They are making a legal argument, not a political or moral one; the first amendment to the U.S. constitution calls out religion specifically. This is the flip side of a related issue, that the Constitution (or at least constitutional jurisprudence) does not sufficiently limit the imposition of irreligious totalizing ideologies because they are not an “establishment of religion.” In the same way, violating a philosophical commitment is not “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Applying the religion clauses of the first amendment is already complicated in a country as socially and religiously diverse as America has become. Consider Masterpiece Cakeshop, whose proprietor’s sincere religious beliefs are not in doubt: He won at the Supreme Court on the grounds that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission was motivated by demonstrable animus against his religion, and even then the decision was 7–2.
Taking this idea seriously, it's hard to see how it manifests in the US.
At best it manifests in a dictatorship where the victorious side murderously purges the other from any position of leadership, civil, military, or social. At worst you get something like the Spanish Civil War, but in a much larger country.
But it’d be a mistake to take it seriously. It’s a bit of dark humor from Scott.
Yes, it would create further divergence between academia’s idea of legitimacy and the ways the federal bureaucracy has created to make academic legitimacy legible and manageable. It would harm Harvard insofar as it made the bureaucracy unable to grant it money because Harvard’s reputation was no longer formally legible.
That raises the question: Does this form of legibility do more good or harm?
… the Trump administration's demands that they install right-wing commissars to monitor the university for wrongthink.
I think that this is a reasonable characterization, but it’s complicated by the fact that they’re demanding right-wing commissars to shoot the left-wing commissars. It’s commissars all the way down. As a conservative, I have deeply mixed feelings about all of this.
I’ve been thinking a fair bit about the conservative movement and how its idea of the relationship between private organizations and the state has changed since the middle of the twentieth century. (That’s not to say that the Trump coalition is identical with the conservative movement, of course.) We’ll see if those thoughts ever become solid enough for an effortpost.
Thank you for this summary; the clarity is extremely helpful.
I am usually not a fan of mootness games, or of Roberts' dodging underlying issues, and I have mixed feelings about this one too. But I have to admire his cleverness at avoiding constitutional crises.
It’s true. Ultimately it comes down to a question of what those basic rights are.
The first one is straightforward, but I'd love to see you expand on the second. I think everyone has seen it happen, but I don't think I've ever seen it framed quite that way.
More controversially, I feel the same is true about mandatory ID cards and hate speech laws, by the way. If Vermont wants Euro-style hate speech laws, I really don’t care. Plenty of states will oppose them. The same is true for gun control, for civil rights, for gay marriage, for religion in government.
As a red-triber in a very blue state, who is often willing to support federalism even when it harms his interests, I draw the line at my basic rights as an American. I shouldn't have to leave my home and my family's legacy here to secure them.
I am neither a parent nor a teacher. I know parents whose children have sound reasons for their IEPs, and sometimes teachers weren't responsive to their childrens' legitimate needs without them. But those same parents often make light of teachers' reasonable concerns. The whole thing strikes me as an awful, dehumanizing, bureaucratic kludge for everybody involved.
I'd be interested to read about your experiences.
This is an excellent take. I have tried to explain these things to people I know, but not half as well. A couple of points, though:
Christianity tried right-wing politics explicitly guided by Christian principles during the Bush administration, and it seems to me the result was disaster, even from a Christian perspective.
I think that Bush sincerely wanted this to work, but his personnel decisions did not reflect that. He largely chose neocons associated with his father’s administration, and they didn’t care about this at all. He also didn’t account for resistance from the permanent bureaucracy that has become so conspicuous since. So I think that there are some approaches left untried here, even if Christians no longer have the political power to attempt them.
Both are very clearly pagans, and never made any notable attempt to claim otherwise.
Trump has occasionally expressed the fig-leaf level of Christian pretense expected of U.S. politicians, but this is even more transparent than it was with Obama. I do think that that, combined with outgroup homogeneity bias, has sincerely confused a few people on the left.
What I see is Christians accepting the evident reality: we no longer have the power to impose our values through law, even were it desirable to do so, and we no longer have the consensus necessary to impose our values on society, even were it desirable to do so.
This is the heart of the matter.
I couldn’t disagree with the author’s framing more. That said, I am not a First Things subscriber, and my take necessarily ends where the archived article does.
The author frames this as a faction on the right discovering human genetics and deciding to jettison family values as a consequence; he emphasizes this with the label “genetic determinist.” This is backward. These are people who already occupied the secular center left to center right and weren’t adherents of family values in the first place. They were already okay with premarital sex (and occasionally adultery); they were already okay with divorce; they were already pro-choice, or at least not so pro-life as to have reservations about IVF. They are part of a right-wing coalition, and they have common cause with social conservatives, but no one was under the illusion that they were social conservatives.
I hold (loosely) that nature and nurture both matter and that the nature-nurture ratio is different in different areas of life. But I am not a consequentialist: if I thought that all life outcomes were 95% genetic, I wouldn’t cease to be a social conservative. It’s good to do the right thing because it is the right thing; positive consequences are frosting on the cake. (Even if you are a consequentialist, you should consider the implications for childhood happiness as well as adult outcomes.)
Looking up the author, Schmitz believes that social conservatives should make common cause with social democrats, not with libertarians or the pro-business right. If he has laid this out clearly and dealt with the difficulties in that position, I’d be interested to read it. In America most social democrats are also social progressives, and they have a history of leveraging the welfare state to promote social progressivism and oppose social conservatism. The current political alignment follows in part from that.
As it is, the piece comes off as a disingenuous attempt to find a label for right-wing social liberals that won’t also stick to left-wing social liberals. I expected better from First Things.
That you reject sanctity and natural law does not make them incoherent.
Do people do this? The thought makes me motion sick.
Cultural differences are real and meaningful, but in this case I wonder if the difference in honesty looks bigger due to a difference in norms about how to return lost property. Unless I were in a small town, handing a lost wallet in to the police probably wouldn't occur to me, and then it would likely be option two or three.
No dunk taken. I was inclined to suggest in an earlier post that part of the difference in perspective came from our different views of grace, imputed vs. infused, but enough Roman Catholics concerns have rhymed with mine to give me pause.
Merry Christmas!
But if you build up trust, it is sometimes possible to be there at the right moment when someone is ready to hear the hard truth that they need.
Thanks. You’re right, of course. I am so used to public figures giving this sort of reasoning disingenuously that I don’t stop to consider whether one might be sincere.
Thanks. Reported as AAQC.
Fr. James Martin is 100% serious and a true believer. He doesn't actually compromise on abortion, he just thinks gun control is an equivalently serious pro life issue.
I know that OP brought up abortion, but I wasn’t thinking of abortion here: I was thinking of Martin’s approach to sexual sins, particularly homosexuality but also various kinds of cohabitation. He seems to prefer having a group of massgoers in unrepentant grave sin over the kind of call to repentance that would split them into a smaller group of repentant massgoers and a larger group that eschews the faith entirely. If that reading is correct, it’s hard to see how he isn’t at odds with the gospel.
I suppose that your understanding of Martin’s motives is much better informed than mine, which is largely limited to social media and reading him in quotation. But man, the pattern match is strong.
… and the college of cardinals retains a conservative plurality large enough to maintain a functional veto.
Interesting. I did not know this.
These are institutionalists who see gentlemanly behavior as very important; liberals know that setting a precedent for hardball will blow up in their faces and conservatives know that there's no real need to play hardball.
The contrast to the evangelical experience in twentieth-century America is really striking here. In the early twentieth century, evangelicals in many denominations realized that all of their institutions – seminaries, universities, missions boards, denominational leadership – had come to be controlled by modernists. They fought back, still not realizing how badly outgunned they were, and in all the big denominations they lost.
But of course we evangelicals aren’t permanently tied to any hierarchy, so they were free to build new institutions and leadership structures. In the middle of the century there was a renewed debate about how those ought to relate to the mainline churches, which still had some orthodox believers in them. In 1979, conservative Southern Baptists realized that modernists were beginning to gain control of their denomination and used the convention to begin their own march through the institutions. After his appointment to lead the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1993, theological conservative Al Mohler famously (and controversially) purged the faculty.
Different evangelical institutions have taken different stances over the years. Those that accommodate liberal theology in their ranks usually have an easier time dealing with secular institutions, and their leadership may be able to stave off mission drift for a generation or so. But those which play hardball with theological liberals have done a much better job staying on mission across generations. As evangelicals have come to realize that we live in negative world, the Southern Baptist approach has become more popular.
In the first draft of my reply to Sloot, I began to speculate that evangelicalism will become more theologically and politically conservative, and that it will at the same time shrink to become less politically relevant to the secular right’s interests. But of course I cannot say for sure.
Traditional Catholics who actually matter simply do not think in terms of years or decades and so the current pope is viewed as a temporary and ineffectual roadblock.
A dear friend of mine is Roman Catholic, though by no means a traditionalist. It is remarkable to me just how many things her social environment within the RCC accepts as valid Catholic positions because of the lack of disciplinary boundary drawing from the hierarchy. It’s an ongoing source of temptation to her, made all the more subtle because she doesn’t recognize it.
Of course, I hope that you all come to your senses and convert tomorrow. Failing that, I hope you are right that theological liberalism in the Roman church is just a passing phase. But if the time to wait it out is measured in generations, then the cost must also be measured in generations.
Yes, by the religious left I mean what early twentieth century Protestants called modernism. (I think that contemporary Catholics had a different, broader definition of the word.) It’s what you get when you accept the tenets of secular progressivism and try to rebuild Christian practice on top of them. It’s not really Christian.
That said, I’ve always understood James Martin to be in this camp. Roman Catholic ecclesiology didn’t allow the fundamentalist-modernist controversy to take the form it did among Protestants, so the divide isn’t as obvious; at least that’s my take.
If you are ever inclined to do related effortposts, I’d love to read about the dynamics (positive and negative) created by having the likes of Martin and Vigano in the same institutional church, as well as how tradcaths have reacted to Francis’ papacy and the loss of the Vatican’s social role as a countercultural bulwark.
I want to ponder a couple of your observations a bit more, because I have some thoughts to untangle. But as a religious righty myself, I would encourage you to distinguish three groups:
- The religious left when it is code switching to speak to the religious right: I think the United Methodist pastor from OP is here.
- Folks traveling from the religious right to the religious left, who may or may not have admitted it yet
- The religious right itself
In particular, I think that the growth of the second group is distinct from drift within the third group. That doesn’t imply that the religious right proper isn’t changing at all, because it is, but if you try to plot its course by following, e.g., Russell Moore, you are going to be confused.
I can see why one might think so, as a polytheistic precursor to the version we now have, but it's not in line with Judean polytheists' practice. When King Josiah of Judah decided he was done putting up with all this pagan nonsense, the Jerusalem temple had plenty of artifacts of polytheistic worship for him to burn, grind up, and/or throw into the river.
Are Christians morally obligated to forgive someone if God has forgiven them? ... Would it be wrong of me to refuse to marry/date her because of her past?
You would have to forgive her her sins. That doesn't entail pretending that her past experiences won't impact her future relationships. So the answer depends on your motives, but generally no, it's not wrong.
Agreed. I think that doing that at scale is necessarily tied up with acknowleging and respecting gender roles so that you can equip people to fill them. Doing away with no-fault divorce would also help in the long run.
I think that modern Fishtown residents have rational concerns about the risks and benefits of marriage in their social environment. There are a lot of pieces to that. Top down changes could help, if that were an option, but there need to be on the ground changes too. I don't know how practical any of that is, absent another Great Awakening.
Do religious people actually genuinely believe that those who willingly perform such stunts are capable of having all their sins washed away?
Sure, if she repents and puts her faith in Jesus Christ. Believers' righteousness is not based in what we have done, but in what Christ has done for us. God forgives much direr sins than that.
The cherry on this cake is that she can get married to a fairly normal guy tomorrow because riley reid, another adult entertainer did this too.
Maybe. Christianity doesn't draw an automatic line from forgiven to ideal wife material, to be clear.
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I am not sure if you mean to imply more depth than you give explicitly, but the version you wrote is not the same as Magusoflight’s. I think it’s misleading to say, “This is fine,” without qualification, at least where kids are involved.
Consider teaching children about paraplegia. You want children to respect its victims and to be aware of what they really are and are not capable of. You want them to understand that disability is not a moral failing. But you don’t want them to think that being wheelchair-bound is just as good as being able to walk, that it’s no affliction at all, and that given a choice between being healthy or paraplegic there is no reason to prefer one over the other.
I think that the folks adding intersex conditions to the preschool and grade school curricula are trying to say that there is no reason to prefer not to be intersex; they are looking to deconstruct sex and gender in the minds of children as young as they can get them. To teach that this is an affliction, to add that little bit of complexity, would undermine their goals.
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