September 2010 Archives

Joanna Brooks' fine essay on Elder Marlin Jensen's apology for...well, we'll get to that...at a meeting of 90 members of the Oakland, CA stake (diocese) points to ongoing uncertainty about the role of the LDS Church in public life these days. Jensen's a lovely guy (I've had dinner with him a couple of times), and that very rare bird: a Mormon General Authority who says he's a Democrat. That he should go to Oakland to hear firsthand the distress of gay and pro-gay rights Saints is at once no surprise and something remarkable under the Mormon sun, given the extraordinary lengths Salt Lake went to mobilize its California troops on behalf of Proposition 8 in 2008. What gives?

Exactly what Jensen apologized for is not entirely clear. Brooks quotes one attendee who reported his words as follows: "To the full extent of my capacity, I say that I am sorry . . . I know that many very good people have been deeply hurt, and I know that the Lord expects better of us." Certainly, Jensen wasn't apologizing for the church's stance on same-sex marriage--his capacity doesn't extend that far. But to say that God expects better of "us"--the Mormon people? the LDS leadership?--suggests that he was doing more than a perfunctory "sorry to have offended you." Whether or not, as Brooks hypothesizes, the church may be shifting its ground a bit on the issue, Jensen's appearance suggests a clear recognition that its Prop. 8 campaign was not a good thing.

Since February 2008, when Thomas Monson assumed the presidency of the church after the death of Gordon Hinckley, maladroitness has pretty much been the norm for Mormonism in the public square. Besides Prop. 8, Mitt Romney's presidential run, the senatorial fortunes of Harry Reid and Bob Bennett, the Glenn Beck phenomenon, anti-immigrant legislation--all these have presented the church with challenges it has not seemed to know how to handle. Hinckley was a master religious politician; Monson, not so much--and indeed, barely a public presence at all.

My take on the Pew survey.

At the Religion Newswriters Association meeting in Denver last weekend, the local Catholic ordinary, Archbishop Charles Chaput, delivered himself of a classic culture-war critique of the news media's coverage of religion: Journalism is composed of knowledge-class professionals who make secularist assumptions about American society that shows they are out of touch with real Americans. Coverage of Christianity in particular is negative, focused on stories about fundamentalism and decline and infighting and repression. This kind of thing was a lot more common back in the 1990s than it is today--but then, Chaput has never been known for being up to date.

I could get on my hobby horse about how the media tend to view religion not through secularist glasses but in categories derived from Western religion. Take, for instance, the Eddie Long story that has been so much in the news in recent days. Like other allegations of clerical sexual abuse, it turns on the issue of hypocrisy. Over at GetReligion (whose picking apart of religion coverage Chaput singled out for praise), Brad Greenberg opines, "More importantly, though, such acts become no more heinous just because they are seen as hypocritical." Well, maybe not in a court of law--but in the court of Christian public opinion they've been so ever since Jesus denounced the "scribes and Pharisees" as "whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead [men's] bones, and of all uncleanness." Hypocrisy is a religious trope.

But be this as it may, what really caught my eye in Chaput's address was this:

One of the worst habits many Catholics had at the start of the clergy sex abuse crisis, including many bishops, was to minimize a very grave problem. But news media show many of the same patterns of denial, vanity, obstinacy, and institutional defensiveness in dealing with criticism of their own failures.

Now, it's pretty white of Chaput to include "many bishops" on his side of the comparison--would that other members of the hierarchy did the same. I'm not sure, though, about the Catholic non-bishops, who remarkably were neither defensive nor vain nor in denial about the abuse. And as for the comparison itself, well, in my observation the news media have, since the mid-nineties, been notably eager to do better by the religion beat. But perhaps the archbishop was referring to more general patterns of vanity and institutional defensiveness on the part of the press. If so, I've got a modest proposal.

Just as some leading American newspapers have hired ombudsmen to monitor and critique their coverage in their own pages, I suggest that American bishops do the same. Hire independent observers to monitor and critique your actions, and publish the results in your diocesan newspaper and on your website. How salutary would that be?

Apology: I've caught some criticism for characterizing Chaput as "mighty white" above. I confess that while I was aware that he is a Native American, I wasn't thinking about that when I used the phrase--but rather was referring to the "whited sepulchre" quotation from Matthew. The idea was in fact to acknowledge with the off-color (as it were) reference--as I did directly by referring to other bishops--that Chaput had said something honorable: no mere whited sepulchre he. But I apologize for what clearly can be taken as a racist slur. Mea culpa. 

Responding to my wish to separate out the views on same-sex marriage of under-30 "sectarians" (evangelicals), Sherkat has kindly run the numbers. What they show, as he points out on his blog, is that the gap between this cohort and its non-evangelical peers is actually greater than between sectarians and non-sectarians in older age cohorts. So much for the myth of young evangelical liberalism on this issue.

Up to a point. But it's still the case that the under-30s are somewhat more liberal on the issue than their evangelical boomer parents--and way more liberal than over-60 evangelicals. So even though they look at this point like over-60 non-evangelicals, the evidence is of a liberalizing generational trend within the evangelical community. What the data show is most segments of American society moving quickly (the younger they are) towards acceptance of SSM, with a few--under the influence of conservative religion--moving more slowly in the same direction.

And why I like it.

While we're on the subject of the relationship between religion and social views, I've just received a pre-publication copy of a paper written by University of Southern Illinois sociology prof. Darren Sherkat and a couple of colleagues analyzing the connections between religion, partisan politics, and views of same-sex marriage. Yes, it''s a gnarly regression-analysis-laden exercise that will appear later this year in the journal Social Science Research--but it provides an excellent window into the structure of the culture wars in our time.

The paper looks at the two-decade period between 1988 and 2008, during which same-sex marriage went from being opposed by two-thirds of the American adult population to less than one-half. In 1988, opposition was more or less the same among Democrats and Republicans, and among the various species of Christians. Now there's a substantial divergence between "sectarian Protestants" (evangelicals) and Republicans on the one hand and everyone else on the other. In a word, the sectarians and the Republicans have shifted far less towards acceptance of same-sex marriage than the rest of the population.

What Sherket et al.'s regressions show is that Republicanism as well as evangelicalism operate as independent variables: Both push their members toward opposition to same-sex marriage. (Just as, it seems, Democratic ideology pushes in the opposite direction.) Unfortunately, the researchers did not create an age cohort of voters born after 1978 that would enable us to see if sectarians in their 20s differed significantly from their elders. Be that as it may, the paper shows how a social issue that didn't significantly divide the public on partisan lines two decades ago has come to do so. You don't have to look further than this week's vote on Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell to understand the dynamics.

I wish Christine O'Donnell had campaigned against witchcraft and dabbled into masturbation.

Last week's Pew survey on the influence of religion on Americans' policy views is notable for revealing how little influence there is. The only areas where religion appears to play a significant leading role in influencing opinion are same-sex marriage, abortion and the death penalty. Sixty percent of pro-lifers and 45 percent of those opposed to same-sex marriage cite religion as the most important reason for their position, while 32 percent of those opposed to the death penalty do the same. But only 12 percent of those who support additional government assistance to the poor cite religion as the most important reason.

Dan Schultz has a good analysis of what this glum news means for pastors who would like to think that what they have to say about the issues of our time. What I'd like to have seen included in the poll is a question on tolerance of other faiths. What's striking is how little difference religion seems to make in Americans' positions on anything but abortion and same-sex marriage. On other issues, its race and ethnicity that make for the differences (check out black Protestants and Hispanic Catholics).

P.S. The poll shows an uptick in pro-choice views since last year, from 47 percent who believe that abortion shout be legal in all or most case to 50 percent. (Those who believe it should be illegal in all or most cases slipped from 45 percent to 44 percent). This is a regression to the norm for this decade--and possibly also a reflection of popular sense that the GOP (pro-life) is in the ascendancy.

My take...over at Winters' "Distinctly Catholic" blog at NCR.

Pace Douthat, but this wasn't more than a modest success for the pontiff. After all, JPII never ran into opposition rallies, and 20k in London is a lot more than a handful of disgruntled picketers. Of course, had Benedict rowed his coracle across the Irish Sea, it would have been a lot worse. 

The business to be conducted was fourfold: the usual appearances before the local faithful and clergy; the new Benedictine tradition of "privately" meeting some abuse victims; the beatification of the Eminent Victorian convert, Cardinal Newman; and a Message. The message this time had to do with the role of religion--and specifically the pope's version of religion--in public life. Unsurprisingly, Benedict would have more of it.

The fullest articulation came in his Friday address to Parliament, titled "Reason and Faith Need One Another." The problem with merely secular democratic decision-making, according to the pope, is lack of moral grounding: "If the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process becomes all too evident--herein lies the real challenge for democracy." So religion is needed to help with the determination.

It's actually not all that clear that "religion" has the clear line on moral principles that Benedict would like. The Catholic Church is anti-abortion and anti-death penalty, but whereas seven of the world's 11 most religious countries (according to Gallup) prohibit abortion, nine of them have the death penalty. Meanwhile, eight of the 11 least religious countries have done away with the death penalty yet all embrace abortion rights. In the world as it is, both religious and secular norms determine social consensus, but neither according to the teachings of Catholicism.

To be sure, Benedict has a way out of such moral confusion:

The central question at issue, then, is this: where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found? The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation. According to this understanding, the role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by non-believers--still less to propose concrete political solutions, which would lie altogether outside the competence of religion--but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. This "corrective" role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves.

This is the old natural law dodge: Everyone has access via reason to "objective" (true) moral principles, but only Our Church knows how to do moral reasoning properly, and we're here to make sure you get it right. Good Catholic boy that he is, Michael Sean Winters is not impressed, and neither am I. There's moral reasoning and there's moral reasoning. To claim a special ability--not based on revelation--to "correct" the reasoning of democratic society at large in the absence of openness to the reasoning of the other side is nothing more than an argument from authority. And these days, the moral authority of the Catholic Church isn't so robust.

"By their fruits shall ye know them," said Jesus, explaining in the Sermon on the Mount how to determine false prophets. It's hard to imagine Benedict delivering "Reason and Faith Need One Another" to the Irish or Belgian or his own German parliament. With fewer victims, the Brits could more easily look the other way.

The Al Chet, the omnibus confessional prayer said repeatedly by worshipers during Yom Kippur, includes atonement for speaking ill of others and otherwise not controlling one's tongue. In this regard, it's good to note some prominent members of my tribe acting on their need to repent.

There's the New Republic's Martin Peretz, who made an on-line apology for suggesting earlier this month that Muslims don't merit the protection of the First Amendment. And there's Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who has sent a conciliatory letter to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak implying that he's sorry for wishing death on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his people a few weeks ago.

Blogging is by definition the electronic antithesis of controlling one's tongue, and to apologize for it while doing it can only amount the sin of insincere confession. But I do repent of any untrue or unfair words I've written here and elsewhere over the past year, and ask your forgiveness if I've offended or injured you by them. And may you all be written in the Book of Life.

The Family--the secretive Jesus-centric cult that runs the National Prayer Breakfast and solicits the engagement of Washington and world's high and mighty--is creeping back into the news. The New Yorker's Peter J. Boyer has delivered himself of an extended report, while another book on the subject from the redoubtable Jeff Sharlet waits in the wings. I'm not an uncritical admirer of Sharlet's 2008 The Family, which makes this eccentric enterprise into the hidden key to American conservative religion. The new book, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy, promises more of the same.

Boyer, characteristically, lets you know where the warts are while suggesting that they aren't anything very serious to worry about. Sure, the Family welcomes evildoers--who else is religion for? The Sharlet view is acknowledged, but waved away. But as usual with Boyer, there's just enough new reporting to give you something to chew on.

I'm chewing on Jim DeMint, the Tea Party's most important paladin in the U.S. Senate, who lives in the C Street house when he's in Washington. He vigorously supported Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, and in the wake of her victory Tuesday, has earned himself more obloquy than ever from the GOP establishment. "It speaks volumes that in Jim DeMint's world, the 'principles of freedom' are more important than a candidate who pays their taxes, is honest with voters and who isn't a complete fraud," a "senior GOP aide" sputtered in Politico yesterday. What would Jesus say to that?

Or so it seems to me.

The old gag was that journalists are the ones who rush onto the battlefield after the fight is over and shoot the wounded. Nowadays, it's the rest of the world that rushes in and shoots the journalists. How could they have paid so much attention to an obscure, publicity-hungry pastor like Terry Jones? What ails them?

The assumption is that media attention is like a stone thrown into the middle of a pond. The splash happens in the middle, with the impact weakening as it spreads out in concentric circles. But that's not how it always works. As the New York Times noted a few days ago, while there had been a little (and probably deserved) coverage of Jones' antics in the Gainesville paper and thence in the AP, the hoopla happened abroad before it occurred in the U.S.. Which was why Gen. Petraeus et al. got into the act.

Under the circumstances, the American media could not afford to look away.

I figure ol' Fred has been a little bummed that Terry Jones managed to get all that attention for threatening to burn some Korans, when the good folks of Westboro Baptist struggle to keep themselves in the public eye. So now where Terry has declined to tread, Westboro's rushing in. But Fred is also planning to burn an American flag, since the burden of his prophetic message is that the U.S. of A. is doomed for its tolerance of homosexuality. Not to mention that he also has nothing but bad things to say about Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Judaism, Hinduism--well, basically about every faith but his own. Anyway, the YouTube of Westboro burning the flag along with the Koran will, one hopes, sufficiently confuse those Muslims inclined to identify the behavior of a radical Christian pastor with U.S. foreign policy that riots and assaults on American troops don't occur. One hopes.

It went down this way. Rev. Terry Jones heard from the Lord that all those excellent reasons for burning a Koran should be waived if and only if Cordoba House (aka Park51, aka the Mosque of Doom) is moved a few blocks uptown, lest the practice of Islam ("from the Devil," in the theology of Jones' International House of Spiritual Dovebars) pollute the Holy of Holies at Ground Zero and bring down His Wrath. Something along those lines. Bring on Harrison Ford.

The key point here is that the proposed Islamic Center has become the all-purpose wedge for legitimating Islamophobia in America today. Everybody down to Sarah Palin disapproves of burning Korans, but gosh, you might trump Donald Trump himself if you drag Ground Zero into it.

Meanwhile, even the most benign expressions of religious inclusivity are becoming occasions for the digital outpouring of anti-Muslim bile. A couple of days ago, the Hartford City Council was inundated when it resolved to diversify its pre-meeting prayers with an Islamic invocation now and then. Given how little interest the Hartford City Council generates these days, I've got to believe that most of the angry emails came from non-Hartford residents. But these days, it's hard to know.

An essay by yours truly, over at Patheos.

His anti-Islamism versus his allies' Islamophobia. My view.

What's scary about the satirical website Christwire is imagining how many people who ran its page views up to 27 million in August actually take it seriously. "A close reader of ChristWire will soon figure out (one hopes) that the site is not serious," Mark Oppenheimer wrote in his New York Times "Beliefs" column Saturday. "But many of the columns are deft enough, just plausible enough, to fool the casual reader. Even--or perhaps especially--a reader whose beliefs are being mocked."

Sure, the Christwire "riposte" to Oppenheimer, "Satire, Poe's Law and the New York Times Campaign to Discredit the Evangelical Message of Christwire," attributes to the Gray Lady "a recklessly pro-Zionist, anti-Christian agenda." Pro-Zionist is hardly a term of opprobrium in conservative evangelical circles these days. Such missteps notwithstanding, it's clear from Oppenheimer's reporting that plenty of people who should know better take Christwire at face value.

And why shouldn't they? Head over to Doveworld, the website of the World Outreach Center, the tiny church in Gaineville, FL, that has generated worldwide attention for announcing its intention to burn a pile of Korans on 9/11. There you'll find a blogpost on "Ten Reasons to Burn a Koran," which is comparable to Christwire's viral "Is My Husband Gay" post (with its 15-point checklist)--except that it's no satire.

David Petraeus has informed the AP that that images of burning Korans could be exploited by Muslim extremists to inflame popular passions in Afghanistan and endanger American troops. From which Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, blogging on the Renew America website, deduces that Gen. Petraeus is making the case that Islam is a religion of violence. Not that Fischer is himself advocating the burning of Korans. No satire there either.

I confess that I'm always a little bit embarrassed by the propensity of the American leadership of my people (the Jews) to try to get Christians to grant us admission in the, ah, club. The president of the Southern Baptist Convention opines that God doesn't hear our prayers...well, why should we give a shit? Sorry.

So my feelings are mixed about the agreement announced this week between the LDS Church and the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, making Jewish victims of the Holocaust the only group exempt from the Mormon doctrine permitting the baptism of the dead, thereby enabling them to win a place in heaven. Unless, I guess, you're a Mormon with a forebear who was a Jewish victim of the Holocaust, in which case you're entitled to request the baptism. In Mormonism, Family trumps just about everything.

Over at Religion Dispatches, the estimable Joanna Brooks thinks this is a good thing. She's a Mormon woman married to a Jewish man, and she takes the occasion to wish us all a happy new year. L'shana tova to you too, Joanna. The hard question has to do with how far and under what circumstances one religious group should alter or suppress a teaching or practice or right in deference to the feelings or doctrines of another group--or to the norms or greater good of society at large--be it in Salt Lake or in lower Manhattan. And let's not pretend this is not a hard question.

According to my take on the latest Gallup numbers.