Heart of the Matter Espresso

Live from Salt Lake City, Utah, this is Heart of the MatterTGNN’s original show where Shawn McCraney deconstructed religion and developed fulfilled theology. ESPRESSO! where we do all we can to worship God in Spirit and in Truth. I’m Shawn McCraneyFounder of TGNN and developer of the fulfilled perspective—calling people to faith outside of religion., your host.

Show 15 544
Hacking at the Root – Part XI
April 11th 2017
Prayer.

The Bible Answer Man

The Man. The Bible Answerman. Thirty years on the air answering peoples questions about… the Bible. Evangelicals loved him – had him come and speak. Believed his insights. Read his books. His gig was ALL – and I mean all – about doctrine. That is what his call in radio program heard all around the world was about – proper exegesis of the Bible – and then proper and acceptable application. The Man – on Palm Sunday, no less, became a card-carrying member of the Greek Orthodox Church in Charlotte North Carolina.

Now this was not some wet behind the ears teen who was proselyted into the faith by cunning missionaries. I remind you it was the one, and only (except for his predecessor, Dr. Walter Martin) Bible… answer man. Now, a Greek Orthodox. Now a man who now, by religious OBLIGATION MUST… receive:

• Baptism,
• Chrismation (anointment with holy oil – which he received with his wife and two of his twelve children on Palm Sunday),
• Confession, and
• Holy Communion.

Who venerates Saints, who celebrates all sorts of feast days, who participates in divine liturgy, and a host of other rites, rituals, and religiosities – including prayer to the Holy Spirit.

Reactions and Reflections

The “faith police” (alive and well in Evangelicalism) are all over this – a couple with decorum, but most with venom – citing passages about “the very elect falling,” and how he was on a downward spiral when he embraced preterismThe belief that all biblical prophecy—especially “end times”—was fulfilled by 70 A.D. More years ago – but most of these armchair quarterbacks thinking they, in all of their wisdom, have the insight and right to judge the Man… the Bible… Answerman. You know what I think? I think, more power to Hank Hanegraph and his family. He is obviously pursuing God in a way that makes the most sense to Him. He’s not uninformed. He finds something meaningful in this road. And his choice is profoundly subjective.

I mean, it’s a beautiful thing when the BIBLE ANSWERMAN reaches conclusions that are at odds with most of fervent Evangelicalism and their thought police. And in this event we are all given a living example how the faith IS subjective, it CANNOT be dictated OBJECTIVELY (because we will never agree) but it is, frankly, lived out from the heart of the individual – and NOBODY on the earth knows the heart. Looking at Brother Hanigraph, all I know, is he is a Bible reader, He does appear to love the Lord, He is willing to go where He believes the Spirit leads Him (no matter what the cost) and he is humble enough to lay his gig on the alter to do what He believes, what He believes, is right. No matter what the critics will say. Congratulations to the Hannegraph family.

Personal Reflections

I received this email recently:

Dear Shawn:

I would like to know the symbolic meaning of your tattoos? Is there any evidence against tattoos in the bible as a Mormon once told me? My tattoos are all personally meaningful to me and me alone. I got my first one for one reason – I severely judged people who had them and saw myself as superior to them. I honestly got my first one to break this attitude within me.

There is an Old Testament passage about not printing on the flesh but it is assigned to the Levite priests. Revelation suggests that Jesus has printing on His thigh, however. Perhaps most important is that in Christ we are free in such things.

She goes on: I always get spiritually fed by your messages at CAMPUS. My husband used to join me in watching your shows. He is hung up over your hair and clothing. I know my sister agrees with him. I explained the importance of looking at your heart and to stop judging by appearances. This is another reason why I look like I do, Linda. It is purposeful. When I was LDS I conformed to their culture but my heart was dead. Their approach – the one your husband apparently is hung up on – is to make the messenger appealing so their false Gospel will be received. Used car do the same thing.

The Message and Mission of John the Baptist

The message and mission of John the Baptist of preparing the way of the Messiah, he came looking very rough – for a reason – the Pharisees wore soft raiment and lived in luxury. In opposition John came living in the wild, eating locusts and honey and dressed in leather and camels hair. This caused Jesus to say to John’s disciples:

Luke 7:25 But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they which are gorgeously apparelled, and live delicately, are in kings' courts.
26 But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and much more than a prophet.

What Jesus seems to be saying to John’s disciples is, “Did you go out into the wilderness to find a man dressed in refineries? No, you didn’t. Such live in palaces of this world. “No, you went out into the wild to find a man teaching the truth, and his apparel was indicative of this. In other words, you didn’t go into palaces to find the truth from men in soft robes but went to a man who was not only a living illustration of the real deal but one who gave you the real deal.

Authenticity and Integrity in Representation

My intentions are the same – and always have been.

Then she asks:

“Will you ever consider changing your focus to appeal to people like my 73 year old husband and my sister who have put up a block to your message over your pony tail, “Brigham Young” style beard, and wrinkled shirts.

Linda means well. She loves her family and wants them to hear. But this request leaves me in a predicament: Do I change how I honestly am and become something I am honestly not, as a means to dishonestly present myself so a segment of society will respond – all the while turning my back on those who DO relate to me? I can’t do it. If I can’t honestly represent myself as I am I can’t honestly represent Him – simple as that.

I was raised to be like a whited sepulcher . . . and was full of dead dried bones. I cannot return to that because integrity must exist in all areas of life – or else integrity will cease to exist – at least for me.

Linda ends with – I remember when you appeared much more conservative in your dress and it wasn’t such a distraction to some people. I smile at this. Love Linda’s heart. I have ALWAYS been different in my appearance – except on the Mormon Mission and LDS Sundays. The very first show we did I was wearing all denim and had bleached cropped hair – and was called on the carpet for that!

The Real Prayer

The real prayer, for all people, is not that others will change to accommodate their prejudices, but that their hearts will change so they can then hear the truth because the game of changing appearances as a means to please others is an endless demand – and never, ever won.

In conclusion Linda says:

I will continue to watch your show and love your heart. Just wishing my husband could join me again in worship. I am sorry if this offends you in any way. Please accept my apology.

Apology accepted – I get your concerns – and will add your husband and sister to my personal prayers that they will first look at themselves . . . before they look at me.

An Insight Into Modern Influences

Alright, let’s get right to it. This is a super important show relative to all the others titled, Hacking at the Branches, Striking True to the Root.

We have been appealing to the mind of Noam Chomsky to try and understand the means and measures the powerful and wealthy “few” use to control the masses or many. You guys have been patient but this is ultimately leading us to a better understanding of modern brick and mortars and how they operate upon people in this day and age.

Again, I do NOT necessarily agree with Chomsky on all of his assessments and opinions on what he believes are injustices perpetrated out on the many through the few in government, big corporations and major media outlets, but I do believe most of his principles are applicable to the few who lead and/or govern modern Evangelicalism OVER . . . the many.

Thus far we have appealed to six of nine.

Principles of Governance and Manipulation

From Control to Election Engineering

The principles the few use to govern and manipulate the many are:

• Reduce Democracy
• Shape Ideology
• Redesign the Economy
• Shift the Burden
• Attacking Solidarity

And sixth, what we covered last week and what Chomsky calls “Running (meaning controlling or owning) the Regulators.”

This brings us to the Seventh Principle where he talks about “Engineering Elections.”

Speaking to this, he first admits that “The concentration of wealth yields a concentration of political power. Especially as the cost of elections skyrockets.”

What he means is that as campaign costs rise “political parties are forced into the pockets of major corporations,” which essentially means that elections are bought and paid for in advance.

When this occurs, we see that more and more elections are “engineered.” Aside from the fact that “politicking runs rampant in organized religion,” and the fact that often (but not always) those who give the most often “receive the most” in organized religion (while the opposite was true in Jesus' day as those who needed the most (the sinners) received the most (from Him in terms of grace), I am not going to spend time trying to align this seventh principle up to modern Evangelicalism.

The Role of Organized Labor

But the Eighth Principle, labeled “Keeping the Rabble in Line,” is very important to our understanding of the ninth (and final point) that we will borrow from Dr. Chomsky.

So, to the eighth principle first – “Keeping the Rabble in Line.”

Now, according to him – and he is no slouch – but according to him and his stated concerns and interests, there has been one unifying force that, with all of its flaws, has been in the forefront of efforts to improve the lives of the general masses or population.

Chomsky says that this force has been . . . (drumroll please) “organized labor.”

“Boooo! Hissssss!” scream the capitalists, the tow-the-line Mormons, and the American Evangelicals. Organized labor bad. Unions evil. They of the debil.

In some ways, they seem to be.

But let’s discuss Chomsky’s points for a minute. First of all, he says that organized labor (or labor unions), “besides being a unifying force among the masses, also serve as a barrier to corporate tyranny.”

Now, I want to take just 30 seconds and repeat his point here. We have been talking about the few – IN THE CHURCH – capitalizing, abusing, and manipulating “the many” so as to retain and protect their wealth and power.

If you are a business owner, I am not siding with Chomsky for labor unions. But neither am I taking a stand against them.

My father, both at the Herald Examiner in Los Angeles as a young man and then while on the LA County Fire Department for twenty-five years, was a card-carrying union member who benefited greatly from that association.

However, when he purchased a steel fabrication company with my older brother, he was dead set against organizing and labor unions (for obvious reasons).

My only point in all we have talked about is that Chomsky is saying that one unifying force that has sought to try and improve the lives of others has been the labor unions – abuses and all.

We have been focused on the few and the powerful’s attempts to control and abuse the many but now, at this point, Chomsky introduces to us the only major opposition that has ever stood in the way of such manipulations – organized labor.

Chomsky goes on to say that the major (almost fanatic and concentrated) attack on organized labor by big business and government is due to the fact that they are “a democratizing force.”

Democracy and Church Governance

Remember the first Principle the few use to control the many – to REDUCE DEMOCRACY? If this is their aim then the few are going to ardently fight against anything that tends to increase it, right?

Already, are you seeing the application of these principles to religion?

If labor unions are a “democratizing force,” and democratizing forces serve to unite the masses, then we can already see – already – that when it comes to church governance, the MOST unifying, democratizing, the most healthy and robust (and I am speaking to the health of the individuals involved) is NOT accomplished through top-down authoritarianism nor is it through top-down committees (like male-dominated elders or deacons boards).

It is in and through an open, subjective environment where all things – including all relative views and beliefs – are freely accepted and the people.

Labor Unions and Religious Institutions

Chomsky has also noted that “organized labor unions stand as a barrier against tyranny.” This is a fact. The management tells people that they have to work 80-hour work weeks for 40-hour pay and a labor union comes in and tells that tyranny, “no way.” Right? We then have another added value evidence here – as one of the things we are trying to stand against is religious tyranny – when ecclesiastical abuses are heaped upon the many by the few in power in the name of God! But I get ahead of myself.

The labor union had been very strong in early America but by the 1920’s it was virtually crushed. By the mid-30’s it began to reconstruct as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sympathetic to laborers and the abuses the few heaped upon them. His hands were somewhat tied to do anything about his concerns so he sort cautiously told the labor organizers that they needed “to force his hand.” How? He told them to go out and publicly protest and demonstrate and when the pressure was sufficient he would be able to put through the legislation they desired.

FDR and the Fight Against Privilege

To quote Roosevelt, he said:

“I am not in favor of a return to that “definition of liberty” under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of a privileged few.”

Now, what have we been talking about here on heart of the matter? The very thing that FDR was NOT in favor of . . .

“. . . a return to that (ugly) definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of a privileged few.”

In other words, Jesus came and set us free – free! Free! But institutions, going all the way back to Constantine, have stepped in and gradually regimented us into the service of the few!” Looking back (with fondness to the days and ways of Jesus Christ) I am also NOT in favor of . . .

“a return to that definition of liberty under which for many hundreds of years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of a privileged few.”

The Impact of Legislation on Labor Unions

Well, it goes without saying that big business was appalled by what FDR supported. Read the business press of the late 1930’s and you will discover evidence to support this.

When the Second World War hit, and everything was put on hold, but when it ended a MAJOR offensive began to put an end to organized labor – and the implementation of the Taft Hartley Act, McCarthyism, and then the Reagan Era – all working to crush it into dust. Now stay with me – we have almost reached the point where all of this will simmer down to where we can leave Chomsky and apply all of this to the faith today.

Chomsky just explained that labor unions, which came back in force under FDR, were systematically crushed by and through a number of attacks, beginning with the Taft Hartley Act and wrapping up with Reagan. The net effect of crushing organized labor was to crush the democratizing power of the people – which was growing – and to put it into the hands of the few.

Control and Engagement of the Masses

Now get ready – something had to rise from the democratizing ashes of the crushed organized labor and give the masses not only a reason to work, and dream, and live, but to ALSO keep them busy and engaged so that the few could continue to “MAN-ipulate” them.

Those who have been LDS know that this is what the LDS do to keep their members from rising up and crushing the few who reign too – they keep them busy, busy, busy – doing work for the living, work for the dead, and work for their salvation – thereby reducing the democratizing effects of thought and questioning which occurs when people step from the manipulations that keep them under control.

Well, the powerful few have long known that when the masses don’t have a common cause – like war or a thing to hate – something to keep them occupied, then the masses start thinking. They also know that when they have crushed the ability for the masses to unify and experience the liberties of democracy that something needs to be “put in play” to keep them occupied, to keep them chasing the carrot, or else they…

The Rise of Consumer Culture

So what happened in America is after World War II business, wanting to keep organized labor at bay, threw everything they at keeping the many preoccupied, diverted, and therefore incapable of thought or participation. And we are then introduced to the greatest manipulation ever heaped upon humanity which serves to keep the masses as spectators in life rather than participants.
(long beat)
They have turned almost all of us into . . . Consumers.

Having crushed organized labor, which is pretty much composed of working people actually thinking about what the few are doing to them, the few, after world war II, devised a plan that would capture the hearts and minds and lives of most people – except the hippies of the sixties, the radicals and the eccentrics, and the occupy wall-streeters of late.

Manufacturing Consent

This brings us to our ninth and last principle Chomsky describes: “Manufacturing Consent” or . . . Providing or creating something that would cause the masses to willingly set their reason, their intellects, and their desire for democracy and liberty away by Replacing their right to “participate” in what happens to them with merely becoming “spectators” – and therefore puppets in the hands of the few.

What was this “something?” Consumerism. Total, abject, devotion to getting things as a means to being seen as a thing. And they did this through a formidable force most human beings cannot resist – advertising. Professionally pitching to people products and lifestyles; creating needs out of wants, and telling us that our goals are obtainable – while virtually telling us what our goals should be, what our lives and bodies, houses, cars, and clothes and make-up and dinners and teeth and skin and hair should “look” like. In order to be accepted, admired, loved and deemed worthy to exist. And society as a whole bit, hook, line and freaking sinker not realizing that we were being reeled from the ocean of liberty and participation and into the boat of servile spectatorship. They do this by presenting apparent opportunities for the lower classes to become like the upperclasses through consumerism – simply as that.

The Illusion of Class Mobility

It’s important for the few to make the many believe a number of things relative to this final principle:

First, its important for them to maintain a standard of class and class consciousness as a means to give people something to shoot for, and then it is important that all people believe they have the actual ability to achieve, or at least rub shoulders, with the higher class – BY AND THROUGH acquiring things – money, goods, material, Maybelline, tennis shoes – things that only the upperclass have access. By getting the masses to buy into consumerism, the few have manufactured the many’s consent to be lulled away from real living and into the endless pursuit of the unobtainable by greedily grabbing for the obtainable at ever turn of their lives.

Chomsky says: “The public relations industry, the advertising agencies, which is dedicated to creating consumers, is a phenomena Developed in the freest countries, which are Britain and the United States, the reason is pretty clear – it became clear almost a century ago that it was not going to continue to be easy to control the population by force – too much freedom had been won . . .”

(Due to womens rights, labor unions, and other democratizing factors)

And so it became apparent that if the masses could not be controlled by force – in freer societies like the US and Britian – that “they have to be controlled through beliefs and attitudes.”

Chomsky says: “Well one of the best ways to control people in terms of attitudes is what the great political economist Thorstein Vebline called, FABRICATING CONSUMERS.”

(For Shawn: Thorstein Vebline is an acerbic Norwegian Econmist who coined the term “conspicuous consumtion” as a means to describe social status or weath.)

“It can fabricate wants . . . makes obtaining things just within your reach the essence of life . . . there going to be trapped into becoming consumers . . .

Chomsky says
Read the business press of the 1920’s where it openly “talks about directing people to the superficial things of life, fashionable consumption, and that will keep them out of our hair.”

He cites Walter Lipman, a major progressive of the 20th century, who wrote famous essays on democracy saying:
“the public must be put in its place so that the responsible men can make decisions without interference from the bewildered herd.”

Public as Spectators

In other words “when the masses, the bewildered herd were spectators and not participants, then

Influence of Media on Consumer Behavior

The would be a properly functioning democracy. Chomsky adds that in light of these insights from men like Lipman that:

“Subsequently, Madison Avenue – representing advertising writ large – ran with this as its goal – to fabricate consumers.” That is done with great “sophistication,” the ideal is what we actually see today – where, for example, teenage girls will go and walk the malls instead of hitting the library –

Chomsky notes somberly:

The idea is to try and control everyone, to turn the whole society into the perfect system – with the perfect system being society becoming a diad or a pair, the pair is you and your television set, or you and the internet in which that presents you with what kind of life you should have, what kind of gadgets you need, and you spend your lifetime and effort trying to gain those things which you don’t need, you don’t want, you throw them away – but that has become the measure of a decent life –

Advertising's Role

He then adds, what we see is, for instance, in advertising on television, that markets are SUPPOSED to be based on consumers making rational and informed choices on what they acquire. For instance, if that was what was then an advertisement on television would simply state the facts about a product. But that is not what we find, is it?

Instead, the television, internet, and print ads all present information and images of sports heroes and actors representing what could be promoting products in ways that have little to do with the facts –

McDonald's presents fun-filled family outings. Truck ads show trucks doing crazy feats while simultaneously warning us against doing them ourselves, and advertising for medicine shows the most beautiful people together in a jacuzzi overlooking a Sedona sunset – but never the side effects. The whole point is to create UNINFORMED consumers that will make IRRATIONAL choices – that’s what advertising is all about – and rarely about the facts about the product.

Influence Beyond Products

Everything advertised – products and services (and even elections) are typically NOT based on informed and rational decisions but AGAIN – on UNINFORMED consumers making IRRATIONAL decisions. Buying on emotions, wants, desires, imagination, hope, dreams – and not actual needs.

Chomsky points out that former POTUS Barack Obama won his election by what Sarah Palin mockingly calls, “hopey changy stuff,” adding that “Obama never really promised anything, it was mostly illusion.”

And so here we are – we have finally landed – the paint by number picture has been presented on how the few manipulate the many as a means to make them spectators instead of participants. They get us to buy into illusion, to invest as uninformed consumers of religion in what they present as hopey, changy stuff which is not based in fact – it's based on a number of the very things that Madison Avenue uses to draw us in – and next week we will springboard off of these principles present in modern institutional Christianity – and strike directly – and without apology – at the root.