An open letter to the staff of Focus on the Family's "Plugged In" magazine.

Dear sirs and madams, 

First off, I want to say I'm a longtime reader.

I went to a Christian elementary school and they used to have your magazines in the library.  Maybe my memory has re-colorized the visuals from my past, but I seem to remember they were always printed in sepia tones.  All the boys in my grade used to get together and read your movie reviews, which catalogued in precise and clinical detail every violent or sexual act depicted onscreen in any given film.  This carried on until our librarian (who would go through books on the Holocaust with a sharpie to blacken out the private parts of the nude victims in the photographs, apparently convinced that nudity would be worse for our psyches than genocide) realized what we were doing and stopped shelving your stuff.

Luckily, I discovered the Internet not long afterwards.

As I matured (well, grew older, at any rate), my interests and attention wandered, as is wont to happen at that stage of life, and my devotion to reading you wavered, as did my faith.  By the grace of God, somehow I wandered back into faith, and one of my first projects was to immerse myself in apologetics, since they were what had hooked me back into the Christian creed and I wanted to use them to hook everyone else, too.  I soon learned that one of the best ways to capture a person's heart is through their imagination, so I went back to your site to learn how culture, in its arts and entertainment, revealed the state of the North American soul.  Since then, I've checked your website with a certain frequency almost every Thursday or Friday to check out the new roster of movie reviews, and I don't expect this will change any time soon.

So let me start off with a compliment.  You probably influenced me a lot more than I realized, or maybe even realize now.  I'm one of those people who can't just relax with a summer blockbuster or a trashy detective novel without being constantly alert to what worldviews are being propagated, or at least assumed, by the creators.  You were my introduction to and initial, informal training in critical analysis (along with the compilations of Roger Ebert reviews I read as a pubescent film critic wannabe), and the stuff that today resonates with me in the work of Northrop Frye, Leland Ryken, and Joseph Pearce probably makes this impression on me because you prepared the soil for them. 

And I have to say that I still really enjoy a lot of your reviews.  You guys have some great writers working for you, and you are very good at discerning exactly what philosophies are implicit in the products of Hollywood and Nashville.  Christians sometimes seem so desperate for any acknowledgment from the movie industry, for example, that they'll accept with delight any positive Christian role model or stray Biblical allusion, and it's refreshing to see you guys challenge the assumptions of seemingly pro-faith movies like Signs or The Fighting Temptations.  Keep it up, because we need such discernment.

On the other hand...

A lot of what I read on your website these days frankly disturbs me as a Christian who's concerned about the condition both of secular and of church culture.  There are times when I fear that what you do might even be (God forgive me if I accuse you unjustly) harmful for the cause of Christ.  I will explain why I think this and pray that you will receive this in the spirit it comes from.  

"Pro-Social Content"

One of the things you seem very concerned with is what Martin Luther called "civil righteousness", that is to say, being a "good person" by the world's standards.  For example, your music reviews always open by discussing an album's "pro-social content".  You also frequently praise movies for promoting loyalty, friendship, and various other cardinal virtues.  I guess your intention here is to applaud artists for encouraging responsible, ethical behaviour.  That is to say, for encouraging their audience to be good people.

This really troubles me.

Not only is it perfectly possible for someone to die without Christ all while being a perfectly good citizen who loves their children, shovels their neighbour's snow, pays their taxes, and enjoys John Tesh, but it may even be that such a person is even less likely to repent of their sins simply because they are much better at convincing themselves that they have no sin to repent of.  This is such a predominant theme in the Gospels that proof-texting almost seems redundant, but one obvious example is the parable of the marriage supper thrown by the king, where we find that the respectable people--the obvious candidates to be in the company of royalty--were too busy with their commendable secular endeavours to attend.  The king instead summons the dregs of society to his supper, "both good and bad" (Matthew 22:10), "the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind" (Luke 14:21).

 Let us remember that, in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, nothing the Pharisee said about himself was wrong, and everything he said was potentially praiseworthy; but the publican had no illusions about his own morality because he had nothing to fall back on except the grace of God (Luke 18:9-14), and thus Jesus announces, explaining why He and His disciples dined with people of notorious lifestyles, "They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick...I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" (Matthew 9:12-13).  So far from praising respectable, "good" people, the example of Christ is to shatter this sort of comfortable socially-acceptable goodness and reveal it all to be...well, a term that will be discussed later in this letter.

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets...."

With this in mind, consider your treatment of Eminem and Marilyn Manson.

Around the turn of the century, when these two were at their respective peaks in terms of popularity, you went after them with a vengeance.  Pro-social content?  Often, they had "absolutely none".  All they did was describe vile and hideous things, assaulting the youth of America with their filth.  The artists themselves were described in vituperative terms: Manson was "spiritually oppressive, socially irresponsible and downright hateful", while Marshall Mathers was "short two sandwiches, chips, a thermos, plastic-ware-and the basket" of being a picnic basket.  They were basically destroying America with their trash, and you couldn't cluck at them disapprovingly enough.

Now, that both these men fill their lyrics with repulsive language and imagery, I won't for a second deny, nor will I defend them for it; on the other hand, one thing I consistently noticed in your reviews was a lack of compassion for these men.  No one can get to a state where they'll describe their family being raped and murdered with glee without being a tragic, broken figure desperately in need of salvation, and yet rather than respond by reaching out to him (as the Christian rapper KJ-52 did) or by questioning where this pain came from and imploring families to pray for him, all you did was denounce him in terms that would make middle-class parents shudder and feel good about themselves for not having any interest in such dreck, all while their suburban-bred teenagers were drawn to such albums for reasons you never bothered to even speculate about, as if perhaps the same problems that produced men like Eminem and Manson were still present in their own homes and schools.

And this, in fact, is what Eminem and Manson were writing about: The increasing commercialization of everything, including religion.  The hostile environments at school.  The basic vapidness of the American dream.  I submit Eminem's song "Who Knew" from The Marshall Mathers LP, a breathtakingly honest album which consistently gets voted one of the greatest ever, as evidence ("[You] told me that my tape taught 'em to swear/What about the make-up you allow your twelve-year-old daughter to wear?/So tell me that your son doesn't know any cuss words/When his bus driver's screaming at him..?")  You described this as him "whin[ing] about being a scapegoat for teen violence" rather than an indictment of a glibly psuedo-Christian culture with a great, yawning emptiness behind a carnival of forced [cheerfulness].

I am terribly afraid that this is the sort of attitude that would leave the poor and the maimed out in the highways and by-ways because of how unsuitably dressed they are for a wedding.

I am reminded of a Flannery O'Connor story called "A Circle in the Fire".  The story depicts a seemingly pious woman who in fact (a la Satan's accusation of Job) really only "loves" God because of her material blessings; and she particularly idolizes her farmland.  When three rogueish teenaged boys wander onto her farm, she offers them a cold sort of hospitality, but is constantly warning them to be careful lest their cigarettes burn down her precious woods.  It becomes clear as the story goes on that she really has no human kindness or compassion for these boys, and they finally lash out at her by doing precisely that.  Interestingly, throughout the story, O'Connor continually comments that the woods seem to be holding back the sky, which appears to be trying to break through them, and when they finally go up in flames, it is like the sun--a familiar symbol in O'Connor's imagery for God--has conquered the trees.  The final line compares the three boys, the three shifty, coarse, unruly and disobedient ruffians to the three Hebrew prophets who were protected from Nebuchadnezzar's fire by the angel.  They were thrown there, recall, for not engaging in idolatry.

I can't help but compare many artists you condemn to those three boys.  Sure, they may not be polite, God-fearing choir boys, but they also see through the insincerity that churches have thrown at them and won't kneel to the Ba'als that Christians so often conflate with God Himself.  Maybe we should heed the words of such unlikely prophets more often.  

"O wretched man that I am!..."

And this leads me to maybe my biggest problem with the reviews I read in your magazine, which in turn are part of an even wider problem I have with Evangelical culture in general: It presents a Christianity which, in my view, is utterly unprepared to deal with the real world.  What I mean by this is that it demands of people a belief that simply doesn't accord with their own nature or their experience of reality.  

Take, for example, the album Along Came a Spider by Alice Cooper, whom you describe as a "professed Christian".  (Kerry Livgren of Kansas gets labelled a "committed Christian" because his lyrics are really happy.)  This is a concept album about a serial killer who calls himself the Spider setting out to kill eight women, wrap their bodies in silk, and cut off a leg from each of them; thus the Spider can be actualized.  But the Spider, in fact, is the voice in the head of an embittered ex-convict named Steven, and when he falls in love with one of his potential victims and lets her be "The One That Got Away", there is briefly a fission between him and the murderous impulses within him, though they quickly overtake him.  Finally, Steven is brought to repentence and turns to Christ ("Salvation"), and the album concludes with Steven in a prison cell for 25 years haunted by the Spider, who whispers mockery and temptation in his ear ("I am the Spider").  

Your review was elegant enough: "The point of all this?  It's hard to say."

Now, if the album had ended on the song "Salvation", the point would have been obvious to you: Jesus forgives us of our sin and heals us of our past.  But because it ends with the much more ambivalent "I am the Spider", it somehow becomes confusing.  

This is what I mean when I say the popular Evangelical brand of Christianity isn't prepared to deal with the real world.  

Alice Cooper is an alcoholic--a successful recovery, due largely to his own conversion to Christianity, but an alcoholic all the same, one who works with addicts to this day.  I have no doubt that the monkey of alcoholism is on his back to this day, continually whispering temptations at him, and no matter how devout he is, that isn't going to change.  I think Steven's final fate is a picture of this: Imprisoned forever with a demon constantly challenging your commitment to Christ.  The ending of the story, as far as this world is concerned, is rarely completely happy, and had Cooper depicted Steven utterly conquering the Spider, I think he would be untrue to his own experience and, indeed, making a false presentation of what it means to be a Christian to the world.  And yet, as grim as the album's conclusion appears, Steven never gives in to the harassment and abuse of his psychological cellmate; he remains quietly committed to Christ right to the end, and we can project onwards to what will happen in eternity.

As far as I'm concerned, that's an awesome ending. 

But it doesn't exactly fall neatly within the framework of "pro-social content".  But, then, Christian rock, in its early years, rarely conformed neatly to the framework of "pro-social content".  Larry Norman often ran into trouble with Christians for his frank discussion of life without Christ ("you've got gonhorrea on Valentine's Day/and you're still looking for the perfect lay...") to the point where some considered his album So Long Ago the Garden a repudiation of his faith.  Daniel Amos was similarly blunt, and their concept album Songs of the Heart, about a traditional ("respectable") couple's conversion to Christianity on a road trip, was only slightly less ambiguous than Alice Cooper's suspense-thriller storytelling.  Bob Dylan's work during his "born-again" phase was still protest music, though it protested the protestors just as much as the Establishment.  Even Keith Green, a transparently reverent musician if ever there was one, was willing to defy some of the Finneyite theology he'd been taught which demanded perfection of a Christian life by writing a song based on "Romans 7".  

This was when Christian music was still respected, by both the mainstream world and by Christians; but now "Christian music" is generally expected to reflect only one aspect of the Christian experience, the part where everything obviously gels together and makes sense (in other words, an extremely slender portion of the believer's life).  Documentary filmmaker David Di Sabatino writes in his article"Why I Would Follow Bono Into Hell", "U2 has made a long, arduous and well-planned trek, astutely avoiding the cultural ghetto of Christian music. (Can you imagine what would have been lost had U2 been signed to Word Records?)"  

If you honestly look at why it's a good thing that U2 was never signed to a Christian label, you will understand the problem I have with the perspective you continually espouse.  The sort of problem-free Christianity you seem to want to limit Christian art to representing is destined to shatter on the rocks of reality--and, in many cases, this will mean apostasy.

That said, I do owe you guys; I only found out about Along Came a Spider by reading your negative review of it.

"All things are lawful for me...do all to the glory of God."

The Christmas Carol is a happy story first, because it describes an abrupt and dramatic change. It is not only the story of a conversion, but of a sudden conversion; as sudden as the conversion of a man at a Salvation Army meeting. Popular religion is quite right in insisting on the fact of a crisis in most things. It is true that the man at the Salvation Army meeting would probably be converted from the punch bowl; whereas Scrooge was converted to it. That only means that Scrooge and Dickens represented a higher and more historic Christianity.

-G.K. Chesterton

Tied in to this are the things you single out in your film reviews.  For example, you're notoriously punctilous in profanity-counting and always tally up exactly how many d-words, s-words, b-word and f-words the characters utter, sometimes more accurately than the other quotes you attribute to them.  Often you'll indicate that the only troubled spot in a movie is the vocabulary, which "unnecessarily" uses these tabboo expressions.  

I will admit that I am really tired of this.

People have historically used "bad language" to express extreme emotions that the regular vernacular can't do justice to.  In other words, to be rather blunt, it often turns up when people are at their most alive, their most animated, their most "plugged in", so to speak, with the world around them, when they care the most.  Sometimes "dang it" just won't cut it.  And we have sacred precedent for this.

In Philippians 3, St. Paul gives us a forceful and powerful denounciation of the Jewish legalists who tried to impose the Mosaic regulations on Christians.  He details his own immaculate record from his time in Judaism: "Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee; Concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.  But," he hurriedly adds, anxious to exalt grace above works, "what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.  Yea doubtless"--and here his prose swells with emotion--"and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ."  (verses 5-8)  The Greek word underlying the Authorized Version's "dung" here is skubalon, and the Evangelical New Testament scholar and textual critic Daniel Wallacehas confirmed that this term was "a vulgar expression with emotive connotations (thus, roughly equivalent to the English 'crap, s**t')".  

Why would the Apostle, capable as he was of such lofty and noble writings as 1 Corinthians 13 and Galatians 5:22-23, resort to such viscereal gutter talk?  Because nothing else would do to indicate how worthless and unworthy human effort was in contrast to the merits Christ earned for us in His suffering on the Cross.  To use a weaker term (like most of his English translators do) would almost be an insult to Our Lord's salvation.  It would almost be a lie.  And our Western world is so gorged and bloated with its own self-righteousness that it needs to hear that its prayer breakfasts, bumper stickers, free-trade coffees and political preoccupations are shit without redemptive power or merit, that it needs Christ before it is too late.  It does not, I repeat, need more "pro-social content" in its art.

This is why I got so frustrated that the single f-word on Mumford and Sons' debut album, which you otherwise highly praised for its "beautiful and spiritual messages", got almost an entire articlededicated to you wringing your hands over this one silly syllable.  And remember that "Little Lion Man" is essentially one long Act of Contrition--it is the singer's sin that he is mournfully referring to when he asks, "I really fucked it up this time, didn't I, my dear?"  Is sin not vile enough, in the context of repentence, to warrant language stronger than the sort you'd hear in a nursery?  

Remember too that when Christianity was in one of its most vitalized eras--the Reformation--theologians used this sort of language all the time.  Read the debates between Luther and St. Thomas More and you'll find they were incredibly creative in their use of "bad language".  But these men were discussing the single most important issue in the universe: Salvation.  It warranted getting worked up enough to cuss a bit.  And, once again, this is why I fear that the brand of Christianity you present to the world isn't prepared to deal with the world.  We are an increasingly desperate age, and a faith which is ruffled by choice words seems bloodless, lifeless, sanitized, weak, and irrelevant to an increasingly large portion of the population.  A more legitimate concern is the frequency and frivolity with which profanity is used these days, which weakens its power to express strong emotions.  Perhaps you should record how profanity is used in a movie as opposed to how often.

The same can be said for your attitude towards alcohol use, which is also, for you, a negative point in any movie.  Yet not only is wine approved of in the Bible, it is actually used as a symbol for the Gospel, as, for example, when Jesus turns water into wine, as opposed to Moses who turned the water into blood.  Psalm 104:15 indicates that God gave "wine that maketh glad the heart of man", and, in discussing tithes, Deuteronomy 14 decrees that, "when the LORD thy God hath blessed thee: Then shalt thou turn it into money, and bind up the money in thine hand, and shalt go unto the place which the LORD thy God shall choose: And thou shalt bestow that money for whatsoever thy soul lusteth after, for oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or for strong drink, or for whatsoever thy soul desireth: and thou shalt eat there before the LORD thy God, and thou shalt rejoice, thou, and thine household" (verses 24-26).  

In fact, I have often wondered whether a proper appreciation of alcohol might not be the sort of pre-evangelism our culture needs.  In the Middle Ages, the culture that was marked by abstinence from alcohol was the Islamic one; the Christian culture was identified as the one with all the booze, often brewed by clerics.  As Dostoevsky says in The Brothers Karamazov, "There would have been no civilization if they hadn't invented God...And there would have been no brandy either."  Now, of course, alcoholism is one of the horrors haunting the West, but I think the approach here is to rescue the baby from its bathwater.  As C.S. Lewis has a demon say in The Screwtape Letters, "You are much more likely to make your man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary than by encouraging him to use it as a means of merriment among his friends when he is happy and expansive. Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy's ground."  Abusing pleasure may lead to damnation, but Lewis believes healthy pleasure often leads to salvation; and once again it would be safer to record how a film depicts imbibing rather than simply that it does depict it.

"And the sword shall devour, and it shall be satiate and made drunk with their blood..."

I realize that you are part of Focus on the Family and thus a large part of what you do is with the intention of giving parents the information they need to decide whether or not to allow their kids to check out one of the products you review; but you hardly supply "just the facts, ma'am", as I wish to address in my final point: Your phobia of violence in a movie.  Here, I do not believe the objection that Christians want to protect the minds of their children will hold.

G.K. Chesterton famously wrote in his essay "The Red Angel", "Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey."  Picking up this theme, the blog "Faith and Theology" says, discussing the violence in Lewis' Narnia story The Silver Chair, "There are people – mostly people with PhDs who have never met a real child – who say the old fairytales and adventures are too violent. For my part, I tend to avoid contemporary children’s writing because it is, for the most part, not violent enough."  There is undeniably something wild and violent about our nature, and writers like John Eldredge are willing to openly admit it and try to find ways of embracing it that cohere with Christian faith.

In contrast, in your review of the explicitly Christian The Book of Eli, your anxiety over the violence was palatable to the point of being amusing.  "Does the violence eradicate Eli's message? No. Does the message redeem Eli's violence? No."  The most interesting moment comes when your reviewer writes, "The overall tone of the film is far removed from the Sermon on the Mount. Rather, it recalls the Bible's bloodiest passages—where legions of soldiers massacred whole people groups, where kings and queens were left in the street to be eaten by dogs."  Whether this critic feels the Bible would have been improved by dropping this "gratuitious violence" is not stated, but it does raise the glaring and uncomfortable question--which, I might add, applies to sexuality as well--if the Bible can depict it so explicitly, and often without obvious purpose, why can't the Hughes brothers?  

This is, once again, untrue both to historic Christianity and to the human experience.  A faith which gets squeamish around violence is not going to hold any sway in this increasingly desensitized and calloused culture.  Plugged In's reviews consistently fail to see a way of redeeming the things that pose a problem to our culture; instead, there is almost always a wholesale condemnation or rejection of it which will end up harming the cause of Christ, I believe.

Conclusion

Finally, should anyone actually have read this far, I want to reiterate that I did not intend for this to be hostile or antagonistic.  In fact, most of the observations come out of years of prayer and reflection that, as I said before, were largely inspired by your work.  I still refer people to your website and your reviews and still enjoy them and are often edified by them.  But we are in a war, and I can't help fearing that your work will in some way continue to fail us if these problems are not addressed.

Forgive me if I have ever been harsh or erroneous in my evaluation of you and may God continually bless you.

Pope, Newman, Vicious, and the Case for Monarchism

"The difference between the two views might be expressed by saying that Naturalism gives us a democratic, Supernaturalism a monarchial, picture of reality...At this point a suspicion may occur that Supernaturalism first arose from reading into the universe the structure of monarchial societies.  But then of course it may with equal reason be suspected that Naturalism has arisen from reading into it the structure of modern democracies.  The two suspicions thus cancel out and give us no help in deciding which theory is more likely to be true.  They do indeed remind us that Supernaturalism is the characteristic philosophy of a monarchial age and Naturalism of a democratic, in the sense that Supernaturalism, even if false, would have been believed by the great mass of unthinking people four hundred years ago, just as Naturalism, even if false, will be believed by the great mass of unthinking people today."

-C.S. Lewis, Miracles, copyright, 1947, pp. 11-12

***

In my early years at university, I remember being quite annoyed with the system.  Multiple professors told me that I was perfectly capable of being an A student if I would simply take the time to consistently conform my essay formats to MLA standards.  This always seemed utterly frustrating and arbitrary to me.  If my ideas and prose were clearly worthy of an A, what difference did it make if the citations weren't organized according to the whims and dictates of some academic czars I had no connection to or notion about?  And so I sat, feeling perfectly justified and unreasonably persecuted in my undeservingly low grades.

That is, until I read Alexander Pope.

I recently broke out my old Norton Anthology to revisit the Essay on Criticism, the piece that changed my attitude completely.  In it, Pope argues that, rather than simply being a matter of taste, there are objective, binding principles on writing derived from the natural order itself:

"First follow Nature, and your judgment frame
By her just standard, which is still the same;
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchanged, and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of art."
[68-73]

But these principles are not simply there for every individual to try to discover for himself: the ancients have done that for us.  Virgil, for example,

"seemed above the critic's law,
And but from Nature's fountains scorned to draw;
But when to examine every part he came,
Nature and Homer were, he found, the same"
[132-135]

This was a novel concept for me, but I was instantly drawn to it, especially after reading Pope's Essay on Man, which attempts to "vindicate the ways of God to man" [16] from the fact of the tightly ordered nature of the cosmos, as was recently being discovered by Newtonian physics, and the first epistle culminates in this ringing declaration:

"All Nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear: Whatever is, is RIGHT."
[289-294]

There is, therefore, something transcendent about the rules of writing, drawn as they are from God's own scheme of the cosmos itself.  In turn, there is an implication for the social order.  

My Norton Anthology notes, "The fourth book of The Dunciad, Pope's last major work, was originally intended as a continuation of An Essay on Man."  The Dunciad, Wikipedia explains, "concerns the gradual sublimation of all arts and letters into Dulness by the action of hireling authors," for, as Norton explains: "In modern England, authors write for money, and ministers govern for profit: conspicuous consumption (especially the consumption of paper by scribblers) has replaced the old values of the yeoman and the aristocrat."  For Pope, there is much more at stake here than simply the quality of the mainstream of literature: "At its deepest level, the subject of The Dunciad is the undoing of God's creation...[it] ends in a great apocalypse, with a yawn that signals the death of the Logos; as words have become meaningless, so has the whole creation, which the Lord called forth with words.  Here Pope invokes, with sublime intensity, the old idea that God was the first poet, one whose poem was the world, and suggests that the sickness of the word has infected all nature."   This really changes a person's perspective on whether or not the way you write your papers really matters in the grand scheme of things; turns out, it matters more than you probably realize.

There is a notion afoot these days that the physical sciences are the "important" disciplines; the study of, say, literature or philosophy may be personally edifying, but they are far less important (and by extension far less dangerous) than the power wielded by an engineer.  Pope, it would seem, disagrees strenuously (though it must be noted his attitude towards art is far removed from that of many contemporary arts scholars- dare we blame the bogeyman of postmodernism for this?), and it may be worthwhile to quote Richard Weaver's bluntly titled book Ideas Have Consequences:

"The most portentous general event of our time is the steady obliteration of those distinctions which create society.  Rational society is a mirror of the logos, and this means that it has a formal structure which enables apprehension.  The preservation of society is therefore directly linked with the discovery of true knowledge...If society is something which can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain...After man evolves his metaphysical dream and becomes capable of rational sentiment, he recognizes two grounds of elevation, knowledge and virtue-if these are not one...The good man, the man with proved allegiance to correct sentiment, has been the natural trustee of authority; the man of knowledge has been necessary for such duties as require system and foresight.  With such criteria it has been possible to erect a structure which mirrors our respect for value.  In proportion to their contributions to the spiritual ideal which the creation expresses, men have found lodgment on the various levels, with the essential feeling that, since this structure is the logos, their stations were not arbitrary but natural and right.  This is society, in which the human being has a sense of direction; literally, it might be said, he knows 'up' from 'down,' because he knows where the higher goods are to be looked for.  It is possible for him to live on the plane of spirit and intelligence because some points of reference are fixed." (emphasis added)

***

As we've all heard, the Pope has visited Britain, amidst a predictable flurry of controversy over the fact that the taxpayer was picking up his tab.  He was received by the Queen, who will probably be the last uncontroversial monarch for some time.  Charles' future reign is not looking rosy, and some have predicted that he will be the last to sit on the British throne.  The impulse towards republicanism is already strong in places like Australia.  

One of the things Charles is proposing which will, to say the least, present challenges when his mother eventually does shuffle off the mortal coil, is dropping the definite article from the royal title "Defender of the Faith".  He has no interest, apparently, in defending the Christian faith specifically; indeed, he even wants his coronation ceremony to be "interfaith" rather than specifically Church of England.  

In response, the Archbishop of Canterbury showed a surprising (and uncharacteristic) amount of backbone in utterly rejecting this proposal.  "Describing Britain as a 'broken society' he said action was needed by the government and the Church to restore a sense of moral integrity," the BBC reported, and added, "The acts of worship that we perform have their integrity. I don't want to see amateurish messing around compromising what's going on."  One might wish this concern for integrity and opposition to compromise permeated more of Rowan Williams' work.

It might be instructive at this point to remember where the title itself originally came from.  In 1521, King Henry VIII published In Defense of the Seven Sacraments, a rebuttal to Martin Luther's treatise On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church in which the German Reformer argued that only Baptism and the Lord's Supper truly qualified as Sacraments.  Henry dedicated his work to Pope Leo X, and for that was awarded the title Fidei Defensor in October of that year.  Luther in turn wrote Martin Luther Against Henry King of England, and, much to the delight of theological/historical nerds everywhere, Thomas More ended up responding to that, too.  

It is worth looking at Henry's letter to Leo briefly, if only for interest's sake.  "Most Holy Father," the message begins, "No duty is more incumbent on a Catholic sovereign than to preserve and increase the Christian faith and religion and the proofs thereof, and to trans mit them preserved thus inviolate to posterity, by his example in preventing them from being destroyed by any assailant of the Faith or in any wise impaired." 

Well, that's a different tune than the one Charles is chirping.

Henry goes on to explain to the Pope, with the plural of majesty ever ready at the pen, that, being "convinced that, in our ardour for the welfare of Christendom, in our zeal for the Catholic Faith and our devotion to the Apostolic See, we had not yet done enough, we determined to show by our own writings our attitude towards Luther and our opinion of his vile books; to manifest more openly to all the world that we shall ever defend and uphold the Holy Roman Church, not only by force of arms but by the resources of our intelligence and our services as a Christian."  He openly calls Luther's doctrine "poison", "deadly venom", and even a "heinous crime", while Luther himself is a "pernicious man" who "refus[es] to return to God", although, in an introduction to the general reader, Henry laments, "I wish he may at last repent himself for having treated of Penance in so evil a manner, that he may wholesomely perform all its parts, since he endeavours to destroy them all; that he may be contrite for his malice and publicly confess his errors; and that by submitting himself to the judgement of the Church – which he has offended with so many blasphemies - he may atone for what he has committed with the greatest satisfaction possible.  I indeed abhor this man’s great madness and most lamentable state and I wish that even now - God inspiring him by grace – he may at length come to his senses, be converted and live."  He ends with an entreaty for Christians everywhere "not foster schisms and discords, especially at this time when it behoves Christians most particularly to be united against the enemies of Christ."  We could perhaps afford to hear this message from Buckingham Palace today.

Ten years later, this probably all seemed like a very strange and peculiar memory to all parties involved.  Henry shook off Papal power, but retained the title, except now, of course, the "Faith" he was defending was the one represented by the "church" he was now the nominal head of.  From here, you can easily trace the downward trajectory from "apologist against Luther" to "defender of all faiths, generally", with the cognitive dissonance of Anglicanism (sometimes described as the church with Protestant Articles and a Catholic Book of Worship) bridging the gap betwixt the two.  Now the cognitive dissonance will consist in a king who claims that he equally upholds all faiths, while at the same time being coroneted holding a globus cruciger (symbolizing "Christ's (the cross) dominion over the world (the orb)") in one hand and a Sceptre with the Cross (symbolizing "the temporal authority of the Monarch under the Cross") in the other.  The more Charles insists he is the defender of all faiths, the weaker the symbol of the Cross is, and, thus, the weaker the authority of the crown itself is.

When I say that I favour monarchism, I hope I'm not misunderstood.  This doesn't mean that I simply prefer someone from a prestigious family wearing jewels and velvet to a silver-tongued devil in a business suit; this is putting the cart before the horse.  It is rather that when a country models its social order after what it views to be the eternal principles of natural law- a society which deliberately situates itself between the rungs on the Great Chain of Being- in other words, a national community truly informed by Christian thought in a way that far outstrips the paltry way that concept is used by the Evangelical right- monarchy seems to generally be the form in which this manifests itself.  As William S. Lind put it in his column "The Prussian Monarchy Stuff", "like all real conservatives, I am a monarchist. The universe is not a republic."

On the other hand, the progressive rejection of cosmic authority usually coincides with an impulse towards personal sovereignty and philosophical autonomy, going right back to Henry's first rebellion against the Papal ruling on his marriage.  Like King Ahab on the eve of the battle of Ramothgilead, Henry chose to reject the pronouncement of the anointed representative of God in favour of the counsel of hand-picked ear-tickling "prophets" who confirmed to him what he wanted to hear.  In both cases, this substitution ended up being the ruler's destruction.  In both cases, we see a clear connection between desire to be self-determining in the moral realm and disruption in the social order.  

***

Or, to be more succinct: "I am an antichrist, and I am an anarchist!"

So begins the Sex Pistols' anti-establishment anthem "Anarchy in the U.K.", a snarling manifesto of chaotic lawlessness with the decisive lyric, "I wanna be anarchy!"  The following year, Sid Vicious joined the band, and if anyone could be said to be the embodiment of anarchy, it was him.  Their next single, "God Save the Queen", was even more controversial: The lyrics were, if possible, even more defiant of authority, and the award-winning cover sleeve showed a photograph of the Queen with her eyes and mouth "censored" out by the name of the song and the band.  This is a fascinating image.  This was a group that didn't blush to swear on TV, promote drug abuse, promiscuity, and violence, and even neglected personal hygiene ("Johnny Rotten" was so nicknamed because of how infrequently he brushed his teeth), but what did they find offensive?  Anyone who had the audacity to tell them what to do.

Wikipedia records this anecdote about the band: "On 10 March 1977, at a press ceremony held outside Buckingham Palace, the Sex Pistols publicly signed to A&M Records (the real signing had taken place the day before). Afterward, stoked on booze, they made their way to the A&M offices. Vicious smashed in a toilet bowl and cut his foot (there is some disagreement about which happened first). As Vicious trailed blood around the offices, Rotten verbally abused the staff and Jones got frisky in the ladies' room. A couple of days later, the Pistols got into a rumble with another band at a club; one of Rotten's pals threatened the life of a good friend of A&M's English director. On 16 March, A&M broke contract with the Pistols."  "I wanna be anarchy"?  I'd say you just about succeeded.  As a footnote to this discussion I refer anyone and everyone to the film Sid and Nancy, not only because it's an incredible piece of filmmaking and Gary Oldman's performance as Sid Vicious is uncanny and powerful, but because it details the ultimate end of a couple who really do try to lead their lives (if "lead" is indeed an appropriate verb) according to the principles of anarchy.

But there is one more point to make about this, again illustrated by a point borrowed from Wikipedia: "In the documentary The Filth and the Fury , John Lydon described the composition of the song's opening lyrics, explaining that the best rhyme he could devise for the first line, 'I am an Antichrist', was a mispronunciation of the second line, 'I am an anarchist'."  This line was not even consciously ideological; it was just words strung together for the sake of a lyric.  And in regards to "God Save the Queen", one of Wikipedia's contributors has supplied us with this quote along with a fascinating editorial observation: "[Guitarist Steve] Jones shrugged off everything the song stated and implied—or took nihilism to a logical endpoint: 'I don't see how anyone could describe us as a political band. I don't even know the name of the Prime Minister.'"  Stories like this abound in regards to the Sex Pistols- when they did their infamous cover of "My Way", Sid improvised many of the lyrics since he hadn't taken the time to memorize them, for example.  Between this, the slurred vocals, and the frenzied ruckus of the instrumentation, we truly have the quintessence of "punk".  Compare all of this to the spirit and exhortations of Pope.  Compare this to the metaphysics of Pope.

***

The day of this writing, Pope Benedict XVI announced the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman, a high-profile convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism.  There is something quietly important about this.  The Church of England is manifestly ill-equipped to deal with the turbulent social forces churning and raging in the United Kingdom, and its internal contradictions are visibly crystalizing into schism.  The changing of the guard was signified by the Oxford Juniour Dictionary dropping wordslike "bishop", "saint", "chapel", and "monarch" and replacing them with terms like "blog", "biodegradable", "celebrity" and "MP3 player".  We need not see any agenda in the editors' decisions; they accurately record the changes in the wider society, and, at the risk of being terribly predictable, I see no remedy for this other than a massive exodus out of Anglicanism back into the Church it originally came out of, a process which the Pope recently made specific provisions for.

King Henry VIII's book defending the Sacraments has recently been re-released in a new edition dedicated to Queen Elizabeth II.  Who knows whether she will ever read it?  Whether or not she ever turns its pages, we shall see how many Brits will end up realizing that within the writings of the cardinal commemorated is found the solution for their "broken society".

Cinematic Catharism: A Review of *The Last Exorcism*

“This is not a work of fiction, or a book designed to entertain, amuse or horrify the reader. It is a book of historic fact and historic research opening up the sacred pages of one of the great mysteries of religious prevalence.

The following pages are commended to the reader for his interest, enlightenment, meditation and analysis.”

So ends St. Elmo Nauman, Jr.'s introduction to his anthology Exorcism Through the Ages, and, indeed, the book is refreshingly free of sensationalism. The historical accounts of demonic activity are as cool and clear as a lake's surface, and a matter-of-fact calm permeates the volume. Records of demonization, from Sextus consulting a medium in ancient Rome to possessed nuns and priests in an Ursuline convent in 17th century France, report on the grotesque phenomena described therein with frank efficiency. One chapter is a catalogue of demonic encounters written by a Prior named Caesar of Heisterback, who begins some of his accounts as simply as this: “In the same monastery called Hoven a nun by the name of Elizabeth was often harassed by the devil.” All the better, perhaps. A set of instructions for dealing with anything dangerous must be as short, punchy, and to-the-point as possible, going into just as much detail as is necessary for safety and security to be maintained. This is very refreshing in a culture which not only loves to indulge in elaborate mythologies but especially loves to flirt with darkness and sorcery.  In 1973, possession was the scariest thing you could put in a horror movie; nowadays demons are characters in comedies and supernaturally-tinged action movies. Getting your mouth sewed to somebody's anus is now considered the scariest premise for a movie; going to Hell is kind of blasé.

Of course, this is the opposite of the attitude that once prevailed. Dr. Nauman, who lacks many of his contributors' solemn attitude towards his subject matter, writes in his chapter “Exorcism and Satanism in Medieval Germany” (in 1974, mind you, with the spectres of Communism and nuclear destruction hanging over the West's head), “The sinister forces in medieval Germany were Satanic rather than political...The medieval mind viewed the world as an arena for the struggle between good and evil, saints and devils, God and Satan.” With the smug aloofness one would expect of a scholar comfortably fitting into modernity, Dr. Nauman paints a picture of a culture that sincerely believed in the supernatural realm and yet couldn't help getting a bit of recreational thrill out of it. “Crowds of people gathered to watch St. Norbert of Magdeburg (d. 1134) conduct a 'combat between the priest and the demon,' an effort to exorcise the devil from a young woman. During his dramatic celebration of a holy mass, the evil spirit in the woman 'roared with laughter' during the sacred elevation of the host, crying out: 'See how he holds his little god in his hands!' The priest was aroused to anger, and employed his ultimate weapon, an attack of prayer aimed straight at the demon. Two strong men forcibly held the girl during the mass and the prayer. Suddenly the evil spirit abandoned the girl and escaped, leaving behind him 'a trail of unspeakably stinking urine.' 'She collapsed, was taken back to her father's house, took food, and soon was entirely restored to health.'” Dr. Nauman records a similar story involving St. Bernard of Clairvaux. “The most eminent men of the times, models for the lives of common men, were full of stories about dramatic personal encounters with the devil. Crowds gathered to see which side would win. It was a great sport.”

Which side would win?

But the orthodox model of the universe depicted Satan as a mere creation, ultimately subordinate to God's providence; the doctrine that Satan was had power akin to deity (the Manicheanism that St. Augustine rejected for Christianity in his youth) had long ago been declared heresy and rooted it out in the Albigensian Crusade. Yet the idea that Satan was a rival power to God, a notion perhaps fueled by the common fascination with battles between priests and the demonized- the existence of combat, after all, often implies that the combatants are fairly evenly matched- led to the emergence of witchcraft. “The common people, unlike their religious or secular leaders, saw an opportunity in this situation. Whereas the Church offered then the benefits of the mass, the State offered then the benefits of taxation. The peasants who saw benefits in neither could turn to the offices of the Devil to get what they wanted. Satanism became the way to pursue one's personal desires.” After this, of course, came the much-maligned anti-witchcraft laws which took Exodus 22:18 as their cue. However, Dr. Nauman notes that “the Church at first only punished witchcraft when some actual harm was done. Perhaps the neighbor's field had been bewitched, or the witch had sent demons to milk his cows and return the milk to her pails, or she had caused someone to die by melting down a wax image dressed in his clothes. Some harm had to be proven before the witch was punished.” Eventually, though, anything associated with witchcraft or confessed to by witches became banned. “Some of these were personal, some social acts. These were now indistinguishable, in the eyes of the law...Witchcraft was believed to be a socially harmful activity.”

Such a notion, of course, is a relic from a time when nature was thought to be shot through with spiritual power; supernatural beings ruled over it, and thus involvement with a fallen angel was far more dangerous to both the individual and the community than we would consider "dabbling in the occult" to be - a quaint idea, of course, to Dr. Nauman, but not to the writers of the New Testament. The anthology includes a chapter entitled “Exorcism and the Bible” by Charles Buck, editor of the Theological Dictionary, who argues persuasively from Scripture that Satan is understood therein as “the leader of the fallen angels, and the arch-foe of God and man...His power, though infinitely short of omnipotence, is represented as great and extensive...by the permission of God, he exercises a sort of government in the world over his subordinates, over apostate angels like himself...he roves full of rage like a roaring lion, to tempt, to betray, to destroy, and to involve us in guilt and wickedness; that his power and malice are restrained within certain limits, and controlled by the will of God.” Buck takes pains to refute the “Socinians” who claim that the demoniacs in the New Testament were simply insane, and Jesus adopted the common language of the people to describe and explain what He was doing when He healed them. “Is such an accomodation...for a moment to be reconciled with the character of such a teacher as Jesus? If the demons were simply natural diseases, was it not of the highest importance for him to have undeceived his contemporaries on these points, and to have corrected the false and pernicious philosophy of the age?” After producing four detailed arguments in favour of taking the Bible at its word when it discusses familiar spirits and their powers, Buck concludes: “On one side we have the wonderful doctrine, that it pleased the Almighty to permit invisible and evil beings to possess themselves, in some incomprehensible manner, of the bodies and souls of men. On the other, we have Christ the revealer of truth, establishing falsehood, sanctioning error, or encouraging deception. We have the evangelists inconsistent with themselves, and a narrative, which is acknowledged to be inspired and to be intended for the unlearned-unintelligible and false. Between such difficulties, I prefer the former...”

 ***

Reverend Cotton Marcus is more succinct, but expresses the same idea. “If you believe in God, then you must believe in the devil.”

The Last Exorcism is set in Louisiana, where, as the reverend notes, the rural areas are soaked with syncrestic superstition (and, as we know from Anne Rice novels, vampires are a dime a dozen). The charismatic (in more senses than one) pastor with an appropriately Puritan-sounding name is the main character of the film; he is a faith healer of sorts with a flair for showmanship, even using magic tricks behind the pulpit, at one point using a deck of trick cards to make a somewhat laboured point about spiritual discernment (“in this world, brothers and sisters, we encounter many faces...”). He is descended from a long line of preachers with a penchant for casting out unclean spirits, and in fact has inherited a Malleus Maleficarum-esque handbook on demonology cataloguing the various devils and the symptoms they exhibit- in Latin. Though this is probably the first mainstream movie to feature a non-Catholic exorcist, the shadow of the Church hangs over the whole thing, right down to the visuals the movie uses to illustrate the pastor's comments; they include an icon of St. Anthony of Padua. Even Marcus' little revivalist church has Roman-looking candles and an altar cloth with “IHS” displayed prominently. (This is by far the most Pentecostal Anglo-Catholic congregation you're likely to find.) In fact, his major weapon when he conducts exorcisms is a big, thick crucifix known to emit hellish smoke at particularly intense moments (“the demon cannot stand the sight of Our Lord!”). Looks pretty impressive until he's shown rigging it up to do so. You see, some time ago, Cotton Marcus- well, it wouldn't be accurate to say he lost his faith, precisely, since at a crucial moment in his life he discovered that he never really had it.

Marcus explains to a documentarian that his son was prematurely born, so prematurely that his life was in serious danger. Fortunately, the attendant medical professionals were able to rescue the child in the nick of time. At that moment, Marcus confesses, he realized his first impulse was gratitude, but in the direction of the doctor, not God, like it should have been if, y'know...God exists. This prompted some serious soul searching on Marcus' part, and the end result was a realization that his attitude towards the supernatural was, really, not too far removed from Dr. Nauman's. (There is a nugget of psychological insight about the nature of faith and unbelief here.) But with bills to pay, a family to feed, and a lack of options/alternatives, Marcus decided to stay behind the pulpit and use people's trust in his spiritual powers to help them. If someone thinks they have an unclean spirit and he successfully convinces them that he's cast it out, who is that ultimately hurting? So Marcus reasoned, at least, until he read about a boy who was suffocated to death with a plastic bag by well-meaning authorities figures trying to drive an evil spirit out of him. This coupled with the news that the Pope has opened an academy to train exorcists prompts Marcus to agree to make a documentary giving a behind-the-scenes look at how he conducts one of his fraudulent rituals and exposing the whole business as phony to the whole world. Not that he likes to be called a fraud. “That's your word, not mine,” he chuckles.

With that mission in mind, Marcus and a two-person documentary team set out in response to an urgent request for help to an appropriately remote and isolated farmhouse, wherein lives Louis Sweetzer, a grizzled but emotional type with a face that reminds me of Clint Eastwood. He is still grieving the death of his wife from a few years ago, from whom he inherited a religiosity that could safely be described as “fanatical”. Concerned about negative influences, he pulled his children out of school to homeschool them, and eventually pulled his daughter out of Sunday school. His former pastor explains to Marcus at one point that Louis didn't find the theology lessons sufficiently “medieval”. When we get a glimpse of this church, it looks like a fairly standard, mainline Evangelical assembly with a door that marks the “Martin Luther Hall”, yet Louis' house is full of crucifixes, and he crosses himself and prays at his wife's grave. His faith may be intense, but it seems somewhat confused, which is usually the lot of a believer who cuts himself off from both the church and the world because neither are living up to his personal standards. Now he lives alone with his son, Caleb, a brooding young man constantly on the brink of violent outbursts, and Nell, an eager but extremely awkward girl with an artistic streak. Oh, and a demon, at least if her dad suspects rightly. Someone's been massacring Louis' animals in the night, and, if the bloodied clothing found at the scene is any indication, it looks like Nell was responsible, though she convincingly insists that she remembers nothing. Marcus promptly gets to work, much to the distaste of Caleb, who's also heard the story about the strangling exorcist and threatens Cotton should his sister get hurt.  ("The camera can look all it wants.")

From here the story escalates as Marcus conducts his rigged exorcism, in the course of which Caleb discovers, to his great relief, that Marcus is a huckster. After the ritual, however, Nell continues to exhibit signs of being disturbed and often goes into paroxysms during which she does things like trying drown a baby doll and creating pictures depicting Marcus and his crew being killed in rather specific ways. Eventually, Louis concludes that the exorcism failed, and since Marcus “diagnosed” his daughter as being possessed by Abalam, a spirit of licentiousness who can only be driven away by an exorcism or by his host's death, Nell must be killed if she is to be saved. All the while Marcus, with increasing agitation, tries to convince him to get Nell psychiatric help without blowing his cover. All of this, of course, is seen by way of footage shot for the fictional documentary, a la The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity, and so forth. But this “mockumentary” element feels kind of gimmicky and unnecessary. Offhand I am not certain the movie's quality would have been substantially affected by whether it felt like a “real” movie. I have to confess that at no point was I honestly scared by any of the dimly-lit and often chaotic set-pieces or by any of the sudden shots of “shocking” reveals. (The fact that the film switches back and forth between a stark, realistic soundtrack and a horror movie score is also distracting.) But there are a couple of things that redeem the film. One is the plot, which isn't above tricking the audience (or tricking it into thinking that it's tricking it) and which held my attention and kept me curious about what the next development would be. The other thing in this movie's favour is some good acting, particularly the performance by Patrick Fabian as the conflicted charlatan conducting his “last exorcism”. Often in the course of the movie he needs to put on appearances as a Bible-believing “spiritual warrior”, not just for his own sake but for the safety of everyone involved, and the film counts on the intelligence of the viewer and the subtelty of Fabian's performance to get across what's going on in Marcus' head.

As the movie enters its third act, without telling his crew (and therefore us) anything explicit, Marcus is clearly having a crisis of unbelief, so to speak; we see him being filmed, unbestknown to him, while he silently prays before attempting a second exorcism (though he brings a handgun to the ritual- just in case). In the movie's final scene, which borrows from Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic story “Young Goodman Brown,” we have the most powerful moment in the whole picture: Confronted by imminent danger and evil, rather than flee with his crew, Marcus pauses for a long time, sets his face like flint, grabs the very crucifix that was once nothing more than a prop for his con artistry, and, holding it forth, marches boldly into near-certain death crying out against the infernal powers in the name of Jesus- and this time, you can hear the conviction in his voice. The way he shouts “you have no power over this child of God!” is more chilling and goosebump-raising than any Linda Blair-esque neck contortions the movie offers us. In this sense the movie's plot can be described as the clergyman from Signs, who also rediscovers his faith in the face of otherworldly adversity, dropped into a setting akin to that of The Wicker Man (with some Rosemary's Baby sprinkled in for good measure).

But that's the positive way of spinning it.

More cynically it can be said that this is a derivative movie, certainly inferior to any of those, albeit leagues ahead of most of the garbage in its genre.  But the very fact that this movie does have more spiritual wisdom and insight than most of the shlock touted as “horror” today counts against it in a strange way. By the end, it is a competition between a man of God piously trying to save a soul and a slave of the devil mockingly spewing blasphemy and exhibiting preternatural abilities- and it's there for us to watch and to enjoy. Unlike Dr. Nauman's book, it is meant to “entertain, amuse, or horrify” the viewer, and so we're right back in the situation of the voyeuristic German peasants captivatedly watching St. Bernard struggling over a girl's enthralled soul. Remember that this movie is produced by Eli Roth, best known for trafficking in torture porn in the order of the Hostel movies, and him presenting this movie would be a little bit like putting Dr. Nauman's book on the rack in the Adult's Only section of a store. It sends a certain message. And, in a way, the fact that this movie is really sort of mediocre makes it more spiritually dangerous than something like The Exorcist, which, while it delved way more deeply into serious territory and was a much more intense movie, at least gave the viewer a sense of how truly terrifying demonic possession is, whereas this makes the bondage of a soul to the devil into a diversionary and forgettable bit of filler.

***

I'd like to repeat something Dr. Nauman wrote: “The medieval mind viewed the world as an arena for the struggle between good and evil, saints and devils, God and Satan.” Well, not just the medieval mind. “To understand the Orthodox view and practice of exorcism, we must know the orthodox presuppositions of evil and the doctrine of Satan...The devil is the cause of rebellion against God. The devil is the cause of corruption and disorder; a parasitic power in the world that will ultimately be destroyed by the power of God in the 'last days.' Because there is no compromise between God and the devil, the struggle will continue until the end...The power of the devil will ultimately be destroyed by the resurrection of the dead and the renewal of the whole creation. Salvation from all evil will be attained by obedience to God and His plan. This world is a battleground between the acceptance of God and evil.”

So writes Rev. George C. Papademetriou in his contribution to Dr. Nauman's book, “Exorcism and the Greek Orthodox Church,” a chapter which comes right after “Exorcism and the Catholic Faith” by Professor Patrick J. Toner, a contributing editor to the Catholic Encyclopedia. There are a few things that strike you when you read these two chapters. Firstly, if you compare them to Charles Buck's chapter on the Biblical picture of exorcism, you'll find they're very much in accordance with the Scriptural evidence about demonology (though Buck rejects “the superstition of the church of Rome”). Secondly, all of it is very much subordinated to the whole work of the Church on earth. Exorcism occurs at baptism, not because infants are “considered to be obsessed, like demoniacs, but merely that they were, in consequence of original sin (and of personal sin in the case of adults), subject more or less to the power of the devil, whose 'works' and 'pomps' they were called upon to renounce, and from whose dominion the grace of baptism was about to deliver them”. Exorcists do not become such simply by coming from a family of demon-fighting preachers; in the Western rite, the “exorcist” is a minor order (along with acolytes, lectors, and door-keepers) which one is ordained to by a bishop, and the East does not even have a specific order of exorcists, since the function of exorcism simply belongs to the priest. This prevents any Benny Hinn-esque glorification of an individual who purports to have “the ministry of deliverance” since all such deliverances are firmly embedded into the context of the ecclesial body and under the authority of the ordained authorities. Further, in the Eastern rite, “everything is repeated three times as a symbol of the Holy Trinity. The priest is an agent of God that expels evil through the divine power and not his own magical power.” The rites of exorcism are very theocentric; symbolic acts like breathing, laying on of hands, the sign of the cross (“that briefest and simplest way of expressing one's faith in the Crucified and invoking His Divine power”), quoting the words of Holy Writ, the use of consecrated objects like church bells and holy water, and even simple, pointed prayer have all marked the Christian tradition of casting out devils.

The Lord Jesus says to His accusers, “if I by the finger of God cast out devils, doubtless the kingdom of God is come upon you" (Matthew 12:28; Luke 11:20). This is always the way that exorcism has been conducted in the Christian Church: In a way that advances the reign of God in this world. It isn't enough simply to cast out a devil; as Reverend Marcus says to Louis, “it's your job to keep him from coming back.” More importantly, in Christian exorcism, a person is delivered from the kingdom of Satan into the kingdom of Christ. The word “exorcism” itself literally means “to adjure”, “to put under an oath”, and a prayer by St. Basil the Great included in Dr. Nauman's book explains why that is: “I exorcise (adjure) you, the beginner of sin and blasphemy, the leader of rebellion and the worker of evil!...I exorcise (adjure) you, unclean spirit, by God Sabaoth and by all the ranks of the angels of God, Adonai, Elohi, Almighty God! Come out and depart from this servant of God! I exorcize (adjure) you by God! Who created all things through his word and by our Lord Jesus Christ, his only begotten son, generated before all ages ineffably and dispassonately...I exorcize (adjure) you by God! Who from on high flooded the world by water and who opened the depths of heaven and destroyed the iniquitious giants and shook the tower of the ungodly...I exorcize (adjure) you by Jesus Christ! Who was baptized in the Jordan and had become a type of incorruptibility by grace in water and before whom all angels and all the powers of heaven stand astonished...I exorcize (adjure) you by Jesus Christ! Who rebuked the wind and calmed the waves of the sea; who banished the array of demons and ordered the pupils of the eyes, missing from the womb, to be restored to sight by means of clay...I exorcize you by God Pantocreator! Who infused his Spirit into men by the God-inspired voice and who acted with the apostles and filled the world with godliness. Fear! Flee! Be banished! Depart, unclean and abominable spirit!...Fear the likeness of the incarnate God and hide not in the servant of God ----!...For great is the fear of God and great the glory of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.”  The very word “exorcism” itself points back to the power being established when a devil is banished.

This is the purpose of exorcism: Not a mere medicinal treatment for the soul, as though the exorcist were some exterminator driving a parasitic pest out of his patient's psyche, but the retrieval of a lost sheep back to the Shepherd and the claiming of more territory on behalf of the conquering King.  Christian exorcism is an offshoot from the Christian doctrine of God's sovereignty.  But the implication at the end of The Last Exorcism (even though the film may not necessarily be trying to glorify evil) as to who wins this particular battle leaves the sort of impression in the viewer's mind that Manicheanism (and, consequently, the Eden-old temptation to seek achievement through Satan rather than God) is known to sprout from, and in a world hungry for both power and for some sort of transcendant meaning, the idea that there is some sort of kingdom apart from God's which we should look to for fulfilment is the last thing we need.

I have a small black book called The Devil: Does He Exist and What Does He Do?”  by Father Delaporte and the Society of Mercy. At the beginning of the book is a letter from Mgr. De Segur to the author which begins: “Reverend Father: If every one busied himself with the Devil as you do, the affairs of God would gain by it.” The Apostle Paul urges Christians to work “lest Satan should get an advantage of us: for we are not ignorant of his devices” (2 Corinthians 2:11), a statement which no longer characterizes Christians who by and large are ignorant of Satan's devices. After the table of contents, there are two prayers we are to offer before reading: “O God, Who didst instruct the hearts of the faithful by the light of the Holy Spirit, grant us the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things and ever to rejoice in His consolation”, and the Hail Mary. The book ends with a prayer to St. Michael. The final chapter is “Advice to Those Who Believe, and to Those Who Believe Not”. To those who believe, he urges them to remember that “the question of the Devil is not one of mere curiousity. The question is one of a living enemy, powerful, present, dangerous, furious. You are reminded that he has caused the terrible, irremediable ruin of a multitude of your fellow-beings. You are warned, in particular, to avoid dark associations, inspired by him, mysterious operations, of which he himself (as often as jugglery is not the sole mover) is the invisible agent.” Then follows a serious of pointed admonitions (“never sleep, if you possibly can, in the captivity of Satan”), and this, I am confident, is the correct attitude towards such matters: Diligent study infused by reverence of God and a careful distance from the seductive allure of the adversary.

“If you have the misfortune not to share our belief,” he continues, “be prudent, and do not rush into intimacy with mysterious beings whose sincerity and good faith you cannot possibly verify...At least, begin by reading attentively the books published by distinguished men who have studied this question coolly and according to the rules of sound criticism...Ignorance is not excusable, when instruction is to be had; and heedlessness is very unreasonable, when there is question of our immortal soul.”

Whatever you do, don't try to fix your ignorance by going to see The Last Exorcism.

The offense of Christmas

Last night, I couldn't sleep because I'd had a large cup of coffee (with five different flavours in it) from Sobey's and my brother was having a massive Halo party right outside my room, so I listened to/watched a debate between Messianic Jewish scholar Dr. Michael Brown and Orthodox Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on the topic of whether or not Jesus died for our sins, and, more specifically, whether He is the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53. It reminded me of how little I appreciate the sheer novelty of the Christian doctrine of the Atonement, and how offensive it was- and is- to the Jewish mind. Yet you can hear the offense in Boteach's voice as he speaks of the blasphemy of a man claiming to be God. When you read the Old Testament, it's easy to understand that attitude. Given the anthropomorphic nature of the pagan gods around them, the transcendance of the God of Israel is stressed in the Hebrew writings. In contrast to the idols who were personifications of the forces of nature, YHVH is seen as being in control of the wind, the sea, even the stars. He is high and lifted up. No wonder some Nazarene carpenter claiming deity was, and is, so shocking and offensive to the Jews.

I have been accused of disliking music because of my criticisms of the way we use it as a drug and worship it instead of using it as a tool to worship, but this morning's church service is evidence that this isn't true. We had the orchestra visiting today, performing carols both familiar and fresh. As I recently did when visiting the Legislature with my mother and girlfriend, I closed my eyes and meditated on the lyrics of these hymns, this time with the experience of hearing the Jewish perspective of Jesus still permeating my thinking. I was recently reading some venter in the Edmonton Journal complaining about Christmas- not because of its religious history, though. The venter did not profess Christianity, but admitted the Christmas story is "neat". Neat? We've become so accustomed to hearing the tale of God incarnating (notice that this word comes from the same root as "carnal") that we've forgotten how bizarre at best andoffensive, at worst, this doctrine really is. 

As I listened to the carols in church, I thought about how for a while I was studying the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but abandoned it when I realized that, as an event, it could not be properly appreciated without the immediate context of the JFK presidency and the broader context of the American political scene of the 1960s (and, for that matter, what it had inherited from the '50s, and so on...). Certainly I could be appalled at the horror of seeing the president's head tear open with an explosion of blood on the Zapruder film, be saddened at the image of a very young John F. Kennedy, Jr. saluting his father's coffin at the funeral before wiping tears from his eyes, and thrilled by the mystery and intruige surrounding the investigation of who fired the fatal shot, but, at the end of the day, the assassination was only meaningful in its larger context. The same is true with Christmas. We can fall into a reverent hush at the image of rustic shepherds and ornately clad kings bowing to worship a baby in a manger (unbiblical though that image may be), feel sympathy and admiration at the plight of the teenaged virgin girl and her longsuffering husband forced to tend to their newborn child in a barn (unbiblical though THAT perception may be), and be filled with warmth at the thought of the angelic message of peace on earth and good will towards men (while perhaps not paying as much attention to the subsequent story of the slaughter of the innocents, with a tyrannical king consolidating his power by ordering the murder of babies), but we really don't appreciate the holiday without reference to its immediate context of the Incarnation and its broader theological context of man's sinfulness and need for redemption, climaxing in the Crucifixion and ultimately the Second Coming.

I wondered also about the debate between Dr. Brown and Rabbi Boteach. I always hate it when I watch or hear a debate, and I agree with one side, and I walk away thinking my side won, and then wondering whether I just think that because I agree with their arguments. I frankly think Brown slaughtered Boteach, using cold, irrefutable logic instead of "pushing emotional buttons" and mischaracterizing both his opponent's position and the Biblical texts he was quoting, as Boteach did. Yet I am compelled to see the validity of Boteach's attitude, his mentality. How can I even dare tread upon holy ground and claim that a fellow flesh-and-blood human being contained all the fulness of Godhead bodily? All the logical arguments aside, how can I dare assign such a title to Jesus? In fact, this comes back to the whole issue of the uniqueness of Jesus. Many other rabbis of His time exposited the Bible in ways almost identical to the way Christ did (indeed, He argues and preaches in a very rabbinical style). The Golden Rule, or some variation of it, is found in nearly every world religion of any note whatsoever. As pointed out in the documentary recently aired on CBC, The Pagan Christ, other, older religions had figures "sent from God" by way of miraculous birth who went on to perform signs and wonders and who were "crucified" to accomplish their mission, only to be "resurrected" afterwards (of course, even December 25 is a birthday for a pagan deity borrowed by Roman Christians). Indeed, setting aside all these "positive" elements of Christ, consider His call for His disciples to abandon their wealth, their vocations, even their very families to follow Him. When religious leaders do that today, we call it a cult.

What is the difference?

Christ Himself.

I cannot look upon or consider the picture of Jesus I see in the Gospels without being irresistably compelled towards Him. I can't possibly compare Him to anyone else in history. His methods, His teachings, anything else about Him- everything else about Him- but not Him. The intracies of His personality, the way He climbs the loftiest heights of worship of God and dependance upon Him and plumbs the depths of depression, discouragement, and loneliness, who expresses the tenderest and fiercest of emotions, all without soiling Himself with iniquity- this is not a cunningly devised fable. That would either make Him "too divine", an untouchable demigod from a warrior faith, or "too human", an antihero of a Shakespearean tragedy. He is too sublime for all of this. I can't even explain why He's different; that explanation doesn't do it any justice at all. Even if a cunningly devised fable could create a myth like the Christ of Christianity, Jesus is just...just look at Him. Just behold Him. I know it seems blasphemous to suggest a man could be God, but look at this man.

I think this is why the author of the carol asks, "Shepherds, why this jubilee?", and answers with: "Come to Bethlehem and see." If we were writing the hymn, we'd doubtless have them say, "Because the King has been born" or something to that effect, but no; these shepherds simply beckon us to come and see. "See Him in a manger laid." Jesus tells the seeker, "Come and see." (John 1:38-39) When Philip told Nathaniel who Jesus was, he expressed skepticism; when Philip said, "come and see", it lead to Nathaniel's conversion (verses 45-46). All the doctrine in the world means nothing without the person of Christ at the centre of it all to validate it. Let us preach Christ.

The new anti-Catholicism.

I have not shown this note to anyone before posting it. Therefore I have not named anyone alluded to herein, although they have all been tagged and will almost certainly recognize themselves.

A very close friend of mine who was initially resistant to my interest in Roman Catholicism has recently come to me more broken than usual admitting that he feels God calling him to become a Catholic, to the disapproval of his father (and the potential disapproval of his friends). I tried to act dispassionate about it, but internally I was delighted- he has a real future in Canadian politics, which needs a healthy dose of Catholic Social Teaching. Another friend of mine has told me with a note of dry amusement that if I were to convert her to Catholicism, her dad would freak out. What I find fascinating about both these anecdotes is that, in both cases, the father in question has pastoral credentials, and is forward-thinking and open-minded but strongly well-grounded in the orthodox Christian faith. Neither of them are artifacts of the old-school anti-Catholicism of Alexander Hislop, whose ill-founded arguments that Catholicism's doctrines descend directly from Babylon were repudiated and refuted by its former chief apologist, Ralph Woodrow, or of Lorraine Boettner, whose arguments haven't been heard much of since Karl Keating made mincemeat of them. Both of them would advocate Christian unity- which this week is dedicated to- and would oppose petty denominationalism and institutional parochialism. Yet they still disapprove of their offspring joining the Romish Church. Why?

I'm not as baffled by that question as I am by the issue of why I would have any role in their possible conversions. Even though seminarians have told me I knew vastly more about Catholic dogma than most Catholic laymen back when I was a Protestant, I'm still a serious rookie when it comes to the heavier issues of the faith. I'm also horrible at the whole "works" thing that Protestants have always bristled at- I'm really behind in praying the Liturgy of the Hours and studying the Catechism. I'm subscribed to a bunch of EWTN podcasts I haven't had a chance to listen to (I never had time for them after some very important Facebook-wandering), and have a stack of books by important Catholic writers that I'm glad are waiting there for whenever I have the motivation to start preparing for what I want to end up doing for a living (Catholic theology and philosophy). They'll have to wait until I finish the Stanley Kubrick canon, though. 

I hadn't intended to publicize my struggles (which I share with more than one new convert to Catholicism) because I knew, and know now, that it'll give cannon fodder to those Protestants who see the Church's doctrine of salvation as being legalistic, arduous, and guilt-instilling. "See what happens when you abandon the simplicity ofsola fide? When salvation is up to you, you're never quite good enough and you'll always feel discouraged and depressed!" or something of that nature. Reflecting on this, I was reminded of a Seventh-Day Adventist minister named Bob Pickle, who wrote an extensive refutation of an anti-SDA documentary made by Jeremiah Films. One of the allegations it makes is that "Adventists are inflexible, guilt-ridden legalists." In response, Mr. Pickle writes: "Probably every denomination has its legalists...Personally, I'm not sure that many legalists feel guilty. Legalism is a way to get rid of guilt, not cause it." Indeed, no matter where you're at, I could make a case that YOUR beliefs are legalistic and guilt-inducing. You only need faith to be saved? How do you know you have faith? From what the Bible teaches? This is what I find hilarious- if you really want to get at what the Bible teaches, you need to do a thorough systematic study of the Scriptures (with a thorough understanding of the original languages), all the while ensuring you're using the correct hermeneutic (grounded by what?). If you don't have time for this (as 90% of Christendom does not), you HAVE to trust your pastor to do it for you. Yet Protestants are constantly encouraging their congregations to "be Bereans" and check what the pastor teaches against Scripture- which they'll then admonish you not to take out of context (historical, grammatical, and theological context, that is). What if it isn't just the Scripture, but also the prompting of the Holy Spirit? Anyone who grew up in an Evangelical or Pentecostal environment like me can attest to the unbelievable amount of confusion and frustration (especially among young people trying to find their way in life) that goes into ferreting out "your personal feelings" from "the leading of the Spirit".

I can't speak for everyone, but I know that for me it isn't the Catholic system of salvation which is daunting- it's the knowledge that two decades of my life was wasted on this emotional and intellectual confusion, and although I don't love God very much, I do enough to want to give Him my best, and now I feel like I'll never be able to give him what I had the potential to.
By and by when I look on His face,
Beautiful face, thorn shadowed face;
By and by when I look on His face,
I'll wish I had given Him more.
Every Christian in any church who truly loves God understands the frustration of not having given Him the service He deserves. Protestant, if you've ever felt contrition for not having read the Bible enough or offering up enough praise, may I suggest you are in a boat similar to mine? If you ever wish you had more godly counselors, can you sympathize with my attraction to a Church which offers me 2,000 years of saints and wisdom? 
We're all fundamentally going to think that the doctrines we adhere to provide real comfort and solace if properly understood, and will feel the temptation to psychoanalyze our opposition and chalk their problems up to faulty theology. I'm frankly tired of it. It may even have some validity (you'd be hard-pressed to not engage in some folk psychoanalysis when you look at fundamentalist Mormons) but everyone I know, including me, sucks at it. We're all pilgrims with visions of a golden city and we're all bobbing in and out of the dark night of the soul. I'm not interested in any sort of ecumenical "we're all in this together" gesture at the moment, I'm interested in people not being retarded (even though I am holding out to see everyone in this note on the other side of the pearly gates someday).

Most people today who don't run KJV-only websites agree with me on this in principle. As I alluded to previously, most Christians are in favour of overcoming these sharp lines of demarcation between denominations. The problem, though, is still fundamentally the same as it's always been: On what terms will we find reconciliation? And on that topic I would like to consider a book I've heard recommended to me several times (interestingly, no-one who recommends it seems to consider the possibility that I already own it, which I do): Pagan Christianity: Exploring the Roots of our Church Practices, by George Barna and Frank Viola. In this postmodern era where doctrine seems to take the backseat and the walk is so significant as to make the talk practically unimportant, the target has shifted from Catholicism's "pagan" teachings to its "pagan" practices. The book chastises Protestants for retaining so many elements of the Catholic Church, challenging Evangelicals to re-examine their received culture and to realize how many assumptions they've unconsciously smuggled into their beliefs. In place of all this cumbersome church hierarchy and Sunday morning rituals, Barna and Viola advocate a return to the pristine model of the Book of Acts.

Of course, the problem is the same as that which has always plagued Protestantism: You cannot fully appreciate what the New Testament teaches if you disregard the millieux of church customs and teachings from which it arose, and thus you have Barna and Viola writing off church fathers from the second century, the direct heirs of the teachings of the very Apostles who WROTE the New Testament. They furthermore fall into the familiar trap of assuming that church today must look identical to church then, which is by its very nature impossible since we see an evolution of church governance within the NT itself which showed no indication of stopping before 100 A.D. As someone on the Protestant broadcast, the White Horse Inn, once observed, if you can see the foundation of your house, your house has a problem. The fundamental issue with recommending this book to someone interested in Catholicism is that all it does is demonstrate that institutional Protestantism doesn't look Biblical, yet there is no grappling with the Catholic theology undergirding, say, the idea of a church building (eloquently discussed in this article). Indeed, there is precious little discussion of just how the Christian is supposed to interpret the last 1900 years of church history, besides rejecting its developments. One comment in particular is revealing. 

On page 81, the authors respond to the objection: "You imply that Finney and other Revivalists began using such things as the altar call strictly because they were pragmatists who invented certain practices to win converts. But how can we say for sure that these men weren't led by the Holy Spirit to employ new methods that would help people recognize their need for Christ?" Their response: "As far as modern pragmatism goes, Christians should decide for themselves whether a particular practice of the Holy Spirit or if it is mere ingenuity at work. We leave such judgments to the individual reader." (emphasis added) This is where the linchpin of the whole affair snaps. What elements of church history do we retain and which do we reject? It ultimately boils down to individualism- the very thing Viola and Barna condemn the Revivalists for emphasizing, and it's this sort of individualistic interpretation of both Scripture and history which has led to thousands of Protestant splinter groups, even among the house-churchers going by (so they feel) absolutely nothing but the New Testament model. (I might post a more extensive review of Pagan Christianity if anyone cares.)

I turn 20 on Friday. I am tired of individualism, both in my approach to life and in my personal theology. I have enrolled in the Confraternity of the Holy Rosary and intend to live up to the obligations of it. I also look forward to the experience of Lent, my first real exposure to fasting. I have a lot of time to redeem and doubtless a lot of pain to endure, but I do believe that joy is not just a dry theological concept but an attainable reality and I pray that, in spite of my horrible example, I can continue to point people to a spiritual path which may bring them into the full riches of God's revelation to His people.