Hieronymus
2mo ago
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is the second greatest commandment. The greatest is, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The two commandments are not the same, and the order is important. You can’t just swap out the gospel for any old cause, not even one that preaches love.
If you remove the supernatural bits from Christianity, you are not left with a new kind of Christianity; you have a new movement wearing Christianity as a skin suit. There have been plenty of these. Off the top of my head, liberation theology, the social gospel movement, and the preaching of John Ball seem to be pretty straightforward parallels.
The command to love your neighbor does not imply that you are to love everyone to the same degree and in the same way. Christians disagree among ourselves about the details. I personally find the first epistle of John to be helpful here, but I also consider it one of the most difficult books of the New Testament. A lot of people read John talking about love, have fuzzy feelings, and ignore the things he says that make it complicated.
I don’t know enough Aristotelian (I assume) philosophy to speak fittingly in terms of essences, properties, and qualities. But I can point out that in Christian belief all men possess the image of God, which gives them value in itself and may resolve your dilemma.
Hieronymus
2yr ago
Seeing the new title of King Charles’ wife, the queen consort, on Queen Elizabeth’s death has left me a surprised and befuddled American. I would love to hear about the Church of England’s role in modern British public life from those who know about it.
The Backstory
As a child I was taught in school that King Henry VIII founded the Church of England because he wanted a divorce from his wife, which Roman Catholic doctrine would not allow. But this is misleading. What Henry sought from the pope was in modern terms an annulment; Henry’s wife Catherine was the Holy Roman Emperor’s aunt, and the pope’s political and military situation was precarious, so the pope stalled. This led Henry to claim supremacy over the church and get the English clergy to grant his annulment. The Church of England still regarded divorce per se, dissolving the valid marriage of two living spouses, to be impossible.
Fast-forward four hundred years to 1936. The new King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom proposed to marry Wallis Simpson, an American in the process of divorcing her second husband. The prime ministers of the Commonwealth realms were not prepared to accept a disreputable queen, and publicly flouting the church of which Edward was in principle the head threatened to create a constitutional crisis. He decided to give up his throne and his responsibilities to marry her anyway. His brother became King George VI, and George’s daughter Elizabeth became the heiress presumptive.
Prince Charles’ Reprise
In 2002 the Church of England decided to allow the divorced to remarry in church – depending on the circumstances and the pastor. In other cases it may be possible to have a church blessing service after a civil wedding.
This is what Charles, Prince of Wales, did when he married Camilla Parker Bowles in 2005. His ex-wife having died, his divorce was presumably no impediment to the marriage, but her ex-husband was still living. Neither of his parents attended the civil wedding, though they did attend the blessing afterward. Queen Elizabeth acknowledged the awkwardness by announcing that Camilla was to be known as Duchess of Cornwall rather than Princess of Wales while Elizabeth lived and as princess consort rather than queen afterward.
The constitutionality of this decision was disputed, and it wasn’t clear whether Charles would follow his mother’s wishes once he was king. So I was surprised when, on Queen Elizabeth’s death, references to Camilla as queen consort occasioned no commentary. It turns out that in February Elizabeth changed her mind and spared Charles the trouble.
What does this imply about the Church of England?
It’s nothing new for the powerful or influential to demand that Christian churches capitulate, and it’s hardly unprecedented for unprincipled pastors to grant those demands. It may be that Elizabeth’s piety and Charles’ sense of duty were the only things that kept him from a church wedding in the first place. But I can’t escape the impression that the Church of England has ceased to be a legitimacy-granting institution beholden to God, at least in principle, and has come to have its own legitimacy judged by how well it follows the Zeitgeist.
Representatives of the Church of England’s laity narrowly turned down a measure in 2012 that would have allowed women to become bishops; some of those voting against the measure were conservatives who opposed the change and some were progressives who thought the measure didn’t take a hard enough line against the conservatives. (The change went through in 2014.) The Archbishop of Canterbury said at the time:
“Whatever the motivations for voting yesterday … the fact remains that a great deal of this discussion is not intelligible to our wider society. Worse than that, it seems as if we are wilfully blind to some of the trends and priorities of that wider society.”
Where does all this leave the Church of England? I’m interested in insights from anyone who has them, but I would particularly love to hear the perspectives of English Anglicans and other members of state churches.
Hieronymus
6mo ago
I want to ponder a couple of your observations a bit more, because I have some thoughts to untangle. But as a religious righty myself, I would encourage you to distinguish three groups:
- The religious left when it is code switching to speak to the religious right: I think the United Methodist pastor from OP is here.
- Folks traveling from the religious right to the religious left, who may or may not have admitted it yet
- The religious right itself
In particular, I think that the growth of the second group is distinct from drift within the third group. That doesn’t imply that the religious right proper isn’t changing at all, because it is, but if you try to plot its course by following, e.g., Russell Moore, you are going to be confused.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Seventy year olds are fully capable of caring about the generations to come. Indeed, financially secure seventy year olds (which presumably describes the elderly in the political class) are among those best suited to think in generational terms. If they don't, that's a deep cultural problem, and electing younger folks may mitigate it but will not solve it.
Hieronymus
6mo ago
Yes, by the religious left I mean what early twentieth century Protestants called modernism. (I think that contemporary Catholics had a different, broader definition of the word.) It’s what you get when you accept the tenets of secular progressivism and try to rebuild Christian practice on top of them. It’s not really Christian.
That said, I’ve always understood James Martin to be in this camp. Roman Catholic ecclesiology didn’t allow the fundamentalist-modernist controversy to take the form it did among Protestants, so the divide isn’t as obvious; at least that’s my take.
If you are ever inclined to do related effortposts, I’d love to read about the dynamics (positive and negative) created by having the likes of Martin and Vigano in the same institutional church, as well as how tradcaths have reacted to Francis’ papacy and the loss of the Vatican’s social role as a countercultural bulwark.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Do you know of any resources that make the history of Hinduism legible to a westerner? I got curious reading about Indo-European languages and then Indo-European religion. The parallels between Germanic mythology and early Vedic religion are fascinating. But the early Vedic religion has clearly been transformed and subsumed. (No cattle sacrifices in modern Hinduism!) I am curious what the different proto-Hinduisms were and how they met and fought and syncretized.
Books I've read on the history of Indo-European religion (admittedly years ago) were light on the Indo-Iranian branch.
Hieronymus
26d ago
Close the loopholes and make it harder for Dem presidents to not enforce the law. Have more of their executive orders get shredded in the courts like DAPA did during Obama's tenure, and like a lot of Trump's EOs always do.
I don't think this is possible, either in principle or in practice. The president has wide discretion not to enforce laws for a variety of reasons. And federal judges, who are routinely blue tribe even when right-leaning, will mostly be looking for reasons to allow a Democratic or neocon Republican president to skip out on his side of the bargain.
We've tried things like this before, and the pro-illegal-immigration factions have successfully defected at the first opportunity. I don't see any reason for optimism that the compromise will be honored in an even more divided country.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
These are not evangelical theologies---and it's fine to dislike them for that reason…
The gulf here is much wider than that. If Jesus Christ was not raised from the dead, then confessional Lutheranism, or Roman Catholicism, or Eastern Orthodoxy falls apart. Liberation theology and the social gospel movement keep on trucking.
… but they obviously incorporate the supernatural.
Only in the sense that they try to “use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop,” in Lewis’ inimitable phrase.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Sounds a bit like human sacrifice and scapegoating doesn't it?
Unironically yes. The Bible depicts it as a sacrifice: though those who killed Jesus didn’t intend it that way, Jesus did. And if you do a quick search, you will find a million sermons with titles like “Christ our Scapegoat,” referencing the literal scapegoat in Leviticus.
Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, offering himself as a sacrifice to God the Father on behalf of sinners is the mechanism. It’s the core of Christian belief.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
I appreciate the summary. Could you clarify what you mean by authority in this context? You seem to be using it in a particularly Mormon way.
It likely goes without saying, but the Protestant take is that the Bible is the inspired and authoritative guide to the apostolic faith and that all subsequent teachers are to be judged by that standard; the canon is closed.
Obviously, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have their takes on the apostolic succession, but I don’t think their notion of authority is the same as yours, and it would be interesting to see it explained from your side.
Hieronymus
7mo ago
The descriptions of 4B make it sound a lot like MGTOW. I don’t know a ton about either, but I remember Men Going Their Own Way as a neighborhood of the broader manosphere, when the blogosphere was more of a going concern. It was generally made up of men who had been burned hard.
I also don’t know if the causes are similar – men mostly seem to come to MGTOW when they are looking to explain and contextualize bitter personal experiences. Is 4B an actual backlash in the West, or is it just that some journalists want to cultivate a backlash? When women join in South Korea, are they operating from painful personal experiences, or are they reacting to a consensus that tells them that any self-respecting woman in their situation should be bitter?
Hieronymus
2mo ago
… the Trump administration's demands that they install right-wing commissars to monitor the university for wrongthink.
I think that this is a reasonable characterization, but it’s complicated by the fact that they’re demanding right-wing commissars to shoot the left-wing commissars. It’s commissars all the way down. As a conservative, I have deeply mixed feelings about all of this.
I’ve been thinking a fair bit about the conservative movement and how its idea of the relationship between private organizations and the state has changed since the middle of the twentieth century. (That’s not to say that the Trump coalition is identical with the conservative movement, of course.) We’ll see if those thoughts ever become solid enough for an effortpost.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
Hieronymus
6mo ago
Thanks. Reported as AAQC.
Fr. James Martin is 100% serious and a true believer. He doesn't actually compromise on abortion, he just thinks gun control is an equivalently serious pro life issue.
I know that OP brought up abortion, but I wasn’t thinking of abortion here: I was thinking of Martin’s approach to sexual sins, particularly homosexuality but also various kinds of cohabitation. He seems to prefer having a group of massgoers in unrepentant grave sin over the kind of call to repentance that would split them into a smaller group of repentant massgoers and a larger group that eschews the faith entirely. If that reading is correct, it’s hard to see how he isn’t at odds with the gospel.
I suppose that your understanding of Martin’s motives is much better informed than mine, which is largely limited to social media and reading him in quotation. But man, the pattern match is strong.
… and the college of cardinals retains a conservative plurality large enough to maintain a functional veto.
Interesting. I did not know this.
These are institutionalists who see gentlemanly behavior as very important; liberals know that setting a precedent for hardball will blow up in their faces and conservatives know that there's no real need to play hardball.
The contrast to the evangelical experience in twentieth-century America is really striking here. In the early twentieth century, evangelicals in many denominations realized that all of their institutions – seminaries, universities, missions boards, denominational leadership – had come to be controlled by modernists. They fought back, still not realizing how badly outgunned they were, and in all the big denominations they lost.
But of course we evangelicals aren’t permanently tied to any hierarchy, so they were free to build new institutions and leadership structures. In the middle of the century there was a renewed debate about how those ought to relate to the mainline churches, which still had some orthodox believers in them. In 1979, conservative Southern Baptists realized that modernists were beginning to gain control of their denomination and used the convention to begin their own march through the institutions. After his appointment to lead the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1993, theological conservative Al Mohler famously (and controversially) purged the faculty.
Different evangelical institutions have taken different stances over the years. Those that accommodate liberal theology in their ranks usually have an easier time dealing with secular institutions, and their leadership may be able to stave off mission drift for a generation or so. But those which play hardball with theological liberals have done a much better job staying on mission across generations. As evangelicals have come to realize that we live in negative world, the Southern Baptist approach has become more popular.
In the first draft of my reply to Sloot, I began to speculate that evangelicalism will become more theologically and politically conservative, and that it will at the same time shrink to become less politically relevant to the secular right’s interests. But of course I cannot say for sure.
Traditional Catholics who actually matter simply do not think in terms of years or decades and so the current pope is viewed as a temporary and ineffectual roadblock.
A dear friend of mine is Roman Catholic, though by no means a traditionalist. It is remarkable to me just how many things her social environment within the RCC accepts as valid Catholic positions because of the lack of disciplinary boundary drawing from the hierarchy. It’s an ongoing source of temptation to her, made all the more subtle because she doesn’t recognize it.
Of course, I hope that you all come to your senses and convert tomorrow. Failing that, I hope you are right that theological liberalism in the Roman church is just a passing phase. But if the time to wait it out is measured in generations, then the cost must also be measured in generations.
Hieronymus
8mo ago
I am curious to hear your reasons for this. My state seems to be moving dramatically (and for me, quite disappointingly) in the other direction.
Hieronymus
1d ago
I usually wonder about this kind of thing in a different sense, because men in spheres bemoaning lack of trad values often mention virginity but I'm never clear on if they're offering the same virginity themselves. And also if they're offering to respect their (prospective) girlfriend's desire for virginity until marriage and would indeed marry her without having sex.
I am reminded of a pastor who praised a groom during his wedding for bringing his bride to the altar a virgin. The pastor’s homily was kind of tacky, and his exegesis wasn’t great, but I think his heart was absolutely in the right place.
Hieronymus
1d ago
A big change happens in the social environment when you achieve a critical mass of family, friends, and neighbors who will hold you to what you and they believe to be right.
If you are a social conservative in a progressive setting, you can expect that a majority of your friends are more liberal than you, even if they are very conservative by local standards; a majority of their friends are more liberal than they, and so on along the gradient until you hit the local norm. Difficult sacrifices are always difficult; but they get a lot harder when your friends don’t respect them, instead encouraging you to do the easier thing that they sincerely believe would be good for you.
An example:
A couple of my college friends got married. They weren’t a great match in terms of temperament, but they genuinely loved each other and could have made it work. They were on the socially conservative end of their church. They were gender egalitarian, but that’s true of almost their whole denomination, and it’s one of the rare churches where for historical reasons this is not a predictor of broader liberalism. The wedding was consciously traditional in a way that expressed the joy and solemnity of the occasion and acknowledged the givenness of the institution.
They had a kid. ADHD, and later a stroke, made it difficult for him to hold down a job. Eventually he found a crummy job that he kept for a long time. If you knew him, you would know that this reflected heroic effort on his part out of deep love for his wife and child, but most people just saw him being less flaky. It wasn’t enough to provide a middle class lifestyle on a single income as your family and I might prefer, but she didn’t expect it to be. She is very type A, and she made more money than he did in a customer service job, later landing a manager role until stress caused her to step down.
They fought. She obviously felt for years that he wasn’t doing enough for the family, but it’s not clear to me how much of that was fair and how much was his failing to carry out her orders; I suspect some of both. Eventually she left him and got a tattoo symbolizing it as a rebirth. She told him (as I found out later) that the divorce would be good for the kid. To her credit, she tried to follow through with good-faith co-parenting. Without his family, he lost his job and his living situation made joint custody impractical; child support has not made things easier. Now she is planning to remarry.
Now, I don’t know what concrete advice she got from her friends. Knowing some of them and knowing her actions, I suspect it was often, “You don’t have to suffer like this.” But I have to wonder: what if they’d had friends and a church that were more conservative than they were?
Maybe someone could have explained that the relationship dynamics that were cute when they were dating would keep them from communicating love and respect once they were married. (I wanted to beat this into them so badly for years, but I wasn’t close enough to either one that a bachelor’s unsolicited marriage advice would be listened to.) Maybe somebody could have convinced them of the goodness in headship and submission and shown how to apply it in a way that recognized her gifts while encouraging him to take a more active role in leading the family. Maybe a friend good with family finances could have run the numbers to see if she could work part time and invest the rest in ways they could live more frugally. Maybe a sympathetic business owner could have found work that suited his abilities and let him provide better. Maybe she’d have heard, “Divorce is not good for your child!” until she either listened or went deaf.
So, a couple of thoughts:
I don’t know how things are in your community. It sounds like they are by and large better off, and I am grateful for that. In mine, the friend gradient toward the norm makes this kind of thing sadly familiar. I hope to figure out what I can do to make the situation better.
Social conservative “converts” are usually in an even more difficult place than my friends when it comes to support. They don’t have the social encouragement to do the hard, countercultural thing; they don’t have someone to help them fit the pieces together in practice; and there is no one to explain the next step in muddling through. I suppose the exceptions are those literal converts lucky enough to find themselves in churches that can provide these things to get them reoriented while it is all fresh and new.
In some cases the possibility of child support can keep men from just cutting and running or give them some skin in the game. But in my friends’ case its function is to make it easier for a woman to leave her husband because she thinks he’s a drag on her, while still demanding some of the (modest but heroic) financial support he provided as her husband. I doubt that the availability of child support caused this divorce, but it has made things worse, and it’s patently unjust. I wonder what socially conservative child support reform would look like.
Hieronymus
17d ago
Yes, but Catherine was obviously lying. The kings of England and Aragon had scholars go through her first marriage with a fine-toothed comb looking for a reason to annul it so that Catherine could marry Henry and maintain the alliance. When they came back saying that the only way to annul the marriage was if it hadn’t been consummated, Catherine said that she had never slept with her husband. That’s not terribly plausible under the circumstances, and if it were true all of the canon lawyers would have been unnecessary in the first place.
The pope actually refused to annul her second marriage for political and military reasons.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
I am not sure if you mean to imply more depth than you give explicitly, but the version you wrote is not the same as Magusoflight’s. I think it’s misleading to say, “This is fine,” without qualification, at least where kids are involved.
Consider teaching children about paraplegia. You want children to respect its victims and to be aware of what they really are and are not capable of. You want them to understand that disability is not a moral failing. But you don’t want them to think that being wheelchair-bound is just as good as being able to walk, that it’s no affliction at all, and that given a choice between being healthy or paraplegic there is no reason to prefer one over the other.
I think that the folks adding intersex conditions to the preschool and grade school curricula are trying to say that there is no reason to prefer not to be intersex; they are looking to deconstruct sex and gender in the minds of children as young as they can get them. To teach that this is an affliction, to add that little bit of complexity, would undermine their goals.
Hieronymus
2yr ago
I have no objection to rolling back the Sexual Revolution, but it needs to apply to men as well - it takes two to tango, after all.
I’m not the GP, but yes, of course. As you point out, restraining the sexuality of one sex implies restraining the sexuality of the other. I want a world where both sexes value chastity, understood in the classic sense of sexual virtue.
It’s great that so many denizens of the manosphere (or whatever it has turned into) have come to see the effects of feminine promiscuity. It means that they have found an important piece of the puzzle. It behooves those of us who see the other pieces to help them fit it together. And some of them do get there! The former pickup artist Roosh is a famous example.
I’m not old enough to remember the years before the pill. But it’s easy to see that the relationship between marriage, sex, and children was obvious then in a way it isn’t now. The relationship was important for more reasons than pregnancy, but pregnancy was a reason that any horny doofus could see.
I keep seeing Christian kids who should know better sacrificing their principles to their libidos and calling it nuance. It’s refreshing to see secular people who notice the burns on others. It raises my hopes that they will come to see how marrying the only woman you will ever sleep with at twenty could be a joy and a blessing.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
They are making a legal argument, not a political or moral one; the first amendment to the U.S. constitution calls out religion specifically. This is the flip side of a related issue, that the Constitution (or at least constitutional jurisprudence) does not sufficiently limit the imposition of irreligious totalizing ideologies because they are not an “establishment of religion.” In the same way, violating a philosophical commitment is not “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Applying the religion clauses of the first amendment is already complicated in a country as socially and religiously diverse as America has become. Consider Masterpiece Cakeshop, whose proprietor’s sincere religious beliefs are not in doubt: He won at the Supreme Court on the grounds that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission was motivated by demonstrable animus against his religion, and even then the decision was 7–2.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
Taking this idea seriously, it's hard to see how it manifests in the US.
At best it manifests in a dictatorship where the victorious side murderously purges the other from any position of leadership, civil, military, or social. At worst you get something like the Spanish Civil War, but in a much larger country.
But it’d be a mistake to take it seriously. It’s a bit of dark humor from Scott.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
More controversially, I feel the same is true about mandatory ID cards and hate speech laws, by the way. If Vermont wants Euro-style hate speech laws, I really don’t care. Plenty of states will oppose them. The same is true for gun control, for civil rights, for gay marriage, for religion in government.
As a red-triber in a very blue state, who is often willing to support federalism even when it harms his interests, I draw the line at my basic rights as an American. I shouldn't have to leave my home and my family's legacy here to secure them.
Hieronymus
7mo ago
If you look at the US political spectrum through a lens of economics and authoritarianism, both parties do look pretty far right compared to most of Europe.…
On economics, I buy it. But authoritarianism is slipperier. On issues of speech, religious freedom, gun rights, or search and seizure, the U.S. is far from perfect but far better than most of Europe – certainly than the European countries most visible from this side of the pond: the U.K., France, and Germany.
As a Protestant, I agree with you that the papacy is no guarantor of doctrinal fidelity. But the core question is this: The pope is said to be the vicar of Christ – is he? Flawed historical assertions and doctrinal contradictions count as evidence against the claim, but the claim itself is true or false and should be addressed as such. (Whether this is the right forum to go deep on that question is a separate issue.)
The same is true of claims about the president of the Mormon church: Is he a true or false prophet? Having a true prophet may be useful, but that doesn’t determine whether Joseph Smith and Russell Nelson qualify. Flawed historical assertions and doctrinal contradictions count as evidence here too. And I think it’s audacious to say that the LDS score well.
What about the Mormon history of pre-Columbian America, which doesn’t jive with any historical source or archeological finds? Or the book of Abraham, whose source manuscripts turned out to be Egyptian funerary texts once we could read hieroglyphs? Or the edits to the Book of Mormon regarding the nature of the godhead? Or the doctrines which were said to be unchangeable but were nevertheless changed, like plural marriage?
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