“When we mention the weather, then, as part of the larger seasonal narrative, or of a smaller, immediate one, like the course of a storm, we’re acknowledging this shared narrative — one of the few universal ones we have. Of course, we aren’t consciously acknowledging it; but nevertheless, don’t we refer to it all the same? Perhaps, then, what we’re accessing when we habitually remark upon the weather outside is this sense of a shared narrative, one that’s as ineluctable as breathing. Our unthinking and fleeting remarks about inches of snow and the shapes of the clouds are a trace of our shared narrative that is the weather and its cycles — the deepest level of any cultural ritual.” In other news, this week will be cold, then warmer, then cold again, it being January and all.

It’s hard to say in what, exactly, our elected representatives believe. Oh, this Congress got all sorts of attention for running, and winning, on a tea partyish platform of ideological purity, but when it comes to belief belief — in the cosmic stuff, last things and first scriptural principles — they’re a distinctly squishy bunch.

They are, like the country they represent, majority Protestant, according to a new study by the Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life. But as is the case with the country’s broader Protestant profile, it’s hard to say what, beyond a general feel-good affinity for Jesus, that faith entails. Not surprisingly, the 112th Congress includes stronger contingents of the well-to-do Protestant denominations: it has four times the percentage of Episcopalians, and three times the proportion of Presbyterians, than you find in the general US population.

But the fastest-growing contingent of the Protestant faithful on Capitol Hill are those who don’t specify any denominational leanings. These souls increased by 19 from the last Congress to this one, up to 58 members. Nor is it clear that these are doctrinally non-denominational believers — yes, the schismatic strain in Protestantism is traditionally so robust that not claiming a denominational affiliation can itself be a denominational affiliation — since only two members of the squishy Protestant sample specified such nondenominational membership.

Firm conclusions or demographic trends from this research are necessarily a matter of conjecture — but then, one does well to caution, so is nearly all discussion of religious doctrine. Some Pentecostal observers, mindful of their own denomination’s fervid growth in the spiritual marketplace, have rushed in to suggest the new vaguely churched Protestant bloc in Congress may be charismatically inclined.

As Charisma magazine correspondent Jennifer LeClaire notes, if you move the yardsticks back aways from the previous Congress, to the heyday of “mainline Protestantism” — the stuffier strains of Methodist, Baptist and Congregationalist faith — then the trendline would seem to favor the more experiential and less doctrinally rigid Pentecostal types of belief. The percentage of Methodists in Congress has dropped by half over the past half century, with Episcopalians and Presbyterians logging dropoffs between a third and a half. The poor Congregationalists have dwindled from 27 to four since 1961. “The religious composition of Congress shows a continued American religiosity, but one that is decreasingly associated with Mainline Protestantism,” Institute on Religion and Democracy President Mark Tooley reports. “Just as Mainline Protestantism no longer occupies the central place in public life as it did a generation ago, we are seeing fewer and fewer elected Representatives from those denominations.”

Of course, it’s in the interest of the Pentecostal brand to lay claim to the growth of an influential cohort of believers — however fuzzy it may have become in theological terms, American Protestantism is nothing if not entrepreneurial. But there are plenty of reasons that LeClaire’s surmise is plausible. For one thing, one of the significant trends in modern U.S. religion has been the rise of Pentecostalism — which originated as a hardscrabble, itinerant and disproportionately African-American Protestant denomination in the poorer stretches of the South and West — into a full-blown gospel of success. A particularly militant wing of Pentecostalism — the so-called Word Faith tradition — claims the adherence of Sarah Palin, the spiritual godmother of last November’s tea party semi-sweep, and the most signature on-the-make personage in today’s conservative political scene.

More broadly, however, Pentecostal preachers are the face of the new millennial equation of Christian observance with unbridled material well-being, in the preachings of such otherwise diverse figures as Joel Osteen and the aptly named chief shiller of the “prosperity gospel,” Creflo Dollar. It’s also the faith of world-class conspiratorial-nut-cum-presidential hopeful Pat Robertson, and has supplied an important tributary of the secretive “Fellowship” faith of high-powered DC spiritual elitists, chronicled expertly by journalist Jeff Sharlet.

Beyond its growing elite appeal, however, Pentecostalism has been a key formative influence in the rise of modern conservatism. As historian Darren Dochuck shows in his new book From Bible Belt to Sun Belt, the Assemblies of God movement in Southern California was instrumental in channeling the historically Democratic-leaning southern migrant population into the Reaganite GOP. Pentecostalism closely tracked the sudden postwar surge of prosperity among the golden state’s southern exiles — like the seemingly miraculous growth of the Angeleno aerospace exurbs, charismatic Christianity appeared to bear direct witness to the chosen character of a socially conservative yet anti-hierarchical and experiential cohort of southern believers.

Pentecostals also formed the vanguard of the 1960s and 1970s “Jesus People” youth movement in California and throughout the United States, helping to brand spiritual conservatism as a sunny, future-oriented faith, much as Reagan had. The features of Pentecostalism that the Protestant mainline had formerly found so off-putting — the glossolalia and faith-healing exploits of a primitive Church militant — now took a backseat to the slick musical spectacles produced at Melodyland, an early forerunner to regional megchurches like Rick Warren’s Saddleback empire, constructed fittingly enough in a former musical theater-in-the-round, just down the road from Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Anaheim.

Pentecostals helped lead the way, in other words, toward a more self-consciously modern formulation of evangelical conservatism, one that stressed direct communion of believers with the Holy Spirit, and therefore was ideally suited to the explosion of televangelical and megachurch preaching alongside the rise of the evangelical right. Much as the original Assemblies of God was the lead spiritual outlet for displaced and disenfranchised agrarian southerners, so has modern Pentecostalism become the signature faith of the Amerian exurb — promising instant spiritual gratification and material earthly reward in a scheme of salvation that elevates the virtue of the striving individual believer above the mainline Protestant social model of the “priesthood of all believers.”

And for all the talk of the tea party’s incorrigibly libertarian skepticism when it comes to manning the well-dug bunkers of the culture wars, it bears reminding that the last election cycle saw evangelical voters turn out in record numbers — a show of strength that inspired former Christian Coalition leader (and Jack Abramoff crony) Ralph Reed to hail the dawning age of the “teavangelical.” The spiritual profile of the new Congress may be something of a work in progress still — but if its newly empowered tea party vanguard is smart, its members will clamor to herald the political gifts of the spirit in much the same fashion that Ronald Reagan did.

Chris Lehmann is our religion columnist now.

Photo from Flickr, by John McNab, 1962.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, currently under investigation for pretty much everything, including allegations that he paid a teenage dancer for sex (see wacky Taiwanese animated news summary above), told the nation that the allegations against him are false and that anyway he has been secretly dating one very special lady this whole time, so when would he even have a chance to bang hookers? In the wake of a police raid on the home of some of his party attendees, the premier explained that the festivities were more of an outreach session than anything else.

Speaking from a studio at the mansion, its shelves lined with photos of his family, Berlusconi likened the operation to a mafia roundup, claiming that the only crime committed by the women was “to give me friendship and affection” during the “elegant” and “tranquil” soirees that gave him the chance to communicate with young people.

Tackling reports he doled out large sums of cash to his female guests, Berlusconi said he was proud to help those in need “with their homes, medical care and schooling for their children, but there was never any connection between money and sexual performances”.

See? The guy’s all heart. And Viagra, probably.

Science, tell me I’m not only pretty, but really smart: “AS if they didn’t have it easy enough already, good-looking people are also the cleverest, a new study has revealed. The research found handsome men scored 13.6 points above the average IQ score of 100. And beautiful women were 11.4 points above the norm, according to the London School of Economics.” Study author Satoshi Kanazawa theorizes that smart, good-looking people like to do sex to each other, resulting in smart, good-looking babies who will grow up wanting to do sex to other smart-good looking grown-up babies, in essence keeping all the smart, good-looking genes in the same pool. Kanazawa cautions, “our contention that beautiful people are more intelligent is purely scientific. It is not a prescription for how to treat or judge others.” Which, uh, good luck with that.

What happens when a tabloid gets wind of a two-year-old study project that was recently presented at a conference and has nothing else to write about? (“Tunisia” being outside of the tabloid purview, I guess.) This: “Walls of water 10ft high in a month-long mega hurricane: California told to prepare for biblical ‘ARkStorm’”! Thanks, Daily Mail! “Told to prepare” is a particularly genius construction. Of course, in its own much quieter way, the Times followed suit. Prepare to die, hippies! But first enjoy this hilarious video.

“Zenyatta’s now in a stall at Lane’s End Farm near Versailles, Ky., awaiting her first breeding date, with the stallion to be announced soon. On the other side of Lexington, Blame will stand at stud and try to reproduce greatness at Claiborne Farm near Paris, Ky. Some 1,200 miles away, one of them will be named Horse of the Year on Monday at the Eclipse Awards, the sport’s Tonys, Emmys and Oscars.”
 — It’s a tough decision. Zenyatta, apparently, is the popular choice among horse racing fans. And she was named after a Police album. (Her owner is former A&M; Records exec, Jerry Moss.) But it’s probably the second-to-worst album of their catalogue. So I’m throwing my vote for Blame, who reminds me of the Afghan Whigs, standing at stud and all like Greg Dulli.

Oh, and as for Year of the Horse? That’s easier.

In the part of his Fox News show not devoted to perfectly enunciated emo-libertarian word salad served over stock footage of Nazi rallies, Glenn Beck occasionally gets emotional about old commercials. Which, like just about everything else having to do with him, is something I’d be perfectly content to leave a secret between him and his horrorshow fan base of gout-afflicted exurban Chamber of Commerce types and seething elderlies. If they want to get together and be dewy over the ad in which a little kid gives his bottle of Coke to Mean Joe Greene, they should absolutely do that. They should do that just as surely as they should remember not to vote, and that’s my stance.

But while it’s easy for me to judge an idiot magical-realist sentimentalism that reads sappy Super Bowl commercials as secret documentaries of the national heart — it is so incredibly easy that I honestly barely even had to type any of what you just read — it’s also true that I and most everyone else make good use of fictive nostalgia. I might imagine, for instance, that it would’ve been great to see Television at CBGB’s in the year of my birth, but it almost certainly would not have been great, and not only because I would’ve been an infant. Everyone involved would’ve been zombified on heroin, Johnny Thunders’ girlfriend would wave a razor in my face for no reason (from what I remember of Please Kill Me she would’ve done this even if I was there as my infant 1978 self), Handsome Dick Manitoba would yarf 72 fully intact qaaludes onto my shoes. I know this, but I remain powerless before the illusion that the show would’ve looked and sounded better and truer than the shows I see today in clean, dark venues with expensive drinks.

The same illusion holds, for me, with the NFL of the 1970s and ’80s. That NFL was doubtless every bit as brutal a wasteland of crass exploitation, puddingheaded bombast and grunty revanchism as this one. Football players and owners and coaches are football players and owners and coaches, and can be expected to behave as such. That the world of the NFL was smaller and marginally and quaintly more disreputable is, like the allure of CBGB’s in that “Marquee Moon” fantasy, the sort of thing that is most appealing at a safe distance. I know all that, but I can’t quite believe it.

But, irresponsible and absurd as it is to imagine a golden age of any kind that includes either Al Davis or the phrase “sex symbol Terry Bradshaw,” the idea of a NFL that was shaggy — not just in terms of mustachery and strange Ford Administration hairdos but, sure, that too — and less dedicated to performing and embodying its brand truths is appealing in some very easy to understand ways. It isn’t so much that the NFL I imagine was more creative or less self-serious or more joyous or any of the other things I wish it currently were — it wasn’t, I know. Professional football has never had a philosopher king era, and if Jim Plunkett looks kind of rock and roll and cool from a particular contemporary perspective, it’s almost certain that he was just as dull and driven and mercilessly competitive as Tom Brady is when it comes to football.

The difference, at least through the scrim of hopeful projection through which I imagine the era but I think also quite possibly truly, is that all involved were a bit less self-conscious about all of it, that the entire NFL Experience seemed to involve just a little bit less at every level. If owners were as craven and self-satisfied then as they are today, the norms of the era dictated that they at least try to seem marginally less cavalier about engaging their fan bases and municipalities the way mining companies engage mountaintops. And if players were reckless, egomaniacal goofs… well, they were. And I think it’s the recklessness that I’m saddest of all to have missed. Or, if not the recklessness itself, then the sense that message discipline was not yet considered a crucial component of the NFL skill set.

The last few decades have not been kind to the practice or premise of the sort of spontaneity I’m talking about, both in the way that they have empowered increasingly comprehensive means and methods of self-regard and in the ways that sad, glib Brand Called You marketization has so coarsened the way that we regard the self we’re constantly checking up on. And so some of this flattening — the subsuming of the individual athletes who gave the came color and shape into a branded whole and the simultaneous acceptance that the subsuming is worth it if the pay is right — was inevitable, or inexorable. Roger Goodell (and David Stern before him in the NBA) might embody the latest and greatest incarnation of this poison-spiked corporatism, but he didn’t start it.

And he can’t quite vanquish it, either. For all the commercials pushing the NFL as A Thing American Families Enjoy Together, for all the furious brand leverage evident in the game’s every televised moment, the game is still played by football players and coached by football coaches. Which is to say: by fucking crazy, crazy humans. If Baltimore Ravens pass rusher Terrell Suggs wants to wear a t-shirt emblazoned with a middle-finger under the words “Hey Pittsburgh” to practice and then mumblingly chide the media for trying to read too much into it, he may or may not be subject to a fine. But I can’t think of a single football fan who would argue anything but that Suggs can and absolutely should do that. (It’s worth mentioning here that Suggs, who looks like a very big and very real version of a very poor police sketch, is someone who won a brawl that started with him getting struck in the head with a length of steel rebar, and criticizing that sort of person seems unwise at several levels)

Is all that silly nastiness helping, in some way, to make the game or the anticipation thereof any more fun? Not for me, not really. But I’ll allow it, in part because if anything is going to make one human being sincerely want to run through the body of another, ill-will — manufactured or not, deeply reasoned or deeply not-reasoned — makes as reasonable a motivator as anything I can come up with. I have no doubt that Terrell Suggs and his goofy, bought-it-in-the-parking-lot t-shirt is in earnest about his disdain for this week’s opponent. I doubt that his sentiment runs much deeper than that screen-printed flipped-bird image would suggest, but I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt that the Steelers and their fans, for reasons that probably don’t run very deep and which might contain trace amounts of any manner of toxic substances, feel the same way.

The pity, then, is less the dim aggro bluster of most NFL trash-talk than how rare and how disreputable it has become. New York’s sports media is famously and hilariously censure-happy, but watching the sour patch grumps that comprise the city’s sports pundit corps attack the Jets for a lack of message discipline in their ramshackle week-long psy-ops campaign against the New England Patriots is a bummer for reasons that go beyond the (manifold) regular reasons that reading the Post is a bummer. It’s true that, as trash talk goes, Rex Ryan’s campaign of passive-aggression and underminer-y linguistic loading was kind of clumsy, but if there’s a reason to criticize it at all, it’s that it lacked Ryan’s usual kookily outsized joy of performance. The Patriots, who have kept up their team-wide Patrick Bateman routine for half a decade now, and are the apotheosis of the NFL’s new victory-without-joy norm, would never take Ryan’s distraction-bait, no matter how well he delivered it. The two teams deal in essentially different styles and languages — watching Ryan’s ragged (and not-necessarily-likable) Jets and Bill Belichick’s lockstep Pats engage each other in the media is like watching a debate between Roddy Piper and Donald Rumsfeld.

That Ryan may actually have managed to piss off the Patriots was only revealed on Friday by a press conference in which Pats receiver Wes Welker made numerous obvious-but-deniable references to Ryan’s now-public foot fetish. (Long story. Gross story.) It hardly seemed worth it. But while Ryan’s campaign might not have been totally true to his rhetorical strengths — cornerback Antonio Cromartie’s witless but frank assessment of the ultra-Batemanian Tom Brady (“He’s an asshole, fuck him”) seems closer to that — only a true churl or overdetermined sports columnist wouldn’t give him points for trying, and for bringing every bit of his hammy (like cured pig meat, not like the slang term) self to the task.

Jeff Pearlman, who has written some terrific books about misbehaving teams and some lousy moralizing columns about misbehaving athletes, has spent much of this week making the curiously not-self-serving argument that the Jets need to cool it, or shut up and deal, or whatever. On Monday, though, Pearlman wrote something better. In that column, he compares Ryan to a former Chicago Bears coach named Abe Gibron, who ran up an 11–30–1 record in the early 1970s. Gibron, like Ryan, was both something of a high-functioning maniac, as well as a man of (um) appetites. Pearlman recounts Gibron tasking Bears clubhouse attendants with soaking bratwursts in beer during practices. “Then, when practice was over, Abe would grill ‘em,” says Bill Martell, the team’s longtime equipment manager. “He’d eat them like they were fries.” It’s a fun piece, full of that sort of goofy color and human ridiculous and old-NFL excess. It would be a shame if Pearlman’s comparison to Gibron were intended as an insult. It’s sadder still to think of how readily, in today’s NFL culture, it could be perceived as one.

So, belatedly, sadly, finally: my season-long exercise in being really wrong is over, and the inanimate object won. Prediction-wise, I was one game under .500 over 16 weeks (I’m taking Week 17, during which I was in Thailand and definitely not thinking about football, as a bye week). The coin was significantly better than that and overall, honestly, I am totally fine leaving it there. I have been fine “leaving it there” all season, honestly. It is the closest thing to an honorable option I’ve got left. Beyond tears and/or ritual suicide, and I don’t care enough about predictions to manage even the former. There’s too much to live for. Too many adjectives to use. Too many elaborate and overdetermined meat similes to attempt. It’s a beautiful world and I can’t let my inability to ever, ever correctly predict a Houston Texans game detract from that. Although I think I seriously went 0–16 in games involving Houston this year, including being wrong on straight-ahead pick ’em games in the last two weeks. So, for the postseason, we’ll be changing currencies — the coin has been hired by a Vegas oddsmaking concern, and in his place I give you King Bhumbibol The Royal Thai Baht (KBTRTB), who will be holding it down through the postseason and will be flipped by me myself. If this thing beats me, too, I’m going to have to seriously consider the tears/ritual suicide thing.

Week 16 and Regular Season Records: Week 16 (and overall) David Roth: 8–8 (115–116–9); Al Toonie The Lucky Canadian Two-Dollar Coin: 8–8 (121–110–9)

Saturday, January 15
•Baltimore Ravens at Pittsburgh Steelers (-3), 4:30pm — DR: Baltimore; KBTRTB: Pittsburgh
•Green Bay Packers at Atlanta Falcons (-2.5), 8pm — DR: Atlanta; KPTRTB: Atlanta

Sunday, January 16
• Seattle Seahawks at Chicago Bears (-10), 1pm — DR: Chicago; KPTRTB: Seattle
• New York Jets at New England Patriots (-8.5), 4:30pm — DR: New England; KPTRTB: New England

David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!

Photo by 30039486@N03, from Flickr.

• It’s true, the machines are coming to kill you; they’ll come and kill you in space, even, where things always be blowing up.

• Meanwhile feel free to get wasted! Because at least we’re not being held endlessly in a brig due to our infatuation with super-cool hackerz.

• Here is some difficult listening; here is some difficult truth.

• Here’s the future of the copyright of your body; here’s that terrible thing that happened a week ago that made everyone upset and arguey. Here’s to naps when you can get them.

A correspondent takes issue with my characterization of the local apothecary as a crucible of spiritual malaise. She notes that: “Your POV may be very gender-specific. Most NYC women I know LOVE going to Duane Reade because it’s fun to stock up on stuff like hair products, makeup, cleaning supplies and tampons/pads. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a female friend tell me she ‘accidentally’ dropped $100+ in a Duane Reade. Shorter: Needs more ovaries.” Similar sentiments have been expressed in the post itself, leading me to realize that, not for the first time, my cock has clouded my cogitations. Apologies; I forgot how you broads all go crazy for the nail polish.