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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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Commenting on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Coronation Sermon

Nobody has made a post about the coronation yet. There weren't any major culture war incidents. It went off without a hitch in other words. I'm reaching to find something to talk about. Here is my reaction to the sermon given by the archbishop of Canterbury during the ceremony. The sermon states the ceremonial role of the British monarch in plain terms and tries its best to skirt around the fact that the king has no power. He likens Charles III to Jesus. Here is the full sermon:

https://www.episcopalnewsservice.org/2023/05/06/archbishop-of-canterburys-coronation-sermon/

We are here to crown a King, and we crown a King to serve.

What is given today is for the gain of all. For Jesus Christ announced a Kingdom in which the poor and oppressed are freed from chains of injustice. The blind see. The bruised and broken-hearted are healed.

That Kingdom sets the aims of all righteous government, all authority. And the Kingdom also sets the means of all government and authority. Jesus doesn’t grasp power or hold onto status.

The King of Kings, Jesus Christ, was anointed not to be served, but to serve. He creates the unchangeable law that with the privilege of power comes the duty to serve.

Service is love in action. We see active love in our care for the most vulnerable, the way we nurture and encourage the young, in the conservation of the natural world. We have seen those priorities in the life of duty lived by our King.

Today we have the honour of being in this Abbey with so many who show such love; you work with charities and organisations, you build community, you serve the nation in Armed Forces, in emergency services, and so many other ways. Next door are 400 extraordinary young people in St Margaret’s, whose lives speak of service. Around the world in the Realms and Commonwealth are so many more. You live your lives for the sake of others.

The unity you show, the example you give, is what binds us together and offers societies that are strong, joyful, happy and glorious. They bear heavy weights for us.

The weight of the task given you today, Your Majesties, is only bearable by the Spirit of God, who gives us the strength to give our lives to others. With the anointing of the Holy Spirit, the King is given freely what no ruler can ever attain through will, or politics, or war, or tyranny: the Holy Spirit draws us to love in action.

This is promised by Jesus who put aside all privilege, because, as the first reading tells us, God will give all things for our sake, even His life.

His throne was a Cross. His crown was made of thorns. His regalia were the wounds that pierced his body.

Each of us is called by God to serve. Whatever that looks like in our own lives, each of us can choose God’s way today.

We can say to the King of Kings, God Himself, as does the King here today, ‘give grace that in thy service I may find perfect freedom’.

In that prayer there is promise beyond measure, joy beyond dreams, hope that endures. By that prayer, for every King, every ruler, and, yes, for all of us, we are opened to the transforming love of God.

The archbishop likens Charles III to Jesus, not by elevating Charles to the level of a god, but by bringing down Jesus to the level of a man. Christians believe that Jesus was both a man and a God. The fact that he was and is an omnipotent deity is essential to Christian theology. But having the limitations of a man is what makes the telling of Jesus' life in the Gospels a compelling story. The archbishop's sermon depicts Jesus as a very talented preacher who relies on the power of persuasion to save souls. This aspect of the Gospel story most closely resembles Charles III's role as archon basileus of a parliamentary democracy. But unlike the British monarch, Jesus had real power to back up his preaching.

The sermon oversells what Charles III can accomplish with mere persuasion. It states with confidence that "showing unity" and "giving a good example" are sufficient to "bind us together", to "offer a society that is strong, joyful, etc." and to "bear heavy weights". By speaking of the ceremonial role of the British monarch as sufficient to accomplish the duties of kingship, the archbishop leaves no consideration for what happens if persuasion fails to produce the advertised results.

I was raised Christian but became an atheist a long time ago. When I think back on Christianity, there are certain concepts that that strike me as peculiar. One of these is the concept that a one's salvation may hinge on a chance encounter with another person whose intervention changes one's life for the better. It strikes me as chaotic, random and therefore unfair. My naïve understanding of Christianity when I was a Christian was influenced by growing up in an individualistic culture and a school system organized along individualistic lines. Every person was tested by God individually, I imagined. Sharing notes or copying answers from other test takers was not part of the test. I believed my choices in life would just determine whether or not my soul was saved. But the thought that my choices in life could be the determining factor in making somebody else a good person literally never occurred to me, and if it had, it would have greatly discomforted me. I would have perceived it as an added burden. Again, it would never have occurred to me that other people were sharing the burden of making me a good person. I would have perceived the sharing of responsibility only as an increased burden. I imagine that people raised in collectivist cultures perceive the sharing of burdens as generally resulting in a decreased burden. The concept of a mutually supporting community taking collective responsibility for the salvation of their souls is probably much closer to how people thought about Christianity in the past. It almost gives me warm fuzzy feelings, but I still find the chaotic, random nature of it discomforting.

Service and helping people is the unifying theme of the archbishop's sermon, but there is something lacking in his call to service. I like to help people. I like to be of service. I like giving people presents. I like teaching. I'm pretty good at it. But something I don't try to do is influence friends and family and coworkers to make them better people. I shrink from any situation where somebody is doing something immoral that I could intervene to correct. It's one thing teach somebody practical knowledge, and quite another to stage an intervention.

Christianity used to take the collectivist approach to saving souls. It wasn't enough to lead the horse to water. Responsible people had to dunk the horse's head and make it drink. The king was often the one doing the dunking. Since the time of the Glorious Revolution, the power of the state has grown enormously. But liberal democracies impose artificial limits on how they use their enormous power. Faced with equine dehydration, or any other societal problem, the solution must be more education, free counseling and state-sponsored therapy. It's fitting that the land of the NHS should refer to kingship as a service. The solution is always a service. Yet there remain certain classes of societal problems that are best solved—or that can only be solved—by issuing a command.

When I think back on Christianity, there are certain concepts that that strike me as peculiar. One of these is the concept that a one's salvation may hinge on a chance encounter with another person whose intervention changes one's life for the better. It strikes me as chaotic, random and therefore unfair.

For what it's worth (not that I am trying to get you back in the fold or anything), that is not really true as far as I know. The way I was always taught is that God deals with people with their circumstances taken into account. So if you consciously reject Jesus, you will likely be judged unrighteous after death (though in the end only God knows, at best we can just speculate). But if you just wind up never having heard of him during your life, that isn't going to factor in. Instead you would be judged based on how much you tried to do right insofar as you were taught it, and what your conscience nudged you to do.

Obviously Christianity has many different schools of though, so there are probably Christians who really do believe that if someone in an isolated Amazon tribe dies without ever having heard of Jesus, they're going straight to hell. But it definitely isn't what I was taught, at least.

Actually, the belief that they're damned is a pretty normal belief, I'm pretty sure.

Among the Roman Catholics, there's the teaching of Extra eccleasiam nulla salus—outside the church there is no salvation, although I'm not sure what Vatican II did to things. The council of Florence has a statement saying that neither pagans nor Jews nor heretics nor schismatics will be saved. Eastern Orthodoxy I think has at times expressed similar thoughts, although I know that universalism is also kind of popular among them, at least in the present day.

Protestants are more varied, I think, but I think with the emphasis on sola fide, there should be the same belief.

Christianity really is an exclusive religion. As Christ says, "I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the father, except through me." John 3:16 is perhaps the most famous verse in the bible: "For God loved the world thus: he gave his only begotten son, so that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life." Paul writes, "For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe."

If you're wondering, how is this just, well it's not as if Christians think they don't deserve hell. Their own salvation is an enormous gift, and it isn't as if it's owed to everyone else that they come to believe in Christ.

Edit: It looks like I understated the effect of Vatican II, Vatican II seems to have reinterpreted the things I was saying so as that they're probably not representative of current Catholic teaching.

The catholic dogma was interpreted this way at the time of the Council of Florence (see also Dante), but it stopped to be long before Vatican II. For example:

To be in the communion of the Catholic Church and to be a member of the Church are two different things. They are in the communion of profession of her faith and participation of her sacraments, through the ministry and government of her lawful pastors. The members of the Catholic Church are all those who with a sincere heart seek the true religion and are in unfeigned disposition to embrace the truth wherever they find it. It never was our doctrine that salvation can be obtained only by the former.

John Carroll, first bishop of the US.

For the protestant, I don't get it. I was taught that they believe in fate, so that your salvation was decided by God before your birth and your actions don't matter, but I'm no expert.

You can't "reinterpret" defined dogma. That's what defining a dogma means.

"For, the doctrine of faith which God revealed has not been handed down as a philosophic invention to the human mind to be perfected, but has been entrusted as a divine deposit to the Spouse of Christ, to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence, also, that understanding of its sacred dogmas must be perpetually retained, which Holy Mother Church has once declared; and there must never be recession from that meaning under the specious name of a deeper understanding" - Dei Filius, First Vatican Council 1870

As for the dogma itself:

"Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff." - Unam Sanctam, Bull of Pope Boniface VIII promulgated November 18, 1302

With regards to John Carroll, of course he's going to be wishy-washy like that. Maryland is surrounded by protestants. If he went around telling people they had to swear allegiance to the pope to be saved, the Establishment Clause might have been under some early pressure.

I agree with you. But that reads to me like it's contradicted by some of the things that Vatican II says about tradition in Dei Verbum, along the lines of Newman.

I think there are ways to get out of some of that—Bellarmine thought that only the canons and other select parts of councils are infallible, I believe, and what you cited first wouldn't fall under that.

But there is the following from Dei Filius, which is an anathema, so everyone would agree that it's infallible:

If anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the church which is different from that which the church has understood and understands: let him be anathema.

Unfortunately, that particular statement is a little ambiguous—the argument could be made (I think it might be unclear, there are features in the text of Dei Filius that could support either interpretation), that that anathema, when it has the word here translated as knowledge (scientia in latin), refers to non-theological sciences like psychology, not to theology.

I would prefer that it were less ambiguous, since I have Catholic friends to argue against who like the idea of development of dogma, but that's how it goes.

(Also, someone else attempting to use the set of texts you pointed out to argue a formerly Catholic friend into more anti-Vatican II beliefs did result in that person leaving Roman Catholicism)