Page 1650 – Christianity Today (2024)

I don't claim to be a great storyteller, but I am the son of one. My 86-year-old father honed his story-telling skills in the finest school in America: the Appalachian Mountains. Below I list the tips I've picked up from him and other great storytellers I've had the privilege of listening to throughout the years. Storytelling is a vital component of good teaching and preaching. I hope these guidelines will improve your teaching as much as they have mine.

1. Never introduce a story by telling your audience how they should feel: "This story is so funny" or "You're going to love this …" It puts artificial pressure on your audience to react a certain way. Besides, if you tell the story well, it should have the desired effect.

2. Never end with the equivalent of "So the moral to the story is …" If the point is not self evident, I've got bad news—it's not a good story.

3. If your story involves some area of expertise, humbly concede your lack of knowledge. If you do your audience will be more forgiving of any unintentional misstatements. Say "I'm certainly no authority on string theory, but as I understand it …" as opposed to "This is the way string works …" Or say "I've never been to Rome, but people who have been there tell me …" as opposed to "Rome's Eiffel Tower is simply stunning …"

4. Embellishments and superlatives become tiresome: "I've never been so scared in my life!"; "It was the most awesome moment!" Remember: if everything has emphasis, nothing has emphasis.

5. Spontaneity is overrated. Practice telling your story, aloud if possible. As you rehearse your delivery, you'll find better ways of turning phrases and getting the timing right.

6. Don't let the story become the entrée. Stories are appetizers and sides; the gospel is the entrée. In a sermon, stories should illustrate not dominate. Stories that are too long or even overly affecting can actually distract from the main message.

7. Be humble. Personal stories that demonstrate your flaws are usually better than those that have you as the hero. If the point of most of your stories is that you're a saint, they will be met with rolling eyes.

8. Know your audience. And tell stories that will connect with them. Cowboy church in Montana probably doesn't want to hear about the Kardashians.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Recently, a young couple started coming to our church. They're very likable. They married a few years ago on the other side of the country, then migrated west to our town, and visited several churches until they ended up in ours. Both take their faith seriously. Both are seeking a place where they can worship, serve, grow. They want a loving and Christ-centered environment in which to raise their daughters in the "nurture and admonition of the Lord."

Both are women. Linda and Rita are lesbians.

My first question to them: "Why us?" There are two or three churches nearby that have no theological issue at all with same-sex marriages: they perform them, celebrate them, welcome those in them. Our church is not one of these churches. We're firmly embedded in our evangelical heritage: a strong emphasis on the Bible, on personal holiness, on evangelism and activism.

And strong feelings about hom*osexuality. Very strong feelings.

Linda and Rita actually grew up in this kind of a church, and that was part of their answer to "Why us?" The other part of their answer was intriguing: they see life and joy in our church, and they want in on it.

We didn't know what to do with them. I lost more sleep over this than almost anything else in my 20 years of pastoral ministry. My heritage told me to give them the heave-ho. My theology told me they were living in defiance of God. But a stirring inside me, which I can only describe as the Spirit of God, told me something else: that God himself had drawn these women here. He was doing something deep in Linda and Rita, and he was entrusting our church to join him in his work.

But let me back up.

Biblical values in tension

Our church embraces two values with equal vigor, and as in this case, those two values are in almost constant tension.

The first value is the truth and trustworthiness of the Bible. As good Baptists, we teach, believe, and try to live out that the Bible is "our one true guide for life and godliness." We are under the Word of God, and though our understanding of it is often patchwork and our obedience to it halting, we have no right to impose on the Bible our own meanings or agendas. If we have done our best interpretive work with the Good Book and have concluded that it teaches a particular truth, then we are beholden to that truth no matter how costly or awkward or unpopular it might be.

That's one value.

The other value is that Jesus welcomed sinners and ate with them. He did this, and then asked you and me to keep up, on his behalf, this work.

Jesus—we all know this—shocked, angered, and offended the religious community in his day by his easy rapport with disreputable people. He not only liked them; he sought them, welcomed them, invited himself to their houses, enjoyed meals with them, and let them off the hook, with scarcely a reprimand, for big-ticket sin items like adultery and thievery and shacking up.

God is doing something deep here, in Zachaeus and Mary Magdalene, in the woman at the well and the woman caught in adultery and the woman who washes his feet with her tears. In all these "sinners and tax collectors," God is revealing, convicting, wooing.

Anytime a man or woman brings their life into the light, God is at work.

That's the source of the stirring I had with Linda and Rita. So we followed Jesus' example with Linda and Rita and joined whatever the Father was up to.

As of this writing, we're still in the thick of it. It's been an interesting, often awkward, mostly grace-filled, always amazing journey. One of our pastors, Shane, was counseling Linda about some communication struggles she was having with Rita. Linda was trying to explain her frustration. Finally, she looked up at Shane and said, "Well, you're married to a woman. You know what they're like."

As Shane said later, "They never taught me at Bible college how to handle that sort of thing."

Convictions Clarified

Our journey with Linda and Rita clarifies some of the convictions we've developed at our church. I've already shared two of those convictions—the Bible is our only true guide for life and holiness, and Jesus welcomed sinners, just as his Father did, and asks us to welcome them too—but let me walk you through a few of our other convictions. I think this will help if you find that your church is too prone to avoid "sinners and tax collectors"—and you would like your church to join God in the deep work he's doing in the lives of people all around you.

Conviction 1: God is here. There are few professing atheists in the world. But there are a lot of practical atheists—people for whom God's "thereness" registers not at all. I sometimes call them apatheists—joining the word theist and the word apathy. Apatheists believe God exists but don't care.

I'm trying not to be one. So I nurture the conviction that God is right here, right now. The main spiritual discipline for fostering this sense of God's nearness is curiosity. I try to stay more interested, regardless the situation, in what God is doing than in what man is plotting or in what the devil's up to. I don't want to be unaware of the devil's schemes. But I want to obsess over the Father's presence and the Father's work. I want to reserve all my strength for pursuing the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

So my deep conviction is that God is here.

Shortly after Rita and Linda arrived, the pastors and elders gathered to think through biblically and practically our response to our gay friends. I began the conversation with this question: "If gays and lesbians want to come to our church, do you see in that mostly God at work, or mostly the devil?"

To a person, everyone answered, "God."

God is here.

Which leads to our next conviction.

2: When someone comes into the light, it's always God at work. Jesus said that he is the light that has come into the world. Those who come into the light step into a place where they can receive truth and grace (see conviction 4). Those who don't come into the light condemn themselves.

Anytime a man or woman brings their true self into the light—letting themselves be seen for who they really are—God is at work. Think of the two men in Luke 18 who go up to the temple to pray. One is a Pharisee, one a tax collector. The Pharisee is a moral exemplar. He is a paragon of virtue. And he knows it. His prayer is lengthy, polished, eloquent, and the entire thing an extended brag on himself.

The tax man is a scoundrel, a bad egg. He's the sort of person "good" people look at and say, "Thank God I'm not him." And he knows it. His prayer is short, stark, desperate. It is a confession and a plea. He's a sinner. He needs God's mercy.

Jesus is pointed in his verdict: the tax man walks away justified before God; the Pharisee doesn't.

Why? Jesus says, "Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted." That exaltation and humbling has much to do with light and darkness. The Pharisee brings into the light only those parts of himself he wants God and others to see—his virtue, his fidelity, his generosity. But most of who he is remains in the dark. But the tax collector hauls his whole sorry, sordid self into the burning light. He hides nothing. He brings before God all his miserable fallenness, folly, brokenness, and evil. He stands without excuse. He dares to ask for the only thing that can help: God's mercy.

And God gives him mercy in spades.

Jesus doesn't demand that first we sort ourselves out and clean ourselves up before we dare step into the light; he invites us to step into the light in order to get sorted out and cleaned up. It's impossible to clean a mess in the dark. We usually only make more mess.

And that leads to the next conviction.

3: When someone brings their mess into the light, their mess usually doesn't get cleaned up unless one of God's people wades into the mess with them. "Brothers and sisters," Paul writes to the Galatians, "if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted. Carry each other's burdens and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ."

This is a remarkable passage. The role of the mature—those "who live by the Spirit"—is to wade into another's mess, not to judge them or join them or feel superior to them or codependently take responsibility for them." The goal: to "restore that person gently."

The Greek here is worth noting: katartizete, literally "be ye attuning." The picture is of an instrument capable of producing beautiful, resonant , evocative music, but badly out of tune. Roughing up the instrument will only worsen and make permanent the problem. Discarding the instrument is stupid; it's a Stradivarius, a possession of inestimable value. It's just badly mistuned, and what should sing and woo instead squawks and yowls. It needs a gentle, masterful touch, a tightening here, a loosening there, to restore it to its true potential.

That's the work of those who live by the Spirit.

Often, those who step in to help clean the mess will look to others like they're endorsing the mess. I think of a pastor from another church who called me a while back and told me he was concerned about our church. He had heard rumors. I asked what rumors. He listed three: a couple living together, a couple having sex outside marriage, and a gay man attending. All three were "messes" that we knew about and had stepped into in an effort to "gently restore." When I told him that, it made matters worse. "What are you doing helping these people?" he asked. "I would have kicked them out a long time ago. I don't understand how you can tolerate sin in the camp."

I don't know how I can avoid it. Several years ago, our church made it our prayerful ambition "to win the heart of the Cowichan Valley." We've been doing that, but the heart of the Cowichan Valley is coming to us broken, afflicted, confused. It is, for the most part, a deeply hurt and unhealthy heart.

But we asked God for that heart. And so we're trusting God that, as we live by the Spirit, he'll give us what we need to tune that heart to sing his praises.

Which leads to the next conviction.

4: What we bring to the work of tuning hearts is grace and truth. Jesus Christ, a reflection of the Father, came full of grace and truth. "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth … . Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known" (John 1:14, 16-18).

John makes clear how Jesus reveals the Father. It's through grace and truth. John contrasts this way of revealing the Father with Moses' way of revealing God—through law. The Mosaic law is an unambiguous manifesto of the standards of a holy God. Law largely deals in commands and prohibitions—do this, don't do that. It's cut and dried.

Then Jesus comes. It's not that God no longer cares about his own standards of holiness. But Jesus brings a fresh revelation. Where Moses revealed, in stone, the unbending standards of a holy God, Jesus reveals, in flesh, the beating heart of a Father God. It's a heart full of grace and truth.

When we speak truth, it should be so grace-soaked it's hard to reject. Our grace should be so truth-soaked, it's hard to accept.

Jesus never had to ponder how to act or to speak in any situation. His holy instinct, wired in by the Father, was always and everywhere to act and to speak with complete grace and complete truth. He didn't choose between the two. He didn't dial one down to play one up. Every time Jesus spoke, everywhere Jesus acted, he revealed God in the fullness of truth and grace.

That day the pastors and elders met to talk about how to respond to our gay friends, we spent most of the time looking at John 1. "What does it mean," I asked, "that whatever we say or do be full of truth?" That, frankly, was well-trod territory for Baptists: sin is sin.

But then I asked, "What does it mean that whatever we say or do be full of grace?" It means, we concluded, that at every point Linda and Rita—or anyone else we "who live by the Spirit" come near to—should know in their bones that we love them and that our deepest desire is for them to win.

We ended that day by coming up with a little proverb of sorts. It's this: When we speak truth, it should be so grace-soaked it's hard to reject; when we show grace, it should be so truth-soaked it's hard to accept.

All this leads to what may be our most startling and most subversive conviction.

5: Jesus reverses the flow of influence between clean and unclean, and empowers us to do the same. The teachers of the law accused Jesus of breaking the law of Moses. What Jesus actually did was more radical: he reversed it. The law was established to keep us safe from moral and spiritual taint. But Jesus, full of grace and truth, came to make us dangerous. He came to turn us into agents of moral and spiritual cleansing and wholeness. He meant for any ordinary Christian to be able to show up at the gates of hell with no more than the Holy Spirit brimming inside them, and for the gates of hell to collapse beneath the weight of our presence.

One more story, from Matthew's Gospel: "A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, 'Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.' Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. 'I am willing,' he said. 'Be clean!' Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy" (Matt. 8:1-4).

Touching a leper was an out-and-out breach of Levitical law. A person with leprosy had a clear mandate: "Anyone with such a defiling disease must wear torn clothes, let their hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of their face and cry out, 'Unclean! Unclean!' As long as they have the disease they remain unclean. They must live alone; they must live outside the camp" (Lev. 13:45-46).

But this man with leprosy understands that a new power is loosed on earth, a power that emboldens him to run right up to Jesus and fall at his feet: "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean."

Somehow this man knew that in Jesus the world has been turned upside-down. Instead of unclean defiling the clean, now when clean and unclean touch, it's the unclean that must surrender its claim. That's revolutionary!

This reversal of influence—the clean can make the unclean clean—represents one of the biggest insurrections that's ever occurred within any religion anywhere, where its own rules get rewritten in a single stroke. But it's one revolution the church has many times in many places lagged behind on. We sometimes just don't get it. We often just don't practice it. I suspect we sometimes just don't believe it.

Our church is starting to believe it. Our church is starting to put it into practice. Our church is trying to catch up with the revolution Jesus started two millennia ago. We're making as many mistakes as discoveries as we go. But as we walk in the fullness of Christ's grace and truth, we find him right alongside, ready to tune even the most out-of-tune heart to sing his praise. And we find that as we walk in the power that was in Christ, we can touch unclean things and not only are we not tainted by them, we make unclean things clean.

Adapted from Your Church Is Too Safe by Mark Buchanan. ©2012 Mark Buchanan. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.zondervan.com

Mark Buchanan is pastor of New Life Community Church in Duncan, British Columbia.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Redeeming Church Conflicts: Turning Crisis into Compassion and Care(Baker, 2012) Tara Barthel and David C. Edling

The Facts: Barthel and Edling tackle a subject most would prefer to ignore yet all have to face. Drawing from their experience with Peacemaker Ministries, the authors face the reality of conflict within churches head-on, including the devastating effects unresolved conflicts have on congregants and mission. But this is ultimately a book about redemption. Hope permeates each chapter. Multiple case studies provide nice balance to the theology and advice.

The Slant: Does anyone actually want to think about conflict? We pastors are especially prone to avoid this subject, unless it’s staring us in the face. But lest this book sound like the word equivalent of broccoli (you’ll eat it, but won’t like it), be assured that it’s more like a hearty dinner with family. Yes, there are some hard realities to face, such as our own complicity in conflicts, but there’s much to enjoy as well. The book is theologically rich, seasoned with wisdom that comes from years in the trenches of church conflict. The hope here is powerful: even our conflicts become opportunities for the gospel’s redemptive work.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

A recent Time article pointed enterprising readers toward an enticing business opportunity for our age: the sleep industry. “Don’t nap on this,” the headline urged. “Capitalize on insomnia as a growth business.” Our desperately sleep-deprived population is a market ripe for entrepreneurial harvest.

They call it “the business of sleep.” And in an otherwise sluggish economy in 2012, it’s booming to the tune of more than 32 billion dollars in the U.S. From medications and mattresses to candles and consultants, this growth industry promises to provide everything the sleepless need.

What most of us think we need is a relatively short obligatory snooze so we can keep going during our waking hours, doing what’s really important: producing and pursuing the American Dream, for which one must be wide awake.

It’s true that sleep is critical to the proper functioning of our bodies and minds—although no one really knows why. Studies show that sleep deficits slow our thinking, compromise memory, make learning difficult, impair our reaction time, cause irritability, increase anger, decrease capacity for stress, and make us less likely to engage in good habits such as eating well and exercising. Sleeplessness also increases risks of depression and anxiety. In one study conducted by the University of North Texas, people with insomnia were almost 10 times more likely to suffer from clinical depression and more than 17 times more likely to be affected by “clinically significant” anxiety.

Sleeplessness affects our judgment and concentration and is linked with higher levels of substance abuse. It’s also linked with a heightened risk of driving accidents, obesity, diabetes, and heart problems.

The sleep-awake connection works the other ways as well: what we do during our waking hours affects the quality of our sleep. From stress levels to eating habits, exercise, and where we let our thoughts dwell during the day, we reap the results at night. Recent research even shows that staring at a lit screen at night, before bed, fools our natural rhythms and causes insomnia.

Sleep needs vary from person to person, but according to the National Sleep Foundation, most adults need at least seven to nine hours of sleep each night. By contrast, American adults average less than seven hours. And nearly two-thirds say their sleep needs are not met during the week. Therein lies the business opportunity.

Sleep is big business partly because we see it as disconnected from waking life. Most of us consider it a forced interruption in our otherwise productive lives. When we’re sleepy, it’s a tempting luxury we dare not indulge in until our work is done. Yet ironically, our sleep-abstinence undermines our work. And more ironically, our failure to value sleep as a critical part of what we do makes it elusive, and therefore even more valuable.

Perhaps the supposed separation between sleeping and waking hours is somewhat false. After all, both are critical parts of a whole life. Would we offer God the work we do when we’re awake and wall off our time in sleep as unworthy of his notice? Perhaps sleep is not simply a necessary activity that fuels the work God put us on earth to do. Perhaps it is part of the work God put us here to do.

God created us not only with a need for sleep, but with an incredible capacity for it—most of us need to spend at least one-third of our life in sleep. Is all this sleep really a waste? a luxury we can’t afford? a haven for the lazy? Or is it an expression of our humanity, an act of submission to God, a celebration of his creation? Might it be valuable in its own right?

The Bible frequently portrays sleep as a reflection of our relationship with God. Sleep is …

An act of trust:

“In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, O Lord, will keep me safe” (Psalm 4:8).

An act of humility:

“It is useless for you to work so hard from early morning until late at night, anxiously working for food to eat; for God gives rest to his loved ones” (Psalm 127:2).

A celebration of God’s blessing:

“You can go to bed without fear; you will lie down and sleep soundly. You need not be afraid of sudden disaster or the destruction that comes upon the wicked, for the Lord is your security” (Proverbs 3:24-26).

A position of receptivity:

“After the wise men were gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. ‘Get up! Flee to Egypt with the child and his mother,’ the angel said” (Matthew 2:13).

A point of distinction between us and God:

“He will not let you stumble; the one who watches over you will not slumber. Indeed, he who watches over Israel never slumbers or sleeps” (Psalm 121:3-4).

Sleep is not a state of non-being. It’s critical—we literally can’t live without it—and active. In sleep, we rest. We relax our muscles in forced paralysis. We dream and generate ideas. We solidify and retain memories. Our bodies restore and heal themselves and, among the young, grow. We reinforce our immunity. We give up control. We place ourselves in the hands of God for our safety and preservation. And we may do much more that we don’t yet know about—sleep is still a mysterious frontier of science.

While we may not fully understand our need for it, we can’t dismiss sleep. Instead we should view it differently. It’s a faithful act in a rhythmic life, honoring to our Creator, and part of what we were put on this planet to do. Sleep matters because, done well, it’s part of a whole life devoted to the one who never sleeps.

Amy Simpson is editor of Christianity Today’s Gifted for Leadership, a freelance writer, and author of numerous resources for Christian ministry, including Into the Word: How to Get the Most from Your Bible (NavPress) and the forthcoming Troubled Minds: Mental Illness and the Church’s Mission (InterVarsity Press). You can find her at AmySimpsonOnline.com and on Twitter @aresimpson.

I am reading a book on the plane. The man whose arm threatens to touch mine is reading a book as well. I sneak sideways glances at his title page and realize we are both reading books about children. I am reading my book because I’m a parent of six children and I’ll take any wisdom and succor I can find, though I’m not sure I have the appetite for yet another treatise on parenting. The man next to me, I discover mid-flight, is a doctor, his wife is a critical care nurse, and they are reading theirs because they’re about to become foster parents. She leans over and tells me why: “I’ve seen too many beaten and dying children in the emergency room. We have to do something. I’m tired of seeing dead kids.”

I had no words to say after this exchange. But my initial hesitation about the book evaporated. I returned to its pages, which then burned in my hands with the fire of her words and her face, a book that suddenly became more than diversion, more than entertainment, more than information.

Despite my heightened attention, there is no desperate, pleading tone in these pages. The 13 essays from various contributors, all scholars in their respective fields, are calm, reasoned, thoroughly researched and quietly enlightening. But The Best Love of the Child: Being Loved and Being Taught to Love as the First Human Right is groundbreaking all the same, responding to the most essential questions for all of us concerned about the well-being of children—our own, and all others. It asks not what is in the “best interests” of the child, the phrase and the sensibility that have directed much of the children’s rights movement of the last few decades, most notably the UN Conventions on the Rights of Children (1989), and a phrase that has guided the legal system in its attempts to administer justice for children. Instead, it asks how can we best love the child? This simple substitution of “love” for “interest” moves the discussion about children’s well-being two giant steps forward. The legal language provides for a “negative justice” that is essential—but is not enough. The first step forward affirms the legal protection of children’s rights to food, clothing, education, and health care, the right to be free from abuse, and other necessities for survival and sustenance, but then moves beyond the legal framework to point us toward a higher and an even more fundamental need of all children: love. Receiving love is the first human right for all children, the contributors assert. In the fields of traditional law, history, sociology, psychology—the purview of this book—”love” is a famously many-splintered word, yet the writers here are undaunted, and offer a blend of research and argument advocating specific means of better loving children in specific ways: with the love of God, in the love of God, within familial and even institutional settings. If we fail at loving our children, the consequences can be grave, as both the book and my seatmates so powerfully reminded me. In Stephen Post’s words, “loved people love people; hurt people hurt people.”

The writers dare, as well, to outline the end of this love, which is the giant second step forward, asking not simply how we can best love children, but how they can best love others. Timothy P. Jackson, the editor of the anthology, who is a professor of Christian ethics at Candler School of Theology at Emery University, describes the second step this way:

[W]e also examine the duties of and love from the child. What is to be expected from children as bearers of sanctity, and what do and should they cherish? How can we create familial and institutional contexts that nurture love for and from our children so that they (and we) might thrive? How do we cultivate a next generation that will appreciate our common humanity, the kind of children who will live lives of generosity and compassion for all people?

How indeed. By now I know I am not reading a parenting book. It is a book for parents, but it offers something few parenting books provide: it moves us beyond our own obvious self-interest as parents into a sense of a communal responsibility for all children, not simply the ones who inhabit our own houses. As such, this is also a book for educators, social workers, church workers, psychologists, anyone who has anything to do with children—which, I hope, is all of us. While staking a tent over the entire world and its children may seem like another foolproof means of inducing paralyzing guilt (which parenting books are famous for), this perspective echoes Jesus’ own words, urging us toward a larger definition and practice of family beyond our own genetic code and household walls.

What are we given, then, to help us love children and equip them to love others? It must be said here that these are not essays dashed off in response to a call for a new anthology. This compilation is the fruit of a major project conducted by Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion. The project, led by the esteemed Martin Marty, gathered twenty scholars from multiple fields to address “The Child in Law, Religion and Society.”

While I can’t include them all, here are a few essays that resonated with me personally. Robyn Fivush reports on the importance of family narratives and detailed storytelling with children, even simply over a day’s events, providing children with a sense of identity and place in the world. (She even includes transcripts of actual parent-child story interactions.) In “When ‘Good-Enough’ Isn’t Really Good Enough: Aiming for the ‘Best’ for All Young People,” the authors argue that child-rearing has become too negatively focused, aimed at keeping kids out of trouble instead of helping them to thrive. (Do I hear an amen?) Cynthia Willett, in her essay “Collective Responsibility for Children in an Age of Orphans,” suggests that our individualistic culture, stressing self-actualization and autonomy, can make orphans of us all, causing us to neglect the common good and to miss the marvelous paradox of freedom—which is best achieved through interdependence. Two essays give us a rare historical perspective, summarizing four centuries of household and childrearing manuals, the Dr. Spocks of their day, concluding that our “enlightened” age of parenting (with its horrific rates of child abuse) does indeed have something to learn from our predecessors. Michael Broyde clarifies the Old Testament concept of love as action rather than emotion, and the care of children, particularly in divorce and death, as a mandate and a duty, as against our contemporary emotional notions of love. Most provocatively, and yet hardly surprisingly, two essays offer the thesis that “unconditional love” is best given and inspired in the context of a stable marriage rather than in other family structures that are becoming increasingly common.

As I moved through the book, I could not shake the words of the woman on the plane, nor could I suppress the image of a little girl I had met at an orphanage in Guatemala a few years ago. She had a cleft palate so severe her face was hardly recognizable as a face. Her arms were shrunken and barely usable. I did not pick her up and play with her as I did with the other children; I could hardly even look at her. Yet this little girl, barely two, was cared for in an orphanage with 28 others, many of them considered unadoptable. I watched the house mothers brush her sleek black hair and put a purple bow in it. They dressed her in cute clothes. I found out later that a team of doctors volunteered their time to perform corrective surgery, and that she had died on the operating table. Her name was Michelle.

I think of the children in emergency rooms being hurt and even dying at the hands of people who have themselves been hurt; and I think of this little girl, who was the subject of so much tangible love from so many. Sometimes even the best love cannot keep death at bay, but I am thankful for those who loved and supported Michelle through her short life. And I am profoundly thankful for the couple beside me on the plane, who will invite hurt children into their home as sons and daughters to provide for more than their “best interest”: to provide a love that may enable them to love others as well.

“We simply cannot live well in the absence of love, and it is the most important gift we can give to our children,” Stephen Post writes in his foreword. While this collection—reader alert—is far from narrative and personal, and at times suffers from an overly academic tone, I am certain the content will not only provoke us to think more deeply about what it means to love children but also inspire us to widen our circle of concern and to look for ways to love all children better in word and deed. Which reminds me: I have overdue letters to write to my sponsored children in Central America. Maybe you have something to do right now as well.

Leslie Leyland Fields is a writer, speaker and professional editor who lives on Kodiak Island, Alaska in the winter and Harvester Island in the summer, where she works in commercial salmon fishing with her family.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Rachel Cusk’s new memoir, Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, confronts me with the invisible work I do to shield myself from a shibboleth of my married-with-children existence. Neither I nor my spouse can choose to divorce. As I plant gardens, drive children to music lessons, and lie next to my husband at night, there is some part of me occupied with the subterranean effort of shoring myself against this forbidden path. Experiencing Aftermath is cathartic, like plunging into an ice floe, downing a shot of whiskey, or reading Nietzsche. As you read Cusk’s first-person narrative of her life following her divorce from her husband, you are making your way not only through the ashes of Rachel Cusk’s marriage but also through the charred remains of the institution of matrimony.

I’ve wondered from time to time whether it is one of the pitfalls of modern family life, with its relentless jollity, its entirely unfounded optimism, its reliance not on God or economics but on the principle of love, that it fails to recognize—and take precautions against—the human need for war.

Aftermath has an Old Testament feel with its imagery of battle, blood, and tombs and Cusk’s unrelenting judgment on gender constructs, the “holy family,” and most especially herself, what she refers to as “the discipline of self criticism.” Mercy is scant, and the law of the land is decreed by Rachel Cusk’s mind.

Before you settle in among the ashes, you must work to keep up; the pace is brisk in the first chapters. I imagine Cusk as a British docent saying, “We are walking, we are walking.” The path is strewn with paradoxes she sets up and moves on from, with little sense of obligation to resolve or even acknowledge her contradictions. Do stories have power to relay truths? Early on she writes that her husband believes that she “treated him monstrously” and that “his whole world depended on this belief. It was his story and lately I’ve come to hate stories. If someone were to ask me what disaster this was that had befallen my life, I might ask if they wanted the story or the truth.”

Questions about the efficacy of stories—and of words in general—appear in Cusk’s earlier works as well, even as she continues to write. In her most recent novel, The Bradshaw Variations, Tonie, a literature professor, broods: “Language takes her further away from it, the mystery of her expectation. You can’t teach if you’re sick of books.” Her colleague’s response? “Books make you sick …. Literature. A virus.” In Aftermath, the story is a log Cusk tosses on the fire in pursuit of the truth. And yet throughout her memoir, Cusk employs story techniques, turns to Greek myths to help her make sense of her own tragedy, and chooses to conclude with a fictional story written in the third person.

“The day feeble Joseph agreed to marry pregnant Mary the old passionate template was destroyed. That was an act of fundamental dishonesty all round: the new template of marriage—a lie!”

There are other contradictions. Cusk is an avowed feminist intellectual, yet when her husband claims equal right to custody of their two daughters, a visceral maternal impulse asserts itself. Meeting with her lawyer, a “petite solicitor,” Cusk writes, “in her presence I felt enormous, rough-hewn, a maternal rock encrusted with ancient ugly emotion.” She doesn’t justify acting upon this impulse, and we are still walking, walking now to the kitchen, the epicenter of domestic travails.

It is hard to enjoy cake when you’re covered in ash and reeling from grief. In a memorable scene, Cusk is making a three-tiered cake to bring to a birthday celebration among her extended family (three generations strong and a not a divorce among them, until now). Her excruciatingly detailed account of the making and the public failure of the cake brings to mind the unbearable scene in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, where the mother from the ’50s spends the morning with her young son making a cake for the father, only for it to flop. In the movie version, Julianne Moore, glassy-eyed, dumps the cake in the trash and announces that they will have to start over.

Cusk writes, “I realise that the cake is a failure. There was something fanciful in my conception of it that was somehow allowed to run riot, unconstrained by a proper recognition of the labour involved in bringing it to life. My vision—three different tiers of lemon, chocolate, and vanilla—had become detached from my competence.” The cake, like everything, becomes a symbol of “the reversal of meaning; it is failure itself.”

When you sit in Cusk’s ashes, you get soot in your mouth and eyes and nose. Who among us hasn’t experienced something akin to this angst? In Aftermath, she writes:

At night I used to wake up and ask myself the question, who am I? For there in the darkness, in the marital bed, I felt myself wheeling on the edge of a black chasm, wheeling with the planets in outer space, hurtling through a blackness rashed with stars. The reality of my room, my home, my life couldn’t seem to anchor me. I was frightened of dying, not because I loved life but because I couldn’t distinguish myself, couldn’t gather together as one entity this self whose existence posited the fact of non-existence.

Who among married us has not experienced moments of loathing their spouse? While Cusk is examining gender roles in the Greek myth of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, she asks, “Do all women have a special capacity to hate their husbands, all husbands the capacity to hate their wives with a hatred that is somewhere fused with the very origins of life?”

After reading Aftermath, one senses more keenly the heat of the flames in her earlier works. In The Last Supper, Cusk’s account of traveling through Italy with her husband and young daughters, most of the narrative revolves around Italian art, the countryside, and her intellectual insights, but interspersed are embers of questions about navigating domesticity with the life of the mind. In A Life’s Work, a memoir on mothering, we are confronted with Cusk’s odyssean struggle to find her own way amidst the culturally inscribed assumptions of birthing and mothering. The Bradshaw Variations, in the fierce light of Aftermath, can now be seen as taking us to the millisecond before the explosion. Consider these thoughts on mothering from one of the main characters:

Claudia remembers, when Lottie was born, the prospect of self-sacrifice coming into view like a landscape seen from an approaching train; she remembers the steady unfolding of it, a place she had never seen before in her life, and herself inescapably bound for it; and then after a while the realization, pieced together from numerous clues, that this was where her mother had lived all along.

Mothering alters women. Behaviors rise up. Stakes are claimed.

Judgments are like ashes I must brush and brush off again as I read Aftermath. As a literature teacher, I tell my college students that they will invariably judge characters, but their essential task in literary analysis is to move beyond judgment in order to understand the characters. Reading fiction and nonfiction alike, I teach them to use cultural context, landscape, imagery, and dialogue to help them enter into the reality of the characters’ lives. But I do judge Cusk, in part because she herself is unstinting in her judgment. Consider her excoriation of the “holy family”:

I blame Christianity—as far as I can see, that’s where the trouble started. The holy family, that pious unit that sucked the world’s attention dry while chastising it for its selfishness, that drew forth its violence and then in an orgy of self-glorification consigned it to eternal shame, that sentenced civilization to two millennia of institutionalized dishonesty; compared with the households of Agnes and Thebes, that family has a lot to answer for …. The day feeble Joseph agreed to marry pregnant Mary the old passionate template was destroyed. That was an act of fundamental dishonesty all round: the new template of marriage—a lie! The family was reinvented, a cult of sentimentality and surfaces; became an image, bent on veiling reality—the stable in all its faux-humility, the angels and the oxen, the manger to which kings come on bended knee, the ‘parents’ gathered adoringly round the baby—an image of child-worship, of sainted unambivalent motherhood, of gutless masculinity and fatherly impotence.

In a memorable scene, Cusk’s sister has come for a visit with her kids in tow. They are walking in the rain along a block of Victorian homes of artists, which are open to the public on this day. The children run ahead and disappear into a house. Cusk and her sister enter a “disorderly room full of a strange, jewelled light.” A tall lady stands at a large table with

a number of curious hats or headdresses; and standing at the table are the children, who as we enter turn around. One of my daughters has become a stag, with dark branching antlers; the other a fox, with a long russet nose and a velvety head. My little niece has become a fieldmouse, my nephew a badger with a bushy white crest. They look at us with dark glossy eyes through the tinted light. In the few minutes of our absence they have been transformed: they are creatures startled in a forest glade by the approach of danger ….

Presently the children take the masks off, all except the stag …. Can I have it? she asks me. Will you buy it for me? She says this within the face of the stag, for I can’t see her mouth. The mask is richly made, … its transformation of her is complete, yet it seems too to have accommodated her own nature, so that I find I’m already quite used to her looking like that. The lady tells me the price. It is high, but not as much as I expected. My stag-daughter watches me, alert, bright-eyed, perfectly still. Please, she says. Please, I love it.

Everyone waits to see what I will do.

Including me. For god’s sake, the girl has lost so much, this is the first time she’s uttered a wish in the book. Please. But the law of the land belongs to Cusk.

Alas, Aftermath is what it looks, tastes, feels, smells, and sounds like when, as Chinua Achebe wrote, “Things fall apart.” Grief informs this land of ashes, and for Cusk, who is repelled by feelings of vulnerability, grief is acceptable terrain: “Grief is not love but it is like love … romance’s estranged cousin, a cruel character, all sleeplessness and adrenalin unsweetened by hope.”

One of Cusk’s gifts is to know when to let a sentence be. ” ‘I have two homes,’ my daughter said to me one evening, clearly and carefully, ‘and I have no home.’ ” Readers who grew up in the aftermath of divorce will find this simple sentence sending them back to the painful “new reality” of their parents’ choices.

While on holiday with her daughters, Cusk writes:

I feel buoyed up … by the feeling—so powerful and so fleeting …. that we have been liberated from the strictures of some authority and are free. I don’t identify this authority as my husband: the authority is marriage itself, and in these moments of liberty I feel him to be just as browbeaten by it as me, feel, almost, that I could conscript him into my own escape and reencounter him there, in non-marriage, both of us free.

The brief fictional coda of Aftermath offers food as a symbol of nurturing equality for a man and woman who have separated—an elusive vision elsewhere in the memoir. I re-read the story with the empathic hope of understanding what purpose Cusk had for it, and came up short. But I will continue to read her traveler’s tales from the strange country of domestic life.

Linda Buturian teaches literature and writing at the University of Minnesota, and is the author of World Gone Beautiful: Life Along the Rum River (Cathedral Hill Press). Buturian and her husband and two daughters live alongside three other families in their intentional cul-de-sac in rural Minnesota, where she is working on a book about art, water, and community.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In May 2011, a majority of the districts in my denomination (Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.) voted to remove from its constitution the requirement that church leaders “live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness.” Individual congregations and presbyteries still have the freedom to adhere to that earlier standard. Indeed, the Session of my own church passed a resolution affirming it shortly after its adoption by the PC(USA) in1996. But the more recent vote now makes it possible for persons in same-sex relationships to be considered for ordination to the offices of elder, deacon, or minister in churches and presbyteries that are open to it. Score another point, it would seem, for the view that same-sex attraction is biologically fixed, so the desire to act on it should not be constrained by literalist readings of ancient texts. Coincidentally, this is more or less the message coming from adherents of what is called Brain Organization Theory (BOT). Its working assumption is that the tendencies of women and men—whether related to sexuality, “masculine” vs. “feminine” personalities, or skills like verbal, mathematical, and spatial ability—are strongly driven by hormonal forces, beginning during prenatal development. These forces are assumed to produce complementary sets of virtues and skills, resulting in mutual heterosexual attraction. And even when nature is not so obliging (as in the case of hom*osexuals), hormonal events—in this case aberrant ones—are again assumed to be responsible.[1]

Around the same time, The New York Times Magazine ran a largely positive article on the American Psychological Association’s 2007 Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation.[2] That document was critical of religious conservatives who insist same-sex attraction is never anything more than a careless choice or a reversible habit. But it also made a clear (and long overdue) acknowledgement of the importance of religious identity. If strongly religious persons with same-sex attractions seek to resist such impulses, it said, the appropriate response includes “therapist acceptance, support, and understanding of the clients, and the facilitation of clients’ active coping, social support, and identity exploration, without imposing a specific sexual orientation identity outcome.” Indeed, the task force discouraged the use of essentialist-sounding terms like lesbian, gay, and bisexual. It noted that “for some, sexual orientation development is fluid and has an indefinite outcome,” affected by factors such as “age, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, religion, disability, language, and socioeconomic status.” The report cautioned that “not all sexual minorities (i.e., those who experience significant erotic and romantic attractions to adult members of their own sex) adopt a lesbian, gay, or bisexual identity.” Instead, “some individuals choose to live their lives in accordance with personal or religious values.”[3]

This clearly reflects a more social-constructionist view of sexuality and (by extension) other gender-related traits, interests, and behaviors. Brain organization theorists lean toward biological essentialism. They assume that terms like sexual orientation, masculinity, and femininity refer to obvious and largely stable behavioral patterns, then try to find the biological events that supposedly cause them. Social constructionists problematize these terms, asking how masculinity, femininity, and sexual orientation are differently defined and reinforced (or punished) in various times and places. Each side in this version of the nature-nurture debate agrees that both forces are at work, but they differ greatly as to which is the stronger, and how the two work together.

The Times article largely endorsed the APA’s more social-constructionist conclusions. Its author interviewed one actively gay and very secular therapist in Texas who claimed to have learned the hard way that some conservative Christian gay men are not helped by coming out of the closet, nor by switching to a more liberal, gay-affirming church. Prior to 2007 he had endorsed APA ethical guidelines that said, in effect, “We’re supposed to support religious beliefs and support sexual orientation.” But, he added, “there was nothing I knew of that says what to do when they conflict.” In wake of the task force report, he now helps such men stay discreetly closeted, be prudent in their same-gender sexual contacts to avoid health and professional risks, and otherwise remain faithful members of their church. One such client, a young assistant pastor, “didn’t want to join another church, nor did he want to come out. For many therapists, the approach would have been to affirm his sexual orientation. But the man cared more about preaching than he did about having an open, intimate relationship with a man.”

This may sound like a recycling of the old Victorian double standard for people of the “respectable” classes—i.e., pretend to follow the rules and have secret sexual dalliances on the side. But the article’s author also interviewed evangelical therapists Warren Throckmorton and Mark Yarhouse, of Grove City College and Regent University respectively. They too work with conservative Christian (mainly male) clients who are dealing with same-sex attraction, but who want their sexual identity and behavior to be disciplined by their commitment to historic Christian norms. They are given support for pursuing a celibate lifestyle, and sometimes even marriage and parenthood, provided that the wife is fully informed and supportive of the project. (Full disclosure: Mark Yarhouse was an undergraduate psychology student of mine about twenty years ago.)

And in fact, the APA task force saw this approach—Throckmorton and Yarhouse call it “Sexual-identity Therapy”—as a viable option. Its chairwoman, Judith Glassgold, was quoted in the article as saying, “People might want to develop an identity that fits with what their religion proscribes. Or they might want to be celibate rather than identify as a gay person. Some people prioritize their religion over their sexuality, like priests and nuns. That’s an identity.” She added that while gay activist and religious therapists mostly agree that attraction and arousal cannot be turned off or on at will, “What we can work on is self-acceptance, identity integration, and reducing stigma.” As if to underscore this affirmation of identity fluidity, the Times magazine article was followed by another, in which a gay rights activist described a visit to an erstwhile friend and fellow activist who, in the wake of a health scare, found God, renounced his longtime hom*osexual identity, and ended up at a Bible college in Wyoming. The article’s author conceded that this might just not be a case of someone “denying his true (i.e., gay) identity.” His friend, he concluded, “might call me some day to say he was gay after all … but I doubt that will happen any time soon.”[4]

A Brief Sermon on Method

Debates about the fixity vs. fluidity of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gendered behaviors take a different form in the academy than in the pastor’s or therapist’s office, though the latter are clearly influenced by what they think are conclusions drawn in the former. The phrase “what they think” is important, because clear scientific conclusions are not easy to come by. To begin with, most people understand that the gold standard for clinical research—medical or psychological—is the double-blind experiment. Thus, when a new drug is being tested, participants with the relevant medical condition are first randomly assigned to drug or placebo (fake drug) conditions in order to control for any pre-existing individual differences. Then, as the experiment proceeds, in order to control for what are known as “expectancy effects,” neither those who take or evaluate the effects of drug vs. placebo know which participants are in which condition: this is the “double blind” piece. At the end of the trial, only if there is a statistically significant difference in improvement between the two groups can the new drug be considered for marketing.

Can we use this research design for tracing causality when we’re comparing not the effects of drug vs. placebo, but the effects of biology vs. environment on gendered behavior? Imagine designing a clinical trial to determine whether boys are hard-wired to be more aggressive than girls, or girls more nurturing than boys. First, we’d have to randomly assign babies to be one sex or another, apart from all the other chromosomal baggage they come with. This we can’t do: girls and boys come as genetic package deals, and once conceived their genetic and environmental legacies are so intertwined that the effects are inseparable. If you think that it’s pre- or post-natal hormones (like estrogen and testosterone) more than unmediated genes that create behavioral sex differences, then you’d need a double-blind design in which you systematically interfere (or not) with the hormonal development of randomly divided groups of children, then trace the behavioral results. Most people agree that it’s acceptable to do this with rodents or monkeys, but not with humans—though it bears remembering that the Nazis did similar human experiments under the sinister rubric of uncovering “truth in nature.”

The animal research does show a relationship between increased testosterone levels and later aggression, regardless of the animal’s sex or whether the hormone is administered pre- or post-natally. By contrast, males castrated either pre- or post-natally may exhibit the opposite pattern of less aggression, unless they receive injected testosterone to compensate. They may also exhibit sexual behaviors typical of females (and vice-versa for females, if they get too much testosterone). Bear in mind that we know little about how these effects would generalize from isolated, lab-raised animals to those in natural settings: rodents and primates are, after all, quite sociable species. And human babies, given their much longer period of post-natal development, are even more susceptible to social influence: their long-term survival literally depends on it. Moreover, the most distinctive biological feature of humans is the plasticity of their brains. The legacy of a large cerebral cortex puts us on a looser behavioral leash than other animals, with the result that, more than any other species, we are built for continual learning—for passing on what we have created culturally, not just what we are inclined to do genetically and hormonally. We are, it seems, hard-wired for behavioral flexibility.[5]

In the absence of direct hormonal manipulation, suppose we were to separate nature from nurture by randomly designating some boy and girl infants to be raised as the other sex after they’re born, to see just how much (or little) they remain stubbornly “masculine” or “feminine” despite the reversal in gender socialization. But, ethical considerations aside, this wouldn’t even begin to approximate a double blind experiment—in the sense of controlling for expectancy effects—because the cat would be out of the bag (so to speak) as soon as the babies’ caretakers began changing their diapers. All this is to say that when studying human gender traits, gender identity, or sexual orientation, essential conditions for inferring cause and effect—the manipulation of one factor (sex) and the control of others (social as well as biological)—cannot be met. It means that “all data on sex differences, no matter what research method is used, are correlational data,”[6] and as every introductory social science student learns, you cannot draw firm conclusions about causality from merely correlational data.

“Eunuchs Made So by Others”: Some Lessons from History

This methodological uncertainty makes for constant debates between adherents of gender essentialist and social-constructionist camps, as the books to be reviewed all attest. Readers might wonder why the list includes historian Mathew Kuefler’s study of eunuchs in the late Roman Empire, and Kathryn Ringrose’s corresponding one on eunuchs in Byzantium. Very simply, few brain organization theorists read history to find connections between their own research and past cultural practices, such as that of castrating a non-trivial percentage of males in the Greco-Roman and Byzantine eras. This was of course not a controlled experiment, but it was a practice that lasted several centuries in the Roman West, as well as the Byzantine East and beyond, with many surviving texts (including some biblical ones) commenting on it. Kuefler and Ringrose try to connect the biological and cultural dots, with a stronger emphasis on the latter. They also examine the reciprocal impact between male castration and church law and practice, appealing to sources like medical texts, sermons, hagiographies, historical narratives, law codes, biographies, and standards for church office holders.

In both Rome and Byzantium, the theories of Aristotle, Galen, and Hippocrates were the accepted basis for doing science and medicine. Obviously, these scholars did not know about genes or hormones as those terms are used today—in fact, Aristotle believed that only fathers contributed any “seed” to fetal development. But they and their descendents were often astute clinical observers, and though castration of males (by removal of the testes and sometimes even the penis) was technically illegal within the Roman Empire, it occurred nonetheless. It was even more common in the barbarian hinterlands, resulting in a steady export of eunuchs to metropolitan areas like Rome and Constantinople. Over time, it was noted that the results of castration varied, depending on when it occurred. If done after puberty, eunuchs might still be able to have erections and org*sms, even though they were unable to reproduce. If done before, the longer-term dearth of testosterone resulted in tall slender bodies, beardless faces, less-developed musculature, and little if any libido. Such pre-pubertal castrates were often considered beautiful as young men (they were at times equated with angels, and some women even pretended to be male eunuchs to enjoy a freedom of mobility normally denied to their own sex), but they also tended to age prematurely and die young.

Because gender relations among the élite were organized primarily around male honor codes, with the concomitant obligation to produce and rule over a legally recognized family, non-reproducing eunuchs were alternately demonized as less than male (yet not quite female) and lauded as “perfect servants”: unencumbered by family or geographic ties and unpredictable passions, and thus able to assume trustworthy roles as domestic administrators, courtiers, imperial officers, and mediators between the worlds of men and women—even between sacred and secular. Kuefler and Ringrose never question the physiological effects of male castration. But they are concerned to demonstrate that, just as for intact males and females, stereotypes about eunuchs’ “essential” traits—not to mention their deliberate training to express such traits—varied too much over time and place for anyone to draw facile conclusions about the “inevitable” effects of biology on personality and behavior. As just one example, in some versions of the Roman Mater Deum (Mother of the Gods) fertility cult, the founding myth included the castration and death of the goddess’ consort as a punishment for his infidelity, and his subsequent resurrection (but not genital restoration) after she belatedly forgave him. During the cult’s annual spring rites, some male acolytes castrated themselves in order to become special priests to the goddess. This included adopting women’s dress—which, according to one source, they acquired by throwing their severed genitals in front of Roman households, whose women were then expected to relinquish some of their clothing.

Needless to say, early Western church leaders did not see such practices as examples of “perfect servanthood”—especially when accompanied by temple prostitution on the part of the Mater Deum eunuchs, as well as females recruited to the cult as virgins. Church leaders were repelled by the practice of testicular mutilation, and mindful of Old Testament strictures against admitting such men to worship spaces. But then there were biblical texts like Isaiah 56, which welcomes both eunuchs and foreigners who profess allegiance to Israel’s God, and Acts 8, which records Philip’s baptism of someone who was both: a eunuch and a high official of the Ethiopian queen. And what were they to do with Matthew 19? There Jesus distinguishes among eunuchs who have been born so, those that have been made so by other people, and those who “have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven”—followed by the weighty words: “He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.” Apparently there were enough men taking this literally in the early church (Origen was reported to be one) for it to merit deliberation at the Council of Nicaea, which ordered priests who had castrated themselves to be removed from office—though exceptions were made if castration had been done by barbarians, or for medical reasons. The aspiring “perfect servant” of Christ was admired if he renounced sexual pleasure as an intact man. But self-made eunuchs were seen as unfairly gaming the system, since most didn’t have to struggle as much to attain the celibate state required for high-level sanctity.

In Kuefler’s account, the Western church’s real coup was to declare Jesus’ words about self-made eunuchs to be metaphorical rather than literal, then to make the war against the flesh needed to attain priestly celibacy a substitute for the Roman honor code, which treated family, military, and political power as the marks of hegemonic masculinity. Of course, clerical life did require “unmanly” submission to God as a metaphorical bride of Christ. But after the Constantinian legalization of Christianity, and in the wake of the later barbarian invasions, such initial submission conferred a lot of power, especially on bishops. They wielded spiritual authority over emperors, who were mere laymen by comparison, as well as over priests and laity in their own territories. They participated in church-wide council decisions that affected people of all stations. They prospered financially from tithes and donations instead of imperial taxes. In the 5th century, the church took over many civic duties as the Roman Empire collapsed, with bishops often assuming the symbolic power previously accorded secular magistrates. As spiritualized “manly eunuchs,” Western churchmen successfully exploited the language of male castration even as they renounced its actual practice.

In the Byzantine East, the fortunes of eunuchs proceeded somewhat differently. From about ad 600 to 1100, they were well-compensated professionals in a wide range of roles. Among the élite, they were household guards, military officers, administrators, doctors, musicians, and guardians of women and children; among the lower classes they were entertainers, actors and prostitutes. In the church, pre-pubertal castrates eventually served alongside “whole” or “bearded” men as priests, bishops, and even patriarchs, and were lauded for their perfect celibacy rather than ostracized for taking a dubious shortcut to achieve it. However, eunuchs were more marginal in the early centuries of the Byzantine era, due to the reigning Aristotelian gender ideology. This envisaged a ladder of virtue with more passive and less-rational women and girls at the bottom, boys who had left the women’s quarters en route to manhood in the middle, and optimally active, reasoning, reproductive males at the top. Especially if castrated before puberty, eunuchs were seen as cases of arrested development: more manly than women or young boys, but by virtue of their feminine appearance and infertility not capable of top-tier masculinity. Thus, in a manner reflecting both virtue and guilt by association, writes Ringrose, when earlier Byzantine sources “wanted to speak well of eunuchs, they did so in terms of positive attributes traditionally ascribed to men. When they wanted to be critical of eunuchs they did so in terms of negative values traditionally ascribed to women.”

In light of such ambivalence, how did the Eastern church later come to accept and honor male eunuchs at all levels of office? Ringrose suggests it was largely traceable to a new reading of Daniel 1, which emerged between the 9th and 11th centuries. The account of Daniel and his companions’ exile from Jerusalem to Babylon notes that they were “youths without blemish, handsome and skilful in all wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding learning, and competent to serve in the king’s court.” Moreover, they were trained and presented to the Babylonian court by the king’s chief eunuch. Thus, various exegetes concluded, though the text doesn’t say so directly, Daniel himself must have been a eunuch. This revised portrait of a major biblical prophet permitted “a broadening of the criteria that signified sanctity in ways that made it possible for eunuchs to assimilate to the religious culture of the era.” Rather than following the spiritualized “manly eunuch” route of the Western church, eunuchs became a kind of revered “third sex,” functioning “in ways that closely paralleled the supposed role of angels: facilitating miracles, conveying messages between divine sources and mortal recipients, and escorting holy individuals …. [I]n the Byzantine mind, eunuchs, while not capable of some things that ordinary mortals could do, possessed a potential for holiness, asexuality, and access to spiritual realms that was not part of the makeup of ordinary mortals.”

“Eunuchs from Birth”: Some Contemporary Controversies

One way to approximate an experiment in otherwise constrained circ*mstances is to do a longitudinal study. In a sense that’s what Kuefler and Ringrose have reconstructed. The physiological effects of male castration remained predictably consistent throughout the centuries they studied. But in terms of their effects on behavior, hormones (or in this case, their absence) did not rage: at most, they insinuated. Otherwise, these authors point out, history would not have produced such varying expressions and stereotypes of “essential” eunuch traits at different times and places—from Roman temple prostitutes to Christian miracle-mediators, and many things in between.

Such a conclusion does not cut much ice with bot adherents, many of whom think they have better ways as scientists to settle the nature/nurture question, despite the methodological challenges (mentioned earlier) that inevitably plague their work. One of these ways is to study so-called intersex people, whose bodies are atypical not from deliberate human interference, but due to accidents of nature. The goal is to infer causal relationships between the abnormal physiology and anatomy of such persons and any gender-atypical behavior they may later demonstrate, and in the process shed light on the causes of behavioral differences between ordinary men and women. Both Roman and Byzantine writers recorded the existence of such “eunuchs from birth.” These included males with undescended testes and people with otherwise ambiguous genitals, often accompanied by adult infertility and atypical secondary sex markers. It is possible that Jesus was referring to such people when he spoke of “eunuchs who have been so from birth.” In both Roman and Byzantine writings, they were often grouped together (for good or ill) with males who had been deliberately castrated.

With the advent of modern techniques to identify typical and atypical patterns of sex chromosomes, genes, and hormones, scientists began to make more nuanced distinctions, many of which are described in Fixing Sex by Stanford biomedical ethicist Katrina Karkazis. In the mid-20th century, with the development of staining techniques to assess the cellular presence of X and Y chromosomes, attention was focused on persons who were shown to have an atypical number of either—for example, Turner’s syndrome women (who have only one rather than two X chromosomes), Kleinfelter’s syndrome men (who have one Y and two or more X chromosomes) and other variations—such as XYY males or XXX females. Infants born with these syndromes do not exhibit external genital ambiguity, and so for the most part have remained medically and socially invisible throughout history. But as chromosome checks have become more common in hospital delivery rooms, other developmental problems—both physical and cognitive—have turned out to be correlated with these chromosomal anomalies.

For example, many Turner’s women can’t produce enough estrogen for adequate breast development, and so may opt for estrogen replacement therapy. And both males and females with extra sex chromosomes may have cognitive-developmental impairments. A few decades ago, the popular press made much of the fact that XYY males were disproportionately found in prison populations—demonstrating, some thought, that the Y chromosome was the source of male aggression. But it turned out that most XYY men had been incarcerated for non-violent crimes such as theft, which suggests it was probably cognitive impairment—rather than an extra Y chromosome beefing up their violence potential—that landed them behind bars: they were less able to plans their crimes carefully, and hence more likely to get caught than normal XY males.

With the rise of endocrinology as a discipline, scientists turned their attention to people who were actually born with ambiguous genitals. They discovered that testes and ovaries produced not just sperm or eggs but also hormones (substances produced by one tissue, and conveyed via the bloodstream to another, to stimulate certain physiological processes). And they found that both males and females produce the full range of gonadal hormones, although in differing ratios throughout the life cycle. In the mid-20th century, scientists discovered there was a prenatal “domino effect,” from genes to gonads (and other internal reproductive structures), to hormone secretion, and eventually to external genital appearance. The XX pattern leads to ovaries, which produce estrogen but very little testosterone, resulting in external female appearance at birth. Substitute a Y for one of the X’s and you get testes, which start secreting a lot more testosterone around the sixth week, eventually producing a male genital appearance at birth. Then, after years of almost complete hormonal latency, it’s a pubertal resurgence of testosterone and estrogen, again in different ratios, that produces male or female secondary sex characteristics such as different body hair distribution and different bone, voice, and breast development.

But in rare instances one of the developmental dominoes gets knocked out of line. The most common (and most studied) type of intersex condition is known as congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), in which a genetic XX fetus, after successfully developing ovaries, uterus, and fallopian tubes, starts overproducing testosterone, though in this case it’s from the adrenal glands. The extra testosterone partially or completely masculinizes the external genitals: at birth, the cl*tor*s appears more or less penis-like, and the labia more or less like a medially fused, but empty, scrotum. (This is not as astonishing as you might think, since male and female reproductive structures develop from a common embryological origin.) The syndrome can also occur in male fetuses, though it does not affect their internal or external sexual anatomy. But in either case, because testosterone overproduction continues after birth, there may follow a dramatically early puberty accompanied by typical male secondary sex characteristics, unless hormone therapy—in this case cortisone to counteract the effects of the extra testosterone—is supplied. In addition, about two-thirds of CAH children suffer from life-threatening salt imbalances that require other forms of intervention.

Even today, about a quarter of CAH females are initially assigned as males at birth. Some CAH adults who were surgically refeminized as infants are quite angry that nobody waited until they were old enough to have a say in the matter. They argue that it is not ambiguous genitals that are the problem but society’s inability to accept persons in whom genetic, gonadal, hormonal, and anatomical sex—never mind gender identity, gender roles, and sexual orientation—don’t line up in neatly dichotomous columns. In fact, most CAH adults profess a female gender identity, and are no more likely to engage in hom*osexual activity than women in the general population—but to CAH anti-surgery lobbyists that is beside the point. Genital surgery on CAH infants addresses no disease risk, and arguably causes more physical and emotional trauma than living a life with ambiguous genitals.

Of course today’s anti-surgery activists can’t turn back the clock to experience what it might have been like to grow up that way. And it’s also the case that many CAH adults operated on as children seem to be content with the results. Many prefer to remain completely anonymous, or at most members of internet or face-to-face support groups. Unlike their activist sisters, they have no interest in picketing the professional meetings of pediatric specialists who won’t stop doing corrective surgery. And, Karkazis points out, it’s hard to know if they should stop, when no well-designed research has been done on the physical, psychological, and social outcomes of genital refeminization, and when a more powerful double-blind study (randomly assigning some CAH infants to have surgery and some not, then following their development) is ethically untenable. Even so, the anti-surgery argument is somewhat supported by case research showing that, contrary to stereotypes about inevitable stigmatization, people who remained genitally ambiguous before the age of plastic surgery grew up with few emotional problems, were content with whatever gender identity they’d been assigned, and sometimes were not even aware that they were unusual. But that was in the days when ignorance about genes and hormones, if not exactly blissful, at least presented people with fewer agonizing choices. Medical progress is indeed a two-edged sword.

In Fixing Sex, Karkazis reports on her interviews with people from many corners of the intersex debate. She does not deal with the questions, attitudes, or pastoral practices of current religious traditions, but neither does she use religion as a whipping boy. She is for the most part scrupulously fair, recognizing that many doctors are well intentioned, and convinced from their own clinical experience that they can anticipate the best outcomes for their patients, with or without surgery. But it’s no secret that some surgeons can become arrogant empire builders, especially if they trained in an era when physicians were mostly independent professionals running their own private practices. Younger doctors, by contrast, are increasingly located in complex research and professional networks, and may even be in salaried rather than fee-for-service arrangements. Especially if they are women, Karkazis found, these doctors are more inclined than their predecessors to dialogue with intersex activists, however “unscientific” the latter’s arguments may appear to older members of the medical establishment. She also notes that both pro- and anti-surgery camps exploit the power of anecdote when it serves their own interests, but dismiss it as “unscientific” when used by their opponents.

Younger physicians are also apt to agree that predicting endocrinological and surgical outcomes is less a science than a complex conversation, requiring a team approach that includes parents, patients’ advocates, independent researchers, and CAH persons themselves. A 2005 consensus statement by an international panel of doctors, with input from intersex activists, basically codified these (among other) conclusions. Though it has only the force of recommendation, not law, it may represent a step toward greater transparency and inclusiveness in dealing with intersex persons. In the end, Karkazis’ conclusion on the nature-nurture debate parallels that of Kuefler and Ringrose. Although sexual difference “is seemingly obvious and certainly real on many levels … in another sense it is a carefully crafted story about the social relations of a particular time and place, mapped onto available bodies.” Nature and culture are mutually influential.

—This essay is part 1 of a two-part article.

1. More academic defenses of BOT include Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain (Basic Books, 2003); Doreen Kimura, Sex and Cognition (MIT Press, 1999); and Susan Pinker, The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap (Scribner, 2008). Popular treatments include Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain (Morgan Road Books, 2006); Michael Gurian, What Could He Be Thinking? A Guide to the Mysteries of a Man’s Mind (Jossey Bass, 2004); and Leonard Sax, Why Gender Matters (Doubleday, 2005).

2. Mimi Swartz, “Living the Good Lie: Should Therapists Help God-Fearing Gay People Stay in the Closet?” The New York Times Magazine, June 19, 2011, pp. 30-35, 54 & 57.

3. apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/therapeutic-response.pdf

4. Benoit Denizet-Lewis, “Going Straight,” The New York Times Magazine, June 19, 2011, pp. 35-39, 46.

5. Evolutionary psychologists are famous for insisting that, due to the survival demands of our hunter-gatherer ancestors’ environment, human behaviors are on a much tighter genetic leash that we might fondly imagine. An assessment of this position is beyond the scope of this essay, but a balanced review and critique of it can be found in Robert C. Richardson, Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology (MIT Press, 2007).

6. Hilary M. Lips, Sex and Gender: An Introduction, 5th ed. (McGraw Hill, 2005), p. 109.

Books discussed in this essay:

Katrina Karkazis, Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience (Duke Univ. Press, 2008).

Matthew Keufler, The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideol-ogy in Late Antiquity (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001).

Kathryn M. Ringrose, The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003)

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen is professor of psychology and philosophy at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The apostle anticipated the time when “itching ears” would drive Christian audiences to reject sound doctrine in favor of teaching that would merely suit their own desires. His remedy, given solemnly to Timothy: “proclaim the message,” teaching it with persistence, patience, sobriety, and a readiness to endure suffering. Thankfully, Timothy and his progeny have followed this stiff advice, making the Christian message available today in more cultures, languages, and settings than ever.

Yet, diseased ears continue their baleful influence. In a Sightings piece last year, Martin Marty bemoaned the fame, following, and f*ckless scholarship of David Barton, whose cause is “to show from eighteenth-century documents that [the] Founding Fathers determinedly and explicitly established a Christian state, which leaves all non-Christians as second-class citizens.”[1] Leaving aside the claims here concerning the Christian nature of the early Republic, I note the passions so easily enflamed by anyone preaching the idea of a Christian state. Yet where is the evidence—on Barton-inspired websites or any other—that such a position could be considered biblically sound doctrine?

To prepare Christian teachers to deal with this and all other modern cases of itching ears, up steps N. Clayton Croy. His remedy—Prima Scriptura: An Introduction to New Testament Interpretation—is far longer than the advice that Timothy received. But in its goal and serious-minded tone, it stands squarely in the tradition of those original, inspired words.

In Prima Scriptura (Scripture as “primary,” “first,” “final”), Croy, true to his Wesleyan Methodist roots, jettisons the venerable sola Scriptura, darling of Reformed stalwarts everywhere. Yet as he develops his comprehensive view of New Testament interpretation, it’s clear that he yields to no one in his high view of Scripture. Furthermore, in language that Pietists would appreciate, Croy hopes that, even through the blood, sweat, and tears of the full-bodied exegesis that he advocates, the NT interpreter may actually “encounter God in the text and be led by the Holy Spirit in discovering meaning and being transformed by it.”

The interpretation Croy teaches is hands-on, inductive, creative, text-focused—and downright demanding.

Croy writes for confessional readers of all stripes—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox—who “belong to communities of faith that affirm the authority of Scripture and the faith of the classic creeds.” More specifically, he’s addressing leaders of Christian communities, and those who aspire to be such, who wish to study and reflect on Scripture with the aim of “informing and shaping the life of faith.” At least on the surface, then, Croy’s intended audience is defined rather narrowly by religious commitment and ecclesiastical position. Yet in its implications and potential benefits, this is a volume that one could fervently wish would play widely across the Christian landscape.

Chapters 1 and 2 move from the modern reader (“Analyzing and Preparing the Interpreter”) back to the NT (“Analyzing the Text”), with particular emphasis on a 12-step method of exegeting the text. Chapter 3 (“Evaluating and Contemporizing the Text”) returns us to the present, explaining why and how to utilize the “hermeneutical adjuncts” of tradition, reason, and experience in grasping the contemporary significance of what we have learned about a biblical text from our exegesis. The final chapter (“Appropriating the Text and Transforming the Community”) reminds readers that “the work of Scripture is not complete until interpreters and their communities respond to its message and are transformed.” James (“be doers of the word, and not merely hearers”) would be proud.

Throughout, Croy pleads for a NT interpretation that is informed by engagement with Bible readers from the broadest possible range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. To that end, chapter 1 asks interpreters to identify their own subjectivity, especially including their social location, theological identity, and life experiences. Croy then goes further, charging would-be NT interpreters to prepare themselves spiritually by embracing honesty, openness (to the text), obedience (to how each genre in the text demands to be read), and piety (expecting to meet and respond to God in the process of studying the text).

Chapter 2, fully two-thirds of the entire book, is definitely the workhouse of Croy’s method, with its fairly standard approach emphasizing “persistent and painstaking observation.”[2] The author grants that the method may seem mechanical, yet, along with the mechanics, he asks interpreters to approach their work in a spirit of dialogue with the text. Such an approach implies a personal openness that expects to be surprised by the text, requiring a humility and a teachability that never come naturally. Exactly the place for the piety that Croy pleads for to kick in.

First step: survey the writing as a whole. Let’s say you’re interested in interpreting Paul’s Letter to the Philippians. Croy assigns students five ways to make this initial survey:

• guided reading—spend time getting the big picture of the letter and its author; also, notice where you the reader find yourself intrigued or curious or irritated;
• use of multiple translations—what’s the “feel” of each? how does each one deal with the more complicated parts of the letter?
• summary and outline—write a brief summary of the whole book, and prepare a detailed outline;
• chart—using a “landscape” orientation, prepare a table with several rows: divide the first row into four parts, one for each chapter, and give a title to each; divide the second row according to the natural divisions and subdivisions of the text; use the third (and additional) rows to chart the various themes, repeated words, and topics Paul uses;
• pictograph—using stick figures and cartoons, prepare an illustrated chart of Philippians.

For the last three points here, Croy gives his own answers. In addition, he gives exercises for students, as he does with each of the twelve steps.

All to say that the interpretation Croy teaches is hands-on, inductive, creative, text-focused—and downright demanding. Steps 2-12 keep up the pressure on readers, broadening the topics to include all manner of textual, literary, linguistic, grammatical, historicocultural, and theological concerns.

Chapter 3 brings the NT interpreter from the ancient world back into our own, shifting from exegesis to hermeneutics. After working hard to understand the meaning of a NT text in its own right, we next must ask how it relates to life here and now. We may have detected some ambiguity or even diversity in where the biblical text is headed (say, in its views toward the secular state), and we may find that its message speaks to a pressing modern issue only very indirectly. Furthermore, once we engage seriously with a range of Christian conversation partners, we may find ourselves in gridlock. What then? Well, then we’re ready for Croy’s third chapter, where he walks us through the necessity and value of using what we might call the “ropes” of tradition, reason, and experience, which Bible interpreters of all ages have used to help tie together the ancient and modern worlds.

Tradition, which asks us to give a voice to past members of the interpreting community, has notably bequeathed to us the classic Christian creeds, which distill what earlier believers found “essential, ancient, and consensual.”[3] Reason engages in a curious dance with faith. Exegesis obviously can go nowhere without reason; for its part, reason has no choice but to release faith as it arises to affirm the core Christian mysteries (notably, Trinity and incarnation). Experience is significant, in part because Christian faith includes the promise of experiential difference (Jesus: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest”). To evaluate a biblical text strictly in terms of my private experience, however, quickly becomes self-serving. Croy has a better idea: take “experience” not simply individually but as “broadly based human experience that is multinational and multiethnic.”

What to do when tradition, reason, and experience speak with no clear voice regarding a disputed issue? What metacriterion should we appeal to? Answer: prima Scriptura. And within Scripture, not just any word should reign (“love” and “justice” currently have their vocal defenders); the highest court of appeal must be the incarnate Word himself, in whose words alone, when acted on, we discover the foundation able to survive all manner of storms. Croy’s clarion conclusion: “Communities that confess Jesus as Lord must be attuned to him and interpret Scripture accordingly. They should be wary of ethical and theological commitments that are contrary to the person and work of Christ, commitments that are unable to find even a hint or trajectory in his mission and message.”

Finally, chapter 4 leaves readers with the hardest job of all: appropriate Scripture in such a way that actual transformation occurs—in me personally, in the functioning and fruit of Christian communities, in every last sphere of environmental, social, and intercultural life on this planet. Thy kingdom come indeed!

I like Croy’s grand, gritty approach to NT interpretation. It won’t sell to the masses. And students and preachers may complain of intense suffering as they grind their way through the steps of this comprehensive method. Yet when those thus prepared stand up to “proclaim the message,” we in the audience will find that we are getting the best possible medicine for our diseased ears, plus the sharpest picture we could wish of the transformations yet before us.

Craig Noll is an editor for the Eerdmans Publishing Company and erstwhile student and teacher of linguistics and New Testament Greek.

1. “David Barton’s Christian America,” May 9, 2011.

2. For a similar approach to exegesis itself, see the excellent Interpreting the New Testament Text: Introduction to the Art and Science of Exegesis, ed. Darrell L. Bock and Buist M. Fanning (Crossway Books, 2006).

3. Note also John Thompson’s comment, “We don’t fully know what the Bible means until we know something about what the Bible has meant” (Reading the Bible with the Dead: What You Can Learn from the History of Exegesis That You Can’t Learn from Exegesis Alone [Eerdmans, 2007], p. 11).

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

It is rare when a book itself marks a liminal moment in human history. Such a claim seems like blatant hyperbole. But The Price of Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century, plus the wider scholarly enterprise underlying it, represents a unique culmination of centuries of thought and struggle against religious persecution and for protection of the rights of conscience, belief, and exercise enshrined in international law but massively violated in the world today.

What makes this book historic is this: for centuries, even millennia, great thinkers have made assertions about the dangers of state favoritism and coercion in matters of religion, along with claims about why people should have the right to peacefully exercise transcendent duties unmolested by political authorities. We now have the means to rigorously test such conjectures. This is what Brian Grim and Roger Finke do. By marshaling unprecedented global data and applying new empirical methods, they not only corroborate hypotheses about the price of freedom denied. They also provide a compelling theory that explains why society works the way it does.

In brief, Grim and Finke probe the question of why religious liberty matters. Their answer is theoretically elegant and empirically powerful: when religious freedoms increase, inter-religious conflict declines, grievances lessen, and persecution wanes. On the other hand, as government restrictions increase—often at the behest of dominant religious groups—so do violent persecution, inter-religious hostilities, and regional strife. Grim and Finke’s theory, which explains the interaction between societal pressures and government practices, provides real guidance to policy makers struggling with renascent religious tides.

To understand how this enterprise came about, a bit of scholarly history is helpful. Roger Finke is one of the pioneers of the “supply side” theory of religion, which contends that restrictions that exact costs or barriers to religious suppliers undermine religious vitality. An underlying premise of this paradigm is that the default condition of religion is diversity, which Peter Berger argues is especially true in a globalized era “where everyone is everywhere.” A free marketplace of religion, on the other hand, allows the natural plurality of faith expressions to blossom, providing more vibrant religious life and, by implication, more tolerant relations among the faithful.

Grim and Finke explicitly draw out the implications of this framework for understanding religious persecution and relations among religious groups. And here they link their theory to a larger intellectual tradition. While they acknowledge that the foundation for their reasoning is centuries old, they focus on Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century who explicitly made the case against religious monopolies or cartels and for the peaceful consequences of allowing natural religious diversity to blossom. Voltaire, for example, contrasted the despotism of state-enforced monopoly he saw in France with the peace of plurality he noticed at the Royal Exchange in London. Adam Smith, similarly, contended that if the government allowed religions to operate freely their natural tendency to subdivide would prevent any one or two from dominating society and enlisting the sword of the state to repress competitors. David Hume expanded on this insight by noting that to ensure public liberty, tranquility, and thriving industry, a wise magistrate must avoid extending favoritism to dominant sects and require that they leave each other alone. These sentiments were echoed in America by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who argued that state enforced religion not only violated individual liberties but threatened the security of the state. In other words, they saw religious freedom as the anodyne of religious conflict.

Grim and Finke are able to test such propositions—and advance a global theory that explains them—because of a remarkable confluence of their lives as scholars and contemporary developments. As to their lives as scholars, Roger Finke and Brian Grim illustrate the creative burst that comes from an exceptional academic partnership. As a sociologist of religion, Finke not only pioneered the analysis of quantitative data to test theories of religion and the state; he also developed the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) at Penn State. That vast project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, provided the prodigious data base for his collaboration with Brian Grim.

Brian Grim nurtured his “science” (as he says on his webpage) as a doctoral student of Finke’s at Penn State. But he brought to that graduate work two decades of experience abroad as a researcher, educator, and curriculum developer. From 1982 to 2002 he worked and lived in Hong Kong, the Xinjiang province of China, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Germany, and Malta. These experiences gave him an intuitive feel for the impact of state regulation of religion, persecution, and inter-religious conflict. As he has remarked in presentations, when he lived in the UAE, where his Catholic faith was legal, he had many opportunities and high motivation to contribute to that society, both in his work and outside of it. In Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, where his faith was illegal, he had few opportunities to contribute outside work and less enthusiasm for work itself, a pattern that he thinks helps explain the very different trajectories of these neighboring nations.

Working with Finke at Penn State, Grim developed a sophisticated method to code, measure, and develop overall indexes of government and social restrictions on religion in virtually every country on earth, an unprecedented development. He first employed this method in his dissertation, then perfected it as senior researcher for the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Here is where we see the synergy of political developments, scholarship, and advocacy. What made this scholarly enterprise possible was the massive lobby campaign in the 1990s that produced the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act. A key provision of that act required the U.S. State Department to report annually on the status of religious freedom in every nation. Those reports, which required that our diplomatic personnel investigate on-the-ground conditions of diverse religious communities, improved over time with the critiques of advocacy organizations and the helpful input of country specialists. While other organizations document religious conditions around the world, the State Department report represents the most thorough and systematic effort to date.

Grim seized on these State Department annual reports as a vast data base that could be combed for objective, verifiable evidence of restrictions. Employing a rigorous protocol that codes discriminatory laws and documented incidents of harassment, arrest, property destruction, and violence, he is able to develop credible country measures that can be compared cross-nationally and over time. The genius of this enterprise is that Grim does not attempt to measure some indefinable quality of religious freedom; rather he codes observable and non-trivial restrictions to develop a broader measure, or index, of how religious practice is constrained.

After publishing initial results of this research, Grim was hired as senior research fellow by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, whose director, Luis Lugo, immediately grasped the significance of the coding methodology. Under Grim’s direction, the Pew Forum supplemented State Department documents with 15 other reports by the UN, the European Union, other regional bodies, and NGOs, and they expanded the number of coding questions and tested them repeatedly for reliability

The fruit of that operation is illustrated by two reports of the Pew Forum, which provide index scores on government restrictions and social hostilities by country, region, and religion. The 2009 report garnered international attention for its finding that 70 percent of the globe’s population lives in nations with high restrictions on religion, while the 2011 report found those restrictions increasing.

As a “Fact Tank” the Pew Forum does not draw causal inferences or normative conclusions from its reports. So while Grim was directing the broader Pew Forum effort, he and Finke were writing The Price of Freedom Denied to test their broader theoretical and normative theory. To do so, they relied on prior coding of 143 countries with a population of two million or more, using State Department reports and a smaller number of coding questions than the subsequent Pew research, which used more reports, a larger number of coding questions, and incorporated smaller countries in subsequent years. While results of their coding for this book are nearly identical with those of the Pew Forum, the public availability of the larger Pew data base provides an extraordinary opportunity for scholars to conduct replication studies—one of the hallmarks of good science—to test the theory presented here.

This brings me to the perennial debate about whether the social sciences can ever be really scientific. While I have fallen on the skeptical side of that debate, The Price of Freedom Denied represents some of the best social science I have ever seen. The project addresses a vital concern, develops a universal theory to explain it, and draws upon global data to test the theory with sophisticated statistical methods and case studies. In other words, it is theory-driven, data-rich, timeless, and real-world in its applications.

But more than this, The Price of Freedom Denied achieves something truly rare in the social world: nomological insight and elegance. Great scientific theories, we learn from the history of science, achieve leverage by explaining more with less, often in counterintuitive fashion. Grim and Finke attain this grail by anchoring their work in several propositions that they rigorously test:

• “to the extent that a religious group achieves a monopoly and holds access to the temporal power and privileges of the state, the ever-present temptation is to persecute religious competitors openly”
• “to the extent that governments deny religious freedoms, physical religious persecution and conflict will increase”
• “to the extent that social forces deny religious freedoms, physical persecution will increase”
• “to the extent that religious freedoms are granted to all religions, the state will have less authority and incentive to persecute religion”

The first three propositions combine to explain a religious violence cycle: Government restrictions on religion trigger strife and hostility among religious groups, which invites more government restrictions, which produces more violent religious persecution. But as the fourth thesis suggests, the vicious religious violence cycle can be broken. When governments relax restrictions on religion and treat all groups equally, grievances lessen and greater societal tolerance and civility ensue, leading to positive cycles where groups channel energies and competition into civil society pursuits. Such a culture, in turn, buoys democratic governance and unleashes economic enterprise.

A theory of such obvious real-world significance deserves the widest exposure and rigorous test and application. Unfortunately, some of the book’s methodological underpinnings are contained elsewhere. Likely acceding to the publisher’s desire to limit length and cost, Grim and Finke do not provide a full explanation of the coding protocol. Instead, we are referred to the ARDA website. Moreover, while their appendix shows how their structural equation modeling tests the religious persecution model, we are directed to their published articles for further details. Thus it takes a bit of a scavenger hunt to understand fully their procedures.

While this is a shortcoming of the book, in another sense it underscores the opportunity for other scholars to use the broader Pew Forum data base to corroborate or refine their theory. In other words, this book should launch fresh scholarly enterprise. Nothing less will be required to overcome the mental barriers among élite policy makers, opinion leaders, and legal cognoscenti who cannot imagine why one would want to protect or advance something as benighted or divisive as religion.

Nowhere is this task more pressing than in the debate over global Islam, which Grim and Finke tackle in their most bold and controversial foray. They begin by pointing out that violent religious persecution is far more common in Muslim-majority countries than elsewhere and occurs with greater severity. As the 2011 report by the Pew Forum shows, nations that saw increases in religious restrictions from 2006 to 2009 came predominately from the Muslim arc.

The authors examine the common explanations for this pattern—the colonial legacy, despotic regimes, lagging economic development, ethnic conflict—and find them inadequate. Instead they argue that dynamics within the Islamic religion itself help explain this disparity. In particular, they point to Sharia law as inherently conducive to discrimination, religious strife, and persecution. Because religion and law are not separated under Sharia, they argue, and because blasphemy and apostasy are treated as serious offenses in all schools of Islamic jurisprudence, Sharia-based societies represent unique challenges to religious liberty.

Grim and Finke would rest on solid empirical ground if their assertions focused on implementation of strict versions of Sharia, often pressed by militant Islamist movements, which invite harassment by authorities or vigilante repression of religious minorities and dissenters.

But because Grim and Finke implicate broader tendencies within Islam, we see a tension between their data and their argument about Sharia. On the one hand, they strive to avoid being either overly critical or timidly uncritical of Islam by hewing close to their data, and they take pains to demonstrate the diversity of practice in Muslim-majority societies. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa they find low levels of persecution in seven of eight Muslim-majority countries and lower levels of persecution even compared to others in the region. This finding prompts the question of why such societies have not adopted the strict versions of Sharia we find elsewhere in the Islamic arc. Is it because of the influence of Sufi evangelization on the continent? African cultural influences? Some other combination of factors? We also see contrary patterns in Central Asia, where persecution seems to arise from policies of authoritarian regimes fearful of independent Islamic civil society, not Sharia.

Rather than apply their theoretical propositions to explore such variation, Grim and Finke slide into what some might see as an “essentialist” reading of Islamic history and culture. They discuss Mohammad as a law-giver and military leader, probe the emergence of Sharia as a way to govern the expanding lands of Dar-al-Islam, and cite Quranic passages that suggest the merger of law and religion in the faith. Because neither author would claim the credentials of a classically trained Islamic scholar, this historical excursus seems a bridge too far. But this criticism does not undermine their universal theory or the propositions underlying it; on the contrary, it calls for further research guided by their model into the dynamics of Islamic societies, their variation and potential for evolution.

Why, then, is this a liminal book? Because it provides a modern theory and voluminous quantitative evidence for a timeless truth: humans are spiritual creatures who thrive best and most harmoniously when they enjoy the freedom to express their fundamental dignity. This insight suggests a strategic opportunity for policy makers, religious authorities, and civil society leaders groping for remedies to the destabilizing religious strife afflicting the globe. In the place of counterproductive measures of repression (all too often the default impulse), strategies that protect the freedom of conscience and religious practice offer the best means of navigating the crucible of the 21st century: living with our differences in a shrinking world.

Allen D. Hertzke is Presidential Professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma. The Future of Religious Freedom: Global Challenges, a collection of essays he edited, is forthcoming this fall from Oxford University Press.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

As I read The Color of Christ, I recalled a meeting of the Christian fellowship I attended in college during which the minister warned us against a conception of Christ he jokingly called “Vidal Sassoon Jesus.” We all knew exactly the image he was talking about. Without knowing its name, most of us were probably picturing Warner Sallman’s 1941 painting Head of Christ, which today has been reproduced over 500 million times. As Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey show, this moment was not inevitable. The white Christ has a history. That history is complicated, confusing, and deeply consequential for Christians and Americans of all creeds and colors.

In September 1963, a bomb went off in Birmingham, Alabama, claiming the lives of four little girls playing in the basem*nt of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Upstairs, one of church’s stained glass windows depicting an image of a white Christ remained perfectly intact save for the face, which was neatly excised by the blast. In the wake of the bombing, observers struggled to comprehend “what it meant for the white Jesus of a black church to have his face blown out.” Writer James Baldwin called the missing face “something of an achievement,” one that freed black Christians from the depredations of an “alabaster Christ” and gave them license to give their God a “new face.” The window in Sixteenth Street Baptist was eventually replaced with one featuring a black Jesus, but the ambiguity of the missing face remained.

Blum and Harvey don’t resolve the deeper meaning of that missing face. Instead, they set out to answer a set of historical questions it raises. What was a white Jesus doing in a black church in the 1960s? What did this figure mean to a black congregation locked in a struggle for their civil rights against a white power structure? Why, for how long, and by whom had Christ been pictured as a white man? In many ways, their book is a history of the nation and race told through the changing ways in which Americans conceived of Christ’s color.

The white Christ didn’t appear on the American stage until the play was well under way. Heirs of Reformation iconoclasm, the Puritans displayed no images of Christ in their churches or homes, and until the early 19th century most Protestant Americans continued to agree with the famous American painter Washington Allston, who declared Christ “too holy and sacred to be attempted by the pencil.” In the 17th and 18th centuries, most visions or descriptions of Christ tended to obscure him in blinding light. During the Great Awakening, some of the most striking imagery surrounding the Son of God focused not on the color of his skin but on his broken body. The pietistic Moravians used graphic descriptions of Christ’s bleeding wounds to evangelize Native Americans, who embraced the bloody savior (one Indian woman declared that “her Heart lov’d the Side Hole very much & wish’d to sink yet deeper into it”). This Christ was blood red, not white.

The origins of the white Christ, the authors argue, lie in the 19th century. In the first decades of the century, organizations such as the American Bible Society (established in 1816) and the American Tract Society (established in 1825) flooded the nation with pamphlets and illustrated Bibles that depicted Christ as a white man in an era when debates over slavery and immigration increasingly made whiteness a marker of citizenship. Northern white Protestants mass-produced images that spread along the same canals, railways, and roads that fed the growing markets and expanding borders of the new nation. This white Christ appeared prominently in the revelations of Joseph Smith, father of the era’s most successful new religious movement.

Like many other Americans of his time, Smith may have been indirectly influenced in his description by a medieval forgery, and Blum and Harvey weave the strange history of the “Publius Lentulus letter” into their narrative. The letter, a description of Christ supposedly penned by a Roman governor of Judea, describes Christ as a man with hair the color of a “ripe hazel nut” and a “ruddy complexion.” The Puritans knew the letter was a fraud, as did most Americans well into the 19th century, but the forgery’s appeal grew steadily. As early as the 1830s, the artist Rembrandt Peale called it a “Portrait of Christ.” This false account formed the scaffolding for the construction of the white Christ, but it would be largely forgotten in the 20th century.

Not everyone embraced such a savior, but neither were they free to remake him in their own image. Slaves identified with the white Christ’s suffering and servanthood, and in their tales and visions of him they often shrunk him into “a little man,” a trickster figure who would help them escape slavery or their master’s notice. Yet the economic, industrial, and cultural power of whites assured that material representations of Christ as white worked their way even into the dreams, visions, and churches of non-white people. Nothing illustrates this better than the answers renowned sociologist E. Franklin Frazier received in 1940 when he asked dozens of young black people, “Is God a White Man?” Most thought he was. Thus, when the bomb went off in Birmingham, it was a white Christ that it defaced.

Between 1890 and 1914, nearly 1.5 million Jews emigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe, and a rising tide of anti-Semitism fueled white efforts to distance Christ from his Jewishness. During this period, New York attorney Madison Grant, in an influential book defending the supremacy of “Nordic whites,” argued shakily that Jesus’ Jewish antagonists in the Bible “apparently regarded Christ as, in some indefinite way, non-Jewish” (emphasis added). To Grant, this suggested Christ’s “Nordic, and possibly Greek, physical and moral attributes.” Filmmaker D. W. Griffith agreed, and in his 1916 film Intolerance he treated viewers to a white Christ (played by the same actor who had portrayed Robert E. Lee in his epic Birth of a Nation!) being crucified by dark-skinned Jews.

In the 20th century, the white Christ went global thanks to missionaries, Hollywood, and Warner Sallman. Movies such as Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings (1927) brought the white Christ to life in black and white and resurrected him in Technicolor. Influential as Hollywood was, Warner Sallman may have been an even greater influence on how people pictured Christ. Painted in 1941, Sallman’s iconic Head of Christ had sold 14 million prints within three years. For many, Sallman’s painting became the face they prayed to in their most private moments and saw in their dreams and visions. (A 1958 letter to Christianity Today claimed that the painting bore “a very close resemblance” to the visions the writer had seen of Jesus.)

The most significant challenges to Christ’s whiteness in the 20th century originated from the Civil Rights movement and black liberation theology. Martin Luther King, Jr., stressed Christ’s universal message instead of his race, but others soon took aim directly at the white Christ. Blum and Harvey extend the roots of black liberation theology back far beyond the small group of academics such as Union University’s James Cone, who led the attack in the 1960s. Cone’s declaration that the “white God is an idol, created by racist bastards” may have been shocking, but its charge wasn’t wholly new. Blum and Harvey trace the beginnings of black liberation theology to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, when intellectuals and artists led by the likes of W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes portrayed Christ as a black lynch-victim.

Examining the outrage surrounding the Jeremiah Wright affair during the 2008 election, some of which revolved around Wright’s comment that “Jesus was a poor black man,” Blum and Harvey suggest that the white Christ is still with us. They chronicle his disappearance from sanctuaries of megachurches appealing to interracial audiences, as well as a devotional by evangelist Josh McDowell calling the white Christ a “racist myth.” Yet, Blum and Harvey show, even as “the white Jesus and white privilege were denounced by everyone, … they remained still-powerful material realities,” reproduced on book covers, T-shirts, and in movies and devotional literature. Blum and Harvey compare this situation to the “place of race in conservative politics” in the late 20th century, in which seemingly color-blind language carries loaded racial meanings. “Divorcing word from image,” they write, “white Christians gained the power to present themselves as egalitarian heirs of the civil rights movement and to continue as producers of racial sacred imagery that tied whiteness to godliness. In essence, they could sanctify whiteness without saying a word.”

Blum and Harvey are persuasive, but a somewhat different reading might have emphasized recent work by Christian Smith, Michael Emerson, and Peter Slade, who have documented from different angles how evangelicals generally embrace an individualistic approach to race, in which it is considered more essential to change hearts than to oppose embedded structural injustices, which they assume either don’t exist or will eventually right themselves. Thus, warnings against the “Vidal Sassoon Jesus” in your heart, instead of the one on your T-shirt, are generally considered sufficient. By this reading, many evangelicals are sincere in their intentions to oppose the white Christ, but they fail to reckon with the overwhelming importance of their own economic and cultural power. Blum and Harvey provide ample evidence that this approach is naïve, even willfully so, but little evidence that it is calculating, as the political comparison seems to suggest. Regardless, their book tells a fascinating story that we cannot afford to ignore.

Robert Elder is a Lilly Postdoctoral Fellow and lecturer in the humanities at Valparaiso University.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.