God, the Sex Vote and human dignity

Do you ever wonder why the poor and the working classes, if they're religious-minded, are almost always followers of the most conservative forms of religion? And why the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to be a partisan of liberal religion, if you're a partisan of religion at all? You could say it's a matter of education, but correlation does not equal causation. I think it has more to do with the kinds of lives poor and working-class people lead. I've written before here about how the deep need for some sense of structure and guidance in her life and the life of her kids brought our former cleaning lady, a Mexican immigrant, into the Pentecostal church. She was not remotely a theological sophisticate, but she knew she needed Jesus, and she needed Jesus in a direct way, and in a practical way. That it's hard for the Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church, or the mainline Protestant churches, in this country to reach people like her, right here in our own country, ought to make us reflect on the shortcomings of bourgeois religion, and bourgeois religiosity.

Here's what I mean: if this woman, Maria, and her teenage girls came to our parish, they would certainly be welcome. They would be in the presence of a liturgy of unparalleled beauty, and indeed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. But if they had no prior experience of Orthodoxy, I wonder if they'd come back? It's not like we're a wealthy parish or anything, but the Orthodox faith takes work to get to know. Similarly, as a Catholic I was often amazed and grateful for the depth and beauty of the Catholic faith, but I often sat in mass wondering what would keep a lost soul from the underclass coming back to church. I know enough about the charismatic churches to know that whatever they lack in theological depth and sophistication, they make up for in speaking directly and realistically to the struggles of those on the economic margins. Whatever the criticism I have of those churches and their theologies, I am grateful for them, because they're reaching people who are drowning in this cultural tempest, and offering them a lifeline that these folks just aren't finding at the more established churches.

To illustrate the point further, here's a passage from a review I once did of the Rev. Chloe Breyer's book about her Episcopal seminary years:

Chloe decides to set up a Bible study for a group of Bellevue patients who are in from Rikers Island, the notorious city prison. She plays a video segment from the Bill Moyers series Genesis. The inmates see Bible scholars agreeing that Genesis gives us plenty of questions, but few answers. Her students don't get it. "They're supposed to be experts, right?" says Tyrone. "So then why are they giving us all this stuff about not having any answers? I mean, it doesn't take a Ph.D. not to have answers! And if they don't have any answers, then who does?"

Others chime in with contempt for the equivocating liberal scholars Breyer so admires. Finally, a Muslim convert speaks up. "See, this is what I'm telling you, man. The Koran is the place to go for answers! . . . I became a Muslim because the Koran has the most truth in it. You don't argue about what it means. You read it, and you know what to do. The Prophet got the word directly from God."

"Is that right?" asks Tyrone. "Is that how it is? The Koran has more answers than the Bible?" Undeterred, and unable to grasp the significance of the moment, Breyer sets out to teach these poor sinners that the Bible doesn't have to be taken literally. There are lots of gray areas, she tells them, and they should feel empowered by the fact that they can interpret Scripture any way they like. The inmates are unmoved.

"They want answers, not questions," Breyer writes. "[T]he more contradictions I point out in the Bible, the more the inmates decide there is no point in wasting their time with a religion that lacks answers."

In other words, the people who have the most to lose from a life without moral boundaries are those who have the most attraction to strict religion. I know, I know, there are exceptions. But I believe it to be true that those who support a libertine cultural politics are those who either have not thought about the consequences of their politics on the broader society, or don't have to think about it because they can't imagine paying a material price for living by those principles.

James Poulos writes about the "Sex Vote" today. He defines "Sex Vote" as a "snappy term for people who are generally willing or even eager to trade away political and economic freedoms for broad (in terms of scope, variety, protection and enforcement) social and cultural freedom." I'd love to read more of his thoughts on this provocative concept, but if I take his meaning, he's arguing that there's really nothing that the Sex Vote crowd won't accept as long as its sexual freedom is protected. I have believed for some time now that for liberal elites (by which I mean academics, journalists, political activists, politicians and the left-wing donor class), the one hill they'll die defending is the Sexual Revolution. And that's true to some degree for us religious conservatives, because sex and culture is not just about canoodling, but has everything to do about the kind of cultural order we'll live in, and even what it means to be human.

I don't think there is nearly enough understanding in America today, and not only among liberals, for how necessary a strong belief in God is for most people -- especially the poor and working classes -- to build lives of dignity and order. I think about how poor my ancestors were, and not too far back, and how the only thing they had was their God and their dignity. Not all of them did, and amid the same material deprivation, they led lives of squalor and disorder. It's hard to make a direct comparison, of course, especially over time, but it occurs to me that they were as secular as any educated upper-middle set, but they were poor, and made room for nothing to keep them morally anchored, and aware of the dignity that they possessed as creatures of God. And what that required of them. Having read the galleys of Julie Lyons' upcoming book about her black Pentecostal congregation in poverty-stricken south Dallas, I am more convinced than ever that when you are living in conditions of poverty and moral chaos, the church is the only thing that will save you (and I'm not talking about in an eschatological sense). Again, I recall Robert D. Kaplan's discussion of how whatever you might say about Islam's strictures, the Islamic faith made it possible for the people of Egypt to endure lives of great stress and suffering while keeping social order and dignity.

We don't understand these things in America today. But we might yet again. The hard way. I mean this: Can we be good without God? That's the question the political theorist Glenn Tinder posed in this 1989 Atlantic Monthly essay, in which he made a political argument that the liberal order is far more dependent on Christianity than people realize, or want to acknowledge. Excerpt:

The spirituality of politics was affirmed by Plato at the very beginnings of Western political philosophy and was a commonplace of medieval political thought. Only in modern times has it come to be taken for granted that politics is entirely secular. The inevitable result is the demoralization of politics. Politics loses its moral structure and purpose, and turns into an affair of group interest and personal ambition. Government comes to the aid of only the well organized and influential, and it is limited only where it is checked by countervailing forces. Politics ceases to be understood as a pre-eminently human activity and is left to those who find it profitable, pleasurable, or in some other way useful to themselves. Political action thus comes to be carried out purely for the sake of power and privilege. It will be my purpose in this essay to try to connect the severed realms of the spiritual and the political. In view of the fervent secularism of many Americans today, some will assume this to be the opening salvo of a fundamentalist attack on "pluralism." Ironically, as I will argue, many of the undoubted virtues of pluralism--respect for the individual and a belief in the essential equality of all human beings, to cite just two--have strong roots in the union of the spiritual and the political achieved in the vision of Christianity. The question that secularists have to answer is whether these values can survive without these particular roots. In short, can we be good without God? Can we affirm the dignity and equality of individual persons--values we ordinarily regard as secular--without giving them transcendental backing? Today these values are honored more in the breach than in the observance; Manhattan Island alone, with its extremes of sybaritic wealth on the one hand and Calcuttan poverty on the other, is testimony to how little equality really counts for in contemporary America. To renew these indispensable values, I shall argue, we must rediscover their primal spiritual grounds.

The exalted individual is not an exclusively Christian principle. There are two ways in which, without making any religious assumptions, we may sense the infinite worth of an individual. One way is love. Through personal love, or through the sympathy by which personal love is extended (although at the same time weakened), we sense the measureless worth of a few, and are able to surmise that what we sense in a few may be present in all. In short, to love some (it is, as Dostoevsky suggested, humanly impossible to love everyone) may give rise to the idea that all are worthy of love. Further, the idea of the exalted individual may become a secular value through reason, as it did for the Stoics. Reason tells me that each person is one and not more than one. Hence my claims upon others are rightfully matched by their claims upon me. Simple fairness, which even a child can understand, is implicitly egalitarian and universal; and it is reasonable. Can love and reason, though, undergird our politics if faith suffers a further decline? That is doubtful. Love and reason are suggestive, but they lack definite political implications. Greeks of the Periclean Age, living at the summit of the most brilliant period of Western civilization, showed little consciousness of the notion that every individual bears an indefeasible and incomparable dignity. Today why should those who assume that God is dead entertain such a notion? This question is particularly compelling in view of a human characteristic very unlike exaltation.

Most of us have come to assume that we ourselves are the authors of human destiny. The term "man-god" may seem extreme, but I believe that our situation is extreme. Christianity poses sweeping alternatives--destiny and fate, redemption and eternal loss, the Kingdom of God and the void of Hell. From centuries of Christian culture and education we have come habitually to think of life as structured by such extremes. Hence Christian faith may fade, but we still want to live a destiny rather than a mere life, to transform the conditions of human existence and not merely to effect improvements, to establish a perfect community and not simply a better society. Losing faith in the God-man, we inevitably begin to dream of the man-god, even though we often think of the object of our new faith as something impersonal and innocuous, like science, thus concealing from ourselves the radical nature of our dreams.

THE political repercussions are profound. Most important is that all logical grounds for attributing an ultimate and immeasurable dignity to every person, regardless of outward character, disappear. Some people may gain dignity from their achievements in art, literature, or politics, but the notion that all people without exception--the most base, the most destructive, the most repellent--have equal claims on our respect becomes as absurd as would be the claim that all automobiles or all horses are of equal excellence. The standard of agape collapses. It becomes explicable only on Nietzsche's terms: as a device by which the weak and failing exact from the strong and distinguished a deference they do not deserve. Thus the spiritual center of Western politics fades and vanishes. If the principle of personal dignity disappears, the kind of political order we are used to--one structured by standards such as liberty for all human beings and equality under the law--becomes indefensible.

Nietzsche's stature is owing to the courage and profundity that enabled him to make this all unmistakably clear. He delineated with overpowering eloquence the consequences of giving up Christianity and every like view of the universe and humanity. His approval of those consequences and his hatred of Christianity give force to his argument. Many would like to think that there are no consequences--that we can continue treasuring the life and welfare, the civil rights and political authority, of every person without believing in a God who renders such attitudes and conduct compelling. Nietzsche shows that we cannot. We cannot give up the Christian God--and the transcendence given other names in other faiths- and go on as before. We must give up Christian morality too. If the God man is nothing more than an illusion, the same thing is true of the idea that every individual possesses incalculable worth.

The idealism of the man-god does not, of course, bring as an immediate and obvious consequence a collapse into unrestrained nihilism. We all know many people who do not believe in God and yet are decent and admirable. Western societies, as highly secularized as they are, retain many humane features. Not even tacitly has our sole governing maxim become the one Dostoevsky thought was bound to follow the denial of the God-man: "Everything is permitted." This may be, however, because customs and habits formed during Christian ages keep people from professing and acting on such a maxim even though it would be logical for them to do so. If that is the case, our position is precarious, for good customs and habits need spiritual grounds, and if those are lacking, they will gradually, or perhaps suddenly in some crisis, crumble.

To what extent are we now living on moral savings accumulated over many centuries but no longer being replenished? To what extent are those savings already severely depleted? Again and again we are told by advertisers, counselors, and other purveyors of popular wisdom that we have a right to buy the things we want and to live as we please. We should be prudent and farsighted, perhaps (although even those modest virtues are not greatly emphasized), but we are subject ultimately to no standard but self-interest. If nihilism is most obvious in the lives of wanton destroyers like Hitler, it is nevertheless present also in the lives of people who live purely as pleasure and convenience dictate.

There can be no decent polities unless many people can resist the historical discouragement so natural in our times. The consumer society and fascism exemplify the possible outcome when nations are populated predominantly by people incapable of the hesitation in which reality needs to be faced or the hope in which it must be judged and reshaped. The need is also personal. In its depths the life of an individual is historical and political because it is one with the lives of all human beings. To despair of history is to despair of one's own humanity. Today we are strongly tempted to split the individual and history, the personal and the political. When this occurs, personal being is truncated and impoverished. People in earlier times of bewilderment and disillusionment, such as the era of the downfall of the ancient city-state system, were similarly tempted, and a standard of life first clearly enunciated by Epicurus in the aftermath of the Macedonian conquest of the city-states is still, in the twentieth century. attractive. Epicurus called for withdrawal from public life and political activity; he argued that everything essential to one's humanity, such as friendship, can be found in the private sphere. Personal life thus is salvaged from the raging torrent of history. But it is also mutilated, for it is severed from the human situation in its global scope and its political contours.

The absorption of Americans in the pleasures of buying and consuming, of mass entertainment and sports, suggests an Epicurean response to our historical trials. The dangers--erosion of the grounds of political health and impairment of personal being--are evident.

Being good politically means not only valuing the things that are truly valuable but also having the strength to defend those things when they are everywhere being attacked and abandoned.

Tinder says the Sex Vote will destroy us politically, but that Christians cannot accept the Benedict Option. How do you defend the things that are truly valuable when the ground beneath your feet is slip-sliding away? What happens to a culture that is post-Christian and therapeutic, in the Rieffan sense, when the therapies we've used to hide from the death of God evaporate in poverty and cataclysm? We may be forced to find the answer to both questions.

As the Bible says, a little yeast leavens the whole bread (paraphrase).

Thus, America and to a lesser extent Western Europe, remain relatively civil in the order God set up in the Triune: Father - Son - Holy Spirit .a.k.a.... Husband, Wife, Children.

I’m going through the Truth Project, and it’s amazing how the Triune nature of God is a carbon copy of the Man, Wife, Children dynamic.

The father society strays from God’s Creation scenario, the less of a social order there will be.

this article has a brilliant insight — the godless upper classes worship at the altar of sex. They will give up all other freedoms for the freedom to sleep with whomever they want. They will destroy the sacred foundations of society (marriage and child-rearing) for the sake of their lust.

Madonna, the promiscuous idol of teenagers, is a case in point.

The insight, while not original to this writer, does seem accurate, at least on the aggregate level.

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