Sherry Chandler

Mike Graves’s conversation with Georgia Green Stamper, the one I mentioned recording last week, is now posted on WUKY’s tonic and you can listen to it via streaming audio at the link.

The blurb for the segment reads like this:

Join tonic’s Mike Graves, Georgia Green Stamper, and a host of others for a two-part discussion about the author and WUKY commentator’s roots and how they led her to explore the history that shaped them.

That would make Leatha Kendrick and me a “host,” a role we can probably fulfill on odd Tuesdays. We contain multitudes. Leatha most assuredly has power, presence, and spirit enough for several ordinary human beings. Through the power of skillful editing, I sometimes sound a little intelligent myself.

Anyway, better to be “a host” than “and others,” a category where I often wind up in publicity blurbs.

The title, by the way, is a pun on the name of a local town, Stamping Ground, in western Scott County. Many European settlers found their way into Kentucky by way of buffalo traces and Stamping Ground was the site for a confluence of buffalo. But of course a “stamping (or stomping) ground” is also, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, “a customary territory or favorite gathering place.”

Georgia writes mostly about her stomping grounds in her new essay collection <em>You Can Go Anywhere from the Crossroads of the World.

The morning’s NYTimes has a fascinating look at a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. “Survey shows,” to quote Monty Hall,

Although a majority of Americans say religion is very important to them, nearly three-quarters of them say they believe that many faiths besides their own can lead to salvation …For example, 70 percent of Americans affiliated with a religion or denomination said they agreed that “many religions can lead to eternal life,” including majorities among Protestants and Catholics. Among evangelical Christians, 57 percent agreed with the statement, and among Catholics, 79 percent did.

Among minority faiths, more than 80 percent of Jews, Hindus and Buddhists agreed with the statement, and more than half of Muslims did.

The findings seem to undercut the conventional wisdom that the more religiously committed people are, the more intolerant they are, scholars who reviewed the survey said.

“It’s not that Americans don’t believe in anything,” said Michael Lindsay, assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University. “It’s that we believe in everything. We aren’t religious purists or dogmatists.”

It might be argued that to believe in everything is to believe in nothing, but hey! I’m agnostic.

Speaking of which,

The survey indicated that the group that had the greatest net gain was the unaffiliated, accounting for 16 percent of American adults.

The new report sheds light on the beliefs of the unaffiliated. Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, 70 percent of the unaffiliated said they believed in God, including one of every five people who identified themselves as atheist and more than half of those who identified as agnostic.

Since the American Heritage Dictionary defines atheist as “one who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods,” I find the concept of a believing atheist, well, unbelievable.

“What does atheist mean? It may mean they don’t believe in God, or it could be that they are hostile to organized religion,” [said John C. Green, an author of the report and a senior fellow on religion and American politics at Pew.] “A lot of these unaffiliated people, by some measures, are fairly religious, and then there are those who are affiliated with a religion but don’t believe in God and identify instead with history or holidays or communities.”

Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Boggles mine, anyway.

Scholars said such tolerance could stem in part from the greater diversity of American society: that there are more people of minority faiths or no faith and that “it is hard to hold a strongly sectarian view when you work together and your kids play soccer together,” Mr. Lindsay said.

But such a view of salvation may also grow out of doctrinal ignorance, scholars said.

“It could be that people are not very well educated and they are not expressing mature theological points of view,” said Todd Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. “It could also be a form of bland secularism. The real challenge to religious leaders is not to become more entrenched in their views, but to navigate the idea of what their religion is all about and how it relates to others.”

But if most of us seem to have some sort of warm fuzzy, especially fuzzy, notion of religion as something that lets us celebrate Christmas and eat chocolate bunnies at Easter, well, there is an upside:

Nearly two-thirds of respondents favored more government help for the poor, even if it meant going deeper into debt. Sixty-one percent of respondents also said “stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost.”

A majority said the United States should pay more attention to problems at home than those abroad, but in the area of foreign policy, 6 of 10 said that diplomacy, not military strength, was the best way to ensure peace.

There’s something I can believe in.

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Addendum: On the other hand, here via Juan Cole is an observation from Rick Shenkman, author of Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter (Basic Books, 2008). It seems right relevant to the notion that Americans are a little uninformed in their beliefs:

I do not wish to engage in a debate about the Iraq War. But the thought of planting a largely Christian army in the middle of the Muslim Middle East over the opposition of most countries in the region, when put as I have just put it, sounds daft. Why did it not ring bells of alarm to Americans in 2003 and after, especially as it became clear that our troops would be staying a long time and that no quick victory was possible? It did not because the administration saw to it that the issue was framed differently. We weren’t planting an army. We were spreading God’s miraculous gift of freedom to a benighted people very much in need of America’s missionary help. It was the triumph of myth over logic.

Why were Americans so susceptible to myth? Foreign policy specialists don’t usually spend a lot of time reflecting on this question. They should. It’s the key to what often goes wrong when foreign policy issues become the subject of public debate.

The answer is, I’m afraid, simple. Myths count more than facts in these debates because Americans don’t know many facts and don’t care to take the time to learn them…

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Update: It’s good to know, I suppose, that James Dobson thinks Al Sharpton an extremist. Lance Mannion has some intelligent things to say about this issue. But I still would like to see religion removed from our political discourse.

[This post contains spoilers, I guess. But the end is inevitable.]

This weekend my husband and I watched Letters from Iwo Jima. We have been a long time working up to the experience. After watching Flags of our Fathers, we had some idea of what we were in for, only worse, because there would be no victory at the end of this movie.

And the violence of the real world is such that I am not all that eager to experience vicarious violence whether it is “art” or “entertainment.”

Still, we were definitely not in the mood for yet another superannuated super hero. I mean Indiana Jones was fun, but come on. All good things pass. As for Rambo, never watched his movies in the first place.

And Letters from Iwo Jima really is a must-see movie.

In the end, I was able to pull back from the violence. It seemed so obviously stage blood to me — or computer animated blood — and then our television screen is tiny so the impact of exploding men and burning men is diminished. I was pulled out of the movie, too, by the panoramic shots of the U.S. army storming the beaches. It seemed so obviously computer animated. I do hate computer animation, though this too may have been more compelling on the big screen.

But I could not disassociate myself from the emotional impact of the film nor did I want to. The real power of Eastwood’s movie is not in the fx but in the characters, the human condition of these men — the general Kuribayashi, the grunt Saigo, the Olympic gold medalist Baron Nishi, the failed secret policeman Shimizu — who are being sacrificed by their country for a lost cause. This has to be the focus, because the outcome is known. Suspense, the unfolding story, has to be found in the interaction of the characters.

Chris Vognar of the Dallas Morning News sums it up like this:

If Flags of Our Fathers is about heroism – why we need it, how we create it – then Letters From Iwo Jima is about honor, its importance, and its folly. For the officers who stand in Kuribayashi’s way and sneer at his unconventional methods (including kindness to enlisted men), honor is a code to be followed blindly and by the book. For the core characters, it’s a way of life, of treating other human beings, of facing the impossible with dignity.

I would say also that it’s about the clash of the old rigid code of warrior honor with the mechanized faceless slaughter of modern warfare. My son points out that this has echoes of Europe at the beginnings of World War I, when the French and British sent cavalry charges out against barbed wire and machine guns. The result, of course, was wholesale slaughter.

That echo is made somewhat explicit fairly early in the film, when the two old cavalry men, General Kuribayashi and Baron Nishi, remember the good old days when soldiers could fight heroically and face to face. No more, they say. The machines have changed things.

Modern warfare has rendered the old style of honor impractical and a little ridiculous. When one commander fails to hold his wing, he orders his entire troop to commit suicide because they have been dishonored. They do this by means of hand grenade. Each man in turn pulls the plug and grasps the grenade to his chest and explodes himself. This is probably the most notorious scene in the movie, and while it doesn’t become as silly as it might, it is not death with dignity. What is more, it is a waste of manpower. The more honorable thing would have been for the commander to do as he was ordered, to fall back and add his force to defending the core position.

In the end, the wounded General Kuribayashi, defeated, facing capture and dishonor, orders his aide to be behead him with his sword. This is a scene worthy of high drama, of Shakespeare’s battlefield. But it cannot be in modern warfare. Kuribayashi kneels, neck extended. The aide raises his sword over his head, ready to do the deed. But before the blow can be struck, the aide himself is struck and killed by what seems to be a stray and random bullet. The General is left to shoot himself with the pearl-handled colt he carries as a souvenir of his time in the United States.

In the final scene, both the sword and the Colt are picked up as war souvenirs by anonymous GIs who don’t know the significance of what they’ve found.