Eugene Volokh has sparked an interesting discussion (here, here and here) regarding Christians' obligation to condemn the inflammatory anti-gay rhetoric of figures like Jimmy Swaggart. (Swaggart essentially asserted that he would be justified in killing a homosexual.)
Volokh suggests that, as members of a movement built around a common set of beliefs, Christians should police their fellow members to ensure against public stances contradicting those beliefs, or at least to avoid leaving the impression that those stances are acceptable within the movement. I agree completely that Swaggart's statement is beyond the pale, and should be repeatedly and openly labeled as such by Christians. But the broader hesitation to condemn loose cannons like Swaggart, Falwell and Robertson may stem in part from the nature of the evangelical Christian movement. Evangelicals are defined in significant part by their insistence that biblical interpretation and application is properly undertaken by the individual believer within the context of her personal spiritual journey. Certainly some community standards will hold sway, to varying degrees, but their authority is secondary, especially when evangelicals are compared to other faith traditions. In this regard, many evangelicals don't voice their objections to outliers like Swaggart, not because they believe he speaks the truth, but because they defer to his individual interpretive prerogative. Disagreement among evangelicals is not generally a cause for discipline or condemnation; it's an inescapable dimension of the movement.
On an unrelated point, Swaggart may offer some insight, or at least cause for reflection, on the controversy over certain bishops' threats to deny communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians. If Swaggart were Catholic and persisted in espousing a belief that the murder of gays is justified, should he be denied communion? My tentative answer is no, but if we're concerned with sending a clear message that a Christian's willful denial of central tenets of the faith will not be ignored by the surrounding Christian community, isn't the denial of communion an effective and powerful way to communicate that disapproval? Or is it enough to voice the community's objections without calling into question the individual's standing within the community? Perhaps it's relevant that Swaggart is a minister of the faith, not a secular actor in the public sphere. But doesn't the Christian community have a pressing concern to communicate disapproval of any publicly visible Christian's open disregard of Christian beliefs? I don't pretend to have the answers to these questions, but if we expect the Christian community to take seriously its members' espousal of un-Christian positions, we can't presume to pick and choose the positions that warrant such treatment.
Rob
Monday, September 20, 2004
Notre Dame's provost, Nathan Hatch, delivered this (I thought) moving and provocative talk after the opening Mass at the University this year. Hatch's remarks built on observations by David Brooks and C.S. Lewis (!) to remind the students that:
Your identity does not derive from how successful you are. All of us, from the top of the class to the bottom, derive our tremendous worth because God, our creator, knows our name, calls us sons and daughters, and takes joy in our own unique gifts. Who you are does not rest on a fickle ability to write brilliantly, to solve the experiment correctly, or climb the organizational ladder.
My second word of advice is this: living in a pressure cooker of achievement, how do we view our neighbors. Our reactions are often twofold, to envy those who seem more gifted and to look past people who seem ordinary. In his recent book on envy, Joseph Epstein notes that envy runs high in the world of art and intellect. “How little it takes to make one academic sick with envy over the pathetically small advantages won by another: the better office, the slightly lighter teaching load, the fickle evaluation of students.”
What is the answer to resenting those who break the curve and ignoring others who seem uninteresting? In his essay, The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis asks us to attend to a proper theology of the human person. He challenges us with the awesome reality of the human person, bearers of the very image of God. “There are no ordinary people,” he concludes. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization––these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, exploit. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself,” he continues, “your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”
In this academic community, during the coming year, may all of our work be leavened by this reality: Neither you nor your neighbor is an ordinary person.
I've always loved Lewis's "The Weight of Glory." In my view, the observations that "there are no ordinary people" and that, indeed, "your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses" are beautiful -- and jurisprudentially significant.
Rick
Here is a thought-provoking essay, by Professor Daniel Crane of Cardozo School of Law, on the "marriage debate." Crane's discussion reminds me of some of the things that Paul Griffiths has had to say on the matter (Here's an essay of Griffiths's in Commonweal). Crane (who identifies as an evanglical Christian) writes:
With same-sex marriage licenses pouring out of City Hall in San Francisco before they were declared invalid, state courts inundated with claims of entitlement to same-sex marriage, a federal constitutional amendment proposed to define marriage as a heterosexual union, and the presidential candidates trying to mollify as many constituencies as possible on this hot potato, same-sex marriage certainly has our attention. Indeed, it's becoming a shibboleth.
A shibboleth is a single issue by which a political candidate or party is judged. The word comes from the biblical story of Jephthah and the Gileadites in Judges 12:4-6. Jephthah had routed Israel's foes from Ephraim and was determined to cut them down to the last man. The Ephraimites weren't obviously distinguishable from the Gileadites by physical appearance, and some tried to sneak through Jephthah's lines. So Jephthah devised a clever test: Any man trying to ford the Jordan was required to say the Hebrew word shibboleth, which means "a torrent of water." Since the Ephraimites mispronounced the word as sibboleth, they were easily identified and slaughtered.
When it comes to politics, we evangelicals love our shibboleths. There is a certain convenience in evaluating political candidates, organizations, and movements by their stand on some discrete social issue—think abortion, creationism, and Prohibition. Though reductionist, the shibboleth approach isn't necessarily irrational. If the shibboleth follows closely from a particular worldview, then it may be a reliable predictor about how the candidate, organization, or movement will react to other issues that people haven't had time to think or ask about.
But, before using a shibboleth, we had better be certain that it accurately encapsulates our worldview. The costs of choosing an improper shibboleth are high. Since the purpose of shibboleths is to create a broad rule of action by generalizing from a narrow assumption, error on the assumption means multiplication of the error many times over.
This is why I believe same-sex marriage is a dangerous shibboleth: It reinforces the status of government as the custodian of the institution of marriage. If the church not only abets but actively furthers the notion that marriage owes its legitimacy to the state's approval, then the battle for the family is all but lost.
He concludes his discussion with the following:
None of this should be taken as an argument that the law should recognize same-sex civil unions. There may be important functional (as opposed to moral) reasons why such recognition would be unwise. Nor should a separation of civil and religious marriage lessen our concern over the recent conduct of activist judges and mayors who have tried to impose their own political vision by judicial or executive fiat, contrary to the clear rules established by state legislatures.
But neither should we escalate the culture war by making this debate into a battle for the heart and soul of marriage. If we do that, we concede that the state owns marriage and that the church's function in blessing unions is subservient to the government's. Far better to lose the battle over the legal definition of marriage than to win it and find that the government now owns one of our most sacred institutions.
Rick
Jessica Wilen Berg, a law prof at Case Western, has a new paper titled "Owning Persons: The Application of Property Theory to Embryos and Fetuses." (Thanks to Larry Solum's blog for the tip.) The title pretty much says it all, as confirmed by the abstract:
Embryos are all over the news. According to the New York Times there are currently 400,000 frozen embryos in storage. Headlines proclaim amazing advances in our understanding of embryonic stem cells. And legislation involving cloning and embryos continues to be hotly debated. Despite the media attention, theoretical analysis of embryos' legal status is lacking.
This article advances a number of novel arguments. First, recognition of property interests does not preclude the recognition of personhood interests. Embryos, fetuses and children may be both persons and property. Second, property law is conceptually more suited to resolving debates about embryos than procreative liberty, as the latter is strongest in those cases where procreation has not yet occurred - e.g., sterilization and contraception. Finally, this article is the first to provide a substantive evaluation of the application of property theories.
The approach is sure to challenge commentators on all sides of the debate. For those who argue that embryos and fetuses are persons, the strong property interests will likely be unpalatable. Similarly, the implications of the combined framework for limiting those property rights as the entity develops will likely be unacceptable to advocates of extensive procreative choice during pregnancy. Nevertheless, this framework provides a more accurate understanding of the legal issues, and therefore may facilitate the eventual resolution of the protracted battle regarding the legal status of embryos and fetuses.
Rob
Get Religion has an interesting post on the media's coverage of the death of an "unborn child" in the wake of Hurricane Ivan.
Rob
