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Bill Countryman

EVANGELICALS AND THE SUPREME COURT

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The Supreme Court, this past week, did three faithful and honorable things, one on behalf of housing for the poor, one on behalf of medical care for all, and (what interests me particularly here) one on behalf of marriage. I say “marriage” rather than “same-sex marriage” because this will actually prove a gift for all Americans by helping to create a public understanding of marriage that doesn’t depend on ideas of sexual hierarchy that are no longer meaningful in our world. It will become easier for all of us (heterosexual people included) to think of marriage as a union of two equal partners.

There will, of course, be a period of backlash, and I don’t minimize its danger. Backlash has an intrinsic weakness, since it is always more a stance against than a stance for something. No matter how much the radical right claims that they’re defending marriage, it will only get harder to see them as doing anything more than attacking a historically marginalized group. Still, we know from the recent murders in Charleston that backlash can continue exacting a mortal toll even after 150 years. There is no expiry date on human depravity.

But my question today is whether Evangelicals will be able to separate themselves from their recent history of making homophobia a stand-or-fall article of religion. There is a laudable effort in this direction on the part of some younger leaders. Older ones mostly seem to be digging the trenches deeper and raising the barricades higher. Given the direction of the population at large (including younger Evangelicals), they may well find themselves leading a much reduced army; but they have loud voices and plenty of money. Will the the rest of us simply have to wait for their decease? (Being pretty much of the same age as they, I do not expect that I will live to see that.)

I have always been perplexed that Evangelicals have committed themselves so intensely and irrevocably to this attack on same-sex marriage. The Biblical case for their position proves tenuous when examined closely, as I argued in the 2nd edition of Dirt, Greed, and Sex (the 12th Chapter, new to that edition). It is stitched together from a patchwork of texts in a way that ignores their substantial differences. It gets much of its power from the fact that it aligns so readily with homophobic feelings, a fact that even some conservative Evangelicals seem to be on the verge of recognizing.

Homophobia is a particular form of the basic human reaction of disgust—a reaction that has proven remarkably malleable, both for good and for ill. It was fundamental to the Nazi campaign to dehumanize Jews, but it has also been used historically to summon emotional energy on behalf of civic morality. The mistake is in assuming that disgust is, in itself, a warrant for an ethical judgment. Sometimes, it is something we need to unlearn or at least disregard. It would be very helpful to the whole conversation if every one involved were to read Rachel Herz’s fascinating and informative That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion (Norton).

Another part of the difficulty for Evangelicals is that they are prisoners of infallibility. (Yes, I know “infallibility” isn’t their preferred terminology, but it’s the everyday word.) Evangelicals, like other Protestants, like to think of themselves as the opposite of Roman Catholicism, but they’re very close to it in this respect. Both groups have, at least in theory, a source of infallible divine knowledge. And people who have committed themselves to this principle do not like it if their leaders start making strange noises about what the infallible source teaches. After all, what ‘s the good of an infallible source if it can change?

Witness the current conservative resistance to Pope Francis (God bless him with long life and health) as he begins to push back against the infallibilities of his predecessors. (Yes, I know that that’s not the right language from a Roman Catholic perspective, either, but I think it describes the current dynamics.) In Evangelical circles, the reaction will typically be even more sweeping and trenchant. For it is not, in practice, the Bible that is their infallible authority, but their received interpretation of the Bible, an interpretation of which the leaders of the churches are custodians. To change that is felt as virtually equivalent to changing the Bible itself.

In my less hopeful moments, I sometimes think that Evangelicals will prove to have killed Christianity in the US with their intransigence on this topic and such other issues as evolution and global warming (against), and laissez-faire capitalism and Armageddon (for). They have, after all, succeeded in christening themselves as the only real Christians—and the secular press has implanted that identification firmly in the public mind. It is hard to imagine a future where this kind of proud intransigence can continue to flourish. Even the durable myth of the glories of the Confederacy is beginning to crumble after 150 years.

God, to be sure, has pulled Christianity through other self-induced disasters, finding the right agents and the right times. But it won’t be easy to deconstruct the current entanglement of faith and unreason, whether in Evangelical reality or in public perception. God prosper those Evangelicals who are trying to do exactly that. For a long time now, the word “gospel,” which once meant “good news,” has sounded on Evangelical lips more like a threat than a source of hope. That was not always the case. I pray they can change it for the future.

A TALE OF TWO RECORDINGS

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Schubert’s 9th Symphony, the “Great C Major,” always made a strong impression on me, but my recording of it disappeared about twelve years ago when Jon and I lost our CD collections to burglars. Last year I finally bought a replacement on the basis of a very positive review, but it proved disappointing. It was performed by a big orchestra with a perfectly blended sound. Given that Schubert employed a lot if repetition, the satiny quality of the sound made it downright soporific for me. I listened to it a couple of times, hoping to form an attachment, but couldn’t warm to it.

Recently, I turned the radio on in the middle of a performance that had me riveted at once. I’d never heard it before. It wasn’t the CD that had been stolen, which I must have liked, but don’t remember specifically. But it communicated exactly what makes me love this music. It turned out to be Charles Mackerras conducting the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

My first thought, before knowing who was playing, was that this was a good example of an “early music” interpretation–or what is now referred to more soberly as “historically informed performance.” What made me think that? The balance of winds against strings was stronger, giving greater clarity, and the orchestra played with attention to every phrase. Not even the repeats sounded automatic.

And, in fact, Mackerras’s notes for the recording show that he had consulted Schubert’s original score—and even made the surprising discovery that the opening andante is actually marked cut-time, not common time as in the editions. In other words, it need to be played about twice as fast as it usually is. He also noted that the ratio of violins to other instruments in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was about what Schubert would have known.

The different instrumental balance altered the listening experience. There was no wall of blended sound, but something more like chamber music, with the various voices engaged in a dialogue that steadily moves the argument along. Even with a smaller ensemble, the Scots managed some splendid fortissimos that were all the more impressive because they can also play so quietly.

But equally important was the attention to phrasing and to what I think of as the “rhetoric” of the music—that business of moving the argument of the piece along. I like Mackerras’ decision to give the second movement almost a “funeral march” quality, where my other recording treated it more as a kind of dance, which made the following scherzo seem unnecessary. It wasn’t a matter of tempo. Mackerras’s second movement is actually a bit shorter and his scherzo much shorter. It’s a matter of giving the music a well-thought-out profile.

I find the same qualities in the series of Beethoven symphonies performed by David Zinman, conducting the Tonhalle Orchestra of Zurich—a gift from my daughter to replace (you guessed it) a set lost in the burglary. Again, Zinman is not an “early music” musician as such. Even though he uses the latest edition of the symphonies, the orchestra plays modern instruments (which, for that matter, I think the Scottish Chamber Orchestra does).

Still, there’s the same quality of clarity and thoughtful phrasing and rhetoric—things that, as I said, I have associated with the historically informed performance folk. And I think it was, in fact, this movement that got people looking at the original documents and trying to recover practices that had been submerged in the growth of larger orchestras and more powerful instruments. A lot of the lessons, in the hands of great musicians, have filtered over into modern-instrument contexts where nobody has struggled to master cranky 17th or 18th century instruments. It encourages musicians, paradoxically enough, to get a new take on the music instead of repeating the conventional one.

All to the good. And yet, there is nothing quite like having it all. An evening with the brilliant Nic McGegan conducting the “early music” Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra is one of the chief musical blessings of life in the Bay Area. Nobody will ever know for sure that what we hear there is “authentic” or exactly what the composer intended. It is just wonderfully energetic, intelligent, nuanced performance where you can really hear what’s going on in the music and the results are predictably gripping.