Author Archives: Jay Case

About Jay Case

I am currently a professor of history at Malone University in Canton Ohio. From 1986 to 1993 my wife and I were missionaries in Kenya with Africa Inland Mission, where we taught social studies at Rift Valley Academy. All three of our daughters were born there. In the time between Kenya and Malone, I earned my masters and Ph.D. in American religious history at the University of Notre Dame.

“42,” History, and Race

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I have to admit that I was a little nervous about how “42” would handle history when I entered the dollar-movie theater.  (Yes, I am cheap. And now you know why my reviews come so long after a film is released).

It’s too bad we don’t wear fedoras anymore, don’t you think?

Of course, the film did well with the material items:  three-fingered gloves, 47 Chevys, the metal grill doors in the airport, flannel uniforms and steel girders in the stadiums.  (There is that problem with the slope in Crosley Field, but we’ll let that pass).  The material items are the easiest part of history to get right in films, so I wasn’t too concerned about that part.

No, I was worried about how the filmmakers would handle race.   They did a fairly good job, in my estimation.

Let me explain my concern.  Have you seen that movie with heroes whom you root for on one side, and bad guys on the other, and there is a complicated and tense conflict between them, but the good guys win in the end?  It’s called Star Wars.  Or maybe it’s Spider-Man.  Or Rocky.  Or The Little Mermaid.  Or The Wizard of Oz. Or Independence Day.  Or Cinderella.  Or Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Well, I don’t know.  It’s one of those movies.  Or maybe one or two that I haven’t mentioned.

If you haven’t noticed, we Americans like films that fit into this simple narrative.  We, the viewers, naturally identify with the good guys (in the old cowboy movies they wore white hats, just to be sure you got it) and we cheer against the bad guys.  And then good wins out, and we all leave the theater feeling fine, especially since we were on the right side.

This can happens with films about race.  We want to put ourselves on the sides of those fighting racism.  We want those bad racists to lose out to freedom, justice and equality.  And when they do, we all leave the theater feeling fine, especially since we were on the right side.

But reality, human nature and race is much more complicated than that.  How do we know we would have been on the right side in 1947 or 1852 or 1666?  And can we really divide humanity into good people and bad people?

Mississippi Burning is among the worst films on this score.  The FBI agents are the heroes and we root for them because we, like all decent Americans at the time, were on the side of justice, right?   Just about every white southerner in the film, meanwhile, is a redneck racist.  With those ignorant accents.  And they’re ugly, too.  Boy I’m glad we’re not like them.

Usually, (and by “usually,” I mean “every time”) when a film that is “based on a true story” divides the good from the bad in such a clear-cut and simplistic way, the film is distorting history.  Exhibit A:  in real life, the FBI spent most of its resources investigating the “trouble-making” civil rights movement, not those who killed civil rights workers.

I was relieved, then, to see a somewhat more complex picture of race emerge in “42.”

Yes, the ugly racists are there – most notably the Phillies manager, Ben Chapman, whose racist taunting of Jackie Robinson had me squirming in my seat.  (There’s a little bit of the simplistic “feel good” motif here, as we all smile with gratification in the credits when we find that Chapman never managed in the majors again after that season.  Yeah, take that, you racists!)

But one of the fine qualities of “42” is that one gets a range of racial responses from the characters in the film.  Robinson’s minor league coach welcomes him, but expresses a disparaging attitude about the ability of “niggers” to play ball (an accurate historical characterization of the guy).  The players on the Dodgers were initially cold, but eventually displayed a range of different reactions, from outright opposition, to conflicted feelings, to gradual respect, to open support – another accurate characterization.

One of the best scenes occurs after Robinson has been on the Dodgers for several weeks and the team is about to play in Cincinnati for the first time.  Pee Wee Reese, who was from nearby Kentucky, comes to general manager Branch Rickey’s office because he has received a threatening letter for playing with Robinson.  Having never faced anything like this before, he wants Rickey to do something about it.  Rickey (whose crustiness is overdone by Harrison Ford — sorry, but his acting bugged me) then pulls out file after file after file of death threats that Jackie Robinson has been receiving all along.

The beauty of the scene is that we the audience, like Reese, are bothered by the idea he has received this threat; we feel the sting of racism.  But when it is revealed that Robinson has been receiving a constant barrage of threats, we realize that he has been living with something much, much worse for quite some time.  It is hard for those of us who are white to fully understand what the world looks like to blacks.  Through this scene we, like Reese, get just a slight glimpse of the sort of pressure that Robinson had to play under (though it was even worse than the film portrayed it:  Robinson also received death threats directed at his wife and threats to kidnap his infant son).

Reese began to see this.  And that is why, in one of the more memorable scenes in the film, as Robinson is jeered and taunted by the fans in Cincinnati, Reese walks over and very purposefully puts his arm around Robinson and talks with him in solidarity for a moment.  We empathize with Reese, who empathized with Robinson.

It’s a great scene.  And it didn’t happen.

Well, it sort of happened, just not in the dramatic fashion portrayed in the film.  I have not seen any historical evidence that Rickey pulled out the file of threatening letters to show Reese what Robinson had been enduring.  That seems to be a dramatic invention by the filmmaker.  More famously, (and despite a statue in Coney Island commemorating the event) it is unclear whether Reese put his arm around Robinson in Cincinnati in 1947.  We don’t have filmed footage or same-day accounts of the event.  Two years later, Robinson said something like this happened, though he thought it might have been in Boston and it might have been 1948.  Others put it in Cincinnati.  And Reese might not have put his arm around Robinson.

As a historian, though, I’m fine with this scene.

Filmmakers have to invent all sorts of things in film. They make up almost all the dialogue.  They have to arrange scenes in ways that hold together and hold our attention.  They have to build some sort of drama.  Real life is never so neat and tidy and dramatic.  But I’m fine with the scene because it draws the viewers into a better understanding of Robinson.  It also reflects some level of transformation within Pee Wee Reese, who was not an avid supporter of Robinson in the beginning, but did become someone that Robinson counted as a friend.  (He was one of Robinson’s pall bearers at his funeral).   So it reflects what was true about Reese and Robinson.

The portrayal of Reese should give us hope that we can be transformed as well.  That is a much better position for us to be in.  We haven’t conquered the problems of race (or any number of other things) yet.  So it is better that we ask for grace, wisdom and humility, than to thank God (like the man in a certain parable) that we are not racists like those ugly redneck southerners…..

 

By the way, even if you are not a baseball fan, you should read Jackie Robinson  by Arnold Rampersad.  It is one of the best biographies, of any kind, that I have read.

 

Also, I’m off to Brazil for two weeks, so there will be another lull in my blogging.

 

 

 

“42” – A Film You Should See Even if You Don’t Like Baseball

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What could be better than a film based on baseball and history?

I know, I know.  I am out of the mainstream here, since “42” is currently in 16th place for top grossing films of 2013.

Sorry, no car chases in the film, either.

I guess I am rather weird because I don’t get all that excited by things that thrill other people.  I don’t know if you will find this disappointing, but nothing explodes in “42.”

(I should point out, however, that there were twelve explosions in the 2 ½ previews that I saw before the film began.  Hollywood is amazing:  how do you manage to work an explosion into a preview of “The Great Gatsby?”  Watch carefully.  These are clever people.)

But “42” is a film you should see.

The film tells the story of Jackie Robinson’s first two years of professional baseball when he became the first African American to play in the major leagues since the 1890s.  It was a momentous development for baseball and for American society.

(My wife said that a student in her class was disappointed that this film turned out to be a lot about race and not enough about baseball.  Poor guy.  He probably likes films with lots of explosions, too.  I’m hoping that when he gets older he’ll understand the world a bit better.)

As this teenager discovered, “42” is about race in American history, with themes that I’ll hit in my next blog.  For now, let’s talk baseball.

If you are one of those poor, confused souls who thinks that baseball is boring, you should pay attention to the scene where Robinson takes his first at bat in spring training against his fellow white ball players on the Dodgers.  Let’s just say that there is nothing boring about a baseball flying in at your head at 90 mph.  More to point, I know of no other film that does a better job of capturing the mental battle that take place between a pitcher and catcher in each at bat.  Of course, we are drawn into this battle in the film because of the momentous racial context that this athletic moment represents.  But let me point out that in games without this racial drama, a similar battle still takes place in every at bat.  The same scene wonderfully demonstrates the mental pressure that Robinson regularly put on opposing pitchers once he got on base.  It’s great baseball.

I also love the way the filmmakers established camera angles from right over the shoulder of the catcher.  One not only gets a visceral sense of the speed of pitches coming in, but you see the sweeping arcs of line drives to the outfield right off the bat, as if you were the hitter yourself.

Look closely — there’s a hill out there in Crosley Field!

And thanks to the marvels of computer generated imagery, “42” managed to recreate the sights and spatial sense of the interiors of old ball parks.  These were famous stadiums that were destroyed before I got a chance to see them:  the Polo Grounds in New York, Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, and Crosley Field in Cincinnati.  (It’s too bad that the film didn’t put in the four foot slope that extended up to the left field fence in Crosley Field, but I suppose that this detail would have just confused or distracted viewers).

Finally, if you don’t understand the appeal of baseball, but are interested in having your life deeply enriched by it, (how can you not want to have your life enriched by baseball?) you should read a wonderful book by Doris Kearns Goodwin entitled Wait Till Next Year.  My wife’s book club (which isn’t exactly packed with baseball fans) is reading it this summer.  It’s Goodwin’s memoir about growing up in Brooklyn as a hopelessly smitten fan of the Dodgers.  Her account of her first communion is worth the price of admission.  It’s a wonderful account of baseball, family and history.  What could be better for a summer read?

 

 

 

 

Short-term Missions, Learning, and an American Evangelical Weakness

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I have a quiz for you.

It’s the same quiz that I gave to my students toward the end of our trip in Kenya.

I told them that I had observed another group of evangelical Americans in a short-term mission situation where they were speaking to very poor people, most of whom did not have jobs and some of whom were homeless.  I told them about a mini-sermon one of the Americans had given and asked them what made this sermon less effective than it could have been.  Here is how it went:  one of the Americans got up with an old bicycle.  He explained that when you get on a bike, you choose where you go.  You decide what path to take.  You decide if you are going to go to work, or to school, or to a friend’s house.  And that is how it is in life, he explained.  We make choices about how we are going to live.  We decide what job we are going to take and what we are going to do with our life….

At this point, several of my students groaned and several others rolled their eyes.

They passed the quiz.  How did you do?

My students groaned because (as they explained to me) the poor women and homeless street boys in places like Maai Mahiu simply don’t have the choices that Americans have.  They can’t choose what job to take, for instance, because in a poor town in a nation with about 40% unemployment and another 30% underemployment, jobs are desperately hard to find.  Yes, poor Kenyans do have choices – moral and spiritual choices, especially — but their choices in so many areas of life are extremely limited.

Would you tell people from the slums of Kibera that they can “be anything they want to be, if they just work hard enough?”

My students were right.  These Kenyans don’t believe that they “can be anything they want to be, if they just work hard enough” (another phrase I heard from an American in that group).  These Kenyans know that this phrase is simply false.  And so, there was a real disconnect between this American way of thinking and the reality of life for these people.

I then asked my students why they knew this and this other team from America did not.  My students had to reflect on this for a few moments.  Someone finally concluded that they listened to the people they met at Maai Mahiu.  My students knew that they should try to understand the situation that these people were in.

But why did these students listen?  Why did they know that they should work to understand the people of Maai Mahiu?  I told them to think about their education.  Excluding the specific class they were taking for this trip to Kenya, where had they learned to listen and understand people who were different from them?  They then discussed a range of classes that they had taken at Malone where they did these sorts of things.  Seven different classes were named specifically.

Why does this matter?  It matters because far too many American evangelicals embark on short term missions trip without a deep sense that, even though they may go to serve, they also need to be learners.  They need to be ready and willing to deepen their understanding of the people they serve.  Far too many evangelicals take the attitude that since they have Christ in their lives, they do not need to learn anything about the people they visit.  They just need to “love on” others and everything will be fine.

But it is not fine.  It is true that God’s grace still works, despite our faults.  It is true that love conquers a multitude of sins.  It is true that this group that I used as an example did some wonderful things.  But it is also true that our efforts can be limited or distorted because of our sins.  It is true that the sin of pride, in assuming we know all we need to know, is a sin that we don’t have to commit.  Many cross-cultural sins can be taken care of through a servant attitude toward learning.  But without a humble attitude toward learning, well-intentioned short-term missions end up with limited effectiveness.  I talked with several Kenyan Christian leaders who, while welcoming and supportive of Americans coming to participate in their ministries, indicated that some groups do not have a good sense of these things.  As my friend Esther said, (in a phrase I find simultaneously telling and painful), she has seen many Americans arrive in Kenya with an attitude that “the Savior has landed!”

These American evangelicals probably would be surprised to find a good number of African Christians whose spiritual maturity is much deeper than their own.

Of course, there are American evangelical leaders who understand these things.  For instance, I know of a famous Baptist preacher who said, in a speech in a missions convention, that we must carry out “our ideas as being ourselves learners.”

But wait.  That Baptist guy was Francis Wayland who was born in 1796.  He gave the speech in 1854.

1854!

I mention this because as a historian of these kinds of things, I can find evangelical missionaries saying roughly the same thing to their American audiences in about every decade since the 1850s.  Many evangelicals don’t get it.  They don’t listen.  And they don’t learn.  The result?  We keep on sending people out into cross-cultural situations who do not draw upon the insights from the past.  As a result, every generation has to reinvent the wheel.  It is still happening today, folks.

Here is one small suggestion:  if you belong to a church that sends out short-term missions, see what you can do to help your church prepare for these trips.  I would recommend a book by David Livermore called Serving with Eyes Wide Open:  Doing Short-term Missions with Cultural Intelligence.  It is very thoughtful, accessible, and written with ordinary evangelicals in mind.

Buy this book!

If your church group reads this book and takes it seriously, they will go out with greater cultural intelligence.  They are less likely to give off the impression that, now that they have arrived, the Savior has landed.

(And for those of you who are weak on your theology, let me mention that the Savior landed about, oh, two thousand years ago).

Why You Should Know That Child Sponsorship Works

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You have probably seen ads for organizations, like Compassion International, whereby a person can donate money regularly to sponsor children who live in poor situations around the world.  Maybe you have sponsored a child.

But does it make a difference?

Consider the following little anecdote.  While our Malone group was in the Kenyan town of Maai Mahiu, my colleague David told me that a young teenage girl was asking about me.  The girl had heard that one of us was a history professor and she wanted to talk to this guy because she liked history.

Now, I have to confess that I am always a bit surprised when anybody tells me they like history.  I tend to view history lovers like myself as rare and slightly strange creatures.  Like Rhinos.  Or Miami Marlin fans.

And I can’t recall anyone actually tracking me down to talk to me because they liked history.  (Does this type of thing only happen in Kenya, I am tempted to ask myself?)

Yet I found myself in this rough town in Kenya talking to this girl who was telling me she liked history.  (You’ll find us in the picture below).  Her eyes lit up as she told me how she was interested in the history of economic development in Kenya– the shipping and railroads and growth of towns.  She explained that history helped her understand things better.  We had a wonderful conversation.

Two history buffs having a little chat.

Here is the problem:   at that moment — a Thursday morning, a school day — she was not in school studying history.   The nation of Kenya cannot afford to provide everyone in the country with a free education, so each student has to pay school fees.  She had dropped out of school because she did not have enough money to pay for her school fees.

This is serious business in Maai Mahiu.  Isaac and Esther Karanja Munji, who have been working with women through their church, Rift Valley Fellowship, understand that there is a connection between dropping out of school and prostitution.  They explained that some teenage girls in this town who cannot go to school often end up in prostitution, simply as a means of survival.  Isaac and Esther know of instances in which mothers, who are prostitutes themselves and do not like the business, tell their girls that if they aren’t in school, they should at least be making money.

As they attempt to help women get out of prostitution, Isaac and Esther have realized that they need to do things to try to break the cycle.  So they have set up a sponsorship program where people can donate money to keep teenage girls in school.

It makes sense to me.  And it made sense to the Malone students, who decided that they wanted to give money to help some of these girls stay in school.  $300 will keep Salome in school for the year.

There are no guarantees that things will turn out well, of course.  Stuff happens.  But given this girl’s obvious academic desires (desires that I wish some of my American students displayed), I’m pretty confident that she will stick with it.  That should give her a fighting chance to avoid prostitution.  And that is something.

But do we have evidence, beyond the logic of individual anecdotes, that these kinds of programs have an impact, overall?

We do.  When I arrived back from Kenya I was excited to see an article addressing this very question in the most recent issue of Christianity Today.  The essence of the article:  a recent set of studies by economists have compared children who have been sponsored by organizations like Compassion with those in similar situations who were not sponsored.  They show that these programs have a substantial effect on helping children get out of poverty.  They work.

That should encourage any of you who have ever supported a child.  Maybe it will help you think about doing so if you have not done so already.  It takes an act of faith.  It takes initiative, effort and internal gumption to support children that you have not seen.  You may not ever travel to a place where you can meet these young people face-to-face.  It takes faith to believe that your money is making a difference when you cannot see the results.  And yet, that is part of how faith and the Kingdom of God works.

The people at Rift Valley Fellowship may also be encouraged, though they don’t tend to draw their hope from data derived from recent studies by social scientists.  Instead, they pray.  They pray earnestly and with remarkable confidence that God will deliver them.  That deliverance can take many forms.  One way it happens is if people like us, who have economic resources, will sponsor children.

The Face-to-Face Factor

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I have just returned from Kenya, where David Dixon (a colleague of mine) and I took nine Malone students on a service-learning trip.  Since David grew up in Kenya and I lived there for six years, it was like going home for us, in some respects.

This wasn’t exactly like a short-term missions trip because it was tied it to a class on the History of Christianity in East Africa.  We emphasized learning more than most trips that churches sponsor.  But it was similar in several respects:  we visited a number of African ministries, we participated in service activities, and we were there for a limited time.

I have seen many dimensions to the diverse nation that is Kenya, including the dimensions that include deep poverty.  So it wasn’t much of a stretch for me when, on our second full day, my Kikuyu friends, Isaac and Esther Munji, took our group down to visit a new church they had planted in a poor town called Maai Mahiu.   Twenty years ago the town consisted of a gas station, a half dozen shops, a few homes and an orphanage.  Today Maai Mahiu is like the Wild West.  Situated along the primary highway that runs through East Africa, the town is pretty much a huge truck stop.  5000 people live in a place that is full of, among others, eager shopkeepers, truckers, prostitutes, homeless streetboys, orphans —  in other words, a lot of people who have lost their ties to families and communities.  It is estimated that about 90% of the people in this town are HIV positive.

Maai Mahiu: The Wild West of Central Province, Kenya

If you have traveled to economically-deprived locations outside of the United States, you can probably imagine what our students faced:  dirt streets with fetid water trickling through them, children scampering about in ragged clothes, trash scattered here and there, and a rather powerful cocktail of not-altogether pleasant smells.

We arrived at the church, Rift Valley Fellowship, and met a small gathering of about a dozen women and teenage girls.  Isaac had everyone introduce themselves.  Then we split up into two groups to walk to the houses of these women and pray for them.  So I set off with a group and ended up with about ten of us crowded into a one-room home.

Again, this was not new to me.  I have visited some pretty poor dwellings in Kenya before.  I have prayed in homes with Kenyans.  I’ve walked through some poor neighborhoods.

So why did I find myself crying as we prayed?

It is the face-to-face factor.  The reality of a situation just has a way of hitting a person much deeper if it is witnessed face-to-face, as opposed to reading about it, or watching it on TV, or hearing somebody talk about it.  We can know things in our head, but most of the time they don’t move us to action like the face-to-face factor does.

Several realities of this face-to-face encounter hit me at once:  the difficult poverty of these women, the recognition that prostitution is one of the few options for generating income for women in this town, the personal dimension of meeting, talking to and learning names of people in this town, the thankfulness these women expressed that someone would care enough about them to come pray for them in their home, my recognition that our students were at that moment getting overwhelmed by all of this, and a deep sense of gratitude that our students still dove into this overwhelming cross-cultural situation, earnestly praying for these women.

The problem of describing this in a blog is that it is difficult to transfer the power of these

realities to those who have not had the face-to-face experience.  I can give you a glimpse, but I cannot fully recapture the reality of that moment in this limited medium.  I have known this for many years.  There have been times during the past two decades that Elisa and I have joked that we just need to take certain people to Kenya so that they can understand things better.  And there are more numerous times when I have been in need being transported myself.

The face-to-face factor is something to ponder carefully.  It is one reason why I believe that the best online classes, though often helpful and necessary, will never be able to match the benefit of a good in-class experience.  It is why we need to spend time with our kids and cannot hope to raise them as effectively from afar or in snippets.  It is tied to the mystery of intimacy, as Philip Yancey points out, for human beings are the only species of animal that commonly has sex face to face.  The face-to-face factor is why we cannot be lone wolf Christians, but must worship, fellowship and pray with others in church.

And the face-to-face factor may serve as the biggest benefit derived from short-term missions trips.  There is a debate within some segments of the American evangelical community about the value of short term missions.  There are good questions to consider in this debate, which I may discuss later.  For now, let me say that I have talked to missionaries and local Christian leaders who say that the face-to-face impact of these trips is a major benefit, for it often spurs Americans to further action.  It connects people across cultural and national boundaries.  And it provokes deeper questions about Christ’s calling for our lives.

I don’t know of any systematic studies that have tried to gauge the impact of the face-to-face factor in short-term missions, though maybe they are out there.  I do know that a trip to Haiti in 1969 had a big impact on my parents.  (How many times did we view slides of Haiti in our living room with visiting friends and family?  About eleventy-bajillion, to my 2nd grade way of thinking).   A short-term trip to the Bahamas when I was in college played a major role in my life decisions.

The Bible speaks a number of times about face-to-face encounters.  Usually it refers to the bright hope of seeing God face to face some day.  I can’t begin to plumb the depths of meaning to this idea, but it does suggest that knowing and being known are more than simply mental processes.  Now we see through a mirror dimly, then we will see face to face.

For a glimpse into the impact of the face-to-face factor on our Malone students, you can check out their final Kenya blog here.

“Argo,” the Oscars, and the Canadians

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Do you pay attention to Canadians?  Should you?

If you are Canadian, do you pay attention to yourself?  Should you?

Let me start with a recollection, as a preamble to my comments about the film, “Argo.”  Years ago, I taught American history to high school missionary kids and Africans in Kenya.  Most of my students were Americans, but I always had a sizeable mass of non-Americans in class.

I remember that some Canadian students tended to make snarky comments about Americans.  According to the tenor of the snark, we Americans had an over-inflated sense of ourselves, we overlooked our faults, and we claimed more for ourselves than we should.

At the time I figured that their reaction was based on two factors:  1) a few of their fellow American classmates probably got obnoxious with their patriotism from time to time, and 2) it’s hard to be a minority, even if you are simply a Canadian trying to convince Americans that they should pay attention to your nation.

I did not think that my American history class contributed to either of these problems.  My course was merely a verdant setting for anti-American snarkiness to flower.  After all, I never subscribed to the philosophy that American history ought to be taught merely as a celebration of glorious advances and triumphs.  In addition to the praiseworthy parts of American history, I taught the flaws and problems:  times and places where racism, greed, sexism and unchristian behavior shaped American history.  I was fair and balanced.

Now, I am not so sure.

Humans have an amazing capacity for self-deception, particularly if it makes us look better.  And because of this capacity for self-deception, we can’t be so confident, on our own, that we have figured out when we aren’t deceiving ourselves.

I was reminded of the dynamics between my Canadian and American students when I watched “Argo.”  And I was reminded even more of the problem of self-serving deceptions when, acting like the suspicious historian that I am, I looked into the history of the event a bit more after I had seen the film.

“Argo” retells the story of six Americans who were caught in Iran in 1979 when Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy and held fifty-two Americans hostage for more than a year.  These six Americans, however, managed to make their way to the Canadian embassy and (SPOILER ALERT – in case you have not seen the film or you don’t know how history turned out) after several weeks in hiding were smuggled out of the country by the CIA.

Ben Affleck is one cool CIA operative

It’s a compelling story.  Ben Affleck plays Tony Mendez, a CIA operative who has to figure out how to get the six Americans out.  We see him working through several ideas and coming up with a crazy idea that gets approved, only because nothing else is better.  We see him creating a fake film company so he can lead the six Americans out of Iran posing as a Canadian film crew.  We see him flying to Teheran himself and driving the Americans through crowded streets with angry protesters.  We see him finally get the six through the checkpoints at the airport and on the jet to wing it home.  And we see him hugging his estranged wife in the end on her porch, while an American flag flutters in a light breeze them.

A fun movie.  Good guys win.  Bad guys lose.

And the Canadians?  Well, the ambassador and his wife sure were nice to host the Americans at their house.  Just the sort of thing we Americans would expect from our friendly neighbors to the north.

If the film weren’t portraying itself as history, I wouldn’t have a problem with this.

But we have this:  according to Ken Taylor, who was the (real) Canadian ambassador who hid the six Americans, 85% to 90% of the ideas and consummation of the plan was due to the Canadians.

Is Taylor exaggerating?  A bit sensitive, perhaps?  After all, it is possible that he is  1) feeling a bit bothered by a few Americans who get kind of obnoxious with their patriotism,  or  2) finding it hard to live in a world in which Americans don’t pay much attention to Canadians.  Is that why he said this?

Maybe.

Probably not.

Well, no, actually I don’t think so.

I trust Taylor’s analysis.  This is the clincher for me:  Taylor came up with the 85% to 90% number in reaction to comments made by Jimmy Carter, who said that “90 per cent of the contributions to the ideas and the consummation of the plan was Canadian.”   So is Carter misrepresenting the situation?  I don’t see why he would be.  The Iran hostage crisis was the most damaging and painful event in his presidency.  He has every incentive to play up and exaggerate the role the U.S. played in this one bright spot of that traumatic ordeal.  Why would he misrepresent the event in a way that downplays the government he led?  I’m buying the analysis given by Taylor and Carter.

And can you cast a Canadian in a cool role?

Ben Affleck could have made essentially the same film, only with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service as the heroes rather than the CIA.  He could have cast himself as Ken Taylor and done all those things that Tony Mendez did.  But he did not.

Here is my question:  would “Argo” have sold as well as it did if the story was about

Canadians saving six Americans, even if it were the same thrilling story of danger and escape?  Would Americans have enjoyed the movie?

Would it have won an Academy Award for Best Picture?

An Episcopalian Who May Not Be Your First Choice as a Banquet Speaker

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Episcopalians are generally a pretty respectable lot.  Well-educated.  Self-disciplined.  Reasonable.  Dignified.  Prudent.   There is often a certain gravitas to them.

So, if you seated James Madison on one side of the table…….

Consider, for instance, the following list of Episcopalians:  George Washington, James Madison, T.S. Eliot, Eleanor Roosevelt, Buzz Aldrin, Sandra Day O’Conner, Colin Powell, Batman.

Not a single one of them would embarrass you at a dinner party.  If you needed somebody to lend dignity to a national event by saying a few words at the opening ceremony, any in this group would make you proud.   Install any one of them as president of a university, and the U.S. News and World Report rankings of the institution would automatically jump up ten places, even if it was already ranked at number five.

And then there is William Wadé Harris.

Sure, this African Christian started down the path of respectable Episcopalianism.  In Liberia in the 1890s, Harris served as a catechist and teacher for the Episcopalian mission near Cape Palmas.  Working for the missionary machinery that brought education, Christianity, bureaucratic government, scientific farming and modest clothing styles to Africa, Harris was an unimpeachable product of, in the terminology of the day, “the civilizing mission.”

At least that is what it could look like for a while, from the outside.  It became harder to see Harris as a respectable Episcopalian, or any kind of Episcopalian, for that matter, in 1910.

Harris was in jail that year.  He had been convicted of treason after raising the British Union Jack on the beach and yelling at the Americo-Liberians (black immigrants from the United States who dominated Liberia) to get out of his country.  But there is more.  While in jail, as Harris explained later, the angel Gabriel visited him in a trance.  The angel descended three times and felt like ice on his head.  According to Harris, Gabriel anointed him as a prophet like Elijah, Daniel, Ezekiel and John, and instructed him to burn fetishes and preach Christ, who was about to usher in the peace of a thousand years, as spoken of in the book of Revelation.

I’m pretty sure that this sort of thing never happened to George Washington.

…..next to Prophet Harris, what would the two talk about? The Book of Common Prayer?

And I can’t see Eleanor Roosevelt casting out evil spirits, miraculously healing the sick, adopting polygamy, or cursing dockworkers who worked on Sunday.  All these actions were attributed to Harris, though.  He sometimes engaged African medicine men in showdowns of supernatural power.  Some say he raised the dead to life.

So one does not know what would happen at dinner parties if Harris were invited.

Catholic and Methodist missionaries, who were almost as respectable as Episcopalians, did not know quite what to make of him, either.  His evangelistic tours through West Africa after 1910 brought hundreds of thousands of Africans to the faith, new Christians who followed his instructions to build churches and wait for white missionaries to arrive with Bibles.  The missionaries, of course, were pleased to see their churches overflow with converts.  But they were not sure if Harris’ baptisms were conducted properly.  They did not approve of polygamy.

This, of course, raised intellectual and theological challenges to the missionaries of his day.  But Harris also raises challenges to westerners today.  Some secular anthropologists like Lionel Tiger often assume that a certain kind of functional coherence exists in traditional religions.  They assume people of other cultures are content with their religious faith and values.  Yet traditional African religions, like religions in the West, are not as tidy as assumed.  Nor are their adherents necessarily content with them.  Many west Africans felt conflicted about the power for good and evil that they experienced in their traditional religions.  William Wadé Harris proclaimed that his African audiences could encounter a spiritual power – the power of Christ – that would release them from the power of their fetishes.  Hundreds of thousands jumped at this chance.

There is a challenge here to American evangelicals, as well.  It is easy, as an American Christian, to view African Christians as if they are American evangelicals with livelier music.  Harris, however, just might make some American Christians uncomfortable if he were to speak in their Sunday School.  Just what are we to do with polygamy and evil spirits, anyway?

We need to keep this in mind:  Christianity that has been transmitted to African soil often bears fruit that may look and taste different from what you’ve plopped on your plate at the Sunday potluck.  Variations of world Christianity can raise issues that many American evangelicals have not considered.  That is just one reason why western Christians don’t have all the answer to issues facing Africa.  As far as I know, the seminaries where we send our ministers don’t offer courses on African fetishes.

Nor do African Christians have all the answers, either.  The challenge, then, is to utilize our resources to collaborate and learn from one another.   The process will probably raise uncomfortable questions, but that happens in the Christian faith.  It can even happen to Episcopalians.