Imagine the Quaker
an erstwhile mirror site for weblog on newquaker.com
archives | newquaker.comSaturday, December 27, 2003
America is in trouble? Well, that's what it says in a full-page ad appearing in Christianity Today and about to appear "in almost every Christian newspaper and magazine across the country" beginning in January 2004. This is just a prelude to a week of fasting and prayer during February 7-14. On the surface the call seems to be for prayer for personal repentance and the restoration of God's spirit in our national life. Indeed, the ad says as much: "Save America Now! is a movement to encourage all Americans to get off the sidelines and onto their knees. It's not about the politics of Republicans, Democrats or Independents .... It is a call for national and personal repentance. It is a call for millions of Americans to pray earnestly for God to save our country." But reading the ad further, reading what more the group has to say on its website www.save-america-now.com, it is clear that this is a campaign to restore America to a Christian nation—"to see that we do all that we can to restore God as the cornerstone as He was meant to be by our Founding Fathers."
It doesn't look like D. James Kennedy or Coral Ridge Ministries is actively involved in this venture, especially since his Center for Reclaiming America already has a "24/7 National Prayer Force" working on this task. I sound cynical, I know, and that's not really how I feel about the moral bankruptcy of the US and the decadence marching from sea to shining sea. But my fervent concern is that we are going to trade our need to return Christ within our lives, to be visible lampposts of his love, for another campaign to turn this nation into a militant army of mainline soldiers under the command of the American Church. We seem unable to find any middle ground—the choice seems to be either paganism or an apostate national church—and forget, like amnesia, that our nation is great because it openly provides for the free expression of religious sentiment. It is no accident that Christianity prevails, but it is also no accident that this is possible only through the free-choice guarantees of our country's constitutional bedrock.
Nazism flourished under a national German church, and the fear is back that this may happen again in the US. The signs are here. My friends at Antipas Ministries have moved a major part of their ministry to Canada in anticipation of this.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 11:22 PM
Tuesday, December 23, 2003
At the request of Sojourners and Jewish Voice for Peace, I just sent the following letter to my Congressman Sherwood Boehlert and Senator Hillary Clinton. I encourage friends to do the same. The letter:
I am writing to request that you ask for an advisory report from the General Accounting Office (GAO) investigating possible violations by Israel of the Arms Export Control Act through its use of Caterpillar bulldozers in the occupied Palestinian territories. According to the Office of the UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs, between October 10 and 20, 2003 the Israeli army demolished 130 Palestinian homes in the town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, rendering 1,200 people homeless.
Since 1967, Israel has used Caterpillar equipment to conduct systematic, widespread, and well-documented destruction of Palestinians' homes, leaving more than 50,000 people homeless. Caterpillar bulldozers were the primary instrument in the demolition of the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002, and a Caterpillar bulldozer killed Rachel Corrie, an unarmed American civilian in March 2003. According to Caterpillar Corporation representatives, "With regard to Israel, sales between Caterpillar and the U.S. government are openly conducted through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales Program."
The U.S. Arms Export Control Act (Public Law 90-829) limits the use of U.S. military aid to "internal security" and "legitimate self-defense" and prohibits its use against civilians. There appear to be good reasons to believe that Israel's use of Caterpillar bulldozers violates this legislation.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 2:59 AM
Now Tom Ridge seems like a decent guy, but changing the national threat level from Elevated (code yellow) to High risk (code orange) just doesn't make me feel safer. Here's why.
In a press release yesterday, the US Department of Homeland Security Secretary sent a "message of reassurance and confidence" to the American people, but at the same time the British newspaper, Sunday Express, was reporting that Saddam Hussein was not captured as a result of careful US intelligence: Instead, said the report, the ex-dictator had been captured first by Kurdish forces—the aftermath of a blood feud between the father of a girl raped by one of Saddam's sons—and was then drugged and abandoned for US troops to find. [Source: Yahoo! News, December 21, 2003]
Really, is there no forthrightness in the Bush Administration? Stop spinning the truth, especially when it determines what color buttons Secretary Ridge gets to push.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 12:43 AM
Sunday, December 21, 2003
The quest of the historical Santa. Social scientists will always struggle with what must be the weirdest fact about historical research—the "sufficiency of culture" for creating and sustaining myths as if they were truths. Santa is one such creature: created as fiction, believed to be real, defined by successive generations of believers, and sustained totally by culture; in fact, it's irrelevant whether there ever was or was not a person called Santa Claus.
Santa Claus is an American name brought to New York via a 17th century Dutch legend of the historical Saint Nicholas, or Hagios Nikolaos, the 4th century Bishop of Myra (Turkey). The Dutch-American "Sinter Claus" is transformed into a little jolly elf who travels by reindeer-drawn sleigh and goes up and down chimneys bearing gifts in Clement C. Moore's 1823 poem, "The Night Before Christmas (A Visit from St. Nicholas)." The 19th century illustrator Thomas Nast, inspired by the poem, creates the first illustrations of the legend, but adds a workshop in the North Pole, elves, and Santa's famous List. The Coca-Cola company remakes Santa as a jolly, taller human in a series of commercial ads. An advertising writer for the Montgomery Ward Company invents Santa's important helper, Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. More contemporary cartoons, movies, and songs answer often-asked questions about Santa, such as his sexuality (he is married to Mrs. Claus) and his age. In Tim Allen's portrayal in Santa Clause (1994), Santa is ageless but not immortal—he is killed in a freak accident, but manages to pass along his powers, including pudge and white hair, to his inspired successor. Things we took for granted about Santa get rewritten in Allen's new Santa Clause 2 (2002), but that has happened before with The Miracle on 34th Street (1947, 1955, 1959, 1983, 1994), Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964), the claymation telefilm, The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974), Dudley Moore's Santa Claus: The Movie (1986), Angela Lansbury's Mrs. Santa Claus (1997), and many other screen and teleplay versions. Will Ferrell's Elf (2003) is the latest of these retellings.
My point is that we are perfectly comfortable with a cultural icon that can be embellished, rewritten, and sometimes wildly transformed—as in the unconventional R-rated film Bad Santa (2003)—and still remain a total fiction, still recognizable despite its distortions, but bearing no resemblance at all to a historical figure. We want to keep pointing to Saint Nicholas, but the fact is that he has been gone and has neither relevance nor relationship to the cultural Santa Claus.
Religion can also function like this, as we know. Scientology, begun entirely as a fiction from the brain of L. Ron Hubbard, cults created in swoons of inspirations, heresies cooked up by emotion, reason, or inflexibility—these are facts of history, too, and no less queer than the sufficiency of culture for keeping alive a "serial story" such as Santa Claus.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 2:03 AM
© Merle Harton, Jr. All rights reserved. Biblical references are NIV® unless otherwise noted.
