7 October 1998
Well, I think our current discussion proves the point: the hot spots in any discussion are religion and politics. In fact, what we have here is the intersection of religion and politics ("politics" meaning the distribution, assignment, taking of power) in the question of who has it in Christianity.
[A] brings us back to straightforward Biblical Christianity in the form of Paul's letter to the Corinthians. Ever wonder why the Bible has letters in it? Because the early members of the cult ("cultus" in Latin is part of the verb "cultivare," meaning to cultivate, and is extended to mean mental cultivation as well as physical cultivation or training) were looking for direction. In fact, the earliest New Testament texts are the letters, rather than the gospels-- "gospel" being the name for a book that recounts stories of the life of Jesus (and yes, the gospels differ in their recounting of these stories--I recommend to all of you the History of Christianity course on this campus: very straightforward talk about where the Bible comes from). The Bible itself has included and excluded a number of different documents over the course of the centuries (to this day the Bible Catholics read is different from the Bible Protestants read). And Paul's words about women's submission became part of Christian doctrine very early.
In the quotations from Augustine and Gratian, we see where religion as doctrine intersects with political, i.e. power, concerns. No surprise: that is one of the features of human institutions, as you'd learn in a political science class (and will probably talk about some in a number of your classes). But such a political statement flies in the face of American ideology, which declares all persons equal. Is American ideology a bad thing? I wouldn't think so. But we must admit it is historically constructed. Another part of American ideology is the separation of church and state: church law (and churches do have law, as [A] and [C] point out) is not state law. Hence what we are seeing in front of us is a conflict between ideologies.
Why do our ideologies conflict?
[D]'s response interestingly brings up what I see as women's power--the power of childbirth--and stands it against political power (political control of the Catholic church). In that way he replicates what, as a good feminist, I've thought is the real issue behind misogyny--here's an excerpt from a message I sent [C]:
[quote]>This is because, according to the Feminist teleology, women are oppressed when they live in a male dominated society. (Please note that this is oversimplified). >
The social structures (things like possession of wealth, purification rites, inheritance laws) of male-dominated societies (or "patriarchies," to use academic parlance--and virtually all Western societies, and not a few non-Western ones are patriarchal in nature) rely on limitations placed on women. Here's how I think about patriarchal societies: social order trumps biology. In basic terms, the continuity of society rests on progeny, and how do we know who the mother of a child is? Well, it's pretty obvious--there are few cases of "mistaken maternity." Think of all those public birthings of rulers. How do we know who the father of a child is? Hmm. Until DNA testing, there was no proof--even blood-typing (also relatively modern) is only partially reliable. Yet the Anglo-American social order names children after their fathers. Thus in this instance the social order reverses the biological order by naming children after their fathers, rather than their mothers. And, in an economy of scarcity, that ability to birth becomes a curse, rather than a blessing (think of No Name Woman).
Women's power is fearsome to the patriarchal order. Think of the story of Hercules deflowering 200 virgins in one night: that's the stuff of fantasy, of myth, of superhumanness. Now think of Messalina, the emperor Claudius's wife, who, in her guise as a prostitute and in a competition with another prostitute, took in 200 men and was still panting for more (you can read about this in Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars). The biological limitations on women in the sexual arena are less than the biological limitations men experience. Harnessing, controlling that superabundance of female energy becomes the ideological necessity of patriarchy. [end quote]
[D] is being disingenuous when he conflates biology (birthing babies) with politics (being the leader). Or is he? Perhaps that conflation is the beginning of politics--and if it is, it has all to do with women, doesn't it? When [D] mentions the inherent "gendering" of language, he interestingly connects the word with the male (and the feminist theoretician Julia Kristeva would agree--her theory is that language is the masculine universe, while pre-language is the feminine, and that poetry is our attempt, in language--from which there is no escape--to find again and describe that pre-language, maternal experience), and doesn't take into account that "difference" doesn't necessarily imply "hierarchy." Except when we're talking politics. And even "equality" is a political word, isn't it?
Why we care about Christianity, part 2
16 November 1998
Souls are there for the touching--our emotive selves, so little attended to in our post-Enlightenment, scientifically-geared society, hunger for some kind of elevating experience. Sociobiologists would say that we are hard-wired for feeling and thinking, having brains that possess an intellectual-emotive nexus (I remember years ago learning that the brain's frontal lobes, the place for imagination and ideas, differentiated the human species) and that such hard-wiring must be useful for the species. Despite biological hard-wiring, Western intellectual culture has spent almost 300 years (if not more) outlining the detriments of the emotions (you'll get to study the Enlightenment next term, and perhaps you'll see how our current intellectual climate and its attitude towards emotion has been historically determined), and assigning emotional response to a lower order of intelligence (for instance, women). We are lucky to live at a time, and on a coast (West), that has been challenging those Enlightenment structures: for instance, David Frank tells me that in his field, rhetoric, the debate rages about letting emotions back into the equation in analyzing debating success.
So what make the emotions suspect? First, they can't be controlled or quantified. Second, they seem to interfere with "productivity" in an imperialist, capitalist society. I'd propose that our horrible graphically-violent movies attempt, in a fully-consumerist culture, to answer that emotive need, to channel it (as with "bread and circuses") away from social concern (about injustice and poverty) into a kind of numbness. It is a tragic consequence of capitalist consumerism.
But the emotions haven't gone away, despite capitalism's desire to either tamp them down or trade on them for profit, or the Enlightenment's mistrust of them. At the same time, English as a language seems poor in its abilities to talk about emotions (our one word for love, for instance, reveals that poverty). Despite that paucity, our radio waves are packed with love songs, and as a culture we are still addicted to narrative--from the life of Buddha to the life of Jesus. These narratives make us think, feelingly (and I'll plug narrative again as a way we learn--narrative's didactic power must be reckoned and respected. Maybe, in fact, narrative and frontal lobes go together), and reveal that knowing is more than thinking; it is also feeling. Perhaps the scientists, or the poets, will give us a new language for talking about the intellectual/emotive nexus.
Patriotism too is a kind of emotion, but I don't think that its emotive force was [X]'s point, and I think [Y]'s argument about [X]'s patriotism is the weakest link in his chain. The rhetoric of freedom in the Constitution (itself an Enlightenment product) was produced by a great number of church-going, God-fearing men who nevertheless, like Thomas More in his Utopia, envisioned a country undivided by the sectarian Christian violence that had so marked the map of Europe and the Mediterranean basin (and still tragically marks Ireland). In the course of American history, that idea of non-sectarianism has migrated to a freedom of non-religion, something the founding fathers, and Thomas More, would have had trouble envisioning. It took about 200 years, and it's not like the road was a straight path, but today American ideology frames a place where religion and religious leaders don't make political policy, and where leaders don't overtly use religious dogma as their basis for political decisions. (Y'all can't remember this, but when John Kennedy ran for president, one of the charges levied against him was that, as a Catholic, he would be beholden to the pope, and that the United States would be controlled by Rome. Your parents, were they citizens in 1960, remember this debate. We're talking less than 40 years ago. The Nixon/Kennedy contest remains the closest in American history. The shadow of sectarian Christian violence haunted that election, as did the power of the American ideology that separates church and state).
So where are we today in this debate? I'd say that the greatest single threat to the American ideology that separates church and state--an ideology that was not threatened by Kennedy because he didn't run for president *as* a Catholic--is the American Christian Right emblematized by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Pat Buchanan. Why? Because they are trading on their religion--a religion shared by many Americans--for political gain. Furthermore, I find the religious right scary because of its professed attitudes towards women, towards Jews, towards gay people, and towards the rest of the world. In other words, it's not Falwell's, or Robertson's, or Buchanan's being Christian that's the problem, but their attempts to mobilize political power on the grounds of *what they read* to be Christian dicta (and I'm with Emily that there are really only two Christian dicta, ""Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself." (Mark 12:30-31)") and their attempts to co-opt Christianity for their own political agendas.
Falwell and Robertson's idea that America has a manifest destiny as a Christian country along with the price they would have to exact to acheive their ends makes my blood run cold. And I expect that that's part of the reason why there's tension in the classroom around the issue of Christianity. We live in Oregon, the state whose Oregon Christian Alliance brought you--was it two or three?--anti-gay measures, which are for me matters of the heart. The American experiment as I see it is the attempt to create a secular society which still hearkens to profound tenets of individual freedom and mutual respect. It's an experiment that has risen to the challenges presented by diversity and has taken the issue of civil rights to include African Americans and women (and has yet to make those same rights fully available to Native Americans). It's an experiment which has taken the tenet "Love your neighbor as yourself," translated it in the political sphere as "Respect the rights of your neighbor as yourself," and kept its eyes open to the conflicted interests that such respect entails. American ideology would never have happened without a rhetoric of individual freedom and liberty that owes its inception to Christianity of a very particular era--the eighteenth-century Enlightenment--and class--landowning men--whose heritage we are still debating today (witness the debate about Jefferson). I hope we continue to have hearts and minds open to these challenges, and that we can learn to situate these challenges historically as well as personally.
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