At the Washington Post’s “Under God” blog, a story about how the Seventh-Day Adventist church guards its trademark—even against other Adventists.
This has got me thinking: will all religions end up trademarked? Do you need intellectual-property lawyers and copyright lawyers to be a “real religion”?
Imagine trademarking “Witch.” Someone in Salem, Mass., is probably thinking about it already.
Prompted to write on “Muslim-Christian relations” for the Washington Post’s “On Faith” section, Jason Pitzl-Waters changed the terms of the usual interfaith conversation and “spoke truth to power,” thus:
These events are the sad fruits of mixing raw social and political power with religions that operate on a exclusionary, one-true-path, basis. What you see in Iraq or Egypt is just the extreme and violent form of a sickness that has haunted history since the now-dominant monotheisms rose to prominence and power [emphasis added].
He then linked to his piece on Facebook and at his Wild Hunt blog.
Right away some concern troll pops up asking, “Of course, you don’t address why a fair number of Pagans, who belong to a supposedly tolerant and diverse community of non-monotheists, are also in the anti-Muslim camp.”
It’s all about [nasty Western] imperialism, you see.
Sure. Take Persia (Iran) for example, the center of a major empire for centuries. Then conquered by the Muslim Arabs in the eighth century, who killed off most of the native Zoroastrian priests and imposed Islam at the point of the sword. Reconquered by the Muslim Tamerlane, who piled up thousands of skulls whenever someone “questioned his authoritah.”
Seriously, I think we are in the “anti-Muslim camp” because we know well that thousands of Muslims want us either (a) converted to their One True Way or (b) dead. Those are your choices.
Look what happens when a “moderate” politician in Pakistan questions that country’s draconian anti-blasphemy laws, which make it criminal to say anything remotely bad about Islam—although you can insult Hindus, Christians, and, I suppose, even Wiccans to your heart’s content.
When he is murdered, his killer is a hero to lawyers (!) and to religious leaders. (Read the dead governor’s last Twitter here.)
I have to wonder, when you drive through Islamabad or Lahore, are there billboards?
Know a Blasphemer?
Call our confidential tip line: 1-8oo-OFF-HEAD
Allah will reward you (and so will the government)!
Is a thorough knowledge of blasphemy law a way to riches in the Pakistani legal profession, like being an expert in water law is here in Colorado?
• • •
One of my favorite scholars of new religious movements, Bob Ellwood, wrote a book late in his career called Cycles of Faith: The Development of the World’s Religions.
He set forth a sort of “lifespan development” theory of religion, in which all the biggies go through the same stages, even as humans go through infancy, childhood, adolescence, etc.
It seems too pat, but it’s appealing, at least when looking at Christianity and Islam.
Ellwood argues that Islam now is where Christianity stood in the 16th century, in the “reformation” stage. And that was the era of the witch trials and of religious wars up and down Europe with aftershocks that carried into the Americas and even followed European explorers and settlers into Africa and South Asia.
Islam, he argues “is in fact displaying many of the initial characteristics of the Reformation period in the history of a world religion. There is a response to secularizing trends, an inward fervor, the early desire to create an ideal society, the emergence of a new kind of elite.” In this case, Islamic thinkers see decay in the Muslim world and blame it all on “the West” (and on the Jews, naturally).
So the concern troll above is just parroting that line: everything the matter in the Islamic world is the fault of “the West.”
Ultimately, Ellwood suggests, the blood-letting recedes, and we move into the era of Folk Religion, when a dominant religion becomes disconnected from the concerns of the political elites—except when convenient. That is where he places Western Christianity now.
I find the book interesting although I distrust Grand Intellectual Schemes. And I doubt that I will live long enough to see the end of the bloody Islamic “reformation,” which because I am a Western Pagan, represents a very real threat to my health and well-being if it comes too close.
Lucky for Jason Pitzl-Waters, there are no blasphemy laws in America, and the very fact that the Washington Post solicits his views shows that religion is not something we kill people over in America, usually.
Heather Abraham at Religion Nerd (in the sidebar) lists the most outrageous religion videos of 2010.
Included is the Christine O’Donnell “I’m not a witch” clip that prompted so many Wiccan responses and parodies. “Dabble-gate,” as Jason Pitzl-Waters calls it, also made it to number three on his top ten Pagan news stories of 2010 list.
But I agree with Abraham that the best video was a well-researched rap video based on Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, complete with reference to Philip of Hesse. Which is really fun if you are, in fact, a religion nerd.
Taken several years ago with tribal permission, this Taos News photo shows the dancers led by former pueblo governor Ruben Romero.
You hear different languages. There are French tourists, German tourists, and some guy in a Rasta tam. Another man looks like he came straight from the nearby Overland Sheepskin Co. store, pausing only to snip the tags off his coat.
I am not the only one in the artsy Anglo uniform of broad-brimmed hat, colorful muffler or scarf, and sunglasses. M. wears her leather jacket and dangling Hopi earrings—another Southwestern look. Scattered piles of ash from the bonfires of Christmas Eve, when they process the Virgin with fireworks and rifle shots.
The air smells of piñon pine smoke mixed with coal smoke. The Indian crafts shops on the ground floor of the old Taos Pueblo are doing a modest business. (Tribal members are required to spend part of each year in the old 13th-century buildings, sans indoor plumbing.)
Old Tony Reyna, a former Taos Pueblo governor, crosses the open ground, a red blanket around his shoulders, leaning on an ornate staff, and his elbow held by a younger man. He is a Bataan Death March survivor—so many of them were New Mexicans. (Jeez, he survived that.) But his appearance is not the signal.
Eventually, you see the phalanx of dancers pass by way up at the east end of the plaza. They pass behind the North House and . . . nothing happens.
Half an hour or so goes by. Then they appear between some houses and the church, and somehow people know to follow them to a little side area. There is a string band, El Abuelo and La Abuela, the little girl (La Malinche in some versions), El Monarca (the king, sometimes Moctezuma.)
No Cortés. El Toro (the bull) is a bison. This is Taos, after all.
The masked dancers wear veils—a curtain of black cords—and thin scarves wrapped to hide their lower faces, tied behind their heads. They carry small canister rattles wrapped in flowing scarves in one hand and a sort of small, decorated wooden trident in the other. Multicolor shawls cover their shoulders and streamers flow down their backs.
The dancers take direction from El Abuelo, the Grandfather. He wears an old man’s mask with a long beard and is dressed like an old-fashioned Hispano rancher: blue jeans, shirt and leather vest, straw hat, and bullwhip, which he snaps for punctuation. He shouts in Spanish His partner is La Abuela, Grandmother, definitely a man, in a head scarf and long skirt, carrying a capacious handbag, who takes special care of the little girl in the princess costume who might be La Malinche. Or maybe not.
El Toro and La Abuela bring out a pole, like a Maypole but with woven sashes tied end to end descending instead of ribbons. The musicians play, the Bull and and the Grandfather hold up the pole—I could go all structuralist here: Bull, Axis Mundi.
Everything means many things, I am sure, and the important thing is just to be there in your body, not to worry about “what it means.”
At the end, El Abuelo shouts, “Le gustan?” (“You like it?”). Everyone applauds, and the dancers go into a house. The crowd disperses, but some people in the know are walking towards the adobe church of San Geronimo.
Half a dozen old ladies, some in blankets, are lined up on the postage-stamp size stone-paved courtyard, surrounded by a low adobe wall. It is a good principle that where the old ladies are is where something will happen—and it will happen when they all get there.
Gradually people assemble around the outside of the wall. Half a dozen straight-backed chairs are brought out of the adobe church. Two at the church end of the court yard, two opposite, just inside the gate. A couple off to one side.
Waiting. My feet hurt. What about the feet of the old women standing on sandstone slabs? Our Taos friends leave to go tend to their dogs. We will see them later.
And then the dancers arrive again, processing through the courtyard gate. The fiddler and guitarist sit in the two chairs at the church end and resume their tune, while the dancers form two files and dance various twirling figures, cowboy boots clomping on the slabs, while El Abuelo snaps his bullwhip and shouts, “Vámanos” (“Let’s go!”), etc.
La Abuela guides the little girl, and at one point the she and the king sit in chairs at the gateway end. A middle aged blanket-wrapped Indian man occasionally calls instructions in a loud whisper: “She’s got to be behind him!” and so on. He must be the real master of ceremonies.
Low, weak sun. It is chilly in the shade. Lucky people with pueblo connections stand on flat roofs looking down into the courtyard. Occasionally a woman will step up to the line of dancers to straighten the streams on (her son’s?) headdress.
We are spiraling past the solstice, and the dancers keep turning and turning. Most headdresses are decorated with squash blossom necklaces and other tribal jewelry, but one displays two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, and when he turns I see that the ribbons down his back are green-gold-red like the Vietnam War service ribbon. Since the dancers appear to be young men, they must have been earned by his relatives?
The sun has well-passed its low zenith, and the dancers keep flowing as in a Virginia reel. At one point El Toro dances down between the two lines and makes a “pass” with each dancer individually. Then Abuelo and Abuela wrestle him comically to the ground and wave his (detachable) balls, which are offered to a woman standing in the church doorway, who smiles and hands them back. La Abuela puts them in her handbag.
Suddenly it’s over with a final series of weaving movements. M. has grown chilly standing in the shade of the church. We will drive back to our rented lodgings in town, pick up food and gifts, and drive a short way north of El Prado to our friends’ house for Christmas dinner. All is right.
After a mere 150 years (the Vatican’s wheels turn slowly), the Roman Catholic church has decided that Mary really did appear in a Wisconsin chapel, now a popular pilgrimage site.
In one striking sign of a divine presence … the shrine’s grounds and the terrified crowd who gathered there were spared the flames of the Great Peshtigo Fire of 1871, which devoured the surrounding lands and homes and caused more than 1,200 deaths.
If I survived the Peshtigo Fire, I would be a believer too.
The economic effects of an authenticated Marian “apparition” are not to be sneezed at either.
Terry Mattingly at Get Religion, a blog about religion and journalism, looks at some of the fallout from the “don’t ask, don’t tell’ repeal for military chaplains.
His main question is whether a new military policy on homosexuals serving openly (they have always been there clandestinely) will affect the ability of some chaplains to follow the dictates of their tradition.
It’s a clash-of-rights issue, as he presents it.
But I what notice is how, once again, Wicca becomes the “default Other” religion, the hard case that must be accommodated:
How many Wiccans feel comfortable with a Pentecostal pastor, a Muslim imam, a Catholic priest, an Orthodox rabbi, an evangelical Lutheran or anyone from another faith leading their rites (if they are allowed to do so under their own vows)? Now, many forms of pagan faith do not have formal ordination procedures (while some do). Who approves the appointment of a layperson as a chaplain? How do a small circle of pagan chaplains serve believers on bases spread out around the world?
…. Now, the dying soldier is a Muslim and the chaplain is Jewish, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Pentecostal, Wiccan, etc. etc.
So far, there are no Pagan chaplains of any sort in the United States military. Well-qualified applicants get nowhere.
At the same time, at least some chaplains have been very supportive of military Pagans. The chaplaincy structure stood behind the Fort Hood Pagan group in 2000 all the way to the top.
Mattingly sees three possible outcomes. None of them is completely satisfactory:
(1) Find some way to end the chaplaincy program (under the assumption that if equal access is not possible, then closing down the chaplaincy program is the only legal option that is fair to all).
(2) Allow clergy to serve without violating their ordination vows (with the knowledge that, even when working with people of good will, this imperfect system will cause tensions and accusations of “hate speech”).
(3) The establishment of state-mandated and government-funded religious rites and rules of conduct of chaplains, mandating that expressions of the beliefs of many clergy are acceptable and that expressions of opposing beliefs are not acceptable. Some chaplains would argue that option (3) is already in place, but it is inconsistently enforced.
Gus diZerega writes a Pagan analysis of Las Vegas.
Michael Oman-Reagan has collected and organized a bibliography of references about religion online and online religion at his blog. Various scholars of new religious movements contributed to it.
Good stuff, if your research interests lie there.
We have a best-selling series of romance novels about vampires written by a Mormon.
But we also have a popular, if not so huge, series of romance novels about people in Amish communities, by a writer who grew up around Amish people but is not herself Amish.
Is this a great country or not? That’s one way to learn about religion. Or you can wait for the English translation of Saint Young Men. Jesus and the Buddha, roommates! The “odd couple” formula works in manga too, evidently.
But wait, you say. Vampires? Religion? Consider that NYU Press has published Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture.
Jeffrey Kripal, whose book Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred I am just starting to read, not surprisingly tells the New York Times that scholars of religion should take “the paranormal” seriously.
Is that the “paranormal” as opposed to the “supernatural”?
According to Dr. Kripal, [four famous paranormal researchers’] omission [from scholarly investigation] is evidence of a persistent bias among religion scholars, happy to consider the inexplicable, like miracles, as long as they fit a familiar narrative, like Judaism or Christianity.
Meanwhile, someone needs to write a novel: Ghost-hunting single Amish girl falls in love with a vampire and discovered Buddhism. Quick!
“Possibly the most WTF viral video since the Christian Side-Hug” (Egregores).