It occurs to me that, the election having passed, this blog has turned heavily toward matters religious. This wasn’t a conscious choice, and I’m neither apologizing nor promising to continue. But I am aware of the adages that “all that’s not eternal is eternally out of date” (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves) and “He who marries the spirit of the age soon finds himself a widower” (variously attributed).
That said, these are both religious and au courant.
A week ago, I commented on the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, deciding to allow “an expansion of the Christian marriage sacrament” in the diocese, asking, rhetorically if not archly, what “Christian marriage sacrament” she was referring to.
Well Glory Be! I’ve seen the light, now that NPR’s Melissa Block has spoken to the Washington National Cathedral’s dean, the Rev. Gary Hall:
BLOCK: Rev. Hall, I gather that it was last year that the Episcopal bishops approved the rite for same-sex marriage – the language to be used at these ceremonies. How different is it from the language for heterosexual marriage, apart from the obvious gender references?
HALL: One of the things I think that same-sex marriage has to teach straight people is about the possibility of a totally equal and mutual relationship before God. Our marriage service that’s in our prayer book – which, you know, has been revised several times since 1549 – carries with it the vestiges of a patriarchal society, so…
BLOCK: How so?
HALL: So, well – you know, for example, handing the bride over to the groom; the vows in the prayer book, up until 1928, were love, honor and obey for the woman. As much as we’ve tried to revise our marriage service to make everything equal and mutual, it still has with it some connotations and vestiges of pre-modern ways of understanding male-female relationships.
I think one of the ways in which gay and lesbian couples really can teach something to straight couples is the way in which they hold up the possibility of an absolute equality and mutuality in marriage. And so this new rite, it’s entirely different than the old marriage service. It’s really grounded in baptism, and the idea of a radical equality of all people in Christ and before God.
(Emphasis added). In other words (Duh!), they haven’t “expanded the sacrament.” They’ve discarded the historical Anglican understanding of marriage, instantiated in its services, as too pre-modern, and invented a trendy, new, egalitarian rite!
Some of us troglodytes have been insisting that you cannot simply decree Marriage Equality® without implicating the question of what marriage is. (Well, we sort of grunt it since we’re troglodytes, but that’s the gist of our grunts.) We can take cold comfort from this tacit admission that we’re right.
But really, who cares? All that matters is polling data and weathervanes. Logic is sooooo pre-modern and patriarchal.
Having raised the bar of “just how crazy can things get!?,” the Episcopalians make room for Evangelicals to get crazier, too, with the dubious assurance that they’re still relatively conservative. Some are predictably making the most of it.
Do Evangelicals still sing “How firm a foundation ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in His excellent word”? Do they wink or smirk when they sing it?
(Farewell, fond thoughts of some day chanting the Prayer of the Hours at an Inaugural!)
When you look at a gun, do you see danger or safety? It all depends on the angle you’re looking from, risk perception experts say. The gun control debate is ultimately a clash of competing worldviews, and it’s very fraught. Each side draws on symbolic narratives — I would call them myths — with deep roots in the American past.
So says Ira Chernus at Religion Dispatches. After that introduction, I had to read on — but not very far.
The big challenge for gun-control advocates will be to summon up a master-myth, a story that takes aim at the heart of the great American love affair with guns—and that will be a tricky shot.
In other words, the gun control lobby really doesn’t have a real “symbolic narrative” or “myth.”
Okay, I really did read further, but that’s still my conclusion. The gun control lobby needs a myth,. Maybe they could even come up with one from the Social Gospel, if they can just figure out how to sanitize or disguise that nasty old word “sin,” which is seems is not all that popular in “Christian” America.
When you must invent and popularize a new myth before you enter the game, you’ve already lost, bunky. At least in the short term. Myths don’t “go viral.”
* * * * *
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 