On Attorney General Holder's Letter Finding DOMA Unconstitutional

A letter from Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr. to House Speaker John A. Boehner released on February 23, 2011,  deals with the constitutionality of Section 3 of DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act) stating that the President has determined that that section of the act is unconstitutional.  What follows is a legal analysis of that letter with some brief commentary.


Section 3 of DOMA states:

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.

This is the section of the statute that writes discrimination against gay and lesbian people into federal law.  Holder states that the President has made the determination that this Section 3 of DOMA “as applied to same-sex couples who are legally married under state law, violates the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment.”  The provision of the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution to which Holder applies states is actually a due process provision not an equal protection provision.  It states that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.  Although the equal protection language found in the Fourteenth Amendment, i.e., no person shall be deprived of the equal protection of the law, that applies to the states but not expressly to the federal government is not found in the Fifth Amendment to which Holder refers, the courts have held that the equal protection analysis developed for application to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment also applies to the federal government under the Fifth Amendment.  Holder expressly addresses what actions the administration will take with regard to defending DOMA in two pending cases in the federal courts that challenge the constitutionality of DOMA.

Holder says that these two suits were filed “in jurisdictions without precedent on whether sexual-orientation classifications are subject to rational basis review or whether they must satisfy some form of heightened scrutiny.”  A little Constitutional Law 101 is necessary to understand that statement.  In law suits challenging the constitutionality of a law on equal protection grounds, the case is almost always decided by what “standard of review” the court decides applies to the case.  There are three basic standards of review, “rational basis”  "intermediate" or “heightened” scrutiny, and “strict scrutiny.”    Holder says he is using the heightened scrutiny test, although frankly his analysis sounds like a strict scrutiny test to me.

Laws make distinctions between persons all the time, and most of the time those distinctions are not unconstitutional.  When the distinction a law makes does not affect a fundamental right or affect a protected class or a “quasi-protected” class (see below), as for example when a law provides that certain persons are entitled to governmental benefits and others are not on the basis of income, the law is constitutional if the government can meet what is called the rational basis test.  Under this test the government must show only that it has a “rational basis” for making the distinction.  It certainly is a rational basis for saying that people with very low incomes are entitled to welfare benefits while those of us with higher incomes are not that the state has an interest in providing at least a minimum level of social security for all of its citizens and in assisting those who can provide that level of security for themselves.  The right to receive governmental benefits is not, generally speaking at least, a fundamental right, and the distinctions it makes between persons are not based on a protected or quasi-protected class of persons.  It is merely a distinction created by statute, not by the Constitution, nor does it otherwise affect anything that is truly fundamental in human life.  That’s why, for example, it is constitutional that my neighbor may qualify for food stamps while I do not even though that means that the food stamps law is treating us differently by giving them to my neighbor but not to me.  When a court decides that a distinction that a law makes between persons otherwise similarly situated does not affect a fundamental right or a protected or quasi-protected class and that the rational basis test therefore applies, the law is almost always found to be constitutional.  The rational basis test is a very easy test for the government to meet.

“Strict scrutiny,” the highest standard of review, applies when the distinction a law makes affects a “fundamental right.” or a "protected class".  The classic example is laws that make distinctions on the basis of race, as being free from racial discrimination is pretty obviously a fundamental right, and race is considered to be a protected class.  The “heightened scrutiny” test that Holder says he is applying here applies to what is called a “quasi-suspect class” such as gender.  Just why gender is a quasi-protected class and not a protected class has never been clear to me, but so the federal courts have ruled.  Under this test the court determines if the law involves important governmental interests and whether the law is substantially related to the achievement of important government objectives. Heightened scrutiny falls between the rational basis test and strict scrutiny, which requires that the distinction between persons relate to a compelling interest and that the law be as narrowly defined as possible to effect that interest.  Actually, several state courts have held that laws limiting marriage to heterosexual couples must satisfy the strict scrutiny test and that such laws to not even survive the rational basis test.  That’s what Judge Downing held in a brilliant trial court opinion here in Washington that our state supreme court later overturned with no reasonable justification, but here Holder applies, or at least says he is applying, the intermediate heightened scrutiny test.

Holder’s reference to the two suits in question being filed in jurisdictions without binding precedent on the standard of review to be applied to constitutional challenges to DOMA also requires explanation.  He is referring to different circuits of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals.  When the US Supreme Court has not ruled on an issue, as it has not in the case of which standard of review applies to DOMA, it is common for different Circuit Courts of Appeal to reach different conclusions on legal issues.  Since the Circuit Courts of Appeal are organized geographically, it is not uncommon for federal law actually to be different in different parts of the country.  If a United States District Court is located in a circuit where the appellate court has ruled that DOMA is subject only to the rational basis test, the Justice Department would probably defend DOMA under that standard because that standard was the law of that circuit.  Holder says that the Justice Department’s previous defense of DOMA has been in courts where it has already been established that the rational basis standard applies.  Since the two cases at issue here are in circuits where that ruling has not been made, the Administration has greater latitude in deciding what position it will take on the issue.

Holder concludes that, in circuits with no ruling on the issue, the Administration will take the position that constitutional challenges to DOMA on equal protection grounds are subject to the heightened scrutiny standard, the intermediate standard of review between rational basis and strict scrutiny.  Citing previous Supreme Court decisions on the matter he says that these criteria apply in determining which standard of review should apply:

1.   Whether the group in question has suffered a history of discrimination.
2.   Whether individuals exhibit obvious, immutable, or distinguishing characteristics that define them as a discrete group.
3.  Whether the group is a minority or is politically powerless.
4.   Whether the characteristics distinguishing the group have little relation to legitimate policy objectives or to an individual’s ability to perform or contribute to society.

Holder then states that “each of these factors counsels in favor of being suspicious of classification based on sexual orientation.”  There is, he says, “a significant history of purposeful discrimination against gay and lesbian people, by governmental as well as private entities, based on prejudice and stereotypes that continue to have ramifications today.”  He says that growing scientific consensus “accepts that sexual orientation is a characteristic that is immutable.”  He then adds that “it is undoubtedly unfair to require sexual orientation to be hidden from view to avoid discrimination,” citing the recent law to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

Holder continues:  Various factors show that gay and lesbian people have limited political power.  The fact that legal progress is being made in this regard does not negate that analysis.  And, he concludes, “there is growing acknowledgment that sexual orientation ‘bears no relation to ability to perform or contribute to society,’” citing earlier Supreme Court precedent.

Holder acknowledges that some circuit courts of appeal have held that the rational basis standard applies to these cases.  He says that some of them rely on old Supreme Court precedent in sodomy cases that has been overruled.  Others have relied on reasoning about procreation that the Justice Department has already rejected in other contexts.  He concludes that those circuit court of appeal rulings are neither correct nor binding.

Holder then very briefly concludes that DOMA cannot survive a heightened scrutiny test, although he doesn’t go into that analysis in any depth.  He cites the standard and says that it applies in the DOMA cases.  In explaining that conclusion he says only that the law fails this test.  He suggests that the justifications advanced in defense of DOMA are "rationalizations for actions in fact differently grounded," meaning I imagine that the law is grounded not in any justifiable considerations but rather simply in prejudice.  He attributes that determination to the President and says that the President has directed the Justice Department not to defend the statute in the two cases at issue, which are pending in the Southern District of New York and the District of Connecticut, the federal trial courts where the suits were filed whose circuit court of appeal, the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, has not ruled on which standard of review applies. 

So far so good, but then it gets a bit strange.  Holder next says that “Notwithstanding this determination, the President has informed me that Section 3 will continued to be enforced by the Executive Branch.”  He sees that directive as “consistent with the Executive’s obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, unless and until Congress repeals Section 3 or the judicial branch renders a definitive verdict against the law’s constitutionality.”  So, in good wishy-washy Democratic fashion (not that I have an opinion about the Democrats today), Holder states two seemingly contradictory positions here.  Section 3 of DOMA is unconstitutional because it cannot survive a heightened scrutiny examination; but, except in law suits in circuits that have not held that the rational basis test applies where it will argue that the law is unconstitutional, the executive branch of government will continue to enforce it.


President Obama's decision, announced by his Attorney General, that DOMA is unconstitutional is a big step in the right direction.  The tide of history is clearly running against continued discrimination against God's gay and lesbian children.  We could only wish that the Obama Administration had the courage, which it seems to lack in so many areas, to take a consistent stand against the law.  Some commentators are saying that the Administration's commitment to continue to enforce DOMA despite the fact that it has concluded that the law is unconstitutional and that it will not defend it in at least some court cases is a good thing because we can't have presidents deciding which laws they will and will not enforce.  Generally speaking that is true.  George W. Bush refused to comply with laws that he thought limited his power, and he was violating his oath of office when he did so.  The situation with DOMA seems different to me.  There is a difference between a president refusing to obey a law for his own political or power purposes and a president refusing to enforce a law that he has concluded unconstitutionally discriminates against a large number of American citizens.  The President's oath is to protect and defend the Constitution.  Here two provisions of that Constitution are in conflict.  The Constitution makes it the president's duty to enforce the laws, but it also says that no person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws.  President Obama and his Justice Department have apparently decided that the constitutional duty to enforce the laws trumps the constitutional guarantee of equal protection for the country's people.  It seems to me that in a case like this, where fundamental rights are concerned, that the protections the US Constitution provides the people should take precedence.  As he always does, Obama has split the baby, trying to have it both ways.  A half measure here is better than no measure, but it is still a half measure; and I don't think that it is a necessary one.  My hope is that the decision announced today is just a first step and that it will, as some commentators are also saying, influence the way litigation on the issue of same gender marriage is resolved in both the federal and the state courts.

Strict Construction? Constitutional Construction and Post-Modern Hermeneutics

     We have just learned that a federal judge in Florida has ruled the entire Obama health care bill unconstitutional.  It was, the news media tell us, the fourth ruling on the constitutionality of that law by a federal judge.  That so-called reform of our nation’s health care delivery system is at best a modest tinkering at the edges of that system based on decades old proposals by, of all people, Richard Nixon and containing provisions similar to those Republican governor Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts.  That being said, there is one fact about those four rulings on the constitutionality of that law that raises a larger issue than the constitutionality of the law.  Two federal judges have ruled all or part of the law unconstitutional.  Both were nominated by Republican presidents.  Two federal judges have ruled the law constitutional.  Both were nominated by Democratic presidents.  Commentators are saying that the fact that these decisions appear to break along political lines depending on which president nominated the judge in each case means that the decisions were political.  They may well have been political.  There is no way to get inside the minds of the judges who made the rulings to determine what the true reasons for their decisions were.  The fact that two Republican judicial nominees ruled the law unconstitutional and two Democratic judicial nominees ruled it constitutional, however, raises a much larger issue about the nature of judicial interpretation of the Constitution, one that is vitally important to any proper understanding of the way in which judicial decision making works.

That issue has to do with the oft-repeated calls from the political right for “strict construction” of the Constitution.  Political conservatives in our country have for decades condemned what they call “judicial activism” and demanded that judges engage only in what they call strict construction (except of course when a court does something they like, as the Supreme Court did in the Citizens United case on the right of corporations to pour unrestricted money into elections.  That is a case of judicial activism if ever there was one, but the conservatives don’t complain about that one).  By strict construction they seem to mean interpretation of the Constitution that sticks solely to the literal meaning of the words in the document.  There are valid objections to this demand for strict construction on multiple levels.  On the purely legal level there is the objection that a Constitution is by its very nature a document that states general principles.  The law, however, deals with the everyday details of life, the complex particulars of life in a complex society.  The Constitution cannot and by its nature should not operate at the level of those particulars.  It is precisely the function of the courts to determine how the general principles stated in the Constitution apply to the minute particulars of everyday life.  In light of this consideration the term “strict construction” actually makes no sense and badly misunderstands the nature and function of any constitution.

There is, however, an even more fundamental objection to the notion of strict construction of the Constitution.  Although I used to be a lawyer and have extensive legal training and experience, this objection to the notion of strict construction comes not from anything I learned in law school or the practice of law but from learning I received in seminary.  It is learning about hermeneutics.  Hermeneutics is the theory and practice of interpretation.  It is a required course in seminary, or at least it was required in mine, because interpretation of religious texts, especially of course of the Bible, is an essential part of the life of faith.  Anyone who is going to preach and teach in a faith setting must necessarily interpret scripture, and the undeniable fact is that interpretation is a complex activity that  requires study to understand.  There are principles of hermeneutics that one must understand if one is going to do or to understand meaningful interpretation of scripture or any other document.

Of particular importance, there are principles of hermeneutics that have been developed in the emerging post-modern world that may not be entirely intuitive to people whose thinking has been shaped by Enlightenment rationalism but that, once understood, are undeniable.  Perhaps the foundational principle of postmodern hermeneutics is that meaning never resides in a text alone.  In and of itself a text is simply a collection of words.  It is simply a collection of marks on paper—or today on a computer screen, iPad, or smart phone.  In itself any text is dead.  Lifeless.  Inert.  Meaningless.  No text speaks for itself.  By itself it doesn’t speak at all.  It just sits there.  In a real sense the text doesn’t even exist except when someone is reading it.

A text, any text, speaks only when it encounters a reader.  A reader brings life to a text.  A reader brings a text alive.  It is in the encounter between a reader and a text, and only in the encounter between a reader and a text, that meaning arises.  It cannot be otherwise.  Meaning is a creation of the human mind.  Nothing has meaning in and of itself.  Anything has meaning only when a human mind gives it meaning.  A thing, anything, has only the meaning that a human mind gives it.  Humans are meaning making creatures, as many contemporary observers have remarked.  Until a text is encountered by a meaning making creature it has no meaning.  Until a text is encountered by a meaning making creature, that is, by a human being, it can have no meaning.  This may be a difficult concept for people thoroughly steeped in the fact oriented rationalism of Western culture, but at its highest and most knowledgeable levels our culture has moved beyond that fact oriented rationalism.  Meaning does indeed arise only within the human mind, and that means that no text has meaning in itself.  It has meaning only in an encounter with a human mind that creates meaning in that encounter.

This principle of postmodern hermeneutics has several vitally important consequences.  One that is of particular importance is that the meaning of any text depends on who the person is who encounters it and creates meaning in it.  Each person is unique, although of course people in similar socio-economic-cultural circumstances have much in common, and we all share a common underlying humanity.  Each reader comes to a text, any text, in her or his uniqueness as an individual and with his or her commonalities with others based on common humanity and on shared life circumstances.  It cannot be otherwise.  We are created as centered selves, as individuals.  We are however also individuals who live in society, in community, in particular cultures, in particular socio-economic circumstances.  When we come to a text, any text, we bring all of that with us..  The encounter of any reader with any text is precisely an encounter between a text and the reader in all of her individuality and commonality.

A necessary consequence of the fact that the encounter of any reader with a text is precisely an encounter between a text and the reader in all of her individuality and commonality is that the meaning that arises in that encounter will, or at least may, differ depending on who the reader is.  Let me illustrate with an example from the sphere of Christianity.  When poor and oppressed people in South America began, on their own, to encounter the Christian Scriptures they gave rise to a whole new kind of Christian theology.  They created liberation theology.  They were reading the same texts the privileged elites of their country and their former European masters had been reading for centuries, but they found new meaning in those texts.  They had been told those texts were about how they could get to heaven after death.  When they read the texts themselves from their Sitz im Leben, from their place in life, they heard those same texts bringing a message of liberation here and now, in this life.  The same texts with different readers produced different meaning.

Another consequence of the principle that meaning does not reside in a text itself but arises in the encounter between the text and a particular reader is that the meaning in the text is not limited to the meaning intended by the text’s author.  We can presume that the author of any text intends to convey a certain meaning through his text.  There is some particular thing that the author intends to say.  An author’s intent, and the way she tries to express that intent, are conditioned by the cultural-linguistic world in which the author lives.  Every author is every bit as much a particular individual conditioned by a particular socio-economic-cultural context as is every reader.  One issue that arises in discerning the meaning of any text is that the reader may be conditioned by a very different socio-economic-cultural context than was the author.  That circumstance can make it difficult for readers approaching a text centuries after the text was written to determine what the original author’s intent was.  More importantly, because meaning does not reside in a text but arises in the encounter between a text and a particular reader, the author of any text loses control of the meaning of the text as soon as a reader other than the author reads the text.  Knowing the author’s intent in writing a text, if that intent can be determined, is not entirely irrelevant to another reader finding meaning in the text, but it is not determinative.  It is not determinative precisely because meaning arises in the interaction between the text and the reader. 

Those of us who have been trained in mainline seminaries are familiar with these principles and how they apply to the interpretation of the Bible.  It is, in my experience at least, far less common for lawyers or politicians to understand these principles and how they apply to the interpretation of the United States Constitution.  The demand by conservative politicians that the Constitution be strictly construed to reflect the original intent of the “framers,” the Constitution’s original authors, goes largely unchallenged at the most fundamental level.  Commentators rarely if ever say that the framers’ original intention is not and cannot be the determinative factor in Constitutional construction because in itself the text of the Constitution, like any other text, has no meaning.  The text has meaning only in its encounter with a reader.  That is the only place where meaning can possibly arise because, as we have already noted, meaning is something that the human mind creates, not something that exists as an objective reality apart from the reader.

What happens when we apply these principles to the four federal court opinions on the constitutionality of the current reform of our health care delivery system?  When we do that we conclude that the mere fact that the two judges who upheld the law were Democratic nominees and the two who found all or part of it unconstitutional were Republican nominees does not necessarily mean that those decisions are political.  They certainly have political consequences, and some politicians will like the political consequences of the decisions in favor of the constitutionality of the law and some will like the political consequences of the decisions against the constitutionality of the law.  But these decisions were made by four different federal judges, four specific human beings who came to the text of the law and the text of the Constitution with their own individuality and their own socio-economic-cultural Sitz im Leben.  It may therefore be that their different decisions were not intentionally political but that they arose merely from the fact that we are dealing with four federal judges and not with one.  The explanation that these decisions are political is, I believe, superficial and does not reflect an adequate understanding of postmodern hermeneutics.

This is not to say that there is not sound legal reasoning in some judicial decisions and unsound legal reasoning in others.  There are established rules of constitutional and statutory interpretation.  One can read a legal precedent in a way that is true to the precedent or in a way that makes the precedent say something it doesn’t say.  An interpretation can stray from the text so far that the text is no longer recognizable as the text.  At that point we no longer have a legitimate interpretation of the text but a misuse of the text.  Postmodern hermeneutical principles do not mean that a text can legitimately be made to say anything the reader wants it to say.  Judges may legitimately not make a text say something it simply doesn’t say, ignore the facts in the record of the case, or make up new facts to support a desired outcome.  There are good judges and bad judges, insightful judges and dull ones.  Postmodern hermeneutics have significant consequences for understanding judicial interpretation, but they do not excuse bad judging.

We conclude then that we cannot say that the four decisions on the constitutionality of the health care reform were political.  They may have been, but simply calling them political is a superficial analysis at best.  There is a broader lesson here.  That lesson is that the calls for “strict construction” of the Constitution cannot survive any deep analysis of the nature of constitutional construction.  Yes, the framers may have intended a certain meaning; but they lost control of the meaning of their document as soon as someone else read it.  Their cultural-linguistic world was very different from ours.  The socio-economic-cultural context of the framers was very different from that of most Americans today.  It is perfectly legitimate for us to find a different meaning in the Constitution than the framers intended.  Indeed, it is virtually inevitable that we will find a different meaning in the Constitution than the framers intended.  That’s how it is with documents, any documents.  

So let’s be done with calls for strict construction.  Those calls are essentially meaningless.  Let us honestly admit that the role of judges interpreting the Constitution is not to figure out what some land-owning (and many of them slave-owning) white men meant well over two hundred years ago.  Let us honestly admit that the judge’s task today it to discern what the Constitution means in our context, not what it meant in theirs. 

We will still disagree on how to interpret the Constitution in particular cases.  That disagreement is unavoidable.  If it weren’t, constitutional construction wouldn't be an issue in our courts.  That’s why it is so important to have a legal system that can produce closure in a constitutional argument by issuing a decision that even those who disagree with it will recognize as legitimate.  What is not legitimate, indeed what is not possible, is to lock the Constitution into its late eighteenth century meaning.  Documents that cannot speak to people in different times and different contexts quickly become irrelevant.  They die and continue to be of interest only to historians.  Postmodern hermeneutics tell us that strict construction of the Constitution is not so much undesirable as it is impossible.  So let’s argue the constitutionality of our laws on a solid theoretical basis, not on the basis of the chimera of strict construction.

Christianity and American Militarism: Comments Prompted by President Obama's 2011 State of the Union Speech

Christianity and American Militarism:

Comments on President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Speech

Last night President Obama gave his State of the Union Speech.  At least some of my friends are enthusiastic about that speech.  I’m not, for a variety of reasons.  One is Obama’s totally uncritical and completely wholehearted endorsement of American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States is somehow radically different from other nations, that we embody principles of liberty and equality in a way that no other country does.  That simply isn’t true.  We are not a shining light on a hill as Obama and American exceptionalism insist that we are.  We are simply the latest in history's succession of world empires, better (sometimes much better) in some ways than some others, no worse than most, typical of empire in most respects.  America is not the light to the nations; for us Christians at least Jesus is.  Obama’s speech last night was nothing but the latest in a long line of imperialist speeches from the head of an imperialist government.  It was better than some, although the ways in which it was better don’t rise much above the level of vague policy outlines with no specifics.  Some of its proposals were simply appalling.  Before the massive shift of the American political spectrum to the right that began with the disastrous presidency of Ronald Reagan in the nineteen eighties we never thought we’d hear a Democratic president call for a five year freeze on spending for government programs that actually benefit people while giving only a meaningless nod in the direction of reducing military spending and restoring a semblance of fairness to our tax structure by making sure the wealthy pay their fair share.   On the whole there was little to like about the speech other than Obama's polished and appealing way of speaking.  There was however much that causes concern.

Here’s the thing that happened last night that causes me the most concern and that says the most about the nature of America today.  Only one thing in Obama’s speech produced unanimous, loud, and protracted applause.  That thing came late in the speech when Obama said "we must always remember that the Americans who have borne the greatest burden in this struggle are the men and women who serve our country."  He meant those who are in the armed forces.  The House chamber erupted in enthusiastic applause that went on seemingly forever.  I nearly cried.  I nearly cried first of all because our country has decided that only those people who join the military “serve America.”  Obama didn't have to say those in the armed forces.  He eventually did, but the applause erupted before he made that clarification.  The President had only to say those who serve the country, and everyone in that chamber and every American hearing his speech immediately knew he was talking about the military.  And I thought:  That means that teachers, nurses and other medical professionals, fire fighters, police officers, sanitation workers, hard working public employees at every level of government, workers building public infrastructure, indeed anyone else doing essential and constructive work in our country isn't serving the country.  Only those in the military serve our country.  Service equals military service.  That’s where we've come in this land of ours.  I feel like weeping for my country.

I feel like weeping because service has come to mean solely participating in a massive war machine whose raison d’être is death and destruction.  Service means enlisting in a military apparatus the primary purpose of which is to kill and to die.  Even those in the military who themselves are unlikely to kill or to die in combat support the institutional structure whose purpose is killing and dying.  They work to make the killing and the dying possible.  Our culture has become so militaristic, so addicted to violence as a solution to problems, that all the President has to say is “the men and women who serve our country,” and we immediately understand those who serve in the war machine; and we immediately jump to our feet with cheers and ovations.    

I want to weep too because I know that my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ taught nonviolence not violence.  About that there simply is no doubt.  Jesus taught and lived an alternative way of life to the always violent way of empire.  About that there is simply no doubt either.  America is the current world empire, and our way is violence, our way is militarism.  All empires are of course militaristic.  Empires are created through military conquest, and they are maintained through the application of military force as needed.  Our empire was created through wars against Mexico, Spain, England, and virtually every nation of the American Indians.  The United States of America is today's Roman Empire.  John Dominic Crossan , one of today’s leading prophets of nonviolence, points out that Rome’s innovation in the way of empire was to station its armies on the periphery of the empire, thereby protecting the homeland from foreign invaders.  That, of course, is why the Roman legions were in Judea in Jesus’ time.  The United States today mimics Rome in this regard.  We station our military forces around the world.  We apply military force as we think necessary to protect the homeland and to protect our imperial economic as well as political interests, never mind that our wars are always immoral and, as in the case of Iraq, are often illegal even under the very worldly standards of international law.  Today we have military forces on the periphery of our empire from western Europe to Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan.  Rome is our teacher, and we have learned well. 

Rome glorified its legions.  It held victory parades in the capital and built monuments to victorious emperors and commanders.  Victorious commanders on occasion became emperors.  Today perhaps more than ever we follow Rome’s example here as well.  Glorification of the American military has saturated our popular culture today.  We hold Memorial Day parades cheering the troops.  We build war monuments, and sometimes our military heroes become President, Eisenhower being the most recent example.  (How many of us remember his warning against the growing power of the military-industrial complex, a term he coined? Yet in Eisenhower's day that part of the war machine was far smaller than it is today.)  Virtually everyone with a public voice today must—and does—laud the service of everyone in the American armed forces, which service of course is always said to be given in defense of freedom.  President Obama last night was just the most recent and visible example.  We have begun referring to every single person who serves in any branch of our military as a hero, regardless of whether or not the person has done anything heroic even by the standards of the world.

We have, in short, done nothing less than create a myth of the American military.  Much of what we say about our military is not factually true, but that isn’t what makes what we say a myth.  What we say is a myth because it is a story that is told to connect the people with an ultimate concern.  It is a story that is told to justify the military and to procure public support for the military.  It is told to procure public approval of the use of the military for the purposes of empire by those in power.  American militarism is an idolatrous myth.  The American military and the empire it serves function as an ultimate concern, but that concern is of course not truly ultimate.  The myth of the American military, however, cannot be questioned.  Anyone who raises questions about it is immediately accused of being un-American, un-patriotic, always with the clear implication that being un-American, un-patriotic, is a mortal sin that no decent person would ever commit.  I am quite confident that this essay will produce the same accusations against me, at least it will if it is read at all widely.  Rejecting the American enthusiasm for the military is a sin within our national mythic system because that stance toward the military serves to separate people from the military, and a good definition of sin is anything that works to separate a person from the ultimate concern of any mythic system, whether that concern is truly ultimate or not. 

The myth of the American military is utterly incompatible with the Christian myth, with the Christian story that serves to connect us with the truly ultimate, with God.  It is nothing less than a competing mythic system, a faith that serves a different god than does the Christian faith.  In the mythic system of Christianity the  ultimate concern is God as we know God in and through Jesus Christ; and God is of course the truly ultimate.  Christianity which truly makes God its ultimate concern, and not some idolatrous concern such as belief in the Bible or in the church, is true non-idolatrous faith.  In our country it co-exists with other non-idolatrous faiths, other religions that make the truly ultimate their ultimate concern; but it also competes with numerous idolatrous faiths that make something conditional and preliminary their ultimate concern, including the myth of the American military.  True Christianity is entirely incompatible with those idolatrous faiths, including the one we are concerned with here.

True Christianity is incompatible with any idolatrous faith because Christianity’s ultimate concern is the truly ultimate while idolatrous faith’s ultimate concern is something that is not ultimate; but Christianity is entirely incompatible with the myth of the American military for another reason, one that is less fundamental but one that may be easier to grasp.  This consideration brings us back to a point we began with.  Christianity is inconsistent and incompatible with the myth of the American military precisely because Jesus Christ taught nonviolence.  The job of the military is, however, precisely violence.  We try to pretty up the military.  We show film of the Navy bringing relief supplies to Indonesia after the tsunami as a recruiting tool, but a soldier I once heard interviewed on television spoke the truth when he said “My job is to kill people and blow up their stuff.”  The job of the military is violence.  The military’s raison d’être is violence.  A nonviolent military is an oxymoron.  The military is there to be violent, and Jesus Christ taught nonviolence.  For a Christian the matter really should be no more complicated than that. 

God of course cares for every soldier of every nation, for God cares for every person of every nation; but God judges our violence and grieves over the death and destruction that it causes.  God calls us back to the true ways of peace, to the ways of nonviolence.  The great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh writes that there is no way to peace, peace is the way.  He isn’t Christian, but he gets the truth about God and violence far better than most Christians.  He teaches and lives far better than most Christians the truth about violence that Jesus taught and lived.  Violence doesn’t lead to peace, violence leads to violence.  Peace leads to peace.  Justice leads to peace.  That is a core truth of true Christianity but one that actual Christianity mostly rejects.

So what must our attitude toward the current glorification of the military, which amounts to nothing less than a militarization of American culture, be?  It must not be that we judge or condemn those who choose to serve in the military.  God doesn’t judge or condemn them, and neither should we.  They are products of their culture, our culture; and their culture, our culture, tells them that serving in the military is honorable and heroic.  Many of them choose the military because they see no meaningful opportunities for themselves in civilian life, and we are in no position to judge their choice. 

We must not, however, buy into the glorification of the military, into the militarization of American culture that was so clearly displayed during Obama’s speech last night.  The myth of the American military permeates the air we breathe today, and it functions to legitimate war and perpetuate violence.  We must not let the mythology of the military, with its stirring symbols of flag and uniform, cloud our vision.  We must not let it obscure the truth.  Jesus is for us Christians the truth.  Jesus taught us Christians the truth, and the truth is that violence is not God’s way.  It is not God’s way because God is not violent.  God is a God of grace, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness, and violence is the opposite of those divine characteristics.  God is a God of life.  Violence destroys life. 

So we must be people of peace.  We must be people who work for an end to violence.  Our ideal, our goal, must be a world without violence, a world without armies, a world without weapons, a world without war.  We must strive always to beat the swords into plowshares and the spears into pruning hooks.  We will never see that vision realized.  The powers of the world, fallen as they are to use Walter Wink’s imagery, are too powerful.  They aren’t going to go away any time soon, but that is no reason for us to capitulate to them, to give in to them.  Nonviolence is the way of the Christian.  Nonviolence is the call of the Christian.  With Christ as our guide we can see the myth of the American military for the idolatry that it is, analyze it with clarity, judge it with wisdom, and work to replace it with the way of God, the way of nonviolence.  If we would be truly Christian we can do no less.

The MLK We'd Rather Forget

It’s Martin Luther King Day, 2011.  A lot of people are talking about him today.  Some progressive voices are saying what I want to say about him, but most people aren’t.  I’ve haven’t before posted one of my sermons here, but I’m now posting the one I gave yesterday.  It’s about Martin Luther King, and it’s about the Martin Luther King we’d rather forget.  It’s an important message.  I hope that by posting it here I can in some tiny measure help to get the word out.

A Light to the Nations

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 16, 2011

Scripture:  Isaiah 49:1-7

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

It’s Martin Luther King Day weekend.  This weekend we pause to remember and celebrate the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  If Protestantism had saints he’d probably be one.  He would at least be venerated as a martyr for the faith, as many people are in Orthodox Christianity.  We don’t do that exactly, but we do celebrate King’s life and work.  Yet as I considered Martin Luther King once more this past week I discerned that we need to ask ourselves just what it is about his life and work that we celebrate; and we need to ask whether there aren’t parts of his life and work that we don’t celebrate, that we’d rather forget.  I am convinced that there are such aspects of his life and work, and that’s what I want to talk about this morning.

We celebrate Martin Luther King the civil rights leader.  We celebrate his courage and the powerful way he articulated, in the great preaching tradition of the Black churches, the cause of equality in our country.  We celebrate his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech.  All of that is worthy of celebration, and we do celebrate it.  But here’s the thing.  Martin Luther King was about a lot more than that, and it’s that a lot more that we maybe would rather forget, that, in fact, a lot of Americans do forget or ignore.

We know that King insisted on nonviolence in the civil rights movement.  It was, I think, that insistence on nonviolence that made him white people’s favorite civil rights leader.  We wanted the civil rights movement to be nonviolent.  That was a good thing, although maybe we only thought it was a good thing because we were afraid of Black America’s righteous anger at centuries of white racism resulting in violence against us.  What we pay less attention to is the fact that King did not limit his call for nonviolence to the civil rights movement.  He saw the connection between violence at home and the violence we were perpetrating at the time in Vietnam.  So he spoke up.  He spoke out against the Vietnam War, and when he did he became a lot less popular with white America.  People told him to stick to his proper sphere of activity, the civil rights movement.  That was of course a racist response to King’s opposition to the war because it said that a Black man’s only legitimate concern was the civil rights of his own people, but just as importantly it greatly misunderstood King’s—and Jesus’—message of nonviolence.  It limited nonviolence as a value to one aspect of life, one set of issues.  It failed to see that King’s—and Jesus’—call to nonviolence is universal, that it applies to all aspects of life.  That was, and is, a part of King’s—and Jesus’—message that a great many of us did not and do not want to hear; but Jesus proclaimed it and King preached it just the same.

And King insisted on more than nonviolence; and he insisted on more than legal equality, equality of legal rights, for Black Americans, as important as that was and is.  He insisted on economic justice for poor people, Black and white and every other color as well.  When he was assassinated in Memphis Tennessee, he was there to support the demands of sanitation workers for a fair wage and safe working conditions.  That was an issue of economic justice not of race.  King also saw the connection between poverty and violence.  He saw that it was disproportionately Black Americans and other poor Americans whom we sent to fight and die in our imperialist war in Vietnam.  A great many white Americans reacted to King’s calls for economic justice the same way they did to his call for an end to the Vietnam War.  Civil rights are fine, we said, as long as you’re only talking about legal rights.  But don’t go supporting the economic rights of the poor.  That’s not your concern, we said, perhaps out of fear that true economic justice for the poor might mean that those of us with economic privilege might have to live a little less high on the hog.

We celebrate Martin Luther King as a civil rights leader, but he was much more than a civil rights leader.  He was an advocate of nonviolence in all aspects of life, and he demanded economic justice for the poor.  Where did all of that emphasis on nonviolence and justice come from?  It came from Jesus, that’s where.  Why did King insist on preaching those things as well as civil rights?  Because he was a Christian, that’s why.  Jesus preached economic justice, what Crossan calls distributive justice, economic justice that assures that all have enough.  Jesus called us to be advocates of such distributive justice as well.  Jesus preached and lived nonviolence, and he calls us to preach and to live nonviolence too.  Martin Luther King got all of that.  A great many Christians do not.  Those things are hallmarks of King’s life that many of us would rather forget.

Our passage from Isaiah this morning may not seem to have much to do with the message of Martin Luther King, but I think it does.  That passage is one of the so-called servant songs from the part of Isaiah scholars call second Isaiah.  In it God calls God’s servant, whose identity historically is unknown, to be a light not only to his own people Israel but to the whole world.  God says to the servant “I will give you as a light to the nations.”  By that light, God says, the nations of the world will see and come to the ways of God.

For us Christians the primary light to the nations is Jesus Christ.  He is a shining beacon in a world of darkness.  He lights the way to God and reveals the ways of God.  What is the way to God that he lights?  What are the ways of God that he reveals?  They are more than anything else the ways of economic justice for the poor and of nonviolence in all aspects of human life.  Martin Luther King understood that truth.  He proclaimed that truth, a truth he learned from his Lord and Savior, and ours, Jesus Christ, our primary light to the nations.  Everyone who reflects the light of Christ is also a light to the nations.  God, you see, calls us to be a light too.

Friends, the world today desperately needs that light.  It desperately needs the light of economic justice.  We are starting to see the effects of the world’s unjust distribution of resources, an unjust distribution from which we all benefit, revealed more and more starkly.  In recent days we’ve seen stories of soaring food prices causing hardship in places like India and Indonesia.  In our own state services on which many people depend just to stay alive are being reduced or eliminated because the rest of us won’t pay for them.  Economic injustice today threatens to destabilize the whole world.  If it doesn’t do it today, it most certainly will do it tomorrow.

Violence today threatens to destroy the whole world.  Prophets of nonviolence like Crossan and Wink say, rightly, that unless we humans can overcome our addiction to violence, can transcend our belief in what Wink calls the myth of redemptive violence, the belief that violence can save us, we will eventually and inevitably destroy ourselves and our part of God’s creation.  We have the means to do it.  More nations are seeking the means to do it.  I and many others are convinced that Jesus’ way—God’s way—of nonviolence is our only hope of escape, the only path of salvation for the world.

Martin Luther King knew these truths.  He knew them because he knew Jesus Christ.  He was a light to the nations because he reflected the light of Christ.  He did that not only by working for civil rights but by working for economic justice and by preaching universal nonviolence as well.  In all of that he was a light to the nations.  Are we?  Amen. 

The Defining Issue

In Liberating Christianity I identified homosexuality as the defining issue in Christianity today.  I called it the defining issue because the issue of homosexuality leads immediately to the more fundamental question of the nature of the Bible and of biblical authority, an issue that largely defines the difference between progressive Christianity and conservative, evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity.  I continue to believe that homosexuality is a defining issue in American Christianity today.  Christianity’s attitude toward God’s gay and lesbian people is first of all a justice issue, one in which most of Christianity is still on the wrong side.  Beyond that, the traditional Christian understanding that homosexuality is per se sinful can be maintained today only by clinging uncritically to a Biblicism that makes an ancient cultural understanding the ethical norm, indeed, by making an ancient anthropology the word and will of God.  In what I am about to say I do not intend to diminish the importance of homosexuality as a defining issue for Christianity today.  A Christian’s, or a Christian church’s, understanding of the Bible and their willingness to let God speak a new word on an issue that appears in the Bible can easily be gauged by their attitude toward homosexuality.

That being said, in recent times I have begun to think that perhaps homosexuality is not the defining issue in American Christianity today.  I want here to consider the possibility that another issue is in some ways more decisive for our contemporary faith.  That issue is our relationship to the Kingdom of God, and it has two major components:  What is the proper Christian attitude toward the question of poverty, and what is the proper Christian attitude toward the question of violence.  These questions more than any others go to the heart of what it means be a disciple of Jesus Christ. 

Despite the Christian tradition’s long insistence that the Christian faith is about how we are saved from sin, about how our souls are saved from damnation and granted a blissful eternity in heaven, it is beyond serious doubt that what Jesus preached was not the eternal salvation of our souls but the Kingdom of God; and it is beyond serious doubt that the Kingdom of God as Jesus preached it was primarily about two things:  distributive justice for the poor and nonviolence.  The historical Christian focus on the afterlife and the eternal fate of human souls is at best a distortion of Jesus’ message.  It is a distortion of that message because it diverts our attention from the things Jesus taught us and leads us to focus on something about which he had little or nothing to say.  (I am of course aware that the Gospel of John can be read as being about the eternal salvation of our souls, although I don’t think that’s really what John is about.  I take it as given, however, that John reflects theological thinking from the end of the first century CE and that it tells us little or nothing about what Jesus of Nazareth actually said or did.  The Synoptic Gospels are also theological tracts from the last third of the first century, but they come significantly closer to preserving what Jesus actually said and did than does John.)  The church's distortion of Christ’s message by focusing on the afterlife is part of a larger refocusing of the faith that occurred when Christianity accommodated itself to the interests of empire after it became the official faith of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE.  I am becoming convinced that what distinguishes true followers of Christ from others who claim the name Christian is our attitude toward the Kingdom of God, that is, toward the distributive justice for the poor and the nonviolence that Jesus actually taught.

Jesus proclaimed God's dream of universal distributive justice for the poor, and I am convinced that one cannot be authentically Christian and at the same time support social, political, economic, and environmental policies and systems that create and perpetuate poverty, that depend on the existence of a large number of poor people as our current economic system does.  Christians can be very good about giving to charity to help the poor.  That is a good thing as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.  Dom Helder Camara, the late Roman Catholic Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in Brazil, famously said “When I feed the poor they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry they call me a Communist.”  It is precisely other Christians who called him a Communist when he raised the question about structures and systems that create and perpetuate poverty; but the Kingdom of God that Jesus preached isn’t just about giving alms, although giving alms is a good thing.  It is about a transformed world, a world freed from the ways of empire, a world in which hunger and poverty do not exist because resources are shared and not hoarded, because none insist on having so much that others must necessarily not have enough. 

The way of empire, the way of extreme inequality in the distribution of resources in which the extravagant wealth of a few is supported by the poverty of many, is the way of the United States today.  It is our way domestically, where more and more wealth is being accumulated in the hands of a tiny percentage of the population and social safety nets for the poor and vulnerable are being shredded so that the wealthy don’t have to pay more taxes and we can continue to spend obscene and unjustifiable amounts on the military.  It is our way internationally, where we as a nation, being something like two percent of the world’s population, consume fully one quarter of the world’s resources.  That reality is intolerable for authentic Christians, people who follow Jesus’ way of inclusion and justice for the poor and the marginalized.  Yet we Christians tolerate it.  More than that, we support and perpetuate it.  Many of us vote for politicians whose policies benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor.  Many of us vote to repeal taxes every chance we get.  We buy into the falsehood perpetuated by those who advocate the interests of the wealthy that government is necessarily and always a bad thing and that income redistribution through progressive tax policy is an inherent evil.  Then we go to church on Sunday and convince ourselves that we are faithful followers of Jesus Christ, a delusion that the church only too eagerly reinforces lest anyone be offended or, worse, withhold their pledge dollars. 

The situation is no better when it comes to that other pillar of the Kingdom of God, nonviolence.  John Dominic Crossan is absolutely right when he says that the way of empire is

religion (or ideology)→war→victory→peace

while the way of Jesus is

religion→nonviolence→justice→peace.

Peace through violence and victory is the way of empire.  Peace through nonviolence and justice is the way of Jesus.  It is the way of God.  It must be the way of the Christian, yet ever since the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE Christians have capitulated to the way of empire and engaged in warfare.  The capitulation began with the formulation of just war theory, which justified the Christian use of violence in rather narrowly defined circumstances.  Over the centuries Christians abandoned even the fig leaf of just war theory and put the Christian faith at the uncritical service of empires and nations.  The Roman Emperor Constantine claimed to have a vision before a battle of the cross and the words “In this sign conquer,” and the church never told him how un-Christian that vision was.  During the Crusades in the early centuries of the second Christian millennium European armies marched into battle at the behest of the church with crosses lifted high and emblazoned on their shields.  With the rise of nation states in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the church had no qualms about blessing the military adventures of those states.  The church sent clerics and missionaries with the armies of the European colonial powers to bless their violence and convert the supposed heathens against whom that violence was directed.  In the first half of the seventeenth century wars between Christians devastated western Europe.  In the modern era soldiers on all sides of the wars that ravaged Europe from the Napoleonic wars to the World Wars of the twentieth century were sure that God was on their side and blessed their killing and maiming of other people, most of whom were also Christians.  There were from time to time isolated voices that reminded the church of the teachings of Jesus.  The churches we know as the historic peace churches—Mennonites, Brethren, Quakers, etc.—are especially important in this regard.  Yet on the whole Christianity turned its back on the teaching about violence of the one it continued to proclaim as Lord and Savior, the one Christians convinced themselves they were really following. 

Today it never occurs to most Christians that their support of the military activities of their nation is inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus, but of course it is.  We come up with all kinds of justifications for Christians participating in violence.  Just war theory was the beginning, but today we usually resort to more supposedly pragmatic considerations to justify violence.  Violence is necessary, we say.  War will bring peace we say, never mind that it never really has.  We have a right to use violence to defend ourselves, we say, never mind that Jesus specifically forbade his disciples to use violence to defend him.  Violence works and nonviolence doesn’t, we say, never mind that as Walter Wink points out we don’t know that nonviolence doesn’t work because we’ve never really tried it universally and consistently and there is good evidence to suggest that in fact it does work in the few situations where it has been tried.  Ever since the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire Christians have been immensely creative in formulating justifications for rejecting the teaching of Jesus on nonviolence. 

None of which changes the fact that violence is un-Christian.  Always.  That’s what Jesus taught, or rather he taught that violence was un-God-like.  Violence is not God’s way.  Ever.  Yet we want both to be violent and to convince ourselves that we are faithful disciples of Christ and that God is on our side.  So we fabricate justifications and reject Christ’s teaching.  We go to church, pray, feel righteous, and then march off to battle or cheer those who do.  The eighth century BCE prophets said again and again that God despises our worship when it is not combined with justice for the poor and vulnerable.  They would say that today as well, but we must add that God despises our worship also when we follow it with war or support for war. 

If we would be true to our Lord and Savior we Christians must be people of peace.  We must work for an end to war and to all manifestations of violence in the world, violence between nations, violence between people, violence against God’s creation.  Our ideal, our goal, must be a world without violence, a world without armies, a world without weapons, a world without war.  We must strive always to beat the swords into plowshares and the spears into pruning hooks.  We will never see that vision realized.  The powers of the world, fallen as they are to use Walter Wink’s imagery, are too powerful.  They aren’t going to go away or be redeemed any time soon, but that is no reason for us to capitulate to them, to give in to them.  Nonviolence is the way of the Christian.  Nonviolence is the call of the Christian. 

So what is the decisive issue in Christianity today?  It is the issue of how we relate to the Kingdom of God that Jesus taught and lived.  It is therefore the issue of how we relate to the issues of poverty and violence.  Are we committed to using nonviolent means to bring an end to violence and an end to distributive injustice?  If we would claim the name of Christ we must answer that question yes.

By Scripture Alone?

In her book The Great Emergence, How Christianity is Changing and Why, (BakerBooks, Grand Rapids, 2008), Phyllis Tickle argues that a wide variety of developments in the modern world have undermined the Reformation’s battle cry of sola scriptura, by scripture alone.  She points to developments such as our culture’s rejection of slavery, its acceptance of divorce, and the emancipation of women (including their ordination) as developments that are clearly un-Biblical and that therefore undermine the Reformation’s notion of Scripture as the sole source of religious and moral authority.  Her comments got me thinking about what the emphasis on experience as the source of spiritual truth that I advocate in Liberating Christianity says about that primal Protestant assertion sola scriptura.  I have concluded that the empirical stress on perception and experience that underlies so much of my book pretty well does away with sola scriptura, indeed, that it undermines that contention about the location of authority in a far more radical way than I perhaps understood when I wrote the book and, therefore, than I expressed in the book. 

Sola scriptura, by scripture alone, became one of the defining slogans of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.  It was the Reformers’ response to the claims of the Roman Catholic Church to be itself the source and location of all authority on matters religious, theological, and moral.  By the early sixteenth century the Roman church had become so corrupt and so worldly that its claims to be the depositum fidei, the depository of the faith, the site and source of all religious truth, rang hollow and lost their power to convince significant numbers of people.   As Martin Luther and the others reacted against the abuses in the Church they also came to question some of the Church’s claims of truth.  Most famously Martin Luther found in the writings of Saint Paul in the New Testament a truth about justification by grace through faith that contradicted the Roman Church’s teaching of justification through works prescribed by the Church.  The Reformers were denying the Roman Catholic Church’s claims about the source and nature of religious authority on the basis of what they read in the Bible.  For them the Bible trumped the church.  They were so convinced of the authority of scripture, and they so needed a source of authority other than the church, that they proclaimed sola scriptura, by scripture alone.

Over time the Protestant reliance on the Bible as the sole source of truth together with broader cultural developments in the West led to the rigid understanding of the Bible as literally true and as the literal words of God that I deconstruct in Liberating Christianity under the term Biblicism.  It remains true however that even in the more liberal, progressive Protestant denominations like my own United Church of Christ any argument on a matter of doctrine, theology, morality, polity, or just about any other subject must be buttressed with quotations from the Bible.  Sola scriptura is deeply seared into the Protestant consciousness even when we reject certain specific scriptural assertions such as, for example, the inherent sinfulness of all homosexual relationships and some of the Biblical statements on the other social issues that Tickle raises in her book.

Yet, as I believe I demonstrate conclusively in my book, scripture cannot be the sole source of our understanding of the Christian faith in all of its aspects.  There simply is, for one thing, too much in the Bible that does not stand up under critical scrutiny.  There is too much that people today simply cannot accept as true and certainly can’t accept as God’s truth.  There are too many contradictions in the Bible.  The Bible does not speak with one voice on most of the issues that concern people today.  Because it does not we must have some other source of authority to help us determine which of the Bible’s voices speaks truth to us. 

In the Roman Catholic Church the identity of that other source of authority is clear.  It is today essentially what it was in the sixteenth century, namely, the teaching magisterium of the Church.  In Catholicism the Church is the arbiter of truth, directing the faithful through the contradictions of scripture to a truth that the Church assures the people is indeed God’s truth.  There is no such authority in Protestantism.  Indeed, Protestantism is radically inconsistent with any such authority.  Protestantism proclaims the priesthood of all believers.  Protestantism advocates individual and group Bible study whether or not a professionally trained and ecclesiastically authorized clergyperson is there to direct the study.  Protestantism does away with the priest and even the church as a mediator between the people and God.  The danger in the Catholic approach is an uncritical acceptance of church teachings regardless of a person’s personal experience.  The danger in Protestantism is an idiosyncratic individualism in which only the person’s personal experience acts as a guide to truth.   Taken to the extreme, neither approach is satisfactory.

Yet we still need another source of authority for truth once we realize that sola scriptura is no longer tenable, if indeed it ever was.  In Liberating Christianity I advocate experience as that other source of truth, although I don't put it in those terms.  My contention that experience is the ultimate authority for any truth is grounded in my conviction that we humans are constituted as subjective beings, and that contention has profound consequences for sola scriptura.  We exist within a self that perceives and experiences a world that seems at least to lie outside of ourselves, and everything we know or think we know necessarily comes to us through our perception and experience.  We have no other way of being in the world.  Objectivity is simply beyond us.  We are inherently subjective beings.  Subjective perception and experience are all we have or possibly can have.  It seems that, given this understanding of the nature of human beings, it would be closer to the truth to say “sola experientia,” by experience alone, than to say “sola scriptura.”

Yet I said above, and I firmly believe, that an idiosyncratic individualism in which only the person’s personal experience acts as a guide to truth is a danger inherent in the Protestant approach to faith.  How do we reconcile that statement of the danger in Protestantism with the reality that perception and experience are all we humans have to go on?  We do it by examining more closely just what it is that we humans perceive and experience.  Among other things, we perceive and experience other humans.  We perceive and experience our faith tradition, of which of course the Bible is a major part.  We can hold our perception and our experience up to the perceptions and experiences of other people.  We can make our experiences and perceptions available to other people to examine and critique.  We can hold our experiences of God up to the experiences of God that the Biblical authors express, for, as I argued in Liberating Christianity, the Bible is more than anything else a record of the faith experiences of its authors.  We can hold our perceptions and experiences up to the myriad perceptions and experiences of God that we find expressed in the writings of the saints and the great theologians of the Christian tradition.  Our own perceptions and experiences may be all we have, but that reality becomes problematic only if we allow our unavoidable subjectivity to lead to an isolated individualism that disregards our experience of other individuals and things.

Our personal experiences then remain the final arbiter of truth for us.  It cannot be otherwise, for we are constituted as subjects perceiving and experiencing what we take (but ultimately cannot know) to be an objective, external world.  Yet our subjectivity need not lead to idiosyncratic opinions that disregard the opinions of the other people or isolate us from the Christian tradition, which we also perceive and experience.  It is precisely our ability to perceive and experience other people as they share their truth with us, whether in our personal encounters with them or in their writings across the ages, that can keep our necessary subjectivity from becoming isolation with all of the spiritual, psychological, and physical dangers that isolation brings.    

Thus, as indebted we are to the profound insights of the Protestant Reformers, we must leave their slogan sola scriptura behind.  It doesn’t hold up in the light of our post-modern understanding of human subjectivity.  The Bible remains a central piece of the Christian tradition that we perceive and experience, into which we enter, and within which we have made the commitment to live our spiritual lives.  Sola experientia doesn’t mean jettisoning the Bible.  It means that we must understand that the Bible, like everything else, is something that we experience.  As with everything else we cannot know that it has objective reality outside of our perception of it.  With postmodern hermeneutics we know that meaning does not reside in the Bible alone but arises in the specific encounter of a particular reader with the Bible, which of course means that any meaning the Bible may have is subjective, as indeed I have insisted all truth and all meaning necessarily are.  It means that scriptura can never be sola, because scripture alone, scripture by itself apart from a specific encounter with a particular reader, has no meaning.  That truth is indeed the real Achilles heel of sola scriptura in the postmodern world.

So we acknowledge our enormous debt to the Protestant Reformers, then move on to a postmodern understanding of human nature, to an empirical ontology and epistemology that is foreign to anyone in the sixteenth century but that is central to postmodern sensibilities, and to an effort to find meaning in subjectivity, perception and experience.  It is not an easy task, but it is an unavoidable task.  May we do it well.

Is Progressive Christianity Viable?

          Perhaps I’m just in a down time, but here’s something that I have been thinking about lately.  I am a passionate proponent of progressive Christianity.  My book Liberating Christianity is, I trust, a positive contribution to the developing theology of progressive Christianity.  I have no doubt that progressive Christianity as I have outlined it in the book and as it is being developed today by many other authors is intellectually and spiritually viable.  Indeed, I believe that the reformation of Christianity that is under way today in the direction of a faith that is mythic, justice centered, and peace oriented is indispensable for the survival of Christianity itself, if indeed the survival of Christianity in the post-modern world is possible at all.  Yet in recent days I have been asking myself the question of the viability of progressive Christianity.  Specifically I have been wondering:  Is progressive Christianity institutionally viable?  Indeed, I have significant doubts about the institutional viability of progressive Christianity. 

My doubts about the institutional viability of progressive Christianity arise from the current state of those institutions that, to some extent at least, contain and support progressive Christianity.  The institution of that type with which I am the most familiar is, of course, my own United Church of Christ; and the current state of the United Church of Christ is not good.  I am not aware that the current state of any other denomination or other institution that to any significant extent embodies progressive Christianity is any better.  The UCC has been losing members and whole churches for decades.  Financial problems have led to institutional reorganizations in the direction of a smaller, less powerful national structure that have done nothing to reverse our institutional decline.  Here in the Pacific Northwest, some parts of which at least are among the most progressive areas in the country, nearly every UCC church is struggling to keep the doors open; and some of them are sure to fail and close.  The culture of the United States turns more and more against progressive thinking in all spheres of life—the political, the social, the economic, the religious.  In order to get elected President Barack Obama had to sever his ties to the UCC and repudiate the progressive positions taken by his pastor Jeremiah Wright.  It is obvious to me both that progressive thought holds the only promise of survival for humanity in the long run and that the cultural climate is turning more and more against progressive thought in every aspect of our national life.

Let me use my little UCC church in Monroe, Washington, USA, as an example.  On the one hand Monroe Congregational UCC is in many ways a vital and vibrant place.  It’s a very small church (average Sunday attendance around 60), but it has roughly doubled in size in the past several years.  It has also become a younger congregation with many children in a church that once had none, and we have grown in a very culturally and religiously conservative area on the outer edge of the more progressive Seattle area.  Many of the people who have come to us are enthusiastic and committed members of our little progressive church.  Yet the long-term survival of Monroe Congregational UCC is at least to some extent in doubt today.  That doubt arises from an apparent disconnect between people’s enthusiasm and their commitment of time and energy on the one hand and their understanding of and commitment to the institutional dynamics of the church on the other.  Simply put, people’s expressed enthusiasm and commitment are not translating into adequate financial support for the church.  It appears at least possible that the church will not be able to maintain itself in its current form for more than perhaps another year.  Specifically, it appears that the church may not be able to support a full-time professional pastor for more than another year.  If the church cannot afford a fulltime pastor there is a real question of its long-term institutional viability, since churches without full-time pastors tend to stagnate if not actually die. If Monroe Congregational UCC were unique or even unusual in that regard I would not ascribe any larger significance to its circumstances, but it isn’t.  It is more typical than atypical of progressive churches in the Pacific Northwest and, I believe, across the country.

Viewed from the outside at least, conservative Christian churches seem to be healthier institutionally, even though I am convinced that their theology is neither healthy nor sustainable in the long run.  Those churches seem to have less trouble attracting new members than do our progressive churches, and the members of those churches, in many cases, simply give more to their church than the members of progressive churches tend to give.  It is important for us to ask why these things are so; and I want to suggest several possible answers to that question. 

To begin let me suggest that perhaps one reason why members of conservative churches tend to support their institutions more generously than members of progressive churches lies in a fundamental difference between conservative and progressive theology.  That difference is that conservative Christian theology is grounded in fear while progressive Christian theology is grounded in grace and love.  Traditional conservative Christian theology maintains that unless a person believes in Jesus Christ, unless a person accepts Jesus Christ as her or his personal savior, that person’s soul will spend eternity in unspeakable torment after that person dies.  That is a theology grounded in fear.  It is a theology that provokes fear as a means of compelling participation in and support of the conservative Christian churches that preach it.  That theology assures those who accept it of a blissful eternity in heaven with Jesus as the reward for conformity with its assertions and loyalty to its institutions.  Progressive Christianity does none of that.  It preaches universal grace.  It is agnostic about an afterlife.  It says that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is about this life and that the Realm of God is located in this world, not in some hypothetical next world.  Conservative Christianity says fear for your eternal soul.  Progressive Christianity says fear not.  Conservative Christianity says we have the only truth that will calm your fear.  Progressive Christianity says that because there is no need to fear you don’t need us to calm your fear.  As a consequence progressive Christianity provokes less commitment to its institutions than does conservative Christianity.  That, I think, is one reason why the institutional viability of progressive Christianity is in doubt.

There are others.  One that may be of particular importance is the disconnect in American culture—and much of European culture—between progressive political and social thinking on the one hand and religion of any kind, especially Christianity, on the other.  A reality that progressive churches today must face is that most progressive people today want nothing to do with organized religion of any kind.  They most particularly want nothing to do with Christianity.  They may call themselves “spiritual but not religious,” but their experience with and understanding of Christianity convinces them, often for very valid reasons, that they want nothing to do with it.  To them Christianity is violent, judgmental, patriarchal, homophobic, and exclusionary.  They haven’t just made all that up.  Christian history and the faith’s current reality provide them with plenty of evidence that leads them to their conclusions.  Indeed, many of us who have devoted our lives to progressive Christianity sometimes wonder if Christianity is not tainted beyond redemption by its history and by its most popular and vocal manifestations today.  To most progressives today Christianity seems like nothing but a vehicle for reactionary social and political policies that promote anything but the peace and justice to which progressive people are committed.  Thus a great many people who might otherwise find a spiritual home in progressive Christianity never will because the mere fact that progressive Christianity is Christian excludes it as an option for them.  The pool of people from whom progressive Christian churches can draw is thus substantially reduced.

Another aspect of contemporary American culture that casts doubt on the viability of progressive Christianity has to do with questions, answers, and certainty.  Americans are uncomfortable with doubt.  Americans are uncomfortable with uncertainty.  I once heard the great British historian/philosopher Isaiah Berlin say that Western culture is characterized by three propositions, namely:  Every question has an answer, every question has only one correct answer, and it is possible to know that answer.  Certainly those propositions characterize the rationalistic, pragmatic nature of American culture.  Americans want answers.  They want certain, clear, factual answers.  Conservative Christianity gives them certain, clear, factual answers.  Beyond that, it gives them the question.  It says that the question we are to ask is:  How am I saved from sin?  Indeed, it asserts over and over again that that is the question that people actually ask.  Then it gives them the answer—by believing in Jesus Christ.  Progressive Christianity is wary of certain, clear, factual answers, and we don’t give people the questions.  We say that we want to live into the questions with them.  We say that no question is out of bounds, and we don’t prescribe mandatory answers.  We want to help people clarify their questions and find their own answers.  Conservative Christianity cites Biblical proof texts to say that believing in Jesus is the only way to salvation.  Progressive Christianity says that there are many different paths to God.  Christianity is one such path, but it is not the only one.  In taking those positions we are profoundly countercultural.  Being countercultural makes it harder for progressive Christianity to be institutionally viable in the culture that it counters. 

So the question remains:  Is progressive Christianity institutionally viable?  There is reason to believe that it may not be, at least not in any institutional form that looks anything like the current Christian structure of local churches and denominations.  I have no idea what some other institutional expression of progressive Christianity might look like, and I hope that I am wrong about the viability of progressive Christianity in its current institutional form.  I have committed my life to that form.  My livelihood depends on one of those little progressive Christian churches.  I know that some people find great support and comfort in that form.  Some people find a community in a progressive Christian church that they find nowhere else.  Some people find a spirituality that they want their children to learn in a progressive Christian church.  Progressive Christianity has an intellectual and spiritual depth that conservative Christianity lacks.  My concern is that all that isn’t enough to sustain the institutional viability of progressive Christianity in the long term given the numerous obstacles that progressive Christianity faces.  Like I said, I hope I’m wrong.  If any of you who read this want to try to convince me that I’m wrong, please post something in the Comments to this post or contact me directly.  I’ll be happy to consider what you have to say.