Category Archives: Faith and Doubt

Wayne Meeks on the Myth of the Self-Interpreting Text


Acclaimed New Testament scholar Wayne A. Meeks , formerly of Yale University, has joined the Smith College faculty for this academic year. Local residents have the great opportunity to attend his three-lecture series, “Through the Glass Darkly: Reading the New Testament in a Postmodern World” (schedule here). Earlier this week, I went to the first installment, “The Myth of the Self-Interpreting Text”. It was like oxygen to my starved brain. Since self-ejecting from the evangelical community, I’ve been looking for conversation partners who are serious about Scripture, but also willing to acknowledge the text’s inescapable entanglement with human biases.

Meeks’ first lecture deconstructed the popular phrase “The Bible says…” First of all, which Bible? Christians rearranged the order of books in the Hebrew Scriptures to turn the open-ended story of the people of Israel into a story that led toward a single fulfillment in Christ. The Bibles used by Catholics and Eastern Orthodox include “apocryphal” books (and not even the same ones) that the Protestant version leaves out. The ancient manuscripts discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 contain still other non-canonical books, such as the Gospel of Thomas, that were probably in use among early Christian worship communities before the canon was settled in the 4th Century.

Meeks concluded: To talk about “the Bible” is to talk about a community and a tradition that acknowledges it as authoritative. No book is a Bible unless some community uses it as such.

What this means, in practical terms, is that “the Bible” is a contextual and evolving thing. There always have been, and probably always will be, different Bibles coexisting simultaneously, as communities grow and change, merge and split.

As used in today’s shrill political debates, the phrase “the Bible says…” commits what Meeks called the fallacy of textual agency. A text doesn’t say anything. Communities that use the Bible say this or that. (Shades of the NRA slogan: “Guns don’t kill people…people with guns kill people!”) It’s a metaphor–a necessary one, but also one that can be manipulated to conceal human agency, with all its less-than-holy motivations. Meeks said the fundamental mistake is to locate meaning in the text rather than in an appropriate interaction between text and reader. (He promised to offer guidance for non-arbitrary interpretation in a future lecture.) Interpretation has a history, or rather, histories.

So…relativism? Not necessarily. Meeks cited the philosopher Hilary Putnam as saying that what we have to give up is not objectivity but absolutism. We proceed in humility and hope. According to Putnam, once we give up on the Platonic “single meaning” that all interpreters are supposedly trying to snag, and instead see interpretation as an interaction between people, the open-endedness of it is a good thing, not a flaw.

During the Q&A, an audience member observed that the breakdown of interpretive communities is a big part of our current political problem. Our liberal-individualist culture likes to treat religion as personal, but most of the time, it is experienced first as communal, as Meeks’ analysis bears out. Whether we are conscious of it or not, our community and tradition fill in the blanks in the text. Think of all the background knowledge you need in order to understand any book, let alone one that was written by multiple authors over thousands of years! But nowadays, our old denominational communities are dissolving, or losing their authority, and new ones are forming along lines that are more political than religious (“progressive Christians”–look at which word takes priority).

This excellent lecture did not resolve my current spiritual struggles, so much as clarify them and thereby make them more distressing.

I suspect Meeks is more of a liberal than a thoroughgoing postmodernist. He placed more faith in “dialogue” between liberals and fundamentalists than I would. (Yes, these terms are loaded and imprecise. You know what I mean, though.) For what is dialogue, really, but the liberal version of evangelism–not about the contents of the text, but the interpretive method? Dialogue depends on the idea that there are multiple perspectives that each contain some legitimacy–the very premise that fundamentalists reject.

Both liberals and fundamentalists have to admit that there are diverse interpretive communities claiming a relationship to the Bible, but they choose to draw different conclusions from this situation. People who prioritize equality and freedom become liberals, while people who prioritize order and justice become fundamentalists.

A liberal looks at the multiplicity of viewpoints and life experiences, and says, “God would not be so unfair and arbitrary as to give the truth to only a few people and condemn the rest, especially when the truth of spiritual matters is so often opaque.” Therefore, she considers it a moral duty to recognize the contingency and partiality of her own viewpoint, and to be sensitive to the ways that political inequality affects interpretive authority. Her compassion takes the form of respecting others’ freedom to seek God for themselves, based on their unique situations.

A fundamentalist looks at the same picture, and says, “Since God is Truth, He would not leave people without a clear and undeniable truth to follow. Since God is righteous, He doesn’t give us the benefit of the doubt for good intentions. Since God is in charge and we are not, He’s within His rights to save only a few.” Therefore, she is comfortable with the idea that one group could be right and all the others wrong. The contingent historical origins of her viewpoint don’t trouble her, because she’s already accepted the premise that God would have to provide some source of revelation that floats above the uncertainties of the human mind, and she believes she knows what it is. Her compassion takes the form of evangelizing in order to save others from condemnation.

I personally feel that the approach I’ve termed “liberal” is closer to the spirit of Jesus in the Gospels. The Jesus I find there valued people more than texts, constantly challenged social and cultic hierarchies of access to God’s love, and was willing to break out the new wineskins to hold the heady brew that the old forms couldn’t contain.

But of course I would feel that way, since I come from a liberal intellectual Protestant tradition! And if that wasn’t the Jesus I found in the Bible…I wouldn’t be a Christian.

So are my evangelical friends right that I am putting politics ahead of faith–elevating my own preferences over God’s word?

Is it possible to do anything else?

Mark Hart: “Holy Communion”


Mark Hart is a Buddhist meditation teacher in Western Massachusetts. We’ll be giving a poetry reading together this February in Northampton. The poem below was first published in the Summer 2008 issue of Rock & Sling, a journal of faith and literature (sadly no longer publishing). Listen to an audio recording on the Bodhisara website.

Holy Communion

He spent one June head bowed
staring down from a timbered bridge
into still water mirroring blue.
From under the slender arching grass,
the wet, brown stone
of a muskrat’s head
arrowed grooves in that glass
and buckled a bladed sky.

Here was a quiet kingdom,
well-contained, a heaven on earth
of succulent roots and silken mud
where the brushed grass quaked
of her broad behind
and she preached her silent sermon
of simple grace, a creature in her place
gliding from bank to tufted bank.

She was his secret life
in the clutter of rooms,
the clatter of his kind,
and he knew the spot
where she entered
her cottage beneath the sod,
he knew the two that followed her
to their nest in that womb of earth.

The meek shall inherit
cool water, green fields
stroked by the breeze—
On a pew of creosote boards he sat
dangling his bare feet down
and partook of her holy communion
where air and earth come together
with a rippling flow between.

Marriage Equality Versus Fertility Cult


After the federal court overturned California’s Prop 8 gay marriage ban earlier this month, conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat lamented the passing of a certain ideal of the family:

This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest — as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing.


Note the odd specificity of this “ideal”. Why “sexually different” (have you ever met two partners who were sexually identical?), and why “biological parents”? These ethically irrelevant qualifiers must be thrown in to preserve the tenuous distinction between procreative straight couples and everyone else.

I agree with Douthat, and with conservative defenders of marriage, that society does have an interest in channeling the disruptive force of sexual desire into stable relationships, surrounding physical intimacy with emotional safety, and orienting lovers toward a future that extends beyond their desires of the moment. Christians should want to strengthen marriage because it can promote integration of body and spirit. Sex without a long-term investment in your partner’s well-being presents a temptation to ignore the golden rule that one should treat others as an end in themselves, not a means to an end.

Thus far, we’re still in the realm of ethics — behavioral standards based on evidence of what is or isn’t conducive to human flourishing. We can express our judgments about marriage versus other sexual arrangements, in hopes that this will encourage responsible choices. But Douthat also wants to make judgments about types of people, deeming one group superior to another, although this serves no purpose because the differences between them are biological and beyond their control. Stigma will not deter the disfavored way of being; at best, it’s a very un-Christian appeal to pride as an inducement for straight married couples to be faithful spouses and parents.

Gay political columnist Andrew Sullivan responds on his blog, The Daily Dish:

…Ross’ argument simply ignores the existence and dignity and lives and testimony of gay people. This is strange because the only reason this question has arisen at all is because the visibility of gay family members has become now so unmissable that it cannot be ignored. Yes, marriage equality was an idea some of us innovated. But it was not an idea plucked out of the sky. It was an attempt to adapt to an already big social change: the end of the homosexual stigma, the emergence of gay communities of great size and influence and diversity, and collapse of the closet. It came from a pressing need as a society to do something about this, rather than consign gay people to oblivion or marginalization or invisibility. More to the point, it emerged after we saw what can happen when human beings are provided no structure, no ideal, and no support for responsibility and fidelity and love.

If you have total gay freedom and no gay institutions that can channel love and desire into commitment and support, you end up in San Francisco in the 1970s. That way of life – however benignly expressed, however defensible as the pent-up unleashed liberation of a finally free people – helped kill 300,000 young human beings in this country in our lifetime. Ross may think that toll is unimportant, or that it was their fault, but I would argue that a Catholic’s indifference to this level of death and suffering and utter refusal to do anything constructive to prevent it happening again, indeed a resort to cruel stigmatization of gay people that helps lead to self-destructive tendencies, is morally evil.

What, in other words, would Ross have gay people do? What incentives would he, a social conservative, put in place to encourage gay couples and support them in their commitments and parenting and love? Notice the massive silence. He is not a homophobe as I can personally attest. But if he cannot offer something for this part of our society except a sad lament that they are forever uniquely excluded, by their nature, from being a “microcosm of civilization”, then this is not a serious contribution to the question at hand. It is merely a restatement of abstract dogma – not a contribution to the actual political and social debate we are now having.

We gays are here, Ross, as you well know. We are human beings. We love one another. We are part of countless families in this country, pay taxes, work hard, serve the country in the armed services, and look after our own biological children (and also those abandoned by their biological parents). Our sex drives are not going away, nor our need to be included in our own families, to find healing and growth and integration that alone will get us beyond the gay-straight divide into a more humane world and society.

Or are we here solely to act as a drop-shadow to the ideal heterosexual relationship?
…


I don’t share much of my personal life on this blog. Regular readers know that I was raised by two moms. But I’d like to speak up now on behalf of another group that’s also slighted by the biology-obsession of the Prop 8 crowd: Adoptive families.

One would think that social conservatives, being pro-life, would want to encourage adoption as an alternative to pregnancy termination. But their rhetoric on gay marriage ties them in knots. As Sullivan observes, gay couples are parents too. The only way to tell them apart is to elevate procreative ability to a spiritual ideal. Inadvertently perhaps, this attitude wounds and discourages potential adoptive parents, reinforcing our fear that infertility is a kind of failure, an exclusion from the highest level of sacred marital union.

As my husband and I have proceeded on our journey to build our family through adoption, we’ve become sensitized to this fertility bias. “Don’t you want to try to have your own children?” well-meaning acquaintances might say. (What do you think we’re doing?)

Through extensive reading and conversations with other families, we’ve also become convinced that an open adoption–where the birthparents are an ongoing part of the child’s life–is beneficial for all parties, especially the child. This too can be a hard sell to friends and relatives shaped by the one-mommy-one-daddy culture. It gives Heather Has Two Mommies a whole new meaning.

I found an unlikely soulmate in sex columnist Dan Savage. In his open adoption memoir The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant, he describes attending an adoption education seminar with a group of infertile straight couples. While the others were grieving the loss of the biological child they’d expected, he and Terry were thrilled that, as gay men, their civil rights had progressed to the point that they could start a family at all. Savage speculates that a lifetime of hearing heteronormative rhetoric contributed to his straight companions’ identity crisis and exacerbated the pain of infertility (boldface emphasis mine):

Heterosexual identity is all wrapped up in the ability of heterosexuals to make babies. Straight sex can do what gay sex cannot, make “miracles.” The straights at our seminar had expected to grow up, fall in love, get married, make love for fun, and sooner or later make love to make life. Infertility did more than shatter their expectations; it undermined their sexual identities.

Straight sex can be recreational or procreational–or both–but gay sex can only ever be recreational. Gay sex is never a means, only an end, and the end is pleasure. Homophobes use this to justify their hatred of gays and lesbians: straight sex, since it can make a baby, is “natural”; gay sex, since it can only make a mess, is not. Babies make straight sex more important than gay sex, so straights are therefore more important than gays. Babies underpin all hetero-supremacism, from “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” to “Gays don’t have children, so they have to recruit yours.” Even when straights are using birth control, procreation still sanctifies straight sex. Even when straights are having sex that couldn’t possibly make babies (oral, anal, phone, cyber), the fact that these two people could make babies under other circumstances or in other positions legitimizes straight sex.

This is pounded into the heads of gay people and straight people alike. Gays grow up believing that their desires, pleasures, and loves are illegitimate; and straights who fall for the hype believe they gotta work that magic, gotta make that baby, or…what? A straight person who can’t make a baby isn’t really a straight person at all. And if you’re not straight, you must be…what? You’re like my boyfriend and me. Suddenly your sex is all recreational, like gay sex, delegitimized and desanctified. Oh, it’s an expression of love–but so is gay sex, and that never made gay sex okay. No babies means no miracles, no magic. The sex you’re having may still be pleasurable, but in a sex-hating (and consequently sex-obsessed) culture, pleasure is not a good enough reason, otherwise gay and lesbian sex would never have been stigmatized.

I sympathized with the straight people sitting around the conference table. I understood what they must have been going through. I had been through it myself, a long time ago. When I hit puberty, I got the news that I was functionally infertile. But the straight couples at the seminar had only recently gotten that news, and they were still adjusting to it. How much we had in common with them was driven home by the rhetoric the counselors used during the seminar. It was the rhetoric of coming out. The straight couples were encouraged to accept what they could not change. In time, they’d see their “problem” as a blessing. It was important to tell family and friends the truth, even if they might not understand at first. They might in their ignorance ask hurtful questions, but be patient and try to answer. And while it is possible to live a lie, possible to adopt a child and pass it off as your biological child, no one can spend a lifetime in the closet.

Now we all had some common ground.
(pp.25-26)


Jesus, Word of the God Beyond Words


Corporations’ legal staff constantly patrol the Internet, searching for disparaging parodies and unauthorized YouTube videos that threaten their ability to control the discourse around their brand name. Proving that no target is too small, the Mattel Corp. last month denied my request to use the name “Barbie” in the title of my forthcoming poetry chapbook, which will now be called Anatomically Impossible Commercialized White Female Body Image Icon at 50. Or The Happy Endings Support Group. We’re still working out the details.

If God were as protective of His trademark as Coca-Cola, we’d all be in trouble.

“What right, really, do we have to talk about God?” asks Mark Galli in “God Talk is Dangerous“, an article on the Christianity Today blog. Normally we’d hesitate to pronounce on an issue that we didn’t know much about. But we often sling around opinions about God’s will and God’s attributes, even though “if there ever was a ‘topic’ beyond our comprehension, it is the infinite, immortal, and all powerful God!” Biblical and theological metaphors are always mere approximations. Galli writes:

This is the genius of apophatic theology, about which our brothers and sisters in the Orthodox tradition have taught us so much. Apophatic theology talks about God in terms of what he is not. God is uncreated, not bound by time and space, and in one sense is unknowable—that is, because he is infinite and we are finite, we can never know God as he is. From the perspective of apophatic theology, we can even say that God does not “exist.” We use that word to talk about people, plants, animals, and rocks. But how and why these created things “exist” cannot be compared to the way a transcendent, immortal deity “exists.”

…[But] the Incarnation and Jesus’ talk about God suggest that there is more than one way to blaspheme—that is, to be irreverent and impious. That would be to so exalt the transcendence of God that there is no room left in the imagination for the scandalous Emmanuel, God with us.

As early church theologian Irenaeus put it, Jesus Christ “gathered together all things into himself … he took up man into himself, the invisible becoming the visible, the incomprehensible being made comprehensible, the impassible becoming capable of suffering, and the Word being made man, thus summing up all things in himself.”

Today there are many who strive to protect the reputation of God. They are, so to speak, on “blasphemy alert.” At their best, they remind us whenever we suggest that God is anything but holy, immortal, and almighty. In an age such as ours—which can be so casual about things divine—I’m glad there are such people around.

But the interesting thing is that God does not seem all that concerned about his reputation. He is the one who inspired people to think of him as an inert rock (Deut. 32) or a common shepherd (Ps. 23), and who came to us not in a flashy show of glory and power but as a baby in a trough wrapped in rags. He apparently isn’t offended when he is mistaken for a simple gardener (John 20).

The incarnation is God’s permission to talk about that which, really, we don’t know that much about—God Almighty! He’s even willing for us to tread on the border of blasphemy if it will communicate something true about him.

To be sure, we are wise to not transgress that border. But that job is made easier when we realize that all our talk about God is partial, that there is no word picture that can do full justice to his being, that there is always something greater than the arresting image we might fashion—and that there is a divine source that can keep us both humble and balanced in our God-talk.


Reading this piece, I had the thought that the Incarnation points to a resolution of the postmodernist paralysis that follows from the inadequacy of language. Rather than revive the failed modernist project of searching for fixed, objective meanings that perfectly contain reality, we can speak knowing that we will fail, knowing also that we are forgiven for our failure to “get it right”. God-in-Jesus would rather that we took a halting step toward communication with him, than that we hung back out of false scrupulousness.

Leslea Newman: “Poem for Two Dogs, Hanged in Salem, 1692”


Lesléa Newman is the author of more than 50 books for children and adults, including the poetry collection Nobody’s Mother (Orchard House Books, 2008). The poem below, reprinted by permission, won second runner-up for poetry in the 2010 Solstice Literary Contest . Read all the winners here .

Poem for Two Dogs, Hanged in Salem, 1692

Did they hang

their heads

as good dogs do

when someone

slips beside them

to loop

a collar

or a rope

around their furry necks

Did they prance

along proudly

as happy dogs do

when trotting

alongside a friend

or stranger

who’s taking them

away

for a nice long walk

Did they give

sloppy kisses

as loving dogs do

when a kind man

or gruff man

kneels

down beside them

and says sit

and stay

Did they shake

all over

as frightened dogs do

when startled by thunder

or lightning

or black hoods

placed over their heads

making everything too quiet

and dark

Did they swing

their tails

as innocent dogs do

when they’re puzzled

or confused

but still

trusting those near

will bring them

no harm

Or did they bare

their teeth

growl and leap

snapping at the Hangman

before he strung them up

and they rose

to Heaven

leaving bodies behind

to be buried like bones

David Woo: “Divine Fire”


Prizewinning poet David Woo and the editors of the Asian American Literary Review have kindly granted me permission to reprint Woo’s poem “Divine Fire” below. The poem’s formal cadences and intellectual vocabulary seem to hold up a corrective to the apocalypse-fervor that he finds so dangerously inadequate.

“How to be good if a caul covers the prospect of your faith?” he asks, getting to the core of our temptation to “create an image, any image,” whose rules are easier to understand than the truly mysterious God. Hating the world in the name of our imagined divinity, we wind up trapped in our own imaginings, vulnerable to the skeptics’ jibe that God is only a projection of human ideals or neuroses.

Read Woo’s thoughts on the genesis of this poem here .

Divine Fire

“No more apocalypses!” the fanatics never cry. Extinction
is bliss for those who resent human life. We mocked
the fizzle of New Year’s 2000. We mock the wingnuts
who let the icecaps melt because the Rapture is nigh.

How to be good if a caul covers the prospect of your faith?
Create an image, any image, haloed, scimitared, thrust it
through Time’s wasp-waisted birth canal, let it emerge
bearded, lank, rebarbative. Tell yourself he’s the Man.

Now sit back as He pries the world apart. This is the end,
you’ll surmise, the end of dalliance, of amity, the last gasp
of afflatus, of consequent sorrow. Watch as He scythes
the last wheat, which flies like the severed heads of infidels.

Then why does the bread we break savor of no body
but the embodied ghosts of ancient grass? What infinity lives
in the turning leaves but a vaulted vision of our bonhomie?
What life basks at this homely fire but sees Saoshyant’s flame?

The embers will hold an American absence, ashes that leave
no mark of ankh or enso on him who frees critical mass
from a suitcase bomb. The last cloud will rain fire on flesh
that chars to faithless marrow. Even now the soul is fugitive.

****
(Editor’s note: Saoshyant is the World Savior figure in Zoroastrianism.)

Emanuel Xavier: “If Jesus Were Gay”


This provocative poem came to my attention on Kittredge Cherry’s blog Jesus in Love, a site that showcases images of GLBT spirituality and other nontraditional portrayals of the divine. Kitt writes:

Xavier makes sweet poetry out of his experiences as a gay Latino whose painful past includes sexual abuse at age 3 and rejection by his Catholic mother for being gay at age 16, leading to homelessness, drug dealing, prostitution — and at last to poetry….

…I perceived the face of Christ in his poems, even the [sexually explicit] ones. The book’s implication is that the rejected gay Jesus might turn to sex, drugs and prostitution to survive in America today. And our Savior would still embody love and beauty amid the muck.

In interviews, [Xavier] credits poetry with saving his life. “Fortunately, I walked away unscathed,” he told CNN. “I thought that God had given me a second chance, and I felt like I had to do something with that.”


Xavier has given me permission to reprint “If Jesus Were Gay”, the title poem of his collection, below. Visit his website at http://www.emanuelxavier.com/.

If Jesus Were Gay

If Jesus were gay,
would you tattoo him to your body?
hang him from your chest?
pray to him and worship the Son of Man?
Would you still praise him
after dying for your sins?

If it was revealed Jesus kissed another man,
but not on the cheek,
would you still beg him for forgiveness?
ask him for miracles?
hope your loved ones get to meet him
in heaven?

If Jesus were gay,
and still loved by God and Mary
because he was their child after all
hailed by all angels and feared by demons,
would you still long to be healed by him?
take him into your home and comfort him?
heal his wounds and break bread with him?

Would wars be waged over religion?
Would world leaders invoke his name
for votes?
Would churches everywhere rejoice
and celebrate his life?
Would rappers still thank him
in their acceptance speeches?

If the crown of thorns
were placed on his head
to mock him as the “Queen of the Jews”
If he was whipped
because fags are considered
sadomasochistic sodomites,
If he was crucified
for the brotherhood of man
would you still repent?

Would you pray to him
when you were dying?
If he didn’t ask for you to be just like him,
If he only wanted you to love yourself,
If he asked that you not judge others,
Would you still wait for him to come back and save your soul?

Would you deny him?
Would you believe in peace?
Would there still be hate?
Would there still be hell?

Would there be laws
based on the meaning of true love?
What would Jesus do?
What would you do?

****
Listen to his poem “Waiting for God”, a plea to end police brutality, on YouTube:


Tuesday Random Song: “Great Is Thy Faithfulness”


This song touched my heart when I heard it about four years ago, when I was just beginning to write my novel and was scared by the unpredictable ebb and flow of feeling close to my characters. I’ve always been hyper-aware of the transience of human lives, and for that reason, all the more grateful for the hope that God’s love is an unchanging foundation.

This clip is from The Big Sing at the Royal Albert Hall, featuring soloist Aled Jones and a whole lotta choirs.

1. Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father,
There is no shadow of turning with Thee;
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not
As Thou hast been Thou forever wilt be.

(Refrain)
Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see;
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided—
Great is Thy faithfulness,” Lord, unto me!

2. Summer and winter, and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above,
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.

(Refrain)

3. Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth,
Thy own dear presence to cheer and to guide;
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow,
Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!

(Refrain)

Supreme Court Says: Non-Discrimination Trumps Free Association


Last month I blogged about Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a pending Supreme Court case that pitted a public university’s nondiscrimination policy against a Christian student group’s desire to restrict membership based on belief and behavior. Specifically, Hastings College of Law (a University of California institution) denied official recognition to the CLS because they required their members to be professing Christians and to disavow “unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle”, i.e. homosexuality.

Following their tradition of shooting off controversial opinions just before they leave town for the summer, the Court yesterday decided the case in favor of Hastings, in a 5-4 decision written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

As I wrote before, it depresses me that a Christian group chose to make their anti-gay stance so fundamental to their identity. I’m glad that Hastings is trying to be a safe place for gay students, especially gay Christians. However, I think the precedent established here will do more harm than good. I sympathize with this analysis from the Christianity Today article:

…[I]t’s unlikely that many state colleges and universities will adapt such an “all comers” policy in the future, said Carl Esbeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Missouri who filed a friend of the court brief in the case for the National Association of Evangelicals, Evangelicals for Social Action, and leaders of the Evangelical Theological Society.

“It’s unlikely, because an all-comers policy by and large defeats the purpose for which state universities allow student organizations to be created and recognized by the educational institution,” he told CT. “Namely, that like-minded people can band together in an association or organization and thereby have not only common reinforcement among themselves but also have a greater voice because they’re speaking as a united group.”

Timothy Belz, who wrote the friend of the court brief with Esbeck, agreed that few schools will follow Hastings’s lead. “Even Justice Ginsburg said that just because it was constitutional didn’t mean it was advisable,” he said. “A lot of universities are not going to find that this is an advisable policy, where you can force the Young Democrats to elect a Republican, or a lesbian group to elect a straight male as their president. It’s a silly rule.”

The spectre of students organizing to take over the leadership of groups they don’t like has already happened at Central Michigan University, said David French, senior counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund and director of the ADF’s Center for Academic Freedom. It’s a strong possiblity at any school with a policy like the one at Hastings, he said in a blog post.

“By emphasizing the value of dissent within groups, the Court ignores the fundamental reality of an all-comers policy: Distinct student organizations exist at the whim of the majority,” French wrote. “If ‘all comers’ can join, then the majority can override the speech of any student group. Thus the true marketplace of ideas exists by the permission (or, more likely, apathy) of the majority. The potential for minority or disfavored groups at schools with an all-comers policy to self-censor to avoid controversy — and potential hostile takeovers — is high.”

But even if Hastings remains the only institution with such a policy, the Supreme Court decision is a blow, Esbeck said.

“The ruling today by the majority of the Supreme Court means that associational freedoms for all groups are diminished today. That includes groups that might celebrate the particular result here,” he said. “The First Amendment is of less value to all of us.”
…


Indeed, imagine your favorite unintended-consequences horror show here: A men’s rights activist takes over the leadership of a student feminist group. A Holocaust denier wants to join the board of Hillel. Applied in this mechanical way, a school policy aimed at protecting diversity actually produces homogenization because there are no safe places for affinity groups to flourish and resist assimilation by the majority.

Elsewhere, at the liberal site Religion Dispatches, Candace Chellew-Hodge counters:

…I don’t really know that, given the tenor of CLS and what it stands for, how many budding gay or lesbian lawyers would want to join them—but they ought to be afforded that right—especially if CLS is looking for recognition and funding from the college. They have to abide by the rules—they don’t get any special right to discriminate.

For all the years that the religious right has been howling about how gays and lesbians want “special rights,” it’s always nice to see the double edged sword cutting the other way from time to time.

I don’t think Candace is seeing the big picture here. Still, she’s right to point out the irony in conservatives’ selective use of the principles of equality, tolerance, diversity, and free association–all of which they want to deny to the GLBT community.

Ultimately, student groups across the political spectrum may realize that official recognition by the university comes with too high a price tag. A little more church-state separation, so to speak, might do them some good.

Signs of the Apocalypse: imachristian.com


Summer is here, and the smell of roasting meat offers enterprising Christians new opportunities to start those all-important conversations over your backyard barbecue. The imachristian.com store’s “Gifts for Father’s Day” page offers this lovely apron that shows which side of the grill you’re on. What better way to impress upon your guests the urgency of escaping hellfire?

For those of you with a mote in your eye, the fine print says “(“It is a burnt offering to the LORD, a pleasing aroma” – Ex 29:18, NIV)”

If Father’s Day is not your thing, other designs include “I’m a Christian Empty Nester Single”. Sounds like that person needs a hug.