2009-12-15 10:00:45

PURPLE STATE OF MIND 2009: It’s Not Just About Religion Anymore.

Filed under: Purple State Of Mind, Reasons To Believe, purple state roadshow
Posted by: John

The question came from a woman a few rows back from the stage. We were sitting in the school gym at New Life Worship Center in Smithfield, Rhode Island, a suburb of Providence, and the subject of my talk was ostensibly why I rejected the Christian faith.

But the question wasn’t about my faith, or lack thereof. It was about her communication skills.

The woman planned to pay a visit to her grown children in Florida for the holidays and wanted tips on how to avoid conflict. She informed me that she’d already alienated her children, so this was an attempt to patch things up. She blamed herself for what had gone wrong.

What I told her came from my own experience.

I said she should just listen to her children. She should try to listen as much or more than she talked. Listening would go along way to mending fences. Second, I told her, before she opened her mouth on any given subject, she might ask herself whether what she had to say was worth whatever pain or aggravation it might cause. Finally, I told her that family was harder than almost any other arena for raising the most difficult questions, and she shouldn’t feel alone in her anxiety.

She thanked me, and that was that. Neither of us mentioned religion. She didn’t mention Jesus, and I didn’t talk about Nietzsche. It was the mutation of a conversation about god into a conversation about, well, conversation.

In a nutshell, that’s what happened  this year with the Purple State project. Slowly but surely, the dialogue started by Craig Detweiler and myself four years ago ceased to be about religion and morphed into something larger. Whether we were in Rhode Island or Massachusetts, Texas or Florida, together or individually, the evolution was the same. What started as an encounter between old friends over the question of god turned into a more general discussion of how to move past the bloody ideological politics of the current age.

In one sense, the Purple State Roadshow of 2009 ended as it had begun, in the presence of Dr. Gary Davis, who introduced me to a round table of Amherst professors last February and played moderator for the audience in Providence. Gary, pictured with me above, was a human book-end, but so much more. One of the attendees at the latter conference, an event sponsored by something called the Apologetics Institute, asked me why I valued my friendship with Gary. My first answer was Irish whisky.

Gary and I had met a few times over the course of the year and talked about our appreciation for Jameson, though when it came down to it, we never actually imbibed together.  We did talk a lot, though rarely about faith. Gary is a Christian, and he makes his living in the evangelical culture, but he doesn’t much care for its heavy-handed approach to winning converts. I like it even less than he does, but I enjoy his  company. He’s a true character, as they say down in Texas, one of those individuals who forged his own path and calls it his own way, even if his peers sometimes look askance.

Our conversations reminded me now and then of Craig, who moved with his family to Malibu this year to start running a cinema program at Pepperdine University. When we started 2009, Craig and I knew we had a few gigs here and there, but we had no idea that the entire project would be transformed to such an extent that end of the year presented us with a completely different version of Purple State than the beginning. This happened, in large part, because the national dialogue continued to deteriorate.

As much as I would love to be optimistic, we end 2009 with reasons for both hope and despair.

The change began in the spring as we headed down to Texas and Florida for events in Abilene, Houston, Tallahassee and Orlando. Around that time, the healthcare was heating up in Washington D.C. By the time we concluded our last function in August, a presentation to the Florida League of Cities, the tea parties had raged, the governor of Texas has talked publicly about secession and Americans had shown up at town hall meetings wearing side-arms.

Meanwhile, the idea of a Purple State of dialogue, in which people could speak their minds across ideological divides and yet still respect their opponents, ceased to be a nice idea about politeness and became an urgent attempt to reverse the national meltdown. One clear sign of the urgency has been our discovery of like-minded projects around the United States, whether the folks at the Village Square in Tallahassee or the people behind the website Science and Religion Today, who recently reached out to us.

It’s no coincidence that our project has a special relevance in Florida. Municipalities and counties have been dealing with ferocious political and cultural confrontation non-stop for at least a decade, and lots of people down there are exhausted. We saw strong signs of a new push to improve the terms of combat, but we also know they have their work cut out for them.

This coming March, the Republican primary contest for a Florida Senate seat promises to be a donnybrook between moderate conservative Governor Charlie Crist and conservative darling Marco Rubio. That contest shows all the signs of becoming a civil war within the state Republican Party, but it’ll be a national test, too,  a measure of how good or bad things are state-wide.

Thank goodness, Tallahassee has its angels. While spending time in the state capital, where the local film festival honored the movie with an award for audience favorite, we met the ingenious and inexhaustible Liz Joyner. Her organization, The Village Square, hasn’t indulged in wishful thinking, ala Rodney King. It jumped into the fray.  This year, while we wrung our hands about the decline in civility, Joyner jumped into the lion’s den and hosted a series of discussions about healthcare, doing everything in her power to bring both conservative and democratic voices into the room.

By her own account, it was exhausting, and she didn’t manage to get the ranks to fall in love with each other, but there was a dialogue, and there will be more.

Thanks to Liz, we got to Tallahassee. Thanks to Wendy Abberger, president of Leadership Florida, we began to see ramifications of our project that had never been obvious before. Wendy is extremely well-connected throughout the business and political communities across the state, and after seeing our presentations at St. John’s Episcopal Church, she invited us to speak to her organization’s annual meeting in Orlando.

In preparation for that event, she told us that her group would be less interested in the religious aspects of our conversation and more interested in the notion of civic dialogue. She also let us know that Leadership members liked their speakers to offer practical advice and asked us for a kind of tool kit for dialogue. I wrote an essay for the event that became the blueprint for what you can now read on our About page.

As important as that conversation was, the Leadership event itself turned out to be the real turning point of the year. It was mid June. Earlier in the year, Texas Governor Rick Perry had made noises about secession, a perennial political flower as reliable as the bluebonnets in spring, and yet scarier somehow in our current climate. The Wall Street Journal ran a big take-out piece that weekend on what secession would look like. Meanwhile, the healthcare town hall meetings had started to get extremely ugly.

Standing before that crowd of 300 or so business leaders, we didn’t need to talk about god to get anyone’s attention. All we had to do was hold up a newspaper.

We didn’t turn our backs completely on faith matters, of course, but even when we went to religious institutions, it seemed to me, something about our mission subtly changed. Stopping off at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas for a few days in April, we engaged with faculty and students on the broadest possible range of topics. Faith made the big river of the dialogue, but the streams and tributaries flowed in a dozen different directions, into the realms of art, politics, journalism, cinema and music.

Thanks to Professor Al Haley, we had access to hundreds of Christians, who brought their questions and concerns to our screening of Purple State Of Mind. At the same time, as if to suggest the various forms the conversation might take, students choreographed dance numbers on the theme of Purple State, and a music professor and his class created an evening’s entire musical program around the same idea.

I don’t mean to preen here. I merely want to suggest that right from the start our audiences in 2009 saw greater possibilities in the Purple State idea than we did. In a very real sense, our audiences reintroduced us to our own conceit, and what they conveyed was more ambitious, more hopeful, more resonant than anything we could have produced on our own. Whether speaking to a screening audience in the River Oaks neighborhood of Houston, courtesy of Fuller Theological Seminary’s Will Stoller-Lee, or addressing the mayors of Florida, thanks once again to Wendy Abberger, we felt a hunger for communication across division that we hadn’t seen the year before.

That brings me back to New Life Worship Center, the last event of the year. I went solo at the behest of Gary Davis, and that rainy November morning turned out to be the most appropriate possible conclusion to a year of new directions.

I was especially moved by the testimonies of two woman live as believers and artists within the evangelical faith, even though as artists their faith makes them outsiders in both the religious and secular worlds. Among fellow believers, they feel themselves to be freaks because Christians find it difficult to embrace artistic temperament and endeavor. Among secular people, the mere fact of their faith makes them doubly freakish. And yet as artists, finding solace in faith and an audience in secularism, they can forsake neither.

I believe this is the predicament faced by tens of millions of Americans around the country in every walk of life. Older ways of identifying ourselves, politically, culturally and economically, have become inadequate and can no longer accommodate a newly emerging society. New forms of identification that might take account of these changes have yet to emerge. In this moment of rupture and dislocation, which also accounts for a lot of the political anger, Purple State takes on a new meaning.

However fragile and obscure its beginnings, this is now a movement for and about people who no longer feel at home in their own communities, but find no shelter in the opposition. Craig and I certainly fall into that category, and so do millions. In 2009, we experienced that reality first-hand.

What can 2010 possibly hold in store?

Comments (2)

2 Comments »

1. Gary here. John, you’re right– it’s hard being faithful to the model of Christian presence in our world set forth in Scripture when your fellow believers have not only lost a voice in the surrounding culture, but have also lost any ability to move in it freely as genuine followers of Christ without feeling they need to put on a facade of “good Christians” (whatever that is).

   It’s been quite sometime since I played the game of being a good Christian. If God only knew! O crap, I forgot…, He does. Nothing to hide now.

   Comment by Gary Davis — December 15, 2009 @ 2:01 pm

2. Thanks for this sprawling recap, John. Wouldn’t believe that this all happened if I hadn’t witnessed (most of it) myself. What a privilege to walk down this messy middle with you….

   Comment by Craig — December 21, 2009 @ 3:36 am

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