You knew the culture warriors were a bitter lot, didn’t you?  This came across one of the gay news lists I subscribe to this morning…

20 Oklahoma legislators vote against recording gay pastor’s prayer in House Journal

Scott Jones, pastor of the Cathedral of Hope-Oklahoma City, delivered the opening prayer Monday in the Oklahoma House of Representatives, according to this report on Jones’ blog, MyQuest. The Cathedral of Hope-OKC is a congregation of the United Church of Christ that spun off from Dallas’ Cathedral of Hope, known as the world’s largest gay church.

The Rev. Scott Jones thanked his legislator, Rep. Al McAffrey, who asked him to pray to open Wednesday’s House session and acknowledged several in the gallery – "dear friends, my wonderful parents, and my loving partner and fiance, Michael.”

Jones is the pastor of the Cathedral of Hope — Oklahoma City.

When McAffrey, D-Oklahoma City, asked in the session’s closing minutes that Jones’ prayer be made part of the House journal, the chamber’s official record, Rep. John Wright objected  

20 upstanding Oklahoma legislators objected to including Jones’ prayer in the record…a thing that is so routine nobody can remember when anyone ever objected to a prayer being included in the record. More Here. Note that the the Oklahoman (The State’s Most Trusted Newspaper) account of the incident characterizes the objectors as being merely "annoyed", and that their annoyance was over Jones’ opening remarks. But the prayer, which even "the state’s most trusted newspaper" characterized as a "generic prayer", was what they voted to remove from the record. You can almost hear Wright gritting his teeth when he tells "the state’s most trusted newspaper" that his motion was "not meant to be derogatory nor divisive nor in any way trying to cause diminishment of someone’s sense of self-worth."

Contacted later, Wright, R-Broken Arrow, said the practice of including a minister’s prayer in the House journal usually is reserved for Thursdays, the last workday for legislators.

That’s one side of his mouth. And here’s the other…spoken in practically the same breath…

"My actions were motivated by the faith, so now if you want to take it and cause the public to be inflamed about it, well, that’s at your feet,” Wright said.

Which brings me to This Post over at Pam’s House Blend. It’s about a book written by a researcher whose primary focus has been the authoritarian mindset.

Yesterday I came across a most interesting book, available on-line at The Authoritarians, which provides a significant body of scientific research that goes a long way to explaining why religious followers (and leaders) have such a hard time with us GLBT folk. The author [Robert Altemeyer] is a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba and has been studying authoritarian people for decades as a psychological researcher.

Altermeyer is offering his book as a free download, or for $9.74 plus shipping for a bound edition.  Here’s a few excepts pinched off Pam’s…

p. 139-140: This chapter has presented my main research findings on religious fundamentalists. The first thing I want to emphasize, in light of the rest of this book, is that they are highly likely to be authoritarian followers. They are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority, and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason, and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times, and are often hypocrites.

But they are also Teflon-coated when it comes to guilt. They are blind to themselves, ethnocentric and prejudiced, and as closed-minded as they are narrowminded. They can be woefully uninformed about things they oppose, but they prefer ignorance and want to make others become as ignorant as they. They are also surprisingly uninformed about the things they say they believe in, and deep, deep, deep down inside many of them have secret doubts about their core belief. But they are very happy, highly giving, and quite zealous. In fact, they are about the only zealous people around nowadays in North America, which explains a lot of their success in their endless (and necessary) pursuit of converts.

Emphasis mine.  Sound familiar?  The motion was not meant to be derogatory nor divisive nor in any way trying to cause diminishment of someone’s sense of self-worth…the practice of including a minister’s prayer in the House journal usually is reserved for Thursdays, the last workday for legislators…my actions were motivated by the faith, so now if you want to take it and cause the public to be inflamed about it, well, that’s at your feet…  Well that certainly explains that, doesn’t it senator?

I try, when I rail against this sort of thing here, to distinguish between fundamentalists and evangelicals, because the mindset between the two is categorically different.  Fundamentalists have certainty.  Evangelicals have faith.  They could not be more different things.  The fundamentalists’ certainty is hollow.  It is brittle.  It is delicate.  We are not gods after all, that we can have perfect understanding.  Uncertainty is the human condition, which is why we need faith.  But faith is also the companion to humility.  We are not gods.  We are human beings and we screw it up sometimes.  We need to keep that in mind from time to time, to insure we don’t screw it up even more.  But the fundamentalist is loath to admit their weaknesses other then to say by rote that they are sinners like everyone else…only forgiven.  This they know for a fact.  They are forgiven…and you are not.  Certainty.  But certainty collapses like a soap bubble at the slightest touch of reality.  So reality becomes the enemy.  So ‘truth’ becomes whatever keeps the bubble safe. 

Faith is not certainty.  Faith is trust, in the face of doubt.  Sometimes, terrible doubt.  Here is Fred Clark at his dazzling best, discussing the difference between the religious certitude of the authors of the Left Behind books, and faith…

Left Behind, pg. 196

The New Hope Village Church is being run by a post-rapture skeleton crew consisting of the apostate Rev. Bruce Barnes and get-back Loretta. Most of the following chapter consists of the long, sad saga of Barnes’ former sham-faith.

Before we dive into that extended monologue, a brief aside on the Rev. Barnes’ former vocation. He (re-)introduced himself to Rayford Steele as New Hope’s "visitation pastor," and repeatedly makes clear that his was a lesser, subordinate role to that of the senior pastor — the Rev. Vernon Billings. This is typical of the hierarchical structure among the staff at many nondenominational churches. This ranges from the senior pastor at the top (i.e., the pope) down through the various "associate" pastors, followed by "assistant" pastors — including visitation staff, like Bruce — on down to the youth pastor, who is just out of Bible College, wears jeans, and ranks somewhere just below the worship leader and just above the head usher.

"I was good at it," Bruce Barnes says of his role as visitation pastor.

This is not true. This cannot be true. All of Bruce Barnes’ extended testimony to Rayford and Chloe is premised on the idea that his getting left behind produced an epiphany of self-knowledge, but this newfound self-knowledge does not extend to the recognition that he cannot have been very comforting in his role as a half-assed poser of a visitation pastor.

Part of the problem here, I think, is that Tim LaHaye is, himself, was a senior pastor during his days at Scott Memorial Baptist Church in San Diego. I doubt he understands the nature of "visitation" ministry any better than Bruce Barnes does. Here’s how Barnes described that work:

"My job was to visit people in their homes and nursing homes and hospitals every day. I was good at it. I encouraged them, smiled at them, talked with them, prayed with them, even read Scripture to them."

Isn’t that nice? He smiled at them. But what Barnes/LaHaye don’t explain or seem to understand is why these people are stuck in nursing homes and hospitals. One gets the sense that an amiable visit from Barnes might have been welcomed by a parishioner who was, say, laid up for six weeks with a broken leg that would soon heal as good as new. But for a parishioner undergoing long-shot cancer treatments — adding the pain of chemotherapy to the already crippling pain of their disease in the hopes that maybe, maybe it would help them live long enough to see their youngest child graduate fifth grade — I can’t imagine that a visit from Guy Smiley would have been much help.

It’s not unusual for seminary students to experience a crisis of faith — and not every student’s faith survives this crisis. The common misperception is that this is due to all that book-larnin’ — that reading Bultmann or the latest from the Jesus Seminar is inherently dangerous to one’s faith. (Far safer to maintain a pose of anti-intellectual piety — which is, again, why many evangelicals prefer the safety of "Bible college" to the academic perils of seminary.) I suppose it’s theoretically possible that some suggestible seminarian might be overwhelmed by such exposure to liberal scholarship, but I’ve never met such a person. No, the real reason that seminary is a crucible for faith has nothing to do with intellectual study. It has to do with CPE.

CPE stands for "clinical pastoral education" — better known as the front lines. CPE has nothing to do with Vernon Billings’ job. It doesn’t involve preaching from a pulpit. It involves, rather, visitation — ministering to people in "nursing homes and hospitals."

Gordon Atkinson, the Real Live Preacher, refers to CPE as "Tear the Young Minister a New One" and describes how his own CPE experience led to a dark night of the soul:

… people facing death don’t give a fuck about your interpretation of II Timothy. Some take the “bloodied, but unbowed” road, but most dying people want to pray with the chaplain. And they don’t want weak-ass prayers either. They don’t want you to pray that God’s will be done. …

I threw myself into it. I prayed holding hands and cradling heads. I prayed with children and old men. I prayed with a man who lost his tongue to cancer. I lent him mine. I prayed my ass off. I had 50 variations of every prayer you could imagine, one hell of a repertoire.

I started noticing something. When the doctors said someone was going to die, they did. When they said 10 percent chance of survival, about 9 out of 10 died. The odds ran pretty much as predicted by the doctors. I mean, is this praying doing ANYTHING?

Compare that with Barnes’ facile summary of his role as a "visitation pastor." If Barnes ever met with someone who was dying, he doesn’t seem to have noticed. The RLP goes on to describe the final, fatal blow that CPE dealt to his young faith. Her name was Jenny:

Thirtysomething. Cute. New mother with two little kids. Breast cancer. Found it too late. Spread all over. Absolutely going to die.

Jenny had only one request. “I know I’m going to die, chaplain. I need time to finish this. It’s for my kids. Pray with me that God will give me the strength to finish it.”

She showed me the needlepoint pillow she was making for her children. It was an “alphabet blocks and apples” kind of thing. She knew she would not be there for them. Would not drop them off at kindergarten, would not see baseball games, would not help her daughter pick out her first bra. No weddings, no grandkids. Nothing.

She had this fantasy that her children would cherish this thing — sleep with it, snuggle it. Someday it might be lovingly put on display at her daughter’s wedding. Perhaps there would be a moment of silence. Some part of her would be there.

I was totally hooked. We prayed. We believed. Jesus, this was the kind of prayer you could believe in. We were like idiots and fools.

A couple of days later I went to see her only to find the room filled with doctors and nurses. She was having violent convulsions and terrible pain. I watched while she died hard. Real hard.

As the door shut, the last thing I saw was the unfinished needlepoint lying on the floor.

A faith that matters, a faith that is worth anything real, or anything at all, has to be able to account for Jenny’s story. Her story, after all, is everyone’s story — the details of time and place may differ somewhat, but not the ending. You and me, and everyone we know, we’re all going to die. Hard. A faith that cannot account for this must give way either to despair or denial.

The faith described in Left Behind cannot account for this. It’s all about denial. Proudly so. "Can you imagine," Irene Steele gushes, "Jesus coming back to get us before we die?"

Can you imagine a visitation pastor bringing such a message to hospitals and nursing homes and people like Jenny?

This is what is missing from the megamall cathedrals of the heartland.  They have plenty of religion, but no faith.  Because faith takes a degree of courage.  They are in love with the bible, for its physicality.  It can give them any answer they want to hear.  But it takes a bit of nerve to look God in the face, and ask a question.  Because you might get an answer.  Why no Pope Urban…actually the earth isn’t at the center of the universe…and oh, by the way…neither are you…

This is why they hate gay folk.  Because we are people of faith.  I’m not talking about religious faith particularly.  But…faith.  It’s why the sincere prayers of a gay pastor had to be stricken from the record in Oklahoma.  Not because he was a gay man, not because his church practiced heresy, but because he kept his faith despite the multitude of pulpits thundering at him their certainty that he was an abomination in the eyes of god.  And so they hate us all…not because we are homosexuals, but because no matter how many times the likes of Sally Kern say we are a bigger danger to America then terrorists, no matter how many times they spit in our faces in the halls of government, or on TV, no matter how many anti-gay amendments they pass, no matter how many anti-gay conferences they organize, no matter how many millions of anti-gay pamphlets they print and wave in our faces, and in our neighbors faces, we still rise every morning, and go on about our lives, hoping for a better world then the gutter they live in, and want us to live in too…working for it in whatever small way we can, with whatever small things we have within us to give to it, despite the horrific torrent of hatred that surrounds us…knowing, somehow, deep down in our hearts, that the better world is out there somewhere.