Tag: moralism

Mark Emmert, the Avon Barksdale of College Athletics

Published on by D. G. Hart71 Comments

Christians, Mormons, Muslims, and Jews worried about the spread of moral relativism in the United States should be encouraged by the sanctions against Penn State imposed this morning by the NCAA (which include vacating all of Joe Paterno’s victories between 1998 and 2011). Granted, Americans show no consensus on gay marriage or abortion, but with slavery and racism now child molestation also is settled. Actually, instead of being relativistic, Americans are morally rigid about most matters. Even pro-choice advocates are emphatic about the moral good of a woman’s right to choose, as well as the immorality of the pro-life position. The problem in the United States is not a lack of morality. It is that most every issue comes in either black or white. This means that a lack of moral consensus among Americans is to put it mildly, contested.

What is less clear is whether Americans are capable of distinguishing among the depravity of various vices the way, say, the Shorter Catechism talks about some transgressions of the law being more heinous in the sight of God than others. The case of Joe Paterno is proof. The overwhelming condemnation of the recently deceased coach would tempt a visitor from Mars to think that Paterno himself had molested the boys who came through Penn State’s football facility. But covering up a felony is not the same level of offense as committing a felony. Just ask Chuck Colson and Richard Nixon.

The laws of Indiana, the site of NCAA headquarters, may be instructive here (even though they played no role in Mark Emmert’s decision to punish Penn State and the reputation of Joe Paterno. Child molestation is a Class A felony in Indiana and is punishable by a sentence of a minimum of six years in prison (according to a 2000 summary). Perjury, on the other hand, is a Class D felony in Indiana and brings with it up to ten months in prison and a possible fine of $10,000. It is fairly clear that Paterno did not commit child molestation. The worst that he did was to lie before the Grand Jury, a difference between a Class A and Class D felony (it would seem to this legally challenged observer). If his offense was simply not reporting Sandusky, Indiana law classifies this as a Class B misdemeanor, which could bring a fine of $1,000 and a prison sentence of up to 180 days.

But this is all based on Indiana law, the jurisdiction where Mark Emmert and his colleagues work. According to one story from last fall, Pennsylvania has no law requiring persons to report child abuse.

What this suggests is that the NCAA is a lot harder on crime than the states themselves which have law enforcement officers with real guns and facilities with real bars and really sharp barbed wire. That may be a good thing, though I can’t imagine Emmert taking away JoePa’s wins if the coach were still alive. (The courage of the NCAA only goes so far.) But it does confirm my impression, after several viewings of The Wire, that justice mediated the state is more forgiving than justice executed outside the law. For anyone who challenged Avon or Marlo, eliminating the challenger’s existence was the only way to maintain order. But inside the agencies of the police, public school teachers, city administration, or journalism, if you violated procedures or lied to bosses, you got a reassignment, a demotion, or at worst lost your job. But unlike Barksdale’s lieutenants who cheated their boss, if you lied to the city editor of the Sunpapers about your source, you lived to see another day.

After today’s actions, the NCAA appears to exhibit a form of justice much closer to drug dealers than to civil authorities. Unfortunately for Paterno, he is not alive to see a day on his calendar that includes a visit to Emmert’s office in Indianapolis.

The Day of Moral Perplexity Has Come for Angelo Cataldi

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

I had thought about entitling this post, “Predators All,” since the revelations of child molestation mount and mount. First it was the Roman Catholic Church, then Penn State, then Hollywood, and now comes word from several adults that Bill Conlin, a longtime baseball beat reporter for Philadelphia’s Daily News, molested them as children. This news cuts close to home for our dear moral blow hard, Angelo Cataldi, since Cataldi has hosted Conlin many times on the show to talk RBI’s and walks-hits-per-inning. Even closer to home, Angelo and Bill are neighbors during the summer when they occupy their beach houses in Sea Isle City, New Jersey.

Not that anyone living outside the Delaware Valley really cares about these Philadelphia media figures, but listening to the shows today (now that classes are over and grades are in) may be of interest to non-Philadelphians if only because of the tone that the various hosts have deployed to discuss this latest scandal. As clear as Angelo and others have been in condemning the alleged acts, the hosts have also exhibited a degree of anguish that was entirely lacking in the case of Joe Paterno. (One important difference is that Conlin yesterday resigned from his writing post, so no one can call for his job.)

On the one hand, all the talk show hosts looked up to Conlin as one of the best baseball minds in Philadelphia (a mind and voice that earned him the J. G. Taylor Spink Award this year for meritorious contributions to baseball writing). In other words, they knew him and could never have imagined that Conlin was capable of such behavior. Now, though, the moral wheels are grinding and different hosts are agonizing over the darkness of human nature, and wondering how much they need to be suspicious of anyone they know.

On the other hand, the hosts are not nearly so condemning of the adults who enabled Conlin (allegedly) to escape any charges for over forty years (and now the statute of limitations means that Conlin will not face criminal charges). No one is wondering who among Conlin’s editors knew about this. No one is blaming the parents of these children who did know (allegedly) of the molestation but did nothing because they did not want to hurt a friend and family member who was coming into his own as a reporter and columnist.

In other words, what is happening in the world of Philadelphia sports journalism is precisely what did not happen when news from Happy Valley arrived in Philadelphia. Instead of imagining how those close to Jerry Sandusky might have reacted to protect both a friend and an institution, Philadelphia journalists called for the figurative death penalty for everyone close to Sandusky.

It is a complicated world out there.

By the way, I keep wondering when the shoe is going to drop in all of these child molestation scandals. We live at a time when practically every form of sexual desire is tolerated; the institutions that promote some of those forms even wind up sponsoring sports talk radio. So why exactly, for instance, do these men who sometimes go to gentlemen’s clubs think that sex between an adult and a child is wicked and perverse? The obvious answer is consent. The children are subordinate to the predators and have no recourse. The flip side of this deduction is that consensual sex is fine, no matter how kinky.

What I don’t understand is how consent makes sex, no matter how perverse, okay. Is the desire of a man for a boy okay? Is it perverse and disgusting? Or does it only become twisted when carried out on a boy (who is incapable of giving consent)? Could it be that certain forms of sex are perverse, no matter whether the partners are consenting and no matter how “natural” either of the partner’s desire is? Could it even be that sex between a married woman and her single boss is also perverse no matter how consensual the sex or natural the adulterers’ desires are?

The reason for asking is to see if the moral sense that does regard child molestation as heinous might also be available to draw lines in other places. These other lines would and should apply as much to heterosexual as to homosexual forms of sexual desire. Ideally, the true form of consensual sex would be one where two people have consented to be each other’s sexual partner for life and to be responsible for rearing any offspring that proceed from their sexual relations.

Forensic Friday: Pauline Indignation

Published on by D. G. Hart73 Comments

Have you noticed lately what tends to make conservative Protestants mad? In public life we see a lot of consternation about abortion, gay marriage, the thievery of the federal government, and outrage over secularists. And let’s not forget a whole lot of anger doled out upon two-kingdom theology and the spirituality of the church. (If you wonder how the critics feel, just look for the word, “radical.”)

But have you ever considered what made the apostle Paul mad? Well, his dealings with the church in Corinth were not pretty. There he found sectarianism, sexual immorality, insubordination, blasphemy, with a theology of glory worked in for good measure. But how does Paul open his letters to these Christians whom today many of the proponents of public righteousness would deem antinomian? In his first epistle he addresses them as “those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints. . .” And he follows that with the apostolic salutation, “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” In the second epistle, even though many problems still exist at Corinth, Paul again calls them “saints” and adds the same salutation as the first letter.

But what about those Galatians, the church that may have been excelling in its zeal for the law? He refers to them as part of the church but not as saints. And while he does also extend an apostolic salutation he does not dally with affirmations of the Galatians piety or the encouragement he takes from them. Instead he cuts to the chase and says he is astonished that they have turned away from the gospel. And within 8 verses of his opening, Paul anathematizes any one who would turn from the gospel he preached. One could well imagine in our times that if a minister were insisting that believers picket at abortion clinics to show the authenticity of their faith, many would fail to object. What damage could be done by such a worthy cause? Granted, you don’t want the picketers to think they are earning merits with God because of their righteous deeds. But that is certainly not a danger in our day and besides, the wickedness of abortion is truly a blight on our nation. So why would it hurt?

But if a pastor was guilty of tolerating incest among his flock, well, the opposition would not be pretty and the minister would likely be out on his ear. But Paul’s reaction was just the reverse. He condemned those who added any works of the law to salvation through Christ. Meanwhile, he was willing to work with the church that had turned a blind eye to all sorts of immorality — even the sexual kind.

J. Gresham Machen detected a similar difference in the way Paul dealt with preachers in Galatia and those in Rome (who were preaching out of envy and strife). Machen observed that Paul was tolerant of bad motives among Roman preachers but intolerant of the Judaizers in Galatia because of the content of the respective evangelists’ messages. And this was a distinction that Machen believed his contemporaries in the Presbyterian Church were incapable of making. The differences between Paul and the preachers in Galatia, Machen wrote:

would seem to modern ‘practical” Christians to be a highly subtle and intangible matter, hardly worthy of consideration at all in view of the large measure of agreement in the practical realm. What a splendid cleaning up of the Gentile cities it would have been if the Judaizers had succeeded in extending to those cities the observance of the Mosaic law, even including the unfortunate ceremonial observances! Surely Paul ought to have made common cause with teachers who were so nearly in agreement with him; surely he ought to have applied to them the great principle of Christian unity.

As a matter of fact, however, Paul did nothing of the kind. . . . Paul saw very clearly that the difference between the Judaizers and himself was the difference between two entirely distinct types of religion; it was the difference between a religion of merit and a religion of grace.

I am no believer in historical laws, but I do see the pattern repeated throughout the history of the church that when Christians begin to make the faith practical by insisting that Christianity’s vitality can only be proved by its effectiveness in changing everyday life, the Christian religion becomes moralistic. At that point, Christians become indignant about urban crime, wayward elites, and national hypocrisy. But when the church is more concerned about the gospel and the forgiveness of sins that only comes through the shed blood of Christ, they may like Paul get indignant about moralism and neo-nomianism. The reason could be that like Paul and Machen, these forensic-centric Christians know that by emphasizing good works in public life the moralizers and neo-nomians implicitly embrace the idea that being good is what makes someone or a society Christian, not faith in Christ.

So here’s a proposal: if you want truly religious affections, start by letting Pauline indignation be the norm for your anger.