Author: Ophelia Benson

This is the scariest thing I’ve read in awhile, at least locally. Schoolgirls being gassed in Afghanistan is much scarier, but locally the Child Evangelism Fellowship is scary as hell. Good News Clubs are terrifying.

Remember the little girl who told her classmate that she was going to hell? Well that was a Good News Club at work.

Their teacher overheard the increasingly heated exchange. When class resumed, she asked everyone to pay attention. People from different religious backgrounds, she explained, have very different perspectives on certain kinds of issues. Emma, feeling good that she had stood her ground, seemed content with the result. But Ashley was crushed. “You mean they lied to me right here in school?!” she began to cry. “Because that’s what they taught me here! How can they lie?”

Because they aren’t actually part of the school but they seem to be, thus giving small children the impression that they are Teachers telling The Truth.

Because the Good News Club seeks to reach children who in many cases are not old enough to read, a centerpiece of its program is the “wordless book,” a simple picture book intended to convey different Evangelical doctrines…The Good News Club aims to use afterschool facilities as soon as possible after the bell rings. Aside from adding to the convenience for students and parents, this maximizes the possibility of contact with non-participating students. It also has the effect of making it difficult for very young children to distinguish between the Good News Club and the other classes they take in school.

And that’s not just a by-product, it’s part of the point.

The club’s best promoters, as the CEF well understands, are the children themselves. Participating students are instructed to invite their classmates to join the group, and prizes are often given to those who succeed. The group’s focus, indeed, is concentrated on the “un-churched” children more than it is on those already in the fold. “If every public elementary school student in the United Sates could join a Good News Club,” the CEF Web site states, “we could revolutionize our culture in one generation!” In short, the confusion Ashley evinced on the playground about just what her school was teaching her was no accident. It is built into the design of the Good News Club program. The average six-year-old cannot reliably distinguish between programs taught by his/her school and those taught in his/her school; and the CEF may be determined to make use of this fact in order to advance its religious aims.

Bad…but at least schools can say No, right? Parents can say No and the schools can say No. Right?

No.

In 2001, in Good News Club v. Milford Central School, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that to exclude the club on the grounds that it is a religious group is to discriminate against its particular religious viewpoint, in violation of 1st Amendment protections on the freedom of speech. The court also went out of its way to say that it could conceive of no basis for concern about a possible violation of the clause of the 1st Amendment that prohibits the establishment of religion. The author of the court’s majority opinion was Clarence Thomas. It is perhaps interesting to note, in that respect, that in a recent speech before a school group, Justice Thomas reminisced fondly about his own school days when he would see “a flag and a crucifix in each classroom.”

Fucking hell – where have I been? How did I not know about the Milford decision? What a nightmare…

“Milford is a bad decision,” a lawyer for Americans United for Separation of Church and State wrote to my husband. But it “is not going to be overturned right now. The lower courts will all follow it and the Supreme Court in its current configuration is not going to reverse itself on this issue.”

Help help.

Fuambai Ahmadu is really quite creepy.

I am not surprised that the women of Kailahun have taken to the streets to protest what is now becoming a brazen attack by anti-FGM activists against female initiation and excision in Sierra Leone…I have witnessed first-hand the proliferation (and invidiousness) of this alarming multi-million dollar “development” industry, financed largely by western countries and international agencies such as UNICEF, WHO, UNFPA and so on. Faced with a global media onslaught depicting the most insidious and racist types of representations of African men and women witnessed since colonial times and the downright force of anti-FGM campaigns to shame, more and more circumcised African women have come to see and define themselves through these media lenses as “mutilated”.

Lots of emotive language there, along with a fair amount of trendy code. Anti-FGM activists are ‘brazen’ – as if there is something shameful about opposing the mutilation of girls. And then there’s all the sly nonsense about money and scare-quoted ‘development’ and industry and financed and western and international – as if it were Walmart and McDonald’s and Coke teaming up to make a profit from saying girls shouldn’t be mutilated. The disdain for UNICEF, WHO, and UNFPA is odd too. But no problem, just pretend it’s all racist and colonialist and there’s no further need to explain. So her position is that international agencies are, by definition, invidious and racist/colonialist and anti-FGM campaigns are brazen and corrupt (being financed by all those invidious international agencies), while people who mutilate girls are all that is good.

[T]here ought to be some respect and sensitivity to Sierra Leonean women and our culture. The term FGM is offensive, divisive, demeaning, inflammatory and absolutely unnecessary!! As black Africans most of us would never permit anyone to call us by the term “nigger” or “kaffir” in reference to our second-class racial status or in attempts to redress racial inequalities, so initiated Sierra Leonean women (and all circumcised women for that matter) must reject the use of the term “mutilation” to define us and demean our bodies…For those of us who take pride in our culture, our ethnicity, and our female ancestors, which Bondo represents, we must continue to stand up for ourselves and defy any attempt by others, however powerful they may be, to rewrite their own histories onto our bodies, to negate our particularities as they universalize their own.

That ‘as…so’ is completely bogus, obviously, because ‘nigger’ does not work the same way as ‘mutilation’ does. Ahmadu calls herself a scholar but her way of ‘arguing’ is not very scholarly.

Meet theologian-social theorist John Milbank.

Militant atheism or “scientism” is expanding to fill the gap left by the “exhaustion” of secular ideologies such as capitalism, communism and humanism, he suggests. “What’s left to turn into an ideology except for natural science itself?”

That’s a false choice. It assumes that everyone wants an ideology and that the putative exhaustion of his list of putative secular ideologies leaves a ‘gap’ and that the ‘gap’ is something that people want to fill. Some people are attracted to ideologies, but not all people are, and even some people who are attracted to them can learn to outgrow the attraction. He is perhaps extrapolating from himself, perhaps for reasons of self-protection: he is dependent on an ideology, so he wants to think that everyone is, so that he will seem to himself less gullible and pathetic. That’s a very very common ploy of the religious, we know: the ‘huh huh you think you’re so smart but you’re just as religious as I am only more so because your religion is more dogmatic than mine and plus besides you don’t even know it’s a religion so ha.’

Milbank’s 1990 book Theology and Social Theory ‘argues that instead of asking how theology may fit into the conclusions of secular social science, theology should challenge social scientists’ assumptions.’

On reviewing the second edition of the book in 2006, Charles Taylor, emeritus professor of philosophy at McGill University, said: “When the first edition was published, the reaction was one of shock. Now, 15 years on, the shock has worn off; more and more people are questioning the universal competency of secular reason.”

And isn’t that just wonderful. More and more people are questioning the universal competency of secular reason, and turning to theology instead. And? What will that accomplish? In what way is theology a good or useful or humane substitute for secular reason? Oddly, Milbank never actually says, at least not in this piece, which one would think would be a golden opportunity to reach a broad audience.

In 1999, Milbank broadened his thesis into a general challenge to secular dominance in Radical Orthodoxy…”In a sense, we were going on the offensive against secularism,” Milbank says. Radical Orthodoxy argued for a return to Christianity’s medieval roots, when “faith and reason were inseparable”. It used creedal Christianity as a base from which to criticise modern society, culture, politics and philosophy.

Right – just as the pope does, just as the Southern Baptist Convention does, just as Fred Phelps does. Only they don’t so much get a respectful hearing in the Times Higher. Dress up fundamentalism in some academicky robes and hey presto, grown-up people pretend to think it’s sort of kind of vaguely sane.

Habit is a “mediating category” between the purely material (the brain) and the purely mental, Milbank theorises. “When you ask yourself where that habit comes from, you either have to see it as random or as something that has established itself in response to something. Then you can start talking about God.”

Sure, I can, but I don’t see why I should, and I don’t want to. I don’t think it’s interesting to start talking about God then. I think it’s orders of magnitude more interesting to go on talking about where habit comes from, but in a way that really wants to find out, as opposed to pretending to find out by talking about God. ‘God’ is not interesting because ‘God’ doesn’t tell us anything real or illuminating about where habit comes from.

There follows paragraph upon paragraph of banal political musing which is remarkable neither for acumen nor for persuasiveness. Then along comes an ally.

Among Milbank’s proteges is Philip Blond, head of Demos’ progressive conservatism project and a former theology lecturer at the University of Cumbria. The ideas within “Liberality versus Liberalism” informed Blond’s concept of “Red Toryism”…

Oh gawd – it would be – Philip Blond, the postmodern theologian. It’s good to see that he’s sustaining his project of Pervasive Oxymoronism. If there’s anything I love it’s a postmodern theologian who is a progressive conservative Red Tory.

Okay – that’s my six impossible things not long after breakfast taken care of; now for the rest of the day.

Now…about PZ’s elephant allegory. It all depends exactly what it is that Eagletosh is getting up to with those wings and iridescent feathers of many hues. That final question, in particular –

Where do you find meaning and joy and richness and beauty, O Reader? In elephants, or elephants’ wings?

In both. Both, both, both. (Gee, that’s a silly word if you say it more than once.) Absolutely in both. There’s no way I’m going to pick one over the other, or repudiate the elephants’ wings. Always assuming, that is, that Eagletosh is doing what we can loosely call poetry, and not religion. He’s doing some of each in the allegory, so that’s why I say it depends. But to the extent that he is doing what we can loosely call poetry; to the extent that he is making up stories and fantasies about what a magical imagined elephant could be like; and to the extent that he is clear that that is what he is doing; to the extent that he is not making truth-claims about the world – then I find meaning and joy and richness and beauty in both. I get to keep Babar, and the Elephant’s Child, and the mammoth in Ice Age. I guess I’m also stuck with that ridiculous line in ‘Paradise Lost’ – a risible item about how the elephant, to make them mirth, wreathed his proboscis lithe, or something like that. But never mind – it’s worth the freight.

We don’t have to choose. We can have both. We can have ethics without religion, we can have meaning without religion, we can have hope without religion, we can have solidarity without religion, and we can have poetry and fantasy and imaginary iridescent feathers of many hues without religion.

Last February four female journalists in Sierra Leone were attacked, forced to strip and marched through a town by a pro-FGM group.

Witnesses said the four were accused of reporting on an anti-FGM campaign last Friday, which marked the international day of zero tolerance to female circumcision. The women were allegedly abducted by a pro-FGM group in the eastern city of Kenema, then stripped naked and marched through the streets before police and human rights organisations intervened to set them free.

The significance of their being stripped and marched through the streets is of course obvious – it’s the pinching and spitting and shouts of ‘Kintirlee!‘ all over again. The point was to say ‘Look at these disgusting shameful horrible uncut women with their grotesque hideous shocking unfixed genitals.’

Witnesses said the women were forcibly taken to the forest headquarters of the Bondo society, a secret organisation of women which traditionally carries out female genital mutilation as part of initiation rites…Speaking to journalists, the head of the Bondo society, Haja Massah Kaisamba, would not comment on the allegations other than saying the four women were taken into “our custody because they spoke unfavourably on radio against FGM”.

Ah. Well that’s a fairly comprehensive comment right there. It says that people who speak against FGM are subject to being abducted by the Bondo society. What more does she need to say?