A Thinking Reed

Author: Lee M.

  • Is same-sex marriage a threat to religious freedom?

    In the argument over same-sex marriage, social conservatives have seen a string of defeats. For all intents and purposes, they have lost the argument based on straightforward morality (“gay sex is wrong”) and the argument based on social harm (“it will undermine straight marriage”). But the last-ditch argument that, in the wake of the California ruling, seems to be getting more play is the religious freedom argument. The idea here is that traditional religious believers will be coerced into compromising their beliefs in order to accomodate gay couples. I’ve even seen some extremely hysterical people (mostly confined to blog comment threads, unsurprisingly) talking about “persecution,” the death of religious freedom in America, and so on.

    This post at the Volokh Conspiracy offers a reasoned response to all this. It examines several recent examples where SSM opponents have identified a looming threat to religious freedom and points out that, in nearly all the cases, it was either a question of a religious organization providing a public service and/or the pertinent laws were non-discrimination laws that had nothing to do with marriage per se. In other words, these were not cases of churches being forced to perform marriages between people of the same sex. The issue at hand was generally whether organizations providing public services or accomodations (whether religious or not) are free to flout anti-discrimination laws that cover sexual orientation.

    This isn’t to deny that there may at times be a genuine conflict between religious principle and politically enshrined rights. But the angst about gay marriage being the death knell of religious freedom seems to be greatly overdone.

  • A Christian defense of liberty

    The Christian Century reviews Glenn Tinder’s recent book on liberty. I haven’t read the book, but I’m a big fan of Tinder’s earlier work, The Political Meaning of Christianity, which has been aptly characterized as combining the insights of both Niebuhrs: H. Richard and Reinhold.

    From the review:

    What makes Tinder’s discussion so refreshing and timely is not merely his resistance to simplistic answers, but his willingness to explore these supremely philosophical issues from an explicitly Christian point of view. Tinder believes that arguments about liberty take on new resonance when they are voiced from within the Christian context. While the dignity of the individual can be grounded in humanistic principles, for example, those principles do not provide its best defense. For Christians, the dignity of an individual reflects the creative act of a God who made humanity in God’s own image.

    If Christ is the Logos and humans are given reason by God, then an unreasoning Christianity is a self-contradiction. Christians are by nature not dogmatic but rather “Socratic,” Tinder tells us. They fulfill their religious character through free engagement with and respect for others. “A strong faith would not recoil from dialogue” but would promote it. Thus individual liberty is an essential component of the Christian life. Protecting individual liberties is a Christian value.

    The irony here, Tinder explains, is that the positive goods of the Christian life are perhaps best realized through the Christian’s support of negative liberty. Negative liberty is freedom from constraint—from limitations imposed by the state, society, corporations and, yes, religion. It is the freedom to do what one wishes to do, and this negative liberty is reflected in the political and legal apparatus through which individuals gain license to worship freely as well as to engage in all kinds of “non-Christian” acts: premarital sex, substance abuse, adultery.

    This is timely as there seem to be a lot of Christians afoot these days disparaging “mere” negative freedom as a bourgeois, individualistic, modernist snare. “True” freedom is freedom for, they say–freedom to obey God’s will.

    Undoubtedly, obedience to God’s will can be said to be a “higher” freedom. But two qualifications need to be registered. First, negative freedom, or freedom from constaint, seems to be a necessary condition for the higher form of freedom. Obedience that is compelled isn’t obedience worthy of the gospel. Second, when people talk about true freedom being found in obedience to God, they often elide the thorny issue of how we discern God’s will and who has the authority to interpret it. All too often in the church’s history, the freedom of obedience to God has been the “freedom” to obey some particular group of people who’ve set themselves up as God’s official spokesmen.

  • Rowan Williams on prayer

    I came across this during a Google search:

    One of the primary tasks of any prayer is ‘How do I let God be God? How do I empty my mind and heart – not so as to confront a kind of void, but so that the personal presence of God can come in?’

    If all prayer is trying to listen to God we have to remember that the God that we are seeking to meet is a person, and we come into a personal presence. And that means of course, that praying is about a great deal more than words in the same way that personal presence is about a great deal more than words. The Word of God – the way God communicates – is by being God, by being himself; so one of the primary tasks of any kind of prayer is ‘How do I let God be God?’ ‘How do I empty my mind and heart, not so as to confront a kind of void but so that the personal presence of God can come in? And words are part of that but only a very small part.

    More here.

  • Perfect love casts out fear

    From James Alison’s Faith Beyond Resentment:

    The whole of my previous life had been marked by an absolute refusal to die. The absolute refusal to take on my baptismal commitment. Of course, because I was unable to imagine that my ‘self’, the ‘I’ who will live for ever, is hidden with Christ in God. And that was why I had to fight all those battles. The ‘I’ who was present in all those battles was the old Adam, or Cain, a ‘self’ incapable of understanding that it is not necessary to seek to shore up for itself a place on this earth, to found a safe space, to protect itself violently against violence. (pp. 40-41)

    Alison is reflecting specifically on his experience as a gay man and how he fought to find a place of acceptance within the institutional church. This struggle, however, created in him a zeal that “was of a prodigiously violent force, powered by a deep resentment”:

    In my violent zeal I was fighting so that the ecclesiastical structure might speak to me a ‘Yes’, a ‘Flourish, son’, precisely because I feared that, should I stand alone before God, God himself would be part of the ‘do not be’. Thus I was absolutely dependent on the same mechanism against which I was fighting. (p. 39)

    It was only, Alison says, when he began to see that God’s love was not to be identified with ecclesiastical violence that he could start to “die” to his resentment – to the old Adam – and move toward forgiveness and love. A dead man has nothing to fear since “the moment he dies, he’s completely free of that whole game of power and victimisation of which he was a part, no longer is he struggling with those powers: he doesn’t have to, for they have no dominion over him, they no longer affect him in any way at all” (p. 43).

    I find this very profound and an excellent precis of the gospel – the notion that being inescapably loved by God frees us to die to ourselves and to love without fear. I’ve become increasingly convinced that being set free from fear is a crucially important part of the Christian message.

    It’s also an insight that I see at the heart of the Lutheran-evangelical re-casting of the gospel message: because we are loved by God in a way that is absolutely unconditional upon what we do, we can learn to love without fear. If God sustains our being and bestows our worth, then we don’t need to struggle agonistically in this world to secure those things.

    How far short we fall of this understanding is obvious in our personal, ecclesiastical, and political lives, it seems to me. After all, how much of what we do, of the violence we inflict on others, is rooted in fear for our own selves, their existence and their value? And how much of our politics – both “sacred” and “secular” – are driven by a fear and resentment of some “other”?

    This is why I think that – as Luther would have it – we need to “drown” the old Adam daily through repentance, through remembrance of our baptism, and through meditation on God’s promises. Church leaders sometimes seem to want to move “beyond” the preaching of the gospel; they think that once we’ve “gotten” forgiveness we can move on to “discipleship” and morality – the really important stuff. But I think this misses the tight connectino between our discipleship and the unconditional love of God in which it’s rooted. If the Christian diagnosis of the human condition is correct, only when we know that our lives are securely “hid with Christ” can we begin to love without fear. And really learning that truth – in the sense of truly internalizing it – requires constant reminders.

  • Sanctuary cities

    There was a nice article in today’s Washington Post about a trip to an animal sanctuary in New York state. Sometimes the question is posed to vegetarians whether farm animals wouldn’t die out if we all abandoned meat-eating, since the reason that so many cows, pigs, chickens, and other farm animals exist in the first place is because we raise them for food. As a defense of factory farming this is incredibly weak; after all, merely bringing a creature into existence hardly licenses treating that creature any way you like. But as a defense of animal agriculture (suitably reformed) it may seem to have more weight since it does seem like the world would lose something if those animals were to become extinct. However, I wonder if something like these farm animal sanctuaries provide an alternative model for how a “post-meat” society might choose to keep them around.

    In his book Animals Like Us the philosopher Mark Rowlands addresses this issue:

    One of the consequences of widespread vegetarianism would be a massive reduction in the numbers of these animals. But what’s wrong with this? If, say, there are only 400 cows in the world instead of, say, 400 million, why should this matter? Answer: it does not. Whether it harms any of these cows depends on the individual interests of each cow, and there is no reason to suppose that the interests of an individual cow in any way involve the numbers of others of its kind, at least not as long as there are enough of these others around to provide it with companionship in a normal social setting. The welfare of each individual cow is completely unaffected by whether there are 400 or 400 million others of its kind. Vain and complex species that we are, we tend to worry about things like “the future of the human race.” So, it might be in our interests to have large numbers of humans around, because we worry about such things, and our (overinflated) view of our role in the universal scheme of things demands our continuation. But cows, pigs, chickens, and sheep certainly do not worry about the size of their species. As long as there are enough of them to form a normal social group, they’re happy.

    It might be true that the elimination of a species or sub-species is a cause for regret, even if that species has been artificially created by a eugenic selective-breeding regime. But vegetarianism does not require the elimination of species. If we are worried about this, then we can always turn over areas of land — maintained by public funds — for grazing by animals that we currently eat. In a vegetarian world, perhaps we might want to do this anyway, as a living memorial to the morally bankrupt ways of our forbears. (p. 120)

    I’m more concerned than Rowlands appears to be that the extinction of species — even an “aritificial” one — might be a bad in itself, despite not affecting the interests of individual animals beyond their need for a sufficiently large social group. Each species is good in its kind and makes up a valuable part of the whole, which would seem to me to tell against its wanton elimination. I also think it might be possible for humans to have benign relationships with farm animals, as both the Post article, much farm writing (e.g. John Katz’s articles), and countless people’s experiences attest. So, preserving the possibility of those unique kinds of relationships might be another reason for making sure farm animal species don’t go extinct, in the unlikely event of widespread vegetarianism. Which is why the farm sanctuary is an intriguing model for post-animal husbandry arrangements.

  • Handful o’ links

    Britain’s Labour Party needs to reinvent itself as a new liberal party.

    Obama vs. McCain on climate and energy policy – not the same.

    Animals as gentically modified drug machines.

    Is Google re-wiring our brains?

    Obama: what kind of liberal?

  • C.S. Lews on democracy and authority

    I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows.

    That I believe to be the true ground of democracy. I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. I believe that if we had not fallen, Filmer would be right, and partiarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful government. But since we have learned sin, we have found, as Lord Acton says, that “all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The only remedy has been to take away the powers and substitute a legal fiction of equality. The authority of father and husband has been rightly abolished on the legal plane, not because this authority is in itself bad (on the contrary, it is, I hold, divine in origin), but because fathers and husbands are bad. Theocracy has been rightly abolished not because it is bad that learned priests should govern ignorant laymen, but because priests are wicked men like the rest of us. Even the authority of man over beast has had to be interfered with because it is constantly abused. (C.S. Lewis, “Membership,” from The Weight of Glory, pp. 168-7)

    I agree with Lewis that democracy (by which I think he would have agreed that he meant limited, constitutional democracy) is grounded in the sinfulness of human beings. Because we are not only frail, ignorant, and limited, but because we are sinful, our power over each other has to be circumscribed. However, I disagree that the kinds of authority he mentions are part of God’s original plan for things, at least as we would likely be tempted to understand it. If anything, I’m inclined to say that men’s “authority” over women is the consequence of sin, not God’s intention. Even a “benign,” paternalistic rule, while perhaps preferable to outright tyranny, falls short of the ideal as a description of a relationship between equals.

    Children and animals are different cases for obvious reasons. Though even here there are qualifications. The “rule” of parent over child is generally agreed to be for the sake of the child’s good. The same, I would argue, is the case for animals. What I think a genuinely Christian notion of “lordship” requires is a subversion of any “vulgar Aristotelian” notion that the “lower” exists for the sake of the “higher” (I don’t think Aristotle himself would have given unqualified endorsement to it, but it’s a sentiment that has sometimes creeped into Christian theology under the authority of Aristotle). Andrew Linzey comes closer to the mark when he describes human beings as the “servant species,” with a lordship patterned after the one who came to serve, not to be served. I think this calls into question the idea that animals can simply be used for our good (however “humanely” we do so). If anything, an unfallen world would be more like an anarchy than a monarchy, at least as far as relations among creatures go. It would be characterized by mutual love and service without the need for coercive restraint.

  • More Red Toryism, plus “atheism is bourgeois oppression”

    Russell has a nice post tying together some of the recent threads about “dissident conservatives” and “red tories.” Meanwhile, John Milbank expands a bit on his views in this interview. Pertinent passage:

    To my mind then, modernity is liberalism, liberalism is capitalism (‘political economy’) and capitalism is atheism and nihilism. Not to see this (or rather not to fully see this) is the critical deficit of Marxism. Again, Taylor is right: all critical resistance to modernity is ‘romantic’’ in character: it 1. allows that more freedom and material happiness is a partial good; 2. yearns also for elements of lost organic values and 3. realises that the anti-body, anti-festivity, anti-sex and doctrine of hell-linked disciplinary and over-organised character of Latin Christendom is ironically responsible for the Enlightenment mentality.

    I’m starting to think that this triple romanticism is more fundamental than left/right characterization, which after all is a kind of accidental result of the French Revolution. Both left and right, as André de Muralt argues are nominalist: either one favours a strong single centre of money or power or both (right) or the rights of the many singly or when totted up (left). Both positions are also in the end atheist.

    We need instead a new kind of ‘romantic’ politics that is specifically religious, and often Christian, in thinking that one can only get distributive equality on the basis of agreed values and an elite transmission and guarding of those values. A more Carlylean and Ruskinian politics then—basically left yet with elements that are not really right so much as pre-modern and traditionalist. Strictly speaking the pre-modern predates right versus left. In Great Britain Phillip Blond is developing a crucially important new mode of ‘Red Toryism’—which might in my view equally be seen as a kind of ‘traditionalist socialism’. This is starting to be noticed in very significant public places and in effect marks the political translation of the paradox of ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ and the beginning of its entry upon the political stage.

    The hard thing now for critical thinkers to do is to think outside ‘leftism’. They have to see that if neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism have totally triumphed this is because the left in traditional mode is incapable of carrying out an adequate critique. In the end this is because it’s atheistic – one needs to be religious to recognize objective values and meanings as not just epiphenomenal. Today in Great Britain the left is more or less now defining itself as scientistic which actually permits an underwriting of a new mode of fascism and ‘racism’ as said above.

    ‘Left Christians’ now have much more to stress the Christian bit if they are truly going to be able to make a critical intervention.

    Atheism is bourgeois oppression. Atheism is the opium of the people—it claims to discover an ontology which precludes all hope. This is what someone like Žižek now openly says. We need now to celebrate instead the faithful legacy of peasants, learned, honourable and paternalist aristocrats, Christian warrior kings like Alfred the Great, yeomen farmers and scholars. Péguy is the man for the hour. William Cobbett also. Chesterton and Belloc likewise.

    Lots of interesting stuff in there, but lots of stuff I think is deeply wrong too. Milbank steals way too many argumentative bases here for me to endorse his call for a romantic pre-modern politics. (Though, presumably he either has or will expand on this in his more formal writings.)

  • Why it matters

    I can imagine some Obama supporters saying, in response to this post, that Obama doesn’t really believe those things; he’s just saying what he needs to say to get elected. And that as president he would certainly never go to war with Iran to prevent it from getting nukes.

    First, we (or at least I) have no way of knowing if this is true. Second, the problem isn’t just what Obama believes deep in his heart. Just saying these things reinforces the story about Iran that the hawks have been propagating – that Iran is ruled by irrational crazies who are hellbent on acquiring nukes so they can launch a suicidal first strike on Israel. (Obama even repeats the notion that Ahmadinejad is some kind of supreme leader with total control over Iran’s foreign policy.) Just publicly endorsing this narrative helps grease the skids to war.

    Needless to say, the exact same thing happened with Iraq. All the “respectable” people accepted the same basic storyline: that Saddam was a crazed and undeterrable despot feverishly working to build up his WMD arsenal. Once these basic outlines of the problem were generally accepted — that Saddam must be stopped — war was all but inevitable. Not least because no one with sufficient influence was willing to stand up and call b.s. on the whole thing.

  • A yankee’s lament

    I am so not cut out for these DC summers. It’s supposed to be 99 today. In frickin’ June. Seriously.