Same
Sex Vows, Theological Crisis
In today’s Belief Blog at the CNN website, a professor of
law in Minnesota makes an argument for gay marriage from the perspective of his
religious faith. Mark
Osler argues that
What
I see in the Bible’s accounts of Jesus and his followers is an insistence that
we don’t have the moral authority to deny others the blessing of holy
institutions like baptism, communion, and marriage. God, through the Holy
Spirit, infuses those moments with life, and it is not ours to either give or
deny to others.
Not surprisingly, his column has given rise to a wide
range of comments, the majority of which offer some version of the rather
simplistic question raised by a writer identified as Buck Mast:
Is the Bible the Word of God or not??
Theological
Crisis
Notre Dame scholar of religion Mark Noll recently
published an informative book about American religion and its response to the
question of slavery prior to and during the Civil War. In The
Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Noll found that evangelical
Protestant preachers and theologians who favored slavery – on both sides of the
Mason-Dixon Line - tended to cite specific excerpts of the Christian Bible,
often taken out of any kind of context as evangelical are prone to do, to argue
that not only did G-d permit slavery but even commanded it. Ending slavery required
disobedience to G-d, they said. And they argued that to ignore one piece of
scripture was tantamount to tossing out the entire faith – where did the
selective process end?
Conversely, abolitionist theologians and preachers often
resorted to a big picture approach to scripture which saw theological and
ethical development as one moved through the Bible ending in the life and
example of Jesus as paradigmatic for Christians. Abolitionists argued that slavery
was simply incompatible with the Golden Rule and the Second Great Commandment,
Jewish teachings placed on the lips of Jesus in the Gospels. As Noll somberly
notes, in the end it is the Union Army and not the superior theological
argument which resolved the question of slavery.
It’s interesting to note how these same patterns play out
in the current arguments about same sex marriage. It is certainly possible to cite
isolated passages of scripture, taken completely out of context, to argue that
somehow G-d opposes same sex marriage. As Shakespeare observed in the Merchant
of Venice, even “[t]he devil can cite scripture for his purpose.” Of course,
such approaches by definition presume that G-d shares one’s own foregone
conclusions, a presumption skewered by religious writer Annie Lamott’s
observation ““You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
Ironically, it is precisely the selective use of
scripture evangelicals decry that has resulted in their own “one man, one woman”
mantra since the vast majority of Biblical history with its patriarchal polygamy
hardly reflects that understanding. As Jessie Jackson is prone to say, “A text
without a context is a pretext.”
A
Bigger Picture
But it is also quite possible to look at the bigger
picture of the faith tradition, to note as President Obama recently argued that
discrimination against same sex couples seeking to marry is simply irreconcilable
with the Golden Rule. One simply cannot love their neighbor as themselves and
actively discriminate against them, particularly in this most intimate area of
human existence. Indeed, it is salient to note that without an evolution of
understanding of the faith tradition and the use of its scripture, including
its failure to resolve the crisis of slavery prior to the Civil War, the
pronouncer of that opinion would not be sitting in the Oval Office of the White
House today but rather working without pay on its janitorial staff.
American default to pragamatism – and thus to the status
quo with its innate conservatism - has historically produced a wide array of myopic
understandings that have not well served America. No doubt, big picture
arguments fly right by the opponents of same sex marriage immediately focused
on a given excerpt of scripture legitimating their foregone conclusions that they
are willing to see as somehow binding and final. Yet, the Golden Rule reflects
the principle of reciprocity that underlies most ethical systems in the world,
most notably Kant’s categorical imperative in the West. And as Lawrence
Kohlberg has noted in his work on stages of moral reasoning, when the principled
post-conventional reason of Stage 5 with its focus on justice confronts the
tribal conventional reason of Stage 3 with its focus on the approval of significant
others, the post-conventional arguments are largely unable to be heard by the holder
of the lower level conventional moral reasoning.
But, the inability – often mixed with the unwillingness –
to see a bigger picture rarely means it doesn’t exist and can’t be seen, it
simply means it hasn’t been seen yet. Big picture moral reasoning has a way of
winning out over the course of history, as Noll’s work so well documents,
albeit often in the wake of a bloody trail of epic struggle.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
