Against the Stream

The Damage Done

At Religion Dispatches, David Gushee reflects on the damage done by the often vituperative hostility of many Christians to the gay community. Of his catalogue of injuries, two jumped out at me as being particularly significant:

• Christians, claiming to follow Jesus, have become identified as the chief enemies of gay and lesbian human beings (some of whom are also Christians), and of the moral and legal rights of lesbians and gays, whereas Jesus’ enemies tended to be people who performed exactly this kind of marginalization on the despised ones of their era.
• Christians have become known for a deeply distorted moral agenda by elevating the anti-gay cause to the top of their public ethics, and this in a world afflicted by war, hunger, ecological disaster and all manner of social injustices.

To my way of thinking these two points illustrate what is most perverse about the way so many Christians have historically treated the LGBT community (all the while purposefully ignoring the reality of the reality of gay and lesbian Christians who want to be part of the church). What is at the heart of the Christian faith is belief in the love and grace of God, as revealed in the life and work of Jesus Christ. At the heart of Christ's teaching was the love and forgiveness of God extended to all human beings, as exemplified in a Christian life oriented toward making that grace manifest in how we treat, not only those closest to us, but even those who we might otherwise view as enemies.

But the Christian anti-gay contingent, which has become identified in the popular imagination with Christianity tout court completely reverses that central principle, and instead puts itself in the position of tracking down and identifying enemies to be villified. Instead of the extravagant welcome of Jesus Christ, they build a barbed-wire fence around God and insist that the gay community is on the wrong side of it. This is a twisted, distorted and evil contortion of the Christian faith, and every Christian has an obligation to stand against it.

And of course, as Gushee notes, this perversity has been compounded by focusing on demonizing the gay and lesbian community instead of standing up for economic justice, against war, and in favor of those who are pushed to the margins of society, those among whom Jesus lived and to whom he preached.

I can only hope that, with the end of DOMA, the defeat of Proposition 8, and the increasing number of states allowing for full marriage equality, more and more Christians will come around to recognizing the damage done by their hostility to the gay and lesbian community, repent, and open their arms to welcome everyone, regardless of sexual preference, into the community of God's love. 

Russell and Copleston Show Hitchens and Dawkins How its Done

A propos of my previous post, here are some excerpts from the famous debate between Bertrand Russell and Fredrick Copleston over the existence of God. A much more illuminating exchange than anything ever produced by the new athiest movement.

 

 

Better Atheists Please

Today at Salon.com, Curtis White excerpts his new book, entitled The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers. In his excerpt he makes several criticisms of Christopher Hitchens that I've made myself from time to time, and offers some detailed critique of the metaphysical question-begging in which Hitchens indulges along the way:

I’ll begin with Hitchens’s metaphysics. Of course, a large part of his book is devoted to denouncing the stupidity of religious metaphysics, especially the idea that God is an entity outside of the ordinary workings of nature. But Hitchens has his own metaphysical claims, claims for which he seems not to feel any need to create arguments. In opposition to religion he proposes Enlightenment reason. What is “reason” for Hitchens? Your guess is as good as mine. Is it the rules of logic? Is it the scientific method? Is it Thomas Paine’s common sense? Some combination of the above? Hitchens seems to feel that, of course, everyone already knows what reason is and there is no need to elaborate its function or its virtues. But this “of course” is the marker of ideology, and the ideologist resists examining his own assumptions because to do so would be to make vulnerable his claims to authority. So eager is Hitchens to get on to the next item in his concatenation of religious insults to reason that he can’t be bothered to say what he means by the term. The one thing that he does seem to be sure of is that reason is something that shouldn’t be “outraged.” Nevertheless, there is no real difference between Hitchens’s outrage to reason and an evangelical’s outrage to God.

Of particular interest, I think, is White's analysis of Hitchens' conception of the idea of conscience. He writes:

After all, what is a conscience? Does it light up on a brain scan when we think virtuous thoughts? And if it is innate (and just what exactly does it mean to be innate?) why was Crassus’s crucifixion of six thousand Spartacans lined up along the Appian Way from Rome to Capua in 71 BCE thought by the people of Rome to be an expression of Roman vertù and a very good reason to honor Crassus with a full triumphal procession back into the city? Are we to imagine that the citizens of Rome threw garlands in the path of the conquering hero against their better judgment? Are we to imagine that after the celebration the citizens were stung by conscience and were unable to sleep at night? Or did Crassus merely confirm for Rome that it was what it thought it was, a race of masters?

Religion is of course neither a garauntor of morality nor is its absence an indicator that morality is absent, but the key moral question of any society is whether its morality is simply a reaffirmation of its own self-conception, or whether it contains within it resources of self-critique that allow it to grow in the direction of greater and more expansive conception of the moral good and who is permitted to partake of it. As we have seen this week in the rulings of the Supreme Court, progress happens, but it is by no means either even nor inevitable.

The problem with the neo-athiest confrontation with religion is not that, as a movement, it does not make many important and valid points about the shortcomings of religion, but by engaging in virtually worthless and fundamentally dishonest forms of strawman argumentation, they both weaken their own case and fail to give religious arguments their due in a way that would lead to any kind of genuine undersatnding either of religious history, or philosophy, or doctrine.

Of course, Hitchens was never interested in producing light when he could generate heat, or of creating understanding when he could engage in polemic.

Reading The Bible Is An Art, Not A Science

The New York Times recently reported on a controversy surrounding a recent sermon by Katherine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the USA. In a recent sermon, she made an observation about a story in the Acts of the Apostles. Here's the relevant bit of the passage:

One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour. But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.

In her reading of the passage, the Bishop said:

There are some remarkable examples of that kind of blindness in the readings we heard this morning, and slavery is wrapped up in a lot of it.  Paul is annoyed at the slave girl who keeps pursuing him, telling the world that he and his companions are slaves of God.  She is quite right.  She’s telling the same truth Paul and others claim for themselves.[1]  But Paul is annoyed, perhaps for being put in his place, and he responds by depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness.  Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it.  It gets him thrown in prison.  That’s pretty much where he’s put himself by his own refusal to recognize that she, too, shares in God’s nature, just as much as he does – maybe more so!  The amazing thing is that during that long night in jail he remembers that he might find God there – so he and his cellmates spend the night praying and singing hymns.

Apparently this interpretation of the passage has itself annoyed some more conservative members of the Episcopal church, who have accused the Bishop of everything from Biblical illiteracy to apostasy. At the root of the controversy is the idea that an Episcopal Bishop would express sympathy for the slave girl in this situation, suggesting that Paul was the guilty party for expelling the divinatory spirit from her.

I've preached a lot of sermons over the years. Some good, many mediocre, and I'm sure a few outright stinkers. I can tell you that it's a challenge coming up with something fresh to say sermon after sermon after sermon. And while I probably would not have preached this sermon about this passage, as a reader, I find it to be an interesting example of reading the text against itself. It's certainly a legitimate reading of the passage to suggest that Paul's actions were done, not out of some sense of holy mission or a desire to liberate the girl from demonic possession, but out of simple pique. It's right there in the passage! He did it because he was annoyed. She irritated him to the point where he lashed out at her spiritually in order to deprive her of her spirit.

The point, which is often lost on religious conservatives, is that the reading of the Bible is not a science, but an art, and the subjective factors of the reading and the setting must inevitably affect what it is that the preacher says about a particular passage. Despite the cries of fundamentalists, the "plain sense" of scripture is often notoriously difficult to discern, and may at times be unhelpful in using the text to illuminate the present action of God in the midst of the world. As the Times story goes on to note:

Mikeal C. Parsons, a Baylor University professor and author of a book about Acts, wrote in an e-mail that Bishop Jefferts Schori’s critics are probably right that “she interprets the text in a direction” that the original author would not recognize. “That is to say,” Dr. Parsons wrote, “I do not think the author of Acts is criticizing Paul’s actions in any way, certainly not for failing to recognize her ‘gift of spiritual awareness.’ ”

On the other hand, Dr. Parsons continued, “there is nothing in the text to suggest” that the spirit in the woman was “evil.” The story is not necessarily about an “exorcism” of demonic powers. Rather, after driving the spirit out, Paul is thrown in prison, because “her owners are incensed that their financial exploitation of the girl’s divining powers have ended” — they can no longer profit from her fortunetelling. In that sense, Paul is definitely her liberator, in a literal as well as spiritual sense.

Certainly there is a lot in this passage about slavery. The girl is a slave, and she refers to Paul and his followers as slaves of God. Paul is jailed for depriving the girls owners of the income they gained through her slavery, and so in a certain sense reading the text as a story about liberation from spiritual and literal slavery is also totally legitimate. But it's no more legitimate on its face than Jefferts Schori's reading. While, as Parsons notes, it may not have been the intention of the author of Acts to criticize Paul's action, there is nothing to prevent the reader of the story from doing so. The mistake is in believing that, because the story is in the Bible, it's intended to represent something that we should embrace or endorse. Paul, for better or for worse, comes across in the Bible as an often-unpleasant person, and reading the story in a way that foregrounds the unpleasant aspects of his personality is a completely legitimate interpretive move.

Once more, at the end of the day, the tension here is between an approach to the Bible that suggests that there is one, and only one, correct way of reading it in any and all situations, and one that recognizes that the Bible is, like many texts, a machine for generating interpretations. And while there may be better or worse interpregations of particular passages, or ones that are more or less appropriate to a particular time and place, that judgement has to take place in the context of an exegetical and theological conversation that is always ongoing in the life of the community of faith, not one that is fossilized in a particular and immutable historical form.

Snowden, the NSA, and American Policy

I have been following the whole controversy regarding the NSA's wiretapping authorities, Edward Snowden's revelations about how far they extend, and what it all means with some interest, but I haven't had a lot to say about it because a) I find a lot of the details to be very cloudy at the moment and b) its the kind of controversy that is more likely to reinforce what people already believe about government, intelligence gathering, and our foreign and domestic policy than to shift anything substantively.

That said, there is no question that the NSA controversy raises some legitimate and troubling issues about the extent to which the War on Terror and the attendant changes in U.S. law has put us in a place where we have sacrificed more of our rights to privacy and protection from illegal searches than we are genuinely comfortable with.

My general opinion about the current NSA scandal is that what makes it scandalous is not that the Obama administration transgressed U.S. law (unlike the Bush Administration's wiretapping scandal of last decade), but precisely that everything that was done was legal. The fact that the legislative conventional wisdom surrounding the use of these new technologies has coalessced around the idea that government may have fairly expansive and intrusive rights over it should be troubling, particularly given the lack of any real public debate about the topic.

There hasn't been any evidence presented to this point that the NSA has granted itself unrestricted access over any and all electronic communications within the United States (let alone that the authority to do so rested with relatively low-ranking operatives like Snowden). As of yet, evidence suggests that the NSA's actions were well within established U.S. precedent regarding electronic communications, insofar as they could gather metadata on who was calling whom, but required a warrant to actually establish wiretaps and other direct forms of electronic surveillance. (Though, it should be noted, others disagree with this).

With regard to foreign surveillance, most of the revelations have been somewhat overwhelming. As Kevin Drum notes:

Snowden has so far presented no evidence that NSA has abused its statutory powers. He obviously doesn't like NSA's statutory powers, but that's a different thing. At one point, for example, he says that the focus on whether NSA is sweeping up domestic communications is a "distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%." Maybe so, but spying on foreigners is NSA's whole reason for existence.

Indeed. You can object to the idea that we have an agency that does such things, but the agency exists and, at least with regard to the subject of foreign surveillance, is certainly doing nothing outside of the bounds of the intelligence gathering game. There might be legitimate objections to the fact that this game is played in the first place, but all the evidence thus far suggests that the game is being played, byt the NSA at least, outside of the United States, where there is no expectation of constitutional protections.

But beyond the general question of what the NSA can do versus what it should do, there is the question of how accurate the story is to begin with. As Rick Perlstein notes, at least some of what Glen Greenwald has reported has suffered from not accurately portraying the NSA policy. (And it should be noted, Greenwald has responded more vitriolically than substantially in response to Perlstein's assertions.

And then there is Snowden himself. While on the one hand, I think it's fair to say that his assertions should be judged on their merit and not with regard to any personal evaluation of Snowden as a person, that's difficult to do when a lot of the most inflammatory charges come from Snowden with little to no documentary evidence to back it up. Every grandiose claim that he makes thus actually undermines his own credibility. When he claims, without providing proof, that he could unilaterally wiretap the President's phone, it is legitimate to question his credibility. When he makes dark insinuations that he may be arrested, murdered, or disappeared, he sounds more overwrought than persuasive. By making himself so much the center of the story, he puts his credibility as a messenger directly in the frame of inquiry. Edward Snowden is not Daniel Elsberg, and the Obama Administration is not the Nixon Administration. It would have been much better if Greenwald and Snowden has made the story less about the whistleblower and more about the documents themselves and what they can be legitimately made to prove. That story might well have been less dramatic, but it still would have been very troubling and worth public discussion.

None of this is to suggest that the erosion of civil liberties and privacy over the last several decades, and particularly since 9/11, is not a very important topic that should be addressed in the most urgent way. I was on record very strenuously calling for the impeachment of George Bush in the wake of his own wiretapping scandal, but instead Congress decided to post facto render legal what the Bush adminstration had done, thus opening the door for much of what Edward Snowden is now alleging the Obama adminstration is doing. I would be much happier to go back to an earlier status quo with a higher standard of evidence required for any kind of intrusion into the electronic privacy of U.S. citizens (wherever they might be), which is why I say that the scandel is that any of this is legal in the first place. But that being the case, what is needed is a renewed sense of the important of individual liberty and a Congress and court system willing to enact legislation protecting that liberty and ensuring that those liberties aren't abused by an overzealous executive branch. But as long as the legal status quo remains as it is, any executive, whether Bush, or Obama, or whoever comes next, will use it to the maximum degree the other branches of government allow. This is putatively the reason for a strong system of checks and balances in the Constitution, and it's unfortunate that this system has been so undermined and abused in recent years.

The End of Exodus International

Yesterday, Alan Chambers of Exodus International, an evangelical "ministry" that claimed to "cure" homosexuality, issued what to all appearances was a sincere and heartfelt apology to the gay and lesbian community (via Rachel Held Evans):

Please know that I am deeply sorry. I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents. I am sorry that there were times I didn’t stand up to people publicly “on my side” who called you names like sodomite—or worse. I am sorry that I, knowing some of you so well, failed to share publicly that the gay and lesbian people I know were every bit as capable of being amazing parents as the straight people that I know. I am sorry that when I celebrated a person coming to Christ and surrendering their sexuality to Him that I callously celebrated the end of relationships that broke your heart. I am sorry that I have communicated that you and your families are less than me and mine. 

I was particularly struck by his recognition, which seems to be exceptionally rare in the Christian anti-gay world, that gay and lesbian relationships are real and loving relationships, the end of which (for the sake of being "cured" of homosexuality) is as devastaing for those abandoned as the end of any heterosexual relationship. Additionally, there is this:

More than anything, I am sorry that so many have interpreted this religious rejection by Christians as God’s rejection.  I am profoundly sorry that many have walked away from their faith and that some have chosen to end their lives. For the rest of my life I will proclaim nothing but the whole truth of the Gospel, one of grace, mercy and open invitation to all to enter into an inseverable relationship with almighty God.

This, I think, is the central realization that must ultimately bring about the end of bigotry against the LGBTQ community within the Church. A Christianity that truly believes in the grace of God to the entirety of the human family must embrace that human family in all of its diversity. While it does not seem to me that Chambers has changed his understanding of homosexuality as a theological more moral matter, he does seem to have made the crucial shift of recognizing that, as grace is God's and is extended to everyone, irrespective of their personal failures, the church must necessarily be open to all.

For my part, I'd like to see him take the next step, that of fully embracing the idea that there's nothing wrong with being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered, and that loving and committed relationships among all of those communities can and should be celebrated by the church.

For now though, Exodus International has done the only thing it reasonbly could do in light of this apology: It has closed its doors. As Tony Jones notes on his blog, it will not be missed.