Kentucky Legislator Tom Riner and the Wall of Separation

1/5/2009--The New York Times story yesterday about Tom Riner and his constant quest for more public expression of God is a story about an opportunity to finally lay to rest some of the culture wars. Riner wants more expressions of gratitude to “Almighty God”, including a legislated reference to God’s providence by the State Office of Homeland Security.

Some or all of this may be unconstitutional under the courts’ current interpretation of the Establishment Clause, but it will be helpful to ask just why that might be. My manuscript, For the Establishment of Religion, argues that these religious expressions are constitutional only if interpreted differently from the way that Riner understands them. Riner undoubtedly is endorsing the God of the Bible, maybe even Jesus Christ. My book argues that references to God are constitutional because they are not unequivocally sectarian endorsements of this kind, but might mean something different, such as the meaningfulness of history and the objectivity of values.

Those who favor a strict separation of church and state seriously misunderstand the kind of polity we have always been. For example, the Constitution omits the word God. So, the separationist concludes, America cannot formally endorse God. But the word God appears everywhere else, such as in the Declaration of Independence and on our money. So, a prohibition on the endorsement of God cannot possibly be the only or best constitutional interpretation of the Establishment Clause, even aside from the political fact that the people insist on such endorsements.

The point should not be that God is not named, but that God is not defined in our tradition. Riner is wrong to insist that the God that may be acknowledged must be his version of God. His actions may be constitutional in promoting the public use of the word God, but his intentions are not.

What if this were actually said to Riner? What if Riner came to see that it is unfair and unconstitutional to tell people with public money just what God means, but that it is okay to acknowledge God as long as there is absolutely no official definition. He might come to see this as a legitimate bow to pluralism.

My aim is to keep America pious in the sense of committed to something beyond materialism and relativism. God as part of the public square is crucial to this effort. But I mean to include many people who think of themselves as atheists and many more who do not endorse Riner’s version of God, including myself. I have a feeling that a grand and important compromise along these lines is possible.

The Fighting in Gaza

1/3/2009--The depressing, developing catastrophe in Gaza is a source of distrust of religion for many people. I make the point in the book, Hallowed Secularism, that the hatreds spawned by religion are one reason that secularism is growing. Jesus said, By their fruits will you know them. Well, the fruits of institutional religion have been violence all too often.

Yet, the fighting in Gaza is not about religion, at least not primarily. I read in the Jewish Chronicle in Pittsburgh that Hamas had made proposals and had premised acceptance of these proposals on a cessation of bombing Israeli towns. I don’t say this to suggest that Hamas is in the right, but to suggest that the fighting in Gaza is not directly about the ultimate existence of Israel.

There should be a rule of international relations for the United States—whoever wins a fair election is the legitimate government. When Hamas won the most recent elections, what would have happened if it had been recognized as the legitimate government? Certainly matters would be no worse than they are now.

As most Israelis certainly are aware, there is no security for Israel in continuing military confrontation. There is no future in that. There must be peace. And ultimately that means convincing average people on both sides. Democracy is the only way to do that. But that means that Hamas must be permitted to govern. As long as Hamas does not cancel future elections, the democratic experiment must be permitted to go forward. Won’t the Palestinian voters eventually vote for peace? Or, do we imagine they are different from us, from the rest of humanity?

The religious threat in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not from Islam, but from the settler movement in Israel. That is where one hears that God gave all the land to the Jews. Let the Jews of America confront this imperial tendency in Torah and not worry so much about the flaws in Islam, real though they may also be.

Ursula K. LeGuin Responds

12/31/2008--Readers of this blog are aware of the role the science fiction classic The Dispossessed plays in the book I recently finished, For the Establishment of Religion. I used one scene from that book to illustrate the relationship of institutional religion to the broader reach of religion that I argue government may establish. One of the characters in the book states that religion is the profoundest relationship a human being can have to the cosmos. My point was that government may perfectly well promote that kind of relationship, but may not promote any particular religion.

I wrote to the author, Ms. LeGuin alerting her to my borrowing and she graciously responded. She objected mildly to the use I was making of her character. She wondered why government would be involved and feared for the wall of separation. She noted that belief is often the enemy of mystery, which is perhaps why she was loose in her treatment of religion in the novel.

Let me respond to Ms. LeGuin here so as not to become tedious to her. Government in our system is a source of cultural values. That is not so true in her book, which deals with a society without formal governing structures. But even in her anarchist setting, social pressure does the same job of setting the cultural context, which is one of the points of the book.

In our society, secularism is rapidly growing. The question is, what kind of secularism will it be? I want government to promote the objectivity of values and to oppose materialism, post-modern humanism and nihilism. I believe these latter worldviews are becoming a kind of default position for many. This is not a matter of doctrine or mystery, but of approaches to reality. Government may promote a healthy culture just as it may promote a healthy physical infrastructure.

A happy and healthy new year to my readers.

Hegel on Hallowed Secularism

12/29/2008--To be anticipated by Hegel is no shame. To be anticipated by Jurgen Habermas interpreting Hegel is still okay I guess. But to be anticipated by Fred Dallmayr criticizing Habermas’ interpretation of Hegel, well, that is not much of an accomplishment.

The text in question is Fred Dallmayr, Margins of Political Discourse (State Univ. NY Press 1989). Dallmayr is discussing and critiquing Jurgen Habermas' positions in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1987). According to Dallmayr, in the chapter on Hegel Habermas begins with the young Hegel in the theological writings: “Habermas points to a certain Romantic or mythopoetic version of reconciliation which Hegel shared with Schelling and Holderlin, his friends in the Tubingen seminary. Countering both the orthodoxy of positive (or established) religion and the abstractness of Enlightenment ideas, these writings appealed to a purified public faith or civil religiosity as the bond tying together and reconciling the conflicting segments of society. Only when represented in public festivals and cults and linked with myths engaging heart and phantasy—Hegel argued at the time—could a religiously mediated reason ‘permeate the entire fabric of the state’” 42.

This sounds very much like Hallowed Secularism, which also seeks a civil religiosity that avoids every dogmatic assertion. Hegel thus anticipated the idea of something like what the upcoming book and this blog are about.

Aside from the question of whether ties of this kind could lead to social “reconciliation,” which is how Dalllmayr presents Habermas’ interpretation, the question for us today is how such a phenomenon comes about. Upon what is Hegel’s civil religiosity built?

For Hegel, the answer to that question lies in the realm of the political or social. Thus, religion there involves relationships within the state. For Hallowed Secularism today, the answer will lie in the realm of science. Religion today must be natural in the sense of scientific regularity.

Chanukah—the Victory of the Taliban

12/26/2008--Tonight is the beginning of the seixth day of the Jewish holiday of Chanukah, thus six lights tonight. I learned growing up that Chanukah represented teh victory of religious liberty, that Antiochus Epiphanes, emperor of the Seleucid Empire, seized the Second Temple in 168 B.C., forbidding Jewish worship and requiring worship of the Greek gods instead. I was taught that the holiday commemorates the rededication of the holy Temple in Jerusalem after the Jews' 164 B.C. victory over the hellenists.

Here is how the story is usually told: The fighting began in Modiin, a village not far from Jerusalem. A Greed officer and soldiers assembled the villagers, asking them to bow to an idol and eat the flesh of a pig, activities fobidden to Jews. The officer asked Mattathias, a Jewish High Priest, to take part in the ceremony. He refused and another villager stepped forward and offered to do it instead. Mattathias became outraged, took out his sword and killed the man; then he killed the officer. His five sons and the othere villagers then attacked and killed the soldiers. Mattathias' family went into hiding in the nearby moutains, where many other Jews who wanted to fight the Greeks joinged them. They attacked Greek soldiers whenever possible. After three years, Mattathias' son Judah Maccabee, Judah the hammer, retook Jerusalem. But there was not enough oil to keep the ritual menorah in the Temple lit. Miraculously, the menorah burned for eight days, enough time to procure more oil.

The later rabbis had their doubts about Chanukah. For one thing, the victory of the Maccabees led to the establishment of the Hasmonean dynasty that persecuted religious opponents and, if I remember correctly, introduced the practice of cruxifixion of critics. The persecuted groups included the party that later became the Pharisees, who later became the rabbinic movement that created the Talmud.

In addition, the rabbis of the Talmud did not favor armed revolt against the overwhelming power of Rome, which the earlier revolt tended to inspire. Rabbinic Judaism began its life as a separate national movement with the opposition by Yochanan ben Zakkai to the war against Rome (66-73 A.D.) that led to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. The legend is told that during the siege of Jerusalem Zakkai arranged to be carried out of the city in a coffin so he could negotiate with the commander of the Roman forces, Vespasian. Zakkai predicted that Vespasian would become Emperor and that the Temple would soon be destroyed. In return, Vespasian granted Zakkai three wishes, including the right to resettle in Javne and continue teaching. Javne became the founding academy of Talmudic Judaism. The rabbis were realists, not zealots.

In this light, one can look differently at the range of opinion among the Jewish people at the time of the Hellenic Empires. Presumably, some of the Jews at the time did not want to give up Judaism but to begin an accommodation of Judaism to the then-modern world of Greek civilization. The mythical killing of the villager might then remind us not of religious liberty but of its opposite--of the tyranny of religious zealots who impose their fundamentalism by violence against their opponents who wish to live both religous and modern lives. In other words, the Maccabees could be viewed in a light similar to that of the Taliban in Afghanistan and all the other religious bigots in the world who are willing to kill those who do not follow their interpretation of religious traditions. I have often wondered why liberal Jews so love Chanukah when they would have been among the first victims of the Maccabees.

The HumanLight Holiday

12/24/2008—Yesterday, Brad Linder of NPR did a story about HumanLight, the secular holiday that coincides with the winter solstice period. According to the story, a number of humanist groups celebrate the holiday in a family-friendly way, with songs, stories and even candle lighting. The story showcased one such celebration, in the Philadelphia area last weekend.

According to the story, HumanLight was founded eight years ago to highlight reason and human achievement. Clearly, however, it also is a way for non-religious families to participate in the Christmas season.

According to Joe Fox, President of the Humanist Association of Greater Philadelphia, with whom I spoke after listening to the program, there is some controversy about HumanLight within the secular community because it is so religious in tone and feel.

HumanLight seems to perfectly represent the struggle in secularism over its connection to religion. My book Hallowed Secularism argues that secularism needs religion in order to be healthy and to serve a flourishing humanity. It is not surprising that parents would want their children to have a little magic during the holiday season. HumanLight follows the pattern that Hallowed Secularism predicts.

On the other hand, secularists here make the same mistake they are always making—over-praising human reason. Reason, after all, gave us Cold War mutually assured destruction and the calculated Vietnam War. Who would think you could separate human beings into two different parts—feeling and reasoning? Reason here really just means no supernatural world and its use that way is misleading.

Why celebrate human beings with all our faults? Better to take a leaf from Christianity and celebrate a holiday called “New Beginnings” that would emphasize the capacity of reality to allow for something new. That is the message of Christmas, perfectly captured in President Obama’s title—obviously Church inspired—The Audacity of Hope. In the darkness of human power—that of Rome—in a stable among the poor, reality responds with an event wholly unpredictable that brings a new grace to the world. Don’t praise us. Praise reality.

In the story, there was one moment that did not serve to overinflate the human. At the celebration, the children watched pictures of galaxies. The wonder of it brought them to silence. More of that. Less of us.

A New Kind of Faith

12/22/2008—I had the usual experience recently at a seasonal party of mentioning the word “truth” and hearing someone ask, “whose truth?”

As C.S. Lewis once suggested, the commitment to the objectivity of values—the belief that some things really are wrong or beautiful—is the real dividing line between religious people and nonreligious people. And, as he also knew, that dividing line does not respect churches or professions of atheism. Many people who call themselves religious are relativists and many who do not, believe passionately in the objectivity of values: think of secular human rights activists.

This observation brings forth strange bedfellows. Conservative jurisprudence is thoroughly relativistic, which is why Justice Scalia writes of history and text and never of truth. Some secularists understand how crucial the objectivity of values is. Sam Harris once proclaimed that he believed in objective right and wrong in a Newsweek interview. Austin Dacey has written a book—The Secular Conscience—defending the idea and criticizing secular relativism.

The problem for secularists is that without God, the concept of the objectivity of values requires rethinking. As Charles Taylor puts it, the phenomenology of universality is frustrated by an ontology of immanence. Or, to be blunt, who stands behind goodness as a guarantee that it is real if there is no God?

That rethinking has not yet been done. This is why “spirituality”, as in the common phrase “I am spiritual but not religious” is usually ethically and historically empty, reduced to personal experiences of transcendence. Truth is normative and operates in and through history. We have to make a public commitment, either expressly or with our lives.

It seems to me that the belief in, and commitment to, the objectivity of values, of right and wrong in this context, is a faith claim. It is a faith claim not really different from belief in God, except that the laws of science lead to skepticism here differently than they do in regard to theism. Is the secularist willing to die for truth, knowing full well that there is no heaven and no Messiah for redemption? The answer can be yes, for this is a new kind of faith.

The Hatred of Unions

12/18/2008—One cleavage that can still be seen between conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants is the attitude toward unions. I don’t think hostility toward unions is pronounced among Catholics. It certainly is among certain Protestants. The difference may lie in differing understandings of solidarity. Conservative Protestantism in America is very individualistic, even heretically so. Karl Barth would not be at home in it.

American hostility to unions is a long standing tendency. It is part of why socialism did not quite catch on here. You see it in the hostility toward public education and teacher unions. And you see it in attitudes toward the automobile loans as opposed to aid to the financial industry. It did not occur to anyone to ask about compensation among ordinary workers in the financial sector, whose compensation, of course, is quite extraordinary. Somehow, that was not even on the table, whereas it is regarded as an affront that ordinary autoworkers make good money. Naturally, good money isn’t so good when your industry is asking for public money, but that was true for Wall Street brokers too.

I don’t know why many American Christians do not see the importance of unions. Our economy is foundering today in part because ordinary wages have lagged. They have lagged for many reasons, but we should not assume that pure market forces are always at work. Partly, management takes more because it can. It can because unions are weak. Stronger unions raise all wages. Ask the nonunion workers at the Nissan plant in Tennessee whether they want to see the United Auto Workers Union broken. They may not want to be unionized, but I imagine they know that potential unionization improves their situation. We need to return to an economy of widely spread wealth. It will be best for the rich too.

Is Dobby Really Free?

12/16/2008--At the end of the movie Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry tricks Lucius Malfoy into freeing his house elf, Dobby. By the rules of Harry’s universe, masters can grant manumission to what are essentially slaves by giving to the creature an article of clothing. [This is not so odd; in the Book of Ruth in the Old Testament, certain transactions are attested by giving one's shoe to the other party]

Harry secretes a sock in a book that itself is evidence of seditious activity and then accuses Malfoy of having given the book to an innocent party. The charge is a ruse designed to distract Malfoy from looking at the book before giving the book to Dobby. The ruse works.

The question is, why is this trick effective? Obviously Malfoy never intended to free Dobby. Why isn’t intention required? By the logic of Harry’s trick, any elf could easily free himself simply by secreting articles of clothing all manner of containers that would then be unknowingly passed back to the elf.

This issue of the intent required to free a slave, and other aspects of the law of manumission, was the subject of Bob Cover’s groundbreaking 1984 book, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process. A trick like the one Harry pulled would probably not suffice to transfer any other kind of property, absent special circumstances. Cover examined the willingness of judges to bend the rules in favor of freedom. The book raised the question of the relationship of positive law to natural law, or transcendent norms.

The movie, and the book upon which it was based, apparently assume that Dobby is free despite the dishonesty involved. The question is, why would that be so?

The Firing of Don Guter

12/11/2008—The rest of the world is unaware that here at Duquesne University School of Law, the Dean, Don Guter, was summarily fired yesterday. No reason was given. Dean Guter did not deserve to be fired. The law school is doing very well on his watch and there is no unmentioned scandal going on. President Dougherty just wanted his own person in as dean. Guter was too independent in his judgment. This is not big news. Things like this happen all the time.

But this is a Catholic Law School. Not only that, but we hear all the time about Duquesne’s “mission”, to serve God by serving students.

I make the point in the book Hallowed Secularism that one of the reasons for rising secularism is that religious institutions do not behave as well as secular ones. That is not always true, but it is true here at Duquesne. When it happens, religion itself suffers. Religion is made to look ridiculous in the eyes of the non-religious world.

Karl Barth once said there is the church of Esau and the church of Jacob. There is the man-made church institution and then there is the representative of the holy spirit--verily God’s representative on earth. It isn’t fair to expect religious institutions to be better than human beings tend to be.

That is true but it is not the point. I would like to see the representatives of Our Religions under the weight of representing God. I would like to see them always asking themselves, what will the nonreligious think if we do a certain questionable thing? This is the way that Jews used to ask, what will the goyim think?

I wish President Dougherty had said to himself before he acted, I had better be especially sure and especially just, because not just my reputation will suffer if I am wrong. Nor just the reputation of Duquesne University. But God’s reputation will suffer. And it has.

The Future of Secularism in American Politics

12/8/2008--for the content of this post, go to The Huffington Post blog at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-ledewitz/the-future-of-secularism_b_149232.html

The Conclusion of For the Establishment of Religion

12/7/2008--I have finished the manuscript of what I hope will become the third book in my trilogy about religion in American life: For the Establishment of Religion. Here is the conclusion:

At the beginning of her classic science fiction novel, The Dispossessed, Ursula LeGuin describes a space flight between two worlds that had been cut off from each other. An inhabitant of one world, the physicist Shevek of Anarres, is being transported by a crew from the other world.

In one scene from the flight, Shevek asks the ship’s doctor why the Second Officer seems to be afraid of him. The Doctor tells Shevek that the Second Officer is religious and knows that “there’s no religion on Anarres.”

Shevek replies, “No religion? Are we stones on Anarres?”

The Doctor responds, “I mean established religion—churches, creeds—“

Shevek ponders this and comes to a new conclusion:

I see… . You admit no religion outside the churches, just as you admit no morality outside the laws. …

The vocabulary makes it difficult. [T]he word religion is…rare. Not often used. …[Y]ou could not seriously believe that we had no religious capacity? That we could do physics while we were cut off from the profoundest relationship with the cosmos?

Our situation in law has not changed at all from the one LeGuin described over thirty years ago. The vocabulary makes it difficult. This book has argued that the government may not establish religion in the sense of churches and creeds, but must establish the religious capacity, or try to, or at least be allowed to try to, if society is to flourish.

This is not a matter of religion versus secularism. I am a secularist. There are many kinds of secularism. It is a matter instead of being open to the profoundest relationship with the cosmos. The New Atheists and many who favor a strict separation of church and state are not open. They are not open to mystery. They not open to the transcendent. Under their influence, and without a counterbalance in the culture, their narrowness may one day come to dominate our social climate. Then we will be stones indeed.

The United States Supreme Court has a role to play here: positive or negative; opening or closing. At the moment, the Justices seem only to have two modes. On the one hand, separation of church and state in the broad sense of opposition to any public expression that has the smell of religion about it. On the other hand, the conservatives, just waiting for their chance to enthrone the Bible as the winner of a contest to be the dominant public expression.

There need be no winners and losers. Let the Court announce that we share a religious capacity and that government, when it establishes religion, is simply trying to keep that human capacity alive in a world of deadening technology, consumption and entertainment. Even when the government uses traditional religious symbols, language and images, it is still trying to keep open a universal hope. It is not declaring winners and losers. If the Court were to announce this, law would occupy a role it has recently forgotten: peacemaker.

Of course, there will still be those who honestly contest the religious capacity, who dispute openness, who despise mystery. Perhaps they are right. And they will certainly have their say. But they have no right to government neutrality.

We are too used to thinking of established religion as a powerful force. It is not going to be so for very long. We had better begin to prepare for the day that it is not. Secularism may confidently put down its weapons. It is going to win the contest against established religion. But when it does, it is going to have to turn to its vanquished foe for help. When it does so, law should not stand in the way.

The Secularization of Islam

12/4/2008—We may look back at the terrorist attacks in Mumbai as the beginning of the secularization of Islam. That, at least, is how the Wars of Religion in Europe during the latter half of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century affected religious life there. Those wars between Catholics and Protestants not only exhausted Europe, they played a part in delegitimizing Christianity among European elites. It was felt by many that any institution that could be responsible for such carnage must be bad.

In similar fashion, if Islamic leadership is unable to decouple Islam from fanatical violence, undoubtedly Islam will lose its educated youth. I do not mean to criticize Islam on these matters. That is not really for an outsider to do. But terrorism is never going to be a choice for the overwhelming majority of believers. If religion and violence are seen as partners, people will eventually turn away from religion.

I doubt that there is anything that Muslim leaders can actually do to isolate Islam’s violent minority. Monotheism of all kinds seems to have this potential for violence.

It took a hundred years in Europe for secularity to really take root. But it did. And there were many reasons for it. But religious violence clearly played a part. Perhaps in the future, Mumbai will be viewed as playing the same kind of part.

How Thankful Was Your Thanksgiving?

12/2/2008--How thankful was your Thanksgiving? Mine was not at all. I wrote in a prior post that Thanksgiving was not part of the culture wars. But, that is not really true. The context of genuine thankfulness marks the difference between a “religious” Thanksgiving and what we would now call a secular Thanksgiving.

This Thanksgiving, I was on a boat in Pittsburgh for a Thanksgiving cruise on the three rivers. It was very nice, with a large number of people. But the cruise people know better than to try to begin the festivities with a prayer. Or, maybe it was not even a prior bad experience. Maybe outside of traditional religion, we are out of the habit of prayer.

Hallowed Secularism must develop the habit thankfulness. This is as close to a healthy attitude toward reality as secularism can now get. But, of course, we need liturgy. Secularists cannot sit down to a Thanksgiving meal and say, “Heavenly Father, we give thee thanks.”

We should first be clear whether thankfulness is necessary. Should we be thankful? Or should we take the world as our right? Which of those two attitudes is healthier? Which one is closer to truth? Did we make the world, or was it a gift?

The world and all its good things can be a gift even though there is no person-like being who gave it. It could just be a gift.

I’m going to make sure next Thanksgiving to begin the meal by saying, “for what we am about to receive, we are thankful; for all the gifts of our lives, we are thankful”. And just so it does not seem awkward to a secularist, I am going to start with that prayer at every meal.

The Grace of Religious Believers

11/29/2008--Do you remember how the Amish reacted to the murder of young schoolchildren in their community? Do you remember how shocked the world was at their forgiveness and generosity? They did not give in to hate. It was quite a comparison to how we all reacted to 9/11.

Now read the reaction of a different religious community, the Lubavitch, to the murder of Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife in Mumbai. Hear again the grace and care. Hear again how we are never to hate in response to evil. Hear again the promise of a better world, while we strive to improve this world every day.

Now, I ask you, fellow secularists, how are we going to live a life like this? Where will the resources and wisdom and peace come from? I don't know, but in the meantime we must draw our Religions close and learn what we can from them


Dear Friends,

Our hearts are shattered at the news from Mumbai where Rabbi Gabi and Rivka Holtzberg, emissaries of the Lubavitcher Rebbe- Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, of righteous memory- were among those murdered in the terrorist attack on the Chabad House there. Tonight their little son Moshe'le, who was miraculously rescued, will mark his second birthday.

Gabi and Rivka uprooted themselves from a life of comfort and convenience to live thousands of miles away from the familiar surroundings of New York and Israel, and moved to India. There they inspired and cared for the local Jewish community, scores of Jewish tourists and business people who frequented their Chabad House. The Holtzberg's shared their love of Yiddishkeit and the warmth of their family with people of all backgrounds in India. And now they have made the ultimate sacrifice for our faith and community. They lived and died as exemplars of the Jewish people on the frontlines. May their souls be bound up in the eternal bonds of life and may their family be comforted among the mourners of Zion.

We have no words, we have no answers. We don't begin to understand G-d's ways, nor are we expected to. Only G-d Himself can restore the light of Moshe'le's life and comfort him and the rest of this aching world. And until He does that, we must continue their life's work. They deserve no less.

We will continue to try and emulate Gabi and Rivka, to seek out our brothers and sisters in every corner of our community, in every corner of the globe - with love and commitment - with acts of goodness and kindness, until that day when G-d Himself will wipe the tears from every face.

It's almost Shabbat. Candle lighting time tonight is 4:39. In a world that has suddenly become darker, we must bring in more light. We urge every Jewish woman to help transform that darkness with the light of Shabbat candles this Friday and every Friday. We call on every person to increase their mitzvot - acts of goodness and kindness - until the day G-d fulfills His promise to us and gives us a world transformed, perfected and redeemed.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Yisroel and Chani Altein

The Habit of Hope

11/25/2008

Today is Thanksgiving. I am reminded that this is the one holiday about which religious believers and nonbelievers do not quarrel. Thanksgiving is beyond the culture wars.

This is the cultural option we need more of. At the moment, the believer and the nonbeliever see themselves as apart, really as enemies. This is not true, however. Even the Pope last week was misinterpreted. On certain matters there cannot be dialogue among the religions. On others, yes there can be, he said. But there is no threat in this. Our religions must remain as they are or they could not teach us secularists anything. Their dogmas are their own. Out of this does not come synthesis, but variety: a secularism that has learned from all the religions.

Thanksgiving is a gift to the secular world from the religious world. That is how we should think of the religions in general, as gifts.

I am finally finishing Ursula LeGuin’s book, The Dispossessed. It is remarkable and I recommend it to you. The book tries to imagine genuinely different human societies. At its center is a colony that tries to live a nonauthoritarian communism, a real anarchy. The book is not a pitch for this; it is not like Robert Heinlein’s 1966 ad for libertarianism, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. No human society avoids flaws.

What LeGuin’s book is really about is hope. In the book, humanity has ceased to hope. The physicist Shevek sees hope as somehow present in the structure of time. This is his new understanding of physics.

Hope is another gift from Our Religions, or some of them. When a politician like Barack Obama comes along and offers just a little of it, our thirst for hope comes rushing out. But hope does not come in the form a this or that person. It has to be believed in as a possibility, out of faith. Life can be really different. A secular society that thinks it is at war with religion, with the very notion of faith, is going to have a hard time sustaining hope. So we had better not become that kind of secular society.

Pleasant Grove City v. Summum

Since it now appears that the following letter to the editor will not be published by the New York Times, I can publish it here. The Pleasant Grove case, Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, was argued in the United States Supreme Court on Novemeber 12, 2008. The case arises out of a lawsuit in which a religious movement, Summum, sued a municipality to either remove a display of the Ten Commandments or allow it to put up a display on the same public land honoring its religious wisdom. The argument before the Supreme Court, however, did not involve the right of the City to display the Ten Commandments under the Establishment Clause. It only involved the right of Summum to put up its own display in the same area. The New York Times took an editorial position in favor of Summum. As the following critical letter indicates, this is a little hard to take seriously. In the case's current posture, I don’t see how Summum can possibly succeed.


To the Editor:

Your editorial position on the Pleasant Grove City case is incoherent. You suggest that the case is a matter of religious discrimination since the City elevated Christianity over another religion in allowing a Ten Commandments display but not a display by Summum. Logically, your objection should not be to any discrimination but to the elevation of Christianity in the first place. Summum originally did object to the Ten Commandments display on Establishment Clause grounds, but the case is not before the Supreme Court in that posture.

In the current posture of the case, Summum cannot possibly succeed. Either the original Ten Commandments display endorses Christianity--or Judeo-Christianity--in which case the proper relief is to remove it, not to add another religion--or the original display is speech by the government that endorses a secular ideal that the Ten Commandments merely symbolizes. If the latter is the case, the Ten Commandments display is not an endorsement of any religion, but is a kind of argument for the transcendent foundations of law similar to the commitment in the Declaration of Independence to unalienable rights. Either way, the proper answer is not to add a display by Summum.

Mike Huckabee’s Christian Party

11/22/2008--Henry Olsen, a Vice President of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal last January, after Mike Huckabee’s victory in the Iowa caucuses, that argued that Huckabee was trying to create a new kind of political movement along the lines of the Christian Democratic tradition in Europe. Huckabee’s populist economics combined with his Christian identification suggested, said Olsen, a “pro-faith” “pro-government” position that would be a challenge to the more secular, private property oriented Reagan wing of the Republican Party.

Now, while the Republicans are trying to figure out what comes next, Huckabee is back with a new book, "Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That's Bringing Common Sense Back to America", which judging by his appearance on NPR last week, represents his position in this Republican Party debate.

Huckabee’s position is probably out-of-touch politically at the moment, since our economic crisis is dominating everything. But that should not rule him out, since Ronald Reagan was also out of touch for awhile. The wheel may turn back to the questions that Huckabee is raising.

Undoubtedly some would say that creating a Christian Party of any kind violates constitutional principles of the separation of church and state. [Notice I don’t say it would be unconstitutional, since it plainly would not be that]. It is probably true that political division along religious lines would be anathema to the framers of our Constitution. So, let’s consider the constitutional principles that might be involved.

One fundamental constitutional principle seems to me to be that votes for a candidate should not be cast on the basis of identity. Of course voters violate this principle all the time, but just as President-elect Obama would be the first to say that African-Americans voters should not have voted for him because he is black, Huckabee would agree that voters who are Christian should only vote for him if their interpretations of the Gospel yield the same policies for public life that his interpretation does. He would agree that Christians should not vote for him just because he is a Christian. It is true that some of those policies touch on faith, such as literal expressions of faith in the public square. But, unless a display of the Ten Commandments on public property is itself ruled unconstitutional by the courts, having such displays there is just another policy. We can see plainly that Huckabee is not running on Christian identity because if offered support by “values conservatives” who are Jewish, Muslim, or secular, Huckabee would welcome them on principle—and not cynically.

This latter observation suggests that the legitimacy of voting for a substantive proposition, including Proposition 8 in California, does not usually depend on the motivation for the vote. The fact that Huckabee claims his policies are supported by the Gospel is not itself a ground to assert that his project violates constitutional principles.

Why then does Huckabee often use the visual symbols of Christianity? I suggest it is not to make a pitch to Christians. It is a different shorthand. It is a quite specific and well-understood shorthand for a collection of otherwise perfectly constitutional policies. I don’t agree with much that Huckabee proposes, but his kind of faith electioneering threatens no constitutional principle.

Ursula LeGuin on Economics

11/18/2008--In the midst of the short-term financial catastrophe that has enveloped much of the world, we must also think about the longer term. What kind of economic life should humankind have? Replying “market” to that question is not a complete answer. The question is, what assumptions about the nature of human beings are implied by the market? Perhaps we need to reject at least some of those assumptions.

Here is LeGuin’s take on economics from her novel The Dispossessed. The description is of Shevek, the anarchist physicist, trying to learn economics.

“He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the money-changers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s act, even the terrible became banal.”

Our new economic arrangements, whatever they are to be, must begin here.

The Mormon church and Proposition 8

11/17/2008--According to the Associated Press, on Friday, November 7, protestors in Salt Lake City “marched around headquarters of the Mormon Church” chanting “Separate church and state... .” The protest was held to criticize the Church for its enthusiastic support of Proposition 8.

There has been more criticism of the Church since then. Today, a story appeared in the LA Times in which Jim Key, a spokesman for the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, was quoted as follows: "We're making a statement that no one's religious beliefs should be used to deny fundamental rights to others… ." The story mentioned estimates, which could not be confirmed, that Mormons gave more than $20 to support Proposition 8.

Now, I was an opponent of Proposition 8 and I support gay marriage (I now wish I had sent some money to the effort to defeat Proposition, but I was guilty of thinking that such a thing could never pass in California). Nevertheless, I have to say that these quasi-constitutional criticisms make no sense. Obviously no one’s religious beliefs should be used to deny fundamental rights, but no one’s political beliefs should either. The question is whether gay marriage is a fundamental right. A majority of Californians does not think it is.

Do these critics really mean that our religious beliefs should not inform our voting? And that it is violation of the separation of church and state when they do? This will come as a shock to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Imagine now the opposite scenario. I go to the polls to vote against Proposition 8. Someone claims that I only support gay marriage because I learned in Hebrew School that all human beings are made in the image of God. This person then says by voting against Proposition 8 on this religious ground, I am violating neutrality toward religion. This is silly. Voters don’t need anybody’s permission to vote. And they come to their conclusion about how to vote through all kinds of considerations.

Next time, say that the Mormon leadership are bigots. Not that they mixed church and state.

Pope Benedict's Healthy Secularity

11/15/2008--According to media reports, Pope Benedict this week called for a “healthy secularity” in public life. While the Pope is particularly concerned with the role of religion in a quite secular Europe, we in America have to come to grips with precisely the same question: just what is a “healthy secularity”?

The project of Hallowed Secularism is one attempt to do exactly that for nonbelievers. But the matter can be looked at as a question of deep public policy under the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the Constitution.

A healthy secularity is one that does not choose among institutional religions or between religion and certain forms of secularism. It does, however, stand against nihilism, materialism and postmodern humanism in the name of objective meaning and justice in history. It openly encourages belief in this common core both by those persons who belong to churches and those who do not, those who believe in God and those who do not. It does not fear the use of traditional religious symbols, such as the word God, to express this common core, as long as it is clear that these symbols are not being used to prefer any one form of belief.

I hope that a call such as this for a healthy secularity might cut through the pro and anti religion debate that some secularists think is a crucial issue in the world.

The Fight Over Christmas

11/13/2008--Recently, the media have reported on the planned Washington D.C. bus advertising campaign by the American Humanist Association. The ads will proclaim, “Why believe in a God? Just be good for goodness sake.” The ads contain a link to a humanist website.

The ads brought the following response from American Family Association President, Tim Wildmon, “It’s a stupid ad. …How do we define ‘good’ if we don’t believe in God? God in his word, the Bible, tells us what’s good and bad and right and wrong. If we are each ourselves defining what’s good, it’s going to be a crazy world.” The AFA has its own “It’s OK to say Merry Christmas” campaign going.

As a nonbeliever, I think Mr. Wildmon missed a great opportunity. Forgetting the Bible for a minute—for after all, the Bible does not speak at all clearly on most issues that confront us—the humanists would probably agree with him that goodness is an objective standard not dependent on human will. Once upon a time, nonbelievers confronted the implications of relativism, but my impression is that today’s humanists do not. Even the tone of the proposed ad suggests there is such a thing as goodness.

Belief in objective right and wrong is not exactly the same as belief in God, but C.S. Lewis, for one, considered the former commitment to be the one that really defines the common core of religious belief—including forms of philosophy we do not usually consider religious.

Mr. Wildmon should have responded by asking the reporter to go back to the humanists. “Tell them I think it is right to kill people,” he should have said, and “ask them whether, if I think that is good, it is good? If the answer is no, ask them what standard other than human will could exist in a world without God?”

I think there is an answer to that question, but I’m not sure the humanists want to debate the matter.

From the Conclusion of For the Establishment of Religion

11/11/2008--In her science fiction classic, The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin describes the trip of a physicist from an anarchist planet to a more Earth-like planet. On the trip, the physicist, Shevek, asks the ship’s doctor why a crew member seems to dislike him.

“[I[t’s religious bigotry”, replies the doctor. The crew member belongs to a religious group and consider Shevek a “dangerous atheist” because “there’s no religion,” that is, “established religion—churches, creeds” on Shevek’s planet.

Shevek is surprised. “No religion? Are we stones… ?”

But Shevek figures it out. “You admit no religion outside the churches, just as you accept no morality outside the laws.” Shevek says there is religion on his planet. The Fourth Mode—religion—is one of the “Categories”. Few people practice all the Modes. “But the Modes are built of the natural capacities of the mind, you could not seriously believe that we had no religious capacity? How could we do physics while we were cut off from the profoundest relationship man has with the cosmos?”

In America, and indeed much of the West, we make the same mistake the crew member made. We imagine that secularists are without “religion” just because they are without churches. Our law of church and state is even based on this strange idea. That is why we say government must be neutral about “religion” when we should mean merely that government should be neutral about the different churches.

But in America, unlike Shevek, even the secularists imagine they are outside the religious sphere. There are even atheist voices that argue against “religion” and fail to distinguish good religion from bad.

One cannot be without religion—or at least a lot of suppression is needed to try. And as Shevek explains, religion as a category is not anti-science.

Who Lost California?

11/8/2008--The question is, who was at fault? Like many others, I was surprised and disappointed that Proposition 8 passed, thus amending the California Constitution and in effect overturning a State Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage in the name of that same Constitution. I would now like to name the guilty party who caused that result.

Part of the blame goes to the dishonest leaders of the Christian right who convinced many ordinary people that there was more to this court decision than merely allowing gay people to marry. They claimed that preaching against homosexuality would next be criminalized. But, of course, free speech remains free, free exercise of religion remains free and overturning gay marriage does not prevent legislation against hate speech. Proposition 8 had nothing to do with religious liberty and anyone who says otherwise thinks the gospel needs lies to support it.

Part of the blame goes to the majority of voters, who simply lacked sufficient compassion to recognize justice when it was right in front of them.

Part of the blame goes to whatever moron thought that the way to gain the right of gay marriage in California was through a court decision. Just as a practical matter, such a decision inevitably would be met by a proposed constitutional amendment. Why would anyone think that such an election would be easily won? Surely in California legislation less far reaching but less likely to set off a constitutional amendment could have been passed. Now California is stuck with a Constitution that will have to be changed again later.

Much blame goes to the California Supreme Court. That court struck down a state ban on same-sex marriage in a 4-3 decision in May, spurring the Proposition 8 campaign. Why don’t State Supreme Courts notice that federal courts, already burned by Roe v. Wade, leave gay marriage alone? The State courts keep treating this issue as purely a legal one without considering what we in the law call prudential matters—are people ready for it? Will the legal arguments be persuasive? What will happen next? Even the terms of court decisions make a big difference. A court can strike down a statutory ban on gay marriage but leave the decision in abeyance until the legislature can deal with it, leaving open all kinds of compromises, such as civil unions, differing terminology etc. Justice Scalia once said that Roe did not really aid abortion rights in the long run because it nationalized what had been building state by state compromises on abortion and created the pro-life movement. Courts are better threats than actors and judges should remember that.

Okay, the actor, actually actors, who are most to blame for Proposition 8 are the naton’s law schools, for failing to teach an organic constitutionalism that recognizes that governance is never just a matter of principle. Law is not a science but an art. And a Constitution does not belong to lawyers but to the people. Its interpretation must always ultimately remain their interpretation. Courts can only lead.

God and the Election of Barack Obama

11/6/2008--Listening to comments of high school students concerning the election of Barack Obama on NPR this morning I was uplifted by their awakened hope for the future. Whatever you think of Obama, his election was something genuinely new and hopeful in the world.

When the biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann described the core biblical understanding of God, he emphasized this sense of surprise: “The Old Testament insists that there is a moral shape to the public process that curbs the raw exercise of power. It equally insists that there is a hidden cunning in the historical process that is capable of surprise and that prevents the absolutizing of any program or power.” This election is the kind of surprise Brueggemann was pointing to.

I don’t mean Barack Obama was sent from God. I mean that at the heart of reality, there is grace. We don’t get what we deserve. Something wonderful and unexpected will often happen.

President Barack Obama

11/4/2008--The work of Gettysburg has now come to completion and Abraham Lincoln can rest in peace at last.

Praying for Victory in this Election

11/4/2008--I have been asked the following question: while the religious believer can pray for a good outcome today, what can the hallowed secularist pray for? This is my short answer:

Let's assume that you believe in the God of the Bible. What would you pray for in terms of this election? It would be blasphemy to pray that God intervene and give victory to your candidate. After all, you might be on the "wrong" side or there might not be a "right" side (see Lincoln: we don't hope God is on our side but that we are on God's side). So, if you are a believer, you can only pray that you have been true to God, or have tried to be true, and that God have compassion on flawed humanity so that we don't get what we deserve. I think the hallowed secularist prays in precisely this way, except substituting for "true to God," true to that which most unifies all reality and hopes for compassion for all (See the Sh'ma, God is one).

Religion and the 2008 Campaign

11/2/2008--Now that the campaign is almost over, and whoever wins, we can ask whether religion played much of a role. The obvious answer is, no. Religion, and other related issues, like gay rights, were overwhelmed by the economic catastrophe that affected almost all Americans, indeed much of the world.

The less obvious answer is, no, but because the Democrats did so much to take it out of play. All through the primaries and the election, the Democrats constantly referred to God and did everything to seem faith-friendly—except changing their positions on substantive issues, which they did not do.

The unlikely answer, though still a part of the story, is of course. The religious right ultimately got a candidate of its own after all: Governor Palin. And Senator Obama lost many votes over the religion issue, whether on substance, the Muslim rumor or Reverend Wright. And the fight within the Catholic Church over the permissibility of supporting a pro-choice candidate was truly something awesome to behold. I’m certain many votes will still be cast on religious grounds in 2008.

P.S. A recent comment asked whether I have any enthusiasm for Barack Obama. I do. Quite a lot in fact, though the task facing the next President is monumental. It’s just that I have supported and admired John McCain for a very long time. I think in 2000 he would have made a better President than Al Gore. But not a better one than Barack Obama in 2008, for reasons related both to Obama and to McCain.