Accidental Historian

Being Me 5: Coping

I started this series on an odd sort of personal note.  I mean, the idea of a personal note is not, in and of itself, odd.  The one I chose, though, is kind of strange.  My goal was to figure out how to take that extremely personal moment and make it universal.  The subsequent posts under the Being Me label were, therefore, an attempt to figure out how to do exactly that.  I cannot finish the thought started by that story on a universal note, however.

The simple fact of the matter is, though, that I believe that the personal is universal and the universal is personal.  That’s why we tell stories to each other, after all.  So for the posts remaining in this I’m simply not going to try to be universal.  If it ends up meaning something to you, great.  If not, I hope you at least enjoy where I’m going, for whatever function of enjoyment exists in this form of storytelling.

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I learned at some point that the trick to making it through was to not actually want anything.  This might seem like a sort of Zen thing, I suppose.  The Buddha said that the source of discontent is desire, after all.  In my case, though, it wasn’t anything Zen at all.

Wanting things was an invitation to failure.  If I were to say, “I want [this],” and genuinely try to get whatever that thing was there was a pretty good chance I’d fail.  If I failed there was a pretty good follow-on chance that someone would make fun of me.  I wanted nothing less than to be made fun of.  I got that a lot, after all.  The easiest solution, then, was to not want or, alternately, to only want that which I could already get.

This, interestingly, is the sort of attitude that’s pretty standard for Evangelical Christianity.  I think it’s pretty standard within most religions, really.  It’s an attempt to channel desire in socially acceptable directions, since human desire is the most obvious danger to strictly built human institutions.  I don’t think that I necessarily took my aversion to wanting things from Christianity, however.

I’m pretty sure that, as with most things, I simply used Christianity as a justification.

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It’s somewhat cliché to talk about defense mechanisms.  I will do so, however, since the term already exists and as much as I’d like to reinvent the wheel just to seem clever it doesn’t seem like a particularly good use of my time or yours, dear reader.  So let’s talk about defense mechanisms.  I had a bunch of them running at any given point, after all.

Like most red-blooded, heterosexual males I developed an interest in the fair sex somewhere in the neighborhood of puberty.  My first specific memories of discovering girls are from the sixth grade.  My first assumptions that the girls I liked wanted nothing to do with me are also from the sixth grade.  Interestingly, my first real memories of being ashamed of my feelings about girls come from the seventh grade, which was also when I started getting all up in the church as a coping mechanism.

I don’t say “ashamed” in the sense that liking girls was, in and of itself, shameful.  If you were a boy you were supposed to like girls, after all.  However, you were supposed to like girls in a chaste way that wouldn’t end until your wedding night.  As such, what I learned to be ashamed of was my budding sexuality and how it made me think about girls.

I figured out how to channel that into a sort of principled lack of action.  Christianity gave me the tools to do exactly that and all I had to do was extrapolate from what I’d learned about sex.  The trick in dealing with any sort of sexual sin-related issues was to deny you had them, after all.  If that didn’t work or sound feasible, then, the other two solutions were to admit to a lesser degree than you actually dealt with or to simply dodge the question.

Eventually the only person I really had to answer to was myself.  I managed to basically convince everyone around me that I was in control of everything (and, in reality, I was about as close as a teenager could be to in control of such things, although part of that was that I allowed my own low self-regard hold a good portion of that particular line).  The excuses were pretty easy, too, and all rolled up into some variation on, “I’m waiting for god’s time/god’s plan/insert cliché here.”  So when I found myself confronted with some other thing I was afraid to do the logical (to my mind) response was to cast all that onto god, too.  It was a ready-made omni excuse.

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The other important trick was to carefully manage how I interacted with everyone else.  The main method involved silence.  Where silence wasn’t an option I offered as little information as possible and filled it with as many caveats as possible.  The final trick was to make sure that most of my friends didn’t know each other all that well.

I also became extremely conservative in my own personal actions.  I only engaged in activities where I knew I would be able to succeed.  If I had to do something where I knew there was a chance of failure I played up the failure aspect and made sure everyone knew I didn’t really care about the outcome and I was trying to fail or I tried to do it in a place where no one would see me.

Mostly I isolated myself.  I then tried to convince myself that I really wanted to live that way.  In truth, I kind of did.  I’m pretty sure that I chose that route precisely because I enjoy being left to my own devices.  There is a bridge too far for such things, however, and I regularly spent my time on the other side of the next bridge over.  I intentionally stunted my own social and emotional growth in an attempt to make sure I’d never, ever find myself in a vulnerable spot.  Being socially and emotionally stunted, however, was a good way of making sure that I was genuinely ill-equipped for those moments I most feared.  It also meant that when a minor example of such a moment presented itself I blew it completely and totally out of proportion in my own mind and just made things so, so much worse.

Weirdly, though, most of the time the people around me didn’t even know what had happened.

This might seem like a lot of work.  This was a lot of work.  So it’s important to ask what, precisely, the end goal was.

In broad terms, my goal was to not get hurt.  I knew that if I said something or did something there was always a risk of being made fun of.  Being made fun of, meanwhile, was intolerably painful.  Similarly, a relationship that added value but suddenly ended would invite all kinds of pain.  I solved the problem of potential future embarrassment or emotional pain by making sure that I never had to experience any embarrassment or emotional pain.  Then I retroactively looked for ways to justify my behaviors.

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For a long time I had the Fat Kid excuse.  Having the Fat Kid excuse, especially in junior high and high school, was a perfect reason.  It was my baseline, “Well, nobody would want me, anyway, so why should I try?” justification.  In 2004 I took that excuse away by losing 110 pounds.  Nobody treated me like the Fat Kid anymore.  Nobody who hadn’t known me before believed me when I told them I’d been the Fat Kid (and this was before Facebook + smartphone = instant proof).

No longer being the Fat Kid didn’t actually change anything, though.  That’s why when I tried to talk about Christianity and leaving Christianity behind I had a hard time honestly saying, “Christianity did this to me,” or, “Christianity did that,” or even, “Ever since I left things have been so much better because I’m no longer [this way].”

That’s also why the story with which I lead off this series kicked me so hard in the gut.  All of the sudden I realized, “I’m doing this thing.  I do not know why I’m doing this thing.  I’d better figure out what’s happening.”

For a long time I’ve felt that I’m doing something wrong and that something has to give.  I didn’t feel like someone else was telling me I was doing something wrong.  I felt like there was something inherently flawed in the way I perceived myself and interacted with the world and I was getting in my own way on that life-long quest for happiness and contentment.

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It’s funny.  Even though I said that I don’t really see an obvious universal angle to my personal story I immediately understood what Ta-Nehisi Coates was talking about when discussing why he doesn’t carry a gun:

This is not mere cant. It is not enough to have a gun, anymore than it's enough to have a baby. It's a responsibility. I would have to orient myself to that fact. I'd have to be trained and I would have to, with some regularity, keep up my shooting skills. I would have to think about the weight I carried on my hip and think about how people might respond to me should they happen to notice. I would have to think about the cops and how I would interact with them, should we come into contact. I'd have to think about my own anger issues and remember that I can never be an position where I have a rage black-out. (Via Fred)

I’ve been friends with gun people.  I’ve put many rounds through guns in my life.  I’m comfortable with guns, comfortable with the idea of guns.  I would never, ever choose to carry a gun.  I would never, ever choose to own a gun.

It’s a realization that I had several years ago when talking to a gun-owning friend of mine about guns and the mentality that goes into being the sort of person who carries a concealed weapon.  His attitude was that a gun is a tool and something that you should have just in case something happens that requires a gun.  My immediate reaction was to point out that I have never, in my life, been in a situation where I felt I needed a gun.  My parents had never in their lives been in a situation where they needed a gun (I also later asked my dad about it and he confirmed that, no, he’d never felt the need to have a gun).

Even though I didn’t have Ta-Nehisi Coates’ words I implicitly understood his idea.  Responsibly carrying a gun requires you to become the sort of person who carries a gun and thinks about carrying a gun and is aware of the fact that you’re carrying a gun.  I am a responsible person.  I am not, however, a gun person.  The difference there boils down to that question of whether you’d like to live your entire life armed or not.

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The problem is that I have been living my entire life armed.  At some point I crawled up into my own little world and tried to make sure nobody else managed to get in there with me or, even worse, pull me back out.

For me, then, the question is, “How do I stop being that person?”

Being Me 5: Manipulation

I didn’t have a girlfriend until after high school.  Hell, I didn’t go on a single date until after high school.  I, um, I had self-esteem issues.  And I was scared of girls.  It happens, y’know?

The thing about the particular person that I started dating right after high school is that I didn’t like her that much.  It was one of those, “Well, I guess this is the best I can do,” sort of things.  Before you go feeling bad for her, I feel I should point out that she was someone who repeatedly and egregiously used men.

We were together for nine-ish rocky months.  It ended when I tried to break up with her but she acted like she didn’t want to break up and then went out and messed around with two other guys, one of whom was a friend who she told that we had broken up.

For at least seven of the next nine years I heard from her every spring.  The last time came after the aforementioned friend’s wedding, when he invited her and I asked him what the hell was wrong with his brain.  Eight months later I got an email from her asking why I hated her.  I responded, which was probably dumb.  I was honest, though.  I told her that I didn’t hate her because that required me to care and I really, really didn’t.

She then attempted to inform me that no one knew me or could possibly know me better than her.  Which, y’know, was weird, since we hadn’t had more than two or three civil conversations in nearly a decade at that point.[1]  She didn’t know me at all anymore.  But she still tried to tell me that no one knew me better than her.

That’s a play that might have worked on me at one point.

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I’m forced to admit that there’s a stretch in my life where it was really easy to manipulate me.  There weren’t really any girls putting their claws into me at the time, though.  I was being manipulated by the church.

Okay, the thing with the girl referenced above did overlap with that.  But, um, I figured it out.[2]

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The thing about Evangelical Christianity is that it’s inherently manipulative.  There’s no way around it.  They tell you that you have to be a certain way and believe a certain way and if you’re not that way you’re going to be punished.  But they have no proof of said punishment.  For any other group this would result in laughter and mockery.  The fact that Christianity in general and Evangelical Christianity in specific has such power is indicative of the power of its manipulation.

I suppose it’s necessary for me to explain a bit.  Sigh.  Okay, let’s get to it.

I was desperate for validation before I hit high school.  I don’t know when it started, so I’ll just go with “before high school” as a catch-all for, y’know, anytime before 14 or so.  I got a lot of my validation from church.  Or, depending on how you define things, I got less negative validation from church.  That might require a bit of explanation, too.

Church, at least as far as I experienced it, was good at a construction of, “We’ll accept you if…”  They were more than happy to want me around.  They were more than happy to want me to get involved and do things.  They only wanted me around and involved if I behaved in a certain way and that way was a narrow, not really particularly Biblical collection of behaviors and activities, however.

That’s where things get sticky.  Evangelical Christianity would have you believe that they’re the sole defenders of a true, Biblical, unconditional love.  The love they peddle, however, is as conditional as any love I’ve ever experienced.  More than a lot, even.

Before I get too deep into things, though, I think I should point out that I don’t really have a problem with conditional love.  I think that all love is, on some level, conditional.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.  One of the things about living in the real world is the realization that nothing whatsoever can be truly unconditional, love included.

The problem here is that the love of the Evangelical Christian god is actually more conditional than most sorts of human, earthly love.  It’s not even a contest, really.  God, according to the Evangelical mindset, is more than willing to revoke his love for infractions as simple as being who you are.  That was an unconscionable viewpoint for me.

There are several people in my life who I used to love and who I would do anything I could to help even though I haven’t talked to them in years and even though the reason I haven’t talked to them is because they hurt me.  There are other people in my life who I can’t stand but upon whom I wish no ill will.  There are even some people who I can’t stand, who have said or done awful things to me, and upon whom I still wish no ill will and who I tend to feel sorry for if I sit down to think about their motivations.  As such, the thing I realized with growing horror towards the tail end of my time in Christianity was that I was more loving and more forgiving than the Christian god as taught by Evangelical Christianity.

There’s a reason I took to referring to god as “the Cosmic Jackass.”  Part of that is because he was a bigger jackass than me and I freely admit that I’m perfectly capable of being a jackass.  If, in the end, my general jackassery stopped short of damning people to hell who didn’t know any better, or people who were just doing their best with a bad hand, or people who did know better but ended up making bad decisions, then where did that leave god?[3]

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None of that really helped with my big problem, though.  I desperately wanted to be accepted.

Christianity, for all its faults, offered one thing that the various other outlets I had did not: a fairly straightforward path to acceptance and respect.  It was fairly easy to start down that path, too.  All you had to do was be the sort of person who showed up and helped out.  There’s always a shortage of people who want to show up and help out in a church.  The other trick is to spend your time studying the Bible and knowing how to say seemingly profound things in Bible study.

I eventually combined those things in such a way that I ended up in leadership positions in church groups.  It kind of happened by default most of the time, too.  I even spent a brief time at a friend’s church the summer after everything kind of fell apart doing my level-headed best to not be that guy.  I still ended up getting pulled in the direction of being that guy.[4]

There was a lot of burnout in the ministries I was involved in.  The same group of people tended to be involved in everything and the same group of people tended to be very tired of having to do everything.  This is a familiar dynamic for any group where something eventually has to get organized and done.

My need for affirmation and the heady rush of being the guy who was there and handled shit created a vicious feedback cycle.  I have to stop here and get back to inherent problem with this whole stretch of self-revelation, however.  I don’t think anyone really intentionally manipulated me.  I think the problem with any group that has a sufficient need of getting stuff done is that if someone shows up and says, “I want to help!” the people that need help say, “Great, get to it!”

Where the manipulation comes in is the inherently manipulative nature of Evangelical Christianity itself.  Every other group in which I’ve involved myself I’ve had the option of saying, “Yeah, I can’t get involved with that.  Sorry.”  In Evangelical Christianity, however, you’re taught that you’re supposed to spend your every waking hour advancing the kingdom of god.  To do otherwise is to risk god’s displeasure.

That’s why I ended up pushing myself well past the breaking point.[5]

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[1]Meanwhile, remember that one of my primary beliefs is in the tug of war between empathy and resentment.  I chose empathy.  I also still have the email string from 2009 floating about and I went back and read it to do my necessary research for this post.  Empathy makes it really hard to do that without feeling bad for shutting her down like I did.

That’s one of my points: empathy is a hard choice to make.  Resentment is the path of least resistance.  It’s easy to hate.  It’s a lot less easy to choose to try to understand another’s pain but then still say, “I don’t need that person in my life.”

[2]Seriously, though, it’s hard to read the email string from the past and not feel like I was being a total dick and wanting to email and apologize for something that happened almost four years ago.  In an exchange between me and someone I don’t care about.  Have I mentioned that choosing empathy as a default is difficult?

[3]I’ve been poorly treated by a lot of people in my life.  I can still remember the names of people who bullied me in grade school.  I can still remember specific instances.  I can also honestly say that if I were responsible for deciding whether any of those people were to be forgiven or tortured for even a minute I’d choose forgiveness every single time.

I mean, I suppose there are extenuating circumstances, like if someone who bullied me grew up to be a child abuser or something.  But if I were god and I had the ability to make stuff like that not happen then you know who I’d blame for child abuse?  Me.  Period.

[4]That was where I met Amy.  At the time I pretty much knew that I was damaged goods and couldn’t really handle trying to win her over.  Interestingly, my solution to the problem was to go back into my church-leader-guy mode.  I literally knew no other way of operating on a level of even minimal confidence.

Now that I put it in those terms it’s blatantly obvious why I spent so much time sitting around and feeling bad about not having Christianity anymore even though I couldn’t be a Christian anymore.  I’ve said that Christianity is like an abusive relationship many times.  It really is.  The reason I stayed in was because when confronted with a situation where I had to dig in and be my best self I had no reserves outside of my identity within Christianity.

That’s not an accident, by the way.  Evangelicals are more than happy to tell anyone who’s willing to listen that the only way to succeed is through Jesus.

[5]I’m not really sure how best to present this part of the story.  But here goes:

The critical stretch for me in regards to leaving Christianity was my second full year at Western Illinois University.  I was on the leadership team for the InterVarsity chapter out there.  I was pushing really hard on the personal aspects of my Christianity.  I was also trying to succeed academically (which, for the record, I did: 4.0 GPO the fall semester, somewhere in the 3.75 range in the spring).  I was also entertaining and confronting serious doubts about stuff for the first time.  Furthermore, I was hanging out with charismatics, which brought a lot more of the prophecy and speaking in tongues stuff out.

For someone full of self-doubt, prone to trying way too hard, and already a little too willing to sit around and try to figure out what god’s will for my life was this was a dangerous combination of factors.  I spiraled off and basically had an extended nervous breakdown.  My primary saving grace in all of it was school.  I refused to let the fact that I was an emotional wreck hurt my GPA, so I pushed on through sheer force of will and intellectual arrogance.  My secondary saving grace was the people I knew who weren’t the people in the ministry I was working with.  Close at hand was a collection of friends of all religious persuasions who were more than happy to just kind of hang out without asking anything of me (which was good, since I was probably a major bag of dicks).  Farther afield was my church at home, which was useful for comparison purposes when the group I was working with seemed completely dysfunctional (which, for the record, it was).

The Police Say this is Normal Control

Terms you would never use to describe me include “the life of the party” and “a social butterfly.”  I’ve always been more of “a wallflower” or “a spaz” or “a total social outcast.”  It’s really why most of my memories of junior high involve watching Wayne’s World too often or playing Super Nintendo games.

This isn’t to say that my only memories of junior high involved saying, “Party on,” while running an airline into the ground on Aerobiz Supersonic.[1]  It’s just to say that, when it gets right down to it, many of my various social stigmas might have been self-inflicted.  I was the fat kid, I was a bit of a spaz, and I started reading Tom Clancy technothrillers in grade school.  Due to a combination of factors I was also often accused of reading the dictionary for fun, which was kinda awkward, since I had a couple friends who actually did read the dictionary for fun.  Thanks to them I still use hircine as an insult from time to time.  It means “goat like, especially in smell.”[2]

Either way, I’ve always viewed myself as an outsider and an observer.  Part of that is because I moved back and forth between worlds on a fairly regular basis.  I grew up in Wheaton and went to church in Wheaton.  I went to public school in Glen Ellyn.  At church my friends either went to the Wheaton public schools[3], the main Wheaton private Christian school, or were homeschoolers.[4]  At school my friends didn’t usually talk about church much at all, but they were usually kids who went to different churches.

To add to this difficulty I went to a Wheaton church that was a bit…shall we say…full of itself.  There are three big Wheaton evangelical churches: Wheaton Bible, College Church, and Wheaton Evangelical Free Church.  I refer to them as “mini-megachurches,” although Wheaton Bible built a new campus (in West Chicago, natch) a few years ago and College Church built a big new annex a while back.  Still, Wheaton is spitting distance from Willowcreek, the ur-megachurch, and I had a girlfriend way, way back in the day who used to drag me up there.  I didn’t like Willowcreek all that much and I didn’t like her all that much, for that matter.  But I went with her because…well, go back to that bit about how I was a socially maladjusted spaz.[5]  It should explain everything.

The church I grew up in was interested, nay, obsessed with the all-important distinction between Christians and Real, True Christians.  So my school friends, many of whom were good, church-going types, usually weren’t good enough.  Truly, many, if not most, of them did not know what the hell a DC Talk even was.

I fit in much better at school after I started listening to Soundgarden.  I didn’t actually fit in particularly well,[6] but at least I knew what the hell everyone was talking about most of the time.  So I had that going for me.

It’s really weird, though.  My memories of junior high are muddled and, often, confusing.  I mostly remember moments and fill in the context later.  Music was always a big part of those memories.

I remember a night at youth group in eighth grade.  I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this before on this here blog, but it bears repeating in this context.  The youth group leader was doing a talk about secular music and its attendant evils.  He played three songs and did a thing about how they were all bad for our developing Christian minds and why.  It was awkward.  He passed out (edited) lyric sheets and then played the songs on a boombox with his finger on the mute button to make sure we didn’t hear any of the four-letter words and, therefore, become scarred for life.  I knew all of the songs.  I’d also learned all of the important four-letter words on the playground by the time I completed the fifth grade.

One of the songs was Green Day’s “Longview,” which is a song about masturbation and, therefore, right out.  One of the songs was Offspring’s “Self Esteem,” which is a song by the Offspring and, therefore, right out.  The third song was Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” which is a song about a kid who kills himself in class and, therefore, right out.

Wait, something about that last bit seems wrong.  Why would a song about a kid killing himself in front of his classroom be bad for a Christian to listen to?  I honestly have absolutely no idea.  It’s especially strange to me since I am the oldest of the Columbine generation.  There were school shootings from time to time as I was growing up, but the big one happened towards the end of my senior year in high school and now there is the world before Columbine and the world after Columbine.

I know now that “Jeremy” was a song that Eddie Vedder wrote to try to make sense of a news story about a kid who killed himself and a memory of a different kid he went to school with who shot up a classroom.  I learned in the eighth grade that “Jeremy” was a bad song because, as far as I can recall, it was about a kid killing himself and it made reference to him biting a breast.  I’m sure there was more to it than that, but that’s what I can drag up.  "Jeremy" was, therefore, relevant to my life.  For some reason, though, as a Christian it wasn't supposed to be relevant or even acceptable.

The Christianity I grew up with wasn’t big on nuance.  That’s why becoming a Soundgarden fan was actually an act of rebellion.  All we were supposed to care about was whether something that was secular used swear words and made reference to sex.  It was best to stick with things that were Christian and the way to tell something was Christian was because it declared itself to be Christian at every possible opportunity.  If something wasn’t Christian then it was bad and if something wasn’t Christian but talked about Christianity it was probably blasphemous and, therefore, to be avoided.

My (partially self-inflicted) status as an outsider gave me a unique perspective on such things.  I desperately wanted to be accepted and considered the right kind of Christian.  I also felt increasingly alienated because I liked things of the world and was friends with people who were either the wrong kind of Christian or not even Christian at all.  I was in a constant tug of war between Christianity and the world.

We all were, though.  There were the acceptable worldly entertainments that everyone was okay talking about.  In high school, for instance, everyone loved U2.  The Simpsons were usually okay, too, for some reason.  But there were other things that were only spoken of apologetically.  One day in high school I rode my bike past that junior high youth leader who’d told us not to listen to “Jeremy” and stopped to talk for a bit.  He was listening to Boxcar Racer and told me as much in an apologetic tone.

The problem was that we were constantly told in church that the only thing that mattered was Jesus and, therefore, the only thing that a proper, good Christian would think about was Jesus.  As such, those things that were marketed for and specifically to Christians were all and always Jesus and, generally, those things were happy and bubbly and more than a little kitschy.  The hardest thing to admit, let alone come to terms with, was that it wasn’t enough.  It simply wasn’t enough entertainment.  It simply wasn’t enough thought and introspection.

This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with writing a song about Jesus.  This isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with writing a bunch of songs about Jesus.  A lot of bands tend to write songs about the same thing over and over again, after all.  I don’t exactly get mad at Roger Clyne for writing a lot of songs about Mexico, tequila, or Mexico and tequila.  The thing is, though, that you can write a song about Jesus.  You can make a career writing songs about Jesus.  You cannot create a music industry around bands that only write songs about Jesus.

This is especially true when you consider that, at least with the mainstream Christian music industry, there were specific ways about which Jesus could be sung.  It all kinda sounded alike after a while.  There are only so many ways you can sing about how Jesus is you totally awesome boyfriend but totally not in a sexual (or gay, for that matter) way, after all.  It’s even worse when you consider that things like “nuance” and “ambiguity” weren’t exactly prized in that world and that “nuance” and “ambiguity” are things that make art interesting and worth revisiting.

There were a few artists I found over the years who did write interesting songs about living life as a Jesus person.  By the end of my time doing the Christianity thing my primary Christian artists were Andrew Peterson, Eric Peters, Rich Mullins, KepanoGreen, Mitch McVicker, and Caedmon’s Call.  Of those, Caedmon’s Call had the most “commercial” success and Rich Mullins was mostly remembered for the dumbest song he wrote (the rather execrable “Awesome God”[7]).  I’m still quite capable of finding all of that music enjoyable.

Of course if you want to put “explicitly Christian” together with “nuance” and “ambiguity” there are few better bands than Over the Rhine.  They became one of my favorite bands after I left religion behind.  They’ve also been relegated to the purgatory of Christianity, existing as darlings of the Cornerstone circuit but never going mainstream.

Still, there’s a reason Soundgarden was such a big deal for me.  I immediately realized that “Black Hole Sun” wasn’t happy and it wasn’t about Jesus.  I didn’t actually know what it was about, but I knew it was different.  I also knew that I responded to it in a way I’d never responded to music before.

That’s the beguiling nature of the secular world to the sheltered Christian.  When art isn’t limited by gatekeepers and checked for purity it can be about anything.  The more I explored the Soundgarden library the more I realized that their music could really be about anything.  To this day I still don’t know what the majority of Soundgarden songs are about.[8]  In fact I’m pretty sure “Jesus Christ Pose” offers more respect to the notion of Jesus than the people who would have been against the song.

It was hard to live in a world where the only way anything was considered valuable was if it was explicitly about how awesome Jesus was.  There’s a lot of that world that I can only start thinking or talking about now, five years after I left.  Right now I don’t know where I’m going with these posts.  I had no intention of writing them but now I can’t seem to stop.

So…y’know…awkward.

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[1]And if you get that reference…welcome to the dork club.

[2]For instance, I sat next to a somewhat hircine fellow on the train tonight.

[3]In seventh grade I developed a bit of a crush on one of the girls in my youth group.  I told this to someone at school who proceeded to make fun of me.  See, one of the Wheaton middle schools is called Franklin.  One of the Glen Ellyn grade schools is called Ben Franklin.  It shouldn’t take much thought to figure out what happened there.

[4]The whole homeschool thing has always been a fascinating thing for me.  When I was younger several of my friends were homeschoolers and I totally wanted to be one, too.  My parents were not on board with that program.  I’ve known a lot of homeschoolers in my life and I can honestly tell you that most of them were probably far better socially adjusted than I was.  I understand the stereotype of the socially maladjusted homeschool kid, especially because I met a few parents who were obviously doing it wrong at later points in my life.  But the notion of regular school = socially properly adjusted and homeschool = weird booger eaters just does not jibe with my experience.

[5]In fact, at 31 I can honestly (and, really, pathetically) say that I’ve had exactly two relationship-esque thingies.  Both were bad ideas that ended poorly.  My next most “successful” “relationship” lasted somewhere in the neighborhood of four dates, followed by the occasional interaction that always devolved into a conversation about why we couldn’t get along.  Eventually I realized that the proper reaction to all that bullshit was to cut ties and walk away because, really, what good was it doing?

[6]I hit high school at the tail-end of the grunge phase.  As such, I tried to be a grunge kid by wearing flannel.  I owned four flannel shirts, two of which were given to me by my grandmother and were more “lumberjack” than “Mother Love Bone.”  It did not end well.

[7]That same youth group leader hated “Awesome God.”  He also hated it for what’s either the best or the worst reason ever.  The song included the line “When he rolls up his sleeve he ain’t just puttin’ on the Ritz.”  This is, of course, an allusion to the notion of putting on a big, gaudy display that ultimately is about form over function.  See, also, Fred Astaire and/or Taco’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

Said youth leader always said that the line made him think of Ritz crackers and he thought it was stupid.

[8]I know a bunch, though, but some of them because I know the story behind the song.  “Mind Riot,” for instance, is an anti-war song Chris Cornell wrote after learning about the start of the first Gulf War.  “Jesus Christ Pose” is about people who mis-use Christianity to pretend they’re being persecuted.  “Like Suicide” is about the time he killed a bird which had flown into his window and severely injured itself.  “Spoonman” is about a man who played the spoons and was written because of a bet.  “Limo Wreck” is a touching tribute to the life and death of Princess Di.  “Fell on Black Days” is about Chris Cornell’s long struggle with a debilitating disease that rendered him incapable of wearing a shirt while on camera.  “Halfway There” is about his partially successful rehab program, which he engaged with the help of Cameron Crowe.

Times are Gone for Honest Men

I’ve spent the last couple days trying to figure out why I care so much that you care about why Soundgarden matters to me.  It’s certainly not because I’m ashamed of that fact.  Declaring Soundgarden one of my all-time favorite bands is exactly as much of a social risk as declaring chocolate one of my all-time favorite foods or Kelly Kapowski one of the hottest television teenagers.

It’s also not because I feel like I have to apologize for not really caring about King Animal.  It’s not a great album, but it’s not a bad album.  There are four other albums about which I feel less ambivalent and more positive in 2012.  Two of them are by Scott Lucas, who has musical chops to spare and almost as much of a hold on my own personal understanding of what makes music worthwhile as Soundgarden.  So, again, it’s not like I’m taking a great risk here.  It’s like trying to decide whether to take Magic’s Lakers or Bird’s Celtics in a basketball simulation.  I’m not trying to argue that the 1999 Clippers are the greatest team in basketball history here.

What it really gets right down to is that I don’t see Soundgarden in a fight with Local H here.  The reason that Soundgarden matters to me and the reason I want you to know why Soundgarden matters to me is because I was talking about Christmas.  Really, is there anything more likely to get you in the Christmas spirit than a rousing chorus of “Blow Up the Outside World?”

Actually…no.  That’s not it.

As I said in the last post, I still remember the three songs I heard in that minivan ride from Michigan: Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” the Counting Crows’ “Mr. Jones,” and Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus.”  I also know why Soundgarden ended up being the band I consider one of the all-time greatest and not, say, Falco.[1]  It’s because my first thought after hearing “Black Hole Sun” was, and I still remember this vividly, “I didn’t know music could do that.”

I didn’t really know what “Black Hole Sun” was about.  For that matter it’s been 18 years and I’m still not entirely sure I know what “Black Hole Sun” was about.  At the time, though, I knew it was about something and that something was big.  I also knew that it was depressing as hell.  I, as I said, didn’t know music could do that.  Part of that is because in my world music didn’t do that.

I was in seventh grade.  My music at the time consisted of what my parents or older sister listened to or what I heard at youth group.  My mother listened to oldies.  My father listened to oldies and smooth jazz.[2]  At youth group I heard, well, let’s review.

There was DC Talk:



There was Steven Curtis Chapman[3]:



There was Dakoda Motor Co



I’m going to go back to the well here and let Matt Nathanson explain the common thread in all of those videos:



Really, I need to bookmark that video.  I just spent, like, 15 minutes trying to find it and I apparently do that every three months or so.

You can tell the Jesus songs because, they’re all blatantly about Jesus.  You can also tell the Christian stations because they’re all blatantly Jesus songs.  It’s really a phenomenon that I figured out long before Matt Nathanson showed up to tell me about it.  You, too, can probably figure this out if you’re the sort who pays attention.

I always knew when I’d hit a Christian radio station.  I didn’t even need to hear the words “Jesus” or “forgiveness” or “resurrection” or “You,” y’know, capitalized.  I could always tell by the sound of the music itself.  Christian music, especially of the radio variety, is tuned differently from non-Christian music.  Specifically it’s tuned to be brighter.  And, yes, brighter is a thing.  It basically means louder and peppier.  It also, interestingly enough, takes away the depth.[4]

That bright tuning is both a musical mixing and a philosophical pigeonhole for Christian music.  The sound is supposed to be brighter and cheerier and so are the words.  If you want to get anywhere in Contemporary Christian Music you have to write cheerful songs about how great life and Jesus and life with Jesus is.  If you want to write about politics you have to write about how Jesus would make politics better.  If you want to write about ice cream you have to write about how Jesus makes ice cream better.  If you want to write about sex you have to go talk to your pastor about your obvious problems, young lady.  Or you have to write extremely heavily veiled metaphor and make sure everyone knows that you’re married.

It’s not a fair comparison, but put ol’ Steven Curtis Chapman up there against “Black Hole Sun:”[5]



There was just something there that Christian music was missing.  I fear that talking about it is one of those things that will take the rest of my life, so I think I’ll stop here for now.

-----------------------------

[1]Actually, there’s a good reason for that.  It’s because “Rock Me Amadeus” is awful in the sort of way that only things made in Germany in the ‘80s that aren’t “99 Luftballoons” can be awful.  Of course, I heard the English language version, but I ain’t bothering to track that down.  You’re welcome for that, by the way.

[2]WNUA, Ninety-Five point Fi-ive.  For the life of me I don’t know why he listened to smooth jazz, since he generally had better taste in things than that.  But…whatever.

[3]I could swear that he had a song that was about dancing with dinosaurs.  I’m a little afraid to look that up, but I’m also afraid that I hallucinated it.  Still, I think that’s one of those things that could explain a lot.

[4]This, interestingly, is also part of the reason I can’t get into King Animal.  It’s tuned just slightly brighter than Badmotorfinger and Superunknown.  Soundgarden is supposed to offer a dark, menacing, and plodding wall of sound.  Bright tuning is not a good way to perpetuate that sound.  It’s almost impossible to listen to “Non State Actor” after listening to “Slaves & Bulldozers” without hearing the difference.  It’s also almost impossible to take “Non State Actor” seriously after hearing that difference.  [EDIT:  Also, um, this is one of those places where it's bleedingly obvious that I'm not really a music guy, but more a guy who hangs out around music enough to know the words but not necessarily pull up the right ones at the right time.  The problem here isn't in tuning, but in mixing and mastering.  For all I know the instruments are tuned exactly the same way in "Non State Actor" that they're tuned in "Slaves & Bulldozers."  For that matter, Steven Curtis Chapman might be using the exact same tuning (doubtful, though, as Soundgarden primarily used drop D tuning, which is a metal/power chord tuning and SCC wasn't really a power chord guy).  It's the studio magic that then makes it brighter and louder.  So now I'm interested to hear the new stuff live, because the more I listen to it the more I realize that my primary objection is that it doesn't sound like Soundgarden is supposed to sound and that's most likely a mastering issue.]

[5]Believe it or not, but I’d never actually seen that video before prepping this post.  My new goal in life is to never see it again.  I mean, holy shit.

The Max Power Way

The byword for the Evangelical world is control.  For all the talk of free will that goes on, especially as a justification for the doctrine of Hell, absolutely no one in the Evangelical world is an independent actor working under their own volition.  This simple fact must be understood by any external observer who wishes to make any sort of sense of the various pronouncements that come from Evangelical thought leaders.  It’s also why that it makes perfect sense to an Evangelical to make a completely nonsensical statement like, “True freedom is slavery to Christ.”  That’s a paraphrase of a popular Bible verse and a prime example of Evangelical doublethink.  Freedom and slavery do not belong together in a positive correlation.  It’s simply logically impossible outside of a construction like, “I’m free to own and enslave as many people as I want.”

In Evangelical world, however, there is no choice between freedom and slavery.  There is only a choice between enslavement to Jesus and enslavement to evil, worldly things and/or Satan hisownself.  It kind of depends on who you’re talking to and where they fall on the fundamentalist-charismatic spectrum.  Jesus and whatever the not-Jesus of preference happen to be are equal and opposite binary forces.  There’s a whiff of the ol’ Manicheanism to the whole thing, but it’s tweaked because if you’re a true follower of Jesus then no matter what happens Jesus will hold on and the Devil can’t win but Jesus is powerless unless the person in question chooses to accept Jesus.  As such, the only space in which free will exists is in this freedom to choose sides.

This, ultimately, is why Jesus is the one-size-fits-all answer to any and every problem in the world.  Problems are caused by enslavement to worldly things.  The solution, then, is to choose enslavement to Jesus.  Do you have a drug addiction?  You need Jesus.  He’ll fix you up good.  Are you poverty-stricken?  You need Jesus.  He’ll provide for all your needs.  Are you a pregnant teenager?  You need Jesus.  He’ll provide for your baby.  Are you gay?  You need Jesus.  He’ll degayify you.

That Jesus/not-Jesus dichotomy is the root of all the confusing and obviously impossible except in a very narrow, specialized case Evangelical strawmen that the Evangelical apologists like to beat around.  A sexually active, unmarried woman isn’t a rational actor making her own decisions.  She’s a slut who’s enslaved to her own carnal desires.  A gay man isn’t a rational actor making his own decisions.  He’s a Devil-besotten sinner who’s been smitten by worldly desire for the all-powerful cock.

The only solution to this form of worldly slavery is to choose enslavement to Jesus.  Jesus enslavement is different from worldly enslavement because Jesus loves you and the world doesn’t.  We know this because the Bible says so (John 3:16, bitches!).  Everyone knows this on some level.  The Bible, after all, says that the heavens themselves declare the glory of god and it’s blatantly obvious that the heavens specifically declare the glory of the god of the Bible and go on to declare the awesomeness of enslaving yourself to Jesus because, well, because Evangelical Christians are far better at non sequiturs than they are at putting together logical proofs.  Geometry is a worldly thing that’s of the Devil, after all.[1]  And if you don’t believe me, there is a part of the Jewish Bible that gives the measurements of a circular item in the Temple and indicates by the way it gives the measure that pi is exactly 3.

I genuinely don’t understand why any of this is considered compelling argument.  I mean, I’m being intentionally snarky about it, but this is Evangelism 101 right here.  It’s logical fallacy after logical fallacy parading as profound consideration of the nature of the universe.  This only works with people who have already bought the idea that the Bible is a foundationally explanatory document.  It’s why the byword for Evangelical Christianity is control.

There are gatekeepers to the Evangelical culture.  Generally these gatekeepers are the pastors.  Their privileged position rests on the notion that they have access to knowledge that other people simply don’t.  That position is privileged and reliant upon the notion that the only valid source of knowledge is something that they have a privileged access to.

I mean, of course, the Bible.  If you didn’t realize that already then, um, I’m not quite sure why you’re here, honestly.

I was in an interesting position during my last few years in the church.  I was planning on going into ministry.  I was a smart guy who obviously knew his shit.  I combined these two things into access to and collaboration with the pastors of the various groups I was a part of.  This wasn’t necessarily a rarefied thing like saying that you’re buddies with Michael Jordan, but for most people the pastor was on a level above and the guy with all the answers.  So while I didn’t occupy a unique position, I occupied an interesting position and approached it with my usually inquisitive style.

I knew a bunch of pastors.  I knew of two who were genuinely willing to respond to questions with the words, “I don’t know.”  Of those, one would basically say, “I don’t know, but the answer is somewhere in the Bible.  You should read it more and possibly find a mentor to help you study.”  I found that frustrating, to say the least.

Still, those two pastors were the ones I was most interested in emulating, because I found a willingness to admit not knowing all the answers refreshing.  I also found that willingness a key part of any process of inquisition.  My main problem was that I kept running up against the realization that a lot of Evangelical pastors didn’t seem to find inquisitiveness a useful quality.

I can still vividly remember sitting in the church I attended for a while out at Western and listening to the pastor rail against the Emergent Church movement.  For him the likes of Rob Bell and Brian McLaren were enemies to be defeated.  For me Rob Bell was a wonderful Christian thinker and Brian McLaren was…well, he was kind of out there and certainly a bit unorthodox but I wasn’t going to call him a non-Christian and certainly wasn’t about to call him an enemy.  Mostly, though, I realized that this pastor, in calling Rob Bell a non-Christian and an enemy was calling another pastor I respected the hell out of a non-Christian and an enemy and, by extension, was calling me a non-Christian and an enemy.

That Sunday was one of the first in my long line of breaks with Christianity.  It wasn’t the first and it wasn’t the most important.  But looking back on it I realize something.

Christianity was a long, exhausting slog for me.  It had no payoff and no payout that I was ever able to discern.  As a bright, inquisitive person all of my questions were met with, “Read your Bible more.”  As a person who was self-critical to the point of pathology all of my self-doubts were reinforced with constant messages that I wasn’t good enough and I was too prone to give in to my sinful human nature.  I indulged in surprisingly few worldly things but was always told that they were too much and I was being too sinful.

I knew a lot of people in the Evangelical world who were massively broken in one way or another.  For me it was my self-doubt.  For others it was a striving to work off some real or imagined past debt.  For still others it was a genuine mental health problem.  And, trust me, I knew a few people who were totally fucked up in the head.

The Evangelical world I inhabited had no shits to give about me or anyone else.  That’s the dirty little secret about the whole thing.  That’s why this post over at Fred’s place about something that happened in Kansas City and which is associated in a weird way with the International House of Prayer is both horrifying and believable.  It’s also why this article about the source of the growing backlash against Wal-Mart is fascinating.

Those of us who had something to prove, something to escape, or something to validate were the best workers.  The church or the parachurch organizations that surrounded it chewed us up and spit us out.  If something went wrong or we burned out it wasn’t because there was something wrong with the system but because there was something wrong with us.  We could be pushed.  We could be directed.  We could be controlled.

My first real glimpse behind the curtain was that pastor who was angry at the Emergent Church movement.  I realized at some point that he wasn’t mad so much as he was scared.  He was scared of Rob Bell and Brian McLaren and the people who read Brian McLaren’s videos and watched Rob Bell’s videos because Bell and McLaren encouraged people to think about things in a different way than that pastor wanted them to think.  That was unconscionable.  That was intolerable.

It’s also why Young Earth Creationists seek to discredit Charles Darwin when debating scientists.  They are literally incapable of understanding that they could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Charles Darwin did, in fact, molest collies but that his personal predilections towards canine canoodling have zero impact on the scientific validity of his observations and conclusions.  They don’t understand that science has moved beyond Charles Darwin and that scientists would tell you that some of Charles Darwin’s conclusions were, in fact, wrong but it doesn’t matter because the overall umbrella idea of evolution through the process of natural selection is still the best explanation for the genetic variations and similarities of the various occupants of this planet we call Earth.

That’s because in the world of Evangelicalism you don’t follow an idea, you follow a person.  Even though the general, overall theory is that there’s this book called the Bible and this religion called Christianity and the people who follow those things assent to the notion that both things exist and have existed for the better part of two millennia it doesn’t matter.  The true arbiter of validity is the interpreter of the Bible and Christianity.  That arbiter is the pastor.  That pastor’s position is fragile at best.

I saw a few pastors fired during my time in Christianity.  It’s interesting, too, because my understanding of why that happened came from a wholly secular source.  I had a boss in high school who was friends with an AM drive-time DJ on one of the Chicago FM music stations.  I did not listen to that show, but instead I listened to a different, nationally syndicated (or soon to be nationally syndicated, I forget) DJ on a different station who had much higher ratings.  This was the ‘90s, kids.  Things like that mattered.

Anyway, one day my boss’s DJ buddy called in and asked to talk to him.  The main phone had recently broken, so we had a temporary replacement that didn’t have a hold button.  The phone, therefore, was deposited on the counter while someone went back to fetch the bossman.  I was there with another one of my coworkers who also listened to the same AM drive-time show I listened to.  We proceeded to discuss our preferred show and why it was awesome because that’s what high school kids do.

My boss came in, picked up the phone, talked to his DJ buddy for a moment, then looked at me with a bit of a grin on his face and said, “He wants to talk to you.”  He then handed me the phone.

I was treated to a string of profanity as the DJ bitched me out.  This horrified me, because I truly thought I had done something wrong.  I was also 16 years old and the sort of kid who literally did nothing to rock any boat I could avoid rocking.  That kind of matters.  See, 31 year-old me would have calmly listened to that string of profanities and then said something to the effect of, “Seriously, dude?  You’re so insecure that you can’t even handle overhearing someone talking about a different radio show in your presence?  Should I extrapolate this into a guess about the size of your penis?”

I did nothing of the sort.  I stood there, rooted in place, unsure of what to do and partially convinced I was about to lose my job because I’d insulted my boss’s friend.  My boss took the phone back, had his conversation, hung up the phone, and told me something that’s worth remembering.  He told me that guys like the DJ in question are insecure because people in that position could be out of that position and forgotten tomorrow.  The DJ was, in short, more existentially terrified of me and what my conversation implied about him than I ever needed to be about him.

I saw a lot of pastors lose their jobs in my time in the Evangelical world.  I realized at some point that being a pastor in an Evangelical church included a certain level of existential terror that they could preach an unpopular sermon on Sunday and be out on their asses on Monday.  That’s why control mattered (and matters, I suppose) so much.  That’s why the Evangelical world is split between the right way and the wrong way and the wrong way is simply not acceptable.  It’s simply not possible to exercise the control necessary to keep a congregation if the congregation is encouraged to think and study and draw conclusions for itself.

That’s why Evangelicals are encouraged to think of themselves as free through enslavement.  It’s why they’re encouraged to think of leaving as a different, more intolerable form of bondage.  It’s why I, as someone who was once respected as a worker and a true man of god, scared a bunch of people when I left.  If I could decide it’s not worth it and then simply wander off to live my life than anyone could.

Simply existing and not acknowledging the Bible as the end-all-be-all source of knowledge is a challenge to Christianity.  That, in turn, is why people like Pat Robertson have decided to declare that I have declared war against Christmas.  I’ve done no such thing, but the simple act of me existing and being who I am is a declaration of war in Pat Robertson’s world.

He is, in short, a tiny man who has to feel big by swearing at a 16 year-old kid for the simple crime of overhearing that kid talk about someone who isn’t him.  It’s impossible to not feel sorry for Pat Robertson because of this.  It’s also impossible to not feel a bit of schadenfreude at the realization that my reaction would cause even more spittle-flecked fulminating from a tiny, pathetic man who has decided to get in a dick measuring contest with someone who has no shits to give about the relative size of their genitalia because it really doesn’t matter, anyway.

--------------------

[1]I, for one, am enslaved to writing out the digits to the right of the decimal points in irrational numbers.  It’s why I eat so much pi, especially around the holidays.

Thank you, thank you.  I’ll be here all week.  Don’t forget to tip your servers.

Good News, Everyone!

We have our next Kirk Cameron.

And, really, if you know anything about Cameron's last couple years on Growing Pains, King looks like he's pretty much doing the exact same thing that Kirk did.  The weird thing here, of course, is that King's arguments against watching the very show he's on are correct, just for the exact and total wrong reasons.  It is a crap show and it is utter filth, just, y'know, not on a moral level, more on an art and quality level.  So that's neat.

Also, too, it looks like this The Forerunner guy is all set up to be his Ray Comfort.  So, hey!  Somebody get him a banana.

Mr. Always Wrong Strikes Again

So, Mr. Robertson had this to say:



This was my Saturday:




And this:




This was my Sunday:




Yeah.  I'm fucking miserable.  And I hate Christmas.  Hopefully soon I'll get around to writing up the big, damn post I was thinking about over the last couple of days about how Christmas is way better now that I'm not an Evangelical.

But for the moment, hey, twinkly lights!  And an adorable dog!  Who might be about to throw up!  Yay!

The Red Apple, Part 2

The word “Jihad” is difficult to use in the post-9/11 world.  Right-wing Christians use the word every twenty-three seconds or so and use the idea of Jihad as synonymous with Islam itself and pretty much every single Muslim.  It’s useful for people who want to alienate the other and justify a war by the oldest excuse in the book: they started it!

A counter-narrative of Jihad arose to make an equal and opposite claim.  I have no idea where it came from, nor do I know where I heard it.  It went thusly, however: Islam is a religion of peace and Jihad is about the inner struggle for purity, but it was corrupted to make Jihad about holy war against the enemies of Islam.  Moreover, the specific version I heard indicated that Jihad was corrupted because Saladin needed a rallying cry to get the various Muslim tribes and kingdoms to unite against the threat of the European Crusades.

This is a convenient counter-narrative.  It’s based in a certain amount of truth, too.  Jihad has two or three meanings and the notion of Jihad as holy war is actually only the lesser struggle.  This is disputed, of course, by historians who claim that Jihad was primarily used to mean actual, physical war.  I don’t know enough to make a judgment call.  It doesn’t matter, however, as the argument is actually somewhat immaterial.

The counter-narrative of Jihad as Muslim anomaly and response to the Crusades pretends that Saladin’s fight to re-take the Holy Land from the infidels arose in a vacuum.  It’s not like the Qu’ran was written sometime around 700 and then, boom, 400 years later there was a Crusade and the Muslims were all, “Oh, shit, now what are we gonna do?”  Muslims and Christians were pretty much at war from the time Islam was founded.  That’s why there were Crusades in the first place.

-

It’s actually really hard to claim that Islam is a religion of peace.  Muhammed was pretty much constantly warring with someone or other.  Muhammed died in 632.  Exactly one century later Charles Martel defeated a Muslim army at the Battle of Tours-Poitier.

For those keeping track at home, that means that in the course of a century the descendants of Muhammed’s religion of peace had managed to conquer North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and curl all the way around to threaten Paris, France.  They had to go the long way around because Constantinople was still at the height of its powers within living memory and blocked invasion of Europe from the east.

Oh, yeah, Constantinople.  In the century between the death of Muhammed and the Battle of Tours-Poitiers Muslim armies had besieged that great city no less than three times, including one siege that lasted for five years and another that involved the troops bringing seeds to plant their own crops so they could be in it for the long haul.  They weren’t so much beating swords into plowshares as bringing plowshares to make sure the swords would get use.

Islamic cosmography, meanwhile, had come to divide the world into three broad categories.  First was the House of Islam, where Islam was the rule.  Second was the House of Safety, where Islam was not the rule but Muslims were allowed to live in peace.  Third was the House of War, which was pretty much everywhere else.  This was also nearly synonymous with Christian Europe.

-----------------------------

A question must be asked before we can proceed: What were the Crusades?

This largely depends on who you talk to.  In the specific telling of the story of the Crusade as a sudden release of violence from a previously peaceful Islamic culture the Crusades were a horrible atrocity and – because words have little meaning these days – Western terrorism on a grand scale.  This is wrong.  It’s not completely and totally wrong.  But it’s definitely wrong.

The First Crusade was a direct result of the Battle of Manzikert.  The Battle of Manzikert came was a direct result of the mutual embrace between the Turkmen and the Muslims.

Early Muslims were primarily nomadic Arabic tribesmen.  They traveled fast, struck hard, and terrorized civilized people.  It was their mobility and ability to endure hardship that allowed them to destroy the Persian Empire and cross North Africa in the space of just a few decades.

They eventually settled down, though.  Empire tends to do that.  In general it’s a good thing, but the practical matters of imperial administration tend to get in the way of overrunning nearby kingdoms.

Then the Muslims ran across the Turks, who hung out around Anatolia and the Caspian Sea.  The Turks were nomadic horsemen of a tradition not all that dissimilar from the Huns or the Mongols.  In the Turks the Muslims saw the spirit of the gazi: holy warriors who cared about nothing more than spreading Islam.

It was the Seljuk Turks who provided the opening for the Muslim conquest of Anatolia, which would mark the long, slow strangulation of the Byzantine Empire.  In 1071 Romanos IV Diogenes lost to a Seljuk army at Manzikert in decisive fashion.  This didn’t destroy the Byzantines, but it destabilized the empire and left all of Anatolia vulnerable to the Turks.  In true Byzantine fashion, though, it was a civil war following the loss at Manzikert that allowed the Turks to take the Byzantine heartland, as opposed to the loss in the battle itself.

In 1095 Alexios I Komnenos was forced to do the unthinkable: request help from Rome to stop further Seljuk incursion.  In 1078 they had taken Nicaea, which was both practically at Constantinople’s doorstep and one of the most important cities to the Byzantine cause.  It could not be re-taken without help.  Latin Christians considered Orthodox Christians half-breed heretics, however.  They weren’t about to go take Anatolia just to keep the Byzantine Empire safe, even if it was in their own best interests.  They needed a bigger justification.  Thus a simple attempt to retake the Byzantine breadbasket became an apocalyptic war for the center of the world.

-------------------------

The First Crusade was wildly successful.  The Crusaders started in Constantinople and marched through Anatolia, retaking Nicaea in the process.  They then conquered Antioch and Jerusalem and established the crusader states.

Less than a century later Egyptian Muslim troops flying the banner of jihad conquered Jerusalem under the banner of Jihad.  Their commander was known in the West as Saladin.  Surprisingly, his reputation was as an exemplar of chivalry and not bloodthirsty savagery.

We shall look at that later.

The Red Apple, Part 1

Re-reading Toby Lester’s The Fourth Part of the World convinced me to re-read Roger Crowley’s 1453 and Empires of the Sea, his great book-end study of the beginning and end of the Ottoman high tide of the Medieval/Renaissance period.  This time, unlike the last, I started with 1453.[1]  The scene-setting in 1453 has reminded me of a current bit of fad in the West that is, shall we say, completely flat-out wrong.  I refer to the tendency among people discussing the American and European response to Islamic terrorism by claiming that the West is at fault because they started it all with the Crusades.

This is, in a word, completely and totally wrong.  Okay, that’s, like, four words.  In order to understand how wrong that is, we must look at a period of history that stretches approximately nine and a half centuries.  That sounds exactly like the sort of thing I would attempt to tackle in one blog post, then turn it into an ongoing series that never quite gets wrapped up…

…Um, crap.

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Crowley begins 1453 with a possibly apocryphal letter from the Prophet Muhammed to Heraclius, then Autocrat of the Romans, as one of the many Byzantine imperial titles made god’s Vice-Gerent on Earth, and to Chosroes, the King of Kings in Persia, whom Heraclius had just defeated in glorious fashion in order to re-take Jerusalem and return the True Cross to its rightful place in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.[2]  The letter invited both kings to embrace the true faith of Allah and embrace Islam.  According to the story Heraclius responded with grace and curiosity while Chosroes had his copy torn up.  The story goes that Muhammed cursed Chosroes for his perfidy, but it was too late, as the Persian King of Kings was already dead by the time Muhammed got the news.

The year was 629.  The Eastern Roman Empire, known to history as the Byzantine Empire, was already three centuries into its eleven-hundred year history and at the height of its powers.  Constantinople sat at the crossroads of East-West geography in space and history itself in time.  It’s dominions stretched from the edges of the Italian Peninsula, through the Balkans, across northern Africa, and into the Holy Land itself, now including Antioch, Damascus, and Jerusalem.  The most Christian nation in all of history held the very ground upon which Jesus and the Apostles lived and walked.

Whether or not Muhammed actually sent a letter to Heraclius and Chosroes is disputed.  Whether or not a possible real letter would have made it to either is also in dispute.  What is not in dispute at all is the fact that the conveniently prophetic letter ended up being conveniently prophetic.

Less than twelve years after Heraclius took Jerusalem the armies of the first Caliphate took it and Damascus for themselves.  Egypt fell next.  Armenia fell another dozen years after that.  The Persian Empire collapsed and surrendered in the meantime.  The first Muslim siege of Constantinople came in 669.

The second stretched across five campaigning seasons from 674-678.  That siege was broken in 679 by the first recorded use of the famed Greek Fire, when the Byzantines demonstrated their mastery of the sea.   A natural storm destroyed most of those who survived the firestorm and Constantinople was safe for nearly half a century.

In 717 the Muslims took advantage of the confusion usually wrought by imperial succession and arrived outside the gates with 80,000 men, enough ships to hold the Bosporus, and, more seriously, seeds to plant their own crops.  They intended to stay outside the walls of Constantinople for as long as it took to convince the Romans to open their otherwise impregnable walls.

That was when Emperor Leo III pulled off one of the most astounding diplomatic stunts of all time.  He convinced the besieging forces that Constantinople would surrender if they turned over some of their food and then destroyed the rest.  The Muslim troops complied, but Leo didn’t follow through on his end of the bargain.[3]  A winter of historically terrible proportions followed, then in the spring the Byzantines were able to destroy a fleet sent to resupply the army.  The siege lifted and Muslim battle standards wouldn’t fly outside the walls of Constantinople for another seven centuries.[4]

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Constantinople might have survived the First Caliphate and, eventually, the Second, but it was crippled.  The biggest issue the Romans had in that case was the fall of their north African holdings, most critically Egypt.  The Muslim troops swept across the continent and at the same time they were checked in the East by the stout walls of Constantinople they flowed into Europe through the Iberian Peninsula.

The Umayyad Caliphate completed its conquest of Hispania (most of the Iberian Peninsula) the same year they were forced to retreat from the walls of Constantinople by the devious Leo III.  The following year they conquered the Narbonne in France.

In 721 Duke Odo of Aquitaine checked a Muslim expansion at the Battle of Toulouse.  By the end of the decade Odo found himself squeezed from the south by the Moors and the Franks from the north and west.  He managed to achieve a short-lived peace, but in 730 everything fell apart for Odo.  He lost at the Battle of Bordeaux and then his troops were slaughtered at the Battle of the River Garonne.

Odo turned to the Franks for help and submitted to the authority of Charles Martel.  In 732 Martel defeated the Moorish forces at the Battle of Tours-Poitiers, roughly 150 miles from Paris.

The Moors still managed to take Avignon.  It wasn’t through conquest, though.  They were invited in out of a desire to resist Charles Martel.  That did not end well for Avignon, as Martel took the city and destroyed it as an example.

By Martel’s death in 741 the Frankish armies were at the gates of Narbonne and had wrested most of Aquitaine from the hands of the Moors.  His younger son, Pepin the Short, expanded on his gains.

The actual long-term impact of Charles Martel’s victory at Tours-Poitiers is disputed.  For a long time it was considered one of the most important battles in history.  Some historians now consider it little more than an effective victory against a raid in force.  Whichever side is right, Tours-Poitiers did bring the Franks into the field against the Muslims for the first time.  That would have a long-ranging impact on history.

It set the stage for Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire, the Reconquista, and, eventually, the Battle of Lepanto.  The intervening years would also bring the Crusades, the rise of the Turks, and the fall of Constantinople.

First blood, though, went to the Muslims.  There can be no question of that.

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[1]I also see that Crowley put out a new book about Venice in January.  Guess I know what’s next on my list…

[2]Holy run-on sentence, Batman!

[3]Because, duh.  “Byzantine” isn’t a synonym for “devious” and “convoluted” for nothing.  Also, it’s interesting how events 734 years later would mirror Leo’s first year on the throne.  Europeans were actually excited when Mehmet II took the mantle of Ottoman leadership in 1451 because he had a reputation as a bit of a screw-up.  Two years later he became the first foreign ruler to occupy Constantinople in 1100 years, save a particularly treacherous Venetian Doge during the Fourth Crusade.

[4]This, for the record, is a mind-boggling stretch of history. The United States has lasted about one-fifth as long as the Byzantine Empire.  Yet there are those who want to convince all and sundry that America is the bestest anything in the history of ever.  Tell that to Constantine.  Or Osman.  Or, hell, the Chinese.

Enlightenment

So, I had a couple posts worked up to a nice frothy lather but decided they weren't going anywhere.  That's probably for the best, I think.

Also, too, I'd decided to make a half-assed closing to my Group Dynamics series, as I just kind of ran out of steam on the idea and wasn't expressing what I wanted to express in any sort of serious way.  It kept descending into polemics and the concrete, which was more-or-less the exact opposite of what I wanted to do.  I mean, yes, sometimes the concrete is necessary, but oftentimes the concrete gets in the way of the things that actually matter.

And so but anyway, I've finally (FINALLY!) gotten around to reading seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees, Lawrence Weschler's luminous biography of Robert Irwin.  Irwin has focused his entire career on questions of perception and presence and removing the image from art in order to leave only the interaction between the art and the self.

As it happens, sometimes I find myself reading the exact right thing for the exact right moment in time.  Were I still a Christian I would call it providence.  These days, though, I just call it "convergence," that wonderful term of art given me by Lawrence Weschler himself.  Either way, I found myself trying to figure out if there was any way that I, as a writer, could make use of Robert Irwin's ideas and lessons.  I was confounded by the question, but did realize that he provided an answer of another sort to a different question, specifically the question of why I saw such great convergence between the Christianity I'd departed and the atheism from which I am beginning my departure.

Anyway, amongst its many brilliant lines, Weschler's book contains this quote from Robert Irwin:

After the Whitney, I might have just disappeared, and in a way that would have been nice.  But as it turns out, I couldn't.  And maybe it's for the same reason I've never been comfortable with the argument from certain spiritual quarters about enlightenment.  I don't doubt that those people devoted to Zen and yoga, the krishnas and all of them, do attain an altered state of consciousness, that they are in a different place, and in a sense a nicer place.  But this is not an enlightened world.  And the world always draws you back. [emphasis his]

To put it in a different way, it's easy to be a holy man on top of a mountain.

This brings me back to the old conversations we used to have on retreats and missions trips about "mountaintop experiences" and trying to bring those moments back to school and work and reality.

Somewhere in there, too, is Martin Buber and the I and Thou, the removal of the space between you and me for those transient, transcendent moments.

For a moment, though, we can unfocus, because in looking at we're really looking for.  Sometimes it's best to just perceive.

And in that moment I realized what I want to say about group dynamics.  Hopefully I'll be able to articulate it in a way that makes even a tiny modicum of sense.