Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Be Careful Where You Put The Ten Commandments

Two years ago, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore dedicated a monument to the Ten Commandments that has since been displayed prominently in the state judicial building. Now, his colleagues on the bench say that the monument has to go, at least from the building's rotunda. His Honor professes to be expressing the free exercise of religion that the First Amendment to our country's Constitution permits. But fellow judges regard his actions as amounting to the establishment of religion, which the First Amendment prohibits.

The way our system works, only judges can finally decide (a) whether an issue like this one is a constitutional issue at all, and (b) if it is, just what the Constitution does and does not say about it. The rest of us, however, can have opinions about both. And a lot of us do. My own began with chagrin that Judge Moore has been taken seriously by anyone as a defender of everyone else's faith. Of all the people who should know better, he tells us with a straight face that a 5,000 pound granite monument to a specific religious tradition, sitting in a federal building, isn't an in-your-face insult to a society committed to religious liberty for all.

Putting the best face on it, what the recently suspended Judge Moore is trying to do is call our attention to the place that the Judaeo-Christian tradition occupies in American history and life. Is this a problem? Of course it is. Part of the problem is with where and how the Judge wants to drop his testimony: at the courthouse rather than in our classrooms and churches. More importantly, it is with his obliviousness to what freedom of religion must mean for a religiously pluralistic society. Pretty clearly, Judge Moore is about the business of elevating one religious tradition in this country above all the others.

For the Judge and his ardent supporters, the indispensable foundation of morality, ethics, and the law is belief in God. "Let's get this straight," he has been quoted as saying, "It's about the acknowledgement of God." Without the superstructure that such a belief provides, he and his fellow believers hold, all three become mere human contrivances whose truth is relative only to the cultures that think them up.

I once heard an eminent Protestant pulpiteer put it this way: When you take "God" out of "Good," all you're left with is a zero. At the time, I thought that his remark fell somewhere between the howlingly funny and the reprehensibly facile. I still do. Human beings can be moral, ethical, and lawful whatever they may or may not believe about God. And they can be none of the above while professing a strong belief in God with all the verbal eloquence of which dissembling people are all too often capable.

Contrary to Judge Moore's certitude, if we are forced to honor the roots of Western law by compressing them into one form or another of a Decalogue, then we are going to encounter difficulties that more thoughtful believers will not be able to resolve easily. For one thing, we will have to decide on exactly which version of the Big Ten we are to go with. Personally, I prefer Deuteronomy over Exodus on the matter, but not everyone will agree. Next, we will have to try to figure out what each commandment meant for its own day before we can get very far figuring out what it implies for ours. Merely citing a prohibition against killing, for example, gets us about as far in determining punishment for capital offenses as it does in formulating foreign policy: nowhere.

And then, of course, there is the matter of how Jesus weighed in on the Decalogue. Apparently, just two commandments were enough for him. It might even be that he wasn't thinking primarily of commandments at all. The so-called "Love Commandment" doesn't look very much like just another externally imposed rule for behavior. It looks much more like the image of an inward virtue, of the sort the ancient prophet Jeremiah seemed to have in mind: I shall set my law within them, writing it on their hearts…For representing this kind of law, granite seems hardly the best medium.

However the situation in the Alabama judicial building is finally resolved, at least two ironies in it should prove memorable. First, a hard-shell Fundamentalist Christian jeopardizes his tenure on the federal bench by defending a tradition of Jewish legalism that Jesus himself staunchly opposed. And second, some of the most ardent supporters of memorializing this tradition the Judge's way belong to a denomination that includes people who are convinced that God does not hear the prayers of Jews anyway.

Wednesday, August 13, 2003

A Gay Bishop, for Heaven's Sake

A little over a year ago, this column began with an invitation to think "Christianly" about issues of importance to the life of faith. The point of the invitation was, and is, to emphasize that how we think as Christians is at least as important as what we think, and that if we keep this distinction clearly in mind, we will have a lot fewer decidedly unChristian wrangles in the church about who is and who isn't a real Christian.

There is probably no issue before church members today that needs approaching in this spirit more than the issue of this present column. Unless you've been on a space station, you probably know that bishops of the Episcopal Church recently elected their first "openly" gay colleague. ( I always find this qualifier intriguing.) The vote was 62 to 43 in favor. It would seem that the Rev. Gene Robinson had a good bit more success in his election than President Bush did in his. But then again, maybe not. To my knowledge, nobody has fled the country over the latter. More than a few Episcopalians may flee their church over the former.

With all due respect to a church in which I have no standing, I would like to express a hope that they won't pull out, that their faithfulness to the Anglican Communion will weigh more heavily than their distress over feeling that some of their leaders have compromised either the sanctity of the sexual relationship, the truth of scripture, the integrity of the Christian witness to the world, or all three. About their feelings, I have nothing but respect. About the premises upon which at least some of their feelings are based, however, I have some doubts.

The sanctity of the sexual relationship? Father Robinson, we have been told, has been in a committed relationship for 13 years. His ex-wife does not believe that it disqualifies him to be either a priest or a bishop. His daughter attended the House of Bishops meeting with him. By contrast, if television offerings these days are any indication, heterosexual marriages are beginning with contests, surviving with the help of adultery, and terminating with irreconcilable differences, permanent resentments, and uncontrollable impulses to start the sordid process all over again.

The truth of scripture? The jury of biblical scholars is still out on the extent to which the Bible as a whole (the "as a whole" here is crucial) condemns gays and lesbian behavior. The verdict has long been in on whether the Bible as a whole condemns gay and lesbian people: it doesn't. These same observations are pertinent to what the Bible also says about divorce. If being gay is incompatible with being a bishop, isn't being divorced a disqualifier also? Looking to the Bible for an easy answer to one question often makes getting any answer to another one much more difficult.

The integrity of the Christian witness? It is hard for me to see much integrity in putting the proclamation of laws and rules above the offer of grace and love. Sometimes I am more Pauline than I like to admit: laws and rules do sink us in hopelessness and spiritual death rather than raise us to joy and eternal life. Whether in the world of business or the transcendent environment of grace, Peter Principles get us nowhere.

On the gay bishop question, I have to think that our Lord's focus would have been more on what kind of a man Father Robinson is all the way around, and less on his partner of choice. What would have interested Jesus especially was the last minute set of allegations about the Reverend's knowledge of a porn site link and pattern of touching people inappropriately. I think Jesus would have been especially gratified to hear that the allegations had no merit.

I am not sure that Bishop Stanton of Dallas chose the right time to go into his closet to pray about his church. Perhaps he could have attended the next day's session and stayed in prayer there, while participating in other orders of business. But I am with him on recognizing Episcopalians' need to be in prayer over what lies ahead for their church. It will be good for other Christians to pray over it, too. Father Robinson's election to the episcopacy will have lasting consequences for all churches, not just Anglican ones.

What I will be praying for especially is that the mind of some of our churches, already made up too soon on both sides of the gay-lesbian issue in general, can still be open to the mind of Christ, as Christ continues to disclose it to us. Care to join me?