The Jesus Tea-Strainer, or the Jesus Poisonous-Seed-Strainer? Or Maybe the Jesus Gold-Sifter

Andrew Wilson just posted a piece on the Theology Matters blog, "The Jesus Lens, or the Jesus Tea-Strainer?", which begins as follows:

I had an interesting series of debates with Steve Chalke recently, on Scripture, the Old Testament, the atonement and sexuality. There are all sorts of things I could say about them (and I probably will, in time), but for me the most striking feature of Steve's presentation was his continual reference to "the Jesus lens". In his view, the Bible should be read through "the Jesus lens", that is to say, in the light of God's self-revelation in Jesus. I agree. But he then goes on to argue that this enables us, and in fact requires us, to correct all sorts of things that the texts actually say, particularly those which involve wrath, death and sexual ethics. Reading through the Jesus lens, for Steve, involves reading a difficult text - say, one about picking up sticks on the Sabbath, or destroying the Canaanites, or Yahweh pouring out his anger - figuring that Jesus could never have condoned it, and then concluding that the text represents a primitive, emerging, limited picture of God, as opposed to the inclusive, wrath-free God we find in Jesus. Not so much a Jesus lens, then, as a Jesus tea-strainer: not a piece of glass that influences your reading of the text while still leaving the text intact, but a fine mesh that only allows through the most palatable elements, while meticulously screening out the bitter bits to be dumped unceremoniously on the saucer.

Wilson goes on to list a series of biblical passages in which the Gospel authors attribute to Jesus angry words that Wilson takes to be in the spirit of the wrathful God that Chalke wants to reject.

There are several concerns I have about Wilson's post: his too-easy conflation of progressive Christocentric hermeneutics with postmodernism, his caricatured understanding of the "Jesus Lens" approach that Steve Chalke and those like him favor, and--most seriously--his failure to distinguish between the angry rhetoric sometimes attributed to Jesus in Scripture and the genocidal acts sometimes attributed to God.

It is one thing to note, in all honesty, that the Jesus we encounter in the Gospels got angry, and expressed that anger in hyperbolic outburst against those who neglected the poor and in other ways failed to live up to the demanding love ethic. But to interpret those outbursts out of the context of the whole gospel story, in which Jesus preached love and forgiveness and died on a cross for the sins of all--including those who were the targets of his angry outbursts--well, that is another matter.

As to the conclusion Wilson reaches based on such an out-of-context reading of these texts, to the effect that the Jesus of Scripture "fits well" with the unfiltered whole of the Scriptures, with all the horrific parts included (the ones that Chalke--wisely, in my view--wants to treat as reflecting an evolving understanding of God within the Scriptures)--well, let's just say that a lot of arguments need to made and critically assessed before such a conclusion is anywhere in the remote ballpark of having any promise of ever enjoying a hint of warrant.

Let me approach my main concern here by looking at the last sentence of the passage quoted above. Here it is again:

Not so much a Jesus lens, then, as a Jesus tea-strainer: not a piece of glass that influences your reading of the text while still leaving the text intact, but a fine mesh that only allows through the most palatable elements, while meticulously screening out the bitter bits to be dumped unceremoniously on the saucer.

Wilson means here to offer an unappealing metaphor, but word choice can often influence how attractive or unattractive a metaphor seems. There's a difference between a mechanism that sifts out what we take to be unpalatable, and a mechanism that sifts out moral horror.

Let us imagine a Chistocentric hermeneutic whereby moral horrors attributed to God are set aside as unworthy of the God revealed through Jesus. It's not a tea-strainer sifting out the bits we don't like, but a poisonous-seed-strainer, straining out the bits that are objectively awful--not the "bitter bits" we don't want to deal with because of culturally situated sensibilities, but the seeds that grow poisoned fruit, the things that when treated seriously by the body of believers tend to have ruinous effects.

Talk about objective evil isn't popular among postmodernists, but Christian progressives like me aren't postmodernists, so we don't care. We think some things are objectively, timelessly evil. We think Jesus helped to shed light on these timeless evils, transforming and refining our ethical systems through his singular witness. And we think that in the light of that witness, certain Scriptural narratives turn out to attribute objective moral evils to God. We think these narratives reflect the errors of primitive peoples, as opposed to honestly describing the nature of God. And we think that those who insist on treating them as honest descriptions of the nature of God are doing something very, very dangerous.

But maybe it's even more helpful to shift metaphors. Consider Martin Luther's preferred metaphor for the Bible. It is like the manger: it contains the baby Jesus, but it also contains straw. And if we refuse to attend to this difference, we're in trouble.

Straw is a milder metaphor than poison. The straw in the manger offers some softness in which the baby can lie more comfortably. But it could be very bad to mistake the straw for the baby. At best, you're going to waste milk by trying to feed it to the straw. At worst, there won't be enough milk left for the baby. The baby is starved because the straw is treated as warranting the same level of attention and devotion.

This metaphor leads me to think about yet another one. Maybe what we need isn't a strainer to eliminate the bad bits from the Scriptures. If Luther's basic approach is right, maybe what we need is a gold-sifter, something that helps us to focus in on what really matters. Maybe the right hermeneutic is the one that helps us identify what deserves our attention and devotion.

The Bachmann/McDonough Principle of Non-Discrimination

I'm thinking academic blogs might be a good place to toss out first drafts of things that may eventually make it into professional articles. Now may be a good time for that, since I've starting work on a philosophy article that brings together some things I've talked about before on this blog.

As I've noted before on this blog, Michele Bachmann maintains that civil marriage laws restricting marriage to heterosexual couples are non-discriminatory. She doesn't say that it's justified discrimination. She says that no discrimination is going on at all.

Why? Because all persons--gay and straight--face the very same marital opportunities and requirements: all are free to marry someone of the same sex, while none are free to marry someone of the opposite sex.

One section of the article I'm working on will look at an argument along these same lines that was put forward by a philosopher, Richard McDonough, in Public Affairs Quarterly (a rather prestigious journal of political and social philosophy). McDonough puts the main line of argument succinctly as follows:

DSSMs [Defenders of Same-Sex Marriage] want to legitimize the right to marry persons of the same sex...But since no one has the right to marry persons of the same sex, the DSSM's demand for the right to same-sex marriage is not analogous to the blacks (sic) demand for the right to study at the same schools as whites or a woman's demand for the right to vote. 

McDonough goes on to argue--in a gesture towards conservative slippery-slope arguments--that the call for the right to same-sex marriage is much more akin to the call for the right to incestuous marriage or polygamy.

In each case, it is a call for a right that, previously, no one had enjoyed. Granting the right, then, "effects a material change in everybody's rights."

When I talked about Bachmann's version of this line of argument, I said that it wasn't any good. Is McDonough's version of it any better?

Well, it isn't much different, except insofar as McDonough repeatedly drums the claim that "DSSM's, DIMs (Defenders of Incestuous Marriage) and DPMs (Defenders of Polygamous Marriage), are arguing for a substantial expansion in everybody's rights" as opposed to seeking equal rights. He also offers his own analysis of why so many think that same-sex marriage is an equal-rights issue: because the gay community is, he thinks, wanting a new right which has an equivalent function for their community that traditional marriage has for the straight community.

This way of putting things, of course, is premised on a kind of segregation of gays and straights into separate communities--which is to my mind a highly problematic way of putting things. But let me set that point aside and explain exactly why this really is an equal rights issue, not an "equivalent" rights issue.

There are, in fact, two distinct ways that one can discriminate legally against a class of people. The problem with both Bachmann an McDonough is that they only recognize one of these ways. Hence, their principle of non-discrimination is artificially truncated.

Here, in brief, is the Bachmann-McDonough Principle of Non-Discrimination (hereafter, BM POND):

When laws subject all persons to identical restrictions and opportunities, no persons are subject to legal discrimination. 

But all of us intuitively know that this principle is false. Suppose that a city is considering a free public school lunch program. Imagine that the following two programs are proposed:

Free Lunch for Non-Redheads: All public school students will be provided with a free cafeteria meal featuring one entree and a beverage--except redheaded students, who must pay for their meal.

Free Peanut Butter Sandwich Lunch for All Students: All public school students will be provided with a free cafeteria meal featuring a peanut butter sandwich and a carton of milk. Students who want anything other than a peanut butter sandwich and milk must pay for their meal.

Now consider eight-year-old Joey--a lactose-intolerant redhead with a life-threatening allergy to peanuts. The first proposed program discriminates against him explicitly--by identifying a class of people to which he belongs, and overtly denying members of that class access to the good that the program makes available to others.

But the second proposed program discriminates against Joey, too--just not in the same way. The first program is overtly discriminatory. The second is what we might call formally discriminatory: It makes a good available, but in a form that is not equally accessible to all. The entire class of school kids with peanut allergies is excluded from access to a social good--namely a reasonably healthy and filling lunch--which the program makes available to everyone else. If Joey avails himself of what the program offers, he risks death. As such, he cannot get from the program the good that the program is making available to his classmates.

That's discrimination. It's this sort of formal discrimination that the Americans with Disabilities Act is designed to redress. If a government program makes a good available to the public--but the good is physically located on the third floor of a building without elevators--then people in wheelchairs are being discriminated against. The discrimination is not overt. The policy does not explicitly say, "Everyone can have this good, except people in wheelchairs. They are excluded." But that fact is hardly comforting to someone in a wheelchair who wants access to the good others can enjoy but has no way of getting it.

BM POND only recognizes overt discrimination. It completely ignores formal discrimination in the law. Under the peanut butter sandwich program, Joey faces the identical restrictions and opportunities that everyone else enjoys. He has the opportunity to eat a peanut butter sandwich for free, and he is restricted from eating anything else without paying for it. But there is a fact about Joey which means that the restriction restricts him in ways that it doesn't restrict others, and the opportunity which is a real for others is no opportunity at all for him.

Bachmann and McDonough are correct that traditional civil marriage is not overtly discriminatory. But they are wrong in concluding that it is not therefore discriminatory. Traditional civil marriage law discriminates against persons with a homosexual orientation by offering marriage only in a form through which they cannot access the key social goods that heterosexuals can access.

In case it's not obvious what that key social good is, let me spell it out. Heterosexuals in our society are not only free to form an intimate romantic partnership with someone they are sexually and romantically interested in, but they are free to have that partnership legally recognized and bestowed with a range of legal rights that are otherwise much harder to receive, and in some cases impossible to receive. The official recognition by the state also communicates a broader social message--an announcement of the intent to establish an enduring union and an expectation that the broader society will view the loving couple as a family unit.

Of course, heterosexuals might seek marriage for reasons other than to get legal and social standing for their intimate romantic/sexual partnerships. They might enter a "sham" marriage to sponsor some person they don't care about for immigration--and when the authorities find out that the two people involved are not in fact pursuing an intimately romantic and sexual partnership, they'll get in trouble. They court fewer legal risks if they marry some filthy-rich 90-year-old who sexually disgusts them out of a desire to inherit a ton of money.

But it is acquiring legal and social standing for an intimate romantic/sexual partnership which has become the distinctive special good for which marriage is prized today. It is for this that people generally get married.

A restriction of marriage to heterosexual pairs affects heterosexuals far differently than it affects gays and lesbians. Such a restriction bars heterosexuals from marrying a certain class of people with whom they cannot experience this social good anyway--and thus does nothing to reduce their access to this distinctive social good. By contrast, gays and lesbians are barred from marrying those with whom they can experience this social good but are free to marry those with whom they cannot. Thus, they are decisively excluded from access to the social good by the form in which the marital institution is made available.

Expanding marriage to include same-sex partnerships erases this inequality. Keeping the restriction in place is legal discrimination. Whether such discrimination can be justified is a different question. But there is no doubt at all that it is discriminatory. Those who say otherwise are working with an artificially truncated understanding of when legal discrimination exists.

Apparently, Atheists Are Grumpy Goats

I found the following image posted at Sarah Brown's blog, and felt compelled to repost it here:



On the one hand, the image--not to mention the reference to "very advanced witnessing techniques"--makes me want to chuckle and roll my eyes. I know nothing about the flyer's origins, and a part of me wants to dismiss it as a bit of satire.

On the other hand, there's the possibility that a real church actually distributed this flyer to its children. And there are things going on in it that make it a bit more serious than something just to be laughed off: the stereotyping (atheists are always sad, often grumpy and bitter); the implicit dehumanization (goat-man, anyone?); the fear-mongering (they "will lash out at children") and the warnings against engaging with them.

These tropes are reminiscent of what I have seen in anti-Semitic and racist tracts.

I doubt that most churches create flyers like this. But how many communicate similar messages to their children without the benefit of a grumpy goat in a bathrobe? In The God Delusion, Dawkins spends some time discussing the ways in which atheists are the targets of prejudice and discrimination.

He's right about this. And as with all prejudice and discrimination, it's learned in childhood. And as with all prejudice and discrimination, it's contrary to an ethic of love.

In the end, if this is an authentic flyer, the motive behind it seems to be fear: fear that a conversation about religion with an atheist might inspire the child to ask questions about what they've been taught in church. Fear is the wellspring from which human divisions and long-term prejudices are born.

On the one hand, there is the Christian faith that drives out fear and inspires love across the gap of human differences. And then there is the Christianity that nurtures fear and builds walls. Both Christianities are alive and well in the world today--and the latter is probably a greater threat to authentic Christian values than any grumpy goat, atheist or otherwise.

Missing the Evolution/Creation Debate

I missed the recent exchange between Ken Ham (the Answers in Genesis Guy) and Bill Nye (the Science Guy). And I have no plan to correct that oversight. I tend to agree with Michael Schulson and Sarah Posner that it was a strategic mistake for Nye to agree to the debate in the first place. Other than offering those on Ham' side the chance to mug for a camera holding silly handwritten signs (and actually face a real prospect of having others look at the results), what exactly is a debate like this supposed to accomplish?

I'm not sure. Science education may have been Nye's goal--but it's not clear that this aim is served by the kind of theater that is expected in this kind of debate. Don't get me wrong. I think there is a place for thoughtful debate. I just don't think that this is what you're likely to get when a science educator who wants to talk about the evidence for evolutionary theory pairs off against a biblical fundamentalist interested in slinging scientifically empty zingers while waving a Bible around.

But if the zingers sound clever and the Bible waving is done with the right combination of earnestness and panache, the fundamentalist may succeed in getting a few cheers out of his base. At the same time, the science educator will face a challenge similar to the one that a high school teacher faces when a disruptive student keeps breaking the flow of the lecture, preventing the rest of the class from concentrating enough to see how all the pieces fit together.

I'd much rather see a discussion of the premises that underlie Ken Ham's capacity to maintain a following, despite the emptiness of his zingers. Those premises are, it seems to me, in tension with one another. On the one hand, Ham treats reputable science as the enemy of faith. On the other hand, Ham apparently thinks that his faith needs the credibility of being "scientific," and so constructs this flimsy "creation science" that aims to look like science to those (and only those) who know next to nothing about science.

What unites these premises is not any sort of internal coherence, but rather a strategic aim. Ham aims to rally people to his "team" by playing to the fear that no meaningful faith can be sustained if real science is taken seriously. And he i able to assuage the attenuated respect for science by offering up a flimsy alternative while portraying legitimate scientists as engaged in a deceptive campaign to discredit religion. For this aim to succeed, Ham has no better friends in the world than vocally atheist scientists like Richard Dawkins.

Here's the thing: the version of religion that Ham peddles is, quite clearly, in conflict with science. Now if that were a problem only for Ham's version of religion, legitimate respect for science--born out of the amazing progress that science has made--would lead religious people away from Ham's version of religion and towards others that fit better with what science teaches.

To save his version of religion from inevitable attrition, Ham needs people to fear that any kind of belief in God or transcendent realities is at odds with science. The more in his religious community who think that, the less likely they are to leave his funamentalist literalism in favor of more moderate and progressive expressions of religious faith. If atheism is seen as the only pathway to genuine respect for science, then Ham is betting that people who grew up in a faith tradition will rather jettison respect for science.

Especially if Ham can then offer up an alternative "science" which gives his followers the illusion of respecting science--an illusion that depends on seeing the scientific community as engaged in some kind of anti-religious conspiracy in which gaping holes in central scientific theories are quietly hidden from view so as to further an anti-religious agenda.

What I'd really like to see is a debate between Ham and a sincere Christian who is willing to take Ham to task for his underlying assumptions about what faith has to be like and about the relationship between reputable science and faith.

Then again, maybe the best bet is just to ignore Ham altogether.

Woody Allen and the Transgression of Familial Boundaries

Back in the 1980's, I was a big fan of Woody Allen. As an undergraduate philosophy major, "Love and Death" was one of my favorite movies.

Then, in the early '90's, Allen's long-term relationship with Mia Farrow fell apart amidst a scandal featuring a sexual relationship between Allen and Soon-Yi Previn, Farrow's adopted daughter (21 at the time). There were also darker accusations about sexual abuse of his and Mia's 7-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow (who now goes by the name "Malone").

I really didn't know what to make of those accusations at the time. But my taste for Woody Allen's movies withered. I stopped watching them. Even setting aside the child abuse allegation, the fact that Allen had a sexual relationship with the daughter of his long-term lover, who was also the older-sister-by-adoption of Allen's own children, was enough to evoke in me a kind of moral nausea. This spoiled his work for me. I couldn't enjoy it anymore.

Now, for the first time, Dylan Farrow has written her own public account of what she remembers--an open letter in which she offers a raw and harrowing description of being groomed and molested by Woody Allen. Allen has broken his long silence on the subject to call the account "untrue and disgraceful."

Maybe so. Or maybe it's both true and courageous. Obviously I don't know which is correct--but unlike some commentators, I don't think Allen's relationship with Soon-Yi Previn and the allegation of child molestation can be treated as wholly unrelated issues.

That's how Robert Weide treats them, in a Daily Beast essay that came out days before Farrow's open letter. Weide, who produced the two-part PBS documentary on Allen, comes to Allen's defense in response to renewed controversy, and among other things questions Dylan Farrow's reliability if not her sincerity. Of course, he does so without the benefit of having read her letter, since that didn't appear until a few days later. He is, instead, responding to a fall Vanity Fair interview in which she stood by the molestation charge.

That charge, according to Weide, is dubious at best. He doesn't question her honesty. Instead, he thinks she might believe the molestation story simply by virtue of having "grown up in a household where this scenario has been accepted as indisputable fact." The power of suggestion, and all of that.

The details of Dylan Farrow's account, as laid out in her open letter, call into question for me this sincere-but-misguided hypothesis. But that's not what I want to focus on here. The fact is that Weide treats the scandal surrounding Woody's undisputed sexual relationship with Soon-Yi as having no bearing on the question of whether we should believe what Dylan Farrow is saying.

Let me be clear: I agree that the relationship with Soon-Yi is not a case of child molestation (unless there are facts I don't now). And I agree that it would be unsound and unfair to offer a simple inference from "Woody Allen started a sexual relationship with the daughter of his spouse when that daughter was 19" to "Woody Allen sexually molested his own daughter when she was 7."

What I want to argue is that both of these things are morally problematic transgressions of familial boundaries (although the latter is far, far worse). And this fact creates a connection.

We clearly can't say that someone who has a history of shoplifting is thereby capable of breaking into homes and stripping them of valuables. But we can say that someone who has done the former has displayed a willingness to ignore an important moral precept about private property and theft--and that a willingness to do that is a necessary condition (not sufficient) for being the kind of person who could do the latter.

That's the sort of connection that I take to exist between Woody Allen's admitted relationship with his now-wife Soon-Yi and the allegations that Dylan Farrow has made. By itself, the connection is hardly sufficient to draw any conclusions. But I can't help but think it strengthens the case for treating that harrowing open letter as what it appears to be based on its content: a courageous confession of awful truths.

But this line of thinking depends on my claim that Woody Allen's relationship with the adopted daughter of his long-time intimate partner amounts to a moral transgression in the same broad class as parental sexual abuse. Am I right that these acts are related in something like the way that shoplifting a sweater from J.C. Penney's is related to breaking into someone's home to make off with treasured heirlooms? The latter, in both cases, embodies evils that the former does not. It more clearly violates someone, a victim who is tangibly and lastingly harmed.

In both cases, the former isn't as bad. But "not as bad" is consistent with being a moral wrong that has things in common with more egregious wrongs.

For me, the problem can be described as follows: At least some role-defined familial boundaries aren't just a matter of quaint tradition but exist for a reason. They exist in order to enable certain kinds of relationships to become excellent instances of relationships of that kind, promoting the goods that such relationships are distinctively suited to serve while preventing harms that being in such relationships makes one vulnerable to. Sometimes one kind of relationship clashes with another, so that actualizing the potential of one requires that you not pursue the other. It's concerns like these that create worries about romantic relationships between, say, a professor and student.

And there are indirect conflicts as well. It is harder to maintain a healthy parent-child relationship if the parent is pursuing a romantic relationship with the child's sibling. And I'm not talking about biological siblings. I'm talking about roles here. If you and Mary think of each other as siblings, and your father (who isn't Mary's father) starts romantically courting Mary, that's going to affect your father-child relationship in potentially troubling ways--especially if you're a young child unschooled in making subtle distinctions. "Dad is sleeping with my sister" blurs familial lines and complicates how one thinks about Dad--even if the sister is a sister by adoption twelve years your senior and Dad isn't your sister's father.

More obviously, if you and Martha are cultivating a life partnership and then Martha starts a romantic relationship with your son, that's going to be more than just an act of infidelity. Something about the very structure of intimate partnership makes it more than fitting that you adopt a paternalistic stance towards your partner's children, even if they're not your own. Not that you have to parent them yourself, but  a life partnership is about supporting one another in one's major life projects--and parenting is a major life project. Solidarity with your spouse means being in their corner when they pursue such projects. This entails a kind of empathetic participation in their parenting commitments that is threatened if you pursue a relationship with their child incompatible with a parental role.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Woody Allen demonstrated a disregard for the sorts of constraints within which various kinds of valuable relationships have the best chance of flourishing.

Sexual molestation of one's own child is the most extreme instance of this sort of violation. It combines the evil of child molestation with the fundamental betrayal of the parent-child relationship. While someone willing to play fast-and-loose with familial boundaries isn't thereby going to molest their own child, a practical disdain for familial boundaries is a necessary prerequisite for molesting your own child.

Woody Allen openly admits to things which display such disdain. That, by itself, doesn't make him a child molester. But it isn't irrelevant to weighing the accusation.

Morality, Science, and Intelligent Design: New Essay on Religion Dispatches

A new article of mine--"Does NIH Head Francis Collins Believe in Intelligent Design?"--has been published in Religion Dispatches.

One commenter ("ortcutt") makes explicit the distinction that is implicitly at work in the article, between moral psychology and meta-ethics. I eschewed this terminology in writing the piece, since I thought my points could be made without introducing those technical terms from my discipline. However, the distinction is helpful and important. Put briefly, meta-ethics pertains to the nature of moral claims and their truth-conditions (if indeed they have a truth value), while moral psychology pertains to our moral motivations and their origins.

In these terms, my article can be summarized as follows: Paul Bloom takes it that when Francis Collins appeals to morality in making his case for God's existence, Collins is invoking an argument premised on beliefs about moral psychology. It is this way of reading Collins that allows Bloom to treat Collins' argument as an intelligent design argument, one that can be refuted by his own research into moral psychology.

But it is more plausible to see Collins' argument as premised on meta-ethical views. And while claims about moral psychology are generally subject to straightforward scientific investigation, meta-ethical claims are not (which isn't the same as saying that scientific discoveries would have no bearing whatever on meta-ethical disputes, but rather that scientific discoveries would have to be invoked as premises in fundamentally philosophical arguments if they're to help us answer meta-ethical questions).

Collins himself may not have been as clear about this as he should have been. Not being a philosopher, he doesn't draw the distinction and sometimes speaks as if his argument is rooted in moral psychology. But when you look at the larger thrust of his arguments, his claims about moral psychology are (it seems to me) best seen as corollaries to his "meta-ethical case for God": If we take it that there are objective moral truths best explained by appeal to God's existence, then we are moving towards a worldview in which the motives for heroic moral actions admit of a layer of explanation above and beyond (not incompatible with) the one that science provides. And this added layer of explanation gives such actions a significance that resonates with Collins.

When understood as an argument for God's existence based on meta-ethical views, Collins' case remains highly controversial. Some naturalists deny the meta-ethical view that moral utterances have a truth value at all (that is, they're "noncognitivists" about ethics); others accept that they have a truth value but deny that moral utterances are "objectively" true; while still others accept that moral utterances have an objective truth value but deny that we have to invoke God or anything supernatural to explain what makes true moral claims objectively true. For arguments like the one Collins invokes to work, all of these naturalist counter-moves need to be answered.

A number of theistically-inclined moral philosophers have attempted to do so in various ways, and continue to refine and develop their arguments in the light of trenchant criticism from naturalist philosophers who are making their own divergent cases for an ethics that does not invoke anything beyond the empirical world.

Collins--as head of the NIH--has other things to do.

The Purpose of Fantasy

I just finished Philip Martin’s The Purpose of Fantasy. It's a lovely book, and a gift to any lover of fantasy fiction. Among other things, it tackles head-on the way in which fantasy is unjustly marginalized in the literary world.

In the chapter about Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, Martin offers an illuminating quote from an earlier interview he had with Beagle. In it, Beagle expresses his distress about the way in which fantasy works are misunderstood: “The problem is just that fantastic literature isn’t taken seriously. It simply isn’t reviewed. It isn’t considered literature…It’s still—all of it—pulp fiction, to be read under the covers.”

Martin explains why such dismissal is a mistake. And since the best refutation comes from great works of fantasy themselves, Martin invites the reader to explore with him twelve selected works of fantasy. In the process, the reader is reminded of old friends and—at least in my case—invited to make new ones. I now have several new books on my reading list that I’m eager to plunge into.

Each exploration of a select fantasy combines an introduction to the story and representative passages with illuminating background information and, more significantly, Martin’s own reflections on the work’s message and significance. He even includes thoughtful discussion questions at the end of each of each chapter.

His broad theme, laid out in the introduction and nicely developed in the subsequent chapters, is that fantasy literature offers a distinctive—perhaps unique—vehicle for engaging narratively with the deeper spiritual and ethical dimensions of our lives. The fantasy medium allows authors to illuminate our understanding of those things that transcend the physical side of our existence—good and evil, the yearning for something more—through the construction of metaphorical realities.

In fact, however, Martin suggests that fantasy may offer “a land beyond metaphor.” In his chapter on Neil Gaiman’s phenomenal little book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Martin puts it this way:

In English class, we all learned the difference between a simile and a metaphor. Fantasy, though, offers a third possibility that eclipses those two. If the narrator in a fantasy book says, “My nanny was an evil witch,” or “The pond is an ocean,” these statements might prove to be neither simile nor metaphor. They can be fantastic images that are magically real in the story.

This insight connects with another persistent theme in Martin’s book: because fantasy stories dispense with the rules of reality as we know it, inventing worlds and rules that all of us recognize as make-believe, they can never be mistaken for factual. But truth and fact aren’t the same thing. And fantasy, precisely because it moves beyond metaphor into the domain of imagined new realities, allows fantasy authors an enhanced freedom to wrestle with truths that transcend the facts.

This was a theme that G.K. Chesterton pressed home in his essay, “The Ethics of Elfland” (found in his book, Orthodoxy), an essay that Martin discusses and builds on in his book. Chesterton argued that by changing the rules of the world, fairy tales remind us of the contingency of those rules. And the wonder that the fantasy world evokes becomes a reminder of the wonder we should feel at the world as it is: “These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”

Fairy stories invite us to step outside the rules of this world and this life. In so doing they enable us to see this world and its rules from the outside. And from that new vantage, we can discern truths that are harder to see when we are bound by the facts—truths such as the fact that an apple’s color is a fitting subject for wonder.

I am a life-long lover of fantasy. I’m also a professional philosopher of religion and ethicist. I’ve always sensed a deep connection between my professional passions and my love of fantasy literature. Martin’s new book helps to lay that connection bare. And for that, I’m grateful.

Civil Marriage vs Civil Union: Why NOT Leave Marriage to Churches?

I've heard many people on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate make the following remark: "Really, the state should stay out of the marriage business altogether. They should offer civil unions to anyone who wants legal standing for their partnerships, and leave marriage to the churches."

Well, why not? There may be reasons for the state to legally recognize and regulate domestic partnerships--but "marriage" is such a heavily weighted concept, fraught with religious and social significance. Why couldn't the state avoid all the controversy by just announcing that it's limiting its role to making legal contracts between domestic partners, without intending these partnerships to be "marriages," however that contested concept is understood?

Some claim that, in effect, that's all the state is really doing now anyway: making legally binding contracts available to those couples who want to enter into them. If we all just agree to stop calling these contracts marriages, then the controversy about making the contract available to same-sex partners will go away. Nobody has to worry that "marriage" is being distorted.

The insistence by conservative churches that marriage is essentially discriminatory is perfectly compatible with the state conferring something that isn't...so long as all agree that what the state confers isn't marriage. For conservatives, this may be a liberating idea: The state can have its egalitarian civil unions, and conservative churches can have marriage, unsullied by the corrupting influence of the enlightenment value of equality under the law.

Of course, it won't actually be protected from egalitarian values. Even if what the state confers isn't called marriage, there are plenty of religious communities that are convinced of the moral imperative to make the good of marriage available regardless of sexual orientation. And nothing is to stop them from calling the egalitarian unions they recognize "marriages." Conservatives are, of course, free to say of those relationships that they aren't "real" marriages--on the grounds that "real" marriage discriminates against persons of a homosexual orientation. But they're free to say that now about state-conferred same-sex marriages.

The difference is that when the state does it, it has a broader social influence than when an individual church does it. If what the state confers is broadly recognized as marriage--and the trend towards legitimizing same-sex marriage continues--then it follows that there is nothing about marriage that essentially excludes gays and lesbians from enjoying its benefits. (Keep in mind that the benefit of marriage is the benefit of having your intimate partnership recognized and treated in a distinctive way; it wouldn't be the kind of benefit that we take it to be if marriage were conferred only in your relationship with individuals with whom you don't have and couldn't ever form an intimate partnership--thus, even if gays and lesbians are as free as anyone to marry someone of the opposite sex, rules that restrict marriage to heterosexual pairings ensures that they are denied access to the benefits of marriage; while heterosexual can enjoy the benefits, gays and lesbians cannot).

Here, then, is the chief reason why religious conservatives are drawn to the idea of eliminating civil marriage altogether, in favor of some form of domestic partnership contract that no one calls marriage: if the state is non-discriminatory in conferring the benefits of marriage, this is likely to have a substantial influence on dominant social values. It is one thing if liberal churches are doing this, something else if the state is. In the latter case, it is far more likely that the broad public will increasingly view the conservative insistence on discrimination in marriage as wrong.

Does that fact serve as a reason for the state to get out of the marriage business, so as not to unduly influence broad social values in a way that promotes equality and leads to greater social suspicion of discriminatory practices? One might argue that a key feature of liberal democracy is that the state strive to be as neutral as possible when it comes to competing value systems, so that everyone has equal liberty to live life in the light of their commitments.

But, of course, this very call for neutrality is justified by a commitment to liberty and equality in the midst of diversity--and any state policy that is premised on the value of equality and liberty in the midst of diversity is going to influence public sentiments in a way that's unfavorable to comprehensive value systems that are discriminatory and repressive and intolerant of difference. If the liberal democratic state can't pursue policies that have the effect of leading people to think more highly of equality than discrimination, then the liberal democratic state is thereby barred from being a liberal democratic state.

To offer an analogy: The state may have a duty--based on its founding values--to extend free speech to Nazi groups. It has no duty operate in ways that protect Nazi groups from social disapproval when those groups exercise their freedom of speech to spout hate.

Put simply, so long as discriminatory religious groups are free to be discriminatory in their own sectarian marriage practices, the liberal democratic state has lived up to its calling. If it offers marriage that isn't discriminatory, then it is further expressing its foundational values--and doing this is not rendered impermissible by the mere fact that doing this is going to indirectly shape public sentiment so that discriminatory religious groups, while still free to practice their discriminatory values, will feel increasing social disapproval when they do so.

So, the state has no duty to stay out of the marriage business just because its egalitarian commitments would force it to confer marriage in ways that would make certain discriminatory religious groups look bad. And so it all boils down to whether there are reasons for the state to do more than confer contracts on domestic partners. Are there reasons for the state to call what it bestows a "marriage"?

I think so. Marriage is a social institution. It was a social institution before there were nation-states like ours that established legal mechanisms for recognizing marriages. It is a social institution that cuts across diverse religious communities (albeit with variations in form). Marriage wasn't invented by Jews or Christians or Hindus, etc.--but Jews and Christians an Hindus all have ways of formalizing marriages within their own religious frameworks.

Obviously, religious communities have reasons why they think they should be involved in this marriage business. So does the state. And if you look at marriage laws, they are what they are in part because those laws help to support and facilitate a distinctive sort of social institution. In other words, marriage laws reflect, rather than create, the social institution in question.

When people get married, they want the legal supports that the state offers, because those legal supports help their marriages to be successful ones. These are legal supports that call upon society as a whole to treat the couple as a family, as a nuclear social unit. Their status as life partners is seen to generate a special claim on the goods required to carry out such partnership--including the right to live together in one country if the partners are of a different nationality (hence the right to sponsor a spouse for immigration) and the right to make crucial decisions for one another when one partner is incapacitated. The cluster of legal rights that constitute civil marriage all have a unifying purpose: to support a social institution of a particular kind.

So long as the cluster of laws in question were formed to support the distinctive sort of social institution that we call marriage, it makes sense to call the legal institution "marriage" as well. And if the state is to really get out of the marriage business, it seems that would mean that the state would stop supporting the social institution of marriage as such and start doing something else. Something more modest. We should expect that getting out of the marriage business and simply being in the civil union business would entail some change in the law.

What kind of change? Would the state do away with sponsoring spouses for immigration? What would it mean if the state were to stop supporting marriage and instead support something more modest? What effects would that change have on society? What reasons has the state had for being in the marriage business, and what would be lost if the state withdrew from that business altogether?

And if the state does not change the laws that govern legal marriage, but instead merely changes the name of the institution, we'd need to ask why. In other words, if the state is still in the business of legally supporting and nurturing the social institution of marriage, but it stops calling what it confers a "legal marriage," why would it do that?

The only reason I could think of would be this: calling it marriage acknowledges the reality of what it is doing with its legal practice in a way that communicates the marital status of the couple in a distinctive way. It is one thing for a church or a subculture to call the couple married. It is something else for the state to do so. When the state does so, it's "official."

The main reason to resist calling legal marriage "marriage" is because one doesn't want the marital status of at least some couples to be "official." Making it official has an effect. I suspect it increases the likelihood that the couple will stay together over time. It enhances the stabilizing effect of marriage. It makes it harder for some people to minimize or trivialize the important social commitments of others. It makes it more likely that people operating as a family unit, committed to being a family unit, will be treated as a family unit. It increases their opportunity to actually live as they have chosen to live.

From the standpoint of a state that is founded on liberal democratic values, ones that lift up equality and liberty, these effects can only be seen as positive. They are negative only from the standpoint of those who wish to deny equality and liberty to some portion of the population. As such, it seems to me that getting rid of civil marriage is a bad idea from the standpoint of liberal democracy. The state, in other words, has no reason to get out of the marriage business, even if certain sub-groups within the country have reasons to want them to.

"Hey, let's ban ALL marriage so we can keep the gays from having it!"

Faced with a federal ruling against Oklahoma's Constitutional same-sex marriage ban, some Oklahoma lawmakers have taken an attention-grabbing step: Propose eliminating legal marriage altogether in the state.

This is an interesting move, especially when one recalls that one of the key pieces of legislation blocking same-sex marriage rights for two decades was called the DEFENSE of Marriage Act.

The conservatives opposing extending legal marriage rights to same-sex couples have marshaled many arguments against it. Most of them, in my judgment, have been pretty awful. But the one that has always struck me as the most sensible, if ultimately unconvincing, is this one (reconstructed as charitably as possible):

Marriage is the bedrock social institution, one that societies across the world have relied on for most of recorded history as a basic way to promote social stability. While there have been variations in its structure, it has always had a heterosexual form, bonding men to women (if not just one man to just one woman). Extending marriage to include same-sex couples is thus a radical change in the design of the institution; and given how crucially important this  bedrock institution is to our social fabric, we should be very hesitant to make radical changes of this sort.

This argument is rooted in the very essence of conservatism: conserving established structures and ways of doing things in a society as much as possible, with a real hesitance to making abrupt changes unless the case for doing so has been shown to be highly compelling. And it hinges on stressing the significance of marriage as a social institution.

The current legislation on offer in Oklahoma is the very opposite of all of that. It proposes throwing out, at least at a legally recognized level, what conservative opponents of same-sex marriage have typically declared utterly essential to a healthy social fabric. (And if you think getting rid of legal marriage isn't such a big deal because people can still be married in churches--think again. Think about what would change in society if no church wedding was ever legally recognized, and no couples were recognized by the law as legal life partners.)

Andrew Sullivan has long argued that the best case for same-sex marriage is essentially conservative: Here is a basic social institution, one whose value in promoting stability and other goods in society has proved itself through long testing. Gays and lesbians, recognizing the value of this institution, also recognize that the service it does to the heterosexual community will benefit the gay community as well. To deny gays and lesbians that is to reject what has been a founding precept of American society--a core value that finds expression in the Declaration of Independence itself: the right of all persons to equal treatment under the law, with equal access to the social and legal conditions that promote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Combine respect for the old institution of marriage with respect for a founding American value, and you have a case for same-sex civil marriage that is conservative through-and-through.

Have opponents of same-sex marriage started showing their true colors--and revealed that they aren't really conservatives after all? Have they revealed that denying the people they hate access to a basic social good matters more to them than preserving established institutions and values? Are current advocates of same-sex marriage more true to the conservative spirit than opponents?

Well, maybe not in general. But they're probably more true to the conservative spirit than the Oklahoma legislators currently proposing anti-marriage legislation.

The Gay Agenda

Sally Kern--the Oklahoma state representative who once declared that gays are a bigger threat to America than terrorism--has been talking about the gay agenda again. This time, she's taken the public stage in response to the recent ruling by a federal judge declaring that Oklahoma's constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage violates the federal constitution. 

Her invocation of the legendary gay agenda sent my imagination into overdrive. Here is the result.

The nefarious Gay Agenda Team (better known as the Gay-Team) has gathered once again in their secret base of operations (better known as Joe's basement apartment) to plot their next move.

Joe, leader of the group, stands by the heavy wooden table that dominates the center of the room. He carefully smooths out his worn copy of The Gay Agenda. His fingers touch the page almost tenderly as he scans the now familiar list of numbered goals. 10 of them, in deliberate mockery of the much-despised Ten Commandments.

The other members of the team--Billy and Gary--are eating leftovers and drinking beer on the sofa and watching old recordings of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

"Alright people, let's get going."

He's ignored.

Billy lets out a gasp. "He looks so much better with that new haircut. Doesn't he look so much better with that new haircut?"

"Definitely," answers Gary through a mouthful of reheated Chicken Tikka Masala.

"I said let's get going!"

The others grudgingly shuffle to the table.

"First off, let's have some updates on how things are going. Gay Agenda Item One: Take over the public education system so that we can use the indoctrinating power of the schools to make all children gay. How's that proceeding. Billy?"

Billy squirms a bit. "Um, well, turns out that schools hire based on teaching ability and devotion to educating children, not gayness. So our agents had to get college degrees in elementary education and compete with everyone else for teaching jobs."

"I don't want excuses. I want an update. How's it going?"

"As I was saying, schools hire based on ability and devotion to education. So our agents had to, you know, become talented and dedicated teachers. And, well, now they seem to care more about teaching the kids than indoctrinating them to be gay."

"You mean our agents have been turned?"

"Well, not exactly. I mean, they're still gay. But it turns out...well, I hate to break this to you, but it turns out schools don't have the power to make kids gay, even if they tried. It's like it's biological or something."

Joe lets out an audible sigh. "So what are you telling me?"

"Some of our agents like being teachers. Because they're good at it and they want to make a positive difference in the lives of kids. And they just want to, you know, do that. This whole indoctrination business strikes them as a pointless misdirection of their energies."

"So they have been turned!"

"Joe. They just want to be teachers. Why don't you, I don't know, cross out Gay Agenda Item One and replace it with something like, Promote a world where anyone with a talent for teaching who cares about positively impacting the next generation is free to become a school teacher without recrimination or discrimination based on nothing but sexual orientation."

Joe stares at Billy. "First of all, that's a lot of words."

"I can probably shorten it with the help of a good editor."

"Second, it doesn't sound nefarious. We're supposed to be nefarious. This just sounds like people wanting equal opportunity and freedom from discrimination."

"Yeah. The thing is, Joe, we're not so big on the whole 'nefarious' thing. We just want equal opportunity and freedom from discrimination."

Joe feels his blood pressure rising. He takes five deep breaths before turning to Gary. But Gary has disappeared. It takes him a moment to notice the top of his blond hair, just peaking over the edge of the table.

"Gary, what are you doing down there?"

"Petting Molly." And then, in a higher voice: "You're a good widdul girl, aren't you Molly? Yes you are! Yes you are!"

Joe can hear Molly's excited whine. He sighs. "Stop petting the dog and tell me about Agenda Item Two."

Gary rises and looks across the table at Joe. "Agenda Item Two?"

"Yeah, you know, the one about systematically destroying heterosexual marriage by changing laws so gays can marry each other?"

"Right. Well, we've actually made really good progress on the changing the laws part."

"So I've heard. And?"

"And...it turns out it has no effect on heterosexual marriage."

"What!?"

"Straight couples...well, their marriages are just the same as they were before. Bad marriages fall apart at about the same rate. Good marriages are still as good as they were before. No change."

"But I was assured by Anita Bryant and James Dobson that gays getting married would destroy marriage!"

"Yeah. Turns out they didn't know what they were talking about."

"Okay, but what about the conservative Christians who argued that letting gays marry would trivialize their marriages. Surely they now find their own marriages to be trivial, right? They look at their marriage and say, 'Well, this doesn't mean anything to me anymore, since gays have it too,' right? I mean, at least their marriages must be falling apart."

"Apparently not. Just recently Rick Santorum was going on about how strong his marriage was and how meaningful and important it was to him."

"What!? Even Rick Santorum? Even he still finds his marriage valuable and meaningful even though gays can get married too? How is that possible? I would've sworn that at least he would experience his most intimate relationship as suddenly trivial and empty. You mean he still loves his wife and finds meaning in their union?"

"Yup."

Joe's head sags. "I guess that was a failure. I suppose we should just abandon that marriage equality strategy and--"

"Actually, we want to keep going with that one."

"But why? You just told me that it didn't work!"

"The thing is, we don't care about destroying the institution of marriage. We just want to have access to it, too. You know, equal opportunity and freedom from discrimination."

"That again? Next thing you know, you're going to tell me to crumple up this whole Gay Agenda and just replace it with Pursue equality of opportunity and freedom from discrimination, regardless of sexual orientation."

"Well," says Gary, "now that you mention it." He looks at Billy.

Billy nods. "Equality and freedom from discrimination. The new Gay Agenda. That, and getting the laundry done."

"And having a Doctor Who marathon," Gary adds. "Next Tuesday, my house."

"Doctor Who," Joe breathes. "That's the Gay Agenda? Equality, laundry, an Doctor Who?"

"About right. Yup."

For a moment Joe hesitates. After all, he's been devoted to his nefarious schemes for a long, long, time. But he does like Doctor Who. A lot. And the magical whining sound of the Tardis can fill many empty places in his heart. Even, perhaps, the hole left by a Gay Agenda that nobody ever really believed in anyway.