Page 1623 – Christianity Today (2024)

Walter Crutchfield had his first conversion moment at age 18, when he accepted Christ as Lord. That year, the self-professed "serial entrepreneur" started his own auto production company, but sold it a year later to attend Bible college. "When I came to Christ, I still had the joy of business," says the Phoenix native. "But the world around me . . . told me that if you were serious about faith, you'd get involved in ministry." And so he did, becoming a full-time pastor. But his second conversion—to the goodness of work outside the church—unfolded over many years.

In this short film, featuring This Is Our City's first helicopter mission, Crutchfield takes us through the real-estate crisis that led him to use his business savvy to bless and beautify his community.

David Murrow’s book, Why Men Hate Going to Church, struck a chord when it was published in 2005. Seven years later, male church attendance is still low. So David went searching for the answer. What he found is reported in Why Men Hate Going to Church: Completely Revised and Updated (Thomas Nelson). Drew Dyck talked with Murrow about reaching men and creating a church atmosphere in which they can thrive.

How can churches attract men?

Make very simple changes, mainly in the area of décor, language, and culture. These can be very subtle. Here’s a piece of low-hanging fruit: If you want a church full of men, simply bring an object into the pulpit every single week. Take your 25 minutes and build it around an object lesson, and I guarantee you in two years you will have a church full of men because men will pay attention. They’ll be thinking, When is the object coming out, and what’s it going to be?

Of course, I’m just ripping off Jesus. His teaching was very concrete. He says, “Show me a coin. Whose face? Whose description?” He was so visual. He’s walking through a wheat field, and says, “Look, the fields are white for harvest.” Or, “Go ahead, Peter. Step out of the boat. Feel the water on your feet. Feel the wind on your face.” He was such a concrete teacher. So that’s what I’m saying: steal from Jesus. He’s more than willing to share.

You write that megachurches have done a better job reaching men. What can small churches do?

My heart is for small churches. I grew up in small churches. Ninety percent of churches are under 150 on Sunday morning. Many of them have tremendous growth potential. Their buildings are paid off and they sit in a strong financial position. But many are graying and failing to reach young people. The problem is that they’re trying to reach young people by reaching young women. They do things like improving the nursery or starting a ladies’ Bible study. Those things aren’t wrong, but you’re never going to get guys that way. You might get a few people right away, but what you don’t realize is that you’re hobbling your church for the long term.

Do you have to be a macho kind of pastor to attract men to your church?

Men have an instinctive BS detector. They walk into a room and within one minute they have a judgment about the man who’s talking to them. So if you’re not a manly man, if you don’t have “man cred,” if you’re not a risk-taker, men are going to pick up on that.

But no, you don’t have to be macho. I mean, Rick Warren is certainly not macho. He regularly tears up in the pulpit. But he is a big vision man. And that gives him credibility with men. You have to be able to inspire men, whether that’s through swagger or vision or courage.

Tim Keller is not a macho guy. But he’s a big idea guy, and he lives in the capital of ideas, New York City. That’s his man cred. Manhattan men are thinkers. They don’t make their money by breaking their backs; they make their money with their minds. So they’re looking for a pastor who is similarly brilliant. And Keller fits that bill. He has an emphasis on mission and getting things done that men admire. Men don’t want to sit in church for 30 years just to listen to sermons and sing songs. At some point men say, “Okay, I’ve listened. What is there to do?”

How have women responded to what you’re saying?

I get more pushback from men who are well-established in the church than I do from women. Women sense the need. Women see their husbands bored. They see their sons dropping out. They see their brothers irreligious. They sit on the pew with nine other women. They know the situation on the ground.

The men who are already in the church and comfortable with the church and, quite frankly, for many of them church is their power area, they are the ones who push back. They are the ones who say things like, “Well, men should just learn to sing those songs,” or “Men need to be comfortable holding hands or hugging.” They have all these pious-sounding phrases.

But it reveals that they really don’t have a missionary mindset. They are comfortable, and more concerned with protecting their own power in the current structure.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

My father is Oglala Lakota/Sioux from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and my mother is Sicangu from the Rosebud Lakota/Sioux Indian Reservation, both located in South Dakota. I lived among my mother's people as a child.

When I was 18, I participated with 600 others in the American Indian Movement's forced takeover and occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Office Building in Washington, D.C. We protested the federal government's breaking of more than 700 congressionally ratified treaties with our tribes. For eight days we occupied the building and were surrounded by riot police. During this period, I allowed hatred toward white people to grow in my heart.

A few years later, however, after enduring drug and alcohol addiction, a stint in jail, and a growing despair over my lostness, I became a follower of Jesus.

Many tribes refer to North America as Turtle Island. More that 700 different tribes believe that Creator put them on this land long before Columbus got lost and "discovered" the New World. In Acts 17:26 Paul writes about how Creator pre-determined times and places for people to dwell in. We are the First Nations peoples of Turtle Island. It would appear Creator brought the Europeans to Turtle Island, too. Perhaps in Jesus, we could have walked together as brothers and sisters, forming a great new community of Christ. But it was not to be. Instead, our people suffered the horrors of genocide and ethnic cleansing. What makes the story most tragic is that biblical narratives were misappropriated to validate these atrocities. Thankfully, however, the story is not finished.

As I have reflected on my conversion experience, I am glad I did not find faith in Jesus in a church building; it spared me from having become Baptist, Presbyterian, Anglican, Pentecostal, or Wesleyan. I just became a follower of Jesus!

But then I was told I needed to become a Christian too, specifically a Euro-American Christian. I learned that only English speakers had the "Authorized" version of the Bible. I discovered the Christian culture, complete with Christian music, Christian T-shirts, and even Christian haircuts. It was almost as if the Bible read, "When a person becomes a Christian they become a new creation. Old things pass away and all things become white."

When Jesus came into my life and overwhelmed me with his love, I wanted nothing more than simply to follow him. I began a life of transformation because he rescued me from a life of addiction, abuse, self-destruction, and likely from a premature death. I longed for the same transformation for our people. Yet I found myself tripping over the cultural trappings of American Christianity. Following the ways of Jesus seemed one thing; becoming a white Christian quite another.

Yet, in spite of all of this, I find in Jesus the possibility for forgiveness, reconciliation, and the path toward Shalom alongside my fellow human beings. We are all ikce wicasa "common human persons" on this road, and Jesus shows us there is always hope for redemption.

The phases of my journey have looked very different. I pastored an Anglo congregation for 13 years and worked for the International Bible Society. I've led Native cultural performing arts groups to places like Tibet, China, Pakistan, and Peru. Along the way, I've had the privilege of seeing many commit to follow The Way of Jesus.

More recently I have lived out my commitment to Jesus at Portland State University, as an adjunct professor, teaching "Native American Religion and the Sacred." I also lived The Way as a traditional Northern Style Powwow dancer, performing my prayers for the people—or while sitting in the inipi or "sweat lodge ceremony" where we confess our faults and celebrate our successes, seeking to become better human beings in the spirit of Jesus.

I began this journey in Christ 38 years ago. The process of growing spiritually has led me to want simply to be ikce wicasa in my local community, following Jesus in the context of Native cultural ways, such as music, dance, drumming, and ceremony.

As a Lakota follower of the Jesus Way, I endeavor to walk in the light of the Creator's presence. I desire something akin to what the Navajo call hozho "the way of beauty," where we live in harmony with all of creation in order to enjoy the beauty around us.

Richard L. Twiss is president of Wiconi International and lives in Vancouver, Washington.

Copyright © 2012 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Jennifer Livingston is a news anchor at WKBT-TV in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and she’s used to being in the public eye. But the critical gaze of one viewer was too much.

After channel surfing into Livingston’s show, a man named Kenneth Krause wrote to her: “I was surprised indeed to witness that your physical condition hasn’t improved for many years.” And “Surely you don’t consider yourself a suitable example for this community’s young people, girls in particular.” And “Obesity is one of the worst choices a person can make and one of the most dangerous habits to maintain. I leave you this note hoping that you’ll reconsider your responsibility as a local public personality to present and promote a healthy lifestyle.”

Livingston went on air to call Krause a bully, and she thanked the public for their support after her husband (also an anchor at the station) posted the comment on the station’s Facebook page. Livingston’s response then went viral, prompting appearances on morning talk shows and several appearances on my own Facebook news feed last week.

But I have to confess, as a fat woman, I’m ambivalent about Livingston’s rejoinder.

On one hand, kudos to Livingston for using her bully pulpit to denounce meanness. (I do think that calling a single e-mail “bullying” dilutes the concept, but I’ll sidestep that issue for now.) On the other hand, her response seems to play into the fat-shaming substance of the offending e-mail. Oh no, he called me FAT! If being fat isn’t a problem, then why the need to denounce the comment as mean? One could call the comment ignorant and prejudicial, but mean?

I wish Livingston had taken this opportunity to call out the hegemony of thin bodies that young people are presented with as visions of what it means to be successful. I attended a lecture last year during which cultural critic Naomi Wolf reported that daytime TV producers are not allowed to book guests who are larger than a size 10 because advertisers don’t like it. The average American woman is a size 14, and if you never see women who look like you succeeding, it keeps you buying what advertisers are selling—diets, cosmetics, plastic surgery, personal trainers. And maybe also a package of bite-sized brownies that come in the refrigerated section because you’re so tired and you deserve a little indulgence. It’s a perverse treadmill with the Industrial Dieting Complex ($60 billion in annual revenues) and Agribusiness nipping at the heels of people who stay fat and never get happy.

But we gotta get healthy! Yes, indeed. I’m almost always working on being healthier in ways big and small (I just did a shot of fish oil, for example), and my weight is absolutely part of that equation. But health is an equation, full of variables, many of which we can’t see or don’t understand. And I’m convinced that most people’s reasons for wanting to lose weight have less to do with a commitment to health and more to do with stigma. Yale released a study in 2006 that reported a list of disturbing trade-offs people would make in order to not be fat:

• —46 percent of respondents reported that they would be willing to give up at least 1 year of life rather than be obese, and 15 percent said that they would be willing to give up 10 years or more of their life.
• —30 percent of respondents reported that they would rather be divorced than obese.
• —25 percent said that they would rather be unable to have children than be obese.
• —15 percent said that they would rather be severely depressed than be obese.
• —14 percent said that they would rather be alcoholic than be obese.

Read those statistics again.

I once had a woman at a park sit down next to me and say, “When people look at you, they want to throw up.” She explained, “I know, I used to be fat.”

The fear of fat is not the fear of death or even illness. It is the fear of life shadowed by the pity and contempt of one’s neighbors. And we fear this pity and contempt because we know it. We harbor it for ourselves, which diminishes our capacity for generous and loving engagement with others. This is why God commands us multiple times to love others as ourselves (Lev. 19:18, 19:34; Matt. 7:12; Luke 6:31, 10:25-28). It’s easy to dismiss self-love as permissive, easy, New Agey schlock, but it’s actually countercultural and hard and absolutely vital to worshiping God.

“Tough love” is a popular concept among evangelicals—especially for those us of who grew up in the sub-cultural thrall of Dr. James Dobson—and some might argue that Krause’s e-mail was loving in this vein. I contend his note is too ignorant to be loving. But we are bombarded by so many negative messages about fat bodies (remember, there’s a lot of money riding on the idea that we’re willing to avoid, or try to avoid, being fat at all costs) it’s hard to blame Krause. He’s certainly not alone in his bigotry. You have to really care about fat people—maybe even actually love some of them—to pay enough attention to see the red flags waving around the conventional wisdom on obesity.

While Livingston was calling Krause out for his ideas about who is and who is not a good role model, maybe she could have also schooled him on the complexity of the relationship between weight and health. As she said, she is more than a number on a scale. But she is also a number on a scale. And while she had the microphone, I wish she had also mentioned that people in the overweight category on the BMI chart actually live longer. Or that life expectancy in the United States has risen—along with the obesity rate—from 70.8 years in 1970 to 78.2 in 2005. Not only are we living longer than ever before, we’re also healthier than ever and chronic disease is appearing later in life. That’s hard to square with the dramatic quality and quantity of the stories we hear on the nightly news about a country with cankles on the verge of collapse due to obesity-related disease.

But hey, Livingston is a reporter, right? Maybe there’s fodder here for a future expose. In the meantime, I for one am happy that Livingston is on televisions across the Greater Lacrosse area every day. And given that the vast majority of time we see fat women on screen their weight is the reason for their appearance—as a sight gag, as a warning, as a maudlin inspiration—I’ll be glad when she’s able to get back to the news.

Lisa Ann co*ckrel is an editor for Brazos Press and Baker Academic. She writes regularly for CT Movies and is working on a book about obesity, community, and the ethics of incarnation.

*NOTE: This message was delivered at the Q Cities conference in Denver on September 27, 2012. My actual comments may have been slightly different from what is written here. Q restricts presentations to a maximum of 18 minutes, so this message could only skim the surface of the complicated intersection of gay rights and religious liberty.

When I was a freshman in college, the GLBA–the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Alliance–organized an annual Gay Awareness week. What I remember most was “Jean Day.” The student leaders of the GLBA posted signs all over campus announcing that students could express their support for gay rights by wearing jeans on Thursday. Of course denim is a second skin for most college students, and it was obvious the GLBA was seeking to inflate their perception of support. The tactic was so transparent few people paid attention—until a conservative Christian student group began putting up their own signs. Their flyers called students who did not support gay rights to “wear a shirt on Thursday.”

The battle lines were drawn. The silliness of the GBLA’s scheme was matched by the stupidity of the Christians’.

Thursday came and members of the GBLA went to class in blue jeans and topless. (Some women wearing only bras.) The conservative Christians marched to class wearing khakis and in some cases multiple shirts, proudly doing their part to “uphold righteousness.” Eventually the two groups got into a heated shouting match. The shirts accused the skins of being godless and immoral. The denims accused the khakis of being bigots and hom*ophobes.

As I watched the scene unfold, the voice of my high school teacher echoed in my head. “Just remember,” he’d told me, “college isn’t the real world.”

Sadly the real world has proven to look more like my college experience than I would have hoped, only now the shouting between the gay community and Christians happens on cable news, talk radio, outside courthouses and in school board meetings. Still there are many of us–both gay and straight, Christian and non-Christian, supporters of same sex marriage, and those like myself who hold to the church’s traditional definition–who do not identify with the culture war rhetoric emanating from either side. We stand on the periphery wondering: isn’t there a better way?

Must we view every advancement in gay rights as a defeat for people of religious conviction? And is the presence of Christian values in the public square automatically a threat to gay rights? What is the place of religious liberty? And how do we elevate the conversation from the shouting match it has become?

I confess to you that in many ways I feel unqualified to address this topic. I am not a constitutional expert or a civil rights scholar. I am not a sociologist or a public advocate for either side. What I am is a pastor; a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is from that identity that I speak, and from that identity I want to ask–What does it mean to enter into the public square, into the tension between gay rights and religious freedom, dressed not in denim or khakis, shirts or skins, but clothed in the Gospel and bearing the image of Jesus Christ?

If we are to bring Christ’s presence into this issue, I believe we must do three things. First, we must reframe the current debate. Second, we must rethink a long-held theological assumption. And third, we must reaffirm our committment to public witness.

REFRAMING

In order to understand the way the debate is currently framed, we must go back to 1976. Newsweek famously declared it “The Year of the Evangelical.” After 50 years on the edge of the culture, the social upheaval of the 1960s and the legalization of abortion in 1972 brought evangelicals out from the shadows. They feared the country had taken a rapid turn away from Judeo-Christian values and intervention was necessary. That year the seeds were planted for the emergence of the Religious Right and the alignment of “values voters” with the Republican Party.

1976 was also the year Harvey Milk was appointed to the San Francisco city council. Milk was the first openly gay political official in the country. Until then gay and lesbian Americans had been a largely hidden minority. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association removed hom*osexuality from its official list of mental disorders; together with Harvey Milk’s political success, it marked the gay community’s emergence from the closet and into the public square.

So, we can look at 1976 as the year when the tension between gay rights and religious liberty became public. In the 36 years since then, evangelicals have primarily seen the issue as a conflict between values. Society will either be shaped by traditional Christian values or by progressive secular ones. There can be no middle ground. One group will win and the other must retreat to the periphery of society from which it emerged.

For the church this framing have been costly. According to Gallop, in the 1970s 66 percent of Americans said they had a strong or high confidence in the church. Today it is only 44 percent. In 1994 only 27 percent supported same sex marriage. Today it is over 50 percent. David Campbell and Robert Putnam report:

The data points to a rich irony about the emergence of the religious right. Its founders intended to bolster religion’s place in the public square. In a sense, they have succeeded. Yet at the same time . . . the movement has pushed a growing share of the population to opt out of religion altogether.

Looking back, the decision to frame the issue as a battle over values was a severe mistake. In reality, the tension had far more to do with identity than values.

Consider Jesus’ words in Luke 6: “Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned.” It is one of the most abused and misunderstood verses in the New Testament. Jesus is not saying we shouldn’t discern between right and wrong. (In fact later in the same chapter he tells us to do exactly that.) He is telling us not to devalue a person as irretrievably guilty or condemn their identity as worthless. We are to believe that all people, including our LGTB neighbors, are made in the image of God and are inherently worthy of his love and ours.

By framing the issue as one of competing values, and then attacking those values, Christians were seen as condemning the core identity of their gay neighbors. When confronted, they might say, “We hate the sin but love the sinner.” But to a culture that understood the issue as one of identity rather than values, this was nonsensical and it opened Christians to accusations of hypocrisy and hom*ophobia–which are the two words young adults now associate with Christians more than any other. If we are to bring the image of Jesus forward, we must reframe the issue and admit that the gay community has been right from the beginning–this issue is not simply about values; it is in fact about identity.

Rather than asking Whose values will dominate the public square? we should be asking: Whose identity is welcomed into the public square? Do we believe LGTB citizens ought to bring their identity into government, business, the media, and education without fear of discrimination? And likewise, do we believe a Christian holding traditional beliefs should be able to bring their identity into the public square without fear of discrimination? Framed this way, the issue ceases to be about winning or losing, or which group gets control and which is pushed back into the closet, and it becomes about learning to share the public square as Americans with different beliefs about marriage and sexuality but all possessing inherent God-given worth.

RETHINKING

This reframing of the issue, however, will require the church to rethink a deeply held assumption carried by many Christians. That assumption has its roots in a sermon preached by John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. While sailing aboard the Arbella, he inspired the Puritan settlers by applying Old Testament promises given to Israel to their colony. If they kept God’s laws, he said, they would be blessed, and if they disobeyed they would see his wrath. “The eyes of all people are upon us,” he declared. The New World would be a “city upon a hill.”

These ideas, and even his words, would be recycled by American religious and political leaders for almost three centuries, to great effect. As a result many still believe America has a special covenant with God. If the country adheres to biblical morality, it will be blessed. If it deviates, it will be cursed. This was on display following the attacks on 9/11 when Jerry Falwell blamed the “pagans, the abortionists, the feminists, the gays and the lesbians” for the tragedy. They had pushed America toward secularism, broken our covenant with God, costing us our divine protection.

As long as American Christians hold to this belief, which has no basis in Scripture, we will never be able to reframe the gay rights / religious liberty issue away from a battle of values toward one of a shared public square. There are two reasons. First, if we believe God’s judgment will come upon us for extending rights to our gay neighbors, then we cannot possibly accommodate their identity into the public square. While the sensible path is to recognize the presence of our LGBT neighbors and cooperate with them to draft laws that ensure their rights while simultaneously protecting religious liberty, instead we risk remaining locked in a winner-take-all battle for social control while the religious liberties of Christians get under-represented in the courts and legislatures. It is a self-defeating posture that must be abandoned.

Second, believing America has a special covenant with God mobilizes Christians through pride or fear rather than love. When leaders, both political and religious, seek to inflate Christians’ fears about their gay neighbors they are not inspiring us to be more Christian, but less. They are not leading us toward faith in Christ, but away from him, because where the fires of fear and anger are fed, the inviting glow of Christ-centered faith and hope and love cannot long endure.

“Values war” rhetoric is not leading us to love our gay neighbors as ourselves, but instead causing us to believe that our well-being necessitates their misfortune. The “us or them” view is antithetical to what Jesus taught and modeled. In other words, believing a false and unbiblical doctrine–America’s covenant with God–is causing Christians to act contrary to a true and biblical one–the call to love our neighbors.

REAFFIRMING

Finally, bringing the presence of Christ into this issue means not only reframing the issue and rethinking America’s covenant with God, it also means reaffirming our commitment to public witness. The Christian presence in the public square is facing challenges from two sides. One is pushing it out, and the other is pulling it. First, by framing gay rights as an all-or-nothing values war, for three decades Christians have given opponents a reason to push them out of the public square, because the Christians are seen as standing against the values of democracy, liberty, and freedom. Lawsuits against individuals, businesses, and groups holding to the historic Christian teaching on sexuality and marriage are mounting. We are reaping what we have sown.

But Christians aren’t just being pushed from the public square, many are choosing to leave it. Over the last 36 years the church has made many mistakes. We see it in the data, we feel it in the culture, and hear about it from our neighbors. And this is causing some Christians to withdraw from public manifestation of their faith in favor of a private devotion.

“If the Religious Right has taught us anything,” they say, “it’s that faith should stay out of politics and business and education.” I believe this is precisely the wrong response. The question is not whether Christians should carry their faith into the public square, but how should we carry it. Will we carry it on the shoulders of fear and anger as a weapon to defeat our enemies? Or will we carry it on the shoulders of love and mercy as a cross that brings healing and comprehensive flourishing to our communities?

In 2006, then Senator Barack Obama addressed this question in his speech on faith in the public square. He said:

Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history – were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity.

For the common good, we must not allow our Chrisitan witness to be pushed or pulled out of the public square, and neither should we retreat into enclaves of private devotion. Followers of Christ must publicly advocate that all people (whether gay or straight, religious or non) be free to live out their identity without fear or violation of their conscience. That means being free to carry one’s faith into school or business. It means not forcing religious organizations to pay for health services that violate their faith, and protecting a business owner being threatened by government officials for holding an unpopular belief. But it also means affirming a Mulsim girl’s right to wear a hijab to school, and the right of her community to build a mosque in their neighborhood. And it means not denying LGTB citizens access to the same legal protections enjoyed by other Americans.

We must ask ourselves, what kind of public square do we want to create? If we desire a public square where all identities are welcomed, then as Christians we must not abandon our place within it, but strive to shape a public square where all people and ideas are welcomed. Where this freedom exists, not only are religious and gay communities more likely to coexist in peace, but I believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ is also more likely to advance. The public witness of the gospel does not simply depend on Christians defending their own religious liberties, but upon our willingness to defend the liberties of those we disagree with.

As Christians, as those clothed in the gospel of peace, we cannot, and should not, demand that everyone share our beliefs. But we can, and should, demand that everyone share our freedoms. When this happens, we will find the courage to take off the armor of the culture war and put on the image of Christ. When this happens, we will find the grace to put aside fear and take up love. When this happens, we can be assured that Christ will be lifted up in the public square and draw all people to himself.

No single word resonates with Americans and millions of others quite like freedom. A television commercial announces that buying a certain automobile or flying with a certain airline will make you "free." People celebrate their country's independence with songs of "freedom" on their lips and ringing in their ears. Politicians, businesspeople, advertisers, salesmen, military leaders and recruiters—all know how to use "freedom" to attract attention and draw interest. Few words are so common while carrying so much weight.

The word is also found throughout Scripture and Christian tradition. Everyone raised in Sunday school knows "the truth will set you free" (John 8:32) and "[i]t is for freedom that Christ has set us free" (Gal. 5:1). Freedom is not just an American or humanitarian theme; it's also a gospel theme.

Unfortunately, two very different ideas of freedom get confused in many people's minds. The biblical idea of freedom is different from, but easily confused with, the cultural value of the same name. And neither one is the same as "free will." It can be confusing to the average Christian who wants to know what "real freedom" is. Is it having choices? Is it lack of coercion and constraint? Is it being able to do whatever you want? In what sense does Christ set us free, and how is that different from what Madison Avenue and Hollywood promise?

At the very heart of the Christian gospel is the strange truth that real freedom is found only in giving up everything secular culture touts as freedom. The gospel, it turns out, requires a distinction between the enjoyment of true freedom and the mere possession of "free will." Not that free will or independence from tyranny is a bad thing; they're just not true freedom. True freedom, the gospel tells us, is trusting obedience, the obedience of faith. That's not exactly the image one finds portrayed in popular culture.

A Kind of Bondage

When I was a kid, I heard many sermon illustrations. My dad was a pastor, and he overflowed with them—in the pulpit and at home! So did the evangelists and missionaries who crowded our kitchen and sanctuary. A memorable one was the homey but pithily expressed truth about freedom—"gospel freedom." A train is free only so long as it stays on its tracks; a train that jumps the tracks is "free" of the rails but no longer free in the most important sense of the word. It's a freed wreck that can't go anywhere. "Free," but no longer truly free.

The great church father Augustine taught that true freedom is not choice or lack of constraint, but being what you are meant to be. Humans were created in the image of God. True freedom, then, is not found in moving away from that image but only in living it out. The closer we conform to the true image of God, Jesus Christ, the freer we become. The farther we drift from it, the more our freedom shrinks.

From a Christian perspective, then, freedom—paradoxically—is a kind of bondage. Martin Luther expressed this truth better than anyone since the apostle Paul. In his 1520 treatise On Christian Liberty (also known as On the Freedom of a Christian), the Reformer put it in a nutshell: "A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone."

In other words, according to Luther, because of what Christ has done for her and because of her faith in Christ, the Christian is absolutely free from the bondage of the law. She doesn't have to do anything. On the other hand, out of gratitude for what Christ has done for her and in her, the Christian is bound in servitude to God and other people. She gets to serve them freely and joyfully. A person who doesn't "get" the "get to" part simply doesn't know the joy of salvation. That's what Luther meant.

Jumping from the 16th to the 20th century, and from a magisterial Reformer to a radical Anabaptist theologian, John Howard Yoder wrote in The Politics of Jesus about "revolutionary subordination." True freedom is found not in insisting on one's own rights, but in freely giving them up by being a servant to Jesus Christ first and the people of God second.

Freedom through Obedience

All that's pretty hard for 21st-century Westerners—heirs of the Enlightenment, brainwashed by modernity's extreme emphasis on individualism and liberty—to swallow. We are bombarded from childhood with the message that freedom means self-assertion, insisting on your rights, throwing off constraints, and creating yourself. The highest virtue in contemporary society is "Be true to yourself." In old-school lingo, "Don't fence me in!"

No truth is more pervasive in Scripture and Christian tradition than this one—that real freedom is found in obedience and servanthood. And yet no truth is more incongruent with modern culture. Here we stand before a stark either-or: the gospel message of true freedom versus the culture's ideal of self-creation, autonomy, and living "my way."

The contrast between the gospel truth of real freedom and its satanic substitute begins to unfold in the Genesis story of humanity's origins and fall. According to Genesis 2, God gave the first humans freedom: "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat" (Gen. 2:16-17, RSV). Conditioned as we are by modernity and its obsession with autonomy, our first reaction is: "How is that freedom?" To us, freedom with limitations is not freedom at all.

We know, however, how grasping for that sort of freedom turned out for Adam and Eve, and indeed for the whole human race. It's a story of shame, hiding, alienation, enmity, toil, and death—in short, the absolute antithesis of freedom. In Paradise Lost, John Milton parodied humanity's Promethean rage against limitations when he had Lucifer declare, "Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven!" The question presses in upon us: When were Adam and Eve most free? In the Garden of Eden, when they could eat of all the trees except one? Or after they lost paradise, and were "free" to roam around and eat whatever they wanted?

The implication of the Genesis story is unavoidable: True freedom is found only in obedience to God and the fellowship that comes with it. Loss of true freedom comes with self-assertion, the idolatrous desire to rule my own square inch of hell rather than enjoy the blessings of God's favor.

The entire biblical narrative can be read this way—as a "theo-drama" of freedom and its loss through the desire and attempt to enjoy unfettered autonomy. Take, for instance, Israel's frequent rebellions and loss of divine protection; or David's rediscovery of joy in obedience to God's law; or the prophets' clarion calls to Israel and Judah to keep God's law, and the people's subsequent loss of freedom from insisting on having their own way.

Nowhere does this counterintuitive theme become clearer than in the New Testament. Jesus said to his disciples: "[T]hose who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it" (Matt. 16:25, NRSV). Again, to his disciples: "[W]hoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave" (Matt. 20:26-27, NIV). True, the apostle Paul spoke often and warmly of our liberty, in Christ, from the law as an external constraint or compulsion. Trusting in Christ is, according to him, the only basis for our right relationship with God. On the other hand, throughout his epistles he counsels giving up rights and freedoms for the sake of spreading the gospel and protecting others' consciences (Rom. 14 and 1 Cor. 8). Paul found real freedom in giving up his rights: "For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them" (1 Cor. 9:19, NRSV).

This gospel theme of true freedom through obedience and servanthood is so pervasive in the Bible that it cannot be missed. And yet, because of our culture's overriding emphasis on autonomy, we miss it all the time.

The Question of 'Free Will'

So what kind of obedience brings real freedom? First, and again contrary to popular opinion, it's not imposed obedience. It's not about obeying God's will because we fear the consequences of disobedience. Gospel obedience is always voluntary. The moment obedience to Christ becomes drudgery or a reluctant, cringing conformity, it is no longer gospel obedience. Only when obedience is joyful, when it stems from gratitude, does it result in true freedom, in the freedom of being who and what we are meant to be. The freedom, in other words, of a train heading along the right track.

Second, obedience that brings real freedom is motivated by self-sacrificial love. Yoder prophetically describes this sort of servanthood as "revolutionary subordination," in which every believer seeks the good of others with no hint of asserting one's own rights. In a community where everyone lives that way out of gratitude to Jesus Christ, empowered by his Spirit, true freedom abounds.

How does all this relate to the concept of free will? Does "freedom" mean nothing more than "free will"?

Obviously not. If, by "freedom," we mean gospel freedom—as in servanthood, becoming and being what God intends us to be, obedience to Christ and growing into his image—then it's clear we're talking about something deeper than mere possession of "free will."

This is something about which Arminians (believers in free will as the power of contrary choice) and Calvinists (believers in bondage of the will and God's absolute, all-determining sovereignty) can agree. As an Arminian, I have often been accused by fellow Christians of holding a shallow view of freedom. Not true. Even evangelical Arminians, "Arminians of the heart" (as opposed to "Arminians of the head"), believe true freedom transcends free will. Free will is simply a God-given capacity for choosing the true freedom offered by God's grace, or else rejecting it through our own self-centered obstinacy.

Not all Christians believe in free will. Luther certainly didn't! But that's not the point here. My point is simply that whether or not one believes in free will, true freedom is something else. It doesn't contradict free will; it transcends it.

All Christians agree that true freedom, the freedom of obedience to Christ and conformity to his image, is a gift of God's grace that we will fully enjoy only in our heavenly glorification. That is the point of Paul's confession in Romans 7—here on earth, we struggle in a war between the "flesh" (fallen nature) and the Spirit, God's gracious gift of dwelling within us. In the meantime, as we await our full glorification, we grow in freedom only by exchanging an attitude of grudging submission to the law for a new heart that delights in obeying Christ. By God's grace, and with the aid of his Spirit, we can realize ever increasing freedom from sin and death. But freedom in its fullness comes only after our resurrection.

Theologians call the gradual process of experiencing true freedom before death "sanctification." We debate about how intense and whole that freedom can be before our resurrection. But we agree that real freedom is an unfolding gift that, by degrees, we receive.

Paul says in Philippians 2:12-13, "[W]ork out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (NRSV). Salvation, in other words, is both gift and task. Paul's "for" indicates that the gift surrounds and underlies the task. But our "work" of obedience and servanthood is truly ours; we are called, by an exercise of free will, to embrace it. We don't sit back and wait for it to "just happen."

Sufficient Grace

On the other hand, whenever we experience that greater freedom of real obedience, being conformed to the character of Christ and true servanthood, we acknowledge that it is all due to God's work in us. That is the "paradox of grace and free will."

Another homey analogy might help make the point.

Every summer, I struggle to water the numerous bushes and flowers that thirstily surround our house in the dry heat of central Texas. I turn on the outdoor faucet with the hose attached and the spray nozzle on its end. Then I drag the 100-foot hose way out to the far corner of the yard, point the spray nozzle at a bush, and press the trigger. Usually, nothing comes out. So, I trudge back around the house to the faucet to see if it's really turned on. It usually is. Why, then, is no water spraying?

Experience has told me that somewhere along the length of that garden hose there's a kink. I may have to hunt for it. When I find it and finally straighten it (or them) out, the water that was there all along can finally quench the thirst of the bush.

God's grace for our freedom is always there—completely—from the moment of conversion. There is no lack of grace or need for grace boosters. But there can be grace blockers—wrong attitudes and habits, hidden resentments and selfish motives. My "job," as it were, is to find them—with the Spirit's help, of course—and work them out through a process of repentance and submission. Free will is a necessary precondition in that process, but not the end result. The process leads not to absolute autonomy, but rather, in increasing measure, to freedom from bondage to sin and death. I'm already free from the law and from condemnation; freedom to become what God designed me to be is God's work and mine together. His work surrounds and enables mine. He gets all the glory. But unlike conversion, it's a process.

The gospel is unconditional good news. Not having to do something, or obey someone, is always bad news. No, the gospel is indeed about getting to, which is always good news. It's the good news about what I get to have as I joyfully let God, through the Spirit, do his work in me: the certainty of victory over sin and death. Only when we embrace that victory—and renounce all claims to rule our pathetic private kingdoms—will we truly be set free.

Roger Olson is professor of theology at Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary, and the author, most recently, of Against Calvinism (Zondervan).

Go to ChristianBibleStudies.com for “The Paradox of Freedom,” a Bible study based on this article.

It’s rare to find a pastor who is attuned to how “place” informs human experience and community. But a discerning pastor can know more about this than most city planners, if they are attentive to the particular shape of the lives of their congregants and their community. Enter Eric O. Jacobsen (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary), a pastor of 14 years, the last 5 as senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Tacoma. “I am not a trained architect or urban planner, but an ordinary pastor who has always lived within walking distance of my church,” he says.

Jacobsen’s 2003 “break-out” book, Sidewalks in the Kingdom (Brazos Press), used the tenets of New Urbanism to help Christians recognize the value of local churches in local neighborhoods. Jacobsen calls his newest book, The Space Between: A Christian Engagement with the Built Environment (Baker Academic), a “more mature reflection” on the subject.

“I’ve lived almost my whole life in mixed-use neighborhoods where every house looks different and you could walk to the store to get milk or to a coffee shop,” he says. “I live in a small city . . . with my wife, four children, and eight chickens. All of our kids can walk to each of their schools.”

In his interview with researcher Joseph Gorra on behalf of This Is Our City, Jacobsen demonstrates how Christians might think about spiritual formation as it enfolds in particular spaces.

What do you mean by the phrase “built environment” in the subtitle of your book?

The built environment is the physical setting of the public realm—literally the space between the buildings.

We don’t pay much attention to it because the spaces between strip malls, fast-food joints, and big-box stores don’t work very well as public spaces. They are set up for the efficient movement of cars. When we go to older American or European cities, or walk around neighborhoods that were built before WWII, we get some sense of what the built environment can be.

It seems that getting out and about is the first key to understanding the built environment.

Yes, for both understanding and flourishing in the built environment, we need to experience it on foot. I realize that in some environments this is impossible, but it is important to resist the temptation to jump in our cars. When we walk, we are confronted with aspects of the built environment that don’t work very well. And, hopefully, we also discover aspects of the built environment that do work well.

Can you offer an example?

When my family lived in Pasadena, we deliberately chose a church, school, and activities to which we could walk. Because this was Southern California, everyone thought we were crazy, even though we were only walking distances less than a mile. But over time, our friends and neighbors joined us in walking and biking. It was fun to see how this changed not only how we experienced the built environment, but also how we related to one another. Walking or biking together to school provided a way to interact with our neighbors and their kids that wouldn’t have happened if we had all been in separate cars.

As a pastor, how has your leadership been affected by engaging your built environments?

I’m not sure if I’m interested in the built environment because I like to walk to church, or I like to walk to church because I’m interested in the built environment. In any case, my pastoral identity is deeply formed by my understanding of the built environment. I think of my church not just in terms of my congregation but also in terms of my parish. I feel as if our church has been placed in a particular neighborhood for a reason, and I try to spend enough time in the neighborhood so as to hear how God wants to use us there.

If human embodiment is core to experiencing community, has the “suburban experiment” failed?

The best way to answer is through analogy. A city is like a pizza, and a neighborhood is like a slice of pizza. Just as a slice of pizza should contain all the ingredients of the pizza, each neighborhood should contain all the things we enjoy and value about the city: homes, coffee shops, ball fields, churches, grocery stores, and so on. The suburban experiment that was so influential in the 20th century involved dividing up the functions of the city into different zones: housing, shopping, office, recreation. This works about as well as eating the elements of your pizza in different courses: you’re still getting the same nutritional value, but you’ve lost the joy of your pizza.

I think we’re starting to realize that the suburban experiment has not done a great job of providing a satisfying experience of human community, and we’re interested in building neighborhoods again.

But will building better neighborhoods with better building practices entail more neighborliness?

Over the past decade we’ve finally figured out that we can damage our experience of human community by designing homes and subdivisions that encourage isolation. But the pressing question now is whether we can fix the problem simply by changing our building practices. One way to frame that question is, If we re-learn how to build neighborhoods, will people automatically start acting neighborly again? I think the answer is ‘no,’ but it leads naturally to the question, What can the church do to help rebuild a sense of community in our neighborhoods?

Does our own busyness contribute to our disconnectedness from place?

One of the great ironies of modern life is that the people who live in “advanced” cultures, which have an abundance of resources and employ time-saving devices, tend to be more harried and stressed out than people who live without these amenities. I think that this is because the more advanced cultures tend to treat time as a commodity that can be saved and spent at will.

We become intoxicated with a sense of power over the hours of our days, and it causes us to push ourselves harder and separate ourselves from the people and places of our lives. When we can get past that illusion and see time as a gift to be received with humility, we will find that our experience of time connects us to the places we live and the people we love. Traditionally, the built environment was a key element of receiving time in a gracious way.

With our identity and vocations, you say in the book, we communally participate in our built environments as a family unit, as the gathered people of God, and as a polis. Why are these three so meaningful?

Well, our first impulse in dealing with complicated issues is to reduce them to the kinds of choices we make as autonomous individuals – namely consumer decisions. “Oh, the environment is in trouble, I’ll buy a Prius instead of an SUV.” When we’ve done that, we feel like we’ve addressed the issue and we continue to live our lives as we always have. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we discover that most of the truly pressing problems we face cannot be solved solely by making individual consumer choices, but require changes at the communal or institutional level. In the Bible, we see three institutions named: the family, the church, and the state. It turns out, rather non-accidentally, that these are the fundamental units of society through which we can shape our built environment in meaningful ways.

How do these units of society shape the built environment?

We shape the built environment as families when we decide on the home that will contain our family life. That home as a physical object shapes the built environment directly, but it also will become a key determining factor in a whole web of travel paths as we get ourselves to work, our kids to school, and everyone to various activities and shopping.

Churches shape the built environment either by becoming a key gathering spot within a particular neighborhood or by becoming a kind of alien presence in a neighborhood where a whole bunch of cars from ‘who knows where’ show up intermittently throughout the week, but especially on Sunday morning.

And the polis shapes the built environment as neighbors get to know each other and start to take an interest in the shared public space surrounding their homes. They can do things on their own – like developing block-watch programs – and they can use their collective voice to advocate for neighborhood amenities like benches and street trees.

Joseph E. Gorra is the manager of academic programs and research for Biola University’s graduate program in Christian apologetics. He is also a contributor to the Christian Research Journal, for TheGospelCoalition.org, the Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care, and for Patheos. As the founder and director of the religious nonprofit Veritas Life Center, he is interested in understanding how Christian knowledge and wisdom shapes life and flourishing. He can be followed on Twitter @GorraResearch.

I did not expect The Casual Vacancy to resemble Harry Potter in any way. J. K. Rowling’s new novel, I had read, would be contemporary realism, not fantasy, aimed at adults, not young teens. It would feature an entire village, not an intrepid trio; its theme would be small-town hypocrisy, not the cosmic battle between good and evil. OK, I thought, maybe it will be like something Maeve Binchy or Elizabeth Buchan or Joanna Trollope might write. Fine: I like “hen lit.”

So eight days ago, when the book was released, I grabbed one of the 2 million hardcover copies published in the U.S., began reading, and quickly appreciated Ian Parker’s faint praise in the “New Yorker”: ” ‘The Casual Vacancy’ will certainly sell, and it may also be liked.” Several hours into the book I emailed a friend: “I’m on page 183 and am waiting to be captivated.” Joanna Trollope this was not.

Here’s the situation: Barry Fairbrother, banker and councillor in the English West Country village of Pagford, drops dead. Various people must deal with his absence: his wife and four children, the council president and deli owner, a couple of lawyers, the local high school’s deputy headmaster, a guidance counselor, several social workers, a pair of doctors, a factory manager, a nurse, a junkie’s daughter, a financier, and several seriously confused adolescents.

Unfortunately, we must memorize some 30 names and learn a lot of backstories before getting to the book’s central conflict: how to fill Barry’s vacant council seat and, more broadly, how to deal with the underprivileged residents of the Fields, a subsidized housing project for the desperately poor. By the time the pace picks up, many readers—if Amazon’s customer reviews are to be believed—have already given up. Too bad: for those who persist, The Casual Vacancy eventually becomes both fascinating and provocative.

Most of the instant reviews were, at best, tepid. Theo Tait, writing in the Guardian, called it “a solid, traditional and determinedly unadventurous English novel …. The book seems doomed to be known as Mugglemarch.”

The New York Times reviewer was even less flattering. “The real-life world [Rowling] has limned in these pages is so willfully banal, so depressingly clichéd that ‘The Casual Vacancy’ is not only disappointing—it’s dull,” wrote Michiko Kakutani (“Darkness and Death, No Magic to Help”). “The novel … reads like an odd mash-up of a dark soap opera like ‘Peyton Place’ with one of those very British Barbara Pym novels, depicting small-town, circ*mscribed lives.”

Everyone agreed that Pagford has nothing to do with Hogwarts: “The only obvious parallel with the Potter books is that, like them, it is animated by a strong dislike of mean, unsympathetic, small-minded folk,” says Tait. But everyone may have read too quickly. The Casual Vacancy and the Harry Potter series are alike in one important respect. Both are based on a profoundly biblical worldview.

Look at how Rowling uses religious themes.

Chapter 1 introduces us to “the pretty little town of Pagford,” dominated by “the dark skeleton of the ruined abbey.” The expensive houses are located in Church Row. The church itself is “mock-Gothic.” The townspeople, we will learn in later chapters, use the building for school plays and council meetings and parties. Another former church, Bellchapel, has been turned into an addiction treatment center. The Old Vicarage is now owned by a Sikh family. Rowling seems to want us to know that the world of The Casual Vacancy is decidedly post-Christian. It is what Quaker theologian D. Elton Trueblood once termed a “cut flower civilization”: pretty now, but rootless and doomed.

And then Barry Fairbrother drops dead.

If this book has a Christ figure, it is Fairbrother. He had not shared in the village’s sins, though he was falsely accused. He reached out to loners, the mentally ill, immigrants, the unattractive, and even the trouble-making daughter of a notorious prostitute and addict. He was the “living example,” thinks one of the few likable characters, of what the council members proposed in theory. “Did they not see,” she muses, “what hopeless advocates they were, compared to the man who had died?” Even his name has Christian overtones: “Fairest Lord Jesus,” “Jesus Our Brother, Strong and Good.” He does not come back to life, alas.

Now Pagford, a village without a living faith, is a village without its one upstanding citizen. No one is fit to fill Fairbrother’s council seat, and yet the council must go ahead and make major decisions involving the poor who share their schools and social services. No wonder things are a mess.

I am not saying that J.K. Rowling has written a Christian allegory; The Casual Vacancy is far more complex than that. Neither am I saying that she was thinking of the Gospels when she devised her plot; it seems unlikely. On her website she says, “I love nineteenth century novels that centre on a town or village. This is my attempt to do a modern version.” Perhaps religious themes sneaked in through her deep acquaintance with Victorian authors and biblical literature. Perhaps she included them intentionally. However they got into the novel, they are hard to miss once you go looking for them.

For example, the upstanding residents of Pagford, like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable (Luke 18:9-14), are thankful that they are not like their neighbors in the Fields:

There was nothing, as far as Howard could see, to stop the [people in the projects] growing fresh vegetables; nothing to stop them disciplining their sinister, hooded, spray-painting offspring; nothing to stop them pulling themselves together as a community and tackling the dirt and the shabbiness; nothing to stop them cleaning themselves up and taking jobs; nothing at all …. The estate’s air of slightly threatening degradation was nothing more than a physical manifestation of ignorance and indolence.

Pagford, by contrast, shone with a kind of moral radiance in Howard’s mind, as though the collective soul of the community was made manifest in its cobbled streets, its hills, its picturesque houses … a micro-civilization that stood firmly against a national decline.

Most of these morally radiant citizens, however, are extremely self-absorbed. They love themselves, but they have no time for their neighbors. We may expect as much of the teenagers, though we sympathize with the school guidance counselor who sometimes wants to shout at the kids, “You must accept the reality of other people …. You must accept that we are as real as you are; you must accept that you are not God.” Sadly, the grown-ups are worse than the kids. Sixteen-year-old Andrew “asked himself whether Simon [his father] even saw other humans as real …. Simon did nothing that required collaboration, and had never evinced the smallest interest in anything that did not benefit him directly.”

This pervasive selfishness means that Pagford, though outwardly pretty, is full of sins: adultery, abuse, theft, gluttony, drunkenness, racism, bullying, indifference, neglect, hatred, envy, pride. Jesus could well have castigated them in the words he directed at the scribes and Pharisees, “Woe to you, … hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth” (Matt. 23:27).

Their sins will not go unpunished. Like the Harry Potter books, The Casual Vacancy is apocalyptic. It does not feature colorful cosmic battles like those in The Deathly Hallows and the Book of Revelation (though one character feels “it would have been a relief if St. Michael had stepped down from his glowing window and enacted judgment on them all”). Rather, like the “little apocalypses” of the Gospels, it is about revelation, unveiling, and judgment.

“Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered,” Jesus warns, “and nothing secret that will not become known. Therefore whatever you have … whispered behind closed doors will be proclaimed from the housetops” (Luke 12:1-3). Presumably Jesus isn’t thinking of the Internet, but some of Pagford’s children spend their days staring at computer monitors. Pagford’s elders have no idea how much the kids know about them—or how easily they can reveal their secrets to the entire village. If “one’s foes will be members of one’s own household” (Matt. 10:36), one’s judges, too, are close at hand.

The Sikh doctor is one of the few Pagford citizens who knows “what Christians were supposed to believe in. Love thy neighbor as thyself.” But who are Pagford’s neighbors, and what would it mean to love them? The day of the fateful council meeting arrives. Political battle lines are defended:

“We’re having to make some very difficult decisions at District Council level,” said Aubrey Fawley [a wealthy financier]. “The government’s looking for more than a billion in savings from local government. We cannot continue to provide services the way we have done. That’s the reality.”

In rhetoric familiar to Americans in this election season, Fawley goes on to berate what he calls a “culture of entitlement” and “people who have literally not worked a day in their lives.”

So tempers flare, and decisions are taken, and the book’s many disparate stories interweave and move inexorably to a conclusion “so howlingly bleak,” said Allison Pearson in the Telegraph, “that it makes Thomas Hardy look like PG Wodehouse.”

Without offering any spoilers, I’ll just suggest that you consider the Good Samaritan, the story Jesus told when someone asked him who, exactly, was the neighbor he was supposed to love (Luke 10:25-37). Change it so that at least three priests or Levites pass the injured person on the road without helping. Have the charitable foreigner provide money for the funeral, not the hospital. Let everyone heap posthumous praises on the people they despise (“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ ” Matt. 23:29-30). And when presented with the most obvious example of their collective guilt, let everyone in the congregation avert their eyes.

There’s not enough redemption in The Casual Vacancy for my taste. A few people seem to have a change of heart at the end, but I’m skeptical. Maybe the impulse will stick. Maybe the council will reform. But Barry Fairbrother is still dead, and the abbey on the hill is still ruined, and most of the people of Pagford are still self-satisfied, racist social climbers. This is the world as it would be with Voldemort in charge. It is frighteningly familiar. It badly needs a Harry Potter to come to the rescue.

LaVonne Neff blogs at neffreview.blogspot.com and at livelydust.blogspot.com.

Copyright © 2012 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

Raising awareness about social problems is an important and tricky business. The general public needs to know about societal ills such as government corruption, environmental decay, sex trafficking. But how do you get audiences to show up for something so difficult and potentially depressing? And many of these films, documentaries and fictionalized dramas alike, leave me with a huge lingering question: What now? Now that I’m aware of the problem, what am I supposed to do with this knowledge?

Trade of Innocents, the latest entry in the awareness-raising genre, takes us to Siem Reap, Cambodia—home of international tourist destination Angkor Watt—to expose something unholy happening the shadows of this ancient temple. There we follow Alex (Dermot Mulroney), a human trafficking investigator somehow associated with the U.S. government, as he works in concert with locals and officials from other countries. His goal, as he tells the new police chief, is to “shut down every brothel in the city that exploits children in the sex trade.”

While Alex is at work, his wife Claire (Mira Sorvino; our interview) volunteers in a local shelter for girls rescued from the sex trade. In working with these young survivors, Claire comes to grips with her own ordeal, the loss of her young daughter a few years prior—a grief she still yearns to process with her stoic, driven husband.

Alex’s main target is Duke (Trieu Tran), a pimp who plucks girls as young as 7 years old from the local neighborhoods to whet the appetites of local customers who are under the mistaken notion that sex with a virgin can cure them of AIDS, and international johns who desire girls who are “less used.” In the film, the johns are mainly represented by Malcolm (John Billingsley), a wealthy U.S. businessman who is trying to buy the services of a 7-year-old virgin for a month. He is willing to pay upwards of $30,000 for this “young, fresh-cut flower.”

For this request, Duke has his sights set on Amy (Thawanrat Tantituvanont), a Cambodian girl raised in the U.S. who has just come to the area to live with her grandpa following the death of her mother. Claire’s friendship with Amy puts Claire in harm’s way as well.

The plot is well conceived enough—if only the execution were as good. While Mulroney is convincing as a government worker—disciplined and necessarily emotionally distant—he’s a little too stoic. He makes Alex seem flat, one-dimensional. Claire is a bit too vulnerable and fragile to be adapting to life in Cambodia seemingly so easily. The bad guys are all evil and twisty. The young girls are mostly playing with sock puppets and drawing pictures of flowers. It’s all a little too black and white.

But the biggest problem is the stilted dialogue many of the characters are given. In Alex’s first conversation with the new local police chief, it seems like he’s reading from an anti-trafficking brochure: “It’s about changing the fear equation so that women and girls trapped in the sex trade don’t have to live in fear. The pimps should live in fear. It’s about supply and demand. Cut off the supply and prosecute those who demand.” This is educational, but not believable as a real conversation—especially with Mulroney’s dispassionate delivery.

Even Cambodia seems a bit sanitized and colorless here. I’ve been to Phnom Penh and other cities in Southeast Asia. While the filmmakers have captured well the cramped housing and the families of five riding around the city on motorbikes, there’s a grit missing—the dusty streets, the dirt that lingers in the humid air, the vacant stares of those who have only known abject poverty.

In reviewing several films about sex trafficking over the years, I’ve noticed that the filmmakers seem to take one of two approaches—showing disturbingly graphic scenes of violence and sexual assault in order to force audiences to understand the horrors, or keeping the disturbing violence and vulgarity implied so that viewers aren’t tempted to look away from the uncomfortable realities of trafficking.

Trade of Innocents takes the latter tack. Violence is implied and off screen. Subsequent wounds are vague smears of blood on face and forearm. I appreciate not having to endure the graphic rape scenes in other films about trafficking, but some of the real danger and fear seems missing here. Even the fight and chase scenes are a bit safe and amateurish. I don’t quite believe people are in real danger.

Both approaches to trafficking films—salacious or safe—seem to have the same goals: raising awareness and moving audiences to do something. Trade of Innocents states this goal very clearly on the closing screen of the film with the words: “Justice Needs a Hero. Be One.” And it points viewers to the “Justice-Generation” website for action steps, suggesting practical ways that one can get involved in the fight.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. Why do you think Alex and Claire have come to Cambodia? What are they moving to—or away from?
2. What do you think has led Malcolm to this place and this request for sex with young girls? What factors have possibly led him to desire this?
3. Can you think of things in American culture that lead to this kind of demand?
4. Did you learn anything about trafficking in the film? Are there people in your life you can also educate with this new knowledge?
5. What other steps can you take to combat trafficking?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Trade of Innocents is rated PG-13 for disturbing thematic material involving sex trafficking of children, and some violence. We never see any sex acts and the violence is mostly implied. One of the teen girls in the sex trade is killed, but her death is off screen. Given the fact that the people being trafficked here are young children, it would likely be disturbing for all but older, mature teens and up. For them, this is a relatively clean enough film to raise awareness of a tough subject.

Photos © Monterey Media

© 2012 Christianity Today. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

Many reviews of Dark Shadows earlier this year (including ours) rightfully noted how writer/director Tim Burton has become a shadow of his former self. Recent films have merely adapted stories to his uniquely whimsical, gothic style instead of offering something that’s truly all his own. Consider Frankenweenie a complete return to form—no surprise since it resurrects two of Burton’s earliest creations from the ’80s.

While working as an animator at Walt Disney, Burton released three short films, his last being 1984’s Frankenweenie. Paying homage to the 1931 classic Frankenstein, the 30-minute production told the story of a boy who brought his dog Sparky back to life after a car accident. Disney considered the project too dark/scary/demented for children at that time and Burton was promptly fired. The film was still shown in the UK and eventually released on video after Burton rose to prominence with Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, and Edward Scissorhands.

Now Burton has revived and reconceived Frankenweenie as a 90-minute animated feature. And if Sparky the dog looks somewhat familiar, then you probably remember “Family Dog,” an animated short from 1987 and a short-lived series in the early ’90s. Burton designed that cartoon canine as a conical-nosed bull terrier, and he brings similar art direction to this feature.

The story remains true to the original’s loving parody of Frankenstein—call it Very Young Frankenstein. Victor (naturally) is a boy genius in the small town of New Holland, which looks a lot like other Burton worlds with its hodgepodge of ’60s chic and spooky residents. People and animals alike have dark circles around their eyes, some more bulgy than others. Lightning storms are frequent. TVs broadcast Christopher Lee’s classic Dracula films. And the science-obsessed kids at school respond to all of this as just another day. The Twilight Zone? More like Edward Scissorhands crossed with The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Victor is a loner who mostly keeps to his attic lab with his best friend Sparky, creating projects to impress his kindly parents. But when a tragic car accident takes Sparky’s life, Victor loses his will to invent—until his science teacher demonstrates in class how electrical current can reanimate a dead frog. Victor attempts a similar experiment at home on a grander scale, utilizing lightning and the body of his beloved dog (not to mention a lot of electrical Frankenstein equipment of his own).

Of course the experiment works and we have a movie, though Victor realizes he needs to keep the miraculous resurrection of Sparky a secret. But classmate Edgar “E” Gore discovers the truth and wants to try the lightning experiment himself on another animal. Before long, the whole class is trying to win the science fair with similar projects, only to learn that their carelessness with science has dire consequences.

Frankenweenie offers some surprises but ultimately plays predictably. What may have been a novel idea in 1984 today seems trite after 25 years of cable television and animated shows that have offered their own Frankenstein parodies. A lot of the details from 1931’s Frankenstein now play as cliché because it’s been done so much.

Stemming from that is the bigger issue: who is the target audience? Adults will likely find the story overly routine, if not juvenile. And it’s too scary for many younger viewers (see Family Corner below). Is your child ready to see a movie that grapples with the idea of losing a pet? Do you want your kids seeing other kids casually messing with electricity? Are they ready for an old-fashioned monster movie with some “ooga booga” moments?

But because this is classic Burton, the uneasy mix of dark comedy and wholesome sweetness works. If your family enjoys Nightmare Before Christmas and Burton’s underappreciated Corpse Bride, this is pretty similar in tone, with its creepy crawlies and minor scares. Frankenweenie provides both without pushing the envelope in a lovable story about a boy, his dog, and his well-intentioned parents.

Burton also excels at telling a familiar tale in a fresh way. Clever details keep Frankenweenie engaging for adults—the realistic behaviors of the dog, the tombstones in the graveyard, the science teacher’s crazy explanation of lightning to his class (and, at a town hall meeting, a crazier explanation for teaching science). The story may be expected, but the details are unexpected.

There’s also excellent, intelligent use of stop-motion animation. In the particularly clever opening, Victor shows his parents a crudely made Super 8 sci-fi movie, demonstrating the most basic principles of stop-motion animation, but contrasting with the film’s state-of-the-art stop-motion at large. Like other movies of this kind, it’s easy to wonder how everything is done with puppetry, especially fire and water.

The Frankenstein metaphor is all too apt. It’s comprised of old, familiar pieces that seem a little worn. And yet, with mad scientist Tim Burton in charge, there’s just enough wit and spark to proclaim, “It’s aliiiive!”

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. Did you buy Mr. Frankenstein’s rationale for wanting Victor to try sports? Why do some parents insist on forcing their kids to participate in something they have no interest in? Based on Victor’s performance in baseball, is there a case to be made for kids needing a push to try new things?
2. Have you ever had a pet die? What were you told as a child, or what did you tell your children? Do you think pets will be in heaven? If so, will we have the same pets in heaven that we had on Earth?
3. Mrs. Frankenstein tells Victor, “When we lose someone we love, they never really leave. They just move into a special place in your heart.” Explain ways that you agree and/or disagree with this sentiment.
4. The science teacher tells Victor that lots of people are ignorant about science because they “like the results that science offers, but not the questions that are asked.” What does he mean by this? Do you agree or disagree? How does a comment like this apply to topics involving science vs. faith?
5. Was Victor right to hide Sparky’s resurrection from his parents? How might things have been different if he had been honest from the start?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Frankenweenie is rated PG for thematic elements, scary images, and action. Whether kids are ready for it could be gauged by their response to Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, classic monster movies like Frankenstein and Dracula, and the prospect of having a pet die. There are a lot of dead animals in this movie, many of which are brought back to life through (irresponsible) children’s experiments involving electricity. Some of the creatures will be scary for little kids, including a surprise “gotcha” moment and a subplot reminiscent of Gremlins. Even some of the townspeople look a bit menacing in their art design with their teeth and eyes. All that, plus some cat poop played for laughs. Still, the film is wholesomely entertaining in its own twisted way.

Photos © Walt Disney Pictures

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