Wild Ideas and Staged Readings

So, a wild thought occurred to me as I was reading The National Review's take on Will Arbery's just-closed play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, about which I've written before. I've been wanting someone to talk to about this play for a while, but almost no one in my immediate world is familiar enough with the script or with the issues involved. And everyone in my world is pretty busy with their own things that they'd love to talk to me about if only I were more familiar with them.

But, among the many ideas the play pitches into the air for characters to bat back and forth is conservative Rod Dreher's Benedict Option. Arbery apparently sent Dreher a draft of the script. Dreher notes, however, that Arbery has not responded to Dreher's emailed questions. Likely, Dreher surmises, Arbery is reticent (as he is in national news interviews) about sharing his own stance. As a playwright, he presents an honest selection of characters who represent a cross-section of conservative Catholic thought in 2017. For Arbery to register whether he supports one or more of the characters would be to upset the balanced, complicated picture his dramaturgy produces. (This seems similar to Lucas Hnath's keeping mum about his beliefs in reference to his excellent play The Christians.)

But Rod Dreher lives here. I live here. It is in my power to create a staged reading/discussion event and invite Dreher to participate.

This is a wild thought because, although I find Dreher's writing often compelling, the two of us stand on opposite sides of a worldview gap. We may concur about President Trump's many shortcomings, but on issues like abortion and sexuality, we would be opponents.

It's a strange kind of opposition in this strange time.

One of Dreher's posts today celebrates Democrat John Bel Edwards's gubernatorial win over Republican Eddie Rispone yesterday, a victory widely seen as a rebuke of Trump. I celebrate along with him.

Trump had campaigned strongly in Louisiana and elsewhere for Rispone, even coming personally to Louisiana on three occasions for pro-Rispone rallies. Such rallies, predictably, turned in to pro-Trump rallies. Dreher points out that Rispone had no discernible platform beyond "Trump likes me; I like Trump." If anything, Edwards's victory signals that pro-Trump rhetoric alone isn't enough to swing a state like Louisiana.*

Edwards, by contrast, has held on to his position as one of the very few Deep South Democratic governors largely thanks to his stalwart pro-life credentials. He signed into law incredibly restrictive anti-abortion legislation during his last term.

I am, as I have mentioned, heartily against most abortion restrictions. I approach reproductive matters from an entirely different place, holding entirely different warrants, than Dreher does.

I support Edwards despite rather than because of his anti-choice stances. There are a number of reasons; his expansion of medicare, his stabilizing the state's finances, his openness with his electorate (he hosts a call-in radio show weekly), his support for teachers, his general alignment with Democratic rather than Trumpist values. In my ideal world, I'd have someone like Edwards but who also works to protect the right not to be forced into continued pregnancy or childbirth, who doesn't treat pregnancy as a functional punishment inflicted on people (disproportionately on women) who have sex. I'll take Edwards, though, because his anti-choice stance makes him a viable candidate. It's the kind of pragmatic calculation Deep South progressives regularly have to make when voting (and the kind of calculation conservatives in other parts of the country have to make about their candidates).

There are other big worldview differences between Dreher and me. Unlike Dreher, I simply fail to see any dire cultural threat from the spectacle of a few drag queens in 30 or so cities reading books to children in public libraries. I'm baffled at the shibboleth status that Drag Queen Story Hour has acquired among a particular bandwidth of cultural conservative. I don't know, but I imagine there's a number of ways that my faith expression (liberal gay United Methodist) would be obnoxious from his Orthodox perspective.

Nevertheless, I'm intrigued at the thought of having a good, long conversation with him about this play. He'd be an ideal conversation partner here. (In the unlikely event you're reading this Mr. Dreher, please do contact me!)

And beyond the wouldn't-this-be-cool factor, a productive conversation with Dreher might restore a bit of faith in the possibility of a pluralist civic ethos. Two people who disagree strongly and are unlikely to convert each other have a deep conversation about faith and politics. What a spectacle. Someone should write a play about it.

We'll see.

*Dreher cites another possible factor in Edwards's victory, one I find depressing yet difficult to discount: LSU won last weekend against its long-time arch-rival Alabama (a rare feat). Spirits in Louisiana--pride and contentment about Louisiana--were high this last week. Had LSU lost, a note of dissatisfaction may have tipped things more in Rispone's favor...

Potential Converts vs. Enemies

Suppose a genie appears. You get a message from Beyond. You magically just know it to be true: your neighbor or co-worker, that person over there you see practically every day? They vote for the other side. And they will never, ever change. You will never persuade them that they're wrong to vote for so-and-so person/party or such-and-such issue/position that you passionately oppose.

What then?

In all the bridge-building initiatives like Better Angels or Dialogue on Race Louisiana that I research and work with, the empathic listening and patient sharing I engage in have a tacit agenda: I might eventually convince enemies to convert. Such an agenda often figures as a rationale for civility in this polarized era. Pundits lecture, for example, how liberals need to listen more to conservatives if they want to win in 2020. I heard several presentations at the conference I attended last weekend about how the anti-abortion (or anti-choice) movement revamped itself in the last twenty years, going from sign-and-slogan, in-your-face yelling with gruesome pictures of aborted fetuses to a savvier, more empathic mode that favors listening and forming relationships (via, for example, crisis pregnancy centers).

There's an evangelical impulse to civility, a hope that a friendly overture might lead to transformation. I don't mean that civility is merely a cynical front for a sales pitch, though sometimes it may be. I mean that a natural (for me, anyway) resource for empathy is the idea that someone who isn't on my side really should be for their own good. I want everyone to be more feminist because I think feminism benefits everyone. I want people to step back from market fundamentalism (the free market will take care of all ills) because I think a bit more socialized organization would provide for people's needs better than competing profit motives. I want people to resist racism because a world without racism is just plain all-around better for humanity. It makes me sad that some people really believe that Drag Queen Story Hour poses a dire threat to children. It frustrates me that some people think that vaccinations are harmful or that immigrants are dangerous, dirty invaders. That's just not a great way to be.

So yeah, if I have a way I think is better, I want other people to be on board with me in following that way.

But what if, somehow, that hope were extinguished? What if I'm left with the neighbor who stands on the other side of an unbridgeable worldview gap?

We can't just agree to disagree on everything. At some point, one of us is going to vote for or against something or someone that's sacred to the other person. I'm pro-choice; my basic belief is that pregnant people should get to choose what to do with their bodies and should never be forced to be pregnant if they don't want to be. That belief runs smack into the deep conviction held by others that a pregnant person's desires must balance with (or, more often, be trumped by) the value of preserving embryonic life.

Most people believe neither in an absolute pro-choice or absolute pro-life stance. But legislation is about drawing lines that are functionally absolute. Laws and court decisions turn grey zones into sharply bordered zones of black and white. We just can't have it both ways. Either people have the legal ability to end pregnancies at a certain point or for certain reasons, or they don't.

The issue is political in Carl Schmitt's sense. It divides people into friend/enemy relations. No meta-rationale or meta-value has enough bilateral credibility to resolve the question. There's no scientific/historical fact, no ethical or religious system, that we can point to in a way that settles the matter for everyone. Abortion and reproductive rights necessitate straightforward agonism (struggle).

This, I think, is a better way--a more challenging way, at least--to think of the Christian precept of loving your enemy. The enemy isn't a potential friend or ally. The enemy is the opponent who espouses a stance you would resist with every fiber of your being.

How shall we treat the enemy?

Health Care, Faith, and Kengor's column

In the wake of the Healthcare Reform victory (hurrah), I found a curious response from conservative Christianity, an opinion piece by Paul Kengor, a political science professor at Grove City College. It's reprinted here on Warren Throckmorton's blog.

Kengor bemoans the fact that so many on the partisan left have invoked Christian themes in their pro-Reform Bill rhetoric, asserting in his view that this bill was God's own bill, affirmed by Christ himself. Kengor contrasts that embrace of Christian rhetoric with the "eight years of outrageous, baseless charges against President George W. Bush on matters of faith" leveled by those same liberals. The left's mobilization of Christian "social justice" rhetoric is all the more galling, continues Kengor, in that it includes provisions for abortion coverage, which Kengor sees as a disqualification for the bill's having anything at all to do with achieving Christlike goals. His piece concludes thus:

It’s a quite radical departure from eight years of scourging George W. Bush every time he confessed he prayed. At long last, there is room for Jesus in the inn, so long as the Savior “supports” a certain agenda. Who says conversions don’t happen?

I want to make several quick observations here.

First, as a left-leaning Christian, I've not been shy about citing my faith as the grounds for my support for the health care reform (i.e., steps toward socialization of health care--and I reemphasize that the bill that just passed is nothing like the full-scale socialization I think ought to happen). I think it's unconscionable that our society makes health care--even and especially life-saving (or quality-of-live-saving) health care--contingent upon a patient's ability to pay for it. My convictions regarding love for the neighbor over love for oneself, the proper ethical treatment of the poor and the sick, the skeptical attitude toward worldly wealth accumulation expressed in the gospels--all of these move me to resist a society where profit for a very few outweighs the good for a great many.

To affirm that my faith inspires me to support this bill, however, is something utterly different than asserting that God personally supports this particular piece of US legislation. I understand God as imposing upon Christians certain ethical guidelines to be applied (in the rich sense of checking in with, thinking deeply about, wrestling with) to life in general. I do not see God or Christ as writing (via verbal inspiration or by proxy) specific laws to be passed. Nor have I ever heard any health care supporter assert anything of the sort. Nor does Kengor cite a single politician, theologian, or social group who asserts anything of the sort.

Kengor charges the liberal left with unfairly castigating George W. Bush with religious fanaticism every time he so much as mentioned his prayer life, even though practically every president before him and Obama after him invoked Christian-religious themes in a variety of circumstances. Now, I believe one can study how and to what extent Bush II mobilized Christian rhetoric (and the kind of Christian rhetoric so mobilized) versus how and to what extent Obama mobilized it and conclude fairly that some stark contrasts separate how each used Christianity and to what ends.

But, insofar as critics decry Bush's (or any politician's) mention of his religious faith in the public sphere as inappropriate, I can agree. I've argued before against the idea that faith is purely private and must remain segregated from public stances. Rather, one's faith (in the broad sense, not just a religious sense) inevitably plays a role in the dynamics of one's positions and arguments. Banning faith from public sphere discourse only drives complicates the democratic process of exchanging ideas and fighting for/against/about different ideals. We need to become more adept at discussing faith-based stances, not less.

Problems arise, however, when faith gets played not as one factor in a decision-making process but as the only factor, a debate-stopper. The battle over abortion provisions in the health care bill,and the related struggles by many faith-based opponents of abortion over whether or not to support the bill illustrates this distinction. For Christians undergoing this struggle, their faith moves them to consider prenatal life as invested with personhood, generally from conception onward (not at all my own conviction, for the record). A bill that refuses to ban abortions in the strongest, most stringent terms, then, is from this perspective, a bill that tolerates medical murder. Yet so much of the rest of the bill moves in directions that do good--that provide coverage for the uninsured, that prevent companies from denying coverage for specious reasons, etc. And proponents of the bill strove mightily to craft policies that limited abortion provisions. The result? Some pro-life advocates ended up supporting the bill; others did not.

This was, I offer, a political struggle in which dynamic conversations about a faith-based conviction played a large role. At the fracture point were people--some people, at least--on both sides who understood and respected the faith convictions of their opponents, even if they disagreed with them.

I detect none of that respect in Kengor's column. For him, the abortion issue in the context of the health care bill isn't a difficult ethical issue that people of good faith--people within the overall Christian pro-life community--can disagree on. Rather, in Kengor's argument Christian faith emerges as a black-and-white stance against abortions (apparently, all abortion, anywhere, at any time, in any conceivable circumstance). Faith doesn't foster debate or conversation; it's instead an end to conversation, a shutting of the books that brooks no nuance or disagreement. Moreover, it wipes away any possible consideration of other things the bill in question might accomplish.

This stance of Kengor's I submit, is as contradictory as the stance he attributes to the liberal left. Faith can and should be part of the public debate, he argues, but apparently only when that faith matches his own exactly. Bush II's faith was fine, for Kengor, and any disagreement with it was just liberal grousing. But Obama's faith, Pelosi's faith, and the faith of other bill supporters (Christian and otherwise, pro-choice and pro-life)--this faith is a fraud. It's illegitimate. Why? Because it isn't his own.

But if you argue, as Kengor does, that faith can and should play a part in the public sphere and in political debates, then you must accept that faith itself--what it is, what it's not; what it enjoins, what it prohibits--becomes an object for debate, a thing contested rather than simply and homogenously affirmed. I suspect that Kengor and other religious right pundits who call for faith in the public sphere don't actually want to talk about faith; rather, they want their own specific faith to end all talk. Because once you start talking about faith, then you have to acknowledge a plurality of faiths, even and especially within your own faith community. This, I submit, has never been a strength of organized Christianity, especially not in its Protestant evangelical iterations.

More later,

JF