Author: Andrew Sullivan

Philip Jenkins, author of The Great and Holy War, explains why the First World War, “with the obvious exception of the Turks … was a Christian war”:

With startling literalism, visual representations in all the main participant nations placed Christ himself on the battle lines, whether in films, posters, or postcards. Jesus blessed German soldiers going into battle; Jesus comforted the dying victims of German atrocities; Jesus personally led a reluctant Kaiser to confront the consequences of his evil policies. Apart from the obvious spiritual figures — Christ and the Virgin — most combatant nations used an iconography in which their cause was portrayed by that old Crusader icon Saint George, and their enemies as the Dragon. Death in such a righteous cosmic war was a form of sacrifice or martyrdom, elevating the dead soldier to saintly status.

In every country, mainstream media stories offered a constant diet of vision and miracle, angels and apocalypse. Angels supposedly intervened to save beleaguered British troops, the Virgin herself appeared to Russians, while Germany claimed to follow the Archangel Michael. Those stories circulated in the first days of the war, and they persisted through the whole struggle, long after we might expect the armies to be wholly focused on the grim realities of front-line life. When the Germans launched their last great offensive in 1918, of course it was called Operation Michael. For the Allies, religious and apocalyptic hopes crested in 1917 and 1918, with the great symbolic victories in the Middle East. Most evocative were the capture of Jerusalem from the Turks, and the decisive British victory at — honestly — Megiddo, the site of Armageddon.

George Weigel blames the “century-long assault on the Christian worldview” leading up to 1914 – he points to Darwin, Nietzsche, and Marx, among others – for the Great War’s destructiveness:

[T]he erosion of religious authority in Europe over the centuries—meaning the erosion of biblically informed concepts of the human person, human communities, human origins, and human destiny—created a European moral-cultural environment in which politics was no longer bound and constrained by a higher authority operative in the minds and consciences of leaders and populations. Some will doubtless think it too simple to suggest that the most penetrating answer to these grave questions—Why did the Great War begin and why did the Great War continue?—is the answer suggested by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn thirty years ago: It was because “Men [had] forgotten God.”

Erasmus responds to Weigel:

It’s true, of course, that in different circumstances religion can either restrain the urge to fight or exacerbate it. Both factors are sometimes underestimated by people of a secular cast of mind. And sometimes, both factors are at work simultaneously. Religion can mitigate conflict within a large group (say, Christendom or the Muslim ummah) but also increase the chances of conflict between those large groups. A century on from the Great War, religion seems in many places to have retained its power to exacerbate strife but lost its capacity to calm and restrain.

(Image: The French military cemetery at the Douaumont ossuary, which contains the remains of more than 130,000 unknown soldiers, via Wikimedia Commons)

Cardinal Walter Kasper, whose new book, Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to the Christian Life, is a favorite of Pope Francis, explains why mercy is central to the Christian understanding of God:

The doctrine on God was arrived at by ontological understanding—God is absolute being and so on, which is not wrong. But the biblical understanding is much deeper and more personal. God’s relation to Moses in the Burning Bush is not “I am,” but “I am with you. I am for you. I am going with you.” In this context, mercy is already very fundamental in the Old Testament. The God of the Old Testament is not an angry God but a merciful God, if you read the Psalms. This ontological understanding of God was so strong that justice became the main attribute of God, not mercy. Thomas Aquinas clearly said that mercy is much more fundamental because God does not answer to the demands of our rules. Mercy is the faithfulness of God to his own being as love. Because God is love. And mercy is the love revealed to us in concrete deeds and words. So mercy becomes not only the central attribute of God, but also the key of Christian existence. Be merciful as God is merciful. We have to imitate God’s mercy.

Why we need mercy now more than ever:

The twentieth century was a very dark century, with two world wars, totalitarian systems, gulags, concentration camps, the Shoah, and so on. And the beginning of the twenty-first century is not much better. People need mercy. They need forgiveness. That’s why Pope John XXIII wrote in his spiritual biography that mercy is the most beautiful attribute of God. In his famous speech at the opening of Vatican II, he said that the church has always resisted the errors of the day, often with great severity—but now we have to use the medicine of mercy. That was a major shift. John Paul II lived through the latter part of the Second World War and then Communism in Poland, and he saw all the suffering of his people and his own suffering. For him mercy was very important. Benedict XVI’s first encyclical was God Is Love. And now Pope Francis, who has the experience of the southern hemisphere, where two-thirds of Catholics are living, many of them poor people—he has made mercy one of the central points of his pontificate. I think it’s an answer to the signs of the times.

(Image: Jan Wijnants’s Parable of the Good Samaritan, 1670, via Wikimedia Commons)

In a lengthy piece, Kathryn Joyce profiles GRACE (or Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment), an “independent group of evangelical lawyers, pastors, and psychologists” that investigates reports of abuse in Prostestant communities. Joyce reports that GRACE founder (and grandson of Billy Graham) Boz Tchividjian “had become convinced that the Protestant world is teetering on the edge of a sex-abuse scandal similar to the one that had rocked the Catholic Church,” and “believes that Protestant churches, groups, and schools have been worse than Catholics in their response”:

“GRACE is not hired by the weak, the self-protective, the blasphemous institutions who invoke the name of Jesus in their cover-ups,” says Kari Mikitson, founder of [abuse protest group] Fanda Eagles. “There are very few Christian organizations out there who want the truth at all costs. If you as an organization are not brave enough to retain GRACE when your survivors request them, then you are a disgrace. And you aren’t fooling anyone—you are hiding skeletons.”

That’s a hard case to make to churches and missions facing lawsuits and public scrutiny. “One of the dynamics of any institution is to survive, to protect itself,” [psychologist] Diane Langberg says. There is no question that GRACE poses risks to the institutions that hire it for investigations. The publication of GRACE’s findings—the first gesture of repentance—ensures that not only will damaging accounts appear in the media but that some supporters and donors will flee.

Over the next few years and decades, Protestant institutions of every kind—fundamentalist, evangelical, and mainline—will be increasingly faced with a stark choice. One option is to follow the example set by the Catholic Church more than a decade ago: Fight back fiercely, not giving an inch when it comes to admitting you may have been wrong. Everyone knows how well that has worked. The other option is represented, thus far, by GRACE alone: Churches, schools, and groups can heed Tchividjian’s call to make themselves vulnerable, to admit what they’ve done wrong, and—hardest of all—to allow that truth to come to light.

Amanda Marcotte elaborates on the challenges GRACE faces, writing that the organization “appears to be a little too good at its job, and often the institutions that initially hire it end up firing it rather than deal with their own cultures of covering up and minimizing sexual abuse.” She zeroes in on Joyce’s discussion of a case at Bob Jones University:

The famously conservative Christian school brought GRACE in to clean house after 20/20 discovered, in 2011, that one of its graduates, a New Hampshire minister named Chuck Phelps, had, upon discovering that one of his congregants raped and impregnated a teenager, thought it appropriate to shame the victim by making her “confess” her supposed sins in front of the congregation. Bob Jones University didn’t want the story to reflect badly on the school, so it responded by hiring Tchividjian and his staff to interview faculty and students about their experiences with sexual assault. What they discovered was a culture of victim-blaming. …

Tchividjian believes that Christian institutions should be welcoming the news that they’ve failed to support the victims of sexual abuse, so they can repent and learn from their mistakes. The institutions apparently do not agree. Just as other groups, such as an overseas missionary organization, had done before, Bob Jones University fired GRACE before the group had a chance to report its final results.

Tracing the history of Christian matchmaking, Paul Putz ponders the popularity of dating sites like Christian Mingle that help evangelicals find each other:

Evangelical marriages provide a conducive setting for children to accept and remain followers of their parents’ faith. It’s a pressing concern: The religious retention rate for evangelicals has been dropping since the 1990s, according to David Campbell and Robert Putnam in American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us. They also suggest “the most important factor predicting religious retention” is whether or not a person’s family was religiously homogenous and observant. Meanwhile, the rate of interfaith marriage has more than doubled since the 1950s, accounting today for 45 percent of all marriages. That trend, according to [journalist Naomi Schaeffer] Riley, has had the unintended consequence of eroding the strength of some faith traditions, partly because “interfaith families are less likely to raise their children religiously.”

Given the reality of our increasingly online, increasingly digital world, Christian niche dating sites serve as an easily identifiable online companion to more traditional offline means used by evangelicals to find a spouse. They allow evangelicals to adopt the broader cultural turn towards individualism in the selection of romantic partners while still remaining true to conservative evangelical insistence on intrafaith marriage. “We want Christians to marry Christians,” [Sam] Moorcroft said. “We don’t want Christians to marry nominal Christians or nonbelievers at all.” And once their customers are married, Christian dating sites claim to provide help on another account: they supposedly facilitate more compatible matches, which, according to ChristianCafe.com’s Fred Moesker, will help “to decrease divorce rates.”

Back in March, however, Jonathan Merritt questioned just how well these sites reflect “Christian values”:

Christian dating sites are quick to invoke spiritual and even Biblical references in an effort to capture new users, but these marketing ploys are often taken so far out of their original context that they have been emptied of almost any meaning. ChristianMingle, for example, has been airing an ad during the History Channel mini-series, The Bible. Images of kissing and hand-holding flutter across the screen as a male voice sings, “Someday he’ll call her, and she will come running. And fall in his arms, and the tears will fall down, and she’ll pray: I want to fall in love with you.”

At first viewing, the spot is wildly effective. But those who are familiar with the song will note that the “arms” mentioned are God’s and not Prince Charming’s. Titled “Love Song,” the hit tune by Jars of Clay is about God calling us into loving relationship with Himself. But ChristianMingle has given the tune a different meaning in an effort to co-opt its familiar religious language and attract users. One has to wonder why the band would license their song for this purpose.

Worse still, the site’s header invokes Psalm 37:4 over a picture of a swooning couple: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” The implication is that if you are a good Christian boy or girl, God will give you your dream mate. This transactional view of God is hard to reconcile with a full reading of the Christian scripture, much less personal experience, but it certainly sounds enticing.

That’s what you’re seeing:

The photographer Ingrid Berthon Moine is taken with testicles, both figuratively and physiologically; turning to the anatomically accurate statues of Classical Greece for her project Marbles, she focuses her lens on representations of the male sex organ. Isolated from the rest of the statues, the male sex organs take on new meanings, their textured curves wrought in stone with masterly precision.

She spoke to Hrag Vartanian about her project:

Hrag Vartanian: What’s your fascination with Ancient testicles?

Ingrid Berthon-Moine: I like to look at men … the way they look at women. There is no better place than a museum to look at perfect bodies (or a stadium during athletics competitions and football matches.) I wanted to go back to the birth of the representation of the human body perfection and it happened during the Classical Greek period when sculptors’ skills drastically increased and they took great care in their attention to anatomical details. I could have worked with the penis but I preferred focusing on these often neglected parts which secrete hormones, make and store sperm.

HV: Did you notice anything you may not have seen before?

IBM: They hang more on the left side which I wasn’t particularly aware of before although I’ve had close encounters on many occasions with the designated parts. Like breasts, they are also victims of gravity and all these details are skillfully reproduced by the Greeks.

See more of Berthon-Moine’s work here. Our own NSFW scrotum coverage here and here.

A NSFW take on the subject:

Another reader illustrates how “sounding gay” can vary across cultures:

I’m an American who lives in Catalonia. I’m as gay as they come but, for professional reasons, I was always “discreet” in the US. I now live as a casually out gay man in Catalonia (where nobody cares) and recently saw myself in a documentary, speaking Catalan. After decades of being mortified by my recorded gay voice, I was astonished at how butch I sounded in Catalan.

Another:

I’m an immigrant from South Asia who learned English from TV and grew up in Queens and central New Jersey. I moved back to the city when I was 18 and during the gentrification (or whatever) of the 2000s, when it seemed as though lots and lots of white dudes from liberal arts colleges around the nation started moving there, my first impression was that they were gay. I quickly realized that most of them were not actually gay, but talked in a way that would get them branded a “faggot” by most of the hood dudes I knew.

Having learned English from newscasters and ’80s action shows, I realized that I probably sounded fairly white and therefore, on that spectrum, not as straight as dudes who talked ’hood. But these guys were halfway between me and the gay men featured in that “Do I Sound Gay?” video. From that view, I guess in hip-hop culture, gayness kind of tracks with whiteness (although that’s changing). Of course that doesn’t hold when you meet a hood guy who is also effeminately gay, but it’s still a widely held view among a lot of people I know and see.

Another broadens the discussion a little more:

This paragraph reminded me of one of the ironies of straight male bullying:

In my youngest years . . .the bullies made me feel like a girl. I wasn’t badly bullied, though I had a few incidents. But the bullies taunting was usually to make other boys feel like girls, to make them feel that the bullies were the real boys and the bullied were the same as girls.

I was bullied incessantly in grammar school, not for being gay, but for being smart.  Until I got someplace (a particular high school, and then university and grad school) where being smart was valued, I shared that insecurity I now know gay and bi men experience.  The irony: a certain breed of homophobic bully uses terms like “pussy” to feminize/insult any target, gay or straight.  I can still recall the moment I turned this on its proverbial head: I was in college, working in a bar, and a local drunk I’d just cut off called me a pussy, in front of several co-workers, male and female.  I just smiled and said “Sure, I’m a pussy: you are what you eat.” This made him look like the loser, and scored me points with my female co-workers.

Another writes, “The whole Do I Sound Gay? thread reminds me of how I became a Dishhead”:

Several years ago – you were still at Time, I think; this was certainly pre-Atlantic – I had seen you on TV. It was Bill Maher or something. The following week, I was at a boring school event. My old friend and co-worker Dan Savage had his kid at the same school as my kids. Dan and I were in the corner chatting about politics. I told him I had seen this gay conservative on TV who I thought was smart. I said, “But Sullivan has the most annoying East-Coast-wannabe-William-F.-Buckley accent I’ve ever heard!” Dan laughed and laughed and told me your accent was because you were ex-pat British and said I should check out your blog. I’ve been hitting refresh several times a day ever since.