Changing Lanes: An Execution to Be Televised Prompts a Papal Statement

Although Pope Francis amended Catholic social ethics to exclude the death penalty rather than continue to accept the punishment in cases in which no other punishment is practical or available, Pope Leo decided in October, 2026 to make a public statement of his Church’s opposition to the death penalty in reaction to the decision of the Trump administration to televise an upcoming execution live on television. That a woman had recently survived execution attempts by two lethal injections may have primed the pope’s pump, as it were. The danger is that the foray into applied ethics by leaders of a religious organization could conflate ethics and theology. That the latter transcends, and may even violate ethical principles, can easily be forgotten when a religious leader speaks out a lot on ethical issues. In the case of Pope Leo’s statement on capital punishment, a distinctly theological rationale can be found, and, I submit, should have received more emphasis, lest the religious leader be reduced to an ethical critic, or conscience. To be sure, in 2026, the world was very much in need of a public conscience, especially because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was still underway, as was Israel’s genocide in Gaza and wanton violence in the West Bank—all of this aggression was being done with obvious impunity.

Tennessee, a member of the U.S., attempted to execute Debra Johnson with two doses of pentobarbital on September 30, 2026. “At one point she was on a ventilator and her attorney did not expect her to survive. However, they said Pike woke up and began walking with assistance.”[1] This quoted passage from the media makes her recovery seem like a miracle. If it was, perhaps the distinctly Christian deity, which is selfless love (agape), saved Pike’s life out of opposition to the death penalty. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord comes from the Old Testament. In the New Testament, the deity is epitomized by compassion especially for one’s detractors and even enemies. Pray for those who persecute you, and respond to their human needs with acts of compassion. Neither prayer alone nor being compassion friends suffices. Forgiveness is implicit in being compassionate to someone like Pike, who in 1995 had beaten and stabbed one of her classmates. It is not as if she had gone a murder spree, mowing down many people with gunfire. If the botched execution could be considered to be cruel and unusual punishment, mercy in the form of a reprieve would be justified. After all, she had already spent 30 years in prison knowing that she would be executed—inflicting that expectation for three decades could also be considered as cruel.

On October 8, 2026, the U.S. announced “that the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at a military base at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, would be livestreamed on 3 December.”[2] Hasan was an army psychiatrist when he “open fire with a handgun at a medical facility at Fort Hood on 5 November 2009 as soldiers waited for medical checks before deployment. He was shot by a police officer during his arrest and left partly paralyzed, and now uses a wheelchair.”[3] It would be interesting to determine whether he was resisting arrest when he was shot. If he was not, then the police employee should have been arrested and charged with attempted murder. As for Hasan, the United Nations’ office of the high commissioner for human rights warned after the Pentagon’s announcement of the public execution that broadcasting it would “breach the absolute prohibition of torture.”[4] Hillary Clinton, a former U.S. Secretary of State, characterized the televising of the disabled man’s execution as a “barbaric idea.”[5] Unlike Pike, Hasan murdered many people. Also unlike Pike, Hasan himself was shot and partially paralyzed, perhaps unjustly. Even so, airing the execution for the world to see could be considered cruel and unusual punishment. This question is political and jurisprudential, as well as ethical in nature; it is not in itself a religious question unless explicit reference to Hasan’s redemption is added.

In writing Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard makes the point that Abraham is both guilty of attempted murder and is faithful to the divine command to sacrifice his son. The negative jurisprudential and ethical claim is consistent with the positive attribution of faithfulness to the Yahweh—both are correct because they refer to different domains. The charge of attempted murder is valid legally and ethically, and the praise of Abraham obeying a divine command even to sacrifice Isaac is valid theologically. The validity of the theological claim is not invalidated by the unethical act of attempted murder. Theology transcends ethics. Were the Ten Commandments in Torah prior to Abraham, then attempted murder would have theological currency and the question would be: Does the commandment not to kill supersede the divine command to Abraham to murder Isaac? Moreover, how are we to navigate between two conflicting divine commands?

Not being Abraham, and with the Ten Commandments in scripture, both Tennessee and the U.S. faced both the ethical quandary of capital punishment and the divine, theological, decree not to kill. In responding to the debate on whether the U.S. should televise Hasan’s execution, Pope Leo reiterated on October 10, 2026, the World Day Against the Death Penalty, that capital punishment is “inadmissible.”[6] The American Midwestern pope claimed that the punishment is contrary to the inherent dignity of a human being. Human dignity is an ethical rather than a theological term, and thus is not useful from a distinctly theological standpoint. In other words, were the pope driving a car on a road, it could be said that he swerved into another lane; even though the two lanes are related, they not the same lane. Unfortunately, the pope did not use the car’s turning signal to indicate to other drivers that he was going from one lane to another. This analogy falls short, however, because the pope did not entirely leave his lane.

Although the pope wandered from his theological education in claiming in his written statement, “Effective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens,” he stayed within his ken, and thus in the theological or religious domain, in adding that capital punishment deprives “those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption.”[7] This raises the question of whether a murderer on death row who has sought redemption could then, on religious grounds, be executed. The pope could have added that in the Ten Commandments, the commandment against killing other human beings prohibits capital punishment—that a murder carried out by a criminal does not justify yet another killing, even by a government. Two wrongs do not make a right is an ethical rather than a distinctly theological saying, and thus should not be used in a religious rationale against capital punishment. Rather than appealing to the dignity of a human being, the pope should have stuck with the theme of redemption and added the commandment against killing human beings. Rather than venture into the field of criminal justice as if he had been educated in that field of knowledge, he should have elaborated on redemption itself. It is admittedly very tempting to go beyond one’s ken to pontificate in other domains of knowledge and human experience. I will not hold this against the Pope, as he too is a native Midwesterner from northern Illinois (even though he serially sins by favoring the White Sox over the Chicago Cubs—or is his lapse merely unethical?).

In conclusion, unless an unethical act (or intent) is proscribed by a divine command or decree, or interferes with soteriology or another distinctly theological value, ethical analysis should be left to ethicists. Put another way, studying theology does not also earn a student the right to a diploma in ethics, which is a subfield of philosophy. To be sure, the two fields can be related, but this is not to say that knowledge in one constitutes knowledge in the other. Unlike theology, criminal justice and the ethics of conduct do not contain the element of religious transcendence, which, as Pseudo-Dionysius wrote, inherently extends beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (emotions). Contrarily, to say that science still has unknowns is not to say that the empirical unknown lies inherently beyond our reach. Religious functionaries and leaders, to the extent that they are oriented existentially to the inherently beyond, and thus to interpreting other human domains of experience  in terms of the theological, radiate holiness by driving without swerving into other lanes in order to have more influence.

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1, “Christa Pike Is Discharged from a Hospital after Surviving Execution Attempt, Her Attorney Says,” APNews.com, October 10, 2026.
2, David Smith and Ariana Baio, “’Medieval’ and ‘Disturbing’: US Plan to Livestream Execution Elicits Global Condemnation,” The Guardian,  October 2026.
3. Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5, Ibid.
6, Fortunato Pinto, “Pope Leo Condemns Death Penalty, Vance Vows Not to Watch Hasan’s Execution Live,” Euronews.com, 10 October, 2026.
7. Ibid.

On Religion and Public Policy: Pope Leo on Dumping

The Terra dei Fuochi, or “land of fires,” is a region in southern Italy where “decades of illegal dumping, burying and burning of waste” had been devastating by the time Pope Leo paid Acerra a visit in May, 2026.[1] Lest visual images of hell’s fires reminiscent of Jonathan Edwards’ sermons come to mind, the devastation was squarely in the this-worldly domain of public policy. The pope’s speech can thus be viewed as an over-reach from the standpoint of his native fauna—the sui generis domain of religion, whose referent transcends not only the limits of cognition, perception, and sensibility (emotion), but also Creation itself![2]

Departing from religion as transcendent experience, the pope “called for a rethink of current economic and social models, urging those present to try to rediscover values centered on solidarity and respect for the land.”[3] As I, like that pope, was born and raised in the Midwest (both of us in northern Illinois, in neighboring regions), I can perhaps be too direct, even blunt, in stating that all of the theological education in the world does not include expertise in socio-economic models. Accordingly, liberation theology is open to criticism for dogmatically reducing the kingdom of God to one economic model. Similarly, Arthur Rich’s attempt to apply seven criteria of justice based on Karl Barth’s theology of creation—even though Christology is much more salient in Barth’s writings—to economic systems warrants a suspicious eye, especially as he, a German, concluded that the social-market economy of Germany to be the most just. Bad air! Yet another of Nietzsche’s expressions also comes to mind: human, all too human. For a theologian or cleric to jaunt over to political economy as if one were an expert in that field of knowledge can indeed be said to be human, all too human. 

Even basing a call for respect for the land on a Creation theology (i.e., God created the land) may be a stretch. To the extent that God orders by separating as the Creator, we too, who are in the image of God, separate uses of land. Just as it is not possible, even in the best of all possible worlds, for everyone to be above average, so consuming organic beings such as humans must lay waste, though of course there is a limit to everything and responsibility can reasonably be inferred. The Biblical Book of Genesis can be interpreted as including Yahweh ordering rather than merely as creating ex nihilo. To be sure, “God created the heavens and the earth,” but the emphasis in chapter 1 extends to separating, and thus on distinguishing. Even creating the heavens and the earth implies that the two are distinguished. Furthermore, in Genesis we read, “God separated the light from the darkness,” created a sky that separated “the waters from the waters,” and “let dry land appear” such that the seas were separated. Accordingly, we can separate lands from lands as per different uses. Furthermore, theological concept of Logos, which refers to God’s rational activity in creating, is more applicable to distinguishing than to making something out of nothing (other than the initial decision to make at all, rather than continue to be self-complacent). Accordingly, we can apply reason to stewardship of the land. Even though stewardship of the land follows from even such an expansive interpretation of Creation as including ordering, the specificity of the pope can be viewed as dogmatic, even ideological, and thus better categorized under public policy. For example, the pope applauded “broad awareness of the seriousness of the criminal activity and the indifference that has left room for these crimes.”[4] He was undoubtedly referring to illegal dumping of chemical waste. I submit that a broad theological argument against such waste as criminal is a stretch.

Similarly, even though the social principle of solidarity, which is a political principle that is widely valued in the E.U. (but not in the U.S.!), can be related to Paul’s writings on Christians being of one spiritual body in Christ Jesus, the tight link between solidarity and social policy, such as affordable housing for the poor, puts the word solidarity firmly in the domain of politics rather than religion. Jesus’ conception of neighbor-love, or benevolentia universalis, in interpersonal in nature, rather than communal, as in the solidarity of a people. Likewise, the Gospels’ espousal of “love thy neighbor” would lose its flavor if put in terms of the political concept of the common good. “Let us learn, then,” the pope said on his visit, “to be rich in a different way: more attentive to relationships, more intent on fostering the common good, more attached to the local area, more grateful in welcoming and integrating those who come to live among us.”[5] In reference to land, the common good harkens back to land that towns separated off from private property for public use. Your horse could feed on the grass there, but not in your neighbor’s front yard! This is a civic rather than a theological distinction.

To be sure, the pope was on firmer ground in referring to interpersonal relationships and even on marginalizing certain people, for “neighbor-love” exists between persons, and Jesus in the Gospels advocates compassion to the marginalized, even a prostitute (which is not Mary Magdalene). So the pope spoke closer to home (i.e., the religious domain) in a specifically Christian motif in observing that the “name ‘Terra dei Fuochi’ refers to the fires lit on the edges of cities, sometimes by small, rejected and marginalized minorities of brothers and sisters whom few know or value.”[6] Compassionately reaching out to the human needs of another person, especially when doing so is inconvenient because of dislike or even hatred, is the very substance of the kingdom of God, according to the American theologian, Samuel Hopkins, who was Jonathan Edwards’ protégé. So Jesus of the Gospels would be proud of the pope for saying, “Marginalization always breeds insecurity: the steep path s to combat marginalization, not the marginalized, to break the entire chain, not to strike only its last link.”[7] But the Christian way of breaking the entire chain is not through public policy, but, rather, one person at a time, through compassionate reaching out to value even as others are repudiating and distancing. Put another way, the Way into the kingdom of Heaven within is not through public policy or even urging solidarity for the common good. To be sure, it is easy to get sidetracked.

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1. Fortunato Pinto, “Pope Leo XIV Visits Southern Italy’s ‘Land of Fires’,” Euronews.com, 23 May, 2026.
2. I am borrowing here from Pseudo-Dionysius, a sixth-century Christian theologian, who wrote on what I would call God’s radical transcendence. Relatedly, God has been thought of as being wholly other. In both of these characterizations, it follows that the domain of religion is not only distinct from every other domain, but also unique.
3. Pinto, “Pope Leo XIV Visits Southern Italy’s ‘Land of Fires’.”
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.

Church Scandals in a Secularizing World

A religious institution can least afford scandal involving highly unethical and illegal activity when the world is secularizing; the headwind alone requires a lot of energy just to stay in place, let alone move forward. The trail of child-rape scandals and cover-ups had by 2018 made a dent in the number of Roman Catholics in Latin America, yet other factors also accounted for the declines in church membership, and thus obfuscated estimates of the fallout in particular.  I contend that the gravity of the sexual abuse and related cover-ups by clergy warrants more than just being reckoned as one of several factors, even though the actual exodus was muted relative to the severity of the crimes.

“The number of Chileans who described themselves as Catholic dropped from 74 percent in 1995 to 45 percent [in2017], according to a poll by Latinobarómetro. The decline of Catholicism in Argentina, from 87 percent in 1995 to 65 percent [in2017] has also been significant.”[1] These are significant drops, and they exist in other countries in the region too. What factors lie behind this downward trend?  The New York Times pointed at the time to increasing secularity in “prosperous nations, including Chile and Uruguay. . . . In countries in the region troubled by violence, stark inequality and entrenched poverty like Brazil, evangelical denominations have cut deeply into the historical base of the Catholic Church.”[2] Fallout from sexual-abuse scandals by priests and covering bishops was also doubtless in the mix. Such abuse by religious men in a religious organization is unlike these other factors, for neither secularity nor economic inequality is so closely associated with, and thus pertaining to, the Roman Catholic Church. The downward effect of the personal failures and indeed hypocrisy of religious functionaries, especially in a denomination in which liturgy is so important in the process of sanctification, should arguably have been more pronounced that it actually was.

To be sure, during his visit early in 2018, Pope Francis “angered Chilean Catholics by defending a bishop who critics [said] protected a pedophile priest.”[3] Victims of Fernando Karadima, “Chile’s most notorious priest,” accused Bishop Juan Madrid of complicity in the crimes. The pope stated that “there is not one single piece of evidence. It is all slander. Is that clear?”[4] Ouch! Juan Cruz, one of the victims, had written, “As  if I could have taken a selfie or picture  while Karadima abused me orothers and Juan Barros stood there watching it all [before being elevated as a bishop by Pope Francis}.” Dismissing such an account was a good way for the pope to throw gas on a fire. “The pope’s comments set off a storm in Chile, raising questions about his commitment to repairing the damage from sexual abuse scandals and improving the decline in the church’s image and adherents” in Chile.[5] From the  standpoint of Jesus’s message, hypocrisy by the vicor of Christ is not a good thing. It is telling that a spokesperson of the Chilean government was closer to Jesus’s  message in stating, “Respecting,  believing  and supporting victims of sexual abuse is  an ethical imperative. No  institutional defense can override this basic principle for a fair society, one that is empathetic with those who most need it.”[6]  Empathy with the most vulnerable is one of the pillars of Jesus’s depicted life and teachings, whereas denial in defense of  the powerful sounds more Roman than Christian.

So I ask: why, even at the time of the pope’s visit to Chile and Peru, hadn’t more Catholics walked away from the Church? Why not a major exodus worldwide after the press reports of the reason for the pope’s chilly reception in Chile?  Imperfect information is doubtless part of the explanation. The short lifespan of moral outrage even at hypocrisy combined with the sheer force of routine in the human psyche is another. Even so, I submit that the importance of taking part in the Church’s sacraments—believed by the faithful to be important to salvation—kept even disgusted Catholics in the pews.  

Most important to a Catholic’s process of sanctification—the gradual transformation into being Christlike and thus fit for full reconciliation with God—is taking Communion at the Mass, which is presided over by clergy. They are a necessary part of a layperson’s return to God, according to Catholic belief. Historically, the Church decided the Donatist controversy by declaring that the moral lapses of a priest does not invalidate his concentration of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. Moral and presumably even criminal faults may give rise to hypocrisy, but saying the liturgy is nonetheless sufficient in the consecration. Think of the liturgy of the Eucharist as a recipe of sorts; if said correctly, the consecration is, hocus pocus, accomplished. Whether the presiding priest was rude to someone before Mass is of no consequence. In a secularizing world, such a rationale is difficult to accept, yet Catholics socialized into the importance of attending Mass for their very salvation have a very different framework of belief. Even though that belief may be sorely tested when clergy misconduct arises, the way to salvation is held to be more important to the individual believer. In this perspective, the pursuit of salvation may appear selfish relative to taking a stand against a rapist priest or corrupt bishop by no longer going to Mass in empathy with the victims. By which of these two alternative courses does a believer become more Christlike—literally taking in the deity via Communion, or following Jesus’s example and teachings on how to live so as to enter the kingdom of God? A tough theological problem to be sure!

The sex scandals have been just one of several factors that together have doubtlessly been perceived by the Vatican as just another headwind that the long-lived institution will doubtless survive as it has survived other set-backs and challenges. Relativizing a current scandal by assuming a two-thousand-year perspective wrongly presumes an infallible coat of armour built up by centuries of existence. That the Catholic Church—any religious institution in fact—has responded so imperfectly (or not at all) is a testament to the human nature involved. Yet this is no excuse. The instinct for greater accountability within the Church is of course valid, for the ongoing need of a clergy so consecration can continue to be done does not justify retaining child-rapists and corrupt bishops who cover up the heinous crimes. For example, the Vatican could remove the rotted clerics and seek replacements. Lest it be objected that bending on the issue of clerical marriage would be inconvenient, the close tie between the Church and the crimes and cover-ups suggests that an inconvenient course-change is called for—that suffering costs due to external actors rather than one’s own volition is insufficient as payment by the institution. Such internal accountability is difficult, given the conflict of interest in an organization being tasked with voluntarily taking a hit (rather than merely taking a hit due to the actions of external actors, such as laity giving less financially). The laity and even the societies within which the Roman Catholic Church exists need not accept such institutional self-serving inertia.  Taking the road less convenient is something clerics ostensibly for agape (i.e., self-emptying) love should not have to be pressured into taking. Perhaps more Christians are needed in the Vatican, and fewer comfortable hypocrites in sheep’s clothing.

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1. Daniel Politi, “As Pope Heads to Chile and Peru, Argentines Feel Snubbed Again,” The New York Times, January 14, 2018.

2. Ibid.

3. Marcelo Rochabrún and Pascale Bonnefoy, “Pope Leaves a Furor in Chile, and Later Defends the Indigenous in Peru,” The New York Times, January 20, 2018.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

On how Church leaders might lead, see Spiritual Leadership and Christianized Ethical Leadership. On the secularization of the Church historically in terms of how wealth has been viewed in relation to greed, see God’s Gold.

Christian Leadership Navigating Geopolitics: Pope Francis in Myanmar amid Ethnic Cleansing

With the U.N. having “denounced the murder, rape and pillaging of the Rohingya in western Myanmar as ethnic cleansing,” Pope Francis had to “strike a careful balance” during his visit to the country in late 2017 “by maintaining his moral authority without endangering his tiny local flock.[1] Even the decision to meet first with Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the commander of the military that had “driven more than 620,000 Rohingya Muslims out of the country” could be taken as a compromise of the Pope’s moral authority because Francis would met with the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and de facto leader of the government, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the next day.[2] That the local Cardinal had urged the Pope not to even use the word Rohingya during the visit pointed in the direction away from the Pope acting as a moral compass and thus to a hit to his reputation as a leader of principle rather than expediency.

Considering the salience of agape, or self-emptying love, in Christianity, the spiritual virtue should be in the Pope’s leadership even in the context of national and global politics, especially if on behalf of a persecuted group. Was not Christ himself persecuted? Furthermore, a history of Christian martyrs suggests that compromising for the sake of one’s self or organization enjoys little legitimacy. To gain the whole world and yet to compromise or lose an opportunity for spiritual leadership in a secular, sordid context—evading talking truth to power—has an anti-Christian resonance that can deplete a Christian leader’s reputational capital.   

The institutional self-protection that an organization tends to engage in can rationalize all sorts of antithetical conduct, including protecting clerics who rape children. Are not such children worthy of protection even if the institution itself bears the brunt? What then of a persecuted religious and ethnic minority? If Christ evinced love where it is not convenient, then Christian leaders should be protecting other religions even more than Christianity itself. Paradoxically, only in such a way can Christianity really thrive, for being true to itself—being authentic rather than self-serving—is true strength, whereas expediency evinces weakness.  

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[1] Jason Horowitz, “Pope Francis Arrives in a Myanmar Tarnished by Rohingya Crackdown,” The New York Times, November 27, 2017.

[2] Ibid.

The Regensburg Domspatzen: Systemic Abuse of Kids in an Established Religious Institution

The utility from beautiful music for many does not justify the physical and sexual abuse of a relative few. Even though utilitarianism goes by the motto, the greatest pleasure (and least pain) for the greatest number, the severity of the pain to a few can, I submit, outweigh a more widespread, yet relatively superficial, pleasure for others. Surely the intensity of pleasure and pain must enter into the ethical calculus. I have in mind here the Regensburg Domspatzen, a Roman Catholic boys choir, in the E.U. state of Germany. This case points to the default power of established institutions and a religious psychology.

On July 18, 2017, Ulrich Weber, an outside lawyer announced the findings of his investigation. He found 547 cases of plausible physical abuse, 67 of which involved sexual abuse.[1] The abuse took place while Georg Ratzinger was the choir’s music director—from 1964 to 1994. His brother would be the Pope from 2005 to 2013. The presumption in terms of accountability was that the Church would police itself according to its Canon Law. However, in this case the personal conflict of interest should have sent the case to the local police, yet this was not the case. Instead, that pope threatened priests with excommunication should they contact the public authorities. Cut off from heaven for aiding accountability concerning people who had abused children! The power to excommunicate itself can thus be viewed as culpable. Moreover, the presumptuousness, including the accompanying blind-spots, that religious authority can engender and perpetuate is worthy of note.

One rather obvious take-away from this case is that the investigation of illegal act should be left to local police rather than religious organizations. Put another way, canon law does not trump criminal law. A second, less obvious, point regards the ethics of the sheer inertia of established societal institutions such as large, very old, religious organizations. Like a speeding ball in the void of outer space, such an institution can go through time seamlessly without virtually any resistance to slow it down, regardless of how unethical or even illegal the internal acts and cover-ups may be. This disconnect for clergy and members alike, wherein they continue as they had as if nothing had changed, can be reckoned as a sort of cognitive pathology in itself akin to or abetted by denial. Members as a whole continue to contribute money, and virtually no one resigns from the organization as an ethical protest or personal stand of sorts. In terms of organization theory, a disconnect between an organization and the wider society can be expected to impair the organization in at least some respects, not limited to diminished reputational capital. In terms of organizational life-cycles, such a period should be one of significant contraction, rather than steady-state. I submit that in the case of the Roman Catholic Church, the combination of being such an established (i.e., entrenched) institution and the psychology of religious denial block the natural “ebb and flow” that both in theory and practice pertains to organizations generally.

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[1] Melissa Eddy, “’Culture of Silence’ Abetted Abuse of at Least 547 German Choir Boys, Inquiry Finds,” The New York Times, July 18, 2017.

On the Impact of the Mind’s Infallible Assumptions in Declarations of Religious Belief

In religious affairs, we don’t typically notice the sheer declarativeness in the assertions of belief. In passing, we don’t isolate the underpinning assumptions. We are all human beings relative to the divine, and yet distinctions within our ranks are asserted or declared to be so, even if implicitly. All too often, the human mind overreaches with impunity. Rarely are the leaps themselves the subject of attention and thus subject to critique. Much more commonly, the substance of the religious belief is noticed and debated. I submit that the assumptions typically involved in making religious statements—even the very nature of the declarative assertion—are more worthy of note on account of the human mind’s vulnerabilities that are rarely noticed, much less subject to rebuke.

Visiting a Hari Krishna temple, I found myself speechless when the preacher reminded me after his talk that my religious beliefs could be wrong, whereas his own could not be. Fully aware beforehand that my beliefs about anything can be wrong, I was more struck by the man’s assumption regarding his own beliefs—that they have the status of knowledge. This man’s mind vanquished the gap between belief and knowledge on account of another assumption: that his religious view is (based on) truth. The direct, unfiltered access to truth is the underlying assumption that relegates the point that the divine source is beyond the limits of human perception and cognition, and thus cannot be known. It is the nature of the religious mind’s assumptions and the supportive cognitive and emotional defense mechanisms that can be said to be in need of transparency.

Regarding the defense mechanisms, the man’s lack of awareness concerning his own behavior and the nature of his assumptions was striking. The insult at my expense—in that only my beliefs could be wrong—seemed to elude the religious man, such that his veneer of kindness, present nonetheless, had a rather strange quality. He also seemed unaware that his ad hominem attacks were insulting, not to mention unbecoming of a cleric. Regarding his cognitive assumptions, such as that he has direct access to truth whose source is transcendent, he lacked the basic awareness of self-contradiction. In particular, it is a self-contradiction to assert that human knowledge is beyond the limits of human cognition.

The lack of basic self-awareness in religious matters can easily enable hypocrisy. The Christian Crusades provide a good illustration of how a lack of awareness can take on a life of its own, occasioning grave sin under the rubric of salvation. The four Roman Catholic popes in the Crusades lured Christian men in Western Europe to fight the enemy by promising salvation. “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”[1] That Jesus of the Gospels preaches love of enemies, even those who persecute Christians, was somehow lost on those pontiffs who were promising salvation for doing the opposite. If the popes regarded the Muslims as having stolen the Holy Land, the Christian response would arguably have been to give them additional properties, for “if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.”[2] Fighting the enemy to take back the shirt is clearly anti-Christian, and yet four popes promised salvation to those Christian men willing to do the task. It is the pontiffs’ lack of awareness, cognitively speaking, of this rather basic hypocrisy that suggests that the human mind is actually rather vulnerable to cognitive lapses in the religious domain.

Given the severity of the lapses, presuming unfettered access to transcendent truth can be seen as yet another indication of the mind’s vulnerability. To use a loose analogy, consider the man who can barely see a nearby tree and yet insists not only that he can see the farmhouse in the distance but cannot be wrong about the color of the exterior paint! The rather basic fault in this man’s claim is somehow invisible in the religious domain, and yet is not salvation more important?

I submit that the human mind has great trouble grasping and holding onto the inherent mysteriousness in the religious transcendent—the divine object (e.g., a deity). Without being aware of itself in so doing, the mind leaps over the mystery in assuming inerrancy concerning that which goes beyond the limits of cognition and perception. It is much easier to be wrong about such an object than the color of a distant farmhouse, and yet the human mind tends to assume the opposite is the case. Strangely, no one calls out the mind, least of all the mind itself.

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1. Matt 5:44. NIV.

2. Matt. 5:40. NIV.

Life in Prison For Killing a Cow: Law and Religion in Gujarat

At the end of March, 2017, the state of Gujarat in India extended the punishment for slaughtering cows from seven years in prison to life-imprisonment. The penalty for transporting beef was also raised to a maximum of 10 years, from three. The severity hinges on religious assumptions presumed to be beyond questioning or reproof.

Vijay Rupani, the chief minister of Gujarat, provided an explanation. “To Indians, the cow symbolizes all other creatures. The cow is a symbol of the earth, the nourisher, the ever-giving, undemanding provider.”[1] So the cow stands for not only all animals that live on Earth, but also the planet itself. To kill such a symbol is tantamount, I suppose, to killing that which nourishes us. Of course, were every cow alive killed, the other creatures of the world would go on, as would our planet, so the emphasis here is on a symbol. Interestingly, the viability of the symbol is thought to save “the whole world from both moral and spiritual degradation,” Rupani added.[2] From a rational standpoint, the claim that people would lead immoral lives in India were cows not protected suffers a lack of causation. Empirically speaking, whether people are ethical, such as at Enron, Authur Andersen, Wells Fargo, and Uber, bears little or no relation to whether one food-source is used or protected.

A person who slaughters a cow for food could spend the rest of his or her life in prison. Prime facie, the punishment can readily seem so excessive that a disrespect for human life may be implied. Even adding in the matter of a living symbol does not alter this point. In fact, the implication is that a symbol is more important than the quality of a human life. For a symbol to take on a life of its own at the expense of actual human beings suggests that the very notion of a symbol has been misunderstood. The mistaken assumption of causality between the protection of cows and the lack of moral and spiritual degradation can be taken as an indication that the very notion of symbol has been warped.

If I am correct in my assertion that the religious and moral assumptions are tenuous (i.e., too extreme), then this case illustrates the danger of superimposing law on top of religious belief. The danger springs from the vulnerability of the latter to a false sense of infallibility. Even the perception of excess can be blocked, and the excessiveness in the law is similarly not caught. Put more generally, the human mind is vulnerable when it comes to religious assumptions, and this fault-line can run through public policy resulting in much harm. It is precisely the allowance for radically disproportioned harm to other human beings that should be the red flag indicating that something has gone very wrong. That this criterion is not the criterion is, I submit, the fault of us all.

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1. Nida Najar and Suhasini Raj, “Indian State Expands Penalty for Killing a Cow to Life in Prison,” The New York Times, March 31 2017.

2. Ibid.

Big Money in a Big Church: Thieves Hit Osteen’s Megachurch

Joel Osteen’s “megachurch,” also known as Lakewood Church, adheres to the Prosperity Gospel, which maintains that God rewards true believers with material wealth in addition to heavenly salvation. Implications from this theological perspective put the congregation and the leadership in a sticky position following the theft of $600,000 from the church. In the following essay, I intend to apply Christian principles to Christianity. How well Christianity makes out may give us some indication of the religion’s future, for a house divided cannot stand—at least for long after the inertia has run out.

The Prosperity Gospel is grounded in the Jewish Scriptures, wherein God repeatedly promises wealth to those of the chosen people who keep faith rather than lapse in maintaining the covenant. Yahweh being the “Possessor of heaven and earth,” the world is God’s property.[1] Human possessions are therefore gifts from God. Proverb 10 promises, “The blessing of the LORD brings wealth, without painful toil for it.”[2] Rather than becoming the absolute owner of the gifted property, the Hebrew is meant to act as God’s steward.[3] That is, God retains the basic or foundational ownership right in His property. Moreover, the property relations embody a relation between Israel and God in which the Israelites owe obedience and service as stewards in exchange for a right to Jehovah’s blessings, which include riches.[4] 

Although the notion of stewardship took root in historical Christian thought, the Prosperity Gospel sprung up in the late twentieth century in the theological approach that privileges the Biblical criterion of “literal meaning” as first advocated in Moody’s 1904 Fundamentals of the Christian Faith. One of the fundamentals is a belief in Jesus Christ. The Prosperity Gospel makes this belief the basis of God’s material rewards. Because the Christian with true belief is “saved” whereas a Jew (as well as Israel collectively) can break the covenant, the conditionality of the wealth once bestowed to those having true belief is muted if not applicable. If my interpretation is correct, then the conditionality in the Prosperity Gospel applies only until the person is “saved”; thereafter, the promise of wealth is unhinged at least in part from the notion of responsibility applied to use.

Joel Osteen's megachurch during a weekend service. A substantial amount of money is doubtless collected even just from one such service. 

This rationale may explain Osteen’s reaction on March 10, 2014 to the theft of $600,000 on the previous day from that weekend’s collections. According to a statement, church administrators were “heartbroken to learn . . . that funds were stolen” and relieved that the funds had been fully insured and thus would be replaced.[5] Tellingly, the administrators added that they were working nonetheless to get back the stolen funds. This orientation involves more than a quite understandable desire for justice—albeit public legal justice rather than the sort of justice that Augustine “Christianized” from Plato and Leibniz, the co-inventor of calculus, developed: love as universal benevolence. Whereas the dominant justice in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is in line with Shylock’s banking scales being restored to balance (e.g., an eye for an eye, or a pound of flesh for late repayment of a loan), justice that has love as charity due to everyone (i.e., neighbor-love as justly owed) is in line with Jesus’s new commandment to love one another unconditionally.[vi]

I submit that taking up the Prosperity Gospel points a Christian to the Old Testament notion of justice as well; the promise being extended to earthly wealth implies that those people who are motivated to quality would also be oriented to getting the wealth back rather than losing even more. Such people would tend to concur with the predilection of the administrators at Lakewood Church to get the funds back even though insurance covers the loss.

Every human perspective is limited, given how we are “hard wired.” So a focus on getting stolen money back and seeing that the culprits pay both literally and in suffering the pain of punishment comes not without an opportunity cost (i.e., the benefits of alternative perspectives that are given up for lack of sight in their directions). In the case of the Prosperity Gospel and the related inclination to view justice as its public legal variety, Christians can slight or even violate Jesus’s dicta in Luke 6:28-30 (NIV) without being aware of the hypocrisy.  Let’s unpack the verse as per the Lakewood case.

The preceding verse has Jesus saying, “bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” As a theft mistreats the owner(s) of the stolen goods—at the very least in not respecting the property rights—Jesus can be read here as proclaiming even the thieves of church funds as blessed. From such a basis the justice of loving the culprits (i.e., they being owed love nonetheless) can readily be grasped. Indeed, Jesus sees to it that the love is operational as benevolence even to one’s enemies (including those who steal from one’s property). First, Jesus gives the general principle: “whoever hits you on the cheek, offer him the other also.” Anyone who has had their residence broken into would doubtless agree that discovering the theft can feel like a slap on the face. Once while studying at Yale, I returned from martial-arts (self-defense) training at the gym to find my apartment ransacked. I felt like someone had slapped me on my face. To be sure, the irony of returning from a self-defense class mitigated the sting somewhat.

As though tailor-made for Lakewood’s administrators and ministers, Jesus makes his imperative concrete. Whoever “takes away your coat, do not withhold your shirt from him either.” If stealing qualifies as taking away, then the officials at Lakewood Church should have put out a statement offering still more money to the thieves. Lest by some convoluted logic an administrator agree to extend the church’s charity program to the thieves even as he or she tries to get the stolen funds back, Jesus provides no such relieve. “Give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes away what is yours, do not demand it back.” While the church officials’ announced intent to get the funds back is strategically in line with keeping insurance premiums down (car owners are doubtless very familiar with this game), it flies in the face of Jesus’s demand not to demand back that which someone has taken away.

Moreover, while the intent is in line with public legal justice, Jesus’s notion of justice as “Give to everyone who asks of you,” or universal benevolence, is quite other. In the seventeenth century, Leibniz labeled the latter theory of justice as caritas naturalis seu benevolentia universalis. Natural love is sublimated from garden-variety lust (eros) to Plato’s love of the eternal moral verities “Christianized” by Augustine as God as the Highest Good, and yet unlike Plato’s intellectual love the human love directed heavenly is expressed as love of one’s neighbor (anyone). Achieving this sort of justice is one of the primary costs of adopting the Prosperity Gospel and (relatedly) Shylock’s notion of public legal justice as akin to demanding a pound of flesh.

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1. Charles R. Smith, The Bible Doctrine of Wealth and Work. London (1924): Epworth Press, p. 23; Genesis 14:19,22.

2. Prov. 10:22.

3. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, p. 25.

4. Ibid., pp. 26, 55.

5. KHOU.com, “Osteen’s Lakewood Church Suffers Theft of Over $600,000 Shocking Texas Megachurch,” The Huffington Post, March 11, 2014.

6. John 13:34.