Is America 70% Christian?

There has been much talk about a recent nationwide poll that reveals that the number of Americans who self-identify as "Christian" has dropped to 70%, the lowest such percentage since these types of polls have been asking the question. It should be noted that the methodology employed by the pollsters might raise questions about its accuracy. The subjects were contacted using land line telephone numbers. The last time I picked up an actual ringing land line in my home was when George W. Bush was still in the White House! But if anything, this methodology would have the result of yielding more traditional Christians than fewer since it would favor older respondents. So, I find the results of the poll to be believable. So, what's the big deal?

The suggestion that America is becoming less and less Christian in nominal terms should surprise absolutely no one. Over the past twenty five years, the Catholic Church has been decimated by a priest sex scandal, no doubt disillusioning many. Mainline Protestant churches haven't faired much better, with practically every denomination experiencing declines in membership and attendance. And yet, in my part of the country, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one of those strip-mall churches that have sprouted up like mushrooms after three days of rain. They are everywhere, in schools, old Seven-Elevens, abandoned warehouses, with names like "Velocity" and "Movement"...sounds exhausting! These non-demonization, mini-congregations offer church for people who wouldn't normally attend one, I'm told. Either that or they serve as a place for people to go after they got tired of their old church. Either way, it seems that less than gaining new converts, modern Christianity has become a mile wide and an inch deep. So, 70%? I'm thinking that might be a little high.

I have no answer to the problem of the declining popularity of Christianity. Partly because I'm not even sure it's a problem to begin with. Whoever said that being hugely popular and mainstream was so great? I can make a case that the Christian "church" was much more effective at changing people's hearts and minds and transforming lives back when we were a persecuted band of outcasts. ( See the Book of Acts ). The beginning of the end for transformational Christianity began the night that Constantine saw the comet and Christianity began its long ascendancy to power and wealth. Seems to me that even Christ himself warned us that, "broad is the way that leads to destruction and many will find it, but narrow is the way to the Kingdom of God and FEW will find it," ...or words to that effect.

Maybe Christianity has tried to get too cute with all the jazzy entertainment driven services, or maybe not. Maybe prosperity gospel heretics like Joel Osteen have muddied the theological waters so as to make sacrificial Christianity unrecogizable. Or maybe, in this new era of relativism, any dogmatic orthodoxy will naturally fall out of favor. What do I know? I'm no expert.

But, there is a sense in my heart that something is wrong. It's as if the Titantic is sinking and the
Christian Church is busy rearranging the deck chairs. I live in a world that is morally unrecogizable from the one in which a I grew up. I watch my cities on fire with discontent, read stories of truly epic corruption and self-serving in the halls of power. But when I go to church I hear sermons with little relevance to what I see happening around me. There is no connection to the real world, only my more secure, less violent slice of it. That's not comforting, it's boring.

70%? Yeah, definitely on the high side.

My Favorite Part of Life After 50

And now...my favorite part of life after 50, the annual physical exam. In my case it's more like the bi-annual physical exam but you get the picture. This is that prudent, responsible, adult thing we are shamed into doing by our wives once we reach a certain age, whereby we haul ourselves to the doctors office so he can measure the degree of our decline and check us over for any new visitations of decrepitude. "Wait, what's this new weird looking mole on your back Dunnevant? That doesn't look good!"

I'll get weighed. Then they actually check my height, I suppose to discover if I have begun to shrink since I haven't grown an inch since tenth grade. My blood pressure will get checked. It will most likely be slightly elevated. Bi-annual physical exams will do that to a person. Then they will take a blood sample to check for a variety of things. They will discover that I am not a drug addict. Then I will pee in a cup and they will discover that I don't smoke and that I had asparagus for dinner last night. All of this stuff happens before I actually see my doctor. The nurses are all angels, smiling all over the place, bouncing around with the enthusiasm of teenagers. Some of them look like they could be teenagers. I've got wrinkles older than some of these women.

Then the Doc comes in. He's the same guy I've been going to since I got married 31 years ago, and man has he aged! Good guy, decent bedside manner, goofy smile and a slightly annoying whiny voice, but good egg. He smiles at me and tells me I look great. " Good  to see you're keeping the weight off. You should see some of the tubs that waddle in here asking why their blood pressure is through the roof as they munch on a snickers bar!" The good part about having the same doctor for 31 years is that they know everything about you. The bad part is...they know everything about you and never fail to remind you about the time that they had to prescribe you that "mystery medicine" before your 13 hour flight to Hawaii at the request of the wife. The generic name was unrecogizable, and at first I thought it was a placebo, until my wife informed me that I had been given Valium to keep me in my seat for the duration of the trip. After all these years he still thinks that's an hilarious story. I fail to see the humor.

So, hopefully after this $275 exam I will be given a relatively clean bill of health...along with an admonition to schedule another colonoscopy since its been seven years since my last, and that I should probably head back to my cardiologists for another one of those ultrasound thingys of my heart. I will promise him that I will and then immediately banish the thought from my head until a few months from now when Pam will pester me into following through.

But here's the good news. I will tip the scales this morning within five pounds of my wedding weight. I still have plenty of hair. I can still see and my hearing is fine regardless of Pam's complaints to the contrary. Not exactly Hercules, but I'm no Homer Simpson either. 

I'll take it.

Our Wedding Anniversary Trip

Last year this time Pam and I realized that our 30th wedding anniversary was about to happen, but neither of us were at a place where an elaborate celebration seemed either appropriate or possible. We were hip-deep in planning Kaitlin's wedding and my father was in the final stages of his life at the Westport nursing home. We made the mutual decision to postpone the celebration until this year.

That has given me an entire year to plan a trip. The two of us haven't been out of the country, just the two of us, in quite a long time. Can't wait. 

It's not hard to believe that we have been married 31 years. Actually, it seems about right. What's hard to believe is what we've managed to do in those 31 years. We brought two babies into the world, knowing virtually nothing about parenting except how to become one. Despite our manifest ignorance, both children survived. Towards that end we were assisted by two wonderful, wise and generous families who were there every step of the way to offer aid and comfort. Looking back on those early years, I can't imagine how we would have managed it all if we lived in Kansas somewhere, a thousand miles from both of our Moms. People do it all the time, I'm told. Just glad we didn't have to.

Raising Patrick and Kaitlin was the hardest but most noble thing we have ever done. We made lots of mistakes along the way. Parenting is a giant trial and error experiment. Stuff that works like a charm on one of them flops on the other. But you keep plowing ahead, mistakes and all. You learn to rely on others. A church comes in handy in that regard. Our kids were nurtured every Sunday by able and loving teachers like Mark and Joann Terlep and Larry and Diane Collawn. They were fortunate to be a part of a youth group led by a youth pastor, Jeremy Welborn who loved them both and helped them find a place. Still, it was no guarantee that they wouldn't turn out to be hooligans. You spend half of your life as a parent second guessing yourself, and the other half praying that God won't punish them for your failures. 31 years later we look at what has become of them and we can't help but feel proud and grateful.

But raising two great kids isn't the only thing we have to show for our time together. I'm still in love with her, for one thing. I think I'm a better person now than when I first got married, and most of that is because of her. I'm not the easiest person in the world to live with, what with my antsy, can't stay on task for more than ten minutes, neurotic behavior most often associated with adolescents. My risk-taking personality has given her logical, organized, planner personality fits for 31 long years now, and yet...somehow it has all worked.

So, we will go away to a tropical paradise for a week. We will do whatever the heck we feel like doing. And you know what? We deserve it!

Oh, and just in case anyone is reading this and thinking since we will be out of the country for a week, it might be a good time to rob our house? I should probably point out that we have employed a full time dog-sitter for the week named, "Max the mule-skinner Monroe" , or " Spike" to his friends...and if you try something while he's here, you will not be his friend.

The Evil Words of the Internet

There are two words in the English language that I have grown to hate, a third that I fairly despise. These are the words that strike terror in my soul. When they appear, very bad things happen. I see them and my heart sinks, my disposition sours and great lamentation is sure to follow. These words have the power to transform me from an efficient, productive businessman into an incompetent, bumbling idiot in a matter of seconds. At the mere appearance of these words on my computer screen, I feel isolation, frustration, then anger. Which words am I referring to, you ask?

                      USERNAME,    PASSWORD,   and their evil cousin...PIN

To get anything done on a computer, one has to identify oneself. I'm not an idiot, I understand the way the world works. There are bad people out there who would love to steal my identity and go on a shopping spree at my expense. So, every website that I frequent for either work purposes or for pleasure requires me to prove that I am, in fact, who I claim to be. To accomplish this, I am asked to provide my USERNAME and PASSWORD.( ok, for the rest of this blog, I'm gonna use U & P...just typing these words is giving me the creeps ). 

So, I cast about trying to come up with a U & P that is at once familiar to me but difficult for some would be identity thief to decipher. To aid me in this effort, I am given special instructions that look something like this:

" U & P must be no fewer than 8 characters and must include both lower and upper case letters, no fewer than two numbers, plus at least one symbol."


So, I fool around with several permutations of dog names, birth dates and street addresses and finally 

enter something that I have at least half a chance of remembering, then get a flashing message that says words to the effect of, " Your U & P really suck! I mean a third grader could figure them out!!" So, it's back to the drawing board. Finally, fifteen minutes later, I manage to enter something marginally acceptable at which I am greeted with a drop down box filled with, "personal identification questions." Wait, what? I thought the whole purpose of the U & P nonsense was to prevent unwanted access from someone other than me. Now, I have to run the gauntlet of personal questions? I must pick three out of a long list of trigger questions:

1. Mother's maiden name

2. Name of first dog

3. Favorite sport

4. First name of closest gay relative


Finally, I'm approved! Then the computer asks me the blessed question..."Would you like to save this U & P?"  My God, YES!!!! You have no freaking idea how much I want this computer to save this U & P!!!! But...there's a problem. Because my computer has done me the great favor of saving this information for me, I never again have to enter it myself, which means it immediately enters the ether, along with the million other things that I have permanently forgotten. Even this isn't a problem, until I try to access this site from, another computer! When I do this, I am always at a different location. So when I try to access say, Expedia, from my iPad, I am restricted from doing so, because all my U & P information is stored on my work laptop! 

See, I know what all of you computer geeks are thinking out there. I can practically feel your judgement and ridicule. " Why don't you write all of your U's & P's down on one piece of paper or
even on some handy storage device so you will always have them available?" Already did that, and
it's three pages! I actually counted them last night. I have 67 different sets of U's & P's to keep track of. Most of them are work related and since I work in the investment business, we are legally obsessed with the privacy of data. You can imagine how complicated and bizarre the U's & P's have to be to enter some of the websites I have to use. My three page cheat sheet is about as dog-eared as the Dugger's family bible.

But the worst thing that happens to me is when I successfully enter a U & P, think I'm home free, only to be greeted by that ghastly formulation: "Please enter your four digit PIN."

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Or, even better..."For security purposes, we require that you change your U & P every six weeks. Please enter a new U & P. And this time, try not to suck."

So, I enter, " YourCOMPAny BLOWS&$@#2 "

" Sorry. Someone has already used this Password. Try again."

Whiplash.....a review.

I saw an incredible movie last night. It starred one of my favorite actors, J.K. Simmons, which was reason enough to watch since he has never been in a bad movie or given a bad performance. It also had a music theme, jazz, to be specific. So there was a lot to recommend...Whiplash. But as the credits rolled after an hour and forty five minutes I simply did not know what to think.

It was a mesmerizing thing to watch. Simmons was brilliant. His performance was taut and crackling with intensity. Every time he entered a room dressed tightly in black I feared him. He plays a jazz band conductor at an elite music conservatory in New York City who begins all of his classes at the stroke of the hour. The players all look utterly terrified, not just of playing a sour note, but even being noticed by this profane, raging volcano of a man. Early in the film he happens upon a 19 year old freshman drummer practicing alone in an empty room. He takes an interest in his evident talent and the rest of the film tells the story of how this man goes about trying to draw the very best out of the kid. Simmon's tactics are...shall we say, a bit light on affirmation.

Terence Fletcher is a bully. His preferred teaching technique seems to be humiliation. He is violent, abusive and a world class devotee of imaginative profanity. As you watch him do his thing you begin to hate him. No one, no matter how talented should have the authority to be such an asshole. No amount of giftedness can possibly excuse such cruelty. And yet...

 Fletcher is a character that is well known throughout the history of mankind. It's the lunatics of this world who produce the most astounding works of art. The men and women who have demonstrated the willingness to go beyond good to relentlessly pursue great, are the ones who end up as legends. It's just not much fun to watch. Fletcher seems obsessed with the story of young Charlie Parker who allegedly had a cymbal thrown at him by the drummer Jo Jones after making a mistake on his sax solo. According to Fletcher's telling, it was this humiliation that fired Parker to become a more committed, determined musician and was ultimately responsible for his genius. Maybe. Something tells me that true musical genius has less to do with 20,000 hours of practice than it does with genetics, but that's just me. But, as you watch the ferocious, abusive techniques employed by Terence Fletcher and the disastrous consequences it has on young Andrew Teller, you find yourself thinking, "Would it kill this guy to give the kid a compliment?"

The most memorable line in the film comes when Fletcher tells Teller, " There are no two words in the English language more harmful than good job." Not exactly an epitaph most people want on their tombstone, but for the pursuit of artistic greatness perhaps there's a grain of truth. 

As I watched this movie I couldn't help thinking about Sherri Matthews. No, she was not an abusive, profane maniac. But she didn't exactly have much patience for mediocrity either. She did give compliments, but never false ones. She instilled a healthy fear in her students, not fear of failing, but a fear of laziness, a fear of the consequences of not giving their best effort. Her high standards and exacting demands created an environment that produced beautiful, award winning music and inspired more than a few musicians on to bigger and better things, my son being one of them.

Maybe Jazz is different. Maybe Fletcher's style is required to root out the good from the great. If so, no wonder so many jazzmen kill themselves!

What Free People Do

A few days ago I wrote a blog about the shooting in Garland, Texas. In it I questioned why anyone would want to stage a "draw Muhammad" contest with a cash prize of $10,000. It seemed gratuitously insulting to people of the Muslim faith. I stand by that opinion. But what I have been reading since about the reactions of many on the left to this incident is disturbing to me, so I feel the need to clarify a bit.

Whenever I see the Westboro Baptist Church in the news, I feel the need to take a long hot shower. These people show up at the sight of extreme pain for some family who has just lost a child, or a young woman, or a soldier. They stand on a corner somewhere within earshot of a private funeral and begin chanting the most vile, hateful filth, the intent of which is to provoke a reaction. They carry signs  claiming that God is delighted with the death of yet another pervert. It makes me want to hop on a plane, fly out there and wipe the street up with them. 

But, do I want them silenced? Do I want my government to be vested with the power to lock them up for their ignorant rantings? No. A million times, no. Why? Because I do not live in Castro's Cuba or Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China or the Germany of Adolph Hitler. The most precious thing in the founding documents of my country is the Bill of Rights, and the first of those rights is Freedom of Speech. If this guarantee has any meaning at all, it must protect all speech, especially the ignorant and vile. We do not need a Bill of Rights to protect the public reading of a Shakesperian sonnet or the soaring speeches of Martin Luther King. We need a Bill of Rights to protect us against a government who arbitrarily decides what kinds of speech it wants to silence. The price of this freedom, this dearest of human rights, the right of self-expression, is the tolerance of opinions that we loathe.

That's why I am against any high-minded attempts to carve out exclusions, to cordone off certain groups, to mark as off-limits any group, no matter how marginalized or dangerous they may be. Sorry, that's just the way it has to be in a free society.

So, let the Westboro folks carry their signs. Let the full light of day illuminate their wickedness for all of us to see. We can all make our own judgements on what we think of them. We are free people and that's what free people do.

Strange Bedfellows

Color me cynical, but when Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell both desperately want the same thing, you better grab your wallet, because we're about to get royally screwed.

That "thing" is fast-track trade authority. The President wants it and McConnell wants him to have it. It will give him the right to negotiate trade pacts, particularly the Trans-Pacific Partnership, without congress being able to gum up the approval process with endless amendments. On this one weird issue, a bizarrely suspicious coalition has grown up in Congress which places the President in the awkward position of being in cahoots with the Republican establishment on one side against a handful of Republicans and almost the entire Democrat party on the other. It also places me temporarily in the nauseating position of being in agreement with the single biggest dirtbag in the history of politics...Harry Reid.( I may have to wash my fingers for an hour after typing that last sentence.)

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is basically NAFTA for the Asian world. I don't want to leave the impression that I am well versed enough in the field of economics and global trade policy to site chapter and verse on something as large and complicated as T-PP, but after seeing the benefits of NAFTA, I want nothing to do with "son of NAFTA." What were the benefits of NAFTA, you ask? Basically it was a windfall for manufacturing jobs...in Mexico. 

So, while the political establishment will hail the passage of T-PP as a triumph of bi-partisanship, I'll take gridlock any day of the week.