Tag: Ross Douthat

Woman Up

Published on by D. G. Hart30 Comments

While love was hoping all things, the BBs have piled on the situation in Houston in a way that raises a number of interesting questions about persecution. Tim Bayly himself insists that the difficulties contemporary Christians confront increasingly resembles what Chicken Little faced:

. . . the persecution suffered by Christians in this country is powerful, silencing the witness and confession of the Gospel everywhere and constantly. To act as if we don’t see or care about this low-grade persecution because it hasn’t yet come for us and our job and children, or because it hasn’t yet come to our city or school system, or because our mayor is not a lesbian who is subpoenaing the sermons of the churches in our city, is to refuse to read our times as closely and well as we read the clouds. It is to sleep when we should be preparing our children to stand against social pressures, stigmas, and loss of income so in the not-very-distant future they will be able to stand against imprisonment and execution.

Sure, it sounds histrionic to speak of the iron fist of diversity, inclusivity, and pluralism as a real threat to the civil liberties of Christians today. Unless, of course, one has studied the growth of the persecution and martyrdom suffered by our brothers and sisters in Christ under the iron fist of that same diversity, inclusivity, and pluralism enforced across the ancient Roman Empire.

As an American who still thinks that the point of the United States had to do with opposition to centralized and consolidated government, I can sympathize with small-government types who object to the politics of Houston. But as a Christian, I have trouble thinking that this qualifies as persecution or that we should oppose it. After all, the New Testament is replete with calls to Christians to bear their cross:

Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions but for the will of God. For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. (1 Pet 4:1-3 ESV)

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. (2 Cor 4:7-12 ESV)

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matt 5:3-12 ESV)

This doesn’t mean that Christians should be masochists who look for ways to experience pain or that we should somehow lose a capacity to distinguish quiet and peaceful lives from one characterized by affliction. But it does suggest that persecution is not something about which we should bitch. It goes with the turf and may actually be evidence (pay attention Obedience Boys) of a lively faith.

At the same time, does a subpoena rise to the level of persecution? Consider a piece by Ross Douthat some time back:

If the federal government suddenly closed all religious schools in the United States, banned homeschooling, and instituted an anti-religious curriculum in public schools, I would absolutely call it persecution. But a step like denying religious colleges access to public dollars would not rise to the same level. It would certainly create hardship and disruption, and weaken institutional religion in significant ways. But it would leave the basic liberty to educate one’s children in one’s own faith intact, and I cannot see the warrant for claiming that a given faith is “persecuted” by the government’s decision to withhold a subsidy. Again: Disadvantaged, yes; persecuted, no.

Likewise, if the government suddenly required businesses to fire Christians, or instituted a policy of discrimination that prevented them from being hired, that would clearly be a form of persecution. But having the rules of a few professions suddenly pose new ethical dilemmas for religious believers is the kind of thing that can happen in any time and place. It’s a challenge, a hardship, a form of pressure … but it’s not really persecution as I think most people understand the term.

And to Dreher’s point that this definition would imply that there haven’t been that many cases of sustained persecution in the United States — well, I suppose I think that’s right. I wouldn’t use “persecution” to describe the rules that kept Jews out of Ivy League schools and country clubs, for instance, or the experience of atheist parents before the Supreme Court rolled back school prayer, or the hostility and scrutiny that Muslims sometimes face in the post-9/11 U.S.A. Or to use my own faith to bring the distinction to a finer point: In the 19th century, the Ursuline convent riots were a case of actual anti-Catholic persecution; the climate of anti-Catholicism that produced the Blaine amendments was not. This isn’t to minimize the anti-Catholicism of the 1870s and 1880s; it’s just to say that not every form of hostility deserves the same label as the work of a Diocletian or a Nero.

And using the “persecution” label too promiscuously, I think, carries three risks beyond intellectual inaccuracy. First, as Dreher sort of concedes, it doesn’t do enough to acknowledge the vast gulf separating the situation of Western Christians and the incredible heroism of our co-believers overseas, who face eliminative violence on an increasingly-dramatic scale. Second, as I tried to suggest in the column, it doesn’t do enough to acknowledge the gulf separating the situation of Western Christians and the situation of gays and lesbians, past and present, facing persecution at the hands of religiously-motivated actors. And finally, it doesn’t actually prepare conservative believers for a future as a (hopefully creative) religious minority, because it conditions them/us to constantly expect some kind of grand tribulation that probably won’t actually emerge.

Could it be then that by invoking the language of persecution Christians are simply showing their desire to get in the line of victims? After all, this is the recent and easy way to achieve status in the United States, namely, to show that you are the object of oppression (even to the point of having your feelings hurt). But that was hardly the attitude that characterized the early Christian martyrs who knew a thing or two about persecution. Here the BBs may want to take a page — of all things — from a woman named Perpetua:

But the mob asked that their bodies be brought out into the open that their eyes might be the guilty witnesses of the sword that pierced their flesh. And so the martyrs got up and went to the spot of their own accord as the people wanted them to, and kissing one another they sealed their martyrdom with the ritual kiss of peace. The others took the sword in silence and without moving, especially Saturus, who being the first to climb the stairway was the first to die. For once again he was waiting for Perpetual Perpetua, however, had yet to taste more pain. She screamed as she was struck on the bone; then she took the trembling hand of the young gladiator and guided it to her throat. It was as though so great a woman, feared as she was by the unclean spirit, could not be dispatched unless she herself were willing.

Ah, most valiant and blessed martyrs! Truly are you called and chosen for the glory of Christ Jesus our Lord! And any man who exalts, honours, and worships his glory should read for the consolation of the Church these new deeds of heroism which are no less significant than the tales of old. For these new manifestations of virtue will bear witness to one and the same Spirit who still operates, and to God the Father almighty, to his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom is splendour and immeasurable power for all the ages. Amen.

There is persecution and then there is persecution (thanks to our mid-West correspondent).

Church Membership beats W-w

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

Thanks to Ross Douthat who notes that “conservative Protestants who attend services rarely have slightly higher divorce rates than the religiously-unaffiliated, while nominally-Catholic young adults have divorce rates that are slightly lower than the unaffiliated but more than three times (!) as high as the rate for frequent mass-goers.” In other words, think you’re religious matters a lot less than being religious.

Douthat quotes David and Amber Lapp:

Nominally religious young adults are in a vulnerable position: they are religious enough to be pushed into early marriage, for instance, but, lacking the social support mediated by an in-the-flesh religious congregation, they don’t reap the benefits of involvement in a religious community. Instead, religion may become a source of conflict. Like Kayla and Adam, most of the working-class, divorced individuals interviewed in the Middle America Project either reported pressure from religious relatives to marry earlier than they would have liked, or reported conflict because one spouse was not on board with the other spouse’s religious involvement.

… while Kayla and Adam identify as Baptist, it’s not surprising that their religious affiliation did little to protect them from divorce. Their actual church attendance was sporadic, and both expressed ambivalence about conservative religious beliefs, particularly those concerning sex and marriage. “I believe there’s a God. I believe in the Bible. I believe in the beliefs, but I don’t exactly walk every line that you’re supposed to walk,” Kayla says.

Is the Last Acceptable Prejudice No More?

Published on by D. G. Hart69 Comments

I like Ross Douthat and all, but the inside Roman Catholic baseball discussions of divorce at his New York Times blog — NEW YORK friggin’ TIMES!! — are perhaps more appropriate for a parochial website like CTC than at the place for all that’s fit to print. Here’s a recent sampling. First Douthat quotes Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry:

I think this is a grace we often overlook. God’s law is as hard as His mercy is infinite. And none of us are righteous under the law. And none of us, if we are honest, can even be said to want to be righteous under the law, in every single dimension of our life. But, particularly in these delicate and demanding aspects of sexual life and life situations, the grace of wanting to want God’s will is already very precious and important. And is it not in those phases, where we are broken down, and all we can muster the strength to pray for is to want to want, or even to want to want to want, that the Church should be most present with the succor of her sacraments?

… If I am a divorced-remarried-unchaste person and, during the eucharistic liturgy, I cry out in my heart, “O Lord! I do not understand your law, and I do not have the will to follow it, but I love you, and I beg you for forgiveness of my sins and the grace to want to want to follow in your footsteps and to be able to humbly receive your body”, is this a contrition that is “sufficient” for me to be able to receive the Body of Christ?

I think so.

Douthat replies in part:

Whatever the complexities and shades-of-gray involved in human sin, it is very clear in Catholic teaching that the medicinal effect, the “succor” of communion, is inseparable (like a two-dose drug) from the succor of a good confession, and you simply can’t make a good confession, and thus be in a position to benefit spiritually from communion, if you don’t intend to take some positive step to separate yourself from a gravely sinful situation or arrangement. To use a higher-stakes version of the professional case Gobry references — if you work at a job that by its nature requires grave sin for full participation (let’s say, I dunno, you’re a lieutenant for the Wolf of Wall Street in his salad days), and you make a confession of sin but have no plan of any kind to disassociate yourself from the business, your confession is by definition insufficient, and saying “I do not have the will to stop defrauding people, Lord, but I pray to gain it” is a sign that you should be praying and not communing.

The same logic, then, would apply to someone in an institutional arrangement that amounts to public adultery under the church’s definitions. You need not have the full desire to change (of course everything is grayer than a term like “perfect contrition” might suggest), but the desire to have the desire is not enough: You need to have some intention to change your life, some idea of alteration, to confess and commune in good conscience.

Can anyone possibly imagine a Reformed Protestant writer for the New York Times blogging about union with Christ or the ordo salutis and the bearing of these debates on denominational politics with reference to American citizens that belong to NAPARC communions? If not, then why do some argue that the anti-Catholic prejudice still exists in the United States? I am well aware that it used to and I can well imagine Paul Blanshard‘s jaws tightening if he were to encounter Douthat while surfing the Times’ webpages. But Ross Douthat free and frequent comments on Roman Catholic faith and practice at the newspaper considered one of the most secular in the nation sure needs to be added to the calculations of anti-Catholic prejudice.

The Call Thickens

Published on by D. G. Hart66 Comments

Jason and the Callers have nothing on Ross Douthat for explaining what’s at stake in current debates about marriage and what they mean for the Call to Communion:

. . . what’s being proposed and discussed and debated among some of the church’s bishops and cardinals — with, it would seem, the blessing of the pope — is something significantly different: An official mechanism whereby a divorced and remarried Catholic could, without having their previous marriage declared invalid, do penance for any sins involved in their divorce and then receive communion without their new marriage being a moral impediment to reception of the host. In practice, this would move the church in the direction of Eastern Orthodoxy, which has traditionally allowed pastoral exceptions for second marriages, but it would so in a more ambiguous way — effectively creating a kind of second tier of marital unions for Catholics, whose existence the church would decide to “tolerate” (in the words of Cardinal Walter Kasper, the leading voice making the proposal) but “not accept.”

Now one can debate the practical effects of such a proposal (I have various thoughts, but again, I’ll save them). And one certainly can, as the Orthodox and many Protestant churches do, make reasonable theological and biblical arguments for accepting second marriages in some form. But here’s the crucial problem: The test for changes to Catholic practice isn’t just supposed to be “what practical consequences are likely to ensue?” and the bar that such changes need to clear isn’t just supposed to be “what can be reasonably defended by thoughtful Christians?” Rather, the primary test and crucial bar alike are supposed to be “what can be reasonably defended in the light of what the Roman Catholic Church has historically affirmed and taught?”

Seen in that light, it is very hard for me to understand how this kind of change wouldn’t create some pretty significant internal problems for Catholic doctrine as currently and traditionally understood. Saying, with Cardinal Kasper, that second marriages can be tolerated but not accepted implies a zone of human conduct that one might call “tolerable sinfulness,” which is an idea that church teaching does not currently support. (And which if it did support would have all kinds of moral and doctrinal implications, extending well beyond this particular debate.) And whatever individuals and pastors decide to take upon their own consciences, declaring the reception of communion licit for the remarried-but-not-annulled in any systematic way seems impossible without real changes — each with its own potential doctrinal ripples — to one or more of three theologically-important Catholic ideas: The understanding that people in grave sin should not generally receive the Eucharist, the understanding that adultery is always a grave sin, and/or the understanding that a valid sacramental marriage is indissoluble.

Which in turn would mean that if he actually made this kind of change — and, as I said in the column, I do not think he will, but it is being debated with his apparent encouragement, so the possibility has to be addressed — Pope Francis would be either dissolving important church teachings into what looks to me like incoherence, or else changing those same teachings in a way that many conservative Catholics believe that the pope simply cannot do.

Now I am obviously neither a theologian nor a church historian, so my judgments on an issue like this are hardly (ahem) infallible. But in following the controversy, the arguments that this sort of move would not require a doctrinal change seem fairly weak. There is the claim that it would be a strictly disciplinary change, not a dogmatic one … but unlike many other disciplinary issues (from Friday fasts to priestly celibacy), this seems like a case where the discipline is more or less required by a doctrine or doctrines, and to alter one is to at least strongly imply an alteration in the others. There is also the invocation of practices from the early centuries of the church, when some second marriages may have been handled in this manner, and the suggestion that under such a reform the church would be simply returning to an ancient practice. But the entire theory of the development of dogma, which is central to defenses of continuity in Catholic teaching, would seem to militate against the idea that the consistent witness (and to this layman, it really does look pretty consistent) of the second millennium of Catholic history, complete with martyrs and dogmatic definitions, can safely be set aside because of some highly ambiguous cases from the first millennium.

Now these are not points that would trouble many liberal Catholics, who often reject the intertwined ideas of consistency in Catholic doctrine and papal infallibility, and for whom the idea of a pope willing to alter doctrine might be a consummation devoutly to be wished. But for conservative Catholics, many of whom have spent the John Paul and Benedict eras arguing that on a range of controversial questions the whole issue isn’t just that the church shouldn’t change, but that it can’t … well, if a change like this did happen, however hedged and with however many first millennium antecedents invoked, that conservative argument would at the very least look weaker than it did during the last two pontificates.

And since it isn’t a small argument … since the church’s claim to a constant, non-contradicting authority lies close to the heart of why many conservative Catholics are conservative Catholics … well, that’s why the “schism” possibility seems worth raising, because hard-to-process theological shocks are where institutional fractures often start. It’s one thing for conservative Catholics to serve as a kind of loyal opposition during this pontificate — to learn to doubt a pope, or disagree with his rhetoric or decision-making, while remaining faithful to the office and the church. It’s quite another if one of those papal decisions seriously calls into question the doctrinal continuity that’s the very root of conservative-Catholic loyalty. And there just isn’t a recent model apart from the Lefebvrist schism for how that kind of more-Catholic-than-the-pope dissent would practically work.

But once again, I could be completely wrong, about either the problematic nature of the shift being discussed or the likely conservative reaction to the change. All I can say for certain is that a development like this would leave me more doubtful than before about the consistency of Catholic doctrine and the nature of the church. But I’m not sure what to read into these feelings: While I obviously fall into the conservative camp in the Catholic culture wars I’m also on the less-rigorous, more-latitudinarian end of the conservative-Catholic spectrum, so I tend to expect that what unsettles me should unsettle the more rigorous even more … but it could also be that if I were more rigorous I’d be more trusting and less suspicious, and less likely to see (invent?) discontinuities where they might not actually exist. I’m not sure …

Wouldn’t it show their Protestant past if the Callers were so candid in their descriptions of the communion to which they call.

If Christians Thought of Themselves Less as Transformers and More as Pilgrims

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

They might receive better treatment. Ross Douthat brings up a good contrast between the Amish and social conservatives:

. . . let’s pause for a moment to consider the substance of the well-known case she cites, Wisconsin v. Yoder, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Amish families had the right to withdraw their children from education after the 8th grade. (And withdraw completely: They weren’t just petitioning for regulations allowing them to homeschool, though I believe that Wisconsin in that era had policies making homeschooling difficult as well.)

Given the usual public-policy justification for compulsory education, it is very easy to see an argument that the beliefs of Amish parents do, in fact, impose a steep cost on “other people” — with the “other people” in question being, of course, their own children, who are denied the years of education that state law and public policy deem essential to their flourishing. Indeed, from the perspective of a society that often seeks to protect children from unfit parents, and that frets endlessly about high school drop-outs and the high school graduation rate, the burden imposed on Amish teenagers by their parents’ beliefs could be seen as far exceeding the burdens involved in today’s religious liberty debates. A gay couple seeking a wedding photographer is likely to be able to find one even in the event that their preferred choice has a religious objection, and an employee who wants contraceptive coverage can usually purchase it directly with their wages for a non-exorbitant price. But an Amish teenager’s only recourse, if she wants the kind of education that the state usually deems necessary, would require an extreme, wrenching break with the family of her birth, the quest for emancipated-minor status, and the like.

But for evangelicals and Roman Catholics who comprise those opposed to gay marriage to gain a hearing comparable to the one Amish have received, they’d have to present themselves as a minority rather than the moral majority. And the dynamics of evangelicalism and Roman Catholicism — where size matters — clearly point in a direction opposite to that of people who are exiles, sojourners, or refugees. Especially when you enter the world of numbers created by democratic electoral politics, you can’t take any comfort from being a minority group. Of course, American Protestants with British backgrounds have never thought of themselves as a minority. But what happened to Roman Catholics?

Noah Millman's On a Roll

Published on by D. G. Hart48 Comments

First he renders Inside Llewyn Davis a great movie (I left the theater scratching my head about a good movie that defied the Coen’s conventions):

There’s a poetic rightness to the fact that “Inside Llewyn Davis,” one of the best films of the year, was not nominated for Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The latest from the Coen Brothers, “Inside Llewyn Davis” does just about everything it can to alienate voters, starting with the fact that it’s about a raging misanthrope. Like “Her” but in the opposite emotional key, this is another story where form and subject are perfectly mated, and where the story wouldn’t work at all if they were not.

The Coen Brothers have always been interested in losers. But never before have they gotten us so close to the heart of one of those losers, and a loser who knows that he deserves to win, and knows he just isn’t going to, and is consumed by the bitterness of that condition. Like “A Serious Man,” this feels like a very personal film for them, but whereas “A Serious Man” wrestled with origins – specifically their Jewish identity – “Inside Llewyn Davis” wrestles with destiny, and the possibility of not having one.

Played with wonderful naturalism by relative newcomer Oscar Isaac, Llewyn Davis is a folk singer in New York in 1961, right before folk is about to explode out of its niche with the emergence of Bob Dylan. But Llewyn isn’t going anywhere. He can’t afford even a rathole apartment downtown, and crashes on the couches of the vanishingly few New Yorkers who don’t hate his guts. One of them is his more successful friend’s wife (Carey Mulligan, giving a nicely subtle performance – watch her eyes while she sings), who informs him she’s knocked up, possibly by him. Another is an uptown academic couple who are faultlessly generous with him, and whose generosity he rewards by lashing out, cursing, saying he feels like a trained poodle.

He’s got more than his share of rotten luck – beaten up by inexplicably malevolent cowboys, robbed of even his minimal royalties by his rotten manager, trapped for hours on the way to Chicago with an outlandishly insulting old jazz man who won’t stop poking him with his canes (the only out-and-out Coen grotesque in the film, played by John Goodman). But he also makes his own bad luck, telling his sister (Jeanine Serralles) to throw out his old stuff (including his old mariner’s license, which he turns out to need), refusing royalties on a ridiculous novelty song that his friend (the one he cuckolded, played with delightfully deadpan squareness by Justin Timberlake) wrote so that he can get the cash quicker (only to see the song do well), and, when he finally gets a chance to audition for a manager who could really take him places (F. Murray Abraham), picking an obscure and depressing song guaranteed to turn him away. And his response to every piece of bad mazel he suffers is the same, whether he’s obviously implicated or not: a sour conviction that it figures, that the universe has it in for him one way or another.

With one exception. In what is certainly a screenwriting joke (given the ubiquity of Blake Snyder’s book) this deeply unattractive character does one noble thing. He saves a cat. Or tries to.

Then Millman wonders about the value of using w-w to debate atheists who use Pat Robertson as an interlocutor:

If I understand [Ross Douthat’s] argument now, it is that the new atheists’ worldview lacks “coherence” – whereas other world views, including some other varieties of atheism, would not lack that coherence so drastically.

I suspect that’s true. But what I would say in response is that virtually nobody has a “coherent” worldview. I’m pretty sure I don’t. And it’s only a certain sort of personality that feels a psychic need for a worldview characterized by coherence. I might even go further and say that some religions are more prone to seek that particular grail than others. I’d certainly rank Catholicism far higher on the “seeks coherence” scale than, say, Judaism, or the LDS Church, to say nothing of faith traditions like Hinduism that don’t even have a clear mechanism for defining the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, and that hence by definition cannot provide that kind of coherence.

If guys like Bryan Cross were to read more Millman and watch more movies by the Coens, would the Call to Communion be funnier and more effective?

Callers' Cognitive Dissonance

Published on by D. G. Hart623 Comments

Ross Douthat wrote recently about the odd reaction of liberal Roman Catholics to the notion that Pope Francis may change church teaching. He referred to Damon Linker’s surprise when doing an NPR talk show and a liberal Roman Catholic caller indicated that Linker was wrong to think that Francis changing the church’s stands was a potentially big deal:

After reading an endless stream of gushing commentary by liberal Catholics on Pope Francis, I’m beginning to wonder if they ever really cared about reforming doctrine in the first place.

The seeds of doubt were planted a couple of weeks after my TNR essay was published, when I appeared on an NPR radio show to discuss the pope. I repeated my argument, but then a caller challenged me. Describing herself as a progressive Catholic, she dismissed my skepticism about the likelihood of Francis reforming church doctrine. “Doctrine for a Catholic, now, is not even an issue,” said Trish from Kentucky (you can listen to her beginning at 24:43). “Catholics do not care about doctrine,” she said, adding, “It’s irrelevant. It’s a non-issue for Catholics.”

That, to be honest, is something that I hadn’t considered when I wrote my essay. As I indicated in my remarks responding to Trish, I had assumed all along that liberal Catholics wanted to liberalize Catholic doctrine — that they wanted to bring the church, as I wrote in TNR, “into conformity with the egalitarian ethos of modern liberalism, including its embrace of gay rights, sexual freedom, and gender equality.”

But here was a liberal Catholic telling me I’d gotten it all wrong. The pope’s warm, welcoming words are “everything,” Trish said, because doctrine, including that covering contraception and divorce, is “useless.”

Douthat concedes that this form of liberal Roman Catholicism may be more prevalent in U.S. circles than he had imagined (though you’d never know that from CTC):

The Commonweal-reading wing of liberal Catholicism would certainly reject the latter idea [i.e., “Roman Catholicism” just happens to be the name of the stage on which your purely individual spiritual drama is taking place], but the kind of “post-Catholic Catholicism” Linker describes is clearly more of a force in our culture today than it was during the early days of the American Church’s post-Vatican II civil war (it’s hard to understand the controversy over American nuns, for instance, without recognizing its impact), and the Trishes of the culture have a strong wind at their back in a way that would-be reformers of the old, 1960s-era school of liberal Catholicism arguably do not.

But Douthat is hopeful of another way of reading the situation, one he found among Jewish Americans whose conflicted and at times hypocritical observance of Judaism’s norms translated into children more observant than their parents.

[The problem is] how to make its hardest rules seem like aspirations rather than just judgments, and how to deal with the many fine personal gradations that can exist between orthodoxy and apostasy, fidelity and dissent. And I suspect there are many Catholics who would be classified as “liberal” who want . . . room to dissent from a teaching or fail to live up to it in practice, but they don’t necessarily want the church to change that teaching so that the dissonance or tension they feel simply goes away. Hence their positive reaction to Francis’s rhetorical shift and their lack of urgency about actual doctrinal change. They aren’t necessarily all Trishes who have decided that they don’t care about what the Catechism says. Some of them, at least, might be more like the Orthodox Jews who parked their cars around the corner without demanding that the rabbi be okay with it, and whose children turned out to be more observant, rather than less.

Whatever this post may indicate about the more than cognitive dissonance — call it denial — that Protestants-turned-Roman Catholic must face when seeing how broad the spectrum of Roman Catholicism in action and possibly wondering why nothing of consequence happens, it does lead to a curious point that many miss about Protestantism, Douthat included. I can actually imagine describing the OPC as the kind of place where the room for dissent that Douthat imagines exists — a church that makes room for dissenters to turn into people with children who become much more disciplined in their observance. After all, we have plenty of public disputes in Reformed circles about the application of redemption, about the law, about biblical interpretation. An ordinary church member doesn’t need to worry about any of this, but also may follow the latest blogs with great zeal. At the same time, our officers know the procedures for negotiating such dissent. We have well prescribed rules and frameworks of jurisdiction that allow for discipline to be real and serious. If you cross the line as an officer, you will suffer, and the people who can make you suffer know what to do. As a lay person, if you don’t adhere to church teaching (as long as you don’t sin), you simply can’t teach Sunday school. Sabbath observance is arguably the best case of this. In many congregations, if you don’t attend both services you won’t be considered for special office. If you don’t return to church at night, no one is going to shame you into a puddle of remorse. Sanctifying the Lord’s Day is the norm, the standard, and it may even be an aspiration. Either way, the rules governing church discipline — which is in the hands of a variety of officers at a number of levels, thus insuring mixed government (hello, ecclesiastical subsidiarity) — give officers a clear sense of how to enforce the norms, even supplying a dose of wisdom by forcing an officer particularly zealous about the Lord’s Day to calculate how his charges against a fellow church member will go with other members of session, presbytery, and even General Assembly.

What Rome seems to lack, in contrast, is any mechanism for dissenters, bishops, priests, Knights of Columbus, Nancy Pelosi to know how to process dissent and its flipside. The Vatican has the levers of power but they are remote from ordinary priests, lay people, religious. In which case, dissent becomes as much a piece of ecclesiastical furniture as papal power. Dissent and papal power are there, but it’s just white noise. There’s no manual for how to adjust the volume or turn off the machine. (And what’s particularly odd about this state of affairs is that Rome has had over a millenium to try to figure this out, and with all that charism no less!)

Thanks to Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances (based on Scripture, of course), Presbyterians have the instructions.

Postscript: Here’s an example of the kind of white noise that dissent and authority comprise for the superior mechanism of an infallible pope. It is from John Allen’s story about papal representatives’ testimony in Geneva before the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Church about the child-abuse scandal:

Second, most of the immediate blowback against Thursday’s presentation by Tomasi and Scicluna focused on the claim that Rome is not responsible for supervising the more than 400,000 Catholic priests of the world, which falls instead to local bishops and religious superiors. Repeatedly, Tomasi and Scicluna offered statements of principle as to how the church ought to operate, but were then forced to concede that implementation varies widely at the grassroots.

Critics found the claim that the Vatican can’t take direct control of the situation disingenuous.

“We’re very saddened that such a huge and powerful church bureaucracy continues to pretend it’s powerless over its own officials,” said a statement from the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

In fairness, insistence on the autonomy of the local church is perfectly consistent with both official Catholic ecclesiology and actual practice in the church. It’s worth noting that a federal judge in Oregon, who’s a Mormon with no dog in Catholic fights, took a close look at the contention that priests are “employees” of the Vatican in a lawsuit related to the abuse scandals in 2012 and ruled that they clearly aren’t.

Nevertheless, the skepticism those claims elicited Thursday illustrates the uphill climb the Vatican faces in trying to persuade people that it couldn’t impose its will if it really wanted to.

In truth, this has long been one the paradoxes generated by the sex abuse mess. For decades, church reformers (especially on the liberal end of things) have clamored for greater collegiality in Catholicism, and they applauded vigorously when Pope Francis pledged support for a “healthy decentralization” in his recent document, Evangelii Gaudium. Yet when it comes to sex abuse, they seem to want the exact opposite — they want the long arm of the law to reach down from Rome and crack heads.

What this perhaps suggests is that theologians working on the nature and limits of papal authority and the relationship between local churches and Rome need to sit down with the child protection people to make sure that the real-world experience of the abuse scandals is brought into the conversation.

The truth of it may be that a strong pope is a bit like a lawyer — everybody loves to complain until they need one.

Turns out that papal authority is great for apologetics, not so great for running the church.

Male Pattern Sensitivity

Published on by D. G. Hart21 Comments

Who is more sensitive?

Bill Smith in response to Thabiti Anyabwile on crazy Confederate uncles?

I should not have to say these things, but I will, though I know some, perhaps including Brother Anyabwile, will take it as the equivalent of “I have black friends”: (1) I have no sympathy for the League of the South. I have never been to Monroe, Louisiana, or attended a Confederate Ball. While I am eligible for membership, I have not joined the Sons of the Confederacy because I do not want anything to do with the racism of some of its members. (2) In seminary in the early 1970s I spent two summers working as an assistant to a black Presbyterian pastor in Jackson, MS. (3) I was run off as a RUM campus minister, with a wife and five babies, in part because of my racial views and practice. Ours was the only integrated RUF in Mississippi, and we integrated the statewide conferences. I stood by an interracial dating couple which included my sitting in an office hearing one of them described as a “white N-word” by a person threatening my job. (4) I have a love-hate relationship with the South, and particularly with Mississippi. Mississippi is a place where place (both geography and status) and people (your family and social group) make a great deal of difference. I hate indirection and insincerity in relationships. But the South is like my family. I can point out theie faults, but if you go to talking bad about my people, I’ll bow my neck and clench my fists. (5) I read B.B. Warfield and listen to B.B. King.

But, nevertheless I am one of those crazy Confederates I suppose because I am (1) white (so far as I know, though there are questions) , (2) Reformed (in my case defined by the 39 Articles); (3) western (in civilization – the “dead white guys”); (4) Southern (by heritage and affection).

Like all paranoid schizophrenics, I feel I have been persecuted.

Or Jemar Tisby on Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson?

So, Blacks were happier during the Jim Crow era? Does he assume that all Blacks now are on welfare?

I’ve actually heard similar reasoning quite often. Usually these comments come from older Whites who grew up in the South and remember it fondly. I understand their point. They look back on their experience of a historical moment that was mostly positive, and they want to remember it that way. The problem in a segregated society, then and now, is that our perceptions tend only to reflect our particular realities. We have little exposure to the realities of others, including an awareness of their hardships.

What Phil Robertson and others get wrong is how they diagnose the state of race relations in America. They use external cues like the frequency of a smile, and their personal exposure to overt instances of racism to judge the climate of a culture. But what some people fail to understand is that there are unwritten rules of conduct when Blacks interact with Whites. . . .

It’s possible that Phil Robertson knew Blacks who were genuinely happy. It’s possible that in his community there truly were exceptionally positive relationships between Blacks and Whites. It’s possible, but not likely. What’s probably closer to reality is that he saw Black people who knew the rules. They knew what they could say and do around Whites who held the power. Even if those Whites were lower-income or “white trash” as Mr. Robertson describes it. There was still a cultural curtain separating the races.

I am merely asking, since it seems that everyone is sensitive and that everyone also expects others to moderate their sensitivity for the sake of getting along, though Joe Carter may differ.

I do believe that Tisby is correct to conclude that:

We all need to examine our tools of discernment. What are we using as evidence for a hypothesis about a people? Are we employing superficial and anecdotal proofs for our theories? Or are we engaging in meaningful dialogue with those who are different from us?

I am not sure that Anyabwile or Smith’s posts meet Tisby’s guidelines, nor do I think either man is without a point. The issue may be whether each man can acknowledge the other’s grievance, or whether one grievance trumps the other and lowers Tisby’s threshold for “meaningful dialogue.” That’s why Ross Douthat’s point (in the context of “12 Years A Slave”) is worth repeating:

A fruitful conversation about race in America, then, would require both sides to somehow pick a different starting point. To get a fair hearing from liberals — and, more importantly, from black Americans — the right would need to begin from a place of greater empathy for the black experience, and greater respect for the historical reasons that voter ID laws and Rush Limbaugh soliloquies can raise so many hackles. To get a fair hearing from conservatives, liberals would need to begin by imputing racism less frequently, attacking racially-entangled policies that aren’t remotely like Jim Crow on the merits rather than just calling them Jim Crow, Round Two, and recognizing that (as with Hitler analogies) the sooner you link your interlocutors to slaveowners, the faster they will tune you out.

Obama-era conservatism has often gone backward, not forward, where this potential conversation is concerned. But a liberalism that expects conservatives to see their present-day positions and rhetoric illuminated and condemned by a cinematic portrait of the evils of slavery in 1840s Louisiana — or that declares them unreachable when they don’t — is a liberalism that’s as unready for dialogue as any insensitive right-wing talk show host.

The Wisdom of the World

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

In light of the recent discussions of Christian rap and hip-hop and the racial attitudes that plague middle-aged white men who don’t either care for or listen to rap, Ross Douthat has advice for worldlings to which Christians could well take heed:

A fruitful conversation about race in America, then, would require both sides to somehow pick a different starting point. To get a fair hearing from liberals — and, more importantly, from black Americans — the right would need to begin from a place of greater empathy for the black experience, and greater respect for the historical reasons that voter ID laws and Rush Limbaugh soliloquies can raise so many hackles. To get a fair hearing from conservatives, liberals would need to begin by imputing racism less frequently, attacking racially-entangled policies that aren’t remotely like Jim Crow on the merits rather than just calling them Jim Crow, Round Two, and recognizing that (as with Hitler analogies) the sooner you link your interlocutors to slaveowners, the faster they will tune you out.

What Mechanism Fixes This?

Published on by D. G. Hart53 Comments

Ross Douthat describes a world that is hard to square with The Call:

There are many Catholics, as I’ve pointed out before, who dissent from church teaching on various issues in a “soft” way that doesn’t really shape their relationship to the church — and this population may be pretty content with a change in tone and emphasis (and press coverage!) that doesn’t otherwise lead to dramatic shifts. (This is roughly what John Allen has in mind when he describes Francis as potentially “a pope for the Catholic middle.”) Then, in an overlapping category, there are self-defined “liberal Catholics” for whom economic concerns are much more crucial to their self-definition than either moral or theological debates, and who are likely to be similarly content with a papacy that seems to be foregrounding and validating their issues even if it’s also reaffirming traditional doctrine on sex, marriage and the family.

Then at the opposite extreme there are liberal Catholics (and many lapsed and semi-lapsed Catholics) whose vision is more comprehensively hostile to the church as it has existed and exists, and whose temporary happiness with Pope Francis is likely to dissipate in the absence of the kind of sweeping, Protestantizing change that more orthodox believers consider not only undesirable but impossible. Where this category overlaps with the various secular and non-Catholic voices who have embraced the “Good Pope Francis” narrative, you can see the potential for an eventual large-scale backlash, of the kind that Joshua Keating hints at in a piece for Slate today, which ends up dismissing Francis’s grasp for a religious middle as all salesmanship and no substance, and the new pope himself as just another Vatican reactionary.

Then, finally, you have Catholics who are morally/culturally/theologically liberal but also realistic about the ways in which Catholicism can and cannot change — by which mean I mean that they want to see their church address and adapt to certain post-sexual revolution realities, but don’t expect or desire a revolution that suddenly makes every church-versus-culture conflict on these issues disappear.

If Jason and the Callers have an answer, I’d like to know.