Values and Noncompliance

Robert Mann, in his substack today, articulates many of my own thoughts about Bishop Budde's message this last week. He also quotes from Kristin Du Mez's substack, where she collects several right-wing criticisms of Budde. Most boil down to (1) she disrespected the president and the event, and (2) she's a bad person and a bad representative of Christianity. 

Much of the latter criticism relates to her gender. A good bit of US evangelicalism (the Southern Baptist segment, mainly) opposes ordaining women for pastoral leadership or preaching. (Other streams of evangelicalism, e.g., Pentecostals, believe differently.)   "Women's ordination," tweeted Reformed professor Joe Rigney, "is a cancer that unleases [sic?] untethered [sic?] empathy in the church (and spills over into society).”* 

I concur with Mann's assessment:

I cannot imagine more loving and gentle words from a pastor to a president. She was full of respect for Trump and his position. Her words overflowed with all the love and concern for the oppressed that Jesus commanded.

Mann goes on to recommend a book by Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith. I'll have to get that.

A different writer I follow, Timothy Burke (the professor, not Tim Burke the journalist), also wrote today about brave, decisive moments--moments of noncompliance. Specifically, Burke criticizes the wave of administrative compliance with new (Trump administration) directives, such as those gutting DEI programs. The force of administrative compliance in a complicated bureaucracy like a university, Burke warns, creates its own unthinking momentum: 

What has hidden inside many compliance regimes is the misuse of compliance to justify voluntary, values-driven, sometimes blatantly ideological interpretations of legal and regulatory requirements and to shield those decisions from any questioning. 

The response, Burke suggests, involves clarifying and acting on personal, professional, and institutional values. In the absence of rules or regulatory bodies to ensure equality, diversity, and inclusion, Burke argues, we must choose to do these things ourselves not out of administrative compliance but because they're the right things to do. It's right to recognize and redress systemic injustices and inequalities. It's right to make the necessary trade-offs to ensure wide accessibility and representation in our institutions and disciplines. 

Such a need for re-valuing values offers an opportunity for faith. The world where religion (and the Christian Church especially) feels itself becoming increasingly irrelevant is also the world in which one set of values/worldviews (white cis-het masculinist evangelical nationalism) presents itself as the only game in town and expects mute compliance. Against this expectation, Christians like Budde get to say, decisively, bravely: No. There are other values, deeper and richer sources of being that connect us to the whole human community, that align us with the Creator's love for all humanity, that take as their model the Redeemer's life of service and sacrifice. 

Noncompliance with the expectations of Trumpian nationalism will read as disrespect, no matter how gently they are phrased.

More tomorrow.

*I was confused here. What's wrong with empathy? So I did a bit of research. A Fellow at New Saint Andrews College, Rigney, I learned, has publicly criticized empathy as a sinful corruption of Christian compassion. Here's my first-impression summary of his take: whereas Christian compassion cares for the good of the suffering person, empathy (in Rigney's view) cares for the feelings of the suffering person. I can see how such a view would help buttress an opposition to LGBTQ+ rights. I'm guessing the reasoning goes something like this: queer and trans folk are confused about what's good for them. Christian cis-het orthodoxy is good; queerness is harmful. Queer/trans folk say that their feelings are natural and good, insisting that those who do not tolerate their expressions of identity and orientation wrong them because they deny queer/trans feelings. Christian compassion a la Rigney would lovingly insist on cis-het Christian holiness. To be pro-queer, as Bishop Budde is, in Rigney's view represents a sinful displacement of compassion by secular empathy, caring about the queer person's feelings rather than for their temporal and eternal good. That's my guess, anyway. I of course disagree, but that's a different post. I'm less certain how calling for mercy for immigrants (not acceptance, not amnesty--mercy) commits a similar sin.