Metanarratology

I share many things with beloved internet film critic Hulk: a deep love of Community, a profound appreciation for Attack the Block, a propensity for gratuitous CAPSLOCK (just ask my Facebook friends). However, we are not in agreement on the question of postmodernism – at least, not all the time.

Much of Hulk's critique of postmodernism is valid. I have days of utter frustration when I completely concur with him on the Emperor's-New-Clothesiness of it all, and fear that, in my enthusiasm for Derrida and Baudrillard and Mark C. Taylor, I have long since disappeared up my own posterior. However, on good days I tend to believe that postmodernism is incredibly fascinating and monumentally important to the task of doing theology today.

I like Lyotard's definition of postmodernism: “incredulity toward metanarratives.”

Postmodernism, and especially deconstruction (my favorite flavor thereof), tends to make a virtue of its own ineffability – again, something that has me swithering as to whether it's super profound or total guff – but “incredulity toward metanarratives” at least seems to capture a kernel of what it has to offer.

The question I am facing, as a Christian that loves deconstruction, is:

Can you be a Christian while maintaining your incredulity toward metanarratives?

Doesn't Christianity, at its very core, necessitate a belief in a metanarrative? If you believe in the salvific death of Jesus on the cross and the ultimate reconciliation of all creation with everloving God, isn't that by definition a metanarrative?

Well. Well. In answer, I have to point to the fact that deconstruction breaks its own rules. Derrida himself said that the one undeconstructible thing is justice. For all that its critics like to paint it as an anarchic free-for-all of wanton relativism, deconstruction is actually very moral. Justice is the peg on which it likes to hang its hat.

And maybe that is the child that calls out the Emperor's nudity, the proof that deconstruction ultimately succumbs to the very metanarrativization it claims to undo. Maybe this appeal to justice is the admission that all of deconstruction and postmodernism is illusory, pointless, a shiny and pretentious way of rephrasing the bleeding obvious.

All I can say for certain is that deconstruction is something that works for me personally at this point in my life – as a way of challenging my preconceptions, keeping me on my toes, critiquing all metanarratives up to and including the one metanarrative that really matters:

“And God will delight when we are creators of justice and joy, compassion and peace!”

On Reading

I don't think I can overstate the influence Roland Barthes' “The Death of the Author” has had on me. It (along with chapter one of this book) launched the line of inquiry that led me to my current studies, which makes it basically responsible for both my current life and my foreseeable future.

I'm still wrestling with it, because I am still trying to figure out the concept of authorial intent. Mostly, I think I'm with Barthes: externally established authorial intent is of no account; we have no access to the psychological state of the author as ey was writing; and we should want no such access beyond what we have in the text itself. Ricoeur makes this a little clearer, I think, by distinguishing in speech between the utterer's meaning (what the speaker intends to say) and the utterance meaning (what the sentence in fact says), and explaining that in written discourse we only have access to the latter. What I get from this is that if “what the text says” and “what you meant to say” are not the same thing, that's your fault for not writing it better.

But there's an additional layer of complication, which is: is there any such thing as “what the text says”? Texts don't have mouths. They don't say anything unless somebody reads – that is, interprets – them. So I'll refine that accusation: if “what somebody reads in your text” and “what you meant to say” are not the same thing, that's your fault for not writing it better.

But is that fair? It's the principle I generally operate on, but it's hard work. If, say, someone calls me out for problematic assumptions in something I wrote, my first instinct is to defend myself by 'splaining, “That's not what I meant!” But I stop. I remind myself that intent is not magic. I remind myself that externally established authorial intent does not matter. I wrote what I wrote, and if even one person reads something problematic there, the problem lies with what I wrote, not with eir reading of it.

But. But.

I also have a belief – a tenuous belief, a belief I am struggling with, a belief to whose demolition I am open, but a belief nonetheless – that anyone can read anything in(to) any text. And is it then fair to hold the author responsible for everything that could be read into eir text?

Anyone can read anything in(to) any text. Does that mean you can take “A Modest Proposal” at face value, ignoring its satirical intent? Does that mean you can reformat “i carry your heart with me (i carry it in”and declare it a short story, rather than a poem? Does that mean you can replace every instance of the word “nunnery” in Hamlet Act III Scene I with “ham sandwich”?

Well... I don't like that phrasing. I don't like telling people what they can and can't do with texts. Of course you can do any of those things. You have a find and replace function in your word processing software. And I take a First Amendment approach to reading texts – I believe you have the right to read any way you want to. I also believe that everyone in the entire world has the right to tell you that your “Get thee to a ham sandwich” reading of Hamlet is utterly ridiculous.

But you know what? You don't have to listen to the entire world. If you find more meaning in “Get thee to a ham sandwich” than in “Get thee to a nunnery”, you can do that to Hamlet. Really. It's called fanfiction.

At its best, fanfiction is a glorious corrective, an enactment of what-might-have-been. “Get thee to a ham sandwich” is a flippant example, but there are countless examples of people rewriting texts that spoke to them, and making them speak better. Star Trek fan who wishes TOS had more women in it? Gender-flip Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Twilight fan unhappy with its total queer erasure? Make a Jakeward slashvid. Rationalist Harry Potter fan? Rewrite the series with a rationalist Harry Stu.

Fanwork is awesome because it blurs or even erases the boundary between reading a text and writing it. There's no clearer demonstration of my belief that all readings are also writings.

However – if all readings are also writings, to what extent can an author be held accountable? Death of the author is a great concept, but in this world of internet discourse that's neither exactly speech or exactly writing, author accountability matters. And comments sections mean that, when it comes to blog posts and tweets and Facebook status updates, we can have access to the utterer's meaning as well as the utterance meaning.

This idea that what we're doing online is a whole new form of discourse still needs a lot of work, and I'm getting pretty excited about doing some of it.

On Writing

Historically, speech has been privileged over writing.

Plato said writing weakens the memory, ruining true reminiscence and true wisdom.

Socrates said writing is static, etiolated, defenseless.

Rousseau blamed writing for isolation, domination, and inequality.

Bergson said writing is dull, empty, dead.

They all thought spoken discourse was the site of real meaning. Speech is the genuine, immediate, meaningful expression of interiority – the true way of bridging the fundamental isolation of one human from another. Writing is exterior, passionless, hopelessly distanciated from both reader and writer.

(I'm cribbing all this from Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory, btw, chapter 2: “Speaking and Writing”.)

We're living in an age where the distinction between speech and writing has been thoroughly blurred. (I dedicate all my Facebook chat logs to you, Derrida.) In fact, so much of our “spoken” discourse is now written or in some way recorded – on an almost daily basis I have conversations via text message and Facebook chat, and I don't even remember the last time I used my cell phone to call someone – that maybe it's a whole new category of discourse. People are discussing this, and I hope with a bit of time and effort on JSTOR and at the university library I can find a lot more stuff on the philosophy of internet-age discourse (recommendations are always welcome, friends!).

That said... writing is still my primary mode of discourse.

Writing isn't just the fact of putting words down on page/screen. It's a whole way of thinking. I write when my pen meets the paper and when my fingers strike the keyboard, but I also write when I construct passages of text in my head (whether they wind up actually written down or not).

In writing I can express myself without the impediments of physicality. In writing, no one expects me to decode all the mystifying subtleties of body language and facial expressions, and no one imputes to me implications I did not intend based on such subtleties that I was unknowingly expressing. In writing, no one will call me out for mumbling, or confuse me with an unexpected question, or look at me funny because I missed a social cue.

Writing is something I know. Writing is something I am comfortable with. Writing is something I feel I can control.

In writing I have time to pause, to reflect, to choose the right words. Writing slows me down, forces me to be self-critical – not, of course, that my written discourse is free of error and bullshit; but it's measurably more so than my spoken discourse. In effect, speaking merely voices my thoughts: writing shapes them.

The Gospel of the Living Dead

I just read a book called Gospel of the Living Dead, in which theologian Kim Paffenroth analyzes five great zombie movies (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead 1978, Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead 2004, and Land of the Dead) from a Christian perspective. Though he stops short of making this explicit, Paffenroth traces a through-narrative of the four Romero films that pretty clearly mirrors the trajectory of Jesus' death and resurrection.

A crucial theme of Romero's first four Dead films, and something very few of his disciples have ever picked up on, is the development of the zombies. Night of the Living Dead presents the ghouls as nothing more than the mindless flesh-eaters we all know and fantasize about shooting; Dawn begins to hint that there is something more to them than just the cannibalistic instinct; Day portrays a zombie beginning to develop rudimentary skills and basic emotional ties; and by Land of the Dead the zombies have their own more or less functional city alongside the humans. Paffenroth reads the movies as increasingly optimistic, traveling from the utter bleakness of Night's wonderfully nihilistic ending to a degree of hopefulness for human/zombie coexistence by the end of Land.

This also is pretty much how I read the crucifixion and resurrection.

Consider: the death and descent of the zombie uprising, with all the hellishness that entails, is the very thing that undoes materialistic, capitalistic, kyriarchal society – Romero is famous for his fierce social critique, and Paffenroth does a fine job of unpacking the films' criticisms of racism, sexism, class inequality, rampant consumerism, and so on – and ultimately allows for the rebuilding of a better world. Now this could be read in the traditionally eschatological way (there's a reason we call it zombie apocalypse), but I prefer a non-eschatological theology that sees this death-and-resurrection narrative as the narrative of the daily taking up of the cross.

Redemption only comes through the utmost suffering. The zombies, like all of society, must lose their souls in order to regain them. They die to self in order to be reborn as a new community. Only by losing our lives can we gain life; only by dying could Jesus defeat death.

Compare Mark C. Taylor's Erring, a “postmodern a/theology” which declares the post-Hegel world to be a world without God, self, history, or book. These four concepts are dead, and something new must be built in their place – something radically new: an erring, mazing, de/constructive, relational freeplay that does not resort to oversimplifications or hierarchized oppositions. Something, in fact, rather like human/zombie coexistence.

I've never understood why Nietzsche's “God is dead” pronouncement shocked anyone. I mean, what do Christians believe happened on the cross? Isn't the crucifixion really the moment that kills God, self, history, and book; that kills the transcendental signified, the ultimate referent, the Logos? And isn't it only by this death that it can rise again, new and different and wonderfully strange?

Bad Science, Bad Hermeneutics

In light of Joel's excellent piece on Dawkins et al., and Echidne's smackdown of the latest pseudoscience from professional troll Sacha Simon Baron-Cohen, I think it's time for me to rearticulate my problems with Enlightenment-style rationality.

Don't think I'm in any way an enemy of reason. I adore logic, reason, systematics, scientific principles (there's a reason my brother calls me The Spock). Unfortunately, the Enlightenment pursuit of pure reason, though I'm sure thoroughly noble in intent, gave rise to the most pernicious evil to plague modernist thought: the myth of objectivity.

For example, my own interest in debunking bad science is intricately entwined with my feminism, anti-racism, etc. I freely admit that it's agenda-driven, because it stems from my most basic, deeply-held convictions about the world (the personhood, equality, dignity, and rights of every human individual).

Every act of the intellect, whether it's science or a reading of the Bible, has as its foundations certain assumptions about the world. It couldn't exist otherwise. Any claim to a value-free, unbiased, objective study of anything is at worst totally mendacious and at best coming from a place of unexamined privilege. Hell, if there's one incontrovertible sign of unexamined privilege, it's a belief in your own objectivity.

Think about some of the things that have been considered Totally Objective Reason-Based Agenda-Free Science:

• That women's delicate ladybrains were inherently inferior to men's
• That black people were biologically inferior to white people
• That trans people were only really trans if they conformed to very rigid gender roles – otherwise they were just confused

And many, many more, many of which still sadly have a grip on the fevered imaginations of certain privilege-denying populations, and all of which have been thoroughly debunked by rigorous deconstruction of their agendas.

This is the true value of postmodernism: that it debunks the myth of objectivity by acknowledging that the observer is also an actor. Meaning, we say in postmodern lit theory, is constructed at the moment of interaction between reader and text; which means that any interpretation is as much a product of the reader as of the text, and any honest reading has to acknowledge what it is the reader is bringing to the table. There's no such thing as “just what's there” – there's only what you see.

The same is absolutely true of scientific inquiry. I'm not saying the methods of rationality aren't sound – I'm saying that, as commonly applied, they don't go far enough. Even as you turn that laser-like judgment and doubt onto the subject under critical inquiry, turn it also onto yourself.

Happily Ever After

My grandmother likes to say that, if she ruled the world, she would outlaw ending fairy tales with “...and they got married and lived happily ever after.” Instead, they would end: “... and they got married, and some days were better and some days were worse, but they both worked jolly hard at it and forged a loving mutual partnership, and I guess you could call that happiness.”

Of course, if I were writing fairy tales, they wouldn't involve marriage at all. The happily-ever-after would be something along the lines of “...and that lonely little girl grew up to have multiple kickass friends on several continents, and they were most excellent people.”

Then again, maybe calling that a happily-ever-after is a little premature. As Herodotus put it, “call no one happy until ey dies.” So, natch, I've been thinking: what is happy?

Since I started grad school, I'm happier than I've ever been. I love California, I love my studies, and I love my new friends (I TOTALLY HAVE FRIENDS HERE, YOU GUYS). Never before have I so quickly and easily found a place where I slotted in, made friends, felt at home: in both high school and undergrad, it wasn't until my second year that I really got comfortable, whereas here I felt totally settled by my second month.

That doesn't mean some days aren't difficult (though so far I've only had one really awful day, and most of that was fury at a profoundly horrible decision on the part of the UK government), and it certainly doesn't mean I'm in a perpetual state of bliss. I'm still human and this is still a human situation.

The thing about happiness – or this thing that I'm calling happiness while I'm still alive, at any rate – is that it necessarily carries with it an undercurrent of sadness. I've noted this at other times when I would characterize my general state as happy (final year of high school, spring through fall of my second and third years of undergrad, my summer 2010 travels around Europe with the then-girlfriend): true happiness is, for me, always accompanied by an awareness that this too shall pass.

Maybe it's different if you're a real, settled grown-up with, like, a career and stuff, but as long as you're planning your life in increments of two or three years, every period of joy you find also brings you the pain of knowing that it will be over soon. I'm in a two-year master's degree program; even next year won't be the same, as some of my friends will have graduated, and the year after that – who knows?

And that's the looming shadow of mortality. Any day, any minute, I or one (or all; oh hai, San Andreas fault) of my friends could snuff it, and it'd be sayonara to this precarious happiness. Any account of the good life has to encompass the tragic transience of human existence; and that knowledge, I think, is what transforms mere surface happiness into the deep, sorrow-tinged contentment that is joy.

This too shall pass: it's a source of sadness, and it's a clarion call to carpe diem, to make the most of this fleeting delight for as long as you're graced with its presence.

Coming Out

I don't talk about when I came out. That phrase makes it sound as though it were a simple, closed, one-off action, which couldn't be further from the truth. No, I talk about when I started coming out. You start coming out the day you admit to yourself (or to your diary, if you're an embarrassingly pretentious dork like me) that you're not the hetero you and everyone else always assumed you are; I'd venture to guess that you finish coming out the moment you shuffle off this mortal coil, though I suppose it's possible that the afterlife is also a stew of awkward assumptions and pronoun acrobatics.

It's a truism, but coming out really is a life-long process. And it's bloody difficult, especially for those of us with an inadequate grasp of conversational nuance. Every time you meet someone, you over-analyse and second-guess everything. Is ey assuming you're straight, or staying open-minded? If you drop a reference to a girlfriend past or present, does that constitute “rubbing your sexuality in eir face” (a phrase that always makes me giggle)? As a generally out gay person, how far into a new acquaintanceship should you explicitly let the other party know you're gay? Could this apparently reasonable and friendly human being transform into an ugly and violent homophobe at the first mention of Melissa Etheridge?

As a queer radical, I sometimes feel that I ought to be proclaiming my gayness at the top of my lungs every waking moment: I should get my hair buzzcut, my face pierced a few more times, and my neck tattooed “GRRL LOVER”, and I should greet everyone with, “Hi, I'm Anna and I am a big ole queer.” That, I suppose, would be the purest manifestation of my political ideology.

But I am not a pure manifestation of political ideology; I am a human being with multiple identities, a sense of discretion, and not inexhaustible reserves of mental strength. Queer is something I am, but it is not the totality of who I am, nor even the most important aspect. It's perhaps the most marginalized of my identities, which is why I feel the need to weaponize it; but I just don't have the wherewithal to be in such a constant state of frontline warfare with the dominant culture. Of course, I am in a constant state of warfare with the dominant culture, but most of that is mental: and, given how exhausting that is, I simply haven't the energy to bring it in a loud, visible fashion every day of the week.

Moreover, I'm afraid of retaliation. I admit it: when my political ideology clashes with my self-preservation instinct, not getting punched in the face dominates nine times out of ten.

(Plus, my hair is great. I love it and will not sacrifice it at the altar of extreme butchness.)

The people it's easiest to come out to as gay are often the hardest to come out to as Christian. (And vice versa, no doy.) In my experience, the communities least likely to make assumptions about your sexuality are the most likely to make assumptions about your secularity. It's deeply frustrating: if I can have a great conversation about Jesus with you, I'll be afraid to talk about Rachel Maddow with you; if we're having fun discussing queer theory or your palaeontology degree, I'm going to have a hard time bringing God into it.

And yet I know that there are many, perhaps even a majority of, individuals who are open to the idea of a queer theologian-to-be. My fear of coming out as gay, Christian, or a gay Christian is exactly what the kyriarchy wants. The compartmentalization and conflict of your different identities is one of the ways you're kept fighting yourself and your potential allies, instead of the actual oppressive forces.

We're all afraid to be judged, outcast, or even physically harmed for who we are. Sometimes this fear is reasonable, often it's not, but in the minefield of social interaction it can be hard to tell. However, I do know this: if you don't know about my very personal passion for social justice, or about my mad dorkiness, or about my love for the Big Guy upstairs, then you don't know me.

The Theology of Broadway's The Book of Mormon Part Four – Jews, Christians, Mormons, & Everyone Else: “I Believe”

Previously in Broadway's The Book of Mormon Week:
Part One – Cultural Imperialism, Suffering, & God's Comfort: “Hasa Diga Eebowai”
Part Two – Pascal's Wager, Reward/Punishment, & Mercenary Faith: “Sal Tlay Ka Siti”
Part Three – Cultural Relativism, Interfaith Relations, & New Religions: “Making Things Up Again”
Expect mild spoilers and offensive content. Detailed disclaimers can be found in the introduction.

This is it: the big Act Two showstopper, the emotional high-watermark, the great thundering anthemic number that will live on in sheet-music form long after posterity has dismissed the rest of the show as pedestrian or dated or something. “I Believe” is definitely the standout track of Broadway's The Book of Mormon as far as I'm concerned – both because it's a stonking tune and because it encapsulates the show's philosophy.

Kevin, after despairing of his difficult mission and confronting his demons in a very dramatic fashion, has an epiphany: he will stand his ground, walk into the valley of the shadow of death, and own his faith with all his heart. It's powerful, affirming, and very frickin' funny.

I believe that the Lord God created the universe,
I believe that he sent his only Son to die for my sins,
And I believe that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America!

This initial juxtaposition of traditional articles of Christian faith with Mormon elements, which sound kind of goofy to a non-Mormon, confronts the religious viewer with the question: why that faith? Why do you privilege one specific holy text, or one particular reading of your holy text, or one definition of God over all others? Are the Mormon-only beliefs (that God lives on a planet called Kolob; that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri) really any sillier than the mainstream Jewish and Christian beliefs that Mormons also espouse?

The trouble with the relativist perspective is that it's not clear where, if anywhere, to draw the line. Are all religions equally true, or at least equally acceptable? What about a cult? What about a faith invented and adhered to by only one person? Most of us would agree that a religion that causes people harm is not okay, but who decides what constitutes harm? John Shore's definition of harm caused by religion would differ from Christopher Hitchens'.

Broadway's The Book of Mormon doesn't really address this issue. As a show written by atheists about religious exclusivists, it fails to delve into the deeper questions of truth and meaning that might be asked by a post-modern or relativist believer. There is, I think, an ethical difference between presenting as fact stuff you believe to be true (Jesus' resurrection) and presenting as fact stuff you believe to be false (Joseph Smith's magical AIDS frog), even if the underlying lessons are good ones; but you wouldn't know it from this show.

As a teenager, my motto, which I though was incredibly clever and witty (okay, I still think it's pretty funny), was “all generalizations are bullshit”. Little did I know, this is a highly deconstructionist statement. The relativist idea that “there is no absolute truth” is itself an absolute statement, and therefore must be false under its own premise. It's a Zeno's paradox of meaning. Zeno's paradox is all very well, but when you want to get somewhere you take a step; similarly, when you want to communicate you accept that meaning exists. If you believe in God, at some stage you pick a stance on the issue of truth.

I believe that God has a plan for all of us,
I believe that plan involves me getting my own planet,
And I believe that the current president of the church, Thomas Monson, speaks directly to God!

Kevin says, “I can't have even one shred of doubt”, but many thinkers believe doubt is a key component of faith. In Robert Anton Wilson's Schrödinger's Cat trilogy, two faith groups are asked , “What is the opposite of faith?” One group replies, “Doubt”; the other, “Certainty.” No less godly a figure than Mother Teresa was tormented by doubts throughout a life of service and humanitarianism.

Is it even possible to will yourself into faith? One of the major criticisms of Pascal's Wager is that you cannot force yourself to believe something. (I think one could argue this point, but I won't go into it just now.) But this song is not so much about Kevin willing himself into faith; it's more about accepting and claiming the upbringing and culture that will always be a part of him: “I am a Mormon, and, by gosh! A Mormon just believes.” To him, “you cannot just believe partway – you have to believe in it all”. He has always believed in Mormonism as a synthesized whole, not as an extra bit tacked on to Christianity, and those of us interested in interfaith dialog would do well to remember that.

I've talked before about atheist smugness; Broadway's The Book of Mormon mostly avoids this by being an exuberant celebration of faith that doesn't shy away from difficult questions. Trey Parker calls it “an atheist’s love letter to religion.” After all, from the rationalist-atheist perspective he and Matt Stone espouse, irrational beliefs sustain us all, whether it's faith in God, belief in human goodness and love, or simply hope of any kind.

* * *

That brings us to the end of Broadway's The Book of Mormon Week here at Gay Christian Geek! Thanks for reading; I hope you've enjoyed it (and are not as heartily sick of these songs as I now am). Quick shout-out to Richard Beck's terrific blog Experimental Theology, which gave me the idea – if you'd like to see it done properly, take a peek at his superb series on The Theology of Calvin & Hobbes.

The Theology of Broadway's The Book of Mormon Part Three – Cultural Relativism, Interfaith Relations, & New Religions: “Making Things Up Again”

Previously in Broadway's The Book of Mormon Week:
Part One – Cultural Imperialism, Suffering, & God's Comfort: “Hasa Diga Eebowai”
Part Two – Pascal's Wager, Reward/Punishment, & Mercenary Faith: “Sal Tlay Ka Siti”
Expect mild spoilers and offensive content. Detailed disclaimers can be found in the introduction.

It's interesting to me that the decline of faith in the west hasn't removed the cultural impact of religious identity. I think it's particularly noticeable among Jews: my cousins near London host an enormous Passover seder and a Rosh Hashana meal every year, and are very active in their local synagogue, and not a one of them believes in God. Atheist Muslim friends, atheist Catholic friends, even atheist Protestant friends have spoken to me about how their family's religious background shaped their experiences of growing up and their characters today.

Recently I had to fill out a form that asked me to state my denomination of Christianity. I thought long and hard about which subgroup I identify with most, but in the end I couldn't narrow it down any further than “Protestant”. I'm very sure, however, that I'm Protestant; I can't even imagine myself being Catholic.

My faith is Protestant with a strong bulwark of Jewishness; my upbringing was Protestant with a strong bulwark of Jewishness. From the values and ideas instilled in my formative years to my present-day beliefs is a straight line: how can I help but be a cultural relativist?

And so I hesitate to call any religion “made-up”. People, if they have any belief, more often than not have the beliefs they were brought up with, and it seems too arbitrary for one religion to be correct and everyone born into a different faith tradition to be at an instant disadvantage with respect to the truth. But religions rarely take well to the new religions that spring up to usurp them. It's at the heart of the Jewish resentment of Christianity, the Christian fear and hatred of Islam, and the tendency of pretty much everyone to make fun of Mormons.

You're making things up again, Arnold:
you're taking the Holy Word and adding fiction.

At this point of the show, ill-informed Arnold is confronted by the villagers with some awkward questions. Lacking the Biblical knowledge or theological understanding to argue his points, he simply invents stories about God curing Joseph Smith's AIDS and declaring female genital mutilation an abomination. Of course, the punchline is that, to a couple billion people, Mormonism itself is “recklessly warping the words of Jesus”. Is that fair? Is it true that “a lie is a lie” – no mitigating circumstances considered?

I'm making things up again, kinda,
but this time it's helping a dozen people.

At the heart of the show lies the question, “Is making stuff up really so bad if it helps people?” I'll return to this question from an ethical perspective tomorrow, but for the moment let's consider the theological implications.

From an exclusivist religious perspective (of any faith), clearly the answer is “yes”. If you believe you have a monopoly on the truth, then you likely feel a duty to share it with others and save them from their false religions. (This is why, as many problems as I have with them, I find I can't judge evangelicals too harshly; they truly believe that they're doing the right thing.)

From the rationalist-atheist perspective, it's one fairytale or another. If you don't believe in God, what's the difference between zombie Jesus and a magical AIDS frog? Either you think it's reprehensible to tell anyone stories of the supernatural and divine, or you say (along with the show's creators) “whatever works”.

To the post-modern believer, however, this question sparks a whole host of further questions. Given the subjectivity of religious experience and the profound influence of cultural background, what can be legitimately considered “made-up”? To a Jew, Christianity is made-up; to a Christian, Mormonism is made up; to a Mormon, Arnold's new religion is made-up – who's right? What relation do facts bear to truth? Any lover of fiction understands that something can be made-up but still true (read Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ for a very interesting take on this, in relation specifically to Christianity).

Without venturing too far into the big spoiler territory, the show concludes (along with many, both religious and not) that, since we can't know what happens after death, we shouldn't dwell on it, but concentrate on living. The specifics of your beliefs aren't important, provided that you try to live a good life, help others, and improve this world in whatever ways you can.

It's hardly a revolutionary stance. But it might just be the best way of living in a world of many faiths and acknowledged cultural relativism.

Tomorrow: The Theology of Broadway's The Book of Mormon Part Four – Jews, Christians, Mormons, & Everyone Else: “I Believe”

The Theology of Broadway's The Book of Mormon Part Two – Pascal's Wager, Reward/Punishment, & Mercenary Faith: “Sal Tlay Ka Siti”

Previously in Broadway's The Book of Mormon Week:
Part One – Cultural Imperialism, Suffering, & God's Comfort: “Hasa Diga Eebowai”
Expect mild spoilers and offensive content. Detailed disclaimers can be found in the introduction.

While I was occupied with learning to make friends, preparing for the onset of puberty, and terrorizing the other little girls of Nairobi's international schools with the help of my never-defeated under-elevens netball team, my mother was confronting an adult's demons. After losing a lot of sleep over the abject poverty on our doorstep, she quit her job and devoted several years to the founding and running of a charity to feed and educate kids living on the streets.

One day, some of these kids started asking Mother about life in her country. “Does everyone in your country have a place to live?”

“Almost everyone. The government tries to provide housing for everyone,” she explained.

“Does everyone in your country have enough to eat?”

“Almost everyone. If they can't work, the government gives them money.”

“Does everyone in your country go to school?”

“Almost everyone. The government provides free schooling for everyone.”

“So everyone in your country is happy?”

I'm reminded of this story by “Sal Tlay Ka Siti”, in which a young Ugandan woman sings of her desire to go to the promised land that Kevin and Arnold described for her. With a devastating combination of humor and pathos, she conflates the Salt Lake City of the boys' description with the Paradise of her mother's stories:

I can't imagine what it must be like,
this perfect happy place:
I'll bet the goat meat there is plentiful
and they have vitamin injections by the case.
The warlords there are friendly:
they help you cross the street,
and there's a Red Cross on every corner
with all the flour you can eat.

Her new-found faith in “a land where evil doesn't exist” is predicated on the realization that “if I want to get there I just have to follow that white boy”; before long, she asks to be baptized. You could call it a mercenary faith: faith motivated by the prospect of gain.

Take, for example, Pascal's Wager. You'll recall its argument that choosing to believe in God is rational because, if God doesn't exist and you believe, you have nothing to lose; but if God does exist and you don't believe, you lose everything. The problem I've always had with this idea is its intellectual dishonesty. In the same vein, people have argued that an ethics born of genuine concern for others' wellbeing is somehow a nobler, more ethical ethics than one that relies on the reward of eternal life.

However, before sneering at Pascal's Wager and mercenary faith as intellectually dishonest, we have to take into account two important theories: the just-world hypothesis and Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

The just-world hypothesis suggests that humans have a psychological need for an appropriate reward/punishment system. I think we can all agree that we have this craving for justice, and that it's not satisfied in this life; that's why we have Law & Order: SVU, the idea of karma, and the concept of God's ultimate justice. (It's also, sad to say, why we have victim-blaming and a champion rationalization mechanism.)

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a pyramid categorizing and ranking human needs: from physiological needs, through safety needs, love/belonging needs, and esteem needs, to self-actualization at the top. The intricacies of this ranking are dubious, but it's fair to say that someone who has neither food nor a piano is not going to prioritize finding a piano. Which is to say: is worrying about the intellectual honesty of our faith not the privilege of the breaded classes?

Yesterday, I wrote that it's easy to say that souls are what matters when your body is comfortable, healthy, and safe. Similarly, it's all very well to debate the ethics of mercenary faith when the goat meat is plentiful. When you lay the innate human yearning for fairness over the lower rungs of Maslow's pyramid, belief in something better is often the result.

“Sal Tlay Ka Siti” asks the question of all missionaries: is your success perhaps less to do with the Lord's message and more to do with the wealth, health, and power you clearly enjoy?

It asks the question of sneering intellectuals: how can you in good conscience tell people they need to have “noble” reasons for their faith?

And it asks the question of everyone in the west: would you like a little perspective with those first-world problems?

Sal Tlay Ka Siti:
the most perfect place on earth,
where flies don't bite your eyeballs
and human life has worth...

Tomorrow: The Theology of Broadway's The Book of Mormon Part Three – Cultural Relativism, Interfaith Relations, & New Religions: “Making Things Up Again”

The Theology of Broadway's The Book of Mormon Part One – Cultural Imperialism, Suffering, & God's Comfort: “Hasa Diga Eebowai”

Part of Broadway's The Book of Mormon Week. Expect mild spoilers and offensive content. Detailed disclaimers can be found in the introduction.

When I lived in London, I attended a conservative evangelical church for two years. I am, as you might have gathered, neither conservative nor evangelical. Evangelicals are extremely keen on sharing their faith; in fact, they talk about little else. Nearly every week we were encouraged to bring a non-Christian friend to some church event (and, knowing how most non-Christians react to being invited to a church event, I can only admire such perseverance); and nearly every week we were asked to pray for “our mission partners” in South Africa or China or France.

The whole concept of mission is very problematic for liberal or left-leaning Christians. On the one hand, mission workers did and do bring much-needed education, infrastructure, and supplies to destitute areas. However, mission's intertwining with imperialism, both economic/territorial and cultural, can't be ignored, and Christian mission can certainly be held responsible for many of Africa's problems today.

The plot of Broadway's The Book of Mormon sees two young Mormon men – all-American golden boy Kevin and nerdy comic-relief figure Arnold – sent on their mission to a village in Uganda. A lot of immediate humor is mined from the simple incongruity of the squeaky-clean, hopelessly naïve Mormon boys transplanted to a little war-ravaged African village. Refreshingly, the jokes are mostly skewed, not against the PRIMITIVE AND WACKY NATIVES!, but against Kevin and Arnold, due to the ways Africa defies their expectations (which, like mine when I moved to East Africa at the age of seven, are based almost exclusively on The Lion King).

“Hasa Diga Eebowai” is the song with which the Ugandans greet them on their arrival. It's a direct rebuttal of Disney's “Hakuna Matata”*: “There's war, poverty, famine, but having a saying makes it all seem better!” Kevin tries to tell the villagers that they mustn't say “hasa diga Eebowai” (=“fuck you, God”), because “things aren't always as bad as they seem.” Naturally, he has no idea what he's talking about.

*Though, to be fair, “hakuna matata” is in fact a common saying in East Africa.

God's presence might comfort Kevin in times of trouble, but the experience of God is subjective. When your “times of trouble” constitute the plane being crowded and the bus being late, it's perhaps a little presumptuous to tell a poverty-stricken war-torn AIDS-plagued community that your God will make them feel better.

Too often, rich Westerners like to ascribe greater spirituality to the poor, as if people living in poverty are unilaterally pure and Godly. I call it “Gap Yah-ism”: to salve our rich-person consciences, we ascribe to people in poverty other assets than material ones – “a sense of enduring hope, as if to say, 'You know, despite our differences you and I are one, we are kindred spirits'...” – trying to convince ourselves that economic injustice isn't so bad because material poverty goes hand in hand with spiritual wealth. Of course, it's true that God does comfort many people who are suffering, and it's true that, per liberation theology, the poor have spiritually privileged voices; but the danger arises when people think that this means poverty and suffering are not so bad after all.

Some Christian exclusivists believe that alleviating the troubles of this life is not as important as converting unbelievers. This lack of concern for social and economic justice was one of the major reasons I left my evangelical church in the heart of London's financial district: it's easy to say that souls are what matters when your body is comfortable, healthy, and safe. In reality, millions of people are suffering, and the breathtaking arrogance of telling people their suffering doesn't matter is exactly what this song is skewering.

“When God fucks you in the butt
Fuck God right back in his cunt.”

To a Westerner, it sounds appalling – I imagine that the vast majority of even secular Westerners wouldn't be entirely comfortable saying “Fuck you, God, in the ass, mouth, and cunt” – but that's the brilliance of the song: if we're so inured to the suffering of our fellow humans that “Fuck you, God” is more shocking than “Eighty per cent of us have AIDS”, doesn't that indicate our profound moral bankruptcy? If Christians – whose entire way of life is supposed to be based on the Golden Rule – care so little for suffering people, isn't it reasonable that suffering people should in turn reject Christianity?

“When the world is getting you down
There's nobody else to blame
Raise your middle finger to the sky
And curse his rotten name.”

There certainly is Biblical precedent for calling out God for heaping suffering on your head. Check out Psalm 88:

“O Lord, why do you cast my soul away?
Why do you hide your face from me?
...I suffer your terrors; I am helpless.
Your wrath has swept over me;
your dreadful assaults destroy me.”

Psalm 88 doesn't end with words of faith and hope in God. It is a litany of despair and pain, and its final line is “darkness has become my only companion.” Contrary to many people's insistence, the Bible doesn't gloss over suffering or offer easy answers (read Job or Ecclesiastes if you want a real head-scratcher). Any honest theology must admit that sometimes God seems at best absent, at worst malevolent, and acknowledge the legitimacy of every response to this fact.

“If you don't like what we say
Try living here a couple days.
Watch all your friends and family die
Hasa diga Eebowai!”

Tomorrow: The Theology of Broadway's The Book of Mormon Part Two – Pascal's Wager, Reward/Punishment, & Mercenary Faith: “Sal Tlay Ka Siti”

The Theology of Broadway's The Book of Mormon: Introduction

The latest fixture of my iPod is the original cast recording of new Broadway musical The Book of Mormon. Obviously, I haven't seen it, but I've been enjoying the songs a lot, and that's why this week is Broadway's The Book of Mormon Week here at Gay Christian Geek!

I won't be talking about the show as a musical, because frankly there's nothing much to say. Lyrically and musically, it's about as complicated as A Very Potter Musical, and shares with that show an infectious pop sensibility that's far from Sondheim.

I will be talking about the show as a vehicle for its creators' philosophy of religion. Matt Stone and Trey Parker – best known for South Park, which is a little too preachy and a little too reliant on gross-out humor for my taste (though I admit that in small doses, e.g. highlight clips on YouTube, it can be absolutely hilarious) – have never shied away from mocking any faith group, even when legal threats were involved. Their fascination with Mormonism in particular is documented in a South Park episode and in the delightful, underrated Orgazmo. What do they have to say about it? What tone do they strike, and what points, valid or otherwise, do they make about organized religion?

I'll do my best to discuss all of this without getting too spoiler-y, for those of you holding out for the West End transfer (I admire your resilience, Michael!), but mild spoilers will be unavoidable. And, to give you fair warning, some of this stuff is incredibly offensive. If you have a problem with blasphemy, cuss words, or jokes lightyears beyond the boundaries of good taste, then this series of posts is probably not for you, and this musical is definitely not for you.

Disclaimers out the way, it's time to gird the loins of your mind (oh, how I love that phrase) and gear up for some serious overthinking. Check back tomorrow for Part One of Broadway's The Book of Mormon Week at Gay Christian Geek!

Derrida, Christ, and the meaning of the text

Derrida hurts my brain. Luckily, Yahoo Answers is there to help. Sally H asks:

When I think of the word 'dog' and have a concept of a dog in my mind - say a dog I saw yesterday, why is this not a correlation between signifier and signified for Derrida? Why is meaning deferred from signifier to signifier and where does this leave the signified? After all I still have the concept in my mind? No Derrida haters please, just a simple explanation. Thankyou x

I find this quite amusing, because my experience with Yahoo Answers until now was limited to mockery on the Never SFW Something Awful, where the questions (and indeed all SA content ever) tended less toward complex philosophy and more toward racism and comprehensive misunderstandings of how sex works.

My favorite answer to Sally H’s query begins “well, i am a ‘hater’” and ends “this guy has always confused the crap out of me.” However, if you want a decent explanation of some of Derrida’s thought, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere on the web.

How about Theoretical Semiotics on the Web? Semiotics for Beginners? There’s really no way to summarize Derrida’s ideas on semiotics. You have to get into Saussure, Plato, Lévi-Strauss; logocentrism, structuralism, deconstructionism; a whole host of complicated concepts and even more complicated chains of thought.

Like most of philosophy and literary criticism, Derrida’s theories focused on the relationship between language and thought. It’s a good place to start if you’re going to study anything in depth. Perhaps it’s just scholars making everything complicated as usual, but there’s an astounding wealth of theories about what the relationship is between language and thought, and how it works. I don’t begin to have an understanding of all these theories, but I do know that it often seems to come down to a fundamental, yet curiously modern, opposition: that of universalism vs. relativism.

Of course, I’m simplifying everything hugely, because going into detail would tax my brain beyond its limits this late at night, but it seems that the Christian is often a moral universalist, while the feminist is a moral relativist. As a Christian, one is supposed to subscribe to the notion of absolute truth; but it doesn’t take much critical thinking to reveal how many of our absolute notions are in fact the product of our culture and upbringing. Two thousand years ago, Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” (John 18:38), and people have been asking him the same question ever since. He never answered.

I’m still figuring out my personal beliefs on the issue of universalism vs. relativism. My first two years as a Christian were spent at a conservative evangelical church, and I knew going in that I was neither conservative nor evangelical. Sometimes it feels as though life would be a lot easier if I were. Conservative evangelical Christians study the Bible a lot, but they do it from a perspective of comfortable universalism. To them, the text comes straight from God, and it is the highest authority.

To me, this viewpoint fails to take into account all the complexities of textual interpretation. To claim that the text is the highest authority implicitly assumes that the text has meaning independent of any reader’s interpretation – that there is a single correct reading of the text – and moreover that this meaning can be discovered.

I suppose I want to believe that. As things stand, I certainly don’t believe it of any text other than the Bible. As for the Bible itself, well, I’m not sure.

Christ is the text. He is the logos (John 1:1, 14). Perhaps his divinity – God’s divinity – lies in his being the one text that does have meaning independent of any reader. Perhaps that’s one definition of what God is.