Following is the middle section of R. R. Reno's opening essay in "The Public Square" section of the latest (June/July 2011) issue of First Things. In it, Prof. Reno addresses the question of just who are "the poor" in America, and how is it that they are poor. spt+
Today, there is certainly material want in America. People who have lost their jobs can’t pay rent. Unmarried young women who have courageously refused to abort their children struggle to make ends meet. Illegal immigrants are exploited; the homeless need shelter; the hungry, food.
Some say the best way to meet these needs involves adopting tax policies designed to stimulate economic growth, along with redoubled efforts of private charity. Others emphasize public programs and increased government intervention. It’s an argument worth having, of course, and to a great degree our contemporary political debates turn on these issues. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is a unifying consensus: The moral character of a nation is measured to a large degree by its concern for the poor.
On this point I agree with many friends on the left who argue that America doesn’t have a proper concern for the poor. Our failure, however, is not merely economic. In fact, it’s not even mostly economic. A visit to the poorest neighborhoods of New York City or the most impoverished towns of rural Iowa immediately reveals poverty more profound and more pervasive than simple material want. Drugs, crime, sexual exploitation, the collapse of marriage—the sheer brutality and ugliness of the lives of many of the poor in America is shocking. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us, poverty is not only material; it is also moral, cultural, and religious (CCC 2444), and just these sorts of poverty are painfully evident today. Increasing the minimum wage or the earned-income tax credit won’t help alleviate this impoverishment.
We can’t restore a culture of marriage, for example, by spending more money on it. A recent report on marriage in America from the National Marriage Project under the leadership of W. Bradford Wilcox, When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America, paints a grim picture. The lower you are on the social scale, the more likely you are to be divorced, to cohabit while unmarried, to have more sexual partners, and to commit adultery. One of the most arresting statistics concerns children born out of wedlock. In the late 2000s, among women fifteen to forty-four years old who have dropped out of high school, more than half of those who give birth do so while unmarried. And this is true not only of those at the bottom. Among high-school graduates and women with technical training—in other words, the struggling middle class—nearly half of the women who give birth are unmarried.
A friend of mine who works as a nurse’s aide recently observed that his coworkers careen from personal crisis to personal crisis. As he told me, “Only yesterday I had to hear the complaints of one woman who was fighting with both her husband and her boyfriend.” It’s this atmosphere of personal disintegration and not the drudgery of the job—which is by no means negligible for a nurse’s aide—that he finds demoralizing.
Teachers can tell similar tales. The wife of another friend told me that her middle-school students in a small town in Iowa were perplexed by Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter: “What’s the big deal about Hester and Reverend Dimmesdale gettin’ it on?” It was a sentiment that she wearily told me was of a piece with the meth labs, malt liquor, teen pregnancies, and a general atmosphere of social collapse.
Preferential option for the poor. A Christian who hopes to follow the teachings of Jesus needs to reckon with a singular fact about American poverty: Its deepest and most debilitating deficits are moral, not financial; the most serious deprivations are cultural, not economic. Many people living at the bottom of American society have cell phones, flat-screen TVs, and some of the other goodies of consumer culture. But their lives are a mess.
And why? It’s a complicated question that I can’t convincingly answer here. But I want to end with a suggestion, if not an argument.
Read it all here (no subscription necessary). This is the first issue of First Things under the editorship of Rusty Reno, a lay theologian at Creighton University and former Episcopalian who was received into the Catholic Church as few years ago. And it's articles and essays like this that made FT a "must read" under founding editor Richard John Neuhaus.
Showing posts with label First Things. Show all posts
Showing posts with label First Things. Show all posts
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Religion, Reason, and Same-Sex Marriage
Following up on his December 2010 Washington Post article, "On Gay Marriage, Stop Playing the Hate Card," Matthew J. Franck writes in the current (May 2011) issue of First Things:
In briefly rehearsing well-known defenses of conjugal marriage that others have elaborated elsewhere, I noted in the Post that marriage "has always existed in order to bring men and women together so that children will have mothers and fathers" and that same-sex unions are "not an expansion but a dismantling of the institution." The response of some readers was not merely that I had not fully fleshed out this argument (which I could readily admit) but that such statements did not even bear the marks of rationality—that they were so obviously wrong that only those in the grip of unreasoning hatred or bigotry could put them forward.
Some of our high public officials, unfortunately, have encouraged this kind of flattening and coarsening of our public discussion. Judge Joseph Tauro, of the federal district court in Boston, in ruling against the constitutionality of section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (which defines marriage as between one man and one woman for the purposes of federal law), said last July that the difference between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples is a "distinction without meaning." How he claimed to know this, since he did not explain it, is anyone's guess, but it was enough for him to conclude that Congress, in passing DOMA, had acted on an "animus" that "targets" people on the basis of a "sexual orientation" of which Congress "disapproves." But DOMA was passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress, and signed by a Democratic president, for the express purpose of defending the right of the people in each state to govern themselves on the question of marriage. It would never even have been proposed in Congress but for the existence of a movement determined to make an end-run around the institutions of democratic decision-making—determined, that is, to persuade judges like Joseph Tauro to bend the Constitution to suit the purposes of a political agenda. DOMA is just what its title says it is—a defense of marriage against assault by a court-centered strategy. Given the feebleness of his arguments, it's a fair question just what "animus" the judge himself has toward people who disagree with him.
In late February, Judge Tauro's view was essentially adopted by the Obama administration, which announced that the Justice Department would no longer defend the constitutionality of section 3 of DOMA but would instead take the opposite position in federal courts. It is perfectly legitimate for presidents to assert their independent judgment about the constitutionality of the laws that govern us. But what passed for judgment in the administration's analysis was shockingly thin. The most substantial point made in Attorney General Eric Holder's letter to House Speaker John Boehner was that, during the 1996 debate on DOMA, some members of Congress had expressed "moral disapproval of gays and lesbians and their intimate and family relationships—precisely the kind of stereotype-based thinking and animus the Equal Protection Clause is designed to guard against."
The disapproval of "moral disapproval": This moves us closer to the heart of the matter. Not long after Judge Tauro's decision last summer came the ruling of Judge Vaughn Walker, of the federal district court in San Francisco, striking down California's Proposition 8, itself a defensive measure passed by a majority of the state's voters in 2008 after the state's supreme court invented a right of same-sex marriage under the California constitution. Judge Walker declared that there was no "rational basis" for Prop. 8. "Tradition alone," he wrote, "cannot form a rational basis for a law." Tradition normally has a presumption in its favor in such inquiries, but not for Judge Walker. He sniffed out what was really going on, declaring that "moral and religious views form the only basis for a belief that same-sex couples are different from opposite-sex couples." The law unavoidably speaks in the name of a community's moral vision, so to what did the judge really object? He called opposition to same-sex marriage a "private moral choice," with "private" meaning it was not entitled to enactment as public morality. Clearly, for Judge Walker, the reason for this conclusion lay in the second term of the phrase of his, "moral and religious views." In the most telling passage of his opinion, he claimed—as a "finding of fact," no less—that "religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful . . . harm gays and lesbians."
There we have it. Marriage only between a man and a woman is a mere "tradition" with no claim on our attention when a claim of "discrimination" is made on the other side. All that this tradition has going for it is the "moral and religious views" of its supporters. But the law embodies moral choices, so why is this moral viewpoint illegitimate as the basis of a law? The problem is that it is driven too much by the religious commitments of those who hold it—and so it must be dismissed from public life and relegated to the realm of "private moral choice," disallowed from enactment as the view of the majority in a democratic society. So toxic is it to hold certain religious views that merely believing them works a "harm" to other people. Those who hold these views must not only be prevented from enacting those views as the will of the democratic majority; they must, to the extent possible, be silenced in the public square. They must . . . shut up.
Read it all here. Prof. Franck is director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.
In briefly rehearsing well-known defenses of conjugal marriage that others have elaborated elsewhere, I noted in the Post that marriage "has always existed in order to bring men and women together so that children will have mothers and fathers" and that same-sex unions are "not an expansion but a dismantling of the institution." The response of some readers was not merely that I had not fully fleshed out this argument (which I could readily admit) but that such statements did not even bear the marks of rationality—that they were so obviously wrong that only those in the grip of unreasoning hatred or bigotry could put them forward.
Some of our high public officials, unfortunately, have encouraged this kind of flattening and coarsening of our public discussion. Judge Joseph Tauro, of the federal district court in Boston, in ruling against the constitutionality of section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (which defines marriage as between one man and one woman for the purposes of federal law), said last July that the difference between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples is a "distinction without meaning." How he claimed to know this, since he did not explain it, is anyone's guess, but it was enough for him to conclude that Congress, in passing DOMA, had acted on an "animus" that "targets" people on the basis of a "sexual orientation" of which Congress "disapproves." But DOMA was passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress, and signed by a Democratic president, for the express purpose of defending the right of the people in each state to govern themselves on the question of marriage. It would never even have been proposed in Congress but for the existence of a movement determined to make an end-run around the institutions of democratic decision-making—determined, that is, to persuade judges like Joseph Tauro to bend the Constitution to suit the purposes of a political agenda. DOMA is just what its title says it is—a defense of marriage against assault by a court-centered strategy. Given the feebleness of his arguments, it's a fair question just what "animus" the judge himself has toward people who disagree with him.
In late February, Judge Tauro's view was essentially adopted by the Obama administration, which announced that the Justice Department would no longer defend the constitutionality of section 3 of DOMA but would instead take the opposite position in federal courts. It is perfectly legitimate for presidents to assert their independent judgment about the constitutionality of the laws that govern us. But what passed for judgment in the administration's analysis was shockingly thin. The most substantial point made in Attorney General Eric Holder's letter to House Speaker John Boehner was that, during the 1996 debate on DOMA, some members of Congress had expressed "moral disapproval of gays and lesbians and their intimate and family relationships—precisely the kind of stereotype-based thinking and animus the Equal Protection Clause is designed to guard against."
The disapproval of "moral disapproval": This moves us closer to the heart of the matter. Not long after Judge Tauro's decision last summer came the ruling of Judge Vaughn Walker, of the federal district court in San Francisco, striking down California's Proposition 8, itself a defensive measure passed by a majority of the state's voters in 2008 after the state's supreme court invented a right of same-sex marriage under the California constitution. Judge Walker declared that there was no "rational basis" for Prop. 8. "Tradition alone," he wrote, "cannot form a rational basis for a law." Tradition normally has a presumption in its favor in such inquiries, but not for Judge Walker. He sniffed out what was really going on, declaring that "moral and religious views form the only basis for a belief that same-sex couples are different from opposite-sex couples." The law unavoidably speaks in the name of a community's moral vision, so to what did the judge really object? He called opposition to same-sex marriage a "private moral choice," with "private" meaning it was not entitled to enactment as public morality. Clearly, for Judge Walker, the reason for this conclusion lay in the second term of the phrase of his, "moral and religious views." In the most telling passage of his opinion, he claimed—as a "finding of fact," no less—that "religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful . . . harm gays and lesbians."
There we have it. Marriage only between a man and a woman is a mere "tradition" with no claim on our attention when a claim of "discrimination" is made on the other side. All that this tradition has going for it is the "moral and religious views" of its supporters. But the law embodies moral choices, so why is this moral viewpoint illegitimate as the basis of a law? The problem is that it is driven too much by the religious commitments of those who hold it—and so it must be dismissed from public life and relegated to the realm of "private moral choice," disallowed from enactment as the view of the majority in a democratic society. So toxic is it to hold certain religious views that merely believing them works a "harm" to other people. Those who hold these views must not only be prevented from enacting those views as the will of the democratic majority; they must, to the extent possible, be silenced in the public square. They must . . . shut up.
Read it all here. Prof. Franck is director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.
Sunday, November 07, 2010
The Doctor Meets the Bioethicist
The Doctor Meets the Bioethicist, in which people with two very different views get to know each other.
The key word that is hard to understand is "specieist." Hat tip Secondhand Smoke, a First Things blog.
The key word that is hard to understand is "specieist." Hat tip Secondhand Smoke, a First Things blog.
Friday, September 11, 2009
R. R. Reno: "Marriage, Morality, and Culture"
The always thoughtful lay theologian Rusty Reno posted the following on Wednesday over at First Things: On the Square.
The tide is going out. Words like fornication have a musty, antiquated ring. Unwed mothers no longer suffer social stigma. Divorce has become common. The large, complicated human reality of sexual desire, mating, romance, and childrearing no longer finds itself ruled by elaborate and widely accepted social norms. And now, of course, we are in the midst of a drive toward same-sex marriage.
I’m not surprised by the latest development. In my years as an Episcopalian, I came to see that homosexuality plays in important role in the much larger phenomenon of changed social mores in the area of sex, family, and marriage. The image of two men or two women kissing gives a dramatic immediacy to the many aspects of sexual revolution: real people, genuinely felt desires, new possibilities, the courage to transgress old norms, and the hope for the lasting happiness based on love’s unifying power.
In other words, homosexuality richly suggests freedom from an old, restrictive moral order, freedom from the inhibiting power of shame, freedom from the burdens of judgment, censure, and condemnation. And it evokes the promise of existential freedom, the inner release from inhibition and fear of social censure.
The allure of existential freedom is not new. In 1859, John Stuart Mill published On Liberty, an argument for expanding the scope of human freedom beyond the realm of the political narrowly understood. In order to undertake what Mill famously called “experiments in living,” we need to be able to escape from “the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.”
Mill was correct. We are social animals. Hardwired to want to fit in, all of us feel the soft coercion of cultural norms. As a result, a deep freedom to live as we please requires more than political rights. We need something like “social rights” that give us leverage over and against inherited culture.
To a very great extent, the cultural history of the twentieth century can be understood as the gradual acceptance of “social rights.” In America, a long dominant Protestant and bourgeois ethos eroded—and then in the 1960s collapsed. In a short decade, divorce went from something dangerously shameful to socially acceptable. Premarital sex and cohabitation followed the same trajectory. Acceptance of out-of-wedlock childbearing came more slowly, as did same-sex relationships. But the end result is now the same. Gay couples now have a social right to live their personal lives free from social censure.
Our courts tend to reflect social reality. In 1965, the Supreme Court was faced with a case (Griswold v. Connecticut) that challenged a law against contraceptives. In its majority decision, the Court identified a right to privacy. As a legal right narrowly understood, it means that the government has no business policing bedrooms. However, it has become more expansive, most notoriously to include right to abortion. Today, the right to privacy pretty much accords with Mill’s notion of freedom from “prevailing opinion and feeling.” It amounts to a right to conduct one’s personal life as one wishes, unhindered by other people’s ideas of right and wrong.
This expansive legal right has been reinforced by a new social consensus. Today, it is singularly gauche to announce that you regard someone’s marital, sexual, or parental choices to be “wrong” or “immoral.” Indeed, the very fact that I put scare quotes around “wrong” and “immoral” is telling. We are now heavily socialized to be tolerant and non-judgmental—with the exception, of course, of refusing to tolerate the intolerant and quick to judge the judgmental. But there is no contradiction. Both the tolerance and intolerance serve to provide and reinforce the now dominant culture, one that believes we should be able to live as we wish.
The controversial question of same-sex marriage is so interesting and important because it marks decisive new phase in our cultural drive toward an every deeper freedom to live as one pleases. Freedom from censure is no longer sufficient. Today, we see an emerging right to cultural approval and endorsement.
Some months ago, the Supreme Court of Connecticut handed down a decision that required the state legislature to make provisions for same sex marriage. The most interesting part of the opinion concerns the alternative of civil unions. As the Court recognizes, the artifice of “civil union” is a bloodless affair designed to remove the legal disadvantages that adhere to the private choices of same-sex lovers: matters of inheritance, health coverage, and so forth. The Connecticut judges deemed civil unions separate but unequal, and their reasoning is telling. Civil unions are unsatisfactory, because they lack the “transcendent historical, cultural, and social significance” of traditional marriage.
Gays and lesbians, by this way of thinking, have a right to a full range of cultural resources for defining their lives together, including the rich symbolic legacy of traditional norms for marriage. Privacy is not enough. It is unfair to deny public endorsement and quasi-sacred sanction to personal choices.
Therein lies the final act of the sexual revolution that has defined Western culture for the last fifty years. A traditional culture constrains and limits desire, especially the volatile complexities of sexual desire. The reasoning behind the drive toward same-sex marriage reverses the direction of authority. Our secular elite culture believes that desires—as long as they do not directly harm others—should command and shape culture. We should be able to make of marriage what we wish.
Result: the emerging postmodern Empire of Desire. In the past, the instruments of political power (e.g., the right to privacy) have been used to tear down official forms of limitation and censure so that desires can find their satisfactions. The soft power of culture has followed the same path. Our present and widespread social censure of moral censure inculcates and reinforces a non-judgmental ethos. Now we are embarking on a much more aggressive program. Everybody should have access to the cultural symbols of affirmation. Everybody has a right to feel normal.
This right to normalcy is very different from the right to privacy. Indeed, they can seem antithetical, since the former requires mobilizing the power of the state to redesign social institutions that we all must live with, while the later is focused on minimizing the role of government in people’s personal lives. Yet I think the right to normalcy follows from the logic of John Stuart Mill’s insights.
As social animals we don’t just want to be free from censure. We are not rugged individualists. We want to feel like we are part of the pack, and as everybody knows, feeling marginal can be very painful, even if everybody is smiling and nodding and uttering reassuring platitudes of acceptance. Therefore, if we really believe that human beings are most happy when they design their own lives, then eventually we will come around to the view that culture as a whole should be turned over to serve our desires. Moral traditions must be available for personal tailoring.
Thus, whatever one thinks of homosexuality, one can see that the judges in Connecticut framed the issue clearly. Same-sex marriage is about achieving a social or cultural equality for everyone, regardless of their experiments in living. It’s about our need to feel normal, and it’s about giving everybody access to institutions that confer feelings of normalcy and legitimacy. In the Empire of Desire, everybody gets ceremonies and ribbons and prizes and their fifteen minutes of fame.
But we cannot turn culture into the equivalent of a public access channel. As Aristotle explained in his account of moral formation and human flourishing, culture humanizes us by demanding our obedience. Happiness does not come from living according to your desires. It comes from desiring to live according to demanding and disciplining social norms that transcend individual desires.
The judges in Connecticut and elsewhere, as well as the larger same-sex marriage movement, are entertaining a fantasy. It is sociologically incoherent to imagine that we can both radically redefine marriage and transfer its “transcendent, cultural, and social significance” to same-sex couples, as if the former does not alter and undermine the later.
We cannot make culture serve our desires—or our ideals for that matter. We cannot turn traditional modes of moral discipline such as marriage into a ready resource for conferring feelings of normalcy or equality. To consciously modify the moral norms of moral institutions such as marriage turns them into something else: existential decoration, imaginary seriousness, or an engineered garment of meaning that cannot help but feel plastic and artificial. A bespoke “transcendent, cultural, and social significance” is ephemeral and short lived.
R.R. Reno is features editor of First Things and professor of theology at Creighton University.
Marriage, Morality, and Culture
R. R. RenoThe tide is going out. Words like fornication have a musty, antiquated ring. Unwed mothers no longer suffer social stigma. Divorce has become common. The large, complicated human reality of sexual desire, mating, romance, and childrearing no longer finds itself ruled by elaborate and widely accepted social norms. And now, of course, we are in the midst of a drive toward same-sex marriage.
I’m not surprised by the latest development. In my years as an Episcopalian, I came to see that homosexuality plays in important role in the much larger phenomenon of changed social mores in the area of sex, family, and marriage. The image of two men or two women kissing gives a dramatic immediacy to the many aspects of sexual revolution: real people, genuinely felt desires, new possibilities, the courage to transgress old norms, and the hope for the lasting happiness based on love’s unifying power.
In other words, homosexuality richly suggests freedom from an old, restrictive moral order, freedom from the inhibiting power of shame, freedom from the burdens of judgment, censure, and condemnation. And it evokes the promise of existential freedom, the inner release from inhibition and fear of social censure.
The allure of existential freedom is not new. In 1859, John Stuart Mill published On Liberty, an argument for expanding the scope of human freedom beyond the realm of the political narrowly understood. In order to undertake what Mill famously called “experiments in living,” we need to be able to escape from “the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.”
Mill was correct. We are social animals. Hardwired to want to fit in, all of us feel the soft coercion of cultural norms. As a result, a deep freedom to live as we please requires more than political rights. We need something like “social rights” that give us leverage over and against inherited culture.
To a very great extent, the cultural history of the twentieth century can be understood as the gradual acceptance of “social rights.” In America, a long dominant Protestant and bourgeois ethos eroded—and then in the 1960s collapsed. In a short decade, divorce went from something dangerously shameful to socially acceptable. Premarital sex and cohabitation followed the same trajectory. Acceptance of out-of-wedlock childbearing came more slowly, as did same-sex relationships. But the end result is now the same. Gay couples now have a social right to live their personal lives free from social censure.
Our courts tend to reflect social reality. In 1965, the Supreme Court was faced with a case (Griswold v. Connecticut) that challenged a law against contraceptives. In its majority decision, the Court identified a right to privacy. As a legal right narrowly understood, it means that the government has no business policing bedrooms. However, it has become more expansive, most notoriously to include right to abortion. Today, the right to privacy pretty much accords with Mill’s notion of freedom from “prevailing opinion and feeling.” It amounts to a right to conduct one’s personal life as one wishes, unhindered by other people’s ideas of right and wrong.
This expansive legal right has been reinforced by a new social consensus. Today, it is singularly gauche to announce that you regard someone’s marital, sexual, or parental choices to be “wrong” or “immoral.” Indeed, the very fact that I put scare quotes around “wrong” and “immoral” is telling. We are now heavily socialized to be tolerant and non-judgmental—with the exception, of course, of refusing to tolerate the intolerant and quick to judge the judgmental. But there is no contradiction. Both the tolerance and intolerance serve to provide and reinforce the now dominant culture, one that believes we should be able to live as we wish.
The controversial question of same-sex marriage is so interesting and important because it marks decisive new phase in our cultural drive toward an every deeper freedom to live as one pleases. Freedom from censure is no longer sufficient. Today, we see an emerging right to cultural approval and endorsement.
Some months ago, the Supreme Court of Connecticut handed down a decision that required the state legislature to make provisions for same sex marriage. The most interesting part of the opinion concerns the alternative of civil unions. As the Court recognizes, the artifice of “civil union” is a bloodless affair designed to remove the legal disadvantages that adhere to the private choices of same-sex lovers: matters of inheritance, health coverage, and so forth. The Connecticut judges deemed civil unions separate but unequal, and their reasoning is telling. Civil unions are unsatisfactory, because they lack the “transcendent historical, cultural, and social significance” of traditional marriage.
Gays and lesbians, by this way of thinking, have a right to a full range of cultural resources for defining their lives together, including the rich symbolic legacy of traditional norms for marriage. Privacy is not enough. It is unfair to deny public endorsement and quasi-sacred sanction to personal choices.
Therein lies the final act of the sexual revolution that has defined Western culture for the last fifty years. A traditional culture constrains and limits desire, especially the volatile complexities of sexual desire. The reasoning behind the drive toward same-sex marriage reverses the direction of authority. Our secular elite culture believes that desires—as long as they do not directly harm others—should command and shape culture. We should be able to make of marriage what we wish.
Result: the emerging postmodern Empire of Desire. In the past, the instruments of political power (e.g., the right to privacy) have been used to tear down official forms of limitation and censure so that desires can find their satisfactions. The soft power of culture has followed the same path. Our present and widespread social censure of moral censure inculcates and reinforces a non-judgmental ethos. Now we are embarking on a much more aggressive program. Everybody should have access to the cultural symbols of affirmation. Everybody has a right to feel normal.
This right to normalcy is very different from the right to privacy. Indeed, they can seem antithetical, since the former requires mobilizing the power of the state to redesign social institutions that we all must live with, while the later is focused on minimizing the role of government in people’s personal lives. Yet I think the right to normalcy follows from the logic of John Stuart Mill’s insights.
As social animals we don’t just want to be free from censure. We are not rugged individualists. We want to feel like we are part of the pack, and as everybody knows, feeling marginal can be very painful, even if everybody is smiling and nodding and uttering reassuring platitudes of acceptance. Therefore, if we really believe that human beings are most happy when they design their own lives, then eventually we will come around to the view that culture as a whole should be turned over to serve our desires. Moral traditions must be available for personal tailoring.
Thus, whatever one thinks of homosexuality, one can see that the judges in Connecticut framed the issue clearly. Same-sex marriage is about achieving a social or cultural equality for everyone, regardless of their experiments in living. It’s about our need to feel normal, and it’s about giving everybody access to institutions that confer feelings of normalcy and legitimacy. In the Empire of Desire, everybody gets ceremonies and ribbons and prizes and their fifteen minutes of fame.
But we cannot turn culture into the equivalent of a public access channel. As Aristotle explained in his account of moral formation and human flourishing, culture humanizes us by demanding our obedience. Happiness does not come from living according to your desires. It comes from desiring to live according to demanding and disciplining social norms that transcend individual desires.
The judges in Connecticut and elsewhere, as well as the larger same-sex marriage movement, are entertaining a fantasy. It is sociologically incoherent to imagine that we can both radically redefine marriage and transfer its “transcendent, cultural, and social significance” to same-sex couples, as if the former does not alter and undermine the later.
We cannot make culture serve our desires—or our ideals for that matter. We cannot turn traditional modes of moral discipline such as marriage into a ready resource for conferring feelings of normalcy or equality. To consciously modify the moral norms of moral institutions such as marriage turns them into something else: existential decoration, imaginary seriousness, or an engineered garment of meaning that cannot help but feel plastic and artificial. A bespoke “transcendent, cultural, and social significance” is ephemeral and short lived.
R.R. Reno is features editor of First Things and professor of theology at Creighton University.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
The Church's Bible
Robert Louis Wilken, author of one of my favorite books, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, is the General Editor of The Church's Bible, a new series of Bible commentaries that I was turned on to last month by R. R. Reno's article on First Things' On the Square.
Three volumes have been released thus far: The Song of Songs, 1 Corinthians, and Isaiah. Prof. Wilken's "Series Preface" helps us understand why this new series is so important for the Church today:
The volume on the Song was first published in 2003, 1 Corinthians (a 2006 Touchstone review had intrigued me to the series), with the third volume (Isaiah) published in 2007. Hopefully, Eerdmanns will be publishing upcoming volumes more quickly.
Three volumes have been released thus far: The Song of Songs, 1 Corinthians, and Isaiah. Prof. Wilken's "Series Preface" helps us understand why this new series is so important for the Church today:
The volumes in The Church's Bible are designed to present the Holy scriptures as understood and interpreted during the first millennium of Christian history. The Christian Church has a long tradition of commentary on the Bible. In the early church all discussion of theological topics, of moral issues, and of Christian practice took the biblical text as the starting point. The recitation of the psalms and meditation on books of the Bible, particularly in the context of the liturgy or of private prayer, nurtured the spiritual life. For most of the Church's history theology and scriptural interpretation were one. Theology was called sacra pagina (the sacred page), and the task of interpreting the Bible was a spiritual enterprise.Using this sort of commentary fits completely in line with what Dr. Gold taught me about biblical exegesis my first semester of seminary. Curiously, it doesn't fit the practice of the exegetes published most often in today's ELCA for the use of parish pastors, which focusses almost exclusively on the historical-critical method through a progressive/liberationist perspective — the main reason why I've stopped using the "latest" ELCA exegetical resources in recent years.
During the first two centuries interpretation of the Bible took the form of exposition of select passages on particular issues. For example, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, discussed many passages from the Old and New Testaments in his defense of the apostolic faith against the Gnostics. By the beginning of the third century Christian bishops and scholars had begun to preach regular series of sermons that followed the biblical books verse by verse. Some wrote more scholarly commentaries that examined in greater detail grammatical, literary, and historical questions as well as theological ideas and spiritual teachings found in the texts. From Origen of Alexandria, the first great biblical commentator in the Church's history, we have, among others, a large verse-by-verse commentary on the Gospel of John, a series of homilies on Genesis and Exodus, and a large part of his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. In the course of the first eight hundred years of Christian history Christian teachers produced a library of biblical commentaries and homilies on the Bible.
Today this ancient tradition of biblical interpretation is known only in bits and pieces, and even where it still shapes our understanding of the Bible, for example, in the selection of readings for Christian worship (e.g., Isaiah 7 and Isaiah 9 read at Christmas), or the interpretation of the Psalms in daily prayer, the spiritual world that gave it birth remains shadowy and indistinct. It is the purpose of this series to make available the richness of the Church's classical traditional of interpretation for clergy, Sunday school and Bible class teachers, men and women living in religious communities, and serious readers of the Bible.
Anyone who reads the ancient commentaries realizes at once that they are deeply spiritual, insightful, edifying, and, shall we say, "biblical." early Christian thinkers moved in the world of the Bible, understood its idiom, loved its teaching, and were filled with awe before its mysteries. The believed in the maxim, "Scripture interprets Scripture." They knew something that has largely been forgotten by biblical scholars, and their commentaries are an untapped resource for understanding the Bible as a book about Christ.
The distinctive mark of The Church's Bible is that it draws extensively on the ancient commentaries, not only on random comments drawn from theological treatises, sermons, or devotional works. Its volumes will, in the main, offer fairly lengthy excerpts from the ancient commentaries and from series of sermons on specific books. For example, in the first volume on the Song of Songs, there are long passages from Origen of Alexandria's Commentary on the Song of Songs, from Gregory of Nyssa's Homilies on the Song, and from Bernard of Clairvaux's sermons of the Song. Some passages willa be as brief as a paragraph, but many will be seeral pages in length, and some longer. We believe that it is only through a deeper immersion in the ancient sources that contemporary readers can enter into the inexhaustible spiritual and theological world of the early Church and hence of the Bible.
It is also hoped that longer passages will be suitable for private devotional reading and for spiritual reading in religious communities, in Bible study groups, and in prayer circles.
The volume on the Song was first published in 2003, 1 Corinthians (a 2006 Touchstone review had intrigued me to the series), with the third volume (Isaiah) published in 2007. Hopefully, Eerdmanns will be publishing upcoming volumes more quickly.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Task Force Dissenters Speak Out
Courtesy Lutheran Forum, the minority on the ELCA Task Force for Studies on Sexuality is identified and speaks further on their dissent from the Task Force's proposals.
However, by focusing on trust, freedom, and love of neighbor, the social statement, Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust, strains forward to see what God might be doing anew within the community of faith, particularly in regards to conduct of persons who are homosexual, rather than building on the foundation depicted in the creation accounts of Genesis. The concept of freedom of the Christian, while helpful in our understanding of salvation by faith alone, cannot be the justification for a lifestyle and behavior contrary to the biblical witness and the moral tradition. From Galatians (5:13) we heard often, “For you were called to freedom.” However, we did not hear often enough the next line, “Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the self-indulgence.” By centering on justification by faith, the social statement minimizes the role of the Law in Christian life, contrary to Luther’s exposition of the Christian life in the catechisms, and is at odds with the Lutheran Confessions—Article VI of the Formula of Concord. Justification by faith does not nullify the commands of God; to argue thus is to fall into “antinomianism.”
We contend that the recommendations proposed in Report and Recommendations, which advocate same-gender unions and the ordination of non-celibate homosexual persons, have little biblical, historical, or traditional support. The proposed recommendations advocate a radical departure from long-held moral tradition and biblical interpretation, thus distancing us further from the Roman Catholic Church, Orthodox Churches, evangelical churches and most of the churches in the Protestant mainstream. We believe this is a very serious step that should not be taken by a sharply divided church, particularly without passage by a 2/3rd vote at the 2009 Churchwide Assembly.
Because of these theological and pragmatic concerns and because the proposed recommendation threatens to fragment the ELCA as a church by allowing synods and individual congregations to determine their own practice, we felt compelled to draft Dissenting Position #1 (found in the Appendix). Recommending broad change in the present policies is extremely unwise and unfaithful. There may come a day in which a new consensus in the Church might mandate a change in teaching and practice, as was seen with slavery and Apartheid. Or, over time, this church might find that its resolve grows even stronger to maintain its foundational core beliefs, such as with the authority of scripture (II Timothy 3:16), justification by faith alone (Romans 3:28), and the primacy of Christ (Acts 4:12). Lack of consensus does not mandate change. In fact, it argues for the opposite: maintaining current policies.
Because longstanding biblical interpretation and teachings of the apostolic faith, all of which are shared with ecumenical church partners and partner churches of the Lutheran World Federation, argue against changing the current ELCA policies, we recommend the following to the 2009 Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America:
Submitted in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
The Rev. Dr. Scott Suskovic; The Rev. Corinne Johnson; The Rev. Carol S. Hendrix
Pastor Zip would amend this (otherwise fine) statement in 2 ways.
First, replace the word "celibate" with "chaste." The heart of my argument in "The Big Lie: ELCA Celibacy Requirement," noting that Vision and Expectations never calls for celibacy, but rather says:
Also, I'm still waiting for the ELCA's sexuality discussions to grapple with Jonathan Mills' thesis in Love, Covenant & Meaning, "that the presence of 'homosexual' desires in a man does not make him incapable of marrying and raising a family." While I recommend the book itself, do take a look at Gilbert Meilaender's First Things review, "Gays Marrying," from May 1998 (!) and the Mills-Meilaender dialogue in October (1998) Letters of First Things (under the headline "Appetite and Eros") for a good description.
Second, I would want to clarify that to "provide pastoral care for all to whom they minister" does not, at least if pastoral care is to be faithfully Christian, permit a Pastor to publicly "bless" a homosexual union -- regardless of how many ELCA Bishops and Pastors have twisted the Conference of Bishop's 1993 Statement to insist that it means the opposite of what it meant in 1993.
Statement by Three Dissenting Members of the ELCA Task Force on Human Sexuality
We begin with a word of thanks and gratitude for the opportunity to serve on the ELCA Task Force for Human Sexuality. Even though the three of us often disagreed with the other 27 members and advisors of the task force on traditional biblical interpretation and theological principles, we were treated as the minority voice with great kindness, dignity and respect. Because we firmly believe the current polices of the ELCA, when enforced, are consistent with the biblical witness, Christian moral tradition, and the view of the vast majority of Christians in the world, we refused to sign off on both the social statement and the recommendations and are submitting our dissent. Changing current policies would sever the ELCA from the ecumenical church and the Christian consensus down through the ages. These policies include:- People who are homosexual in their orientation must live a celibate lifestyle in order to serve on the roster of the ELCA. (Visions and Expectations and Definitions and Guidelines for Discipline)
- The 1993 Statement of the ELCA Conference of Bishops states that “there is basis neither in Scripture nor tradition for the establishment of an official ceremony by this church for the blessing of a homosexual relationship.” However, this statement by ELCA bishops acknowledged that local pastors within their contexts are to “provide pastoral care for all to whom they minister.”
However, by focusing on trust, freedom, and love of neighbor, the social statement, Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust, strains forward to see what God might be doing anew within the community of faith, particularly in regards to conduct of persons who are homosexual, rather than building on the foundation depicted in the creation accounts of Genesis. The concept of freedom of the Christian, while helpful in our understanding of salvation by faith alone, cannot be the justification for a lifestyle and behavior contrary to the biblical witness and the moral tradition. From Galatians (5:13) we heard often, “For you were called to freedom.” However, we did not hear often enough the next line, “Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the self-indulgence.” By centering on justification by faith, the social statement minimizes the role of the Law in Christian life, contrary to Luther’s exposition of the Christian life in the catechisms, and is at odds with the Lutheran Confessions—Article VI of the Formula of Concord. Justification by faith does not nullify the commands of God; to argue thus is to fall into “antinomianism.”
We contend that the recommendations proposed in Report and Recommendations, which advocate same-gender unions and the ordination of non-celibate homosexual persons, have little biblical, historical, or traditional support. The proposed recommendations advocate a radical departure from long-held moral tradition and biblical interpretation, thus distancing us further from the Roman Catholic Church, Orthodox Churches, evangelical churches and most of the churches in the Protestant mainstream. We believe this is a very serious step that should not be taken by a sharply divided church, particularly without passage by a 2/3rd vote at the 2009 Churchwide Assembly.
Because of these theological and pragmatic concerns and because the proposed recommendation threatens to fragment the ELCA as a church by allowing synods and individual congregations to determine their own practice, we felt compelled to draft Dissenting Position #1 (found in the Appendix). Recommending broad change in the present policies is extremely unwise and unfaithful. There may come a day in which a new consensus in the Church might mandate a change in teaching and practice, as was seen with slavery and Apartheid. Or, over time, this church might find that its resolve grows even stronger to maintain its foundational core beliefs, such as with the authority of scripture (II Timothy 3:16), justification by faith alone (Romans 3:28), and the primacy of Christ (Acts 4:12). Lack of consensus does not mandate change. In fact, it argues for the opposite: maintaining current policies.
Because longstanding biblical interpretation and teachings of the apostolic faith, all of which are shared with ecumenical church partners and partner churches of the Lutheran World Federation, argue against changing the current ELCA policies, we recommend the following to the 2009 Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America:
- Affirm and uphold the current policies of the ELCA, including both rostering and discipline, as stated in Vision and Expectations and Definitions and Guidelines for Discipline.
- Affirm the pastoral guidance of the 1993 Statement of the ELCA Conference of Bishops, that “there is basis neither in Scripture nor tradition for the establishment of an official ceremony by this church for the blessing of a homosexual relationship.” However, pastors within their local contexts are to “provide pastoral care for all to whom they minister.”
Submitted in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
The Rev. Dr. Scott Suskovic; The Rev. Corinne Johnson; The Rev. Carol S. Hendrix
Pastor Zip would amend this (otherwise fine) statement in 2 ways.
First, replace the word "celibate" with "chaste." The heart of my argument in "The Big Lie: ELCA Celibacy Requirement," noting that Vision and Expectations never calls for celibacy, but rather says:
Single ordained ministers are expected to live a chaste life. Married ordained ministers are expected to live in fidelity to their spouses, giving expression to sexual intimacy within a marriage relationship that is mutual, chaste, and faithful. Ordained ministers who are homosexual in their self-understanding are expected to abstain from homosexual sexual relationships.That last sentence is about chastity, not celibacy. (See what I wrote here, too.) Likewise, the Definitions and Guidelines for Discipline speak of "chastity," not "celibacy." Again, see Pr. Richard Johnson's July 2004 Forum Letter article, "Controlling Chastity."
Also, I'm still waiting for the ELCA's sexuality discussions to grapple with Jonathan Mills' thesis in Love, Covenant & Meaning, "that the presence of 'homosexual' desires in a man does not make him incapable of marrying and raising a family." While I recommend the book itself, do take a look at Gilbert Meilaender's First Things review, "Gays Marrying," from May 1998 (!) and the Mills-Meilaender dialogue in October (1998) Letters of First Things (under the headline "Appetite and Eros") for a good description.
Second, I would want to clarify that to "provide pastoral care for all to whom they minister" does not, at least if pastoral care is to be faithfully Christian, permit a Pastor to publicly "bless" a homosexual union -- regardless of how many ELCA Bishops and Pastors have twisted the Conference of Bishop's 1993 Statement to insist that it means the opposite of what it meant in 1993.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Tolerance
Francis Beckwith, writing "Same-Sex Marriage and the Failure of Justificatory Liberalism" last Wednesday at First Things On the Square, the context being the passage of California's Proposition 8 and the rage and anger in response:
But then the initial argument, offered to the general public several decades ago—the call for the wider society to be tolerant of homosexuality—was something of a ruse. Many of us were under the impression that the requirement of tolerance entailed that citizens were in fact permitted to offer negative or positive judgments about the objects of their toleration, and in some instances shape policy consistent with those judgments. After all, one does not tolerate that with which one agrees; one embraces it. One can only tolerate that with which one disagrees. This is why the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles is misnamed. One ought not to be merely tolerant of one’s fellow human beings; one ought to embrace them as persons with intrinsic dignity made in the image of God. Of course, what these persons believe and practice for a variety of subjects—including religion and human sexuality—are the proper objects of tolerance.Read it all here.
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
The Spirit of Traditional Morality
This by Nathaniel Peters over at First Things on the reaction to the news that the presumptive Republican Vice-Presidential nominee's teen-aged daughter is with child:
Joseph Bottum wrote: “though surely it’s an odd moment when an out-of-wedlock pregnancy becomes a symbol of conservative cultural values, but chalk it all up as yet another way in which abortion has skewed the natural divisions of American politics.”For what it's worth, this pastor thinks Peters and Bottom are both correct. It is an odd moment skewed by the abortion debate. And it's, well, Christian people acting like Christians, something we (being sinners) don't always do well. And something those hostile to Christians don't get because it doesn't fit with their preconceptions about us.
I beg to differ. The issue is not only that we applaud Bristol Palin for upholding the sanctity of life. The issue is how social conservatives deal with people when they don’t live up to our moral values. Do we stand up and roundly condemn them, or do we care for them while continuing to propose a more excellent way?
What we’ve seen is that, contrary to expectation, social conservatives have chosen not to condemn. The country has seen that “family values” not only means teaching your children not to have sex outside of marriage, but also supporting them responsibly should they fail to follow the teaching. In other words, it means teaching them what sin is and loving them if they sin.
That kind of standing in the truth with love should be a hallmark of those who believe in traditional morality. And it should be incomprehensible to those who do not understand the spirit behind that morality. In that light, it’s only natural that the way Sarah Palin has handled her daughter’s pregnancy should be seen as a symbol of conservative cultural values, and that those who do not share those values should be threatened by the truth lived in love.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Bob Benne on the ELCA's Sexuality Draft
Here is Prof. Bob Benne's critique of the draft ELCA social statement on sexuality from First Things: On the Square (one of my "Blogs for Faithful Churchmen"). Dr. Benne is a lay theologian/ethicist who I've read for years and who I'm glad to have gotten to know personally through Lutheran CORE. He is the director of the Center for Religion and Society at Roanoke College, an ELCA college in Salem, Virginia.
As an aside, I still have yet to look at the 46-page (double-spaced, plus notes) draft itself. But I suspect that if I were to turn to the sections of the Catechism of the Catholic Church dealing with marriage, family, and sexuality I would find them more pastorally useful than anything that has come from this 6-year study. And something much more in tune with traditional Lutheran teaching on sexuality, too. Zip+
A Sexual Ethic for Teletubbies, or
By Robert Benne
In mid-March, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) Task Force on Sexuality released a draft of what is supposed to become a Social Statement—a basis for internal church policy and a platform for advocacy in society. Millions of dollars and thousands of hours of effort have been put into an unending series of studies that have wrestled with the vexing problems of assessing the morality of homosexual relations, and from that assessment making further judgments about the blessing of gay unions and the rostering of homosexual clergy who are in committed partnerships. The basic theological/ethical challenge to assess homosexual conduct has never been addressed adequately in any preceding document. This draft Social Statement is no different in spite of expectations: It simply says that the church is divided on that issue. The kind of theological/ethical argument in this current document, however, is precisely the kind that will set the stage for a revision of Lutheran teaching on sexual ethics in the future. Such a revision would mean that the ELCA is no longer a church following in the footsteps of the Lutheran Reformation.
One of the noticeably odd features of the new draft is its absence of “males and females,” “women and men,” “husbands and wives,” “boys and girls,” and “mothers and fathers.” Instead, one reads of “couples,” “partners,” “engendered persons,” “parents,” and “children.” The subjects of the statement seem to have no distinct features, a bit like the amorphous Teletubbies of children’s television. This reluctance to affirm definite forms extends to the statement’s posture toward marriage and the family, commandments and law, guiding principles, and especially toward rules. In fact, this aversion to specific forms seems to be the fatal flaw of the document, leading to a vagueness and fluidity that undermines its capacity for genuine guidance in the church.
This formlessness appears immediately in the statement’s theological and ethical foundations. The law, though affirmed, remains a ghostly, abstract, and empty category. No commandments are mentioned. No covenantal structures—such as God’s gift of marriage to Adam and Eve—are affirmed. Indeed, there is no explication of male and female together being created in the image of God. Rather, the statement tries to derive its sexual ethic from the incarnation of Jesus and the justification his work has wrought. One of most astounding statements in the document asserts that ‘a Lutheran sexual ethic looks to the death and resurrection of Christ as the source for the values that guide it’ (emphasis mine).
Certainly Jesus makes relevant statements about sexual ethics, but these have little to do with incarnation or justification. He reaffirms the creation account of woman and man being created in the image of God; he upholds marriage and offers very strict conditions for divorce. He condemns all sorts of sexual sins—adultery, fornication, lust, etc. But all these are built on the law of God he inherited from Jewish tradition, which gives the basic form and content to the sexual ethics he teaches and sometimes sharpens.
This effort to derive sexual ethics from incarnation and justification is a very un-Lutheran way of making an ethical argument. Luther argued that marriage is located in the order of creation and should be guided by natural law, best summarized in the Ten Commandments. Given that, he thought marriage should be under the jurisdiction of the state for the common good of society. He criticized precisely the Roman Catholic tradition that kept marriage completely under ecclesial authority (governed exclusively by canon law) and that located it in the order of redemption (marriage as a sacrament imparts saving grace). Rather, Luther proposed that marriage is first of all a social estate open to all, non-Christian and Christians alike. (See John Witte’s elaboration of the Lutheran teaching on marriage in his From Sacrament to Contract.)
While it is true that God’s justifying work in Christ enables us to take up our calling in marriage, which can then be made into a Holy Estate in the church’s blessing, the form and content of marriage are given by the structure and guidance of the law. The form is very specific—a life-long covenant of fidelity between a man and a woman oriented toward loving communion and procreation. It provides the “place of responsibility” where our vocation is lived out. No formlessness there.
The statement clearly de-centers marriage as the touchstone around which Christian sexual ethics are elaborated. It takes up marriage as a topic only near the end of the document. It is even equivocal about the God-ordained status of marriage. It affirms that “Marriage is a structure of mutual promises between a man and woman blessed by God,” yet later suggests that “marriage” (quotation marks in the original document) is accorded legitimacy merely by its “historic origin.” It tepidly allows that this church “does not wish to alter this understanding” but then hurries on to dilute its affirmation by observing that some states already use “marriage” to refer to same-gender unions.
Likewise, the statement remains resolutely formless when it takes up family life. It grudgingly agrees that the nuclear family fosters the development of trust in children and youth, but immediately notes that it has not always done so effectively. Later it opts for a functional definition of the family and suggests that many arrangements can get the tasks done, not just the “conventional one.” Its pastoral compassion for many in “broken” families overcomes the possibility of making a normative statement about the form of the family.
But the biblical and Christian moral traditions are not so reluctant. A child always has a mother and father: Jesus has Joseph and Mary, Cain and Abel have Adam and Eve. Though there may be extended and even “tribal” families, the Bible always depicts a child having a mother and a father. Great care is taken to affirm and nurture this triad. A Commandment is devoted to it. It is biblically and traditionally normative, and no amount of appropriate pastoral accommodation to the fracturing or confusion of the modern family will change that.
The writers of the statement also make a strange move when they decide to use “trust” as the central ethical principle for human relations in marriage and family life, while avoiding the use of “love” as a principle. Indeed, there is little reflection on the meaning and forms of love, yet another example of the aversion to specific forms.
Trust and love are two different things. The former is a more passive quality in which one person allows his or her being to be dependent on the trustworthiness of another. Love is a more active principle that moves outward toward the other. There are distinct forms of love—libido, eros, philia, agape—that are expressed in different kinds of relationships. Some forms of love are inappropriate in some kinds of relationship. Libidinous love ought not be expressed toward children or those outside the marital bond. Chastity is the Christian virtue that leads to self-control in these matters. Agape love, the crown of Christian ethics, makes unconditional commitments and heals and restores broken relationships. Sexual love—a lively mixture of libidinous and erotic love—is to be expressed fully only in marriage and is appropriate to form. The Bible and the Christian tradition clearly prohibit sexual love to be expressed between siblings, parent and children (incest), between different kinds of species (bestiality), and between those of the same sex (homosexuality.)
These sorts of distinctions are deeply embedded in the biblical material as well as in the Christian moral tradition held by nearly all Christians throughout the ages. Sadly, the Social Statement does not draw upon that tradition to make such distinctions. There is, after all, more in Christian memory than the New Testament, Luther, and contemporary experience, which are the sources employed by the statement. Its amnesia contributes to its formlessness.
The statement promotes an ethic of responsibility—a good thing for mature people—but distances itself from any reliance on rules, another example of aversion to form, in this case formalism in ethics. For example, it cannot bring itself to affirm a rule against premarital sex or cohabitation, let along homosexual conduct. Rather, it pleads for responsibility in maintaining a level of sexual intimacy commensurate with the degree of commitment. While not favoring or giving approval to cohabitation, the statement does not proscribe it either. It inveighs against promiscuity but cannot proscribe premarital sex. Its ethic of responsibility might well allow both practices in certain circumstances. And what young person cannot find sufficient reason in his or her circumstances to justify both premarital sex and cohabitation? Clear rules might be important here, just as the rule against adultery makes things very clear for married couples. A solid ethic of responsibility would employ rules, some absolute in character.
The statement’s aversion to form gives it something of a Marcionite whiff. That aversion represents a distinct distancing from our Old Testament heritage. Little development of the creation story and the instituting by God of marriage. Little mention of the Commandments as guidance for Christian life. Little mention of the rather strict rules that undergirded life together in early Christian communities. No mention of the Old Testament—and New Testament—proscription of homosexual conduct. Indeed, little use of the law at all, in spite of its claim to honor it. It seems that, whenever Christians want to release sexuality from its created forms and from the commandments that guide it, they move away from the faith of Israel and fasten to New Testament emphases on incarnation and justification. Without the law, such emphases quickly lead to the “gospel of inclusion,” one without repentance or amendment of life. And, in the case of this statement, weak and indeterminate guidance for moral life.
It is not as if the old teachings are totally absent. They are not. But they are constantly qualified by an ethic of responsibility that shies away from forms of all kinds. I can’t say it better than the statement does itself: “A Lutheran sexual ethic deeply attuned to justification and incarnation extends well beyond the application of static principles, even biblical ones, to varying situations. This ethic is more about directing us to find a responsible place for sexuality in the service of God’s ongoing activity in the world than about containing its ambiguous power.”
Certainly the ELCA has not made a conscious decision to adopt the Marcionite heresy. But it, like other mainstream Protestant churches, has been pushed in that direction by strong feminist and gay-liberation movements within its membership. Those movements suspect that heterosexual males have been in charge of the historic faith from Abraham on down to the present time—and they want to call a halt to that. Shouldn’t women and gays and lesbians refuse to allow those heterosexual males define what to them are oppressive forms and rules? If we remove the sharp edges from the forms and dispense with the rules, won’t our general ethic of responsibility be applicable to all sorts of relationships? The statement seems to be saying “yes” to both those questions. The trouble is, saying “yes” also abandons the specific moral teachings of the Bible and Christian tradition.
Though I expected the statement to make an attempt at assessing homosexual conduct, it didn’t. But if the foregoing argument is at all compelling, the writers of the statement might be in the process of embracing a formless creation, which is a necessary prelude for the positive assessment of homosexual relations.
This unsettling suspicion overshadows the many good features of the statement. Its analysis of our current sexualized society and its many victims is one with which I heartily agree. (It seems to me, however, that the statement forgets about the millions of human beings eliminated by abortion, many of whom were the victims of irresponsible sexual behavior.) Its call for pastoral compassion for all is persuasive. Its spirit of civility and moderation is admirable. At times it speaks eloquently about marriage, though too little and too late. It makes an effort to take up the thorny questions of premarital sex and cohabitation, though it does so with less guidance than I think necessary. And, considering the difficulty of reaching consensus on these contentious issues, the statement proposes a serious line of argument, a subversive one with which I sharply disagree.
Robert Benne is director of the Center for Religion and Society at Roanoke College and the author of several books, including Reasonable Ethics: A Christian Approach to Social, Economic, and Political Concerns.
As an aside, I still have yet to look at the 46-page (double-spaced, plus notes) draft itself. But I suspect that if I were to turn to the sections of the Catechism of the Catholic Church dealing with marriage, family, and sexuality I would find them more pastorally useful than anything that has come from this 6-year study. And something much more in tune with traditional Lutheran teaching on sexuality, too. Zip+
A Sexual Ethic for Teletubbies, or
Lutherans Embrace a Formless World
By Robert BenneIn mid-March, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) Task Force on Sexuality released a draft of what is supposed to become a Social Statement—a basis for internal church policy and a platform for advocacy in society. Millions of dollars and thousands of hours of effort have been put into an unending series of studies that have wrestled with the vexing problems of assessing the morality of homosexual relations, and from that assessment making further judgments about the blessing of gay unions and the rostering of homosexual clergy who are in committed partnerships. The basic theological/ethical challenge to assess homosexual conduct has never been addressed adequately in any preceding document. This draft Social Statement is no different in spite of expectations: It simply says that the church is divided on that issue. The kind of theological/ethical argument in this current document, however, is precisely the kind that will set the stage for a revision of Lutheran teaching on sexual ethics in the future. Such a revision would mean that the ELCA is no longer a church following in the footsteps of the Lutheran Reformation.
One of the noticeably odd features of the new draft is its absence of “males and females,” “women and men,” “husbands and wives,” “boys and girls,” and “mothers and fathers.” Instead, one reads of “couples,” “partners,” “engendered persons,” “parents,” and “children.” The subjects of the statement seem to have no distinct features, a bit like the amorphous Teletubbies of children’s television. This reluctance to affirm definite forms extends to the statement’s posture toward marriage and the family, commandments and law, guiding principles, and especially toward rules. In fact, this aversion to specific forms seems to be the fatal flaw of the document, leading to a vagueness and fluidity that undermines its capacity for genuine guidance in the church.
This formlessness appears immediately in the statement’s theological and ethical foundations. The law, though affirmed, remains a ghostly, abstract, and empty category. No commandments are mentioned. No covenantal structures—such as God’s gift of marriage to Adam and Eve—are affirmed. Indeed, there is no explication of male and female together being created in the image of God. Rather, the statement tries to derive its sexual ethic from the incarnation of Jesus and the justification his work has wrought. One of most astounding statements in the document asserts that ‘a Lutheran sexual ethic looks to the death and resurrection of Christ as the source for the values that guide it’ (emphasis mine).
Certainly Jesus makes relevant statements about sexual ethics, but these have little to do with incarnation or justification. He reaffirms the creation account of woman and man being created in the image of God; he upholds marriage and offers very strict conditions for divorce. He condemns all sorts of sexual sins—adultery, fornication, lust, etc. But all these are built on the law of God he inherited from Jewish tradition, which gives the basic form and content to the sexual ethics he teaches and sometimes sharpens.
This effort to derive sexual ethics from incarnation and justification is a very un-Lutheran way of making an ethical argument. Luther argued that marriage is located in the order of creation and should be guided by natural law, best summarized in the Ten Commandments. Given that, he thought marriage should be under the jurisdiction of the state for the common good of society. He criticized precisely the Roman Catholic tradition that kept marriage completely under ecclesial authority (governed exclusively by canon law) and that located it in the order of redemption (marriage as a sacrament imparts saving grace). Rather, Luther proposed that marriage is first of all a social estate open to all, non-Christian and Christians alike. (See John Witte’s elaboration of the Lutheran teaching on marriage in his From Sacrament to Contract.)
While it is true that God’s justifying work in Christ enables us to take up our calling in marriage, which can then be made into a Holy Estate in the church’s blessing, the form and content of marriage are given by the structure and guidance of the law. The form is very specific—a life-long covenant of fidelity between a man and a woman oriented toward loving communion and procreation. It provides the “place of responsibility” where our vocation is lived out. No formlessness there.
The statement clearly de-centers marriage as the touchstone around which Christian sexual ethics are elaborated. It takes up marriage as a topic only near the end of the document. It is even equivocal about the God-ordained status of marriage. It affirms that “Marriage is a structure of mutual promises between a man and woman blessed by God,” yet later suggests that “marriage” (quotation marks in the original document) is accorded legitimacy merely by its “historic origin.” It tepidly allows that this church “does not wish to alter this understanding” but then hurries on to dilute its affirmation by observing that some states already use “marriage” to refer to same-gender unions.
Likewise, the statement remains resolutely formless when it takes up family life. It grudgingly agrees that the nuclear family fosters the development of trust in children and youth, but immediately notes that it has not always done so effectively. Later it opts for a functional definition of the family and suggests that many arrangements can get the tasks done, not just the “conventional one.” Its pastoral compassion for many in “broken” families overcomes the possibility of making a normative statement about the form of the family.
But the biblical and Christian moral traditions are not so reluctant. A child always has a mother and father: Jesus has Joseph and Mary, Cain and Abel have Adam and Eve. Though there may be extended and even “tribal” families, the Bible always depicts a child having a mother and a father. Great care is taken to affirm and nurture this triad. A Commandment is devoted to it. It is biblically and traditionally normative, and no amount of appropriate pastoral accommodation to the fracturing or confusion of the modern family will change that.
The writers of the statement also make a strange move when they decide to use “trust” as the central ethical principle for human relations in marriage and family life, while avoiding the use of “love” as a principle. Indeed, there is little reflection on the meaning and forms of love, yet another example of the aversion to specific forms.
Trust and love are two different things. The former is a more passive quality in which one person allows his or her being to be dependent on the trustworthiness of another. Love is a more active principle that moves outward toward the other. There are distinct forms of love—libido, eros, philia, agape—that are expressed in different kinds of relationships. Some forms of love are inappropriate in some kinds of relationship. Libidinous love ought not be expressed toward children or those outside the marital bond. Chastity is the Christian virtue that leads to self-control in these matters. Agape love, the crown of Christian ethics, makes unconditional commitments and heals and restores broken relationships. Sexual love—a lively mixture of libidinous and erotic love—is to be expressed fully only in marriage and is appropriate to form. The Bible and the Christian tradition clearly prohibit sexual love to be expressed between siblings, parent and children (incest), between different kinds of species (bestiality), and between those of the same sex (homosexuality.)
These sorts of distinctions are deeply embedded in the biblical material as well as in the Christian moral tradition held by nearly all Christians throughout the ages. Sadly, the Social Statement does not draw upon that tradition to make such distinctions. There is, after all, more in Christian memory than the New Testament, Luther, and contemporary experience, which are the sources employed by the statement. Its amnesia contributes to its formlessness.
The statement promotes an ethic of responsibility—a good thing for mature people—but distances itself from any reliance on rules, another example of aversion to form, in this case formalism in ethics. For example, it cannot bring itself to affirm a rule against premarital sex or cohabitation, let along homosexual conduct. Rather, it pleads for responsibility in maintaining a level of sexual intimacy commensurate with the degree of commitment. While not favoring or giving approval to cohabitation, the statement does not proscribe it either. It inveighs against promiscuity but cannot proscribe premarital sex. Its ethic of responsibility might well allow both practices in certain circumstances. And what young person cannot find sufficient reason in his or her circumstances to justify both premarital sex and cohabitation? Clear rules might be important here, just as the rule against adultery makes things very clear for married couples. A solid ethic of responsibility would employ rules, some absolute in character.
The statement’s aversion to form gives it something of a Marcionite whiff. That aversion represents a distinct distancing from our Old Testament heritage. Little development of the creation story and the instituting by God of marriage. Little mention of the Commandments as guidance for Christian life. Little mention of the rather strict rules that undergirded life together in early Christian communities. No mention of the Old Testament—and New Testament—proscription of homosexual conduct. Indeed, little use of the law at all, in spite of its claim to honor it. It seems that, whenever Christians want to release sexuality from its created forms and from the commandments that guide it, they move away from the faith of Israel and fasten to New Testament emphases on incarnation and justification. Without the law, such emphases quickly lead to the “gospel of inclusion,” one without repentance or amendment of life. And, in the case of this statement, weak and indeterminate guidance for moral life.
It is not as if the old teachings are totally absent. They are not. But they are constantly qualified by an ethic of responsibility that shies away from forms of all kinds. I can’t say it better than the statement does itself: “A Lutheran sexual ethic deeply attuned to justification and incarnation extends well beyond the application of static principles, even biblical ones, to varying situations. This ethic is more about directing us to find a responsible place for sexuality in the service of God’s ongoing activity in the world than about containing its ambiguous power.”
Certainly the ELCA has not made a conscious decision to adopt the Marcionite heresy. But it, like other mainstream Protestant churches, has been pushed in that direction by strong feminist and gay-liberation movements within its membership. Those movements suspect that heterosexual males have been in charge of the historic faith from Abraham on down to the present time—and they want to call a halt to that. Shouldn’t women and gays and lesbians refuse to allow those heterosexual males define what to them are oppressive forms and rules? If we remove the sharp edges from the forms and dispense with the rules, won’t our general ethic of responsibility be applicable to all sorts of relationships? The statement seems to be saying “yes” to both those questions. The trouble is, saying “yes” also abandons the specific moral teachings of the Bible and Christian tradition.
Though I expected the statement to make an attempt at assessing homosexual conduct, it didn’t. But if the foregoing argument is at all compelling, the writers of the statement might be in the process of embracing a formless creation, which is a necessary prelude for the positive assessment of homosexual relations.
This unsettling suspicion overshadows the many good features of the statement. Its analysis of our current sexualized society and its many victims is one with which I heartily agree. (It seems to me, however, that the statement forgets about the millions of human beings eliminated by abortion, many of whom were the victims of irresponsible sexual behavior.) Its call for pastoral compassion for all is persuasive. Its spirit of civility and moderation is admirable. At times it speaks eloquently about marriage, though too little and too late. It makes an effort to take up the thorny questions of premarital sex and cohabitation, though it does so with less guidance than I think necessary. And, considering the difficulty of reaching consensus on these contentious issues, the statement proposes a serious line of argument, a subversive one with which I sharply disagree.
Robert Benne is director of the Center for Religion and Society at Roanoke College and the author of several books, including Reasonable Ethics: A Christian Approach to Social, Economic, and Political Concerns.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
The Long Lent Explodes in Los Angeles
I've been home the last week for my 30-year high school reunion.
The headline in Sunday's (Los Angeles) Daily News:
This has been the story in LA ever since. The Daily News' front page on Monday and Tuesday remained focussed on this $660 million settlement. Monday:
We're reading notes from an interview with Cardinal Mahoney (which apparently upset His Eminence), stories about victims, and questions about the Cardinal's future. That last links concludes ominously:
Meanwhile, LA's talk radio is blistering the Cardinal Archbishop, at least on KFI (where John and Ken seem to have nothing good to say about the Church) and KABC (where the usually common sense Larry Elder is beside himself over Cardinal Mahoney still having a job).
What the people of Los Angeles are not hearing or reading about is the outrage among faithful Catholics that dates to the beginning of the sexual abuse scandal, which blew open in January 2002 in Boston and then spread across the nation. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus of First Things was calling this the "Long Lent" back in 2002. At one point he wrote:
Bishops stopped acting like Bishops, and trusted secular counselors to fix priests who could not keep their vows. When they got caught, they let their defense and insurance lawyers stall and protect, rather than confessing their sin and doing their penance. (Which, it seems, is exactly what "saved" the original offenders.) The $660 million this has finally cost the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, after millions more paid elsewhere and even the bankruptcy of other Dioceses, is only the money side of the cost this has been to the Catholic Church. What about the cost to the faithful laity, clergy, and religious? And worse, the cost of (and to) those who lost their faith, or had it stripped away -- Catholic, protestant, and others?
And in all this we cannot set aside that this Long Lent, which still continues, has been deftly used by anti-Catholic zealots who attack the Catholic Church because it indeed has some sort of accountability for this sort of thing, even when it is horribly misused and mangled by those who should know better. Meanwhile other parts of our culture, in both sacred and secular realms, this same sort of behavior does not get much attention, or where in the popular media it is even encouraged.
Who'll pay for that when those chickens come home to roost?
The headline in Sunday's (Los Angeles) Daily News:
Sins of the fathers to cost church $660 millionRead it all here.
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles will pay a historic $660 million to more than 500 victims who were abused by clergy during the past 70 years, sources said late Saturday.
In what would be the largest payout in the church's sex-abuse scandal, sources close to the archdiocese and a lawyer for the victims said Saturday that terms of a settlement are being worked out this weekend. If the agreement holds, each victim would receive between $1.2 million and $1.3 million.
The news came just two days before the first of more than 500 clergy abuse cases is scheduled for trial jury selection Monday.
Ray Boucher, attorney and negotiator for the victims, confirmed late Saturday that a settlement had been reached, but he declined to provide specifics.
He said a news release will be issued today (Sunday) about the formal announcement of the settlement, which will take place on Monday morning.
A source close to the archdiocese confirmed to the Daily News that an agreement had been reached but said details and legal language were still being hammered out.
This has been the story in LA ever since. The Daily News' front page on Monday and Tuesday remained focussed on this $660 million settlement. Monday:
Mahony's mea culpaRead it all here.
Cardinal offers apologies to sexual-abuse victims; claimants doubt sincerity
Calling sexual abuse by clergy a "terrible sin and crime," Cardinal Roger Mahony apologized Sunday to hundreds of people who claim they were molested by priests in the nation's largest archdiocese.
The apology came during a news conference following Sunday Mass and a day after the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed to pay a record $660 million in a settlement with 508 victims.
"There really is no way to go back and give them that innocence that was taken from them," Mahony said. "The one thing I wish I could give the victims ... I cannot.
"Once again, I apologize to anyone who has been offended, who has been abused. It should not have happened and it will not happen again."
Mahony said he has met with dozens of victims of clergy abuse in the past 14 months and those meetings helped him understand the importance of a quick resolution to the lawsuits.
The cardinal is scheduled to be in court this morning to go over the final settlement. He said the church's decision to settle on the eve of the trials - which were set to begin today - had nothing to do with keeping him from testifying.
We're reading notes from an interview with Cardinal Mahoney (which apparently upset His Eminence), stories about victims, and questions about the Cardinal's future. That last links concludes ominously:
Meanwhile, with the civil case now settled, it appears a criminal case isn't out of the question. Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley issued a statement Monday afternoon making that clear.I can hardly wait to see tomorrow morning's paper.
"Today's massive civil settlement highlights the institutional moral failure of the archdiocese to supervise predatory priests who operated for years under its jurisdiction," he said.
Regarding confidential documents that could be released as a result of Monday's settlement, Cooley said, "If these documents reveal evidence of criminal activity on behalf of individual priests or anyone else, we will pursue them.
"The book is not closed on our investigation."
Meanwhile, LA's talk radio is blistering the Cardinal Archbishop, at least on KFI (where John and Ken seem to have nothing good to say about the Church) and KABC (where the usually common sense Larry Elder is beside himself over Cardinal Mahoney still having a job).
What the people of Los Angeles are not hearing or reading about is the outrage among faithful Catholics that dates to the beginning of the sexual abuse scandal, which blew open in January 2002 in Boston and then spread across the nation. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus of First Things was calling this the "Long Lent" back in 2002. At one point he wrote:
I have said it before: we have probably not yet felt the full fury of the storm aroused by the grave misgovernment of the Catholic Church in America. I do not want to write about this, and I wouldn’t blame you if you do not want to read about it. Since all this broke in January, I have given no less than thirty hours per week to the subject, talking with endless reporters, and doing radio interviews. (I’ve been turning down as many as half a dozen television interviews per day, because they take so much time in traveling to studios, and mainly because most of them provide an opportunity for no more than a few sound bites and a food fight.) Please, I’m not whining. It is just to say I’m weary of the subject, but recognize the probability that it will not let us go.That was in June 2002. In May 2004, Fr. Neuhaus wrote about "The Catholic Reform:
For weeks now, the media have been in a feeding frenzy. I do not say that in criticism of the media. Let it be stated unambiguously: the leaders of the Catholic Church, meaning mainly the bishops, are responsible for the crisis and for the consequent frenzy. Of course some reporting is sensationalistic, and of course it is amusing to see the New York Times, day after day, running essentially the same story on the front page, as though they’re afraid people are going to forget about it. But, regrettably, there are also new developments, and no doubt will be more, that legitimate the major attention paid.
There is this difference: for the first time in years, I have the impression that most journalists are really trying to understand what is happening, or at least to find a story line that makes sense of what is happening. In other words, the story doesn’t conveniently fall into the conventional left/right, liberal/conservative boxes on which reporters usually depend. Recall that the story started out as a “pedophilia” scandal. The story has rightly moved beyond that now. The scandal is only very marginally about pedophilia. With very few exceptions, it is about adult men having sexual relations with adolescent and older teenage boys. So everybody has by now heard a great deal about “ephebophilia.” It is not necessary, however, that we learn a new vocabulary. There’s a perfectly good old fashioned word for same-sex sex. Homosexuality is very close to the center of the crisis. At the epicenter is the grave negligence of bishops. Not all bishops, to be sure, but too many. And, as in the case of Palm Beach, Florida, not only grave negligence but active complicity. Two months ago a lawyer and friend of the Church told me that before this is over we will see a bishop or two in jail. I thought that hyperbolic. Now I am not so sure.
The cover of the 150-page report of the National Review Board (NRB) is deep purple, the color of Lenten penitence, which is just right for this telling moment in the Long Lent that began with the Boston exposures of January 2002. It is titled “A Report on the Crisis in the Catholic Church in the United States.” Not the “Sex Abuse Crisis in the Catholic Church” but the “Crisis in the Catholic Church.” Long before there was a sex abuse crisis, there was a spiritual crisis, a moral crisis, a doctrinal crisis, and a crisis of misgovernance in the Catholic Church in the United States. All these crises finally come down to what the bishops did and did not do, what the bishops have and have not been doing for decades. The report is about priestly perpetrators and their victims; it is about seminaries and spiritual formation; it is about lawyers and the compromising of the Church’s independence. But, mainly and most importantly, the report is about bishops.Read it all here. Alas, the Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles did not seem to get it in full. Phil Lawler says it like this in a special to Catholic World News:
When, in their panicked Dallas meeting of 2002, the bishops created a National Review Board of prominent Catholic laity, I was opposed to the idea. I said and wrote that the bishops should take the heat and the responsibility for what had happened. I thought it was a dangerous precedent to have lay episcopoi of the episcopoi, overseers of the episcopal overseers; that it would play into the hands of dissenting Catholics who challenge what, in Catholic teaching, is the divinely constituted structure of the Church governed by bishops who are successors to the apostles. I hoped the bishops would devise some means—perhaps a plenary council or a long collegial retreat—to honestly examine what had gone wrong and come up with a believable program for reform. I was wrong. It is now apparent that the bishops as a body, meaning the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), were incapable of doing what the National Review Board has done. It is inconceivable that the bishops and bureaucracy of the USCCB could have produced the forthright analysis and program of reform that the NRB issued in Washington on Friday, February 27. The NRB has done what the bishops should have done. The report is a great gift to the bishops and to the Church. Now the question is whether the bishops are capable of receiving the report, and acting on it. If not—and the initial responses are not encouraging—they will, as the report suggests, further undermine the confidence of the Catholic faithful in the authority, competence, and moral integrity of their leaders. That is the “Crisis in the Catholic Church in the United States.” The report leaves no doubt that clerical sex abuse opened a window, exposing to sight a much larger reality of nonfeasance and malfeasance in the leadership of the Church.
Five years ago Cardinal Roger Mahony was reportedly encouraging Vatican officials to ask for the resignation of Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law. Using the same logical arguments that the American prelate presented in 2002, the Vatican should now ask Cardinal Mahony himself to step down.Thanks to blogger Steve Ray for that report.
The sensational cost of the sex-abuse scandal for the Los Angeles archdiocese far exceeds the devastation in Boston. The $660-million legal settlement announced on July 16 is nearly five times the total of the financial damages in Boston. Combining that settlement with previous agreements, lawyers' fees, and other associated costs, the overall price to be paid by the faithful Catholics of Los Angeles will approach $1 billion.
Yet the monetary costs, grave as they are, still do not reflect the most serious damage to the Catholic faith. Only rarely do I agree with an editorial in the Boston Globe, particularly when the topic is the Catholic faith. But today's Globe editorial is on target:In the eyes of victims, the scandal will never be fully resolved as long as bishops who put the interests of their fellow priests over the protection of children remain in positions of leadership.One could – and should – go further. This ugly chapter in Catholic history cannot be closed until the Church rebukes those prelates who put their own interests ahead of the needs of the Catholic faithful and the Catholic faith. Cardinal Mahony is the most conspicuous example.
Bishops stopped acting like Bishops, and trusted secular counselors to fix priests who could not keep their vows. When they got caught, they let their defense and insurance lawyers stall and protect, rather than confessing their sin and doing their penance. (Which, it seems, is exactly what "saved" the original offenders.) The $660 million this has finally cost the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, after millions more paid elsewhere and even the bankruptcy of other Dioceses, is only the money side of the cost this has been to the Catholic Church. What about the cost to the faithful laity, clergy, and religious? And worse, the cost of (and to) those who lost their faith, or had it stripped away -- Catholic, protestant, and others?
And in all this we cannot set aside that this Long Lent, which still continues, has been deftly used by anti-Catholic zealots who attack the Catholic Church because it indeed has some sort of accountability for this sort of thing, even when it is horribly misused and mangled by those who should know better. Meanwhile other parts of our culture, in both sacred and secular realms, this same sort of behavior does not get much attention, or where in the popular media it is even encouraged.
Who'll pay for that when those chickens come home to roost?
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Campaign to End Poverty
Last October I wrote here a bit about the ELCA's participation in the ONE Campaign.
Last week, Ryan Anderson over at First Things offered this in, "Bono Still Hasn’t Found What He’s Looking For," an article about Bono's RED Campaign:
Last week, Ryan Anderson over at First Things offered this in, "Bono Still Hasn’t Found What He’s Looking For," an article about Bono's RED Campaign:
It reminded me of one of Bono’s earlier endeavors: the ONE Campaign. Bono titled this “the campaign to make poverty history.” Its strategy was simply to rally Americans to call upon President Bush to allocate one additional percentage point of the U.S. budget to fighting extreme poverty across the globe.Tell you what. You want to help those in need? We have links to ELCA Disaster Response and Lutheran World Relief on Zion's front page. Or send a check to your local food pantry, homeless shelter, etc. It's still Lent and sacrifice is good for your soul.
Surprisingly, they never ask for any direct contributions: “ONE isn’t asking for your money, we’re asking for your voice. ONE does not accept donations. Instead, we hope that you’ll take action with ONE by contacting Congress, the President and other elected officials and ask them to do even more to fight global AIDS and extreme poverty. We encourage you to sign the ONE declaration and help by spreading the word about the ONE Campaign by talking about it with your friends, family and co-workers. Additionally, you can show your community that you support ONE by purchasing ONE merchandise on our website.”
Just sign our petition! Just call President Bush! Wear our wristband! That’s all it takes to make poverty history! You don’t even need to give a dime!
What a bizarre method. Why not appeal to our consciences directly and ask every American to donate 1 percent of our personal budget to the poverty-fighting charity of our choice? The ONE Campaign made significant inroads with the religious communities—having them demand more from the government. Why not ask for a tithe? Why not call for personal contributions instead of political noise-making?
But that would require sacrifice. And that wouldn’t sell. Nor would it be trendy. It’s so much easier to say we can fight AIDS by buying Armani and Gap. It’s so much easier to say we’ll end world poverty by telling Congress to do something about it. My “good-looking” “fine self” sleeps so much better at night knowing that my (RED) purchase has bought pills for someone in Africa, that my signature on the ONE declaration means I’ve done my part.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
The Parable of the Good Soccer Mom
A the tail end of my Saturday entry I mentioned that I would be on the Peoria Life Chain, missing a big chunk of the final game of my beloved Los Angeles Angels. That enables me to bring to your attention to, if you haven't already read it, last Thursday's First Things: On the Square entry.
For background, it seems that the Democratic candidate for Governor of Texas is joining a growing number of Democrats (including our Junior US Senator from Illinois in (rightly) declaring that a "Christian voice" (or, at least, a "voice of faith") in American politics ought not be the exclusive property of the Republican Party. Congressman Bell invokes Jesus in the national debate over embryonic stem cell research, declaring a clear answer to "What would Jesus do?"
First Things Junior Fellow Ryan Anderson responds by offering this "retelling of a familiar parable."
I've been a subscriber to First Things since issue #13 and I was an Intern Pastor at Saint John's Lutheran Church, Helena, Montana -- when every penny counted.
For background, it seems that the Democratic candidate for Governor of Texas is joining a growing number of Democrats (including our Junior US Senator from Illinois in (rightly) declaring that a "Christian voice" (or, at least, a "voice of faith") in American politics ought not be the exclusive property of the Republican Party. Congressman Bell invokes Jesus in the national debate over embryonic stem cell research, declaring a clear answer to "What would Jesus do?"
First Things Junior Fellow Ryan Anderson responds by offering this "retelling of a familiar parable."
Read the rest here.The Parable of the Good Soccer Mom
“You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
Chris Bell, because he wished to be elected governor, asked, “And who is my neighbor?”
Consider the Parable of the Good Soccer Mom: An embryo fell into the hands of ambitious scientists after she was left over in the freezer of an in vitro fertilization lab.
A molecular biologist happened to be journeying through the lab. Seeing that the embryo was very small and didn’t look like other human beings, he decided that it was not a human being. And he passed to the other side of the lab and left the embryo for his colleagues.
Likewise a moral philosopher came to the place and launched into an exposition of human embryology and developmental biology. He concluded that the human embryo was a whole human being at the very beginning of her life. The embryo possessed all of the internal resources necessary to guide herself—by a self-directed process—through further stages of development toward the maturity of organismic life. In doing this, the embryo integrates herself so as to keep her unity, identity, and determinateness all intact. No mere part of some other organism—as the sperm and egg cells whose union brought her into existence were—the embryo is both functionally and genetically distinct from any other organism, a whole and complete (though immature) human being. The term embryo is just a way of classifying the early human being, just as the terms fetus, newborn, infant, child, adolescent, adult, and octogenarian all refer to human beings at other stages. These terms, he concludes, refer to the same self-developing, unitary organism: the human being.
While the molecular biologist got the science wrong, the philosopher got it right. But the embryo could feel no pain or pleasure and exhibited no consciousness of any type, and so the philosopher concluded that the human embryo had no moral status and possessed no rights. And he, too, passed to the other side of the lab and left the embryo to the tender mercies of the scientists.
But a Soccer Mom who came upon the embryo was moved by both scientific fact and right moral reason. Aware of the humanity of the embryo as established by modern embryology, she wondered what was owed to the human being in the embryonic stage of life. She thought that whatever was owed to human beings at other stages of life was owed to them at the embryonic stage. For age and stage of development certainly are not morally significant. Older people do not have greater moral status; neither do the more fully developed. All human beings are of equal moral worth, she reasoned, because they are equally human. So, what is owed to human beings? Why, human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, possessing free will and rational natures that make them entities of intrinsic—and not mere instrumental—worth. They are to be treated as subjects and not as objects. Hence they are owed protection, support, and aid. In a word, they are owed love.
She summed up her findings: A human embryo is a whole member of the human species. Each human being entered life as an embryo. And all human beings are subjects of profound, inherent, intrinsic worth in virtue of what they are, not what they can do. And if they are subjects of worth in virtue of what they are, then they bear this worth from the moment that they first come into existence.
The Soccer Mom then rescued the embryo, transferred her to her womb, and cared for her.
“Mr. Bell, which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the embryo?”
I've been a subscriber to First Things since issue #13 and I was an Intern Pastor at Saint John's Lutheran Church, Helena, Montana -- when every penny counted.
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