It Isn't The Same
A number of evangelical leaders have released what they call The Nashville Statement. It's a statement of their faith that affirms marriage is meant to be between a man and a woman. They also affirm that homosexuality is morally wrong (if I'm reading them right).
Needless to say, they're being condemned by people and groups across the country.
So what do you do? Well, the generation that believes deeply in something eventually dies out, and their replacements may believe differently. It isn't that hard to reinterpret something (and claim it's not really a reinterpretation).
In fact, the Statement gets a bit squishy here and there when it discusses homosexuals, as if it didn't want to sound too harsh. I wonder if they would have put things the same way fifty years ago.
Not that long ago--but long enough ago that same-sex marriage was highly controversial--I predicted that we'd never have another Dem candidate for President who didn't support gay marriage, and that we may not have another Republican candidate who doesn't support it either.
Will evangelicals ever change their mind? If they do, it'll probably be a slower process. But it's hard to stand against the majority for long. (Or you can have something that may be worse--a religion lots of people profess but don't really practice.)
And as a related question, how does a religion respond when the society around them starts punishing them for not keeping up with the times? Look at how the Mormons changed their views on civil rights overnight when things were heating up.
posted by LAGuy @ 9:27 AM
10 Comments:
The mayor of Nashville tweeted the following:
The @CBMWorg's so-called "Nashville Statement" is poorly named and does not represent the inclusive values of the city & people of Nashville
I suppose it doesn't violate the First Amendment when a civil official tweets a condemnation of someone's religion.
Yet I'm pretty sure that if the mayor of San Francisco had tweeted a condemnation of Jewish circumcision or kosher meat practices, or when mayor of New York had tweeted a condemnation of Muslim women who wear head-scarves, commentators on CNN and the Washington Post would be telling us that this amounted to religious persecution in violation of the First Amendment.
Note that nothing in the Nashville Statement calls for the government to ban gay marriage, or to regulate who visits bathrooms. It's a document of surrender. It is Evangelical leaders saying to American culture: Okay, you win, we surrender. On matters of sexuality, the laws of the United States are, and will continue to be, written by those who support gay marriage, LGBT rights, and so on. We cannot win this fight. But we continue to believe on a personal, moral level that certain practices are immoral, and we will teach this in our churches.
And the mayor of Nashville and much of the liberal commentariat is replying: Sorry, that's not good enough. We are not content to rule the public spaces while you teach your children and your church-members your old-fashioned morality.
Which raises the question: What terms of surrender would be acceptable to the powers that be?
I've known people who studied law and cared about First Amendment issues (and weren't conservatives) who wondered what would happen when same-sex marriage became legal, even a basic human right.
I think they thought there could be reasonable accommodations, but I'm not sure they saw the tidal wave that was coming that makes any compromise hard to achieve.
I don't know what demands society will make on religions over this issue in the near future, and I don't know how far the courts will go (or will have to go) to protect them. We'll just have to wait and see.
I don't see society as making any "demands" on different beliefs.
So bigamy is legal?
LAGuy, I responded to the political criticism of the Nashville Statement, not to your post, which asks more substantive questions. They are questions that can't be adequately addressed in a brief forum.
But to address them inadequately:
You mentioned three options: (1) a religion/church/group might quickly change its stance, conforming to the outside culture; (2) it might change its stance slowly, resisting the culture for years or decades, but finally caving in; (3) it might become "a religion lots of people profess but don't really practice" (in other words, all the members and leaders of the group adopt the dominant culture's views, without changing the official creed or holy book, which is merely ignored).
If you look at the history of religions, it's easy to find examples of all three of these responses by various religions confronted by some conflict with the culture they lived in. (I'm not addressing cases of explicit persecution, but rather, social conflict -- which manifests primarily as social pressure, although sometimes with legal ramifications.)
But you can also find examples through history of the following options as well:
(4) A religion holds out against what seems to be an unstoppable cultural pressure, but then that cultural pressure fades away and the religion keeps on going.
In such cases, sometimes certain subsets of the religion compromise with the dominant culture, and then after this aspect of the culture fades away, those who compromised -- thinking themselves the vanguard -- are suddenly quite embarrassed, and perhaps even punished. There are plenty of movements that were huge for decades and then vanish, e.g., the temperance / prohibition movement. There's no sign of the LGBT movement receding, but who knows: when a significant portion of American women's sports champions are either transwomen (biologically male) or transmen (taking testosterone, which was banned until the transgender movement came along), will there be a backlash? I have no idea.
(5) The culture doesn't retreat, and yet a religion holds out indefinitely. Leaving aside divine intervention, this usually requires certain sociological mechanisms. Jewish minorities lived for centuries in Christian and Muslim countries, Christian minorities lived for centuries in Muslim countries, and Zoroastrian minorities lived for centuries in Persia, completely rejecting the outside culture. But they did this by creating their own self-sufficient subcultures. They didn't rely on the outside culture to educate their children, to provide their entertainment, or to help their sons and daughters find someone to marry. Without a robust subculture, I don't believe that these minorities could have survived. With a robust subculture, they were able to survive and even often thrive.
Ironically, I think that this is harder in a democracy, because in a democracy a minority is tempted to think that it can change the culture to match its own views. But the groups that survived for centuries were quite realistic: the Jews of France never tried to convert the king to Judaism, and the Coptic Christians of Egypt never tried to contest Islam as the established religion. They merely asked to be allowed to run their own communities with a certain amount of independence.
Rod Dreher's new book, The Benedict Option, is an argument that traditional Christians in the United States must do exactly that: stop trying to win the "culture war" (which he says is over, and the Christian Right lost), and start building institutions that can survive in the long term. He says that this doesn't mean that Christians should necessarily throw away their TVs and cell phones. But he says that if the young folks in a church are spending all their free time watching TV and reading websites produced by liberal American culture, and the church offers them nothing of substance and nothing to think about, then that church won't exist (in any meaningful sense) in a couple decades.
The captchas are getting smarter and smarter, or I am getting dumber and dumber. Soon I won't be able to post here because I will be unable to correctly identify which squares show an apartment building (do condos count?), which show a storefront, and which show vehicles.
Addressing two questions:
First, Bigamy remains illegal, but for how long? In fact polyamory may be illegal, but that can only be enforced through bigamy laws, Communal living, where the multiple members consider themselves as married, is not and cannot be criminally prosecuted. And cases have already been filed seeking the government distributed benefits that are currently limited to married couples, discriminating against groups of three or more who mutually love each other.
Second, what happens to religions is they divide and then subdivide again and again. There are something like 8 or 9 major Presbyterian denominations, all tracing their roots to John Knox and the Church of Scotland. There is the one that still doesn't allow women to preach. There is the one that allows women to preach but not self-avowed homosexuals. And there are certainly Mormon sects that still practice polygamy, avoiding (for now) violating the laws against Bigamy by not seeking multiple marriage licenses, though this causes them to lose government benefits for all but one of the wives.
DG, when you see a Protestant church that has many members pulling in one direction, and many members pulling in the other, there's a good chance that this church will soon split. As you poitn out, there are tons of Presbyterian denominations. (Although in the USA, I wouldn't say there are nine "major" ones -- I would save that label for PCUSA and PCA alone.)
Churches with strong central governments, on the other hand, rarely split. More often the members stay put (even if they gripe about how much they dislike the current pope for being liberal / conservative / whatever), or individual members drift off into other churches or out of Christianity altogether. Catholic schisms since the fifteenth century have resulted in miniscule break-off churches like the Old Catholics and Pope Michael's church in Kansas. They have almost no social relevance. During the Kulturkampf, Bismarck briefly tried to declare the Old Catholic Church the rightful owner of all Catholic property in Germany, but there were so few Old Catholics that they were unable to take him up on his offer.
I believe the same applies to the polygamist Mormon schismatics: they get a lot of news coverage, but they number somewhere between 8,000 and 60,000 -- compared to 16 million in the LDS church.
I agree with you regarding bigamy. I don't know any bigamists, but polyamorists aren't hard to find in big liberal cities, and once the right lawyer finds a sympathetic client ("the hospital won't let me visit my co-spouse, and it's breaking my heart!") that domino will topple.
Yeah, that capcha thing is just fucking with us.
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