In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to the many, multidimensional conflicts in the Middle East, with a particular focus on the influence of radical Islam. Many are inclined to see a conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations, a “clash” that divides East from West. Perhaps this is why some do not know and others have forgotten that Christianity is an eastern religion, firmly rooted in the intellectual ferment of the Middle East. This is important to remember, as the last remaining Christian communities are driven from the region by Islamist groups or misplaced by the ravages of civil war. William Dalrymple’s classic, From the Holy Mountain (1997) provides a detailed and insightful look into this dying culture. It is a timely read as Christians around the world celebrate the Easter Season.
Writing from an austere monastery cell on Mount Athos, Dalrymple tells us in the first chapters that the journey we are about to embark upon will follow in the footsteps of a wandering monk and his student, John Moschos and Sophronius the Sophist. The purpose of their journey across the entire Eastern Byzantine world in the spring of 578 A.D. was to collect the wisdom of the desert fathers, sages, and mystics of the Byzantine East “before their fragile world – already clearly in advanced decay – finally shattered and disappeared.” Fourteen hundred years later, Dalrymple replicates their journey, staying in monasteries, caves, and remote hermitages across the Eastern Mediterranean, collecting anecdotes from the remaining inhabitants of long-forgotten communities. Dalrymple’s book is not a plodding travelogue, nor is it a dry commentary on asceticism or obscure monasticism. With witty and elegant prose, he brings to life the old Byzantine world and its modern incarnation. Dalrymple reminds us, “From the age of Constantine in the early fourth century to the rise of Islam in the early seventh century – the Eastern Mediterranean world was almost entirely Christian.”
In Antioch (now Antakya, Turkey), Dalrymple brings us to the pillars of the stylites, Christian ascetics who lived atop high, unsheltered pillars where they would preach, pray, and fast. Byzantines looked on the stylites as “intermediaries, go-betweens who could transmit their deepest fears and aspirations to the distant court of Heaven, ordinary men from ordinary backgrounds who had, by dint of their heroic asceticism, gained the ear of Christ.” Acknowledging the strangeness of the practice, Dalrymple says, “It is easy to Read more
In modern, Western societies religion is tied up with the idea of privacy. In the wake of the Wars of Religion, religious and political thinkers invented the idea of a private sphere in which one could practice one’s religion separately from the public sphere of political action. The idea of privatizing religion has proven powerful and on the whole hugely beneficial. It allows for religious toleration and religious pluralism without suppressing religious belief and practice. Believers must simply keep their religion private, or perhaps more precisely we define as private the religious behavior that we are willing to tolerate.
The same seventeenth- and eighteenth-century world that used the idea of privacy to manage religion also employed the idea of private activity to make sense of the increasingly important role of markets in society. Aristotle thought of economic activity as part of the government of the household, which of course was seen as a private (and therefore not particularly important) realm as opposed to the public space of the agora, were the important aspects of life occurred.
By the time the Wars of Religion were winding down in the mid-seventeenth-century, however, commerce had become politically important. At the same time, the relocation of religion (and with it the ultimate questions of the good life) to the private sphere had rendered what went on there of far greater importance than it had been for Aristotle and his successors. By the eighteenth-century we had a whole new field – economics – that was focused on thinking about commercial life as a distinct sphere, and with the rise of nineteenth-century liberalism, this commercial activity – like religion – was conceptualized as a private matter, one where the collective decision-making of politics was to hold limited sway.
Many of the current skirmishes over law and religion are less about the relationship of God and Caesar than they are about the law regulating the relationship between God and Mammon. Cases like Hobby Lobby or the debates over anti-discrimination law and state Read more
A warm welcome to Professor Nate Oman, who will be our guest for the month. Nate teaches at the William & Mary Law School, and his most recent publications include International Legal Experience and the Mormon Theology of the State, 1945-2012,100 Iowa L. Rev. 715 (2015) and an excellent co-authored piece on the Hobby Lobby case, Hobby Lobby, Corporate Law, and the Theory of the Firm: Why For-Profit Corporations are RFRA Persons,124 Harv. L. Rev. F. 273 (2014) (with Alan Meese).
Nate has just finished a book manuscript on the philosophy of contract law that offers doux commerce as a justification for contract law. He is writing about different theories of how the law should structure the relationship between commerce and religion. His first post with us, Indiana and Doux Commerce, is up today. Great to have you with us, Nate.
The following is a post by Center friend and supporter Don Drakeman.
As part of a lively debate about originalism and same-sex marriage (at the Volokh Conspiracy site between Orin Kerr and Ilya Somin), Larry Solum has suggested that there is “no good empirical data on public beliefs about originalism.” I can’t add to the substantive debate, but I have some empirical data about what the public believes about originalism. Readers can decide whether it is good or not.
In 2012, I commissioned a YOUGOV survey of 1000 Americans specifically on the topic of originalism. Most surveys have simply asked voters to choose between the Constitution’s original meaning and a more modern, living Constitution approach. Over time, the public has generally split about 50-50 on that point, with a majority periodically flipping from one side to the other. In my Originalism 2012 Survey, 60% chose the understanding of the Constitution at the time it was originally written, with 40% picking “what the Constitution means in current times.”
But here’s the interesting part. I asked the “current times” respondents what the Supreme Court should do with evidence of the original meaning.” I expected that most would say that it should be either irrelevant or, or merely historical background. Yet, only 3% said that the Court should ignore it, 18% opted for it to be used only as historical background, and an impressive 79% said that the Supreme Court should “consider it as one of the various factors that should be considered in making the decision.” So, all in, over 90% of Americans think that the original meaning is at least relevant to the Supreme Court’s decision, with half or more considering it determinative.
That strikes me is as a pretty powerful reason for us to think hard about what the original meaning really is. Many of the debates among originalists center on exactly where we should be looking for that meaning. I asked the public that question. Offered a series of possible sources, a majority of the public said “yes” or “maybe” to all of these four possibilities: Dictionary definitions; how average voters at the time of ratification understood it; how hypothetical, well-informed ratifiers would have understood it; and the understanding of the framers. When asked which of these is the most important in the event of a conflict, 66% picked “what the Constitution’s framers intended it to mean.”
Whether the public’s views are important is an interesting question for debate. (For what it’s worth, I believe that they are.) For today, however, I simply wanted to point out that we do have some empirical data, and it speaks pretty clearly.
The Supreme Court recently granted cert in Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc. The issues presented in that case are whether specialty license plates are a form of government speech, and whether Texas engaged in viewpoint discrimination when it rejected the SCV’s plate design featuring the Confederate battle flag. In a 2011 article in the Tulane Law Review, I wrote about license plate speech more extensively from a perspective slightly different than that presented in the Walker v. SCV case. My focus was on the question of Establishment Clause responsibility for religious messages on license plates. But the issues raised overlap significantly.
Does a state’s specialty license plate program create a public forum for speech? If religious messages are displayed on the license plates, is the message purely private religious speech, or is it attributable to the state for Establishment Clause purposes?
I’ve been intrigued by some recent posts on this blog and how they confirm my long-held view that the normative decisions we make with respect to the law’s treatment of religion are deeply intermeshed with cognitive choices we make — how we “see” and understand religion. Religious phenomena don’t fit easily or self-evidently into the mental maps by which we divide the pieces of the secular world. All we can do is approximate, and those approximations matter.
Let’s begin with Mark’s fascinating and wonderfully observant recent post about an ad for the Marble Collegiate Church that he recently saw in a New York City subway. The ad itself was unremarkable, touting Marble Collegiate as “Church the way you always hoped it could be.” (Marble Collegiate itself is more remarkable, founded in 1628 as a Dutch Reformed congregation and serving in the 20th century as Norman Vincent Peale’s pulpit for some 50 years.) But the ad included a prominent disclaimer form the MTA (the local transit agency) taking up the bottom third of its precious space: “This is a paid advertisement sponsored by Marble Collegiate Church. The display of this advertisement does not imply MTA’s endorsement of any views expressed.” What gives? Read more
Not long after his election, the new Pope explained why he had taken the name “Francis”: “Ah, how I would like a church,” he said, “that is poor and is for the poor.” It was refreshing: the Pope was going to change the basic terms of the conversation between the Church and the world. Instead of waging a grinding “culture war” against a secular West, the Church would instead speak to the most urgent concerns of the global East and South. The first Pope to come from beyond Europe and the Mediterranean basin promised to be the champion of those who lived in the parts of the earth where hunger, injustice and persecution abounded. Places like the Philippines, Mexico, and Nigeria had already become the true center of gravity of a global Church, displacing Quebec, Chicago, Milan and Vienna. The new Pope would speak for the populations of the emerging world – for their suffering, their desperation, their resilience, their energy, their sense of hope. The “North/South” polarity would supplant the “Left/Right” one. The Church would make the pivot to poverty. In making that turn, it would address the West too – but by awakening it from the deadly self-absorption of the affluent.
So when one learns that the Synod of Catholic cardinals and bishops summoned by the same Pope has returned the conversation to the culture wars of the West – though with unmistakable overtones of capitulation on many of the bishops’ part — it is, to say no more, a disappointment. Try as it may, the Church under Francis seems to be unable to resist scratching the sores of Western sexuality. The consuming obsessions of the West, now in the terminal phases of the sexual and cultural revolutions that have swept over it for more than half a century, are dominating the Church’s agenda once again. At the Pope’s insistence, the bishops did a reset, plunging the Church into renewed debate over divorce and homosexuality and cutting short the conversation that the Pope had earlier invited over famine, persecution and want. With Islamist terrorist groups like Boko Haram recently murdering 2500 Catholics in one Nigerian diocese alone, and with Christian children being crucified or cut in half by ISIS, you might think that the world’s bishops would have more pressing things on their mind than the compatibility of same-sex unions with Church teaching. You would, of course, be wrong.
Indeed, even considering “family” issues alone, the non-Western Church was short-changed: how much attention was given to the question of inter-faith marriages, despite its being a major concern for the Church in India? In the Philippines, many marriages break up because poverty forces a spouse or parent to migrate overseas in search of employment, leaving home, spouse and children behind. Philippine Cardinal Luis Tagle noted this problem, saying that poverty “goes right at the heart of the family” in his country ; but how much attention did this issue get?
What is more, the organizers of the Synod openly expressed their indifference to – if not contempt for – the opinions of the leaders of the non-Western Church. They spoke as if the opposition of the African bishops to their “modernizing” program could stem only from irrational hatred and prejudice. What the Africans needed, they seemed to be saying, was a good, stiff dose of Richard Posner’s writings. In the controversy over the initial draft of the Synod’s statement, Cardinal Walter Kasper, an octogenarian German theologian and a favorite of the Pope’s, infamously said:
Africa is totally different from the West. Also Asian and Muslim countries, they’re very different, especially about gays. You can’t speak about this with Africans and people of Muslim countries. It’s not possible. It’s a taboo. For us, we say we ought not to discriminate, we don’t want to discriminate in certain respects.
Kasper later denied having made those revealing remarks – a denial that was then proven to be false. In any case, the remarks hardly seemed out of character for the Cardinal. In an interview with the German magazine Focus published under the heading “Third World Land,” Kasper was reported to have said, “When you land at Heathrow you think at times you have landed in a Third World country.” The German Cardinal obviously notices different things when he is at the airport from what Cardinal Tagle does. The Philippine prelate spoke of his anguish in watching Filipino mothers at airports forced to part from their children because their poverty is so desperate that they must leave their families and search for work abroad.
Not Just Cardinal Kasper
Even if Cardinal Kasper’s statement were merely condescension on the part of the passenger with the first-class cabin towards the passengers in steerage, it would be bad enough. But Kasper and those like him simply did not seem to understand the position. Perhaps the Africans and Asians are not just squinting narrowly at the issue of homosexuality, but rather looking at the state of Western culture as a whole? And perhaps they do not like what they see? Perhaps the cultural exports of the secular West – its current practices regarding marriage, abortion, childbirth, the family, the relations between the sexes – are no more wanted in Africa and Asia than the West’s toxic wastes and sewage effluents? (New York Cardinal Dolan’s wonderful defense of the “prophetic” African Church effectively made these points. )
But the problem with the Synod went far beyond the tactlessness and incomprehension of elderly European churchmen. Apparently at the Pope’s insistence, the Synod’s final report included three controversial articles that had received the approval of a Synod majority, but not the supermajority required for consensus. The final report will now go to the Church throughout the world for discussion and debate before the Synod reconvenes. You can be sure that the media coverage of the debate in this intervening period will focus overwhelmingly on the articles that the Pope reinstated. Cui bono? In their effort to get the conversation back on the familiar tracks of the Western culture wars, the Pope and his bishops are doing serious harm to millions of faithful Catholics trying to live out the Gospel in hostile and often dangerous conditions in the emerging world.
My former student, Andrew Ratelle, makes the point forcefully:
By upholding the nuclear family, the Church made what was perhaps the most important social investment in history. People in the poorer, more pagan regions of the world where polygamy, polyandry, arranged and child marriages were common, now had a place to look for support when it came to building a life that was most beneficial for themselves and their children. By weakening this support, or at the very least dispersing it to include more “diverse” arrangements, these bishops have weakened the very shield from which the nuclear family has received so much protection. Even in our own country, where “diverse” familial arrangements have almost become synonymous with urban poverty and crime (at least for those who have no gilded safety net to fall into), where should families look to now, since the Church has seen fit to dilute the medicine they have thrived on for so long?
Church leaders in the developing world understand this perfectly well. South African Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, for instance, wondered how he could deny communion to an African man living in polygamy in accordance with local culture and tradition, if he had to administer the sacrament to a divorced man married to his second wife? “Successive” polygamy, Napier pointed out, is hardly distinguishable from “simultaneous” polygamy.
Pope Francis was right (at first): it really is time to change the conversation. The global Church is not the parochial Western Church; the Church of the poor and the marginal is not the affluent, greying Church of Western Europe and North America. The Church should not be shadowing the West’s cultural trajectory all the way downwards. The future of the Church lies elsewhere. Ex oriente, lux.
Rod Dreher’s post at The American Conservative, Ghosts of Colson & Neuhaus, is exceptionally interesting. It summarizes the discussions at a recent seminar hosted by First Things editor Rusty Reno, including both Catholics and non-Catholics, on the state of the culture, and more particularly on the state of the American Catholic Church. Much of the focus was on the current generation of students. There’s a lot here, but one issue stood out for me: the real debate within American Catholicism.
As one of the participants at the seminar argued, there really is not, despite the media, a major debate between “liberal” and “conservative” American Catholics. There is indeed a political debate between liberals and conservatives, but it does not map on to any important debate within the American Church. “Liberal” Catholics are Catholics on their way out the door. Their children will be either non-Catholic or else serious Catholic believers. “Liberal” Catholicism is like “liberal” Protestantism: a way station to something else. At best, it will survive as a cultural inflection; it has no chance of being a living faith.
The deeper and more fascinating debate is between those who think that American Catholicism is compatible with this country’s political regime, and the “radicals” who deny it. The accommodationists, to call them that, trace back to Fr John Courtney Murray and nowadays include people like Robert George and George Weigel. The radicals include Alistair Macintyre and others less well known to me. The accommodationists think that there is a lot wrong, to be sure, with American culture and politics, and that the problems may have begun as long ago as the Progressive Era; but they also think institutional reform is both necessary and (still) possible. They want to reinvigorate core institutions of American civil society like the family, the Church, and other voluntary associations.
The accommodationists can point to a period like the 1940s and 1950s to show that American society can be, not just tolerant, but even receptive, to Catholicism. They would probably distinguish between two kinds of American liberalism – the classical liberalism of the Founders, and the liberalism of the present. The former regarded government as, essentially, a scaffolding or a set of neutral procedures, allowing citizens to pursue their private projects peaceably within an agreed-upon framework. The latter kind of liberalism posits that the State exists to pursue certain substantive goods. Both forms of liberalism rest on a conception of the sovereignty of the individual, but the latter form assumes that the State must play a more active role in bringing about the conditions in which individual choice can flourish. Since that form of liberalism regards the family and the Church as inimical to the sovereignty of the individual, it is inimical to Catholicism. But the earlier, historic kind of liberalism is not hostile to such institutions, and indeed draws sustenance from them. (This, of course, was Tocqueville’s argument.) Thus, for the accommodationists, the task ahead for American Catholics seems to be to restore the pristine form of liberalism to American politics.
The radicals regard the 1940s and 50s not as “ordinary time” but as an exceptional and ephemeral truce between Catholicism and American liberalism. They see today’s form of liberalism as the natural or organic outgrowth of classical liberalism, not as an aberration from it. Thus, the antagonism between Catholicism and American liberalism has always been there, even if at times it has been latent. For the radicals, the fundamental flaw in American liberalism has existed since the Founding: liberalism has a false anthropology. It assumes an atomistic conception of the individual, who extricates himself or herself from loneliness and reaches society through a series of bargains. We are not made for society; we construct it. We are not naturally altruistic; we are utterly self-seeking. We are not natively good, nor do we even have natural propensities towards the good. We are incorrigibly evil, but with cleverly devised institutions, we can sometimes produce good effects from evil causes. Political outcomes, like market ones, are guided by an invisible hand, which transubstantiates private vice into public virtue. In essence, the radical Catholics think that American liberalism is founded on a Calvinist, and hence false, conception of human nature. For them, such liberalism both starts and ends in what Burke called “the dust and powder of individuality” which sooner or later is “dispersed to all the winds of heaven.”
There are problems for each side of the Catholic debate. The radicals will have to explain more clearly how the liberalism of the present is continuous with, indeed grows out of, the classical liberalism of the early Republic. They will have to demonstrate the historical and conceptual linkages between the Calvinist and consumerist conceptions of human nature, and how the one eventually developed into the other.
The radicals will also have to explain how the American Catholic Church of the 1950s and 60s achieved such rapport with American society. Ancient, metaphysical, hierarchical, dogmatic, and other-worldly as it was, it nevertheless exerted a powerful influence over a society that was self-consciously modern, pragmatic, tolerant, democratic and secular – an influence far greater than that exercised by the American Church of the present. The Church may have been like a gorgeous if barnacled Spanish galleon, cast ashore by careless waves on some cold New England beach; but however incongruously, it fitted the landscape. Was that “ordinary time,” or is this?
The accommodationists will have to explain why things went wrong and how they can be corrected. Given the stupendous efforts that have been made in the “culture wars” of the past forty years to recapture American culture or even just to hold the line against its further deterioration, they will have to show how, in much less promising circumstances, further efforts will bring tangible improvements.
Unquestionably, this is a serious and important debate – one that calls the ultimate assumptions of the American regime into question. Many of us are shocked and depressed by the current state of America – its hardness of heart to the most vulnerable; its contempt for the poor; its violence abroad and at home; its corrupt sexual morality; its increasing intolerance and persecutory zeal (with ourselves as targets); and so on. But for these debating Catholics, the question is whether the American situation is curable, by some kind of reform program; or incurable, inherently tending to self-destruction.
The parties to the Catholic debate are thinking foundationally – a sure sign that we are in crisis. They are asking: Do we continue to engage the legal and political system? Or do we break off and try to create sheltered communities of our own, like the hidden church under the Roman Empire? What can we learn from the adaptive strategies of other religious minorities (a particularly interesting observation in Dreher’s posting came from an Orthodox Jew)? Is America a disappointing friend, or is it an enemy? If it’s an enemy, how do we deal with it?
The World Jewish Congress reported late last week that the Danish Minister of Food and Agriculture, a 38 year old Social Democrat named Dan Jorgensen, had signed a regulation effectively banning the Jewish ritual slaughter of animals for food. Jorgensen explained the ban on Danish television by saying “animal rights come before religion” – or, according to another translation, “animal rights precede religious rights.”
Under the new regulation, all animal slaughter must be carried out after stunning, which is contrary to the Jewish practice of shechita, or ritual slaughter. Denmark’s Jewish community (which numbers a mere 6,000 persons) opposes the minister’s decision. The European Commissioner on Health, Tonio Borg, questioned the legality of the ban, saying that it “contradicts European law.” On the other hand, Jorgensen’s decision was acclaimed by the Animal Welfare Intergroup, of which he had been President.
If the Danish government and parliament let the decision stand, Denmark will join several other western European nations, including Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Poland and Switzerland in prohibiting such ritual slaughter. (Holland had attempted to ban shechita, but a Read more
On February 25, the CUNY Institute for Education Policy in New York will host what looks to be a fascinating discussion on tax credits for primary and secondary education–including education in religious schools. Past CLR Forum Guest Ashley Berner (left), the Institute’s Deputy Director, will be one of the panelists. Here’s a description:
For most Americans, “public education” has meant the traditional neighborhood school. That once-unassailable image is changing, however, as states and districts have begun to sanction a wider array of schools such as magnets and charters, and new school funding mechanisms such as tax credits and vouchers – stirring up controversy in the process.
There are important arguments on each side. To its defenders, the dominant model reflects democratic governance structures, advances citizenship formation, is ideologically neutral, and should be preserved with minor adjustments. Innovators, for their side, believe that the expansion of educational options yields better academic outcomes and more diverse classrooms, extends choice to more families, advances pluralism, and aligns the United States’ school system with those of other democratic nations.
New York is now considering a bill that creates an Education Investment Tax Credit to stimulate up to $300 million in charitable donations for public classrooms and for K-12 scholarships for students to attend Catholic, Jewish and other private schools. Please join us for a lively discussion of the bill’s benefits and limitations in light of international education systems.
In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to the many, multidimensional conflicts in the Middle East, with a particular focus on the influence of radical Islam. Many are inclined to see a conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations, a “clash” that divides East from West. Perhaps this is why some do not know and others have forgotten that Christianity is an eastern religion, firmly rooted in the intellectual ferment of the Middle East. This is important to remember, as the last remaining Christian communities are driven from the region by Islamist groups or misplaced by the ravages of civil war. William Dalrymple’s classic, From the Holy Mountain (1997) provides a detailed and insightful look into this dying culture. It is a timely read as Christians around the world celebrate the Easter Season.
On February 25, the CUNY Institute for Education Policy in New York will host what looks to be a fascinating discussion on tax credits for primary and secondary education–including education in religious schools. Past CLR Forum Guest