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Sunday, July 06, 2008

The Missing Generation, pt. 2

In the last post I said that the primary reason the Church is missing lots of young adults has little to do with the the mission, theology, or politics of the Church, but much to do with demographics. The economic and social forces that prolong adolescence and delay “settled” adulthood are what keep people from participating in worship. I’m also bracketing my qualms about equating “adulthood” with “settling down.” Some of the most visionary and mature Christian adults I know never settle.

But now I want to backtrack a bit and say that this extended adolescence is also part of what creates friction between unchurched young adults and “The Church.” There are two components to extended adolescence. One is physiological and sexual, and the other is social.* These are related issues, but I want to illustrate them separately.

First, the physiological and sexual. People hit puberty earlier. The research varies, but the most extreme research suggests that the average age of menarche has fallen from age 15 (or even 17 in rural, nutritionally-poor areas) to age 12, with some girls having their first period as early as 8 or 10. The most conservative research suggests that the drop is more modest, perhaps from 13-and-a-half to 12-and-a-half. Regardless, people’s bodies mature earlier and they marry later than they did 100 years ago. If you roll the clock way back, some people estimate that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was just 13 when she was betrothed to Joseph.

Now, if people are maturing earlier and marrying later, they have a longer period of time in which to be sexually active. While Jane Austen’s heroines typically married somewhere between 18 and 21**, the average age of marriage these days is 27 or 28 (as I pointed out in the last post). So the time between when someone begins to sexually mature and the time at which they marry (if they marry at all) can be as long as twenty years.  That’s two decades.

During this time, a human being becomes socialized to their peer group. They begin placing more weight on what their peers think than their families. We encourage this process through factory education, where we isolate persons from those in other age groups, teaching them as a class or cohort, and refer to them as a “generation.” So their primary source of character education comes not from family, not from church, but from their peers.

And media.

Mary Pipher, Carol Gilligan, Jeane Kilbourne, and a number of other feminist psychologists, sociologists, and other researchers have pointed out that this is when girls get socialized to think of themselves as objects, to lose their voice, to develop eating disorders. Although their parents have been telling them from birth that they can do anything, be anyone, and have social equality with men, they are relentlessly educated by the media and by their peer group that their primary value is derived by being sexually attractive and sexually pleasing to men. There is a similar social travesty that happens to boys, but for the purposes of considering extended adolescence and how it impacts what we do as church, it’s easier to see in our culture with girls. What is on the cover of men’s magazines? Women. What’s on the cover of women’s magazines? Women. Women as objects. Women as infantile. Women bound, powerless, and dehumanized.

We dump young teenagers into this environment, and the only advice they hear from the church is “do not have sex.” For 20 years. Oh, and don’t touch yourself. Although the Bible doesn’t say a word about masturbation, it’s assumed that any sexual pleasure you give yourself is wrong and shameful. It’s a theme the popular culture is all too happy to take up with either mocking or shocking. Mocked in movies like American Pie, or expressed as shock when the surgeon general mentions the word.

Imagine yourself as a teenager immersed in this environment. You are told you must suppress all sexual feelings for 20 years. Save yourself for marriage. Yet you know that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce - in fact, it’s likely that your parents are divorced, and one or both of them may be living with a girlfriend or boyfriend. See the problem?

Now, follow me carefully here. I am not talking about premarital sex,*** or pornography, or media culture. I am talking about the church’s credibility. From the beginning of puberty, everyone knows the church is not credible on this issue. We all know it, and nobody says a blessed thing about it. Into this credibility gap we are sold a vision of ideal sexuality, involving all kinds of products ranging from cosmetics to viagra. Sexual fulfillment becomes something you buy, not something that comes from deep intimacy with another human being. We are taught to be immature, and to linger in this state well past “adulthood.” Our extended adolescence is characterized by immature sexual attitudes and sexual anxiety.

By contrast, adulthood is associated with boring and unsexy things: minivans, baby spit-up, balancing checkbooks, paying the bills. Corporate-produced mass culture offers us a choice between this world, and the world of young, idealized, sexualized hipness, and even the most media-savvy of us buy into it.

The second component of extended adolescence is social, and it has to do with responsibility and the relative value of your contributions to society. I like to use the illustration of a reality television show that came on PBS several years ago called Frontier House. Three families go to spend several months in Montana, living as the pioneers did. When the kids first begin the adventure, you hear them complain. “What are we going to do for all these weeks? It’s going to be horrible! There’s no television, no cell phones, no video games, no malls.” Over the course of the program, you get to see what they fill their time with. They learn to ride horses. Because they have no mp3 players, they make their own music. Some learn to play the guitar. They milk the cows. The collect the eggs. If they fail in their chores, the family suffers. But the cool thing about the program is that you see the kids absolutely bloom. They grow up.

At the end of the show, they return to their homes. They wander their McMansions like zombies. The modern world sucks the life right out of them. And they say, “there’s nothing to do here but watch television, play video games, and go to the mall.” In Montana, they are useful. They actually contribute to the survival of their family and the flourishing of their community. In the modern world, they become surplus people. They have no social value except as consumers, and they know it. They can do two things - go to school, and buy crap. This is why all media culture is geared toward teenagers, who have the most disposable income and the most time on their hands. They have no other use.

Again, follow me carefully. I’m not arguing that “kids today just need to get a job.” That’s just it. They don’t need to get a job. There’s nothing that depends on them getting a job except some external expectation that they “learn responsibility” or some such dreck. You can’t just give them more chores and drill a work ethic into them. Our society considers them surplus people. They are an economic problem, which is why we need to delay their entry into the workforce for 20 years (during which time, by the way, they aren’t supposed to “do it”). And they know it! On a gut level, the place that tells them they are a fully functional, competent human being who have the skills to survive on their own, they know that they are still children.

And when they act out this anger, frustration, lust, or despair, we blame it on hormones. Or we make up some ridiculous generalization about “kids today.” I say it makes sense when prisoners act like prisoners. 

When these teenagers become young adults, the landscape changes a bit. Now, when you work in a retail store to make money to pay bills, you get to become part of that shallow society. Now you get to sell crap to teenagers. And when you grouse about having a dead-end job, or about your tremendous debt-load, or about the fact that your career has no meaning, or if you demand better, you are vilified by news pundits as belonging to an “entitlement generation.” Why can’t you just shut up and work for The Man, like your grandparents did? Why are you so spoiled? Preachers parrot back this conventional wisdom in pulpits all across America, again losing credibility with young adults.

But I do believe that part of what the church needs to do is to help people grow up. Not just by helping “young adults,” because we have several generations of people who have grown up under this same model who have been educated to be consumers. Nor am I suggesting we all need to move back on the farm or become Amish (though there is something appealing about that). But I do think that part of what is called for is a radical re-visioning of our lifestyle and how we behave as communities together. How do we give teenagers meaningful work? How do we create a community in which “unsettled” young adults can make important contributions to a community’s thriving? 

*(When I use the term “extended adolescence,” I do not mean to denigrate adolescents or to use it as a purely negative term. Donald Joy’s book Bonding: Relationships in the Image of God is where I first grew to like the idea, and I’ve found it to be useful in explaining the way that we simultaneously idolize and infantilize youth. “Adolescence” the way I use it here is a social construction which our media culture uses to educate children to be consumers and to prevent adults from growing up.)

**(I’m not claiming that Jane Austen’s works are reliable estimates of average age of marriage, but it’s a nice reference point to consider. There is some debate about whether these age differences are as extreme as I’m claiming. Regardless, I think it’s pretty significant for the church if 100 years ago, the span of time between when one matured sexually and the time of socially-acceptable sexual experience was shorter than today.)

***(When I’ve talked about this with other church workers, they inevitably get frustrated and ask, “well, what should we do, then - pass out condoms?” This misses the point. I do not seriously think the church should either a) promote earlier marriage or b) encourage sex outside of marriage. But I do think our credibility is at stake if we do not honestly confront the economic forces which impact families and human sexuality.)

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

The Boy Jesus

We don’t know much about Jesus’ childhood. We have the birth narrative, of course, and the story of his parents’ encounter with Simeon and Anna. But we only get one childhood event, from when he was a precocious 12 year-old impressing the scholars in the temple.

The boy Jesus has been fleshed out a bit thanks to recent scholarship on the “Jewishness” of Jesus. A recent twist in this trend has been an interesting discussion about whether it is more appropriate to refer to Jesus as a Jew or a Judean. Rob Bell’s artful teaching-sermons often focus on the Jewish background of the gospels. People eat this stuff up, because for most of their lives they have been served up a Jesus that is context-free, whose pious sayings seem to come out of nowhere. A Jesus without a context, without a childhood in which he learned, is a Jesus without personality. This kind of Jesus, I have argued, is unloveable.

Our culture celebrates and idolizes childhood. Thanks to Sigmund Freud and Charles Dickens, all our biographies of famous people start with their childhood. Who were their parents? What formative events shaped the course of their lives? How did they feel about their mothers? We talk about the inner child, the hierarchy of needs, how people learn to trust, to love, to dream and pursue their ambitions. But childhood in the first century was something else entirely. Children were incomplete persons. They were, some have argued, nobodies. This interpretation makes Jesus’ words about greatness and entering the Kingdom of Heaven more powerful. The disciples ask him who will be greatest in the Kingdom. He says we must become like a child not because children are trusting or innocent (both of which are debatable), but because they are not great. The nobodies are the greatest. When you read it this way, his saying is revolutionary. When you read it the normal way, it’s just sentimental glurge.

And it is at least partially because of this disregard for children, this belief that they should be seen and not heard, that we have almost nothing of Jesus’ childhood.

David Buttrick often said in class that Jesus was not born with a “magic Christian brain.” He did not fall from the sky with an omniscient mind in order to teach Christian doctrine. He was born, educated, and formed by his first-century Jewish context. It was likely while in Nazareth or Capernaum that he learned Hillel’s Golden Rule:

What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Law; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.

Compare that to Jesus’ version from the Sermon on the Mount:

Do to others as you would have them do to you. For this is all the Law and the Prophets.

Christians are often surprised that Jesus did not invent the Golden Rule. We attribute more originality to him because of his special status as the God-Man. But no matter how Divine you believe Jesus was, he was fully human - he learned. He was taught. He absorbed the best teachings of his day.

To me, this image of Jesus not only as teacher, but as learner, is part of what makes him lovable. Even if you have a high Christology, even if you believe Jesus was Fully Divine, the Word of God made Flesh - he had to learn how to talk. He had to learn how to think. He would not have walked around as a four-year-old lecturing his parents without getting spanked for sassing back. He had to learn how to share. He had to learn in what contexts it was unacceptable to pick his nose or break wind. These are the things children have to learn. Nobody - not even God - gets to skip childhood.

Once I heard a little girl ask during a children’s sermon: was Jesus ever spanked? I think that question gets to the heart of a tough theological issue. How human was he? Fully human? Did he screw up? Did he get in trouble? Or was he such a sinless goody-two-shoes that he always upheld the status quo, never fought, never lied, and never hurt anyone else. In other words, was he so good that he never actually had to learn anything?

What is being human, if not learning? Growing? Changing? If Jesus did not experience those things, then can it truly be said that he was fully human?

Christians sense this issue underlying the spanking question. I’ve asked other preachers this question, and they hem and haw. “Well,” they say, “the Bible says he was sinless.” Yes, I reply, but that isn’t the question. The question is, did he get spanked?

I suspect that he did - especially after temple incident when he was 12. He ditched his parents to hang out in the temple for three days. When they found him, he said, “why were you looking for me? Didn’t you know I’d be in my father’s house?” Here in Alabama, we call that sassing back. After hunting frantically for three days, do you think his parents stood for that kind of back-talk? Now, I’ve always maintained that corporal punishment is not the best discipline, and I do not advocate spanking. But I’m guessing that, in their frenzied state, after hearing that kind of lip, Joseph and Mary took him out behind the woodshed. And when their arms grew tired, I bet they took turns.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Jesus and Sarcasm

Some people are unconvinced when I tell them that Jesus often uses sarcasm. But here is yet another example: the parable of the unmerciful servant. The story goes like this: a servant owes his boss about a gazillion dollars. He’s brought before the boss and makes a ridiculous plea - “give me a few days, and I’ll pay back everything.” This is nonsense, and the hearers know it. But the king simply waves his hand, and cancels a debt as big a the gross national product of a small country. Then the servant leaves the boss and finds someone who owes him 20 bucks. He roughs his debtor up a bit. His fellow servants witness this injustice, and tattle to the boss.

Now, here is the outrageous part. The boss goes back on his word. The boss does something as morally reprehensible as the unmerciful servant. He reinstates a cancelled debt. Instead of being morally indignant at the servant, we should be morally indignant as the boss! So is this boss our God? Keep in mind that Jesus sometimes uses characters in parables for what God is not like. For example, in the parable of the unjust judge, Jesus obviously does not mean God is like an unjust judge.

Also keep in mind that before Jesus tells the parable of the Unmerciful Servant, he has just told Peter that he should forgive someone who sins against him not seven times, but seventy times seven. He tells Peter, in effect, that he should be an endless well of forgiveness.

Yet another thing to keep in mind about this parable: before talking about forgiveness, Jesus talks about how communities should deal with offenses. First you talk it out privately. If that doesn’t work, you bring in a friend. If that doesn’t work, you take it to the community. Notice that the fellow servants don’t follow this protocol. So every character in the story demonstrates a lack of mercy.

This parable illustrates the opposite of what Jesus says about forgiveness, from top to bottom, from the boss to the fellow servants. It raises the question, what would it be like if God were as unforgiving as we are? And yet though this parable is obviously an example of what God is not like, I’ve heard this passage used as a prooftext that Jesus believed in a hell of eternal torment. “See?” they say. “Jesus says hell is a place where people are tortured until they can pay!” Is that what Jesus really says? If so, then Jesus is also saying that God is a jerk who goes back on his word. If we are meant to read this parable as an allegory of metaphysical reality, then Jesus is a hypocrite - demanding of his followers a kind of forgiveness that surpasses God’s own. Either that… or Jesus is being sarcastic.

But just in case we were too stupid to get the message, Jesus offers this little gem: “This is how my heavenly Father will treat you unless your forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” So in other words, though Jesus tells us to forgive “seventy times seven,” God will trade us forgiveness, tit for tat? No! It’s sarcasm! It’s dry humor, and it’s painful to me that people are so slow to get it. Put the two statements together: “Forgive your brother or sister seventy times seven / but God will torture you for eternity if you don’t forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” Could this be anything but dry humor?

I mention his name often, but I should point out that I owe a good bit of my interpretation of this passage to David Buttrick. As I’ve said before, his teaching really helped me see Jesus in a new way. I recommend his books to all preachers and thoughtful Christians.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Why Most Christians Don’t Love Jesus (Part 2)

I began to love Jesus when I realized he had a sense of humor.

You don’t get to hear his sense of humor often, because preachers prefer to crack their own jokes. Our jokes are funny, and usually involve something cute a kid said about God. Jesus jokes tend to be rather caustic, and sometimes involve poo-poo, and we don’t use that kind of language in the pulpit. Also, when you tell one of Jesus’ jokes instead of your own, you lose something in translation, and then you are put in the less-than-exciting position of explaining the punchline. In fact, I feel that’s most of what I’m doing when I’m preaching: explaining a punchline that we keep missing. I stand there with my palms upward, my brow furrowed. I ask the congregation, somewhat desperately, “do you get it?”

But I had a hard time relating to Jesus until I realized he used sarcasm. I think we all understand that sarcasm isn’t nice, and if Jesus were nice, he wouldn’t use sarcasm. Thank God he wasn’t nice. Realizing he wasn’t nice was liberating. If Jesus was sometimes sarcastic, might it be okay with God if I was snarky sometimes?

It happened while I was in a class with David Buttrick on the Parables of Jesus. There were two stories in particular - jokes, really, although we call them parables. Let me set up the joke first. The Judeans were tired of being kicked around, and they loved this passage of scripture from Ezekiel chapter 17:22 and following:

” ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself will take a shoot from the very top of a cedar and plant it; I will break off a tender sprig from its topmost shoots and plant it on a high and lofty mountain. On the mountain heights of Israel I will plant it; it will produce branches and bear fruit and become a splendid cedar. Birds of every kind will nest in it; they will find shelter in the shade of its branches. All the trees of the field will know that I the LORD bring down the tall tree and make the low tree grow tall. I dry up the green tree and make the dry tree flourish. 
” ‘I the LORD have spoken, and I will do it.’ “

They often compared nations to trees, and they had this dream that one day they would be a great nation, God would vindicate them, and people from all over the world would come to Jerusalem to worship at the temple. Well, then Jesus comes along and tells them this story:

Again he said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.”

So for centuries preachers have preached about the tiny mustard seed growing into a tree, some going so far to posit that there must have been some other kind of species of tree called a mustard tree. But the point of the story is that Jesus is making fun! The mustard plant is a weed. It’s more like a dandelion than a tree. It’s a joke! He’s being sarcastic! It would be like someone saying about the United States - “ah yes, America, the great eagle. That ferocious predator whose favorite food is road kill. America, that great melting pot where everyone is a descendent of illegal immigrants. America, that shining city on a hill - and the hill is made of human skulls, and the brightest light in that city is a sign for McDonald’s.”

If Jesus goes around saying things like that, it’s no wonder he gets himself killed. But it’s also no wonder that people stand up and follow him.

Another time, in Luke 13:8, Jesus tells a parable about the day of judgment, the day of the Lord that is coming when the bad guys will all get what’s coming to them, and the righteous will all be saved. But that Great Day keeps not coming. Here they are, thumbing through their copies of Left Behind, wondering how much longer they have to wait. Jesus says the nation is, again, like a tree that hasn’t produced fruit. So the owner comes and says, “cut it down! This tree has been barren for 8 years, it doesn’t have any leaves, and it’s rotten on the inside.” The gardener replies, “give me another year to work with it.” And then your Bible (the NIV, naturally) puts it very delicately - “let me put some fertilizer around it.” Only Jesus doesn’t say fertilizer. He uses a much more colorful term. The idea here is that you’re looking at a stick in the ground, and the gardener is begging for a stay of execution, saying if he just has one more year to work some shit (coprion) into the soil, he’ll make it produce. It’s ridiculous!

But the fact that Jesus uses humor to make his point tells me that there’s a real person here, under the text. We’re talking about a person who cracked jokes, who had a edge, who wasn’t afraid to offend people. And when I began to learn about that Jesus, I began to fall in love with him. So, as I said, the turning point in my relationship with Jesus was learning he had a sense of humor.

Now, I know that we often remake Jesus in our own image. To professors, Jesus is teacher, to liberals, he’s a liberal, to conservatives, he’s a conservative, to mystics, he’s a guru, and to me, he’s a vulgar liberal evangelical theologian. But… there’s a real Jesus under here somewhere if we will simply dig a bit. He resists all those attempts to boil him down to one thing or another, because there is always another facet to his personality. And one of the important things about being in a relationship with a real person is that you are always learning more about them. They push you, and you grow. You push back, and it becomes a kind of dance. It sounds more romantic than it is, but if you’ve been in a relationship like that, you understand. I’ve only been married 13 years, but I know there is more to both my wife and me that we each have yet to learn. Likewise, I expect to learn more about Jesus through study, prayer, worship, experience… but most of all through mutual friends, other people who know him well and who can shed a bit more light on his personality.

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Why Most Christians Don’t Love Jesus (Part 1)

I have a confession to make. For most of my life as a Christian, I have not loved Jesus. Sure, after my conversion experience, I believed (some) Christian doctrines. I believed Jesus was the Son of God, and that it was important to have a “personal relationship” with him (whatever those things mean), yadda yadda yadda. But I didn’t love him.

I recently saw some “man on the street” interviews in which the interviewer asked kids and adults who claimed to be Christian how they would describe Jesus. Most of them said:

Really nice? And… um… kind? And… um… Forgiving? Just, you know, really… nice.

Nice. Do you know what nice means? It means no second date. As in:

“So, how was the blind date?”
“Fine.”
“Well what did you think of him?”
“Oh he was nice.”

You know there’s not going to be a second date. No love there. On the other hand, if you describe someone you are madly, passionately in love with, you will almost never use the word “nice.” This is a word you use about someone only if they completely fail to make an impression on you. They don’t stir you up, they don’t make you angry, and they certainly don’t help you grow. People describe Jesus that way because they Jesus they know has no personality.

So I knew that I was supposed to love Jesus, that we ought to love Jesus, but how can you love someone so abstract? With no body, no physical presence? Who doesn’t talk to you? How can you love someone with all your heart and soul and mind if you never see them and you never hear their voice? That’s not a relationship. That’s neglect. Oh, I know, the spiritual folks say things like, “but he talks to me all the time. He talks to me through the sunsets, and the oceans, and through the silence.” Well why doesn’t he use verbs and nouns like everyone else? “He talks through the Bible.” Oh please.

But most Christians are afraid of this kind of talk, as I have discovered when I ask them about it. They, too, know they are supposed to love Jesus, but nobody has ever told them how. And I believe that deep down they know that the only answer they have to the question “why should I love Jesus,” is “so you don’t go to hell.” So under threat of eternal damnation, we’re supposed to flex some internal muscle to love someone we don’t know, can’t see or hear, and who has no personality beyond nice.

In addition to this improbable emotional obligation, Christians often tell others in our culture (especially teenagers) that although Jesus doesn’t like the music they listen to, the movies they watch, the books they read, their atheist friends, their clothes, their attitude, or anything about them, he loves them. So it isn’t surprising that many people find it difficult to muster up the emotional energy to love Jesus.

Another reason I’m pretty sure most Christians don’t love Jesus is that occasionally I’ll hear Christians wonder, “why did they kill Jesus? Why couldn’t they see that he was the messiah?” It bewilders them because the Jesus they’ve been taught all their life is not dangerous, is not threatening, upholds the status quo and walks around in a bathrobe spouting trite sayings that sound like they were stolen from Hallmark greeting cards. “Blessed are the meek, blessed are the quiet, blessed are those who act like doormats, blessed are those who are nice to puppies.” One professor I had said that the only reason anyone would want to kill such a Jesus is because he was boring. When Jesus’ message is “be nice, don’t cause trouble, go to church, and support the status quo,” it’s no wonder people don’t feel any love for this perfect, sinless, goody-two-shoes.

But Jesus must have been electric. Dazzling. His disciples were ready to die for him. His words galvanized people, and threatened people, and he was dangerous enough to be killed. You can get a sense of this kind of passion during election years. People get out the door and go to a polling station and vote, they get into arguments over coffee, and they disown members of their own family based on their passion for Obama, or Clinton, or McCain, or Huckabee. And many times this passion is based as much on a figure’s personality as it is on any particular issue. People write fan mail to Bono or J.K. Rowling, they go on pilgrimages to Graceland, because they are a fan (fanatic) of someone they hardly know.

Jesus must have been the same way. People got so worked up about Jesus that they rejected family members, that arguments broke out whenever someone mentioned his name. He was such a lightning rod that the establishment put out a contract on him. What about him inspired such love and hatred?

I’m not sure anyone could ever answer the questions completely, but over the 7 Sundays of Lent and Easter I’m going to give it my best shot.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Why Obama Will Win: Learned Optimism, Hope, and the Power of Words

Martin Seligman is a behaviorist. He is best known for his experiments exploring the idea of “learned helplessness.” Dogs were exposed to repeated, unescapable electric shocks. When they were given the opportunity to escape the shocks, simply by leaping over a barrier, they did not. They simply stayed there and took it. They had learned to be helpless. I’ve seen it often enough in the eyes of people who come in to my office to talk, to pray, to cry.

What is less known is his related idea, “learned optimism.” He explores the idea in his book of the same name. His operational definition of an optimist is someone who attributes success internally (due to one’s own good qualities, hard work, etc.) and attributes failure externally (circumstances beyond one’s control like the weather, other people, etc.).

One of the most fascinating chapters is on optimism’s influence on presidential elections. Seligman and his assistants analyzed the speeches of all of the presidential candidates in the 20th century. They came up with a way to score how optimistic a speech was by how often success was attributed internally, and how often failure was attributed externally. Without exception, the candidate with the highest optimism score won. Seligman’s findings reminded him of an idea from science fiction, Isaac Asimov’s “psychohistory,” the scientific way of predicting the behavior of societies.

It doesn’t take long to think back over recent elections and simply ask, which candidate was most optimistic? Remember these pairings? Bush vs. Kerry. Bush vs. Gore. Clinton vs. Dole. Clinton vs. Bush. Bush vs. Dukakis, Reagan vs. Mondale, Regan vs. Carter, Carter vs. Ford. In every single pairing, the president who seemed the most optimistic won. As you look back over the names of the men who lost the elections ask yourself - did any have a compelling vision of the future? Did they sound optimistic?

When I’ve mentioned this theory to other people, sometimes they will roll their eyes and say something like, “oh no, you mean all someone has to do is sound positive? What if they’re positively wrong?” But I think that question misses the point. One thing people look for in a leader is their ability to articulate a vision and chart a course for the future. They don’t want someone who uses phrases like, “economic malaise” or “inconvenient truth.” Or, if a leader does use phrases like that, they’d better have something equally positive to counterbalance it. “Audacity of hope” has a nice ring to it.

And although his opponents often sneer at Obama’s persuasive and empowering rhetoric, the fact is that little unites a country like a great orator. Words are ideas. They influence the way we think and act. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” “I have a dream.” “We will fight them on the beaches…” In Christian theology, the Word is a big deal: the word creates the world, becomes flesh, and brings life. We’ve been starving for good words for eight years. The words we’ve heard instead are about redefining torture or our civil rights or the mission in Iraq. Some people’s actions make us lose faith in words. Others use words to restore our faith.

Anyway, Seligman didn’t apply his theory to primaries (as far as I know), but I think in the Obama/Clinton pairing, Obama wins. Again, you can see the same problem with Edwards - although he speaks the truth, and his message sounds prophetic, he doesn’t sound optimistic. As for the Republican candidates and optimism: McCain, Guiliani, Huckabee, Romney - well, it’s just painful. Can any of them articulate a vision?

I must confess, I’ve learned a bit of helplessness myself after these last two national elections. Part of what will determine the outcome of this election is if Americans have learned helplessness, and stay home instead of voting. It is possible that people, like Seligman’s dogs, have learned that nothing they do makes a difference. It takes a significant infusion of hope to get people to see the possibilities, to help them learn that they don’t have to lie down and take the abuse.

Listen to an Obama speech. Can you hear the influences in his rhetoric? There’s some black preaching. There’s a bit of Kennedy and some King and maybe even some Reagan. As a preacher, I believe in the power of the right word at the right time. Given Seligman’s research, I will be shocked and amazed if he doesn’t win the primary next week, and the election in ‘08.