Where Have All the Christian Intellectuals Gone? (Does Anyone Remember John Paul's and Ratzinger's Purge of Catholic Theologians?)

It's a thing now among journalists and religion commentators to ask what has happened to the public intellectuals of the churches in the past few decades — as Catholic commentator E.J. Dionne does in this Commonweal essay. Where have they gone? Why are they not with us any longer — the Niebuhrs (or, as Fred Clark points out, the Martin Luther Kings who never get mentioned in this discussion, and isn't that curious, and noteworthy)?

Short Takes on Demand of Religious Leaders for Continued Right to Discriminate Against Gays: Continued Moral Failure of Catholic Centrism

Some of my short takes on several pieces of news commentary in the past few days:

Quote for Day: "Congratulations to the Arizona Legislature for Doing Such an Excellent Job at De-Evangelization"

E.J. Dionne on the Arizona legislature's excellent "de-evangelization" program:

E.J. Dionne on Media's Ability to "Turn on a Dime": Critical Reflections about Media's Claim to Mediate Social Reality to Rest of Us

This is the kind of thing I'd have written in my journal, before I began blogging--and as I read the day's news and news commentary. Now that this blog has become my journal . . . .

Provocative One-Liners from News, First Week of 2014

Provocative one-liners from smart news commentary or articles I read this past week:

E.J. Dionne on Francis's Decision to Canonize JPII and John XXIII: "One for One Side, One for the Other" and Why Centrists Drive Me Up a Wall

E.J. Dionne's statement at Commonweal right now about the "saintly politics" Pope Francis is ostensibly using as he canonizes both John Paul II and John XXIII reminds me of why centrists drive me up a wall. "One for one side, one for the other -- it's a good formula for harmony, something Catholicism needs right now," Dionne writes.

The Devastation in Oklahoma: Government and the Common Good

The devastation in Oklahoma is, of course, in the forefront of my mind this morning. Just yesterday, I swapped emails with a former colleague who now lives not far from Oklahoma City. He was telling me about the previous round of tornadoes that passed close to where he lives. We agreed that those of us who have grown up in or lived in areas where tornadoes are prevalent learn to heed that humming in the blood and bones that tells us tornadic conditions are nearby, though there's precious little one can do except take the best shelter one can find when a tornado approaches.

Obama Administration Grants HHS Concessions to Catholic Institutions, Centrist Commentators Cry Victory, While Headlines about the Catholic Church Say . . .

And here's where the determination of the current leaders of the Catholic church to maintain at all costs the historically developed and entirely mutable system of clericalism about which I just blogged has brought the Catholic church at this point in its history: 

Tribalism as Illuminating Category for Discussing American Catholicism and Evangelicalism: Carrying on the Conversation in 2013

As 2012 ended, I began compiling a list of religion-politics-culture discussions from the year that seemed worth continuing in 2013. Then I thought better of posting it, though, because much of what I had to say by way of commentary as I put the list together seemed to be a downer. (Yes, believe it or not, I do sometimes curb my tongue and suppress postings I've drafted if they seem excessively negative or doleful.)

Left, Right, Center: American Catholic Centrists Recycle Predictable Election-Year Meme

Lots of blather these days at centrist Catholic blog sites about who occupies the center (which is to say, who issues the defining dictates that limn the lives of everyone else in the world).  About who's center-right, center-left, center-center . . . .

E.J. Dionne on Moral Obligation of Centrists: Turning the Critique to Catholic Centrists

E.J. Dionne is absolutely correct with his analysis of how far to the extreme right the Republican party has now moved under the management of the Koch brothers and their tea party puppets.  And he's absolutely right to decry the wink, nudge complicity of beltway centrists (Dionne calls them moderates) in legitimizing views  that are, as he puts it, so far beyond any measure of intellectual or moral sanity that they're plainly "nuts."  Dionne is indubitably on target with his analysis suggesting that Republicans of the ilk of Eisenhower or Taft would be regarded as socialist redistributionists by today's GOP.

Andrew Sullivan on Letter to English Catholics about Marriage: They Cannot Speak Our Name

Why has it taken liberal Catholics so long to begin seeing what many of us have seen for some time now? I just wrote.  And as I dealt with that question, I suggested a compelling answer to it: liberal-centrist Catholics have, for far too long, simply pretended that the brother and sister Catholics on whose backs the papal and episcopal whips fall are not there.

E.J. Dionne on U.S. Bishops' Squandered Opportunity (and Me on Liberal Blindness)

E.J. Dionne argues that the U.S. Catholic bishops squandered a premier moment of unity in American Catholicism, when Catholics across the spectrum, including liberals like him, stood with the bishops in their resistance to the attempt of the Obama administration to have religiously based institutions cover contraceptives in healthcare plans.  The tea-party response of not a few bishops to the reasonable accommodation the administration offered the bishops has convinced many Catholics, he writes, that the bishops are more about Republican politics than about moral teaching:

End-of-Week News Wrap-Up: Mainstream Media's Tilt to Right, Another Arrest Following Homphobic Frenzy Whipped Up by Bishop William Lori

An end-of-week wrap-up posting that ties together recent events and commentary with previous postings on this blog . . . .

In a posting earlier this week, I noted that, despite abundant evidence challenging this narrative, the mainstream media persist in speaking of the U.S. as a “center-right” nation. I noted that this mythic narrative, repeated ad nauseam in our media, assures that our political discourse is constantly skewed to the right, and provides right-wing thinkers who do not represent the center with gate-keeping and veto power in our political deliberations.

E.J. Dionne offers a similar analysis of the role of the media in our political culture in an op-ed piece this week in Washington Post. Dionne notes that the constant tilt of mainstream media to the right is “closing off political options that should be part of the public discussion.”

Dionne notes that Rush has only to sneeze or Newt to tweet, and the media hurl their machines into motion to cover the story. By “regularly treating far-right views as mainstream positions and by largely ignoring critiques of Obama that come from elected officials on the left,” the mainstream media assure that figures like Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich continue to have gate-keeping power in our important national political conversations, and veto power over all of our futures, though neither man holds office or reflects the views of a majority of Americans.

In postings about the shooting of Dr. George Tiller in Topeka last Sunday, I noted the thinness of mainstream media coverage of the ideological and religious background of Scott Roeder, the man charged with this murder. I pointed in particular to connections between white supremacist groups and “Christian” groups employing a dangerous, bloody apocalyptic theology that encourages violence against people of color, women, gays and lesbians, and those perceived as pro-abortion.

In light of those observations, I recommend an article at the Alternet site today—James Ridgeway’s “brief history of the radical violent right.” Ridgeway notes Roeder’s ties to the Freemen movement, whose theology is informed by an ideology known as Christian Identity, “which holds that Jews, blacks, and other minorities aren't actually people and therefore don't deserve constitutional rights.” Rights are for real people, those who aren’t three-fifth of a person, those created by God to rule and to define the humanity of “inferior” human beings: rights are for “white Sovereigns.”

As Ridgeway notes, it might seem curious that pro-life Christians have found themselves edging closer and closer to such far-right racists, whose theologies hardly reflect mainstream Christian views. But when it comes to abortion, evangelicals and Catholics increasingly find themselves connected to extremist groups like the Freeman, because of one important “bridge”: the connecting point joining mainline Christian pro-lifers and far-right groups like the Freemen is misogyny. The Freemen are attracted to the anti-abortion cause because

[t]he Sovereign crowd viewed women as chattel, and the prospect of an independent woman deciding to seek an abortion didn't sit well with them. I gained some insight into this line of thinking in another piece I once wrote about a young woman in Oklahoma who aspired to join the Christian Identity group, hoping that its followers would teach her to shoot and become a guerrilla. Instead, the men asked her for sex. When the woman replied that she wanted a relationship first, one of them replied, "Women are for breeding."

I’ve said it before and I have to say it again: the U.S. Catholic bishops have ended up in bed with some very strange bedfellows, in the “pro-life” cause. And that alliance—with racist, misogynist, homophobic thugs whose core values in many areas, including the economic sphere, are starkly at odds with Catholic values—is radically undermining the credibility of the pro-life movement. As long as the Catholic bishops are unwilling to address the violence their perfervid rhetoric about abortion is producing, and the ties to some of the most ungodly sectors of our culture with which the bishops seem willing to live as they preach the gospel of life, the bishops will not convince many of us to share their outlook on life.

And speaking of those ungodly ties and those unseemly bedfellows: there has been yet another arrest in Connecticut, following the choice of Bridgeport bishop William J. Lori (and Archbishop Charles Chaput in Denver) to whip up a homophobic frenzy this spring, as Lori and Chaput sought to torpedo legislation that proposed to place oversight of Catholic parish finances in the hands of layfolks rather than priests.

This week New Jersey police arrested radio host Hal Turner on a Connecticut warrant, after Turner posted a statement on his website threatening openly gay Connecticut legislators Michael Lawlor and Andrew McDonald. Turner stated,

It is our intent to foment direct action against these individuals personally. These beastly government officials should be made an example of as a warning to others in government: Obey the Constitution or die.

These are, of course, the very same two openly gay legislators that Bishops Lori and Chaput targeted in their spring crusade. The word “beastly” is codespeak for gay, in the work of violent right-wing homophobes from Michael Savage to Fred Phelps. Just as I predicted months ago, Lori and Chaput’s homophobic rhetoric links them to some of the most violent anti-gay people in our nation, and is continuing to elicit threats against the two gay legislators Lori and Chaput chose to target.

As Daniel Altimari notes in a Hartford Courant article yesterday,

The remarks on the blog [i.e., Hal Turner’s blog] were a reaction to the recent controversy over a bill before the legislature's judiciary committee that would have changed the way the Roman Catholic Church is governed, taking power away from church officials and turning it over to lay members.

Turner is enraged, it appears, because it has recently been announced that the Bridgeport diocese is under investigation by the Connecticut Office of State Ethics for possible violation of state lobbying laws, after Lori organized the rally at the state capitol challenging the potential legislation regarding parish finances.

The church’s response? The Bridgeport diocese has just filed suit against the state to seek an injunction against the Office of State Ethics.

And the diocese’s ally, Hal Turner, now facing charges for inciting violence against Michael Lawlor and Andrew McDonald, the same two openly gay legislators Bishops Lori and Chaput targeted back in March? He’s a well-known white nationalist and white supremacist, known for his outspoken anti-Semitic views, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has characterized as a radio “host of hate.”

Strange bedfellows, Bishop Lori and Archbishop Chaput—shameful bedfellows for Catholic bishops to climb into bed with. I continue to call on the U.S. Catholic bishops to challenge the noxious use of homophobia by some bishops to achieve political ends, and to exercise fraternal correction by calling to accountability their brother bishops who continue stooping to such low and dangerous tactics.

Otherwise, somebody’s going to get hurt—really hurt—and those who fomented the violence will have blood on their hands, as will those who stood by in silence and said or did nothing as the ugly words poured forth.

Thought for the Day: One-Issue Analysis Misses the Point of What Ails Us

This strange approach to politics, involving nudges, nods, and winks on cultural issues, reflects the real division in the nation: between those who want to have a culture war and those who don’t. At election time political candidates need simultaneously to "rally the base," which includes a heavy quotient of culture warriors, and to "appeal to the center," meaning the majority (often left of center on economic issues), which sees health care, education, jobs, taxes, and national security as central concerns trumping gay marriage or abortion. The result is a strained, dysfunctional, and often dishonest political dialogue based on symbolic utterances. Hot-button questions that rally particular sectors of the electorate—and draw listeners and viewers to confrontational radio and television programs—preempt serious discussion of what ails American culture and society.

E.J. Dionne, Jr., Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008), p. 50.

Thought for the Day: The Odd and Troublesome Focus of Contemporary Christians on Homosexuality

There is so much work to be done to battle against family breakdown and to encourage husbands and wives to strengthen their commitments to each other and to their children. It is, at best, odd and troublesome that religious traditions that have contributed so much to the just ordering of our public life should expend so much energy fighting the desire of homosexuals to have their own committed relationships respected by government, and their rights enshrined in law.

E.J. Dionne, Jr., Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008), p. 115.

To Talk of Many Things

And now time to catch up on this and that.

I mentioned some time ago (I think) that my nephew Luke had completed his master’s degree in South Asian Studies. Recently, I read his thesis, and doing that reminds me once again to congratulate him on his accomplishment.

The thesis is a study of how India and the Indian media have viewed ethnic conflicts in Sri Lanka in the past decade. It’s well-written, cogently argued, and thoughtful. I’m proud of my nephew and hope this degree will be a starting point for jobs that fulfill his dreams, and/or more education.

I also mentioned in a previous posting that my nephew Kate had applied for the job of her dreams in the big city. Kate was offered the job she wanted and began a few weeks ago. She seems very happy in her new life. I’m proud of her, too, and wish her very well.

Perhaps because I’ll always be an educator at heart, I think often these days of the world we’ll leave to the next generation. I’m frightened. I’m sad. I’m not confident we who have “made” the world that’s being handed on have done a very good job of it.

I read discussions of the recent UMC General Conference on the official UMC website and elsewhere. One recurrent theme is that the conversation about homosexuality—which is to say, about our LGBT brothers and sisters—should be over.

We’ve had our say. We’ve told them they’re sinners. If they don’t like it, they should look for another church. We have better things to do, real needs to attend to. Let’s stop talking about an issue that we’ve resolved in favor of biblical truth.

I’m appalled at such discourse. It’s everywhere. As E.J. Dionne’s book Souled Out notes, the lines created by the intersection of political and religious concerns in the U.S. have created alliances across religious communions. The same rhetoric of exclusion that I’m reading on UMC websites exists in my own Catholic church, where brothers and sisters concerned to maintain the purity of their church routinely invite brothers and sisters with less access to The Truth to leave and join the Episcopalians.

I’m appalled. How can anyone who understands what church is all about, at its core level, invite others to leave? What is it about the very presence, the faces, the existence of gay brothers and sisters, that elicits such savagery among many followers of Christ?

How can anyone read the gospels and think that they’re about our becoming comfortable, about excluding anyone who makes us think about the world in surprising new ways that cause extreme discomfort? How can anyone who reads the gospels (or has even a passing knowledge of Christian history) not see the ugly insincerity of the choice of the contemporary church to choose one “sin” alone as The Sin for which one should forever be excluded from communion?

And as this happens, young folks—those to whom we’re bequeathing the sorry mess we have made of the world—have almost no interest, on the whole, in maintaining these structures of exclusion. If the churches of Main Street USA are really concerned about transmitting the gospel to a new generation, they’d be doing all they can to end the exclusion of LGBT brothers and sisters, if only to build bridges to the new generation.

The fact that churches want to keep on clinging to these structures of exclusion has everything to do, I believe, with the need of some of us to remain comfortable and to remain empowered. We’ll do anything we can to hold onto the seats of power, even if that “anything” includes lying about and savaging a marginalized group of people. We will mortgage the future of the coming generation to maintain our power and privilege in the present.

On the lying front, I see articles on various blogs today about how the religious right wishes to take credit for supporting interracial marriage, in the wake of the death of Mildred Loving. As a number of blogs are noting, those in the religious right now taking credit for having advanced the cause of interracial marriage are, quite simply, lying about the roots of the religious right—about its roots in a reflex reaction in the Southern U.S. against integration.

As I have noted, I know these folks, flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. Their attempt to celebrate civil rights today is tinny and insincere, coming as it does from the same quarters that, a half century ago, fought tooth and nail to keep segregation in place, including in the church. The strategy of division in the religious right—of pitting African Americans against LGBT Americans, and of implying that the civil rights aspirations of the former are legitimate and of the latter illegitimate—rests on a whopper of a lie about the commitment of the religious right to racial equity.

As the blog commentaries are also noting, Mildred Loving herself noted the parallels between her struggle as an African-American woman to be free to marry the man she loved, and the struggle of LGBT Americans for equality. Mildred Loving was among the many African Americans who see the important connections between the fight for civil rights among African Americans and the parallel fight of LGBT Americans for equality.

I say much of this as well against the backdrop of the current U.S. presidential election, where recent articles note that the rise of Barack Obama to the position of Democratic front runner has everything to do with the need of younger people to have a future full of hope. Hope. Change. Those wedded to the politics of the past miscalculated, in this election cycle. In ridiculing the emphasis of Barack Obama and his supporters on hope and change, the defenders of the status quo have failed to understand the dynamics driving the millennial generation.

As with the churches and those defending the status quo in church life . . . .

Finally, I write against the backdrop of conversations with my co-religionists about issues like giving communion to politicians who have made statements supporting abortion. I find it very difficult to believe that we are undergoing that stupid conversation once again.

Polls indicate that the large majority of U.S. Catholics do not want to see the Eucharist used as a political weapon. Catholic tradition at its best maintains that the decision of someone to receive communion is a decision of conscience made by the person herself, in consultation with her spiritual director.

The Eucharist should not be politicized. If American Catholics cannot move beyond the politics of stalemate produced by the religious right, we will end up having nothing to say to contemporary culture. We won’t be part of the coalition trying to forge a new political consensus around the hope for constructive change for the future.

It is such a tragic waste of time and energy, to be involved in these stale old battles that are merely symbolic—attempts of a group of religious purists to assert their symbolic control over the rest of us. I am growing not merely weary of these attempts, but impatient of them.

Each time we have an election cycle, I notice the vultures hovering over the inter-religious conversations of churches in the U.S., doing all they can to pick at the bones of discontent in the conversation, so that the conversations do not move forward, so that people continue fighting over this and that scrap. These are carefully engineered and well-funded attempts to thwart the possibility that progressive groups within the mainstream churches might make common cause and move the political discussion in a new direction.

Those engaged in this sabotage process are seldom honest about what they are doing, about the groups for which they shill, about who is funding them, about the unsavory groups with which they are allied. And yet, one of their choice tactics is to try to manipulate the words of those they’re seeking to stalemate, to imply that their progressive opponents are dishonest and corrupt.

Enough. Anyone filled with belief is filled with hope. And hope builds. Hope is about giving ourselves over to a love that moves us outside ourselves and beyond ourselves. The ravenous need to control—to destroy in the process of controlling—is about some other kind of energy, not an energy fed by hope and love.

Souled Out Again: The Coupling of Justice and Mercy

A few disparate thoughts today—a day on which I am returning home from my trip, and have little time to blog—from E.J. Dionne’s new book Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008).

I like Dionne’s constant coupling of mercy and justice. Dionne notes that our American political discourse today is impoverished, because it tends to dismiss the “hard” language of justice for the softer discourse of a kindler, gentler mercy that has no real substantive content. We talk rhetorically about being kindler and gentler—more merciful—but have no measures, no benchmarks, for what it means to be merciful, since we eschew considerations of justice as we natter on about our mercifulness.

In fact, as he notes, we have relegated questions of social and economic justice to some religious and political netherworld, where they have little impact on our deliberations about what it means to be good, civil, humane people. We have drawn a line between authentic “religious” input in the political sphere, confining it to areas of sexual ethics or the morality of family life, and conversations about economic justice, treating the latter as though they have no connection to the moral or religious realm. As Dionne notes,

But how does one define justice? That question is central to sorting out what government’s role in the marketplace should be. Here again, one of the most important debates among religious people has been buried beneath a mound of media reports about sexually charged questions that are presumed to appeal to a wider audience (p. 81).

In Dionne’s view, this avoidance of rhetoric about justice in our political discourse, and the confining of the religious contribution to sexual morality and family life, radically impoverishes our public discourse. The major religious traditions of the world have a great deal to say about justice as the enfleshing of mercy, about how justice affects family life:

The narrowing of our moral and religious vision is one of the great tragedies of American politics since the late 1970s. Our traditions, most certainly Christianity and Judaism, teach us that we should not lie, cheat, or steal, and that we are supposed to love our neighbor. Shouldn’t the question of how such moral rules apply to our economic and social policies be a matter of lively debate within our political system? It is simply absurd to say that religious voices can be heard on family life, but not on the economic underpinnings of the family; on personal responsibility, but not on the responsibility of great economic actors; on generosity of the spirit, but not on the economic works of mercy (p. 89).

Dionne uses strong language to characterize this deliberate narrowing of our national discourse about politics: he calls it sinful. This analysis implicitly challenges the churches themselves. It suggests that churches do not serve their adherents well when they talk about mercy without speaking of justice. It also implies that churches mislead the public when they cause us to imagine that one can be authentically religious without seeking justice in all areas of life. As Dionne puts it,

The narrowing of the focus of religious engagement in politics to abortion, gay marriage, end-of-life questions, and a handful of other cultural issues is—it’s a strong word, I know—a sin. It limits the reach of faith. It suggests to some who might otherwise contemplate belief that religion is primarily about right-wing politics and drives many people away. In the case of Christianity, it radically confines a tradition that through history has had much of importance to say about the just ordering of political, economic, and social life (p. 123).

I am thinking of all of this today, in light of my recent experiences at a United Methodist university in Florida, and as the UMC General Conference continues. Methodism is very attractive in its rhetoric of mercy. Methodist ministers speak freely and easily about their work as a ministry of mercy.

Yet in recent decades, as have other Christian churches, Methodists have often tended to accept the neo-conservative blackout of justice discourse in the public sphere. The silence of the United Methodist Church about the justice dimensions of its institutions’ treatment of gay and lesbian persons, for instance, strongly undermines the claim of the UMC to be merciful to gay and lesbian persons. One cannot practice mercy without being just. One cannot be just without practicing mercy.

This constant coupling of justice and mercy was clear to John Wesley, and is an insight of Wesleyan spirituality that Methodism needs to recover today, in order to be a prophetic voice within the public sphere. When justice is uncoupled from mercy, when churches cave in to the pressure of neo-conservatives to treat discourse about justice as if it not at the very center of moral discourse in all religious traditions, churches end up being churches captive to culture (which is to say, captive to wealth and power), not churches that offer a salvific word to culture.

In making these observations, my intent is not to single out or attack the United Methodist Church. It is to speak out of my experience working at two UMC institutions, and, in particular, out of an experience of conspicuous injustice (and lack of mercy) at the last of those two institutions.

I speak as an outsider to the Methodist tradition. At the same time, the scriptures and credal traditions that bind one Christian church to another point all of us to a shared goal of living justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. What happens in one Christian communion affects other communions. It is in the collective interest of all Christian institutions to craft a language in which justice and mercy meet in the public sphere.

It’s also in the interest of all Christian institutions to model the church’s own life and that of its institutions around a shared ethic of justice and mercy. The churches will be credible, when they speak the countercultural word of the gospel to culture, only to the extent that they themselves live counterculturally.

Nothing is more countercultural than living justice and loving mercy. By embodying that goal in its own life and exemplifying what justice coupled with mercy can mean for human communities, the church makes the reign of God present in a way that urges secular social institutions along the path of mercy and justice.

With regard to gay and lesbian human beings, the churches have a long, long way to go. We continue to be subject to ugly injustice within the churches themselves. To the extent that this is the case, the churches forfeit their right to profess to be embodiments of mercy. They also undermine their countercultural message of justice for society at large.

Benedict's Visit: Drawing Lines or Opening Arms?

This has been a week of travel, in which it has not been easy to be online frequently. Given this, and since I’ve fulfilled my major task for the week—to send an open letter to Bishop Timothy W. Whitaker of the United Methodist Church’s Florida Conference—I want to end this work week with a brief reflection on some news stories that have caught my attention this week.

I’m, of course, following the news of Pope Benedict’s trip to the U.S., to the extent that I can do so without easy internet access. I am heartened that Benedict has met with survivors of clerical sexual abuse. I’m reading Bishop Geoffrey Robinson’s Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church (Dublin: Columba, 2007) now, and am persuaded by his argument that the abuse crisis is the most serious challenge the Catholic church has faced since the Reformation. I’m also persuaded by his contention that, had the pope addressed this crisis forthrightly, with transparency, from the time it broke as an international news story in 2002, we would be much further down the road of healing than we are now.

That being the case, Benedict’s meeting with survivors is a symbolic gesture of great importance—about which, more in a moment. If reports are correct which say that Benedict has also distinguished between pedophilia as the problem to be addressed, and homosexuality in the priesthood, then I am further heartened by what Benedict is accomplishing on this pastoral visit.

There have been strong forces within the church that wished to use gay priests as a scapegoat in ugly image-management attempts to sweep the abuse crisis under the rug. Archbishop Wilton Gregory has made that argument explicit, claiming that the church doesn’t have a pedophilia crisis but a homosexuality crisis in its priesthood. If Benedict has, indeed identified pedophilia as the problem to be addressed, and has distinguished between pedophilia and homosexuality, then he has made a valuable contribution. The crisis will not be resolved by scapegoating gay priests. It is a crisis of abuse of power first and foremost, and must be resolved at that level—not at the level of sexual orientation, which has nothing at all to do with its genesis or prevalence.

My posting yesterday reflects on Hilary Rosen’s recent comparison between Benedict and Desmond Tutu in a Huffington Post article. As I state in that reflection, in my view, if the churches truly want to reach the minds and hearts of people in the 21^st century with the gospel and to address social needs around the world, they cannot continue to attack gay and lesbian human beings.

The attack on a group of human beings already subject to social stigmas in many places in the world undercuts the churches’ proclamation of the good news. It undermines the churches’ attempt to be a beacon of hope for justice everywhere in the world. The church cannot participate in injustice and at the same time convince people—thinking people—that it stands unambiguously and everywhere on the side of justice.

Benedict himself has called for investigation of seminaries in the U.S., to weed out gay candidates for the priesthood. Not only will such a witch-hunt not “solve” the abuse crisis (which is about abuse of power first and foremost): this is a radically unjust attempt to manage the crisis and the public image of the church by scapegoating gay priests.

Impression management will not resolve the problem of abuse. Scapegoating a marginalized group of human beings will not resolve the problem. The problem has everything to do with misuse of clerical power, with a system of clericalism that accords a vastly disproportionate share of power and privilege to clergy rather than laity in the Catholic church.

Until that problem is addressed honestly, forthrightly, with transparency and full accountability, the abuse crisis will not go away. Though Benedict’s symbolic measures this week have been for the good, in my view, they are only a first step: as Geoffrey Robinson argues so cogently, dealing with the crisis before us now will require radical re-thinking of the role of the papacy, of clericalism, and of how power is used (and misused) in the Catholic church. It will require dialogue that permits the laity to have a voice, and, in particular, that brings to the table groups that have been rudely shoved away, including gay and lesbian believers as well as theologians silenced by Benedict himself when he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Acting as head of that Congregation, Benedict unleashed a monster, and he must now confront that monster if he wishes to bring healing to the church at this moment of crisis. Some of the most talented and forward-thinking minds in the church—including Charles Curran—were silenced by Ratzinger at a point in the history of the church when we most need their contributions to move beyond the abuse crisis.

In addition, under the papacy of John Paul II, both John Paul and Cardinal Ratzinger allowed some groups of Catholics in the United States to present themselves as the sole “orthodox” voice of Catholicism. These Catholics want the church to speak with a unitary voice on their “non-negotiable” issues. They want the church to read all dissenters out. They prefer a church of the holy few rather than the unwashed many—a Donatist church rather than a truly catholic one. They want the church to speak with their unitary voice, and to be their church.

They also wish to see the Catholic church explicitly aligned with one political party, the Republican party. To a great extent, they have turned the church in the U.S.—or tried to do so—into a political machine to serve the needs of the Republican party.

As E.J. Dionne says in his superb new book Souled Out, which I cited in a previous blog posting, this alliance of right-wing interest groups in U.S. Catholicism with the Republican party reached its nadir in the 2004 elections, when some bishops did all but stand on their heads to coerce Catholics to vote “right”—that is, to vote Republican. Some bishops were willing to take the entirely untraditional and theologically insupportable route of using the Eucharist as a political weapon in the 2004 elections. These bishops threatened to deny communion to Catholics who did not endorse their list of “non-negotiable” issues.

And, though these bishops hotly insisted that voting Republican was voting for life, they were conspicuously silent when the administration they told Catholics to elect betrayed all Catholic pro-life values in its response to Hurricane Katrina. They have been much more muted in their criticism of the tremendous assault on pro-life values in the Iraq War than they have ever been about abortion.

The recent Pew study shows about a third of American Catholics having walked away. Many of us have done so, I would submit, because we can no longer stomach the politicization of a tradition that has a much richer perspective on the interface of religion and politics. It is our very commitment to Catholic values—the broad range of values that vastly exceed the tight little list of “non-negotiable” issues—which causes us to distance ourselves from the church insofar as it is the Republican party at prayer.

Until the church deals with the monster it has unleashed by politicizing Catholic faith at this point in history, by allying Catholicism with a narrow political option in the Western world—until it deals with the connection between that attempt to bully all believers into lockstep thinking and voting, and the system of clericalism, it will continue to bleed members. And those who walk away will include individuals and groups whose contributions are crucially needed if the church is to be truly catholic, as well as to meet the significant challenges of transmitting its fundamental beliefs and values to the postmodernist culture of the 21st century.

If Benedict really wants to begin dealing with the deep roots of the abuse crisis, he needs to begin making clear distinctions between the endorsement of a single political option, which betrays the richness of the church’s tradition, and an approach that recognizes that the church brings a wide range of values to political life, which need to be applied in diverse ways in different cultures. Benedict needs to stand against the misrepresentation of “the” Catholic position in the American political sphere by some groups of American Catholics who want to use their “non-negotiables” as a litmus test to rule the rest of us out of their church. Only then will many of us take seriously what he has said and done this week about the abuse crisis.

A case in point: in my travels this week in the American heartland, I have found that many Catholic homes have gotten a recent mailing from Karl Keating of Catholic Answers. The mailing has to do with the upcoming World Youth Day in Sydney. In flaming bold red letters, it opens by announcing to Catholic families that their young people will be preyed on by homosexual activists at this international Catholic event. It calls on those receiving the flyer to donate so that they can keep Catholic youth safe in Sydney.

Mr. Keating’s letter characterizes gay and lesbian persons as “sinister.” He says that gay and lesbian persons are intent on “recruiting” Catholic youth. Mr. Keating waves the battle flag of intrinsic disorder. He states, “These people [sic] practice what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls ‘acts of grave depravity’ that are ‘intrinsically disordered’.” “These people” have chosen an immoral “lifestyle” and are not entitled to “special civil rights.”

These people? These human beings? These brothers and sisters in Christ? These people?! What Catholic values does that phrase represent, I wonder?

What to make of such a letter? Many of us might shake our heads and dismiss it as just another example of the ugly propaganda of the religious right.

I think letters like this deserve more attention, however. In the first place, this is a vile political screed masquerading as a religious statement. It is a screed that employs hate speech. It fuels social violence against a group of people identified as the sinister Other. It trades blatantly on ugly insupportable stereotypes of gay and lesbian human beings as sexual predators targeting the young.

The letter deserves attention as well because its mailing coincides with the visit of Benedict to the U.S. The timing of this letter can hardly be coincidental. In the same week that heartland Catholic families are glued to their t.v. sets watching Benedict, hearing news of his attempt to address the abuse crisis, they are reading a foul missive from a right-wing Republican activist group purporting to speak on behalf of “the” Catholic church, attacking a group of stigmatized individuals.

E.J. Dionne’s Souled Out notes the mysterious way in which Keating’s Catholic Answers group suddenly found funding to create a Catholic voter guide in 2004—a voter guide calling itself the Catholic voter guide, which overtly endorsed the Republican candidate. Attempts to track the money funding this politico-religious venture have not been successful, though Dionne notes that there are strong indicators that the funds came directly from the Republican party.

In the week that Benedict comes to try to bring healing to the U.S. church, one Catholic group in the U.S. sends out a hate-filled screed blanketing the American heartland, seeking to use gay and lesbian human beings as objects in a political game designed to bring Catholic votes, once again, to the Republican party. Pope Benedict, if I may be so bold as to address you, you have work to do: the healing we need is much deeper than symbolic gestures, however noble and good those gestures are as a first step.

To find healing that goes beyond the symbolic level, we need a church in which people of good will are once again free to speak their minds, to follow their informed consciences, to talk and pray together about very serious issues that cannot be resolved by top-down coercion, by crozier-shaking and excommunications, by threats of hell and damnation, or by allying the church with a single political option. To deal with the wounds of our church today, you must deal with some of what you yourself set in motion in the period in which you headed the CDC.

Even if you yourself have broken with that crozier-shaking style now that you have become pope, there are powerful groups within the Catholic church, as well as bishops, who continue to try to bully and coerce rather than to persuade and love. Thank you for giving signals, in your meeting with survivors of clerical abuse, that a much more pastoral, more thoughtful, more nuanced, and above all, more loving response is required on the part of a church that truly wishes to retain the loyalty of those targeted by the attack dogs that have been unleashed in the church in recent years.

We must move beyond the insider-outsider lines that try to create a church of the pure and washed, of true believers who happen to be all Republicans. I find the contention of Cardinal John P. Foley that “good morals, like good art, begin by drawing a line” absurd both on the face of it, and as a theological proposition (see Ian Fisher and Laurie Goodstein, “Hard-Liner with Soft Touch Reaches Out to U.S. Flock,” NY Times, 13 April 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/us/nationalspecial2/13pope.html). Foley uses this analogy to characterize the approach of Pope Benedict, the drawer of lines that define what is and is not Catholic, who is or is not inside the church.

I can think of all kinds of good art that is non-linear, that does not require drawing a line. And in my reading of the gospels, Jesus was all about transgressing social and religious lines that made some people insiders and others outsiders, some folks more human than other folks. The life and ministry of Jesus was about abolishing the lines that suggest that God loves some people more than others—or does not love some people at all.

The central Christian symbol is a set of lines that undercut and transgress a unitary line—a cross. If one wishes to meditate on the role of lines in Christianity, and if one takes this symbol as his or her starting point, then one might arrive at the conclusion that, in its core significance and at a fundamental level, Christianity challenges the drawing of any line that makes one group the inside group and other groups outsiders. The vertical line is cut across by the horizontal one, at the very heart of Christianity.

Rather than being about a single line that shows who is in and who is out, Christianity is about two lines that stretch the single line to its limits—about one line that crosses over the other, so that there is never a single, excluding line, but a pair of lines representing the open arms of a God who embraces every single human being. An effective papacy would take this symbol as its starting point . . . .

Souled Out

People talk about God as though doing so is easy, self-evident.

I talk about God that way.

But here’s the problem. To communicate with humans, God must reveal Godself to us in a way that we can understand, receive, appropriate.

Which means that any language about a God who reveals Godself to us in this way is inevitably tinged (tainted?) with human discourse, human insights, human words. It can’t be otherwise.

All talk about God has dirty human fingerprints smudged all over it. Dirty not because being human is sordid. Dirty because being dirty is the human condition. As Wendell Berry says, humans are earth lifted up a little while.

We seldom advert to the fact that all of our God-talk is smudged with human fingerprints.

It behooves us to do so. We’d have far fewer pretensions, in the name of God, far fewer sweeping claims to represent God, if we kept in mind the limitations of all of our God-talk.

The other horn of the dilemma re: language about God is that God truly is beyond all we can say—beyond human ken. Human discourse about God should always reserve, someplace within it, the recognition that God is actually beyond speech.

But a God who is totally Other, who is not as we are—whose very definition is alterity—cannot reveal Godself to us in any way that makes sense, unless God does so by adverting to human categories of reception.

Speech claiming to represent, capture, speak for God, must always subvert itself, if it is faithful to its origination point outside human ken.

Maybe those mystics are right, who say that cessation of human chatter as we near God is the wisest path.

In a way, it’s the same with trying to talk about oneself. The human heart is deep beyond all understanding—beyond even our own understanding. We try to grasp “our”selves—in dreams, for example (and perhaps preeminently)—and “the” self slips, slides, eludes all grasp.

For me, blogging about my pilgrimage thus becomes well-nigh impossible. It is so because I inevitably have to talk about myself, about my life experiences, the insights derived from those experiences.

I have made a covenant with myself to speak as Audre Lorde decided to speak when she faced her incurable cancer: with fearless willingness to say as I see.

I fail daily at keeping covenant. I’m not sure I can ever reach the depths Lorde reached.

If I did, the truths I tell would be something like Emily Dickinson’s definition of how we know when we have encountered a good poem: it takes the top of our heads off. Transformative truth, truth that makes a difference, is that kind of truth. We know we have met it, that it has come inside our doors, when we have that experience in its presence.

I do not live with such truth. I do not meet it. I seldom find it.

Writing about myself is ultimately boring, because I am a bore.

One truth about myself is that I am a failure. I don’t want to face or tell that truth.

I’m reaching old age and do not even have a job, gainful employment. I don’t have health coverage because I’m not employed and live in the U.S. I can’t afford that coverage.

Hence I don’t take good care of myself, of my health.

And yet I can’t blame any external factors for my unwillingness to exert myself and do a better job of caring for myself. I’m lazy. I’m tired. I have turned out, in the end, to be what I’ve been told I am: an old queer who can’t hold down a job.

This sounds self-indulgent. It is self-indulgent. On the other hand, it’s how I feel at a deep level these days, as both Steve and I struggle to recover from what happened to us last year in Florida—to find any kind of work possible, but also work we can actually do. My mother used to speak of how even digging ditches is good work if done honorably. (I have no idea why ditch-digging was her symbol of the lowliest labor possible for a man—a relic of the mythological Ur-memory of her Irish mother, perhaps?)

I don’t think I would be a good ditch-digger. I’m rather old and broken down, and wasn’t much of a dab hand at manual labor even in my better days.

I want to own my own responsibility for all my failings. Commitment to my covenant of telling unvarnished truth in this blog demands that I do so.

At the same time (again, the slipperiness of trying to find an angle to understand self and speak about what we so glibly call ourselves), as E.J. Dionne points out throughout his new book Souled Out, there’s no way to talk about family values without talking about the harm done to human families—the ravages to human psyches and lives—produced by unemployment and lack of health coverage.

One feels worthless. One feels worthless perhaps because one is worthless. But that feeling of worthlessness is definitely compounded when one is able to work and cannot find work commensurate with one’s abilities. One feels worthless when one is consistently shuffled to the bottom of the deck in the workplace, and the reason seems to be clear: one’s humanity is judged less deserving of full recognition than that of one’s “normal” peers.

Perhaps the cruelest thing my boss-friend at my last job did to me was to give my enemies cause to rejoice over me. Now they can say so easily that the fault is not with a system that relegates gay human beings to subhuman status. The fault is with Lindsey himself.

I say that this was cruel for my friend to do because she knew our stories intimately. We had shared them with her. She knew the damage she was doing to us, when she discarded us. Before firing me, she told me, unbidden, “I do not throw people away.” Which suggested to me that the recognition that she was doing so in our case was definitely in her heart and mind as she deliberated about what she was about to do . . . .

Enough of this plaintive meditation. It is framed by concern about a family member who is direly ill. These post-Easter days have been hard enough because of that alone. And talking and thinking about myself is grotesque, when people face serious illness.

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An addendum, four hours after I "penned" the above: I've just read on Towleroad blog that NPR reported yesterday the Justice Department is investigating the possibility that U.S. Attorney Leslie Hagen was fired because of rumors she is a lesbian. The firing happened as the Department became ever more politicized under Attorney General Gonzales.

Thankfully, Hagen at least had written evaluations of her work prior to her firing. These were all outstanding. Given these, the question is why she was fired after Gonzales's senior counsel Monica Goodling took a particular interest in her work. Insiders privy to conversations that occurred with Goodling state that the rumors of Hagen's supposed sexual orientation came up in conversations with Goodling prior to Hagen's firing.

It does happen. Still. It's shameful. But it happens.

It ruins lives. But it happens.

And the churches are silent. The churches actually egg it on. The churches undermine the solidity of gay relationships and gay families and then accuse gay human beings of unable to form solid relationships and healthy families.

It's grotesque. It's very hard to live one's way through, around, with any dignity.

It's particularly hard for any of us who still retain some shred of affiliation to the spiritual and social justice goals of the churches.

Towleroad links to the following NPR story: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89288713.