Religious Liberty and the Ruling on Prop 8
February 14th, 2012 § 3 Comments
by Matthew Raley
Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Prop 8′s ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional. No surprise there. The real question is what will happen at the U.S. Supreme Court, and what the implications will be for religious liberty.
Some observations:
1. It is not clear how the Roberts Court will rule on Prop 8. The outcome will likely depend on Justice Anthony Kennedy, who remains the swing vote on many issues. I will be surprised if the court renders a sweeping decision on the gay marriage question. Look for a narrow one.
This is a weak position for traditional marriage supporters. A narrow ruling against Prop 8 has the effect of institutionalizing gay marriage in the U.S., where a narrow ruling in favor of Prop 8 merely keeps the issue in play.
2. Suppose the high court upholds the 9th Circuit’s decision and gay marriage becomes the nation’s new legal default. A church’s liberty to sanction only marriages between a man and a woman comes into question, and the legal climate for this kind of liberty is very mixed.
In 2010, the high court ruled in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez that a public law school could refuse to recognize a religious group that did not abide by the school’s anti-discrimination standards. The fall-out from that decision is being felt by Christians at Vanderbilt, a private university. The vice chancellor recently told Christian groups that they have to allow non-Christians to be members and even leaders of their organizations if they want official recognition. He said in a public meeting, “We don’t want to have personal religious views intrude on good decision making on this campus.”
A rare moment of candor from a PC mandarin, and a glimpse of what life will be like if tweed totalitarianism gains even more power. There’s religious decision making, and then there’s good decision making. We just want you to make good decisions. That’s all.
There are examples of this pushiness elsewhere. New York City recently expelled churches from using public schools on Sundays. (The Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge.) The Obama administration decided to force all organizations to provide health insurance that covers contraception, even Catholic institutions. Though the administration has wavered in recent days, it has shown what it really thinks about religious liberties. Catholic adoption agencies in Illinois are closing rather than comply with the state’s new non-discrimination policy. A New York Times article about the controversy makes clear that religious liberty claims are insensitive and tiresome.
Some progressives clearly have an appetite to purge religion from civic, legal, and academic life. Not all progressives. There are those who agree that churches should not be forced to allow gay marriages, or to support any of a host of other choices sanctified by the vice chancellor of Vanderbilt. Such honest progressives recognize the importance of conscience.
So there is some ballast against those who want a purge.
In addition, recent infringements on religious liberty have to be balanced against the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision last month that anti-discrimination employment laws must respect a ministerial exemption. The decision is sweeping, and may be a game-changer for churches.
3. The practical threat to religious liberty will not come from the suave bigotry of vice chancellors, or from gay marriage laws like the one Governor Christine Gregoire signed in Washington State this week. The threat will not come from homosexuals as a group, or from progressives.
The most practical threat is from lawyered-up thugs. In their mania for a religion-free society, radical activists will use lawsuits as a shakedown tactic. They will not need friendly Supreme Court decisions. All they will need is money enough to sue — and they have plenty. They will move from suing cities over crosses and nativities and public prayers to suing churches for “discrimination.”
I have spent years in ministry opposing the attempts of the religious right to turn churches into centers of political activism. Demagoguery and money do not impress me. And if I have not countenanced toxic activism from the right, even though I’m a political conservative, I certainly will not roll over for the cultural left, with which I have no sympathy whatsoever.
I fear we are headed for a new low in American discourse, in which public debate is abandoned in favor of lawsuits. If so, the civil society that has made America strong will splinter, and the conscience of every person will be at the mercy of the best financed pressure group.
Sermon for My Grandpa’s Memorial
February 6th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
As I remembered Grandpa in the hours after he died, I thought of 1 John 3.1-3.
See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.
I struggled with my memories of Grandpa that night. Each memory was good without giving me comfort. In fact, some of my most important memories of him were like a slap in the face. Grandpa is gone. I won’t see him again in this life. There were some gifts that only he could give because he was Grandpa, and no one can replace him. Though I can remember what he gave, he won’t give anything more.
The words from John helped me understand something about Grandpa’s life and death. Meditate on them with me.
John’s point is that the Father has given us a unique relationship. Look, John says, at “what kind of love” the Father has given. John doesn’t marvel that there is so much of God’s love, or that God’s love toward us is so deep, but that God’s love is a specific kind. His love is the kind that calls us his children.
John explains what he means elsewhere in this letter. Human beings are sinners, and have no fellowship with God (1.6, 8). So we do not become his children because we love him, but because he loves us first. And the Father loved us by giving his Son Jesus on the cross to pay for our sins (4.10). When we believe in Christ, John says that we are “born of God,” that God “abides in us” (4.13-16; 5.1).
The love that calls us children of God is the kind that bought us a second birth in Christ.
Grandpa believed these things. He and Grandma realized who Jesus is and began to follow him at a Billy Graham crusade. Grandpa knew that God’s love is not a generic benevolence, but a sacrificing love.
The next statement John makes is stark. He describes the alienation between the world and the Father. “The reason why the world did not know us,” John says of himself and the other apostles, “is that it did not know him.” John also explains and repeats this statement throughout his letter. There is no darkness is God, and darkness does not have any fellowship with him (1.5-6). “Do not love the world or the things in the world,” John writes (2.15). “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”
This kind of alienation from the world was something Grandpa knew too. He told me that, before he started following Christ, he had been made Sunday school director at his church. Grandpa realized that he had been in charge of teaching children about Christ, but hadn’t been following Christ. So he went to the pastor and resigned. The pastor didn’t see that Grandpa’s lack of personal experience with Christ made any difference, and declined his resignation. Grandpa was astonished. “You mean, it doesn’t matter to you whether your Sunday school director is a Christian?” A major reason why he and Grandma moved here in 1955 was the realization that their church didn’t think being “born of God” was important.
In fact, the new birth is constantly being downgraded from essential to optional. Those of us who claim to follow Christ tend to rejoice in our sins being paid without looking too carefully over the itemized bill. The logic of John—the logic of the Bible as a whole—is relentless on this point: sins by nature are destructive and incur a cost. Grandpa’s sins were costly. His redemption came at a price. The logic drives on: if that cost is paid for me, then I do not belong to myself anymore. Grandpa struggled to reach that conclusion. And so we all do. We sometimes wish that we could take some of the world’s plastic into the streets of gold.
John’s next sentence is the reason I thought of these verses the night Grandpa died. “We are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared.” There are two points in those words. He says we have this amazing identity right now: we are God’s children. All the acceptance, security, and love of God’s household belong to us. The story has passed the turning-point. But then John says that we can’t picture what we will be. The Last Day hasn’t come. Our final image hasn’t downloaded yet. The story isn’t over.
So when Grandpa was with us, he belonged in the Father’s household. He was a child of God. But there is more to Grandpa that remains hidden.
These words from John helped me because I realized that the best gifts I received from Grandpa were from Christ. In this life, Grandpa was born of God, and the many good things Grandpa gave were the overflow of that new birth.
Some of those things were simple.
He knew how to delight and amaze his grandkids. He could twist an apple in half with his bare hands. He made all sorts of toys: trucks, puzzles, guns. He taught me the first lessons I can remember in creativity. When I was 8 or 9, I asked if he would make me a rifle. All I had in mind was the shape of a rifle cut out of wood. Grandpa went to his shop, drew a rifle onto a scrap of plywood, and proceeded to cut it out. But I could see that the barrel was way too short. I was worried. Didn’t Grandpa know about rifles? Didn’t he know that the whole point of a rifle was the long barrel? I gently pointed this out to him, but he didn’t seem concerned at all. So I figured it could still pass for a sawed-off shotgun. But Grandpa had other ideas. What I thought was the barrel was actually just the stock. For the barrel he used a couple feet of half-inch PVC pipe. When the bad guys saw me coming with that rifle, they all ran.
The first lesson in creativity was, “Don’t rush the genius.” The second was, “A creation is the best gift.”
Grandpa could be extremely funny. He was the master of deadpan storytelling. I can’t tell his masterpiece the way he told it, but I can give you the gist.
Across the road from the family home was a field that Grandpa was clearing, and in the field was a stump. He decided that, instead of cutting the stump out, it’d be faster to blast it. So he went to town to buy dynamite from the only place you could get it, and that was the Baptist pastor’s wife. She sold him the dynamite, but she gave him some advice. “Don’t pack too much under the stump. Only use a little.”
He nodded but thought, “What does she know?”
When he was finished packing all the explosives he had under the stump, he lit the fuse and took off running. The blast shot the stump into the air, past Grandpa, across the road, over the family home, and into the back yard.
Moral: listen to the pastor’s wife.
The simple gifts are worth a lot, whether a toy or a tall tale. But some of the things Grandpa gave me were deeper.
I worked with him on his rentals for two summers as a teenager. I learned from working alongside him, and I learned from watching how he related to people—open, polite, understated. I saw these things and more because he gave me time.
He also gave me understanding.
One summer I preached a sermon at a Free Church youth conference in Denver in front of a panel of three judges. I was seventeen. My model for public speaking was William F. Buckley, Jr. When I finished and sat down with my youth pastor, Dan Tedder, and the judges, one of them held up my notes and said, “What is this? What are you trying to do?”
Grandpa was on the church board at the time, and he heard from Dan about how the judges reacted. A couple weeks later Grandpa and I were reroofing one of the 7th Street houses, and somehow we started talking about Denver. He stopped, set his hammer down, and said, “I heard what that judge said about your sermon. That wasn’t right. You just keep following the path you’re on, and the Lord will use you.”
I was blessed in my teens to have people in my life who understood me, my parents and Dan Tedder included. Grandpa’s gift of understanding at that moment was powerful.
John’s words helped me understand that Grandpa’s gifts to me really came from Christ’s work in Grandpa. God used Grandpa’s gifts to stir and strengthen my spiritual life, and I continue to grow because of them.
John’s next words helped me understand Grandpa’s death. “But we know that when [Christ] appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” John picks up the idea that we don’t know yet what we will be in eternity. The end of the story is when Christ returns. We will finally have an unobstructed view of him. No more speculation about what he is really like, no more wondering what he would do or say. We will see Christ as he is, and John says we will then become like him—just the way children learn.
What is Christ like? Glorious, gentle, meek, true, life-giving, gracious, loving.
Grandpa had some of those qualities some of the time, and because he was a child of God those good things built us up. Now Grandpa sees Christ as he is. Grandpa is like Christ. He has all of Christ’s qualities eternally. His story is finished.
John’s last words in these verses give us a glimpse of Christian integrity. “And everyone who thus hopes in [Christ] purifies himself as he is pure.” We don’t purify ourselves by willing away our sins, nor by rationalizing them. We purify ourselves by setting our hope as God’s children on the Last Day, the hope that we will see Jesus Christ in his perfection, and that we’ll become complete in him. This hope arouses us to reject the plastic gloss of this world and strive for the prize of the upward call.
The Drug Ethic Under the Microscope
February 2nd, 2012 § 2 Comments
by Matthew Raley
An opinion piece about A.D.D. medications by L. Alan Sroufe was published in the New York Times on Saturday. “Ritalin Gone Wrong” remained on the Times‘s most emailed list Tuesday. Also published on Saturday was “An Appointment With Dread”, one of a series of online pieces about anxiety medications. The article by Alissa Nutting was also still hanging out on the most emailed list two days later.
A third article about meds and behavior was published the same day. “Are We Ready for a ‘Morality Pill’?” was written by the well-known (infamous?) philosopher Peter Singer and researcher Agata Sagan.
All of these pieces deal with the predisposition problem: our behavior seems to be determined by factors beyond our control. We would very much like our predispositions to be biochemical, so that we could jump our ethical and emotional gaps with the momentum of dosage.
Singer and Sagan argue that, if biochemistry predisposes our actions, and if one can demonstrate differences in brain chemistry between ethical and unethical people — the criterion in their article is reduced to empathy — then free will is not really a factor in human behavior. So why not take a pill to become better?
(Empathy equals good ethics. It’s hard to know who was more sophomoric, the writers of the piece or the editors who said, “Yeah, that’s a worthwhile contribution to the millennia of Western thought.”)
Nutting gives readers a hilarious look at daily life spent inside an anxious mind, and a less funny peek at how to connive the desired prescriptions out of a doctor. The longevity of her article on the most-emailed list suggests that she is hitting more than people’s funny-bone. I hear reviews of anti-anxiety drugs in conversation as if they were films or smart phones.
Sroufe’s article is substantive, rigorous, and devastating. He has been studying the psychological development of troubled children for four decades, long enough to see how a supposition about A.D.D. led to a 20-fold increase in the consumption of Ritalin and Adderall over the last 30 years.
The supposition has been that A.D.D. is rooted in biochemistry, and that it is therefore treatable with medication. In the early 1970s, children with A.D.D. who took the drugs showed better ability to concentrate than those who didn’t. Open-and-shut. Parents and teachers dealing with behavioral problems day in, day out needed no more proof.
But there are problems.
Ritalin and Adderall, Sroufe points out, are stimulants. They do not calm children. The short-term increase in concentration results from heightened excitement. By 1990, researchers had thought to ask, “How do these drugs affect children who don’t have A.D.D.?” Srouf surveyed the literature and documented that “all children … responded to stimulant drugs the same way.” In fact, “versions of these drugs had been given to World War II radar operators to help them stay awake and focus on boring, repetitive tasks.”
Sroufe writes, “To date, no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships or behavioral problems, the very things we would most want to improve.” Children’s bodies simply adapt to the stimulants.
He rejects the idea that A.D.D. is a biochemical problem. He says hard evidence doesn’t establish a link. On the contrary, his own studies point to environment as the culprit. He has followed 200 children born into poverty since 1975. “What we found was that the environment of the child predicted development of A.D.D. problems.” Policy-makers don’t seem too interested in that conclusion.
Young people are taught very few moral principles. The only one that I hear them repeat consistently is the responsibility to “take your meds.” If you don’t set your brain chemistry right, you make poor choices. To be sure, there is a relationship between the body and the emotions. Treating the body properly changes your outlook. But those insights don’t automatically yield moral and spiritual health.
We are not dealing with the predisposition problem seriously. By attempting to solve it with pills, we have created a society that is ethically helpless.
