The American Conscience and the Horror of Denial

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Anonymous businesswomanJocelyn is in her final year at an Ivy League law school. Though she came from humble roots and didn’t enjoy the birthright of a silver spoon in her mouth, Jocelyn took a can-do approach to life. Valedictorian of her high school class, her establishment  as a 17-year-old of a hospice program in Charleston, S.C., geared specifically for the poor was a deciding factor in her acceptance to every notable university to which she applied. Perfect SATs and an IQ of 142 fast-tracked her for great things post-grad school. You can recognize Joceyln on campus by the designer handbags she indulges in and her winning smile. At 5′ 8″ and 118 pounds, the willowy brunette has the looks to match her intellect, as her offers from international modeling agencies will attest. Several of her professors remarked that with her combo of stunning good looks and brains, Jocelyn could write her ticket anywhere.

In contrast, Jessie didn’t make it past 10th grade, which was a disappointment to upperclassmen at her high school who expected the easy source of a good time to keep producing for another couple years. The hair color comes from a bottle, and the attitude is pure sass—pretty much the only thing pure about Jessie. Looking for more, she left her small town in Indiana and headed for the big city, where’s she’s a common sight in local bars and on street corners. Her weapon of choice is a pair of crimson stilettos she found on sale at DSW, and with her long legs and short shorts, Jessie attracts a lot of attention. Or she did. A couple face-busting fights with that guy who hangs around her, a meth bust or two, and some other hygiene issues have taken the luster off the small town transplant. You’d guess 40, but she’s actually just 26. And if you had to conjecture about her life trajectory, the angle is downward, with the streets looking meaner. The other day, she got bypassed up for a younger girl, with the man tossing off a “skank” after looking her way and deciding no.

Now if I asked you which was a prostitute, would you say Jocelyn or Jessie?

The answer? Both. Sure, Jocelyn’s clientele is more upscale and her prices higher, but law school isn’t cheap.

Which brings us to infamous abortion “doctor” Kermit Gosnell.

The New York Times blog ran a post called “What the Gosnell Case Doesn’t Mean.” I find it telling that the URL slug for that post is “what-the-gosnell-case-doesnt-tell-us,” a surefire sign that even the writer knew better. You see, anyone breathing knows exactly what the case tells us. Better that our enlightened betters now inform us of what that telling actually means. And so goes the media’s infatuation with its own moral brilliance, informing the great unwashed of meaning.

The only difference between Jocelyn and Jessie is the pretense we constructed in our own minds about the virtue of one over the other. Both women made their money selling their bodies to men. Strip away the settings and the details, and the outcome is the same.

The only real distinction between the Gosnell case and the typical abortion mill that escapes our collective judgment is the level of sloppiness.

The great lie of denial that happens every day in America is that seemingly rational people can’t bring themselves to be aghast at the Jocelyns of this world. Same for abortion. The abortion doctor in Beverly Hills is no different than Kermit Gosnell, save for a cleaner operation and better quality K Cups in the waiting room. The outcome is the same: Two people go in, and only one comes out. Context means nothing to the one who doesn’t leave alive.

That Americans, for the most part, can’t understand this is why The New York Times blog writer can get away with the denial he spews all over the monitor. By insisting that Gosnell is NOT the typical face of the abortion industry, he perpetuates myths and salves the conscience of a country. Vilifying Gosnell is our contemporary version of “one man must die for the good of the nation”–except we feel better about our choice over that of the Jews and Romans, because our scapegoat is so obviously guilty.

We tell ourselves how enlightened we are, that we can’t be fooled by mere facades, and then we declare our support for the “right to choose” and ask for Jocelyn’s number.

The Cardiovocal Atheist

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Vocal atheist returns less than 11,000 results, says Google, but I ran across it at least three times in items I read last week. In contrast, vocal Christian returns 127,000 Google results.

Funny thing is, atheism doesn’t start with what is voiced with the mouth. I guess Google, fount of all theological wisdom it might be, got this right.

Psalm 14:1 begins like a punch to the solar plexus:

The fool says in his heart, There is no God.

I did a bad thing there in that quote. I left out the ESV’s quotation marks around what the fool said. Instead, I went more for the formatting style of an internal thought. You see inner monologue formatted that way in novels. Sometimes, it’s even written like this:

The fool says in his heart, There is no God.

That second style seems even more ominous than the first. Almost like a shout. Or the whispered thoughts of the heroine in the horror flick who is walking the “empty” house, and we hear her inner trepidations–and all the while we know the deranged killer is right behind her.Inner wasteland

Regardless, what is said in Psalm 14:1 is internal only. It reverberates inside the heart. Call it cardiovocal. A resonate dissonance that ends up shattering the whole man, like some cheap crystal facing Ella Fitzgerald on Memorex.

One gets the sense that it’s a ruminated internal saying, too, a cardiovocalization people repeat over and over as if looped, a repeating sample people dance to.

I think if you could hear the cardiovocalizations of the average person, you would hear There is no God loud and clear. A person doesn’t have to say it with his or her lips because it never stops echoing in the chambers of the heart.

Which is why I think that Alister McGrath, the noted theologian, is wrong in his The Twilight of Atheism. There is no God is the mantra of atheism, and it is being cardiovocalized by millions, if not billions. It is not a saying fading into twilight but a reality expressed nonstop in the world today. Even if we do not hear people saying it with their lips, we see it practiced ad nauseam. People living as if there were no God. Some mantra must be driving that reality.

While the silent cardiovocalizations of some people do come out in practice or in veiled writings, the nature of such inner monologue is to be hidden. You won’t get a judge who claims to be a moral person yet who makes immoral judgments admit that There is no God drives his decisions. Or the pastor who can’t stop checking out the ladies. Or the soccer mom who lives solely to buy more stuff.

Funny, though I’ve learned a lot in 50 years, one of the most important lessons goes back to my childhood and a children’s story. In that story, it says, What is essential is invisible to the eye.

Might I substitute ear for eye, in this case? Because that interior cry of atheism is rampant. It is essential to understand its prevalence, what it means, and what its ramifications are.

Christians are not immune to cardiovocalized atheism, which should sober us. Every day, I read material written by supposedly devout Christians who deny the gifts of the Spirit, mock the supernatural, make peace with the things Christ gave His very life to destroy, and craft endless mitigations of truth, which masquerade as “enlightened” spiritual treatises and “doctrinally pure” systematic theologies. In short, there is no difference between such people and atheists. The cardiovocalizations are the same. There is no God is at the core.

Sounds like a conflict, right? How can believers in Jesus have a heart that says There is no God?

Simple. They decide that they don’t like what the real God is saying and substitute a god of their own creation. If that’s not a denial of God, then what is? There might be a god, but there is no God.

No person is immune. What is your heart silently saying?

If Christians don’t understand this broken message of the heart, then we will not understand why people appear OK on the outside, yet the world keeps moving forward in the wrong direction. We will not understand motivations that seem to clash with spoken intentions. We will assume everything is fine with the people we encounter, yet inside they are screaming something that should appall us.

Jefty Economics and the Least of These

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{Somewhere in this rant is a worthy post. My apologies to readers in advance that the worthy post didn’t materialize.}

In the course of reading a smattering of Christian blogs wrestling with the economic devastation laying waste to America, I happened across Al Mohler’s take on the subject. By the time I got done reading the last word, it was all I could do not to shake my head in disbelief.

To understand the rest of this post, please read Mohler’s post, “A Christian View of the Economic Crisis.”

Done? Okay…

The first thing that bothers me about Dr. Mohler’s post is that it appears to be caught in a classic, science fiction time warp. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Eisenhower was president.

This is a great problem for much of conservative Evangelicalism. We’re like Jefty in Harlan Ellison’s seminal short story “Jefty Is Five.” In that work, the narrator tells of a neighbor boy who remains five-years old all his life. Jefty’s radio plays dramas from the 40s and 50s that were canceled decades ago. Jefty sends away for secret agent decoder rings offered by cereal companies that no longer exist—and receives them in the mail. In short, Jefty never grows up, nor does the ethereal, dead, dusty world that swirls around him. And he scares the willies out of the normal people who encounter him.

When I read Dr. Mohler’s post, it’s like I’m perusing Jefty’s newspaper, and I can read how the corporations are leading our country to greatness, and every father receives a gold pocket watch (that matches his smoking jacket) after 40 years on the job because he worked hard and climbed the corporate ladder like all hard workers do, and, golly gee willikers, his company put out the best darned widgets at the best darned price, and if you ever had a problem with your widget, they’ll send a repairman in a pressed suit (and a tie, even!) who won’t charge you a dime, and he’ll have your problem solved in fifteen minutes or your money back plus 10 percent for your trouble.

And at night, angels tuck you into bed.

That’s how Jefty economics works.

Jefty economics bases its reality on the old advice that with a little hard work, and the right amount of pluck, any freckle-faced lad can himself embody the classic Horatio Alger story and become a captain of industry.

It sounds so swell.

This, however, is what the Bible says:

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.
—Ecclesiastes 9:11

Jefty economics can’t account for chance. It doesn’t allow that people may deviate from the climb to the boardroom by simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lazarus outside the rich man's house - by DoréIt can’t account for the capricious whims of a college admission committee that this year (and this year only) thought that building ashrams in India was a more noble reason for selection than your solution to world hunger, therefore you had to settle for Podunk U. instead of Harvard. It can’t factor in that after you killed yourself for decades to crawl to a middle management position in Kludge Corporation of West Oconomowoc, the CEO’s mistress left him and, in a fit of pique, he sacked your entire department and farmed it out to bean counters in Pakistan. The next thing you know, you’re a greeter at Wal-Mart wondering how the American Dream passed you by.

Who can understand how these things happen? The Jeftys of the world would turn on their radios and give you the answer: “The Shadow knows….”

Welcome to the world of Jefty.

Only problem is, that’s not your reality or mine.

In some ways, I can’t fault Dr. Mohler. Seminary presidents, theologians, and academicians aren’t the best at taking the lifestyle pulse of janitors, taxi cab drivers, and third-shift workers at the old widget factory (who just lost their jobs because the Armani-wearing board of directors moved the work to Shanghai).

See, Jefty economics functions in such a way that the real world, with all its gritty, black ugliness, doesn’t exist. The Jefties of this world can’t see it. The people who are getting killed economically, and have been getting killed for a long time, never happen. They’re simply not there.

Here’s reality: The way we do business, the way we fuel our economy in this country, the way we have been practicing capitalism in the good ol’ U. S. of A. has come home to roost.

I’ve been watching what has been happening to the middle class over the years. It’s not pretty. Hard-working people have been watching their real wealth evaporate. Families I know who were adamant that they were going to maintain the conservative Christian ideal and keep mom at home are not only having to have mom work but are seeing both wage earners’ incomes stagnate to the point that polygamy sounds like the only viable economic option.

And as for the mantra that hard work gets you ahead, it’s time to let that Jefty-ism die. Perhaps at one time it was true, but I know so many people who are killing themselves with hard work and are getting nowhere because they aren’t the right kind of person, didn’t go to the right Ivy League school, didn’t take the Skull & Bones pledge, don’t know the right Masonic handshake, don’t have the right skin color, don’t have the right religious beliefs, and on and on.

I met a person several years ago who shames most of us in hard work. I watched that person get brutalized time and again by the kind of wicked people who populate so much of today’s corporate world. That wonderful person kept a clean nose, gave 210 percent all the time, was the last to turn off the lights at night, and got nowhere. There was always some Maserati driver in a corner office who made sure this person never got out of the cubicle. That constant heel to the neck hurt that person incalculably.

Truth is, I know too many people like that one. They’ve been the canaries in this economy’s coalmine for years. And now the mine’s caved in and gas is seeping into the depths. Is that a striking match I hear?

Here’s the worst part: The kind of people that flame out in the economy aren’t welcome in a lot of conservative Evangelical churches, those gorgeous, multi-million dollar edifices full of Jeftys.

I know because I’ve been in a few Jefty churches. I sat in a men’s Bible study at a prominent Baptist church as a half dozen captains of industry talked about “those people.” Just the other day, a friend told me that the pastor of his old church spotted him in a restaurant and just had to regale him with how wonderfully the new building plan was going and all the millions that he’d raised. Dropped all the monetary figures just to show my friend how stupid he was to leave such a dynamic church. But my friend knew this same church split earlier because a handful of its people had the nerve to evangelize poor Hispanics. You know, dishwashers, gardeners, and garbagemen. Those people. The ones you let into your corner office to dump out your trash can, but God forbid they should aspire to anything higher. Besides, they could never get into the country club—except perhaps as the catering help.

When I hear Dr. Mohler talking the way he does in his piece, I have to wonder if he knows how the sub-economy populated by the least of these lives. If he understands that we really are Two Americas and are becoming more so every day. When he says that people today invest in the same companies that Warren Buffett does, I’ve got ask: “Dr. Mohler, have you priced some of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway stock lately? You might be able to buy some at $135,000 a share, but I sure can’t.  And have you noticed that the Gateses and Waltons of the world who can plunk down $100,000 without batting an eye get offered a whole new world of higher-paying investments that Joe Sixpack can only dream about?” Then I’d like to introduce the seminary president to hard workers like Edwin Howard Armstrong. And then I’d introduce him to people who don’t have Wikipedia entries, people who broke their backs working and lost their homes anyway. People who don’t have Ivy League networks. You know, people to whom chance just so happened to happen.

Part of me says I’m being unfair, but part of me says I’m not.

Here’s the saddest part of all. The people who are still operating under the economic pretensions of the “I Like Ike” era are the ones who were looking the other way while the morally-challenged, who laughed all the way to the bank at the expense of the rest of us, engineered  this fine economy we have now.

Yes, I’m angry.

I’ve been saying for years that the global economic game we’ve been playing is not even zero sum but negative sum. When the Church sat back and welcomed the Industrial Revolution like it was the Second Coming of our Lord Himself, we erected an idol that would eventually taint every part of our lives. I find it ironic to the nth degree that so many conservative Evangelicals are fighting the culture war tooth and nail, failing at the same time to see that the war itself is the natural outcome of what they welcomed 150+ years ago.

Christians cannot turn blind eyes to social and economic justice and NOT reap the whirlwind.

We conservative Christians gave up on reforming business practices. Left that to the liberals. No, a few of us tasted the wealth for a while and it intoxicated us. (“Hey, no fair, Dan! We compensated by starting a workplace Bible study to show we still cared about the souls in our companies. That counts, doesn’t it?”)

Despite what Mohler says, too much of how we lived was based on greed and short-term thinking. As long as our companies posted better figures quarter over quarter, who cared what havoc our practices would wreak down the road? Leave that for some other generation!

Well, that generation is here. And, too bad, we’re it.

Thanks, Jefty.