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. 

A flawed argument against contraception

This post arises from a discussion I've been having online with Catholic apologist Dave Armstrong. It began when Dave cited a passage from Calvin condemning contraception on the ground that it is a form of pre-emptive murder. As an offshoot of that discussion, Dave has posted a succinct statement of the "murder analogy" argument against contraception. The core argument goes as follows:

A) Contraception is a deliberate act of preventing the conception of Person X who would have been conceived had the persons been open to new life.

B ) Therefore, the goal or intention is to obliterate the (earthly) existence of Person X.

C) That is also the goal of a murder: to obliterate the (earthly) existence of Person X.

D) Therefore, in the deepest sense, contraception and murder are alike, and evil.

E) Contraception, however, takes it a step further and disallows even the *beginning* of Person X who might have been / would have been conceived, BUT for contraception.

F) Thus, it not only obliterates the earthly existence of Person X, but any existence whatsoever of the Person, in terms of having an eternal soul.

G) In that sense, contraception is even more anti-life than murder is.

H) Therefore, in a qualified, specific sense, contraception can almost be said to be as heinous and wicked as (and philosophically equal to) murder.

This argument doesn't work, because you can't commit a crime against a nonexistent entity. A hypothetical person who would have been conceived under some counterfactual circumstances or other is a nonsensical construct. I can prevent a particular sperm from making contact with a particular egg. But hypothetical people aren't people. I have no moral duties toward them whatsoever. Murder is wrong because it involves malice toward an existing person.

Step F makes the logical problems in the argument even more evident. You can't "obliterate" the existence of that which does not exist.

Furthermore, as someone pointed out when Dave originally posted this argument on his Facebook page, the argument proves too much, because a married couple who choose to go for a walk instead of having sex are also committing "murder" by this logic. If preventing the existence of "Person X" is akin to murder, then whether one does so by abstaining from sex or by engaging in non-procreative sex is irrelevant to the nature of the crime against Person X. You can't import other (much more solid) objections against contraception into _this_ argument, if the argument is to stand on its own two feet. Certainly _if_ non-procreative sex is wrong on other grounds _and_ preventing a person’s existence is wrong, then committing both sins together would be worse than committing only one of them. But if preventing a person’s existence is a crime against them, then it’s a crime no matter how innocent the thing-you’re-doing-instead-of-procreating would otherwise have been.

I can see two ways in which the argument might have some merit, logically:

1. If one could “mess with time” either through time-travel or foreknowledge. So, for instance, if you go back in time to prevent someone who does exist from being conceived, then you are motivated by malice against a specific person whom you know in your present. Of course, we don’t know if this is even possible. Perhaps prophecy could be seen as another example of “messing with time.” So when Merlin in That Hideous Strength tells Jane that she has failed to conceive a child who would have delivered Logres, that makes a certain amount of sense (though it may involve Molinist “middle knowledge,” which is a philosophically controversial concept), because Merlin is capable of prophecy. Even then, though, it makes no sense to say that she did so deliberately, since she did it before she heard the prophecy. Once she heard the prophecy, she could have intentions toward “the child prophesied.” I’m still not sure that it would make sense to say that she committed a crime against said child, though. Her crime, on Merlin’s premises, was rather against Logres.

2. More solidly, the “preformationist” theory to which Calvin and many other premoderns adhered allows you to talk about crimes against future people. If the "seed" is an incipient person or "potential person" then it makes sense to speak of preventing it from fulfilling its potential. Whether that's actually a crime against the future person is  a difficult philosophical issue, I think, but a case could be made that it is. And that's what I take Calvin to be arguing. Dave responded to my initial objections to the use he was making of the Calvin passage by saying that I was "failing to see the forest for the trees." On the contrary, I'm pointing out that the trees in this particular forest won't make the kind of lumber Dave needs. Without preformationism (or time travel) the “quasi-murder” argument fails utterly, because there’s no one to commit a crime against.

"Blog tour" for my wife's book

It may seem somewhat improper to review a book by my wife, but hey, she asked me to do it and I'm being upfront about my "bias"!

With said bias in mind:

Jenn's basic argument is that Methodists who pushed for the use of non-alcoholic "wine" in the Eucharist in the late 19th century were doing so based on a coherent theological/philosophical point of view based in "common-sense realism." I'm no expert on commonsense realism, so I won't discuss the more technical historical-philosophical aspect of Jenn's argument. But she captures the American Victorian Protestant ethos brilliantly. The theologians, moral reformers, and authors of household advice manuals whose work she examines all shared the conviction that clear thinking about the world, based on reliable sense impressions and free from undue influence by passion or imagination, was key to personal morality, social welfare, and true religion. They were deeply suspicious of the irrationality and self-indulgence that they identified with Romantic poets on the one hand and with Catholic immigrants on the other. They believed sincerely that "cleanliness is next to godliness" (maybe even identical with it).

The most appropriate symbol for this view of the world was water. Jenn quotes a number of "temperance hymns" which extol the benefits of "pure, cold water" (see p. 62, for instance). Jenn is writing about Methodists, not Mormons, but it may be significant that Mormons (like some early Gnostics) substituted water for the "fruit of the vine" in their version of the Eucharist. Methodists and other mainstream Protestants were too attached to traditional Christianity to follow the Mormon example in this. Indeed, temperance reformers initially did not condemn all alcohol, instead arguing for stricter standards of purity in the production of alcohol and fighting against the distilling trade. Properly produced beer and wine could be consumed healthfully in small quantities (this was John Wesley's view). Hard liquor and the "adulterated" beer and wine often drunk by the lower classes were entirely evil. Benjamin Rush's "temperance thermometer" reflects this early view (p. 21). By the middle of the 19th century, however, temperance advocates had moved on to the condemnation of all alcohol. This brought them into apparent conflict with the Bible, which frequently speaks favorably of wine and seems to mandate its use in the Eucharist. Lacking the claims to additional revelation put forward by the Mormons, how were Methodists and other mainstream American Protestants to handle this apparent conflict? The answer lay in the "two-wine theory," which argued that "pure" wine was in fact non-alcoholic. One of Jenn's most interesting sources (about which I heard a great deal while she was writing the dissertation that eventually became this book) is Frederic R. Lees' Temperance Bible Commentary, which goes through every verse in the Bible discussing wine and argues systematically for the two-wine theory.

The central chapters of the book deal respectively with "Alcohol and Science," "Alcohol and the Overthrow of Reason," "Alcohol, the Ideal Worker, and the Poisoned Chalice," and "Alcohol and the Truth of the Gospel." A further chapter discusses how similar concerns about cleanliness and rationality underlay the move away from the common cup toward small individual cups.

The concluding chapter, beginning "This is the story of how grape juice became holy" (p. 121), is a brilliant summary of the argument of the book as a whole, focusing on the contrast between a contemporary "liturgical" sensibility valuing mystery, ecstasy, and passion and the theological views that motivated the temperance reformers. Jenn is formed by the liturgical tradition within Methodism, and this book is an impressive exercise in getting inside the heads of people with whose assumptions she fundamentally disagrees.

Obviously the book is useful for all grape-juice-using American Protestants (not just Methodists) who want to understand their heritage on this point, as well as for non-American Protestants, American non-Protestants, and even those who are neither American nor Protestant, who may wish to understand the weird practices of this particular tribal family. However, in a society increasingly divided along "culture-war" lines, where people on both sides routinely refuse to see any intellectual validity in the other, the seriousness with which Jenn takes her subjects' ideas may be the greatest significance of the book. (Jenn is not, I'm happy to say, unique in this respect--there are a number of young scholars of American religion who are doing this kind of thing.) It is common to hear liberal intellectuals claim (or more tragically, just assume) that the "great unwashed" of conservative American Protestantism do what they do for fundamentally non-theological reasons, usually because they are being manipulated by millionaires. In the present instance, it is often asserted that the Welch family promoted non-alcoholic Eucharistic "wine" for purely financial considerations. Jenn shows the abundant intellectual roots of Eucharistic grape juice (if juice can have roots), demonstrating that 19th-century American Protestants, right or wrong, had coherent reasons for their views. She also points out that temperance advocates saw themselves as "progressive," interpreting Scripture in the light of science and clearing away the fetid foliage of tradition to make way for the light of common sense and responsible democratic citizenship.

In summary, this book is an engagingly written, often wryly funny work of scholarship that sheds light on some of the basic underlying assumptions of the mainstream 19th-century American Protestant tradition, which continues to shape American society today. For those of us who come from that tradition, the book helps us understand ourselves better. Thanks to Jenn's work, I have a much better understanding of just what it is about my religious heritage that I reject, and why that rejection has brought me where I am today. I stand firmly on the side of mystery and paradox against common sense. And yet when I read this book, I hear the rippling of cool, clear water and I have a better understanding of the moral and spiritual vision that shaped my childhood than I did when I was under its un-enchanting spell.

(Final note: one of the big questions left to be addressed by this book is the role of emotion and even Romanticism in the Wesleyan tradition. Our mutual friend Chris Armstrong of "Grateful to the Dead" tends to emphasize this--he and Jenn have some disagreements on the subject. In my own case, I find that the "Romantic" elements of my heritage are the ones with which I am still most in agreement, while the "common-sense" elements are the ones I am most inclined to reject outright. But this is not a subject that can be addressed adequately within the limits of this review.)