'Free exercise' of religion & the covering up of child sexual abuse

The "free exercise" clause of the First Amendment has been used for lots of things. In a lot of different ways.

It's been understood by the Supreme Court to mean that those fired for their religion still have a right to unemployment benefits, and to mean that religious institutions have the right to define "minister" any way they want, and to fire those so designated for any reason. It has been applied to protect the rights of those who sacrifice animals, and those who are required by their faith to distribute literature. The idea that government can't rightly pass a law prohibiting the free exercise of religion has been successfully used to defend those who won't salute the American flag, those who won't send their children to public schools, those who use controlled substances in their worship, etc., etc., etc.

Now Sovereign Grace Ministries, an association of New Calvinist churches led by C.J. Mahaney, are arguing that "free exercise" also means churches can't be taken to court on charges of covering up sexual abuse.

The churches, in an official press release, argue:

SGM leaders provided biblical and spiritual direction to those who requested this guidance. This care was sought confidentially, as is a right under the First Amendment. We are saddened that lawyers are now, in essence, seeking to violate those rights by asking judges and juries, years after such pastoral assistance was sought, to dictate what sort of biblical counsel they think should have been provided. SGM believes that allowing courts to second guess pastoral guidance would represent a blow to the First Amendment, that would hinder, not help, families seeking spiritual direction among other resources in dealing with the trauma related to any sin including child sexual abuse.

On these grounds, the church is seeking to have lawsuits alleging leaders protected child predators and covered-up child sexual abuse dismissed, the Associated Press reports.

According to the lawsuit, the "biblical and spiritual direction" that was offered to help families "dealing with the trauma related to ... child sexual abuse" involved a lot of covering up evidence that crimes occurred.

Sovereign Grace Ministries is accused of forcing abused children to forgive their abusers.

They are accused of disciplining those who wanted to tell legal authorities about the abuse.

And more.

According to the suit, which was filed on behalf of eight who were once children in the church:

The Church directed members to unquestioningly 'obey' the Church in all matters, including methods of parenting, place of residence and employment .... Between 1987 and the present, the Church repeatedly confronted occasions of sexual predation of children was occurring under the Church's auspices. The Church failed to alert law enforcement authorities, and failed to take any steps whatsoever to protect the children from sexual predation. Instead, the Church taught members to fear and distrust all secular authorities, and expressly directed members not to contact law enforcement to report sexual assaults. This practice has not stopped, as is evidenced by teachings as communications as recent as August 2011. On those occasions when the Church was not successful in persuading the parents of the victim to refrain from contacting law enforcement, the Church interfered with the administration of justice by tipping off the sexual predators that they had been reported to law enforcement. The Church provided sexual predators with free legal advice and counsel on how to evade accountability, and repeatedly worked with sexual predators to mislead law enforcement. The Church was willing to, and did, make false statements to law enforcement officials and in courts of law in its efforts to protect sexual predators.

The lawyers representing the people claiming they were abused and that church leaders knew about it and didn't report it are making a fairly straightforward case that being a minister does not relieve one of all legal responsibilities. On-going crimes have to be reported. People being harmed have to be protected. Dissembling on behalf of a pedophile isn't protected by the First Amendment or any amendment, and isn't a right recognized by the United States Constitution.

As the co-council explained in an interview:

You cannot participate in wrong doing regardless of your status as a pastor. They don't have the right to put people into harm's way. And they don't have the right to step in the middle and obstruct justice. So there are duties imposed by law that when you know that you have somebody who is harming people, you are not allowed to let that person keep harming people.

Sovereign Grace Ministries' lawyers, on the other hand, is making the case that "Maryland courts can’t get involved in the internal affairs of church business." They filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds on Monday. They are of course also making the argument that they are not guilty of the cover-ups of which they've been accused, and have made multiple statements about the high priority they place on the protection of children against sexual assaults. The first legal line of defense they church is using though, is the argument that even if they did cover up sexual abuse of children, the courts do not have the right to "second guess" that pastoral care.

The argument is that religious institutions are -- or ought to be -- autonomous and self-governing, and courts have no right to interfere with religious groups' internal affairs. (Arguments against "second guessing" have also been used in extra-legal contexts to quell or at least quiet critiques. See Rachel Heald Evans' piece, "How [Not] to Respond to Abuse Allegations"). According to the Associated Press, this legal argument has been defended by some legal scholars and a number of judges. Courts in the states Utah, Wisconsin, and Missouri have said the First Amendment does protect religious institutions from intruding courts.

Other experts disagree with that position. One law professor, for example, told Christianity Today that "the First Amendment is not—and shouldn't be—a defense against child abuse." Even in the cases of clergy-penitent privilege, where the law doesn't require that crimes be reported, that legal protection does not normally extend to cases of child sexual abuse.

Sovereign Grace Ministries is not the first to make this case. They're following the legal strategy laid out by the Catholic Church. In Rhode Island, a decade ago, the Diocese of Providence argued that it had a First Amendment right not to turn over documents allegedly pertaining to its own cover-up of child sexual abuse. The argument worked for more than nine years, but was then rejected by the court.

The judge in that case ruled:

By no elastic stretch of the most fertile imagination can one rationally conclude that such information or any such communication deserves or merits confidentiality as expressions of religious freedom.

The church subsequently settled the suit for $13.5 million.

The next hearing in the case against Sovereign Grace Ministries is scheduled for March 8.

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Things that Žižek says in between saying other things

Notes of confessions, disavowals & affirmations & other asides in Slovoj Žižek's speech, "Das Jahr der gefährlichen Träume," in Heidelberg, Feb. 25, 2013.

"You say: 'Now you are a stupid magician. You go all around, where is your rabbits?'"

"Now I make some crazy steps."

"Of course, I am still a communist and so on."

Žižek in Berlin, 2011.

"Of course, I am still opposed to Islam."

"This is the logic I am afraid of, you stick to your ideals."

"Don't worry."

"Now we come to the philosophy part ... I mean politics."

"Malcolm X, you know, said 'fuck the African roots.'"

"They really hated me, all those multi-culturalists."

"Don't hit me. I am a feminist. I say this to provoke."

"This is what is beautiful in global capitalism, what I really love: Even the English language itself is being taken away from the English ones."

"Besides the obvious stupid fact that English is not my language."

"The answer is unambiguous: yes and no."

"I will try not to be too long, so I will skip how the logic I am trying to describe functions here."

"All great thoughts occur by mistake."

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Evangelicals so dominate the North American religious scene that 'evangelical chic' may be impending.

-- Bob E. Patterson, in Carl F.H. Henry, published 1983

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What can be learned from repeated misprints in journal citations

Mistakes, misprints, and typos are easy: a transposition of characters can happen with the slip of fingers;  a word can be added or dropped from a quote with a shift of the eye. These things happen.

The way these things happen, their frequency and their patterns, may also be important.

As M.V. Simkin and V.P. Roychowdhury argue in a 2002 paper, "misprints in scientific citations should not be discarded as a mere happenstance, but, similar to Freudian slips, analyzed."

In that paper, pointed out recently by demographer Conrad Hackett and historian Yoni Applebaum, claims that mistakes made in scientific citations can tell us something about academics' work. Simkin and Roychowdhury, from the University of California, Los Angeles, look at the way certain mistakes in citations are repeated, copied, and spread. They identified one paper, for example, that had been mis-cited 196 times. Out of those 196 citations that did not exactly, correctly reproduce the information of the original paper, 78 made exactly the same mistake. There were identical misprints in more than half of the cases where there were misprints. That is statistically improbable, according to Simkin and Roychowdhury, if everyone were reading the original paper. It's just not plausible that 78 different papers made exactly the same mistake.

They argue that these 78 identical misprints of a single source are, rather, reproductions of a mistake.

Simkin and Roychowdhury reported that they found a dozen cases of this, and from these sets of identical mistakes they attempt to work out a method to mathematically estimate the percentage of people who have not read the work that they cite. Their conclusion:

Up to 80% of those who cite popular academic journal articles have never actually read them bit.ly/14FSf3H (h/t @conradhackett)
— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) February 17, 2013

There are some questions raised by this conclusion. The paper is ambiguous on some points. For example, is it reasonable to think that accurate citations are being reproduced at the same rate as inaccurate citations? Also, does it hold that because one oft-repeated citation was re-cited without examination of the original that that is also true for less common citations? If it's true that 80 percent of those who cited a particularly popular paper didn't actually read that paper, does that mean that, therefore, 80 percent of all citations are second or third hand? Or that 80 percent of authors always do this? It's not clear to me that there's an argument that these particular cases are representative of all cases of citations. There are good reasons to be skeptical of a strong version of this claim, such as,

In journal articles, 80% of authors include citations to articles they probably haven't read, suggests study. bit.ly/14FSf3H
— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) February 17, 2013

This is a very bold interpretation of the evidence being offered. It is not a misrepresentation of the authors' arguments, but it's nevertheless a very strong claim that may not be completely supported by the study.  A more cautious interpretation of Simkin and Roychowdhury's argument might be that there is a class of citations that are copied and reproduced by scholars who don't take the time to search out the original source.

If one sets aside the question of whether or not these citations were copied without consulting the original, and thinks about this research as just examining how citations are propagated, a stronger and more important conclusion emerges. This is the conclusion that Simkin and Roychowdhury reach in a later paper on the same subject. There, they claim "Our analysis of misprint propagation provides the evidence that citation copying dominates the dynamics of the network of scientific papers" (emphasis original).

There may or may not be evidence that eight out of 10 journal article authors are not doing due diligence with as many as eight out of 10 of their sources, but the way misprints are reproduced does demonstrate something important about the way information spreads.

The more apt metaphor for these misprints that are being reproduced might be genetic mutations. Simkin and Roychowdhury describe the errors as Freudian slips, but that's not quite right. A slip of the tongue may reveal much, but it's not repeated and reproduced.

The suggestion implicit in these studies is that these mistakes are important, but not that they're important in and of themselves, necessarily, but important in how they demonstrate the functioning of information networks. What is visible, with these repeated mistakes and misprints, is the way that academic information is not distributed in a way that's simply linear and unidirectional. Units of information, represented by citations, are not actually, mostly, passed from the original source to a recipient, but from a source to multiple recipients, who are then also sources for other recipients, in a multidirectional, webbed process.

As Simkin has elsewhere argued: "a paper that already was cited is likely to be cited again, and after it is cited again it is even more likely to be cited in the future."

To a certain extent, this is obvious. After all, in our own era of techno-social networks, the operations of some networks are readily apparent. It's easy to see that Conrad Hackett's tweet about this paper was retweeted more than 30 times, and one can trace a transmission line quite simply, from, say, this blog post to Yoni Applebaum's tweet to Hackett's. This is how the data from a paper published more than a decade ago spreads. While it's less apparent that the 32 journal articles that cite this 2002 paper about citation also can by this information in this fashion, it's plausible to expect that similar sorts of networks were at work.

Despite the common appearance of such networks, though, and the apparent ways that information is distributed, i.e., reproduced, it's commonly forgotten.

One way that this is ignored in my own area of study is that readers, in my case specifically readers of contemporary Christian fiction, are thought of as singular. There are assumptions of isolation: readers reading what they read all by themselves, individuals, completely detached from any social processes. This isn't always true, but it's often the case that the ways in which readers are networked and connected are ignored. There's still a persistent practice of thinking of texts as transmissions of information from the author to the reader, in a simply, linear, unidirectional process.

A fuller understanding of what has to happen for an individual reader to read a text can reveal a lot of detail that would otherwise by mystified.

As Robert Darnton has written, there is a "communications circuit," a cycle through which books, and also more generally texts, "come into being and spread through society." Darnton argues that the history of a text should be broadened to include not just the author and the reader, but the author, the publisher, the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the readers. None of these agents are acting in isolation, as kind of pure individuals. When a reader reads, all of these other agents are also at work. The reader is always part of these social contexts and processes, these networks -- though, Darnton notes, "Reading remains the most difficult stage to study in the circuit that books follow" -- and also there are networks of readers.

The dynamics of such networks, as Simkin and Roychowdhury say, often dominate, which is to say they go a long way in determining who reads and how.

This is true, too, for academic readers, and can be traced in the way academic information is distributed. The reproduction and propagation of misprinted citations is one interesting way to see that.

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Church suppers changing lives

Lots of studies have shown that religious people in America are more generous that areligious people. The more people go to church, the more generous they are. As Robert D. Putnam, professor of public policy at Harvard, summarizes the research, "people who are involved in religious networks are more likely to be good citizens."

There's something curious, here, though, when you break down the question of what it means to be "religious." The theological content of someone's religiousness has little to do with their generosity. Whether or not someone has faith or believes, or how much they believe, turns out to be rather irrelevant to the likelihood they demonstrate this sort of behavior.

Putnam says the statistics show that faith and belief in God do not correlate with people being good citizens and good neighbors. Religious people, Putnam says, are "nicer," but only when "religious" is taken to mean "people who have denser personal relationships with other people in their congregation or their religious community. It's not faith per se, it's communities of faith that matters for, our data shows, whether people are good citizens or not and whether they're happy or not."

According to Putnam, it's not clear why "church friends" have more of an influence on civic participation that other associations or groups of friends, but research shows that they do.

Turns out, in ways that social scientists can measure, the most life-changing part of church seems to be the church suppers.

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Pope speaks on Dorothy Day

In his Ash Wednesday talk, a few days after his resignation, Pope Benedict XVI spoke about Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement.

In November, the U.S. bishops voted unanimously to move forward with the canonization process that would recognize Day as a saint. Day is most often know for her social justice efforts, her activism, and her political radicalism. On Wednesday, though, the pope emphasized a different aspect of Day's biography:

The ability to oppose the ideological blandishments of her time to choose the search for truth and open herself up to the discovery of faith is evidenced by another woman of our time, the American Dorothy Day. In her autobiography, she confesses openly to having given in to the temptation that everything could be solved with politics, adhering to the Marxist proposal: 'I wanted to be with the protesters, go to jail, write, influence others and leave my dreams to the world. How much ambition and how much searching for myself in all this!' The journey towards faith in such a secularized environment was particularly difficult, but Grace acts nonetheless, as she points out: 'It is certain that I felt the need to go to church more often, to kneel, to bow my head in prayer. A blind instinct, one might say, because I was not conscious of praying. But I went, I slipped into the atmosphere of prayer ....' God guided her to a conscious adherence to the Church, in a lifetime spent dedicated to the underprivileged.

In our time there are no few conversions understood as the return of those who, after a Christian education, perhaps a superficial one, moved away from the faith for years and then rediscovered Christ and his Gospel.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, likewise describing Day's life as a turning-away from the secular, has called her "a saint for our times."

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Coming soon

First official artwork for Left Behind (the remake), which is reportedly on schedule to start production this spring. 

The original book addresses the possibility of the story of the rapture being made into a movie, and is very skeptical of that possibility: "If somebody tried to sell a screenplay about millions of people disappearing, leaving everything but their bodies behind, it would be laughed off."

The question now is: what if they did sell it, twice?

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American evangelicals ♥ Pope Benedict XVI

One of the really fascinating stories of American evangelicalism in the 20th century is how evangelical attitudes towards Catholicism completely changed. In 1926, one of America's leading fundamentalist pastors, J. Frank Norris, attacked Catholicism and warned American evangelicals not to trust them, with sermons and articles with titles like "The Conspiracy of Rum and Romanism to Rule this Government."

Such attitudes persisted even into the 1960s. But things have changed since then. As Religion News Service notes, American evangelical leaders have responded to Pope Benedict XVI's announcement of his resignation by praising the man, and saying how much they will miss him.

Daniel Burke writes:

Just a generation or two ago, such lavish praise might have been unthinkable. During the early 1960s, evangelist Billy Graham — sometimes dubbed the Protestant pope — took heat for inviting Catholics to join his revivals. But after the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), denominational barriers fell and ecumenism prospered.  

Meanwhile, evangelicals developed an appreciation for Catholic culture, and Catholics found ready evangelical allies in the battles against secularism, abortion and gay rights.  

'One of the challenges of evangelical Protestantism as it became a political force was to find a vocabulary to talk about the role of Christian faith in a diverse, pluralistic society like the United States,' said R.R. Reno, executive editor of First Things, an interreligious journal. 'By and large, they turned to Catholicism.'

The other major factor in this cultural shift -- besides Roe v. Wade, which at first was considered just a Catholic issue that evangelicals shouldn't particularly care about -- was the Cold War, and the Catholic Church's opposition to communism.

The American religious historian Barry Hankins has written about the change in the "marketplace of ideas" that brought evangelicals and Catholics together.

Of course, there are still those out there like William Tapley, who talks about the papacy in terms of the antichrist and assorted end times prophecies. That's just an extreme fringe, though. The days of Norris-style warnings about Catholicism has passed.

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The North American papabiles

There are only a few North American names floating around in the speculation about the possible next pope, following the sudden resignation of Pope Benedict XVI on Monday. The chances that the next leader of the Roman Catholic Church will be from North America are exceedingly slim. The names that come up in this game of speculation, though, say something about the landscape, about the shape and tendencies and dispositions of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States and Canada, in relationship to the Vatican.

There's little point in speculation, except as a game, but the speculation nevertheless is interesting for what it reveals about the leadership of the Catholic church. It's interesting, for that reason, to look at the three top North American names on the odd-maker's list of papabile cardinals: Marc Ouellet, previously of Quebec, Timothy Dolan, of New York, and Raymond Burke, previously of St. Louis.

There are some differences in style, temperament, and the focuses of their careers, but also some marked similarities, especially with regards to opposition to "secularism" and debates over the correct interpretation of the Second Vatican Council.

The odds on Marc Ouellet becoming the next pope are currently at 7 to 2. That's down a bit from the days before Benedict's announcement, when they were 5 to 2, but still very, very high. Cardinal Ouellet  is actually the very best bet for pope according to those setting the odds, and Vaticanologists do consider him to be a real candidate, though not by any means a sure thing.

In fact, Ouellet himself is on record as  saying it "would be a nightmare" to be made pope, and it's possible that he could decline the papacy.

Ouellet, born in 1944, was elevated to the cardinate in 2003 by Pope John Paul II. He speaks five languages, and has good connections to Latin American cardinals, as well as Italians, who make up about 25 percent of the college of cardinals, and could conceivably draw solid support from both groups when the cardinals gather.

Ouellet's career has been as an academic. He has a doctorate in dogmatic theology, and has been a professor and rector at Catholic seminaries. He is associated with federation of theological journals named Communio, as was Hans Urs von Batlhasar and Pope Benedict XVI.

Looking through his speeches, homilies and public statements, it becomes apparent that the rapid secularization of Quebec in "Quiet Revolution" in the 1960s was significant in his intellectual formation. Ouellet has said, in his public statements, that the first mission of the leaders of the Catholic Church in the 21st century must be to respond to this secularization.

In 2001, he gave a very strong statement about what he looks for in leaders of the church. He said:

Today, especially in the context of our secularized societies, we need bishops who are the first evangelizers, and not mere administrators of dioceses, who are capable of proclaiming the Gospel, who are not only theologically faithful to the magisterium and the pope but are also capable of expounding and, if need be, of defending the faith publicly.

In his time as a primate of Canada, this issue of secularization came up in a conflict over how religion was to be taught in schools. The Supreme Court ruled that religion could only be taught in schools if it was taught neutrally, a decision that Ouellet strongly disagreed with. He argued that the so-called neutrality was actually a "dictatorship of relativism" that was "applied beginning in elementary school."

Ouellet thought that this apparent culture war skirmish was indicative of the "profound crisis shaking the foundations of European culture." He said: "A new raison d'etat imposes its law and tries to relegate the Christian roots of Europe to a secondary plane. It would seem that, in the name of secularism, the Bible must be relativised, to be dissolved in a religious pluralism and disappear as a normative cultural reference."

Ouellet said that many of the teachers in Quebec elementary schools had a "Marxist" approach, which was being masked as neutral.

This wasn't just a matter of clashing worldviews or a debate about the possibility of ideological neutrality in education, though. Ouellet held that Quebec was betraying its religious tradition with this secularization, and that the results were catastrophic. This was the theme of his first homily as archbishop of Quebec City:

Quebec languishes far from the values that gave strength and glory to its forefathers. Its will of cultural survival dramatically clashes with a very low birth rate and catastrophic youth suicides. These incomprehensible suicides tear us to pieces, and alarm us about the family situations and about the values that should give sense to their lives. Are these not the signs of the most serious loss that is striking Quebec society: the forgetfulness of its spiritual heritage, the forgetting of its martyrs and saints? But how much more should we see to the teaching of the virtues and spiritual attitudes that form the soul and the destiny of the people!

Ouellet has expressed concern that the same forces that are work in schools and in undermining European societies have also been felt within the church. Church leaders don't only need to speak the gospel to the secular world, they also need to save the church from that secularism. This is a concern, especially, in how the Second Vatican Council has been interpreted by many.

Ouellet said: "After the council, the sense of mission was replaced by the idea of dialogue. That we should dialogue with other faiths and not attempt to bring them the Gospels, to convert. Since then, relativism has been developing more broadly.”

This is not to say, however, that Ouellet simply dismisses dialogue, or is always strident in his speech, a committed cultural warrior. In one very public act as cardinal, he apologized for Catholic Church's historic failings, specifically towards women, homosexuals and minorities. Last year, in a homily in Ireland, he apologized for the church to the victims of sexual abuse by clerics. He called it a "great shame and enormous scandal," and a "sin against which Jesus himself lashed out."

On the other hand, there were previous instances where it was reported that Ouellet refused to apologize, saying the church was not yet ready for that step.

My sense, though, is that in both the cases where Ouellet engages and dialogue and those in which he opposes it come out of a consistent theological position that can be seen in his interpretation of Vatican II.

In a theological reflection on the council, he said, "Fifty years after the opening of the Second Vatican Council, we have seen that its chief inspiration was the ecclesiology of communion, which a right interpretation of the Council gradually identified and emphasized."

Ouellet said that in the "ecclesiology of communion," the church itself becomes a sacrament, which is to say that it has a very important role in the world, much of which has been secularized, a role as the carrier of grace. He said:

The Church thus becomes a sacrament [...]. As 'sign,'  she is the bearer of a mysterious divine reality that no image or analogy of this world will adequately express. As 'instrument,' she works efficaciously for the salvation of the world through her union with Christ, who associates her to his unique priesthood as his Body and Bride. The Church’s mission thus coincides with the sacramental form of the love that reveals God at work in the world, in an intimate synergy with the witnesses of the New Covenant.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, a conservative American Catholic who writes for National Review, calls Ouellet "brilliant and holy." Considering his chances to become the next pope, she notes: "He’s got a steady hand and is widely respected — and his resemblance to John Paul II in certain — even physical — ways is uncanny."

If Lopez likes any North American leader of the Catholic Church more than Ouellet, it's probably Timothy Dolan, whose chances, as of Benedict's resignation, were set at 25 to 1, though they've now dropped to 40 to 1.

According to Lopez, Dolan, born in 1950, would be a very good choice because "Everyone knows Cardinal Dolan and his media acumen and warm and pastoral heart."

Dolan has only been a cardinal for a year, but already he's the face of American Catholicism. Which means he's  charismatic, camera-ready and conservative.

He's been called a "back slapper," and a professional extrovert who loves to talk sports.

A lot of attention has been paid to Dolan's temperament and style. It can be seen as his greatest strength and weakness, in being considered for pope. Dolan was elevated to the cardinate by Benedict XVI, who, it has been said, tended to look for prelates with a certain sort of style. Benedict wanted "leaders who are basically conservative in both their politics and their theology, but also upbeat, pastoral figures given to dialogue," those who were part of the "center-right" of the American Catholic hierarchy. That means,

Bishops who are temperamentally conservative but who prefer to set a tone rather than impose penalties, who give pride of place to pro-life issues but also devote energy to other social justice concerns, who are often more invested in concrete pastoral concerns rather than political battles, and who are willing to work within the bishops’ conference as an expression of collegial relationships with other bishops.

This has been called "affirmative orthodoxy." The description suits Dolan very well.

His interpretation of the Second Vatican Council, for example, puts an emphasis on the church's "evangelical duty." He has said that Vatican II should be understood as a teaching that "refines the Church’s understanding of her evangelical duty, defining the entire Church as missionary, that all Christians, by reason of baptism, confirmation, and Eucharist, are evangelizers."

Dolan believes that, following Vatican II, because of the secularization of modern societies, evangelism is the mission of the church, "central to the life of every local church, to every believer."

This has led him to be very outspoken, politically. He has regularly made the news for his critiques of Barak Obama. He spoke out to oppose Obama's invitation to speak at Notre Dame, for example, and has been on the forefront of opposition to the Obamacare requirement that employers, including Catholic hospitals and charities, provide coverage of contraception in their employees' insurance plan.

Sometimes, his opposition has not been temperate. On one popular FOX News show, Dolan said the Obama administration was a "force trying to caricature" Catholic bishops as "bullies," and warned of a new religion "called secularism," that wanted to "duct tape" the mouths of religious people when they entered the public square.

The cardinal said that secularists, and specifically the president, were trying to erect a "Berlin wall" between church and state.

Dolan has, at other times, spoken out about what he perceives to be a pervasive anti-Catholic bias that manifests in political opposition to the American bishops. In an interview with the Associated Press, he  said, "Periodically, we Catholics have to stand up and say, 'Enough. The church as a whole still calls out to what is noble in us."

In that same interview, however, he also reached out to alienated Catholics, saying, "Please come back. We miss you. We're sorry if we hurt you. We'll listen to you. It's not the same without you."

He has also been vocal about the abuse scandals that have rocked the church, and alienated many of those Catholics he's now saying he wants back in the church. Dolan has said he is "haunted" by the fact that clerics routinely sexually abused children with impunity, and said"it is impossible to exaggerate the gravity of the situation." He acknowledged that the church cannot yet put the scandal behind her. In 2009, he said: "We're nowhere near to admitting that, thanks be to God, we've got this behind us .... And we should be glad that we can't say that. Because it's the kind of thing that is necessitating the vigilance ... to see that it never happens again."

Some prominent conservative Catholics have said the cause of the abuse was the liberal theology creeping into the church, blaming the factions they have consistently opposed. Dolan, however, has identified the root cause of the scandal as the church's penchant for secrecy. He said, ''Mistakes were made in the past because it was a little closed, a little clandestine, and we've got to be more open, more transparent.''

Dolan has not been entirely separate from the scandal, though. When he was an archbishop, in Milwaukee, he authorized payments of up to $20,000 to priests who'd been abusing children, a severance package of sorts to convince them to not fight laicization. Dolan denied doing this, but subsequent investigation showed he was involved in the pay-outs. The one time he mentioned this money, he referred to one such payment as an "act of charity" when pressed by a reporter.

Dolan's response to the abuse scandals has not defined him, though, as much as his personality and his visibility has. In the last few days, he's been on numerous media outlets discussing Benedict's resignation. He wrote about the pope's empty chair in a column in the New York Daily News in a way that could only be described as "pastoral."

As the Religious News Service notes, "Dolan’s extraordinary visibility and popularity are being cited as factors that could make him the first American with a realistic shot at being elected pope when the College of Cardinals gathers in March," but,

The same everyman exuberance that endears him to the hoi polloi can strike the stodgier College of Cardinals as sophomoric. Asked about his sense of humor, Benedict once said: 'I'm not a man who constantly thinks up jokes.' Compare that to Dolan on '60 Minutes' about arriving in New York: 'They asked me when I got here, 'Are you Cardinals, Mets, Brewers, or Yankees?' And I said, 'When it comes to baseball, I think I can be pro-choice.'

As Dolan himself noted, his papacy is "highly improbable," but it's significant that more than a little attention has been given to that outside chance.

The third cardinal to make the bookies' list of North American papabiles is said to have the same odds as Dolan, but his chances seem to have gotten little to no public attention. Raymond Leo Burke's odds of become pope are also currently at 40 to 1, having dropped from a slightly higher but still improbable 33 to 1 a few days ago.

It's not clear why Burke, born in 1948, the former St. Louis cardinal who heads the Vatican's supreme court, should be less talked about than Dolan in this context, except that he's less gregarious and not as well known to Catholics in the pews (though more well known in the Vatican).

Burke's most public moments have come from his denunciations of pro-choice Catholic politicians. He has regularly made very public pronouncements that Catholic politicians who are pro-choice should be denied communion. He spoke out against John Kerry in 2004, and said Ted Kennedy should be denied a church funeral when Kennedy died in 2009.

His position on this is not without support from conservative Catholics, though there's far from universal agreement on this, even among bishops who would generally ally with Burke on political issues.

The cardinal has gone further, though, and made the very unusual and controversial argument that bishops who do serve the Eucharist to pro-choice politicians should be removed, a statement for his he later apologized.

He has also said that Catholics who voted for pro-choice politicians were committing a mortal sin, a statement which he softened in a clarification, but then, in another context, seemed to reiteration just as strongly.

In 2009, he made the argument this way:

If a Catholic knowingly and deliberately votes for a person who is in favor of the most grievous violations of the natural moral law, then he has formally cooperated in a grave evil and must confess his serious sin. Since President Obama clearly announced, during the election campaign, his anti-life and anti-family agenda, a Catholic who knew his agenda regarding, for example, procured abortion, embryonic-stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage, could not have voted for him with a clear conscience.

Burke has also attracted media attention when he urged that similarly absolutist lines be drawn when people who were associated with Catholic institutions made or were known to have made pro-choice statements. He argued for the discipline of a basketball coach at St. Louis Univeristy, a Catholic school, who made pro-choice statements, and opposed a fundraiser for a Catholic hospital that featured singer Sheryl Crow for the same reason.

According to Burke, he's only insisting that the church remain consistent in its witness. Regarding Crow's performance, for example, he said that it mattered that she was pro-choice even though she wasn't herself Catholic, because, "A Catholic institution featuring a performer who promotes moral evil gives the impression that the church is somehow inconsistent in its teaching."

Though many in the American Catholic hierarchy agree with Burke about these issues of moral evil and the real threat of modern secularization, Burke's tone is significantly harsher. He appears to wholeheartedly embrace the idea of a culture war, warning that Catholicism may soon be illegal, Catholic teaching will likely be outlawed, and that the struggle with secularism is a struggle to the death: "secularism will in fact predominate, and it will destroy us."

If you examine his arguments about denying pro-choice Catholics communion, however, it has less to do with secularism, per se, than with his interpretation of canon law. In fact, though Burke is clearly concerned about American politics and public life, his greater concern is "antinomianism," disregard for the law, within the church itself.

As a canon law expert, he holds that disregard for church law and "indifference toward church discipline" are at the root of the church's problems.

In a speech he gave this past summer, Burke described how he came to the realization of the depth of the problem of this antinomianism. He said:

After I began my studies of Canon Law in September of 1980, I soon learned how much the Church’s discipline was disdained by her priests, in general. When I answered the question of a brother priest regarding my area of study, the fairly consistently reaction was expressed in words like these: 'I thought that the Church had done away with that,' and 'What a waste of your time.' The usual reaction, in fact, reflected a general attitude in the Church toward her canonical discipline, an attitude inspired by the hermeneutic of discontinuity, by that sense that 'a day of sunlight' had arrived in the Church, in contrast to the darkness of what had gone before. Institutes of the Church’s law, which, in her wisdom, she had developed down the Christian centuries, were set aside without consideration of their organic relationship to the life of the Church or of the chaos which would necessarily result from their neglect or abandonment.

The "hermeneutic of discontinuity," in Burke's view, undercuts the church's claims of truth, severely damaging its witness. He believes that this idea that the church can change and does and should change is responsible for the "betrayal" of the interpretation of the Second Vatican Council in the United States. After reflecting on his experience in the 1980s, he continued:

The 'hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,' which has tried to highjack the renewal mandated by the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, is marked by a pervasively antinomian culture, epitomized by the Paris student riots of 1968, and has had a particularly devastating effect on the Church’s discipline. It is profoundly sad to note, for instance, how the failure of knowledge and application of the canon law, which was indeed still in force, contributed significantly to the scandal of the sexual abuse of minors by the clergy in our some parts of the world.

In some cases, Burke seems to argue that so-called "reforms" were the cause of the sexual abuse and cover-up, though, more often, as above, he says only that it was a significant contributing factor.

Burke himself, it should be noted, has been accused of participating in cover-up of sexual abuse by priests.

Burke's own efforts have, for the most part, been aimed at a restoration restoration of the "disciplinary tradition of the church and respect of the law in the church."

As part of that restoration, he has advocated the church bring back some elements of the Tridentine mass. He doesn't think that the mass should necessarily always be done in Latin, as some traditionalists maintain, but does believe that the current liturgy should be revised, with some of the older rites reintroduced. He also wants strict enforcement of the uniformity of liturgical services, so that they really are "catholic," and do not vary from region to region and parish to parish. He has called for an official crack-down on "liturgical abuses,"which he says destroy or seriously threaten Catholic faith. 

It's no accident that Burke was put in charge of reaching out to traditionalists who have left the church over developments they see as accommodations of modernity, most notably the Society of Saint Pius X.  A number of sustained efforts were made by Benedict XVI to bring the traditionalists back into the church, despite some controversy surrounding the traditionalists, and Burke led those efforts, being both sympathetic to the traditionalists' arguments and critical of their willingness to reject authority they disagreed with. 

The cardinal has been called Benedict's top U.S. advisor, and he has been seen as the hand behind the promotion of like-minded conservatives, such as Cardinal Charles Chaput and Archbishop Salvadore Cordileone, though it's not clear if there's any merit to those speculations. Likewise, some think Burke was the one instigating investigations into the Leadership Conferences of the Women Religious, who are alleged to promote "radical feminism" and teachings contrary to the churches.

Burke's life and ministry have not been solely concerned with canon law and church discipline, though. A major accomplishment of his career has been establishing the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe on 103 acres in La Crosse, Wisc. The shrine promotes "fully authentic Marian devotion," and is a place of pilgrimage, housing hundreds of saint's relics. Burke started this when he was a bishop, in Wisconsin, but has returned as an archbishop and as a cardinal.

There's only a very outside chance that Burke will emerge from the cardinal's conclave next month as the new pope. It's likely, though, that in his role as cardinal, he will want the new pope to be someone who can lead a restoration movement in the church, bringing her back to the disciplinary tradition.

Looking at Burke's life and work, and Dolan's and Ouellet's, helps very little with speculations about the next pope. That these are the names that come up in such speculation, though, says a lot about Catholicism in North America, today. These are the men who are perceived to be close to the Vatican and also connected to and actively leading the churches in America. There are some real differences, especially in personality, temperament, and in the subjects they've devoted their lives to studying. There are also some strong similarities. All three understand "secularism" to be a major threat, and are, in their ministry, committed to opposing and combating that secularism.

Further, all three of the American papabiles have made the correct interpretation of the Second Vatican Council a central part of their ministries, and their ministries are, in some sense, about putting the correct interpretation of the council into practice. The next pope may be the first who is post-conciliar, but he, along with the American hierarchy, will likely continue to be defined by the controversies and competing interpretations of Vatican II. 

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Lecrae and the future of Christian music markets

The Grammy for the year's best gospel album went to Lecrae, last night, the Reformed rapper who had a chart-topping album earlier this year where he rapped about writing "songs for the perishin' and parishioners." It was the second time he'd been nominated for a Grammy. 

Due to Grammy rules, his hip-hop album "Gravity" fell into the gospel category, rather than rap, but the win nevertheless highlights Lecrae's cross-over appeal. 

It's not simply taken for granted that a Christian rap album would be successful in a general market, nor that a Christian rap album with a general appeal would still be acceptable to Christians. But things are changing. Markets are shifting and attitudes are adjusting. The world of contemporary Christian music is very different than it was when Amy Grant stirred up so much controversy, and even since the '90s, when, as Heather Hendershot wrote, there were these ongoing struggles over faith and markets, with "people in the Christian music industry [...] attempting to negotiate between their heartfelt beliefs and a secular marketplace that they realize is wary of both evangelical faith and politics."

Those negotiations are different, today, and seem less tortured, for one thing. 

Lecrae has been on the forefront of a change. His Grammy win is part of that, as is the big big win for a band that started in a Vineyard Church, but last night took home the award for album of the year. 

In a recent interview with PBS, Lecrae talked about the relationship between Christianity and hip hop, and articulates the kind of argument he's been making for several years now. The argument itself is interesting, but what's more interesting to me is the fact, first, that he has to make this argument even though there've now been more than 50 years of continual evangelical adaptations of pop music, and, second, that he's been quite successful at it:

A lot of people will say hip hop, because of what it has been consistently associated with, should have nothing to do with Christianity whatsoever, like you can't be Christian and rap at the same time, but I would challenge them in that. There are things that culturally we have given some kind of cultural connotation to or perspective on, but it doesn't have to be identified with that.  

If I take a butcher knife, you would think 'horror movie.' But, I could just be serving food to the homeless and carving turkey and giving them out. And so, the culture has given this identity to the butcher knife as this evil thing that kills, but really you can take that use that for a whole 'nother purpose that's redeptive and helpful.  

I think rap is the same way. Culturally it's been used as something that's negative, and bad, but I think you can take it and use it for redemptive purposes and helpful purposes as well. 

I'm not sure it's clear why and to what extent Christian music markets have changed, by Lecrae and his Grammy are a good example of how it has.

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Wohl dem, des Hilfe der Gott Jakobs ist; des Hoffnung auf den HERRN, seinem Gott, steht; der Himmel, Erde, Meer und alles, was darinnen ist, gemacht hat; der Glauben hält ewiglich; der Recht schafft denen, so Gewalt leiden; der die Hungrigen speist. Der HERR löst die Gefangenen. Der HERR macht die Blinden sehend. Der HERR richtet auf, die niedergeschlagen sind. Der HERR liebt die Gerechten.

Der HERR behütet die Fremdlinge und erhält die Waisen und Witwen und kehrt zurück den Weg der Gottlosen.

-- Psalm 146, Luther Bible, 1545



Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God: Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is: which keepeth truth for ever: Which executeth judgment for the oppressed: which giveth food to the hungry. The Lord looseth the prisoners: The Lord openeth the eyes of the blind: the Lord raiseth them that are bowed down: the Lord loveth the righteous:

The Lord preserveth the strangers; he relieveth the fatherless and widow: but the way of the wicked he turneth upside down.

-- Psalm 146, King James Version

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Habermas' secular sources

I maintain that we have good reasons to insist on secular sources for justifying the principles of the constitutions our forms of societies fortunately have for constituting the polity. 

I don't think -- it is not necessary to take resource to religious sources for justifying the principles.

-- Jürgen Habermas

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Beyond "religious liberty"

Most of the attention given to the roiling legal fight over insurance coverage and birth control and the limits of religious exercise has come in the form of arguments about "religious liberty."

It is an issue of religious liberty, of course, though the tendency has been for those arguments to obscure more than they reveal. An example of this is Mike Huckabee's advocation for the craft store Hobby Lobby last month. Huckabee encouraged people to shop at the chain in an act of solidarity, a consumption-as-politics act of activism. He said:

They are having to fight in court for the most basic American rights of freedom of religion and freedom of speech .... The Obama administration insists that companies like Hobby Lobby bow their knees to the God of government health care mandates, even when those mandates are a clear and direct contradiction to their personal beliefs of faith.

The conflation that he's making here, between the corporation, Hobby Lobby, and "their personal beliefs of faith," is exactly what's at issue in these lawsuits. The grammatical issue of replacing a singular noun with a plural pronouns isn't an accident; it's the point. In promoting the identification of an individual shopper with the company, Huckabee's not actually making an argument that for-profit corporations can have religion and have the right to exercise religion, but re-casting the issue as a conflict between those who are for and those who are against religious freedom.

For the most part, though, it seems that the people most concerned with these legal battles are only concerned contingent on this confusion.

So it's interesting to see two conservative Christian media outlets approach the Hobby Lobby et al legal battles with Obamacare's HHS contraceptives coverage mandate from a very different direction. This last week, there were two articles where the lawsuits were put into a very different context.



At Christianity Today, journalist Melissa Steffan connected the legal cases to the pro-life movement. She wrote:

The battle over the mandate—and the emergency contraception it requires—has long been over personhood. Is a fertilized egg a person? Do the emergency contraceptives stop eggs from uterine implantation, ending a person's life?  

But now the legal battles against the HHS employer contraceptive mandate are shifting to very different questions of personhood: Are for-profit corporations "persons" in such a legal sense that they have religious rights? And do their religious liberties allow them to avoid the mandate?

Steffan doesn't try to articulate what the connection between those two arguments about personhood might actually be. The people she quotes -- mostly advocates for the companies suing the Obama administration -- don't approach that question either. The question is only raised, and pointed at.

It's a really interesting incongruity, though. Are the people who are dedicated to the idea that life begins at conception comfortable with this expansion of the definition of "person" to include corporations? Is this merely a pragmatic tactic, or is there an underlying philosophical connection between these two arguments about personhood?

At First Things, meanwhile, a professor from Pepperdine approached these lawsuits by connecting them to arguments about Sharia law in America.

Michael A. Helfand wrote:

The more religion has gone commercial, the more difficult it has become for courts to figure out how to treat conduct that that is simultaneously religious and commercial. Of course, these constitutional skirmishes are part of a far larger infrastructure of religious commerce. 

Notable examples include Sharia-compliant financial instruments and Jewish heter iska agreements, both of which are mechanisms for restructuring loans so as to avoid Islamic and Jewish law’s respective anti-usury rules. Religious communities have embraced contracts that use commercial forms to govern and structure a variety of religious relationships, such as employment contracts, arbitration provisions, and prenuptial agreements.

I don't entirely follow Helfand's line of reasoning. If I read him right, he's pivoting off of these lawsuits to make the case that religious laws have a place in American jurisprudence. His conclusion is that,

the best way to prevent the potential negative impact of religious law is to encourage ingenuity and creativity precisely at the nexus of religion and commerce. So long as courts continue to ensure that parties enter such agreements out of their own volition, the sophisticated drafting of agreements and structuring of relationships can provide solutions to the most worrisome religious customs and practices. Those supporting initiatives that hope to disaggregate religion and commerce miss the core insight that commercializing religion isn’t the problem: It’s the solution.

What this has to do with Hobby Lobby and other for-profit corporations opposed to insurance plans that cover employees' contraceptives, I'm not sure. It's interesting, though, to see the several emerging alternative rubrics for thinking about these legal cases besides arguments about "religious liberty."

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Francis Schaeffer and the death of Baby Doe

Francis Schaeffer's 1982 message to the Presbyterians at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was pretty simple: the philosophy of modern society is humanism, and humanism means death.

The speech was part of Schaeffer's book tour for A Christian Manifesto, which had been published the year before. That book and tour, along with 1976's book and film series How Shall We Then Live? and 1979's book and film Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, all made a sustained argument about the need for Christian activism. The pro-life movement, as such, can be traced to these arguments; the religious right as a "bloc" and a single, mobilized, political entity, was formed in part by these efforts. Schaeffer made the historical and philosophical case that undergirded the emerging movement.

The argument was about attitudes towards life and death.

Attitudes exemplified by the issue of infanticide.

The case Schaeffer made to the Presbyterians hinged on claims about infanticide, its prevalence and its popular acceptability. His philosophical critique of modern America and his proscriptive solution of Christian action both depended on the accuracy of his cultural analysis. Both were dependent on the question of whether or not Schaeffer was right about the way the world was at that moment. For that reason alone, it's worth inquiring into the question of infants killed by doctors in 1982.

The answer to the question of whether or not Schaeffer was right about infanticide in 1982 will go some ways towards answering the questions of whether or not he was right about the modern world, and right or not about humanism.

Schaeffer's abstract, philosophical critique was a critique of humanism. This is constant throughout his work, and was essential to the point he was making in February 1982.

Schaeffer told the people at Coral Ridge:

What we are facing is Humanism: Man, the measure of all things -- viewing final reality being only material or energy shaped by chance -- therefore, human life having no intrinsic value -- therefore, the keeping of any individual life or any groups of human life, being purely an arbitrary choice by society at the given moment.

This is not an obvious argument. Humanism, as articulated in the two Humanist Manifestoes, explicitly and adamantly affirms the value of human life. The first Humanist Manifesto, written in 1933, concludes with the claim that humanism will "affirm life rather than deny it." The second Humanist Manifesto, written in '73, states that "the preciousness and dignity of the individual person is a central humanist value." Schaeffer is claiming that the humanists are wrong about what humanists believe. Or, more precisely, that they misunderstand the logical consequences of consistently holding to their humanist epistemology and ontology. They don't see the contradiction between denying God and excluding revelation and the supernatural from conversations about public policies, on the one hand, and upholding the value of human life on the other. For Schaeffer, the humanists may say that human life has value but they can't say it is intrinsically valuable, and that makes all the difference.

This is not just an abstract claim, though. Schaeffer was making an argument about what was actually happening in American at that moment. He claimed that this social development was visible: Humanism has taken over and has wrought death.

As evidence of this, he offered the current practice of doctors and nurses committing infanticide. Those who looked, he said, would see how humanism, in practice, meant the devaluation of human life:

Believe me, it's everywhere. It isn't just abortion. It's infanticide. It's allowing the babies to starve to death after they are born. If they do not come up to some doctor's concept of a quality of life worth living. I'll just say in passing -- and never forget it -- it takes about 15 days, often, for these babies to starve to death....

So what we find then, is that the medical profession has largely changed -- not all doctors. I'm sure there are doctors here in the audience who feel very, very differently, who feel indeed that human life is important and you wouldn't take it, easily, wantonly. But, in general, we must say (and all you have to do is look at the TV programs), all you have to do is hear about the increased talk about allowing the Mongoloid child -- the child with Down's Syndrome -- to starve to death if it's born this way. Increasingly, we find on every side the medical profession has changed its views. The view now is, "Is this life worth saving?"

This is not a philosophical claim. It's a claim, rather, about what was actually happening in 1982, and should be a matter of record, a claim that could be verified. Where arguments about what humanists "really" believe are not likely to go anywhere, it should be a simple enough matter to establish whether or not Schaeffer was right about what was happening in American hospitals in 1982. Note that he was not here making a slippery slope argument, saying that the legalization of abortion will at some future date end up meaning that infanticide is an accepted practice. That's common in pro-life rhetoric, and Schaeffer made that argument too, but that's not what Schaeffer was saying here. He was making the claim that there was a general practice in the medical profession -- i.e., an implementation of humanism -- such that certain sorts of infants were being starved to death.

Is this true?

Were newborns being regularly killed in American hospitals -- easily, wantonly, and so on?

No.

There's one particularly famous case from that same year that would seem, on one level, to confirm what Schaeffer argued. An infant born with Down's syndrome was allowed to starve to death in a hospital in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1982, two months after Schaeffer's Florida speech. Some of the basic facts might seem to confirm his claims, but the details of that case show that Schaeffer was wrong -- importantly -- about the majority attitudes towards life and death in American hospitals. The full story of the Baby Doe case, as it's called, seriously undermine Schaeffer's argument.

Here's what happened: a child was born on Good Friday, April 1982. He was born with Down's syndrome and a disorder of the digestive system, esophageal atresia. This meant he could not eat.

There were three doctors in the case. Two recommended transporting the infant immediately to another hospital where emergency surgery could be preformed. The surgery had a 90 percent chance of success. The third -- the doctor who actually delivered the child -- said that there was another option that the parents had to consider.

They could let their child die.

The third doctor, Walter Owens, said the surgery would be painful, and possibly only the first of many, and the child would still have Down's. He suspected there were also other issues, such as brain damage. He said the child would be a "mere blob." They had a choice and they needed to know they had a choice that they had to make.

The family, which had had experiences with children with Down's, decided to let their child die. Owens told them they were being courageous, and said, "Here's how I look at it. If you let the baby die, you're going to grieve a little while. But if you go ahead with this surgery, you're going to grieve for the rest of your lives."

To this point, the story seems to align exactly with what Schaeffer predicted. Owens was a Unitarian-Universalist, incidentally, which would also fit Schaeffer's cultural analysis of the betrayal of Reformed Christian worldview and its consequences.

The story goes on, however. One of the doctors recommending the emergency surgery -- who happened to be named Schaffer -- fought for the infant's life. He appealed to the hospital authorities, and they brought in a judge on Saturday night to make a decision about this case. According to Jeff Lyons, who wrote the history of the Baby Doe case (1, 2, 3, 4), the judge was at home coloring Easter eggs with his children when the call came, and there was an emergency hearing at the hospital.

Lyons writes:

At issue was nothing less than whether parents ever have the right to refuse live-saving treatment for their children and whether a life of handicap is so abysmal as to warrant its termination at birth. 

Only rarely in American jurisprudence had such questions been raised. On the few occasions on which they had, the courts had almost invariably ruled against the parents and in favor of life. But in those instances the doctors had always been lined up against the parents. 

In Bloomington, however, it was a different matter. There existed a strong--one might say vehement--difference of clinical opinion as to what the best course of treatment was.

After hearing the evidence and the testimony of the conflicting doctors, as well as the arguments of the hospital's lawyers and a cleric, the judge took 30 minutes to deliberate. Then he ruled that it was not the court's place to make this decision: when a family is presented with two options by medical professionals, it is their right to make the choice about which course of action to take concerning a newborn infant. The family in this case had made their decision, and the child would die.

That wasn't the end of it, though.

The nurses revolted. A sign was taped to Baby Doe's crib saying "Do Not Feed." Possibly this was because of the problem with the infant's esophagus, but it was taken as a symbol of the parent's decision to starve their child. The head nurse saw the sign and responded: "Over my dead body." En masse, the nurses threatened to strike.

Francis Schaeffer, from a certain perspective, seems prescient here. At Coral Ridge, two months before, he had said that nurses would be asked to participate in the death of infants. He predicted there would be signs on cribs that said "Do Not Feed," and that nurses would be fired if they refused to follow those orders. The nurses in Bloomington did refuse, though, and they weren't fired. The hospital took their side. Instead of firing the nurses, the child was moved out of the nursery, taken to another floor, and the family was required to hire private nurses.

There was also immediate, fierce criticism of the judge, and so the decision was referred to the state's Child Protection Committee, with a guardian appointed to represent the interests of the child in that hearing. After 45 minutes of deliberation, Lyons reports, the committee returned with the same decision, affirming the rights of the parent's to make this medical decision.

Neither the court nor the committee, it's worth noting, never made any sort of decision about the value of the infant's life, or about the ways in which, perhaps, quality of life could be measured against life itself. Rather, they considered and made a ruling about who has the right to the final decision about how to respond to an infant's serious medical condition when doctors disagree. They decided, very conservatively, that the state does not have the power, nor does the hospital. The rights are the parents', in consultation with their physicians.

There was another legal challenge the next day, when the county prosecutor tried to have the child declared neglected, giving the state the authority to overrule the parent's decision. That failed, and there were then a series of other efforts: a local attorney acting on behalf of the county prosecutor applied for a temporary restraining order agains the parents; a lawyer for the National Right to Life Association filed a petition on behalf of a couple that wanted to adopt Baby Doe; an appeal was made to the Indiana Supreme Court; plans were made to appeal to the Supreme Court.

All of these failed. Mostly for legal and technical reasons.

The parents, meanwhile, named the child Walter after Owens, the doctor who'd recommended they let him die. They had the infant baptized into the Catholic Church by their parish priest. They asked their nurses when the ordeal would be over.

Others continued to fight for the infant's life, nevertheless. Protestors gathered outside the hospital with signs. The doctor who strongly recommended the emergency surgery, Schaffer, tried to break into Baby Doe's room to administer an IV, to feed the dying child. Lyon's calls it "one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of American medicine, an episode that saw one doctor guard a dying baby from another doctor who was threatening to try and save its life." The rescue mission only stopped because it was too late. The doctor said he knew that feeding the dying infant intravenously could cost him his medical license or even result in criminal charges of kidnapping. But he didn't care. It was too late, though.

At six days old, denied medical treatment and denied food, Baby Doe died.

There don't seem to be any reliable figures to indicate how many similar cases occurred in the United States in 1982. It's just not known if, as Schaeffer said, such practices were "everywhere." The fact that this case received such attention, though, and evoked such a strong response, suggests that letting Down's children or otherwise handicapped children die was not common or commonly accepted. A similar case in 1983 received similar attention, and similarly garnered outrage from the public, the medical community and legal community, indicating that while there were some doctors doing this sort of thing, they faced overwhelming resistance.

Schaeffer's description of the culture, where "the medical profession has largely changed," is simply factually wrong.

But what should be made of this? It seems significant that he was wrong. Schaeffer's cultural analysis and his philosophical analysis in this 1982 speech depended very much on the truth of the claim that infanticide was happening, and happening without any resistance. The entire argument that he made in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., can be summed up with these two arguments that both rest on this purported fact of infanticide: modern society is humanist, humanism results in the devaluation of life, and thus the modern world is now a place where infants with Down's are being nonchalantly killed.

But they weren't, though. Not nonchalantly.

According to reports, even in such liberal quarters as the Washington Post, Baby Doe's death was considered a tragedy. The American Academy of Pediatrics expressed "open concern that Baby Does' obstetric physician had made a mistake, that poor advice was given to the family and that such an event should be avoided." An article published in the Western Journal of Medicine said the doctor made a "serious judgement error," because of his own prejudice and bias. The next year, in response to the public outcry, every hospital that received federal funding was required to prominently post signs announcing "discriminatory failure to feed and care for handicapped infants ... is prohibited by federal law." Several laws were passed, following the case. Reflecting on the case 20 years later, the judge who'd been called to the Bloomington hospital on Easter eve noted that "if this situation had happened in present-day courts, there would be no doubt all action would have been taken to save the baby's life because of new state and federal laws that prohibit such acts."

If Walter Owens received any support in this case, for his opinion that the child should be allowed to die, it wasn't very vocal. Even those who opposed the Baby Doe regulations went out of their way to make it clear that they thought the doctor made a horrible decision.

All of this points to the fact that Schaeffer was wrong. The reaction to the Baby Doe case shows that the America of 1982 was not the kind of place that Francis Schaeffer thought it was. While there may have been a few who, in specific cases, asked the question, "Is this life worth saving?," that was clearly not happening "on every side." When you look at what actually was the case, what you find is the opposite of what Schaeffer said would be found. People overwhelmingly wanted to keep this infant alive, and valued his life enough to try to get the government to take away the parents' legal rights.

Schaeffer's message, to Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and in those tours in 1976, '79 and '82, was about the dangers of humanism, and how Christians should wake up because humanism had taken over their world, reshaped their country, and put the lives of America's most vulnerable in jeopardy. In this specific instance, he made very concrete claims about how that was happening, but it's clear he was wrong.

Schaeffer's cultural analysis was mistaken.

The only possible conclusions, it seems, is that either he was wrong about humanism having taken over America, or, alternatively, it's just not the case that humanism devalues human life in the way Schaeffer said it did.

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Doubt in the library

Megan Phelps-Roper, once thought to be the future of Westboro Baptist's campaign to tell America how very much it is hated by God, has now left her grandfather's church.

As she told journalist Jeff Chu, doubt came, as it so often does, from questions of epistemology and a sense of the expanse of history. Megan's situation is unusual, but this thought process follows a well-travelled route.

Chu writes:

She kept trying to conquer the doubts. Westboro teaches that one cannot trust his or her feelings. They’re unreliable. Human nature 'is inherently sinful and inherently completely sinful,' Megan explains. 'All that's trustworthy is the Bible. And if you have a feeling or a thought that’s against the church's interpretations of the Bible, then it's a feeling or a thought against God himself.'

This, of course, assumes that the church's teachings and God's feelings are one and the same. And this, of course, assumes that the church's interpretation of the Bible is infallible, that this much-debated document handed down over the centuries has, in 2013, been processed and understood correctly only by a small band of believers in Topeka. 'Now?' Megan says. 'That sounds crazy to me.'

In December, she went to a public library in Lawrence, Kansas. She was looking through books on philosophy and religion, and it struck her that people had devoted their entire lives to studying these questions of how to live and what is right and wrong. 'The idea that only WBC had the right answer seemed crazy,' she says. 'It just seemed impossible.'

Phelps-Roper has left the church, and Topeka, and is currently trying to figure out what she does believe.

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God and Mammon and religious liberty

You cannot serve both God and Mammon. At least, you can't if you're a corporation, according to the Obama administration's proposed new rules regarding what sort of organizations will be required to provide employees insurance coverage of contraceptives under Obamacare.

Previously, the Obama administration had allowed for an exemption to the contraceptives mandate that was fairly narrow. Groups were exempted only if they met four criteria: 1) their purpose was the "inculcation of religious values," 2) most of the employees shared that religion, 3) most of the people being served shared that religion, and 4) they were a non-profit organization. This defined the sort of organization the law was considering as "religious."

This definition of "religious" is the fundamental issue in a slew of lawsuits about the health care policy.

One of the main objections to this working definition was the way it deemed religious service groups to be not religious. A Catholic soup kitchen is not mainly about the "inculcation of religious values," nor does it primarily serve Catholics.

With these proposed changes to the rules, released last week, the administration acknowledges that "religion" can mean many things, and doesn't just describe houses of worship. In the proposal for new rules, it says:

The Departments agree that the exemption should not exclude group health plans of religious entities that would qualify for the exemption but for the fact that, for example, they provide charitable social services to persons of different religious faiths or employ persons of different religious faiths when running a parochial school. Indeed, this was never the Departments’ intention.

Therefore:

the Departments propose to amend the definition of religious employer ... by eliminating the first three prongs of the definition and clarifying the application of the fourth. Under this proposal, an employer that is organized and operates as a nonprofit entity and referred to in section 6033(a)(3)(A)(i) or (iii) of the Code would be considered a religious employer for purposes of the religious employer exemption.

In practice, what this would mean is that any non-profit organization can fill out a form stating their religious objections and identifying themselves as religious, and they thus opt-out of the mandate. They can then provide health insurance for their employees that fits with the requirements of their religion and the rules of Obamacare; other arrangements will be made to provide contraceptives for those employees who want it, arrangements that won't involve the religious employer.

This is designed to resolve a good many of the lawsuits while not requiring employees to be disadvantaged by their employers beliefs. Whether it will or not is an open question, I suppose, but that's the purpose of the new rules, to strike a balance between accommodating religious belief and not allowing religious practices to be imposed on or negatively affect those who don't believe. The administration says:

The proposed accommodations would provide such plan participants and beneficiaries contraceptive coverage without cost sharing while insulating their employers or institutions of higher education from contracting, arranging, paying, or referring for such coverage.

The way the balance is struck, here, is by broadening the legal definition of religious organization. Now, to be counted as religious organization, only two things are necessary: the group must considered itself to be and hold itself out to be religious, and there can't be any profit.

This means the lawsuits that have interested me most, which are about the religious rights of for-profit corporations, will go forward. This compromise specifically excludes them. Hobby Lobby, Inc., and other corporations with religious owners will still have to take their case to the courts to argue that corporations have religions and have the right to exercise them.

There have been a variety of responses to the proposed new rules. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops declined to comment for the Associated Press, and said they're studying the proposal. Law firms involved in the cases defending for-profit corporations that have religious objections to insurance plans covering employee's contraceptives have said this is "picking and choosing who is allowed to exercise faith," and that the government should create an exemption for any "moral decision," disregarding anything else. Other responses have been crazier. At National Review, one writer interprets the compromise as a "double dose of authoritarianism" designed to force Catholic nuns to have birth control coverage.

Here's a thought provoking question, though. Matthew Schmitz of First Things asks:

The Obama administration believes that conscientious objections to contraception should prevail in the non-profit sector, but not in for-profit corporations. Why? Do employees of non-profits need contraception less? Do the conscience claims of their leaders matter more? Why are tax-exempt organizations granted more rights than those which pay taxes?

To put it another way, why can't a corporation serve both God and Mammon? What is it about being for-profit that necessarily excludes an organization from being legally considered religious?

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