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Once again I’m piggy-backing off of Jesus Politics. The New PantaGruel is a prime example of how social conservative thinking does not dovetail naturally with economic conservativism. They show what happens when socially conservative Christians develop deeper habits of political deliberation. They do not become “liberals”, they become independents who are critical of both of the main parties in the US.

I’ve invited Pantagruel to consider some of my own postings. I also have some comments on a post entitled, Arguments Against Single-Issue Voting Lack Nuance, Honesty, and Guts that came out just before the election. The post is by Fr. Gassalasca Jape, S.J., Inquisitor(G.J.(ps, I earlier used G.P. because I have an uncle who goes by those initials.)). G.J.’s main point is that there is nothing wrong with weighting a single issue as being of primary concern in deciding one’s vote. He chastises the Christianity Today for being overly concerned with appearances and respectability with the mainstream by adopting their extreme characterization of single-issue voters. G.J. is critical of how CT dismisses supposedly “single-issue voters”, while at the same time implicitly pushing Bush as a candidate through their selection of important issues.

G.J. states why for him Abortion undergirds other issues:

Abortion, properly understood by pagans and religionists alike, pertains to end of life “issues,” like euthanasia; genetic meddling on all kinds of life; the proper limits of the state; economic and “social” justice–and more. How we regard and treat life, especially human life, and the health of the family (the fundamental ordering structure of society) is a basic, foundational political concern that rightly precedes all others. One can vote on it as a “single-issue” or “litmus test” because it impacts all other “issues” most profoundly, and a person’s views on “abortion” always tell you a great deal about that person and what you might expect from them.

For G.J., one’s stance on abortion is key to whether one is for the culture of life or death. It comes down to how all choice takes place in a legal and social context and that pro-choicers implicitly endorse a libertarian legal/social context where the individual(woman) is the arbiter of what is right or wrong.

However, G.J. dismisses considerations of whether there is some ambiguity as to when we become human beings and deserve legal personhood. He treats the sanctity of human life as key to the health of the family, which is then the fundamental ordering structure of society. This may fit with what Pam Cochran argues is a confusion of the traditional USAmerican notion of family with the more inclusive biblical notion of family. A confusion which may then lead one to over-weight the importance of fallible attempts to maintain the traditional family as a means to strengthen civil society. G.J. also passes without comment over the important issue of whether Republican Party is likely to significantly change abortion law. That is, whether pro-lifers can expect significant reductions in abortions, given our current political strategy of focusing on ephemeral, marginal changes, while maintaining our long-term commitment to make all elective abortions illegal again.

I would maintain that our political strategies affect our opposition’s strategies. As such, prolifers bear some responsibility for the reactionary political strategies of pro-choicers that oppose compromise on even marginal changes. This is why I believe prolifers need to change their political strategies to depoliticize and prevent abortion. It also is why abortion should have been weighted less in the last election on account of the fact that sustainable progress would require more changes in political strategy from both sides.

So, in response to G.J., I have no problems with a single issue being decisive for someone’s vote in an election. What I have a problem with is when an issue remains decisive for several elections; all the while very little progress is made on said issue and our voting strategy has serious, unintended consequences. In that case, unless a convincing alternative strategy, besides giving one party way too much power, is proffered to effectively make changes on the issue, we should change tactics and advance our goals through other strategies.

That is why I focus my activism to prevent abortions (and the deaths of already-born people) by persuading pro-lifers to admit that we may not be able to make our ideals into law and that we need to understand pro-choicer’s positions better to foster compromises to prevent abortions and to allow for other issues to be decisive in our elections. Beyond that, I see movement towards the development of more of a “culture of life” as properly arising from the bottom-up, rather than the top-down. That is why I encourage my prolifer activist friends to emphasize more on the changing of hearts rather than laws, since in a world where time, energy and resources is scarce, there is invariably a tradeoff between different forms of activism and we all must count the (opportunity) cost.

dlw

Thanks to Jesus Politics for this prophetic polemic by Rick Mercier.
my favorite paragraph:

Jesus was quite a troublemaker. In fact, I’m thinking the Bush administration would have a special place for Jesus were the swarthy Nazarene to take up his ministry today in the U.S. of A.–in a cell with other Middle Eastern men awaiting deportation.

When I visited Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis a couple of weeks back, I was pleasantly surprised that, for sunday school, they had a lawyer describing the US’s extreme denial of rights to swarthy-looking, middle-eastern types at Guantanamo Bay. In retrospect, it was somewhat tragic that the lawyer dealt with the subject with the language of ahistorical Economics, not faith. He appealed to the cost of our actions and did not point out how the historical Yeshua would have fit in perfectly with those whom we treated so unjustly.

dlw

Just read the recent editorial by Frank Rich. I have to say I wish the religious right played a smarter game. Because I do not like having children so easily exposed to brazen heterosexual promiscuity in the media. But at least we’ll be have the president pushing for an amendment to protect the sanctity of marriage from them homosexuals undermining our moral values.

dlw

ps, I just read Kristof’s take on the Left Behind series. Inasmuch as premillenialism was a theological innovation that reflected the pessimism in the wake of the civil war over our ability to establish the millenium through political activism, I find it offensive for LaHaye and Jenkins to assert their art as being literally what the Bible teaches. Last I heard, the doctrinal debate over exclusivism vs inclusivism was still ongoing among Christians. And we are all still accountable for our public actions and how they lower or raise up barriers to our ability to share about our faith with others.

dlw

Gracias a Carlos over at JesusPolitics for bringing to my attention a beliefnet interview of Christian author, Max Lucado.

I’m going to get my friend Solly somewhat tiffed at me, but you know what they say, the only good calvinist is an inconsistent one. Lucado shows his inconsistencies in a manner that is irenic in intent and which also shows considerable wisdom. In particular, he is wise in counselling us to watch our language and to seek God’s will for how to heal our country and to remember that God is not an American God. He counsels fellow religious conservatives to consider how God has given them the chance to catch their breath and evaluate where we were headed and reminds them that God despises the proud and he gives grace to the humble.

One can value much of what Lucado writes without agreeing with him that God chooses presidents, or that people’s political priorities/affiliations(he doesn’t comment on whether people vote at all or not.) are due to God’s will. Perhaps due to his emphasis on predestination, Lucado obscures that there are choices we make in terms of our political involvement. There are choices even if we were to consider our general political orientations as predetermined, or unlikely to change. Lucado obscures these choices by how he frames the issues. For example, he frames the issues of the sanctity of marriage and the sanctity of life as what God spoke on these issues and that they are not open to change. This stance is just plain anti-intellectual. God never spoke through the Bible about when legal human personhood should begin. It is our traditions that determine our beliefs about when we become human beings. And our traditions are not teleologically led by the Holy Spirit as the historic institutionalization of antisemitism and racism within Christian churches has shown. Lucado also repeats the NAE’s party line on homosexuality.

Lucado, not unlike Greg Boyd’s Sword and the Cross sermon series, also obscures that what is politically at issue is just as much a question of political strategy as what our ideal legal changes should be. In political strategy, we must always make fallible judgements about what can and cannot be changed about the fallen world we live in. This includes accepting that somethings are not going to change in the near future, while other things may be changed for better or worse and we need to inculcate in ourselves the need to pray for the wisdom to discern the difference. Then, even if God did put us into our parties, we may better glorify God by loving our political opponents by deliberating on how best to use our political capital and hold our party’s politicians accountable for their actions as our representatives.

dlw

The Ukraine has a special place in my family’s hearts, inasmuch as my parents and other family members have visited it several times with short-term mission trips to their sister-Baptist church in Ukraine. My parents have learned important ukrainian phrases like, “Please, No more Food!”

I read with much interest Timothy Ash’s Guardian article on the Ukraine. I myself encouraged my parents to write to their senators and congresspeople on behalf of the Ukrainians. I mean, they’re evangelicals, the BushAdmin has to listen to them. They got him elected.

I hope that evangelicals can become enraptured with the details of what is going on in the Ukraine and realize how fragile democracy is and what a privilege it is to have the right to vote and safeguards against election fraud. We need the experiences of Christianity in the rest of the world to help revive our own culturally-entrenched and out-worn understandings of Christianity. I’m not talking as much about theology or doctrine, but rather how we go about letting our lights shine before the rest of the world.

dlw

Wikipedia has an extensive entry on Fundamentalism. It would be good for liberals who seek to avoid another rout like the past election to understand the meaning.

For fundamentalists, the belief that the Bible alone is the basis for determining what is right conduct has discouraged a sweeping dedication to the life of the mind and elevated shared beliefs, such as with the traditional pro-life position on abortion, to the same level of veneration as scripture. This has, in turn, led to a neglect of political subjects or an involvement that only trusts certain sources and which is heavily weighted by certain presuppositions and that take literally the meaning of labels, like conservative and liberal, whose actual referents are changing.

In general, these groups are not into involvement with society. In the past, they have not been heavily involved with politics. And their emphasis on shared beliefs makes them very contentious with each other, often undermining their ability to act together, as well as their witness to others.

All of this goes to say that if we can resolve the cultural wars issues then we will undermine the Republican Party’s source of strength. Many of them may still participate in politics, but their votes will not be as predictable or reliable for the Republican Party and there will likely be less political solidarity so as to give other groups more of a chance to be decisive in influencing elections.

dlw

Kaysea of Any Girl Can be Glamorous suggested for me to read Naomi Wolf’s 1995 article in the New Republic after I had argued that Kerry would have won if he adopted my proposal for compromise on abortion. She brought up Wolf’s piece in tandem with her distrust of our ability to take the highly charged emotionality out of the process of finding some political middle ground. Wolf’s basic point is that pro-choicers made a mistake by framing the issue outside of morality and that morals should be brought back in by them into the debate.

This sort of reasoning may have been what led Bill Clinton to adopt the phrase of making abortions, safe and rare. The problem with such a change in rhetoric is that it is not coupled with proposals that would make abortions more rare. However, Wolf’s article is probing and full of some wonderful quotes. My favorites are:

By refusing to look at abortion within a moral framework, we lose the millions of Americans who want to support abortion as a legal right but still need to condemn it as a moral iniquity.

Because of the implications of a Constitution that defines rights according to the legal idea of “a person,” the abortion debate has tended to focus on the question of “personhood” of the fetus. Many pro-choice advocates developed a language to assert that the fetus isn’t a person, and this, over the years, has developed into a lexicon of dehumanization.

Free-market rhetoric about abortion can, indeed, contribute to the eerie situation we are now facing where…babies seem to have less value in themselves…than they do as products with a value dictated by a market economy.

Affluent men and women who choose abortion because they were careless or in a hurry or didn’t like the feel of latex–are not the moral equivalent of the impoverished mother who responsibly, even selflessly, acknowledges she already has too many mouths to feed.

The language we use to make our case limits the way we let ourselves think about abortion.

Wolf’s assertion is that pro-choicers’ use of “free-market” rhetoric has undermined their ability to hold the moral high ground on the issue of abortion. It has permitted pro-lifers to make too many inroads with their own more morally-oriented rhetoric. I, myself, have made my case as an argument for how to alter the regulations of the abortion-industry so that a woman’s right to elect an abortion may be defined according to the moral beliefs of the vast majority of her fellow citizens. I’ve also wanted to stand at abortion rallies with a (rather large) sign saying “All Choice occurs within a Legal Framework! Let’s talk about what should be that Framework!”

Wolf suggests mainly changing the rhetoric of being pro-choice to incorporate more morality-speak, where women view abortion as “sinful” and acknowledge that they should ask forgiveness for an abortion(to whom?) and atone for the abortion. She also stresses that the normative utopic vision that feminists strive for should be expanded to include where abortions are rare and traumatic events.

IMHO, Wolf implicitly concedes too much of the framing of the debate to pro-life activists. At issue for her is morally and ethically justifying keeping unqualified abortion legal, not redetermining when legal personhood begins and clarifying what is a non-elective abortion. She gives her own example of angst from when she took the morning after pill; a pill that only works shortly after conception and prior to implantation. It seems unwise to treat the use of abortafacient technology at this early stage as equivalent to aborting a second or third-trimester fetus. For in this very preliminary stage: the zygote has no brain activity, may subdivide into identical twins, separate zygotes may unite into one zygote, and the zygote naturally faces an 80% chance of being absorbed by the womb. These are anomalies that do not exist at later stages and which legitimize the use of the morning after pill in case of condom-failure or rape.

Also, Wolf does not ask us to deliberate on what makes us human beings and how we may, with careful exceptions, extend protections given to newly-born infants to the unborn, while ensuring that the mother’s needs are attended to during the pregnancy. The “genius” of my proposal is that it doesn’t presume that, based on our deliberations, we would need to agree as to when legal personhood should begin to make legal changes. After all, it’s not like we ever agree on any other legal changes that we make. Why should unamity be required to redefine when legal personhood begins? A woman’s right to elect an abortion at all stages of pregnancy is not equivalent to her total bundle of rights under the law. It need not be treated as sacrosanct. Yes, some may be emotionally manipulated prior to a referendum, but the specifics of my proposal guarantee that no minority group, religious or secular, will change when legally human personhood begins without making their case successfully to rest of the population.

It is my contention that this would guarantee a woman’s right to elect an abortion in defined circumstances, regardless of whether Roe-V-Wade remains law. It also will more effectively prevent abortions and direct all US citizens to deliberate on when human personhood begins. And that ought to be something that people from both sides of the aisle would want to support.

dlw

my past writings reflect my moderate, heterosexist views on the matter. By heterosexist, I mean I do not believe homosexual and heterosexual orientations are equally valid in God’s eyes. The only reason I believe this is because of the Bible’s strident condemnations of homosexual acts. Because I give the Bible authority over my worldview and am an open-view theist, I believe that the existence of people with homosexual orientations is due to the fallenness of the world, not God’s will. In my view, Gay-rights activists often obfuscate Hume’s dictum that one cannot argue from an is to an ought without an intermediary normative premise. Their normative premise is often anything that occurs “naturally” cannot be wrong. While to sin is to choose, or a product of past choices, we are also born into sinful situations whose causality is not easily determined. Read more

Bob Jones III writes a congradulatory letter to prez Bush. Both Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall have posted about it at their widely read blogs. Its scary the extent that so much gets read into these issues of abortion and homosexuality and what-not. Its clear to me that Bush’s win may be a pyrrhic victory for religious conservativism. If the tensions between the different sides continue in their present state or get worse, the result will be deadlock on the above-mentioned issues and neglect on many other important issues and an increased animosity between the different sides of the cultural wars, with particularly difficult consequences for those of us, like myself, who stand with one foot on each side.

The Prism E-pistle had a wonderful article on the social changes that came about from a revival among the Welsh in Great Britain early in the 20th Ctry. I can affirm to you that I’ll be praying for a real revival to take place in the US that will work towards a detente in the cultural wars, that will counter the excessive individualism and insularity among so much of Christianity in the US.

dlw

Frank Rich’s recent article points out how religious conservatives in Blue America are only getting largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment, which still doesn’t have a prayer of rounding up the two-thirds majority needed for its passage. He points out the hypocripsies of Fox News and how media capitalism is more responsible for a decline in traditional values than anything else and yet, they fall under the radar of the religious right.

Rich underscores the tentative nature of the political influence of the religious right by pointing to how the Republican party’s three biggest stars in post-Bush Republican politics are

Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All are supporters of gay rights and opponents of the same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. Only Mr. McCain calls himself pro-life, and he’s never made abortion a cause. None of the three support the Bush administration position on stem-cell research.

IMO, such is the consequence of the prevalence of poorly developed habits of political deliberation among the religious right. They do not submit their leaders to sufficient scrutiny and demand that they innovate in the political strategies meant to acheive their objectives, rather than deliver their votes reliably and cheaply to the economic conservatives that still predominate over the republican party.

For example, let us take Ron Sider, his failure to mention the likely futility of passing a heterosexual marriage constitutional amendment in his pre-election letter to prism-epistle readers makes me wary of the extent that he and the NAE are truly committed to delineating factual understanding for us evangelicals. The man never mentioned the likely consequences of what laws would be more likely to change as a consequence of Bush being elected rather than Kerry. This is something he should have apologized for in the more recent prism e-pistle news-letter.

Now, if the fault lied solely with the lack of habits of political deliberation among many religious conservatives, we would be in big trouble. Habits of political deliberation don’t change dramatically over night, but the fault also lies in the political solidarity on a narrow range of issues caused by the cultural wars. Therefore, if we can depoliticize abortion and take the winds out of the sails of gay-rights activists that want legal gay-marriages, the religious right will need to reconsider the issues on which they are politically active. And that will no doubt reduce their solidarity as a voting group. Instead, they will need to debate and therein deliberate.
dlw

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