The historian Philip Jenkins, who is an erudite and insightful observer of contemporary religion, writes a column for The Christian Century. In the issue of May 15, 2013, he has a piece reflecting on the twentieth anniversary of the attack by agents of the US government on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, during which eighty people, including twenty children, lost their lives.

The Branch Davidians were a sect started in 1930 as an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists. They continued two of the core beliefs of the parent movement: an expectation of apocalyptic events about to happen in connection with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, and the belief in the continuing validity for Christians of at least some commandments of the Old Testament (including the observance of the Lord’s Day on Saturday rather than Sunday). The term “Davidian” refers to their teaching that the Hebrew kingdom of David would be restored prior to the Second Coming. They were expelled from the mainline Adventist church because of this and some other peculiar doctrines and practices (such as vegetarianism and the establishment of an armory to defend themselves against the violent upheavals of the Last Days). In the 1990s, following a number of fierce (and occasionally violent) struggles over the leadership of the sect, it was taken over by Vernon Howell, a charismatic figure who changed his name to David Koresh and claimed prophetic authority for himself. Among other things he amassed a large stock of weapons in the Texas compound.

In early 1993 an armed force of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms tried to execute a search warrant at the compound. As far as I can tell, there was no evidence that the weapons were used or planned to be used for any nefarious purpose; the ATF agents were just supposed to find out what was there.  (The Bureau is a rather strange agency of the federal government. It was established, under a shorter name, as long ago as 1789 in order to collect a tax on imported liquor. It is part of the Department of the Treasury. It had its glory days under Prohibition, when it had a great time smashing barrels of illegal booze and pouring its contents down the sewer. Tobacco and guns were added later to its jurisdiction.) The attempt to carry out the search of the Branch Davidian compound ended in a gun battle, during which four ATF agents were killed. Thereupon the FBI took over the operation, under the authority of Janet Reno, the attorney general in the Clinton administration (a hard-nosed individual not easily thought of as simpatica). After a 51-day siege, during which Koresh refused to give up, the FBI launched an attack. In the course of this attack a fast-moving blaze was ignited and utterly destroyed the entire compound, killing those inside. A subsequent official inquiry essentially exonerated the FBI from responsibility for the conflagration; Jenkins claims that it remains unclear whether the fire was caused (presumably unintentionally) by the FBI attack, or was ordered by Koresh himself as an act of mass suicide.

Jenkins astutely describes how the Waco incident has supplied contradictory symbols to both the progressive and conservative camps in the ongoing American culture war. On the Left, Waco has come to symbolize the lethal potential of religious fundamentalism. The notion of mass suicide has obviously appealed to this constituency: Waco can then be interpreted as a companion piece of the Jonestown incident, when in 1978 another sect leader, Jim Jones, ordered the mass suicide of 918 people (also including children, and also in response to a perceived threat from the US government) at his so-called Peoples Temple in Guyana in South America. Then as now, this type of fundamentalism is associated by progressives with the Christian Right, the “gun culture” of the National Rifle Association, and conservatism in general. I suppose a proof text of this perspective could be the notorious statement by Barrack Obama, made at a fundraiser in 2008, saying that jobless people in small towns “get bitter [and] cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them”. (One may wonder what sort of religion Obama was “clinging to” during the twenty years he was a member of Jeremiah Wright’s church in Chicago.)

And on the Right, Waco symbolizes government overreach, tyranny and the attack on the Second Amendment of the constitution. On this side of the aisle, of course, there is the propensity to blame the FBI for the tragedy—a massacre by government forces rather than a mass suicide by the Davidians. It is then put in the company, not of Jonestown, but of Ruby Ridge, Idaho, where in 1992 federal agents (also from the FBI and the ATF) besieged the compound of the “survivalist” Randy Weaver and in the resulting firefight killed his wife and son.

I think that Jenkins is right when he suggests that the contradictory symbolizations of the Waco incident not only demarcate the boundaries of the two camps of the American culture war twenty years ago, but continue to do so today. He expresses the view that the tensions have lessened somewhat. I rather doubt it. Perhaps the ideological rhetoric is a bit less strident, but the polarization in politics has deepened, as the two major parties are more clearly aligned with one or the other camp in the culture war. Both moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans, the kind of politicians who make compromises possible in a democracy, have been marginalized if not eliminated in their respective parties. And survey data show that the religious profile of an individual is a major predictor of which side he or she belongs to. The polarization continues, as does the mutual demonization of the two camps manifested so clearly in the conflicting interpretations of Waco. Of course both stereotypes are distortive—most conservatives are not religious fanatics with guns, most progressives are not bent on federal thugs running roughshod over the Bill of Rights. Stereotypes can be empirically false, yet be very useful politically.

Three times a year I teach for a week or so at Baylor University, which is in Waco, Texas. The site of the Branch Davidian compound, more precisely what is left of it, is one of the three tourist attractions (the other two are the Dr. Pepper Museum, where one can follow the history of this locally produced beverage and imbibe it at the end of the tour, and the Crawford farm of George W. Bush, which is not open to the public but which adjoins a restaurant where one can obtain matchbooks inscribed “Texas White House”). I have been to the Davidian ruin. It is a sad and lonely place. Besides the remains of the buildings, there is a plaque with the names of all the victims of the conflagration and a little hut, which supposedly contains some memorabilia of the sect but which was locked when I was there. The locale is certainly conducive to contemplating the homicidal follies of which both religion and government are capable.

There are other scenes, showing a side of religion very far from either fanaticism or violence. A couple of years ago I was driving with a colleague from an event in Austin back to Waco. We passed a place called Temple. My colleague said that there was a big Hindu sanctuary in that town; he had not been to see it, and he asked me whether I would like to do so. Of course I said yes. (I never found out whether the location was a coincidence or whether it was chosen because the town is called Temple.) We asked for directions at a gas station, where the attendant readily told us how to get to what he called “the Hindu church”. It is a large building, unmistakably Indian in its architecture. Neither of the two resident priests was there, but we were shown around by a visiting layman. Two things impressed me. In the main building there is a large space for major rituals, sometimes attended by some two thousand worshippers from all over the Southwest. But then there were a number of small chapels (I counted eight), each devoted to one or two deities. This is an interesting case of Americanization: In India temples are typically dedicated to one or two gods, who they are depending on the region. This won’t work in America, with worshippers coming from all regions of India. The chapels make it possible for worshippers to find their preferred god or goddess. As I pointed out in a recent post, in America every religious tradition tends to organize itself in denominations. The other thing that impressed me is more directly related to the topic of this post. At the end of the tour I asked our guide whether they had experienced any hostility from the neighbors. After all, we were in the very heart of the Bible Belt, where one might expect some negative reactions to the erection of a prominent shrine to an emphatically non-Christian “paganism”. Our guide seemed puzzled: “Hostility? Not at all. People have been very friendly. They have been curious about us—what we do here, what we believe in. But hostility? Not ever”.

[Memorial outside remains of Branch Davidian compound, photo courtesy Getty Images.]

The media have been full these days with news about the seemingly inexorable victories (at least in America and Europe) of the sexual liberation movements that began over fifty years ago. Same-sex marriage is being legislated in a lengthening list of American states and European nations. The ruling coalition in Germany is threatened with dissolution because of a split over the issue of quotas for women in corporate management. Insular Icelanders (who, one would think, should be preoccupied with a persistent and pervasive economic crisis) have fallen in line with other Scandinavian countries by keeping prostitution illegal, but prosecuting its customers rather than its providers, who are defined, rather ambivalently, both as professional “sex workers” and as certified victims. I understand that the intended beneficiaries of these measures are not very enthusiastic, being more comfortable with the old-fashioned sleazy arrangements.

Of course much of the world outside the United States and the European Union is, to put it mildly, more skeptical about all these liberations. Western progressives, certain that they are “on the right side of history”, can dismiss such skepticism as an expression of a backward mentality sure to crumble eventually before the triumphant march of Enlightenment. In American media the New York Times is particularly mesmerized by anything relating to homosexuality. I expect one day to see two headlines on page one of this “newspaper of record”: A big one, “Chinese and Japanese Navies in Fierce Battle over Disputed Islands. Japan Invokes Defense Treaty with the US.” And one in only slightly smaller print, “Papua New Guinea Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage”.

Sigmund Freud has been a bête noire of feminists for having written, in an essay on human sexuality, that “biology is destiny”. Actually this is a misquotation. What he wrote was that “anatomy is destiny”. But that sentence was in the context of a passage asserting that little girls are greatly distressed when they discover that they lack an intriguing protuberance possessed by their brothers, and that this “penis envy” is a basic feature of female psychology. This context of course has only reinforced the view that the old curmudgeon was a terrible male chauvinist. I am not sure that Freud is accurately categorized in this way. It seems to me that his view of sexuality is not so much biological as mechanical—a hydraulic system of pipes, where repressing some items in one place will lead to their popping up somewhere else. I am quite sure that Freud, had he lived to see it, would have been appalled by the recent wave of sexual liberations. He was, if anything, a rather repressed type himself. The only known deviation from uptight bourgeois morality on his part was a not quite innocent attraction to his wife’s sister (which may or may not have been consummated).

But let me not quibble. Let me stipulate that the offending sentence could be read as meaning that biology is destiny. In which case Freud has regiments of followers today among scholars in different disciplines, who try to explain all or most human behavior in terms of inborn drives, genes and the neurology of the brain. The curious irony is that many adherents of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transsexual movement have come to subscribe to the view that biology is indeed destiny—while at the same time other members of the same movement fiercely maintain that “gender” is an arbitrary social artifact, largely independent of its biological substratum. The movement thus oscillates between biologism and sociologism (which, I suppose, should not surprise us—political rhetoric is not an exercise in logic).

The dominant political discourse of the GLBT movement has now proposed that sexual orientation is not chosen but congenitally given—in other words, is destiny. As I have pointed out in an earlier post on this blog, this is a significant change from the earlier defense of gay rights in terms of the freedom to choose one’s lifestyle as one prefers. In other words, it is similar to religious freedom and freedom of speech, protected under the First Amendment. The explanation for the change of discourse is clear: If sexual orientation is not a choice but a given, it is like skin color, and therefore the movement can wrap itself in the mystique of the Civil Rights Movement. Gay rights are now defended constitutionally, not in terms of free exercise or speech, but of equal treatment under the law (Fourteenth Amendment). The mystique of racial equality has become an important component of the American Creed and as such well worth embracing.

Thus some gays have become quasi-Freudians. Feminists who are lesbians and/or allied with gay men have participated in the paradigm shift. (I am not aware of any apologies to Freud.) This has not prevented other feminists, probably a majority, to derive their discourse from sociology rather than biology. They are behaviorists, not Freudians. The ubiquity of the concept of “gender” in feminist parlance brilliantly reveals the underlying assumption: The term “sex” still retains the understanding that there is something crassly biological in the behavior covered by the term—people still “have sex”; nobody “has gender”. “Gender” is a grammatical term, not a biological term. It is a social construct, which, unlike sex, varies widely between human languages. Thus the “sun” is masculine in French, feminine in German (le soleil – die Sonne), while the reverse is true in the case of the “moon” (la lune – der Mond). Among other things, this means that French and German feminists seeking to purge language of its alleged bias against women have a more difficult task than their English-speaking sisters (who must concentrate on their relentless campaign against the generic masculine). To be sure, some linguists have maintained that there is a universal grammar which all actual languages share. Be this as it may, nobody is born speaking French, even if there is an innate and very general structure that French shares with every other language. Such a structure is not very helpful as a French-speaker tries to converse with an individual whose only language is Chinese. For better or worse, human individuals (with very few transsexual exceptions) are born with sex-specific genitalia; nobody is born speaking Chinese or French.

In sum: It seems very likely to me that homosexuality is a destiny for some individuals and a choice for others. It doesn’t have to be either/or. I don’t see why the demand for the rights of people with this sexual orientation, a demand deeply rooted in the values of democracy, should hinge on an unnecessary dichotomy.

I will make some concluding observations about all this, first as a (very cautious) social scientist, then as a (convinced and less cautious) moralist. (This last term was once ascribed to me in a pejorative sense. If it means that I am a citizen with strong moral convictions, then I am willing to plead guilty.)

In the first capacity, let me recall that the respective importance of nature and nurture in the shaping of an individual has been debated for a very long time. It seems plausible to me that both are involved. We still don’t know with any degree of precision where one leaves off and the other begins. But it is clearly distortive if we conceive of human beings as either chimpanzees with a more complicated brain or as free agents with a body at their disposal. In the matter at hand, it is very probable that there are biologically rooted differences between men and women, and that these determine some of their behaviors. It is evident, however, that different societies have been very inventive in the institutions built on top of (and sometimes against) the biological determinants.

In my capacity as a moralist, I am suspicious of all movements—I have the lingering intuition that every movement can very quickly turn into a lynch mob, and that I would be a likely target of its rage. The movements of sexual liberation have, I think, been a mixed bag. Some of their consequences have been very good, such as the ending of discrimination against women and of the persecution of homosexuals. Other consequences have been less desirable, such as the legal definition of privileged victim categories, or the politization of private life. Only rarely does one have the luxury of coming across a movement that one can endorse without reservations—in that respect, the Civil Rights Movement was unusual (at least until much of it turned to victimology after the death of Martin Luther King).

Let me end with two suggestions: Gays should give up trying to be a racial minority. And feminists should stop denying that, whatever else they are, they are also part of a species of mammals.

[Photo of Sigmund Freud and his daughter, courtesy of Getty Images]

In its May 2013 issue, First Things published an article by Edward Shapiro under the title “The Crisis of Conservative Judaism”. The last phrase does not refer to conservatism in general, but to the specific branch of Judaism that goes under that name. As is well known, American Judaism is divided into three denominations—Orthodox (which is most continuous in adherence to traditional Jewish law), Reform (which is most accommodating in modifying that law in line with the alleged requirements of modernity), and Conservative (which is more or less in the middle between the first two—if you will, modernizing but cautiously).

Actually, the situation is more complicated than this trilateral division would suggest. Each of the three major denominations has internal variations. Thus Orthodoxy is a rather large tent, which includes the so-called Modern Orthodox who would be hard to distinguish from what Conservative Judaism was originally intended to be. There is the so-called Reconstructionist Judaism, presumably to be located theologically to the “left” of Reform. And the various ultra-Orthodox haredi and Hasidic groups could each one be described as a denomination of sorts—certainly the most dynamic of them all, the Lubavitcher movement. The “crisis” with which Shapiro’s article deals comes precisely from the problem of locating Conservative Judaism in this highly pluralistic spectrum.

Shapiro describes a sharp decline in numbers of American Jews adhering to Conservative Judaism—in the 1990s, from 43% to 33% of those affiliated with local synagogues. By 2000 Conservatives fell to number two in the number of members, leaving first place to Reform. (The Orthodox are still number three but growing fast, in the 1990s from 16% to 23%, largely because they have the most kids. Generally speaking, modernity and any aggiornamento with it has a negative effect on fertility.) The “demographic haemorrhage” is strongest among young people, boding ill for the future of the denomination. There is also a sense of foreboding in its leadership. This reached a certain climax in May 2012, when Ismar Schorsch, outgoing head of the Jewish Theological Seminary (the banner institution of Conservative Judaism in New York), used his commencement address to characterize the theological orientation of Conservatism as “inane” and of encouraging “pampered and promiscuous individualists contemptuous of all norms”. He fell short of suggesting that his audience should march out and join the nearest Orthodox synagogue, but the address was naturally registered with dismay.

Let me try and make some sociological observations about this development.

Max Weber (1864-1920), arguably the main founder of the sociology of religion, and the Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch, were not only contemporaries but friends. Both (probably in conversation with each other) conceptualized two basic types of religious institutions: the “church” and the “sect”. The first is a large entity well embedded in society, into which individuals are born. The second is a tightly knit community, distinct from the larger society, which individuals deliberately join. For German scholars of that generation the distinction made a lot of sense. It described quite accurately the distinction between the large established ecclesial bodies, such as the Protestant Landeskirchen, and the conventicles spawned by Pietism, whose members saw themselves as belonging to the ecclesiola in ecclesia—the “little church” faithful to the truth, a subculture within the “big church”, which must compromise the truth in order to keep the allegiance of the masses. If applied to a more general sociology of religion, the Weber/Troeltsch typology is still useful but becomes wobbly. This is well illustrated by Weber’s essay “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism”, which contains his still interesting reflections about religion in America, but which puts mainline Protestant churches under the heading of “sects”, presumably because they are voluntary associations which individuals freely join.

A not very felicitous attempt to expand the conceptual trilogy was to do so by adding the term “cult”. I don’t find that very helpful: it has best be defined as a sect you don’t like. Much more useful is an addition suggested by the historian Richard Niebuhr (not to be confused with Reinhold Niebuhr, his more famous brother) in his 1929 book The Social Sources of Denominationalism. He suggested a third concept: “denomination”. As far as I know, the term originated in America, whose religious landscape it well describes, but it can just as well be applied to religion in other countries. In Niebuhr’s sense, a denomination can be defined as a “church”, a big tent into which one may be born and which does not isolate itself from the larger society, but which is also a voluntary association that one may join or freely decide to stay with. Moreover, this is a religious entity that accords other entitities the right to exist, either in practice (because there is no alternative) or in principle (in the name of interdenominational amity). Free-church Protestantism, as it first developed in the Netherlands and in Britain but then exploded in America, fits the concept very neatly. But it is pertinent to any social situation which combines religious pluralism with religious freedom. Such situations are proliferating today all over the world—which cannot be understood as either Americanization or Protestantization (for example, Catholic bishops in Latin America or Eastern Orthodox bishops in Russia are tempted to do so).

Back to America: Every religion in America sooner or later becomes a denomination, whether it likes it or not. The diversity of Protestant churches has facilitated acceptance of denominationalism. Roman Catholicism first accepted it as a practical albeit regrettable necessity, finally legitimated it theologically at the Second Vatican Council. Judaism is no exception.

Judaism in America is faced with a paradox: Traditionally understood, being a Jew is a matter of destiny rather than choice. In Jewish law, an individual is a Jew because of having a Jewish mother. One does not choose one’s mother, nor (if male) choose to be circumcised. But in American society today, remaining a Jew is in fact a matter of choice—one may sever all ties with Jewish life, even join another religion. To be sure, there are strong social and psychological pressures which, in many instances, make it difficult to exit the Jewish community. But even an individual raised in a closed ultra-Orthodox  environment in, say, Boro Park or Williamsburg in Brooklyn, can take the subway to Manhattan and never come back—and he or she knows this. Empirically, Judaism in America is one faith among many. But the background of Shapiro’s story is the exuberant pluralism that exists within American Judaism. Thus the individual who escaped from Brooklyn may join a Reform synagogue on the Upper West Side, or become a Roman Catholic, or for matter become a Buddhist (a considerable number of Buddhist teachers in America have Jewish names).

The differences between the three major Jewish denominations center on the authority of traditional Jewish law. This comes out very clearly on the issues of gender, specifically on the role of women, both in general and in the synagogue, and the status of homosexuality. Both Reform and Conservatism tend to be progressive on these issues, whereas Orthodoxy does not. Needless to say, the weight of Jewish tradition, all the way back to the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, supports the Orthodox; the other two have to re-interpret (or, if you will, relativize) the tradition. This of course aligns the different Jewish denominations on the two sides of the American culture war, a fact fully supported by Jewish voting patterns. Jews have overwhelmingly voted Democratic for over fifty years, ever since they began to break through the discriminatory barriers erected against them during (if not necessarily because of) the FDR administration. The Democratic party has become the much preferred political arm of progressives, who in turn are led by college-educated, upper-middle-class individuals—that is, by the stratum to which the majority of American Jews belongs. (As someone once quipped, “Jews have an income like Episcopalians, and vote like Puerto Ricans.”) No surprises there. It is therefore not surprising either that first Conservatism and now Reform have been leading among synagogue-going Jews. Given the demographic ascendancy of Orthodoxy, this may change. Orthodox Jews already find themselves in alliance with Evangelical Protestants and traditional Catholics on hot-button issues like abortion, gender equality and same-sex marriage. This alliance may or may not get stronger in the future.

In a war, including a culture war, being in the middle is not an advantage. One is pressured to take sides. Neal Gillman, a professor at Jewish Theological Seminary, defined Conservative Judaism as “living with ambiguity”. Shapiro asks, plausibly enough: “Why should anyone want to live with ambiguity when there are rival movements offering clarity and certainty?” I for one can think of many good reasons to live with ambiguity, both theologically and politically, and so does what is probably a majority of Americans. But, on either side of the cultural divide, those who offer “clarity and certainty” make more noise and recruit most activists. Not good news for Conservative Judaism.

Judaism has become an accepted reality in America in a way unprecedented in any other modern society. Some years ago I noticed that synagogues were listed under “churches” in the yellow pages of telephone books (this has now changed—somebody should research when and why this change occurred). In survey data Jews are on the top of groups liked by people outside the Jewish community (Muslims and atheists are least liked). There are very high rates of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, which has caused alarm in some Jewish circles (Irving Kristol once observed, “We were worried that Gentiles would want to kill our children, now we worry that they want to marry them.”) The alarm may be premature:  The Orthodox outbreed everyone else, and their children marry in rather than out.

The future of American Judaism will be mainly determined by developments outside it—the future of the American culture war (which in turn will be much influenced by the state of the American economy), the future of American power and its cultural model in the world (including its regime of religious freedom), and, last not least, developments in the Middle East affecting the future of Israel. All the same, barring catastrophic political or economic scenarios (in which case all bets are off), Judaism will continue to be an integral part of the American pluralistic scene, and it will continue to be religiously vital and pluralistic within. I would rather not try to predict what shape its denominational structure will take.

[kavram / Shutterstock.com]

There are events that are so surreal that they almost inevitably evoke religious language. This was certainly the case with the attack on the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, so it is not surprising that such language erupted in its wake. But this particular event makes religious reactions especially appropriate, more so than would be the case with other mass gatherings.

The Boston Marathon has both ancient and more proximate religious roots. Marathon is a town in Greece, the site of a battle in 490 BCE in which a small Athenian force defeated a much larger Persian army. Supposedly a messenger ran all the way to Athens without ever stopping, upon arrival exclaimed “We have won!”, then collapsed. The name “Marathon” was then given to a running competition at the first modern Olympic Games held in Athens in 1896, intended to reincarnate the ancient festival—a sacred ritual going back to around 700 BCE, dedicated to Zeus, the head of the gods.

More proximately, its reiteration in Boston is held on Patriots Day, a public holiday—indeed a “holy day”—commemorating the battles of Concord and Lexington in 1775 that inaugurated the War of Independence. It is a holiday which embodies the soul of the city of Boston and with it the founding myth of the United States. An attack on it, beyond its horrendous brutality, has the quality of blasphemy.

On April 19, 2013 The Boston Globe provided extensive coverage of the religious ceremonies in the wake of the attack. There was a solemn service at Trinity Episcopal Church on Copley Plaza, right next to the crime scene. No doubt there were other denominational services. But here I want to make some comments on the informal and formal interfaith services, explicit manifestations of the civil religion and its relation to the several denominations.

Soon after the bombings a makeshift memorial was spontaneously put up. A Globe article described it as “an eclectic collection of crosses, candles, teddy bears, medals, running shoes, and hundreds of other personalized items that reflect a common sorrow.” I don’t know when or where this practice originated, but it has occurred on other occasions of shared grief, for example following the death of Princess Diana. There were a few overtly religious messages inserted into the display, but the memorial as a whole had a clearly ritual, quasi-sacral character. People were coming and going, stood quietly in an attitude of prayer, wrote messages. A six-year old girl laboriously wrote a message saying “We love you so much!”. That was the major theme—expressions of affection for the victims. Then there were affirmations of resolve against violence, and expressions of the intent to run again in next year’s Marathon. Sacral ritual or not, no denominationally specific religion was visible here.

The official memorial service took place three days after the attack, at the Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Cross. It was attended by President Obama and other top officials. Obama denounced the evil of the murderous deed, promised to bring the perpetrators to justice (the suspected bombers were still at large), and expressed his special affection for Boston. This is the lesson he took from the event: “That’s what you taught us, Boston. That’s what you reminded us—to push on, to persevere. To not grow weary. To not get faint. Even when it hurts. Even when our heart aches.” People in the audience said that they were comforted and inspired by the President’s message. It was by all accounts an effective sermon. But it was a secular sermon, despite its religiously distinctive setting.

The opening address at the Cathedral service was delivered by the Reverend Liz Walker, a Presbyterian minister. I was struck by the following passage: “How can God allow bad things to happen? Where was God when evil slithered in and planted the horror that exploded our innocence?” She said that she had no answer, and added, “But this is what I know: God is here, in the midst of this sacred gathering and beyond.”

I would not be misunderstood: I have no problem whatever for a minister not knowing “the answer” to the age-old question of theodicy. After all, I co-authored a book with the title In Praise of Doubt—by definition, I think, faith implies an absence of certainty—I don’t have to believe what I know. But that is not the point here. The point is this: The faith that Walker represents does have an answer, centered on the redemptive process inaugurated by the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, culminating on that Day of Judgment when all evil will finally be punished. But what is more: She could not (whether in tones of certainty or not) explicate this answer in the context of this service. Once again, I would not be misunderstood: I have no criticism of Walker’s reticence about the Christian faith she is supposed to represent. It would have been inappropriate here for her to come out with overtly Christian (let alone with Protestant or, if such there are, Presbyterian) references.  But it is useful to reflect about the relation between any specific faith and the civil religion affirmed in this service.

I was not there, but the Globe account does not record any expression of a specific faith. Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the much admired Archbishop of Boston (he was mentioned as papabile at the recent Conclave), made no mention of any specifically Catholic “answer” either: “The tragedy… shakes us out of our complacency and indifference and calls us to focus on the task of building a civilization that is based on love, justice, truth and service.” Rabbi Ronne Friedman, who presides over the largest synagogue in Boston quoted a Hasidic source: “The entire world is a narrow bridge, but the important principle is to transcend, somehow, your fear.” An atheist might agree with this. The representative of the American Islamic Congress quoted a passage from the Koran, but that one too could be affirmed by any morally decent person. Needless to say, there are distinctive Jewish and Muslim “answers” to the question of theodicy (beyond the not unimportant point that the question was probably raised explicitly for the first time in  the Hebrew Bible, in the Book of Job). In any case, as far as I can tell, this was an event in which anyone, even a very secular person, could feel at home—and, most importantly, experience a strong sense of solidarity with the community assaulted by an obscene act of violence. This was the experience reported by all the participants who spoke about the service.

Grace Davie, a British sociologist, has written about the way in which established churches, in moments of collective grief, become the official mourners of the nation, even though only a minority of citizens worship in their services. The Church of England played this role at the funeral of Princess Diana, as did the Lutheran Church of Sweden (it has recently been disestablished) when the cruise ship “Estonia” sank in the Baltic Sea and a large number of Swedish tourists perished. The United States of course has no state church, but all the denominations together serve to legitimate the civil religion that can be embraced by all citizens.

This is a very distinctive American version of the separation of church and state, a quite strict legal separation, yet with diverse religious groups noisily present in public life. I think that, by and large, this has been a very successful arrangement. It presupposes that a religious group, when it enters public space, must translate its commentaries into terms that can be understood and debated by all citizens, most of whom will not be members of the particular group. Put differently, if one wants to persuade fellow-citizens in public space, one must employ a secular discourse. That discourse does have a moral foundation, the value system of the “American Creed”. Adherents of this or that specific faith may find these values more vague, even superficial, than the ones derived directly from faith, and they themselves may understand their allegiance to the Creed in terms specific to their faith. Thus the secular discourse of the public space coexists with the plurality of specific (if you will, “sectarian”) religious discourses.

The American case is different from other cases where religious pluralism and religious freedom coincide. Yet it is similar in the need for a common discourse not identified with any specific denomination. This should not trouble people of faith, unless they are unwilling to recognize the right of other faiths to exist in the same society. The Dutch legal philosopher Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) was one of the founders of modern international law. He insisted that such law was to be a rational enterprise, which could be agreed upon by states with widely different religions. In his remarkable phrase, international law should be formulated etsi Deus non daretur” – “as if God did not exist”. Grotius was anything but an atheist. He was a pious man, belonging to the Arminian branch of the Dutch Reformation.  I would call it its more humane branch, as against the grim Calvinism that dominated in the Netherlands for a while. (Indeed the Calvinist authorities then in charge forced Grotius into exile, in England and in Germany.) It seems to me that his formula is relevant to church/state issues today.

[Photo courtesy Getty Images]

On April 4, 2013 the New York Times carried a story about a group of Dominican friars in Ireland.  Contrary to the development in other Catholic monastic orders, these Dominicans had decided to continue wearing the traditional habit of white tunic and black cloaks (because of which Dominicans have been known as Black Friars). The point of the story is that this order has been unusually successful in recruiting new members, despite the overall steep decline of religious vocations in Ireland (in that quite typical of Europe, but particularly sharp in that country because of the recent crop of pedophile cases and the scandalous revelations about Catholic charitable institutions in the not too distant past). According to the Times story, the Dominicans have also been relatively successful in attracting recruits in other countries, including the US.

What caught my attention was the lifestyle of these Dominicans. This goes back to the earliest times of the order, but is particularly relevant in the current situation of the churches in Europe and other strongly secular environments. Unlike other monks, Dominican friars live, not in monasteries, but in communal residences, then go to work (mostly teaching and preaching) in the outside world. I was particularly struck by a quote from a recently ordained Dominican: “My hat goes off to diocesan priests, but I don’t know how they do it without community life. Today, you need the support of your brothers”.

The Dominican Order of Preachers was founded by a Spanish priest, Dominic de Guzman, and officially recognized in 1216. Like the other so-called mendicant order, that of the Franciscans, the Dominicans were to be more mobile and flexible than the monks confined in monasteries. Unlike the Franciscans, the main purpose of the Dominicans was to combat heresy and to teach correct doctrine. Their history is rather a mixed bag. They played a very unsavory role in the brutal suppression of the Albigensian heresy in what is now the south of France. Worse, they were put in charge of the Holy Office, better known as the Inquisition, in which capacity they tortured suspected heretics and, if found guilty, handed them over to the state authorities to be burnt at the stake (so as not to sully the Church by acts of cruelty which, somebody seemed to remember, were in some tension with the teachings of Jesus). The notorious Grand Inquisitor Torquemada was a Dominican. But the order also has much brighter dimensions to its history. It has a brilliant intellectual tradition (with Thomas Aquinas as its high point), as well as a mystical one (Meister Eckhart, Catherine of Siena). Bartolome de Las Casas, who defended the rights of the Indios of the Americas against the oppression by their Spanish conquerors, was a Dominican; so was Yves Congar, one of the major figures in the theological movement leading up to the Second Vatican Council. It is important to emphasize that this brighter side of the Dominican heritage is operative today, though there is continuity with the early mission of teaching and preaching the supposed truth of the Catholic faith.

Much of the current debate concerning clerical celibacy in the Catholic Church has focused on its sexual aspects—the difficulty of maintaining the celibate ideal in a strongly sexualized culture, the sexual frustration that must go with celibacy, and the possibility (not proven) that the latter may foster a homosexual inclination (which, for a number of those so inclined, may or may not lead to pedophilia). I don’t want to speculate here on any of these aspects. But I think that there is a very simple human aspect, quite removed from any sexual issue, which ought to be in the center of this debate—the loneliness of being a Christian minister in social environments in which this vocation is implausible. As is a frequent habit of mine, this thought led me to an issue far removed from the topic of the Times story: the decline of the Protestant parsonage.

If one gives credence to the monastic vocation at all, it is arguable that the Eastern Orthodox Church has solved the matter of celibacy in a much more practical way than Rome: The monastic life is separate from that of ordinary priests. Such priests are expected or actually required to be married. Bishops must be monks. In an Orthodox perspective, the entire Roman Church is one big monastery, from the Pope on down!  [If I may voice a hunch here: Given the theological fact that the Eucharist is at the heart of Catholic piety and that only priests can celebrate it, and given the empirical fact that the shortage of priests is reaching crisis proportions,  Rome will be pushed in an Eastern direction.]

But there is a more proximate comparison—with married Protestant clergy. The solution there has been simple and drastic: The overwhelming majority of Protestant ministers have solved the problem of loneliness by getting married. [In this as in many other matters, Luther led the way: When a group of nuns joined his movement, he felt obligated to find husbands for them. Nobody wanted one of them, Katherine Bora, who had the reputation of being opinionated and headstrong. He ended up marrying her himself. By all accounts, the marriage was a happy one.]

A couple of years ago I heard a very interesting lecture by a historian about the cultural role of the German Protestant parsonage (das evangelische Pfarrhaus) and its recent decline. (The same historian very recently helped to organize an exhibition on this topic in a Berlin museum.) For several centuries this had been a central institution in German cultural life. An amazing number of scholars, artists and statesmen started out as children growing up in this milieu. The main point of the lecture was that this institution no longer exists. There are probably a number of reasons for this, but the most salient one is that few women today are prepared to play the traditional role of the minister’s wife (as Frau Pastor)—having no outside career of her own, being her husband’s helpmeet (a sort of unpaid curate), and his special deputy in matters involving women and children in the congregation. Add to this the strong possibility that she does not fully share her husband’s faith. This of course does not mean that such marriages cannot be happy. They are certainly capable of making the minister less lonely. But they make the traditional function of the Protestant parsonage quite obsolete.

At the lecture one participant asked whether one could imagine a new institution that could perform a similar function. At the time nobody seemed to have an idea. One idea occurred to me afterward. It may be relevant beyond the particular situation of German Protestantism.

Imagine a group of pastors and their families sharing a large residence. Today the pastors will be both men and women, as will the non-pastoral spouses. Such a residence could easily be structured so as to safeguard the privacy of each family and yet provide space for community activities—including cultural activities attended by outsiders. If the church authorities paid for this residence, it would surely be cheaper than maintaining, say, four or five separate parsonages. There would always be someone available to do babysitting. And who knows, there might be enough synergy in such a place to be bring about new cultural vitality, in addition to making ministry loss stressful and more effective.

German Protestantism after World War II created imaginative new institutions, foremost among them the so-called Protestant Academies, a unique type of think-tanks dealing with morally relevant issues of public policy. The above idea would thus be one of a succession of institutional innovations. But this one reminds me of an event very far removed from Europe and, as far as I know, with no religious associations—the institution of the “joint family” in India. This was very traditional—a group of brothers residing in one big house with their several families. In recent times it was looked upon as an old-fashioned arrangement, to be discarded by university-educated middle-class people, who wanted to be modern and to live exclusively with their nuclear families. As professional women in this class increasingly worked outside the home, child care became an increasing problem, aggravated by the difficulty of finding reliable domestic servants. Suddenly the old “joint family” seemed like a solution to the problem, and it underwent a modest revival. Sometimes necessity is the mother of imaginative social innovations.

The newsletter Law and Religion Headlines carried a story on March 24, 2013, about a public hearing by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about a matter that has for several years caused First Amendment litigation and attracted special attention in Christian media (the Headlines story first appeared in the Christian Post, an Evangelical publication). The matter at issue is the tension between the free exercise of religion and the principle of nondiscrimination. The most explosive case in point was the original intention (or so it seems) of the Obama administration to force nuns to distribute condoms to employees of Catholic schools or hospitals. The question that led to the hearing by the Commission is a little different: Do campus religious groups violate nondiscrimination laws or regulations if they insist that their members subscribe to certain religious beliefs or codes of behavior? To the non-legal mind the answer is clearly no. By the time the legal mind has started chewing over the question, the matter becomes less clear.

The issue is not whether any religious group on campus must “accept all comers” (to use the legalese phrase). Thus, as far as I know, the First Amendment allows a group to hold meetings on campus to promote the view that the Pope is the Antichrist (a doctrine held by the Lutheran Wisconsin Synod)—a group which, logically enough, will exclude Roman Catholics from membership. If this anti-Pope group were forced to accept Catholics as members, the latter could take over by a majority vote and send a letter of allegiance to Rome. The issue is not what any group may do, but what group is officially recognized by the university—a recognition which not only has symbolic value (letterheads with the university logo), but very often bestows hard material benefits (notably access to funds from student fees).

In 2010 the Supreme Court did decide one such case, in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. The University of California Hastings College of Law (Martinez was the unlucky dean) had required the Society to admit individuals of any of the (by now) officially recognized sexual orientations—“Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transsexual”, or “GLBT”. (Those of us with a cross-cultural orientation are reminded of the term “scheduled castes”, which the British coined in India to refer to groups at the bottom of or outside the Hindu caste system). The Society, an Evangelical organization, had previously barred such individuals from membership, on the grounds that its faith condemned homosexuality. The Christian Legal Society sued the College on First Amendment grounds. The Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 ruling, upheld the College’s position. The majority opinion was written by Justice Ginsburg, who rejected the distinction between “status” and “conduct” made by the plaintiff (homosexuals may not be able to change their nature, but they can choose how to behave), and charged that the Society had “cloaked prohibited exclusion in belief-based garb”. The dissenting conservative judges protested the “forced inclusion of unwanted members”. If one grants that homosexuality is an inextricable combination of nature and behavior, Ginsburg’s ruling makes sense—in this, she reflects what has become liberal orthodoxy, a paradoxical application of Sigmund Freud’s view that “biology is destiny” (the old Viennese conservative would have been shocked by this twist). Be this as it may, the 2010 decision was made with the  assumption that homosexuality is a “status” similar to that of being African-American. This leaves wide open the possibility of devoted Catholics joining that Lutheran group and taking it off on a pilgrimage to Rome. Not to mention a take-over by an orgy association of one of these “chastity clubs” flourishing among young women on Evangelical campuses. I cannot claim to have researched the great variety of cases in this area. A particularly intriguing case is that of Vanderbilt University, whose nondiscrimination policy insists that recognized student groups must “accept all comers”—specifying that Republicans must be eligible to join College Democrats and even to run for leadership positions in that group. The possible scenarios are delicious to imagine. Of course religious freedom does not directly enter here.

I have previously written about a militant secularism having become a noisy presence in America. I have called it (only half tongue-in-cheek) Kemalist—after Kemal Ataturk’s view of religion as a backward superstition to keep out of public space.  It is the ideology of a quite small group that would not get anywhere through the democratic process and can only work through the courts, the least democratic branch of government. I can’t see Justice Ginsburg as a secularist ideologue. More likely, she reflects the views of church/state relations that have come to be taken for granted in the liberal subculture.

The legal mind, and the bureaucratic mind which is its lowbrow offspring, likes to squeeze the immense vitality of human life into abstract categories. Once these categories have been established, they must be imposed on everyone. I recall an episode I came across during my stint in the US Army. I knew a company clerk in Fort Benning, Georgia, where I spent most of my time in the military. He was enormously bored on his job. This was just before the two revolutions which transformed the American South: desegregation and air-conditioning (making the region more humane, more tolerable in the summer, and because of these two developments more dynamic economically). My acquaintance spent his days sitting at his desk, with little to do, sweating and swatting away the flies. He acquired a flypaper, which did indeed attract and kill a good many flies. He counted the number of flies caught on the flypaper and began to send weekly reports with this information to base headquarters. After three weeks of this exercise every unit in Fort Benning received a memorandum from headquarters, demanding to know why no flypaper reports had been submitted.

[Flies courtesy Shutterstock]

The interview with the BBC took place just before his “enthronement” (that is the term). It is noteworthy that in this interview Welby addressed the issue of same-sex marriage. That is not only a hot-button issue in the Anglican communion, threatening a schism between its branches, respectively, in the Anglo-Saxon countries and in Africa (where most Anglicans now reside, most of them ferociously hostile to homosexuality). It is also highly relevant in current British politics. Coincidentally, as Welby was “enthroned” as Archbishop, the House of Commons passed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage by a comfortable majority (despite a broad interfaith campaign against it). The bill has been pushed by Prime Minister David Cameron, part of his project of rebranding the Conservative Party as open-minded and modern. (Colonel Blimp is no longer to be welcome in Tory circles.) Welby took a nuanced position. He said that he still adheres to the “formal opposition” to active homosexuality by the Church of England, which goes with the definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Just what does the adjective “formal” imply here? Asked whether he would turn a blind eye to some gay relationships, he replied that “it’s not a blind eye—it’s about loving people as they are and where they are.” He spoke with warmth about the “stunning” quality of some gay loving and stable relationships. Is Welby joining the voices in Europe and America suggesting that the churches should stop investing time and effort in a battle that may already be lost? In any case, Welby is unlikely to go on the barricades over this issue. He mentioned that he intends to meet with Peter Tatchell, a prominent gay activist.

By any measure, the United States is a more religious society than the United Kingdom, which makes for a different balance of political forces in the culture wars. But there is an important similarity in the debate over same-sex marriage: It is really about one word—the word “marriage”. A majority of people opposing same-sex marriage is willing to allow same-sex couples the legal status of “civil unions”, with all or most of the rights held by married couples. But this does not mean that the battle is over nothing. The disputed word stands for two widely discrepant worldviews, one continuing to affirm the nation as being “under God”, the other looking on the nation as held together by an essentially secular compact (indeed, if you will, by a “civil union”). Yet both worldviews are considered by their adherents as representing absolute, indeed sacred values. In other words, what we have here is a religious war, in which compromise is tantamount to apostasy. In religious wars people passionately defend and attack different doctrinal wordings. Of course, as has been clear since the 1970s, homosexuality is just one item in a larger catalogue of disputed topics. But it is pivotal. Right now, it seems to me, this particular topic stands for all the others.

Each side in this battle wants the state to solemnly ratify its doctrine of marriage. The progressive side has been on the offensive, the conservative side (naturally) manning the defenses. Part of the progressive offensive has been to appropriate the symbols of the conservatives—to appropriate the words that describe their identity. The appropriation of the word “marriage” is a kind of symbolic identity theft. The gay movement—or, as it now prefer to call itself, the “LGBT movement”—for obvious reasons likes to compare itself with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. African-Americans were discriminated against because of the color of their skin. An analogy suggests itself: One of the aims of the Civil Rights Movement could have been the demand that the government (perhaps via the US Census) officially classify all citizens as “white”. Every analogy limps. But this one, it seems to me, is worth mulling over. A different strategy is possible: Rather than wrestling away the symbols of a dominant group, an insurgent movement may demand that its distinctive symbols be treated with respect—that is, that its separate identity be accorded cultural dignity and legal rights. That has been the direction taken by the Civil Rights Movement. As I recall, that was the original thrust of the gay movement.

This is not the place to spell out my own view of this topic. It is not easily enlisted under either banner. Long before this became a mainstream position, I was fervently opposed to the persecution (not an exaggerated term) of homosexuals that was rampant in Western countries until very recently. (My office at the New School for Social Research was a few blocks from the famous Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, and I was delighted when In 1969 a group of gay men decided to fight back against yet another harassing  police raid.) Against conservatives, I would point out that what they call “traditional marriage” is in fact bourgeois marriage, a little older than the steam engine, and with little resemblance to a Biblical view of the institution (if you doubt this, just refer, no less, to the last of the Ten Commandments, where a wife is counted among a man’s possessions, along with his slaves and domestic animals). Against progressives, I would suggest that it is evidently counterfactual to deny the uniqueness of an institution built around the astounding mystery of a man and a woman jointly bringing a new human being into the world. This leaves open many questions, but it means that one begins to think about the modern institution of marriage in prudential rather than absolutist terms.

Wars of religion, unless they result in the total victory of one side, typically end with a formula of peace. In the modern history of the West the most important such formula was the one of the Peace of Augsburg (1555), which almost a century later (in 1648) ended the Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants, which had decimated the population of central Europe—cuius regio eius religio, roughly translated, “he who rules decides the religion”. This meant that the ruler decided whether his realm would be Catholic or Protestant; those who didn’t like the decision would be allowed to leave. This was certainly an improvement over earlier practices of massacring or forcibly converting the losing party, but it is a territorial formula of peace very hard to realize under more recent pluralistic conditions.

There have been other formulas of peace: One in which the state was based on Islam, but where various (not all) religious minorities were accorded certain rights (a more modern incarnation was the Ottoman millet system). An ingenious formula from India, by which every ethnic or religious group became a caste, retaining its distinctive characteristics while becoming somehow integrated into the Hindu system. A formula curiously shared by the late Roman Empire and Confucian China, nicely summarized by Edward Gibbon (he referred to Rome but could have put this in Confucian language): “The people believed all religions to be equally true, the philosophers to be equally false, and the magistrates to be equally useful.” It seems to me that, under modern conditions, it is difficult to beat some form of the separation of religion and the state as a formula. There are different versions of this, but they share the assumption of a common political space, with a secular discourse within which public debates must be conducted. This does not mean the “naked public square”, which my old friend Richard John Neuhaus deplored—a space from which all religious language must be barred. Nor does it obviate the need of some common values, foremost among which must be the core democratic value of the inviolate dignity and rights of every human individual. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) coined an interesting phrase in this connection: One of the founders of modern international law, Grotius proposed that this law be developed etsi Deus non daretur—“as if God did not exist”. It should be emphasized that Grotius was anything but an atheist; he was theologically committed to Arminianism (the more humane version of the Dutch Reformation).

What would be a “formula of peace” for the topic under discussion here? For policy considerations, marriage would be moved from the realm of the sacred to that of the profane. The state would get out of the business of defining marriage altogether, leaving it to individual citizens or communities to define and solemnize it in any way they choose. In other words, the state accepts the empirical reality of pluralism in this area of life. The state simply registers contracts of cohabitation by a limited number of individuals (if nothing else, polygamy or polyandry would make the welfare state unaffordable), but would only become much more intrusive if or when children are involved in such an arrangement. In other words, civil union would be the only legal category, available to everybody, regardless of sexual orientation—while “marriage” would be a religious or philosophical category not defined in secular law.

Such a formula might work in some European democracies. It is very unlikely to be realizable in the United States, where the debate has been absolutized to a degree that would be hard to reverse. Justin Welby, if he intends to go in this direction, would have a better chance in Britain. On both sides of the Atlantic, I would think, it would be good advice to lower the temperature of the debate.

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held its annual meeting on March 14-16, 2013, in Washington. Widely reported on in the media, its main agenda was fiscal conservatives and social conservatives assuring each other that they could collaborate in reviving the Republican Party despite their different emphases on issues, respectively, north and south of the navel. On March 15, 2013, Religion News Service carried a story that, I imagine, few people beside myself found interesting. Let me explain why I think that it is interesting.

For the first time in the history of the organization opposition to the death penalty was put on the agenda, by no less than two heavy hitters of the conservative movement: Richard Viguerie and Jay Sekulow. The latter formulated his position as follows: “I’m opposed to the death penalty not because I think it’s unconstitutional—although I think it’s been applied in ways that are unconstitutional—but it really is a moral view, and that is that the taking of life is not the way to handle even the most significant of crimes… I think we have to be careful in executing final judgment. The one thing my faith teaches me—I don’t get to play God. I think you are short-cutting the whole process of redemption [by imposing the death penalty]… I don’t want to be the person that stops that process from taking place.” Most people who oppose the death penalty do so because of its intrinsic cruelty. Other reasons for opposition is the mounting evidence (due to DNA testing) that innocent individuals have been convicted of capital crimes, the discriminatory execution of poor and minority defendants, and the exorbitant costs of prosecuting these cases. What is interesting here is an explicit religious rationale for the opposition.

There is a large quantity of data about attitudes to the death penalty in the United States. The political differences are very clear: Conservatives are more in favor, liberals more opposed. This is equally clearly reflected in the differences between Republicans and Democrats. The majority of all Americans are still in favor of the death penalty—according to recent data from the Pew Research Center, 62%, as against 31% opposed. However, there has been a steady decline of those in favor since the mid-1990s, when Pew started to trace the issue—from a peak of 78% in favor. The figure for those opposed goes up if the questionnaire mentions life in prison without parole as an alternative to execution. The data on the attitudes of religious people are less clear, though they generally correspond to the conservative/liberal divide (except for African-American Protestants, a majority of whom are in opposition). Interestingly, the difference between white Evangelicals and white mainline Protestants is not as large as one might expect—respectively 77% and 73% in favor. A sharply deviant group consists of those who claim no religious affiliation—57% opposed to the death penalty (a figure that correlates with overall liberalism). Catholic attitudes have shifted toward opposition since 1995, when Pope John Paul II issued the encyclical Evangelium Vitae, which for all intents and purposes rejected the death penalty (the Roman Catholic Church now routinely links opposition to the death penalty with opposition to abortion and euthanasia, all seen as part of a comprehensive “culture of life”).

Despite the slow but steady decline of support for the death penalty, the United States still stands out from other Western democracies in this matter. Principled opposition to capital punishment has become a stable component of so-called “European values”—the United States could not be admitted to the European Union on moral grounds. This particular expression of “American exceptionalism” has not been helpful to US claims to stand for universal human rights.

The relation of Judaism to the death penalty is complicated and cannot be pursued here. From early on, Jewish law has been very reluctant to inflict capital punishment. In any case the issue has been abstract for more than two millennia—the Roman Empire took away from Jewish legal authorities the right to execute people, and the modern state of Israel has no death penalty in its criminal law (with the exception of the crime of genocide for which Eichmann was executed).

The historical record of Christianity in this matter is (to put it in carefully value-neutral terms) horrific. This is all the more remarkable in the case of a religion whose founder proclaimed a message of non-violence, who himself suffered death by a particularly cruel form of execution, the instrument of which has become the central symbol of the faith. (It is somewhat startling to reflect what might have happened if, instead of the crucified Jesus, the symbol of Christianity on every altar had become the gallows, with the body of Jesus hanging from it.)

Early Christians, close as they were to the founding events, would not serve in any capacity that would involve them in the administration of the death penalty. This changed dramatically when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman state, and it has changed little until very recently. No major Christian tradition can be omitted from this generalization (other than the so-called “peace churches”, notably Mennonites and Quakers).

There is no reason here to go into the ferocious history of Islam in this regard, nor are any of the major Asian traditions (including allegedly compassionate Buddhism) likely contributors to the contemporary catechism of human rights. The claim of the currently fashionable “new atheists”, to the effect that all religions lead to violent atrocities, is empirically spurious: The most ghastly atrocities of the twentieth century were committed by neo-pagan Nazis and atheist Communists. (Perhaps I may allow myself to refer to a statement by Gilbert Keith Chesterton, to the effect that the doctrine of original sin is the only Christian doctrine for which no faith is required—one just needs to look around. Or, to put the same idea in more secular terms, homo sapiens is not the moral climax of the evolutionary process.)

It would be a mistake to see in this little incident at the recent conservative meetings a reason to say yes to the question heading the Religion News Service story: “Will conservatives unite against the death penalty?” I would not hold my breath. What is probably happening here is that the slow tendency away from the death penalty will increasingly affect conservatives, for all the reasons mentioned above. It is not difficult to envisage some scenarios that would abruptly reverse this trend, in America and even in Europe. In the short run in this country, the little incident may be part of the Republican effort to resuscitate the notion of a “compassionate conservatism”.  If one is opposed to the death penalty for fundamental moral reasons (as I am), one would prefer if the opposition were based on less tactical reasons. For worse and (sometimes) for better, history is not an ongoing philosophical seminar.

[Crucified figure photo courtesy of Shutterstock.]

Soon after the white smoke rose from the roof of the Sistine Chapel, a Vatican official announced to the huge crowd gathered outside that “Habemus Papam!”—“We have a Pope!” Then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, came out as well on the famous balcony and spoke to the crowd in fluent Italian (his parents were immigrants to Argentina from Italy). He is now Pope Francis. Catholics have a Pope. Should the rest of us care? I think the answer is yes.

To say that one should care in no way means that one admires the pomp and circumstance of the Conclave, or that one is convinced by the theological rationale on which the institution of the Papacy is based. As for myself, my reaction on both counts is prototypically Lutheran: Despite a certain appeal of an ancient ceremony being performed in the twenty-first century, defiantly in the face of an arrogant secularity (how does one say chutzpah in Latin?), the pomp is essentially off-putting. Then there is the so-called Petrine Commission (Matthew 16), in which Jesus is supposed to have appointed the Apostle Peter as his Vicar on Earth and in succession all subsequent bishops of Rome: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” What I know of New Testament scholarship suggests that Jesus ever having spoken these words is thunderously improbable. (Of course there is a fantasy provoked by the Conclave in the mind of any American citizen at this time of Washington gridlock—Gail Collins, among others, mentioned it in her column in the New York Times: Would it not be great if we could lock up President Obama and the leaders of the two parties, and not let them out without their having produced the fiscal “grand bargain”? No such luck.)

There is the obvious reason to care: the enormous size and global expanse of the Roman Catholic Church. It matters what happens in the headquarters of this, the first multinational corporation (although it is clear that the control of Rome over its global subsidiaries is less than total). It is obviously significant that Francis is the first Latin American Pope and the first Jesuit one. The first fact shows a recognition that the demographic center of Christianity has shifted from Europe and North America to the developing societies of the Global South. Though in this case one may point out that Argentina (along with Chile and Uruguay) is part of the Southern Cone, which is the most European region of Latin America—there were few African slaves in those countries, and the Indians were mostly massacred. I’m less clear about the significance of the Jesuit connection. The Jesuits started out as the intellectual shock troops of the Counter-Reformation, but in recent years the order produced quite a few progressive dissidents. This is why Rome preferred relying on more reliably conservative organizations like Opus Dei. Is this a mark of reconciliation between Rome and the Jesuits, or a ratification of the control by the former over the latter?

Both progressive and conservative commentators thus far agree that Francis is unlikely to effect large changes in the Church. He is seventy-six years old, hardly an age of revolutionary reformers. One may speculate that the cardinals who elected him wanted a steady hand on the steering wheel, no daring experiments, perhaps a tighter grip on the machinery of the Curia (his administrative experience has been limited to Argentina, and it cannot be predicted as of now how he will be able to find his way among the arcane intrigues and conspiracies of the Vatican). Certainly none of the changes desired by progressive Catholics are in the offing. Francis is known as a theological and moral conservative. He also has the reputation of a humble man (constantly mentioned is his use of public transportation), and as someone with a great concern for the poor and marginalized (at one point he ceremonially washed and kissed the feet of HIV-infected individuals). His choice of Papal name is clearly meant to evoke the memory of Francis of Assisi, who embraced lepers and shunned the splendors of Rome.

If one looks at the Roman Catholic Church from the outside, there are many things to admire. This is, I think, the only Christian community which has created a distinctive culture extending across many national borders—in art, music, literature, philosophy. There are other Christian centers that had cultural as well as religious effusions—Constantinople, Moscow, Canterbury, maybe Geneva or the Lutheran centers of learning in Germany—but none to be compared with Rome. In other words, Roman Catholicism is not only a religion but a civilization, one closely related to the history of the West. There is also a distinctive Catholic piety, which has by and large resisted the rejection of the supernatural that has eviscerated much of mainline Protestantism. One does not have to be a Christian believer to understand that the heart of the Gospel (whether true or not) is the belief that God’s coming into the world in Jesus Christ has inaugurated a tectonic shift in the reality of the cosmos. In other words, the heart of the Gospel is not a new moral code, a therapeutic spirituality, or any political agenda. Such secularizing projects have turned up within Catholicism, but they were kept within bounds (not least because Rome would make sure of this). Catholicism retained a robust supernaturalism that resisted the translation of the Gospel into tepid moralism, psychotherapy or politics. Some years ago I had a conversation with a colleague, who could presumably be described as a liberal Catholic. I went through a long list of Catholic beliefs and moral principles, from Papal infallibility to contraception, asking her whether she agreed with them. She kept saying no. I then asked her why she was still a Catholic. She thought for a moment—this was not a pat response—then said, “Because there is still mystery there.” Yes, exactly.

It seems to me that the much-vaunted Catholic social teaching is more ambiguous. There is indeed an impressive list of Papal encyclicals dealing with issues of modern societies—Rerum novarum by Leo XIII (1891), Quadrogesimo anno by Pius XI (1931), Centesimus annus by John Paul II (1991). They contain some useful ideas, such as solidarity and subsidiarity, respectively proposing that society should recognize the interests of all classes, and that government should stay as close as possible to ordinary people’s lives. One becomes a little less enthusiastic about these documents when one recalls that the first two were used to legitimate the “corporate state” of authoritarian Fascism in the 1930s and Christian Democracy in the 1950s. The third encyclical made an important contribution by accepting the “market economy”, but then distinguished it from “capitalism”—“market economy”/good, “capitalism”/not good. This is a spurious distinction, not helpful in thinking about economic policies. But there is one very important fact that is not ambiguous at all: Since the Second Vatican Council the Roman Catholic Church has steadfastly advocated human rights and democracy, providing both with a decidedly theological legitimation. As the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington (not a Catholic) pointed out, this has made the Church an important factor in the “third wave of democracy”, in Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Philippines. I would add to this list of moral achievements the (rather late) opposition to the death penalty—in my view, a crucial test for any civilized society.

When Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI, I was asked what I thought of this. I replied (not really facetiously) that I was pleased: Given his history, Benedict would be busy giving a hard time to progressives within the Church (which was bad news for Catholic progressives, but of no real interests to outsiders), and thus would have little time to do mischief to the larger society (such as supporting populist policies that would inhibit economic growth and be bad for the poor). Benedict’s agenda turned out to be more theological and pastoral (the “new evangelism”), but he did not falsify my political prediction. Pope Francis, by the early accounts, seems less theologically punitive than his predecessor, but is equally conservative on basic issues of faith and morals—such as Papal infallibility, ordination of women, priestly celibacy, homosexuality, even contraception. He has said some negative things about “capitalism”, but has shown no sympathy for so-called Liberation Theology.

I would say that the most important question will be what Pope Francis will say or do about the “preferential option for the poor”. This phrase was first used by Pedro Arupe, the then head of the Society of Jesus, in a 1968 letter to Latin American Jesuits. It was proclaimed in the same year as a fundamental Catholic principle by the conference of Latin American bishops in Medellin, Colombia. Its core meaning is quite simple and hardly controversial for a Christian social ethic: That a central moral test for any society is how it treats its poor and marginal members. The question of course then becomes: just what is good for the poor?  The “preferential option for the poor” became the battle cry of the Catholic Left, in Latin America and beyond. Gustavo Gutierrez —A Theology of Liberation (1971)—placed the concept within a neo-Marxist analysis of modern society: Poverty is the result of capitalism, and the answer is class struggle leading to socialism. This analysis and the ensuing revolutionary agenda became the core message of Liberation Theology. It had wide influence, especially in Latin America. Rome did not like it from the beginning. Rome reaffirmed the basic moral imperative implied by the phrase, but it rejected the method of class struggle and generally the reduction of the Gospel to a political agenda.

There are two ways of understanding the “preferential option for the poor”—one linked to the neo-Marxist analysis, one not so linked. Thus far Rome has followed the latter understanding. I have no doubt how one must come out if the fate of the poor is one’s major concern: There are all kinds of welfare-state measures that are possible to mitigate the effects of poverty, but economic growth is the precondition of any promising policy of moving people out of poverty into a decent level of material life. Equally important: Populist redistribution, let alone socialism, will not lift people out of poverty—indeed, in arresting economic growth, populism and socialism are the preconditions for making poverty permanent. Put simply, the “preferential option for the poor” results in a preference for a capitalist economy focused on growth, since only this type of economy has shown a capacity to lead to dramatic improvements in the condition of the poor. Obviously there are broad areas of disagreement on the relative importance of the state and of market forces in making the transition out of poverty as humane as possible. But the “preferential option for capitalism” must be the basic guide for policy. Rome has spoken quite intelligently on these matters before. However, Rome sometimes changes its mind. The financial crisis in Europe and the US has given Leftist ideas and movements a new appeal. This has been particularly the case in Latin America, where “neo-liberalism”, a synonym for capitalism, is still a dirty word in much political discourse (not least in Argentina).

How, if at all, will Pope Francis deal with this problem? Catholics and non-Catholics have an interest in this issue.