Tag Archives: Christianity

Concerning Megan Fox and the Holy Spirit

Eagle Eye Los Angeles PremiereIn a recent Esquire interview, actress, model, and international sex symbol Megan Fox discussed her own Pentecostal experiences and orientation.  Her revelation was surprising and incongruous to many.  In her words:

“I have seen magical, crazy things happen. I’ve seen people be healed. Even now, in the church I go to, during Praise and Worship I could feel that I was maybe getting ready to speak in tongues, and I’d have to shut it off because I don’t know what that church would do if I started screaming out in tongues in the back.

“It feels like a lot of energy coming through the top of your head — I’m going to sound like such a lunatic — and then your whole body is filled with this electric current.”

I won’t comment on what I think of Fox’s sense of Christianity except to say that the Scripture speaks of spiritual fruit in the lives of believers AND removing planks from our own eyes before judging others AND the fact that God’s ways are not our ways.  There’s a mystery to things that I cannot fully understand, so I’m content to leave ultimate matters up to God.

foxWhat is interesting about Fox’s confession is that, quite honestly, she might actually check the box entitled “Pentecostal” on a faith survey.  She, in others words, may very well be “on my team.”  For Heaven’s sake, she’s even into that classic hobby of Pentecostals, end-times prophecy:

“I’ve read the Book of Revelation a million times,” Megan Fox says. “It does not make sense, obviously. It needs to be decoded. What is the dragon? What is the prostitute? What are these things? What is this imagery? What was John seeing? And I was just thinking, What is the Antichrist?“

Now, other than the obvious benefits for recruitment, what does this mean for Pentecostal self-identity?

I have to chuckle when I hear that someone like Megan Fox has had such experiences, or that singer and fellow sex Katy-Perry_2012symbol Katy Perry grew up in a Pentecostal minister’s home.  I chuckle because despite how strange that seems (considering traditional Pentecostal ethics and Fox/Perry’s sexual provocations and ubiquity), it fits in a certain way.

Pentecostalism has always carried within it the seeds of a very un-Gnostic message: that the body is meant to be linked to the Spirit, and that our faith is experienced and lived out in very bodily ways.  Tongues.  Dancing.  Shouting.  Falling down under the power of God.  A friend of mine in seminary once said that Pentecostals “twitch.”  I don’t like the word, but it is true we are a very embodied faith…for better and for worse.

Despite Pentecostalism’s generally conservative moral and social stances, it has also had its share of scandals involving the complicated matters of the flesh.  At the turn of the 20th century early founder Charles Parham was once accused of committing “unnatural offenses” (i.e. homosexual acts).  Aimee Semple McPherson of Foursquare fame once disappeared for a season in the 1920s, claiming kidnapping but more likely running away for a lengthy tryst with her lover.  And then, of course, can we forget the infamous Pentecostal sex scandals of the 1980s with Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker?

Understand me: I’m not trying to Elmer Gantrify my fellow coreligionists here or say that we are necessarily worse on this count than others (though this would be an interesting research project).  Indeed, there are an overwhelming host of Pelmer gantry.1entecostal ministers and laypersons who are sexually faithful to their spouses and their chastity.  I just think  it is fascinating that Megan Fox, as a frequent object of popular sexual fascination, is also in some sense Pentecostal.  It is a strange development, no doubt.  But also one that fits a certain understanding of my own faith tradition.  The body–our God created, though now fallen flesh–gives us trouble, but we Pentecostals refuse to give it up because it is a part of who we are.  Though it can cause us trouble (see above) we believe that it is a part of how God made us, how God redeemed us, and how God continues to work through us.  Such a flesh-spirit faith is an earthy and risky one, but it is richly biblical.  It can and does often go “off the tracks” from time to time, but Pentecostals are not ones to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

If David, Samson, and Solomon are in some sense all heroes of the faith and the writer of Ecclesiastes a source of wisdom in Scripture…and if the history of my own movement involves such risky openness to the body, perhaps Megan Fox can be Pentecostal too.

In a time when global expressions of Christian faith are becoming increasingly Pentecostal, Fox’s life is testimony to the fact that the term may now very well “contain multitudes.”

What a world.

Religion and Politics, Part III

For Christians, what role ought faith to play in our public lives?  From the days of Jesus being asked about the giving of the imperial tax to Caesar (Mark 12), people of the “new covenant” have been wrestling with this very question.

Faced with a hostile pagan empire that surrounded them in the first centuries after the ascension of Jesus, the earliest Christians had little problem differentiating themselves from the “world,” even while persistent questions continued to be asked about the combined role of the State, religion, and the viability things like military service.

Following the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312 and the slow Christianization of Rome, believers entered into a new kind of Church/State relationship that we in America are now only slowly exiting.  Some see this linkage as the worst thing that happened to the Faith, others as more of an encouraging success.

Whatever the case, questions of faith and politics remain.  So my short answer to the question I posed at the outset is this:  our faith must be central to our understanding of our political selves and our subsequent actions.  In other words, if my Christian faith is not central to my politics, I ought to question how central it is to my life in general.

This is not to say, however, that just because my faith exists as the base of my politics I ought to vote in a predictably “conservative Christian” way.  Political choices are rarely that simple.  It has become axiomatic of late for the mainstream of Christianity in the United States to affirm that “God is neither a Republican nor a Democrat,” and on this point I would tend to agree with my coreligionists.  I do not believe that one party is necessarily holier than the other.  To say that one of them is seems foolish and reductionist.  But then that is the trouble with our binary, winner-takes-all system.  It forces us to assert imagined perfection when the best we ever have is a political corpus permixtum.

Yet affirming the Lord’s lack of liaison with any one of our two main parties also can obscure things…because we as citizens of faith are regularly asked to pick one of them to lead our nation.  On this point I would simply say that in order to vote based on our faith, we must be clear about how we understand the core content of our faith.  Of what our operating theology consists.  Discerned through Scripture, meditation, prayer, personal experience, and the community of faith, we must be aware of those things we perceived most central to the Christian faith.

In some areas, all Christians can agree. Justice, for example, is a major and core theme of Scripture.  Economically speaking, I would say that both Romney and Obama desire to see prosperity in our nation and the uplift of the poor and downtrodden.  Neither of them wants to crush the poor.  They simply have different plans for achieving their goals.  As people of faith, then, we also have to use wisdom to determine which of these plans will work best…while acknowledging that there may be some big things about international economic inequalities and justice that neither candidate is willing to address.

On sticky social issues, matters are more complex.  Many Christians will tell you that abortion is the single issue upon which they will vote.  I understand this position.  I do.  But surely (as our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters remind us), a theological emphasis on life means more than just eliminating abortion, doesn’t it?  It has to do with issues of healthcare, euthanasia, our care of the elderly, capital punishment, and the myriad questions of war.  Similar complexity exists on most of the issues upon which Christians may feel strongly.  How individual Christians discern the basis and major emphasis of their faith and the teachings of Christ will therefore influence the direction they vote in these areas.  If one believes Jesus is against abortion and capital punishment…they will have weigh the relative importance of each as well as make a judgment call as to which party or candidate will effectively work to address these concerns in society–even if neither of them run on that particular platform.

In the midst of this messiness we are called to participate.  To choose.  I am and will continue to be loath to tell others which candidate to select, because I feel that in some ways both have some good to offer mixed in with the bad.  Both affirm Christian ideals even as other parts of their policies negate them.  Instead of throwing our hands up in disgust, I would encourage believers to ask themselves what they really believe and know about the teachings of Christ…and vote, informed by the best wisdom our world has to offer, as best they can for those principles that God has placed closest to their heart.  Even if their vote is different from mine, if it is honest, well articulated, independent of any outside influence, and keeping with a portion of the heart of God–which never can be exhausted by one political party or candidate–I will be happy.  Well, happy, that is, if we as Christians will then choose, after the election, to remain engaged as citizens working for the same principles we vote for.  That’s a lot harder for me and all of us than simply checking a box on a ballot.

By the Waters of Babylon

In my Church History I course, we’re currently focused on the first few centuries of Christian history–a time when the status and security of early believers was anything but secure.  Surrounded by a hostile Roman Empire that neither understood or appreciated them, Christians of the first century were the subject of disgust and disdain.  Rumors about them were spread impugning the Faith and Christians were sporadically persecuted and harassed.  Some even paid the ultimate price of martyrdom.

During the Church’s infancy, Christian believers had little trouble remembering some of what we have forgotten.  In words made immortal in the book of I Peter, we are told the following:

Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul.  Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. (I Peter 2:11-12)

Exiles.  Foreigners.  Christians are, in other words, not about what the world around them is about.  There is a difference.  Yet it is a difference that many in the Church forgot when, less than a generation after the fiercest Roman persecution ended, the Emperor Constantine himself because a Christian.  The Empire–and the lives of the faithful–changed forever.  In the centuries following, at least in the West, the line between the ways of the world and the ways of God were much less clear.

Yet in many ways we in the modern West now understand the exilic perspective of Christianity better than any generation since Constantine.  Christian exclusivity garners disdain, just as it did during Roman times.  Religious syncretism in various forms is a pervasive tendency.  The Church is derided (sometimes rightly, often wrongly) for being ignorant, hateful, and vile.  Once again, we realize we are exiles…and maybe, just maybe, we’ve been exiles the whole time.

Consider: the continued  removal of the veneer of “Christianness” from our society might actually be a good thing.  After all, do we really want “In God We Trust” plastered on our money?  Is this even true?  Has it ever been?  Do we want our politicians saying “God bless America” if they don’t even mean it?  Do God and politics ever mix?  As old and faulty assumptions fade, the distinctions the Scripture has no problem drawing may become a little clearer for all of us.  In the process it just might help us to lives our lives a little more humbly.

Like the early believers, we might then spend less time trying to maintain society’s adherence to the outward trappings we often assume are necessary, and more time as Christian witnesses, apologists, and servants in a world that will never be our home.

There are a host of issues a perspective like this raises…but surely it is worth considering, no?

I’m (Not?) a Puritan

Courtesy of my favorite sci-fi news site:

One of the many, many things we love about Game of Thrones is its ability to hold nothing back in the mature content department. We can’t imagine what the show would be like without all the blood, blades and breasts that HBO allows for. But some foreign broadcasters aren’t so impressed, and one was so concerned with the show’s nudity that it pulled the plug in the middle of a new episode.

Game of Thrones has no shortage of nudity and sex.  It is, after all, on HBO.  It makes sense that a television station in a place like the United Arab Emirates would be naturally worried about such content.  What it makes me wonder, though, is how “bad” such material is in the first place.

As anyone who has read a National Geographic knows, not all nudity is pornographic.  In certain cultures today and various groups throughout history, nudity and sex have been less taboo than they are for us.  Especially in the United States, and certainly amongst many conservative Christians, most if not all depictions of these things are considered unhealthy, inappropriate, and sinful.  They are said to uniformly lead to lust and further down the road to destruction.  Others say no.  They say that by failing to accept sexuality and the human body as a natural part of life, we separate ourselves from our humanities.  We are simply too uptight.

At the risk of perpetuating an unfair myth about our New England forefathers, I am forced to ask myself and my fellow co-religionists the question: are we too puritanical?  Further, have we made nudity or sex such a taboo that our sometimes secret violation of it becomes a larger matter for us than others who do not so sharply divide things?  Is it wrong for us to watch something like Game of Thrones, or is it wise for us not to?

Understand that I have no equivocation on the issue of pornography.  It is destructive to the men and women involved in the industry, devastating to those caught up in it, and deeply damaging to the families that are affected by it.  It debases the image of God within each of us and represents some of the darkest parts of humanity.  I condemn it 100%.  Pornography seeks to serve only our basest needs and is a kind of sexual gluttony at its worst.

However, Game of Thrones–as a story where the violence, sex, and nudity are part of a larger narrative and, at times,  means to a greater end–might not be pornography because its main goal is not the same.  Even so, I do question why so much sex–and such graphic depictions–have to be such a constituent part of many HBO shows.  It blurs the line between legitimate expression of the drama and needless titillation.

A Supreme Court justice once wisely said the following:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

I think I would agree, but that it is even more complicated than that.  It is not just a matter of all of us together recognizing what is or isn’t obscene, but each individual acknowledging on a personal level the effect of such material.  If a thing is pornographic for us–regardless of what someone else thinks–we need to stop and seriously consider what is going on.

I do believe that some can watch Game of Thrones in sinless perfection, enjoying the epic saga as a deeply textured tale of flawed humanity.  Others?  Well, for them it would be a lot of steps in the wrong direction and lead to a debasement of themselves and a dehumanizing of others.

Being free to show and view what we want does not always lead to freedom.

I welcome your comments, critiques, and accusations of Puritanism.

Resurrection Now

ImageSome thoughts from Andrew Sullivan in this week’s Newsweek:

“In the anxious, crammed lives of our modern twittering souls, in the materialist obsessions we cling to for security in recession, in a world where sectarian extremism threatens to unleash mass destruction, this sheer Christianity, seeking truth without the expectation of resolution, simply living each day doing what we can to fulfill God’s will, is more vital than ever. It may, in fact, be the only spiritual transformation that can in the end transcend the nagging emptiness of our late-capitalist lives, or the cult of distracting contemporaneity, or the threat of apocalyptic war where Jesus once walked. You see attempts to find this everywhere—from experimental spirituality to resurgent fundamentalism. Something inside is telling us we need radical spiritual change.

But the essence of this change has been with us, and defining our own civilization, for two millennia. And one day soon, when politics and doctrine and pride recede, it will rise again.”