Critical Theory on the Left

I had a conversation today with a friend who thought I was evading his argument when I mentioned intersectionality. The subject was whether current patriots are best described by Samuel Johnson's quip: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel".  It started in comments under a blog post featuring a cartoon from Mad Magazine in 1968. The claim was that current patriots, supposedly like those in 1968, claim to love this country while hating most of the people who live here.  The deplorables who voted for Trump and who claim to love the USA, on this view, are racists, xenophobes, misogynists, homophobes, and generally members of privileged classes who want to prevent others from sharing their prosperity.  

I mentioned that it's not the patriots who are banning books and censoring free speech, not the patriots who have made grievance mongering the core of their platform.  The left's intersectionality is based on stoking grievances in as many groups as possible to oppose the supposedly privileged white upper classes, this without any substantive policy to help people rise or succeed in the modern economy.  

None of this is new as ideological cant.  The French Revolution started with grievances against the aristocracy and quickly descended into mob rule.  Marxists organized millions against capitalist oppression.  Absalom's revolt against his father, the Biblical patriarch David, drafted everyone with a complaint into his rebellion.  He stood by the city gate with the claim that he would do justice if he had power.  His coup killed twenty thousand before the archetypical radical, while riding his mule under a tree, hung himself by his long hair and died.

Grievance mongering isn't new, but intersectionality does have a postmodern slant.  Organizing various ethnic, sexual, transsexual, and ideologically radical groups for political action grew from Marxist roots when capitalism proved more viable than the revolution of the proletariat.  American labor unions were deaf or indifferent to dialectical materialism, but academe took up dialectical opposition with radical fervor.  Literary theorists became intent on deconstruction of every vestige of Western culture for the oppression supposedly embedded in the texts and artifacts of the Western canon.  

The foundational premises of Western civilization include Hebrew ideals about human dignity in the image of God, Greek philosophy, later Roman Stoicism, and Scholastic philosophy.   These modes of thought postulate that truth is real, and until William of Occam's nominalism and eventually Existentialists' supersession of formal order in the universe, political, scientific, and moral thought progressed in pursuit of truth.   Deconstructionists and critical theorists reject the premise that truth is attainable or that it is in any sense more real than an interpreter's perspective.  

Dialectical materialism may be a relic of the Marxist past, but materialism is now an article of faith in postmodern thought and critical theory.  Charles Darwin's attempt to explain the origin of species challenged the formerly assumed principle that form in nature is metaphysical.  Postmodern thought rejects metaphysical order.  Darwin's work has been described as the ideology that makes it possible to be an intellectually coherent atheist.   In current dogma, biological species evolved in adaptation to an inert physical environment.  It is still tough to swallow the idea that a cat is not a dog only because something in random mutations over millennia distinguished feline from canine attributes.  It's even more difficult to accept that male and female are a spectrum of physical and psychological options.  To this we've come.

Postmodern thought and critical theory assume that truth is an illusion sustained by the most powerful members of the cultural community.  The impenetrable works of Derrida and Foucault, for all their pretense, reduce to the contention that power is the determining factor.  Those with power create culture that sustains them in their privilege.  Talk about social justice is sloganeering that in essence means taking from one group to equalize another.  It's a zero-sum game.  There is no discussion of how the wealth that is being contested was or is created.  

The assumption that there is no truth, and certainly not moral truth, does not obliterate the human craving for life to be fair, for justice.  Social justice may be an illusion of cynical left wing organizers, but most people are not indifferent to needless suffering.  Most people want to feel that they are good, decent, and that they care about others, and not only themselves.  This too can be compromised or corrupted.  Pharisees, Puritans, and Social Justice Warriors, if nothing else, want to appear virtuous.  Virtue signaling is modern Puritanism.  The moral sense does not die, because it is real.  It is metaphysical, like male and female or distinct species of biological life.  Critical theory founders on its own nihilism.  

The Plague

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.  

                                                                                                      --Voltaire

Holy Week in the Pacific Northwest is blessed with Dogwood and Cherry blossoms.  In the sunlight a mist evaporates from the Firs and Pines.  It remains that April is the cruelest month.  This year it came with a global pandemic.  The American outbreak started a few miles from our home and blocks away from our church.   One of our musicians plays piano at Life Care Center of Kirkland where recently two thirds of the residents and forty-seven workers fell ill.  Thirty-five residents died.

Quarantines and state mandated social distancing have restricted church ministries to the Internet.  On Monday, email from the director of lay readers at the church increased my sense of isolation:

   

Good morning,

It is Holy Week and Fr. Michael is planning our Good Friday service and vigil.

It is planned to read the Passion of Christ, with members of the Lector ministry taking part.  Fr. Michael has volunteered to read Pontius Pilate and asks that a woman volunteer to read the words of Jesus. Deacon Missy will be the narrator. It will be recorded in advance from the distance of our homes to be played back on Friday.

Please reply to me by Tuesday of your willingness to participate. I will notify you of the record date and time when I learn of it.

My reaction was immediate, “What is he thinking?”

My wife tried to keep her sense of humor, “Can we get a man who identifies as a woman to read Mary Magdalen?”

“Mary doesn’t appear in the Passion Narrative,” I said.

“It must have been sexism by the authors of the Gospels.  Give her some lines.”

She went back to what she was doing.  I continued to think about it.  This is The Screwtape Letters: Satan hacking our thinking and we can’t discuss it without hurting or offending people.

St. John’s Episcopal Church has been the locus and community of our lives for years.  Part of the Diocese of Olympia, the ethos is that of left-coast political culture, but friendly.  We have hung on, tenuously at times, against condescension that exudes from the hierarchy where gender politics are not subtle.  At a recent diocesan convention, the delegates were instructed to add preferred gender pronouns to their name tags. 

When we were invited to join St. John’s, lawsuits were raging in various parts of the country against churches trying to leave the Episcopal Church USA with their property.  We didn’t join, but we sing in the choir, serve on an Education Committee, and participate as lay readers and occasional contributors to the Prayers of the People.   When the lawsuits began, we stopped contributing financially to the church.  I came to the Episcopal Church as a cantor and choir section leader in another parish where my musical training was remunerated.  Maybe our musical contributions are worth something.

I knew there was nothing I could do and sent the following reply to the email.

My shock at Fr. Michael's request that a woman portray Jesus in this reading of the Passion narrative was followed by anger and now by profound grief.  Diane and I have maintained participation at St. John's against consistent political and ideological advocacy that alienates and often offends us.  The gender ideology pervasive in the Episcopal Church may err on the side of inclusion.  This is probably a good thing, but to make Holy Week into another bit of propaganda for "progressive" ideology against the Incarnation is more than we can bear.  We love St. John's people, but this seems to be it.

There were people at St. John’s who expected us to leave when the church married a lesbian couple five years ago.  When my wife and I agreed to sing at the ceremony, one of the brides called me on the phone, evidently to inquire whether we had any compunctions about it. 

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because we love you, Lee.”

We’re still friends.  These women had been living together for many years before it became legal to get married.  Leona’s bank account was hacked, and Leila didn’t have access as domestic partner.  They decided to get married for estate reasons.  Lee is a member of the church and the choir.  Leila wanted nothing to do with the church, but she was persuaded in discussion with our organist and his partner to invite God’s blessing on their union.

The response to my email was anticlimactic, several chirpy replies from women who offered to read.

Our deacon replied:

Thank you, Donna, for leading this new ministry of recorded worship with all its challenges. Looking forward to proclaiming the Gospel in a new and unique way.

Peace of the Lord, Missy
Deacon, St. John's Episcopal Church, Kirkland, WA

Reconciliation is not just part of the Gospel; reconciliation is the Gospel.
Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury

The quote from the Archbishop of Canterbury didn’t help my state of mind.  After fifteen years at St. John’s, most of our friends are members.  I’m old enough to retire, but I continue to work from my home office.  My wife retired during the last recession, and, often enough, feels isolated.  Her sisters live far away.  Her parents, my parents, and my sister are deceased.

We have considered leaving the left coast for lighter traffic and more congenial politics.  The question of finding another church always has been part of the discussion.  Other conservative friends have commented that a move could put any of us in a situation of being more liberal than our neighbors instead of more conservative.  The music in most conservative churches sends us running for the parking lot.

Resignation to finding another church is depressing, but Diane is irrepressible.  She has been a dynamic presence and joy every day of our thirty-five-year marriage. 

Fr. Michael’s response to my email included a conciliatory effort:

I hear your anger and pain and I'm sorry that my request was the cause of that pain.  I made the request not to advance a cause but because I wanted to experience of the fullness of Christ's humanity.

I think he means what he says.  What, to me, is unnecessary accent on an already dominant cultural consensus is, for Fr. Michael, an interest in the feminine character of God.  My argument isn’t with him.  It’s with incessant attempts to modulate gender.  We now have a neutered hymnal.  A former deacon said he thinks it is time to rewrite the creeds.  My experience of feminine character in the deity is every day with my wife. 

None of this is academic at St. John’s church.  We have gay parishioners, and several members have transgender or gay children, now adults or adolescents.  The issue of women’s ordination is past disputing.  We’ve had women celebrants of the Eucharist.  A woman reading Jesus’s words in the Passion narrative is similar enough to a woman priest reciting the words of institution in the Eucharist.  Consensus is that it’s wrong to question the injustice of keeping women clergy from full participation.  Liturgical churches have a bit of a problem with it.  I can abstract the words of institution from a woman celebrant, so why not in the Passion narrative?

For years I have attended a men’s study group where the conversation rambles.  It is one opportunity to opine conspicuously against the Episcopal hierarchy.  Most of the guys are not interested in confrontation.  Apparently, they are not aggrieved by sermons about social justice that are mainly identity politics.  Our bishop has an itinerant shame show featuring his claim to be a “recovering racist”.  When we have had a priest in attendance for our discussions, we hear often about white male privilege.

One morning during the study, our former priest averred that the reason homosexuality is condemned in the Hebrew Bible is because it puts a man in the subjugated, penetrated status of a woman.   I replied that people recoil at contemplation of homosexual intercourse without any sense of violation of male privilege.  He wouldn’t consider it and bolstered his argument by claiming that Roman conquests included the ultimate humiliation of Sodomizing soldiers of the defeated armies.  So it’s about male domination, one way or another.  I didn’t point out that his claim required us to believe there were battalions in the Roman army who could get it up for this triumphant humiliation of their foes.  Several of the men in our study group are Marines, veterans of the Vietnam War, one of them a colonel, two others retired officers.  None of them objected to this line of bull.

We’re in a stage of the sexual revolution where people accept nonsense as an inevitable part of the Zeitgeist.  In another session of our study, I raised the issue of medical professionals assisting children with gender dysphoria in discovery of their authentic selves.  For the identity problems of adolescence, they too often administer drugs to prevent the onset of puberty and, often enough, encourage surgical “sexual reassignment”.   Sex change is impossible, undeniably.  Medical atrocities, unfortunately, are not.  There are people convinced they should be amputees who seek surgery to remove an arm or a leg.  It’s clearly pathological, but to refer to transgenderism as pathology is anathema.  We’re coerced into the doctrine of sexual fluidity, and it would be difficult to find anybody who questions it in the hierarchies of mainline Protestant churches.

I thought we might be able to have a civil discussion of the issue of the woman Jesus-reader at the men’s study group, and I sent the following email to members of the group.

Gentlemen, 

Today I ran into something in the current Episcopal ethos that is beyond what I can affirm.  You'll find correspondence following that includes Fr. Michael's request to have a woman portray Jesus in the reading of the Passion narrative.  I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was stunned.  The Incarnation of Jesus is gender specific.  Human gender is binary.  To promulgate fluid gender ideology against the formal order God has created is idolatry.  My convictions count for little in the Episcopal church.  Diane and I have been alienated for years, but we have generally felt that inclusion of all people is important. The culture has reached a stage of madness about gender that somebody has to object.  I'm interested in discussing it if anybody has the guts.

I got a reply from the meeting organizer that we could have the discussion.  He also sent his contrasting view:

Mike,

I'd be happy to have some discussion in the meeting tomorrow.  I am giving you fair warning about what my arguments will be.

I have often argued that in modern times we should read the words in the Declaration of Independence as "all people are created equal...."  If we get past that, then we can discuss:

1) What chance that position had in 100 A.D.  Or in 1000 B.C.

2) What chance the Apostles would have had if the Messiah, Mary's child, had been a woman.

Our faith came out of a male dominated era and out of an older male dominated religion.   What in our church’s beliefs would fail if Jesus had been a woman?  I am not talking about Roman Catholic traditions that give us only male priests and only male popes.  Those clearly were to protect the guys in power and further the male dominance in society.

My argument is that it makes no difference to the basic doctrines of Christianity whether Christ was male or female.

Peace and Health,

Bob

Our rector responded later in the day:

Hello all,

I took today to rest and write, but I received a text suggesting that it might be useful for me to attend tomorrow's Bible Study given Mike’s email.

I’d love to talk about it at tomorrow’s Bible Study.  I’m not interested in debating, so much as our listening and reasoning with each other.  I have no expectation that I’ll change your mind or that you’ll change mine.

But we will each be changed by the act of reasoning together this question of the ultimate significance of God coming to us as a man?  I hope so.   We’ll talk tomorrow morning if the group wants to explore this question.  And I am also available to speak to you and Diane about my decision to ask a woman to read Jesus part and my motivation behind it.

Thank you for having the guts to express yourself so honestly!

Blessings and grace,

Michael+

This was enough to keep me awake the night before the study thinking about whether I had anything to add beyond my correspondence.  Are my anger and grief only a reaction to being overpowered by the church hierarchy?  Episcopal polity is a throw-back to British aristocracy.  The church that is now hypercritical of patriarchy is itself an oligarchy.

Of course, my wife and I were discussing our impasse.  Her perspective, beyond my reaction to the female reader as propaganda for current gender madness, is that of facts against mythological reading of the gospels.  Whether God could be incarnated as a woman, whether the deity is male, female, both, or neither, it remains that the Incarnation on which Christianity is based is gender specific.  Jesus was a man who was crucified in a conspiracy of the religious establishment and by complicity of the Romans.  For a woman to read Jesus’s lines takes the Passion narrative out of history.
 

We both remember the account by an interim priest of a Gallup poll whether priests thought the resurrection of Jesus was historical or not.  George Gallup was an Episcopalian who researched the theology of his co-religionists.  On this take, he found that only 40% of priests professed faith in the resurrection.

“So,” Diane says, “having a woman read Jesus, our church joins the camp of the metaphorical gospel.”

“I wouldn’t have thought so”, I replied.  “Father Michael says he expects Jesus to ‘show up’ in difficult ministerial situations he encounters.  It could be a spiritualized theology, but he entered the priesthood after a personal crisis.  Why would he leave a successful business career for something he thinks is a myth?”

She insists, “Jesus existed and was crucified.  If you believe any of this and the resurrection, you can't re-assign his gender.  Do you want to make Mother Teresa male for some reason?  It’s difficult enough to believe in God against the holocaust.”  She didn’t have to mention the present epidemic. 

So, what am I going to do with a discussion at the study group?  Even if I can make sense to a few men who understand me, it could create controversy.  Fr. Michael’s previous church was the remains of a parish decimated by now familiar disputes in which the majority left rather than submit to episcopal oversight.  The church building apparently defaulted to the diocese, or, maybe, the members were involved in lawsuits.  Fr. Michael was sent to pick up the pieces.  He’s only been here a matter of months.  Discussions among people who selected him indicated they were looking for a unifying presence, not a militant.  We had a feminist associate for a while who hectored people to a degree that even some of the women told her to lighten up.  St. John’s parish isn’t militant.

As far as we know, nobody at St. John’s has contracted the virus, but we’re complying with the governor’s attempts to control it.  The men’s study is being conducted online.  I joined the meeting and waited as faces popped up on my computer monitor.  A few guys needed a minute to get used to the technology.  There were cordial greetings.  I could see Fr. Michael’s face among others on the screen.

The meeting organizer asked, “Are you on, Mike?”  Bob is the one who had earlier sent his arguments for debate.

“Yes, I’m here.”

I don’t know who raised the issue of my request for a discussion, but somebody asked whether we should have it.

I said, “I have my opinions, but I’m willing listen.  Some feminization of Christianity is inherent in The Sermon on the Mount.  Men have to resist male assertiveness to follow Jesus.” 

We had been reading 1^st and 2^nd Samuel, the power struggles between Saul and David.  I had commented on the striking contrast between Jesus’ ministry and David’s conquests.  Jesus didn’t have power or influence. 

“This stuff goes way back.  Men have never known quite what is required of them. Origen castrated himself, becoming literally a eunuch for the kingdom of God.  Bridal mysticism is a misconstrued metaphor in which the individual believer, instead of the church, is seen as the bride of Christ…”  I realized this was going nowhere.  “But that’s tangential.  We simply have a problem when a woman reads Jesus in the Passion narrative.  It cuts the backbone out of the church’s proclamation.  How is anybody supposed to believe this is historical if we revise it to current proclivities?”

I guess it was Fr. Michael who interrupted me.  Nobody except the meeting organizer, had yet agreed to this discussion.  “How many want to have the discussion Mike has requested?

Two men said they would prefer to have the formerly scheduled study in the book of Samuel.  These guys probably aren’t indifferent.  Maybe only a few of them read my email.  I’ve wondered how many understand my rants.

But it stung.  “If nobody is willing to spend half an hour on this, I don’t think I belong here.  Let’s call it…”

Somebody said ok.  There was an uncomfortable pause as I looked for the button to leave the meeting and pushed it.

Many times, it is nice to have a job.  Today it helped me forget this unpleasant Lenten experience.  I spent the time working on technical articles in review.  The sun was shining in my office.
 

By 3:00 o’clock I was ready for some exercise.  Diane and I are learning how much time and expense it takes to stay healthy around seventy years of age.  We consult various therapists, take supplements.  Late in the day, I lift weights and run.  Recently, I persuaded Diane to join me at our Nautilus machine on the idea that strength training is important for bone density.

In the garage we do our various repetitions.  While I’m on the bench press, Diane shadow boxes karate chops that I showed her from a martial arts class I had in high school.  Then it’s her turn on the machine.  I can forget just about anything when she smiles at me.

She has remarkable strength in the leg press.  A walk with her can be a marathon, while she smiles, speed-walking, seemingly without effort.

She has been telling me that things are going to be fine, and she is persuasive, as I was saying about the feminine aspects of the deity… .

When we’re finished with the machine, I head outside, and she rolls down the garage door behind me.  I run up an S-curve beyond our cul-de-sac with increasing focus as the incline of the hill steepens. 

In the next few days two guys from the study group emailed me expressing their sympathies about the aborted discussion.  One of them left his former church when he couldn’t deal with it any longer.  He thinks the pendulum will swing back after a while.   But nobody in his former church seemed even to notice his departure after 45 years of membership.

I got a message from our deacon:

Dear Mike and Diane,

I hope you will take Father Michael's invitation to discuss your view on his choice of reader for Jesus in the Passion Narrative. You may not agree with his action, but I pray you can come to the table to discuss it. At the Heavenly Banquet there will be all sorts of people, and I am sure we will all be surprised. Until then let us Love One Another as God asks us to do. 

Peace of the Lord dear Brother- and Sister-in-Christ.

The Rev. Michelle "Missy"
Deacon, St. John's Episcopal Church

Reconciliation is not just part of the Gospel; reconciliation is the Gospel.
Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury

Fr. Michael had conveyed that this discussion could be set sometime after Easter and others may attend.  I got the message, second-hand, that other conversations were to be discouraged.  In the interim, I am left to contemplate how a woman Jesus-reader would help me to experience God in human Incarnation.  As I mentioned, my wife is pretty good along this line.  My mother was a woman of incarnate goodness and love. 

I don’t want further indoctrination.  In marriage counselling with my former wife, a psychologist had enumerated my offenses of male privilege to explain why my wife was drunk every day.  Being relieved of the rhetoric we’re hearing in church should be fine.  So many clergy want to be prophets of social justice.  If any of them have read beyond the hierarchy’s echo chambers, they seem yet oblivious to the unintended consequences of Great Society largess.  Hebrew prophets decried oppression of workers and neglect of fatherless children.  After fifty years subsidizing dysfunctional behaviors in this country, there are more non-working, substance-abusing fathers, more fatherless children, and hopelessly dependent mothers than ever, both in urban and rural areas.  Along with the welfare state, a much-vaunted sexual revolution has destroyed families and bequeathed to us a church that venerates homosexuals in some analogue of martyrs in the 3^rd century.  Somebody has to talk back... .

It’s Good Friday, and my wife wants to join the vigil service tonight online.  I said I’d rather forget the whole thing.  High tech church is difficult enough without controversy.

Now, she has returned from a shopping trip under the Governor’s precautions.  In the driveway she opens the back of her SUV to unload bags of bark for the Azaleas.

“How was the line at Home Depot?”

“Pretty bad, six-foot intervals, halfway around the building.”

I unload bags of bark.  It must have been a bit of a heft for her, getting forty-pound bags into a shopping cart.  She can’t understand how it doesn’t bring people to their senses when gender ideology puts transgender men into competition in women’s sports.  Women fought for Title 9 scholarships, funding, and venues that are being taken away because most people can’t buck ideological cant.

Another writer, an online friend, put me into state of mind to defend my church despite its liaison with madness.  Brenda Renee, in a recent story, relates sexual abuse by men with power in her Evangelical church.  Beyond the heinous assault of male pronouns for God that offend feminists, Brenda, every year, has to contend with memories of an Easter eve struggle that ended in rape, then attending church the next day where her assailant was present, having to pretend to celebrate the resurrection. 

The ensuing years haven’t changed much about denominations of the church in which women make coffee and take care of children, but are excluded from serious discussions and church polity.  This is patriarchy of the sort that our rector seems to be trying to get past. 

Brenda doesn’t consider herself a feminist.  She didn’t believe the accusations against Kavanaugh.  Now, in fact, she wants to know why I have put up with politically correct nostrums in the Episcopal Church for so long?  A bit defensively, I asked her, “So, how and why, after the abuse and sexism conveyed in your essay are you still in your church?  A woman of your intellect shouldn’t put up with it?"

She explained that the theology is sound even in that backwater.  My problem is that in our church—our former church—the hierarchy has decreed that it is hetero-sexism to believe there are two genders and that various sexual preferences are pathological. Current dogma has it that people adapt from a spectrum of sexual orientations.  But, outside of Jean Genet’s novels, not everything that exists is natural. 

When Diane read Brenda’s essay, she was shaken, depressed.  I can agree with some of the ranting in every forum about male privilege.  Brenda recovered, has a good marriage, children and grandchildren, but Easter always reflects trauma from when she was maybe sixteen.   Having never met her beyond online discussions, even from a thousand miles away, I can tell she is attractive.  Give a man an inch and it can make him into an abuser.  

The new consensus isn’t entirely wrong.  The problem isn’t feminism or gay liberation.  Homosexuals have been hitting on me since I was sixteen years old, but they take no for an answer.  The two women married in our church have made the best of their situation.   Leona prayed regularly for me when I was suffering with atrial fibrillation.  Doing research while Lee was praying, Diane found the cure: I was deficient in magnesium and iodine.  Supplementation solved it two years ago with no recurrence!  Where is the church that is better than what we are leaving?   As a church musician, I've seen it all.

We watched Easter at St. John’s online at 9:00 AM.  The Lord is risen indeed.   A nearby Catholic Church has another webcast at 11:00 AM.  I was confirmed in the Catholic Church before musical employments took me elsewhere.  We opted for the Episcopal Church because Diane wasn’t enthusiastic about the Romans.  Sex scandals were raging.

At 11:00 AM we watched the Easter broadcast from St. Jude’s.  The music was upbeat, not to say jive.  Bishop Mueggenborg was making the rounds, Woodinville at 8:30, St Jude’s at 11:00.  His sermon was an analogy based on the account of the angel who sat upon the stone rolled away from the tomb of the risen Jesus, a vision of God’s removal of obstacles.  God rolls them away and frees us to live as Jesus lives, bringing God’s presence into the world.

After the webcast we were in my office, the technology hub in our house.  Diane has been getting vocal coaching online since the quarantine.  We found old hardware that has been unused for some years in the attic and spent an hour trying to set it up. 

There was no more discussion of the Catholic Church.  Then I was taken by surprise when Diane said, “In our relationship there are times when we need to find our separate ways.”  I thought she was going to propose one of her marathon walks.  “This conference that Fr. Michael wants to have…  I don’t want to tell our friends that their children are sick.”

I said, “You can tell them that you object to the female Jesus-reader because it makes the story metaphorical.  I think the rampant gender ideology it is worth arguing.”

“I can’t tell good people the way they live is wrong.  What about Nanette’s son who has felt all his life that he is a woman in a man’s body?”

“Did he have the surgery?”

“Yes, as an adult.  He made his own choice.  Do you think Leona and Leila should have lived like nuns?”

“People have to make the best of things,” I said.  “We love them.  We accommodate, in some cases provide therapy.”

“Homosexuality has always existed.  If it’s dysfunctional, why didn’t it devolve?”

“Lots of things exist that are abnormal, pathologies, but now psychotherapy is becoming illegal.  It’s important enough to me to take the heat.”

“But I want to support you.”

“Explain your perspective to Fr. Michael and to whomever shows up at this conference.  I’ll tell them mine.  Is this a result of our option at the Catholic Church?”

“You know I have other problems with the Catholic Church.  I suppose we can go there, but they won’t let me take communion.”

“Some priests are ok with it.  I discussed it at Blessed Sacrament, while I was in Bill’s choir.”

“I know, ‘the real presence’”

“That’s all there is to it.  At the level of the metaphysical, the bread becomes the body.”

Why should it be difficult to simply transplant ourselves in the Catholic Church?  Monday morning dawns on our discontent.  I can go back to work, but Diane must fight the feeling of loss and impending condemnation if we have this conference with the rector and our friends in the parish.  Martyrs died rather than burn incense to Caesar.  Here we are on the verge of complicity with an odious Roman edict: “some sex is disordered”. 

The taunt of Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?” is postmodern.  Ideology reduces to power.  The world and its creatures are only matter in chaotic recombination.  Some nihilist artist will soon paint or create a drama in which the Mother of God is transgender.  We cannot acknowledge normative form because this entails that some things are malformed.

“You’ve been telling me things will be alright,” I said.  “Do I have to convince you now?”

She answered, “Things will be what they will be… .”

“Hard to argue with that.”

“Things will be said… .”

“No doubt, they’re already being said.  My email went to a lot of people.”

So let it go.  But go.  Little is to be gained by controversy.  Nobody is going to die because St. John’s church garbles the gospel.  There are casualties of intellectual dishonesty about gender, but the suicide rate is about as high among transgender people with or without “gender reassignment”.   It's preferable to avoid moralistic rhetoric on either side of LGBT disputes.

People are dying as we wait for medical authorities and government to lift or sustain the quarantines that have put millions out of work, many of whom were already living paycheck to paycheck.  More than twenty million Americans are newly unemployed.  How long can the quarantine mandates continue?   When they are removed, will epidemic caseloads overwhelm the hospitals?  Computer-generated projections have been wrong.  Even when available, testing is inconclusive.  Disputes about our options are as much politics as science.  What is truth?

Fentanyl and White Male Privilege

Federal immigration officials seized enough fentanyl last year to kill nearly twice the population of the United States.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit revealed in a year-end report that in total, about 2,737 pounds of fentanyl were seized in Fiscal Year 2018, along with 7,103 pounds of heroin, and 225 pounds of chemicals used to make these drugs.

“According to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, mass quantities of fentanyl are being produced in China and brought illegally to the United States, contributing to the growing crisis in the U.S. The rise of fentanyl in the United States can be traced back to China’s large chemical and pharmaceutical industries, which manufacture vast quantities of the drug and its analogues to export to the western hemisphere with little regulatory oversight. Many of those shipments go to Mexico, where Mexican TCOs profit from their infusion of fentanyl into their narcotics.”

For some reason the drug use has been increasing disproportionately among men, particularly in the construction trades.  One theory as to why is a crisis of masculinity.

“Ideals of masculinity may be making men more vulnerable to the sort of thinking that leads to fatal overdose. Officials around Vancouver, B.C. are building their prevention plans around that theory.”

 “We’ve realized that a number of the men dying down here aren’t [homeless addicts],” he says. “They are construction workers; they’ve got jobs. They are anywhere between 20 and say 35, 40 years old. They come down here on Friday night, they cash their checks, they’re having a beer, they grab a paper of down [heroin] to go home with, they snort it at home. They go to bed. They don’t wake up.

“In fact, health officials are now planning intervention specifically for those in the building trades. And as overdose deaths among men now far outstrip those among women, many doctors, officials, and social workers question whether the drug crisis is also an overlooked crisis of masculinity.

“Men take bigger risks with drug use and feel that they can handle their intake. Amid social and economic changes, many men have lost their traditional moorings – making them even more vulnerable in this high-stakes era for drug consumption.”

I have a theory of my own about why men are more vulnerable now to drug abuse.  Even when they are working and productive, many men find that they are expendable in the economy of community and family.  The welfare state has made it possible for women with children to get along without the father.  A man who doesn't know his children, or whose children have been aborted, doesn't have responsibilities that have historically civilized men.  Interestingly enough, Hispanics, whose family ties remain stronger than other ethnic groups are not succumbing at the rate of the white and black populations.

Mammon Ascendant

David Bentley Hart is always interesting.  His piece Mammon Ascendant, why global capitalism is inimical to Christianity is excellent in detail.  If his analysis is meant to be descriptive rather that prescriptive, it concludes on the tonic.  A few unresolved themes hang in the air.  It's often said that capitalism is only tolerable because it's better than the alternatives.  The alternative that Hart suggests, in a faint echo after his sonata, is E. F. Schumacher's economics of the small.   Circa 1975, a lot of people applauded the beauty of Schumacher's small, but any serious discussion had to deal with the facts: then or now, without capital-intensive industrialization, the planet would not have begun to sustain the billions living on it.  Then, Ehrlich and his ilk were clamoring about the population bomb.  Now Microsoft and Amazon are staffed by Indians and Chinese, who were supposedly beyond even a merciless life-boat ethic.  But, the research-funding dependent class is fear mongering about inundation while the evidence indicates a lifting of all boats.

For my money, earned mostly at Microsoft, I'll hold out for the nation-state against global capitalism and its culture annihilating crescendo.  Crony capitalism has ominously domesticated government as a mute on it's roar, but technology is effectively amplifying the counterpoint.  Tim Berners Lee is Gutenberg for our time, and the Internet can make another Reformation.  Bloggers are explaining, against pharmaceuticals-industry propaganda, that the FDA is more of a health hazard than global warming.  If the chattering classes were deaf to the recent populist revolt, it was everywhere evident on social media.  The Russians who were involved must be very good!  They can even influence ballot recounts in the precincts in Michigan that so embarrassed Democrats.

It's not government that is the problem, but Reagan was close to the truth.  When an aristocracy thrives in government and controls the economy and culture, it dampens any resonance in subsidiary organizations and flattens community.  The Republican party maintains some of the coalition among conservatives that rallies people against the elites who would orchestrate everything to their tune.  Democrats, and their dupes in the main-line Protestant hierarchies, are still living in what Hart describes as nostalgia for the idiot happiness of the early cultural revolution.  In matters of religion and public life, the aristocracy of the Protestant mainline resembles the sycophantic clergy of the old British monarchy.  Social justice mandates of Hebrew prophets, which they are eager emulate, turn into advocacy for socialism in effect.  Democrats like to remind us of the deficits Reagan inflicted after a foray into supply-side economics, while defense spending increased to more than neuter any effect of what George Gilder calls releasing the knowledgeable from the powerful.  Somebody needs to continually remind the social justice crowd that their rhetoric laid waste large areas of the earth and its people for most of the twentieth century.

Rational Self Denial

The term kenosis as adapted from the Gospels and St. Paul can be read as incarnational theology in which Jesus "empties himself" of divinity to become fully human and to suffer and die. There is also that disturbing injunction to followers of Jesus: "Take up the cross". This has been spiritualized by mystics, ancient and modern, to mean a metaphorical self denial that leads to growth, renewal, rebirth, enlightenment, divinization, etc. In some cases, these ideas run counter to the incarnational conception of becoming more human.

In the early church self denial often meant persistence in faith while being rejected by family, friends, and even attacked or made into a literal martyr for the kingdom of God. Martyrs were venerated and even emulated. The ascetics tended to spiritualize the severe teachings of Jesus to the degree that "mortification of the flesh" seemed the most noble attempt at godliness.

A lot of good came out of the efforts of spiritual athletes, but it came mainly after the era of desert hermits and stylites. The mature monks created communities with rational boundaries. The monastic orders became centers of scholarship and industry. They founded universities and did scientific research based on their erudition in many cultural traditions.

There have been many attempts to draw parallels between the idea of Christian kenosis and Hindu or Buddhist spirituality.  The Eastern mystics say or imply that emptying the self, even annihilation of the self, leads to spiritual growth or divinization. I think, to the degree that this makes sense, it shows the similarity of the ascetic overreach of Christian mystics and Eastern mystics.

Self denial can induce spiritual growth, if it is rational: that is to say, it serves some purpose, other than an attempt to be good.  People deny themselves for many reasons. Parents deny themselves many pleasures to raise children well. Artists deny themselves a salaried income and often having a stable family life to pursue their music or literary careers. Married people sacrifice some autonomy to live together harmoniously. In this sense, self denial is better described as self discipline. Christians have the severe teachings of Jesus that call them to sacrifice for the kingdom of God.

I'm pretty verbose on this subject, so I'll refer to more than you'll likely want to read in a couple of places. The opera Thais is an artistic rendering of the battle of flesh and spirit: http://sacredopera.blogspot.com/.../a-meditation-on-thais...
Also, the "self denying receptivity to God's formative power" is a considerably anti-masculine virtue: http://www.newoxfordreview.org/reviews.jsp?did=0200-dodaro

Finally, there is the question of whether there is anything left if one succeeds in self denial.  To succeed at anything requires discipline, but self denial could negate the object of the discipline.  Ayn Rand, the advocate of selfishness, notes that a woman who denies herself a new wardrobe to support the expense of raising her child is not sacrificing much unless she values a new dress more than her child.  Any musician trying to sustain his art doesn't sacrifice self by living in penury to continue being a musician.  Sacrificing self would be giving up the music and denying what he most wants in life.

Who we are is what we have to give to other people and to the achievements to which we strive.  It's a balance, trying to make everything we are and what we hope to achieve fit into one lifetime.  The mystical impulse to become a spiritual athlete by mortification of the flesh and any and all aspirations, is likely to lead to some quandaries.

Ideology as Law

Culture Eats Ideology for Lunch

--attributed to Peter Drucker

In our era of polarized disputes, partisans on the left and on the right tend to develop their arguments using conceptual frameworks premised on social justice versus free enterprise; personal autonomy versus the right to life or biologically normative form; the global economy and open borders versus the nation-state and rational self interest.

Advocates for social justice support government regulation of the economy and redistribution of wealth against people whose ideology is based on axioms about private property that are as old as Thomas Paine's 1776 pamphlet Common Sense.  Paine's ideological framework posits freedom of conscience that clashes with the current reading of Thomas Jefferson's statements about separation of church and state.

Is there any way out of the culture war these frameworks provoke and through which we interpret the issues?  For people of faith an analogy can be drawn between ideologically based thinking and St. Paul's discussion of justification of the law versus salvation by faith.

Romans 4: 13-16
The promise to Abraham and his descendants, that they should inherit the world, did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith.  If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void.  That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants--not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham, for he is the father of us all.

Early Christians contended with Judiazers who insisted that their coreligionists follow the Law of Moses. Paul distinguishes adherence to the legal code from comprehension of a more profound ethic of the heart and conscience.

Romans 2: 13-16
For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.  When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.  They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus. 

For this analog to be of use, it helps to acknowledge that ideology can be rigid and intolerant on both sides of the cultural/political divide.  Advocates use ideology to simplify issues into false dichotomies and create stereotypes of their opponents.  The religious right vilifies the politically correct dogmatists in academe and academics return the "compliment".  From either perspective the stereotype seems justifiable, and the culture war becomes a religious war. It should help to acknowledge that thinking in dichotomies and stereotyping groups of people are the methods of propaganda.  Stereotypes are the hard core of prejudice.

We started by quoting St. Paul.  It is interesting to mention a couple of ideas from Saul Alinsky's book, Rules for Radicals:

5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions." 

13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions."

The terminology of these tactics--weapon, enemy, target--leaves no doubt that the objective isn't truth but inflicting damage on opponents.  It doesn't take much imagination to find examples of this strategy in contemporary politics.  Broadsides attacking Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi come readily to mind.  For Donald Trump these methods are stock in trade.  To be clear, St. Paul also talks about spiritual warfare, but Christians have applied the metaphor literally to opponents whose differences were doctrinal or demographic.

The first thing to note about Alinsky's rules is that they reduce to the logical fallacy known as ad hominem argumentation.  Attacking or discrediting the person instead of the concept or position they hold doesn't prove anything. Illustrating the ways that Trump can be a jerk doesn't mean his campaign was wrong about trade policy, immigration, or foreign wars.  Even if corrupt politically connected investors made Solyndra into a crony capitalist scam on taxpayers' money, it doesn't prove that government funding for research and development is destructive of free enterprise.

We all want to win arguments, but what is it that disposes some people to believe Trump in spite of his character flaws?  Many of these people see corruption in every government program regardless of evidence that is contrary to their expectations?  The ideological framework of our thinking includes premises that can determine the conclusions that we will reach and how the evidence will be interpreted.

Lest we neglect the obvious, some people refuse to see corruption in government programs even when it is indisputable: drugmakers led by Pfizer agreed to run a very significant public campaign bankrolling political support for the 2010 health-care law, while the Obama administration promised to block provisions opposed by drugmakers worth 80 billion in tax savings and discounts.  The administration's stated, noble intent to provide health care for uninsured people has been sufficient to keep millions of people in support of the Affordable Care Act, continuously assuming any opposition is irrational if not immoral.

Vested interest is surely one of the reasons people's thinking tends to be constrained by ideological preconceptions.  Upton Sinclair, who advocated socialist views, is credited with the statement, "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." This quote comes from Sinclair's 1935 book about his campaign for governor of California, subtitled, How I got Licked.  Now, eighty years later, California has armies of people vested in jobs represented by public employees unions, who understand the arguments for socialism very well.

Another way to dissect the monstrous stereotypes created by the culture war is to ask not "who is harmed by the problem?", but rather, "who benefits from the problem?"  Many advocates make careers of controversy.  The writer's dilemma is getting readers past the first paragraph.  Selling out to one faction in a dispute can be good for ratings. Maybe in the process you create fake news. Speaking one language in the political tower of Babel may be widely unintelligible, but those who understand can make a polemicist's career.  Ask Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter about anything in the news and you know what kind of answer you'll get, but they're doing very well financially.  Ask CNN executives how their attacks on Donald Trump have been for the bottom line, but don't ask whether they think Russia-gate is anything more than a "Nothing burger", as Van Jones put it in a moment of candor.  Jones' point was not necessarily that the Russian collusion narrative is false, but that it is a distraction from substantive issues such as joblessness, drug addiction, and crime, and not likely to lead to impeachment of a President, even if he is insufferable to progressives.

All this is a prelude to saying that ideology is inadequate to understanding, much less solving, the kinds of problems that evoke our bitter disputes.  St. Paul's discourses distinguish between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.  The law can be helpful, but in the difficult cases, that is to say, the important ones, the rules don't fit the game.  Paul goes as far as saying, "the written code kills, but the Spirit gives life."  [2nd Corinthians 3:6]

Another familiar passage from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians includes this gem: "Our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect."  [1st Corinthians 13:9]  This is a startling admonition from the man whose epistles are read authoritatively every Sunday.  The church has historically relied on scripture, tradition, and reason to establish doctrine and polity.  Paul had all these and a personal encounter with a man risen from the dead, yet he conceded that his knowledge was imperfect.  An honest appraisal of our disputes and our failures should lead to acknowledgement that the law and, for people faith, even prophecy can't eliminate uncertainty in our encounters with other people's minds.  For Christians, whose prayers affirm faith in the Holy Spirit and providence, it's theologically incoherent to assert that the formulations of socialism or laissez-faire capitalism can resolve our arguments about economic policy and its effects on business, labor, or the poor. 

Pope John Paul II made frequent references to "a preferential option for the poor".  And social justice is a fine metaphor.  But historical evidence indicates that capitalism has lifted more people from poverty than any other economic system.  Ideals, metaphors, and facts comprise our thinking and our discussions. They motivate and mobilize advocates and adversaries.  Eventually these cultural artifacts become the foundation for ideologies and institutions.  Human rights and constitutional government are built on ideas that took centuries to develop in civilized society.  We ignore the ideas that generated them at our peril. But ideas are not absolute.  We need all the perspectives on the issues, especially on those that lead to conflict, because, as St. Paul wrote, quoting an earlier prophet, "None is righteous, no, not one".