Category Archives: Interview

HELL IN AMERICA

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Here’s my interview with Kathryn Gin Lum.  Lum teaches at Stanford University.  She recently wrote, Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction.

Moore: This is an arresting piece of work.  What motivated you to tackle this issue?

Gin Lum: Thank you. A death in the family spurred me to think about the historical processes that influenced the ways Americans think about death and what, if anything, comes after. My research led me to realize how much Americans have thought about hell and how little scholars have taken their thoughts seriously. We’re often looking for other, this-worldly reasons to explain the ways people act—money-mongering, power-plays, etc. In this kind of framing, belief in hell comes across as both banal and bizarre. But it was (and is) powerful and powerfully connected to this-worldly motivations and inequalities. So I was driven by these questions: What did it mean to believe, as many Americans did, that the majority of the world was damned, but you were not? What did it mean to believe that your salvation might be linked to your ability to save others? How did this influence day-to-day life, race relations, and political behavior? And how might we view American history differently when we take the fear of hell seriously?

Moore: Many years ago, Professor Harry Stout of Yale mentioned that spending so much time reading Puritan sermons forced him to think much more about his own mortality.  Did your work on this sobering subject have any such impact?

Gin Lum: Great question. So many of the historical figures I engaged with believed in their interpretations of hell with absolute conviction, and yet so many of them ended up at complete odds. I think my research actually reassured me that right now, we’re all just seeing through a glass darkly. The best we can do is to have humility about what we don’t know and live well towards others.

Moore: Why didn’t the Enlightenment quash belief in hell for Americans where it did for Europeans?

Gin Lum: The new nation was an experiment in republican polity, and as such, people were nervous. Without a monarch, what would keep the masses in line? Evangelicals argued that God must remain the monarch of the nation, and that any transgressions against Him would be punished, just as would be the case with an earthly monarch. But while a temporal monarch could only wield the threat of death, an eternal God could and should punish eternally.

The disestablishment of state churches also helped hell to survive. In an atmosphere where different religious groups were forced to compete for converts, the hell-wielding groups had a weapons advantage, so to speak.

But hell was never just about social control. It also survived because ordinary Americans found the idea of hell compelling. It raised the stakes of day-to-day life, powered social reform movements, and promised to right inequalities faced on earth. 

Speaking of inequalities, a final reason I would offer for hell’s survival is the monstrous inequality of slavery in antebellum America. The threat of hell provided the strongest possible language for slavery’s opponents and its supporters to condemn each other, as well as the institution itself.

Moore: In what ways were some Americans beginning to rethink their belief in hell?

Gin Lum: Some Americans turned to Universalism in the eighteenth century, certain that a just God could never condemn any of His creatures to eternal hell. Universalism continued to persuade some in the nineteenth century, but a host of compromise positions also arose to nuance the starkness of eternal hell without going as far as complete rejection. These alternatives included Spiritualism and Swedenborgianism, which blurred the boundaries between this life and the next; Mormonism, which offered a hierarchical afterlife with more gradations than the binary heaven and hell; and annihilationism, which framed hell as a lake of fire that completely extinguished the damned instead of torturing them eternally.

Moore: The Civil War challenged every American’s beliefs.  Andrew Delbanco famously said prior to the war Americans believed in the providence of God, but after the war they believed in luck.  Even some war chaplains reevaluated some of their Christian beliefs.  Would you unpack that some for us?

Gin Lum: Chaplains began the war thinking that it was a great missionary opportunity that would force men to think seriously about their salvation. They warned them that death in combat wouldn’t ensure heaven afterwards. But the sheer scale of death in the Civil War softened their and many other Americans’ attitudes toward eternal hell. Dying for the country came to be seen as sufficient sacrifice for a heavenly reward. How could chaplains tell grieving loved ones otherwise?

Moore: Did the challenges to the traditional teaching of hell affect Christian missions?

Gin Lum: Christian missionaries were deeply motivated by the conviction that they were saving the world from the fires of hell. So if anything, challenges to the traditional teaching of hell made them all the more certain that the world, including their own nation, needed saving. But Christian missions also affected the traditional teaching of hell. Their writings exposed more Americans to the vast numbers of people—both on the continent and overseas—who did not subscribe to Protestantism. While missionaries cited such numbers to elicit sympathy for their cause, others started to look at these numbers and wonder whether God might allow alternate paths to salvation instead.

 

 

BODY BY GOD

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It is undeniable that God has housed us in bodies.  It is also undeniable that these bodies affect what we typically label our “souls” or “spirits.” Many times during the course of the day we are reminded of this fact. Migraines make it more challenging to pray.  Pushing ourselves during a workout can make depression recede.  We need help in this area as the much written about Gnostic tendencies of many modern-day Christians continues apace.

Breakthroughs in technology and research are allowing us to peer more deeply into our physical selves.  Rob Moll’s new book, What Your Body Knows About God (http://www.amazon.com/What-Your-Body-Knows-About/dp/0830836772/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8) is a well-written and accessible account.

Moll is an award-winning author, editor-at-large with Christianity Today, and communications officer to the president of World Vision.

Moore: As a young Christian I read Being Human (http://www.amazon.com/Being-Human-Nature-Spiritual-Experience/dp/0830815023) during a time of study at L’Abri in Switzerland.  It helped me understand the ever-present Gnostic tendency in American Christianity.  How does your book remind us that bodies are not bad things, but divinely designed for a purpose?

Moll: What Your Body Knows About God is a celebration of our bodies, created in God’s image. We ought to marvel and be filled with awe as we understand just how God has created us, and how God’s design leads us toward worship, love, and a better life.

For example, you mentioned that exercise can stave off depression. So does prayer. Prayer also leads us to be more compassionate. Not just because being closer to God makes us more like God in a spiritual sense. But prayer stimulates parts of our brains involved in compassion. We also have these mirror neurons that help us mimic the expressions and behavior of other people. So we can literally feel what another person is feeling. We can actually love our neighbors as ourselves, because God gave us the biology to do so. It is inspiring and motivating to realize this.

Moore: Did your previous book, The Art of Dying (http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Dying-Living-Fully/dp/0830837361) affect your motivation to write What Your Body Knows About God?

Moll: Absolutely. I can’t tell you how many times I would hear people at a funeral say something like, “Well the body is just a shell. She’s still with us.” When you’ve got the flu you don’t say your body has the flu, but the real you doesn’t so you might as well finish mowing the lawn. No, when your body has the flu, you have the flu. When your loved one has died, you grieve because you can’t be with that person any more. We mourn and weep because someone’s death isn’t just a death of the body. It is a death of the person. And our hope is not in a disembodied life in heaven. Our hope is in the resurrection of our bodies.

What I realized working in a funeral home and with hospice patients was that people who tend to deal well with grief, people who mourn productively, are those who deal with the body. Regarding death, they have a funeral with a body present; they carry the body to the grave and lower it into the ground. They might put a shovel full of dirt on top of the casket. They do things that recognize the body matters, and when we deal with the body in this way we deal with grief much more productively. So, I wanted to pursue a book that looked at why our bodies are so essential to our spiritual lives.

Moore: What encouragement would you give to those who feel that they have irreparably abused their bodies?

Moll: Our bodies are not static. If we have done something to abuse our bodies, that changes us. It can change us deeply. But it doesn’t have to be permanent. An addict may always be affected by the substance they abused, but we can overcome addictions. We can take steps toward changing ourselves in positive ways.

The brain is plastic. Everything we learn gets encoded into our brains by the growth and development of neurons. Our neurons are constantly growing and changing; therefore we are changing too. If the stroke victim can learn to walk or the 80-year-old can learn to play the piano–and they can–we can take advantage of our plastic brains and change for the better.

Moore: You have a wonderful section on how beauty affects us.  How important is it that we pause and consider that we are created with five senses?

Moll: Our brains process information by slicing it into pieces and storing it in different parts of the brain. In fact, one brain researcher says the brain processes information like a blender with the lid off, spraying data all over the inside of our skulls.

This matters for our worship. We often want people to remember a lesson from Sunday, so church is often like a class. But classrooms are terribly designed for learning. If we want people to remember things, if we want them to have meaningful experiences in church that go on to make a difference in their lives, then we need to do more than give them pieces of information.

That’s where beauty comes in. Since our brains are splicing up all this data, the more data we have the better. We can much better remember information that makes use of all our senses. A story, a theological truth, combined with visual beauty, a smell, music, and movement (like crossing ourselves) can turn a dry fact into something rich with meaning and value. In other words, the cathedral will always beat out the mega church as a site for worship.

Moore: How do habits help us utilize our bodies in productive ways?

Moll: We have two brains: our intuitive brain and our rational brain. The vast majority of our thinking happens intuitively, without our consciously paying attention. We’ve all found ourselves pulling into the driveway and suddenly realizing that we hadn’t been paying any attention to how we got there. Our brain has been on autopilot. That’s not a good thing when we are driving, but it is a totally normal thing. Our brains want to be so good at processing routine tasks that more and more of our thinking is on autopilot.

That’s why spiritual disciplines help us so much. They take an activity and use it to put spirituality on autopilot. We learn to pray automatically about whatever confronts us in our day. We develop discipline around our cravings because we fast. We learn to hold our possessions loosely because we tithe. Our faith shouldn’t be thoughtless, but if we are to become more like Christ we need the disciplines to make Christlikeness normal and natural.

Moore: A number of findings show that depression can be greatly helped by regular exercise, eating well, and consistent sleep.  This certainly does not discount the wise use of drugs at times, but how can we better encourage the depressed to avail themselves of non-chemical treatments?

Moll: It is my understanding that for people with minor depression, prayer is as effective as medication. And prayer’s side effect is merely greater compassion! However, sometimes our bodies or our brains simply aren’t functioning correctly. So we they need medical help. That’s okay too.

My concern isn’t really whether people use chemical or non-chemical treatments. My concern is that our culture and our churches pressure people to behave in “normal” ways–often ways that are unhealthy and that contribute to their anxiety or depression. We have little patience for people who might be suffering from some mental health or other health problem. Something like twenty percent of people are currently prescribed behavioral medication. (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/healthcare/health/healthcare/story/2011-11-16/Report-1-in-5-of-US-adults-on-behavioral-meds/51241236/1) That’s one in five people.

So for me the question isn’t whether or not they should get chemical help. (They should get help that works!) The real question is not what are they doing but what are we doing? How are we caring for our loved ones, our neighbors, our friends at church who are suffering from anxiety, depression, or other disorders? How are we helping them to live well? There’s a pretty good chance that fewer people would need medication if more church members lived compassionately.

Moore: Most of us have taken the transformation spoken of in Rom. 12:1,2 as simply a metaphor of sorts.  Do you think recent research about the malleability of the brain (neuroplasticity) is showing that there actually is a physical change to our thinking organ which comes from repeated behaviors?

Moll: We take these verses as a metaphor, but I’m not sure Paul did. He wrote that we should be transformed by the renewing of our minds. When you read about the effects of prayer on our brains and how compassion leads to healthy lives, how the good life–scientifically speaking–is one lived with empathy for others and is filled with a sense of meaning and purpose, then you start to think that the biblical writers knew a lot more than we give them credit for.

So, yes, research is showing that whether or not Paul intended to use a metaphor, he didn’t need to. Our spiritual lives–especially when we engage Scripture, worship, and prayer with all of our attention–will literally transform our brains.

We can become spiritual because we are made physical.

CHURCHILL AS AUTHOR, READER, ACTOR

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The following interview was done with the award-winning historian, Jonathan Rose.  Rose teaches at Drew University.

Moore: Books about Winston Churchill abound. In light of the glutted Churchillian landscape, what motivated you to write this particular book?

Rose: Literature is the one aspect of Churchill’s life that hardly anyone has explored in any depth.  And yet, even before he entered Parliament, he had established himself as a tremendously popular author.  He wrote history, biography, war reportage, literary criticism, futurology, even a novel.  Moreover, his political agenda was profoundly shaped by what he read and wrote.  So Churchill is too important to be left to the political historians: you won’t fully understand him unless you study him as a man of letters.

Moore: I was surprised to learn how much Churchill utilized various insights gained from studying the American Civil War.  Would you unpack that some for us?

Rose: His American grandfather, Leonard Jerome, was part-owner of the New York Times and a supporter of the Union cause, even in the face of the Draft Riots of 1863.  So he was an inspiration for Winston, who saw no clear boundaries between warfare and journalism.  And in his lifelong struggle to preserve the British Empire, Churchill’s model was the Civil War, which he viewed as a successful effort to preserve the American Empire.  He didn’t quite see that there were important differences between the two cases.

Moore: It is fascinating to see how much the theater influenced Churchill in his various public roles.  Describe that a bit.

Rose: All his life he was a passionate theatergoer.  He learned his brilliant oratorical skills by watching actors at work.  As a parliamentary performer, he was always on stage and in character.  And his distinctive wit owed much to his two favorite dramatists, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.  The theatre offered Churchill a script for political action: as Home Secretary he enacted penal reforms after seeing John Galsworthy’s prison drama Justice.  And though he never wrote a play, his history of the Second World War is written with a fine sense of drama, timing, and climax.

Moore: Ecclesiastes 12:10 speak of the preacher searching “to find just the right words.”  Churchill spent much time getting his words right.  What can we learn from his care and concern over language?

Rose: He dictated most of his books and speeches to a secretary, then he would grab the typescript from her and scribble extensive revisions in ink.  That’s why his writing had an oratorical resonance.  Sometimes, when delivering a speech, he would appear to hesitate, grope for the right word, and inevitably hit on it.  But that was an act: in fact his speeches were carefully scripted.  There he was poles apart from today’s politicians, who robotically repeat catchphrases pretested on focus groups.

Moore: You mention some of the favorite books of both Churchill and Hitler.  It is interesting to see Don Quixote listed as one of Hitler’s favorite books.  Did more grandiose stories spark Hitler’s imagination?

Rose: Hitler read compulsively: racist tracts, creepy occult books, and Wild West stories by Karl May, a German author who never ventured west of Buffalo, New York. He loved The Merchant of Venice, and (still more chillingly) his personal library included a booklet on poison gas.

Moore: Political conservatives love to retrieve Churchill for inspiration, but most don’t seem to know of Churchill’s concern over what we call today, “crony capitalism.”  Why is this particular concern of Churchill’s not well known?

Rose: This was a crusade that Churchill launched early in his political career, before 1906, and it drove him to repudiate the Conservative Party.  Inspired by Adam Smith, he believed in free market capitalism tempered by a social safety net, but he was deeply hostile to any form of corporate welfare.  In fact, if libertarian conservatives and Tea Partiers knew better this side of Churchill, they would admire him even more.

Moore: Churchill was not completely alone in appreciating the threat of Nazism, but many did not.  What made Churchill so prescient?

Rose: Churchill always hated totalitarian regimes, starting with the schools he attended.  And you could say he recognized the threat of Nazism when Hitler was still a schoolboy.  Churchill’s 1899 novel, Savrola, was a third-rate political melodrama, but also uncannily farsighted: it’s about a brilliant orator who fights an unspeakably wicked Middle European dictator.  So when the actual Hitler appeared on the political stage, Churchill leapt into the heroic role he had created thirty years earlier.

Moore: One of David McCullough’s favorite books is Churchill’s little book on painting.  Painting was more than a hobby for Churchill, wasn’t it?

Rose: Certainly, it was also therapy.  The Gallipoli fiasco plunged him into a deep depression, and painting pulled him out of it.  It gave him a sense of control when his life was spinning apart.  He compared composing a work of art to planning a military campaign – except that when you brush paint on a canvas, it stays put.

Moore: Many reading this interview are Christians.  Many minister in various full-time vocational capacities.  What are a few things these folks could benefit from in reading your book?

Rose: They may be surprised to learn that Churchill grappled seriously and deeply with theological questions.  He wasn’t a conventional Christian, but he always had a clear moral vision and fought for it relentlessly.