1.It takes a village, says Sarah Bessey: “There isn’t any need for guilt because we rely on our village as parents, because we are part of someone else’s village. This is the way we were created: to need one another, for family, for one another. It’s not something new, folks: this is called community.”
We often talk about subsidiarity in the context of government. It’s just as vital for all the other actors involved — including families. Absentee “small” government that turns its back on the village makes parenting a lot harder than it should be.
“White men’s anger is ‘real’ — that is, it is experienced deeply and sincerely. But it is not ‘true’ — that is, it doesn’t provide an accurate analysis of their situation.”
3. The CFPB is still kicking ass: “The Justice Dept. and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced the largest auto loan discrimination settlement in U.S. history with the news that Ally Bank has agreed to pay $98 million, including $80 million in refunds to settle allegations that it has been charging higher interest rates to minority borrowers of car loans.”
5. The ridiculous and shamefully self-serving use of the adjective “biblical” continues as a hallmark of white evangelicalism: “Because of the biblical manner in which Pastor Driscoll has handled this situation, Tyndale strongly stands behind him and looks forward to publishing many additional books with him.”
Christians want to fight for a corporation’s right to practice its faith by refusing to provide insurance coverage for contraception. The voices of clergy tell us that birth control is tearing at the moral fabric of our society and many point to contraception as the reason for decline of Christianity.
When we fight against contraception, we tell a generation of women that Christians don’t care about their education, productivity, or empowerment. We highlight the brooding sense that Christians don’t want women to be intelligent, working beings, but we want a woman’s worth to be solely based on her sexuality.
We discussed that here last week in a post called “American evangelicalism is defined by political tribalism.” Bird and British theologian N.T. Wright are both perplexed by how their fellow followers of Jesus arrive at — or, really, start from — a position opposed to universal health care. These guys would both meet any theological or doctrinal definition of “evangelical,” but they’re living, reading and writing from outside of the American cultural context. Since they don’t share the political tribalism that shapes and defines white evangelical Protestantism in the U.S., they’re startled and bewildered by its cruel callousness.
For a more polite rendition of that tribal, culturally conformed callousness, see Michael J. Kruger’s “Obamacare, N.T. Wright, and the Via Media.” Part of Kruger’s post is a critique of Wright’s instinctive seeking of the “middle ground” — always seeming to seek some place to stand betwixt the liberals and conservatives. Fair enough — that’s often true of Wright, but as Bird notes, Wright is Anglican, and “ever since the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity (1558), via media is how we Anglicans roll.” Criticizing an Anglican for a via media approach is like criticizing a Catholic for being hierarchical — it’s true, but, well, duh.
The really surprising thing about Kruger’s post is that Kruger is a Reformed theologian. He teaches, and serves as president, at the Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte. Yet Kruger seems wholly unfamiliar with, and wholly ignorant of, Reformed political theology.
That’s more shocking than the credulous falsehoods Kruger swallows and regurgitates as his talking points against universal health care:
Nationalized healthcare is fundamentally on the left side of the political landscape and constitutes a clear move towards a more socialist mode of governance. It is a monumental government power-grab of almost 20 percent of the U.S. economy.
Keep yer gubmint outta Michael Kruger’s Medicare!
The political tribalism shaping the white evangelicalism of folks like Kruger tends to leave them factually challenged, so it’s not surprising that Kruger doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. He imagines some sort of pristine free market in health insurance prior to Obamacare, apparently never having glimpsed the vast kludgeocratic mess of state and federal programs, subsidies, credits and regulations that this new, improved kludgeocratic mess is replacing. (That’s the more charitable interpretation. It seems kinder to Kruger to assume he didn’t know the U.S. was providing a $250 billion-a-year tax subsidy for employer health coverage, rather than to assume that Kruger only opposes subsidies for the working poor but not for corporations.)
Kruger’s ignorance of the existence of Europe’s Christian democratic parties and their long championing of universal health care — a fight often influenced by Reformed and Catholic political theology — is also shocking for the head of a Reformed seminary:
Wright tries to temper this reality by pointing out that “every other developed country” has nationalized healthcare, implying that American needs to get with the program. But, the fact that America stands alone does not invalidate its approach. Historically speaking, America has always been distinctive from the rest of the globe in precisely this area, namely its commitment towards economic freedom for its citizens, with limited government intervention. One might make the opposite of Wright’s point, namely that what makes America great is its willingness to not join the European socialist program.
“Historically speaking,” Kruger doesn’t know his hat from his hindquarters. If he thinks the many Reformed Christian parties of Europe are part of a “socialist program,” I’d hate to think what he’d make of Calvin’s Geneva.
Michael Kruger does not care for the European socialist schemes of European socialists like Margaret Thatcher, who was European. And therefore socialist.
Let’s be generous, though. Kruger is clearly way out of his depth. He’s a New Testament scholar, and I’m sure he know more about the New Testament than, say, Ezra Klein. Sure Kruger is embarrassingly wrong about the details, reality and history of health care in America and in Europe, and, yes, it would be prudent for him not to sound off on subjects he’s so proudly ignorant about, but if the folks at the Kaiser Foundation ever put out a report on the Synoptic Problem, I bet it would come off just as ignorant and amateurish as Kruger’s attempt to pontificate in their area of expertise.
Still, though, Reformed political theology is not a secret. It’s kind of a big deal. I studied it at a Baptist seminary under a Mennonite professor. It’s one of the few areas where I can find a genuine holy envy of my Calvinist brothers and sisters. I find Calvinist atonement talk monstrous, I think TULIP is an incoherent mess, and I think they’ve barely begun to grasp the way that E.P. Sanders and the new perspective on Paul swept away the ground on which Luther and Calvin built much of their theology, leaving the whole thing suspended, like Wile E. Coyote, over open air above a precipice. (I suspect that last point, by the way, is what motivates much of Kruger’s antipathy toward Wright.) But yet I find Reformed political theology — particularly the whole Kuyperian school of European socialists — to be elegant, constructive and immensely helpful.
I appreciate that political theology is the unwanted stepchild in seminaries. You can’t get a seminary degree without studying, say, Pauline christology, but you can easily graduate without ever having even heard of subsidiarity or sphere sovereignty. Fair enough. Seminaries are training pastors, not prophets. But those pastors are serving congregations made up of citizens and neighbors who have to live as citizens and neighbors. They need more than just sound exegesis, and the whole of theology and Christian political/ethical teaching provides something they need. Seminaries should be teaching political theology too.
Or, at the very least, seminaries ought to be run by people who acknowledge its existence — people who aren’t so woefully ignorant of political theology that they could write something like this:
But third, and most problematic, Wright defends nationalized healthcare on the grounds that “Christians taught that we should care for the poor and disadvantaged.” While I certainly agree this is a Christian value, how does that fact lead one to conclude that the government should be the body doing it? This simply does not follow. Historically, it was Christians caring for the poor and disadvantaged and not the government!
Sweet holy Dooyeweerd that’s some shameful nonsense.
I’ve come to expect this kind of immature ignorance from nondenominational white evangelicals who are wholly cut off from the rich traditions of Christian political thought, but to see the president of a Reformed seminary parroting this idea of social responsibility as a zero-sum competition is really disheartening.
In Christian political teaching social responsibility is always differentiated, mutual and complementary. It is never exclusive, binary or competitive. In Reformed theology, social responsibility is always differentiated, mutual and complementary. It is never exclusive, binary or competitive.
When you see a Reformed theologian suggesting otherwise, you know without checking that this person is an American and that what they’re saying is not the product of Reformed or Christian teaching, but merely the latest talking points of the political allegiance that defines their tribal identity.
The remarkable thing is the perpetual warning of imminent catastrophe: “If X happens, then all is lost,” the headlines warn. Then X happens, after which the next month’s issue says, “If Y happens, then all is lost.”
These stories can only appeal to people who are: A) very, very easily frightened; and B) unable to recall last month.
• Poor people must prove that they are innocent of the vices of the powerful:
… Sims was arrested for DUI in 2010 by Atlanta police. He is among the state lawmakers who voted in favor of House Bill 861, which mandated drug testing for all Georgians seeking public assistance funding.
Maybe that’s because her politics and her contemptuous disdain for the poor and the working class also overlooked her devout “Christian faith.”
Or were Isaiah, Jesus, James and John all just kidding?
• For 10 years I worked at a daily newspaper using the AP Stylebook, and for most of that time I had a long-running argument with my boss’s boss about the use of the term “illegal immigrant.”
Now, almost two years after I got laid off, the Associated Press has announced that it will no longer use the term. I’d call the newsroom to gloat, but my boss’s boss got laid off too and I don’t think either of the people left in that newsroom has the time to answer a phone.
Never give your bank permission to reach into your account and take your money. If you do, they will help themselves every chance they get. They took $32 billion from their depositors last year, and then had the chutzpah to call it a “service” and a form of “protection.”
Explain to me how a decent person can steal $32 billion a year and then maybe I’ll be persuaded that they might be decent people.
• I really, really, really hate the phrase “living in sin.”
It’s evangelical-speak for POSSLQ and few phrases reveal more about the stunted, unbiblical, sex-obsessed understanding of “sin” in American Christianity. Jamie Dimon is never described as “living in sin.” Wayne LaPierre is never described as “living in sin.” Unless and until that phrase comes to be employed to refer to people like that, it will always ring hollow — a meaningless phrase that signifies only the meaninglessness and hypocrisy of the subculture that produced it.
If he listened, he would understand that a demand for equality is a moral demand. If he listened, he would understand that moral argument hasn’t been marginalized, it has been marshaled against him. There is a moral argument being made, forcefully and repeatedly, and it is an argument that demonstrates the immorality of Al Mohler and other defenders of inequality.
• “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
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.
Bryan Fischer speaks at the 2012 Values Voter summit in Washington. Organizers apparently asked Mitt Romney whom he would like to have speak just prior to his speech. Gov. Romney quickly consulted my blog, saw that I had written nearly a dozen posts criticizing Fischer, and requested Fischer precede him because, Romney said, “Fred and his ilk shape the public and media perception.”
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.
In any case, Jethani’s endorsement of Dalrymple’s weirdly anachronistic history of the religious right is not the biggest problem with his attempted rebuttal of Cheshire’s piece. The biggest problem with Jethani’s post is that it’s pastoral malpractice. We’ll get to that in part 2.
This is, rather, a plea that we follow Augustine and divest ourselves of the notion that interpreting a text literally means taking it as an historically accurate account of things that happened in time and space. If the text isn’t an historical narrative, then treating it as an historical narrative is not properly a literal interpretation. Now, I realize that discerning an author’s intention in this regard can be tricky — but not as tricky as you might think, if you attend to ancient genre conventions.
Ryan and his defenders rely heavily on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which Morlino defines as: “the problem at hand should be addressed at the lowest level possible — that is, the level closest to the people in need.” The federal government is so far removed from people on the ground, they argue, that it cannot possibly be responsible for addressing problems associated with poverty. That’s only true, however, if institutions at lower levels actually have the capacity to meet those needs. And that’s far from the case. As we discussed earlier this summer, each and every religious congregation in America would have to spend an additional $50,000 annually just to cover the proposed cuts in one federal nutrition program.
It’s likely the same reason most Western news organizations haven’t republished the topless Kate Middleton pix. Or why most US newspapers do not show dead soldiers. Or why, as I write this, I have told the head of my college’s NPR network that we will not publish the name of an underage rape victim, even though state law gives us the legal right. Such restraint does not damage our journalism.
Those who engage in these fallacies believe that becoming indignant, or refusing to question a particular belief, are virtues. In other words, one should become indignant, and not becoming indignant indicates a moral flaw in one’s character; one should refuse to question privileged beliefs, and persistence in questioning represents a character defect.
… Righteous indignation undermines civil discourse and often corrodes efforts aimed at reasonable compromise. When righteous indignation is invoked, conversation stops and violence may begin. For the indignant party, reason may be suspended. Righteous indignation muddles thinking, elevates emotional reactions to primacy in the discourse, and displaces its alternative: impassioned, reasoned, thoughtful analysis.
Americans continue to have a small number of expensive, poor quality cell phone providers. And how much does this cost you? Take your phone bill, and cut it by 80%. That’s how much you should be paying. You see, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, people in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Finland pay on average less than $130 a year for cell phone service. Americans pay $635.85 a year. That $500 a year difference, from most consumers with a cell phone, goes straight to AT&T and Verizon (and to a much lesser extent Sprint and T-Mobile). It’s the cost of corruption. It’s also, from the perspective of these companies, the return on their campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures. Every penny they spend in DC and in state capitols ensures that you pay high bills, to them.
Rep. Ryan claims his budget reflects the Catholic principle of “subsidiarity.” But he profoundly distorts this teaching to fit a narrow political ideology guided by anti-government fervor and libertarian faith in radical individualism. This is anathema to the Catholic social tradition. In fact, ever since Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, Catholic social teaching has recognized a positive role for government and our collective responsibility to care for our neighbors. It was another Ryan — Msgr. John Ryan — who in 1919 worked with Catholic bishops on a visionary plan that called for minimum wages, insurance for the elderly and unemployed, labor rights and housing for workers. The “Bishops’ Program for Social Reconstruction” recognized that free markets and self-reliance alone were not enough. These proposals eventually helped inform historic New Deal programs that for the first time sought to buffer families from the cruel vagaries of profit-driven markets that had little concern for human dignity. Subsidiarity recognizes that those social institutions closest to the human person — families, communities, churches — can effectively respond to human needs. But subsidiarity, according to Church teaching, also insists that government has a responsibility to serve the common good when these institutions are unable to address the more systemic issues of poverty, inadequate health care, environmental degradation and other societal challenges.
So this “motherhood is the most important job in the world” thing is an outlier. And it’s a tool used to not give actual mothers their due. It romanticizes what motherhood actually looks like; since the job is So Important, it’s positioned as something that women should be happy to sacrifice for. Of course motherhood should be tedious and financially stressful and uncompensated — your compensation is the smile on your child’s face! And that’s invaluable. If you think otherwise, you are probably some sort of witch.
None of which is to say that parenthood doesn’t have incredible emotional benefits — the smile on your child’s face is invaluable. But that smile doesn’t mean that you should have to forgo healthcare or basic financial stability.
… It’s easy to talk about what you value. But when Republicans value things, they put money behind it. And I’m not seeing many dollars spent on mothers.
If you want to know if a person is likely to pull the blue or red lever at election time, ask for an opinion on the death penalty. It’s as good a single issue indicator as you are likely to find.
… Unfortunately, the death penalty is so popular in the South that we are unlikely to see abolition anytime soon. Although southern states are executing fewer people since the advent of life without parole laws, our prisons are filling up with old men who have lived most of their lives in prison and will die there. A growing number of lifers are still in their teens. Abolishing the death penalty is a laudable goal; but capital punishment isn’t the only symptom of a punitive consensus that has controlled American public policy for half a century.
The popularity of capital punishment in the states of the old Confederacy suggests there is more in play here than murder rates. In fact, if you take a map highlighting the rate of lynching during the Jim Crow era and superimpose it over a map showing the frequency of executions in the United States, the correspondence is almost exact. States that lynched a lot of people are now executing a lot of people. Is this merely a coincidence? Alas, it is not.
“A projection from 1981 for rising temperatures in a major science journal, at a time that the temperature rise was not yet obvious in the observations, has been found to agree well with the observations since then, underestimating the observed trend by about 30 percent.”
If only “the government” would get out of the way, then private charities could step in, step up, and fix all of our problems.
This is not a serious suggestion, but it’s a popular one, perennially put forward by people who insist we should take them seriously. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat offers a recent version of this in a recent column titled, tellingly, “Government and Its Rivals.”
“Rivals,” you see, because it’s a competition. If X helps a poor person, then no one else can. All responsibility is exclusive and competitive, etc.
The first and largest problem for Douthat and others arguing this is that the facts and numbers are easy to find and they all run counter to the theory. The scope of private charity is not adequate. Nor has it ever been.
Before Social Security, private charities worked hard to provide a small measure of economic security to a small percentage of America’s elderly poor. But the massive reduction in poverty among America’s elderly came about through Social Security, not through private charity. After the establishment of Social Security, of course, private charities have continued to assist the elderly and — contra Douthat — the existence of Social Security has leveraged their effectiveness, not diminished their efforts.
That’s the second problem for those calling for the total privatization of the public safety net — they are contradicted by the vast majority of those who are actually working in the very private charities they praise. From the top leadership to the foot soldiers in the trenches, the people who are doing the hard work of those private charities overwhelmingly wish to see more and more vigorous public support, not less, and certainly not none. They do not view themselves as “rivals” of the government.
This has also always been the case. (Of the many distortions in Marvin Olasky’s seminally dishonest The Tragedy of American Compassion, one of the worst was the way he surgically removed the voices of the 19th- and early-20th-century charitable workers he praises. For an antidote to Olasky’s influential revisionism, see Norris Magnuson’s Salvation in the Slums: Evangelical Social Work 1865-1920. Magnuson consults the same primary sources as Olasky, but actually quotes from them. The contrast is revealing.)
The third problem is more theoretical and abstract, resulting from a basic misunderstanding of subsidiarity that inverts and perverts its meaning. This is where Douthat goes off the rails, but, again, he is not the first or the only person to do so. Subsidiarity is based on solidarity and on the foundational idea of universal, mutual and complementary responsibility. The notion that public and private actors are, necessarily, “rivals” rejects the possibility of solidarity and mutual responsibility, twisting it into something competitive and exclusive. Helping the poor is not a zero-sum contest between public and private actors.
That distortion leads Douthat to confuse cause and effect. He imagines that “government” is usurping the role of civil society, when what is actually the case is that government, as the responsible agent of last resort, has been compelled to do more due to the abdication of responsibility on the part of a civil society increasingly shaped and weakened by a musical-chairs, Randian individualism that denies the universal responsibility of solidarity.
But my main point in response to Douthat’s confused talk of “rivalry” is to point out again the fourth problem for him and for everyone who embraces this theory that privatized charity would thrive and succeed if only it were freed from government interference and government “competition.”
We needn’t discuss that idea as a mere theory. It has been tried and implemented for decades in an experiment that is national in scope. The results are evident for all to see, to measure and to contemplate.
This is how Haiti works. If you wish to see a world in which thousands of vibrant private charities are hard at work with no government interference, support or competition, then just look at Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere.
The utopia that Ross Douthat dreams of has been made real in Haiti. The blueprint he sketches has been built there in a nation mostly ungoverned save by the work of NGOs. Look there and you will see what Ross Douthat wishes for America.
See also: Booman Tribune: “Romney’s Giant Blunder,” which takes a more cynical view of the idea of a “rivalry” between public and private assistance to the vulnerable.
Many Republicans and Christians claim the church, rather than government, should be the one to help the poor. These folks argue that government should stay out of providing social services, and don’t want to see their tax dollars used for such purposes. But when it comes to “values,” many conservatives do not have a problem with government promoting a certain family model using millions of dollars in federal funds.
Which one is it? If you want government to stay out of the church’s role in caring for the poor, wouldn’t you also want government to step aside so the church can foster healthy relationships, including marriage and fatherhood?
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