Back from some time away due to sickness and a conference. Now I'm on the long, slow climb back to being caught up. Part of the catching up process involves re-establishing my habit of regular postings. Thus--
It seems none other than the Rev. Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps will be protesting here in my own town soon. A local high school is doing The Laramie Project, Tectonic Theatre's documentary play about the aftermath of Matthew Shepard's murder. The play itself features an extended scene that references Phelps's protest of Shepard's funeral and of the trial of his killers. One of the characters (based, of course, on a real person) responds to Phelps's protest by staging a counter-protest of people dressed as angels. As Phelps and his crew yell anti-gay invectives, the angels stand in front of him and raise their wings, blocking him from the funeral (or from the cameras).
Since then, Phelps and his Westboro Baptist church regularly choose to protest various productions of the play, which in turn inspires large counter-protests along the lines of those represented. Given that Laramie Project has become something of a high school staple (low tech requirements, large cast, easy-to-prove liberal credentials), Phelps is rarely at a loss for some site to protest, and communities are rarely at a loss for occasions to prove how liberal they are in response.
Don't get me wrong. I think it can be admirable to organize and stage a counter-protest. I've participated in some counter-protests against him myself. Certainly Phelps's message merits a counter-statement...
...or does it? Something about the formula of "Phelps comes/counter-protest staged" makes my alarms go off.
His ministry depends upon people at least seeing his bright neon signs. As I've written before, he's not so interested in creating converts; his hyper-Calvinism leads him to see most everyone else as hopelessly non-predestined anyway. Phelps's demonstrations function more as God's pointing finger of judgment, a conduit of divine disapproval for the nation's refusal to impose the death penalty on homosexuals. (One wonders if they believe in positive reinforcement, traveling to Uganda, perhaps, to praise legislators there for considering a death penalty measure for homosexual acts).
But, as just about anyone who's seen Phelps in person knows, the Westboro presence is generally anticlimactic. There's generally a handful of protesters, like a smallish family on vacation, waving their admittedly eye-catching signs. It's sort of pathetic, really--so pathetic that I wonder honestly whether they would continue at all were it not for the fact that their well-publicized presence guarantees a massive counter-reaction from the community.
More disturbingly, and with all due respect for the good intentions of the organizers: what is the point of the communal counter-reaction? It certainly won't convince Phelps et al. that their cause is hopeless or wrong-headed. Quite the contrary--the more resistance they inspire, the more the Phelps crew become convinced of the meaningfulness of their action. Doesn't the counter-reaction itself give Phelps just what he wants, i.e., proof that his righteous condemnation is making waves with the heathen? Could it be that the automatic counter-reactions by communities that Phelps visits have the unintended side-effect of encouraging Phelps to continue?
The stronger argument for counter-protests, of course, is that they aren't for Phelps's benefit but for the community's. A strong counter-rally against Phelps demonstrates to that community that his level of intolerance is, well, intolerable. I suppose that community audience has a number of sub-divisions. There's the GLBT sub-community, for whom their community's gesture of support could be a meaningful counter-message to Phelps's "God Hates Fags" rhetoric. I can see, also, how a communal counter-rally could encourage connection and mutual awareness within the left-liberal-activist sections of that community. I could even see how the occasion of a rally in contrast to Phelp's message might push some otherwise stand-offish (or apathetic) "moderate" folk to make an active choice. The rally re-casts Phelps's visit into an either-or melodrama, forcing the audience of the community to take sides.
But if I might play devil's advocate: speaking as a GLBT member of my community, it's nice that my city wants to rally to say that, at the end of the day, gay people shouldn't be called fags and given the death penalty. But I would hope that my community thinks that in any case. More directly, there's lots of ways I can think of for my community to express support for me that I'd rather see happen than a one-time counter-rally against a fire-and-brimstone caricature like Phelps. How about a non-discrimination policy? How about domestic partner benefits? How about health care for GLBT couples? (how about health care for everybody, come to think of it)?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredulous toward the notion that my civic community has my back, as demonstrated by a one-off reaction to the cartoon-level intolerance of Phelps, when that same community fails consistently to enact the day-today recognitions of equality that would make a material difference in my life and in the lives of other GLBT people.
That, I think, is the danger of Phelps and Westboro--not that they will actually inspire people to adopt their wacko beliefs but that they give people who otherwise do little or nothing for GLBT people a chance to acquire pro-tolerance credentials simply by standing up and saying, "You know, it's wrong to call those people fags and say they should all die and burn in hell." Phelps makes tolerance easy, a matter of standing up against him. If tolerance within a pluralized democracy means anything beyond beautiful phrases, surely it means an ongoing work of standing up for the rights and equality of people unlike you.
Now, if a counter-Phelps rally represents for some people a first step toward a broader perspective on what tolerance means--then super. But the danger I fear is that Phelps can just as easily be an occasion to participate in a facile fad of tolerance chic.
More soon,
JF
Showing posts with label tolerance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tolerance. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
State Neutrality and Religious Liberty
So: do public schools have the right to censor graduation speeches of valedictorians when those speeches contain overt Christian evangelizing (i.e., not merely mention of their faith but an explicit proselytizing pitch)? As a matter of law--as demonstrated in the cases I referenced yesterday--the answer is yes. School officials have a right to control speech given by persons acting as representatives of that school at events the school sponsors.
The underlying debate, however, relates to why schools feel the need to censor said speeches in the first place. One conservative evangelical commentator (posting a comment on a conservative news site report about the story) wondered if the students' remarks would have been censored had the students been speaking about a divisive issue that had nothing overt to do with religion, such as global warming. Of course no one but the school officials in question could offer an answer to that inquiry; I suspect that school officials are fairly controversy-averse and that a screed either for or against environmentalism would at least get some heavy scrutiny.
Clearly, however, the feeling in these situations seems to be--whatever might be the status (censored or allowed) of nonreligious controversial speech--religious speech is certainly suspect. Public schools strive to maintain a "separation between church and state," interpreting this idea (a Jeffersonian turn of phrase that doesn't actually appear in the Constitution) to mean that state entities must avoid any appearance or substance of preferring a specific faith over another. Indeed, the reality of people who do not profess any religious belief at all pushes many institutions to step back from making or endorsing any affirmation of faith (e.g., a reference to a Higher Power, "in God we trust," "one nation, under God").
The evangelical argument I rehearsed yesterday argues that such strict faith-neutrality contains and demands a particular understanding of faith that in and of itself qualifies as religious. In the neutral-state view of religion, faith is a private affair with optional public features. A person may enjoy the right to believe in their heart of hearts whatever they'd like. They furthermore have the right to associate with others of similar belief and practice faith rituals in private space (provided said rituals do not themselves involve illegal activity, such as human sacrifice, polygamous marriage, or drugs).
But, when operating in public space or when acting as an agent of the government, the believer must submit the practice of their belief to norms of social commerce. When private belief and public duty conflict, government agents are expected to prioritize their public duty. A police officer may not arrest a Wiccan simply because the officer is Southern Baptist and believes witchcraft to be evil. A teacher may not use class time to proselytize students in public school.
The counter-argument to this logic would say that faith does not--cannot--map cleanly onto a logic of public and private separations. An evangelical is a Christian no matter where she works or where she travels. She does not shed her Christian convictions when she leaves church or when she arrives at work; indeed, most varieties of evangelicalism would teach that "part-time Christianity" isn't Christianity at all. Faith is all-encompassing, un-ignorable, or it is nothing. For the state to suggest that faith must be otherwise--that it should be privatized--is a religious imposition.
Now, several objections to this line of thinking present themselves. If religious liberty--the freedom of conscience so prized by evangelicals--is to have any real effect, the state must refrain from endorsing any one faith formally. Were the state to declare one faith the "correct" or "official" faith, all other faith practices (including atheism) would instantly assume second-class status. Christian conservatives often draw on authors like David Barton to argue that the US is in fact "a Christian nation," that Christianity (as opposed to other faiths) plays a privileged historical role in US history and is thus due for some acknowledgment and deference. They would contend that such acknowledgment need not translate into hardships on other religions. The UK boasts the Church of England as an official faith but allows the full spectrum of religions to flourish.
I suspect, however, that such Christians would not find this argument nearly so convincing were the US's historical tradition seen as Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu rather than Christian. Calls for a faith-based nation as compatible with a scheme of religious liberty evaporate when the faith in question ceases to be a particular variety of Christianity. At the very least, having an official recognized faith suggests that conflicts between religions would likely be decided in favor of the predominant religion. If the state is to stay out of the business of promoting one religion above another, if the state is instead to maintain space for all religions to co-exist in the same society, then the only sensible scheme involves strict state neutrality.
That neutrality, and the general religious liberty it seeks to ensure, forms the Greater Good to which an individual's otherwise always-everywhere-no-matter-what practice of faith gets submitted. The right to religious expression, after all, exists in concert with other rights and other Goods. The government would ban the practice of a religion that called for the murder of a next-door neighbor, for example, because the neighbor's right to life outweighs the individual's right to practice a murderous faith.
To be sure, the scheme of religious liberty that allows for a thousand faith flowers to bloom does not reflect the exclusivity that is the property of many faiths. A die-hard Missouri Synod Lutheran, for example, believes his faith is uniquely correct. Other faiths aren't just variations; they are heresies, and their beliefs are false teachings. By taking a neutral stance, the state grants a kind of practical legitimacy to all faiths in general that few if any of those single faiths would endorse. But what of it? The alternative would seem to be some form of state theocracy, either soft or hard. Christian conservatives often stray dangerously close to calling for just such a theocracy (indeed, some Christian groups overtly assert that God's law ought to be the law of the land--that's a whole other argument for later).
Thus, religious liberty, state neutrality, and therefore the willingness of state agents to submit their faiths to a public/private division all form part of the given circumstances, the social compact, of what it is to be a US citizen. Those unable or unwilling to accept that the state won't echo their personal religious beliefs should, to put it brutally, find another country.
Clear enough, no?
Perhaps--but I think there's some room in this religious debate for a bit of Devil's Advocacy.
More tomorrow,
JF
The underlying debate, however, relates to why schools feel the need to censor said speeches in the first place. One conservative evangelical commentator (posting a comment on a conservative news site report about the story) wondered if the students' remarks would have been censored had the students been speaking about a divisive issue that had nothing overt to do with religion, such as global warming. Of course no one but the school officials in question could offer an answer to that inquiry; I suspect that school officials are fairly controversy-averse and that a screed either for or against environmentalism would at least get some heavy scrutiny.
Clearly, however, the feeling in these situations seems to be--whatever might be the status (censored or allowed) of nonreligious controversial speech--religious speech is certainly suspect. Public schools strive to maintain a "separation between church and state," interpreting this idea (a Jeffersonian turn of phrase that doesn't actually appear in the Constitution) to mean that state entities must avoid any appearance or substance of preferring a specific faith over another. Indeed, the reality of people who do not profess any religious belief at all pushes many institutions to step back from making or endorsing any affirmation of faith (e.g., a reference to a Higher Power, "in God we trust," "one nation, under God").
The evangelical argument I rehearsed yesterday argues that such strict faith-neutrality contains and demands a particular understanding of faith that in and of itself qualifies as religious. In the neutral-state view of religion, faith is a private affair with optional public features. A person may enjoy the right to believe in their heart of hearts whatever they'd like. They furthermore have the right to associate with others of similar belief and practice faith rituals in private space (provided said rituals do not themselves involve illegal activity, such as human sacrifice, polygamous marriage, or drugs).
But, when operating in public space or when acting as an agent of the government, the believer must submit the practice of their belief to norms of social commerce. When private belief and public duty conflict, government agents are expected to prioritize their public duty. A police officer may not arrest a Wiccan simply because the officer is Southern Baptist and believes witchcraft to be evil. A teacher may not use class time to proselytize students in public school.
The counter-argument to this logic would say that faith does not--cannot--map cleanly onto a logic of public and private separations. An evangelical is a Christian no matter where she works or where she travels. She does not shed her Christian convictions when she leaves church or when she arrives at work; indeed, most varieties of evangelicalism would teach that "part-time Christianity" isn't Christianity at all. Faith is all-encompassing, un-ignorable, or it is nothing. For the state to suggest that faith must be otherwise--that it should be privatized--is a religious imposition.
Now, several objections to this line of thinking present themselves. If religious liberty--the freedom of conscience so prized by evangelicals--is to have any real effect, the state must refrain from endorsing any one faith formally. Were the state to declare one faith the "correct" or "official" faith, all other faith practices (including atheism) would instantly assume second-class status. Christian conservatives often draw on authors like David Barton to argue that the US is in fact "a Christian nation," that Christianity (as opposed to other faiths) plays a privileged historical role in US history and is thus due for some acknowledgment and deference. They would contend that such acknowledgment need not translate into hardships on other religions. The UK boasts the Church of England as an official faith but allows the full spectrum of religions to flourish.
I suspect, however, that such Christians would not find this argument nearly so convincing were the US's historical tradition seen as Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu rather than Christian. Calls for a faith-based nation as compatible with a scheme of religious liberty evaporate when the faith in question ceases to be a particular variety of Christianity. At the very least, having an official recognized faith suggests that conflicts between religions would likely be decided in favor of the predominant religion. If the state is to stay out of the business of promoting one religion above another, if the state is instead to maintain space for all religions to co-exist in the same society, then the only sensible scheme involves strict state neutrality.
That neutrality, and the general religious liberty it seeks to ensure, forms the Greater Good to which an individual's otherwise always-everywhere-no-matter-what practice of faith gets submitted. The right to religious expression, after all, exists in concert with other rights and other Goods. The government would ban the practice of a religion that called for the murder of a next-door neighbor, for example, because the neighbor's right to life outweighs the individual's right to practice a murderous faith.
To be sure, the scheme of religious liberty that allows for a thousand faith flowers to bloom does not reflect the exclusivity that is the property of many faiths. A die-hard Missouri Synod Lutheran, for example, believes his faith is uniquely correct. Other faiths aren't just variations; they are heresies, and their beliefs are false teachings. By taking a neutral stance, the state grants a kind of practical legitimacy to all faiths in general that few if any of those single faiths would endorse. But what of it? The alternative would seem to be some form of state theocracy, either soft or hard. Christian conservatives often stray dangerously close to calling for just such a theocracy (indeed, some Christian groups overtly assert that God's law ought to be the law of the land--that's a whole other argument for later).
Thus, religious liberty, state neutrality, and therefore the willingness of state agents to submit their faiths to a public/private division all form part of the given circumstances, the social compact, of what it is to be a US citizen. Those unable or unwilling to accept that the state won't echo their personal religious beliefs should, to put it brutally, find another country.
Clear enough, no?
Perhaps--but I think there's some room in this religious debate for a bit of Devil's Advocacy.
More tomorrow,
JF
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Valedictory Speeches, Religious Expression, and Faith-Neutral Worldviews
Some background:
My interest in the Swiss Minaret Ban controversy stems most immediately from a longish conversation I had with my partner this past Thanksgiving weekend as we made the 10-hour drive back from my family's home in Oklahoma. There we listened to part of a podcast about another event stirring up religious/tolerance issues.
The situation? One Erica Corder, a graduating senior at a Colorado high school, was chosen as one of three valedictorians based on her grade point average. As such, she and was given the chance to write and deliver a 30-second speech at graduation. Her remarks were submitted beforehand and approved by school officials, but at the graduation ceremony, Corder altered her speech (text from this Christian Science Monitor story):
The school officials, dismayed at the proselytizing surprise, demanded--on pain of withholding her diploma--that Corder submit a formal apology that both specified that the remarks were her own and that she knew that, had she submitted those remarks to the school, they would not have been approved. This she did, but she then sued the school for violation of her first amendment right to freedom of speech. The court (first a federal judge, then the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals) ruled against her, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Paralleling this situation in many ways is this case of Brittany McComb, who similarly strayed from her approved valedictory remarks to speak on the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus--only to have school officials turn off her microphone mid-speech. With the help of the Rutherford Institute, McComb also sued for violations of her free speech rights. As was the case with Corder, federal and appellate courts ruled against her, and the Supreme Court turned down her case for review.
Now--the conservative evangelical spin on/reaction to these cases differs significantly from the cases themselves. To many conservative Christian organizations, these cases represent clear instances of Christian expression's being censored from public life, which they interpret as a violation of the first amendment's establishment clause. Crucially, however, the cases themselves involve not freedom of religion but freedom of speech. The courts' rulings against Corder and McComb deal not with whether the student may or may not make religious expressions but whether or not the schools have the right to control student speech at events those schools sponsor (like graduation). Here legal precedent supports schools' authority to so contorl speech.
Moreover (and this is a point that gets glossed over in some news stories), both McComb and Corder entered into understandings with their respective schools that they would deliver speeches pre-approved by school officials. Both McComb and Corder violated that understanding by straying from their remarks. Thus, to frame these events as schools swooping down to penalize Christians for their beliefs is to block out significant parts of the story.
That being said, clearly the religious nature of the women's speeches were at issue in both schools' actions. Indeed, McComb's school had, on previewing her speech, blocked out the religious references contained therein; McComb's change to her speech as delivered apparently consisted largely of restoring those parts of her statements. So, while freedom of speech was the presenting issue, the special nature of religious expression turns out to be the underlying issue. Schools, as official state institutions, are uncomfortable with appearing to support the expression of a particular religious belief. In deference to the first amendment's prohibition against state establishment of any particular religion, the schools restrict religious expression at their official events.
Conservative evangelicals (here I might specify the more politically active, "religious right" segments of conservative evangelicalism) challenge this interpretation of the establishment clause. While agreeing (ostensibly, at least) that government ought not formally declare support for a particular religion, they would insist that individuals can and must be able to express and practice their religion regardless of the particular context in which they find themselves. For the government to restrict religious speech of its employees or representatives, conservative evangelicals argue, is to take the establishment clause too far, intruding upon the individual's right to religious practice.
The most interesting variant of this argument suggests that the logic of state neutrality towards religion is in fact itself a religious belief, or at least a particular worldview about the proper status of religious belief and expression. That is, the US establishment clause as commonly interpreted casts religious expression as a private practice, an aspect of a person's existence and life-world that the person may bracket or mute in particular situations. A Christian could, in this view, practice her faith by preaching on street corners on day and cease preaching/proselytizing while working as a government census taker the next day. The state thus imagines a world where particular religious expression can and should take a back seat to the greater good of state neutrality toward any one religion.
The counter-argument here (and I'm not quoting from any particular argument I've read) would be that religions are not light-switches to be turned on or off as the situation commands. One is a Christian--one behaves as a Christian and does Christian things--all the time. Especially when presented with a situation in which one's faith demands a particular action, one cannot allow the state's interest in faith neutrality to override the individual Christian imperative to faith expression. A Christianity that can be turned on and off, in other words, is not really Christianity at all. To suggest otherwise is to disrupt a fundamental understanding of Christianity itself.
Now, immediately I can think of (and my partner quickly outlined for me) several objections to this line of thinking.
Let's go over these tomorrow.
JF
My interest in the Swiss Minaret Ban controversy stems most immediately from a longish conversation I had with my partner this past Thanksgiving weekend as we made the 10-hour drive back from my family's home in Oklahoma. There we listened to part of a podcast about another event stirring up religious/tolerance issues.
The situation? One Erica Corder, a graduating senior at a Colorado high school, was chosen as one of three valedictorians based on her grade point average. As such, she and was given the chance to write and deliver a 30-second speech at graduation. Her remarks were submitted beforehand and approved by school officials, but at the graduation ceremony, Corder altered her speech (text from this Christian Science Monitor story):
"We are all capable of standing firm and expressing our own beliefs, which is why I need to tell you about someone who loves you more than you could ever imagine. . . . He died for you on a cross over 2,000 years ago, yet was resurrected and is living today in heaven. His name is Jesus Christ. If you don't already know him personally, I encourage you to find out more about the sacrifice he made for you so that you now have the opportunity to live in eternity with him."
The school officials, dismayed at the proselytizing surprise, demanded--on pain of withholding her diploma--that Corder submit a formal apology that both specified that the remarks were her own and that she knew that, had she submitted those remarks to the school, they would not have been approved. This she did, but she then sued the school for violation of her first amendment right to freedom of speech. The court (first a federal judge, then the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals) ruled against her, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Paralleling this situation in many ways is this case of Brittany McComb, who similarly strayed from her approved valedictory remarks to speak on the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus--only to have school officials turn off her microphone mid-speech. With the help of the Rutherford Institute, McComb also sued for violations of her free speech rights. As was the case with Corder, federal and appellate courts ruled against her, and the Supreme Court turned down her case for review.
Now--the conservative evangelical spin on/reaction to these cases differs significantly from the cases themselves. To many conservative Christian organizations, these cases represent clear instances of Christian expression's being censored from public life, which they interpret as a violation of the first amendment's establishment clause. Crucially, however, the cases themselves involve not freedom of religion but freedom of speech. The courts' rulings against Corder and McComb deal not with whether the student may or may not make religious expressions but whether or not the schools have the right to control student speech at events those schools sponsor (like graduation). Here legal precedent supports schools' authority to so contorl speech.
Moreover (and this is a point that gets glossed over in some news stories), both McComb and Corder entered into understandings with their respective schools that they would deliver speeches pre-approved by school officials. Both McComb and Corder violated that understanding by straying from their remarks. Thus, to frame these events as schools swooping down to penalize Christians for their beliefs is to block out significant parts of the story.
That being said, clearly the religious nature of the women's speeches were at issue in both schools' actions. Indeed, McComb's school had, on previewing her speech, blocked out the religious references contained therein; McComb's change to her speech as delivered apparently consisted largely of restoring those parts of her statements. So, while freedom of speech was the presenting issue, the special nature of religious expression turns out to be the underlying issue. Schools, as official state institutions, are uncomfortable with appearing to support the expression of a particular religious belief. In deference to the first amendment's prohibition against state establishment of any particular religion, the schools restrict religious expression at their official events.
Conservative evangelicals (here I might specify the more politically active, "religious right" segments of conservative evangelicalism) challenge this interpretation of the establishment clause. While agreeing (ostensibly, at least) that government ought not formally declare support for a particular religion, they would insist that individuals can and must be able to express and practice their religion regardless of the particular context in which they find themselves. For the government to restrict religious speech of its employees or representatives, conservative evangelicals argue, is to take the establishment clause too far, intruding upon the individual's right to religious practice.
The most interesting variant of this argument suggests that the logic of state neutrality towards religion is in fact itself a religious belief, or at least a particular worldview about the proper status of religious belief and expression. That is, the US establishment clause as commonly interpreted casts religious expression as a private practice, an aspect of a person's existence and life-world that the person may bracket or mute in particular situations. A Christian could, in this view, practice her faith by preaching on street corners on day and cease preaching/proselytizing while working as a government census taker the next day. The state thus imagines a world where particular religious expression can and should take a back seat to the greater good of state neutrality toward any one religion.
The counter-argument here (and I'm not quoting from any particular argument I've read) would be that religions are not light-switches to be turned on or off as the situation commands. One is a Christian--one behaves as a Christian and does Christian things--all the time. Especially when presented with a situation in which one's faith demands a particular action, one cannot allow the state's interest in faith neutrality to override the individual Christian imperative to faith expression. A Christianity that can be turned on and off, in other words, is not really Christianity at all. To suggest otherwise is to disrupt a fundamental understanding of Christianity itself.
Now, immediately I can think of (and my partner quickly outlined for me) several objections to this line of thinking.
Let's go over these tomorrow.
JF
Monday, November 30, 2009
Swiss Minarets and Thomas Kuhn
I've been thinking of late about incommensurability, which of course moves me to think of Switzerland.
Switzerland first: As you may have heard, the Swiss voted this last Sunday to amend their Constitution's religious freedom statutes to ban minarets from being built in their country. The referendum campaign, spearheaded by a right-wing party (the Swiss People's Party, or S.V.P.), played on European fears of "Islamification," referring to cultural changes wrought by the influx of immigrants from Muslim countries. The campaign inspired a war of posters and pundits for and against the ban. The signature poster of the S.V.P (found, along with other posters, here) depicts a black, burka-clad figure in the foreground. Behind her is a depiction of the Swiss flag with a half-dozen black minarets sprouting (piercing?) like missiles from it. "Vote yes on the Minaret ban," reads the block lettering.
The vote's results surprised and dismayed the European community (see here and here), especially as the referendum passed with a 57.5% majority (in a 53% voter turnout). Swiss government officials, many of whom seem embarrassed about the amendment's passage, nevertheless admit that the vote democratically expresses the will of the people. There's no trickery here, just a simple, clear political victory.
For most liberal-progressive observers, the Swiss ban represents a disappointing, even frightening reaction to the challenge of cultural and religious difference. Given that Muslim-European tensions run much hotter in other European countries, the Swiss vote may auger a tightening of borders and sharpening of (white/Christian) cultural norms. For supporters of the ban, the referendum establishes a crucial defense against influence of a culture whose ideals and practices are seen as radically opposed to traditional Swiss and European values. One Belgian politician, speaking in support of the ban, put the case thusly: "It’s a signal that they [Muslim immigrants] have to adapt to our way of life and not the other way around."
Notions of cultural adaptation, tolerance, and religious liberty church messily within this controversy, which brings me to incommensurability. I draw this term from the work of Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher and historian of science most famous for his 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In that book (and I simplify brutally), Kuhn refutes the commonsense picture of science as a narrative of steady, accumulative progress. Instead of a smoothly ascending line where discovery builds upon discovery builds upon discovery, Kuhn argues that science instead operates more episodically, resembling perhaps a series of disconnected graphs.
Indeed, for Kuhn the very definition of "science" changes radically over time. Scientists working within a field at any one time operate more or less within the bounds of a commonly held model, a paradigm, that describes the basic contours of what a particular science (say, astronomy) is and what it should do. Paradigms function as a common set of assumptions about the way things are that give scientists a range of options for experimenting in, observing, and explaining reality. Paradigms define for scientists what there is to be done, scientifically speaking.
The Ptolemaic model of the solar system, for instance, served as the predominant astronomical paradigm for the Western world for many centuries. In this model, the Earth is the center of the universe. A set of crystalline spheres (one for the sun, the moon, each of the recognized planets, and the stars) rotate concentrically around the Earth. For a very long time all astronomical activities operated within this model. Observational evidence that seemed to contraindicate this model (the retrogression of Mars, for example) served not to disprove the model but to indicate the need for greater elaboration of the model. "Epicycles" (miniature orbits within orbits) were thus invented, complicating the system but more or less explaining away the apparent difficulties.
With Copernicus and Galileo, however, the Ptolemaic model had to be scrapped in favor of a whole new paradigm in which the earth and other planetary orbited the sun. Suddenly (well, "suddenly" on grand-historical timescales) "astronomy" had an entirely different set of grounding assumptions. Lifetimes of "scientific" work on the nature of epicycles became, in this new paradigm, the exploded fictions of a bygone era. It was not possible, in other words, to be a Ptolemaic astronomer with Copernican tendencies. One had to convert totally from Ptolemy's paradigm to a heliocentric paradigm if one wished to remain an astronomer.
Or consider physics after Einstein. One could not be a dedicated Newtonian physicist and work within a paradigm of general relativity. Scientific paradigms are, for Kuhn, incommensurate with each other, so radically different that between the two there can be only conflict or conversion, not compromise or adaptation.
I've been thinking about incommensurability in a different sense, relating the idea not to scientific paradigms but to religious paradigms, religious worldviews. In the Swiss minaret controversy I locate not two such worldviews (the right-wing S.V.P. and the Muslim immigrants) but three: those two and the tolerant-secular-European worldview that wants to see all religions as practicable within a scheme of ordered, democratic liberty. Although of those three, I identify most with the latter, I have to wonder whether that third option is in fact the least capable of conceiving of and dealing with incommensurate worldviews.
What do I mean by that?
More tomorrow,
JF
Switzerland first: As you may have heard, the Swiss voted this last Sunday to amend their Constitution's religious freedom statutes to ban minarets from being built in their country. The referendum campaign, spearheaded by a right-wing party (the Swiss People's Party, or S.V.P.), played on European fears of "Islamification," referring to cultural changes wrought by the influx of immigrants from Muslim countries. The campaign inspired a war of posters and pundits for and against the ban. The signature poster of the S.V.P (found, along with other posters, here) depicts a black, burka-clad figure in the foreground. Behind her is a depiction of the Swiss flag with a half-dozen black minarets sprouting (piercing?) like missiles from it. "Vote yes on the Minaret ban," reads the block lettering.
The vote's results surprised and dismayed the European community (see here and here), especially as the referendum passed with a 57.5% majority (in a 53% voter turnout). Swiss government officials, many of whom seem embarrassed about the amendment's passage, nevertheless admit that the vote democratically expresses the will of the people. There's no trickery here, just a simple, clear political victory.
For most liberal-progressive observers, the Swiss ban represents a disappointing, even frightening reaction to the challenge of cultural and religious difference. Given that Muslim-European tensions run much hotter in other European countries, the Swiss vote may auger a tightening of borders and sharpening of (white/Christian) cultural norms. For supporters of the ban, the referendum establishes a crucial defense against influence of a culture whose ideals and practices are seen as radically opposed to traditional Swiss and European values. One Belgian politician, speaking in support of the ban, put the case thusly: "It’s a signal that they [Muslim immigrants] have to adapt to our way of life and not the other way around."
Notions of cultural adaptation, tolerance, and religious liberty church messily within this controversy, which brings me to incommensurability. I draw this term from the work of Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher and historian of science most famous for his 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In that book (and I simplify brutally), Kuhn refutes the commonsense picture of science as a narrative of steady, accumulative progress. Instead of a smoothly ascending line where discovery builds upon discovery builds upon discovery, Kuhn argues that science instead operates more episodically, resembling perhaps a series of disconnected graphs.
Indeed, for Kuhn the very definition of "science" changes radically over time. Scientists working within a field at any one time operate more or less within the bounds of a commonly held model, a paradigm, that describes the basic contours of what a particular science (say, astronomy) is and what it should do. Paradigms function as a common set of assumptions about the way things are that give scientists a range of options for experimenting in, observing, and explaining reality. Paradigms define for scientists what there is to be done, scientifically speaking.
The Ptolemaic model of the solar system, for instance, served as the predominant astronomical paradigm for the Western world for many centuries. In this model, the Earth is the center of the universe. A set of crystalline spheres (one for the sun, the moon, each of the recognized planets, and the stars) rotate concentrically around the Earth. For a very long time all astronomical activities operated within this model. Observational evidence that seemed to contraindicate this model (the retrogression of Mars, for example) served not to disprove the model but to indicate the need for greater elaboration of the model. "Epicycles" (miniature orbits within orbits) were thus invented, complicating the system but more or less explaining away the apparent difficulties.
With Copernicus and Galileo, however, the Ptolemaic model had to be scrapped in favor of a whole new paradigm in which the earth and other planetary orbited the sun. Suddenly (well, "suddenly" on grand-historical timescales) "astronomy" had an entirely different set of grounding assumptions. Lifetimes of "scientific" work on the nature of epicycles became, in this new paradigm, the exploded fictions of a bygone era. It was not possible, in other words, to be a Ptolemaic astronomer with Copernican tendencies. One had to convert totally from Ptolemy's paradigm to a heliocentric paradigm if one wished to remain an astronomer.
Or consider physics after Einstein. One could not be a dedicated Newtonian physicist and work within a paradigm of general relativity. Scientific paradigms are, for Kuhn, incommensurate with each other, so radically different that between the two there can be only conflict or conversion, not compromise or adaptation.
I've been thinking about incommensurability in a different sense, relating the idea not to scientific paradigms but to religious paradigms, religious worldviews. In the Swiss minaret controversy I locate not two such worldviews (the right-wing S.V.P. and the Muslim immigrants) but three: those two and the tolerant-secular-European worldview that wants to see all religions as practicable within a scheme of ordered, democratic liberty. Although of those three, I identify most with the latter, I have to wonder whether that third option is in fact the least capable of conceiving of and dealing with incommensurate worldviews.
What do I mean by that?
More tomorrow,
JF
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Acceptance, Tolerance, and Spiritual Wrestling Matches
What a pickle I've gotten myself into!
One of my major concerns as a researcher and as a Christian involves the issue of inclusivity, otherwise known as the problem of exclusions. As a left/liberal/progressive person, my default mode is "inclusivity-good/exclusivity-bad." Liberal-left folk tend to pride themselves on how welcoming and tolerant they are, and I try to be so in my work and life.
Yet my scholarship indicates to me some problems with the purely pro-inclusion stance. For instance, the sentence above smashes together welcome and tolerance as if the two were synonymous. Of course this is not so. As critics like Michael Waltzer and Wendy Brown write, tolerance is a tricky term. It's managed to install itself as a liberal-left buzzword, one of the integral features of any proactive social justice initiative.
Yet tolerance by definition disrupts the warm-'n-fuzzy affect of inclusivity. You tolerate only those things, those people, or those behaviors that you basically disapprove of. If you approved of the person/thing/act in question, you wouldn't have to tolerate it; you'd simply accept it. Welcoming operates on a semantic frequency close to that of full acceptance. Tolerance, Brown reminds us, begins as the stopgap measure in which bitter foes agree not to slaughter each other. "Uneasy co-existence," not "hands joined in unity,"--this is the tolerant state.
When it comes to the Body of Christ, the church, my initial question was how tolerant we as Christians need to be of others whose views seem, well, anathema to ours. I have difficulty, I confess, seeing how my faith can possibly match that of, say, someone who honestly believes that the poor deserve not to have access to health care. Other Christians, by contrast, would flatly deny the suggestion that I as an openly gay man could be a Christian. To what extent, I wonder, ought we to accept or tolerate our ideological/theological others?
I want to say that God's standard is always to be surprisingly, shockingly accepting. I am led to this partly by conviction from (as far as I can discern) from the Holy Spirit, partly from the witness of other saints in the faith (including my sister and my parents) who model for me a radically inclusive faith, and partly from examples in scripture.
As I've written, I do not view the Bible as inerrant and infallible (a position which defines another fundamental disagreement between me and other Christians), but I do value it as an inspired witness (perhaps even as the witness par excellence). And as such, the gospel narratives contain multiple instances of Christ shocking those around him with his radical inclusivity. He did not merely tolerate people; he accepted them, welcomed them, ate with them, touched them, let them wash his feet with their hair--I just don't see him setting up any kind of boundary. Yes, several gospel writers tell of Jesus castigating the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders (a narrative inclusion that bespeaks the antagonism between the early Christian church and some in the first-century Jewish community). But Jesus also spends time in deep, loving conversation with those same people (e.g., Nicodemus in John 3).
But, as I mentioned yesterday, other instances--not as many, I would say, but still some--feature Jesus as relating a more exclusivist picture of the Kingdom of God. The parable of the King's Son's Wedding Banquet (in the first part of Matthew 22) is one of the harshest in this regard. There the King ends up inviting all comers to his son's wedding, only to then weed out those guests not dressed appropriately: "Many are called," Christ says, "but few are chosen." This isn't acceptance, and it isn't even tolerance (the guest in question is bound hand and foot before being thrown into the outer darkness). It is Christ saying--apparently--that the Kingdom is closed to some.
Thus my pickle. I have at my disposal some easy-out ways to interpret this passage--mainly the "it's an interpolation from the human writer, not the actual words of Christ" bolt-hole. It's tempting... The parable of the Wedding Feast itself gets parallel treatment in Luke 14 and even in the Gospel of Thomas 64 (thank you, Wikipedia). Both of these, however, lack the bummer ending that Matthew includes, with the "weeping and gnashing of teeth" that is Matthew's trademark. Since it's that ending that bugs me particularly, I could explain it away as an anomalous addition (along with the particular violence that Matthew's version contains, e.g., the slaughter of the original guests in retribution for their violence toward the original messengers of the King). Matthew, as I recall my Bible training, typically features harsher-than-usual attitudes toward Jews, so the violent fate of those originally invited (the Jews, in some popular interpretations) has some explanation.
But I don't think I do my faith any favors by simply editing out this particular difficult part and side-stepping a spiritual wrestling match. (I have fewer qualms about reading beyond certain other Biblical mandates, mind you--slavery, gender relations, homosexuality, etc.). Truth be told, Matthew isn't alone in preaching exclusivity, nor is the Wedding Feast the sole instance in the Bible of God establishing and enforcing some harsh distinctions. I might as well deal with this example of non-acceptance/intolerance in the Kingdom of God.
More tomorrow,
JF
One of my major concerns as a researcher and as a Christian involves the issue of inclusivity, otherwise known as the problem of exclusions. As a left/liberal/progressive person, my default mode is "inclusivity-good/exclusivity-bad." Liberal-left folk tend to pride themselves on how welcoming and tolerant they are, and I try to be so in my work and life.
Yet my scholarship indicates to me some problems with the purely pro-inclusion stance. For instance, the sentence above smashes together welcome and tolerance as if the two were synonymous. Of course this is not so. As critics like Michael Waltzer and Wendy Brown write, tolerance is a tricky term. It's managed to install itself as a liberal-left buzzword, one of the integral features of any proactive social justice initiative.
Yet tolerance by definition disrupts the warm-'n-fuzzy affect of inclusivity. You tolerate only those things, those people, or those behaviors that you basically disapprove of. If you approved of the person/thing/act in question, you wouldn't have to tolerate it; you'd simply accept it. Welcoming operates on a semantic frequency close to that of full acceptance. Tolerance, Brown reminds us, begins as the stopgap measure in which bitter foes agree not to slaughter each other. "Uneasy co-existence," not "hands joined in unity,"--this is the tolerant state.
When it comes to the Body of Christ, the church, my initial question was how tolerant we as Christians need to be of others whose views seem, well, anathema to ours. I have difficulty, I confess, seeing how my faith can possibly match that of, say, someone who honestly believes that the poor deserve not to have access to health care. Other Christians, by contrast, would flatly deny the suggestion that I as an openly gay man could be a Christian. To what extent, I wonder, ought we to accept or tolerate our ideological/theological others?
I want to say that God's standard is always to be surprisingly, shockingly accepting. I am led to this partly by conviction from (as far as I can discern) from the Holy Spirit, partly from the witness of other saints in the faith (including my sister and my parents) who model for me a radically inclusive faith, and partly from examples in scripture.
As I've written, I do not view the Bible as inerrant and infallible (a position which defines another fundamental disagreement between me and other Christians), but I do value it as an inspired witness (perhaps even as the witness par excellence). And as such, the gospel narratives contain multiple instances of Christ shocking those around him with his radical inclusivity. He did not merely tolerate people; he accepted them, welcomed them, ate with them, touched them, let them wash his feet with their hair--I just don't see him setting up any kind of boundary. Yes, several gospel writers tell of Jesus castigating the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders (a narrative inclusion that bespeaks the antagonism between the early Christian church and some in the first-century Jewish community). But Jesus also spends time in deep, loving conversation with those same people (e.g., Nicodemus in John 3).
But, as I mentioned yesterday, other instances--not as many, I would say, but still some--feature Jesus as relating a more exclusivist picture of the Kingdom of God. The parable of the King's Son's Wedding Banquet (in the first part of Matthew 22) is one of the harshest in this regard. There the King ends up inviting all comers to his son's wedding, only to then weed out those guests not dressed appropriately: "Many are called," Christ says, "but few are chosen." This isn't acceptance, and it isn't even tolerance (the guest in question is bound hand and foot before being thrown into the outer darkness). It is Christ saying--apparently--that the Kingdom is closed to some.
Thus my pickle. I have at my disposal some easy-out ways to interpret this passage--mainly the "it's an interpolation from the human writer, not the actual words of Christ" bolt-hole. It's tempting... The parable of the Wedding Feast itself gets parallel treatment in Luke 14 and even in the Gospel of Thomas 64 (thank you, Wikipedia). Both of these, however, lack the bummer ending that Matthew includes, with the "weeping and gnashing of teeth" that is Matthew's trademark. Since it's that ending that bugs me particularly, I could explain it away as an anomalous addition (along with the particular violence that Matthew's version contains, e.g., the slaughter of the original guests in retribution for their violence toward the original messengers of the King). Matthew, as I recall my Bible training, typically features harsher-than-usual attitudes toward Jews, so the violent fate of those originally invited (the Jews, in some popular interpretations) has some explanation.
But I don't think I do my faith any favors by simply editing out this particular difficult part and side-stepping a spiritual wrestling match. (I have fewer qualms about reading beyond certain other Biblical mandates, mind you--slavery, gender relations, homosexuality, etc.). Truth be told, Matthew isn't alone in preaching exclusivity, nor is the Wedding Feast the sole instance in the Bible of God establishing and enforcing some harsh distinctions. I might as well deal with this example of non-acceptance/intolerance in the Kingdom of God.
More tomorrow,
JF
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