In today’s first “On The Square” article, Joe Carter notes that country music reflects our cultural values but is nonetheless viewed with suspicion by its peer genres of popular music. What’s left in the lyrics is, Carter argues, just as consequential as what’s left out.
An examination of the sixty most popular country songs of 2010 reveals that faith and family are recurring themes within the musical genre: Fathers are mentioned in ten of the songs, mothers in seven, and children in five; six of the songs allude to marriage; mentions of prayer, preachers, church, heaven, and God are heard discussed in three songs; and the Bible is named in one. Altogether, twenty-three of the sixty songs include at least one of these themes.
Second is George Weigel‘s weekly column. This week, he reports on some startling recent figures on global Christianity. On the one hand, persecution is as alive as ever:
The provocation in the 2011 report involves martyrdom. For purposes of research, the report defines “martyrs” as “believers in Christ who have lost their lives, prematurely, in situations of witness, as a result of human hostility.” The report estimates that there were, on average, 270 new Christian martyrs every 24 hours over the past decade, such that “the number of martyrs [in the period 2000-2010] was approximately 1 million.” Compare this to an estimated 34,000 Christian martyrs in 1900.
On the other hand, there’s plenty of good news on the demographic front:
Africa has been the most stunning area of Christian growth over the past century. There were 8.7 million African Christians in 1900 (primarily in Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa); there are 475 million African Christians today and their numbers are projected to reach 670 million by 2025. Another astonishing growth spurt, measured typologically, has been among Pentecostals and charismatics: 981,000 in 1900; 612,472,000 in 2011, with an average of 37,000 new adherents every day—the fastest growth in two millennia of Christian history.
Today’s first “On The Square” essay comes in from Matthew Lee Anderson, who looks into social critic Caitlin Flanagan’s take on Karen Owen, the Duke senior who seduced thirteen Duke athletes as “research” for her undergraduate thesis. Owen’s misspent thesis, Anderson suggests, proves a source of both horror and of hope.
Flanagan seems to fit Owens into her pre-determined template of female desire gone awry. For Flanagan, female sexual desire “is deeply enmeshed in the desire to be seduced, taken, treated….with a measure of aggression,” which explains why Tucker Max is (thank God) inimitable by the female sex, despite their best efforts. Flanagan’s Owens—noting the questionable relationship to the real Karen Owens—is the antithesis of Bella, the heroine of the extraordinarily successful adolescent novel Twilight.
…
I appreciate Flanagan’s optimism that Owens feels regret for doing what seems so obviously destructive, but interpreting Owens’ behavior through the lens of Twilight is also the easy way out for social conservatives. Treating Owens as motivated by revenge may implicitly reinforce the traditional sexual morality of Twilight, but in doing so also allows us to avoid accounting for the more difficult prospect that Owens is, if not happy, at least not particularly concerned about her choices or motivated by a sense of animus. While an instinctive social conservatism might be okay, we need to ensure the facts fit.
“On The Square” today, Joe Carter points to the alarming double standard on sexual assault he finds in our culture: A deep disdain for rape, vicious crime that it is, but a cavalier attitude toward the epidemic of prison rape:
In 2004 the corrections industry estimated that t 12,000 rapes occurred per year—more than the annual number of rapes reported in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York combined. Three years later a survey by the U.S. Department of Justice found that more than 60,000 inmates claimed to have been sexually victimized by prison guards or other inmates during the previous twelve months.
Today’s second essay comes in from George Weigel, who draws our attention to one reason we should maintain hope in the ideal university: the phenomenon of “Aggie Catholics.”
Aggie Catholicism is something to behold. Daily Mass attendance averages 175; there were closer to 300 Catholic Aggies at Mass on a weekday afternoon when I visited a few years back. Sunday Masses draw between 4,000 and 5,000 worshippers. There are 10 weekly time-slots for confessions, which are also heard all day long on Mondays. Eucharistic adoration, rosary groups, the Liturgy of the Hours, and the traditional First Friday devotion are staples of Aggie Catholicism’s devotional life.
Cold weather and rosary-bead sightings were just about all the secular reporters appeared concerned with at this year’s national March for Life, many of them drawing more attention to the chill in the air than to pro-lifers’ resilient reasons to bear it. And that was when they reported on it at all. But chilling, whatever the journalists say, was the last thing marchers were doing this year, with the event’s overwhelmingly youthful crowd stretching over a mile on Constitution Avenue, voicing slogans that were resolute and bold, but not, as many would prefer to believe, “angry.”
Along with banners representing university pro-life groups and parish committees, something of the contemporary pro-life tone was evident in the protest signs on display. One light-hearted favorite was “Chuck Norris is Pro-Life,” and a more serious one read, “Children’s Rights End at Conception.” But none, however light or serious, were so unbecoming as the pained and agitated slogans so often heard at pro-abortion rallies, on the increasingly rare occasions they occur. There’s no pro-life equivalent to “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries.”
We can hardly be blamed for giving this a simple explanation. Any coherent social movement must say yes to some ideas and no to others, and pro-lifers say yes to human life and no to the validity of abortion as a choice to end it. But there’s a certain cult of niceness in our public square today, one that says yes to yes and no to no, with the path of least resistance being the primary moral impulse of a “nice” person.
But through common sense, we can see that, for instance, while a toddler’s mother will gain kudos as a “nice” parent for always saying yes to her child, one can hardly blame the child for growing to disrespect figures of moral authority altogether, especially those who say “no.” While pro-lifers remain firm in their “no” to the horror of abortion, the youthful and energetic movement seems impenetrable to slanders of curmudgeonhood and naysaying, and remains cheerful in the fight, preoccupied with the “yes” and not indulgent with their “no.”
Featured “On The Square Today” is, first, Joe Carter’s weekly column; today’s is a reflection on emergent evidence about the origins of atheism—in particular, origins of the non-philosophical variety:
A new set of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology finds that atheists and agnostics report anger toward God either in the past or anger focused on a hypothetical image of what they imagine God must be like. Julie Exline, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University and the lead author of this recent study, has examined other data on this subject with identical results. Exline explains that her interest was first piqued when an early study of anger toward God revealed a counterintuitive finding: Those who reported no belief in God reported more grudges toward him than believers.
And in “The Reagan Centenary,” George Weigel draws our attention to remarkable parallels between John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, as discerned through Weigel’s personal experience of them both:
They were both orphaned young: the future pope, literally; the future president, virtually, given the alcoholism of his father.
They were both men of the theater, whose extensive acting experience gave them both crucial skills and a conviction: that the word of truth, spoken clearly and forcefully enough, could cut through the static of evil’s lies, rally hearts and souls, and create possibilities where only obstacles were apparent.
Their understanding of, and loathing for, communism came to both of them early: Reagan, through his battles with Hollywood communists for control of the Screen Actors Guild; John Paul II, through his experience of the brutalitarian period of Polish communism after World War II. Both knew that the crucial battle with communism was in the realm of the human spirit, for communism proposed a false, yet seductive, view of the human future that could best be matched by a nobler vision of human freedom.
They were both dismissed as “conservatives” by pundits for whom “conservative” was a polite placeholder for “reactionary.” Yet the truth of the matter was that both were radicals: Reagan, in his convictions about ridding the world of nuclear weapons; John Paul, in the depth of his Christian discipleship.
Our “On The Square” article today is R.R. Reno’s much-anticipated weekly column. In today’s essay, Reno explores one response to an acclaimed paper arguing for traditional marriage, and analyzes how liberal critiques of traditional marriage unveils liberalism’s vision of itself:
Of course the practice of marriage has varied a great deal throughout human history. But the union of men and women for the purposes of forming a family unit—which is to say the traditional institution of marriage in all its variety—stands alongside religious forms of solidarity as the most fundamental and primeval mode of social organization available to the human species. If, as Koppleman and other liberal legal theorists forthrightly affirm, the modern liberal state can do with this fundamental institution as it wishes, then it seems to me that there is nothing the modern liberal state cannot redefine, reshape, or reinvent.
Creating and never recognizing—it’s a vision of political life that fills me with foreboding. After all, the human person, like the institution of marriage, is (thank God) pre-political, to be respected not remolded, recognized rather than subjected to redefinition.
George Weigel’s Wednesday column is our second “On The Square” essay today; in it, Weigel continues to examine the “tectonic shifts” in Catholic episcopal leadership in America, including recent measures by Bishop Thomas Olmsted:
Bishop Olmsted inherited a terrible situation in Phoenix: The previous bishop had been disgraced; the local legal authorities had stated publicly that they could not trust the Church to police its own house in matters of sexual abuse, and proposed to take over that function themselves. Bishop Olmsted didn’t squawk, nor did he deny that serious problems existed. Rather, he quietly and decisively set about fixing what needed fixing, so that the public authorities were soon content to revert to a more normal Church/state relationship.
In today’s second “On the Square” essay, Fr. Thomas Guarino (a past contributor to First Things and a member of Evangelicals and Catholics Together) writes on concerns about draconian juridical policies within Catholic dioceses, and the effect they hold on the theology of priesthood, especially for faithful priests:
Various actions taken against accused priests suggest that current policies are straining the theology of the priesthood. This may have the short-term advantage of preventing litigants from storming the Church door. It may keep the media at bay for the moment—a media that, in any case, will always find the Church a stumbling block because of her insistence on the incomparable truth she bears. But such actions are also having the disastrous effect of eroding Catholic doctrine, the only treasure that the Church really has to offer.
“What Is Marriage?” Robert P. George, Ryan Anderson, and Sherif Girgis’ recent article on marriage in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, has generated something of a discourse among scholars of opposing views, even being called a “succinct and clear exposition” by one prominent same-sex marriage advocate.
That advocate, Northwestern Law Professor Andrew Koppelman, offered a measured critique of George, Anderson, and Girgis, but most importantly, as the trio wrote, embraced the “less politically palatable implications of rejecting our position,” discarding the marital norms of monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence. Barry Deutsch of FamilyScholars also responded, somewhat less seriously, but seemed not to grasp the central thesis of “What Is Marriage?”, even taking the sadly usual (but decidedly unscholarly) tack of questioning the good faith of the article’s authors.
George, Anderson, and Girgis’ most recent response is to NYU Law Professor Kenji Yoshino, the first prominent voice to respond to “What Is Marriage?”, but also the least forthright. Twice now, in Slate, Yoshino has reframed and simplified the George-Anderson-Girgis argument to suppose a reductio ad absurdum. In their response, the three colleagues point out, among other concerns, Yoshino’s insistence that they get marriage wrong, despite his persistent refusal to identify what marriage is:
Our first reply challenged Yoshino to explain his own view of marriage, such that two men or two women could form what is truly a marital relationship. Yoshino: “I thought the answer would be intuitive: I want . . . marriage to widen to permit same-sex couples to enter it.”
Translation: Yoshino wants marriage to be whatever it must be such that two men or two women could truly marry.
In today’s second “On The Square” column, Gerald Hiestand, an evangelical pastor, describes a uniquely modern Christian dilemma: the unsettling schism between pastors and theologians. While the history of Christianity encourages the view that pastor and theologian are part of the same vocation, modern times have seen unprecedented division:
Historically, the church’s most influential theologians were churchmen—pastors, priests, and bishops. Clerics such as Athanasius, Augustine (indeed, nearly all the church Fathers), Anselm, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Edwards, and Wesley functioned as the wider theologians of their day—shaping not only the theological vision of their own parishes, but that of the wider church. In their day, the pastoral community represented the most influential, most insightful, and most articulate body of theologians.
But since the nineteenth-century (in North America, at least) the center of theological reflection has shifted from the parish to the university. The pastoral community is no longer called upon—as a matter of vocation—to construct theology for those beyond their congregations. Instead, our present context views the academy as the proper home for those with theological gifts. Those with shepherding gifts are directed toward the pastorate. And those who are gifted in both areas? Well, they’ll have to choose. But can this be right? Do we really mean to suggest that the proper home of a theologian is in the academy, disconnected from the pastoral vocation?
For readers of George Weigel’s “On The Square” column on the First Things homepage: While we will not feature one such column this week, we will run our next installment early in the new year.
When contending with philosophic heavyweights, one can either refuse to argue or argue to win, but the worst thing one can do is to debate without actually arguing. Something like that was in play when NYU Law professor Kenji Yoshino penned a brief response in Slate to “What is Marriage?”, a paper released last week making the case for traditional marriage. In his rejoinder, Yoshino suggests that the conjugal view of marriage is untenable because its existence would be unfair to those who cannot (or choose not) to achieve it. Although he might have been the right kind of scholar to respond to this momentous piece of scholarship on marriage, Yoshino clearly chose not to address arguments he takes for granted as settled.
Robert P. George, Sherif Girgis, and Ryan Anderson—the article’s authors—defended their arguments today at Public Discourse, reasoning that their piece both addressed Yoshino’s concerns and made what is thus far an unrefuted case for the conjugal view of marriage.
Indeed, Yoshino’s posting brings to mind points developed in a recent paper by Yoshino’s colleague at NYU, Professor Jeremy Waldron—one of the world’s most eminent legal philosophers. Waldron observes that it “infuriat[es]” many of his fellow liberals that some intellectuals remain determined, in Waldron’s words, “to actually argue on matters that many secular liberals think should be beyond argument, matters that we think should be determined by shared sentiment or conviction.” In particular, Waldron laments, “many who are convinced by the gay rights position are upset” that others “refuse to take the liberal position for granted.”
The central argument of our article is that equality and justice are indeed crucial to the debate over civil marriage law, but that to settle it—to determine what equality and justice demand—one must answer the question: what is marriage? So this is what the debate is ultimately about. In making our case for conjugal marriage, we consider the nature of human embodiedness; how this makes comprehensive interpersonal union sealed in conjugal acts possible; and how such union and its intrinsic connection to children give marriage its distinctive norms of monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence.
We also show that those who would redefine civil marriage, to eliminate sexual complementarity as an essential element, can give no principled account of why marriage should be (1) a sexual partnership as opposed to a partnership distinguished by exclusivity with respect to other activities (including non-sexual relationships, as between cohabiting adult brothers); or (2) an exclusive union of only two persons (rather than three or more in a polyamorous arrangement). Nor can they give robust reasons for making marriage (3) a legally recognized and regulated relationship in the first place (since, after all, we don’t legally recognize or closely regulate most other forms of friendships).We were explicit in framing these as challenges to proponents of gay civil marriage. And if anyone is capable of meeting them, surely it is Professor Yoshino. So his decision to pass over those challenges in perfect silence confirms and reinforces our belief (also amply defended in our article) that only the conjugal view can answer them.
It is one thing, and isn’t another—and that’s not mere subjective opinion. Or so we read in What is Marriage, a new and momentous paper authored by First Things board member Robert P. George, along with former First Things assistant editor Ryan Anderson and Rhodes Scholar Sherif Girgis. Found in the upcoming issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the paper treats the trickiest arguments in the same-sex marriage debate the with the precision and rigor for which these three scholars are known. Questions, for example, of whether marriage is primarily a legally-sanctioned romantic partnership, or if its essential purpose resides in something else.
George, Anderson, and Girgis also address questions such as whether natural marriage discriminates against persons with same-sex attractions, how marriage differs from friendship, and whether its link to fertility and child-rearing is essential or merely incidental. They examine allegations of harm done by same-sex marriage, and explore the ways that re-imagining marriage will (and in some cases, already has) rework the state’s endorsement of the human family, as well as certain religious and moral freedoms. And then they take on the same-sex marriage arguments that most reflect the moral spirit of the age— “constructivist” arguments, as George, Anderson, and Girgis dub them. As for these kinds of claims, the authors write:
They deny that there is any reality to marriage independent of custom—any set of objective conditions that a relationship must meet to ground the moral privileges and obligations distinctive of that natural kind of union which we have called real marriage. For constructivists, rather, marriage is whatever social and legal conventions say that it is, there being no separate moral reality for these conventions to track. Hence it is impossible for the states policy to be wrong about marriage: different proposals are only more or less feasible or preferable.
Today’s first “On The Square” item is Joe Carter’s column; today it’s a whimsical creation story narrative. But it’s not your run-of-the-mill creation story; rather, it addresses a certain inequality of myth Carter finds between the children of Judeo-Christian tradition and the children of atheist materialists. As the latter children have recourse only to the turgid prose of cosmologists, Carter proposes a more humanistic myth for them, revealing the amount of faith one needs to believe it:
In the beginning was Nothing, and Nothing created Everything. When Nothing decided to create Everything, she filled a tiny dot with Time, Chance, and Everything and had it expand. The expansion spread Everything into Everywhere carrying Time and Chance with it to keep it company. The three stretched out together leaving bits of themselves wherever they went. One of those places was the planet Earth.
In today’s “On the Square” essay, First Things columnist Elizabeth Scalia draws attention to a recent episode in the “war on Christmas” and the war on the “war on Christmas,” both of which have grown rather tiresome over the years. Scalia notes that the cynical author of a recent blasphemous exhibit at the Smithsonian understands freedom of speech to be exactly the opposite of what it is:
Depictions of atheists, communists, or exploitated Crucifixes are risk-free ventures. There will always be a Gopnik ready to call such depictions “smart” and an insecure, media-cue’d gentry ready to embrace them for social cache, and a publicly funded art establishment eager to fund them. There will always be a career to be made.
Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” shows us a working-class man standing amid his neighbors. By the tilt of his gaze we know he is speaking to someone elevated, perhaps seated at a bench or dais—someone in authority. There are no nightsticks in sight, as there would have been and would be today in too many places in the world. There is no commissar, monitoring his comments, demanding either his acquiescence or his silence. There are only people, not all agreeing, yet giving a man his say. Somewhere behind him is, undoubtedly, a reporter from the local newspaper, a young Gopnik, free to write whatever he wants.
In today’s second “On the Square” article, Peter J. Leithart points out that what poets have always seen in love (“It’s a burning thing”) can be appreciated by theologians with equal attention—a lesson available to us since the Fall of our first parents.
Most offenses against love, Leithart goes on, owe to “defenses against intimacy”—intimacy that brings with it fear of losing one’s self to the existential other, whether God or man.
This has been true since Eden, but the natural post-Fall instinct to recoil from intimacy is reinforced by a culture that in its most basic assumptions and habits is a massive, systematic defense against intimacy, and this is, paradoxically, most obvious in what it tells us about will and desire. The world tells me that my choices are free only if they are entirely and completely mine. If any other person influences my decision, it is no longer free, no longer valid. Other people are obstacles to my freedom, threats to my will. The flame only consumes.
In today’s first “On the Square” essay, Joe Carter sets up a startling and original juxtaposition between two disparate characters: Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark and Frank Capra’s George Bailey. While for Roark, all roads lead to self-satisfaction, George Bailey represents—on the surface, at least—an archetype of self-sacrifice and self-giving. But the comparison requires a more thorough analysis:
…Capra’s audience flatters themselves by believing the message of Wonderful Life is that their own lives are just as worthy, just as noble, and just as wonderful as George Bailey’s. In a way, they are as delusional as the Randian Rourke-worshippers. Despite the fact that they left their small-town communities for the city, put their parents in an assisted living facility and don’t know the names of their next door neighbors, they truly believe they are just like Capra’s hero.
What makes George Bailey one of the most inspiring, emotionally complex characters in modern popular culture is that he continually chooses the needs of his family and community over his own self-interested ambitions and desires—and suffers immensely and repeatedly for his sacrifices.
And in our second “On the Square” item, George Weigel explains why Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s ascent to leadership among his brother bishops means “the tectonic plates within U.S. Catholicism’s ordained leadership have shifted.”
In addition to the litany of unhelpful distortions and indulgence in wishful thinking on the part of some religion opinion writers over the weekend, some of the more rigorous in their ranks have provided helpful bits of writing on the Pope’s “condom comment.” One is Dr. Janet Smith’s helpful analysis, which offers this useful analogy on the condom-use question:
If someone was going to rob a bank and was determined to use a gun, it would better for that person to use a gun that had no bullets in it. It would reduce the likelihood of fatal injuries. But it is not the task of the Church to instruct potential bank robbers how to rob banks more safely and certainly not the task of the Church to support programs of providing potential bank robbers with guns that could not use bullets. Nonetheless, the intent of a bank robber to rob a bank in a way that is safer for the employees and customers of the bank may indicate an element of moral responsibility that could be a step towards eventual understanding of the immorality of bank robbing.
Still better is Jonah Goldberg’s excellent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, where he gets to the heart of Church critics’ philosophic error. He also reveals respect for the rationality of the Church’s view, even while he doesn’t fully accept it himself:
Over the weekend, the media (mis)reported that Benedict had renounced the Roman Catholic Church’s longstanding “policy” against condom use. I put “policy” in quotes because the media have a tendency to portray all church positions as if they were like rules for trash pickup; easily changed or abandoned upon papal or bureaucratic whim. That’s not how it works.
What Benedict said in a book-length interview is that in certain circumstances, using a condom would be less bad than not using one. To use Benedict’s example, a male prostitute with HIV would be acting more responsibly, more morally, if he wore a condom while plying his trade than if he didn’t.
The pontiff understands that not all harms are equal. Assault is wrong, for instance, but assault with a deadly weapon is more wrong than assault with a non-deadly one. Recognizing and limiting the harm you do can be the “first step in the direction of a moralization, a first act of responsibility in developing anew an awareness of the fact that not everything is permissible.”
Ross Douthat also offers useful commentary on his blog, in “Condoms, Catholicism and Casuistry” pointing to a 1996 interview in which then Cardinal Ratzinger showed his deep appreciation for the human and supernatural questions raised by the culture’s contraceptive impulse:
…Today we find ourselves before a separation of sexuality from procreation such as was not known earlier, and this makes it all the more necessary not to lose sight of the inner connection between the two. . . . [Third], the Church wants to keep man human … we cannot resolve great moral problems simply with techniques, with chemistry, but most solve them morally, with a life-style.
Pope Benedict’s clarification of the moral theology relating to condom use has produced one of those moments in media life when journalists ceremoniously remove their thinking caps and implement a hopelessly formulaic analysis of the Church’s inner politics and theological dialogue.
CNN and others have so far breathlessly noted Pope Benedict’s nuanced statement, but only with about as much subtlety as inept opinion writers reported on his equally nuanced quotation during the “Regensburg Moment.” Others, like the Telegraph, have been positively devious, proclaiming that the Church no longer opposes contraceptive acts. And, tiresome to say, each of these articles wearily attempts to relate the condom comment to past sex abuse by priests.
The expected lines of “argument” have been drawn up: The antiquarian, stuck-in-the-mud Church is finally catching up with modern ethics, with the spirit of the age, and with progress. After all, we are at a point in human history where the vast majority of things formerly prohibited are now considered good.
There are those who see the Church primarily as a political body, which, owing only to its self-interest, tends not to change its “policies” on issues very often. Other commentators have a somewhat more accurate understanding of the Church as a messenger with an unchanging message, but still are at pains to understand moral absolutes. Then there are those who understand that the Church proclaims certain moral absolutes, and must therefore be consistent.
Fr. Raymond De Souza published a short piece today on the recent “orgy of violence in Iraq”, in which sixty Catholics and their priests were killed while attending Mass at Baghdad’s cathedral, Our Lady of Salvation. A more anti-Christian attack could hardly have been orchestrated, with the Muslim gunmen shouting “God is Great” as they systematically killed the priests, then as many of the parishioners as could be dispatched before police arrived and their suicide vests came into use. Photojournalists documented the post-mortem scene inside the cathedral, and—let’s just say the walls were covered in blood, making Saving Private Ryan’s Omaha Beach scene look antiseptic.
De Souza expresses what strikes me as an entirely appropriate anger, not just at the attack, but at our apparent numbness to it. For one, it’s hard to reconcile our tepid indifference to a coordinated, systematic, religiously-themed attack on worshiping Christians with the widespread ignition of violent Islamic protest (and calls for death to Christians and Americans) in response to Rev. Terry Jones lonely, unfulfilled threat to burn Korans. He writes:
Indeed, the international community issued the usual boilerplate condemnations, most of them refusing to identify those responsible. The same statements could have been used had the Rotarians decided to massacre the Salvation Army. In the Church, too, there is often a reluctance to support vigorously Christians under attack, and to call things by name. . . .
Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. So Scripture teaches us, and so it must be for us, leaving vengeance to the Lord, and imploring the grace of conversion and reconciliation. But let us not blanch from raising our voices to the Lord, with righteous anger and hot tears, that He might visit His vengeance upon those who did this, bring down His wrath upon their heads and exact upon them a terrifying justice in full measure.
That’s not the language of imbalances; it is the anguish and agony of the shepherd when the flock is being slaughtered.
As a read through the First Thingsarchive can attest, the intersection of religion, culture, and public life is usually complex enough to require analysis, not mere observation as a spectator. New York City, the “prolepsis of the New Jerusalem,” has been a venue for quite a bit of that intersection, but rarely in such plain form as was recently executed in another great city by the Opera Company of Philadelphia.
As their press release goes, they performed a “Random Act of Culture” at Macy’s in City Center Philadelphia, home of the famous (and still the world’s largest) Wanamaker pipe organ. In the flash mob style of New York’s Improv Everywhere, 650 choristers burst into an almost seasonal run-through of the “Hallelujah” chorus of Handel’s Messiah. Thankfully, it seems the secularist police were off duty at the time of the singing.
Jennifer Fulwiler, atheist-turned Catholic apologist, runs Conversion Diary, a beautifully executed and winsome blog chronicling “what it’s like to be part of an orthodox faith after a life of nonbelief.” Several weeks back, she posted an audio file of her riveting yet refreshingly unvarnished conversion story.
Another good audio byte is here, where she recounts how her cultivated pro-choice mystique was, as the saying goes, mugged by reality. Another excellent post can be found here, where Fulwiler recounts a first encounter with a “real Christian”—that is, a Christian who didn’t fit the received caricature so common in secular culture:
One evening in college some friends and I were sitting around in my dorm room, getting ready to head out to go to a party, when the phone rang. Caller ID showed that it was yet another telemarketer. Our number had been inundated with sales calls, and I was getting sick of it. We had some time to kill before we needed to leave, so I decided to have some fun with the telemarketer for my friends’ amusement.
I motioned for everyone to get quiet, clicked the speakerphone button, and answered the call. Immediately a middle-aged-sounding man began his pitch, announcing that he was with a local home services company and asking me leading questions about my carpet cleaning needs.
Doing a horrible imitation of an east Texas accent, I interrupted him to say, “I don’t believe in cleaning carpets.”
He paused. “Excuse me?”
“Sir, that kind of thing is against my religion,” I said in a lecturing voice. The idea came to me to play the role of a religious zealot, to see if I could get the telemarketer to be the first one to hang up if I launched into a hellfire and brimstone lecture about how carpet cleaners were from the devil. Boy, wouldn’t my friends think that was hilarious — me, the consummate atheist, playing the character of a religious nut!
One recent addition to the same-sex marriage debate is the claim that by advancing arguments that civil marriage ought not to become gender-neutral, conservatives have “blood on their hands,” having committed the polemical equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater, especially given the tragic recent suicides of gay sexual harrassment victims.
As the argument goes, young gay teens witness the battle over the public meaning of civil marriage, and conclude that traditional marriage threatens their future—even the worth of their own lives—causing depression and suicide among the emotionally vulnerable. In other words, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes might describe it, it’s a case of deciding whether advocacy for the status quo on civil marriage constitutes a “clear and present danger” to public mental health.
There are at least three preliminary objections to the “clear and present danger” argument. First, it is highly dubious to claim that proposals for same-sex marriage have a logical connection to the gay rights movement. The nuts and bolts of same-sex marriage, after all, merely propose that civil marriage law be changed so as to be indifferent to gender; this in turn refocuses the purpose of marriage on adult preferences, and away from solidifying the archetypal environment for child-rearing. This setup is logically not “gay marriage,” because two men civilly marrying need not identify as gay for the contract to be recognized.
There are no plans to test prospective couples for gay self-identification; this, among other things, would discriminate against groups like bisexuals, or the arguable majority of others who take their “nontraditional” sexual orientations to be more fluid than to fit into strict categories of attraction. It is true, of course, that gender-neutral marriage is conducive to the novel kinds of family structures many public intellectuals are now positing, but the broad identification of same-sex marriage with the ordinary human rights of self-identifying gay people is simply a logical mistake.
Back in our December 2009 issue, we published a While We’re At It needling Conservapedia, the curious online home of the Conservative Bible Project. The underpinnings of that project, it seemed, stressed conservatism first and Christianity second. Sneering leftist hermeneuts, it’s furtively alleged, read liberal biases into Scripture, a state of affairs calling for a conservative solution not in hermeneutics but in an equal and oppositely biased exegesis of the biblical text:
. . . the Conservative Bible Project sets out ten guidelines to shape the proposed retranslation. Some of these include an emphasis on “powerful conservative terms” such as “volunteer” instead of “comrade,” “resourceful” instead of “shrewd,” or, in another case, a decidedly pragmatic substitution of “gamble” for “cast lots” to effect guilt-by-association with gambling. Even free-market principles should be brought out in the text, the Conservapedia writers insist—especially in Jesus’ “economic parables.”
One of Mark Shea’s posts today brought to mind another manifestation of this misordering of first principles—what Pope Leo XIII called “Americanism” in his 1899 apostolic letter Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, as Shea points out. As the letter suggests, it’s one thing to be patriotic, but quite another to be “American first, Christian second.”
From the foregoing it is manifest, beloved son, that we are not able to give approval to those views, which, in their collective sense, are called by some “Americanism.” But if by this name are to be understood certain endowments of mind which belong to the American people, just as other characteristics belong to various other nations, and if, moreover, by it is designated your political condition and the laws and customs by which you are governed, there is no reason to take exception to the name.
But if this is to be so understood that the doctrines which have been adverted to above are not only indicated, but exalted, there can be no manner of doubt that our venerable brethren, the bishops of America, would be the first to repudiate and condemn it as being most injurious to themselves and to their country. For it would give rise to the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive and would have the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world.
If a politician stood before us and proclaimed, polemically, that his campaign would be entirely without polemics, would we believe him? Or, worse, if he said his campaign would try to avoid politics? Tyranny over language either works or backfires spectacularly in political movements, and each passing instance of it adds urgency to the need for “political” to be rescued from its current status as a slur.
Styled after the Rainbow Sash Movement, People Representing the Sexual Minority is a student group at St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict. Like Rainbow Sash, PRiSM’s favored method of protest is to disrupt Catholic Masses, as they did recently against Archbishop John C. Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
The group expressed frustration after Archbishop John C. Nienstedt withheld the sacrament from them because they wore rainbow buttons and sashes signaling their support for same-sex “marriage” and homosexuality. The archbishop, who was celebrating his first student Mass at St. John’s on September 26, instead gave a blessing to members of the group, which included students from St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict, as well as three nuns and a priest.
Though the group’s tactic relies upon denial of Communion for effectiveness, members nonetheless chided Archbishop Nienstedt’s withholding of the Sacrament as an “extreme statement.” And then there was the best line of all, from one of the students: “We weren’t the ones who made it political….Once the archbishop denied communion, he made it political.” Immunity from politicking aside, the protesters truly didn’t seem to grasp how thickly they had layered the irony. Plainly, a statement that a protest is not political is itself a political statement. Second, if Nienstedt’s adherence to Church law is a political statement, it was a statement coerced by PRiSM members, which, of course, means it is properly attributed to them alone. An interesting episode, indeed, wherein Nienstedt’s purported political offense—in the eyes of PRiSM activists—almost seems to overshadow the primarily sexual issue at the heart of the activists’ cause.
