Here's an interesting Beliefnet interview with religion professor Stephen Webb, author of a new book called Good Eating, who "describes himself as an 'evangelical theologian' whose vegetarian lifestyle is biblically based." He explains:
I started reading the Bible again from a perspective of compassion for animals, and I felt like I was reading it for the first time. I discovered a whole world of passages about animals.
The trick is to see the Bible framed in terms of God's love for all of creation and the shared destiny of humans and animals. Animals are a crucial part of God's creation. They're there when animals are shown in heaven in the great visions of the prophets.
From this he concludes that [v]egetarianism is the diet of hope, an eschatological diet":
It's a diet of witnessing to your hope that, in the end, God will restore the entire world to God's original intentions. That God will redeem humans and animals alike.
Redeem animals from what? Not their own sins? You have to rethink heaven. It's not just for people who sin--it's for any creature who has suffered, whose life has been incomplete, who's been a victim. Heaven is about the restoration of all things to their original goodness.
I wouldn't want to go around judging everyone who eats meat, but I do think vegetarianism is an act that witnesses to our faith.
Among the interesting exegetical elements: the point that Adam and Eve still ate fruit and nuts after God gave them dominion over the earth (and only ate meat after the fall), and the claim that God gave the Israelites a sickening oversupply of quail as punishment for their being dissatisfied with manna.
It's also interesting that, among other things, this is the same Stephen Webb whose previous book American Providence, according to the publisher's synopsis,
argues for a robust doctrine of providence--a doctrine that he contends has been frequently neglected by American theologians due to their reluctance to claim any special status for the United States. He defends the idea that American foreign policy should be seen as a vehicle of God's design for history.
I wonder if, given our current cultural-political alignments, Professor Webb is the only person in the world who believes in both vegetarianism and the providential role of the United States.
At a deeper level, though, the two positions may be consistent. In Webb's outlook, both vegetarianism and American providentialism appear to be efforts to bring God's ultimate intentions for the world into the here and now.
It does seem to me, though, that a Christian idea of American providentialism, to be consistent with the kind of "vegetarianism of Christian hope" that Webb defends, has to have two qualifying features: (a) I should have a preference against using military force -- otherwise you're dismissing any Christian eschatological hope that the ultimate norm of peacemaking can be brought into the world's affairs, the very kind of eschatological hope that Webb advocates with respect to diet and treatment of animals. (Not having read the first book, I don't know what he says about the use of military force.) (b) It should have an appreciation of how a providential nation can be arrogant and get things wrong. (And the two books may be consistent on this score; according to this review by Jean Elshtain, what Webb's earlier book defends is "a position of chastened providentialism within which providence is felt as a burden that checks triumphalism.")
Harvard theologian Harvey Cox heralds the resurrection of a "progressive" wing of American evangelicalism, evidenced in the evangelical leaders who have called for campaigns against global warming and poverty, criticized the Iraq war, and so forth. "This does not mean they will all vote for Democrats, with whom they still disagree on several matters, but that they are concerned about a much wider range of issues." Then Cox has something to say about "family values" and the gospel:
One reason the future may belong to these new evangelicals is that they take the life and teaching of Jesus more seriously than the religious right, which bases its positions not on the gospels, but on what they call "traditional values" and "family values." But Jesus himself had little to say about family values; rather, he emphasized love of neighbor, and even of the enemy.
A quick, non-sytematic reaction to this paragraph: One can agree with Cox that the current Religious Right fails to emphasize some central Biblical themes in its public-policy prescriptions -- I do think this with respect to poverty, the environment, and peacemaking -- and at the same time think that that "family values" are important for a few reasons: (1) Jesus did say things about family, e.g. condemning divorce or at least its easy availability. (2) Ideals and commands concerning family appear prominently elsewhere in the scriptures. (3) The principle of the importance of family is defensible without appealing to the authority of Jesus or scripture and thus is the kind of argument particularly appropriate for a religiously pluralistic society (as progressives often emphasize in other contexts). (4) Some aspects of "family values" are important to other themes that Jesus did emphasize, e.g. the care of the vulnerable including children (for whom stable, supportive families are important). (5) An emphasis on the family may therefore be a valuable means of translating elements of Jesus's teaching into today's circumstances, when the nuclear-family household has largely replaced ties such as extended family, village, or clan that would have been central in Jesus' time.
I think we could all agree that what these arguments provide support for is a wholistic focus on family health and stability, not a focus solely on an issue like opposing same-sex marriage (even if the latter is properly part of the wholistic agenda).
ThisWashington Post article describes clergy who blog, the difference between the approaches/content of their blogs versus their sermons/homilies, etc. A couple of Catholic parish-priest bloggers appear in the story, but overall the evangelical and "emergent" pastors are more cyber-savvy:
Several churchgoers said blogs are a fairly natural fit at "new paradigm" churches such as History Church and National Community Church, where one of the 12 core values is "everything is an experiment" and 75 percent of the 900 members are single and in their twenties. Several Catholic and mainline Protestant ministers said their blogs do not blend in as seamlessly within their more traditional congregations.
In today's Washington Post, Robbie George and bioethicist Eric Cohen expand the moral critique of South Korean researcher Hwang Woo Suk's embryonic stem cell (ESC) project beyond the fraudulent data he reported:
Hwang's violation involved the exploitation of women, who undergo a risky and unpleasant procedure -- first, ovarian hyperstimulation, then the insertion of a needle into their ovaries to procure the wanted oocytes -- with no medical benefit to themselves. In the attempt to produce a single cloned embryo, thousands of eggs were harvested and used as raw materials. . . .
In the end, the lesson of the cloning scandal is not simply that specific research guidelines were violated; it is that human cloning, even for research, is so morally problematic that its practitioners will always be covering their tracks, especially as they try to meet the false expectations of miraculous progress that they have helped create. . . .
Instead of engaging in fraud and coverup, or conducting experiments that violate the moral principles of many citizens, we should look to scientific creativity for an answer. Since the cloning fraud, many scientists -- such as Markus Grompe at Oregon Health & Science University and Rudolf Jaenisch at MIT -- have been doing just that. And others, such as Kevin Eggan at Harvard, may have found a technique, called "cell fusion," that would create new, versatile, genetically controlled stem cell lines by fusing existing stem cells and ordinary DNA. Scientists in Japan just announced that they may have found a way to do this without even needing an existing stem cell line.
The ongoing development of stem-cell research that avoids the moral problems of creating and destroying embryos is certainly welcome news. One nit: I wonder if others who know more about this think that there also significant dangers of hype and pressure for results concerning the non-embryonic research.
(Thanks to MOJ reader and St. Thomas law student Kelly Crow for the pointer.)
The New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, has rejected a state constitutional claim for same-sex marriage. I haven't read the whole decision yet, but it appears to be decided under rational-basis review, rejecting the arguments that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made in finding opposite-sex-only marriage irrational. As the New York Timesreports:
The decision called the idea of same-sex marriage "a relatively new one" and said that for most of history, society has conceived of marriage exclusively as a bond between a man and a woman. "A court should not lightly conclude that everyone who held this belief was irrational, ignorant or bigoted," the decision stated.
"There are at least two grounds that rationally support the limitation on marriage that the legislature has enacted," the court said, "both of which are derived from the undisputed assumption that marriage is important to the welfare of children."
First, the court said, marriage could be preserved as an "inducement" to heterosexual couples to remain in stable, long-term, and child-bearing relationships. Second, lawmakers could rationally conclude that "it is better, other things being equal, for children to grow up with both a mother and the father."
Although there are arguments for same-sex marriage as a matter of policy, this decision looks like it reflects proper judicial humility and restraint in refusing to tar opposite-sex-only marriage with the labels of irrationality or bigotry.
In response to Rick and Steve ... I think that the requirement of "secular purpose" does serve a role in keeping government to its proper sphere of this-worldly matters -- an orientation that is important to both religious freedom (assigning religious matters largely to an autonomous religious sphere) and political freedom (reinforcing limited government). But if the requirement is too severe, it turns the useful concept of this-wordly-oriented government into the bad concept of a secularized government that must turn a blind eye to the religious insights that are relevant to this-worldly matters (and that, as Rick reminds us, the democratic majority believes are relevant). Such a government consigns religion to the private sphere alone, especially as the government grows in size and occupies more of public life. That's my worry about Steve's nearly absolute rule against government expression of religious propositions.
To me, the main distinction that's relevant here concerns not the rationale(s) for government action, but the nature of the action. If the government is acting within its ordinary sphere of authority -- making rules of justice and policy concerning this-worldly matters like economics, criminal law, health and social welfare, foreign affairs, etc. -- then it should be able to rely on religious rationales pretty much like other rationales. Even here, I think it helpful to demand that government articulate some secular rationale for its action; this helps keep government oriented toward the sphere of this-worldly matters. (And in response to Rick, I think that we can make a distinction between rationales that explicitly rest on ultimate or religious claims and those that stop short of doing so -- even if the latter might logically have to rest ultimately on premises about ultimate matters. Pretty much any distinction between the civil and religious spheres, from Augustine to Canossa to the First Amendment, rests on our ability to make some such distinction however imperfect.) But for the reasons I gave before, this is not and should not be much of a barrier; there is virtually always a secular rationale accompanying the religious ones. I think, for example, that the Court was off base in Epperson v. Arkansas when it claimed there was no rationale for opposition to evolution other than Biblical literalism.
By contrast, if the government is acting within the explicitly religious sphere -- prayers, religious ceremonies, religious displays -- then normatively I think it is stepping beyond, or to the edges of, its proper sphere and I would like to see it more constrained. Thus I have a lot more normative sympathy for the civil rights law that contains a "whereas" clause referring to God creating humans equal than I do for the official prayer or creche display.
Steve makes a good point about the difference between citizens' arguments and government actions: the latter are subject to the Establishment Clause and therefore to some kind of limit on reliance on religious reasons as support for legislation. The interesting question is, what is that limit? Steve puts it two ways: (1) that those enacting legislation must "provide secular reasons to meet constitutional requirements," and (2) that "[g]overnment may not pass a restriction of any kind with a whereas clause arguing from the authority of God" because "[i]t is not the role of government to tell us what God has to say about any subject." The second rule is tougher, because it would stop the legislature's expression of a religious rationale for a law even if also expressed lots of secular rationales.
I certainly agree with #1 (descriptively and normatively). I just think that it's very seldom violated: e.g there are unquestionably secular reasons supporting abortion restrictions (which is why it's funny that Obama raises that example). There were even secular reasons motivating the restrictions on teaching evolution -- like the fear of Social Darwinism -- as the recent bio of William Jennings Bryan documents. When people think some behavior violates God's standard, they almost always think it has bad worldly consequences as well.
I have more doubts about Steve's proposition #2 (doubts expressed here). Wouldn't #2 make the Declaration of Independence a violation of the Establishment Clause because the Declaration grounds human being's rights on (among other things) "[the] endow[ment] by their creator"? Wouldn't the proposition make Jefferson's Virginia Religious Freedom Statute a violation of the Establishment Clause because that statute grounds religious freedom largely (though not solely) on religious propositions such as "Almighty God hath created the mind free"? Shouldn't we avoid reading the Establishment Clause as containing principles condemning these foundational documents adopted around the same time? If a modern-day civil rights law contained a whereas clause referring to the equality of "all God's children" and incorporating the Declaration's claims about equality and rights coming from the divine Creator, should the clause -- or the legislation -- be invalidated?
I'm glad to be able to talk about the Declaration today, and to wish everyone a happy 4th of July.
In the department of promotion of my own projects, may I recommend a new multiauthor treatise, Religious Organizations in the United States: A Study of Identity, Liberty, and the Law, just published by Carolina Academic Press, for purchase by your law school (or other institution's) library? As the Carolina blurb puts it, "[t]he legal structures of religious organizations encompass not only their corporate organizations, but the many ways employment, property ownership, decisions regarding forms of ministry, and participation in society define a particular institution. . . . The book [provides] a detailed description of policies, identity, and the effect of legal rules on church structures." The authors include (among others) lawprofs Angela Carmella, Carl Esbeck, Edward Gaffney, Donald Hermann, Douglas Laycock, William Marshall, and yours truly, as well as well as religious-history eminence Martin Marty, USCCB general counsel Mark Chopko, leading sociologist of religion Rhys Williams, and newly minted federal judge (and ex-lawprof) Pat Schiltz. As Rick recently noted, threats to religious institutional autonomy are becoming more frequent and pressing; this book offers some background and resources for responding to them.
