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If we don’t turn it around, guess what folks…

Claimed writer and director of anti-Islam film that sparked extremist violence in Egypt and Libya.

I remember thinking, with Western intervention in Libya, that this all had a familiar ring to it. But perhaps this time would be different, many of us hoped. How, though, one conflict can escape the reality of its conditions and not realize certain consequences is beyond me.

Snooki, of Jersey Shore fame, recently renounced her wild ways and embraced the conventional American lifestyle. A deeper look at this standard narrative presents problems for those who want freedom, not just acceptance.

Our job is to keep separate the spiritual and temporal, church-state, metaphysical and physical where all the nuclear weapons are. We’re doing this in the technologically most lethal organization ever created by humankind—our U.S. military.

All the invocations of God’s name and snippets of the Bible and Nuns On the Bus and what have you can’t really help the Democrats so long as the larger religiously-tinged framing about what’s good and what’s bad remain untouched.

A few years ago during a college break, when my floor was deserted and peaceful, a middle-aged couple stopped by my office door looking for someone who taught religion. “We’re from the Unification Church,” the man said. I gasped. The Moonies! was my immediate, rather graceless thought. With great excitement, and flashbacks to news reports of mass weddings dancing through my head, I composed myself and invited them in to chat. They seemed pleasantly surprised that I knew what the Unification Church was and, perhaps most of all, that I hadn’t shut the door in their faces.

Intolerance is perhaps easier to attribute to those who claim an observance to biblical orthodoxy. From gay rights to science, proponents of biblical orthodoxy have assumed the role of self-appointed guardians of the truth. Such claims are the feeble attempt to provide answers to moral questions using a litany of biblical texts that support their presuppositions. But the unhealthy adherence to orthodoxy is not the exclusive property of those who embrace a conservative approach to scripture.

For evangelicals like Steve Matthews, Burning Man embodies deep-seated fears which can also be seen playing out in other aspects of American culture. Many conservatives fear that America is undergoing decay, and this is taking place in the spiritual realm as well. A lingering economic malaise, coupled with our continued cultural fascination with apocalyptic scenarios, provides a context in which Burning Man functions as a Rorschach test.

Judgment is a process, a refiner’s fire, not a permanent condition. If people can’t abide the idea of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot gliding right through the Pearly Gates, they don’t have to worry. But no one should ever say “never” about anyone else’s chances. The theological and ethical point is to try to have the mind, and more importantly, the loving heart of God.