Scott R. Paeth is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. He works in the fields of Christian Social Ethics and Public Theology.
Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly reminds us that, in evolving toward support of gay marriage, Barack Obama has been evolving toward the perspective endorsed by his denomination and mine, the United Church of Christ:
When the Obamas were last regular church members, it was, famously, a congregation of the United Church of Christ in Chicago. Like a lot of First Families, they have not joined a specific church in Washington, so I assume the UCC remains their spiritual “home.” As part of a decentralized denomination (hence the traditional name for their largest constituent element, the “Congregationalists”), many UCC churches have been performing same-sex marriages for years. But the entire denominationembraced the practice in 2005, adopting a resolution of support:
The resolution was adopted in the face of efforts to amend the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. It was both a theological statement and a protest against discrimination, said the Rev. John H. Thomas, the president and general minister of the denomination, which has 6,000 congregations and 1.3 million members.
Religious conservatives may scoff at the UCC (or the Episcopalians, or other mainline denominations that are, to use the buzzword, “open and affirming” to gay people). But the UCC is the country’s oldest Christian religious community, and among other things, was spearheading the fight against slavery back when many of the religious conservatives of the early nineteenth century were largely defending it as a divinely and scripturally ordained institution.
One of many reasons I'm glad to be part of the UCC is its stance on marriage equality. It's good to see Barack Obama finally coming around to see the value of that stance as well. Here's hoping that the fact that his position is rooted in his Christian faith gets a lot more coverage. It's certainly worthy of it.
Jay Michaelson at Religion Dispatches argues that Obama's statement in support of gay marriage yesterday struck the right note of reconciliation between religion and support for marriage equality:
But it is also a principled stand for a different variety of religious values. Rick Santorum believes that you have to choose between God and gay, between sexuality and religion. And although I’ve gotten in some trouble for saying so, I’ll repeat my view that Dan Savage did as well, when he said that we have to “ignore the bullshit in the Bible” about gay people, just as we ignore the bullshit about slavery. Savage’s view is fine as a personal religious ideology, but coming in a public statement from Gay Activist #1, it tells traditional religious people that there’s no space for them in an LGBT-inclusive world. Once again, it’s God vs. Gay, at least as that God is understood by traditionalists.
Obama’s thoughtful statement sends a different message. It says that values like introspection, compassion, and justice support, rather than oppose, equality for LGBT people. We can interpret Leviticus, Romans, and Corinthians ten ways from Sunday. But what we can’t ignore are the calls to justice and compassion.
I actually thought Savage's comments, given as they were with his typical snarky bluntness, weren't really problematic at all. He's absolutely right that the Bible is absolutely wrong on slavery, and trying to thread the needle to say that it doesn't really say what it so clearly says in order to be allowed to say that it really does mean what it says on homosexuality is just disingenuous. The scandal isn't that he used blunt language to say that; the scandal is that it needed to be said.
Nevertheless, if the goal is to push public policy forward in the political realm, Obama's statement was clearly a welcome and appropriate way to do that. And the President made it clear that his faith at least in part motivated his decision:
"This is something that, you know, we’ve talked about over the years and (Michelle Obama), you know, feels the same way, she feels the same way that I do. And that is that, in the end the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people and, I, you know, we are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others.
"But, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me as president and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a as a dad and a husband and hopefully the better I’ll be as president."
The results from the President's opponents, and from opponents of marriage equality were, of course, typical. Cardinal Dolan was "saddened" by the decision (that man is saddened by some strange things!), while several of his Republican rivals saw this as the end of his reelection prospects.
Predictions are hard, especially about the future, but I'll go out on a limb and say that this decision will probably neither help nor hurt him in the general election. It was the right decision to make though, and if there is justice in the world, it will help him at the polls come November. On that, we'll just have to wait and see.
You know the old saw, about how you never talk about religion or politics in polite company. Since that's my field, if I listened to that advice, I'd be rendered mute at any social function the moment anyone asked what I do.
Fortunately, there are others who want to be able to talk about these topics as well, even "in polite company," and among them is John Danforth, former Missouri Senator and Episcopal Priest. The Danforth Center at Washington University was founded in 2010 and sponsored a number of events on the intersection of religion and politics:
Now the center is unveiling its most visible and far-reaching endeavor, with the release of its new online journal, "Religion & Politics." Officials at the center are calling "Religion & Politics" a journal, in the tradition of academic publications, but it's ambitions are more akin to magazines with a mix of narrative journalism, feature news reporting and informed commentary — Harper's, the New Yorker or the Atlantic.
Scholarly research and classroom teaching make up one prong of the Danforth Center's mission, said its director, Marie Griffith, who is also the editor of "Religion & Politics." The other is to engage the public, and the confluence of academia and journalism is a key feature of the journal. Through its content, the center will be introduced to the wider world beyond Washington University's campus.
"We're very much writing to a broad, educated audience, as diverse an audience as we can reach," said Griffith. "So we wanted high quality writing, not a bunch of academics talking amongst ourselves."
The journal's motto — "Fit for polite company" — fits Danforth's original motivation for founding the center: a belief, laid out in his 2006 book, "Faith and Politics: How the 'Moral Values' Debate Divides America and How to Move Forward Together," that religion had become a political wedge.
This is a project that sounds like it has a lot of potential. I'm looking forward to seeing what develops.
We are really going to need to develop a new vocabulary to describe the shamelessness of the Vatican, the Cardinals, and the whole hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church:
Now it turns out that conservative American churchmen living in Rome -- including disgraced former Boston Cardinal Bernard Law -- were key players in pushing the hostile takeover of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, or LCWR, which they have long viewed with suspicion for emphasizing social justice work over loyalty to the hierarchy and issues like abortion and gay marriage.
Vatican observers in Rome and church sources in the U.S. say Law was “the person in Rome most forcefully supporting” the LCWR investigation, as Rome correspondent Robert Mickens wrote in The Tablet, a London-based Catholic weekly. Law was the “prime instigator,” in the words of one American churchman, of the investigation that began in 2009 and ended in 2011. The actual crackdown was only launched in April.
Cardinal Law came to personify the clergy abuse crisis. He was the first member of the Catholic hierarchy shown to have actively covered up clergy abuse. Immediately after the Boston Globe broke the abuse story in 2002, Law refused to step down. But 11 months later, when priests’ records were released by court order showing that Law took elaborate steps to cover for abusers, he stepped down. ...
After leaving Boston, Law was named to the prominent position of archpriest of the St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome. He also serves on several Vatican boards and committees and he participated in the 2005 conclave that elected Pope Benedict. But he hasn’t been seen in Boston since he left.
This is the man, this child molester by proxy, who is no less guilty of the crimes committed against the children whose molestation he abetted than were the priests who actually committed the crimes, who has decided that the real problem with the Catholic Church in the United States is that the nuns are too liberal, and, as though the shamefulness of the whole situation were not egregious enough ... got the Vatican to listen to him. He should be rotting in a jail cell in Suffolk County. The reason he hasn't been seen in Boston since his resignation is because he realizes he's probably be subject to arrest.
Once again, the sclerotic and superannuated conclave of the Catholic hierarchy demonstrates that he has no moral authority, deserves no moral authority, and needs to stop acting as though it's owed moral authority.
Jana Reiss at Religion News Service relates her experience in finding that the best place to see her religion fairly presented on television is on Comedy Central:
Last weekend at a retreat I attended, one of the highlights was a late-night popcorn fest where dozens of Mormon women sat together to laugh uproariously at a year's worth of Mormon-related clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. ...
Then this week Jon Stewart hit the nail on the head once again with this fantabulous monologue about Mormonism and Mitt Romney. Even the ominous opening music pokes fun at recent media coverage of Mormonism, which so often panders to fearmongering.
How much of Mormonism's racist past is Romney personally accountable for? Stewart showed clips of various commentators weighing in on how Mitt should be held to a higher standard, and then summed it up with this brilliant take-away line:
Boys, you can’t cherry-pick the worst aspects of a religion and then hold every member of that religion solely responsible for it. It’s not even relevant. It’s not like Mitt Romney will pursue policies that are unfair to black people because he’s a Mormon.... He’ll do that because he’s a Republican. –Jon Stewart, May 2, 2012
My thanks to Jon Stewart and his entire writing team for being equal-opportunity satirists. When Mormons do something stupid, which we will, I have no doubt that they will nail us for it. This is right and good. But I appreciate the fact that on The Daily Show, Mormonism is regarded as no more or less inherently ridiculous than any other religion.
We need to be willing to laugh at ourselves, because all of our faiths are fanitly ridiculous, particularly when seen from the outside. But we all are also entitled to see our faiths fairly presented, even in satire. That's something that Stewart and Colbert have over vituperative atheists like Bill Maher, and we should be grateful for it.
Pamela Geller, she of the racial and religious invective directed toward Muslims, held an event recently in Dearborn, Michigan which was allegedly intended to draw attention to human rights concerns of Muslim women. The pretext of the event was the killing by her father of a young Muslim woman, which Geller has been trying to frame as an "honor killing" (a claim for which there is no evidence).
Meanwhile, the Arab American Institute engaged in some counter-programing by holding their own event. While Geller's event required pre-registration, the A.A.I. event was free and open to the public. Two members of the A.A.I. attempted to cover Geller's event. Here's what they found:
So, an event is held, allegedly on behalf of the rights of Muslim women, and when Muslim women show up to participate, they are escorted out by the police. The American right wing is apparently a zone of discourse that's immune to irony.
At a certainly point, I suppose I should no longer be surprised by the freak show quality of the religious right. But I can certainly be angered by it.
Jonathan Chait takes on Paul Ryan, and reminds us once again that his affiliation with Ayn Rand isn't accidental:
In 2005, Ryan spoke at a gathering of Ayn Rand enthusiasts, where he declared, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” Ryan has listed Rand’s manifesto, Atlas Shrugged, as one of his three most often reread books, and in 2003, he told The Weekly Standard he tries to make his interns read it. Rand is a useful touchstone to understand Ryan’s public philosophy. She centered libertarian philosophy around a defense of capitalism in general and, in particular, a conception of politics as a class war pitting virtuous producers against parasites who illegitimately use the power of the state to seize their wealth. Ludwig von Mises, whom Ryan has also cited as an influence, once summed up Rand’s philosophy in a letter to her: “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: You are inferior and all the improvements in your condition which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.”
Ryan now frequently casts his opposition to Obama in technocratic terms, but he hasn’t always done so. “It is not enough to say that President Obama’s taxes are too big or the health-care plan doesn’t work for this or that policy reason,” Ryan said in 2009. “It is the morality of what is occurring right now, and how it offends the morality of individuals working toward their own free will to produce, to achieve, to succeed, that is under attack, and it is that what I think Ayn Rand would be commenting on.” Ryan’s philosophical opposition to a government that forces the “makers” to subsidize the “takers”—terms he still employs—is foundational; the policy details are secondary.
Someone needs to teach the unctuous Joel Osteen the meaning of the word "discrimination":
In an interview on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked the pastor if being gay was a sin.
"I believe that the scripture says that being gay is a sin," Osteen smiled. "You know, every time I say that, Chris, I get people saying, 'You're a gay hater and you're a gay basher.' I'm not. I don't dislike anybody. Gays are some of the nicest, kindest, most loving people in the world. But my faith is based on what the scripture says, and that's the way I read the scripture."
Wallace also pressed the preacher on the issue of marriage equality.
"I don't think we should discriminate against anybody," Osteen replied. "There was an issue where somebody couldn't go visit a gay loved one in the hospital. I don't think that's right. I think they love each other. So, I think there should be some [rights]."
"I'm not for gay marriage, but I'm not for discriminating against people."
Right. Because excluding an entire group of people from participation in a cornerstone social institution is ... not discrimination?
And, let's be honest: Osteen's alleged "faith" may be a lot of things, but one thing it absolutely isn't is "based in scripture."
Paul Ryan has, on more than one occasion, praised the work of atheist libertarian whack-job Ayn Rand. Apparently, he's realized that might play so well at Georgetown:
"I, like millions of young people in America, read Rand’s novels when I was young. I enjoyed them," Ryan says. "They spurred an interest in economics, in the Chicago School and Milton Friedman," a subject he eventually studied as an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio. "But it’s a big stretch to suggest that a person is therefore an Objectivist."
"I reject her philosophy," Ryan says firmly. "It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas," who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. "Don’t give me Ayn Rand," he says.
As Sarah Posner points out, Ryan's shift may have to do with the argument that he and some of his conservative Catholic kindred are attempting to make that liberal economic policies are contrary to Catholic social teaching and that their pro-rich, pro-ginormous corporations, pro-unfettered and uncontrolled capitalist policies are more authentically Catholic.
At the heart of their argument is a debate on the meaning of the Catholic term "subsidiarity," which means, as Dan Maguire explains, "that nothing should be done by a higher authority that can be done by active participation at lower levels." In other words, Catholic teaching has a preference for policies that originate and are controlled as close to the local level as possible. Conservative Catholics like Ryan believe that means that Catholic social teaching is "anti-statist" and thus opposed to the "statist" policies of the Obama administration. As Maguire notes, this is garbage and demonstrates a deep and abiding ignorance of Catholic thought.
Yet here is Ryan, throwing Rand under the bus and pledging alligience to Thomas Aquinas. Of course, he still buys Rand's economics, he just thinks Aquinas would too. Unfortunately for Ryan, Thomas Aquinas's position is very clear: Private property is necessary for the creation and maintainance of a good society, but only if it is used for the sake of the common good:
Two things are competent to man in respect of exterior things. One is the power to procure and dispense them, and in this regard it is lawful for man to possess property. Moreover this is necessary to human life for three reasons. First because every man is more careful to procure what is for himself alone than that which is common to many or to all: since each one would shirk the labor and leave to another that which concerns the community, as happens where there is a great number of servants. Secondly, because human affairs are conducted in more orderly fashion if each man is charged with taking care of some particular thing himself, whereas there would be confusion if everyone had to look after any one thing indeterminately. Thirdly, because a more peaceful state is ensured to man if each one is contented with his own. Hence it is to be observed that quarrels arise more frequently where there is no division of the things possessed.
The second thing that is competent to man with regard to external things is their use. On this respect man ought to possess external things, not as his own, but as common, so that, to wit, he is ready to communicate them to others in their need.
Notice that last clause. It's important. We posses things, not as our own but as common, and are prepared to give them to others in their need. I invite you to consider whether this bears any resemblance at all to Republican attitudes on matters of economics and taxation. I don't believe it does.
Needless to say, the theological faculty at Georgetown were unimpressed:
In terms of understanding the Catholic Church’s doctrine on social issues, “we’d give that speech an F,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest at Georgetown’s Woodstock Theological Center. “Catholics believe that problems should be dealt with at the lowest levels. But if families could take care of themselves, and the local government could, we wouldn’t have the crisis that we’re facing right now.”
The Vatican has appointed an American bishop to rein in the largest and most influential group of Catholic nuns in the United States, saying that an investigation found that the group had “serious doctrinal problems.”
The Vatican’s assessment, issued on Wednesday, said that members of the group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, had challenged church teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, and promoted “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”
The sisters were also reprimanded for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” During the debate over the health care overhaul in 2010, American bishops came out in opposition to the health plan, but dozens of sisters, many of whom belong to the Leadership Conference, signed a statement supporting it — support that provided crucial cover for the Obama administration in the battle over health care.
[...]
“I’m stunned,” said Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a Catholic social justice lobby founded by sisters. Her group was also cited in the Vatican document, along with the Leadership Conference, for focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping “silent” on abortion and same-sex marriage.
Mind you, this is just after it was revealed that the Bishops themselves took a stand against the Ryan budget on the grounds that it harmed the poor (perhaps trying to redeem themselves from charges that they're being too partisan):
“Major reductions at this time of economic turmoil and rising poverty will hurt hungry, poor and vulnerable people in our nation and around the world,” the Rev. Stephen Blaire, bishop of Stockton, Calif., and the Rev. Richard E. Pates, bishop of Des Moines, wrote for the conference. “A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to the poor and vulnerable persons; it requires shared sacrifice by all.”
I think Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches is right in her analysis on this:
As I've argued before (and argued again today in a taped interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody, which should air soon), politicians should not be seeking the approval of any religious body for their legislative proposals. I fully understand the impulse of progressive Catholics who believe in their church's long history of social justice advocacy who want to push back against it being hijacked by the likes of Paul Ryan, and I certainly understand anyone wanting to make an argument against his budget on any moral grounds.
No one is denying Rosa DeLauro or Paul Ryan the ability to claim that their faith guides them through the budget process. And Catholics surely are going to engage in robust arguments about whether Ryan's cold-hearted, small government justifications do or do not align with Catholic teaching. But if one doesn't want the Bishops' imprimatur on the contraceptive coverage, if one thinks that the Bishops' demand that public policy conform to their religious edicts is a violation of the Establishment Clause, then their approval of the budget should be irrelevant. I know it's all politics and optics, a fight over who, of the Catholic House members, is truer to the social justice tradition? And I know that DeLauro and others are pushing the Bishops to bring the same outrage to bear on the budget that they have to the contraception wars.
But consider: child sexual assault cases against the church continue to be tried; the Bishops order a crackdown on nuns already under investigation for, among other things, disagreeing with the Bishops and promoting "certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith;" an individual Bishop compares the president of the United States to Hitler and Stalin; all while an increasing number of Catholics are saying, "no, thank you" to the Bishops' "religious freedom" jeremiad. Yet, in spite of all this, in the war over the Catholic meaning of the budget, their moral authority has taken center stage.
It's one thing to say that a religious tradition informs your public policy choices, but wielding the Bishops' putative authority as a sword puts you in the position of being cut by it. I might agree with the Bishops' reasoning on one issue or another, and choose to reference them on the strength of their arguments. But that's a very different thing than saying "my policy is right because the Bishops say so," which seems to be what both anti-contraceptive Republicans and anti-oligarchy Democrats are attempting to do here.
As I've said before and continue to say, the Bishops can no longer expect to be heeded when the make arguments on the basis of their moral authority, because they have none. None. None. Which is why the most hilarious part of this whole account was this line from the NYT piece: "The sisters were also reprimanded for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” If this is true (and it's not), then woe betide the whole of the Church.
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