Ran across a blogad for something truly different this morning and I had to give them some props. An extremely smart musician in Chicago has come up with the idea of remaking classic Xmas carols as Klezmer tunes. The result is hysterical:
Go listen to a few of their samples or download the free complete version of “Oy To The World”. You’ll either kvetch or kvell.
Given the increased prominence religion has had in America over the last several years, I suppose this is not so surprising, but it’s not good news at all — a big article in the NY Times about the Christianization of the workplace.
On the face of it, it’s a nice idea:
One of the movement’s objectives is to give Christians an opportunity to “out” themselves on the job, to let them express who they are, freely and without feeling persecuted. Few would argue with such a goal: it suits an open society. And if it increases productivity and keeps C.E.O.’s from turning into reptiles, all the better.
Even government agencies are getting in on the game:
In 2001, Angie Tracey, an employee at the Centers for Disease Control, organized what she calls a “comprehensive workplace ministry,” among the first officially sanctioned employee religious groups within the federal government. She says that many colleagues have been “saved” at her group’s Bible studies and other gatherings on government property, and she describes the federal agency’s not-yet-saved employees as “fertile ground.” Her program has spread rapidly within the C.D.C., and employees at other divisions of the federal government — the Census Bureau, the General Services Administration, the Office of Personnel Management — have contacted her about bringing the Word into their workplaces, too.
Apparently it is completely legal to do this at a government agency, although frankly it boggles my mind that that is so.
But even if workplace evangelism is legal, it’s still got a big problem; that being the fact that part and parcel of the evangelical Christain faith is to prostletize. It sets up a dynamic tension between people who approve of that activity, and those who either have a secular orientation or who belong to faiths which do not have a tradition of evangelism.
On a small scale, who cares? If it makes for successful businesses and happy employees, why should anyone be concerned? Becasue these people have big plans. Some of them want to have not only Christian businesses, but all-Christian towns, and even an all-Christian America:
Later I met several of the men for lunch at the Olde Main Eatery downtown. One owns the local fitness center; another runs a heating-oil business. As they talked, their ideas and objectives expanded. It turned out that their group — Pray Elk River — is part of a network of municipal officials, ministers and small-business owners across the country that has the goal of winning whole towns over to Christ.
[snip]
Rick Heeren — a businessman and the author of “Thank God It’s Monday!” — is the Midwest representative for the national umbrella organization, which is called Harvest Evangelism. He told me that Harvest Evangelism had chosen Elk River as a “detonator city” through which, ultimately, the nation will be turned to Jesus Christ. (Other detonator cities include Honolulu and San Jose.)
Frankly reading this kind of thing turns my stomach in a mix of revulsion and fear. The America these people envision is an America that this Jew has literally no place in. And there are a hell of a lot more of them than there are of people like me. Although the author takes great pains to detail how kind, how nice, and how loving the evangelicals he meets generally are, the important question is never asked: what happens when you expand out of your all-white, all-Christian suburbs and meet people not willing to live within your vision?
The closest they get is when the author asks one of the subjects of the article, bank owner Chuck Ripka, the following:
When I asked Ripka if a Jew or Muslim had ever applied for a job at the bank, his choice of language was a bit odd: “We don’t really have that in our community at this point.”
The bank is located in a more or less all-white suburb in Minnesota, so no surprise there. But it is a critical point the author never quite addresses. This phenomenon is here and is is growing. It’s even fully legal. But what happens when the inevitable culture clash begins?
I often think that when America finally fails, it will be this schism — the religious versus the secular — that brings it down. If these differences calcify for a few more decades, it’s not such a stretch to see the day come when the Christian heartland decides it does not want or need those ungodly people on the coasts who refuse to conform to their vision of an all-Christian America and seriously tries to form an America of its own.
And in my heart of hearts I have to say, maybe that’s the right solution. It would certainly be better than the nightmare vision of a civil war over the future of America, or even worse, the repressions, deportations, or even executions that might emerge out of one America dominated by the theocratic mindset.
I ran across a well-written piece over at a blog I would not normally visit today. It’s nice to see that at least a few people on the other side of the blogosphere grok why many Jews do not feel comfortable voting Republican.
In brief:
The first is that Jews tend to be very intimidated by evangelical Christians. Jews as a whole don’t really try to convert people and evangelicals are all about evangelizing and converting. Big culture clash there.
[snip]
The second is that Jews are a minority culture. When Christians start talking about faith-based initiatives, Jews realize that anything they do is going to be overwhelmed by the vastly Christian majority.
Indeed. These are not the only reasons, of course, but they are very pertinent ones. (Yglesias offers a few more).
It would be nice if more folks in Red-State Blogville “got it”. Volokh twice suggests that Jews have some racial or genetic predisposition to be liberals, a suggestion I find offensive and even potentially frightening. But expecting rationality from far-right wingnuts like him is probably too much to ask.
The New York Times has a long, interesting analysis of President Bush today. Not that it’s going to change anyone’s minds, but I think it’s pretty well-done.
The Decembrist more or less says what I was going to say, except that I felt from very early on this was all about religion and belief. I think being on the outside of the religious mainstream in the US helps sharpen your instincts on this point, but for all I know the Decembrist is Jewish, so maybe not.
I’ve felt for a while that September 11th took some otherwise normal people and turned them into rabid “get the Arabs” Bush supporters, but not many people have looked at what it did to Bush himself. This article doesn’t make the point directly, but I think that change that Suskind points to, that of going from “a self-help Methodist” to “an American Calvinist” was very much a reaction to 9/11.
And then there’s the people around Bush. This section pretty much sums it up:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Religious fervor, total arrogance, and dead-wrong political instincts. It would be hard to find a worse trifecta for the people running this country.
I just hope we start to find our way back to normalcy on Election Day.
I’m in a pretty foul mood from trying to get my system rebuilt (have just a handful of programs reinstalled so far) and then I find this in my Gmail in-box: Hate Crime in SF
Swastikas were scrawled over as many as 50 campaign signs in a hate crime against an Israeli-American Richmond District businessman seeking election to the Board of Supervisors.
The target of the anti-Semitic vandalism spree was David Heller, president of the Geary Boulevard Merchant Association and first-time candidate for supervisor in District 1.
Upon arriving to work Monday morning, Heller was inundated with messages from business owners whose windows had been defaced with swastikas over the weekend. In each reported incident, the campaign sign, which features Heller’s picture, was taped to the inside of the store window and the vandal used a black marker to superimpose a swastika and a Star of David symbol in front of Heller’s face on the outside of the glass.
I lived the the Richmond district for 2 and a half years. It’s a great place to live and is arguably the most overtly Jewish section of the city; there’s three synagogues and one of the city’s two kosher butchers in the area where this hate crime happened. Anti-semitism is always upsetting but when it hits close to home like this it’s also scary.
What also concerns me is that a number of the businesses who were displaying signs for Hiller have now pulled then out of their windows becasue they’re concerned about the potential for further vandalism – which hurts his campaign. Now I don’t know anything about Hiller as a condidate but when people can be scared into not supporting a candidate for fear of violence there is something very wrong going on.
Bleh.
Back to rebuilding my system.
Kristof has a column today worth reading in its entirety. He’s talking about “Glorious Appearing,” the latest work in the “Left Behind” series. If you’ve had your head under a rock, these books are best-selling novels, widely available – I even saw the most recent one for sale in the downtown SF Costco. In “Glorious Appearing” Jesus finally does return, and not only does he send nonbelievers into a chasm with a wave of his hand, but also the bodies of others are ripped apart and left strewn around the Earth, presumably as a warning to the remaining believers what could happen to them if their faith wavers.
Kristof:
It’s disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety. If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of “Glorious Appearing” and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture.
I’m with Kristof 100% on this. Why do Christians get a pass for this kind of language when Muslims don’t?
Here in America, we’re free to believe what we want and to read what we want. I completely support the right of evangelical Christians to read “Glorious Appearing” and believe that God will cast their friends, neighbors, and even their relatives into a pit of fire (not to mention billions of Hindus, Muslims, Jews and even Mormons). But that doesn’t mean that other people shouldn’t ask hard questions about what kinds of paths those beliefs can take a believer down, and whether actions generated by those beliefs are truly right.
It’s also well-known that the current Presidential administration is a deeply Christian one. We need to ask whether this attitude of “they’re all going to Hell anyway” (aka the James Baker ‘Fuck The Jews‘ point of view) has had a real impact on their foreign and domestic policies. This President, after all, has not been shy about saying Jesus is his favorite philosopher and a more important guide to him than his own father.
Kristof also says:
As my Times colleague David Kirkpatrick noted in an article, this portrayal of a bloody Second Coming reflects a shift in American portrayals of Jesus, from a gentle Mister Rogers figure to a martial messiah presiding over a sea of blood. Militant Christianity rises to confront Militant Islam.
It leaves me uncomfortably wondering where Jews fit into the picture.
Going off on a quick tangent – I sometimes wonder – how, if you’re a deeply devout evangelical, do you live with the sincere belief that most of your fellows on this planet are going to burn in hell? Do you worry about it, pray for them, and hope they see the light? Or do you just pretend to be nice to them and in the privacy of your home, laugh at them all for being doomed to Hell?
I doubt many Christians of that persuasion read this blog, but I would really like to know.