Once upon a time, it may surprise you to learn, the American Puritan set wasn’t so afraid of the natural world. In fact, they embraced it with a passion very much akin to the environmentalists of today. My favorite American landscape painter, Fredric Church, embodied the thinking in those days. His absolutely stunning landscapes were representations not merely of nature’s awesome beauty, but also of the eternal spiritual truths one may behold within. They were revelations on canvas for "…those who have eyes to see and a mind to understand".
In his essay, Church and Luminism: Light for America’s Elect, David C. Huntington says of Church’s painting, The Andes of Ecuador, that it is…
…a joyous paean to a divine universe. The very composition appears to soar in exaltation. All, as it were, becomes a resurrection. The light of the sun expands without effort to touch and bless the whole earth. The atmosphere itself bears the higher message of the painting. In Cotopaxi, however, the sun must suffer for the evils of this world.
Church painted Cotopaxi in 1863 and many understood it to be a parable for the nation in the midst of a bloody civil war. Understand, these were not your trite modern bible story paintings. They were realistic, almost hyper realistic, awesomely beautiful landscapes. Church twice visited South America, drew many sketches in oil on paper of the natural wonders there. As well as any modern day naturalist, Church took pains to make sure that every detail of his landscapes were true to nature. And yet they were created by an artist for a viewing public that took for granted that the natural world and the revelations of the Bible not only did not contradict one another, but did in fact emphasize one another.
Cotopaxi is a geological parable, a proverb drawn from the sacred "volume in stone". The canvas is as charged with the spirit of prophesy as is Bushnell’s discourse. "The word, the meaning and the expression" of the great Andean volcano becomes a "revelation" to "those who have eyes to see and a mind to understand". Cotopaxi is nature’s type for the regeneration of America.
Once upon a time in America, religion was not at war with the natural world. In fact it was the pride of many biblical literalists that Americans held a special regard for the natural sciences. Some even believed that it was here in North America (some said it was Yosemite Valley) that the Garden of Eden had once been located. Much of the 19th century efforts to protect and preserve the natural wonders of America were based in no small measure on these deeply religious people’s intent to venerate that "sacred volume in stone"…
For those who will have remarked the visible absence of an explicitly Christian context in The Personal Narratives and Cosmos of Alexander von Humboldt, works which twice inspired Church to visit South America, McCosh’s treaties would seem to provide a missing link between Church’s religious and Humboldt’s secular approach to natural history. Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation is a dedicated Calvinist’s guide to the "Science of Design". Geology is viewed as a Bible in stone, infallibly inscribed with the story of creation. Like the verbal Bible, known to the generations who lived without the benefit of the new dispensation of science, the physical world is as much, so McCosh tells us, the word of God as is the word recorded by the prophets and the apostles.
And then Darwin came along and scared the steaming shit out of all of them, and they never forgave science for it. It takes courage, and a little humility, to look God in the face and ask a question, because you might just get an answer. Why yes Pope Urban, Gallilao and Copurnicus were right…the earth isn’t at the center of the universe after all. And oh…by the way…neither are you…
After Darwin, America’s religious purists retreated back into a padded room prison of Bible idolatry which has corrupted them ever since. It is not a matter simply, of science verses the Bible. Religion that teaches its faithful to deny any fact that contradicts its dogmas makes liars out of them. First to themselves, then to their neighbors. When lying to yourself becomes a daily necessity, to lie to your neighbors becomes simply a fact of life.
Witness the routine, almost offhanded lying by the modern religious right in their war against their gay and lesbian neighbors. A good recent example is provided by Timothy Kincaid over at Box Turtle Bulletin…
Reports are coming in that some people collecting signatures in opposition to the new marriage law in Maine are doing so under false pretenses (Sun Journal):
Gerard Caron walked into the Auburn Post Office and was met by a woman with a pair of clipboards.
“This petition is against gay marriage and this other petition is to support gay marriage,” she said, according to Caron.
The Poland man said he asked her why there would be a petition to support something that already happened, referring to the petition “in support of” gay marriage.
“She just kinda gave me a little grin and didn’t say anything,” he said.
Then he looked at the two petitions and discovered they were identical, both were supporting the repeal of the same-sex marriage law, Caron said.
There is no way this person honestly made that mistake. It was a lie. A simple, easy, toss-off lie for Jesus. We are doing God’s work and that means we have to lie. Eventually the lying becomes so ingrained in one’s day to day life that it goes unnoticed. What was a pious duty becomes a habit of two-facedness. Thus, during the Dover Pennsylvania Intelligent Design trial, Alan Bonsell, then on the Dover Pennsylvainia school board, may have actually believed it when he told Judge John Jones that he didn’t know who the money came from to purchase copies of Of Pandas and People, a creationist textbook, even though he himself had handed his father the check for $850 to buy them…a check that a former board member had given him, from the proceedings of his church’s fund raiser for the books…
The judge also wanted to know why the money needed to be forwarded to his father, why Buckingham couldn’t have purchased the books himself.
Bonsell stammered.
"I still haven’t heard an answer from you," Jones said.
"He said he’d take it off the table," Bonsell said.
"You knew you were under oath?" Jones asked at one point.
Yeah he knew he was under oath. This is what fundamentalism brings people to. More specifically, it’s what idolatry brings people to. They are not worshiping God the creator. They are worshiping a book. After Ben Stein’s film Expelled came out, National Review columnist John Derbyshire smacked out into the open what his fellow movement conservatives are loath to speak of publicly…
When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise. Individual creationists can be very nice people, though they get nicer the further away they are from the full-time core enterprise of modern creationism at the Discovery Institute. The enterprise as a whole, however, really doesn’t smell good. You notice this when you’re around it a lot. I shall give some more examples in a minute; but what accounts for all this dishonesty and misrepresentation?
My own theory is that the creationists have been morally corrupted by the constant effort of pretending not to be what they are. What they are, as is amply documented, is a pressure group for religious teaching in public schools.
The shifty… That’s it exactly. It’s the shifty. But Derbyshire doesn’t dig deeply enough into the cause. It isn’t simply creationists are pretending not to be a religious pressure group. Morality in the fundamentalist world is a constant struggle to have it both ways.
All this was churning in my thoughts the other day when I came across this post by Marv Knox, Editor of the Baptist Standard. Marv thinks it’s time for Baptists to talk about homosexuality. Here’s what talking looks like to Marv…
I’m not a geneticist or a biologist, so I don’t know if someone is “born homosexual.” I do know many homosexuals who swear they did not choose their orientation and never would choose to feel this way. Still, a direct reading of Scripture says sexual relations are designed by God to be enjoyed between one woman and one man exclusively within the bonds of marriage. While I empathize with the pain and grief of homosexual friends, I believe the Bible says their option is to remain celibate. I do not belittle their suffering, because the sex drive is one of the most powerful forces on Earth, but I also cannot ignore what seems to me the plain teaching of Scripture. Likewise, I do not feel their same-sex yearnings alone comprise sin. Humans are responsible for actions, not feelings. So, we must differentiate between homosexuality and homosexual activity.
There’s lots here to unpack, but if the first thing that strikes you is how shallow this man’s empathy is for his gay "friends" you don’t grasp what it means to talk about…well…anything, in fundamentalist circles. It all comes back to the bible, and ultimately there is no talk because there are no questions. Questions aren’t permitted. Only answers. Does your job bite? Well, Ephesians 6:5-8! Are credit card companies ripping off the public? Well, Psalm 37:21! Origin of the species? Well, Genesis 1:20! Homosexuality? Well, Leviticus 20:13!
Talk about homosexuality? Sure…as long as we already know what the answers will be. Talk to homosexuals? By all means…to save them. You can talk all you want as long as you don’t listen.
Marv empathizes with the pain and grief of his homosexual friends. Some of my best friends are… But he is also perfectly willing to join in the pummeling of them because that’s what the bible tells him he must do. This he regards as friendship. Look at that, if you have the nerve. His "friends" are in pain and grief. Marv is not looking the other way while they suffer. He’s looking right at it, adding his own righteous measure to it, and calling that empathy. He must. The bible calls us to love our neighbor, and to kill the homosexual…
Mark 12:31 And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.
Leviticus 20:13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.
"A direct reading of scripture" says both these things. We must love. We must kill. Therefore, to love the homosexual, is to kill them. Or at least, to make sure they understand that God condemns them.
And let it be said that gay people are killed every year in this country by murderers who claim some measure of justification in the bible’s condemnation of homosexuality. But while actually killing his homosexual neighbor may be more then Marv’s conscience will endure, twisting the knife in their hearts can be seen as a kind of tough love, the moral qualms at seeing yourself doing it washed, washed, washed away in the knowledge that you are simply obeying God’s will. That isn’t you bringing pain and grief into the lives of your homosexual neighbors, it’s the fallen state of humanity…it’s Satan…it’s God’s will…not mine… I am twisting this knife into your heart because God wants me to love you…
Once upon a time the righteous believed that God’s will could be seen in nature’s design. Then one day nature informed them they weren’t the center of the universe and they turned away in anger. But as Jacob Bronowski once said, when you discard the test of fact in what a star is, you discard in it what a human is. The commandments were not written on the stone, but in the stone, and in the light of the sun and stars, and in the songs of birds, and the color of the tiger’s eyes and the fish’s scales, and in our flesh and blood and bones, and in our hearts. To turn away from the natural world is to turn away from your human identity, and everything fine and noble a human being can become. Then you enter the wasteland, where inflicting pain and grief upon your neighbor is regarded as loving them…where the death of love is embraced as the purest essence of it. No Marv, let’s not talk about homosexuality. Let’s talk about how you became so callow. You need to understand why that happened.
