A Thinking Reed

Category: Religion and society

  • September reading notes

    Well, okay, the month isn’t over yet, but it sure is flying.

    Earlier I mentioned I was still working on Monbiot’s Heat. Well, I still am. Just haven’t been in the mood to read it. ‘Nuff said.

    Finished Jame’s Alison’s Raising Abel. I stand by my earlier claim that, while Alison has some absolutely brilliant insights, I don’t think his Girardian analysis does justice to the entirety of the biblical witness. I also feel like he has an allergy to metaphysics and is forced to account for everything Christ does for us in sheerly psychological terms, which seems reductionistic to me.

    Picked up a copy of Gerhard Forde’s Justification by Faith – A Matter of Death and Life for a quarter at a church yard sale. This is vintage Forde – pithy, direct and committed above all to the Reformation insight of justification by faith. Forde stresses the language of death and resurrection as a necessary complement to the more forensic “legal” language we often use to talk about justification. I also read Carl Braaten’s Justification: The Article by Which the Church Stands or Falls wherein Braaten makes a surprisingly (to me, anyway) robust defense of justification by faith alone. I say surprisingly because of what appeared to me to be his move to a more “catholic” position in recent years. Taken together these two books provide a good picture of what commitment to the principles of the Reformation can look like in the contemporary theological and ecumenical scene.

    Right now I’m working on Reza Aslan’s No god but God, which is both a history of Islam and an argument for a more pluralistic understanding of Islam. Extremely informative and well-written, though at times one does get the feeling that Aslan is whitewashing a bit. He essentially shrugs off Muhammad’s military conquests with “that’s the way things were done then” and gives a rather idyllic picture of Christian and Jewish minorities under Islamic rule. Still, a very interesting book and I’m looking forward to seeing where he goes with his argument for why Islamic militants have Islam wrong.

  • God and the taxman

    The September “issue” of the Jounal of Lutheran Ethics is now up, with a special focus on taxes, wealth, and poverty

  • Ends and means, again

    E.F. Schumacher on “Buddhist economics”:

    While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is “The Middle Way” and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern–amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.

    For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He is used to measuring the “standard of living” by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is “better off” than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. […] The ownership and consumption of goods is a means to an end, and Buddhist economics is the systematic study of how to attain given ends with the minimum means.

    Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity, taking the factors of production–land, labour, and capital–as the means. The former, in short, tries to maximise human satisfactions by the optimal pattern of consumption, while the latter tries to maximise consumption by the optimal pattern of productive effort. It is easy to see that the effort needed to sustain a way of life which seeks to attain the optimal pattern of consumption is likely to be much smaller than the effort needed to sustain a drive for maximum consumption. (Small Is Beautiful, pp. 57-58)

  • Jesus and Hillary Clinton

    This story about Hillary Clinton’s religious convictions at Mother Jones starts out interesting but veers distinctly into paranoia.

    I carry no water for HRC’s candidacy, but it seems to me that what you see is pretty much what you get: a centrist-to-conservative Democrat, as amply demonstrated by her voting record. She is not the socialist harridan of so much right-wing imagination. But the idea that she’s some kind of crypto-Religious Right Manchurian Candidate is one of the least plausible accounts of her true motivations I’ve ever heard.

    Also, the suggestion that supposed HRC influences Reinhold Neibuhr and Paul Tillich taught that Christians should focus on individual piety instead of social change is laughable.

  • Bono fatigue

    I was reading this somewhat interesting piece on “emergent” Christians in Austin, TX and found myself pondering a deep mystery: why are all these post-evangelical, post-conservative, post-modern, post-whatever Christians so into U2?

    “For the emerging churches, (church is) not a place, it’s a people,” Gibbs said. “It’s not a weekly gathering; it’s a seven-day-a-week community. And you don’t go to church; you are the church.”

    That doesn’t mean emerging Christians have turned their back on observing the sabbath, but their services are a far cry from what many grew up with. They might use literature and poetry in the liturgy or play U2 and Van Morrison songs before and after the service.

    […]

    Charles Whitmire, pastor of Crestview Baptist Church, began noticing that the young professionals moving into the church’s North Austin neighborhood would rather go for a bike ride on Sunday morning than sing “The Old Rugged Cross” with a congregation where the median age is 70.

    So with his members’ support, he established Phoenix Church of Austin earlier this year. Whitmire leads the evening services in the sanctuary, and his first service included references to Bono and David Letterman and featured a driving rock band. Whitmire, an avid cyclist and screenwriter who fits the demographic he’s trying to reach, had bumper stickers made up that said “Make Church Weird.”

    I don’t really have an opinion one way or the other on the value of the whole emergent/emerging church thing. A lot of it seems to me to be a kind of intra-evangelical dispute with younger people breaking away from the bland megachurches and Republican politics of their elders. So, I take it that part of what it’s trying to do is to appeal to “da yoots.”

    Hence my question: what’s the deal with all the U2? U2 is old people’s music! (By which I mean music enjoyed by people my age.)

    I mean, I like U2 as much as the next guy (well, some of their stuff, anyway), but are they really that big among people, say, under the age of 25? (This is not a purely rhetorical question; maybe they are.)

    Part of the whole U2 obsession (extending even into the stolid mainline with “U2charists” and the like) no doubt has to do with Bono’s status as vaguely Christian global do-gooder. And, yes, you can find all kinds of religious themes and references in U2’s music. But I can’t help but wonder whether gen-x goateed “emergent” pastors aren’t doing the same thing that Baby Boomer evangelicals did: projecting their ideas of what’s cool onto the young people they’re ministering to. All the facial hair, tatoos, grunge-y rock, candles, and angst – it’s sooo 1990s, people!

    On the other hand, if someone wants to put on a Killswitch Engage eucharist, I might be interested…

  • From animal rights to cosmic democracy

    The second part of Clark’s essay on “Animals, Ecosystems, and the Liberal Ethic” wades into deeper and more interesting waters.

    Clark contends that it’s “better to abandon abstract argument, in favour of historical.” Ownership, he maintains, is a social concept and thus the idea that we can do whatever we want with what we “own” is a needlessly abstract and ahistorical way of looking at things. It’s better to think in terms of “historical claims and protections, not with the pre-social rights of self-owners: rights established not by abstract argument, but by the slow discovery of a mutually acceptable forebearance and cooperation–a process, incidentally, that there is no sound reason to limit to human intercourse.”

    The early liberals, he maintains,

    did not appeal to absolute rights of self-ownership (restricted by the equal rights of others). Private property was defended as the likeliest way of enabling a society of freemen to subsist in mutual harmony, and cultivate their virtues: if we each had some portion of the land to tend we would be less likely to fall prey to tyrants, and the land itself would prosper. What we owned, however, was not the land itself, but the lawfully acquired fruits, and we owned these only for their lawful use. “Nothing was made by God for Man to spoil or destroy” (Locke, ‘Treatises’ 2.31: 1963 p. 332; see Hargrove 1980). Individual liberty rested on the value God placed in every soul, as a unique expression of His glory, such that any despotism, however benevolent in purpose, must issue in a decline of valuable diversity. Each of us has a profound and vital interest in the virtue of our fellow-citizens, and in the continued viability of the ecosystems within which we live.

    Clark brings this classical liberal insight into conversation with recent writing on “deep ecology” with interesting results. The main idea of deep ecology is that, rather than being self-sufficient individuals, we are all parts of the ecosystems to which we belong, the whole which has a certain priority over the parts. This is not to downgrade the value of the individual, but to point out that her flourishing depends on the flourishing of the whole of which she is a part.

    Individualists, and some animal rights proponents like Tom Regan, have been wary of what they call “environmental fascism” that seems to threaten to subordinate the interests of the individual to the collective. We sometimes see this tension between environmentalists and animal rights people: environmentalists are mainly concerned with preserving ecosystems even if that means, for example, culling animal herds.

    Clark, however, sees a “necessary moral synthesis” of libertarian and “zoophile” intuitions in a vision of a kind of cosmic ecology. A reasonable and proper good for individuals depends on the good of the whole: “The living world (which is itself an element or function of the cosmic whole) is like ‘the federation or community of interdependent organs and tissues that go to make up [a physician’s] patient’ (Gregg 1955; see Lovelock 1982). Claiming a spurious advantage for individuals at the price of damage to the whole is simply silly.”

    The whole he sees as the City of God. Invoking Berkeley he identifies this with the whole created universe, each in its own way reflecting an aspect of God’s glory. And each part has a claim to exist, if only for a short time. It’s reasonable that we should protect our own kind against threats to life and limb, but beyond that we ought to be content with our allotted portion. There can be no absolute “right to life” because death comes for us all and is part of the fabric of the universe; but we can aim for a “letting be” of things according to their kind:

    The rights that all self-owners have simply as such cannot include any right of immunity to disease, predation or famine. No such right can be justly defended for all self-owners, since the terrestrial economy is organized around the fact of predation. None of us can be treated absolutely and only as ‘ends-in-ourselves’, never to be material for another’s purposes. Of all of us it is literally true that we are food. If blackbirds have no right not to be eaten by foxes (and people, correspondingly, no duty to protect them), since such a general right would deny the right of life to foxes, but blackbirds have all the ‘natural’ rights that all self-owners have, it follows that we too have no right not to be eaten. The only ‘right to life’ that all selfowners might be allowed, just as such, is the right to live as the creature that one is, under the same law as all others. Foxes do no wrong in catching what they can: they would be doing wrong if they prevented the creatures on whom they prey from enjoying their allotted portion in the sun, if they imprisoned, frustrated and denied them justice. Foxes, obviously, are not at fault.

    The libertarian thesis, applied to the terrestrial biosphere, requires that no-one do more than enjoy a due share of the fruits of the earth, that forward-looking agents plan their agricultural economy with a view to allowing the diversity of creatures some share of happiness according to their kind. It does not require that everyone abstain from killing and eating animals, if that is how the human creatures that are there can live. Some people may so abstain, because they see no need to live off their non-human kindred, but this (on liberal views) must be their choice, not their duty. Libertarians, by the same token, will not see any general duty to assist people against aggressors. Even aggression, it turns out, is not necessarily unjust, a violation of right, though enslavement is. Even if some acts of aggression are unjust, there is no general duty to defend the victims. Any duty that such libertarians acknowledge to assist the prey will rest upon their sense of solidarity, not on abstract rights of self-ownership.

    Clark calls this a “radically anarchic view of human and extra-human intercourse,” but says that we might be justified in going beyond this by acknowledging the fact that, within the “cosmic democracy,” most of us animals already exist in social groupings, many of them including multiple species. “We can,” he says, “moderate the merely libertarian ethic by the ethic of solidarity: both depend upon our vision of the moral universe, both are necessary.”

    The vision of the cosmic democracy, of a universe in which each thing has its appointed part to play and its own particular dignity, eminently justifies decent treatment of non-humans, and even an extension of sympathy and mercy. “[I]t may also be compatible with justice, even required by a more elevated sense of ‘justice’, that we should give each other more than we have a right to demand: we may construct ‘laws of the nations’, and tacitly agree to assist those who are in need, so long as we may justly do so.” What Clark seems to have in mind here is what I referred to the other day as the “special duties” owed to those creatures that we share our lives with in a particular way, such as pets or other domestic animals. “Emotions of solidarity” combine with and reinforce “contractual justice” as we find our circle of sympathy expanding outward, pushed by the vision of cosmic democracy wherein we are all related as partial reflections of the Creator’s glory.

    This “visionary solidarity” seems a long way from the bare-bones political ethic of libertarianism, and Clark admits that he has pushed the liberal ethic to the point of collapse:

    If ‘we’ are illumined by this vision of the living world, we may request a like forebearance and enthusiasm from our fellow citizens. Those who show that they cannot conceive of the world in its richness, cannot sympathize with their fellow-creatures, may seem to us to be menaces. It is, correspondingly, our ‘natural right’ as self-owners so to organize society to introduce that vision into all with whom we must associate.

    Now this is heady stuff. Though it must be qualified by what Clark says a bit earlier:

    This would be a ‘fascist’ vision only if it implied that there was some elite group entitled to inflict upon an ignorant world the legislation they thought justified, at whatever cost to the ideals and lives of their victims. There is no such implication: on the contrary, it is just those elite groups which most offend against the rules of liberal solidarity.

    So it seems that what he’s getting at is this: we need something like a paradigm shift, a new moral vision that takes in the whole of the living world, not just the human sphere and this vision will naturally impace the way we order our common life. But this isn’t the sort of thing that can be imposed from the top down. So there’s no question of a kind of green fascism.

    Given what I’ve seen elsewhere of Clark’s political views, I would imagine that he would favor this vision being propagated through decentralized and non-hierarchical local communities joined in some kind of loose federation.

    From my earlier post on Clark’s “anarcho-conservatism”:

    Following Jefferson and Kropotkin, Clark seems to favor a decentralization of political power to the most local feasible level. He rejects, however, revolution as a means to replacing the military or political form of association with peaceful and non-coercive methods. Even Gandhi’s “non-violent” revolution, he points out, resulted in no small amount of bloodshed, and the Indian state that replaced British colonialism arguably suppressed liberty in a number of ways, not the least of which being the incorporation of unwilling minorities into the Indian state.

    Instead, Clark adopts what he calls “anarcho-conservatism,” an anti-revolutionary commitment to expanding the organization of the civil or economic means of social cooperation, side-by-side with, and gradually replacing coercive means. He concedes that such a conservative stance risks being insufficiently sensitive to present injustice, but argues that change which grows organically out of a people’s past is preferable to the kind of sharp break with it that revolution often brings.

    Analogously, Clark might say that a change in our evaluation of the moral status of animals can and should develop organically from existing moral traditions. And so he might find Matthew Scully more congenial than Peter Singer on this score. A gradual modification of our moral views, developing in an organic, quasi-Burkean fashion is more likely to take root than some attempted revolution from above.

  • Faith on the farm

    The New York Times looks at a variety of religiously-motivated farmers concened with good stewardship, humane treatment of animals, and fair treatment of farm workers.

    It’s always tough to know how widespread the phenomena discussed in these kinds of “trend” stories actually are, but it’s heartening to think that “environmentalism” is no longer a dirty word even among some very conservative religious believers. I think this may well be a function of age; an older generation of religious leaders may have dismissed environmental concerns as inimical to our glorious system of “free enterprise” or even condemned it as a kind of ersatz religion, but younger believers don’t seem to be carrying that baggage:

    “Food and the environment is the civil rights movement for people under the age of 40,” said the Rev. John Wimberly, pastor of the Western Presbyterian Church in Washington.

  • Liberation, human and animal

    (This post actually started out short. Honest!)

    Christopher (at his new blog) directs our attention to this article by Andrew Linzey on the connection between violence against animals and violence against humans.

    Clearly it’s not a matter of cruelty to animals causing violence against human beings in a straightforward way. Rather, as Linzey says, “cruelty to animals is one of a cluster of potential or actual characteristics held in common by those who commit violence or seriously anti-social acts.”

    This raises the question of how animal liberation and human liberation might be connected. Animal liberationists are often faced with the objection that human oppression is so severe and widespread that to divert efforts and resources to injustices against animals would be irresponsible at best and misanthropic at worst.

    In this article philosopher Stephen R.L. Clark suggests, however, that while some proponents of animal welfare and liberation have neglected issues of human oppression, the two causes are actually integrally connected. In his words, “[a]s long as we live, as human beings, in hierarchical, class and caste-divided societies, we must expect us to be cruel,” and a “genuinely humane endeavour on behalf of the non-human cannot be separated from a similarly humane endeavour on behalf of humans.” The idea being, I think, that as long as we have the mindset which takes domination and exploitation as natural and inevitable, neither animals nor weaker and more vulnerable humans are safe.

    At the level of our general view of the world, at least, there is a significant connection between our view of other human beings and our view of other animals. If God creates all this is out of love, then, to the extent that we share in or imitate the divine love, we will see other beings as having a value and integrity and mystery that is independent of whatever benefits we might get from them. As Clark says “[i]n love, we attend to things as being beautiful. Willing their good, we come to know what ‘good’ is in their case. False love imposes burdens, fantasizes, and grows angry when the ‘beloved’ is not as we wish. True love puts aside concupiscence.”

    Love isn’t just a sentiment; it’s the most truthful and accurate perception of reality there is. Our typical perception of reality is in terms of how things affect us. This is natural and probably inevitable to a great degree, but moral progress largely consists in moving beyond this egocentric perspective and recognizing the independent reality and value of beings other than ourselves. “Love is the recognition, the realization, of a creature chosen from eternity by God, who ‘hates nothing that He has made (why else would He have made it?)’…What God has chosen is not only what is, literally, human: every thing is a message of love, which we misread or miss entirely as long as we suppose that we are ourselves the only centre of the universe.”

    Consequently, when we perpetrate violence against others, or exploit them for our own gain, we are denying their independent reality and treating them as mere means to our ends. Humanism and most traditional forms of Christianity agree in holding that only human beings are genuinely ends-in-themselves. But unlike humanism, Christianity has a certain built in trajectory toward a wider apprehension of the value of all created being.

    The worry, of course, is that a greater appreciation of the value of non-human creatures will somehow downgrade the moral status of human beings. Though rarely is actual evidence offered to back this up, critics can point to thinkers like Peter Singer who simultaneously advocate for better treatment of animals and argue for the permissibility of killing “defective” or “unwanted” infants. Thus in the minds of the critics any blurring of the line between the value of human and non-human life seems inextricably tied to a diminished appreciation of the dignity of human beings.

    But I don’t see why this has to be the case. Singer is a bit of a unique case because, as an ultra-consistent consequentialist, he is willing to follow the premises of his arguments to the bitter end where someone else might balk at his conclusions, many of which are highly counterintuitive to say the least! But it by no means follows that someone arriving at similar conclusions about our treatment of animals by a different route needs to embrace the same conclusions as Singer regarding, e.g. abortion or infanticide. Andrew Linzey, for instance, not only argues for a paradigm shift in the way we look at animals, he has also argued against using human embryos as experimental subjects on the similar grounds that life is not simply ours to do with what we will as long as it seems to serve our interests.

    In other words, concern for animals isn’t properly understood as an attempt to downgrade the moral status of human beings but as an attempt to upgrade the status of other animals. No one (well not no one) thinks that feminism must necessarily result in downgrading the moral worth of men. As the somewhat sardonic bumper sticker puts it, “Feminism is the radical idea that women are people.” We might say, less pithily, that animal liberation is the radical idea that living, sentient creatures are more than mere objects or material to be used in whatever way we see fit. Human beings should feel threatened by that assertion only to the extent that our present lifestyles are premised upon its denial.

    This doesn’t mean that genuine human and animal interests won’t ever conflict (though I’d argue far less so than some anti-animal liberation polemicists would lead you to believe). But to the extent that the moral life is about learning to see others as independent realities having their own worth and goods proper to their nature, I don’t think we can, at least on religious grounds, set the limits of our moral concern at the boundary of the human kingdom.

    But even if that’s right it doesn’t resolve the question of priorities. Even if we agree in principle that animals are beings whose welfare and dignity ought, in an ideal world, to be safeguarded and that concern for animal well-being and human well-being is part of the same view of created being as intrinsically valuable, how can we justify attending to animals when there is so much human misery in the world? Shouldn’t we focus on the most important issues first?

    I think the response to this objection has at least three parts. First, much of our mistreatment of animals would be abated merely by ceasing to do certain things. This doesn’t require us to dedicate new resources to the well-being of animals, but merely to stop harming them. I’m not going to claim that, say, vegetarianism is morally obligatory, but the greatest source of human-inflicted animal suffering, both quantitatively and qualitatively, is almost certainly animal agriculture. Virtually all of us (meaning those of us in the industrialized West, the kind of people with reliable internet connections. ;-)) have it in our power to stop contributing to this by, at least, seeking alternatives to factory farmed meat.

    Secondly, in allocating our resources dedicated to alleviating suffering or improving the lot of others, very few of us adhere to a strict utilitarian ordering by focusing all our efforts on the single most serious problem currently facing the world. For instance, you could argue that nuclear disarmament is the most serious moral problem there is because it alone has the potential to result in the utter destruction of the human race (and most other life for that matter). By this standard, pretty much every other problem pales in comparison. And yet many people feel eminently justified in dedicating time and resources to causes other than nuclear disarmament.

    Why is this? I think it’s partly because we don’t order our priorities in quite that rationalistic a fashion. Different people feel drawn to different issues or causes for a variety of reasons that often have more to do with personal experience than a dispassionate ordering of priorities. And this applies to people who’ve dedicated part of their lives to working toward improving the lot of animals. Is someone who works on behalf of animals to be criticized for spending that much less time working to alleviate poverty or fight illiteracy if the person who has taken up those causes isn’t to be criticized for failing to dedicate all their efforts toward eradicating war or disease? There is properly a kind of division of labor, it seems, based on interest, personality, experience, and sympathy that doesn’t admit of a simple hirearchical ordering.

    Third, it can be argued that we have, by our assertion of dominion over other living creatures, incurred special obligations toward them. Our obligations, for instance, to animals in the wild may largely be to “do no harm,” but our obligations toward domesticated animals may well be stronger precisely in light of the fact that we have taken them into our service. Just as a man has obligations to his own children that he doesn’t have to the children of strangers, we may well have special duties of care to “our” animals as a consequence of the rights we have asserted over them and the use we make of them.

    We also often recognize special duties to the weak and vulnerable; contrary to some theories of morality, moral considerability isn’t directly dependent to one’s abilities as a free, independent agent capable of discharging duties and entering into agreements. In fact, our moral sentiments often point in quite the opposite direction: those who are weak and unable to fend for themselves call for greater care just because they are at our mercy.

    It’s also worth pointing out that some of the most important efforts on behalf of animals were undertaken by those with impressive humanitarian records. William Wilberforce, not exactly a slouch in the area of human rights, co-founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It may be that widening the circle of moral concern, far from being some kind of zero-sum game where some can benefit only at the expense of others, actually reinforces benign attitudes, making people more sensitive to suffering and injustice wherever it’s found. And it may even be that proper attention to the rightful claims of humans and animals will only be acheived together.

    [Note: this post has been slightly edited for clarity.]

  • Sex, marriage, and false dichotomies

    Marvin has a terrific post on same-sex marriage in the church, pointing out the silliness of some of the slippery slope arguments (Next it’ll be group marriages! Marriage to animals!) made against churches blessing these relationships. Far from being part of some hedonistic collapse in moral standards, the movement for recognition of gay relationships is in many ways a conservative one, with same sex couples seeking to reap the benefits of stable, committed, monogomous relationships.

    I don’t post on this much, because it’s amply covered elsewhere, but one of the reasons I support same-sex marriage (as well as civil marriage or unions or whatever they end up being called) is because I’m conservative about sex. Eros is a powerful and dangerous force, one that is best channeled into a stable, faithful relationship that is enabled to contribute to the well-being of the surrounding community. Both Paul and Luther seem admirably pragmatic about marriage, seeing it as a way of taming our sinful impulses. And Jesus says that it is a penultimate institution, intended for this world, but not the world to come. To me this suggests a certain flexibility in approaching marriage: it’s intended to contribute to human flourishing here and now, not necessarily to mirror some eternal archetype. I’d add, of course, that it can be a kind of school of virtue where we learn to love by committing ourselves to loving one particular other person (a bit more on that here).

    Maybe I’m unusual, but I had no objections same-sex relationships before I became a practicing, adult Christian, so I didn’t really go through some process of “overcoming” ingrained objections to them. I was raised in a conservative small town, but pretty much as soon as I came into contact with gay people I couldn’t discern any reason to object to two people of the same sex being in a romantic relationship. Maybe it was partly due to the fact that I was routinely accused of being a “fag” by other kids in school (it seemed to be a generalized term of abuse for bookish, awkward, or otherwise anomolous kids, which is not to trivialize the torment that actual gay kids often undergo, mind you), but I found myself rather instinctively sympathizing with gay classmates.

    As someone who leans to the traditional side in matters theological I’ve tried to understand and sympathize with the traditionalist position here, but, in my judgment, the biblical evidence is too ambiguous (a useful overview here) and the arguments from natural law, etc. too unconvincing to sustain that position in the face of my experience of gay folks (and I would now add gay Christians). And I’d add that the fact that this has become a “debate” over an “issue” that often takes place at a very abstract level far removed from people’s actual lives and relationships seems to me to be quite wrongheaded.

    So, in the church I find myself in the awkward position of agreeing with the “liberals” about this but not about certain theological matters, while being out of sync with a the “conservatives” on what for many has become the sin qua non of faithfulness. However, I do think that a lot of people “on the ground,” especially younger ones, are less likely to line up in quite the way that the most vocal people on both sides would have it. So I’m hopeful that there’s a possibility of a “third way” that isn’t just in the mushy middle but rejects what I think are the false choices being presented to us.

  • Christians and markets

    Here’s a smart article by Kathryn D. Blanchard, a professor of Religious Studies at Alma College. She argues that Christians, especially the Christian intelligensia, need to get beyond abstractions about “the market” and “capitalism” and look at the ways in which particular markets can serve or impede human flourishing.

    She makes some points that ought to be better known among Christian thinkers than they apparently are: that markets are as much about cooperation as competition, that in the real world human relationships, including market relationships, are better described by language more complex than that of narrow utility maximization, and that there is great potential for good and evil in the way markets work.

    Lately some Christian thinkers have taken to condemning “capitalism” or “the market” wholesale, but, instead of proposing some alternative system like communism or socialism, they propose the church itself as an embodiment of an alternative system of economic practice. No doubt there are good reasons for promoting alternative economic arrangements for various purposes, but Prof. Blanchard is surely right to point out that it’s folly to suppose that markets are evil per se or that one should try to extricate oneself from them:

    Most markets in the real world, however, tend to fall somewhere in the grey area between good and evil. They are the media by which moderately well-off, educated, responsible and well-intentioned Christians (you know who you are) acquire objects of ambivalence, such as organic food, liberal arts educations, modest homes, Italian wine, the internet, comfortable or even fashionable shoes, air conditioning, jogging strollers, or beds. These are items that most of us not only enjoy (or hope to enjoy someday) but—let’s be honest—believe we cannot live without, even if we feel somewhat sheepish about them.

    Later she writes:

    Quixotic attacks on a generalized capitalism can give way to fruitful interactions with particular markets and market behaviors, starting with our own and moving outward—especially with an eye toward the coercive externalities they may visit on our neighbors near and far. We must get up off the communion rail and bear witness to the “kin-dom” of God in small acts such as writing to our elected representatives about justice for migrant workers, supporting news sources that aim to reflect the truth, foregoing meat from factory farms or fresh blueberries in November, or buying carbon credits to offset the last flight we took to an annual meeting.

    With God’s help, such humble acts may lead us into bolder ones. It’s not enough to sit at our marketed computers in our market-sponsored offices writing marketable books and articles about how bad “the market” is. Like “the church,” the market is people. Our economic task is to create and support just markets, while crying out against and divesting from unjust markets.

    Obviously she isn’t proposing that the market should absorb all relationships. The error of at least some economists and libertarian types is to think that the unregulated market can effectively provide all the necessary goods for society. More sober thinkers realize the need for a strong moral, cultural, social and legal framework to keep the market “in the box.”

    Christians, I think, are often uneasy with markets in part because they rely on virtues less exalted than that of self-giving love. But Prof. Blanchard is surely correct when she says that the motives we have when we engage in behavior within markets (like in the rest of life) are more complicated than pure love or pure self-interest. As she wisely says, “the market is people” who are, decidedly, a mixed bag.