Un-Christian Crosses in the Desert

...And the end of the semester slams into me like an out-of-control freight train, one car after another piling up on top of the other. Just when I think I'm caught up --boom!--another stack of papers or administrative duty or student emergency barrels down on me. It's been difficult to focus on my own research/reflections of late.

Nevertheless (to switch locomotive metaphors), I am seeing a bit of light at the end of the finals-week tunnel, and in that dim illumination I've noticed some interesting developments on the faith-in-public-life front.

Stanley Fish wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times this week in which he repeated his compelling arguments concerning the vexed position of faith in an ostensibly secular state. As you may be aware, the Supreme Court recently ruled (in Salazar v. Buono) that a cross erected decades ago in the Mojave desert did not in fact violate the First Amendment's establishment clause. The Mojave Cross's history and conflict is rather complicated, not at all like the clear-cut melodramas of--say--Ten Commandment Monuments built specifically to provoke challenges to church/state separations.

Originally erected in 1934 on government land as a way of honoring WWI veterans, the cross has apparently been rebuilt a number of times by private parties, most recently by Henry Sandoz, who (without government permission) drilled holes into the rock outcropping to make the cross he built harder to remove. The cross serves as a gathering place for local Christians at Easter. Its compatibility with the First Amendment has only recently became an issue. In 1999, a request to build and place a Buddhist symbol to honor war dead was denied. In 2001, retired park service employee Frank Buono challenged the legality of the cross, arguing that it represented a clearly religious statement by the state and therefore violated the Establishment clause.

A number of complex political and legal moves and counter-moves followed; courts tended to side with Buono, but legislatures tended to act to protect the cross from removal. These conflicts culminated in the government's attempt to transfer the land around the cross to a private group, ostensibly negating the First Amendment conflict. "Tilt!" cried Buono and his lawyers. That act, they argued, was a shady dodge by the government specifically to preserve the cross, constituting yet another act of religious favoritism by the government.

The Supreme Court, then, ruled primarily on the issue of whether the government's land transfer was legal. The ancillary import of the ruling, of course, concerns whether or not the cross itself constitutes a religiously specific statement that the government cannot endorse officially. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that the transfer was legal, that (in Justice Kennedy's opinion for the plurality), the cross served a secular purpose (honoring veterans) rather than a religious one.

Fish clarifies that he personally has no problems with a cross in the desert on government lands. But the reasoning Kennedy advances, Fish argues, strains credulity. The Court performs what has come to be the standard maneuver for preserving religious (and here religious almost always means "Christian") symbols on government property: it drains the symbols of religious import. The cross, in Kennedy's rhetorical scenario, is not faith-specific but generic, a common cultural marker of respect and homage. This--despite arguments from the plaintiffs that, for example, no Jewish person would consider a cross on her grave to be a generic and unexceptionable symbol of respect.

Moreover, Fish points out, Kennedy doesn't merely stop at declaring the cross non-religious; he also attempts a defense of the government's accommodating religious symbols more specifically. These two lines of argument, writes Fish, undermine each other. The court seems to want the cross to be simultaneously religious and secular, an intellectually dishonest stance that puts the lie to the court's claims to religious neutrality. Says Fish: "The Christian and conservative Web sites that welcomed the decision as a blow for Christianity and against liberalism knew what they were looking at."

To be sure, conservative Christian websites did welcome the decision. But, to extend Fish's argument a bit, I don't think it's actually in Christianity's best interests to praise the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too reasoning of t Salazar v. Buono. Surely for Christians--conservative evangelicals especially--the cross is and must be specifically, specially religious. To claim otherwise is to deny the significance of one of the key events in our faith story.

I should note that, for many conservative evangelicals, their stance on the government's display of religious symbols remains refreshingly honest. For them, the cross (like the Ten Commandments displays or nativity scenes) is specifically, uniquely Christian. Their arguments for having governmental displays of such symbols rest on the concomitant rationale that the US itself is specifically, uniquely Christian. I disagree strongly that the US is "Christian" in the sense they mean, and I therefore dispute their case for using tax dollars to pay for the construction and upkeep of massive Ten Commandments displays. But at least, in those cases, the faith status of the cross is never in question. The cross is exclusively Christian, and its display is advanced by Christian exclusivists (or, at least by people who believe it right and proper for the USA to have a primarily Christian character).

This--the religious nature of the state, the state's proper boundaries for displaying or preferring one religion (or any religion) over another (or none at all)--this is a vital debate to have in a world where states find themselves adjudicating between wildly or even violently divergent faith worldviews. It's vital, too, for Christians to involve themselves in this debate, to test out how and to what extent we want a government to prefer our religion over others (even if that preference doesn't translate to exclusivism). Evangelicals and Religious Right pundits often rail about the dangers of godless governments, but really--can anyone point to an overtly/offically religious state that doesn't have a horrifying history of specifically faith-inspired violence and/or oppression? Does Christianity really thrive when it's in control of the government? Or--if not control--how might faith as such secure a voice in representative democracies? Isn't there a difficult but happier medium between theocracy and utter secularity?

And that's the problem with the "religionless religious symbols" argument. It seems to advance theocratic interests, but ultimately it contributes to a faith-less society. It renders us less able to debate about the role of religion in government or in public life.

If the goal is to ensure that crosses and Commandments displays on government land remain intact, then the legal loophole of it's-not-really-religious seems tactically advantageous; it gets immediate results (i.e., the continued display of Christian symbols). But, aside from the dishonesty involved in pretending that the cross isn't religious, the tactic contributes to a dangerous secularizing trend. It reinforces the view that faith and faith-based stances really do have no place in democratic government, that faith is always only private and personal. Religious motivations and faith-based value arguments become vaguely embarrassing, like bodily functions. They come to exist only behind closed doors or facades of neutrality. Surely such a view of faith is the opposite of what Christians and other religious viewpoints want. We want--we need--for faith to be a part of the public discourse about the Good. Otherwise, faith--and to a certain extent values in general--becomes some subterranean, mysterious force that no one has a vocabulary for.

It helps us not at all, then, to pretend that faith doesn't exist or doesn't clamor for representation in a democracy. Let the cross remain religious, and let the debate begin. Don't settle for arguments that de-Christianize a Christian image. After all, didn't Christ have some grave words for those who would deny him?

More later,

JF

Hashing Out Fish's Argument

Wuff! What a depressing week in politics this has been. The Massachusetts upset equals health care in trouble, the state legislature/governor slashes education funding, the university slashes jobs/programs in response, and now the Supreme Court overturns a hundred years of precedent to enable mega-corporations to donate unlimited funds to campaign advertisements.

I'm a bit heart-weary right now to pursue the question Stanley Fish poses (well, poses and answers, really), but here I go anyway. Maybe it will cheer me up.

Does philosophy matter? By philosophy, Fish means a comprehensive, all-informing belief in the nature of Truth. For instance, you could believe that Truth--the capital-T, it's really there Truth--exists in terms of things like morals or God or the meaning of life. One might call this brand of beliefs foundationalism, since it asserts the ultimate existence of a foundation, a moral-ethical-theological-what-have-you grounding for a host of other, smaller beliefs.

Alternately, you could believe that there's no such thing as Truth, at least no Truth that we as humans can perceive in any unadulterated way. This, of course, would be something like a postmodern antifoundationalism, which would point out that the ideas and ideals a particular time/place/society reveres as absolute, couldn't-be-more-obvious Truth turn out to be bounded to that time/place/society. Other times, other places, other peoples turn out to have their own unique foundations.

Now, the foundationalist might say that those other times simply got it wrong,or perhaps, vice-versa, that they got it right while we in the here and now have it wrong. Either way, the Truth actually exists. Moral Absolutes exist as certainly as planet Pluto does. (See what I did there?) Being trained in postmodernist historiography, I lean more toward the antifoundationalist side of things. Historical study can be awfully hard on notions of transcendent or universal Truths of humanity. The more you search the breadth of human experience through history and geography for a universal Truth of homo sapiens, the more likely you are to find exceptions to just about any Truth you can assert beyond, well, mortality (and even then, any anthropologist can tell you that how cultures conceive of dying and death varies radically across time and space).

But does being a foundationalist or an antifoundationalist really matter? Fish says, more or less, "Not really." At least, he clarifies, your position on Truth generally exists without the world-shattering consequences many would attribute to it. To quote from his "Truth but No Consequences" article I cited in yesterday's post:

"That is to say, whatever theory of truth you might espouse will be irrelevant to your position on the truth of a particular matter because your position on the truth of a particular matter will flow from your sense of where the evidence lies, which will in turn flow from the authorities you respect, the archives you trust, and so on" (Fish 390).

Thus, argues Fish, it's specious for foundationalists to point to antifoundationalists and say (for instance), "Well, since you don't believe in absolute truths, why don't you step out of a window since gravity's just a socially contingent construction" or (and this is a favorite) "So, since you don't believe in absolute truth, on what grounds would you be able to take a moral stand against someone like Hitler?" Beliefs on particular matters like the persistence of gravity or the wrongness of genocide, notes Fish, don't require the backup of an unquestioning faith in Universal Truths. One needn't be a professional physicist, in other words, to not want to fall out of a window (nor does one have to be an ethicist to express a brute-level disgust at the idea of hurting or killing other people).

Nor, Fish continues, is it any better for an antifoundationalist to claim superiority over a foundationalist via some comparison to cultish fundamentalism: "You just believe X because you aren't smart enough or brave enough to question your core beliefs. Anyone who doesn't agree with you in every detail must be an infidel." Plenty of people would dispute such a characterization, actively making an argument about the need for constant self-reflection by referring to Foundational Truths like the goodness of tolerance or liberty. One needn't be antifoundationalist, in other words, to be critical, ethical, or nuanced.

Indeed, Fish concludes, the metaphysical position on truth (foundationalist or antifoundationalist) is by definition a general metaphysical position, detached from "mundane and empirical" matters of a particular situation. Governing such mundane/empircal matters (Fish's examples: how can God exist in the face of the Holocaust? and what are the contingent historical situations that gave rise to the Holocaust?) are not metaphysics but the requirements of a particular discipline--theology (theodicy, to be specific) for the one example and history for the other. Each discipline has its own set of investigative methods, its own rules for defining questions and finding answers, and none of these flows necessarily from one or the other position, antifoundationalist or foundationalist. You can do good or bad historical work, good or bad theodicy, good or bad just about anything regardless of whether or not you believe in Transcendent Truths or in contingent truths.

It's a provocative argument Fish unfurls, especially as he does so in his signature grumpy-old-iconoclast mode. I don't always agree with Fish--I don't totally agree with him in this line of argument, for example--but I nearly always find him a bracing read. He makes me think more carefully about the assumptions that underlie my scholarship, my activism, and of course my faith.

More tomorrow,

JF

Stanely Fish, Truth, and Worldview Apologetics

To recap from yesterday: Stanley Fish, riffing on Barbara Hernstein Smith's new book on science/religion conflicts, highlights a recurrent theme of his thought--the surprising irrelevance of Absolute Truth to human life and thought. This is an argument he's made before (see "Truth But No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn't Matter." Critical Inquiry 29 (2003): 389-416. Print.), but it's not one he's applied to the science/religion theatre of the culture wars.

I'm fascinated by Fish's arguments because I see them as posing an intriguing challenge to evangelical worldview analysis. As I've written about before, worldview analysis is a somewhat new (or at least resurgent) trend in some corners of evangelical thought. Drawing loosely on 1930s-style presuppositionalist apologetics, worldview evangelists posit that human beings move through the world with the help of worldviews, founding philosophies that on conscious and unconscious levels shape values, actions, assumptions, and reactions. Within worldview evangelism, Christians (a particular variety of Protestant Christian, at least) live within the "Biblical Christian" worldview. This worldview competes with other philosophies, be they alternative religions (e.g., the Hindu worldview, the Islamic worldview) or secular belief systems (e.g., naturalist materialism, marxism, postmodernism).

For worldview evangelists, of course, only the Christian worldview enjoys epistemic validity. It is True in a way that other worldviews are not. The task of the Christian, according to the worldview approach, involves 1) becoming conversant with the Christian worldview, learning to live it out more fully; 2) learning about competing worldviews, including how and why they are untrue; and 3) becoming adept at engaging people living within other worldviews, hopefully guiding them to a realization of the inferiority of their native worldviews relative to Christianity.

Fish--by no means a worldview analyst--presents a potent challenge to worldview analysts' assumptions. On one level, he is what most worldview evangelicals would call (or dismiss) as postmodern. That is, Fish does not (at least in his public writings) endorse the idea of Grand Truths that transcend particular times and places. One can believe in them with all one's heart. One can kill for them, die for them, and/or base one's whole life's work (artistic, political, philosophical, religious, what have you) on them. But what one cannot do is demonstrate once and for all that such Grand Truths really are Grand Truths. (Fish clarifies that he is actually referring to grand, philosophical truths and not to specific, mundane facts like "the sky is blue"). The point is that humans lack access to some Unambiguous Guarantor of Truth whose intervention and judgment would convince any and everyone of the truthiness of the Truth.

Worldview analysists tend to simplify such postmodernist beliefs: "Postmoderns don't believe in truth at all." The core of the worldview version of Biblical Christianity, see, is that Truth does exist, it comes from God, and is revealed more or less clearly and completely in the Bible. Other belief systems are flawed ultimately to the extent that they depart from, modify, or deny altogether Biblical Christianity's foundational truth.

Postmodernity, then, is especially scandalous, claiming not only that the Biblical Christian lacks the Ultimate Validity it claims, but that no worldview has such Ultimate Validity. Why? Because either such Ultimate Validity doesn't exist, or (at least) humans lack the ability to access the core of Transcendent Truth in an unmediated way.

Worldview evangelism departs at this point from other forms of Christian outreach and apologetics by refusing to go down the obvious avenue of direct engagement. Faced with a challenge like "I don't believe in Ultimate Truths" (or perhaps "Moral Absolutes"), worldview evangelists do not say "Well, they exist, whether you believe them or not!" Rather, worldview tactics train evangelists to ask questions, to probe the unbeliever's unbelief, catching them finally in a logical contradiction. The favorite for postmoderns? "Isn't the claim that there's no Ultimate Truth itself an Ultimate Truth?"

That's clever enough as it goes, but Fish's arguments are more radical than "there's no truth." At the end of the day, Fish contends, it really doesn't matter whether you believe, deep down, in Absolute Truth or in non-absolute, contingent little-t truths. Why? Because humans don't move through life double-checking every action, reaction, or thought for its conformity to some grand philosophy or worldview. Instead (I quote from Fish, who in turn is quoting Smith), "the sets of beliefs held by each of us are fundamentally incoherent — that is, heterogeneous, fragmentary and, though often viable enough in specific contexts, potentially logically conflicting" (qtd. in Fish, "Must").

In other words, most people live by doing and believing what seems to work, what proves "true," in localized contexts--not by fidelity to specific, all-encompassing philosophies. Science--operating empirically, deductively, via hypothesis and experimentation--works very well for some areas of life. Faith (or art, or sports, or love) works well in other areas. The fact that science and faith are mutually incapable of addressing each other's areas does not prevent people from drawing on both of them (sometimes at once, as when I pray while waiting for a medical test's results). This is as true, Fish insists, for postmodernists as it is for non-postmodernists. Holding and living by (at least potentially) logically contradictory sets of beliefs are just part of human existence.

For worldview analysts, though, logical contradiction within a worldview equals a death-blow for that worldview. Ditto non-comprehensiveness. Biblical Christianity (properly interpreted, of course) has no contradictions, explains everything exhaustively, and is therefore a superior worldview. The worldview evangelist assumes that, being brought to face a logical contradiction within their native (non-Christian) worldviews, nonbelievers will be shocked and disconcerted (and thus ready for the Holy Spirit to guide them into belief in Christ).

To be fair, many atheists place a similar trust in the power of their rhetoric to force believers into looking at the logical contradictions in Christianity (e.g., an all-powerful, loving God who allows earthquakes to devastate Haiti).

Fish, on the other hand, suggests that both die-hard atheists and die-hard evangelicals who make this assumption are in for a shock: most people are actually OK living in paradox, living without the unity of an all-encompassing, utterly harmonious philosophical system.

All this is not to say I agree totally with Fish. I do think there are reasons why faith or non-faith in Ultimate Truths do matter.

More tomorrow,

JF

Stanely Fish, Religion, and Science

Apologies: this again will be a short-ish post. I have a lot on my mind this evening, from funding cuts and termination notices for non-tenured faculty at my university to the Democrats' upset in Massachusetts (and the threat that poses to health reform hopes) to my first of teaching tomorrow.

I bracket all of these worries, however, to point you to a stimulating blog post by Stanley Fish on his New York Times blog. There Fish reviews (positively) and ruminates on (extensively) a book by Barbara Hernstein Smith, Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion. Smith (in Fish's view) effectively identifies and dismantles some of the common arguments that crisscross debates about the conflict between science and religion (e.g., science is but a kind of religion, religion is nothing more than cultish and anti-intellectual hogwash).

Both of these arguments, she contends--indeed, the whole framing of science and religion as locked in some winner-take-all struggle--are flawed. The argument against science (or perhaps, against materialist naturalism) involves science's inability to prove the ultimate epistemic validity of its own preconceptions. Science, like logical positivism, begins with axioms that cannot themselves be ultimately validated.

Fine, Smith says, but that doesn't make science any less valuable. Its value, she explains, lies not in our unshaken faith in the capital-T Truth of science but science's effectiveness at explaining, predicting, and controlling certain aspects of existence. We value science, in other words, not because we have Absolute Faith in its Eternal Truth (we don't) but because science allows us to meet and overcome particular challenges. Got a broken leg? Science can help. It matters not at all if the patient (or even, come to think of it, if the doctors) actually have Utter Faith in the power of casts and medicine. When it comes to fixing broken bones, science (i.e., medical techniques substantiated with science) works.

For other challenges--how ought we to behave? what kind of laws make for the best society? how can I live in the face of X suffering?--science works less well. For those kind of questions, other human endeavors (perhaps religious faith) work.

As some of Fish's commentators posted (see those under the "highlights" tab), Smith's case appears to echo that made twenty-odd years ago by Stephen J. Gould. Gould famously described religion and science as "nonoverlapping magisteria"--different enterprises differently suited to different tasks. They ask different questions, and they only come into conflict when they are mobilized in the service of tasks for which they are not intended (e.g., creation science).

I sense, however, that Smith's work goes beyond Gould. Fish certainly does. The piece of Smith's book he finds especially enticing isn't only the "they're not really in conflict" conclusion but her contention that contextualized pragmatism (does it work? for what does it work?) and not epistemic certainty (is it True?) ought to form the distinguishing characteristics between science and religion. This rationale offends some aligned with science (the first highlighted comment exemplifies this). The new scientism would argue that science isn't just different but better because it is in fact True. It describes Reality in ways that religion does not and cannot. Moreover, science willingly submits itself to proofs, ever ready for Reality to smack down X or Y hypothesis via experimentation. Religion, goes this line of thinking, fails because it doesn't similarly submit to falsification.

Of course, philosophers of science have moved beyond pure Popperian faslificationism as the sine qua non of science for some time now. The old canard of reflexivity still works: at what point or by what test does falsificationism itself become open to falsification? Historians of science point out that, were strict falsificationism the criterion for science, many of the most famous and influential scientists would fail the test. So too would many quantum physicists or string theorists, whose work is effectively (at this point at least) untestable yet still valid qua scientific work. Other philosophers point out that falsificationism declines to define exactly what constitutes a "test" or a proper "falsification"; one can nearly always attribute a failed test to a bad test ("We just don't have the technology to test this properly") rather than to a bad hypothesis.

Smith's argument is that A) science simply doesn't have access to some objective viewpoint from which one can adjudicate its Truth relative to religion; and B) it doesn't need such access. Why? Because humans don't operate by determining what system of thought (dare I say worldview) is transcendentally true or false; we care more, evolutionarily speaking, about what works in a particular situation. A longish quote:

What this means, among other things, is that the various projects we pursue and engage in may not all cohere in a single intelligible story. We may not be unified beings. In fact, Smith says, “the sets of beliefs held by each of us are fundamentally incoherent — that is, heterogeneous, fragmentary and, though often viable enough in specific contexts, potentially logically conflicting.” The potential for logical conflict, however, exists only under the assumption that all our beliefs should hang together, an assumption forced upon us not by the world, but by the polemical context of the culture wars.

This is an old argument of Fish's, but it's well put here. Humans simply don't work via fidelity to all-encompassing, fully articulated, internally non-contradictory belief systems. We operate, instead, through an ever-shifting hodgepodge of cobbled-together beliefs that we keep or discard based largely on how well they work in helping us move through life. I needn't be convinced of the Theory of Gravitation to know I don't want to step out of an open fifth-story window. Were a wholly different explanatory model of falling things to come about that replaced gravity entirely, I'd still avoid open windows in high buildings.

Why does all of this spark my interest? I feel it captures some of my problems with worldview analysis and worldview evangelism.

More on that tomorrow,

JF