I suggested yesterday that the Mormon church might not be very happy with Beck's assertion that it doesn't stand for social justice. Today, I read this in the New York Times:
Philip Barlow, the Arrington professor of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University, said, “One way to read the Book of Mormon is that it’s a vast tract on social justice.”
“A lot of Latter-day Saints would think that Beck was asking them to leave their own church,” he said.
Mr. Barlow said that just this year, the church’s highest authority, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, issued a new “Handbook of Instructions” in which they revised the church’s “threefold mission” and added a fourth mission statement: Care for the poor.
Also of note, today Beck apparently dialed it back a bit, saying to his audience:
"There's a lot of people who say social justice and some of them don't mean Marxism, but others do. And you need to know which is it."
If your church is preaching social and economic justice, you'd better do some digging and find out exactly what that means. Because if that means 'big government" if that means yes you've got to support these big government programs, then you don't have a church, you have an organ of the government. You have the anglican church over in England, which we left. You have the church of england. Separation of church and state It's weird that I have to argue with someone like Jim Wallis the separation of church and state. Now if your church is talking about social justice in the way that you empower yourself to go out and help the poor, well that's exactly what Jesus or Allah or Buddha or whoever it is, would like you to do.
There's just so much comedy in Beck's attempts to analyze history and politics. I love how the Church of England, which "we" left (I guess Beck doesn't have any Episcopalians in his audience), is somehow cast as the bad guy in this. Really? The church of England is what we should fear American churches becoming? Because, in many ways, I'd be OK with that.
But of course, the underlying issue is total nonsense. A church speaking out in favor of social justice, even in favor of particular kinds of program (e.g., the minimum wage or universal health care) doesn't in any way, shape or form make it an "organ of the state."
I know, I know: Why argue with a crazy person? But again, crazy person with a megaphone deserves to be refuted.
Thinking about my post yesterday, I realize one thing that I neglected to touch on was the disconnect that seems to exist in the minds of those who believe that Jesus did not preach a message of social justice between the teaching of Jesus and the prophetic tradition in Hebrew literature.
Now, I'll grant that for many of the anti-social justice Christians (among whom Beck clearly wants to put himself), the prophetic books of the Bible don't seem to mean what they do to people who can, for example, read. For some, "prophecy" in the Biblical sense has nothing to do with the plea that the prophets make to follow the commands of God in seeking justice for the oppressed, the widow, the orphan, and the sojourner. It's got nothing to do with the divine condemnation of those who practice injustice, who "attach land to land, and lie down with the temple prostitutes on garments given in pledge." It's got nothing to do with the patterns of social malformation that afflicted Israel and Judah in the monarchical period, despite the very clear implications of the words of the prophets themselves. No matter how directly the prophets seem to be addressing issues of injustice and socio-political oppression, to a particular brand of Christian "literalist" (whose literalism never seems to actually connect to the literal meanings of words) the prophets don't have any concern for any of this. Rather, the prophetic books are all about the far, far distant future, and have no relevance to the people to whom they were actually preached.
Jim Wallis likes to tell a story about working with a youth group once. He handed out Bibles and scissors, and told his students to cut out of the Bible all the passages they could find that pertained to social justice. By the time they were done, the Bible's were falling apart, unusable, because the removal of those passages had destroyed them. As he likes to say, that's what you have when you remove social justice from the Bible, a book full of holes.
Beck's reading of the Bible, with its individualistic emphasis on "you" and what "you" personally can do to help people, divorces Christian responsibility from the social context that was so central to the religion of Jesus by divorcing it from the prophetic calls for social justice that were the heart, the very heart of the prophetic books. Any time spent with Amos, Hosea, or Micah will demonstrate this fact.
More's the pity then that Beck is attempting to lead so many Christians away from what is at the heart of their faith, at the heart of the Bible, and at the heart of Jesus' teaching.
What revulsion I still have left over in me after contemplating Marc Theissan (about whom more later, I hope), is reserved these days for Glen Beck.
In fairness, Glen Beck is crazy. Ordinarily, I have a great deal of compassion for the crazy. But your average crazy person does not have a nationally televised talk show in which he encourages others to share his craziness. Nor is he treated as an authority on anything apart from the color of the sky in his particular little universe.
But Beck, of course, does have such a show, which is why it's important to push back against his craziness. And in this case, the particular craziness dovetails well with the overall questions of religion and morality.
The other day, you may recall, Beck let loose with the following tirade on his radio show:
"I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them ... are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words.
Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"
This raised some eyebrows among many Christians, who understand social justice to be an integral part of the Christian message. Today, Beck returned to the subject:
According to Beck, then, the teaching of Jesus is a purely personal and individual demand to do small, specific acts of good, rather than a general appeal to social justice. Therefore, or so the argument goes, anyone who seeks social justice as an expression of their Christian faith is deviating from the Gospel.
This warrants some commentary:
First, it's not at all clear to me that Beck understands the first thing about Jesus' teaching. Listen to his commentary again. He says repeatedly that the Gospel is about "you!" That is, about particular, isolated, atomized individuals. We aren't, on Beck's reading the of the Gospel, associated or related to larger communities. We are alone, and our moral action is wholly in our own hands.
What's striking about this is how divorced it makes the teaching of Jesus from its own context, which was a society in which the interrelation of individual and communal responsibility was quite explicit. The modern, atomized individual doesn't enter the picture. Even when Jesus addresses individuals, he addresses them as individuals incorporated into a social context.
Second, nevertheless, what it means ethically to respond to Jesus' teaching is not simply a matter of reading the Bible and then doing it, in some simplistic sense. Quite the contrary, it's a matter of figuring how how we, the readers, are to respond to the text that we're reading. Even were we to give Beck the benefit of the doubt and agree with him that Jesus is addressing only particular individuals, that still leaves us with the question of what we, both individually and corporately, ought to do to respond faithfully to his call. In some cases that will mean direct and personal individual action, but in other cases, and far more crucially in the context of our responsibility for society, it will mean collective action, and collective action, insofar as it is motivated by the Gospel, will be a matter of seeking social justice.
It is interesting, though, to contemplate what Beck seems to be saying at this point: does he not believe in collective action? Does he not believe that one of the functions of society is to establish justice? Does he not believe that justice is social as well as (perhaps instead of) individual? I suspect that insofar as he's given the matter thought (an hypothesis for which I have no evidence), he must believe in collective action! Leaving aside the rather obvious point that this is what societies are, he himself aspires to be the leader of a movement, the goal of which is to effect some form of social change -- and here's the kicker -- in response to perceived social injustice! That is to say, Beck is fashioning himself as the leader of a social justice movement.
The question then, is what is it about churches that teach and preach social justice that bothers' Beck. I can't imagine it's really an objection to collective action for the sake of social change. It's got to be an objection in terms of content. He wants social change, but he wants the right kind of social change (don't ask me what the content of his definition of the "right kind" of social change is, though. It's some kind of inchoate return to a simpler age).
But liberal churches that talk about social change generally mean such things as advocating for universal health care, better public education, and more social equality across a number of issues. And that, for Beck, is the problem, as is evident from the clip above. He's objecting to Catholic Churches pushing for universal health care, or seeking to overcome poverty. And while it's not surprising to me that he knows some Cardinals somewhere that object to some dimensions of the liberal social justice agenda, insofar as they are opposed, in principle, to social justice tout court, they are themselves in fact ignorant of Roman Catholic Social Teaching, which may be the best kept secret in Catholicism, but not, I had always assumed, from its Bishops!
Beck of course, knows nothing of Roman Catholic social thought. He may know little about his own Mormon faith. I wonder if the official position of the Mormon church is really that they don't believe in social justice? I would be surprised if that were the stand they wanted to take.
In the end, Beck is just another right wing populist demagog. But Demagoguery is dangerous when it becomes influential. There is a great deal in liberal religious approaches to social justice to criticize, but Beck lacks the knowledge and the wisdom to be able to engage in a genuinely trenchant criticism of progressive religious appeal for social justice. He froths and spews, and produces the most inane and inaccurate garbage, but there is nothing, in the end, of substance beneath all of the foam. He commentary really is, "a tale told by an idiot. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Via Martin Marty, we find this interview in the Wall Street Journal with former Israeli spy, former Muslim, and convert to Christianity, Mosab Hassan Yousef. In his convert's zeal, Yousef says of his former co-religionists:
At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don't want to admit this is an ideological war.
"The problem is not in Muslims," he continues. "The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to."
This is, as the saying goes, unhelpful, on multiple levels.
First, Yousef's agenda in all of this, to sell a book, is pretty transparent. While I'm sure he's 100% sincere in his religious outlook, he publicizing a perverse and distorted understanding of both Islam and Christianity with these claims.
Second, it's important to bear in mind that his condemnation of Islam is a condemnation of a small, particularly virulent strain in a religion of over a billion people, the vast majority of whom would never contemplate or approve of terrorism, nor would their leaders.
Third, as Marty points out, the idea of a fanatical, murderous, warrior God is not unique to Islam, but is certainly well represented in both Jewish and Christian texts as well. All three religions have a violence problem, both in terms of their texts and in terms of their history. It's what we do with those texts and that history that defines how we go forward.
Fourth, as a general matter, condemning another person's God concept is a loser as a strategy to promote communication. As an evangelical Christian, Yousef may understandably feel compelled to share his faith with the Muslim community from whose ranks he came. But if so, he's picked an awful way to do so. People of different faiths can and do disagree, and ought to be able to talk honestly about those disagreements. But insofar as the conversation starts with someone saying "now, let me tell you why your God is the essence of evil," no real communication can take place.
I actually have a lot of sympathy for Yousef. I have no doubt that it was difficult to break with his family, friends, and community in order to adopt a new faith. And given the history of Hamas, I'm sure its dangerous as well for him. Nevertheless, what he's done in this interview, and presumably also his book, isn't going to help anyone. Certainly not himself, and almost as certainly, not the many other Muslims he hopes to reach through his evangelization.
Martin Marty, echoing Rene Girard, summarizes things well:
Henceforth? Max Scheler wrote that an apostate “is engaged in a continuous chain of acts of revenge against his own spiritual past.” There may be plenty against which to react, but one has to ask what good his demonizing of his neighbor’s God will do in the already mutually demonizing conflicts of our day. What René Girard calls “the mimetic principle” is in action here and these days: You say something about our God and they say something worse about ours, so we say something “worser” yet about theirs, in a constant escalation which can lead to neither security for us or a better (in our eyes) alternative for them.
Fun facts about Paul Ryan's "conservative" budget alternative: It actually raises taxes on 90% of all taxpayers, eliminates Medicare, doesn't reduce the deficit, and doesn't balance the budget.
I say, let Congress vote on it, and get all the Republicans on record.
For many years, my impression of the Washington Post was formed by the picture of heroic journalism created by All The President's Men. I don't know what happened to that Post, but today's Post has decided that scraping the bottom of the barrel to find third-rate apologists for torture to populate its editorial pages is consistent with its reputation for fine journalism.
Witness the recipient of today's Tendentious Argument of the Day award:
Where was the moral outrage when fine lawyers like John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Steve Bradbury and others came under vicious personal attack? Their critics did not demand simple transparency; they demanded heads. They called these individuals "war criminals" and sought to have them fired, disbarred,impeached and even jailed. Where were the defenders of the "al-Qaeda seven" when a Spanish judge tried to indict the "Bush six"? Philippe Sands, author of the "Torture Team," crowed: "This is the end of these people's professional reputations!" I don't recall anyone accusing him of "shameful" personal attacks.
Marc Theissen really is a despicable and immoral creep. First, he defends the indefensible Bush Administration use of torture against detainees. Then, he attacks Justice Department lawyers who defended these detainees according to the standards of the American legal tradition. Then, in an act of dishonesty and shamelessness worthy of a first class sociopath, he combines the two arguments, by excusing war criminals John Yoo and Jay Bybee in the process of attacking lawyers who did precisely what they were supposed to do.
Yoo and Bybee, just to be clear, weren't fulfilling their professional responsibilities as lawyers. They were thwarting them. The lawyers who defended Al Qaeda suspects (many of whom, as it turns out, were actually innocent!), were acting in the best traditions of the U.S. legal system.
I continue to hope that one day John Yoo will decide to take an ill informed vacation in Spain, a country which claims universal jurisdiction for human rights crimes, so that he'll eventually get the trial he so richly deserves. Marc Theissen has committed no crime, and so there's nothing to prosecute. He's just morally bankrupt.
In a better world, GOP stalwarts would be standing up for Grant as one of the leading figures of their party’s founding. Grant stood for a humane approach to Native American policy, and did more for African-Americans than any president between Lincoln and Johnson. He deployed federal troops against the Ku Klux Klan, got Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1875. And of course before becoming President, he won the Civil War, which was kind of a big deal.