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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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 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.
Quotes below are from the 1975 edition of this book (left).
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.
* 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.”
Here’s where we left off on the subject of police and other first responders: “When one system collapses, another system is forced to bear the weight — putting an undue burden and undue strain on that other system. What we’re talking about here, then, is a failure of subsidiarity.”
Here’s Dallas Police Chief David Brown desperately trying to communicate what that means, specifically, for big city police departments in America:
We’re asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. We’re just asking us to do too much. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding? Let the cops handle it. Not enough drug addiction funding? Let’s give it to the cops. Here in Dallas we got a loose-dog problem. Let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail? Give it to the cops. … That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.
What Chief Brown is describing is what happens when subsidiarity breaks down.
I won’t try to provide some dictionary definition of what subsidiarity means — those tend to be more confusing than the idea itself, which is subtle, but not really all that complicated. The point is simply to acknowledge that we’re all connected to one another in all the various roles and spheres and responsibilities we have in life. If we each meet our responsibilities, we make it easier for others to do so as well. But when we fail to fulfill our responsibilities, we make it harder for others to fulfill theirs.
I’m not directly responsible for raising the kids next door. That’s primarily their parents’ job. But I am responsible for those kids, and for their parents, in indirect ways. I can be a good neighbor or a bad neighbor. Being a good neighbor makes those parents’ job easier. Being a lousy neighbor can make it harder. Those kids and their parents and I are all also connected as citizens of our township, our school district, our state and our nation. Again, I can choose to be a responsible citizen or an irresponsible one — and that choice affects my neighbors’ ability to do right by their kids.
This can be empowering — if we’re all connected, we’re all capable of indirectly assisting each other by sending out ripples of support. But it also reminds us that our irresponsibility can ripple forth, indirectly burdening and harming others as well.
What Chief Brown is describing is the end result of widespread irresponsibility creating a greater burden for police as the responsible actors of last resort. His complaint is echoed in similar complaints from other government agencies forced to take responsibility because no one else will.
Americans have been perversely confused on that point ever since President Reagan warned us that “government is the problem.” That ideology taught us to fear Big Gubmint expanding to usurp all the responsibilities that were rightly ours as sovereign, solipsistic individuals. This is backwards and upside-down. It’s like railing against orphanages for usurping the rightful role of parents.
Yes, that could happen. It’s possible that a community with a large, overpopulated orphanage got that way because Big Orphanage conspired to abduct children, murder their parents, and discourage all relatives, neighbors, church-groups and the like from acting as foster parents, all so they could consolidate ever-more power for their expanding Orphanage Leviathan. But it’s far more likely that a large, overpopulated orphanage is the result of abdication, not usurpation. It’s far more likely that it is a final, desperate act of last-resort responsibility overburdened by the failures and irresponsibility of multiple levels and layers of the community’s larger network of mutuality.
So, yes, it’s possible that — as Reaganite ideology tells us — Big Police has expanded to usurp the responsibilities of our mental health systems, and also that Big Police shouldered aside our wonderful drug addiction programs to take those over, further consolidating its power. And that now Big Police is even subsuming responsible pet ownership as it seeks to include loose-dog catching in the grasp of its totalitarian tentacles.
Chief Brown argues that the opposite is happening, and that seems far more plausible. Our mental health system — a network of mutuality unto itself including layers of government, insurers, regulators, employers, hospitals, the medical profession, etc. — has been irresponsible, he says, and so police departments either have the choice to join in that irresponsibility or else to be the last resort of responsibility, taking on a task they are ill-equipped and ill-prepared to perform. If the rest of society — the rest of the network of mutuality — refuses to fulfill its responsibility for the care of mental illness, then police departments will have to step up and do the best they can.
Will they handle that well? Of course not. It’s not supposed to be their job. And — like every job — it’s not something that anyone can do well when denied the direct and indirect support of the rest of the community.
The usurpation by Big Gubmint that Reagan imagined everywhere is always possible, and sometimes happens. But far, far, far more common is the situation Chief Brown describes: government forced to take on ever-greater responsibility due to the irresponsibility of other actors in our network of mutuality — individuals, corporations, families, economies, cities, towns, counties, states, schools, businesses, churches, etc. Government is far too burdened with the responsibilities abdicated by all those other actors to have much time or resources left over for the nefarious usurpation of even more responsibility.
But the top-down usurpation of Reagan’s nightmare is not entirely imaginary — as Chief Brown himself inadvertently acknowledged with his final example. I omitted that example with the ellipses in the quote above, but let’s look at it here. Here’s the chief’s full statement:
We’re asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. We’re just asking us to do too much. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding? Let the cops handle it. Not enough drug addiction funding? Let’s give it to the cops. Here in Dallas we got a loose-dog problem. Let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail? Give it to the cops. 70% of the African American community is being raised by single women. Let’s give it to the cops to solve that as well. That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.
The chief frets that “70% of the African American community is being raised by single women” and says this is a problem police departments are being asked to solve. That’s infuriatingly oblivious. This is not a problem police are being asked to solve, but a problem police are being asked to stop causing. The selective War on Drugs and the mass incarceration of black males in America are a huge contributing factor to the problem Chief Brown laments. Not to mention that the children of Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, Akai Gurley, Dante Parker, et al., are now being raised by single women.
Police are very often in exactly the position that Chief Brown argues — the overburdened and under-supported responsible actors of last resort who are forced to cope with problems the rest of society, at multiple levels, refuses to deal with. But they are also, like the rest of society, sometimes guilty of failing to meet their own direct responsibilities — thereby overburdening others in turn.
In the previous post, we noted that in their role as “first responders” to emergencies unrelated to law enforcement, the guns that police officers carry are neither necessary nor helpful. The presence of those guns — the introduction of those guns — increases the danger present, rather than reducing or helping to resolve it safely.
When people with guns are summoned in an emergency, they sometimes respond as people with guns — whether or not guns are capable of addressing the emergency in question. This makes things worse.
This is particularly — and often tragically — the case when police are called on to be the “first responders” in an emergency involving someone suffering from mental illness, emotional distress, or psychosis. Too often, those stories end like this awful encounter a few months ago, “Parents called 911 to help suicidal daughter — and ‘police ended up putting a bullet in her.’”
Melissa Boarts is one of at least 262 people who have been fatally shot by police so far in 2016 [as of April 6], according to a Washington Post database. At least 41 of those killed by police were carrying a knife or other blade, and about a quarter of all police shooting victims were mentally ill or experiencing an emotional crisis.
People with untreated mental illness are 16 times as likely to be killed during a police encounter as other civilians approached or stopped by law enforcement, according to a study from the Treatment Advocacy Center.
… Since January 2015, the Post has tracked more than 1,100 fatal shootings by on-duty police officers, with one in four involving someone who was either in the midst of a mental health crisis or was explicitly suicidal. A Post analysis has found that in half of those cases, the officers involved were not properly trained to deal with the mentally ill — and in many cases, officers responded with tactics that quickly made a volatile situation even more dangerous.
When people are suicidal, we send “first responders” with guns. When a mental health crisis or emotional crisis becomes an emergency, our standard operating procedure is to add guns to the equation. This is a terrible idea with all too predictable results.
Stories like the one above are frighteningly common (warning: autoplay video at link), and law enforcement officials themselves are among the loudest of those calling for a change in this “first response” approach:
“If you talk to most police officers, the most volatile situations are the ones with mental illness,” said Tom Dart, sheriff of Cook County, Ill., who has worked to raise awareness about the large number of people with mental illness in jails and prisons and to improve their treatment. …
… Some police departments have formed crisis intervention teams, whose members have special training in dealing with people with mental illness. Training focuses on ways to calm people in the midst of a breakdown, rather than using force.
In Miami-Dade County, about 4,600 officers have been trained in crisis intervention, said Steven Leifman, an associate administrative judge in Florida’s Miami-Dade County Court. Before the program began, police were involved in the shooting of someone with mental illness about once a month. In the five years since the training began, there have been only four or five such shootings, he said.
Once a month. In a single county.
No one has ever called the police saying, “My relative is having a mental health crisis, I want you to come here and shoot them dead.” Anyone making such a call might themselves be arrested. Police would likely respond to such a request by — correctly — insisting that it’s not their job to come to your home to shoot and kill your relative who’s having a mental health crisis. And yet many people have made the opposite of that phone call, telling police “My relative is having a mental health crisis, but I don’t want you to come here and shoot them dead” — only to have that happen anyway, despite their pleas.
That can leave families of people with serious mental illness with nowhere to turn.
“I am terrified to call the police when it involves my son,” said Candie Dalton, of Englewood, Colo., whose 20-year-old son has schizophrenia.
Dalton said her son’s interactions with police have left him terrified of law enforcement. Once, he was the victim of a home invasion robbery. When he was unable to articulate what had happened, police accused him of selling his possessions for drug money. Officers then arrested him because of an unpaid speeding ticket.
On another occasion, Dalton called police because her son threatened her with a kitchen knife. Police responded with overwhelming force.
“There were multiple cops aiming their guns at my son until he got on the ground,” Dalton said. “One of the officers later told me that my son was close to having a hole in him so big they could drive a Mack truck through it.”
According to that article, the crisis intervention training in Miami-Dade is working, but such efforts and results are the exception, not the rule. Barring such training, when police are summoned to deal with a mental health crisis, they are summoned as first responders with guns. They are the people with guns who arrive as people with guns. And, unsurprisingly, those guns often get used.
“The traditional police response to people with mental illness has often been ineffective,” a Department of Justice guide says, “and sometimes tragic.”
Intensive training for police may help them to better serve as first responders in emergencies arising from mental health or emotional crises. If we’re going to continue to rely on police as the first responders in such situations, then we need to establish — and fund — far better and more comprehensive training for that response.
And part of that training, I’d argue, should be to leave the damn gun in the car.
The larger problem with police responses to crises of mental health or emotional distress is that it shouldn’t be their job. We’re asking police to do something that doesn’t have anything to do with their role as law enforcement professionals.
This is one of many, many ways in which we’re asking the police to be something other than, and far more than, police.
This is a major theme in that USAToday article linked above:
Many law enforcement groups are concerned about the demands placed upon them.
“Police are being forced to be mental health counselors without training,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, the largest police organization in the country. “It underscores a real tragedy: the total collapse of the mental health system in the United States. People who should be wards of the hospital are wards of the street.”
When one system collapses, another system is forced to bear the weight — putting an undue burden and undue strain on that other system.
What we’re talking about here, then, is a failure of subsidiarity.
John Oliver’s team did a terrific job on Last Week Tonight covering as much of the subject of police reform as they could in half an hour. It’s informative, entertaining, funny, and yet righteously angry. Watch the whole thing:
At about the 10 minute mark there, Oliver & Co. replay a 2016 clip from former Dallas Police Chief David Brown lamenting that “we’re asking cops to do too much in this country.” We discussed that clip here back in 2016 during a previous iteration of the cycle of protest and failed reform.
Brown’s words remain important, I think, because they highlight the flipside of the problem, which is also a big part of its cause. Here again I’ll risk losing your attention by discussing this in the framework of “subsidiarity” — the principle from Christian political thinking (but not exclusively from Christian thinking) that helps us to think more clearly, and to act more justly, by emphasizing and clarifying that moral responsibility is always both universal and differentiated. This is what the Bible talks about in that section of the epistles that talks about an “inescapable network of mutuality.”
I sometimes describe subsidiarity by asking “Who is ‘you’?” If you are a sibling, you’re responsible for being a good sibling, but that gets harder to do if your other siblings are irresponsible, or if your parents are irresponsible. It’s more difficult to be a good sibling with irresponsible, crappy parents because in addition to the proper role you need to play as a sibling, you’re also forced to pick up the slack for your parents, fulfilling the responsibilities they’ve left unattended. That’s extra work. It’s not supposed to be your job and you’d be much better able to do your job if you didn’t also have to do their job.
That’s what Chief Brown was expressing as his frustration that “we’re asking cops to do too much.” He’s right — for specific values of “we” in that sentence. “We” — the city and county, state and federal governments and the budgets they produce — have been asking the police to take on responsibilities that shouldn’t be their job, responsibilities that we should not and cannot expect them to be any good at fulfilling.
But as we’ve seen, and as we’ve shown this past week, there’s also another “we” made up of millions of ordinary members of our community that is asking the police to do a lot less in this country. This “we” is asking the police to stop taking on responsibilities and tasks that lie beyond the essential functions they are intended to perform. They’re asking that different actors and institutions be asked, or be created, to attend to the responsibilities that ought not to belong to the police.
This request is being received by many police departments as a threat — one they’re determined to crush, violently and lawlessly. That’s immoral and dumb for a host of reasons, but it’s particularly immoral and dumb given that the response from the police themselves ought to be “Yes, please, thank you so much for saying so.”
Imagine that you’re the center fielder on a baseball team.
But in order to save money — and to offer popular cuts in ticket prices, including free luxury seats for select fans — the team’s management has decided not to hire anyone to play left field or right field. Instead, they’ll be depending on you, alone, to defend the entire outfield, from foul pole to foul pole, all by yourself.
Initially, this might seem like quite the ego-boost. Management is telling you that you’re so good, so special, that you can do what most teams use three people to do! Maybe they even boost your salary a bit since they don’t have to pay those other outfielders anymore. Awesome!
But this would get tiresome very quickly. Your team is going to lose every game. You’ll be exhausted and demoralized, quickly realizing that you’re not three times better than any other outfielder, just three times less effective.
You’ll realize that no matter how much management tries to spin this as a sign of your immense value, they’re actually overworking you, asking you to do more than they should — to do more than you can. And all those long innings chasing blooper doubles hundreds of feet away will vastly outweigh that little boost in salary they gave you. You might have once been a good center fielder, but without teammates carrying their share of the defense, you will suck at your job.
And no one likes sucking at their job.
So when the fans start booing every inning, protesting how routine fly balls turn into 10-run rallies for the other team, those boos ought to be music to your ears. Give the fans what they want, you’ll think, stop asking me to do too much and just let me cover the one part of the outfield I’m supposed to be responsible for and let me leave the rest to somebody else.
You’d have to be a raging narcissist as well as an idiot to be offended at the suggestion that your team needs a left fielder and a right fielder too — that they need to stop relying on you to do what even Willie Mays or Andruw Jones or any of the DiMaggios couldn’t be expected to do alone. You ought to be grateful for the boos, because what they’re asking for might one day let you go back to doing your job, and only your job, and to possibly again being proud of that work.
If you didn’t see it that way, the fans would start booing you too. And they’d be right to do so. Because that’d be a sure sign that you probably wouldn’t be content with just playing three positions by yourself. You’d be demonstrating the kind of maniacal ambition that won’t be satisfied until you were playing all four infield positions too — and also pitching and, somehow, catching as well. You’d be revealing yourself as someone who didn’t care about losing 162 games and turning the team into an unwatchable laughingstock, because you’d rather suck at nine positions than just play one well.
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