Mike Huckabee on Jeremiah Wright

Here is part of what Mike Huckabee said concerning the manufactured controversy surrounding Jeremiah Wright on MSNBC's Morning Joe:

As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say "That's a terrible statement!"...I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack -- and I'm gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who's gonna say something like this, but I'm just tellin' you -- we've gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told "you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus..." And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

(h/t: Daily Kos and Political Base.)

Of Roosting Chickens

I've been attempting to avoid commenting on the manufactured "controversy" surrounding Trinity UCC in Chicago and their now retired pastor Jeremiah Wright. That church and its esteemed pastor have been dragged through the mud as a part of an ongoing attempt to smear Barack Obama as being of suspect religion. First he was painted as a Muslim, the new dangerous "other," and now as that is losing traction (by and large, anyway) we're back to that old dangerous other.

The controversy surrounding Trinity UCC - a controversy that exists solely because one of their members has a good chance to be the first black person elected president of the United States - is not about religion, though it is couched in religious language. Ultimately it is about race. It is about how white ears hear powerful black claims. It is about the inability of many whites to understand the prophetic tradition of black preaching, and the unwillingness of many whites to recognize the distance between white and black religious language, and to suspend judgment until they have the requisite grounding to properly interpret statements.

The best case in point of this concerns Rev. Wright's now infamous declaration just after 9-11. But, before I get to that statement, I want to echo these words from Rev. Otis Moss III (one of the key-note speakers at my seminary's recent Festival of Theology), who recently replace Wright as the pastor of Trinity UCC:

Dr. Wright has preached 207,792 minutes on Sunday for the past 36 years at Trinity United Church of Christ. This does not include weekday worship services, revivals and preaching engagements across America and around the globe, to ecumenical and interfaith communities. It is an indictment on Dr. Wright’s ministerial legacy to present his global ministry within a 15- or 30-second sound bite.

I could not agree more. To reduce a 36 year preaching career to a few statements yanked entirely from their historical and textual contexts is at best unprofessional and grossly negligent, and the main stream media should be ashamed for their participation in the dumbing down of American racial and religious dialogue. What we're seeing is at best a lazy narrative, and at worst latent racism once again rearing its ugly head in American public life.

In the coming days I may offer posts on Black Theology (Rev. Wright was greatly influenced by James Cone, about whom I have written many times on this blog - to understand Wright's prophetic message you have to have a basic understanding of the theological presuppositions and commitments of the Cone school of Black Theology) and the prophetic tradition. Today, however, I want to narrow my focus to a single quote from Wright, because the way that this quote has been represented in American media illustrates my contention that this discourse is at least lazy, if not outright racist.

The New York Times (whose article is the most responsible journalistic treatment of the manufactured "controversy" I've encountered, as it interviews both James Cone and the University of Chicago Divinity School's legendary Dwight Hopkins, two leading voices in Black Theology, making it the only journalistic attempt I've seen to place Wright properly in his theological context) reports that just after 9-11, Jeremiah Wright preached a sermon that included:

We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards,

and

America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

That same Times article includes - very responsibly - Wright's explanation for those words, and how they functioned pastorally in his congregation. However, neither it nor any other source that I've seen mentions what many in Wright's congregation undoubtedly knew even as they were hearing this sermon from their seats in the sanctuary that morning: Wright was echoing Malcolm X.

In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X explains the controversy that served as the excuse used by Elijah Muhammad to silence him, which in turn was the mechanism by which he left the Nation of Islam. He was asked by Elijah Muhammad to give a speech at the Manhattan Center, shortly after the assassination of president John F. Kennedy:

The title of my speech was "God's Judgment of White America." It was a theme familiar to me, of "as you sow, so shall you reap," or how the hypocritical American white man was reaping what he had sowed.

The question-and-answer period opened, I suppose inevitably, with someone asking me, "What do you think about President Kennedy's assassination? What is your opinion?"

Without a second thought, I said what I honestly felt - that it was, as I saw it, a case of "the chickens coming home to roost." I said that the hate in white men had not stopped with the killing of defenseless black people, but that hate, allowed to spread unchecked, finally had struck down this country's chief of state.

Malcolm X connected the assassination of president Kennedy to the violent hatred in America; in other words, to racism. Now, to white ears this sounds at first at best a reckless stretch, and at worst - well... we've seen the sorts of labels applied to Wright for saying something very similar. However, an appreciation of the historical context quickly shows that Malcolm X had a point. For instance, on the day that Kennedy was killed, the University of Tennessee - only recently integrated, with a handful of black students - had to close. Was this in commemoration? An act of remembrance for a beloved president? Was this due to collective shock that in this unstable time not even the most powerful person in the country is safe?

No. This was because there were so many white Southerners in the streets of Knoxville celebrating the death of that n- loving president. (If you don't believe me check out the brilliant new documentary on ESPN, Black Magic. It contains both first person accounts of this, and archival footage.) Across the American south there was a large, vocal minority of the white population that saw Kennedy's death as the justified result of his stance on civil rights. It was not a stretch at that time to say that racist white anger, fear, and paranoia led either directly or indirectly to Kennedy's assassination, even if such an assertion is less credible today.

In order to understand the statement by Wright quoted above, yanked as it is out of his context, you have to have some appreciation of its use of Malcolm X. Just as Malcolm X linked an American tragedy to American sin, Wright is doing the same thing. But instead of pulling a Jerry Falwell, he is coming from a very different, more prophetic tradition.

The New York Times piece linked to above provided some space for Wright to explain his words, to place them gently back into the context from which they were yanked:

Asked in an interview last March to explain the sermon, Mr. Wright said he had been questioning the country’s desire for vengeance against the perpetrators, counseling his congregants to look inward instead.

Immediately after the attacks, the country’s response was “to pay back and kill,” he said. But before it got “holier than thou,” he said, the nation should have considered how its own policies had led to the events of that day.

The quote in question from Rev. Wright, like the Malcolm X quote to which it points, has been interpreted as saying something sinister, like America deserved to be the victim of a terrorist attack, like the attack was somehow justified. But placed in this context, neither Wright nor Malcolm X are saying any such thing. They are offering explanations, not justifications. They are using their prophetic voices to note the connection between a horrific event and social, economic, and political policies that create the landscape within which that event takes place.

If America were not such a violently racist country, built on the backs of slaves, over the corpses of the native population, it may not have produced the conditions in which John F. Kennedy was killed, and in which many white racists celebrated his death. This is Malcolm X's point.

In the same vein, Wright says, "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards." If we had not done this, then the necessary conditions for the attacks on September 11 may not have been met. This does not justify those attacks. But neither does it let us blindly ignore our own corporate participation in them.

This is not hate speech, it is prophetic speech, in line both with the prophets of ancient Israel and the prophetic tradition of black preaching. It may grate on our ears, but listening to it and taking it seriously may just do us a world of good.

(My next post will concern what I mean by the prophetic tradition.)

_______________________

Update: 3-19-08, 1:27 pm

Finally having some time to check on some of the blogs I like, I saw this excellent post by Liam. It is similarly concerned with Wright's statements, but does perhaps an even better job critically examining them and placing them in context. More importantly, Liam's focus is slightly broader than mine, and so he addresses multiple statements rather than the single one I parsed out here.

Got Jesus? Good for you... now will you please stop trying to sell him?

Let me preface this by saying that I have no problem with evangelism. In fact, while I have little either politically or theological with the vast sea of humanity carelessly labeled "Evangelicals," I still identify myself as an evangelical Christian. I am someone who has had an experience of God as revealed through the person of Jesus, and seek to share that experience with others. That's the most basic description of an evangelical Christian I can think of. I don't go around trying to convert people to my religion, but neither am I afraid or ashamed to share my faith with anyone who is interested.

But... If I see one more attempt to pass my savior off as some capitalistic commodity, I just might start burning things.

On the way home from running errands this afternoon, I passed a church with a simple message on its sign for the new year:

Try Jesus This Year

It reminded me far too much of other such careless attempts at anonymous evangelism. Everywhere I turn I see bumper stickers like:

Got Jesus? or

Jesus is the Answer.

Amateur evangelists have sales pitches as polished as the most professional of telemarketers, with a one-size fits all message aimed at placing their product in as many homes as possible. The way such slick campaigns are commoditize religion, I wouldn't be surprised to see a sign or sticker beckoning me to

Test Drive Jesus Today,

or offering me

Salvation: Satisfaction Guaranteed, or Your Money Back.

The problem with modeling evangelism on the highly effective slick advertising campaigns of our culture - aside from the fact that such campaigns are by nature manipulative and misleading, if not outright dishonest - is that it offers what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace, packaging Jesus as some product to be tried, with minimal investment on your part.

The same Jesus who the Gospel of Mark records as saying

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

is now being offered in a convenient free trial (or trial-free?) form.

The same Jesus who Dietrich Bonhoeffer described as bidding us come and die is now a non-threatening, non-challenging, commodity. Some possession or potential possession, cheap and easy to acquire.

G.K. Chesterton said that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. I'm not sure I entirely agree with him, as I know a few atheists who would honestly beg to differ, having devoted themselves to the discipline of the Christian faith, only to be left cold and lonely. But his words should be kept in mind by those who sell Christ and Christianity as a product. The Christian faith - like any religion - is not a commodity. Jesus Christ can be neither bought nor possessed. And salvation - whatever one believes about grace - isn't just given away without any investment on the part of the one to be saved.

The Christian like involves discipline, devotion. It involves faith - by which I mean a great deal more than just believing and being able to articulate a few propositions concerning God. It involves one's entire being taking God as reveal through Jesus as what Paul Tillich called one's "ultimate concern." It means relinquishing all concerns with one's immediate self-interest, subordinating one's will to an experience, a revelation, of God.

This is probably not news to most of the readers of this blog. But it must be news to the masses here in the Bible who peddle Jesus like a product, advertising from the lawns of their church or the bumpers of their cars. And so to those masses, who no doubt stopped listening to me long ago, I beg you (this time literally) in the name of all that is holy:

Please stop trying to sell me Jesus!

Speaking of politics and religion...

I saw this Washington Post editorial cartoon by Tom Toles linked to at Drinking Liberally:

"Do You Believe Every Word of This Book?"

"Do you believe every word of this book?" the questioner asked, holding up a Bible. There are few venues appropriate for such a question, in my mind. As far as religious questions go, it is both divisive and misleading. Divisive, in that the question is used most often not as an honest appeal for information, but rather as a loaded test of one's orthodoxy. Misleading, because what exactly constitutes believing every word (and, in which translation/edition) is left undefined.

I do not recall ever having been asked this question, though I've served in churches who might not have minded asking me it if they had any idea the answer I would offer would be anything but an unqualified "yes." I don't know how I would answer it. The most honest answer would be a simple "Of course not, and neither do you." But such an answer might not sufficiently challenge any assumptions that underlie the question.

But, as unhelpful as that question is in most of the contexts I could place it, it is infinitely less helpful in the place where I actually heard it.

I didn't watch the GOP presidential debate the other night. I didn't watch it for at least two reasons:

1. I'm not a Republican, and so my opinion on any candidate attempting to win the Republican nomination for president of the United States couldn't matter less. They won't let me vote in the primary.

2. American political "debates" aren't really debates at all, and that makes me mad. Debates involve persons interacting with ideas, answering questions, challenging others and responding to challenges. But these made-for-TV events are more successions of stump speeches offered in response to generally staged questions.

The recent GOP on CNN debate, however, is, like the Democratic debate before it, evidently part of a new trend. Questions came from a variety of sources, from political cartoonists (have they ever been invited to the table before?!?) to the general public. And it is from that broad category "general public" that the question at the top of this post came. I first saw the video of it here.

"Do you believe every word of this book?" I don't know how all of the candidates responded to this question. The CNN clip that I linked to had only part of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's answer. I imagine that, if the question were asked sincerely, it was probably aimed at candidates like Romney, a Mormon, and presumptive frontrunner Rudy Giuliani, whose religious credentials have been called into question.

That this question was asked bothers me. But what bothers me more is my conviction - and I should state again that I don't know how the candidates answered, nor how their answers were taken - that the answers to it matter to many as much as any other issue. Of course in a democratic society in which religious people vote - and, given the prevalence of religion, that is every democratic society - there will always be some mixing of religion and politics. As a religious person whose politics are shaped in large part by my religious convictions and commitments, I don't think this is an entirely bad thing, either. But I still have serious problems with question like "Do you believe every word in the Bible?" shaping political discourse in this or any country.

One of those problems stem from the very nature of our democracy. The First Amendment to our Constitution is clear: there is to be no establishment of religion, nor any inhibiting the free exercise of religion. Part of this means that there is, in our nation, no religious test for office. To tie one's ability to hold office to one's religious faith would, it seems clear, violate both the Establishment clause (by favoring a particular religious expression over others, or by favoring being religious over being irreligious) and the Free Exercise clause (by placing such an incentive to be religious or to be religious in a particular way that one's liberty of conscience is placed at odds with one's political ambition).

This question, of course is not being asked by some powerful political agency, and so fails to rise to the level of a First Amendment violation. But in a culture in which one might be effectively disqualified by a sizable chunk of the electorate on the basis of one's answer to such a question on national television, this isn't exactly the case of a private citizen asking an honest religious question in private, either.

While many of our nation's presidents have had religious beliefs at odds with the majority opinion of their day, America has never had a self-proclaimed atheist as president. America has never had a Muslim, nor a Jew, nor a Hindu, nor a Buddhist, nor a Sikh, nor a Shinto, nor (as is becoming timely) a Mormon president, either. By and large, whatever their private religious beliefs, America's presidents have matched the nation's public Protestantism. This is not accidental. Religion in American politics matters. But the strong correlation between religiosity and political power calls into question our commitment to the First Amendment. It also, I would argue, calls into question the wisdom of the concerns that many religious people bring to political candidates.

The second concern that I have with asking GOP presidential candidates, on national television, whether or not they believe every word of the Bible, is a religious one. It does not stem from my conviction that in fact no one currently living, Christian, Jew, or otherwise, really believes every word in the Bible. It also does not, as far as I am aware, stem from the fact that my own views on Biblical authority are anything but orthodox. Rather, it stems from my concern that such questions promote a false religiosity, an uncritical religiosity, and a religiosity more interested in articulating agreement with propositional statements than in a commitment to the kinds of social change that I see as the essence of the Kingdom/Reign of God, one of the dominant metaphors of Jesus' ministry.

Our current president would be right at home answering the question in question. He would no doubt offer an unqualified "YES!" before giving testimony to the power of scripture and the God represented in it in his own life. He is at his rhetorical best telling of how the God of scripture saved him, rescuing him from the meaninglessness and sinfulness of his youth. The language of faith is second nature for him.

But under the veneer of public faith, as we have all, I suspect, learned, lurks something sinisterly anti-Christian, if the witness of Jesus has anything to do with Christianity. The prevalence of such wonderful bumper stickers as "Who Would Jesus Bomb?" and "Who Would Jesus Torture?" speak to the innate contradiction between the reckless militarism of this administration and the witness of the one our president claims is his Christ. Beyond that, I wonder how the apostle Paul [correction: the anonymous author of I John], who coined the wonderful phrase "perfect love drives out fear," would think of one who claims to be Christian while leading a reign of terror, cultivating a sense of perpetual fear in the American population.

The Biblical witness is infinitely more concerned with social and economic justice than with the trappings of religion, and yet our current president seems always more concerned with "faith-based initiatives" than with the plight of the poor and the vulnerable, those on the margins of our society. While he could no doubt articulate his belief in the Biblical text, there are quite a few Biblical texts he is not living by.

Asking candidates whether or not they believe every word in the Bible is not a very efficient way to discover their religious commitments. Further, while, like me, their religious commitments may shape their politics, and thus provide us with some useful information about them, being religious is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for being a good president. To place even an informal religious test on the office of the president serves neither America (who has a great many devout but decidedly bad presidents) nor religion (which has been misused by far too many ambitious persons).

Young White Evangelical Protestants Turning Away From President Bush (But What Does it Mean?)

Taking a break from writing a paper this morning, I saw a link to this study by the Pew Forum at Arkansas Democrat-Gazette religion editor Frank Lockwood's blog, the Bible Belt Blogger. It notes the precipitous drop in President Bush's approval rating among young (18-29 years old) white evangelical Protestants:

In 2002 (at the height of his popularity among all voters) Bush's approval rating among young white evangelicals was a whopping 87%, compared to a still incredible 67% approval rate with the total population.

In 2007, however, only 45% of young white evangelicals approve of president Bush. While that is still considerably stronger than his approval rating among the entire population (33%), it is significant to note that not even a majority of those who were once his strongest supporters approve of the Bush presidency.

But, the important question to ask - and the question I can't answer - is this:

What does this mean?

What it doesn't seem to mean, at least according to the Pew Forum, is that young white evangelicals are growing more liberal. A disturbing number of the population to which I nominally belong (60%) still believe that it was right for the US to invade Iraq. An even more disturbing number, given that we all claim allegiance to one who was unjustly executed by the state, (72%) favor capital punishment. While those numbers are not compared to numbers from 2002 (when Bush was at the height of his popularity among both young white evangelical Protestants and the general population), they are compared to the numbers for all Americans between 18 and 29. And, no surprise, only 56% of young Americans (compared to 72% of young white evangelicals) favor the death penalty, and only 41% of young Americans (compared to 60% of young white evangelicals) think that it was right to invade Iraq.

Abortion is a separate issue, because it can easily be made part of a comprehensive pro-life philosophy that opposes wars and state-sanctioned killings. However, it was also a part of the Pew Forum's study, and no surprise, young white evangelicals differ from their peers on it, too. 70%, according to the Pew Forum, believe that it should be "more difficult for a woman to get an abortion," compared to just 39% for young Americans in general.

The study did not, as far as I could tell, ask questions about the actual prosecution of the war in Iraq, nor did it seem to ask about other important issues for young white evangelicals, such as global climate change. It is possible that many young white evangelicals disapprove of president Bush for these reasons - the war is going badly, and the natural environment is becoming more important for young white evangelicals shaped by a kind of "stewardship" theology. And, of course, there are many, many more reasons to oppose the Bush presidency, stemming from corruption, incompetence, and cronyism (and boy, aren't those three related!).

So, I'm not sure what to make of these numbers. While, as a liberal Democrat who takes my faith seriously, I hope that they signal a seismic political shift; as a rational human being I just don't see the numbers reflecting that. Rather, I think the numbers simply reflect what a bad president George W. Bush has been. Even the bulk of his base has left him.

But We Proclaim Christ Crucified (Part I): Isaiah 53 in Buddhist-Christian Dialogue

[Please check out the Introduction to this series.]

Whenever I see a crucified figure of Christ, I cannot help thinking of the gap that lies between Christianity and Buddhism...

Christian symbolism has much to do with the suffering of [humanity]. The crucifixion is the climax of all suffering. Buddhists also speak much about suffering and its climax is the Buddha serenely sitting under the Bodhi tree by the river Niranjana. Christ carries his suffering to the end of his earthly life whereas Buddha puts an end to it while living and afterward goes on preaching the gospel of enlightenment until he quietly passes away under the twin Sala trees. The trees are standing upright and the Buddha, in Nirvana, lies horizontally like eternity itself.

Christ hangs helpless, full of sadness on the vertically erected cross. To the Oriental mind, the sight it almost unbearable...

The crucified Christ is a terrible sight and I cannot help associating it with the sadistic impulse of a physically affected brain.

- Excerpts from D.T. Suzuki's essay "Crucifixion and Enlightenment," found in his Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist.

The ideal of Mahayana Buddhism is the Bodhisattva, who vows to forestall nirvana until all sentient beings have been liberated from samsara, this realm of suffering. This ideal demonstrates a Buddhist commitment to end all suffering. This powerful commitment makes a lie of the common Western assumption - taken from the common English translation of the First Noble Truth, "Life is suffering" - that Buddhism is passive and pessimistic. Buddhism does take seriously both human suffering and the suffering of all sentient beings, which it identifies as a fundamental problem. But Buddhism is not only a description of a problem; it is also a prescription for the solution of that problem. At its best, it is a way of life deeply committed to the cessation of suffering.

For this reason, the image of Christ hanging in agony on the cross is a troubling image for Buddhists. The common Christian understanding of this event as an act of redemptive suffering, in which God through Jesus takes on the suffering of the world, is foreign to their way of thinking. But within the scandal of the cross there can, I hope, also be found the grounds of some kind of reconciliation between Christians and Buddhists.

I believe that both Christians and Buddhists share a deep concern about suffering, and a commitment to as far as is possible alleviate suffering. This shared common ground - despite what D.T. Suzuki refers to as the sadism of the image of the crucified Christ - can be the foundation for the joining of Christians and Buddhists in the cause of alleviating suffering wherever it is found.

A little while ago I received an email from a young Buddhist (I don't know his age, but I do know that he is just beginning to explore a Buddhist life, and I salute him for that) troubled by the image of the "Suffering Servant" presented in Isaiah 53. His concern reminded me very much of D.T. Suzuki's concern while looking at the image of Christ hanging on the cross: What kind of a God would do this to someone?

His concern compelled me to explore the image of the "Suffering Servant" in Isaiah 53, and what follows is an excerpt from my response to him:

The passage from Isaiah that you are concerned with comes from what most scholars (regardless of the religious commitments) call Second Isaiah. While it is now included by both Christians and Jews in the book of Isaiah, it was almost certainly not originally part of the same work. According to the Jewish Publication Society's commentary on Isaiah, chapters 1-39 were the product (though, I would add, this does not necessarily mean that they were written down in his lifetime) "of a prophet who lived in Jerusalem during the 8th Century BCE." The passage you are concerned with - coming from Second Isaiah, chapters 40-66 of the book of Isaiah - comes from the work of a different prophet, who addressed the concerns of Judean exiles in Babylon, which means that it comes sometime after 586 BCE.

So the unknown prophet whose work is lumped in with that of Isaiah was concerned with the needs of a group of Jews living in exile, after their homeland was destroyed by the Babylonian Empire. In that context, it is not hard to see why any prophetic work would have to address the suffering of a defeated and demoralized people, who believed themselves to be chosen by God, only to have their homes and their identities crushed by a mighty empire.

My reading of the Suffering Servant is that he represents the exiled Jewish community, who are deeply concerned about what their present state (in Babylonian captivity) says about their relationship with God. Here the unknown prophet offers the (contextually) comforting message that suffering is not incompatible with being chosen by God for some special purpose.

Christians would later - when wrestling with what we call the scandal of the cross - apply this passage to Jesus. Again you have a community struggling to come to terms with what suffering and defeat say about one's relationship with God. The one who had revealed God, and who had preached a powerful (and political!) message about the kingdom of God (if God is sovereign, then Caesar - with his foot to the throat of the Jewish followers of Jesus who eventually formed the Christian religion - is NOT sovereign; if the kingdom belongs to God, it does NOT belong to Rome!) had been crushed by the Roman authorities. What, then, does this say about Jesus? What does it say about the God of Jesus?

Part of the answer to this concern can be found in teachings concerning the resurrection of Jesus. Whether these teachings point to a physical, bodily resurrection, or to something more metaphorical, their effect on the Christian community is the same. The scandal of the cross is answer by the power of the resurrection. Rome could kill Jesus, but they couldn't keep him (or his message) in the grave.

But another important part of the answer was found in the prophetic passage that troubles you: suffering at the hands of worldly powers does not prevent one from having been chosen by God. Jesus can be both the Christ and the one crucified by the Romans.

Placed in this context, I don't read this passage as saying that God wills or intends suffering. Rather, this passage is a message of hope to those who are suffering that their suffering is not incompatible with their status as ones chosen by God. Whether that message still preaches today, in a vastly different sort of context, is obviously open for debate. What I'd encourage you to see is that this passage is not offered up as a timeless message from God to all persons everywhere, but rather a very situational message from humans wrestling with their understanding of God in the face of existentially disorienting suffering.

But We Proclaim Christ Crucified (Introduction)

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

"I will destroy the wisdom of
the wise,
and the discernment of the
discerning I will thwart."

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength.

- I Corinthians 1:18-25 (NRSV)

When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

- I Corinthians 2:1-2 (NRSV)

These words from the apostle Paul to the church in Corinth stand as a challenge to me. A challenge I can no longer shirk. With them he wrestles with the greatest scandal of Christianity: Jesus, dying at the hands of the Roman power he defied, hanging on a cross. With them he attempts to solve the problem that scandal poses by inverting it; seeing in it not the futility of the one whose followers proclaimed the Anointed of God, but rather the very power of God.

As I get time over the next few weeks and maybe months, I plan to wrestle here with the crucifixion of Jesus. This is what Christian theologians have been wrestling with for as long as there has been a Christianity. At this moment I can't articulate everything that I think that the scandal of the cross means and has meant. That scandal has been cheapened by those who wish to see in it an easy victory; those who refuse to wrestle with it honestly, exploring in it the mystery of God in the midst of human suffering.

I will say upfront that I do not believe that Jesus was God, or some perfect human. I do not believe that his death was a perfect atoning sacrifice for my sins and the sins of the world. I do not believe that his death was part of God's plan for the redemption of the world - I do not believe in redemptive suffering.

But I still call myself a Christian: One who seeks to follow Christ. One who sees the nature of God mysteriously revealed in Christ. And I do believe that God was at work in Jesus, the Christ, reconciling the world both to God and to itself. And so for me - especially since I cannot believe in completely perfect, sinless persons or divine-human cohabitation, and since I refuse to believe that God wills our collective salvation through the brutal execution of anyone, much less a man such as Jesus - the scandal of the cross looms darkly over me. If my theology cannot somehow wrestle honestly with the crucifixion of Jesus, then it is a fraudulent, dishonest theology.

In this series I will, then, look through Christian history to see how others have wrestled with the scandal of the cross. I will look across religious lines to see how the scandal of the cross has impacted Christian conversations with other faith traditions. And I will look within myself to see how my understanding of "Christ crucified" has changed over time, and is continuing to change.

I cannot promise any firm conclusions, or any safe or easy answers. I cannot pretend to understand the mystery of the presence of God within human suffering. But I can promise to use whatever theological tools I have at my disposal to, whenever I can, posting here my own wrestling with and reflections on the crucifixion of Jesus.

The first post in this series will come later today, when I post some reflections on Isaiah 53, on the "Suffering Servant" - a passage from the Hebrew Bible co-opted by Christians in our attempt to wrestle with the scandal of the cross.

Why Do We Like Fairy Tales?

As you can see from the relative flurry of blog activity around here, I've finished my frantic re-reading of the Harry Potter books, giving my self a few days to emotionally process the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince before I pick up the series' final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

When I'd decided to re-read the whole series in anticipation of the final book, I was working my way through some Liberation theology. My wife says that I learn more outside of school than I possibly could in, and one look at the reading regimen I give myself each summer says why. This summer I'd already gone through a couple of Michael Eric Dyson books (not theology texts in and of themselves, but relevant to my own theological project), along with Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (I should write about that one sometime, an ambitious project chasing a thesis through history and pre-history), Paul Tillich's Radical Social Thought by Ronald H. Stone, and some other books that are not immediately relevant to my academic pursuits, but which were good reading anyway (Randall Balmer's Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical's Lament, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Karen Armstrong's first memoir, Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Self-Discovery, Zora Neale Hurston's famous Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Maya Angelo's follow-up to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, titled Gather Together in My Name).

After all of that, I decided to tackle some Latin American Liberation theology, as that represented a gaping hole in my education. I decided to start with Jon Sobrino's Spirituality of Liberation: Toward Political Holiness, in which he addresses the Vatican criticism that Latin American Liberation theology is just Marxism in Christian language. In it he argues - quite compellingly, I might add - that you can't separate the spiritual from the political, and so he makes more overt the innate spirituality of Liberation theology.

While reading that, I also found a copy of George Kelsey's 1965 book Racism and the Christian Understanding of Man (the whole story of how and why I found that text will hopefully be a post unto itself soon enough). So, as you can see, when I temporarily stopped letting Harry Potter interrupt my theological studies, I had more than enough to go back to. But when I picked Kelsey and Sobrino back up, I just couldn't quite get into it. My mind was elsewhere, in a magical world of children's fantasy.

I didn't want to read theology just yet, I realized. I wanted to read fairy tales. So I shelved Sobrino and Kelsey again, and picked up George MacDonald's classic 1858 work, Phantastes, in which a man named Anodos, on his twenty-first birthday, comes of age and inherits his late father's writing desk and memoirs. And, as happens so often in fairy tales, when he opens up his father’s desk, he finds a fairy. The fairy tells him, after a brief philosophic argument concerning size (meaningless, the fairy argues) and form (which, the fairy claims, really matters), that tomorrow he will see the fairy kingdom.

That's as far as I've gotten in it, so far. But, reading it on the heels of the Harry Potter books, I started wonder why, exactly, we like fairy tales? Why, in other words, would I put my theological work aside once again to pick up a nineteenth century fairy tale. I, who went over three years without reading a single novel? I, who read theology texts for fun?!?

I can't claim to know the whole history of fairy tales. I don't know when they first appeared, nor do I know which cultures have them and which (if any) do not. I can't even give a firm definition of "fairy tale." I can say that, by "fairy tale" I mean more than just stories with fairies in them. I mean what most mean by fantasy, though I have in mind a particular kind of fantasy: children's fantasy. Fantastic, imaginative books and stories meant for children, though they enthrall the child in each of us.

I wrote here that I've probably learned as much theology these imaginative works as I have from theology texts. Whether that's true or not, it feels true, and since

a.) I wrote that, and

b.) I tossed my theological reading aside for a round of Phantastes

I've meditated on what fairy tales have in common with religion, because I suspect that's why I like them, and that may be why others like them, too.

At a bare minimum, fairy tales and religion have these two things in common:

1. They both involve an existential component, a voyage of self-discovery, and

2. they both involve a mystical component, an unveiling of a hidden layer of reality.

Additionally, in both fairy tales and religion, the existential component is deeply connected to the mystical component.

Take the Harry Potter series, for example. In it, a young orphan, raised by is abusive aunt and uncle, with whom he can find nothing in common, dreams of being something more, something special. Then comes the moment of discovery: he is, in fact, a wizard. This moment of discovery is powerful and compelling, because it taps into our own sense of uniqueness, our own desire to somehow be more than we appear to be. And, this moment of discovery is both existential and mystical. In it Harry Potter not only discovers a sense of identity that both makes sense of and transcends his daily experience, he also has unveiled to him a hidden layer of reality: the mysterious world of witches and wizards, unknown to non-magical Muggles.

This theme is not, of course, unique to Harry Potter. In my own fairy tale library I see it over and over again. In Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain a young boy named Taran dreams of being more than an Assistant Pig Keeper, only to have unveiled to him a hidden layer of reality that changes his experience of self and the world. In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins sets off on a mystical quest and finds not only a wider world than he could have possibly imagined, but also a deeper and richer sense of self. In Lewis' Narnia books, British children walk through a wardrobe into a magical kingdom beyond their wildest imagination, in which they find themselves heroes and royalty. And, before there was Harry Potter, Ursula LeGuin wrote her Earthsea books, in which Ged, who dreams of being more than the son of a blacksmith, discovers that he is a wizard.

In each of these fairy tales - and, I suspect, in thousands more that I can't think of at the moment - the mystical and the existential are linked. A hidden layer of reality is unveiled, and someone small who dreamed of being large finds that who they are transcends even their most ambitious dreams. Stepping out into the wider reality starts a voyage of self-discovery, in which the lonely dreamer becomes the person they are meant to be.

This is very much like my experience of religion, an experience that I started to own for myself just before my fifteenth birthday, when I had my own meeting of the mystical and the existential. But, rather than tell that story now, I'd like instead to point to the dangers inherent in this experience of religion, as they are dangers shared by the characters of fairy tales.

The first danger is with the existential. While it is exhilarating to find that you are somehow more than you thought you were, more even than you ever dreamed you could be, that experience also can make you self-absorbed. This is, as I read it, the biggest character flaw in any fairy tale hero. While their mystical experience has broadened their metaphysical perspective, their concern is often still narrow, still self-absorbed. So, often, is it with those of us who have "found religion." In our ecstasy at beginning the long process of authentic self-discovery, we focus on that self-discovery, and on ourselves. The dangers of this should be obvious to any of us who fight the raging beast of ego.

The second danger is with the mystical. Seeing the more, the sacred, in a previously hidden layer of reality is also exhilarating, to say the least. But it can also make us inclined to neglect our normal experience, to minimize the value of the mundane. Catching glimpse of the sacred [note: here I am using "secular" and "sacred" in the sense of Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane - I'm not using "profane" because of the negative connotations of the word] can sometimes make the secular seem so trivial, so insignificant that we can't bring ourselves to focus on it except in an effort to let go of it. But this can lead to the worst sort of arrogance and moral callousness. Properly understood, if we grant a division between the secular and the sacred, we still see the sacred in the secular, making the secular a sacramental realm in which the sacred is mediated. It is, in other words, the vehicle through which we see God, and has its own unique value within the concern of God. So our mystical experience - like the mystical experience of the fairy tale heroes - should not drive us away from the secular, nor should it diminish our concern for the secular. Rather our mystical experience should drive us toward the secular, seeing it as a sacral realm.

Aware of these dangers, we can guard against them, using our own enriched existential experience of self to deepen our concern for others, and using our expanded view of reality to make more precious our daily world. Good fairy tales touch that part in us that craves meaning, and help us process the grand fairy tale that is the story of our life.

Some Words From Heraclitus

Some of you may remember my paper on Xenophanes' Critique of Religion. While I am not a huge fan of the ancient Greeks, I have studied them a bit, and have found some of them to be remarkable insightful - especially on the subject of religion. It seems that - despite the vast differences between the ancient world and our own, and the similarly vast differences between the many varied expressions of religion - not too much has changed in the last few thousand years, at least as far as the human search for meaning and the divine is concerned.

Recently my friend Aaron reminded me of Heraclitus. Not, of course, that I had forgotten that Heraclitus existed. But, it had been a long time since I had read anything on Heraclitus, and Aaron gave me the chance to crack open my ancient Greek philosophy texts and do a little reading.

Heraclitus is most famous for the comment that Aaron remembered,

It is not possible to step twice in the same river.

He was a contemporary of Pythagoras (roughly 571 - 497 BCE) and my beloved Xenophanes (roughly 570 - 478 BCE) about whom very little is known. He lived in Ephesus in the late sixth and/or early fifth century BCE, and was called by the ancients the "dark philosopher" as much for the mystery of his life as for any darkness in his thought.

In most college philosophy courses all of the pre-Socratic philosophers are lumped into a single group, and given a single problem: What is the underlying substance of the universe? They are then allowed a sentence or two, before they are swept under the primordial rug by Socrates and all that followed. In this paradigm, just as Thales (early sixth century BCE) is seen as the guy who said that everything is water and Anaximenes (mid sixth century BCE) is seen as the guy who said that everything is air, Heraclitus - along with being the "you can't step in the same river twice" dude - is seen as the guy who said that everything is fire.

If these kinds of metaphysical statements are taken literally, they appear quite absurd, even a little bit stupid. But they are not offered as scientific descriptions of the natural world. Rather, they are metaphors used to come to terms with the metaphysical make-up of the world. So, for Heraclitus to say that everything is fire, he is saying something much more subtle. He is pointing to the ever-changing nature of reality. His concept of fire, as such, is almost mystical, a metaphoric way to speak of some quasi-divine power in the universe, at work in all things, behind all activity and all matter.

But aside from saying that everything is fire, and that you can't step into the same river twice (two related claims, by the way, as they both point to a universe characterized by ceaseless change) he also had some good one-liners that survive to this day. He spoke brutally of both Homer and Hesiod, the twin giants of Greek mythology, saying things like:

Homer deserves to be thrown out of the contests and whipped...

and

The most popular teacher is Hesoid. Of him people think he knew most - he who did not even know day and night...

What is more interesting than these insults, however, is why he offers them. He said that Hesiod "did not even know day and night," but Hesiod, in Heraclitus' view, is by no means alone in that. Anyone who distinguishes between day and night, in Heraclitus' view, does not know them, for "they are one."

What is in opposition is in concert, and from what differs comes the most beautiful harmony.

Like the Taoists, then, he looks for what bridges dichotomies:

Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living each other's death, dying each other's life.

He also finds dichotomies where others might see a unity:

Sea is most pure and polluted water: for fishes, it is drinkable and salutary, but for [humans] undrinkable and deleterious.

He also shares in common with the Taoists a desire to redeem the "dark" things, that which has been identified as immoral, or scandalous:

To god all things are beautiful and good and just, but [humans] have supposed some things to be unjust, others just.

Similarly, he heaps scorn on what is revered:

The consecrations of the mysteries, as practiced among [humans], are unholy.

He can be seen as inverting the values of Greek culture and religion, seeing the value in that which has been stigmatized, while calling into question the value of that which has been revered. At the heart of this, perhaps, is a healthy appreciation of divine mystery and human foolishness:

[Humanity] is called childish compared with divinity, just as a [child] compared with a[n adult].

There is a great deal not to like in what remains of Heraclitus' thought. He despised commoners, and strove for (like many Greeks) a kind of excellence characterized by self-exalting fame. His thought not only justifies but even glorifies violence. But in both his inversion of conventional wisdom and in his appreciation for divine mystery - a mystery that transcends the conventional religion of his and any other day - there is much here that edifies.

Some Questions for Dr. Holsinger

It looks like I'm beginning to share Frank Lockwood's undying obsession with the Bush administration's nominee for Surgeon General, having posted twice on the subject in the last two days. This, then, is the last post on the subject, I promise.

In my last two posts I expressed some concern for Dr. Holsinger's views on homosexuality, and also for the way that he has thus far been treated. I also expressed my own conflict over his nomination. What I didn't do was arrive at any conclusions or give any suggestions. In this last post I'll do my best to do that.

Having now rather thoroughly (but by no means exhaustively) explored what the issues are with Dr. Holsinger's nomination to be U.S. Surgeon General, what do I think? What should happen next? Of course, no one with any power whatsoever will ever ask me questions like that, but I'll answer them here anyway.

I think that, as always happens unless a nomination is withdrawn, Dr. Holsinger should appear before the Senate for confirmation hearings. And, I think the Senate should do its job. That is, the Senate - and especially the Democrat leadership in the Senate - should address concerns and ask questions, without deciding in advance whether Dr. Holsinger should be confirmed. That does not mean that I think Dr. Holsinger should be confirmed. I have serious doubts about that. But I think that he should go through the confirmation process as he would through a trial (a trial by ordeal, perhaps?), without being prejudged.

I think he should be asked tough questions (questions like the ones I'll offer in a moment), and that he'd damn well better have some good answers. And, I think that in the (unlikely?) event that he answers those questions thoroughly and satisfactorily, I think that he should be confirmed.

What questions would I ask him? Questions like these:

Dr. Holsinger, in 1991 you wrote a paper titled the Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality. Do you stand by what you wrote in that paper concerning homosexuality, or have your views changed? If your views have changed, then how have they changed and why have they changed? (And, if not, thank you and goodbye!)

Dr. Holsinger, you helped found a church that "ministers" to those who no longer wish to be gay. What is your medical opinion of attempts to change someone's sexual orientation? Have you ever been directly involved in any attempt to alter someone's sexual orientation? If so, what exactly was your involvement, and are you still involved in such attempts? If you have been involved in such attempts in the past and are no longer involved, why are you no longer involved in such attempts? What changed?

Dr. Holsinger, do you think that homosexuality is a disease? Can it be treated? What is the basis for your opinion?

From what little I know personally of James Holsinger - and especially from what I know of him by his reputation in the United Methodist church and in the state of Kentucky - I highly doubt that he would lie to Congress. Like most who seek to navigate the treacherous waters of the confirmation process, he may evade some questions (I certainly would). It is that evasion, more than outright dishonesty, that I fear. If he answers a question, and answers it completely, then I'd trust his answer. And, if he can honestly answer questions like the ones above in a way that removes justified concern about his position on homosexuality, then I see no reason why he shouldn't be confirmed.

But I strongly doubt that he could answer those questions the way that I think he ought to. And if not, what then? Then he should not be confirmed. If he can't honestly say that homosexuality is not a disease, and if he cannot honestly distance himself from attempts to alter persons' sexual orientation, then he has no business being Surgeon General. But he is at least entitled to - assuming his nomination is not withdrawn - a fair hearing in the confirmation process, before he is tossed aside.

The Problem With Group-Think

Yesterday I waded into the controversy surrounding Dr. James Holsinger's nomination to be U.S. Surgeon General. In that post I expressed both my disagreement with Holsinger's views on homosexuality and gay sex, and my deep conflict over his nomination. While I used to attend worship with him, I could never be mistaken for a big fan of his.

However, reading Max Blumenthal's views at the Huffington Post and the reader comments that followed it, I was reminded of what, far more than a kind of blind religious ideology, is wrong with the nature of public discourse in this country. Simply put, we so rarely really speak collegially with people who fundamentally disagree with us and our cherished values, that we have forgotten how to be charitable toward our "enemies."

While Blumenthal made some excellent points (especially in his criticism of Holsinger's involvement with a church that supports gay conversion therapy) he never considered any of the readily available evidence that Dr. Holsinger might not be the slave to a conservative evangelical ideology that his critics would have him be. As noted in my previous post on the subject (and in a Louisville Courier Journal article) in his previous positions of secular leadership Dr. Holsinger has supported expanding the public funding available for stem cell research and developed a reputation for treating people fairly without regard for sexual orientation. As the Courier Journal notes, "as chancellor [of the University of Kentucky's Chandler Medical Center], he once faced down two conservative state senators who threatened to withhold funding from a lesbian health-care seminar at UK in 2002."

I certainly have many reservations about James Holsinger. I am deeply concerned about his views on homosexuality, and have long lamented his (in my view) negative and reactionary impact on my denomination. But when his critics refuse to engage - even for a fleeting moment - any evidence that might paint a more complicated picture of him, they do neither their cause nor the broader cause of decent and reasonable public discourse any good.

I wonder if people like Blumenthal refuse to consider Holsinger's behavior in his previous positions of secular leadership (at the University of Kentucky and with Kentucky's state Cabinet for Health and Family Services because of some biased caricature of my home state. Perhaps it is simply assumed that everyone in Kentucky is a conservative evangelical homophobe, so Holsinger's ability to comport himself well in secular leadership in the state of Kentucky has no bearing on his ability to serve a national position. I don't know. And, perhaps I'm defending Holsinger - whom I've never seen fit to defend before, having vigorously opposed his influence on my denomination - out of some need to defend what remains of the dignity of my home state.

In any event, regardless of Holsinger's opponents motives in overlooking evidence that complicates their caricature of him, or of my own motives in defending a person whom I neither like nor support, this simple fact remains: when we only dialogue with people who already agree with us, we lose our ability to engage our ideological opponents with charity. That impoverishes our public discourse, and keeps us from being able to reason together.

This is most evident in the comments that follow Blumenthal's lopsided opinion-piece. Calling into question Holsinger's impeccable medical credentials, calling him names like "batsh*t crazy a$$hole" and "freakazoid;" these don't do anyone any good. They only mirror that which I hate about most neo-cons and conservative evangelicals, a willingness to believe the worst about their opponents, and to dismiss them with the wave of an unsupported ad hominem.

I don't know that Dr. Holsinger is fit to serve as U.S. Surgeon General. I have some serious misgivings about that. But I do know that as a human being, a doctor, and as a professor and administrator, he is worthy of some respect. And, as a nominee, he is worthy of reasonable consideration. It may well be that such reasonable consideration would find that he has no business being Surgeon General. But if our decision making process is so fraught with such unreasonable discourse as is coming from bloggers and others trying to apply pressure to Senators to dump a nominee for Surgeon General before they've even met with him, we will never be able to make reasonable decisions that benefit the public. We will simply have the same sort of government we've had for the duration of the Bush administration, with the only change being the name of the party controlling the House and Senate, and the content of the ideology being imposed on the public without a concern for well-reasoned public discourse.

Wading in on the Holsinger Controversy

By now most people interested in religion and politics know that Lexington, KY doctor and United Methodist James Holsinger has been nominated by President Bush to be the next Surgeon General of the United States. What you probably don't know is that I grew up in the same church as Dr. Holsinger, before he left to be part of a start-up congregation and I moved to Louisville. Because of our connection - though we are by no means close - I have been following his controversial nomination with great interest.

Frank Lockwood, the Bible Belt Blogger, religion editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, formerly of the Lexington Herald Leader has been fanning the flames of this controversy for some time. His blog is the best place to quickly catch up on what all of the fuss is about.

To briefly sum up the situation, Dr. Holsinger is, in addition to being a professor at the University of Kentucky's medical school, a prominent figure in the United Methodist church. It is his church work that has drawn the criticism to his nomination. He served on a church committee that studied homosexuality before withdrawing from that committee when he thought that it might change church teachings on homosexuality. In 1991 he published a paper for that committee titled the Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality, in which he argued that gay sex was pathological, both unnatural and unhealthy. You can find the text of that paper here, at Frank Lockwood's Bible Belt Blogger blog.

Additionally, as a member of the United Methodist Judicial Council, he was involved in two decisions which, while in accordance with the Book of Discipline, pained me and other advocates for full acceptance of gays and lesbians. As part of the Confessing Movement, he has consistently pushed the church in a more conservative direction. He may or may not be involved with a group called Good News which, based out of Wilmore, KY, has pushed for the United Methodist church to split over the issue of homosexuality.

What is not in doubt is that Dr. Holsinger is a conservative evangelical Christian, part of a movement to reform the United Methodist church (in a way that I wholeheartedly disagree with), who feels that the Bible unequivocally condemns same-sex sexual relationships. The question is whether or not these positions should disqualify him from serving as U.S. Surgeon General.

Focus on the Family has supported Dr. Holsinger's nomination, rightly arguing that there should be no religious test for office. However, I fear that it is not Holsinger's critics (a long list of prominent Democrats, including Barack Obama, Ted Kennedy, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Christopher Dodd, along with the Log Cabin Republicans), but rather the Bush administration that has in this case applied a religious test. While James Holsinger may be a talented physician of some renown and distinction, I suspect that he came to the Bush administration's attention not primarily because of his medical work, but because of his religious and political views. For that reason it seems to me that his views are fair game.

However, as this article from the Louisville Courier Journal notes, Holsinger's religious views only tell part of the story. In it you find this passage which challenges the notion that his moral and theological views of homosexuality will impact his positions on public policy:

But more than a dozen Kentuckians who have worked with the former secretary of the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services and chancellor of UK's Chandler Medical Center say he is not bigoted and is deeply committed to providing health care for all.

"He never expressed anything but acceptance and fairness in the workplace," said Maria Kemplin, a lesbian who worked as a budget and policy analyst for Holsinger when he was chancellor.

As a cabinet secretary, Holsinger championed causes at odds with some conservative religious views, including stem cell research.

And as chancellor, he once faced down two conservative state senators who threatened to withhold funding from a lesbian health-care seminar at UK in 2002.

"He was unflinching in his support," said Phyllis Nash, who organized the conference and was then vice chancellor.

Personally I am deeply conflicted. While I disagree with Dr. Holsinger's position on homosexuality and many other cultural, ethical, and theological issues, and while I view him as having a decidedly negative impact on my denomination, making us a less welcoming and less compassionate church, I don't think that his religious views should automatically disqualify him from serving as Surgeon General. I am deeply concerned about his apparent view (at least as of 1991) that gay sex is pathological, and that homosexuality is a disease. That would call into question his ability to educate the American public on matters of health. But there is some reason for hope that, despite his religious views, he still values fairness, and is able to tolerate gays and lesbians despite his opposition to their lifestyle.

I wish that the Bush administration would base their nominations for important positions on ability rather than world-view. Then perhaps we would be able to fairly access whether or not James Holsinger has the ability - despite his world-view - to do the job of Surgeon General.

Liberation and Reconciliation Held Together by Roberts

We've already looked (perhaps far too) extensively at James Cone's Black Theology and Black Power, which seeks to Christianize Black Power (or, perhaps, Black Powerize Christianity) within a theological framework of liberation. Cone sees Christ as black, and sees the work of Christ in the work of Black Power. He hears Christ calling blacks to assert themselves and shake off the shackles of their oppression. To that end, his work is helpful.

However, as we've noticed, there are some troubling aspects of it. First, as we've already seen, Cone offers up a theological defense of violence in the name of resisting oppression. While I have some sympathy for his position, in that I agree with the need to make a sharp moral distinction between the violence of oppressors and the violence of the oppressed as they fight against their violent oppression, I am, to say the least, highly suspicious of any attempt to see Christ working through means that the historical Jesus would have certainly condemned.

More troubling, perhaps, is the exclusivism of Cone's position. He, as best as I can tell, sees God exclusively at work within the black community. Within his framework there is little hope for the salvation and reformation of whites, and perhaps even less hope for reconciliation. Yes, Cone does offer some halting suggestions for reconciliation, and at least a tiny morsel of hope for whites, but his primary concern, it seems to me, is to condemn white oppression of blacks, and to call blacks to power. While both of those tasks are noble, in and of themselves they hardly comprise the entirety of Christianity.

I plan to go on and read much more Cone, hoping to see how he develops a more comprehensive theology that will go beyond his equating of Christianity and Black Power. However, for the moment I am sidestepping his work and moving on to Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology by J. Deotis Roberts.

Like Cone, in the preface to the latest edition of his work, Roberts repents of his former sexism. Unlike Cone, however, Roberts has chosen to wash the sexist language from his work, revisiting the ways in which he speaks of both God and humanity to incorporate womanist and feminist critiques of language. This makes the book much easier to read from my perspective, but I am glad that Roberts calls attention to his former exclusively male language, so that he sidesteps the attack that Cone, too, tried to avoid: that of trying to forget past sins, and as such leave them entirely unaddressed, in the past.

Unlike Cone, Roberts is interested not only in providing a theological framework for the liberation of blacks, but also in reconciliation between the races. He sees the two as intimately connected to each other, and as together comprising the heart of Christianity:

My understanding of the Christian faith leads me to speak of both liberation and reconciliation as proper goals for the Christian church in general and of the black church in particular. I understand the church to have a center, but not a circumference - and exclusiveness to be a means to universalism and not an end. Therefore the black church, in setting black people free, may make freedom possible for white people as well. Whites are victimized as the sponsors of hate and prejudice which keeps racism alive. Therefore, they cannot know for themselves the freedom of Christians, for they are shackled by a self-imposed bondage. The cry for deliverance, for authentic freedom for existence, on the part of black people, may be salvific for all regardless of the nature or cause of oppression.

In the section surrounding this quote Roberts is principally concerned with two things:

1. Understanding a concept of "chosenness" as relates to the black people in general and the black church in particular, and

2. Offering up the family as a proper model for the nature, structure, and role of the black church.

To this end, Roberts devotes a great deal of time to understanding the history of "chosenness" as it applies to other groups who have claimed titles such as "the people of God" for themselves. He also devotes a great deal of time to understanding the history of the black family, both in Africa and especially in diaspora. He is particularly concerned with the impact of slavery and its aftermath on the nature and strength of the black family.

But within that project, he is also building to his understanding of the need for a black theology to be a Christian theology that is concerned with more than just black people. And, as a Christian theology, he stresses the need for black theology to be concerned with both liberation and reconciliation at the same time. In the above quote he is, within that context of both liberation and reconciliation, offering up a brief glimpse at the connection between black deliverance from white oppression and white deliverance from white oppression. He sees both the oppressed and the oppressors as the victims of oppression, with each being held in a kind of bondage to the evil power of oppression. This concept of the joint victimhood of oppression - even if only one party is morally culpable for the oppression - sets the stage for a joint deliverance from oppression, with blacks acting as a kind of "chosen people" whose deliverance makes possible the deliverance of whites, as well.

While Roberts is building here a black theology, it is not a theology that is solely concerned with black persons. Insofar as it is a Christian theology, it is primarily concerned with Christ, even if it is principally concerned with how God through Christ speaks to the black experience. Within this concern for Christ, the notion that ultimately "all are one in Christ Jesus is very important for Roberts. And this notion helps inform Roberts' view on black-white relationships, and ultimately paves the way for reconciliation between the races:

The assertion that all are "one in Christ Jesus" must henceforth mean that all slave-master, servant-boss, inferior-superior frames of reference between blacks and whites have been abolished. This principle must operate not merely on a spiritual level, but on the plane of human social relations as well. The slave must be set free, but the slave system must likewise be destroyed so that the suture will be free of human bondage. The black church, as a family, as a corporate expression of the Christian faith of black people, is called forth into empowerment actions. It must become a gestalt, a structure of mass power of black people operating against oppression under Christian sponsorship. The black church must use all its resources to launch a massive assault against white power in church, community, or state that is responsible for the oppression of black people. But even in our revolutionary action for the liberation of black people, we must hold up at all times the possibility for black-white interracial fellowship and cooperation. Reconciliation between equals, no less than liberation, is the mission of the black church.

Like Cone, Roberts calls the black church to the cause of liberation - the liberation of black people. Like Cone, Roberts sees black pride, black power, as an integral part of this work of liberation. The black church is called to help lift up the black people, and in doing so to help build them up. As such, the black church is called to fight against white power everywhere that white power oppresses blacks, even within the black mind.

But while Roberts shares the urgency of the "by any means necessary" crowd, he does not share their ethics. The black church is called to be a Christian church, not just a black church. As such, while the liberation of the black people is imperative - and is, in fact, a Christian duty - that liberation cannot be used to justify the full exclusion of all white persons from the process of making blacks equal to whites, both in reality and in the minds of both blacks and whites. Where Cone is willing to at least in part justify the use of violence to force whites to consider the basic humanity of blacks, Roberts reminds the black church that the church must always hold liberation and reconciliation together. And racial violence from either side makes the task of reconciliation that much harder. In other words, the violence of white oppression of blacks does not justify revolutionary violence.

Yes, the church is to "assault" white power, but that assault is not an assault against white people. Rather it is an assault against the structures of power ingrained in our culture. And, as we have seen from other sources, the best assault against what Walter Wink calls "the Powers" is a nonviolent assault.

At first glance Roberts' views may be much more comforting to white Christians than Cone's theology of Black Power. But, while Roberts calls the black church to act like Christians as they fight for liberation, he no less than Cone issues as strong rebuke to the white church, an anti-Christian church that serves as a vehicle for the oppression of blacks rather than the propagation of the liberating Gospel. Just as Roberts calls black Christians to act like Christians, he also calls white Christians to act like Christians. And he is pretty clear that, as far as he is concerned, most are not.

What separates Roberts from Cone, however, is that Roberts holds out more hope that whites will eventually see their own participation in the oppression of blacks as a denial of Christ and the Gospel, and will thus eventually repent and convert. Then, finally seeing blacks through the eyes of Christ, and as such as their fundamental equals, they will finally be ready for reconciliation between equals.

Al Mohler on Genetic Treatments for Homosexuality

For those of you who don't know of him, Al Mohler is the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, the flagship seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention. In some Baptist circles he is almost venerated, in others, well... not so much.

My step-grandfather, Wendell Garrison, is the former president of the Illinois Baptist State Association and served on the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee from 1976-1984. He has long been a leading moderate voice among Southern Baptists, and is perhaps the most respected Southern Baptist pastor in Illinois. He is also no fan of Al Mohler, seeing him as more of a politician than a pastor, and more of a polemical bully than a scholar. In his mind, Mohler represents everything that has gone wrong with the Southern Baptist convention.

Living in Louisville, however, I didn't need my step-grandfather's growing frustration to poison me to Al Mohler. I just need my own eyes and ears. Mohler's often-inflammatory rhetoric, rhetoric that paints his opponents as little anti-Christs seeking to ruin "Biblical" Christianity, is enough to make any fair-minded Christian sick to their stomach. Worse, too many of his disciples treat him as a quasi-God, a semi-divine being whose utterances are as close to the Word of God as humans ever get. I've seen too many star-struck students fawning all over him not to wonder what it is, exactly, that they serve in the seminary's cafeteria.

This year around Christmas I had the exquisite pleasure to spend a few days with my grandparents in their home in Swansea, Illinois, just on the Illinois side of St. Louis. Wendell and I spent long hours talking theology and church politics before we finally, and quite nervously, broached the divisive subject of homosexuality. While my views on the subject have changed a great deal over the past few years, as I've moved from a fundamentalist/literalist position to my current theology, I was never quite sure how to talk to my step-grandfather. After all, not only is he a fairly old man now - which in my mind has always unconsciously (and wrongly!) been associated with conservativism - he is also a retired Southern Baptist pastor. In all my life I'd never met a Southern Baptist who publicly professed anything other than that homosexuality is a vile sin, condemned unequivocally by the very Word of God.

Wendell eased into the subject by talking about how much Southern Baptists have changed during his lifetime.

We've always had a strong concept of the separation of Church and State, he told me, but now that we're starting to taste some political power we're selling out our most treasured ideals.

He moved from that to the subject of Biblical literalism, saying that Southern Baptists today have wedded themselves to a thoroughly modern reading of the Bible, a reading that he thinks is unsupported by the text itself. On the subject of inerrancy, he said,

Tell where the Bible itself says that it is inerrant! It isn't there. You can't say that the Bible is your primary religious authority, and say that the Bible is inerrant, because the Bible itself makes no such claim. And I don't feel like making claims about the Bible for the Bible. If it doesn't think that it is inerrant, I see no reason to impose that view on it.

Then we finally got where he was trying to take us. I think that he had guessed my evolving views on human sexuality before the conversation even started. He had, after all, helped talk me through my crisis in faith after I'd left pastoral ministry. He knew that, in the current climate in evangelical denominations, there was a deeper reason why I was allowing a bad situation at a single church to keep me from further pursuing my pastoral career. So he asked me bluntly:

What do you think about homosexuality?

I gave some half-hearted cowardly answer, not wanting to risk discussing such a divisive issue with a family member. He patiently listened to me stammer, before he replied,

I remember thinking about it as a young man. It occurred to me then that I hadn't chosen my sexual orientation, so it seemed unlikely to me that gays would have chosen theirs, either. And, if they haven't chosen to be the way that they are, then God must have made them that way. How, then, could it be sinful?

Al Mohler, it seems, has finally come around to seeing at least the first half of my step-grandfather's point. BluegrassReport.org, a progressive blog on Kentucky politics, in a scathing editorial pointed me to a post on Al Mohler's blog. In it he all but concedes that the phenomenon of same sex attraction is genetic rather than volitional.

However, rather than take the next step, and argue that because homosexual inclinations are not volitional they - and at least some of the behaviors that arise out of them - must not be sinful, he clings to his "Biblical" view that all homosexual acts are sinful, and must be roundly condemned. This places him in a difficult position, though there is no evidence in his post that he grasps the difficulty of his position. In this difficult position he advocates the use of genetic treatments to eliminate homosexual tendencies.

As Mark Nicholas points out in the BluegrassReport.org piece, that position is a difficult one for someone who has in the past roundly condemned kinds of genetic therapy for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other diseases. While I acknowledge that, from Mohler's point of view, there may be a difference between stem-cell therapy and the kind of genetic treatment that he thinks might be possible for homosexuality, taking his positions together I am forced to wonder if he really thinks that being gay is a more serious "disease" than any of the actual diseases that could be treated by stem-cell therapy.

This viewing of human sexuality as so seriously pathological that it demands an invasive intervention that fundamentally alters one's genetic make-up strikes me as more than a little disturbed. I highly encourage you to read Mohler's post for yourself, and to read it as charitably as possible. Especially look at his ten points at the end, which include, after some preliminary theological concerns, statements like:

If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.

and

We must stop confusing the issues of moral responsibility and moral choice. We are all responsible for our sexual orientation, but that does not mean that we freely and consciously choose that orientation.

What do you make of this view?

Theodicy in the Priestly Creation Myth?

One of the ideas I've been kicking around for my eventual MA Thesis is a continuation of some of my ideas here about theodicy. That is, perhaps my Thesis would look at the moral and religious implications of theodicy, while also perhaps expanding the concept of theodicy to include other kinds of religious attempts to wrestle with the problem of evil. Evil, suffering, pain, and the like are, after all, not just philosophic, theological, and especially logical problems for a particular brand of theism that asserts God's unlimited perfection and goodness. They are experiential problems for all persons.

For my Intro to Judaism class I'm currently reading The Divine Symphony: The Bible's Many Voices, by Israel Knohl, a professor of Bible at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In it he notes the problem that evil poses for all forms of monotheistic religion, not just the philosophic theism that sticks to a strict concept of divine omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence:

The most crucial problem facing monotheistic religion is the source of evil. In polytheistic religions, evil can be blamed on wicked divinities. But if there is only one God and God is perceived as good and merciful, how can we explain the existence of evil in the world?

This question, Knohl asserts, was burning in the minds of the Priestly editors of the Torah. It can even be seen beneath the text of the first Creation Myth of Ancient Israel, found in Genesis 1:1-2:4a. That myth, in Source Theory, is traditionally attributed to the Priestly Source, a source that is seen by many scholars as a later voice from the post-exhilic period, but is seen by Knohl as a pre-exhilic voice. In fact, Knohl argues quite convincingly that the what he calls the "Priestly Torah" can best be dated to "the period between the building of Solomon's Temple (tenth century B.C.E.) and the time of King Hezekiah and the prophet Isaiah (second half of the eight century B.C.E.)."

This is important for him, because he argues that the Priestly Torah was a response on the part of the "elite priests in Jerusalem" to a crisis in the social and religious climate of Ancient Israel - a crisis spoken to by the great prophets of that time.

That there was a socio-religious crisis in Ancient Israel at that time is beyond dispute: the texts of Amos, Isaiah and Micah all speak to it. Knohl succinctly describes the crisis in a single sentence:

People thought that they might acquire sanctity by meticulous performance of the cultic laws, ignoring at the same time the social-moral commandments.

In response to the attack on the Temple cult that followed the prophetic articulation of this crisis, Knohl argues that the priests made public stories and traditions that they had long guarded, and the result was the formation of the Torah text. This, of course, was an ongoing process - they didn't just publish a single, definitive manuscript. But, at its heart, according to Knohl, the Priestly Torah - that is, the parts of the Torah that are attributable to the Priestly Source - are a response by the priests to this socio-religious crisis.

Anyway, the first creation myth in Genesis is part of what Knohl calls the Priestly Torah. In addition to responding to the contemporary crisis that Knohl sees as responsible for the Priestly Torah, Knohl argues that this myth is also in part a response to the problem of evil as it might have been understood at the time.

The problem of evil is, after all, not exactly a new problem. In previous posts we have discussed this a little, when looking at one of Augustine's theodicies from the 4th century CE. However, it wasn't a new problem in Augustine's day, some 1650 or so years ago. In fact, it was an ancient problem even in antiquity; perhaps as old as monotheism, or even old. Human beings have, as best as we can tell, been wrestling with the experience of pain and suffering for as long as there have been both human beings and pain and suffering. And, at some point, every religion must account for the origins of this experience, which we label "evil."

So it should come as no surprise that the Priestly Torah, in its creation myth, struggles with the nature of evil; particularly since, as Knohl notes, in Judaism as with all other monotheistic religions, there is no evil deity for the problem to fall back on.

After providing us with a reading of Genesis 1:1-3, and a brief discussion of the syntax, Knohl writes:

The most striking conclusion that follows from this observation of syntax is that before the formation of light, which was the first act of God as Creator, there were already entities that predated God's creation. These primordial materials consisted of unformed and void earth (tohu v'vohu), darkness (hoshekh), and deep waters (tehom). Thus we do not have in Genesis 1 a claim for creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihlo).

Before we go any further I should note, for those of you who may feel threatened by the idea that there is no Biblical support for creation ex nihlo, that Knohl is an Orthodox Jewish rabbi who takes the Biblical text very, very seriously. In other words, he is not some radical like me who seeks to overturn the religious apple cart. His work is his attempt to come to terms with the text of his Bible, a text in which he sees the Word of God. This reading, then, is one that comes out of the Biblical text itself, and not a radical reading that somehow manipulates the text. In fact, this reading is much, much more faithful to the Biblical text than any reading that would see creation ex nihlo in this story. Creation ex nihlo is an extra-Biblical concept that has been read back into the Bible by those who sought to see the Greek philosopher's God in the God of Ancient Israel. That it has become "orthodox" in the Christian tradition demonstrates that even the most "orthodox" of Christians have sought to re-interpret their scriptures in light of their cultural setting, just like we "liberals" do today.

But, the question before us is not one of "orthodoxy" v. "heresy" in the contemporary Christian context. Rather, it is one of what Knohl makes of these three pre-existing primordial entities, and how they relate to the problem of evil as understood by the priestly editors of the Torah.

We cannot interpret tohu v'vohu as a designation for formless matter, as it is often interpreted; rather, it is a reference to some primordial entity that preceded divine creation and that was used in that process. Elsewhere in the Bible, the word tohu means "desert," "waste," "devastation," and this is also the meaning here. God begins Creation assuming the presence of this primordial tohu. On the first day, God created light as a contrast to the preexisting darkness. On the second day, God separated the preexisting water by forming the expanse of heaven. On the third day, God gathered the original waters that were left under the expanse, and distinguished the earth from the seas.

We see here a progressing process of ordering, making distinctions, and building up from preexisting substances. This movement from chaos to order in the myth is important, because it presents us with a both progressive and ongoing picture of Creation. Creation is not a one time event in the past, in which God made everything ex nihlo. Rather, it is an ongoing story that takes place in time, in which God shapes that which already existed, while adding to it, ordering it, and making important distinctions between "light" and "darkness," water "above" and water "below," and between "sea" and "land." These distinctions correspond to the three primordial materials that Knohl translates as "darkness," "deep waters," and "unformed and void earth."

In positing these primordial substances, in overtly saying that "some elements of the universe were not created by God," Knohl sees the priestly editors as both attempting to explain the existence of evil and as placing "limits" on "God's force and authority as Creator." He argues, in fact, that this aspect of the creation myth is an overt attempt to solve the fundamental problem of evil:

The primeval elements tohu, hoshekh, and tehom all belong to the evil sphere. Hence, the Priestly claim that these entities predated God's Creation is really a claim about primordial evil. The three elements comprising the preexistant cosmic substance are the roots (put another way, the substance) of evil in the world. At the conclusion of the Priestly account of Creation, it is written: "And God saw all that He had made, and found it very good" (Gen. 1:31). All that God had made was very good. Evil was not made by God. It predated Creation in Genesis 1!

This reading presents us with a much more religiously and morally satisfying kind of theodicy. In it God, rather than explaining evil away, takes the preexistant substance of evil and shapes it into something good.

This is very similar to the way in which Process Theology in the Christian tradition looks at the relationship between God and evil. In both accounts God is somewhat limited, in that there are things beyond God's creative power. And, in both cases God actively works, in an ongoing process, to address the problem of evil. This divine activity demands our participation, calling us to co-create with God; that is, to work with God to help alleviate suffering by shaping evil into good.

On “Why Gays (as a Group) Are Morally Superior to Christians (as a Group)” by Stanley Hauerwas

Since joining the Christian Peace Bloggers blog-ring I've been meaning to post something on one of my favorite little essays, Stanley Hauerwas' “Why Gays (as a Group) Are Morally Superior to Christians (as a Group)”. I've been meaning to post on it because it combines two hot-button moral/political/theological issues in a really creative way. It seeks to explore

a.) how homosexuality relates to military service, and

b.) how Christianity relates to military service.

To say any more up front would be to steal from the delight of reading about it. So, here is a slightly edited version of a paper I once wrote on the essay:

________________


In this brief essay, Duke Divinity School Theological Ethics Professor Stanley Hauerwas takes a unique approach to the issue of whether or not gays (as a group) are being unfairly discriminated against by not being allowed to serve in the military. He only briefly addresses of discrimination, saying “I see no good reason why gays and lesbians should be excluded from military service,” but that discrimination does not concern him. In fact, he says “I think it a wonderful thing that some people are excluded [from military service] as a group. I only wish that Christians could be seen by the military to be as problematic as gays.”

While his essay is not, in the end, primarily concerned with either the moral value of homosexual behavior or the discrimination of groups on the grounds of sexual orientation, he does provide at least a cursory treatment of the issue of discrimination against gays, saying “Discrimination against gays grows from the moral incoherence of our lives” and not from “the threat that gays might pose to our moral or military culture.” This is because most people are not “secure in their convictions and practices.” After all, “people who are secure in their convictions and practices are not so easily threatened by the prospects of a marginal group acquiring legitimacy through military service.”

His approach to this issue does not even consider the moral value of homosexual sexual acts. I believe that, given what I know of his theology, and given the subtext of this essay, that Hauerwas does not believe that homosexuality is consistent with Christian ethics. But, on the issue of whether or not gays should be allowed to join the military, the moral value of their actions is, to Hauerwas, irrelevant. Why? I think that there are at least two reasons for this.

The first reason is that, for Hauerwas, the military itself is immoral. In fact, he spends the bulk of his essay arguing that Christians should, on moral grounds, be exempt from military service because their ethics would so contrast with the ethics of the military. Hauerwas asks, for instance, “What if Catholics took the commitment to just war seriously as a discipline of the church?” What would be the result of such a commitment? He says that the result would be the exemption of Catholics from military service, because Catholics would question the nature of the American military, and the way in which the military wages war. They would object to the use of nuclear weapons, even as a deterrent; and they would object to bombing runs which kill civilians. They would even object to having a standing army, because “[t]he very fact of our standing army means too often such discussion [on when to go to war] is relegated to politicians who manipulate the media to legitimate what they were going to do anyway.”

He also asks us to “[i]magine Catholics, adhering closely to just war theory, insisting that war is not about killing but only incapacitating the enemy.” Imagine Catholics deciding “[t]hey could participate only in wars designed to take prisoners and then, if that is not a possibility, only to wound. Killing the enemy is a last resort” for them. If Catholics decided to make just war theory an important part of their religious life, then would they be fit for military service? Wouldn’t they pose a much greater threat to the military way of life than gays?

And, to Hauerwas, Catholics are not the only Christians whose lives should threaten the military ethic. In fact, all Christians ought to live in such a way that their lives are incompatible with, and threatening to, the prevailing ethic of our military culture. After all, “Christians are asked to pray for their enemy.” Could a soldier “really trust people in [their] unit who think that the enemy’s life is as valid as their fellow soldier?” Could someone who views all life as a gift from God, and all people as (at least potentially) children of God, really be effective at the kind of wars waged by the United States? Such wars require the dehumanization of the enemy. Such wars require even the acceptance of some civilian casualties as inevitable.

So, the first reason why Hauerwas refuses to, in the context of this essay, consider the moral value of homosexual sexual acts is because the military is, itself, so immoral. Christian ought to, on moral grounds, be exempt from military service; and, as long as they are not, and as long as gays are, “it seems clear... that gays, as a group, are morally superior to Christians.”

The second reason why I think Hauerwas refused, here, to consider the moral value of homosexual sexual acts, is a more subtle one which is not overtly contained in the text, though some passages hint at it. It has to do with the way that he views Christian ethics, and who is bound to Christian ethics. Evangelical Christians, particularly in today’s culture, tend to want to turn America into an ethically Christian culture; at least in the sense that all Americans should be bound to uphold a Christian sexual ethic. But, given that in a number of important and non-sexual ways (such as the military) American culture is totally incompatible with Hauerwas’s understanding of the Christian ethic; such a goal (to conform America to a Christian sexual ethic) seems ill conceived and totally impossible.

I suspect that Hauerwas would say that the goal of evangelical Christians in America ought not to be to conform American culture to a Christian ethic, but instead ought to be to convert individual Americans into Christians. Then, and only then, will they, as Christians, be bound to uphold a Christian ethic, and such an ethic would contrast with American culture in many more important areas than sex. As it is, evangelicals are getting it backwards. They are trying to change society as a whole, forcing their ethic onto people who are not bound to that ethic. Such acts, rather than encouraging those people to convert to their kind of religion, actually serve as a deterrent, turning them off to the evangelical expression of Christianity.

While the essay in question was written in 1993 to address the issue of gays in the military, the ideas contained in it and drawn from it are particularly helpful in the wake of the 2004 election, in which 11 states passed referendums on amending their constitutions to define marriage as being between a man and a woman. Hauerwas writes, “Gay men and lesbians are being made to pay the price of our society’s moral incoherence not only about sex, but about most of our moral convictions. As a society, we have no general agreement about what constitutes marriage and/or what goods marriage ought to serve. We allegedly live in a monogamous culture, but in fact we are at best serially polygamous. We are confused about sex, why and with whom we have it, and about our reasons for having children.”

All of these moral confusions create an environment in which we, wishing to establish a firm moral line, come down on people who are different from us. “[T]he moral ‘no’ to gays becomes the necessary symbolic commitment to show that we really do believe in something.” And, of course, the one thing on which we are sure is the one area in which we are not tempted. Christians so often wish to be told that homosexuality is wrong so that they can overlook the ways in which they sexually misbehave. They claim that homosexuality poses a threat to marriage to overlook the more obvious threats to heterosexual marriage; heterosexual sexual misconduct.

As quoted earlier, “people who are in their convictions and practices are not so easily threatened by the prospects of a marginal group acquiring legitimacy.” This quote, of course, was intended to apply to gays serving in the military, but it certainly also applies to the prospect of gay marriage. Legitimizing marginal groups does not threaten those who are secure. Secure heterosexuals who adhere to a morally coherent heterosexual sexual ethic and who live in secure marriages should not be personally threatened by the prospect of allowing persons of the same sex to marry each other. This statement does not depend on the moral value of homosexual sexual acts.

And so, in an essay which concerns issues of import to gays, Hauerwas does not include any statements on the morality or ethics of the homosexual lifestyle. Why? Because, presumably, his audience does not primarily include gays. It primarily includes heterosexual evangelical Christians who use gays and lesbians as a scapegoat for the problems contained within their own heterosexual marriages. It primarily includes heterosexual evangelical Christians who love using the issue of homosexuality to make themselves feel better about their own sexual deviance. As long as they have gays and lesbians to point to and to blame for their own problems, they don’t have to face up to the role that they have played in undermining the sexual morality in their society and in their church. As long as they have gays and lesbians to point to and blame for their martial problems, they don’t have to own up to their own role in the so-called “decay of marriage and traditional families.”

Secure, married, heterosexual Christian couples know that the state and health of their marriage does not depend on whether or not gays, as a group, are legitimized by either being allowed to get married, or by, as a group, being allowed to serve in the military. They know that the state and health of their marriage depends entirely on their own actions and attitudes. And so, to introduce a discussion on the moral value of homosexual sexual actions would be to distract from the main point of Hauerwas’s essay, which serves as a form of moral and ethical instruction to Christians who already have their own opinions on homosexuality, and use those opinions as a means by which to ignore the ways in which they fail to live up to the ethical standards of their own religion.