Holy Moly

The Revealer raises a troubling question about Texas exit-poll data.

19% of respondents id'd themselves as "Other Christian" -- neither Catholic nor Protestant. Really? This must reflect the huge Greek Orthodox community in Texas, right? Or is it possible that 19% don't know that their tradition is Protestant?

This is why we need to teach religion in public schools. I'm serious! Religious literacy is important for everyone regardless of their personal affilliation/convictions/lack thereof. And religious institutions clearly can't be trusted to contextualize their teachings. We need comprehensive world religion classes in every high school.

The Pew forum's new study, currently getting a lot of press attention, touts the "remarkable dynamism" of the US religious landscape. It's a well-designed study that--unlike those commissioned by mainstream media outlets and by religious polling firms like Barna Research Group--fully accounts for the diversity of belief and practice within protestant Christian traditions:

...the Protestant population is characterized by significant internal diversity and fragmentation, encompassing hundreds of different denominations loosely grouped around three fairly distinct religious traditions - evangelical Protestant churches (26.3% of the overall adult population), mainline Protestant churches (18.1%) and historically black Protestant churches (6.9%).

"Remarkable dynamism" is a tidy way of saying everything's kind of up in the air:

The survey finds that constant movement characterizes the American religious marketplace, as every major religious group is simultaneously gaining and losing adherents. Those that are growing as a result of religious change are simply gaining new members at a faster rate than they are losing members. Conversely, those that are declining in number because of religious change simply are not attracting enough new members to offset the number of adherents who are leaving those particular faiths.

There are no simple narratives to pull out here, but a wealth of interesting data, all available at Pew's website. Still, there is a trend towards the unaffilliated:

The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.

Unaffilliated doesn't necessarily mean non-believer, however:

Like the other major groups, people who are unaffiliated with any particular religion (16.1%) also exhibit remarkable internal diversity. Although one-quarter of this group consists of those who describe themselves as either atheist or agnostic (1.6% and 2.4% of the adult population overall, respectively), the majority of the unaffiliated population (12.1% of the adult population overall) is made up of people who simply describe their religion as "nothing in particular." This group, in turn, is fairly evenly divided between the "secular unaffiliated," that is, those who say that religion is not important in their lives (6.3% of the adult population), and the "religious unaffiliated," that is, those who say that religion is either somewhat important or very important in their lives (5.8% of the overall adult population).

I was also curious about motion between mainline protestant population and evangelicals. Anecdotally, I hear about evangelicals wanting to leave behind conservative theology/politics behind without abandoning christian faith completely, and thus choosing mainline churches. But I also hear about former mainliners joining more evangelical churches that are better at providing niche-marketed lifestyle-focused programming and a comfortingly stable doctrinal worldview, which is appealing in a volatile economic and geopolitical climate. So which direction are people actually moving? Both ways! About 30% of evangelicals used to be mainliners. About 30% of mainliners used to be evangelicals.

So religiosity, even Evangelicalism, is not something fixed and imposed on people from above--at least, not any more. It is constantly in flux; so while religiosity isn't going away any time soon, if instead of writing them off, we stay in dialogue with religious people whose political goals and claims about ultimate reality are at odds with our own, we have a chance to influence the choices they make in the religious marketplace.

About a year ago, I started saying that most important and difficult race in '08 was going to be Obama vs Clinton, not Ds vs. Rs. Now, I'll be straight with you all: I'm a big Obama fan, and have been since the beginning of his national-level political career: his 2004 Democratic convention address. This is what I wrote then:

Everyone's talkin' bout Obama. First black president?... that speech set out a vision of liberal values in terms that no conservative could disagree with. Compare this with Clinton, whose method of triangulation took up conservative buzzwords and values, essentially conceding that liberalism was a moral vacuum. I've been thinking for quite some time that liberals need to stop talking in terms of rights and starting talking in terms of what IS right.

Oh, what a cute, naive, idealistic, 23-year old I was!

Intuitively, I felt that Obama could reestablish a Democratic majority, and make progressive values mainstream again. I'd just read What's The Matter With Kansas, and to hear Barack succinctly dismiss the red-state vs blue-state paradigm as a fiction meant to polarize and manipulate America and prevent us for working together for our common interests was exhilarating.

And obviously, it helps that he's an incredible orator, able to authentically tap into black religious discourse in a way that is still inclusive and accessible. Back in 2004, the liberal evangelical Jim Wallis was trying to tell us "God Is Not A Republican Or A Democrat". But John Kerry's patrician inability to connect with white evangelicals made that line a hard sell. I remember wincing at this during the 2004 presidential debates:

QUESTION: Senator Kerry, suppose you are speaking with a voter who believed abortion is murder and the voter asked for reassurance that his or her tax dollars would not go to support abortion, what would you say to that person? KERRY: I would say to that person exactly what I will say to you right now.

First of all, I cannot tell you how deeply I respect the belief about life and when it begins. I'm a Catholic, raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life. It helped lead me through a war, leads me today.

But I can't take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn't share that article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew, Protestant, whatever. I can't do that.

Translation: Abortion is morally wrong, but because of these lofty abstract liberal ideals about separation of church and state, rights and pluralism, I'm unable to prevent it from happening. Morality doesn't really figure in to how I govern, but I feel your pain.

Compare that with Obama.

Questioner: I see a great a contradiction going on in our society, right now, and I don’t understand it. Maybe you can help me out. On the one hand, we see a guy like Michael Vick, who will likely lose his livelihood and spend some time in jail and there’s been a tremendous outcry against this man because of fighting dogs. There’s been a huge, huge reaction. On the other hand, we have 34 years and counting where thousands of innocent, sweet babies are being killed every day through what we call abortion, yet that voice has seemingly died out. What would you do about that and what’s happening in our society when people can’t seem to see this contradiction?

Obama: The issue of abortion, I don’t think, has gone away. People think about it a lot, obviously you do and you feel impassioned. I think that the American people struggle with two principles: There’s the principle that a fetus is not just an appendage, it’s potential life. I think people recognize that there’s a moral element to that. They also believe that women should have some control over their bodies and themselves and there is a privacy element to making those decisions.

I don’t think people take the issue lightly. A lot of people have arrived in the view that I’ve arrived at, which is that there is a moral implication to these issues, but that the women involved are in the best position to make that determination. And I don’t think they make it lightly. I don’t think they make it callously, so I reject a comparison between a woman struggling with these issues and Michael Vick fighting dogs for sport. I don’t think that’s sort of how people perceive it.

Now, this is one of those areas – again, I think it’s important to be honest – where I don’t think you’re ever going to get a complete agreement on this issue. If you believe that life begins at conception, then I can’t change your mind. I think there is a large agreement, for example, that late-term abortions are really problematic and there should be a regulation. And it should only happen in terms of the mother’s life or severe health consequences, so I think there is broad agreement on these issues.

One area where I think we should have significant agreement is on the idea of reducing unwanted pregnancies because if we can reduce unwanted pregnancies, then it’s much less likely that people resort to abortion. The way to do that is to encourage young people and older people, people of child-bearing years, to act responsibly. Part of acting responsibly – I’ve got two daughters – part of my job as a parent is to communicate to them that sex isn’t casual and that it’s something that they should really think about and not think is just a game.

I’m all for education for our young people, encouraging abstinence until marriage, but I also believe that young people do things regardless of what their parents tell them to do and I don’t want my daughters ending up in really difficult situations because I didn’t communicate to them, how to protect themselves if they make a mistake. I think we’ve got to have that kind of comprehensive view that says family planning and education for our young people and so forth – to prevent teen pregnancies, to prevent the kinds of situations that lead to women having to struggle with these difficult decisions and we should be supportive of those efforts. That’s an area where there should be some agreement.

Translation: Morality is important in how I will govern. Things aren't always black and white, though. We live in a complicated world.

That brings me to another factor that is really going to bring it home for Barack, if he makes it to the general. In 2004, I was just starting to feel it but couldn't fully predict how far it would go: the hemorrhaging of the religious right. Jerry Falwell is dead. Pat Robertson is marginalized, disliked by many evangelicals. Ted Haggard got caught with his pants down. To me it seems that evangelicals are looking for a way out, or a path forward. They're embarrassed by the way their leaders have conducted themselves. They're embarrassed by George W Bush. By degrees, they seem more and more ready to embrace new narratives about the role of faith in politics, about the relationship between Christianity and the broader culture. They're getting curious about environmentalism and anti-poverty movements. The once-sturdy alliance between economic conservatives and social conservatives is getting more fragile. They're realizing that we live in a complicated moral universe.

For someone who can successfully reach out to that audience, this is an amazing opening, and BHO is taking it. Despite a solidly liberal platform, and solidly liberal record, the guy is wildly popular with evangelicals who don't even agree with him about policy! My old archnemesis Relevant Magazine, the self-appointed voice of young hip evangelicals, asked their readers who Jesus would most likely vote for, in a readers poll conducted in November/December. Barack Obama came in first. Mike Huckabee came in second! Hillary Clinton was voted "least Christian". (Leave it to Relevant to ask a poll question about which candidate was "least Christian!")

Many of these people are still pretty damn conservative. According to the same poll, their pet issues are illegal immigration and bioethics! And yet they're way stoked about voting for a candidate with a very liberal record on these issues. This is big.

These are kind of obvious meta-narratives, sorry. I'll go into more detail in future days. I'm getting back into the blogging business. 2008!

Apparently the piece I wrote about ABC No Rio has been picked up by THE NATION for their Jan 28 web edition!

The story of ABC No Rio has always been one about creative engagement with the politics of space. It began on New Year's Eve in 1979 when a group of artists invaded a vacant storefront on Delancey Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side. At the time, the neighborhood was blighted by widespread arson and a culture of drug addiction.

During the 1970s, thousands of buildings in New York City had been abandoned by their landlords, became property of the city through foreclosure, and sat vacant and neglected. The art exhibition on Delancey Street entitled "The Real Estate Show" was a provocation: why should these spaces sit idle? Watching the grainy black and white video footage that documented the event, there's a palpable sense of indignant playfulness as trash was cleared away and art crudely taped to walls. Neighborhood kids joined in the fun, drawing on the walls and interacting with the sculptures.

The city authorities were not amused. Police padlocked the building and the artwork was rudely confiscated and shipped to a warehouse across town. As one reviewer noted at the time, "the show's basic ideological premise--that artists, working people, and the poor are systematically screwed out of decent places to exist in--could not have been brought home with more brutal irony."

The story could have ended there, had the artists conceded defeat--instead they chose to fight.

This is an excerpt from a spotlight chapter I wrote for the All-Ages Movement Project's forthcoming book.

Barack Obama gave this speech this morning:

The Scripture tells us that when Joshua and the Israelites arrived at the gates of Jericho, they could not enter. The walls of the city were too steep for any one person to climb; too strong to be taken down with brute force. And so they sat for days, unable to pass on through.

But God had a plan for his people. He told them to stand together and march together around the city, and on the seventh day he told them that when they heard the sound of the ram’s horn, they should speak with one voice. And at the chosen hour, when the horn sounded and a chorus of voices cried out together, the mighty walls of Jericho came tumbling down.

There are many lessons to take from this passage, just as there are many lessons to take from this day, just as there are many memories that fill the space of this church. As I was thinking about which ones we need to remember at this hour, my mind went back to the very beginning of the modern Civil Rights Era.

Because before Memphis and the mountaintop; before the bridge in Selma and the march on Washington; before Birmingham and the beatings; the fire hoses and the loss of those four little girls; before there was King the icon and his magnificent dream, there was King the young preacher and a people who found themselves suffering under the yoke of oppression.

And on the eve of the bus boycotts in Montgomery, at a time when many were still doubtful about the possibilities of change, a time when those in the black community mistrusted themselves, and at times mistrusted each other, King inspired with words not of anger, but of an urgency that still speaks to us today:

“Unity is the great need of the hour” is what King said. Unity is how we shall overcome.

What Dr. King understood is that if just one person chose to walk instead of ride the bus, those walls of oppression would not be moved. But maybe if a few more walked, the foundation might start to shake. If a few more women were willing to do what Rosa Parks had done, maybe the cracks would start to show. If teenagers took freedom rides from North to South, maybe a few bricks would come loose. Maybe if white folks marched because they had come to understand that their freedom too was at stake in the impending battle, the wall would begin to sway. And if enough Americans were awakened to the injustice; if they joined together, North and South, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, then perhaps that wall would come tumbling down, and justice would flow like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Unity is the great need of the hour – the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.

I’m not talking about a budget deficit. I’m not talking about a trade deficit. I’m not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans.

I’m talking about a moral deficit. I’m talking about an empathy deficit. I’m taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.

We have an empathy deficit when we’re still sending our children down corridors of shame – schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education.

We have a deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months; when families lose their homes so that lenders make a profit; when mothers can’t afford a doctor when their children get sick.

We have a deficit in this country when there is Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others; when our children see nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree today, in the present, in the twenty-first century.

We have a deficit when homeless veterans sleep on the streets of our cities; when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur; when young Americans serve tour after tour of duty in a war that should’ve never been authorized and never been waged.

And we have a deficit when it takes a breach in our levees to reveal a breach in our compassion; when it takes a terrible storm to reveal the hungry that God calls on us to feed; the sick He calls on us to care for; the least of these He commands that we treat as our own.

So we have a deficit to close. We have walls – barriers to justice and equality – that must come down. And to do this, we know that unity is the great need of this hour.

Unfortunately, all too often when we talk about unity in this country, we’ve come to believe that it can be purchased on the cheap. We’ve come to believe that racial reconciliation can come easily – that it’s just a matter of a few ignorant people trapped in the prejudices of the past, and that if the demagogues and those who exploit our racial divisions will simply go away, then all our problems would be solved.

All too often, we seek to ignore the profound institutional barriers that stand in the way of ensuring opportunity for all children, or decent jobs for all people, or health care for those who are sick. We long for unity, but are unwilling to pay the price.

But of course, true unity cannot be so easily won. It starts with a change in attitudes – a broadening of our minds, and a broadening of our hearts.

It’s not easy to stand in somebody else’s shoes. It’s not easy to see past our differences. We’ve all encountered this in our own lives. But what makes it even more difficult is that we have a politics in this country that seeks to drive us apart – that puts up walls between us.

We are told that those who differ from us on a few things are different from us on all things; that our problems are the fault of those who don’t think like us or look like us or come from where we do. The welfare queen is taking our tax money. The immigrant is taking our jobs. The believer condemns the non-believer as immoral, and the non-believer chides the believer as intolerant.

For most of this country’s history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays – on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.

And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King’s vision of a beloved community.

We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.

Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for President, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.

So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scape-goating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others – all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face – war and poverty; injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.

Because if Dr. King could love his jailor; if he could call on the faithful who once sat where you do to forgive those who set dogs and fire hoses upon them, then surely we can look past what divides us in our time, and bind up our wounds, and erase the empathy deficit that exists in our hearts.

But if changing our hearts and minds is the first critical step, we cannot stop there. It is not enough to bemoan the plight of poor children in this country and remain unwilling to push our elected officials to provide the resources to fix our schools. It is not enough to decry the disparities of health care and yet allow the insurance companies and the drug companies to block much-needed reforms. It is not enough for us to abhor the costs of a misguided war, and yet allow ourselves to be driven by a politics of fear that sees the threat of attack as way to scare up votes instead of a call to come together around a common effort.

The Scripture tells us that we are judged not just by word, but by deed. And if we are to truly bring about the unity that is so crucial in this time, we must find it within ourselves to act on what we know; to understand that living up to this country’s ideals and its possibilities will require great effort and resources; sacrifice and stamina.

And that is what is at stake in the great political debate we are having today. The changes that are needed are not just a matter of tinkering at the edges, and they will not come if politicians simply tell us what we want to hear. All of us will be called upon to make some sacrifice. None of us will be exempt from responsibility. We will have to fight to fix our schools, but we will also have to challenge ourselves to be better parents. We will have to confront the biases in our criminal justice system, but we will also have to acknowledge the deep-seated violence that still resides in our own communities and marshal the will to break its grip.

That is how we will bring about the change we seek. That is how Dr. King led this country through the wilderness. He did it with words – words that he spoke not just to the children of slaves, but the children of slave owners. Words that inspired not just black but also white; not just the Christian but the Jew; not just the Southerner but also the Northerner.

He led with words, but he also led with deeds. He also led by example. He led by marching and going to jail and suffering threats and being away from his family. He led by taking a stand against a war, knowing full well that it would diminish his popularity. He led by challenging our economic structures, understanding that it would cause discomfort. Dr. King understood that unity cannot be won on the cheap; that we would have to earn it through great effort and determination.

That is the unity – the hard-earned unity – that we need right now. It is that effort, and that determination, that can transform blind optimism into hope – the hope to imagine, and work for, and fight for what seemed impossible before.

The stories that give me such hope don’t happen in the spotlight. They don’t happen on the presidential stage. They happen in the quiet corners of our lives. They happen in the moments we least expect. Let me give you an example of one of those stories.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organizes for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She’s been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and the other day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

So Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we begin. It is why the walls in that room began to crack and shake.

And if they can shake in that room, they can shake in Atlanta.

And if they can shake in Atlanta, they can shake in Georgia.

And if they can shake in Georgia, they can shake all across America. And if enough of our voices join together; we can bring those walls tumbling down. The walls of Jericho can finally come tumbling down. That is our hope – but only if we pray together, and work together, and march together.

Brothers and sisters, we cannot walk alone.

In the struggle for peace and justice, we cannot walk alone.

In the struggle for opportunity and equality, we cannot walk alone

In the struggle to heal this nation and repair this world, we cannot walk alone.

So I ask you to walk with me, and march with me, and join your voice with mine, and together we will sing the song that tears down the walls that divide us, and lift up an America that is truly indivisible, with liberty, and justice, for all. May God bless the memory of the great pastor of this church, and may God bless the United States of America.

The always awesome Punk Planet passes this article along from Advertising Age (hardly a hotbed of anti-corporate sentiment.)

Costly Red Campaign Reaps Meager $18 Million Bono & Co. Spend up to $100 Million on Marketing, Incur Watchdogs' Wrath By Mya Frazier

Published: March 05, 2007
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- It's been a year since the first Red T-shirts hit Gap shelves in London. The collective marketing outlay by Gap, Apple and Motorola for the Red campaign has been enormous, with some estimates as high as $100 million.

Steven Spielberg smiling down from billboards in San Francisco; Christy Turlington striking a yoga pose in a New Yorker ad; Bono cruising Chicago's Michigan Avenue with Oprah Winfrey, eagerly snapping up Red products; Chris Rock appearing in Motorola TV spots ("Use Red, nobody's dead"); and the Red room at the Grammy Awards. So you'd expect the money raised to be, well, big, right? Maybe $50 million, or even $100 million.

Try again: The tally raised worldwide is $18 million.

The disproportionate ratio between the marketing outlay and the money raised is drawing concern among nonprofit watchdogs, cause-marketing experts and even executives in the ad business. It threatens to spur a backlash, not just against the Red campaign -- which ambitiously set out to change the cause-marketing model by allowing partners to profit from charity -- but also for the brands involved.

Enormous outlay
By any measure, the buzz has been extraordinary and the collective marketing outlay by Gap, Apple and Motorola has been enormous, with some estimates as high as $100 million. Gap alone spent $7.8 million of its $58 million outlay on Red during last year's fourth quarter, according to Nielsen Media Research's Nielsen Adviews.

But contributions don't seem to be living up to the hype. Richard Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the recipient of money raised by Red, told The Boston Globe in December, "We may be over the $100 million mark by the end of Christmas."

Rajesh Anandan, the Global Fund's head of private-sector partnerships, said Mr. Feachem was misquoted, and defended the efforts by Red to increase the Global Fund's private-sector donations, which totaled just $5 million from 2002 to 2005. (The U.S. Congress just approved a $724 million pledge to the Global Fund, on top of $1.9 billion already given and $650 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)

'Hugely frontloaded'
"Red has done as much as we could have hoped for in the short time it has been up and running," he said, adding: "The launch cost of this kind of campaign is going to be hugely frontloaded. It's a very costly exercise."

Julie Cordua, VP-marketing at Red and a former Motorola marketing exec and director-buzz marketing at Helio, said the outlay by the program's partners must be understood within the context of the campaign's goal: sustainability. "It's not a charity program of them writing a one-time check. It has to make good business sense for the company so the money will continue to flow to the Global Fund over time." She added that since many of Red's partners haven't closed their books yet on 2006, more funds likely will be added to the $18 million.

But is the rise of philanthropic fashionistas decked out in Red T-shirts and iPods really the best way to save a child dying of AIDS in Africa?

Parody mocks Bono
The campaign's inherent appeal to conspicuous consumption has spurred a parody by a group of San Francisco designers and artists, who take issue with Bono's rallying cry. "Shopping is not a solution. Buy less. Give more," is the message at buylesscrap.org, which encourages people to give directly to the Global Fund.

"The Red campaign proposes consumption as the cure to the world's evils," said Ben Davis, creative director at Word Pictures Ideas, co-creator of the site. "Can't we just focus on the real solution -- giving money?" [ed. note--actually the real solution would be better public policy, but maybe that's too radical a sentiment for Advertising Age]

Trent Stamp, president of Charity Navigator, which rates the spending practices of 5,000 nonprofits, said he's concerned about the campaign's impact on the next generation. "The Red campaign can be a good start or it can be a colossal waste of money, and it all depends on whether this edgy, innovative campaign inspires young people to be better citizens or just gives them an excuse to feel good about themselves while they buy an overpriced item they don't really need."

Fears of nonprofits
Mark Rosenman, a longtime activist in the nonprofit sector and a public-service professor at the Union Institute & University in Cincinnati, said the disparity between the marketing outlay and the money raised by Red is illustrative of some of the biggest fears of nonprofits in the U.S.

"There is a broadening concern that business is taking on the patina of philanthropy and crowding out philanthropic activity and even substituting for it," he said. "It benefits the for-profit partners much more than the charitable causes."

Well, yeah. This is the central thrust of one of my favorite passages from Tom Frank's "One Market Under God". Frank describes a presentation by French ad executive Jean-Marie Dru:"

[Dru] asserts that mankind [has] entered a new era in which the value of brands would have to invent some high-profile scheme for identifying themselves with liberation; they would have to identify and attack some social “convention” …and would have to align themselves with some larger “vision “ of human freedom. From a longer perspective what Dru was proposing was the colonization by business of the notion of social justice itself…The brands that would prevail would be those that identified themselves with some former aspect of radical politics…we would have brands for social justice rather than movements. Dru did not invent this strategy. He merely described what was going on in advertising as the decade unfolded. Benetton was working to equate its brand with the fight against racism, Macintosh with that against technocracy; similarly Pepsi owned youth rebellion, while Nike staked a claim to “revolution” generally.

So brands against AIDS is just the next step. Corporate greenwashing campaigns against global warming will probably be next. Of course, the real goal is to build the brand identity--these campaigns will never deliver on their revolutionary promises. It's always more bullshit to get us to buy crap we don't need. Say that out loud in our present hip new-economy cultural moment and you're liable to be dismissed as a "cultural pessimist" or a cynical "hater," old-fashioned, dogmatic, insufficiently forward-thinking or whatever. Maybe the emergence of this actual empirical data will help move that discussion forward?

You know how high school kids, when they're emo about something and they don't want to talk about it so they just post song lyrics in their livejournals? I need to do that now. Okay.

The Evens.

Cut from the cloth, and cut quite severely
Is this my world I no longer recognize?
I'm hearing common words, common expressions
But nothing is common in my eyes

How do people sleep amidst the slaughter?
[editor's note: stop right there for second. it's easy to react to that line and think it is cheesy and trite, and like something Midnight Oil might say. That was my first reaction, to roll my eyes and go "Ohhhhh, Ian!". But if it sounds trite, maybe you've heard it a lot because it's an irreducible truth, but dealing with it is hard so we have this coping strategy we come up with: cynicism. What happens when we let that lyric hit us? Take a deep breath and ask yourself, how do we sleep amidst the slaughter? What mechanisms exist to distance us from the bad shit? It really is a good fucking question, isn't it? Back to the song?
Why would they vote in favor of their own defeat?
Get out to the well and check the water
Results were incomplete

Cut from the cloth, and dead to the masses
Just another case to be eulogized
But I'm breathing, breathing with no assistance
And responding to stimuli

Can anyone explain these new laws of nature?
Why would they rule in favor of their own defeat?
Cynics are excused from standing up to problems
Because they can't get out of their seats

Cut from the cloth, ran out screaming
I hope that none of this will stick to me
Everyone is nice, everyone is kind now
At least they're nice and kind to me

Why would they fold up something so precious?
Why would they sing in favor of their own defeat?
Maybe they found their voice while out shopping
The price was hard to beat

From Democracy Now:

It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of his birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life is that several years -- his last years -- are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever. Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter. But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" -- including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi," and the Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

Democracy Now! provides a convenient podcast-sized MP3 with two of King's greatest speeches from late in his career. We'll be blasting it from the P.A. this afternoon in Anacortes while we play our monthly kickball game.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

And from his final speech, "I have been to the mountaintop":

Now the other thing we'll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people. Individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively -- that means all of us together -- collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the American Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it.

We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles. We don't need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."

And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy -- what is the other bread? -- Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on town -- downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.

But not only that, we've got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank. We want a "bank-in" movement in Memphis. Go by the savings and loan association. I'm not asking you something that we don't do ourselves at SCLC. Judge Hooks and others will tell you that we have an account here in the savings and loan association from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We are telling you to follow what we are doing. Put your money there. You have six or seven black insurance companies here in the city of Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an "insurance-in."

Now these are some practical things that we can do. We begin the process of building a greater economic base. And at the same time, we are putting pressure where it really hurts. I ask you to follow through here.

Withdraw from unjust economic systems. Invest in economic systems that are fair. Pretty simple.

Recently confirmed: I will be speaking in Grand Rapids, Michigan in late March at Calvin College's "Festival of Faith and Music." The website describes it as:

Designed to forward a comprehensive interrogation of the ways grace, love, compassion, and the Christian faith are expressed in the world of popular music.

Events for ffm 2007 include two nights of LIVE performances by some of the leading artists in folk, rock, roots, and independent music, workshops led by musicians, critics, scholars, producers, and keynote speakers.

Anyway, I'll be presenting some of the findings of my undergraduate thesis on hip consumerism in Christian media culture, with a focus on Relevant Magazine, and probably some additional reflections on the theological basis for a renewed independent cultural praxis. I'm very flattered and grateful to have been invited to be a part of it. Sufjan Stevens, Neko Case(?), and Emmylou Harris (?!?) will be among the performers. And a bunch of pretty legit-looking speakers who write books with titles like Colossians Remixed: Subverting The Empire(!)

Full info is here.

By the way, have you heard that Neko Case record, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood? I know, you're thinking "pretty alt-country lady, boring!" but really it is my favorite record of the past year--at least as adventurous, textured, and sonically engaging as the last Xiu Xiu record, with some really weird dirty organ sounds, deep deep reverb--and the songs are just heartbreaking, surprising, inventively structured.

A troubling update: Nora Conner at The Revealer notes that not all the leaders that the U.S. media is identifying as "leftist" are actually all that progressive. Zeroing in on the victory of new Nicaraguan president, former Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, Conner notes that "the New York Times described it as "another gain for leftists in Latin America"; and the Washington Post insisted that the Ortega victory was "an embarrassing setback for the Bush administration."

Conner argues persuasively that Ortega's basically abandoned his leftist roots. For example, he's allied himself with an old rival, retired cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, in support of an awful, extremely strict ban on abortion. Yikes.