Things That Make Us Go Hmmm…
On the faculty side of the parking lot, two rows away from the student’s bumper sticker reading “Smile! Your Mother Chose Life” (see my ranting about this one below in my blog of Nov. 9, 2009) is this amusing take on life in 21st CE America:
I express my individuality through mass-produced bumper stickers.
Indeed.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Look for the Union labeling…..
In one of the news lists I receive, the discussion has focused on teacher union, a rather hot topic these days given the Florida legislature’s pending attempt to eliminate continuing contracts for Florida teachers. One of the comments in the discussion featured the following:
“As far as unions go, from my experience in a few different ones, there is no such thing as a ‘good union.’"
Sadly, this marks the tenor of the discussion about teachers generally and unions specifically. Indeed, calling it a discussion requires a stretch of the imagination. It’s more akin to a lynch mob than a thoughtful discussion.
I find it sad that teachers have become the scapegoat for an entire society’s ills. It confirms my fears about the value of education – or lack thereof - to our culture. Reform is too often code for taking a meat axe to a profession whose members already endure poor pay and often intolerable working conditions. And there is no small amount of irony in adults using skills taught them by teachers to decry the very professionals who helped make them who they are.
Perhaps more troubling is the mindlessness about unions which marks so much of this diatribe. One would think that unions are part of some kind of diabolical plot from the comments we read. Of course, what that demonstrates more than anything else is how skewed to the right our entire political system is in America. Cross the border in either direction and the question of whether unions should be allowed (note the parent/child presumption in this) would be seen as incomprehensible.
Teacher unions may well protect some incompetent teachers from their just deserts. Tenure may well allow some professors who long ago stopped caring about the education of their charges to coast to retirement. Where this is the case, this is where the focus should lie – on dealing with incompetence and lack of concern. But broadside bashing of unions is not only uncritical and thus unhelpful, it simply exacerbates the problem.
I am a fifth generation educator, third generation college educator teaching at least part time for 32 of my 56 years of life. I have taught students from fifth grade to doctoral level. I have worked under a number of managers in the process. And I have always been a union member. There are good reasons for that.
The principal at the middle school where I taught right out of undergraduate was a coach who had been promoted. He had promised to complete a masters degree as a condition of his job. Five years later he had taken one class. He played favorites with the local redneck kids at the expense of the newly arrived kids, mainly transplants from New York. He was racist, homophobic and prone to hit on young female faculty. He spit tobacco juice in a large can from the lunch room during his conferences. There were a lot of things you could say about this man but that I could ever trust him with my professional assessment or job security were not among them.
Five years later the administrator of the public schools hospital-homebound program in which I taught for two years was a rather obtuse (and obese) woman from the Bible Belt. She felt threatened by my law degree and rarely failed to remark about that in my presence. I once listed on the required absentee form my reason for absence as “ague,” a rather humorous (and archaic) way of saying “bad cold.” She returned my form with a sticky note reading “You have to give a reason for your absence.” I copied the definition from the dictionary and returned it to her. Later that year, word came to me that I’d need to find a new job. I did. Upon leaving I was told by a confidante in the administration that this woman had made homophobic remarks about me to fellow administrators from day 1.
If I based my understanding of management solely on these two examples, I’d come to the conclusion that educational management is incompetent and misanthropic. If I used the logic of the teacher union lynch mob, I would go on a crusade to reduce if not eliminate most educational management. Of course, that would be reducing an entire group of people to its worst examples. It would be intellectually lazy and dishonest. I refuse to do that. And my current department chair at the university where I teach is the example of why such is not appropriate. He is quite fair, open minded, highly qualified and effective. He cares deeply about his instructors and his students. So, while my examples do not make a case for a mindless dismissal of all educational management, they do readily illustrate why teachers need unions.
Without the union, I would have been fired mid year in both of those public school positions. The first required me to work at $8000/year gross, no benefits (1977) and no contract. The school board members publicly called their teachers “fools” and said if they didn’t like working for near the poverty level, they could leave. In the second job, I grieved the school board twice and won twice for contract violations. Little wonder that a teacher with a law degree intent on holding the board to its contractual obligations would become a target for firing.
Unions are a necessary evil. They are not perfect, anymore than any other human institution. But that includes the management to which teachers are subject. To leave teachers defenseless against arbitrary and sometimes incompetent managers does not promote quality education, it generates dissension, low morale and resentment.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In one of the news lists I receive, the discussion has focused on teacher union, a rather hot topic these days given the Florida legislature’s pending attempt to eliminate continuing contracts for Florida teachers. One of the comments in the discussion featured the following:
“As far as unions go, from my experience in a few different ones, there is no such thing as a ‘good union.’"
Sadly, this marks the tenor of the discussion about teachers generally and unions specifically. Indeed, calling it a discussion requires a stretch of the imagination. It’s more akin to a lynch mob than a thoughtful discussion.
I find it sad that teachers have become the scapegoat for an entire society’s ills. It confirms my fears about the value of education – or lack thereof - to our culture. Reform is too often code for taking a meat axe to a profession whose members already endure poor pay and often intolerable working conditions. And there is no small amount of irony in adults using skills taught them by teachers to decry the very professionals who helped make them who they are.
Perhaps more troubling is the mindlessness about unions which marks so much of this diatribe. One would think that unions are part of some kind of diabolical plot from the comments we read. Of course, what that demonstrates more than anything else is how skewed to the right our entire political system is in America. Cross the border in either direction and the question of whether unions should be allowed (note the parent/child presumption in this) would be seen as incomprehensible.
Teacher unions may well protect some incompetent teachers from their just deserts. Tenure may well allow some professors who long ago stopped caring about the education of their charges to coast to retirement. Where this is the case, this is where the focus should lie – on dealing with incompetence and lack of concern. But broadside bashing of unions is not only uncritical and thus unhelpful, it simply exacerbates the problem.
I am a fifth generation educator, third generation college educator teaching at least part time for 32 of my 56 years of life. I have taught students from fifth grade to doctoral level. I have worked under a number of managers in the process. And I have always been a union member. There are good reasons for that.
The principal at the middle school where I taught right out of undergraduate was a coach who had been promoted. He had promised to complete a masters degree as a condition of his job. Five years later he had taken one class. He played favorites with the local redneck kids at the expense of the newly arrived kids, mainly transplants from New York. He was racist, homophobic and prone to hit on young female faculty. He spit tobacco juice in a large can from the lunch room during his conferences. There were a lot of things you could say about this man but that I could ever trust him with my professional assessment or job security were not among them.
Five years later the administrator of the public schools hospital-homebound program in which I taught for two years was a rather obtuse (and obese) woman from the Bible Belt. She felt threatened by my law degree and rarely failed to remark about that in my presence. I once listed on the required absentee form my reason for absence as “ague,” a rather humorous (and archaic) way of saying “bad cold.” She returned my form with a sticky note reading “You have to give a reason for your absence.” I copied the definition from the dictionary and returned it to her. Later that year, word came to me that I’d need to find a new job. I did. Upon leaving I was told by a confidante in the administration that this woman had made homophobic remarks about me to fellow administrators from day 1.
If I based my understanding of management solely on these two examples, I’d come to the conclusion that educational management is incompetent and misanthropic. If I used the logic of the teacher union lynch mob, I would go on a crusade to reduce if not eliminate most educational management. Of course, that would be reducing an entire group of people to its worst examples. It would be intellectually lazy and dishonest. I refuse to do that. And my current department chair at the university where I teach is the example of why such is not appropriate. He is quite fair, open minded, highly qualified and effective. He cares deeply about his instructors and his students. So, while my examples do not make a case for a mindless dismissal of all educational management, they do readily illustrate why teachers need unions.
Without the union, I would have been fired mid year in both of those public school positions. The first required me to work at $8000/year gross, no benefits (1977) and no contract. The school board members publicly called their teachers “fools” and said if they didn’t like working for near the poverty level, they could leave. In the second job, I grieved the school board twice and won twice for contract violations. Little wonder that a teacher with a law degree intent on holding the board to its contractual obligations would become a target for firing.
Unions are a necessary evil. They are not perfect, anymore than any other human institution. But that includes the management to which teachers are subject. To leave teachers defenseless against arbitrary and sometimes incompetent managers does not promote quality education, it generates dissension, low morale and resentment.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Are you a religious man, professor? – Part II
In rereading the first part of my reflections on the question my student posed me on Good Friday, am I am a religious man, I am struck by how nearly creedal my first comments were. This is a bit ironic from a former seminarian who asked his systematic theology professor the first day of classes “Why would anyone want to put theology into a system and what kind of theology would lend itself to a system in the first place?”
What I have attempted to do here - and throughout much of my life - is to put my thoughts into some kind of order, identifying overarching principles and values while at the same time scrupulously avoiding dogmatic assertions. My reasoning is that while discussions of ideas about the divine require some kind of order to permit any fruitful exchange of ideas, little can ultimately be known about G-d (assuming arguendo such exists). Moreover, the limits of human understanding demand no small amount of humility in even thinking about this subject, much less talking about it.
Indeed, my very use of the incomplete word G-d, which I have shamelessly stolen from rabbinical Judaic practice, reflects my own attempts to constantly remind myself that my own constructs of the divine – like everyone else’s - are incomplete, the finger pointing toward something ultimately beyond description and comprehension. I am more than aware of the tendency to confuse the finger for that to which it points. It’s precisely the point when Berger’s veil of mystification causes us to forget that our constructed understandings, whatever else we might say about them, remain the work of human hands that we lapse into idolatry.
At the same time, I realize that human beings need constructs to express ideas and experiences to communicate with each other. Without words and the concepts they reflect, our spiritual lives would remain internalized within each of us and any reflection on the same would amount to little more than solipsism. Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart of the 1980s provides the narrative of a woman whose religion commanded a membership of exactly one. Its name: Sheilaism. You can guess the woman’s name.
Ironically, it’s the concern for self-focus that brings me to my second major concern about institutional religion – its tendencies for projection. While this concept began its career as a measure of the psychopathology of Freudian thought, the Jungian understanding of the shadow content of the unconscious and the very human tendency to locate this shadow in the other has been one of the most helpful understandings I have ever learned. I am constantly aware that what exorcises me about the other may well be my own shadow I am identifying in them. And the routine social practice of dehumanizing and demonizing the identified scapegoat provides an inexhaustible supply of material for consideration and discussion for my life as an academic.
To return briefly to my previous post, I need to emphasize that I understand existentially why people create constructions of G-d and formulae of salvation in order to provide themselves some relief from the terror of potential self-annihilation at the time of death. None of us wants to think about the time when we might be no more. And thus we create numerous schemata of salvation or liberation which posit a life after death, its causes and conditions and the means by which such an after- life is attained. And we call those creations “religions.”
The study of religious belief systems proves interesting both in the creativity in logic and the cultural experience brought to bear in their construction as well as in the similarities and differences in those various systems. Among the commonalities in religions we find issues of right relation and ultimate justice unresolved in the current life, we find the desire to escape suffering – either from a return to samsara or the fires of purgatorial or hellish existences – and no small amount of resulting guidelines for the current life which readily lend themselves to forms of behavioral control.
Of course, the study of comparative religions does not require a support for or a defense of the various schemata proposed. The student is free to find any or none of the systems particularly compelling. Study of religions takes place at a distance. One is not required to pass judgment on the ultimate truth – or even the appeal - of the ideas studied, only to become familiar with them. As I say to my students, you don’t have to believe anything as a result of this class, but you must demonstrate your familiarity with the ideas studied.
All of that changes when one moves from education to indoctrination. Where suspension of belief in considering the ideas of a religious system is key to successful study of world religions, the willingness to buy into a given constructed understanding up front is the starting place for devotional and doctrinal approaches to religion. And this, from my viewpoint, is where the trouble begins.
In the Gospel of Luke, which is by far my personal favorite of the four canonical gospels, the writer begins his account of the “good news” of Jesus called the Christ with this statement:
1:1 Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, 3 I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first,* to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.
What becomes clear to the discerning eye almost immediately is the following:
1. This is not written by an eyewitness. The writer asserts that s/he (since the writer never identifies him/herself) writes after “investigating everything carefully” and hearing the surviving accounts of “eyewitnesses and servants of the word.” In law, such evidence would be of dubious value – hearsay. But in scripture which began its life as oral tradition, this is a relic of the transmission process of virtually all scripture.
2. This is not a history. There is a goal in the telling of this account – “so that you may know the truth…”, i.e., so that you will eventually hold the same understanding of “the events” that the writer holds.
3. There are a number of possible constructions of this story to choose from: “Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account…” But there is also a clearly desired outcome of considering them: “the truth.”
4. There is a target for this account: Theophilos, the god lover, a shorthand way of saying that if one is truly a lover of G-d, they will buy into this writer’s understanding.
The writer of Luke evidences precisely my concern with dogmatic and devotional approaches to religion. At a very basic level, he reveals that his understanding is one of many possible understandings. Perhaps more importantly, he reveals that given that there are so many possible ways to understand what he’s about to lay out, his is but one of a number of possible interpretive constructions – phenomena – of “the events” which he is portraying. But he cannot stop himself from taking the next seemingly inevitable step – the assertion that his is the “right” (read “only”) construction and thus “the truth” (emphasis on “the”) one must ultimately accept as definitive.
When one combines the existential anxieties of potential self-annihilation through death, the resulting desire for an afterlife and the human need for constructions to discuss such ideas, it is not terribly surprising that a number of systems providing a means to attain a favorable afterlife have been constructed by human beings throughout history. As Peter Berger explains in his Sacred Canopy, human beings externalize their understandings, expressing them in words, symbols, rites, et al; they objectivate those understandings, coming to see them as objectively true, having a life of their own; and finally internalize those understandings, experiencing them as encountering them from outside of themselves, having an existence which is seen as natural, common sense and self-evident.
The key step in this three step process involves an only partly conscious process of active forgetting. Berger called it the veil of mystification by which human expositors lose sight of the fact that the ideas they see as having an objective existence of their own are ultimately the work of their own hands, or in this case, their own minds. Of course, even a cursory study of the history of ideas reveals that all traditions, if traced back far enough, have a point in their life histories where they are innovations. When people claim the mantle of tradition as dispositive of any question of validity or authority, they ultimately reveal a desire to avoid critical consciousness of that history and a critical consideration of the merits of the idea they would defend.
Even so, the realization that religious ideas about the afterlife are ultimately the products of human construction can never be completely dispelled by their adherents and purveyors. Much like the material of the shadow lurks in the psychic sewer of the unconscious, the knowledge of the fact that at a very basic level we have essentially made up our own stories of an afterlife to reassure ourselves that such might actually exist and thus relieve our existential anxieties always lurks in the darkness of the less than fully conscious mind. And so we must constantly seek to reassure ourselves of “the truth,” professing that truth in groups where we can look to each other for constant affirmation of our construction and producing that “truth” in theological creeds, confessions, tracts, catechisms, institutes, and church teachings.
When that does not fully achieve the object of repressing the memories of our constructive process, we seek affirmation through outsiders through proselytizing, a process that is ultimately much more designed to relieve the cognitive dissonance of believers than to offer “the truth” to the other. Indeed, the resolution of cognitive dissonance requires us to attribute much more beneficence to our motivations than they ultimately merit. And so we hear evangelizers speaking of offering a gift to their targets, of sharing a beautiful truth with those whom we presume to need what we have.
But uncritical, dogmatic approaches to faith are by definition brittle. The imperative of avoiding conscious recognition of the constructive history of the ideas frequently purveyed as absolute, ultimate, unchanging, eternal, et al, creates an ongoing liability for the holder and the purveyor of these proffered truths. And thus those who would dare to pull up the cover of consciousness to reveal that history will frequently be seen as enemies of the truth if not the very enemies of G-d him/herself. The accusation of heretic, its original Greek root haireisthai meaning "to choose," points toward the choice of the messenger who is shot, the prophet who is stoned, of insisting upon being conscious of the reality of these ideas, their inception and the motivation behind them, a reality that many true believers will sadly find too risky to even consider.
In Richard Rubenstein’s Approaches to Auschwitz he describes a young Martin Luther eager to tell the Jews of Germany of the great new truth of Protestantism, certain that now shed of its Roman Catholic baggage, Jews will readily see the light of the Christian faith and embrace it. His references to the Jews are generous, brotherly. But a mere decade later, when the Jews are still lighting their candles on Friday evening, when the Jews have not converted in mass, Luther begins to see them as what Rubenstein calls “the disconfirming other.” Not only have they not converted, thus disproving Luther’s optimism, they continue to practice a contrary faith system in the face of the new revealed truth of Protestantism, thus drawing Luther’s version of the truth into question. Not surprisingly, Luther assesses this situation as intolerable and proclaims the need for the annihilation of this disconfirming other, a decision that says much more about the insecurities of Luther than anything about the Jews.
In his vitriolic “On the Jews and their Lies,” Luther asserts:
They are real liars and bloodhounds who have not only continually perverted and falsified all of Scripture with their mendacious glosses from the beginning until the present day…. The sun has never shone on a more bloodthirsty and vengeful people than they are who imagine that they are God's people who have been commissioned and commanded to murder and to slay the Gentiles. In fact, the most important thing that they expect of their Messiah is that he will murder and kill the entire world with their sword.
What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? Since they live among us, we dare not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of their lying and reviling and blaspheming. If we do, we become sharers in their lies, cursing and blasphemy. Thus we cannot extinguish the unquenchable fire of divine wrath, of which the prophets speak, nor can we convert the Jews. With prayer and the fear of God we must practice a sharp mercy to see whether we might save at least a few from the glowing flames. We dare not avenge ourselves. Vengeance a thousand times worse than we could wish them already has them by the throat. I shall give you my sincere advice:
First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians….
Three centuries later, brown shirted German descendants of Luther would take these words to heart on a terrible night known today as Krystallnacht.
The belief that one has the only truth, the readiness to invoke G-d to support that truth and the willingness to cast those who do not share the truth into outer darkness, starting in this world and continuing into the next, says a great deal about the fragility and brittleness of constructed religious understandings. The perceived need to cause others to share those understandings – we have what you need – bespeaks the second besetting sin of institutional religion – the inevitable tendency toward projection. But it also bespeaks a related sin which virtually every religious tradition condemns – a lack of humility.
Clearly it is not easy to embrace humility if one is a true believer driven by existential security anxieties. Humility means the ability to say one does not have all the answers. Humility means the willingness to admit that the answers one has found are at best partial on a good day. Humility means eschewing the all-too-common tendency among religious people to purport to know and speak for the mind of a G-d so far beyond human comprehension that such assertions reveal themselves as absurd and arrogant almost from the beginning.
There are many aspects of the Christian tradition of which I am an ordained priest that I find appealing if not compelling. I am a catholic in my love of liturgy and my appreciation for the analogical imagination of catholic spirituality which can see the divine everywhere if one is willing to look for it. I am an Anglican in my love of beautiful music and wordscrafting, incarnational theology and fine architecture and iconographic décor. I find the way of Jesus, Francis, Oscar Romero, Julian of Norwich and the many other saints of the faith, most of whom never made it to the official calendar, to be formative for my own faith. And as a mystic, I experience the divine in a wide multitude of places and faces. The created world simply screams of the divine in my experience of it.
But I also readily see the divine outside my tradition in the symbols, practices and beliefs of other world religions. My spiritual life is informed by the examples of non-Christian saints from Gandhi to Rumi to the wisdom of indigenous traditions. And I readily own the shadow of my tradition from Luther and the Holocaust to the crippling social diseases of slavery, sexism and homophobia and too many misanthropic wars which the Christian tradition has legitimized historically.
My tradition is one path of many to the divine. As the Hindus say, many paths, one destination. Humility requires recognizing the partial nature of the truth about the divine my path provides as well as the destructiveness that results when that partial nature is not recognized and religion becomes imperialistic. Given that reality, my grasp of my tradition is firm but tentative. I don’t think the day will ever come when I would convert to another tradition. But there will also never come a day when I forget the constructed nature of my own faith tradition and assert it to be the only way. Holding my own faith tentatively and in humility, I am able to consider other faith traditions on their own terms, if imperfectly. And hopefully, it will prevent me from projecting my own beliefs onto others as the only possible way to see things.
Admittedly, a critically conscious, tentatively held and other engaging religion is probably way too frightening for those who seek existential security in religion. And so long as that is true, institutional religion will be the realm of the true believer. And to the degree that is true, there is little place for a man like me in such religions. So the answer to my student’s question is that while I am a deeply spiritual human being, I am probably not a religious man. And at a very basic level, perhaps that’s OK.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In rereading the first part of my reflections on the question my student posed me on Good Friday, am I am a religious man, I am struck by how nearly creedal my first comments were. This is a bit ironic from a former seminarian who asked his systematic theology professor the first day of classes “Why would anyone want to put theology into a system and what kind of theology would lend itself to a system in the first place?”
What I have attempted to do here - and throughout much of my life - is to put my thoughts into some kind of order, identifying overarching principles and values while at the same time scrupulously avoiding dogmatic assertions. My reasoning is that while discussions of ideas about the divine require some kind of order to permit any fruitful exchange of ideas, little can ultimately be known about G-d (assuming arguendo such exists). Moreover, the limits of human understanding demand no small amount of humility in even thinking about this subject, much less talking about it.
Indeed, my very use of the incomplete word G-d, which I have shamelessly stolen from rabbinical Judaic practice, reflects my own attempts to constantly remind myself that my own constructs of the divine – like everyone else’s - are incomplete, the finger pointing toward something ultimately beyond description and comprehension. I am more than aware of the tendency to confuse the finger for that to which it points. It’s precisely the point when Berger’s veil of mystification causes us to forget that our constructed understandings, whatever else we might say about them, remain the work of human hands that we lapse into idolatry.
At the same time, I realize that human beings need constructs to express ideas and experiences to communicate with each other. Without words and the concepts they reflect, our spiritual lives would remain internalized within each of us and any reflection on the same would amount to little more than solipsism. Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart of the 1980s provides the narrative of a woman whose religion commanded a membership of exactly one. Its name: Sheilaism. You can guess the woman’s name.
Ironically, it’s the concern for self-focus that brings me to my second major concern about institutional religion – its tendencies for projection. While this concept began its career as a measure of the psychopathology of Freudian thought, the Jungian understanding of the shadow content of the unconscious and the very human tendency to locate this shadow in the other has been one of the most helpful understandings I have ever learned. I am constantly aware that what exorcises me about the other may well be my own shadow I am identifying in them. And the routine social practice of dehumanizing and demonizing the identified scapegoat provides an inexhaustible supply of material for consideration and discussion for my life as an academic.
To return briefly to my previous post, I need to emphasize that I understand existentially why people create constructions of G-d and formulae of salvation in order to provide themselves some relief from the terror of potential self-annihilation at the time of death. None of us wants to think about the time when we might be no more. And thus we create numerous schemata of salvation or liberation which posit a life after death, its causes and conditions and the means by which such an after- life is attained. And we call those creations “religions.”
The study of religious belief systems proves interesting both in the creativity in logic and the cultural experience brought to bear in their construction as well as in the similarities and differences in those various systems. Among the commonalities in religions we find issues of right relation and ultimate justice unresolved in the current life, we find the desire to escape suffering – either from a return to samsara or the fires of purgatorial or hellish existences – and no small amount of resulting guidelines for the current life which readily lend themselves to forms of behavioral control.
Of course, the study of comparative religions does not require a support for or a defense of the various schemata proposed. The student is free to find any or none of the systems particularly compelling. Study of religions takes place at a distance. One is not required to pass judgment on the ultimate truth – or even the appeal - of the ideas studied, only to become familiar with them. As I say to my students, you don’t have to believe anything as a result of this class, but you must demonstrate your familiarity with the ideas studied.
All of that changes when one moves from education to indoctrination. Where suspension of belief in considering the ideas of a religious system is key to successful study of world religions, the willingness to buy into a given constructed understanding up front is the starting place for devotional and doctrinal approaches to religion. And this, from my viewpoint, is where the trouble begins.
In the Gospel of Luke, which is by far my personal favorite of the four canonical gospels, the writer begins his account of the “good news” of Jesus called the Christ with this statement:
1:1 Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, 3 I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first,* to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.
What becomes clear to the discerning eye almost immediately is the following:
1. This is not written by an eyewitness. The writer asserts that s/he (since the writer never identifies him/herself) writes after “investigating everything carefully” and hearing the surviving accounts of “eyewitnesses and servants of the word.” In law, such evidence would be of dubious value – hearsay. But in scripture which began its life as oral tradition, this is a relic of the transmission process of virtually all scripture.
2. This is not a history. There is a goal in the telling of this account – “so that you may know the truth…”, i.e., so that you will eventually hold the same understanding of “the events” that the writer holds.
3. There are a number of possible constructions of this story to choose from: “Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account…” But there is also a clearly desired outcome of considering them: “the truth.”
4. There is a target for this account: Theophilos, the god lover, a shorthand way of saying that if one is truly a lover of G-d, they will buy into this writer’s understanding.
The writer of Luke evidences precisely my concern with dogmatic and devotional approaches to religion. At a very basic level, he reveals that his understanding is one of many possible understandings. Perhaps more importantly, he reveals that given that there are so many possible ways to understand what he’s about to lay out, his is but one of a number of possible interpretive constructions – phenomena – of “the events” which he is portraying. But he cannot stop himself from taking the next seemingly inevitable step – the assertion that his is the “right” (read “only”) construction and thus “the truth” (emphasis on “the”) one must ultimately accept as definitive.
When one combines the existential anxieties of potential self-annihilation through death, the resulting desire for an afterlife and the human need for constructions to discuss such ideas, it is not terribly surprising that a number of systems providing a means to attain a favorable afterlife have been constructed by human beings throughout history. As Peter Berger explains in his Sacred Canopy, human beings externalize their understandings, expressing them in words, symbols, rites, et al; they objectivate those understandings, coming to see them as objectively true, having a life of their own; and finally internalize those understandings, experiencing them as encountering them from outside of themselves, having an existence which is seen as natural, common sense and self-evident.
The key step in this three step process involves an only partly conscious process of active forgetting. Berger called it the veil of mystification by which human expositors lose sight of the fact that the ideas they see as having an objective existence of their own are ultimately the work of their own hands, or in this case, their own minds. Of course, even a cursory study of the history of ideas reveals that all traditions, if traced back far enough, have a point in their life histories where they are innovations. When people claim the mantle of tradition as dispositive of any question of validity or authority, they ultimately reveal a desire to avoid critical consciousness of that history and a critical consideration of the merits of the idea they would defend.
Even so, the realization that religious ideas about the afterlife are ultimately the products of human construction can never be completely dispelled by their adherents and purveyors. Much like the material of the shadow lurks in the psychic sewer of the unconscious, the knowledge of the fact that at a very basic level we have essentially made up our own stories of an afterlife to reassure ourselves that such might actually exist and thus relieve our existential anxieties always lurks in the darkness of the less than fully conscious mind. And so we must constantly seek to reassure ourselves of “the truth,” professing that truth in groups where we can look to each other for constant affirmation of our construction and producing that “truth” in theological creeds, confessions, tracts, catechisms, institutes, and church teachings.
When that does not fully achieve the object of repressing the memories of our constructive process, we seek affirmation through outsiders through proselytizing, a process that is ultimately much more designed to relieve the cognitive dissonance of believers than to offer “the truth” to the other. Indeed, the resolution of cognitive dissonance requires us to attribute much more beneficence to our motivations than they ultimately merit. And so we hear evangelizers speaking of offering a gift to their targets, of sharing a beautiful truth with those whom we presume to need what we have.
But uncritical, dogmatic approaches to faith are by definition brittle. The imperative of avoiding conscious recognition of the constructive history of the ideas frequently purveyed as absolute, ultimate, unchanging, eternal, et al, creates an ongoing liability for the holder and the purveyor of these proffered truths. And thus those who would dare to pull up the cover of consciousness to reveal that history will frequently be seen as enemies of the truth if not the very enemies of G-d him/herself. The accusation of heretic, its original Greek root haireisthai meaning "to choose," points toward the choice of the messenger who is shot, the prophet who is stoned, of insisting upon being conscious of the reality of these ideas, their inception and the motivation behind them, a reality that many true believers will sadly find too risky to even consider.
In Richard Rubenstein’s Approaches to Auschwitz he describes a young Martin Luther eager to tell the Jews of Germany of the great new truth of Protestantism, certain that now shed of its Roman Catholic baggage, Jews will readily see the light of the Christian faith and embrace it. His references to the Jews are generous, brotherly. But a mere decade later, when the Jews are still lighting their candles on Friday evening, when the Jews have not converted in mass, Luther begins to see them as what Rubenstein calls “the disconfirming other.” Not only have they not converted, thus disproving Luther’s optimism, they continue to practice a contrary faith system in the face of the new revealed truth of Protestantism, thus drawing Luther’s version of the truth into question. Not surprisingly, Luther assesses this situation as intolerable and proclaims the need for the annihilation of this disconfirming other, a decision that says much more about the insecurities of Luther than anything about the Jews.
In his vitriolic “On the Jews and their Lies,” Luther asserts:
They are real liars and bloodhounds who have not only continually perverted and falsified all of Scripture with their mendacious glosses from the beginning until the present day…. The sun has never shone on a more bloodthirsty and vengeful people than they are who imagine that they are God's people who have been commissioned and commanded to murder and to slay the Gentiles. In fact, the most important thing that they expect of their Messiah is that he will murder and kill the entire world with their sword.
What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? Since they live among us, we dare not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of their lying and reviling and blaspheming. If we do, we become sharers in their lies, cursing and blasphemy. Thus we cannot extinguish the unquenchable fire of divine wrath, of which the prophets speak, nor can we convert the Jews. With prayer and the fear of God we must practice a sharp mercy to see whether we might save at least a few from the glowing flames. We dare not avenge ourselves. Vengeance a thousand times worse than we could wish them already has them by the throat. I shall give you my sincere advice:
First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians….
Three centuries later, brown shirted German descendants of Luther would take these words to heart on a terrible night known today as Krystallnacht.
The belief that one has the only truth, the readiness to invoke G-d to support that truth and the willingness to cast those who do not share the truth into outer darkness, starting in this world and continuing into the next, says a great deal about the fragility and brittleness of constructed religious understandings. The perceived need to cause others to share those understandings – we have what you need – bespeaks the second besetting sin of institutional religion – the inevitable tendency toward projection. But it also bespeaks a related sin which virtually every religious tradition condemns – a lack of humility.
Clearly it is not easy to embrace humility if one is a true believer driven by existential security anxieties. Humility means the ability to say one does not have all the answers. Humility means the willingness to admit that the answers one has found are at best partial on a good day. Humility means eschewing the all-too-common tendency among religious people to purport to know and speak for the mind of a G-d so far beyond human comprehension that such assertions reveal themselves as absurd and arrogant almost from the beginning.
There are many aspects of the Christian tradition of which I am an ordained priest that I find appealing if not compelling. I am a catholic in my love of liturgy and my appreciation for the analogical imagination of catholic spirituality which can see the divine everywhere if one is willing to look for it. I am an Anglican in my love of beautiful music and wordscrafting, incarnational theology and fine architecture and iconographic décor. I find the way of Jesus, Francis, Oscar Romero, Julian of Norwich and the many other saints of the faith, most of whom never made it to the official calendar, to be formative for my own faith. And as a mystic, I experience the divine in a wide multitude of places and faces. The created world simply screams of the divine in my experience of it.
But I also readily see the divine outside my tradition in the symbols, practices and beliefs of other world religions. My spiritual life is informed by the examples of non-Christian saints from Gandhi to Rumi to the wisdom of indigenous traditions. And I readily own the shadow of my tradition from Luther and the Holocaust to the crippling social diseases of slavery, sexism and homophobia and too many misanthropic wars which the Christian tradition has legitimized historically.
My tradition is one path of many to the divine. As the Hindus say, many paths, one destination. Humility requires recognizing the partial nature of the truth about the divine my path provides as well as the destructiveness that results when that partial nature is not recognized and religion becomes imperialistic. Given that reality, my grasp of my tradition is firm but tentative. I don’t think the day will ever come when I would convert to another tradition. But there will also never come a day when I forget the constructed nature of my own faith tradition and assert it to be the only way. Holding my own faith tentatively and in humility, I am able to consider other faith traditions on their own terms, if imperfectly. And hopefully, it will prevent me from projecting my own beliefs onto others as the only possible way to see things.
Admittedly, a critically conscious, tentatively held and other engaging religion is probably way too frightening for those who seek existential security in religion. And so long as that is true, institutional religion will be the realm of the true believer. And to the degree that is true, there is little place for a man like me in such religions. So the answer to my student’s question is that while I am a deeply spiritual human being, I am probably not a religious man. And at a very basic level, perhaps that’s OK.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Are you a religious man, professor? – Part I
It was Good Friday when my student asked me this question on the way out the door of class: “So, professor, are you a religious man ?” I remember sputtering out some response to the effect that while I think most who know me would describe me as a deeply spiritual man, my ties to institutional religion are strained on a good day. I envision myself as inhabiting the orbital ring as far removed from the planet of western Christian institutional religion as one can get and still remain within telemetry.
Of course, that’s an explanation most college undergraduates readily understand as they wrestle with their belief systems, putting their parents’ religion and politics on trial in the crucible of dorm room bull sessions and classroom discussions. But this is a response from a man on the other side of many years of seminary education and a doctorate in religious studies, a man ordained by a venerable religious tradition as a priest with a number of years of practice of that priesthood. That rather unexpected stumbling response has caused me a good deal of rethinking of what I believe and why over this first week of Easter.
While I have historically found the Unitarian-Universalist approach of negative self-definition (I don’t believe this, I’m not that) a bit off-putting and less than intellectually – not to mention spiritually - rigorous, I found my thoughts focusing on a couple of points that continue to surface in my teaching and study of world religions. While the Easter season focuses on resurrection and the hope of life after death, I find myself back at Good Friday looking at sins, sins that gave rise to the crucifixion of the Christ in the various theologically interpretative constructions of Jesus’ execution which see that event as somehow an atonement for human sin generally.
What are the sins of the institution to which I maintain only loose connections after years of engaging its seminary educational process and enduring its control issue-driven process to become ordained? And upon what basis would I judge the institution?
Increasingly, the answer to the second question is less a judgment than a resignation to the reality that human institutions will inevitably bear all the human warts of its individuals writ large. The church is what it is. I accept that even as I continue to participate peripherally in efforts to move the church into a more humane presence in the world. Clearly, the church rarely lives into the potential overarching principles of the Great Commandments (Love God, love your neighbor as yourself) would suggest possible. But the question for me is not whether the church is right or wrong so much as whether I feel compelled to continue to engage that church with my remaining and increasingly scarce life energies, i.e., to be a religious man, in my student’s query. And this is where I return to Good Friday and what I see as the two besetting sins of this stream of tradition I cannot seem to get past.
The first besetting sin of western Christianity as I see it is its self-focus. So many of my students make remarks in class discussions and in their papers to the effect that their adherence to the Christian tradition has everything to do with assuring themselves of a favorable afterlife. In its usual form, it is constructed as such: unless I believe in the church’s teachings about Jesus as the Christ who died for my sins, I won’t get to go to heaven.
Now, this is somewhat expectable from college undergrads whose brains have not reached full developmental and physiological maturity and who thus tend to think in self-focused terms. That was certainly a description of my own mind at age 20. But to the degree it reflects their parents’ thinking, from whom most of us inherit our religion and politics, it’s troubling. As I often say to my students when we discuss Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning, Stage 2 (of 6) “What’s in it for me?” moral reasoning is somehow charming in 8 year olds. It’s less than charming in the same child at 18.
But where this line of argument becomes untenable is when we hear it from the pulpit professed by educated clergy who ultimately know better than this underdeveloped self-focused thinking would suggest. I once heard a priest (who is also a medical doctor with a distinguished career in health care) remark in a Christmas Eve service that the baby Jesus had to be born because he had to die for our sins. I nearly lost the contents of my stomach (which admittedly contained no small amount of alcohol that night) right there in the middle of midnight mass. Another Christmas Eve in Tallahassee a priest compared Jesus’ birth to a famous alka-seltzer commercial: “When Jesus is born, the world says, ‘Oh, what a relief it is!’” Oh, what a relief getting out the door of that service proved to be!
Now, don’t get me wrong. I see nothing wrong with hoping for a life after death. In a Eucharistic liturgy which we use at Integrity gatherings adapted from a number of sources by my dear friend and fellow Episcopal priest, Warren Thompson, the affirmation of faith concludes with this statement: And, I believe that I may hope for a life with God that is not terminated by death. AMEN. In all honesty, I think most of us would admit that we share such a hope. Indeed, truth be told, I am deeply hoping my dear mother, Saint Marge, will meet me at the end of the tunnel in the great white light when I die.
But I don’t know that will happen. And neither does anyone else, regardless of how they express their hopes. Where I begin to lose respect for institutional religion is when its members deliberately confuse verbs like “hope” or “believe” for those of knowledge, verbs which suggest the mere recognition of established fact. We don’t know. And we lie when we say we do, first to ourselves and then to others, the practice of “bad faith” that Sartre warned us against.
Certainly I recognize the desperate existential anxiety such statements reflect. At some level, a truthful statement would be “Because I am terrified by the prospect of annihilation of my individual existence at the time of physical death, I feel compelled to believe that life after death is a fact and thus I must buy into an atonement theology construct to assure myself of that.” Of course, the fear in such a statement would be palpable, which is precisely why most people cannot be honest with themselves in such a brutal manner.
But even a compassionate understanding of the existential anxiety which compels professions of faith about the afterlife and how to attain it does not make such professions factual. It makes them earnestly held beliefs. And at the heart of such beliefs is a bottom line, non-negotiable concern: individual self-preservation. Little wonder that much of institutional religion as I have experienced it in the west is marked by intellectual dishonesty driven by self-focus.
Admittedly, this tendency is greater in Protestant traditions focused on believing than in Catholic bodies whose emphasis has long been more on belonging. David Tracey’s excellent analysis of dialectical (G-d is radically absent from the world, individuals reflect depravity) Augustinian imaginations as opposed to the analogical (G-d is radically present in the world, individuals reflect the image of G-d) Thomist/Franciscan imagination has long noted these differences. But, in an American culture which has been both strongly shaped by the Protestant dialectical imagination which in part has given birth to a hyperindividualist culture which both shapes its newly arriving members and affirms those already present in their self-pursuit, all of us are, to varying degrees, informed by an ethos of self. As my Orthodox Catholic director in Clinical Pastoral Education at Stanford observed, “In America we breathe Protestant air.”
Where I see this self-focused approach to religion as most egregious is in the constructions of most atonement theologies. Frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever really believed that G-d was unable to forgive sins without a human sacrifice. What kind of G-d cannot forgive his human creations when they live into their imperfections? Even worse, what kind of G-d demands human sacrifice as a condition of forgiveness? Perhaps the bloodthirsty god of Aztecs (if we can rely on the self-serving reporting of Spanish conquistadors here) or the bloodthirsty god of Southern Baptists who demand an eye for an eye, extracted in the state killing chambers they run in the states of the Bible/Death Belt.
Finally, what kind of G-d sires a single child only for the purpose of slaughtering him to take care of other people’s sins as the midnight mass sermons suggested? Perhaps the “cosmic child abuser” is a bit too harsh (and simplistic) of an accusation against such a construction of deity, particularly in light of Trinitarian theology which speaks to G-d in three persons which ultimately means G-d himself is consenting to be killed so he can forgive human sins. But, this is a convoluted theology on a good day. And it remains bloodthirsty no matter how mystified these understandings become through the vagaries of abstract theology. What kind of model is such a god for human behavior?
A religion which requires people to believe that their individual salvation is their ultimate (if not singular) concern, to paraphrase Paul Tillich, is a religion which infantilizes its adult believers. It at least encourages them – if not requires them – to continue to look through lenses of pre-adolescent preconventional moral reasoning – “It’s all about me.” It requires the construction and ongoing affirmation of theologies of the death of another as a means of vicariously pursuing self-interest. And it is heedless to its means of doing so.
Immanuel Kant’s restatement of the Golden Rule has always struck me as the heart of any sound ethics worthy of thoughtful adults. “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end" Clearly, any atonement theology which would assert that Jesus had to die so human beings, whether collectively or individually, could go to heaven is a violation of this categorical imperative. And I find no small amount of irony in the fact that these theological constructions which would interpret the death of Jesus in their very essence violate the ultimate principle that Jesus himself taught: Love your neighbor as yourself – i.e., Do not treat them as a means to an end.
So, if religion is not all about me, ultimately, then what should it be about? In my estimation, a religion worthy of thoughtful adult believers would include the following:
* A focus on relationship of the individual to
- one’s own inner depths, to all other living beings,
- to the created world in which we live
- and to the creator which lies beyond all of this and yet in whose very being all creation
exists, the ultimate connection of all that is.
* Seeing sin as the violation of relationships and forgiveness as the means of repairing and restoring them, including relationship to G-d
* A focus on moral principles – as opposed to the moralistic rules imposed on everyone by the most powerful tribe – which guide and evaluate all relationships. Such broad principles would include
- a value of life in its fullest for all living beings,
- the willingness to seek out and respect the image of G-d on the face of every living being,
- the willingness to admit imperfection from which flows wrongdoing and the courage and
strength to recognize the harm of one’s thoughts, words and deeds, to admit the need for
change and to engage the struggle to do so,
- an ultimate existential trust that the universe is a good place and that our lives will not be
lived in vain.
An adult religion constructed in terms of relationship does not infantilize its members by conditionalizing human desires (and thus behaviors) for constructs of existential security. Rather, it focuses on responsibilities which flow from relationship. The Hebrew prophet Micah stated this well in answering the question “[W]hat does the Lord require of you?” with this recognition of religion as relationships and the responsibilities which flow from them: “[D]o justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with God…”
A religion which cannot escape the focus of self and the existential anxieties of death is not a religion worth practicing. A religion which is so concerned with individual salvation or tribal confessional boundaries - both speculative focuses on the next world (if any exists) - that it cannot be fully present in the present world in any effectual manner is not a religion worthy of thoughtful adult adherents. And a religion which has nothing to say to this world worth hearing is ultimately bound for the dustbin of history.
I think it is worth noting that the sayings which the Jesus Seminar have voted to be most likely authentic sayings of Jesus are statements of relationship and gratitude for the graciousness of creation and the responsibilities which flow from them. They are also, almost to the saying, statements which reflect a post-conventional moral reasoning (Stages 5 to 6), reasoning which transcends tribal and nationalist boundaries and reflects moral obligations to all other living beings in spite of any socially constructed expectations. They are focused on this world, its inhabitants and the creator G-d who lies within as well as beyond that creation. They reflect existential trust in G-d and the other, a far cry from the fear-driven constructs of atonement.
This is a religion which reflects compassion at its core and justice defined by right relations, just as the prophet Micah prescribed. And thus it is at least in its potential a religion with something to say to the world worth hearing. Jesus taught a religion worth practicing. And he articulates a way worthy of thoughtful adult followers. How very far from this religion of Jesus are the religions about Jesus - though only loosely - which have come to bear the name Christianities.
I have more to say including my thoughts on the second besetting sin of western Christianity – projection – but that must await another post.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
It was Good Friday when my student asked me this question on the way out the door of class: “So, professor, are you a religious man ?” I remember sputtering out some response to the effect that while I think most who know me would describe me as a deeply spiritual man, my ties to institutional religion are strained on a good day. I envision myself as inhabiting the orbital ring as far removed from the planet of western Christian institutional religion as one can get and still remain within telemetry.
Of course, that’s an explanation most college undergraduates readily understand as they wrestle with their belief systems, putting their parents’ religion and politics on trial in the crucible of dorm room bull sessions and classroom discussions. But this is a response from a man on the other side of many years of seminary education and a doctorate in religious studies, a man ordained by a venerable religious tradition as a priest with a number of years of practice of that priesthood. That rather unexpected stumbling response has caused me a good deal of rethinking of what I believe and why over this first week of Easter.
While I have historically found the Unitarian-Universalist approach of negative self-definition (I don’t believe this, I’m not that) a bit off-putting and less than intellectually – not to mention spiritually - rigorous, I found my thoughts focusing on a couple of points that continue to surface in my teaching and study of world religions. While the Easter season focuses on resurrection and the hope of life after death, I find myself back at Good Friday looking at sins, sins that gave rise to the crucifixion of the Christ in the various theologically interpretative constructions of Jesus’ execution which see that event as somehow an atonement for human sin generally.
What are the sins of the institution to which I maintain only loose connections after years of engaging its seminary educational process and enduring its control issue-driven process to become ordained? And upon what basis would I judge the institution?
Increasingly, the answer to the second question is less a judgment than a resignation to the reality that human institutions will inevitably bear all the human warts of its individuals writ large. The church is what it is. I accept that even as I continue to participate peripherally in efforts to move the church into a more humane presence in the world. Clearly, the church rarely lives into the potential overarching principles of the Great Commandments (Love God, love your neighbor as yourself) would suggest possible. But the question for me is not whether the church is right or wrong so much as whether I feel compelled to continue to engage that church with my remaining and increasingly scarce life energies, i.e., to be a religious man, in my student’s query. And this is where I return to Good Friday and what I see as the two besetting sins of this stream of tradition I cannot seem to get past.
The first besetting sin of western Christianity as I see it is its self-focus. So many of my students make remarks in class discussions and in their papers to the effect that their adherence to the Christian tradition has everything to do with assuring themselves of a favorable afterlife. In its usual form, it is constructed as such: unless I believe in the church’s teachings about Jesus as the Christ who died for my sins, I won’t get to go to heaven.
Now, this is somewhat expectable from college undergrads whose brains have not reached full developmental and physiological maturity and who thus tend to think in self-focused terms. That was certainly a description of my own mind at age 20. But to the degree it reflects their parents’ thinking, from whom most of us inherit our religion and politics, it’s troubling. As I often say to my students when we discuss Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning, Stage 2 (of 6) “What’s in it for me?” moral reasoning is somehow charming in 8 year olds. It’s less than charming in the same child at 18.
But where this line of argument becomes untenable is when we hear it from the pulpit professed by educated clergy who ultimately know better than this underdeveloped self-focused thinking would suggest. I once heard a priest (who is also a medical doctor with a distinguished career in health care) remark in a Christmas Eve service that the baby Jesus had to be born because he had to die for our sins. I nearly lost the contents of my stomach (which admittedly contained no small amount of alcohol that night) right there in the middle of midnight mass. Another Christmas Eve in Tallahassee a priest compared Jesus’ birth to a famous alka-seltzer commercial: “When Jesus is born, the world says, ‘Oh, what a relief it is!’” Oh, what a relief getting out the door of that service proved to be!
Now, don’t get me wrong. I see nothing wrong with hoping for a life after death. In a Eucharistic liturgy which we use at Integrity gatherings adapted from a number of sources by my dear friend and fellow Episcopal priest, Warren Thompson, the affirmation of faith concludes with this statement: And, I believe that I may hope for a life with God that is not terminated by death. AMEN. In all honesty, I think most of us would admit that we share such a hope. Indeed, truth be told, I am deeply hoping my dear mother, Saint Marge, will meet me at the end of the tunnel in the great white light when I die.
But I don’t know that will happen. And neither does anyone else, regardless of how they express their hopes. Where I begin to lose respect for institutional religion is when its members deliberately confuse verbs like “hope” or “believe” for those of knowledge, verbs which suggest the mere recognition of established fact. We don’t know. And we lie when we say we do, first to ourselves and then to others, the practice of “bad faith” that Sartre warned us against.
Certainly I recognize the desperate existential anxiety such statements reflect. At some level, a truthful statement would be “Because I am terrified by the prospect of annihilation of my individual existence at the time of physical death, I feel compelled to believe that life after death is a fact and thus I must buy into an atonement theology construct to assure myself of that.” Of course, the fear in such a statement would be palpable, which is precisely why most people cannot be honest with themselves in such a brutal manner.
But even a compassionate understanding of the existential anxiety which compels professions of faith about the afterlife and how to attain it does not make such professions factual. It makes them earnestly held beliefs. And at the heart of such beliefs is a bottom line, non-negotiable concern: individual self-preservation. Little wonder that much of institutional religion as I have experienced it in the west is marked by intellectual dishonesty driven by self-focus.
Admittedly, this tendency is greater in Protestant traditions focused on believing than in Catholic bodies whose emphasis has long been more on belonging. David Tracey’s excellent analysis of dialectical (G-d is radically absent from the world, individuals reflect depravity) Augustinian imaginations as opposed to the analogical (G-d is radically present in the world, individuals reflect the image of G-d) Thomist/Franciscan imagination has long noted these differences. But, in an American culture which has been both strongly shaped by the Protestant dialectical imagination which in part has given birth to a hyperindividualist culture which both shapes its newly arriving members and affirms those already present in their self-pursuit, all of us are, to varying degrees, informed by an ethos of self. As my Orthodox Catholic director in Clinical Pastoral Education at Stanford observed, “In America we breathe Protestant air.”
Where I see this self-focused approach to religion as most egregious is in the constructions of most atonement theologies. Frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever really believed that G-d was unable to forgive sins without a human sacrifice. What kind of G-d cannot forgive his human creations when they live into their imperfections? Even worse, what kind of G-d demands human sacrifice as a condition of forgiveness? Perhaps the bloodthirsty god of Aztecs (if we can rely on the self-serving reporting of Spanish conquistadors here) or the bloodthirsty god of Southern Baptists who demand an eye for an eye, extracted in the state killing chambers they run in the states of the Bible/Death Belt.
Finally, what kind of G-d sires a single child only for the purpose of slaughtering him to take care of other people’s sins as the midnight mass sermons suggested? Perhaps the “cosmic child abuser” is a bit too harsh (and simplistic) of an accusation against such a construction of deity, particularly in light of Trinitarian theology which speaks to G-d in three persons which ultimately means G-d himself is consenting to be killed so he can forgive human sins. But, this is a convoluted theology on a good day. And it remains bloodthirsty no matter how mystified these understandings become through the vagaries of abstract theology. What kind of model is such a god for human behavior?
A religion which requires people to believe that their individual salvation is their ultimate (if not singular) concern, to paraphrase Paul Tillich, is a religion which infantilizes its adult believers. It at least encourages them – if not requires them – to continue to look through lenses of pre-adolescent preconventional moral reasoning – “It’s all about me.” It requires the construction and ongoing affirmation of theologies of the death of another as a means of vicariously pursuing self-interest. And it is heedless to its means of doing so.
Immanuel Kant’s restatement of the Golden Rule has always struck me as the heart of any sound ethics worthy of thoughtful adults. “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end" Clearly, any atonement theology which would assert that Jesus had to die so human beings, whether collectively or individually, could go to heaven is a violation of this categorical imperative. And I find no small amount of irony in the fact that these theological constructions which would interpret the death of Jesus in their very essence violate the ultimate principle that Jesus himself taught: Love your neighbor as yourself – i.e., Do not treat them as a means to an end.
So, if religion is not all about me, ultimately, then what should it be about? In my estimation, a religion worthy of thoughtful adult believers would include the following:
* A focus on relationship of the individual to
- one’s own inner depths, to all other living beings,
- to the created world in which we live
- and to the creator which lies beyond all of this and yet in whose very being all creation
exists, the ultimate connection of all that is.
* Seeing sin as the violation of relationships and forgiveness as the means of repairing and restoring them, including relationship to G-d
* A focus on moral principles – as opposed to the moralistic rules imposed on everyone by the most powerful tribe – which guide and evaluate all relationships. Such broad principles would include
- a value of life in its fullest for all living beings,
- the willingness to seek out and respect the image of G-d on the face of every living being,
- the willingness to admit imperfection from which flows wrongdoing and the courage and
strength to recognize the harm of one’s thoughts, words and deeds, to admit the need for
change and to engage the struggle to do so,
- an ultimate existential trust that the universe is a good place and that our lives will not be
lived in vain.
An adult religion constructed in terms of relationship does not infantilize its members by conditionalizing human desires (and thus behaviors) for constructs of existential security. Rather, it focuses on responsibilities which flow from relationship. The Hebrew prophet Micah stated this well in answering the question “[W]hat does the Lord require of you?” with this recognition of religion as relationships and the responsibilities which flow from them: “[D]o justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with God…”
A religion which cannot escape the focus of self and the existential anxieties of death is not a religion worth practicing. A religion which is so concerned with individual salvation or tribal confessional boundaries - both speculative focuses on the next world (if any exists) - that it cannot be fully present in the present world in any effectual manner is not a religion worthy of thoughtful adult adherents. And a religion which has nothing to say to this world worth hearing is ultimately bound for the dustbin of history.
I think it is worth noting that the sayings which the Jesus Seminar have voted to be most likely authentic sayings of Jesus are statements of relationship and gratitude for the graciousness of creation and the responsibilities which flow from them. They are also, almost to the saying, statements which reflect a post-conventional moral reasoning (Stages 5 to 6), reasoning which transcends tribal and nationalist boundaries and reflects moral obligations to all other living beings in spite of any socially constructed expectations. They are focused on this world, its inhabitants and the creator G-d who lies within as well as beyond that creation. They reflect existential trust in G-d and the other, a far cry from the fear-driven constructs of atonement.
This is a religion which reflects compassion at its core and justice defined by right relations, just as the prophet Micah prescribed. And thus it is at least in its potential a religion with something to say to the world worth hearing. Jesus taught a religion worth practicing. And he articulates a way worthy of thoughtful adult followers. How very far from this religion of Jesus are the religions about Jesus - though only loosely - which have come to bear the name Christianities.
I have more to say including my thoughts on the second besetting sin of western Christianity – projection – but that must await another post.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Saturday, April 03, 2010
Heterosexism, Homophobia and Crucifixion:
Musings on Black Saturday
Yesterday in the philosophy of law class the problem of how to describe understandings of LBGT people which are antagonistic to their interests arose. Given that I am working on a project to examine the deceitful campaign practices surrounding Proposition 8 in California largely funded by religious sources which took away marriage rights then being exercised by same sex couples, perhaps a little discussion of terms is in order.
The easier of the two terms used to discuss this phenomenon is heterosexism. While a number of the online dictionary sites including Meriam Webster provide a rather enigmatic definition which equates heterosexism with “discrimination or prejudice by heterosexuals against homosexuals,“ such definitions focus on behavior and attitudes in a completely acontextual manner which is not terribly surprising given the general pattern of American discourse.
A better definition is offered in Hate Crimes: Confronting Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men (Herek, Berrill, Berrill, 1992), where the authors describe heterosexism as
an ideological system that denies, denigrates and stigmatizes any nonheterosexual form of behavior, identity, relationship or community. Like racism, sexism and other ideologies of oppression, heterosexism is manifest in societal custom and institutions, such as religion and the legal system (referred to here as cultural heterosexism), and in individual attitudes and behaviors (referred to here as psychological heterosexism…). [Herek, 89]
A second useful definition is offered by Elizabeth P. Cramer in her work Addressing Homophobia and Heterosexism on College Campuses [2002]:
The expectation that all people should be or are heterosexual. The belief that heterosexual relations are normal and are the norm. These expectations and beliefs occur on individual, institutional and cultural levels. The behavioral manifestations of heterosexist belief include denying marriage licenses for same-sex couples and restricting health and retirement benefits to those in heterosexual marriages.
What these definitions provide is an understanding that heterosexism, much like my black seminary classmate noted about racism years ago, is in the very air we breathe in western culture. Much of the time, we are simply unaware of it. Heterosexism pervades every aspect of our culture and only becomes jarringly noticeable when someone dares to break the surface of our unconsciousness to point out the obvious: this is a socially constructed understanding with little basis in reason and with generally destructive results when put into practice.
But with the deconstruction of heterosexism which has occurred as a result of the LGBT liberation movements beginning in the 1950s, the luxury of naiveté (a phrase borrowed from the 12 Steps movement) which uncritically sees heterosexism as “normal and the norm” has been lost as the socially constructed and destructive nature of heterosexism has been named. In the process, while heterosexism has been exposed as a social construction, the former understandings of tradition, nature and divine purpose have correspondingly been revealed for their roles in legitimization – rather than as origins - of this social construct.
At the point that such deconstruction, demythololgizing and delegitimation has been completed and published and/or broadcast to the public, the luxury of naiveté is no longer available to those who become aware of it. Such awareness is increasingly difficult to avoid with the disconfirming evidence from science and the experience of LBGT people widely disseminated on worldwide media.
While many people engage in denial of the truth of their own prejudices once exposed while others seek to avoid the disconfirming evidence of their prejudice –sometimes by engaging in classic kill the messenger responses - those behaviors alone suggest a profound – if less than totally conscious - awareness of the prejudice. Indeed, cognitive dissonance theory suggests that the more their rhetoric reflects demonization of LBGT people, the more elaborate their systems of legitimization become, the more dismissive of disconfirming evidence and those who would purvey it their responses become, the more evident that at a very basic level these are people who know better. [Tavris, Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), 2007].
All of these behaviors are evidence of desperate attempts to deal with cognitive dissonance resulting from knowing better – whether such awareness is conscious and thus capable of articulation or simply the gnawing awareness in one’s gut of that dissonance - but speaking and acting in conflict with such “knowledge. “ French philosophy Jean-Paul Sartre referred to the ploy of first deceiving oneself prior to engaging to deceive others with assertions one either knows to be false or for which one has consciously avoided any disconfirming evidence as the practice of “bad faith.”
The http://about.com/ site regarding civil liberties notes that “Heterosexism is distinct from homophobia, though homophobia is in all likelihood the driving force behind heterosexism.” This an important observation. The unconscious, prejudicial aspects of heterosexism are perhaps expectable in a heterosexist culture, particularly a consumerist culture which readily utilizes appeals to heterosexual potential for mating as a means of conditioning its desired customers into buying products and services without regard to need. But can an ongoing uncritical default to socially constructed understandings be seen as rational in light of its exposure as a social construct?
Homophobia as a psychiatric diagnosis is problematic on a good day. Definitions of phobia range in intensity and extremity from life threatening attitudes and behaviors to mere avoidance behaviors. Psychopathologizing homophobia in most cases is unwarranted and unhelpful in any reasoned discussion of heterosexism and its attendant oppressive social structures and culturally based attitudes. This is not to say that homophobia cannot become pathological, only that such is not the beginning place in talking about it.
At the same time, the persistent question of rationality (or the lack thereof) in many responses to the deconstructive revelations of the prejudicial and ultimately destructive nature of responses to any non-heterosexual feelings and behaviors suggests that something deeper and perhaps darker is at work than a mere socially constructed misanthropic pattern. Indeed, one definition of phobia points toward that connection:
"The nature of phobia is a persistent avoidance behavior and is secondary to irrational fears of a specific object, activity, or situation. -- -- -- phobia are unreasonable and unwarranted fears given the actual dangerousness of the object, activity, or situation avoided." (Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Kaplan, 1985).
While Kaplan’s definition continues to use fear as a basis for his definition, it perhaps offers a helpful criteria for distinguishing the pervasive, largely unconscious heterosexism native to our culture (though less and less unconscious) with the rejection of reasoned argument once such naiveté is lost through exposure to disconfirming evidence. A useful distinction of homophobia from heterosexism would thus turn on the role of reason in responding to evidence that heteronormative attitudes, behaviors and resulting institutional structures are by definition socially constructed and ultimately based in prejudice, to whatever degree realized.
I am generally slow to use the term homophobic in my classes or in my writing because of its incendiary nature. But I am willing to use it under the conditions I lay out here because it is ultimately more accurately descriptive than mere designations of heterosexism permit. I am also resistant to self-serving arguments from those who hold prejudicial attitudes, legitimating them with one or more of the usual media, that the use of homophobia somehow is reducible to little more than name calling and serves to becloud rather than enlighten discussions on this subject.
Holders of prejudice never want to own up to their misanthropy. That's the nature of prejudices. Moreover, it is a human tendency to seek to construct one’s own self-understanding in the brightest aspects of the persona while repressing into the shadow all less than acceptable aspects, something Carl Jung observed over a century ago. This would be increasingly true of the label of homophobia as such attitudes are increasingly seen as socially unacceptable. It is perhaps revealing that prior to the vote on Proposition 8 in California, not one single poll predicted its passage. Clearly the halo effect is alive and well.
Having grown up in a late Jim Crow period in the South during which schools were desegregated, I am more than aware of the resistance we Southerners had to being called racists even as our attitudes and behaviors spoke volumes about the repressed and thus very powerful role our racism played in our lives. We used many of the same arguments regarding the term racist that one hears today in legal and religious circles around the use of the descriptor homophobia: this word shuts down discourse, this word is not accurate enough to describe anything in particular, this word pathologizes mere holders of social prejudices. We also heard the arguments that fail to distinguish the attitudes themselves from the classic legitimizations of those attitudes frequently utilized by their holders: requiring me to reconsider my prejudices here would cause me to go against God (the Pope, the church, the faith, et al), the law, nature or centuries of tradition.
Clearly it is possible for Roman Catholics to reject the current Papal position on homosexuality (as with any number of other pronouncements, many of them dealing with sexuality) and polls of the faithful repeatedly indicate a majority do. Nature provides a textbook case for the regular occurrence of homosexual behaviors in the animal kingdom. Tradition provides a textbook case for the tendency in human history to engage in destructive socially constructed relationships among human beings and then legitimize them with appeals to supernatural, natural and traditional authorities. (see slave trade) only to later admit their wrongfulness though some were able to recognize and willing to risk their own well being to declaim such practices long before that time.
Of course, all of these defense mechanisms ultimately evidence the very reality my definition of homophobia would assert: homophobia is evidenced by a rejection of reasoned argument in the consideration of this phenomenon. The former arguments above seek to avoid confrontation with the disconfirming evidence that reasoned discussion of homosexuality inevitably reveals. The latter arguments above attempt to justify prejudicial arguments by unquestioning deference to authority in response to or avoidance of disconfirming evidence. In neither approach is reasoned argument enjoined. But in either case, it is at the point that the arguer is confronted with the evidence of the untenable nature of their position, rejects the evidence and continues to hold to understandings in contravention of that reason that the description of their responses could be considered actively homophobic rather than mere passive bearers of culturally driven heterosexism.
While it is clearly understandable why holders of prejudice might construct elaborate defense systems for their prejudices, such suggests an ultimate – if not totally reflected upon - awareness of their wrongful nature, not the innocence of character and rightness of attitude the arguments would suggest. People who truly believe their attitudes are correct if not righteous do not need to construct elaborate defense systems. The rectitude of their arguments speak for themselves.
I find it odd that this is the subject I am addressing on this Black (or Holy) Saturday, the day after Good Friday (good for whom? certainly not Jesus) when one of history’s most famous executions is remembered. I almost asked my world religions students yesterday to do a three minute writing assignment on this question: Clearly Jesus is the most famous example of crucifixion though it was a common practice in the Roman Empire. Who gets crucified today? Why? Time did not permit but it would have been interesting to hear their answers.
If we are being honest with ourselves, we will have to admit that all misanthropic social prejudices crucify their targets to some degree. Perhaps this is an appropriate subject to ponder this day on which Jesus sleeps in his tomb while we, his grief-stricken followers, ask ourselves, “How could this have happened?”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Musings on Black Saturday
Yesterday in the philosophy of law class the problem of how to describe understandings of LBGT people which are antagonistic to their interests arose. Given that I am working on a project to examine the deceitful campaign practices surrounding Proposition 8 in California largely funded by religious sources which took away marriage rights then being exercised by same sex couples, perhaps a little discussion of terms is in order.
The easier of the two terms used to discuss this phenomenon is heterosexism. While a number of the online dictionary sites including Meriam Webster provide a rather enigmatic definition which equates heterosexism with “discrimination or prejudice by heterosexuals against homosexuals,“ such definitions focus on behavior and attitudes in a completely acontextual manner which is not terribly surprising given the general pattern of American discourse.
A better definition is offered in Hate Crimes: Confronting Violence Against Lesbians and Gay Men (Herek, Berrill, Berrill, 1992), where the authors describe heterosexism as
an ideological system that denies, denigrates and stigmatizes any nonheterosexual form of behavior, identity, relationship or community. Like racism, sexism and other ideologies of oppression, heterosexism is manifest in societal custom and institutions, such as religion and the legal system (referred to here as cultural heterosexism), and in individual attitudes and behaviors (referred to here as psychological heterosexism…). [Herek, 89]
A second useful definition is offered by Elizabeth P. Cramer in her work Addressing Homophobia and Heterosexism on College Campuses [2002]:
The expectation that all people should be or are heterosexual. The belief that heterosexual relations are normal and are the norm. These expectations and beliefs occur on individual, institutional and cultural levels. The behavioral manifestations of heterosexist belief include denying marriage licenses for same-sex couples and restricting health and retirement benefits to those in heterosexual marriages.
What these definitions provide is an understanding that heterosexism, much like my black seminary classmate noted about racism years ago, is in the very air we breathe in western culture. Much of the time, we are simply unaware of it. Heterosexism pervades every aspect of our culture and only becomes jarringly noticeable when someone dares to break the surface of our unconsciousness to point out the obvious: this is a socially constructed understanding with little basis in reason and with generally destructive results when put into practice.
But with the deconstruction of heterosexism which has occurred as a result of the LGBT liberation movements beginning in the 1950s, the luxury of naiveté (a phrase borrowed from the 12 Steps movement) which uncritically sees heterosexism as “normal and the norm” has been lost as the socially constructed and destructive nature of heterosexism has been named. In the process, while heterosexism has been exposed as a social construction, the former understandings of tradition, nature and divine purpose have correspondingly been revealed for their roles in legitimization – rather than as origins - of this social construct.
At the point that such deconstruction, demythololgizing and delegitimation has been completed and published and/or broadcast to the public, the luxury of naiveté is no longer available to those who become aware of it. Such awareness is increasingly difficult to avoid with the disconfirming evidence from science and the experience of LBGT people widely disseminated on worldwide media.
While many people engage in denial of the truth of their own prejudices once exposed while others seek to avoid the disconfirming evidence of their prejudice –sometimes by engaging in classic kill the messenger responses - those behaviors alone suggest a profound – if less than totally conscious - awareness of the prejudice. Indeed, cognitive dissonance theory suggests that the more their rhetoric reflects demonization of LBGT people, the more elaborate their systems of legitimization become, the more dismissive of disconfirming evidence and those who would purvey it their responses become, the more evident that at a very basic level these are people who know better. [Tavris, Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), 2007].
All of these behaviors are evidence of desperate attempts to deal with cognitive dissonance resulting from knowing better – whether such awareness is conscious and thus capable of articulation or simply the gnawing awareness in one’s gut of that dissonance - but speaking and acting in conflict with such “knowledge. “ French philosophy Jean-Paul Sartre referred to the ploy of first deceiving oneself prior to engaging to deceive others with assertions one either knows to be false or for which one has consciously avoided any disconfirming evidence as the practice of “bad faith.”
The http://about.com/ site regarding civil liberties notes that “Heterosexism is distinct from homophobia, though homophobia is in all likelihood the driving force behind heterosexism.” This an important observation. The unconscious, prejudicial aspects of heterosexism are perhaps expectable in a heterosexist culture, particularly a consumerist culture which readily utilizes appeals to heterosexual potential for mating as a means of conditioning its desired customers into buying products and services without regard to need. But can an ongoing uncritical default to socially constructed understandings be seen as rational in light of its exposure as a social construct?
Homophobia as a psychiatric diagnosis is problematic on a good day. Definitions of phobia range in intensity and extremity from life threatening attitudes and behaviors to mere avoidance behaviors. Psychopathologizing homophobia in most cases is unwarranted and unhelpful in any reasoned discussion of heterosexism and its attendant oppressive social structures and culturally based attitudes. This is not to say that homophobia cannot become pathological, only that such is not the beginning place in talking about it.
At the same time, the persistent question of rationality (or the lack thereof) in many responses to the deconstructive revelations of the prejudicial and ultimately destructive nature of responses to any non-heterosexual feelings and behaviors suggests that something deeper and perhaps darker is at work than a mere socially constructed misanthropic pattern. Indeed, one definition of phobia points toward that connection:
"The nature of phobia is a persistent avoidance behavior and is secondary to irrational fears of a specific object, activity, or situation. -- -- -- phobia are unreasonable and unwarranted fears given the actual dangerousness of the object, activity, or situation avoided." (Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Kaplan, 1985).
While Kaplan’s definition continues to use fear as a basis for his definition, it perhaps offers a helpful criteria for distinguishing the pervasive, largely unconscious heterosexism native to our culture (though less and less unconscious) with the rejection of reasoned argument once such naiveté is lost through exposure to disconfirming evidence. A useful distinction of homophobia from heterosexism would thus turn on the role of reason in responding to evidence that heteronormative attitudes, behaviors and resulting institutional structures are by definition socially constructed and ultimately based in prejudice, to whatever degree realized.
I am generally slow to use the term homophobic in my classes or in my writing because of its incendiary nature. But I am willing to use it under the conditions I lay out here because it is ultimately more accurately descriptive than mere designations of heterosexism permit. I am also resistant to self-serving arguments from those who hold prejudicial attitudes, legitimating them with one or more of the usual media, that the use of homophobia somehow is reducible to little more than name calling and serves to becloud rather than enlighten discussions on this subject.
Holders of prejudice never want to own up to their misanthropy. That's the nature of prejudices. Moreover, it is a human tendency to seek to construct one’s own self-understanding in the brightest aspects of the persona while repressing into the shadow all less than acceptable aspects, something Carl Jung observed over a century ago. This would be increasingly true of the label of homophobia as such attitudes are increasingly seen as socially unacceptable. It is perhaps revealing that prior to the vote on Proposition 8 in California, not one single poll predicted its passage. Clearly the halo effect is alive and well.
Having grown up in a late Jim Crow period in the South during which schools were desegregated, I am more than aware of the resistance we Southerners had to being called racists even as our attitudes and behaviors spoke volumes about the repressed and thus very powerful role our racism played in our lives. We used many of the same arguments regarding the term racist that one hears today in legal and religious circles around the use of the descriptor homophobia: this word shuts down discourse, this word is not accurate enough to describe anything in particular, this word pathologizes mere holders of social prejudices. We also heard the arguments that fail to distinguish the attitudes themselves from the classic legitimizations of those attitudes frequently utilized by their holders: requiring me to reconsider my prejudices here would cause me to go against God (the Pope, the church, the faith, et al), the law, nature or centuries of tradition.
Clearly it is possible for Roman Catholics to reject the current Papal position on homosexuality (as with any number of other pronouncements, many of them dealing with sexuality) and polls of the faithful repeatedly indicate a majority do. Nature provides a textbook case for the regular occurrence of homosexual behaviors in the animal kingdom. Tradition provides a textbook case for the tendency in human history to engage in destructive socially constructed relationships among human beings and then legitimize them with appeals to supernatural, natural and traditional authorities. (see slave trade) only to later admit their wrongfulness though some were able to recognize and willing to risk their own well being to declaim such practices long before that time.
Of course, all of these defense mechanisms ultimately evidence the very reality my definition of homophobia would assert: homophobia is evidenced by a rejection of reasoned argument in the consideration of this phenomenon. The former arguments above seek to avoid confrontation with the disconfirming evidence that reasoned discussion of homosexuality inevitably reveals. The latter arguments above attempt to justify prejudicial arguments by unquestioning deference to authority in response to or avoidance of disconfirming evidence. In neither approach is reasoned argument enjoined. But in either case, it is at the point that the arguer is confronted with the evidence of the untenable nature of their position, rejects the evidence and continues to hold to understandings in contravention of that reason that the description of their responses could be considered actively homophobic rather than mere passive bearers of culturally driven heterosexism.
While it is clearly understandable why holders of prejudice might construct elaborate defense systems for their prejudices, such suggests an ultimate – if not totally reflected upon - awareness of their wrongful nature, not the innocence of character and rightness of attitude the arguments would suggest. People who truly believe their attitudes are correct if not righteous do not need to construct elaborate defense systems. The rectitude of their arguments speak for themselves.
I find it odd that this is the subject I am addressing on this Black (or Holy) Saturday, the day after Good Friday (good for whom? certainly not Jesus) when one of history’s most famous executions is remembered. I almost asked my world religions students yesterday to do a three minute writing assignment on this question: Clearly Jesus is the most famous example of crucifixion though it was a common practice in the Roman Empire. Who gets crucified today? Why? Time did not permit but it would have been interesting to hear their answers.
If we are being honest with ourselves, we will have to admit that all misanthropic social prejudices crucify their targets to some degree. Perhaps this is an appropriate subject to ponder this day on which Jesus sleeps in his tomb while we, his grief-stricken followers, ask ourselves, “How could this have happened?”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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