Sightings 6/2/08
The Idolatry of America
-- Martin E. Marty
Let Damon Linker, author of The
Theocons: Secular America Under Siege summarize Charles Marsh and his
Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Cultural Captivity:
"A professor of religion at the University of Virginia and a
devout evangelical, Marsh believes that the politicization of Christianity in
recent years—using the good names and moral commandments of the church to 'serve
national ambitions, strengthen middle-class values, and justify war'—has been
spiritually disastrous for evangelicals in the United States.
Conservative American Christians, he claims, have forgotten the
difference between 'discipleship and partisanship.' They have
'seized the language of the faith and made it captive to our partisan
agendas—and done so with contempt for Scripture, tradition, and the global,
ecumenical church.' The result has been a oollapse into spiritual
unseriousness, as Christians have 'recast' their faith 'according to our
cultural preferences and baptized our prejudice, along with our will to power,
in the shallow waters of civic piety."
Agreed. All
(basically) true. So say significant numbers of evangelical
pastors, theologians, professors, journalists, and activists. They
have entered a new stage of criticism, or moved beyond criticism, as piles of
recent books attest. So the interest in Marsh, who wants to "take
stock of the whole colossal wreck of the evangelical witness and then try to
rebuild a more authentic Christianity in its place," focuses on what he would do
and how he would do it. Linker, in a review titled "The Idolatry
of America," admires much of Marsh's work and goes a long way with him, but then
criticizes Marsh for his over-reaches. They are theological and
political, and have to do with how theology relates to politics.
The New Republic, which published the review on
April 23rd, usually tends to the secular or Jewish world of books, so it is
impressive to see it give four dense pages to genuine Christian theological
debate, with big names featured. As Linker sees it, Marsh makes
too much of two twentieth-century giants (pin-up boys in the Marty house), Karl
Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Barth, after a slow start, threw
his weight behind the anti-Nazi clergy movements, criticized nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century Protestant liberal theology for tailoring God to meet
the political needs of the bourgeoisie—and so American evangelicals have done,
summarizes Linker, taking "their theological cues not from the Bible or the
Church Fathers but from Karl Rove and Michael Gerson."
Not so fast, or not so far, writes
Linker: Barth overdid his critique of German liberalism, and Marsh
overdoes his comparing and analogizing of American evangelical capitulations to
those German pastors who supported Hitler. (MEM agrees: too much.)
As for Bonhoeffer, the dissenter whom the Nazis executed one month
before the war ended, Linker sees him as a hero—he'd better!—but does think
Marsh is too ambivalent when he sees comparisons between clergy in Germany and
evangelicals here today. "The implication is there," because—and
this is Linker's main point—Marsh expects too much, is too lofty in his
expectations, too unwilling to settle for the ambiguities and messiness of being
a believer and a citizen in the kind of world we have. "We should
be grateful to Marsh for reminding us of the nobility of the true believers."
But, Linker adds, the fixation on purity, with which evangelicals
at large were charged, now is applied to too-pure Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Marsh.
The people just named help us deal with this.
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Sightings
comes from the Martin Marty Center
at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Columbia history professor Samuel Moyn has posted his paper, Jacques Maritain, Christian New Order, and the Birth of Human Rights. (HT: Solum) Here's the abstract:
This paper traces some changes in Catholic political theory eventually taken up and extended during World War II by Jacques Maritain, who became the foremost philosophical exponent of the idea of "human rights" on the postwar scene. I show that the invention of the idea of the "dignity of the human person" as embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights occurred not in biblical or other longstanding traditions, but instead in very recent and contingent history. In conclusion, I speculate on what the restoration of Maritain's route to human rights to its proper contexts might suggest about the cultural meaning the idea had in postwar Continental Europe, which became its homeland.
Here are two more reader responses to the hypothetical about the lessons children will absorb from a loving and committed same-sex couple who are unable to marry.
Continue reading
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Mirror of Justice reader and friend, Professor Scott FitzGibbon, has this observation to Rob’s recent May 28 posting on options regarding support and opposition to same-sex marriage proposals. Here is Scott’s response which I think enriches the debate:
Professor Vischer’s hypothetical eight-year-old, in his blog of May 28, will “absorb” a favorable attitude towards marriage, the argument goes, by visiting with children whose lesbian parents are married.
The apparent strength of this conclusion derives from the stipulation in the hypothetical that the lesbian parents she visits, and their children, are “happy” and the household environment is “loving.” Suppose the reverse and you get the reverse conclusion. Suppose the lesbian relationship to be troubled or unstable – and the literature suggests that will not infrequently be the case – and its presentation as a model of marriage will cast that institution in a poor light rather than a flattering one.
I doubt, anyway, that a kid who grows up to establish an opposite-sex relationship decides whether to marry her boyfriend based on what she absorbed as a child from observing a lesbian couple down the road. Her own parents will be the strongest model.
Further, it is surely not all a matter of what the child “absorbs.” The alternatives proposed in the hypothetical do not include anyone actually discussing anything with the kid. If her parents are Catholics, they might explain to her that, happy or not, same-sex couples cannot really be married, and that whether or not they are enjoying the relationship they are not on the road to true felicity, in this world or the next.
