Blessed Are

It seems to have become fashionable to complain about American Christians having adopted a persecution complex. There's an article over at Slate all about it. And I get it, it's really annoying when people who are legally members of a protected class of American citizens, and one that is an overwhelming majority, to boot, jump on the bandwagon on wailing about how everyone is out to get them. I'll admit that I'm not above snarking about it and rolling my eyes myself. But this is one of those things that should come as a surprise to precisely no-one with a working understanding of Christianity.

My freshman year in college was an introduction to the idea that being African-American could be considered something that more than skin deep, and there was a Right way, and a Wrong way to go about it. Being myself, I learned, was the Wrong way. Having grown up in an overwhelmingly white neighborhood, I had the language and mannerisms of a White suburbanite. I also got along fairly well with many White people - and that was my real failing. To the degree that "Blackness" was often seen as being aggressively Not White, being the target of a certain amount of everyday racism became proof that one was being Black the Right way. To me, being "properly Black" often seemed a lot like picking unnecessary fights with people. But what did I know?

For me, Christian complaints about being society's new whipping boys fall into the same mold.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
Matthew 5:10-12

Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.
Luke 6:22-23

Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.
Luke 6:26

Once one assumes a correlation between the opprobrium and condemnation of "people" and being righteous, akin to the prophets and due heavenly rewards, it becomes understandable how that same persecution becomes a positive. Because the more people are against you, the more likely you are to be doing it right. And, as Luke points out, vice versa, so if the broader society openly welcomes you then that would be just as much evidence that you're doing it wrong.

From the outside, of course, it does look ludicrous. People in the United States overwhelmingly identify as Christian. The largest non-Christian religions in the country only poll in single digit percentages. But from the inside, it's often a different story. In my own experience, many Christians, especially evangelicals, are aggressive gatekeepers of the faith, being keen to lock out anyone who fails to live up to this or that standard. And once the pruning is finished, one is left with a much smaller group, one small enough that it could make sense to see them as beset on all sides by a society threatened by their righteousness.

Of course, Christians and African-Americans aren't the only groups that fall into this sort of thinking. Conspiracy theorists are notorious for it. The idea that opposition is evidence of correctness is an old one, and unlikely to go anywhere soon. And this isn't an accusation of cynicism - rather, it's noting a logical progression. So I'm not sure that it does a lot of good to be put out by it, especially when the act of being put out by it can, itself, contribute to it.

Castles and Controversies

For a niche product, Dungeons and Dragons seems to garner much more than it's share of attention. The number of people who take exception to some aspect of the game seems infinite at times. The latest edition is no exception.

The main drivers of the coffeepot conflagration are, interestingly, sexuality. The authors included a short passage in a nod to the overlap between the gaming an LGBTQ communities.

This, I can kind of see starting a controversy. Kind of.

It was mostly well received. Of course, there were people on the far right who immediately took this to be an attempt to recruit children into a leftest agenda of sexual libertinism (because it just wouldn't be the United States without them), but most of the criticism came from LGBTQ gamers, who took exception to the language used.

And it turns out that this wasn't their only gripe with the game. It turns out that two of the people that Wizards of the Coast (the division of Hasbro that produces the game) consulted with were on the bad side of many LGBTQ gamers, enough so that the day after the rules were released, calls for a boycott were already echoing through social media.

This one, I never would have guessed.

Unlike the satanic panic of the 80s, with its focus on Dungeons and Dragons as a cause of suicides and occultism, none of this has risen to the level of being considered at all newsworthy. Mainstream America is likely completely unaware of what's going on with the grandfather of role-playing games. But still, I suspect that there's some poor guy in Wizards of the Coast's marketing department who is even now resolving to become more acquainted with alcohol this weekend.

Respect

Another crack at boiling a long, wordy post into something short and to the point.

Oh, Say, You Must See

A couple of days ago, I was reminded of an argument that I'd allowed myself to be dragged into concerning the state of the nation. It went a little something like this: A self-described conservative made the point that until President Obama and his liberal agenda came along, that the country had been doing pretty well at protecting everyone's rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Foolishly allowing my Truth Reflex to kick in, I noted that the United States had never really manage to live up to it's ideals in the past, and noted three historical instances where we had failed to protect the rights of certain out groups to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. The response - "It's a shame that you hate your country."

Now to be sure, I wasn't being particularly critical of the United States, and this person and I both agreed that we were falling short on the whole "living up to our national ideals" thing. Yet I was being called out for hating my country because I saw American history as a process by which the United States was moving closer to living up to our ideals, as opposed to a halcyon age from which we had been forcibly, and recently, evicted by someone who was moving us away from them. And between then and now, I have encountered more examples of people seeing hostility, and even bigotry, in a failure or refusal to see people and institutions in a way other than they wish to be seen.

If we're going to claim to value honesty, then we have to be prepared for people to tell us things that we don't like, don't want to hear and potentially trigger us to feel badly about ourselves. We have to be prepared for the idea that when people see us differently than the way we see ourselves, that it's not simply due to them having an ax to grind, but may very well simply be an artifact of the different ways in which people understand the world around them. It's worth being on guard against an impulse to create a circular and self-reinforcing way of seeing the world where people are perceived as hostile because we perceive their observations of us as libelous, and we perceive their observations of us as libelous because the speakers are hostile.

"My country, right or wrong," is slipping out of the lexicon of the would-be patriot, precisely because it presupposes that the country can be wrong. And it is being replaced by an orthodoxy of perception that does not allow for error, and thus, for improvement, where everything other than a static perfection is seen as a unwarranted criticism, leveled by the traitorous. It's ego-preserving, but in the long run it sacrifices all else. Which seems a very steep price to pay.

Powers and Policies

No, wait... It was just before they talked about the Supreme Court allowing in television cameras, right?

They didn't say that, I was sure they did - wasn't it right after they said "Let's give the vote to every adult citizen of the United States?" Oh... wait.

Snarkiness about the cynicism of invoking the Founding Fathers only on things that they'd happen to agree with you aside, this plays into the conservative idea that the President is usurping their prerogatives.

But the President can't "bypass Congress and do whatever he wants" via Executive Order. If he could, does anyone honestly think that he would have farted around with Congress when it came to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or raising the nation's debt ceiling? Or anything else the President finds important? This is just another example of the political reality that political parties would rather that executive offices be weaker when they don't control them. Eight years ago, it was the Democrats complaining about President Bush and his penchant for Signing Statements when bills passed by Congress were not to his liking, but he didn't want to veto them.

So, if you will forgive me the rather blatant tautology, the President can only do via Executive Order what the President can do via Executive Order - and expanding the scope presidential authority is not on the list.

Another point worth mentioning is that it isn't 1789 anymore. (Thankfully.) And in the intervening two-and-a-quarter centuries, the public's understanding of the office of the President has changed - with some assistance from Congress, who appear to rather like having a convenient scapegoat when things go wrong. While the President is both Head of State and Head of Government, we've also saddled the office with the role of Head of Getting Things Done. I don't recall the Founding Fathers ever putting forth the idea that the Presidency should be drafting laws and sending them over to Congress to have them passed But we've now come to see it as a failure when the President cannot convince Congress to adopt certain policies he favors - even though the job of the President is to _execute_ policies, not create them. That's what the Legislature was supposed to have been for in the first place. Still, we expect candidates for President to campaign on initiatives that they cannot exact solely on their own, and we judge their leadership by how well they sell that to ally and opposition alike - despite the fact that "leadership" and "salesmanship" are really different things.

This is often convenient for members of Congress, who are able to point to "a lack of leadership from the White House," especially when they need to explain a lack of progress on something that the public may find appealing, but that the Congressperson is dubious about. But I doubt that this was an intentional feature of the system.

In the end, President Obama and Congressional Republicans in the House and Senate are both playing the same game - they're attempting to advance their own ideas of what they feel is best for the country, and are accusing the other of sabotage. As for following the rules, they're each doing that mainly to the degree that they have to, or it benefits them to be seen doing so. And all of this is really just the way the game is played. It's a much a feature of Realpolitik as misrepresenting what the other side is up to.