Category: Attitude
Monthly First Things dump
Three Idolatries
Whether one thinks that “religion” continues to fade or has made a comeback in the contemporary world, there is a common notion that “religion” went away somewhere, at least in the West. But William Cavanaugh argues that religious fervor never left — it has only migrated … from the church to the nation-state … When nationality becomes the primary source of identity and belonging, he warns, the state becomes the god and idol of its own religion, the language of nationalism becomes a liturgy, and devotees willingly sacrifice their lives to serve and defend their country.
(Robert Benne, describing Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (emphasis added). This is by the same William Cavanaugh who wrote The Myth of Religious Violence, and it almost appears a précis of what I’m finding most interesting in the latter, for instance:
As Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, ours is an unliturgical age in most respects, with one enormous exception: the public life of the citizen of the nation-state. Citizenship in secular countries is tied to symbols and rituals that have been invented for the purpose of expressing and reinforcing devotion to the nation-state.
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The shift from church power to state power is not the victory of peaceable reason over irrational religious violence. The more we tell ourselves it is, the more we are capable of ignoring the violence we do in the name of reason and freedom.
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The function of public education is “the training of American citizens in an atmosphere free of parochial, divisive, or separatist influences of any sort — an atmosphere in which children may assimilate a heritage common to all American groups and religions … This is a heritage neither theistic nor atheistic, but simply civic and patriotic.” A patriotic and united allegiance to the United States is the cure for the divisiveness of religion in public.
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“The designation of the religious and the political is itself a political act.”
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There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons… . In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe. [Quoting Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason]
(The Myth of Religious Violence)
Tertullian at the beginning of the third century said there are three forms of idolatry. One is the cultural or poetic … the other’s philosophical … and the third is political.
The demonisms inherent in the political order, or at least the demonisms to which the political order is especially prone – Tertullian says the most dangerous of these, the most serious of these, is political idolatry, because it carries the sword.
Father Patrick Henry Reardon, discussing his decision no longer to require or to sign Illinois marriage licenses in order to conduct a sacramental marriage.
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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)
Reversals
Machiavelli meets Alinsky. Are there any survivors?
Tipping Point
Does the continuation of civility and moral community require that we maintain the American imperium? Via Rod Dreher:
Father Patrick Reardon, pastor of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, has just released the following statement:
Because the State of Illinois, through its legislature and governor’s office, have now re-defined marriage, marriage licenses issued by agencies of the State of Illinois will no longer be required (or signed) for weddings here at All Saints in Chicago.
Those seeking marriage in this parish will be counseled on the point.
Father Pat
No longer be required or signed. No recognition of the state’s authority over marriage. One is reminded of Alasdair Macintyre’s famous remark about the decline of the Western Roman Empire:
A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium.
I could be wrong, but it sounds like the pastor of All Saints parish has concluded that the continuation of civility and moral community no longer has anything to do with shoring up the American civil order, and in fact depends on repudiating it in the matter of marriage.
A Benedict Option has been embraced by an Orthodox parish in Chicago. Who’s next?
Father Pat has never been bashful about playfully expressing provocative opinions. He’s quite involved in the conservative ecumenical journal, Touchstone, as Senior Editor. He is widely respected and influential beyond Orthodox circles. Though I had not stopped to guess who would be the first fairly-high-profile pastor or denomination to announce such a policy, he probably would not have been in my top ten list. There are much hotter heads and more strident, quick tongues than his. His precedent has gravitas.
The comments to Dreher’s blog add to my conviction that we’ve reached a tipping point. First, the story proved a sort of Rorschach test. Perceptions of Father Pat’s intentions were all over the spectrum, as initially were perceptions of Rod’s approval or disapproval. There were many who thought this was some sort of protest, intended to influence Illinois to reverse its course, which is the same idiotic treatment mainstream media give every move of the Catholic hierarchy: it’s all about power and politics.
We just don’t even understand each other any more. I see little hope of regaining that in the short run. Some power has come down and confused our tongues.
But there were those who saw and endorsed more or less what I saw (my 100% endorsement of any of the following is uncertain):
Brian: My oldest daughter goes to a Christian school, and one of the things they do is recite the pledge of allegiance regularly. As someone who served in the military and grew up disposed to see God’s providence involved in the creation and sustaining of this country, I was surprised the negative reaction that the pledge elicited in me. Why should my kids pledge allegiance to a state that holds them in contempt? Why should we pledge allegiance to anything other than the Kingdom?
VikingLS: The point isn’t to prevent the acceptance of gay marriage, it’s to opt out out of the system.
Cascadia: This is the best news I’ve heard in weeks. Drawing a bright line between civil and religious marriage should have been done long ago. It would have saved much spilled ink.
Hans: I think that’s long overdue.
Until the last 50 years or so, US marriage laws (or at least NY laws,where I live) were more or less consistent with the Christian understanding of marriage. But the laws have been changes to something that in no way resembles Christian marriage. All civil marriages are now “gay marriages.” There is no recognition at all of reproduction obligations, and what is left is a series af tax benefits, inheritance and other rights, and access to various subsidized social benefits, like employer sponsored family health insurance ….
ck: The point is that the pastors of the church are no longer complicit in state licensure. By not signing the state license, this protects the church from civil rights claims made against them. And seeing that religious liberty will no longer be a defense, the best the Church may be able to do is stop being complicit in granting state marriage licenses.
Michael K: The US might become like Europe and Latin American countries with a Napoleonic Law Code. There are two marriage ceremonies. The first is the legal signing of the marriage license at the gov’t office and the second is the religious ceremony. A religious minister in these countries do not sign the state marriage license as is the practice in the US and I would guess most of the Anglosphere. This Orthodox church is de facto adopting the Continental practice. If you want to get married at this church and have the marriage legally recognized you need the two ceremonies.
rr: This is a great move! Kudos to Fr. Reardon. My brother is a Protestant pastor and is considering the same thing. From what I can tell, many other clergy are as well.
Civic marriage has been a farce since the advent of no-fault divorce. Same-sex marriage will only make it more of a joke. The time is overdue for the church to distance itself from the state’s nonsense on marriage.
For what it’s worth, here’s my take. This isn’t a political protest. It isn’t grandstanding (Father Pat’s too good a writer to let it go with a terse announcement to an e-mail list if he wanted to grandstand).
It’s a sorrowful recognition that what the state calls “marriage” has lost a critical mass of commonality with what the Church knows marriage to be, so that Father Pat as a clergyman wants no part of the civil counterfeit (kinda like a conscientious baker, but you can’t lay a glove on the Padre, neener, neener!). It’s a statement that it is a matter of indifference to Father Pat whether a couple is civilly married as long as they’re sacramentally religiously married (I venture a guess that any future convert couples from Evangelical churches that forewent the state license for similar reasons will be received as married though their religious marriages were not sacramental). I very much doubt that Father Pat will discourage couples from getting civilly “married,” aware of the place at the government trough that status assures them.
More deeply, I think Rod nails it with his Macintyre quote: Father Pat has “ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of [the American] imperium.”
But I would hope that the counseling Fr. Pat provides or arranges for others to provide would include:
- Recognition that being “married” civilly (essentially, a domestic partnership or civil union with the state arrogating the name “marriage” because of it’s cachet) confers a lot of financial and other governmental benefits.
- That two high-wage spouses might benefit on income tax by not being married, filing as single.
- That no civil marriage means no civil divorce. I know of a crack-pot (or was he a visionary?) who forewent civil marriage in favor of an oddly-named Christian Reconstructionist ceremony – but went to court years later to get out (the court not learning for a very long time that these idiots were seeking relief to which they weren’t entitled; theirs was no better legally than a Marvin v Marvin palimony case).
There are others suggestions I considered in lawyerly fashion but have omitted. Antenuptial agreements if you’re not going to marry civilly, for instance. In Catholic Canon Law, it’s my understanding, such an agreement on how to divide property in the event of separation is just about conclusive proof that you don’t even really intend to be married as the Church knows marriage.
Longer-term, this may signal the turning of the popular tide against government benefits for the mere status of “married” in the government’s debased sense. This should have come up when “child-free” marriage became the oxymoronic rage. Now perhaps we’ll tie some of those benefits to the presence of dependent children in the home rather than to “marriage” per se.
But if I’m right, Father Pat’s a bellewether, however this plays out.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Dark Nights
Vacation: too brief, too close to home
RFRA offends the right people
It looks as if passage of a Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana is almost assured now.
A fairly sleek federal prototype has been turned into a convoluted multi-page state version. That’s just what happens, I guess, when a pretty simple concept (the free exercise of religion is important, it’s threatened, and it’s not identical to the right of free speech) gets sullied by collateral attacks (notably, the national news stories, involving same-sex “marriage,” that occasioned Indiana RFRA’s introduction). Those collateral attacks have been effective enough in our polarized political culture that opponents now just call the bill things like the “religious discrimination act.”
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Like a dog returning to its vomit, our local newspaper amplifies that idiocy. Humility has never been among its editorial virtues. It savagely defended a sexual predator because – well, he’d been the poster boy for our gay rights ordinance, so he couldn’t possible be a predator, could he? It’s wrong to “discriminate,” so what could possibly go wrong if we take a guy who’s attracted to guys and put him in an an unsupervised power position over troubled adolescent (not pre-pubescent) guys? The people who thought something was fishy about that were Not Our Kind of People, either.
But Wisconsin officials found our poster boy in flagrante delicto, and a search turned up secret selfie videos proving conclusively that the Indiana charges had been true all along.
So the newspaper had to come clean and admit that it had been horribly, tragically, arrogantly wrong and that 28 cheese-heads paid the price.
Ha ha ha! Had you going, didn’t I? No, of course it didn’t come clean! The newspaper took a subdued, passive-voice approach. “Mistakes were made,” you know. “We all were taken in.” That sort of thing.
No, we weren’t all taken in. The Wrong Kind Of People thought the troubled adolescent boys who accused this criminal of sodomizing them were telling a plausible story that merited investigation. Only ideological blindness kept the newspaper from seen that they were right: the charges might be true or might be false but they weren’t off-the-wall.
You can buy your ink by the barrel, but it’s hard to spill enough of it to cover up that kind of error in judgment.
Just so now. RFRA supporters are Not Their Kind of People. End of subject. Bring out the ridicule and the accusations. Pour on the ink!
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Now might be a good time to recall why we needed, , and still need, RFRA. The answer is not “so fundamentalist creeps can discriminate against our dear GL brothers and sisters.” Read the two preceding links. And remember that Federal RFRA does not apply to Indiana. That inapplicability is a federalism principle, applied by the Supreme Court after Federal RFRA was adopted (and rightly so, I must admit).
I’ve spent some time on this issue, and I’m not talking about blogging time, which without some background is just mouthing off – like writing newspaper editorials. I’ve come to realize that Antonin Scalia’s rationale in Employment Division v. Smith wasn’t quite so sweeping as I (and just about everyone else) first thought. At the Federal level especially, few laws impinging on religious freedom are passed without some exception lobbied for by the Chamber of Commerce (e.g., does not apply to employers with fewer than 15 employees) or the AFL-CIO or someone powerful. When Congress builds in such exceptions, they make the law no longer “neutral” and “of general application,” so religious conscience exceptions will ride in on the coattails of the other exceptions.
That suits me just fine. But it requires lawsuits and courts, just as some lawsuits and courts will probably be needed to adjudicate Indiana RFRA claims:
- Is the religious claim sincere?
- Is the burden on free exercise material?
- Is the government interest for the burden compelling? (Here’s where I think courts are suspiciously deferential.)
- It the burden as narrowly tailored as possible to serving the compelling interest? (This is where other exceptions to the law prove that a little lenity for religion, too, would be in order.)
The only reason that’s a problem, in the eyes of the press, is that the press values religious freedom outside the Church building so very, very little. Oh: and we don’t have any notorious cases yet in Indiana of religious freedom being materially burdened for trifling, trendy causes.
That “not a problem in Indiana” argument sure was a winner on imposition of same-sex marriage, wasn’t it?
It also remains true that, in many cases, the concerns of religious people can be protected as freedom of expression or freedom from compelled expression, as when a photographer declined to photograph the Alan Sears family for an ADF Christmas Card because the photographer disapproved of ADF:
I oppose the goals and objectives of your organization and have no interest in working on its behalf.
How did religious freedom warrior Sears respond?
“We’re talking about human dignity. It violates someone’s dignity to require them to create images that violate their core beliefs,” Mr. Sears said. “I think I’m a pretty nice guy, and my family are kind folks, but to require this woman to portray me in a loving, family-centered way that is contrary to her views and her conscience, I think it would be an act of violence against her dignity.”
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I’m frankly hard-pressed to come up with an example of a situation in which I – if I was a baker, photographer, florist or bandleader (wonder why nobody has dragged a band before a Human Relations Commission for declining to play at a same-sex “wedding” reception?) – would decline to serve a gay or lesbian individual at all (I’ve served many in my real profession). It appears that I’m not alone on that, as most of the craftsmen in the cases now working through the courts regularly served gays and lesbians, but drew the line and doing custom flowers, photos or cakes for a ceremonial union (as I’d be a poor choice to lead a charge for same-sex marriage in the courts).
I’m even hard-pressed to come up with an example of a situation in which I would decline to help celebrate a same-sex “wedding” for religious reasons that weren’t equally (or even more) refusals to express a sentiment I could not express with integrity.
But same-sex unions isn’t the whole point of RFRA, as witnessed by the historic Supreme Court case that led to its adoption. So I’m happy that we’re going to get an Indiana RFRA, and to be a sore winner instead of a sore loser for a change.
The victory may be brief, though, as those who hate religious freedom already are doubtless at work on strategies to get a federal judge to strike down Indiana RFRA because we’re mean. “Just look at the newspaper coverage at the time: the motivation for Indiana RFRA was to let fundamentalist creeps discriminate against our dear GL brothers and sisters,” right?
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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 