Category: Thrown down gauntlet
Sunday 8/17/14
Friday, 6/20/14
The World Vision kerfuffle
World Vision’s same-sex marriage flip-flop this week would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.
My impression is that it’s been under-covered journalistically, but Terry Mattingly says that at least Christianity Today (which is no longer on my regular reading list) covered it. Also:
Note the reference to the “international operating budget of nearly $1 billion.” Question: Where does most of that money come from? How much of it is from religious groups, how much is from donors and, crucial point, how many of those dollars now come from private foundations and government sources that may be lobbying for the modernization of any nasty old doctrines that define World Vision’s mission? Trust me, there is a story there. The World Vision showdown is not about secularists opposing religious people. It’s a story — from the viewpoint of many government leaders and journalists — about good Christians with modernized doctrines striving to cause reform among the bad Christians who are in part (repeat, “in part”) defined by, well, 2,000 years of Christian doctrine on sexuality, family and marriage.
(Terry Mattingly) Still, how can this happen:
The agency had announced Monday that its board had prayed for years about whether to hire Christians in same-sex marriages as churches took different stands on recognizing gay relationships. World Vision says its staff members come from dozens of denominations with varied views on the issue.
followed just 24 hours later by this?:
The aid group told supporters in a letter that the board had made a mistake and was returning to its policy requiring celibacy outside of marriage “and faithfulness within the Bible covenant of marriage between a man and a woman.” “We have listened to you and want to say thank you and to humbly ask for your forgiveness,” the agency said in the letter, signed by World Vision president Richard Stearns and board chairman Jim Bere.
This story ought to be driving serious Evangelicals to serious thinking about their roots, the firmness of their real foundation. Instead, we get Andrew Walker at First Things exulting that
Evangelicalism did triage this week, and did it well. We saw through the malaise (sic) of theological indifferentism and insisted that while evangelicalism remains a big tent, at some point, the canopy ends.
The exulting seems facile to me, though I confess that trying to read Evangelicals arguing with one another over this makes me realize that I’ve become almost incapable of understanding their manner of speech. Not that I disagree necessarily, but that I see English words stream by my eyes on the page but cannot apprehend, or can barely apprehend, a coherent thought behind it. (If you can translate Walker for me, I’d appreciate it. Really.) So I am genuinely uncertain what Walker means except “horray for our team!,” or as they say at Yale
Boola, Boola; Boola, Boola; Boola, Boola; …
Then Walker adds this:
In each age, intellectual surrender and compromise has stood before the church, yet she keeps on going. The faith persists. As G. K. Chesterton said that bears repeating: “Time and again, the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. But each time, it was the dog that died.”
Got that?
- “The Church.” You’d almost think Evangelicalism actually has an ecclesiology, even though clearly World Vision was not a Church, but one of those parachurch thingies, unanswerable to any putative Church.
- You’d almost think that “intellectual surrender and compromise st[anding] before the church” was a formidable foe instead of a second weird metaphor.
- You’d almost think that what Evangelicals mean by “the Church” is what Chesterton meant – that Evangelicalism actually has a deep “time and time again” to look back at with admiration – but you’d be quite mistaken if you did. Chesterton was writing of Roman Catholicism, against which Evangelical tends to define itself (when it’s not cannibalizing Catholic thinkers).
In the hour of real trial, will Evangelicalism field 7,000 unbent knees, a squadron of Polycarps who won’t offer even a pinch of incense? Is it God’s Ark?
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Tony Woodlief’s Sand In The Gears blog, which appears infrequently but is almost always good, has a confessedly angry response to “worldly vision” that barely overlaps with my thoughts, including this (emphasis added):
Those of you who were outraged by World Vision’s state-pressured recognition of same-sex marriages, would you turn your backs on the little girl in danger of being sold into sex slavery in Thailand, the little boy in Haiti whose mother cannot feed him, for a point of dogmatic purity in an organization which is not the Church?
Leah Libresco at American Conservative identifies some of those who called for a World Vision boycott (Billy’s son Franklin for one) and explores, with a little help from her friends, what it would be like if the boycott mindset were universalized.
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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)
New Years Day Full House 2014
Impacting Indiana for 33 years!
Advance America, in a Sunday bulletin insert offered to churches, lays out what its leaders see as dangers ahead:
» Authorities jailing pastors for preaching against homosexuality.
» Cross-dressing men violating women’s privacy in their restrooms.
» Government forcing business owners to cater to same-sex weddings.
» Schools teaching children that gay marriage is normal.
The flier, put out this fall, argues that the items are “Just Four Dangers of Same-Sex Marriage” that could be on the horizon if Indiana fails to safeguard its traditional marriage definition, which already is contained in state law.
(Indianapolis Star story reprinted 12/13 by the Journal & Courier on page C1)
The flyer was quickly dismissed by “experts.” I’m an expert of sorts, and in the context of the article (“dangers of same-sex marriage”), I’d say the fourth is almost certain to happen in Indiana if Indiana recognizes same-sex marriage, even if there’s no legislative mandate to do it.
The others really are, in varying degrees, either (a) plausible but not consequences of recognizing same-sex marriage or (b) outright implausible in the United States.
Bear in mind that the defeat of HJR-6 does not mean that Hoosiers favor same-sex marriage or that SSM will become law. I likely would vote against it, with mixed feelings, because the second sentence is so vague that it feels like deliberate sabotage of the Resolution by false friends. (This isn’t an accusation of anyone. I don’t know who dreamed up that second sentence, or what they had in mind.)
A statutory prohibition already exists. The way litigation on homosexuality-related laws progress these days, things like the Advance America bulletin insert likely will end up marked as Trial Exhibits in any lawsuit alleging that Hoosiers only approved HJR-6 because they’re bigots with a “bare desire to harm” gays (not to mention that we’re ugly and our mothers dress us funny). That kind of evidence weighs heavily with Justice Kennedy, and he’ll be sure to accuse us of bad stuff in his 5-4 opinion for the majority.
But how about the specific “dangers ahead”?
- “Authorities jailing pastors for preaching against homosexuality.” “Jail,” implies crime. Eric Miller of Advance America, a lawyer, knows this. Free Speech remain pretty secure, though the made-up right to sexual expression, free from any stigma, is ascendant. I’d not bet against jail in 50 years, nor would I bet against extreme social and media hostility toward anti-homosexuality preaching in very short order. And there will be preachers so obsessively fixated on this particular sin that they’ll deserve to be held suspect. But jail? I call “bullshit” on this one.
- “Cross-dressing men violating women’s privacy in their restrooms.” Not a consequence of same-sex marriage. There are apparently true stories about “gender identity” mismatches with biological sex, and of a school being forced to allow a boy who identifies as a girl to use the girl’s restroom. Weird marks of cultural insanity, to be sure, and of the sort of insanity that would also think same-sex marriage reasonable. But whoever came up with this “danger” was just free associating about the outlandish things sexually troubled people do, not reasoning about consequences of SSM.
- “Government forcing business owners to cater to same-sex weddings.” This is a big topic. Lots of stories about this sort of thing from states that ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. Indiana has no such law. New Mexico
bans SSMadheres to a traditional definition of marriage but does have such an anti-discrimination law, and a New Mexico photographer is on her way to SCOTUS appealing her hefty fine for declining to photograph a “commitment ceremony” that couldn’t be a “marriage” precisely because of the state’s non-recognition of SSM. Some Indiana cities and counties, moreover, have banned (maybe more accurate to say “subjected to free-floating flak from do-gooders on Human Relations Commissions if someone complains”) “discrimination based on sexual orientation.” I think it’s highly likely that caterers, photographer, bakeries and the like will be subjected to petty harassment of Human Relations Commissions in some localities if Indiana recognizes same-sex marriage, but those ordinances are relatively toothless.
Of course, it’s hard to imagine Indiana recognizing same-sex marriage without previously or concurrently banning discrimination based on sexual orientation statewide. Bear that in mind as you look at my precis on some of these three items.
Advance America, despite its Christian pretenses, appears guilty of transgressing the 9th Commandment which, even Protestant Reformers agreed, includes reckless gossip.
But what do you expect from a group whose website boasts that it’s “Celebrating 33 Years of Impacting Indiana!”? What say we give Indiana a high colonic, to thoroughly rinse out 33 years of accumulated Advance America toxins, and call it a day?
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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)
Declaration of Dependence
Holy smokes! I wasn’t going to stop to blog today, the Monday of Holy Week in Orthodoxy, when there will be too little time for professional duties. But this is too good not do share.
Scott Galupon on The Blind Spot of Conservatism, quoting Yuval Levin:
We are all dependent on others. The question is whether we are dependent on people we know, and they on us—in ways that foster family and community, build habits of restraint and dignity, and instill in us responsibility and a sense of obligation—or we are dependent on distant, neutral, universal systems of benefits that help provide for our material wants without connecting us to any local and immediate nexus of care and obligation. It is not dependence per se, which is a universal fact of human life, but dependence without mutual obligation, that corrupts the soul. Such technocratic provision enables precisely the illusion of independence from the people around us and from the requirements of any moral code they might uphold. It is corrosive not because it instills a true sense of dependence but because it inspires a false sense of independence and so frees us from the sorts of moral habits of mutual obligation that alone can make us free.
Galupo, though, thinks there are other false senses of independence, such as
a desire to escape the stifling atmosphere of rural America and discover the wider world; to pursue a life of the mind; to experience, as the British playwright David Hare put it in his screenplay for The Hours, the “violent jolt” of life in the metropolis.
Our culture stokes this desire, and in no small way our economy depends on it. When politicians tirelessly invoke the “American Dream,” when we celebrate social mobility and “churn,” we are encouraging millions of young Rod Drehers to leave their Starhills and become “boomers,” as the poet Wendell Berry (via Wallace Stegner) describes those whose ambition compels them to leave home.
To make the point in the context of our ongoing clash over immigration, do we not at least unwittingly celebrate the dilution of communities when we hold up as heroes those who leave behind their friends and extended families to pursue employment in America? To borrow the simple phraseology of Rod’s mother, a young man who leaves a village in Latin America or South Asia is no longer there.
This is not to dispute Levin’s point about a large and active state “pulverizing” civil society; the phenomenon is real and, as I’ve written before, a purportedly morally neutral state will always and inevitably tip its hand about what it believes to be positive goods.
My point is that big government is not the lone, or lately even the chief, pulverizer of civil society.
(Emphasis added)
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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)
Sex and Cosmology
I don’t know when Rod Dreher sleeps. He must read and write about 22 hours a day. He’s currently on a book tour – ten cities in eleven days – while suffering mono.
Continue reading “Sex and Cosmology”
