Stephen Prothero makes some good points in his blog post, “Political pledges are unbiblical and unchristian.” For example: “Many of these oaths ask politicians to sign onto a lot of silliness that has nothing to do with the issue at hand.” And: “these vows tie the hands of politicians, making them unable to consider changing circumstances.” But when he cites Matthew 5:33–37 as a biblical proof text for not signing pledges, and argues that Jesus’ words imply that “Republicans who have signed these pledges have literally made a pact with the devil,” I have to wonder whether he’s thought this issue all the way through. After all, if it’s wrong to take an oath against raising taxes, same-sex marriage, or permissive abortion laws, is it somehow right to take an oath to become, you know, the president of the United States of America? I can’t help but think that Prothero’s use of the Bible is more than a bit opportunistic.
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This will be the hallmark of America’s next revival: an embodied faith that makes the connections between conviction and practice, between Spirit and flesh, between the world that is and the world that ought to be. Something is stirring in a dozen different movements today to teach God’s people to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This one thing is more important than any of the smaller movements we are part of.
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“What’s Behind China’s Hard Line Against Catholics?” A combination of pride and fear, evidently.
According to the Rev. Bernardo Cervellera, director of AsiaNews, China’s new hard line is a reflection of both strength and weakness. With its status as an economic superpower now indisputable, China no longer has to cultivate the good opinion of Western nations that are literally in its debt.
“There may have been a time before the (2008 Beijing) Olympics when China may have thought it needed the Vatican’s approval for international respectability,” Cervellera said, “but now it doesn’t.”
Despite its growing assertiveness abroad, Cervellera said, Beijing is increasingly anxious about unrest among its own people. Along with skyrocketing growth, China has wrestled with inequality, corruption and environmental damage. That makes the regime even more determined to defuse any potential source of organized resistance, including the Catholic Church.
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“Willow Creek Splits with Exodus International”:
Willow Creek Community Church’s formal relationship with Exodus International has ended.
While the decision to part ways dates back to 2009, news that the South Barrington megachurch had cut ties with Exodus, the world’s largest ministry addressing homosexuality, did not surface until late June.
Scott Vaudrey of the elder response team said in writing that Willow Creek’s decision was not intended as a social or political statement, but rather an indication of “a season of reviewing and clarifying some of our affiliations with outside organizations.”
Alan Chambers, president of Exodus, disagrees. “The choice to end our partnership is definitely something that shines a light on a disappointing trend within parts of the Christian community,” he said, “which is that there are Christians who believe like one another who aren’t willing to stand with one another, simply because they’re afraid of the backlash people will direct their way if they are seen with somebody who might not be politically correct.”
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“Youth Movement: Finns Seek Renewal”:
In October, a televised debate over homosexuality on the national broadcast station spurred 40,000 people to leave the FELC. This past March, Lutheran youth magazine Nuotta created a firestorm by posting a YouTube video of a girl describing her decision to leave a lesbian lifestyle after converting to Christianity.
The video prompted the FELC to recommend that funding be cut from two conservative youth ministries that publish Nuotta, said Timo Keskitalo, chairman of the Evangelical Alliance in Finland. Most Christian organizations are legally separate from the FELC, which comprises 78 percent of Finland’s 5.3 million people, but operate under it. Local church councils can cut financial support to such groups and stop hosting their events.
The controversies shocked Finns, said Hannu Nyman, a pastor with Logos Ministries of Finland, which partners with Campus Crusade for Christ. “The division between conservatives and liberals in the church became more evident,” he said. “Committed Christians have been taken by surprise at the strong liberal front among [FELC] leadership.”
The FELC has taken steps to marginalize conservative youth, Keskitalo said. In late April, the Ministry of Education announced it would remove youth training accreditation from the Finnish Bible Institute, which supported the Nuotta video. Bishops refuse to ordain young ministers who do not support women’s ordination, he said.
An example of Neuhaus’s Law at work: “Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.”
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“One Big, Happy Polygamous Family”:
One might expect the civil liberties community to defend those cases as a natural extension of its campaign for greater privacy and personal choice. But too many have either been silent or outright hostile to demands from polygamists for the same protections provided to other groups under Lawrence.
The reason might be strategic: some view the effort to decriminalize polygamy as a threat to the recognition of same-sex marriages or gay rights generally. After all, many who opposed the decriminalization of homosexual relations used polygamy as the culmination of a parade of horribles. In his dissent in Lawrence, Justice Antonin Scalia said the case would mean the legalization of “bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality and obscenity.”
Justice Scalia is right in one respect, though not intentionally. Homosexuals and polygamists do have a common interest: the right to be left alone as consenting adults. Otherwise he’s dead wrong. There is no spectrum of private consensual relations — there is just a right of privacy that protects all people so long as they do not harm others.
In other words, the slippery slope exists and it’s wonderful. Oy vey!
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I’m not a Bachmann fan, but…
…left-leaning pundits know better. They can see right through Bachmann’s charade of supporting Catholic positions and cultivating Catholic backers and detect the fire-breathing anti-Catholic bigot beneath.
Their sudden concern for the problem of anti-Catholicism is surprising, given that some of the same folks now flogging Bachmann for a 500-year-old anti-papal phrase buried in her former denomination’s doctrinal statements frequently tell Catholic Church leaders to shut up and butt out of public policy debates — unless, of course, those debates concern immigration or the death penalty. They mock the pope and Catholic teachings, blast lay Catholics who defend those teachings in the political arena and call for the revocation of the church’s tax-exempt status when they hear priests defending Catholic teachings too pointedly from the pulpit around Election Day.
Many of these secular critics of the Catholic Church do not blink an eye when Bill Maher describes the pope as a “Nazi” and the Catholic Church as “a child-abusing religious cult.” Nor do they speak up when government officials force Catholic Charities out of the adoption business for refusing to place children with same-sex couples because doing so would contradict Catholic doctrine. Apparently, they consider anti-Catholicism acceptable after all, as long as it comes from the left end of the political spectrum.
Their cynical attempt to smear Bachmann with the anti-Catholic label does not negate the role that religious concerns play in candidate evaluations. Asking questions about the beliefs of presidential contenders is perfectly appropriate during this election cycle, just as it was in 2008, when America learned that Barack Obama had spent decades in a church led by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, of “God damn America” fame. Back then, many in the establishment media dismissed Wright’s inflammatory rhetoric as irrelevant to the presidential candidate who had sat listening to it during his formative years.
They were wrong. It matters how a politician views God, the world and others who do not share his beliefs. And given the history of anti-Catholicism in America, Catholics are right to take an interest in the way political leaders view their church and its role in society.
Yet they also should note how politicians express those views in action. Most Catholics who adhere to their church’s moral teachings would happily take a Protestant who supports Catholic values over a cafeteria Catholic who opposes his own church at every crucial turn. The question they ask when evaluating the religious character of a candidate is not simply “what do you believe” but “how do your beliefs shape the way you act in the public square?”
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“How To: Write a Science-Explains-Religion Op-Ed”: A fine piece of mockery with a link to a suitably mockable illustration from the Los Angeles Times.
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Czech Tomas Sedlacek’s recently translated book Economics of Good and Evil is, in this context, a nice corrective. Not that Sedlacek is particularly polemic or mean-spirited. On the contrary, his prose is courtly throughout; more gracious humanist than trollish blogger. But all the grace in the world can’t conceal his central point, which is the same as that of “Bloom County”—economists don’t have any idea what they’re talking about. And this, in turn, is in large part because they aren’t talking about anything.
This isn’t to denigrate economics as a field of inquiry. On the contrary, Sedlacek argues that economics has an illustrious history—going all the way back to Gilgamesh, which is basically the beginning of written records. When Gilgamesh demands that his people forego time with their families in order to build the giant wall around the city of Ur—that, Sedlacek says, is an economic issue. When the Jews in the Old Testament tried to figure out whether morality is repaid with good in this world, that was an economic concern. When Diogenes insisted that the way to happiness was to throw away all his goods, even his water jug because he could drink with his hands; that was an economic decision. Economics for Sedlacek is about the most profound questions in human existence.
The Economics of Good and Evil, for Sedlacek, then, isn’t a special branch of economics. It’s the whole enchilada. When economics first took shape as a discipline in the 18th and 19th centuries, as Sedlacek points out, it was a branch of moral philosophy. It was, specifically about the relationship between good, evil, and desire. Adam Smith addressed himself not just to how people could satisfy their wants, but to what they should want. Specifically, he argued (contrary to the opinions often attributed to him) that people needed to have sympathy for one another if society was to function. Self-interest, in itself, could not form the basis of society. Economics, for Smith, was not just descriptive, it was normative.
And that’s positive, Sedlacek (normatively) argues. Because if you don’t think about morality, you end up with a morality you haven’t thought about. Or, as Sedlacek puts it, “Models an sich (in and of themselves) are not able to convince us; nearly every worldview has a legion functional of sufficiently functional models at its disposal. The choice of particular economic theory therefore depends much more on the a priori worldview the individual is equipped with.”
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“Five Essential Reads on the American Civil War”: Items 3 and 4 examine the war from theological and moral vantage points, respectively.
GeorgePWood.com 