Against the Stream

Chick-fil-A, Gay Marriage, and Why Anyone Should Care

So, I gather that there has been some kind of controversey over recent comments by Chick-fil-A's president Dan Cathy on the subject of gay marraige. Here's what he said:

"We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit ... We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that...we know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles."

This comment has provoked a range of reactions, from support by usual suspects such as Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum to condemnations and moves to ban Chick-fil-A restaurants from New York, Boston, and Chicago.

Rachel Held Evans has a response to the controversey on her blog, urging Christians who support gay and lesbian rights to act with respect toward those conservatives with whom they disagree, refraining from using language like "bigot" or "homophobe." Specifically, she writes:

But I beg you to please remember that not all Christians who speak out against gay marriage are bigots or homophobes, and calling them those names is as unjust as it is unkind. Many of the people I love most in my life fall into this “camp,” and most of them mean it when they say that they sincerely love their friends and relatives in the LGBT community and wish they knew of some way to hold to their convictions without hurting or insulting their neighbors. (emphasis in original)

There's  alot to agree with in what Rachel writes, but I think this portion is worth commenting on, precisely because much of what you think of this position depends on what you think "bigotry" and "homophobia" entail. This is a point that Fred Clark at Slacktivist has made in the past, and its worth repeating: To the degree that you are on the side of those who have committed themselves to the exclusion and marginalization of LGBT folks within American society, you forfeit the right to be treated as one of the good guys. As Fred puts it:

Look, here’s the deal: It doesn’t matter if you think you’re a nice person. And it doesn’t matter if your tone, attitude, sentiments and facial expressions are all very sweet, kindly and sympathetic-seeming. If you’re opposing legal equality, then you don’t get to be nice. Opposing legal equality is not nice and it cannot be done nicely.

Nice is different than good, but opposing legal equality for others is neither. It’s simply unfair.

So be fair.

It’s probably best to be fair and also kind, but fairness is the important part. As long as you’re fair, no one else will really care whether or not you’re particularly kindlyabout it. But if you’re not fair, then kindness isn’t even a possibility.

So, to that degree, "bigot" and "homophobe" are perfectly legitimate terms to apply to Chick-fil-A and those who support the restaurant based on its support for marriage inequality. It may not be "nice" to use those terms, but it is wholly fair and appropriate. Rachel may well believe that many of these folks are nice people, and its true that the may act nice while in the process of practicing bigotry, but that doesn't make them any less bigots.

And, to be clear on this, the real issue with Chick-fil-A is, as Fred again notes, not simply that it's president is a bigot, but that it is, as an institution, actively supporting organizations that exist to promote the legal discrimination against gays and lesbians:

Yes, Dan Cathy recently reaffirmed his views and his stance. That’s old news. The newnews — the news that has led to calls for boycotts of Chik-fil-A — is that Cathy and his company are bankrolling political groups in an effort to deny other people the right to marry and to deny them the right not to be fired because of who they are.

This isn’t about Cathy’s “views” or his “stance” — his opinions or his words. His history of such comments may have prompted a hilarious drag-queen Wilson Phillips parody (NSFW, and also an ear-worm warning) but Cathy’s words alone did not prompt calls for a boycott.

Those came after it was learned that Chik-fil-A’s corporate foundation was supporting groups like the Family Research Council. The FRC is a political lobby (and also, according to the SPLC, a hate-group). Chik-fil-A’s support for the Family Research Council and it’s viciously anti-gay agenda is a political act. It is an act ofpower against others and a use of power to harm others.

It's hard, under that set of circumstances, to argue that there is nothing more than simply a matter of personal distaste at stake here. There is the use of company resources to promote legalized bigotry. Those who have decided that the proper response to this is either boycott or demonstration are well within the bounds of legitimate discourse. Indeed, on that front, I find the idea of showing up to Chick-fil-A in drag hilarously appropriate as a response. It's the actions of Chick-fil-A that deserve a response, not simply the odious opinions of its president.

Is "The Life of Brian" Anti-Christian?

Tony Jones wants to know whether people think that "The Life of Brian" is an anti-Christian film. And the answer, from my perspective is "yes, clearly it is" and "no, of course not, don't be stupid."

Tony draws our attention to this converstion between Pythons John Cleese and Micahel Palin and two, presumably Christian, critics of the film.

 

The Christian critique is, apparently, that no non-Christian viewing the film could walk away from it believing about Christianity what Chrisitans believe about Christianity, which is clearly the case. But then, why should they? The point of the film is obviously not to make Christian converts, and the mistake these critics make is in misunderstanding what the film was intended to lampoon.

Cleese and Palin try to make the point repeatedly that the film is sending up forms of religious hypocrisy and fanaticism that distort and undermine the message of Jesus Christ. Palin gets to the heart of the matter when he notes that he can't comprehend how Christians can go to church every week, listen to the Gospel, and yet continue to support war and vote to cut funding for hospitals. The response of the clergyman in the conversation (who Tony identifies as "the guy in the pink robe with the huge pectoral cross") is beside the point. The fact that there are Christians on the right side of the issue doesn't mean very much when the established church of England and the bulk of its members sit idly by and allow things to happen which are contrary to heart of the Gospel that they claim to follow. The most it might serve to prove is that Christians can be found, against all expectations, even in the Church.

And this leads me back to my point above: Yes, The Life of Brian is anti-Christian if you identify Christianity with the established Christian churches, their leaders and their followers. The movie is mercilessly anti-Chrsitian if that is your benchmark for Christianity.

On the other hand, if Christianity is understood in light of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, then the movie can't be said to be anti-Christian in any regard. Jesus Christ himself is treated with utmost respect throughout the movie. It's those who listen to him and purport to follow him (or his analogue, Brian), that are the butt of every single joke. So in that sense, Christianity isn't even the subject of the movie, never mind something the movie is against. And the movie seems to take no stand whatsoever on the other theological matters of God's existence or Christ's status as the messiah.

 

Of course, this requires us to make an uneasy distinction between Christ and his church, and that distinction is difficult to make to the degree that Christ is known and followed by this church. But the church is, like the apostles, a fumbling bunch of ninnies, who are usually incapable of finding their ass with both hands, never mind speaking definitively or authoritatively about the revelation of God among God's people.

Violent Rebellion and the Christian Right

Religion Dispatches today features an article on the rise of the rhetoric of violent insurrection among members of the Christian right during the last few years, and particularly in the wake of the health care law and HHS mandate controversies (which of course ties back into conservative opposition to abortion).

Eric Metaxes is featured as one prominent example: An evangelical Christian who can appear with Barack Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast, and then shortly thereafter make Godwin's law breaking comparisons between the United States today and Nazi Germany.

Of course, as the article points out, Metaxas's book, while popular, has been panned by actual Bonhoeffer scholars, and not the least of the problem is Metaxas's unhistorical and theologically problematic attempt to transform Bonhoeffer from what he was -- a reluctant participant in a conspiracy against a genuinely diabolical regime -- into a standard issue American evangelical culture warrior. This is why Clifford Green accused Metaxas of "hijacking Bonhoeffer".

But, as the article points out, this is hardly the worst of it. There are others who are more directly suggesting that conservative Christians should take up arms against the allegedly repressive government of the United States. Fr. C. John McCloskey is another example:

In his original essay, McCloskey’s avatar, Fr. Charles, explained how “the great battles over the last 30 years over the fundamental issues of the sanctity of marriage, the rights of parents, and the sacredness of human life have been of enormous help in renewing the Church and to some extent, society.”

McCloskey’s literary device allows him to avoid openly seditious language, while suggesting that conservative Catholics and allied evangelicals should prepare for civil war. Now a Research Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute, which published his update, McCloskey repeated his vision of “the secession of the ‘Culture of Life’ states from the United States, precipitating a short and bloody civil war that resulted in a collection of the Regional States of America.” He also says that the Church of “2030” was “much smaller... and nary a dissenter to be seen.”

While there’s certainly no indication that anyone is following McCloskey’s script, if they did it would not be the first time in recent history that fiction was used to help people to imagine scenarios for domestic terrorism and insurrection. The neo-Nazi novel The Turner Diaries, which opens with the blowing-up of a federal building, has infamously been used as a blueprint for white supremacist revolution in the U.S. for a generation—Tim McVeigh had a copy when he was arrested.

The reference to McVeigh is a cautionary note. As the saying goes: It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye. It's one thing to wield this kind of rhetoric from the comfort of a position as an author who is invited to share a stage with the President of the United States. It is one thing to offer these kinds of parables from the position of someone who isn't actually planning to lift a finger to bring about the kind of bloodshed and anarchy that they are so evidently hoping someone else will bring about on their behalf. It is another thing to stand in the midst of the chaos unleashed by anarchy and civil war and attempt to deal with the fallout. Little children should not play with high explosives. And from the perspective of both theological insight and personal bravery neither Metaxas nor McCloskey are much more than little children.

And the Nazi analogies are Exhibit A that this is so. Particularly Metaxas, who allegedly researched his book on Bonhoeffer, should understand the vast differences between the situation in the United States today, and that under the Nazis in the 1930s. That he should so blithely wield the Nazi analogy suggests a serious flaw in either his historical research or his rhetorical honesty. Probably both.

 

God and the God Particle

The big science news over the last several days has been the discovery of the Higgs Boson, or at least something that has many of the Characteristics of the Higgs Boson (sometimes called the "God particle," to the annoyance of many scientists and theologians!).

So, if you're not a physicist, the first question you may be asking yourself at this point is "what's a Higgs Boson?" Perhaps this will help:

 

However, it should be noted that, whatever it is that's been discovered at CERN, there are still many, many unanswered questions that remain in light of this discovery. And even the question of what's been discovered is very much up in the air:

If you were to say July 4, 2012 was the day the Higgs boson was officially discovered, you wouldn't really be wrong. As CERN Director General Rolf Heuer put it, "As a layman, I think we have it." That's about as unequivocal a statement as you're likely to get from CERN, which is understandably conservative when it comes to announcing possible physics-shattering discoveries. But then, there's a second half to Heuer's quote, one that probably won't get as much attention: "But as a scientist, I have to say, 'What do we have?'" That's a huge question, one that won't be answered today, maybe not this year. Today's announcement is just the beginning of the Higgs story, definitely not the end. (emphasis added)

That hasn't stopped a great deal of speculation on the implications of the Higgs Boson for religion, which is I suppose inevitable when you dub something "The God Particle." I think there is some suggestion that, once the Higgs has been discovered the last nail in the coffin of religion as a rational way of understanding the world will have been placed, but really there is no reason to believe that this is the case.

The central problem from my perspective is in the poor understanding that most people have of what is being discussed when the word "God" is deployed. As Frank Schaeffer noted in the video I posted yesterday, the deepest wells of the theistic tradition, at least in the Christian framework, understand that whatever we may say about God, we are confronted with a reality that is beyond our capacity to comprehend in any kind of adequate way. So any statement about the divine is an attempt to understand an impenetrable mystery.

Now, I think many people, both of a religious and an anti-religious persuasion, think that this is a cop-out. I can remember an old George Carlin routine where he complained that, whenver he asked the local priest some deep theological question about God, or the incarnation, or the Trinity, he'd be met with "It's a mystery!" Which seems like a wholly inadequate answer when coming from someone who's supposed to be in on the mysteries. And of course, many religious people seem to think that believing in something innately mysterious is leaving too many questions about their own state of salvation up for grabs, and so they prefer their religion to come prepackaged with all of the answers included.

But this is a misunderstanding of what is meant by the word "mystery" here. A mystery isn't a puzzle of which we haven't put the pieces together yet, and it's not simply anothe way of saying "I don't know, quit asking so many questions." To say that something is a mystery in the religious sense is to say that we are confronted with a dimension of existence that is in principle beyond our capacity to totally comprehend. We may catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of our eye, or we may come to understand it partially in terms that make some sense to us, but we never get the whole picture, or really much more than the tiniest fragment that can fit into our consciousness. This is a very different thing than simply not knowing something. As in the novel Flatland, it is as though we were a two-dimensional figure trying to explain the concept of three-dimensions to a two-dimensional world.

But as regards the Higgs and God, it should be said that, however much the Higgs winds up being able to tell us about the physical characteristics of the world around us, no one should realistically believe that it will provide all answers or dispell all mysteries. And from a theological perspective, it ought to be made clear that there is no knowledge of the natural world that can stand, in itself as a refutation of the existence of a transcendent and omnipotent God.

This is what I mean when I say we need to use the word "God" properly in this context. Properly understood, God in the theistic tradition (for the most part, there are certainly some exceptions, such as some brands of process thought) is not a being within the universe. Rather, God, understood as creator, is understood to be a) a necessary being and b) therefore necessarily existing outside of the universe of created things. By "necessary being" here, I mean a being whose existence is not contingent or dependent on any other thing. All things within the universe -- from trees to people to duckbilled platypuses to the Higgs boson -- are contingent and dependent. In other words, it is possible for them to not exist. But God refers to a being whose existence is not contingent and (if you buy Anselm's ontological argument) is not capable of not being.

What this means is that any new knowledge about the nature of the universe of created things, while it will increase the overall fund of human knowledge about the world, and thereby glorify God, cannot give us new insight in its own right about the nature and character of God.

This is not to say that scientific discoveries cannot raise genuine questions about the nature and character of God as implications of their findings. Thus, darwinian evolution raises genuine questions about God's goodness and omnipotence, if in fact nature is "red in tooth and claw" and evolution is an undirected process. Similarly, our knowledge about the size and age of the universe raises substantial questions about divine providence and the place of human beings in God's plan. But in themselves, these issues do not serve as refutations of any particular theological principle, though they do raise substantial theological questions that theologians ought to be both willing and eager to explore as a part of their work.

From that perspective then, the Higgs offers a wealth of new material for theologians to consider, and no doubt as we learn more about how it functions and what we can learn about the nature of the world through our study of it, it will continue to offer new challenges for theologians and philosophers, as well as physicists and cosmologists.

Are Denominations Passé?

According to David at the blog "In the Meantime," they may well be. An example of his argument:

1) Denominations are confusing in a post-Christian world and often an impediment to mission. When the larger culture was nominally Christian, we had the luxury of squaring off behind our denominational identities. No longer. Ask the typical person with little or no familiarity with the Christian faith the difference between Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians and she’ll likely give you a blank stare that indicates she’s wondering whether you’re still talking about Christianity. Here’s the sad truth: most people in the various denominations have little sense what they mean and no one outside them really cares.

2) The differences between the major denominations are relatively minor. As much as I love a good real-presence vs. memorial-feast slugfest or round of justification/sanctification truth-or-dare, the truth is most of the denominational differences are not only unintelligible to their own members but, in the larger scheme of things, relatively minor. Across the board the major Protestant denominations share a biblical canon, confess the major ecumenical creeds, and observe the same two sacraments. I therefore can – and regularly do – worship at churches of any of the major denominations and feel not even a quiver in my theological conscience.

Read more at the link.

Frank Schaeffer on Religion, Politics, and Spirituality

July 4th Religion and Politics Reading List

At Religion Dispatches today they have a list of recent articles detailing the various ways in which religion, politics, patriotism and partisanship have intersected in the United States recently. If you're looking for something to read this July 4th, go check it out.

The Singularity is Where?

At Religion Dispatches, Andrew Aghapour discusses Ray Kurzweil's evangelizing on behalf of the emergence of "the singularity" as evocative of new religious movements:

Over the last 15 years a brilliant and charismatic self-made man has been campaigning across the United States, describing a near-future event that will deliver human salvation, immortality, and unlimited creative potential. After this event, he claims, the trappings of earthly life will no longer plague us: we will no longer age or get sick; we will be able to create our own worlds to our exact preferences; and we will no longer be restricted to our current physical forms. 

This man’s vision has become the center of a growing movement that already has tens of thousands of adherents, dozens of shared texts, and its own non-profit school that aims to “assemble, educate, and inspire a cadre of leaders” to one day “address humanity’s grand challenges.”

This might sound like a run-of-the-mill new religious movement, but what makes Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity” movement unique is that it doesn’t consider itself religious at all. Singularity Theory holds that technology will continue to grow exponentially until “human” and “digital” forms combine seamlessly.

There are of course a great many parallels between singularity theory and religion, but is singluarlarity theory best understood in terms of religious categories? That's unclear to me. It's an interesting experiment in futurism, and certainly applies well to our strange technological age. Whatever light the theory of religion may shed on the topic, the underlying question of our reliance on technology deserves to me carefully explored from religious, moral, and sociological points of view.