Guarding our neighbor's pride--yet another response to Morgan Guyton

If I'm not careful this blog will become nothing but a parasite on Morgan's. He raises such good questions in both his blog and his FB comments, and I find myself responding on Facebook at such length as to warrant a blog post of my own. I'll try to blog about other things as well. . . .

Most recently, Morgan has raised the question of how his sense of the need to affirm "queer pride" relates to his theological belief that we need to be willing to "renounce everything about who we are in order to become a Christian disciple."

I think there are two issues here:
1. The question of whether "pride" has the same negative connotation for people (especially but not exclusively people who belong to disadvantaged social groups) whose temptation is to self-contempt as it does for people whose social location and/or psychology make them more likely to be tempted to arrogance.

2. Granted the traditional premise that pride is bad, the paradox arises that humility for me means, in some sense, respecting the "pride" of the other.

I think 1 is resolvable by recovering the fully orthodox Christian doctrine of human nature--i.e., rejecting the Calvinist and to some extent also the Augustinian (though there's a lot of value in Augustine) claim of total depravity. I can distinguish, for myself (though of course it's not easy), the line between affirming my value as a good creation of God (over against the voices in my own head or coming from other people that tell me I'm no good) and a sinful arrogance that lords it over others. I think (and there's plenty of support for this in Augustine and even in Calvin) that a mark of pride in the sinful sense is that it leads us to be abusive toward others. Pride is the chief characteristic of tyrants--which is why, in case anyone reading this should have any doubts, it's always a bad idea to vote for a person who says he has never needed to ask God for forgiveness. Psychologically, I think it's sound to say that pride in the sinful sense is always the result of a lack of confidence in one's inherent dignity as God's good creation. (The promise of the serpent, "you will be like gods," implies that the dignity Adam and Eve already have as God's creatures and stewards of the earth isn't enough--that they are really inferior beings who need something more that the serpent can offer in order to have real dignity.) If you have inherited vast wealth and feel the need to prove to yourself and the world that you are more than just the spoiled scion of privilege, you will be tempted to become the kind of person who is always bragging about being a "winner."

The trickier problem, as I see it, is no. 2. Humility, for me, means in part that I submit myself to the wisdom of the Christian tradition, on sexuality and on other matters. But at times this may involve me in complicity with the abuse of others. I find the Christian (and specifically Catholic) picture of what human sexuality is supposed to look like profoundly compelling, and I find that it speaks effectively to my own potential to abuse others. But I hear the point that Morgan and many others are making that when I, as a heterosexual male, affirm the eternal validity and authority of this ethic, I am contributing to a way of thinking that causes gay people to fall into despair, lose any sense of their dignity as children of God, and in some cases kill themselves.

An issue that touches me more closely is women's ordination. I find it arrogant of me to assert, over against the Catholic Church, that the practice of ordaining only men is theologically flawed (even though my own theological reasoning would lead me to conclude this). But it is more poisonously arrogant of me to affirm, over against my wife and other women who feel called to ordination, that their calling is invalid because a theological system that I find personally compelling says so. The conclusion I've come to with regard to Catholicism is that I can submit my own "intellect and will" to the Church, but not that of my brothers and sisters in Christ (particularly, in this case, my sisters in Christ). 

I don't think there's an easy answer here. I come down on a different place with regard to how this applies to gay people than Morgan does, but I'm deeply conflicted about it precisely because I fear that I'm actually exercising a form of arrogance in trying to be humble vis-a-vis the historic Christian tradition. One of the reasons I find Morgan's presentation of the "pro-gay" case much more compelling than that of many other progressives is that Morgan clearly recognizes the conflict from the other side. 

Romans 1, original sin, and identity

One of the key passages in theological debates over homosexuality is Romans 1, in which Paul appears to label same-sex sexual behavior as an example of the depravity that results from idolatry and human sinfulness generally. Morgan Guyton argues in this recent post that, in fact, the teaching of Romans 1 leads in the opposite direction. One way to make this point, found in this address by the Catholic theologian James Allison, is to argue that Paul is using examples of sexual depravity that Jews would have found horrifying in order to set up the rhetorical "punch-line" of Romans 2. Allison points out that it's pretty ironic to use Romans 1 as an excuse for pointing at some "other" group of people and demonizing them as hopelessly depraved, when that's exactly what Paul is criticizing his Jewish readers for doing in Romans 2. (Morgan makes very similar points in his book How Jesus Saves the World From Us and, implicitly, in this piece as well.) So I'm broadly in agreement with the point Morgan makes in the conclusion to his post:

. . . .since I’ve met too many LGBT people who are plainly not filled with wickedness, evil, covetousness, and malice, I have concluded that Paul is not condemning LGBT identity itself in Romans 1. When I was filled with wickedness, evil, covetousness, and malice, it was an LGBT church that nurtured me back to health. 

However, agreeing with people is boring. Here's the part I disagree with. Morgan argues in the first section of his post that original sin should be understood as social, not biological. He repeats the common claim that Augustine basically invented this idea based on a mistranslation. (I don't think that's true--Augustine used a questionable translation of Romans 5:12 to support his theology, but I don't think that one verse was the reason he came up with the theology in the first place. I also question whether the weaker pre-Augustinian language of an "inherited stain" should be understood as purely social.) He finds the idea that "people are born wicked" to be "one of the most nihilistic, toxic teachings of pop Christianity."

I wouldn't, myself, say "born wicked." But I would say "born/conceived as sinful beings." I don't think we can reduce original sin to the effects of socialization on us and rule out a "biological" component. I believe that the Biblical and traditional picture of the Fall (human and/or angelic) is that it affects every aspect of the universe as we know and experience it. (See my seven-part blog series on Greg Boyd's "warfare theology," especially this post on Boyd's doctrine of creation. While I focus in that post on problems I have with aspects of Boyd's position--as I said, agreeing with people is boring--I think he makes an excellent claim for the need to invoke the fall of created beings as part of our explanation even of "natural evil.")

Morgan argues that Paul's appeal to a natural knowledge of God in Romans 1 refutes the idea that "we were born with a 'fallen nature' that makes us unable to see and worship God." I agree. This is why I think the Calvinist view of human sinfulness is untenable. Calvin, for instance, argues that people are culpable for not recognizing God even though the knowledge of God in creation is never going to be enough to bring them to salvation, and I find his argument completely unconvincing. Similarly, Morgan argues in the second part of the post that criticizing same-sex behavior but not orientation is a "compromise" reached by evangelical Christians who realize that they can't "pray the gay away." From a Catholic perspective, at least, this isn't true at all. (Gagnon, whom Morgan cites as saying that orientation is sinful, is, again, a Calvinist.) Orientation, while it may be "disordered," is not in itself sinful. In both of these cases, Morgan is setting up a false dichotomy.

The Fall may affect our biology without making us incapable of seeing and worshiping God. It may consist in part of disordered desires which are shaped by culture so as to become part of our identity. We are all affected by this. We all have identities that are, in part, idolatrous. I understand how glib it seems for a heterosexual to say "we're all sinners." And of course the claim that we are all sinners, that all of our desires are disordered to some degree, and that all of our identities are idolatrous to some degree, doesn't necessarily mean that same-sex desire is "intrinsically disordered" (i.e., that a sexual desire for a person of the same sex is disordered by virtue of the sex it is oriented to). But it provides conceptual space in which this is a possibility. I applaud Morgan's reluctance to tell someone else that their sense of identity is wrong. But when I am asked to reject and tear down the historic Christian understanding of sexuality and marriage (and yes, I know many progressives deny that there is any such thing as a coherent "historic Christian position," but I can't address that here) on the basis of someone's sense of identity, my belief that all of our identities are shaped by idolatry is going to make me slow to join in the crusade.

Morgan describes the position of "sexual traditionalists" as being "that LGBT identity is just a fad created by the market, an unnatural desire formed by our skewed frame of reference." I certainly would not trivialize LGBT identity in this way. I do say--and said in a comment on Morgan's FB post a few days ago--that I think the broad cultural framework in which we debate these issues is shaped by what Zygmunt Bauman would call "liquid capitalism." And possibly Morgan had that remark of mine in mind. I was not clear enough in that discussion that I think this shapes all of us--I am not for a minute suggesting that gays are somehow more the puppets of late capitalism than the rest of us. We are all shaped by a culture that bombards us constantly (through advertising, for instance) with the message that we are defined by our unique, unquestionably valid desires, and that these desires (which drive the engine of capitalism) cannot be denied without harming us. 

So yes, it's clearly true that Paul's condemnations do not apply primarily or in their full force to people who are in faithful same-sex sexual relationships. But Paul's portrait of a world mired in idolatry applies to our world of late capitalism as it applied to the world of Greco-Roman paganism. And so when there is a call to change an important part of Christian doctrine and practice, I have to ask myself whether that change will really (as Morgan thinks) move us toward greater freedom from idolatry, or whether it's a move toward a different kind of idolatry. From my perspective, this is exactly why we have the Christian tradition to guide us--not that we accept it blindly or uncritically, but that we allow it to raise questions about the idolatries to which we may be blinded by the mores of our place and time.

But of course, most people who champion "sexual traditionalism" not only do so in a way that is cruel and unjust to gay people (which I may well be guilty of as well, though I try not to be), but abstract it from these larger cultural issues. Conservative Christians seriously seem to think that gay marriage is a horrific threat to society while drone warfare, pervasive gun violence, social inequality, torture, and environmental devastation are all, at most, political issues which Christians should carefully think about while avoiding taking "self-righteous" absolute positions. (That's leaving out the large number of conservative Christians who think that right-wing solutions to these issues are the only "Biblical" ones!). That's one reason why I find Catholic social and moral teaching so compelling--it addresses the whole range of moral issues in a way that cuts across left-right dichotomies. I think that the Catholic Church is wrong about women's ordination, and they may be wrong on sexuality too (or they may turn out to be right about women's ordination as well). I don't think we have certainty about any of this, and I think we should be charitable to each other as we try to work it out.

Kim Davis and the ethics of workplace resistance

I hadn't planned to write a formal blog post about Kim Davis. I've gotten involved in several conversations about her on FB recently, mostly playing devil's advocate, and I thought probably that was enough--or even too much.

But then my beloved wife Jennifer complained that she didn't have anyone writing about Davis on the Patheos Faith and Work Channel, and I agreed to write a blog post here and have her repost it over there. So, with some misgivings, here goes.

I'm going to try to bracket the question of whether the Supreme Court's decision on gay marriage was the right one, but to be clear on my own biases, I'll start by saying that I don't think it was. More precisely, I don't think the word "marriage" can rightly be used to describe a union between two people of the same sex. At the same time, I support gay couples (and any other permanent, committed association among consenting adults) having legal benefits. The word "marriage" is clearly now used in a legal context to mean "a union that receives certain legal benefits," so I would not myself have a problem handing out marriage licenses if I were in Davis' position. Furthermore, many of the statements she has made both before and after her imprisonment are statements I would not endorse or support.

The question I want to focus on is this: given her convictions, is her decision to stay in office and refuse to issue licenses justifiable? Many people who share her beliefs (perhaps more fully than I myself do) argue that she should just resign. The common argument is that she is "refusing to do her job," and that if your job and your personal convictions conflict, the answer should be to give up your job.

I disagree with that position. For one thing, as this article points out, there are quite a few examples of local government officials defying "higher" government authority in the name of liberal causes, and liberals do not, generally, object to this. Arguably one could claim that these other cases were different because the courts had not definitively ruled. Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, for instance, issued marriage licenses in 2004, but stopped when the courts told him to. He then initiated a suit in state courts which led to a 2008 decision striking down the state law and allowing same-sex marriage in California. There are a number of similar instances of people challenging laws against gay marriage, as well as other laws generally disapproved of by liberals. I don't know if any of these cases involved defiance of court orders. Still, I think it's safe to say that people who agree with the SCOTUS decision on gay marriage condemn Davis not primarily for procedural reasons but because they believe what what she is doing is intrinsically wrong.

Thus, the question I want to address primarily concerns the argument made by many conservatives, who disagree with Davis' refusal to resign while applauding her substantive position. Conservatives sometimes point out that their own criticisms of liberal "lawlessness" (such as the examples mentioned above) ring hollow if they then applaud such actions when engaged in by someone on their own side. Conservatives are, in fact, generally more likely to appeal to "the rule of law" as an abstract principle that must be defended.  So the question before us is: should a person whose job conflicts with her convictions renounce the job?

It seems to me that it depends greatly on just what the conflict consists of. Many of the analogies people are making to Davis' situation are to situations where resignation would obviously be the right course. A person who took a job in an liquor store and refused to serve alcohol would be behaving unreasonably, for instance.

But such an analogy implies that, in fact, giving out marriage licenses for same-sex couples is an intrinsic part of the job of being a county clerk. It is certainly not the whole of her job. It is one particular part, and only became part of the job because of the recent Supreme Court decision.

Indeed, the Kentucky State Constitution has not yet been amended to eliminate the language saying that marriage must be between a man and a woman. Clearly under the currently prevailing definition of the powers and responsibilities of the judicial branch, a law that has been declared unconstitutional is automatically no longer binding. Whether or not that's the right way to view the question (and some conservative commentators argue that it isn't), it might seem reasonable to amend the state constitution before throwing people in jail for following it. The political reality is that there is little or no will to do this, or to impeach Davis. Hence, her opponents have to work through the court system.

All of this political complexity puts Davis' situation in a rather different light. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the various political actors, she is clearly not simply in the same situation as a person who seeks a job in a liquor store while refusing to sell alcohol, or even (the most commonly used parallel) a conservative Muslim of the Saudi variety who refuses to give drivers' licenses to women. Davis was elected under a state constitution that defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. She swore to uphold that state constitution. The legal situation has changed under her, in a way that she considers illegitimate. Whatever the moral and legal rights and wrongs of the situation, this has to affect the question of whether someone with her convictions should resign or not.

If those convictions include the belief that the U.S. government ought to follow "Christian principles" (as hers clearly do), then the answer would seem to be "no." Davis is not an Anabaptist. Her "Apostolic" Pentecostal tradition certainly has roots in a quasi-Anabaptist withdrawal from governmental structures, but that doesn't seem to be where her community is today. In other words, for Davis simply to resign would be a tacit admission that the State is an illegitimate place for Christians to be. This is particularly cogent given the legal situation when she took her oath of office.

I therefore cannot join in the calls for her simply to resign as the obviously correct thing to do. I cannot condemn her, given her convictions, for remaining in her position until forced out and for accepting prison as a consequence of her intransigence. Whatever my other issues with her views and actions, I admire her for her stubbornness and her willingness to be a "squeaky wheel."

There is a further practical consideration here: we live in an age where efficiency is prized above everything else, and where institutions (governmental and otherwise) typically follow the path of least resistance. My own experience as a college professor taught me this the hard way. When my position was eliminated (as part of a very dubious set of financial decisions by the university), I listened to those who warned that I needed to appear desirable and unthreatening to potential future employers. I gave an interview to the student paper in which I bent over backwards to be meek and gentle about what had happened to me. I did throw in what I thought were some fairly obvious barbs against the poor priorities of the administration. But given the reaction, I apparently miscalculated. I was praised high and low for being "classy" and not showing resentment. My mild criticisms accomplished nothing. I wish now that I had been much more fearless and much more explicit. Institutions will proceed in their inexorable, complacent path unless wheels are very squeaky indeed. As C. S. Lewis once said, a few military officers court-martialed for refusing to bomb civilians would accomplish more than legions of conscientious objectors. If you believe that an institution rests on a fundamentally righteous foundation but is losing its way, then standing in the path of the juggernaut and letting it crush you is a nobler approach than jumping off.

At the same time, I can't help wishing--indeed, yearning--for such protests to be made on far more important and clear-cut matters. (Of course, for Davis this is an important and clear-cut matter.) Abortion is one such issue, on which Davis would most likely agree with me. But what about drone warfare? What about police brutality against racial minorities? What about the plight of undocumented immigrants? What about the years of torture practiced by agencies of the U.S. government? There have been cases where people were "squeaky wheels" on some of these issues (conservatives pointing out liberal "lawlessness" use "sanctuary cities" as one example, for instance). But I long for Christians to become more consistently prolife across the political spectrum, and more stubborn and audacious in how they live out these convictions.

As we wait for and work toward that day, however, we need to recognize those like Davis who are standing up for their convictions, whether or not they have chosen the right hill to die on. And we need to do this not only for Christians but for people of other religious traditions or none who make principled stands.

For instance, Charee Stanley was recently fired from her position as a flight attendant because, as a Muslim, she refused to serve alcohol. Certainly her case is different from that of Davis in a couple of ways. Obviously she is not a government employee, on the one hand, and on the other she took the job knowing that alcohol was involved (she converted to Islam recently, and concluded that her faith wouldn't let her serve alcohol even more recently). Her employer initially agreed to an accommodation, but rescinded the agreement because of the complaint of another flight attendant (a complaint pretty clearly motivated by anti-Islamic prejudice, given the reference to "foreign writings" and to Stanley's headgear). Conservative Christians who support Davis need to be rallying around Stanley as well.

Let us all, whatever our ideology, go the extra mile to accommodate the firmly held convictions of others, whether we agree with them or not. Healthy pluralism consists not in the imposition of an iron-clad rule of neutrality (which is impossible) but in a complex dance of courtesy and accommodation to the other. And even when, by our lights, the other does not return our courtesy (her staunchest fans would surely not claim that Davis is a tolerant or accommodating person), we should still go the extra mile anyway. And we should demand that institutions claiming to represent us do so.

Ten theses on gay marriage

OK, since no one (except Stephen Milliken) is excited about monism, here are some theses about gay marriage:

1. Gay marriage really is the redefinition of marriage to make it gender neutral. It is not simply the granting of "equal access" to an institution whose meaning remains the same.

2. However, given the shifts that have taken place in our cultural understanding of marriage, such a redefinition makes sense. That is to say, we have privatized the concept of marriage and defined it in terms of the desires and needs of individuals, while questioning traditional "essentialist" ideas about gender. Hence, it no longer makes sense to many people to define marriage in gendered terms.

3. The trend toward erasing gender differentiation is the root of gay marriage.

4. Gender differentiation is a natural given of the human condition and thus should not be erased, but the way it has been expressed historically is always shaped by sin, and so the recent reaction to gender norms is both a needed correction and itself the source of a new set of sinful "cultural constructions."

5. The concept of "homosexuality" as an intrinsic part of some people's identity, defining who they are, is probably best seen as a modern invention, parallel with the concept of race, and shaped by particular kinds of gender norms in the modern West. If homosexuality is to be seen as an intrinsic part of a person's identity, then it ought to be affirmed as a good part of God's creation. But it is not clear that it ought to be seen in these terms, given its culturally constructed nature.

6. Opposition to gay marriage rests on the belief that gay men ought to be treated just like straight men in terms of marriage law, and gay women like straight women.  In that sense it is radically different from opposition to racial intermarriage to which it is often compared. However, it's true that this results in gay couples being treated differently from straight couples.

7. Whatever one's position on gay marriage per se, it is abominable that same-sex couples are not able to have practical benefits such as visitation rights and joint tax returns. This really is a question of simple justice, and as long as these basic legal benefits are only extended to married couples, civil marriage for same-sex couples is indeed a basic mandate of justice.

8. Civil unions, the briefly considered and swiftly abandoned compromise, are not "separate but equal" if they are made available to everyone. Marriage, of course, already was available to every adult as an individual, but not to every couple (that is, gay people could marry, but they had to marry members of the opposite sex. While this may seem to be a "useless" right, it is nonetheless exactly the same right that straight people have.) Hence, there would be no inequality in retaining the word "marriage" for opposite-sex unions, while granting identical practical rights to any two (or possibly more) adults who wished to enter into a civil union. (Of course, this would not necessarily imply a sexual relationship, which simply isn't the business of the state one way or the other.)  However, given the present state of affairs, the best approach may be for the state to drop the word "marriage" altogether.

9. Contrary to common belief, the specifically Christian arguments for gay marriage (rooted in the overturning of gender norms in Jesus) are much stronger than the secular arguments, which are generally question-begging (inasmuch as they assume the validity of broader cultural shifts which genuine conservatives wish to contest in the first place).

10. Faithful, loving relationships between equals are always, in themselves, good. Hence, the pictures of happy couples celebrating yesterday ought to be cause of rejoicing to all decent people, whether or not we agree that "marriage" is the right word to use for those unions.