The Churches and Fascism: The Other Side

Interesting reminder last night of the path some churchmen* took during the Nazi period, which provides a model for us today different from the one provided by those who blessed fascist leaders. Last night, we happened to watch Claude Berri’s 1967 film “The Two of Us” (Viel homme et l’enfant).

As many readers already know, it’s a classic memoir of life in occupied France, told through the eyes of a little Jewish boy evacuated to the countryside to live with an elderly Christian couple who are unaware that they are hosting a Jewish refugee. The charm of the film has to do with the interaction between the gruff, anti-semitic “grandfather” smitten by the little boy desperately trying to hide his identity even from his hosts.

One scene in the film spoke strongly to us. It could easily be lifted out of the Pétain years and used as a parable for contemporary Catholics as they discern political choices.

It’s a Sunday homily in the parish church. The grandfather has gone unwillingly, aware that the local priest doesn’t share his anti-semitic views.

And sure enough, the priest chooses to preach on the response Jesus demands that his followers make to the scenes of hatred and murder unfolding all around them. He tells the parishioners that it is entirely anti-Christian to make judgments about whom God loves and whom God rejects.

That’s God’s work, the priest says. It’s God’s job to sort the tares from the wheat, and the measure God uses is far different from the one we ourselves use. In fact, God has a particular love for those who are oppressed, no matter where they’re found or who they happen to be.

Including—and especially—the Jewish people, since, after all, Jesus was a Jew, wasn’t he? God looks at the world at each period of history, the priest informs his parish, to identify those most in need of love and acceptance. And it’s the obligation of Christians to do the same, over and over, in new cultural settings and new time-frames.

Why a parable for the contemporary church? Obviously, because a significant proportion of church members have been expending so much energy—and continue to do so, even now, when far more serious substantial issues face us and demand our creative responses—deciding who’s in and who’s out. Who belongs and who doesn’t.

Who’s worthy to sit in the pew and who isn’t. Who’s the true Catholic (or evangelical, or fill in the blank) and who’s the false one. Who should receive communion and who ought not to do so.

This is what the culture war and the wafer wars have been all about: human beings taking it on themselves to mind God’s business and do the sorting of the wheat and the tares here and now, in the muddled circumstances of history. And these are the hate-filled impulses on which fascism feeds. This is why I see the churches inextricably involved with the rise of fascism—or with preventing its rise, in the way in which they deal with the impulses of hatred right within their own walls.

The parish priest in the film is completely correct to challenge the root of the fascist impulse—the willingness to give way to hatred, and on that basis, to begin dividing people into worthy and unworthy. The willingness to use coercion and power to consolidate the division of human beings into worthy and unworthy. The readiness to lie and bully when all other means have failed, to cheat and steal and call this righteous behavior when we imagine we’re doing it in the name of God.

When some people of faith (like the parish priest in the Berri film) can see so clearly that these options are anything but consonant with the basic ethical tenets of all world religions, why does the fascist option keep attracting other people of faith (like the German bishops depicted in the photo accompanying yesterday’s posting about discernment)? This is a complex question, one that would take page after page of careful analysis to answer.

But one obvious answer that leaps off the page immediately—and deserves attention, in the context of the religio-political debates currently underway in the United States—is this: in the Catholic context, there’s been a fateful and malicious retrenchment in the period following the Berri film, which was made in the era of Vatican II. That was an era in which the church spoke about positive dialogue with the contemporary world, and about retrieving aspects of theology and ethical thinking that had fallen by the wayside in the period in which the Catholic church was in complete, closed, defensive reaction to modernity.

Within the context of the dialogue Vatican II invited with the modern world (a dialogue Pope John Paul II and his chief advisor Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, largely shut down), a promising new approach to moral theology, but one rooted in biblical and patristic thought, began to develop. This approach stressed the formation of good character as the goal of ethical life, rather than—as the Catholic tradition had stressed in its period of reaction to the modern world—a focus on individual acts as good acts or evil acts.

The moral theology that began to develop after Vatican II, but was quickly squelched by the top pastoral leaders of the church, noted that character is more fundamental than acts. Produce good people, and good acts will follow.

The exclusive focus on acts as the center of the moral life runs the risk of keeping people woefully immature, when it comes to making moral decisions and political decisions that involve moral judgments. At its worst, it produces a churched population that looks for some answer book—a catechism, a bible—to provide all the answers it needs as it makes moral judgments. And, it should be noted, some answer book as authoritatively interpreted by church leaders . . . .

The churches, especially in the American context, all too often keep their adherents in a state of moral infantilism, through their focus on the rightness and wrongness of this or that act, as proved by selected texts of catechism or bible, interpreted exclusively by church leaders. This approach to the moral life (and to the application of the moral life in the political realm) yields simple-minded sloganizing that all too quickly degenerates into a hate-filled division of everyone into the right and the wrong, the good and the bad, the in and the out, the true believer and the false believer, the blessed by God and the despised by God.

In other words, it paves the way for the kind of leaders that rose to power very quickly in Nazi Germany. One of the painful lessons the churches ought to have learned in that period is how important it is to prepare people carefully to make political decisions on some moral basis that goes beyond sloganizing, pandering to hateful social movements, and resorting in the most simple-minded way to religious authority figures to tell us what is right and wrong.

Forming people of good character who make sound moral judgments is far more difficult than telling people to do this and that. Helping people develop character, helping them to come to sound ethical decision making within their own lives, using their own minds and consciences, is much more difficult than handing them catechisms and bibles and telling them to do x and avoid y.

I hold the American Catholic bishops responsible for helping to foster such immaturity in moral decision making among American Catholics, that many of us simply cannot see the way in which we have sold out our most fundamental values in the elusive pursuit of "the" pro-life candidate. We’ve needed much more from them as pastoral leaders in the past several decades, we who still identify, however tenuous the connection has become, as Catholics. While we’ve needed religious education to allow us to gain adult maturity in moral decision-making, we’ve been spoon-fed. We’ve asked for respectful dialogue and have been handed Catholic answers.

And the fruit of this approach to the moral life has been so exceedingly bitter that, with their abdication to the religious right, Catholics have practically forfeited any claim to have something of importance to say to the public sphere, in a period in which making ethical moral judgments about political issues has perhaps never been more imperative. Fascism—telling people what they must do, forcing them to do it if they refuse, and pandering to hate—is certainly a lot easier and a lot less messy.

But, oh, the price, when we give in to it!

*Men, because most churches have historically excluded women from key leadership roles.

Joe E. M., Requiescat in Pace

Yesterday, I felt low-spirited all day. I attributed this to malaise with the damnfoolery of our national political “discussions,” the willingness of people to lie brazenly and then dare us to have the intelligence or integrity to call them to accountability for their lies. Stupidity wears on me. But venality does so even more, I think.

Today, however, I happened to look at the little diary I keep of dates of birth and death of family members and friends. And when I did so, I discovered that yesterday was the anniversary of my school friend Joe M.’s death in 1994.

I’ve spoken before about my intent concern to remember those whose lives come and go and seem all too easily forgotten. I myself am first among those capable of forgetting. I challenge myself to remember that every human life is a story, and every story is worth hearing.

It grieves me tremendously that social structures of denigration and exclusion prevent our hearing the stories of many significant lives. One of the themes explored constantly in the art of those tracking the AIDS crisis of the latter part of the 20th century was the extinction of one life after another due to AIDS—an extinction that robbed us of many talented, loving human beings long before we expected to lose these members of our families and of our circles of friends—and with the extinction of so many so quickly, the challenge not to forget.

Joe’s was one of those lives. From the time I was 9 or 10 up through the end of high school, Joe was my best friend, my inseparable companion. We shared a Sunday School class. We both sang in the church youth choir, and spent every Wednesday afternoon after school wandering the streets of town with our friend John as we whiled away the hours up to choir practice.

We had a route, a routine, that never varied. We headed first to the downtown pharmacy with its old wooden and glass cases, its marble counter at which one could sit on rotating red stools and enjoy a sundae or a hamburger.

Our standing order was a Dr. Pepper into which we dipped sticks of soft peppermint candy until it became pocked with the sweet dark liquid. We then ate the candy greedily and followed it with swallows of cold Dr. Pepper. The combination of mint and prune-flavored soft drink shocked the palate, in a way we deemed delicious, so narrow was the society we inhabited.

After visiting John’s father’s secretary Mrs. Shuff, and vaulting up and down the exterior, glass-enclosed staircase of his father’s office building, we headed to a hamburger grill near our church, where we also had a standing order. Here, it was hamburgers served with grilled onions and mayonnaise.

Some Wednesday evenings, we popped over to a newsstand nearby, to peruse magazines not to be found in our three church-dominated homes. Chief among these were muscle-men journals, at which we laughed—the ridiculous poses, the bulging pecs and arms, the skimpy bathing suits. Three young teens who had no clue in the world that we were all gay, who had no access at all to any kind of gay “literature” other than those magazines, which Joe confessed to me years later, shockingly me profoundly, that he sometimes carefully rolled up and hid in his umbrella case, to sneak them out for closer scrutiny in the privacy of his own home.

(So we did have a clue, though we lived in total denial—really, total ignorance—or who we were, because we had no vocabulary at all to name our experience of life.) What must the store owner have thought of us? I seem to recall semi-affectionate, semi-ironic glances from him that troubled me at bit, because I could only half guess at their significance. How many other upstanding citizens of our church-ridden town came to his store daily to enliven and extend their experience of life beyond Sunday School and choir practice?

As high school went on, Joe and I became closer each year, sharing almost all of our classes, since we were in an “accelerated” track in English, science, and math, and took four years of Latin together, as well. We competed fiercely, inventing insanely esoteric quizzes about obscure literary figures, books, quotations, to administer to each other in the study periods that occurred throughout the day. Our mothers competed vicariously in their own Sunday School class, where my mother was once furious at Joe’s mother for noting that her son read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca much more quickly than my mother’s son did.

Then we went to college, and everything changed. I was at Loyola in New Orleans, Joe at Tulane. Even though the schools were side by side, we seldom saw each other. I transferred my adolescent Sunday School fervor to the Catholic church, its rituals, its theology.

Joe moved along a different path. He found he was gay and came out of the closet. He told me this in a way that I persistently identified as shocking in later conversations with him—though I would no doubt have been shocked at the revelation under any circumstances. Especially since I was not permitting myself to be conscious of a similar narrative in my own life, totally inexperienced though I was with any sexual activity at all.

In our junior years, Joe went off to a year in England, and then decided he belonged there. He did all he could to stay longer than that year abroad. My memory of the circumstances is fuzzy: I think he stayed several years and then could not obtain permission to extend his visa.

He went to New York, studying film there and obtaining a graduate degree in film-making. By this time, I had met Steve, and our lives were engrossed in church work—and in our relationship with each other, which was clearly a gay one, but which we chose then to see as one of temporary experimentation with a sexual expression neither of us had tasted before, as “good” little Catholic boys.

Joe and I grew further and further apart. I was in the closet, and not even aware that there was a closet, since I was in total self-denial about the reality that needed to be shut away—even while living in a committed, intimate relationship of love that was the very center of my emotional and spiritual life.

Then Joe told me that he was HIV+. By this point, I think I had already begun to come out to myself, and then to my family and friends, and I had either told Joe of my own gayness before he told me of his medical diagnosis, or I told him this shortly after he told me he was positive.

Joe’s struggle with AIDS—a harsh one, as with so many young men who had AIDS in that early period of the crisis—did not really bring us closer. We had grown apart for too long. The religion to which I clung—still, bafflingly, since there was little comfort or consolation in the Catholic church for gay people in those years (and there is not now)—separated Joe and me. He had repudiated the childhood faith that was even more the center of his life and his family’s than had been the case for me and my family.

And he had no choice except to do so. His parents bought him an apartment in New York, and were generous in supporting him when he was unable to keep a job. But they also made it very plain to him that he need not come home, need not let our town know who he was and the life he had been leading. It is out of respect for their privacy, though I am not sure they are still living, that I do not use my friend's full name in this memoir.

I learned of Joe’s death from a friend of his, a Louisiana acquaintance, who had been with him and his parents as he died. The friend told me that Joe had died looking at the sun set over the Hudson—a scene he always loved. He had left a request for his ashes to be taken to England and scattered in a place he felt was his place more than any in the world. The friend knew the spot, and was to take Joe’s ashes there.

Someone later—I forget who; the friend, I think—sent me the funeral program from Joe’s funeral in our Arkansas hometown. The front cover had a scripture verse splayed across the top: “The wages of sin is death.” I think I filed it away somewhere. I have not wanted to look at it after reading the scripture verse his family chose for the funeral.

Like every life lost too soon, like every life lived in such straitened circumstances that the person living the life has too little time and energy to make her or his contribution to the world, Joe’s life counted. It was valuable. It was important.

We have lost immeasurably much by losing Joe M. before he could give us all he was capable of giving. We lose immeasurably much each day that we permit our social and ecclesial structures to give any human the impression that she or he does not count.

I am obliged to remember my friend. I am proud to do so. I have no doubt at all, knowing Joe, that he would find much to criticize in this eulogy and in my blog as a whole. Joe was far wiser than I have ever been about holding his tongue.

Nonetheless, warts and all, I want to remember this friend whom I miss very much, on the day following his death fourteen years ago. Joe E. M., rest in peace.

The Kind of Place from Which Hate Comes: Discerning the Spirit in Political Decisions

In a previous posting on this blog, I noted a brilliant observation of Rev. Gilbert H. Caldwell from this year’s United Methodist General Conference (http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/04/dirty-money-united-methodist-church-and_28.html). At a panel discussion sponsored by Soulforce, Rev. Caldwell spoke about the interconnected –isms by which social groups (including churches) engineer the denigration and exclusion of despised outsiders.

Theocracy Redivivus: Standing on the Recycled Promises

Yesterday, the National Catholic Reporter website uploaded a Religion News Service article by David Finnigan entitled “McCain to Make Full-Throttle Push for Catholic Vote” (http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/1754). The article notes that Catholics attending the RNC are confident that McCain can gain the Catholic vote, especially now that he has chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Finnigan notes that the warm reception by Catholic leaders in the Twin Cities is in marked contrast to how the Catholic officials of Denver related to the Democrats. Minneapolis-St. Paul Archbishop John Nienstedt hosted a cathedral Mass for Republican delegates on Sunday, and the cathedral pastor offered the closing benediction at the convention on Monday. Officials of the archdiocese are speaking of the obligation of Catholics to vote exclusively on the basis of life issues—Catholic codespeak for abortion, which is to say, Catholic codespeak for, “The church tells you to vote Republican.”

Flashback: 1992 again. I submit an essay to a national contest. The “prize” is an invitation to present winning essays at a conference sponsored by a research center for the study of religion in American culture.

My essay is one of several chosen for presentation at the conference. Unbeknownst to me (or to any other “winner,” I later discover) the format created by conference organizers is to have each of us read our essays—all on the progressive edge of American religio-political thought—and then have a “respondent” read an essay countering everything we’ve just said.

And we’re not to have any opportunity to respond. It’s a set-up, pure and simple. We’re told that this is what “balance” and “objectivity” are all about. The person chosen to critique (that is, trash) my essay is a woman whom no one knows to be African American until she identifies herself as such in her “critique” of my essay. She calls herself a black feminist conservative. She finds my work garbage.

I’m baffled not only by the patent meanness of how the conference is organized—to set up progressive thinkers for trashing against which they cannot defend themselves, in front of an audience composed largely of religion reporters who are also largely sympathetic to the conservative respondents. I’m also baffled by the transparent absurdity of what some of the respondents say.

A woman (since the conference, a friend of mine) who played a leading role in helping develop a statement on sexual ethics for the Presbyterian Church USA gives a stunning paper documenting the way in which the secular media helped torpedo this document, through collusion with conservative groups working inside the Presbyterian Church to keep it on the “right” path. In the response to her, a neoconservative Jewish scholar from the East Coast talks about how wonderful religion is in the American South (where most of those conservative Presbyterians who helped torpedo the statement on sexual ethics in the most underhanded way possible, smiling to beat the band all the while, happen to live).

I wonder as he talks if he’s ever been to the South, if he’s ever lived there, if he knows—as I do, from intimate experience—what most of those folks he’s defending think about him and his religious beliefs. Does he know the potential for malice and harm in the religious worldviews he’s defending—for political reasons? And malice and harm projected at not only those he feels other than himself, but towards himself and his own group of folks?

He should. It was, after all, only twelve years before this conference that Dr. Bailey Smith, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, informed us that “God almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.”

I was dumbfounded, too, by a Mormon respondent to a paper that had nothing at all to do with Mormonism, but was on the progressive end of the political and religious spectrum. The respondent held some official role in the Mormon church. He told us how wonderfully supportive his LDS stake had been to a young man who came out as gay, who was sent off for reparative therapy, and who came back to live in the stake.

What we never heard was whether the young man was “repaired.” What we never heard was what it was like for him to live as an out gay man in a Mormon town in Utah—if he wasn’t “repaired.”

What I learned from this conference was how willing powerful political forces in our nation—including the mainstream media—had become to make themselves tools of the religious right, to bend the truth in service of the political agenda of the religious right. I learned that progressive scholars of religion were fair game for those forces, to be set up as targets for derision in a conference that professed to be interested in objectivity, balance, and dialogue.

I learned that scholars, journalists, and neoconservative political activists living outside the regions of the country in which the theocratic agenda of the religious right has most power to determine the lives of those folks are among the most ardent supporters of the religious right. If one lives in, say, Nantucket rather than Charlotte, it’s easy to talk about what a wonderful role the religion of the bible belt plays in American life.

It’s not, after all, one’s own personal liberties that are in danger of being curtailed by theocratic activists in Nantucket. It is one’s own life that’s on the line in Charlotte, though. In Nantucket, it might be unthinkable to imagine people with bibles ranting in the streets when “Angels in America” is staged by a local theater company. Not in Charlotte. In Nantucket, nude statues in the streets might not raise an eyebrow. In Charlotte, they could well do so.

In Nantucket, elected local officials would probably think twice before they spoke of the need to drive all gay folks in the world from the face of the earth. Not in Charlotte. Gay in Nantucket and out of the closet? You’d find laws protecting you from firing simply because you were gay. Not in almost any city in the bible belt.

Libraries in Nantucket seldom have to contend with questions about whether a young-adult novel portraying a gay couple sympathetically would be yanked from the shelves, due to protests from pressure groups that scan the library shelves with eagle eyes on a regular basis. In the bible belt, such behavior is old hat.

I suppose the point I’m wandering around to with this flash from the past is that Faulkner turns out to be right: the past is never truly the past. For all of us who hoped and predicted that no major political party would try this election cycle to play the religious-right culture war card, those hopes and predictions proved to be false.

We had placed our hopes on the waning power of the religious right to appeal to American voters. It’s not, after all, as if we haven’t now seen the face beneath the mask, we said among ourselves, we who had hoped for new political and religious options. The religious right has so thoroughly discredited itself through scandal after scandal—scandals that show the central propositions of the theocratic agenda to be based on pure hypocrisy—that no one with a sound mind would choose ever again to go that route.

Would they?

Turns out they will, and with a vengeance. And if we don’t like it, those of us dreaming of alternatives for our nation that address real needs and not the largely fictitious ones the religious right keeps asking us to consider, we might as well lump it.

When you can’t persuade people through reason, through the power of your example, through the validity of your ideas and your vision for society, then take the gloves off and force them. That’s the ultimate card that fascist movements always play. It's really the only card in their deck. All else is prologue, an attempt to coerce covertly rather than overtly.

Learn to lie. Learn to deceive. Learn to paint over the green with red paint and dare others to call what you've painted anything but green. If people persist in asking you to disclose information and to prove your point in rational debate, try changing the subject. If they rudely continue persisting, tell them you refuse to talk to them anymore.

God is on your side, after all. What's a little lie, a little deception, a bit of coercion, when you're doing the Lord's work?

If anyone doubts that the religious right has been and remains a fascist movement, I invite him or her to move to any small (or large) town beneath the Mason-Dixon line and begin asking questions about issues or practices that the local theocrats have declared off-limits. If you want to know the religious right, and what theocracy will be all about when it’s finally fully enacted across the land, don’t head for Cape Cod. Head for Harrison, Arkansas, or Columbia, Tennessee. Go to Gastonia, North Carolina, or spend some time in Shreveport.

They’re baack. And we’d better accept it and stop the nonsense—the talk about change, the demands for rational arguments to back up social proposals. The platform may be so thoroughly frayed, so worn out, that sound buyers wonder why they think they can sell it to us again. The version we’re being offered may be so different than the one originally advertised that we find it impossible to believe they think we can’t see the discrepancies between the advertisement and the product.

But never mind. It’s not about change at all. It’s about the opposite of change. It’s about trying to force people to accept the same tired old idea—even packaged as something different, though we're not supposed to notice the difference—one more time. It’s about telling people to elect the same officials who have promised to “protect” life one more time (don't look at the record: look at the promise), and to call that reform—reform of those who originally went to D.C. to reform things and who must now be themselves reformed.

But from the inside. We’re being asked now to allow the reformers to reform themselves, and not to notice any sleight of hand in the orders issued to us from one election cycle to the next. And, oh yes, to trust, of course, since only one political party has God on its side.

And it’s that party for whom the mitered men of the Catholic church want to throw parties.

Think you've seen meanness and lies—in the name of God—up to now? Get ready: you haven't begun to see what they're capable of. In the name of God . . . .

The Nonsense Is Over

Well.

I guess we've been told.

Steve Schmidt, senior campaign adviser to John McCain,informed the media today that there will be no further statements from the McCain campaign about the vetting process for Sarah Palin (www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/03/mccains-new-palin-strateg_n_123527.html).

Schmidt's written press release states, "This nonsense is over."

And here, silly me, I had been under the impression it had just started.

The Unclothed Emperor: Sarah Palin and Catholic Voters

I’ll put my cards on the table right away: I think Sarah Palin would be a disaster as vice-president. In fact, I find it insulting in the extreme that a major political party would offer her to the American people as a possible vice-president—as if we have no brains, no moral acumen, no ability to sift fact from fiction even when the fiction is so outrageous that only a fool would mistake it for fact. If I were a woman, I’d be fighting mad at the insinuation that I might choose to vote for Sarah Palin because she’s a viable role model for women in the 21st century.

Political analysts are rightly focusing attention on Sarah Palin’s lack of any preparation at all for the office for which she’s being proposed. I share this concern. But my primary objection to Sarah Palin has to do with her religious worldview. It’s, in a word, dangerous—dangerously dangerous.

And here’s the galling thing about it: there’s nothing really new about Sarah Palin’s religious worldview. The kooky theocratic positions she defends, tricked out in carefully clipped scripture verses that ignore the entire gist, the basic moral thrust, of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, are not significantly different from those that the political right has dangled for some years now in front of “values voters.”

The insult Sarah Palin represents to American voters is that she’s being offered to us now: now, when anyone with eyes to see can see that the values shtick of the religious right has never been anything but a carrot dangled before the horse of right-wing Christian voters, with no intent for that carrot ever to reach the mouth of the horse. Who keeps predictably lunging for the carrot, wizened as may be, even when it will never have a taste of it . . . .

There are many ways to approach the question of all that is dangerous about Sarah Palin’s religious worldview—an all that comprises a grab-bag full of horrors ranging from the belief that women are made to be dominated by men, to the belief that God has a special place in God’s heart for the red, white, and blue, to the assumption that the war in Iraq is a holy war, to the conclusion that God intends to “save” the Jewish people before the final curtain of history slams down, and that anything the state of Israel does in the meantime is therefore automatically blessed by God. And then there’s the shooting wolves from airplanes thing, the cherished proposition that the natural world is given into “man’s” hands to exercise dominion over (read: exploit) it . . . .

Not to mention the whole family values bag of tricks, whose contents are rightly being pulled out for inspection by bloggers and reporters today, and examined with mingled amusement, consternation, and disbelief. Here’s a way to track the absurd claim the religious right continues to try to make on American voters’ loyalty today—even today: in less than two decades, the religious right has gone from wagging its finger at us about the immorality of out-of-wedlock pregnancy (remember Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown?), to chiding us now if we dare to wonder whether conceiving a child without benefit of marriage might be antithetical to sound family values.

We’re now being told—and told we’d better swallow the story, or else—that conceiving a child before marriage is a positive demonstration of pro-life values. It’s a choice that affirms the sanctity of marriage, the resolve of “Christians” to overcome abortion, the complementarity of servant women and master men. Tom Minnery, senior v-p of Focus on the Family Action, informed the American public after he and other right-wing politico-religious head honchos had twisted McCain’s arm to pick Palin, that she "she has not rejected the feminine side of who she is, so for that reason, she will be attractive to conservative voters" (www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/the-secretive-right-wing_b_122881.html).

Puhleez. I don’t care a flip whether Sarah Palin’s first-born son arrived eight months after she eloped with Track’s father. I think it’s as distasteful (and as enervating, given the real problems our society faces) to focus attention on the struggles Bristol Palin now faces as it was to focus attention on Bill Clinton’s White House sexcapades week after dreary week after dreary week several years ago.

But—and this is a but that can't simply be cast aside as irrelevant special pleading on the part of liberals—the Sarah Palins of the world have made these questions an issue. Sarah Palin opposes sex education in schools. Sarah Palin believes abstinence-only education works. Sarah Palin has held her foot in the door to keep pregnant teen mothers from receiving benefits they desperately need in order to raise the children that she and the churches allied with her tell these teens they must bear and raise, or else.

Sarah Palin has represented herself as a shining exemplar of family values. She is a courageous foot soldier of the Lord in the battle against demonic gays with their demonic clamor for marital rights equal to the ones she and her spouse enjoy. It beggars belief that her defenders would now seek to flip her own family’s record vis-à-vis family values upside down and try to convince us that this painfully marred record not only does not require embarrassed justification, but is actually exemplary—a wonderful demonstration to us of the lessons about the ideal family that the religious right has been trying so hard to get through our thick skulls lo these many years now.

And who’s buying this hogwash? Well, Catholics, for one thing—at least some Catholics, and if a recent online Zogby poll is any indicator of the drift of Catholic opinion after McCain’s announcement of Palin as his running mate, a goodly number of Catholics.

Today’s Clerical Whispers blog has a report that a Zogby poll done soon after the announcement found that 54 percent of Catholic respondents see McCain’s choice of Palin as positive—a percentage that mirrors the views of voters as a whole in the entire sample of 526 respondents (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/09/zogby-online-poll-shows-most-catholics.html). Fifty-four percent of American Catholics—if the Zogby poll is accurate—see Palin in a positive light. Fifty-four percent of my co-religionists not only do not see her eccentric, dangerous religio-political worldview as objectionable, but presumably find it consonant with Catholic teaching and Catholic values.

These findings don’t surprise me. But they do boggle my mind. They represent the strongest possible indictment of the American Catholic bishops, who have intentionally led Catholic voters into the cul-de-sac of Christian right politics—a cul-de-sac going nowhere, because it was designed to be a dead end. And it has not taken rocket science to see this. In continuing to permit—even to encourage—Catholic voters to believe it is their religious duty to vote for Sarah Palin and her ilk, the American Catholic bishops are shamefully abdicating their duty to be responsible teachers of their flock, not to mention competent pastors.

There is tremendous irony in what has happened to the American Catholic vote in the last two decades. And if we cannot see that irony, I think we might as well begin to pack our bags and abandon the public forum in which we claim we have something of importance to share about values.

Here’s the dark heart of the irony: Sarah Palin is what used to be called a lapsed Catholic. She was baptized Catholic, and as a young teen, chose to be re-baptized in the Assemblies of God church (see Cathleen Decker and Michael Finnegan, “Palin Has Risen Quickly from PTA to VP Pick,” Los Angeles Times, 30 August, www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-mccainveepbio30-2008aug30,0,2159346.story).* In choosing Sarah Palin over Joe Biden—apparently with the active complicity of many bishops—American Catholics are choosing a lapsed Catholic over a practicing one. The claim that Sarah Palin somehow represents Catholic values better than Joe Biden does requires as many mental contortions to make it acceptable as does the claim that conceiving a baby out of wedlock is an exemplary demonstration of family values.

What is wrong with this picture? Well, it’s what’s always wrong when fiction trumps fact, and when we’re asked to pretend that we don’t spot the fiction, that our eyes and brains are on cruise control—a damning irony so frequently evident in the behavior of morally vacuous leaders that Hans Christian Andersen invented a fairy tale about an emperor with no clothes to expose the irony.

As recently as last Saturday, the high muck-muck of the Knights of Columbus, Carl A. Anderson, was once again spouting gibberish about how Catholics have no choice except to vote McCain in this election, because Biden is “a man at odds with the highest levels of his own Catholic faith” (see http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com, linking to an op-ed piece by Anderson in the Sun Times [Chicago], www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/1136768,CST-EDT-open30.article). Yes, that Carl A. Anderson, the same Supreme Knight who recently announced to this year’s annual convention of the Knights of Columbus that,

We will never succeed in building a culture of life if we continue to vote for politicians who support a culture of death.

It is time that Catholics shine a bright line of separation between themselves and all those politicians who defend the abortion regime of Roe v. Wade.

Imagine if this year millions of Catholic voters simply say “no” – no to every candidate of every political party who supports abortion (www.kofc.org/un/eb/en/convention_2008/index.html).

If this is not a classic look-at-the-emperor’s-splendid-clothes argument, then I’ve never met one of those splendid-clothes arguments. News flash for Mr. Anderson: millions of Catholic voters have been simply saying no to candidates who support abortion, over and over—as in helping get Mr. Bush elected.

And if the current presidential regime even remotely resembles what “building a culture of life” rather than a culture of death is all about, then I believe I’ve just spent the last four years on Pluto rather than planet Earth. In what shape, form, or fashion does the response to Katrina represent the values of a culture of life? Or the war in Iraq? Or the failure to provide even basic healthcare for millions of citizens, including millions of children and teen mothers struggling to raise children?

The disparity is too easy to see. The glaring reality—the gap between fact and fiction—is simply too obvious. Something else must be going on in the bishops’ willingness to let themselves be played for fools again and again by the religious right, when no promises about life values are ever cashed in, and yet Catholic voters are asked one more time to believe that their votes will contribute to a culture of life, if they’ll only vote right.

There must be some other reason for the bishops to permit people like Carl Anderson to claim the protection of the episcopal mantle, as they fulminate about what those at the “highest levels of the Catholic faith” think about matters political. Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that the American Catholic bishops, on the whole, actually believe in and support the “values” of the current administration, in all their bankrupt ugliness, more than they do the values of those who propose viable ethical-political alternatives to the status quo.

It’s about power. It’s all about power. It’s about image management. It’s about money, its ebb and flow. It’s about compromises and back-room deals. It’s about you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

It’s, as Sarah Palin reminds us, about men ruling the world and women submitting to their God-given role as servant leaders. It’s about abandonment of pastoral responsibility—an abandonment so painfully evident in what we now know about the abuse crisis and how a majority of bishops have handled it that I really do not know how these distinguished gentlemen of the cloth keep holding up their heads, let alone stand in the pulpit and preach to us.

And this is an abandonment of pastoral responsibility that runs through the leading ranks of all American Christian churches. Were it otherwise, McCain would never have even considered insulting our intelligence and moral sensibility so profoundly by offering Sarah Palin to us as an exemplar of Christian values.

*Interestingly enough, though John Allen’s analysis of Palin as a post-denominational Christian notes the irony of her appeal to Catholic voters, Allen does not even mention her childhood Catholicism: see http://ncronline3.org/drupal/?q=node/1739.

Rachel Maddow and Pat Buchanan: Hateful Speech Translates to Hatreful Acts

Back after the long weekend, during which Steve and I spent welcome days with our dogs in the Ozarks, walking, reading, and watching and listening to waterfalls. The butterflies were beautiful. They’re different at different seasons, and always abundant in the little valley where we look for them beside a creek.

On this trip, a dark blue-black one with radiant iridescent blue spots along the lower part of the wings, and orange spots at the wingtips. Along with these, though congregated in separate locations, were a small brilliant orange butterfly with black markings.

And today the remnants of Gustav are with us, raking the state with constant rain and high winds. A day to read, write, listen to music, nurse chigger bites, and be glad that one is fortunate enough to be inside, to have an inside to which to go.

And to the news: today’s Alternet news site has excellent commentary by George Lakoff on some underlying reasons for the failure of progressive political thinkers to reach many American voters where they live and move and have their being. Lakoff notes that radical right-wing activists have been adroit about spinning narratives that engage the emotional-cognitive lives of mainstream voters (www.alternet.org/election08/97193/lakoff%3A_palin_appeals_to_voter_emotions_--_dems_beware).

Where we in the reality-based community who fight for progressive causes emphasize facts, those on the right have been spinning stories—and, in this way, they have succeeded in defining the conversation such that brute facts outside the confines of their narrative frames, no matter how convincing those facts are, fail to reach people’s hearts and souls. Lakoff challenges those of us who want to keep democracy alive at this precarious moment in our history to learn to tell stories and to find metaphors to engage people’s minds and hearts:

Our job is to bring external realities together with the reality of the political mind. Don't ignore the cognitive dimension. It is through cultural narratives, metaphors, and frames that we understand and express our ideals.

Lakoff’s reflections remind me of why I began this blog. I’m spending much of each day blogging because I’m convinced that many stories that don’t get a hearing in the mainstream media deserve a hearing. They have to be told. There’s no way we can understand our experience as a nation unless we hear the suppressed narratives that mainstream news outlets won’t touch, because the truths these narratives contain are inconvenient for those who have spun the dominant narrative.

Narratives from the margins provide facts that challenge the claim of mainstream perspectives to have the final word on what it means to live in America at this point in its history. The stories from the margins unravel the dominant narratives imposed on us from above. They force us to begin thinking differently about who we are, what we have done in the past, and our potential as a nation. They also seduce us into reverie and reflection, just when we think we’ve found a new meta-narrative that explains everything and includes everyone.

They catch us up in our quest for total explanation because they remind us of inconvenient bits of our history we hope to forget, to sweep under the rug when these bits of history become problematic. To a great extent, the political and religious right are trying to do this now with their recent history vis-à-vis their gay brothers and sisters.

As the cultural tide turns in favor of gay rights—as polls indicate younger Americans of all political affiliations rejecting homophobia—the political and religious right are trying to make us forget what they have done to their gay brothers and sisters in recent decades. Those on the right are trying to change the subject, to discover a new all-encompassing meta-narrative that will engage the passion of American voters while sweeping away inconvenient memories of the price we have paid for previous dominant narratives of racism and homophobia.

Clearly, that new meta-narrative will focus on brown people who (in our imagination as it is manipulated by those trying to control the conversation) invade our borders—illegal immigrants, Muslims, the people who planned 9/11. This may be the last federal election cycle in which we see the religious and political right trying one more desperate time to engage the visceral fears of the voting public by waving the gay flag as a warning sign, now that a shift is underway to demonizing narratives about threatening invasive brown outsiders.

Because the cynicism underlying the political use of human beings—gay, brown, Muslim, whatever group is in the sights of the right at any particular time—is so breathtakingly calculating and has been so destructive, I am glad that there are those among us who won’t allow those who have used and demeaned some of their brothers and sisters to forget.

Like Rachel Maddow. Choosing to make her a major political commentator is one of the smartest moves I’ve seen a mainstream news outlet make lately. I was particularly delighted with her comments to Pat Buchanan last Monday (25August) as MSNBC commentators dissected Michelle Obama’s speech to the Democratic National Convention.

In her inimitable nice but honest-to-God way, Rachel Maddow put Pat Buchanan on the hook, right before God and everybody. And let him squirm just a little bit. And he did and said nothing—could not do or say anything without admitting the truth of her damaging charges against him.

Maddow spoke about her reaction to Pat Buchanan’s saber-rattling culture wars speech to the Republican National Convention in 1992. As a young 19-year old who had just come out of the closet, she reacted to what the DNC and the RNC of that year did in personal terms. And how else could she have reacted? How else can anyone react to political speeches, except in terms of her or his own personal experience? Those speeches—the kind Pat Buchanan gave—had a personal impact on her own life and on the lives of people she knew and loved.

Rachel Maddow told Pat Buchanan that when he rattled his saber in 1992 and called for America to declare a culture war on those promoting “homosexual rights,” she felt as if her country were declaring war on her. By contrast, when she watched and listened to the Clintons, she felt drawn to them and their platform because she had the strong sense "they don't want an America that doesn't want me in it." As she told the chastened and silent Mr. Buchanan, "I felt like these people don’t hate me and would respect me if we met."

Indeed. Words make a world of difference. Especially when they are used like stones to hurl at someone—and when that someone is either you yourself or someone you love. Pat Buchanan may not like to be reminded of this today—I have no doubt at all he’d like to forget this—but his words in 1992 had real-life effects on real, living, breathing human beings.

Like Steve. And like me. Listening to Rachel Maddow brought back snippets of my own narrative that I have a responsibility to remember and pass on, because this is a tiny piece of what happened in America in 1992—of what some Americans did to other Americans in that year, as a result of Pat Buchanan’s call for a culture war against gay Americans. Of what some Christian and some Catholic Americans did to other Christian and other Catholic Americans who just happened to be gay.

When Mr. Buchanan (have I mentioned he’s a Catholic?) gave his culture wars speech at the RNC in the fall of 1992, we had just begun our second year of teaching at a small Catholic college in North Carolina. The college could have been anywhere USA—that is, any small Catholic college in the USA owned by a religious community. This one happened to be a Benedictine college.

Well, not quite anywhere. It was and is a college with a reputation for being on the far-right fringes of American Catholicism, and one decidedly in the pocket of the politico-religious right. We knew only bits and pieces of its reputation at the time we were hired to teach theology there—both of us.

What we knew troubled us, but as gay theologians living in a coupled but non-public relationship, we did not have the same freedom of choice in selecting jobs that our straight colleagues had. When the offer of two jobs at the same institution came along in the year after Steve had been denied tenure unilaterally by the rector of the seminary at which he had taught for some six years, we took the offer, cautiously but hopefully, believing the promises made to us by the school’s administration.

I will never forget that 1992 convention and Pat Buchanan’s culture war speech. I have no choice except to remember, because it is now part of my personal history. The small Benedictine college was very different from Xavier University, at which I had taught happily the first seven years of my career, and where I was offered tenure, turning down the offer to take the job in North Carolina.

For one thing, Xavier is owned by a community of religious women. The macho game playing and macho posturing that dominated the life of the male-owned Catholic college simply were not a part of the culture of Xavier.

Xavier is also an HBCU, and the kind of right-wing politics I was to encounter at the Benedictine school in North Carolina was just not in evidence at Xavier. Many faculty, both white and black, had no patience for neo-conservative political and religious thinking. They knew very well what it translates into, in the lives of African Americans.

The climate at the Benedictine college was night-and-day different from that at Xavier. At the Benedictine college, being a “liberal” was considered an oddity, a betrayal of what the school stood for—of the Catholicism that Patrick McHenry, a graduate of this college who now sits in Congress, has called purer and truer than that of other areas of the country.

A vicious, nasty Catholicism, I soon found—one where radical conservative activists on the faculty did not think twice about stuffing my campus mailbox with hate mail, and where I was severely punished for protesting this hazing and trying to get to the bottom of it and stop it.

And things only got worse—and decidedly so—with the 1992 RNC. That culture-war speech? Those hateful words uttered by the Catholic neoconservative icon Pat Buchanan? They energized the right-wing faculty at this small college. During the convention, as the anti-gay rhetoric spewed forth, the delight of the faculty—of the male faculty, I should day, for the most part—was tangible in the faculty lounge. It was very similar to the tangible gloating delight the same faculty exhibited when Clarence Thomas was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice and Anita Hill slapped down.

I had never met anything like this. I didn’t know places like this existed in American Catholicism. (I now know better, of course, and I’ve met versions of the same thing on Methodist campuses, where it’s better disguised as treacly “Christian” piety.) It was so . . . ugly. Downright ugly.

During all the time of the convention, when some monks would come daily to the faculty lounge to smoke with and high-five the other old boys as they gloated about how the Republicans were holding the family values line, only one person ever spoke to me about the convention. And about how it might be affecting Steve and me—who were clearly a couple, but also playing the Catholic don’t ask, don’t tell game, because we knew no other options if we were to keep our jobs and continue to function as theologians.

This was a monk who eventually left the monastery, a monk who was himself gay and who was struggling to claim and honor his identity. He left in part due to what the monastery and the college did to Steve and me at the end of that academic year.

As I’ve previously noted, the college gave me a one-year terminal contract and refused to provide any reason for the contract. The college also refused to place my final semester’s evaluation in writing—for understandable reasons, since I had been given a glowing oral evaluation the week before I was given the terminal contract. How to put the two together, and avoid litigation (which really was not an option, as the college’s administrators and monks knew, because 1] NC is a right-to-work state where people can be fired for no reason at all, and 2] NC has no laws protecting the rights of gay persons or gay employees)?

I could go on at length with details of this story. For the purposes of this reminiscence, I want only to note that Rachel Maddow is absolutely correct to try to call Pat Buchanan to accountability for the words—the shameful, anti-Christian words—he spoke in 1992 at the RNC.

Those words had real-life effects on real-life people. For Steve and me, they helped energize a movement within the American Catholic church that has made it almost impossible for gay Catholics to feel welcome today in our churches. The words signaled the start of a culture war within the American church itself, which has had quite a few casualties—gay people hounded out of jobs, gay people whose vocations have been thwarted and whose gifts have been rejected insofar as we have not chosen to remain self-denying, self-hating, and closeted.

Not long after Steve and I left the college in question, the abbot of the monastery took over the leadership of the college and mounted what many gay people living in the region saw as an outright purge of gay folks. He fired some seven or eight “single” faculty and staff members for specious reasons. I have a copy of a letter a local gay person who graduated from the college sent to a monk in the monastery that owns the college, protesting this purge (and identifying it as such), and stating his intent to move from the Catholic church as a result of what he saw the abbot doing.

The abbot justified his actions to the media as an attempt to re-establish Catholic identity in the college, as more lay faculty were hired and vocations to the monastery dwindled. How we who were gay and closeted at the college represented any kind of threat to the Catholic identity of the college was never clearly explained.

For Steve and me, these events were the beginning of the end for our careers as theologians. From that time until now, we have been persistently blackballed by any Catholic institution to which we apply for work. We spent several years living hand to mouth, and it’s impossible to read and write—that is, to do theological work—when you live hand to mouth, struggling to make ends meet, worrying about lack of medical insurance. These were years in which we were also caring for my mother, who was suffering from severe dementia, at home—a time in which we were least prepared to deal with the upheavals in our life the Catholic monastery and college caused when it ran us off.

So yes, Pat, Rachel is right: words make the world of difference in people’s lives. When people throw out words as weapons, those weapons do find targets. And they’re almost certain to wound the targets they find—the flesh and blood and psyches of those they find, when the targets are human beings.

Your words, uttered so casually, gave heart those looking for more reason to marginalize and hate in the name of Christ. In doing so, they had real effects on our real lives. And on many lives. Some of those lives cannot now be recovered, since the people to whom they belonged are no longer with us.

Like young Matthew Shepard, who was beaten to a pulp and then hung on a fence to die. I’m not accusing you directly, Pat, of causing his death. But I am saying—and I want you to hear this, as a fellow Catholic—that the words you uttered in 1992 had an ugly, toxic effect on our culture at large, and increased the proportion of hatred of gay people in our culture.

And it is from those cultural toxins that events like the killing of Matthew Shepard bubble up.

What will you as a Christian, as a Catholic, do now about those words you uttered 16 years ago, Pat? What will all the Christians, all the Catholics, who listened with glee to the family-values rhetoric in 1992, and who acted on that hate rhetoric, do now, I wonder?

The words may now be past for you, and you may want to repudiate them. But the wounds they inflicted still trouble our lives. Now as you try to distance yourselves from the words you once spoke, to pretend you did not speak them or mean them, what will you do about the lives that remain crippled due to the words you no longer want to own?

Christianity teaches us that we remain responsible for the effect of our words on others, even when time has passed. We remain responsible because, at the end of our lives, we must own our words and the effect they have had on others.

It is easy to disown words we have spoken in the heat of the moment. It is so much harder to bind up the wounds those wounds inflict, especially when the wounds go deep and linger for many years.

And yet there is no other option for people of faith, is there? Not if we believe, as people of faith around the world do, that we must give some final accounting for our lives, for the increase of love (or of hate) we have set in motion in the world through our lives.