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WEAK AND STRONG IN THE CHURCH TODAY

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Jesus’s commandment to his followers is framed in two ways in the New Testament: “Love your neighbor as yourself” or “Love one another.” For the life of the church, both forms are vital, but the second is the more telling. We seldom succeed in loving one another very well. Most of the time we do not know one another and, if we do, we may not like the people we know. What does it even mean to love people one does not know or like?

It is impossible to specify in advance what the full dimensions of such love might be, since love is a creative force, a manifestation of the Spirit. It creates relationship even as it grows out of relationship. But we can specify a few minimum elements of it. One would be to offer respect to one another as human beings and creatures of God. If we keep people submerged into some clearly defined group of “others,” we are keeping them at arm’s length, assuming that we know everything about them we need to know. Those people over there are “western liberals”—end of story. Those people over there are “bigoted evangelicals”—end of story.

Another element of love would be to esteem one another as people of faith. This implies that we all have a story of faith that, however imperfect (and it is always imperfect), is worth hearing out. It means that we do not readily dismiss one another. It also means that we persist in telling our own story, even when we may be saying unpopular things. After all, God has often been known to speak through prophets who were rejected by the larger community. At the same time, loving one another requires us to entertain seriously the notion that any of us may, being human, also be wrong. Our disagreements have to be talked through. But love does not co-exist with arrogance; it only lives in the house of humility.

The opposite of love is withdrawal from relationship—in other words, to use its churchly name, schism. Schism has always been regarded, at least in theory, as a grave sin, precisely because it is the opposite of love. This hasn’t kept Christians from practicing it extensively over the course of our history. But it is still a sin and a serious one, given how specifically Jesus warned us against it.

But what can we do when faced with divisive issues? How were the two parts of the community at Rome to eat together? How are Christians today who disagree over ordination of women, blessing of same-sex marriages, or the authentic identity of transgendered people to love one another and remain in communion? Despite claims on all sides, there is no simple formula for determining in advance which side is right. Christian conservatives were wrong on the topic of slavery in the nineteenth century; liberals were right. On the other hand, in the time of Hitler, some who opposed him could be described as conservatives, while some liberals (at least in one definition of the term) were willing to accept his “German Christianity.” Historically, the course of the church’s future gets worked out through a complex process of interaction. Each age’s issues are subject to a process of discernment. It seldom happens overnight.

How, then, to proceed? The answer is a bit different, depending on where your starting point is. Paul held that those who were “weak in faith” were inclined to be judgmental, those who were “strong” to be dismissive. Having found myself, at different moments in my life and on different issues, on both sides of that divide, I think Paul’s critique is right.

I can’t say why I have the misfortune of living on both sides of the divide. I only know that, by temperament, I like things to be relatively predictable and well-formed. Take the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. I shall probably always miss the cadences of the older language. The late twentieth century may have been a high point in liturgical studies, but it was a low point in terms of English liturgical prose. At the same time, the revisions revealed in a much clearer way the basic form and meaning of the rites, and for that I am grateful. I don’t want things to change. But I do want them to make sense. And, often as not, those two desires are in conflict.

In that situation, my “weak in trust” side thinks that the changes are destroying my religion. Easy enough to think. Christianity has repeatedly been botched by Christians with devout intentions. But my “strong” side is saying, “Oh, but it’s so much clearer and more intelligible now.” The “weak in trust” says, “You’re losing the sense of the numinous.” The “strong” says, “Mystification is not the same as mystery.” And so they go at each other. The “weak in faith” side thinks the “strong” side is a wrecker and a barbarian. The “strong” side dismisses the “weak in faith” side as a prisoner of the past who will just have to get with the times.

How do these two co-exist without producing some kind of spiritual breakdown? The “weak in faith” side has to get reacquainted with the Spirit, the creative whirlwind that deals out destruction as well as new life—destruction, indeed, that makes new life possible. I have to learn that I cannot make an idol out of every detail of my received faith or I will soon have no room in my sanctuary for the real God who is always making all things new. It doesn’t mean that I treat the received tradition lightly—only that I remember that it has changed in the past and it will change again and each change must be judged on its own merits.

The “strong” side, on the other hand, which sees (eventually) the sense of ordaining women or of celebrating the desire of two men or two women to a stable, life-giving, socially-supported and -supporting marriage or of accepting transgender persons as the people they have come to recognize they truly are—this “strong” me is tempted to dismiss the “weak” for not seeing what is so obvious. (I encourage this arrogance when I conveniently forget that I didn’t “get it” right away myself.)

To put it another way, both sides agree in one respect—in their ability to forget that they are not perfect or omniscient—and so each insists on the partial mode of grasping truth that each enjoys. And they’re not forgiving of the people on the other side. They dismiss each other. They break communion. They shut out the possibility that those other people are also trying to be faithful.

What do I hope to see happen? Not that either side should simply give up, but that we remember that we are, all alike, imperfect people who are nonetheless people of faith, people touched by the love of God, people who may yet see things differently. The bad thing is if we ignore each other and pretend that those people on the other side of the church aisle don’t really exist. The worst thing is if we leave the building and pretend that there is no one on the other side of the aisle. “What people? What aisle? I don’t see anybody over there. We left them back at St. Bidulph’s when we organized this new, purer congregation. After all, they were traitors to the Bible or the tradition.”

Loving one another means hanging together somehow through the troubles. And that is possible only if we have the humility to hear one another out and to go on seeking ways to explain our faith to those who cannot yet see what we see. In the process, I think all sides will have to unpack and reexamine their basic assumptions. And we shall all have to learn how to look around us for signs of faith, hope, and love in our lives and in the lives of others. Love does not live in the house of arrogance. No one is infallible—no single Christian, no single group of Christians. That’s one reason why love is so important.

AGGRIEVED EVANGELICALS

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How many Evangelical Christians in the US feel that they are in danger of persecution—or even actively subject to it? It’s hard to have any certainty, but politicians on the Right are convinced that they are numerous and constitute a gold mine of votes. The victories of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primaries seem to bear this theory out. Though he has little else to recommend him to Evangelical voters, he has beaten out more eligible candidates by projecting himself as a strong political figure who will protect them from persecution by gays, lesbians, and transgendered people. The same anxiety has also prompted a raft of recent legislation in heavily Evangelical states claiming to protect religious freedom. Apparently state politicians have keyed into this fear, too.

For an outsider, the fear is difficult to fathom. Evangelical florists or caterers are alarmed that they might be providing services to the weddings of same-sex couples. There is some suggestion that they would seem to be endorsing such a marriage. But one doesn’t hear of any of them claiming the right to pass judgement on, say, the remarriage of divorced persons. Clearly, something more than doctrinal consistency is at stake.

The nearest analogy I can think of comes from the early years of my life, when many states had laws forbidding marriage between people of different races. I grew up in a state that was partly Southern in culture, and there was little doubt that marriages between Euro-Americans and African Americans elicited strong negative emotions in the white community. My guess is that many business owners would have refused to provide services for them. (Because of the particular history of Oklahoma, marriage between Native Americans and Euro-Americans generally elicited less hostility.)

The public reasoning against such marriages was often framed in terms of eugenics, but it was more deeply based, I think, in religion—like its kindred practice of apartheid in South Africa. And, even more fundamentally, it was a purity issue. Whites in Oklahoma (and many other places) were anxious about being “contaminated” by blacks. For that is how purity codes work.

If “contamination” sounds like an outrageous term, that is exactly the point. There is an analogy between purity codes and basic sanitary considerations, but the purity code expands to categorize wide reaches of one’s world as clean or unclean, pure or impure. White business people were not just concerned to avoid “endorsing” interracial marriage. They were afraid that they would be, both in their own estimation and in the public eye, contaminated by it. The same, I think, is true of Evangelical business folk today in relation to same-sex marriage.

Purity codes are pervasive among human beings, though some groups lay more stress on them than others. They also vary a great deal in content from one community to another, but each group holds to its own peculiar code with a fervor undiminished by the fact that their neighbors may subscribe to other and different codes. The whole complex, psycho-social process is superbly illuminated in Rachel Herz’s interesting study, That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion (Norton).

As a way of organizing life, the sense of purity may be indispensable. But, like all things human, it is not innocent. Purity codes can become divisive and destructive when they are used to categorize some persons or communities as dirty or unclean. Such people will inevitably tend to be pushed aside from the common life. Indeed, the accusation that they are unclean is a necessary part of the process of exclusion, for it defines them as a public menace. It wasn’t just interracial marriage that made whites anxious in my childhood. It was the sharing of water fountains, restaurants, swimming pools, schools, churches.

Purity, after all, is always, by definition, vulnerable and under attack. “Dirt” contaminates and must therefore be avoided if it cannot be eradicated. “Dirt” evokes fear and anger and hostility.

A recent article in the New York Times (An Ayatollah’s Daughter Prompts a Debate on Religious Persecution in Iran, by Thomas Erdbrink, 5/18/2016) is relevant. The offense, described by an “official with Iran’s conservative judiciary” as “obscene and despicable,” was a visit by the daughter of a prominent religious official (and former president of Iran) to another woman who is a leader of the much persecuted Bahai religion in Iran. The two had tea together. Physical proximity, the sharing of food—both occasions of contamination. It is easier to persecute people whom one has defined as impure; it becomes harder when some bold person sits down with them and treats them like human beings as Ms. Faezeh Hashemi did with Ms. Farima Kamalabadi. Hence the need the authorities felt to categorize Ms. Hashemi as unclean alongside Ms. Kamalabadi. The Bahai must be kept at a distance from decent folk or decent folk might question why the Bahai are being persecuted.

Evangelicals in the US may believe that their purity is under threat from gay and lesbian and transgendered people; they may even feel that as persecution. But the greater problem may be that Evangelicals, where they enjoy cultural power (as in many parts of the US), may wield their purity as an offensive weapon against those they categorize as unclean.

This is particularly clear in the case of public officials who want the freedom to refuse marriage licenses or other civic rights to those who offend their own religious sensibilities. This would allow them to make the equal protection of law a dead letter for those of whom they disapprove. In short, the real goal of the campaign to “protect” Evangelicals from what they see as persecution is to limit the freedom of others whom they have categorized as unclean. If they feel the need to protect their personal purity, Evangelicals should find other ways to do it. Better yet, they might heed the Apostle Paul’s admonition, uttered precisely in the context of concerns about purity: “Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand.” (Romans 14:4 NRSV)

More on Paul and the problems of purity in a future post. . . .

INVISIBLE UNDER THE CLOAK OF INFALLIBILITY

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John Donne once said that the great spiritual malaise of his time was melancholy. My candidate for that distinction today would be the ease with which we assume the cloak of infallibility. It is our age’s favorite variation on the cardinal sin of pride (disguised deftly as humility) combined with a strong shot of anger and of anger’s distilled form, hatred—a very heady cocktail designed precisely to match our taste for self-righteousness

But let me be more exact about my topic. I am not writing about either papal infallibility or the infallibility (aka inerrancy) of scripture. While I do not profess either doctrine, I know faithful Christian people who do, and neither doctrine seems to pose any insuperable barrier to their genuine Christian faith. There is no occasion in these for anathemas, however much I may be tempted. (Well, I do seem to recall having come close to hurling a few such anathemas in Lovesongs and Reproaches. If so, I recant.)

My subject, rather, is the way in which all sorts of people (including those of us who don’t officially believe in infallibility of any kind) appropriate infallibility for ourselves. Not that we would admit to it. In fact, we would resist the notion mightily: It is not I who am infallible. I am merely the messenger, the reporter, the humble servant of infallibility.

What prompts these reflections at just this moment? For one thing, there is the ongoing drama of Evangelicals worldwide, hiding under the cloak of infallibility in order to attack gay and lesbian people—in some cases targeting their rights, in others their bodies and their lives as well. For another, there is a new bit of comedy playing out in the Roman Catholic Church, in which conservative voices are trying to figure out how to seize control the pope’s infallibility for themselves to ease their anxiety that the new gentleman in the chair is about to promote some things that they know infallibly to be false. It is a conundrum, of course. But it isn’t the first time that some Roman Catholics have come to the conclusion that they are more Catholic than the pope.

But the illness is much more widespread than these two examples. What are the symptoms by which one can recognize it? One is the offloading of responsibility: “I, of course, am a generous and loving person. It is not I myself who tell you that you are evil. I am just the reluctant messenger of God/truth. God/truth makes me do it.” When we adopt this stance, we usually feel that it is self-evidently right. After all, this is what my own group has long believed. Where would we have gotten it if not from God? The prospect that it might have more to do with the social norms of rural America in preceding generations (in the case of Evangelicals) or the politics of two preceding popes (in the case of conservative Roman Catholics) or academic culture (in the case of the new atheists) is not to be admitted into consciousness.

Another symptom is the avoidance of serious human engagement with the people one condemns. One claims not to know any of the sinners in question (e.g., gay folk or remarried divorced persons or women who have had an abortion) or else to know a few and perhaps even feel sorry for them (though the knowledge usually does not go beyond general acquaintance). In addressing those identified as displeasing to God, the infallible person adopts the stance of an adult lecturing a teen-ager, never that of an equal—thereby ensuring that there will be no real communication.

And if pressed on the issue of the scriptural command to love one’s neighbor as oneself, the victim of this spiritual disease will then explain that, of course, that is exactly what he or she is doing for you. Since you are doing something infallibly defined as wrong, the only loving thing to do is to prevent you from proceeding, even if it must be substantial cost to you. Really, all this misery is for your own good. Claiming love as the justification for patently unloving acts is thus a third symptom.

A fourth symptom is pervasive anger. Seldom does anyone claim infallibility in any other emotional state. Such anger lends a certain sense of exaltation to the human psyche, especially when it frees us to behave in ways we would normally consider boorish. It is really quite delicious to find oneself carried away by righteous emotion as one assaults the reprobate. The problem is that anger also clouds our perception of reality, painting everything and everyone with whom one is angry in the most livid and threatening of hues. In this way, it feeds on itself and creates new and worse caricatures of these people whom now, to tell the truth, one well and truly hates.

A fifth symptom is the way the illness communicates itself through the body. The traits of righteous anger, being visible, are particularly helpful in diagnosis: the narrowed eyes, pinched lips, jutting chin, rigidly held limbs, all approximating (as far as humanly possible) the look of an angry chicken (as my late friend M. R. Ritley pointed out to me some years ago.)

This spiritual malaise has proven so contagious that it has worked its way through all areas of modern human discourse. Atheists are as subject to it as the religious. Political theorists and economists easily become its mouthpieces. Our autocrats of taste may in fact have little else to fall back on. And it seems to be taking on increasingly ugly forms—forms that threaten us with loss of the hard-won civilization that our forebears have slowly constructed over the last four or five millennia.

Bearing the cloak of infallibility exacts a cost. Like Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility, it exposes us to deeply inhuman menaces that would like to sap our souls. We are in danger of becoming hollow shells held together by little more than a brittle crust compounded of self-esteem and hostility toward the enemy. The supreme indicator of spiritual health is the opposite—not infallibility but love.

REVELATIONS AND MISTAKES

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A Sermon preached at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California. September 13, 2015

Texts: Isaiah 50:4-9a; Mark 8:27-38

REVELATIONS AND MISTAKES

The story we just heard—the one where Peter confesses Jesus as the Messiah—is right smack dab in the middle of Mark’s Gospel. All the rest of the book circles around it. Mark means for us to pay attention.

And it’s a great high point. Peter gets it right. He’s the first person to say out loud who Jesus is.

But then, as we heard, it all falls apart. Jesus starts to explain that being Messiah is not going to be all triumph and glory for him, and Peter interrupts: “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong.” Jesus makes a meaningful turn of the head away from Peter to look at the rest of the disciples— just to let them know he’s talking to them, too—and says, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

And then, just to be perfectly clear that he means the message as broadly as possible, he calls the crowd in alongside his disciples and says to them all, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

That was a fast slide down a slippery slope, wasn’t it?

so, what do we have here? We’ve got pluses and minuses. We’ve got hope of glory and intimations of suffering. We’ve got a big-time revelation and a big-time mistake. And Mark sets it up to make us to pay close attention, doesn’t he? Mark thought it was critically important to the story he was telling. And it’s also critically important right now in the world we’re living in. So let’s think about it some more.

Peter gets it right; he has his great moment of insight. And that leaves him thinking he’s got everything sewed up. He’ll be riding the Messiah’s coattails into a new and better world. Exactly how he pictured that world is impossible to know, but there’s a good chance that it included a lot fewer Romans than the world he was actually living in. There’d be a better deal for Peter’s own people—the farmers and herders and fishermen who made up the Galilean country folk. There would probably be a lot less arrogance from the big-shots in Jerusalem. It was going to be a new era of true religion and prosperity for the right people—his people.

But Jesus hauls him up short and says, “You’ve got a very inadequate notion of the Messiah. You didn’t pay attention when they read Isaiah in synagogue, did you? ‘I gave my back to those who struck me and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I did not hide my face from insult and spitting.’ If you’d listened, you’d know that God’s Anointed isn’t going to get an enthusiastic welcome in this world.”

And Jesus goes on to say to Peter and everybody else, “You won’t be getting rich or powerful off my messianic ministry. Just the reverse. Drop that idea right now.”

You may remember that, of course, they did no such thing. Jesus would have to keep repeating that lesson over and over again.

Now, I said that this passage was particularly important for us in the world we live in. Why? Because we’re living in another age when people are determined, like Peter, to translate their revelations into power plays. Not just religious revelations: atheists have proven as good at it as the religious have. (Just think Nazism and Soviet Communism.) I sometimes think scientists may be the most adept of all. Just think, for example, of all the money that’s changed hands over the last couple of decades because of people who’ve had a revelation that what you really need to be eating is the opposite of what you’ve been eating and then offered to sell you a pre-packaged version of the truth.

But I’m going to focus on religious temptations because, after all, that’s what we know best. And it’s easy to pick an example because it’s been all over the news—the case of Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who decided that her religion had full possession of the truth and gave her the privilege of ignoring her legal duties and oppressing her neighbors. She turned her religious faith into a campaign to control the world around her, including people whose faith differs from hers.

And that, of course, is something we see a lot of now. It’s not just Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians. Islam, at the moment, is rife with it—some of it in a much more vicious form. Even Buddhism is having its turn in Myanmar.

Judaism, isn’t immune to the temptation, either. The Settler movement in Israel and the West Bank is another example of it, particularly mind-boggling given that modern Israel was founded as a refuge from precisely this sort of treatment elsewhere. Was Peter envisioning a kind of Jewish caliphate? Did he want a Jewish Taliban? I don’t suppose he had that detailed a plan, but he was probably moving in that direction.

There is something scary about the way we human beings slip from our moments of revelation to the moment of imposing our insight on others. First, we just want everyone to share our insight. And then we move on to the point of thinking that our insight is so clear and so true that it cannot be questioned. And then it begins to seem obvious that we ought to compel others to see it, too. Peter was heading right down that path when Jesus brought him up short with “Get behind me, Satan.”

We mild-mannered Episcopalians may think we’re exempt, but we’re not. Historically, we’ve had our persecutorial moments, and we’ve certainly been known to entertain feelings of superiority (of which our fellow Christians are well aware). And add to that the fact that this is a liberal congregation. When liberals embrace new enthusiasms, we, too, can be quite political about demanding that others conform. We’re gathered here in Berkeley, right? We, if anyone, should know that political correctness has a certain tyrannical potential. This isn’t just a myth made up by Republican politicians, though they’ve certainly milked it for everything it’s worth.

No human being is safe from imitating Peter’s error. Like him, we persistently fail to get the message. We think that, because we’ve seen this revelation, everybody else has to as well—and in our time frame and on our terms. But no. The Messiah’s revolution isn’t going to proceed from triumph to triumph. It comes about through the persistence of trust and hope and love in the face of suffering and weakness. Beware of thinking that we’ll be able to bypass all that and just have a lovely wallow in our own brilliant grasp of truth—lovely as it may sound.

And now that I’ve said all this, you may think that I’m going to sum up here by telling us all not to be so damned confident. (Notice that I’m choosing my language in imitation of Our Lord.) But, in fact, that’s not quite it either. Mark isn’t saying that Peter’s revelation was wrong. It was what Peter wanted to do with it that was wrong.

There really is a revelation here. It’s just that Peter—like the rest of us—was very slow to understand it. What had he seen that made him acclaim Jesus as Messiah? He had seen in him a revelation of the heart of the universe. He saw in Jesus that God, moved by passionate love, had come looking for him, had come to draw him into God’s embrace, had come to reveal the true center of existence.

He went wrong in that he couldn’t, at first, accept that offer of love in it almost unimaginable breadth and depth. He could only think of it in the familiar terms: power, money, celebrity, religious certainty—all those things, you know, that Satan tempts Jesus with in another familiar gospel story. But it’s none of those things. It’s love.

Jesus wasn’t telling Peter to soft-pedal his revelation. And Peter understood that. Jesus was telling him to understand it more deeply and more truly. God, in Jesus, has taken the profound risk of coming right here among an ordinary bunch of people like us to offer us love. That’s the revelation we celebrate every Sunday at this Holy Table. And we draw from it hope and we pray that we will become deeper and wiser and more loving by it—not so that we can inflict it on others, but so that we can share it and welcome one another—everyone whom God touches with it.

Peter accepted the “Get behind me, Satan” and still confessed the “You are the Messiah.” It took patience and trust. That’s where we want to go, too.

THINKING ABOUT KIM DAVIS

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The case of Kim Davis, County Clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, is giving me cause to reflect. On the one hand, I am strongly opposed to what she has done. Gay and Lesbian people have struggled long and hard to achieve, in practical terms, the full citizenship that, in theory, we always possessed. It is not easy to be gracious when one person who happens to be in a position of power feels free to nullify our most recent legal advance.

On the other hand, I am, like Kim Davis, a Christian who has occasionally felt it necessary to place myself sideways in some community process for reasons of conscience. To be sure, she may not regard my Episcopal tradition as Christian and I tend to look on her Christian tradition as a distortion of the historic Christian faith. Still, I fully understand the importance of conscience in matters of faith.

I am thus in the awkward spot of respecting her willingness to stand firm while at the same time believing that her understanding of Christian faith is mistaken on this topic and that she ought to reconsider. It’s unlikely that she and I will ever engage in direct conversation on the topic. Nor, I fear, is it likely that it would prove fruitful if we did.

My reservation is based on experience. For some years I functioned as one of the “point” people in the Episcopal Church’s long conversation on the topic of sexual orientation. I repeatedly found that Evangelical Episcopalians who attended (many simply stayed away) refused to engage in any real sort of conversation at all. They listened only in order to to decide how they were going to attack. As a result, they never really comprehended what was being said on the other side. They refused to treat faithful lesbian or gay Christians as anything more than interlopers. And they claimed the authority of Scripture for their position even while they were unwilling to go back to scripture with an open mind in order to discuss the interpretation of others. Their own presentations consisted in repeating what they had already said over and over, as if one more repetition might finally persuade where the previous hundred had failed.

In short, I have no expectation that people from the broadly Evangelical spectrum, including the Pentecostal tradition to which I am guessing Ms. Davis belongs, will or even can engage in straightforward conversation with those of us who belong to other Christian traditions. Happily, there seems to be some conversation on the issues of sexual orientation arising within the Evangelical world now. I pray that it may be more productive than what I experienced as an outsider.

My continuing question, however, as I think about and pray for Kim Davis is how Christian people arrive at points of such great intransigence on issues that are not really central to Christian faith. Christian perspectives on marriage have varied widely over two millennia. Many of the earliest Christians were profoundly suspicious of heterosexual marriage, which they saw as the enemy of true Christian faith and life. It was a distraction, exerting a constant pull toward worldliness and giving rise to the anxiety that undermines faith. Never was it conceived as a fundamental aspect of Christian belief. The Evangelical exaltation of marriage (and of the relatively modern nuclear family) owes little to the Bible and not much to ancient Christian tradition. It began as a twentieth-century reaction to the increasing visibility of same-sex oriented people—effectively a theologizing of homophobia—and not much different from the use of the curse of Ham/Canaan to justify first slavery and then the continuing degradation of people of African ancestry—a defensive move by slave holders and racial bigots.

And yet, I recognize that we all have to take our fundamental convictions seriously. Not just religious people, but all sorts of people. How then are we to live together without destroying our common civil society by trying to enforce our convictions in the public sphere? For that, of course, is the issue for the rest of us—not what Ms. Davis believes, but what she does or does not do in her office of County Clerk.

There is a parallel—in principle though not in gravity—to the much graver attack on civil society that now plagues the ancient center of the Muslim world (and laps over into other parts of the world). For some reason, we human beings find it possible to feel that the depth of our convictions exempts us from responsibility for their consequences in the lives of others. At that point, we forget that we are not in fact the God (or whatever other principle) in which we believe and we somehow turn ourselves into absolute authority. It is the deepest and most treacherous temptation of humankind, the true sin of pride. (It is also, of course, not limited to religious people. I need only name Fascism, Nazism, and Soviet Communism to make that point.)

When we find that we are no longer willing to enter into conversation with the people we judge, that we only want to dictate to them, that we have decided that we can no longer learn anything knew or find a new perspective, that our faith is so complete as to admit of no addition or alteration, we are in grave danger. And we place the world around us in grave danger.

There are things in this world that would be worth suffering martyrdom for. God defend us all from them. But the privilege of denying other people their human and legal rights is not one of them.

CREATION AS EVOLUTION

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The hostility of modern Evangelicals (and their Fundamentalist forebears) to the science of evolution is founded less on scripture than on an ancient cosmology from the Hellenistic Era that drew a sharp distinction between the eternal unchangeability of God and the chaotic, unpredictable character of human life and of the world around us. (Think earthquakes and hurricanes, for example.)

This cosmology (often referred to as “Ptolemaic” because it was codified by the astronomer Ptolemy) held good for a couple of thousand years before Copernicus upset it. It envisaged Earth at the center of everything, surrounded by concentric spheres that carried the celestial bodies around us. The closest of these spheres to earth was the one that carried the moon and it served as the demarcation line between the perfection of the heavens above, where all the stars and planets were seen as obeying regular laws, and the radical imperfection of life here below—the sublunary regions of earth, air and sea.

There was a tendency to associate the perfection of the heavens with God’s perfect and unchanging creation and to attribute the chaos of life on earth to some other cause. Among Christians, it could be seen as related to the Fall of Humanity that forced us out of Eden according to Genesis 3. Paul, for example, seems to suggest that humanity’s failure forced the whole sublunary region into its existing distressed and chaotic state (Romans 8:18-25 ).

The Seven Days of Creation, as narrated in Genesis 1, could perhaps be seen as presupposing the idea of a cosmos perfect as it left its Creator’s hand. God did, after all, pronounce it “very good.” One might still ask, of course, whether “very good” necessarily equates to “perfect” in the sense of “beyond alteration or improvement” or whether it just means what it says: “very good.”

The Eden narrative, in Genesis 2-3, however, contains within itself, alongside the possibility of immortal perfection, the possibility of defection, of falling away, of death. Evangelical rejection of biological evolution rests largely on a presupposition that the perfect original creation could not have allowed for such dramatic subsequent change. But the Eden narrative (Genesis 2) actually suggests just the opposite. It says that God did not create the full reality we know as humanity in one moment, but began with the singularity of Adam and only afterward came to recognize that for one such creature to be genuinely human there had to be more than one.

The God of Eden, like other gardeners, seems to work in part by plan and in part by trial and error. Just read the text carefully—literally, in fact. It was such a reading that led to the Four Sonnets on Eden that appeared on this website in recent weeks. They emerged from paying attention to the strong element of change and uncertainty in Genesis 2-3.

It may, of course, have been possible for humans to grow in relationship to one another and to God while still remaining in Eden. Perhaps, in some parallel universe, there are some who did. But we can barely imagine what that would be like, so far is it from our own experience. Perhaps we can get a hint of it from those moments of human joy when we are most filled with love and delight in the creation—including the human creation. That’s the closest we get to Eden.

Christians in the seventeenth century found it difficult to abandon the ancient cosmology with its clear separation of unchanging celestial perfection from our human sublunary floundering. Poets like John Donne and George Herbert could not quite let it go, deeply embedded as it was in the Christian imagination. But, with Galileo and Newton, their successors learned to shift to a different perspective, displacing earth from the center of the universe and losing the orderly symmetry of the old model.

Darwin took this shift to a deeper level, a more concrete and embodied one. This did not prevent the mainstream of Christian theologians from acknowledging the weight of Darwin’s scientific work and that of his followers. Only in Fundamentalism and its progeny did evolution come to be treated as a stand-or-fall challenge to Christian faith. But if Evangelicals would take their direction from the Eden narrative, they might as easily come to a position friendlier to Darwin and to modern evolutionary biology. Here God creates in a less tidy fashion, with an element of the unforeseen and unpredictable. It is not “evolution” in the Darwinian sense, but it leaves ample room for a process like natural selection.

What is more, human and Christian life in this world is an extension of the same reality. We may represent a falling away from one kind of human perfection—that of Eden—but we also represent a new kind of human possibility, that of coming to know good and evil. Whatever humanity may become beyond and with this knowledge will be different from what we could have become before or without it.

Is one kind of existence better than the other? I would not venture to judge in a case where I know only one of the sides being compared. But there is an old Christian tradition that says our fallen and raised humanity will prove the better of the two. It is the tradition of felix culpa, the “fortunate fall,” which brought about the new and unforeseen wonder of Mary’s motherhood and the union of God and humanity in Jesus.

Thus God will gain some lovers who abide

and some who come back wiser to God’s side.

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.