Old habits die hard

Last updated on: June 26, 2023 at 6:17 pm By Fred Clark

If you asked ChatGPT to imitate George Will’s baseball writing, the bot might produce something like this sentence: “Baseball is woven into so many of our lives because it is that sphere where childhood dreams play out and lifetime memories are made, where communities come together in triumph and disappointment.”

That’s from David Brooks’ latest column, and it seems even more soul-less and inauthentic in context. It’s s sentence that convinces the reader only that its writer has neither childhood dreams, nor lifetime memories involving baseball, and that the game has never been, in any meaningful way, “woven into” his life.

Fortunately, most of Brooks’ column isn’t about baseball. Unfortunately, the rest of it is even worse — more pretentious, more confused, and less sincere.

Why waste any more time on this habitually disingenuous hack — this second-generation Reader’s Forum shopper and lifelong capicola-eater? Because Brooks’ column is, I think, confused in some helpfully clarifying ways. It is an attempted “Kuyperian” attack against “little platoons.” It’s a criticism of “the politics of spectacle” that is, itself, an example of “the politics of spectacle.” And, above all, it’s a vivid demonstration of one representative Old White Guy’s bewildered failure to understand that 2023 is not 1983, and thus comes across like a boilerplate “shut up and dribble” rant of the sort that Brooks’ predecessors cranked out about Branch Rickey in 1947.

When I was a seminary TA, I had to grade papers on Jim Skillen’s book about the Reformed political theology of Abraham Kuyper. It wasn’t hard to tell which students had read the book and which ones were just riffing based on a loose grasp of the class discussion. Brooks’ column reads like the latter.

“Sphere sovereignty” was Kuyper’s Protestant/democratic revision of subsidiarity — an attempt to preserve its insights without the hierarchical Great Chain of Being baggage in the original. Brooks enlists this language forgetting that Kuyper’s spheres are distinct, but still “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Brooks seems to think of these spheres as existing in conflict, competition, or tension — as though civic groups, families, and churches were engaged in a tense standoff like the end of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

This is not what “sphere sovereignty” means.

That’s not how this works. Subsidiarity and/or “sphere sovereignty” are descriptions of and guides to neighborliness, not ground rules for a game of musical chairs. The greatest danger to neighborliness and to justice is not the usurpation Brooks fears — “when one sphere tries to take over another sphere.” The threat to justice, to neighborliness, and to every mutually bound “sphere” of society, rather, is the problem of abdication. When one sphere drops the ball, refusing or failing to meet its responsibilities, the others are forced to step up to do more.

For a real-world example of what that looks like, consider the civic association that is the subject of Brooks’ column and of his scorn: The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

The Sisters are a group of drag queens who dress as nuns. Their original habits were the genuine article — donations provided for an all-male production of The Sound of Music by actual Catholic nuns who got the joke. The ad hoc “order” of Sisters sprang from that as a social club — a civic group no different, in pretentious Kuyperian categories, from the Rotarians or the Elks or Masons or Mummers (although their costumes weren’t quite as flamboyant as those of the latter two). They formed a softball team and played against the Gay Men’s Chorus and the Metropolitan Community Church (baseball has been “woven into” the group since its earliest days).

The Sisters were always spectacular, but their early days didn’t involve anything like what Brooks condemns as “the politics of spectacle.” They were certainly political, in the sense that any group that refuses to comply when told they have no right to exist is inherently political. But they didn’t pick that fight and they didn’t start it. And anyone who critiques a politics of resistance without acknowledging the explicit, pre-existing, overwhelming politics it is resisting against is either a fool or a fascist.

What the Sisters mostly did, early on, was Bingo. They hosted Bingo to raise money for community groups and they were good at it because they were funny and fabulous and anyone who isn’t utterly dead inside is bound to have a good time playing charity bingo hosted by a bunch of bawdy drag queens dressed as nuns. This is a time-tested formula that we humans have found fun and funny since the origins of Panto centuries ago.

Things changed for the Sisters when everything changed in the 1980s with the arrival of “gay cancer” and “GRID” and what eventually came to be called AIDS. This is where the abdication of the spheres dragged this social club into a more explicit form of politics.

Look again at Brooks’ list of Kuyperian spheres: “There is the state, the church, the family, the schools, science, business, the trades, etc.” Consider how utterly and thoroughly most of those failed in their duties and responsibilities when confronted with the crisis of the AIDS epidemic. But the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence stepped up, raising their voices, raising attention, raising a ruckus, and raising funds to care for and to fight for people who were being abandoned by their families, churches, and governments.

Which of these do you think was a neighbor? Go and do likewise.

That last bit is from a famous Jesus story about a despised outcast who stepped up when other “spheres” refused to fulfill their neighborly obligations. The care, decency, and responsibility of the Good Samaritan in that story shamed the careless indecency and irresponsibility of the priest and the levite. That shaming was not the Samaritan’s intention, but it was an inevitable consequence of his neighborly action being offset by the background of their callous, indifferent inaction.

How dare an unclean, unholy Samaritan bring shame on distinguished authority figures like a priest and a levite? That, in essence, is Brooks’ complaint in his column. He scolds the Sisters for “narcissism” and for “inflaming hatred,” and for failing to embrace some proper-channel, tone-policed politics of respectability. Brooks begrudgingly acknowledges that the Sisters “provided invaluable services to those in their community, especially during the AIDS crisis,” but every other phrase about them in his column reads like it was written by Anita Bryant in 1983.

Brooks also misunderstands the relationship between the Sisters and, well, the Sisters. He imagines that their attire “dishonors the nuns who live in poverty serving the poor.” And he performs offendedness on behalf of these imagined sisters.

That’s not how that works either. Very broadly speaking, there are two types of Catholic sisters. There’s the kind who put on full habits with wimples so they can protest outside of movie theaters or Dodger Stadium or on EWTN, and then there’s the kind who “live in poverty serving the poor.” The latter group isn’t offended by the antics of their old friends in the Sisters because they’ve been working alongside them for decades. They’ve long been allies in more than one sense. (The former group is, of course, offended by everything.)

David Brooks chose to be vicariously offended when the Dodgers awarded the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for their community service before a game played on Pride Night — refusing even to notice the team’s magnanimity in honoring a San Francisco-based group before a game against the Giants. “When the Dodgers embraced the culture war spectacle, even just a little, they eroded the integrity of their sphere,” he wrote.

This is exactly what columnists like David Brooks were saying on April 15, 1947. I think Brooks half-realizes that, which is why he tries to qualify that a bit in his next sentence: “Personally, I think it’s great for teams to honor groups in their fan base, as with Pride Night or Hispanic Heritage Night; but I think it’s wrong for teams to honor organizations that ridicule other groups in their fan base.”

So no more group tickets for the Knights of Columbus, I guess.

But, again, what Brooks calls “ridicule” there is simply the deserved, earned shame that always falls to those who “pass by on the other side.” The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence didn’t make a mockery of the church. The church’s disdainful inaction throughout the AIDS crisis did that.

I said above that this column reminds me of something written about the Dodgers in 1947 or about gay activists in 1983, but let me give you one more date that everything Brooks says here recalls in vivid detail: October 3, 1992. Brooks is making the same muffled and muffling defense of injustice that — to our shame — we all nodded along with after Sinead O’Connor tore up that picture of John Paul II on Saturday Night Live:

And just seconds after that moment, with astonishing rapidity, we’ll hear the comforting voices of the pre-written consensus, the reasonable-sounding song of the Very Serious People reassuring us that we do not need to trouble ourselves with asking those rabble-rousing prophets and sages and scribes what it was they were trying to get us to look at. We’ll swiftly be told that even if it might have been brave or commendably idealistic for those misguided souls to have interrupted us all like that, there’s no need to disturb ourselves overmuch because if it were anything really important those people would have gone through the proper channels. Even if we vaguely suspect we might abstractly agree with the goals they seek, it’s more important in that moment to condemn their methods. After all, whatever it was those folks were so upset about, whatever made them so upsetting to us, it’s their fault that it’s still a problem because they didn’t have the decency to go about addressing it in the right way. Shouldn’t we go about things in the right and proper way?

That was more than 30 years ago, before “the Boston Globe’s investigation, and the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, and the Houston Chronicle’s recent series,” before “the investigation of the Magdalene laundries and the Ryan Report and the mass-graves at Tuam.” Before the death of Savita Halappanavar and of all the American Savitas and Savitas-to-be now living in a post-Dobbs world.

It was, in other words, a time when more people might be expected to share the illusion that shapes Brooks’ entire column — the assumption that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops somehow possesses a moral high ground from which to look down upon the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

9/2 Flashback: On abortion

Last updated on: September 1, 2022 at 4:56 pm By Fred Clark

From September 2, 2020, “I am a Christian. Here is what I believe about abortion.”

Subsidiarity, mofos.

I want to talk about abortion with my fellow white evangelical Christians.

More specifically, I am addressing those evangelicals who have not sworn their full allegiance to Donald Trump. We might refer to this group as the “19 percent” — meaning the minority of white evangelicals who did not vote to elect Trump in 2016, but I am hopeful that the share of those willing to read or to listen here will be somewhat larger than that.

We might describe my intended audience here as a spectrum ranging from Michael Wear to Russell Moore, which is to say those of my fellow American evangelical Christians who are Trump-resistant or at least somewhat Trump-reluctant. Some of you are emphatically opposed to Trump while others may be ruefully supportive of him due primarily to his support for judges and policies more likely to end legal abortion.

Wherever you fall on that spectrum, you and I disagree on the meaning and the morality of abortion. This post is not an exercise in persuasion or in condemnation. Nor does it involve the suggestion of any sort of compromise or “middle ground” or “third way.” All I want to do here is to explain, as simply and clearly as I can, what it is that I believe about abortion and what the political implications of that are for me.

The abortion discussion in the 1975 edition of this book was scrupulously biblical, but it wasn’t an effective means of producing an absolutizing partisan faith based on a foundation of political support for white-/Christian-nationalism, so that section on abortion was rewritten, and reversed, in order to produce that result.

The difference between what I believe and what you believe is, in some ways, a lot smaller than you might imagine. The implications of that difference expand outward, producing very different responsibilities and obligations for the law, for citizens, and for all of civil society — including the church.

Here is that difference: You believe that full human personhood begins at the moment of conception, which is to say that a fetus, an embryo, a blastocyst, a zygote possesses an equal moral standing to that of any child or adult. To end a pregnancy, therefore, is to take a human life — an act indistinct from taking the life of any other child or adult.

I do not believe that. I make a distinction between the potential human personhood of a fetus/embryo/blastocyst/zygote and the actual human personhood of actual infants, children, and adults. I believe that potential human personhood has great value and great moral significance, but not as great as that of any and every actual human person. Abortion is a serious and significant matter, but it is not at all like “murder.”

The prolific evangelical apologetics writer Norman Geisler put it this way:

The one clear thing which the Scriptures indicate about abortion is that it is not the same as murder. … Murder is a man-initiated activity of taking an actual human life. Artificial abortion is a humanly initiated process which results in the taking of a potential human life. Such abortion is not murder, because the embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person.

That distinction, which Geisler argued was derived from biblical teaching and biblical prooftexts, led him to conclude that abortion was justified and even obligated in some cases:

When it is a clear-cut case of either taking the life of the unborn baby or letting the mother die, then abortion is called for. An actual life (the mother) is of more intrinsic value than a potential life (the unborn). The mother is a fully developed human; the baby is an undeveloped human. And an actually developed human is better than one which has the potential for full humanity but has not yet developed. Being fully human is a higher value than the mere possibility of becoming fully human. For what is has more value than what may be. …

Birth is not morally necessitated without consent. No woman should be forced to carry a child if she did not consent to intercourse. A violent intrusion into a woman’s womb does not bring with it a moral birthright for the embryo. The mother has a right to refuse that her body be used as an object of sexual intrusion. The violation of her honor and personhood was enough evil without compounding her plight by forcing an unwanted child on her besides. … the right of the potential life (the embryo) is overshadowed by the right of the actual life of the mother. The rights to life, health, and self-determination — i.e., the rights to personhood — of the fully human mother take precedence over that of the potentially human embryo.

The crucial point here is that final sentence, so let me repeat it: “The rights to life, health, and self-determination — i.e., the rights to personhood — of the fully human mother take precedence over that of the potentially human embryo.”

Please note what this does not say or mean or imply or entail: It does not mean that the potentially human embryo has no rights, or no value, or no meaning, or no significance, or no dignity. To regard “the potentially human embryo” as meaningless or worthless would be wrong — wrong both in the sense of immoral and in the sense of inaccurate.

How, then, ought we to account for and to honor the moral claims and moral value of the potential personhood of the unborn? How do we, as you all often say, “protect the unborn”?

The problem with that question is the word “we.” Who is we?

That is always an essential question in Christian ethical teaching and Christian political thought: “Who is ‘we’?” And the way that Christians, for centuries, have tried to answer that question — to clarify and differentiate all of the potential meanings of “we” — fall under the heading of subsidiarity.

Subsidiarity is both a prudential principle and an ethical one. To violate or to reject subsidiarity, then, is both immoral and ineffective. Subsidiarity clarifies the varied and various roles that different people, different actors, different institutions and agencies have — the varied and various responsibilities and obligations we all share in different and differing capacities. It describes what the epistle calls the “inescapable network of mutuality” that binds us all together directly and indirectly. Our various places and roles in that network shape our various responsibilities and duties to one another. To abdicate the responsibilities that are rightly ours, or to usurp the responsibilities that are not rightly ours, is both imprudent and immoral.

Subsidiarity teaches that those closest to a given situation have the greatest responsibility for that situation. Every other actor and agency in the network of mutuality also bears responsibility, but their indirect responsibility takes the shape of supporting those closest, who hold the primary and most direct responsibility.

I believe in subsidiarity. It seems clear to me that the primary responsibility for “protecting the unborn” is given to those whose bodies are literally transforming for that very purpose, which is to say with the actual human persons, the women* whose bodies are carrying and have carried every potential human person who has ever later been born. They are the most direct actors here, exponentially closer and more responsible than anyone else, and the responsibility and obligation of everyone else is to ensure they have all the moral and material support they require to fulfill that role.

I trust those women. I trust them more than any indirectly responsible actor who would trample on their subsidiary obligations by trying to usurp the responsibilities entrusted to those women by nature and nature’s God.

Will 100% of those women make 100% of the best choices 100% of the time? Of course not. They are, like all of us, human, and no human or group of humans is ever always capable of always making only the very best choices. But their humanity is all the more reason to affirm their agency and dignity to choose, not a license to strip them of that humanity by stripping them of their responsibility, dignity, agency, and freedom.

It is not my job — not my ethical duty nor my capacity — to usurp their primacy here. Not as their neighbor, not as their relative, not as their congressional representative or as their pastor or as their president or as their appellate-court judge. Every other actor, agency, institution, civil society organization, magistrate, and pastor does have an indirect role to play — the role of supporting these women to make the best choices and to have the best choices available to them.

What does that mean in practical terms? It means, for most of us, working to create a context for their choices in which they are never constrained by desperation or duress, by the market-worshipping coercion of penury, by fear or want or threat. It means working to establish a context in which financial support, vocational opportunity, human potential, human thriving and human dignity are not contingent or conditional or inconstant. It means creating a context which is hospitable to welcoming new life, and therefore a context in which the choice of hospitality is possible and promising. (If I were to choose a text for a sermon on the politics of abortion, it would be the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath.)

Sometimes, when I describe this role and this obligation, those who wish only to deny subsidiarity by a top-down decree criminalizing all abortion will accuse me of just trying to change the subject. But this is the subject. Subsidiarity teaches me that what is best for “the unborn” will be what is best for their mothers. The only way to “protect the unborn” is by protecting those carrying them — protecting their health, dignity, wellbeing, financial security, agency, and freedom.

My uncle was an obstetrician in the 1960s. He was hired to reform a regional hospital in central Pennsylvania that was struggling with one of the worst infant mortality rates in the state. He took the job only on the condition that he could, instead, address the crisis that hospital hadn’t recognized — that it also had one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the nation. Some thought that he, too, was trying to change the subject, but he insisted that if they took better care of those mothers, the infant mortality problem would also be resolved. And it was.

If “we” want to “protect the unborn” then “we” must trust those entrusted with that duty. Erasing or outlawing their central role, their humanity, and their agency is both imprudent and immoral. “We” — for any given value of “we” — need to center them, support them, and provide for them a larger context in which they are best able and equipped to do what is best for themselves and for those potential and actual human persons in their care.

This is what I believe. This is my “abortion politics.” The sectarian nuance and the detailed working out of this may vary somewhat, but this is, in broad terms, what tens of millions of other American Christians who are also Democratic voters also believe.

Again, I am not telling you this in an effort to persuade or to convince. I have done that elsewhere and will do it again, but that’s not what this post is about. I am not here attempting to create any compromise or debate and would not welcome either one. (Although I’m sure the DEBATEME!-boi reply guys will still show up in comments, because fish gotta swim.)

I am telling you this only because I think it is something you should know. What you decide to do with that knowledge, what you feel you’re allowed to do with that knowledge, I leave up to you.

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* Mostly women, but not only women. That needs to be said here, for accuracy’s sake and not for the sake of what many of my fellow evangelicals might dismiss as “political correctness.”

8/8 Flashback: Unsullied

Last updated on: August 8, 2022 at 3:15 pm By Fred Clark

From August 8, 2011, “On the road to Weehawken”

Back in 2011, Rick Warren said something dumb — something perniciously dumb, corrosive, and destructive. He said that caring for people in poverty is the responsibility of the church … so far so good … and therefore it is not the responsibility of the state. Ugh.

That’s dangerous nonsense that threatens several different things I care about: the gospel, the Bible, the Baptist tenet of separation of church and state, the Gettysburg Address, healthy communities, justice, democracy.

So I responded by noting that centuries of Christian thought and teaching, as well as Moses and the prophets, has always taught that “Responsibility is differentiated, mutual and complementary, NOT exclusive, binary and competitive” and posted that phrase 10 times, with each iteration linking to a discussion of “subsidiarity” or of “sphere sovereignty” or of “the inescapable network of mutuality,” all of which highlighted the various forms of foolishness and injustice that flowed, inevitably, from Warren’s notion of “exclusive, binary, and competitive” responsibility for justice, welfare, and the common good.

That resulted in a squadron of flying monkeys from Warren’s Saddleback Church flapping through the comment section here to angrily defend their leader and his vision of exclusive, binary, competitive nuttery. I responded to this drive-by trolling from the mega-church here — “Subsidiarity and Saddleback” — pointing out that, thankfully, none of those folks actually fully believed what they were saying.

My argument there, alas, uses words like “subsidiarity” and “differentiated” and “complementary” and I’d probably have been better off just replying with this old joke:

Early one morning a man turned up at the house of his minister in tears, saying, “Please, can you help. A kind and considerate family in the area is in great trouble. The husband recently lost his job, and the wife cannot work due to health problems. They have three young children to look after, and the man’s mother lives with them because she is unwell and needs constant care. They have no money at the moment, and if they don’t pay the rent by tomorrow morning the landlord is going to kick them all onto the street, even though it’s the middle of winter.”

The minister replied, “That’s terrible. Of course we will help. I will go get some money from the church fund to pay their rent. Anyway, how do you know them?”

To which the man replied, “Oh, I’m the landlord.”

An old joke would’ve been more appropriate, since our visitors from Saddleback were, themselves, mainly insisting on their own variation of an even older joke, retelling the Saddleback Approved version of the parable of the Good Samaritan in which first a mayor, then a congressman “pass by on the other side” without helping the injured man and everyone from Rick Warren’s church cheers and says, “Damn straight! You’d better not interfere — that’s the church’s responsibility not yours, you Big Government Tyrants!”

But instead of a joke or a story, I responded to our anti-neighborly neighbors from Saddleback with the discussion of a real life variation of Jesus’ parable, in which a certain Airbus fell among birds on the flight from New York to Charlotte. …

Or consider the role and duty of a ferry boat captain. Her job is to pilot a ferry boat from Point A to Point B and back again according to schedule while ensuring the safety of her passengers. That is her primary responsibility. It’s what she was hired to do and what she is paid to do.

That duty and responsibility means that she must not stray from her assigned route. Any such deviation will put her ferry and its passengers off schedule. It could also expose her passengers to added risk, endangering their safety and thus betraying her duty as ferry boat captain.

But one day not too long ago, several ferry boat captains did exactly that. With little thought for their unchanging daily duty, they turned their boats around and, instead of taking their passengers safely to shore in a timely manner, they carried them to the middle of the river.

They did this because Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot of US Airways Flight 1549, had just landed his Airbus 320 right there, on the surface of the Hudson River.

Ferry boat Capt. Brittany Catanzaro was not hired to rescue airline passengers from the river. That was not her job. She wasn’t hired to do that and she wasn’t being paid to do that. She was responsible for the passengers aboard the NY Waterways ferry Thomas H. Kean, and not for the passengers of US Airways Flight 1549. Those passengers were US Airways’ responsibility. And water rescue is the job of the Coast Guard or of the FDNY or NYPD.

I’m not sure exactly where in the Hudson Capt. Sully touched down, actually. He may have been closer to the Weehawken side of the river, in which case the stranded passengers perched on the slowly sinking airplane would have fallen under the jurisdiction of New Jersey’s rescue personnel.

None of those responders, however, hesitated for even a second that day to consider such jurisdictional niceties. They all sprang into action without any thought as to who might bear specific or exclusive responsibility for the people stranded in the river.

The very idea of “exclusive responsibility,” in fact, would have seemed horrifying.

Capt. Catanzaro and Vincent Lombardo, captain of another NY Waterways ferry, arrived at the plane within just a few minutes of its touching down in the river, followed soon after by Circle Line ferries and FDNY marine units. They all responded so quickly because they all knew — by training, or by instinct, or by virtue of just being human — that it’s foolish to debate over jurisdiction, or to imagine that the responsibility to act belonged only to one agency and not to any other.

The passengers on that slowly sinking plane were headed to Charlotte and then, from there, to Seattle and to whatever business awaited them in those places. They had no previous relationship to the ferry boat captains or to the passengers on those ferries before Capt. Sully expertly splashed his plane down onto the river on which they were floating. And after that crazily beautiful landing, the only relationship they all shared was that of the crudest most basic kind — a shared humanity and physical proximity.

But that basic relationship was enough for the people on those ferries to recognize, instantly, that it made them responsible. It was enough, even, for them to put every other responsibility they had on hold. No one boarded those ferries expecting to spend the rest of their afternoon plucking strangers out of the water. That wasn’t their job. Like the Samaritan in Jesus’ story, those people had places to be and jobs to do. They were just trying to get to Manhattan or to Weehawken so that they could get on with whatever those other duties and responsibilities were.

But then their circumstances changed and thus their responsibilities changed, because they knew that’s how it works.

It would have been wrong for those commuter ferries and sight-seeing boats to “pass by on the other side.” It would have been wrong to tell themselves that those soaked and sinking strangers were the exclusive responsibility of someone else — the Coast Guard, the FDNY or US Airways — and not their responsibility too. Because (go ahead, say it with me) responsibility is never exclusive, binary and competitive. It’s always mutual and complementary.

We all know this in extraordinary situations, but somehow we tend to forget it in our ordinary lives. Sometimes we choose to forget it because, after all, we have places to be and our own jobs to do, and we imagine that our own lives will be easier if we could somehow exclude ourselves from mutuality.

But mutuality makes our lives easier, not harder. Mutuality isn’t a burden. “Bear one another’s burdens,” the apostle Paul wrote. But some selfish, reptilian part of our brains recoils at the idea — I’m having enough trouble bearing my own burdens, thankyouverymuch. The last thing I need is to get saddled with everyone else’s too. I’m just trying to get to Jerusalem or to Weehawken. I’ve got enough on my plate as it is.

And thus we avoid helping and we avoid being helped. And then we construct ridiculous intellectual justifications for this rejection of mutuality. “Either/Or!” we declare. “Never Both/And.”

Extraordinary circumstances can break through our protective shell and remind us that we know better, and that we can be better and act better and live together better in a better world.

I just wish it didn’t take an Airbus 320 splashing down out of the sky to remind us of that.

April 17 Flashback: It wasn’t me

Last updated on: April 13, 2022 at 1:52 pm By Fred Clark

From April 17, 2019, “Ignoring hateful extremists doesn’t make them go away“:

One popular response to hateful demagogues like Trump or Wiles is not to respond at all. Ignore them and maybe they’ll just go away. Criticizing them or challenging their lies, this argument holds, just gives them more attention and more oxygen. Maybe if we never mention the growing influence of CBN and Trinity and EWTN and Charisma and TruNews et. al. then all of those fear- and hate-inducing outlets will stop having influence.

Maybe if we stop paying any attention to them, no one else will pay any attention to them either.

I suppose that it’s possible that such a response has sometimes succeeded in the past. Examples of such successes wouldn’t easily spring to mind because, after all, every such example would be someone who was first ignored and then went away.

But many, many counter-examples do spring to mind — examples that show this non-responsive response often fails catastrophically, essentially amounting to an unconditional surrender.

Risking such catastrophic failure does not seem prudent. Nor does it seem prudent to accept an argument that positions itself as prudence but that counsels the same timid course of inaction that would result from simple cowardice.

In its most extreme form, this idea of “ignore them and let’s hope they just go away” twists itself into a time-traveling logic that reverses cause and effect, blaming critics of hateful demagogues for those demagogues’ very existence. One of the weirdest and wildest examples of this argument for retroactive causation was something we discussed here several years ago — when now-CEO and president of Christianity Today Tim Dalrymple explained that the rise of the religious right and its influence was the product of, well, me.

Recalling that strange episode led me to revisit a couple of posts from early 2013. Seeing as they’ve aged pretty well, and they’re relevant to our conversation of What To Do About Rick Wiles, I’m reposting them here:

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‘Mainstream’ evangelicals criticize critics of the religious right

Well, I told you this was coming.

Last month I wrote about a modest bit of push-back from “mainstream” evangelicals against the appalling things said by several religious right leaders following the massacre in Newtown, Conn.

Mike Huckabee, James Dobson, Bryan Fischer and Franklin Graham disgraced themselves by blaming the shootings on the separation of church and state, same-sex marriage and legal abortion, prompting widespread criticism from a wide variety of Christian leaders and just about anyone else who heard what they said.

But, as usual, mainstream evangelical leaders, magazines, bloggers and spokespeople were hesitant to condemn those remarks. Their constituency, after all, is the same white evangelical populace that watches Huckabee on Fox News, listens to Dobson and Fischer on the radio (on 7,000 and 200 stations, respectively), and that inexplicably regards Franklin Graham as the legitimate heir to his father’s legacy. They are thus, understandably, rather timid about criticizing those folks.

Yet a handful of “mainstream” evangelical types did clear their throats and respond to Huckabee and Dobson, including Out of Ur, which is the blog of Leadership Journal, the magazine for pastors put out by the folks at Christianity Today.

Out of Ur published a guest post by Michael Cheshire, an evangelical pastor from Colorado, who wrote, “They Think We’re a Hate Group, and They Might Be Right.” Cheshire compared the vocal and visible leaders of the evangelical religious right with a “crazy uncle”:

I feel like I’m with a crazy uncle who makes ignorant comments while you’re helping him shop. You have to stand behind him and mouth, “I’m so sorry. He’s old and bit crazy. He means well.” So to my gay friends, scientists, iPhone users, and others he blamed for the horrendous killing spree by that mentally ill young man, I stand here mouthing a few words of apology to you.

The rest of Cheshire’s piece was pretty forceful, so much so that I worried “… it might get him banished into the limbo of ‘controversial’ evangelical voices — Cizik-ed away to a seat beside folks like Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis, whose continued membership in the tribe is permitted mainly as a way of marking its boundary.”

And that didn’t take long. Less than two weeks later, Skye Jethani posted Out of Ur’s backpedaling semi-retraction of Cheshire’s comments: “No, We’re Not a Hate Group.”

Jethani explains that the religious right is not representative of the silent majority of American evangelicals. That’s a false impression, he says, created by sensationalistic journalists and, Jethani says — citing Timothy Dalrymple — created by wily progressive Christians. He links to Dalrymple’s unique explanation for the rise of the religious right. It’s due, he says, to:

… people like Fred Clark. I think Fred dramatically underestimates the extent to which he and his ilk shape the public and media perception of evangelicals when they shine a relentless light on every ridiculous and offensive thing an evangelical pastor or radio host does, and completely ignore the good and important work that the vast majority of evangelicals do on a regular basis.

Yes, it’s all true. I started this blog in 2002. At the time, James Dobson was an inconsequential figure broadcasting his radio message daily on a mere 7,000 stations (mostly AM). He’d only written a couple dozen books at that point, and only half of those had become national best-sellers. And only 500 or so of the thousands of newspapers and evangelical publications in America bothered to carry his weekly column.

But once I started shining my “relentless light on every ridiculous and offensive thing an evangelical pastor or radio host does,” that criticism — cleverly disguised as posts about the Iraq War, eschatology, Buffy, Niebuhr, subsidiarity and manufactured housing — catapulted James Dobson to national fame, leading Time magazine to dub him “the nation’s most influential evangelical leader.”

I’ve done the same thing for countless others — Franklin Graham, Rick Warren, Bryan Fischer, Tony Perkins and dozens of other such figures who I’ve managed to elevate without ever even mentioning them here.

My very first substantial post, on my original blogspot site, criticized Pat Robertson for selling “sentergistic” anti-aging milkshakes. The effect of that post was so powerful that it lifted Robertson to a second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses 14 years earlier.

My influence is vast, unstoppable and retroactive.

Or, alternatively, Dalrymple and Jethani might be talking out of their backsides. It’s one of those.

Read the whole post(s) here.

April 16 Flashback: Y’all

Last updated on: April 13, 2022 at 12:02 pm By Fred Clark

From April 16, 2004, “Who is you?”

The previous post tells the story of three ordinary people who acted as citizens and neighbors when confronted with a drowning man.

Their actions were heroic, yet this is very much a textbook case. This was an ethics professor’s hypothetical in real life. (Ethics profs love hypthetical drowning victims almost as much as they love hypothetical Nazis. They even like to confront their students with hypothetical drowning Nazis.)

The problem with many of the hypothetical predicaments posed by ethics profs is that they also involve a hypothetical, abstract and undifferentiated “you.”

Consider the following all-too-real hypothetical: You see an old man sleeping in the doorway of a church. His blanket is thin and the night is cold. What do you do?

The answer depends on who “you” are. You may be a local beat cop. You may be the pastor or a parishioner of that church. You may be a professional social worker. You may be a volunteer at the local homeless shelter. You may be a member of the city council. You may be the old man’s daughter or niece or his long-ago college roommate or Army buddy. You may be a stranger who lives across the street from the church. You may be a despised Samaritan just passing through. You may be an airman first class who made a wrong turn on his way to the county clerk.

Regardless of who “you” are, you are responsible. But the nature of your responsibility — particularly in the longer term — differs according to the differentiated responsibilities of the various examples above. These differing responsibilities are complementary. They are not — despite the popular American confusion — exclusive.

Read the whole post here.

Here comes the jackpot question in advance

Last updated on: December 30, 2021 at 3:17 pm By Fred Clark

• The Dunning Kruger School. Eric Levitz on “The Authoritarian Right’s 1877 Project.”

Shorter version: The white right that rules today’s Republican Party hates the first Reconstruction — the brief spasm of actual constitutional democracy that existed for about a dozen years after the Civil War. The white right also hates the second Reconstruction, i.e., the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which led to the brief spasm of actual constitutional democracy that the Roberts Court has been aggressively dismantling ever since.

A 6-to-3 majority of Supreme Court justices wholly disregards the existence of the 15th Amendment. These lawless jurists claim this makes them “conservative,” but it merely makes them Confederate.

• The good news here is that a Methodist church in Boise, Idaho has removed a stained glass window honoring and depicting the traitor Robert E. Lee. The bad news here was that a Methodist church way up north in Boise, Idaho, had a stained glass window celebrating treason in defense of slavery and kept it there, in the sanctuary, until the year of two thousand and twenty one.

Idaho became a state in 1890. It’s statehood was a brazen exercise in partisan politics — an effort to add two more Republican votes in the Senate. This is why we added so many stars to the flag in the years following the Civil War, and it’s why we have two Dakotas even though one would obviously have been sufficient. Adding states in order to gain votes in the Senate was a tactic first embraced by the Radical Republicans — the actual Party of Lincoln — to ensure the ratification and enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments. By 1890, alas, the Republican Party had mostly abandoned Reconstruction, so the addition of Idaho’s senators didn’t help to make the 15th Amendment any more meaningful in 1890 than it is today.

I happen to believe that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution are, in fact, constitutional and ought to be enforced whether or not a majority of white senators agrees. So I’m supportive of efforts to revive this traditional tactic, adding two new senators each from Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Birmingham.

N.B.: That RNS piece linked above reports that the stained glass window was “deconsecrated” after it was removed from the Methodist sanctuary, thus suggesting that the Scalzi family church was probably also formally deconsecrated before it was sold to its new owners.

• Niebuhr-blogging: Moral Man and Immoral Society and vaccination mandates. This is John Fea applying a general statement from Niebuhr to a particular context:

It is the responsibility of the federal government, with all its resources and scientific experts, to reduce the impact of COVID-19 on American life. When the vaccine was released, the federal government (led by the CDC) tried to achieve “solidarity by a mutual accommodation of interests.” In other words, the government tried to convince people to take the vaccine. But when their efforts at “social cohesion” failed, and people placed their “liberty” over the common good, mandates became necessary.

Let’s add my other click-bait hobby horse into the mix here — subsidiarity. Yes, “it is the responsibility of the federal government … to convince people to take the vaccine,” but this is not solely or exclusively the responsibility of the federal government. Other agencies and actors — state and local governments, educational institutions, religious institutions, religious congregations, families, neighbors, voluntary associations, media, clubs, teams, guilds, bands, businesses, and all other facets of civil society — all share direct and indirect differentiated responsibility “to reduce the impact of COVID-19 on American life.”

And, like the federal government, all of these actors ought to avoid coercion until, in Niebuhr’s phrase, “efforts to achieve solidarity by a mutual accommodation of interests have been exhausted.” And once those efforts have been exhausted, all those other actors — in all of their various and differentiated direct and indirect capacities — are, just like the federal government, obliged to employ whatever more coercive means they have available.

You are an individual citizen in a nation state. You are also a child or parent, a sibling or cousin, a neighbor, a customer, an employee or employer, a congregant, a member, a fan, a subscriber, a correspondent — a resident of an inescapable network of mutuality. Do what you can, where you can.

• Dennis Quaid was extraordinary in The Rookie, and Zachary Levi was charming in Chuck and Shazam. That might be enough to persuade me to watch the two of them in a Kurt Warner biopic, but not when that movie is billed as “faith friendly” and “inspirational” and comes from the white evangelical world of “Christian cinema.” I trust the cast, but not the writers, directors, and producers. So thanks anyway. (But it is a pretty great story.)

• Congratulations to the “24 inmates awarded BA degree in pastoral ministry [who] will serve NC prisons as ministers.”

I have questions, concerns, and caveats here — many of which are similar to those I have regarding the program that trains brave inmates to become skilled firefighters who save lives and homes in California every year during wildfire season. But none of those concerns qualify my admiration for the men who have pursued the training and mission offered by either program.

• The title of this post comes from this classic Frank Loesser song, “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”

It’s a terrific song that has become a year-end holiday standard and a track that great singers love to include on Christmas albums. That wasn’t what Loesser had in mind. He was thinking of this question being blurted out by someone so love-struck that they were suddenly unable to imagine a future without their beloved. It’s one thing to ask someone to celebrate New Year’s Eve with you in late December. It’s quite a bit more than that if you say this on a first date in June.

In any case, I love this song, but I love it less this week. When you sing “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” on December 30 you seem to be taking the other person for granted in a way that’s almost disrespectful.

‘I catch him when he’s straying, like any brother would’

Last updated on: December 3, 2021 at 2:43 pm By Fred Clark

“CNN suspends Chris Cuomo indefinitely,” CNN reports:

CNN has suspended prime time anchor Chris Cuomo “indefinitely, pending further evaluation,” after new documents revealed the cozy and improper nature of his relationship with aides to his brother, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. …

Cuomo’s 9 p.m. program is frequently CNN’s most-watched hour of the day. He is a larger-than-life presence at the network. And he was determined to stay on TV this year despite a flurry of sexual misconduct allegations against his brother, which culminated in the governor’s resignation three months ago.

But new documents released on Monday showed that the veteran journalist was more intimately involved than previously known in shaping his brother’s defense.

“The New York Attorney General’s office released transcripts and exhibits Monday that shed new light on Chris Cuomo’s involvement in his brother’s defense,” a CNN spokesperson said Tuesday evening. “The documents, which we were not privy to before their public release, raise serious questions.”

“When Chris admitted to us that he had offered advice to his brother’s staff, he broke our rules and we acknowledged that publicly,” the spokesperson continued. “But we also appreciated the unique position he was in and understood his need to put family first and job second.”

“However, these documents point to a greater level of involvement in his brother’s efforts than we previously knew,” the spokesperson added. “As a result, we have suspended Chris indefinitely, pending further evaluation.”

It always rankles a bit when cable news channels describe the hosts of their celebrity panel chat shows as journalists, as if staging semi-scripted nightly arguments between opposing political consultants makes you Ida B. Wells or Nelly Bly. CNN calls itself a 24-hour “news channel,” but it’s really a 24-hour op-ed channel which occasionally puts its opinion columnist shows on pause to cover breaking news.

That’s frustrating, because CNN is quite good at covering breaking news. Yet they’ve realized that, most of the time, actual news reporting doesn’t get the ratings that they can get with the celebrity panel chat shows, even though they’re not good at that, and even though those shows are the opposite of a public service. So most of the time CNN is doing the thing they’re not good at instead of the thing they are.

But let’s set that rant aside for another day. The point here is that Chris Cuomo plays a journalist on TV for CNN and it turns out that he has, for the past year, been a dishonest and unethical journalist when it comes to the story of his brother Andrew, the now-former governor of New York. CNN and its viewers trusted Chris Cuomo to report honestly and accurately on stories involving his brother and Chris Cuomo violated that trust.

That’s a terminal offense in journalism. It’s a clean out your desk and go home and find a new line of work offense. And it’s aggravated by the ugliness of Chris Cuomo’s “involvement in his brother’s defense.” He was (allegedly) using his position as a TeeVee Anchor Guy to help aides for his brother collect dirt on and discredit the women who were accusing the former governor of harrassing and bullying them. So this wasn’t just a matter of bias and a failure of journalistic ethics, it was also his cooperation and complicity in the same immoral, disgraceful behavior that ultimately forced his brother out of office.

But still, it was his brother. His actual flesh-and-blood, grew-up-together brother. And so it’s hard to look at Chris Cuomo’s situation without, as that CNN spokesperson said, appreciating “the unique position he was in and … his need to put family first.”

That shaped the reaction to Cuomo’s suspension by most of his (male)* peers in the journalist-ish world of TV panel chat show hosts and guests, op-ed columnists, and blue-check Twitter pundits, most of whom seemed strangely united — across the political spectrum — in responding by saying something like, “I’m not saying what he did was right, but if it was my brother …”

There was an almost boastful tone in many reactions to Cuomo’s quandary, a kind of macho posturing: “What Chris Cuomo did was indefensible, but it was nothing compared to the vile things I’d be willing to do to protect my brother.”

The moral instinct here reminds me of the old joke: “A friend is someone who helps you move. A best friend is someone who helps you move the body.” The moral premise of that joke is not that covering up a murder is good, but that the competing moral claim of loyalty to one’s friend ought to take precedence. It’s better — morally better — to aid and abet murder as an accessory after the fact than it is to be a disloyal friend.

Do we really mean that when we repeat that joke? It’s hard to say. It’s a joke, after all, and what strikes us as funny about it may be the way it exaggerates the obligations of friendship beyond what we understand to be the proper limits of those obligations. Regardless of how funny it is, or why it’s funny, the joke sticks with us because it invites us to consider the clash between competing moral obligations, and that’s the stuff of great storytelling.

This is where real dramatic suspense comes from: the clash of moral obligations. Or, even better, the clash between moral absolutes.

We can be idly entertained, to a degree, by a story in which Our Hero is confronted with a choice between Right and Wrong. But such stories tend to be forgettable and disposable. They linger in our memory only due to their icky residue of flattery. Like all stories, they invite us to ask, “What would I do if confronted with such a choice?” But when that choice is simply between Right and Wrong, the right answer is obvious and cheap and easy, and we come away feeling obvious and cheap and easy for flattering ourselves by providing the only possible answer.

But stories that force Our Hero to choose between Right and Also Right don’t have obvious, cheap, or easy answers. They’re suspenseful because we genuinely don’t know which moral good the hero will choose to honor and which they will choose to deny. And they’re suspenseful because we’re genuinely not sure which moral good we would choose if we were in their shoes. We’re genuinely not sure which moral good we ought to choose. Neither option is obvious, or flattering.

Which brings us to the text for today’s sermon and the song that provides the title for this post, “Highway Patrolman,” from Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.

Joe Roberts is a good man. That’s the premise of this story, but whether it is or can also be the conclusion of the story is the question here. Joe is a good man, but he’s “got a brother named Frankie, and Frankie ain’t no good.”

Joe loves his brother. That’s good. He is committed to looking out for his brother, to being his brother’s keeper, and that’s good. Joe also probably feels obliged, and maybe a little guilty, because he got a farm deferment in the draft, while his little brother was sent to Vietnam for three years and came back changed for the worse. So we understand, and sympathize, when Joe tells us that sometimes he used his position as a highway patrolman to keep Frankie out of the kind of nickel-and-dime trouble Frankie had a knack for getting into. That’s maybe not so good, but we understand.

For all of the love and the guilt and duty he feels for his brother, Joe still recognizes that there are limits to this obligation. All of those male pundits rushing to affirm Chris Cuomo’s anything-for-my-brother behavior emphasize the “like any brother would” instinct, but they miss the more important part of Joe Roberts’ manly moral creed: “I catch him when he’s straying.” Joe understands that his real duty to his brother is not to help him get out of trouble, but to keep him from getting into it.

The story reaches its crossroads when Joe gets a call involving Frankie and something more serious:

Well, the night was like any other, I got a call ’bout quarter to nine
There was trouble in a roadhouse out on the Michigan line
There was a kid lying on the floor, looking bad, bleeding hard from his head
There was a girl crying at a table, and it was Frank, they said

Now our good man, Joe, is forced to choose between two things he values, between two competing moral claims. Joe is sure that “a man”* must never “turn his back on his family.” But he also knows that he has other obligations and duties — to his job, to his community, to that kid lying on the floor and the girl crying nearby — and that this time he can’t just “look the other way” and cover-up Frankie’s misdeeds.

So what does he do? What can he do? What should he do? What would you do? When those aren’t easy questions, you’ve got a good story. But if you’re dealing with those kind of questions and it’s not in a story, that’s another matter. Dramatic tension and suspense are great stuff in fiction, but in actual life they’re rather unpleasant.

One way to describe the clash of moral obligations confronting Sgt. Joe Roberts (and “journalist” Chris Cuomo) is to consider the complementary principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is a fancy word we discuss around here quite a bit. It’s the term in Christian ethical teaching that explores what Martin Luther King Jr. was getting at when he reminded white clergy that “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Subsidiarity refers to the ways we differentiate between those direct and indirect obligations of mutuality, helping us navigate and prioritize and particularize what to do and where to act in what might be an otherwise paralyzing and overwhelming sea of obligation.

Subsidiarity, in other words, locates each of us within the vast “network of mutuality.” Joe Roberts’ is Frankie’s brother, and that matters. It shapes and specifies his moral obligations to Frankie, recognizing that this particular direct relationship carries with it direct obligations that are different from what Joe owes to others who are not his brother. Proximity and kinship and personal history impose additional moral obligations and help to define our moral obligations. But they do not bound or limit those obligations. Those obligations are not bounded or limited by proximity or by kinship or by personal history. They are not bounded at all.

Subsidiarity reminds us that we are our brothers’ keepers, but solidarity reminds us that everyone is our brother. Solidarity is universal. Anything less than that isn’t solidarity at all, just a Hobbesian war of all against all — a temporary stage of Hatfields-vs.-McCoys “kinship” that inexorably leads to a lethal game of musical chairs among the surviving kinfolk of whichever clan prevails.

Joe has a brother named Frankie. He also has a brother “lying on the floor, looking bad, bleeding from his head” and a sister crying at a table. A man who opts to help one brother while turning his back on all those other members of his universal family, well, he just ain’t no good.

And if he does that, he ain’t any good even to Frankie. As King reminded us in the verse preceding the ones quoted above, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

We know how the song ends. Five miles from the Canadian border, Joe “pulled over on the side of the highway and watched his taillights disappear.” But what does that mean?

Some take it to mean that Joe is, once again, “looking the other way” and letting Frankie get away. His little brother won’t be arrested, won’t face a trial or a prison sentence. But I don’t think Frankie winds up a free man. He’s been banished, exiled bearing the mark of Cain. He has literally driven himself beyond the boundaries of moral obligation, carrying himself outside of the community of Joe and of Maria and of that bleeding kid, outside of the state and the nation.**

Frankie is gone. And after sitting there for a moment on the side of the highway, Joe will turn his cruiser around and head back home, returning to his particular place in the inescapable network of mutuality and to his role as the keeper of all of his brothers and sisters there.

* I’m discussing all of this in terms of morality, but that’s not quite the same thing as the kind of unspoken moral code that seems to be underlying most of this response to the Cuomos’ situation, which has less to do with morality per se than with some notion of “manliness.” The moral bravado of the claim “I would do anything to protect my brother because that’s what it means to be a good brother” is shared and legitimized by male pundits in a way that the claim “A good sister would do anything to protect her sister” would not be.

The instinctive defense of Chris Cuomo is also gendered in that he was taking his brother’s side against the women his brother had abused. That makes it seem like one of the competing “moral” claims here is the ethical principle of “bros before ho’s” — which is actually neither ethical nor principled at all.

** Sorry, Canada, for casting you in this story as the outer darkness and the realm beyond the bounds of unbounded moral obligation. The universal kinship of solidarity and the universal obligation of the mutuality of subsidiarity really does not and cannot stop at the political constructs of national borders. But the song had to end somewhere and so it ends where Joe’s story ends, not Frankie’s. Joe’s story ends at the border because he is, after all, a highway patrolman. He works for the state.

I am a Christian. Here is what I believe about abortion.

Last updated on: September 2, 2020 at 7:31 pm By Fred Clark