Category: Faith & Ideology

“Fervently Catholic, proudly gay, happily celibate”

A New York Times feature Saturday morning profiles Eve Tushnet, styled A Gay Catholic Voice Against Same-Sex Marriage. Eve Tushnet is a very intriguing and forthright thinker/writer who had dropped off my radar though I had admired her in the past.

I find her intriguing today because, on a general topic that remains contentious (which is why it merits careful discussion, again and again, until sanity reigns) and shrill (it often seems that the world is divided into “it’s an abomination” and “you’re a closet queen homophobe” camps), I find myself agreeing with her almost 100%. Her position lifestyle convictions — shared at least in general terms by Orthodox, Catholics, and at least a few others — are neither antinomian nor “phobic” about anything.

Read the profile and read Tushnet’s website a bit. (Here is the link to subscribe to her blog, offered because it was deucedly hard for me to locate.)

Although one might fault her for writing and talking so much about her own sexuality (there’s too little privacy about private things in our exhibitionist age), I believe I understand her decision. In a world where opinion on homosexuality is as polarized as I described, a still-recent convert to a humbler, more historic Christian tradition may be excused for saying repeatedly that “the Gospel is good news for everybody” (as Fr. Thomoas Hopko put it) and “I’ve got credibility because I’m joyously living what I say.” So she’s not hiding her little light under a bushel.

I claim no exalted expertise or credibility on homosexuality. I have watched, read and thought a lot about it as one of the contentious “culture wars” issues of the day, and I’ve pushed back against the gay rights cause where I thought it was going beyond a demand for human dignity and impinging on the rights of others (in general, see my discussion of Chai Feldblum here). When I pushed back, I regretted the wounded and uncomprehending looks from some “out” acquaintances and friends, and accordingly triple-checked and recalibrated my Golden Rule Empathyometer. (I wasn’t off by much if at all. Whew!)

Here’s where I may disagree with Tushnet:

  • “Fervently Catholic” — “She could do better than that,” says this still-recent Orthodox convert from Protestantism. ‘Nuff said about that. 😉
  • “Proudly gay” — these aren’t her words, and perhaps she wouldn’t use them. I simply don’t know what they mean. Pride about anything is dangerous. Pride about unchosen homosexuality seems as silly as being “proudly straight.” And “gay” is also problematic: I thought “gay” connoted non-celibacy; I’ve even had televised debates where my adversary scornfully dismissed the possibility of celibacy with some catty crack like “what do you think ‘gay’ means!?” “Matter-of-fact about her homosexual orientation” seems apt. “Convinced that sexual orientation cannot be changed” is plausible as well, as the falls of several high profile evangelical “reparative therapy” fans attest. But “proud.” Nah.
  • “She does not see herself as disordered” — this passing characterization, in case you’re unaware, represents a gentle repudiation of the Roman Catholic position that homosexual inclination is “objectively disordered.” I’m inclined, in contrast to Tushnet, to agree with that characterization — while quickly adding that there’s something(s) “objectively disordered” about a lot of things in this world. For that reason, I have not taken “objectively disordered” as a put-down, or particularly applied it to persons as opposed to inclinations and practices.
  • “Sin ‘means you have a chance to come back and repent and be saved,’ she says” — While it is true that “sin” doesn’t mean “you’re bad,” neither does it mean you have a chance to come back and repent and be saved. Sin (Greek amartia) means missing the mark (from which miss you indeed can repent etc.).

Somehow, though, it seems inadequate simply to say I agree with the rest of Tushnet’s “positions” in the profile. Instead, I especially appreciate her courage in advocating and modeling celibacy and passionate friendships, including same sex friendships, as the profile alludes to Tushnet’s “theology of friendship, as articulated in books like St. Aelred’s ‘On Spiritual Friendship.’”

I know some decent people who think that anything like “passionate friendships” are just too dangerous (or some such thing) for people with homosexual inclinations, but were there no other problems with that view, there is the very real danger in of any self-imposed, or socially-imposed, isolation. My attitude (to put it in terms of one of my own besetting sins) basically is “The world’s a dangerous place. I can’t stop eating just because I have an inclination to gluttony. I must eat – and risk loss of control – or die. And by analogy ….” I’ll bet you can fill in the rest (which presumes a universal human need for deep friendship). We’re “persons” only in relationship, and an isolated “individual” isn’t much to brag about.

Tushnet is refreshingly realistic about temptation, too: “‘It turns out I happen to be very good at sublimating,’ she says, while acknowledging that that is a lot to ask of others.” Perhaps a lot to ask especially of people trying to become fully human persons in close relation to others.

But in the world, as in the monastery, when a Christian falls, he/she gets back up. And if you fall again, you get up again. Maybe you ask yourself at some point “Am I exposing myself to too much temptation? Should I flee like Joseph from Potiphar’s wife?,” but that’s not my call to make for anyone other than myself.

Eve Tushnet: I’m putting you on my blogroll. Keep up the good work.

Not your father’s fundies — but he’ll take them

I had occasion to pass through the halls of a fundamentalist Church recently. I’m not using “fundamentalist” loosely. If I told you the denominational affiliation, and if you have your chops when it comes to various schismatics, you’d say “Oh, yeah. They’re fundamentalists, alright.” If you knew nothing more than that many of their ministers come from Bob Jones University, you’d know, too.

Still, it’s a church I have respected. They do good work. They get dirt under their nails. They take on tough cases as well as well-scrubbed yuppies who know their Emily Post Miss Manners (who is an etiquette expert today?!). They have a counseling ministry, Protestantism’s ersatz substitute for the Mystery of Confession in historic Christianity. They generally don’t yell.

Thinking my destination might be the main sanctuary auditorium, I went in and sat down to wait. The folks who were setting up didn’t look right for the occasion I was expecting. Turns out, it was their Praise Band assembling for a rehearsal, complete with a big honkin’ drum set in a plexiglass enclosure (presumably to keep it from overwhelming all else).

After finding the right place and finishing my business, I exited within sound of the auditorium again. I really didn’t have to be close. The band was very loud (and not half bad as those things go).

40 years ago, such a thing would have been unthinkable. Larry Norman was cutting edge. You got him for a concert somewhere other than church. You felt transgressive when you did. Your parents fretted.

Today, your parents are cheering tolerating docilely the new Larry Normans as a “way to keep my grandchildren in Church.”

I’m not surprised.

“How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in his excellent word …”? Sorry, but this is Sinking Sandsville. No firm foundations here. Evangelicals and fundamentalists are late adopters of fads, but they adopt them just the same. Because they think that Christianity is a bunch of propositions to get into your head, they think the medium is irrelevant. And because they seem to think that worship is a matter of quickened pulse, adrenaline rush, and loss of emotional control generally, they may even cheer a raucous, rhythmic medium.

They’re wrong.

Though not surprised, I am disappointed. And I shake my head at the — what? amnesia? entropy? — that allows so much change in a single lifetime (my own, in this case) to pass without effective objection and without deep reflection on what such things say about the fundamental (if I may use that word) defect of “Bible only” Christianity: the infallible Bible speaks only through fallible interpreters.

Fallible interpreters can change their minds day-by-day.

And transform a fundamentalist church into something almost unrecognizable in a generation or two.

“Auricular confession”

One of my blind spots as a Protestant was the need for formal confession, which we dismissed as “auricular confession” and considered a patent superstition and absurdity. “Who needs a priest to confess?!”

A nice, simple explanation of why we Orthodox confess to a Priest: salvation is more than forgiveness.

… If someone sincerely repents of a sin done by him, of course God will forgive him. But for salvation this is not enough. The Lord came down to earth and was incarnate so that man would be transfigured and reborn. To make him a new creation in Christ (cf., 2 Cor. 5:17). For this the Lord established the Holy Mysteries – sacred actions in which, under a visible image, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the invisible grace of God is given, freeing man from life in sin and giving him life with God. Man cannot perform upon himself a single Mystery – Baptism, Marriage, Unction….

So, is the Catholic view — the Protestant target, with the arguments carried over as an objection to Orthodoxy ad hoc — essentially the same? It appears that it differs:

“The whole power of the sacrament of Penance consists in restoring us to God’s grace and joining us with him in an intimate friendship.” Reconciliation with God is thus the purpose and effect of this sacrament. For those who receive the sacrament of Penance with contrite heart and religious disposition, reconciliation “is usually followed by peace and serenity of conscience with strong spiritual consolation.” Indeed the sacrament of Reconciliation with God brings about a true “spiritual resurrection,” restoration of the dignity and blessings of the life of the children of God, of which the most precious is friendship with God.75

Catechism of the Catholic Church, section 1468. Maybe I’m missing something, but the RC emphasis on reconciliation seems to be based on reassurance that God isn’t angry any longer.

The Orthodox emphasis in contrast is on transformation and rebirth. Indeed, the best part of confession by my lights is when the Priest prescribes a penance that I hadn’t thought of as a way to root out the detestable sin.

The Protestant equivalent, it seems to me, is the “counseling ministry” of big Churches. But the problem is there’s no mention of counseling ministries in the Bible that Protestants claim as their sole authority. Like Biblically baseless “infant dedication” services (faux baptism for anabaptists whose consciences tell them that their children are precious to God now, and not just potentially precious if they “pray the Sinner’s Prayer®” some day), it’s an ersatz solution to a problem that doesn’t exist in historic Christianity.

Is Sarah Palin a fake feminist?

It should be no secret that I am not a fan of Sarah Palin, but among her defects is not patent falsity as a feminist, as Jessica Valenti’s column at the Sunday Washington Post alleges. Valenti careens around like a pinball deprecating all things Palin, but in my opinion falls short of making the case that Palin’s feminism is fake.

Pro-life feminism is something I happen to know a few things about. It captured my attention 25 years or so ago when I heard a recording of Sidney Callahan, a distinguished social psychologist, teacher, and syndicated columnist in moral psychology, state the case for it. It had a humane and compassionate angle that I found very attractive personally. (I regret that Callahan’s talk seemingly not available online; I believe I ripped it from tape to MP3 and could share it with anyone interested after checking copyright more closely.)

So I became a supporter of Feminists for Life before it had a political action committee — not a member, as I think there’s something creepy about a man saying he’s a feminist (it strikes me as being on roughly the same level as “Hey, baby! What’s your sign?” or “Want to come up and see my lithographs?”) — even though some of its positions were well to my left at the time. (I also supported the “Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians” who intuited that they were particularly vulnerable to selective abortion should a “gay gene” ever be identified.) I have received the Journals of FFL for decades as a result. Valenti can sneer at the “debated notion that first-wave feminists were antiabortion,” but I’d rather have the affirmative than the negative of that in a debate.

I now consider the support of the Susan B. Anthony list, the FFL-affiliated PAC formed years later, a reliable indicator of a bona fide pro-life candidate who is not (necessarily) wedded to the religious right. I give essentially nothing to the National Right to Life Committee or its PAC these days, but in most election cycles, I’ll pore over SBA List endorsements for candidates, almost invariably women, whose positions (and odds) seem especially good, and then I’ll support them modestly. (Public records of such giving has gotten me labeled an anti-choice fanatic by the brain-dead denizens of Journal & Courier online comboxes.)

I probably could go on, but suffice that I know whereof I speak when I say that Valenti is either consciously lying or fabricating factoids when she alleges that pro-life feminism is a cynical ploy adopted only after “protesters realized that screaming ‘Murderer!’ at women wasn’t winning hearts and minds.”

But, of course, Palin isn’t a feminist — not in the slightest. What she calls “the emerging conservative feminist identity” isn’t the product of a political movement or a fight for social justice.

It isn’t a structural analysis of patriarchal norms, power dynamics or systemic inequities. It’s an empty rallying call to other women who are as disdainful of or apathetic to women’s rights as Palin herself: women who want to make abortion and emergency contraception illegal and who fight same-sex marriage rights. As Kate Harding wrote on Jezebel.com: “What comes next? ‘Phyllis Schlafly feminism?’ ‘Patriarchal feminism?’ ‘He-Man Woman Hater Feminism?'”

So let it be clear: Valenti considers abortion (and “emergency contraception,” but I repeat myself) and same-sex marriage among the sina qua non of feminism. That marks her as a “radical feminist” or something close.

In radical feminism, if you’re not tying “power dynamic or systemic inequities” to “patriarchal norms” — if, for instance, you tie them in the slightest to such phenomena as the Chamber-of-Commerce types pushing to get women into the marketplace in the early 20th century in order to suppress wages, or the prudent self-protection rendered more urgent by no-fault divorce and its effective abolition of marriage — you’re a fake feminist. I’m all in favor of words having somewhat precise meanings if possible, but as a few of my links to Wikepedia in this posting demonstrate, “feminism” as of today can follow a lot of different adjectives.

“So God made man; in the image of God He made him; male and female He made them.” Human equality does not require identity of aptitudes and roles (though it is dangerous, if not outright wrong, to apply generalizations to specific people). A gifted athlete is no more or less fully human that a gifted scholar. A layman is no more or less human than a pastor or priest. Men and women are of equal dignity even if they are measurably different — and not different merely in the matter of some plumbing that only matters on special occasions.

Feminists for Life essentially embraces a form of what apparently is known today as difference feminism, or cultural feminism or new feminism. I have a little trouble getting worked up over the label, or holding myself out as expert in the taxonomy of feminism. But having followed them all these years, I know that the proper valuing of women for the common good is a bona fide concern of Feminists for Life.

So is Sarah Palin a fake feminist? Well, she’s to the right of many SBA-endorsed politicians. And I’m ready to believe that just about anything about her is fake. But I draw the line at credulously falling for an empty screed like Jessica Valenti’s column.

Deep down, Emergent Church is shallow

I left the Evangelical world decisively about the time Bill Hybels’ Willow Creek Church was its fad du jour, so Emergent Church was largely unknown to me. Having left, and after a few years having given up on the idea that surely the folks over there are just waiting to hear what stunned me 14 or so years ago (Orthodox Christianity), I haven’t really kept up with the characteristic novelties, fads, charlatans, personages and artistes of Evangelicalism. (Oh yeah: I did read Blue Like Jazz and kept thinking that Donald Miller was channeling Holden Caulfield.)

But Father Gregory Jensen apparently has kept up, with the Emergent-flavored variety of Evangelicalism at least, and despite some sympathy, sees it as rooted in Oedipal adolescent rebellion.

From his review of Andrew Farley’s new book, “The Naked Gospel: The Truth You May Never Hear in Church,” extended quote:

Whatever might have been the justice of his criticisms of the Medieval Catholic Church, Martin Luther began a historical process that embodied a fundamentally different understanding of what it means to be Christian. For Luther and those who followed in his footsteps, to be a Christian meant not to live according to Tradition of the Church but to protest against it. We have reached a point now that when tradition–even Christian tradition–conflicts with the individual and his desires it is the individual and not tradition that is given the primary place.

…

Within the broad context of Protestantism is that people criticize yesterday’s critics. (sic) We come to see yesterday’s heroes as those who would bind us, the new generation, even as they were once bound by those who came before them.  The dynamic here is almost Oedipal.  Just as a man rebels against his father, his son in turn rebels against him.  But this isn’t maturity but childishness.

…

Thanks to my relationship with the Ooze, a site “dedicated to the emerging Church culture,” I’ve had the opportunity to read and reflect on works significant to the Emergent Church movement.  For all that I admire the energy and enthusiasm of this movement, I’ve concluded that it is simply the latest manifestation of the anti-Traditionalism that is at the core of both Protestantism and neoliberalism.  And like both, I fear the Emergent Church movement will in time fragment into every smaller sects, leaving it is wake spiritually and psychologically damaged men and women.

…

Contrary to his own assertions, Farley’s book is not about the Gospel.  While I think he is right in rejecting the deformation of Evangelicalism, he simply substitutes his own idiosyncratic view of the Gospel for the one under which he grew up.  This is simply another in a long string of attempts to justify Evangelical Christianity’s love affair with rebellion against Tradition.  St Anthony the Great warns his monks about just this when he says “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”

The problem here is that without a solid grounding in the Christian Tradition, the Emergent Church movement, like Protestantism and Evangelical Christianity before it, has little to offer.  My earlier reference to Oedipus was not accidental.  Like the rebellious adolescent, Farley’s book confuses criticism with mature thought and supplanting one’s father with being an adult.  This is not a surprise; criticism is easy.  But stripping away the neuroses of Evangelical Christianity is different from presenting the Gospel in its fullness.

Farley does not present the Gospel in its fullness; he wants to present the “Naked Gospel.”  But the Gospel isn’t, and never has been, “naked.”  Like Joseph, the Gospel has always worn that divinely tailored coat of many colors (see Genesis 37:3) called Holy Tradition.  “Therefore, brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle” (2 Thessalonians 2:15, NKJV).

If readers finds Farley’s critique compelling, they owe it to themselves to seek out an Orthodox Church and discover the Christian Tradition in its fullness.  It is possible to live a life that is more than criticism.  Through the sacraments of the Church you can become a “partaker of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), progressively freer from your sins and evermore the person God created you to be.

In a sense, the only thing remarkable about this is that there’s a felt need to remark on it. The glimmers I’ve gotten of the Emergents suggested that they are the latest Evangelical schtick (sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper), wherein the distinctive transgressivism is borrowed artifacts — candles, incense, silence, maybe a few icons — from Christian traditions that actually are rooted in something.

But maybe if Father Gregory has earned their respect, they’ll hear him when he says the Emperor’s new clothes look suspiciously like the old clothes — under the nice-smelling Fabreze, the same superstructure of rebellious and novelty-seeking thought, convinced that only the chains of the past prevent fulfillment, and that going back to the Bible (or the “Naked Gospel”) will unlock the door thereto.

I was privileged for a year and a summer to attend Evangelicalism’s best, Wheaton College, preceded by four years at Wheaton Academy, its loosely-affiliated Christian boarding school. Many (not all) of my friends from there have crashed and burned. Some know they’ve apostasized. But some still think of themselves as Evangelical Christians of some sort, while manifesting by attitude (and in at least one disappointing case, by explicit words) that there’s no love of God, but only some cheap fire insurance. Church attendance pays the premiums. They never saw, or long ago ceased seeing, the rabbit. I was one of them (I’d ceased seeing what I saw as a child), though I hadn’t yet abandoned the chase before Orthodox Christianity blessedly blind-sided me.

What’s at stake is not bragging rights, much as we all love to brag. What’s at stake is sheep without a Good (and stable) Shepherd, becoming over time Father Gregory’s “spiritually and psychologically damaged men and women.”

Perhaps what deters them from the fullness of the Gospel is precisely that it’s not shallow; that you can’t jump in and feel the bottom; that the Christian tradition “is what it is” despite your pet theories of what this (or that) verse “means to me” —and that what it is is 2000 years deep; or just that it brings God so uncomfortably near (rather than freezing Him in a book one can manipulate to mean most anything).

The best lesson I learned coming into Orthodoxy was that if it and I disagreed, it was probably right. Time has proven that true in many ways, is still proving it true in some ways, and has in no wise ever proven it false.


Chasing the rabbit

Father Stephen recounts an evocative story from the Desert Fathers, set in the context of the Gospel According to John (1:14 “we have beheld his glory”) and John’s first epistle (1:1 et seq: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life — the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it”). The story is the perfect conclusion — indeed, could almost stand alone:

There is a story from the Desert Fathers about a young monk who asked one of the holy men of the desert why it is that so many people came out to the desert to seek God and yet most of them gave up after a short time and returned to their lives in the city.

The old monk responded:

“Last evening my dog saw a rabbit running for cover among the bushes of the desert and he began to chase the rabbit, barking loudly. Soon other dogs joined the chase, barking and running. They ran a great distance and alerted many other dogs. Soon the wilderness was echoing the sounds of their pursuit but the chase went on into the night.

After a little while, many of the dogs grew tired and dropped out. A few chased the rabbit until the night was nearly spent. By morning, only my dog continued the hunt.”

“Do you understand,” the old man said, “what I have told you?”

“No,” replied the young monk, “please tell me, father.”

“It is simple,” said the desert father, “my dog saw the rabbit!”

Choose your own Jesus

Ross Douthat takes a detour and frolic from politics to diss the interminable “search for the historic Jesus.” The proximate cause of his ire is a religion professor reportedly much smitten with the “well attested” notion of Jesus ben Pantera, the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier:

Now of course what Gopnik means by “well attested” is “well attested and non-miraculous,” which is fair enough so far as it goes. But this no-miracles criterion is why the historical Jesus project is such a spectacular dead end — because what would ordinarily be the most historically-credible sources for the life and times of Jesus Christ are absolutely soaked in supernaturalism, and if you throw them out you’re left with essentially idle speculations about Jesus ben Pantera and other phantoms that have no real historical grounding whatsoever.

Think about it this way: If the letters of Saint Paul (the earliest surviving Christian texts, by general consensus) and the synoptic gospels (the second-earliest) didn’t make such extraordinary claims about Jesus’s resurrection, his divinity, and so forth, no credible historian would waste much time parsing second-century apocrypha for clues about the “real” Jesus.

…

[T]he synoptic gospels and Saint Paul’s epistles do make absolutely extraordinary claims, and so modern scholars have every right to read them with a skeptical eye, and question their factual reliability. But if you downgrade the earliest Christian documents or try to bracket them entirely, the documentary evidence that’s left is so intensely unreliable (dated, fragmentary, obviously mythological, etc.) that scholars can scavenge through it to build whatever Jesus they prefer — and then say, with Gopnik, that their interpretation of the life of Christ is “as well attested” as any other. Was Jesus a wandering sage? Maybe so. A failed revolutionary? Sure, why not. A lunatic who fancied himself divine? Perhaps. An apocalyptic prophet? There’s an app for that …But this isn’t history: It’s “choose your own Jesus,” and it’s become an enormous waste of time. Again, there’s nothing wrong with saying that the supernaturalism of the Christian canon makes it an unreliable guide to who Jesus really was. But if we’re honest with ourselves, then we need to acknowledge what this means: Not the beginning of a fruitful quest for the Jesus of history, but the end of it.

Ross is good when he’s carrying forward the New York Times’ mission, but this is better than good. Bullseye! All thumbs up!

Right diagnosis, wrong prescription

I often like Dennis Prager’s syndicated columns, and there’s some things to like about a recent one titled “The World is a Cruel Place and if America Weakens, It Will Get Crueler.”

Prager first, and pretty fairly, defends Christianity against today’s common calumnies. Then he realistically rehearses the woes of much of the world today, including the oddity that Russia, while remaining fiercely Orthodox in many ways, nevertheless lost its moral compass during 70 years of Communist tyranny and hasn’t regained it, functioning today as a nihilistic thugocracy.

Then he proposes that Lincoln’s America — “The Last Best Hope of Earth” — is the balm for the world’s woes — if only we can get the left out of power,  because the left thinks of America in post-Christian, Christendom-hating ways that render America impotent.

But there’s an odd asymmetry to that argument. It seems to presume that if we only get rid of left-leaning leaders, America will resume its role as the modern realization of Christendom rather than another nation rapidly becoming post-Christian. Although we’re lagging Europe in explicit secularization, we are implicitly secular right down to the pews of most Churches (see here for a long and evocative essay by Father Stephen, and here for a shorter piece explaining that “The default position of America is secular protestantism”).

Our foreign policy as carried out by both parties promotes our imperial goals, not Christianity, and muscular Krustian foreign policy will only make us more odious in the eyes of the world.

Sorry, Dennis: I’m not sure even you believe this one. If you want to make a case for voting out the Democrats and voting in Republicans, you’ll need to do better.

Bare breasts good, burqas bad

The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson explains, in terms I 95% agree with, why Europe’s burqa bans are a bad idea:

Belgium is moving toward a total ban on face-covering veils in public. Italian police recently fined a woman for wearing a burqa. In France, a law banning garments “designed to hide the face” is likely to be introduced in July. “The burqa is not a sign of religion,” says French President Nicolas Sarkozy, “it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.”

…

The motives of European leaders in this controversy are [un]sympathetic. Some speak deceptively (and absurdly) of a security motive for banning Islamic covering. Who knows what they are hiding? But by this standard, the war on terrorism would mandate the wearing of bikinis. The real purpose of burqa bans is to assert European cultural identity — secular, liberal and individualistic — at the expense of a visible, traditional religious minority. A nation such as France, proudly relativistic on most issues, is convinced of its cultural superiority when it comes to sexual freedom. A country of topless beaches considers a ban on excessive modesty. The capital of the fashion world, where women are often overexposed and objectified, lectures others on the dignity of women.

For what the opinion of an outsider is worth, I do think the burqa is oppressive. It seems designed to restrict movement, leaving women clumsy, helpless, dependent and anonymous. The vast majority of Muslim women do not wear complete covering because the Koran mandates only modesty, not sartorial imprisonment.

But at issue in Europe is not social disapproval; it is criminalization. In matters of religious liberty, there are no easy or rigid rules … Some rights are so fundamental that they must be defended in every case. But if a democratic majority can impose its will on a religious minority for any reason, religious freedom has no meaning. The state must have strong, public justifications to compel conformity, especially on an issue such as the clothes that citizens wear.

In France — where only a few thousand women out of 5 million Muslims wear the burqa — a ban is merely a symbolic expression of disdain for an unpopular minority. It would achieve little but resentment.

Keys here for me:

  • The idea that we’re respecting the dignity of women by banning burqas is contemptible nonsense given how we treat women ourselves. Immodesty is not authentically liberating.
  • As intimated in Gerson’s opening (not quoted above), the ban is a kind of Western imperialism, only exercised over immigrants not “through colonialism but through migration.” As Gerson says, “Some rights are so fundamental that they must be defended in every case,” but burqa bans are not protecting fundamental rights.
  • I have long wanted to maintain a capacious middle ground between (1) crime and (2) legal right. I want to be able to disapprove and even, perhaps, to shun practitioners of bad behaviors (call them “(1.5) Vice”) that I wouldn’t want criminalized. As an Orthodox Christian, I would exercise that sparingly, but there are instances like excommunication where it is expected that arms-length will be maintained even as one prays for the repentance of the excommunicated one. And, yes, I willingly cede the same to others who disapprove of something I do; I’ve been wrong, and sometimes it was expressions of disapproval — not legal sanctions — that set me right again.

However, Gerson emphasizes the wrongness of burqas even on Islamic principle (“the Koran mandates only modesty, not sartorial imprisonment”). It strikes me as presumptuous for an outsider to hold much opinion about the teaching of another tradition’s holy books. Living religious traditions may well have interpretive traditions of some subtlety, or may have extratextual traditions that are considered legitimately binding. In that sense, Gerson himself applies his Protestant “Bible only” sensibility to Islam in an “imperialist” spirit that may differ from European secularists impositions of sexual freedom more in degree than in kind.