A Thinking Reed

Category: Religion and society

  • The deserving poor

    Author Kritzer, a Jewish convert to Christianity by the sound of it, writes on contrasting Jewish and Christian attitudes toward giving to the poor.

  • Mouw on evangelicalism

    Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, is interviewed in the LA Times on what it means to be an evangelical. Nothing really new there, but he does highlight a kind of “broad tent” evangelicalism that seems to be gaining more notice.

    I read Mouw’s Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport and He Shines in All That’s Fair. The first is a remarkably gentle and irenic commendation of Calvinism, and the latter explores the Calvinist concept of common grace. Both were very enjoyable and worthy reads, though Mouw didn’t make a Calvinist out of me. (Sorry, Dan!)

  • Barack Obama: Where’s the beef?

    Another link from Gaius: David Sirota critiques the hype about a 2008 Barack Obama presidential run. Coming from the progressive Left, Sirota points out that Obama has essentially no record of willingness to take the lead on any controversial issue. Sirota doesn’t blame Obama himself as much as the people for whom he’s become a kind of cipher for progressive ambitions.

    I’ve noticed the same phenomenon among some left-leaning Christians who seem to see Obama as the ideal standard bearer for a center-Left Christian progressivism. But with essentially no legislative record to speak of, it’s hard to see why that should be. A couple of good high-profile speeches and a willingness to say positive things about “faith” seem to have been sufficient to garner this widespread adoration.

  • Animals, nature, and Christian ethics

    Stephen Webb, theologian and author of On God and Dogs and Good Eating, has an intriguing article at The Other Journal called “Theology from the Pet Side Up: A Christian Agenda for NOT Saving the World” which combines two of my pet interests (pardon the pun), Christian concern for animals and the theology of nature. In it he argues that Christians should not sentimentalize “unspoilt nature” and ecosystems which routinely sacrifice, often in brutal and painful ways, individual creatures for the sake of the integrity of the whole. Rather, he says, we should see pets as in some ways the paradigm for what God intends for animals. They are to be brought into the circle of communion and companionship which God has established. Consequently, he suggests that Christian concern for “the environment” should properly begin with attention to particular creatures:

    [T]heologians are often in too much of a hurry to talk about nature these days, and thus they do not take the time to reflect about the nature that is closest to them—their pets. Environmentalists lift up the values of interdependence and holism, which they adopt from ecology, but these principles are another way of saying that eco-systems do not care about individuals. Rather than interdependence, I would want to emphasize relationships. Interdependence suggests that nature works quite well on its own accord, and human intervention inevitably upsets the balance. When I think of interdependence, I think of a spider’s web, not a mutual affirmation of difference and dignity.

    Christians have no business promulgating the aesthetic appreciation of coherence—a part of the whole is good as long as it contributes something to that whole—which reflects the old idea that this is the best of all possible worlds. The world is fallen, and nature is not what God intended it to be. The violence of nature is not all our fault, either, because the world into which Adam and Eve were expelled was already at odds with the peaceable harmony of Eden. If nature is fallen and its fall preceded our own, then there is little we can do to change nature in any dramatic way. Yet we can, like Noah with his ark, save a few fellow creatures from suffering as we try to warn others about God’s impending judgment.

    […]

    Beginning a theology of the environment by reflecting on pets will lead to a very different place than beginning with nature in general or wild animals with their freedom threatened by human population growth. The nature that God pronounced good in the Genesis creation account was not the nature that forced humans to toil for their food and animals to fight each other. Animals were named by Adam, which suggests that the authority of humanity over animals is not incompatible with intimacy and friendship. Animals are meant to stand in relation with God by being in relation with humanity. In his science fiction novel, Perelandra, C. S. Lewis describes a planet where the fall has not (yet) occurred. He portrays the animals as both mysterious and gentle, living according to their own laws but also welcoming human company.

    Traditionally, Christian theology portrays heaven as a garden, not a wild jungle, a place, like the original Garden of Eden, where God allows life to grow without the countless sacrifices of violent death. It is thus possible to argue that pets are the paradigm for the destiny of all animal life. In other words, according to the Christian myth, animals were originally domesticated, in the sense of being nonviolent and being in a positive relationship with us, and they will be again.

    I think Webb is right to resist turning nature as we find it into something that is normative for our attitudes toward the natural world. Nature is red in tooth and claw, and it’s proper for humans to alleviate (or at least not exacerbate) the suffering that seems endemic to our fallen world.

    But I also think Webb is a bit dismissive of legitimate environmental concerns. Granted that nature is “fallen” or, at the very least, not what God ultimately intends her to be, and granted further that we shouldn’t idealize “wild” nature, does it follow that we shouldn’t be concerned with fostering what integrity and beauty she displays? Webb is right that environmentalism can take on religious overtones, but this argument is often used by conservatives to shrug off environmental issues. Just because some people make an ersatz religion out of environmental concern doesn’t mean that there aren’t real problems that need attending to, for our own sake if for no other reason. The need to adress environmental problems arises quite naturally from the concern for the well-being of individuals (including our animal friends) that Webb places at the center of the Christian ethos.

  • Evangelism in the mainline and the loss of transcendence

    Chris at Even the Devils Believe has a good post on birth rates and evangelism in mainline Protestantism, jumping off from the recent comments from Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori about how Episcopalians aren’t incresing their numbers due to the low birth rates among “better-educated” people who care about preserving the earth.

    Leaving aside the condescending tone of those remarks toward our Catholic and Mormon friends, Chris correctly points out the whistling-past-the-graveyard nature of this attitude. He also notes that Christianity is not exclusively, or even primarily, a religion that propagates itself by inheritance, but by evangelism, which is where mainline Protestantism has been falling down on the job. And it needn’t be a matter of “liberalism,” narrowly defined as churches who have centrist-to-liberal stances on the usual litany of issues.

    While I try to resist sweeping generalization about “postmodernism” or what “postmodern” people are supposedly like, I think that one thing that can be said is that postmodern people, outside of a relatively small band of committed secularists, are open to an experience of the transcendent. The closed clockwork universe of high modernism probably never had much of a hold on most people’s minds, but it’s also lost much of whatever intellectual justification it once had. I’ve argued before that “supernaturalism” is not what keeps people away from religion. When theologians decry rampant “secularism” I sometimes think that’s because they are taking their academic colleagues as representative of the population as a whole.

    But, however important it may be to engage secularist or hard-core “naturalist” thought, that’s simply not where most people are coming from (the same might be said of “postmodern” thought, which is still largely confined to the academy, but that’s a topic for another day). So, if there is a “liberalism” (or maybe “modernism” is a better word) that’s at fault here, I think it might be the variety which downplays the transcendent, or “vertical,” aspect of faith in an attempt to appeal to “modern” people.

  • NRCAT statement of conscience

    If you’re concerned about reports of the use of torture in the war on terror then you might consider endorsing the National Religious Coaltion Against Torture‘s “Statement of Conscience.” I’ve mentioned this before, but recently received an e-mail saying that they’re aiming to have 50,000 signatures by mid-January.

    You can view and endorse the statement here. I know I would make a lousy political activist because I’m always at least a little bit skeptical that these sorts of things will have any effect, but, hey, couldn’t hurt, right?

  • Black helicopter watch

    I read the NT Wright lecture I linked to yesterday and I tend to agree with Jonathan that Wright is too optimistic about a global army (or “police force” as he calls it) as a viable alternative to our present situation.

    Wright says:

    First, we must work from every angle either to enable the United Nations and the International Courts of Justice to function as they should, or to replace them with something else that can do the same job better. The only way we could have done something wise in Iraq would have been for a force, with the energy of the whole international community behind it, composed equally of Norwegians and Nigerians, of Australians and Pakistanis, of Chileans and Japanese and, yes, British and Americans. To continue to resist the making real of such an internationally credible police force, as many on the right in America have done, is more and more obviously a way of saying that now that we’re in power we will use that power utterly for our own advantage, and rule out the possibility that anyone might call us in turn to account. Of course, when China or India becomes the next superpower, we can expect the present superpower to go running for help to any international court that might then exist. But the point is this: it is time to make the transition globally that we in this country made in the 1830s when we moved from local militias to a credible national police force. Of course with any such move there are all the same dangers of the abuse of power. But we already have abuse of power; it is part of the task of the church, in calling present abuse to account, to work for a better structure which could actually deal, with visible credibility, with all kinds of problems around the world. I wish I thought that such a refreshed United Nations was likely to emerge soon. But we must work and pray for something like this to happen. In such work, and in such prayer, God is present to call both the War on Terror, and the Terror itself, to account.

    I think there are a few problems with this. One is the implication that abuse of power won’t be more pronounced at a global level than at a national level. While it’s certainly dangerous for any nation to act as judge in its own case, any kind of world government or army would have the added danger of being the only game in town. A world government, for instance, would presumably have no “right of exit” acting as a check on its pretensions. There is the added problem that the more removed any governing body is from the people it governs, the more problems there are with accountability.

    In addition to problems of monopoly and accountability, I think the empirical claim that a multinational invasion of Iraq would have had significantly more credibility and that that credibility would’ve made a significant difference to the success of the mission is dubious. The thing is that most people in the world would resent outsiders coming into their country and bossing them around. Maybe the invasion of Iraq would’ve engendered less resentment if it was the kind of multinational force Wright envisions, but the attendant bomb-dropping that would’ve still been necessary (and which Wright rightly deplores) would no doubt have created the same kind of enmity toward any invading force. I don’t think the dynamic of occupation changes just because it has a UN (or whatever) imprimatur on it.

    It’s interesting to me that Wright uses the analogy of England moving from local militias to a national police force, because an American would read that totally differently. If any politician in Washington proposed replacing all local law enforcement with a federal police force, people of every political persuasion would roundly denounce it. Suspicion of centralized power is part of our political DNA.

    Not to say that better international institutions aren’t desirable, but I can’t help but think that any kind of global UN army would be a standing invitation to more meddling and intervention by the powerful nations of the world (who would almost certainly dominate it like they do the UN in its present form) or it would result in a deadlock when powerful nations’ interests clashed (just as the US and the USSR essentially prevented the UN from functioning as intended during the Cold War).

    If anything, my inclination is to go in the opposite direction and make political institutions more participatory by devolving important functions to regional and local levels, with less centralization, more federalism, more local autonomy, and with decisions made among the people who are most affected by them. That may sound utopian, but no less so, I’d argue, than what Bishop Wright is proposing.

    All that said, there are a number of good and important points made in the lecture, and I think Wright’s account of how Jesus inagurates God’s kingdom and Christians participate in it is very good.

  • Abortion – can the moral issue be avoided?

    Amy Sullivan, who has carved out something of a niche covering liberal and progressive Christians, has an interesting article at the New Republic on the candidacy of anti-abortion Democrat Bill Ritter, who appears to have a good shot at winning the governor’s race in Colorado. Ritter, a Catholic, opposes abortion but seems to take a fairly pragmatic line that what he can do as governor is to actively seek to reduce the number of abortions, primarily through prevention and support of women in crisis pregnancies. But he is unapologetic about the fact that he is anti-abortion.

    This reminds me of an article written for the Atlantic about ten years ago by George McKenna, called “On Abortion: A Lincolnian Position.” McKenna’s advice to pro-lifers is to follow a strategy analogous to Lincoln’s position on slavery. While admitting that it had been ruled legal, one could still denounce it as a moral evil and seek ways to mitigate its spread.

    McKenna offers a hypothetical campaign statement embodying such an approach:

    “According to the Supreme Court, the right to choose abortion is legally protected. That does not change the fact that abortion is morally wrong. It violates the very first of the inalienable rights guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence — the right to life. Even many who would protect and extend the right to choose abortion admit that abortion is wrong, and that killing 1.5 million unborn children a year is, in the understated words of one “a bad thing.” Yet, illogically, they denounce all attempts to restrain it or even to speak out against it. In this campaign I will speak out against it. I will say what is in all our hearts; that abortion is an evil that needs to be restricted and discouraged. If elected, I will not try to abolish an institution that the Supreme Court has ruled to be constitutionally protected, but I will do everything in my power to arrest its further spread and place it where the public can rest in the belief that it is becoming increasingly rare. I take very seriously the imperative, often expressed by abortion supporters, that abortion should be rare. Therefore, if I am elected, I will seek to end all public subsidies for abortion, for abortion advocacy, and for experiments on aborted children. I will support all reasonable abortion restrictions that pass muster with the Supreme Court, and I will encourage those who provide alternatives to abortion. Above all, I mean to treat it as a wrong. I will use the forum provided by my office to speak out against abortion and related practices, such as euthanasia, that violate or undermine the most fundamental of the rights enshrined in this nation’s founding charter.”

    Obviously such a position would please neither hard core pro-lifers nor hard core pro-choicers. The former regard anything short of legal prohibition to be tantamount to legally approving the murder of innocent children, while the latter balk at any government interference in what should be regarded as an essentially private choice. But if it’s true that most Americans, as polls seem to suggest, regard abortion as an evil, but nevertheless think it should be legally protected under at least some circumstances, then such a stance might have real appeal.

    Of course, it’s one thing for a Democrat in a fairly conservative place like Colorado to take an anti-abortion (even if still “pro-choice” stance), but it’s not clear this would fly on the national stage where abortion rights groups still hold a good deal of power in things like nominating presidential candidates. I remember during the Democratic primaries in the last presidential election how virtually all the candidates appeared at some NARAL event essentially swearing their undying fealty to the pro-choice cause. Could a Democrat make a statement like the above and have any chance of winning their party’s nomination?

    The other interesting question is whether traditionally “pro-life” voters would pull the lever for such a candidate. My impression is that he or she would have a good chance of peeling off many moderate pro-lifers. Consider that President Bush, who has received so much support from pro-lifers, is actually to the “left” of many of them on abortion. He’s said that he supports exceptions in the cases of rape and incest to any hypothetical abortion ban, and has also claimed that people’s hearts and minds have to change for any change in the legal situation to be effective. So the space between the Bushian position and the McKenna position doesn’t seem quite so great.

    Personally I’m pretty conflicted on what I think the best legal regime would be with respect to abortion. For one thing, I’m not fully convinced that killing, say, a one-month old embryo is morally equivalent to murdering a newborn baby or a full-grown adult. I recently revisited this in reading philosopher Robert Wennberg’s Life in the Balance. Wennberg, an evangelical Protestant, argues for a “gradualist” approach that locates the beginning of a right to life at conception, but qualifies it by saying that this right increases in strength as the fetus develops. That doesn’t mean that it’s not wrong (at least prima facie), but if it’s not as wrong, then the bar for interfering with a woman’s bodily autonomy seems to go up. Whether this is a coherent moral position or just squishy intuition on my part I’m not sure, but my uncertainty is enough to make me hesitant to seek the kinds of legal restrictions most pro-lifers want. That said, I think the case for restriction gets progressively stronger throughout the course of pregnancy, so that killing an eight-month old fetus is pretty darn difficult to distinguish from infanticide. Which isn’t to deny that specifying those gradations with any degree of precision would be tough, especially for purposes of enshrining them into law.

    However, I’m inclined to agree with McKenna that it’s possible to say that abortion is wrong even if you don’t want to seek to outlaw it compeletely. At the very least, you can make the case that government should discourage it (perhaps with both negative and positive sanctions as he suggests) and at the very least not encourage it.

    There’s also a natural connection here to scientific research that destroys embryos. Even if one doesn’t think that an embryo has value equivalent to a newborn baby such that destroying it is tantamount to murder, it doesn’t follow that it has zero value. And to encourage the existence of an entire industry that reduces nascent human life to raw materials certainly expresses a low value on that life. And the case here is if anything more cut-and-dried than the case of abortion since no one’s bodily integrity is at stake. So, part of an approach to abortion along “Lincolnian” lines would be not to allow the practice of devaluing unborn human life to spread in this way.

    Now, some people will balk at the idea that the government should take a position on a contested moral issue like this. And there are good reasons for worrying about government-sponsored moral bullying. But, if the state is going, for example, to fund research that destroys embryos, then it has already effectively, if not explicitly, taken a position on the value of embryonic life. Maybe an argument can be made that the value of the research outweighs the value of embryonic life, but that itself is a moral position, not a value-neutral one.

    Some progressive Christians seem to want to enact measures that they say will reduce the number of abortions without actually coming out against abortion as such. For instance, they may advocate increased anti-poverty spending which one suspects they would’ve advocated for reasons quite unrelated to abortion anyway. This has the added benefit of not rocking the boat too much with secular liberal allies. Which is fine in itself; the merits of various anti-poverty programs can be discussed without reference to abortion. But that doesn’t mean that the issue of the value of unborn life can be avoided altogether, as the example of stem-cell research shows. A position like McKenna’s shows that it’s possible to address the moral issue seriously without necessarily endorsing the full legal prohibition of abortion. But it may also require taking some unpopular positions, including ones advocated by the dreaded Religious Right.

  • Putting the conserve back in conservatism

    The Boston Globe ran an article yesterday on the attempt by some activists to reach out to evangelicals on environmental issues. A new documentary “The Great Warming” is aimed at least in part directly at mainstream conservative Christians and features appearances by Richard Cizik, an official at the National Association of Evangelicals.

    It’s fairly easy to see why a Christian should oppose the despoilation of God’s creation. What’s less frequently mentioned is that environmental protection ought naturally to be a conservative position too. After all, you’d think conservatives would be all about conserving things. At one time this was widely acknowledged. Russell Kirk, the intellectual godfather of modern conservatism, was very much a lover of nature and opponent of paving over green places in the name of the free market. One of Kirk’s paragons of conservatism was staunch conservationist Teddy Roosevelt.

    Another seminal early conservative thinker, Richard Weaver, once said that the difference between the radical and the conservative was that the former saw reality as infinitely plastic and amenable to the human will, whereas the latter respected the order of reality as a given and something that the human will should conform itself to. In these terms, respecting the integrity of the natural world would be the conservative position, while seeing it as so much raw material for human projects would be the radical view.

    One might also point out (and I have) that the spirit that animates conservative positions on, say, abortion, euthanasia, and the exploitation of human embryos for research should naturally yield a hesitance to exploit the natural world through unrestrained economic development, genetic engineering, and unbridled technological “progress.” In other words, a worldview that takes the intrinsic value of life as a fundamental axiom might end up being both “pro-life” and “green.” Green icon E.F. Schumacher, for instance, was also a devout Catholic and articulated just such an affinity. However, in today’s political taxonomy these two groups are largely on opposite sides of the political spectrum (though phenomena like “Crunchy Cons” may indicate that change is afoot).

    So, I think the intellectual connections between conservatism and “creation care” are already there, but we all know that ideas are not the only thing that drives politics (to say the least). TR-style conservationism doesn’t have much of a foothold in the current GOP. However, if a significant block of traditionally conservative voters such as evangelicals make environmental issues a high priority, we may see some change at the political level. What the Globe article and others I’ve read on the same topic don’t make clear is to what extent environmental issues have penetrated down to the grass-roots of evangelicalism, or if this is a phenomenon largely confined to the intelligensia.

  • Dinner with Bishop Wright

    So, yesterday at about four o’clock I received a somewhat cryptic e-mail from the curate of our church asking if I had gotten the invitation to “dinner with Bishop Wright.” I hadn’t received any such thing and, intrigued, I gave him a call. And it turned out, yes, he meant that Bishop Wright, the Bishop of Durham, famed NT scholar and churchman. The good bish is in town giving a series of lectures at Harvard Memorial Church and had graciously agreed to have dinner with a group of folks from the Advent.

    Naturally I was very excited at the opportunity and hopped on the T after work to meet up with everyone at the John Harvard Brew House in Harvard Square. Bishop Wright and his wife were there along with about twenty of us from the Church of the Advent. He entertained questions about everything from the state of the Episcopal Church and the broader Anglican communion, to pacifism and the idea of a global peacekeeping force, to the polarization of American politics. Obviously a really brilliant guy and also very engaging and humble.

    I got the chance to ask him about how he thought Christians should put forth a political agenda in a pluralistic society, in light of some of the fears of “theocracy” that have been bandied about. He was very dismissive of such talk and basically said that you have to put all the cards on the table, including those relating to God. He also spoke of the need to de-couple what he called a “right-of-center theology” (by which I take it he meant robustly realistic and traditional views of the Resurrection, Atonement, person of Christ, etc.) from an automatic pairing with right-wing politics. In his view there are good elements in the agendas of both the Right and the Left and Christians shouldn’t automatically line up behind one or the other. He also spoke extremely well of Rowan Williams as someone in the UK who has been able to cross political lines in a way that enables him to speak to those in power from a truly independent standpoint.

    Even though I can’t claim to be a great devotee of his work in that I’ve only read (I think) one of Bishop Wright’s books (though I’ve liked what I read), it was still a fantastic opportunity to meet him and a lot of fun to boot.