A Thinking Reed

Category: Religion and society

  • The worst kind of cocktail party – one with no booze

    Marvin, Jonathan, and Jennifer have been going around a bit about some of the same issues I talked about here regarding Christians, patriotism, politics, and Stanley Hauerwas. Now, unlike these three, I’ve never formally studied theology, much less under the man himself, so I always feel a little underqualified jumping into these discussions. But, fools rush in…

    I agree with Jennifer’s point that there are lots of ways of being “political” that can’t simply be reduced to voting and conventional political activism. Moreover, she’s right to point a finger at the mainline: all too often mainline Protestantism assumes the shape of a vaguely religious humanism that seeks to usher in utopia through political activism, seemingly willing to replace the gospel of Christ with the UN Millenium Development Goals.

    But Marvin gets at what I was trying (rather long-windedly) to say when he says in a comment on Jennifer’s post:

    the same scriptures that call the Church to be a different polis demand respect for the Emperor while ascribing fear to God, and demand subjection to the governing authorities while acknowledging the Lordship of Christ. The family, the corporation and the state do have legitimate claims on us. Subordinate to the claims of Christ and his Church, to be sure, but legitimate claims. Hauerwas frankly has nothing to say about how to do this balancing act, and this is the crucial pastoral theology issue of our time. How do you be a faithful Christian when you’re also a cog in the machine?

    I think there are resources in the Christian tradition for addressing this issue–concepts like natural law, vocation, “orders of creation” and so on–which have long been endorsed by mainstream Christians. But these are also the very things the “Hauerwas school” have railed against for downplaying or sacrificing Christian distinctiveness.

    My view, though, is that these are still useful approaches, even if they might need retooled a bit (e.g. a version of natural law that takes evolution seriously; a concept of vocation that doesn’t reinforce the status quo). There are resources out there for this which, as far as I can tell, the churches haven’t made a great deal of use of. But I do think they provide a more promising way forward.

  • More on the churches and patriotism

    After reading this comment thread over at Chris’ blog, it ocurred to me that there might be a communication breakdown of sorts between mainline Protestant and evangelical responses to the quote from Stanley Hauerwas under discussion.

    When Hauerwas first started churning out his jeremiads, they were aimed primarily at the liberal mainline establishment that, in his view, had compromised itself in taking “responsibility” for American society. But now, it seems that he’s finding a lot of readers among American evangelicals who find him a bracing antidote to the uncritical nationalism of a lot of their churches.

    To a large extent, these two groups may have very different experiences of what it means to be a church in American society. For instance, I’ve never been a member of a church that traffics in the kind of uncritical nationalism that others seem to be referring to here; if anything, the churches I’ve attended have no problem recounting the litany of American evil. Plus, I’m well-acquainted with secular critiques of American exceptionalism, nationalism, and military intervention; so hearing that God’s kingdom isn’t to be identified with the Pax Americana doesn’t exactly comes as shocking news. Becuase of that I tend to focus on what I see as the dangers of quietism and churcholatry arising from Hauerwas’ perspective. But if I was an evangelical I might have a very different impression.

    In light of this conversation I was particularly attuned to any potential nationalistic overtones at church this morning. I worship at an ELCA church that is definitely left-of-center, but also has many congregants who work for the government, non-profits, are in the military, etc. (The church is on Capitol Hill just a few blocks from our place.) The pastor’s sermon, as far as I was concerned, struck just the right notes. He talked, based on the gospel passage, about how Jesus’ yoke being “easy” means that it is perfectly fitted for us. He then went on to talk about how the American colonists threw off the yoke of the British Empire in order to craft a “yoke” based on human rights, democracy, and opposition to monarchical power.

    We are, he said, inheritors of that legacy which carries with it a responsibility to extend those blessings more consitently throughout our society. But beyond this, he went on, is our higher loyalty to Jesus’ more excellent way of agapic love. What we do as citizens of a republic must be set in the context of our allegiance to Jesus and the way of being in the world that he pioneered.

    We did sing “America the Beautiful,” but we closed with this song, which one would, I think, be hard pressed to identify with jingoistic nationalism:

    This is my song, O God of all the nations,
    A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
    This is my home, the country where my heart is;
    Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
    But other hearts in other lands are beating
    With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

    My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
    And sunlight beams on clover-leaf and pine.
    But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
    And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
    Oh, hear my song, O God of all the nations,
    A song of peace for their land and for mine.

    I quite like this vision of patriotism. We can love our country and have a special responsibility for it because its ours, not because we think it’s better than everyone else’s. And we can recognize that other people love their homelands too, and that this shouldn’t be an obstacle to peace between nations. It appeals to my “little Americaner” sensibilities (or whatever the proper analogue of a “Little Englander” is).

    At any rate, though, I think this illustrates my point about different experiences of what it means to be a church in America and how to relate to the larger society.

  • How should Christians celebrate the 4th?

    Speaking of Christians and patriotism, I liked this piece from the Christian Century.

    I mean, I personally spent the 4th helping my wife study for the bar exam, but in principle I like what this article has to say.

  • Christianity, patriotism, and divided loyalties

    Ben Myers posted this bombastic Stanley Hauerwas quote (is there any other kind?) for Independence Day:

    I assume most of you are here because you think you are Christians, but it is not all clear to me that the Christianity that has made you Christians is Christianity. For example: How many of you worship in a church with an American flag? I am sorry to tell you that your salvation is in doubt. How many of you worship in a church in which the fourth of July is celebrated? I am sorry to tell you that your salvation is in doubt.

    The quote is from an address to a group of seminary students, but it’s a good encapsulation of much of what Hauerwas has said about the relationship between Christianity and America over the years. Jim West provided a stern rebuke of Hauerwas here; Fr. Chris has some thoughts here.

    The question here is one of loyalties, but I think the terms in which it is debated are often simplistic: you’re either loyal to the nation (in this case, the US) or to the church. This misses the point that we have multiple overlapping and interpenetrating loyalties, which cannot be neatly and hierarchically ordered. (With one important exception that I’ll get to in a minute.)

    We find ourselves, simply as a result of the place we occupy in the world, with loyalties to family, friends, spouses, children, communities, employers, professional associations, charitable organizations, social clubs, religious bodies, and various levels of political community. As a general rule, these don’t need to be justified by recourse to some ethical theory, they are simply the warp and woof of our life together. Nor is there any simple algorithm for settling the conflicts that arise between these loyalties. Sometimes I may have to choose between loyalty to my family and loyalty to my spouse, or between my employer and my country, or between my religious community and my political community.

    An important qualification of all loyalties, though, is the more universal ethical context in which we exist and which, for theists anyway, flows from, is rooted in, or reflects the divine mind. This means that particular loyalties can only make limited claims on us. For example, a father’s duty to care for his children doesn’t entitle him to harm other people’s children. Loyalty to my country doesn’t justify inflicting injustice on citizens of other countries. In other words, preferential treatment of those to whom we’re connected by special bonds isn’t wrong per se, but it’s subject to qualification in light of more universal duties.

    Because our highest loyalty, if we’re Christians, should be to God, we are called to follow God’s will, so far as we can discern it, in all areas of our life. The national community, though it can and has become an object of idolatry, can, acting through the government, be one instrument for advancing these values. And, I’d add, that in many cases it’s the only agent in society that can do certain things. Self-styled radical Christians who want us to live in anarchist communes rarely seem to address things like infrastructure, environmental protection, and the social safety net. Are Christians supposed to abandon our concern with these things and leave the “dirty work” to the “heathens”?

    The problem I see with the Hauerwasian view is that it has a tendency to elevate the church to the object of highest loyalty and threatens to collapse the distinction between Christ and the church. Gerhard Forde warned against seeing the church as an “eschatological vestibule” where the kingdom of God has already come in its fullness instead of as an earthen vessel where we hear God’s word and receive the sacraments. The church, as a human institution, is no more immune to corruption than any other, so we can’t assume that it deserves our unconditional loyalty any more than the nation does. In fact, a good candidate for the essence of Protestantism might be the imperative to criticize the church in light of the gospel.

    All of which is not to say that Christians should traffic in American exceptionalism. No nation can, contrary to what most of our politicians seem to think, be the world’s last, best hope. That title belongs only to God. Which is why we’re obliged not to identify any of the powers and principalities of this age with the divine will but to seek to embody that will in our life together. The point is that we all have “divided loyalties,” but Christians are supposed to (however imperfectly) order them to our universal duty to God.

  • Redeeming the time

    LutherPunk has started up a new blog less focused on theology and ministry and more focused on crafting a lifestyle of self-sufficience and reduced consumption in what might seem like a not-too-promising location: modern suburbia.

    Derek weighs in here and points out that resisting consumerism dovetails with classic Christian virtues like “prudence, temperance, moderation, and respect for the creation.”

    Which brings me to one of the, for me, most compelling parts of Michael Northcott’s recent A Moral Climate, which I mentioned briefly here. Although Northcott firmly defends the scientific consensus on climate change, he offers a Pascal’s wager-style argument to the effect that changing our current lifestyle would be a good thing even if global warming wasn’t happening:

    action to stem climate change would be prudent even if certain knowledge that it is happening, or about the severity of its effects, is not available or believed. If global warming is humanely caused, then these actions will turn out to have been essential for human survival and the health of the biosphere. In the unlikely even that it is not, then these good actions promote other goods — ecological responsibility, global justice, care for species — which are also morally right. (p. 274)

    Northcott deepens his argument with a discussion of the Christian conception of time. Humanity, in the Christian understanding, is not called primarily to seize control of historical processes, but to witness to God’s love and mercy:

    Time in modernity thus becomes a human project, and ordering time towards human welfare requires economic and political artifice. By contrast, in the Christian account of redemption the future is hopeful because of the Christ events in which bondage to sin and suffering is undone by the definitive redeeming action of God in time. In the Christian era time is no longer a political project as it had been for Plato, and as it has become again in post-Christian modernity. Instead Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection are teh actions of the eternal, transforming the direction and future possibilities of human existence within time from beyond time. (p. 278 )

    In previous chapters Northcott had outlined certain key Christian practices – such as dwelling, pilgirmage and eucharistic feasting – that are in sharp contrast with our technological-industrial world’s obsession with mobility, speed, and utility. These practices aren’t means of engineering history, but ways of dwelling within history, in light of the cross of Jesus:

    In these practices Christians take time to order their lives around the worship of God because they believe that they have been given time by the re-ordering of creation which occurs when the Creator dwells inside time in the Incarnation and so redeems time and creation from futility, and from the curse of original sin. In the shape of this apocalyptic event, Christians understand that they have seen not only the future redemption of creatureliness, but the way, the ‘shape of living’, that they are called to pursue between the present and the future end of time. (pp. 278-9)

    For Christians, living in a way that minimizes our use of limited resources and impact on the planet isn’t simply a means to reducing envionmental despoilation, it’s living “with the grain of the universe,” to use John Howard Yoder’s memorable phrase. Peaceableness, which encompasses our relationships with the human and non-human creation, is ultimately in sync with the deepest and most lasting reality, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

  • Hippie cons?

    Dan McCarthy writes that, along with Ron Paulites, post-industrial localist conservatives are a hopeful sign on the Right, and kindly mentions this blog as a small data point. Whether this adds up to a “movement” is anyone’s guess, but the blogosphere (ironically) has given me the opportunity to be exposed to people who take issues like localism, food, sustainability, and the environment seriously, but from a distinctly conservative point of view (often, but not always, rooted in a religious view of the world).

    I have in mind here folks like Russell Arben Fox, Patrick Deneen, John Schwenkler (who Dan also mentions), Rod Dreher, the Caelum et Terra bloggers, and the now defunct New Pantagruel webzine, among others. It remains to be seen, though, whether a) this impulse is confined to a few blogospheric eccentrics and malcontents (and I mean that with all affection!) and b) whether it’s properly seen as part of “the Right.” On the last point, I’m not terribly hopeful that American conservatism can or particularly wants to address the concerns that these folks are raising.

  • Surprisingly relevant

    H. Richard Niebuhr on what Karl Barth called “culture Protestantism”:

    How often the Fundamentalist attack on so-called liberalism–by which cultural Protestantism is meant–is itself an expression of cultural loyalty, a number of Fundamentalist interests indicate. Not all though many of these antiliberals show a greater concern for conserving the cosmological and biological notions of older cultures than for the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The test of loyalty to him is found in the acceptance of old cultural ideas about the manner of creation and the earth’s destruction. More significant is the fact that the mores they associate with Christ have at least as little relation to the New Testament and as much connection with social custom as have those of their opponents. The movement that identifies obedience to Jesus Christ with the practices of prohibition, and with the maintenance of early American social organization, is a type of cultural Christianity; though the culture it seeks to conserve differs from that which its rivals honor. The same thing is true of the Marxian-Christian criticism of the “bourgeois Christianity” of democratic and individualistic liberalism. Again, Roman Catholic reaction against the Protestantism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seems often to be animated by a desire to return to the culture of the thirteenth; to the religious, economic, and political institutions and to the philosophical ideas of another civilization than ours. In so far as the contemporary attack on Culture-Protestantism is carried on in this way, it is a family quarrel between folk who are in essential agreement on the main point; namely, that Christ is the Christ of culture, and that man’s greatest task is to maintain his best culture. Nothing in the Christian movement is so similar to cultural Protestantism as is cultural Catholicism, nothing more akin to German Christianity than American Christianity, or more like a church of the middle class than a workers’ church. The terms differ, but the logic is always the same: Christ is identified with what men conceive to be their finest ideals, their noblest institutions, and their best philosophy. (Christ and Culture, pp. 102-3)

    It’s not hard to think of several contemporary parallels here: the fundamentalist yearning for a “Christian America,” the reduction of Christian distinctives to left-wing peace and justice sloganeering, or the reactionary Christian urge to defend “Western Civilization” at all costs (against immigrants, Muslims, etc.). Niebuhr would have no trouble spotting these as variants of the “Christ of culture” theme.

  • One of these things is not like the others

    Rod Dreher writes:

    I think the most common, and superficially common-sensical, questions that comes up in discussions of this issue is, “How does Jill and Jane’s marriage hurt Jack and Diane’s?” The idea is that unless you can demonstrate that a gay marriage directly harms traditional marriage, there is no rational objection to gay marriage.

    But this is a shallow way to look at it. We all share the same moral ecology. You may as well ask why it should have mattered to the people of Amherst, Mass., if some rich white people in Charleston, SC, owned slaves. Don’t believe in slavery? Don’t buy one. Similarly, why should it matter to the people of Manhattan if the people of Topeka wish to forbid a woman there to have an abortion? Or, conversely, why do the people of Topeka care if women in New York City choose to abort their unborn children? Don’t believe in abortion? Don’t have one.

    Gee, what could possibly be the morally relevant difference between 1. owning another human being as a chattel slave, 2. disposing of an unborn human life and, 3. entering into a lifelong loving partnership with another consenting, adult human being?

    “Moral ecology” arguments, while not something I’d dismiss out of hand, depend on there being something intrinsically wrong with whatever act or phenomenon it is that’s under consideration. If it’s not bad in itself, what reason is there to believe it will “pollute” (i.e. affect in a harmful way) the moral ecology?

    In the case of slavery, and arguably abortion, it’s not at all difficult to see what makes them bad–they harm other human beings, or violate their liberty, etc. However, in the case of gay marriage, its goodness or badness is precisely what’s at issue. For those of us who see same-sex marriages as just as capable, in principle, of manifesting virtue and contributing to human flourishing as opposite sex ones, there’s no particular reason to worry about damaging the moral environment (and, by implication, straight people’s marriages). The moral ecology argument depends on a prior demonstration of the inherent wrongness of gay marriage itself, which hasn’t been forthcoming.

  • The church and social justice

    Derek and Christopher have both been pondering the issue. Also relevant is this post on Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society from Fr. Chris.

    I’ve wondered from time to time if part of the problem isn’t that the church has lost the idea of vocation. Instead of equipping lay people for ministry in the world (including, for those who are called to it, politics), we seem to have shifted to a model where the institutional church is seen as the primary locus of Christian political activity, as a kind of social service agency/political advocacy organization. By contrast, a more vocational model might focus more on spiritual and moral formation in the context of classic Christian practices like worship, prayer, Bible study, and works of mercy.

    This isn’t to say that churches shouldn’t speak and act corporately on issues of social concern, but maybe they should be more selective about it. It’s too easy for the church to become identified with a partisan political agenda when it insists on speaking about every issue under the sun, especially ones where sorting out the right position depends on a lot of contentious judgments about matters of empirical fact. The church speaks most powerfully, it seems to me, when it can speak with moral clarity rooted in fundamental Christian principles.

  • More from Beckmann on food aid and the farm bill

    Last week I blogged about Bill Moyers’ recent interview with Bread for the World’s David Beckmann. Beckmann discussed, among other things, how current US farm policy distorts food aid programs for very poor parts of the world. You can read more from Beckmann at the Christian Century here. Beckmann is clear that it’s a complicated issue, but there are some fairly straightforward ways in which current policy favors big US agribusiness to the detriment of the recipients of aid.