A Reader Writes: If Karl Barth Was Addressing Fundamentalism in Europe, How Is It Possible to Say that Notions of Biblical Inerrancy Are Grounded in Defense of Slavery?

In response to my posting last week about Fred Clark's response to Emma Green on the connection between the Southern evangelical defense of slavery and the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, Larry Motuz writes, 

Ira Chernus on Obama's Semi-Niebuhrianism: Shadows and Suffering, Heading Nowhere

Ira Chernus's critique of the "semi-Niebuhrianism of Mr. Obama (and of almost all media pundits who sling Niebuhr's name around today) is brilliant.  As I've noted for some time now, the highly selective use of Niebuhr's theology to justify a principles-lite "realism" that sanctifies the status quo is a bastardization of Niebuhr's theology, which is rooted in the social gospel.  And that's to say, it's rooted in a powerful tradition of American theology that sees the status quo as always susceptible to change and always in need of reform, from the vantage point of the prophetic insights of world religious traditions.

David Brooks on the Atrophy of Theology Today: A Matter of Perspective

I'm not surprised to see a number of leading figures of the American Catholic intellectual center celebrating David Brooks' recent observation that our culture has a hole in it caused by the atrophy of philosophy and theology.  My centrist brothers and sisters seem unable to understand that what Brooks persistently decries, as he decries the loss of theology in our culture, is the very backbone of theology in the Catholic church following Vatican II, and of similar strong movements in all the Christian churches in the same period: the attempt to connect the dots between abstract theological ideas and the lived experience of human beings, an attempt at dot-connecting that tries to make sense of the truth claims of religious groups by examining the effect of those truth claims on the real lives of real human beings.

David Brooks on Niebuhrian Need for Renewed Sense of Sin: Where Does Incivility Arise in American Society?

Moderate conservatives like David Brooks are eager to bring civility back to American society--to retie the now-frayed ties that bind us.  And, as a critique of any theological and political analysis that might point to a progressive solution to our problem of civility, moderate conservatives like Brooks propose a highly selective reading of Niebuhr which removes from Niebuhr's theology its very foundation: the social gospel presuppositions out of which this theology moves, even as it eclipses those presuppositions with Christian realism.

More Beck vs. King: Andrew Murphy on the Difference

More fine analysis of the absurdity of Mr. Beck's claim to be a new Martin Luther King.  This piece by Andrew Murphy is at Religion Dispatches today.

Jeremiah Wright's Little Rock Sermon: What He Said, What I Heard

When I blogged about Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermon at New Millennium Baptist church in Little Rock yesterday, I mentioned that I might add a bit later about what Rev. Wright said in his sermon.  I’m not sure that the notes I took are worth sharing with anyone else, because they’re idiosyncratic.  Like most longtime listeners to sermons, I hear what I want to hear in homilies that make a broader and more elegant point than the one I’m receiving—though I have long since trained myself to hear the text even as I weave my own subtext while I listen.

Jim Martin on Glenn Beck's Bête Noire: Christianity in All Its Disturbing Fullness

Following his Saturday revival meeting for America, Mr. Beck continues his full-throated attack on the social justice teachings of Christianity--which is to say, on the Christian gospels themselves.  Beck is now adding to his broadside this spring against the strong social justice strands of Christian teaching and his attempt to co-opt and subvert the social gospel Christianity of Martin Luther King the charge that President Obama espouses liberation theology.

Remembering the Real Martin Luther King: True Revolution of Values Demands Justice for the Poor

Tom Roberts' commentary at National Catholic Reporter about Mr. Beck's national revival meeting yesterday is well worth the read.  As Roberts notes,

In this Orwellian era, when a TV entertainer like Glenn Beck is able, if only for a day, to somehow claim to advance the vision of Martin Luther King Jr. while urging listeners to flee from churches that preach social justice, a major reality check is in order.

Candace Chellew-Hodge on Judge Walker's Prop 8 Decision: Prop 8 Defenders on Wrong Side of History

Also at Religion Dispatches this morning, outstanding commentary about Judge Vaughn Walker’s prop 8 decision by Candace Chellew-Hodge.  She focuses on Judge Walker’s conclusion that, because those defending prop 8 were able to cite only their own prejudice as the ultimate ground of their wish to ban same-sex marriage, they find themselves on the wrong side of history.  Because history is moving slowly but surely (yes, with halts and reversals) away from homophobic prejudice and towards the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people in the human community.

As it has moved towards the full inclusion of women and people of color, with legal and judicial enactments following in democratic societies to acknowledge this movement and enshrine it in laws pointing to national foundational documents like our own Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Paul Raushenbush to the President: Mr. Obama, Find Your Inner Niebuhr

 

A month ago, I blogged about Niebuhrian influences on President Obama’s political philosophy.  I noted that it has long been fashionable for some politicians and intellectuals to invoke Reinhold Niebuhr when they want to give the impression that their political philosophy has theological depth and warrant.  Among beltway politicians and in the ivy-league universities that supply the beltway and corporate world with many of its leaders, Niebuhr is treated as a theological bulwark against progressive political ideas and movements. 

As my posting about Niebuhr and Mr. Obama notes, many of those citing Niebuhr as a hard-nosed realist who scorned progressivism obscure the complexity, nuance, and above all, social gospel roots of Niebuhr’s—in the same way that these same circles and the mainstream media that take their cue from them constantly cite Pope John Paul II’s (neoconservative) theology of the body while completely ignoring his powerful (progressivist) encyclical on the priority of labor.

Shifting Moral Minds in a Society as Unfinished Task: New Year's Reflections on Women'

Talking about the changing moral mind of social groups and the shifting moral consensus of a society may cause some who hear this theological language to assume that social groups have monolithic social and moral minds. That’s clearly not the case, and is not what the social gospel movement meant in using this concept.

The insight that social gospel theology sought to capture in developing the concept of a social mind is that social groups do sometimes generate new perspectives on moral issues previously taken for granted as resolved. And when that happens, when a new consensus develops with sufficient sway to draw in the center of the social group in question (with the all-important assistance of leaders who recognize that social problems commonly involve moral aspects that cannot be ignored if we want to solve those social problems), the new moral consensus of the group is then enshrined in legal changes that create a new moral mind in the practice of the society in question.

The step of legal enshrinement of a new moral consensus does not necessarily mean that all groups within a given society endorse the moral shift that has taken place in their culture. In fact, there remains, in many cases, considerable resistance to any new moral consensus of a society enshrined in laws protecting that consensus. In many cases, groups actively resistant to the changes that have taken place—groups intent on removing the legal protections in place to safeguard a new moral consensus—coalesce around their goal of resistance.

I used race and gender issues as the framework for a reflection about how societies change their moral minds yesterday. To say that our society has changed its moral mind about race and gender does not mean that we have eradicated racism or misogyny. Resistance to racial justice and reconciliation and resistance to women’s rights remains very strong in our culture. And this resistance is often fueled by contemporary manifestations of the same religious viewpoints that initially resisted the enactment of laws to abolish slavery or eradicate segregation, or laws to provide equal rights to women.

The key point to be emphasized here is the point about legal enshrinement of a new moral consensus—of a new moral mind—of a society. When that occurs, the moral mind of the society in question can be said to have shifted decisively. But such legal enshrinement of a new moral consensus does not mean that everyone in the particular society has changed his/her own mind about the morality of the issues under consideration. Much work remains to be done in our own society around issues of race and gender, even after we have made breakthrough shifts in how we perceive those issues, sufficient to generate new legal protections for those affected by racism and misogyny.

As this new year begins, I’m thinking, for instance, of how far we’ve come (and how far we still have to go) in the area of women’s rights. Of women’s freedom and self-determination. Of recognition of women’s full personhood.

My thoughts about these issues today are framed by a post-Christmas conversation with one of my nieces. This is the big-city, glamor-girl niece who has the job of her dreams in New York, a first job right out of college. We are very happy for her. She worked hard to have the right to earn enough money each month to pay, just barely, the horrendous rent for a tiny shoebox apartment in Manhattan. We are proud of what she’s accomplishing.

This is an opportunity not one of us would want to see my niece denied, even as the social pressure for young women to marry and have a family remains strong, and as that pressure predicts that a young woman living on her own and pursuing her dreams will one day wake up feeling unfulfilled, and will realize that she needs a man and a family in order to achieve “true” fulfillment. My niece is creating her new adult life with full awareness of those siren voices which remain so strong in our culture, and which seem particularly strong in many of our churches even today: voices that prophesy doom for women living on their own, paying attention to themselves, seeking self-fulfillment and the right to live dreams. Voices that would never prophesy doom for men (well, straight white men, at least) seeking any of those things.

My niece and I spent the evening of the day after Christmas talking about this. One of her concerns now is a relative of hers who seems (from an outsider’s perspective, at least) to be locking herself into a set of grim options for the future. This relative has a circle of friends in which several of the young women, all at the end of high school, have become pregnant and married.

My niece is concerned about the same thing happening to her relative, given her relationship with a young man who seems to fit well into that circle of teens. As we talked about that, my niece said to me, “I want to say to her, ‘Really? You mean people still do that? Get knocked up at 18 and feel obliged to marry the father? Really? That’s still going on?’"

As my niece talked, I realized that she is baffled that “that’s still going on” because she herself has moved into a different world than the one in which her young relative lives. This is a world from which there is no turning back. It is the world in place now that the women’s right’s movement has opened doors for young women, through which one goes to find a place radically discontinuous from the old place of female proscriptions: a world in which women have a right to choose, to pursue their dreams, to reject societal expectations that imprison women, to ignore moral imperatives based on the idea that biology is destiny, and that the biological destiny of women is to live in a reproductive prison.

At the same time, I realized as we talked, the world in which she lives is not the world taken for granted by her young relative—or by many other people in Western cultures today. And that despite the accomplishments of the women’s movement and the enshrinement in law of protections of women’s rights.

Society has changed its moral mind, in the West at least, about the place of women in the world. But persuasive subcultures within the overall framework of Western culture have not moved in the same direction in which cultural consensus has moved, re: these issues. And considerable reaction to women’s rights still exists, particularly in religious groups, many of which would encourage my niece to return to the world in which her young relative lives—to look for a man to fulfill, support, and control her.

The life my niece is living is one lived against the backdrop of those church-based expectations for women. On one side of her family, only two generations ago, a female ancestor lived precisely the script she now fears small-town church-based society is writing for her young relative.

This ancestor became pregnant several years before she was 18. She hid that fact up to the day on which she disappeared onto her parents’ back porch, delivered her baby by herself, and walked inside with the newborn in her arms, to announce to her mother and step-father what had just happened.

She did the right thing. She did what her town and church expected her to do. She married the father and raised two other children by him. She quickly learned that the young man who had impregnated her was far from perfect—that he drank heavily and could be abusive when drunk.

When the children were approaching high school age, her husband died suddenly in a tragic accident. Left a young widow with three children and few means of support, this remarkable woman went to college and completed not one, but two, masters' degrees in education. With those, she was able to provide for her children in a time and place in which single mothers struggled merely to put food on the table.

My niece knows this story. The woman to whom it happened chose to make it public when my brother and sister-in-law married. I am glad she made that choice, since the story provides one among many lenses through which my niece can now view her life as a young woman in the 21st century, and can consider the options available to her.

To our discredit, though the women in my family were strong-minded and assertive—and though they chose careers for themselves when women were expected to be housewives and mothers—my family would have suppressed such a story. We have no base-born children in our family—not even the ones who, a few generations ago, walked down the streets of my family's small town in their mother’s tow, bearing the name of the male member of our family who fathered them, looking just like him. They didn’t exist. To us, at least.

My niece does not want the fate her ancestor endured to be revisited on her young relative. She wants the passing of generations to mean something different for women—new possibility, if nothing else, for those who want that possibility. She does not want her relative trapped, as so many young women in the church-dominated town in which she lives are trapped, in a world of unhappily married wives who join Facebook groups called 100,000,000 Christians Worship God, or Jesus 2008.

If the relative wants that world, fine. But if not, there should be options for her—options like those my niece has had, options to have a life of her own, and not the life imposed from outside. The precious option to have a self in a world that denies a self to women, or makes women pay an enormous price for seeking themselves.

Not much has changed, one might think, when one hears this story. And yet a tremendous amount has changed, when it comes to women’s rights. Even though the moral mind of society may not have changed everywhere to the same degree, it has changed substantially and decisively enough to provoke a shift in our laws, so that the laws of Western nations now recognize the right of women to the same self-determination men enjoy.

Still, the task of developing a new moral mind in a society is an ongoing task, because the fragile consensus on which new moral minds are based is always tenuous and always subject to attack from groups that have a strong interest in undermining a new moral consensus. The fight to preserve and extend a new moral consensus is an ongoing fight. It requires continued activity on the part of those convinced that the new path a society blazes for itself re: an issue of human rights is worth keeping there, keeping open, keeping accessible.

Because in any society there will always be those who want to close off paths that permit more people more liberties. In any society there will be those who see the liberty of a group previously hedged about with moral and social prohibitions as a threat to morality itself: allow those people—people of color, women, gays—such liberties, and who else will want freedom from oppression? And how to draw moral lines, when we cannot do so across the backs of those whom we have kept in subjugation for that very purpose?

Such battles continue, even in 2009. They continue because the resistance to human rights—to human rights for all—remains strong, even at the very center of many Western cultures. And no leader who leads from the center in Western culture today can afford to ignore that fact, if he or she truly wishes to lead with change in mind.

Societies' Changing Moral Minds, Changing Societies' Moral Minds: Reflections on the Eve of a New Year

I ended yesterday’s posting with a comment about the changing moral mind of our society—about our culture’s developing moral consensus that gay human beings are fully human and deserve all rights accorded to any other human being. Today, on this eve of a new year, it strikes me as important to talk further about the idea of the moral mind of a society, and how that moral mind changes.

The concept of society’s moral mind is a key theme in social gospel theology—a theological movement linking action for progressive social change to Christian theology, which had strong influence on American religion and culture in the latter part of the 19th and the first part of the 20th century. The influence of the social gospel has continued in American Christianity up to the present, even though the movement itself fell into decline after World War I.

For instance, there are strong social gospel motifs in the thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr. King’s education in both Atlanta and Boston brought him into contact with scholars steeped in social gospel theology. His own powerful theology constantly echoes social gospel themes. King’s oft-quoted statement—highlighted in the graphic accompanying yesterday’s posting—that the moral arc of the universe is long, but bends towards justice, is a social gospel insight, one that captures the responsibility of people of faith to discern the trend of justice in their society and move their churches towards that trend.

The theology that developed around the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s incorporated key social gospel themes, including the insistence that societies can sin and that social groups can develop a new moral awareness. Social gospel theology insists that people of faith have an obligation to pay attention to the developing consensus of the social groups to which they belong, since that consensus often challenges churches and demands that they undergo conversion of taken-for-granted assumptions that have begun to appear as immoral, in light of shifts in the moral awareness of society at large.

Influential social gospel theologians, including Walter Rauschenbusch and Shailer Mathews, the subject of my doctoral dissertation and of a book based on that dissertation, note that the trend of societal moral development is ineluctably towards greater and greater recognition of the personhood of those previously depersonalized. American slavery rested on the assumption—it justified itself by assuming—that slaves are 3/5 of a person. Women were depersonalized for generations because the legal systems of many societies enshrined beliefs that women require male control and supervision, since they are less able than men to govern themselves—less fully personal than men.

As social groups become aware that these depersonalizing assumptions, applied to one group and then another, are immoral, since the humanity of all human beings is equal, movements to change the moral consensus of society around these assumptions begins. Those movements gradually shift the thinking of the culture at large, and eventually that of churches, as well—culture first and churches second in many instances, because churches all too frequently prove to be the bastion of resistance to progressive social change.

As Martin Luther King, Jr., put the point, churches too often form the taillight to progressive social movements, rather than their headlight. Here, too, King was echoing social gospel thinking, which sees the development of new moral awareness in social groups as a process that goes far beyond the boundaries of churches, and which often requires churches to address their own complicity in sinful social practices such as racism and misogyny.

It has now become commonplace to analyze what has happened in Western cultures with racial and gender prejudice as a breakthrough of moral awareness, based on a growing consensus that it is immoral to treat people as less than human because of pigmentation or gender. Once that breakthrough of awareness has happened, we cannot go back: we cannot choose again to countenance slavery or outright, legally protected misogyny without undermining our claim to be a society built on moral principles, a democracy built on the key insight that all people are created equal and should have access to the same set of human rights.

Many citizens of Western societies, however, continue to resist the breakthrough of a similar moral awareness regarding the humanity of gay persons. And much of that resistance is fueled today—as it was in the movements for rights for both people of color and women—by the churches.

Viewed from an historical perspective, many Western cultures are today where they were in the past, at that threshold moment when the social consensus re: people of color and women was just about to shift decisively: on the cusp of a new moral mind regarding the place of gay human beings in society—regarding the humanity, the full humanity and access to the full gamut of human rights—of gay human beings. We are there because we have reached a point of moral awareness from which there is no retreat.

Once increasing numbers of people in democratic societies begin to recognize that prejudice based on innate characteristics such as race, gender, or sexual orientation, cannot be justified, because there can be no justification for using innate characteristics to dehumanize and depersonalize any group of citizens in a truly democratic society, change has to happen. It has to take one of two forms: either the society has to reject the claims of the group now demanding attention as a dehumanized group, or it has to eradicate all barriers to that group’s access to human rights.

At the breakthrough moment, society has to act. It has to make choices. People have to make choices and take stands. We have to make choices and take stands.

There is no morally justifiable intermediate stage in the process of developing moral awareness after that process has reached the moment of breakthrough insight. Once that stage has been achieved, there can no longer be weighing of claims or moral calculation, with the attendant assumption of such weighing and calculation that prejudice remains legitimate, simply one acceptable opinion among others in a pluralistic society.

Once society has come to the moment of breakthrough awareness of its complicity in historic injustice towards a dehumanized group of people, the time for compromise, for bringing everyone on board before we make up our cultural mind, for permitting prejudice masked as religious belief to impede democracy, is over. Breakthrough awareness introduces a time for change: a time when decision is demanded.

I have explored these themes in published works that track my own response to racism—to my racism—in my life journey. These autobiographical theological reflections examine the moments in which I became critically aware that I had taken for granted attitudes and assumptions from my formative years which were racist.

As the reflections note, once I saw these attitudes and assumptions for what they were—social constructions of reality rather than accurate readings of social reality; prejudice imposed on me by the culture in which I grew up—there was no going back. Once my eyes were opened to the racism in the society around me and in myself, I had no choice except to make a choice: to confront my own prejudice and to deal with it, in every way I could discover it in my attitudes and decisions. That is, I had no choice if I wished to continue claiming an interest in being a moral agent, someone who took the moral claims of others seriously.

My articles reflecting on my own struggle to deal with my breakthrough awareness of the racism of my culture of origin, and my own racism, use that reflection as a prism to look at the struggle of social groups to deal with such breakthrough awareness. As I reflect on how social groups incorporate new breakthrough moral awareness and change their moral minds, it has become clear to me that the urge to shift moral thinking about human rights issues does not come from the center.

It comes, instead, from prophetic and progressive movements within faith communities and in society at large. It comes from those who explore the growing edge of moral awareness in their own social and faith groups—those who are willing to move away from the warm, safe embrace of the center to the margins, where the beliefs of the center are tested and proven true or false.

This movement from the margins to the center, this challenge of the prophetic minority to the center, has been going on for some time now in Western cultures, vis-à-vis gay human beings and gay human rights. We are now at a moment of breakthrough awareness in which what prophetic and progressive movements in our culture have seen for some time—that gay human beings are as fully human as other human beings, and deserve the same human rights as other human beings have—is beginning to impinge on the consciousness of the culture at large.

As that breakthrough awareness is communicated from the prophetic, progressive margins to the center, it becomes impossible for those who claim to lead from the center to ignore the growing moral consensus of their society. Certainly many church groups that have much invested, historically, in marginalizing and condemning gay human beings, will continue to resist the breakthrough of moral awareness and the new moral consensus that this breakthrough implies.

Leaders that concede moral ground to these resistant religious groups will fail, however, in one of their chief tasks as leaders in a democratic society, if they allow these groups the right to determine the direction of their society, vis-à-vis the question of human rights for gay persons. While religious groups have and should have, in a pluralistic democratic society, the right to hold their unique beliefs, they do not have and should not have the right to determine the moral consensus of society about the human rights of marginalized groups about whose humanity the society is slowly shifting its awareness.

There are religious groups that continue to imagine women as inferior creatures, and which build their church polity and dogmatic systems around that fantasy. There are religious groups that continue to denigrate people of color by overtly racist teachings and by church-political decisions that contribute to the marginalization of people of color.

We no longer permit these groups to determine the social consensus—the moral mind of our society—about people of color and women, however. We do not do so because, at the moment of breakthrough awareness in these areas, we decided once and for all that our future as a democratic society required us to make a choice. We chose to underscore the humanity of women and people of color—despite what many believers and many churches continued to teach.

The role of national leaders like Lincoln (or, later, Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson) was crucial in the process by which the center affirmed the growing moral consensus of its day, re: issues of race or women's rights. We have successfully negotiated the difficult passage to new moral consensus regarding racial and gender issues because we have had leaders willing to stand at the center in order to redefined the center, morally speaking.

Lincoln exemplifies the process I am sketching here. Lincoln deliberately claimed his role as a moral leader at a time of shifting moral consensus. He did not flench from the moral obligation his presidential office imposed on him, at a time of shifting national moral consensus about slavery.

When Lincoln took office, the nation was deeply divided over the issue of slavery. In assuming office, Lincoln stood at the center and sought to hold the nation together. At the same time, he refused to yield to arguments that holding the nation together and representing the center required him to concede anything at all to those people of faith and those churches that supported slavery and the continued dehumanization of African Americans.

As president, as the moral leader at the center of a nation that purported to value democracy while practicing slavery, Lincoln recognized the inescapable force of a new moral consensus regarding slavery, which had slowly developed on the margins, in prophetic movements of abolition with both secular and religious roots. Lincoln saw that the center had no choice except to endorse that moral consensus, if the American people wished to be faithful to the ideals with which their democratic experiment began.

Sound leadership in a democratic society has an important and inescapable moral dimension. It does so because questions of human rights are always moral questions, and democracy is centered on assumptions about human rights. At historical moments in which the moral mind of a society has begun to coalesce around growing awareness that a social group has been dehumanized and denied human rights for insupportable reasons, the only possible option for a leader who wishes to lead with moral authority is to recognize and deal with the growing new moral consensus in her or his society.

And to lead the nation towards that consensus, when it extends human rights to a group previously marginalized. Even when that leadership requires the leader to stand up to the moral authority of religious groups who wish illicitly to impose their peculiar, anti-democratic presuppositions about the marginalized group in question on society at large.

This is where we find ourselves today, as a people, I believe: this is where we are on the eve of 2009. This place in which we find ourselves calls for exceptionally strong leadership that does not eschew moral responsibility. I pray that the new president will be capable of providing that leadership. And I promise continued discussions of these important issues (important to me, if to no one else) in the new year.