Abortion Leads to Murder?

August 26, 2013 By 30 Comments

I always hate the way the media and the lobbyists behave after a shooting. About 15 minutes after a shooting you can expect that a gun control lobby will hold a press conference pushing for stronger regulations. About 7.5 minutes after that, the NRA will have a rebuttal. A little while later some right wing Christian group will show up to explain that this is all because we took prayer out of schools.

I know the lobbies pretty much have to do this. It’s their job after all. And the media probably feels that it’s their job to publicize the debate. But it always feels so rote and repetitive, and so opportunistic as well. When the situation is horrible, the people who jump in to press their political agendas look like vultures even if their intentions are good.

Recently a young man named Christopher Lane was shot and killed in Oklahoma. Three young men have been arrested for the crime. There’s been a lot of acrimony because two of the shooters were black, which has led some right-wing sources to turn Lane into the anti-Trayvon. Also, it was initially alleged that the shooters committed the crime just for the fun of it. It’s started the usual arguments over the morals of American youth.

This set up the worst vulture I’ve ever seen. Worst is multiple ways. She’s Janet Morana, director of the anti-abortion group Priests for Life. Obviously she was looking for a way to tie her agenda to the shooting. This was her hook:

First of all, we have to start with the fact that since 1973…. These kids are survivors. They could have been aborted. And that’s a fact. And people don’t realize. They’re post-Roe v Wade, and therefore there’s a thing called “survivor syndrome.” There’s a psychiatrist up in Canada, Dr. Philip Ney, has studied this for decades and shown the effect. Just the fact that you could have been aborted can affect you as a survivor of Roe v Wade.

(Hattip to Amanda Marcotte)

…. So every child born after 1973 – myself included – is suffering from survivor’s guilt? Excuse me? Never mind the implausibility of it, how exactly does a condition that usually leads to depression cause someone to commit murder?

Incidentally, Dr. Philip Ney is the head, and possibly the only member, of the Christian Heritage Party in Canada. Just judging from the website it’s the canuck equivalent of a fringe “Take Back America for JESUS” party.

Filed Under: Abortion, Current Events 30 Comments

Why Are The Millennials Leaving? Because They Can.

August 5, 2013 By 16 Comments

Just about everyone is reacting to the Barna Group’s surveys that show a decline in church membership among the millennial generation. Just about everyone sees the problem through the lens of their own experience.

Rachel Held Evans wants a change in substance – high church, more open minded with less focus on listing the things you shouldn’t be doing with your genitals. Richard Lindsay says that we need a change in style and substance, by doing everything that Evans says not to do. And Hemant is saying that atheists are to blame, and whatever we’re doing we need to do more of it.

On one hand, my instincts as a historian are telling me to keep out of this. Maybe this is big, maybe it’s just another case of the younger generation ignoring their parent’s religion until they become parents themselves. “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings” and all that.

On the other hand, I can’t help thinking of Martin Marty’s column on the low church participation in early America. That changed after the revolution, in part because more churches were built but also because there was more social pressure on people to attend them.

That social pressure crested during the Cold War, as faith and patriotism were merged together in opposition to godless communism. But the Cold War ended in the late eighties, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Is it a coincidence that the “rise of the nones” and the “flight of the millennials” seems to have begun in the ’90s? Folks like Per Smith at Irritually think it’s not, and I’m starting to agree.

So here’s a hypothesis: the high levels of church membership seen in the last half of the 20th century were driven by the narrative of the Cold War. The social pressure and close association between national identity and religion drove people to church. Now that those pressures have eased, church membership is in decline.

Most folks I’ve read are focusing on the “civil religion” aspect. I’m taking more of a Thaddeus Russell approach. Perhaps we’re all less high-minded than we like to admit, to the pollsters and even to ourselves.

Americans are under less social pressure to be part of a church than at any time since WWII. It seems less important to be part of a church community. In most areas there is little stigma attached to those who do not attend. Combine this with an increasing value on leisure time – since modern consumer capitalism is eager to give us new ways to spend it – and you see people who would rather stream Netflix on their tablets than get out of bed and go to that church social.

Without that pressure we are simply drifting back to a state in which a fair percentage of the population is unchurched. Not un-religious or un-spiritual, but unchurched. Belief has not declined, but belonging has.

If I’m right then 1) I’ll be fricken amazed, and 2) the question becomes where will this drift take us? Will some other force arise to send people back to church? Will we go back to pre-cold war levels? Or has society changed enough, through increasing secularism, that we will drift toward numbers last seen in Colonial times?

Filed Under: Current Events, Religion 16 Comments

The Sandy Hook Truth Movement has Found a Victim

January 18, 2013 By 40 Comments

Gene Rosen’s story at Salon jumped out at me:

“I don’t know what to do,” sighed Gene Rosen. “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘how much am I being paid?’” Someone posted a photo of his house online. There have been phony Google+ and YouTube accounts created in his name, messages on white supremacist message boards ridiculing the “emotional Jewish guy,” and dozens of blog posts and videos “exposing” him as a fraud. One email purporting to be a business inquiry taunted: “How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the ‘shooting’. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov’t sponsored hoax anyway?”

“The quantity of the material is overwhelming,” he said. So much so that a friend shields him from most of it by doing daily sweeps of the Web so Rosen doesn’t have to. His wife is worried for their safety. He’s logged every email and every call, and consulted with a retired state police officer, who took the complaint seriously but said police probably can’t do anything at the moment; he plans to do the same with the FBI.

What did Rosen do to deserve this? One month ago, he found six little children and a bus driver at the end of the driveway of his home in Newtown, Conn. “We can’t go back to school,” one little boy told Rosen. “Our teacher is dead.” He brought them inside and gave them food and juice and toys. He called their parents. He sat with them and listened to their shocked accounts of what had happened just down the street inside Sandy Hook Elementary, close enough that Rosen heard the gunshots.

In the hours and days that followed, Rosen did a lot of media interviews. “I wanted to speak about the bravery of the children, and it kind of helped me work through this,” he told Salon in an interview. “I guess I kind of opened myself up to this.”

In American, conspiracism has always been with us. Sometimes it’s funny. But increasingly, thanks to the internet, small groups of vocal conspiracists are able to push their narrative into the public eye. It’s hard to imagine the Birthers or the 9/11 Truthers being as prominent without youtube and web forums.

So, yeah, don’t feed the trolls. But what do you do when the trolls start biting on you?

Filed Under: Current Events 40 Comments

Religion and Economics Don’t Mix

January 1, 2013 By 6 Comments

The phrase “fiscal cliff” was coined by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to describe the expiration of certain stop-gap economic measures at the beginning of the new year (that being today.) I suspect that Bernanke now regrets the hell out of inventing the phrase. He forgot how much our media loves little pithy labels and looming disasters. “Fiscal cliff” has become the most overused phrase in politics.

My impression is that the “fiscal cliff” is an entirely political problem. Economists seem divided on how much harm we now face. The real issue seems to be the federal legislature, which is so politically divided – particularly within the Republican party – that no agreement can be reached.

But there is no problem so great or small that it cannot be spun into a morality tale about the failure of modern society. Enter Benjamin Wiker at the National Catholic Register, who wants to use our latest political fiasco as an example of the problems of secularism:

That we seem to be merrily rolling along toward a fiscal cliff is evident. Why is not as clear — at least not the deep why. Some of the depth of the problem can be plumbed out if we look at the relationship between secularism and our current morbid financial mess.

Ah yes, Catholicism and its “four levels of meaning” and Aristotelian philosophy. Does there really have to be a “deep why” behind every kind of political shenanigans?

It would be more persuasive if the philosophy weren’t always so self-serving:

To live in a secular world means that the only heaven, if there is to be one, will be on earth. And since there are no souls in a secular, materialist world, then the only goods we can get are bodily goods. Thus, we run on from the self-preservation of having sufficient food, clothing and shelter to seek superfluous pleasures, titillations, entertainments and luxuries.

Fair enough. The idea of “the good life” now means a high standard of living rather than a life lived in harmony with the will of God. But there’s a chicken and egg problem here: did our secularism result in a drive for affluence, of did our rising affluence result in secularism?

Furthermore, we live in a capitalist society where the desire for “superfluous pleasures, titillations, entertainments and luxuries” drives the economy. As someone once said, nevermind the ten commandments, our economy demands the right to covet freely and widely.

Wiker sees this as a modern problem:

But as we became more secular, things became more crass. Some began to argue that a vice, greed, was actually good, because the desire for wealth — especially if it is inordinate and all-consuming — will produce more wealth for oneself and others and spread technological, medicinal and practical benefits that enhance everyone’s life.

The problem is, the idea that “private vices are public benefits” comes from Bernard Mandeville, in the early 18th century. The idea that individual greed can produce common good is hardly a new thing.

Wiker goes on, turning the “fiscal cliff” into a standard conservative sermon against entitlements. You see, it’s our secularism that drives us to acquire more, which the government provides to us in the form of social security, medicare, etc.

He makes the dubious assertion that these entitlements go beyond a safety net. But even if we accept the argument that welfare programs go beyond what is necessary for a stable society, I just can’t make the jump from “superfluous pleasures, titillations” etc. to unemployment insurance. Welfare just ain’t sexy, and I don’t know the last time I met someone who got hot over foodstamps. You can make an argument against the social safety net, but this isn’t it.

And none of this provides any insight into the deadlock in congress. Why the repeal of the Bush tax-cuts is supposed to be a sign of decadent secularism isn’t obvious, nor does the opposition to a hike on the upper income tax-rates look like a spiritual position. Wiker really needs to find a better hook for his sermon.

Finally, I’d like to ask Wiker and other Catholics who see deep spiritual forces behind political and economic troubles about the “deep why” behind the various Vatican banking scandals. Does the current strife represent the encroachment of secularism? Did the 1980′s scandal, which required a bailout courtesy of the Knights of Columbus in decadent America, represent some moral failure on the part of the Vatican?

Filed Under: Catholicism, Current Events 6 Comments

Subway Death Caused by Religious Hatred

December 31, 2012 By 29 Comments

On Saturday, Indian born Sunando Sen was pushed in front of an oncoming NYC subway car and was killed. His attacker was Erika Menendez, who has been charged with second degree murder and a hate crime because of her justification (pdf):

It is further alleged that the defendant admitted pushing the victim and said in sum and substance “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.”

It’s probably worth noting that this is the second such attack this month, although the previous attack seems to have no hate crime attached. That makes this seem like a copycat crime.

It may also be worth noting that the NYC subways have recently sported pro-Israel, anti-muslim ads. I don’t think it can be argued that there is a direct link, but it’s worth mentioning:

Filed Under: Current Events 29 Comments
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