Here is a sermon preached by Brian McLaren at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church on July 16. My comments are in [bold and brackets]. (Video is available on the Media Hub, http://gchub.episcopalchurch.org/)
"Sisters and brothers, we live in a strange time in relation to the E-Word. For many of us, the word evangelism evokes ugly and morally tainted associations with colonialism, religious supremacy, and shabby televangelism. As a result, many Episcopalians would say that evangelism may be Southern Baptist or Pentecostal, but it's not Episcopalian, thank you very much. May I humbly propose that the time for this reactionary prejudice against evangelism is over? May I further propose that from this day forward, we see E-piscopal and E-vangelistic as a holy union joined together by God, and what God has joined together, no one should put asunder. Amen?
Think of it this way: If only fundamentalists evangelize in America, what predictions can you make about the future of the American religious landscape? If Christian moderates and progressives seldom if ever share their faith with love and enthusiasm, what will their future be? [The natural sense of this paragraph in light of the previous one is that Southern Baptists and Pentecostals are "Fundamentalists." This is playing to the gallery and unfair.]
To rediscover the good and true essence of evangelism, we need to rediscover evangelism in a more biblical light.And we can start with today's reading from 2 Corinthians. There we see evangelism as our call to demonstrate and proclaim a new creation in Christ. We see our call to live and invite others into a new way of life. We see evangelism as recruiting early adopters to be part of a radical new beginning for the human race - which Paul calls the new creation in Christ.
This world and its empires are living by an old script, Paul would say. Politics of domination and exploitation, economies of consumption, sociologies of exclusion and prejudice, and psychologies of shame and self-justification all flow from the old destructive narrative that is passing away. The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ mean for Paul, among many other things, that it is time for a new politics of service and the common good, for new economies of sustainability and regeneration, for new sociologies of reconciliation and love, and for new psychologies rooted in grace and faith [So here he explains what he understands to be the meaning of the cross. No mention of sin or repentence or faith or justification. The only meaning is a social justice meaning and "new psychologies rooted in grace and faith" whatever that is supposed to mean.] . . . in short, in Christ, all things are made new, and evangelism means recruiting and training people to defect from the old order and throw themselves wholeheartedly into the new way. [Essentially people "see the light" and roll up their sleeves to save themselves by saving the world. This is entirely Pelagian. Apparently there is no need for repentance from sin, forgiveness and grace. The cross is an inspirational story, not an event of cosmic salvation.] The E-word for Paul, then, is the R-word: reconciliation. We are God's reconciling co-workers; we are God's reconciling co-conspirators; we seek to demonstrate what it looks like to be spiritually and socially reconciled individuals and communities in the Spirit of the risen Christ.
This ministry of reconciliation gives us a vibrant new identity, according to Paul. We are not merely religious insiders huddled in our stained glass ghettoes, nor are we religious outsiders living without reference to the living God, but instead we are God's peace ambassadors, insiders who intentionally move outside to invite - actually, please is Paul's word - to plead with others to be reconciled to God. So we plead with them to rethink everything [rethink - that's it?] and follow the way of Jesus. [We can do this?] We plead with them based on the good news that in Christ, God is offering amnesty for all offenders, whatever they've done, whoever they've been. We plead with people to stop being part of the problem, and to join God in Christ as agents of the solution, so God's will can indeed be done on earth as it is in heaven. ["We plead with people to stop being part of the problem." Does works righteousness get any more banal than this?]
If we go to our reading in John seeking a more biblical understanding of the E-word, we see none of the ugly things that typically scare well-bred Episcopalians. [Unlike the great unwashed of other denominations, one presumes - can we say shameless pandering?] away from evangelism. Instead, we see intelligent and earnest people engaging with Jesus in mutually respectful conversation, and at the center of the conversation, we see Jesus ask a simple, powerful question: what are you seeking? In this way, evangelism first means inciting redemptive conversations, asking good questions, helping people think about what they're really seeking in life . . . and then it means inviting people to come and see . . . to come and experience . . . to join us on a journey of faith and mission and see what unfolds.
I'm sure agree that these are good things, beautiful things, needed things. I think that Episcopalians could get downright excited about evangelism if it were defined like this. [Instead of being defined in those old-fashioned ways that talk about sin and repentence] And frankly, I believe Episcopalians will get excited about evangelism again. [Oh yeah, its bound to happen any minute now in a denomination losing 1,000 members per week.] I think it's time. I think it's happening already. But dear brothers and sisters, three obstacles or distractions must be overcome for that to happen.
The first and most obvious is institutional conflict. I believe your community has been doing a difficult but needed service for the whole church and the whole world by wading into turbulent waters in recent years. [This is as clear an endorsement of the heretical and divisive decisions to endorse homosexual behaviour in Christian leaders as one could imagine. What else could he be talking about in this context? He is commending them for schism!] But there is more at stake than the immediate outcome in terms of policy. What good would it be for your side - whatever that is - to win the debate if in the process you lost your balance and lost your identity as God's evangelistic agents of reconciliation? [Is McLaren so dense that he actually believes that TEC is an agent of reconciliation? With a Presiding Bishop who calls individual salvation a heresy? With a social gospel that focuses on politics and economics and not on personal salvation? What does the word "reconciliation" mean here?] Your challenge, it seems to me, is to faithfully work through this season of conflict without letting it form or deform your identity. Your challenge, it seems to me, is to reaffirm at this very moment of institutional conflict your deeper incarnational identity as ministers of reconciliation.
That brings us to the second potential obstacle or distraction, which I would identify as institutional identity. People like you in these times of institutional conflict and stress could easily be tempted to lodge your identity in the saving of a beloved institution. But here we encounter, I believe, a great spiritual paradox. To recall Jesus' words, what if those who try to save their institutions will lose them? What if the best way to save an institution is to focus on saving something else, something bigger? What if the point isn't saving the institution but rather leveraging the institution in the saving of . . . the world, the world God so loves, according to John 3:16? In your simultaneous commitment to the Millennium Development Goals and to true and deep evangelism, [OK, they at least claim to be commited to the MDG but where in this Convention do you see any committment to evangelism? Where - unless evangelism is redefined as social work.] you are in the process of choosing this outward, missional [the word "missional" has now been hijacked - it is an empty word] focus . . . leveraging your institution for God's mission in today's world. So much depends on this.
That means that we can't afford to have a single one of you, as leaders in the church, to see yourselves as institutional maintenance people alone. From oldest to youngest, from the most seasoned bishop to the most newly baptized disciple, you must see yourselves as leveraging the institution for the mission of making disciples, and not vice versa. Do you see the difference? If you seek to do evangelism for the sake of the institution, I think you will lose ground and experience frustration. But if you align and retool the institution for the grand biblical mission of making authentic, fully-formed disciples of Jesus Christ for the good of the world, I think you will find God's empowerment and blessing at every turn.
Which brings us to the third obstacle which all denominations face, not just Episcopalians: along with institutional conflict and institutional identity, we must grapple with institutional rigidity. From my outsider's perspective, your most urgent issue of institutional rigidity related to the complex ways candidates are accepted and trained into ordained ministry. To put it bluntly: for all your system does well, it is perfectly designed to scare away from Episcopal leadership almost everyone with the spiritual gift of evangelism. And I have to make a confession: I am one of those people who was scared away about twenty years ago. I was deeply drawn both to evangelism and to the Anglican tradition while I was in graduate school in my twenties. But as I approached my discernment retreat with the bishop, I increasingly felt that a call to Episcopal ministry was at odds with my primary calling to evangelism. I hope that you will make it possible for people like me not have to choose one over the other in the future. May it be said to all people who are gifted and called in evangelism that the Episcopal church welcomes you. Amen?
The good news is that this would be a relatively simple thing to change . . . and the Episcopal structure itself, I believe, has remarkable inherent powers of self-renewal. And that's why, I believe, this moment of Episcopal crisis is also a moment of Episcopal opportunity. Perhaps, in the ways of the Spirit, the crisis and opportunity always go together. In that Spirit, let us pray:
_____________________
My Summary: This is a sad and abysmal sermon that is simply not Evangelical. No one should be in doubt now about where Brian McLaren stands theologically. He stands with The Episcopal Church - the most radical left wing denomination in America just barely to the right of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. You don't need the Jesus of Nicaea and Chalcedon to fund the vision of evangelism as social work proferred here. Whether McLaren still believes in the deity of Christ or not, he doesn't need to in order to preach this kind of sermon. He can talk the lingo, but the theological content has been evacuated. It is really too bad. He is a nice man; but his theology simply does not measure up to Scripture and Tradition.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Modernity as a Heresy Revisited: A Clarification of Terms
A few weeks ago I posted a brief article on Michael Allen Gillespie's excellent book, The Theological Origins of Modernity, entitled: "Descartes' Understanding of Man." This post generated two posts of condemnation by Halden Doerge, the second of which generated 78 comments including some very interesting ones from Doug Harink and D. Stephen Long. The posts are entitled: "Why Modernity is not the Problem" and "Why Modernity is not a Christian Heresy" and can be found here.
One of the comments near the end tried to summarize what Halden's problem is with my post and said the following.
"Clearly Halden is concerned, at least on some key level, with the politics effected (or perhaps at the heart of) a certain discursive strategy: whereby an opposition to modernity functions to present Christendom (as what is prior to modernity) and modernity as the only two games in town.”
Halden then quoted this statement and said: "Thanks, Dan. This is quite well put."
So we have a starting point for discussion here. Halden's problem is that he thinks that by calling Modernity a Christian heresy, I am setting up a choice between Chrisendom and Modernity: Choose One! This is so far off from what I was intending to say that it means that clearly there has been a breakdown in communication. Halden and I are not using words to meant the same things. We may well disagree dramatically about Jesus and the Gospel, (or maybe agree), but it would take a lot of terminological clarification to be sure one way or the other.
Christendom - Halden uses this word pejoratively exclusively. He apparently thinks there should never have been a Christendom. The fact that Christendom arose at all is proof positive that the Church had fallen into compromise and true discipleship had been overshadowed by worldliness. I would now use "Christendom" in a more neutral way that I did in my book, Rethinking Christ and Culture, to mean the geographical location where most people are Christian. Christendom need not necessarily imply Constantinianism. (Se below.)
Constantinianism - Halden does not use this word. He does not need to because it for him appears to be synonomous with Christendom. I disagree. I understand "Constantinianism" to be an eschatological heresy first identified by Yoder. (See my: The Politics of the Cross, ch. 6.) Constantinianism is the false doctrine that Christ's future kingdom can be brought into existence here and now by human effort and does not need to await the Second Coming. This heresy allows the Church to over-identify itself with a particular human government or ideology and sanctify it. This leads to utopianism, totalitarianism and ecclesial compromise with violence. I would not say that Christendom necessarily needs to be Constantinian, although it is a constant temptation.
Orthodoxy - I never mentioned either Constantinianism or Christendom in my post, but Halden seems to hear "Christendom" when I say "Orthodoxy." This is deeply concerning to me. Tolstoy took this approach to the limit when he says that one must choose between the Nicene Creed and the Sermon on the Mount: one have one or the other but not both. Is that true? Or is it exactly the opposite of the truth? I contend that one can never have the Sermon on the Mount without the Nicene Creed. One can have a bland form of liberal tolerance, yes, but not the radical discipleship of the Sermon on the Mount without orthodoxy. (If Jesus was just a man and he said what Matt. 5-7 says he said - then he was insane.)
I would not deny that the concept of orthodoxy was misused in Christendom as a tool of oppression. The Church should have stuck to excommunication and not become complicit in killing heretics. There should have been religious freedom. But the abuse does not negate the proper use (Aquinas). Orthodox doctrine is still essential to the Church, its abuse in Christiandom notwithstanding. Christians too are sinners and will abuse everything holy: sacraments, church office, canon law, tithes, music - you name it! We cannot drop everything that has been abused or there would be no Christianity left.
Heresy - I used the term "heresy" in its precise, technical, theological sense. A heresy is a twisting of a true doctrine either by over-emphasizing one aspect of the truth at the expense of other aspects or by over rationalizing the mystery. Contrary to Halden's concerns, "heresy" can never be completely "the other." On the other hand, he goes too far in implying (without actually saying so) that true doctrine "generates" heresy. No: sinners generate heresy, not by faithfully handing on true doctrine (orthodoxy), but by twisting and distorting it.
So Orthodoxy can be used under the guidence of the Holy Spirit to discern truth from error, to correct false teaching and to guard the purity of the Gospel the Church is charged to preach. Orthodoxy can be radical! It can take us back to the roots of our faith. Orthodoxy can condemn deviations from tradition that distort the biblical narrative centering on Jesus Christ.
Of course nominalism arose out of the Medieval Church and of course many orthodox ideas were in the mix of concepts used by Occam and others. It didn't drop out of the sky. It wasn't imported from India. But heresy is always a twisting of truth. Strictly speaking, that which is completely "other" (such as Hinduism or pre-Christian paganism) can never be heretical. Only a Christian doctrine twisted or over-rationalized can be heresy. And that is what the nominalist view of God turned out to be. As one commentator noted, nominalism is not itself a heresy (which is not to say it could not be wrong) but applied to certain doctrines (God and man in this case) it can lead to heresy. And it did.
Halden is too quick to reduce everthing to politics when he says that Orthodoxy conjurs up images of coercive, violent Christendom for him. This is as reductionistic as what he opposes.
One last point: Halden tries to play off "Jesus" against "Orthodoxy" in his post and is rightly criticized for it by Harink and Long. I don't mean to pile on, but there is perhaps one more point to be mentioned here. The question that is begged in using "Jesus" to critique Christendom or Orthodoxy or whatever is "Which Jesus?" There are many concepts of Jesus floating around out there. Which Jesus is the basis for critique? I'm reading Harnak's History of Dogma right now. If Halden does not mean Harnack's Jesus, then what terminology (other than the terminology of the creeds, i.e. orthodoxy) can Halden turn to in order to clarify what he means by "Jesus?" Surely Harink is correct to say that my call "Back to Orthodoxy" in the end is the same as Halden's call "Back to Jesus." But if so, then why cannot Halden admit that Orthodoxy may function as a way of critiquing Christian unfaithfulness today?
I did not have the pure pagan or total non-Christian in my sights, but rather liberal Christianity as in The Episcopal Church. Now they are heretics and also as Constantinian as they come. They are so intertwined with the dominant culture of Modernity that they cannot even conceive of the Church standing against the destruction of marriage and the abandonment of the virtue of chastity. I would go further and say that their heresy even arises out of their Constantinianism because it is their desperate lust for "relevance" that drives their abandoment of communion with orthodox Christians.
John Milbank on Socialism and Liberalism
I have not read much John Milbank except for a few scattered articles here and there and Theology and Social Theory twice (which is an insufficient number of times for anyone wishing to understand it).
However, I have been thinking about how Christians should think about contemporary politics for a while now and recently I noticed Halden Doerge worrying about Milbank's increasingly conservative position on sex, which some attribute to the influence of Pope Benedict XVI and others to growing up. Anyway, in the comment thread was a link to this Milbank essay "The Politics of Paradox" in Telos. In reading this essay I felt as though someone was reflecting back to me some of the thoughts I have recently written (some of which I have included in conference lectures that are to be published in a couple of upcoming books of essays).
It appears to me that Milbank is on a similar journey to the one I've been on for the past few years. I used to say that I was conservative in theology but liberal on social issues and I even got to the point of becoming slightly uncomfortable with the label "conservative." But over the past five years I have lost all confidence in anything leftwing at all and have come to view political and theological liberalism as two aspects of one reality. I have never been able to see that socialism and liberalism are really all that different from one another in their philosophical presuppositions, although many people view them as opposites. Socialism, insofar as it has anything to do with Marxist or other modern thinking, seems to me to be to share too many assusmptions with liberalism and can be subsumed under the heading "modernity" along with liberalism. (Pre-modern "socialism" seems to me to be a completely different animal and not usefully labelled "socialism" at all.) Contemporary Western democracies are moving toward an integration of the equality principle (Marxism) with the freedom principle (Liberalism) in a statist paradigm that I refer to as "soft totalitarianism."
Anyway, the only adequate label I have found to describe my political and theological stance is conservativism. The problem, of course, is that neo-conservativism,which is a form of classical liberalism, has been taken by many to be the only possible definition of conservativism. But I think this use of neo-conservative is a passing fad and will eventually be a footnote in history. Future historians will revert to more accurate terms like "capitalism" and "classical liberalism."
To be conservative is to be respectful of tradition, suspicious of all forms of utopianism, aware of the limits of politics, conscious of the effects of original sin and to know that ultimate hope for peace and justice lies beyond this world as it now is. Therefore, conservatism comports well with the Christian hope in the glorious second coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Chirst, which will usher in the radical transformation of both us and the world that is necessary for the kingdom of God to come in its fullness. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus and Paul were all conservatives in this sense. The Bible as a whole and creedal orthodoxy are also conservative in this sense.
Below is an extract from Milbank's article. I will put my comments in [bold and brackets].
"As Phillip Blond has suggested, there are now three crucial global forces in the world: capitalist rationality, Islam, and Christianity. [I mostly agree, but I would say "liberal modernity" instead of "capitalist rationality" because pure capitalism is pretty well non-existent in the 21st century. Big business and big government now cooperate and inter-penetrate in the bureaucratic micro-management of so much of modern life that freedom has been reduced to consumer choice rather than true moral freedom. If capitalism were triumphant, big government would be practically non-existent.] And of the latter two, the global reach of Christianity is far more serious and far more likely to prevail in the long term. This means that the anomaly pointed out almost a century ago by Hilaire Belloc is likely to pose its cultural contradiction ever more strongly upon the world stage. This is the manifest gap between the teachings of Christianity which still undergird Western morality, on the one hand, and the theory and practice of capitalism, on the other. [Agreed with one priviso - that we understand that even democratic socialist countries (which after all are supposedly alternatives to capitalism!) also share in the rational administration of life that is the bane of modernity. Is Sweden or Spain really not fully immersed in modernity's individualism, hedonism and rationalistic disdain for tradition, family and the sanctity of life?]
I believe, along with Radical Orthodoxy in general, that only the Church has the theoretical and practical power to challenge the global hegemony of capital and to create a viable politico-economic alternative. [Amen] I stand thereby in a long tradition of Anglican and Catholic Christian socialism, which has always insisted on the necessity of the "Christian" component for the "Socialist" one. In that sense I have always stood proudly amongst those who see themselves as "conservative theologically, radical politically." [The debatable point here is whether "Christian" and "socialist" in the modern sense can ever be reconciled.]
But over the years I have become more aware of the potential for smugness and inertia in that perspective. [Me too.] One can gently challenge it in three ways. First, there is a dimension that I have already hinted at. Can Christians really, fundamentally, categorize themselves as either left or right? [This is to rephrase my question at the end of the paragraph above.] Surely, as André de Muralt has argued, both the ideas of "the rule of One," of the sovereign center, and of the "rule of the Many," of individuals either in contracted dispersion or collective unity, are equally "nominalist"—both genealogically and ontologically? For both deny primary real relation, the real universal that is "the common good" and the role of "the few," whether that of the guiding virtuous elite or of the mediating institutions of civil society. But "right" and "left" define themselves variously in terms of either "the One" or the "the Many," both nominalistically construed. [Now we get to the heart of the issue! This is what I have been meaning all along by referring to socialism as "modern."]
Today, of course, what we really have is two versions of a "left" celebration of the "Many" either as individuals or as a democratically voting mass. For reasons still not yet sufficiently accounted for by historians and social theorists, we have a "liberal right," stressing economic negative liberty, and a "liberal left," stressing cultural and sexual negative liberty. In reality, of course, the two liberalisms are triumphing both at once and in secretly collusive harmony. [Yes, this is what I meant above when disussing the convergence of the equality principle and the freedom principle in contemporary politics. Western welfare states are merging Marxism and Capitalism into Statism.] So perhaps what still sustains party conflict is alternating anxieties among the populace about the inevitable insecurities generated by now economic and now cultural "freedom" in different temporal phases.
It follows that the very division of left and right assumes a nominalist social ontology, which of course I would reject. And it is also critically important to remind oneself that this division only postdates the French Revolution. [Right - it is modern.] This has created a curious historical delusion from which almost no one is really free. For we suppose that the premodern is somehow allied with "the right," just as barbarous journalists frequently imagine that the divine right of kings was a medieval theory, when it was in reality an early modern one. But pre-nominalist modernity was neither left nor right, neither "progressivist" nor "reactionary"—it was simply "other" to most of our assumed sociopolitical categories. [Exactly; this is what I have been trying to say for a year or more now on this blog. The reason we have to go back behind modernity is to get something that is not contaminated with dead-end dualisms. The idea that pre-modernity (i.e. Medieval Europe) was "right wing" is ludicrous.]
There is a further point to be made here. When the French revolutionaries invented "left" and "right," they arguably took us back to paganism and indeed they often explicitly supposed that they were doing so. [I have not encountered many writers who have had the insight and courage to say this - but any I have encountered (Lasch, Belloc, Chesterton, Kreeft, Kirk, etc.) have all been conservatives.] For characteristically, the ancient Greeks lined up philosophies of the spirit and of "ideal forms" with aristocracy and philosophies of matter with democracy. It is as if they assumed that the latter was always a matter of lowest common denominator and not of highest common factor. But as I have already suggested, the Christian revolution cuts right across this categorization. Instead of siding with "the noble" over against "the base," or inversely "the base" over against "the noble," it paradoxically democratizes the noble: hence Paul addresses his interlocutors as "all kings." [This is the reason why Paul's letters contain the Haustafeln, rather than radical manifestos for slaves and women to revolt. Paul is so radical on relationships in Christ that he can be conservative about secondary issues like social organization.] Yet at the same time, if there is now a new possibility of the spread of virtue (virtue being redefined as the more generally possible attitudes of love and trust, immune to the instance of "moral luck" as usually understood), there is still a political place for the superior role of the more virtuous and of those appointed to be the "guardians" of virtue, the virtuosos of charisma." [This need for virtue as the prerequisite for true freedom is the reason for Pope John Paul II's great disappointment with much of the consumerism and debauchery that followed the end of Communism in Eastern Europe. They became like Western Europe to a great extent, which was not John Paul's goal.]
You can read the whole article here. It is not a clearly thought out manifesto, but rather a slow-moving groping toward the light. If Milbank keeps reading Benedict XVI and John Paul II, he is bound to end up a conservative and that would be a very interesting development!
However, I have been thinking about how Christians should think about contemporary politics for a while now and recently I noticed Halden Doerge worrying about Milbank's increasingly conservative position on sex, which some attribute to the influence of Pope Benedict XVI and others to growing up. Anyway, in the comment thread was a link to this Milbank essay "The Politics of Paradox" in Telos. In reading this essay I felt as though someone was reflecting back to me some of the thoughts I have recently written (some of which I have included in conference lectures that are to be published in a couple of upcoming books of essays).
It appears to me that Milbank is on a similar journey to the one I've been on for the past few years. I used to say that I was conservative in theology but liberal on social issues and I even got to the point of becoming slightly uncomfortable with the label "conservative." But over the past five years I have lost all confidence in anything leftwing at all and have come to view political and theological liberalism as two aspects of one reality. I have never been able to see that socialism and liberalism are really all that different from one another in their philosophical presuppositions, although many people view them as opposites. Socialism, insofar as it has anything to do with Marxist or other modern thinking, seems to me to be to share too many assusmptions with liberalism and can be subsumed under the heading "modernity" along with liberalism. (Pre-modern "socialism" seems to me to be a completely different animal and not usefully labelled "socialism" at all.) Contemporary Western democracies are moving toward an integration of the equality principle (Marxism) with the freedom principle (Liberalism) in a statist paradigm that I refer to as "soft totalitarianism."
Anyway, the only adequate label I have found to describe my political and theological stance is conservativism. The problem, of course, is that neo-conservativism,which is a form of classical liberalism, has been taken by many to be the only possible definition of conservativism. But I think this use of neo-conservative is a passing fad and will eventually be a footnote in history. Future historians will revert to more accurate terms like "capitalism" and "classical liberalism."
To be conservative is to be respectful of tradition, suspicious of all forms of utopianism, aware of the limits of politics, conscious of the effects of original sin and to know that ultimate hope for peace and justice lies beyond this world as it now is. Therefore, conservatism comports well with the Christian hope in the glorious second coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Chirst, which will usher in the radical transformation of both us and the world that is necessary for the kingdom of God to come in its fullness. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus and Paul were all conservatives in this sense. The Bible as a whole and creedal orthodoxy are also conservative in this sense.
Below is an extract from Milbank's article. I will put my comments in [bold and brackets].
_________________________
"As Phillip Blond has suggested, there are now three crucial global forces in the world: capitalist rationality, Islam, and Christianity. [I mostly agree, but I would say "liberal modernity" instead of "capitalist rationality" because pure capitalism is pretty well non-existent in the 21st century. Big business and big government now cooperate and inter-penetrate in the bureaucratic micro-management of so much of modern life that freedom has been reduced to consumer choice rather than true moral freedom. If capitalism were triumphant, big government would be practically non-existent.] And of the latter two, the global reach of Christianity is far more serious and far more likely to prevail in the long term. This means that the anomaly pointed out almost a century ago by Hilaire Belloc is likely to pose its cultural contradiction ever more strongly upon the world stage. This is the manifest gap between the teachings of Christianity which still undergird Western morality, on the one hand, and the theory and practice of capitalism, on the other. [Agreed with one priviso - that we understand that even democratic socialist countries (which after all are supposedly alternatives to capitalism!) also share in the rational administration of life that is the bane of modernity. Is Sweden or Spain really not fully immersed in modernity's individualism, hedonism and rationalistic disdain for tradition, family and the sanctity of life?]
I believe, along with Radical Orthodoxy in general, that only the Church has the theoretical and practical power to challenge the global hegemony of capital and to create a viable politico-economic alternative. [Amen] I stand thereby in a long tradition of Anglican and Catholic Christian socialism, which has always insisted on the necessity of the "Christian" component for the "Socialist" one. In that sense I have always stood proudly amongst those who see themselves as "conservative theologically, radical politically." [The debatable point here is whether "Christian" and "socialist" in the modern sense can ever be reconciled.]
But over the years I have become more aware of the potential for smugness and inertia in that perspective. [Me too.] One can gently challenge it in three ways. First, there is a dimension that I have already hinted at. Can Christians really, fundamentally, categorize themselves as either left or right? [This is to rephrase my question at the end of the paragraph above.] Surely, as André de Muralt has argued, both the ideas of "the rule of One," of the sovereign center, and of the "rule of the Many," of individuals either in contracted dispersion or collective unity, are equally "nominalist"—both genealogically and ontologically? For both deny primary real relation, the real universal that is "the common good" and the role of "the few," whether that of the guiding virtuous elite or of the mediating institutions of civil society. But "right" and "left" define themselves variously in terms of either "the One" or the "the Many," both nominalistically construed. [Now we get to the heart of the issue! This is what I have been meaning all along by referring to socialism as "modern."]
Today, of course, what we really have is two versions of a "left" celebration of the "Many" either as individuals or as a democratically voting mass. For reasons still not yet sufficiently accounted for by historians and social theorists, we have a "liberal right," stressing economic negative liberty, and a "liberal left," stressing cultural and sexual negative liberty. In reality, of course, the two liberalisms are triumphing both at once and in secretly collusive harmony. [Yes, this is what I meant above when disussing the convergence of the equality principle and the freedom principle in contemporary politics. Western welfare states are merging Marxism and Capitalism into Statism.] So perhaps what still sustains party conflict is alternating anxieties among the populace about the inevitable insecurities generated by now economic and now cultural "freedom" in different temporal phases.
It follows that the very division of left and right assumes a nominalist social ontology, which of course I would reject. And it is also critically important to remind oneself that this division only postdates the French Revolution. [Right - it is modern.] This has created a curious historical delusion from which almost no one is really free. For we suppose that the premodern is somehow allied with "the right," just as barbarous journalists frequently imagine that the divine right of kings was a medieval theory, when it was in reality an early modern one. But pre-nominalist modernity was neither left nor right, neither "progressivist" nor "reactionary"—it was simply "other" to most of our assumed sociopolitical categories. [Exactly; this is what I have been trying to say for a year or more now on this blog. The reason we have to go back behind modernity is to get something that is not contaminated with dead-end dualisms. The idea that pre-modernity (i.e. Medieval Europe) was "right wing" is ludicrous.]
There is a further point to be made here. When the French revolutionaries invented "left" and "right," they arguably took us back to paganism and indeed they often explicitly supposed that they were doing so. [I have not encountered many writers who have had the insight and courage to say this - but any I have encountered (Lasch, Belloc, Chesterton, Kreeft, Kirk, etc.) have all been conservatives.] For characteristically, the ancient Greeks lined up philosophies of the spirit and of "ideal forms" with aristocracy and philosophies of matter with democracy. It is as if they assumed that the latter was always a matter of lowest common denominator and not of highest common factor. But as I have already suggested, the Christian revolution cuts right across this categorization. Instead of siding with "the noble" over against "the base," or inversely "the base" over against "the noble," it paradoxically democratizes the noble: hence Paul addresses his interlocutors as "all kings." [This is the reason why Paul's letters contain the Haustafeln, rather than radical manifestos for slaves and women to revolt. Paul is so radical on relationships in Christ that he can be conservative about secondary issues like social organization.] Yet at the same time, if there is now a new possibility of the spread of virtue (virtue being redefined as the more generally possible attitudes of love and trust, immune to the instance of "moral luck" as usually understood), there is still a political place for the superior role of the more virtuous and of those appointed to be the "guardians" of virtue, the virtuosos of charisma." [This need for virtue as the prerequisite for true freedom is the reason for Pope John Paul II's great disappointment with much of the consumerism and debauchery that followed the end of Communism in Eastern Europe. They became like Western Europe to a great extent, which was not John Paul's goal.]
_______________________
You can read the whole article here. It is not a clearly thought out manifesto, but rather a slow-moving groping toward the light. If Milbank keeps reading Benedict XVI and John Paul II, he is bound to end up a conservative and that would be a very interesting development!
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
The Pill? No Thanks
The blog "ProWoman ProLife" is an excellent source of "against the stream" thinking done by a team of nine women who come from quite different perspectives but who often agree on social issues. All are pro-life and all seem to have misplaced their membership cards in the official second wave feminist movement, although most are not about to give up the term "feminist" without a fight. (And seeing that Brigette Pellerin has a black belt in karate, one would be well advised not to disagree too vehemently!) You can see their profiles here.
They recently had a colloquium on the issue of the Birth Control Pill. Six of the contributors gave their perspectives and all were anti-pill. This is interesting. Here are some quotes, some longer than others. By all means read the whole thing.
Andrea Mrozek
"Ten years ago, I would have said if you are pro-life you ought to be in favour of preventing pregnancy. Today I am against the birth control Pill. Why?
A combination of factors. I read the book The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women by Barbara Seaman and other studies. I didn’t like what I learned regarding the history of the Pill, how it was developed and what the effects are on women.
I also consider that the Pill aids and abets our pro-abortion culture.
The Pill has created a world whereby sex and babies are entirely separate enterprises. They aren’t. A virgin birth? Very surprising. Pregnancies that follow sex—not very surprising. Planned parenthood (the idea, not the organization) is, in large part, a myth.
There’s nothing wrong with taking some measures to plan a family, and/or prevent pregnancy. But an entire culture that depends on a little Pill to be sure that sex never results in kids except exactly when you want it to? A culture courtesy of pharmaceutical companies, who always had their profits, not our best interests, in mind (read Seaman)."
I also harbour concern that the Pill functions as an abortifacient some of the time."
Brigette Pelerin
"Where I’m from (Modern Late 20th-Century Suburbia), good girls are the ones who are on the Pill. The other ones are irresponsible idiots or (worse) cloistered religious types.
It didn’t occur to me to question this proposition until well into my 20s. But once I did, it was impossible to look back, and it was (and still is) impossible not to feel angry and betrayed. For the Pill is not good. . . .
The worst is the idea that women ought to be on some form of “reliable” birth control so as to be available for sex at a moment’s notice. How is that empowering? No, there’s nothing wrong with sex; it’s just that sterile sex isn’t real sex. When they tell you good girls who want good sex ought to be on the Pill, they’re lying to you."
Patricia Egan
"Even for those women who eschew artifical birth control, the efficiency and ubiquity of the Pill bring consequences. Until its arrival fertility and children were irresistible forces of nature for virtually all women, and therefore for the culture. Today, fertility and children are mere options for self-actualization, commodites for which women may or may not make space in their lives. This is the culture today, whether or not you accept it."
Rebecca Walberg
"I’m deeply ambivalent about the birth control pill. My concerns fall into three general categories. First, the mechanism by which some pills act isn’t clear: do they prevent ovulation, or do they prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg? These are two very different things. . . .
Second, we know very little about the long term health effects of using the Pill, especially when taken for a protracted time. This should be of huge concern to feminists; and in fact they took on HRT for menopausal women by criticizing it as an attempt to make money off a natural part of women’s lives, by pharma companies who hadn’t done enough testing to demonstrate its safety. The same critique applies to hormonal contraceptives, but very few feminists are asking these questions. . . .
Finally, I dislike what the Pill has done to our culture. By creating a quite reliable barrier between sex and procreation, it helped to separate sex from marriage (or a committed loving relationship) and started us down the slippery slope to the hook-up culture. . . .
Tanya Zaleski
"I don’t like the birth control Pill. Not when I used it, and not when someone I love uses it. Mind you, I don’t dislike the Pill any more than the ring, the patch, the shot, or the IUD with that hormonal release action.
It – my disdain for the Pill – does have some to do with the nausea, headaches, breast tenderness, irregular bleeding, weight gain, sexual side effects and mood changes I and others have suffered at the hands of hormonal birth control. Not wild about blood pressure spikes and heart palpitations, either. And why is it that women with a history of breast cancer are discouraged against using the Pill? Then there’s the fact that many women using hormonal contraceptives get pregnant anyway. And when that happens to us, we tend to feel guilty, like we did it on purpose. How, I ask, is any of that at all empowering?
Véronique Bergeron de Grandpré
"My breaking point came when my third – and I thought last – baby was 6 months old: I read the fine print on my new Pill prescription. The nausea, the headaches, the spotting, the mood swings, the aneurysm hit me like a ton of brick. I looked at my husband and said: “Please tell me you don’t want me to take that shit. Please tell me it’s okay, we’ll learn natural family planning and welcome any unplanned pregnancy like they were meant to be. Please, I can’t do this to my body anymore.” We took the jump and never looked back."
In closing, let me just add this quote from the comment thread from "Husband." I think it is right on.
"PWPLers:
Permit me to provide one husband’s perspective.The pill demeans men. It permits us to indulge an appetite without any consequences at all, and that is demeaning.
Were I single and knowing that I could get what I want (sex), pretty much when I want (most days of the month except when she’s ….er… cranky), without having to fear what I don’t want (being tied to this chick indefinitely because of a kid) would be pretty darn hard to resist. I can gloss over the baseness of my pursuit by pretending to be sensitive along the way. (Sure, I’m fine with having the vegetarian thai instead of the beef…. Hell, I’ll even drink one of those damn coolers instead of a beer – just as long as I get sex later on). That sensitivity can then extend to other things – like co-habitating (I just think we should take the time to get to know one another….) or abortion (you know girl, I don’t want to interfere with your right to choose….) and man oh man am I scoring big time. Then, a few years later, when I get tired of her, I can toss her over (we just seemed to stop communicating….) without consequence, for another one, preferable a few years younger.
This is one hell of an arrangement. Except that it isn’t, because I am something of a Dorian Gray, apparently all good on the outside, pretty rotten within. If I’m married, it isn’t quite as bad, but almost, because I can continue to objectify her.
Sex with consequences is an extraordinary means to help men to continue to reflect on the inherent dignity of women. The act of reflecting helps us maintain our own dignity. The pill erodes that reflection, and demeans us as a consequence."
If you read the women's comments, you wonder how on earth the drug companies sell so many of these stupid little pills. But if you read "Husband's" response, I think the answer comes into focus. It is not empowering women, but irresponsible men.
They recently had a colloquium on the issue of the Birth Control Pill. Six of the contributors gave their perspectives and all were anti-pill. This is interesting. Here are some quotes, some longer than others. By all means read the whole thing.
Andrea Mrozek
"Ten years ago, I would have said if you are pro-life you ought to be in favour of preventing pregnancy. Today I am against the birth control Pill. Why?
A combination of factors. I read the book The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women by Barbara Seaman and other studies. I didn’t like what I learned regarding the history of the Pill, how it was developed and what the effects are on women.
I also consider that the Pill aids and abets our pro-abortion culture.
The Pill has created a world whereby sex and babies are entirely separate enterprises. They aren’t. A virgin birth? Very surprising. Pregnancies that follow sex—not very surprising. Planned parenthood (the idea, not the organization) is, in large part, a myth.
There’s nothing wrong with taking some measures to plan a family, and/or prevent pregnancy. But an entire culture that depends on a little Pill to be sure that sex never results in kids except exactly when you want it to? A culture courtesy of pharmaceutical companies, who always had their profits, not our best interests, in mind (read Seaman)."
I also harbour concern that the Pill functions as an abortifacient some of the time."
Brigette Pelerin
"Where I’m from (Modern Late 20th-Century Suburbia), good girls are the ones who are on the Pill. The other ones are irresponsible idiots or (worse) cloistered religious types.
It didn’t occur to me to question this proposition until well into my 20s. But once I did, it was impossible to look back, and it was (and still is) impossible not to feel angry and betrayed. For the Pill is not good. . . .
The worst is the idea that women ought to be on some form of “reliable” birth control so as to be available for sex at a moment’s notice. How is that empowering? No, there’s nothing wrong with sex; it’s just that sterile sex isn’t real sex. When they tell you good girls who want good sex ought to be on the Pill, they’re lying to you."
Patricia Egan
"Even for those women who eschew artifical birth control, the efficiency and ubiquity of the Pill bring consequences. Until its arrival fertility and children were irresistible forces of nature for virtually all women, and therefore for the culture. Today, fertility and children are mere options for self-actualization, commodites for which women may or may not make space in their lives. This is the culture today, whether or not you accept it."
Rebecca Walberg
"I’m deeply ambivalent about the birth control pill. My concerns fall into three general categories. First, the mechanism by which some pills act isn’t clear: do they prevent ovulation, or do they prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg? These are two very different things. . . .
Second, we know very little about the long term health effects of using the Pill, especially when taken for a protracted time. This should be of huge concern to feminists; and in fact they took on HRT for menopausal women by criticizing it as an attempt to make money off a natural part of women’s lives, by pharma companies who hadn’t done enough testing to demonstrate its safety. The same critique applies to hormonal contraceptives, but very few feminists are asking these questions. . . .
Finally, I dislike what the Pill has done to our culture. By creating a quite reliable barrier between sex and procreation, it helped to separate sex from marriage (or a committed loving relationship) and started us down the slippery slope to the hook-up culture. . . .
Tanya Zaleski
"I don’t like the birth control Pill. Not when I used it, and not when someone I love uses it. Mind you, I don’t dislike the Pill any more than the ring, the patch, the shot, or the IUD with that hormonal release action.
It – my disdain for the Pill – does have some to do with the nausea, headaches, breast tenderness, irregular bleeding, weight gain, sexual side effects and mood changes I and others have suffered at the hands of hormonal birth control. Not wild about blood pressure spikes and heart palpitations, either. And why is it that women with a history of breast cancer are discouraged against using the Pill? Then there’s the fact that many women using hormonal contraceptives get pregnant anyway. And when that happens to us, we tend to feel guilty, like we did it on purpose. How, I ask, is any of that at all empowering?
Véronique Bergeron de Grandpré
"My breaking point came when my third – and I thought last – baby was 6 months old: I read the fine print on my new Pill prescription. The nausea, the headaches, the spotting, the mood swings, the aneurysm hit me like a ton of brick. I looked at my husband and said: “Please tell me you don’t want me to take that shit. Please tell me it’s okay, we’ll learn natural family planning and welcome any unplanned pregnancy like they were meant to be. Please, I can’t do this to my body anymore.” We took the jump and never looked back."
In closing, let me just add this quote from the comment thread from "Husband." I think it is right on.
"PWPLers:
Permit me to provide one husband’s perspective.The pill demeans men. It permits us to indulge an appetite without any consequences at all, and that is demeaning.
Were I single and knowing that I could get what I want (sex), pretty much when I want (most days of the month except when she’s ….er… cranky), without having to fear what I don’t want (being tied to this chick indefinitely because of a kid) would be pretty darn hard to resist. I can gloss over the baseness of my pursuit by pretending to be sensitive along the way. (Sure, I’m fine with having the vegetarian thai instead of the beef…. Hell, I’ll even drink one of those damn coolers instead of a beer – just as long as I get sex later on). That sensitivity can then extend to other things – like co-habitating (I just think we should take the time to get to know one another….) or abortion (you know girl, I don’t want to interfere with your right to choose….) and man oh man am I scoring big time. Then, a few years later, when I get tired of her, I can toss her over (we just seemed to stop communicating….) without consequence, for another one, preferable a few years younger.
This is one hell of an arrangement. Except that it isn’t, because I am something of a Dorian Gray, apparently all good on the outside, pretty rotten within. If I’m married, it isn’t quite as bad, but almost, because I can continue to objectify her.
Sex with consequences is an extraordinary means to help men to continue to reflect on the inherent dignity of women. The act of reflecting helps us maintain our own dignity. The pill erodes that reflection, and demeans us as a consequence."
If you read the women's comments, you wonder how on earth the drug companies sell so many of these stupid little pills. But if you read "Husband's" response, I think the answer comes into focus. It is not empowering women, but irresponsible men.
Why Pro-lifers are Against Contraception and Sex Education Consisting of Contraception Instruction
Steve Waldman seems genuinely puzzled by the fact that pro-life Christians are opposed to handing out contraception and sex ed lessons to teens in an attempt to reduce the number of abortions. I must admit that I'm puzzled by the fact that he is so puzzled. He writes:
"I'm often asked by pro-choice friends why pro-lifers oppose sex education, family planning, and contraception. Don't those approaches reduce unintended pregnancy and therefore the numbers of abortions? It's a question at the heart of efforts to achieve "common ground" on abortion."
This language of "common ground" is the language used by the Evangelical and Catholic Obama supporters (such as Waldman) to describe what are trying to sell as an "abortion reduction strategy." Part of the strategy seems to be to drive a wedge between the Evangelicals and more liberal (contraception accepting) Catholics, on the one hand, and the conservative (contraception rejecting) Catholics, on the other. The goal is to isolate the conservative Catholics from the other two constituencies, which are seen as fertile ground for selling the "abortion reduction" strategy.
The problem with the so-called "abortion reduction" strategy (condoms and sex ed.) is that you have to convince people that it actually reduces abortion and this premise flies in the face of the past 50 years of sex ed. and contraception strategies. It is not that sex ed. and contraception are untried proposals that might work if only we gave them a whirl. Rather, we have raised a couple of generations of North Americans on sex ed. and easily available contraception without putting a dent in the abortion rate. So Steve Waldman should not be surprised that pro-lifers reject the Obama administration "abortion reduction" strategy when it has been proven ineffective by recent history.
In addition, recent statistics from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta show the alternative "abstinence only education" does reduce the number of abortions. The statistics compare the abortion rates in states that accepted funds for absitinence only education versus the rate in those states that did not.
"For teen girls under the age of 15 years old, from 2001 – 2005, there was a 7.5% decrease in abortions among the states which have rejected funding for abstinence only education.
For teen girls under the age of 15 years old, from 2001 – 2005, there was a 23.1% decrease in abortions among the states which have accepted funding for abstinence only education.
The states which have accepted funding for abstinence only education showed a 208% greater reduction in abortions among girls 14 years old and younger, when compared to the states which have rejected funding for abstinence only education.
Overall, the abortion rate among girls younger than 15 years old in states which rejected abstinence only funding was 37.3% higher, than in states which accepted funding."
An article in the UK's Mail Online documents a recent British government program aimed at reducing abortion by promoting contraception and contraception instruction, which led to a doubling of the rate of abortion by those in the "abortion reduction" program.
"A multi-million pound initiative to reduce teenage pregnancies more than doubled the number of girls conceiving.
The Government-backed scheme tried to persuade teenage girls not to get pregnant by handing out condoms and teaching them about sex.
But research funded by the Department of Health shows that young women who attended the programme, at a cost of £2,500 each, were 'significantly' more likely to become pregnant than those on other youth programmes who were not given contraception and sex advice.
A total of 16 per cent of those on the Young People's Development Programme conceived compared with just 6 per cent in other programmes."
So if the Obama administration were really serious about reducing the number of abortions, they would promote abstinence only sex education programs instead of funding more contraception and contraception instruction types of sex education programs. But they are doing the exact opposite, which makes pro-lifers extremely dubious about their real intentions. After all, the evidence is in and the course of action the Obama administration wants to take is clearly not going to work. So why are they pressing ahead with it?
Obviously the conservative Catholics who reject all contraception are not going to fall for this line and the Obama administration knows this. But Evangelicals and Catholics who accept contraception under certain conditions (i.e. for married couples only and not for the purpose of rejecting children altogether) are seen as softer targets.
The effect this whole strategy is having on me, however, is to cause me to question the morality of contraception more and more. The whole idea that we are "entitled" to sexual gratification when we are not committed to marriage and to raising the children that might result from our sexual activity seems to me to be the root of the entire problem. This idea is a manifestation of the individualism and hedonism that characterizes modern Western society and its culture of entitlement. We want our sexual gratification and we want it badly enough to risk having to kill unborn childrent to mitigate the consequences of our lust.
The only question left is whether artificial contraception is wrong is all circumstances except in the case of a married couple who have serious and substantial reasons for spacing out children or limiting family size (not mere preferences) and who are prepared to accept any child conceived rather than resort to abortion or whether it is intrinsically wrong period. The horrific consequences of the widespread acceptance of the "contraceptive mentality" in the Western world over the past half-century strongly suggests that this is a moral question Evangelicals will need to ponder seriously and pray over fervently in the next few years.
"I'm often asked by pro-choice friends why pro-lifers oppose sex education, family planning, and contraception. Don't those approaches reduce unintended pregnancy and therefore the numbers of abortions? It's a question at the heart of efforts to achieve "common ground" on abortion."
This language of "common ground" is the language used by the Evangelical and Catholic Obama supporters (such as Waldman) to describe what are trying to sell as an "abortion reduction strategy." Part of the strategy seems to be to drive a wedge between the Evangelicals and more liberal (contraception accepting) Catholics, on the one hand, and the conservative (contraception rejecting) Catholics, on the other. The goal is to isolate the conservative Catholics from the other two constituencies, which are seen as fertile ground for selling the "abortion reduction" strategy.
The problem with the so-called "abortion reduction" strategy (condoms and sex ed.) is that you have to convince people that it actually reduces abortion and this premise flies in the face of the past 50 years of sex ed. and contraception strategies. It is not that sex ed. and contraception are untried proposals that might work if only we gave them a whirl. Rather, we have raised a couple of generations of North Americans on sex ed. and easily available contraception without putting a dent in the abortion rate. So Steve Waldman should not be surprised that pro-lifers reject the Obama administration "abortion reduction" strategy when it has been proven ineffective by recent history.
In addition, recent statistics from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta show the alternative "abstinence only education" does reduce the number of abortions. The statistics compare the abortion rates in states that accepted funds for absitinence only education versus the rate in those states that did not.
"For teen girls under the age of 15 years old, from 2001 – 2005, there was a 7.5% decrease in abortions among the states which have rejected funding for abstinence only education.
For teen girls under the age of 15 years old, from 2001 – 2005, there was a 23.1% decrease in abortions among the states which have accepted funding for abstinence only education.
The states which have accepted funding for abstinence only education showed a 208% greater reduction in abortions among girls 14 years old and younger, when compared to the states which have rejected funding for abstinence only education.
Overall, the abortion rate among girls younger than 15 years old in states which rejected abstinence only funding was 37.3% higher, than in states which accepted funding."
An article in the UK's Mail Online documents a recent British government program aimed at reducing abortion by promoting contraception and contraception instruction, which led to a doubling of the rate of abortion by those in the "abortion reduction" program.
"A multi-million pound initiative to reduce teenage pregnancies more than doubled the number of girls conceiving.
The Government-backed scheme tried to persuade teenage girls not to get pregnant by handing out condoms and teaching them about sex.
But research funded by the Department of Health shows that young women who attended the programme, at a cost of £2,500 each, were 'significantly' more likely to become pregnant than those on other youth programmes who were not given contraception and sex advice.
A total of 16 per cent of those on the Young People's Development Programme conceived compared with just 6 per cent in other programmes."
So if the Obama administration were really serious about reducing the number of abortions, they would promote abstinence only sex education programs instead of funding more contraception and contraception instruction types of sex education programs. But they are doing the exact opposite, which makes pro-lifers extremely dubious about their real intentions. After all, the evidence is in and the course of action the Obama administration wants to take is clearly not going to work. So why are they pressing ahead with it?
Obviously the conservative Catholics who reject all contraception are not going to fall for this line and the Obama administration knows this. But Evangelicals and Catholics who accept contraception under certain conditions (i.e. for married couples only and not for the purpose of rejecting children altogether) are seen as softer targets.
The effect this whole strategy is having on me, however, is to cause me to question the morality of contraception more and more. The whole idea that we are "entitled" to sexual gratification when we are not committed to marriage and to raising the children that might result from our sexual activity seems to me to be the root of the entire problem. This idea is a manifestation of the individualism and hedonism that characterizes modern Western society and its culture of entitlement. We want our sexual gratification and we want it badly enough to risk having to kill unborn childrent to mitigate the consequences of our lust.
The only question left is whether artificial contraception is wrong is all circumstances except in the case of a married couple who have serious and substantial reasons for spacing out children or limiting family size (not mere preferences) and who are prepared to accept any child conceived rather than resort to abortion or whether it is intrinsically wrong period. The horrific consequences of the widespread acceptance of the "contraceptive mentality" in the Western world over the past half-century strongly suggests that this is a moral question Evangelicals will need to ponder seriously and pray over fervently in the next few years.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Blogging will be sporadic and light over the next two weeks. It is time for our annual camping and canoeing vacation in Algonquin Park. We will come back when we have seen a few of these and gotten this tired, which at our ages takes less time than it used to take!
What is Worse than Legal Abortion? Coercive Abortion
Charles Colson's Breakpoint column "Where's the Choice in This?" deals with American funding of coercive abortion in China. This reality certainly strips the mask away and reveals that the "pro-choice" rhetoric is just that - empty rhetoric.
__________
"Last year, a young Chinese woman—let’s call her Dan Li—ran afoul of the Chinese government. She had become “illegally pregnant.” By the time the authorities found out, Dan Li was seven months along. Family planning officials tied her to a bed, induced labor, and, when the baby was born, killed the baby.
What happened to Dan Li is an abomination—one, however, that tragically takes place regularly in China. But now, thanks to the U.S. Congress, you and I will be paying for it.
Last March, without fanfare, Congress passed a bill providing $50 million for the United Nations Population Fund. This organization promotes abortion around the globe—including in China. What makes the bill especially heinous is that it voided Kemp-Kasten, a bill which, for two decades, prevented our tax dollars from funding forced abortions and sterilization.
This blows the lid off the argument that abortion is all about giving a woman choice. If Congress really stands for choice, as they claim, why did they vote for coercion? If feminists are really for choice, why aren’t they fighting this law? Why isn’t our pro-choice President demanding that this brutalization of women be stopped?"
__________
The only answer is that feminists and other pro-choice people are not really pro-choice. They are pro-abortion because they see abortion as the best solution to certain social problems. The same people eventally will view infanticide and euthanaia as solutions. This is a fundamental characteristic of the culture of death: viewing the killing of the innocent as an acceptable solution to social problems.
Read it all here.
__________
"Last year, a young Chinese woman—let’s call her Dan Li—ran afoul of the Chinese government. She had become “illegally pregnant.” By the time the authorities found out, Dan Li was seven months along. Family planning officials tied her to a bed, induced labor, and, when the baby was born, killed the baby.
What happened to Dan Li is an abomination—one, however, that tragically takes place regularly in China. But now, thanks to the U.S. Congress, you and I will be paying for it.
Last March, without fanfare, Congress passed a bill providing $50 million for the United Nations Population Fund. This organization promotes abortion around the globe—including in China. What makes the bill especially heinous is that it voided Kemp-Kasten, a bill which, for two decades, prevented our tax dollars from funding forced abortions and sterilization.
This blows the lid off the argument that abortion is all about giving a woman choice. If Congress really stands for choice, as they claim, why did they vote for coercion? If feminists are really for choice, why aren’t they fighting this law? Why isn’t our pro-choice President demanding that this brutalization of women be stopped?"
__________
The only answer is that feminists and other pro-choice people are not really pro-choice. They are pro-abortion because they see abortion as the best solution to certain social problems. The same people eventally will view infanticide and euthanaia as solutions. This is a fundamental characteristic of the culture of death: viewing the killing of the innocent as an acceptable solution to social problems.
Read it all here.
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