Mirror of Justice

More trouble for church autonomy

This time from California.  Apparently, the California Supreme Court has ruled that two Riverside County girls may sue a Christian high school, under non-discrimination laws, that expelled them because the principal believed they were lesbians.

Coercion v. Expression

I should have been more precise in my earlier post about the flag-burning amendment, and Rick's skepticism underscores my lack of clarity.  I can envision a prudent role for the expressive function of the law in articulating, or even facilitating, the society's collective embrace of a certain symbol -- e.g., a law describing the official flag of the United States and recommending a certain course of treatment (disposal, folding, etc.) by citizens.  I would separate the expressive component from the coercive component.  If the law, understood as representing the coercive power of the state, mandated particular treatment of a class of objects (rather than a specific irreplaceable object, such as a flag sewn by Betsy Ross) solely because of the objects' symbolic value, I would object.

My question to Rick (and others): can you think of an example where state power could prudently be brought to bear to mandate certain treatment of a class of objects that are valuable solely because of their symbolism?  When it comes to symbols, shouldn't the state act like the Church: willing to propose, but not to impose?

Rob

Porn as knowledge??

Thank you Rob for bringing Steve Chapman's (Chicago Tribune) views on rape and pornography to our attention.  Chapman seems to suggest that porn equals knowledge and that this knowledge has contributed to a decrease in rape.  I'd be tempted to laugh at Chapman's conclusion if the stakes weren't so high.  I have no idea whether the growth in the porn market has any correlation, positive or negative, to the incidence of rape. 

The destructive effects of the porn industry, however, reach far and wide.  Dateline reports, for example, that an estimated 16 million people in the United States suffer from the devastating effects of sexual addiction. The Dateline article recounts the downward spiral of three sex addicts including Mark Lasser, a married minister and counselor, who started down the road to sexual addiction with soft-porn when he was 11 years old.   Here in Oklahoma, our newspapers are daily filled with stories of prominent people - ministers, police officers, and ADA's who have lost jobs and/or family because they couldn't resist visiting certain sites on the internet or soliciting a prostitute.  An Oklahoma state district judge is currently on trial for what was going on beneath his robe during court sessions.  (The judge has denied the allegations).  Many sex addicts eventually turn to programs like Sexoholics Anonymous, a twelve step program patterned after AA, for help. 

Instead of empowering these 16 million men and woman, America's "changing attitudes about erotica" (Chapman's phrase) helped enslave them by sexual compulsion, leading to a web of lies, deceit, and shame as the addict attempts to lead a double life. 

The Doctrine of Double Effect, Etc.

While at a gathering in Dublin this week (with MOJ-friends Gerry Whyte, Chris Eberle, and others), I had occasion to read a book by the Trinity College Dublin professor of theology who organized the gathering, Nigel Biggar.  The book is titled Aiming to Kill:  The Ethics of Suicide and Euthanasia (2004).  I want to call to the attention of MOJ-readers chapter 3 of the book:  "The Morality of Acts of Killing".   Chris Eberle, who also read the book, and I agree that Professor Biggar provides, in chapter 3, an admirably accessible and wonderfully thoughtful discussion of the doctrine of double effect, dealing with several competing positions. One of the best discussions of the DDE we've ever read.  Click here for a link to the book.
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More porn = less rape?

I'm aware of the long-running debate over whether pornography is causally linked to violence against women; I was not familiar with this perspective on what that causal link might be, as set out by Steve Chapman in today's Chicago Tribune:

One theory about the causes of rape . . . has been thoroughly demolished. Among religious conservatives and left-wing feminists, it's an article of faith that pornography leads inexorably to sexual abuse of women and children. But while hard-core raunch has proliferated, sexual assaults have not. Could it be that pornography prevents rape?

In fact, our changing attitudes about erotica are part of a generally more open and honest approach to matters involving sex. And one vital product of that openness has been a willingness to confront questions that were often avoided in the past. Today, kids grow up being taught that "no means no," rapists can't be excused because their victims were dressed provocatively, and adults are never allowed to touch children in certain ways.

Those themes have hardly eradicated this scourge, but they have worked to discourage predators and embolden potential victims. Maybe the main lesson from the decline of sexual assault is an old one: Knowledge is power.

Rob

Beinart, Moral Confidence, and Humility

Because I had to make a long car drive this weekend, I had the chance to listen to the whole of Peter Beinart's book The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.  It's good on several levels.  As readers may know from reviews like this one, the book argues for a revival and adaptation today of the Cold War liberalism practiced by Truman and Kennedy, which took extremely seriously the fight against totalitarianism but also recognized that America could only fight that war effectively if it (1) recognized limits on its own unilateral power and (2), along with military measures when necessary, also promoted economic development (abroad and at home) that would reduce the appeal of Communism.  (It's a good question whether there are enough liberals who will go along with Beinart's vision; but it might appeal to a lot of "national greatness" conservatives as well.)

Among the book's heroes is Reinhold Niebuhr, whose Christian appreciation of original sin led him to emphasize that even as America combatted the evil of the Soviet system, it must also recognize its own flaws and capacity for evil acts.  (Beinart unfortunately says little or nothing about the theological foundation of Niebuhr's views.)  Part of Niebuhr's argument was that those who know that neither side in a historical conflict is wholly innocent will be better able to make the real historical distinction between evil and imperfect good, and will not be paralyzed by the shattering of illusions of innocence.  We may be forgetting this lesson again; one worrying phenomenon Beinart mentions is that the Bush administration's moral and practical failings in Iraq may have turned off many Americans altogether on the central importance of promoting Middle Eastern democracy and development in order to undercut Islamic totalitarianism in the long run.  It's not a Christian book, of course, and "mak[ing] America great" is by no means our ultimate concern.  But a lot of the wisdom in the book about how best to preserve an acceptable level of freedom and justice in the world parallels Christian wisdom about human nature, and could easily overlap a lot with just-war principles.

Tom

"The Enemy of Thought"?

In Christianity Today, Alan Jacobs worries that the blog is the "friend of information but the enemy of thought."  Here's a provocative snippet:

Blogs remain great for news: political, technological, artistic, whatever. And they provide a very rich environment in which news (or rather "news") can be tested and evaluated and revised, as we have seen repeatedly, from cnn's firing of Eason Jordan to the discrediting of Dan Rather's story on President Bush's National Guard service. But as vehicles for the development of ideas they are woefully deficient and will necessarily remain so unless they develop an architecture that is less bound by the demands of urgency—or unless more smart people refuse the dominant architecture. . . .

As I think about these architectural deficiencies, and the deficiencies of my own character, I find myself meditating on a passage from a book by C. S. Lewis. In his great work of literary history, Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, Lewis devotes a passage to what he describes, with a certain savageness, as "that whole tragic farce which we call the history of the Reformation." For Lewis, the issues that divided Catholics and Protestants, that led to bloodshed all over Europe and to a seemingly permanent division of Christians from one another, "could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure." Instead, thanks to the prevalence of that recent invention the printing press, and to the intolerance of many of the combatants, deep and subtle questions found their way into the popular press and were immediately transformed into caricatures and cheap slogans. After that there was no hope of peaceful reconciliation.

On a smaller scale, the same problems afflict the intellectual and moral environments of the blogs. There is no privacy: all conversations are utterly public. The arrogant, the ignorant, and the bullheaded constantly threaten to drown out the saintly, and for that matter the merely knowledgeable, or at least overwhelm them with sheer numbers. And the architecture of the blog (and its associated technologies like rss), with its constant emphasis on novelty, militates against leisurely conversations. It is no insult to the recent, but already cherished, institution of the blogosphere to say that blogs cannot do everything well. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.

Abp. Williams and Subsidiarity

Joseph Komonchak has an interesting post over at Commonweal's blog on the applicability of the subsidiarity principle within the Church.

Symbols and regulation

Rob suggests that the proposed (and now, I gather, yet-again-defeated) flag-burning amendment was a political stunt and a waste of time.  I agree, I think.  (Not that such stunts and wastes of time are anything new in Congress!)  At the same time, I wonder if my reaction owes too much to my (perhaps excessively) libertarian take on free-speech questions?  Rob writes:

[S]ymbols are important, in large part, because they are accessible and interpretable in ways that transcend collective edicts.  Using the law to express the non-negotiable sanctity of the physical embodiment of national identity strikes me as an understandable, but ultimately absurd, endeavor.

It's not clear to me, actually, that it is "absurd" to think that law's regulatory (and expressive) functions may, and even should, play a part in the construction and maintenance of some symbols, particular symbols of the political community for whom the law speaks.  Any thoughts?  (Again, I am against a flag-burning amendment, because I am against any restriction on plausibly political expression that I can imagine.)

More on patriotism and "cosmopolitanism"

Responding to my post, the other day, about Catholics, patriotism, and cosmopolitanism, a friend and MOJ reader reminds me of these statements by the Council:

1.      Decree on the Church's Missionary Activity (1965) sec. 15:  "The Christian faithful...should live for God and Christ by following the honourable customs of their own nation.   As good citizens, they should practice true and effective patriotism [amorem Patriae], should avoid altogether racial prejudice [stirpis contemptum] and rancorous [exacerbatum] nationalism, and should foster a universal love of human beings."

sec. 21:  "...the lay faithful fully belong at one and the same time both to the People of God and to civil society.  They belong to the nation in which they were born.  They have begun to share in its cultural treasures by means of their education.  They are joined in its life by manifold social ties... They feel its problems as their very own...  they must give expression to this [Christian] newness of life in the social and cultural framework of their own homeland [patriae], according to the traditions of their own nation, a culture which they should get to know, heal, preserve, develop in accordance with contemporary conditions, and finally perfect in Christ.

2.      Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (1965) sec. 75:  "Citizens should develop a generous and loyal devotion [pietatem] to their own country, without narrow-mindedness but rather in such a way that they always simultaneously look to the good of the whole human family which is tied together by manifold links between races [stirpes], peoples, and nations.  May all Christians feel a special and personal vocation in political community..."

Cochran on the Catholic Court

Pepperdine law prof (and friend of many MoJ-ers) Bob Cochran has an essay in the new issue of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity titled "The Catholic Court Appeal."  Here's the intro:

The Supreme Court has been dominated since the founding of our country by mainline Protestants, but with Samuel Alito joining Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and John Roberts, five of the nine justices are now Catholics. All five have been appointed in the last 20 years. In the previous 200 years, only seven Catholics have served on the Court.

There may be political explanations for the attractiveness of Catholic justices, but I think three Catholic doctrines—natural law, subsidiarity, and religious freedom—help to explain why a majority of the justices are now Catholic. My argument is not that citizens who support, presidents who appoint, and senators who confirm these justices consciously do so because they want Catholic religious beliefs on the Court, but that these doctrines yield habits of thinking that make Catholics attractive candidates to the broad range of the American people.

I write as an Evangelical, but one who has come to share a commitment to the Catholic doctrines that I will mention

Rob

Toward a Catholic Legal Theory of Flag-Burning Amendments . . .

Yes, symbols are important.  But symbols are important, in large part, because they are accessible and interpretable in ways that transcend collective edicts.  Using the law to express the non-negotiable sanctity of the physical embodiment of national identity strikes me as an understandable, but ultimately absurd, endeavor.  Further, given that Catholic legal theory is operating in the "reality-based world," I'll go ahead and open the MoJ debate on the flag-burning amendment with the (entirely unoriginal) observation that it seems like a colossal waste of time.  As Dana Milbank observed today:

The chamber has scheduled up to four days of debate on the flag-burning amendment this week. If that formula -- one day of Senate debate for each incident of flag burning this year -- were to be applied to other matters, the Senate would need to schedule 12 days of debate to contemplate the number of years before Medicare goes broke, 335 days of debate for each service member killed in Iraq this year and 11 million days of debate on the estimated number of illegal immigrants in the country.

Am I missing something?  Are we all agreed that this is straightforward election-year posturing?

Rob

Cardinal Newman Society

. . . is profiled in the new Chronicle of Higher Education.  (HT: Open Book)

Rob

The Marsh case

Dan Filler (of Concurring Opinions) has some thoughts about the Supreme Court's recent death-penalty decision, Kansas v. Marsh.  Here is more, from Scotusblog.  The specific question presented -- to which Justice Thomas's majority opinion confined itself -- had to do with the provision of Kansas law dealing with the balancing of aggravating and mitigating factors in capital-sentencing proceedings.  However, the case became the occasion for a pointed, and interesting, exchange between Justices Souter and Scalia about the death penalty more generally, about the implications of DNA-based exonerations for the death penalty's legality and morality, about the relevance of other countries' practices and norms, and about role of judges.  Check it out.

10 Commandments Movie

Here's a preview for a genre-defying new movie that promises to bring timeless scriptural truth to today's hip-hop masses.  (Warning to sensitive ears.)

Rob

Catholics, competition, and patriotism

The other day, I came across this paper, "Our Anticompetitive Patriotism," by Professor Todd Pettys.  Here is the abstract:

This article examines the profound regulatory implications of Americans' deep, quasi-religious devotion to their nation. I argue that Americans' powerful identification with their country poses a significant threat to the system of intergovernmental competition that the Framers envisioned. The Framers believed that the state and federal governments would compete with one another for citizens' loyalty and for the regulatory power which that loyalty often yields, and that this competition would give both sovereigns strong incentives to remain finely attuned to the needs and desires of the citizenry. I contend that the nation's seemingly exclusive claim to citizens' patriotism significantly shields the federal government from the competitive forces that the Framers believed would restrain its ability to govern in objectionable ways. I conclude by advancing a two-part argument. First, to ensure that the federal government does not wield monopolistic power in a vast array of domains, we should give increased consideration to treaties and other regulatory alternatives that require America's leaders to negotiate with their counterparts in other countries. Second, in the years ahead, Americans may very well develop the supra-national patriotic sentiments necessary to sustain such models of international governance.

It is an interesting point:  The Framers (some of them anyway -- certainly Alexander Hamilton hoped that national loyalty would win out) expected that citizens' loyalties to their own states would facilitate competition between the states and the federal government, and among the states themselves.  Pettys notes that Americans' "quasi-religous" devotion to their *nation* throws a wrench in the competitive-federalism works.  It is probably also part of the story that Americans are much more mobile than ever that, increasingly, most places feel, look, and regulate like most others. 

To be a Catholic, I suppose, is to be "cosmopolitan," in the sense that we have been baptized into a community that is bigger than, and prior to, with larger purposes than, any nation, including our own.  At the same time, to be Catholic is to understand and appreciate the importance to human flourishing of rootedness-in-community, of mediating institutions, of subsidiarity, etc.  Probably, membership in the universal Church is not what Pettys has in mind when he speaks of "supra-national patriotic sentiments".  I wonder, *should* we want Catholics to develop such sentiments?  Or, at the present moment, is it at least as important for all of us to re-discover sub-national "patriotic" sentiments?  Or, is that even possible?

Some thoughts about Church autonomy

I would like to thank many of the MOJ contributors who have recently raised some important questions involving Catholics in public life-- be they university professors, office holders, theologians, or citizens. I believe that Rick's recent posting on the Church autonomy conference he recently attended helps me frame the thougths that I would like to present in this contribution that address the issue of Church autonomy.

Rick properly asked a question about the Constitutional source of the Church-autonomy doctrine. I imagine most lawyers addressing this issue would immediately think of the religion doctrines that emerge from the First Amendment. But I think that it is not only the free exercise and anti-establishment doctrines that would apply; we must also consider the apppropriate application of church members and their churches relying on the protection of rights regarding assembly, petitioning the government, and free speech and expression. Of course, other elements of the Constitution that also apply would include the doctrines involving equal protection, due process of law, and the prohibitions against bills of attainder and ex-post facto laws.

Coming back to some of the First Amendment matters for a moment, I want to address the difficult issue of the "wall of separation." I think most of us would agree that the Constitution does not use this formulation; however, some Supreme Court jurisprudence has attached particular, and perhaps undue, significance to a phrase found in a political letter written by Thomas Jefferson who had no hand in the drafting of the Constitutional text to which his phrase has often been applied. But, let us assume for this discussion that the Jeffersonian formula provides a useful analogy to understanding the First Amendment religion provisions in some contexts. I will further assume that most of us would be inclined to agree that there could be situations in which exclusive deference to particular religious views in developing public policy might raise establishment questions. So if the Church is barred from certain actions under some circumstances that would constitute establishment, is the State barred from any intrusions into the proper activities of the Church? In other words, does the separation principle generate responsibilities for both? I believe the separation principle also obligates the State from improper incursions of the Church's matters just as that principle restrains the Church from interfering with certain matters that properly belong to the temporal authorities. If the abstention obligation also applies to the State, its improper intrusions into Church affairs interferes with the autonomy of the Church.

In this context, individuals (office holders and citizens who are also members of the Church) need to be mindful of the dichotomy presented. But, when the person claims loyalty to both institutions--the sacred and the temporal-- he or she must be clear on certain first principles. Just as the Catholic owes certain responsibilities to the State, the Catholic office holder and citizen cannot use the authority of the State to intrude into those matters that properly are those of the Church. An illustration of this last situation would be the unsuccessful attempt last summer and fall of some members of the Massachusetts General Court (the legislature) to impose certain financial obligations and reporting duties on the Church.

How we think about the respective autonomies of the State and Church brings me to something Patrick had raised in one of his recent postings. In one of his discussions, Patrick made a reference to the Woodstock Reports. I did not realize they are posted on-line, so I took advantage to read some of the Woodstock Center's recent monthly reports. I found a passage in the June 2006 report [Here] pertinent to this posting. In an entry entitled "Vagaries of Faith and Politics", the author, William Bole, made this interesting observation in the context of the "prophetic voice" of bishops in nonpartisan debates on the political issues of the day:

"Some would argue the bishops muted this nonpartisan message in the 2004 [sic], when a furious handful of them stole the election-year stage by denying communion to Catholic politicians (especially liberal Democrats) who take a prochoice stand on abortion."

I believe this author is correct when he offered his suggestion that a small number of bishops had publicly addressed the duties of Catholics vis-a-vis their respective roles in participating in the temporal affairs of the State in 2004. However, I question his use of particular language and the accuracy of his portrayal, and I lament the image which his chosen rhetoric portrays. I read most, and I believe all, of the statements that American bishops issued during the 2004 election year regarding the public responsibilities of Catholics in exercising their public duties as either officials or as citizens. I found their written and oral statements clear and helpful in clarifying Church teachings that applied to many of the pressing issues being debated during the election season. I did not find their rhetoric "furious." Firm: yes; furious: no. I also recall that "stealing" is a crime, but I do not think any bishop committed this crime by exercising his proper teaching authority and other duties of episcopal office. In short, no bishop and no group of bishops "stole" anything in the context of the election-year stage. To suggest otherwise reveals an attitude that may well lead to the State improperly intruding into the Church's exercise of its autonomy.

I return to Rick's posting. I think he is on to something important when he concludes that Church autonomy could well be the religious-freedom issue of the present day. It is surely an important one. As we continue to address it, we also need to be mindful that there are other sources of authority addressing the relationship between the Church and the State. Some of them are from international law and could very well apply to the ensuing discussions; but, we must never forget the Church's own body of law that also has a bearing on this important issues and those others related to it.    RJA sj

Schiltz on Hirshman

My colleague Lisa Schiltz responds to our ongoing conversation (see here, here, here, here, and here) regarding Linda Hirshman's critique of the claim that staying home with the kids is a legitimate feminist option:

I was prepared to be outraged by her article, but I actually agreed with much of what she says.  I think it’s important to keep in mind that she is quite consciously addressing a very narrow band of women – highly educated, affluent women who are married, have a couple of kids, and are nearing 40 years old.  Those are the women she was studying; even though she addresses her “rules” to younger women, she’s thinking about them as women who are going to be just like the ones she studied in a few years, unless they start making some different choices.

I think a lot of the advice she gives those younger women is great career advice.   Hirshman is right to tell these young women that “glass ceilings” in the workplace these days are much more likely to be a function of choices they make about how much time and energy they’re willing to dedicate to their job, and strategic decisions they make about launching their careers than of lingering prejudice against women.  I also really appreciated her suggestion for the proper economic analysis of the cost of child care to a married couple.  It ought not be deducted from the woman’s salary to determine whether it makes economic sense for the woman to keep working;  it ought to be deducted from the joint salary of the couple.  Indeed, she sounded almost Catholic about her criticism of the former method of calculation, saying “it totally ignores that both adults are in the enterprise together."

And I heartily applaud Hirshman’s challenge to the “older” women – as she calls them: “the privileged brides of the Times.”  If women never rise to leadership positions in the public sphere, the unique genius of women that our Church articulates so forcefully will never have a chance to change the power structures in the U.S.  Hirshman wrote:  “If the ruling class is overwhelmingly male, the rules will make mistakes that benefit males, whether from ignorance or from indifference.”  I’d go even further, and say that if women who are mothers never rise to leadership positions in the public sphere, our families are going to continue to suffer from the mistakes our countries leaders have been making about all sorts of policy questions.  In the words of everyone’s hero, Mary Ann Glendon:  “[F]or the first time in history large numbers of women occupy leadership positions and almost half of these new female leaders – unlike male leaders – are childless.  Will this affect our goals and values?  Will it affect our programmatic agenda?  You bet it will.  People without children have a much weaker stake in our collective future.  As our leadership group tilts toward childlessness, we can expect it to become even harder to pay for our schooling system or for measures that might prevent global warming.  America’s rampant individualism is about to get a whole lot worse.”  I think some women with children really need to take up the challenge of working outside the home.  I think the ones that Hirshman’s talking to – well-educated, wealthy women who probably only have one kid who is now in school full time – are exactly the ones who ought to heed this call, and step up to the plate to try to make things better for other mothers who aren’t in a position to do so.

That all being said, I think Amy’s hit the nail on the head with the most important mistake that Hirshman makes – buying in to the notion that flourishing means meeting the standards of  success established by the current power structures – the very ones Hirshman criticizes.  In fact, Hirshman’s own research support’s Amy’s point, but Hirshman doesn’t seem to recognize that.  She says, “Half my Times brides quit before the first baby came.  In interviews, at least half of them expressed a hope never to work again.  . . . [W]hen they quit, they were already alienated from their work or at least not committed to a life of work.  One, a female MBA, said she could never figure out why the men at their workplace . . . were so excited about making deals.  ‘It’s only money,’ she mused.”  So Hirshmann recognizes that women are rejecting current workplace environments for reasons OTHER than just the desire to be home for their children.  But then she ignores that, and, as Amy points out, challenges women to go back to those workplaces and gives advice for how to be successful under the criteria for success that those workplaces establish.

I agree, as I usually do, with Amy.  We’re all called to work, to participate in all sorts of ways in God’s ongoing creation.  Hirshman’s wrong to insist that ONLY the work we do in the paid workforce can contribute to our flourishing, but it’s also wrong to insist that, for women who are mothers, ONLY the work we do at home with the kids can be considered legitimate “work” to contribute to our flourishing.

I agree with your notion that we ought to have more respect for the different possible rhythms in a person’s life.  I’ve often argued that workplaces like law firms could be more productive over the long term if they could balance one contrasting cycle I’ve noticed between men and women.  About the same time that many women who are getting through the most intense early child-raising years have fresh energy to devote to their professional lives, many men are feeling totally burned out from intense career building years and end up careening into mid-life crisis affairs and other unproductive escapades.  I’ve only ever thought about this in terms of law firm productivity, but given this exchange on MOJ, I’m wondering if maybe we ought to also be encouraging men to channel that mid-life crisis energy into parenting their teenaged kids!

Finally, I also do think it’s true that sometimes, out of love, our own individual “flourishing” does have to be sacrificed for others.  I suspect that many of the women that Hirshman is talking to – and many of the ones who seem to have gotten so angry about her article -- did give up their jobs out of love – sacrificing for love of their spouses and their kids.  When they’re confronted with the fact that there is, really and truly, a cost to that sacrifice, they don’t want to accept that.  I think that’s what’s behind some of the vehemence of the reactions to things said in the “mommy wars.”

Compendium's cover

I received in the mail today my copy of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (order yours today, here!).  It looks to be a rich and inspiring resource.  The introduction describes nicely the foundation for the whole enterprise -- an "integral and solidary humanism," one oriented to the "full truth about man." 

As much as the introduction, though, I really like the cover.  It's the Allegory of Good Government, a fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, which is in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Italy.  (There is also, in the same room, the Allegory of Bad Government.)   Professor Nicole Garnett opened a recent paper of hers, "Ordering (and Order in) the City," with this:

The walls of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Italy, are graced with Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s striking frescos contrasting the effects of “good government” and “bad government” on fourteenth-century city life. In the city under good government, men work to repair stately buildings, women socialize in the streets, and merchants sell their wares in a busy marketplace. In the city under bad government, the buildings are crumbling, men stand idle (save one crafting weapons), bandits terrorize the innocent, and the bodies of murder victims lie in the streets.  The goals of urban policy, it appears, have not changed in over six hundred years.

The frescoes' messages seem consonant with the renewed interest, particularly among Christians, in urbanism, and also with Joel Kotkin's dictum that cities were, and should be, "sacred, safe, and busy."

Church autonomy gathering

I'm back from a fascinating, two-day roundtable conference of scholars and practitioners on "church autonomy."  The conversations were fascinating; what a treat to hear so many stories from folks who are "in the trenches" of church-autonomy cases.  Some of the questions we kicked around -- and I'd welcome MOJ-ers' thoughts -- included:  What is the constitutional source of the church-autonomy doctrine(s)?  What is its content / reach?  How can lawyers, judges, and our fellow citizens be educated about the doctrine and its importance, particularly in a post-clergy-sex-abuse-scandal context, and particularly when -- as Alan Wolfe has reported -- Americans generally regard religion as spirituality, and churches as little more than overlapping personal experiences?  How can the doctrine be framed (can it be framed?) in a way that is both true to the relevant constitutional text, history, and structure, *and* to our various ecclesiologies?  And so on.

This is, I think, the religious-freedom issue of our time.

More on cities and suburbs

The brilliant and delightful Professor Nicole Garnett has posted a new paper, "Save the Cities, Stop the Suburbs," that should be interesting to those following MOJ's ongoing "urbanism" (new and old) threat.  Here is the abstract:

This Essay reviews two recent books: Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History and Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History. Bruegmann, an architectural historian, makes an important contribution to the thinking about suburban sprawl by placing current development patterns in historical context. Bruegmann builds a strong case that the costs of limits on suburban development - especially the reduction in the supply of affordable housing - might well outweigh their benefits. His failure to consider whether measures other than suburban growth restrictions might enliven cities, however, is a serious shortcoming. The Essay suggests that urban officials must find ways to make cities, in Kotkin's words, “sacred, safe, and busy,” places again. The Essay urges local governments to examine how city land use policies (as opposed to suburban ones) affect urban life and suggests that city officials must address inevitable tensions between safety and busyness and between busyness and beauty.

"Jesus Is Not a Republican"

Indeed, he is not.  That said, Randall Balmer's piece -- to which Michael linked recently -- strikes me as smug, self-indulgent, and superficial.  It's standard partisan hackery, top to bottom, but -- convenient for the Chronicle of Higher Education -- his Daily Kos talking points have been laundered through the strikingly uncharitable screed of an evangelical Christian.  What's most interesting -- to me, anyway -- is that the screed follows a "woe is me, I have suffered for my progressive views from intolerant conservatives" complaint.  Pot, meet kettle.

We're told that "on judicial matters, the religious right demands appointees who would diminish individual rights to privacy with respect to abortion."  Whatever.  It is held -- how many times will we hear this silly charge? -- against the "religious right" that the Republicans have not "tried to outlaw abortion."  Just how ignorant about legal and political realities, one wonders, is Mr. Balmer?  (What's more, it is clear that Mr. Balmer would fault the Republicans if they *did* try to outlaw abortion).  Balmer says that the militaristic language of some evangelicals is a "reproach to the [G]ospel I honor [?] and to the Jesus I love."  Perhaps.  But so is Mr. Balmer's statement that "on judicial matters, the religious right demands appointees who would diminish individual rights to privacy with respect to abortion."

To be clear:  Yes, Jesus is not a Republican.  Yes, Balmer has identified a number of issues on which the current administration could be criticized in good faith by thoughtful, reasonable Christians.  Yes, it would be bad if Christianity -- or even the (shudder) "religious right" -- were to confuse the message of Christ with the platform of the Republican party.  But Balmer has added nothing to our conversation.

I have been absent from the blog for a week or so, and I regret it that this first post in a while is so obviously shaped by irritation.  But there it is.  Here at Mirror of Justice, we disagree, from time to time, about the political implications of what I am determined to believe is our shared commitment to the enterprise of seeking, with the help of the Church's social teaching, the truth about the world and about how our lives together ought to be ordered.  I continue to believe that, in the vast blogosphere, ours is one of the few sites where a large group of engaged and intelligent people, who have come to very different conclusions about politics, are still able to talk with and learn from one another, all the while growing in friendship.  But again, Balmer's piece, and rants like it, are not -- in my view -- consonant with our aims and shared commitments.  It is fact that some of us -- who are every bit as engaged, educated, informed, and committed to the Catholic social tradition as any others of us (and certainly as Mr. Balmer) -- believe that, contrary to Eduardo's suggestion, there are quite a few more reasons than "stem cells, abortion, and homosexuality" to prefer, all things considered, the present Administration's policies and personnel to the alternatives that were offered, and that reasonable, faithful, and not-in-the-clutches-of-the-religious-right Catholics can disagree about, say, the implications of the tradition for the estate tax.

Continuing Exchange with Joel Nichols on "Homeward Bound"

Amy,

Fair point about the downside of the possibility (and indeed history) of misuse of the "sacrifice" language to exclude women, which I decry as much as you.  In fact, I probably was inartful in using the phrase "sacrificial," for I'm not convinced that caring for children is always and necessarily sacrificial.  While there is some self-sacrifice involved, there is also a self-actualization aspect.   I would contend that success in Hirshman's terms (or even as intellectual stimulation) is  not  the pinnacle of human development and fulfillment.  Rather, attachment and the value of a deep relationship with another person provide better measures for both human development and fulfillment, both in developmental theory and in the Christian account.  It's hard to know how better to encapsulate that than the dependency of a child.

Also, while I join your focus on working toward more just structures in society, I think we should not lose sight of the fact that it is working toward the betterment of children that often achieves those more just structures  (which is a large part of my problem with Hirshman's argument). Rather than marginalizing children and the attendant care for them (which your response certainly does not do), we instead should shift our focus toward children and ask what lifts them up and advances them.  This is true both theologically (as mentioned in my earlier comments) and practically. For example, studies show that the surest way to help lift a child out of poverty around the world is to teach that child's mother to read.  Or, by further example, by focusing on studies that show that children's young brains are literally hard-wired to connect in sustaining relationships with adults (with parents, in faith communities, with teachers, etc.), our attention turns toward the need to establish structures and situations that will provide for exactly that kind of interaction and success for children.

And my response to Joel’s response:

I agree wholeheartedly that to focus on children is a good way to a more human society; but I'm not sure that an exclusive focus on children necessarily gets us to the goal line in terms of changing workplace structures.  First, it can become a provisional thing - accommodations while children are small.  Two, not everyone is a parent - it's important for people without kids to not let work become an idol, either.  I remember a story about a young woman rolling her suitcase to the elevator for a umpteenth time, and another woman says, "let me guess, single,no pets?"  There's an assumption that if you don't have kids your life has to be all about work – and that’s unhealthy too.  I'd also frame the broader solution relationally - but children doesn't capture the whole set of problems.

Response to Joel Nichols / Sacrificial Care

Joel, I agree that “sacrificial caring” is at the heart of the message of Jesus—but I am also concerned that the language of “sacrifice” has been employed as a powerful vehicle to in effect exclude women from the public sphere.  Not all of Hirshman’s concerns are completely unfounded.   I’d prefer to frame the critique more generally: that it is bad, for the most part, for anyone—mothers, fathers, married or single—to routinely work 12 hours a day, whether that person is a lawyer in an “elite” firm responding to the pressure to meet a billable hours quota, or a person who cobbles together three part-time jobs in order to afford health insurance.  And as a matter of justice and of love, we should be working hard to probe ways to challenge and change these structures which do so much damage not only to individual identity and family life, but also to broader commitments in the community as well.  Amy

Jesus not a Republican? An evangelical Christian speaks ...

[The following piece will be of interest to many MOJ-readers.   I would have excerpted the piece and posted a link to the  entire essay, but as I understand how the online Chronicle of Higher Education works, the link would have expired after three days.  So I'll just paste the entire essay here.  (Sorry, Mark.)

If someone can tell me how to provide a link that does not expire, I'll delete this post, excerpt the piece, and provide that link.

Now, off to Trinity College Dublin to discuss the Christian foundations of political liberalism with MOJ-friends Chris Eberle and Gerry Whyte (and others too)!

Be well, all.

Michael]

The Chronicle Review
June 23, 2006

Jesus Is Not a Republican

By RANDALL BALMER

In November 2002, 30 years after my previous visit to Wheaton College to hear George McGovern, I approached the podium in Edman Chapel to address the student body. At evangelical colleges like Wheaton, in Illinois, there are two kinds of required gatherings: chapel and convocation. The former is religious in nature, whereas a speaker at convocation has the license to be far more discursive, even secular — or political. The college's chaplain, however, had invited me to preach in chapel, not convocation, and so, despite temptation, I delivered a homily that was, as I recall, not overly long, appropriate to the occasion, and reasonably well received.

I doubt very much that I will be invited back to Edman Chapel. One of the benefits of being reared within evangelicalism, I suppose, is that you understand the workings of the evangelical subculture. I know, for example, that when my new book on evangelicals appears, the minions of the religious right will seek to discredit me rather than engage the substance of my arguments. The initial wave of criticism, as an old friend who has endured similar attacks reminded me, will be to deny that I am, in fact, really an evangelical Christian. When that fails — and I'll put up my credentials as an evangelical against anyone's! — the next approach will be some gratuitous personal attack: that I am a member of the academic elite, spokesman for the Northeastern establishment, misguided liberal, prodigal son, traitor to the faith, or some such. Another evangelical friend with political convictions similar to mine actually endured a heresy trial.

The evangelical subculture, which prizes conformity above all else, doesn't suffer rebels gladly, and it is especially intolerant of anyone with the temerity to challenge the shibboleths of the religious right. I understand that. Despite their putative claims to the faith, the leaders of the religious right are vicious toward anyone who refuses to kowtow to their version of orthodoxy, and their machinery of vilification strikes with ruthless, dispassionate efficiency. Longtime friends (and not a few family members) will shuffle uneasily around me and studiously avoid any sort of substantive conversation about the issues I raise — and then quietly strike my name from their Christmas-card lists. Circle the wagons. Brook no dissent.

And so, since my chances of being invited back to Edman Chapel have dropped from slim to none, I offer here an outline of what I would like to say to the students at Wheaton and, by extension, to evangelicals everywhere.

Evangelicals have come a long way since my visit to Edman Chapel in 1972. We have moved from cultural obscurity — almost invisibility — to becoming a major force in American society. Jimmy Carter's run for the presidency launched us into the national consciousness, but evangelicals abandoned Carter by the end of the 1970s, as the nascent religious right forged an alliance with the Republican Party.

In terms of cultural and political influence, that alliance has been a bonanza for both sides. The coalition dominates talk radio and controls a growing number of state legislatures and local school boards. It is seeking, with some initial success, to recast Hollywood and the entertainment industry. The Republicans have come to depend on religious-right voters as their most reliable constituency, and, with the Republicans firmly in command of all three branches of the federal government, leaders of the religious right now enjoy unprecedented access to power.

And what has the religious right done with its political influence? Judging by the platform and the policies of the Republican Party — and I'm aware of no way to disentangle the agenda of the Republican Party from the goals of the religious right — the purpose of all this grasping for power looks something like this: an expansion of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the continued prosecution of a war in the Middle East that enraged our longtime allies and would not meet even the barest of just-war criteria, and a rejiggering of Social Security, the effect of which, most observers agree, would be to fray the social-safety net for the poorest among us. Public education is very much imperiled by Republican policies, to the evident satisfaction of the religious right, and it seeks to replace science curricula with theology, thereby transforming students into catechumens.

America's grossly disproportionate consumption of energy continues unabated, prompting demands for oil exploration in environmentally sensitive areas. The Bush administration has jettisoned U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which called on Americans to make at least a token effort to combat global warming. Corporate interests are treated with the kind of reverence and deference once reserved for the deity.

The Bible contains something like 2,000 references to the poor and the believer's responsibility for the poor. Sadly, that obligation seems not to have trickled down into public policy. On judicial matters, the religious right demands appointees who would diminish individual rights to privacy with regard to abortion. At the same time, it approves a corresponding expansion of presidential powers, thereby disrupting the constitutionally mandated system of checks and balances.

The torture of human beings, God's creatures — some guilty of crimes, others not — has been justified by the Bush administration, which also believes that it is perfectly acceptable to conduct surveillance on American citizens without putting itself to the trouble of obtaining a court order. Indeed, the chicanery, the bullying, and the flouting of the rule of law that emanates from the nation's capital these days make Richard Nixon look like a fraternity prankster.

Where does the religious right stand in all this? Following the revelations that the U.S. government exported prisoners to nations that have no scruples about the use of torture, I wrote to several prominent religious-right organizations. Please send me, I asked, a copy of your organization's position on the administration's use of torture. Surely, I thought, this is one issue that would allow the religious right to demonstrate its independence from the administration, for surely no one who calls himself a child of God or who professes to hear "fetal screams" could possibly countenance the use of torture. Although I didn't really expect that the religious right would climb out of the Republican Party's cozy bed over the torture of human beings, I thought perhaps they might poke out a foot and maybe wiggle a toe or two.

I was wrong. Of the eight religious-right organizations I contacted, only two, the Family Research Council and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, answered my query. Both were eager to defend administration policies. "It is our understanding, from statements released by the Bush administration," the reply from the Family Research Council read, "that torture is already prohibited as a means of collecting intelligence data." The Institute on Religion and Democracy stated that "torture is a violation of human dignity, contrary to biblical teachings," but conceded that it had "not yet produced a more comprehensive statement on the subject," even months after the revelations. Its president worried that the "anti-torture campaign seems to be aimed exclusively at the Bush administration," thereby creating a public-relations challenge.

I'm sorry, but the use of torture under any circumstances is a moral issue, not a public-relations dilemma.

And what about abortion, the issue that the religious right decided in the early 1980s was its signature concern? Since January 2003, the Republican and religious-right coalition has controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress — yet, curiously, it has not tried to outlaw abortion. Why? Could it be that its members are less interested in actually reducing the incidence of abortion itself (in which case they should seek to alter public opinion on the matter) than in continuing to use abortion as a potent political weapon?

Equally striking is the rhetoric that leaders of the religious right use to motivate their followers. In the course of traveling around the country, I have been impressed anew by the pervasiveness of the language of militarism among leaders of the religious right. Patrick Henry College, according to its founding president, Michael Farris, "is training an army of young people who will lead the nation and shape the culture with biblical values." Rod Parsley, pastor of World Harvest Church, in Ohio, issues swords to those who join his organization, the Center for Moral Clarity, and calls on his followers to "lock and load" for a "Holy Ghost invasion." The Traditional Values Coalition advertises its "Battle Plan" to take over the federal judiciary. "I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare," Ralph Reed, former director of the Christian Coalition, famously declared about his political tactics in 1997. I wonder how that sounds in the ears of the Prince of Peace.

Such rhetoric and policies are a scandal, a reproach to the gospel I honor and to the Jesus I love. I went to Sunday school nearly every week of my childhood. But I must have been absent the day they told us that the followers of Jesus were obliged to secure even greater economic advantages for the affluent, to deprive those Jesus called "the least of these" of a living wage, and to despoil the environment by sacrificing it on the altar of free enterprise. I missed the lesson telling me that I should turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, even those designated as my enemies.

The Bible I read says something quite different. It tells the story of ancient Israel's epic struggle against injustice and bondage — and of the Almighty's investment in the outcome of that struggle. But the Hebrew Scriptures also caution against the imperiousness of that people, newly liberated from their oppressors, lest they treat others the way they themselves were treated back in Egypt. The prophets enjoin Yahweh's chosen people to "act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God" and warn of the consequences of failing to do so: exile and abandonment. "Administer true justice," the prophet Zechariah declares on behalf of the Lord Almighty. "Show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other."

The New Testament echoes those themes, calling the followers of Jesus to care for orphans and widows, to clothe the naked, and to shelter the homeless. The New Testament I read says that, in the eyes of Jesus, there is no preference among the races and no distinction between the sexes. The Jesus I try to follow tells me that those who take on the role of peacemakers "will be called the children of God," and this same Jesus spells out the kind of behavior that might be grounds for exclusion from the kingdom of heaven: "I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me."

We could have a lively discussion and even vigorous disagreement over whether it is incumbent upon the government to provide services to the poor, but those who argue against such measures should be prepared with some alternative program or apparatus.

The agenda of the Republican-religious-right coalition, moreover, is utterly disconsonant with the distinguished record of evangelical activists in the 19th century. They interpreted the teachings of Jesus to mean that, yes, they really did bear responsibility for those on the margins of society, especially for the emancipation of slaves and for the rights of women.

In addition to distorting the teachings of Jesus, the religious right has also been cavorting with some rather unsavory characters in its quest for political and cultural power. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who last year pleaded guilty to accepting $2.4-million worth of bribes, had earned a 100-percent approval rating from Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition while a member of the House of Representatives. During more than two decades as a member of the state Legislature, Jim West, a former mayor of Spokane, Wash., sponsored various bills aimed at curtailing the rights of gays and lesbians, as well as a bill that would have outlawed any consensual sexual contact between teenagers; the voters of Spokane recalled West last December, after he admitted to arranging gay sexual liaisons over the Internet and offering city jobs in exchange for sexual favors.

For the better part of three decades now, we've been treated to the moral sermonizing of William J. Bennett, who wrote The Book of Virtues and served as Ronald Reagan's secretary of education and as one of Bill Clinton's most relentless critics. We now know that Bennett is a compulsive gambler. Ralph Reed, currently a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Georgia — the first step on his road to the White House — has always preached against gambling as part of his "family values" rhetoric. He has also done consulting work for Enron (which engaged in other forms of gambling) and accepted as much as $4.2-million from Indian tribes intent on maintaining a regional monopoly for their casinos. "I need to start humping in corporate accounts," he wrote to the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Tony Perkins, a graduate of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and head of the Family Research Council, arguably the most influential religious-right organization aside from Focus on the Family, has had ties to white-supremacist organizations in his native Louisiana.

The purpose in ticking off a roll call of rogues associated with the religious right (and the list could have been longer) is not to single individuals out for obloquy and certainly not to suggest the absence of moral failings on the other side of the political spectrum — though I must say that some of this behavior makes Bill Clinton's adolescent dalliances pale by comparison. The point, rather, is to argue that those who make it their business to demand high standards of moral rectitude from others ought to be able to approach those standards themselves. My evangelical theology tells me that we are, all of us, sinners and flawed individuals. But it also teaches the importance of confession, restitution, and amendment of behavior — whether it be an adulterous tryst, racial intolerance, or prevarication in the service of combating one's enemies. We have seen nothing of the sort from these putatively Christian power brokers.

"Do not be misled," St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians. "Bad company corrupts good character." Jesus himself asked: "What good would it be for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul?" The coalition with the Republican Party is blasphemy, pure and simple.

It has also led to a denigration of the faith. The early years of the religious right provide a case in point. The pursuit of political power and influence in the 1980s came at a fearsome price. For most of the 20th century, evangelicalism had existed primarily within its own subculture, one that protected individuals from the depredations of the world. It was an insular universe, and the world outside of the subculture, including the political realm, was corrupt and corrupting. Believers beware. Along about 1980, however, evangelicals, newly intoxicated with political power and cultural influence, succumbed to the seductions of the culture. It was during the Reagan years that we began to hear about the so-called prosperity gospel, the notion that God will reward true believers with the emoluments of this world. Evangelicalism was still a subculture in the 1980s, but it was no longer a counterculture. It had lost its edge, its capacity for cultural critique.

A number of people have asked me what the religious right wants. What would America look like if the religious right had its way? I've thought long and hard about that question, and the best answer I can come up with is that the religious right hankers for the kind of homogeneous theocracy that the Puritans tried to establish in 17th-century Massachusetts: to impose their vision of a moral order on all of society.

The Puritans left England and crossed the Atlantic in the 1630s to construct what John Winthrop called a "city on a hill," an example to the rest of the world. The Puritans configured church and state so the two would be both coterminous and mutually reinforcing, but only one form of worship was permitted.

Without question, Puritanism in 17th-century Massachusetts was a grand and noble vision, but it ultimately collapsed beneath its own weight, beneath the arrogance of its own pretensions. By the middle of the century, Puritanism had become ingrown and calcified, the founding generation unable to transmit its piety to its children. By the waning decades of the century, in the face of encroaching pluralism — Anglicans and Quakers — and the rise of a merchant class, the Puritan ministers of Massachusetts were making increasingly impassioned, frantic calls for repentance. What frightened them — no less than the leaders of the religious right at the turn of the 21st century — was pluralism.

Despite the best efforts of the Puritan clergy, spirituality in New England continued to languish into the 18th century. The tide began to turn when fresher and more energetic preachers entered the scene in the 1730s. George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, Isaac Backus, and others challenged the cozy relationship between church and state and thereby reinvigorated religion in New England. The force of their ideas and their assault on the status quo spread throughout the Atlantic colonies in an utterly transformative event known as the Great Awakening.

The lesson was clear. Religion functions best outside the political order, and often as a challenge to the political order. When it identifies too closely with the state, it becomes complacent and ossified, and efforts to coerce piety or to proscribe certain behavior in the interests of moral conformity are unavailing.

Thankfully, the founding fathers recognized that wisdom and codified it into the First Amendment, the best friend that religion has ever had. The First Amendment was a concession to pluralism, and its guarantee of a "free market" of religion has ensured a salubrious religious marketplace unmatched anywhere else in the world.

Unfortunately, some of the clergy in New England still refused to concede their prerogatives and surrender to the religious marketplace. Congregationalists in Massachusetts and Connecticut clung stubbornly to their establishment status, not wanting to forfeit the tax subsidies afforded them by the state. From his post in Litchfield, Conn., Lyman Beecher resisted "the fall of the standing order" in Connecticut. In 1820, however, a scant two years after Connecticut did away with state-subsidized religion (Massachusetts would follow suit in 1833, the last state to do so), Beecher was forced to repent. Although he and his fellow Congregationalist ministers had feared "that our children would scatter like partridges,"