Free E-Book Today Only: What on Earth Do We Know about Heaven?

Today only, Randal Rauser's book on the afterlife, What on Earth Do We Know about Heaven?, is available for free as a Kindle e-book. From June 6-12, it will be available at the discounted price of $3.99.

Randal Rauser is a thoughtful theologian who has written a number of excellent books aimed at making theological arguments and perspectives accessible to a lay readership. He also runs an active and lively blog here. If you haven't read any of his books, a free e-book is as good a place to start as any.

Is "the Sober Truth" about AA sober and true? Considering a recent challenge to AA. (Part 1)

Is Alcoholics Anonymous being subjected to unfair criticism--perhaps partly rooted in unconscious anti-religious bias against AA's Christian roots?

This was the question I found myself asking after reading a recent Salon piece by Lance Dodes and Zachary Dodes, authors of the recent book, The Sober Truth. The primary author, Lance Dodes, is a clinical psychiatrist who's been treating addiction for decades--and he seems to be on something of a crusade. In a recent NPR interview, he asserted that "AA has probably the worst success rate in all of medicine" and is "harmful to the 90 percent who don't do well."

This is quite a scathing indictment of one of the most respected and venerable organizations for fighting alcoholism and addiction. And as I read the Salon piece (an excerpt from the recent book), I started out skeptical, became irritated, and ended up a bit angry. Dodes does make a number of good points about the way our culture has appropriated AA's 12-step model--making it the heart of for-profit rehab centers, and endorsing it to the exclusion of other approaches to promoting sobriety. But when it comes to Dodes' direct challenge to the value of AA, the argument in the Salon piece amounts to little but sophistry.

In fact, it reminded me a bit of Richard Dawkins' rhetorically excessive and intellectually sloppy "take-down"of religion in The God Delusion. Which might, I suppose, mean that Dodes and Dodes have a bestseller on their hands. But it doesn't mean that the millions who benefit from AA should pay much attention to them.

In the next couple of posts on this blog, I want to consider some of the problems I found with the Dodes' supposed take-down of AA, at least as laid out in the Salon piece. While it's possible that some of these problems are resolved in their book, my decisions about what books to spend time on need to made in the light of the information available prior to investing those resources. And the Salon piece leads me to be very skeptical that the investment would be worth it.

Here's why.

1. Inconsistent Approach to Anecdotes

Part of my initial skepticism when I started reading the piece was based on my experience: the people I know who've made a sincere effort to work the program have had great success with it, which is not what I'd expect if Dodes' 5-10% success rate were accurate. This is "anecdotal" evidence, of course--specific personal experiences used to assess a general claim.

But anecdotal evidence is not always bad. If a general claim is at odds with one's personal experience, this doesn't mean the general claim is false. But it does give one reason to be skeptical--especially if one's body of personal experiences would be very surprising or unlikely were the general claim true.

But while Dodes is happy to sweepingly dismiss the anecdotal evidence in support of AA with a few gestures (pointing out that the general public only hears from the AA success stories), when it comes to his own astonishing claim that AA is "harmful to the 90% who don't do well," Dodes resorts to...anecdotal evidence.

He tells the story of "Dominic," a patient of his who got out of AA the same mangled understanding that Dodes puts forward as if it were the only one (more on this in the next post). Dominic wasn't able to achieve sobriety when he tried to follow his mangled understanding of AA's principles, but he did manage to uncover what was really triggering his drinking after eight months of (potentially expensive) therapy. Apparently, since pursuing the AA path kept Dominic from getting the therapy he needed (as if pursuing therapy and AA were mutually exclusive, as if there aren't tons of people who do both), AA delayed his enlightenment--and may even have triggered him (when, for example, he misinterpeted AA's tradition of giving out tokens to celebrate milestones in sobriety as a tally system that played into his fears of failure).

I'm sorry. When you make a claim to the effect that AA is bad for 90% of people who pursue it, you need more than a dubious anecdote or two. An anecdotal experience might lead you to be suspicious of a program--but to decide whether that suspicion is justified, you need more than anecdotes. In the Salon piece, that's all we get.

2. Dubious Statistics

But what about Dodes' assertion that AA has a low success rate, of only 5-10%? In the Salon piece, Dodes assures us that this figure comes from peer-reviewed studies. I'm sure there are such studies. But what exactly are these studies measuring? What is their definition of "success"? According to a Scientific American article, a 16-year study of problem drinkers published in 2006 found the following:

Of those who attended at least 27 weeks of AA meetings during the first year, 67 percent were abstinent at the 16-year follow-up, compared with 34 percent of those who did not participate in AA. Of the subjects who got therapy for the same time period, 56 percent were abstinent versus 39 percent of those who did not see a therapist—an indication that seeing a professional is also beneficial.

At least on one reading of "success rates," this could be taken to mean that AA has a 67% success rate. But, of course, to simply assert that AA has been shown to have an almost 70% success rate based on this study would be seriously misleading--especially since not participating in AA has, by this study, a 34% success rate.

Dodes' figure, without the proper context and qualifications, is likely to be similarly misleading. (From what I gather here, one common source of the 5% success figure is that it's a measure of retention in the program after a year, and has its roots in a misconstrual of an internal AA study--with at least two studies indicating a substantially higher retention rate. But are retention rates really the best way to measure success? How many show up at a meeting or two well before they're ready to commit to the challenge of getting sober?)

Even if we can settle on a useful definition of success, another problem is this: In measuring the success of a twelve-step program, you need to distinguish between the success of those who actually work the steps from the success of those who just show up. It's like the difference between measuring how many of those using an antibiotic properly are cured of their infection, and measuring how many of those sent home with a prescription for the antibiotic are cured. If many of those prescribed the antibiotic don't actually use it or use it properly, it's hard to assess the antibiotic's efficacy under proper use--unless we have some way to determine who is using it properly and only count their cure-rate.

Dodes actually invokes the antibiotic analogy at one point in the Salon piece, in response to AA's claims that those who really work the steps are very successful at remaining sober. Dodes takes this to imply that if AA doesn't work for you, the fault is yours. He finds this an irresponsible assertion that would be dismissed out of hand were it made with respect to an antibiotic or new chemotherapy treatment. "In professional medicine, if a treatment doesn’t work, it’s the treatment that must be scrutinized, not the patient."

Here, Dodes has failed to pay any attention to the crucial distinction made above. In professional medicine, if prescribing a course of treatment isn't working, good doctors would first ask why. Are the patients actually following through on the treatment plan as prescribed? If not, then that may be the problem. In other words, in professional medicine you do need to "scrutinize" the patient: Is the patient skipping doses or stopping treatment before the course of antibiotics has been completed? If you don't, you are in danger of dismissing a valuable treatment based on patient error.

Likewise, when it comes to AA, we need to focus on the success-rate of those who actually follow the 12 steps properly if we want to know how successful they are in helping alcoholics stay sober.

But doing that is going to be difficult in the case of AA for a couple of reasons. And this leads to my third concern about Dodes' Salon piece.

3. Treating Absence of Evidence as Evidence of Absence.

In the case of AA, the nature of the beast makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to come up with definitive conclusions concerning the success rate of those who actually work the program. One reason for this is that AA's "treatment plan" is very different from a course of antibiotics. When it comes to antibiotics, all you need to do is swallow the pills on schedule until they're gone. While your attitude might have some placebo effect, it's going to be relatively minor.

But working the steps in AA is more like following the practice guidelines of your music teacher: commitment and focus matter at least as much as plodding through all the assigned etudes and scales and practice pieces. Put simply, difficult-to-measure subjective phenomena play a much bigger role when it comes to making proper use of what AA offers than they do when it comes to making proper use of antibiotics. In AA, there's a difference between working the program and going through the motions, and it's a difference that matters a lot for one's chances of success. It's also a difference that's difficult to take into account in a study.

That difficulty is compounded by the "anonymous" feature of AA. Here's how one overview of studies into AA puts the problem:

Accurate reports about the success rates of 12-step programs like AA and NA are notoriously difficult to obtain. The few studies that have attempted to measure the effectiveness of the program have often been contradictory. Fiercely protective of their anonymity, AA forbids researchers from conducting clinical studies of its millions of members.

In the face of that commitment to anonymity, it is hard to do any kind of study that takes into account the distinction between the committed twelve-stepper and the guy who's going through the motions. Because if you want to take that distinction into account you're going to need inside information about each person in your study--the kind of qualitative information that humans use to determine who is really committed and who is just floating along. And I can't see how you could get that kind of information without violating the confidentiality of the AA model.

Finally, there's the problem of accounting for variation in understanding and approach among AA groups. Just as with religious communities, there are different ways of understanding the 12 steps, different attitudes towards the Big Book, and different attitudes towards alternative, non-AA approaches to sobriety. Some AA groups are similar to fundamentalist exclusivists, and some are more like religious progressives. With that kind of variability, does it even make sense to ask about the success of AA as a single, monolithic entity?

What does all of this mean? It means that it would be very difficult, given the limitations of the real world, to come up with a reliable scientific way to measure the success rate of committed participation in AA. That doesn't mean no measures can be taken. But it does mean that they will typically fail to account for all the important variables, may not measure the right things all the time, etc.

But Dodes seems to treat this limitation of science as if it were the failure of AA. In this respect, he reminds me of those among the New Atheists who, under the influence of logical positivism, dismiss as unbelievable any assertion that resists scientific testing.

In the Salon piece, Dodes notes the following:

In 2006, one of the most prestigious scientific research organizations in the world, the Cochrane Collaboration, conducted a review of the many studies conducted between 1966 and 2005 and reached a stunning conclusion: “No experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA” in treating alcoholism.

This, of course, is the very conclusion one would expect given what I've said above--but Dodes presents the conclusion of the Cochrane Collaboration as if the failure to unequivocally demonstrate AA's effectiveness were reason to suppose that it's ineffective.

This is logical positivism on steroids: if it resists unequivocal proof in an experimental study, don't believe it--even if eighty years of human experience give reason to think it has considerable merit.

Let's be clear: there are lots of truths that we have yet to demonstrate are true. There are lots of truths that we will never be able to demonstrate are true. And there are some things that we have reason to think are true based on collective wisdom and a rich body of anecdotal evidence, but which we haven't been able to unequivocally demonstrate as true using experimental studies.

The rigor of science is wonderful when it can be applied--but there are some questions that fall in principle outside the scope of scientific inquiry and others where a scientific approach faces formidable practical hurdles. The question of AA's success rate falls into the latter category. And so, even if AA is the most successful addiction-recovery program around, we shouldn't be surprised if, to this point, "no experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA."

We should, however, be very surprised when someone who quotes this conclusion then asserts--in the same paragraph--that AA has a 5-10% success rate, as if some experimental studies have been able to unequivocally demonstrate the ineffectiveness of AA.

Rather than quoting dubious numbers out of context, what we should do is wrestle with what to do when we have to make a decision but don't have precise "scientific" answers. Looking into better ways to find those answers makes sense--but in the meantime, should you check out AA if you or a loved one is struggling with addiction?

The Dodes, at least in their Salon piece, don't offer much reason not to. The best they offer are some anecdotes, dubious statistics out of context, and the fallacious insinuation that absence of clear scientific evidence of success is evidence of failure. While they are surely right that therapy can often provide useful insights in the pursuit of sobriety, there is nothing preventing those who attend AA from pursuing therapy as well--unless they are prevented by financial constraints, in which case it's a good thing that they at least have AA, which is free.

In the next post in this series (which I may not get to for a few days), I will look at how the Dodes walk through the 12-steps, focusing on how their understanding of those steps seems to be distorted by (perhaps unconscious) anti-religious bias and a tendency to read the steps through the lens of fundamentalist theology.

Was C.S. Lewis a Heretic?

In a recent guest post on Andy Gill's website, Tylor Standley offers a list of Christian luminaries who--by the standards currently invoked by some conservative Evangelicals--should be dubbed heretics.

It's a pretty effective post. The aim, of course, is not to encourage Evangelicals to "excommunicate" C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther, St. Augustine, Billy Graham, and others. Rather, it's to invite them to rethink the rigid criteria of Christian orthodoxy that they impose. Do you really want to adopt a standard of what it means to be a "true" Christian that's so narrow you'd do well to bar your children from reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, lest they be led to heresy?

I personally found the comments on the post as instructive in their way as the post itself. Rather than concede that these heroes of the faith would have to be judged heretical by the current standards so many Evangelicals impose, several commenters tried to rescue their heroes from the charges.

For example, Standley "accuses" Billy Graham of being an inclusivist--that is, a Christian who thinks that non-Christians might actually be saved. Why think that? Well, in a 1997 interview, Graham said, "They may not even know the name of Jesus but they know in their hearts that they need something that they don’t have, and they turn to the only light they have, and I think that they are saved and they are going to be with us in heaven."

Just in case anyone doubts it, Standley links to a video in which Graham utters these words. A commenter responded by questioning the authenticity of the video, noting that "voices can be pretty easily impersonated." (Another commenter responded that they knew the quote was authentic because they wrote down his words when he said them.)

But of particular interest to me was the response to the claim the C.S. Lewis was an inclusivist (of the same sort as Graham) and that he denied the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement in favor of the Christus Victor theory. Standley points to The Chronicles of Narnia in support of both claims.

I don't want to get bogged down in the details of rival theories of the Atonement and the way that Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe reflects the Christus Victor view. The careful and systematic parallels between the Aslan-sacrifice story and the Christus Victor interpretation of the Christ's Atonement are vivid and unmistakable, as Greg Boyd nicely articulates here.

What interests me is that, rather than concede that a Christian might legitimately favor the Christus Victor theory, several people chose instead to challenge Standley's evidence for Lewis's supposed heresies...by arguing that the Chronicles of Narnia are a work of fantasy fiction, not theology, and so cannot be taken as representing Lewis's actual theological views.

Really?

It is true, of course, that some fiction writers toy with worldviews not their own, and shape stories defined by ways of seeing things that they don't personally endorse. These aren't the stories that make believers out of people--usually they have a very different effect. But when Lewis wrote his children's fairy tales, he was quite deliberately shaping the fruits of his imagination and the form of the fairy tale into a Christian allegory. He wanted his books to be a mode of Christian education. And every Christian Evangelical out there knows as much. That's why they're so eager to have their kids read the Narnia books.

But just in case there's any doubt, Lewis told us as much himself. In a 1956 New York Times essay, "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said," Lewis put it this way:

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past certain inhibitions which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did I find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the suffering of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to... But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could. 

Lewis saw quite clearly the power of stories to shape the heart and to give rise to religious feeling. As such, he chose to put his storytelling to the service of his faith--using the form of the fairy tale to "steal past the watchful dragons" that keep children (and adults) from experiencing the real potency of Christian teachings.

Would he do this work in service of theological perspectives at odds with what he believed to be true? I suppose, in attempting to sever the connection between Lewis's fiction and his theology, you could make such a claim. But then you'd render Lewis something worse than a heretic.

There are plenty who have trouble with Lewis precisely because of what he admits to in the 1956 essay: He knows he can shape the hearts and minds of others through storytelling, and he sets out consciously to do so. Some think this is little better than religious brainwashing.

I think that's a harsh judgment. While there are reasons to worry about indoctrination of susceptible minds, I think every good story and every effective storyteller has a message that, precisely because of the emotive and immersive power of story, can "steal past the watchful dragons" and hit us in a new and transformative way. Whether that's a good or a bad thing depends a lot on the message and the motives of the messenger.

Imagine how much worse our judgment of Lewis would be if, instead of telling allegorical stories in support of what he believed, in order to nurture feelings of wonder and reverence in relation to what spurred those feelings within himself, Lewis was in the business of using the power of storytelling to serve messages he thought were false.

It seems to me that the defining feature of a propagandist is indifference to the truth. Propagandists want to cement the power of their political faction or increase sales of their product--and will propagate whatever message serves these goals. Storytellers who love the true and the good, and who tell a story that honestly express their vision of the true and the good, are a different creature altogether.

This is what I take Lewis to be. And if that's what you take him to be, then you can't dismiss the theological ideas that emerge so vividly in his stories. Yes, they are fantasy. Yes, they are fiction. But they are fantasy fiction with a purpose--and if you're convinced that the purpose is heretical, you don't do Lewis a favor by saying he didn't really mean it.

Capital Punishment and the Christian Conscience

A couple of weeks ago, the ethics of capital punishment was pushed into the national spotlight by a botched execution here in Oklahoma. In the aftermath, here's something I noticed: When the horrific nature of the convict's death was mentioned, people were quick to point out the even more horrific nature of the crime.

Behind that move lies the retributive idea that it's intrinsically good to inflict suffering on wrongdoers, suffering that's proportionate to their offense.

But this is one idea that Jesus consistently challenged. As Christians--followers of Jesus--think about the death penalty, they would do well to ask, "Who would Jesus execute?" And although Jesus was Himself put to death by the state, He was never in a position to order an execution. So evidence of what Jesus would have done has to be more indirect.

Here, then, are some things for Christians to think about as they wrestle with the ethics of the death penalty:

Is Religious Freedom Really the Issue?

In my last post I considered some legislative attempts to preserve, under the heading of religious freedom, the right of private parties to discriminate. (The most recent example is Mississippi's "Religious Freedom Restoration Act.")

But what, exactly, is religious freedom? Doesn't our understanding of religious freedom depend on our understanding of religion?

Religious Freedom vs Freedom to Discriminate: The Case of Mississippi's "Religious Freedom Restoration Act"

In February, the Kansas House of Representatives passed a bill aimed at protecting the "right" of its citizens to discriminate against gays and lesbians on religious grounds. In the wake of cries of segregation, the Kansas State Senate killed it.

A few weeks later, the Arizona governor vetoed a similar bill that had passed both branches of the Arizona legislature.

Earlier this month, both branches of the Mississippi legislature passed its own version of the bill, which the governor promptly signed into law. The law goes into effect in July. Unlike the earlier bills, the Mississippi bill received little media attention--despite actually becoming a law (unlike its predecessors).

Perhaps this is because the Mississippi law is a bit different from the Kansas and Arizona bills.

The Holiest Night

Before the joy of Easter comes the cross.

My faith, shaped by the Lutheran tradition, teaches me that it is on the cross that we encounter God's most profound revelation of the divine essence.

It is not through rising in glory that God's loving nature finds its most perfect expression, but rather through suffering the most humiliating and agonizing of punishments despite His perfect innocence.

It is not through defeating death that Jesus' divine nature shines forth most profoundly, but through facing it.

It is not in seeing the empty tomb that we witness the deepest truth about God. It is, rather, in seeing the incarnate God accept the very worst that humanity can do, endure the most profound rejection, and love us still. Love us with a radical, unflagging love.

In the cross we see God step into the place of debasement, the place of despair, the place where human beings are treated like something worse than things--step into that place and say, "Here I stand."

And in that moment, every scapegoat ceases to be a a sacrifice to the gods and becomes instead what we do to God. "What you do to the least of these, you do to me." On the cross we see just what that means.

In that moment, our ultimate rejection of love discovers the meaning of a love that reaches across the gap of rejection and says, "Not even this can separate us."

In that moment, our worst afflictions become moments of solidarity with the very foundation of reality. When we feel most cut off from the good, when despair and loneliness and anguish seem to consume our souls, we discover that God is there--and not just there, but there at His most human, at the point at which the divine enters most fully into the world.

By an act of stunning audacity, God turns the universe on its head, and finds a way to be most fully present to us in that space where God is felt to be most fully absent.

The empty tomb is the effect, the consequence. The cross is the thing itself.

Today is Good Friday, Silent Friday, Black Friday. Today Christians turn their thoughts to this staggering thing.

May this holiest night rip through the veils of the ordinary and move you to wonder.    

Blog Milestones

This blog has enjoyed two milestones in the past week. First, the previous post, "Slumber Parties in the Shadow of Death: A Holy Week Meditation," was my 500th post on this blog. Given how long my posts tend to be, that's a lot of pages.

Second, my post before that one, "Anti-Gay Bigotry, Sincere Belief, and Christianity," has now surpassed 10,000 page views--a first for this blog. Most of the traffic to the post seems to be coming from Facebook, meaning that a lot of people have found it challenging enough or meaningful enough (or both) to share.

Slumber Parties in the Shadow of Death: A Holy Week Meditation

In the spring after my father’s death, on the night before Easter, my then eight-year-old son announced that he wanted to invite his sister over for a slumber party. It would involve bringing her stuffed lion-bear across the hall. And her pillow. As far as slumber parties go it was a low-stress affair.

In fact he’d already invited her. The two were anxiously awaiting my blessing. My daughter—a twirly five-year-old—clung to my leg saying, “Can we, Daddy? Can we? Can we?” Her brother was perched on his toes, hands clasped over his belly and eyebrows raised. “It’s Easter Eve! It’s a special occasion!”

I found myself looking down at my children with an ache. They weren’t thinking about it, but it was hard for me to think of anything else. Hard not to see in this eager moment the shadow of October; hard not to hear that same request, born then from the need for comfort in the dark.

Anti-Gay Bigotry, Sincere Belief, and Christianity

There's a meme going around on social media that looks like this:



A recent Huffington Post article, "The Myth of Christian Discrimination in the LGBT Rights Movement," did a pretty nice job of explaining some of the key problems with this meme. But there are things I wish the article would have said--and there is a grain of truth in the meme that I want to acknowledge.