Jonathan J. Prinz / Beyond All That

Ambiguity

I missed Doubt when it played on Broadway and was late to see its movie translation.  Now I can’t get it out of my head.  John Patrick Shanley has written a powerful and timely parable.   The storyline, if you’ve not seen either version, echoes the now infamous sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church and about which I wrote in a recent post, Where was God.  Its main characters, a nun parochial school principal and the parish’s priest, are oil and water in a contest of wills and of credibility.  They are imperfect souls and each, expressed powerfully at separate times of naked candor, has doubts.  Each is also the accuser of the other; Sister Aloysius pointing her enraged finger at what she believes to be a “child molester”, Father Flynn suggesting that she is holding the school back, out of touch with modern times and needs.  The film version pits Meryl Streep against Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Need I say more?

 

The script is one of accusations, but leaves us to draw our own conclusions.  How we come out may be colored by what we know today and what was not known (or revealed) in 1964, the time in which the story is set.  It is Shanley’s genius of not providing the answer that keeps our minds turning and, of course, forces us to join the protagonists in doubt.

 

To me the strength, and perhaps the larger message, of the drama is not so much doubt as it is ambiguity.  We’re faced with two characters, a dour aging schoolmarm nun who is disciplined to the point of cruelty and an affable priest who easily wins the hearts of his flock.  Both are vulnerable though Flynn more transparently so.   The accusations made are not of moral equivalence, being mired in the rigid past holds no candle to child molestation.  Yet the potential purveyor of the lesser evil is painted with a very dark brush while he of the alleged much greater wrong shines in the light.   We instinctively dislike her and are attracted to him.  Ambiguity.

 

So the parable here doesn’t relate so much to what we now know about the goings behind the veil of professed piety in any given church, but in how many of us view religion and, for that matter, much of our society.  It isn’t so much that we have doubts, though that is also true, but that we are confounded by the ambiguity.  We are torn between promise and repeated disappointment.  What should be good, what we expect to in fact be perfect, falls short, often terribly so.  What’s projected to be extraordinary is transparently human and flawed.  The recent “falling from grace” of a number of high profile politicians didn’t disturb us because they “violated” their marriage contract (not that we condone it), but because they had been so publically sanctimonious about their own morality and so judgmental, even accusative, of others.  So, too, when we see “pious” mullahs send out goon squads to beat up citizens with different views (much as brown shirts beat up Jews in Nazi Germany), we see a larger and wider ambiguity about professed piety in other places.  That poses a serious problem, one that we are all being forced to consider.  Our world is an ambiguous place and that can be unnerving, even more unnerving than doubt.

 

When God Rules

Theocracy and democracy are antithetical and incompatible. The idea of an Islamic Republic is an oxymoron, but so too is a Christian, Jewish, or Hindu Republic.  The dictionary defines republic as “a state in which supreme power is held by the people.”  In that, even “state religions” work only if they are largely ignored, relegated to the symbolic and ceremonial.  Think England and Denmark.  Any semblance of democracy under religious rule is at best destined to be compromised and at worst a cosmetic charade.  At some inevitable point, when “democracy” finds itself in conflict with God, or to put it more accurately God as those in power would define it, kiss the voice of the people goodbye.  

So it is a consideration of theocracy and in a larger sense the role religion plays in governance that comes to mind most in watching the sad and frustrating events unfold in Iran.  Not surprisingly, the newly repackaged Newsweek devotes its current issue to the subject beginning with a stage setting piece by editor Jon Meacham entitled, Theocracies are Doomed, Thank God.  Meacham, who with Sally Quinn also moderates the Washington Post’s On Faith “conversations on religion and politics”, has written extensively on religion’s role in the making of, and he would likely say sustaining, our nation.

Largely because it is out of tune with modernity, Meacham contends theocracy can’t survive.  Hopefully he’s right but I am less sanguine about that happening any time soon.  The fact is that, to one degree or another, we have been the throws of modernity for more than a century and theocracies, some relatively newly minted like Iran’s, are still with us.  When the Shah was deposed in 1979 we certainly thought of ourselves as living in modern times even if we lacked some of gadgets that have become so ubiquitous in our lives.  If the monarchy of Jordan or the constitutional dictatorship in Egypt were swept aside today, chances are they will be replaced by some kind of theocratic rule, just as would be the case if the Pakistani democracy fails.  In fact, today’s theocrats don’t seem undermined by modernity.  They actually use its tools very effectively to their advantage in spreading or solidifying their power.   Meacham would say that’s not his point, that modernity empowers the individual, and over time he may be right, but “over time” is the pesky detail that may prevent many of us, regardless of our age, from ever seeing it.

Of course you don’t have to have a full-blown theocracy to have religion playing a significant, and in my view detrimental, role in governance.  The experience of America in the last three decades has brought that home to all of us.  Alan Keyes, whose last appearance on the political stage was as Barack Obama’s opponent in the Illinois Senate race, has become somewhat of a caricature, but is perhaps more upfront about the motivations of the Religious Right than others.  Keyes is an unabashed theocrat who, understanding Constitutional restrictions at the federal level, has argued for the establishment of theocracies in individual states.  Keyes-like thinking and power grabs continue, and there is no indication that they won’t do so into the foreseeable future.  “To say that theocracies are doomed,” Meacham writes,” is not to argue that religion is any less important in our age.”  He sees it continuing its active role but within a democratic context.  Of course, the same modernity that may ultimately spell the demise of theocracies could spell trouble for religion itself.  After all in the ultimate sense, all religions believe that God rules and I see trends that modernity, especially as expressed by a growing number of our young people, is beginning to question that fundamental premise. 

Theocracies are the invention and tool of orthodox religion, often at the extreme.  That’s not surprising because democracy is anathema to all orthodoxies where “free will” in the sense that whatever individuals, even a majority, may want at any given time is simply not possible if it goes contrary to doctrine.  Mortals speaking for themselves never have the last word.  If democracy were at play, the Catholic Church would be ordaining priests and promoting protected safe sex.  There are rules and rulers who have been empowered, often claimed to be empowered, by the divine to set limits and to be the ultimate arbiters as is the case, at least to this point, with the “supreme leader” in Iran.  So whether or not votes were counted accurately or at all is really irrelevant because under any circumstance the power of the ballot box is subject to, and arbitrarily accepted by, those who invoke a “higher authority”.

However enduring religion may be and no matter how it may enrich the lives of its adherents, when God rules in whole or in part humans always come off with the short end of the stick.  The ultimate supreme ruler, the unseen and unseeable God gives enormous license and cover to those mortals who purport to speak in “the name of the divine”, those ultimately self-proclaimed surrogates here on earth.  Divine authority is a discussion stifler, a showstopper.  “God says” is the ultimate trump card of theocracies, but also of any debate whether on matters of state or those religious-based issues that still plague us like abortion, same-sex marriage, stem cell research and end of life.  In each, logic and even empirical evidence doesn’t play, much less have a chance.  Once God is in power, absolute democracy dies.

Of course we do live in a democracy and a majority of our citizens consider themselves religious.  They are troubled by what they see in Iran and what people are doing elsewhere in “God’s name”.  They urgently tell themselves and their children, that’s not me/us, not my/our religion.  And they are right and perhaps also wrong.  For those who have been alienated by religion, it isn’t necessarily the religion they have experienced first hand that turns them off, but where religion can, does and did go.  It may be an unfair way to judge religion as a whole, but it’s an unmistakable fact.  Looking at the vehemence of those on the hard right when it comes to social issues here or the brutality being expressed by the Mullah’s in Iran, I see a kind of desperation at play.  Perhaps I think modernity will take us to a different place than does Jon Meacham, but the passion and over-the-top action of all these “religious” bespeaks people who see their world and their particular values system coming undone.  Iran brings that sense of desperation to the fore, as did the recent murder of Dr. Tiller.   It’s hard to argue that we’re not headed for more of it as the desperation level rises.  Theocracies may be doomed, but they are still very much with us.

"Our Problem" with Marriage

My father, who knew it first hand, always said anti-Semitism is not a problem of Jews but of anti-Semites.  I thought of that when seeing white men deride Justice-designate Sotomayor’s musings about the wisdom of a Latina woman.  Let’s remember that this is a country in which such men were long considered the only people wise enough to make any decisions from the bench, much less vote, and that the current President of the United States is in office despite, not because of, the start given us by the founding white males.  So, beyond the now retrograde partisanship of these extreme voices, there is also a disingenuousness that speaks much more to their problem then hers.  What’s really bothering them is not what Sotomayor said, but that they still prefer seeing “one of their own kind” sitting on the Court.

In many ways that kind of self-serving thinking is what was always at the root of the civil rights suppression that gripped and stained our history.  It is how change impacts on our self-perception, how it affects us personally that counts, so we resist it.  I believe that dynamic is what’s at play in the ongoing controversy over same sex marriage.  If you have any doubt about how personally threatening it is, just consider that bill entitled, “The Defense of Marriage” – read that “self-defense”.  In many respects, the recent brutal murder of Dr. George Tiller notwithstanding, it is much deeper than that surrounding abortion.  True, opponents of choice consider abortion a “life and death” matter, but it’s not their life that hangs in the balance or more precisely their view of themselves.  Homophobia is not the problem of gays and lesbians but of heterosexuals who feel threatened by it.  In a very profound way, what some wishfully characterize as a “lifestyle” challenges what society has ingrained in us as “normal”.  I say wishful, because those who invoke that antiquated thinking are actually afraid that sexual preferences can be influenced like choosing one hairstyle over another just as racial bigots thought color could be transmitted at the water fountain.  Sexual orientation, like the pigment of our skin, is something we’re born with.  It can’t be acquired.  Regardless, the idea that gays and lesbians represent what is just one normal expression of human life is too much for some people to contemplate or to admit.

So the question we have to ask ourselves is not why same sex couples seek the right to marry, but why so many of us oppose it.  In that opposition, religion plays a central role and one that seems increasingly hard to defend.  Rick Warren, who some see as America’s pastor, doesn’t speak for all religions – some liberal clergy do embrace the idea of same-sex marriage – but expresses a classic answer that religion gives for many “why” questions: the force of longevity.  In explaining his opposition in a 2008 interview with Steven Waldman of Beliefnet he put it this way, “For 5,000 years, marriage has been defined by every single culture and every single religion - this is not a Christian issue.  Buddhist, Muslims, Jews - historically, marriage is a man and a woman.”  In short, we do it this way, because we always did.  By that logic Judge Sotomayor wouldn’t qualify for any bench, certainly not our highest court.   But Warren doesn’t leave it at that, adding what are much more revealing and substantive reasons for his opposition.  “God,” he tells Beliefnet, “who always acts out of love and does what is best for us, thought up sex.  Sex was God's idea, not ours.  Like fire, and many other things God gave us, sex can be used for good, or abused in ways that harm.  The Designer of sex has clearly and repeatedly said that he created sex exclusively for husbands and wives in marriage.”  No religious argument against same sex unions could be more clearly or honestly stated.

Same sex marriage goes against tradition and everything we’ve learned since hearing “see Dick and Jane run” or that has been inculcated in us by our religious upbringing.  The idea that the ideal life culminates in coming together with that perfect opposite sex partner – being “fruitful and multiplying”, doing the right and expected thing – is ingrained in us.  And for 90% of the population that’s exactly what can or does happen, though many very happy marriages don’t produce offspring either by choice or physical circumstance.  So, beyond all the other emotional and practical challenges they face in their ”failure to live up to the dream”, same sex couples find themselves fighting an uphill battle on marriage just because it threatens so many of our self-perceptions, our ideas of the norm.  All they want is to have what the rest of us can so effortless acquire for ourselves, and we don’t like it one bit.  How dare they?  Contrary to what Rick Warren and others contend, it isn’t so much that these unions redefine marriage; it is that we see them as redefining our own marriages, which is of course absurd, totally in our own minds.

Warren is right when he says, “A committed boyfriend-girlfriend relationship is not a marriage. Two lovers living together is a not a marriage. Incest [a gratuitous and inflammatory inclusion on his part] is not marriage.  A domestic partnership or even a civil union is still not marriage.”  That’s precisely the argument put forth by same sex couples.  But what he leaves out is that, in the end, marriage which has become such a loaded word, is the simply the formal institution that transforms an emotional commitment between two people into a contractual, theoretically permanent, obligation.  No more, no less.  We may opt to impose religious ceremonial on it, “sanctify” it, but that doesn’t change the underlying fact, nor is such ritual required by our legal system.  Why entering into that legal obligation called marriage, including the sanctifying part, should be denied any couple, heterosexual or homosexual, defies logic and fairness, equality under the law.  How can we honestly speak of family values without promoting the building of family units for everyone, even those don’t look like Dick and Jane, much less Adam and Eve?

A few states have finally legalized same sex marriage.  The tide may be changing.  In that, the recently announced alliance of the famously opposing litigators (Gore v. Bush), conservative Ted Olson and liberal David Boies, in representing litigants against California’s unfortunate Proposition 8 is particularly heartening.  It is likely that the case will end up before the Supreme Court where both are seasoned and noted practitioners.  Not only is this joint effort unusual, it may suggest that more of us are beginning to face the real and broad nature of being human in all its natural manifestations.  Indeed even people like Dick and Lynne Cheney, whose daughter is gay, understand that this is not a conservative vs. liberal but a real-life human issue.  I don’t know if the Olson/Boies Constitutional argument will prevail in court, but it appears that we are on our way to an inevitable change.  One of the benefits, perhaps the ultimate benefit, will be that it may make us think differently about ourselves.   Then it won’t be an “our” or “their” problem, but no problem at all.

Where was God?

Last Thursday, the NY Times reported that a commission established by Prime Minister Bertie Ahern back in 2000 finally issued its long awaited report.  It confirmed “tens of thousands of Irish children were regularly sexually and physically abused by nuns, priests and others for more than sixty years in hundreds of [Church run] residential institutions that housed the poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted”.   The last of these horrific places were closed only in the 1990s and there was, and remains, great resistance by both the Church and the Irish Department of Education to investigating, much less reporting, what occurred within their walls.  Sadly, as anyone who has followed the news in recent years knows, this is by no means an isolated case.   Even its breathtaking scope is not without peer.  William Lobdell in his recently published book “Losing my Religion” recounts the story of remote St. Michael Island “where a single Catholic missionary raped an entire generation of Alaska Native boys,” and he was not the sole abuser.  I had just finished reading Lobdell's book when the Dublin findings were made public.

Bill Lobdell has lost his faith, one that had been methodically and urgently won as an adult.  His is the story of a highly personal intensive religious pursuit, a journey that ultimately led him from being “born again” to the doorstep of a Catholic conversion.  Already a seasoned journalist, he felt triumphant in landing the religious beat for the LA Times.  At the time, he saw it as a made-in-heaven symbiotic dream job that combined a concurrent quest for personal faith and an equally dedicated professional pursuit as a reporter.  It morphed into a nightmare that would give him many troubled and sleepless hours.  What he hoped would be uplifting and reassuring turned to be just the opposite, beginning with his reporting on the fall of Michael Harris, a fabled Hollywood priest, and culminating on that Alaskan island.  What made the many stories of abuse he covered ultimately overwhelming were not so much the acts of the predatory priests, which could be explained on an individual basis, but the complicity and duplicity of the institutional Church.  It, he and others were to discover, engaged in a systematic effort to cover-up wrong doing that made Watergate pale in comparison, and it did so at the highest levels.

So where was God in all of this?  The great and classic religious question, one posed across all faiths, is, “why do bad things happen to good people?”  The bottom line answer to this question is some version of “God works in mysterious ways”. Not really a satisfactory response, but adequate for most believers.  The religious generally are willing to give God a pass, accepting that divine action is not always understood.  The widespread abuse that has enveloped the Catholic Church, actions of an institution as Lobdell puts it, that God “is supposed to be guiding”, can’t simply be construed as mysterious.  So they pose a much far more profound theological dilemma.  We may bemoan, but can accept, many of those bad things happening to good or innocent people by attributing them to “accidents” or illness-causing genetic flaws.  But the willful evil acts of those who claim to speak for God and act in God’s name are something totally different.  After all, Catholic doctrine views the Pope as Christ’s direct representative – he speaks and acts for God. The Cardinals, Bishops and priests (some of each class were involved) are his surrogates, exercising substantial power.  Only a priest can offer a Mass reenacting the sacrifice of Christ and it is the priest who is empowered to grant God’s absolution for human sin.  Lobdell understood that, and the underlying and corrosive question posed or implied by his book is, how could God allow divine surrogates to behave in that way, or condone the institutional behavior of the Church?  He finally submitted to this painful but logical Occam Razor answer, “the simplest explanation kept boomeranging back to me: there was no God.”

Let’s put that in a larger perspective.  If, as is the case with so many people, one believes that God has a hand in everything that happens – for example that he both spares and takes lives – then he must have a hand in approving the actions of his representatives here on earth.  You can’t believe that a priest can act in God’s name, and presumably approval, one minute and not in the next.  That’s precisely why the broad scale scandal that has overtaken the Catholic Church in recent years has turned so many Catholics away from their religion, and not inconsequentially has had a ripple effect of making many non-Catholics question their faith as well.  Where was God when all of this was going on?  Were the divine “eyes” simply averted, as someone once suggested was the case with the Holocaust?  If God is God, that’s hard, if not impossible, to believe.  God was clearly absent when everyone assumed the divine is always on watch, or as Bill Lobdell suggests, perhaps there is no God.

Moral Decisions

President Obama faces what can only be described as a moral dilemma when it comes to dealing with the past sins of his predecessor’s administration.  It is one that I am sure troubles him greatly, as it does me.  Much as we like to think moral decisions are simple and self-evident, many are in fact complex, and can’t necessarily be made in isolation.  They often carry with them unintended moral consequences.  That is exactly the case in our (not only his) present situation.  On the one hand we have what are euphemistically called “detainees”, an umbrella term that conjures up images of open-ended incarceration, general abuse, outright torture and overdue adjudication.   On the other, and make no mistake this is the core of the moral dilemma, we have the denial of access to healthcare for millions and a growing unemployment that has not only taken jobs from the working, but has dropped the structurally unemployed yet another rung lower on the ladder of survival.  Notice I didn’t say success.  Each of these, sorting out the truth of the past and finally righting our social system in the future, present moral issues because each impacts on the lives of human beings, not to mention the standards of our society.

The President has opted to make what some see as a pragmatic, and others may feel is a callous, choice: the future over the past.  Frank Rich suggests in the NY Times today that the in the end he can’t avoid the past and will ultimately have to release those photos and establish some kind of truth commission.  Perhaps, and my own instinct is to say, I hope so.  But Obama appears to believe that doing so poses too high a risk, one that, Rich’s contention notwithstanding, potentially will destroy not facilitate his agenda.  He has good reason to be concerned.  For a long time now, the American public has shown little ability to focus on more than one subject at a time.  We suffer a kind of mental retardation, fostered and fine-tuned by a media hungry for the kind of overwhelming stories that can drive ratings.  Think OJ, but in all fairness think all the way back the William Randolph Hearst.  Poignantly the deep financial trouble in which newspapers and the news media as a whole find themselves is only likely to exaggerate this self-serving need and worsen the situation.

Single stories, often shallow gossip and sensationalism, can (and do) suck the air out of everything else.  Think about these potential competitors for attention: the sensational misdeeds of the Bush years against the dry complexities of universal health care and how it will be delivered.  Is it any wonder that some conservatives, led on by the former Vice President, are now calling for full disclosure?  You can bet they understand the President’s “pragmatic” decision well and, despite their trademark pious chest beating, morality doesn’t factor into this at all.  It is the blood of debilitating distraction that they smell.   In a perfect world, yes in a truly moral world, Barack Obama and we along with him, would not face this terrible dilemma, this need to make choices.  That we are in this place, tells you how much trouble we’re really in, and none of us carries a “get-out-of-jail-free” card.  The press is single focused and collectively we eat it up, or at least the majority of us while the rest are complicit in their silence.  Detroit sells us environmentally disastrous vehicles and we buy them.  It’s become impossible to discern the chicken from the egg.  

The past and the future, a moral question?  That’s easy.  Reveal the past and improve the future; an unambiguous and consistent moral decision, but one that sadly may not reflect reality.  The President may be making the wrong choice here, but he has perhaps overwhelming evidence to support his decision.   Let’s also remember (as he probably does) that, while there is always ample time to consider the past, it may be running out to right the future.  In that context, perhaps the trade here is one of morality delayed to obtain morality realized.  It’s not pretty, but if we’re honest, we all make similar decision all the time.  We’re imperfect.

On the Sidelines

In her insightful new book “The Breakthrough”, journalist Gwen Ifill turns the spotlight on four remarkable African Americans: a congressman, a mayor (of the city where I grew up), a governor, and the President of the United States.  It is a political narrative with a recurring theme – the shift from the “Moses” to the “Joshua” generation.  Her principal subjects are beneficiaries of the civil rights movement; all were too young to have participated in it.  They are of Harvard and Yale not of Howard and Morehouse.  With some key Moses generation players still on or near the stage, the transition has not always been easy.  Some have tried to label these new generation leaders “post-racial”.  Of course that’s at one simplistic and impossible.  Race may play a different role, but it still hangs over them and us.  That said, what Artur Davis, Corey Booker, Deval Patrick and Barack Obama have in common is that they are speaking to and for a much broader audience with more comprehensive purpose.  The only post racial thing about it may be that they are pulling their audacity (as Obama has called it) off, in no small part because the larger generation of which they are a part has moved on as well.

It is impossible to think about the civil rights movement without the central role played in it by clergy, which in part accounts for the Biblical Moses-Joshua leadership metaphor.  In his final days, Martin Luther King, Jr. presciently declared, as did Moses, “I see the Promised Land, …I may not get there with you”.  So in thinking about Ifill’s exploration of generational shift, I can’t help but considering whether there is an analogy in religious leadership, a Moses and Joshua generation.  There is, but it has taken a very different turn.  The Moses generation of Martin King was deeply engaged in the world beyond the pulpit, and not only in civil rights.  King, and many of his Christian and Jewish colleagues were equally vocal about the Viet Nam war.  They were concerned about both injustice and peace.  Ironically, just as the societal engagement of the Black Joshua generation has expanded beyond the civil rights struggle, the vistas of the Joshua religious leadership have contracted, sometimes to what amounts to effectual disengagement.  Coming off decades in which religion played such a high profile, some would say heavy handed, role in the body politic that may seem an outlandish statement.  Let me explain.

King and his fellow activist clergy came to the civil rights movement as religious leaders.  They were specifically moved by their faith and routinely peppered their speeches with the language of the Bible and other religious writings.  They came out of religion but not to impose their specific religious doctrine on anyone else.  Their underlying message may have been rooted in their beliefs, but it was unmistakably universal.  King’s message could be uttered by Christians, Jews and Muslims or, for that matter, atheists with equal vigor and intent, and it was.  In contrast, the high profile religious leaders who became engaged “with society” in the Joshua generation did so with the intent of imposing their parochial beliefs on everyone else.  Their agenda was not achieving a unity of purpose around universal ideals but promoting laws and practices that would conform to their ideology.  By definition, their goals could not be universally embraced because they aren’t universal.  That is a profound difference.  Martin King used his civil rights won moral megaphone to oppose the Viet Nam war, but would never have used his position, as did Rick Warren, to lobby for Proposition 8, imposing his specifically religious view of marriage on everyone else.

The Moses generation of clergy used their pulpits to turn their congregation’s faces and minds outward.  Activism, such as it is in the Joshua pulpits, turns inward.  Today’s clergy are largely focused on the parochial to the degree that it’s hard to think of any religious leader across all denominations that is playing the universal role of a King, a William Sloane Coffin or an Abraham Joshua Heschel.  Aside from those seeking to impose their parochial agenda on all of us, religious leaders have moved to the sidelines.  They may have personal opinions on the broader issues that face our society, many of which have distinct moral implications.  They may sometimes speak of them within the confines of their sanctuaries, but they have no significant voice in the public square.  It took a New Yorker journalist to both expose and then to express moral outrage about Abu Ghraib.  The religious community remained relatively silent.  Imagine if that had happened when King and the Moses generation of religious leaders were on the scene.

Religion is losing followers and its response is to turn inward and focus on communicating its values and traditions to the immediately present and accounted for within its walls.  It sees survival in the parochial and, in doing so, has lost its universal voice.  Ifill’s subjects have all faced charges that they are insufficiently Black, as if opening to the world threatened their identity.  Perhaps today’s religious leaders fear attention to the outside, the universal, threatens their faith’s identity.  It sees the political Joshua generation of the Black Americans as one that is losing its identity by melding into the larger world of common ground, of why we are alike not why we are different.  Perhaps the religious Joshua generation believes it can’t afford that path, but society and religion itself has lost something from their disengagement.  Insularity feeds on itself, and religion is likely to pay a high price for its retreat from common concern.  The prophets would be dismayed.

Disillusionment unlimited.

On March 12th, the New York Times carried a front page story reporting that Catholic and Orthodox Jewish officials had banded together in opposition of a bill pending in the State Legislature that would temporarily lift the statue of limitations on child sex abuse law suits.  The bill, also opposed by the Civil Liberties Union, presents some broader legal issues, but it is the opposition of these religious groups that is so telling.  The sex abuse of children by Catholic priests is now well known to all.  It has cost the Church dearly in both reputation and in the pocketbook.  In fact, a Catholic spokesman sought to discredit the legislation by suggesting an ulterior motive, that it was only “…designed to bankrupt the Catholic Church”.  Why Jewish groups have a stake in this is less known, but no less horrific.

A month earlier, NPR broadcast an investigative report by Barbara Haggerty on All Things Considered about the abuse of orthodox children in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.   In it she tells the story of Joel Engelman and Joe Diangelo, both now young adults who were abused in their Hasidic community’s mikvah (ritual bath) and school.  Diangelo, raped by an unknown assailant while having a pre-Sabbath cleansing, was so traumatized that he ultimately changed his name from Joel Deutsch and has cut all his ties with both family and community.  The then eight-year-old Englmen was abused twice a week over a period of two months by Rabbi Avrohom Reichman, principal at his school, The United Talmudical Academy.  Like the Catholic Church, the Hasidic community tried to cover up the scandal.  One of their spokesmen even dismisses it as “…being blown out of proportion — big time.” At best, they seek to ajudicate compaints within their own internal “legal” jurisdiction, which often amounts to discrediting the victim while sustaining the perpetrator.  Reichman was actually suspended but Haggerty reports was hired back in July of last year “one week after Joel Engelmen turned 23 and could no longer bring a criminal or civil case against the rabbi.”  This was far from an isolated case. Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, Haggerty reports, “has 10 active sexual abuse cases involving Orthodox Jews — including a school principal…and Hynes says there could be many more.”  Author Hella Winston reported to Haggerty that, in researching for her book Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels, she “encountered dozens of alleged victims who told her sexual abuse is an open secret in the Hasidic community.  But the community is so insulated and the rabbis are so powerful that few dare to come forward.”

Orthodox religions are not, as some current critics might have it, innately evil.   But they are the breeding ground for, among others, modern day terrorism.  The September 11 hijackers were fundamentalist orthodox Muslims acting “in God’s name”.  In 1994 Baruch Goldstein, an American born orthodox Jewish physician and graduate of The Yeshiva of Flatbush, gunned down worshipers in a Hebron mosque killing 29 and injuring 150 before he was beaten to death by the crowd.  He was eulogized as a martyr by his orthodox rabbi; his graveside in Kiryat Arba has become a shrine to someone who “gave his life” for his people.  In contrast, those who killed him are deemed murders by his fellow orthodox extremists.

Over the last three decades, orthodox religious groups have played an aggressive, and in my view very negative, role in American life.  They have grabbed hold of the public microphone and, in part by taking control of the Republican Party, have used it and political power to influence public policy.  That has, among others, set back progress in both stem cell research and in combating global warming, though some in the religious right are coming around on that issue.  The orthodox have presented themselves are arbiters of morality and values including how young people should approach sex.  In that, their blocking of comprehensive education in favor of abstinence-only teaching has led to disastrous consequences.  In her November 2008 New Yorker article, Margaret Talbot reports that in states where orthodox religion holds sway, and sex education is inhibited or limited to abstinence, teen pregnancy, STDs and early marriages leading to higher rates of divorce prevail in contrast to those where it has no such influence.  Anna Quindlen echoes these findings in her most recent Newsweek opinion piece, Let’s Talk About Sex.

Orthodoxy, like much of religion, is predicated on a leap-of-faith and on assumptions about our past, present and future that often run contrary to what many of us would consider positive progress.  The results can be repressive and, taken to their ultimate conclusion, often lethal.  Progressive religionists often disavow this approach to faith, but their own insularity, timidity and relative silence has allowed it to dominate the agenda and give religion its most visible public face.  While many in the orthodox communities adhere to their beliefs with heartfelt loyalty and integrity, the hypocrisy meter is off the charts for others, in many cases their leaders, whose words and deeds fail to match.  The protests against lifting the statue of limitations on child abuse by the self-proclaimed pious are only a metaphor for a much larger and more pervasive problem.  It’s scope is reflected in the just released General Social Survey showing that only 20% of us have great confidence in organized religion, just about the same number that trust in our beleaguered banks.  It is a broad brush of disillusionment that affects all religion not only the religious right orthodox.

Tried and true?

Charlie Rose has a knack for giving us access to very interesting people and ideas.  That’s particularly the case with his series of topical interviews, none more so than those focused on the interrelated areas of technology and science.  A few days ago he spent an hour with Google’s Eric Schmidt.  In the closing minutes, Schmidt was asked whether people in technology are different?  “Yes”, he answered, “technologists as a group tend to be more analytical, data driven,…more global in their focus…they’re into creating whole new businesses.”  In his experience, he continued “other companies are often locked into a paradigm that was given to them by their grandfather.”  People in technology, he concluded, believe “that you can literally change the world.”   A parallel contrast was drawn between science and religion by Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in his 1999 Natural History Magazine essay, Holy Wars.  Tyson writes, “scientists heap their largest rewards and praises upon those who do discover flaws in established paradigms. These same rewards also go to those who create new ways to understand the universe. Nearly all famous scientists, pick your favorite one, have been so praised in their own lifetimes.  This path to success in one's professional career is antithetical to almost every other human establishment – especially to religion.”

It is precisely for this reason that I have never found science and religion to be ultimately compatible.  To be sure there are many religious leaders who profess just the opposite, who accept many of science’s discoveries and who, in theory at least, share its commitment to searching for truth.  So, too, there are those in science who have strong ties to religion. Nobel Lauriat Sir John Houghton, among the world’s preeminent climatologists, is a devout evangelical Christian.   The problem is that religion’s embrace of science, and in seeking what scientists would call truth, is always conditional.  In his recent book Why Faith Matters, Rabbi David J. Wolpe reflects that conditionality when he describes science as “… a vast, glorious tribute to the abilities God gave us to discover secrets about the created world.”  God and divine creation are immutable.  Again, some of his colleagues, Jewish and Christian, might not put it in exactly the same way, but the message is clear.  Truth, another one of those loaded words, cannot transcend or deny the “truth” of God, however individual religions may define it.  Religion, joined by many of us, draws the line at “inconvenient truths” – truths that question its basic premise.

Interestingly both Schmidt’s citing corporate commitments to old paradigms and Tyson’s suggestion that overturning paradigms is a basic purpose in science strike at the core of the problem.  In his argument to uphold Proposition 8, Pepperdine Law Dean Kenneth Starr contended, among other things, that marriage, defined as between a man and a woman, had been part of California law and practice from the beginning.  Similar arguments were made in other places about slavery and women’s suffrage.  While not a lawyer, I think it was his weakest (that a majority of voters favored Prop 8 seems stronger).   But it is exactly the one often used by religion in defending the continued reading of old texts and of observing customs that have lost any contemporary meaning.  It is the “tried and true” argument that in the end forecloses discussion because it claims no relevancy to be proven.  Religion embraces science and technology conditionally and also selectively.  The Religious Right is happy to use mobile phones and even to “tweet” as communications tools or to promote their ideology over the Internet, all products of science and technology, but not the “pill” that will prevent pregnancy.  The first serve their purpose, the second runs contrary to what they perceive of as “God’s will”.

But the real issue is the one alluded to in Schmidt’s last statement, the thing about “changing the world”.  Barack Obama ran on a platform of change, an idea widely embraced at least in theory.  He has consistently warned that change is easier said than done, reflecting that most of us are change-resistant.  What really bothers the religious about issues like abortion, stem cell research, same sex marriage, science and (perhaps to a lesser degree) technology is that they challenge what is tried and long accepted as true.  They require fundamental change.   On a very personal level, and these battles tend to be personal, such change undermines their perception of self.  That’s not merely inconvenient, they just can’t let it happen.  Science and technology are great, but they can go too far.

Loaded Words

“We are a nation”, proclaimed Barack Obama in his Inaugural, “of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers.”  I am sure those who count themselves among the non-religious were heartened by that nod given them; one rarely afforded in recent years.  The irony of this neglect is that, according to both the just released ARIS and the 2008 Pew surveys on religion, the “nonbeliever” group is the fastest growing in the nation (having doubled since 1990) and now outnumbered only by Catholics and Baptists.  There are five times as many of them among us as there are Muslims, Jews and Hindus combined.  They represent at least 15/16% of the population and if you add the 5.2% non-committal ARIS respondents perhaps closer to 20%.  Moreover, Pew found that number rises to 25% among those 18-29.  ARIS reports that 70% of the non-religious are under 50 compared with 59% of Catholics and only 49% of Jews.  Neither of these studies really measures the depth of active participation among the religiously identified, which is often minimal.  But even taking their numbers at face value, and especially the trend both suggest, one wonders if what De Tocqueville characterized as “a religious nation” may endure as such in the future.

That hasn’t happened yet, and there are many thoughtful people who think religion has always been, and will always be, deeply embedded in America.  Perhaps that’s why the non-religious are a minority that gets little respect and indeed is marginalized, including by the loaded words that have crept into our discourse.  First among them is the term “nonbeliever”.  For sure the President simply meant nonbelievers as those who don’t believe in God.  Whether even that is a fair characterization of all those who no longer identify with religion is open to considerable question.  Professed atheists remain only a small (though growing) number of that group.  But, in the context of our current political and social milieu, the important point is that nonbeliever suggests something pejorative.  Those so named are implied to have no beliefs.  That may account for the fact that a large majority of Americans say they wouldn’t vote for a nonbeliever as president – no belief in God equates with no belief at all.  Of course, that’s a fallacious assumption and always has been.  Thomas Payne, without whose pen our democracy might never have come into being, probably didn’t believe in God but could hardly be called someone with no belief. 

Words do count and where religious-speak prevails, and is accepted as “gospel”, some have been co-opted and given a proprietary and loaded meaning.  When words are used for our exclusive purposes, or turned on others, language is transformed from being the instrument of free discourse into a tool of arrogant self-confirmation.  That’s precisely what’s happened to the word belief but also to others like values, morality and life itself.  Religion has long seen these words as their domain, but since the 1980s they have also been politicized.  Their definitions have been loaded to meet specific ideological objectives.  Just as those who don’t believe in God are deemed to be nonbelievers, only those who follow religion are considered to be people with values – the famous “value-voters” obsessed about by pundits during the Bush years.  While a growing number of neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers now believe morality to be innate, religion still claims that word as its own, seeking to be its ultimate arbiter.  But no word has become more politicized, manipulated or loaded with ideological meaning than life.  The religious, of all stripes believe that life is ultimately under God’s control, but some have taken upon themselves to impose their particular read of that on everyone else.  They use life as a manipulative slogan.  It has become a proprietary brand, accepted and reinforced by the press and public officials who have ceded its “right” to those “speaking in God’s name”.  Not only does that give the religious extreme the upper verbal hand in a debate drawn as one between “life” and “choice”, this loaded branding suggests an opponent who promotes death, murder as they blatantly call it.  Again, as with nonbeliever, the implication transcends the issue of abortion.  It reared its loaded head in the infamous Terry Schiavo spectacle as it does in the stem cell debate.  The embryo has become the “unborn”, a life with seemingly greater rights than those of the real living – the child fighting leukemia, the adult with a spinal injury or facing a tortuous Parkinson’s existence.

You don’t have to read the results of surveys to know that religion has lost its grip on many of us, perhaps vastly more than simple identification numbers would suggest.  When CNN’s Jack Cafferty asked listeners why that’s so, many attributed it to an alienation with organized religion, an institution often disconnected from our daily lives.  Others blame the kind of religion that has taken center stage; that controls the microphone and the public agenda or that sponsors acts of terror.  What about words?  Perhaps it’s true that “sticks and stones can break my bones” but not so that “words will never hurt me”.  Words alone can’t drive us from religion, but loaded words can hurt and they do turn us off.  We are, as the President said, a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and increasingly we are also a nation of the non-religious.  All are believers.

Beyond all That

There has been a lot of finger pointing of late.  We have to look beyond all that.  By the summer of 2008, polls suggested that more than 80% of the public thought the country was headed in the wrong direction.  You can read that as an indictment of the Bush administration, and reference the election to prove your point.  That’s too easy.  Perhaps, we should rather look in the mirror.  After all we are the country.  So I’d rather that we turn this statistic on ourselves and admit that we – all of us – were headed in the wrong direction.  The enormous problems we face today can’t all be blamed on what one President left on another’s plate.  There is little doubt that Bush bequeathed Obama a negative legacy of almost criminal proportions, but he had a lot of help and we, that amorphous country from which we like to disassociate ourselves, were willing enablers. 

Something has gone terribly wrong with the values to which subscribe or to which we pay homage.  We gaggle at celebrity and at Fortune’s pathetic and shrinking list of the super rich while factory workers vote for politicians who cut taxes on everyone but the hourly wage earner.  Like lemmings we, and I include myself, follow that misnamed thing called “conventional wisdom” when we should know that it is nothing but “conventional stupidity”.  Perhaps the context of Phil Gramm’s infamous “country of whiners” was off the mark, but we most certainly like to complain about our woes being the other guy’s fault.  Elie Wiesel may be no financial genius (though he probably likes money as much as anyone else), but someone with a $17 Million foundation bares a fiduciary responsibility in turning it all over to a single “money manager”, even one who is not a crook.  The promise of big returns was just too good to resist.   Sure the banks held out misleading mortgage and credit card offers, but we took and we used.  In large measure we are responsible for where we find ourselves.  Perhaps our financial institutions have a systemic problem, but so do we.

Almost since its inception, I’ve focused my blog almost exclusively on politics, hitting other subjects only on an ad hoc basis.  There were good reasons to do so and to begin advocating for Barack Obama even before his formal announcement.  Needless to say, I’m happy to have him in the White House.  His position is not enviable, but somehow I think he is the right person for the time.  If we can bend our heads around the truth that you can’t lose 20 pounds in a week, perhaps we’ll be better equipped to understand that this crisis won’t be fixed overnight.  Instant is just not in the cards.  In any event, at this point there are an untold number of voices speaking out on matters political and economic, many of them doing it better and with substantially more credentials.  My interest hasn’t waned, but I want to turn my efforts in another direction, one that reflects the larger writing in which I’ve been engaged, specifically the role that religion plays or for many doesn’t play in our lives.  We’re facing some very real problems that will have to be overcome, but I want to look beyond all that.  Some people believe the President shouldn’t be thinking about health and energy as we face this crisis.  I think he’s right; both are deeply intertwined with our financial woes.  So, too, while my turn from political commentary to things beyond all that may seem equally unrelated, life is all of a piece.  It isn’t only about what we do but who we are and in all things there is a substantial amount of déjà vu.

Here’s just one example of what I mean.  In the scheme of things is there much difference between a mega-corporation and a megachurch?  Both like to tout their numbers, $5 Billion “earned” this quarter, 20,000 members and counting.  Is bigger means better any more or less a value?  When Joel Osteen looks out at the assembled thousands at Lakewood, he tells them (and us) that they have come to find God.  He unashamedly promises them much in God’s name.  God will protect and God will fix. I don’t know him and can’t question his commitment or faith.  But do you have any doubt that he and his “Tammy Faye” or Rick Warren and his aren’t pretty proud of the institution they built much as were Sandy Weill and his wife Joan?  In looking out at that former stadium filled to capacity it’s hard to believe that it doesn’t occur to Osteen that all those eyes and ears “are focused on me”.  Of course, he and Warren aren’t the whole or even a small part of religion, but they are often the face of it we see on the news and in the public square.

Religion is a human endeavor and while the megachurches are building their memberships (often at the expense of smaller institutions) growing numbers of Americans are rethinking their commitment.  They were reared in a church or synagogue but are now looking beyond all that, wondering if just doing what they always did still works for them?  Perhaps for the majority it does, but as we consider the general path we’ve been on in other areas, I can’t think of a better moment to ask the question or to look beyond.  That’s what I hope to do with this reset blog, “Beyond All That”.  I hope you’ll come along and engage with me.