Trump and the 14th Amendment, a plea for a church for the nones, and a scientist confesses how he left out the whole truth so he could get published.
Trump and the 14th Amendment
Article 14, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution reads as follows:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
That’s the argument being made. The 14th Amendment was passed after the Civil War with the intention of preventing Confederates from holding office. Surely it is still applicable in other cases, though. I can imagine it coming in handy with the new “illiberal” assaults on the Constitution from both the right and the left. But can it apply to what Trump did?
Some legal scholars claim that the article is “self-executing“; that is, its provisions are matters of fact, not requiring a judicial finding or a conviction of a crime. Therefore, any local election official could consider Trump not qualified and so leave him off the ballot.
That seems a real stretch. There would have to be some mechanism for determining whether someone had committed “insurrection” or “rebellion.” For all of the 91 charges filed against Trump, none of them accuse him of the crime of insurrection.
Still, a lawsuit has been filed in the state of Colorado to keep Trump off the ballot on 14th Amendment grounds. State officials in New Hampshire and Michigan are also studying the possibility of invoking the 14th Amendment to keep Trump off the ballot on their own authority. It might take the Supreme Court to resolve the question.
A Church for Nones
We have been discussing the decline in church attendance and affiliation, even among Christians, but here is a twist: Perry Bacon wrote a column for the Washington Post entitled I Used to Be a Christian. Now I Miss Church [behind a paywall, but available here].
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, a Catholic, discusses Bacon’s dilemma, referring to other writers who are saying much the same thing [behind a paywall, but available here):
Bacon is a case study for this postreligious angst: After decades spent attending first charismatic and then nondenominational Protestant churches, he has drifted into the no-religion camp, and he doesn’t particularly like it. He has a young daughter, and he misses the social and ethical benefits of churchgoing, but at the same time, he feels alienated from moral and theological conservatism, even the attenuated form in the churches he recently attended, and he doesn’t have specific Christian certainties to keep him in the pews.
So he calls for a a “church for the nones.” Bacon writes,
I can easily imagine a “church for the nones.” (It would need a more appealing name.) Start the service with songs with positive messages. Have children do a reading to the entire congregation and then go to a separate kids’ service. Reserve time when church members can tell the congregation about their highs and lows from the previous week. Listen as the pastor gives a sermon on tolerance or some other universal value, while briefly touching on whatever issues are in the news that week. A few more songs. The end. An occasional postchurch brunch.
During the week, there would be activities, particularly ones in which parents could take their kids and civic-minded members could volunteer for good causes in the community.
Sounds like any number of “Christian” churches today!
To want the externals of religion without its content would be an example of what St. Paul warns against, a phenomenon of the “last days,” which will be characterized, among other things, by “holding the form of religion but denying the power of it” (2 Timothy 3:5; RSV).
Scientist Left Out the Whole Truth to Get Published
“Believe the science,” we are told on any number of issues. But “science” is not a unitary body of truth. Science is the work of “scientists”; that is to say, human beings who have biases, agendas, politics, and ambitions of their own. The scientific method is designed to filter out that human element, but it can’t quite.
You have got to read the piece by Patrick T. Brown, published in The Free Press, entitled I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published, with the summary deck, “I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work.”
Brown, a climate scientist, published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature a study entitled “Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California.”
He didn’t falsify any data. Climate warming, he says, was a factor in the wildfires. But it was not necessarily a major factor. A fuller treatment of the topic would include the problem of forest management, in which state regulations prevent the thinning of forests and contribute to the proliferation of highly-flammable undergrowth. Brown admits to selecting and framing the data that is in accord with the prevailing narrative about catastrophic climate change, which he knows that the editors of Nature promote.
A researcher’s career depends on his or her work being cited widely and perceived as important. This triggers the self-reinforcing feedback loops of name recognition, funding, quality applications from aspiring PhD students and postdocs, and of course, accolades. . . .
In theory, scientific research should prize curiosity, dispassionate objectivity, and a commitment to uncovering the truth. Surely those are the qualities that editors of scientific journals should value.
In reality, though, the biases of the editors (and the reviewers they call upon to evaluate submissions) exert a major influence on the collective output of entire fields. They select what gets published from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is conducted more broadly. Savvy researchers tailor their studies to maximize the likelihood that their work is accepted. I know this because I am one of them.
Brown has since left academia for the private sector, which, he hopes, will allow him to pursue science as he thinks it ought to be pursued.
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