Category: Christianity generally

Sexual miscellany

Whiling away the hours until the Paschal Vigil tonight, I’ve caught up on a little reading. I mention sex (1) to drive traffic and (2) because there’s a sexual component to two of my three notables. (The third will get a separate posting.)

First, in the spin battles over Obamacare, we have Kate Michelman, abortion activist, lamenting that the Democrats so quickly abandoned insistence on covering “all the medical services women need and deserve.” From her perspective, the Democrats aren’t reliable friends, and “the pro-choice movement must have a powerful political presence independent of the Democratic Party.” She blames the Democrat strategic decision to recruit moderates after the 2004 election, which in fact led to election of several relatively moderate Democrats starting in 2006.

Indeed, it’s got to be a tough time to be a pro-abortion Democrat. There’s got to be – what? one? two? – dissonant voices in the Festive Friends of Feticide chorus that used to do unison soooo much better. Of course, the Republicans can count on Olympia Snow (sadly, Orthodox) and Lincoln Chafee peeling off from the GOP abortion platform at the drop of a hat. And there’s others whose pro-life song is delivered up so tone-deaf that I don’t really trust them to hold if the wind shifts a little. Maybe “tone deaf” is the wrong metaphor, but they don’t sound authentic. They sound like they’re dropping memorized sound bites.

So I feel your pain, Kate – enough so that I won’t call myself Republican today. I’m now roughly 30 years into dreaming of the day when abortion won’t be a partisan issue, but as the parties try to achieve their optimally big tents, that day bodes to be a while coming.

Ironically echoing her distrust of Democrats is Kathleen Parker, a generally conservative columnist at the Washington Post, lamenting Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak’s vote-switch for 30 pieces of silver a rather meaningless Executive Order. The unreliability runs both ways. Someone else dissed Stupak by saying you can’t count on pro-life Democrats. Indeed, party discipline can be pretty compelling. Stupak defends himself against Parker here.

Looking well past the next election – and the next, and the next – is Kasper Melville’s Battle of the Babies in the UK’s New Humanist magazine. The story should be a familiar one for both the triumphalist secularists and the tongue-clucking “hell in a handbasket” religious folks: the devoutly religious are outbreeding secularists by a large enough margin to spell the doom of secularism as any dominant force.

The latest iteration of this “prognostication comes courtesy of political scientist Eric Kaufmann, a reader in politics at London’s Birkbeck College, and the author of the new book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, out in March from Profile Books.” Kaufmann is facially neutral, while Melville is a secularist himself. They’re both not too alarmed by the prolific breeders in Anabaptist Amish and Hutterite enclaves, but the Quiverfull “movement” has Melville’s knickers in a knot:

However the success-through-fertility of [Amish and Hutterites] has served as a powerful model for newer variants of fundamentalism with a far more sinister agenda. One such is the Quiverfull movement (The name derives from Psalm 127: “Children are a heritage from the Lord/ Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them”). Kaufmann describes Quiverfull as “backward engineered religion”, an attempt to replicate the successful growth of these historic sects, combined with an ambitious agenda for political power. Under the leadership of the infamous religious conservative Doug Phillips, son of Howard, who was instrumental in the early stirrings of the Religious Right, Quiverfull, a coalition of neo-fundamentalist protestant denominations and communities, dedicated to biblical literalism, deeply patriarchal and morally conservative and separatist in mindset, has a 200-year plan, a “self-conscious strategy for victory through fertility”, as Kaufmann calls it. “They look around and see the low birth rate amongst the secular population, and the success of the sects, and they say, ‘Hey, we can take over here and quickly.’ They think that God should be the family planner. For them contraception is one step toward abortion. There are stories of Quiverfull women who can only have three or four children breaking down and feeling that God has not blessed them.”

Not to worry, Casper: Evangelicals (your “fundamentalists”) cannot maintain anything for 200 years. Someone will get a ThD from Fuller for reinterpreting “happy is the man who has his quiver full.” Nobody gets a doctorate for preserving and transmitting Evangelicalism unaltered. There may still be something called “Evangelicalism” in 200 years, but it’s doubtful that it will look anything like today’s version.

Remember, you heard it here first: Quiverfull is just one of Evangelicalism’s fleeting manias. They remind me of the T-Shirt I heard about: “They say I have Attention Deficit Disorder, but they just don’t underst… Hey! Look! A Chicken!”

Now Muslims are a different matter, though I’ve long been mulling over to the extent to which Islam, too, are inherently incoherent inasmuch as their religion, too, is based on a book susceptible of private interpretation. (They do differ from one another, you know.)

Rod Dreher, looking at Melville’s article (after I’d noted it but before I blogged) passes over the Quiverfull folks and focuses on a common a trait noted by Kauffman:

“I call them ‘endogenous growth sects’. The defining features are that they have strong boundaries to the outside, they try to live segregated from the rest of society, they practice ‘in’ marriage, they have high fertility rates and high retention of members – it’s grow-your-own-fundamentalism. The irony is that in terms of growth this is the most successful model for religion in Western secular societies. This is not true for the developing world, or for the Muslim world, but it is for the West.” The reason why Kaufmann covers both older forms of fundamentalism like the Amish and Hutterites, sects that are not likely to put the fear of God into secularists because they seem so passive, so withdrawn and uninterested in imposing their worldview on the rest of us, alongside more aggressive and self-consciously power-hungry forms of evangelical Christianity and Islamism is because, in his argument, the older sects provide the model of success that is now being followed by the newer ones. To understand them, Kaufmann argues, we need to look at the older forms they are self-consciously aping.

This is what Dreher calls the “Benedict Option” – semi-monastic, consciously counter-cultural. I’ve been wondering, as has Dreher, whether conscious separation, which surely will get us labelled “fundamentalist,” is the only real option in a very seductive society.

Jason Peters on the Krustian sell-a-bration of Eester

Item 983 on my growing list of reasons I’m blessed to have stumbled onto Orthodox Christianity.

This kind of stuff, I’m afraid, is the entropic eventuality of Protestantism. We experienced it as “Worship Wars” in my Protestant church before I left, eventually giving one group reluctant leave to “plant” a new church to its tastes. “Church planting” was the lipstick we put on the pig of splitting up.

I look back now and think neither side knew what real worship looked like, but one was more clueless than the other.

I hesitate to use the term “entropy” with Roman Catholicism, which has endured for a rather long time now. But they’ve got some boundary-setting to do, as in this (I shudder to use the term) Liturgy in Los Angeles:

Architecture and Starkitecture

In an era where Houston’s SuperDome can be a “church” for Joel Osteen and his followers, it’s good to know that there still are those who take Church design seriously. It’s especially good to know since I’m chairing my Parish’s Building Committee as we’ve outgrown our current quarters.

Our current quarters are in the American Orthodox genre of “hermit crab.” We take whatever shells other critters abandon – in this case, a “Kingdom Hall” abandoned by Jehovah’s Witnesses (I remember when it was new around 1960):

Our cast-off shell

I recall our Priest, Father Charles, lavishly dousing the interior with holy water, noting that it would take a lot to drive the heresy from the place. But even after adding the cost of holy water, the price was right.

But our next move, we think, should be to something permanent, and thus properly Orthodox. More on that later.

The Wall Street Journal reviews two designs of a Notre Dame-trained Architect, Duncan Stroik, working in a traditional Latin Church vocabulary (subscription may be required). While the Narthex view of The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe left me lukewarm at best, I’m glad I clicked the slideshow link. The first aerial, showing the domed cruciform sanctuary behind the Narthex persuaded me to keep reading and looking, discovering “the splendor of the nave and sanctuary.”

The Thomas Aquinas College chapel is more appealing from the outside, but the interior disappoints with white painted plaster that reminds me too much of the Puritan minimalism of New England Congregational Churches. To be sure, the columns, flooring and aisles would give a Puritan the vapors, but the whiteness seems discordant to me – too “post-Vatican II.”

So why with such historic forms available have Catholics built modern monstrosities for the last 50 years?

Is this excretion a sick joke?

I’ve never been Catholic, and I well know how easy it is to misunderstand a tradition from outside it, so I’ll not speculate.

Before I published this, Ross Douthat of the New York Times picked up the same Wall Street Journal story. Follow his links for proof that butt-ugly brutalism ain’t necessarily cheap.

Meanwhile, on my side of the Great Schism, we have a rising younger architectural star, Andrew Gould, whose temple designs have only been realized once so far. Orthodox parishes in America tend to be much smaller than Roman Catholic parishes, and our temples are proportionately smaller as a result. But an advantage we have, which I think militates in favor of “doing it right” when we build our temples, is that we aren’t liturgical innovators. Our Liturgies are extraordinarily stable. We don’t need to build something cheap so we can knock it down in a few decades to erect what the folks at Fuller Seminary tell us is the Big New Thing God Is Doing to Grow Your Church. My exploration of Church design-build firms for and with our Building Committee suggests that in the current Protestant world, design is often driven by sociological Church Growth theories, and that the big design-build firms promote those theories.

Andrew’s home parish, Holy Ascension near Charleston, may now look relatively stark on the interior, but those white wall are plaster, and will be covered with icons over the decades to come. It is a work in process in that sense, as I believe has been true of most Orthodox temples over the millennia. His whole portfolio of Ecclesial design work bespeaks permanence.

The plaster walls of the properly Orthodox temple Andrew designed and we hope to build, will also receive icons in the future:

Proposed Saint Alexis Exterior
Proposed Saint Alexis Interior

The setting is rural – the source of some personal regret for me, since not one current member of our parish will be within walking or normal biking distance – and commodious. Though I wish we could have afforded a site closer in, I’m excited by the prospects. One of the deepest human needs, I’m convinced, is worship, and an architect whose designs aren’t conducive to that should be used for kindling. (The syntax of the prior sentence isn’t what I intended, but I’m going to let it stand, if you catch my drift. Call it serendipitous.)

“New Atheist” Christopher Hitchens’ Christian Brother, Peter

Tip of the hat to Ross Douthat for his link to Peter Hitchens’ How I found God and peace with my atheist brother.

The article is more interesting, in my estimation, than Douthat’s excerpt, interesting though that is. I was prepared from that excerpt for a manifesto of dubious orthodoxy. What I found instead was a sketch of a pilgrimage from banal atheism to thoughtful Christian faith.

Having never gone through an atheist or agnostic phase myself, I would commit stereotyping if I uttered this, but Hitchens has earned the right to name it:

We were sure that we, and our civilisation, had grown out of the nursery myths of God, angels and Heaven. We had modern medicine, penicillin, jet engines, the Welfare State, the United Nations and  ‘science’, which explained everything that needed to be explained.
The Britain that gave me this self-confidence was an extraordinarily safe place, or at least so it felt to me as a child.

But I can appreciate how “the old unsettling messages” became a wedge that gradually opened his mind and heart:

I no longer avoided churches. I recognised in the great English cathedrals, and in many small parish churches, the old unsettling messages.

One was the inevitability of my own death, the other the undoubted fact that my despised forebears were neither crude nor ignorant, but men and women of great skill and engineering genius, a genius not contradicted or blocked by faith, but enhanced by it.

…

I also knew I was losing my faith in politics and my trust in ambition, and was urgently in need of something else on which to build the rest of my life.

I don’t think the inevitability of my own death was a sufficiently conscious concern of mine until I found Orthodoxy (which coincided, of course, with my aging and the consequent, undeniable physical infirmities), but I was very aware that believers of old were not crude or ignorant and that politics and ambition were inadequate foundations for life.

Peter (I call him that not from faux familiarity, but because the other Hitchens is better known) pulls no punches in identifying the covert locus of much of today’s anti-Christian rage, and the culprit he fingers appears guilty to me:

[I]n recent times it has grown clear that the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat by secular forces which have never been so confident.

Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power. In an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.

But unlike Peter, I think the urge to power has an accomplice: the sort of facile faith that finds science a threat – a faith I once held, knowing no better way to live out devotion to Christ – and whose fear of The Other is expressed in demonization – of which I was mercifully guilty less often than many on the religious right. Facile faith invites facile atheism. Demonization invites counter-demonization. I think Peter may intuit that, as here:

I do not loathe atheists, as Christopher claims to loathe believers. I am not angered by their failure to see what appears obvious to me. I understand that they see differently. I do think that they have reasons for their belief, as I have reasons for mine, which are the real foundations of this argument.

Peter and I diverge stylistically about the utility of arguments over morality:

He [Christopher Hitchens] often assumes that moral truths are self-evident, attributing purpose to the universe and swerving dangerously round the problem of conscience – which surely cannot be conscience if he is right since the idea of conscience depends on it being implanted by God. If there is no God then your moral qualms might just as easily be the result of indigestion.

Yet Christopher is astonishingly unable to grasp that these assumptions are problems for his argument. This inability closes his mind to a great part of the debate, and so makes his atheist faith insuperable for as long as he himself chooses to accept it.

One of the problems atheists have is the unbelievers’ assertion that it is possible to determine what is right and what is wrong without God. They have a fundamental inability to concede that to be effectively absolute a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter.

On this misunderstanding is based my brother Christopher’s supposed conundrum about whether there is any good deed that could be done only by a religious person, and not done by a Godless one. Like all such questions, this contains another question: what is good, and who is to decide what is good?

I do agree with Peter that a binding moral code needs grounding. Maybe there’s a gene for altruism, as the evolutionists recently seem to postulate. But what if I don’t have it, or mine’s mutated or unexpressed? What if I act the sociopath as a result? Society, made up of a majority where the gene is present and expressed, may have the raw power to squash me, but they cannot logically utter any moral condemnation – though they assuredly would do exactly that.

But Christopher Hitchens likely will never appreciate that unless he’s first blindsided by something else – maybe Rogier van der Weyden’s 15th Century Last Judgement (which blindsided Peter) or “the unexpected force of poetry, which can ambush the human heart at any time” (as Peter notes).

Finally, I really appreciate Peter’s succinct putdown of a stupid, stupid, canard that can only be uttered by somebody who didn’t notice the savagery of pagan Nazis and atheist Communists in the bloodiest damned century the world has ever seen:

Another favourite argument of the irreligious is that conflicts fought in the name of religion are necessarily conflicts about religion. By saying this they hope to establish that religion is of itself a cause of conflict.

This is a crude factual misunderstanding. The only general lesson that can be drawn is that Man is inclined to make war on Man when he thinks it will gain him power, wealth or land.

Amen, brother Peter. Only brother James – one of those crude and ignorant folks from 2000 years ago – rivals your brevity (James 4:1-2).

Why would a Muslim (or, f’rinstance, a Druid) become Christian?

Mosab Hassan Yousef, now 32, was the son of a key Hamas leader, who he seems still to admire despite having secretly embraced Christianity and then becoming a spy for Israel’s Shin Bet:

He’s a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he’s doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn’t matter if he’s a terrorist or a traditional Muslim.

Living now around San Diego, Yousef

says he had reached the conclusion that terrorism can’t be defeated without a new understanding of Islam. Here he echoes other defectors from Islam such as the former Dutch parliamentarian and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

So much for his theories about terrorism and Islam, which I offer to introduce Yousef and to provoke thought about Islam if the reader be so inclined.

What’s really interesting to me is Yousef’s reason for embracing Christianity:

“I found that I was really drawn to the grace, love and humility that Jesus talked about,” he says in “Son of Hamas.”

Mr. Yousef has some of the evangelist in him, even as he insists he is not a particularly devoted Christian and is still learning about his new religion. He wants Palestinians and Israelis to learn what he did from the Christian God.

…

“I converted to Christianity because I was convinced by Jesus Christ as a character, as a personality. I loved him, his wisdom, his love, his unconditional love. I didn’t leave [the Islamic] religion to put myself in another box of religion. At the same time it’s a beautiful thing to see my God exist in my life and see the change in my life. I see that when he does exist in other Middle Easterners there will be a change.

“I’m not trying to convert the entire nation of Israel and the entire nation of Palestine to Christianity. But at least if you can educate them about the ideology of love, the ideology of forgiveness, the ideology of grace. Those principles are great regardless, but we can’t deny they came from Christianity as well.”

I have an enduring intuition that there are millions in the United States – Muslims, Jews, New Agers, Wiccans, Druids, self-declared Agnostics and Atheists, and even lapsed Christians – who are secretly drawn to Jesus Christ “as a character, as a personality,” and who love him, his wisdom, his unconditional love.

But they hear from some prominent Churches (or is it many? I’ve lost touch with that subculture, but I know it was around within my lifetime) a message that sounds too much like Jonathan Edwards’ “Angry God,” a staple of English lit classes when I was younger.

Or just as likely, they see in mainstream Christianity or in the Megachurches (the effete spiritual descendants of Edwards; “Entropy: It’s Not Just About Physics Any More”) a moralistic therapeutic deism that they can do quite well without, thank you. I have an often-oblivious, sometimes-perceptive friend who was frank and perceptive when he said that the sermons in his mainstream Church were such smarmy encouragement they weren’t worth his time. He could do better, quicker, elsewhere if he wanted a pep talk.

Or maybe they catch on that their emotions are being manipulated, not their spirit nourished, through the praise band and other hubbub. Or maybe pick up a total con man, who promises fabulous wealth in return for a “word of faith” backed up with a generous donation. That’s a massive turnoff.

So such Christ-admirers must choose, they think, between (1) the Jesus they see in the New Testament, or (2) the Churches they know. There’s something seriously wrong with that picture. Christ promised, after all, to build and preserve His Church, so how can it be in conflict with Him?

I have another enduring intuition that the heart-longing of such conflicted people will find its home in Orthodox Christianity, which is not like anything most people in America have ever seen. Contrary to what it connoted to me 15 years ago (forbidding ritualism of some sort coupled with doctrinal rigidity), is all about Jesus Christ (“it is sooooo not ‘about me’!” one visitor exclaimed) and becoming His worthy image and likeness by the healing of the human soul (Greek “nous”). (Matthew Gallatin coincidentally has a current podcast that vividly but fairly contrasts the Orthodox view of salvation from that typified by Jonathan Edwards. Orthodoxy’s different on the surface partly because it’s different deep down on such things.)

Do I dissemble? Didn’t I just tacitly fault “moralistic therapeutic deism”? How does Orthodox “healing of the soul” differ from MTD?

Well, first, it’s not moralistic. Really. (Once you really get the hang of it, you live far more by love than by rule.)

Second, it’s not deism.

Third, the therapy/healing in Orthodoxy starts not with faddish self-esteem and positive thinking, as in MTD, but with repentance.

John Romanides, in the posthumous collection of his Greek University Lectures on Patristic Theology, summarized Orthodox dogma:

  1. God became man. (No deism there!)
  2. There’s no repentance after death.

I don’t think either point is ever lost in any Orthodox Church, or could ever be lost if the cycle of services is maintained, though it can be obscured by human foibles.

Though repentance may sound grim (that presumably is why is has disappeared from Krustianity), it is a seed, and then a spiritual horticulture, that flowers into the glorious and all-laudable Saints. There’s no shortcut.

And ironically, that soul healing in the end really is about the worshipper, whose real, deepest needs are met, after years of worship and asceticism (that’s what deep repentance looks like), even if the Divine Liturgy does not immediately appear much of a balm for yesterday’s pink slip, dust-up with a lover or such. (I do recall, though, in addition to a riot of sensory impressions at my first Orthodox Liturgy, my first taste of Orthodoxy’s healing calm.)

I pray, too, that Yousef may find Orthodox Christianity, as I think he’ll find some real Krustian shortcomings in Southern California Evangelicalism. (Some of it in his vocabulary in the interview may foreshadow that, though he acknowledges that he’s “still learning about his new religion.”)