Advent in Herod's Kingdom

Long before Christmas season was a consumer extravaganza starting just after Halloween, it was a period of solemn religious reflection starting four Sundays before Christmas. For some of us, it still is. In America that means it's both. I experience, and enjoy, the secular Christmas of eggnog, gift wrap, and Dean Martin, but I'm also mindful, maybe a bit more each winter, of Advent and its quieter demands. We're in the bleak midwinter, of the season and sometimes of the spirit. And midwinter's never seemed bleaker than when I watch the news.

Advent was originally a period of fasting, a shorter chillier Lent before the twelve days of Christmas feasting. Part of me still prefers that model to the current model of feasting until the 25th and then collapsing into post-holiday blues. I don’t diet in December, although maybe I should, but it’s worth a little sobriety and reflection. We are in the desert of short days.

Jesus of Nazareth was not really born in winter. But he came in the midst of a spiritual winter. He came into a dispirited world. And, as our parish priest recently reminded me, Jesus was born into a political winter: into an occupied country, whose local puppet rulers had grown corrupt and whose imperial masters had let their own republic die. It was a season for cynicism, a solstice of despair. And the faint gleam of hope that Jesus brought was a long way off. As I’ve blogged before, Christmas is Christianity’s second holiday. Easter celebrates the fulfillment of hope. Christmas only gives a far-off sign, a cold shimmer on a winter night, to keep hope alive. The promise will be kept, but not yet. Not for years yet. You need to hold onto your faith for decades more.

Jesus was born poor and naked in Herod’s kingdom. And Herod was no good king. The gospel of Matthew says that Herod sent soldiers to kill the infant Jesus, and to massacre hundreds of children hoping to get the one they’d been sent for. That story isn’t historical, but it is a lesson about power and fear and how monarchs lead.

Medieval and Renaissance England loved to stage King Herod. He was one of the great roles of English theater. He ranted. Long, insane rants about how great and powerful he was, how he was the greatest of the great. An incarnation of the Sin of Pride, made ridiculous by that sin. Hamlet is still using Herod as the example of over-the-top acting: to “out-Herod Herod” is to out-ham the hams.

So Shakespeare’s vision of the Christmas holidays involved a ranting, egomaniacal king, an absurd boaster who was actually a foreign puppet. But that vainglorious buffoon sends armed men to tear children from their mother’s arms. There’s such a thing as getting too close to the original meaning of Christmas.

It’s Advent, and we live in Herod’s kingdom. Children are taken from their mothers, and the king is angry with the wise men. Virtue and kindness are out of favor. Despair comes easy. But Advent’s promise is hope in the distance: a star on the horizon, an obscure birth in a village far from fame or power. Tomorrow may not be better. Tomorrow may be even darker than today. But a better day is coming, in its own time, and when it comes no earthly power will be able to delay it.

What to do in the cold dark days between the promise and the fulfillment? Stay faithful. Make ourselves ready. Remember that Herod will not last forever. And hold tight to the advice the angel gives the shepherds: “Be not afraid.”

Happy holidays and merry Christmas.

What Is Praying?

I have been too angry to write about the mass murder in Las Vegas, and too angry to write about the empty and reflexive offerings of "thoughts and prayers" that now follow every murder like it. But let me take this opportunity to talk about the question of what prayers are, and how they might be different from thoughts. America's general enthusiasm for religion masks deep, sometimes nearly bottomless religious differences, and so many, many people talk about praying, but use that word to mean very different things: sometimes contradictory things. What is praying, anyway?

Praying is different from simply thinking because it is directed outside yourself, to some larger spiritual power. (This also makes prayer different from meditation. I have prayed, and I have meditated, and they are not the same thing at all.) Prayers have an address outside yourself; they are addressed to a god or to some other spiritual being. Some people pray to departed ancestors, to deceased saints, or to angels. But it's always to a spiritual being of some kind, rather than to someone who is walking around with a cell phone right now. The big differences in the way people pray are their reasons for praying and what they think prayer can accomplish.

On one end of the spectrum, there are people who pray in an attempt to influence or control events in the real world. They pray to get a promotion at work, to avert a hurricane, to cure a loved one's apparently incurable cancer. If you're Huck Finn, you pray for God to give you some fish hooks. There is a lot of this, all over our culture, and it doesn't break along clear denominational lines.

I tend to be skeptical of this practice myself. It is, on a fundamental level, a straight-up magical practice, no different from the prayers dedicated to idols during a ritual sacrifice. ("O mighty Jupiter, are you hungry? We have a delicious spring heifer for you. And, by the way, is there any chance you could make it rain?") In some cases, it is a very obvious magical practice, as with santeria rituals or the self-described "prayer warriors" who imagine they are fighting various demonic influences over our world. I am not interested in sorcery as a religious practice, and moreover I find it disrespectful. This is the omnipotent Creator of the Universe we're talking about. It isn't Let's Make a Deal.

But at the same time, many people I love and respect do pray this way, some of the time, and I would not try to talk them out of it. When my mother's cancer came back, I wasn't telling anyone not to pray for remission. I never would. Someone close to me once prayed for a desperately-needed career break, got it, and followed through on a promise to return regularly and light more prayer candles at the place where he'd made the original prayer. I don't have a real problem with that.

But I think almost everyone recognizes that this kind of prayer is only appropriate for situations when you have already done everything else that's your power, or when the situation is completely outside your power to begin with. You pray for the hurricane to pass your town by because, really, what else are you going to do? You pray for God to cure a loved one's cancer because there is nothing else you can do about your loved one's cancer. Almost everyone gets that. Even if you consider such prayer to be a form of self-deception, human beings sometimes need a little self-deception to keep going.

Things become very different if you expect such prayer to substitute for action. Lighting a candle in a church after you've already done everything you can to prepare for a key job interview is one thing; lighting a candle instead of preparing for your job interview is another, much stupider, thing. Praying that the chemotherapy cures your family member is more than understandable. Telling your family member to pray instead of trying chemotherapy would be grotesque.

So if someone's offering "thoughts and prayers" in addition to concrete action, that's terrific. But if
the "thoughts and prayers" formulation means, as it too often does, "I intend to pray that no more mass murders like this happen again, and that is all I intend to do about the problem," then as far as I'm concerned you can stuff those thoughts and prayers. Your magic does not work. It is a pathetic self-deception, and nothing can be more arrogant that offering someone who is suffering your grandiose delusions in place of actual help.

And for what it's worth, I never prayed for God to cure my mother's cancer. God already knew what I wanted and how desperately I wanted it. Mom's cancer had not come back because God figured that I wouldn't mind. So I did not pray for God to do my bidding or work me a wonder, like some petty conjuror. I prayed for God to make me a better son while my mother was still alive.

Once you move past the vast number of prayers that aim to effect the visible world, you get to a gray area of what I will call funerary prayers: prayers dedicated to the spiritual welfare of the dead. From the skeptical atheist's point of view, these prayers are at least as pointless as prayers that attempt to control business, medical health, or the weather. In fact, they may be even more pointless, since they are aimed at an afterlife whose existence atheists do not concede. The only advantage of such prayers is that they are immune from immediate falsification. When you pray for a tornado to miss your house and the tornado destroys your house, everyone can see your prayer didn't work. When you pray for the welfare of your dead grandmother's soul, who knows? There's no way to tell if it's working or not.

This kind of prayer was once a flashpoint in the violent Catholic-Protestant disputes that roiled the West from the early 16th to the early 18th century. But the practice of this kind of prayer has now become popular even in denominations that technically forbid it. (Lots of people do it, but you might also meet fierce objections to the practice; it's slightly unpredictable.) I was raised in a tradition that focuses strongly on these prayers for the dead, and even if I doubted their effectiveness I would still participate in them for reasons of culture and tradition, for much the same reason I would still always make sure my loved ones got proper funeral rites. At this point, I can no longer specifically remember praying for my mother's soul during her funeral, but I almost certainly did.

On the other hand, I have seldom prayed for the welfare of Mom's soul since her funeral, largely because I don't believe she is in need of such prayers. I have some deceased relatives for whom I never pray, because I'm very confident of their spiritual state, and other relatives whom, for various reasons, I give a more strenuous effort. (I will confess that I once began a silent prayer for a departed family member with the phrase, "Okay, Lord. Let's not make this about me.")

If someone says that they plan to pray for the souls of the Las Vegas victims, I am okay with that. Flights of angels sing them to their rest, and so on. But I wouldn't accept that as the sole appropriate action.

The last major form of prayer, and the form most of my own prayer life centers on, is prayer asking for spiritual strength and guidance. I pray to ask for more patience, more generosity, better understanding. I don't pray for God to change the world around me for my convenience. I pray for God to change me, and make me better.

If you're a skeptical rationalist type, this might seem like simply a particular form of focused meditation, a way to focus my own mind on what, to an atheist, can only be an imaginary addressee. And if it were only that, I would still defend its value. But I will add, again, that the practice is very different from meditation. When I meditate I am trying to clear my mind, to leave it blank. Prayer very much engages the parts of the mind that meditation is trying to still. Prayer has a direct, positive focus.

When I pray for wisdom and guidance, I am asking for help deciding what to do. In effect, I am praying for instructions. Such prayer is never a substitute for action. It is a prelude to it.

If people say they will pray about what to do to stop another mass murder like the one in Las Vegas, I hear that and feel like it's the right thing to do. But appropriate prayer has to lead to proper action. "I've prayed on the Las Vegas murders, and I've decided we need to change some things," is what I'd prefer to hear.  But somehow that's never the party line.

cross-posted from Dagblog, where all comments are welcome (comments here are closed)

In Defense of Ebeneezer Scrooge

Oh, joy. The War on the War on Christmas is back. People are hollering that now that Trump has been elected, everyone is going to have to say "Merry Christmas" all the time and have "Merry Christmas" said to them all the time, whether they like it or not, and they don't like it, screw them anyway. What better way to express the meaning of Christmas? It's so very far from the spirit of Christian humility and love that I find myself, against all odds, ready to mount a defense of Ebeneezer Scrooge.

As we all know, Scrooge's response when wished a "Merry Christmas" is to say "Bah! Humbug!" We all know that, from early in childhood, as Scrooge's tag line. And we don't worry about what it means, exactly. It's an old-timey phrase that Scrooge says, and we get that it's negative. We learn the phrase much too early for the word "humbug" to be in our vocabulary for other reasons. So we don't think about it. But Scrooge is saying something very specific. The word "humbug" means fraud. Scrooge is saying that the holiday of Christmas is a fraud and an imposture. And, as Dickens's original readers all knew, Scrooge is saying that for well-established religious reasons.

Scrooge is expressing a religious objection to Christmas. A Christian religious objection to Christmas. Although Scrooge isn't shown as especially pious (because the whole story is set up to make him lose his argument), he is speaking for a long English Protestant tradition that viewed Christmas as a bunch of non-Biblical paganish nonsense. Those Puritanical Protestants had a strong  theological point here, in that the December 25th date is sooooo totally not Biblical.

(I'm not going to walk you through the details, but think about the Gospels' reference to the shepherds tending their flocks by night. What kind of shepherds tend their flocks outdoors at night near the end of December? Terrible, terrible shepherds who are letting all of their sheep die of painful exposure to the cold. What is wrong with these shepherds? Why don't they bring the flocks in for the winter like everyone else does? Do they hate sheep? But I digress. The answer is, it's not actually winter in the Gospel story.)

Anyway that have-you-heard-this-before rap your atheist office-mate annual lays on you across the cubicle divider about how Christmas is really this pagan holiday that Christians took over blah blah etc. etc., turns out to be basically accurate. But your atheist explainer friend has unwittingly borrowed that argument from a group of hard-core Christian fanatics from earlier centuries, who were absolutely determined, on the grounds of their faith, not to celebrate any Papist idolatrous nonsense like Christmas.

Ebeneezer Scrooge is recognizably descended from those Christian hard-liners, which is why his first name is Ebeneezer. Giving your children names from the Old Testament, rather than the name of a later Christian saint, is a Puritan practice, and into the 19th century that combination of Jewish first name and English last name is a sign of Puritan family history, the same way having a first name like "Rainwater" suggests that your parents were hippies. (If you see an early American named Ezekiel, Abraham, or Nathaniel, you can be 95% certain they have New England Puritans in their family tree.) Ebeneezer Scrooge is actually named after a rock (no, really) from the first book of Samuel. He's got a stony heart, right? But notice that his hard-firsted partner, Jacob Marley, also has an Old Testament/Puritan name. The nice guys in A Christmas Carol don't get those Old Testament names. They're named Bob and Fred.

Also notice that, partly because of stubborn religious objections, Christmas was not actually a legal holiday in Dickens's England. As in, no one had to close their store. That little exchange near the beginning where Bob Cratchit asks for Christmas off (or, and this is worth noticing, Scrooge prompts Cratchit to ask for Christmas off: "You'll be wanting the whole day off tomorrow?") makes no sense to us today. Why does Bob have to ask for the holiday off? Everybody gets the holiday off. Actually, they don't, because it's not actually a holiday. So give Ebeneezer Scrooge his propers: even at the beginning of the story, he gives Cratchit Christmas Day off when he doesn't have to. He closes shop on a day he could have done business and he pays Cratchit a full day's pay for a bogus fake holiday, a fraudulent humbug that Scrooge probably thinks of as un-Christian. He even goes out of his way to make sure to that Cratchit asks, which means that however much Scrooge huffs and grumbles he has actually decided to give Cratchit the paid day off before Cratchit asks. So don't be so hard on the guy.

Now, my boy Charles Dickens is very intent on promoting Christmas, for lots of reasons. Part of it is about a larger High-Church Anglican movement bent on reviving traditional holidays. And part of it, famously, is commercial, because Dickens wanted to promote Christmas gift-giving. (He published a lot of work in once-a-year annuals designed to be given as Christmas presents; A Christmas Carol was first published in one of these Christmas-gift-ready compilations.) He wants to make the strongest case for Christmas he can. And therefore, by and large, he leaves Jesus out of it.

A Christmas Carol always works from the premise that Christmas itself is not religiously defensible. The Ghosts make every conceivable argument for the Christmas holiday EXCEPT the argument about Jesus's birth. They never go to the Bethlehem story, never even get close. Because there's no way to con Scrooge, or frankly to con the readers, into accepting that this is actually Jesus's birthday. Dickens knows better than to make an argument he can't win.

So Dickens makes a case for a non-sectarian, ultimately secularized Christmas, based on recognizably but not exclusively Christian values, such as generosity, and a generally small-c conservative emphasis on the pleasures of tradition. (Dickens is working the tradition angle from the first few sentences of the story, in ways that work all the better because they don't call full attention to themselves.) And in there Dickens slyly folds in his message that the best way to celebrate Christmas is to buy things.

Now, I love A Christmas Carol. It tells its story very well. But then, I'm a superstitious Papist. What do I know? But I want to point out that one of the things A Christmas Carol is doing is taking Christ out of Christmas. And it does that in 1843. So don't tell me it's some modern liberal conspiracy. Charles Dickens did it, long before any of our grandparents were born. And he invented the holiday we all know today: a commercial and secular holiday that's about vague, feel-good sentiments and about tradition for tradition's sake, rather than about any actual religious content per se. Dickens made Christmas for everyone, because if it were actually about Jesus most Christians would not have accepted it.

Ebeneezer Scrooge doesn't accept Christmas because of Jesus. Ebeneezer Scrooge doesn't accept that Christmas has anything to do with Jesus. And no one in the story who comes from the Afterlife tries to tell him any different. What turns Ebeneezer Scrooge around is a general set of positive values, loosely tied to Christianity but by no means tied to any specific sectarian identity: kindness and generosity, warmth and affection, values that you'll tend to find among believers of nearly every religion. Scrooge likes to hear the Christmas bells, but you'll notice he doesn't actually attend any church. He's not observing a religious holiday. He's just in it for the peace on earth and goodwill to men.

So, however you celebrate these winter holidays, let's keep Dickens and Scrooge (reformed version) in our hearts this winter: a warmth and generosity that extends itself to all without exclusion, without getting hung up on the details of doctrine or on membership in any specific sect or tribe. Wish people well this holiday season with no strings attached, without being stingy of your good will. And God bless us, every one.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Joseph's Pyramids and American Popular History

Yes, Ben Carson, who is officially running for President, is happily telling people that the pyramids are not actually pharaohs' tombs, but grain storage built by Joseph from the Book of Genesis. Never mind that there are (for example) sarcophagi in the pyramids. And never mind that the Bible doesn't actually say anything about Joseph building pyramids or in fact building anything (Genesis Ch. 41). Ben Carson isn't worried about archaeology or facts. He sees the rival theory that, yes, aliens from outer space built the pyramids as the main intellectual threat to his position.  I'm not here to discuss how ridiculous Carson's position is. The real problem is that large numbers of Americans believe things almost as stupid as this. Carson is only one outlier in our country's deep and rich tradition of historical ignorance.

We pay lots of attention to Biblical literalists' attacks on science, especially on the science of evolution and therefore on the disciplines of biology and geology. But we politely overlook the pervasive religious attacks on history. As a country, we shy away from public contradiction of the Bible's historical claims. If anything, secular American culture amplifies the historical misinformation found in the Bible.

Let me say, before I go any further, that I am a believing and practicing Christian. I am not writing this because I am opposed to Christianity or to Judaism. I went to Bible study last night. But being honest in my faith means being honest about the things in my own tradition's sacred writings that are not credible as accounts of literal events, the things that I would never accept as reliable in someone else's religious scriptures. Faith is a way of making sense of the world around us, not a way to distort or deny the world. A belief system that has to defend itself against facts is not an expression of faith, but of fear.

I am fortunate that I almost never run into the problem of religious pseudo-history in my classroom. But occasionally, when I teach a survey course on English literature before 1800, I run into a student who has picked up some misinformation from the modern neo-Pagan movement (although these students are not always self-identified pagans or Wiccans). These students will take for granted that in, say, 1400 AD there was a secret but organized and flourishing practice of Celtic paganism in Britain. This is not even close to the truth. Modern paganism was invented over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, over a thousand years after the pre-Christian Celtic religions died out. (Many odd, disjointed bits of pre-Christian culture and folklore did survive, but certainly nobody was worshiping Medb or Belinus for all that time.) While the students might have come by that misinformation from a religious source, deference to their religion does not (and really cannot) extend to allowing them to assert imaginary facts. A Wiccan student doesn't get a free pass to claim that there were Druids running around Chestershire during the period of the Crusades, because that didn't happen.

It would be a different story if we uncovered physical evidence of pagan worship in late-medieval Chester. Fifteen hundred years of an ongoing religious practice across the British Isles would inevitably leave traces behind for archaeologists to uncover. But none of that stuff is there. And there would also be documented references, sooner or later. (The ancient Greeks had a whole bunch of secret, initiates-only religious practices, but they still documented that they had them. Even when a culture doesn't write all of its secrets down, it still writes things like "Never write down the secrets.") And when my studies lead to read myths or legends from extinct religions, I don't take those texts at their word if archaeological evidence contradicts them. Ancient Irish legend is full of warrior heroes driving chariots, but archaeology in Ireland never turns up any chariots. The obvious conclusion is that pre-Christian Irish warriors did not have chariots. (Maybe these legends have been influenced by cultural contact with Greek and Roman epic; I don't know enough to test that theory.) Likewise, the Romans have their beloved Aeneas story, in which their nation was founded by a courageous band of Trojan refugees who sailed to Italy, but the archaeological evidence tells a different story. The digs show Rome growing out of one small Latin tribe, ethnically similar to the other Latin tribes in its area. They weren't from somewhere else.

This is all fine, because no one worships Jupiter or claims to be descended from Aeneas these days. But the Book of Exodus also tells a story of a tribe traveling from a foreign land to their destined home. And there is no archaeological evidence to back that story up. This is generally considered impolite to say, and you can go a long, long time in this country without hearing it mentioned in the mass media. But it is the truth. There is no factual evidence for the Bible's story about a the nation of Israel living as slaves in Egypt, or of an Israelite migration out of Egypt. (My best understanding of the current evidence, which is a long way from my field, is that archaeologists can see the early Jews emerging among settlements of ethnically-similar groups and gradually becoming a separate people. I'm told that part of how you can trace their emergence is that some settlements no longer have any pig bones.) If I am going to be truthful with myself, I need to read the Book of Exodus as symbolism rather than history, because there is no more historical evidence for my faith's story about Moses than there is for the Romans' story about Aeneas.

Most Americans know pretty clearly that the description of the creation in the Book of Genesis and the story of Noah's flood are not backed by modern science. Relatively few Americans know that the description of the Israelites fleeing Egypt is not backed by modern history. I don't simply mean that the miracles in Exodus, the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea, are not literally true. I mean that there is no reason to believe that the Jews came from Egypt, or had been in Egypt at all. This certainly includes the patriarch Joseph from the Book of Genesis. But to mention that in the United States is to risk giving offense.

In fact, you can routinely see Biblical accounts of history presented as fact on allegedly educational cable channels, This was true long before those channels sank to the levels of reality-show dreck where the free market has currently consigned them, and it certainly hasn't gotten better. I have watched self-described historical documentaries show the "informational" map showing the Jews' path out of Egypt. And certainly, no one even hinted that there were any serious historians or archaeologists who doubted the accuracy of the Exodus narrative, let alone that most or all serious scholars doubt it. There was no percentage in that. You could only offend viewers (of at least two major religions) who don't want to hear that the Biblical story isn't true.

Let me suggest, in passing, that one of the greatest moral lessons in the Book of Exodus is that faith means heeding exactly the message that you least want to hear. If Moses didn't listen to things he did not want to hear, he would have just turned away from that burning bush and kept walking, because it Exodus makes it very clear that Moses does not want any of what the bush is selling. But the uncomfortable truths are the ones we most need to face. If I turned away from the unwelcome truth that the Book of Exodus is symbolic rather than historically accurate, I would be turning away from one of Exodus's most crucial moral lessons. Using Exodus as a guide to history but turning away from it as a guide to morals strikes me as the worst possible way to read that book.

So here we are in an America where we teach very little history and, worse still, where we indulge our fellow Americans' inaccurate beliefs about history if they got their bad information from a religious text. All of this is done in the service of protecting believers from better knowledge of their own scriptures, of allowing them to read rich, complex religious texts naively and without reflection. And our secular, commercial, profit-driven media actively participates in those religious fictions, because you can make great profits changing money in the temple. The next time you hear complaints that Christians are persecuted by America's "secular culture," and those complaints are due as soon as someone puts up the first "Happy Holidays" sign, remember that America's secular culture promotes Christians' pseudo-history as fact on TV.

It's not just that Ben Carson has an extra-scriptural fantasy about Joseph building the pyramids. It's that many educated, secular Americans don't realize that Joseph was never in Egypt at all. At the other extreme, there are self-described secularists who dismiss everything in the Bible as a fantasy and cannot distinguish historical figures like David or Ahab from legendary figures like Isaac or Joseph. (This is like treating Henry VIII and King Arthur, or Paul Revere and Paul Bunyan, as equally real.)

And in our willful common ignorance, other forms of ignorance flourish: the unending fantasy archaeology of North America, seeking for lost white American ancestors, the pseudo-historical origin myths promoted by people like Elijah Muhammed or Joseph Smith, the inane quest for "ancient astronauts." It promotes sectarian fantasies, like the attempt to rewrite the Founders' religious positions to align them with Christian sects that had not yet been founded, and secular  fantasies: the conspiracy theories about Freemasons and the search for Sasquatch. Ben Carson is ridiculous, but our society has actively and consistently promoted bogus history for a very long time. Carson is just a quicker student than the rest of us.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

In Praise of Fred Rogers

A county clerk down in Kentucky, Kim Davis, is refusing to do her job, getting herself thrown in jail for contempt, and posing as a martyr. Once again, an extremist and divisive version of Christianity, obsessed with minor points of doctrine and followed by only a minority of Christians, is presented to the American public as "Christianity." This is nonsense, of course. Only a tiny, tiny minority of Christians believe that handing same-sex couples a wedding license is somehow sinful. And disapproval of homosexuality is an incredibly minor Christian doctrine which some theologians exclude altogether, while on the other hand not setting yourself up as judge over your neighbors is a core Christian belief. I could go on, but then we'd be talking about Kim Davis instead of actual Christianity, which is just what Kim Davis wants.

I'd like to talk about a positive example instead: a genuinely devout Christian who spent decades in the public spotlight and did nothing but good there, who never turned his faith into a weapon of division but used it, day after day, to welcome and include all comers. I am talking, of course, about Mr. Rogers.

Or rather, I am talking about the Reverend Fred Rogers, ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963. Rogers was, according to virtually everyone who knew him, a deeply committed believer. But he never preached on Sundays. The TV show was his ministry. Let me go further: it appears that the seminary that ordained him considered the TV show his ministry. Fred Rogers was, as Brother Elwood puts it, on a mission from God.

But you won't see or hear any explicit Christian symbolism on Mister Rogers's Neighborhood. It's not there. And I don't mean it's cleverly disguised, either. That was not Fred Rogers's game. The Kingdom of Make-Believe isn't some C. S. Lewis feed-the-children-Jesus-when-they're-not-looking propaganda. King Friday XIII is not God, X the Owl is not Jesus, and Donkey Hote is not the Holy Ghost. When Mr. Rogers feeds the fish, he's not doing some Christian fish symbolism. He's just feeding some fish. There is nothing sectarian in Mister Rogers's Neighborhood. There is nothing exclusively Christian about it, nothing aimed at one religious group and absolutely nothing aimed at converting or indoctrinating Fred's audience of impressionable preschoolers. This was by design. Terry Gross, of NPR's Fresh Air, once asked Fred why there wasn't any Christian symbolism in the Kingdom of Make-Believe. Fred answered, simply and directly, that he never wanted any child to feel excluded in the Kingdom of Make-Believe.

But not being sectarian or exclusionary does not mean that Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood was not Christian. Remember, the people who ordained Fred a minister explicitly told him that his show was his ministry. Fred's refusal to exclude children or insist on any doctrinal labels was part of the show's Christian mission. He did without the superficial religious symbols in service of a deeper Christianity.

Where was the religious content, then? Everywhere. And I mean that. Almost every syllable spoken on that show came from Fred Rogers's religious convictions. (Everything that he did or said on the air was deliberate and purposeful. Every show is a meticulously crafted and executed lesson.) The core message that Fred made sure to include in every single show, more than once, was the Christian message of universal, unconditional love: "I like you just the way you are." The central lesson, every day, was that the children watching were people deserving of love. Fred didn't talk about being Christian. He made himself an example of Christian love.

Now, you don't have to be Christian to entertain the idea of every individual's fundamental worth and dignity. There are secular versions of that. But the idea that every human is unconditionally worthy of love is both at the very heart of Christianity and broadly palatable to non-Christians. Nearly every religious tradition includes a mix of core ideas that are nonetheless widely attractive to outsiders and more peripheral beliefs that often serve to define sectarian boundaries. Most people can get on board with Talmudic teachings on justice and integrity. Most people are not eager to embrace the "can't touch the light switch on Friday nights" rule. "Love thy neighbor" is a big, ecumenical hit. "Stained glass windows are sinful idolatry" is, more or less by its nature, designed to divide and exclude.

The two kinds of religious teachings do very different things. There are a set of moral and philosophical positions, which offer believers guidance in the big questions. And there are a set of generally minor and sometimes even peculiar doctrines that serve to mark group identity and form community. "How do we live a just life?" is an essentially but not exclusively Jewish question. "Is it okay to eat milk and meat together?" is a question about whether you're Jewish. Religious groups focused on conflict with outsiders tend to focus on these relatively peripheral, sect-specific positions (or put another way, sects focused on peripheral doctrines tend to focus on conflict with outsiders). During the heyday of Christian-vs-Christian religious violence in Europe, back in the 16th and 17th centuries, the stained-glass-or-no-stained-glass question was treated as crucial, with love-thy-neighbor and thou-shalt-not-kill taking distant back seats.

Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood was all core principles and no checkpoint shibboleths. Fred was not interested in sectarian identity, because universal love has no room for Us vs. Them. He never talked the talk. He unrelentingly walked the walk. He did not preach lessons. He provided an example, and in doing so proved truly exemplary. 

Although he became a cultural touchstone, Fred Rogers's message was deeply counter-cultural. Our society, although superficially and nominally Christian, has a deep emphasis on teaching children to compete, to earn their parents' approval and too often their parents' love. Our children are bombarded throughout their childhood with messages about winners and losers. (Even the self-esteem movement, widely derided for not teaching children to compete enough, accepts the winners-and-losers premise, destructively telling children that they are all winners rather than pointing to a value system beyond winning.) There's no room in that for I like you just the way you are, but Fred Rogers insisted on that room. He made space for that message where there had been none. The only shame was that when students grew out the the pre-kindergarten age on which Fred focused, there weren't equally powerful voices communicating that message to first graders and up.

And part of Fred's greatness as a teacher (and make no mistake, Fred Rogers was a great master teacher) was his deep and evident humility. Humility is another central Christian virtue that doesn't get much attention or love in our nominally Christian country, but Fred embodied it. Listen to him singing on the show. He's obviously not a professional singer. He doesn't have a "good," i.e. media-ready singing voice. He'd get cut immediately on American Idol (a show obsessed with competition to the point of, what's that word, idolatry). But singing well is not the point. Fred is not embarrassed, and you aren't embarrassed for him, because his ego has nothing to do with it. He doesn't care whether or not his voice is good or bad. Singing is just something that helps his lesson, and so he does it, with the impeccable confidence of the utterly humble. That humility was part of his educational genius, because it meant that nothing was ever about Fred. It was always about the student learning.

What matters to Fred is not the technical polish of his singing, but the connection he makes with the kids. Singing is a way to make himself more emotionally present to them, to connect. And the very fact that he's singing in such an unpretentious way underscores that he is opening himself up to the kids, creating intimacy and trust. He is telling them that he won't laugh at them because he knows they won't laugh at him. (Ask yourself this: who do YOU feel comfortable singing in front of? See what I mean?) And the singing, which starts every single show, communicates something essential about the value system: it's not important to show off. You don't sing to impress other people, let alone to show who is a better singer. You sing to people as a way to connect with them. We are a country of showing off for the neighbors. Fred Rogers made every lesson about loving the neighbors, in every sense of that word.

Fred Rogers bore witness to his Christian beliefs every time he stepped in front of a camera. His Christianity was always inclusive and never divisive. It's humbling to watch, because I will never be that good a teacher or nearly that good a Christian. But being humbled is part of the point.

cross-posted from, and comments welcome at, Dagblog

A Story from the Crusades

Apparently, some people are very upset that President Obama suggested that some Christians did bad things during the Crusades. Where does he get off saying something like that? Let me tell you a little story from the Third Crusade.

in 1191, King Richard the Lionhearted (or rather, Richard Coeur de Lion, Roi de l'Angleterre; Richard didn't speak any English) was besieging the city of Acre. The siege had been going on since before Richard had arrived in the Holy Land, and capturing Acre would be his most important victory during the Crusade. And eventually the defenders of Acre offered to surrender. 

Richard accepted their surrender and promised to spare their lives. He gave them his promise as a king that they would be spared.

And then, naturally, Richard began negotiating a ransom deal with the Muslim Sultan, Saladin (Salah ad-Din). They made a deal that Richard would turn over his 2700 Muslim prisoners in exchange for 1500 Christian prisoners, a ransom payment in cash, and a piece of the True Cross (an object everyone involved considered a fragment of the actual cross on which Jesus had been crucified). Richard set a one-month deadline for payment. So far, so good.

When the deadline rolled around, however, Saladin was caught short and didn't have the full ransom together. When Richard and Saladin tried to work out an alternate payment plan, things got testy. Richard's idea, for what it's worth, was that Saladin hand over the money and captives he had, Richard hold onto all the Muslim prisoners, and Saladin take Richard's promise as a king that Richard would turn the hostages loose when he got the final payment. Richard figured his promise as a king should be good enough. Actually, the implication that it wasn't was fairly insulting.

Then, with negotiations stalled, Richard got angry about waiting. So he took out all 2700 prisoners and had them killed.

He did it on a hilltop outside Acre where Saladin and his army could see the executions happening. That would teach them. The fairly small Muslim army on the scene tried to rescue the prisoners, but the larger Christian army held them at bay until all the hostages were dead.

A few follow-up questions: hadn't Richard given those prisoners his promise that he would spare their lives? Why yes. Yes, he did.

And wasn't the original plan part of a prisoner exchange? What about the 1500 Christian prisoners that were supposed to be swapped for the 2700 Muslims who got killed?

I think you know what happened. Those 1500 people got executed as a reprisal. Saladin didn't really have a choice. His troops had been made to watch their fellow-Muslims executed in cold blood, and after that they weren't ready to deal with Richard, or any of the other Crusaders, at all. The whole war got bloodier and more ruthless.Once you kill your prisoners, the new rule of war becomes No prisoners.

Is there an upside to this story? Why yes. The good news is that in the Fourth Crusade, Christians did not commit any atrocities like this against Muslims.

You see, the Fourth Crusade never got to the Near East at all. It only got as far as Constantinople, the capital of Orthodox Christianity, which the Crusaders promptly sacked. Then they went back to Western Europe. The Fourth Crusade didn't do anything despicable to Muslims because the Crusaders decided to do despicable things to other Christians instead. Happy ending, right? Deus vult and all that.

This has been a brief message from History Everyone Has Known for a Long Time. Thanks.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Religious Freedom vs. Religious Privilege (or, Franklin vs. Penn)

The version of "religious liberty" currently promoted by the American right, best exemplified by the Hobby Lobby decision and the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act," is not only a recipe for future religious disputes and persecution. It represents an approach to religious freedom that has already created trouble. It was tried and abandoned so early in the American Experiment that most of us don't learn it in school. That's because the policy of providing religious groups extensive privileges or exemptions, rather than maintaining a neutral public square for all, failed before the Revolution.

Many of today's religious conservatives object to a religiously-neutral public square (where, for example, everyone has to follow the same laws). This, they say, restricts their free exercise of religion. They feel entitled to exercise their "sincerely held" religious beliefs in full. The problem with this is that when everyone enjoys maximal rights of free exercise, parties inevitably infringe on other parties' rights to free exercise. People of other faiths are not allowed to practice, or people are forced to abide by some religious precept which they do not believe. (For example, non-Catholics might not be denied certain health coverage benefits because of a Papal encyclical from 1968, forcing those non-Catholics to abide by the tenets of someone else's faith.) The approach that Justice Kennedy et al. have so improvidently revived grants certain parties (especially powerful parties) particular carve-outs or concessions, allowing them spheres of influence where they are exempted from the ordinary rules.

Some of the original Thirteen Colonies, of course, began as religious concessions on a grand scale, with particular religious minorities (in the 17th-century English context) granted their own domains to settle and govern. The most obvious of these are Puritan New England (settled by radical Congregationalists and Presbyterians), Maryland (granted to the Roman Catholic Lord Baltimore as a personal fiefdom), and Pennsylvania (granted to the Quaker William Penn as his personal property). This idea of colony-as-denominational-ghetto is, of course, an outgrowth of 17th- and 18th-century England's own sorry resistance to religious toleration, and its bias toward its own official Church; better to give the Quakers huge swaths of territory in the New World than to accept an England where all faiths were welcome.

But in all of these colonies, albeit in different ways, there was serious conflict between the locally privileged religion and people of other faiths. Maryland never quite got off the ground as planned, because so many of the colonists were resistant to the idea that Catholicism would be specially privileged; the colonists had to struggle with a superior civil authority in order to achieve a more level and neutral public square, with the same rules for all.

Puritan New England became a site of significant religious persecution, as the Puritans battled non-Puritan groups and one another. That Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island are three different states is testimony to the Massachusetts Bay Puritans' gift for squabbling and schism. Connecticut and Rhode Island were founded by Puritan religious dissenters from Massachusetts. The struggle between the Congregationalists and Presbyterians was more peaceful, but bitter and socially divisive. And other religious groups had no rights at all. Baptists and Quakers were not only expelled from Massachusetts, but whipped for good measure; the Massachusetts Puritans insisted on their religious freedom not to intermingle with other faiths. The final extreme was the execution of some Quakers for being Quakers, at which point the royal government had to step in. A superior civic authority had to restrain the majority of the colonists from oppressing and persecuting their neighbors.

(One of the ironies that I've blogged about before is that Mitt Romney has enjoyed far more religious liberty in modern secular Massachusetts than he would have in colonial religion-in-the-public-square version. Secular Massachusetts elected him Governor; theocratic Massachusetts might well have hanged him. When modern religious conservatives complain that the "secular culture" oppresses them and limits their freedom, they have NO idea what they're talking about.)

In Pennsylvania, the case was most complicated, with the colony owned by a family of Quaker proprietors and the colonists divided between a Quaker-led political faction and a non-Quaker faction. But the special privileges accorded to the Quaker faith did, inevitably, burden the rest of the Commonwealth. The most startling example was the reluctance by the pacifist Quakers to countenance a colonial militia despite recurring armed conflicts with the French and the Native Americans. That left their fellow-colonists with the choice of going undefended, and thus dying for beliefs they did not share, or of shouldering the entire risk and expense of colonial defense themselves, without any contribution from the Quakers. In the 1740s Benjamin Franklin (nobody's military man) had to organize an all-volunteer militia without legislative sanction; essentially a self-funded private club to defend the colony. The Pennsylvania legislature wouldn't actually fund a state militia until 1756, two years after the French and Indian War had begun in Pennsylvania, and a year after the colonial commander of the British Army had been killed in action there.

The Quakers' special prerogatives could only be sustained by limiting the political freedoms of others. "Religious liberty" conceived as special privileges or exemptions for believers has repeatedly, inevitably, become an infringement on others' liberty.

Franklin stands as an exemplar of the other, more successful approach to religious freedom. Franklin advocated a public square open to all, with no special advantage or favor to any sect. This often put him at odds with the Quaker party in colonial politics. But, since it is the eve of the Fourth of July, let me be bold on the great Franklin's behalf: he was right, and his political opponents were wrong.

Franklin, who belonged to no organized church and swore to no particular creed, advocated a "secular" public sphere, the true religious equality where all believers (and unbelievers) are accepted by the commonwealth and all accept the same obligations to the commonwealth. Franklin remained on friendly terms, by his own account in the Autobiography, with every religious denomination in Philadelphia by donating money whenever someone was trying to build a church. He believed in a Philadelphia where faith was a choice and every citizen had the same freedoms, where every conscience was free and where no one had to bear the burden of a stranger's beliefs.

The William Penn model has failed, more than once. Now that the RFRA and five short-sighted Supreme Court justices have revived that long-discarded model, it will fail again, but only at the cost of burdening Americans' liberty. Under the Penn model, some people have more religious freedom than others; the rest of us are free to exercise someone else's religion. And that tends, always, to mean extra religious freedom for  the rich and powerful at the expense of ordinary citizens' freedom. The rest of us are free to worship as my Lord Baltimore pleases, free to sacrifice to William Penn's lofty principles, free to have the chief shareholder of the corporation that employs us make moral decisions about our wombs. The model of "religious liberty" as special privilege always ends up giving all the liberty to the privileged.

That was not the America Benjamin Franklin wanted. And I say, this Glorious Fourth, that Benjamin Franklin was right in 1776, and right in 1787, and Benjamin Franklin is right today. Freedom of conscience is not about exemptions or concessions. Every conscience is, and can only be, equally free. And only a neutral public square, where all have equal standing, allows religious equality. Franklin was right, and history will continue to prove it.

Happy Independence Day.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Religious Liberty vs. Hobby Lobby

Let's start with one thing. It is not acceptable for my boss to make my religious decisions. It is not acceptable for your boss to make your religious decisions, or for somebody else's boss to make religious decisions for them. Your religious freedom is yours, alone. It does not belong to your employer, to your landlord, or to anybody else. The deepest stupidity of the inane Hobby Lobby decision is that it uses religious freedom to let your boss take away your religious freedom. That is not acceptable. And it is not sustainable. Five allegedly rational Supreme Court justices have just opened the door to vicious religious conflict. Because letting your boss make your religious decisions is not acceptable, and over the long run people will not accept it.

I will admit that the Supreme Court and I come at First Amendment questions from different directions (although with a shared commitment to the First Amendment's value). They look back at it from the present day, viewing the Constitution as a point of intellectual origin. They understand its context and immediate antecedents, but their historical narrative is about the creation of the Constitution and the past two centuries of its interpretation. My scholarly work forces me to look forward to the Constitution. The writers and books I study are from an earlier period, inhabiting a world in which the Constitution is not yet imaginable. So I have gradually come to see the Constitution in terms of what went before, to see it as a set of codified solutions to particularly ugly historical problems. I don't have to imagine where we would be without Constitution or the Bill of Rights, because I have all too clear a picture of what the world without them was like.

The 16th and 17th centuries were periods of ferocious religious warfare, complete with terrorism, persecution, assassination, torture, inquisitions, and massacres of civilians. I use none of those terms figuratively. Kings were stabbed to death by religious fanatics. Religious leaders were burned alive in the public square. Conspirators plotted to blow up government buildings, to overthrow regimes. Women and children were beaten to death by mobs of their own neighbors. All of this was done by Christians to other Christians, and no denomination's hands were clean. If you look back at this history hoping to find that your own church behaved like the good guys, you will be sorely disappointed. Every existing Christian group played both the villain and the victim, more than once.

The hundred years or so before the Constitutional Convention saw the European religious conflicts modulate somewhat, so that religion became one volatile and dangerous wild card in larger games of international conflict and domestic factionalism. But religious intolerance and aggression did not go away. The settlement of the Thirteen Colonies was partly driven by the need to escape various forms of sectarian prosecution. And while the wars of religion were no longer the main show, they were certainly not gone. The last armed revolt aimed at putting a Roman Catholic on the English throne was in 1745. Benjamin Franklin was 39 years old at the time.

When I hear 21st-century American Christians complain about being persecuted for their beliefs, I am caught between laughter and disgust. Those people have no idea what real persecution is. And the danger to Christians has never been the secular state. The greatest danger to Christians; religious freedom is always other Christians. Secular government was devised to protect Christians from one another, and it is the only thing that has been shown to work.

The First Amendment guarantees free exercise of religion, and prohibits the establishment of any favored religion. The current religious right loves one clause and hates the second. They want freedom of exercise. They hate that the Establishment clause enforces a level playing field, and prevents one religious group's exercise from infringing upon others. Enormous bitterness is directed toward Jefferson's phrase "separation of Church and State," with endless tedious reminders that Jefferson's phrase is not in the First Amendment per se (but only a clear record of, ahem, original intention). But the fact is, you can't have one without the other. Religious freedom is only possible if the officially-secular state enforces a neutral playing field.

If we allow various Christian groups (or hypothetically other groups, although only Christians have that kind of political muscle in the United States) to use political or economic power to push their version of Christianity on others, the live-and-let-live "free exercise" arrangement falls apart. And then push comes to shove.

If certain parties are allowed to exercise their religious rights so vigorously that other people aren't free to make their own religious decisions, then no one can afford religious tolerance anymore. If my neighbor is permitted to impose his religion on me, then my only recourse is to drive everyone whose religion I disagree with out of the neighborhood. If the principal of the public elementary school has religious freedom to proselytize my (hypothetical) children, then I need to discriminate against certain potential principals on religious grounds, eliminating people whose beliefs I don't share. If a Mormon governor is liable to ban coffee shops, then I can no longer vote for a Mormon candidate. If people are using business to push religion, I can no longer do business with people of incompatible religions. That's a very bad outcome, but it's also the inevitable outcome.

If the government does not act as a referee, religious toleration becomes impossible, unworkable. If individuals are allowed to use whatever leverage they happen to have to coerce their neighbors or employees or tenants into conforming with their own religious beliefs, what you create is a competition in which people are forced to keep amassing more and more coercive muscle. The only way to keep your neighbors from jamming their religion down your throat is to organize some coreligionists and jam your religion down the neighbors' throats. That turns into persecute or be persecuted: a swift, ugly, and distinctly ungodly cycle.

What five of the Supreme Court justices have decided in Hobby Lobby is that religious coercion by non-government agents is actually a guaranteed right, and that the government cannot step in to prevent it because that would limit the coercive party's right to free exercise. That is a mind-bogglingly stupid position. And it ultimately leads back to the bad old days of sectarian infighting, where the only way to protect your own religious liberty was to trample everybody else's. I don't want any part of a country like that. I been there before.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Justice Roberts's Gay Marriage (and Mine)

The Supreme Court spent Holy Week (or, as Jesus would call it, Passover) debating gay marriage, which Chief Justice John Roberts clearly opposes. Religious opponents of gay marriage like to argue that the purpose of marriage is to beget children, so that only heterosexual marriages are "real," because only biological fertility makes a marriage "real." By this standard John Roberts's own marriage is not real, and neither is mine. I do not believe that, and neither should he.

John Roberts did not marry until 41, to a woman his own age, and they adopted their children. Justice and Mrs. Roberts are, as that link suggests, believing Catholics. That their marriage did not result in biological children does not make them less Catholic or less married. Roberts married an intellectual and professional peer rather than, say, a twenty-five year old. If he had married a twentysomething admirer, that hypothetical marriage would likely have led to biological children. Would such a marriage, to less closely-matched spouse, have been more authentic? More sacred? I do not believe so. I do not think Justice Roberts believes so, either.

Like Roberts, I did not marry until my early forties: a year and a half ago last Monday. Like Roberts, I married a person who was my equal or better intellectually, professionally, and emotionally. For me as for Roberts, that meant someone relatively close to my own age. And, like Roberts and his wife, my spouse and I share a faith life that is part of our marriage; as it happens, we and they belong to the same church. External circumstances make beginning a family out of the question for the near future; it would be irresponsible of me to father a child when I spend most of every week hundreds of miles away (just the thought of my wife entering labor while I am that far away from her opens a swampy pit inside my stomach). I am not less married because we do not have children. And I would not be more married if I had chosen a spouse with whom I could wait ten years to begin a biological family because she was half my age: God forbid.

I could not be more married than I am. My relationship with my spouse has become a fundamental element of my identity, whether I wake up beside her or two state lines away. Marriage is not just dating with tax benefits; it has the potential to transform and reorient your life, to change the way you move through the world. My marriage is part of who I am. And my spouse, to borrow John Donne's words, is the compass "who makes my circle just, and makes me end where I begun." I believe and hope that Justice Roberts's marriage gives him the same sense of purpose and the same consolations.

I do not believe that marriage is a means to an end, or simply a prerequisite to something else. Nor do I think anyone truly married can believe that. The purpose of marriage is to be married: to enter a lifelong relationship with your spouse. It is, as John Milton argued long ago, a remedy for the loneliness of the human soul: "against all the sorrows and casualties of this life to have an intimate and speaking help, a ready and reviving associate in marriage." Sex can be arranged by other means; childbirth can be arranged by other means, but, as Milton says, only marriage can satisfy the soul's thirst to join "to itself in conjugal fellowship a fit conversing soul ... many waters cannot quench it, neither can the floods drown it." The intellectual and spiritual companionship of marriage, not the potential for begetting children, is essential and irreplaceable.

Justice Roberts' spiritual and emotional bond with his wife, the essence of his marriage, is exactly what he would deny his fellow citizens because they have taken another man for a husband or another woman for a wife. The commitment to intense lifelong partnership comes to those who will not or cannot have children of their own body. That is as true for gay husbands and gay wives as it is for straight husbands and straight wives, as true as it is for John Roberts and his wife, as true as it is for my spouse and for me. Except for the privilege society offers to one class of citizen instead of another, John Roberts' marriage is a gay marriage, a source of profound spiritual and emotional nourishment that transcends the biological. The comforts and fulfillment of Justice Roberts's marriage, which I hope continue for many more years, are no less valid because he and his wife have not conceived children. But neither are the consolations of his fellow citizens' marriages any less real or valid because they, like Roberts and his wife, may not physically procreate. If John Roberts believes, as I trust he does, that marriage is a genuinely spiritual institution, then he should respect and honor the emotional and spiritual bonds of marriage. If mere biology invalidates such a bond, then John Roberts can no more be married to his true partner than two men or two women can be. Their marriages are as real as his, or mine. And to dishonor the sacred reality of those marriages dishonors his own.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Supply-Side Jesus Is a Lie

cross-posted from Dagblog

NPR broadcast this piece, on American Christians' disagreement over Christianity's economic teachings, on Morning Edition today. Unsurprisingly, left-leaning Christians like me feel Jesus taught a basically leftist approach to social welfare issues; we feel that when Jesus is talking about feeding the poor and the hungry, comforting prisoners, and helping the homeless, that he means exactly what he says. Right-leaning Christians, perhaps also unsurprisingly, feel that Jesus forbids public spending on the poor, or taxing the rich, or interfering with personal economic liberty. Their Jesus generally sounds a lot like Ron Paul.

After the House passed its budget last month, liberal religious leaders said the Republican plan, which lowered taxes and cut services to the poor, was an affront to the Gospel — and particularly Jesus' command to care for the poor.

Not so, says Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, who chairs the House Budget Committee. He told Christian Broadcasting Network last week that it was his Catholic faith that helped shape the budget plan. In his view, the Catholic principle of subsidiarity suggests the government should have little role in helping the poor.

I know intramural religious disputes can seem completely mystifying to outsiders, and even to nominal insiders who haven't had much religious instruction. It's too easy to believe that whatever a particular preacher on TV (or NPR) happens to be saying on the air is "what Christianity teaches," but Christians disagree passionately about almost everything, including things that might seem straightforward and simple. So let me put this religious disagreement in context:

If Congressman Paul Ryan went to church yesterday, the first Bible reading he heard was this:

Acts 4:32-35

The community of believers was of one heart and mind,
and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own,
but they had everything in common.
With great power the apostles bore witness
to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus,
and great favor was accorded them all.
There was no needy person among them,
for those who owned property or houses would sell them,
bring the proceeds of the sale,
and put them at the feet of the apostles,
and they were distributed to each according to need.

How do I know what selections from the Bible were read in Ryan's parish yesterday? Because, like every Sunday, the same three readings from the Bible were read in every Catholic parish yesterday.  So this reading wasn't just read in Paul Ryan's church. It was read in Rick Santorum's church, and Newt Gingrich's, and all five conservative Supreme Court Justices'. If they went to Mass yesterday, this is what they heard near the beginning of the service. And if they happened to sleep late yesterday, this passage comes by (like every single passage in the New Testament) every three years in a systematic rotation. They all know this passage.

Now, what the Apostles are doing in this passage might sound a lot like socialism. That's because it is a lot like socialism: no individual property, redistribution of wealth according to need, collective decision making, and what is basically a 100% capital gains tax. Where did the Apostles get such ideas? From hanging around with Jesus, whom they worked with closely during his life and from whom (if you believe in the New Testament) they received further direct instruction shortly after his death and resurrection. Now, if you don't believe in Jesus's resurrection, that's fine. If you're not interested in what Jesus or his personal disciples thought about economics, more power to you. But if you're making a claim that Jesus opposed socialism, you're just making up your own Jesus who says whatever you want him to say. You aren't the first, so don't feel special.

Compare what St. Peter and the gang are getting up to in Acts of the Apostles with the kind of "socialism" that Republicans accuse Barack Obama of. If you think slightly higher tax rates on people who make a million dollars a year, a few new bank regulations, and a national health-care plan built on private for-profit insurers is "socialism" then Jesus's best friends are all screaming Commies. (Although, to be fair, Judas wasn't involved in the socialism recorded above, having already taken the path of individual enterprise.) You won't catch Barack Obama whipping any moneylenders.

If we want to ask "What Would Jesus Do?" about the economy, it is very clear that Jesus, unlike Obama, would not regulate banking. Jesus forbids banking outright. He forbids lending any money at interest, clearly and explicitly. What he meant by that is not up for debate. (If you want your Jesus to sound like Ron Paul, it's important not to quote much of what he actually says.)

I'm not recommending socialism, or the abolition of banks. I would not urge Jesus's economic program on the modern United States. But that's the point: it's not that left-leaning Christians are following Jesus's economic teachings and right-leaning Christians aren't. It's that even most left-leaning Christians are far, far to Jesus's right on economic issues. The Gospel's teachings about wealth and poverty aren't somewhere in the middle of America's current political spectrum. They're completely outside our terms of debate. (In fact, following the Gospel's teachings without any rationalizations would mean dismantling capitalism. I have no stomach for that.)  Neither the American left nor the American right is obedient to Jesus on these questions. The right simply happens to offer a more intense and flagrant version of the left's disobedience to these teachings.

How do Paul Ryan or Rick Santorum or Antonin Scalia consider themselves good Catholics? The same way the rest of us do: by picking and choosing the teachings they pay attention to. For a long time, liberal American Catholics have been derided as "cafeteria Catholics," picking and choosing the teachings we find attractive and ignoring those we find less congenial. And it's true: my spouse and I try to be good Catholics, but we disobey the Gospel every single day. (We have a joint savings account). Yet American conservatives use the cafeteria model too, and as conservative ideology has gotten more fervent and intense over the past years it has moved conservative Catholics into ever-more-restricted selections from the cafeteria line. At this point, Ryan and Santorum aren't just choosing cafeteria style. It's like they're filling their trays with nothing but the Jello. Ryan's budget wants to punish the poor, the sick, and the elderly in the name of individual economic liberty, by which he means the moneylenders' profit margin. Santorum fixates on relatively minor teachings (and on teachings that he finds indirectly implied), while blatantly disobeying major teachings. Conservatives deplore contraception as abhorrent to God, but accept and even cheer the death penalty, despite the Church's condemnation of it. (It's true that no one uses contraception in the Gospels, but you might recall that it includes an execution. It's not in favor.)

Conservative Catholics often scold liberal Catholics for not properly respecting the teachings of the bishops and of the chief bishop, the Pope. But the bishops' religious authority is based, directly and completely, on the authority of the Apostles. The theory is that they're the Apostles' successors, with the Pope having St. Peter's old job. If the authority of the bishops matters, the Apostles' authority has to matter as much or more, and as you can see above, the Apostles themselves are a bunch of leftist hippy communists. You can't make a big deal out of disobeying Peter's two-thousand-years-later replacement but flout the actual Peter.

I'm in no position to judge others' practice of Christianity. I am absolutely terrible at it. But the truth is, almost every one of us is. Jesus never promised any of his followers that any of this would be easy. I'll freely admit that the Christianity I manage to follow, and to be honest even the version of Christianity that I try to follow, is different from what Jesus actually taught. But when you see Christians debating their politics and their faith, remember that all of our Christianities are different from what Jesus taught. That's been true in American politics since the Pilgrims got to Plymouth Rock, and it's not going to change in our lifetime.

Opening Day Farewell

Today is Opening Day for most of Major League Baseball, including my beloved Red Sox. For most baseball fans, the experience of falling in love with the game is inextricably bound up with their relationship to the men in their family, to the father or uncle who took them to games and played catch with them in the yard. But my love of baseball grows out of my love for a woman: my aunt Ann, who was laid to rest this week. Today is the first time I have been in Boston for Opening Day since I left New England fifteen years ago. And today is my first Opening Day without Ann. I had expected her to have another, and another. I was not prepared for this day to come without her.

Ann had no children. She was a sister in a Catholic order, what most people would call a nun. (Technically nuns are something different, and since they live cloistered away from the secular world you've probably never met one. The "nuns" you meet in the everyday world, running schools and hospitals and charities, are technically known as sisters. They do God's work in the most practical and literal way, as genuine work. Ann was one of them.)

As her oldest nephews, my brother and I were the closest things she had to sons. When we were still small, she began taking us to Red Sox games for our birthdays, which meant weekend stays with her in Boston, once fairly early in the season and once near the end. (I would like to officially thank my brother for having a birthday that tends to fall in the middle of pennant races.) We saw some great and dramatic baseball together. We were in the bleachers when the 1986 team clinched the American League East and their ride to the playoffs; I have a framed photo in my office that Ann took that day from the stands, with Oil Can Boyd on the mound in full windup, a few pitches before he ended the game and jumped up and down for joy, like a child. We also saw some profoundly undramatic baseball together over the years. A lot of September games have nothing at stake but the player's professionalism and self-respect; over time, I came to view those games as the most revealing, in certain ways: the games played for the highest stakes of all. And, truth be told, you can see a game any time over the summer when not much goes on, and the actual suspense is over by the fourth inning. We saw those games with Ann, too, and watched every pitch. Leaving early was never even mentioned. When you start a thing, you finish it, and when you love a team (or a person), the love is  not conditional.

It would be easy to say that Ann taught me about baseball as a metaphor for life, and so on, but she didn't, and it's a cliche, and Roger Angell has already said all that better than I ever will. And anyway baseball isn't much more of a metaphor for life than any other part of life is, and in some ways it's a less of one. (Life, for example, involves women. And men over forty. And doing your job when it rains.) What I learned about life on those trips I learned getting to and from the games. Ann was an adult, and lived in the city, and being with her I saw what adulthood and city life were like. She could not only find her way around Boston, but find a place to park. She could keep two kids under ten interested and occupied for two and a half days. She was the most streetwise person to ever set a good moral example for anyone, and she set a good moral example to most. Being around her taught me how to be an adult, and made me want to be kinder. When I graduated from college, it seemed natural to start my first adult job in the Boston Church: Ann's version of Boston, and Ann's version of the Church. The Catholicism that the sisters lived was, and is, the face of the Church that I found most comfortable and appealing. Reporting to a sister as my first boss made all the sense in the world.

And for all of the Hall-of-Famers we watched play, all of the dramatic hits and big games, my best memories are of sitting in the stands with Ann and my brother when nothing much was going on, sitting in Fenway and being together. I'd give a lot to sit with Ann through nine dull innings today.

Is baseball a metaphor for life? Is opening day a metaphor for spring and rebirth and new beginnings? Maybe. Sure. But when you come right down to it, baseball is an excuse to sit outdoors with someone you love. If it were nothing else but that, it would be enough.

Rest in peace, Ann.

Birth Control Makes Catholicism Work

cross-posted from Dagblog

My brilliant co-bloggers Ramona and Destor have been especially brilliant this week on the Catholic bishops' outrage at having to pay for full employee health insurance. Destor is so smart about the church and state principles involved, and Ramona so good on the women's-health issues, that I have nothing left to add but my own personal experience. I am a former employee of the Catholic Church. I used to have a health-insurance card with the Archdiocese of Boston's seal printed on it. That wasn't an experience of religious liberty. That was an employer exercising its muscle to impose on employees' religious consciences. And it involved the hypocritical pretense that the Archdiocese and its good works did not fundamentally depend on careful family planning by its employees, as every American diocese did and does.

I was in no personal need of the contraceptive pills that my health card wouldn't get me, because I was a dude and because I had a romantic life which rendered family planning moot. But one of my co-workers explained what our health-insurance card meant for her. Prescriptions for contraceptives weren't covered, and had to be paid for out-of-pocket at the exorbitant rate reserved for the uninsured. And any doctor's appointment where contraceptives were discussed or prescribed was also not covered, even if the appointment was primarily to treat something else. (And obviously, it didn't matter why contraceptives were being prescribed. If, like many women, my co-worker needed the pill for medical reasons unrelated to family planning, then she would simply have an uninsured medical problem.) That isn't just refusing to be "forced to buy contraceptives." That is an employer using its muscle to put obstacles in its employees' way, to press its own agenda upon employees no matter their own religious beliefs. In this case, my Jewish co-worker had her employer's religious convictions forced upon her. That is not freedom of conscience.

This is what "freedom of religion" has come to mean to today's religious right: the privilege to push your religion on others, and to play the victim when your bullying is interrupted. The official leadership of the Catholic Church has utterly failed to convince even its own followers of its position on contraception: 

in recent polls, about 95 percent of Catholics have said they use contraceptives, and 89 percent say the decision to use them should be theirs, not the church’s,

and another recent poll shows Catholics favoring the Obama administration's ruling by a 58-37 margin. So the "religious principle" being discussed here is a recent teaching embraced mainly by the Church's hierarchy, but not actually part of most believers' practice of the faith. But having failed to persuade rank-and-file Catholics of the Church's novel and ill-thought-out position, the leader of my Archdiocese, Bernard Cardinal Law, resorted to bullying employees with his economic power, interfering with their medical decisions because he was The Boss.

The claim that Cardinal Law's conscience would have been violated if the organization he led had been "forced to buy contraceptives" is nonsense. The Church does not buy contraceptives, penicillin, X-rays, or any other medical good. It buys a premium for a health plan for its employees, and that plan pays for medical goods and services. But isn't that just buying contraceptives with the Cardinal's money? No. Because the premium on my health plan was not the Cardinal's money, even if his little stamp was on the card. It was my money. It was part of my pay. I had earned it, through the work specified in my contract, and what I did with the benefits I was owed was no more the Cardinal's business than what I did with my paycheck. Employees' medical decisions and religious beliefs are their own. (If I bought a hamburger on Good Friday, I wasn't forcing the Cardinal to "buy meat" against his religious beliefs. Once someone pays you, the money is yours.)  Even if the employer pays the insurer directly, that doesn't entitle it to dictate the way medical insurance was used. If it did, the Christian Science Monitor couldn't be required to provide health insurance at all.

And let me be very blunt here. Almost all of the employees covered by the new ruling are working in the non-profit sector at non-profit salaries. They are teachers, doctors, nurses, and social workers in the Catholic Church's schools, hospitals, charities, and colleges. They are not paid unfairly, but the Church does not pay them, and could not afford to pay them, well enough that they don't need to worry about when and how they start their families. The first year I worked for the Boston Church, I was paid the princely sum of fifteen thousand dollars plus health insurance. My co-workers who had more experience and credentials than I did were paid better than that, at least, but they were still paid much less than people in similar jobs outside the Church. I didn't think my salary was unfair, considering the original skill level I brought with me, and I was happy to have the opportunity to do the work I was doing and to get better at it. But that decision was only possible for me because I was not going to be starting a family. I could not have taken that job if I were responsible for a child. If I'd had a child on the way, I would have had to look for other work. And the idea that I would "let God decide" when children would come, and in what numbers, while I was working for a salary that wouldn't cover day care, is the height of irresponsibility. Catholic schools and Catholic charities and Catholic hospitals are only economically possible because of contraception. Without family planning, they would have to close.

The sisters and brothers who once staffed those institutions no longer exist in anything close to the numbers needed to keep them open. You cannot run a school or hospital with American nuns any more, because there aren't any. They have been replaced by lay employees who have not taken vows of poverty, and so need to be paid. The schools and hospitals stay open because those lay workers are willing to work for below-market wages. But since those educated below-market-wage professionals have also not taken vows of chastity, they have to make decisions about starting families, and about the size of their families. They cannot afford to let children come on their own schedule, in whatever numbers. They have to make the same decisions that most middle-class families make about when they can afford to have a baby, except they have to make them even more carefully. If everyone who worked for the Catholic Church in this country had the large, unplanned families the Church recommends, then the schools and hospitals and charities would not be able to pay the parents well enough to support their children. Those schools and hospitals would either go broke or lose most of their workers to more profitable jobs. This is the reality underlying the Church's good works.

It isn't wrong; those schools and charities and hospitals need to be low-cost to serve the Church's mission. I've never been sorry I worked for them, or served the people I served while I was on the Church's payroll. But to pay people a wage which will not allow them to start a family and then make them go into their underpaid pockets for the birth-control pills that allow them to keep working for you is wrong. It is unworthy of any of the values the Church stands for. And making a grand pious show of it only makes the bishops' behavior more sinful.

Why Tenure Exists, Part 1

cross-posted from Dagblog

Zandar, at Balloon Juice, points out that Missouri's new Creationism-in-the-schools bill, HB 1227, applies not only to K-12 schools but to the state's public colleges and universities as well. According to the bill,

Notwithstanding any other law, any introductory science course taught at any public institution of higher education in this state, including material concerning physics, chemistry, biology, health, physiology, genetics, astronomy, cosmology, geology, paleontology, anthropology, ecology, climatology, or other science topics,

will be regulated by the requirements of the law, which means equal time for the "intelligent design" theory.

If scientific theory concerning biological origin is taught in a course of study, biological evolution and biological intelligent design shall be taught. ... If scientific theory concerning biological origin is taught in a textbook, the textbook shall give equal treatment to biological evolution and biological intelligent design.

Now, this bill will probably never become law. But I find it simultaneously disgusting and amusing that only "introductory" classes are regulated, meaning that University of Missouri faculty would still be free to teach actual science to their majors (who would only be misled in Biology/Geology/Physics 101 but hipped to what's really what in the next class) while all the non-majors filling distribution requirements would get a set of deliberately dishonest courses designed to insulate them from any scientific knowledge that would challenge their faith-based misconceptions.

That pretty much sums up the religious right approach to science. They want a small group of actual scientists and engineers who know how things really work, and a much larger class of scientific illiterates who are left free to believe anything that makes them feel good about themselves. Scientists are meant to be a special caste, given the privilege of pursuing knowledge at the price of keeping it to themselves.

What's merely disgusting, and not amusing, is that the proposed law applies not just to biology but to physics, astrophysics, and geology, and outlaws anything but "empirical fact," meaning in practice that which conservative Missouri lawmakers consider to be an empirical fact. Millions of years of fossil records are clearly not "empirical" enough. The Big Bang Theory, and with it the rest of the Standard Model in physics, surely does not make the cut; the Big Bang is just someone's interpretation of some radio hiss, right? String theory, likewise, cannot yet be confirmed. Nor, if we come down to it, would Special Relativity or Hubble's constant make the lawmaker's cut, since like so much of science these ideas are largely demonstrated through mathematics. If you take out the parts of contemporary science that rest on abstruse mathematical proof, you leave pretty large holes in our understanding of the world.

The only saving grace, of course, is that tenured science professors, even at state universities, could not be forced to to do this, and more importantly could not be fired for teaching their students real science. This is the first and most important reason for academic tenure: to insulate the pursuit and transmission of knowledge from the worst outside pressures. Tenure is the reason that "intelligent design" is NOT taught in public colleges and universities, even in the buckle of the Bible Belt. Tenured college teachers are free from political pressure in a way that high school teachers have never been. Without tenure, the facts about science, about history, about the world we live in, became subject to the whims of the State Legislature, or the Board of Trustees, or the college's biggest donor, rather than being subject to the actual facts.

Tenure is often imagined as a personal job perk, and it's true that there have been occasions when tenure has been abused at this college or that. But it's not just part of an employment package, like a dental plan or a 401(k), because it is not designed as a reward for an individual but as a privilege for an activity. Tenure is designed to enable and to protect the pursuit of knowledge. It keeps scientists who study climate change from being fired for studying climate change, or for finding out things that some influential person doesn't want to be true. Tenure operates, in effect, as one of the academy's quality control guarantees. It offers a base-line reassurance that the information produced by academic research is on the level, and has not been cooked up in some bigwig's office.

In order to do this, tenure does offer individual scholars real and valuable privileges. But the core of the privilege is the freedom to do your job right. It does not protect anyone's right to do their job poorly, although that is how it is frequently portrayed. Tenure has sometimes been turned into a cover for shoddy work habits, but that's not in keeping with even the letter, let alone the spirit, of the law; no one's university bylaws allow the tenured to skip their duties. If I decided never to show up for the classes I teach, tenure should not and would not protect me. If, on the other hand, two-thirds of my Board of Trustees became enthusiastic converts to the idea that the Earl of Oxford wrote the works of William Shakespeare, and ordered me to give "Oxfordian thinking" equal time in my classroom, tenure would allow me to politely tell them no and go back to teaching reality-based literary history. They couldn't do a thing about it. That's what tenure is for. It keeps the job of spreading knowledge in the hands of people who actually know what they're teaching.

Of course, if a bill like Missouri's ever became law, the problem would be that many introductory classes, the ones that the Missouri legislature feels free to meddle with, are largely taught by untenured and untenurable "part-time" instructors, who are employed at will. The advanced classes are taught by the tenured faculty, who cannot be punished for teaching actual science, but most of the lower-level classes are given to poorly-paid adjunct teachers who can be fired without even giving a reason. Under HB 1227, those people would have to give equal time to "intelligent design," or to global cooling, or to astrology, as the Missouri State Legislature saw fit, or else be replaced by someone who would. Lots of people who call themselves educational "reformers" talk about the need to have fewer tenured faculty members; this is what they're talking about.

The Romney Paradox (and the Crybaby Bishops)

cross-posted from Dagblog

Mitt Romney used to be Governor of Massachusetts, a commonwealth which has at various times been A) the closest thing to a theocracy America has ever had and B) the poster child for tolerant secular liberalism. Many vocal religious conservatives now insist that the tolerant secular liberalism is an infringement on their religious liberty, and that they can only fully exercise their religion when the state actively endorses and promotes their religious values for them.

Back in the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, of course, the government did actively promote religious values, and the official magistrates were under the indirect supervision of the ministers. (Massachusetts was never such a theocracy that the ministers were directly in control, but the religious leaders could make and break the politicians; they weren't officeholders, but they were political bosses). This is the closest resemblance that any historical fact bears to the Christian Nation narrative popular with today's religious right.

Here's the thing, though: none of the people currently demanding a Christian Nation would have been able to exercise their religion under that system. Virtually without exception, today's right-wing religious activists belong to denominations that were banned in colonial Massachusetts (or would have been, had they been founded in time). Mitt Romney, likewise, would not have been allowed to practice his faith or even to remain in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The Massachusetts authorities in the 17th century were given to expelling members of dissident religious groups, such as the Baptists, with an instructive public whipping to hasten them on their way. They executed people for the crime of being Quakers. (Those executions led the English government to tyrannically curtail Massachusetts' religious freedom by forbidding the colonists to hang people for being a different flavor of Protestant Christian.) After the King outlawed religious executions, the God-fearing colonists had to content themselves with whippings, expulsions, and breaking into to private homes to see if anyone was holding a Quaker service inside.

Baptists were outlaws; the Pentecostalists and other later evangelical denominations would surely have been outlawed too. Practicing Catholicism was out of the question; Massachusetts Puritans looked on the Catholic Church as a diabolic organization headed by the Anti-Christ. The Catholics didn't enjoy religious toleration in England, let alone Puritan New England, and as late as the 1830s a mob burned down a convent in greater Boston, because it was full of, you know, nuns.

And as for being a Mormon, if there had been any Mormons yet, forget it. Groups that got driven out of 19th-century Illinois wouldn't have stood a chance in theocratic Boston. If Mitt Romney had shown up in the Massachusetts Bay Colony he would have been immediately thrown in jail, publicly flogged, and (if he caught a few bad breaks) hanged. In fact, every single Republican candidate for the presidential nomination, including Herman Cain and Tim Pawlenty, belongs to a church that would have been criminalized in early colonial Boston.

On the other hand, "Godless" liberal Massachusetts, that terrible threat to religious freedom, has treated Mitt Romney remarkably well. Not only did he get two degrees from Harvard (whose Puritan founders would have never admitted anyone of his faith), and he was actually elected to John Winthrop's old job as Governor! (We're still trying to harness the original colonists spinning in their graves to make green electricity.) He didn't do any of that on a wave of religious support from his fellow Mormons, of whom Massachusetts has approximately none. He did it with the votes of people who don't believe in his religion and have no particular sympathy for it, even some people who view Mormonism as slightly crazy. Those voters disagree with Romney's personal religious choices, but respected his right to make them and did not penalize him for them. Tolerant liberal values gave Mitt Romney the maximum freedom to practice his faith.

The people of Massachusetts did expect Romney to live up to the traditional separation-of-church-and-state deal, in which the elected magistrate represents the interests of the whole commonwealth and not his private religious convictions. If Mormon Governor Romney felt that, as a Latter-Day Saint, he had to close down all of the state's bars, liquor stores, and coffee shops, he wouldn't have been Governor Romney for even a week. In fact, Romney signed the repeal of the old Puritan-inspired Blue Law against selling alcohol on Sundays. He acted on behalf of the voters who had delegated him his authority, rather than using that authority to express his own religious concerns or impose them upon the public.

Was this a limitation of his religious freedom? No. It was a recognition that an elected leader is a representative of the public. If Romney had insisted that his freedom of religion entitled him to use his office to promote his specific values, he would have been barred from that office, because under that system no reasonable voter would ever choose to empower any candidate whose religion differed from their own. If we all agree that the President of the United States will keep his religious practice separate from his public duties, then anyone can be President. But if we considered the President of the United States free to use the powers of office to promote his or her own faith, then no one who doesn't share my particular faith, or yours, would be acceptable to me or to you. We can have, say, a Quaker president (like Nixon), because we know that the president won't simply disband the armed forces to keep with his Quaker faith. If Nixon had undergone a (spectacularly unlikely) crisis of conscience and decided that he had to be true to his religious upbringing he had to abolish the army and navy, he would have been impeached faster than he could resign.

Today's religious right complain about the separation of church and state as a hindrance to their religious freedom. Most recently, some Catholic bishops have complained that they can now longer receive taxpayer funding for adoption-placement services that exclude gay couples from adopting. They are free to run a Catholic adoption agency, and free to turn away gay couples if they choose, on the principle that children are better off orphans than raised by two men or two women. What they view as "government-backed persecution" is that the taxpayer will no longer underwrite this. Apparently, the bishops feel the government is obligated to fund an adoption service that deliberately limits the pool of adoptive parents, rather than giving its money to adoption services that accept more potential parents and therefore place more kids. “In the name of tolerance, we’re not being tolerated,” one of the bishops has told the New York Times, which reports that these bishops fear "an escalating campaign by the government to trample on their religious freedom."

To those bishops, I can only say: get over it. If you feel that it is important to keep orphans from being adopted by gay couples, and want to run a heterosexual-only adoption service, you can do it with donations from like-minded donors. You're not being "persecuted" because the government won't fund it for you. Taxpayers don't want their money spent to keep orphans from being adopted. Keeping orphans from being adopted because your religion currently teaches certain ideas about gayness is also not a public benefit. And as far as intolerance for the Catholic faith goes: baby, if this feels like persecution to you, you have clearly arrived. Nobody's set fire to a nunnery in this town for a long, long time.

Today's religious right defines "freedom of religion" as the freedom to use public resources, and public authority, in order to further the goals of their own specific religion. But almost without exception, the groups who feel "persecuted" by the government's religious neutrality are the groups who would never have been tolerated in the United States under the kind of arrangement they're currently agitating for. The Catholics, evangelicals, and Latter-Day Saints, for example are all traditionally disfavored religious groups who have only managed to thrive in this country because the Establishment Clause defends their religious freedom through tolerant neutrality. Their attacks on "tolerance" and "liberalism" as a kind of persecution is an attack on the very things that have shielded them from persecution in this country. It's like watching people trying to tear the roof off their own house. They might succeed in leading this country into a new period of deep religious intolerance. What they won't succeed in doing is escaping that intolerance themselves. It wouldn't just be the people that the religious right dislikes who would become targets if they ever got their way. And God forbid that they ever do.