Wednesday, February 24, 2016
I agree, Marc, Christians must be optimistic "over the truly long run." But the question is, is that only so in the long run in which we are all dead (and resurrected)?
As an ironist, I actually think there's room for optimism before that. (We might be able to open our eyes, see incongruities, and go in a different direction.) But I don't see how a tragedian can think so.
Marc: I wonder how your commendation of Justice Scalia's "optimism" on the willingness of the majority to make religious accommodations ("in the long run, optimism is not so bad a bet") fits with the "tragic" approach to religious freedom. In our back and forth a few months ago, you argued that tragedy is the most accurate outlook and that even my "ironic" outlook was too sunny for today's religious-freedom clashes.
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Some reflections of mine on Justice Scalia--his faith and judicial philosophy--at Christianity Today. Admiring, with some criticism. The final paragraph:
In end, however, Justice Scalia was a prophet, like many of the great dissenters in the Court’s history (he will rank with Oliver Wendell Holmes among the greatest). And prophecy involves ringing tones and stark terms; it is hard to combine those with qualifiers that charitably give the other side every benefit of the doubt. Justice Scalia lost many battles on the Court, and some of his positions will become even less popular over time. But many of his words will ring with prophetic power for generations to come.
Sunday, February 14, 2016
There will be reams written about Justice Scalia. You could disagree with him (for the record, I have a fair number of times). But the main NPR story, picked up by lots of other sites, has a discrete but very clear error about his record that ought to be corrected before it becomes established. Nina Totenberg writes there:
On questions of separation of church and state, Scalia was a consistent voice for accommodation between the two, and against erecting a high wall of separation. When the court, by a 7-to-2 vote, struck down a Louisiana law that mandated the teaching of creationism in school if evolution is taught, Scalia was dismissive of evolution, calling it merely a "guess, and a very bad guess at that." [Referring to Scalia's dissent in Edwards v. Aguillard]
Scalia did not call evolution "a very bad guess." That was his characterization of what the Louisiana legislators who supported the balanced-treatment law believed. He recounted their belief in order to argue that they had "secular purposes" for supporting the law (thus satisfying prong one of the Lemon v. Kurtzman test), not that their purposes reflected accurate beliefs. The paragraph containing the phrase "bad guess" is one of several paragraphs chock full of cites to the legislators' statements in the legislative record. Here is how Scalia introduced the paragraphs, followed by the relevant paragraph itself (emphases in original):
Before summarizing the testimony of Senator Keith and his supporters, I wish to make clear that I by no means intend to endorse its accuracy. But my views (and the views of this Court) about creation science and evolution are (or should be) beside the point. Our task is not to judge the debate about teaching the origins of life, but to ascertain what the members of the Louisiana Legislature believed. The vast majority of them voted to approve a bill which explicitly stated a secular purpose; what is crucial is not their wisdom in believing that purpose would be achieved by the bill, but their sincerity in believing it would be.
Senator Keith and his witnesses testified essentially as set forth in the following numbered paragraphs: ....
(2) The body of scientific evidence supporting creation science is as strong as that supporting evolution. In fact, it may be stronger. Id. at E-214 (Young statement); id. at E-310 (Sen. Keith); id. at E-416 (Sen. Keith); 2 id. at E-492 (Sen. Keith). The evidence for evolution is far less compelling than we have been led to believe. Evolution is not a scientific "fact," since it cannot actually be observed in a laboratory. Rather, evolution is merely a scientific theory or "guess." 1 id. at E-20 - E-21 (Morris); id. at E-85 (Ward); id. at E-100 (Reiboldt); id. at E-328 - E-329 (Boudreaux); 2 id. at E-506 (Boudreaux). It is a very bad guess at that. The scientific problems with evolution are so serious that it could accurately be termed a "myth." 1 id. at E-85 (Ward); id. at E-92 - E-93 (Kalivoda); id. at E-95 - E-97 (Sen. Keith); id. at E-154 (Boudreaux paper); id. at E-329 (Boudreaux); id. at E-453 (Sen. Keith); 2 id. at E-505 - E-506 (Boudreaux); id. at E-516 (Young).
It couldn't be clearer that Scalia was describing the legislators' views about evolution, not asserting his own.
One website had to correct this same misstatement a few months ago. NPR should correct it now.
I recently published some reflections on the issue of patenting of genes--human and non-human--from the perspective of religious and secular ethics. It includes reflections on the conference that St. Thomas's Murphy Institute co-sponsored with the Von Hugel Institute at St. Edmund's College, Cambridge (UK), last fall. A sample from my piece:
The Cambridge conference showed how religious thought can make valuable contributions to debates over patents on life. Catholicism is well suited for these conversations, with its bedrock commitment to the dignity of human life, its history of reflection on the purposes and limits of private property, and its global network of institutions serving the poor and vulnerable....
The conference also showed that the relationship between life patents and human dignity is complex. One cannot simplistically dismiss all patents in the genetic area as “playing God.” Christianity calls for us not to leave nature alone, but to exercise stewardship for the common good...
But biotechnology, in the Pope’s words, also gives those with knowledge and economic resources “an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity,” and “nothing ensures that [such power] will be used wisely.” Thus patents related to living things still must be subjected to limits based in morality and the equal dignity of all persons. That means first (as all our conference speakers emphasized) that governments must continue to ban patents on natural products and processes, on human beings and on human organs.
Second, even when biotechnology patents are appropriate, the effects of such technologies must be regulated to ensure they produce benefits, not harms.
UPDATE: Another piece on the issue, referring to our conference, by Simon Ravenscroft, one of our organizers, on the Religion and Ethics page of Australian television.
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Wednesday, January 6, 2016
Wheaton College's provost is recommending that Professor Larycia Hawkins be removed from her tenured position for having stated (as part of an expression of civil solidarity with Muslims) that Muslims and Christians worship "the same God." The matter now goes to a faculty advisory committee for its recommendation, and then to the college president.
Wheaton's website contains a set of responses to FAQs concerning the situation. They don't address what I think is the most serious challenge to Wheaton: Do the asserted reasons for saying Islam worships a different God (i.e. Islam rejects the Trinity and Christ's place in salvation) also apply to Judaism? Professor Hawkins seems to affirm (according to the Christianity Today link above) that Muslims and Christians understand God very differently. But the Jewish-Christian differences in understanding of God--many of them similar to the Muslim-Christian differences--do not stop most Christians, I think, from saying that Christians and Jews both worship the God of Abraham.
On the other hand, Wheaton also says (in its FAQ responses) that "[o]n the part of the College, further theological clarification is necessary before [a] reconciliation [with her] can take place, and unfortunately Dr. Hawkins has stated clearly her unwillingness to participate in such further clarifying conversations," which created an "impasse." So perhaps she hasn't allayed concerns that, for example, her "same God" statement might be taken to reflect a more general religious universalism, or a minimizing of the deity and central importance of Jesus, both of which would of course be inconsistent with Wheaton's evangelical commitment.
But that doesn't deal with the more specific claim that "Muslims worship the God of Abraham, albeit with very different understandings than Christians." And I can't help but think that if one is willing to apply that to Judaism but not to Islam, the reason is cultural and political distrust rather than theological distinctiveness. Thus it would be good to know what Wheaton says in this context about Christianity and Judaism.
Thanks very much to Mike for quoting the Catholic Church's position on this from Nostra Aetate. Perhaps the Catholic teaching can give evangelicals some food for thought as they grapple with this issue.
UPDATE: Here is Professor Hawkins's fuller description of her position, in a December 17 letter to Wheaton's administration. HT: Frank Beckwith (he gives his own take on the issue here, and a catalog of others' perspectives here)
Thursday, December 31, 2015
As Howard Friedman reports at Religion Clause, a second lawsuit has now been filed against the Montana Revenue Department for its silly decision to exclude parents and donors of religious schools from participating in the state's tax-credit program for donations to "student scholarship organizations" (SSOs). This complaint is in federal court.
The comments our St. Thomas religious liberty clinic filed, on behalf of several organizations, when the Department was considering the rule predicted that it would be awash in litigation. Why the tax lawyers at the Department wanted to bring this on is beyond me. As we wrote back then, the exclusion is based on a House that Jack Built sequence: the asserted need to prevent the state from crediting "a donation to an SSO that funds a scholarship that assists a parent who chooses a school that may or may not be religious."
Saturday, December 26, 2015
(Minor spoiler alert too:)
If you want it (for, say, holiday dinner-table arguments), Ross Douthat gives a long, detailed list of why The Force Awakens is not a reboot of, but rather the "the same frickin' movie" as, previous ones. He almost persuades me that its overwhelming critical success is evidence of cultural decadence. (No reason to post this here, except that MOJ writers frequently discuss what Douthat says and this gave me an excuse to endorse this view of Ep. 7.) And yes, if the attractive new characters are given an interesting new plot in the next two episodes, the new series will prove to be a success.
Monday, December 21, 2015
The Montana Legislature recently enacted a state tax credit for donations to charitable organizations that provide scholarships for students attending private schools (including, on equal terms, religious schools). When taxpayers have objected that such a programs "aids religion," a number of state courts have rejected that assertion on the merits, most notably the Arizona Supreme Court in Kotterman v. Killian, 972 P.2d 606 (Ariz. 1999). And the U.S. Supreme Court held that taxpayers lacked standing in federal court to challenge Arizona's program under the Establishment Clause (Arizona Christian Sch. Tuition Org. v. Winn, 131 S. Ct. 1436 (2011)).
Unfortunately, as Religion Clause recently reported, the Montana Department of Revenue (charged with enforcing the statute) has promulgated a rule excluding the use of tax credits to support donations for students who use them at "sectarian" schools. The Department has the misguided notion that this program is prohibited by the Montana Constitution's ban on "any direct or indirect appropriation or payment from any public fund or monies ... to aid any [school] controlled in whole or part by any, church, sect, or denomination." Mont. Const. Art. X, sec. 6. This is a particularly egregious example of the use of a state "Blaine Amendment" to discriminate against families who choose religious schooling for their children, and against donors who want to support that choice. (As we've noted here recently, the Supreme Court is considering important certiorari petitions challenging the application of Colorado Blaine's Amendment to discriminate against religious choices in education.)
Several parents, represented by the Institute for Justice, have filed suit against the new rule. During the agency process preceding the final promulgation of the rule, the Religious Liberty Appellate Clinic at St. Thomas, which I direct, drafted comments (here) filed by the Christian Legal Society and the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod. We pointed out a bunch of things, with lots of supporting authority: that a tax credit is not an appropriation or payment, that the credits aid families rather than religious schools as such, and that such discrimination against religious choices is contrary to basic First Amendment principles. One sample bit (emphasis added):
Indeed, excluding religious organizations from this credit would a fortiori require excluding them from tax exemptions and from deductions for charitable contributions, since those exemptions are not separated by the additional steps present here: donation to an SSO that funds a scholarship that assists a parent who chooses a school that may or may not be religious. To find an unconstitutional connection in the House-that-Jack-built sequence of actions here would have intolerable consequences, “endanger[ing] the legislative scheme of taxation.” Toney, 744 N.E.2d at 357. The Montana Constitution, and thus the tax-credit statute, provides no authority for the Department to take this step.
Thanks to UST Law student Jennifer Tripp for her drafting work on the comments.
Thursday, December 17, 2015
In The Washington Post, evangelical theologian Miroslav Wolf criticizes Wheaton College's decision to suspend a professor who is wearing a hijab in solidarity with peaceful Muslims and who based her decision in part on the ground that Muslims and Christians "worship the same God." Wolf says the suspension reflects not a sound assertion of Christian theological distinctiveness, but rather the current political-cultural "enmity" toward Islam (the headline ramps this up to "bigotry," although Wolf doesn't use that term). Wolf notes that Christians (most Christians?) have long accepted that Jews worship the same God, which leads him to ask this good question:
Why is the Christian response to Muslim denial of the Trinity and the incarnation not the same as the response to similar Jewish denial? Why are many Christians today unable to say that Christians and Muslims worship the same God but understand God in partly different ways?
Is there a good answer to the question? One can certainly say (as Wheaton has) that substantially different understandings of the nature of God must be maintained with clarity, and when those differences exist one is not really worshiping "the same God." (See Christianity Today's follow-up story.) But what's the argument for distinguishing, on that score, between Judaism and Islam in their theological differences with Christianity?
Wolf emphasizes other major theological-ethical differences between Christianity and Islam besides the Incarnation: specifically, the Christian assertion that God is, ultimately, love. But, he says, if Christians emphasized that latter difference, "they would need to show how struggle against enemies is a way of loving them — an argument that many great theologians in the past were willing to make." And by any measure, a lot of Americans (including American Christians) currently are not acting with love toward Muslims.
Logically, Wolf's latter point doesn't matter to the "same God" issue: Christ's command to love your enemies applies no matter who they worship or don't worship. (And Wheaton has made clear that Hawkins was free to wear the hijab as an expression of solidarity with Muslim persons; the issue is her "same God" rationale.) But it seems to me Wolf also has a point: when theology becomes operational in politics and culture, our treatment of other people will be connected to how much commonality with them we are able to see.
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