• UPDATE: "…moral lapses of Republican Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina will damage the GOP brand in the South. Sanford, who is married with four sons, had been a strong public advocate of ‘family values,’ but he has been making headlines because of his admitted affair with his Argentine mistress, Maria Belen Chapur."

• UPDATE: "South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has cleared his schedule this week to take a personal trip with his wife, three weeks after announcing his extramarital affair with an Argentine woman, his office announced Wednesday."

You have heard of Governor Mark Sanford? He’s back.

For a day or so Michael Jackson’s death grabbed the headlines; then his funeral drowned-out Sanford again. But sequentially, like an unending soap on daytime TV, squeezed between Jackson’s death, his memorial, and debate about where to plant his body, the story of Sanford’s affair with an Argentine mistress has long enough legs to jump from South Carolina where Sanford is governor to California where in Los Angeles Jackson reigns as king in his death as he never did in life. But intermittently, Sanford resurrects: several lead stories in a couple of days, see above, and here.

More than mere tabloid sex keeps the story alive.

Sanford had already admitted to adultery, five liaisons, in fact; he apologized to everyone, but insisted he would stay in office. He cited ancient Israel’s King David as reason for doing so. You know Bathsheba and all that? Of course, David had Bathsheba but one time, not five; but then he did do away with the lady’s husband.

Perhaps Sanford now owning up to several more than just five trysts with his lover is his way of keeping up with David. Then, too, he says he’s crossed the line with other ladies, as well.

But how did David get in the mix? Here emerges the drama turning cheap tabloid trash into a dynamo for the political press. Pundits smell more than a little hypocrisy from a sitting governor whose rise to Republican stardom began with winning a congressional seat way back in 1994. That’s when the ‘family values’ revolution engineered by Newt Gingrich threw the House of Representatives into wide-open, holier-than-thou, back-to-the-family Republican arms. Back then, Freshman Congressman Sanford was as holier as they come.

Now, the odor of two-faced legalism that exempts the politician from rules made for the public wafts through this whole affair like stink from my long-dead-dad’s Limburger cheese. Like a bumbling clown with a fan at a funeral, Sanford’s inept efforts to cool the affair keep the smell of something rotten hidden in the casket floating around the room.

Let me explain.

• (Unless otherwise noted the quotes that follow are taken from A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, at Spurgeon.org; and Charles G. Finney: How Theology Effects Understanding of Revival, at The Highway. But they are widely available elsewhere, with a caveat: revisionist work on Finney is rampant; many of his more egregious statements have been redacted; and his doctrinal positions modified, postmortem.)

"You see why you do not have a revival," stated the self-assured, egotistical Finney in his 1835 Lectures on Revival. "It is only because you do not want one; because you are neither praying for it, nor feeling anxious about it, nor putting forth efforts for it."

Finney concluded, "God has put the Spirit at your disposal. If the Church will do all her duty, the millennium may come in this country in three years [i.e., 1838?]. . . If the Church would do all her duty, she would soon complete the triumph of religion in the world."

Assessing Finney’s ministry, Billy Graham concluded that Finney near single handedly produced "one of the greatest periods of revival in the history of America."

Yet, instead of either the millennium or "triumph of religion in the world" following Finney, on the heels of his "revivals" America plunged into civil war. Giving Finney the benefit of the doubt—he may have been off a few years on dating the millennium—his revival methods, combined into a brand new evangelical medium, were applied diligently over the next 150 years by a spate of evangelists from D. L. Moody to L. S. Chafer to Billy Sunday to Billy Graham, with Phoebe Palmer and "all on the altar" squeezed between. Yet, instead of heralding a belated millennium, there followed the bloodiest, costliest, and most disastrous century in human history.

Billy Graham, of course, came along after the Great War to End All Wars (WWI), The Depression, WWII, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki; but he was right there with every President from Truman to Bush—including proudly Nixon—for Korea, Viet Nam, Gulf War I, and the War on Terror, including 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq. And after applying all the new methods proposed by Finney, at the close of Graham’s gargantuan efforts odds still favor Iran getting The Bomb, Radical Islam winning the War on Terror, everyday Islam triumphing in religion, and Sharia law running the millennium.

Revival, where art thou? As it turns out, promising revival, Finney had pronounced judgment on the entire evangelical movement. Promising life, his new methods worked death. The message of his McLuhan’ medium, then, was, "Evangelicalism is sure to self-destruct!" It has. All signs say we are now in a post evangelical age.

What happened? And what does the future hold in store because of what happened? Well, ask Grandpa…

To reference producers comments on video, see Emma the Angel

Doing church growing up was a fairly straightforward affair: prayer meetings, Bible studies, and memorizing Scripture at home; mid-week church, Sunday school, and church on Sundays. I cannot remember not being in church; and also cannot remember not knowing the gospel.

We were Pentecostal to the core; Assemblies of God, to be exact. My buddy down the street was Baptist—thoroughly so. His Dad was a Baptist lay-minister. But other than him being allowed movie shows and me not, our church stuff meshed nicely. Probably this was because without making any big deal of it, we shared the same gospel. He read John 3:16 as did I. That was enough. I cannot remember that his eternal security or my charismata were ever mentioned—they probably were; but not in a serious enough way to be memorable. Of course, I had not at that point met Emma.

Given these roots, over a lifetime I never fell out with the Baptists over the gospel. Baptists I know hold tightly to biblical traditions covered with gray hair: their doctrine’s been around for awhile; and despite squabbles, little gets shifted as to gospel essentials. So too, Assemblies of God-style Pentecostalism has its roots in a strong gospel tradition stemming from Calvin. Early on this set the denomination apart from certain precursors to Pentecostalism not nearly as concerned with the integrity of the gospel as with other matters. In a similar way, today this strong gospel tradition sets mainstream Pentecostalism apart from a many-faceted, late-born epilogue to the movement that includes wild offshoots sprouting like weeds in a garden—and Emma; let us not forget Emma.

The precursors went their way but are still around; the epilogue’s wild offshoots keep sprouting. Together, precursors and offshoots have had a profound affect on how we view the gospel, and Emma the angel has had no small part in this. This being so, Emma matters to all to whom the integrity of the gospel matters. You can be sure, then, that Emma matters to Jesus.

Let me tell you why.

The precursors reach back to John Wesley, who was perhaps far more Arminian than Arminius; he was the master marketer of Arminianism, anyway; and semi-Pelagian to the core. But the precursors come forward though Charles G. Finney, who elevated Wesleyan views from mere step-child status into a full-blown Pelagian twin. If Wesley believed sinners were drowning but could grasp a life preserver, Finney insisted they need only swim for shore. God agrees with neither. He directs the gospel only to those who have already drowned. Owning up to this in part (as evidenced later by men like Lewis Sperry Chafer who endorsed Calvin), but fascinated with Finney’s on-demand revivalism, the "all on the altar," not-quite-second-blessing movement was born. Remembered as the so-called Keswick higher-life movement, it developed in two directions: on the one hand, it shaped full-blown second-blessing Pentecostalism cleaving the born again experience from the baptism of the Holy Spirit; on the other, it morphed into not-quite-second-blessing dispensationalism cleaving Jesus as Savior from Jesus as Lord. As expounded by Chafer, Jesus becomes your savior sovereignly, but only you can make him Lord. Chafer clarified this in his classic, He That Is Spiritual (See also reference above on Keswick, and this review of Chafer, Must Christ be Lord to be Savior? NO) This Chaferian emphasis seems to serve two purposes: first, it preserves the "all on the altar" higher-life flavor of Keswick while dispensing with distasteful (to some) second blessing theology; then, too, it allows evangelicals to hold serious-minded, stodgily-solid, gray-beard Father Calvin by one hand and fanciful, colorful, dynamic, inventive, persuasive, marketable Uncle Finney by the other. And it carves out a place ever so nicely, if not intentionally, for Emma as the eminently marketable guide watching over a kind of schizoid, psychic Christianity.

Thus, in brief, such were the precursors. As for the epilogue, the late-born offshoots have come primarily in two phases: first, Latter Rain, ca 1945 sparked by William H. Branham; and second, Charismatics, ca 1960 inspired by Episcopal Rector Dennis Bennett. We consider them in reverse order.

The Charismatics emerged front and center when Dennis Bennett an Episcopal priest at Saint Luke’s Parish in Van Nuys, California, announced to his church that he had spoken and would continue to speak in tongues. Bennett addressed the Pentecostal Fellowship of Greater Los Angeles shortly after his experience. In that message, he was as solidly in the Bible and honoring of the gospel as any Pentecostal or Baptist I have ever heard. It does not follow, of course, that Charismatics after him have always been as solid gospel-wise; but many of them drifted into Assemblies of God and other like-minded churches. In fact, they went where welcomed and today, "charismatic" is a benign-enough term to apply even to Calvinist John Piper’s Bethlehem Baptist Church. For the most part, Charismatics have been embraced by the larger evangelical milieu.

Such is not the case of the earlier Latter Rain. Decades before the Charismatics came along independent-minded Pentecostals had already spawned the lesser-known latter rain movement which is seldom quiet, loudly dismissive of tradition always, separatist in spirit, and would no more drift into an Assemblies of God-type Pentecostal or an un-Pentecostal-type Baptist church then they would wait around for sound biblical exegesis. PFA (pull from air?) prophecy is much more exciting. Besides, Emma gets to tag along; and from a Latter Rain perspective, Emma and others of her breed are key to a whole new gospel revolution. Jesus, it seems, they have had enough of. Ah, say, Jesus, got a moment? Meet Emma. She may know your Momma, so don’t feel bad when she says, "Move over...." It’s kind of in the family...?

Some date the movement to a revival in a Canadian Bible School in 1948; the Assemblies of God rejected the movement in 1949; but in fact the touchstone of the Latter Rain especially as it affects American evangelicalism today was William H. Branham’s healing revivals already underway in 1941; he published his seminal tract, "I Was Not Disobedient Unto the Heavenly Vision" in 1945; and claimed The Angel—Emma’s main man, apparently—visited him in 1946; Branham’s "angel" has formed a core of the movement’s claims regarding frequent "outpourings" from that point forward, including the touted Toronto, Canada, revival and the most recent event in Lakeland, Florida.

More on the above ahead; here we note that these offshoots of my side of the aisle, along with the precursors to my side of the aisle (I am letting my Baptist buddy off the hook), have profoundly affected how we do church today; and it is just no longer the case that I and my Baptist buddy can agree on the gospel and let other matters care for themselves. The other matters have so intruded on the gospel that often the gospel of God gets buried beneath tons of imitations. Precursors and offshoots alike have produced frauds of "deeper experience" mysticism which passes itself off as a "fuller" gospel in various guises. And too many innocent, and/or gullible bystanders to the whole thing have swallowed tainted bait sold to them as good news.

We Pentecostals used to call ourselves "full gospel;" then "charismatic" came along and the "full" fell by the wayside. But there is in fact only one way in which supposed full gospel people are not frauds: that is if with Paul we mean the gospel as "the whole will of God" (Acts 20:27). By this, Paul meant that he declared the full meaning of Jesus as Lord of all, Jesus Christ having fulfilled God’s complete intent in creation, and his promise in covenant, thereby upholding the integrity of God and of God’s gospel.

Quite different than this, somewhere along the way the label "full" grew bigger than the gospel. The offshoots of Pentecostalism inspired by precursors of second-blessing mysticisms stretched the label way beyond the boundaries of the gospel of God and came up with distortions much closer to gospel of Barnum and Bailey. Emma slipped into her bright shinny circus get-up and took over where Jesus left off. Thus we discover anew a truth of long-standing: when the gospel we preach is no longer God’s call to his full will to serve Jesus as Lord, Emma and her crew will happily supply what is missing. As Mr. Dylan insists, "Everybody’s gotta’ serve somebody."

In all of this, the integrity of the gospel has been compromised. To see how, we need to nail down what we mean by integrity. Then we’ll get back to Emma.

Even taking into account practices they describe as essential to these communities, one finds little variation from what the church—every church—should be. So where does the emerging come in? Why emerge rather than just be? It all sounds rather uppity and judgmental, like, "We’re the ‘should be’ getting away from the dregs we leave behind."

McKnight also observes lightly, "It is said that emerging Christians… drink like Southern Baptists—meaning, to adapt some words from Mark Twain, they are teetotalers when it is judicious…[but] evangelize and theologize like the Reformed—meaning they rarely evangelize, yet theologize all the time."

And this clue may help unravel the enigma that so-called emerging churches are yet today: they are closer to Mark Twain than McKnight imagines. Indeed, beyond fitting Twain‘s quip, like Twain they cannot escape the tug of the birth canal, the tie to what birthed them squalling, bawling, and bloodied into an upside down world. If they are at all the church, they cannot escape being the church. However emerged they may think themselves to be they are not really.

Let me explain.

First, Twain, too, was an emerging believer in his own ‘gospel’ who never quite made it—to the fully emergent side of his faith, I mean. He remained always tied to what he desperately wanted to run away from.

Further, Twain certainly fits McKnight‘s analogies cited above. On the one hand, while not a Baptist, he drank like one: abstaining when judicious just long enough to win the hand of his beloved Olivia ‘Livy’ Langdon. Twain affirms in a letter, "I shall do no act which…Livy might be pained to hear of—I shall seek the society of the good—I shall be a Christian…" He followed this with another note assuring Livy‘s mother he would "never taste wine or spirits upon any occasion whatsoever; I am orderly, and my conduct is above reproach in a worldly sense; and finally, I now claim that I am a Christian."

A Twain scholar sees in these two letters "a type of spiritual progression; the first indicates a desire to become a Christian, the second contains a declaration of faith…considering the yearning for faith…and his lifelong fascination with biblical themes, it seems likely that this struggle for faith was at least partially genuine."

Even so, the same scholar observes, "this flirtation with orthodoxy was short-lived…shortly after the marriage, some of the piety did disappear, and Twain did begin to slip away from whatever doctrinal orthodoxy he may have attained."

Twain wears the emergent Baptist shoes rather nicely.

On the other hand, Twain writes, "I was brought up a Presbyterian…I was sprinkled in infancy…. It affords none of the emoluments of the Regular Church – simply confers honorable rank upon the recipient and the right to be punished as a Presbyterian hereafter…"

Not much, unless someone makes a deliberate connection.

Or unless Joe and Melissa Johnson of Watching Theology, found on Steve Brown, Etc., reminds us quite unintentionally that they might have quite a bit in common; and in reminding us, offer a graphic lesson in how to do church for the church that really wants to be Jesus’ church—which is, by the way, a missional community.

However, such lessons were not the intent, as far as I can tell, of Watching Theology in their review of Winter Light, a film by the noted Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), who made a career of convinving us God was gone—away on business, as Tom Waits sings. The review was just the first thoughtful piece in an ongoing "Silence of God" series that film, theology, and philosophy buffs should check out. Even so, if you make a ripple in the pond you have to accept disturbing a leaf floating by as a consequence. And if that leaf floats a little sideways anyway…

Well, they made the ripple; this leaf has been disturbed and hopes to disturb you, the reader of this post, in turn. Indeed, I hope to disturb you with the connection between magic lanterns and missional communities.

Ingmar Bergman’s film career began with the former because it may have been missing the latter. And I am willing to bet Bergman is not the first nor the last whose career trajectory, indeed whose life path has been shaped—for good or bad—by what was not there at the beginning.

A vacuum attracts debris indiscriminately. Our mission as the church of Jesus is to be there in the place of the vacuum to deflect the debris, when possible, while always filling space-time with what really makes things go…

Nahum, for example—Mom used to insist—prophesied the automobile; and now here were millions of them running around: "The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall justle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings" (Nahum 2:4). Mom quoted that verse more than one time turning chariots into Chevrolets, torches into headlights, and lightning into beams of light streaming from them; all to charge up a kid’s commitment to Jesus by reminding me that we were "in the end times."

Moses, too, got into the act. There was his warning against women wearing men’s clothing; and now here they are doing it, Grandma used to lament, scowling at women in slacks or jeans. "God foresaw it would come to this—a sign of the end for sure," she preached, quoting Deuteronomy 22:5 straight from the King James: "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God."

She would then declare stoutly that we were so far into the end times that she would still be alive for the Rapture—she was near 70 at the time—and would meet "Daddy" (her pet name for Grandpa who had died years before) in the air along with Jesus, and so we would not have to worry about a funeral for her.

And I knew for sure she was right because even if Leave it to Beaver’s Mrs. Clever wore a dress with heels to cook and clean, I knew our neighbor lady wore Levis not just to cook and clean but out in public watering flowers and going to grocery store, for heaven’s sake!

It happened, however, that even before Grandma died and we had a funeral in spite of end time prophecies, there came the time when I noticed a chink in my literalist armor. It was not what the Bible said but what it was silent about that made the dent. Dad rolled his own smokes and was roundly condemned in the literalist circle where we fellowshipped yet I could find nary a word in Scripture prophesying this scourge of tobacco that had come upon the earth. How could God have overlooked an item of such import to the literalists and yet made these other matters so clear?

Thinking thusly, when someone pointed out later that in the Revelation John prophesied the coming of satellites (Revelation 8:13; 14:6-9), I nodded and with a throat-clearing, "Ahem," excused my self from the conversation.

In fact, by the time Sputnik came along I was marveling at literalist prophecy in a different sort of way...

"You testify against yourselves," Jesus declared acerbically, "that you are the descendents of those who murdered the prophets" (Mathew 23:29-31).

In a day of popularized religion it is hard to get one’s mind around a prophet, let alone a prophet who was "stoned…sawed in two…[or] put to death by the sword" (Hebrews 11:17). It requires even greater mental morphing to grasp that popularized religion did them in.

We mean by "popularized religion," the true faith of God made market-ready for the masses, replacing a call to conversion with an invitation to be comfortable, conviction with compatibility. We mean the religion, for example, of the biblical King Jeroboam (see 1 Kings 12 and13), sold to the people as the easy way to get to God.

"It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem," Jeroboam suggested skillfully, stroking a natural bent for ease. "So here are your gods," he offered, pioneering seeker-friendly religion by replacing Israel’s Jehovah with gods so much closer, convenient, affirming, and inclusive.

He even authenticated these new gods: "These are the gods who brought you up out of Egypt," he assured everyone, thereby laying the dubious cornerstone for all seeker-friendly religion to come (see 1 Kings 12:28).

The point is, people won’t settle for being snookered, no matter the ease and convenience: genuine makes the sale, as every guy selling Rolex watches and Cartier jewelry out of the back seat of his car knows. Perception is performance—people will buy if you can just convince them it is real; that it actually came from China matters not a wit if they can just feel it is real and that they got it for a song.

Who has time to run down pedigrees anyway? Authenticating the thing should be as easy as getting it, wearing it, and sharing it. And what better way is there to authenticate anything than having a popular, super-star hero say, "Yep! This is the real deal!" "So Jeroboam said so, and a great many people believed him. After all; he was the guy who had listened to the people when Judah’s King Rehoboam would not; he was the guy who took the complaints, wants and wishes of the people to heart when Rehoboam had not; so he was the guy near and dear to everyone’s heart, whom everyone loved: "Hail, fellow, well met!" the people shouted in acclaim, as it were; the idiom translates into "We trust you because you are that swell fellow with the great big smile who never met anyone who wasn’t a friend!"

If we can believe anyone, we can…

The George w. Bush team (2001-2009) rightfully landed a second term because we trusted Mr. Bush on the international front with the war on terrorism even if his domestic policies with regard to the finance sector came up way short. Ironically, it turns out that, as his tenure showed, domestic policies with regard to regulating the cowboys on Wall Street are so entwined with international policy that the old capitalist mantra of mere self-interest as pushed to the limit by Bush suddenly appears poor beyond recovery

"Whoopee Ti Yi Yo," the cowboy’s days are numbered—again.

Let me explain

Just days ago the Los Angeles Times profiled "a fourth-generation cowboy working in a region where being a cowboy no longer makes sense," the paper says. The cowboys in San Diego County, California, are riding off into the sunset.

In fact, there remains a mere handful of working cowboys in the entire U.S. Workers in "animal production support roles" number about 9000 all told." These include farm hands, stockyard workers, more than 3200 rodeo workers, and all working cowboys. Do the math—real working cowboys are a rare, disappearing breed.

So too, Kevin Rudd promises, the cowboys on Wall Street just might be parting with lassos, bullwhips, and spurs to take up with green eyeshades, quill pens, and double-entry accounting ledgers. They will be trading rodeo-like rollicking for detailed accountability. It may be that the cowboy economy, first labeled such by economist Kenneth Boulding back in the 1960s (See "Why Santa Took Off the Cowboy Boots," this blog), like cowboys in San Diego, just no longer makes sense.

Not all agree. For example, "Adam Smith must be rolling over in his grave," lamented Lawrence Eagleburger, a noted global free market advocate from the days of the elder George H.W. Bush. Smith is stirring, Eagleburger thinks because we are "walking very far away from capitalism."

Or, at least the sort of capitalism envisioned by Eagleburger.

Yet, Eagleburger’s one time boss, then President George H. W. Bush declared in a speech to Congress on September 11, 1990, exactly 11 years before the infamous 9/11 destruction of New York’s Trade Towers, "The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation…. Out of these troubled times a New World Order can emerge…."

For a short time back then Eagleburger was Secretary of State. But apparently he did not apprentice well under Bush I; his unbridled, unregulated free market vision just doesn’t mesh with "historic…cooperation" of the type meant by Bush.

Eagleburger contends that the "regulators…don’t want freer markets," meaning by regulators specifically France and Germany; further, that in attempting to form some sort of agreement with these "regulators," President Obama "has done us a great deal of damage." By this Eagleburger explains that the President has pushed the U.S. "left of center, in the ditch over there" because "he’s a regulator himself."

Hmm.

It may be that in Eagleburger’s mind, Obama just does not have the gall it takes to maintain U.S. presence in a world of Eagleburger-anointed, Adam Smith-oriented, free-market capitalism; Eagleburger may think that, in fact, Obama is a European-type socialist in disguise intent on leading America into socialism. Eagleburger did refer to Obama as a "charlatan." When asked to define this, Eagleburger could only mention Obama’s fund raising methods, very weak evidence to support such a charge. In fact, Obama’s fund raising seemed very free-market oriented, highly capitalistic.

So there has to be more going on here.

"Greed is good...?" You’ve heard that, right? Gordon Gekko‘s (Michael Douglas) stated that famously in the 1987 movie Wall Street.

But we’ve also heard it more recently, from a much more credible source. "…we have too much fear and too little greed," former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers explained, assessing the current state of the U.S. economy. Greed seems to be the driving force behind a capitalist economy—we need it to keep it going, says Summers. Apparently, many people agree—that is, until things fall apart and then suddenly it’s politically correct to say, "Greed got us into this!"

"The only real difference between Bernie Madoff and the management of AIG is that when Bernie Madoff got caught, he pleaded guilty. When AIG got caught, it asked the government for $170 billion," the Boston Herald, poignantly stated beneath the headline, "Bailout ensures AIG’s greed, gall".

Who would have thought?

So in fact it took more than greed to get us where we are. Greed just is not enough—if it takes gall, too.

I thought about replacing gall with another word, but it seemed chauvinistic, given that it starts with "b" and has nothing to do with ladies’ lingerie. And if you cannot figure that out, you just don’t need to know.

But speaking of gall, it took a lot of it to get us into the economic mess we are in right now, a la AIG, GM, Chrysler, etc. Now, by gall I do mean big brass b— ah, lots of gall that assumes self-entitlement. No one without a huge reservoir of gall equating with a gigantic ego would ever taken the stupid risks (AIG), or have ignored obvious prudent steps (GM, Chrysler), and thereby put us in the economic mess we—all of us— now own as a nation.

In short it took great big brass ones to put the entire economy of a nation in the hole by putting other people’s money at risk, all to enhance one’s already ostentatious profits; or as in the case of GM, to assume that any corporation is such an icon of the economy, such a cherished institution that one can dawdle about keeping up with the competition because, well, because we’re GM.

"We want to continue the vital role we've played for Americans for the past 100 years," GM CEO Rick Waggoner stated to Congress months back as he held his hand out for a bailout after he had tooled into DC in a $55 million dollar corporate jet. If AIG is too big to fail, we are too vital. We are GM, doggone it!

Of course, the other side of this economic mess is that some people think God set this whole thing in motion as the original capitalist....

Execs at GM and Chrysler realized this sometime around midnight Sunday (March 29,2009) when they expected to hear him shinnying down the chimney with another $22 billion in his sack.

Instead, GM‘s CEO Rick Waggoner‘s walking papers bounced down the chimney like a lump of very hard coal, caromed off the grate, and slid into the stocking Waggoner had left hanging by the chimney with care. Waggoner is now looking for work.

Chrsyler‘s CEO Robert Nardelli seems to have squeaked by with nothing more than a empty stocking (relatively speaking; Chrysler actually got another $6 billion and 30 days to shape up and complete a merger with Italy‘s Fiat or they‘ll be shipping out for sure in a forced bankruptcy. UPDATE: Chrysler reported reaching a deal with Fiat on Monday within hours after Washington issued the ultimatum).

Who would have thought? Just a few months back it seemed Washington was Detroit‘s Santa Claus for sure; but in fact I think we got it right in the previous post: Santa‘s no match for the USA‘s free wheeling cowboy economy.

So with what is left of his reputation in hand, word was he may have run for part‘s unknown. Who wouldn‘t be concerned with getting away before every boy and girl in the world came to think that everyday was Christmas; and that Wiis and X-Boxes now belonged in Cracker Jacks boxes because big fat bank accounts making video games seem like trinkets were the new Christmas goody to be handed out; and these had nothing to do with being good; in fact, the badder you were—with other people‘s money, anyway—the more Christmas cash you could get in January, June, or July, or any other month of the year? But now…?

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus; he is just not spending much time right here right now. Last seen landing in Amsterdam, we can‘t be sure the Dutch let him stay. Worried about ING asking for more money, the Dutch didn‘t want to get too close to the fat jolly fellow until his stained reputation as a front for Wall Street with an office in Washington could be rehabilitated.

Because:

• the boots weren‘t his; they didn‘t fit, and his feet hurt;
• they are an affront to reindeer décor;
• the Dutch have taken a dislike to all things cowboy;
• Santa is just plain tired so he went to work for ING (Internationale Nederlanden Groep) on loan from AIG (American International Group);
• all of the above; or, none of the above.

Clue: headlines that didn’t make it into the Dutch daily newspaper De Volkskrant on Monday, to wit, "Santa Claus Conscience Corrals Cowboy Economy?" The paper did report that "ING Chief Executive Officer Jan Hommen said he had made a ‘moral appeal’ to the top 1,200 employees to return their variable bonuses earned last year."

Shades of AIG! Santa has defected to the EU (European Union) for sure! But folk in Brussels are not polkaing for joy just yet—they are sniffing around for the cowboy boots.

The fallout from U.S. taxpayers‘ outrage over bonuses paid to the AIG execs who led the giant insurer into near-default has reverberated globally and shaken the Dutch Finance Ministry to is core. So the Ministry has made a "moral appeal" for the return of "300 million euros (about 409 million U.S. dollars) in bonuses [paid] to about 40,000 staff members last year." These bonuses were paid AIG style even though ING "posted a net loss of 729 million euros (about 996 million dollars) for 2008 and has planned 7,000 job cuts."

In fact, the Dutch losses seem like chump change, mere "walking around money," less than a billion U.S. dollars compared to AIG‘s hundreds of billions in losses (when you combine losses from credit default swaps with the larger losses from AIG‘s Investments division ).

And maybe this is why Santa defected, sans the cowboy boots.

Let me explain.

Back in 1879 one fellow famously opted for Santa being an essential part of America culture, writing that "Yes, there is a Santa Claus;" he is one ray of that "eternal light with which childhood fills the world." That settled the issue for most Americans until AIG came along. For many Americans AIG extinguished that "eternal light." Now it seems, Santa is trying to defect to the Dutch.

It is just easier for Santa to appeal to the higher sensibilities of the wishful thinking he symbolizes in a culture where a paltry billion dollars seems worth quibbling about. Why go on beating his head against the cowboy culture of Wall Street? The Street had not a qualm about rolling the dice with credit default swaps that placed, not a mere billion, but hundreds of billions of dollars of other people‘s money at risk.

Did I say they lost the roll? They shot craps in a way that no one in the history of Monte Carlo, Las Vegas, or the back alley ever has.

So after more than a century of trying to be hopeful and influence the cowboy culture of Wall Street with peace, joy, and love, even a wishful thinker like Santa is for sure tired. Feet hurt, Santa? You bet!

While Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley did not refer directly to hara-kiri, he clearly meant the taking of one’s own life as a matter of honor originating in the era of the Japanese Samurai. In fact, Hideaki Noguchi, vice-president of H.S. Securities in Japan was the last Japanese exec to even come close to traditional hara-kiri. He committed suicide by slitting his wrists missing his belly—the hara-kiri sweet spot—by at least a few inches; and he did the deed on the Isle of Okinawa in a capsule hotel at a Japanese resort missing by about 1000 miles the Tokyo Stock Exchange where the fruits of his failure were mostly felt. That occurred in 2006. More recently, in 2007 a Japanese Minister of Agriculture hung himself in the face of criticism about misused funds. There is no evidence that anyone suffered much from his misdeeds.

So AIG execs—what about it?

Plenty of people have suffered from your misdeeds—unless of course you can show to the public you missed work that day the credit default swaps were handed out?

Oh yeah, and before you grab that sword we should note that Senator Grassley clarified his comments. He doesn’t really think you should do the hara-kiri number. He‘s after an apology sincere enough to make a difference in how we all look at you: pretty much with the evil eye right now.

Should we feel differently?

In the end, political posturing won the day; there was just nothing real to hold onto.

The Court signaled that it probably would uphold Prop 8, while not invalidating gay marriages already on the books; in short, it will offer a convoluted decision leaving a conundrum in place—whatever that may mean!

But this is just the point. The Court bore witness to its own loss of meaning as a symptom of a larger social malaise: the essence of what it means to human escapes us.

That it is not crystal clear that gay marriage is an abomination to God, an affront to humanity, and a denial of the fundamentals of humanness is proof of a societal darkness leaving us as ignorant of ourselves as an orangutan is of table manners. Impulse, appetite, and opportunity remain our constant companions in darkness, hounding ghosts of a civility that once was, making a mess that makes even the biggest monkeys proud but leaves humans retching their guts out in a gutter along a trail to nowhere.

Not civil enough any longer to know what humanness is, let alone have the courage to state it clearly, the Court grasps at what is merely momentarily opportune—the will of the voters— to avoid saying what should be stated clearly: that marriage is more than impulse, appetite, and opportunity—hormones, hunger, and a handy partner—which is what raw sexual drive is, hetero or homo. Marriage requires the richness of—dare I say it?— pure human sexuality, not in the sense primarily of holy but just untainted, unadulterated, and organic: human sexuality in its natural state forming an integral element of the whole; human sexuality serving its vital role distinguishing male from female in a vital union from which marriage springs.

• "But also, this seal of approval is based on the value rising out of celebrating the differing roles. There is no greater threat to human value than forgetting, ignoring, or deliberately blurring the differences…."

In fact, I recommend you go to that post, "THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE GUY WITH GALS," and read it before you read this. You will find it by scrolling down or following a link in the column to the right. But doing so is not essential. This post will make sense either way; but that post adds flavor.

At this writing tomorrow—Thursday March 5, 2009, to be exact—the California Supreme Court will hear oral arguments for and against California‘s Prop 8—the ban on gay marriage.

The issue is inflammatory enough to have sparked demonstrations, debates, and open hostility. GOD HATES GAYS, shouted one sign at a recent fracas on a local college campus, even as a professor of law decried Prop 8 as an affront to the fundamentals of human justice. It is only fair, he argued, that gays be allowed to marry—and he meant each other: same sex marriage equals justice in his world.

But not in God’s world.

Of course, neither in God’s world does anyone wave signs selling hatred as a virtue.

One error on both sides of the issue is to elevate raw human will to the level of supposed noble causes: to blame one‘s own hatred of gays on God, for example; or to exalt one‘s own sentiment about gays to the level of justice, on the other. Both are arrogant expressions of rebellion against God, replacing God’s will with human opinion. Neither have anything to do with what God really thinks of gays.

To discover that you have to follow the curious case of God and gays in the Bible…

Now, it will do no good to say, "Yes! The Bible says God hates gays," on the one hand; or "Baloney! The Bible is irrelevant," on the other. Both responses are fruit of a common seed: ignorance of the Bible.

The Bible "has the ring of truth," said J.B. Phillips upon close enough examination of it to produce his widely-used paraphrased Bible.

The Bible is true because "it is true to what is," said Dr. Francis Schaeffer upon examining the major world philosophies in light of the Bible.

The Bible claims that God is speaking from its pages. If he is, the Bible makes perfect sense while making sense of the world; if he is not, then nothing makes sense....