A Thinking Reed

Category: Religion and society

  • Fox on The Party Faithful

    Russell Arben Fox has a substantial post (he doesn’t really write any other kind) on Amy Sullivan’s new book, The Party Faithful, about the up-and-down relationship between the Democratic party and religious believers. I haven’t read the book, but it sounds interesting, and Russell’s reflections are worth checking out in their own right.

  • “Making God’s kingdom real”

    Matthew Yglesias, pointing to this post by Alexia Kelley at the TPM Cafe discussion of E. J. Dionne’s Souled Out (see my previous post), says that it exhibits “a side of the ‘religious left’ that strikes me as a bit creepy and illiberal.” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it does employ a style of language that I find a bit wrongheaded:

    It is particularly tempting for people who are privileged to have a seat at important tables to forget that our task is nothing less than making God’s kingdom real.

    […]

    Clearly, all of this has specific political implications, but it also requires a more expansive religious imagination that is mindful of ultimate ends. For Christians, this is the work of building God’s kingdom up here on earth – realizing a time of justice and peace. Our Jewish brothers and sisters speak of tikkun olam, repairing or perfecting the world. Martin Luther King, Jr. and thousands of nameless heroes of the civil rights movement were challenging unjust social structures, but they were also converting hearts and moving spirits through an uncompromising moral witness to human dignity.

    I’m genuinely curious where this language of “building God’s kingdom” or “making God’s kingdom real,” which seems to be a staple of some segments of the Religious Left, comes from. It strikes me as both biblically and theologically dubious. Does God need us to build his kingdom? I can’t think of any place in the New Testament where this kind of language is used. And it seems to imply a very Pelagian view of human agency. So, what is its historical provenance? Does it come from the social gospel movement?

    It also, as I’ve argued before, seems to identify God’s Kingdom with an idealized social and political state of affairs. But the final advent of the Kingdom, at least as traditionally understood, involves far more than this. We’re talking about the end of suffering, disease, and death and the healing of all relationships between human beings and God. No political settlement engineered by human beings, however just, can accomplish this.

  • Dionne on faith and politics

    I’ve always liked E. J. Dionne’s work, and there was a good interview with him on NPR (listen here) this morning about his new book Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. Here’s an article he recently published at Commonweal.

    Dionne’s earlier book Why Americans Hate Politics is a great overview of the U.S. political scene, though a bit dated by now.

  • More on +Rowan’s lecture

    Via Fr. Chris, an in-depth analysis and defense of the now-infamous Rowan Williams “sharia lecture” by Mike Higton, a theologian and scholar of Williams’ work. As Higton says in his brief summary:

    Despite everything you’ve heard and read, the most striking thing about Rowan Williams’ lecture is that he mounts a serious and impassioned defence of ‘Enlightenment values’.

    Fr. Chris also makes the following point that’s well worth considering:

    It is always interesting — frustrating, too — to observe how Muslims are criticized illegitimately for doing things that Christians seem to be called to in some ways as well. 1 Cor 6 seems to suggest that we Christians should also avoid bringing our legal disputes into the secular realm, solving them within the Church wherever possible. The Muslim system goes further than this, so the situations are not identical. But on the face of it, I don’t see the desire to adjudicate some claims within one’s faith community — especially where there are safeguards so no one is coerced to give up their basic human rights, an important caveat in Williams’ proposal — is illegitimate.

    P.S. See also Ross Douthat and Alan Jacobs for somewhat more critical, but still intelligent takes.

  • Making room for religious law?

    There’s been a lot of blogospheric hubabaloo about this rather dry and academic lecture given by Rowan Williams on the possibility of recognizing, in some official fashion, religious legal jurisdictions within a pluralistic society. What was reported as the Archbishop appeasing Islamic extremists is, in reality, a nuanced exploration of some significant issues in the philosophy and theology of law.

    In fact, Williams’ lecture is an interesting discussion of some of the issues we’ve been batting around here, specifically the question of how particular religious identities can be expressed within a pluralistic and secular state. What Williams is exploring is the possibility that, for certain specified matters, religious believers could choose to “opt-in” to legal (or quasi-legal) arrangements based in religious principle. Which sounds to me like a form of religiously-based arbitration.

    The emphasis here is on the need to recognize that society is composed not just of individuals, but of a plurality of groups, each with their own particular identity. And that each person has plural identities in being both a citizen of the state and a member of one or more group within society. To allow people to opt-in to certain particular legal or quasi-legal frameworks is part of recognizing the reality of religious and other identities and the claims they make upon their adherents. So, a Muslim might choose to have certain issues relating to marriage or finances adjudicated by an Islamic “court” within the broader framework of the law of the state.

    Rowan is careful to note that there are potential pitfalls in making sure that all people have their rights as citizens secured and that coercion and abuse are avoided. He is insistent that there be a prior guarantee of equality before the law and a baseline morality for all citizens. And this is where his lecture seems most germane to the issues we’ve been hashing out. He sees the role of the law as “a mechanism whereby any human participant in a society is protected against the loss of certain elementary liberties of self-determination and guaranteed the freedom to demand reasons for any actions on the part of others for actions and policies that infringe self-determination.” In other words, the authority of particular communities over their members is limited by recognition of an essential shared human dignity.

    It is not to claim that specific community understandings are ‘superseded’ by this universal principle, rather to claim that they all need to be undergirded by it. The rule of law is – and this may sound rather counterintuitive – a way of honouring what in the human constitution is not captured by any one form of corporate belonging or any particular history, even though the human constitution never exists without those other determinations. Our need, as Raymond Plant has well expressed it, is for the construction of ‘a moral framework which could expand outside the boundaries of particular narratives while, at the same time, respecting the narratives as the cultural contexts in which the language [of common dignity and mutually intelligible commitments to work for certain common moral priorities] is learned and taught’ (Politics, Theology and History, 2001, pp.357-8).

    This is similar to what I’ve been calling “chastened” liberalism: it upholds the irreducible importance of self-determination and the need for a sphere of free action for the individual, but it also respects the reality of “thick” communities. It refrains from trying to loosen their bonds more than is necessary to ensure an essential measure of justice and freedom for each person as well as a kind of modus vivendi or negotiated peace between different communities within a society. This would be in contrast to a more universalizing or “crusading” liberalism that upholds a single form of life as the best for every person: the free-wheeling, unattached, cosmopolitan individual.

    Now, It’s not entirely clear to me how much freedom Rowan envisions people having “over against any and every actual system of social life.” For instance, if I can opt-in to a more restrictive religious law, can I also opt-out again? In other words, exactly how much authority does he envision ceding to religious communities? Is it possible to give communities a significant degree of autonomy while still upholding the principle that whether or not to belong to such a community is a matter of individual choice? This is, I think, the more reasonable version of the concern raised, somewhat hysterically, in some quarters by Rowan’s speech. I recommend reading the whole thing, though it is a bit dense in places.

  • Whose faith? Which rationality?

    In a comment to this post, Eric makes the valuable point that “reason” is not a univocal term. He points out that what some theologians are up to is trying to recover a richer notion of what reason is. He refers to Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address which called for a kind of “re-Hellenization” of our understanding of what reason does in contrast to the often dessicated account of reason offered by much modern (and post-modern) thought.

    Now, I think this is all to the good. There definitely is a strain in post-Enlightenment thought that has reduced reason to instrumental or scientific rationality, banishing everything else, such as religious and moral truth, to the realm of the subjective.

    However we understand reason though, we need to be careful not to smuggle our preferred conclusions into our definition of rationality. For instance, should reason be defined as that which, when rightly used, leads us to God? This makes atheists irrational by definition, but that sounds like a word game or winning by definition. It’s more charitable to admit that different people, employing their powers of reason to the best of their ability, can come to different conclusions about God’s existence and other important questions of existence.

    I agree that there is a problem with certain modernist accounts of rationality to the extent that they restrict the category of knowledge to beliefs supported by a certain kind of evidence or method of inquiry – that appropriate to scientific work. This excludes certain modes of knowing – personal, experiential, intuitive, even mystical – a priori. A more comprehensive view of reason would see these as complementary ways of knowing, not inferior ones. But by their very nature these modes of knowing aren’t publicly demonstrative or easily verified intersubjectively. So, as a basis for deliberating about the common good they have problems.

    The challenge, if a pluralistic society is to find some kind of modus vivendi, is to locate an overlapping consensus on the conditions for a relatively decent social order. To say that Christians should be in the public sphere “as Christians,” as Stanley Hauerwas likes to say, leaves unclear what it means for them to be there as Christians alongside non-Christians. Should Christians seek to embody their convictions about what’s right in the law, to bring it into conformity with God’s law, as Mike Huckabee says? Or should they take a strict policy of non-involvement with the structures of government?

    I sometimes think that this is more of a theoretical problem than a practical one. Personally, I often find I have more in common politically with my some of my secular friends than many of my co-religionists. Indeed, I have little difficulty finding common ground with them on a whole host of issues. Does this mean that my political views are insufficiently informed by my religion? Maybe. But it could also be that religious belief under-determines political belief by its very nature. After all, I’m hardly the first person to observe that the line from Christian doctrine and moral principles to concrete policy prescriptions is hardly a short or straight one.

    This brings up another, often unappreciated, fact: we talk all too easily about “the” Christian tradition or “the” Christian narrative. But there is no single, coherent, uncontested Christian narrative. The Christian tradition is an ongoing conversation or argument, sometimes a bloody one. In a very important sense it’s highly misleading to think in terms of “Christians” being aligned with or in conflict with “non-Christians” or “secularism.” There simply is no unified Christian community or perspective on society. This may be a tragedy or a blessing depending on your point of view, but it’s a fact that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

    I guess what I’m saying is that however we understand reason, it’s not going to guarantee unanimity on the ordering of our public life. In fact, one of the most important conditions of a peaceful and liberal society is that those in the minority – who, after the votes are counted, still dissent – can count on their rights being respected and that unanimous agreement isn’t a necessary condition for social peace. The same need is present in the church, where we see that even shared theological premises don’t automatically generate agreement on contentious issues.

    I’m not pretending to have resolved the issue: it’s an open question whether we can continue to get along and seek the common good while maintaining divergent conceptions of the good. But this may be a problem that’s never “solved” once and for all – it may not be a theoretical solution that we need, but the virtues of civility, charity, and humility required to travel alongside those very different from ourselves.

  • Pro-life and pro-Obama

    Interesting post from Frank Schaeffer (son of the famed evangelical guru Francis Schaeffer). Schaeffer’s piece does have a whiff of the Obama-as-messiah meme, though, with its insistence that Obama can lead us to a “spiritual rebirth, a turning away from the false value of consumerism and utilitarianism that have trumped every aspect of human life. […] to stop seeing ourselves as consumers […] to stop seeing ourselves as me and begin to think of we.”

    Is this something the president can really do? Or should try to do? How about just executing the laws and upholding the Constitution for a change?

    (via Levellers)

  • Faith, rationality and the common good

    Fr. Chris has a good post defending Jeffrey Stout from Christian neo-traditionalist critiques. I’m no expert on Stout, but I think I’m overall more sympathetic to what I take to be Stout’s side in this debate.

    Call me an old-fashioned liberal, but I am deeply skeptical about this idea of replacing a shared rationality with appeals to particular “narratives” or “socio-cultural traditions.” And this is not, in my view, a sheerly “secular” or “liberal” view: there is a long theological tradition which holds that the logos that became incarnate in Jesus is also the principle of intelligibility in the universe which is, in principle, accessible to all people. And this shared participation in the logos allows all of us to discern something of the true and good.

    Each tradition, I would suggest, discerns some aspects of the logos, but at the same time “we see through a glass darkly” which mandates a degree of humility in our judgments about the good. It’s not as though we have a “tradition-free” vantage point which gives us access to pure rationality, but that we each start in a particular place, but seek to find common standards for making judgments about the good.

    Keith Ward makes a similar point in discussing Karl Barth’s “Nein!” to natural theology:

    Barth accepted the pluralist view that various competing worldviews can be equally rational or justifiable to their respective adherents, but made the invalid inference that no reasons can be given for accepting a particular revelation. He was right to think that the giving of reasons is very largely an ‘internal’ matter of exhibiting the coherence and integration of your own scheme of beliefs. But he was mistaken in denying that there could be a common basis of human knowledge and experience to which your belief-scheme needs to be related, with varying degrees of plausibility. All of us speak from a specific viewpoint, but we have the best chance of approaching truth when we take fully into account the viewpoints of others on what is, after all, the same reality. (Ward, Re-Thinking Christianity, p. 195)

    This is the core problem as I see it with certain “postmodern” approaches to Christian belief. Yes, you can make it appear that any worldview is as justifiable as any other if you see them as employing incommensurable and competing “rationalities.” However, once you’ve done that, you’ve essentially undermined any claim for your belief-system to be true. After all, if rationality is sheerly up for grabs, what reason do you have for thinking that your worldview gets at the truth any better than your neighbor’s?

    A better starting point – and one that I would argue is theologically sounder – is to assume that all human beings have, in virtue of their innate cognitive abilities, the ability to grasp at least some part of the truth about reality. Now, Christians believe that they have been given a particular insight into the nature of that reality by God’s self-revelation in the history of Israel and in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but this doesn’t necessarily cancel out other insights or knowledge. Given that God is both creator and redeemer, we ought to expect the opposite: that people’s natural God-given capabilities for knowledge will yield genuine insights.

    This ought to encourage a great deal of cooperation and even consensus in thinking about the common good while at the same time allowing Christians (and others) to offer their own distinctive perspectives on that good. I agree what I take to be Stout’s view that, for the most part, whatever consensus is achieved will be ad hoc and empirical, rather than deriving from a priori universal truths embedded in rationality as such, but Christians in particular should expect there to be a great deal of overlap considering that we all share a God-given ability to reason, learn about the world, and reflect upon the good.

  • What kind of religious “center”?

    Bill McKibben reviews two books on Christianity: one by Harvard preacher Peter Gomes, and the other a book from the Barna Institute, the Gallup of evangelical Protestantism, reporting on young people’s perceptions of Christianity.

    Gomes is an interesting guy: a black, old-school New England conservative, Anglophile Baptist minister who happens to be gay. He’s widely regarded as one of America’s best preachers and has published popular collections of sermons as well as a book on the Bible. (I once heard him preach at a Christmas “Carols and Lessons” service in Harvard Memorial Church.)

    In McKibben’s telling, Gomes’ new book focuses on the Gospel texts and seeks to recover the scandalous and countercultural message of Jesus from religious accretions. Jesus, Gomes writes, “came preaching not himself but something to which he himself pointed, and in our zeal to crown him as the content of our preaching, most of us have failed to give due deference to the content of his preaching.”

    McKibben elaborates:

    That preaching, in Gomes’s telling, has several important dimensions. First, it is a doctrine of reversal — of the poor lifted up and the rich laid low. It’s not just that the meek will inherit the earth, a sweet enough sentiment, but that the powerful will lose it. In Jesus’ words, “How terrible for you who are rich now; you have had your easy life; How terrible for you who are full now; you will go hungry!” Jesus takes sides, and usually he is found on the side of the oppressed and unlucky: “The good news was for those who had no good news,” writes Gomes, sounding much like the Catholic liberation theologians of late-twentieth-century South America, now largely suppressed by Rome, who spoke often of Jesus’ “preferential option for the poor.” For the rest of us, we are instructed to love our enemies, to practice the Golden Rule, “love those beyond our comfort zone, and be merciful to others as we hope God will be merciful to us.”

    Turning to unChristian by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, we see a portrait of Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 who have turned against a Christianity that they perceive as “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” “old-fashioned,” “insensitive to others” and having a single-minded emphasis on conversion that’s irrelevant to their lives. “This is a brand of religion that, for all its market share, seems at the beginnings of a crisis.”

    McKibben sees signs of hope, however, in a cross-pollination of moderate evangelicalism and a revivified social gospel movement. He points to the National Association of Evangelicals’ statements on global warming, the work of Jim Wallis-type evangelicals, and the fact that even Rick Warren, the veritable poster boy for suburban mega-churches, has changed the focus of his ministry to addressing dire social needs like third world poverty. Further, McKibben thinks that someone like Peter Gomes, with an emphasis on the message of Jesus, can challenge the nascent moderate and center-left varieties of evangelicalism further in this direction, and in particular on its attitudes toward homosexuality.

    In general, I think the idea of a revitalized religious “center” is a good thing. Not in the sense of a restoration of the oldline quasi-establishment, but in the sense of a living alternative to ultra-conservative or socially comfortable brands of Christianity that have, until recently, been its chief public face in the U.S. The oddness of this situation is only highlighted by the fact that, for instance, in the UK evangelicals seem to be spread over a much broader portion of the political spectrum; the close identification between evangelical Christianity and the Right seems to be a uniquely American phenomenon in significant respects. (Compare, for instance, the views of “conservative” British evangelicals like N. T. Wright and John Stott on issues like debt relief, war, and globalization with their American counterparts.)

    However, I am wary of too pat a distinction between the “preaching about Jesus” and the “preaching of Jesus,” with the latter being preferred to the former. While recovering the challenging and countercultural message of Jesus is surely something American Christians need to do, there’s an opposite danger of ending up in the empty cul-de-sac of 19th and 20th century religious liberalism that reduced Jesus to a preacher of ethics and social reform while downplaying any supernatural claims about his status. This particular stream always ends up running into the sand for a very specific reason: if Jesus is merely a teacher of morals or social reform, once you’ve learned the lesson you don’t need the teacher any more. And, for that matter, once it becomes clear that these teachings are discernible by all people of good will, what does Christianity offer that’s distinctive?

    I think more recent biblical scholarship also reinforces the close identification, rather than separation, of the preaching of Jesus and the preaching about Jesus. Once scholars have dropped certain progressivist assumptions from the 19th century they were able to see that in the preaching of Jesus one’s response to him was decisive for one’s standing in God’s kingdom. This doesn’t return us to an individualist pietism, since the kingdom is a social reality, but it’s a reality with Jesus at the center. (An overview of recent scholarship that I found helpful is Michael McClymond’s Familiar Stranger: An Introduction to Jesus of Nazareth.)

    My worry then is that, in its quest to be socially relevant, “neo”-evangelicalism may be in danger of repeating some of the mistakes of Protestant liberalism. In my view, a revitalized religious center has to hold together dogma and ethics, personal transformation and social reform, mysticism and ministry. If Christians have anything to offer the world it can only be because they think Jesus offers something that transcends (but also affects) politics or social reform. Interestingly, there seems to me to be a real thirst among younger mainliners for a recovery of the traditional spiritual practices of the church along with a recognition that the mainline has too often forsaken mystery, worship and holiness for political activism. And, no doubt, mainliners can learn a lot from the warm-hearted piety of evangelicals. A whole church will, to borrow a phrase from John Paul II, breathe with both lungs – those of the active and contemplative life.

  • Barth, Yoder, and the problem of war

    I assume that most readers of this blog also read Marvin’s site regularly, but in case you don’t, you should really check out his current series on Karl Barth and war:

    Part 1
    Part 2
    Part 3
    Part 4
    Part 5

    With more to come, including a “Yoderian” response to Barth’s position.

    See here for some brief thoughts of my own on J. H. Yoder’s critique of Barth.