This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I would be surprised if this is true given the experience of the Christian equivalents.
To be clear, the Christian tradition is similarly clear and firm to the Islamic tradition on many hot-button issues. It isn't particularly the case that, say, Christianity was historically ambiguous about sexual morality in a way that Islam was not. Nonetheless many churches have been hollowed out, and I am unsurprised to see the same process going on in Islam. Catholicism, if anything, is more explicit about many of these laws than Islam, and yet most Catholics defy that.
My guess is that one of the key factors here is that for most people, religious identity is something more like cultural identity or community - for most Catholics, "I'm Catholic" means "I identify as part of the Catholic community" and not "I positively assent to all the doctrinal claims of the Catholic Church". Likewise I suspect for many Muslims, "I'm a Muslim" is a statement about which community group they're part of, rather than what they actually believe. And the beliefs can be substantially revised as long as the sense of group membership remains intact.
Put bluntly - only autistic weirdos care about their religion's actual doctrines and commandments. So it has ever been, and so it will ever be. Even in religions where rule-following is a huge part of daily life, those rules are followed as something more like a cultural habit than anything else.
Pro-gay Christians aren't lying. I think the ones who argue directly that the Bible is neutral or positive about same-sex relationships are saying something obviously false, but I don't think they know that it's false. Lying involves a sort of psychic pain - people don't like do it, and if we have to lie for a very long time, we usually trade that lie for a self-delusion. Delusions are easier and more comfortable to maintain.
The few Haider-style MINOs that exist at the moment, I feel pretty confident, are not making public claims that they privately know to be false. I doubt they are very different to the Christians or Jews who went down the same path before them.
This feels ahistorical to me. See: Iconoclasm, the 30 Years War, etc... Revisionists might claim that these disputes weren't "really" about religion. But that's just cope. Before modern times, people deeply cared about religion, even the little nitpicky things, and were often willing to fight and die for it, or even spend their whole lives in a monastery praying.
Does that mean that everyone was rules adherent all the time? Of course not. But it does mean that people thought the rules mattered. Pre or extramarital sex was taboo in nearly all Christian cultures until modern times. If you were caught doing it, it could have dire consequences.
Even today, Catholics can't get remarried if they get a divorce.
And let's not get started on Judaism, which is just nitpicky rules all the way down.
Even if we accept that the thirty years’ war and all other similar conflicts back to Martin Luther were about religious doctrine, this was a time in which the great majority of lay people could not read and in which the majority of the peasantry barely even practiced (whether Protestant or Catholic) what we would today consider those forms of Christianity - until the late 18th century Christianity as practiced in rural Europe was a weird syncretic blend of Christianity and ancient folklore / paganism.
Sure, I can believe the average peasant soldier in the thirty years war believed they were fighting for God / Christ and that the enemy were infidels, but that they were well versed in the specifics of the philosophical debate? Nah, I doubt it.
Literacy was actually really high in some of these times and places. I remember seeing something—maybe a Scottpost?—about how 1600s America was remarkably literate, sometimes in Latin. Side effect of the massive Puritan influence. It’s why political philosophy was so popular. Paine et al. would get so much mileage out of pamphlets because they were part of a long tradition.
The opening shots of the Reformation largely took place through pamphlet wars. Sure, the main audience was religious or academic. But that got diffused very efficiently to congregations.
You probably read that in Scott's review of Albion's Seed. The thing is that that phenomenon was a uniquely Puritan anomaly and not shared with the other English colonies, and certainly not with continental Europe until much later.
While dependent on the printing press, It was more the fact that religous arguments were being made in the vernacular languages at all that caused the Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion. Translations of the works of men like Luther did in the 16th century what the internet did in the 21st, bringing people face to face with value systems and beliefs sometimes fundamentally alien to their own, and causing some to embark on a century-long bloody crusade to rid Europe of all the newly-revealed heretics.
Yep, that’s it. Thanks!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this assumption might be wrong. I am not a historian of the Middle Ages, but my understanding is that common people of the time were interested in doctrinal disputes to a surprising degree.
A good analogy would be how a person today, though scientifically illiterate, still has an opinion on the correctness of the Big Bang, evolution, climate change, etc...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not a secular divorce at least. The completely legitimate and not abused annulment process however...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oh yeah. That the Pauline prescriptions only hold about what we'd call prostitution (or if they're all sex-positive and 'sex work is real work', they go for "no no what was meant is abusive relations where there is power imbalance") and not 'loving committed same-sex relationships'. Arguing over the definition of pais and that condemnation was of paederasty or paedophilia, not homosexuality. Claims that the Centurion and his servant (see pais) were same-sex lovers and Jesus blessed or at least approved of the relationship by healing the servant (seemingly the idea that the man whom the local Jewish community praised as righteous might care about a servant if he wasn't fucking him is too extreme to hold in contemplation; no, the only reason a big-wig would care about a household slave is if the slave was his bed-warmer. That's... not really helping the cause of "gay is okay and Christian too!", guys?)
David and Jonathan as gay lovers. Naomi and Ruth for the distaff side (and never mind that they were mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, what's a little intergenerational technical incest against lesbian love?)
Yes. I've seen the arguments against Romans 1:26-27 as dispositive, for instance, and they seem profoundly weak to me. It is true that for Paul same-sex relationships are not the fundamental vice, but rather a symptom of the fundamental vice of idolatry - but that hardly seems a defense of those relationships, no more than the same observation is a defense of wickedness, covetousness, gossip, foolishness, or cruelty, all of which are in the same passage. It is true that the phrase Paul uses in those verses, para physin (against nature), is used in other contexts in a positive way (e.g. in Romans 11:24), but this in no way turns the negative reference in 1:26-27 into a positive one. Likewise you sometimes run into the argument that Paul was talking about people acting 'against nature' in the sense of against the way they are created, and he didn't know what sexual orientation is - now that we do know what it is, we understand that for a homosexual person to eschew same-sex relationships would be acting against their own nature. Therefore the Pauline argument should actually be in favour!
And so on. There's a lot of very standard but also very weak argumentation along these lines - here are two examples from the Australian debate a few years ago. I do not think these need to be particularly dignified with a response - in particular I think the second piece's conclusion that we need to be "even more Pauline than Paul" is an excuse for revisionist sophistry, where as long as we can contort a 'big idea' into something that can be awkwardly construed as supporting whatever we want to do today, we're free to ignore all the details of that idea.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that, if one approaches the Christian tradition - including both the Bible and the two thousand years of interpretation and practice on top of that - with anything like a neutral gaze, the disapproval of same-sex relationships is clear and unambiguous.
Nonetheless, people who have been raised in and identify with Christianity nonetheless sometimes want to affirm same-sex relationships. Rather than face the understandable psychic pain of needing to either abandon Christianity, or abandon their convictions about sexuality, they instead go for the oh-so-much-easier approach of convincing themselves that Christianity says what they wish it said.
I think this is an instructive example not only for Christians thinking about issues to do with sexuality, but for Christians thinking about any moral issues whatsoever - because on every issue, there is a temptation like this, a temptation to disfigure the gospel and make it into whatever is convenient for one's present interests.
At any rate -
As for Christianity, so too for Islam. I don't think the clarity of Islamic teaching on this point will help it any. Christian teaching is just as clear, and yet...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link