For those who didn’t see Mark Oppenheimer’s article in the New York Times earlier this month, Living the Questions was mentioned in his weekend “Beliefs” feature. Oppenheimer focused on the evangelical group, Fixed Point Foundation, and its effort to air an ad during the super bowl. In “Super Bowl Ads Will Leave a Religious Question Unanswered,” Oppenheimer suggests that,
Mark Oppenheimer writes for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Mother Jones, Tablet, The Forward, and many other publications. He is an editor of The New Haven Review and an occasional commentator on NPR.
“Perhaps he (Larry Taunton of Fixed Point) should share some halftime pork rinds with the folks at Living the Questions, a Phoenix company that publishes liberal Christian education materials. They too had an advertisement rejected, by broadcasters who may have shared Fox’s fear that any religious message could anger some of the audience.
Last month, Living the Questions bought radio time for one of its products on stations in Portland, Ore. The one-minute ad for Saving Jesus, a 12-part video course, begins with the question, “Ever feel like Jesus has been kidnapped and taken hostage by the Christian right?”
In Portland, the advertisement was dropped after the first day by three stations owned by Entercom Radio, and dropped after 10 days, and 36 airings, by KINK-FM, owned by Alpha Broadcasting. Erin Hubert, program director for Entercom, said that although the station received only one complaint about the spot, it was dropped “because a local advertiser wanted that time.”
But David M. Felten, co-owner of Living the Questions, said his media buyer told him in a Jan. 6 e-mail that “there is a radio group in Portland that asked us to pull their online streaming spots off of the air due to some listener complaints.” And KINK-FM was also responding to feedback from listeners, said Amy Leimbach, the director of sales for Alpha Broadcasting.
“If a commercial is offensive to our listeners, regardless of who the client might be, and we get a constant barrage of complaints, we will take it off the air,” Ms. Leimbach said.
Of course, it is unclear who would be more upset by an ad defending Christianity from the “religious right”: those on the religious right, who feel slighted, or secular rock-radio listeners who resent evangelism even from liberal Christians.Ms. Leimbach refused to share any of the many e-mails she said her station received each day the ad aired.
The general reaction, she said, was “I can’t believe KINK would take a position on this,” Ms. Leimbach said. “They felt by running it, the station was taking a position on religion.”
It is not just broadcasters who fear the power of religious advertising to anger customers.
In December, the Fort Worth Transportation Authority ran bus advertisements that read, “Millions of people are good without God.”
Local Christians responded with a bus boycott, and one group hired a van bearing the message “I Still Love You. — God” to follow a city bus. Within a week, the transportation authority resolved the conflict by banning all religious advertising, including that of atheists.
And so, liberated from eternal quarrels, Fort Worth city buses — like Fox Sports and KINK-FM — will have more space to sell us potato chips and car leases.”
The whole article appeared in print on February 5, 2011, on page A12 of the New York edition of The New York Times. To read the whole article, click HERE.
Thanks again to Mark Oppenheimer for the ink on LtQ! Thanks also to Chuck Currie, whose hustle with the Portland media, social media savvy, and blog-posts were responsible for bringing LtQ’s radio “drama” to the attention of many.
For a link to the Radio Spot that caused all the hubbub, click HERE.
PORTLAND, OREGON – What is media giant Entercom Communications afraid of? Curriculum publisher “Living the Questions” recently contracted with three of Entercom’s Portland area stations, KGON-FM (Classic Rock), KWJJ-FM (Country), KYCH-FM (Classic Hits) to run professionally produced ads as part of their online streaming radio services. Without an explanation beyond “due to listener complaint,” the ads were pulled after only one day.
Living the Questions is a respected resource of video curriculum for progressive Christian communities around the world. The Portland radio spots advertised a new series called “Saving Jesus” with the seemingly balanced introduction:
“Ever feel like Jesus has been kidnapped and taken hostage by the Christian Right? Or maybe even worse, simply cast aside as irrelevant by those on the secular left?”
Portland was chosen specifically because of its established reputation as a liberal-leaning market. However, there seems to be very well organized opposition to any message other than that deemed acceptable to the Christian Right. That or it doesn’t take much for Entercom to be threatened into compliance with the expectations and prejudices of a fraction of their listening community.
And now, after moving the ads to “substitute” Portland radio stations, Alpha Broadcasting’s KINK has pulled the ad because, according to KINK’s Amanda Quillen, programming is “getting flooded with calls & emails” “from angry listeners ‘bothered’ by the message.” Are these angry conservative Christians calling? Angry liberals?
If it is angry Christians defensive about their narrow interpretation of Jesus, how are they any different from Muslim Extremists who react so negatively to representations of the prophet that they deem offensive? What’s going on in Portland?
Portland Blogger & UCC pastor, Chuck Currie
“I’ve used the Saving Jesus curriculum and other programs from the Living the Questions series at three Portland-area churches,” said The Rev. Chuck Currie, a minister in the United Church of Christ (www.chuckcurrie.com). “It is deeply concerning to me that Portland radio stations would refuse to air commercials for a Christian education program when they have no qualms about running negative political advertising. Either these stations are caving to voices from the Religious Right or from those who wrongly assume that all religion is bad. Banning advertising from progressive Christians is not at all dissimilar to how media in some parts of the country tried to keep The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other religious voices fighting for civil rights off the air in the 1960s.”
In a similar development, a print version of the banned radio ad is scheduled to run in the same region in Time, Newsweek, and The Week at the end of January 2011. Although the ad is a simple picture of Jesus along with the questions above, the legal department at Sports Illustrated rejected the ad as too “jarring.” No further explanation was available.
“Saving Jesus” co-author, Jeff Procter-Murphy, has run into similar challenges in the past. He recalls trying to rent a billboard promoting the work of pro-LGBT clergy group, No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, in Phoenix. Clear Channel refused to release available billboards for the ad. As Clear Channel had the monopoly on the market, the group had no other options.
Montgomery, Alabama. 1965. 100,000 people demonstrating for voting rights. Tex Sample was there.
Finally the time came for Dr. King’s speech. I still regard that speech in Montgomery as the equal of the one that he had made in Washington in 1963. And when Dr. King enters into the last part of that speech, he began a kind of a call and response with himself, initially. He shouts out: “How long?” and he responds to himself, “Not long! How long? Not long! How long? Not long because no lie can live forever! How long? Not long! Because while the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice!” “How long?! Not long!” “How long?! Not long!” And then he shouted at us, “How long?” and those thousands of people got up off the ground and on their feet and shouted back, “NOT LONG!!!!”
Although the day culminated in Dr. King’s inspiring speech, there were other profound experiences of grace along the way…
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Former Academic Dean and Emeritus Professor of Church and Society at the Saint Paul School of Theology, Sample is a freelance lecturer, workshop leader, consultant, and storyteller. His books include Ministry in an Oral Culture: Living with Will Rogers, Uncle Remus, and Minnie Pearl, and co-editor of The Loyal Opposition: Struggling with the Church on Homosexuality. He is currently the coordinator of the Network for the Study of U.S. Lifestyles.
Excerpted from Living the Questions 2.0,
Episode 16: Social Justice:
“Realizing God’s Vision”
(Available as both a Small Group study and in a Home Edition for personal use at www.livingthequestions.com)
In this excerpt from the original Living the Questions program, Heather Murray Elkins shares a poignant story about the mystery and meaning of Christian baptism.
The Rev. Dr. Heather Murray Elkins, teacher, author, and truck-stop chaplain, is Professor of Worship, Preaching, and the Arts at Drew Theological School.
Excerpted from LtQ’s new “Saving Jesus Redux,” the words of Robert Raines are given voice in this prayer for the New Year. May your discontent lead to change and transformation in 2011!
O God,
make me discontented with things the way they are in the world,
and in my own life.
Make me notice the stains when people get spilled on.
Make me care about the slum child downtown, the misfit at work,
the people crammed into the mental hospital,
the men, women and youth behind bars.
Jar my complacency, expose my excuses,
get me involved in the life of my city and world.
Give me integrity once more, O God,
as we seek to be changed and transformed,
with a new understanding and awareness of our common humanity.
It’s that time of year again. Shoppers are rushing home with their treasures — all to honor the birth of a 1st century Jewish peasant. If most folks even think about anything beyond the gifts and carols, the conventional wisdom is that we’re celebrating the occurrence of actual historical events some 2000 years ago — wisdom based on an assumption that the gospels are history.
But even a cursory reading of Matthew and Luke reveal conflicting story lines, characters, and theological agendas that show that they couldn’t possibly BOTH be historically accurate. But that’s OK. Neither one was ever intended to be history, but symbolism. The problem comes when well-meaning believers try to make them into something they were never intended to be.
In Living the Questions 2.0, Marcus Borg makes a case for moving from the magical thinking of pre-critical naiveté through critical thinking to a post-critical naiveté that can still appreciate the Christmas stories for their deeper theological meanings, not their supposed historical accuracy.
“I don’t think the truth of the Christmas stories is dependant upon whether Jesus was born in Nazareth or Bethlehem, whether there were wise men, whether there really was a star. I think the truth of the stories is in their ancient archetypal religious symbolism, those affirmations that Jesus is the light and the darkness, and so forth.
“To hear these stories is using some of the most ancient archetypal language with one of their central affirmations being, Jesus is the light of the world, the true light that enlightens every person, with even them coming into the world. That’s the star, the radiant glory of God, and the angels in the night sky. It is the ability to hear the birth stories as true stories even though you know the star is not an astronomical object of history but probably the exegetical creation of Matthew as he interprets the sixtieth chapter of Isaiah as a literary creation. Even as you know that Jesus was probably born in Nazareth and not in Bethlehem. And even as you know that Herod the Great never ordered the slaying of all male babies in Bethlehem under age two, but rather that is the use of the story of the birth of Moses in the time of Pharaoh when Pharaoh issued a similar order and the author of Matthew is saying the story of Jesus is about the story of the true king coming into the world who the evil kings seeks to swallow up. This is the story of the exodus all over again. This is the story of the conflict between the Lordship of God known in Christ and the Lordship of Pharaoh and the rulers of this world and the rulers of this world always try to swallow up the one who is of God. Is that true? Post-critical naiveté is the ability to hear that as a true story.”
The birth narratives in Matthew and Luke are unlikely to portray much of anything that is “true” historically, but remain beautiful examples of engaging stories that conveyed the gospel writers’ claims of who Jesus was for their communities. Once we get over the need for the stories to be “true” factually, we can re-engage with them and appreciate the richness of their symbolism.
Pastors David Felten and Jeff Procter-Murphy, along with the voices of top Bible scholars and church leaders—including Marcus Borg, Diana Butler Bass, John Dominic Crossan, Helen Prejean, and John Shelby Spong—provide a primer to a church movement that encourages every Christian to “live the questions” instead of “forcing the answers.”
Based on the bestselling DVD course, "Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity" tackles issues of faith, dogma, and controversial subjects that many churches are afraid to address. "Living the Questions" is the most comprehensive survey of progressive Christianity in existence today.
Available at www.livingthequestions.com, through online booksellers, and as a Kindle download!
“A welcome book that is bold (without being contentious) and courageous (without needing to be triumphant), Felten and Procter-Murphy give voice to a faith that provides a profound alternative to the dominant ideology of ‘American Christianity.’ Attention should be paid!”
— WALTER BRUEGGEMANN, PROFESSOR EMERITUS, COLUMBIA THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
Living the Questions 
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