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July 28, 2005
Shaking the Biblical Foundations by Guest Blogger Dr. Bruce Prescott
Posted by Faithful Progressive
Shaking the Biblical Foundations
By Mainstream Baptist blogger Dr. Bruce Prescott
A recent controversy over which “Holy Scriptures” on which Muslims must place their hands when swearing to tell the truth threatens to shake the biblical foundations of the state of North Carolina. When finally resolved, it might also set a precedent that sends aftershocks across the nation.
A couple years ago Syidah Mateen asked a judge if she could use the Quran instead of a Bible as the foundation for her oath to testify truthfully. The judge wasn’t sure whether that was legal, so he had her simply affirm to tell the truth and asked for a higher opinion on the legality of using the Quran. Guilford County Senior Resident Superior Court Judge W. Douglas Albright, a strict constructionist jurist, ruled that “An oath on the Quran is not a lawful oath under our law” and added that “Everybody understands what the holy scriptures are. If they don’t, we’re in a mess.”
The ruling that “Holy Scriptures” could only refer to the Bible quickly generated criticism that the court was endorsing a particular religion and thereby violating the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. North Carolina’s Administrative Office of the Courts was asked to determine the validity of Albright’s ruling. That office, however, has been dragging its feet. Last month, State Supreme Court Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake, Jr. said he had no idea when the agency would decide how to address the issue. This week, the ACLU filed suit to get a decision.
There were reasons for the state’s procrastination. One is simply the press of ordinary business. Another reason is that those who insist that the U.S. is a “Christian Nation” will not take any ruling permitting the use of scriptures other than the Bible lightly. As Michele Combs, communications director for the Christian Coalition, said, “Some traditions that we’ve had for 200 years need to stay.”
The Christian Coalition’s opposition to the plurality of scriptures in courtrooms fits hand in glove with the goals of the political revolution that it has been helping to achieve through patient and methodical grassroots politicking. What is gradually being overthrown is the First Amendment’s guarantee that the government will treat people of all faiths and of no particular faith with equal dignity and respect.
After a quarter century effort, the Religious Right has secured a majority of the legislators and chief executives of our state and federal governments. Their presidents and governors and legislators are busy stacking the country’s judiciary with “strict constructionist” jurists like U.S. Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts who may eventually confirm Albright’s ruling -- no matter what North Carolina’s courts eventually decide.
Undoubtedly, it is true that virtually all of the original inhabitants of North Carolina understood “Holy Scriptures” to refer to the Christian Bible. Equally indisputable is the fact that many of the current citizens of that state no longer accept the Christian Bible as “Holy Scriptures.” If constitutions are understood to be “living documents,” then the purpose of the oath could serve as a guide to interpretation. Since the purpose of the oath is to help secure truthful testimony, “Holy Scriptures” could refer to the most sacred text of the person making the oath.
Strict constructionist jurists, however, disdain any thought that constitutions could be living documents. In their opinion, the original meaning of the words “Holy Scriptures” will prevail until Muslims and others successfully convince their Christian neighbors to change the state constitution.
In effect, by simply affirming that “some traditions that we’ve had for 200 years need to stay,” the Religious Right is assuring that the forever contentious debate about liberty of conscience and freedom of religion moves from the principled and reasoned discourse of the courtroom to the passionate and inflamed rhetoric of the public square.
Unlike the strict constructionists, the founders of our republic were fully aware of the volatile nature of the differences that arise when religious beliefs and practices are imposed by force of law. That is why they forbade Congress to pass any laws establishing a religion or prohibiting its free exercise.
Posted by Faithful Progressive at 08:10 PM | Comments (18)
July 27, 2005
Down with Feminism, Up with the Patriarchy!
Posted by Jesus Politics
It is no secret that an ugly sexism is at the root of the Christian Right worldview. The quotes below remind us again just how explicit this misogyny and patriarchy really is. It is worth noting that the quotes this week are coming from popular and well respected leaders of the Christian Right and not from marginal figures without any influence or following.
Diane Passno, an executive vice president at Focus on the Family:
I hope people will see the feminist movement for what it is — hurtful to women. Feminism’s two focal points are its love affair with abortion and lesbianism.
Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:
We must choose between two unavoidable options: either the Bible is affirmed as the inerrant and infallible Word of God, and thus presents a comprehensive vision of true humanity in both unity and diversity, or we must claim that the Bible is, to one extent or another, compromised and warped by a patriarchal and male-dominated bias that must be overcome in the name of humanity. [ ]For too long, those who hold to the biblical pattern of gender distinctions have allowed themselves to be silenced, marginalized, and embarrassed when confronted by new gender theorists. Now is the time to recapture the momentum, force the questions, and show this generation God's design in the biblical concept of manhood and womanhood.
Feminism has failed miserably, and ironically it has exacerbated the very problem it set out to resolve," she writes. "Instead of promoting healthy self-identity for women or contributing to a greater harmony between the sexes, it has resulted in increased gender confusion, increased conflict, and a profound destruction of morality and family. It has left in its wake a mass of dysfunctional relationships and shattered lives. People of this culture no longer know what it means to be a man or a woman or how to make life work.
John MacArthur Jr., pastor of Grace Community Church, Sun Valley, CA:
One of the most devastating, and debilitating, and destructive movements in our day is the "Feminist Movement." [ ] The real feminist agenda is frightening. The real feminist agenda is Satanic [ ] Feminism with all of its assorted features and its unique companionship with homosexuality is an old, old heresy that is meant to destroy God's design. It really started in the Garden when Eve, the original feminist, stepped out from under Adam's authority and thought that she would act independently and led the whole race into sin; and thus the first act in Satan's feminist agenda was successful.
Central to the crisis of this era is the systematic attack on the timeless truths of biblical patriarchy. This attack includes the movement to subvert the biblical model of the family, and redefine the very meaning of fatherhood and motherhood, masculinity, femininity, and the parent and child relationship. We emphasize the importance of biblical patriarchy, not because it is greater than other doctrines, but because it is being actively attacked by unbelievers and professing Christians alike. Egalitarian feminism is a false ideology that has bred false doctrine in the church and seduced many believers. In conscious opposition to feminism, egalitarianism, and the humanistic philosophies of the present time, the church should proclaim the Gospel centered doctrine of biblical patriarchy as an essential element of God’s ordained pattern for human relationships and institutions.
Doug Giles, Townhall.com columnist and host of the Clash Radio show:
If concerned conservative Christians want to improve our nation biblically, then the Church has got to eliminate its effeminate drift and re-establish a masculine base.
Posted by Jesus Politics at 10:27 PM | Comments (23)
One for the Team
Posted by Fresh Politics
There is quite a bit to talk about in the world of Washington D.C. at the moment. This week, though, I'm going to have to take a pass. I've spent the last three years – and a very intense seven weeks – preparing for the Bar exam, which began yesterday. And over these grueling weeks of Bar review classes and constant studying, the one thing I keep reflecting on is how amazing families and friends can be.
My husband has been a tireless cheerleader. I haven't seen the inside of the kitchen or a grocery store since Bar review classes began. No opportunity for studying has been abandoned – even a soak in the Jacuzzi has been ripe for some flashcards or a pop-quiz on my Contracts outline. A software engineer, he quizzed me enough on evidence to ask me some very good questions one evening while we were studying. And he could certainly tell you that we live in a community property state.
My son has taken time from his schedule of playing video games (quite the task for a teenager) to quiz me on Constitutional Law flowcharts. He agreed to lend me his watch for the exams so I can keep track of time. My favorite: one afternoon, while I was at the dining room table doing another round of practice essays for the third day in a row, he informed me that the Bar exam looks like it really...well, let's just say that he wouldn't want to take it.
The night before the exam, my mom called to wish me luck although it was 11:30 on the East Coast – well past her bedtime. I turned on the computer to find an encouraging instant message from a dear friend on day one of the exam. My husband walked me down to the test taking center at six in the morning and was there to bring me lunch at one o'clock sharp, and I felt nothing but intense gratitude.
Tony Perkins, I don't need you to tell me what family values are. Love, support, commitment – these are family values, and no political party has a monopoly on them. My neighbor, who most definitely votes on the other side of the political spectrum than I, promised to say a prayer for me on Tuesday morning.
It's a reminder to me – a hopeless political geek – that what happens in Washington matters, but what happens in your everyday life matters more.
Posted by Fresh Politics at 01:59 AM | Comments (2)
July 26, 2005
Thoughts on Abortion
Posted by Father Jake
With the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, we can anticipate much discussion of the topic of abortion over the coming weeks. Even though this is a touchy topic, I think we need to talk about it. What follows is simply my personal thoughts. They are not the official position of any organization. They are not the work of a scholar or a person in the medical profession. They are also not necessarily “right.” They are simply my thoughts at this present time.
As I understand it, the various approaches to the issue of abortion can be broken down into three positions;
1. Unborn babies are human beings.
2. Fertilized eggs (or one celled zygots) are not human beings.
3. We cannot draw a line defining when the fertilized egg becomes a human being.
Considered separately, each of these statements appeals to common sense, to some degree. But #1 cannot contain #2, and #3 is really no position at all.
Yet it is #3 that needs to be considered at the beginning, I think. As a Christian, one of the essential issues would be ensoulment, as that would be the moment the fetus would become a person. Does ensoulment happen at conception?
Consider the situation of a fertilized egg dividing after conception, forming twins. If ensoulment happens at conception, do they each get half a soul, or is ensoulment delayed in this case? This might seem to be an absurd example to some folks. I don't think so, as what it reveals is that we have at least one specific situation in which we have to admit we don't know when the moment of ensoulment happens, which places doubt on the assumption that it happens at the moment of conception. Drawing the line at conception is making such a judgment based on assumption.
Drawing the line at any time is problematic, as without good data, we find ourselves arbitrarily moving that line. Let's say we agree that three months is the line; a fertilized egg is not a human until that 91st day. I'm fairly sure that it would not be too difficult to convince you, in light of special circumstances, to allow a fetus that was 90 days, 23 hours and 50 minutes old to be considered a baby. Or, in other circumstances, to consider a baby that was 91 days and 10 minutes old to be a fetus. Drawing the line quickly becomes a slippery slope, with little or no consistency.
One consistent position seems to be to draw the line all the way back to before the sexual act. That seems a bit extreme to me, and tends to mix some issues that I would think need to be addressed separately. Yet, possible solutions, from every side of the issue, do indeed include such line drawing to some degree.
I think the lack of a line that everyone can agree on is at the root of why this issue is so divisive. So, problematic or not, I think we have to try and find such a line.
How do we go about doing this? To keep things simple, I'm going to refer to the two models of ethical decision making; deontology and consequentialism. A deontologist would assert that some things are always right, and some things are always wrong, based on a moral code, often credited with divine inspiration. A consequentialist would claim that the greatest good for the greatest number is the right thing to do.
The classic example of this is to imagine you are the captain of a sinking ship in the North Atlantic. You are in a life boat, which is sinking because it is overloaded. As captain it is your responsibility to make a decision; do you send some people over the side to freeze to death in order to save everyone else? Or do you refuse to do that, because killing another person is always wrong?
The realities of life are not always black and white. In order to sort through some of the difficult ethical decisions we are sometimes called to make, most of us will end up a bit of both; a deontoligical consequentialist, if you will. Some things (rape, murder) are always wrong. Others are not so clear.
I would think that most folks can agree on a few things being always wrong regarding this issue. I've never met anyone who described themselves as "pro-abortion." I think we can agree that abortion is always a tragic event. Could we then say that using abortion as a form of birth control is wrong? There are better ways; such as improved health education, including teaching both contraception and abstinence, and better access to health services. A focus on preventing unwanted pregnancies would seem to be the way to eliminate abortions.
But things happen. Let's consider some exceptions. What about rape victims? I'm not sure I can really talk about this, as I can't imagine living with that kind of trauma. I've heard insisting that a rape victim give birth is "punishing" the woman for the rest of her life. I find that logic troubling. The potential child is innocent. Do we decide to terminate that life because of the possible trauma it may cause to the woman? Is that the greater good? I realize I'm going out on a limb here. The rape victims that I have known are sometimes quite traumatized for the rest of their lives. This may be one of those areas where I'm wrong, due to my lack of understanding of the specifics of the situation.
Danger to the woman's health is another exceptional situation. I think this one calls for careful consideration. Ethically, one could make a case for self defense. The situation is not that clear, of course, as the infant/fertilized egg is innocent. Yet the woman's body is being threatened by another. The reality is, even if you're convinced that all abortions are acts of murder, in this case doing nothing could be considered intentionally harming the mother.
I'm not going to go into some of the more extreme arguments, such as population control or eugenics, as I don't think they are worthy of consideration, and I haven't heard anyone advocating for either one for a long time. Those who still claim that pro-choice folks have such an agenda are stretching the truth a bit, it seems to me.
Lots of words, that leads to what conclusion? Most likely a rather unsatisfactory one for some folks. Abortion is always tragic. As a form of birth control, it is abhorrent. At the same time, life experiences do not always fall into clean little categories. Any restrictions need to allow for consideration of the specifics of each situation. Blanket outlawing would be a step backwards, and would deny women the right to safe health care that met the needs of their particular situation.
Life is a precious gift. I'm troubled by the Dr. Kervorkians, the Donald Rumsfelds, as well as some of the rhetoric I hear on this issue. History shows that human beings can kill one another, and that over time we can become rather callous about it. It looks to me like we're rapidly growing some new callouses, in a number of different places.
So, there are some of my thoughts, uncensored, and to some, no doubt terribly politically incorrect. I look forward to hearing yours.
Posted by Father Jake at 07:04 AM | Comments (50)
July 25, 2005
Sinless in the Capitol? - Not Under the Bush Watch.
Posted by Public Theologian
In his book, James Dobson’s War On America, former Vice-President and on-air co-host of “Focus on the Family” Gil Alexander-Moegerle revealed a little-known theological quirk about his former boss, child psychologist-cum-kingmaker James Dobson. Dobson, whose Nazarene roots place him squarely in the nineteenth century Holiness tradition that regularly professed such a conviction, believes that he is sinless. That is, he has reached a stage in his own personal sanctification that he is beyond sin, which Alexander-Moegerle believes is part of what lies behind his autocratic leadership style in his organization as well as what gives him such assurance that his politics are exactly what God wants for America.
Although President Bush is not a member of a Holiness-inspired sect, I am beginning to think that the same sinlessness of which Dobson understands himself to be in possession has now filtered down to Bush and his administration. Why do I think this? Consider the following examples:
1. First there was the runup to the war in which the American people were cruelly deceived about the existence of WMD, which we now know never existed. The President and his minions repeatedly stoked the fires of fear with threats of nuclear weapons, even though it is now clear that even within his own administration people were warning the President that what he was saying was not true. Yet now that his lies have been unmasked, none of his religious followers have ever called him to account for his deception.
2. When Ambassador Joe Wilson exposed the administration’s false claims about alleged Iraqi attempts at uranium purchases with Niger, the Bushies outed his wife, Valerie Plame, who worked as a covert expert on counterterrorism, one of the most vital areas of our national security. This outing endangered her life as well as the lives of anyone with whom she ever came in contact in her days as a field agent. It also chilled potential informants who might want to help our government avert terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons, which was her specialty. But where was the religious right when this dastardly deed was revealed? Why were they not at the White House using all of their clout to protect our national interests and make sure that the President hold accountable whomever did this? Or do they only go to the White House for signing ceremonies?
3. When it became clear that the President’s own political advisor was the one who told reporters about Plame, he switched what he said before, which was that whomever had revealed the name would be fired, even as he assured the American people through his press secretary that two of the suspects-Karl Rove and Scooter Libby- were not the ones who did it. Now he says that he will wait to find out whether or not a crime has been committed. And where is the outrage of the religious right? They who cast themselves as the “moral majority”—should they not be demanding that the President keep his word and give up the traitor on his staff who would endanger our national security for craven political gain?
4. Now this weekend we find out why Attorney General Alberto “Torture Memo” Gonzalez was not nominated to the Supreme Court. According to Frank Rich in Sunday’s New York Times, on September 29, 2003, then White House Counsel Gonzalez told White House Cheif of Staff Andy Card but then waited twelve hours to formally inform the rest of the White House staff that it had to preserve all materials related to the Plame outing after being notified by the Justice Department that an investigation into the matter was being launched. Undoubtedly, the President did not want the Attorney General to have to go before Congress and answer why he waited and what might have been going on around the Executive Branch during that time. But do you think we will hear the right wing theocrats howling this week for Rove’s, Gonzalez’s or even Bush’s head on a platter? I wouldn’t count on it.
This, of course, is only scratching the surface of the immoral acts of this administration. I could write a whole column and then some on the lies that the Bushies told their own party members about the Prescription Drug Bill, or one on their attempts to lie about their own scientists' findings about how badly the environment is doing. The point is that there are some very immoral acts going on in our government these days and the religious people who have aligned themselves with the bad guys and who are laying down moral cover fire ought to be ashamed of themselves for not standing up for the truth.
For the entire Clinton Administration these same “moralists” jumped at every rumor and false charge in an attempt to smear him. Jerry Falwell, for example, hawked a video on his church TV show alleging that the Clinton’s had Vince Foster murdered because he knew too much about Whitewater. When they finally did find something about Clinton’s private life, they turned that moral lapse into an impeachment proceeding that made the US the laughingstock of the world and which boosted Clinton’s popularity to stratospheric levels.
But here the ethics police have all of a sudden gone deaf and blind. Here we have a stack of lies that has piled up as swiftly as the dead bodies and debt that they engendered. The nation’s security has been compromised, the military is on its heels, we are hugely in debt because of a war we cannot afford and about which we were deceived, and all these people can do is whine about why they can’t have the Ten Commandments in their local courthouses.
It is time for people of faith in America to wake up and say “Enough!” We have got to get our nation back on a proper moral and ethical path before the fundamentalists destroy it. The Bush Administration is far from sinless and their moral lapses need to be exposed and rooted out, but that first requires a religious reawakening in our citizenry.
Posted by Public Theologian at 02:36 AM | Comments (81)
July 22, 2005
An Interview with Kathleen LeRoy, Christian Alliance for Progress V.P.
Posted by Faithful Progressive
Faithful Progressive (FP): Who is Kathleen LeRoy?
Kathleen LeRoy (KLR): I am currently Vice President of Operations, of the Christian Alliance for Progress. I have 20 years experience in profit and non profit management. I am a licensed mental health therapist, a mother of two and I was raised in the South. I helped to build a women’s center in Jacksonville, have been a member of L’Arche Harbor House for many years. I built a store that marketed artisan's goods from developing nations for fair market value.
FP: What is your own religious background, and how does it relate to your work with the Christian Alliance for Progress?
KLR: I was raised Episcopalian and it was a rich community life for me and my family growing up. I have done lots of outreach work through the church over the years. I have been embarrassed to call myself a Christian for years not because of my faith and beliefs but because the language and the name of Christianity has been usurped to fulfill an agenda that is more about exclusion and power than the values I learned about Jesus’ life. I refuse to roll over any longer but I am going to stand up and speak my beliefs! This organization is a way for me to reach out to what I believe are the millions of Americans that feel the same way I do.
FP: Some people, especially out in the blogosphere, want to know exactly how and why the Christian Alliance for Progress was formed before supporting it. Can you give them some background?
KLR: Christian Alliance for Progress was formed after years of a vision percolating and then sparked the night of the election in 2004. It was formed to reclaim Christianity and to make our nation a more compassionate nation. It was founded in a southern town in a red state in a red county by a remarkable group of progressives that for years have been surrounded by conservatism. I appreciate the diversity and uniqueness of the leadership of this organization. We have a talented corporate strategist, a brilliant theologian with an immense amount of education and a gift for pastoring, and myself. And what I bring to the table is a good deal of experience with creating structures and implementing a vision and a heart for spiritual and personal growth in a corporate setting. At this time we are using contributions to Expand the Movement and Build Field Political structures, to execute a media strategy, to Collaborate with Other Progressive Organizations, to Broaden Web functionality and to expand staff.
FP: You were involved in moderating the Rockridge Institute Forum for Spiritual Progressives--how did that turn out?
KLR: It was a success and the dialogue was very rich. But dialogue is not what progressive lack it’s action and it’s drawing the line in the sand. That is why Christian Alliance for Progress is here.
FP: I understand that you attended the recent Take Back America conference--what speakers impressed or interested you the most? Why?
KLR: The media folks, Bill Moyers and Arianna Huffington. They had a clearer vision than any other, they had the most spark and they did not shy away from calling people out. They demanded better.
FP: I've been asked here in Madison, the birthplace of human stem cell research-- how would the Christian Alliance for Progress approach issues relating to science and healing such as the stem cell debate?
KLR: Well, the theocrats in Jesus’ day attacked him for healing on the Sabbath. According to them, that was a major violation of the religious law. For them, it was more important to uphold a religious dictate than it was to ease the suffering of a human being. We can see that very same mindset in the “no, no, absolutely not” approach to stem cell research. The Radical Right has this position statement: “We stand for life.” Well, you know, who doesn’t? But what an incredibly simplistic way to dismiss complex scientific and ethical questions! It’s a nice, pat religious principle, just like “No healing on the Sabbath.” But while they are standing for life, what happens to the people who are dying from Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s?
The Right says, if you stand for life, then you’ve got to stand against medical research, against science, against human healing. If they succeed, America will no longer lead the world in scientific and medical discoveries.
FP: What is the biggest difference between organizing at the local level and the national level? Why is it important for progressive Christians to be heard on the national level?
KLR: Both are critical. Each and every community needs to identify and call out ways that Christianity has been hijacked in their individual areas and to collect their voices around issues that most matter to them. And from a national level all of us in all of our communities need leadership and a sense of organization, something that the liberal community has lacked. The religious right is so well organized and powerful. Everyday we are reminded of this and it is disempowering to us. In order for progressives to overcome this and feel empowered, we need to be organized with our neighbors-- knowing that we are not alone. And, most importantly, we need to be organized in a national way so that we can collectively make a difference.
As an organizational leader, I recognize the biggest difference between organizing at the local level versus the national level is the importance of remembering more about what we have in common and less about our differences. And that we have to speak a language that is about values, a message that is simple and clear. We have to reach out to all knowing that all may not follow but enough will to make a difference.
It is important for progressive Christians to be heard on a national level because right now the Christian voice in America doesn’t represent values such as compassion, equality, inclusiveness, right use of power, spiritual foundation and responsibility and obligation. And the Christian right has a tremendous amount of influence in our nation and not just on current issues but on decisions that will chart the course of this nation and world for decades to come. The bottom line is our values do inform policy, and our values are developed through our faith so let’s talk about our faith and let’s fight for our values and not just in our living rooms and in small groups in our church but right out in the public square.
FP: Have you ever been involved in any political campaigns? Were you a values voter?
KLR: I was a Howard Dean fan and I participated online.
FP: Who are your favorite thinkers and writers in the area of politics, religion and theology?
KLR: Marcus Borg and Karen Armstrong and Jimmy Carter.
Politically in the blog world, Daily Kos, MyDD, Atrios and of course the Christian Alliance for Progress Bloggers (Fresh Politics, Father Jake, Public Theologian, Jesus Politics & FP)
FP: Many people feel frustrated by both the perception of religious people and the Bush Administration--what can they do to change things?
KLR: Join Our Movement , collect voices and be counted as Christians. Build a movement of 10's of millions of people and let America and the world know that the leaders of religious right to not speak for us them. Learn to speak about our values in a way that Middle America can resonate, tell your stories and reach out to people.
Posted by Faithful Progressive at 12:42 AM | Comments (20)
July 21, 2005
Eric Rudolph and Christian Violence
Posted by Jesus Politics
Below are quotes from Christian bomber, Eric Rudolph. His violent views are not representative of the vast majority of conservative and fundamentalist Christians, but it seems of interest to observe where his views overlap with the general pro-war, pro-capital punishment, pro-gun, and anti-gay violent tendencies in the Christian Right.
From Eric Rudolph's Statement:
Abortion is murder. And when the regime in Washington legalized, sanctioned and legitimized this practice, they forfeited their legitimacy and moral authority to govern.[ ] There is no more legitimate reason to my knowledge, for renouncing allegiance to and if necessary using force to drag this monstrosity of a government down to the dust where it belongs.
----
Understandably the majority of Americans who have dehumanized these millions of children with the label of fetus are able to kill in good conscience and to recognize and support the government which sanctions this. But then there are those who call themselves "Pro-Life", and who claim that abortion is murder; they also claim that those who would use force to prevent it are just as morally reprehensible as the abortionists. For these people I have nothing to say other than you are liars, hypocrites, and cowards.
You so-called "Pro-Life," "good Christian people" who point your plastic fingers at me saying that I am a 'murderer," that "two wrongs don't make a right," that even though "abortion is murder, those who would use force to stop the murder are morally the same," I say to you that your lies are transparent.
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Tell me plastic people, are you not the ones waving the flag in support of the coward Bush's operation in Iraq? Do you not say that Washington's cause justifies the bombing and shooting of thousands of people? Answer me, is the causus belli of promoting democracy in the Middle East more weighty for waging war than the systematic murder of millions of your own citizens? After all, the unborn are citizens, are they not? Is not that the basis of your argument for a "right to life" guaranteed in the Declaration of lndependence and embodied in the Bill of Rights?
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Along with abortion, another assault upon the integrity of American society is the concerted effort to legitimize the practice of homosexuality. Homosexuality is an aberrant sexual behavior, and as such I have complete sympathy and understanding for those who are suffering from this condition. Practiced by consenting adults within the confines of their own private lives, homosexuality is not a threat to society. Those, consenting adults practicing this behavior in privacy should not be hassled by a society which respects the sanctity of private sexual life. But when the attempt is made to drag this practice out of the closet and into the public square in an "in your face" attempt to force society to accept and recognize this behavior as being just as legitimate and normal as the natural man/woman relationship, every effort should be made, including force if necessary, to halt this effort.
From Eric Rudolph's Allocution:
America was a great country, like a ship of discovery sailing straight and true to new lands. Then in 1973 its rudder was jammed and now it veers wildly on the seas of moral uncertainty. This country that put a man on the moon, now will not provide enough sustenance to care for its own children. This country has enough food to feed the world, but not an ounce of milk to spare for another child. Americans have the technology to satisfy any desire, but can't bring themselves to slow down for nine months as another human being passes through their lives. This country promotes a culture of selfishness and death and tells its daughters that their lives will be wasted if they bring an unplanned pregnancy to term. Every variety of filth is tolerated and aggressively pushed with the complete support of the state – abortion, homosexuality, pornography – but this country does not tolerate the values of life, family, and human dignity. They celebrate the likes of Hugh Hefner, Larry Flint, and Howard Stern as reflections of the American spirit, but those who attempt to save the lives of unborn children and who wish to promote a culture that respects life are now treated as fanatics, threats to American freedom. Britney Spears, Eminem, and Madonna are held up for our children as heroes, but the names of America's
great men are now drug through the mud. And more heinous still, this country lionizes the fallen abortionist as a martyr for freedom, but he who attempted to knock the bloody knife out of her hand is treated as a criminal, standing in the docket for sentence.
God is not fooled, posterity will certainly judge differently. Even if it should take ten years, 50 years, or 500 years before this black night of barbarism is swept into the dustbin of history, I will be vindicated, my actions in Birmingham that overcast day in January of 1998 will be vindicated. And as I go to a prison cell for a lifetime, I know that “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course. I have kept the faith.”
Posted by Jesus Politics at 05:49 AM | Comments (16)
July 20, 2005
Play Ball! : The Nomination of Judge Roberts
Posted by Fresh Politics
Last night, President Bush announced his nomination of Judge John G. Roberts, Jr. to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. Relatively new to the bench, Judge Roberts was confirmed to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in May 2003.
It is imperative that the Senate carefully evaluate Judge Roberts before moving forward. The American people should know what they are getting in Judge Roberts, who is young and could serve for decades. Senator Patrick Leahy, in response to the announcement, commended Justice O'Connor for being open-minded, and stressed that her replacement should share that quality. I second that. Senator Charles Schumer remarked that Judge Roberts should answer questions that he refused to answer before being confirmed to the D.C. Circuit.
I second that, too. It is one thing to profess deference to precedent when being nominated to a lower court. But the Supreme Court is the top court for the country. It has the power to change precedent, to create law. Judge Roberts should not evade proper questions with that excuse.
For me, it is way too early in the process to have a firm opinion on whether Judge Roberts should be confirmed. I do not know enough about him and given his short tenure as a judge, the few opinions he has authored are unlikely to shed much light. There is some information out there that gives me some not-so-minor chills (check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_G._Roberts_Jr.), but I'd like to learn more.
As Senator Schumer said, this is a “new ballgame.” Well, I've got my nose-bleed seats, and I'm ready to watch.
Posted by Fresh Politics at 06:59 PM | Comments (4)
July 19, 2005
The ACLU are Terrorists?
Posted by Father Jake
It appears the FBI has gathered almost 1,200 pages of documentation on the American Civil Liberties Union. Why has this group suddenly found itself under the microscope? Is the ACLU a sleeper terrorist cell?
Could it be because they are a prominent voice for safeguarding religious freedom? Could it be because they need to be silenced if the theocrats are to move their agenda forward?
If you listen to the shrill voices coming from the religious right, you’d think that the ACLU was the devil incarnate. As I mentioned last week, Jerry Falwell went out of his way to single out the ACLU as being responsible for 9/11. What is rather ironic is that this same ACLU came to Falwell’s defense only a few months after his outrageous accusation when the state of Virginia tried to block his church from incorporating. The ACLU challenged the law because it violates the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of free exercise of religion.
Dr. Jeremy Gunn, Director of the ACLU’s new Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, offers us a concise summary of their approach;
Religious freedom is an essential element of our democracy -- indeed it is the very reason America is the most religiously diverse nation in the world," said Dr. Gunn. "The two critical components of religion are the free exercise and the establishment clauses in the First Amendment of the Constitution and neither should be overlooked. The ACLU has been at the forefront in defending our religious freedom, and I look forward to engaging in the ongoing debate about the need for government neutrality in matters of religious opinion."
So why has the federal government turned the FBI loose on the ACLU? Could it be because of the emergence of organizations like the Council for National Policy which has successfully brought together the religious and fiscal right?
Excited by Reagan’s election, Tim LaHaye, Richard Viguerie, Weyrich and a number of far-right conservatives began meeting to discuss ways to maximize the power of the ultra-conservative movement and create an alternative to the more centrist Council on Foreign Relations. In mid May, about 50 of them met at the McLean, Va., home of Viguerie, owner of a conservative fund-raising company.
Viguerie had a knack for networking. Shortly before helping launch the CNP, Viguerie and Weyrich initiated the Moral Majority and tapped Falwell to run it, making the obscure Lynchburg pastor a major political figure overnight. Viguerie’s goal was to lead rural White voters in the South out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party by emphasizing divisive social issues such as abortion, gay rights and school prayer.
Back when the CNP was founded, it was a little less media shy. In the summer of 1981, Woody Jenkins, a former Louisiana state lawmaker who served as the group’s first executive director, told Newsweek bluntly, “One day before the end of this century, the Council will be so influential that no president, regardless of party or philosophy, will be able to ignore us or our concerns or shut us out of the highest levels of government.”
From the beginning, the CNP sought to merge two strains of far-right thought: the theocratic Religious Right with the low-tax, anti-government wing of the GOP. The theory was that the Religious Right would provide the grassroots activism and the muscle. The other faction would put up the money…
Bringing together the two strains of the far right gave the CNP enormous leverage. The group, for example, could pick a candidate for public office and ply him or her with individual donations and PAC money from its well-endowed, business wing.
The goals of the CNP, then, are similarly two-pronged. Activists like Nor¬quist, who once said he wanted to shrink the federal government to a size where it could be drowned in a bathtub, are drawn to the group for its exaltation of unfettered capitalism, hostility toward social-service spending and low (or no) tax ideology.
Dramatically scaling back the size of the federal government and abolishing the last remnants of the New Deal may be one goal of the CNP, but many of the foot soldiers of the Religious Right sign on for a different crusade: a desire to remake America in a Christian fundamentalist image.
Note that Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson are either current or recent members of the CNP. The ACLU would be a serious stumbling block for a future American Theocracy, wouldn’t it? Is this just another conspiracy theory? Consider this piece of legislation; The Constitution Restoration Act;
Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, the Supreme Court shall not have jurisdiction to review, by appeal, writ of certiorari, or otherwise, any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer or agent of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official or personal capacity), concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.'
A governmental agent can claim God as the "sovereign source of law", and there's not a thing the courts can do about it. Here's David Kubiak's take on this bill, from his article entitled Introducing The Constitution Restoration Act - Say Hello To Taliban America And Goodbye To Godless Judges, Courts And Law;
...In other words, the bill ensures that God's divine word (and our infallible leaders' interpretation thereof) will hereafter trump all our pathetic democratic notions about freedom, law and rights -- and our courts can't say a thing. This, of course, will take "In God We Trust" to an entirely new level, because soon He (and His personally anointed political elite) will be all the legal recourse we have left.
When the ACLU is treated as terrorists, we had better sit up and take notice. Not only does this emerging American Taliban offer the world a disgraceful example of our great nation, it also denigrates the message of divine love offered to us through Jesus Christ. They must be stopped.
Posted by Father Jake at 06:32 AM | Comments (5)
July 17, 2005
Whatever Happened to Fundamentalist Progressives?
Posted by Public Theologian
One of the strangest features of the contemporary political landscape is the marriage of convenience between religious conservatives and traditional elements of the Republican Party. If you had lived a hundred years ago, for instance, you would have experienced a similar theology from the fundamentalists but the politics would have been very different. The great populist of the latter part of the 19th and first quarter of the 20th century, William Jennings Bryan, who most people remember as the fundamentalist prosecutor in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, had a long and successful political career during which he railed against the moneyed interests of his day and on behalf of the common working person.
According to the William Jennings Bryan Recognition Project,
Bryan is credited with early championing of the following: (1) graduated income tax (16th Amendment), (2) direct election of U.S. senators (17th Amendment), (3) women's suffrage (19th Amendment), (4) workmen's compensation, (5) minimum wage, (6) eight-hour workday, (7) Federal Trade Commission, (8) Federal Farm Loan Act, (9) government regulation of telephone/telegraph and food safety, (10) Department of Health, (11) Department of Labor, and (12) Department of Education.
Now from that list of liberal political accomplishments, one would imagine that Bryan was probably a godless atheist, right? In fact, he was anything but, which was why he was the prosecutor in charge of convicting Tennessee biology teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution against state law in the mid-1920’s. Bryan’s theology was hardly distinguishable from Jerry Falwell’s or Pat Robertson’s today. But his politics were very different.
The understanding of Jesus that Bryan brought to the public square was a Jesus who was concerned about fair wages, fair taxes, fair working conditions, and the good that the government could do for its citizens. Bryan was also a world-renowned champion of peace, using his position as Secretary of State in the Wilson administration as a platform for peacemaking , rather than saber rattling. But somewhere along the way, this message of concern for common people and for peace went by the boards amongst fundamentalists and was instead replaced by a Jesus who favored the powerful and who walked with potentates, and who thought that force was a legitimate means to achieve American public policy ends.
This is the Jesus of the contemporary Religious Right, who favors small government, low taxes, and who would be more likely to give you a lecture on self-reliance and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, than he would be to heal you or feed you with the little boy’s five loaves and two fishes. In short, this Jesus sounds like he just finished a summer internship at the Cato Institute.
How did this Jesus come to be? How is it that fundamentalism left its roots and created the Jesus that had no critical word for Wall Street but who instead embraced market economics as the path to the kingdom of God? Simply put, Christian fundamentalists sold their birthright for a mess of pottage in the late 1960s and early 1970s to traditional elements within the Republican Party who lacked a populist side, in exchange for the money and access to power that it craved in its attempt to reassert its long dormant political influence on the American public square. The so-called Rockefeller Republicans, who had previously been uninterested in sticking their noses in other people’s bed sheets, and who had instead been concerned about enhancing corporate profitability, had to give way to the fundamentalist obsession with America’s sex life. On the other hand, and here is my point, the fundamentalists, who had heretofore been the champions of the poor and middle-class, now had to embrace the agenda of Wall Street and Big Business in order to get what they wanted out of the deal.
The problem with this compromise is most acutely seen when it comes to the question of the morality of abortion, which is something about which the fundamentalists are deeply concerned. On the one hand, they are adamant that abortion is murder and insist that they will not stop their political crusade until the number of abortions in the United States reaches zero. On the other hand, they represent a political party that advocates a set of policies that keep both girls and boys ignorant about the ways to prevent unwanted pregnancies, thereby increasing them, and that promotes policies that would push a woman standing on the brink of poverty towards having an abortion. They support tax cuts for the rich, thus cutting the necessary funding for helping women who would seek an abortion in order to stay out of poverty, while at the same time they stand against laws which would raise the minimum wage, laws which would establish health care for all Americans, and laws which would provide our young people with an adequate education about human reproduction and birth-control options.
This is an all the more pressing issue now, inasmuch as the fundamentalists are flexing their political muscles in an attempt to force President Bush to nominate a Supreme Court justice who will overturn Roe vs Wade. And they may well be successful in this. But what kind of world is it that they will create for the women who they will force to bear these children, as well as for the unwanted children that they compel to be born? One would think that in preparation for such a world, the fundamentalists would be ramping up taxes and expanding social welfare programs to make ready for their New World Order in which the one million abortions that they will prohibit are translated into one million more live births. But here is where the fundamentalists’ compromise has them caught. Having made their deal with the devil of Wall Street in order to gain the political power necessary to overturn Roe, they cannot now break free in order to create the community services necessary to welcome another one million children into our society.
The horror that their worldview may be about to wreak on women who may be forced by these zealots to bear children against their will, may be only but the tip of the iceberg of the great social problems that will result from the birth of a million unwanted children each year. It is shameful that the very people who want to force this upon the rest of society have not made adequate provision for its consequences.
Posted by Public Theologian at 11:10 PM | Comments (11)
July 15, 2005
Think Globally & Act Locally? Yes, but…Looking for a New Paradigm
Posted by Faithful Progressive
In 1972, the United Nations held the first international conference on the human environment in Stockholm, Sweden. The great biologist Rene Dubos and other experts prepared an innovative report on the status of the environment and how to improve it. This UN conference was the origin of the phrase "Think Globally, Act Locally". FP was 16 years old that year, and I fondly remember placing one of those bumper-stickers (with this catchy new slogan and a picture of the planet as seen from space) on my VW bug. There was just one problem with this idea: people bought into it too much. Many activists set their sights almost exclusively locally: particularly those of us to the left of center who had experienced so many national defeats. This was especially the case with liberal religious activists, who created a whole slew of lasting local social service institutions during this period. And they--we-- have accomplished a lot in our own communities. But it may be time to re-think the idea of just thinking globally and just acting locally. To use the jargon of the moment: it may be time for a paradigm shift.
In his piece, Breaking Out of the 'Disaster Management Rut,' Ilan Kelman of Cambridge University writes:
“Action is frequently most effective when implemented locally so that local conditions are understood, and objections or concerns can be dealt with more immediately and directly, assuming that appropriate mechanisms exist to effect the desired action…Local small-scale and decentralized efforts, however, might need wider and higher-level support to inform them of preferred policies and actions, to supply necessary resources and provide an external evaluator or monitor which could add credence and impetus to the local efforts...National agendas, guidance and operational support for linking disaster-risk reduction, development and sustainability would provide strategic direction and promote consistency, thereby helping to avert local decisions that fail to account for impacts beyond the local area, or which could otherwise conflict with the longer-term and wider objectives... More global approaches are also necessary for certain threats… International intervention is also often demanded for conflict and trans-boundary creeping environmental changes among other situations. For disaster-risk reduction, "think globally, act locally" must be matched with "think locally, act globally", plus thinking and acting in between levels.” Though his topic is disaster relief, his points obtain to most efforts to create compassionate change. Acting locally is simply not enough anymore.
What are the implications of this for U.S. activists? First and foremost, we need to start acting much more forcefully at the national level. Think about this Movement we are trying to build, the Christian Alliance for Progress.(CAfP) A great bunch of people came together in Jacksonville, Florida to express their frustration at the divisive and cruel agenda of the Christian Right and to describe what they think real Gospel values, the heart of the ministry of Jesus, would look like. They acted locally but did not stop there--they are doing the hard work of trying to take this new movement to the national level, where we can have a wider impact. The leaders of CAfP have even been heard to say that in this they are consciously following the model of the Christian Right.
If there is one thing that the Religious Right has understood better than the religious center and left it is the need to act nationally as well as locally. While we were busy tending our own gardens (a la Candide) and staffing our local homeless shelters, the Right was organizing at the national level. James Dobson himself claims to have an e-mail list with more than 3 million members. Through their Values Action Teams, Extreme Right Christian leaders meet with more than 100 Congressional staffers on a weekly basis. They gather to push their agenda of putting limits on the ability of scientists to do basic stem cell research, restricting the rights of gay Americans and trying to criminalize abortion in every case while cutting funding for proven sex education and birth control programs that dramatically reduced the actual numbers of abortions in the 1990’s. (For the first time in a decade, the numbers of abortions has remained the same and not declined.) The national agenda of the Christian Right has dominated the discussion of moral values.
Meanwhile, we’re mostly still stuck in the 1970’s, acting locally and often just thinking globally (say, listening to World Music at Starbucks and reading the New York Times)--while skipping altogether the national level where so much that impacts all of us happens.
There are, however, some recent hopeful efforts of people organizing National advocacy groups, including the Christian Alliance for Progress itself. The Internet and e-mail have played a key role in bringing people of common vision together to create a new Movement. It's not enough to come together nationally every four years at the time of Presidential elections--that's why many of us are here.
Beyond this, there are exciting new efforts to act globally such as the Make Poverty History campaign. Much of this effort has had a specifically religious cast to it, and it has brought together people of diverse views and faiths.
Writing in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, ELCA St. Paul Bishop Peter Rogness recently wrote:
“I think this movement is, at its heart, a religious one, not in the narrow "my line to God gives me all the right answers on lots of issues" sense, but in a powerful, converging and unifying sense. Perhaps the time of claiming exclusive religious certainty that polarizes and vilifies is waning, finally, and a new movement stirs -- a recognition that at the heart of our faith (and, much to our surprise, we find it at the heart of virtually all faiths) is the simple claim that God is gently but surely guiding us to live lives of compassion and solidarity with all who live in the grip of poverty.
For all the attention we give to the many "wedge issues" that divide us, it is clear that acting on behalf of the poor is a convergence issue. Whether dealing with malaria and literacy in Africa or health and child care in Minnesota, an agenda of compassion is bridging divides and uniting people.
What is needed is political leadership that gives expression to this new movement. The budget stalemate in this state came about in part because of the growing reluctance to arbitrarily withdraw services from children and low-wage workers. National policy is beginning to acknowledge that the rest of the developed world is far ahead of us in seeking to save the lives of the 29,000 children who die each day from poverty and disease. There is growing awareness that our health -- our future -- as a people will come not from our arsenals but from our compassion.”
Posted by Faithful Progressive at 06:17 AM | Comments (5)
July 14, 2005
The Reformed Prose of Douglas Wilson
Posted by Jesus Politics
Douglas Wilson is pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. His church is a member of the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches. Below are some quotes from his articles in Credenda Agenda.
For example, when women were granted the right to vote, the nation had already accepted the lie that a nation is nothing more than a collection of individuals . And so the matter was framed this way: men as individuals can vote, so why cannot individual women do the same? We were so muddled we thought we were giving the franchise to women when we were in fact taking it away from families.
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Contrary to popular teaching on the Christian home, a man's duty is not be a real sweet guy, well-liked by all at church. Much of the effort being expended on masculine renewal today is nothing more than a discipleship program for weenies, a pale copy of the secular men's movement of a few years back. In contrast, a husband must assume a mantle of strength, and the demeanor of masculine leadership.
It explains why Promise Keepers, a masculine renewal movement, was so easily diverted into a maudlin and weepy sentimentality. It explains why ministers cannot teach on certain subjects from the pulpit. It explains why Christians cannot articulate why women in combat is an abomination. It explains why the masculine virtues of courage, initiative, responsibility, and strength are in such short supply. We cannot resist the demand to let pretty women lead us for the simple reason that we are currently being led by pretty men.
The day of infamy was September 11, and many have told us that it will take its bloody place next to December 7. And it was a day of infamy, but that same week contained another infamy, far worse in nature, and far more damaging in that it was not recognized. That day was the Day of Prayer and Remembrance on the following Friday, September 14, when America, in the aftermath of a devasting judgment from the living God, convened a polytheistic worship service in the National Cathedral, now better called the National Pantheon, and called upon her gods—gods that cannot hear and cannot save. But this idolatrous service showed us at least one good thing—it demonstrates beyond any reasonable objection that the root of our disease is in our worship.
Christian medievalism, however, presents us with a view of a whole life, full of truth, beauty, goodness and all their nasty contraries. The medieval period is the closest thing we have to a maturing Christian culture. It was a culture unashamed of Christ and one sharply at odds with the values of modernity.
First, we must repent of how the American Church has trivialized the marriage between Christ and His bride, the Church, through how we blaspheme in our worship services. All across America, Christians will be signing petitions in favor of a constitutional amendment against homosexual marriage, and then they will return to worship services in which beach balls are batted around the sanctuary, trite ditties are endlessly sung, movie clips are shown instead of sermons, and the Lord's Supper is something that the older Christians remember having done years ago. And what these petition signers will not realize is that a country in which Christians worship the Triune God this way is a country which deserves the judgment of homosexual marriage.
Posted by Jesus Politics at 08:10 AM | Comments (11)
July 13, 2005
If It Looks Like A Duck: Karl Rove and the Outing of Valerie Plame
Posted by Fresh Politics
Karl Rove should not resign. He should be fired.
Over these last few crazy weeks, there has been a lot of speculation about the extent of Rove's involvement in the outing of Valerie Plame. The whole event has become a bit of a crazy spectacle with Matthew Cooper's last minute decision to testify (after being released from confidentiality by his source) and Judith Miller's imprisonment for refusing to do same (though, in my opinion, she's no hero, and I have no sympathy for the time she is spending in jail...but that's another post). Now we know that Rove was not only involved, but, contrary to previous assertions, gave information about Ms. Plame to reporters before Robert Novak's infamous column was published. I don't know what his legal liabilities are, if any. That is something for Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to worry about and a grand jury to decide.
Legal liability, however, is quite a different animal from the real-world consequences flowing from this breach. The White House has repeatedly stressed that it would not tolerate this conduct and that the offender, if discovered, would be fired. (As an aside...apparently, this has become controversial; however, it appears clear that the Administration, at a minimum, strongly suggested that the leaker would be fired. See http://mediamatters.org/items/200507120004). So when we finally learn that Rove was involved after having been repeatedly told that neither he nor any other high level administration officials had anything to do with the leak, what happens? They refuse to comment – Scott McClellan spends a press briefing professing a newfound respect for not speaking about ongoing investigations and President Bush flat out refuses to answer when asked if he is going to fire Rove. And they parse, stressing that Rove did not actually say her name, only “Mr. Wilson's wife.” Never mind that at the time, a quick Google search would have quickly identified “Mr. Wilson's wife” as “Valerie Plame.”
The fact is, after two years of being told that no high level administration officials were involved, we learn that at least one was. I don't envy Scott McClellan right now because how on earth do you explain the discrepancy? Someone lied at some point in this whole affair. We can discuss the intricacies of what was said, with what intent, and with what knowledge for two more years. But there is a plain meaning to the assertions that have been paraded before the public for the last two years and that no amount of hair-splitting will change. At the end of the day, the American people were lied to and someone should pay the consequences for that. This administration, which has been riddled with problems of misrepresentations and embellishments (remember those WMDs?) absolutely must take a stand to begin the process of restoring credibility.
The talking heads on television can have a parse-fest. But much like the American people quite intelligently dismissed Bill Clinton's definition of “is,” so too will they see through the current White House stonewalling and RNC spin. They said that White House officials were not involved, now Rove admits he was. They said the leaker would be fired. Now, they should follow through.
Posted by Fresh Politics at 04:46 PM | Comments (7)
July 12, 2005
Falwell; "Christian Alliance is not Christian"
Posted by Father Jake
Here is a confidential letter, dated July 8, 2005, that Jerry Falwell sent to all the members of Moral Majority and Liberty Alliance. The entire letter is about the Christian Alliance for Progress. He begins with this statement;
Last month, a new leftist religious organization announced its inception to battle the alleged domination that Dr. James Dobson, Pat Robertson and I have on modern-day politics. This organization, the Christian Alliance for Progress, is hardly “Christian."
I did not know that Rev. Falwell had acquired the ability to peer into the souls of others. Let's recall who this new self-appointed guard of the pearly gates is;
This is the same Jerry Falwell who brought us the entertaining news item some years ago regarding his revelation that Teletubbie Tinky Winky was gay. What was the evidence for such a claim? The character was purple, had a triangle on his head and carried a purse, of course.
This is also the same self-proclaimed prophet who told us that AIDS was "God's judgement on homosexual promiscuity." And, as one last example of this man's psychic abilities, we have him to thank for revealing to us the real criminals behind the 9/11 terrorist attack;
...I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'
It appears that quite a few people don't live up to Rev. Falwell's expectations. I must admit that I feel a little better knowing that those of us of the Christian Alliance for Progress have not been singled out for eternal damnation.
Now that we've identified the source, let's see what he has to say to justify his judgmental statement;
First, the sole purpose for Jesus’ ministry on earth was stated in His own words: “… for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:30). Any organization that deems to calls itself “Christian,” simply must have as its basis the reality that Jesus asserted that salvation could come only through Him.
So that's what that verse means? I thought "saving the lost" included scattering the proud in their conceit, casting down the mighty from their thrones, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry with good things, and remembering God's promise of mercy. But it was all about using a formula of words to state a uniform belief regarding Jesus. Silly me. Moving on...
The group is simply falling in line with untold numbers of past liberal church groups that have promoted abortion-rights, homosexual rights and anti-war sentiments.
Why did he boil down our lengthy values statement to three issues? Because those are the issues that will rally his troops (or donors). Never mind the environment. Never mind that over 6,000 verses of the bible address poverty issues. Let's just talk about those five verses that justify the kind of bigotry that fueled the flames that threatened a UCC church in Virginia last week. And then there is the big fundraiser; abortion...
...abortion is clearly not the will of God. The Bible does not expressly address abortion...
No, it doesn't, Jerry. But, Exodus 21:22 requires a monetary payment for causing a miscarriage, yet if the woman is harmed the penalty is "a life for a life." Your position appears to place a higher value on the unborn than the life of the woman, which, using your criteria, is contrary to "the clear teaching of scripture."
Or, do you claim that God has revealed to you a new teaching on this topic that is not contained within scripture? If I was to make such a claim on another issue, I'd bet, if I was a bettin' man, that you'd use that as further evidence that I'm not a "real" Christian, wouldn't you? Tell me, then, since you admit that your stance is not supported by scripture, other than the vague reference you offered, on what authority do you claim the high moral ground?
What is most curious about the abortion segment of this letter is his final statement on the issue; "...the Bible is clear — “Thou shalt not kill.” This is then followed by a challenge to those Christians who oppose the war;
Finally, the Alliance calls for peace and an end to war, but they cannot understand that the only true peace that man can know comes through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. He was not a hippie do-gooder, but rather the Son of the Living God who came to earth to pave the one way to heaven for mankind. To present Him as anything less is an outrage.
Am I confused, or did he just sidestep the entire issue of the war in Iraq; a war that has caused the death of over 20,000 innocent Iraqi civilians and over 1,700 Americans? Rev. Falwell may be surprised to learn that many of us who participate in the Christian Alliance for Progress also have a close personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and it is from this relationship that we are compelled to call for an end to the killing. But, of course, these are not "Christian" motives; that judgement has already been made. Instead, we are now "hippie do-gooders." I must assume that is intended as an insult?
In his closing, we find this statement;
Many Americans are seeking to discover the true peace of Christ and real meaning for their lives. While evangelical Christians will continue to be denounced and despised by the fashionable left, we must continue to devotedly and passionately take the truth of the Gospel into the world.
I've got a news flash for you, Jerry. If you would care to look over your shoulder, you may discover that not all evangelical Christians are marching lockstep behind you;
A top official of the National Association of Evangelicals told reporters gathered at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary that the Moral Majority, a 1980s political movement dominated by Christian conservatives, was ''an aberration and a regrettable one at that," even though it drew evangelicals into the political process, because the organization was ''fatally flawed by a hubris that made the movement condescending and more than a bit judgmental."
"...more than a bit judgmental." From the tone of the attempted attack on CAP, it appears that Falwell is carrying on that tradition.
It is my opinion that Jerry Falwell is using those who disagree with him on various issues as scapegoats to justify his leadership among the fundamentalist Christian movement; a movement that seems to me to be the last gasp of a dying world view.
Sir, I find you to be misguided at best, and possibly a very dangerous man. I will continue to challenge your statements or teachings that victimize the children of God. But please know that when I stand before God, I will remember you in my prayers, as you remain my brother in Christ.
Posted by Father Jake at 02:51 AM | Comments (78)
July 11, 2005
The New Inquisition
Posted by ChristianAlliance
Editor's Note: Guest Blogger Sollicitudo Rei Socialis joins us today to comment on a controversial New York Times article on evolution that was published this weekend. We welcome his following and the other bloggers of the Roman Catholic social justice blog.
Guest Blogger Sollicitudo Rei Socialis
In an op-ed article for the New York Times on July 7, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Vienna, shocked the world by taking a stand against evolution which is contrary to about a century's worth of Catholic teaching on the subject. Not only was it shocking that a Roman Catholic cardinal would take such an unusual position on evolution, but it was even more shocking in light of who this particular cardinal is. Cardinal Schönborn is not just an obscure Austrian archbishop, but the lead editor of the official Catechism of the Catholic Church published in 1992 under the pontificate of the late Pope John Paul II. Among Catholic prelates, his intellectual expertise is matched, perhaps, only by Pope Benedict XVI.
Far from being an innovative approach beginning with the pontificate of Pope John XXIII or the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church's teaching authority has taken a favorable approach to evolution and scientific research in general for over a hundred years. For instance, Pope Leo XIII, writing in 1893, taught that the sacred writers of scripture "did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language" (Providentissimus Deus, #18). Writing in 1950, Pope Pius XII even more explicitly endorsed "research and discussions" regarding evolution:
The teaching authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter -- for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God" (Humani Generis, #36).
Cardinal Schönborn is quite right to say that it is impossible for a Catholic to believe in a view of evolution which excludes God entirely. However, the assertion that Catholics must adhere to the doctrine of intelligent design does not seem consistent with the teaching of the popes in the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century. It seems very clear from this teaching that Catholics are free to believe in theistic evolution, which acknowledges that the theory of evolution fits into God's providential plan for creation. Theistic evolution differs significantly from intelligent design, since the former holds that evolution is part of God's providential plan but not necessarily directly guided by God himself, and the latter holds that God directly guided creation from start to finish.
In light of the differences between theistic evolution and intelligent design, my question for Cardinal Schönborn is this: What is more magnificent -- a God who can put things together, or a God who can throw parts out there which are so unique and so advanced that they can not only put themselves together, but also evolve into more advanced organisms and adapt to meet the needs of various environments? Clearly, a clockmaker who can make parts which are so advanced that they make their own unique clock is superior to a clockmaker who builds the clock himself. Those who hold to theistic evolution and those who hold to intelligent design agree that God is the "Uncaused Cause," as Cardinal Schönborn puts it. The differences lie in exactly what process the Uncaused Cause has caused. When it comes to this question, Catholics are free to disagree over the answer.
Although God is the ultimate master of creation, he nevertheless makes use of his creatures' cooperation (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, #306). In his infinite wisdom, he chose to cooperate with Nature in order to create all things, including human beings. Why? Perhaps one reason is to emphasize the relationship of all things to one another. Each living thing, from the most intelligent human beings to the tiniest and most basic single cell organisms, comes from a process that is entirely natural. We differ in that each human being has been given a soul; we have been endowed with God's own breath, his own life. This supernatural life makes us stewards of creation; but this supernatural life dwells in a body which arises from natural processes and relies on Nature for its continued existence. This cooperation between God and Nature in the creation of human beings ensures that we will be good and responsible stewards of creation, not only because God wills it on the supernatural level, but also because we rely upon Nature at the natural level. If we arise entirely from intelligent design, without regard for the cooperative role of Nature, this intrinsic reliance upon and interdependence with Nature is lost, and our sense of responsible stewardship is weakened.
Aside from the metaphysical considerations, there are also practical factors to consider before the Church radically redefines its teaching on evolution.
The first practical question to consider is: Are we ready for another "Galileo incident"? It was only in the pontificate of the late Pope John Paul II that the Roman Catholic Church finally apologized for its persecution of Galileo, who contended that the sun was the center of the galaxy at a time when the Church contended that the earth was the center of the galaxy. Of course, it turned out that Galileo was right and the Church was wrong. The overwhelming evidence on this new matter is that human beings did, in fact, evolve -- intelligent design is also a scientifically interesting theory, with the third and much less popular "scientific creationism" being almost entirely untenable. Is the Roman Catholic Church willing to once again be on the wrong side of history and science, in the event that it turns out that evolution is scientifically correct and those opposed to the theory have been wrong?
Another practical consideration is the impact a redefinition of the Church's teaching on evolution could have on Catholics in the scientific community and Catholic education. It has been noted in the New York Times that Cardinal Schönborn is on the Congregation for Catholic Education, the curial office responsible for carrying out the pope's delegated jurisdiction over Catholic educational institutions. Although he has said that the Congregation has no plans to issue new instructions regarding evolution, it is nevertheless a concerning development that a member of the Congregation is seeking to redefine the Church's teaching on evolution. The best way to do that, after all, would be through the Church's educational institutions.
Such a redefinition could have widespread and dangerous implications. Faithful Catholics would be alienated from the scientific community because of their inability to accept the dominant and most promising theory relating to the origin of human beings and, in fact, the origin of all that exists. Depending upon where the Catholic's dominant loyalty lies, he would be faced with a decision to either disobey the Church or to reject the scientific community altogether in favor of the Church's teaching authority. The long-standing war between the Church's teaching authority and human reason, halted by the popes of the 19th and 20th centuries and by the Second Vatican Council, would be reignited. The credibility of Catholic educational institutions would be eroded, leaving students -- Catholic and non Catholic alike -- wondering if they should accept a Catholic education which is less credible than that which is offered by public, secular educational institutions.
The Church must think long and hard before it takes these dangerous steps toward war with the scientific community and human reason. If history is any indication, science and reason will prevail, and the Roman Catholic Church will be left to look rather foolish once again. One of the worst moments in the Church's ugly past in the war against reason was the Inquisition, in which the Dominicans played a shadowy role. It would be a shame if Cardinal Schönborn, also a Dominican and a well-educated man, were to initiate a new inquisition against science and human reason. Let us hope and pray that he does not.
Posted by ChristianAlliance at 12:25 PM | Comments (15)
July 08, 2005
Our deepest sympathy, prayers and friendship to the people of London
Posted by Faithful Progressive
We offer our deepest sympathy, prayers and friendship to the people of London on this terrible day. We will have you in all our thoughts and prayers today, and over the next weeks. We also hold close the people of Iraq, who have also suffered so much from similar acts of violence. We pray that we do all that we can to be peacemakers in a world too filled with hatred, violence and war. Dear Lord, we pray for peace.
Here is a Joint Statement from British Christian and Muslim Groups and a Christian Prayer for this tragic day.
Posted by Faithful Progressive at 12:06 AM | Comments (12)
July 07, 2005
Three Recent Baptist Sermons Challenge the Christian Right
Posted by Jesus Politics
Some of the sharpest critical resistance to the Baptist and Christian Right often comes from fellow Baptists. Below are some quotes from three recent sermons.
A disease of uncivil religion has infected our land. This disease has been incubating for 25 years, but has reached epidemic proportions in our current time of terror. The motivation of uncivil religion is not to recognize God in our national life, but, rather, to represent him. The high priests of this uncivil religion desire not so much to speak to God in the public square, but, rather, to speak for God. Toleration of diversity has been replaced by persecution of it. Ceremonial prayer has been supplanted by sectarian orthodoxy. Unity and consensus is seen as moral compromise; division and fear are the tools of choice. A weird historical revisionism seeks to rewrite the foundational value of religious liberty as something novel and exotic and dangerous, rather than the basis upon which our founding fathers and mothers built American democracy. Brent Walker is shockingly correct in saying, “If put to a vote today, the First Amendment would not pass.” God has been kidnapped, co-opted for political ambitions. Houses of worship have been turned into precincts of partisanship. Uncivil religion no longer wants government to make citizens. It wants government to make converts.
Our Lord himself endorsed the measured and appropriate recognition of government’s role in his famous encounter with the Herod party of his day. They came to Jesus trying to get him to contradict and violate his legendary monotheism, and his exclusive allegiance to God. “Tell us then what you think,” they asked Jesus. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” Jesus, knowing their malicious intent, asked them to show him the coin used to pay the tax to the Roman government, a denarius, about a day’s wage for a common laborer. “Whose head is this?” Jesus asked, pointing to the image of the emperor embossed on the coin. “And whose title?” When they answered, Jesus gave his classic response, “Then give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” (Matthew 22.15-22) Go ahead and give the government its proper due, but anybody with a lick of sense knows the guy on this coin isn’t
God. God cannot be imaged or titled. God is the great I AM, beyond representation and description. Give that God your life—completely, totally, exhaustively. Tip your hat to Caesar, turn over your heart to God. I don’t imagine that this text was read at that political rally, the so-called “Justice Sunday,” held several weeks ago in a Kentucky church. You can’t give your lives whole-hog to Caesar like
those folks are doing and put up with Jesus at the same time. This is one of the many parts of the Scriptures that the uncivil religionists conveniently leave out of their canon. Would somebody show me in the Bible where it says we have to get our guy elected to office before we can advance the kingdom of God? I may have missed it, but I don’t remember one single instance where the church ran a candidate for the Roman Senate.
It is no theological accident that Jesus was put to the test of uncivil religion by the Devil himself. At the outset of his ministry, he was shown all the kingdoms of world with their massive power and glittering prestige, and promised access to this wealth and power in
exchange for only one small act of tribute. This was the original faith-based initiative, and Jesus knew it. The Devil knew it too, just like those operatives in Washington who dangle similar carrots in front of inner-city pastors know it. Imagine what Jesus could have done with all that money and all those resources. He could have set up schools and clinics and treatment centers and food banks and homeless shelters. The devil offered Jesus a voucher system. He didn’t take it. If Jesus had wanted us to build his kingdom with the support of government, he would have chosen the Devil’s option. Jesus knew you can’t have the blessing of God and the buy-off of
government at the same time. Jesus repudiated the Devil’s tempting offer in a rebuke we need unambiguously to give the uncivil religionists of our day: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.” (Matthew 4.10)
Statistics do not tell all the truth, but we simply can’t ignore the fact that one billion people in this world live on less than $1 a day. We can’t close our eyes to the fact that eight million people around the world die each year simply because they are too poor to stay alive, that’s 20,000 a day. I don’t care what your politics are, or what economic theory you believe in, as followers of Christ we must enter into this suffering.
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Our government must make changes in policy that gives a greater priority to poor people. Our churches must make changes in practice and programs so that more of our money and time is going to the poor, and less to ourselves. Our families must make some changes in spending habits, in what we do with leisure and holidays and possessions. And, most important of all, each of us as individuals must make changes in our life style, in our giving and in our attitudes.
Some today set the principle of soul liberty against the principle of Biblical authority. Baptists have never understood it thus. Our deep commitment to soul liberty is because it is essential to Biblical authority in our lives. Through soul liberty we fulfill Paul's instruction to the Philippians to "work out your salvation with fear and trembling." Through soul liberty we recognize God's own respect for our free will. Through soul liberty we recognize that no one else can answer for us - neither priest, nor preacher, nor creeds or councils. Through soul liberty we honor the primacy of every soul's encounter with the living God. This is the very heart of what it means to be a Baptist Christian and what the priesthood of all believers means. Our commitment to biblical authority through soul freedom has been precious to us. And it is precious to us now! It doesn't make our life together easier, but it is essential for radical personal discipleship.
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Many of us became American Baptists because we saw in this family of faith a profound intertwining of biblical authority with the freedom to explore, examine, and even question. We can testify that coercion in matters of faith does not work
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Other Baptists may have forgotten how precious this soul freedom is. American Baptists; don't you forget it.
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In the midst of its divisions, the world needs the witness of a people bound together in love, committed to the difficult task of walking with one another in the midst of strong differences. We stand at a crossroads. In our world, the path of radical discipleship, the path of radical love is the road less taken. We dare not choose another. We dare not choose the wrong road...the road that leads to separation. That choice will certainly unite you with like-minded people, but will give you small souls, and make you comfortable Christians. The radical call of Jesus doesn't make us comfortable. Take the road-less-traveled - the rich road of love of one another and service for Christ in the midst of our differences.
Posted by Jesus Politics at 08:04 AM | Comments (9)
July 06, 2005
...And Justice For All: Thoughts on Sandra Day O'Connor
Posted by Fresh Politics
By now, it's old news that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is retiring. I've lamented, called friends, made predictions. My feelings about the news were amazingly strong. As a woman, I am concerned about the future of reproductive health. As a progressive, I fear that President Bush will choose an idealogue as her successor. Yet, as news sunk in, I had to admit that, despite my political differences with Justice O'Connor, I had really come to like her.
My feelings about Justice O'Connor really developed over the years, but I remember the turning point clearly. I was in my teens when Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 Supreme Court case that re-affirmed Roe v. Wade, was decided. That Justice O'Connor authored the plurality decision was of little consequence in my mind. I saw her as a traitor to women – someone who succeeded in the face of tremendous adversity only to turn her back on others just like her once she reached the top.
That sentiment persisted for many, many years. Then, as a first year law student, I had to read Casey in Constitutional Law. Prior to that time, although I knew Casey's essential holding, I had never bothered to read it. I can still remember sitting at my dining room table, thoroughly engrossed in the words. Beautifully written, carefully reasoned, and incredibly sensitive to the highly charged issues presented by the case, to me it read like a favorite novel. I was awestruck. The opinion was not the simple rantings and conclusion-filled statements of a reactionary. It was compassionate, multi-faceted, nuanced; demonstrating careful attention to facts and a wise respect for the importance of stable legal precedent.
It stands, many casebooks later, as one of the most eloquent opinions I have read. In addition, it was the first time that I understood that there was more to Justice O'Connor than I had given her credit for. Over time, I have come to respect her as being a justice with integrity. True, she has been a faithful Republican in many ways. Yet, Justice O'Connor is her own woman and has been fairly consistent in trying to keep an open mind and see that justice is done. This does not mean that I always agree with her, but even when I disagree with her ultimate conclusions, I trust that she gave each argument careful consideration. I cannot say that about all of the justices currently serving.
In the wake of the announcement that Justice O'Connor is retiring, there has been a lot of talk about abortion. While I fully support a woman's right to choose, the Supreme Court is more than Roe. The nation's “court of last resort,” it demands principled judging. It demands justices who have their ears – and their minds – open. It is about having justices who recognize that the backdrop of its cases is today's world, not the romantic notions of life in centuries long gone. That was the beauty of Justice O'Connor. In many ways, she met this standard (with few exceptions, most notably Bush v. Gore).
Looking forward, I hope that President Bush chooses a successor who can be this kind of justice. I don't need a justice who agreees with me on all issues, which is fortunate since it is unlikely President Bush will consult with me prior to making his choice. What I need – and what I believe this country deserves – is a justice who will listen and care more about dispensing justice than political ideology. At the end of the case, the parties are the ones who have to move forward and live with the decision that was handed down. Justices retire, but their decisions usually live on. The least we can have as a nation is a court that will have fairly and completely heard all sides.
Posted by Fresh Politics at 05:30 PM | Comments (4)
July 05, 2005
UCC Calls for Equal Marriage Rights
Posted by Father Jake
Yesterday, the General Synod of the United Church of Christ overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling for "equal marriage rights for all people, regardless of gender."
This is the first time a mainline denomination has openly supported equal marriage rights. It is most appropriate for this historic action to occur on Independence Day, as the Rev. John H. Thomas, General Minister and President of the UCC, acknowledged;
On this July Fourth the General Synod of the United Church of Christ has acted courageously to declare freedom, affirming marriage equality, affirming the civil rights of same gender couples to have their relationships recognized as marriages by the state, and encouraging our local churches to celebrate and bless those marriages.
UCC seminarian and blogger Chuck Currie offers us a statement from the supporters of the resolution;
The message of the Gospel is the lens through which the whole of scripture is to be interpreted. Love and compassion, justice and peace are at the very core of the life and ministry of Jesus. It is a message that always bends toward inclusion. The biblical story recounts the ways in which inclusion and welcome to God’s community is ever-expanding – from the story of Abraham and Sarah, to the inclusive ministry of Jesus, to the baptism of Cornelius, to the missionary journeys of Paul throughout the Greco-Roman world. The liberating work of the Spirit as witnessed in the activities of Jesus’ ministry has been to address the situations and structures of exclusion, injustice and oppression that diminish God’s people and keep them from realizing the full gift of human personhood in the context of human communion.
It's about time one of the mainline denominations took such a stand. One can only hope that the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists and Lutherans will be emboldened by this just and courageous action.
The United Church of Christ has about 6,000 congregations with 1.6 million members. It is the result of four traditions uniting, one of which is the Congregational Churches, who trace their roots to the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England. Their motto is "that they may all be one," which is drawn from Jesus' prayer for the unity of the church. You can learn more about the UCC here.
The captives have been set free on this Independence Day. Thanks be to God! The trail forward has been blazed. Who will be the next to follow?
Posted by Father Jake at 04:53 AM | Comments (26)
July 04, 2005
If It Doesn't Fit You Must Acquit: Why Romans 1 Can't Be Used Against Gays in Public Policy Debates
Posted by Public Theologian
Religious conservatives who want to deny gays and lesbians the same civil benefits as everyone else in society often attempt to use the Bible as proof for the validity of their position. But as I will discuss in this post, the Romans 1, the lengthiest biblical passage which discusses same-sex practice, provides no support for such a claim but has instead been used by the Religious Right as a fence against gays and lesbians in order to keep them from experiencing the full measure of citizenship in this society.
One would think that with the vehemence with which they press their case, that the Religious Right would have entire books of the Scripture which addressed homosexuality at their disposal from which to draw their core arguments. But there is actually a paucity of biblical texts that even mention same-sex activities, and none of them are useful for drawing public policy conclusions. The story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is certainly one of the fundamentalist’s favorite, belief in the Old Testament itself makes it clear that the primary sin of the two cities was inhospitality towards the needy (Ezek. 16:49). The passages in Leviticus are generally disregarded even by conservatives, because they are imbedded in what scholars call the Holiness Code of biblical law, which does not apply to Gentiles outside of the land of Israel. They include provisions for the death penalty for those who engage in same-sex practice, which all but the theocrats on the Religious Right would reject. There are a couple other alleged references in lists found in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy which conservative biblical translations recklessly translate as “homosexuals” and “sodomites,” but five minutes with a concordance and a Greek lexicon will demonstrate that this is simply bias masquerading as scholarship. We have no idea what activities the words in question actually refer to, so to attempt to use these texts to craft public policy against a class of people when we don’t even know what the words mean, is simply immoral, and beneath the dignity of any truly Christian ethic.
There is only one passage in all of the Scripture that has enough substance to it at all for this discussion, and even here, the discussion is not even about homosexuality, as even conservatives will admit. That passage, of course, is found in Romans 1. In legal and ethical reasoning, one must always proceed by analogy. THIS statute or principle fits THAT particular instance of behavior. In what follows I will give three reasons as to why this passage cannot be used against gays and lesbians to deny them civil benefits in American society.
#1 Even Fundamentalists Don’t Believe Paul’s Argument of Causality
Operating as he is in a pre-scientific universe, Paul gives the standard Jewish explanation for how it is that some people come to engage in same-sex behavior. It is not an original idea, but one that is borrowed from the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, a book that is accepted by Roman Catholics as authoritative, but not Protestants. The Wisdom of Solomon offers the opinion that same-sex practice is a result of idolatry, wherein the confusion that obviously exists between the proper worship of God and the false worship of idols gets transferred to sexuality, such that rather than having sexual relations with the opposite sex, the Gentile idol worshipers get confused and have sex with persons just like themselves. Paraphrasing the Wisdom of Solomon, Paul makes it quite plain that this is how same-sex behavior begins:
[T]hey exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator. (1:23-25)
Curiously, however, this is one of the features of the fundamentalist argument, which is supposedly based solely on the Scripture, which amazingly disappears. For when one examines the literature and the methods of the right-wing organizations designed to make gays go straight, one finds an entirely different explanatory mechanism for how it is that these folks see homosexuality developing. I will not waste your time by reciting the cockamamie pseudoscience behind these programs, whose methods have been rejected by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, but I will give you a very brief synopsis: They don’t think it has anything to do with the worship of four footed beasts. So incredibly, without any hint of irony at all, these people attempt to wrap themselves and their viewpoint up in the Bible, even as they themselves dismiss it, and properly so I might add, as not having anything scientifically to say about the truth of the origins of homosexuality.
#2 Nowhere Is Same-Sex Practice Called A Sin
Romans 1 is one of those places where people think they know what they’re reading, when in fact they don’t. I’ve had people on scores of occasions insist that Paul calls homosexuality a sin in Romans 1. Invariably, after I ask them to read the passage to me, they look at me with a look of triumph on their face as if they showed me what was what. That changes, however, whenever I ask them to find the terms “sin” or “unrighteousness” in any of what they just read. Of course they cannot find them, because that’s not what Paul says.
As readers from another time and another place, the sin and unrighteousness is forced on the text by the reader himself or herself, for that is not what Paul was up to. Although Paul knew full well the language of sin and unrighteousness, as evidenced by the appearance of both terms throughout the rest of Romans, in ch. 1 he instead uses the language of honor and shame, which is a common feature of traditional societies in which social stratification is achieved not by means of wealth, as it is in our own society, but by means of conformity or disconformity to socially accepted standards of behavior. When everybody in a society has about the same amount of economic wealth, how does one differentiate oneself from another? The answer is by means of honor and shame, which is precisely the language that Paul uses to describe the Gentile practices of same-sex behavior in Romans 1.
Now because contemporary American readers live in the context that judges one’s social standing by a completely different set of criteria, they often imagine that they are reading a condemnation of same-sex behavior in Romans 1, when in fact their reading is an inter-Jewish social critique of the outsiders set of practices, practices, which from the sound of it were stereotypically applied to Gentiles as a whole. Such criticisms were frequent in antiquity all the way up until the last century, when we became aware as a society of the unjustness of stereotypes. Even 50 years ago, it was commonplace to find both public and private statements to the effect that Mexicans were this, blacks were that, the Irish were notorious for this, the Italians could always be counted on to do that, etc. etc. and that is what Paul is doing in Romans 1: He is using an already well-established Jewish rhetorical stereotype regarding Gentile behavior, describing it as that which would cause dishonor in the eyes of Jews. But nowhere, and I mean nowhere, does he describe what they do as sin. If anything is sinful in his description, it is the idolatry that leads to the same-sex behavior, rather than the same-sex behavior itself, which is only the fallout from the idolatry.
But here again, we must ask ourselves the moral and ethical question: who believes this or talks this way now? Who thinks that it’s OK to make such stereotypical remarks about other racial or ethnic groups? And who uses the framework of honor and shame as a means of determining social stratification? The answer, of course, is nobody, but that doesn’t seem to stop the fundamentalists in our midst from acting as if this passage is transparently relevant to our own context.
#3 If Romans 1 Can Be Used to Deny Gays Civil Benefits, Then Everyone Else Is In Trouble Too
One of the biggest problems that the fundamentalists have in applying Romans 1e to everyday decisions of public policy, is the fact that Romans 1 is situated in the larger context of Romans chaps. 1-3, such that simply reading chap. 1, which is what most people do when they think about this subject, completely ignores what is really going on in the text.
As Richard Hays of Duke University has pointed out, what Paul is doing in Romans 1 is laying a rhetorical trap. He offers the aforementioned stereotypical description of Gentile idolatry and its subsequent same-sex behavior as a means of drawing in his readers, who are settling in for a nice read about somebody else’s problems, which has always been how most people like their sermons. Then right in the middle of all their chuckles and wagging fingers at the antics of those zany Gentiles, Paul hits his readers with the sledgehammer of chaps. 2-3, which make it absolutely clear that whatever the readers thought about the behavior of the Gentiles, the reader himself or herself is actively engaged in a life that is as bad or even worse than what Paul had just described in chap. 1. The soaring climax to that section found in chap. 3, in which Paul says “There is none righteous, no not one.” they explain the apostle’s contention that there is no room for boasting on any persons account. The way Paul sees it, there is no such thing as a moral lapse, because that would suggest that most of the time , we were actually on our best behavior, and that only occasionally did we step out of line. Instead, in his view, all of humanity, both Jew and Greek, is pervasively steeped in sinfulness, and is unalterably stuck with the consequences, which is that all of us, no matter what our achievements, fall short of the glory of God.
Now what is so amazing about the deployment of this section of Romans by the fundamentalists in the public sphere is that they attempt to press the first chapter and its negative view of same-sex practice with inexhaustible vigor. They are tireless in their efforts to remind America that God hates homosexuality, but here the conversation ends, as if the Scripture said no more, because their strategy of reading completely changes once they arrive at chap. 2. What had been completely applicable to public policy with a laser-like precision in chap.1 now dissolves into meaningless platitudes about how of course we are all sinners, when it comes to chap. 2. The absolute certainty with which they were willing to apply chap. 1 in their quest to attack gays and lesbians on matters of public policy is now replaced by hesitation, reticence, and qualifications regarding chaps. 2-3, which all of a sudden strangely seems opaque and inapplicable in any public context.
But they can’t have it both ways. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, or in biblical terms, judge not that you be not judged. In other words, in biblical faith, one cannot erect a standard for others that one is not willing to live by oneself. But that is precisely what is going on with the fundamentalists in their use of Romans 1 as a bludgeon when it comes to pointing out other people’s alleged sins, but who waffle on Romans 2-3 when it comes to addressing their own. If the church is going to say that Romans 1 ought to be the criteria for preventing the full acceptance and inclusion of gays and lesbians into community life, then how in the world can it then turn and ignore Romans 2-3 when it comes to the rest of us? That is simply baseless prejudice masquerading under the guise of biblical faith. If we are going to deny, for example, gays and lesbians the more than 1400 federal benefits available to married based on this application of Romans 1, how can any of the rest of us ask for our benefits and our marriage licenses in light of the next two chapters, and do so with a straight face and clean heart? The answer is that we can’t, and because we can’t, it is simply unethical and immoral for us to be using Romans 1 in such a twisted fashion.
Posted by Public Theologian at 03:18 PM | Comments (37)
