Reza Aslan's outrage

Among scholars of religion, there's no consensus on the relevance of scholar's personal religious beliefs and practices to their scholarship.

Some scholars are quite open. They mention their religious identity in the classroom, affiliate themselves in their books, explain their interests in terms of their religious identities, and even on occasion write from the position of a believer. Others are open but private. They're willing to talk about themselves and their beliefs, but keep it separate from their scholarship. This is where I'm at: I sometimes talk with students or colleagues about my own faith and religious history, but it's not something I talk about in class or in my writing, mostly because it seems like it would cause more confusion than clarity. Others, still, are entirely private, and simply refuse to answer any personal questions.

When scholars are open about their religious identities, though, it is entirely fair to ask them about their religious identities.

This seems to me to be commonsensical, but perhaps it isn't.

There's a big loud kerfuffle right now about a recent FOX news interview with Reza Aslan, author of a popular book about the historical Jesus. The interviewer, Lauren Green, started the interview with the question, "you're a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?"

Aslan was outraged at the question and went on the offensive. The clip went viral. People got pretty excited ("Reza Aslan is superhuman"; "Hats off to Reza Alsan"), and expressed their outrage at the question.

It's bullshit.

There was nothing wrong with the question.

One can assume, as many have, that the subtext of the question was that Muslims don't have the right to write books about Jesus, but that's an assumption. One can assume the question is Islamophobic, but that's an odd assumption that would need to be defended. There's nothing necessarily biased about mentioning a scholar is Muslim, especially when the scholar has regularly talked about his own religious biography in relationship to his work.

The question could also be taken at face value, as a question about this scholar's personal interest.

Aslan choose to treat the question as hostile, but he didn't have to.

He could have responded by talking about how historically important Jesus is, or talking generally about how he's interested in various religions' origins, including Christianity's. He could consistently defer personal questions, as many scholars do (saying something like "my personal beliefs aren't that interesting or important; what I want do is try to understand this subject in it's historical context").

Aslan also could have talked about his own changing relationship to Jesus -- which he has, actually, in numerous interviews. On Fresh Air, he told Terry Gross that he grew up a secular Muslim and converted to Christianity when he was 15, but left the faith shortly thereafter. On The Daily Show, he told John Oliver that his mother and wife are Christians and his brother-in-law is a Christian minister. Aslan told the Huffington Post he's been "obsessed with Jesus for a very, very long time," adding "I heard the Gospel when I was 15 years old and it just blew me away." On NPR's Weekend Edition, he explained his current religious position by saying,

I wouldn't call myself a Christian because I do not believe that Jesus is God, nor do I believe that he ever thought that he was God, or that he ever said that he was God. But I am a follower of Jesus, and I think that sometimes, unfortunately -- I think even Christians would recognize this and admit it -- those two things aren't always the same, being a Christian and being a follower of Jesus.

Aslan is clearly open to talking about his own religious beliefs, and talking about how they shaped, informed, inspired and contextualized his scholarship. He's repeatedly said that his own biographical position -- for instance, that his wife and mother are Christians -- should inform readers' opinions. It's reasonable, then, for him to expect to be asked how his religious beliefs should affect readers' opinions.

In this case, though, he opted for outrage.

It's feigned bullshit.

It's another manufactured scandal, which makes for good TV, I guess. If you're into that. It appears to be pretty irresistible on the internet, where we all apparently troll around looking for clips and snippets that confirm the stupidity and/or evilness of those we believe to be stupid and/or evil. Smugness reigns, as always, and controversy is good for sales.

This isn't an example of attacks on Muslims or attacks on scholarship. It's evidence that this is an age of viral marketing, and that publicity stunts are pretty effective marketing tools, even if they are pretty tiresome and generally shady, conning people into an emotional response that makes someone money.

The outrage, if there is an outrage, is that so many people bought into fake outrage.

"Bought" literally.

Forgive me if my distaste for FOX and for right wing anti-intellectualism doesn't compel me to rush to Aslan's defense. If he doesn't want his personal life and religious identity to be a factor in how his scholarship is seen, he's entitled to keep those things private. If he talks about them sometimes, though, and other times acts like it's outrageous to ask about what he regularly talks about, I'm going to be fairly short with my sympathies. When that inconsistency isn't just idiosyncratic, but appears to be part of a book marketing scheme, I'm not going to share the "outrage."

When, in addition to all that, the man misrepresents his scholarly credentials, he's not a hero of academic freedom. He's not a champion of scholarship in the face of the forces of anti-intellectualism. He's yet another creature of the culture of fake outrage, manipulating cultural divisions for the sake of sales of his book.

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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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Alton T. Lemon, 1928 - 2013

Alton T. Lemon, the plaintiff in a landmark Supreme Court case on the separation of church and state, has died at the age of 84. A very private man, little is known of his life apart from his membership in the American Civil Liberties Union and brief time as president of a Philadelphia Ethical Humanist Society. His obit didn't make the New York Times until 21 days after his death.

In the late 1960s, though, he lent his name to the lawsuit where the Supreme Court established the three-part legal test for determining whether or not a government has violated the constitution by "respecting an establishment of religion." Wherever American lawyers debate whether or not a government has, in fact, gone so far as to endorse a religion, Lemon's name is invoked.

Asked about his role in First Amendment history, Lemon said he was proud to have been involved in Lemon v. Kurtzman, but:

I have never sought public recognition for my role in the case. Almost all of our friends are Protestant and some don’t understand my position. We had one friend who was a schoolteacher who thought it was terrible that God was being removed from the schools .... Some people go down in history in famous books, but I might go in a dusty law book or something. I don’t view things out of proportion.

It's not just the dusty history books, though. The three-part establishment test that bears Lemon's name, the Lemon Test, is a contentious bit of jurisprudence. It has been attacked from a number of directions and may not survive the John Roberts court.

The two most conservative justices on the court, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, issued a blistering attack on the Lemon test in 1993. In a concurrence authored by Scalia, the Lemon Test was described as "Like some ghoul in a late night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad." Especially bothered by the inconsistent use of the judicial standard, Scalia accused his fellow justices of invoking or ignoring the Lemon Test as suited their purposes.

"Such a docile and useful monster," he wrote, adding:

For my part, I agree with the long list of constitutional scholars who have criticized Lemon and bemoaned the strange Establishment Clause geometry of crooked lines and wavering shapes its intermittent use has produced .... I will decline to apply Lemon -- whether it validates or invalidates the government action in question.

One need not endorse either Scalia's legal philosophy or his argumentative style to think there's a problem with the Lemon Test. It's maddeningly vague and wide open to wildly divergent interpretations.

According to the Lemon Test, a government has endorsed a religion if:

• a law is passed which does not have "a secular legislative purpose,"
• a statute's "principal or primary" effect is either to advance or inhibit religion,
• a governmental action results in "excessive government entanglement with religion."

In that decision, then-Cheif Justice Warren Burger said the test was necessary because of the vagueness of the First Amendment prohibition of "respecting an establishment of religion," and because the constitutional guarantee does not just prohibit a state religion, but many other state-religion interactions as well.

As Burger wrote:

The language of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment is, at best, opaque, particularly when compared with other portions of the Amendment. Its authors did not simply prohibit the establishment of a state church or a state religion, an area history shows they regarded as very important and fraught with great dangers. Instead, they commanded that there should be 'no law respecting an establishment of religion.' A law may be one 'respecting' the forbidden objective while falling short of its total realization. A law 'respecting' the proscribed result, that is, the establishment of religion, is not always easily identifiable as one violative of the Clause. A given law might not establish a state religion, but nevertheless be one 'respecting' that end in the sense of being a step that could lead to such establishment, and hence offend the First Amendment.  

In the absence of precisely stated constitutional prohibitions, we must draw lines with reference to the three main evils against which the Establishment Clause was intended to afford protection: 'sponsorship, financial support, and active involvement of the sovereign in religious activity.'

The lines that have been drawn, though, are hardly clear ones. How can the secularity of a law be determined? By what measure is the "primary" effect of a law to be judged? An entanglement should be considered excessive in comparison to what? And to whom does it have to seem excessive?

In at least 20 recent federal court cases, the Lemon Test has been used in different and inconsistent ways. Judge Richard Posner, a Reagan appointee, described the Lemon Test as "formless, unanchored, subjective." In a 1980 ruling, written by Kennedy-appointee Byron White, the Supreme Court noted that the Lemon Test lacked "clarity and predictability," two things typically valued in a law.

Legal scholar J.H. Choper, who clerked for Earl Warren and now teaches at Berkley, said the endorsement test that bears Alton T. Lemon's name "fails to provide a judicial standard capable of principled application." According to Choper, "application of the Lemon test generated ad hoc judgments incapable of being reconciled on any principled basis," and resulted in a kind of "conceptual disaster area."

This conflict and confusion is at issue in two current cases which could give the Supreme Court the opportunity to revisit the question of the Lemon Test.

The court has agreed to hear Town of Greece v. Galloway this term, and decide whether prayers offered by private citizens to open town council meeting violates the First Amendment prohibition on respecting establishments of religion. A lower court, citing the Lemon Test, concluded that because the majority of such prayers were Christian, the town was effectively affiliating with the Christian faith. A central part of the dispute is over whether the second prong of the Lemon Test -- the matter of primary purpose -- should be measured in terms of intent or effect.

The court is also considering hearing Elmbrook School District v. Doe, a case where graduation ceremonies were held in an evangelical church. There's no dispute this was done for practical reasons, but the lower courts have disagreed on whether or not the school's use of the religious space was excessive entanglement and over whether or not it advanced religion. One lower court ruled that observers would be able to separate the religious symbols of the church sanctuary from the proceedings.  Another disagreed, concluding that "Regardless of the purpose of school administrators in choosing the location, the sheer religiosity of the space created a likelihood that high school students and their younger siblings would perceive a link between church and state."

It's possible that rulings on either or both of these cases could substantially transform the test by which "respecting an establishment of religion" is judged.

The late Lemon, for his part, reported being worried in the last decade of his life that the courts would erode the legal separation of church and state. He wasn't worried about the judicial standard that bore his name per se, but was bothered by the trend he saw of conservative justices  allowing for government endorsements of Protestantism. In 2003, he told the Philadelphia Inquirer that "separation of church and state is gradually losing ground, I regret to say."

A year later, he expressed his suspicions that conservatives would establish a state church, if they could.

"At this point in my life," the then-76-year-old said, "I seriously wonder why we have religion. I am not so sure it does more good than harm. I think that the battle for church-state separation has to be a continuing fight."

And, judging by the contentions over the Lemon Test, it is.

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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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'This right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy'

Roe vs. Wade, the federal case that legalized abortion, thus determining one critical line of political battle and cultural division for generations to come, was handed down by the Supreme Court 40 years ago today.

The decision, writing by Justice Harry Blackmun, focused on the question of whether privacy was a right guaranteed by the constitution. That's not normally the core of the debate as it's debated day to day in American culture, but that was the central question of the legal issue.

A key excerpt of the decision, on the matter of a constitutional right to privacy:

The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however, going back perhaps as far as Union Pacific R. Co. v. Botsford, (1891), the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. In varying contexts, the Court or individual Justices have, indeed, found at least the roots of that right in the First Amendment, Stanley v. Georgia, (1969); in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, Terry v. Ohio, (1968), Katz v. United States, (1967), Boyd v. United States, (1886), see Olmstead v. United States, (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting); in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights, Griswold v. Connecticut, ; in the Ninth Amendment, (Goldberg, J., concurring); or in the concept of liberty guaranteed by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, see Meyer v. Nebraska, (1923). These decisions make it clear that only personal rights that can be deemed "fundamental" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty," Palko v. Connecticut, (1937), are included in this guarantee of personal privacy. They also make it clear that the right has some extension to activities relating to marriage, Loving v. Virginia, (1967); procreation, Skinner v. Oklahoma, (1942); contraception, Eisenstadt v. Baird, (WHITE, J., concurring in result); family relationships, Prince v. Massachusetts, (1944); and child rearing and education, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, (1925), Meyer v. Nebraska, supra.

This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent. Specific and direct harm medically diagnosable even in early pregnancy may be involved. Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it. In other cases, as in this one, the additional difficulties and continuing stigma of unwed motherhood may be involved. All these are factors the woman and her responsible physician necessarily will consider in consultation.

On the basis of elements such as these, appellant and some amici argue that the woman's right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses. With this we do not agree. Appellant's arguments that Texas either has no valid interest at all in regulating the abortion decision, or no interest strong enough to support any limitation upon the woman's sole determination, are unpersuasive. The Court's decisions recognizing a right of privacy also acknowledge that some state regulation in areas protected by that right is appropriate. As noted above, a State may properly assert important interests in safeguarding health, in maintaining medical standards, and in protecting potential life. At some point in pregnancy, these respective interests become sufficiently compelling to sustain regulation of the factors that govern the abortion decision. The privacy right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be absolute. In fact, it is not clear to us that the claim asserted by some amici that one has an unlimited right to do with one's body as one pleases bears a close relationship to the right of privacy previously articulated in the Court's decisions. The Court has refused to recognize an unlimited right of this kind in the past. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, (1905) (vaccination); Buck v. Bell, (1927) (sterilization).

We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.

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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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Culturally contested Christmas

A curious historical fact: the first people to work to "take the Christ out of Christmas," as it were, were not atheists, or crass materialists, or secularists/pluralists trying to diminish the role of Christianity in American culture. They were Protestants.

Protestants were very conflicted about Christmas in the 1800s.

For one thing, many were opposed to the "mass" part of Christmas, i.e., the Catholicism implicit in the holiday. If December 25 was a religious holiday, that seemed to mean accepting the Catholic tradition of the church calendar and the Catholic idea of tradition, the same tradition that led to the veneration of the Virgin Mary, the authority of the Pope and the church councils, and all the sundry things Protestants argued should be rejected because they're not in the Bible. The Bible which says nothing about a gift-giving solstice holiday.

At the same time, Protestants felt a strong impulse to take the cultural practice of the day -- the Christmas of the tavern, the Christmas of the department store -- and repurpose them as devotional practices.

This meant that they were at the same time critical of the non-religious celebrations of Christmas and leery of the religious celebrations too.

As Leigh Eric Schmidt writes in Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays:

Through much of the nineteenth century, the Christianization of Christmas was a quite fragile proposition, tentative and fragmentary. Every time a pastor tried to remind his congregation that Christmas was a solemn religious event that 'should be observed in the heart as well as at the hearth, in the temple as well as at the table,' he seemed to have to admit that the most visible observances of the season were 'rioting and vain amusement' -- shooting guns, callithumpian music, practical jokes, heavy drinking and the like. The churches were invariably hard pressed to communicate the devotional dimension of Christmas; the raucous plebeian version of the celebration always threatened to drown them out.

Confessedly, these Protestants in the Puritan mold were partially to blame for the sorry state of Christmas devotion in the colonial and antebellum worlds. The tradition of holiday purgation, long shared in by Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and many Methodists, bequeathed a model of thorough desacralization that actually helped Christmas go its secular way in American culture. Time and again these Protestants insisted that Christmas was just like any other day, that it was without 'any peculiar sanctity.' At best, Christmas was an object of 'mistaken piety'; at worst it was the occasion of superstition and corrupt tradition. Given these presuppositions about the idolatry of the ancient church calendar, when low-church Protestant began their home-centered recovery of Christmas in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, they often welcomed it back explicitly as a 'social holiday,'not as a 'religious observance.' As one Sunday School publication, the Baptist Teacher, editorialized in 1875, 'We believe in Christmas -- not as a holy day, but as a holiday.'

As has been regularly pointed out, the so-called "war on Christmas" is pretty specious. It is the case, though, that the meaning of Christmas is and has always been culturally contested. In its practice, this holiday is often conflicted, with multiple meanings, divergent rituals, discordant customs, and perpetually competing interpretations.

It's common today, for example, to find evangelicals at once upset that Christmas has been "commercialized" and that Wal-Mart clerks don't recognize the religious nature of the celebration in their standard customer greetings. This isn't a new thing, though; the conflict over what Christmas is has a long history. And it's not only the case of a conflict between the American Protestant majority and others, be they Catholic or non-religious. The conflict runs even through American Protestantism itself.

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'Christianity is not a religion'

I don't know whether it's really possible to have a meaningful, reasonable debate about the place of religion in public, and about the question of what it means for the government to not "respect an establishment of religion," but a lot of examples like this "discussion" above seem to indicate it's not.

This debate, like so many on this subject, gets very weird very fast, as Bill O'Reilly claims Christianity is actually not a religion (unlike Methodism and Catholicism), and thus not subject to that clause of the First Amendment. "It is a fact," O'Reilly says, "that Christianity is not a religion. It is a philosophy. If the government was saying that the Methodist religion deserves a special place in the public square, I would be on your side." Even attempting to make any sense out of that claim just makes me tired.

And that's before the argument reaches its apex, where these public figures argue about who would have a hypothetical problem with what, and the host launches into accusations of insanity and fascism.

*sigh*

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