Marriage traditionalists shoot the messaging

There's a consensus growing among marriage traditionalists that they have lost the political and public battles over same-sex marriage. Now, it seems, the fight is over. It's just a matter of time. Whether it was electoral losses that made it seem this way, or polls that show that there've been dramatic shifts of public opinion, or something else, pessimism has won.

There's not a consensus about why, though. There are evolving discussions -- fights? -- trying to come to some conclusion about this. Why did the conservatives lose this? Why did they lose so suddenly, so dramatically, so apparently irrevocably, but most especially just, why did they lose? Even a few years ago, it didn't seem so inevitable.

Nathan Hitchen, of the John Jay Institute, thinks he has the answer. Marriage traditionalists lost because they were too rational. They got carried away by the clear logic of their arguments, and forgot that arguments alone can't sway the body politic.

It wasn't the message. It was the messaging.

Hitchen writes:

Better arguments from natural law, while necessary and helpful, are unlikely to turn the tide of opinion because many people are not convinced rationally in the first place: television, songs, friends, and their own experiences shape their understanding of love and marriage. In short, we are shaped by unconscious influences, social and personal narratives, and emotion [...]. 

What persuades people falls outside the boundaries of classical or formal logic: emotion, deeply held narratives, stories, metaphorical thinking, and ideas that stick in people's minds. There are no mere 'facts' that make sense to an audience as a basis for further reasoning disconnected from the emotional network of beliefs they already hold about their identity.

Hitchen wants the religious right, et al, to learn to deploy emotions, narratives, metaphors, and other extra-logical forces. He thinks the case against same-sex marriage should be re-made, but this time not so strictly logically, not so dependent on theories of Natural Law.

Should happen, and can. The piece is billed a "primer," and offers strategies, practical advice, for winning this culture battle. Practical advice such as:

• Advocates should counter by telling bigger stories that include both sides in a way that repositions victim and victimizer and changes the hero. Take the revisionist story’s givens and make them not-givens.
• Pro-marriage messengers could tell personal stories Connection and Creativity plots that tell how they as children had problems that only fathers and mothers together could have solved, thereby generating emotional meaning unique to conjugal marriage. (Emphases original).

A few things:

1. Suggesting that your opponents haven't been persuaded by your arguments because they're immune to reason is not typically a persuasive argument. It's not a very likely to be appealing to those who have, in the last decade, changed their minds and come to accept or support same-sex marriage. To say people have rejected not just your reasoning, but reason itself, is, at best, demeaning to those you're trying to persuade.
2. Political opponents of gay marriage have used narratives, emotions, memes, etc. The idea that they haven't is pretty silly, if you remember any of the last 50 years (Adam and Steve? Man-dog? An attack on marriage? Radical homosexual agenda?) One of the main functions of the Natural Law arguments that Hitchen's thinks have failed, recall, was to rationalize and legitimize the once politically successful but now politically unsuccessful argument from disgust.
3. Hitchens underrates the strongest argument for gay rights, and same-sex marriage specifically, which hasn't been an emotional trick or trope or rhetorical move, but gay people themselves. The main problem with arguments against gay marriage has been that, whether rational or emotional, they're significantly less persuasive to people who know and care about gay people. A story that "repositions victim and victimizer and changes the hero" seems unlikely to touch that. 

It's possible this is the wrong way to think about this primer, though. Maybe it shouldn't be thought of as a plan for new tactics in ongoing political battles, but as a tool to reassure conservatives that even though they feel like they're on the wrong side of history, they're actually obviously right. The primer seems like it will likely work, to the extent it does, to safeguard the message against serious self-questioning. It will re-direct internal criticism to the more incidental matter of messaging.

The fundamental claim being made is that Americans haven't rejected what these people are saying, but just how they're saying it. That seems pretty clearly wrong, but also a comforting thing to tell yourself when you're faced with round after round of rejection.

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'I cannot trust the Christian church'

James Baldwin, on the racism of America's white churches:

In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin writes that African Americans have generally been bewildered that white Americans think of themselves as they do, as obviously good, and good at heart, despite the evidence of their institutions and history. He writes:

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negros know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents -- or, anyway, mothers -- know about their children, and that they often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and thwat they have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency really has been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.

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The "nones" of 87 years ago

Most of the debates about the "nones" have had to do with interpretation. The question is, who are they? The question is, what does it mean?

A question that hasn't been so prominently raised is whether this new thing is really so new.

Charles Richter, of (Ir)religion in America, has turned up some evidence it's not. From the University of Illinois student newspaper in 1926, a letter from a student questioning the interpretations of a survey of university students' religious affiliations. According to the letter, only one student out of more than 10,000 identified as an atheist, but there were more than a few that were religiously unaffiliated.

The letter writer, who signs A.B.C, argues:

Shall we say that only one is an atheist and the rest are religious, but merely indifferent to church attendance, or shall we take into consideration the deadliness of Christian intolerance and admit that some of the 1,828 did not register as atheists for fear of ostracism? I am an atheist, but when I registered I did not admit that fact because I knew the registers would be made public, and some enthusiastic religionist might bring the information to the attention of the Great Christian Majority, to my discomfort.

There's a familiarity of this argument -- atheists need to "come out," and so on. This is a very contemporary debate, happening 87 years ago. While clearly the ranks of the unaffiliated have swelled since the days when less than two percent of university students said they didn't belong to any specific religion, the category of those who don't fit comfortably into a religious demographics survey, it turns out, is not new.

It's just that they didn't have a clever name for it in 1926.

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Some facts about women who have had abortions. Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the supreme court decision that legalized abortion in the United States. 

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Understanding the "nones" as a demographic dissent

Some people are very uncomfortable with the category of race. Whether for personal, biographical reasons, they just feel like they don't fit any particular category, or for political or philosophical reasons, they get the US census at the beginning of every decade and balk at the question, What is this person's race?

This reticence, interestingly, does not show up in the final results. The final census doesn't list some small percentage of people as not having a race or as not having answered the question. This is because, as NPR recently reported:

When respondents don't choose a race, the Census Bureau assigns them one, based on the racial makeup of their neighborhood, among other factors. The method leads to a less accurate count.

A similar phenomena has happened with the new studies of religious demographics, where an increasing number of people have refused to answer the question, the now notorious "nones." Analysts have tried to interpret this response in various ways. The fundamental mistake that has been made, as I have argued, is to treat the people who answer the religious affiliation question this way as a unified group of people.

The problem may go deeper than that, though.



My interpretation of this group has been to insist on pluralizing the "nones," and talk about how cultural shifts have allowed for a new variety of ways to position oneself in relationship to religion. I.e., there are more people willing to self-identify as atheists and humanists, but there are also increased numbers of religious people who understand themselves to be religious but who aren't affiliated with any group, there are those who are affiliated but uncomfortable with public identification, the spiritual-but-not-religious, and so on.

When I have done that, though, I was still insisting on reading this group as defined in terms of ways of affiliating and belonging, as essentially being a complicated subset of a category but still, despite the complications, in that category of religious affiliation. Perhaps, though, that is what the "nones" object to.

Another way to understand this group is as objecting to religious classifications. Not strictly religious affiliations, though there's some of that, but to the project, in general, of religious demographics. 

Elizabeth Drescher, who I have criticized on this before, makes this point excellently in a recent piece, "None" means "None". After re-reading her more recent piece, and reflecting back on a point that Michael J. Altman made about the implicit problems of understanding the "nones" in terms of affiliation, I'm having to rethink my approach. It still seems fairly accurate, as far as it goes, but the unwieldy complication of the taxonomies of (dis)affiliation cause me to suspect I'm missing the point when someone says "none."

Drescher reports on one interview with a young "none" that's specifically enlightening in this regard:

When I asked if he would see himself as 'spiritual but not religious,' he rolled his eyes and groaned dramatically.  

'I don't want you to be thinking of me in terms of spirituality or religion,' he continued. 'Not my religion—if I have one—not your religion. These designations just should not be part of how we relate to each other no matter what we believe.' So, he eventually concluded, 'You can go ahead and call me ‘none.’ But only if you know I really mean "none" by that.'

The suggestion, I think, is quite interesting: rather than thinking of this group as religious in a specific way, might we not think of them as simply dissenting from the category?

Perhaps the "nones" aren't mainly to be thought of as religious or non-religious in a new or different way, but as a group that has a problem with the question, in much the same way that some protest self-identifying with a particular race.

Those people aren't themselves a new demographic, but rather are saying that they think the category is a problem.

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Michele Bachmann's post-eleciton disasters

Michele Bachmann's ill-fated campaign for the GOP presidential nomination ended over a year ago, after a brutal loss in the Iowa Caucuses. Bachmann, who is now returning to Congress for her another term, had serious religious right bona fides, having been politicized by Francis Schaeffer in 1977, but couldn't rally the Republican faithful and couldn't manage the necessary transformation into a plausible national candidate.

Her campaign went from disaster to disaster.

Her campaign is still going from disaster to disaster, long after it's over.

A year after the campaign, Peter Waldron, the Bachmann staffer in charge of evangelical outreach is now saying the congresswoman is refusing to pay staffers for work they did. It's a relatively small amount of money. Bachmann ended her presidential campaign with more than $2 million in her war chest and reportedly raised more money in her congressional campaign than any other candidate, but is, according to the disgruntled ex-staffer, refusing to pay out on less than $5,000 of outstanding bills. Which seems like strange behavior.

Or, as Bachmann's one-time head of Christian outreach put it: "It is sobering to think that a Christian member of Congress would betray her testimony to the Lord and the public by withholding earned wages from deserving staff."

The official response has been accusations that Waldron is lying. Which he may be, though that only calls into question the Bachmann campaigns competency in another way. This man, after all, has a historythat would have given another political team pause before making him a key part of its strategy.

There's been some speculation that this conflict stems from a separate post-campaign disaster, the ongoing investigation into the alleged theft of a list of homeschooler's e-mails. According to the Star Tribune, the Bachmann campaign eventually paid the homeschool group $2,000 for using or misusing the list, but the campaign is also being sued by the individual they got the list from and the criminal investigation into how that happened is still open.

Whether that's the source of the conflict or not, the public fight between Waldron and the Bachmann loyalists has now escalated, with the ex-staffer now making colorful accusations about unusual things going on in the campaign and the extreme extent to which Bachmann let her staff control her. Things were so bad, according to Waldron, that avid supporters didn't recognize the Bachmann they thought they knew, and "More than one staffer was grateful to God that she didn't win the nomination."

This isn't reliable information, of course, but there is a clear pattern of very bad judgment from this Republican leader of the religious right. Whether one believes the ex-staffer or thinks he's crazy or both, the conclusion would be the same: Bachmann lacks the ability to surround herself with reasonable, reliable people. A good number of her history of crises can be attributed directly to this fact, and she'll likely continue, despite her success at fundraising and winning the vote of her Minnesota district, careening from disaster to disaster.

Her fiercest supporters and critics hold that this is because of her strong ideological positions. It seems possible, though, that it's just incompetance.

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'A mode of a priesthood in a church forever'

The poet Charles Olson was born 102 years ago today.

Olson, in a terribly, hilariously cranky interview with the the Paris Review, said of his poetry,

I write a poem simply to create a mode of a priesthood in a church forever, so that a poem for me is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being. If you want to talk about actuality, let’s talk about actuality. And it falleth like a doom upon us all. But it falleth from above, and if that's not straight the whole thing is doodled and if straight then you can modality all you want. You can do anything, literally. Right? That I think is one of the exciting possibilities of the present. Modal throughout -- that's what I love about today’s kids. I like them because I think they’re modaled throughout. I don’t think their teachers are at all. I mean I'm almost like astringent here. I sit back in my lollipop Gloucester and don't do anything. A dirty lousy cop-out. I remember way back when I was young, ten years ago. I was lobbing 'em in. Now it's the Vietnam War. Dig? You follow me? It was marvelous. Playing catch, if I may say that -- with a European audience as well. But I mean catch -- we were playing catch. And he's a goddamn nice fielder. All that Jewish Bronx shit. I don’t mean because it’s Jewish. It’s this late Jewish, late east Bronx literature which to a geologist like me is just uninteresting. A geochronologist geologist. The world machines -- that’s what they got now. The world machines. When will government cease being a nuisance to everybody.

Elsewhere, perhaps in a different mood, perhaps more seriously, he said, "right form, in any given poem, is the only and exclusively possible extension of content under hand."

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The obsession with the obsession with the end of the world

The first episode of the reality TV show Doomsday Preppers was watched by 1.29 million people. It is the most-watched show in National Geographic's history. By the time the fourth episode of the second season aired last month, ratings had suffered a little, but still there were more than 700,000 viewers.

It's very unlikely that all those 700,000 viewers were themselves interested in ways to prepare for the end of the world. It seems unlikely even that such a show would make sense, economically, if it catered only to those sympathetic to the ideas of the subjects of the show. And really, the people featured in this show are presented as strange, as freaks, as laughable.

To quote the New York Times review:

Watch [...] for a short while and, unless you’re a prepper yourself, you might be moderately amused at the absurd excess on display and at what an easy target the prepper worldview is for ridicule.

It may be the case that there's a "burgeoning 'prepper' movement," as USA Today claims, but there's little actual evidence of that. Such people do clearly exist, but that's not a new thing. And that's not why such a show exists.

If you want to explain the reason such a show as this exists, you have to look not only at the existence of the people featured in the show, asking why there are so many people dedicating their lives to preparing for the end of the world, but also at the audience.

Why are there so many people so fascinated by people so obsessed by the end of the world?

This is true, too, with the slate of apocalyptic predictions all due tomorrow, the Mayan calendar and the black hole at the center of the galaxy and the hidden planet set to collide with earth. The number of people who take such theories seriously is vanishingly miniscule. The number of people who take seriously the people who take such theories seriously, however, is quite sizable. How do we explain that?

I'm very skeptical, personally, about reports of how widely such apocalyptic theories are believed. A lot of the accounts of belief seem to be very vague or very naive about what it means to believe, and there's also a strong, strong tendency towards credulity when it comes to other people's credulity. However, even if we accept the phenomenon of apocalyptic beliefs without any skepticism, that wouldn't explain the cultural phenomena of obsession with the end of the world. Because that obsession, in American culture at this moment, is not just and not even most basically obsession with the end of the world, but obsession with obsession about the end.

Beyond the matter of "true believers," there's a cultural phenomenon right now of avid interest in true believers. There's a market, here, and it's booming.

It's not enough to just explain the people featured on Doomsday Preppers, the people out there who aren't joking about Nibiru, the people who are violent in their belief in the possibility of zombie apocalypse. If we want to understand this, we can't just look at the obsessed on the TV screen. We have to also look at us looking at the TV screen.

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Obamacare prevents abortions

A new study suggests that the Affordable Care Act, i.e., "Obamacare," may be "the single most effective piece of 'pro-life' legislation in the past forty years," reducing abortions by up to 78 percent (!). The study tested the effects of Obamacare by covering the costs of birth control -- particularly more expensive but more effective methods -- for poor and currently uninsured or under-insured women.

The results:

"Between 2008 and 2010, abortion rates in CHOICE [study] participants ranged from 4.4 to 7.5 per 1,000 after adjusting for age and race. These rates are considerably less than the rates in St. Louis City and County for the same years and far below the national rate of 19.6 per 1,000. Using these data, we then estimated the difference in abortion rates and number of abortions prevented each year if CHOICE were available to the entire population of the region. Based on the number needed to treat, one abortion could be prevented for every 79–137 women and teenagers provided the CHOICE intervention.

".... changes in contraceptive policy simulating the Contraceptive CHOICE Project would prevent as many as 62–78% of abortions performed annually in the United States."

In the first year of the study, providing birth control for more than 9,000 women prevented an estimated 3,000 pregnancies that would have likely resulted in abortions. In comparison to women from the surrounding area in the same socio-economic bracket, the number of abortions in subsequent years was reduced by nearly 2,000 per year.

The study -- done by Jeffrey F. Peipert, Tessa Madden, Jenifer E. Allsworth and Gina M. Secura at the Washington University School of Medicine --  concludes that this is a "a clinically and statistically significant reduction in abortion rates," supporting the idea that "Unintended pregnancies may be reduced by providing no-cost contraception and promoting the most effective contraceptive methods."

Providing "no-cost contraception" is exactly what Obamacare would do, if not gutted or repealed by Republicans.

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Ritual, money, & the death of a pet

By some accounts, the function of religion in daily life, and especially of religious ritual, is to lend solemnity to otherwise puny, pallid human moments.

I think of this as the Peter Ivanovich theory of religion, named after a character in Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Iliyich. Ivanovich, at the start of the story, finds himself at a funeral and "like everyone else on such occasions, entered feeling uncertain what he would have to do. All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to cross oneself."

This is religion as a response to what could be called existential awkwardness. Ritual being what you do when you don't know what to do. The idea is that religion and/or ritual serve to mark, to recognize the seriousness and importance of a moment that would, without that mark, not seem that important at all. There is, in the act, an insistence that something is important and meaningful, despite how it might seem.

This is how I would see pet funerals, the practice of treating deceased pets to the same processes and ceremonies traditionally reserved for humans.



In a mostly horrid bit of journalism, Business Week recently re-discovered the industry of pet funerals, as seems to happen somewhat regularly. Mostly this piece is a baseless trend story, written up as a will-you-believe-this-ridiculousness?, without actually demonstrating much interest in understanding what might explain this "phenomena" or why people, apparently lots of them, want funerals for their cats and dogs and pot-bellied pigs and hamsters.

There's one interesting moment of insight, though. At the very end, Bob Walczyk, the apparently empathy-less owner of Forever Friends in Green Bay, Wisc., notes that services such as his allow people to solemnize their pets' deaths and lives, and to do something, perform some act, that declares the importance relationships with their pets.

Except, for Walczyk, what allows people to mark out meaningfulness in the face of apparent meaningnessless isn't religion, and isn't ritual. But money.

As the reporter writes,

"the most valuable secret he’s learned after years in the business, Walczyk says, is that selling a pet funeral means never offering the lowest price. Customers aren't looking for value; they're looking for quality.  

 "'We're the most expensive place in town,' Walczyk says with a laugh. 'And everybody still comes to us.'"

Maybe one should update Tolstoy: "All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to spend money."

One way to think of this would be as a market essentially functioning to replace religion in modern life. I wonder, though, if it might not be more helpful to broaden the standard understanding of ritual, to think about how consumption can also be ritualistic, and how, whether people are religious or not, there's still this need to mark out aspects and moments of life as different, and rituals still serve this important, Peter Ivanovich-function in people's lives.

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Obama's blasphemy law

Ruling in favor of Westboro Baptist Church, last year, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the church members' very offensive speech was still protected by the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. Even though that speech was offensive, and even though it was outside a U.S. soldier's funeral.

Roberts wrote, "The fact that Westboro spoke in connection with a funeral ... cannot by itself transform the nature of Westboro’s speech."

Those opposing the church's protests -- which are famous for provocative slogans such as "God Hates Fags," "God Hates America," "Pray for More Dead Soldiers," and "You Will Eat Your Babies" -- had argued that, specifically because these signs were outside a funeral, they were different than if they'd been elsewhere.

President Barack Obama endorsed that argument that funerals are different this month, in a statement he made as he signed HR 1627 into law. The law -- sponsored by Republican congressmen from Florida, Ohio, Colorado and Tennessee -- limits just a little bit more Westboro Baptist's ability to protest America, declare God's condemnations and generally be provocative in the exercise of their religion. Obama supported this limiting of speech, he said, because of a "sacred duty." Where the lawyers in the Westboro court case and Samuel Alito, the one justice who dissented from the Supreme Court ruling, argued this sort of speech is different because at a funeral it's more hurtful and harmful, Obama instead argued this speech is wrong because it is blasphemous.

Blasphemous not against God, per se, but against a sense of secular sacredness. Against that which is holy in what has been called America's civil religion.

 The relevant portion of the bill reads:

"PROHIBITION.—For any funeral of a member or former member of the Armed Forces .... it shall be unlawful for any person to engage in an activity during the period beginning 120 minutes before and ending 120 minutes after such funeral, any part of which activity—

(1)(A) takes place within the boundaries of the location of such funeral or takes place within 300 feet of the point of the intersection between—

(i) the boundary of the location of such funeral; and (ii) a road, pathway, or other route of ingress to or egress from the location of such funeral;

(B) and includes any individual willfully making or assisting in the making of any noise or diversion—

(i) that is not part of such funeral and that disturbs or tends to disturb the peace or good order of such funeral; and (ii) with the intent of disturbing the peace or good order of such funeral."

President Obama on Aug. 6, the day he signed HR 1627.

Obama said in his signing statement:

"I think all Americans feel we have a moral, sacred duty towards our men and women in uniform.  They protect our freedom, and it’s our obligation to do right by them.  This bill takes another important step in fulfilling that commitment."

Highlighting this specific section of the 45-page law that seeks to restrain the Westboro Baptist protests (or others like it), he said:

"I am very pleased to be signing this bill into law.  The graves of our veterans are hallowed ground.  And obviously we all defend our Constitution and the First Amendment and free speech, but we also believe that when men and women die in the service of their country and are laid to rest, it should be done with the utmost honor and respect."

The argument here is one of sacred time and sacred space, which ought not be defiled.

For Roberts, the funeral changes nothing. Speech on "broad issues of interest to society at large" is the same as it was two hours before or after, the same 100 feet away as it is 300. Space and time remain secular; nothing is transformed by the fact of the funeral. For Obama, on the other hand, there is a transformation. A sanctification. The time around the funeral of a soldier and the space around the funeral become "hollowed."

As Robert Bellah said, famously, in 1967, "American civil religion is still very much alive."

It's in this sense of "American civil religion" that Obama's invocation of a sense of sacredness is perhaps best understood. Where there are other arguments for limiting this sort of speech, he chose this one. "Civil religion" is a tricky term. Not least because Bellah -- who hasn't himself been in love with the term he popularized in this context -- offered descriptions that were somewhat unwieldy. The basic idea, though, involves exactly this sort of argument. Civil religion involves public rhetoric that appeals to a transcendent reality that's not related to any revealed religion, but to a sacred that's sensed as revealed in America and American history. That "transcendence" is understood as immanent to all Americans, making it secular at the same time it's decidedly not. It's supposed to be easily and immediately recognizable to Americans, and also act as the ultimate ground of an argument, justification for a policy.

Bellah says this civil religion is about the "universal and transcendent religious reality as seen in or, one could almost say, as revealed through the experience of the American people."

Classic examples of this include the rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, and also such everyday occurrences as invocations of the "Founding Fathers." Every president in recent memory has made this appeal to the transcendent truth understood and accepted by Americans to be revealed in America, to the point it's hard to imagine a president not doing this. It's like American exceptionalism plus.

The important point is that the appeal can be contrasted to an appeal to the common welfare. Most arguments in the public sphere are grounded finally in something being generally, socially good. A proposal is understood as justified to the extend it's beneficial for the general public. When there is a dispute about policy in modern democracies, be taxes or abortion or whatever, the assumption on all sides is that each side respectively believes itself to be right, and there's agreement on what "right" means and what it would mean to be that. That is, it's accepted without question that policies are to be judged by their results in the lives of the people. This is the so-called "naked" public square, where the grounds for arguing for that which is good are strictly secular.

This can be contrasted to a directly religious argument, where a given religion and, importantly, that religion's authority, serves as ground for argument. I.e., "because the Bible says," and arguments of that nature. These grounds don't offer themselves up to general evaluation and deliberation, but are understood as fixed and final, "absolute," affirmed not by the demos of democracy, but by the (holy) ground itself. Such grounds are not even rightly considered res publica, in that they're essentially inaccessible to the public except for purposes of invocation. 

What Obama is doing here, in making an appeal to the sacred and the hallowed, but a "sacred" and a "hallowed" accessible and immanent to (ostensibly) all Americans regardless of creed, is thus neither secular nor, in an important way, not secular.

A child from Westboro Baptist protests at a funeral.

The argument isn't that Westboro Baptist's exercise of speech is somehow bad for the American people (though that argument could be made). It's not that the social costs of allowing their offensive behavior is so egregious it's necessary to curtail the right of Free Speech at least a little. But it's also not appeal to special revelation, some fixed truth separate from the general experience of the American people. It's supposed to be something that all Americans know and affirm instinctively, and yet is also absolute in the sense it's affirmed as good and true entirely apart from the general welfare, and affirmed as essentially not needing any affirmation.

That is to say, the argument underlying the President's decision to sign into law a limitation of the First Amendment's guarantee of the freedom of speech is that the space and time around a soldier's funeral are fundamentally different from other spaces and times. They're transformed. And holy. But holy in this very peculiar way, where the secular is transcendent, the transcendent secular.

And protesting at a funeral, instead of an exercise of a fundamental American right, is blasphemous, an offense against that special "hallowedness" revealed in America.

One can almost hear Justice Roberts repeating that "The fact that Westboro spoke in connection with a funeral ... cannot by itself transform the nature of Westboro’s speech."

There's really no way that I know that one can argue about whether it does or doesn't. As with all matters of revelation, one either accepts that soldiers' funerals are self-evidently different, or one doesn't. Westboro's placards either appear as simple speech, offensive in the normal way, or as more than that, as a violation of something sacred.

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Shane Claiborne, symbol of a possibility

Shane Claiborne, it turns out, can stand for Germans symbolically as representing one end of a range of the possibilities of what Christianity can be.

Claiborne -- of The Simple Way -- was referenced in a recent German opinion piece about (re)discovering the Christian faith, mentioned as an example of Christianity that is "radikaler als Punk oder Revolution," "more radical than punk or revolution." The authors, Elke Naters and Sven Lager, are Germans living in South Africa, where they escaped their Berliner ennui and found their faith. They speak of that faith specifically in the context of South Africa, but the raise Claiborne as an example of this kind of thing they're talking about existing in the West.

He's cited, too, as a counter-example to the one their German friends raise when they think of active and committed Christianity: George W. Bush. Claiborne is a representative of another alternative American Christianity, and is used in the piece to represent a version of Christianity that bourgeois and broadly liberal Germans might find compelling.

They affirm this kind of Christianity, which they present, kind of, as a challenge to Germans: They believe the Bible, they believe Jesus resurrected "und in uns lebt," "and lives in us," and they believe in eternal life, heaven and hell. This, they add, has a practical effect, a social consequence, as "wir glauben an ein Leben vor dem Tod," "we believe in life before death."

Naters and Lager write that Claiborne is an example of this life:

"Seither sehen wir die Kraft des Glaubens nicht nur in Südafrika. Der Amerikaner Shane Claiborne zum Beispiel hat schon viele Jahre vor der Occupy-Bewegung 10.000 Dollar in Münzen und kleinen Scheinen auf die Wall Street gekippt, und einen Tumult verursacht, dass die Straße abgesperrt werden musste. Radikale Großzügigkeit verschließt die Türen der Gier – so lautete seine christliche Botschaft."

"Since then, we have seen the power of faith not only in South Africa. The American Shane Claiborne, for example, had been at it already many years before the Occupy Movement dumped $10,000 in coins and small bills on Wall Street and the tumult caused the street to have to be locked down. Radical generosity closes the doors of greed -- that was his Christian message."

Claiborne strikes me as an odd figure to have this function. Not because he doesn't preach this message Naters and Lager describe, but just because he's such a relatively minor figure, in the scheme of things. Why wasn't Jimmy Carter the counterpoint to George Bush? Here Claiborne is, though, in the German press, representing a different kind of Christianity.

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The new irrelevance of Rick Warren

There's something really about odd Rick Warren's explanation for why he's cancelled the planned Obama-Romeny forum. The megachurch pastor and best-selling author had announced he would reprise his role as presidential job interviewer, but now he won't.

Because:

"We created the civil forums to promote civility and personal respect between people with major differences .... The forums are meant to be a place where people of goodwill can seriously disagree on significant issues without being disagreeable or resorting to personal attack and name-calling. But that is not the climate of today's campaign."

Isn't this completely backwards, though? There's a lack of civility, so the forum is supposed to promote civility, but there isn't civility, so the forum is cancelled. But if what the forum was intended to accomplish were a fiat accompli, then what would be the point?

It's a strange argument.

One suspects something else must be going on.
Perhaps it's the politics of a Warren interview event for the respective campaigns. There was a report the campaigns nixed the thing, not Warren, and he's announcing he's cancelling it as a way to save face.

One could see how the whole thing would be just problematic for Obama and Romney. Neither of them really stood to gain. Obama would likely face hostile questions on same-sex marriage, which came up last time, when Obama's position was much more amenable to Warren than it is now. And abortion again too. These aren't the issues Obama is campaigning on, and his answers are not likely to swing any voters or motivate any of those in Warren's audience in his direction. At best, I guess, Obama could placate social conservatives, though it's hard to see how that happens. For Romney, too, the possible pitfalls seem much more serious than the potential gains. He could face hostile questions about his Mormonism. He could get attacked on his inconsistent record on social conservative issues, or even the current positions he espouses such as abortion being acceptable in cases of rape. It's hard to see how Warren steers the conversation towards the topics Romney wants to talk about.

It seems that the sense is that this campaign will not be won on the kinds of issues Warren cares about. But it could be lost on those issues.

Another way to think about what's going on here is that Warren just has failed to make himself a plausible public gate keeper. A certain amount of neutrality is necessary for one to be a respectable, acceptable host of a forum. When Warren was positioning himself as a "post-culture war" kind of evangelical, who took a more liberal position on issues such as the environment or AIDs in Africa, there was at least an argument he'd be even-handed in his criticism of the candidates. As someone more publicly associated with opposition to California's Proposition 8 and saying that Obama administration's policies amount to a "crumbling of our constitution's first guaranteed freedom: the freedom of religion," he doesn't seem like someone who's going to be good at facilitating a conversation. He doesn't seem to be moving past the culture war in any meaningful way.

The loser here is Warren, given that he still seems to want to be a power player, a power broker and king maker. His position as religious authority on the public square has evaporated in the last four years. Whether it's the politics that have changed or Warren himself, his ability to exert an influence here is gone.

Maybe he's not the only loser, though. I thought that, in the last election, the respective candidates' answers to Warren's question about evil were maybe the most interesting and really the clearest things said about underlying, governing philosophies.

While it's ridiculous and ahistorical to think this campaign is somehow dirtier or more aggressive than others, or more that way than ever, that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. It would have been nice to hear the candidates try to thoughtfully answer some big, fundamental questions. If Warren could have done that, it could have been a good thing.

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WPA Federal Arts Project mural in Eugene, Ore., painted by Carl Morris.

Morris, in an oral history:

"We left the houseboat and we had moved to New York, because I had already been told no [by the committee deciding who would paint a mural in Eugene, Ore]. While we were there a funny thing happened. A friend of ours said, 'I don't know what you think of fortune tellers, but there is one I would think you would find amusing down in the Village if you would like to come down.' We said, 'Sure.' This fortune teller not only told an awful lot of things I didn't want to hear but also said, 'You will get a letter that will send you west.' I said, 'O.K. I'm going to get a letter.' Went home and got this letter from the department saying that I'd been awarded this commission. So we moved back out here and Hilda came to Portland and found a house for us. I went down to Eugene and spent time down there going through the lumber industry and agriculture and all of that, and completely reworked the whole idea all over again. Then, I don't know why these things always have to happen with drama, but again then I was awarded the final acceptance on this, we of course had to have a bottle of scotch. And woke up the next morning in such a condition that I think I heard the words Pearl Harbor five times before it penetrated."

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America's first atheist

"Almighty Freedom! give my venturous song
The force, the charm that to thy voice belong;
Tis thine to shape my course, to light my way,
To nerve my country with the patriot lay,
To teach all men where all their interest lies,
How rulers may be just and nations wise:
Strong in thy strength I bend no suppliant knee,
Invoke no miracle, no Muse but thee."

-- Joel Barlow, The Columbiad: Book I.

Barlow is not thought of as a significant figure of late 18th, early 19th century America. He's a little noted epic poet, and a minor diplomat remembered only really for drafting the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, which contains the controversial clause, "As the government of the United States of America is not founded in any sense on the Christian religion."

He is significant, though, as possibly America's first atheist.

James Turner, in his book Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America, suggests Barlow is a plausible candidate for America's first atheist. There may, of course, have been an underground of unbelief in America in the late 1700s, but the evidence we have of the era's skepticism indicates it was directed towards the authority of the clergy, the specifics of creeds and dogmas, and the status of revelation. Not towards God per se. Skepticism was skepticism of "superstition," but that didn't often extend to include metaphysics as such, or the idea of God as revealed in the order of things. The deists and those of that inclination wanted to rationalize religion, but considered atheism a slur to be avoided. Tom Paine, for example, started out his attack or revelation and organized religion by stating, "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life."

According to Turner, God was understood as epistemologically necessary, even for those who rejected organized religion. Knowledge was thought only possible via science, and science required nature be consistent and regulated by discoverable rules. "God" was the ground of those rules, and thus the guarantor of rationality. To be skeptical of God was to be skeptical of the possibility of knowledge.

That was more radical than most of the era's radicals were willing to be.

Turner writes, "The known unbelievers of Europe and America before the French Revolution numbered fewer than a dozen .... disbelief in God remained scarcely more plausible than disbelief in gravity."

One of those who came to disbelief with the French Revolution was Barlow.

At least to an extent.

Turner suggests Barlow flirted with the idea of atheism, but then drew back. Perhaps because it was too radical. Perhaps because that active unbelief was only sustainable in the context of France at the time of revolution. Even if he didn't withdraw from the idea of atheism, or at some point again take up deist beliefs, Barlow masked his unbelief, and didn't openly proclaim it. This might of been because, as his biographer Richard Buel, Jr., explains, with the failure of the revolution in France and the increase in religiousness in America with the Second Great Awakening, an outright rejection of all conceptions of God was politically untenable. Propagating atheism would have completely marginalized Barlow, so he maintained a public position of "rational religion," skeptical but within the bounds acceptable to the American public.

Barlow came to his tentative atheism through the influence of Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, who published anti-religious works anonymously in Amsterdam and hosted the Parisan salon that contained many or most of the known unbelievers preceding the French Revolution. D'Holbach argued that "The universe, that vast assemblage of every thing that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects." Holding to that conception of materialism, he was, it has been noted, "long and loud" in his "expressions of atheism." This was so provocative a position, at that point, even Voltaire disavowed it.

In 1795, six years after the French Revolution began, Barlow wrote a letter from France to America praising d'Holbach's work. "I rejoice," he wrote, "in the progress of good sense over the damnable imposture of Christian mummery." In the same letter, Barlow endorsed d'Holbach's depiction of the Apostle Paul as a "famous Montebank."

According to Buel, Barlow was slow, though, to move from criticism of Christianity to outright atheism. Buel writes,

"Entries Barlow made in his notebooks between 1799 and 1801 are sprinkled with references to writings that maintained there was no such thing as an intelligent God and that all religions were illusions. By 1802 these ideas had become Barlow's own. He then objected to prayers to a sentient Supreme Being on the grounds that reason and intelligence were attributes of a dependent rather than an independent agent. If God were indeed sovereign, he would be the equivalent of nature and, as such, without intelligence."

Implicit in this account of his rejection of the God of deists is the epistemological problem of atheism Turner describes. Whereas "natural theology," be it orthodox or deist, posits a supernatural designer of nature, ensuring the orderedness of nature, Barlow finds this idea of an intelligent Supreme Being nonsensical. Specifically because he thinks the conditions necessary for "Supreme" and for being "intelligent" are contradictory. Note, though, that this would also imply that nature is reason-less, which, as Turner explains it, would have undermined the foundational idea of the science of the time, which was that reason and order, in the forms of natural laws, could be detected. It's not clear how or if Barlow imagined himself getting out of this conundrum, but it seems possible, at least, from what Buel says, that he managed it with what might be called philosophical secularization. That is, by just not allowing reference to an "ultimate reality" grounding the rules of nature, preferring instead what Charles Taylor calls "the ethic of freedom and mutual benefit" that constitutes the "Modern Moral Order."

Barlow may not have gone that far, though. These are tentative steps. The move from appealing to the ultimate reality of the order of things to appealing to immediate, immanent question of mutual benefit is at least embryonic in this advent of American atheism, but then it's embryonic, also, in a lot of the political philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries. That doesn't mean it could have been articulated.

Comparing his earlier and later poems, one can note the progress of disbelief in Barlow's thought, from generic Christian sentiment to deism to something more (or less).

Though Barlow was apparently never exactly orthodox, he was a Congregationalist, earlier in his life, and served, even, as a chaplain during the American Revolution. In an early poem written for his graduation from Yale and noted mostly for strongly stating opposition to slavery, Barlow imagines "the Lord of Life" addressing Christopher Columbus, offering a somewhat standard Christian account of the coming resurrection.


The Lord of the poem says the "sons of earth" will "Rise to life" and "behold the promised birth." In the final moment of human history, as described by the God of the poem, "Stern vengeance softens and the God descends, / The atoning God, the pardoning grace to seal, / The dead to quicken and the sick to heal."

In 1787, nearly a decade later, the year before leaving for France, Barlow published his epic The Vision of Columbus. In that, the deity discernible is less Christian, more deist. The God described seems more an abstract principle, the first cause and ground of the laws of nature held to be deists. As found in the first book of the poem, the divine is "that great Source, that life-inspiring Soul, / Suns drew their light and systems learn'd to roll." Barlow's poem speaks of the "trace" of "Heaven's own conduct," which is visible when people "look thro' nature" and has been "stamp'd the mind of man."

Twenty years later, Barlow published an expanded and revised version of the epic, re-titled The Columbiad. Here, in 1807, the divine seems almost completely rejected -- or if not rejected, replaced. Barlow invokes no god but Freedom, and proclaims, "Strong in thy strength I bend no suppliant knee, / Invoke no miracle, no Muse but thee."

As the Guardian noted in a review of Buel's book last year, The Columbiad involved some major revisions of the earlier poem, "transforming his Christian epic The Vision of Columbus into a secular, republican epic." In the later poem, "one of the strangest pieces of literature produced by a 19th-century American," released just five years after Barlow's notebooks evidence a personal atheism, Barlow

"versifies about geological evidence contrary to the Christian creation story, describes the secular apocalypse that will come if Americans fail to emancipate their slaves, and ends with representatives of the major religions discarding the symbols of their faith to join into one world-governing council, based in a crystal palace in Mesopotamia."

A progression of skepticism is visible in Barlow's poetry, but the final version visible in The Columbiad does not actually seem to go as far as outright atheism. What's presented would not be problematic for deists, though it would be for Christians. The skepticism presented in the poetry doesn't seem to go as far as his private notebooks.

It's notable, too, that when Barlow was attacked as an atheist in the American press in subsequent years, his defenders argued he wasn't an atheist, but merely another deist. Atheism was beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse, and Barlow didn't publicly cross that border. Even if he was a committed atheist, he made sure he could still pass as a deist.

Whether this is because he himself wasn't entirely confident in the position, as Turner claims, or because taking such a controversial stand would have been political suicide, as Buel argues, may be a matter of speculation. Perhaps it was both. But Barlow wasn't open about his lack of belief, whether he lacked with deep conviction or was merely flirting.

He didn't publicly promote d'Holbach-style atheism with something like the equivalent of Tom Paine's book. To the extent he did promote such ideas, he did so anonymously.

In 1802, for example, the year "these ideas had become Barlow's own," he translated the final portion of Constantin Volney's Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires). The first half of the work, which exposited a philosophy of history, had been translated by Thomas Jefferson, but Jefferson stopped before translating the sections of the book dedicated to religion, realizing it would open him up to significant criticism from his political opponents. Volney had already fled America ahead of an expected deportation, and acknowledged the final section of his book was meant to provoke doubt about religion. Barlow finished the work, including the controversial chapter entitled "The Origin and Filiation of Religious Ideas," which argued that humans had invented religion and gods to explain astronomical phenomena. He did this secretly, though. Neither Jefferson nor Barlow had themselves cited as the book's translator.

Buel notes,

"both of the responsible parties now preferred avoiding public identification with Volney's ideas .... Barlow grew increasingly mindful of his reputation among his countrymen. The Ruins would prove to be a tough sell in an America beset by the religious fervor accompanying the Second Great Awakening."

Barlow managed to keep his unbelief quiet enough to be appointed in 1811 to negotiate a commercial treaty with Napoleon. Not that he was entirely free from suspicion. The New York Evening Post, opposing the diplomatic appointment, called Barlow an "apostate priest and reviller of the very religion he publicly professed ... a phrenzied and bloody-minded jacobin, a modern philosopher and a sycophant of those in power" (sic). This seems to have been pretty standard political rhetoric, though, of the sort common directed at deists and those sympathetic to the French Revolution.

If Barlow was America's first atheist, he was tentative about it. "Flirtation," Turner's term, seems to be accurate. He came to his unbelief privately, in the context of his reading and his private notebooks, and he kept it private too. It's significant, nonetheless, that he did go so far as to disbelieve, even if only cautiously. It was, in his notebooks, a crazy thought. And not one without consequences. Barlow hesitated, in the face of those consequences, but still might be rightly understood as marking an early moment in a significant societal shift.

Barlow's private unbelief, as possibly America's first atheist, is an important moment in that move Charles Taylor describes as "a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood as one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace," the shift from a society in which "it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believes, is one possibility among others."

In this sense, Barlow is significant to late 18th, early 19th century America. There may have been a historical moment, there, where in the privacy of his notebooks Barlow was the only American anywhere who thought of himself as rejecting all conceptions of God. Where he was the one who thought what was almost unthinkable, that there is no God, and thought it even to the point of tentatively, privately, accepting for himself what to most was an insult, a slur, the name "atheist."

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Let me root, root, root for the home team: When sports replaces religion in the rites of death

"It was such a big part of her life, why not be a part of her send off too."

Errol Morris' latest short documentary, on sports funerals:



As a reporter, I covered one of these in Georgia in 2007 or '08. The viewing was set up as a tail gate party, and everyone wore University of Georgia Bulldog gear in accordance with the will of the man who'd died. A large bulldog was inflated in front of the funeral home, bulldog flags were flown from the hearse, and the man was buried with two tickets to the next game in his hand.

Morris doesn't get into the specifically religious aspects of these funerals, though he does ask one Cubs fan if there will be sports in heaven.

The Georgia funeral director I spoke to saw sports funerals as replacing traditional religious rites. For these people, he said, religion was too dour, too somber. They didn't want organ music and a rented minister. What they wanted was a celebration, and for their friends and families to enjoy at their deaths what they had enjoyed in their lives. Religion wasn't an important part of their lives, wasn't what gave their lives meaning. Sports was. So they designed these non-religious rites of passage around that idea.

The widow at the viewing I attended agreed with that. She said she hadn't known of her husband's plans until he died and she read his will, but that he'd done what he knew would comfort her and everyone who cared about him.

"All this," she told me, "is him saying to me, 'don't cry, now. I don't want no crying.'"

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The political expediency of 'culture war'

It's useful to remember, when "culture war" fights reach a fevered pitch, that these conflicts and controversies are stoked and perpetuated in large part by people who don't really care. 

It's politics. And political expediency. 

There are those who do care, of course, and who really are deeply concerned about religious colleges and hospitals, for example, being required to offer birth control as part of their health care plans. But there are just as many or maybe even more who seize on such issues without any convictions except political gain. As much as Republican leaders shouted about "religious liberty," it was fundamentally political "points" that motivated them, not fear of religious exercise being curtailed by a Health and Human Services mandate. 

This is clear in how the issue has been handled after it passed from the headlines. 

As Politico reports:

"But now, with the rule set to take effect Wednesday — part of the 'Obamacare' law the GOP hates so much — the fiery repeal rhetoric has fizzled. In fact, few on Capitol Hill are saying anything about it at all.

"And that House vote to block the rule? Never happened — and isn’t in the works either. A group of die-hards on the issue asked for it again in a closed-door meeting [last] Wednesday with House leadership but said no promises were made.

"Even Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.), one of the most vocal critics of the rule and co-sponsor of a bill to eliminate it, has gone quiet now that the rule is about to kick in."

If one actually believed that this mandate is a violation of the free exercise of religion, this isn't how you'd respond. The actual actions of the representatives make it seem like this wasn't seen as a matter of defending the Constitution, but rather rhetoric and politics. The issue is a wedge, which might move some voters right, and motivate others to go to the polls.

There's no evidence, though, the Republican party as a party agrees with those suing the federal government over this birth control mandate that "after August 1, 2012, Plaintiffs will no longer have the right to make health care insurance decisions in line with their Catholic views," because on Wednesday the HHS rule "will go into effect and force Plaintiffs to pay, fund, contribute, or support artificial contraception, abortion, abortifacients or related education and counseling, in violation of their Constitutional rights and deeply held religious beliefs."

It's hard to see how the Republicans' very tactical response is anything other than a betrayal.

Not that there won't be congressmen and women across the country campaigning for re-election on the platform that something must be done on the issue they failed to do anything about.

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The Mather tomb

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Monologue at a Boston bookstore

Did you get my text?
My phone is about to die.
I thought I sent it to you, but it looked like it went to somebody else.
John Winthrop.
John Winthrop.
JOHN. WIN. THRuuuP.
Remember him?
From the Winthrops.
Winthrops.
You read that 38,000 page series on the Winthrops.
Well, I'm glad I didn't send you the text, then.
You would have been like, 'what is this?'
Hello?
Hello.

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