Now Thank We All Our God

As with most things, I approach Thanksgiving as a spectator sport. There's a cultural battle over the meaning of the national holiday, or least that's what it looks like on my Facebook wall. On one side are my conservative evangelical friends, who with fetching earnestness encourage us to give thanks to God for blessing us, and for letting us be Americans. On the other side are my Christian anarchist friends, and others who lean that direction, who find in Thanksgiving a heinous paean to imperialism and genocide. And I have to admit that being thankful for being an American just means being thankful to be on the dominant side of the imperialistic dyad, which is a little like thanking God that you're not a dog, a Gentile, or a woman.

Some are holding protests against Black Friday, or declaring "Buy Nothing Day" -- and here, too, the earnestness is fetching. I am reminded of Eugene McCarraher's reflection that "talking about consumerism is a way of not talking about capitalism," but I suppose I can't blame them for wanting to feel like they're doing something. I'm somewhat sympathetic to their way of seeing things, but I don't share their enthusiasm, or their identification of the problem. I made the following comment in reference to a "wanted" poster of Columbus on Peter Walker's Facebook wall:

On one hand, I feel ya. Violence is not, by any stretch of the imagination, uniquely white or European, but it's hard to get away from the realization that our nation came into existence through genocide, deceit, and oppression.

On the other hand, name for me a society that isn't, at some point in its history, based on conquest, displacement, or treachery. The actions of our forebears were not some anomalous aberration from the norm, but the norm itself in plain relief. White guilt is predicated on a latent ethnocentrism that suggests that our "enlightened" white European predecessors, of all people, should have known better.

Refusing to celebrate Thanksgiving might honor those who died needlessly, and the ways of life and forms of wisdom that are gone to us forever, but feeling bad about the past won't restore indigenous peoples. Moreover, focusing on this one day and this one period in history too easily elides the ways in which our present society is sustained by oppression and violence.

The way to honor the victims of history is not to burn dead white guys in effigy but to work to abolish oppressive structures.

What I find interesting is the way in which these perspectives mirror each other by taking Thanksgiving seriously. In solid agreement that Thanksgiving must mean something, must be invested with some kind of quasi-cosmic significance, they wrangle over that meaning. I suppose in some ways they are recapitulating theological debates over the Lord's Supper.

Like the Eucharist, Thanksgiving is steeped in blood. Like the Eucharist, Thanksgiving is a contested site of theological import. And, like the Eucharist, perhaps what is important about Thanksgiving has less to do with the metaphysics of meaning than with who is at the table.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

It's time.

I started this blog several years ago, on the heels of other blogs, each of which had the same purpose: to be a place where I could share secret thoughts. As my internal world veered farther and farther from evangelicalism while my external world remained an active part of it, I had to extract part of myself to a virtual world where I could say what needed to be said. As I've written elsewhere, some people create virtual personae to escape themselves; I created one to be myself.

The problem is that such a bifurction, however much it served me at the time, ultimately means that neither persona is really me. At some point -- and I think I knew this -- I'd have to come out of the closet, to simply be who I am and let the chips fall where they may.

When my church gig ended a few months ago, I expected a certain freefall, and I wasn't wrong. What I mean is that without the financial pressure to play a particular role, I would be free to explore who I am in ways I haven't been before, but also bereft of a rather significant identity marker. What I'm finding, though of course it's a little early, is that I feel a little less torn between extremes.

The "real me," as he emerges, doesn't need to try so hard to pass as an evangelical. We're still part of an evangelical church (we've never been members, and likely won't be), but I'm no longer on staff and I'm not leading worship. I can float on the edges, hang out in the periphery. I don't feel I need to "set an example" by being more enthusiastic than I really am. I'm not worried someone will discover my "secret," though I see no need to proclaim from the housetops that I'm a liberal heretic (I've been tempted to proclaim it in my Facebook status just to see what happens). I can decide not to show up, or to go somewhere else.

At the same time, I feel less like I need to pass as a "godless academic" (and if my visit to the Episcopal church last week is any indicator, academics really aren't that godless -- depending, of course, on your view of the Episcopal church). What I really mean by this is that I'm more comfortable owning my identity as an aspiring religion scholar and armchair theologian, and while there's a methodological distinction that needs to be maintained (I'm in American studies, not theology), there's also no way to definitively separate the two. In fact, my arguments regarding postsecularity would deconstruct such a distinction.

In light of this, I've done two things: I've changed my Blogger profile to my real name, and I've joined my friend Thom Stark (author of The Human Faces of God) and others in a collaborative project called Religion at the Margins, also under my own name (which we've seeded with content from our respective blogs, though there's also a new piece by me). I thought about taking this blog down or changing the name but I think I'll keep it for now. I want my work for RatM to be a little more serious, inhabiting the intersection between religious studies and theology, and there may be a call to post the occasional more personal item here. Plus, the blog has served me well, and there's the chance that someone will finally get the title and tagline.

But "Ira," the online persona that came out of this blog and the attendant Facebook profile, has served his purpose. He'll live on, of course, inside of me (where he's been all along, really), smoking Chesterfields and drinking vodka and tonics. You'll probably see him peek out from time to time.

Anyway, pop over to the new site. Find us on Facebook and show us some love.

I'm going back to my plow.