Obama-Hajj: 2 Million People, Maybe More

Did you know that the Hajj is not the only annual religious event to draw pilgrims in the millions?

I hadn't thought about this much, until December. The Hajj was much on my mind then, when I opened up the Washington Post and read this article about 5 million Catholics converging on the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City to pay their respects to the Virgin.

I had no idea. I had been thinking of the Hajj as a singular event, unique to Islam in its power to draw literally millions of people into one particular space to pay respects. The Virgin pilgrimage in Mexcio proves the Hajj is not alone -- and when I gave it some thought, I could come up with two more pilgrimages drawing such great numbers of believers: millions of Hindus flocking to bathe in the Ganges on Mauni Amavasya (it'll be next Monday this year), and millions of Shiites making the pilgrimage to Karbala, in Iraq, on Ashura.

Despite the trend of American evangelical mega-churches servicing tens of thousands at a time on Sunday mornings, I could come up with no religious holidays here in the United States with the power to draw a crowd of millions ...

... which brings me to today.

I got up early this morning to join a couple million of my fellow American citizens in marking the ascendancy of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States -- an event not without its insistent religious overtones, whether it counts as a true pilgrimage or not.

The Obamas, of course, began their day with prayer, as is customary, at St. John's Episcopal Church across the street from the White House. (They worshiped at the 19th Street Baptist Church two days ago, on Sunday.)

I started my day with neither prayer nor church attendance (and I was busy on Sunday with other pursuits besides church).

As it happened, I started my day with a very quick shower, before cooking a breakfast of eggs and tomatoes with a side of veggie sausage for my houseguests. We were 15-strong in my three-bedroom apartment, with my housemates and I providing temporary lodging for pilgrims from Chicago, Brooklyn, and Raleigh-Durham.

At 8:15, I left the house with two of my guests to meet three other friends and move as a unit of six down to take our place on the National Mall. We had aimed for a medium-close vantage point, but after finding checkpoints blocked twice, we eventually settled for a very-far-away vantage point and took up a nice spot near the World War II Memorial, about a mile away from the actual event, but close to a large Jumbotron and loudspeaker.

Nearby stood four religious protestors holding signs.

"The Wages of Sin is Death," read one sign. "Trust Jesus," read another. A third sign quoted a very lengthy passage from 2 Chronicles about nations turning to God to receive blessing, and fourth man held no sign but wore an electric-blue T-shirt stretched tightly over his enormous belly, with a printed message inviting the reader to "Ask me why you're going to Hell."

The fat man and the sign-bearers took turns with a megaphone informing one and all why we are going to Hell -- whether we had asked them about it or not. When the megaphone wasn't being directed toward the crowd to inform us of our sins (focusing on the usual suspects, of course: gays, feminists, abortionists, atheists), it was directed toward the heavens to invoke the wrath of god.

Moments after the blue-shirt man had called on God via megaphone, the second invocation of the day began to be pronounced -- this time from the dais of the inauguration.

As is well-known, Obama chose to invite Pastor Rick Warren, the evangelical preacher famous for his solid support of California's Prop 8 (as well as his self-help book and his mission creep toward more traditionally liberal issues like poverty and AIDS), to offer a prayer to God before his swearing-in.

When Pastor Warren's face appeared on on the Jumbotron, I discovered with surprise that I had to turn my back. I had not planned ahead to do this, but to face the screen, and give him the same attentiveness I had given to Dianne Feinstein or Aretha Franklin or Joe Biden or John Paul Stevens would have felt like an untruth to me.

So, I wheeled silently around and turned my face upwards and saw bare brown branches criss-crossing a perfect blue sky. Nobody else within my view chose to do this, and I avoided looking into their faces, preferring to trace the branches and mull over the content of Warren's prayer. I noticed that others nearby chose also to react to Pastor Warren in various ways, such as cheering when he announced that Jesus had changed his life, or chanting along with the Bible verses.

One of my friends later remarked that she found the invocation to be "ecumenical." (I disagree.) Another stated that Warren had offered up a number of "surprisingly good lines." Fair enough: Warren did offer that his god is "loving to everyone," allowed that the country is not united by "religion" but by "freedom," and called for "civility in our attitudes even when we disagree." Fine. All very nice sentiments.

For what it's worth, I think a simple back-turn does represent "civility of attitude even in disagreement," and also I do deeply disagree with Warren's presence as part of the program.

I disagree with Warren's anti-gay attitudes -- no doubt about it -- and found it quite disappointing that after the Election Day combination of the Prop 8 catastrophe with the Obama win, that Obama chose to repeat that unhappy combo on his Inauguration Day.

Yet even more than I disagree with Warren's views on gay relationships, I deeply disagree with such an invocation of god at all at a governmental function.

Warren opened his prayer by calling out to "Almighty God," whom he addressed as "our Father." He suggested that "all nations, all people" will "stand accountable" before his god on a day of judgment. And he closed his prayer by making sure that it was signed, sealed, and delivered in the name of Jesus -- in not one, but four languages -- before quoting the words of Jesus as recorded in the book of Matthew, in the form of the Lord's Prayer.

That's not very ecumenical to me (not all Christians believe in Judgment Day, or stick to the old-school "Father" formulation), and beyond ecumenism it certainly does not take into account the interfaith pluralism that comprises America -- much less acknowledge those of us who follow no religion at all.

Obama, it must be noted, did indeed acknowledge this pluralism in his own speech, when he declared that "We are a nation of Muslims and Christians, Jews and Hindus -- and non-believers." And yet even that, to me, did not go far enough. We are a nation of Buddhists and Taoists and Wiccans and Zoroastrians and practitioners of the spiritual traditions of America's indigenous people -- as well as many variations and combinations of these, and more.

Furthermore, I would remind our wonderful new president that "atheist" is not a bad word. Atheists and agnostics and humanists and secularists and ethical rationalists need not be defined in relative opposition to what he thinks we are not ("believers"), not least because most of us, most likely, believe in quite a lot. (The word "atheist" is helpfully very precise about what it is we do not believe.)

I do happen to believe, like Rick Warren, in civility even in disagreement. I also believe, like Rick Warren, that commitment to freedom is more essential to the preservation of the American union than commitment to religion. And though I do not believe in heaven, I do not begrudge the poetic sentiments behind Warren's suggestion that Dr. King (who did believe in heaven, probably) is looking down with approval from above on today's inauguration; I'd simply express such respect for an ancestor with different language.

In 2013, when Obama is elected to his second term, I would challenge him to remember that he chose three Christians to pray over his first inauguration (Revs. Gene Robinson and Joseph Lowry, in addition to Warren), to the exclusion of literally all other faiths. And I would suggest that if he is comfortable with the invocation of "Y'Shua" at his inauguration, then he should be comfortable with the invocation of Allah, or the Four Corners, or any one in the pantheon of Hindu gods and goddesses: Lakshmi, Saraswati, Brahma, Hanuman, or any of the others.

And if he's not comfortable with those other invocations, then I've no doubt that an upstanding atheist -- perhaps a member of a local Ethical Society -- would be more than happy to oblige him by writing some appropriate remarks that invoke no deity at all, before respectfully making the pilgrimage.

Halloween: What Are You Supposed to Be?

My friend Samm held a giant party with her housemates on Halloween.

I had planned ahead for this, purchasing my costume well ahead of time. The Monday after I attended The United Church, I was feeling inspired by the clerical collars of Rev. DeGroote and his younger colleague. I had needed to purchase a black suit for myself back in June, when I served as an attendant in a friend’s wedding, so I thought I could easily add a black shirt with the square patch of white showing at its collar, and I would have an instant priest's costume.

I looked online and discovered that I could purchase a relatively inexpensive short-sleeved official priest's shirt from a company in Maine. Because some of the fields were optional on the online order form, I did not have to name my “seminary” or “congregation,” but the denomination field was mandatory, so I checked "other."

At Samm's party, most everyone assumed I was costumed as a Roman Catholic, but in my mind I had clothed myself as an Episcopalian. I would say this out loud, when someone would make a mistake and ask me how many "Hail Marys" I wanted them to say, or (more often) approach me and ask, "What are you supposed to be? A child molester?"

Mohammed was at the party, dressed in traditional Arab garb -- a long, floor-length tunic, sandals, and Saudi headdress. I demanded that he teach me the Arabic phonetics for the Shahada so that when party-goers would ask me to pray for them I could mix it up a bit. We got as far as the phonetics for "I attest that there is no god-entity but the Allah god-entity..." before getting distracted and not returning to the task.

Rachel was at the party too, dressed as some kind of product advertisement. She told me I looked strangely "right" in my priest's outfit, and I confessed that it actually felt kind of right -- very comfortable. We were standing in the backyard talking, and shortly I excused myself to go back into the kitchen and refill my glass of wine.

While I was pouring from the bottle I had brought, a drunk milkmaid I had never met before wandered up to me with her tits up to her chin and her empty glass waving back and forth under my nose.

I thought she might have tried to give me a sexy look, or something.

Pausing from my own glass, I quarter-turned and filled her glass for her.

"Thanks," she slurred, "What are you supposed to be?"

Puzzled that it wasn't obvious, I inclined my chin, in case my beard was obscuring my collar. I pointed to the square of white at my throat.

"Oh," she said, "You're a gay priest. That's funny."

Then she walked away.

The idea of me as a man of the cloth wasn't always so preposterous. I didn't grow up in a denomination that employed priests, but I took other types of godly men as my role models when I was a child -- various ministers, or the evangelical missionaries who would visit my church and church camp to talk about their work in Korea or Jamaica or Papua, New Guinea.

One of my earliest long-range forecasts for my future involved me and my best friend from church becoming missionaries together in Africa. I planned this out when I was probably 14, and Jonathan would have been about 16. The way I figured it, we would each marry a girl from the church and then the four of us would work as a team. The girls got swapped around in my imagination, but the idea of doing good work for God together with Jonathan remained a constant.

Missionary work would not be an option for a gay man according to how I grew up. Priests and ministers and missionaries are role models, right? And gay men? We just aren’t.

That’s why we shouldn’t be teachers or Boy Scout leaders or parents either. In fact, it would be hard to imagine a gay man in any role that could be considered admirable. All of our accomplishments are tainted because of our gayness.

The purpose of this life is to follow Jesus, and being gay is not following Jesus, so our lives are doomed until and unless we get serious about repentance and redemption. Who could admire the gays’ stunning refusal to address their sin? And who could want someone like that in a leadership position in a church?

Moses’ commandment to stone the gays to death doesn’t apply anymore, said my church, because Jesus brought the new covenant and freed us from the total insanity of Jewish law. But read Leviticus again, they would say. It definitely shows what God thinks of the gay folk, if under the old law He wanted us dead, right away, with impunity for the community that drives us out of the camp, pelting our bodies to pulp in the desert sand.

Moreover, though Jesus was silent on the gay menace, the New Testament nonetheless backs up the Old, with Paul assuring the Romans that men who flame with lust for one another will receive in their bodies the due penalties for their perversions.

In a letter to the Corinthians, Paul supposedly condemns gay men a second time, but as with Koheleth’s musing on his or her ephemeral life, the shades of meaning change depending on the translation you read. Of the four versions of the Bible on my shelf, you can choose between condemnation of:

1. The effeminate and abusers of themselves with mankind,
2. Male prostitutes and homosexual offenders,
3. Adulterers and homosexual perverts, or
4. Those who use and abuse each other and those who use and abuse sex.

At Christmastime, in 2003, after Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to recognize same-sex marriages, I sat in the pew at my parents’ church in Kentucky.

The preacher read Paul’s verse from Romans about the due penalty for perversion, and then he compared the situation for Christians in first-century Rome with the situation for Christians in 21st-century America.

He shouted: “It was a wicked world in ancient Rome. Wicked! Idolatry! Christian persecution! All manner of perversion! But with this thing in Massachusetts, it's just dark here in America. I don’t see how it could have been any worse in Rome than it is right here, right now.”

This was met with a chorus of amens from the men, and judgmental tsking sounds from the women, which was and is typical there -- but at least my parents’ church doesn’t produce a Hell House.

What's a Hell House? Hell Houses are the evangelical alternative to haunted houses on Halloween.

They work like this: Instead of witches stirring pots or zombies popping out of coffins, the scenes played out inside a Hell House depict all kinds of modern blasphemies and affronts to the evangelicals’ god -- as well as the tortured afterlife that the perpetrators of such blasphemies and affronts can expect to suffer for eternity. The theory (sort of a one-night reduction of what a lifetime of Sundays can teach you as an evangelical) is that if you are terrorized enough, that sometime before the end of the walk-through, you will have resolved to accept Jesus Christ and avoid the torment.

The Hell House model as an evangelical alternative to a possibly-Satanic Halloween has gotten popular enough to support a cottage industry by the New Destiny Christian Center in Colorado, which continues every year to sell its pre-packaged version of a Hell House kit to churches across the country.

The kit includes props, instructions, and scripts for the actors to follow. And it's not just the useless, futile, tragic lives of gay men that are depicted. New Destiny encourages including young women who choose abortion, drunk drivers, domestic abusers, and teenaged ravers on drugs. Visitors watch the tragic consequences of the wasted lives -- women bleeding to death after killing their babies, promiscuous girls getting raped and committing suicide, and gay couples wasting together of AIDS -- all while being mocked by the demons who are transporting them to Hell.

"We don't do it to scare people,” one pastor at a church in Texas told his local CBS affiliate last week. “The scary part about the Hell House is the reality that we portray. That is the scary part."

That’s not what’s scary to me.