Upsetting the Natural Order

 It belongs to non-modern religion to believe two things: 

1. To believe that religious behavior and belief is a constituent of the natural order.
2. To believe that religion and belief are part of the framework that holds up the natural order.

In its most primal form religion taught that a people's rituals and beliefs both existed from the beginning and were somehow necessary for the annual return of the rains, or the migration of the herds and flocks, or the changing of the seasons. 

The major religions in our contemporary world no longer assert that the natural order is upheld by their rituals. But there is a strong belief within Islam, Christianity, and Judaism that the moral order of our social world is dependent on religious belief and practice. This is easy enough to see in the now common trope asserting that everything went wrong with US morality when prayer was taken out of public schools. Or in an older Catholic teaching characterized by the short novel Mr Blue by Myles Connolly, which imagines that the future of society hinges on a single celebration of the Eucharist. Supporters of the Tridentine Mass appear to concur. 

What we need to notice here isn't the kind of pious assertions of First Things intellectuals, their traditionalist Protestant sympathizers, or their various Muslim counterparts. It is just how high the stakes have been raised in the question of religion and the social order. Holders of this belief in the causative relationship between right religion and the social order are asserting that any attack on true religion is an attack on the entire social order and invites nothing but social chaos. 

It is in this often mild-mannered assertion that we find the real roots of radicalism and violence. When we believe that failure to conform to our religious ideal isn't just a poor personal choice, but a direct attack on the social and moral order that provides for our life and well-being, then violence is inevitable. We've created a zero-sum game that allows only for retreat into some religious redoubt from the chaos outside or an all out counter-attack to destroy the enemy of all that is good. 

Which is why ISIS launched yet another sectarian attack against Shi'ites in Peshawar just yesterday, March 7th, 2022. In the understanding of Islam found broadly among the group called Islamists it is believed that the moral and social order of humanity depends on the propagation of Islamic teaching. Shi'ite belief and practice varies from this teaching in ways that for Islamists undermines the entire mission of Islam and indeed the future of humanity. So when all else fails violence is the only option. 

It may seem churlish to compare Conservative Christians with ISIS, but only if we forget how much violence has been begotten in the name of purging Christianity of its defects and the world of its opponents for the sake of upholding the moral order of the universe. Christians didn't go out of the business of religious war and killing heretics (if we ever left it) because we somehow rediscovered Jesus' teaching 1800 years after his birth. We were put out of business by a growing secular society that wouldn't tolerate such nonsense and justifiably wanted to put, and keep religion in its place. Modernity had its own violent follies to explore. 

And it is nonsense. Religious teaching may inspire, and religious ritual underscore, the best of human values. Religious revelation may indeed inspire us from the Transcendent to see ourselves and our world in new ways. But in no way is the natural or moral order of the universe dependent on such revelation, teaching or ritual. The universe is too big, and humanity too varied and complex, for our current moral evolution to be dependent upon any one religion or indeed all religions combined. This doesn't make religion irrelevant. It just makes it a part, and a part only, of God's providence for creation and it's creatures. 

Religious violence is rooted in the claim that religion is more than God intended it to be. Indeed it is rooted in the religious assertion that our world depends on religion rather than God. So long as this persists we'll have religious bullies asserting themselves against the dreaded heretics of their own fold, swinging out their elbows to claim a right to public power, or whining defensively that secular society never really understood their good intentions. The upshot will be a continued decline in all such religion, with which God will manage and still extend God's love and care for creation and humanity just fine. 

Sharia and the Modern World

 On February 16, 2022, the Washington Post ran an article explaining how a man who had murdered his sister in an honor killing was released from prison because his family forgave him. This was not only acceptable but required under Pakistani interpretation of Islamic law. How can such a thing possibly happen?

One of the most obvious things about classical Islamic law is that it regards the family as the fundamental social unit. This was innovative in breaking down tribalism, but created a new set of problems. In classical Sharia crimes like murder are regarded as primarily offenses against a family (and God), not the whole of society and not necessarily against an individual. But it isn’t just murder. This is also true of laws governing things like marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance. In Islamic law all of these are matters between families, not merely individual men and women and even less the ruling authorities.

In the specific case of murder it is (apart from God) the family of the victim whose rights have been violated and thus it is the family which must be satisfied that justice is done. For much of Islamic history it would be the family that was responsible for carrying out any punishment; including the death penalty. Or, as in recent cases in the United Arab Emirates, the family could accept a payment from the murderer or his family in lieu of other punishment. In the case reported by the Washington post the family is both the family of the murder victim and the murderer. So the family could choose to simply forgive the murderer.

This idea that the family is the primary interested party in a crime is contrary to all modern sensibilities. In the United States we have seen numerous cases in recent years where families forgave a murderer. But such forgiveness plays no role in determining punishment. In the modern world murder isn't a private matter. It is a crime against the entire social order that exists to protect human lives. Murder isn’t a crime against the family of the victim, it’s a crime against all of us And it is a crime against the law that represents our interests. 

In short Shari’a, like all traditional religious laws, is built on a fundamentally different understanding of what it means to be human in society than that which is at the foundation of the modern nation-state. 

This isn’t the only difference between Sharia  and modern law. Sharia law is divided into two parts: laws concerning the rights of human beings and relationships between humans, and laws concerning the rights of God in relationship to human beings. Thus in Sharia law blasphemy, apostasy, and abandoning Islam are illegal. They are violations of the rights of God. 

In modern legal thinking God has no rights that human governments are obliged to respect or enforce. Religious acts and attitudes cannot and should not be criminalized. Religion has no claim in the realm of either civil or criminal law in the modern state. But under classical Sharia the state is obliged to enforce the rights of God.

Pakistan, like many Muslim countries,  has a hybrid system of law that tries to accommodate both modern laws and Sharia law. As the case reported in the Washington Post demonstrates, the efforts to create a hybrid system have been an abject failure. This is because modern states are unified primarily by a common system of law. You can have a multicultural state and society. You can have a multi-religious state and society. But you cannot have a multi-legal state or society or there will simply be chaos. And chaos is the defining characteristic of those states which try to have both modern laws and Sharia law, or for that matter modern laws and Christian law, modern laws and Jewish law, or modern laws and Hindu law. 

Back in Pakistan the problem of the murderer being forgiven by his family and released from prison predictably brought howls of protest from human rights group within and outside Pakistan. In particular women’s rights groups were outraged. The outrage simply shows that Pakistani society is divided. Modern Pakistanis cannot live with laws based on a pre-modern worldview. But many Muslim Pakistanis cannot live with modern laws that do not recognize the rights of families to their honor, and God to God's singular demand for obedience. 

But again, the problem is not unique to the Muslim world. It is a problem that divides Israeli Society, which also has two sets of laws: one religious and one secular; and in which some Jews demand that their religious law supersedes secular law. It happens in the United States when religious people claim a right to ignore the laws designed to protect the public health and welfare and demand that the law support their religious ideology. Indeed the same problem exists in every country a where religious believers insist that the state not merely give them freedom of religion, but actually support their religious beliefs, values, and practices. 

It happens that it is within the Muslim world that the conflict between religious law and modern law is most acute, simply because the creation of modern states is such a recent development in the Muslim world. But seeing events in Pakistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world shouldn't just result in condemnation of clear abuses of human rights. We should also look at ourselves, and realize how easily the chaos of conflicting laws can happen even here. 

The Limits of Dialogue

A long time ago I was driving in Kuala Lumpur and as I came around a corner in a quiet neighborhood I found a man beating a woman on the side of the road. He and she belonged to an ethno/linguistic/religious culture in which I have some expertise and much experience. For that reason in a heartbeat an entire cross-cultural / interreligious dialogue played out in my mind.

I would tell him to stop. He we would tell me that his religion and culture allow him to physically chastise a disobedient wife. I would suggest that he was misinterpreting his sacred texts, and that well-known scholars of his religion and culture would say otherwise. He would assert that he preferred to trust God's Word to a group of academics. 

My fallback plan would be to point out that what he was doing was against the law. He would assert that God's law was more important than human laws. 

I would appeal to his battered wife, but she was likely to tell me to mind my own business. Or to be too frightened of him to say anything at all. 

Finally I would tell him that if he didn't stop I would stop him. He would point out that for me, an American, to tell him how to behave in his own country was the height of colonialist behavior. He might even use a few choice indigenous terms for Americans/Europeans. How would I answer that? 

In the event this dialogue never took place. I got out of my car and told him to stop. He told me to mind my own business. I physically threatened him. He relented and let go of his wife, who ran to my car. I asked her where she wanted to go and we went there, leaving him on the side of the road. 

This kind of thing has happened to me a few times in my life. Once I picked up a young man who had been injured in a motorcycle wreck out in the country. No one would take him to the hospital, or accompany me to the hospital and care for him as I drove. They were afraid of evil spirits if he died. So I verbally intimidated one of them until he came along in the car to the nearest hospital. He was scared. It was a long 60 minute drive with my newly recruited assistant moaning about unclean spirits, possession by the monkey god, and so on. In the end the boy survived and I paid for a taxi to take his friend back to his village. 

Another time I rescued a truck driver who accidentally knocked over a motorcyclist who tried to pass him on the right. The cyclist was okay, but the gang of boys with him had every intention of doing some harm to the truck driver. So I stood them down and took to the driver to the local police. My actions were a clear intervention and violation of local custom. I was siding with the servant of a big corporation over relatively powerless local workers. 

I could go on. My point is simply that there comes a time when dialogue over.  Despite cultural differences, integrity, power structures, colonialism and so on dialogue comes to an end because human lives are more valuable than anything else. They are the only thing that is actually sacred, and thus their preservation is of greater importance than any scripture and any religious teaching and any claim to know God's will. That it what we learn from Christ. 

This doesn't save us from complex moral and ethical decisions where saving one life means abandoning another. Nor does it remove the reality of moral ambiguity in the midst of complex structures of power that makes it impossible to tell who is innocent and who is guilty. It simply gives us a basis for making decisions when it comes down to the preservation of human lives.  

Today I read in the Religious News Service that many African church leaders, and some United Methodist leaders, have chosen to support laws that criminalize LGBTQ personhood and to affirm actions that cause death and physical harm to these persons. African Leaders and LGBTQ Rights In my view these bishops are no different from the man beating his wife on the side of the road. They are no different from the vigilantes ready to kill a man they think is guilty. And when they are silent they are no better than the bystanders waiting for the death of an accident victim. 

If these reports are true there can be no further dialogue. Only whatever effort is possible to save human lives. Respect sometimes means crediting leaders with a humanity they have not yet discovered by refusing to engage them any further until they repent and cease attacking that which is sacred.

To the Taliban: It's not really Islamic Law, is it?

The Taliban have, not surprisingly, reinstituted the brutal regime of gruesome punishments that has been central to their idea of an Islamic State. When challenged they defiantly claim they will not give up on God’s law. 

But is cutting off the arm of a thief God’s law in Islam? Is stoning adulterers God’s law in Islam? The question is relevant to Muslims, Christians, and Jews because all three traditions have scriptural mandates for the community to carry out such grotesque acts. Even as a Christian I must ask whether the Taliban's actions fall within what I know about Islamic law. 

These crimes and their punishments are referred to in Islam has "hudud," which in this case means offenses against God. Or more literally crimes which transgress the boundaries God has set. However, even in the Prophet’s lifetime putting these laws into effect in a human community was complicated. 

Early on the human implementation of these punishments seemed inconsistent with other values the Quran enjoins upon the Muslims. When the Muslim community moved from these general laws to specific people and offenses there immediately arose complexities that begged for definition and exception. 

Moreover it could be argued that God, in God’s final judgement would punish those whose sin offended only God, such as apostasy. After all, these were offenses against God.

So questions came to Muhammad about these punishments. How serious must a theft be to warrant removing a thief’s hand? What standards of evidence were necessary to establish adultery?  How can you carry out a harsh punishment without risking it becoming a death penalty?  And most of all, who exactly is to carry out the punishment? These are critical matters in which the Quran by itself is silent and thus demands interpretation.

These complexities are no doubt the reason that for most of Islamic history these punishments were rarely carried out. The questions above, and many others led Islamic courts to recategorize criminal behavior in ways making it more amenable to human judgment. It is only in the last century that Islamist movements have made codifying and implementing these punishments central to their demand for what are called "Islamic States." And it should be remembered that much of this codification was inspired by, if not driven by the need for colonizing powers to systematize local law. 

But in this modern codification Islamist movements make two fundamental mistakes, as numerous Muslim scholars have pointed out. 

First they assume that there a should be Islamic States. In reality neither the Qur'an nor the Hadith make any mention of a state in its contemporary form, nor did any such state exist in Islamic history until the modern era. There were kingdoms, and caliphates, and military dictatorships. But no states as we know them. Taking these crimes and punishments and putting them in the context of a modern state is deeply problematic. It takes these laws out of the context of personal, human interactions characteristic of classical Islamic societies and places them in the context of a modern state’s bureaucratic machine. 

Inevitably the result, as pointed out by scholars like Zaiuddin Sadar and Tarik Ramadan, is oppressive, violent, and dehumanizing. What Muslims need to be Muslims isn’t an Islamic State, as Sadar and Ramadan point out, it is human rights. 

Secondly there is a difference between Shariah, or Divine Law, and these hudud laws and punishments. 

Shariah, Divine Law, does not spring direct from reading the Quran. At the very least the Quran requires interpretation, the mastery of which involves considerable study of everything from grammar, to literary forms, to history.  Moreover, according to classical Islamic teaching, Shariah is identified through a process of rational reflection on its four roots: the Quran, the Hadith traditions of the Prophet, the use of analogy, and seeking the consensus of legal scholars. To take a punishment directly from the Quran is to tear it away from the context of the Prophet’s interpretation of the Quran, the wisdom of the early Muslim community in understanding its full meaning, and the consensus of the community about how it is to be administered. As Muhammad said, “my people will not agree on an error,” making the consensus of the people critical to the understanding of Shariah. 

In short, just listing the hudud crimes and punishments as laws and implementing them on an ad hoc basis isn't Shari'a, it isn't Divine Law. And in the context of a modern state it may be a travesty of Divine Law. 

The reality is that calls by Islamist groups for hudud punishments in modern times have served one or both of two purposes. The first is to claim some kind of Islamic legitimacy among Muslims who are ignorant of Shari'a. Some politicians put these laws in place with no intention of enforcing them, and indeed in circumstances in which they are unenforceable. They want to appear Islamic without actually doing what they know is wrong. The second reason is to give an excuse for engaging in a reign of terror against the enemies of the state. 

The Taliban have used the hudud punishments both to claim Islamic legitimacy and to excuse their terrorist rule over an unwilling population. 

And that is why the Taliban regime may claim to be an Islamic state, but quite apart from its enemies from within who clearly disagree, the Taliban implementation of Quranic punishments has little or no claim to be rooted in Shari'a, or Divine Law.

But I want to take this a step further based on a recent presentation I heard by a Muslim scholar. She pointed out that in Islam the highest realm of ethics is not submission to outward laws, but ihsan, or doing good for others; beneficence. Ihsan is putting into action the core of Islam. It is, as Dr. Hiza Azam pointed out, putting Shariah into action. 

Quran 4:36, "Worship Allah, and do not associate with Him anything, and be good to parents and to kinsmen and orphans and the needy and the close neighbor and the distant neighbor and the companion at your side and the wayfarer and to those (slaves who are) owned by you. Surely, Allah does not like those who are arrogant, proud"  

Quran 2:177 "Righteousness is not that you turn your faces toward the east or the west, but [true] righteousness is [in] one who believes in Allah , the Last Day, the angels, the Book, and the prophets and gives wealth, in spite of love for it, to relatives, orphans, the needy, the traveler, those who ask [for help], and for freeing slaves; [and who] establishes prayer and gives zakah; [those who] fulfill their promise when they promise; and [those who] are patient in poverty and hardship and during battle. Those are the ones who have been true, and it is those who are the righteous."

Always beneath the laws are the principles that determine how they are to be interpreted and implemented.

So here is the takeaway: When the Taliban announce that they are going to implement the punishments found in the Quran they are not actually implementing Shariah, or Divine Law as it is understood by most Muslims. Indeed from the standpoint of classical Islamic jurisprudence they are taking these verses of the Quran entirely out of their proper context, and thus may be implementing something completely opposed to Divine Law. 

Those of us who are non-Muslims looking on in horror at the emerging Taliban regime should not be misled by their claims to be the guardians of Islamic Law. They are far from it, and far from representing the religion of which our Muslim neighbors are a part.  

The Taliban aren't Fundamentalists.

Are the Taliban Fundamentalists? 

Is the Texas anti-abortion law like Shari'a? 

Well people seem to be saying so, but they are wrong, maliciously wrong. The Taliban are not Fundamentalists, and Texas anti-abortion law isn't like Islamic Shari'a. 

To understand why we need to go back in history a bit. 

The first religious use of the word "fundamentalism" was coined at Princeton Divinity School over 120 years ago. A group of Protestant Christian theologians led by Benjamin Warfield were alarmed by the influence of modern ideas on Christianity. They therefore formulated a list of what they saw as the fundamentals of Christian teaching. They and those who followed them proudly called themselves "fundamentalists." 

And what were the fundamentals? Well they asserted that the authoritative basis for Christian teaching was Bible, which was without error and should be interpreted literally. Secondly they asserted that five doctrines were fundamental: The total depravity of humankind, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints. None of these beliefs have any relationship to Islam, so clearly the Taliban are not fundamentalists in this sense.

Through the twentieth century the word fundamentalist gradually lost its popularity among conservative Christians, most of whom preferred to call themselves Evangelicals. They had a little different take on being faithful in the modern world. 

However, the term fundamentalism was revived and introduced into the formal study of religion by Martin Marty and others who launched the "Fundamentalism Project" in 1987. They were trying to identify common characteristics across movements in many different religions. Perhaps the most important long term effect of the project was that it legitimized using the term fundamentalist for groups in any religion, and not just a specifically  Christian groups. The project never succeeded in creating a definition for fundamentalism that could usefully be applied across many religions, although it certainly stimulated a lot study of emerging religious groups. It is now 20 years or more out of date.

But there was another factor influencing the use of the term "fundamentalism." Long before the Fundamentalism Project began liberal and progressive Christians had come to use the word "fundamentalist" as a broad term of derision for any Christian who didn't share a liberal theology and progressive political agenda. It wasn't a theological description, it was an emotional ejaculation. 

With the extension of the word "fundamentalist" to other religions there was a kind of legitimization of using this derisive term against non-Christian religious movements as well. Again not a description, but an expression of emotion. 

In short the term "fundamentalist" ultimately had no clear meaning beyond "someone I don't like," and has come to be widely used in that way in American culture. 

This has two pernicious results. First, lumping together all conservative religious groups with militant and even terrorist religious groups like the Taliban casts derision and hate on peaceful, innocent religious movements that happen to resist modernity and progressive politics. This is particularly harmful to Conservative Muslims and Orthodox Jews, who face endemic islamophobia and anti-semitism already.  

The second pernicious result is that it actually obscures the truth about the Taliban and similar Islamic movements. And it thus makes it impossible to engage in public discourse about how they should be engaged politically and religiously. 

So what are the Taliban? Well they are not a group interested in getting back to the fundamentals of Islam. In fact their embrace of terrorism, their violence against religious minorities, their tribal interpretations of Islamic law and government, and their treatment of women are radically different from the  fundamentals of Islam, even in its orthodox pre-modern forms.  

Beyond this the Taliban didn't organize around the rejection of modernity, like the original fundamentalists. They organized in opposition to colonization by the Soviet Union and subsequently by their opposition to any government supported by an outside power. Or more bluntly: the Taliban are organized around a desire for the political and military power in order to implement and enforce their radical Pashtun nationalist religious agenda against an unwilling population. 

In saying this I don't mean that they don't have religious motives, or at least religious excuses for their behavior. I mean that these motives and excuses aren't based on the historically and widely recognized fundamentals of Islam. So calling the Taliban "fundamentalists" both misleads efforts to combat them and denigrates the teaching of Islam and the vast majority of Muslims. 

So what about Texas' anti-abortion law as a form of Shari'a? The same problem. Except this time people totally ignorant of what Shari'a really is are using it as a kind of byword for laws they don't like. They use it as insult against Texas law when all they really do is insult our intelligence. You cannot fight what you do not rationally describe, and insulting potential allies (for Shari'a may be on your side) isn't a good political strategy. 

The term "fundamentalist" is void of intellectual content and serves primarily to focus ill will on religions and religious movements that may be perfectly innocent. It is high time to banish it from both religious and public public discourse.  Similarly the term Shari'a as used in anti-Muslim and anti-Texas polemic is without rational content and only serves to obscure the truth about both Muslims and Texas.

It may take a few more words to describe a religious movement with which one disagrees, or a law that one finds loathsome, but that is burden those engaged in adult conversation are obliged to bear. 

You Can't Always Have What You Want

Conflict over control of the public space to promote one form of identity over another is as old as our Republic. The desire for such control is the birthplace of totalitarianism whether it comes from progressive or conservative political forces.

A series of cases related to religious freedom have recently come before the Supreme Court. The details of each case vary, and the Robert's Court has chosen to rule on fairly narrow aspects of the law. This leaves an unresolved tension between claims to religious freedom and demands for non-discrimination.   

LGBTQ+ Individuals are claiming a right to participate in private sector programs and to purchase goods and services without discrimination against their identity and the ways they express it. Other individuals and groups are claiming that allowing or facilitating LGBTQ+ participation in their programs, or purchase of their goods and services, involves them directly in behavior to which they have a strong moral objection based on religious teaching. 

Note that it is behavior and activity to which there is a moral objection, not LGBTQ+ individuals themselves. In the recent case of Fulton v. Philadelphia,  Catholic Social Services did not claim a right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals. It claimed that "CSS holds the religious belief that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman. Because CSS believes that certification of prospective foster families is an endorsement of their relationships, it will not certify unmarried couples—regardless of their sexual orientation—or same-sex married couples." 

It is the relationship, not the individual, that CSS could not in good conscience affirm. Similarly in a case the Supreme Court declined to hear today (July 2nd, 2021) there was no question that the florist who filed suit had worked with LGBTQ+ persons for decades. Her objection was to flowers for a same-sex wedding. In this case the court's refusal to consider the case let stand a ruling against her in a lower court.

What is at stake in these cases is whether individuals and groups can be compelled by law to participate in activities, behaviors, or relationships they find morally objectionable, or whether the constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and expression allow them to decline such involvement. This makes the problem different from that of discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, religion or political beliefs. The individuals aren't being excluded on the basis of who they are, but on the basis of what they are doing. 

Except that it isn't that simple.

There are two ways to look at human identity. The older of these ways understands identity as a given no matter how the individual acts. A person's sex, family, ethnicity, gender, religion, and even political affiliations are a primal part of who they are and cannot be changed. Withdrawal from society, whether in the form of a Hindu Sadhu, Christian monk or nun, or Buddhist bhikkhu was the only alternative to accepting one's identity.

In the modern world we have come to see identity not as a given, but as something that individuals choose to enact. You can take action to change your family, your ethnicity, your sex, your gender, your religion and your political affiliations. Modern identity, the modern sense of self, is created through action. A person creates themselves; writing through their actions an autobiographical narrative of who they are as they go along. 

In the West the shift from identity as a given to identity as something enacted began in the early modern era. Changing religious identity was revolutionary 500 years ago and could engender violent responses, but it came to be accepted as a basic human right. During the birth of the United States changing political affiliation became an accepted part of changing identity, and again a basic human right. And Europeans migrating to the US enacted changes in their national and even ethnic identities to adopt the new identity: American. 

Now in the 20th and 21st centuries there is an acceleration of this movement from given identity to enacted identity. This acceleration has been accompanied by broadening those aspects of identity that can be enacted rather than being a given. This is particularly the case with sex, gender, and sexuality. Aspects of the self that many people still regard as immutable are becoming more and more widely accepted as a matter of choice being put into action.

Recognizing this clarifies the conflicts that are now unfolding. In the modern world religious identity is an identity that must be enacted. One cannot just be a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, or Buddhist. One must act out the beliefs and practices of these religions. Now this centuries old understanding of religious identity is claimed in relation to sexual identity. Whatever the biological and psychological components, sexual identity is no longer understood as a given.  It is a chosen way of living out one's relationships in public life. And that includes marriages, adoptions, and even transitioning parties.

What is unfolding in the US is that Roman Catholics and conservative Protestants are maintaining that while religion is a properly enacted identity, sex and sexuality are a given identity; fixed by God. There may be deviations, but no acceptable exceptions. As a result the claim that religious identity must be enacted directly conflicts the claim that the same is true of sexual identity.

In a diverse society the possibilities for conflict are thus nearly endless. For a baker to enact his religious identity he cannot offer a service to a person who needs that service to enact their sexual identity. For one doctor participating in an abortion is murder, while for another it may be a moral obligation. And either may work in an institutional setting that whose desire to freely enact its moral understanding conflicts with that of the physician. 

The only reason we don't have constant conflict over enacted identities is because in general individuals and groups can choose from multiple providers of services and simply choose to take their business and needs to someone who has no objection to fulfilling them. In a society where almost every service is available from a corporation whose only identity is enacted by making money it isn't hard to find almost any service one might desire.

And yet there are many for whom this is not satisfactory. Many people simply don't have access to a diversity of choices. In many parts of the US there don't exist a variety of tailors, bakers, hospitals, florists, adoption agencies and so on. 

Second, having long been marginalized LGBTQ+ persons do not wish to merely enact their identity somewhere in public (probably on the margins.) They want to be able to enact their identity always and everywhere in public. They don't want to be accepted in the sexuality in a big city but not their rural home town. Anything less than total acceptance is just another form or marginalization.

But of course the same thing is true of those who wish to enact their religiously based moral standards. They don't want to be forced from the public realm by demands that they act against their religious convictions. That is also marginalization. 

A truly diverse society cannot offer either those enacting their religious identities or those enacting other forms of identity what they want. A diversity of conflicting ways of enacting identity, including sexual and religious identity, cannot be realized simultaneously in every place or relationship. Demanding that one type of identity take precedence over others in public simply shifts the locus of marginalization from one group to another. 

This is essentially what is happening in the cases coming before the Supreme Court. The demand is being made that identities related to enacting different forms of human sexuality take precedence over  enacting of religious identities, or visa versa. If it passes, anti-discrimination legislation before Congress will ultimately generate a precedence of sexual identity over religious identity, although it is more likely to generate endless litigation than open the public space to diverse identities.  Even if the legislation passes, the Constitution will continue to be a battleground for contention over discrimination in the realm of enacted identities. 

But legislation isn't just initiated by LGBTQ+ progressives seeking relief from discrimination. Social conservatives have, at a state level, legislated to discriminate against LBGTQ+ persons. Laws outlawing  use of bathrooms by transgender persons, forbidding changes in legal sexual identity by those who transition, and in particular banning abortion are all thinly veiled efforts to write religious doctrine into law while pushing any who can't live within those constraints to the margins of society. 

Conflict over control of the public space to promote one form of identity over another is as old as our Republic, so there is no excuse for not knowing that it is both futile and oppressive. It is the birthplace of totalitarianism whether it comes from progressive or conservative political forces. 

The public space can accommodate the actual diversity of society only when the members of that society are willing to give up their individual or group claims to dominate the whole public space in order to make room for everyone in at least most of the public space. 

If all insist on dominating everywhere then eventually our society will face two choices. It can self-destruct through a withdrawal into self-affirming private enclaves. Or it can effect a takeover of the public space by a government with a commitment only to maintaining its power. We can withdraw into fenced and barricaded communities with an empty public square. Or we can lapse into a totalitarianism that discriminates against everyone. We need not look too far historically and geographically to see what happens to societies in which either of these has occurred. 

Israelis and Palestinians - A Conflict Misunderstood

There is no modern solution to a non-modern conflict. 

What is called modern world, or modernity, is an understanding of the nature of reality that came to prominence in North Atlantic culture from the 17th century onward. Prominent in modern culture is the idea that all human behavior is, and should be, governed by natural law, human laws, and self-realization. Some of the laws governing human behavior are natural and can be discovered through the sciences of psychology and sociology. Others are made by humans themselves to be willfully imposed and voluntarily followed. Some are the rules humans choose for themselves as part of their personal identity. 

God’s law, beyond natural law, is excluded from consideration because if it exists at all it follows no discernable pattern and can achieve no universal consensus. And consistency and universal consensus are the marks of any true description of reality.  

There is also, in our time, a non-modern world that continues to be present in our societies. In this world human behavior is and should governed by interlocking systems of mutual obligation. These obligations are understood to be primal, built into the structure of reality, and are between humans and the non-human natural world, family members, clan members, tribe members, one’s fellow humans beyond the tribe, a variety of spirits or deities, and ultimately God. Law is essentially a description of these obligations, which are root of an identity that is unreservedly related to a community. 

 

At many levels, even in supposedly modern societies, the rule of law and the system of mutual obligations come into conflict. In Highway Patrolman Bruce Springsteen sings about a man caught between law and family obligation, “nothing feels better than blood on blood.” One could offer a thousand such dramas where the essential conflict is between modern obedience to the rule of modern laws and obedience to the law of primal obligations. 

 

If we understand this we can better understand the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, because both Israelis and Palestinians, and their ethnic and religious allies, are in conflict at two levels; one modern and one non-modern. And there is no modern solution to a non-modern conflict.

 

The modern Israeli view of this conflict is typically taken back 2000 years ago to the time in which Rome colonized Israel. After a series of civil wars Rome ultimately expelled the Jewish people from land that was rightfully theirs by virtue of having long inhabited, cared for, and governed it. Yet is remained for the Jews their homeland, and they maintained an intrinsic relationship to it through constant ritual remembrance and whenever possible a return to it. (A modern account typically leaves out claims about God giving the land to the descendants of Israel, because such claims are beyond modern modes of argument and reason.) 

 

The modern argument for the current status quo of both Jewish possession of the land and Israel’s sovereignty over it continues with an account of the legal purchase of land by Zionist settlers, who then held internationally recognized titles under Ottoman law and much later purchased land from 20th century Arab/Palestinian landowners. Ultimately an international decision and settlement of borders recognized Israel as a state and set aside land for a future Arab state. Because the newly independent state of Israel was at war with its neighbors the exact borders in that agreement were never realized in practice. 

 

Finally, and more contentiously, the argument goes that certain lands occupied in a war of self-defense can be legally annexed to Israel out of necessity for its own security, so long as the annexation is done under a set of clear, rational, laws passed by a democratic Israeli government. And further, that Israel has a legal right to secure the safety of its citizens and borders through police and military actions even if this sometimes means acting outside Israel’s borders and legal possessions. 

 

The argument ends with the expressed desire that a treaty, binding in international law, could be signed between internationally recognized governing authorities to resolve final issues of borders, sovereignty, and land ownership. In the meantime another kind of agreement, the Oslo accords, regulates issues of jurisdiction, land ownership and management. 

 

The modern Palestinian view of this conflict, pitched equally in terms of law, is rather different. First it questions the validity of Ottoman claims to ownership of the land subsequently purchased by Jews. After all, the argument goes, the Arab families that actually lived on the land claimed by Ottoman landlords had done so for centuries. Their right to the land was not acknowledged when the Ottomans conquered it, and their own legal systems for determining land rights had simply been ignored. In short they, not the Ottoman and certainly not the Jewish title holders, had the prior claim. 

 

Continuing this argument maintains that the UN Resolution 181 partitioning the former British Mandate of Palestine was passed with no representation by the Arab residents and landowners and violated the UN Charter itself which granted peoples the right of self-determination. The subsequent Declaration of Independence by Israel was thus in violation with the fundamental principles of international law. Thus no state has an obligation to recognize Israel, and indeed most majority Muslim countries do not formally recognize Israel. 

 

Going further, this modern argument states that Israel’s subsequent acquisition of land outside the boundaries specified in UN Resolution 181 has been through wars of conquest and subsequently is not recognized in international law, even as supposed title transfers from Arab/Palestinians to Israeli Jews have no basis in an agreed legal framework. The argument then goes that Israel has unilaterally violated the Oslo accords by its allowed expansion of Jewish settlements; noting that even in Israeli law many of these settlements are illegal. 

 

Beyond this, both sides continue to pose modern arguments concerning ever finer points of Israeli law, international law, and past and current events and treaties. 

 

And none of this actually tells us what is really going on. Because there is a distinctly non-modern side to both the Israeli and Palestinian societies that plays a huge role in the conflict. The non-modern side to the conflict arises from the ways in which both parties are involved in interlocking primal obligations  and identities that find no recognition in international law, but which they cannot give up and retain their sense of integrity and identity. 

 

For Israel these obligations are outlined through a series of covenants between God and Israel, culminating in the Torah. In these covenants the people of Israel are bound together in mutual family, clan, tribal, and ethno-national obligations. As importantly they have both ownership and an absolute obligation to be stewards of the land that God has promised them, and in particular of Jerusalem and the Temple as the sacred space in which God has chosen to be most immediately present for God’s people. Such ownership is non-transferable and cannot be abrogated. 

While circumstances over the past millennia temporarily relieved Israel of these covenantal obligations, the obligations never ceased. And now these circumstances have changed. For many Israelis and Jews more broadly the situation that has emerged in the last two centuries has renewed their absolute obligation to the promised land in general and Jerusalem and the Temple Mount in particular. Such obligations are sacred, and cannot be negotiated away by modern laws and treaties. They are the essence of Jewish identity.

 

The result, at this moment among both Jews generally and within Israel is conflict between Jews who understand themselves in terms of sacred obligations and those who understand themselves in terms of modern national and international law. While only a minority of Israeli Jews are religious, a larger number accept the non-modern/traditional world view in a visceral sense even if they don’t enunciate it in religious terms. 

 

There is a similar situation among Arabs/Palestinians. Their obligations to family members, clan members, and tribes are deeply inscribed in their ancient culture and affirmed by their religion: Islam. Similarly their culture and religion obliges them to be stewards of the lands of their ancestors; to care for their fields, trees, springs, and streams. Moreover, that religion gives them a sacred obligation to care for and protect the Al-Aqsa mosque which marks the very spot from which Muhammad journeyed to heaven and returned. And again, these are obligations established with and through God, and cannot be negotiated away. To be an Arab Muslim from the land between the Jordan and the sea is an identity bound to these obligations. In modern terms it is to be a Palestinian. 

 

Thus no purely modern framing of this conflict, whether it places it in the context of International law, psychological trauma, or sibling rivalry can provide more than a partial and temporary solution. Nor can the conflict be seen solely as a religious rivalry, although this has existed between Muslims and Jews. Religion is just a pointer to sacred obligations that overlap within a social and geographical terrain. 

 

I use the term “overlap” intentionally, because it appears to this outside observer that neither Jewish nor Muslim sacred obligations necessarily conflict. Yet in reality both sides understand their sacred obligations to be exclusive. This is why, as my friend Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger suggests, they can be resolved only through processes of reconciliation (rather than law) through which people understand that what was viewed as exclusive can be viewed otherwise without being disloyal to history, the  tradition and to the overall system. Finding a path toward reconciling apparently exclusive obligations is the work of Roots https://www.friendsofroots.net.

 

In the meantime those of us who care about both Israelis and Palestinians would do well to be conscious of the need above all for a reconciliation that cannot be reached through diplomatic efforts and the exercise of power. And we can support those groups, of which there are many, working toward that reconciliation  - often far from the spotlight of the media but ultimately to much better effect than either military force or political arm twisting. 

Enough with Bashing the Catholics and Evangelicals

 I’m over the rather continual progressive bashing of Evangelicals and Catholics. It is pointless, alienating, and risks becoming an exercise in self-righteousness. This is particularly so when the charge is that these groups are unloving without acknowledging that the meaning of the term “love” is part of the disagreement. 

Catholics, traditional Evangelicals, and Orthodox Christians find in the Biblical narrative and the tradition of the church support for a particular understanding of the created order that is intellectually coherent and emotionally satisfying. It is hierarchical and binary in its physical form, gendered with regard to animals and humans, cyclical with regard to time, ordered by eternal laws, and embraced in its entirety by God; whose relationship with it gives it purpose and meaning. 

The relationship of God to this created order is characterized by the word “love,” and thus the maintenance and restoration of this order is the essential act of love. The life of Christ, and particularly his death on the cross, is the ultimate act of Divine love to restore this order. When defined in this way, acts that discipline individuals into conformity with the created order are acts of love; human expressions of God’s relationship with Israel and then the Church over the millennia. 

There is no contradiction in saying that the Catholic church loves LGBTQ persons and that it refuses to bless their marriages. From their perspective the refusal to bless is an act of love intended to bring into or keep them within the order of creation. 

Of course there is a tension point, particularly among some Evangelical Christians: the ways in which they have already abandoned parts of the created order as found in the Bible under the pressure of social change. The justification for this has come by reading the Christ narrative as one not merely of restoration, but of progress. 

Under the influence of modernity and its acceptance that social structures evolve and progress, these Evangelicals make a move that the older Orthodox and Catholic traditions found more difficult. They came to see Christ as not merely restoring, but revealing hidden aspects of the old created order. When egalitarian and democratic ideals took hold in popular society Evangelicals embraced them as Christian while Catholics and Orthodox remained politically reactionary for much longer. Recognizing gender equality and divorce and remarriage took longer, but under the pressure of changes in their own membership Evangelicals eventually decided that this type of “progress” was actually just a deeper understanding of what had been there all along in scripture. 

But even so Evangelicals found ample New Testament evidence for an ordered creation, and love as the discipline that restores and maintains this order. The order wasn’t changing, it was just becoming clearer through the study of scripture under the influence of Christ’s Spirit. Discernment was the key, and up to now most Evangelicals haven't discerned Christ revealing a less binary and gendered social order. 

Where progressive Christianity has finally broken from Catholic and Evangelical views is that it does not read the Biblical narrative as a description of God’s order for creation. Progressives can read Genesis 1 and 2 to be sure. But instead of finding an order we find a process of ordering, a process that is evolutionary and progressive and whose continuation is placed in the hands of humanity as its stewards. The scriptural narrative does not reveal an order. It reveals the principles God has put in place to guide the progress of creation. 

Christ then comes to heal a creation and humanity whose ability to progress has been broken by sin. And through his death and resurrection Christ by his Spirit in the Church restores humanity to its task overseeing the continual progression of the created order toward the Reign of God as revealed in both Jewish Scripture and Christ’s own ministry. 

And this reveals an understanding of God’s love and thus human love that breaks sharply from the traditional view of love. For progressives God’s love revealed in Christ aims to fulfill, rather than merely restore, creation. It accepts and embraces emerging forms of self-understanding and social relations so long as they move humanity and creation toward the ideals of God’s Reign. It is the love of a realizable eschatology, even if it awaits some further act on God’s part to be fully realized. It is love as acceptance of difference given that we still await the full revealing of the glory of the Children of God.

So ultimately there is little point in talking about who is or is not acting in “love.” Progressives, Catholics, and Evangelicals simply don’t have a shared understanding of what the word love means. Nor, when it comes to it, do we have a fully shared understanding of the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection. And this isn’t merely in terms of atonement theory, but in terms of what constitutes the meaning of “sin” and what is entailed in overcoming it by Christ. 

We need to show solidarity with those who are being wounded because of their ongoing affiliation with groups that reject them, but at this point that means an invitation to leave a church that has no capacity to offer what we regard as love. 

In my wife’s language there is a saying, “like chickens talking to ducks.” But really what is happening is chickens talking to chickens about ducks, and visa-versa. As if this is going to change anything. We might consider trying to find a common language. Or at least listening long enough to be heard. 

The Right Side of History?

Quite often these days I’ve heard someone claim that they, or their political party, is “on the right side of history.” 

I’m afraid that this bit of bluster conceals the truth: There is no right side of history.

First, there is certainly no short-term right side of history. Having lived a short 65 years I’ve seen my own life, country, and world change directions so many times that every prediction about the right side of history over the short term is at best unreliable.

On a longer scale there are three contemporary basis for claiming that history has a right side and that some people and movements are on it and some aren’t. 

The oldest claim, based on some form of revelation, is that God (or some sort of divinity)  created the universe with an inexorable purpose, and continually guides it according to that purpose. If you knows that purpose you can be on the right side of history, 

The problem with this model is that among those who claim to understand God’s purposes there is intense disagreement concerning just what God wants. To claim, while holding a minority view of the correct interpretation of scripture (and they are all minority views) that one is “on the right side of history” goes beyond bluster to arrogance. 

Other religions such as Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism also have multiple variations on whether and in which direction history moves, and in none is there a single widely accepted answer. Even the idea of a final judgement, shared by Christians, Muslims, and Jews is subject to multiple temporal and eschatological variations.

A second claim to know the right side of history comes from the assertion that the world is progressing along certain historically discernible lines. The leaders of the American and French revolutions believed they had discerned these lines, as did Karl Marx and eventually the Communists. The problem with this claim is twofold. First, if Tom Holland in Dominion is correct then all of these are just variations on some form of Christian eschatology rooted in the wider culture of Christendom that preceded modernity. But even if these modern interpretations of history broke free of their cultural heritage they are sufficiently contradictory as to call the whole project of finding an arc of history into question. 

The third possibility is that the direction of history is determined by the purely natural causes characterized by scientific theories of evolution. 

Initially evolutionary theory seemed almost completely antithetical to the high ideals of progress found in the revolutionary movements of the 18th and 19th century. Survival of the fittest seemed to imply the inevitable triumph of the strong over the weak and a process of human history characterized by continual conflict over the control of resources. The peaceable kingdom dreamed of by religious people was definitely the wrong side of history, as were the egalitarian dreams of the founding fathers. 

Science has now taught us that nature is a complex system made of complex subsystems all possessing degrees of equilibrium and change. The equations that characterize this change are non-linear, making prediction of future changes impossible. What we do know from the study of the past is that the fittest in one situation (like dinosaurs) can quickly become extinct, replaced by others more suited to the ever changing system. Species that hold within their gene pool the greatest diversity of potential paths forward will be the survivors in the long run.

Diversity, as it happens, is a key survival characteristic of both species, eco-systems and societies. Under the right circumstances the weakest and most marginal may be the key to the future for the strongest and most central. Maybe. 

Because history in evolutionary theory is much like a mutual fund; past performance is no guarantee of future success. All it takes is a meteorite or a virus to change the course of history and rewrite the evolutionary list of the survivors and the extinct. 

As a result, to get to the present we humans must always rewrite the past, keeping historians and scientists always in business. The arc of history must be constantly redrawn, as indeed it always has been. The objective evidence shows us only this: humans have learned to value those things which help us to survive. Then when we survive we attribute to history the affirmation of our values, calling it progress. The only thing that puts you on the right side of history is living long enough to write it.

The view that humans determine the future by their choices, and calculate its arc by constantly recalibrating the effects of those choices may seem antithetical to Christian tradition. It is not, although choosing the Christian alternative is purely a matter of faith. 

The teaching of scripture, the key teaching from God for Christians, is that we humans have been put in charge of three things: the care of the natural world, the development of our social world, and the writing of its history. In short: making history and writing history. The first two were bequeathed to Adam, and the third to the prophets. God reveals God’s self as the judge of our efforts, not the doer of our work. 

There isn’t an arc from Eden to the New Jerusalem, only human decisions sometimes faithful to God’s calling and sometimes not. The End described in the Bible isn’t the conclusion of a logical progression. It is a sudden intrusion of a force more powerful than either comet or virus, with the assurance that no one will know the day and hour when it will come. God redeems history, we write it.

We live in the meantime. It is the time in which God has charged us to bend history to our will with the caveat that if we wish to survive God’s will must be our own. Be fruitful and multiply, essentially survival, is our only mitzvoth. We already know enough to know that the few signposts toward survival God has revealed continue to serve remarkably well, but only if, in our making and writing of history, we continue to take note of them. 

For now, if you ask who is on the right side of history well, I am. At least until I become history, or at least hopefully a couple of good anecdotes at the wake.

Moral Convictions - the Wrong Start in Human Relations

Recently on the PBS show "Hidden Brain” they discussed recent research on moral convictions. What research shows is that psychologically these moral convictions are seen as facts, objective facts in the world, even though if the person holding them could step back they could see that they are subjective states of mind.  

But the problem isn’t merely that we see moral convictions as objective facts. We associate our own moral character with upholding our moral convictions.  Thus, if someone disputes our moral convictions they are equally calling into question our moral character.   If they cannot be convinced to agree with us, at the very least we have a deep psychological need to remove them from our presence in order to maintain our psychic balance. Or we need to remove ourselves from their presence.  Either way, the emotion associated with this need to move apart from somebody is hatred.  The person who disputes our moral convictions is a person that to some degree we have a psychological need to hate. 

Of course any Christian can see that  the psychology of moral convictions demonstrated through scientific tests and reasoning comes into direct conflict with the command of Christ that we love one another without reserve. But to fully understand how we can learn to love and include those who do not share our moral convictions we need to talk about the Bible, and some rather unfortunate history. 

Part of the long story of the Hebrew Bible, our Christian Old Testament, is a story of how the Hebrew people became more and more aware of the breadth and diversity of God’s love. By the time we reach the 8th century prophets we have learned, with Israel, that God’s love and concern for humans is truly universal. In Amos chapter 9 God reminds Israel that Divine guidance not only led Israel out of Egypt, but the Philistines out of  Caphtor and the Arameans out of Kir. Whether in blessing or judgment Israel has no special place. 

In the Psalms, in Isaiah, in Malachi we find the same affirmations not only that God cares for all humanity, but that all humanity in some way worships and honors God. 

This idea, hinted at poetically when Psalm 87 asserts that all the peoples have their birthplace in Zion comes to its fulfillment in the universality of inclusion found in the teaching of Jesus. He not only finds faith among the nations of the earth, the universal impact of his death and resurrection breaks down the last barrier between righteous and unrighteousness. All, are saved when he is lifted up above the earth, and he draws all people to himself. 

Unfortunately at a fairly early stage in its history our Christian community turned away from the trajectory that began when Abraham was called to be a blessing to all the families of the earth and the apostles were send to the ends of the earth. 

By its second and third century the church, instead of focusing on the breadth of God’s love began obsessing over who was saved and why. Rightfully eschewing the divisions Paul so clearly decried the church instead focused on new divisions:  between the baptized and unbaptized, between those who held orthodox beliefs and those who didn’t. 

In Christ there may be neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. But for the emerging Catholic Church there was certainly a difference between the saved and the damned, or the orthodox, the heretics, the apostates, and the pagans. The old categories that might have divided the nascent Christian church in the time Paul were replaced by new categories suited to an empire, a civilization. Everything was based on whether you were baptized or not, whether you held the right beliefs or not. The practice of damning the pagans and anathematizing fellow Christians became a Christian habit.  

These new divisions were complimented, if we may use the word, by a hierarchical view of the created order drawn from the Genesis account of creation and neo-Platonism. Paul’s poetic vision aside, his own hierarchical understanding of the orderliness of God’s creation eventually justified the perpetuation of social hierarchies as exclusive as any in the pagan world. 

Nor were these finally overcome by Enlightenment egalitarianism and universalism, which the church fought tooth and nail. Instead Enlightenment Christians like Schlieremacher would devise their own hierarchies, now all quite scientific. And in the United States emerging scientific theories of race were readily read back into biblical accounts of ethnic distinctions to justify the enslaving of Africans.  The mark of Cain, the descendants of Ham, were blessed with forced conversion and then cursed with slavery. 

The result of all this is that contemporary Christian church inherited a dearth of traditional resources for comprehending diversity of its world in its emerging forms. And it is thus ill-equipped to realize in its life, or the larger life of society, the inclusiveness that is the natural result of the universality of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ. 

Instead, and indeed despite a century of ecumenism, differences in belief quickly devolve into differences between the saved and the damned, and a diversity of cultures and customs is all too quickly mapped onto the distinction between the righteous and the unrighteous.  

And this brings us directly to what I spoke about earlier in terms of moral convictions. The traditional church has imbued us with a set of moral convictions, and indeed a moral order, that only grudgingly makes way for genuine diversity and inclusion. 

But we do have a resource and that resource is Jesus Christ and his teaching. It takes little effort when one reads of the conflicts between Jesus and the teachers of the law to see a new revelation that actually interrogates moral convictions. That is what Jesus does with great consistency - he questions the moral convictions by which the Jews of his day lived, and loved, or hated. 

Even the disciples of Jesus are sometime aghast at his breaking of conventional moral codes, whether in conversing with the woman at the well or mixing with the unclean and uncouth. 

In our time Jesus is the one who leads us into the questioning of our own moral convictions. It is precisely the old law law written on our hearts and leading us into hateful hearts that we need to question. It is that old law that must be replaced by a new law, the law of love. 

Instead of letting our neighbor’s disagreement with our moral convictions lead us into just another form of ritual cleanliness and isolation, another variation on the old hatred for apparent unrighteousness, we need to see in our neighbor the probing of Jesus himself. The neighbor who will not let us rest easy in our convictions is just ike the prisoner, the sick, the hungry, the naked: an incarnation of Christ demanding that we love our neighbor as ourselves. Not merely when, but particularly because he or she is puncturing our posture of moral confidence and asking us to find ourselves not in our own righteousness, but the righteousness of Christ. 

In a time of deep divisions, exclusion, and hatred the teaching of Christ provides a guide for those who have been blind guides. 

34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

And on these we must hang together, or we will fall apart.

Civil Society and Social Distancing

Part 1

1. The concept of civil society in the West begins in Greece and Rome over 2000 years ago. But it really takes on meaning in the Enlightenment as political philosophers try to reimagine how a society can be organized. 
1. They recognize that businesses in general, whether in the form of guilds or emerging corporations and companies, represent one aspect of every society.
2. They recognize that government, meaning kings and associated parliaments, nobles and etc were another aspect of every society. 
3. But what about everyone else? At one time the church had been considered a third critical part of society, but in England and later the US the church was officially “disestablished.” For practical purposes it dis-integrated into competing sects. Religion was theoretically moved to the realm of private belief rather than being a public institution. 
4. Civil society then becomes the name for all those individuals and organizations in a democratic society whose political behavior determines the shape of that society. When civil society is strong, then the citizens control government and shape society to suit their interests. When civil society is weak then other interests (churches, businesses, media, and so on) take control of the state to their own benefit.
2. The US constitution recognizes the importance of civil society in the first amendment: 
1. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
2. Freedom of conscience or religious belief, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom to demand that the government stand by its promises are the fundamental basis for civil society. These insure that individuals are free to act together politically in a democratic setting. Civil society thus embraces both individual freedom and forming communities of action.
3. BUT freedom isn’t the only thing necessary for civil society. Equally important are constraints on public behavior that make it possible for individuals to work together. People have understood this from the dawn of time and it appears in the ethics of Aristotle, Confucius  and the Hindu Laws of Manu. If people do not discipline their own public behavior so that they can work with other people, then they become weak and fragmented, and ultimately are subject to tyrants and oligarchs.
4. So the big question is how people learn to discipline their own behavior so that they can cooperate in the task of building up society as a whole. Institutions, whether business, government, or church impose standards of behavior on those who work in them. But civil society can only exist when citizens freely constrain their own behavior; when they discipline themselves. It is self-discipline that is the basis of civil society.
5. And as the title of this talk suggests, this seems to be more difficult in a time of social distancing. So now a few notes.

Part 2

    

1. First it is useful to remember that what we call “social distancing” is really physical distancing that creates barriers to face to face communication. 
1. This is important because a key constraint on our public behavior is the presence of other humans.
1. With the exception of some specific individuals, we all possess in our brains circuits that specifically respond to the facial expressions and tones of voice of our fellow humans. And these create empathy, a sense of having the same feelings. 
2. Take away face to face interactions and it takes an imaginative effort to remain empathetic. As a result empathy eventually begins to disappear. 
1. As it disappears our behavior may well become more and more selfish and quite possibly hurtful. 
2. Or alternatively our behavior becomes more and more rule driven, and thus inflexible and unable to distinguish between different persons and their unique situations.
3. This same capacity for empathy means that we are always watching how others respond to us. We don’t want to make fools of ourselves in public, and this is a second important source of self-discipline. And again, this form of self discipline dissipates with physical distance and barriers to face to face interaction. We’ve all seen the jokes about people gaining weight, not wearing pants or skirts, and etc while locked down at home. They reflect a truth about what happens in the absence of full body social interactions.
2. But remember that communicating over physical distances has been a problem in every society, and in a minute we will look at the legacy of solutions to this problem. 
3. Our current situation isn’t just caused by physical distance. It has been created over the last century by what is the rise of REAL social distancing. 
1. Modern Americans work too many hours in isolation, change jobs too frequently, move their residences too frequently, and spend too many hours in front of a TV or other screens to have regular interaction with their neighbors.
2. Our cities and suburbs are effectively built on economic segregation. At work everyone may be on a first name basis, but in the parking garage and at home there will be a large physical difference between executives, their subordinates, and the PA’s and admin assistants. They live in different neighborhoods, eat at different restaurants, shop in different stores, and watch different TV shows. 
3. At the same time both the fragmentation of mass media and the rise of social media allow us to create new affinity groups that have the false intimacy found among people who agree with each other but never look each other in the eye. The size of our social groups has gotten bigger but much less diverse.
4. As a result we don’t have a chance to practice being part of civil society, to the point that we’ve almost forgotten how civil society actually works. 
2. Beyond the distancing we’ve created ourselves, a second contemporary problem is the rise of anonymity and the avatar. 
1. The home becomes a castle, surrounded by locked doors, shaded windows, privacy fences and entered through garages whose doors open and close automatically. It is quite possible that most of us never know or meet our neighbors. We live anonymous lives. 
2. But worse is the rise of the avatar, the substitute image of ourselves, a mask that hides our real selves from those with whom we socialize.
1. The philosopher and sociologist Charles Taylor notes that one aspect of European culture, and indeed most cultures, is the masquerade. It is the creation of a social space in which identities are hidden. And it is associated with a period of social chaos. In Christian culture it is typical of the period before Lent, called Carnival, Fasching, or Mardi Gras. These periods are associated with, allow, and even encourage every form of what is normally bad social behavior; excessive drinking, sensual displays and overt eroticism, lasciviousness, and even violence. 
2. But while this masquerade was limited to a brief part of the year, it is now a permanent feature of all those forms of socializing that are digitally mediated. The use of avatars has put us all in a perpetual state of social chaos. 
3. So until early this we year had two choices for socializing. 
1. We could meet people face to face and know exactly who we were meeting and use the full set of human communication skills. 
2. We could use digitally mediated communications and never be quite certain who was behind the mask. And the masks were, and are, getting better and better. Already I’ve been experimenting with a virtual 360 meeting room called Spatial that creates a lifelike avatar based on a photo of your head. It wouldn’t fool anybody, but such avatars are already emotionally compelling. 
3. Even current video conferencing only helps a little with anonymity and avatars. We’ve all seen how people use the possibility of an avatar to essentially hide what they are actually doing from the people in the video conference. 
4. Back in 1973 Roger Daltry of The Who sang “can you see the real me, can you, can you”. Today the answer is probably not. But I can see your pet dog, your grandchild, or Darth Vader standing in for you. 
3. In the end it isn’t so much physical distance, but social barriers such as isolation, anonymity, and avatars that have weakened civil society to the point that we are in real danger of losing the freedoms that make democracy possible and protect it from tyranny or oligarchy or both. 
4. What has changed with the COVID 19 crisis is that the residual physical contacts important to civil society have been curtailed, making us conscious of what we have actually been losing for decades. 

Part 3

1. So how do we maintain a civil society. I think we can learn from the ways civil society has been maintained when physical distances kept people from face to face communication. We can learn from people who wrote letters, for example, or communicated by the wireless to use that old word for the radio. And here is what we can learn.

1. First - we must do away with avatars when we socialize via social media. 
1. A key concern of socializing from a distance is always knowing to whom you are speaking. From letters sealed with wax, to trusted messengers, to passwords and codes it has always been essential that we speak directly and intimately only with those whom we know, and know about. 
2. This is why that old school “anonymous letter” was rightly rejected as a credible basis for action except in totalitarian societies that were already socially degenerate. Protecting the real identity of a whistleblower is far different from allowing slander behind the mask of an anonymous avatar. 
3. For my part I simply do not relate to anyone who doesn’t give me their name, and a picture of themselves, and enough information for me to identify them.  
2. Second - we will need to reintroduce the kind of formality in communication that characterized social life in the early 20th century and before.  We may not think of it this way, but formality actually protects all of us from emotional abuse and makes civil discourse possible.

1. First it establishes the respect we owe each other. Civil society is always hierarchical and never fully egalitarian. Formality simply recognizes this reality and establishes that every member of society has a respected place.
2. Salutations in email actually need to get more formal so that we establish an atmosphere of mutual respect. Or in the case of close friends they need to be more intimate to establish a common humanity. An email that begins, “Hi” simultaneously establishes the false intimacy of informality while encouraging disrespect. 
3. Secondly, formality in addressing people establishes the respect we want others to show our colleagues. In private I call my colleagues by their first names. In public, especially in front of students they are all Dr. so and so. This isn’t being stiff. It’s being realistic about a real hierarchical relationship. You cannot fairly grade a student that you want to also befriend. You don’t give an F to a friend, you give it to someone subordinate to you. The same is true of giving a raise or a demotion. Formal language simply acknowledges the reality of the role of power in our relationships and creates clear communication. 
4. Thirdly having a formal language that excludes derogatory terms, curse words, bigoted references, and so on insures that we don’t offend people who can’t see that we were only joking, or who we may not even know. And indeed most modern companies have strict guidelines for communications to insure that discourse stays civil. Until recently such guidelines were found among politicians. And they still remain in the military and civil service. But this is hardly new. The British Navy had such regulations in the 16th century and the language of diplomacy goes back even further.
5. In other words we cannot have civil society if we do not have the discipline to maintain a civil tongue, to use old fashioned language. Name-calling, innuendo, slander, curse words, derogatory references to political affiliation, race, gender, physical appearance, handicaps, and age all destroy civil society by destroying civil speech. Their acceptance in public speech destroys civil society. Their current use by the public and by politicians will destroy America.
1. Third - and this is new in our society, we need to be attentive to how our words will be received across physical and cultural distances.  
1. In the business world it is now common for an office of human resources to be dedicated to working out the formal language that can be used across various cultural divides. The business world knows that civility is critical to profitability and the mission of the company. 
2. Now the rest of us must learn that lesson with regard to social media. A Tweet, a Facebook post, and LinkedIn posting, and Instagram photo: All of these will travel instantly beyond the closed culture of the person from whom they originated into the wide, diverse, world. And if they are insensitive to cultural differences in communication they will create offense, alienation, and contribute to the breakdown of civil society. 
3. In social media we all speak through a megaphone. We do not know who is listening, so we need to guard carefully what we say. 
2. Forth, those of who really wish for civil discourse, should consider staying within civil spaces among civil friends.
1. An old friend of mine reminded me “if you wrestle with pigs you are going to get muddy.” Or as my mother said, "you know who you are by the friends you keep. And so do others.”
2. And since then I’ve stayed away from Twitter. Twitter is the social equivalent of a group of drunken adolescent boys in a strip bar. If you have a so-called “conversation” on Twitter it is likely to be interrupted or drowned out by someone you don’t know and will never want to know. Unrestrained, it is the opposite of a civil society with civil discourse. 
3. Facebook isn’t quite so bad, but I diligently unfriended and unfollowed anyone on Facebook that engages in uncivil behavior. Why would I want you as my Facebook friend when I would avoid you in real life? 
4. But note a problem: the commercial success of Facebook and Twitter, like that of most cable news, depends on uncivil, divisive, conversation. That is what draws eyeballs to the screen, that is what drives advertising revenue, that is what pays. So again, it must be the self-discipline of the public that uses these tools that keeps us civil. 
1. Fifth, we need to get out more often and leave behind our various “screens.” 
1. The best thing in my neighborhood about so-called social distancing is that all the young families are stuck at home. With their children. And as a result they are getting out of the house as often as they can. Suddenly for the first time in a decade I actually see all of my neighbors and can greet them from safe distance. 
2. And related to this - all the yards are looking great. Because we are all now conscious that there are other humans out seeing our houses and yards. Instead of waiting for a visit from code enforcement or the HOA because an anonymous neighbor reported us, we clean things up because we conscious that our behavior affects others. 
3. Civil society is built in public, in public spaces like restaurants, parks, museums, the theater, and most of all the neighborhood, which is the modern equivalent of the old village or town. We don’t need to rub shoulders with each other. And we can wear masks. But we need to be conscious that we occupy the same space with our fellow human beings, and that keeping that space safe, clean and healthy for all us is the fundamental task of civil society. 
4. Groups like the Rotary, or Sunday school classes that are currently meeting online are great. Online maintains relationship built face to face. But ultimately however much we adapt age old lessons for communicating across a distance they are only a temporary substitute for face to face encounters. Assuming of course, that in those encounters we show the value we have for our fellow humans by maintaining a social distance and wearing a face covering.

Lost without Translation

When I was first sent as a missionary to Austria I was almost immediately invited to a theological commission meeting for churches in Central Europe.  This seems like a great idea until I realized that in the commission meetings everyone spoke German.   Suddenly my PhD didn’t really mean a whole lot.  Even when I could understand what the discussion was about, I really couldn’t say anything.  And if I did say anything I sounded like a five-year-old because that was about the level of my German at the time. Without the language all your knowledge, all of your insights, and all of your experience is locked up inside of you and it cannot be communicated.  

It is no different when we come to the cultural realm of digitally mediated relationships.  It is a realm and a culture with its own language.  It is a visual language, and an aural language. It is a language with its own forms and grammar.  And if you don’t communicate in that language then you can’t be heard, or you will seem like a metaphorical five-year-old. Even if you have a PhD. 

My own podcast efforts are a pretty good example.  The content is good.  But I haven’t learned how to speak the aural language of the medium, and I don’t yet really understand the forms and grammar.  So my podcasts do not sound good.  What am I going to do?  In this case I don’t have time to learn to use the tools to bring the quality of my podcasts to where they need to be.  So I’ve hired an expert.  And experts are available on sites like fiverr.com and others for a reasonable cost. You can hear the problems I’m trying to overcome. https://interfaith-encounters.simplecast.com

On the other hand, learning to speak the visual language of the new media fascinates me.  And I have spent considerable time trying to learn it.  I’m getting better.  But I didn’t learn German in just a few months, and it is foolish to believe that I will learn the visual language of the new media in just a few months. But we're getting there: But I’m getting there: https://www.youtube.com/c/InterfaithEncounters

People with PhD‘s tend to look down on those they see as mere technicians. But the scriptwriter, the cinematographer, or the audio engineer has had to work every bit as long and hard and master every bit as great a body of knowledge as anyone with a PhD in theology, history, psychology, or math. And we need them, because without them we cannot translate our insights into the language of contemporary society. 

And when they become partners with theologians the result can be spectacular. More importantly, if theologians don’t want to be their partners then we will  lose our voice, as we have been losing it steadily for the last century. 

The same thing is true of the English language spoken between generations.  And I don’t just mean the mastery of a few idiomatic terms. There is been a good deal of research done on how people respond emotionally to certain words and phrases, depending on their generation. I have a doctoral student doing just this kind of research now and her bibliography runs to dozens of contemporary works dating to the 1990’s. 

What is notable is that words and phrases that create a positive emotional response in the baby boomer generation can create a profoundly negative response among Millennials and Gen Xers. They are as powerfully discriminatory as sexist and racist language.

This means pragmatically is that a lecture, or Sunday school lesson, or a sermon that has a strong positive impact for one generation can have a strong negative impact on another generation. And this is not necessarily because of the content. It is simply because of the selection of words and phrases used to convey that content.  The difference can be even more dramatic if the two generations are also raised into different cultural environments, for example the environment that exists entirely outside the church and the environment that exists inside the church. 

This does not mean that the situation is hopeless. It simply means that we must attend to the way we appear to others, whether it is visually, linguistically, or aurally. 

Living and working in Austria it became paramount for me to learn German. Just as living and working in Malaysia it became paramount for me to learn Malay.  I now regard it as paramount to learn the visual and aural language of contemporary culture and society.  Because grownups don’t pay attention to five-year-olds, however otherwise precocious.