Happy Birthday, Your Lifestyle Is a Sin Against Truth, But I Love You: Being Gay and Living in a Church of Truth without Love

In two preliminary reflections about the new papal encyclical Caritas in veritate that I’ve posted on this blog (here and here), I’ve argued that Benedict is trying to put the rabbit back into the hat—to correct a weapon-like notion of religious truth that he himself set into motion when he headed the Catholic church's doctrinal watchdog office, the CDF. I argue that “the pope is now trying to reconnect what ought never to have been separated, if we want to call ourselves Catholic and orthodox: love and truth.”

And I note that, in its practical applications, the notion of truth derived from Benedict’s work (as Cardinal Ratzinger) in the CDF and from John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis splendor has been used in an eminently uncharitable way in the church in recent years, to hound valuable members of the body of Christ out of communion, to force unquestioning conformity to disciplinary directives that do not have the standing of absolute truth necessary for salvation. I state,

John Paul II’s teaching about truth, behind which Ratzinger stood always in the background, has translated, in American Catholicism, into something that is not adequately Catholic. It has translated into witch hunts and the reduction of a fine, complex, ancient tradition, particularly in the area of ethics, into an anti-intellectual set of formulas that are used not to provoke thought or to invite discourse designed to help us fathom and internalize the tradition. These simplistic, anti-intellectual formulas are not intended to help us immerse ourselves in the transformative Truth Who is God. They are intended to separate the saved from the unsaved.

Today I’d like to provide an example of the process I’m describing above. It’s one close to home, and is therefore one not easy to write about. It involves a family I love, one very near to me, which is at the same time not my own family of birth.

And so I feel a certain reluctance to talk about the business of this family in a public forum. I do not want to deepen divisions that already exist in this family. I try to live with the goal of healing the world, not making its wounds more prevalent.

At the same time, there is no healing until we identify what has to be healed—not just theoretically, but practically, in the world in which we live and not in some abstract fantasy world that exists inside our heads. And to identify what has to be healed, we have to analyze what is right there in front of us—our own lives, our own experiences, our stories. We have to tell our stories in a way that brings meaning to them, in order to discover meaning (and healing) in our lives.

The story I want to tell now does involve me, but it’s primarily the story of my life partner Steve and of his family. And I tell it with his permission.

Yesterday was Steve’s 58th birthday. Just as I finished my commentary yesterday on Caritas in veritate, in which I proposed that Benedict is seeking to correct applications of his theology of religious truth that have become destructive in the church because they have separated truth from love, Steve received a number of birthday cards from his family.

One of these was from one of his sisters. Steve has been in conversation with this sister for some time now about an incident that happened several years ago when he and I were visiting his family. For reasons still murky to us, this sister’s husband has taken a violent turn towards the two gay members of Steve’s family—towards Steve and one of Steve’s brothers who happens also to be gay. And towards me as Steve’s partner and the partner of Steve’s brother.

When we were visiting several years back, Steve’s sister invited us to come to her house. When her husband heard of the invitation, he threatened her and us with violence if we came to his house. He forbade us and Steve’s gay brother and his partner ever to set foot in his house, and informed us all that if we ever did try to visit, we could expect to be met with violence.

We’ve seen enough of this person’s behavior in other situations to know that if he threatens violence, that’s a threat to be taken seriously. And so we have never sought to visit Steve’s sister on any subsequent trip to his family. In fact, we have never been in her house at all.

Being with this sister and her husband (and their eight children) is now, it goes without saying, excruciatingly painful. What does one say to someone—to a family member—who has threatened to do violence to you? For being who you are. For being gay.

And who has never—not once—apologized for this outburst and for these threats. And to a sister who has never again alluded to them or sought to apologize for them, and who has never once lifted the ban on visits to her house. Who probably can’t do so, without courting violence herself.

How does one kneel and pray beside someone like this, as we were expected to do at Steve's father's funeral a year ago? What does prayer mean when such ugly words hang in the air between you and another person, and the person who has uttered them is unwilling to take them back or even talk about them?

In recent months, probably because Steve’s father’s rather sudden death a year ago has produced family soul-searching that, Steve had hoped, might lead to healing and rapprochement in his family, Steve has tried to talk to this sister about what happened on that visit. And about how it affects him and me, when we now visit Steve’s family.

One practical effect of the threat is that I simply do not want to visit Steve’s family again. This sister and her husband are one among several siblings who have refused to accept me, and who have been grossly offensive to me. One brother has refused to shake my hand when I offered it to him. Another brother has told us not to visit him or his family.

These are the siblings in Steve's family who have remained Catholic. Three other siblings have distanced themselves from the church and are generally cordial. One of Steve's brothers, who is not gay, has, in fact, been extremely kind to us. The pain, the insult and injury, are inflicted solely by the Catholic members of this family.

That in itself makes me not want to visit Steve’s family. I can't stand the tension, the shattering of all that I believe is sacred. At his father’s funeral last year, it struck me as wildly . . . well, strange and insincere . . . that we all knelt to pray the Rosary, with the brother who refused to shake my hand leading it, and that we all prayed for an increase of charity in our lives. While we refuse to shake each other’s hands. While we tell each other not to visit our house.

While we threaten violence to each other, if the banned members of the family visit the righteous members. What can it mean, this prayer, this Catholicism, which treats family members with such conspicuous disdain, in the name of Christian love?

And so Steve’s sister’s birthday card yesterday. It contains a touching apology for the pain her husband’s threats of violence may have caused Steve and me (but not a revocation of the order never to visit her family). Then it goes on to say, “While I cannot condone the gay lifestyle because it is a sin against Truth . . . most importantly I love you and I love Bill.”

And now what do we do with that statement? If it affected only me, I know precisely what I’d do: I’d ignore it and continue my intent never to visit Steve’s family again, if I can avoid doing so. That’s a decision I don’t make easily, since I have no right to write off any human beings in the world, to act as if they don’t exist. And they’re his family, for God’s sake. He is connected to them by blood and being alienated from them hurts him like hell.

And I’ve learned in life never to say no. I’ve learned that just when I say I will not ever do something, that’s when life teaches me a lesson and forces me to remember that the reins of my life lie not in my hands but in God’s.

I can’t just ignore this birthday-greeting statement of Steve’s sister now, and go about my business, for another reason: this is that I see on a daily basis how these statements and the ugly, excluding, judging attitudes that lie behind them rob him of soul. I see first-hand and every day how these statements hurt him.

This birthday statement comes on the heels of a decision one of his nieces has just made, to invite Steve and his gay brother to her wedding, but to exclude their life partners. The niece is Catholic Catholic Catholic. She’s a product of the Franciscan university at Steubenville, and has spent some time living in England at a charismatic community based around the Birmingham oratory, which has close ties to her alma mater.

She majored in theology, and she has chosen to be married on the feast of the Assumption. Catholic. Did I say Catholic?

And she has deliberately (and, to my mind, coldly) chosen to pretend that neither I nor the partner of her other gay uncle exists, for her wedding. It’s not as if she is oblivious to the pain this has caused her uncles, either. Steve, at least, wrote to tell her of his reaction. And so did two of his brothers—the ones now distant from the church—who told her they will not attend her wedding out of solidarity with their brothers, whom she’s hurting by excluding their partners from her wedding.

Did I say Catholic? Steve’s niece and his sister are doing what they are doing out of sincere devotion to what they regard as the truth—the Truth, as Steve’s sister’s birthday greeting says: “I cannot condone the gay lifestyle because it is a sin against Truth.” But I love you.

Happy birthday. I love you. And oh, by the way, have I told you you’re a sinner? But I love you anyway.

How do people, religious people, work themselves into such intellectual, emotional, spiritual prisons? What kind of human being uses a birthday card to inform her brother that he’s a sinner? And relies on religious sanction as she does so?

And thinks she can then go on to talk about love?

Something’s wrong in the church today. And that something has everything to do with how the rubric of truth has been used in the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict, to exclude brothers and sisters from the family of God. To deny salvation to one’s brothers and sisters. To berate and threaten and demean one’s family members in the name of God.

While claiming that what one is doing is about love and not about plain old meanness that does not have a scintilla of sanctity about it.

I don’t get it. But it’s the world in which many of us live nowadays—many of us who are gay. The story I’m telling here is one that many other gay people could also tell about their dealings with their families, especially with their Christian families.

It’s a story of “truth” that has taken leave of love, and as a result, of “truth” that is damaging the church at its very heart—which is supposed to be all about love and about truth in the service of love, if the church has anything to do with Jesus. What kind of family—what kind of Christian family—believes that it is necessary for one family member to inform another that he’s a sinner, on his birthday for Christ’s sake? What kind of Christian family thinks it has the right to talk about loving someone whom it has just slapped in the face?

The sister sending this letter had her first child prior to marriage. I would not for the world have dreamed of informing her that she was a sinner as she struggled through that experience. Not my business. Who am I to look inside her heart and make that judgment? How do I know what circumstances led to that unfortunate event in her life?

And what would I accomplish by telling any member of my family that he or she is a sinner? If we’re all sinners, then why would I wish to single out one particular sinner and try to make his or her sin the prototype of all sin in the world? Why not focus on what’s much harder, dealing with my own sinful ways and my own stubborn heart, trying to foster love where suspicion and pain prevail?

I just don’t get it. But I do see, crystal clear, where Steve’s sister is coming from. Behind her statement that the gay lifestyle is a sin against Truth lie several decades of hard-hitting Vatican rhetoric about the splendor of Truth.

That rhetoric has done untold damage to the church. How the rhetoric has been applied, particularly in American Catholicism, has hurt countless numbers of people.

And these developments have made it much harder to talk about what should always have been central to the life of the church, but has been lost sight of by many of those who have chosen to set truth against love, with papal sanction: this is charity. Where charity and love prevail, there God is ever found.

That venerable old hymn talks about God being found where love dwells, not where truth prevails. Love, first and foremost: because God is love, and those who love abide in God. Love, first and foremost, because we delude ourselves if we claim to love God when we cannot love God in the people around us. Love, first and foremost, because love sums up the whole law and the prophets.

We have gotten away from what is first and foremost in our tradition, with our noise about Truth in the past several decades. It may now be too late to reconnect that absolutely central Christian insight about love first and foremost to all the “truth” floating around in the church in recent years, for many of us who have been the primary victims of this “truth.” I applaud Benedict for trying. But I'm not sure he's going to succeed. For too many of us now, the church has become an impediment, as we seek God.

And as we look for love, healing, salfivic love, in a church in which truth has been played against love in a way that tells us, over and over, that we have no rightful place in the family of God, no right to expect any real experience of love and acceptance from brothers and sisters who claim the right to see themselves as loving even as they threaten and demean us. In the name of truth that has long since taken leave of love.

"Charity in Truth": Putting the Rabbit Back in the Hat, Reconnecting Truth and Love

As the week ends, I’d like to make a few more observations (in addition to those I made a day or so ago) about the new papal encyclical Caritas in veritate. Once again, these are preliminary observations, rather than careful responses to specific aspects of the document, which I’m still reading. These are my attempt to capture what seems to me to be one of the primary intents of this document, an intent that hasn’t received much attention in any analysis I’ve read thus far.

That intent is to engage a strand of Catholic thinking that has become dominant in the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict. It’s a strand of thought that directly emanates from Benedict himself, from his work as Cardinal Ratzinger when he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under John Paul II. In that capacity, the current pope has had enormous influence on the direction the Catholic church has taken since Vatican II.

In key respects, the legacy of Ratzinger-Benedict is very mixed, and, indeed, has been destructive to the church. In my view, Benedict sees this now as pope, at least to a certain extent, and Caritas in veritate is an attempt to correct a trend he himself set in motion in the church under the previous pope, as the watchdog for orthodoxy under John Paul II.

One other prefatory remark before I get to the heart of what I want to say. I could, if I wished, frame what I’m about to say as a scholarly theological reflection, citing significant theologians and texts. I could well use technical theological language to make my points here.

On this blog, I have chosen to write at a different level and to a different audience. As I’ve noted since I began Bilgrimage, in my view, academic theologians do a disservice to the church when they write only in an abstruse language accessible primarily to other trained theologians. The entire church has a vested interest in the theological enterprise. The calling of theologians is a ministry within the church, and that ministry builds the church when it is exercised in a way that draws “ordinary” lay people—with their rich theological insights, stemming from their lived experience of faith—into the theological conversation.

I understand why many theologians have chosen in recent years to write differently, to address a trained theological audience in esoteric language that shuts out the majority of the people of God. They’ve done so because they are afraid. And their reason for fear has everything to do with that current that Ratzinger set into motion as head of the CDF, a current entirely amenable to John Paul II. It has to do with the cowing, intimidating way in which the Vatican and its enforcers at the level of the episcopacy have used the rubric of “truth” in the church to discipline, weed out, intimidate, and control the people of God—and theologians, in particular.

Speak outside the narrow canons of “truth” established by the last two papacies, delve into the mysteries of the faith in a way that tries to make them accessible to the people of God and relates those mysteries to the contemporary age, ask critical questions about how the “truths” promoted by the last two regimes relate to the broader tradition and are to be received by the faithful today, and one can find oneself in serious trouble. During the Ratzinger-Benedict and John Paul II regimes, the church has hemorrhaged good, faithful, Spirit-led theologians, one after the other, who have been barred from teaching, run out of their jobs, and in many cases, deliberately pushed out of the church by the Vatican and various bishops.

This has done incalculable harm to the Catholic church. It has set the church back centuries and has crippled the church in its response to late modernity and the postmodern period. It has dumbed down the church, created a generation of anti-intellectual and pastorally inept clergy, and stifled careful, critical thought necessary to deepen people’s experience of faith in a complex cultural context. The reactionary moment Ratzinger-Benedict and John Paul II have fostered in the church has assured that the Catholic church has increasingly little of importance to contribute to important postmodern cultural conversations, little, that is, that is credible to thoughtful people for whom the religious enterprise is more than catechetical in the barest, least thoughtful sense of that term.

And these developments have everything to do with how Ratzinger-Benedict and John Paul II chose to regard and to talk about Christian truth in the latter part of the 20th century. The “truth” the last two papal regimes have promoted has been largely a clerical possession, and the theological enterprise in the Catholic church has, insofar as possible, been deliberately subjugated to clerical control. This is another reason that I choose not to speak in a trained theological voice on this blog. To do so at this point in Catholic history is all too often to reinforce a clerical system and a clerical worldview, which badly need to be reformed and not bolstered, if the church is to have a viable future.

Following Vatican II, there was, at the center of the church—and in Ratzinger’s CDF, in particular—an intent fear that the theological enterprise would get out of hand, out of clerical hands. Much of the emphasis on “truth” that has dominated Catholic thought and pastoral statements during the last two papacies is an attempt to assure that theology remains, if not always in clerical hands (because the numbers of priests are falling even as more lay people are becoming theologians), at least controlled by those hands.

Much of the theological vocabulary and the theological thought-world with which we’ve ended up as a result is, frankly, stultifying, anti-intellectual, and heavily skewed in a male-dominant, clerical-dominant direction. I refuse to reinforce that vocabulary and worldview. In my view, it represents the dead hand of one tiny but all-powerful and privileged contingent of the people of God, the clerical elite, on the church and its future. And because that tiny, all-powerful and privileged elite is also necessarily male, at this point in history—due to John Paul II’s and Ratzinger-Benedict’s insistence that clerics must be male—this vocabulary and worldview reek of patriarchal assumptions.

I want to speak in another voice on this blog, and in my work as a theologian. My goal is to speak in a voice that makes sense to a wide range of people of good will, whose experience of God is every bit as valuable as that of male clerics—and perhaps ultimately far more valuable to a church that wants to have a viable future.

In my view, Caritas in veritate represents a dawning awareness on the part of Benedict that the concept of truth he has enabled in the church in reaction to Vatican II—a heavily clerical concept that reflects the experience of only a small proportion of the people of God—has begun to do incalculable damage to the church. Caritas in veritate is, at one level, an attempt to correct a weapon-like notion of truth that Benedict himself has promoted, which betrays the tradition itself in some important ways.

In traditional Catholic thought, truth and love have never been separated—never separated, that is, in texts or movements regarded by the tradition as orthodox. The way in which “truth” has taken on a life of its own in the Catholic church in the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict—as a vigilant, reactionary, watchdog force in the church intent on pummeling anyone who strays from its dictates—is not orthodox at all. It is the antithesis of orthodoxy.

It is a viewpoint that subjugates what passes for eternal salvific truth, but is really a temporally conditioned and mutable disciplinary ruling of the church, to what always has to be central in the church, if the church is to be credible in its claim to live according to the way of Jesus: love. Truth without love is nothing. It is dead. It is, indeed, a dead hand on the life of the church, which must constantly be animated by love, if the church is following the Spirit of God who is love.

John Paul II's Veritatis splendor certainly made the points I am making. But those who wanted to read this document as the vindication of truth over love—as the vindication of a vigilant, reactionary, watchdog notion of truth intent on pummeling anyone who strays from its dictates—did not hear that aspect of John Paul II’s encyclical. And it must be admitted, they did not hear that aspect in part because Ratzinger and John Paul II did not want that aspect to prevail.

They wanted the reactionary watchdog notion of truth to prevail. And now they are faced with the results of that choice: a church in which groups claiming to stand for “the” truth do everything in their power to hound others out of the church, while maintaining that they represent the best of papal thinking and of the tradition, even as they use the tradition very selectively and in ways that betray the core of the tradition. And while they seem, quite frequently, to be oblivious to the demands of charity in their crusade to assure that the church abides in the truth, in their truth, in historically conditioned and mutable expressions of the tradition that do not capture that tradition for all times and all places . . . .

In my view, Benedict has written Caritas in veritate as a reminder to his own disciples, to those who now claim the center of the church and who claim to represent orthodoxy and tradition in all its purity, that truth without love is nothing at all. It is certainly not orthodox, traditional, or rooted in the gospels.

What has been lost sight of in the church in this period of perfervid professions of faith by those who own the truth exclusively, and use that exclusive ownership to rule others out of communion, is that the concept of truth is multi-faceted and complex in Catholic tradition. There are salvific truths, truths necessary for salvation. And there are disciplinary “truths,” historically conditioned statements and stances taken by the church at official levels and imposed on the whole church in the name of truth, which do not reach the level of salvific truths. And which may therefore be questioned and changed . . . . .

Traditional Catholic theology has always recognized that there is a hierarchy of truths in the church, and that not every assertion of the teaching church and its pastoral leaders deserves the same degree of obedient response. The truths that stand at the center of the faith, those necessary for salvation, are not numerous. The classic credal statements of the church capture those truths.

They point us to the kind of truth the scriptures regard as salvific and transformative—truths centered on relationship, not on formulas to be memorized and repeated. The scriptures focus on God as the ultimate truth, the truth whom we must encounter with our whole hearts and minds if we expect salvation. Formulas that lead us to the God who transforms our hearts and minds operate at a level of truth secondary to the truth who is God. They capture in halting human language what transcends language. They encapsulate classic responses to the divine that frame our experience of the divine in later generations, and induct us into the salvific encounter with God in our own lives.

The concept of truth, the various levels at which the term operates in Catholic thought, the crucial distinction between the biblical and the dogmatic notion of religious truth: these have been muddled and leveled in the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict, with lamentable results. Now, every statement that emanates from Rome or from bishops’ conferences is likely to be regarded as truth—as absolute, salvific truth—no matter the level at which that statement functions.

Disciplinary “truths,” statements designed to establish boundaries within which the faithful are expected to live, are conflated with salvific truths, as if the teaching about artificial contraception (or homosexuality) functions at the same level and is to be received with the same deference as the teaching about the divine-human nature of Christ. “Truths” that are merely disciplinary rulings by pastoral leaders now operate, in the thinking of many Catholics, as weapons to be used to divide the sheep from the goats, the saved from the unsaved. With seriously destructive consequences for the church as a whole . . . .

What is temporal, historically conditioned, what has developed over time and can change (and must and will change eventually) is being treated by many Catholics today as immutable, salvific, truth that must be held by all Catholics who expect salvation. And demands are made in the name of that immutable salvific truth to weed from the faithful anyone who dissents in good conscience from truths that do not touch on the heart of faith, that are merely disciplinary regulations of pastoral leaders, and that can well be questioned and changed.

As a theologian, Benedict is aware of these distinctions. As a pastor, I think he’s becoming aware, now, of the damage that his conflation of salvific truth with disciplinary truths has done to the church. And of the need for charity, even as we discuss truth. Especially of the need for charity, as we discuss truth.

And so he has written an encyclical that tries, after the fact, to reconnect the two, truth and love, at this point in the history of the church, in a period in which what passes for truth has all too often taken leave of love in the church. The encyclical certainly continues the hard emphasis of John Paul II-Benedict on truth as a central aspect of the Christian way of being in the world. And it continues the creeping infallibilist conflation of salvific truths with disciplinary "truths."

But even as it does so, it does so with a new awareness—I believe—of the damage that has been done to the church in the name of "truth" in the past several decades. And so it seeks to correct, after far too much damage has already been done, what ought never to have been set in motion in the church—the disjunction of truth from love, as mutable, historically conditioned disciplinary rulings from the center of the church have been imposed on the people of God as truths necessary for salvation.

Bedford, Texas or Anaheim, California: The City of God vs. the City of Man in Contemporary Anglican Orthodoxy

Wow. Little did I know when I was blogging earlier today about the Christ-vs.-culture debate in the Anglican communion that the Most Reverend Robert William Duncan, Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America, had just upped the ante in this debate. Considerably so. Archbishop Duncan has just written an open letter (H/T to Clerical Whispers) to his Episcopalian brothers and sisters, setting them straight about who owns God. And who doesn’t. Decisively so.

Archbishop Duncan (who leads one of the splinter groups that has developed in the U.S. to resist gay rights in the Anglican communion) makes no bones about it: his group and groups like it represent God. The rest represent, well, hell.

In stark Manichean dichotomies that mistakenly claim Augustinian provenance, the Most Reverend Robert Duncan tells us it all comes down to Bedford, Texas or Anaheim, California. To Jerusalem or Babylon. To received values and behaviors or revolutionary tastes. To the City of God or the City of Man.

To Archbishop Duncan’s Anglican Church in North America or the Episcopal Church USA. To Archbishop Robert Duncan or Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori. To God or the devil. To blessing or curse, life or death.

To church or culture, and to gay exclusion/holding the line or gay inclusion/giving in to godless demonic culture.

And so now we know: it all comes down to Bedford, Texas or Anaheim, California—the whole, tortuous, fascinating, complex course of Christian history—to the absolute, certain, unquestionable identification of Bedford, Texas with the City of God, and Anaheim, California with the headed-for-hell-in-a-handbasket City of Man. Bedford happens to be, you see, where the Anglican Church of North America just met to elect one Robert William Duncan their archbishop.

Who’d a-thunk it was so simple? God and Archbishop Duncan or the devil and Bishop Schori? The City of God incarnate in Texas, the corrupt City of Man skulking about California. Gays in and blessed or out and damned. Christ or culture.

Archbishop Duncan cites St. Augustine as the source for his black and white analysis of things that neatly places God on Archbishop Duncan’s side and against his Episcopalian brothers and sisters. The only problem is, this is not what Augustine said in his City of God. And it’s not the reason he wrote that work.

Augustine was an opponent of the Manicheans, you see, and a critic of their simplistic, black-white worldview that divides everything into good and evil, light and darkness. And allows us to know, short of the final winnowing and judgment that belong to God alone, who fits where.

Just as he was an opponent of the Donatists, with their puffed-up certainty that their little group and theirs alone had captured Christian truth and virtue for all time. In Augustine’s view, they were like frogs sitting around a tiny pond croaking that their little bit of water was the Mediterranean.

In Augustine’s view, only God knows who belongs to the City of God and who to the City of Man, and it’s God’s business and God’s alone to make that judgment. And when God does make it, Augustine maintains, many of us will be mighty surprised at who’s in and who’s out: many of those who are oh so certain they are in the City of God and oh so certain that their enemies are out will find that the opposite is the case, on that final day when sheep and goats are separated.

Bedford or Anaheim. The tiny pond or the big wide sea. Augustine would, I think, be very surprised (and perhaps not entirely amused) to see where the “orthodox” of our day have ended up, while claiming as their authority works he wrote to defend a very different orthodoxy, one far bigger than the one they wish to promote in his name. Having tussled with the Manicheans and the Donatists over precisely the question of separating the sheep from the goats and the tiny pond vs. the big wide sea, he’d perhaps find it terribly ironic that the church has now come to reside in all its countercultural and doctrinal purity only in little old Bedford, Texas in this year of our Lord 2009.

Christ or Culture: Framing the Anglican Debate about Gay and Women's Rights

Recent commentary (e.g., here) about what’s happening in the Episcopal Church asks whether it’s church or culture: do churches stand against and hope to lead the cultures in which they live; or do they cave in to the culture around them and go along with cultural trends antithetical to the gospel?

This stark either-or understanding of the complex dialectic relationship between church and culture is simplistic in the extreme. It ignores the reality of how church and culture have always related to each other throughout history: at some points, the culture leads, developing insights, norms, and trends that challenge the church to be more acute in its reading of the gospels and more faithful to the gospels; at other times, the church calls on culture to abide by the culture’s own norms of fair play, justice, and decency.

As the question has been framed in the American mainstream media for some time now, the church appears to have only one choice: either to stand doggedly against culture when culture moves in directions the church condemns; or to give in to culture and lose its soul. The question has been framed that way because this is how the religious right chooses to see the church’s options vis-à-vis women’s rights, abortion, and homosexuality, each of which has been made by the religious right a litmus test of orthodoxy and a test case for the church’s willingness to preach against or capitulate to the culture at large.

This simplistic either-or way of framing the church’s options at this point in history completely overlooks the significant classic work of H. Richard Niebuhr, which found a variety of options for churches as they confront the cultures in which they live. Niebuhr offers five typologies: the church can stand over against culture; it can succumb to culture; it can seek to place itself above culture; it can view its relationship to culture as paradoxical; or it can concern itself primarily with transforming culture. As an accomplished student of Christian history, Niebuhr found all these options running throughout Christian history. And he noted that churches can incorporate several of these tendencies simultaneously at any given point in history.

Though the dependence of H. Richard Niebuhr and his brother Reinhold Niebuhr on the social gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th century is often not acknowledged because the Niebuhrs were critics of the social gospel, both accepted key principles of the social gospel theology even as they critiqued this theology. One of these principles—which strongly underlies Richard Niebuhr’s work on Christ and culture—is that the kingdom of God (and, consequently, the church) and culture co-exist in a constant dialectic relationship throughout Christian history.

This approach to the question of Christ and culture, which is central to the thought of leading social gospel theologians including Walter Rauschenbusch and Shailer Mathews, assumes that the church exists primarily to proclaim the reign of God and to prefigure the reign of God in its own life, over the course of history. Social gospel theologians followed German biblical exegetes who, by the latter part of the 19th century, became aware that Jesus’s life and ministry were focused on proclaiming the imminent arrival of the reign of God in history, not on founding and building a church.

The concept of church is nowhere to be found in Jesus’s thinking. This concept, and the structures that flow from it, are later developments in response to Jesus’s proclamation of the reign of God, and to his death and resurrection. The church is an attempt to institutionalize the memory of Jesus’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection, and his proclamation of the reign of God.

Out of these biblical findings—which have long been accepted by both Protestant and Catholic scripture scholars and theologians, and are resisted only by marginal fundamentalist groups within the churches—the social gospel developed a theology focused on the church’s obligation to respond to the culture around it in dialectical fashion, as both the world and the church move towards the consummation of history that Christian faith identifies as the reign of God. Social gospel theology recognizes that both the secular and the sacred realms can prefigure the reign of God through their moral insights, their vision of the possibilities of human existence, and their pursuit of justice for all.

Social gospel theology thus provides an important optic through which Christians can view some cultural developments as challenges to the church itself, because those developments more adequately realize the notion of the kingdom of God that Jesus set forth in his life and preaching than the church has yet realized the notion. This is the insight Martin Luther King—who was influenced in important respects by the social gospel and the Niebuhrs—was articulating when he said that the church ought to be the headlight of movements for justice, but often finds itself the taillight.

The church has found itself challenged throughout the course of history by secular developments that are more adequate expressions of the reign of God than are to be found in the church’s own life and teaching. Conversely, there have been times in the course of Christian history when the church has played a prophetic role in calling cultures to accountability to their secular notions of justice and fair play.

From an historical standpoint, the church’s relationship to culture is always dialectical. It is more complex than any one typology can capture. It is a dance, a give and take in which the culture often leads, and the church follows, or the church leads, with the culture following.

It would be fatuous for anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of Western history to deny that the churches have often been capable of shocking, grotesque cruelty and injustice: the churches have again and again betrayed Jesus’s notion of the reign of God in their behavior and institutional life. The churches have blessed and helped to foment wars, even calling wars “holy.” They have tortured and burned “heretics” and “witches.” They have fostered pogroms against the Jewish community, and in the Holocaust, many believers and many church leaders turned a blind eye to the mass murder of Jewish people. The churches long accepted and even practiced slavery. The churches have historically oppressed women and sought to subject women to second-class status as human beings.

In many cases, the churches only gave up these inhumane, cruel practices when secular movements began to challenge the church to recognize that its way of dealing with particular groups of people was immoral and antithetical to the Christian gospels. In many cases, secular societies have had to make laws to force the churches to adhere to even the most fundamental moral principles inherent in the gospels that the church proclaims as its foundational documents.

The debate now underway about the role of women and gay people in church and world cannot be reduced to a simplistic church-vs.-culture analysis, in which many churches’s anti-gay and misogynistic stances somehow have the blessing of the gospels, and the culture’s willingness to accord rights and freedom to women and gay persons represents an abdication of Christian principles. The debate cannot be reduced to that simplistic text, that is—the text the Christian right wants to continue seeing throughout the mainstream media—if we are honest about what is going on in this debate, and what the debate entails.

One of the grand ironies of the either-or church-vs.-culture analysis is that the very groups within Christianity who now want to claim that they and they alone are standing stalwartly against culture in resisting women’s rights and gay rights are themselves deeply enculturated—and enculturated precisely in their misogyny and homophobia. Misogyny and homophobia are every bit as much historically developed cultural patterns as racism and slavery are.

In defending racism and slavery in the 19th century, the predecessors of those Christian groups now claiming to be saviors of the church against corrupt gay-affirming mainstream culture constantly maintained that they alone had maintained the doctrinal purity of the church throughout history, with its blessing of slavery. In defending racism and slavery in the 19th century, the predecessors of Christian groups now defending misogyny and homophobia claimed to stand on orthodox ground and perennial “truth,” while they were actually fighting to maintain historically developed cultural practices that have nothing at all to do with the gospels and the reign of God, and everything to do with the power of select groups over groups on whose backs that illicit power rests.

As the Anglican communion struggles with questions about how the church ought to respond today to the legitimate demands of women and gay persons to be treated as fully human, many Catholics are looking on with a smug sense of superiority founded on an illusion: this is the illusion that the Catholic church somehow holds to higher standards, which set it apart from culture more successfully than is the case with the Episcopal church.

What we really need to ask ourselves, we Catholics, as we watch the fray with those smug grins on our faces is whether our superiority, our resistance to cultural captivity, means then that we stand against women and gay persons, in their battle to be accorded full humanity and to be treated as persons with the full range of human rights accorded to all other persons. If not—if we do stand with misogyny and homophobia because we stand for orthodoxy and perennial "truth"—then can we truly claim to be standing with the gospel and Jesus, even as we stand proudly against culture?

"Charity in Truth": Some Preliminary Reflections on Benedict's Encyclical

In case readers are wondering, I’m not ignoring the pope’s recent encyclical Caritas in veritate. I was out of the country when it came out, and without a reliable internet connection as I traveled.

So I didn’t begin reading it in earnest until my return to the U.S. last week, when I was able to download a copy of it. Since I happened to be in Germany at the time, I did read interesting summaries and analysis of it in the German press when it appeared, summaries far more intellectually challenging than anything I have yet to read in the American press.

I should be perfectly honest and state from the outset—as a preface to anything I might later write about the encyclical—that encyclicals just don’t do it for me. I read them; I study them and have taught them. I value what they have to say, within certain limits that have everything to do with the historical conditioning of any church document.

Like many American theologians, I have wondered about the obliviousness of most American Catholics to the venerable social teaching of the Catholic church, as this has been articulated in encyclicals and pastoral letters. I have been amazed, in particular, by the refusal of those American Catholics who have set themselves up as the chief guardians of orthodoxy in recent decades to listen to this social teaching, at the same time that they loudly profess themselves to be more Catholic and more Roman than the rest of us.

But encyclicals just don’t do it for me. If I’m seeking spiritual enrichment—and I often am, when I turn to a theological text, more than I’m seeking intellectual stimulation—I’d far rather read Meister Eckhart or Teresa of Avila, Johann Baptist Metz or John Dominic Crossan, or for that matter, Audre Lorde or Mary Oliver. And the gospels.

Encyclicals don’t convey transformative truth to me, and that’s the kind of truth I hunger for when I read theological or spiritual texts (or politically transformative ones or soul-changing literary works). And that presents something of a problem for anyone reading a text that calls itself “Charity in Truth,” with its many self-conscious echoes of John Paul II’s encyclical “Splendor of Truth.”

I’m finding Caritas in veritate particularly hard slogging, because the text is, frankly, such a mess. It’s a compendium of just about every theological aperçu Benedict has had, in a long, distinguished career as a theologian and Vatican official. As a compendium, it never moves in a straight, clean line, but moves in circles, back and forth, engaging over and over some of the movements and tendencies in church and society that have preoccupied Benedict for decades now.

It’s a rough beast slouching somewhere to be born, then—and I do not intend to belittle the document in making that observation, but to note the hermeneutical problems that anyone who tries to take the document seriously will encounter from the outset, if she or he reads it with due attention, particularly to the manifold context(s) it’s seeking to engage.

It’s a valuable document, because it sets the record straight about an issue that many American Catholics (and the mainstream American media) simply refused to face during the pontificate of John Paul II: this is the critique of unbridled capitalism that runs very strongly through the thinking of John Paul II and his successor. It is simplistic and dishonest to reduce the work of these complex thinkers to a single anti-modern, anti-communist reflex. The American media sought consistently to do that with John Paul, and got away with it, because the text of the pope’s defeat of communism which dominated American media discourse about John Paul II, a text that consciously and deliberately obliterates his critique of capitalism, outshone any other aspect of his papal reign.

With Benedict, it’s going to be harder to ignore the critique of unbridled capitalism, for a variety of reasons. One is historical: the neo-conservative moment has been eclipsed by something else now struggling to be born in Western history, something rightly critical of the excesses of a “conservatism” that was not ever conservative at all, but which basked in warm, fuzzy, hypnotic and totally false nostalgia while it enabled one of the most a-traditional, anti-conservative periods of ruthless economic rapacity in world history.

Another reason I think Benedict’s critique of unbridled capitalism will receive more of a hearing than John Paul II’s similar critique did is that Benedict has, unfortunately, failed to dazzle people either inside or outside the church, as the charismatic John Paul II dazzled. And that lack of dazzle may well work to Benedict’s advantage, when it comes to this encyclical.

Let’s face it: there hasn’t been much of a narrative line to Benedict’s papacy, thus far, other than one of constant resistance to this and that. Fairly or unfairly, the media have been adroit about depicting Benedict as a constant naysayer, and, for whatever reason, he and the coterie of Vatican advisors with whom he’s chosen to surround himself have not been conspicuously successful at countering that media narrative. Indeed, they’ve acted again and again in ways that lend credence to this simplistic narrative.

So when Benedict does say something that’s not merely no and again no, and when he says it substantively and brilliantly, I believe people are inclined to listen. They want to find some hook on which to hang this papacy, which otherwise has the feel of an interim papacy everyone's merely enduring until a dazzling successor to John Paul II comes along. I suspect that Caritas in veritate may well turn out to be that hook, the defining moment of Benedict’s papacy.

One other very surface, top-of-the-head impression—and I reserve the right to change my mind about this as I read further in the text: it strikes me that Benedict’s choice to focus on the theme of love in truth is an indirect but quite deliberate attempt to correct an impulse in the church that he himself played a huge role in setting into motion. This is the impulse represented by John Paul II’s Veritatis splendor —or, more precisely, by how “Splendor of Truth” came to be used and read in many Catholic circles, notably in the United States.

I remember when Veritatis splendor came out. I remember the effect it had on the life of the church, in theological circles, on my own life. I have blogged about that. As I noted in a previous posting about this topic, in the latter part of the 1980s, I was asked by a graduate program in lay ministry at a Catholic university to write a textbook in ethics for this program.

The program was the Institute for Ministry at my alma mater, Loyola of New Orleans. I wrote an introduction to Catholic ethical theory for this program in the late 1980s, and when it was finished, was told by LIM’s director that he had sent it to bishops across the nation, and had gotten glowing reports about it back from almost all dioceses.

When Veritatis splendor came out, however, this introduction to Catholic ethics, which had just been reviewed by bishops across the nation and found to be solid and orthodox, suddenly became problematic. I was asked to re-write the text, incorporating huge chunks of Veritatis splendor as much as possible.

I did so. I labored hard on the revision. This request came just after a Catholic college in North Carolina has just given me a one-year terminal contract, while refusing to disclose why I was being given a terminal contract after I had just had an extremely positive annual evaluation. When that college's leaders lied to me after I appealed for the reason for my terminal contract and when the abbot of the monastery that owned the college colluded in the stone-walling, I resigned.

So I needed the money I would make by revising this ethics text, frankly. And I needed even more desperately some assurance that I still had a place somewhere in the church, that my vocation as a theologian still counted for somebody somewhere in the Catholic church.

The experience of receiving the terminal contract just as Veritatis splendor was coming down the pike, and of being asked to revise an introduction to ethics that I had written only a few years ago, because it was suddenly problematic in light of Veritatis splendor, was a watershed experience for me as a theologian. In fact, after these experiences, I never again found any place at all in the Catholic church to follow my vocation as a theologian. Nor did Steve.

One door after another began to shut—to slam—in our faces, and we found ourselves on the outside looking in, first as theologians and then as Catholics. Loyola's Institute for Ministry chose not to hire me to teach in its program any longer, though I had previously been an academic advisor to the program, had written one of its textbooks, and, exceedingly hurtful, was an alumnus of Loyola.

The message that Steve and I began receiving persistently from every Catholic institution with which we came into contact at this moment of our vocational lives, the message that we were not welcome anywhere, had everything in the world to do with Veritatis splendor, and with its rubric of truth.

Truth as weapon. Truth as a sword to cleave the faithful from the unfaithful, to drive the unwashed and impure out of the community of the washed and pure. Whatever John Paul II (and Ratzinger) intended with this encyclical, the practical effect for many Catholics—for many Catholic theologians, particularly those writing about ethical issues—was devastating. This encyclical was used as a blunt instrument to bludgeon people into submission, and if we failed to submit, to drive us out of communion.

I did revise my ethics text, but it appeared that even my alma mater now found my work as a theologian—my Catholicity itself—lacking. To the best of my knowledge, the revised text was ditched and not used in the program after I labored hard to produce it. As I labored for months at the revisions, I found that one chapter alone, the chapter on sexual ethics, was suddenly problematic above all—an ironic finding, when I had been assured only four or five years ago that the text had passed the muster of almost all bishops in the country, as a sound and faithful introduction to Catholic ethics.

And the sticking point now, with the promulgation of Veritatis splendor was, above all, the question of homosexuality. I revised. I labored. I dumped huge sections of Veritatis splendor into the revised text. But nothing sufficed. Though I had written the previous text as theologians normally write texts nowadays, depending on the community of my peers to help me evaluate and critique the text, this time around, I was appointed a censor, a Jesuit whose field was not even moral theology.

Every chapter in my revised text pleased him, except the chapter on sexual morality—and the section of that chapter that could not receive his imprimatur was the chapter on homosexuality. Every time I tried to produce a revision to this chapter that sought to hold in tension the venerable Catholic teaching about the primacy of conscience and the magisterium’s condemnation of homosexual acts, I received page after page of single-spaced notes that essentially commanded me to do what in conscience I could not do: write a chapter which told students the Catholic church condemns homosexuality, and leave it at that. No nonsense about conscience, and no hermeneutical questions about the scriptures that forbid homosexuality.

The point I want to make with this story is simple: John Paul II’s teaching about truth, behind which Ratzinger stood always in the background, has translated, in American Catholicism, into something that is not adequately Catholic. It has translated into witch hunts and the reduction of a fine, complex, ancient tradition, particularly in the area of ethics, into an anti-intellectual set of formulas that are used not to provoke thought or to invite discourse designed to help us fathom and internalize the tradition. These simplistic, anti-intellectual formulas are not intended to help us immerse ourselves in the transformative Truth Who is God. They are intended to separate the saved from the unsaved.

The truth we’ve ended up with is not transformative at all. It’s nothing like the biblical notion of truth—of God as the ultimate truth, Whom we must encounter in transformative love, and with Whom we must grapple in the darkness of faith. It has no adequately Catholic sense that religious truth operates on a complex variety of levels, and that not every formula is equally central to the life of faith. It completely overlooks the hierarchy of truths, placing all "truths" in the church at the same level, trying to impose all of them on everyone, as if all are revealed, infallible truth necessary for salvation.

The notion of truth that has come to prevail in American Catholicism following Spendor veritatis is formulaic, simplistic, catechetical in the worst, most mindless, sense of that term. It convinces no one. It cannot convince, because it is not designed, as religious truth must be, to reach the heart. It betrays the tradition. It is a weapon used to make the church less, rather than more, catholic.

And I believe Benedict now sees this, and wants to address what happened when he and John Paul II put that particular weapon into the hands of uneducated bishops and layfolks who welcomed the weapon to mount a vicious purge in the church, a purge all about trying to force everyone possible to dance to their political and ideological tunes. I think the pope is now trying to reconnect what ought never to have been separated, if we want to call ourselves Catholic and orthodox: love and truth.

And I suspect that this move comes too late, for many of us . . . .

Peter Daou Hits the Mark: Obama's Presidency Will be Defined by Righting America's Moral Ship

Yes and yes and yes. And yes again.

Peter Daou is absolutely on the mark today with a Huffpo piece about what will define the Obama presidency—if the president finally decides to ditch the “political insiderism, Rahm-style deal-making, image-management and perpetual campaigning the Obama team is so adept at” and return to the moral foundation of the platform for which he campaigned.

Daou maintains,

In the end, Barack Obama's presidency will be defined by the extent to which he attempts to right America's (badly adrift) moral ship. Providing universal quality affordable health care is only a part of that process, albeit a significant one (emphasis in original).

He defines the moral center of Obama’s platform (which is the moral center of participatory democracy itself)—what so many of us desperately want for our nation after the havoc wreaked by Bush-Cheney (and Rove, Gonzales, Rice, and assorted other criminals)—as follows: “bedrock principles of justice, fairness, and equality of opportunity.” And then he spells out what those principles mean, if we want to retrieve a democratic society and the moral foundations on which it rests:

On health care, it means stating goals clearly and refusing to accept a watered-down compromise that ends up benefiting the very same interests who are gaming the system for profit today.

It means refusing to allow the obscene enrichment of bankers at the expense of everyone else.

It means ceasing, not extending and reinforcing Bush's worst excesses on secrecy and civil liberties and detainee treatment.

It means refusing to allow the continued dismissal of gay rights.

It means refusing to allow further avoidable environmental degradation.

It means seriously re-examining our Afghanistan policy.

It means seriously re-examining our drug laws and gun laws.

It means speaking out forcefully on the widespread abuse of women -- even when it seems inopportune.

And on and on.

We can accept nothing less from this administration, if we care about our imperiled democratic experiment. If we do allow the administration to offer less, to continue its insincere Rahm-style image management techniques, its craven pandering to the wealthiest and most powerful among us, we might as well write finis to that experiment and look elsewhere in the world for societies aspiring to live by bedrock principles of justice, fairness, and equality of opportunity.

That’s what I’ve been saying over and over, and I can’t stop saying it. Because it needs to be said. It's time for the administration to stop making excuses, to cease with the coy refusal to articulate clear goals that are consistent with the progressive platform on which the president campaigned, and to stand by its promises and respect the mandate it has received from millions of Americans fed up with the Bush legacy.

If not, it's over—for all of us, as a democratic society.

Mr. Obama Reaches Out to Progressive Bloggers re: Health Care: Too Little, Too Late?

There’s much important discussion (e.g., here and here) right now in the blogosphere about President Obama’s recent confab with progressive bloggers, as he appeals for support for his initiative to reform health care. This outreach is essential, if this crucial social reform is to be enacted under Obama’s presidency.

It’s essential because the Republican party intends to do all it can to stop health care reform in its tracks. The GOP knows that if this one reform is pushed through by the new administration, the fate of the party of angry old white men will be sealed: health care reform will consolidate the Democratic hold on the White House and Congress for the foreseeable future. And so the Republicans are willing to block health care coverage for millions of needy American citizens, even as they argue that they represent the moral high road and defend Christian values in the public square.

It is particularly disappointing to see a Catholic, African-American leader like Michael Steele try to block health coverage for all Americans, when his own religious community strongly supports the need for health coverage for all citizens, and laments the lack of health coverage for the neediest among us. Because poverty affects African Americans in the U.S. disproportionately, a significant percentage of African-American citizens lack access to good health care.

I applaud the president’s outreach to the progressive blogging community, re: the health care issue. At the same time, I’m of the opinion that this outreach is too little and too late. As I have predicted in many previous postings about the president’s betrayal of progressive supporters, while Mr. Obama has dilly-dallied, tried to build futile bridges with the Republican party and the Christian right, and refused to commit himself to key aspects of the progressive platform on which he campaigned (e.g., immediate abolition of don’t ask, don’t tell), his poll numbers have begun to dip, and the forces of resistance to him have begun to recoup strength.

The honeymoon period is over, and having alienated his staunchest supporters—progressive ones, who include many members of the LGBT community—the president is now casting about for support for policies he should have been steadfastly pushing forward from the beginning of his administration, when his ratings were high and the power of the opposition was in decisive check. I wholeheartedly agree with Miles Mogulescu when he concludes that the president has shown a “paucity of audacity” in allowing himself to be led through the nose by key advisors who are nothing but pragmatist number crunchers tone-deaf to the ethical implications of leadership.

It is impossible to lead well while ignoring the ethical foundations of good leadership. In my view, the administration of Bill Clinton, which began with promise similar to that of the Obama administration, failed dismally when Mr. Clinton began to cut hard-nosed and ethically bankrupt deals regarding issues like gays in the military. Once he showed himself to be ethically compromised, it was easy for his many opponents to block important aspects of his platform including health care reform.

I had hoped that with President Obama, we would not be in for another round of spineless, morally obtuse Democratic “leadership” which treats the progressive wing of the Democratic party with contempt. Many indicators suggest that, after the considerable damage inflicted on all of us by the Bush administration, the nation as a whole has moved to the left in its expectations and would have strongly supported a wide range of progressive initiatives when the president took office.

The president’s advisors, however, have insisted on playing by the playbook of the early 1990s, and have chosen to ignore the mandate given to Mr. Obama in this election—along with the ardent hope of many Americans for substantive progressive changes to set the nation back on a democratic course following Bush-Cheney. As Pam Spaulding argues very persuasively in a posting yesterday (see the first link above) about Mr. Obama’s appeal to progressive bloggers to support his health care initiative, there has been a fundamental lack of consistency, of coherence, in how President Obama has pursued his progressive platform.

That lack of coherence, which began (just as in the Clinton administration) with a cynical betrayal of promises to the LGBT community and with a gleeful willingness to throw LGBT supporters under the bus, is now undermining the president’s ability to push through the crucial health care reforms many of us so strongly want. I predict—and I do so with great sadness—that Mr. Obama’s inability to articulate and decisively push forward the unambiguous progressive platform for which so many of us voted will undermine everything that he now seeks to do as president, and will succeed in re-empowering the Republican party and the religious right.