Christianity by State: The Religious Dimension of Federalism

According to the  2010 U.S. Religious Census of Religious Congregations & Memberships Study by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, less than 50 percent of the people living in the United States identified themselves as Christian adherents in 2010. There were more than 150.6 million out of 310 million. Even so, candidates for the U.S. presidency still felt the need to vocalize the fact that they are Christian (while the opponent doesn't quite measure up in that respect). President Obama made a point during his first two years in office to stress his Christianity as if it were the membership card to the Oval Office. It would seem that the litmus test was already antiquated and thus needlessly constrictive on potential candidates.

The full essay is at "Christianity by State."

God's Gold through the Centuries

In the wake of the financial crisis that came to a head in September of 2008, people might have been wondering if sufficient moral constraints on the greed on Wall Street are available, even possible. The ability of traders to create complex derivative securities that are difficult for regulators to regulate, much less understand, may have people looking for ethical or even religious constraints. It would be only natural to ask if such “soft” restraint mechanisms really do have the puissance to do the trick.

Here’s the rub: the tricksters are typically the last to avail themselves of ethical or religious systems, and they the wrongdoers are the ones in need of the restraint. Blankfein said of his bank, Goldman Sachs, that it had been doing God’s work. About a week after saying that, he had to walk his statement back and admit that the bankers had does some things that were morally wrong. Although divine omnipotence is by definition not limited by human ethical systems, it is hard to imagine a divine decree telling bankers to tell their clients one thing (buy subprime mortgage derivatives) while taking the opposite position on the bank’s proprietary position (shorting the derivatives, beyond being a counterparty to clients). Divine duplicity seems to represent an oxymoron on a megascale rather than a justification for greed.
As the crisis erupted and was subsequently managed by public officials in government and new managers brought in to salvage AIG, I was researching the history of Christian thought on profit-seeking and wealth. I have since published an academic text and a nonfiction book, which develops further on the treatise on the topic. As the book is too recondite for sane people (i.e., outside of academia), I am writing a non-fiction book on the topic for a broader readership.
To whet the appetites of those of you who are waiting for something more readable that a recondite thesis, I present a brief account of my original research on the topic here. Most significantly, I found evidence of a gradual shift in the thought between Aquinas and the fifteenth-century Christian Humanists (mainly in what is now Italy). Whereas early Christian thought had tended to stress the negative attitude toward riches—the camel being in extreme pain in getting through the eye of the needle—in the Renaissance Christian theologians tended to argue that being wealth is necessary for a Christian to exercise the godly practical virtues of liberality and magnificence (particularly the latter, which alone permits gifts reflective of God’s majesty).
Something had happened in the dominant Christian attitude on wealth that made the religion less of a buttress against greed because it had become possible for a Christian to be both rich and to go to heaven. Cosimo de Medici is a perfect example of a banker who was assured by the pope that a career based on usury would not necessarily bar a banker from entering heaven (assuming he gave financially to the Church).
The various Reformers can be read as efforts to pull Christianity back from being so close to incorporating love of gain, or greed. I looked at the (Standard Oil) monopolist and devout Baptist, John D. Rockefeller, to get a sense of how efficacious the Reformation was in attempting to arrest and reverse the momentum of the pro-wealth Christian paradigm.
Having sketched the shift and subsequent reactions of the Reformers, I turned my attention to trying to explain both the shift itself and the efficacy of the Reformation. I believe the increasingly commercialized environment since the Commercial Revolution does not provide enough of an explanation; I contend that one must look at the religion itself to find the roots of the shift and the results of the Reformation as concerns the religion's theological attitudes toward wealth. In other words, Christianity itself must be examined. As you read through the book, you could do worse than ask yourself: is there something deeper in Christianity at work in the historical shift in thought on wealth and profit-seeking?  You will find my theory in the conclusion. Undoubtedly, you will develop your own as you reflect as you read.
The main question I pose through the treatise is whether religion itself, as a phenomenon touching the human domain of existence, can hold us back from ourselves even when we least want it to do so. If so, then a religion operating in the human domain can operate as a wholly-other mechanism by which sins such as greed can be reduced in force or perhaps even finally extirpated. To expunge the sordid stuff from our banks and corporations, human nature itself would have to be radically changed. Perhaps the question is whether it is possible even if not probable for religion operating through human beings to accomplish this task, given that religion cannot but interact with the world.

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See related essay: "Religious Sources of Business Ethics"

The non-fiction book: God's Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth. Available at Amazon. 

Transcending Limited Notions of the Divine

When religion meets human nature, does the gravitational pull of me, me, me tend to encompass the journey downward in an all too comfortable direction? In his Natural History of Religion, David Hume proposes his theory that any religion begins with a focus on something akin to divine simplicity, but then becomes increasingly robed with anthropomorphic artifacts until the sheer weight of which brings down the tree whose inherently upward-looking striving succumbs to the increasing weight of the human.

In other words, is religion too weak to withstand the human, all too human ornaments that we conveniently adorn of our religions? The ornaments ultimate reflect ourselves, and thus are so convenient. So too is surrounding ourselves with others of like beliefs a matter of convenience. That is, religion can unwittingly become all about the self. Such religions or sects thereof can get sucked into a regular orbit of convenience without any of the congregants noticing the gradual and subtle slide.

As an antidote, transcendence, the unique and core aspect of religion and spirituality, can be utilized to get us outside of ourselves, including our concepts. The concept of God inhabiting a tree or stone relatively easy to transcend as a person looks past the image, both physical and cognitive, toward what is beyond, or through the favored image. Similarly even religious concepts that are themselves invisible, such as justice and mercy, can be transcended as a person moves on to even more basic divine concepts—even that of the One. Because the human mind is finite, even concepts revealed by a divine source are limited as they enter our cognitive atmosphere. Augustine likened this to light coming through a dark window. Accordingly, he warned that the relationship between the Father and Son should not be anthropomorphized into a human father-son relationship. St. Denis of the sixth century claimed that even Son itself as a limited human concept affixed to a divine person (of the Trinity) should be transcended in moving closer to the mystery that shrouds the divine in Christianity.

Simply stated, God lies beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility, and thus beyond our concepts—even those associated with divine revelation. Denis refers to the transcendence of God as the brilliant light that is in the darkness of unknowing. Hence faith is not knowledge. The latter is human, all too human, and thus must be transcended in order to transcend beyond our limited domain. Only when even the lofty religious concepts are transcended—not denied or pushed aside, but, rather, gone through them—can God be yearned for distinctly—meaning distinctly from religion being about the self, and thus a faith that is too convenient. The unknowability or ineffability of the divine is not hostile to religion, but is rather its salvation as distinguished from egoism and even selfishness.

The yearning itself, combined with transcending the religious concepts—especially those that are so very comfortable—is the best way religiously to leave the self behind. From a focus beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility, the spiritualized person returns to herself and our domain newly sensitized. When such a person looks at others, the sensitivity manifests automatically as compassion. This is more reliable, I submit, than relying on human intentionality, as in a decision to treat someone with compassion because of a religious teaching. Given the gravity of the human self, even in the religious sphere, compassion that springs automatically from the sensitivity to our world, including other people, is more reliable. Hence, paradoxically letting go cognitively of our cherished religious concepts of divine attributes can lead to transcendent religious experience—the sui generis essence of religion and spirituality—and more faithful feeling and action regarding religious ethical teachings.

Mandela’s Courage as Politicized Forgiveness

Whereas we grasp the interior sense in which Gandhi taught to forgive, the media promoted a false, politicized forgiveness as operating in Mandela’s case. I am of course impugning the aggrandizing press here, rather than Mandela himself.
In claiming that Mandela “insisted on forgiveness,” John Mahaha uses the following quote from the man himself: “To go to prison because of your convictions and be prepared to suffer for what you believe in, is something worthwhile. It is an achievement for a man to do his duty on earth irrespective of the consequences.”[1] The suffering being referred to here is neither suffering for its own sake nor suffering unnecessarily. In regard to being willing to suffer for what he believed in, Mandela had Gandhi as a role model, though (and this is crucial) Gandhi's social-moral principle of nonviolence cannot be reconciled with Mandela's prescription of violence. To the extent that advocating armed rather than non-violent resistance legitimated even just a portion of Mandela's prison time, the Father of South Africa could not have considered his own suffering in prison as strong (morally) as that of the Father of India. By moral strength, I have in mind a sort of power that had escaped Nietzsche's grasp; it is the sort of strength that Jesus evinces in the New Testament. Both Mandela and Gandhi endured great suffering to be true to their respective principles and see them realized in a more just world. This is not to say that both men forgave in the same sense, or that both deserved their respective suffering equally.
I submit that what Mahaha took in his piece to be forgiveness is actually something else. In philosophical terms, he unknowingly committed a category mistake. To be willing to suffer for one’s convictions is indeed laudable, but forgiveness is not necessarily entailed or even implied. I suspect that Mandela himself would admit that he did not feel any sense of forgiveness during the 27 years of imprisonment. I have seen video-taped footage of him on the prison-island refusing to speak with a group of people passing by while he was outdoors. His stiff glance and held silence belies any hint of forgiveness.
Lest it be claimed that Mandela forgave his former oppressors once he had regained his freedom, his second wife insisted on a television interview following her husband's death that Mandela had drew on an incredible strength of self-discipline and fortitude, rather than the interior sort of forgiveness that Gandhi preached and felt. Sadly, commentators and both print and broadcast journalists marveled in saccharine platitudes at Mandela's amazing forgiveness after suffering for nearly three decades in prison. Clearly, the journalists and pontificators had not done their research.
The research could have started with topical statements from Mandela himself. “If you want to make peace with your enemy,” he once said, “you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”[2] Insisting that such advice is none other than felt forgiveness artfully “gilds the lily,” as if dipping Mandela’s heart in gold with the benefit of hindsight. The working peace is political rather than interior; accordingly, any forgiveness would be likewise, for Mandela would not have said “you have to work with your enemy” were the enemy already forgiven. Instead, he might have said, “you must get to the point of caring about and for your enemy.” Although the term political forgiveness applies, the operative virtue here is actually closer to political courage than forgiveness. According to his second wife, Mandela used great self-discipline rather than forgiveness to resist the impulse to retaliate and instead work with the bastards.

Nelson Mandela reaching out to a former enemy. Political or religious forgiveness? (Image Source: Wikimedia Commons)

It takes interior courage to muster political courage, to deny oneself the convenient route politically. Mandela drew on his mighty courage in not only risking imprisonment by urging armed resistance, but also pushing himself to work with the party of his former oppressors. I suspect that humility, even if only in a political use, played a role after his arduous suffering in prison. Elongated pain has a way of resizing a man’s estimation of his own powers and proper stature. Interestingly, endured suffering may also rarify courage, for the downside is no longer of the unknown. While more difficult to unpack than saccharine forgiveness so often bandied about by dandies, tremendous self-discipline applied as courage as political forgiveness more closely fits the man who saved South Africa from itself.

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1.  John Dramani Mahama, “Mandela Taught a Continent to Forgive,” The New York Times, December 5, 2013.

2. William Welch, “South Africa’s Leader Transformed Nation, Self,” USA Today, December 27, 2013.

The Seminarian

A closeted gay student at an evangelical seminary is a contrast with a rather obvious clashing point, with the predicted ending being that the student is kicked out and must find or come into his own identity free of exterior constraints. Yet The Seminarian (2010) smartly avoids that road well-traveled. Instead, the screenwriter risks giving theology a prominent, and perhaps even central place in the film. The venture is at odds with the bottom-feeder mentality of Hollywood represented in the film, De-Lovely 2004), in which Cole Porter’s bisexuality occupies center-stage. Comparing these two films, irony drips off the screen as De-Lovely, which is patterned after a theatrical musical, looks down on Hollywood and yet has a common theme, while The Seminarian is a film through and through and yet takes the high road by supposing that the viewers can and will stay through some substantive theology, which transcends social issues and even the dramatic.

The full essay is at "The Seminarian."

A Deal with China: Did the Vatican Lose Its Soul?

In September, 2018, the Vatican and the Chinese government reached “a provisional deal” that would end “a decades-old power struggle over the right to appoint bishops in China.”[1] In regard to the power struggle itself, the deal “would mark a major victory for China.”[2] In regard to spreading Catholicism globally, the Vatican stood to gain both in terms of souls and money. Protestantism had been spreading fast in China, whereas the number of Catholics at the time was 10 to 12 million.[3] The question is therefore whether the Vatican ceded too much for the promise of access to the world’s most populous nation.
In the New Testament, Jesus advises to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Does this mean that a secular government should have the final say over who is to be a bishop in the Catholic Church? Jesus himself is portrayed in the New Testament as a religious figure who is by no means sanctioned by the Roman government. Ultimately, he is put to death for claiming to be a king, which the Roman government cannot abide. Similarly, the Chinese government could not abide bishops not approved by the government—and least of all, bishops said to be future kings. Yet a Roman Catholic bishop must be approved by the Vatican—the Pope himself—to be a Roman Catholic bishop. For a government to do so is presumptuous, even impious. It would seem, therefore, that bishops following Jesus would continue to risk arrest and persecution by worshipping in the underground churches, rather than in the “parallel structure: a state-sanctioned, state-controlled Catholic Church.”[4] Again, as Jesus says, those who try to save their lives will lose them, and those who are willing to lose their lives will save them, and thus themselves. Therefore, Pope Francis would have gone too far had he agreed to bishops being appointed above his objections. To be sure, bishops could get the nod from both parties.
In the provisional deal, “Pope Francis recognized the legitimacy of seven bishops appointed by the Chinese government. Because they had not been selected by the Vatican, they had previously been excommunicated.”[5]  This recognition solves that problem, but what about the appointment of future bishops? Which side would have the final say? Would either have a veto? The provisional deal is not clear on this point. “Neither side provided a clear answer.”[6]
At the time of the agreement, Archbishop Claudio Celli, a lead negotiator for the Vatican, said the deal provides for “the intervention of the Holy Father for sure” in the selection of bishops. The negotiator would not say, however, that the intervention could be a veto; he said only that “the Holy Father gets to say something about the appointment of bishops.”[7] Only having a say, such as in raising objections, is not sufficient, I submit, for a Roman Catholic official must pass muster with that Church in order to be Roman Catholic.
That the Vatican would have to sever relations with Taiwan raises the question of how bishops there would be selected. Moreover, in ceding this point, the pope risked being perceived as throwing out a very small country for one with a lot of potential Catholics. Was this even to save more souls or to catch up on Protestant denominations in China? Did the Vatican stand to pull in a lot of money from the expected increase in numbers in China? Even in raising these questions, I see a lot of distance from the negotiations and the relationship between Jesus preaching and the Roman government, as well as the preachments themselves—especially in regard to treasure not being of the earthly sort and to being willing to bear one’s cross rather than travel on the road of convenience; for in gaining the whole world to save itself, a religion may lose its very soul.[8]

1. Jason Horowitz and Ian Johnson, “China and Vatican Reach Deal on Appointment of Bishops,” The New York Times, September 22, 2018.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. On Christian thought on greed in relation to wealth, see Skip Worden, God’s Gold,available at Amazon. 

7 Billion People Worldwide in 2011: Catholicism's Humanae Vitae Compromising or Protecting Human Life?

According to the Huffington Post, “Amid the millions of births and deaths around the world each day, it is impossible to pinpoint the arrival of the globe's 7 billionth occupant. But the U.N. chose on October 31, 2011 to mark the day of that occupant's arrival with a string of festivities worldwide, and a series of symbolic 7 billionth babies being born.” I contend that the milestone is nothing to celebrate; rather, it should have served as a wake-up call for us all, lest the species continue undaunted to maximize itself right out of existence. Both the slope and its relative abruptness, evident in a historical perspective, ought to have given us all pause in our assumption that our species would necessarily go on without either self-regulation or a drastic correction from nature. 

                                            Source: UN Population Division

It may simply be human nature to focus on putting out individual brush fires without pausing to ask whether one person set them all and to look at the fires in a larger, historical perspective. It could be that the fires are fueled in large part by decades of built-up deadwood from "no fire" policies. In other words, it could be that we are more complicit than we know. Our presumption that absolves us of any role and our assumption that we can't be wrong may be the death of our species. Before getting to the role of religion as illustrative of this presumption and assumption as applied to over-population, I want to briefly discuss the relevance of global population to several problems facing the world so the gravity of the problem can be better grasped.

Other things equal, more people on Earth means more consumption and thus more pollution. In other words, a species that does not self-regulate its size may alter the ecosystem (i.e., climate) beyond the range of that specie’s own habitat. In academic terms, a schizogenic (maximizing) variable can breach the “ecologizing” constraint that is an ecosystem. Still less understandable, a schizogenic variable within a system can destroy that system’s homeostatic nature. In short, the 7 billion milestone (and still counting) portends baleful consequences for our species.

In addition to climate change, one could point to commodity supply, such as foodstuff and energy. The increase in the price of corn, for example, could be attributed to the increasing use of ethanol (made out of corn). Going further, an increasing population means increasing demand of both, so the explanation should not rest with “alternative energy sources” as an issue. Both food and energy can be expected to be stretched as the global population increases. Oil companies going to more high-risk extractions of oil (e.g., deep-water wells in the Gulf of Mexico) can be viewed as still another manifestation of what happens when energy supplies are relatively fixed. Fundamentally, increasing global population magnifies the disconnect between the maximizing variable and finite resource supplies. If we as a species refuse to regulate ourselves as a species, we do so at the peril of our progeny. Indeed, the transmission of human life may hang in the balance ironically as people and certain organizations enable the maximizing tendency in order to transmit human life.

As the world’s population was thought to surpass 7 billion, Eric Tayag of the Philippines’ Department of Health warned, “Seven billion is a number we should think about deeply. We should really focus on the question of whether there will be food, clean water, shelter, education and a decent life for every child," he said. "If the answer is 'no,' it would be better for people to look at easing this population explosion." I contend that Tayag was understating the problem and thus the need for corrective action at the global level. Problematically, however, some influential international organizations have priorities that exacerbate rather than solve the problem.

The Huffington Post reports that in the Philippines, “much of the population question revolves around birth control. The government backs a program that includes artificial birth control. The powerful Roman Catholic church, though, vehemently opposes contraception.” The vehemence itself may be a problem for the Vatican. The teaching itself may evince an overreach from the vantage point of a religion. As such, the foray may unnecessarily compromise the Vatican’s credibility even to the Catholic laity.

According to the Huffington Post, “The Catholic clergy opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest, stem cell research and all artificial contraception and sterilization methods, including birth control pills and condoms. But according the 2008 National Survey of Family Growth, 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women over the age of 18 have used some form of contraception banned by the Vatican. Even among more religious Catholic women, who attend Mass on a weekly basis, 83 percent use some form of contraception. In 2009, 63 percent of Catholic voters said they support health insurance coverage for contraception, including birth control pills, according to a Belden Russonello Strategists poll.” Essentially, the laity have been saying that the hierarchy has been overstepping its proper domain, given the Catholic Church is a religious organization and morality is not theology. Ironically, the overreach has diminished rather than extended the clergy’s influence. The root of the clergy’s error may be their conflation of morality and religion.

The “transmission of human life,” and, moreover, “the happiness of human beings” referred to as the basis of the humanae vitae encyclical have at best an indirect relation to religion or theology, which, being about God’s nature, transcends the human domain. In other words, the encyclical has a rather secular basis. It is at best peripheral to worshipping God. To claim the transmission of human life is somehow like God being the Creator obfuscates the human and the divine. It is thus to make a category mistake.

Even in terms of humanae vitae as an ideal, acting only when one can act in the ideal can be criticized. Indeed, this dictum is inconsistent with the very notion of ideal. For example, to say that one should ideally eat fruits and vegetables is not to say that one must never eat a cookie. Likewise, to say that a man and woman being in love and actively involved in the transmission of human life is an ideal in married life is not to say that one should limit oneself to it. Rather, it is to say that making love with the possibility of transmitting human life is better than making love in marriage without transmitting human life. It is a fallacy to go from this to claim concerning an ideal that “therefore” one should never act other than in the ideal.

It would be unfortunate if the transmission of the human species were compromised rather than sanctified by a religious organization whose clerics mistake the very notion of ideal and apply it in a domain that is only indirectly related to religion. In other words, even well-meaning maximizing (i.e., over-reaching) can function as a catalyst in the downfall of the human species. The underlying culprit may be individual self-interest, whether by individuals or organizations, that is inherently partial and thus puts the part ahead at the possible expense of the whole. Beyond the self-interest may be the intractable assumption that one cannot be wrong, for this assumption alone can blind one to the harm of which one is unknowingly complicit. The end of the transmission of human life may come down to human stubbornness and presumptousness (i.e., to human pride), ironically perhaps most strident in its own assumption of infallibility when it is in religious garb.

Sources:

Encyclical Letter Humanae Vitae, Paul IV.

Jim Gomez and Tim Sullivan, “World Population Hits 7 Billion: Babies Celebrated Worldwide,” The Huffington Post, October 31, 2011. 

Laura Bassett, “The Men Behind the War on Women,” The Huffington Post, November 1, 2011.