Some Bitter Fruit

The issue has faded off the front pages and slogged into the courtrooms now--the Obama administration's attempt to force religious employers to pay for medical insurance for their employees that includes contraception and abortion coverage.  The only "religious exemption" to be allowed was for actual houses of worship themselves; if a religious group has hospitals, schools, universities or other charitable activities, they were to be outside the exemption.  There was a lot of uproar, and the spectacle of the Southern Baptist Convention siding with the Roman Catholic Church against the Federal Government.  The uproar has quieted down, but the lawsuits have been filed.  One small business even persuaded a judge to grant an injunction against the rule being applied to their operation--something that usually only happens if the judge thinks the plaintiff has a chance of winning his case.

But over time, this to-do reminded me of something I wrote almost exactly five years ago.  It started as a comment on my online friend Steve Sensenig's "Theological Musings" blog.  Steve thought enough of my comment to re-post it as a guest post.  I re-copied it to my own blog as well:  http://postmodernredneck.blogspot.com/2007/09/basic-question.html   For those who might want to see the original extensive discussion, it's here:  http://www.theologicalmusingsblog.com/2007/08/27/how-not-to-judge-someones-orthodoxy/

For those who would prefer the quick version, I was pointing out a dichotomy that has existed in Christianity for most of its history.  Is Christianity (a) a set of activities engaged in on Sunday morning, led by official staff with a set of tenets enforced by the staff, or it is (b) a way of living, 24/7/365, in relationship with God and with each other.  Some might say it is both, but I pointed out five years ago that it is not a stable symbiosis--over time, (a) crowds out (b).  In fact, thinking about it now, I would add that in times when (a) dominates, the church is dull, boring, and what we might call "dead"--as well as having problems with internal corruption (pastoral adultery scandals among the Pentacostals and charismatics, a la Bakker, Swaggert, et al., pedophilia scandals in the Roman Catholic church, financial scandals among the Eastern Orthodox--and that's just the modern stuff, history is full of it!).  And in times of renewal and revival, (b) comes to the fore:  people begin to focus on applying Christianity to their daily lives and to the society they live in.  The abolition of slavery in Great Britain and its possessions was one result of this; the growth of abolitionist sentiment in the United States was likewise a result of the early 19th century revivals, and the failure of those revivals to penetrate as far in the Deep South as they did in the North and Midwest was a major cause of the Civil War.  (At Red River Meeting House, the beginning of the Second Great Awakening and the Camp Meeting movement in 1800, attendees saw the Holy Spirit falling on blacks as well as whites and concluded that black people did have souls--contrary to what some southern preachers were teaching--and that slavery was wrong.  That area, on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, became an anti-slavery stronghold, and may well have been a factor in Kentucky not joining the Confederacy.  If that revival had spread farther south as well as to the north, the Civil War might have been avoidable.)

Back to the present day:  It came to me that the administration's mandate does make some sense if religion is limited to what you do inside a building on Sunday morning or some other specified time, and is not expected to have any real influence on what you do the rest of the week.  So it is a result of, a "fruit" to use a Biblical term, of the (a) view of Christianity.  But the mandate is a total rejection of (b), claiming to override any place for Christian principles in the workplace or the health insurance market.  So this mandate controversy is a debate over the real nature of Christianity, not just what some in the government think it is, but what it ought to be, and to some extent, who gets to decide?   The fate of real religious freedom in this country hangs in the balance.

Hard Choices

I know I haven't written anything for a while; as I said to a friend lately, "Life is what happens while you were making other plans." But some things have been nagging at me for several months, and maybe I can get something down here.

There's been a lot of noise the past few months over the "enhanced interrogation" methods used on some of the captured terrorists by our government. I have to admit that a lot of the outrage on one side strikes me as politically motivated, because so many of these people have been putting down traditional morality for many years, and mocking anyone who seems to be associated with it. (I may have something more to say about this in another post, if I can get it written.) Yet suddenly they are up in arms over this misbehavior! They have excused all kinds of moral lapses among their friends and supporters, but let their political opponents commit a sin, and they are enraged over it.

I've seen some others who are conservatives themselves and are outraged that their leaders approved these actions. And many conservatives are saying essentially, "hey, it worked--therefore it was justified!" (Apparently many religious conservatives fall into this group, too.)

It seems to me that most people want to paint their own side as bright white and their opponents as totally black. The trouble is, life doesn't always work out that way. As a Christian, I believe we are all fallen people, living in a fallen, damaged world. Even the best of us fail at times, and at the other end of the spectrum there are people who are almost completely evil, doing good about as often as the best do wrong. Most of us land somewhere between. And one result of this situation is that sometimes things are not "black and white" with a clear choice. Sometimes you look at the available options and none is completely white, all are darker or lighter shades of gray. The principle involved is called "the lesser of two evils." I would even say sometimes it may be three or four evils, or more. All you can do is try for the one that is the least black, as far as you can tell. I have had a few times in my life that I had to make that sort of decision, on a small scale--nothing of any national importance or significance--and I am glad that I did not have to make any such choices involving life or death for other people. I am very glad I was not in a position in government having to make the choices about interrogating prisoners.

I do not agree with those who call the "enhanced interrogation" a good thing; I think it is an ugly thing. But I can see that it may have been necessary, or seemed necessary at the time. That still does not make it a good thing, and I think we need to recognize this. On the other side, those who did not have to make such decisions themselves need to show a little more humility and not be so self-righteous in condemning others. If they were in the same position with the same responsibilities, they might make the same choice. And if there really are some in elected office who did know about the matter, kept quiet until the uproar started, and then joined the chorus of outrage: these may be the worst of all.