Heather Mac Donald claims, in a piece that has set off a small tinderstorm in the Corner, that religious conservatives and secular conservatives are "temperamentally compatible allies." It is a matter of definition that we are intellectually so, but when it comes to temperament, I find myself wondering whether Mac Donald's own argumentation bears out her assertion.
For one example, consider the rhetorical trick (requiring not a little misreading) with which she responds to a believer's point that "something has to be fixed in place to assert something, and for religious people what is fixed is God." Mac Donald scoffs not at the notion that something must be fixed in order for any assertion to have any basis, but at the unmade claim that religious people, or even just Christians, have achieved "harmonious agreement" or "unanimity." It's easier, I suppose, to punctuate a misreading with references to "bloody sectarian wars" than to address a key argument against her secularism.
In her initial piece, Mac Donald writes, "Suffice it to say that, to many of us, Western society has become more compassionate, humane, and respectful of rights as it has become more secular." This point, which is obviously arguable on the specifics, logically leads exactly to the reason that we need something to be "fixed in place" in order to make reliably moral assertions. If we haven't a transcendent external something, then on what do we base our zealotry for being humane? The answer that Western society has often supplied over the past fifty years or so has been to raise the ideal itself (e.g., humaneness) to a transcendent level. But herein difficulty arises: Humane by whose standards and from whose perspective? What do we do about competing claims?
One need read no more deeply in the standard texts of this discussion than Chesterton's Orthodoxy to encounter the argument that such self-fixed principles have a way of working around to their opposites. Handed the dictate to "be humane," humanity finds itself underwriting the livelihoods of delinquents and catering to the emotions of small, discrete groups to the detriment of countless families that can no longer maintain close ties, either geographically or emotionally. (Never mind the underwriting's encouragement of soul-sapping dependency in its recipients and the catering's affirmation of destructive mindsets.)
Moreover, the mandate to follow mushy principles, largely on the basis of gut emotion, creates opportunity for nothing so much as demagoguery. This, it seems to me, is part of what a correspondent to Jonah Goldberg calls society's "totalitarian temptation." Swept up in the quest for Heaven on Earth, feeling the tantalizing proximity of a more humane world, we are easily manipulated for the benefit of a few.
Mac Donald counters the unattributed suggestion that "what makes Republicans superior to Democrats is their religious faith" with the assertion that "what makes Republican principles superior to Democratic principles is that they are based on a more accurate assessment of human nature." But politicians, by their nature, will follow inclinations where they lead, guiding the movement toward their own gain. Unrooted or vaguely rooted "political philosophy" may be adequate to guide the individual, but when individuals march together, philosophy tends to be trampled by desire. Consequently, we don't necessarily want our politicians to accurately assess human nature. (One could argue that Mac Donald's stated ambivalence toward the success of Republicans indicates that she objects to the party's readjustments meant to capitalize on just that assessment.)
Religion — specifically Christianity — grounds us across cultures and generations in soil that is neither so contradictory as human nature nor so apt as deified principles to send us tumbling of our own momentum into a totalitarian noose. It offers the most full expression of human nature to enable, as Chesterton puts it, the "lion [to] lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity" — his essential nature as a lion. Left to our own devices, humanity is prone either to bind the lion in wool or to thrust the lamb into battle.
Mac Donald could object that taking abstracts to the point of obsession, that susceptibility to mush-minded demagogues, and that one side of our nature's being sublimated to the other need not be the case in a Godless universe, and abstractly, perhaps she's correct. But it invariably becomes the case without a distant, unreachable pole star Who is only indirectly related to the particular issue before us, Whom we believe to have our best interests in mind, and Who ties all of creation into a meaningful whole.
"The claim that we are overseen by an omniscient, omnipotent God who also loves every human being and treats every human being with justice does not square with the slaughter of the innocents that I see every day," Mac Donald writes. While I am very sorry to hear that she must personally witness the slaughter of innocents daily, with no apparent hope for counterbalance or meaning (in which case, it's a veritable miracle that she's so even tempered), I must insist that her empirical laboratory is insufficiently broad to justify judgment against God. That innocents die, especially when slaughtered by human agents, only conflicts with the notion of a loving and just God if the materialistic view of the world is prior — if this life is all. In a world that Christians see as fallen, anyway, divine justice need not manifest, and divine love need not be fully expressed, within its boundaries.
Similarly, I cannot comprehend why Mac Donald sees "perhaps a tension in arguing simultaneously that Western individualism is a legacy of Judeo-Christianity while blaming our turn away from that religious tradition for our excess of individualism." As the individualism is a legacy of the religion, so is the religion a prerequisite of the individualism. Throughout such discussions between believers and unbelievers, evidence abounds that the unbelievers are almost willfully arguing against the logic of religion when what they really object to are the assumptions. And believers are not immune to their own version of this error. This is the split of faiths between those who choose each of the possible one-word beginnings: "yes" and "no."
Ultimately, therefore, I'm not inclined to disagree with Ms. Mac Donald: a given individual does not need God in order to arrive at any particular conclusion after picking and choosing from among the myriad priorities, principles, and predilections. Every lunatic in the asylum can attest to our ability to do such things. But humanity is a collection of individuals; creation is a construction of pieces. And it is at that level that God is much more clearly a necessity. I find that to be suggestive of His actual existence, but at the very least, those of conservative temperament should correctly identify — and not actively rail against — the advantages of encouraging our fellow man to start with "yes."
"Merry-go-round" is an interesting term, almost like an advertising slogan: "This go-round will maketh you merry." In a more perfect world (e.g., one in which I could make my living thinking and writing), I'd chase the word's etymology around in its circle. A merry-go-round may also be called a "carousel" — once, a "playful tournament of knights in chariots or on horseback" — which is surely related (via French) to "carousal," or "carouse" — noun: "a drunken revel"; verb: "to drink liquor deeply or freely." It seems to me that much is presumed in calling such a ride a "merry-go-round"; some people might be more inclined to call them "sickening-go-rounds," a difference of opinion that can be carried through the language to the experience of carousing.
I began down this linguistic path because I don't know what Neil Sinhababu is talking about when he writes:
I throw out the beliefs formed by having some emotionally-driven attitude towards a state of affairs, and thus coming to believe that there's some objective goodness or badness out there in that state of affairs. All that's left is the goodness of pleasure and the badness of displeasure, which can be discovered without any emotions standing between us and our pleasure or displeasure. ... So the objective goodness of pleasure and the objective badness of displeasure are all we can know of objective goodness and badness.
How does one separate emotion from sensation in this way? If I find the sensation of a carousel pleasant, it will make me merry; if I find it unpleasant, it will make me unhappy. In the other direction, if I've some emotional reason to dislike carousels — say, for example, a resurgence of the fear that I felt as a child watching "Something Wicked This Way Comes" or of the alienation that comes to an emotional head at the end of "Catcher in the Rye — then I'll find the sensation, or the collection of sensations, to be unpleasant. If the absence of emotion is the determinant of objectivity, therefore, the impossibility of teasing apart one's experience of a merry-go-round into sensation and emotion would foil attempts to determine the objective goodness of the ride. Sinhababu claims that I can know that my "sensations of black are sensations of darkness," but what if black evokes comfort?
If you've similar online reading habits to mine, you'll know that Sinhababu makes these claims in the service of an argument against Matthew Yglesias's moral relativism (expressed here and here), so don't conclude that my disagreement with Sinhababu implies agreement with Yglesias. I agree with Sinhababu 's larger argument that we cannot "throw out the idea that there are objective facts somewhere, just because people keep forming their beliefs in wacky ways, or because there's a lot of disagreement, or because everyone is fighting over stuff." However, the seeds of his argument's defeat are sown into its assumptions, a fact that juts out particularly with his interjection of "sadly" here: "Emotional judgments from gut feelings, sadly, play an outsized role in determining many ordinary people's beliefs on issues where there are objective right and wrong answers."
Sinhababu would agree with me, I'm sure, that the reality of physical truths does not mean that there are no non-physical, or moral, truths. He might even agree with me that the existence of physical truth implies the existence of moral truths, inasmuch as both involve types of knowledge and proof of objectivity for one suggests the possibility of objectivity in the other. However, arguing on behalf of moral truths — "goodness and badness" — by teasing apart sensation and emotion and by invoking pleasure, places him in the position, if not of testifying for hedonism, of ceding the fundamental assumption of relativism: that emotions and preferences — the essentials of "self" — are fundamentally physical phenomena with no deeper significance than the physical circumstances that caused them.
The danger of this concession is evident in the very first comment to Sinhababu's post:
Some argue that a world without objective moral truths is unworkable. This is easy to sell because it conforms to common assumptions, but it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. As Matt argued, you wouldn't be able to tell a world with objective moral truths apart from a world without.
How does the commenter know that "you wouldn't be able to tell a world with objective moral truths apart from a world without"? Only by believing that moral truths don't act in — or constrain — the world in the same way that physical truths do. I might as well assert that you wouldn't be able to tell a world with the truth of gravity apart from a world without it.
And this brings the conversation back to Yglesias:
The interesting point came, I think, in Jonah's second post wondering, "How are you going to convince others, to pick a nice progressive example, that gay marriage is a moral imperative or that torture is wrong without an appeal to conscience?" To me, this is just the point. Jonah's witnessed me engage in arguments with moral aspects in the past, and, indeed, we've debated various issues from time to time. There's no point in an actual moral conversation where adding "and my views are objectively correct!" adds anything to what's happening. Obviously, appeals to conscience are a part of argument. Equally obviously, conscience exists -- people feel guilty sometimes and have the capacity to empathize and people take advantage of these traits when arguing. I might say to someone, "Well, look, how would you feel if you were being told you couldn't marry your lover, that your relationship was going to be permanently relegated to second-class status, all because, hypothetically, recognizing the legitimacy of your love might lead to a decline in heterosexual marriage rates at some time in the future?"That sort of thing is a classic of moral discourse, but obviously it doesn't "prove" anything. And that's generally how these things go. When you argue with people, you try to appeal to shared sentiments, point out alleged inconsistencies in the other guy's position, and so on and so forth. What underlies the possibility of discussion isn't objective moral truth but the fact that, say, Jonah and I have a vast stockpile of things we agree about and one tries to resolve controversies with appeals to stuff in that store of previous agreement.
Yglesias skirts the question of what it means for moral principles to be objectively correct, which is that acting in contravention of them will have undesirable consequences. It only adds nothing to claim "objective correctness" if that is where the explanation ends. If we explain how our moral view will objectively lead to a state of affairs from which our shared conscience shrinks, then we can advance the conversation toward moral truth. Turn Yglesias's example back on itself: how would a homosexual feel if our entire society were to collapse because countless children had been deprived of the stable mother-father homes that traditional marriage had previously fortified, all because he or she wanted a government stamp on his or her relationship?
Ultimately, we agree on matters of goodness and badness, on morality. We mainly disagree on the terms through which it is all considered. Even head-sawing Islamists (to use another of Yglesias's examples) would likely claim to be appalled at killing for the sheer pleasure of it, or even killing for no reason whatsoever. What they disagree about are the terms in which their own killings are performed and the consequences that they have for themselves and, indeed, the entire world.
There's a point at which all of these arguments collapse into inexpressibles of faith, of course. One can create imaginary figures to carry the torch of believing in pure selfish evil (e.g., that a private whim is worth global destruction). One can reject without consideration the factual arguments of others or attempt to redefine "good" so as to deny progression toward the worldly decay that is evil's indication. But to push the argument too deeply into abstractions of what people or cultures could conceivably believe is, again, to imagine a world in which belief is purely an illusion.
It is also, as Jonah Goldberg suggests, to leave one's self open to just accusations of inconsistency, or worse. And one of its consequences is the undermining of the moral certainty that is ultimately crucial toward moral — and physical — survival.
Not to troll the Providence Journal letters section for material, but this offering from Vance Morgan — philosophy department chair at the ostensibly Catholic Providence College — is just too perfect to pass up:
Dawn Cousineau, one of the Catholic faithful protesting The Da Vinci Code, was quoted in a May 19 news story ("Da Vinci Code draws small protest") as saying that the movie is "a Christ-bashing film."At the heart of the book and the movie is the hypothesis that Jesus fathered a daughter with his wife, Mary Magdalene. The book and movie are entertaining fiction, hardly substantial enough to challenge someone serious about his or her Christian faith.
But I'm wondering which is more offensive to Ms. Cousineau's belief system: marriage or parenthood?
Ah, how clever of Professor Vance! It must take multiple degrees to hone one's ability to leverage a deliberately superficial misunderstanding as an expression of contempt. As if to say: "Nobody's insulting you, you ignorant papist."
One can only hope that the "Da Vinci Code as family-values film" spin dies with this edition of the Journal.
An always-perceptive reader (involved professionally with the visual arts) emails:
Such a topic, censorship. The Church militant lies down like multicultural pussycat toward Islam but stomps its boots over a dumb read like The DaVinci Code.No, censorship is not atrocity. But it provides cover for atrocity. If giving offense is criminalized [as thoughts have already been criminalized through hate-crime legislation] then Islam and its theological impetus toward violence is protected from examination and public rejection.
As previously stated, I do not support calls for Christians' pursuing "legal means" if read as "means that manipulate the law" (as opposed to "means that are legal"). That said, there's an undertone to free-speech arguments against Christian outrage as if to suggest that we can't let Muslims get away with their pressure because it will unleash the Christians. No doubt, this undertone is generally unintended (although there are surely secularists who fear losing ground in their campaign to push religion from the public square altogether).
The practical effects, therefore, of eminently safe outcries (including quasi-fictionalized revelations about Catholic conspiracies) against supposed Christian overtures toward theocracy, combined with a failure to treat Islam in like manner, combined with continued thrusts against Christians in Western government and society (e.g., adoption in Massachusetts) is the scuttling of internal compromise out of an inability to absorb an encroaching threat. I'd suggest that further strengthening our mechanisms for pluralism — which would mean increasing Christians' say in their own government and their own societies, largely via federalist principles — would be more apt to disperse the rising Islamist tide than further narrowing the public sphere would be.
For one thing, our system is ingenious in its ability to divert hostility into politics. For another — again — the Christians among us will understandably be less inclined to defend a society that deliberately insults and excludes them.
(N.B. — Certainly, Glenn Reynolds, to name one, is not included among those who have failed to treat Islam in like manner.)
PROEM:
It's been awhile since I've been active, so for those who don't know (or recall): for an easier-to-read layout, click "Turn Light On" at the top of the sidebar.
Now, I'm not saying that this square can't be circled, but explanation would seem in order from Professor Reynolds. Statement 1:
OF WINDS AND WHIRLWINDS: Now that the Muhammad-cartoon precedent has been set, we've got Christians calling for censorship of stuff that offends them. No surprise, there.UPDATE: Chuck Pelto emails: "they won't be as effective as their Islamic counterparts ....until they start sawing off people's heads with dull knives." That'll come, if people keep caving to the Islamists. Fanatics learn by example.
EUGENE VOLOKH LOOKS AT A TIME "When the idea of self-preservation was as jealously guarded from the young as the facts of sex had been in earlier ages."I think the view that it's connected with a (somewhat degenerate) notion of holiness is right, too. Call it Christianity's poison pill.
I've expressed offense at the insistence that Christians will surely take the violent path of Islamic radicals once they come to comprehend the efficacy of the latter's methods. Does that mean I've taken a mild dosage of the poison? Or is reticence to forceful self-preservation only a "poison pill" when it means putting the West — as opposed to Christianity — at risk?
Perhaps conservative Christians ought to be clearer with their secular allies that their rhetorical and physical defense of the West focuses on preserving what is Christian about it.
ADDENDUM:
The professor responds:
IT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN atrocity and self-defense, between resolution and fanaticism. That it's being missed even by thoughtful observers goes some distance toward proving my point.
I'm not so sure that Glenn has drawn the lines as starkly as he believes. Statement 1 relates to Nigerian Roman Catholic Cardinal Arinze's suggestion that:
Those who blaspheme Christ and get away with it are exploiting the Christian readiness to forgive and to love even those who insult us. There are some other religions which if you insult their founder they will not be just talking. They will make it painfully clear to you
As I've said, I'd want more context before trusting Reuters' interpretation of the Cardinal's intended prescription, but even so, would censorship be atrocity? What Glenn elides when he places such "legal means" on the same path as "sawing off people's heads with dull knives," it seems to me, is exactly the "poison pill" that he laments in statement 2: namely, "the desire for holiness, the belief in sacrifice, and a willingness to serve as the butchered victim acceptable to God."
In that passage, Rebecca West is referring to England's failure to foster courage for self-preservation even though "every day Germany and Italy were formulating in more definite and vehement terms that they meant to vanquish and annihilate" the nation. Arguably, Muslim activists and secularists are — each in their own way — formulating in more definite and vehement terms social and legal principles meant to vanquish Christianity from the Western public square (with the former doing so by more generally elbowing out Western culture).
Where resolution ends and fanaticism begins is certainly a moral question with which we all must grapple, and for Christians it is, if anything, made more difficult by the belief that self-preservation is not all. At what point is one being fanatical about self-preservation or, conversely, about self-sacrifice? Surely, the line will vary according to context, but it isn't obvious to me that Glenn is considering the material context (war versus censorship) rather than the context of the thing being preserved (the West versus Christianity).
Perhaps it's merely the juxtaposition of his thoughts with those that had been swimming through my head for my previous post, but I'm inclined to guffaw when Robert Bidinotto, a proclaimed Objectivist, issues such breathlessly italicized statements as this:
In other words, [Cardinal Arinze believes that] the government should bring in its armed officers to FORCE people to "respect" other people's religious beliefs -- specifically, belief in Christianity and Jesus Christ. Leaving aside the practical problems of compelling an emotion like respect -- and also leaving aside the ominous question of exactly what might be viewed as signs of "respect" or "disrespect" -- consider the other Orwellian implication: that government should take sides in matters of religion, and throw its coercive weight behind politically-favored belief systems.But what else should we have expected? Given the virtually unanimous capitulation of Western media, politicians, publishers, and other "cultural leaders" to militant Islamists who demanded "respect" for Muhammad and Islam, on what grounds can these same "cultural leaders" now resist demands that Christianity be afforded the same "respect"?
More to the ugly point: What will happen to anyone who dares to criticize any of these religions, or their iconic leaders and symbols?
Personally, what I find noteworthy is that the Cardinal would be so bold as to allude to "some other religions which if you insult their founder they will not be just talking." African Christians — as any American churchgoer who has listened to visiting clerics knows — are keenly aware of what "other religions" are capable of. Pending further incidents, therefore, I'd say it remains a bit offensive for Glenn Reynolds to declare that Christians' resorting to "sawing off people's heads with dull knives" is only a matter of time.
Given the necessary Reuters bias filter, it remains a possibility, as far as I can see, that by "legal means" Cardinal Arinze meant "means that are legal," not means that "bring in [the government's] armed officers." But even so, if Bidinotto is correct that the Catholic Church is asking "that Christianity be afforded the same 'respect'" as Islam, how can he simultaneously see it as asking the government to "take sides in matters of religion, and throw its coercive weight behind politically-favored belief systems"?
In a culture in which Christianity cannot be taught in public schools with anymore than passing hints that it might actually be true and in which Church-related organizations are being driven out of such missions as providing adoptive homes, even as Islam receives the full minority-group handling, we must, at some point, cease to pretend that Christians are seeking the special treatment of a favored group.
Writes Eugene Volokh:
I had hoped that the Catholic Church had learned that it's wrong to try to use legal coercion to suppress religious views that one disapproves of -- and that no religion should have a legal right to be free from criticism or disagreement (or for that matter novels it dislikes).
Volokh has been remarkably fair-minded on church-state matters, so I've no doubt that he and I agree more than disagree across the board of such issues, and I do agree that a religious leader's urging "legal coercion" — as opposed to "coercion that is legal" — would be worthy of criticism. Still, while the Catholic Church has enough experience in the West that, as an institution, it ought to know better, we might mitigate matters somewhat by pondering whether recidivism would be a relapse or an acknowledgment that the old errors are now common practice — for secularists as well as other theists.
There can be little doubt that in both groups can be found people with a penchant for, in Cardinal Arinze's words, "exploiting the Christian readiness to forgive and to love even those who insult us."
Is there anything more... I can't think of the word... banal, unimaginative, predictable, hackneyed than the Newsweek quote trumpeted by the apparent har-har fest for atheists, The God Who Wasn't There?
Irreverently lays out the case that Jesus Christ never existed
Wouldn't it be more intriguing to "reverently lay out the case" or, alternatively, to irreverently lay out the case that He did exist? Nothing is as damaging to atheists' case as the inescapable impression that the drive to be irreverent precedes their conclusions.
Sometimes monologues can entrance those who encounter them already in progress. Apart from whatever humor or passion (or both) the author and actor are able to impart, periodic evidence of the intended audience and the gradual accumulation of context can make the unfolding of the implied plot feel like a revelatory discovery — particularly when one encounters the monologue on the radio, which provides no additional clues than the tinctures of the voice.
Such was the case some Christmases back when, while walking the dog, I discerned that the man on the radio was supposed to be a farmer of some sort. In telling his wife (I assume) of a fantastical dream that he'd had just before entering their home, he realized that it had not been a dream. Indeed, he'd walked into their house to get some blankets because the messiah had just been born in their barn.
To be sure, the actor was of sufficient talent that I've sacrificed much of the effect in my retelling. The sense of wonder in his voice was palpable, and his giddiness was reminiscent — forgive my mind the easy comparison made both then and now — of Scrooge upon waking to a Christmas morn. And with that crescendo of elated drama came the thought that among the obstacles keeping moderns from faith in Christ is the excessively limited scope that the New Testament stories appear to have. It confounds expectations that so significant a person as the Son of God — God Himself — would be born into the world without the entire planet's shaking.
A few minutes' consideration will yield the conclusion that millennia are but moments to an eternal God, and the entire world has shaken, as it were, in response to Jesus' birth. Still, much as with a foggy, rainy day after Christmas, there's something not altogether satisfying about observing the feel of a special day fade as life goes on.
More minutes' consideration may bring the recollection that the story of Jesus' birth is hardly without action, what with the appearances of angels, Herod's slaughtering of innocent children, and the various other incidents. I wonder whether we've diluted the drama of Christmas in order to accommodate an intended audience of children and a preferred message of peace — even tranquility.
The cultural manipulations of the Christmas season have created a particular feel that I, for one, would be loathe to discard. The greed and overdoneness ought to be discarded, but the simplicity of good will and the plain striving for giddiness deserve preservation, at least as undercurrents. Nonetheless, I've no doubt that a new movie could become an instant holiday classic by presenting Christ's birth with all the cosmic drama and thematic emphasis that cinematic art is able to muster. The gore and gut-wrenching scenes of The Passion of the Christ would be out of place, of course, but the key idea would be a potent gift to our society: to bring Jesus to life for a society that no longer understands much of what its culture has handed down.
In the meantime, may Christmas carry sufficient significance for you that the feeling doesn't fade over the coming weeks and months.
This — from an NPR commentary by Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller) — is rich:
I don't travel in circles where people say, "I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith." That's just a long-winded religious way to say, "shut up," or another two words that the FCC likes less.
Another way of figuratively using "two words that the FCC" dislikes comes to mind:
The skit, performed last week in Las Vegas, included Teller, dressed as Christ on a full-size cross, entering the room on a cart. According to the column, a midget dressed as an angel "performed a simulated sex act on the near-naked Teller." Penn, in a Roman gladiator costume, unveiled the scene by pulling away a "Shroud of Turin" that covered the cross.
So one side — presented always, in my experience, as a general representation of an unflappable caricature — insults by having confidence that its belief is correct. The other side, as Jonah Goldberg puts it, "actively enjoys mocking and condescending to people who believe in God."
In response to Goldberg, Andrew Stuttaford — who says of religion, "it's not a subject that worries me very much one way or the other" — asks, "Why does theological debate have to be muffled in cotton wool, euphemism and that feeble contemporary desire not to give 'offense'?" Not that wool and gloss ought to be items in every rhetorical toolbox, but I'd reply to Stuttaford that a prerequisite for "debate" is generally to avoid chasing the other side off with jeers.
For all Jillette's pleasant-sounding claims about wanting "to be more thoughtful" and "to treat people right the first time around," his disbelief in God apparently does not foster sufficient human sympathy of "I know you take this matter seriously." Instead, the sentiment is: "nothing you can say or do will be listened to."
Having been deliberate in ignoring the initial letter to the Providence Journal on the matter of women priests because it was basically a press release from a liberal Catholic group, I couldn't help but notice that bias and/or a tone-deaf headline writer ruined the Projo's attempt at balance. Tell me: which side do you think a letter with the following title supports?
This is why only men should be priests?
The author — whose point of view is generally taken for headlines — writes with an explanatory tone, not a questioning, hypothetical, or curious one. Adding a question mark to the title, at best, suggests the mainstream media's typical biased objectivity or, at worst, a naked and sarcastic incredulity.
The Providence Journal's editorial pages have been admirably balanced (considering their regional market). One hopes that heretofore subtle indications of a shift prove illusory.
For my column — which will now be appearing every other Wednesday — I pondered the formation of London's homegrown Muslim terrorists: "Exploding Across Arm's-Length Tolerance." The bottom line is that the common thread that runs through the astute explanations — the root cause, if you will — is disengagement. And pushing religion, and the religious, away from politics and government will only exacerbate the problem.
With the necessary qualification that I'm responding only to a single essay by him, I'd suggest that Rabbi James Rosenberg of Barrington, RI, is attempting to align himself in a discordant way theologically for ulterior reasons at which I won't guess:
I am one of those who believe that "the search is an end in itself, without any hope or possibility of ever attaining the goal of truth" -- at least not "The Truth."Nevertheless, I deny with every fiber of my being that I am a nihilist, that I subscribe to a philosophy of nothingness. Rather, I call myself a God-Wrestler. God-Wrestling is shorthand for my lifelong commitment to spiritual struggle, a struggle that transforms and liberates, a wrestling that renews and freshens and chastens. It is Jacob's wrestling to become Israel. It is what God demands of me day after day, even when I'd rather be fishing. ...
I know Jewish God-Wrestlers and Protestant God-Wrestlers and Catholic God-Wrestlers. Ours is the approach of seeking and asking, not of finding and learning the "correct" answers. We do not claim to know for certain what God requires of us, because for us Scripture is not "the Word of God" but rather the record of our ancestors' efforts to get close to God.
Whether he considers it the Word of God or not, surely Rabbi Rosenberg knows his scripture well enough to recall that Jacob's wrestling match only lasts until the dawn, at which point the stranger (i.e., God) tells him, "you have contended with divine and human beings and have prevailed" (emphasis added). Rosenberg's treatment of this passage is especially telling in context. If the Bible is not the Word of God, then it is available for perusal and elision — as a source for useful analogies and representations tweaked to fit.
One needn't delve into this particular exegete's preferences, however, to justify my opening suggestion. That there's more to the Rabbi's statement than theology is evident in the fact that even his short piece in the Providence Journal cannot sustain a consistent view. Writes the man who doesn't believe there to be "any hope or possibility of ever attaining" Truth:
I would suggest that there are many paths that lead to God, many ways of walking in faith.
What Rosenberg in actuality suggests is that there are many paths that lead around God — always on the nighttime side of the mountain. God-Wrestling is an activity that can only be pursued indefinitely while darkness persists. With the light that dawn brings, we are bound to begin learning about our opponent.
Apart from qualities of intellect and literacy, what makes Andrew Sullivan so interesting to address is the fact that he's an excellent debater and, as such, is willing to take risks with his rhetoric. As when he approaches statism to declare the Constitution a "workable civil version" of religion, he's willing to give glimpses of cards that a more cautious man with his objectives might keep obscured.
The downside is the frustrated reaction that he can inspire in those who sense that his emphasis is on debate rather than intellect — that the principles under consideration aren't really open for discussion. Consequently, the statements that make up his arguments periodically give the impression of boxing steps rather than exposition. Once frustration has subsided, however, one can look to the areas around which Sullivan has danced to discover the heart of the matter. (Whether his contradictions and avoidance are deliberate or instinctive is a question of how much credit the reader wishes to give him, and it is one on which I vacillate.)
For example, in a recent response to Jonah Goldberg, Sullivan defines fundamentalism in relation to politics and dogma:
Just as Oakeshott very carefully allows a place within Western political thought for the politics of faith, so do I within what might be called conservatism. My worry is when that faith becomes fundamentalist, i.e. less interested in political arrangements than divine imperatives.
Yet, in the subsequent paragraph, he decries neocon cynicism as follows:
I have to say I'm not too enamored of outsiders backing fundamentalism in faiths they do not share for political purposes. But, hey, that's been the neocon position on religion for a long time: we don't believe it, but it's good for the masses.
In one breath, Sullivan worries that public faith is drifting from the political realm to the religious. In the next, he complains of those who treat religious groups as factions with which they may or may not be able to join for political purposes. But if the proper role of religion in the public sphere is to make "political arrangements" (a vexingly vague term in Sullivan's usage), then why would it be inappropriate for outsiders to encourage arrangements that suit them? Or, as Goldberg puts it, "Would Andrew support outsiders backing 'reform' in these faiths?"
The curiosity is that Sullivan — who believes that "it's best to leave religion out of" political questions of morality to maximize a freedom characterized by radical individualism — handles individuals strictly according to their roles within his political framework. Neocons "don't believe [in religion], but it's good for the masses." There are neocons, and there are religious people. Folks who fall within religious segments of the broader neocon category, as I probably do, will find Sullivan's analysis particularly discordant.
Because this separation is untenable beyond a very narrow range of argumentation, Sullivan must chase it across the boundary of religion, where it renders thus: The "central tenets" of religious groups involve faith in particular facts (e.g., that Jesus was the Messiah), but drawing social and political conclusions from those facts is "Evangelical fundamentalism and the creeping infallibilism of Wojtyla-Ratzinger." Apparently, it can be a matter of religious Truth that Jesus was the Word of God, but the implications of what He actually said must remain ever open for debate — within and outside of a particular "religious tradition."
Observers of modern society, generally, and Andrew Sullivan, specifically, understand that this distinction transfers all too easily to people's personal worldviews. What they believe is one thing; what they do is another. There are religious creeds, and there are personal preferences, and the former can only be said to be true to the extent that they do not infringe on the latter.
And here we reach the heart of the matter. Sullivan professes that his "first concern with any religious argument is: is it true? Not: is it useful?" What he does not explain is how one determines whether a religious argument is true or false. Long familiarity with his work leads me to think that his determination of Truth ultimately flows from his intuition and desires. Although I would join him in arguing that the faithful must incorporate these factors into their searches, I would suggest to Andrew Sullivan — as I would to the secular neocons whom he describes — that a religion's utility toward good ends is also evidence of its truth.
One point that Christians put forward in support of Jesus' divinity is His wisdom — that His teachings ring true, that His parables apply to our lives, that His instructions effect what He promises when followed. There is certianly space in this for ecumenism and "political arrangements"; others can act in accordance with the Truth of the Word without knowing (or admitting) that they do so.
There is also, we should all agree, room for the truth in politics. If a religion's prescriptions increase the measure of good in the world, then a rational society may very well be able to trace their functions in non-religious terms. Furthermore, a rational society founded in an ideal of pluralism can properly require advocates of one policy or another to do the work that such tracing entails. Only an irrational society would mark as invalid any policies that people of faith claim to be in accordance with God's will simply on the grounds that others disagree.
The following suggestion of Andrew Sullivan's, which I read in a piece by Jonah Goldberg, strikes me as surprising coming from a European and shocking coming from a Catholic:
[Conservatives of doubt] can point to the astonishing success and durability of the U.S. experiment to buttress the notion that the Constitution is a much more stable defense of human equality than that inherent in any religion. The Constitution itself has far wider support among citizens than any theological argument. To put it another way: You don't need an actual religion when you already have a workable civil version in place.
Readers will be aware that I'm a patriot in the conservative sense, but I have to ask: By what historical standard is two hundred years and change evidence of durability? People who live among monuments to their cultures that date back millennia might be hard-pressed to stifle a chuckle. Similarly, those whose religions are defined by documents and traditions with the same or longer heritage might wonder whether Sullivan is playing games with the terms that qualify something as durable. The question of success would be just as arguable (especially if we factor in the acceleration of social change over time).
In its jarring lack of doubt about its own premises, Sullivan's odd bit of argument by convenient assertion appears to be an attempt to tiptoe past an inconvenient factor in his assessment of the American people. Goldberg writes of the "both-and" (versus an "either-or") that defines conservatives as people who have both "skepticism about the new and faith in the old." But the self-contradiction inherent in Sullivan's blind confidence in doubtfulness lays bare a more fundamental "both-and": the Constitution may indeed have "far wider support among citizens than any [particular] theological argument," but that is only because Americans believe that — in one way or another — their theological arguments are, themselves, embedded within the Constitution.
This attitude manifests most directly in those who believe that (for example) "America is a Christian nation" as a Constitutional matter. Sullivan disagrees with that saying, no doubt, but he can't deny that those who agree with it are likely to be among the Constitution's supporters.
The less direct means of embedment — in my view, the proper Constitutional understanding — is that religious principles exist in the civil sphere as a function of the governmental processes that the Constitution lays out. This sort of support for the Constitution hinges on citizens' ability to shape their government according to their moral beliefs.
It is not enough to treat "moral appeals" simply as free speech — to be restricted to "crusades for personal salvation, evangelism, or social work, rather than... legislative change." To the extent that Sullivan is correct that the "purpose of the Constitution was to preserve the Declaration of Independence's right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,'" it must also allow them (as the Declaration continues in the very same sentence) "to alter" their government, "laying its Foundation on such Principles... as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Andrew Sullivan is prominent among commentators throwing about the dark image of theocracy, but again, he seems to be playing games with terminology. Theocracy does not describe a particular set of policies — or even the moral authority that informs them. It describes the civil authority that determines them: those acting as God's explicit representatives. With democracy, on the other hand, all authority must filter through the people.
That Sullivan has now gone so far as to suggest that the Constitution establishes a "civil version" of — and replacement for — religion reveals how much closer those of his political persuasion are to theocracy than are the "conservatives of faith" whom they oppose. That zealots for individual license traverse a dim alleyway to tyranny is evident in their conviction that their preferred policies — from abortion to same-sex marriage — are subjects of Constitutional guarantee.
Even those supposed "theocrats" who would go so far as to argue for mandatory prayers in their local public schools don't argue that the judiciary ought to find that the Constitution requires them.
(N.B. — I'm sure this has been done before and better, but it was easier to draw than to seek.)
How much influence John Paul II had on my sense of the world is, I regret, absolutely impossible for me to say. Just as Ronald Reagan was the personified Mr. President for people of my age, Karol Wojtyla defined the character of The Pope. For me, however, the difference is that political conversation was in the air surrounding my family, whereas only the periodic intersection of politics and religion brought the latter within view of my unreligious youth. Indeed, it was only a few years ago that I began thinking of the Pope before Paul Anka and Reggie Jackson among people with whom I share a birthday.
This is all to say that the central emotion evoked by the passing of this man for whom the media has held a deathwatch for as long as I can remember is regret that I wasn't very aware of John Paul II while he walked the Earth. But as in everything, there is hope buried beneath such regrets: so much of Wojtyla's life and works are left for me, along with countless generations, to discover — fresh and alive, an echo, we can hope, of the immortality of which the man himself spoke on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C., on October 7, 1979: "Human life is precious because it is the gift of God, a God whose love is infinite; and when God gives life, it is forever."
A precious life to be sure. Pray for us, Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, Holy Father.
With all of the discussion of the specific acts included in Mel Gibson's The Passion, I'm a bit surprised more wasn't made of relevant aspects of the history of the investigation of the Shroud of Turin:
According to Barbet, the Shroud shows that prior to taking up the Cross, Jesus was subjected to two drastic forms of punishment. First, he was severely beaten with a stick about 1.75 inches in diameter. "Excoriations are to be found everywhere on the face, but especially on the right side." Barbet found "haematomas beneath the bleeding surfaces." The nose "is deformed by a fracture of the posterior of the cartilage." The marks show that the stick was "vigorously handled by an assailant standing on the right of Jesus."After that, he was subjected to scourging by two men employing the well-known Roman "flagrum," a leather whip featuring small balls of metal or bone designed to tear the skin. Barbet finds more than fifty such strokes. "All the wounds have the same shape, like a little halter about three centimeters long. The two circles represent the balls of lead. . . . We may assume that during the scourging he was completely naked, for the halter-like wounds are to be seen all over the pelvic region, which would otherwise have been protected. . . . Finally, there must have been two executioners. It is possible they were not of the same height, for the obliqueness of the blows is not the same on each side."
Mark Krikorian's theology of death row strikes me as, well, debatable at the very least:
This is something that has long bugged me — any attempt by a supposedly remorseful murderer to overturn his death sentence ought to be prima facie evidence that he is not, in fact, remorseful. Part of remorse is accepting the fact that you deserve the law's punishment for your heinous crime — in fact, if you're a Christian, you deserve damnation, which you hope you will be spared by God's grace. As the penitent thief at Calvary rebuked the other thief who mocked the Lord, "Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss."
I'll say, first, that I know absolutely nothing about the case to which Krikorian is responding, so I can't presume or dismiss the sincerity of the criminal at hand. Even so, I can't help but think that those Christians who themselves oppose capital punishment on theological grounds would object to the suggestion that their particular understanding of God's will should be invalid for those actually at risk of death from the contravening policy. It's convenient for the criminal to have religious objections to the death penalty, to be sure, but that certainly doesn't prove that he has no true remorse.
Apart from specific religious-political issues, Mr. Krikorian's requirement for the remorseful seems a bit narrow — in part because he emphasizes remorse rather than repentance. In similar circumstances, wouldn't Krikorian want the opportunity to right some wrongs, do some good, before he faced his judgment? Nothing is gained by forcing the truly repentant man into a state of remorse that he cannot prove his sincerity by future deeds.
(N.B. — To be honest, I still haven't entirely worked out my opinion on capital punishment, but I take Krikorian's argument as evidence that justifying the policy might do more harm than good.)
... to judge the religion practiced by my co-religionists, but there's something I just can't fathom: Every Sunday, people around the world shuffle into Catholic Masses. They sit at the pews, listen to the homilies, and participate in the rituals. All of this is done, in most cases, with a statue, picture, frieze — something — with the image of the founder of the Church, the man whom we are to emulate in life, the God whom we are to love, Jesus Christ, hanging from a cross, having been tortured, scorned, and ultimately murdered in an excruciating way.
Now, I know this is hardly a rare perspective, but that knowledge makes it no easier to understand how folks can sit in those pews with this mindset:
I go to mass not to have to deal with problems, but to get a respite from them, so with the friction... it doesn't really make me feel on Sunday morning like getting up and going.
This profound moment in Eric Johnson's conversion (to Catholicism) story makes concrete something that's been on my mind lately:
Surveying the Church's two-thousand-year record, I noticed another strange fact. No matter where it was, even under friendly governments and during peaceful times, she never quite managed to become respectable. Whenever a society thought it had domesticated the gospel, there arose a Francis of Assisi to shake the complacency of those who would relax and enjoy their comforts rather than serve others. The contemporary example of Pope John Paul II was foremost in my mind. How tempting it must be to show up in a foreign country, soak in the adulation of the masses, say a few innocuous platitudes, and fly off in a cloud of ersatz goodwill. Here was a man whose love for humanity was so great that he challenged whole nations to strive for a more perfect order and risk opprobrium for doing so. The sight of a leader who neither pandered to our worst impulses nor consulted opinion polls to mold his message was deeply impressive to me.Was the pope the head of the one, true Church of Christ? After all, there are a lot of churches out there. How can anyone say that a particular church is the right one? And doesn't that mean the other Christians are wrong? The answer, say Catholics, is that most of what the other churches teach is true but incomplete. What is missing is a coherent explanation of how divine Providence works in the world. God took on human flesh to be a living sacrifice for us, and to teach us by word and example. He underwent not only the physical pain of death by torture, but also the spiritual pain of bearing the punishment for every sin that ever was and ever will be committed. Was it really so implausible, I reasoned, that the Lord would fashion an instrument to preserve the memory of Jesus' words and deeds and protect that memory by guaranteeing it would not become corrupted?
If the Catholic Church was not the true Church, it was a horrible monstrosity, because it presumed to speak with the authority of God but taught erroneously. Would a God of justice permit his name to be misused in this way for fifteen centuries?
Pondering all of this, I put down what I was reading. "My God," I thought. "I actually believe this stuff."
It doesn't matter whether one begins exploring the faith out of intellectual curiosity or emotional desperation. It doesn't matter whether one converts because or in spite of the Church's history. What matters is whether its teachings are true. All faults and successes must be filtered through that perspective.
A Catholic is a Catholic because of the Catechism, not because of a history book.
(Via Lane Core's Blogworthies)
Many of Cox & Forkum's cartoons are simply brilliant. But I'm not sure how they get from this reportage:
"While millions of people in the world struggle to survive hunger and disease, lacking even minimal health care, in rich countries the concept of health as well-being figures in creating unrealistic expectations about the possibility of medicine to respond to all needs and desires," said the Rev. Maurizio Faggioni, a theologian and morality expert on the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life."The medicine of desires, egged on by the health care market, increases the request for pharmaceutical and medical-surgical services, soaks up public resources beyond all reasonableness," Faggioni said. ...
Psychiatrist Manfred Lutz, a Vatican academic, hailed John Paul, who for years has struggled with Parkinson's, as "the living alternative to the prevailing health-fiend madness." ... "Precisely in the handicap, in the disease, in the pain, in old age, in dying and death one can, instead, perceive the truth of life in a clearer way," Lutz said. "The pope's message is 'suffering is part of life and has meaning," the doctor said.
To this cartoon:
Religious believers and non-believers — whether or not they know in which camp they reside — will have irreconcilably different approaches to a given issue. For the example in point: to a non-believer, a religious organization such as the Roman Catholic Church, just like any organization of any type, is its members and what it does. If the people and/or the actions are seen as corrupt, then the organization is defined by corruption. Believers, on the other hand, add a layer of import such that the visible practicalities of the organization are not the whole story. That could be good or bad — depending on what the believer actually believes in — but there's another dimension of consideration required when assessing corruption.
Within the field of Christian belief, with its roots in the New Testament, scriptural incidents can help to frame that assessment, and if we take the twelve disciples' portrayal in the Gospels as an indication, then the manifold flaws in the history of the Church are neither inexplicable nor invalidating. As if to provide a crystallization of this point, both Matthew and Mark note the same action of those who were with Jesus at his arrest: with the violence escalating, with the initial seizure that would begin the Passion, Jesus declared that it all must happen so that scripture would be fulfilled, and the disciples "left him and fled."
If nothing else, the religion that God sent this troupe of doubters and deniers to establish is clearly not one requiring perfection among entrants. The Church in which Simon Peter — arguably the most conspicuous doubter and denier of the lot — is held to be the prototypical pope ought not be expected to be the perfect representative of Christ on Earth, inasmuch as even membership in its hierarchy is not synonymous with sainthood. Rather, it is a body through which all of humanity — sinners that we are — can find our way to God in spite of our failures. The crucial question is: "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Not: "Peter can you be perfect?" Will you try... not will you succeed.
So to those who see a pattern encompassing, for example, both acquiescence to the fad of castrati and the horrid handling of sexual abuse cases in recent decades, I say that they are correct. The human beings who make up the institutional Church are susceptible to the evils of their times, and the lamentable reality is that those human beings will often fail or fall short in attempting to further explicit ends especially in the direction of cultural gravity. Castrating boys was an excommunicable offense, after all, and employment of the men who'd been subjected to the procedure was hardly unique to the Church. Castrati were so popular that composers sometimes felt compelled to write them into operas for their own sake. More to the point, as inclined as we may be, in the conceits of our less candidly brutal era, to set ourselves above our ancestors, the impulse remains familiar:
Elevated to the position of stars throughout the 18th Century, castrati raised the art of singing beyond human limits. History has recorded the names of a number of famous castrati, who have become legendary in Europe, for example: Caffarelli, Farinelli, Porporino, Senesino and Bernacchi. They attained a level of popularity similar to that of the rock stars of our time. 18th Century groupies went so far as to wear medallions bearing the portraits of their favorite castrati, a fashion not dissimilar to the pins and T shirts fans of rock stars wear today.
How many girls in the modern age have been starved, surgically manipulated, and all but tortured for the excuse of beauty? How many boys have been pushed to exhaustion and misery on the slim hope of athletic success? How many children have been ridden to nervous breakdowns by the constant push to succeed academically — ever younger and covering ever more ground?
I do not intend to deny the organizational Church's errors (evils) or to absolve it of the need for recompense. Indeed, dealing with the Scandal has become a matter of intra-Catholic dispute, and there is much that I would advise be done differently. But in a culture that abuses children relentlessly — almost as a matter of principle — in ways with superficially noble objectives and in ways that cannot be cast otherwise than as licentious, travesties among clerics and in the hierarchy too easily provide the illusion of a redemptive proxy.
Rewriting history to unravel the Church from the developing Western Culture with which it was intimately entwined for so many centuries does not allow us to discard the darkness with the former and keep the blessings with the latter. We cannot expiate our sins by sacrificing those charged with tending the Shepherd's sheep. Believers and non-believers alike do well to recall that hypocrisy isn't among the cardinal sins; consistency makes no virtue of vice, and seeing the sins of others does not diminish our responsibility for those that we share, much less absolve us of our own.
Rod Blagojevich, the governor of Illinois, better brace himself for litigation:
"What we're doing today is older than scripture: Love thy neighbor," the governor told the audience yesterday, according to the Associated Press. "It's what Jesus said when he gave his Sermon on the Mount: 'Do unto others what you would have others do unto you."'
As the refrain so often goes: what right do the executive and legislative branches of the Illinois government have to force their religious views on the people of that state? Surely the letter from the ACLU is already in the mail.
Well, perhaps a letter of congratulations. According to Bryan Preston, the ACLU supports this legislation, which:
... adds "sexual orientation" to the state law that bars discrimination based on race, religion and similar traits in areas such as jobs and housing.... the bill's sponsor, state Sen. Carol Ronen, D-Chicago, is on record stating it should be applied to churches, meaning they would not be allowed, for example, to reject a job applicant who practices homosexual behavior.
Ronen said: "If that is their goal, to discriminate against gay people, this law wouldn't allow them to do that. But I don't believe that's what the Catholic Church wants or stands for."
As the governor apparently knows, one of the First Amendment's penumbrae covers the establishment of religious views when it involves turning scripture back on the people who actually believe in it. Most Christians would have others do unto them reasonable measures to turn them away from sin. Well, the government of Illinois is only too happy to oblige.
(via Lane Core's weekly Blogworthies)
Embittering personal experience has kept a story that's already old by blog standards among my bookmarks. Patrick Sweeney quotes from the AP summary of the circumstances:
A group of parents and parishioners are accusing the Orange County diocese of violating church doctrine by allowing a gay couple to enroll their children in a Catholic school.The group has demanded that Saint John the Baptist School in Costa Mesa accept only families that pledge to abide by Catholic teachings. That would likely bar the men's two adopted boys from attending the school's kindergarten because of church opposition to relationships and adoption by same-sex couples.
School officials have rejected the group's demands and issued a new policy stating that a family's background "does not constitute an absolute obstacle to enrollment in the school."
Commenter John B. makes the best argument in the boys' favor:
Has anyone stopped to think that a Catholic education might be a vehicle to convincing this child that the homosexual marriage of his/her parents is morally wrong? Maybe it will even convince the parents (but I doubt it). The Holy Spirit works in mysterious ways.Maybe a Catholic education and a set of morals might be just what this child needs now in his/her life.
I'll say, first of all, that this isn't one of those topics upon which people far removed from the situation can offer vehement conclusions. Inasmuch as the superintendent of diocese schools in this case is apparently a priest, the situation there seems to be somewhat better than my experience. In the system in which I taught for a brief time, the education wing of the diocese is more a loosely affiliated group, and as I painfully learned, the guiding principles are far more corporate than Christian.
Indeed, at least in the pre–high school grades, the teachers have no particular training in religion, often opting to fit in the religion lessons where they can, if they can. They've got no basis to answer any difficult questions that the children might have, and they have neither the background nor the diocese support versus the parents to be firm while teaching doctrines that might raise objections. (Lesson one for the unaware middle school teacher: divorce is a third rail.)
None of this is meant as an attack on the teachers, or even the administrators. The problem is that the schools are run more or less as public schools, but with prayer and far fewer resources. In this context, the question arises to rebut John B.: But are those boys, and their parents' apparent set of morals, what the other children need? The balance, as I've said, must be made at the more local level.
On the larger issue of Catholic schools' character, I'm probably not alone among blogosphere Catholics in thinking that they need to be stronger in their religious content. I'd go so far as to add the weight of market forces to this demand. High schools appear to be a different matter, but the lower schools — again, to my experience — lack the elite draw. Owing to a blend of Christian responsibility and a need to fill classrooms to the maximum, the children admitted are often those who've had difficulty in public schools, for one reason or another.
Without the strict codes of the parochial schools of yore, however, these students don't even come close to gaining in religious structure what they lost in taxpayer-funded services. Sometimes I've wondered whether the schools aren't continuing to subsist on the remembered impressions of parents and grandparents of what Catholic school was like when they were children. Neither the illusion nor the calculation can long remain.
Similarly the teachers. Pitiful pay is one thing within the context of a church community. The picture begins to change when they must keep pace with public procedures for certification and maintenance thereof that become law under at least the tacit assumption that public schools assist teachers in meeting the requirements. It changes further still when they are not treated as ends in themselves, but as potential sparks for lawsuits of one kind or another, to be cut loose at the first hint of trouble.
I'm drifting a bit — venting — but the point is that Catholic schools, at least in some cases, have traded away their character, whether absorbing the character of their well-to-do clients or emulating the better-financed public schools. If particular schools conduct themselves as fully Catholic institutions, take them or leave them, then I'd be persuaded that they can venture to admit those children who are in heightened, and sensitive, need of a Christian influence on their lives.
But in the environment that I describe, few teachers are going to present the Church's disagreement with the lifestyle of a given student's parents. Furthermore, schools that have faltered too far may find themselves, in seeking to accommodate such children, being pulled toward what the secular culture wishes they were, rather than what they ought to be.
Well, I can certainly relate to this:
There is a saying that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. The converse is also true. If God wants to make you laugh, he will tell you his plans for you. On April 4, 1999, at the Easter Vigil, I was received into the Catholic Church. Just a couple of years before that, if a prophet had told me that I would rejoice on entering the Church or that tears would stream down my cheeks as I went to my first confession, I would have told him that he was gravely mistaken.I was at the apogee of my conservatism based on Randian positivism. To me, radical selfishness was the highest virtue. The pinnacle of individualism and being a self-made man were my highest ideals. The natural virtues helped to modify this idealistic positivism toward how I related with others, but it was not enough. My nose had long before achieved orbit as I looked down at those poor superstitious mortals who still believed in hunter-gatherer myths such as God.
Thus begins Jeff Miller's "conversion story." I find such pieces always worth reading — familiar and inspiring.
Believers have long wanted science to return to an internal culture with proper respect for religion, but this isn't quite what they've had in mind:
Top neurologists, pharmacologists, anatomists, ethicists and theologians are to examine the scientific basis of religious belief and whether it is anything more than a placebo.Headed by Baroness Greenfield, the leading neurologist, the new Centre for the Science of the Mind is to use imaging systems to find out how religious, spiritual and other belief systems, such as an illogical belief in the innate superiority of men, influence consciousness.
A central aspect of the two-year study, which has $2 million (£1.06 million) funding from the John Templeton Foundation, the US philanthropic body, will involve dozens of people being subjected to painful experiments in laboratory conditions.
Jeff Miller and his commenters have highlighted two disturbing aspects of the experiment. The first is the impression, the subjects' consent aside, that "scientists" are torturing Christians presumably with impunity. The second is to be found in this paragraph from the news story:
The study is considered of vital importance in the present world climate, given the role of religious fundamentalism in international terrorism. A better understanding of the physiology of belief, the conditions that entrench it in the mind and its usefulness in mitigating pain could be crucial to developing counter-terrorist strategies for the future.
The obvious implication is that those who think this study is "of vital importance" wish to discover "the physiology of belief" in order to reduce it to what might be seen as acceptable levels through scientifically developed techniques. But see if the impression doesn't deepen — and darken — while you ponder a question that Paul Cella posed to his readers:
What is preferable — that Europe continues on its path of secular nihilism, with the crushing weight of multiculturalism descending in an ever-drearier enervation; or that Europe becomes Islamic?
Perhaps we American theists, watching from the sidelines, have been too quick to assume that secular nihilism would passively prostrate itself to Islamic fundamentalism. We all understand secular nihilism (or whatever you prefer to call it) to be a faith in its own right — its greatest lack being the fortitude that positive* faith provides. It seems to me that the envisioned "counter-terrorist strategies" (whatever they are) could evolve to remedy this weakness in two ways: The mettle can be sapped from theistic faiths. Or it can be artificially generated in an atheistic faith, whether for political or military combat.
This is the stuff of science fiction, to be sure, but cultural clashes of continental proportions seemed, until recently, to be the stuff of historical fiction. Either way, maybe our culture's dabbling in surrealism was part of a divine plan to prepare us for the future.
* I use "positive," here, in the descriptive sense, opposite "negative," not in the sense of attributing value.
ADDENDUM:
A graph of E.U. demographics that Dan Drezner posts on his blog gives some perspective about what the future holds for Europe — and not mitigating perspective.
PROEM:
For a page layout that you may find easier to read, click "Turn Light On" at the top of the left-hand column.
Glenn Reynolds notes a post on Reason's blog about two events involving religious groups and offensive thespian productions. Thus chimes in Salman Rushdie:
The continuing collapse of liberal, democratic, secular and humanist principles in the face of the increasingly strident demands of organised religions is perhaps the most worrying aspect of life in contemporary Britain.
Frankly, I share others' concerns about laws that limit speech having to do with religion, and Charles Paul Freund's post on Reason was framed in context of the proposal of such a law in the U.K. We've recently seen, in Australia, what lies around the corner, and Christians no less than libertarians should be concerned.
That said, it seems to me that Rushdie's use of "organized religion" is euphemistic. Compare incident one:
Windows of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre were smashed and fire alarms set off, and the building was pelted with eggs. Some police officers were injured.About 1,000 Sikhs from around the country had gathered in Birmingham's Centenary Square to protest against the play, which is set in a Sikh temple where rape, abuse and murder take place.
With incident two:
Christian protesters set fire to their television licenses outside the BBC's London offices on Friday as outrage spread over the public broadcaster's plans to air a profanity-laden musical. ...Michael Reid, a pastor and self-styled bishop who organized the peaceful demonstration ahead of the airing on Saturday evening, called the musical "filth."
While we're defending freedom of speech from one angle, let's not blur lines crucial to the very same freedom from another angle. And let's not forget this consideration:
British viewers pay around 120 pounds ($225) a year for their color television licenses.
Among the confounding aspects of the theodicy controversy is the likelihood that the people who claim that tragedy disproves God, or at least His goodness, would scoff if offered a world of utter comfort at the price of free will. In contrast, believers understand, even if we differ in specifics and even if the practice can be difficult, that the solution is to develop our sense of comfort such that we accept and submit to God's will of our own accord. Even in this mangling world, that perspective takes the existential sting (as distinct from the personal ache) out of tragedies.
Part of the mistake, I think, is in the urge to insist that there is blame to be attributed. What is, what exists, is ultimately good by definition. Not many theists would welcome the emotional response that would surely follow any statement that appears to minimize the palpable suffering of parents who've lost their children. If the statements are made thoughtlessly and under inappropriate circumstances, those emotional responses would be entirely justified. But such emotion isn't a response to religious understanding when circumstances allow a more contemplative exchange.
Sufficiently removed, it is not obscene to balance emotion with emotion. Here's a question to ask yourself: If it would have prevented the tsunami, would you have sacrificed your own children? Rare (and likely dishonest) are those parents who would say "yes." Nobody would expect such a thing; in fact, in some contexts we admire unyielding love in a parent. Yet, every event of history leading up to your birth allowed you to be — caused you, as God's child, to exist. In a manner of speaking, one could suggest that God puts up with the catastrophe to make you possible. Not just "a person." Not just a person resembling you in some particulars. You. That is a God of love.
Here's a question on the other side of the scales: If you could remove every difficulty from your children's lives, would you? Personally, I'd suggest that doing so would steal something at the core of your children's humanity. And we — both children and the parents who help to form them — are created in God's image, after all.
Of course, we can return to the mantra: God, if He is a God of love, could have created us without the pain. But we don't have a larger context of what God was trying to accomplish with this world — what, specifically, He is trying to create in us — in order to assess whether He's managing it with love and toward ultimate good. We are incapable of comprehending something so vast. I mentioned previously the possibility that the Western aid following the tsunami softened the heart of a future bin Laden. Well, imagine these possibilities piling up to take account of every single person — living, dead, and yet to be born — affected by the calamity. At what point do we cease to see opposing measurements of good and evil and see, instead, a process that, in its end, we can accept as definitively good?
Ron Rosenbaum asks whether God could have created "a better, less murderous human nature—consistent with free will." One implication of this question is to pit the notion of God's goodness against the notion of his love. In order to be good, in other words, He would have had to preclude the existence of everybody who has ever existed (minus two).
I, for one, cannot imagine what it could possibly mean to say that God could have created autonomous people who are shaped in some measure by pain without the pain. What's really being said here is that the complainers would have created a different world than God has, inhabited by creatures innocent of pain. It's a value judgment, not a statement pertaining to mechanism. (And, as above suggested, it probably involves idealistic values that the speaker himself doesn't hold.) I suppose, similarly, a molecule might object to some of particulars of its existence, but who would be moved by its claim that the Creator could have made mountains without molecules?
Ultimately, there may be no breaching the gap between those with whom I share an approach to religion and those who insist, with Rosenbaum, that theodicy has yet to break beyond "vague evasions." The gap may even be insuperably broad between myself and my fellow Christian David Hart, who would apparently see my theology as "odious" and "blasphemous." In the case of the latter gap, surely this is an instance in which "the many paths to God" ecumenism applies such that those willing to leave explanation alone to stand on faith and those drawing on faith to think through explanations needn't resort to insults.
Such debates, even when too heated, are themselves evidence of a perspective for which we must strive, even as we admit that intellectual understanding is no match for ponderous grief. If the greatest good lies in a greater understanding of God and a more fully appreciative comprehension of His nature, then that good can exist not in spite of our grief, but within it.
Maybe it's just my current state of mind, but I'm really finding myself surprised by discordant theological statements lately. Particularly striking have been the "if you want a God like..." statements. Here's one from John Derbyshire:
All that kind of thinking trivializes God. It belongs to the category of thinking that A.N. Whitehead called "misplaced concreteness." It shows a dismal poverty of imagination -- reducing the divine to science fiction (or in the case of the "Left Behind" books, to a combination of sci-fi and spy thriller). The ID-ers' God is a sort of scientist himself, sticking his finger in to make things work when natural laws -- His laws! -- can't do the job. Well, if that's your God, I wish you joy of him. My God is much vaster and stranger than that.
I wonder: How would Derb respond to evidence that God had "stuck his finger in"? Would it lessen God in his view, or require Derb to enlarge Him in a new way? I ask because the first thought that comes to my mind when I hear specifics about the search for proof of design is that, even more, it would be proof of God's communication with us. Worked into His blueprint of reality — perhaps at the molecular level — would be a flaw (as Derb sees it) meant to act in the world in an entirely distinct way from the scientific mechanics: through its effect on us.
As the owner of a half-century-old house, I've found that the quirky fixes that I come across immediately make human intelligence real for me — of a particular human. A flawlessly operating heating system may be a marvel of ingenuity, but it can seem to be the product of an automated mechanical construction process. It's difficult to picture its designer. Come across something jury-rigged, however, and the thinking, feeling person is right there with you.
Just a thought.
So... theodicy. What follows is neither in response to nor targeted toward those whom any recent calamity has directly affected; I can only pray that God will forgive me for my gnashing of teeth at events far less trying than the devastation that the tsunami and other events have wrought of late. Patrick Sweeney is right to say that understanding "why God allows the good to suffer and the wicked to thrive is not a comfort to the afflicted."
Rather, Patrick is half-right. Understanding will comfort; how could it not? What would be "stupid" is to attempt explanations in the midst of suffering. Nonetheless, the sowing of doubt continues apace, making it reckless not to pick up the other side. Therefore, it is to those sufficiently removed from personal loss for emotion not to be an insurmountable barrier that I suggest: If your vision of God is such that your faith can be shaken by the reality of catastrophe, then you'd best reformulate that vision, because your faith rests on an obvious fantasy.
Holding this view is part of why I've found my reading of essays, such as one by Ron Rosenbaum, to be reduced to pure exercise:
... it is an underappreciated scandal that, philosophically, the "age old question" of theodicy has not been satisfactorily answered without resort to vague evasions ("It's all a mystery," "We just can't understand God's plan," "It will allow good to manifest itself in the hearts of the survivors," "We live in a fallen world," "The dead are better off in heaven"). A failure that asks us to just have faith that it's all for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Just 278 words into a 3,114-word piece, and Rosenbaum has already used the word "satisfactorily" twice in this way. When you disagree with a premise that's so firmly declared, the next few thousand words tend to resonate like an intellectual game. Rosenbaum repeats the favorite response that an all-powerful God could have made a world without evil, but in which human beings still had free will. The fact that, instead, God created the world that we inhabit supposedly presents believers with a conundrum that Arts & Letters Daily editor Dennis Dutton puts thus:
If God is God, he's not good. If God is good, he's not God. You can't have it both ways, especially not after the Indian Ocean catastrophe.
What Rosenbaum and Dutton are essentially asking for is Heaven on Earth as proof of God and His goodness. The impression that such declarations give — notwithstanding the confidence with which they are stated — is that the issue lies more with the speaker's feelings about pain and definition of good than with God's role. There's something commiserable about the urge to offer God a standard of goodness up to which He must live.
Often, particularly when the person providing an "objective" measure of good for God to follow is an atheist, the point is as Michael Novak describes it: "to get me to deny the reality of God." Again the sense of a game pushes up between the lines; I don't know what creeds Rosenbaum and Dutton follow, but the former insists that the question has never been "satisfactorily answered," and the latter asserts that it cannot be.
These exchanges can go around and around, and surely many a "taunter" (Novak's word) has batted away with glee every attempt of a believer to put his view into mutually agreeable language. Even Eastern Orthodox theologian David Hart provides a platform from which to swing, saying that "no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends."
And so it goes. John O'Sullivan, perhaps wistfully, mentions in passing the possibility that American GIs' "visibility also reduces the hatred of the Christian West on which Osama bin Laden feasts" in Muslim parts of South Asia. The notion made me wonder how the anti-theodicists might dismiss a suggestion that the tsunami, by its generation of goodwill, may have turned around the view of, say, an Indonesian man who was on track to make bin Laden look like a cheap prankster. Probably they'd say that a God of goodness wouldn't have needed to slaughter the innocents in order to change one man's mind.
I could continue that particular thread by suggesting that what is possible, when it comes to human society, is muddled up with our thresholds for apathy and for holding grudges. But since these are meant to be examples in circular futility, I'll just throw out a couple more. What if I suggest that without pain there is no pleasure? Well, God could have created a world in which that wasn't true. That without fault and error, the universe would merely be a vast playground, not a place in which we could derive purpose? Well, God could have created a world in which that wasn't true.
It begins to seem that no answer is satisfactory mostly because what people really want is to live in a world in which the tsunami didn't happen, in which it could not have happened. That, my friends, would not be the world in which we live. And that, in turn, is why the argument is probably futile; either you accept that the world explains God, or you believe that God owes us an explanation — now — for the world in order for us to believe in Him.
(N.B. — due to length and hour, I'll continue this essay in a part 2 post tomorrow, as measured by breakes in consciousness.)
I've been meaning to recommend this column by Chuck Colson for almost a month; I've just found it difficult to figure out what to quote as a sample:
With plenty of time to think, Jake [DeShazer] wondered: What makes people hate each other? And he also wondered: Doesn’t the Bible say something about loving our enemies?He asked his jailers for a Bible and eventually got one. He read it with fascination, re-reading some parts six or more times. Then, ten days into his study, he asked Christ to forgive his sins. He remembers, “suddenly . . . when I looked at the enemy officers and guards . . . , I realized that . . . if Christ is not in a heart, it is natural to be cruel. . . . [M]y bitter hatred . . . changed to loving pity.” Remembering Christ’s words from the cross— “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”—he asked God to forgive those who tortured him, as well. ...
When the war ended, Captain Fuchida returned to his family farm near Osaka. Later, stepping off a train in Tokyo, he was given a copy of Jacob DeShazer’s booklet. Intrigued, he began reading the Bible. And despite his Shinto heritage, he accepted Christ as his Savior.
That's not the end of the miraculous part.
Richard Dujardin has a long piece in today's Providence Journal titled "2004 in religion," and what a telling first sentence it has:
It was a year when many gay couples in Massachusetts rejoiced, being able to marry legally for the first time.
(In case you're wondering, the fact that, "with the help of religious conservatives, 11 states banned same-sex marriages" is held until the second to last sentence of the piece.)
In "The Virtue of Hate," from the February 2003 issue of First Things, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik contrasts two exhortations — one Christian and one Jewish — that seem to touch the heart of the difference between the two religions (emphasis in original):
Arguing that the newly empowered South African blacks readily forgave their white tormentors, Tutu explains that they followed "the Jewish rabbi who, when he was crucified, said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." ...[At the climax of Yom Kippur, Jews] have spent the past twenty–five hours meditating upon their sins and asking for forgiveness. Now, they suddenly turn their attention to those who gave no thought to forgiveness, no thought to God, no thought to the dignity of the Jewish people. After focusing on their own actions, Jews turn to those of others, and their parched throats mouth this message: "Father, do not forgive them, for they know well what they do."
The understanding of knowledge and awareness is the pervasive difference. And it bears not only on the object of hatred, but also on the source of it; the hater should know well what he does, too, as Soloveichik indicates when he writes the following:
The message is that hate allows us to keep our guard up, to protect us. When we are facing those who seek nothing but our destruction, our hate reminds us who we are dealing with.
The disheartening implication of this — disheartening especially because I don't recall ever hearing it disputed — is that love alone is a blinding emotion. "Burning hatred, once kindled, is difficult to extinguish," and hatred "must be very limited [and] directed" — suggesting that it can be applied with circumspection. Love, on the other hand, is granted no such controllability, no such thoughtfulness.
Christian love is not, however, the romantic love of complete abandonment. On the same topic as Soloveichik, Jeff Jacoby writes:
It defies reason and upends morality to claim that God loves both Saddam Hussein and the innocent Kurds he gassed to death -- that He bestows His love on Osama bin Laden no less than on the 3,000 souls he butchered on 9/11.
The minimized possibility, in this, is that God's love is not an indulgent, all-permissive love. Good parents teach their children right and wrong, and they will be disappointed when a child goes astray and stern when imparting the lesson. Their love, however, is constant. The modern popular imagination can only resort to pleas of denial to explain parents' persistent love even for progeny who turn toward evil, but that is an indictment of the modern popular imagination, not of love nor of God.
Christian love between people is not worship or adoration; it is the desire to serve, to help, and one cannot help others without honestly acknowledging their true natures. That is the difficult challenge: not to hide truth, blinding ourselves to the inroads that evil has made in others so that we can love them, but to realize others' faults and love nonetheless. Thus, in loving our enemies, we seek to comprehend the cracks through which evil has seeped into them and to help them free themselves of it.
This will involve insisting on repentance and recompense (and let us not underestimate the pain of coming to terms with direct personal culpability for travesties). It will also require care not to invite them to further sin through naive benignity.
Hatred, in contrast, blinds by diminishing the role that the hated person plays in our prescriptions. Hatred is predictable, because it is grounded in the intention to harm rather than the intention help its object. Hatred makes those who harbor it vulnerable to any enemy willing to accept it with a shrug. Hatred also blinds those who would make it a virtue to important lessons. Soloveichik relates the following as an example of the way in which hatred "allows us to keep our guard up":
The rabbis of the Talmud were bothered by a contradiction: the book of Kings describes Saul as killing every Amalekite, and yet Haman ["the Hitler of his time"], according to his pedigree in the book of Esther, was an Agagite, a descendant of the Amalekite king. The Talmud offers an instructive solution: after Saul had killed every Amalekite, he experienced a moment of mercy, and wrongly refrained from killing King Agag. This allowed Agag a window of opportunity; he had several minutes before he was killed by the angry Samuel. In those precious moments, Agag engaged in relations with a random woman, and his progeny lived on to threaten the Jews in the future.
In the Catholic Bible, this scene is chapter 15 of the first book of Samuel, which would support an entire discussion on its own. For now, the relevant point is that Soloveichik is presenting it as teaching the lesson that more hatred of Agag in Saul would have prevented Haman from ever having been born. (Properly gauging hatred, it would seem, is a tricky matter indeed.)
I see quite a different point: Haman was born, and hatred to the point of utter genocide did not prevent it. And the solution is to hate more? This is merely one thread in the entirety of the Old Testament, of course, but perhaps subsequent history would have been entirely different had Agag been treated according to the modified rule that Christians follow. I find it thematically suggestive that Haman's rampage begins when the Jewish Mordecai is alone among the king's servants in refusing to bow to him; enmity begets exchanges of genocide.
Rabbi Soloveichik states that there is "no minimizing the difference between Judaism and Christianity on whether hate can be virtuous," and the more one considers it, the more the question seems to relate to elemental beliefs. From a Christian point of view, the most profound reality that those who killed Jesus "knew not" was that theirs was an act of deicide. Borrowing a phrase from Jacoby, "those who torture and murder without qualm, who are pitiless in the pain they inflict on others," ignore what is sacred in every human being. In charity, we hope that they know not the spiritual truth of what they do.
That charity, as an expression of love, is critical for our own well-being. In order to hate, no matter how under control we believe the emotion to be, we must also turn our eyes from the sacred in those whom we hate. For hatred's sake, we deny that, somewhere within them, God is part of their true natures. In doing so, we deny that He is necessarily part of our own.
One of my fortunate discoveries, this fall, after I'd come to the stunning revelation that not all music with an explicitly Christian message is saturated with a trying-too-hard unctuousness, was Who We Are Instead by Jars of Clay. A review by Mark Joseph that I'd read in early August was absolutely glowing, and it ended by pointing to another revelation:
Among these [fans], ironically enough, is U2's front man Bono, who recently noted, "I've had their version of the song 'Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet' in my car for a year now, and you know what — it never has failed me yet."
Not surprisingly, given my past, I'd never heard U2 described in a Christian context before I began sifting through the Christian neighborhoods of the blogosphere, but apparently the theme has been there all along.
In the time since I read Joseph's review of Jars of Clay, the more-famous of the two bands has released what is being declared its "most conspicuously Christian record," and I can't help but wonder if there's been a Christian music equivalent of what the business folks call "upward management." Is the mainstream, commercial success of such bands as Creed, Sixpence None the Richer, and Jars of Clay beginning to make it acceptable again for pop/rock stars to express their faith? To come out?
That may or may not be the case, but the possibility does indicate a damaging bifurcation of faith and public life that has spread across more aspects of society than music. In a review of a previous album by Jars of Clay, Mark Joseph noted the band's fight to be treated "in the category that describes their music (pop/rock), not the category that describes their faith (gospel)." For too long, now, there has been religion and there has been culture, and one could fully integrate with one by becoming a stranger to the other.
That reality detracts from both aspects of our society, and it would be a mistake to see it as the work of only one side. Doug Giles describes the issue from the other angle:
Since God is the self-existent Lord of the universe and accountable to no one, he could have made the world in which we live completely beige. He could have been a minimalist who only shops at West End. He's God and can do what he wants. Instead, God dumped a lot of unnecessary splendor on us, expressly for our enjoyment. And you know what ... this freaks out the altar-call-driven, number-crunching, pragmatic, no-taste Church-goer because it seems that such expenditure is a waste of time, space and energy.
It sounds oversimple to say it, but at least part of life's purpose is to live, and arts and culture enhance that experience. The opposing reflection of this truism is that arts and culture lose their force without meaning and lose their coherence when disengaged from philosophy. Religion and culture oughtn't be kept distinct any more than they ought to be self-consciously melded. Each is ubiquitous in a person's life, and if we return to the practice of peering through life where they overlap most visibly, we will surely bring about a renaissance in the decades to come.
Back when Janet Jackson's Super Bowl striptease and Howard Stern's usual antics inspired the Senate to increase the fines for indecency to a level at which media corporations wouldn't sniff at the penalty,* Jeff Jarvis began a post titled "The Daily Stern: Taps for the First Amendment" as follows:
TEARING DOWN THE BILL OF RIGHTS: Religious fundamentalists, organized as a Dumb Mob, just dealt a deadly blow to free speech in America with legislators, cynical hypocrites, as their henchmen and media standing idly by, the short-sighted quislings.
Jarvis titled another post, specifically about reaction to the Super Bowl incident, "Book burners." To this rhetoric, somebody who disagrees with Jarvis's general position might be inclined to respond thus:
There is no religous war in America. That ended more than two centuries ago. And now we enjoy the benefits of that struggle. We should be grateful for that and stop squandering it with squabbles.
I didn't write that; Jeff Jarvis did. When religious citizens insist on a standard of propriety in the public square, their expression is "the organized effort of one Dumb Mob." When the argument is over religious displays in the public square, both sides need to "grow up and count their blessings" — and quietly put their creches "anywhere else." If only we could all develop Jarvis's fine-tuned sense of what is "silly" and what is "ridiculous." (Disallowing "an instrumental version of a Christmas ditty" receives the first adjective, but what about disallowing the lyrics to be sung?)
In Jarvis's view, "we are fortunate enough to have a First Amendment that guarantees our freedom to worship... yet we squander that fortune, that blessing, with silly, egotistical, show-off squabbles." I wonder what religious freedom amounts to, though, if the extent of worship — of religious expression — is not an open question. Jarvis (a Congregationalist whose sect's expression of theism is not generally targeted for restriction) has an understanding of the church-state relationship that is not incompatible even with radical secularism. But what of those who disagree fundamentally about the appropriate roles both of religion and of the law? Is it squandering the fortune of religious freedom to insist that citizens have a right to make their religion visible in their public capacity, even when others strenuously disagree, or does it contribute to that fortune?
There is no more expedient way to kill religion than to treat it as a private taste, a fashionable sensibility. Religion dies from silence. Among my most startling discoveries upon opening myself up to the possibility of faith was that people actually believe that stuff. What's more, thoughtful, reasonable, intelligent people believe that stuff! How is it possible that I could grow up not understanding this in a country in which 96% of citizens celebrate Christmas? I'd say that the answer is not unrelated to the willingness of people in '80s–'90s Northern New Jersey to be accommodating enough to say "happy holidays" so as not to offend.
Jarvis makes a puzzling statement when he says "millions around the world would die -- yes, die -- to enjoy" our freedom of worship. I'd suggest that submitting to death would be a counterproductive approach to enjoying anything in this life. As for securing religious freedom — broadly speaking — for others, accepting death has what might be called an extramundane precedent. The more insidious danger to religion and expression thereof is that we'll all learn to keep our lips prudently sealed about God out of concern that "He would roll His eyes"... you know, if He really existed.
* Jarvis argues that the amounts are such that he "can be bankrupted for making what is, in fact, political speech." Putting aside the what and whether of political speech, a wry chuckle is in order with the application of perspective. According to the Washington Post piece to which Jarvis links, the fine had been $32,500; frankly, that's more than enough to bankrupt somebody in my circumstances.
If Jarvis wants to argue that such fines ought to be relative to the person or organization that violates a particular rule or that there ought to be an explicit procedure for seeking mitigation, that would certainly be a reasonable suggestion — one that I'd support. It mightn't even be adequate that Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT) added language to the penalty change in order to allow "the FCC to consider [smaller-market broadcasters'] size when assessing fines." But somehow, I th