THE RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE NEWSLETTER
Volume 1, Issue 6 -- November/December 2000

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The Religious Language Newsletter is written and published every other
month by Suzette Haden Elgin, Ph.D. (linguistics), from the Ozark Center for Language Studies (PO Box 1137, Huntsville, AR 72740-1137 USA; e-mail OCLS@madisoncounty.net). It's available by e-mail only, in plain text, and is free to members of the Lovingkindness Network (annual dues, $5.00). For more information, contact OCLS; thanks to a generous donation, all issues are posted at http://www.forlovingkindness.org.
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IN THIS ISSUE: Editor's Note; Booknotes; The Religion/Science Interface; Cyberscrap; Religious Publishing; In Black and White; Quotes & Comments; Membership Renewals & Gift Memberships.

EDITOR'S NOTE

I had hoped to say something here about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, which most assuredly involves religious language, but the situation keeps changing; anything I might say would probably be irrelevant by the time it reached you. I'm pleased this morning that there seems to be a glimmer of hope, with the announcement that a cease-fire agreement is beginning to be implemented. That is good news, at least, if it turns out to be accurate.

I thank you for all the useful materials and correspondence you've been sending me throughout this past year; I'm very grateful. My best wishes to you one and all for the holiday season, and may the New Year treat you gently.

BOOKNOTES

1. Patrick Madrid has written an interesting book called _Pope Fiction_, from Basilica Press 1999; the ISBN is 0-9642610-0-6. The subtitle is a decorous "Answers to 30 Myths & Misconceptions About the Papacy," and decorum is maintained in the well-written contents, but the punning main title more accurately expresses the author's tone. Suppose you disagree with every other word Madrid writes in this book -- that's certainly possible, since its subject is 30 disputes, most of them passionate and ancient. Even so, I believe you would enjoy reading what he has to say.

Consider the second of the 30 disputations. It defends the Catholic doctrine based on Jesus calling Peter the rock on which he would build his church; it challenges the claim that Paul specifically said that rock was Christ rather than Peter. The section opens with "A lot of Catholics get tripped up on this one. There are some pope fictions that sound very convincing, right out of the box, and this is one of them." The headers in the section are: "Christ rocks the world; Forget about the competition; A rock by any other name is still a rock; Early evidence; The rock that will not roll"; and (reaching across the aisle!) "A Protestant opinion." It's very hard to write this sort of thing without falling into either obscurity or excessive cuteness; Madrid manages nicely. Recommended.

2. I'm very frustrated about Os Guiness' book, _Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don't Think and What To Do About It_ (Hourglass/Baker 1994, ISBN 0-8010-3870-7). There's the awful title, which sets up a contrast between fitness and fatness that can only be called bigotry, because bigotry is what it is. The marketing department may have thought that "fit bodies/fat minds" was cute and would have legs, but where were the editors and the author while this desperate case of Tin Ear Syndrome was sweeping through the place? The book doesn't carry on the "fit versus fat" concept; it comes up in the introduction, where its physical proximity to the chapter title -- "A Scandal and a Sin" -- nicely ties fitness to righteousness and fatness to wretchedness, turning something that was already ugly into something foul; and then it's dropped. (The "sin" turns out to be not fatness, not gluttony, but anti-intellectualism.) The book itself is good -- well written, well argued; it's a shame that the title and cover and introduction set up so distorted a frame for it. What Guinness wants to say is that "evangelicals have chosen to rely on a rhetoric of protest, pronouncement, and picketing rather than persuasion.," and he makes a convincing case for that thesis. Finally, his arguments don't apply only to evangelicals; they apply equally well to anti-intellectuals of any faith or denomination. The Table of Contents goes like this: Part One: A Ghost Mind -- Polarization; Pietism; Primitivism; Populism; Pluralism; Pragmatism; Philistinism; Premellenialism; Part Two: An Idiot Culture -- Amusing ourselves to Death; People of Plenty; All Consuming Images; The Humiliation of the Word; Cannibals of PoMo; Tabloid Truth; Generation Hex; Real, Reel, or Virtually Real?; Part Three: Let My People Think. Recommended in spite of all the mess.

THE RELIGION/SCIENCE INTERFACE

1. My thanks to Hal Davis for forwarding a story by A. S. Berman (from _USA Today_ online for 05/18/00) titled "Scientists share a TASTE for the spiritual." Berman tells us Albert Einstein said "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind. However, "despite such validation from the father of modern physics, scientists who believe they've had religious or paranormal experiences tend to keep quiet about them, for fear of being ostracized by those in their profession.Charles Tart hopes to change all that .Last year, the Berkeley, Calif., psychology professor launched a Web site called The Archives of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences, or TASTE, to give men and women of science a forum in which to share "spiritual" experiences among sympathetic members of the scientific community. ... From the beginning, Tart was adamant that only the experiences of true scientists and medical professionals would grace the site, he says, in part because they alone are trained in the art of objective observation."

Interesting. Here's a man setting up a site to counteract one bias and carefully hedging it with yet another bias; "true scientists" and "true medical professionals" versus the unwashed phony scientists and quacks. Tart has expressed surprise that about half of his contributors have asked to remain anonymous; maybe they're afraid of being exposed as not "true" enough. [You can read the entire story at http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/net012.htm; the TASTE website is at http://www.issc-taste.org/index.shtml.]

2. _Forbes ASAP_ for 10/2/00 has a very interesting essay on page 84 by Sir John Templeton, titled "The New Jerusalem." (I suspect Templeton probably regrets the title now, in the context of the Israeli/Palestinian crisis; it has nothing to do with the content that couldn't have been expressed in other ways.) Templeton says he spent 45 years working to help people get higher profits, and then decided to give 100% of his time and resources to "helping the world build spiritual wealth." He says: "Probably no human has yet learned even 1% of what humans can learn about divinity." His Templeton Foundation now gives more than twenty million dollars every year "to encourage the many entrepreneurs who are trying to increase our base of spiritual information." He wants rigorous scientific investigation of spiritual questions; he wants a way to prove (or disprove) such propositions as that it's better to give than to receive. He believes the return on investments in spiritual/scientific research would be enormously higher than the return we now get on investments in secular/scientific research. [There is much resistance to Templeton's work, by the way; there are many people who feel that looking for proof in a religious context is offensive because faith should suffice.]

3. The 5/1/00 issue of _Newsweek_ (sent by Nancy Burnett) had a lengthy feature on miracles -- "What Miracles Mean," by Kenneth L. Woodward, pp. 54-60. Woodward tells us on page 56 that 84 percent of adult Americans say they believe God performs miracles and 48 percent claim to have personally experienced or witnessed a miracle. The article is followed on page 61 by Philip Hefner's "Why I Don't Believe in Miracles," in which he offers us a statement so simple-minded and so filled with undefined terms that I can't think of anything positive to say about it, as follows: "My interest in science has deepened my appreciation of the difficulties of miracle-talk. The idea that God intervenes in the laws of nature, and then redirects their course, is problematic because it raises the specter of chaos and unpredictablity. If we can't rely on the regularity of nature, most of life becomes impossible... ... Why is God tweaking only certain outcomes and not all? If God is active in all natural events, why don't they turn out better?" Why indeed? If God is tweaking only certain outcomes, and isn't making certain that they turn out "better" as individual humans define "better," no doubt God has good reasons for that.

My favorite candidate for a paradigmatic miracle is the story of the one provided to King Hezekiah. Hezekiah's palace had a staircase that was used to keep time; the sunlight fell on a high step at the beginning of the day and moved down the stairs as the day went by. God makes the sunlight go in the opposite direction, so that it moves ten steps backward up the stairs. In miracles of that rare sort, there are only two choices: (a) it was indeed a miracle, or (b) somebody is deliberately lying.

4. I recommend the "Science Pages" section of the 9-10/99 issue of _Books & Culture_, which begins by focusing on Robert Pennock's book, _Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism_ (MIT Press 1999). Philip Johnson (of the Intelligent Design Movement) argues against Pennock; Pennock responds. Here's a sample from Pennock, on page 32:

"The only new item in Johnson's article is his acknowledgment that language evolves. This is an important admission... Traditional creationists do reject linguistic evolution, and for the same reason they reject biological evolution, because it goes against a plain reading of Genesis, which states that God specially created the different languages in the great confusion of Babel. I discuss this case, because the theory of the evolution of languages matches that of the evolution of biological species in all of its most significant elements... No one designed English, or any other natural language."

5. Although the focus of this article is not strictly on science, I think it belongs here; if you haven't yet read it, please do read "The Opening of the Evangelical Mind," by Alan Wolfe, on pp. 55-76 of the 10/00 _Atlantic Monthly_. On page 76, Wolfe quotes George Marsden, asking this question: "Why are there in mainstream academia almost no identifiable Christian schools of thought to compare with various Marxist, feminist, gay, postmodern, African-American, conservative, or liberal schools of thought?" [You can read this piece online at http:// www.theatlantic.com/evangelical, where you'll also find interviews with scholars discussed by Wolfe and some links to additional resources.]

6. There's a very interesting book written by Paul Davies titled _God and the New Physics_ (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster 1983); the ISBN is 0-761-52806-8. Davies takes up all the usual questions that have to do with conflict between science and religion -- free will, miracles, creation by accident or design, and so on -- and he covers them from a historical viewpoint as well as the viewpoint(s) of scientific theory. Here's a quote from pp. 45-46, to give you an idea of how he goes about it.

"The God who is outside time is regarded as 'creating' the universe in the more powerful sense of 'holding it in being at every instant.' Instead of God simply starting the universe off (a belief known as deism rather than theism) a timeless God acts at all moments. ... Roughly speaking, the laws of physics are apparent to us as regularities in the way things happen... When we press the brake pedal in a moving car we expect the car to slow down. When we ignite gunpowder we expect it to explode. We expect a hot flame to melt a block of ice, or a hard floor to smash a falling vase. ... From our limited perspective within spacetime we interpret these regularities in terms of cause and effect; the sun's activity causes the Earth's orbit to curve, and so on. But there is an alternative possibility -- that every event is actually caused by God, operating on the universe from outside, carefully arranging the events to display the regularities."

CYBERSCRAP

1. A new videogame by Peter Molyneaux, coming out from Lionhead Studios, is described roughly as follows: You are an omnipotent deity, and the worse you treat your worshippers the more they will try to appease you with offerings. When it was being tested, Molyneaux reports, "most people who tested the game could not bring themselves to be utterly evil. There may yet be hope for the human race." ["The Fall Lineup," b Chris Taylor, _Time Digital_ for 9/00, pp.76-77; on page 77.]

RELIGIOUS PUBLISHING

1. I was surprised by two articles from the 5/29/00 issue of _Publishers Weekly_: "Heaven and Hearth," by Marcia Z. Nelson (pp. S4-S6) and "Devoted to Devotionals," by Kimberly Winston (pp. S13-S15). I would never have guessed that one of the hottest topics in religious nonfiction publishing today is "practical spirituality," especially in the "domestic spirituality" subcategory. As in "How do we find the Divine in the office, the backyard, the grocery store?" (Page S4). It amazes me to read that devotionals -- especially the kind offering one section a day for 365 days -- are so popular that bookstores have trouble keeping them on their shelves. This is said to be true for all denominations (and for Protestants, Catholics, and Jews -- nothing said about Muslims or other faiths), with an estimated 80-90% of readers being women. Sales figures quoted for devotionals are routinely 500,000 and on up, into the millions. Popularity is also growing for shorter versions -- 30 to 60 days -- because, the articles report, people feel guilty if they miss a day, and the 365-day commitment can be hard to fulfill. People feel guilty if they miss a day.... That surprises me too. (My thanks to Frances Green for the copies.)

IN BLACK AND WHITE

In the religious language of Judaism and Christianity, one of the most troublesome effects comes from the persistent equation of "white" with everything good and pure and holy, and the equation of "black" with everything evil. Sins are black; black sheep commit them; redemption washes them white as snow. If you're a colorless child all that has one effect; if you're a black child, it has quite another. And the terrain of this phenomenon stretches far beyond church and Bible; children who have no contact whatsoever with overtly religious situations will still find it everywhere in their language environment. Item #1 below is an example of this reach; Item #2 discusses a very new (and to my mind, very befuddled) current movement to reverse the equation.

1. "Frequently enough in my boyhood during the 1950s and 60s, some black person, during the holiday season, would complain about the whiteness of Christmas, that Christmas, if not an inherently racist idea, had become an added oppressive weight in the lives of African-Americans. Irving Berlin's 'White Christmas' was regarded in some quarters with a kind of measured irony; here was a song not about weather but about culture. People would say, 'That line "and may all your Christmases be white" is the white man's hope for the future.' "

This comes from "Dreaming of a Black Christmas," by Gerald Early, pp. 55-61; the quote is on page 57. Early's subhead is "Kwanzaa bestows the gift of therapy," and he discusses Kwanzaa intensively in the essay, unable to decide whether he can wholeheartedly support it or not. He acknowledges that Kwanzaa can offer some relief from the incessant equation of whiteness with goodness in our popular culture; it can offer some relief from an obligation to _celebrate_ whiteness; it can give children of color some treasured memories that aren't indexed under "whiteness." He has objections....the holiday seems contrived, its seven principles are neither a philosophical system nor a theology; Kwanzaa doesn't move him yet, and yet he can see its value. Recommended.

2. _Books & Culture_ has recently been discussing capital-W Whiteness (as in "White studies," for example). In "No Exit?" (pp. 18-19 of the 11-12/00 issue), Susan Wise Bauer tells us on page 18 that "The language of Whiteness is, more often than not, explicitly religious." She quotes Jane Lazarre (from _Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness_), claiming that whiteness is 'a burden which can be redemptive' if white Americans are willing to be born again. "What race scholars offer to well-intentioned whites," Bauer says, "is the equivalent of a religious conversion. ... Admit that you wronged all non-Whites by your very existence. Society will be changed by White admission of guilt, and by White acceptance of a new central story around which Whites can build new lives. But practically speaking, this admission of White guilt is made nearly impossible -- because no atonement can ever be made for the sin of Whiteness. ... White students who admit their complicity in Whiteness are offered no option but to live forever in a state of ongoing abject repentance, with guilt as an ever-present roommate. ... There's no way out."

I don't believe that those investigating the contrast between what is happening to Blacks in our society and what is happening to other people of color pay nearly enough attention to the effects of religious language, where the saturation with blackness in the vocabulary of evil is a constant toxin. And I don't think that trying to tack a semantic feature [+GUILT] onto the vocabulary of whiteness (or Whiteness) is going to do anything more than create additional poisonous confusion.

QUOTES & COMMENTS

1. I bought the Fall/Winter 1999 issue of a magazine called _What Is Enlightenment?_ because of its cover display -- big bright upper-case type reading: "Men's Liberation? Women's Liberation? Gay Liberation? How free do we want to be?" The content is uneven -- some spectacularly good, some pedestrian -- and there seems to be a struggle between the marketing department and the editorial department throughout. There's an interview with Mary Daly in which Daly seems so combative that I was startled. Here's a sample from "Could Christ have been a woman?", an interview with Fr. Basil Pennington conducted by Simeon Alev, pp. 78-87 and 143-146, on page 87. The question asked was "Is it conceivable to you that Christ could have been a woman?"

"In his time and place? No. I mean, look, he had a hard enough time as a man! Could he today? Well, yes, if God had chosen this as the time and place for the Incarnation, I think it could have been possible -- though I sitll suspect he probably would have chosen to be male because the contemporary world is still far from being a place where a female Incarnation would be universally accepted. ....I think the great thing will be when women...can really lead and help society to move ahead. But we're still a good way from that as far as I can see, in this country and probably every other country in the world."

Yes. Let us all rise and point out the undeniable fact that most Americans, whatever their gender, do not find it conceivable the the President of the United States could be a woman.

2. _Christianity Today_ for 9/4/00 had a piece on page 27 titled "What Would Andy Do?", written by Corrie Cutrer, all about a new Bible-study series based on _The Andy Griffith Show_. "Since its release in May 2000, churches and ministries have purchased over 6,000 copies of the video-and-study-guide series." Software engineer Joey Fan started the series for his own church; Thomas Nelson Publishing came along and picked it up for nationwide distribution and will soon be bringing out a second series. Why _Christianity Today_ felt obliged to point out in this half-page piece that most of the show's writers were Jewish I cannot imagine; it's very ecumenical of them.

3. Ralph Wilson preaches "the gospel of shrining"; he "re-named himself Mr. Shrine, formed a company he calls Shrinerite Productions, ...was hired to teach shrine-making courses at art museums, community centers, and service organizations around the country. Now he offers a line of mail-order shrine-making kits through his Web site..." This is from "Highway to Heaven," by Andy Steiner, on pp. 28-29 of the 5-6/00 _Utne Reader_; the quotes are from page 28. Steiner says roadside shrines have been around in the Southwest for generations, where they're called "descansos, or resting places" and have begun spreading over the rest of the country.

I understand why highway departments and police departments would have objections to roadside shrines; I can understand how the practice might cause traffic problems, even accidents; I can understand that "shrine regulations" might be hard to write and even harder to enforce. But I dislike the objection made by Archbishop David Hope of the Church of England, who has "charged that the growing interest in public memorials... has ushered in a new era of hyterically maudlin reminiscences." One human's maudlin is another human's heartfelt.

4. Sally Lloyd sent me an AP story by Richard N. Ostling, titled "Book examines fundamentalism's forms," from the 4/1/00 _Lansing State Journal; the book discussed is Karen Armstrong's _The Battle for God_, published by Knopf. Ostling writes that fundamentalism "is a slippery term that is rejected by many of those commonly grouped under that label. Armstrong admits the difficulties of defining it, but writes that it's an apt designation for 'embattled forms of spirituality, which have emerged as a response to a perceived crisis,' namely the fear that modernity will eradicate faith and morality. ... In true fundamentalism, tolerance is sin."

I find that definition especially intriguing given the pervasiveness in fundamentalism of war metaphors and the language of combat. For an extraordinary example of what I mean, go to http://www.worthynews.com and read the story by Debbie Piper titled "Piper says prayer is essential in battling spiritual warfare." That's John Piper, giving a Carver-Barnes Lecture at a theological seminary and saying things like this: "The number one reason prayer doesn't work for saints is because we have taken a wartime walkie-talkie and turned it into a domestic intercom." He complains that "people have simply stopped believing that life is war" and pleads for a return to that belief and its practice. (My thanks to Pat Mathews for forwarding the copy.)

**MEMBERSHIP RENEWALS & GIFT MEMBERSHIPS**

This is the final issue for the year 2000; thanks for being a network member this year. Dues for 2001 are $5.00, to OCLS, PO Box 1137, Huntsville AR 72740-1137, before January 1, 2001. Gift memberships for next year are 3 for $10.00; send me your list of e-mail addresses and I'll follow through. I'll be happy to send gift cards for you by post if you get all the relevant information to me by November 15th. Just be sure you tell me which holiday the gift is for and what gift message you want sent; and be sure to send both e-mail and postal addresses. If you prefer that I send the gift message by e-mail, I'll be glad to do that instead. Thank you.

Copyright © 2000 Suzette Haden Elgin
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E-mail newsletters by Suzette Haden Elgin for 2001 will be: _The Linguistics & Science Fiction Newsletter_; _The Religious Language Newslet- ter_; and _The Verbal Self-Defense Newsletter_. Each $5.00 a year for six issues, by e-mail. Information and a free sample issue from OCLS@madisoncounty.net.