Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 458
October 10, 2012
One fifth of Americans have no religion
The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has published an important new study of Americans who are unaffiliated with any religion.
One-fifth of U.S. adults say they are not part of a traditional religious denomination, new data from the Pew Research Center show, evidence of an unprecedented reshuffling of Americans’ spiritual identities that is shaking up fields from charity to politics.
But despite their nickname, the “nones” are far from godless. Many pray, believe in God and have regular spiritual routines.
Their numbers have increased dramatically over the past two decades, according to the study released Tuesday. About 19.6 percent of Americans say they are “nothing in particular,” agnostic or atheist, up from about 8 percent in 1990. One-third of adults under 30 say the same. . . .
But the United States is still very traditional when it comes to religion, with 79 percent of Americans identifying with an established faith group. . . .
Members can be found in all educational and income groups, but they skew heavily in one direction politically: 68 percent lean toward the Democratic Party. That makes the “nones,” at 24 percent, the largest Democratic faith constituency, with black Protestants at 16 percent and white mainline Protestants at 14 percent.
By comparison, white evangelicals make up 34 percent of the Republican base.
The study presents a stark map of how political and religious polarization have merged in recent decades. Congregations used to be a blend of political affiliations, but that’s generally not the case anymore. Sociologists have shown that Americans are more likely to pick their place of worship by their politics, not vice versa.
Some said the study and its data on younger generations forecast more polarization.
“We think it’s mostly a reaction to the religious right,” said Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, who has written at length about the decline in religious affiliation. “The best predictor of which people have moved into this category over the last 20 years is how they feel about religion and politics” aligning, particularly conservative politics and opposition to gay civil rights.
via One in five Americans reports no religious affiliation, study says – The Washington Post.
I’m struck by the comment that a typical congregations would include people of different political beliefs and how that isn’t the case so much anymore. (My impression is that churches that don’t mingle politics with the gospel, such as Lutheran congregations, still generally contain both Democrats and Republicans. That’s evident in the commentary on this blog, which has people who are very conservative theologically representing different political positions.)
I am also struck by the contention that churches getting involved in politics seems to be a major factor in the rise of the “nones.” I wonder how many pastors who want their churches to be ‘missional” and who make a point of adopting all of the church growth methodologies designed to make their congregation more attractive to the “unchurched” endorsed a candidate on Political Freedom Day, not realizing that this kind of political activism is exactly what is driving people away from churches.
Now to legalize polygamy
Now that gay marriage is legal in many jurisdictions and broadly accepted, activists are taking up the cause of polygamy. The liberal Washington Post religion columnist Lisa Miller is sympathetic:
This week, in one of his first public statements since this past summer’s anti-gay-marriage remarks, Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy told an Atlanta television reporter that he supports “Biblical families.” This comment immediately gave rise to jokes questioning his familiarity with the Old Testament, where, as any Mormon elder can tell you, patriarchs such as Abraham, Jacob and David all practiced polygamy.
John Witte Jr., however, thinks it isn’t so funny. A scholar of religion and law at Emory University in Atlanta, Witte is working on a lengthy history of polygamy due out next year. He believes that polygamy is the next frontier in marriage and family law. If states are able to dismantle traditional or conventional views of marriage by allowing two men or two women to wed, then why should they not go further and sanction, or at least decriminalize, marriages between one man and several women?
This is the argument that Kody Brown and his wives, the stars of the reality television show “Sister Wives,” are making in a civil suit against the state of Utah. They are claiming that Utah’s anti-polygamy laws violate their privacy and their religious freedom. “The Browns want to be allowed to create a loving family according to the values of their faith,” Jonathan Turley, the family’s lawyer, wrote in an op-ed this summer.
Beneath the sensationalism, there lies a real question. If Americans increasingly value their rights to privacy and liberty above historical social norms, then why should the state not legally approve other unconventional domestic set-ups? In his first chapter, Witte presents the problem this way. “After all,” he writes, “American states today, viewed together, already offer several models of state-sanctioned domestic life for their citizens: straight and gay marriage, contract and covenant marriage, civil union and domestic partnership. Each of these off-the-rack models of domestic life has built-in rights and duties that the parties have to each other and their children and other dependents. And the parties can further tailor these built-in rights and duties through private prenuptial contracts. With so much marital pluralism and private ordering already available, why not add a further option — that of polygamous marriage?”
This is an argument that makes defenders of individual liberties sweat, for few people like to be put in the spot of having to uphold a social taboo. But really. If the purpose of marriage is to preserve personal happiness, protect and raise children, and create social stability through shared property and mutual obligation, then why is polygamy so problematic if it occurs among consenting adults? The two-parent household may be an ideal, but real life is far messier than that. Children are raised all the time by groups of adults: there are exes and steps, adoptive parents and biological, mistresses and wives. Didn’t someone say it takes a village?
Witte is worried about this line of thinking. He sees the “sexual liberty for all” folks increasingly pressing their cases in law reviews, saying “those that oppose polygamy are just like the homophobes and the patriarchs.”
via Polygamy may be hot, but in marriage three’s still a crowd – The Washington Post.
Is there any Biblical reason why polygamy should not be legalized? That is, set aside natural law arguments, what’s best for women, the needs of children, etc., and just focus on the Bible. Clearly, the New Testament demands monogamy for church leaders, but that requirement doesn’t seem to be binding on everyone. And, of course, polygamy was almost the norm in the Old Testament, in particular for leaders of the magnitude of Abraham and King David.
The defining texts for marriage, on the other hand, are those that refer to Adam and Eve, and Christ and the Church, and to “the two” becoming “one flesh.” Those would argue against polygamy. (Jesus doesn’t have more than one bride, contrary to the gnostic manuscripts being circulated, and the applications of this relationship to the vocation of the marriage in Ephesians 5 don’t really work for more than one spouse.)
And yet we cannot say that Jacob was sinning or defying God’s will when he took many wives whose progeny created the Twelve Tribes of Israel, can we? The practice of Christian missionaries when a polygamist converts has been to make him put away all but one of his wives. How can that be a good practice? Doesn’t that do great harm to the wives who are abandoned? And doesn’t this violate the definite Biblical prohibitions against divorce?
If we cannot make a Bible-only case against polygamy, does this mean that extra-Biblical reasoning is necessary, if in this case, also in other moral and legal issues?
Plot to bomb my old church
I used to live in Miami, Oklahoma. The local college, Northeast Oklahoma A&M, was my first teaching job out of grad school. That was where I became a Lutheran, being catechized and received into membership at the wonderful congregation of Mt. Olive Lutheran Church.
Imagine my surprise to hear about Gregory Arthur Weiler II, 23, of Elk Grove Village, Ill., who had a list of 48 churches, with maps and diagrams, that he planned to bomb in and around Miami. An alert motel worker noticed that this particular guest was collecting materials for what appeared to be Molotov cocktails.
Miami police arrested Weiler and found in his room, in addition to the bomb-making equipment and the list of churches, a journal and other writings, including this statement of his plans:
“Self-Promote for the next 4 years while beginning list of goals written out in Oklahoma having to do with destroying and removing church buildings from U.S., a tiny bit at a time — setting foundation for the years to follow.”
Mt. Olive would have had to have been one of the churches on his list. The churches were all in Ottawa County, and 48 would have had to include them all.
I grew up in the next county over from Miami (pronounced “my-am-uh”). And in yet another case of the news striking close to home, I see that Weiler’s court-appointed attorneys are from a law firm run by a guy I used to go to school with!
via Motel workers discuss church bomb plot arrest – KansasCity.com.
October 9, 2012
Legalism is worse than liberalism
More on how Christians from all traditions are discovering Luther’s distinction between Law and Gospel. This is evident in this post from Southern Baptist pastor Micah Fries at Project TGM, who goes on to make a further point that we conservative Lutherans might sometimes overlook:
When I grew up, the great enemy of the gospel was almost always known as “liberalism”, or possibly, “moderate theology”. Today, however, it seems that we must equally be on guard against a different enemy. This new enemy is just as old as the first, but it is often more difficult to spot. Of course, it would be the enemy of legalism.
These two polar opposites of liberalism and legalism both stand apart from each other, in a sense, but in a very real way, they both accomplish the same goal; that of undermining God’s word. Liberalism, of course, reduces God’s word, and in doing so attempts to make a mockery of those who would dare take that word at face value. It assumes a position of great authority, in fact it could be argued that it assumes a position of greater authority than scripture itself as it attempts to “rectify” the “errors” found in the bible. Legalism, however, is also guilty of reducing the power and authority of God’s word, albeit in a much more insidious manner. While liberalism takes away from God’s word, legalism adds to it, and although it is different in practice from liberalism, it is essentially accomplishing the same goal, that of assuming authority over God’s word. While liberalism claims that scripture says too much, legalism claims that scripture does not say enough.
In all of this, however, I often find myself wondering if legalism might not be a greater danger to the Gospel, than the danger that liberalism itself poses. . . .
First, legalism is a difficult to diagnose cancer. All too often legalism is a subtle, creeping cancer that masquerades as holiness. In Matthew 23, Jesus points out that the Pharisees were guilty of adding “heavy loads” to the backs of their disciples. In Philippians 3 Paul points out that the Judaizers were “dogs” who “mutilated the flesh” in their pursuit of holiness. Both of these groups were guilty of affirming Scripture and yet adding to it in a further attempt to clarify their brand of “holiness”. When we take our personal convictions and apply them unilaterally, regardless of their clarity in Scripture, we may be guilty of this same creeping legalism. . . .
Second, legalism leads to a diminished recognition of sin. . . .A certain mark of legalism is a capacity to recognize others’ sins while failing to see our own. In his article on a topic similar to this, J.D. Greear cautions us concerning this danger. Good legalists get so busy playing watchdog for the sins of others, that they fail to see their own gross failure. As a result, personal sin is diminished, all in the name of “protecting holiness”. . . .
Third, legalism worries more about “its reputation” than it worries about Jesus’ reputation. . . .Legalism worries more about whether someone else saw them talking to that “sinner” than it worries about that sinner actually being engaged with the gospel. Legalism is happy to preach to the sinner, so long as they will clean up and show up at the church on Sunday morning, but it would recoil in horror at the thought of going to the gutter with the person who is far from God. Ironically enough, at this point legalists are terrified of becoming like Jesus as we see Him in Mark 2:16. This unhealthy understanding of God and the gospel undermines the Romans 5:8 nature of the gospel and assumes a false righteousness must precede our ability to respond to the gospel, while also denying our own personal depravity and in doing so it neuters the heart of the gospel.
Fourth, legalism trumpets man’s capacity to do good, and in doing so undermines the depth of God’s grace. Legalism, in its efforts to adhere to the “holiness” code of rules and regulations, assumes man’s ability to “do good” and in doing, pulls the legs out from under the grace of God as exhibited in the gospel. Legalism loves hard work, and lots of it. The more you are able to work, the more holy you must be. Interestingly enough, this kind of pursuit will almost lead to a forced, false spirituality. Legalism judges you on behavior, not the condition of your heart, and therefore can encourage behavioral change, regardless of the heart’s condition. It is because of this that our churches are filled with unregenerate people, who still feel completely at home in our congregations. They have applied the appropriate levels of behavior modification to be found acceptable, so that their dark hearts are rarely if ever noticed.
These are just a few of the many dangers that legalism poses to the heart of the gospel. While liberalism was, is and always will be an enormous threat to the gospel, I would plead with Southern Baptists to recognize the danger that legalism also poses to the gospel. While it is easy to preach about the liberals “out there”, it is probably beyond time that we preach against the legalists who are among us; who often are us.
HT: Adrian Warnock
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Constructivist politics
Postmodernists, who believe that truth is relative, reject such retro concepts as logic, evidence, and reason, all of which assume that truth is objective. Instead, postmodernists practice what they call “constructivism.” Truth is not something we discover; rather, truth is something we “construct.” Thus, argumentation involves “de-constructing” other people’s truth claims (showing them to be nothing more than impositions of power) and constructing “plausibility paradigms” to advance your own power-agenda. And, since truth is inherently personal, another way to argue is to attack the person who holds to that truth.
We all need to understand this, especially in today’s political climate. Both sides do it. The very notion of “spin”–which is openly recognized to the point that TV networks set up “spin rooms” and both sides openly acknowledge having “spin doctors”–is an open acknowledgement of postmodernist techniques. What matters is not overall truth but cherry-picking facts and then giving them an interpretation favorable to the power agenda of one side or another. For postmodernists, interpretation is more important than information. A successful argument is a construction of reality that wins over–indeed, that imposes itself on–other people
Here is a particularly blatant example of political constructivism, from the Washington Post in an article on President Obama’s post-debate campaign speech:
Obama said that when he reached the debate stage “I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney. But it couldn’t have been Mitt Romney,” Obama said, adding that the “real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy. The fellow on stage last night said he didn’t know anything about that.”
The Mitt Romney everyone saw onstage giving his views from his own mouth is not the real Romney. The real Romney is the one we have been constructing in our campaign ads.
And notice how the fact cited here comes from an elaborately spinning interpretation: It is claimed, perhaps accurately (a matter for old-school analysis), that Romney’s economic plan doesn’t add up and is off by $5 trillion. The Democrats then use this number in different ways. Here Obama calls it $5 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy. In the debate and in campaign ads he takes it as a $5 trillion tax increase on the middle class. This is because for his numbers to add up, he would have to get the $5 trillion from somewhere, so he would have to raise taxes on the middle tax. Notice the movement from “would have to” to “will.” Romney will raise your taxes.
Never mind the Republican belief in supply-side economics and that Republicans from the time of Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush never raise taxes to this magnitude, preferring instead to just let shortages add to the deficit.
Never mind that Romney said in the debate that he would not raise taxes by $5 trillion. Furthermore, that he would not cut what the wealthy are paying now.
No, this is not his real position. His real position is what we say it is, the way we have constructed it.
October 8, 2012
Pulpit Freedom Sunday
Yesterday had been declared “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” by a group of activist pastors and a conservative legal organization. Over a thousand pastors purposefully violated the law by endorsing, by name, a political candidate, something non-profit organizations are not allowed to do. They recorded their endorsement sermons and are all going to send a copy to the IRS.
The idea is to force the IRS to take action against them, setting up a court challenge on the grounds that the law violates the Constitution’s guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. See Pastors to take on IRS in plan to preach politics from the pulpit | Fox News.
Did any of you pastors take part in this act of civil disobedience? Did any of you attend a church where this happened? Do you know of any Lutheran churches that participated (which would seem to be a clear violation not only of the secular law but of Lutheran doctrine with its Two Kingdoms theology)?
Doesn’t this violate Romans 13? Shouldn’t the churches that did this lose their tax exempt status? After all, civil disobedience includes taking the punishment for violating the law. If churches want to exercise a political authority–something that the Reformation utterly opposed when the Pope did this sort of thing–shouldn’t they just abandon their tax exempt status so they can function like other political organizations? Is it really unconstitutional? Or is there a case to be made for Pulpit Freedom Sunday? If so, what is it?
How illegal immigrants inflate the electoral college
Illegal immigrants and other non-citizens don’t have the right to vote, of course. But, as required by the Constitution, they ARE counted in the census that determines the population of states for the allocation of congressional representatives. That means a state with large numbers of non-citizens can get more electoral votes, which determine presidential elections, than it would have otherwise. The breakdown favors the Democrats. Leonard Steinhorn, a professor at American University, gives the analysis:
An Obama victory could hinge on a quirk in the Constitution that gives noncitizens, a group that includes illegal immigrants and legal permanent residents, a say in electing the president of the United States.
As required by Article I and the Fourteenth Amendment, the decennial census, which allocates to each state its congressional seats and Electoral College votes, is based on a count of all people who live in the United States, citizens and noncitizens alike — or as the Constitution phrases it, “the whole number of persons in each state.” That means millions of noncitizens who are ineligible to vote are included in Electoral College calculations, and that benefits some states over others. Most of these noncitizens are here legally; however, the Pew Hispanic Center estimates that about 45 percent of noncitizens are undocumented immigrants.
In 2010 and most previous years, the census did not inquire about citizenship, but the American Community Survey (ACS), which samples our population every month, includes a breakdown of citizens and noncitizens. Plugging the 2010 ACS citizen-only numbers into the Census Bureau’s apportionment formula shows that five states benefit electorally from their noncitizen populations: New York, Florida and Washington each gain one congressional seat and thus one Electoral College vote; Texas gains two; and California — with 5,516,920 noncitizens out of a total population of 37,341,989 — gains five.
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Montana each lose a seat under the official formula as compared with an apportionment that counts citizens only. . . .
Looking at how the states might vote in November, there is no scenario in which Mitt Romney benefits from the inclusion of noncitizens in the Electoral College calculation, but there are several in which Obama could gain three to five Electoral College votes, thus deciding a close election.
via Without voting, noncitizens could swing the election for Obama – The Washington Post.
Prof. Steinhorn gives some reasons why it makes sense to count everybody, citizen or not, though he says the impact on presidential elections needs to be remedied by eliminating the electoral college.
Do you have any other solutions? Or is this not really a problem?
“Anti-Christianism” TV
Maria-TV is a new Egyptian television station, all of whose employees are women. Though it’s getting attention in the West because all of its broadcasters wear the niqab, the total covering except for a slit for the eyes, the purpose of the station is to battle Christianity. (The crusade for all Egyptian women to wear niqab, which the pre-revolutionary secular regime discouraged, itself targets women who are Coptic Christians, whose, of course, reject the veil, making them easily identified.) This story includes a new word that, unfortunately, may get more and more currency: “Anti-Christianism.”
Maria TV’s owner, Ahmed Abdallah, is a prominent Salafist preacher, well known in Egypt for his anti-Christian rhetoric. Abdallah and his son Islam, the channel’s chief executive, were arrested last month for burning a Bible during a protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Sept. 11.
And while the women who work for Maria TV said they want to promote their belief that all Egyptian women should be covered, the channel also serves as a vehicle for what the chief executive said was an effort to dim the influence of Christianity in the Muslim-majority region. . . .
The all-female Maria TV launched July 19, the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, broadcasting for four hours each day using al-Ummah’s satellite frequency. The channel takes its name from Maria al-Qibtiyya, an enslaved Coptic Christian from Egypt who became one of the wives of the prophet Muhammad. The name represents “transferring from slavery to freedom, from Christianity to Islam,” the chief executive said. . . .
The women at the channel say they find it ironic that the niqab is often seen as a symbol of oppression. “My freedom is Islam, my freedom to talk from my niqab, work in my niqab, go to university in my niqab,” the manager said. “So I am trying to bring across the idea that every human has a right to live and choose the lifestyle they find appropriate.”
During the interview, Islam Ahmed Abdallah stood up to answer a cellphone that had been ringing inside a plastic bag. After switching it off, he explained that it belonged to a former Coptic Christian his team had recently converted to Islam. New converts are not allowed to use technological devices during their first three months as Muslims, to prevent relatives or other loved ones from trying to make them reconsider, he said.
Makram-Ebeid, the Coptic woman who served in parliament, said some of her fellow Christians are terrified by what they see as a “wave of anti-Christianism.”
via Egypt’s Maria TV pitches strict vision of Islam – The Washington Post.
Happy Columbus Day!
We should have a discussion for Columbus Day as we have for other holidays.
This day is also observed in Latin American countries as Dia de la Raza, a day to mark the meeting and mixing of Native American and Spanish cultures. Many Native Americans, especially in the U.S.A., see Columbus Day as a time of mourning. But other activists use it as a time to celebrate the Hispanic presence in the Americas and to protest what they consider to be injustices, such as restrictive immigration laws. Columbus, of course, was an Italian who served the monarchs of Spain. In the United States, this day is also a time to celebrate the Italian presence!
What is the true meaning of Columbus Day? (Besides the true meaning that Columbus discovered America on October 12!) Is there a Christian dimension to this holiday, or had we better just leave that alone?
