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Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes? Part II

In appreciation for Michael's post below, I want to add a bit of biblical back-up for that great theologian Chico Marx!

This week we read at Morning Prayer John 9, the story of the man born blind. It is, in many ways, the classic text for an empirical theological mode. While fear of losing power (the Pharisees in the story), or fear of being thrown out of the synagogue (the blind man's parents) prevent  those around him from seeing what is right before their eyes, the newly cured blind man expresses his incredulity at their (newly acquired) blindness: "The man answered, ‘Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes!'

This, it seems to me, is one place to start in distinguishing what I would call the tradition of 'religious left' theology, the kind of progressive theology that we see in Reinhold Niebuhr earlier in the 20th century, or in Rowan Williams' more recent work on a theology of sexuality. The abstract deployment of scriptural texts, or the convoluted turns of some natural theology arguments are simply no match for the eye-opening witness of healing, grace and love that so many have seen in same-sex couples in our parishes, and for the blessings of prudent, non-exploitative family planning.

Unless one employs a blindingly rationalistic theory of the 'noetic effects of sin' such that we can't trust our own eyes, the catholic faithful, as Michael's post gives evidence of, have seen far more of the truth of things than some in power (and in fear of losing that power) can imagine.

In listening to  the remarkable words of Maureen Walsh, the conservative Republican from Walla Walla, as she speaks of her passionate love for her lesbian daughter, I for one hear the deepest meaning of what the First Amendment calls the free exercise of religion. Free from fear, free to rejoice in the blessings that come as gifts to us,  right before our very eyes. 

Questioning the Ministerial Exception

Over at The Immanent Frame, the constitutional law scholar Leslie Griffin has an interesting piece just up, "Are religious institutions entitled to disobey the law?" her analysis of the Hosanna-Tabor case currently before the Supreme Court. Here's a snippet of her piece: 

One recurring justification for the ministerial exception has been the “problem” of women priests. The specter of the Roman Catholic Church being forced to ordain women priests has repeatedly haunted discussions of the ministerial exception. Catholic women priests are wrongly used as a justification for the exception. It was unfortunate that the women priests issue became part of the oral argument inHosanna-Tabor, as it distracts attention from the more important issues at stake in the exception. Four justices—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito—raised questions connected to the issue of Catholic women priests.

Let me be clear. No one argues that the courts can force the Catholic Church to ordain women. That argument is a red herring. In the forty years that the ministerial exception has existed, I count only one court case of a Catholic woman who (unsuccessfully) sued to become a priest, but at least ten cases of Catholic women who knew with absolute certainty they were not priests. Yet those women were suddenly ordained ministers when they went to court to enforce their employment contracts against Catholic employers.

Also, earlier this month Winifred Sullivan also wrote on the case. 

I admit to struggling with how to think about this case. It makes me quite uncomfortable, as a minister, to think that the church can use the ministerial exception to wield such power over me when I seek to challenge its moral and legal authority. The issue of whistle-blowers on sexual abuse is just one of the most troubling cases Griffin brings to mind. She writes: 

In Weishuhn v. Catholic Diocese of Lansing, for example, a case with a cert. petition currently pending before the Court, a Catholic elementary school teacher reported possible sexual abuse of a student’s friend to state authorities as required by Michigan law. Weishuhn was fired for not informing the school principal of her actions. In another case, a Catholic school principal was fired after complaining to the bishop that her priest-supervisor assaulted and battered her. The church successfully asserted that those teachers—who could never be ordained priests—were ministers whose claims could not be reviewed by secular courts. Cases of race and age discrimination, sexual harassment and hostile work environment, and disabilities discrimination and retaliation have met a similar fate. In such cases the ministerial exception protects discrimination instead of religious freedom.

Can the church say to me that the only avenue I have is to take the matter to ecclesiastical courts, not to the court of law? This hasn't worked out so well, not in the Roman Catholic Church, nor in my own Episcopal Church. I guess I never realized that by getting ordained as a priest, I was risking being at the whim of a church that argues that it has complete autonomy in its realm, regardless of the injustices within. Was I simply naive about the power the state has granted to the church? 

I'm inclined to think that the ministerial exception is a bad idea, and hope that there are other ways of dealing with the legitimate right for churches to choose their own ministers (e.g. the Catholic Church's limiting of the priesthood, the example that both Griffin and Sullivan suggest is wielding perhaps too much of an influence on the justices' thinking). I wonder what others here think. 

 

Are we underestimating theology?

See here: http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/09/26/taking-theology-seriously

Silencing Speech: Marriage Equality, The Catholic Bishops, and Robert George

There's an excellent piece today in the NY Times by Jason Stanley on how some forms of speech are not about making substantive claims, ones that are answerable, but rather are about silencing a point of view with which one is not willing to engage. 

A perfect example of such speech is the recent response of the Roman Catholic bishops of New York to the passing of the Marriage Equality bill here in NY. The silencing here is multiple, from the absurd suggestion that in its words and actions the church has upheld its charge to treat gay persons with 'respect, dignity, and love,' to the laughable idea that marriage has always been between one man and one women. The silencing of the Holy Scriptures here is rather obvious, and that it does not even give them pause is all too telling. 

This is not to say that silencing only comes from the right. As Rowan Williams has cogently argued in his remarkable essay, "Theological Integrity", such silencing is no political partisan. And yet it is undeniably the case that those arguing against full equality for glbt persons are most resolute in not being willing to listen to the voices of glbt people in making their own arguments. One look at Robert George's response to Eduardo Penalver's recent piece on Archbishop Dolan's silencing techniques is a case in point. When one moves beyond the schoolyard nonsense of 'the pot calling the kettle black' defense, and examines carefully George's writings on marriage, one sees it for what it is: an attempt to silence glbt voices by suggesting that tyranny and polymorphous perversity are not far behind.

One searches in vain for one shred of evidence that George has taken up the reasoned arguments of the many philosophers and theologians on marriage equality for glbt persons. (Admittedly, Bishop Spong is an easy target! But has he read Marilyn McCord Adams, Eugene Rogers, James Alison, just to name a few). Instead, his definition for marriage, like Archbishop Dolan's, works by abstraction and willful self-delusion. To suggest as the New York State Bishops have, that  'Marriage has always been, is now, and always will be the union of one man and one woman in a lifelong, life-giving union" is not reasoned speech, but a plugging up of the ears, a denial of the scriptures, and a lie. 

Of course, George needs this lie, as his favorite 'argument' is to pull out the spectre of polymorphous perversity, when he loudly hints that same-sex marriage is a slippery slope that will lead to polygamy (gasp!) of all things. Knowing that this is in fact a biblical arrangement for marriage is irrelevant: politically, this scare tactic, it is hoped, will silence his opponents. Marriage is what the Roman Catholic Church says it is, even if the Church lies to itself about this. 

George suggests that his own arguments are being silenced by his progressive opponents  when he writes, in response to Penalver, that his worthiest opponents have not "even attempted" to respond to his challenge for progressives to give a 'principled' defense for the legal expansion of marriage to include same-sex couples. Why not multiple partners? he asks.  Why not couples who share a common interest in tennis and who do not have a sexual relationship? Why not brothers or sisters for that matter?

In fact, these questions are answerable, even if a number of them seem so silly as not to warrant response. (is it really worth arguing that tennis-playing or baseball are adequate analogies for mutually faithful, ascetically disciplined same-sex love?) The silencing occurs when, in a footnote, George lays down this rather dogmatic claim: "Note that only sound arguments based on true principles can be inherently decisive." (p.269) 

But of course, one can have quite an argument about what such true principles are. Pragmatic views of the law can be held, such that the state need not make the (rather odd) kind of argument George does, that only penetrative vaginal sex between a man and a woman counts for the 'organic bodily union' upon which marriage (again in his oddly idiosyncratic view) rests. The state has long allowed legal marriages between not only infertile couples (his argument here is, as Koppelman has noted, especially troubling) but impotent ones, or couples otherwise unable to have sex (think of couples who marry at the end of a terminal illness).  A pragmatic approach to marriage law might well agree with George about the interest the state has in stable families, monogamy and child-rearing, without needing to swallow the 'principle' of 'organic bodily union' in George's sense. 

 Marriage has a multiple of goods, and the state need not accept any one set of principles for its defense, especially such a narrow one as George's. And should the state ever decide to revisit the question of polygamous marriages? A principled and pragmatic view of the law could handle this as arguable, rather than rule it out through a silencing rhetoric of perversity and fear-mongering. 

All that said, I think it fair to be concerned about the religious freedoms of those who will not accept the recent revisions in marriage law in NY State. If the Catholic Church through its bishops wants to continue to hold to a view that many (even the majority in its own pews) no longer hold, then as an institution, they need to be protected so to do. Silencing through the law is as bad as silencing through false speech. In the end, I suspect that a pragmatic and principled approach to marriage, one that listens to the experiences of families with gay children, will win the day. Thanks be to God. 

 

 

Brian McClaren on Osama bin Laden's current whereabouts

McClaren, a leader among progressive Evangelicals, (though his thoughts on LGBT inclusion have thrust him outside some Evangelical circles), has this to say in response to the question of whether hell has itself its latest member. Here's the heart of his response: 

I think OBL's destiny is to face the living God who is ultimately and absolutely and beautifully just and loving. I believe God's justice and love are perfectly integrated so as not to be, at heart, two separate things, but one beautiful, holy, awesome reality. I also believe that God sees and understands everything, from every angle, in ways that we do not and can not, which is why judgment from our limited perspective is so wrong. Whatever is wrong and evil in OBL will, I believe, be named, exposed, revealed, and dealt with appropriately, in the perfect light of God's justice and love. Whatever remains of God's good image inside OBL will be distinguished from the rest and dealt with appropriately, again in the perfect light of God's justice and love. Whatever from his story can be healed will be healed. Whatever cannot will be dealt with in some other appropriate way. Somehow, grace will have the final word. Somehow (as they say), love will win - not at the expense of justice, but through and with and in justice. Beyond that, I have no desire to speculate ... only to live my life in harmony with God's justice and love.

 

Eugene Rogers on Same-Sex Complementarity

Eugene Rogers is one of the finest Christian theologians working today in the area of sexuality. Trained in the theology of Karl Barth and Thomas Aquinas, he is unique in his insistence on making a theological, rather than a 'rights-based' argument for same-sex marriage. His recent piece in the Christian Century is a wonderful summation to his recent work on the Episcopal Church's theology committee. It should be required reading for anyone who thinks that progressive Christians need to do a soft shoe shuffle around the theological and biblical bases for full inclusion of GLBT persons.

Here's a snippet from the article: 

As for Christ, orthodox theology makes him fully human and fully divine. As God, Christ occupies neither gender, since God is the source of it all. As the medieval axiom goes, God is not in a category, Deus non est in genere. The corollary reads like a translation: "God is not in a gender." Thus the seventh-century Council of Toledo could insist that the first person of the Trinity "gave birth" to the preexistent, heavenly Christ "from the womb of the Father."

Graham Ward has noticed that the maleness of Jesus is a curious thing. Lacking a human father, Jesus received no humanly produced Y chromosome, and yet he is circumcised. The Middle Ages has much to teach us about the maleness of Jesus as well. The language of Cistercian piety called Jesus the mother of monks. Male priests invited male monks to suck milk from Jesus' breasts. They urged them to crawl into the wound in his side, the better to enter his womb. That was how to be born again in the Middle Ages—from the womb of Jesus. Medieval authors never wavered from using masculine pronouns for Jesus, nor did they confine him to masculine images. Christ could be all to all. Christ was the bridegroom to women and to men. Indeed Christ's body, if male in Jesus, was female in the church.

Although the church has often used typology to enforce gender roles, the logic of typology opens roles up—because any gender can represent a type. This is part of the mystery: Christ has never been the bridegroom for women alone and the church has never been a bride composed only of men.

Consider that in the Middle Ages an abbot could be gendered male, as a physical man; female, as a member of the church; male again, as a priest; female again, as a mother of monks; and female at prayer, as a soul before God. The complementarity theory of male and female turns out to be distinctively modern in confining a person to one gender—and to that extent untraditional. In the Middle Ages, gender could vary according to the greater reality represented...

To sum up: Ephesians does not require heterosexual complementarity, even if it uses gendered language. A critic has called this interpretation "a refusal to see the obvious." But that's true only if gendered language requires gendered representation. And it doesn't. Otherwise, only women could lead a church gendered as female, and only men could be children of God on the pattern of God's Son. But that's absurd. We do permit men to represent the church, and we do admit women as children of God. An inflexible interpretation of gender confines the reading of scripture, restricts the resources of tradition, ignores the data of creation and reduces salvation to absurdity.

 

Jim Wallis and Sojourners' disappointing stand on LGBT inclusion

Episcopal Cafe has been one of a number of progressive religious groups to express their deep disappointment by the recent decision of Sojourners to reject a Mother's Day ad by Believe Out Loud, a Christian group working for full inclusion of GLBT persons. Sojourners responded not once, but twice yesterday to defend their position.  The response to Wallis's rationale for the decision has largely been negative, at least from my most recent perusal of the comments on his blog post. 

My own view is that Wallis' position is indefensible, and reflects a lingering theological abstraction in some evangelical thinking. Note the language referring to GLBT people as 'wedge issues' or as 'controversy' and the eloquent responses by GLBT persons to Wallis,  rejecting this way of seeing them as issues. And who can anymore honestly think that full welcome requires one to chose this over and against orthodox and biblical faith? Has he not read James Alison and Eugene Rogers or spent time listening to the many many other gay Christian writers, thinkers, and worshippers who are often more theologically literate and biblically rooted than the denominations in which they  serve?

The ad itself was not at all controversial in my view, and so it is rather shocking that Wallis, who has made a life's work fighting for justice, cannot see this as simply another aspect of his justice work. It is tempting to try to 'keep the dialogue safe and open' as he says, but part of fighting for justice will also mean taking stands that one knows will cause such dialogue to break down over irreconcilable positions. Perhaps this inability to make a strong stand on full inclusion reflects some of the theological problems with Wallis' recent Covenant for Civility. While in principle civility is an important virtue, and one can certainly see evidence of its erosion in American public life, anyone who recalls the fractious battles over Civil Rights in the 60's knows how readily such a call for civility was all too often mobilized by those seeking to cling to power in order to squelch any real dissent. Prophetic dissent, as Wallis' mentor William Stringfellow often noted, will necessarily be seen as uncivil and  be parsed as impatience and arrogant pride by defenders of the status quo. One can see this view in the debate between Wallis and his opponents in the comments to his recent blog defense. 

More troubling to me in Wallis' defense of his rejection of the ad was his third point, in which he says: 'We have also suggested that the major differences of theology and biblical interpretation in the church with regard to issues such as the nature of homosexuality, gay marriage, and ordination are not issues that should be allowed to divide the churches – that local churches should lead the way here, and that an honest, open, respectful and, hopefully loving dialogue should characterize the church on these very controversial questions.'

Again there is the theological abstraction: it is 'issues' rather than loving, committed Christian persons that he sees here. Further there is his troubling use of  the passive voice: such issues 'should not be allowed to divide the churches.' My own denomination is one that is now so divided. But the question is: who is dividing it? Surely not LGBT persons and their allies! Again and again we have insisted that there is room for all at the table even as we move forward boldly for full inclusion, only to be met regularly by rather uncivil and often rather violent rhetoric against GLBT persons and their allies. The church is insisting that the denial of full inclusion of GLBT Christians in all aspects of church life is no longer a legitimate position. But in most cases it is those holding this position who have excluded themselves, as in the recent boycott of the Primates meeting by conservative Anglican leaders. For sure, it is a challenge to come to the table when one's position is no longer recognized as authoritative, and is even held as illegitimate. But it can be done. Again, in my denomination, Dan Martins, who rejects gay marriage and same sex blessings, has stayed in the church and was recently elected bishop of Springfield, which required the consent of the church who, as a whole, no longer accepts his view as legitimate. He received those consents and is now the bishop of Springfield. This isn't to say that it will be easy for Bishop Martins to be at the House of Bishops meetings, nor will it be easy for those who see his view as de-humanizing of GLBT Christians. But the prophetic witness is never easy, never without pain, and division, as Paul has reminded us, is sometimes necessary in order for the truth to be made manifest in the fires of dissent and passionate love. 

 Perhaps around the editorial tables at Sojourners such scenarios are not yet conceivable. But more often and perhaps in this case the peace has been kept only by putting dissent 'on the back burner', which is exactly what Wallis defends when he says that Sojourners simply doesn't have time to focus on GLBT justice. 

Fair enough, no one has time for everything, but it seems dishonest to say, as he does, that a simple stand on the side of justice for GLBT persons would necessitate taking him away from his own mission fighting poverty and economic injustice. That's another false choice and one suspects he knows it.  

Welcome to Hell?

We've heard a lot about hell in the past week. From speculations by pundits about Osama bin Laden's current whereabouts to headlines in the New York Daily News and presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee's rather remarkable 'Welcome to hell' comment (just where does Huckabee think he is when issuing such a generous invitation!?), it seems the subject is more lively than ever. 

It is tempting, given that my own current doctoral work in theology is  devoted to the topic, to speak at great length about the biblical version of hell which differs quite dramatically from the chatter. Rather than do that, however, I'll simply link here to the sermon I preached this past Sunday, in which the topic loomed large. Both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles are quite interested in hell, and consider it very real, but not at all in the way many today think. [forgive the long loading time on the sermon site. I've not mastered the format!]

A Comeback for Hell? On Ross Douthat, David Brooks, and Rob Bell

As is typical around Easter time, we can expect a spate of media stories fanning the flames of both religious and anti-religious passions.  This year, Time Magazine took advantage of the new book by evangelical mega-church pastor Rob Bell and made its annual pilgrimage into religious controversy with this cover title: What if There’s No Hell?  Predictably, Time found Southern Baptist Al Mohler available to answer this burning question: “"When you adopt universalism and erase the distinction between the church and the world," says Mohler, "then you don't need the church, and you don't need Christ, and you don't need the cross. This is the tragedy of nonjudgmental mainline liberalism, and it's Rob Bell's tragedy in this book too."

Not far behind Time, the New York Times followed suit this weekend with two editorials. The first, by David Brooks, used a review of the smash hit musical “The Book of Mormon” to  lambast nonjudgmental mainline liberalism.  Brooks writes,  “Vague, uplifting, nondoctrinal religiosity doesn’t actually last. The religions that grow, succor, and motivate people to perform heroic acts of service are usually theologically rigorous, arduous in practice and definite in their convictions of what is True and False.” Lest anyone be confused as to where rigorous theology is to be found, he concludes his article: ‘It’s worth remembering that the religions that thrive in real-life Africa are not as nice as the religion in the play. The religions thriving in real-life Africa are often so doctrinaire and so socially conservative that they would make Pat Robertson’s hair stand on end…The vague humanism of the outside do-gooders didn’t do much to get people to alter their risky behavior. The blunt theological talk of the church ladies—right and wrong, salvation and damnation—seemed to have a better effect.”  Again we find hell invoked—a most useful doctrine!

Finally,  on Easter Sunday, the NY Times’ columnist Ross Douthat brought home the point with his column “A Case for Hell.” While tempering his enthusiasm for the holy torture chamber long enough to draw back from the idea that Gandhi might be in hell, Douthat nevertheless argues that it is only the overly compassionate (read: liberal) pastor who puts out the holy fires of wrath to make God more palatable. “But,’ Douthat insists, ‘to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.” And so, to avoid this horrifying vision (to Douthat at least!) of play for play’s sake, and not for some extrinsic reward and/or punishment, Douthat preaches hell-fire as the only way of preserving some semblance of moral order.

It is hard to know where to begin to intervene in all of this muddle of half-baked theological confusion. Andrew Sullivan and Mark Silk, two progressive religious voices, responded to Brooks' recent piece, but both responses are somewhat disappointing. Sullivan rightly suggests that lurking in Brooks’ piece (and it is clearly on display in Douthat’s) is a rather cynical mobilization of a doctrine one does not quite believe to be true for the sake of a moral-political end to which one is committed. And Silk uses the example of the Trappist monks murdered in Algeria and the subjects of the recent French film Of Gods and Men to refute the idea that for religion to thrive it must be rigid and doctrinaire.

Yet both, to my mind, fail to respond to the most troubling claim of Brooks and Douthat: that liberal/progressive religion is neither rigorous nor familiar with the ‘usefulness’ of preaching hell, and is therefore unable to respond compellingly to the greatest ethical and political crises of our day.  Sullivan and Silk almost conceded the point!

My own view is that this charge of Douthat and Brooks has some merit to it.  The religious left of late has, with a few notable exceptions, not been terribly interested in the topic of hell, often viewing it as an embarrassing vestige of its theological past. One notable exception is the American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, whose readings of Jonathan Edwards inspired greatly his own theological thinking. Though acknowledging that Edward’s theology of hell needed some ‘demythologizing’, Niebuhr nevertheless is the (unacknowledged) source of the Rev. Mohler’s thought quoted above. In his classic 1937 text, The Kingdom of God in America, Niebuhr wrote this about theological liberalism’s failures: ‘A God without wrath brought men without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

The great Episcopal theologian and lawyer William Stringfellow, whose own progressive theology is considered one of the most significant theological voices of our time by no less than the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, was also a preacher of hell. He wrote, in his classic text A Public and Private Faith, “The first place to look for Christ is in Hell.”

Of course what Stringfellow and Niebuhr meant by hell here is not at all what either Douthat or Brooks mean. For a progressive religious theology, my own view is that two things are needed for a genuine theological revival. The first is a rigorous deconstruction of the politically opportunistic, even cynical view of hell  put forth by Douthat, Brooks, Mohler, and even Rob Bell.  The second is a robust retrieval of a doctrine of hell by progressive religious voices. In my next post, I will take a step in this direction using some of the writers discussed above.

[Note: Please use your real name if you are commenting.] 

 

 

France's Veil Law enacted: History lessons ignored

This week the long anticipated French law making illegal any public wearing of the veil (niqab) went into effect. It will be fascinating to watch in the weeks and months ahead to see how the French legal system deals with this draconian bill. Anyone who has read Fanon’s justly famous essay, “Algeria Unveiled” from the midst of that most brutal, torture and terror filled  war  waged by France during the 50’s and 60’s, or who has studied the multivalent symbolic reach of veiling and unveiling of women in Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers will both marvel at the uncanny repetition of irrational, orientalist fear shown by the French in this instance, and  be frustrated by the way many westerners fail to recognize how resistant the veil is to simplistic reductions to either abject feminine submission or religious fundamentalism.

The Muslim practice of veiling is a rich and complicated one, as the remarkable recent scholarship of a number of Islamic scholars have shown. Two of the more interesting readings of the veil that I am aware of are those of Leila Ahmed, professor at Harvard Divinity School, and Saba Mahmood from UC Berkeley. Both are feminist scholars of Islam who reveal in arresting detail that the history and present practice of veil-wearing is a very complex one, and needs to be very carefully contextualized in its local adaptation to be properly understood. The veil in Saudi Arabia, for example, will mean quite different things than it does in Egypt, for example. Mahmood will even resist reducing it to a symbol at all, insistent that its religious significance should not be minimized in favor of sociological, political and personal interpretations. It may speak of an intensely intimate relationship with God, and not be primarily for public scrutiny or 'reading', in other words.

Ahmed, an Egyptian by birth, has just published a new book, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America, in which she shares her own slow transformation from having a deep dislike and suspicion of the veil and its meaning for women and Islamic life more broadly, to an appreciation for its role in progressive political and religious movements by women. How especially disappointing it is, then, that the French have moved to ban it in the name of making France safe from reactionary Islamic forces. It would seem that Fanon’s critique, launched in the very midst of a war because of which it had precious few ears to hear it in the metropole, has not yet found its mark so many years later. One hopes that American political leaders are not too quick to smugly dismiss the French law as something ‘unthinkable’ on American soil, and will take the time to listen to these prescient Muslim women’s voices. We have much to learn from them, not only about politics and inclusivity, but about the richness of the Islamic spiritual tradition, of which the veil is a significant and potent part. 

 

Bishop Gene Robinson: Hope for the Religious Left

On April 6, Bishop Gene Robinson will be visiting Cornell University as the annual Wood lecturer. The title of his talk here on campus is a hard hitting one: How Religion is Killing Our Most Vulnerable Youth. Based on a Huffington Post piece the bishop wrote in the wake of a rash of teen suicides last year, the Bishop minces no words when it comes to condemning the steady stream of religiously inspired venom directed toward glbt persons. It need not be as obvious as the vitriol of a Fred Phelps. As Janet Shortall wrote in a superb piece on this blog last fall, anti-gay church folk have learned how to mobilize ‘tolerant’ rhetoric even while making it clear that they view glbt persons as engaged in immoral and depraved behavior. Being polite, Bishop Robinson has argued, is better than nothing, but given the deep-seated animus directed at glbt folks for so long in many religious communities, much more is required of us on the religious left. We must be bold in our witness to the many and varied gifts glbt persons have brought and continue to bring to our faith communities.

 

For myself, I have often rejoiced at the presence of my glbt brothers and sisters in the midst of a church that has so often received them with hostility or stony silence, when it has received them at all. Karl Barth famously wrote, alluding to an encounter of Frederick the Great with his physician, that if one wanted a natural proof for God’s existence, one had only to look at the survival of the Jewish people. In times when I have wondered where hope is to be found amidst the church’s many failings and betrayals, I’ve often felt that one of the best answers is simply this: glbt persons continuing to draw near to the throne of grace, steadfast in the face of so much hostility, humbly insistent that they are children of God.

 

It is this hopefulness, above all else, which makes Bishop Robinson such an inspiring spiritual leader for all of us—in the wake of death threats, verbal vitriol hard for most of us to fathom, much less be the object of on a daily basis, including attempts to blame him for all of the troubles in the world-wide Anglican Communion, he has refused to demonize those who attack him, insisting, remarkably, that he needs these  brothers and sisters for the sake of his own salvation. Early in his life he heard in the scriptures the voice of God calling him beloved, and he has allowed this voice to sustain him even in the whirlwind of hatred, self-doubt, and personal failure. Having grasped the taproot of faith, God’s unconditional love, he longs to share this sustenance, not merely with glbt persons, but with all of us—regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation. 

 

In his book In the Eye of the Storm, the bishop shares a wonderful story of a man who, upon coming across a stranger trapped in the bottom of a deep crevasse, promptly leaps in after him, causing the first man to shout in exasperation: Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here. To which the second man replies, Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.

Whatever hole we may find ourselves down in, one senses we have a familiar friend in Bishop Gene Robinson, who's gone to the depths many times, and knows of a few precious stepping stones to help us on the long way out.

 

 

 

Gandhi, Rumsfeld and the question of hell

Speaking of Gandhi, there has been a lot in the religious news lately about a new book by the mega-church pastor Rob Bell in which he questions some common conservative understandings of hell. Arguing that conservative evangelical assumptions that all non-Christians are headed for hell is morally reprehensible, especially when one considers Gandhi, for example, Bell is trying to carve out a different understanding of hell for himself and his followers. 

He would do very well to read the recent piece on the Huffington Post by Rita Nakashima Brock, called "Should Donald Rumsfeld Go to Hell?" {http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rita-nakashima-brock-ph-d/should-donald-rumsfeld-go_b_830874.html] It's a remarkable piece by Brock, one that captures the historic political entanglements of the Christian doctrine of hell. It also puts forth a theological vision of heaven and hell that those on the religious left will, I suspect, find very intriguing. 

Is Hell a Matter of Public Concern? A theological response to Snyder v. Phelps

What is clear from reading Justice Roberts’ decision is that he and his fellow justices in the majority interpret the words and actions of Westboro Baptist Church as on a continuum with other religious voices in the public square, more outrageous and extreme, to be sure, but even so as part of the ‘public debate’ that religious voices in America have long fought to be a part of. For someone who identifies with the religious left, then,  one might think that this decision on the part of the court is a necessary evil insofar as it protects other very unpopular religious voices from being penalized in the public arena. One saw something of this line of reasoning in the following comment on a Catholic blog: “It was intended to state an opinion that hurt people. We are allowed to do this in this country. Hateful stuff is written and spoken all the time. It hurts people. When people say gays are immoral or going to hell, e.g., it hurts. It is also allowed.”

One can hear in a statement like this the concern that a decision against Phelps and Westboro Baptist might render more plausible the attempts to ban anti-abortion and anti-homosexuality speech of central importance to many religious conservatives. Perhaps even the anti-war speech on the part of the religious left, if outrageous enough, would have been at risk as ‘hate speech’ or IIED. During oral arguments the repeated comparisons of the Phelps’ actions to the Vietnam and Iraq war protests not only by Justice Scalia and Roberts but also by Justice Sotomayer show evidence that the speech before them was seen as on a continuum—the far edge of public debate.

To think along these lines, however, is to fail to recognize how utterly unique Westboro Baptists’ actions are and  how  theologically distant their views are from nearly all religious groups in the U.S. seeking a public voice. Some of this distance was indicated in the amicus brief filed on behalf of Snyder by the state of Kansas, though not insofar as it related to the theological beliefs of the Phelps. Most Americans, perhaps especially on the religious and political left, will likely and mistakenly associate Phelps with what they will call the ‘Religious Right’. In fact, Westboro Baptist Church picketed Jerry Falwell’s funeral, indicating that by their light, Falwell had ‘split Hell wide open the instant he died.”

The court could have profited by questioning Margie Phelps at more length about the theological beliefs of Westboro Baptist.* My sense is that without this understanding, what sets the Phelps’ actions apart from, say, emotionally distressing anti-abortion protests  or even vehemently anti-gay rhetoric from religious conservatives will be missed. It is not simply that most religious conservatives have the decency to respect the intense and traumatic grief of a family having just lost a son or daughter to a violent death. Nor is it, as some have suggested, that most religious conservatives in America are also deeply patriotic (a debatable assumption) and so abhor Westboro’s claim that God is killing U.S. soldiers.

Rather, the key at getting at what sets the Phelps’ theology  speech apart from nearly all other public religious voices is in their theology. This can be gleaned if we pursue a line of questioning Justice Breyer began in oral argument when he suggested that intentional infliction of emotional distress may be defensible when one is doing it for ‘a cause…to demonstrate how awful the war is.” This, of course is not the Phelps’ position at all. Far from viewing the war as ‘awful’, they see it as a glorious triumph of God’s wrath on America. In their theology God’s ‘speech’ is the very killing of these young men and women, sending them immediately to hell for further torment.  To traumatize and to terrorize all those outside their church with their speech is the goal, since in their distorted version of Calvinism, they are quite sure that all outside their congregation are going to hell by God’s will. To contribute to this judgment, to quite literally ‘give hell’ to the Snyder family, and by extension all they can reach by the platform granted them by the media and the Constitution, is their one and only aim. By violating the fundamental precept of both orthodox Roman Catholicism and strict five point Calvinism that one cannot know who is damned to hell (even Judas has never been definitively judged as so by the Roman magisterium), Phelps and Westboro Baptist are able to in effect bring hell to earth right now, or, in their favored paraphrase of Jeremiah, ‘to put the cup of fury to the lips of this nation and make them drink.”

Hell-fire preaching has a long and storied history in the American context. But again, we should not mistake what the Phelps are doing with, say, the hell-preaching of a Jonathan Edwards or the rich history of five-point Calvinist preaching as we see it today in someone like the popular five point Calvinist preacher John Piper. Piper, as conservative a preacher as they come, and one ready to preach hell when the occasion arises,** is nevertheless quite orthodox in insisting that neither he nor anyone can know who is in hell. Thus at a funeral sermon preached in his congregation for a suicide, Piper did not suggest that the person was in hell, nor is he willing to say, as far as I know, that  a specific ‘unrepentant’ homosexual person is in hell. 

Indeed, it is the theology of hope for repentance that marks the Calvinist and Roman Catholic tradition of preaching hell, and insofar as such preaching has a place in public discourse, it is as a religiously intensified  plea for ethical, moral, and political reform. Its sources may be religious, but its recommendations for reform are open to reasoned public debate. Secular people may not preach hell, but some of the doomsday scenarios described by those advocating various political and social causes bear a distinct family resemblance.

And here is where the confusion lies when one is not aware of Westboro Baptist’s ‘outlier’ theology. For they too use the language of repentance. In her oral argument, Margie Phelps stated ‘our answer is you have got to stop sinning if you want this trauma to stop happening.’ If one of the justices had stopped to explore this statement, I suspect things might have gone  differently. It might be assumed that in this context to repent, to ‘stop sinning’ means to cease engaging in homosexual behavior or to support it in any way. This would be a mistaken assumption, however. For there are innumerable other Christian and non-Christian groups who would share this message, yet, according to Phelps, none of them are repenting properly. All are going to hell as well, the Falwells among them. In a fascinating discussion of the Phelps’ theology in her groundbreaking Ph.D dissertation, Rebecca Fox-Barrett describes how a man from Florida who preaches the exact same message as the Phelps, up to including links to Westboro Baptist’s website as an amplification of his own message, is viewed by the Phelps as ‘rebellious’ and unrepentant. The reason? He will not leave Florida and join their church, submitting to their  ultimate authority as God’s only true voice. There is no salvation outside the Westboro Baptist Church, and repentance thus has no meaning outside its boundaries. This is clear from Fox-Barrett’s dissertation, where the only instances of repentance acceptable to the church’s leaderships are ones internal to the church, where a member accepts rebuke from the leadership and submits to its decisions. Thus repentance, to ‘stop sinning’, is ultimately part of a closed and I would argue a private system.

Why, then, do the Phelps’ spend such an inordinate time going outside the confines of their trauma-machine to preach to the world?*** It is not, as we find among other religious voices of the left and right, in order to persuade, or even to evangelize in hopes of bringing others to join their church. The few examples of outsiders who  ‘converted’ to the Phelps’ message and moved to Topeka have, according to Fox-Barrett, very rarely been accepted by Westboro as members.  As they put it on their website, GodHatesFags.com, ‘We are not really interested in a dialogue with you demon-possessed perverts. We are not out to change your minds, win your soul to Jesus, agree to disagree, find common ground upon which to build a meaningful long-term relationship, or any other of your euphemisms for compromising in our stance on the Word of God.”****

And the 'Word of God 'for outsiders is, as Fox-Barrett shows, violent death and endless torment in hell. That this Word creates violent opposition only re-inforces the private fantasy that they and they alone are God’s persecuted remnant. Their speech is purely for internal boundary maintenance and to inflict trauma on outsiders. As Margie Phelps put it immediately following the Supreme Court verdict, God’s word for ‘public concern’ just is violence: “when you stand there with your son in bits and pieces you’ve been dealt some emotional distress ‘by the Lord your God’.

Would knowing this about the Phelps’ theology and the purpose of their protests have mattered in the legal setting of a Supreme Court decision? I wonder. Certainly politics are part of all legal proceedings, and desire for those on the right to protect religiously motivated anti-gay speech and for those on the left to protect equally unpopular anti-war speech may well have played a role. In any case, closer scrutiny to the  Phelps’ theological speech may well have called into question its ‘public’ nature, and made a decision against them less dangerous for protecting the vast majority of religious voices from unwarranted IIED tort liability. It is certainly harder, knowing this theology, to imagine what value the Phelps’ message has for a public whose sole value, in the Phelps’ eyes, is as an object of their God’s brutalizing, uncommunicative word of damnation. 

 

*she was questioned at length about her legal understanding of the First Amendment and IIED tort issues—here she was both extremely knowledgeable and confident, not surprising given her father’s own legal background and the fact that eight of her siblings are also lawyers.

 

** Most famously, perhaps, Piper recently preached a sermon in his home state of Minnesota arguing that a tornado that hit the steeple of the local ELCA church was a sign of God’s impending wrath for that denomination’s tolerance of homosexuality.

 

*** One the most disturbing aspects of the Phelps’ and Westboro Baptist are the accounts of violent physical, emotional, and spiritual abuse of their children. Two of Fred Phelps sons have written and spoken extensively about this trauma inflicted on them and their mother and siblings. Hell was an ever-present reality in their lives and is, sadly, to this day.

 

**** For the quote  here, see p. 23 of the remarkable University of Kansas Ph.D dissertation of Rebecca Fox-Barrett, a Mennonite who was, for several years, given unprecedented access to the Phelps’ and their church. Pray not for this People for their Good: Westboro Baptist Church, the Religious Right, and American Nationalism. (unpublished) Unfortunately for scholars of religion, the Phelps’ website was disabled recently by hackers opposed to their message.

 

 

Two Cheers for Obama on Marriage Equality!

Yesterday’s announcement that under President Obama’s direction the pernicious Defense of Marriage Act will no longer be defended by the Justice department is a major victory for the GLBT community and its allies. Certainly there was no coherent way that Obama could in good conscience continue to use his office to send lawyers into the arena to defend a law he believes to be unconstitutional.

Yet in continuing to draw a distinction between marriage and civil unions, and accepting the later while demurring on the former for glbt couples, Obama is, I would argue, still clinging to an ethically and theologically problematic position. As is well known, Obama, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune during his presidential campaign defended this distinction on theological grounds:

"I'm a Christian. And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman."

On the surface the statement seems sensible enough, and clearly Obama has plenty of company among Christians and other religious folks across the political spectrum. And yet, to suggest that marriage and gender complementarity are necessarily tied together and that this is in fact the Christian position does not follow for a number of reasons.

First, Obama seemed not yet to have come to terms with the fact that there now exist in this country, and throughout the world, legally married, GLBT, Christian couples. One is tempted to respond to Obama’s blindness here by re-staging a famous (fictional?) dialogue: Q: So, do you believe in gay marriage? A: “Believe in it? Hell, I’ve seen it!’ That there are more and more GLBT Christian married couples whose religious beliefs are every bit as robust and perhaps even as orthodox as Obama's,  simply exposes the precarious ground upon which the above distinction rests. Plenty of theology has been done by Christians, among other religious groups, articulating a defense of marriage inclusion that in no way undermines traditional theological claims, and in some cases even heightens and deepens our understanding of the theological tradition. If President Obama has not read, among many others,  the works of James Allison, Eugene Rogers, Sarah Coakley, robustly Christian theologians all, one hopes that some of his religious advisors (Jim Wallis, maybe?) will encourage him to do so. He need not cling to this troublesome notion that being a Christian necessitates marriage discrimination.

Secondly, Obama’s invocation of gender complementarity as an essential aspect of marriage is increasingly hard to maintain. One might of course appeal to the rigorous arguments of queer theorists like Judith Butler showing  that gender is not and has never been a straightforwardly binary structure without slippage. Furthermore, the Christian tradition is full of examples of what we might today call ‘gender-bending’, whether one looks, as Stephen Moore and others have done at the fascinating gender problematics of the Song of Songs, or of the tradition of the ‘manly eunuch’ in Matthew Kuefler’s brilliant work (The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity U. of Chicago Press, 2001). Recent critical scholarship has increasingly shown that the Christian tradition is not at one with itself on such matters as gender complementarity.

And yet one need not delve into these historical and theoretical intricacies to render problematic Obama’s reliance on gender complementarity. Even closer to the present, and perhaps especially relevant to readers of this blog, one has only to look at the increasingly tangled legal issues surrounding the marriage of transgendered couples, where attempts at fixing the gender of couples is a very difficult and puzzling legal matter. To take perhaps the most famous example:  Texas, a state that does not recognize marriage between same-sex couples, has recently been forced to deal with this issue when El Paso County Attorney Anne Bernal asked Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott to render a ruling on whether she should issue a marriage license to  Sabrina Hill and her female partner. Hill, born a man in the state of NY but, following gender re-assignment therapy now holding a Washington state birth certificate as a woman, upends the neatness of Texan law. On the face of it, to issue the license would appear to grant a marriage license to a same-sex couple, which Texas does not allow. However, at the time Texas did not recognize the legal right to change one’s gender, and so Hill’s original birth certificate as a man would seem to require Ms. Bernal to issue the marriage license. One can see immediately the tangled legal, ethical, and even biological thickets into which this case necessarily leads. At what level is gender determined: chromosomal, anatomical, cultural-performative? There are no easy answers here, unless, I suppose, one simply refuses to grant marriage licenses to transgender couples of any sort, though this seems a rather far-fetched solution. I wonder whether  cases like Sabrina Hill’s will be dismissed as ‘outlier’ cases irrelevant to legal reasoning and here I would be very interested to hear what our legal scholars at Religious Left Law think!

My own, theological  view is that Sabrina Hill’s case highlights the very  dubious grounds for maintaining a rigid gender complementarity as theologically normative. I am heartened here by the work of theologian  Cameron Partridge, a transgendered Episcopal chaplain at Harvard and a patristics scholar whose work is on the cutting edge of exploring resources within the Christian tradition for re-thinking gender within a Trinitarian, robustly Christian framework.

Obama's decision yesterday is a victory to be celebrated even as there is a great deal more work to be done. There is reason to hope that his position on marriage equality is evolving, and one hopes he will listen attentively to these  Christian and other religious voices from the left in his own theological discernment.  

Left Behind: Taking Reinhold Niebuhr to Hell

As a deeply appreciative reader of Religious Left Law for some time now, I am delighted to have been asked by Steve Shiffrin to participate on this blog. As an Episcopal chaplain here at Cornell and a doctoral student in theology at Syracuse, I suppose my competence falls more on the ‘religious’ than on the ‘law’ side of the blog, so I will use my posting privileges to ruminate on what a progressive political theology might look like for our time.

In 1933, Reinhold Niebuhr, in an attempt to re-vitalize what he considered a politically and ethically stagnant religious left in America, wrote that what was needed was ‘‘a more radical political orientation and more conservative religious convictions than are comprehended in the culture of our era.’  Unwilling to concede theological integrity to the theo-political right, Niebuhr famously re-introduced such seemingly moribund notions as original sin to account for what post-niebuhrian theologies will sometimes call structural or institutional sin. He then used this creative re-reading of the Augustinian tradition to launch a Marxist influenced attack on corporate power and greed (Henry Ford was a favorite target),  religious nationalism, and the complicity of liberal elites in economic inequality.

Niebuhr’s theo-political vision is a rich and complex one. He was not always clear about the theological import of the political language he brilliantly wielded, and his oeuvre has inspired, ironically, the likes of neo-conservative thinkers like Richard Neuhaus. When one of the inheritors of the Niebuhrian tradition, Jim Wallis, questions the very use of the political idiom of ‘left’ and ‘right’, ‘liberal’ and conservative’, he is perhaps cautiously warning of the potential straightjacket the Niebuhrian position can lead to when it allows its own biblical idiom to be thrust into a notoriously narrow political landscape.

Nevetheless, I remain convinced of the soundness of the Niebuhrian vision of a progressive politics married to a theological vision that refuses to give ground to those who would seek to push progressive voices outside the reach of the life-giving wellsprings of our various spiritual traditions. I am in deep agreement with Steve’s recent post “Spiritual, But Not Religious” suggesting that  many young people are seeking a religious voice that is progressive in its political orientation. In my view this desire is combined with a deep longing to be re-connected to the rich and life-giving spiritual traditions and practices that sustain one in fighting social, economic, and political injustice against very long odds.

Niebuhr’s  mobilization of original sin for radical political ends is thus one of a number of powerful examples of how progressive religious voices can re-claim spiritual nourishment from reactionary forces. Perhaps it is true that Niebuhr did not always see that such a stance may lead one, not into the hallowed halls of political power and theological neo-orthodoxy, where he often liked to find himself, but into the very precincts of the powerless,  what the psalmists knew as sheol, or hell-on-earth.

 Yet I suspect that the author of the famous Serenity Prayer would have appreciated this saying from the twelve step rooms for those on the verge of being banished to the outer darkness by reactionary religious forces: ‘Religion is for those who are afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who have already been there.”  A theology born out of hell? It may be even less obvious than the Niebuhrian recovery of original sin,  but it is my own sense  that  just such a politics of spirituality  is needed in our day, when hell on earth is all too real for so many, and thus where people of faith most need to abide- in solidarity and in fighting, hopeful love. And hell born by the merciful heart of love may prove to be far more hospitable a place to wrestle with God than any orthodox or neo-orthodox dream of heaven has ever imagined. Certainly no one has ever been turned away from approaching and even entering through hell's gates! And oddly enough, as the great Algerian writer Hélène Cixous noted after time spent in a Cambodian refugee camp, this 'hospitality of hell' may be the very ground of a new political hope for those on the left and for those left behind.