Don’t decoy, avoid or make void the topic

February 18, 2012 By Fred Clark 37 Comments

Scott Paeth: “Sex for Christians“

From an evangelical perspective, of course, it would be argued in response that sexual fidelity is central to Christian morality, but I’ve got to say that I don’t see it. You can point to Biblical passages that accentuate it, but you can point to other passages where it really is not that big a deal. Certainly in his own teaching and preaching, Jesus had a lot more room for the sexually “impure” than for those that were quick to condemn them. Concubines abound in the Old Testament! And the story of Judah and Tamar doesn’t even blink at Judah’s willingness to sleep with a prostitute.

… While for some Christians, sexual ethics — or any ethics for that matter — don’t have to be relevant, since they are simply rooted in obedience to a divine command … for most Christians, as for most people in general, if a moral norm seems irrelevant and, indeed, arbitrary, and if violating it doesn’t seem to harm anyone, it’s very hard to convince them to adhere to it. I’d go farther and say that, if there is not a comprehensible, sensible reason to adhere to a set of mores, people won’t. Even Christians. Even seminarians. And again, as above, even if they might abstractly understand it to be sinful, in the absence of any rational understanding of what is harmful about it, the idea that it’s sinful simply because God (or more probably accurately, some pastor somewhere) said so won’t amount to much, any more than with drinking or dancing.

John Shore: “If no one’s being hurt, God’s OK with your sexuality“

I don’t want anyone hurting or in any way violating or exploiting anyone else, of course. And certainly no one should ever sexualize children. But duh. Beyond that, why should I care what another person does with their affections and/or body? If everyone involved in any kind of sexual attraction or activity is a sane, capable, consenting adult, I’m out, concern-wise. That’s their business. Not mine. Not yours. Not their pastor’s. Not anyone’s. Theirs.

… Christ didn’t sacrifice himself on the cross so that everyone could start worrying about what everyone else was doing with their sexuality. He let himself be killed by hate so that we might at least begin to grasp how true it is that the only thing that ever matters is love.

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Catholic bishops fight to deny health care to the 98 percent

February 5, 2012 By Fred Clark 104 Comments

The 98 percent, that is, of American Catholic women who use contraception.

Some 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used contraceptive methods banned by the church, research published [in April] showed.

[An April 2011] report from the Guttmacher Institute, the nonprofit sexual health research organization, shows that only 2 percent of Catholic women, even those who regularly attend church, rely on natural family planning.

The latest data shows practices of Catholic women are in line with women of other religious affiliations and adult American women in general.

“In real-life America, contraceptive use and strong religious beliefs are highly compatible,” said the report’s lead author Rachel Jones.

She said most sexually active women who do not want to become pregnant practice contraception, and most use highly effective methods like sterilization, the pill, or the intrauterine device (IUD).

Catholics are not opposed to contraception. Catholics are not morally opposed to contraception. Catholics are not theologically opposed to contraception. Contraception does not trouble the conscience of Catholics. Nor should it.

All of which means that it is simply not accurate in any meaningful sense to say that opposition to contraception is a “Catholic” position.

It is a bishops’ position and only a bishops’ position. And as such, it is not terribly meaningful, since Catholic bishops really shouldn’t ever have to decide whether or not they’re going to use birth control.

If one wants to know about the medical, practical, ethical, moral or theological implications of contraception, then a bunch of celibate men without medical degrees is really not the smartest place to turn. I’m sure they have opinions, but I have no idea why anyone would think their opinions — uninformed on every meaningful level — should be given more weight than the informed opinions of those who are women, or medical professionals, or both.

All the bishops bring to the discussion is their expertise and authority on theological and ethical matters. And on that point they fail miserably. Nearly all — 98 percent — of their followers have examined their consciences and found no qualm, trouble, worry or uneasiness with regard to the use of contraception. The bishops say it’s evil. The laity overwhelmingly and emphatically disagree — and unlike the bishops their assessment is based on meaningful experience. So on the subject of contraception, the Catholic bishops are reduced to telling their “followers” not to listen to their conscience. How is that a position of moral authority?

The bishops have this one wrong. The harder they dig in to defend this mistake, the more damaging it becomes to their credibility, moral authority and membership.

Does anyone doubt that what Brad DeLong says here is true?

Someday — maybe five, maybe 10, maybe 20, maybe 50 years from now — some Pope is going to say: “The fact that God gave us concealed ovulation means that birth control is completely fine. If God had not wanted humans to make love whether or not such lovemaking is ‘open to conception,’ She would have set things up so that human females went into estrus and human males were only aroused by females in estrus, the way it works with so many of our other mammal cousins. Paul VI and his successors John Paul I and II and Benedict XVI were narrow-minded misogynists who made serious theological errors.” That day is coming sure as the sun rises in the east every morning.

That day is surely coming. The only question is how many American Catholics will be left by the time that day arrives.

 

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Rick Santorum vs. Pope Pius XI — one candidate, two encyclicals

January 10, 2012 By Fred Clark 93 Comments

I read two recent items about former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum that both turned out to be, oddly, about former Pope Pius XI.

First up is an excellent question from Mary at The Left Coaster, who notes that Republican presidential candidate Santorum opposes contraception, arguing that sex without the possibility of conception is “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Mary suggests a follow-up question for the candidate:

Perhaps someone should ask him whether he plans to be celibate after his wife passes through menopause.

That’s an interesting question. The answer I’ve usually heard to that question was that the story of Abraham and Sarah shows that even post-menopause, there remains the possibility of conception due to a miracle.

That’s pretty weak, and a transparent bit of retro-fitting — an excuse seized as a rationale for the teaching rather than a belief from which the teaching is derived. If the possibility of a divine miracle overcoming menopause is sufficient, then why isn’t the same true of the possibility of a divine miracle overcoming condom-use?*

For the official Catholic answer to Mary’s question, we need to turn to Pope Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii, or “Of Chaste Wedlock” (or “A Celibate Virgin Talks About Sex”). Pius XI, like Rick Santorum, sought to rule out the use of contraception. The only substantial difference between their views is Santorum’s desire to make this teaching civil law here in America. (And, unlike Santorum, Pius XI never said he wanted to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut — although that’s probably on account of his dying some 26 years before it was decided.)

Santorum’s phrase — “counter to how things are supposed to be” — echoes the central thrust of the argument in Casti Connubii. That encyclical says that sex deliberately separated from procreation is regarded as “a grave sin” because it is against nature. How can we be sure that it is against nature? Because it is regarded as a sin.

That’s either a powerful double proof or else a silly bit of circular reasoning, I’ll let you decide which. But either way — whether you see this as a potent argument or merely an undefended assertion — the answer to Mary’s question lies in that word “deliberately.” Pius XI argues that infertility due to menopause isn’t deliberate and, therefore, he said that it isn’t “acting against nature” for a married couple to get all connubii even if due to “natural reasons either of time or of certain defects, new life cannot be brought forth.”

So there is an answer to Mary’s question, it’s just not terribly compelling in that it depends utterly on the underlying assertion. And it’s not at all compelling for those of us who are not Catholic and, therefore, are not compelled by the coercive threat of eternal damnation to accept it.

And that, of course, brings us to the next follow-up questions for Rick Santorum. “Why should everyone in America be compelled to follow Catholic doctrine?” And “Why should anyone in America be compelled to follow any doctrine?”

You can probably tell that I’m not overly impressed with the arguments Pius XI puts forward in Casti Connubii. I am, however, quite impressed with the arguments he affirmed in the encyclical he released a few months later, Quadragesimo Anno, or “In the 40th Year” (following 40 years after Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, which laid the foundation for later Catholic social teaching). It was there that Pius XI made official his church’s support for the principle of subsidiarity. That’s an idea I find enormously helpful for thinking about the world and our differentiated, complementary responsibilities within it. (It’s even more helpful once it’s shorn of the hierarchical medieval outlook that Pius XI preserves in his discussion of it, but let that pass for now.)

As it turns out, Rick Santorum has also been talking about subsidiarity, leading two conservative columnists — David Brooks and Michael Gerson — to hail the candidate as bringing about either “A New Social Agenda” or perhaps “The Return of Compassionate Conservatism.” But despite their attempts to ascribe to him some new and substantive intellectual approach, Santorum’s references to the principle lead me to agree with The Christian Century’s David Heim: “I doubt Santorum has thought much about subsidiarity.”

Vincent Miller, in the Catholic magazine America (via Bold Faith Type), goes further than Heim, discussing, “Rick Santorum and the Lobotomization of Subsidiarity“:

This debate is important not only for politics, but for Catholic social thought. Santorum and other so-called “conservative” uses of subsidiarity are deeply distorted and threaten to confuse believers and deprive the republic of the full force of this Catholic moral principle.

The full Catholic version of Subsidiarity is outlined in the Vatican Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. As a moral principle subsidiarity has both a positive and negative meaning. In its positive sense, “ all societies of a superior order must adopt attitudes of help (“subsidium”) — therefore of support, promotion, development — with respect to lower-order societies.” (#186) In its negative sense subsidiarity limits such intervention from usurping the power and agency of lower level governments, communities and institutions, including the family.

The distortions are not Santorum’s fault. Catholic neo-liberals (who generally call themselves conservatives) have worked tirelessly to reduce subsidiarity to its negative sense and establish this as the keystone of Catholic social thought. They do so by selective reading — and outright editing — of Papal teaching from Pius XI through John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

This careful lobotomization of subsidiarity renders Catholic social teaching a docile partner in the neo-liberal program of limiting government and subjecting social institutions (schools, healthcare) to market logic. (Witness Ayn Rand devotee Congressman Paul Ryan’s invocation of subsidiarity in his attempted apologia for his radical budget to Archbishop Dolan this summer).

… Families and communities are being profoundly disempowered in precisely the way subsidiarity cautions against, but not by government. Our lives are ruled by insurance companies, banks, media conglomerates and transnational corporations.

While Santorum is willing to take aim at big media, the rest of the epochal growth in corporate power is outside of his subsidiarity lens.

Subsidarity has much to contribute to our political thought. In order for it to do so, we must retrieve its full meaning, and develop it further to address the new challenges we face. Those wishing to do so (including Brooks and Gerson) would be better served by starting with the discussion of governance in Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate and the Pontificial Council on Justice and Peace’s document on Financial Reform. Pay particular attention to the parts that George Wiegel says should be ignored.

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* I posed that question to an acquaintance who is a Catholic theologian. Unfortunately, he answered my question with a question of his own: “So you believe that sex can occur primarily for pleasure?” My response — “Believe it? I’ve seen it with my own two eyes!” — prematurely ended our discussion.

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Love in action

September 27, 2011 By Fred Clark 264 Comments

It’s not easy to tell the difference between a survey reporting a change in behavior patterns and a survey reflecting the same behavior, but a change in respondents’ willingness to be honest with pollsters.

The latter is my guess as to what’s really revealed in the studies cited in Tyler Charles’ Relevant magazine article “(Almost) Everyone’s Doing It” — subtitled “A surprising new study shows Christians are having premarital sex and abortions as much (or more) than non-Christians.”

“Surprising” to whom? Well, to CNN’s John Blake, for one, who says “one of the biggest surprises” in the article is that:

80 percent of unmarried evangelical young adults (18 to 29) said that they have had sex – slightly less than 88 percent of unmarried adults, according to the teen pregnancy prevention organization.

The article highlights what challenges abstinence movements face. Movements such as “True Love Waits,” encourage teens to wear purity rings, sign virginity pledges and pledge chastity during public ceremonies.

What Blake describes as a “challenge” for “abstinence movements” might rather be interpreted as a consequence of those abstinence movements. It may be that “Don’t — and that’s all you need to know” doesn’t work as a substitute for actual sexual ethics.

“Love is the fulfillment of the law” may need a bit more fleshing out, as it were, to provide what we need from a sexual ethic. But it’s a much better starting point for that effort than is “Sex is a dirty, dirty sin that you should save for the one special person you marry.”

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You must remember this …

April 25, 2011 By Fred Clark 258 Comments

I tripped over a very strange sentence in The New York Times on Friday. It was in John Leland’s article about the group of evangelical Christians planting churches in the East Village, the “Evangelical Squad” behind Trinity Grace Church.

Responding in the Village Voice, Rosie Gray has some fun with the way this group is “trying to seem so hip and edgy in an  awkward ‘Cool Dad’ kind of way.” And she’s right, but that’s not what bugged me. What bugged me was this paragraph:

Sexual morality has been a divisive issue for some Christian churches, and a challenge for an evangelical church trying to move into the East Village. Trinity Grace considers all sex outside marriage sinful, and marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Mr. Wasko said that he had kissed three women before marrying his wife, and that he now regretted all of them.

This is just bewildering.

… He had kissed three women before marrying his wife, and that he now regretted all of them.

Alien. Incomprehensible.

… He now regretted all of them.

This is so very much the opposite of my own experience, memory and emotions that I started to worry that maybe I was the weirdo here. Maybe this enduring regret for every kiss one has ever shared, given or received is the normal human response. Maybe it’s just me who’s being strange for not being stricken by that regret.

But then I remembered, you know, every song and poem ever written on the subject. I don’t think it’s just me. Pastor Wasko’s burden of regret is odd.

It’s possible, of course, for a kiss to be something regrettable. Like any other interaction with another person, a kiss might be shared for the wrong reasons. A kiss might be duplicitous, or it could be a betrayal. It might even be a kind of exploitation — a taking advantage of someone else. But those would be extraordinary, unusual cases and one doesn’t get the sense that such extraordinary, unusual cases are what Mr. Wasko is describing. He’s not suggesting that he was extraordinarily unlucky to have gone 0-for-3. He is suggesting that this is how it should be for everyone, that every little kiss to anyone other than one’s eventual spouse — every first kiss other than one’s last first kiss — should and will be cause for regret and remorse.

And the more I thought about it, the more that made me angry. Wasko is presenting his alleged regret as normative and instructive for his congregation. He wants them, in a way requires them, to feel and express this same misplaced regret.

He is unhappy about something he has no cause to be unhappy about, so he wants his congregation to share his unhappiness. He is filled with remorse and shame for things for which he has no cause to feel remorse and shame, and now he is inflicting that remorse and shame on his congregation.

That’s wrong. It’s cruel — a kind of pastoral malpractice.

And what about those three unfortunate women who are the objects of Pastor Wasko’s ostentatiously inordinate regret? Is there any way for them to hear this without perceiving it as rude and unkind? Or, even worse, as suggesting there was something regrettably dirty about them? Doesn’t it seem to say that the kisses their younger selves shared with his younger self have somehow tainted him? Doesn’t it seem to say that these women were and are, somehow, unclean?

And for what? Because of a kiss.

And more importantly what of Mrs. Wasko? I would guess that her future husband was not the first and the only boy or man she ever kissed. And her husband seems to expect her to feel remorse and regret because of that. He expects her to feel sadness and shame for whatever may have transpired in her life before they met. One gets the sense that he would hold her to the same strange standard of “sexual morality” he is applying to himself — and that he would be no more able to come to terms with her past than he has been able to come to terms with his own. One gets the sense that he regards her supposed past supposed “transgressions” as being as regrettable as his own.  His voluntary expression of regret for the three kisses in his own past suggest an unspoken, but tangible, resentment of any similar kisses in her past.

Take something normal and innocent and good and recast it as something impure and wicked and it seems to me you’re bound to end up in such a place — burdened with unshakable regrets and unspoken resentments.

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