Three Red Herrings in the Gay Marriage Debate

June 30, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

The dust is settling from the battle of Albany, and the smell of red herrings is in the air.  Gay-marriage is now legally recognized in the state of New York.  Out of every 9 Americans, 1 now lives in a state that legally affirms gay marriage, and with California likely to follow soon, the proportion will soon swell to 1 out of every 6.  While the air is filled with commentary on gay marriage, I wanted to address three red herrings in the debate.  The idiom comes from the notion that one could use the pungent scent of a “red herring” to throw a hound off the scent of whatever it hunted.  A red herring diverts attention from where attention properly belongs.

When I hear people say these things, I know they’re not really informed on the reasons why social conservatives oppose gay marriage.  My purpose here is not to build an argument against gay marriage.  I have a longer series (most recently here) on basic matters of homosexuality and Christianity.  The point here is to help people — whether they oppose or support same-sex marriage — better understand and discuss the arguments.

“How could same-sex marriage possibly be a threat to my marriage?”

It’s not.  If Adam and Steve wish to marry in New York or Massachusetts, this will do nothing to harm your marriage in California or Georgia — or even in New York or Massachusetts.  But here’s the thing: no one ever claimed that the legal recognition of gay marriage is going to harm your marriage.  The claim is that it will harm the institution of marriage.  And, with all due respect, the institution of marriage is more important than your marriage.  Societies are built on the institution of marriage.  But I’m sure your marriage is nice too.

“Gay Marriage Has Been Legalized in [Pick a State], and Armageddon Hardly Seems to Have Broken Out.”

This too is true, and this too is irrelevant.  No one was predicting that demons would rise up out of the earth and slaughter humankind.  Nor was anyone foretelling that the legal recognition of gay marriage would provoke a sudden rash of divorces or instant social disintegration.  The concern was — and is — that the legalization of gay marriage contributes even further to the long-term deterioration of the institution.

Here’s one very important thing to understand.  Those who oppose same-sex marriage do not see the fight for same-sex marriage as a continuation of the Civil Rights struggle.  The Civil Rights struggle does not even enter their minds when they consider same-sex marriage, because they do not believe that a person has a civil right to marry a person of the same sex with the imprimatur of the state, or that a person has a civil right to adopt one course of action (marrying a person of the same sex) and have it treated legally the same as another course of action (marrying a person of the opposite sex).  In other words, in this view, there is no civil right to marry whomever you please, and “equal protection” does not enter the equation; people in themselves deserve equal protection before the law, but different courses of action can and should be treated differently.

Most social conservatives see the same-sex marriage movement as a continuation not of the Civil Rights fight, but of the sexual revolution.  The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s established a trajectory of greater freedom of sexual expression, of broadening the field of sexual behaviors that are accepted and celebrated, and of disapproving the judgment of sexual behaviors or identities.  Many social conservatives see the push for same-sex marriage as the next phase in the sexual revolution, the next phase in the deterioration of moral-sexual norms, and the next step toward the dissolution of the basic and God-ordained family structure.  The sexual revolution, they claim, has already done incalculable harm.  They see a direct connection in the past five decades between the sexual revolution and the breakdown of the family, with skyrocketing increases in divorce, out-of-wedlock births, and deadbeat dads — and all the poverty, stagnation and malaise those things bring.

It’s a slippery-slope argument made by people who believe they’re already halfway (if not further) down the slope.  Slippery slope arguments often seem exaggerated, because they invest all the importance of the whole downward path in the very next step.  Every step down a slippery slope only takes us a little way.  But it also creates momentum.  And when you look back, you realize how far you’ve fallen, how much ground you’ve lost.  Nearly 40% of American children are now born to unwed mothers.  And the disintegration of the American family has done the most harm in low-income African-American communities, where there was less stability and social capital to start with.  Over 70% of African-American children are born out of wedlock.  For all the heroic efforts of single mothers, the children of single moms are as a general rule less healthy and less educated, and more likely to enter gangs and engage in criminal activity.

The point is this: American society once built a bulwark around the traditional family structure.  Perhaps in some ways or for some people groups the removal of that bulwark has been liberating, but the conservatives who oppose gay marriage believe that the removal of the bulwark has, on the whole, been absolutely devastating.  The further and further we depart from the family structure God intended, they believe, the more damage we do to our society.

“If Christians Really Cared About Marriage, They’d Fight Against Divorce”

This is not so much untrue as uninformed.  Yes, Christians have made a mess of marriage all by themselves.  Yes, Christian churches have not stood against divorce as strongly as they should have.  But the implication — that conservative Christians are doing nothing to fight divorce — is false.

First, countless Christian ministries seek to improve marriages.  Many thousands.  And every Christian church in America is engaged in this fight.  Elders, deacons, pastors and pastoral counselors at churches spend a very significant proportion of their time training congregants in how to be good spouses and good parents and in helping couples and families stay together.  Some of the Christian ministries most well known for their opposition to gay marriage — like Focus on the Family — actually devote the greater portion of their time and resources to helping marriages and families.  Focus, for instance, funded 66,000 counseling sessions last year, many of them on marital problems, and most of their media is about building strong marriages and families.

Second, of course, this is not an either/or.  Religious conservatives can oppose gay marriage and take pains to reduce the divorce rate at the same time.  And they appear to be having success.   48% of marriages amongst non-Christians end in divorce.  Some who identify as Christians but rarely attend church actually fare worse.  But the rate for all Christians together is 41%, and the rate for all Christians who frequently attend church (once a week or more) is 32% (this according to the General Social Survey, 2000-2004).  Catholics who attend church frequently divorce at an even lower rate, at 23%.  So, many of the religious groups that oppose gay marriage also fight against divorce, and do so with some success.

Third, Christians too are influenced by culture, and the fight against gay marriage seeks to arrest a cultural movement that degrades the moral and spiritual foundations of marriage.  So the opposition to gay marriage and the fight against divorce are actually seen, by the people involved in the fight, as closely related.

Again, this was not an attempt to build an argument against gay marriage.  That would require other arguments, and deeper levels of explanation.  This was just an attempt to address some of the red herrings.  My hope is that people who find the opposition to gay marriage mystifying will understand it a little better, or at least understand why these bumper-sticker slogans are not found convincing by social conservatives.

Filed Under: Homosexuality Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Christian Curmudgeon Condemns "Go the F*** to Sleep"

June 29, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

I’m not a prude.  I swear.

I was raised in a devout but non-legalistic home.  There was a stretch in grade school and junior high when I swore like the sailor who made other sailors blush.  Even today, there are one or two of the lesser expletives that escape my lips on rare occasions.  I enjoy sharing a glass of wine, a beer, or a Long Island Iced Tea with friends, or (more rarely) a cigarette or two.  I laugh at crude jokes, enjoy high school gross-out movies much more than I should, and find the florid foul language of some movie and TV characters hilarious.  I’m not saying I find these things harmless.  Not at all.  But I do find them funny.  While I’m no rebel, I’m no Ned Flanders either.

So it’s with some curiosity that I find myself concerned by Adam Mansbach’s book, “Go the F*** to Sleep!”

I thoroughly understand the sentiment.  I put my daughter to bed every night that I’m home.  She’s a tenacious fighter, a headstrong spirit, and willing to cajole and manipulate, to lie or feign hunger or thirst, whatever it takes to keep her daddy in the room a little longer.  I am a flawed and sinful parent.  I get angry and overwhelmed, ashamed and defeated, exhausted and at the end of my rope all in a single night.  So when I first saw the book title, and saw a PDF of the first couple pages, I laughed out loud and thought it a clever and harmless bit of bonding between parents over their shared exasperation.

I’m no longer so amused.  The book is now a Grade A cultural phenomenon.  You can hear it read aloud by Samuel L. Jackson.  If you’re only familiar with the title, some of the complaints might seem overwrought.  So if you don’t mind the language, you might want to listen before we go any further.  Because there have been complaints.  Our own Karen Spears Zacharias refers to the “violent language” of the book, language that “demeans children.”  Eric Metaxas, of whose book “Go the F*** to Sleep” appears to be a parody, argues:

I’m concerned that vulgarity has now officially entered the mainstream of our culture and I think people have to respectfully stand up and say “no thanks.”…I think we always have to ask ourselves: What kind of a culture do we want to live in? Because if we don’t think about that, and we don’t have the guts to speak up in a gracious and civil manner, then things will inevitably continue to slide in the same direction…Besides, a book with the title “Go the F*** to Sleep” is only one short step away from a hypothetical book written by a husband about his nagging wife, titled “Shut the F*** Up!” Couldn’t that be hilarious?…Also, can’t we admit that “Shut the F*** Up!” could slightly encourage spousal abuse? Don’t we think “Go the F*** to Sleep” might conceivably encourage child abuse? Not even slightly? Really?

On the positive side, there’s something good in knowing that other parents get flustered and feel like failures (the narrator eventually exclaims that he’s “a sh*tty-*ss parent”) when they can’t get their kids to sleep.  It’s good to laugh and commiserate.  But I find myself persuaded by the criticism:

  1. The book invites parents to imagine expressing their frustration in a series of ripe expletives.  That’s part of what makes it funny, of course, the juxtaposition of thoroughly foul language with the idyllic scene of a parent whispering a bedtime story to a little one.  It brings to mind the famous “Landlord Pearl” videos from Will Ferrell.  Karen’s right that the sad reality is that many parents do speak to their children this way.  It seems like every time I go to the mall, a carnival, or the aquarium, I hear parents cursing not only in front of their children, but at their children.  I find it appalling.  I’m also concerned — even though I sometimes laugh — at the extreme crudeness of the language in popular entertainment today.  Comedies intended for young people in recent years have shown a woman unknowingly using semen for hair-styling product; a young man masturbating with an apple pie in one movie and throwing his pubic hairs out a window and into the mouths of wedding guests in another; and high schoolers imagining their beefy female gym teacher in lingerie in order to prevent climax while engaging in sex acts with their girlfriends.  As Eric says, When do we say enough is enough?  Is there some point when thoughtful people — and perhaps especially thoughtful Christians and other people of faith — should stand up and call for less crudity and less coarseness in our public culture?  Should we object to this book — which tells a toddler to “Shut the f***up and sleep!” or “F*** your stuffed bear, I’m not giving you sh*t!” — before it gets worse?  The scary thing about a slippery slope is that no single step further down the slope seems like a big deal — but eventually you look back and realize you’ve descended a long way into the muck.
  2. It’s also hard to hear language like that (along with the author’s “a hot crimson rage fills my heart”) and not feel an implied menace or threat of violence.  Child abuse has long been, and remains today, a deep and pervasive problem in American culture — indeed, in human culture.  A healthy culture constructs moral, social and psychological barriers to violence against children.  For some people, because of their personality and upbringing, those barriers are thick and all but invincible.  For others, they’re precariously thin.  I think some of the folks who are saying “Of course no one would ever do that” are overestimating the goodness of millions upon millions of parents, or underestimating just how thin that barrier can be.  In fact, given the right (or wrong) circumstances even for them, the barrier might be far thinner than they believe.  For some people, it’s wafer thin, and it only takes a little bit more to break it down for their first act of violence against their children.  And let’s not pretend that verbal violence does not, even slightly, degrade the barrier against physical violence.  That’s usually where the road to physical violence begins.

More neutrally, I wonder if a part of the different responses to the book comes from the different ways in which we experience cursing.  If you’re in an environment where those words, when they’re spoken, carry a threat of violence (a testosterone-fueled environment, say), then you’re more likely to perceive that this book has a menacing aspect.  If you’re in an environment where those words are 99% of the time used in harmless jest (say, between computer nerds in a cubicle village), then the threat will probably seem remote to you.  But remember, those words do carry an implied threat in many places, and it’s not only computer nerds or the enlightened literati who are going to read this book.

My little girl.

Finally, this is going to sound almost unbearably self-righteous, so please know I’m speaking to myself as much as anyone else.  But what ever happened to the Philippians 4:8 principle?  ”Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things.”

As one friend pointed out, it’s a remarkable and precious thing that my daughter so desires my presence that she will do just about anything to keep me in the room a little longer.  She takes comfort in having me near.  Even when she’s just lying there, reading a book, it matters to her to have me there.  It won’t always be that way.  Someday she’ll want to hide from friends when she’s with me, but right now she delights in pointing out her daddy.  Someday she’ll want to shut the door to her bedroom, blare the music and pretend that I don’t exist, but right now she wants to be with me as often and for as long as possible.

Rather than imagining cussing her out for her deceptive, scheming ways, isn’t it more pure, more lovely, to reflect on the tiny miracle that my daughter loves me and wants me beside her in the dark?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Is Homosexuality Voluntary?

June 28, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple
Note: This is part of a series on Christianity and Homosexuality.  See the introduction and first and second parts.

I’ve stated as clearly as I can (links above) that the church should confess for its poor treatment of gays, that the church should express the extravagant and self-sacrificial love of Christ for gays as for all people, and that being or becoming homosexual cannot be reduced to a simple matter of choice.  The proper question is whether homosexuality is voluntary.  Whereas a choice is “a discrete and generally thoughtful and intentional decision between alternatives,” something is voluntary but not a choice if it “is a slow migration in one direction that emerges in aggregate from countless minute choices.”  So, now: is homosexuality voluntary?

First, let’s define terms.  Homosexual desire is, of course, a desire to have sexual relations with the same sex.  A homosexual inclination is persistent or habitual homosexual desire — not merely a desire here and there, but a constant or consistent desire for same-sex sexual relations.  Homosexual identity is a cultural and psychological construct; it is when an individual has embraced the notion that he is homosexual and takes up what that means in society.  Then homosexual behavior refers to sexual acts with people of the same sex.

When we ask whether homosexuality is voluntary, we begin with the inclination toward homosexual desire.  Without a persistent desire, neither the identity nor the behavior will enter the picture.  So the question is now: Is homosexual inclination — an inclination to desire same-sex sexual relations — voluntary?

It would take too long to explain how I interpret the studies in genetic, hormonal, environmental and social-psychological factors influencing sexual orientation.  So I’ll simply state my view.  Neither homosexual identity nor homosexual behavior are inherited; one cannot inherit — genetically or hormonally in utero — a cultural construct or pattern of action.  One can only inherit an inclination toward desires (a preference), as well as needs and capacities, attributes and the like.  I inherit a need and habitual desire for food, but I can refuse those desires and starve myself to death.  I do not inherit the behavior of eating, or the cultural construct/identity of “overeater” or “foodie” or etc.

When it comes to homosexual inclination, I do not believe there is a “gay gene.”  Complex factors of human personality, like persistent desires and inclinations, emerge from multiple genes and from the ways in which those genes interact with upbringing and environment.  Just as there is no “lawyer gene,” or “desire to cook” gene, so there is no “gay gene” or “desire for same-sex sexual relations” gene.  It’s not that simple.  There may be a set of genes, and in some cases that set may be dispositive (i.e., it may ‘make you gay’), but in the vast majority of cases I believe that the inclination toward same-sex desires emerges over time through a thousand-and-one subtle interactions between nature and nurture.

Yet I have still not said whether or not homosexual inclination is voluntary.

Here’s the problem.  I know plenty of people who identify themselves as gay and who tell me that they have never experienced a desire for a person of the opposite sex.  It would be prejudicial dismiss their testimony just because it’s not what I want to hear.  Yet I also know plenty of people who identify as gay but say they have experienced opposite-sex desire at some point in their lives — and dismissing their testimony would be prejudicial as well.  Similarly, I know of folks who sought to reform their same-sex desires and found they could not.  Yet I also know of folks who have, through much struggle and over the course of years, cultivated their desires away from same-sex desires and toward opposite-sex desires, and have been happily married for many years.  I think all of these stories are legitimate and reflect genuine experience.

In other words, I believe there’s a spectrum.  On the one end are people who have only experienced sexual desire for people of the opposite sex.  I cannot imagine being attracted to someone of the same sex.  But I believe my friends who tell me they cannot imagine being attracted to people of the opposite sex.  And then there are various points in-between.  A young man who has always loved women but once had an attraction to one friend; a young woman who explored lesbianism in college and never afterward; the man who has desires for both sexes but chooses one or the other; etc.  Identities and desires are, to some extent and for some people, malleable over the course of time.  While moderns and postmoderns tend to think of ethics in terms of discrete decisions (“choices” as I defined them in the last post), the ancients (such as Aristotle) thought of ethics largely in terms of the cultivation of the proper desires over time (the “voluntary” as I defined it).  Certain disciplines, practiced consistently for years, could prune some desires, redirect others, and nurture nascent desires into life.  That is, when the voluntary is pressed persistently in the same direction, some people can accomplish some (limited) change in identity, inclination and desire.

So where does this leave us?  Let’s divide this into two questions.  Is it voluntary to ‘become‘ homosexual? Here are my views. Homosexual inclination is probably not genetically programmed, but emerges through the interaction of nature and nurture.  However, that inclination may be fully and even irrevocably formed by the time a person has become fully self-conscious and morally accountable for himself or herself.  In other words, even for people who are not ‘born that way’, developing the inclination to same-sex desires may not be voluntary, because they find those desires fully and exclusively rooted within themselves by the time they conscious of any sexual desires at all.

To give an analogy, imagine that a person only developed the ability to see colors when he turned 10 years old.  If his parents painted him red on the night before his 10th birthday, he might well assume that he has been red all along, because he has only seen himself in red and never in another color.  The same could be true here.  Since the same-sex inclination developed prior to the age of moral and sexual self-consciousness, they honestly cannot remember (and may not have felt) any sexual desires for people of the opposite sex.  It seems as though they have always been this way.

However, for other people, there may have been a voluntary element in the development of their inclination to same-sex desires.  This is not the boy who “knows” he’s gay at 8 years old.  This is the female college student who decides to experiment with lesbianism; or a 15-year-old boy who has mostly experienced heterosexual attractions, but who suddenly finds himself attracted to a male friend; or perhaps even someone with strong homosexual desires, but in whom those desires were not as early and as deeply rooted.  The long-term voluntary cultivation of sexual inclinations very clearly (to my mind) has a role to play in those in the middle of the spectrum (the lesbian-until-graduation, the bisexual, etc.); I think it may also have a role to play in some whose same-sex desires emerge a little later and more mixed.  But, again, there are likely others who will feel no voluntary element whatsoever in the way they ‘became’ homosexual.

Second, is it voluntary to ‘be‘ (or to remain) homosexual? After a person has recognized that he’s inclined to same-sex desires, is it possible to cultivate different desires over time?  My answer to this can only be: I’ve known people of both kinds.  For some people, the inclination seems so deeply rooted, and so thoroughly regnant over their sexuality, that it seems they will never be able to cultivate a different inclination.  Yet for other people, there does seem to be the possibility of cultivating a different sexual inclination over the course of time.  Perhaps the same-sex inclination is not as deeply rooted within them, or perhaps they have the roots of both inclinations and can choose to nurture one set of roots and not another.

Many are the stories of people who have sought to change their same-sex desires and found no success.  Traditionalist Christians have too often dismissed those stories, as though the individuals simply did not try hard enough.  And many are the stories of people who have sought to cultivate opposite-sex desires and who have found success.  This does not mean that they never felt same-sex desires again, but that they have seen those desires diminish and their opposite-sex desires grow.  Gay-rights activists have too often dismissed those stories.  To me, both sets of stories have legitimacy, and both reflect real experience.  Convenient though it would be for one side or the other to paint it black-and-white, the world is a good deal more messy and complicated.  For some people, there seems to be a voluntary component in developing and maintaining the inclination toward same-sex sexual relationships; for others there seems to be — at least by the time they become morally and sexually self-conscious individuals — no voluntary component at all.

Now, all of this has been to speak of inclinations, not actions.  A person may be inclined toward a desire, and never act upon that desire.  So the question now becomes — and I’ll turn to this in the next installment — is it still possible to speak of homosexuality being “wrong”?

Filed Under: Christianity and Homosexuality, Homosexuality, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Monday Funny

June 27, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

This was too late to make the Sunday Funnies for last week, but some things just have to be shared:

(HT Bradley Wright)

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Rabbi Shmuley Shmears Mohler, Tries to Boteach Him a Lesson

June 27, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

If you’re not familiar with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, then you’ve been missing out on one of the most fearfully and wonderfully named of contemporary religious writers and cultural commentators.  I’m not quite sure how this came to my attention — and I’m not sure how I find myself defending Al Mohler so often lately.  But here we are.  Listen to the Boteachings of Rabbi Shmuley:

Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, tweeted a message to Congressman Anthony Weiner saying, “Dear Congressman Weiner: There is no effective ‘treatment’ for sin. Only atonement, found only in Jesus Christ.”

I hear you, Rev. Mohler. But I seem to recall many sexual scandals involving evangelical ministers that would seem to undermine the premise that salvation through Jesus Christ grants immunity to sexual sin.

I have debated Rev. Mohler many times…I have enjoyed his company…But just as soon as the TV camera goes on, Mohler’s persona changes. He is one of our Christian brothers who believes that Christians alone are saved, that Jews, however moral, ethical, and virtuous, are condemned to the eternal bonfire simply because they don’t believe in Christ.

No doubt this is the reason that Rev. Mohler has turned to Weiner, a Jew, and attempted to proselytize him via Twitter, the implication being that Weiner’s Judaism has not prevented him from sin but Christianity will.

These comments just grow curiouser and curiouser as they go along.  The lesson the Rabbi goes on to impart is that “Redemption is never a function of belief and always a function of deed,” and “It is not faith that guarantees our morality but rather an ironclad commitment to righteous action, be we atheist or theist.”  You can read the whole response here.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

I found the response not only deeply unfair to Mohler, and passive-aggressively ad hominem in its suggestion that the version of Mohler one sees on the television is just an act, but also pretty shocking in how superficial and off-base it is.  Did anyone other than Rabbi Shmuley interpret Mohler’s tweet to mean or to presuppose that “salvation through Jesus Christ grants immunity to sexual sin”?  Or to imply that “Weiner’s Judaism has not prevented him from sin but Christianity will”?

The disconnect here is so severe that either the good Rabbi is deliberately scoring cheap rhetorical points or (what I prefer to believe) there is a basic misunderstanding.  Let me suggest more than one:

1.  Rabbi Boteach seems to assume that when Mohler speaks of “atonement,” Mohler means something like “making morally perfect.”  Otherwise I fail to see how Boteach can interpret Mohler in the way he does.  Mohler says that atonement is found only in Christianity.  Therefore a Christian will be atoned (which Boteach takes to mean: immune to sin) and a non-Christian will not be.  Yet this is not what Mohler or any self-respecting Christian theologian would mean by atonement, which is a removal of the guilt of sin (not an intervention that prevents you from sinning again) and entering into union with God.

In other words, Mohler is not suggesting that Christianity will prevent a person from sinning.  Christianity is not really about stopping people from sinning; the Christian scriptures are very clear that even the redeemed will continue to wrestle with sin.  So Rabbi Boteach seems to assume a Jewish sense of “atonement” and uses it to criticize Mohler for being too Christian-centric.  The word for this is “irony”.

2.  Rabbi Boteach, presumably on the basis of a set of presuppositions regarding what goes on in the hearts and minds of evangelicals, infers that Mohler was attempting to proselytize Anthony Weiner.  Again, does anyone else really believe that?  Does anyone think that Mohler supposed Weiner would come across his Tweet, have a change of heart, and surrender his life to Jesus?  Of course not.  The Four Laws booklets boiled the gospel down enough already; I don’t think Mohler or anyone else wants to get into “Tweeting people into the kingdom.”  Mohler’s comment was intended for his Twitter followers, as a reminder that it is redemption and not therapy that a person truly needs in Weiner’s situation.

3.  I don’t know Al Mohler’s position on the eternal destiny of the Jews, but many evangelicals believe that God will ultimately reconcile the Jewish people to himself through the grace of Christ and that God will ultimately be faithful to the promises He made to the Jews.  I take this to be the point of Romans 9-11: If we cannot trust God to keep the promises He made to the Jews, how can we trust God to be faithful to the promises He made to us?  So, at the least, I suspect that Boteach puts across a very rudely abbreviated version of Mohler’s views on the salvation of the Jews.  The Jews occupy a special category in salvation history, and Christians do not generally regard the Jews in the same camp as, say, atheists or secular materialists.

4.  Finally, I’m tired of people representing salvation, in Christian terms, as a matter of “belief.”  It’s not about belief.  It’s about faith.  Faith is something far richer, far deeper, far more profound and all-encompassing than belief.  When we say belief in contemporary culture, we often mean something like intellectual assent to a certain claim.  In this case, it is intellectual assent to…what?  To the proposition that Jesus Christ is the Messiah and the Son of God?  However we construe Boteach’s comment, it missed the boat by a mile.

Salvation, Christianly understood, is a matter of placing one’s entire being in the trust and care of God’s gracious redemption through Christ.  Certain beliefs are generally necessary to create the context in which this can happen, but it is not the beliefs themselves that are salvific.  What is salvific is what Kierkegaard has called “resting transparently” in God through Christ.  Christians believe that there is a God who created us, that this same God communicated himself and his grace to us through the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, and that those who cease fighting God and fighting to be God and instead rest in the embrace of Christ will enter into a communion with God that will last forever.  Those who reject God’s gracious provision hold themselves apart from God, and historically the Christian church has held that those who hold themselves apart will remain apart from God in the afterlife.  But again, the Jews hold a unique place in salvation history, and Christians have a variety of viewpoints on the ultimate fate of the Jews.

Unfortunately, Rabbi Boteach’s comment is an example — and this happens on all sides, folks, so please don’t suppose that I’m being unfairly partisan here — of someone scoring rhetorical points at the cost of charity and mutual understanding.  It’s easy to pretend that someone believes X and make them look foolish for it.  It’s much harder to listen well to one another, to represent the other side’s viewpoint responsibly, and then offer your own critique.  But it’s worth the effort.

Filed Under: Peace Between Religions, The Ethics of Rhetoric Tagged With: ,
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