On deleting posts
Only did this once before, but I regret -- for reasons that I suppose I can best describe as personal privacy reasons -- my most recent post, and I have just decided to remove it.
I want, however, to keep available an interesting link that was posted in the comments, and therefore recommend to anybody interested in Roman Catholic doctrin on human sexuality, this blog post from the exceptionally well-informed Michael Liccione.
posted by Ken Pierce @ 5:20 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
http://mliccione.blogspot.com/2006/06/biggest-stumbling-blocks.html
[with some embarrassment] No, Michael, the Episcopal one is turning out to be much more difficult to write than I anticipated. I mean, I can write a fast version, but it's not fair enough to the liberal side for me to feel good about posting it.
The very short version is that you have a number of divides in the Episcopal Church. One is metaphorical: there was historically a Fact wing, a Results wing, and a sizable Family component that was the swing vote. The Family component, if forced to choose between the Fact side and the Results side, would have chosen the Fact side; but they mostly wanted everybody to just get along, and the Results side convinced them that the way to do that was to cast their votes with the Results people instead of the Fact people.
Then you also have the intellectual divide between the people who privilege their own modern-day cultural assumptions about what kinds of behavior are intolerable, and those who draw their moral principles primarily from Scripture -- which if you're skeptical you can describe as privileging the ancient cultural assumptions of the Apostles and first-century Church in general.
Finally -- and this is the part that would draw howls of protest from the Left -- there's the peculiar dynamic by which the Left natters on incessantly about the importance of "tolerance" as a poor substitute for charity, despite the fact that everybody, including the Left, finds some behavior or other intolerable. Combine that with the closely related political tactic that the Left has used in other arenas: as long as you're the minority, you carry on incessantly about the importance of toleration, but the moment the swing-vote middle is fool enough to think you're actually tolerant by character rather than by necessity, and therefore fool enough to give you power, you set about enforcing your own moral views about what's intolerable with every means at your disposal. (Joseph Bottom has related comments over at "First Things," and very rightly points out that this is not so much a trait of the Left as it is a trait historically found among minorities who see themselves as persecuted and then gain majority status; we have seen it on the Left in recent decades simply because the Left is the side that has been in the position where such a tactic is effective. But he also argues, and I think reasonably, that the American history of tolerance is a dramatic exception to the general human habit of intolerance, and that the American religious tradition may well have a lot to do with this, and that if we abandon the traditional American religious tradition we may find as well that the American genius for genuine toleration is lost as well. But that's another topic for another day.)
Since privileging of modern prejudices is very highly correlated with a Results orientation, the Episcopal Church's story over the past few decades is, in very short form, this:
The anti-traditionalist forces have over the years, one step at a time, violated the moral principles that traditionalists held dear, and when the traditionalists rose up to complain, the anti-traditionalists appealed to "tolerance" and persuaded the Family-driven, let's-all-get-along boys in the middle not to agree to discipline them. But as it became obvious that the anti-traditionalists hated the moral principles of Scripture and that the let's-all-get-along-boys didn't care enough about those moral principles to enforce them, traditionalists began leaving the church (primarily for the Orthodox and Catholic) churches, in an ever-accelerating process. And as the traditionalists left, the balance of power shifted inexorably to the anti-traditionalists, until we reached, a few years ago, a point at which the anti-traditionalists were sufficiently dominant not to need the let's-all-get-along boys anymore. At that point they began a more or less vicious (how vicious depended on the temperament of the local bishop) persecution of the remaining traditionalists, and began taking a series of measures designed to flaunt their control -- to the absolute horror of the let's-all-get-along morons who had fallen for the bullshit "tolerance" rhetoric, failing to recognize -- as should have been obvious to any half-wit twenty years ago -- that traditionalists and anti-traditionalists cannot get along because each side finds the others' behavior to be intolerable.
So at every opportunity in the last few years the Episcopal Church has not just violated the moral views of the Anglican Communion as a whole, but has gone out of its way to do so in as pointedly offensive a manner as possible. If I may put it this way, the Episcopal Church is not content with disagreeing with the Anglican Communion, but feels it necessary to raise both middle fingers, and then to turn around, drop its trousers, and flash the full moon.
The people running the Episcopal Church do not want to be part of the Anglican Communion; but they want to be able to say, "Hey, we were willing to try to get along, but those intolerant bastards kicked us out." Either that or they are the most incredibly clueless fools that God ever made. Not being privy to their private thoughts and private counsel, I don't know which is actually the case.
You can see why this needs to be rewritten and why I need to make a much better effort to see things from the anti-traditionalist perspective enough to at least have some sympathy with their world.
Michael,
I'm a Fact-based traditionalist who joined the Episcopal Church because it was the American branch of Anglicanism. So for the Episcopal Church to have gone confrontationally Results-based, anti-traditionalist, and anti-Anglican does pretty much represent a complete repudiation of everything I valued in the Episcopal Church to begin with; and naturally I know better than to think I can view that repudiation with dispassionate objectivity.
Traditionalist Christianity can lend itself to self-righteous moralizing (as can any creed in the world including atheism, self-righteous moralizing being an activity that comes naturally to human beings); but it does not lend itself to intellectual preening, nor to privileging of one's own cultural blind spots. If you're going to tell yourself that you're superior to other people because you're smarter than they are, or if you're going to tell yourself that God belongs to the same political party you do...well, you can do that using Christianity, but only by some pretty heroic intellectual contortions. My own not-very-firmly-held opinion is that the liberalism of European "Christianity" (very loosely so called) is part of the same cultural phenomenon that causes European politicians to be largely dismissive of what the ordinary European voter wants (at least that's what it looks like from this side of the pond): elitism, which in America is heavily concentrated in academia and the media but has little real staying power when it comes to real political power, seems to be much more firmly in control in Europe. And Christianity is pretty severely antithetical to elitism -- unless you can talk yourself into proclaiming that the "real" meaning of the Christian texts is actually only accessible to an academic elite, which elite wields a methodology that frees them to ignore the original intent of the text and to read into it whatever preordained conclusion they desire. And that, if I may be uncharitable, is pretty much liberal "Christian" "scholarship" in a nutshell. (As a classics major whose professors equipped me with strong opinions about what constitutes responsible scholarship, my contempt for the pseudoscholarly tripe of the Rudolf Bultmanns and Elaine Pagelses of the world is felt much more deeply than is either common or charitable. Most conservative Christians have charity problems with the progressives because they're heretics; but the fact that they're heretics doesn't get me too upset because I have far too many delightful friends who happen to be either heretics or unbelievers. But the fact that they do "scholarshit" -- that REALLY pisses me off.)
Rudolf Bultmann is famous for having said something along the lines of, "Modern man, having seen the modern railway and [some other technological marvel], can no longer believe in miracles." (I don't remember the exact quote.) This is equivalent to saying, "Modern man thinks that the one is logically relevant to the other," which in turn is equivalent to saying, "Modern man has the approximate reasoning power of a brain-damaged cocker spaniel." Unfortunately for Bultmann and Spong (another progressive who has said for years that the Church has to throw out all its traditional teachings or else lose members), modern man is quite a bit more intelligent than they expected. Therefore when liberalism replaced the hard teachings of Christianity with the Spongian/Bultmannian equivalent, "What our culture says -- yeah, we agree with that, 100%"... Well, look at it this way. If you're just going to tell me what I already believe and what everybody else in my culture is already telling me, what do I need you for? The one indisputable result of the Episcopal Church's focus on "inclusivity" -- long defended by Episcopal Church politicians on the grounds that we had to "keep these people in the Church" -- is a cataclysmic collapse in the number of people who take the trouble to be included in the Episcopal Church of the U.S.A. I would imagine the dynamic in Europe was reasonably analogous, though there I am no expert.
Feel free to correct anything silly I've said about the European situation.
Hey, I think I found the Bultmann quote. It's from his essay “The New Testament and Mythology:”
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...the kerygma [message of the Gospel] is incredible to modern man...It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.
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