Book Review – Mary Mae And The Gospel Truth by Sandra Dutton
(NOTE: Updated to fix a bad tag.)
What happens when a precocious ten-year-old from a conservative religious family encounters fossils in her school yard and starts asking questions?
Sandra Dutton offers a look at this situation through the eyes of Mary Mae Krebs in her book Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth.
Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth
We meet Mary Mae at a church service in Ohio, circa 1988, where she's singing with her visiting grandmother. It seems that Mary Mae isn't content to simply accept everything she's told, and she manages to attract some attention to herself by asking uncomfortable questions about the Genesis creation stories.
"The world is six thousand years old. You look in your Bible."
"Where?"
"Well, Genesis. Where else? You got the whole Creation, right there."
Soon as we get home, I get my Bible out and run my finger down every line of Genesis. I'm looking for six thousand, whether it's in numbers or spelled out in letters. I go through it twice. Second time I'm reading with a flashlight in bed. Only six I find is on the "sixth day," what God created, and in different folks' ages, like Enoch living three hundred and sixty-five years.
I tell Mama Sunday morning I can't find no six thousand, and she says she don't have time to look, she's got too much work to do. (pg. 12)
Mary Mae's questions and her refusal to let other people think for her provide sources of tension between her and her mother, her pastor, her Sunday school teacher, and her friends. At various points, she questions a number of issues that she spots in Genesis:
- Light and dark existing before light sources like the sun.
- Varying lengths of generations.
- How all the animals could possibly have fit on the ark, and the logistics associated with their care.
The answers and explanations given to her tend to be in the vein of "you just have to have faith" or "if the Bible says it, it must be true", but these don't deter her. I think that's admirable, and anyone who has ever had a child respond to every answer with "why?" should be able to understand Mary Mae's persistence.
At school, Mary Mae's teacher, Miss Sizemore, is teaching her students about fossils, and the ancient age of the Earth, and how the rock layers visible where the local highways are cut through the mountains represent different geological periods. She finds herself fascinated by the trilobite fossils that she finds in the rocks exposed by an excavation at the school yard and in other places, and she comes to realize that explanations like "God put them there to test us" just don't wash.
A large measure of my interest in this book flows from the fact that I have no life experiences to compare with Mary Mae's. I grew up as a liberal Catholic, and (try as I might) I cannot recall any time in my school-age years where I learned something in (public) school that caused tensions at home or at church. I was, of course, familiar with the Genesis creation stories (although it was much later before I realized there were two stories instead of just one), and the story of Noah's flood (again, the actual text suggests two versions of the story), but my Sunday school classes never tackled them in any detail (which I now consider to be a failing...). For me, the science-vs-religion question is really a no-brainer: we learn about the observable world by observing it, and science is the framework for making sense of those observations.
As I consider Mary Mae's conundrum, I have to cast it in terms of what I expect the people around her to say and do. Through this preconceptual lens, Dutton's characters serve their purposes quite well - Miss Sizemore as the voice of secular science for example, or Mary Mae's mother presenting the extremely conservative religious perspective - although the only supporting character with much complexity is Granny (who really serves as an older and wiser version of Mary Mae's own conscience). While there might be a small risk that a reader could be trapped by stereotypes, Dutton made a smart choice to avoid overdeveloping the ancillary characters beyond Mary Mae's perspective.
The book touches on a number of related topics, and Dutton exposes several important ones just enough to spark some discussion:
- Kids in public schools being given alternative work when the curriculum conflicts with religious beliefs.
- Parents pulling their kids out of school for homeschooling and realizing that it's not as easy as they expected.1
- Parents of different religious backgrounds deciding how to raise their children.
- People believing whatever their pastor happens to tell them on any given day.
In the end, Mary Mae and her family come to a compromise position that, from the perspective of a ten-year-old is probably sufficient. In many real-life situations similar to Mary Mae's, some sort of compromise may be the best anyone can hope for, and I think Dutton realizes that.
But it's also a little troubling, in my view, for a couple of reasons.
The first has to do with the audience of the book. A few obvious candidates are:
- Kids who are in the same situation as Mary Mae - they're learning things at school that contradict what they've been taught at home or in church, and they're trying to figure out a way to reconcile these views.
- Parents of such kids who are trying to deal with challenges to their belief system.
- Pastors/clergy or teachers of such kids who are looking for ways to help the kids work through the issues.
The compromise position that the book takes means that a lot of parents (who want their kids to believe the same way as they do) and clergy (whose livelihood depends on people believing certain things) won't find the book useful - they may want books that reinforce their beliefs. The kids who are in situations most like Mary Mae's are also likely to be kids from families and churches with very conservative religious beliefs for whom compromises simply aren't acceptable.
Teachers of such kids may be justifiably reluctant to suggest that children challenge the beliefs of their parents. Teachers that do so may well find themselves looking for work.
That leaves the kids themselves, and I'm honestly not sure how many kids would find this book on their own. That's a shame, because a clever child reading about Mary Mae's journey could come away much better prepared to engage with their parents about questions of belief.
There is one other audience for the book, and I think it's probably a large one (though difficult to count): close friends or relatives of families with Mary Maes who might find themselves involved in the situation.
So, in effect, Dutton's compromise solution to the problem at hand might have the unintended consequence of keeping the book out of the hands of many of the people who would benefit the most from it. I think that's just a reflection of the nature of the subject and not any fault of hers.
The other reason I find the compromise troubling is that I don't think that it is a stable equilibrium. This is beyond the scope of the book, but I think it's relevant to mention.
We leave Mary Mae at a point where she's been told that there are some gaps in the Biblical narratives, and science can step in to fill those gaps. If her interests never went beyond trilobite fossils, that might be sufficient. But is that likely? I'm not at all sure that it is.
At some point, she'd learn some world history and find out that Egypt had a well-documented culture and civilization that continued moving right along during the time when, according to the Bible, the world was under water and Noah's family was all that was left of humanity. She might learn of solid evidence of human habitation in the Americas dating back well over 11,000 years - older than the Earth by some Biblical reckoning.
Maintaining a claim of Biblical truth vis-a-vis science and history becomes an increasingly untenable goal, unless "science" and "history" are redefined to bend around the Bible.
At the end of the day, Dutton has put together a sensitive, gentle story that validates the message that it's OK for kids to ask questions and look outside of the beliefs they've been raised in. That's the first step of many. I would hope that the book can find its way into the hands of families facing circumstances like Mary Mae's, and that it might help nurture the spark of curiosity that all children seem to have.
-Jay
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1I am of two minds about homeschooling. I can see how, if it's done properly, it could be rewarding for both parents and children, but I've seen far more instances of it being done poorly than of it being done well. That's all I'll say about it now. It's a topic for another time, perhaps.
Disclosure and Some Background
I'm working on a book review right now that's a bit of a departure from the sort of things that I usually read. I'll refrain from too many details just yet, but just to keep everything above-board, the author contacted me about writing a review and provided a review copy of the book on the strength of some previous posts of mine.
With that out of the way, I'll provide some background.
The book in question is about a fundamentalist Christian1 girl trying to sort out her love of science (specifically her interest in evolution) and her religious background.
This is a topic of personal significance to me for several reasons, but the one I'll focus on here is that nobody ever approaches the evolution/creationism issue from the perspective of the kids.
Pretty much every forum or blog out there that routinely covers the topic deals with it from an adult perspective. When kids enter into the discussion at all, it's most often (these days) in the context of discussion about the Dover trial or of creationist school board candidates and textbook selections in Texas2, or somehow in connection with Ken Ham's Creation Museum.
While the adult-side discussions of evolution and creationism (and the broader discussions of science, religion, and whether or not they can coexist) are certainly important, even crucial, it's all too easy to forget that on the other side of the court cases and the school board elections and the museum exhibits are tens or hundreds of thousands (or more) of kids who are directly impacted by the outcomes of those events. In the U.S., most of those children will be from religious backgrounds that are at best ambivalent towards evolution and at worst outright hostile to the concept3.
Some of these kids may respond to material about evolution by simply ignoring it, or learning enough to pass a test, or challenging it with what they may believe are strong, well-reasoned objections that they read in a book or on a website somewhere4, but some of them will start to engage with the material, and that engagement will lead to some questions that may well fly headlong into the face of religious doctrine and foundational beliefs.
This is a difficult enough situation for adults to work through, and it's easy to suppose that it's much harder for kids, since the parents and family members that they would normally go to for answers might not be receptive to discussing the subject - few topics are more capable of dividing people than religious disagreements - but it's a situation that I suspect is more common than people might think, particularly as increasingly unfettered access to the internet means that more children will be exposed to different points of view than they have been in the past.
So, all that being said, I was intrigued by the opportunity to review a book that deals with the evolution/creationism issue from the perspective of a child trying to sort things out. It should be interesting.
-Jay
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1Still wishing there was a word that was equally descriptive but less pejoratively loaded...
2Why Texas, you ask? It seems that Texas is a huge influence on textbook publishers because of the number of students in the state. Texas buys a lot of textbooks. Textbook publishers want to sell textbooks to Texas. Therefore curriculum decisions in Texas can influence the textbooks that are used in many other states.
3I'm operating on the assumption that parents teach their kids according to their own beliefs, and based on the numbers shown here.
4When I was active on some of the E/C forums, it wasn't uncommon to see the same arguments pop up nearly word-for-word in many different threads. Once you're familiar with them, it's even possible to tell where they originally came from.
A New Chick Tract – “Things To Come?”
I haven't written about Jack Chick and his religious tracts before. Joshua Zelinsky has reviewed a few of them on occasion (such as the two he talks about here), but the urge to do so has never really hit me until recently.
Chick tracts, for those who don't know, are the little comic-book-like religious pamphlets that you sometimes find left in public places.1
His work is notable for its total lack of nuance or subtlety. Chick's theology is based on the notion that anyone who doesn't believe precisely as he does (including his KJV-only stance on the Bible, which is just weird) is going straight to hell. I think he has a real hell fetish, since in many of his tracts the most detailed artwork is in the panels showing people getting tossed off a cliff into the flames. He also has it in for Catholics, Muslims, Jews,2 non-whites, women, gays, straights who don't hate gays, and pretty much anyone who isn't Jack Chick.
His latest is a little number called Things to Come? What struck me about this one is it's subtle3 juxtaposition of anti-Catholic sentiment4 with Rapture theology.5
The main narrative of this tract is that a (Catholic) fortune-teller (Delores) isn't being very successful telling fortunes (I'll throw Chick a bone here and grant that he got this part right...), and is confronted by her housemate (I think we're supposed to infer that the two women are lesbians, but it's somewhat ambiguous) about the failures. The housemate, Maria, mentions a Mr. Rogers who tells the future from "an ancient black book." Maria mentions that their priest, Father Dowling, doesn't want people going to Mr. Rogers. (Message for Mr. Chick - Catholics know full well what the Bible is, and have produced some fairly highly regarded scholarship about it, such as the work of the late Raymond E. Brown.)
Dolores goes to see Mr. Rogers, who tells her about Jesus and the rapture. We get a typical Chick-scene of people getting burned:
Chick loves burning people, and apparently fails to see the inherent contradictions between the concept of an all-loving, merciful God and a God who gleefully tosses large numbers of people into the fire. Conversion by coercion. Gotta love it.
Anyhow, the tract moves on to some of the most egregious anti-Catholic bile that I've ever seen in comic form:
Chick seems to have formed his opinions of Catholics without ever having bothered to, I don't know, learn anything about Catholic doctrine, or attend a Catholic Mass, or even talk to a real live Catholic.
So the "fake" Jesus sets himself up as Pope, but is actually the Antichrist, and Russia and the Muslims (neither of which even existed when the Biblical books were written) are going to attack modern Israel, which is rather different from Biblical Israel.
Now, after Mr. Rogers regales Delores with his scare stories and bizarre vitriolic propaganda, he poofs away, leaving a very shocked Delores sitting opposite a chair full of seedy clothes:
Goodness.
The basic premise at work here (besides "Catholics are evil") is that if you believe the way Jack Chick thinks you should, you'll be rewarded, and if you believe anything else at all, God is going to pitch you into the flames forever.
It's worth looking at this another way: God, according to Jack Chick Theology, is really vindictive and petty - he's just itching to toss people into the fire for just about anything. This stands at odds with any notion of a kind and merciful God, unless you perform some serious verbal and logical contortions. Chick also can't decide whether accepting Jesus is sufficient or whether one has to do good works (contrast his use of Acts 16:31 and his use of 1 Corinthians 3:11-15), so it's really not clear what one would have to do to be saved, other than spend most of one's time cowering in fear and not asking too many questions. And let's not forget the hate speech.
I'd be tempted to write Jack Chick off as just another kook on the fringes of ultra-conservative Christianity, except for the fact that his tracts turn up frequently enough that he must have a fairly significant following. I've personally found them in hospitals (see footnote 1, below), on the table at McDonald's, in hotel rooms, in airplane seatbacks, and in public restrooms at colleges, airports, sporting venues, and highway rest areas. His ubiquity makes him dangerous - his simplistic us vs. them theology is distressingly easy to understand, and his manipulative scare tactics can be very effective on people who haven't developed critical thinking skills.
My questions to the folks who are out distributing these things, or who might be inclined to use them are simple:
- Do Chick's portrayals of Catholics, Jews, Muslims, gays, and so on match anyone you actually know?
- Is Chick's characterization of God as a sadistic tyrant who relishes pitching people into the flames one that you agree with?
- Do you think that attempting to convert people by terrifying them is a good thing?
My hope is that people who actually give the matter some thought will reject Chick's extreme views as the poisonous concepts they are.
-Jay
1Personal digression: last fall when my dad went in for open-heart surgery, one of my brothers found a stack of Chick's Heart Trouble? screed that some assclown had left sitting in the open-heart waiting room. Heart Trouble? is a more heavy-handed version of Ray Comfort's Are You a Good Person? schtick, framed as a conversation between a physician and a heart patient. I'm of the opinion that attempting to win converts by trying to scare people into accepting Jesus (or any other belief system, for that matter) by insinuating that they and/or their sick loved ones are going to burn for eternity if they don't follow a specific subset of beliefs is nothing short of emotional battery, and shouldn't be tolerated. We binned the tracts.
2He's kinda schizophrenic about Jews. On the one hand, Chick's eschatology requires that Israel play a big role, but in the end the only Jews that are worth talking about are the ones who become Christians.
3In the same way that getting hit in the head with an anvil is subtle...
4I'll go ahead and point out that the Catholic Church has a lot of grave institutional problems - most notably its atrocious handling (at all levels, all the way up to the top) of child rape by members of the clergy. That said, Chick's anti-Catholic vitriol doesn't have anything to do with real flaws and problems in the Church, and instead grows out of his distorted and hate-filled theology.
5Nutshell history of Rapture theology: John Nelson Darby basically made it up in the 1830s, Cyrus Scofield popularized it in his 1909 version of the Bible, and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins spun it into the dreadful Left Behind books starting in 1995. As well-known as it is, Rapture theology is flat-out rejected by much of mainline Christianity, including the Catholic church. At it's heart, it contends that the Book of Revelation really was written as a prediction of events far in the future, rather than the obvious and much more well-supported interpretation that it was written to a contemporary audience about events that were occurring then, and that when predicted events didn't come to pass, it simply meant that the author was wrong, not that he was writing about things thousands of years in the future. As long as something hasn't happened, you can claim it will, but that's a pretty thin argument to build a worldview around. An interesting survey of end-of-the-world beliefs down through history can be found in Sharan Newman's The Real History of the End of the World: Apocalyptic Predictions from Revelation and Nostradamus to Y2K and 2012.
The Vileness That is Westboro
Do you know this man?
Fred Phelps
This is Fred Phelps. There's a special little corner of hell reserved for him.
Fred is the leader of a vile, hate-based organization known as Westboro Baptist Church. Westboro has made a name for itself by staging protests at things like the funerals of soldiers, the funerals of hate-crime victims, other Christian groups that they don't like, and, recently, the San Diego Comic-Con.
Fred, and his congregants (which are mostly members of his extended family) hate pretty much anyone that isn't them - gays, Catholics, most mainline Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus - and aren't afraid to say so.
The Westboro theology (one can almost freely interchange Westboro the organization and Phelps the person) is built on the premise that they're right and everyone else is wrong, and woe be unto those who might question anything that the church teaches.
This is brought out in stark clarity in this video of an ABC news segment about a young woman named Lauren Drain. Ms. Drain is the daughter of two Westboro members who was thrown out of the church for having the temerity to raise questions about hypocrisies that she saw within the group. (From Yes But However, via Skippy.)
Ms. Drain has found herself completely cut off from her parents and younger siblings over her criticisms of Westboro. Her young sister has rejected her, and her parents speak of her expulsion in much the same way as you might talk about throwing a spider out of the house. "That's the Lord" is how Ms. Drain's mother responds when the question is raised about kicking out other children questioning Westboro. No remorse. No hesitation. No thought.
One might be tempted to dismiss Westboro as an irrelevant fringe group, and indeed mainline Christian groups generally distance themselves from WBC. I think that's a mistake. The ease with which parents can cut themselves off from their children and siblings can disengage from siblings is chilling. The degree of venomous, hateful indoctrination received by the children within the group is alarming. No preschooler should ever be singing "God hates the world". That's sick. That's evil.
Westboro is a shining example of what unquestioning faith and obeisance to an ideology can lead to. The way to combat such an ideology is to drag it into the harsh light of day and confront it.
-Jay
Letters To The Editor
The written word is a wonderful thing. It serves as a transmission vector for knowledge and culture, and allows us to express ourselves in ways that the spoken word can't. Anyone who has ever gotten caught up in a good book and suddenly realized that it's 3:00 AM knows what I'm talking about.
The written word can also be dangerous. When used as a tool of propaganda, it can serve to control and subjugate. It can challenge authority and can lead to wars.
The written word can be many things, including strange and vaguely frightening.
And the written word can be used to make points quite the opposite of what it looks like at first glance.
The following letter to the editor appeared in the 2 July 2010 Louisville Courier-Journal. (I'm reproducing it because the CJ eventually archives such things and they become difficult to ferret out. The letter in question is on page 3.)
Going Gaga
Lady Gaga is a repulsive image that all people of goodwill should strive to avoid. Her most recent pornographic music video, which features highly sexualized images coupled with Catholic religious symbols, betrays her as nothing more than a mediocre Madonna-wannabe. In the video, she squirms around half-naked with half-naked guys while abusing Catholic symbols. It is clear the singer has now become the new poster girl for American decadence and Catholic bashing, which she perversely fobs off to the world as "creative art."
When asked in a recent interview by Larry King if she was considering having children some day, she answered "not right now because it would destroy my creativeness." She seems oblivious to the fact that there is nothing more creative for a woman than to have a child. Sadly, fame, fortune and false idolatry have become the heartbeat of American culture. These things seem more important to the masses than life itself. But in the end, they are all only illusions that will wither and fade. In the end, "the first will be last and the last will be first."
Now, the video in question (here, in case anyone cares to look) is pretty damn tacky - it plays out like some sort of weird sexual nightmare. Is it offensive? Probably to many - although I would describe it more as stupid and pretentious more than I would offensive.1
Good Lord! What is That Thing Eating Her Head!?!
It isn't clear why the letter writer chooses interpret Lady Gaga's video as being anything other than a ploy to generate attention (much like her propensity for ghastly and outrageous outfits). I can envision a conversation between Lady Gaga and her production designers:
Designers: But Gaga, this video is really pushing the boundaries of good taste. People are going to go ballistic over the content!
Gaga: Yes, and for every blog or article criticizing me, a bunch of people will find the video and watch it, and some of those will buy my albums. I can't lose!
Designers: But that's just callous manipulation of people's prejudices and sensitivities for personal profit!
Gaga: And you have a problem with that? I'm an entertainer. That's what I do. It doesn't matter whether people listen to me because they're inspired by my music, or impressed by my dance moves, or want to see me on stage with machine guns attached to my bra.
Designer: Sooooo. Any ideas for your next video?
The bottom line is that controversy = publicity, and if you're a singer, publicity = revenue.2
The second part of the letter is more touchy. The letter writer, who was female, appears dangerously close to defining women in terms of the productiveness of their uteri, and her comment is a direct affront to women who cannot or chose not to have children. Moreover, it's not clear how Lady Gaga's expressed choice to not have children in any way impacts anyone else's choice. Gaga has every right to make that choice. It's also true that the letter writer has a right to her opinion, and a right to express it. And I have a right to say that I think the letter writer's opinion is just plain wrong and myopic because it makes the presupposition that women are no more than baby factories.3
The bottom line is that the letter writer finds Lady Gaga to be a poor role model. Fine. Don't listen to her music or watch her videos or read articles about her. But don't expect everyone else to follow your lead.
We get to go down a different path entirely with the 11 July 2010 response to the original letter (The letter in question is on page 2.):
Double-barreled irony
In regard to a letter printed in last Friday's Courier-Journal , I, too, would like to lend my voice to those offended by Lady Gaga's outrageous behavior. While I haven't seen the video in question, I have seen her scantily clad image on the cover of the current issue of Rolling Stone. It is shocking enough that this so-called "Lady" is wearing next to nothing. But the fact she sports a bra bearing two assault weapons is a double-barreled attack against basic American values. More than our flag, the cross or holy scripture, the gun is unquestionably the greatest object of reverence in this great land of ours. Would Ms. Gaga's brazen behavior be tolerated if Dubya and "Dead Eye" Dick Cheney still called the shots? I think not. Thank God and baby Jesus we still have strong conservative role models like Sarah Palin, a lifelong member of the NRA. We can rest assured that her values are just as conservative as her undergarments.
On first glance, this letter (submitted by a male) seems to be the product of a somewhat disturbed individual. One can almost imagine him muttering out loud to himself as he composed his missive.
But I don't think the letter is the product of a disturbed individual. I think it's the product of someone who read the first letter and thought "It's pretty silly to get spun up over a music video and a throwaway comment on Larry King, and it's pretty silly for the newspaper to give a letter about those things any column space. I wonder if I can get something even more over-the-top published..."
This, I believe, is a classic example of what has become known in internet circles as Poe's Law. To wit:
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.
Nathan Poe, circa 2005
(In point of fact, I think that Poe's Law generalizes well beyond religion and can be applied to parodies of any extreme position. Politics is an obvious example, as suggested by the Sarah Palin reference,4 and extreme positions on climate change and anti-vaccination come to mind as other applicable subjects.5)
In other words, the letter writer has successfully foisted himself off as an outlandishly conservative Christian when, in fact, he probably isn't, but you certainly can't tell that from the writing.
Why might he have wanted to do this? To me, the most obvious reason is to make the point that there are more important issues to worry about than the crass behavior of a pop singer.
Maybe the writer really was put off by a gun-festooned sports bra. Maybe he really does think that Sarah Palin is a superb conservative role model and not merely a publicity hungry twit. It's possible, but I don't think so.
-Jay
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1"Offensive" is a very ambiguous term, anyway. I find it interesting that when people talk about how a music video, or a movie, or a book is offensive, they're often very detailed in talking about precisely which aspects of the material are offensive. This suggests that they watched or read it very closely. And some people seem to be offended a lot. It's not like anyone is forcing someone to watch Lady Gaga videos against their will. Personally, on the few occasions I find something to be that offensive, I just find something different to watch or read.
2Personally, I kinda like some of her songs, but her bizarre costumes and such don't really do much for me.
3In the last few years, it's somehow come to be fashionable to claim that everyone's opinions are equally valid. Perhaps nowhere is this so prevalent as in the evolution/creationism debates in school systems around the country where "teach the controversy" or "teach the alternatives" are rallying cries. The problem is that all opinions aren't equally valid - many are just flat wrong, sometimes dangerously so.
4It is very difficult to separate Sarah Palin's political views from her religious views. Talk to Action has a number of articles analyzing Palin's religious views and their implications on her politics, if anyone is interested.
5I have an issue with the use of the term fundamentalist. It tends to be used pejoratively, and it isn't as well-defined as many might think. The term evangelical is somewhat less pejorative but is also poorly defined - an acquaintance of mine self-describes as evangelical, but falls towards the extremely liberal end of the Christian spectrum, and has been accused by some of not being Christian enough, whatever that actually means. Even terms like extremely conservative Christian are imprecise enough to be confusing. Nevertheless, given the lack of better, succinct terminology, I'll use these those terms with the caveat that they are broader than I would prefer and inevitably sweep people in which they shouldn't.
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