Upon entering my former church, the first things one noticed were ten framed photographs displayed in a line on the opposite wall. They were all of white men in clerical collars, displayed to honor every reverend who had pastored the parish since its founding in 1887.
I always found it interesting to see the societal transitions reflected in the photos. Arranged in chronological order, the first was of a stiffly Victorian-looking fellow, with each subsequent pastor looking more casual than the last. The final photo, the only one in color, was of the current pastor, who has been leading the church since 1982.
When I arrived on the scene, circa 1995, the church was a vibrant and progressive parish with a strong outreach to the gay community and all others who felt wounded by what most viewed as the wrongful moralism of orthodox Christianity.
I was clearly the most conservative congregant, yet to my surprise, I was elected to the church council. One night, at the conclusion of an otherwise unremarkable meeting, the president asked if there was any new business. “Yes,” replied Beverly (let’s call her). “I move that the photos of all the former pastors be taken down from the narthex.”
When asked why she had made such a strange motion, Beverly explained that they were all white men. So much white maleness, she insisted, was patriarchal and unrepresentative of the parish’s current essence.
“If it weren’t for those ‘white men,’” I responded heatedly, “we wouldn’t have this beautiful church in which to meet. We wouldn’t enjoy solid finances. Heck, we wouldn’t even be a parish!” And I had a reasonable suggestion, which I regretfully stated in an unhelpful sarcastic tone: “Rather than putting the pastors in the closet, why not instead add photos of current members to show ‘who we are’?”
Beverly reacted in kind. Her voice dripping with disdain, she asked me, “What are you doing here, anyway?”
Good question, I thought. Her challenge forced me to finally admit that as my parish and the national church of which it is a part were moving rapidly to the moral and theological left, I was heading in the opposite direction. We had ceased to be a good fit. Within a year, I made the painful decision to join a more conservative parish. A few years after that, I converted out of the national church.
Since the recent election, I have been thinking of that old episode. In many ways it seems that the nation is following the same cultural road taken by my former parish. I can almost hear the refrain: Take those awful photos out of the narthex!
Once again, I dissent. Recall that white men issued the Declaration of Independence’s “self-evident” assertion of universal equality. Three hundred thousand white Union soldiers gave their lives to free the slaves. Having been convinced of the sheer moral righteousness of the Suffragette cause, white men amended the Constitution to grant women the franchise. White men also risked their safety, and sometimes shed their blood, in solidarity with people of color to bring down Jim Crow. In short, but for the acquiescence of—and societal reform by—white men, we wouldn’t have reached the current better day in which an African American was twice elected president and the current female Secretary of State is his heiress apparent.
To be sure, I am not at all pleased with many contemporary political and cultural trends. I believe too many conflate liberty with license and fear that some want to replace true equality with new categorically invidious divisions. Indeed, I worry that our society is in danger of turning away from Martin Luther King Jr.’s content-of-our-character Promised Land just when we have nearly reached the destination.
Which brings me back to the fateful evening when Beverly told me to take a hike. The question about my place in the parish was barely uttered when Pastor (as everyone called him) cut her off cold. Reiterating an oft-repeated homily theme, he firmly told her, “Everyone is welcome at this church! We are about creating unity in the midst of differences here, not giving in to discord. No one doesn’t belong.” Then he asked us both to calm down and shake hands. We did, and despite our continuing fundamental differences, we never shared another cross word.
A few years ago, I happened to be in the neighborhood and decided to stop by the church and say hello to the Pastor, whom I still hold in great affection. As I entered the narthex I was very gratified to see the past pastors still in their place of honor on the wall—a sign of continuity in the midst of dramatic change.
Our political, cultural, and social divisions look as if they will continue to widen. But they need not tear us apart. As Pastor always taught: We need to keep working at loving our neighbor because no one doesn’t belong.
Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. He also consults for the Patients Rights Council and the Center for Bioethics and Culture. His previous “On the Square” articles can be found here.
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Comments:
Great piece again. Love FTs.
Recall also that those same white men failed to apply that self-evident assertion of universal equality to millions of African slaves. Any self-evident assertion that is not backed up by principled action on a matter where its application is so glaringly obvious is worse than useless, as far as I am concerned. The white men in question deserve no honor whatsoever for making that assertion.
Words are very cheap indeed; deeds evidencing a sincere and principled conviction about the meaning of the words are what really matters.
The white men in question deserve no honor whatsoever for making that assertion.
Words are very cheap indeed; deeds evidencing a sincere and principled conviction about the meaning of the words are what really matters.
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2 questions - Which white men do you honor? And what deeds do you do?
Well C of the E Member, as far as you are concerned, I can't argue. But a bit more objectively, it is certainly undeniable that many of the founding fathers that wrote so eloquently of equality owned slaves. Nonetheless, the principles they laid down in their writings were the principles that eventually brought down slavery. And Jefferson, whatever his personal foibles, explicitly recognized the evil of slavery in his Notes on Virginia. Words, my friend, are quite the opposite of cheap. There was a reason Percy Shelly called poets the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." We fall in love the way we do in large part because of Romantic poetry. Our politics is the way it is largely because of the words put down by our founding fathers, whose ideas, in turn, come from the words of the Bible, Locke, Rousseau, and classical, i.e., Roman, republican thinkers. Life is much more complex than our current political Miss Grundys would have you believe. In human affairs, it is not at all impossible (in fact, it happened) that the words of slaveholders would eventually free the slaves.
In answer to your two questions:
1) Whether a person is white or not, or is a man or not, is entirely irrelevant to whether they are objectively deserving of honor.
2) The only criterion that matters is living a life of heroic virtue. In other words, the only human beings deserving of honor are the saints.
The founders of the United States most certainly were not saints. The Church should therefore strongly discourage the cult of adulation that surrounds them, and hold up the example of its saints with much greater vigor than it does.
"The white men in question deserves no honor whatsoever for making that assertion"
Does that then invalidate the Declaration of Independence, what it represents, and how it has guided our country, until recently. We have president who believes that this is so.
I am a 66 year old 'negro' and the founders though they were not saints, who is, deserve honor for what they started.
This reminds me of my visit to Sewanee a couple of years ago. There in one of the halls is a portrait of Gen. Leonidas Polk, kinsman of the president, and I believe an ordained Episcopalian minister and president of the University of the South. There was a controversy about that portrait -- some people wanted it down. When a single member of the Sewanee faculty can boast one tenth of the courage and the self-sacrifice of Leonidas Polk, I'll give them a hearing. It was courage in a bad cause, people will say. Strange -- the fiercely abolitionist McGuffey could find it in his ample heart to honor the valor of men like Lee and Stonewall Jackson, but we, whose political opinions cost us exactly nothing, cannot find it in our hearts to give them honor. Shame on us.
You write: "Throwing dead white males such as the founders of this country on the trash heap because they did not free the slaves betrays both moral arrogance and an ahistorical attitude."
To begin with, I vehemently reject your accusation of moral arrogance as completely unjustified. The plain fact is that you are in no position whatsoever to know anything about my inner states or motivations. By all rights, you owe me an apology for advancing the accusation.
Speaking as someone who knows much better than you do my internal emotional and moral states, I can tell you that what motivates my comments on this thread is legitimate moral outrage, not moral arrogance. The chattel slavery that was practiced for hundreds of years in the United States, and that was fully condoned and in many cases even enthusiastically practiced by many of the founders of that nation, was an unspeakable evil that caused immense levels of unbearable suffering for millions. The warranted moral outrage about this historical fact is only further compounded by observing the blatant hypocrisy of these very same founders in claiming to have founded a new nation on alleged principles of equality for all.
For those who allow themselves to contemplate in an unflinching manner the historical realities concerning what chattel slavery actually involved, there is just no sugar-coating the sheer satanic ugliness of it all. I don't care what time and place a person lives in - if he or she is a humane and morally sensitive human being, he would have found the sadistic cruelty and wanton disregard for the intrinsic value of human life that prevailed on slave ships, many slave plantations, slave auctions, episodes of sadistic slave punishments, etc., utterly morally appalling.
The fact that the founders of this nation by and large did not have this reaction to the realities of their "peculiar institution" does not speak well at all of their moral sensibilities. The fact that, above and beyond this, they had the gall to imagine themselves to be uniquely praiseworthy champions of "justice and equality for all," cannot evoke anything other than moral disgust for the blatant hypocrisy involved, especially if the attempt is made to hold these same individuals up as paragons of virtue today for the sake of advancing an ideological agenda. (Note: If the attempt to hold the founders up as paragons of virtue were not made as widely as it is, as part of a project of creating mythological narratives concerning the early history of the United States, the whole matter would not warrant nearly the attention that I am giving it on this thread.)
Finally, I would point out that your line of argument implicitly rests upon a position of culturally and historically based moral relativism. If there really are absolute transhistorical moral norms, then a person of pure heart ought to be able to clearly recognize the particular evils and depravities that characterize the age in which they live - no matter what the prevailing moral sensibilities of the age in question are. But in exempting the founders of this country from this expectation, you are in effect arguing that chattel slavery was somehow less evil in the late 18th century than it would be now precisely because the cultural mores that prevailed at the time this country was founded regarded it as morally permissible. In so doing, you are basing the morality or immorality of chattel slavery in the 18th century on the vagaries of changing historical mores, rather than on unshakeable eternal truth.
In fact, in so arguing, you are falling prey to the very "dictatorship of relativism" that Pope Benedict has gone out of his way to denounce. If it is possible for a person living today to transcend the misleading cultural mores of the present age and see transhistorical objective moral truth for what it really is, as Pope Benedict argues, then this can be no less true of any other age in history, including the time of the founding of this country. As such, anyone who takes the existence of objective moral truth seriously, as I do, is only being logically consistent in applying to any particular age of the past the same expectation that persons of virtue and sound moral sensibility will recognize the grave evils that prevail in that age for what they are, as one expects persons of virtue and sound moral sensibility to recognize present-day grave evils for what they are.
In sum, the claim that there really are transhistorical moral truths is logically incoherent unless one is willing to acknowledge that the founders of this country do not in any way deserve a "free pass" for ignoring the grave evils of chattel slavery, while at the same time claiming to be upholding the universal rights of all.
The founders of the United States most certainly were not saints. The Church should therefore strongly discourage the cult of adulation that surrounds them, and hold up the example of its saints with much greater vigor than it does.
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An interesting reply. Which saints do you hold up?
I'll volunteer my answer - Patrick and Hildegard have affected me, and there are worthy examples in the life of Saint Thomas More. (And though not recognized as saints at this time, there are also examples that I would hold up from the lives of Bartolome de las Casas and John Paul the Great.)
Saint Joan of Arc. The peasant girl who was the paragon of chivalry, brave, gentle, merciful, courteous, kind, and loyal. The faithful daughter of the Church, to whom her sacraments were the Bread of Life and whose conscience, by frequent confession, was kept fair and pure as the lilies of France. The girl of seventeen, who, alone understood the political and military situation of her country. To restore the confidence of France it was necessary that the Dauphin should penetrate the English lines to Rheims, and there be crowned. She broke the lines, she led him to Rheims, and she crowned him.
Six hundred years after her death, the last remnant of her country’s honour was preserved by those who fought under the banner of the daughter of Lorraine and the invaders of her beloved country surrendered on 8th May, the day on which the Maid had raised the siege of Orléans.
On the subject of slavery, I take it that your condemnation of those who do not condemn slavery would extend to the Orthodox Church's one time acceptance of slavery (though urging its amelioration) in Byzantium, or Paul's sending back Onesimus to Philemon without asking that he be freed, though asking that he be treated as a brother in Christ, or Jesus for not condemning slavery in scriptures, even healing the slave of a centurion without rebuking the centurion for having slaves or asking that the slave be freed?
Curious,
Richard
Whatever stereotype one associates with the busts will immediately be carried over to the church and what its about. “This place is the fruit of the attitudes and ideas of these men,” one will think, and the Beverly’s of today aren’t able to think beyond whatever stereotypes are attached to them.
" A few years after that, I converted out of the national church." is this to indicate that the writer is no longer a practicing Catholic?.......or?
First of all, the Church of the East is the Nestorian Church, not the Eastern Orthodox Church. The two are quite different from one another in important ways. But if Nestorian churchmen have ever condoned chattel slavery (which they may or may not have - I just don't know the facts), I would certainly condemn them for that in no uncertain terms, just as I do the founders of the United States.
As to Paul and Onesimus, that is precisely why I employed the phrase "chattel slavery." Slavery meant something very different and relatively milder in the case of Onesimus than it did in the case of a violently abducted West African who rotted to death in chains in the claustrophobia-inducing hold of a transatlantic slave galley after being cruelly whipped and sexually abused, or who was condemned to an utterly inhumane existence after being auctioned like livestock if he happened to survive the journey.
That said, I do find the suggestion that Paul condoned even much milder forms of slavery problematic. For that reason, I interpret Paul's request to Philemon as carrying with it the clear implication that Philemon ought to exercise his Christian brotherhood with Onesimus by granting the latter his full freedom from slavery.
As far as I can tell, the Nestorians at all times had an admirable record on the refusal to hold slaves. Your definition of chattel slavery, however, needs adjustment: a chattel slave is not determined by the severity of enslavement or the severity of service, but is rather an issue of the law. A slave is a chattel slave if he or she is a thing under law, the property of the master with none of the prerogatives of a person, utterly at the mercy of another human being (Aristotle calls slaves living tools). Onesimus was almost certainly a chattel slave as were most Greek and Roman slaves--in fact he was a runaway and technically liable to branding or death if captured. This was undoubtedly not the outcome in this case, thanks to the intercession of Paul and the Christianity of Philemon.
The enslavement of black slaves and their sufferings under the terms of European ownership was in general harsher than than of slaves in Greece and Rome during the Classical period, though there were great slave revolts in Rome, particularly those in Sicily, and in Italy under Spartacus. The principal purveyors of the black slaves were other blacks who took their merchandise as captives in war or on raiding parties and sold them to Europeans and Muslims at a nice profit. In fact there were black kingdoms built on the gold gained from the slave trade. Less than ten percent of the transatlantic trade went to the U.S., and these blacks had a longer lifespan than their brothers and sisters to the south in Hispanic and Franco America because they had better care and living conditions. This does not abrogate the horror of black slavery in the colonies and the United States. There are revisionist who wish to argue that the North Americans invented chattel slavery, but as far as I can tell this is simply scholarship as vengeance, which does not always yield the truth.
Jefferson was in fact severely conflicted about slavery though he owned many slaves. He spoke very harshly of slavery and feared that the vengeance of a just God might strike down the U.S. for this institution (and I think He may yet do), but he backed both pro and anti slavery legislation and never declared decisively for one side or the other. Unlike yourself, I do think that he deserves credit for making world famous principles of human freedom under God starkly at odds with the practice of many Americans and leading painfully but effectively to the abolition by civil war and civil law of slavery in the U.S. I do think he was a great man. I do not think that he was a saint.
If Roman chattel slavery was a fact, and it was, then there will be room for enemies of Christianity to attack the actions (and lack of them) of Jesus in scripture. I think that the answer to the attack is that Jesus was calling for a radical transformation of the human spirit under the grace of the God of Love and a perfect Christian can not consistently be a slave holder. Once Paul writes that in Christ there is no slave or free, the handwriting is on the wall for "Christian" slavery. If Jesus had preached openly against slavery he would have been executed forthwith by the Roman authorities and the gospel would have been stillborn.
By the way, I agree with you that slavery is always and everywhere wrong. This is why I am sorely troubled by the very uneven record of my own church, Western Catholicism, on the subject until very recently. Well, as they say, God writes straight with crooked lines.
Best,
Richard
The funniest thing is to look at how priest hairstyles changed with the time. They basically reflect the trends in the general culture. Victorian -- crew cut -- hippie -- short -- Philipino. And the smiling! No one smiled before 1970.