Tag: Tobin Grant

…With Liberty and Justice for [Each of Us]

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Rockwell PledgeThe Hobby Lobby decision may mark a rhetorical turning point in the interface between religious rights and individual rights. For decades we have been focused on one part of the Pledge of Allegiance (“One nation, under God”). But now I think our social imagination has shifted to the latter phrase (“with Liberty and Justice for All”). Then we’ve individualized that last phrase, so that the focus is on each person’s liberty and justice. Trying to navigate the space between various people’s individuality leads to the conflicts that seem never ending across the internet and media.

As is usually the case on this blog, this thesis came to me due to the contradictions inherent in a number of things I saw on social media. This morning I read a post on The Gospel Coalition blog titled “They Know Not What They Do” written by Greg Forster. He argues that it’s plausible to argue that secularists who oppose religious rights are misunderstanding basic issues about religion and society. He writes:

Such ignorance almost certainly does play some role, but that cannot be the whole story. Given his defective understanding of what religion is—and, for that matter, what a business is—the secularist genuinely doesn’t understand why the owners of a company would feel their consciences were at stake in the company’s actions.

His concluding lessons are fairly optimistic but took some turns to get there. But it was the quote that caught my attention. The “secularists” I read after Hobby Lobby understood that the Greens had issues of conscience. But they also were thinking of the impact of that decision of conscience on other individuals. They were calculating potential harm done to others in the process and found that unacceptable.

My friend David Fitch posted an 2013 article from the New York Times titled “Generation LGBTQIA” (which for some reason was in the Fashion and Style section). It told the story of how the LGBT label became inadequate because it didn’t include enough possibilities to cover each person’s experience. (Q is for Queer, I stands for Intersex and A stands for Ally). The implication is that each personal expression of sexuality and/or affinity must be affirmed as an expression of true individuality.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. “In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian [mundane],” Professor Halberstam said.

I read an interesting piece by Derek Rishmawy titled “I Used to Believe X for Reason Y…and the Failure of Intellectual Imagination.” He suggests that our focus on personal story can sometimes lead to overgeneralization and ad hoc conclusions. He says we need conversation with those others to protect us from logical error. Derek was writing primarily about young evangelicals telling conversion stories away from what they used to believe. As much as I think story is really, really, important I’ve always argued that story is only the beginning of dialogue and not an end in itself. But I readily acknowledge that in the broader society we have a tendency to speak only from personal experience and validate that over others’ experiences.

Sociologically, I want to place the impetus for all of the above on the prioritization of individualism within western society. It’s been nearly 30 years since  Habits of the Heart documented the damage that rampant individualism does to community. Over those three decades, what Durkheim called “the cult of the individual” has only grown stronger. As Durkheim predicted, this is a result of increasing diversity and changing bases for social solidarity.

I use Michael Sandel’s Justice in one of my fall classes. Today’s social media had me thinking of his chapter on Libertarianism. Sandel says that Libertarians oppose three things:

1. No Paternalism. Libertarians oppose laws to protect people from harming themselves…

2. No Morals Legislation. Libertarians oppose using the coercive force of law to promote notions of virtue or to express the moral convictions of the majority…

3. No Redistribution of Income or Wealth. The libertarian theory of rights rules out any law that requires some people to help others, including taxation for redistribution of wealth…(60)

In the midst of pondering how we shifted to the last phrase of the pledge of allegiance, about liberty and justice, the whole libertarian thrust came clearer to me. All these years of celebrating individualism in politics, movies, reality television, social media, the blogosphere (hello?), and education (especially higher ed) have taken a toll. It seems to me that we are less interested in liberty and justice for all as we are in liberty and justice for each person.

And that’s an untenable situation. There will be winners and losers. There will be some liberties that are sacrificed for others. Some people cannot pursue their liberties without infringing someone else’s.

GallupAverageAlso today, Tobin Grant posted some very interesting data on the changing role of religion in society. He analyzed five different measures of religion in American life that Gallup has tracked over the years: religious identity, church attendance, membership, religion’s importance in life, and religion’s relevance for today. All five of these show a dramatic decline. Then he statistically combines them into one measure and shows that change. My initial impression was that I’d tell my stats students that the truncated Y axis makes the decline look more dramatic than it really is. After all, it’s only a drop from 78% to 69% over 20 years.

But then I got to thinking that there may be something more happening. Perhaps there’s some tipping point below which religion is no longer the “one nation, under God” factor (more Durkheim). Maybe once we have 30% of the country thinking that religion is okay if that’s what you choose, then all we have are competing individual values.

Finally today, I came across an article written after the Hobby Lobby and Wheaton decisions by Winifred Fallers Sullivan, Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and affiliate professor of law at Indiana University. In her piece, “The impossibility of religious freedom” she writes provocatively about the  nature of religious freedom in legal terms as recognized by courts. It’s a detailed argument, outlining the importance of religion regardless of its broader acceptability. She calls out liberal critics of the court decisions. Of the justices, she writes:

Their common refusal, together with that of their predecessors, to acknowledge the impossibility of fairly delimiting what counts as religion has produced a thicket of circumlocutions and fictions that cannot, when all is said and done, obscure the absence of any compelling logic to support the laws that purport to protect religious freedom today.

 

So what do we do? Somehow we have to find a way to recast our argument in ways that speak to common values. That can affirm the multiplicity of voices and interests present in the society. Religion will be one of those voices but perhaps not a dominant voice, at least not one with a language the broader culture is prepared to hear. So when we evangelicals make our claims for privilege, we’ll have to do so in ways that transcend our unique group interests and speak to the broad range of expressions within the society.

Somehow, we’ve got to find our way back to that “Indivisible” which connects the “one nation” to the “liberty and justice for all”.

 

This is not about Duck Dynasty

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McDuck

The picture is the result of a humorous tweet Thursday making reference to the Duck Dynasty news with reference to Scrooge McDuck’s swimming pool of money. As I wrote on Facebook, I’ve never seen the show. In fact, I avoid “Reality Television”. So for all I knew, it might have well been a throwback to Duck Tales.

But now I know about the “controversy”: How Phil Robertson gave an interview to GQ, in which he shared his views about homosexuality and race relations. In sharing his opinions, he was brash and inconsiderate. How A&E took offense at his comments about homosexuality (but, somehow as Jonathan Merritt observed, not about race) and indefinitely suspended him from further episodes of DD. The public response to the banishment was quick and loud. On the one hand, twitter was aflame with those criticizing Robertson’s comments. On the other, there were thousands and thousands taking to Facebook to complain about how he was being punished for holding to Biblical standards.

But as my title says, I’m not really interested in the specifics of this situation. Somehow it blends together with the Paula Deen controversy over racial language, the Chick-Fil-A row over the owner’s interview regarding same-sex marriage, and the never-ending War on Christmas. Add in random ACLU actions, an isolated teacher who won’t let a child write about Jesus, and Atheist Billboards and the result in a near-permanent sense of outrage on the part of good Christian folks everywhere.

I’ve been wondering why this happens with such regularity and why we seem unable to build the bridges that will allow evangelicals to be faithful witnesses that helps the broader society understand the Gospel of Christ’s Kingdom. Friday, Tobin Grant wrote this wonderful piece for Religion News Service drawing on the work of sociologists James Davison Hunter and Christian Smith to suggest that evangelicalism has historically needed to be under attack as part of its cultural identity.

I addressed the same argument in my recent post on the Future of Evangelicalism:

This is buttressed by a more internal challenge: the cognitive frameworks defined by the idea of Worldview. Fifteen years ago, Christian Smith argued in American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (1998) that evangelicalism developed a subcultural identity based on being under assault from secularism and liberal Protestantism. I’d suggest that this attempt to remain separate relies on specific forms of scriptural argument and educational philosophy. However, it is a tenuous position. As Hunter observed in his book on Evangelicals sixteen years earlier, the realities of the modern world and the desire for acceptance or influence make separatism harder to maintain.

As I reflect on this shifting relationship between evangelicalism and the broader culture, I’m struck with a couple of things. First, the boundaries between church and culture are increasingly porous. It’s not just that conservative Christians seem to watch a lot of reality television (and situation comedies and police procedurals and bed-hopping dramas). It’s that we evangelicals simultaneously critique the culture while seeming to be fully immersed in it. I’m not suggesting that cultural isolation is to be preferred. Instead, there is a need to develop a better sense of discernment. How can we handle contemporary culture that maintains a distance between full engagement and isolation? When do we enjoy the top situation comedy and yet still maintain a Kingdom critique?

Second, I realize how much the outrage is not just predictable but quite likely manipulated by external forces. I’ve been wondering if A&E knew the Robertson was going to give the GQ interview. How could they not? Don’t they have publicists who manage things like that? Aren’t there contractual relationships involved? So how were they “shocked” when the Duck Commander said outrageous things?

This begins to really feed my cynical side. It’s not hard to imagine that A&E allowed the interview, took offense at the comment, and made themselves the center of the universe for a few days. As I reflect on the ongoing raft of outrages, I can find similar winners benefitting from the pain of others.

I’m reminded of Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas. He argues that conservatives in Kansas sided with Republicans in opposition to their own economic interests over concerns about moral issues. But the trick, he suggested, was that nothing ever changed on the moral issues. The solution was just around the corner, which kept the Kansans voting Republican.

I’m not making a political argument here. But the basic analogy holds. There are forces at work trying to maintain a sense of outrage. They may be what we call principalities and powers. They may be economic interests. They may be the result of an evangelical search for power and prestige. They may be the result of religious celebrities who maintain their audience by being offended at slippery slope arguments about the nature of modern society.

So what do we do? Perhaps the first thing is to find a new sense of balance. Let’s decide that we won’t immediately react to every situation that is suggested on cable news, Christian websites, and Facebook pages. Maybe we can say, “there may be more to this story”. Or “maybe this can’t possibly be true”. Or “that one thing was outrageous but it’s not a broad trend”.

The second thing is to engage in some critical thinking: who benefits from this outrage? Does outrage move us toward the Kingdom of God or delay its arrival?

Finally, we need to ask what it means to live as Christians in a world that is not exclusively Christian. Those who hear us will not share our vocabulary or scripture references or church traditions. We must be working on telling our stories in ways that are inviting to others, that tell the truth, and that don’t demonize others in the process.

In the movie Network, anchorman Howard Beale screams “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” His rant led to great ratings, so he had to keep it up. Eventually, he began criticizing the structures at the network so they had to find a way to eliminate him without damaging their power. Howard teaches us that anger cannot be sustained. Eventually it either gives way to complacency or it leads to more important questions. Maybe the answer is to lessen our anger. After all, when Jesus equates anger and murder in Matthew 5:22, he doesn’t have an exemption for being angry at cultural figures or political leaders. He just says to guard our anger.

Frederick Buechner writes this about anger in Wishful Thinking:

“Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor the last toothsome morsel, both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back — in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”