Against the Stream

The Problem of Thomas More and Religious Liberty

I love A Man for All Seasons. It is truly one of my favorite movies and I return to it periodically in order to appreciate once more the fine writing and acting on display. Of course, A Man for All Seasons is also a play with an overtly political point about the need to stand up for one's conscience in the face of political pressure to yeild. This is a theme that Robert Bolt explores in a number of his plays and scripts, but its never more clearly on display than here.

And yet, Bolt is able to make his point about Thomas More only by leaving out some uncomfortable truths about his reign as Lord Chancellor of England, including his torture and execution of alleged heretics. Perhaps most egregious was the role he played in the capture, imprisonment, and execution of William Tyndale as punishment for translating the Bible into English.

All of which is to say that the use of Thomas More as the central figure in the U.S. Conferene of Catholic Bishops' "Fortnight of Freedom" in opposition to the proposed HHS contraception mandate somewhat problematic. Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches explains:

The United States government, unlike Henry's England, is not under the religious authority of Rome, or any religious body, for that matter. (That's in the Constitution, last time I checked.) Through the contraception mandate, or any other duly enacted law or regulation, such as the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, the United States government is not flouting religious authority. That's because it doesn't answer to religious authority, like monarchs did in 16th century England. The United States is a democracy, an experiment born of events and ideas that took place long after Henry ordered More beheaded; of events and ideas that explicitly reject the notion of either monarchical or religious absolutism; and which protects Americans of all religious faiths from More's (or Tyndale's) fate. (The Bishops apparently don't like these events, or misapprehend them and their relationship to American democracy. The Archbishop of Miami, Thomas Wenski, recently said that "efforts to restrict religious liberty are seemingly founded in a reductive secularism that has more in common with the French Revolution than with America's founding.")

The very idea that providing women with insurance coverage is somehow tantamount to the terror and violence inflicted on both sides in Reformation England—or to the historical cataclysm that was Henry's schism from Rome—is so absurd I'm stunned as my fingers tap across my keyboard. If we're going to spend the next five and half months discussing whether Barack Obama is like Henry VIII, well, God help us.

We seem to live in an age of rhetorical excess. It's not enough for the Bishops to disagree with the Obama adminstration on the contraception mandate. He must be the equivalent of Henry the VII, and their decision to oppose the mandate must be seen as an act of martyrdom on par with the beheading of Thomas More. This is a ridiculous comparison on its face, not least because the mandate as it is currently constructed allows the church to keep its scruples while still allowing for their non-Catholic employees (as well as those Catholics who dissent on the issue of contraception), to continue to have access to contraception.

But as I've written before, the real issue for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is not really their rights to keep their own consciences, but their insistance that everyone else, Catholic and non-Catholic, must keep their conscience as well. And it is this point that makes the Thomas More comparison strangely apt.

More died for the sake of his conscience. More also caused others to die for the sake of their consciences. He burned heretics at the stake and he pursued William Tyndale mercilessly (a fact that ought to give the Bishops' Protestant allies some pause). Like the Bishops, what he wanted was not freedom of conscience regarding matters of religion, but for his own view of religious orthodoxy to prevail. And he was willing to make others suffer for the sake of that vision. While one may admire many of his qualities as a Christian and as Henry VII's Lord Chancellor, it would be a mistake to hold him up in an American context as a defender of religious liberty. He was most certainly not, and neither are the Bishops.

TED, Taxes, and Income Inequality

 

There has been an interesting back and forth over the past few days about Nick Hanauer's recent TED talk about the idea of "job creation." Apparently TED had decided not to run the segment, and Hanauer cried "censorship," after which TED decided to go ahead and relase it. You can see the piece above.

The key element of his talk is the following passage, from an editorial he wrote on the topic:

I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.”

What he says here shouldn't be controversial. It's black letter economic principle: "job creation" come about ultimately through consumer spending, in other words, it's stimulated by demand, so giving ordinary consumers more money to spend has a greater stimulative effect than giving rich people more money to spend, because the rich are probably already spending near the top of their capacity. Giving Nick Hanauer a 10% tax cut won't stimulate the economy nearly as effectively as giving someone with realtively little money one, since Nick Hanauer has almost everything he might need, whereas an ordinary middle class American will take that money and immediately spend it on goods and services that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to purchase. Again, really not controversial.

It's become controversial because of the ideological capture of the idea of "job creator" to mean "enormously wealthy." The idea is that the wealthy create jobs through their investments, which to be fair, is true to a point. But the stimulative effect on the economy of low taxes for the rich is far less potent than benefits for the poor and middle class would be. In fact, because the low taxes on the rich have necessitated deep cuts in programs to the poor and middle classes, as well as cuts in education and infrastructure around the country, the low taxes on the wealthy have actually had a counter-stimulative effect. They've actually made the economy worse, or at least, haven't helped it get better.

I'm glad to see Hanauer and a few other members of the hyperwealthy in the United States beginning to push back against this ideology, precisely because, as Hanauer notes, as a matter of social policy, it's not only good for the poor and middle classes, but it is also ultimatley better for the wealthy to live in a well-managed, just, relatively equal society with a well-maintained infrastructure and a sound educational system.

Obama, Gay Marriage, and the UCC

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.

It's Not God Versus Gay

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.

What Kind of Christian is Barack Obama?

So asks Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast today. His answer:

I was raised, for example, in the 60s and 70s in an Episcopal Church in which "Christian" meant none of those things. Our church wasn't political, but we had lots of English professors and teachers and the like, so presumably our share of liberals. To my knowledge, people didn't believe most of the Bible literally, and I don't recall being told that I needed to believe that there really was talking snake. It was a story that made a point. There are millions of Christians like this, and they're certainly no less Christian than the literalists. I'd say they're more Christian. The point is not to believe that a snake could speak, but to understand what was being said about temptation. And this is where I think Obama comes in.

From everything we know about Obama, he strikes me as being very like a lot of the Episcopalians I grew up around. Intellectual. Reader of Thomas Merton and that bunch (and indeed Niebuhr--look at how Obama apparently immersed himself in Niebuhr). A believer. But not in the way you're supposed to believe for the newspapers to call you a "believer" in politics. ...

One thing I've always wished Obama might do is revive the skeptical-religious tradition in this country, to show the media that there are, still, millions and millions of Americans who fit in that tradition. That tradition was dominant in our public discourse when I was little. Then the literalist right muscled its way onto the scene, and the left (part of the blame lies with it, too) tried to push religion out of the picture entirely. Maybe in the second term (how many times am I going to write that sentence in the next six months?!), after he endorses gay marriage, he can start talking up Teilhard de Chardin. That'd be fun!

As of today of course, Obama has endorsed gay marriage, and like Michael, I think this is indeed an expression of his deep Christian faith. I too would now like to see a revival of that skeptical religion that he writes about, and an Obama discourse on de Chardin would be entertaining, if nothing else. I look forward to seeing it happen.

"Religion and Politics": For Polite Company

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.

Faith-Based Initiatives and the Obama Administration

Sarah Posner despairs at the Obama administration's failure to make any real progress at rolling back the discriminatory provisions of the Bush-era Faith Based Initiatives program:

And yet, nearly four years after Obama’s campaign trail pledge to reform the faith-based office, beneficiaries of federally funded faith-based social services — people seeking drug treatment, mental health services, marriage counseling, pregnancy prevention services, prenatal care and more — have insufficient legal guarantees that their constitutional right to be free from government-funded, imposed religion will be protected. Today, your tax dollars can still fund, under a George W. Bush executive order, a religious organization that decides, for example, that it can fire the gay employee because its religion so dictates or that it will only hire people of the same faith. Its supporters call it “co-religionist hiring,” but that’s just a polite term for taxpayer-supported discrimination.

This really shouldn't be all that hard: Organizations that want federal funding do not get to discriminate, and organizations that want to discriminate do not get federal funding. If equal protection under the law is supposed to mean anything, than it ought to ensure that U.S. taxpayers are not put in the position of funding organizations that refused to abide by basic non-discrimination law.

None of this means that religious organizations can't choose to discriminate on the basis of sincerely held beliefs about who should or shouldn't be allowed to work for them. If they want to deny gays and lesbians, or women, or members of other religions the ability to work with them on helping those in need, they should be free to do so. But if they're going to, then they can't ask for federal funds.

I understand this may make their work harder, but then they've got to choose: Is their desire to discriminate on doctrinal grounds stronger than their desire to do good, or isn't it?

Colbert on Ryan, Rand, and Jesus's Preferred Tax Policy

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Paul Ryan: A Legend In His Own Mind

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.

 

Executing the Innocent

Andrew Gelman argues that you have to accept it if you favor the death penalty:

My larger perspective on the death penalty, informed by my research with Jim Liebman several years ago, is that you can only accept capital punishment if you’re willing to have innocent people executed every now and then. And, the more effective you want the death penalty to be, the more innocents you have to execute.