On breaking bread with and breaking with the dead

My friend Alan Jacobs’ new book, Breaking Bread with the Dead, is a marvelous set of essays meant, among other things, to encourage readers to not abandon “the dead,” old books and authors whose conventions, ideas, and such we might find odd, hard to grasp, or even, in some measure, simply noxious. Indeed, as he puts it, sticking with these authors while not simply capitulating to them, has the potential to improve our “temporal bandwidth” and “personal density,” make us less amenable to being tossed to and fro upon the winds of (pseudo-intellectual) fashion.

Good advice, and I suspect our culture would indeed be in something of a better place if we were not so detached from or even antipathetic toward our literary, historical, religious, and philosophical forbearers. (Though it is an interesting question, to me at least, as to why even our historians at times seem to lose this, but I suppose we all lose our heads on occasion).

Reading Alan’s book put me in mind of teaching Plato’s Republic in my Introduction to Political Philosophy course, which I did for nearly every semester of the past 12 years. There’s a point in the dialogue where Socrates, having finished describing his “city in speech” as a way of illustrating what a just soul looks like, must return to some questions his interlocutors are not wont to let go. Kallipolis sounds nice and all–peaceful, unified, etc.–but they’re wondering how they’re to have wives and children? What about their private lives, how will they go?

The reader can almost feel Socrates sort of sigh, maybe scratch what was no doubt a mess of hair, and then admit he wanted to avoid the question but, fair enough, there are things to be faced and he’s not one to avoid those hard questions. So the dialogue then pursues what Socrates calls the “three waves” of “practical” problems, among them the idea that both men and women can be guardians (the defenders of the city) and even philosophers. For the undergraduate reader in the 21st century, the fact that this is a problem to be faced or even argued for creates its own degree of dissonance, but the students are apt to think of Plato as a man of their own time, an egalitarian who saw, as they do *of course*, that men and women have the “same nature” and thus should be afforded the same opportunities. Ancient Greece can be awfully strange–it sure is nice to see that someone as smart as Plato anticipated our moral advances so very long ago. Three cheers for us!

But then–and sometimes I have to point this out and sometimes there’s a particularly perceptive student who does–the dialogue keeps going and Socrates and his ever-agreeable audience happen to mention that, yes, men and women can both be philosophers because some of them have that “nature,” in the same way that the philosopher has a completely different “nature” than, say, the shoe-maker. Whoa, wait, what’s that again? What does it mean that the philosopher and the shoe-maker have different natures, and what are the consequences here? Well, what it means, among other things, is that they have different kinds of souls, different capacities and inclinations that mean that the shoe-maker would never be happy or fulfilled if he (or she!) were put in charge of the city, nor would the philosopher be happy or fulfilled if he (or she!) were to spend his (or her!) life making shoes. Tightly intertwined with Plato’s seeming sexual egalitarianism is a deep and abiding inegalitarianism based on talent. The best society–at least at a first pass–is one in which those of more (and the right sort of) talent rule those of lesser talent. Plato’s egalitarianism requires, it seems, a highly stratified society.

It’s a great teaching moment, for then I would typically ask the question: how do we decide who gets to be in charge of things in *our* society? After some fumbling about, students usually land on the idea that we’d like to have people in charge who have earned it. Though they’re not so naive as to think that we actually inhabit a meritocracy, they do tend to rather like the idea. But I then point out that the idea of “merit” isn’t self-defining and especially in our information-economy age, what counts as “merit” looks a lot like native intelligence, the ability to acquire educational credentials, and so on. Or–and this is just a hypothetical to make them think–doesn’t even the idea of a meritocracy suggest that those with more natural talents deserve to be on top? Have we really escaped Plato’s stratified-by-nature “city in speech”?

We leave the question unresolved, for we move through The Republic rather quickly, and we need to get on to the ways in which the search for justice undermines the pleasures of private life (no marriage, no kids of one’s own, no private property, etc.), and it is the unresolved-ness that is, I think, so very helpful to my students. They need to be made uncomfortable, to feel the tensions they bring with them into the classroom, to grapple with their own inconsistencies and, even, the impossibility of fully answering some questions. And it is the writings of these long-dead thinkers, in some measure so very far removed from us, that best helps them to do it. So go read an old book, especially perhaps one whose ideas you find a bit disreputable or just strange. And thank Alan Jacobs for the encouragement.

Abortion Politics

This Sunday was “Sanctity of Life” Sunday at church, where the sermon and collective prayers paid particular attention to the issue of abortion and related “life” issues. (Just a note: there’s a myth out there that conservative churches in particular are overrun by politics. But my experience—and the research I’ve seen backs this up—has been that politics is all too rarely mentioned in most churches, especially predominantly white churches, though it is mentioned a lot in a small minority of them). That got me to thinking about how abortion plays into our politics and a few things occurred to me. (Note that in what follows, I’m assuming that abortion is almost always morally impermissible. This isn’t an argument about that—for that, see Frank Beckwith’s Defending Life, among other things).

There seem to me three characteristic mistakes people who think abortion morally wrong tend to make with regard to its relation to politics. The first is to suggest what we might call a “privatization” strategy, to say that yes, we might think it wrong, but we shouldn’t impose that view on others. Some do so out of a general liberty argument—women should have the liberty to make choices that impinge significantly on their bodily integrity and life plans—and some (like Pete Buttigieg did recently) out of the idea that the often-religious sources of opposition to abortion make its restriction impermissible. Both of these strategies seem to me obviously mistaken, for the reason that if abortion is wrong, it’s wrong in such a way that demands political action.

Consider, if you will, the evil of racial segregation. Jim Crow-style segregation had (at least) two interlocking elements, a social system in which whites were themselves committed to living apart African-Americans and excluding them from full participation in the economy, associations, etc., as well as a political system that either required segregation or created powerful incentives in favor of it. The privatization strategy would be the equivalent of getting rid of laws requiring segregation while leaving untouched, say, private employers’ discriminatory hiring practices or restaurants refusing to seat black customers and so on. We rightly would see this not just as a half-measure but indeed as an injustice. So, too, with the privatization strategy, except that this is much worse. For while we can debate about the extent to which the state should try and refashion the contours of private associational life, there’s no debate as to whether the state has a role to play in preventing the killing of human beings. If abortion is wrong, it is wrong because it is the unjustified killing of a human being, and no political authority can rightfully claim itself as a political authority if it ignores that.

The second mistake is a bit more subtle. Perhaps we might call this the “equivalency” mistake, for its proponents err in supposing that abortion is just one of many issues, all of which have to be balanced out against one another. I sometimes worry that the late Cardinal Bernardin’s “Consistent Life Ethic” ends up applied in this way; similarly, when folks append the term “pro-life” to everything from immigration to health care to the environment, what is sometimes at work is the idea that, yes, abortion is wrong and, yes, we should work to reduce it, but we should also be concerned about all of these other things. I don’t disagree with that as such (see below for the third mistake) but it’s just not the case, empirically or morally, that abortion is just one issue among many. Globally, for example, there are literally hundreds of millions of people who have not gotten the chance to grow up, learn, play, fall in love, start families, work, worship, and the like because they were killed in utero. Sometimes, I suspect that folks tire of the abortion debate and want to move to issues where they think they might actually succeed; other times, I think they end up in practice with the “privatization” strategy. In any case, we quite obviously prioritize issues of life and death in other political contexts, so why wouldn’t we prioritize this one?

The third mistake is what really hit me this morning (not, I should add, because of anything that was said in church), and this is what we might call the “sole issue” mistake. Abortion is a significant dividing line in American public life and for many people, it is the most important, sometimes the only important issue they vote on. Is that a problem? I’d say no and yes. I’d say no in the sense that we all should have certain moral commitments from which we are unwilling to budge and if we have candidates or parties that violate those commitments, we should not affirm those parties or candidates by voting for them. Would you vote for George Wallace the segregationist? But I’d say that making a single issue the sole issue around which you make your political choices is indeed a mistake, for what it does is to make that issue—in this case, abortion—into the whole of what a reasonably just order requires. Elective abortion should be outlawed because it is unjust, but it is not the only thing about which justice is concerned. To continue the analogy from above, a society in which abortion is outlawed but the races are segregated by law and custom is not a just society, just as a society in which racial segregation is ended but abortion permitted and supported is also unjust.

To narrow your political vision such abortion becomes the “sole” political issue that concerns you betrays a misunderstanding of why you should be opposed to abortion in the first place and makes you vulnerable to manipulation by those who will leverage that narrowness for their own ends—and then when they have gotten what they want from you, they will cast you aside or simply ignore you. This is, to my mind, one of the mistakes part of the pro-life movement in the US has made with its willingness to ally with—even cheerlead for—President Trump. It alienates potential allies, discredits the moral and intellectual grounds for opposing abortion, and even perhaps sets the ground for political failures in the years to come. We can, and should, do better.

On the Integralists

This week I published a short piece in Comment arguing that the lessons of Europe’s 19th century Christian political parties could be of use to 21st century (American) Christians grappling with how to respond to our own cultural and political context.  I’ll leave it to readers (both of you!) to see what they think about it, but one piece of my argument was aimed at a loose group of thinkers who might be banded together under the label “integralist.” (I’m hedging a bit because there are lots of differences among those thinkers, but I don’t think it’s unfair to group Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, and some others as operating within a common stream of thought).

I suggested in my piece that the integralists, as much as they quite rightly point out the dangers of a kind of maximalist liberalism, are unpersuasive (at least to my mind) in their view that liberalism as such is so maximalist. (By maximalist, I have in mind the quite real tendency on the part of some liberal progressives to try and remake all social institutions, to include churches, voluntary associations, families, etc. in the image of liberal political institutions.) There is not, on my view, a necessary move from some liberal political premises–freedom and equality of human persons, natural liberty, and the like–to the notion that all institutions and associations must always and immediately genuflect before the dictates of our cultural mandarins.

Vermeule disagreed and via Twitter pointed to this blog piece disputing the importance of my “necessity” claim. His argument there is that while of course there are a good many things that aren’t necessary in politics, there are quite often “structural propensities” that, in the end, amount to the same thing. Yes, perhaps liberalism is not necessarily destined to make us all, in Stephen Macedo’s words, “California” but that’s where the easy path lies, given certain structural tendencies, and that’s where we are quite likely to end up, necessity notwithstanding.

Fair enough. I don’t disagree with that as such, but Vermeule’s point in the blog is that the typical remedy–making recourse to the cultivation of virtue–is insufficient precisely because of the structural propensity of modern liberalism. My argument, though, isn’t just a recourse to virtue but rather is interested first in encouraging the development of institutions and associations that can work to do two, interrelated things: (1) help reshape the political order to help Christians (and others) live according to conscience; and (2) help Christians figure out how to live (and act politically and culturally) in relation to the broader culture.

The point is that if liberalism is not necessarily committed in some teleological way to making us all into autonomous individualists–and I think it’s not–Christians do better to find ways–institutional ways–to “encourage” liberal orders to recognize its own limits. My chief worry with the integralist strategy, at least as an intellectual project (which is all it really is at this point), is that it makes liberalism into an all-or-nothing project for both Christians and liberals.

(There’s a whole other set of theological considerations but that’s perhaps for another day).

Marilynne Robinson at Wheaton

The marvelous novelist Marilynne Robinson gave the plenary address last night here at Wheaton College as part of our annual theology conference, this year dedicated to engaging the theological themes in her writings. I have very much enjoyed her novels (Gileadseems an obvious cut above the rest) but have also thought her essays less impressive—and so I was interested to hear what she might offer up to our relatively conservative community that, almost universally, seems to adore her work.

In one sense, what she offered up was quite unremarkable, at least insofar as it was pretty much what you would expect a liberal Protestant to say if she wanted to say something about our current religio-political moment. White evangelicals are hypocrites. Christians should be more concerned with social welfare. And so on. I guess it’s a bit remarkable that she didn’t, it seems, do much to soften her critiques even when talking to people at which they were largely aimed. (Though to be clear, at least in the college itself, there is more than a bit of lamenting at those evangelicals whose enthusiasm for the president has, to put it mildly, outrun their good judgment. And to be just as clear, there’s plenty in white evangelicalism to criticize.)

But there were a couple of curious disjunctions in the talk that are probably worth noting. The first was her repeated (if often only implicit) critique of evangelicalism for its willingness to claim that it has a handle on Christian orthodoxy as over against others (probably in her mind, most pointedly liberal Protestantism). Again, this is not a new critique, and she quite rightly suggested that we should maintain some humility when it comes to claiming to know exactly what God is up to in our day. She pointed out how we are too driven by “fear” and that fear can cause us to draw hard lines between us and “them” without a recognition that the “them” are beloved of God and could be, maybe soon, one of his most faithful followers. She offered us a good reminder that rather than treating those who stand outside the faith as enemies or hostiles, we might think of them as at least potential brothers and sisters in the faith. (She at times seemed to flirt with a kind of Barthian universalism or maybe a Rahner-ian “anonymous Christian” view but didn’t really land there). But she paired that with repeated admonitions about how certain sorts of public policy choices—making reference to mental health care, gun control, and the criminal justice system—were clearly and obviously un-Christian. Now, maybe there’s a distinction to be made between the (incorrect) claim that one knows what the faith is (and isn’t) and the (correct) claim that one knows what the faith demands politically (and what it doesn’t). But given that Robinson seems quite given to the idea that the “faith” inherently includes some sort of social commitment (read: social justice), I don’t know that it’s much of a distinction at all, and to wag one’s finger while doing pretty much the same thing is a bit incongruous.

I should note here that I don’t mean to say that she shouldn’t attempt to draw distinctions. I quite agree that there are policy choices that Christians shouldn’t endorse. Back in the early 20^thcentury, it was an excommunicable offense for Catholics in Germany to join fascist movements. (The Church lifted that ban as part of its unfortunate Concordat with the Nazi regime in 1933, alas). I’m a bit more politically latitudinarian on this than the Catholic Church (meaning that I don’t think that having immoral political views means you are outside the salvation of Christ), but it seems perfectly reasonable for Christians to call out their fellow self-identified Christians when they act politically in ways that are sinful. But I also think this is perfectly appropriate when it comes to the Church proper. We can certainly endorse the notion that our understanding of God and His purposes is always to some degree uncertain without then embracing a radical non-judgmentalism as to what counts as properly Christian. Everyone does it; indeed, it’s hard to imagine having any sort of community without doing some line-drawing. That we should be reluctant to draw those lines too quickly or too brightly or without a good bit of allowance seems right, but Robinson seemed unhappy with line-drawing at all, at least the sort she didn’t like.

That points to the more interesting disjunction. (Liberal Protestants complaining about evangelical line-drawing is hardly new, just as is their penchant for doing their own line-drawing at the same time.) The first half of her talk was an extended defense of the idea of conscience and the ways in which that was an important spur for the Reformation. But in the second half, she trotted out what feels like now a kind of almost pro forma critique of individualism (though there were some interesting intimations from her that suggested a kind of defense of individualism). What struck me, though, was how the two sides of the critique don’t fit together. Conscience is important but when you cite Emerson, as she did, you are almost inevitably headed toward the sort of disconnected, romantic individualism that she (rightly, in my view) finds so troublesome. Here, the Catholic tradition seems helpful, for it talks (so far as I understand it) in terms of rightly orderedconscience, not just conscience per se. Our contemporary cult of authenticity contains within it a view of conscience that merely demands a kind of coherence to your views. In practice everyone imposes limits (that is, draws lines on what counts as properconscience) but the impulse is toward a solipsistic conscience, not a rightly formed one. What’s lacking here—and this is a problem in both liberal and conservative Protestantism alike—is a sense of rightful authority, things to which we owe obedience even when, maybe especially when, we do not find it easy to consent. I don’t know that I have an especially good answer to this dilemma—I’m just as American in that sense as the next—but it does seem to me an enduring dilemma, one that even as astute a person as Marilynne Robinson seems flummoxed by.

 

Why I am #NotHillary and #NeverTrump and will not vote for either of the two main candidates for president this year.

I’ve had a few folks ask me what I have been thinking in this election year and so I thought I would sketch out my thoughts on the matter and especially on why I can’t in good conscience vote either for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. And trust me, it’s worth every penny you’ve paid for it.

With regard to Clinton, my reasoning is pretty straightforward. I’m not inclined toward many of her policy choices, but my sense is that she will be a fairly ordinary, and ordinarily bad, president after she is sworn in this coming January. (Yes, I think she will win, and win relatively easily). But I can’t vote for her because she is firmly, persistently, and even enthusiastically in favor of protecting and even expanding abortion rights in our country (and overseas). She cannot even manage her husband’s “safe, legal, and rare” mantra. My judgment is that abortion (save for life-saving efforts) is an intrinsic evil and that I cannot vote for someone who thinks as she does.

Of course, lots of people describe themselves as pro-life but think that holding to my position is a mistake. They typically advance two different arguments. In the first, they suggest being this sort of “single-issue” voter goes too far, ignoring all the other reasons one might (or might not) vote for a particular candidate. In one sense, this is correct. If all you do is vote on the basis of a single issue, then, yes, it’s quite likely you’ll fall into moral and political error at some point. But everyone, I would submit, has a single issue, or even a cluster of issues, that serve as a kind of moral floor beneath which they will not go. Ask yourself: would you vote for a segregationist? No? Welcome to the ranks of the single-issue voter.

In the second, though, they suggest refusing to vote for pro-choice candidates misses the ways in which other policies—support for mothers, parental leave, etc.—might work to reduce the abortion rate and, after all, aren’t we really in the end looking to reduce the numbers of abortions? Yes, that’s the goal, but in the context of a changed political order that is at least reasonably just. It is not enough, I think, to simply reduce the numbers of abortions—even halve them—while all the more securely protecting the rest via law. Suppose that Clinton’s package of proposals would reduce abortions in the U.S. down to half, roughly 300,000 or so a year. Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Yes, it would, but what then, given that her package of proposals also includes public funding for abortions, rolling back the relatively small number of limits now on abortion rights (including lifting federal restrictions on partial-birth abortions), and expanding funding for abortions (and abortion rights) overseas? On even the most optimistic view (and I’m pretty skeptical of this optimistic view), we might have fewer abortions, but those that occurred—and 300,000 a year is a lot!—would be even more well-protected by law in the U.S. (and elsewhere). And since the real goal is rid ourselves of the elective abortion scourge entirely, we might very well actually be further from that goal, politically speaking, than we are now. Much of Europe is better than the U.S. in one sense on this issue, as they typically restrict abortion to rather early in pregnancy. But in another sense they are worse off: there are, as I understand it, almost no serious political movements trying to end abortion and the prospects for further restricting it are quite dim. (It’s probably worth noting that Europe also belies the idea that very generous welfare states would work to make abortion “unthinkable.”) Our goal should be a constitutional order that reflects what we claim about inherent human dignity, and a vote for pro-choice candidates is not a move in that direction. And so I shall not vote for Hillary Clinton (or Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, who both are also pro-choice).

Ostensibly, of course, Donald Trump claims to be a convert to the pro-life cause, but he’s so incompetent in talking about the issue and is so untrustworthy in general that we should have, to put the matter charitably, no expectation that, even if elected, he would follow through on his campaign promises. But even if he were genuinely pro-life, I would not vote for him.

First, his policy proposals are just short of awful. He, like Clinton, makes noises about opposing free trade. (She hedges better and there’s good reason to suppose that she’s dissembling, which, ironically, is probably a good thing). He is hostile to the First Amendment (which, in a way, she is as well). He is emblematic of crony capitalism and seems likely to institutionalize it further, rather than trimming it back. He is hostile to immigrants (not just immigration, legal or illegal). He seems unwilling to confront our enemies and strategic challengers in a way that is likely to produce more conflict, not less. He is, in a word, just the sort of big-government “centrist” we don’t need. (And that all assumes that he actually does have any policy commitments – it seems just as likely that he’s making stuff up as he goes along and would continue to do so in office, presuming his advisors could get him to work at all).

But his awful policies on their own wouldn’t be enough, probably, to say that I categorically wouldn’t vote for him. (Though his opponent would have to be really, really, really bad, Hugo Chavez sort of bad).  What really seals the deal for me is that his character makes him distinctively unfit for the office of the president. Any politician’s character matters (just as everyone’s character does), but it matters especially for those who occupy an executive office. Presidents make all sorts of promises and have all sorts of goals, but they are often defined by their reactions to events imposed upon them. President Bush campaigned promising a “modest” foreign policy and 9/11 changed all of that. Jimmy Carter did not expect to deal with the Iranian Revolution (and the ensuing hostage crisis). And so on. Ask yourself how you think Donald Trump would react to a China throwing its weight around in the South China Sea? Or to a major terrorist attack in the U.S.? Moreover, the presidency has great latitude to implement/shape policy in some ways independent of Congress, as presidents have increasingly discovered. Inasmuch as you might be disturbed with the scope of President Obama’s executive orders or administrative decisions, imagine a President Trump with the same kind of leeway. I don’t think there is any reason to trust him with that sort of power.

Finally, and this is really an extension of the previous point, it is no accident that Trump’s candidacy has worked to redefine normalcy down. He is cultural and moral poison, inducing otherwise sane people to defend his vulgar admissions of sexual assault as mere “locker room” talk and making open proclamations of racial, ethnic, and religious bigotry once again acceptable as part of our public discourse. These things had not, of course, ever gone away, and it was always possible to find them muttered sotto voce by clever politicos (or less guardedly in some of our country’s byways) but even the patina of hypocrisy was an example of vice paying tribute to virtue. We all knew—or all pretended—that we shouldn’t talk that way. It was unseemly and would bring about the end of one’s political or business career. What Trump’s candidacy has done is, to mangle his own phrase, to make open bigotry great again—and he is not at all concerned about that. Consider: have you ever heard him really worry about or condemn the sorts of racist or racialist or sexist or anti-Semitic rhetoric some of his supporters use?

Trump is, by almost all accounts, a deeply immoral man who resembles more the tyrant of Plato’s Republic than anything else. (Except that Trump isn’t, thank God, nearly so competent). No one who wishes our country well (and that would not include the current KGB Tsar in Russia) should think he should be president. And so I shall not vote for Donald Trump.

Am I, then, “wasting” my vote if I vote for some third party or, as I plan to do, vote for a write-in candidate (e.g. Evan McMullin)? Well, consider what you’re doing when you are voting. Are you effecting a particular outcome, e.g. the election of a candidate to office? Consider scenario A, where you vote for one of the candidates and then Scenario B, where you don’t vote for either. Is there any difference in the outcome between the two Scenarios? The answer is almost certainly, as in one-in-six million (or however many voters you have in your state), no. Your vote matters only in an infinitesimally small way—and, really, not at all, at least as far as the outcome is concerned.

But your vote does matter for you, in the sense that it matters to who you are and who you are hoping to become. When you vote, you are expressing a view that this person (or party) would do better at moving your country (or state or town or whatever) toward what you take to be a just (or more just) state of affairs. You are, then, expressing something about yourself. What are you saying about yourself if you say, as any number of GOP voters seem to be saying, that you think Trump is a terrible person, not worthy of the office of the president, and yet a good choice to be president? You might frame your choice as a vote against Clinton (and perhaps it is that) but it is also, inherently, a vote for Trump. (The logic works for the converse as well). Is that who you want to be, someone divided against yourself?

It seems to me that one of the things we should try to do in this messy world is to live, so far as we can, an integrated moral life, one where our actions reflect a coherent set of moral commitments, including a commitment to the sort of social and political order we would like to inhabit. That’s certainly not always possible and we may indeed sometimes be faced with genuinely tragic choices, but that’s just not the case with our vote in this presidential election. We need not sully our consciences in the vain expectation that we are somehow effecting the “least bad” outcome—we have next to nothing to do with electoral outcomes as individuals. We have a great deal to do with who we eventually become. (It’s worth noting that the smaller the group of electors, the more likely it is we might be forced into tragic moral trade-offs, but the numbers for a presidential election make that possibility vanishingly small. But note further that the title of the post refers to #NeverTrump and #NotHillary—I will vote for neither, but my dislike of each is not equivalent. She is ordinarily bad while he is extraordinary in his bad-ness).

Finally, some might ask (and people do), what if everyone did as I suggested, and voted 3^rd party/write-in or simply didn’t vote at all? How would our democracy work? That’s an interesting thought experiment, but it’s the wrong question. The right question is, what would happen if people genuinely voted their conscience and looked to affirm who they thought would make the better office-holder and not just who would beat some despised opponent? Would we have ended up with the two most unliked candidates in memory? I suspect not.

So vote your conscience, keep your soul, and things might even turn out better than the alternative.

 

Thinking About the Christian Intellectual

I’ve been thinking a bit about Alan Jacobs’ piece over at Harper’s on the absence of the Christian intellectual as part of our society’s public discourse. (I haven’t, I should say, followed all too closely the various responses already up, except to see the all-but-inevitable “hey, what about me?” sorts of posts. For those of you in the academy, you knew that was coming, right?) What I liked especially about Alan’s essay was its refusal to assign any kind of easy “blame” for the fact–and I think it is indeed a fact–that Christian thinkers working from explicitly theological frames don’t get much of a hearing in public these days. Too many of our secular friends just don’t have an ear for theological language (or are ideologically committed to not having an ear) and too many Christians don’t know how to tune their voices (and, frankly, too many of them aren’t willing to do the hard, slogging work to actually be able to do serious intellectual work). But two things struck me in reading that I think are worth bringing out.

First, I think there’s a piece of the essay that hasn’t gotten enough notice and that’s the question of what it actually means to *be* an intellectual today as opposed to, say, the 1940s and 1950s. Jacobs suggests that each of the intellectuals he’s interested in had a posture of interpretation that grounded their most important works–they were public intellectuals in that they were bringing their  scholarly, philosophical, theological, and moral sensibilities to bear on understanding and interpreting the world around them so as to illuminate that world for their reading publics. Niebuhr, whatever else he was doing, wanted people to understand that the happy-clappy utopianism of the early 20th century was a mirage and that you had to be tough-minded if you wanted to do good in your politics. I’m not so sure that’s how *our* public intellectuals see themselves or the world. They seem (to me, at least) to think of themselves much more in line with the 19th/20th century Russian intelligentsia who had bought into Marx’s dictum that the point of philosophy (and, presumably, any kind of intellectual work) was to “change” the world, not just understand it. Jacobs gestures at this with his discussions of “technique.” To be an intellectual in our day means mastering some set of rhetorical or disciplinary “techniques” that can then be applied more widely in the service of “social change” or “justice” or whatever the term is these days.

Perhaps I’m wrong about this and our sense of the intellectual hasn’t changed, but it does strike me that we are in the midst of a revival of the idea that we can indeed grasp the levers of history and achieve, in a way that our early 20th century forbears failed to do, fully just, fully prosperous social order. If only the peasants would get with the program. So when Alan asks why aren’t there any Christian intellectuals anymore, I think part of the answer has to be that we lack his sense of intellectuals altogether–or, at least, that’s true as a *public* matter.

The second thing that struck me was more a question of institutions. He notes that many of these public intellectuals had communities within which they developed, tested, and refined their public ideas–and then places within which they could communicate them to a wide audience. Both seem more difficult today. On the latter side, our public discourse is much more obviously differentiated in any number of ways and it’s impossible to imagine what would stand in for a Time Magazine cover these days. But on the former, it’s also more difficult and it’s especially more difficult to have differentiated sorts of conversations.

Here’s what I mean. I host a Christian political thought workshop every summer here at Wheaton–anyone who is a Christian who is doing “political thought” (which I define rather capaciously) is welcome to come and have their working papers gone over by other Christians. The idea was to create a space within which we could have the sorts of philosophical and theological discussions that are hard to do together in the modern academy. We can talk in ways that just don’t fit in an R-1 research university seminar. But I wonder how available those spaces are to many people, and especially spaces where others, who don’t share some basic presuppositions, aren’t listening in? If Christians (or anyone else) is always looking over their shoulders, wondering how *everyone* might react to their half-baked ideas, it’s hard to see how they’ll develop well as intellectuals (Christian or otherwise). The digital world is remarkable, among other things, for its ability to connect us quickly across vast distances, but it also makes it possible for our ideas (half-baked and otherwise) to travel just as quickly, sometimes when they’re not exactly ready. Perhaps this is what Alan was pointing to in his references to “subaltern counterpublics” and I wonder if those are becoming less and less available?

Same-Sex Marriage, Religious Liberty, and the Democratic Moment

 

Now that the Supreme Court has ratified Same-Sex Marriage (SSM) as a “fundamental right” in Obergefell v Hodges, it looks as if we will finally get to how religious liberties will fare. For the past 10-15 years, scholars and pundits have variously warned about or celebrated the idea that broad changes in how the law thinks about sexual orientation would impinge on individuals’ and institutions’ exercise of their religious beliefs. (See this edited volume as one example) Here (as much for my own benefit as anyone else’s) I thought would sketch out what I take to be the most significant possible challenges religious communities and individuals will face in the coming years, at least as things stand right now, what would we (traditionalist religious believers) might do in response. To give away the conclusion, I think these challenges can genuinely be met, but only if we take seriously our own obligations as citizens in a democratic republic to vindicate and protect our own liberties not merely through litigation and court decisions but more importantly through popular deliberation and legislative action. In other words, if we are to find ways to give religious liberty its due, it will be up to us as citizens and the men and women who represent us in our legislative bodies to make it happen. The advent of SSM offers us a democratic moment—will we take it?

The first thing to note is that SSM in and of itself will not likely present any direct challenges to religious liberty. Instead, because it embodies and represents a deep and pervasive change in how we think about sexuality, families, and the like, it really just accelerates the growing sense within our society that broadly popular anti-discrimination norms should be extended to include sexual orientation (and, I think, gender identity). The challenge of SSM is really the challenge of non-discrimination.

It’s worth pausing for a moment, then, to think about why we value anti-discrimination norms—and why we sometimes don’t. It’s not uncommon to hear or read people suggest that we shouldn’t abide any sort of discrimination, but a moment’s reflection shows that to be obviously untrue. No one (or almost no one, I’d guess) really minds that Harvard prefers smart high school students to dumb ones and thus discriminates. Similarly, it would be an odd thing if you couldn’t “discriminate” in your choice of a spouse or roommate. Or if the NBA didn’t prefer people who could jump over people (like me) who can’t. But we would find it objectionable (and legally actionable) if Harvard refused to admit Latinos or the NBA discriminated against Lutherans. We’d even find it morally bothersome if someone was committed to only marrying or rooming with someone of a particular race, though it’s unlikely we’d make it a legal issue (though there were some interesting legal cases with regard to the latter that show its complications). What accounts for the difference in our moral and political judgments?

The difference lies in our judgment that, first, there are some aspects of our selves, the ways in which we identify and are identified, that should not shape how we treat others or are treated—they are “morally irrelevant,” we might say. Imagine someone made employment decisions in a bank based on the length of the applicants’ nose – just silly, right? More importantly to this discussion, we also have made the judgment that access to certain goods—employment, education, health care, legal judgments, etc.—are so central to living even a reasonably good life (in our society, at least) that their availability should not be conditioned by these “morally irrelevant” characteristics. If you fail to study hard or just don’t have the native intelligence to do really well in school, then Harvard is not wronging you by not admitting you. If Harvard denies your application because of your skin color or ethnicity or place of birth, then it has indeed wronged you. Sometimes, we might acknowledge that you’ve been wronged—it seems right to say that you’ve been morally wronged if someone refuses to be your friend or be romantically interested on account of those sorts of characteristics—but not make it a matter of political judgment because to do so would extend the state’s reach beyond its proper scope. (Imagine a Federal Friendship Law). When Congress enacted the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a way of breaking racial segregation, it represented a dramatic expansion of federal political authority precisely on the theory that black citizens’ lives were being systematically devalued and made difficult solely on account of their race—and that the only way to change that was to prohibit (and penalize) racial discrimination across a wide range of “public accommodations.” Over time, Congress added other categories—sex, age, marital status, etc.—with the view that these, too, should not impinge on our access to those fundamental goods necessary to living well in modern America.

The true challenge that SSM represents for religious liberties, then, is that it offers a shot in the arm to efforts to extend those anti-discrimination norms to include sexual orientation and gender identity. (The latter isn’t necessarily required by SSM, but it seems to follow along nonetheless). And so the question becomes whether in extending those norms, we should continue or even expand the range of exceptions we offer to religious believers and institutions or, conversely, whether we should narrow or eliminate them. Currently, most religious institutions (at least the non-profit ones) get more or less a pass on most anti-discrimination statutes, and it’s easy to see why. It would be strange thing indeed if a church or mosque could not require a minister to be of its own faith. So the Catholic Church can freely discriminate not just against non-Catholics in its selection of priests, but also against women.

The partial exception to this broad set of exemptions is race, and it is here, in particular the Supreme Court decision in Bob Jones v United States, where we can see highlighted where religious liberty and expanded non-discrimination norms could come into conflict. Bob Jones University was (and is) a fundamentalist Christian college that used to (though no longer does) discriminate on the basis of race. The IRS decided that this meant it could no longer claim a tax exemption and the Supreme Court agreed in 1974 that the public interest in eradicating racial discrimination meant that the university’s religious liberty had to give way. The idea is not that you couldn’t have a racially discriminatory church or college or whatever, but, rather, that the state could decline to “subsidize” such an institution with tax-exempt status, even if such a decision meant that the state was picking some religious entities out for disfavor (thus rubbing up against the well-established principle that the liberal state cannot support some religious communities over against others). (I tend to think the notion that tax-exempt status is a “subsidy” represents a poor understanding of the proper relationship between the state and civil society institutions, but my views, for some reason, have not won Supreme Court approval yet). The general principle is that while religious liberty is important, in this particular case, it’s more important that the state work to eradicate racial discrimination.

For some, since moral opposition to homosexual practice is on a par with racial discrimination, religious groups that don’t get on board with the new dispensation should likewise lose their tax-exempt status. We should not, I think, discount this possibility, especially with respect to states or local municipalities where religious liberty protections might be weaker than they are on the federal level. But before giving into full-fledged panic, it’s worth noting a few things here. First, so far as I know, no court has, in fact, extended the logic of the Bob Jones case in such a way as to take it beyond race. No religious institution has lost its tax-exempt status because, for example, it only allows one sex to participate or hold some sort of office. Second, since Bob Jones is a university, it doesn’t quite fit into the same category as churches proper (which should probably be a relief to churches, but not mean very much to schools, non-profits, etc.) And, finally, the Bob Jones case was at the tail end of a long series of legal and political efforts to combat a much more pervasive set of discriminatory institutions, something that is obviously much less true with regard to sexual orientation. So though it is clearly the case that if you think that moral opposition to homosexual practice is on a par with racial discrimination, you probably should be in favor of extending the Bob Jones case to all sorts of other situations, it seems to me that the political and material conditions make such a move not immediately in the offing.

Much more likely, at least in the short- to medium-term, are any number of smaller, more localized efforts to ostracize religious communities who hold to orthodox sexual views. We will likely see, for instance, efforts to exclude those communities’ access to public venues and certainly public monies, the latter through grant and contract rules requiring adherence to non-discrimination norms. Plenty of communities went out of their way to disadvantage the Boy Scouts over their (now ended) ban on gay scoutmasters and President Obama looks to issue an executive order prohibiting those who hold to traditional religious views from competing for government contracts. We may also see efforts, already in motion to some degree, to use licensing and other forms of credentialing procedures to weed out those who don’t affirm the new dispensation. Gordon College had its accreditation threatened last year over the issue, and it seems plausible (likely, even) that other credentialing bodies will try and flex their muscle in the near future as well.

Finally, and much more nebulously, it seems likely that we will see an invigorated move to make traditional views outside the bounds of “polite society” (as if our society is anything like “polite”). All one needs to do is to think about the overheated response to Indiana’s proposed state-level RFRA (especially in a context where state anti-discrimination laws did not over sexual orientation) to recognize that there are powerful cultural movements dedicated to making the traditional view of sexuality as socially noxious as explicit displays of racism.

So what to do?

Well, we could just try and withdraw from the surrounding culture a la the Amish, but that seems unlikely to succeed in any sense, even if it were an attractive option. We live within a regulatory state that claims a wide expanse of interests, ones that do not stop at the threshold to our homes, churches, or anywhere else. Though the Supreme Court found that churches do have a broad “ministerial” exemption with regard to anti-discrimination norms Hosanna-Tabor v EEOC, it is telling that the Obama administration argued (unreasonably, in my view) that no such exemption was required by the First Amendment, suggesting instead that churches and other religious institutions should be required to defend discriminatory practices in court as intrinsic to their religious mission. Few share that expansive view, but it seems reasonable to think that, unless trends change, regulatory efforts that fall just short of that will be on the table in the relatively near future. (It’s worth noting in this context that though the court was unanimous in affirming the “ministerial exemption,” there was significant disagreement about how far the exemption should extend within religious organizations. The state will not be able to tell churches how they choose their ministers, but with regard to their teachers, support staff, and the rest, we can’t be sure). Religious liberties thrive not just in a culture where the law is right, but where popular sentiment believes in its principles as well. When the state can (and does) reach most everywhere, it will do no good to simply try to build high walls around our institutions and hope we won’t be bothered.

A better answer starts in noting that in all the various challenges I sketched out above where the initiative lay–in the political, that is the legislative and executive, branches of government. Though the Supreme Court affirmed SSM as a “fundamental liberty,” the Court is, I think, highly unlikely to demand on its own that churches and other religious organizations change their views accordingly. Rather, if we get threatened with a loss of tax exemptions or what-not, it will be on account of cities, states, and the like deciding to take action. The Court didn’t on its down decide that Bob Jones shouldn’t have a tax exemption; it just ratified the IRS’s decision as constitutional. When the California State system decided to suspend InterVarsity Christian Fellowship it did so because it made a judgment about the relative importance of non-discrimination and religious liberty – and it reversed its decision when pressed on the merits. If and when cities or states think about yanking churches’ and schools’ tax exemptions, or when credentialing bodies suggest you can’t become a licensed counselor without pledging to the new faith, it will be people in political office who make those decisions—real, live, people who can be reasoned with or even replaced through electoral efforts.

And this is why I think the conflict between religious liberty and SSM offers us what we might term “a democratic moment.” The most significant debates are not to be held, at least at first, in the courts, but in legislatures and regulatory and licensing bodies. We are conditioned to think that our most significant debates happen in front of judges—and courts do matter, of course—but that’s just not true in this case. Courts will not decide these outcomes. They may ratify (or overturn) them, but the first move belongs to us as citizens engaged in moral and political deliberation. So when a city or state begins to deliberate about whether traditionalist religious colleges and non-profits should continue to receive tax-exempt status, our first impulse should not be to ask about how this fits with this or that legal doctrine or whether the courts will affirm or deny. It should be to engage in serious, thoughtful, and passionate deliberation with our fellow citizens, making the case that we have good reasons for organizing as we do and that they have good reasons for respecting that. In other words, we should act as citizens, not subjects, and validate our liberties in politics, not just beg courts to do it for us.

Christians (and others who think religious liberty shouldn’t always lose) should recognize that while we might lose (and will lose in some places), those losses are not inevitable, nor are they simply issues of legal and constitutional doctrine. These are moral and political matters that citizens in a democratic republic have a responsibility, the privilege really, of deliberating about and deciding. It would be a shame if we didn’t recognize that.

Why Toleration Is Never Enough and Why Moral Conservatives and Free Speech Liberals Will Keep on Losing

Two groups have, of late, found themselves more than a bit on the defensive, and seem befuddled about why. Moral conservatives, those increasingly rare birds who think that not only is there some objective set of moral standards but also, generally, that those standards should be publicly recognized, have been shocked (not as in “shocked, shocked!”) that lots of folks want to follow through on the premises of the sexual revolution and reorder how we think about marriage—and that, as with most social revolutions, if you don’t get on board, you’ll find yourself the object of social, economic, and political ostracism. Free-speech liberals, on the other hand, increasingly find themselves besieged as the places they once thought citadels of free expression—our colleges and universities—sometimes seem to care more about psychological safety and comfort than the rough and tumble of opposing ideas.

What gives? Why can’t we just come to reasonable disagreement about the many matters that, in fact, divide us and figure out how to tolerate those differences? Why can’t same-sex supporters just leave the marriage traditionalists alone? What’s so terrible about having someone on campus who thinks things you find terrible? Whatever happened to principled toleration, both ask?

And herein lies the change that underlies, I think, the dilemmas for both the moral conservative and free-speech liberal: toleration is, in the minds of many, no longer enough, if it ever was.   For the last few decades have witnessed a sea-change in the way a broad swathe of scholars and intellectuals think about the social and political response to moral pluralism. Traditionally—at least for the past few hundred years—the standard response to pluralism has been toleration, by which we generally mean being willing to put up with something we find morally noxious on account of some other, more important, good. Locke, in his Letter on Toleration (1689), argues for toleration among (most) Protestant churches because it helps secure civic concord and best respects the nature and limits of government. (Those aren’t his only arguments, but I’ll return to this below). This eventually gets expanded to include all Christian groups, and then others until you get to what I take to be the apotheosis of liberal toleration, John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle.” On Mill’s view, society and government (and it matters that he includes both) can only coerce or even severely criticize individuals to prevent “harm” to others. The Supreme Court, which has largely written Mill’s principles into its First Amendment speech jurisprudence, draws the circle of what counts as publicly actionable harm pretty narrowly: incitement to violence, libel, etc. It has been a principle of American public life—certainly not observed consistently in practice—that the proper response to moral disagreement is to allow others their views, though within certain limits and with the caveat that toleration does not imply an abstention from offering serious, even polemical, critiques.

We might ask, though, why Locke found it necessary to include in his Letter the various religious arguments for toleration? He starts the letter off suggesting that the “chief characteristickal mark” of the church is toleration. (A mistake both theologically and sociologically, it seems to me). Everyone I’ve ever read on this makes these sorts of claims at least somewhat instrumental—most everyone reading his writing would be Christian, and you should always appeal to your audience—or as a reflection of his own, fairly latitudinarian Christian views. Perhaps that’s correct, but what I also think is true is that toleration as an abstract claim about letting people be only has real moral and political teeth provided that you have some good positive reason to tolerate. Or, to use the language I offered above, provided that when you tolerate some noxious practice or belief, you are always, inevitably tolerating with an eye toward some other good you interested in securing. When you tolerate your irascible relative at family gatherings, you do so because the good of familial peace is worth tolerating for. Locke’s argument for toleration works, insofar as it does, precisely because the goods it secures are worth putting up with your religiously wrong neighbors.

So what does this have to do with the ostracism of moral conservatives and the retreat of free-speech liberals? In relatively recent debates over toleration, there has developed a view that says toleration is simply not enough. In tolerating others, we implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) communicate that what they do or believe is, in our view, morally disreputable. That can have serious effects, of course, on the tolerated’s sense of self-worth and ability to live her life as she sees fit. Instead of toleration, the argument goes, we should instead offer one another mutual respect or positive regard or, and this is the key move, recognition. We need not morally endorse others’ lives full stop, but we should go beyond a grudging indifference to something like a decently warm encouragement. And the reason, broadly speaking, we must do so is because the goods we thought we could secure via toleration are not enough. They still leave those being tolerated the object of social opprobrium and thus at some real disadvantage—or worse.

Hence, it is not enough for gays and lesbians to achieve a rough degree of legal and political equality. Nor is it enough for tender college students to hear criticisms that go to the heart of their own sense of identity. Unless their moral lives are, in some real way, recognized and affirmed not only by public (or university) authorities and unless their fellow citizens (or students or speakers) can be counted on to do the same, real, substantive equality will remain elusive.

But this makes for the obvious question: if recognition, not toleration, is the rule of the day, why can’t moral conservatives or others with unpopular views make similarly structured claims? Well, in my view, they should be able to and the fact that they can’t helps reveal an incoherence at the heart of the recognition claim. Given a certain range of moral and religious pluralism, it is principally and practically impossible to extend recognition to all or even most, especially once recognition extends into our everyday social lives. Recognition is, or at least can be, a zero-sum game. And so what is lurking behind the purported argument for recognition—and toleration, for that matter—is a set of moral judgments about what lives are in fact worth recognizing or tolerating, and here is where the misunderstandings of moral conservatives and free-speech liberals will continue to lead to loss after loss. It is not enough to merely beg for toleration on the grounds of tradition or conscience or some-such. Nor is it enough to suggest, as Mill did, that it is worth our while to hear scandalous or provocative views. For when our latter day inquisitors deny the requests for recognition or toleration, the reason is that the moral and psychological harms they suppose themselves to be receiving stem from what they view as morally problematic views of the world. It is the sheer existence (or at least their own awareness) of these terrible people and their ideas that seem to function as a standing rebuke to their own moral self-conceptions—and thus those terrible others must be marginalized and even run out of impolite company.

The implication here is obvious, if not altogether comforting: if moral conservatives and free-speech liberals are to find success, even if that just means being let be, they will have to do more than just make ever louder claims in favor of toleration. They will need to do the more laborious, painstaking work of making the case that the lives or practices they hold dear have real positive value to them, to convince our morally skeptical neighbors that a life lived in obedience to some great good (or even God!) is one worth living, that hearing and engaging claims that challenge, even hurt, your sense of yourself is of very great benefit. I confess that I have no great confidence that success can be found in such an enterprise, but I think it really is our only option.

Is Islam “the cause” of Islamic terror?

Take a look at this crackerjack bit of reporting on the Islamic State.  (Ignore the requisite use of “medieval” – I think he merely means the time of Islam’s founding, though I wonder if Islamic historians use the same terminology).

The article’s virtue is that it takes seriously the question of whether Islam the cause of the Islamic State.  More generally, we can (and should) as whether self-described Islamic terrorists, such as those who attacked the Charlie Hebdo paper offices or perpetrated the 9/11 attacks?  (Note: the “self-described” here relates to the “Islamic,” not the “terrorist” label).  As stated, it’s almost certainly true and also almost certainly false.  It’s almost certainly true in that, as a description of the terrorists’ subjective self-understanding, Islam is understood as motivating their actions.  They say they are acting out of a particular understanding of the demands of Islam and so in that sense, yes, Islam causes Islamic terrorism.  But it’s also almost certainly not true as well in that Islam is not the cause of Islamic terrorism in that there are plenty of social, economic, political and other factors that impinge on an individual’s actions.  And herein lies the trouble in figuring out the degree to which “Islam” causes people to commit these horrific acts of violence.

 You’d think that social science—which is all about trying to figure out what causes various social and political phenomena—would pretty good at helping us figure this out.  And scholars have done lots of research trying to understand why some people commit terrorist acts (and, implicitly, why others don’t).  The trouble is that our social sciences have a hard time thinking about ideas as having causal power and so they tend to discount ideas as significant.  Here’s why.

 First, ideas themselves are just that—concepts, arguments, etc. floating about in speech—until they attach to particular persons or institutions that can put them into play and thereby make things happen.  But just as soon as they get attached in that way, teasing out their causal effects gets confounded by the fact that the actor—whether individual or institutional—has a history, a class location, a sex, a race, etc.  That is, the actor is a material creature with material interests, demographic factors, and a history that can also do work to explain all of our actions.   Consider Samuel Huntington’s Third Wave that explains the great wave of democratization in the latter third of the 20^th century in part through reference to the Catholic Church’s change of heart with respect to liberal democratic rights at Vatican II.  Anthony Gill in turn suggests that the Church did that because it was in their interests (at least in certain parts of South America).  These two explanations are not, strictly speaking, mutually exclusive but it’s a pretty vexed question how one might tease them apart (and decide which is more basic).

 Second, ideas are never just “ideas” or a single cohesive idea that gets put into play across a variety of contexts or situations.  We usually see instead that the “idea” is in fact a family of ideas, different conceptions that have a reasonably close resemblance but that certainly aren’t always the same thing, or at least the same thing in all the relevant respects.  So when we ask whether “Islam” caused a certain sort of action, it’s a pretty simple thing to point to places where people hold to that idea and don’t commit the action—and give an all too easy negative answer.  But that might be, of course, because what one person takes “Islam” (or any other set of ideas) to be is different than what another person takes that idea to be.

 The temptation, then, for the social scientist is to favor material explanations over the ideational.  Some do it for philosophical reasons (e.g. material causes just are more basic) and others for professional/methodological ones (e.g. you can count and measure material factors while ideational ones are frustratingly fuzzy).  But in either case it seems to me a mistake, since it suggests that we are merely material creatures, subject solely to material causes and in practice indifferent to moral (or immoral, as the case may be) suasion.

 So does Islam cause terrorism?  Well, sure, in the sense that we have any number of people who have committed terrorist acts motivated (they say) by what they take to be Islamic beliefs (however incoherent or poorly structured they may be).  But, no, in the sense that this is not the only thing going on—it’s probably not even the only ideational thing going on.  But it is striking that over thirteen years after the 9/11 attacks we’re still having these kinds of debates.  I wonder what that says about us?

David Gushee’s Changing Mind: Evangelicals and Sexual Ethics

On November 4th David Gushee published an op-ed in the Washington Post titled “I’m an evangelical minister. I now support the LGBT community–and the church should, too.” Here, Gushee makes his case for rejecting the traditional Christian teaching on homosexual conduct, framed in terms of the LGTB community as a sexual minority. He summarizes it thus:

For me, the answer to this debate has become simple: There is a sexual-minority population of about 5 percent of the human family that has received contempt and discrimination for centuries. In Christendom, the sexual ethics based in those biblical passages metastasized into a hardened attitude against sexual- and gender-identity minorities, bristling with bullying and violence. This contempt is in the name of God, the most powerful kind there is in the world. I now believe that the traditional interpretation of the most cited passages is questionable and that all that parsing of Greek verbs has distracted attention from the primary moral obligation taught by Jesus — to love our neighbors as ourselves, especially our most vulnerable neighbors. I also now believe that while any progress toward more humane treatment of LGBT people is good progress, we need to reconsider the entire body of biblical interpretation and tradition related to this issue.

Put simply, it finally became clear to me that I must side with those who were being treated with contempt, just as I hope I would have sided with Jews in the Nazi era and with African Americans during the civil rights years.

A caveat: I understand that this op-ed reflects thinking Gushee develops in more detail in his recent book Changing Our Mind (David Crumm Media, 2014) and in his series of 17 posts for Baptist News Global. I haven’t read the book and have only scratched the surface the BNG posts, so what follows here is focused on Gushee’s Washington Post piece. (For a critique engaging the broader project, see Matt Franck’s excellent piece for Canon & Culture.)

The Logic: As I make it out, the basic structure of Gushee’s argument goes like this:

• Christians are oppressing sexual minorities (based on contested scriptural interpretation);
• The Gospel requires standing with the oppressed;
• Christians should drop their ethical claims about sexual behavior as part of standing with the LGTBQ community.

Gushee’s logic here is worth noting. The last step–dropping traditional Christian claims about sexual ethics—rests on two rationales: 1) the fact of being oppressed; and 2) Gushee’s judgment that the clarity of scripture on this issue is “questionable.” In his Washington Post piece, the first of these claims bears the lion’s share of his argument; the second is merely mentioned in passing. I believe the first claim is flawed and the second to be unsubstantiated. We’ll consider each in turn.

What Gushee gets right: It’s helpful to recast Gushee’s language of “standing with” in terms of a biblical conception of love. The fact of being oppressed does indeed call for a loving Christian response to suffering. Gushee’s exhortation to treat those who identify as LGTBQ with love is thus well-taken: he describes a history of “contempt and discrimination” towards those who so identify and rightly treats “bullying and violence” as un-Christian. In addition to the compassion Gushee calls for, we might add that where Christians have sinned, love also requires repentance and confession. So far, so good. Moreover, Gushee wants to compassionately account for the suffering of those who identify as LGBTQ–an important aspect of showing love in a fallen world, and an issue that resonates with the experiences described by the likes of Wesley Hill.

Divine love: welcome with an agenda: Where Gushee’s argument gets into trouble lies with the implications of love for our ethics: Does the call to “love the oppressed” change the substance of Christian ethics? Many would say yes. Christians sometimes talk about God’s love as “unconditional” and there is a sense in which this is quite right. God does not wait for sinners to reform themselves before He reaches out to them. Instead, God is like the father in the story of the two brothers in Luke 15. He runs to meet the prodigal son–the one who knows he is helpless and cries out: “‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’” (v. 21, NIV). But thinking of God’s love as “unconditional” can easily distort the agenda that God’s love entails. When confronted by the Pharisees in Matthew 9 for the keeping company with tax collectors and sinners, Jesus replies in Matthew 9:12: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” (NIV) The implication is that those who mistakenly think they are healthy wrongly fail to call the doctor–just as in the Luke 15 story where the “good” brother is in danger because he does not know his need. Gushee frames the LGBTQ issue as “not primarily an issue of Christian sexual ethics” but rather “primarily an issue of human suffering.” Here, he seems to endorse the first aspect of divine love (the welcome) while avoiding the second (love’s agenda). But the need to take love’s welcome more seriously does not, ipso facto, abrogate any aspect (jot or tittle?) of love’s agenda.  Thus, while the fact of being oppressed does support the argument to love, it does not provide any support for changing the transformative content of that love. To push the point further, any time that we suggest that love is only welcome (and thus not also transformation)—a gospel of “I’m okay; you’re okay”—we encourage each other to think of ourselves like the older brother in Luke 15 who stays at home and who see no need to repent. To the extent that we reduce love to “welcome”, we accept that false claim that ethical disagreement is itself dehumanizing. Insofar as Gushee makes this reduction, he seems to go beyond opposing political oppression (dehumanization) to requiring a positive affirmation of a new sexual ethic.

Interpreting scripture: Given the above, the substantive merits of Gushee’s rationale for altering Christian sexual ethics must rest entirely on his account of scripture’s witness regarding sexual ethics—a matter that gets minimal treatment in Gushee’s op-ed (and thus also by me in this post). In it, Gushee describes “Our argument has centered on six or seven biblical passages that appear to mention homosexuality negatively or appear to establish a heterosexual norm: the sin of Sodom, the laws of Leviticus and the list of “the unrighteous” in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10.” He describes “endless debates over how to interpret that handful of biblical passages.” Gushee attempts to resolve this debate with the claim that, “I now believe that the traditional interpretation of the most cited passages is questionable.” If we should reject any apparent biblical teaching that has ever been subject to the sort of questioning Gushee describes with respect to sexual ethics, then no major teaching of scripture that has ever been questioned should be held securely, including, for instance, Christ’s divinity, the trinity, and the nature of justification. Put differently, this would mean that the existence of a question–such as the disagreements that required councils of the Church to iron out creedal commitments–should preclude accepting the Bible’s apparent meaning. I understand that Gushee has devoted significant attention to the scriptural and theological questions tied up in Christian sexual ethics and I look forward to reading and engaging his arguments. Suffice it to say, however, that more than being “questionable” should be required to reverse course on the Church’s long-held interpretations of the Bible.

Implications: Finally, we should recognize that more is at stake than just how to interpret a handful of passages on specific sexual acts. To make this claim suggests a case of serious theological myopia. Strongly implicated in questions of human sexuality and relationships are other matters of no small import to Christians: the doctrine of creation, especially as regards marriage and the family; the relation of God to his people as a bride (Hosea, Ephesians 5); the theology of Divine covenants, which are always made with familial implications; and the very model of relational plurality-in-unity: the Holy Trinity. I expect that Gushee knows all of this; indeed I believe he engages some of these issues in his more extensive arguments. But he would do better to resist casting LGTBQ  issues as a “love vs. questionable passages” dichotomy in which Christians should choose “love.” Of course we should choose love, but that love must be understood in theological context, in all of its rich fullness and breadth—to the extent that we can comprehend it.