Taking religion seriously

Few films treat religion at all, and most that do treat it with disdain or humor, while some use it to promote a certain religious belief. Stephen Frears’ new film, Philomena, is one of the rare films that takes religion seriously and walks a fine line between between criticizing it and acknowledging its goodness.

 

The film is based on the book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by Martin Sixsmith, which tells the true story of Philomena Lee's 50-year-long search for her son. Steve Coogan, who co-wrote the screenplay, plays Sixsmith, a journalist who has just lost his job as a Labour government adviser and is at sea about what to do next. Then a woman approaches him to talk about her mother, who gave birth to her son Anthony at the convent in Roscrea, in Ireland, was forced to sign away parental rights to her son—but still cared for him until he was adopted at age three—and worked as an indentured laundry lady.

Eventually, Martin agrees to write a human-interest story, and he and Philomena (Judi Dench) begin their search for her son. In flashbacks, the film shows young Philomena giving birth, then working in the convent and being allowed to see her son one hour each day. Her anguish when the boy is adopted has stayed within her, held at bay, for 50 years. She approaches this search timidly, not wanting to offend the Catholic Church, which she remains devoted to.

Martin, on the other hand, grew up Catholic and has long since left the church and converted to atheism. He is vocal about his criticisms of the church and the Christian faith, though he lets up when he sees that Philomena is not in agreement with him.

They visit the convent, where the nuns tell them the adoption records were lost in a fire. Later, Martin hears that the convent deliberately destroyed the records in a bonfire and had sold the children to adoptive parents, mostly in the United States.

Through his previous work, Martin has contacts in the United States. He learns that Philomena’s son had been adopted by Doc and Marge Hess, who renamed him Michael Hess. He grew up to be a high-ranking official in the Reagan administration. He was also gay, and closeted because the Republican Party was “rabidly homophobic,” according to one character. He had died nine years earlier of AIDS.

Philomena had longed to know if her son ever thought of her, and it looks like she’ll never know. They eventually locate Michael's most serious boyfriend, however, and he tells them Michael is buried in the convent’s cemetery back in Ireland.

Throughout their search, Martin’s knowing, secular, unsociable self contrasts with Philomena’s naïve, Catholic, gregarious sensibility. On several occasions they have discussions about religion, and Philomena, the one most hurt by the church, is more at peace than Martin. This comes to a head in a climactic scene.

The screenplay, Dench’s typically fine acting and Frears’ direction make this a fine film that avoids sentimentality and steers clear of preaching a certain message. And its handling of religion is remarkably evenhanded.

Experiencing God is hard work

Surveys show that Americans are into the supernatural. Some would say obsessed. According to a 2011 Associated Press poll, 80 percent of Americans believed in angels—even 40 percent of those who never went to church. A 2009 poll from the Pew Research Center reported that 20 percent of Americans experienced ghosts, and 1 in 7 had consulted a psychic. A 2005 Gallup poll found that 75 percent of Americans believed in something paranormal and that 40 percent said that houses could be haunted.

In an article published on Oct.14, 2013, in the New York Times, T.M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford University, surveys some studies of this phenomenon.

Some scholars, she writes, believe these date show that belief in the supernatural is hard-wired. She refers to anthropologist Pascal Boyer, author of Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origin of Religious Thought, and psychologist Justin L. Barrett, author of Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, who argue that the fear that one would be eaten by a lion or killed by a man who wanted your stuff shaped the way our minds evolved. 

“Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were more likely to survive if they interpreted ambiguous noise as the sound of a predator,” Luhrmann writes. “Most of the time it was the wind, of course, but if there really was danger, the people who worried about it were more likely to live.”

The thinking here is that the search for an agent evolved into an intuition that an invisible agent, or god, may be there. Luhrmann notes that this theory can be argued from different theological positions. Boyer is an atheist and treats religion as a mistake. Barrett is an evangelical Christian who thinks God’s hand steered evolution.

Luhrmann argues, however, that intuition and sober faith are two different things. She asks us to consider how some people attempt to make what can only be imagined feel real. “They do this by trying to create thought-forms, or imagined creatures, called tulpas,” she writes. “Their human creators are trying to imagine so vividly that the tulpas start to seem as if they can speak and act on their own.”

That term, she explains, comes from the explorer Alexandra David-Néel, who wrote that Tibetan monks created tulpas as a spiritual discipline during intense meditation. Tulpa practice has now become popular, with dozens of sites on the Internet with instructions on creating one.

Luhrmann describes how these work. She interviewed a young man who set aside an hour and a half each day for this. “He’d spend the first 40 minutes or so relaxing and clearing his mind. Then he visualized a fox (he liked foxes). After four weeks, he started to feel the fox’s presence and to have feelings he thought were the fox’s.”

Later, he stopped spending all that time meditating, and the fox went away. Luhrmann concludes that “experiencing an invisible companion as truly present—especially as an adult—takes work: constant concentration, a state that resembles prayer.”

“This very difficulty may be why evangelical churches emphasize a personal, intimate God,” she writes, and why “churches that rely on a relatively impersonal God (like mainstream Protestant denominations) have seen their congregations dwindle over the last 50 years.”

This will not surprise those familiar the centuries-long tradition of Christian mysticism, which delves into the work of contemplation, paradoxical as that sounds.

Luhrmann ends her essay thus: “Secular liberals sometimes take evolutionary psychology to mean that believing in God is the lazy option. But many churchgoers will tell you that keeping God real is what’s hard.”

An excellent and necessary film

Films are judged by many measures. Three I often use are (1) a film’s excellence, which includes the various aspects of a film’s creation: its direction, writing, acting, cinematography; (2) its importance, which includes what it teaches about life and our world, new insights into humanity and challenges to us about how we respond to people; and (3) its emotional impact.

Many films fit one of these categories; only a few each year seem to fit all three. 12 Years a Slave is one of these rare films. It is outstanding in all aspects of its creation; it is an important, I venture to say necessary, film for people, especially Americans, to see; and it leaves viewers with strong feelings of sadness and anger.

Now let me offer a caveat to the second point. This is a difficult film to watch. The violence and dehumanization it depicts are horrendous. And the film’s director, Steve McQueen, doesn’t let us turn away quickly. The camera lingers on many scenes holding us there so that we cannot look away.

12 Years a Slave is adaptation of the 1853 autobiography Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northrup, a free black man who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841 and sold into slavery. He worked on plantations in the state of Louisiana for 12 years before his release.

Writer John Ridley makes excellent use of detail throughout the film and creates a variety of characters so that neither slaves nor slaveholders are seen as a type but as individuals. Slaveholders vary, for example, from owner William Ford (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), who is relatively kind and saves Northrup’s life, to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), an extremely racist and abusive planter who believes his right to abuse his slaves is enumerated in the Bible. The slaves as well have particular stories, from Eliza (Adepero Oduye), who weeps endlessly for her children, who were sold to a different owner, to Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), who picks the most cotton of any worker by a wide margin and is frequently raped by Epps, yet remains strong and resilient.

The performances in this film are consistently good, but several stand out. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Solomon Northrup. He shows the shock of being treated as a slave when he is in reality a free man, and he portrays vividly the agony of his suffering at the hands of the slavemasters and overseers. His changing posture becomes part of his portrayal of the change slavery creates in a person. Fassbender and Nyong’o’s performances also stand out in their power to make us see them as real, complicated human beings.

McQueen, who is British, paces the film well and inserts occasional scenes from nature that juxtapose their beauty with the horror the slaves are enduring. And the music by Hans Zimmer is appropriately understated. Here, too, the juxtaposition between Northrup’s fiddle playing (he is a trained musician) and its setting in a plantation where he is a slave, adds to the emotional impact of the film. And when a group of slaves sing a spiritual at the funeral of an old slave, it is a powerful moment that speaks to the persistent faith and hope that helped them endure such injustice.

12 Years a Slave is both excellent and important. Though difficult to watch, it keeps before us the necessary truth that our country held people in legal servitude for many years, and that servitude represented a great evil. We dare not forget that.

This gets my vote, thus far, as the best film of 2013.

Churches adopt the 'binary of liberalism'

Church members often reflect the wider society in their conflicts and how they identify themselves. Joshua Brockway, a Church of the Brethren minister and a doctoral student who works on the staff of that denomination, writes about this phenomenon in his blog for Missio Alliance.

In “Scandal of the Brethren: Binary and Church,” he notes how churches often divide themselves into two camps: conservative and progressive. He calls this the “binary of liberalism,” which he says “has framed the way we imagine ourselves as disciples.”

We in Mennonite Church USA must recognize that this isn’t just true of the Church of the Brethen. It is also true of us—and many other churches.

Brockway writes about how this plays out: “We unintentionally (or intentionally, depending on who you talk to) label our congregations and our districts as progressive and conservative. There are even certain places that receive a wink and nod when they are mentioned because of the extent to which they reflect one or the other of the modern camps.”

He goes on to get more specific about how this tends to work by looking at the question of sexuality. He notes that in 2009, Church of the Brethren leaders initiated an extended process of local study and districtwide listening sessions in response to two different responses to the question of sexuality that were presented to the church for discussion at an annual meeting. In 2011, the final report was presented to the church, and a decision was made.

“The report was a case study in the conservative-progressive divide in the church,” he writes. Though not a statistical survey, the report showed that there were generally three camps that emerged from the local conversations.

First, the report said there are two camps at the far ends of the spectrum, one conservative and one progressive.

The surprise came when leaders realized that together “the two groups comprised one-third of the members of the denomination. That means that one-sixth of the denomination is decidedly progressive and another sixth is conservative.”

This means that two-thirds of the denomination are somewhere in the middle of the question about sexuality. “In terms of parliamentary procedure, the deciding majority is in the middle,” Brockway writes.

Further, this means that the two ends of the spectrum—the minority—are driving the conversation. Sound familiar?

This has serious consequences for the church. Brockway writes: “The ideologues on the ends—those most set in their perspective regardless of what is happening in their congregation and in their community—make no room for those in the middle to narrate their perspectives or experiences. The majority of the church is shut down by the constant debates and politics of one-third of the membership duking it out among themselves.”

Brockway says that in his experience, this same breakdown is true for other issues as well: war and peace, mission and evangelism, gender and leadership. This does not mean, however, that the middle is lukewarm.

Brockway warns against adopting a model of making decisions that teaches us “there can be only two options—winner and loser, with us or against us, yes or no.”

This model derives from modern liberalism, he writes, with its emphasis on efficiency and the binary of progressive and conservative, which forms us to expect only two answers.

By following this model, he concludes, “we have not only lost the memory of our past but we have lost the ability to envision the possibilities of faithfulness in our context.”

Why Christianity makes emotional sense

Review of Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense by Francis Spufford (HarperOne, 2013, $25.99, 240 pages)

There’s a long tradition of Christian literature called apologetics, which is an intellectual defense of Christianity, why it’s reasonable to believe it. British author Spufford in his witty, accessible and profane new book takes a different approach. His is a defense of Christian emotions, “their grown-up dignity.” He writes: “The book is called Unapologetic because it isn’t giving an ‘apologia,’ the technical term for a defense of the ideas. And also because I’m not sorry.”

Who will want to read this book? First, Christians will be drawn to it but will also find plenty they may disagree with. And his swearing will offend some.

Second, people who like to read good writing. Just take a few minutes to read his brief critique of the message New Atheists have put on British buses: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” His beef is with the phrase “enjoy your life.” What follows is prose that reads like a good novel.

Third, the curious. Whether or not you call yourself a Christian, take note of that word in the subtitle: “Surprising.” You will find something to surprise you, whether or not you agree with it.

While Spufford, who is an Anglican, claims not to be presenting an intellectual defense, he does make reasonable arguments in an attempt to clarify what Christianity is; he just tries to tie them to people’s experience. For example, he notes that people may view believers as “people touting a solution without a problem, and an embarrassing solution too, a really damp-palmed, wide-smiling, can’t-dance solution.” Then he argues that “it’s belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable.”

Another part of the subtitle he keeps to throughout is “Emotional Sense.” While many claim that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer, Spufford writes that “it is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don’t have the feelings because I’ve assented to the ideas.”

Spufford develops his own terms as alternatives to standard theological ones. For example, his second chapter is called “The Crack in Everything,” in which he presents a way of addressing “sin” without using that word, which tends to refer to “the pleasurable consumption of something,” especially sex. He goes on to create a term he uses throughout the book: HPtFtU, which stands for the human propensity to f--- things up.

In “Big Daddy,” he addresses the experience of God, which he describes thus: “I am being seen from inside, but without any of my own illusions. I am being seen from behind, beneath, beyond. I am being read by what I am made of.” Then he goes into a long description of awareness in lovely prose. He notes that such an experience brings comfort but is not comfortable. “Starting to believe in God,” he writes, “is a lot like falling love, and there is certainly a biochemical basis for that.”

Spufford reiterates the emotional sense of faith: “I’m only ever going to get to faith by some process quite separate from proof and disproof; … I’m only going to arrive at it because in some way that it is not in the power of evidence to rebut, it feels right.” He concludes that God “is as common as the air. He is the ordinary ground. And yet a presence. And yet a person.”

In “Hello, Cruel World,” Spufford considers the problem of evil, which he describes thus: “What sort of loving deity could have the priorities that the cruel world reveals, if the cruel world is an accurate record of His intentions, once you look beyond reality’s little gated communities of niceness?” He then dismisses several theodicies, or arguments to solve this problem, before concluding that “all is not well with the world, but at least God is here in it, with us. We don’t have an argument that solves the problem of the cruel world, but we have a story.”

This leads to his chapter on Jesus, which he calls “Yeshua,” where he retells the story of Jesus from the Gospels. Scholars will no doubt find it too cursory, but I found it well done and engaging.

Even though Spufford writes in his preface that he didn’t write the book to “engage in zero-sum competition with atheists,” he has those and other voices in mind at times as he confronts and names certain perspectives. In his chapter “Et Cetera,” he points out the view that somebody, “probably St. Paul, retrospectively glued Godhood onto poor Jesus,” who was really “a minor first-century religious reformer with a bit of a bee in his bonnet about gentleness. A well-intentioned and irrelevant person from the pre-Enlightenment ages of superstition.”

In “The International League of the Guilty, Part Two,” Spufford deals with the difficulty of balancing grace and justice. He writes, “We want God’s extra-niceness confined to deserving cases such as, for example, us, and a reliable process of judgment put in place which will ensure that the child-murderers are ripped apart with red-hot tongs.”

While parts of Unapologetic may tax one’s patience, most of it reads quickly. And while some of his points are hard-hitting, confronting Christians as much or more as others, the tone is mostly confessional. He’s giving us his experience, how he came to see how Christianity makes emotional sense.

This is likely a book I’ll return to more than once. And I imagine others will, too.