Cut the lifespan, increase sales, increase profit. Evil genius.

But church camp was so much more than smashing tapes or even singing Kumbaya (for the record, we never actually sang Kumbaya). Kids fled to camp to escape their parents and instead came face to face with the Father of the cosmos, from whom there was suddenly no refuge. We could not hide behind a fast-paced, multimedia barrage of secular distraction, within which God seemed so very small and far away and insignificant. Here, the God we had set on a shelf along with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy took on a fierce, immediate relevance. God mattered, and we understood we were either for Him or against Him. Our week-long camps were and are a part of a broader revivalist strategy for shocking the youth into the faith, and no discussion of Christian culture is complete without examining this experience. If under-21 clubs are a rite-of-passage among the general teenage populace, the youth revival service holds a similar distinction among believers.

The gaining of a culture comes hand-in-hand with the dismissal of the old. And what better place to cast off the “old man” than in the middle of the wilderness, isolated from temptation and surrounded by believers? To experience church camp is to seize life’s remote control and press “fast forward.” We acquired best friends and romantic partners, wept through heart-wrenching breakups, turned from cursing like sailors to praising like priests, all in the course of one week.

It started with fun. Yes, fun. And not even necessarily “religious” fun. Just your traditional summertime wackiness, like cabin pranks and pillow fights, or a talent show, or the presentation of an award to the eighth-grade boy who ate fifty pancakes. And the merchandise. Oh, the merchandise! For ten dollars, you could purchase your very own one-hundred percent cotton t-shirt with one of various Christianized versions of popular secular attire, or even original Jesus-wear. Wardrobe evangelism appealed to our consciences, if not necessarily our sense of style, and some of us just needed clean clothes after a week of fishing, soccer, water sports, babe-hunting, “Frisbee golf,” pillow fights, and altar calls. One shirt boasted, “I may be having more fun than you.” Another sported the infamous Christian fish. As a fiscal conservative, I avoided most of the lures of the Jesus market, but did in one instance succumb to temptation and purchase a t-shirt with the (at the time) culturally relevant message, “Satan loves you…NOT.”

I still don’t understand the “NOT” shirts.

But the merch was just a sideshow.

Enter the evangelist: an apocalyptic, physically imposing figure, handsome and well-groomed and sporting a youthful-looking goatee to connect with our hip generation. But the voice was what made or broke him; that booming, God-like voice that thundered down from the top of Mt. Sinai and shook open every secret place. If you had thought an unkind thought about your counselor, the evangelist’s voice brought that sin to remembrance and raised it up before the assembly in his clenching, waving fists. The death rays shooting from his eyeballs melted your pimply, adolescent skin, making you slink down into your chair, down into a stain of your former self. His eyes kept watching, and everything trembled: he in the Spirit, you in fear….

Reporter John Blake makes some relevant observations. A diverse congregation means a broad range of tastes in music and preaching style, which can translate into conflict, while some people just aren’t comfortable being in racially-mixed groups, and others still hold racist attitudes.

But Blake, like most journalists, begins with and never questions one crucial assumption—that a segregated church is an indicator of racism. And because he leaves his ethical judgment unexamined, he never looks beyond color and custom to deeper theological divides.

To illustrate, let us imagine we have wandered into a mosque in Deerfield, Michigan. Would we ever, upon noticing the Middle Eastern ethnicity of most of the worshipers, accuse that mosque of being racist or racially-exclusive? Or if all the members of a New York synagogue happened to be of Jewish descent, would we demand them to include the Irish? With the exception of a potential plot for a Seinfeld episode, I doubt it.

We know that people tend to follow the beliefs and practices of those who raise them. Thus, Arabs go to mosques, Israelis go to synagogues, and Italians go to mass. A person from Group A will spend more time interacting with Group A than Group B, because Group B does not represent his interests and values as well as does group A. Nothing sinister or racist about this.

The American religious segregation of whites and blacks was ignited by racism, but is sustained by conviction. Not the conviction that whites and blacks should drink from different water fountains. Rather, the conviction that keeps the Italians praying the Rosary and the Dutch quoting the five points of Calvinism. As whites and blacks met in different buildings on Sunday morning, they developed unique beliefs and traditions. Blake notes the discomfort whites may feel while listening to a fiery black preacher, but never considers that the discomfort might stem from legitimate theological differences that cannot simply be set aside for the sake of integration. I have met Christians who would even take offense at the use of an organ in a church service, because, in their view, instruments are forbidden from Sunday worship. Not surprisingly, the most integrated churches are often Pentecostal churches, because the movement has its theological roots in both races.

Even so, ethnicity does play its own part in Sunday worship. For many people, church is a place to celebrate one’s ethnic heritage, eat ethnic foods, and be with other people of the same race. This seems particularly true in America, because, as immigrants brought their faiths with them, their churches became a way to assert themselves among the other groups. Thus, the Greeks go to the Greek Orthodox church, and the Serbians go to the Serbian Orthodox church, although technically these two divisions are of the same denomination.

The ethno-centric attitude does suggest a mix-up of priorities. But the issue here may be more a lack of Christian sincerity than the presence of racism (although racism is sometimes a factor). By simply assuming the necessity, and the reason for the necessity, of integration, we often miss the big picture of a theologically divided Christianity that has many problems beside racism to grapple with.

After all, maybe a part of social maturity is learning to be comfortable with our differences to the point that we do not always have to integrate to feel we are not racist.