The Moderate And The Radical

I went to a pro-life conference this weekend. There were some interesting speakers there. Two in particular made me think. One was a full time pro-life activist from CCBR. The other was a former publisher of Calgary's major daily newspaper. A guy named Peter Menzies. Menzies traced back the way the pro-abortion and pro-gay marriage won the media and eventually the public to their side. His point was they did it a little at a time. The changes they asked for were always incremental. He said the media love moderates. They don't like radicals. That is even more true in Canada than the US. Canadians are much more polite and not wanting to offend or even listen to someone who might be offensive to someone else.

His point was the social liberals have done a much better job of making their position seems moderate every step of the way even while the sum total of the change they have effected is quite radical. One example of how radical the change has been was the firing of Damian Goddard for tweeting that he supported traditional marriage. So his point was this step by step ever moderate approach has been working for the other side in this fight. We have not used it very well and have lost in large measure because we have been seen as the radicals.

His suggestion was to aim at some moderate gains. Gendercide is one battle we can win. Most people oppose aborting a child because it is a boy or because it is a girl. So we can sound moderate there. Making it a crime to coerce a woman into an abortion is another moderate gain we could aim for. How can a feminist oppose that? It is just protecting a woman's right to choose. These are battles we can win and we can move the ball forward. If we keep doing that and keep winning we can eventually move society a long way.

The other speaker, the pro-life activist, he does not care at all who thinks of him as a radical. He loves to show gory pictures of abortion fetuses. He wants to make people uncomfortable. He want to hit them over the head with the truth. He uses strong words like genocide and holocaust. His point is that it is not him who has taken the radical position. It is our culture that is radical.

So I ended up thinking these two guys should have had a debate. What one sees as counterproductive the other sees as the only way to make real progress. Both characterize the pro-life strategy to date as the opposite of what they are suggesting. The radical would say we have been too polite. The moderate would say we have been too offensive. The pro-life movement is large and diverse so examples can be found of each. But where should our efforts be concentrated?

One thought I had was that the pro-abortion and more recently the pro-gay movement did lie about their ultimate goals. OK, they may have been ignorant of where their own movement was going. I am a bit skeptical of that. Nevertheless, for pro-life people, they would definitely need to deal with pro-aborts saying this is a ploy to try and eventually make all abortion illegal. How would we respond? Would we lie? I have trouble seeing how you get around that. Satan can use deceit as a tactic. We can't. Even when we see deceit has worked well for him.

Thinking about the saints. How many saints were considered radicals and how many were considered moderate? I can't think of many moderate ones. Some were moderate on many issues and picked their spots about what position to take. But I can't think of any that consistently avoided taking radical positions.

For myself, I value logical consistency. Taking a moderate position on abortion might be an easier sell but it is fundamentally an incoherent position. Saying abortions based on gender should be illegal and not saying all abortions should be illegal is really ducking the central question. That is the question of whether the unborn child is a human person or not. The pro-life position appeals to me because it deals with the question and is not afraid of the logical implications of the answer. These more moderate ideas jsut don't have that property at all.

I wonder of God intentionally gives us radical truths that are hard to moderate without creating an incoherent position. The divinity of Jesus is one example. How do you construct a moderate version of that? I have thought that maybe if I encourage a person to go to mass more often then maybe they will drift into stronger Catholicism. But eventually a more radical choice will need to be faced. There is just no way around it.

The same is true of the church. How can you create intermediate steps between protestantism and Catholicism? It does not really work. Liturgically you can find a middle ground but in terms of doctrine and authority there really is no middle ground. Either you are your own pope or you let someone else do the job.

Two Kinds of Violence

Pope Benedict made a very interesting speech at Assisi. He talked about two sources of violence. The violence of religion and the violence of atheism. It is quite interesting. We can attack somebody because we believe they are evil. That is something all religions need to deal with. Of course all religions were represented at Assisi so it was a good time to bring that up. It is kind of against inter-religious etiquette to bring up topics like religious violence but there would have been little gained from a polite photo op. So he was quite bunt. We, as Christians, have engaged in violence and we need to deal with it. Violent Christianity has always been a perversion of the true Christian faith or at least an undeveloped version of the Christian faith. Still it has happened. To some extent it still happens. We need to do what we can to end it.

Of course many of the other religions represented there have a much worse track record for violence than Christianity. He especially focused on the 25 years since the last interfaith conference at Assisi.  A time when religious terrorism really began to become a problem in may parts of the world. The idea that people "consider God as their own property, as if he belonged to them, in such a way that they feel vindicated in using force against others."

I think this is awesome. One of the myths about atheism is that not believing in God makes you better able to speak out against religious violence. It just isn't true. I can't imagine any atheist being as effective as the pope was here. He has credibility precisely because he is a man of faith and not a wishy-washy faith.

He also warned that as much as religion has an issue with violence atheism has a bigger one. He mentioned concentration camps but he also mentioned drug abuse. What he calls the "decline of man." We might not embrace full blown atheism at the state level but secularism is causing us to drift morally. It is the absence of God in a different way than the communists and the Nazis imposed it but it leads to violence none the less. The number of people killed by the US government in the war on terror has been skyrocketing. The body count from the war on drugs is huge. Then you have abortion. The numbers for that are insane. This is all violence that we accept as a society. We have lost our moral center. Even when we protest we don't know why. We occupy Wall Street and all we can do is babble about 1% and 99%. We can't articulate a moral principle.

I think the "decline of man" should be one of those phrases that forms a shorthand for what Catholics believe is wrong with the world. Like the "culture of death" was for John Paul II. The evil has grown to effect much more than our view of the sacredness of human life. It has effected politics big time. The financial sector is in serious trouble because of moral failings. It is all over the academic world especially in philosophy. The Decline of Man seems like an insightful phrase. He just needs to keep using it.

Religious Life

When discerning a vocation the first step is to understand the beauty of each choice. If you look at either marriage or the religious life and see nothing attractive about it then there is something wrong with you. That is not an insult. That is information. We know that about marriage. If someone says there is nothing about marriage that is appealing you would wonder about them. Those that do say that mean they could not bring themselves to commit to one partner for the rest of their life. But most don't say that. Most people love the idea of falling in love and having it last forever. Having children. People might not be willing to make the sacrifices required to get there but they understand that it is a good place to be.

It is much less common with religious life. Many people react with complete aversion to the idea of becoming a nun or a priest. They see nothing at all appealing about it. That is honest. But they need to understand that shows a lack of spiritual maturity. It is not that they are not called to religious life. It is that they have not taken their faith seriously enough to even ask themselves the question. Do you believe God alone is enough to full satisfy all your desires for as long as you live? The theological answer to that is easy. Of course He is. He is God. But do you believe that in your heart? Is there something in the vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience that is just too much? That you cannot imagine God would satisfy that desire and bring you to a place of joy.

That is not a matter of calling. It is a matter of faith. When faith gets practical you find out how real it is. It is hard. It is something we need to grow into. But the exercise has benefits that go way beyond any potential religious vocation you might have. What happens is your desires are reordered as desires for God that might involve an intermediate goal. You might want a career. But why do you want a career? Is it so you can feel significant? Is it so you can earn money and do some good for yourself and for others? These are not bad things to want but why do you want them? You keep digging and you either get to God or you get to self. Ultimately those are the two real ends we pursue. The part that is ordered towards God can be sacrificed at God's command. The part that is ordered towards self needs to be repented of. We need to give ourselves fully and unconditionally to God.

If you go there then you can see marriage and religious life as two great goods. It will be sad that you can only do one. That is a good space to be in. Often someone will take a long time to surrender to the religious life and when he finally does God surprises him with a wife. I see something good about stories like that. Entering marriage in a place of total surrender to God. The point is not to make everyone religious. Most people should marry. But everyone needs to leave the choice up to God.

One of the big problems with marriage is many don't enter it in that place of surrender. There is a mentality of contraception and divorce in our culture that we can drift into all to easily. Often the reason why marriage appeals to us more than religious life is because we think we are required to give less in marriage. In some ways that is true but we should not marry out of an aversion to self-donation. If we are still in that space when we marry that is a very bad sign.

Preference for the Poor

The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace came out with a document. I though John Allen had a good take on it. He talked about how the majority of the Catholics in Africa, Asia and Latin America have some very different thinking about economic justice than Catholic in Europe and North America. This document was written by an African, Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana. It reflects African thinking. This is one of the great things about being Catholic. You benefit from the wisdom of Christians of other times and other cultures. We tend to get trapped in the modern western mindset. Not only the secular western culture that influences us but the Christian western culture that is better but still very narrow in it's perspective. Catholic tradition breaks us out of that to some extent. It works for issues that have been around for a long time. But what about the more recent issues like globalization. Tradition has less to say. But we still benefit from the fact that the church is Catholic and it is one. We share the church with men like Cardinal Turkson and about 750 million other Catholics who are not part of the western culture. We can benefit from them. We also benefit from the fact that the church is holy and apostolic. That is the magisterium has special gifts to be able to discern God's wisdom. That does not just apply to infallible documents. We need to learn to think with the church.

So how has the Catholic community been doing? I don't see a lot of attempts to learn from this document. It has fallen into the left/right political divide. The conservatives have been most disappointing because they normally take the church quite seriously. They know the church has wisdom but cannot bring themselves to consider the possibility that some conservative orthodoxy might need to be questioned. They point out that it is not infallible. they have pointed that out again and again and again. OK. Got that. But it is still a document written by one of the church's foremost African thinkers. Someone Pope Benedict trusts on matters of justice and peace. It represents a very common viewpoint inside the church at all levels. One the pope is endorsing. Not a powerful endorsement but a thumbs up nevertheless.

I believe the proper Catholic response to such a document is constructive engagement. We can debate. We can disagree. But we should not write off Cardinal Turkson as a liberal. Trying to fit him into the American political picture is just nonsense. We should expect him to transcend those categories. We need thinking like that because both Republican and Democrats have managed to run us into a mess. How much constructive engagement have their been? Mostly it has been a defensive, dismissal. 

One big point of difference is the view of the United Nations. Nobody knows better the the Catholic church how the United Nations has been used to make abortion and contraception more available. But Catholic thinkers have not been willing to call the entire institution a bad thing. Pope Benedict took his name from the WWI Pope Benedict XV. That Pope Benedict put forward some of the ideas that President Woodrow Wilson adopted and later grew into the League of Nations and then the United Nations. Pope Benedict XVI is actually a big fan of Pope Benedict XV. So it is no surprise he thinks the idea of international authority has some potential. WWI showed how one war could engulf the whole of Europe so conflict resolution really was everyone's business. The recent crisis shows how one nation's financial policy can cause major problems worldwide. Why should preventing such crises in the future not be done on an international level?

Yes, there is a national element here. As John Allen points out, many are "wary about the global influence of the United States." I can see that Americans might have a different view of this. Giving up sovereignty to international bodies is something they rarely do. Economically they are still powerful but not quite the superpower they once were. The times are changing. The church is not afraid of new ideas.
We should not be under the illusion that we can get to utopia through human effort but we can and should try to make things better.

When God Seems To Change

Called To Communion has responded to an article arguing that Catholicism has changed its doctrine on salvation outside the church. This is a common claim. Atheists often make a parallel criticism that the God portrayed in the Old Testament is bloodthirsty, vengeful, and mean. There are some documents from church history that don't seem to fit with modern Catholic teaching and there are some passages from the Old Testament that don't seem to fit with our image of God shaped by the New Testament.

I think atheists and Catholics are right to point out that this is a real problem. God never changes. When something claiming to be a revelation from God changes over time we need to wonder. It could  possibly be evidence that their claim is false. That this is just man trying to know God but it does not have the reliability of God but rather the reliability of the people involved. When we examine the claims of Muslims, Mormons, or Jehovah's Witnesses to speak for God we find inconsistent statements they have made over time and they become Exhibit A in our case against these false prophets. So can a similar case be made against the bible? Or against the church?

The answer is that God did not reveal everything about Himself and His plan to save man all at once. We see it being revealed slowly over many centuries. God chose to take man on a journey. Man needed to know the seriousness of sin. So we have the event of the flood. Every child knows the story because their are lots of animals involved. But the story is really about the fact that sin was everywhere. God is a powerful and when we sin we are just daring Him to destroy us. This is not smart. God is gracious and does save eight people but only eight. Was that the whole picture of God? No. But it is truth about God. The same God we serve today.

This pattern continues. God focuses His efforts on the Israelites. Why just them? Why not everyone? God wanted to show a contrast. Here is My chosen people and here is everyone else. Did God abandon everyone else? No. But the focus was on the special graces being given to the nation of Israel. God did use His power to carve out a space in a heathen world for His people. He decreed that some nations be exterminated to make room for the Israelites.  A pretty extreme measure to be sure. Is God guilty of mass murder? God is the giver of life so He has the right to take life away. Murder involves us taking that prerogative from God. So murder does not make sense as a charge. But God was showing a contrast. His people could not just fit in with all the other nations. In fact, they needed to be protected from their influence. Extreme measures were needed.

The point is salvation history is not just about Good Friday and Easter. It is very long and complex for a reason. We start to have problems when we simplify it. It is a natural thing to do but we must never lose track of the fact that the big picture is very big.  We end up with a very truncated spirituality. We end up in serious doubt when people point out parts of the bible we have been ignoring.

The same is true of early church history. There was an emphasis on the importance of the church for a long time. That is not something that went out with Vatican II. It was not part of Catholic confusion. It is a real truth about how God is working in the world. To leave the church and try and maintain your relationship with God was and is spiritual suicide. That is the truth God chose to drill into us first. It is possible that a person might have such a dysfunctional view of the church and the sacraments that not much would be lost. That case was not really address until more recent times. The reasons should not be hard to see. People today have used that teaching as an excuse to stop evangelizing and start dissenting. We are very good at ignoring subtle distinctions when it suits our own agenda. If that that had been revealed at the Council of Florence people would have misunderstood it much worse. God wanted to show us anther millennium and a half of what He could do with the church before he made us aware that He has always been working outside it as well. He knows we are slow to grasp certain concepts like obedience.

So at the end of the day both the bible and the church pass the scrutiny. Atheists can fail the bible and protestants can fail the church but that is their choice. We are not logically forced to reject them because the two stories are not incompatible. One is a deeper telling of the other. It forces us to remember some truths about God that may not be fashionable to talk about today but that is a good thing.

Fertility and Pornography

Marc Barnes says a lot of interesting things. One of them has got me thinking quit a bit recently. It comes in point #6 in his post called 10 Reasons The Pill S@#%$. He points out a study that found when you give female chimpanzees contraceptives the males in the community showed an increase in confusion, violence, masturbation and homosexual behavior.

Increase in confusion, violence, masturbation and homosexual behavior? All well and fine, a cute experiment, right? It’s what your average, American, teenage boy is growing up with! The truth is we don’t know exactly what it’s doing to the modern man, but it certainly isn’t something we can conveniently gloss over. We would never look at a chemical that causes cancer in monkeys and say, “Oh, but this couldn’t happen to us! We like this chemical!” And yet no-one seems to be worrying about The Pill’s affect on men. I am willing to bet my life that the rise in pornography-use/masturbation in adult men does not mirror the rise in hormonal contraceptive use by some strange and coincidental accident.

What attracts men to women? There are many factors. A lot only get turned on while a woman is fertile. Fertile women smell different. They talk different. Their eyeballs look different. These are subtle cues that cause men to become aroused much more quickly and effectively by a fertile woman. Women are also more interested in men while they are fertile. It should not surprise us. The church teaches us the God intended sex for procreation. Science is just confirming that.

But what happens when you put a man into a community where almost all the young women are using the pill? Most of what should be attracting him to women isn't there. First of all, both men and women will have a lot less pleasure from the sexual energy of their interactions. Secondly, what remains in woman to attract men will be over-emphasized. What is that? Mostly it is the body shape of a woman. That is still there. So men get overly interested in breasts and buttocks. That leads to immodest dress and pornography. But that is not the way God made men and women. The shape of a woman's body is taking a role that is out or proportion to what God has intended.

What happens when you have a Christian community of young people? There you have men and women committed to chastity. Obviously the woman won't be taking the pill. Women dress modestly. What happens? Do men ignore the modest women and find someone who is wearing less clothes? No. They find the modest women very attractive. Why? Maybe it is because they are allowing their bodies to be what God made them to be. Attractive to men in more ways then we can imagine. Not a constant attraction but in a monthly cycle. It is an interesting dynamic to contemplate. Who does she want to spend time with when she is more attractive? Who wants to spend time with her when she is less attractive?

As a protestant I thought a lot about how premarital sex was messing up the dating and courtship process. This is another way the start of good marriages and strong families has been disrupted by societies decision to embrace sin. The damage is always so much deeper and more widespread than we foresee.

Poster Boy For Hate

Rev. Robert Jeffress has been making a lot of waves because he makes blunt statements and he has ties to Rick Perry. Bill Donahue of the Catholic League made this comment:

Where did they find this guy? When theological differences are demonized by the faithful of any religion—never mind by a clergyman—it makes a mockery of their own religion. Rev. Jeffress is a poster boy for hatred, not Christianity.

So what has this guy said? I have not gone into a lot of depth but the quotes I have see are that Mormonism is a cult. Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism are false religions. He also said, “Much of what you see in the Catholic Church today doesn’t come from God’s word. It comes from that cult-like pagan religion. Isn’t that the genius of Satan?”

OK, those are not sounding very charitable but they are likely phrases picked out of longer talks. The point is he is just plainly stating what he believes. I agree with him on some of it but not all of it. But should we call him the "poster boy for hate" because he says this? That is a very short-sighted and dangerous comment.

The one thing that Christians and especially Catholics are accused of frequently is hate speech. I think it will get a lot worse. Many people will lose their jobs or go to jail because they voice their Christian faith and society labels it hate speech. It is already happening. Mostly to people on the fringes of Christianity that make more shocking statements. Rev. Jeffress seems to be one of those. But if we start to deny people's freedom to speak that way then it won't be long before all serious religious discourse is banned.

Think about it. All evangelism takes the risk of offending someone. When we say something that might convict someone of their sin and produce repentance it might also produce another reaction. It might cause them to convict us of hate and get angry. That is why so many evangelists were martyred.

So when we see talk in society of hate speech we should be concerned. We should not be encouraging it and we should certainly not be engaging in it. So I was very disappointed to see Bill Donahue using that kind of language. He has gotten into the media frequently as a defender of the Catholic faith. Not sure how that happened but it is reality. So he needs to be careful what he says. Calling Rev. Jeffress the poster by for hatred is a very bad way to react to the statements in question. Sure he says Catholicism is wrong. The way to deal with that is to start a dialogue and try and correct some of the false statements he made.

I know most media and most people don't have the patience for that. They love to hear someone shout out a clever insult. But we can't go there. We need to be about reason and love. Calling someone hateful is not love. Putting the truth out there for anyone who cares to listen is harder but it is needed.

Then there are the true statement he made. He is not far off when he talks about Mormonism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Sometimes we need to say negative things about other religions and we need to say them quite clearly. We even need to say negative things about Evangelicals. To say a religion is false is not to hate the people who adhere to that religion. To equate the two is a big mistake. It suggests dialogue with other religions can be meaningful or it can be charitable but it can't be both. But it must be both. We must love those in other faiths but that love must motivate us to point out the very serious problems with their religion.

Think about smoking. If someone is a smoker and I am not what is the loving thing to do? To avoid the topic of smoking? To not say one negative thing about it? But there are really solid reasons I don't smoke and really bad consequences for smoking. Should I not bring those up?