Anglican Schism, Ho-Hum

The Anglican church's crumbling foundations | Stephen Bates | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk:

If the Americans are shown the door the consequences for worldwide Anglicanism are incalculable and not just because the wealthy US church largely pays for and sustains the communion, including in those parts of the world where the church's mission would not otherwise survive. In the Church of England there are many who find they have more in common with their American brethren than with the strident, coercive voices they hear from the conservatives.

So the Anglican Communion as an institution is over. So what? Why did we ever need it in the first place? I can still go to any Anglican church in the world and feel perfectly comfortable going for Communion. So can anyone else, if they have the nerve, whether Anglican or not--no one is checking. What difference does it make if there's an Anglican Communion with an institutional struction and bishops that fly around the world to have confabs with one another?

I thought the whole point of having a "Communion" was that anyone who was a member of a church in the Communion could take Communion in any church within the Communion. It was like having one's money in a bank that had lots of branches around the world with ATMs where one could do banking business. Suppose Bank of America fragments so that my local branch is no longer part of the same firm as all these other branches around the world but I can still use their ATMs without paying additional fees. Why should I care? The institutional structure makes no difference to me so long as I can conduct my banking business conveniently wherever I go. The Anglican Communion makes no difference to members if they can still go to Communion in any Anglican church, whether in or out of the Anglican Communion. What else is there?

I suppose there's the money--and lots of it. For churches outside of the US being in the Anglican Communion has been like Having Contacts: it provides access to the money and power of the Episcopal Church. When the schism becomes official, will the Episcopal Church keep sending money to poor Anglican Churches in the Global South? And if it does, will they accept it? Hell I care. If the Episcopal Church stops sending money or other churches stop accepting it, then the Episcopal Church will just plow it back into endowment or use it to litigate over church property in the US and to maintain empty churches. Why should I care? I contribute to Oxfam. There are plenty of secular charities sending money to the Global South and no particular reason to have that money channeled through the Episcopal Church.

So I am still puzzled. What is the point of the Anglican Communion? It isn't needed as a vehicle for income transfers from the US to the Global South. It certainly doesn't exist to maintain doctrinal uniformity--that's the last thing I or most other Anglicans want. It doesn't issue Communion tickets because anyone can go to Communion in any Anglican church no questions asked and no ticket needed. So what on earth was it ever for? And what bad consequences will there be if it splinters into two or two hundred fragments?

The New Atheists

The philosopher's God | HE Baber | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

I wrote this piece for The Guardian, which got the predictable comments there and then enjoyed something of an afterlife on Butterflies and Wheels with more predictable comments.

I suppose I can understand some of the hostility to religion. There are still a few people around who were raised as fundamentalists and got beat up by it or who live in backwaters where conservative evangelical Christianity is the religion du jour, religious participation is de facto mandatory and non-participants get flak. And there are many more who don't have much contact with religion of any kind but who have picked up the rhetoric of these embittered ex-fundamentalists because it's an intellectual status symbol or because it's bad and therefore cool. Ho-hum.

What I don't understand is the virtually universal tone-deafness to religion--the utter failure to understand its appeal. But maybe I just have an anomalous understanding of what religion is.

Religion as I understand it is metaphysics + cult.

Metaphysics isn't empirical. The metaphysical commitments of religion don't have anything to do with the way in which material world operates. Science tells the whole story about that. They are solely concerned with out-of-this-world matters: the existence and nature of God and the possibility of postmortem survival. The metaphysics of religion commit one to belief in the supernatural, to out-of-this-world states of affairs--not to any claims about the supernatural influencing the natural order or breaking into it by way of miracles.

Cult consists in liturgy and, by extension, the infrastructure that houses it and facilitates it: church buildings, religious art, silverware and costume. It includes also all literature, music and art that has religious themes.

That's it in its essence. For historical reasons all sorts of other stuff has been tacked on, much of which has been, over the centuries sloughed off. Religions once provided cosmologies: now we know better and have abandoned creation myths for scientific accounts of the origin of the universe. Religions, Abrahamic religions in particular, told an historical story: we now know better, read the Bible critically and recognize that most of the history it includes is at best fanciful.

Most religious believers still seem to imagine that religion provides ethical guidance. It's time to dump that too: ethics is a purely secular discipline. As far as the Big Questions about the Meaning of Life and such, these aren't even intelligible. Faux-religions that dispense with the metaphysics but insist that they have something to offer when it comes to ethics and questions about Meaning or The Human Condition are completely worthless. Secular ethics, a philosophical specialty, deals with ethics and the empirical social sciences tell us everything there is to know about the "human condition."

So what is left is metaphysics and cult. That's religion in its essence. So what's the problem with that? Interesting metaphysics, that doesn't in any way undermine a completely scientific understanding of the natural world, ceremonies, customs and wonderful art and, if we're lucky, religious experience.

The Big Tent Collapses

More briefly, on the quasi-collapse of the Episcopal Church, I ask why people leave the Episcopal Church for more conservative groups--not only or primarily break-away "continuing Anglican" outfits, but non-Anglican evangelical churches, the RC Church and Orthodox churches?

The explanation one always hears is that these people are social conservatives who object to the liberal policies of the Episcopal Church and other mainline churches. But is this really true for all, or even for the majority? Could it possibly be that what they're after is religion--a commitment by the church to belief in the supernatural, a program to get members in touch with it, and moral support for religious belief in a world where it's increasingly socially unacceptable?

I'd bet that for lots the conservative moral and social agenda to which these churches are committed is a don't-care for many people. These churches unabashedly offer religion and lots of people are prepared to get on board with the conservative agendas as a concommitant--or at least sign on and ignore them. I might too, but I just cannot accept the conservative agenda as a don't-care. I might if I were male because the nub for me is the commitment to understanding gender as theologically or metaphysically relevant. I can't no way no how buy that and, when I've contemplated trying in order to affiliate with a church that was religiously congenial it slams me as a reducio of religious belief: if Christianity, real Christianity with real theistic metaphysics, entails that men and women are in some deep metaphysical sense different, then I cannot buy Christianity.

Conservatives are on the whole patronizing jerks about this. They respond by saying either (1) that I don't understand that difference doesn't mean inequality or that (2) if I'm not willing to accept the "hard sayings" which invariably concern sex and gender, I'm not sincerely religious--I'm just interested in, as one formerly Episcopalian Orthodox priest put it, haberdashery. But that's untrue--about me and about others who cannot buy into their program.

(1) It isn't inequality to which I object but la difference as such--the idea that men and women are in some deep way different or ought to play different roles, even if those roles were genuinely equal. (2) It isn't that the "hard sayings" are hard in the sense that they would prevent me from living the life I want to life or doing the things I want to do. They are just plain unbelievable and, when I've tried out the mental gymnastics it would take to generate belief in these hard sayings it invariably strikes me that believing the fundamental religious claims takes mental gymnastics and may be equally implausible. Reducio.

There may be virtue in doing things that are hard to do, that take self-sacrifice, but there's no virtue in believing things that are hard to believe. What is peculiarly offensive about religious conservatives is the assumption that believing seven impossible things before breakfast is virtuous and that anyone who balks at that is just an aesthete playing games, dabbling in liturgy, without any serious religious commitment.

Pared-Down Episcopal Church Is Looking to Grow Through ‘Inclusivity’ - NYTimes.com

Whether Episcopalians really can regenerate a church based on youth and “inclusivity” remains to be seen. So far, they have paid a price for their actions. Four bishops, the majority of their dioceses and numerous parishes around the country jumped ship in the last few years to form a new, theologically conservative entity called the Anglican Church in North America. That group will not consecrate women, not to mention gay men and lesbians, as bishops. It has about 100,000 members, while the Episcopal Church has about two million. But a church study shows that membership declined about 6 percent from 2003 to 2007. The Episcopal Church also saw its contributions decline...To theological conservatives, these are signs of a church that will ultimately collapse because it has sold its soul to secular political causes.

Well, I'm glad that I left over 10 years ago, because if I hadn't I'd be heartbroken.

Of course the Episcopal Church will survive my lifetime, getting older, grayer and smaller--as I get older, grayer and, worst of all, smaller. But it is not going to "grow through inclusivity." Do these priests really believe that the Church will regenerate and then some by picking up a larger gay clientele and attracting "young people" because of its new, cool image? I wouldn't put it past them. Back when I was a kid they thought they could attract me by doing folk masses and adopting the idiom of the youth culture as interpreted and expurgated by middle-aged clerics.

And, of course, the conservative Anglican lot will do even worse. In Episcopal Church dioceses they'll meet in school cafeterias until they get sick of it and join some more established coventicle of holy rollers. In break-away "Anglican" dioceses they'll effectively kill off the local Episcopal Church and then become just another evangelical Protestant denomination or quasi-denomination.

What were they thinking? The outcome was predictable: anyone could have seen it coming. This campaign for gay rights in the Episcopal Church didn't benefit gays who were perfectly capable of taking care of themselves and didn't need to be adopted as yet another victim group or social justice project. And it undermined the Church. It didn't make anyone better off and it made some people worse off. How could any agent, individual or corporate, knowingly set out to achieve such an end?

The only answer is that they were blinded by by their own arrogance. These priests, overpaid do-gooders working for an organization that represented 1% of the American public, imagined that they had a prophetic voice to which the great unwashed would listen. They imagined that they had the standing to be heard and the resources to make a difference, like rich old ladies assuming that they could get their way--imagining that because they had a small clientele of retainers and sycophants the whole world was listening to them, when they were nothing but laughable nobodies.

Express any reservations about the Episcopal Church's program and you get tarred as a conservative because the whole controversy was represented by the Church, and in the media to the extent that they paid attention, as a battle in Culture Wars between liberals and conservatives. So any critique was hopeless--especially vexing to me as a liberal. I don't think there as anything whatsoever wrong with homosexual activity. I don't, for that matter, think there is anything wrong with any consensual sexual activity, whether it's part of a "committed relationship" or not. Sex is a trivial entertainment.

But the priests who were promoting this agenda just couldn't or wouldn't distinguish between the question of whether homosexual activity was ok and the question of whether the Episcopal Church should launch a campaign to persuade people that it was. Maybe this was a manifestation of residual adolescent cynicism: if people object to the Church's agenda it's just a cover--they're really homophobic reactionaries and puritans who object to the goal of "inclusion."

So now, even if I wanted to go back, where would I go? I certainly have no sympathy whatsoever with the conservative agenda of these break-away groups. None allow women bishops and most won't even have women priests. Their ethical commitments, including their views on sexuality, are diametrically opposed to my own. But there is less room in the Episcopal Church for me because as a consequence of this fight the Church has become an ideologically based organization focused on promoting political agendas and engaging in social action. The miserable irony is that I support these political agendas and am largely in agreement with the social vision. I just don't think that this is what the Church is for--and I don't think that it can pursue these goals effectively. Politics and social action are the business of secular organizations--and I contribute and belong to lots of those.

Church is for religion, because it isn't in a position to do anything else effectively and no other organization can do religion at all. The Episcopal Church is going down the tubes because it's clergy don't think religion is important or interesting. I sat through endless discussions "facilitated" by church growth gurus during the Decade of Evangelism which articulated a "vision" for the Church which assumed that religion wasn't important and that, in any case, people weren't interested in it. To attract members "congregations" (another buzz word) need to offer an array of essentially secular programs and activities--schools and pre-schools, coffee-klatch groups for stay-at-home moms, barbecuing consortia for guys, youth groups for high school kids, do-good projects and volunteer work, softball games and golf tournaments, adult education on various topics, crafts groups, exercise groups and every sort of community activity. Then they would come because those where the things that interested people--not religion.

But they didn't come, because secular organizations provided all this cheaper and better. Now that religious affiliation is de facto as well as de jure optional people are not going to bother with the Church unless they're interested in religion.

So now where are people who are interested in religion supposed to go, now that the Episcopal Church has gone further down the road to being a private, upscale community center? I saw where the Church was going years ago on a trip to Alaska to give a lecture and visit a theologian friend. She took me to the local Episcopal Church which had been colonized by academics and area yuppies--the tiny minority who were not yet resolutely secular. It was, I recall, an A-frame ski lodge affair in polished beech with a large hand-crafted patch quilt hanging from a balcony. The service consisted of selections of Good Music performed by the virtuoso organist, who taught at the university music department, and announcements of the various activities in which the congregation was engaged, including AIDS ministry, recycling and various social action projects. The liturgy was squeezed into the cracks of the corporate self-congratulation ceremony and there was, of course, the inevitable home-crafted bread baked by some organic housewife in birkenstocks.

But what are the alternatives? None for me because the split in the Church--not merely in the Anglican Church between Episcopalians and break-away groups, but between the old mainline and evangelicals across the board--mirrors the Culture Wars split in the larger society between secular liberals and religious conservatives. The difference is that within the larger society secular liberals are increasing while conservative evangelicals are declining, within the churches conservative evangelicals are taking increasing market share while the mainline is dying out. So the end toward this trend is heading will be the picture Obama's publicity crew has in mind when it tags yet another minority to be conciliated as "people of faith." The US, belatedly, will become a secular society on the European model, where most people are polite agnostics and where a small minority of polite conservatives, on the Rick Warren evangelical lite model, promotes family values.

Wise Latina

Sotomayor backs off ‘wise Latina’ quote - The Boston Globe

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, deflecting tough questioning by Republicans on the second day of her confirmation hearings, said yesterday that in 17 years as a judge she has never let her own life experiences or opinions influence her decisions. Sotomayor said her now-famous remark that she would hope a “wise Latina’’ would make better decisions because of her life experiences than a white male was a regrettable “rhetorical flourish that fell flat,’’ and does not reflect her views.

I once remarked that I didn't think that being a woman gave me any special perspective on teaching logic and that the philosophy department at my university would do just as good a job if it consisted entirely of white males.

I got slammed. This was something one wasn't supposed to say because, it was held, people of good will should promote the noble lie that members of disadvantaged groups, women and ethnic minorties, had something special to offer. As far as I understand there are two reasons for telling this lie: (1) it is supposed to be encouraging to members of disadvantaged groups and, more importantly, (2) it is supposed to persuade employers and others in positions of power to stop discriminating against women and minorities.

Since around 1970 women and minorities have been expected to make identity politics noises. So, Obama as a rising black politician was expected to do ethnic, join a black church and talk about black liberation. And Sotomayor was supposed to make noises about the special wisdom of Latinas. Neither of them, of course, believed it, and I doubt that their critics believe that they believed it: these are just the noises you're supposed to make to be a good mainstream liberal who happens to be a member of a minority group.

What a pity Sotomayor couldn't just tell the unvarnished truth. These are just the noises we minorities are supposed to make. We're supposed to take pride in our ethnic heritage--we certainly don't dare say that we feel no connection to it or consider it irrelevant. We're supposed to utter platitudes about the importance of diversity, about the special contributions (whatever they are) that members of different ethnic groups make.

Of course it's walking a tightrope because while making these noises we have to signal that we don't really mean it--that ethnicity is just a little hobby for us, as it is for the descendants of European immigrants. But everyone has always known what the game is so it's hardly dishonest--certainly not as dishonest as the behavior of Republican interrogators feigning shock at one conventional little feel-good remark about wise Latinas, pretending that they believe that I or anyone else ever took this bullshit seriously.

Bravo, Turkey!

Turkish gameshow Penitents Compete tests atheist resolve | World news | guardian.co.uk

It sounds like the beginning of a joke: what do you get when you put a Muslim imam, a Greek Orthodox priest, a rabbi, a Buddhist monk and 10 atheists in the same room?

Viewers of Turkish television will soon get the punchline when a new gameshow begins that offers a prize arguably greater than that offered by Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Contestants will ponder whether to believe or not to believe when they pit their godless convictions against the possibilities of a new relationship with the almighty on Penitents Compete (Tovbekarlar Yarisiyor in Turkish), to be broadcast by the Kanal T station. Four spiritual guides from the different religions will seek to convert at least one of the 10 atheists in each programme to their faith.

Those persuaded will be rewarded with a pilgrimage to the spiritual home of their newly chosen creed – Mecca for Muslims, Jerusalem for Christians and Jews, and Tibet for Buddhists.

For Colleges, Small Cutbacks Are Adding Up to Big Savings - NYTimes.com

For Colleges, Small Cutbacks Are Adding Up to Big Savings - NYTimes.com: "s for living on a budget.

Campus life is getting a bit dirtier as housekeeping standards are relaxed. Oberlin College in Ohio saved $22,300 by scaling back on window washing, and Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., is power washing its sidewalks and windows once a year instead of twice. Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., is having office trash picked up weekly instead of daily, a change that eliminated three custodian jobs.

Please don't increase my course load! But I don't care if they never empty my wastebaskets. Puleeze! Put a trash barrel in the hall once a week and we'll just empty our own trash baskets. What I'm not sure I like is the elimination of those three custodian positions.

Happy Bloomsday!

Op-Ed Contributor - But Always Meeting Ourselves - NYTimes.com

Editorial - Neither Real Nor Free - NYTimes.com

Anti-Neocolonialism in Iran

Editorial - Neither Real Nor Free - NYTimes.com:

Although a runoff was widely expected between the two top vote-getters, the polls had barely closed before authorities declared victory for the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And it was a landslide: 62.6 percent versus just less than 34 percent for the main challenger, Mir Hussein Moussavi.

I followed this election pretty closely and this is a real bummer. And in the end, if Ahmadinejad got significant support it's our fault. US policies during the Bush years gave every tin pot dictator, theocrat and warlord from Teheran to Timbuktu free hand to play the anti-neocolonialist card. Everyone recognized that Bush's talk about freedom meant nothing more or less than US domination and that his crusade to liberate Iraq was intended to install a friendly puppet who would supply the US with cheap oil. It's hardly a surprise that most of the world doesn't distinguish between westernization and economic/political domination by the West, in particular by the US.

I'm really depressed that by all accounts the opposition movement is likely to fizzle. I pray that they have a civil war, their own civil war without US interference.

Iranian Culture Wars

Landslide or Fraud? The Debate Online Over Iran’s Election Results - The Lede Blog - NYTimes.com:

A reader using the Web alias “Iranian Voter” reminds us that the repeated warnings from Iran’s intelligence service that opposition movements in favor of reform in Iran are nothing more than foreign government plots are believed by some Iranians:

"Color revolutions were masterminded by the West to turn former Soviet states into western satellite states, thus encircling Russia with hostile pro-Western states. Iran is of course the missing gap, the vulnerable underbelly of Russia. Yet, is that all you westerners conceive of us, your stooges? You have not learned the historical lessons then. A few days before the election the Moussavi camp turned green, made human chain, simulated 1978 street clashes, their puppet masters at CIA headquarters & MI6 in rapture. Soft green-colored coup turned to be a putsch and a grief to its organizers."

I do hope--and believe--that the US will have the good sense to stay out of this one.

Personally I've never understood why anyone cares one way or the other about being the "stooge" of a foreign power or some other alien group. But there are clearly a significant number of people who prefer to live in shit so long as it's their own shit.

It's hardly peculiar to Iran. We've been fighting this culture war in the US for over 30 years now: the war between the educated urban upper middle class and the lower classes--working class urban white ethnics and and rural rednecks. And we've finally won. Interestingly, Ahmadinejad had support for the same demographic that voted, against their material interests, for Republicans in the US for the past 30 years: the urban lower classes and the pious rural poor. The matter with Iran is the same thing that's the matter with Kansas: a large body of resentful peasants and proles who would rather sacrifice material well-being and live in their own shit than be "stooges" of the educated, urban-coastal upper middle class--the lawyers and liberal politicians, college professors and journalists or, in Iranian terms, "the West."

Marx got it right and wrong. He was right in recognizing that the one really significant international conflict was class war. He was however wrong in thinking that it was a war between the peasants and proles on the one side and the capitalists on the other and, even more importantly, that the peasants and proles were the good guys. It was a natural mistake because he couldn't have anticipated the significance of "knowledge workers" in the 20th century and beyond. He saw "intellectuals" as a small, peripheral minority, potentially allied with the proles and peasants. He certainly never imagined that the proles and peasants would ally themselves with the capitalists against a large and growing professional intelligensia. Adam Smith writing a couple of generations earlier didn't even know what to make of educated professionals like doctors and opera singers--upper middle class professionals just didn't fit into his system.

It's a pity that we who lived through the Revolution ignored what Marx got right but picked up what he got wrong. Out of a laudible intent to stick up for the underdog we gave the proles and peasants a free pass. They were religious bigots--excusable, just a feature of their culture. They were crude, tasteless and ignorant--a mark in their favor: they weren't hypocritical or pretentious. The men were brutal, sexist and beat women up--no problem: women's rights could wait. I say "we" however in the generic sense for which there is no equivalent in American English. I was furious about my fellow student radicals who admired the working class, valorized their "culture" and the cultures of non-western peoples. I knew what these people were like at first hand and loathed them.

But returning to the Iranian elections, I'm reminded of own stolen election in 2000. As a thought-experiment imagine that after all the dirty tricks and the selection of George W. Bush by a Supreme Court packed with his supporters, some foreign power like the EU had intervened. Personally I'd have been delighted, but I suspect most Americans, obsessed with notions of national pride and the avoidance of stoogery, wouldn't have liked it one bit. I would love to be a colony of the EU because all I've ever wanted politically is a social democratic welfare state and I don't care who runs it: I couldn't care less about sovreignty, independence or national pride and being a colony wouldn't bother me in the least.

But most people don't feel that way, either in the US or in Iran. So I hope, and optimistically, expect that the US will bud out. This is their culture war, not ours, even if it is part of the larger global culture war between the educated upper middle class and the masses.

And we will surely win that culture war--not we Americans but we the global educated upper middle class, allied with the liberal populations of affluent countries and educated elites throught the world against the proles and peasants in the US and abroad. When things get too bad for the masses, as they did when the US economy collapsed last fall, they will decide that they would rather throw in their lot with the lawyers, college professors, journalists and urban-coastal yuppies than sink in their own shit. That's how Obama got in. But even more interestingly and importantly, when things get better for the masses they, or at least their children, will become us.

Sotomayor's Pick-up Line

The 'Racist' Uproar Over Sotomayor's "Wise Latina" Comment

Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences...our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure....that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

Why did someone as smart as Sonia Sotomayor say such a dumb thing? Because until recently these were the dumb things you were supposed to say without thinking--conventional feel-good lines about the importance of diversity. They were throw-aways, like "How are you?" (please don't tell me)--political pick-up lines.

Back in the old days "What's your sign?" was a conventional conversation starter--polite social discourse in mixed company. You weren't expected to take astrology seriously, but you certainly weren't supposed to dispute it. It was part of the soothing background noise that filled otherwise embarrassing silences--cultural muzak. You expected it to be there, but you weren't supposed to listen to it much less criticize it as if it were real music.

By the latter part of the 20th century, identity politics was cultural muzak: padding for committee reports and the stuff of mission statements. No one took it seriously until Rev. Wright, during his 15 minutes of fame, announced that black and white children thought with different parts of their brains. Then Americans discovered they didn't like it one bit.

There was however a legal angle. The Bakke ruling made it illegal to use affirmative action as a remedy for societal discrimination. There were very good reasons for affirmative action, most particularly, as a mechanism for leveling the playing field where implicit bias and outright discrimination still put women and minorities at a disadvantage. To be safe though, and to stay within the constraints of the law, advocates of affirmative action policies had to pretend that the rationale was the promotion of "diversity." It was a Noble Lie.

In addition, the cultural myth that women and people of color had something special to contribute could be cited to make the case that it was in everyone's interest to desegregate schools, neighborhoods and places of employment. Women's gendered "management styles," employers were told, were good for business. Citizens were urged to recognize ethnic diversity as a social benefit, adding color, variety and cultural richness to their local schools and neighborhoods. Instead of appealing to altruistic motives, advocates of fairness pretended that desegregation was a matter of self-interest.

Noble Lies are eventually exposed. It always seemed to me that it would have been better to tell the truth in the first place. Women and members of ethnic minorities are disadvantaged by implicit bias, for which there is ample empirical evidence, and ongoing discrimination. Discimination in most cases is virtually impossible to prove, particularly since most is unintentional and innocent. As employers, educators and citizens we are not, for all our good will, gender- or color-blind. So for all practical purposes, gender- and color-conscious policies are currently the only feasible way to off-set the consequences of bias and, in the end, to achieve gender- and color-blindness.

But that's not the way politics, whether governmental or academic, works and why I'm no politician. Politicians have to play cultural muzak for the same reason that, in normal social settings, socially competent individuals have to make appropriate light conversation. "Hot enough for you?", "What's your sign?," "So, what do you think of the Padres this season?" I only learnt late in life that most people don't really want to do conversation most of the time, much less argue. For many, conversation is just background noise, an excuse for some other sort of non-intellectual personal contact (not necessarily sexual) that they enjoy.

Sotomayor was just making conversation and, in spite of conservative's attempts to inflate it, most Americans recognize that. Still, one hopes that given the lessons of the presidential campaign and Americans' professed repudiation of identity politics, we will stop making that particular kind of chit-chat.

Obama at Notre Dame

At Notre Dame, Obama Defends His Abortion Stance - NYTimes.com

President Obama directly confronted America’s deep divide over abortion on Sunday as he appealed to partisans on both sides to find ways to respect one another’s basic decency and even work together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. As anti-abortion leaders protested his appearance at the University of Notre Dame, the nation’s storied Catholic university, Mr. Obama defended his support for abortion rights but called for more “open hearts, open minds, fair-minded words” in the debate that has polarized the country for decades.

Well, Obama got it right on this one, though the persisting Religious Right won't be convinced and Progressives will make a show of yapping and whining. Embedded in the political rhetoric was the hard kernel: abortion is a moral issue about which rational, educated, informed people of good will disagree. Pro-choice advocates aren't baby-killers; pro-life partisans aren't out to enslave women.

Will Obama succeed in de-politicizing abortion? I doubt it. It would mean winding back 30 years of history, during which the personal became political and economic issues were eclipsed by Culture Wars. During that time conservative Evangelical Protestants who ignored abortion as a "Catholic thing" during the run-up to Roe v. Wade got on board with the pro-life agenda in order to form a political alliance with Catholics and Progressives made abortion a litmus test because fighting for "women's right to choose" was easier than fighting for affirmative action to end sex segregation in the labor force--and, of course, more sexy.

But, who knows? Then we were riding high and could afford to worry about "lifestyle issues." Now the economy dominates everything and the lower classes, dangling over the abyss of unemployment and forclosure, don't have the leisure to worry about the rights of stem cells.

Obama did good. The Religious Right rump will keep waving signs showing dismembered fetuses and conventional feminists will froth at the mouth about his support for abortion reduction but most Americans will support him.

The Next Christendom

Amazon.com: The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity: Philip Jenkins: Books

Fear of Islam is peaking, fueled by reports that the religion is burgeoning in numbers as well as militancy. Jenkins grants that Islam is indeed booming but marshals the evidence that today's largest religion, Christianity, will grow exponentially, too, and will remain the faith of the largest proportion of humanity. But the Christianity of 2050 will be very different from that molded by the 1,300 years during which Christianity was the faith of a rapidly developing Europe. The new Christianity will be liturgically anarchistic compared with the staid services of white, upper-middle-class people today. It will be overwhelmingly the faith of poor nonwhites living south of Europe, the U.S., and present-day Russia, and it won't reflect the values of the wealthy global north. It will revive Christianity's root emphases on healing and prophecy because its adherents will resemble the poor and oppressed who first embraced the redemption, the healing, and the blessing that Jesus promised.

I've been reading this book which is a wonderful read but remarkably depressing. In addition to making a compelling case that Christianity will become the religion of the barbarians, Jenkins argues en passent that the barbarians will take over, through immigration and outbreeding.

If that's correct it's the end of the Roman Empire. The effete secular Epicureans of the near-sterile Senatorial class bewailing the decline in standards while the barbarians sack Rome. Aging Europeans (and Americans) will be swamped by young immigrants from the Third World breeding innumerable children. The barbarians--the brutal beasts who beat up women and whose life's goal is to fuck and impregnate as many as possible--will win. The illiterate, superstitious barbarians who join the church because it promises healing and material benefits will remake it in their image.

I'm not entirely convinced this will happen because the sects that working class strivers, including immigrants, join are potent forces for social mobility--and even in the US, social mobility is a lot better than it was 1500 years ago. So our barbarians will be civilized--develop habits of thrift and prudence, make money and see to it that their kids are educated. Those kids will establish half-way covenants, and their kids will be completely assimilated and secular. It took 1000 years to civilize the northern European barbarians but these days it only takes three generations to make a gentleman.

Still it's lousy either way. Either you have religion preserved under the auspices of barbaric holy rollers, the end of the Enlightenment and of liberal Christianity, or you have the inevitable march of secularism, with only a brief pause for the time it takes the barbarians to become civilized. I suppose that if I had to choose I'd pick secularism over a return to barbarism.

Jenkins is certainly right in noting that the charismatic Christianity that flourishes in the Global South and amongst immigrants to the Global North is closer to the Christianity of the New Testament than the respectable, institutionalized European version, which is dying out. But this kind of authenticity has never interested me.

Why, I wonder are we stuck with Hobson's choice between liberal, increasingly anti-religious secularism and a Christianity that is becoming increasingly conservative by attrition as the educated, liberal elite abandon religious practice altogether? Why didn't Christianity go the way of Greek religion which evolved into a system of cults and practices that could accommodate everyone from upper crust Epicureans who regarded the gods as no more than allegorical figures, monotheists who regarded them either as manifestations of the one God or lesser, semi-divine beings, and illiterate peasants who worshiped the stones and stocks at the boundaries of their fields?

Some guesses. Christianity was from very early on doctrinal: it included a package of beliefs which, over time, were made more specific. To be a Christian was, minimally, to sign on with those beliefs. In spite of the fact that according to one poll a small but significant proportion of self-identified Christians of various denominations say they don't believe in God, the idea that one would identify as a Christian and take part in liturgy without believing seems pointless given this understanding of religion as fundamentally doctrinal and liturgy as an expression of doctrine.

Moreover, religious practices have become divorced from civic and patriotic celebrations in a way that no one until recent times could have imagined. Anyone can participate in the civic events but participation in liturgy is, at least in theory, reserved for those who have made a doxastic commitment. Historically, as the requirements for orthodoxy grew increasingly stringent, fewer and fewer people could conscientiously commit to orthodoxy. In the past this was the root of sectarianism. And it was a matter of dumb luck which sect ended up setting the standard. In the East, Orthodoxy became the orthodoxy by a fluke. If Constantinople hadn't hung on until the 15th century, long after north Africa and Asia had fallen to the Turks, Monophysitism or Nestorianism might have been the orthodox industry standard in the East.

Currently however the response of most dissenters is not to form sects or alternative churches but to drop religious practice altogether. Since citizens don't, as a part of their ordinary civic involvement, need to participate in religious rituals, and since they see no point in doing so, they drop out.

The trend is self-perpetuating. As dissenters, skeptics and merely nominal Christians drop out of the Church, the Righteous Remnant becomes increasingly homogeneous and conservative, socially as well as theologically--and off-putting to still more people. So the Remnant becomes still smaller and more intense. Churches become sects; civic religion is replaced by secular myths and celebrations; the gathered church becomes the paradigm. Secularism becomes inclusive while Christianity becomes increasingly exclusive.

In the ancient world strict secularism was anomalous: the officially polytheistic religious establishment, such as it was, could accommodate almost anyone including Epicurean materialists, monotheists and animists. Now secularism is inclusive while Christianity is strictly defined and exclusive, no longer a cultural default, so you don't get fellow-travelers.

So now you have evangelical mega-churches operating as self-help programs for the neo-barbarians, promoting a socially conservative agenda. Their version of Christianity is srictly defined and, as I learnt in a "church planting" class I took, the expectation is that the "seekers" who come to investigate are expected to become "fully devoted followers" in 6 months to a year. Meanwhile, mainline churches have become activities centers for the elderly.

In the end neither will survive. The elderly will die off and the next generation of oldsters--my generation--who dropped out of the Church 30 years ago will find other ways to occupy their time. The barbarians amongst us, the immigrants and indigenous lower classes, will become civilized and secular. And the Global South will become civilized and secular in a century or two, once they get on track economically. That's the way Christianity ends--not with a bang but with a whimper. Not because an enlightened public no longer has any use for metaphysics but because churches have effectively abandoned metaphysics--because conservative churches offer little more than self-help programs, puritanical ethics and social control, and because mainline churches offer nothing.

How Do Americans Really Feel About God? | The American Prospect

[T]he Pew Forum looked at 'the fluidity of religious affiliation in the U.S.' and found that roughly half of U.S. adults have changed religion at some point in their life. Further, the number of Americans who identify as unaffiliated with a particular religion -- now hovering around 16 percent -- has grown more rapidly than any other religious group in recent decades. In recent years, the story of American religion has been hyped up in fire and brimstone thanks to our previous president, a self-proclaimed born-again Christian, and the massive evangelical movement that influenced him to enact policies that were consistent with religious perspective: the global gag rule, abstinence-only sex education, and marriage-promotion programs, just to name a few. But those days are over...Americans are testing the waters of a new kind of religious complexity. This isn't the New Age spirituality of The Secret or the rabid atheism of Ivy League intellectuals. It isn't the over-the-top bar mitzvah or quinceañera. This is the steady, patient movement of citizens who are searching for the center again, Americans who want to believe in the goodness of a country and its people, folks who are affiliated with fairness and kindness over any one institution of worship...Strangely, Barack Obama's election was the closest thing to a religious experience that I've ever had. My faith was renewed in a country that, at times, has felt beyond saving. My heart swelled with the sense of interconnection that I've only heard described in spiritual terms. I certainly don't think he's a god, but I do think that the hope and sense of responsibility and community that he's been able to inspire in people is profound.

The Pew Forum report linked in the article notes also that the unafilliated are not only the fastest growing "religious group" but the one with the highest attrition rate: more than half of all individuals who were raised unaffiliated become affiliated. And I'm one of them.

Maybe that's why it's so devilishly hard for me to understand the widespread animus against religion--Christianity in particular. Whatever is the problem?

As far as I can see there are 3 problems:

• The exercise of political power by churches and religious lobbies, particularly in the interests of promoting socially and politically conservative agendas.
  
  
• The affirmation and promulgation of false beliefs.
  
  
• The promotion of implausible and unduly restrictive moral rules, especially regarding sexual conduct.

Even so, it's still hard for me to understand. As the article notes, the political power of the Religious Right has been broken. They had a 30 year run--now it's over. And they didn't accomplish much of anything. Row v. Wade stands; Iowa has legalized gay marriage; campaigns to mandate the teaching of "intelligent design" in the public schools have flopped; and, when it comes to the alleged rights of stem cells, most Americans frankly do not give a damn.

Still, the New Atheists and their followers are vexed and urge constant vigilance. Those Fundamentalists could come back in force at any time and, some urge, apparently rational liberal Christians are just "enablers." They cite the Crusades and the Inquisition to make the case that religion--Christianity in particular--is a politically potent, destructive force.

I wonder how many could explain what the Inquisition was or even answer a multiple choice question about the approximate date of the First Crusade, or what it was supposed to accomplish: 8th century, 12th century, or 16th century? The whole campaign to defend the Enlightenment against incursions by militant Fundamentalists seems awfully like the Reds-under-beds scare during the Cold War.

As for the affirmation and promulgation of false beliefs--who cares? While I was grading my logic yesterday morning I was listening to a Sunday Morning TV show about the latest fad for "cleansing" which is supposed to leech out poisons from the body through the ingestion of godawful concoctions laced with hot peppers, and enemas. Devotées swear by it, though there's no empirical evidence that it does any good. Religious belief is surely no more harmful than this nonsense or any of the other health fads and therapies Americans consume. And surely religion, at least religion of the mainline Protestant variety, is less harmful than than the anti-vaccination movement or the campaign against genetically modified foods or, for that matter, the Mars-Venus literature.

So I, as a Christian, believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and Jesus Christ as his only son, our Lord, and the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Big deal. That's metaphysics. I know metaphysicians who believe that tables and chairs don't exist and others who believe in Platonic forms, sets, numbers and propositions do, and many, including me, who believe that denizens of merely possible worlds exist. So what? We all have arguments, none of which are conclusive, and many of us are likely wrong. But our ontological commitments are harmless. No one bothers with us and there's no reason why they should or, arguably, why they should bother with people for believing in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God with his suite of angels, archangels and all the company of heaven.

I suppose the real issue is sex. Christianity, at least officially, mandates restrictions on sexual activity. Popular culture defines human worth in terms of sexual attractiveness and sexual activity. This at least is the way it was in the wake of the sexual revolution when I came of age. I diligently strove to have sex with as many men as possible and managed to achieve double digits though not, I think, triple digits.

But how many Christians take their churches' official doctrines regarding sexual expression seriously? So whatever is the problem? More generally, why should anyone worry about churches' official doctrines concerning any moral issues since churches don't have the power to enforce them and most adherents don't take them seriously. They're pleased when their churches endorse moral views they hold on independent grounds but ignore moral injunctions they do not endorse.

So why did I, like most others who were raised unchurched, become religiously affiliated? What interested me were the aesthetic elements broadly construed, mysticism and metaphysics.

If I had been born later, or further to the west, I doubt that I'd ever have developed the slightest interest in religion. If I grew up amongst megachurches meeting in auditoriums, where people sat in theater seats listing to Christian soft rock and therapeutic sermons I would never have been attracted.

But I grew up amongst brownstone churches filled with dim religious light, vibrating with the numinous. And I was in training to be a musician: I sang the Mass in Latin, and the Te Deum and Magnificat, in innumerable classical settings. The People of the Land in my neighborhood were Italian Catholics and I grew up with Mediterranean Folk Catholicism--which I envied. I am hard-wired for high church: Anglo-Catholicism opened its gaping maw, swallowed me up, smirked and burped. I just plain love churchiness and all religious stuff--the buildings, the music, the smells and bells, the Prayer Book, and all the gee-gaws and frou-frou.

I was also interested in mysticism, something that went beyond the heart-swelling "religious experience" the author describes, something that has little to do with any sense of "interconnection," hope, responsibility or community. I suppose I can understand those sentiments but they've never really interested me much. I was after an acid trip. That churchy stuff did it for me--and still does.

Finally, I find the metaphysics intriguing--in particular the doctrine of the Trinity and the Real Presence doctrine, on which I write. Is it true? I don't know, any more than I know whether any of the other metaphysical commitments I've taken on, to four-dimensionalism, the existence of possible worlds or mereological universalism (the last currently under reconsideration), are correct. But I've plonked for them and will defend them, unless I become convinced otherwise. Maybe most importantly I simply like working on these issues.

I doubt that I'd have become interested in religion if I were raised affiliated and ground through the whole regime of church and Sunday School as a child: smarmy Jesus and sentimental Jesus stories, construction paper projects, niceities and moralizing. It's drivel but it's harmless drivel. Whatever is the problem?

The Way We Live Now - Kindergarten Cram - NYTimes.com

The Way We Live Now - Kindergarten Cram - NYTimes.com

Jean Piaget famously referred to “the American question,” which arose when he lectured in this country: how, his audiences wanted to know, could a child’s development be sped up? The better question may be: Why are we so hellbent on doing so?

Easy answer. Because the US is a high-risk, high-stakes casino that is ostensibly a fair meritocracy. We have the highest Gini coefficient in the civilized world and the most meager social safety nets. And we do not believe that it is feasible to provide decent lives for all. There will always be losers, we believe, and so we're desperate to make sure that our kids aren't amongst them.

Given the way the system works, this means pushing kids ahead of the curve fast since, at every stage of the game children will be (officially or unofficially) tracked and have to perform ahead of their peers to get onto the fast track for the next stage which will solidify their advantage. At every stage advantages and disadvantages accumulate and the gap between the minority groomed for success and the throwaways grows. It may be possible to get off the dummy track but at every stage it becomes harder and less likely.

By high school students are irrevocably sorted into those who are groomed upper middle class lives--placed in AP classes, sent to science fairs, and pushed into the "leadership roles" in student government and extracurricular activities that will get them admitted to "good colleges"--and the rest who are kept occupied, disciplined and controlled. Students on the disciplinary track conclude, with good reason, that school is nothing but a kind of jail and simply want out. They see no connection between education and future benefits because for them there is none.

Parents don't want their kids on that track with good reason. I was on it and it was miserable. I saw the smart kids at a distance, the Rah-Rahs who wore madras, who were in "advanced classes," on student council and in various clubs, who were lauded as National Merit Semi-Finalists at school assemblies. I knew some of them from orchestra--another one of the extra-curricular activities that would look good on their college applications. But they weren't in my classes, where students resented being in school and the ethos was passive-aggressive, where teachers' primary concern was keeping us quiet and preventing us from chewing gum.

No one ever talked to me about college, or encouraged me to do extra-curricular activities, or expected me to do well, or even expected me to be interested in what I was ostensibly supposed to learn. School was just a dull job we had to do, like the jobs we would get when we graduated. I sometimes think that the real purpose of the regime was teaching us how to cope with boredom to prepare us for boring drudge work.

Of course we go hellbent for leather to speed up development so that at every stage kids will get into the top quintile, to keep them from being tracked into the kinds of classes that not only stifle ambition but kill any interest in intellectual activity.

Those yuppie parents who push their kids to read at 3 and fight to get them into the "best" pre-schools, are behaving rationally. As long as there's an educational tracking system which feeds into what is, contrary to our official ideology, the most rigid socio-economic tracking system in Global North parents will clamor for kindergartens where 5 year olds are drilled to pass tests.

Op-Ed Columnist - Defecting to Faith - NYTimes.com

[A] study entitled “Faith in Flux” issued this week by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life questioned nearly 3,000 people and found that most children raised unaffiliated with a religion later chose to join one.

I'm one of those and suppose I'm typical of most who

said that they first joined a religion because their spiritual needs were not being met. And the most-cited reason for settling on their current religion was that they simply enjoyed the services and style of worship.

But I'm not particularly sympathetic to Blow's reductivist conclusion that

As the nonreligious movement picks up steam, it needs do a better job of appealing to the ethereal part of our human exceptionalism — that wondrous, precious part where logic and reason hold little purchase, where love and compassion reign.

At the crudest level, why should "the nonreligious movement" have to do this job? Why don't people just visit churches, go to services, support churches that maintain the buildings and run the services, and believe whatever they please? There's a good reason for this: "the nonreligious movement" doesn't do architecture. And, for all that an increasing number of American yuppies regard themselves as Buddhists, they don't build temples.

I suppose the deeper question is that of why we don't think that visiting churches, participating in services and maintaining buildings isn't good enough. I just finished reading a great read: Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion, describing the conversion of Europeans to Christianity. What did that conversion mean for the Goths and Britons, the Anglo-Saxons, Franks and Lombards and, in the end, the Wends and Lithuanians? Initially, at least, it meant little more than conformity to a practice--churchgoing and following various rules for social organization. Why don't we think it's good enough that we participate in religious practice and support the institution that makes them possible, whatever we believe?

For myself I have no interest in the Church as "community." If I had any interest in "community" I would certainly not look for it in any church. Church people are not my kind of people and I want nothing to do with them. But I love the buildings, the services and the music, and I like participating anonymously, alone in a crowd.

Alone in a crowd is my kind of "spiritual" experience--walking through a farmers' market, as I did this morning. I like people as "background." I like participating in crowd scenes where I don't have to make contact with anyone but can just appreciate them as throbbing Life. In the same way, I like going to church so long as I don't know anyone and can participate impersonally as part of that impersonal Life. I don't want anything to do with them personally and certainly don't want to be a member of the "community."

Is this really so terribly queer? I don't assume that everyone is like me. But I see no reason to assume that no one is--that no one but me has that interest in the impersonal numinous, in church buildings, services and ceremonies in which one can participate anonymously as a a mere part of the crowd, submerged in the seething mass. That seems to me the religious impulse at its core: to recognize that one's life makes no difference, that one is of no significance or worth, that in the grand scheme of things one is of absolutely no consequence.

But so much for metaphysics. Why should the "non-religious movement" pick up steam? If it does, what will it provide? Buildings? Art? Mythology?

Blow, and others who write on this, are not among us who were raised without any religion. They were ground through the regime of churchgoing and Sunday School, raised in worlds where there was an obligation to believe and those who couldn't manage it were in some sense failures or, in any case, untrustworthy.

I was brought up to believe that religion was, at best, a mechanism for keeping "uneducated people" in line and a comfort for the elderly facing death. I was taught that all religious belief was superstitious and that any interest in religion was morbid and "sick." Blow just doesn't get it, doesn't get what it is like to be brought up secular. For me, and I suspect other like me, religion is a guilty pleasure--one of those forbidden things like sex that deliver big thrills. And for me at least it isn't the believing that delivers the thrills but the buildings and services, the business of organized religion, the outward and visible signs.

I can read the handwriting on the wall. Organized religion will collapse and, I believe, we'll all be the poorer for it. Because organized religion is not a matter of doctrine or moral rules, as those who were raised with it believe, but a matter of art, architecture, mythology and ritual. For most, that has been poisoned by dogmatism and puritanism so, to the extent that they have an interest in "spirituality" they will look for it in "the non-religious movement"--which has nothing to offer.

I still don't get it. De facto churches don't require loyalty oaths and can't enforce moral commitments. There are no gatekeepers. Anyone can go to any church and enjoy the service with no questions asked. Why don't people questing for "spirituality" just do church and ignore the stupid things that clergy say--like everyone else?

1. 

Iceland

At the Polls, Icelanders Punish Conservatives - NYTimes.com:

With about a third of the final vote counted late Saturday, it seemed that the country’s leftist caretaking government would be formally voted into power, with the Social Democrats projected to gain 22 seats and their partners, the Left-Greens, appearing to gain 13 seats in the 63-seat Parliament. The conservative Independent Party, ousted after a wave of demonstrations in January, was projected to gain just 14 seats with less than 23 percent of the vote, down considerably from its total in 2007.

I spent 3 weeks in Iceland in 2002 when my husband had a heart attack flying back from England and the plane was re-routed to Reykjavik.

It was September, and I liked the weather--cool, windy and unpredictable. But it was terrifically expensive and I thought the architecture was perfectly awful. I couldn't connect to it because it wasn't on my Culture Tree and, after 3 weeks, I got sick of fish. Tomatoes were more expensive than caviar: I hadn't realized before then how much I craved fresh veg.

I stayed at the Salvation Army Hostel--http://www.hostelz.com/hostel/29706-Salvation-Army-Guesthouse --highly recommended! It was populated by backpackers and skinflints, mostly from Scandinavian and German-speaking places, and the showers worked! Hanging out in the smokers' lounge I got a intriguing picture of their views of Americans and, even more interesting, the British--like my husband. It was fascinating to discover that they regarded Brits sort of peripheral Italians: as one put it, "Nothing works, and they don't work." In my experience this is true--and I approve.

I did not approve of the Icelandic language. A book I got declared cheerfully that most Icelandic verbs were irregular. Also, they have case endings, which I detest. I thought that with English, a Germanic language, and a little German I might have a shot. But, forget it. I went to the University to see if I could make contact and do a little work but I couldn't even find the philosophy department. Even technical terms and the names of academic disciplines are strictly Germanic and completely unintelligible. I only found out later that philosophy was not "philosophia" or anything like that but "heimspeki"--very interesting, I guess it means "worldview."

Negotiating Reykjavic I realized what it must be like to be an immigrant in a place where one couldn't even read the signs--having to ask people everything, being dependent on the good will of others. Of course, they all spoke English. But I hated having to ask. In France and Italy I could get around, but this was perfectly awful. I only realized that English was really a Romance language when I went down to breakfast at the Salvation Army Hostel. There was coffee--good coffee--and a couple of pitchers labeled "mjolk" and "surmjolk." I immediately poured the surmjolk into my coffee making the perfectly reasonable inference that it was cream, the top of the milk--sur-milk. It wasn't.

There's no punchline to this story. I'm glad the Icelanders are keeping the faith and keeping the red flag flying. Having spent that time in Iceland I feel a connection--I know Rekjavic really well because I've walked all around it and follow Icelandic politics a little. Anyplace we go marks our souls, I think. But this place was seriously alien to me, even more so because it was so near yet so far--a first world country populated by white folk, where I didn't stand out, but in some way I can't even articulate more alien to me than Kenya, which I hated but where I felt in some strange way more connected.

Christian Political Activism

The FundamentaList (No. 77) | The American Prospect

The Times' Frank Rich, in his gloating obituary of the anti-gay-marriage movement, got a little ahead of himself on Sunday. Rich is right that, as Paul Waldman demonstrated last week, public opinion is trending toward legalization of marriage equality. Still, fundamentalist religious movements should never be counted out of American politics. Nor should their gentler cousins, whom the new president has embraced, be written off.

When I was doing theology, as an undergraduate, pietism was demonized. Authentic Christianity, we were told, was worldly, socially engaged and of its very nature political. Good liberal Christians recognized that true religion was a matter of acting politically in the secular city for the good of the other. Community organizing was a religious vocation and street demonstrations were liturgy. Conservative Christians, were wicked, irresponsible navel-gazers, obsessing about individual sin and selfishly cultivating a "personal relationship with Jesus" instead of working politically to establish the Kingdom of God on earth.

Then the conservatives went political. They captured the media, demonstrated in the streets and worked politically for social change. And liberals were horrified.

I used to be outraged by the endless moralizing about social engagement. Now I've mellowed out and suppose I understand the liberal moralizers' motives better. Churches are full of nice people who want to "do for" others, want to be useful and virtuous. Most have the idea that virtue consists in personal niceness and conventional charitable activities. Liberal clergy, surrounded by all these nice people, were trying to get across the message that there was no bright line between personal niceness and charity on the one side and political action on the other. Giving to charity and dispensing sandwiches to bums on grates is good but working politically for a more just society where there aren't any bums on grates is all of a piece with that and, arguably, more efficient. Working politically for social justice is a religious duty.

I'm fine with that but don't think that it's the essential business of churches to do either--particularly when it undermines the provision of specifically religious goods and services. Ideally churches shouldn't do either charity or political action: promoting the general welfare is the business of the state and political action is the job of political organizations. The poor are always with us, and there will always likely be dysfunctional people who hang around churches for both material and emotional handouts. But comes the Revolution most will be taken care of by the government and secular social service providers. To the extent that Christians are committed to "doing for" others, particularly others who are less well off, they should support that Revolution not only to establish more efficient mechanisms for making people better off but to relieve churches of the burden running do-good programs.

So now the fundamentalists are running, and financing, political campaigns to stop gay marriage and other social arrangements they find offensive, while liberal Christians are campaigning for gay marriage and a variety of other worthy projects. I agree with the liberals about the worthiness of these projects but don't think that it's the business of churches to promote them. Liberal churches' promotion of gay rights achieves nothing: no one cares whether the Episcopal Church blesses same-sex unions or whether liberal churches support any of the items on the menu of good liberal causes (which I myself support). No one takes their smarmy moralistic twaddle seriously--or should. All they've done is undermine their institutions.

On the bright side, the conservatives will sink themselves by opposing gay marriage and abortion and by taking the losing side on a variety of other social issues. They will not get their agendas through--the Zeitgeist is against them--and will only discredit themselves. Good!

The pity is that by campaigning for these moral and political agendas, liberal or conservative, churches will only undermine themselves and have fewer resources to devote to the provision of specifically religious goods and services.

Agnès Poirier: French students have reinvented the art of demonstration | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk:

This beautiful square, right in the heart of Paris, opposite the city town hall, has been chosen by protesters to stage a ronde des obstinés, loosely translated as the hard-headed round. They've been walking in circles for two weeks, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They may be hundreds, or just a dozen in the dead of night, but the walk keeps going round. They were the first surprised to see that it should keep going, that neither rain nor cold could hamper their newly set perpetual motion. What are they protesting against? The rushed and ill-conceived university reform wanted by the Sarkozy government which would, in the words of a university professor, transform knowledge into commodity, students into clients, professors into service suppliers and universities into enterprises seeking profits at all costs.

Let's do it here!

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Eliot, T.S. 1917. Prufrock and Other Observations

In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.

A few weeks ago I visited my undergraduate alma mater, where I got a rather haphazard, mediocre education--even thought I didn't know it at the time.

Some of the science programs were serious and decent. Science majors graduated and got jobs in labs, went on to graduate programs or medical school. But most of us were majoring in humanities and the general assumption seemed to be that we were there strictly for cultural enrichment. There was never any talk about careers or graduate programs: that was considered crass. Faculty seemed to assume that we would be taken care of: guys would go into the family business or get jobs through connections, and women would marry guys who worked in the family business or got jobs through connections. Some wouldn't even make the pretense of working: they would be "sportsmen" and ladies-who-lunch.

The goal of the philosophy department was to prepare students for careers as upper crust faux-intellectuals. We were there learn how to make conversation about Ideas and chat about interesting "philosophies"--to be polished, finished and groomed for polite society, where it was important to have things to say about Art, Literature, Philosophy and Current Events.

This wasn't so hot for me because I went to college to train for a philosophy professor job. I only found out that I hadn't gotten the training I needed when I got to grad school and was slammed.

Now that I'm an academic myself I wonder why faculty at my alma mater went along with this or why faculty anywhere would voluntarily join the race to the bottom. I suppose the thought is that we in useless humanities disciplines need to sell ourselves by making out that we provide the veneer of civilization, teach students to make conversation about Ideas and inculcate "values" so that the students we credential for upper middle class sales and office park jobs will be able to make conversation about Art, Literature, Philosophy and Current Events as popularly understood and be nice people.

But why would we go along with this? We go though the whole agonizing business of grad school, fight it out in a miserable job market, sacrifice wealth and security, because we love our chosen fields, because we want to do research and teach--like the emaciated Clark of Oxenford, riding his miserable old nag, who would gladly learn and gladly teach. We have tenure--the license to pursue research were it leads us and to teach students as we think right, to show them the wonders of our chosen fields and the pure glory of the life of the mind (as it used to be called). Why do we sell out to provide entertainment, to pander to parents and cater for student's adolescent whims, to give our customers what they imagine philosophy is rather than what we know it to be, which is immeasurably more interesting?

I'm both puzzled and outraged as I see my colleagues going this route, promoting the kinds of junk that parents imagine "philosophy" is and which students, in their immaturity and ignorance, find interesting. We discover that students are interested in this, that or the other kind of bullshit, so that is what we provide. And no one outside of our profession knows any better because they think philosophy is bullshit anyway. We're employed to provide the Discovery Channel version of philosophy so that students can make what passes as intelligent conversation and those who are on board with the agenda think this is astute, cynical and terribly clever: we will feather our nest, add positions to our department, get perks.

But for what? If we wanted this stuff we'd have gone into investment banking