08-15-2006, 07:50 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Evangelism a flawed path to foreign policy</b>
http://www.christianaggression.org/item_di...0&type=ARTICLES
August 13, 2006
Times Argus
I can remember standing, as a small child, on a street corner in the old South End
of Albany, N.Y., on a sunny Sunday afternoon. The corner of South Ferry and
Pearl, I believe it was, just half a block from my Grandfather Lange's
settlement house, where the good folks of his congregation swapped food and
clothing for sermons. "Swapped" isn't quite the right word, because there was no
trade; the mendicants who came to the door got both in exchange for only
appearing to be interested in the sermon.
On this Sunday afternoon â probably 1939 or 1940 â Grampa Lange was preaching
sinner-come-home to mostly empty air and the occasional passing car.
Though his sermons predicted eternal doom for those who refused the invitation,
his manner was invariably gentle. His tag team preaching partner, however, a Mr.
DeVreest, was a give-'em-hell ranter who actually pointed at passersby as he
pronounced their imminent and everlasting confusion. The only listeners who
didn't move quickly on were men in undershirts at the windows of four-story
brick walkups, watching as they smoked and listened to the Yankees game on the
radio. I saw them again decades later when I first read T.S. Eliot: "â¦lonely men
in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windowsâ¦."
Nothing ever happened. The sound of the ballgame echoed distantly in the
background, and an occasional trolley car rumbled past. Eventually my baby
sister and I sang one of the little kids' songs we knew, and we all trooped back
to the settlement house for another service, another sermon, more singing, and
once in a while a supper of thin beef stew and floating dumplings.
Evangelism, it's called. Originally a great Greek word, from eu, meaning "well,"
and angelos, "messengers." Evangels are those who bring us good news. Grampa
Lange was one of them. His profession was pharmacy, and his passion saving
souls. But even in the Depression in the tattered South End, it wasn't enough
simply to advertise the settlement's social services. Grampa went out to the
hedges and ditches, as it were, to bring 'em in. To be perfectly honest, I can't
say that I ever counted a single success, and like the small boy getting his
first look at a giraffe, I occasionally wondered, "What's it for?"
The answer comes easily to most Christians. We do it because we're supposed to.
Says so right in the Great Commission, in the 28th chapter of Matthew: "Go
forthâ¦and make all nations my disciples; baptize men everywhereâ¦." That seems
simple enough. But in reality it's like saying to a gang of street urchins,
"Here are the keys to that semitrailer over there. It's filled with explosives.
I'll pay you a thousand bucks to get it to Chicago as fast as you can."
It's not the message, you see; it's the messengers. Each of us who wishes to
tackle the job brings to it his own unique abilities and baggage, and takes away
pretty much what he's brought. So we hear a million changes on the same melody.
Not all of them are lovely. Many are loaded with self-interest, judgment, or an
implication of moral superiority. Almost all are freighted with a presumption of
divine certainty. The goals are diverse: preparation for the approaching end of
time; social service and welfare; swelling the ranks of the faithful. The
agendas range from the inspired to the obscene. You can hear dozens of them via
the broadcast media.
One of the sweetest of evangelists I've ever known about was Father Raymond de
Coccola, a Corsican Oblate who volunteered in the 1930s to serve the Barrenland
Inuit along the north coast of Canada. For 12 years he lived, traveled, starved
and laughed with them. He healed their wounds and illnesses as well as he could
with his meager medical kit. He accepted as genuine and worthy their ancient
animism, and witnessed to them his own faith only when someone, sitting perhaps
inside an igloo during a long blizzard, asked why a man like him, raised in a
place where it was always warm, would leave it to come to such a disagreeable
climate. He nursed many, baptized a few, and eventually buried most of his
friends when a flu virus, introduced by a handshake from a visiting constable,
wiped out most of them.
What made Father de Coccola so extraordinary, to me, was his apparent ability â
though he held a firmly doctrinaire view â to accept without judgment or
condescension the views of others quite unlike himself. If you've read the
recent piece by reporter Shankar Vedantam in The Washington Post, you have a
pretty good idea that most of us find that impossible. We filter out information
that contradicts our biases in order to keep them strong. In particular, he
writes, "People who see the world in black and white rarely seem to take in
information that could undermine their positions." The temptation to see things
in black and white is encouraged by the increasingly complex, interconnected,
and nuanced problems that we face as a global society. There's only one simple
solution. We all know what it is, but the man who expounded it got himself
crucified by the establishment; and the rest of us consider it practically
impossible.
<b>When you couple the evangelical impulse with that natural human difficulty in
absorbing dissonant information, and then apply them to foreign policy, the
results can be particularly pernicious. </b>At present we are led by a man whose
intuitive decisions are informed by his evangelical Christianity, and who
believes (a key word in his vocabulary; check out its frequency) that a
one-size-fits-all American democracy is the panacea for the world's problems.
Millions of rational (and, admittedly, irrational) adults around the globe beg
to differ. Far better than forcing democracy on them might be an honest effort
to wipe out the obvious imperfections in our own republic, and when people ask
us how we do it, then, like Father de Coccola, we show them.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
http://www.christianaggression.org/item_di...0&type=ARTICLES
August 13, 2006
Times Argus
I can remember standing, as a small child, on a street corner in the old South End
of Albany, N.Y., on a sunny Sunday afternoon. The corner of South Ferry and
Pearl, I believe it was, just half a block from my Grandfather Lange's
settlement house, where the good folks of his congregation swapped food and
clothing for sermons. "Swapped" isn't quite the right word, because there was no
trade; the mendicants who came to the door got both in exchange for only
appearing to be interested in the sermon.
On this Sunday afternoon â probably 1939 or 1940 â Grampa Lange was preaching
sinner-come-home to mostly empty air and the occasional passing car.
Though his sermons predicted eternal doom for those who refused the invitation,
his manner was invariably gentle. His tag team preaching partner, however, a Mr.
DeVreest, was a give-'em-hell ranter who actually pointed at passersby as he
pronounced their imminent and everlasting confusion. The only listeners who
didn't move quickly on were men in undershirts at the windows of four-story
brick walkups, watching as they smoked and listened to the Yankees game on the
radio. I saw them again decades later when I first read T.S. Eliot: "â¦lonely men
in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windowsâ¦."
Nothing ever happened. The sound of the ballgame echoed distantly in the
background, and an occasional trolley car rumbled past. Eventually my baby
sister and I sang one of the little kids' songs we knew, and we all trooped back
to the settlement house for another service, another sermon, more singing, and
once in a while a supper of thin beef stew and floating dumplings.
Evangelism, it's called. Originally a great Greek word, from eu, meaning "well,"
and angelos, "messengers." Evangels are those who bring us good news. Grampa
Lange was one of them. His profession was pharmacy, and his passion saving
souls. But even in the Depression in the tattered South End, it wasn't enough
simply to advertise the settlement's social services. Grampa went out to the
hedges and ditches, as it were, to bring 'em in. To be perfectly honest, I can't
say that I ever counted a single success, and like the small boy getting his
first look at a giraffe, I occasionally wondered, "What's it for?"
The answer comes easily to most Christians. We do it because we're supposed to.
Says so right in the Great Commission, in the 28th chapter of Matthew: "Go
forthâ¦and make all nations my disciples; baptize men everywhereâ¦." That seems
simple enough. But in reality it's like saying to a gang of street urchins,
"Here are the keys to that semitrailer over there. It's filled with explosives.
I'll pay you a thousand bucks to get it to Chicago as fast as you can."
It's not the message, you see; it's the messengers. Each of us who wishes to
tackle the job brings to it his own unique abilities and baggage, and takes away
pretty much what he's brought. So we hear a million changes on the same melody.
Not all of them are lovely. Many are loaded with self-interest, judgment, or an
implication of moral superiority. Almost all are freighted with a presumption of
divine certainty. The goals are diverse: preparation for the approaching end of
time; social service and welfare; swelling the ranks of the faithful. The
agendas range from the inspired to the obscene. You can hear dozens of them via
the broadcast media.
One of the sweetest of evangelists I've ever known about was Father Raymond de
Coccola, a Corsican Oblate who volunteered in the 1930s to serve the Barrenland
Inuit along the north coast of Canada. For 12 years he lived, traveled, starved
and laughed with them. He healed their wounds and illnesses as well as he could
with his meager medical kit. He accepted as genuine and worthy their ancient
animism, and witnessed to them his own faith only when someone, sitting perhaps
inside an igloo during a long blizzard, asked why a man like him, raised in a
place where it was always warm, would leave it to come to such a disagreeable
climate. He nursed many, baptized a few, and eventually buried most of his
friends when a flu virus, introduced by a handshake from a visiting constable,
wiped out most of them.
What made Father de Coccola so extraordinary, to me, was his apparent ability â
though he held a firmly doctrinaire view â to accept without judgment or
condescension the views of others quite unlike himself. If you've read the
recent piece by reporter Shankar Vedantam in The Washington Post, you have a
pretty good idea that most of us find that impossible. We filter out information
that contradicts our biases in order to keep them strong. In particular, he
writes, "People who see the world in black and white rarely seem to take in
information that could undermine their positions." The temptation to see things
in black and white is encouraged by the increasingly complex, interconnected,
and nuanced problems that we face as a global society. There's only one simple
solution. We all know what it is, but the man who expounded it got himself
crucified by the establishment; and the rest of us consider it practically
impossible.
<b>When you couple the evangelical impulse with that natural human difficulty in
absorbing dissonant information, and then apply them to foreign policy, the
results can be particularly pernicious. </b>At present we are led by a man whose
intuitive decisions are informed by his evangelical Christianity, and who
believes (a key word in his vocabulary; check out its frequency) that a
one-size-fits-all American democracy is the panacea for the world's problems.
Millions of rational (and, admittedly, irrational) adults around the globe beg
to differ. Far better than forcing democracy on them might be an honest effort
to wipe out the obvious imperfections in our own republic, and when people ask
us how we do it, then, like Father de Coccola, we show them.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->