A Thinking Reed

Category: Social and ethical issues

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • O brave new world!

    At the First Things sort-of-blog Jason Byassee reviews what sounds like a fascinating book from Methodist ethicist Amy Laura Hall called Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction which, in Byassee’s words “aims to show that the powerful narrative of ‘progress’ in twentieth-century American Protestantism is linked indelibly with eugenics, abortion, Hiroshima, racism, sexism, psychotropic drugs for kids, and the triumph of a neoliberal economics that grinds the heads of the poor….”

    The debate about genetic manipulation, selective abortion and other kinds of bio-engineering have taken something of a back seat in recent years to what have seemed like more pressing issues, but this is going to be with us for a long time as technology continues to raise new questions. Byassee wonders – with good reason I think – whether the mainline churches in particular have the theological spine left to look critically at the presumption in favor of “progress” and our desire to exercise ever greater control over natural processes.

  • 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.

  • MLK and non-violence

    Given how Martin Luther King Jr. has become a kind of American plaster saint that politicians of all stripes routinely genuflect toward, it’s easy to forget how radical his message was:

    As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; for they ask and write me, “So what about Vietnam?” They ask if our nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence I cannot be silent. Been a lot of applauding over the last few years. They applauded our total movement; they’ve applauded me. America and most of its newspapers applauded me in Montgomery. And I stood before thousands of Negroes getting ready to riot when my home was bombed and said, we can’t do it this way. They applauded us in the sit-in movement–we non-violently decided to sit in at lunch counters. The applauded us on the Freedom Rides when we accepted blows without retaliation. They praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause, and so noble in its praise when I was saying, Be non-violent toward Bull Connor;when I was saying, Be non-violent toward [Selma, Alabama segregationist sheriff] Jim Clark. There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, Be non-violent toward Jim Clark, but will curse and damn you when you say, “Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children. There’s something wrong with that press! (emphasis added)

    More here (via Hit and Run).

    Of all the people currently running for president, who’s really willing to embrace this message?

  • Animal cloning: cui bono?

    Marvin asks:

    So what if it’s safe? Do we need to clone beef cattle, dairy cattle, swine and chickens? It’s not like I’m starving, and I’m not sure how this helps people who are starving. Who benefits from cloning livestock? This seems to be yet another great example of what I’ll call “technologism:” If we can do it; we must. We just can’t seem to help ourselves.

    Not to underestimate the human impetus toward “if it can be done, it will be done,” I think there are very concrete interests at stake here. This summary provides some helpful information:

    For farmers whose livelihoods depend on selling high-quality meat and dairy products, cloning can offer a tremendous advantage. It gives them the ability to preserve and extend proven, superior genetics. They can select and propagate the best animals–beef cattle that are fast-growing, have lean but tender meat, and are disease-resistant; dairy cows and goats that give lots of milk; and sheep that produce high-quality wool. Through cloning, it would be possible to predict the characteristics of each animal, rather than taking the chance that sexual reproduction and its gene reshuffling provide.

    What’s at issue here, it seems to me, is the continuing institutional “commodification” of animals. Less and less are farm animals regarded as beings with their own natures that merit respect. Rather, they’re products that can be engineered to lower costs, suit consumer preferences, and generally behave less like organisms and more like machines. Needless to say, the chief beneficiaries are likely to be big agriculture interests who can afford cloned animals, and the biotech firms who hold the patents to the cloning technology.

    The article linked above tries to make the case for some benefits accruing to the animals from cloning:

    Cloning has the potential to improve the welfare of farm animals by eliminating pain and suffering from disease. “From time to time, in nature, you find a naturally disease-resistant animal,” says Rudenko. “You can expand that genome through cloning, and then breed that resistance into the overall population and help eliminate major diseases in livestock.”

    Cloning can reduce the number of unwanted animals, such as veal calves, says Ray Page, chief scientific officer and biomedical engineer at Cyagra, a livestock cloning company. Veal calves are commonly surplus male offspring from dairy cows. Since the males don’t produce milk, they are not as useful to the dairy industry and are turned into veal calves. Cloning can ensure the creation of more female offspring for dairy production.

    Of course, what this article omits is that a big part of the reason that farm animals are so prone to disease is that they are kept in unnatural and barbaric conditions, which is why our meat is pumped full of hormones and antibiotics. And it’s dubious, to say the least, to suggest that the demand for veal wouldn’t ensure that the supply of calves is maintained.

    It ends up looking like cloning is at best a techno-fix band-aid on the already inhumane conditions that farm animals are subjected to. This is all leaving aside the harm that the cloning process itself inflicts on animals: both the extraction of eggs and the health problems that cloned animals, at least in the early stages, were prone to. The most likely result, I’d guess, will be to reinforce a purely instrumental view of animal life and to increase the profits of those who see animals as little more than meat machines.

  • It’s a small world

    The Mother Jones article on the global impact of China’s environmental problems that I mentioned the other day can be found online here. It’s long but well worth a read.

  • God’s Own Party

    Harold Meyerson points out one of the problems with touting your party or candidacy as the “Christian” one: people will start to actually expect you to live up to the standards of Jesus.

    Here’s something C. S. Lewis had to say about the idea of a “Christian” political party:

    It is not reasonable to suppose that such a Christian Party will acquire new powers of leavening the infidel organization to which it is attached. Why should it? Whatever it calls itself, it will represent, not Christendom, but a part of Christendom. The principle which divides it from its brethren and unites it to its political allies will not be theological. It will have no authority to speak for Christianity; it will have no more power than the political skill of its members gives it to control the behaviour of its unbelieving allies. But there will be a real, and most disastrous, novelty. It will be not simply a part of Christendom, but a part claiming to be the whole. By the mere act of calling itself the Christian Party it implicitly accuses all Christians who do not join it of apostasy and betrayal. It will be exposed, in an aggravated degree, to that temptation which the Devil spares none of us at any time–the temptation of claiming for our favourite opinions that kind an degree of certainty and authority which really belongs only to our Faith. The danger of mistaking our merely natural, though perhaps legitimate, enthusiasms for holy zeal, is always great. Can any more fatal expedient be devised for increasing it than that of dubbing a small band of Fascists, Communists, or Democrats ‘the Christian Party’? The demon inherent in every party is at all times ready enough to disguise himself as the Holy Ghost; the formation of a Christian Party means handing over to him the most efficient make-up we can find. And when once the disguise has succeeded, his commands will presently be taken to abrogate all moral laws and to justify whatever the unbelieving allies of the ‘Christian’ Party wish to do. If ever Christian men can be brought to think treachery and murder the lawful means of establishing the régime they desire, and faked trials, religious persecution and organized hooliganism the lawful means of maintaining it, it will, surely, be by just such a process as this. The history of the late medieval pseudo-Crusader, or the Covenanters, of the Orangemen, should be remembered. On those who add ‘Thus said the Lord’ to their merely human utterances descends the doom of conscience which seems clearer and clearer the more it is loaded with sin.

    All this comes from pretending that God has spoken when He has not spoken. He will not settle the two brothers’ inheritance: ‘Who made Me a judge or a divider over you?’ By the natural light He has shown us what means are lawful: to find out which one is eficacious He has given us brains. The rest He has left to us. (from “Meditation on the Third Commandment,” in God In the Dock)

  • Of staph infections and disappearing honeybees

    What does it mean to say that our industrial food system is “unsustainable”? Michael Pollan suggests an answer: when you insist on treating animals like machines as a necessary requirement of your food system and they persist in behaving like organisms. Call it biological blowback.