The Serpent's Wisdom

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, feminist blogger, has chosen to resign from the presidential campaign of John Edwards after being embattled (by certain right-wing zealots) for several weeks. The final straw, in the eyes of the Catholic League's head, Bill Donohue, was this comment in her review of the movie Children of Men:

The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where god is viewed as so powerful he can impregnate without befouling himself by touching a woman, and women are nothing but vessels.

This apparently qualifies as a "vulgar" and "intolerant" anti-Christian comment. To say that critique is intolerant shows an utter misunderstanding of the concept of intolerance, which seems, from the perspective of people like Bill Donohue, to mean, "any act or utterance which offends our oh-so-delicate sensibilities."

The right has tirelessly labored to misappropriate the idea of intolerance, so that people think it refers not to efforts to counter structural power imbalance in our society, but to improve the niceness of language. By focusing on language they hope to take the focus off of actual oppression.

There is absolutely no measure whatsoever by which Christians are oppressed in this country. Keep that in mind. Christians run this country; they utterly dominate the public discourse, the cultural institutions, the laws, the mores, the standards of decency. Isolated instances of anti-Christian discrimination (which do occur) do not constitute institutional or state-sponsored oppression, exploitation, or disenfranchisement of Christians.

So, in order to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of misappropriating the idea of intolerance, they have to make people think that saying mean things (or things you claim are mean) in your blog is the equivalent of a pogrom, or a gay-bashing, or a clinic-bombing.  It is insulting to anyone who is working to end real intolerance in the face of violence and numerous other obstacles.

All that said, i also happen to think Amanda is absolutely right about the Christian idea of the virgin birth.

The gospels' authors must have felt some pressure to distance themselves from Pagans, who depicted divine impregnation of mortal women in a sexual way. In fact, Mary herself had to have been immaculately conceived, so that she would not bear the stain of Adam's sin -- because, apparently, sex itself befouls and stains your soul.

Amanda's comment about women only being a vessel applies too, because this was a widely-held belief about pregnancy in the ancient world: women were only a vessel through which men brought children into existence. This desire to cut women out of the picture is the very essence of misogyny. This view is most obvious in the account of the Gospel of John, whose author claimed that Jesus existed long before Mary did, making Mary's womb nothing more than a tunnel through which he passed into this world.

Bridget Mary Meehan said she and seven other women are Roman Catholic priests after being ordained Monday during a riverboat ceremony in Pittsburgh.

But church officials say the ordination was invalid and could lead to excommunication. Pittsburgh's Roman Catholic Diocese warned the women beforehand that those participating will have "removed themselves from the church."


The Church of Kenya writing to the Anglican Consultative Council interprets this as, "the provinces of Canada and ECUSA... by their actions have chosen a different path from the rest of the Communion and should be considered by the rest of the Communion as having broken fellowship. They need to re-consider their official standing in the spirit of repentance, reconciliation and willingness to re-affirm their commitment to the Communion and restoration should only take place after repentance and healing".

What do these statements and issues have in common? Look at the emphasis i added to these quotes above to see what i am getting at. In each case, we have a worldwide religious organization with clear rules about who is allowed to contribute in what way and who is not, and a group of dissidents who believe the rules are against the spirit of the church and who actively break the rules in accord with their conscience. We have in each case the organization stating in response that the dissidents have removed themselves from fellowship by their actions.

Actions of conscience in defiance of prejudicial institutional rules can have a profound effect on public opinion. For example, look at what has happened in the United States since San Francisco's mayor Gavin Newsom began issuing marriage certificates to same-sex couples in 2004. Opposition to same-sex marriage has dropped from 63% to 51% and support has risen from 30% to 39%. Since then one state, Massachusetts, has instituted same-sex marriage; in Massachusetts, same-sex marriage is supported by 62% of the population.

Public opinion took a similar course when courts began to strike down laws banning interracial marriage, too. When this redefinition of marriage took place, conservatives warned that public morality, indeed the fabric of society itself, was threatened with collapse. This has not happened, in fact in the last 20 years there has been a notable and enduring drop in the crime rate. Massachusetts has not seen any sign in the last two years that its social institutions are collapsing.

Similarly, there have been no signs of collapse of British civilization since the Church of England began ordaining women.

I've written in the past about "trajectories" in the development of Christian doctrine and practice. The idea of trajectories (or as Jon Stewart called it in his interview with Bill Bennett, the "human condition"), extended to the evolution of justice over the course of human history, provides a way to gauge the change over time in a culture's social institutions.

If the trajectory of the human condition is towards greater equality and equity of human rights, seen through the history of debates over slavery, freedom, suffrage, property rights, employment access, freedom from violence, then we must conclude that those who seek female priests, gay bishops, or same-sex marriage are on the right side of history.

At the outset, the church was an egalitarian emancipatory movement seeking justice for the oppressed and downtrodden. Christian doctrine, however, is not equipped to handle the situation where the church itself is an instrument of oppression, or, even more subtly, where the language itself of Christianity has been co-opted and misappropriated. The authors of the christian testament could not have conceived of such an outcome. They did see the dangers of literalism, but could not have protected against the subverting of their message.

As the ancient theologian Valentinus observed, when we awaken from a bad dream, we find that the scary phantoms which gave us chase are nothing. Similarly, "one's ignorance disappears when [one] gains knowledge, and... darkness disappears when light appears." Acts of conscientious dissent, like the ordaining of women as Roman Catholic priests or the consecration of homosexual bishops in the Anglican church, have the effect of waking us from our bad dream because they are in accord with the trajectory of justice in human history. The phantoms we feared prove to be nothing, just figments, and public opinion shifts drastically in the course of a single generation.

This demonstrates the importance of being brave.

Have the dissenters truly separated themselves from the community of justice and faith? Notably, talk of divisiveness and schism comes not from the dissenters but from the voices of the institutions -- who then is the actual source of that divisiveness? Is what defines a strong union conformity and strict obedience to written rules, or is it mercy and respect for diversity?

An article on the Boston Catholic Church's public self-flaggelation over the child sexual abuse scandal made it really sink in for me how besides the point "sorry" is when you've been abused.

Someone who's been abused doesn't want to hear "I'm sorry." Quite often this is a tactic employed by abusive partners to confuse the survivor and prey upon their willingness to empathize with the abuser. If it's employed in a particularly self-effacing way the implication is, "Now i've punished myself, you don't have to."

It's not that apology or contrition is a bad thing, but it is beside the point. It is irrelevant. What abuse survivors need to hear is, "It won't happen again." They need for it to then actually not happen again.

Yesterday i explored the idea of armed rebellion as a way of maintaining the social structure, of making it look like a problem is being addressed so that we don't have to examine more deeply to see the real roots of wrongness. Prostration and self-flaggelation is another cop-out; however sincere it may be, it's a delaying tactic that helps us avoid the really hard, deep introspection that has to occur.

Guaranteeing that something won't happen again is hard, and it takes a long time to demonstrate. It requires someone who has done wrong to remain under scrutiny for a long time, perhaps years or decades. Prostration and pitiable apology is an attempt at avoiding that scrutiny and saying, "It's all even now." It's also designed to make the survivor look unreasonable when insisting that it's not enough.

I've been on the other side of this, too. When i committed wrongs against my ex i beat myself up for it; but look at what a successful delaying tactic this was -- it wasn't until now that i finally understand how irrelevant this is.

ETA: My point in this post is not to beat up on the Catholic Church; i have plenty of criticism for them, but that's just part of the heaps i have for many institutions. It's just that this article was what spurred on this realization.

Thanks to badsede for providing a link to an (unofficial) English translation of the just-published document for the Congregation for Catholic Education about the non-admission of gay men to seminary, in response to my rather snarky post Thursday night on the matter.

To be honest, after reading it i am convinced it is even worse than i had feared.

The straightforward way to address sexual misconduct in the seminaries and in other church organizations would seem to be (1) establishing rules of conduct and educating people about them and (2) disciplining or removing people who violate them. This is no different from the way we make and enforce laws in society at large: you establish an ethical standard, engage in character formation by educating people about that ethical standard, and then trust that most people want to be good. When they aren't, you remove them.

I get the sense that this text means that the Catholic Church has concluded that this way of addressing the matter is not sufficient. It could be asked whether that failure was the result of not actually applying the approach above -- there are scattered accounts for example of errant priests being shielded from removal or other consequences.

But now instead the goal is to try to guess beforehand who will be the troublemakers, and prevent them from entering the seminary. This could mean anything from asking a few questions about one's life and experiences, which would be relatively unintrusive, to literal hunts for people not who have actually broken rules but who might. It's very tricky and problematic, and from what i'm reading (see for example here and here, thanks to pamscoffee and arisbe for the links respectively), there is considerable confusion within the church as to what is actually expected or intended.

So, rather than clarifying what the Church will do, this text seems to muddy the waters further. There will be great variance in how this text is interpreted and implemented -- variance which will be unfair to anyone, gay or straight, who applies for ordination.

But even more disturbing than that is what the document says about the meaning of being gay. ( Read more... )

Catholic group feels Wal-Mart doesn't think the world goes around Christ, so it calls for a boycott. (thanks to arisbe for the link)

Why on earth should any Christian care what respect Wal-Mart (or any other worldly institution) does or does not have for Christian observance? I am consistently disappointed in expecting people to understand that there can be no compulsion in faith. With compulsion it ceases to be faith. But that matters little to those who want to see Christianity as a political force. It was, firstly, not a political movement but a radical movement, that is, a movement that sought to change society by focusing on bettering each individual from within. The Christian Testament is full of language expressing mistrust for becoming entangled in the political process. Using the message of Christ to promote a political agenda misappropriates and de-radicalizes Jesus' concern for the compassionate and dignified treatment of all people.

Which brings me to my second point: why should anyone, much less someone calling themselves Christian, have no objection to the role Wal-Mart plays in world poverty, but care instead whether Wal-Mart bows down before their god? Wal-Mart's business model directly impoverishes people and therefore contributes to their misery. This is directly counter to everything Jesus and the other prophets said. Why is that not a more compelling reason for Christians to avoid Wal-Mart? (The only answer i can think of is selfishness.)

The commercialization and commodification of Christmas is another way in which the Christian message has been misappropriated and de-radicalized. If you pay too much attention to the worldly thing which Christmas has become, you lessen the impact in your life of observing the birthday of your god.

On Monday, March 17, St. Patrick's Day, four of us from the Ithaca Catholic Worker Community - Peter De Mott, who served in both the Marines and the Army including a year in Vietnam as a Marine, Clare and Teresa Grady and Daniel Burns - went to the Army-Marine Recruiting Center in an act of nonviolent civil resistance to war making. We read the following statement and poured blood around the entrance to the center, including on the flag, to call attention to the horror of war. It may seem strange. You may wonder -- why did they have to pour blood, why on the flag?...

...War is bloody. The blood we brought to the recruiting station was a sign of the blood inherent in the business of the recruiting station. Blood is a sign of life, which we hold to be precious, and a sign of redemption and conversion, which we seek as people of this nation. The young men and women who join the military, via that recruiting station, are people whose lives are precious. We are obligated, as citizens of a democracy, to sound an alarm when we see our young people being sent into harm's way for a cause that is wholly unjust and criminal. Blood is a potent symbol of life and death.

Blood is the sacred substance of life, yet it is shed wantonly in war. As Catholics, when we receive the Eucharist, we acknowledge our oneness with God and the entire human family. We went to the recruiting center using what we have - our bodies, our blood, our words, and our spirits - to implore, beg, and order our country away from the tragedy of war and toward God's reign of peace and justice.

from The March 17, 2003 Action of the "Saint Patrick's Four"

The four argued that their actions were legal because the invasion of Iraq was illegal under international law. Because the United Nations had not approved the invasion of Iraq, the invasion was a series of serious illegal acts that constitute war crimes. And, under the Nuremberg Principles of international law, individuals have international rights and duties to prevent crimes against humanity which transcend the national obligations of obedience imposed by the individual state.

They further argued that if their actions were indeed illegal, they were authorized under the defense of necessity because the harm they caused was far smaller than the harm they were trying to prevent. They talked with the jury about Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, and the Boston Tea Party. They reminded us, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, that everything done by supporters of Hitler in Germany was illegal, it was only those who tried to stop him who were violating the law.

After twenty hours of deliberation, the jury locked up 9-3 to acquit them. As the jury was released, the crowded courtroom gave them a thunderous standing ovation. The power of the people to present their views about justice had prevailed over narrow law. Later, the District Attorney announced he would not re-prosecute them, stating that he thought another jury trial would yield the same outcome.

Recently, however, the federal government jumped into the fray. Last week the St. Patrick's Four appeared in federal court in Binghamton, New York to be charged on four federal charges arising from the exact same action.

They are now charged with federal conspiracy "by force, intimidation, and threat" to impede an officer of the United States - a felony charge that carries punishment of up to six years in prison and a $250,000 fine. They are also charged with criminal damage to property and two counts of trespass, charges punishable by up to an additional 2 years in prison.

from The St. Patrick's Four and Resistance to the War in Iraq

Their trial on these trumped-up federal charges starts today.

Today was the first time i'd ever heard of the Saint Patrick's Four. The news media are not reporting on them for the same reason that they were reluctant to say anything about the Pope's condemnation of the war on Iraq or of his criticism of Israel: namely, because the Chaliban desperately wants Catholics to vote Republican. Thinking they can sway American Catholics to vote GOP because they agree on abortion, they have to downplay the potentially more serious issue of disagreement over the war.

When i marched against the War in New Orleans in 2003, the only visibly Christian group with us was Pax Christi. Catholic opposition to the war is a serious threat to the Chaliban, who want to present Christianity as a united force.

The early heresiologists complained of the Gnostics that they taught that one's salvation lies in what one knows, rather than one's faith.

In my usage here, faith is different from belief; faith is intransitive, whereas belief is transitive. Faith means maintaining hope and trust, whereas belief entails an object: one believes "something," one doesn't just generally "believe." In my opinion there is no difference between "knowing" a concept and "believing" a concept.

Christianity rooted in faith would be unitive; but Christianity rooted in belief is divisive, because words are imprecise and spiritual concepts shift around as we examine them. An emphasis on belief becomes invariably an emphasis on hairsplitting: homoousia vs. homoiousia, filioque, etc. This turns the church into a "who's-in-who's-out" game based on one's concepts, rather than a "we're-all-in-this-together" game based on recognition of each other's faith. Therefore, so far as I can tell, many Christians in practice are guilty of the exact same error of which the ancient Gnostics were accused -- seeking Christ through defining of concepts rather than through faith.

Many Christians have both faith and beliefs. But it seems to me that an abundance of faith would make emphasis on beliefs seem unnecessary; when one has strong faith, whether one is Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Pagan, or what-have-you, that one is not overly concerned with the details of what other people around them believe, and furthermore, that one generally does not feel the need to question the validity of other people's faith or beliefs. So I think emphasis on beliefs is indicative of a widespread crisis of faith.

I've argued this point before, only to have it denied and the assertion repeated by proselytizers: I would be "saved" if I only professed belief in Jesus as my Lord and Savior; nothing more is essential. But typically it is not true that this is all I need, because many of the people who have tried to proselytize me tack on a lot of concepts which they think necessarily follow. For example, they might say that if I do not oppose abortion I must not have "actually" accepted Jesus, and so on.

It frightens me to contemplate the idea of God operating that way: picking and choosing on Judgment Day among people with real faith but excluding some because they happened to believe in the wrong concepts. With so many contradictory ideas floating around, how could I ever be sure I happened to choose the right collection of concepts to be "saved" and go to heaven?

Whether or not God works that way, many people do, and they use concepts rather than faith to play "who's-in-who's-out." Mormons usually find themselves on the excluded end of this, being told they believe in the "wrong Jesus." There is no bottom to this slippery slope; emphasis on "belief in the right concepts" versus faith is inherently divisive.

It happens to Catholics too, sometimes, here's a case in point.

A Christian adoption agency that receives money from Choose Life license plate fees said it does not place children with Roman Catholic couples because their religion conflicts with the agency's "Statement of Faith."

Bethany Christian Services stated the policy in a letter to a Jackson couple this month, and another Mississippi couple said they were rejected for the same reason last year. "It has been our understanding that Catholicism does not agree with our Statement of Faith," Bethany's state director Karen Stewart wrote. "Our practice to not accept applications from Catholics was an effort to be good stewards of an adoptive applicant's time, money and emotional energy."

from Christian adoption agency snubs Catholics (thanks to burkean for the link)

On Monday, before he was elected Pope, Cardinal Ratzinger sent a message about what he felt was the most important direction for the church to take.

"We are moving," he declared, toward "a dictatorship of relativism . . . that recognizes nothing definite and leaves only one's own ego and one's own desires as the final measure."

The modern world, Ratzinger insisted, has jumped "from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, up to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and on and on."

...Where John Paul was sunny, Ratzinger was serious -- and a worrier. Walls in Rome are plastered with memorial posters to John Paul that carry his famous quotation, "Be not afraid." Cardinal Ratzinger declared yesterday that the church has much to fear. from Cardinal Ratzinger's Challenge

One person's "dictatorship of relativism" is another person's "listening to other people's views and according them some measure of dignity." To use a phrase like "dictatorship of relativism" is to declare war on the marketplace of ideas.

It would be one thing if he spoke only about theology, or about life within the Catholic Church; however, the Church is a global policymaking body and affects the laws in many countries -- so for many people, their lives and freedoms are literally on the line. As lady_babalon wrote a few days ago,

[W]e have chiding letters from the Vatican to America encouraging pharmacists to refuse to dispense contraceptives to women, whether or not they are Catholic. We have the Vatican backing nurses and doctors who will refuse to give emergency contraceptives to young girls who have been raped, whether or not those girls are Catholic. We have the church actively lobbying to make or keep contraception illegal in countries all over the world. The Catholic Church will not rest until NO WOMAN, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, has the option of using birth control.

Pope Benedict XVI spoke as someone who has spent a quarter of a century silencing dissent within the Catholic Church. The message is clear: there will be more entrechment, not less.

Edit. Hear NPR's report "The Future of Dissent in the Catholic Church"

So, if Cardinal Ratzinger is elected pope, would it be disrespectful to hum the Star Wars Imperial Theme to myself every time I see a picture of him? (Thanks to stonemirror for the link.)