Tag: political Christianity

So You Want Christian Law but Not Shari’a?

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Don’t forge that Christians can be as threatening to non-Christians as Muslims to Christians (and we’re barely talking about Old Testament law):

So with all other great movements in malignant morals. For example, that of the Lord’s Day Alliance. There are plenty of members of the alliance, I venture to opine, who devote at least a part of Sunday to recreation–perhaps automobiling, or piano-playing, or gastronomy, or novel-reading, or the beating of children. But that doesn’t take anything from their noble passion to destroy and prohibit the recreations of the common people. That doesn’t detract from their gallant effort to make the average man’s Sunday a day of tedium and horror, of sullenness and gloom. That doesn’t make the less laudable their vicious and violent attack upon the poor fellows who go to Back River on their one day of rest to sit under the trees and drink a few bottles of beer and hear a happy song or two and get a breath of fresh air.

The Anti-Cigarette League follows the examples of these elder lodges of chemical purity. It does not ask its members to stop smoking themselves; it merely asks them to advocate laws putting heavy penalties upon smoking by others. Its funds will be divided fairly into two parts. One part I shall keep myself, as a modest recompense for my laborious shaking down of the pious. The other part will be devoted to the propaganda. Rabble-rousers will be supplied to Sunday-schools and Chautauquas. Horrible examples will be exhibited to trembling children. Eminent cigarette manufacturers will be denounced by name. Candidates for public office will be browbeaten into line. Literature will be distributed showing that the cigarette is the mother and father of crime, that every cigarette smoker is a potential pirate and murderer, that all the sorrows of the world are caused by the abhorrent coffin-nail.

Calling Jon Stewart's Bluff

Published on by D. G. Hart45 Comments

I am a Jon Stewart fan even though I only occasionally see clips of the Daily Show. Stewart was Larry Sander’s permanent guest host on the Larry Sanders Show, which earns Stewart high marks in the Hart household, the Sanders Show being a brilliant homage and parody of the late night talk show genre. Stewart also makes a cameo appearance in Wordplay, a witty and charming documentary about the culture of New York Times crossword puzzles’ editors, designers, players, and competition. For these reasons I was heartened to see thanks to my headlines feed at Google Chrome that Stewart had poked fun at Democratic mayors for saying that Chick-Fil-A was unwelcome in their cities. Here is the clip.

Stewart, as you might expect, dishes it out both ways, which is fine since using a sandwich as a form of political identity does not exactly seem what the Greeks had in mind when thinking through representative government. But (spoiler alert!) when he concludes that Chick-Fil-A’s and gay marriage’s products are both good, I demur. For one, has Stewart really considered how healthy a fast-food fried chicken sandwich is? I’m sure that dressings, fat, and steroid drenched chicken breasts make such meals a challenge to good health. For another, how do we know that gay marriage is a positive social arrangement? In fact, one objection to this change in law is that we have no idea what the consequences — positive or negative — of such a change to millenia of legal arrangements and cultural expectations will be. Though we do have some data from social scientists on the benefits of regular marriage.
(For instance, we have enough time to say that the National League is superior to the American League because the former does not use the designated hitter.)

So maybe the way to resolve the kerfuffle over Chick-Fil-A is to be doubly contrarian. Both Chick-Fil-A and gay marriage are unhealthy for America.

Then again, has anyone noticed that homosexuals are among the leading defenders of marriage at a time when marriage is at an all time low in the United States? Could it be that folks who used to thrive on an anti-bourgeois, urban, and culturally and politically radical identity have now embraced a convention associated with white-bread, middle-class, suburban life? Or is gay marriage simply a way of flipping the bird at all those Chick-Fil-A eaters who made family values a political slogan? You want family? You got it.

Muslims Have Their Scarves, Christians Their Sandwiches

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

Political religion takes different forms. For political Islam, a women wearing a head scarf is a symbol of devotion and of defiance against western secularism. For American Christians, it looks like eating a chicken sandwich is a signal of a citizen’s belief, morality, and politics.

All of a sudden, biting into a fried chicken sandwich has become a political statement.

Chick-fil-A, the fast-food chain known for putting faith ahead of profits by closing on Sundays, is standing firm in its opposition to gay marriage after touching off a furor earlier this month.

Gay rights groups have called for a boycott, the Jim Henson Co. pulled its Muppet toys from kids’ meals, and politicians in Boston and Chicago told the chain it is not welcome there.

Across the Bible Belt, where most of the 1,600 restaurants are situated, Christian conservatives have thrown their support behind the Atlanta-based company, promising to buy chicken sandwiches and waffle fries next week on “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day.”

The rest of the news story is here.

As theatrical as the controversy over Chick-fil-A may be (and the company may actually do well from the adverse publicity which is still publicity), one point stands out, though by now it may be a little stale. According to this news story, the mayors of Boston and Chicago have said that Chick-fil-A is unwelcome in those cities. According to Rahm Emanuel, “Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values.” The mayor likely said this thinking that he was taking a courageous stand for diversity and tolerance. But he was also expressing great intolerance in the name of diversity and tolerance.

That may be the intellectual hobgoblin that haunts everyone living in a liberal democracy, though usually only libertarians see that tolerance means toleration even for groups or persons whose views are nutty or objectionable. But it is odd that bright people like Emanuel don’t see that they are erecting a form of intellectual orthodoxy that is just as inflexible as anything the Religious Right might construct.

What Emanuel also fails to see is truth that Thomas Jefferson recognized as basic to living in a free republic. The president’s line about the irrelevance of religion would seem to apply here: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Does Chick-fil-A actually hurt Emanuel or other residents of Chicago just because the owner objects to gay marriage? Ideas are supposed to be freely held in America, as long as they don’t hurt others. (Hurt feelings don’t count since we all face people, ideas, and acts in the United States that don’t empower and affirm us.) Since Chick-fil-A provides a service that many use, and creates jobs that produce tax-payers, why does Emanuel actually care about Dan Cathy’s ideas?

Yes, liberals can be hypocritical. But so are conservatives. What’s surprising is that liberals can be as dumb as (they think) their political opposition.

Postscript: Matthew Lee Anderson makes a good point when he distinguishes “tolerant” (i.e., liberal) from “intolerant” (i.e. Religious Right) consumer boycotts. The latter objects to specific products, the former to ideas. So it’s not the chicken sandwich that offends, but the ideas of the guy who makes it. Perfectionism lives.