I recently went to “Bach Vespers” at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church here in New York. The music was good, the ceremony dignified, the physical surroundings beautiful and fitting, the people highly presentable in a high-class respectable Northern European serious-minded style.
I won’t go back, because all those fine things were made part of the rites of an evil religion.
The church describes itself as “a ‘Reconciling in Christ’ Congregation, welcoming all persons regardless of sexual orientation, race, ethnic origin, gender, class or any other possible exclusionary distinction.”
All that, interpreted literally, is entirely unobjectionable. Any half-way serious church could say the same, because what it has to offer is meant for everyone and offered as such.
A normal church would say though what it is that it has to offer to everyone. Holy Trinity leaves the point obscure. To all appearances, what it offers is that it welcomes everybody to a congregation that is based on the principle of welcoming everybody.
What could that mean? When they’re not doing Bach, is the processional “We’re here because we’re here,” followed by “For he’s a jolly good fellow“? That, of course, would be absurd. There must be something going on that they aren’t mentioning—especially when the congregation doesn’t look at all like a cross-section of New York society.
The program noted that as part of their observance of World AIDS Day they had panels of the World AIDS Quilt on display. Again, there is nothing wrong about expressing concern about a killer disease. Why AIDS, though? Why not prostate cancer or infant diarrhea? Both are underfunded by comparison, and I thought religious progressives were supposed to stand by people who get left out. It’s true that AIDS is a major catastrophe in Africa, but if they’re upset about that are they big into the Ugandan solution that emphasizes abstinence and monogamy? I very much doubt it.
So what’s the story? It seems obvious that the point of their statement of distinctives is not that they welcome everyone to what they have to offer, but that Other People Don’t, and those other people are evil bigots. In substance, the statement is an attack by people who identify as Christian on people—they personalize the issue—who take Christian morality, at least sexual morality, seriously. It is an attack that refuses to say what it is about, and that is basic to the religious mission of the church. And it is that mission that they are using Bach and traditional Christian ceremonies and accessories to promote.
What is that mission, though? Evidently, it’s an attempt to reconfigure the world so that Holy Trinity’s points of concern, “sexual orientation, race, ethnic origin, gender, class or any other possible exclusionary distinction,” play no role in ordering social life. Why otherwise would they put elimination of “discrimination” front and center as their ultimate religious commitment?
Everything’s going to be based on other things, then, so we can all be free to do and be whatever we want as long as it doesn’t interfere with the new basis of social order. What is that basis, though? Evidently, money, certified expertise, and supposedly neutral bureaucracy, all in the service of maximum equal preference satisfaction. It’s not clear what else it could be if all other distinctions are eliminated.
The people attending were evidently prosperous, highly educated, well-placed functionaries, and they think all that’s A-OK. In effect, then, the view of the good folks at Holy Trinity is that Christ was crucified, Martin Luther took his stand, and Bach wrote his masterpieces, all so that people just like them could rule over the populace like contented cattle, while doing what they please in their private lives.
I’m sure they don’t look at it that way. Very likely they think God’s doing a New Thing, and what they’re doing is something wonderful. I find it hard to see it that way, though, so count me out.
That church
That church has bean a far left bastion for years. It has been thoroughly taken over. It is common condition, by the way, for up scale churches in NYC. In this case it is indeed a shame for they have a first rate music program. Even the Catholic churches suffer from this left wing infiltraton, though to a much smaller degree, though they are getting worse by the year.
In my parish (I am an RC) you here all sorts of nonsense about “social justice”.
The mainstream denominations have been thoughly debauched by the Left. They moeindugle in moral vanity than the do religious worship. These debauched elites have bought hook line and sinker the leftist propaganda that the West is evil, starting with Christianity, of course.
One wonders how we can survive with folks like this running things. “Inclusion”? Well it is just the opposite of course. It is war against the West.
Don’t take “nondiscrimination” literally
Jim Kalb asks,
A world where all those categories play no role is just their ostensible aim. They’re not consciously misleading anyone, but if they truly wanted a race-blind, gender-blind, etc. society, they wouldn’t be supporting affirmative action and “diversity” so religiously. These aren’t 1960s liberals. While they want an intrusive bureaucratic government, they don’t want a world where blackness, gayness, and femaleness, etc. “play no role in ordering social life”. What they want is to stand with the Other against the Privileged, where the Privileged is defined as white-male-heterosexual, and the Other is defined as anyone else. And no, they don’t think God’s doing a New Thing. They think that they are doing an Old Thing, namely, following the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.
This is light-years away from the nondiscrimination of 1960s liberalism.
Haven’t we been through all this?
The bad thing about formally colorblind etc. liberalism from the current point of view is that it allows race, sex etc. to continue to play a role in ordering social life—as demonstrated, for example, by disproportionate representation in leadership positions. To make them truly nonfunctional you have to equalize their results, which is what e.g. affirmative action is intended to do. And people do talk about religious support for homosexual activity as an instance of God doing a new thing.
I’ll try to rem tene
Ouch! Sorry if I repeated myself, I’ve got an awful memory. I’ll try to respond with something new.
By “nonfunctional” I assume you mean that being black, gay, etc. will be no more important socially than being left-handed or wearing glasses. One reason I don’t believe that this represents contemporary liberalism’s ideal is that liberals themselves don’t describe their ideal this way. Half a century ago, they did describe their ideal this way (for blacks of course – the other categories hadn’t been discovered), even if they supported color-conscious means to that end. The best explanation for the change in liberal rhetoric over the last half century is that it represents a change in belief, not a hidden agenda or whatever.
Even if you’re right that equality of results via affirmative action is necessary to make these categories truly nonfunctional, that doesn’t mean that equality of results is a means to that end.
Anyway, I hope that was a new comment. If this is something I’ve said before, then apologies in advance.
What’s primary and what’s secondary?
By “nonfunctional” I mean something like “not promoting social functioning through the way it works.” If “Hispanic” refers to a loose system of practices, attitudes, and social networks that help people make sense of their lives and deal with what comes up, then in that case ethnicity is functional. If “Hispanic” is a marker that picks out people thought to need government benefits to counteract the bad effects of the system of practices, attitudes, and networks they’re tied into, then in that case it’s not functional.
As you suggest, liberal rhetoric and talking points change from time to time. Liberals seem to make the change without much sense of incongruity and without losing many adherents. To me that suggests those things aren’t fundamental, so to understand what’s going on we should try to see what stays the same.
I’ve been an amateur observer
I’ve been an amateur observer at this sort of political philosophical level for a little while. You notice early on that smart people hold crummy views and attitudes, such as the one supported in the arrangements you’re critiquing here, and that they don’t reflect on them. This still fascinates me, though by now it shouldn’t. Obviously rationality and fairness are highly contingent qualities.
I’d assume they’re ELCA. They
I’d assume they’re ELCA. They represent a little more than half of American Lutherans. The Missouri Synod is conservative and the Wisconsin Synod even more conservarive.
Social issues
Social issues (non-discrimination and the like) are the results of the society’s evolution. Now you would not think that a sane person would officially ban a mixed (black and white) marriage, yet in Virginia it was illegal until 1967. You would not think that death penalty for homosexuality is a sane law, yet in Uganda the president just trying to institute it. So you see, this all reflects the evolution of society. Over a hundred years ago, people thought that slavery was a pretty normal thing, good in the eyes of God; you probably would think in the same terms, sneering at abolitionists, lamenting their actions as directed at erasing all distinctions, of destroying the established social order. And I would say, such attitudes were normal, and you’d be very normal too. But such normalcy usually goes extinct and all that is remains is a sense of deep shame for the past idiocies.
Evolution, devolution, revolution
You’re right that sometimes some things seem normal and other times they don’t, and sometimes differing standards of normality make people ashamed of the past or present. Dunno what that proves. Go with the flow? Turn going with the flow or some particular scheme of social development into a religion? The point of the post was to say that the latter is a bad idea, especially in this particular case.
You should work on your examples a bit. The proposal in Uganda to impose the death penalty on e.g. homosexual acts with a minor is a new development, so I suppose it is an instance of social evolution. And slavery was the South’s “peculiar institution” so it’s odd to present it as something generally viewed as a simple matter of course.
Reply to comment: Social issues
MS,
You make a logical point, but the problem is that your timeline is far too brief. The institution of race-based slavery in Anglo-American (or in fact in overall “Western”) culture was not normal, but was a heretical and thankfully brief interlude in a much older tradition. For most of Western cultural history back to at least pre-Hellenistic Greece, the slave-master dynamic had been based on economic situation and ability. (And yes, quite often ability was influenced by the individual’s station in society – as it still is today.) The slave – who usually was not racially different from the master – exchanged legal fealty in exchange for care. This was a deeply personal relationship in which both parties had a personal stake of honor in fulfilling their duty to the other. Quite often it was a voluntary relationship, in which slavery was a welcome alternative to death or starvation. Furthermore, it was a revolving door relationship, in which all knew that at any moment the winds of fortune could blow the other way, and the slave become the master.
It was only after Western culture became influenced by alternative views that this idea of a mutually-beneficial economic relationship changed. In particular, Western culture around the Mediterranean was influenced by the Moorish institution of enslaving non-Muslims simply because they were not Muslim. No longer was slavery a preferred alternative to death in battle or starvation in famine, but rather an imposition based on the religious faith of the slave (which was at the time usually associated with race.)
Even when Western culture began to adopt race-based views of slavery, culminating perhaps in Anglo-American black slavery, the old Western tradition of mutual duty and honor between master and slave was far from dead. This is apparent from the first-hand accounts of early 19th century Northern abolitionists who visited the Southern slave plantations and reported on the obviously harmonious relationship between black slaves and white masters. These men were certainly not predisposed to see anything favorable in the institution of racial slavery, and yet they reported on the typically happy relations and even friendship between slaves and masters. Did this change the inherent injustice of the institution? – No. Again, however, it important to recognize that completely involuntary, race-based slavery was a radical mutation of the traditional Western characterization of the institution.
I have devoted several paragraphs to discussing the radical nature of race-based slavery in the Anglo-American tradition, so I will just briefly mention that anti-miscegenation laws appear sporadically throughout Western history, interspersed with periods of relatively free racial intermarriage. Virginia in 1960 was not “normal” – and neither is Virginia in 2010 – unless one’s definition of “normal” is a selfish definition based purely on when and where one is living. (I would not contest such a definition, because it clearly makes logical argument impossible.)
Ultimately, I urge you not to focus on social changes which occur in a very brief span of only 200 or 300 years, and call this “evolution”. This is not an example of evolution, it is an example of change. Not all change is evolution. In general, it is a mistake to speak in terms of “social evolution” – evolution is properly a concept of the biological sphere. Societies do not “evolve” – they change. The concept of “social evolution” is really a bastardization of a biological theory and the political goals of a certain group of modernist social philosophers. As we can clearly see from examining Western history on a 1,000-year or 5,000-year time-scale, what you are branding “social evolution” is really just another cycle of change. The path of human social development is less a straight road along which we progress than a wheel around which we revolve – though even that is a grossly simplified and unsatisfactory model.
By the way. It is particularly ironic that you should choose the abolition of race-based slavery as an example to chide Jim on his attachment to traditional Christian religious faith and social observance, given that the Christian religious faith and social observance was pretty much Entirely Responsible for the movement to end race-based slavery (and then later, the beginnings of race-based social discrimination.)