I think Maddow does controlled outrage very well. Pollitt is rather good also.
Also, Serwer on civil rights and cultural changes and, of all people, Richard Cohen.
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67 comments
December 24, 2008 at 1:27 pm
blueollie
Ok, I’ll give a disclaimer: aside from reading an occasional “pop-history” book, I am rather ignorant.
So, since there are historians here perhaps someone can educate me as to why the following argument would be wrong:
Jesus was a 1′st Century Jew and Christianity grew out of a Middle Eastern society that existed from 50-300 CE. Their norms (and their teaching) would appear to be quite regressive to us; by our standards they WOULD be bigots.
Hence anyone who tries to practice Christianity in its original form would necessarily be a bigot.
Therefore, it is better to break with Christianity altogether rather than to try to pretend that Jesus and the early Christians were somehow tolerant new-age nice guys.
Or, put another way: Warren is right about Christianity therefore it is better not to be a Christian at all?
I am not trying to be a troll; after all I find Warren and his ideas to be offensive and backward. And I am an atheist.
But I bring this up here because there are experts in history on this site who can correct me.
December 24, 2008 at 2:28 pm
kid bitzer
i don’t think any experts on history are going to be able to enlighten you about jesus’ attitude towards gay marriage.
at least, not the experts who care about evidence.
December 24, 2008 at 2:31 pm
A White Bear
Yeah, Ollie, I rather agree. I understand the outrage, because we’ve elected a president whose social policies are a lot more liberal than his religion generally suggests. Our “current” president has enacted social policies a lot more conservative than his religion generally suggests. But personally, I feel pretty confident that Obama’s fairly conservative religious and personal values are aspects of his life that will inform his political decisions in different ways from Bush’s.
Rick Warren is an asshole and is wrong. But Christians tend to genuinely believe that they have more in common with a Christian who is politically different from them than with a non-Christian with their own political views. I took Obama’s choice to be a sign that he wants the blessing of the evangelical community because he considers himself a part of it, even if he doesn’t take the same political directives from that community that others do.
As an ex-evangelical, I admit my heart is warmed somewhat by the prospect of an openly Christian political leader who talks about his faith, but puts the political emphasis of his life on the kinds of issues Jesus actually spoke about–caring for the needy, elderly, and sick, rather than crushing those least able to protect themselves from people in power. I think he might have the ability to change some of the evangelical political rhetoric that has been so poisonous for so long. But that’s going to look a lot like bowing to the enemy at times. I hope it works.
Like Maddow, I think he could have made a far less insulting choice than a California pro-8 megachurch guy. But unlike Maddow, I’m more interested in waiting to see what he does politically than in railing against his choice of someone who’s going to talk in public for a few minutes on Jan. 20. As a previous guest she had pointed out, pulling Warren right now would be a far bigger screw-up than keeping him. Sadly, the queer and queer-allied communities are far less likely to spend the next four years undermining Obama’s agenda than a vast population of really pissed-off evangelicals who have been desperately looking for a reason to hate him.
December 24, 2008 at 2:35 pm
A White Bear
That sounds really overly conciliatory, doesn’t it? I would like to reiterate that Warren is a terrible and divisive choice that has put Obama into a nasty double-bind. Now that it’s made, though, I think it’s best for liberals to really hold Obama’s feet to the fire on the agenda itself, rather than force him to incite culture-war armageddon.
December 24, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Barbar
I didn’t find the Warren choice surprising at all. And I don’t mean this in a cynical “of course the Democrats will spit on the left” way. I thought 90% of Obama’s shtick was “people’s politics are often determined by their emotional needs and I may not agree with everyone on everything but I will listen and be respectful and try to understand… and I think I can make some headway doing this.” And it’s pretty clear that Obama (who I believe grew up atheist in an essentially atheist household) thinks of religion as the basis for community, something that satisfies emotional desires and needs to be respected. Someone with this mindset is just not going to be that averse to letting Rick “20 million copies sold” Warren give a 2-minute prayer.
That’s not to say that feelings of betrayal and outrage are unjustified or inappropriate; this is just my two cents.
Maybe a silver lining is that Warren moderates somewhat as he becomes more mainstream. Apparently he supported Prop 8 because of free speech concerns, see?
December 24, 2008 at 4:24 pm
urbino
Like the Caroline Kennedy brouhaha, this is one I have a hard time caring much about. Would I have preferred that Obama pick somebody like Jim Wallis? Yes. But, honestly, my real preference would be to forgo the prayers, entirely.
I keep hearing people saying this is a huge stage to give Warren and will give him and his views much more influence.
Really?
I mean, can anybody name any of the people who’ve delivered inauguration prayers before? Ever? I sure as hell can’t. (I would guess Billy Graham was called on at least once, but the influence/prayer causality works the other way in that case, just as it does in this one.)
The fact is, this is a nothing task that’s going to do nothing for Warren’s reach and influence a week later, just as it has done for every one of his predecessors. If there had been no ruckus raised over his selection, nobody would know even now that he was the one giving the invocation. He’d've been on the teevee when he delivered the actual prayer, and then gone right back to the circle of influence he already had. Just like everybody before him.
December 24, 2008 at 4:26 pm
silbey
Can anybody name who gave the invocation in 2004? No looking at Google or peeking at the other thread in which I asked this question.
December 24, 2008 at 4:27 pm
urbino
But Christians tend to genuinely believe that they have more in common with a Christian who is politically different from them than with a non-Christian with their own political views.
That’s much, much less true than it once was, though I think things may be swinging back that way, now.
December 24, 2008 at 4:43 pm
urbino
Pwned by silbey. Go away for a few days, and all the good stuff’s already been said.
December 24, 2008 at 7:03 pm
EKB
Actually, Warren didn’t so much compare gays to pedophiles as he talked about marriage between older men and young girls, something very common in India and other Asian countries. He talked about polygamy. He talked about brother-and-sister marriage. All these practices have existed and some do still exist, for the most part legally in various parts of the world. It actually is Maddow who jumped to the conclusion he was comparing gays to people we in our culture consider criminals and perverts. So maybe Warren was talking about marriages he felt Christianity forbade…but not about the people participating in them. I bring this up because a lot of religions, and notable among these religions are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have ways of defining insiders and outsiders based on rather strict rules…such as those concerning marriage. I really think Christ was trying to get away from this purity stuff, but many of his heirs put it all back in. Thus, orthodox Christians — and Warren and many other evangelical Christians could be called orthodox — would certainly be opposed to gay marriage, but might very well not be opposed to gays per se in our society. Or maybe uncomfortable with gays, but not really into gay-bashing. Just like they might feel like they couldn’t condone the polygamous relations of a Muslim, but might be perfectly able to have a Muslim as a friend, or might feel uncomfortable about Muslims but really not approve of Muslim-bashing.
I write all this because I think it is really important to recognize that we all, if we looked beneath the surface, would have difficulties with each other’s beliefs about the right way to do things. A trivial example: an orthodox Jewish friend of mine won’t even set foot in a non-kosher restaurant and will not eat anything at my house, which kind of offends my sense of hospitality, but doesn’t break up our friendship or our acceptance of each other in non-religious circumstances.
We find woven into our identities beliefs that are often entrenched by upbringing and experience and irrationality, the undoing of which is quite a challenge. It has been mentioned, for instance, that among blacks, the hostility to gay marriage is an incredibly complex issue having in part to do with the problems that exist in marriage among black men and women.
Which is almost, but not quite, beside the point. We might want to ask the very respected black preacher who is also giving a prayer at the inauguration what he thinks of gay marriage.
Is it possible that there are some on the liberal left who can’t calm down enough to be tolerant of divergent views?
December 24, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Matt McKeon
People who oppose same sex marriage, but drag in other things, as Warren(and others have), are basically conceding they have no good reason to oppose same sex marriage.
December 24, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Michael Turner
“Equivalent” becomes “equating.” Now, wait a minute —
There’s polygamy all through the Old Testament. Does Rick Warren “equate” pedophilia with an adult woman entering into a polygamous marriage of her own free will? Note that he said “brother and sister” (again we can assume he means consensual adult decision), but this gets translated in the invective against Warren as “incest”, about which we’re on hair-trigger alert because the usual connotation these days leans more toward the pedophilic sense and less toward “too consanguinous by the norms of our society.”
I’d say Warren meant “equivalent” in the sense of “these are all marriages involving sexual relations considered sinful by (latter day) Christian standards.” To me, this leaves open the question of just how heinous the “sin” of homosexual behavior might be, in his mind.
After all, even taking specific instances of polygamy, incest and pedophilia, you can’t morally equate specific acts even within each category, so how can you equate acts between them? I’m sure Rick Warren recognizes this.
Polygamy? Forcing a woman into a (monogamous) marriage — yes, this still happens in America, I know victims of it — must certainly be worse than a woman electing to become a man’s second, third, nth wife, and I don’t see why Rick Warren would say that the hypothetical monogamous marriage was the more moral of the two.
Incest? Two adult first cousins choosing to have sex with each other isn’t something I’d “equate” with a father raping his daughter, and I see no reason to believe that Rick Warren would equate the two acts, morally.
Pedophilia? Given our patchwork of laws across various states about age ranges for marriage and statutory rape, there are probably some states where certain man-girl marriages are perfectly legal, and others where a man having sex with a girl that age is illegal. For all I know, Rick Warren has a problem with the marriageable-age laws in some states where he’s pretty popular.
And this is just America. As EKB points out above, that’s just scratching the surface.
Someone very close to this controversy over Rick Warren said the following at an AIDS conference in 2006:
Did this speaker go on to draw distinctions among these “sins”, or object to the categorization of “gay man” in “sinner”, to say that his ability to be compassionate was a challenge for him, when the AIDS patient was gay? No. Here is the very next sentence:
Rick Warren himself? No, that was Barack Obama speaking, on World AIDS Day, at Rick Warren’s invitation, along with Sam Brownback.
Here is Obama in debate against Alan Keyes in 2004. Alan Keyes might remind many of us here of a highly articulate sophomore ripe for recruitment by Moonies (if not Larouchites), and he’s in fine lunatic form in this one — watch the whole thing, it just keeps getting better. But what’s more striking in a way is how Obama slides and sidles all around the question of why his religion makes it impossible for him to commit to the legitimacy of gay marriage.
Keyes is all logic without reason, much less reasonableness. Obama is very reasonable, but Keyes is right that there’s not a lot of logic in Obama’s position — one minute it’s that marriage is a commitment before God, the next is that it’s just all about “tradition.” He’s not really being much more logical about it than most Americans are, and most Americans oppose gay marriage.
I don’t know whether anybody has asked Obama point-blank, “Are homosexual acts a sin in the eyes of God, according to your religious beliefs?” Maybe he’s a smart enough politician to avoid being put in that bind, and maybe if he were asked, he would somehow come out OK despite being even more evasive than he was in that 2004 debate with Alan Keyes. Obama is just too smart of a politician to allow himself to be categorized clearly on issues where clarity might be a (net) political liability. At the moment, gay marriage is one of those issues.
Maddow is, like Olbermann and some others, including a number of shoutmeisters on the right, a talented partisan info-tainer. I don’t go to her for the terms of the debate on any question, though.
December 25, 2008 at 5:24 am
EKB
What we really need is a discussion of where law and morals based on faith do/should intersect.
December 25, 2008 at 6:16 am
jim
Rick Warren dislikes gay people, thinks homosexual acts are sins, considers gay marriage a parody of a God-given mystery. He has a number of other objectionable opinions, too.
On the one hand, the invocation is not a terribly important aspect of the inauguration; it’s particularly unimportant to most of the people objecting to Warren’s participation. I’m reasonably sure that none who originally planned to attend the inauguration changed their plans because Warren would be giving the invocation.
On the other, Warren’s invitation is an insult to the broad left. Not just to the LGBT community, but the rest of us, too. How should we react to Obama’s claimed commitment to “science” when he invites an evolution-denier to open his inauguration?
So we should continue objecting — particularly those with widely heard voices, like Maddow. She is setting the terms of debate. It’s important and valuable that she picked up the Christophobe comment. That’s Warren making the usual evangelical claim that evangelical christianity, and only evangelical christianity, is Christianity — to oppose him is to oppose Christ.
December 25, 2008 at 6:48 am
EKB
It’s important to understand that people hold their beliefs for reasons that seem right to them. It is far better, in our dyspeptic and divided country, that we try to talk to each other, reach out, than categorically condemn. Because we, on all sides, cling so tightly to our beliefs, we only dig our nails in deeper when we perceive we are under attack. For instance, someone I know says he absolutely refuses to deal with anyone who wouldn’t accept the marriage of gays as equal to the marriage of straights. If we on the left define what Warren is saying as “insult” or as “completely and unforgivably homophobic” then we will perceive what he is saying as just that We get angry, we get exclusive. We think of Warren as less worthy than we are, ultimately less human, perhaps. If we say instead how could he believe that? If we try to get a feel for the wider context, we might get somewhere. It is worth noting that Joseph Lowery, the other clergyman speaking does support gay rights and gay marriage without reservation and that this hasn’t driven either Lowery or Warren away. Lowery is able to define the issues as civil rights issues, not religious issues, something that fundamentalists of all sorts everywhere have a hard time doing. But Lowery, a Baptist, is heard by people who don’t agree with him from the opposite perspective to ours. So rather than continuing to dig the canyon between camps, perhaps we could talk about the fact that no one can save everyone (I think of the AA prayer — to accept that which I cannot change, or however it goes); that in our society we have clashing views which means we can in our own churches perhaps conduct ourselves in certain ways, but not in the wider world; that in the United States, we have always had these civil-religious clashes, but that at the base of it all, the trend has been, thank goodness, towards legal inclusiveness, of distinguishing civil rights from religious creed. We not-so-religious folks will have to accept that there are, however, Christians whose whole being is tied up in the belief that there is only one road to Christ. They have to learn that some of us are willing to risk not following that road and not try to use the secular legal system to force us to do otherwise.
I might remind folks that Warren has probably done more good than most of us; that his focus is not on gay rights or lack thereof most of the time, but that the spotlight of the press and of activists on both sides has put it there.
Maddow is not setting the terms of the debate; she is adding fuel to the fire of intolerant speech. She’s trying to be too clever by far.
December 25, 2008 at 6:52 am
Matt McKeon
As far as gay marriage, what we really need to do is mind our own business. If you concerned with protecting marriage, pass a law against divorce.
December 25, 2008 at 6:57 am
Matt McKeon
Rick Warren, as well as Dr. Dobson and the rest of that ilk worship Satan, anyway, if you belief the New Testament.
Listen, my name is going on the wrong posts. EKG should be credited with the pro Warren position.
December 25, 2008 at 7:38 am
jim
EKB: Warren has probably done more good than most of us; . . . his focus is not on gay rights or lack thereof most of the time
I, and probably most of the people involved, don’t care what Warren thinks or does. I am not a member of Saddleback church, nor its neighbour. I care what Barack Obama thinks and does. There are things I care about deeply that I thought and hoped that Obama would act upon. There are things that the LGBT community cares about deeply that they thought and hoped that Obama would act upon.
Obama’s invitation to Warren calls into question his commitment to those things. We object to Warren invocating because we object to Obama symbolically abandoning (or even just attenuating) his support for those things we care about.
That’s what the debate is about. Obama, not Warren.
December 25, 2008 at 8:42 am
drip
That’s what the debate is about. Obama, not Warren. That debate is over. Obama threw a marine hero, turned Navy corpsman, turned minister out of his life without much trouble. He picked up this billion dollar Elmer Gantry without missing a step. Slick. I feel good about my bumper sticker.
December 25, 2008 at 8:58 am
silbey
There are things I care about deeply that I thought and hoped that Obama would act upon. There are things that the LGBT community cares about deeply that they thought and hoped that Obama would act upon.
Obama’s invitation to Warren calls into question his commitment to those things. We object to Warren invocating because we object to Obama symbolically abandoning (or even just attenuating) his support for those things we care about.
That’s what the debate is about. Obama, not Warren
It’s important to remember that *this is not the same thing as him actually abandoning his support for those things we care about.* From my perspective, he’s paying Warren back for a political favor done during the campaign with something that is entirely symbolic. Warren is not going to have any substantive input on the issues.
Is is possible that Obama thinks that the best way to get actual movement on the issue is by conciliating a younger generation of evangelical preachers, like Warren?
December 25, 2008 at 8:59 am
Michael H Schneider
In 2005 I was one of the delegates from my precinct to the county meeting of the Democratic party. At the county meeting the delegates elect the people who go to the state central committee, who run the state Democratic party.
The County meeting was called to order, and when everyone was quiet and paying attention a guy in an outfit got up at the microphone and told us all to bow our heads and pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Not being a Christian, I didn’t. I thought “what is this? This is official Democratic praty meeting, and we’re being told to pray to Jesus? I thought that the Democratic party was the party open to non-Christians.”
Opening any government or political event with anything like a prayer is a really bad idea. It gets everyone into the whole argument about religious beliefs – are Warren’s beliefs Christian? are they sinful? what does he really believe, anyway? Those aren’t arguments we want to be having.
I don’t know whether anybody has asked Obama point-blank, “Are homosexual acts a sin in the eyes of God, according to your religious beliefs?”
That’s exactly the sort of question that shouldn’t be asked. I don’t give a flying rat’s patoot what Obama’s religious beliefs are, and neither should anyone else. He shouldn’t be trying to enact those beliefs into law.
The idea of the separation of church and state is to avoid all that. We should respect that eparation, and simply not try to mix religious celebrations with our political process, and we shouldn’t have Rick Warren or anyone else leading a prayer or a blessing at the inauguration.
December 25, 2008 at 10:23 am
EKB
I can agee with the last part of this last post, but I’m afraid we’ve always struggled with this mix. Billy Graham, pastor to presidents and invocation-giver for YEARS AND YEARS was far more objectionable than Warren, for instance.
We live in a messy world. If the edges of our positions blur into each other a bit, so much the better.
And I do think that Obama is trying to practice what he preaches, which is inclusion. And he himself, as are many Americans, hetero and homo, may be uncomfortable with the idea of homosexuality. Moving people towards an acceptance of what they are uncomfortable with is what the goal should be.
December 25, 2008 at 11:44 am
Ben Alpers
Our “current” president has enacted social policies a lot more conservative than his religion generally suggests. … I took Obama’s choice to be a sign that he wants the blessing of the evangelical community because he considers himself a part of it, even if he doesn’t take the same political directives from that community that others do.
Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ. He is not an evangelical Christian. And, at least on the issue of gay marriage, he is distinctly to the right of his church. Obama opposes equal marriage rights. The UCC, for three years now, officially supports them.
The Rick Warren invitation is about pandering to the Christianists. It is galling both because it rewards a bigot and because it suggests that, even in an Obama administration, the Christian right is likely to get more attention than the actual left.
Of course, this really isn’t surprising. The left and progressive Democrats largely supported Obama’s centrist presidential campaign pretty unconditionally. And we’re getting pretty much what we bargained for.
December 25, 2008 at 11:47 am
Ben Alpers
Ooops…I misedited the beginning of that quoted passage from AWB. I meant to quote this:
we’ve elected a president whose social policies are a lot more liberal than his religion generally suggests
My point being that, given his membership in the UCC, Obama actually stands to the right of his religion on many social issues.
December 25, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Barbar
How should we react to Obama’s claimed commitment to “science” when he invites an evolution-denier to open his inauguration?
I don’t know. How should we react to Obama’s claimed commitment to Israel if he’s going to talk to Ahmadinejad? Are we genuinely worried that Obama isn’t going to be sufficiently pro-science, or are we just indulging ourselves pretending to be “disappointed” that Obama doesn’t view evangelicals as bugs to be crushed into dust?
December 25, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Ron Tunning
I keep hearing people saying this is a huge stage to give Warren and will give him and his views much more influence.
Really?
I mean, can anybody name any of the people who’ve delivered inauguration prayers before? Ever? I sure as hell can’t. (I would guess Billy Graham was called on at least once, but the influence/prayer causality works the other way in that case, just as it does in this one.)
Might I suggest that this year’s inaugural differs significantly from any in recent memory, marking for the first time in history the elevation of an African-American to the nation’s highest office. And not just an African-American, but a man with a distinctively unique and multi-cultural name.
The expectation is that more people will attend this inaugural than any other in history, and moreover, it will be viewed on television and via the Internet by a vast, global audience that will far surpass in size and diversity any previous induction of a U.S., or for that matter, any other nation’s chief executive or head of state.
This truly will be an historic occasion, with every detail examined and parsed for meaning. I tend to agree with the “pundits” in one regard — that everything from Obama’s middle name to the color of his skin, his youth, and his broad cultural experiences, will be heralded as an indication of a transformational moment, replete with promise and inspiration.
In this context the selection of Rev. Warren is momentous, and Obama is very much aware of its likely impact. This is a candidate who campaigned claiming the “fierce urgency of now”, and whose rhetoric soared with references to change and promises of inclusion. I very much doubt that most liberals and/or progressives envisioned the inclusion of a fundamentalist Christian in the inaugural ceremony, conditioned as we/they are to think of inclusion as referring to racial and cultural minorities traditionally aligned with the Democratic Party.
One of Obama’s most impressive qualities is his appreciation for language, especially after eight years of a president so embarrassingly inarticulate, which includes a mastery of crafting rhetoric that is very light on specifics and yet persuasive because it allows an audience to hear what it wants to hear. And while that might be a fabulous attribute in a candidate, it becomes more problematic when confronted with people’s real expectations derived from that rhetoric.
Extending to Rev. Warren the honor of delivering the invocation at his inaugural was a colossal mistake, and not just because it offended a key Democratic Party constituency that overwhelmingly supported him. More damning is the cynicism it conveys, suggesting that by affording Warren a presence of honor either his views or those of his followers can be co-opted. I’m reminded of this excerpt from JFK’s inaugural address:
…remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.
December 25, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Ron Tunning
I meant to italicize this excerpt from Urbino’s comment:
I keep hearing people saying this is a huge stage to give Warren and will give him and his views much more influence.
Really?
I mean, can anybody name any of the people who’ve delivered inauguration prayers before? Ever? I sure as hell can’t. (I would guess Billy Graham was called on at least once, but the influence/prayer causality works the other way in that case, just as it does in this one.)
December 25, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Ron Tunning
Barbar,
I don’t believe anyone objects to Obama having conversations or discussions with Rev. Warren. The outrage stems from the timing and venue.
I attempted to address this issue in a diary I posted at the Daily Kos.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/12/21/22523/752/795/675520
December 25, 2008 at 1:42 pm
silbey
…remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.
So, since we’re parsing historical inaugurations, who gave the invocation at Kennedy’s?
December 25, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Michael H Schneider
I don’t believe anyone objects to Obama having conversations or discussions with Rev. Warren. The outrage stems from the timing and venue.
It’s not quite the venue: it’s that everyone who wants to watch the innauguration (a political ceremony) wil be forced to also watch Rick Warrenn’s prayer ( a relgious ceremony).
I can put up with whatever Rick Warren wants to do in the privacy of his own church. If he wants to embrace the Christian lifestyle, that’s his business. But when he wants to promote the Christian agenda by forcing everyone who wants to share in our political life to also share his religious ceremonies, that’s where I draw the line.
He’s a theocrat, like Zawahiri and Queen Isabel and Benedict whatever-his-number. He showed with Prop 8 that he wants to make his religious idea of marriage into the only kind of marriage allowed by California law. That’s over the line. I mean, I no more should have to watch his prayer than he should have to watch hott gay buttsecks on the innaugural platform.
It’s not that it gives Warren a platform, or exposure, it’s that it gives legitimacy to the notion that it’s okay to require prayer – or other test of religious belief – as a condition to participation in our democracy.
December 25, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Barbar
I guess I don’t get it.
First, it’s not like Obama is inventing the idea of having someone give a prayer during the inauguration. As a hardcore atheist I can’t say I like the imposition of religion on government, but I’m pretty damned sure Obama never pretended to have an agenda of obliterating religion from the public sphere. Quite the opposite, actually. And I was fine with it during the campaign, and I’m fine with it now, because we live in a country that re-elected George Bush in 2004 and it seems politically silly to pretend that half the country doesn’t exist.
Second, this idea of Obama as a remarkable transformative figure who was going to *silence* hatemongers seems off to me. One of the things I liked about Obama was that he recognized that people don’t change their minds just because you tell them to shut up. As far as people parsing the meaning of Warren’s involvement, I’ve thought about it a lot and what I’ve come up with is: “1 out of 4 Americans is an evangelical Christian.” Doesn’t seem that complicated to me.
I realize that I think of Rick Warren as a dumbass idiot who has sold 20 million books and has tons of followers, and not as someone hellbent on banishing me from society, so maybe that affects my perspective.
Obama is a politician, and thus his interests can diverge significantly from those of his followers. I realized a few months ago that Obama’s foreign policy = more of the same, and that my vote against HRC in the primaries, based largely on her support for the Iraq War, probably really didn’t matter in that sense. But I’m really not surprised/disappointed at all by the Warren thing.
December 25, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Ariel
I agree with Barbar. Disappointment (although not outrage) could only result from expecting too much. Obama never promised to be the Left’s white knight, bringing peace to the realm by smashing its foes. He only promised to transcend the culture wars and embrace needed practical measures. Terms like “progressive,” “pragmatic,” and even “scientific” were code words for reform on the basis of fairly conservative, broadly acceptable values (as they have been in the past). Similarly, Obama stressed the goal of national reconciliation and consensus time and again.
Consensus is obviously a perpetual impossibility, but I think one of the Obama people’s concrete premises was that there was no inherent reason evangelicals should oppose winding down America’s foreign military commitments, instituting (and institutionalizing) a broadly environmentally conscious policy, and doing something to make the economy more equitable. So long as the culture wars raged, evangelicals would always array themselves on the side of Republicans and thus offer support for the latter’s economic and foreign policies. Thus ending the culture wars became a prerequisite. But since there is no actual agreement on issues such as the OKness of homosexuality and abortion, the only option is simply to change the agenda without further ado. Unfortunately this essentially means sacrificing gay rights in the name of the supposedly bigger picture.
LGBT groups and their friends should of course not accept this view, and they have every reason to criticize sharply the selection of Warren. But they should also be careful about how far they push. If the invocation is a platform for Warren, it becomes all the more so the as the controversy increases. I agreed entirely with Pollitt in the video when she responded to Madoff’s incredulity at Warren’s stirring up the pot again. Warren is more than happy to accept the chance to reaffirm his message in a national media spotlight. He is banking on the fact that many, perhaps most Americans agree with him, and probably view his wording as exceedingly reasonable.
December 25, 2008 at 4:04 pm
wendee
Is this really so surprising? Obama is a capitulationist. Through and through. The behavior we are seeing now is the exact same behavior seen during the elections. He is not the least bit post-partisan, but is instead entangled in party politics. All of the things he’s done to win Republican favor up till now is a signal of what kind of president he’ll be: one who fosters an illusion of supporting and promoting progressive causes while bankrolling and actively supporting Republican causes.
He does have a history of this: touring with a Gospel singer who counsels gays on how to be straight and refusing to directly associate with people who are supportive of LGBT causes. It’s easy for him to announce support the LGBT rights while doing nothing of any substance to support them.
He’s a shrewd, calculating politician who is able to mask his pandering and flip flopping with euphemisms for capitulation like “overcoming differences”, “unity rather than division”, and how nothing can be accomplished because the left and the right in this nation refuse to work together in the manner he thinks they should. Does he really leave ideology at the door? Or is he really sharply aware of ideology and knows how to push buttons to accomplish… what again? The same old, same old?
December 25, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Ben Alpers
The reason that Warren’s participation is so much more important than that of previous clergy who’ve taken part in inaugurations is that we’re at something of a tipping point moment in the fight for LGBT rights. And the movement to deny those rights is led by Rick Warren’s branch of Christianity and, among others, by Warren himself.
That being said, I’m not at all surprised/disappointed by Warren. This is just the kind of crap I expected from an Obama administration. I continue both to take some comfort in the fact that Obama is a significantly lesser evil than McCain would have been (which is why I supported Obama), and to hope that progressives do not quietly settle for the kind of center-right “Third Way” policies we’re likely to get for the next four-to-eight years.
December 25, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Michael H Schneider
it’s not like Obama is inventing the idea of having someone give a prayer during the inauguration
Irrelevant. A bad idea is a bad idea, even if Bill Clinton or George Washington did it first.
I’m pretty damned sure Obama never pretended to have an agenda of obliterating religion from the public sphere
Irrelevant. A bad idea is a bad idea, even if it’s a bad idea Obama embraced with enthusiasm during the campaign. It’s not so much a matter of disappointment or outrage (although one could have had hopes for better, and be finding them dashed) as of pointing out “this is a really bad idea.”
I think of Rick Warren as a dumbass idiot … and not as someone hellbent on banishing me from society, so maybe that affects my perspective.
Yes, I’m sure it does. I myself have been threatened and harassed by thugs (both in uniform and not) because they inferred from my appearance that I held beliefs with which they disagreed, and I trace my ancestry to a tribe that’s been officially deprived of rights (including the right to life) by Christians, so that probably affects my opinion.
Some people are not quite as intransigent as I, and would find a prayer like ‘let’s all take a moment to thank our creator for the gifts we’ve received’ to be unobjectionable. That’s why Obama selecting someone who is known for the message “Let’s all remember that anyone who hasn’t accepted Jesus is damned to hell for all eternity, and that it’s our duty to make them accept Jesus, and that all thos gays and lesbians are particularly going to hell and we should use the law and prison and the guns of the police to make sure they know they’re doing wrong and to prevent them from sinning again” is particularly upsetting. In other words, “sacrificing gay rights in the name of the supposedly bigger picture” is the sort of bargain with the devil that I think is a really bad idea.
December 25, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Barbar
It’s not so much a matter of disappointment or outrage (although one could have had hopes for better, and be finding them dashed) as of pointing out “this is a really bad idea.”
Well, for you this is the case. For many of the other people who are outspoken, it is about outrage and disappointment. And I don’t think this is a case of mindreading; people are simply saying that they are outraged and disappointed. Even people in this very thread.
I also don’t see Obama “sacrificing gay rights” (I don’t see him championing them either but that’s a different issue). It’s not even clear to me that having Warren give a prayer at the inauguration is a setback for gay rights. It’s not like Warren and his bajillion followers would disappear and lose political influence if Obama just ignored him. Meanwhile, Warren has already started to rationalize his support of Prop 8 by making ridiculous arguments about free speech. This isn’t exactly glorious progress but exactly how much better off would gays be if Warren wasn’t coming to the party on January 20th? How many rights would they be gaining or not losing?
Again, it’s hardly my place to tell people who are upset that they shouldn’t feel the way they do. Just my two cents.
December 25, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Michael Turner
Malcolm Gladwell’s take on Rick Warren undoubtedly seem too generous by half, to at least half of those posting here. I find it striking on several points (the influence of management ‘guru’ Peter Drucker on Saddleback, Rick Warren as early adopter of Internet technology, etc.). For purposes of this discussion, however, I think the following passage is most apropos:
You have to wonder if there isn’t a certain organizational tutelage being acknowledged in the selection of Rick Warren, and a certain kind of ideological point being made. In the choice of Lowery, you can see homage being paid to the contributions of the civil rights movement, and for reasons that should be obvious enough. I’m not going to parse that choice out, but the ways in which Lowery can be distinguished from Warren (including on the issue of gay marriage, where Lowery seems more liberal) all have their own symbolic resonance. What’s interesting to me here is the comparison of Warren’s style of building out his movement with Obama’s style of campaigning. I think it’s possible that Obama and his people learned a lot from watching Warren, including things about the dangers of that style of operation.
This speculation is not exactly a stretch, is it? Obama was a member of an evangelical megachurch (Rev. Wright’s) during a time when it grew rapidly. As a born politician, the organizational aspect of that growth must have interested him very much. In Rick Warren, you have a very similar church-growth phenomenon, but one stripped of almost everything not essential for rapid growth. And it turns out, you can throw out a lot of Republican ideology and it actually helps speed growth, if anything.
Now, strategies for building a huge religious following shouldn’t be slavishly imitated for winning elections. Elections are events, not institutions. With the presidency in particular, we have term limits. Finally, churches are not constitutional democracies. There’s only so much you can use from evangelical recruitment strategies, and much that you aren’t even allowed to use, in politics. And yet, what is a party base but a collection of ideologues, and what is ideology if not modernity’s secular substitute for belief-systems that used to be regulated by churches?
What Rick Warren did in growing his church so quickly involved stealing a lot of members from other evangelical fundamentalist churches. So it would be a lot to expect that his church would throw out very much of the Biblical morality that is so much a part of that segment of American culture. Still, as with most evangelical church growth, it also relied on converting non-believers, in part by showing them that all the embarrassing cultural trappings of older churches were beside the point — or, as Rick Warren put it, nobody listens to organ music on their car radio. In particular, a megachurch, by growing while holding services in secular settings, until it reaches small-town-scale gatherings, cocks a snoot in the face of the clubbiness of much of American protestantism, it rejects exclusivity in its open exercise of the sheer power to mass huge crowds of worshippers.
However, it’s not enough to reject rejection, you need a means of inclusion, and it seems the real nexus of recruitment in the Warren model is what Gladwell calls “the cellular church” — the small-group weeknight meeting. I see this as prefigured in AA and in the huge expansion of that pattern of group-driven character reconstruction (“recovery movement”), that got extended to anything that might be considered an addiction in the 80s and 90s. It’s not a huge leap from “higher power . . . whatever you conceive it to be” to accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Indeed, that’s just a return to the roots of AA, if anything.
Interestingly for our time, AA was founded at the nadir of the Great Depression, and Dem party leaders are insisting on using the term “recovery” to describe the Keynesian economic platform being nailed together now. There’s a rough conceptual template here for taking the view that we are coming out of an economy informed by the “sin” of lying (whether you were Bernie Madoff or the average “liar loan” recipient), with the pattern of lying stoked by the deadly “sin” of greed, but also that sin is a universal condition, and absolution should be available to anyone who is truly repentant. No doubt this is also how it plays in Orange County, home of Rick Warren’s congregation, and also an area that rose with the housing bubble, and crashed with it as well (since a disproportionate number of jobs there were related in one way or another to the bubble.)
“Hold your friends close and your enemies closer.” There is much in Rick Warren’s style of operation to admire and emulate. There is also much cause for suspicion and vigilance. From AA and “recovery” generally we got promotion of the disease concept of addiction, which has proven very useful in destigmatizing addiction and making it more treatable. However, we also got the concept of divine intercession to cure the disease (or at least make it less of a problem); Christ miraculously cured the sick, so why can’t the power of God help people stop snorting coke? We’ve become so accepting of the “recovery” protocol that most Americans don’t think twice when a judge orders someone into a 12-step group as part of their “punishment”. Hardly anybody sees such a sentence as violating church-state separation. Where you run into problems is when you start saying that homosexuality is like drug abuse — that some people, whether by nature or nurture or some combination thereof — might be more susceptible than others, but if we all pray for each other (and reject cultural changes as illegitimate “nurture” of the “sin”), God will help “miraculously cure” it.
There is a lot of power in the “cellular” organizational model. As with anything with a lot of power, it should be watched. And the best way to watch it is to watch its exemplars and its prophets. Rick Warren found a fertile field in Orange County, with its low “social capital” engendering a craving for community. That’s craving is a problem in much of America. Advertisers have yet to find much profit in online social networks, which clearly feed off the same craving. However, ideologues and religious fanatics might find a footing in those spaces, as the economic gloom gathers. To be able to see down inside what Rick Warren has built might give us get hints of the future, in time to do something about it. It’s not a mentality you can ignore. It’s not something that will go away if you reject it strenuously. Attacks that don’t kill it are only likely to make it stronger. Pull it closer, see its human face, ask yourself to what degree and in what sense you might be looking into a mirror.
December 26, 2008 at 12:51 am
Ariel
In other words, “sacrificing gay rights in the name of the supposedly bigger picture” is the sort of bargain with the devil that I think is a really bad idea.
I think it’s a bad idea, too. I meant to say that this is what I take to be the Obama people’s thinking, and therefore something to be considered in making tactical choices.
December 26, 2008 at 12:52 am
Ariel
Oops, the second part shouldn’t be italicized.
December 26, 2008 at 2:57 am
Michael Turner
That’s why Obama selecting someone who is known for the message “Let’s all remember that anyone who hasn’t accepted Jesus is damned to hell for all eternity, and that it’s our duty to make them accept Jesus, and that all thos gays and lesbians are particularly going to hell and we should use the law and prison and the guns of the police to make sure they know they’re doing wrong and to prevent them from sinning again” is particularly upsetting.
Rick Warren is known for all those things? Wow, I guess I haven’t done enough research on him.
In other words, “sacrificing gay rights in the name of the supposedly bigger picture” is the sort of bargain with the devil that I think is a really bad idea.
“Bargain with the devil”, I like that figure of speech in this context.
It could be worse, though. Just think what it would be like if there hadn’t been that rift between Rev. Wright and Obama, and it was Wright giving the invocation. Think of how conservative evangelicals would be so pissed off with having evangelical Christianity represented at the inaugural by someone like Wright, who appeared just last weekend at a Muslim-American conference, sharing the stage with that Iraq-war-hater, Juan Cole, and that lesbian rock musician Melissa Etheridge. Among other things, Wright said:
Conservative evangelicals would be going nuts over it. Except, oh, wait: that was actually Rick Warren, not Jeremiah Wright, appearing and speaking.
Oh, this is just too impossible for me to understand. Rick Warren is a hatred-spewer, I tell you, a hatred-spewer, and he wants cops to round up gay men and lesbians and march them into church to repent.
Just keep repeating it: hatred-spewer. Hatred-spewer. If you repeat it long enough, it becomes true. Didn’t we learn that from the Bush administration?
Hatred-spewer.
Tell everyone to say it. That way, it becomes true.
December 26, 2008 at 11:37 am
Michel H Schneider
Evangelicals want children to have the right to pray in school, for example, and they vote for conservative Republicans who support that right.
Lie. Lie from the lying liars who tell lies. That is a lie.
This is reason #45,972 that I despise Gladwell and many evangelicals. I know it’s a bit tangential, but it needs pointing out.
Childdren praying in school has never been the issue. Children are allowed to pray in school, wherever and whenever and however they (subject to the usual limitations on animal or human sacrifice, talking out of turn, etc.).
Forcing children to pray in school – using the police powers of the state through the compulsory school attendence laws to force children to pray as part of their school activites – that’s the issue.
I dont think I have any obligation to understand the theological distinctions. But I do think that everyone has an obligation as a citizen to at least have a basic grasp of the constitution and what it means – including the 1st amendment.
December 26, 2008 at 11:39 am
Michael H Schneider
crap. html tag closure failure. sorry
Read everything after first paragraph as not italic
December 26, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Martin G.
Am I the only one who sees an irresistible opportunity to make double entendres in the name “Saddleback”?
December 26, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Ron Tunning
Slide into those chaps and give it a ride.
December 26, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Michael Turner
This is reason #45,972 that I despise Gladwell and many evangelicals.
In case this confuses anyone — Gladwell can be (and has been) accused of engaging in and purveying fuzzy thinking, but he were an evangelical, I think we’d know by now. It’s almost in the definition of “evangelical” that these people are sandwich-board advertisers for Christ.
As for whether Gladwell is, on this point, a “lying liar who tells lies,” well, I don’t see how that’s justified. Consider that he’s a Canadian who got his first writing gigs at the conservative American Spectator, and flirted with Reagan-style conservatism, but then shook all that off to become a liberal within a few short years. Consider that he’s mainly been a pop-science writer. He may only vaguely remember how the issue was been worded, and might have been echoing it uncritically. His main concern in that article about Saddleback was: how does this thing work as a social phenomenon? Exactly how Americans should properly phrase the school-prayer issue was apparently secondary to him (and to his editors at the not-exactly-conservative-evangelical New Yorker, for that matter.)
Gladwell may also share the Canadian sensibility on when and how prayer is allowed in schools — in other words, he’s confused, as many Canadians appeared to be, at least as late as 8 years ago. If I were a Canadian, and not very interested in this particular issue, and working in America, I might think that the two situations were parallel, if not virtually identical.
I do think that everyone has an obligation as a citizen to at least have a basic grasp of the constitution and what it means – including the 1st amendment.
Perhaps so, but appears that Gladwell is not a U.S. citizen. As a graduate of the University of Toronto, he probably didn’t even take an American Institutions breadth-requirement course. As bureau chief for a U.S. newspaper or two, he probably cared less what the op-ed writers were yelling at each other and more about getting them to stop yelling and start writing. What would Gladwell read if he actually looked at the Constitution anyway? That “congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”? If that were some unerring guide on these issues, why did it take almost 200 years to evict the practice of prayer in schools on an administrative basis?
So, can we move back to a more (shall we say) reality-based discussion now, please? Unless, of course, you have evidence that Malcolm Gladwell is a conservative evangelical who does know that the real issue about prayer in schools isn’t whether children are allowed to pray, and who consciously obscures the issue in his choice of words. That would be interesting. But even if so, we’re unlikely to find out from anyone who’s been this lazy, so far, about checking the coordinates before launching on the target.
December 26, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Michael Turner
Oops – 2nd to last para and first part of last para — de-italicize in your brain, please. Better yet, ignore entire comment.
December 26, 2008 at 8:15 pm
dana
Am I the only one who sees an irresistible opportunity to make double entendres in the name “Saddleback”?
It has been driving me crazy for a week.
December 27, 2008 at 1:18 pm
jazzbumpa
Besides saddling people with a religion that holds thinking back, I’m stumped. Are there other opportunities in the name
December 27, 2008 at 1:21 pm
jazzbumpa
. . . in the name “Brokeback Church?”
(My attempt to italicize gang badly aglay.)
December 27, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Michael H Schneider
So, can we move back to a more (shall we say) reality-based discussion now, please?
I’ll try as hard as I can to politely note where we disagree, without accusing you of having departed reality. Here’s the first place:
[If Gladwell] were an evangelical, I think we’d know by now
Apparently you thought I was saying that Gladwell is an evangelical. That’s not what I said.
“I despise Gladwell and many evangelicals” is what I said. Not “I despise Gladwell and many OTHER evangelicals.” I named two two distinct and disjunct categories – as if I’d said “I hate dogs and cats” and you’d responded “but cats aren’t dogs.”
We all knew, I assumed, that many evangelicals had been falsely claiming that children have been deprived of the right to pray in school. I don’t have any references handy, but I’m sure they’re out there.
Your next argument, if I understand correctly, is that as a Canadian Gladwell is simply ignorant about the US constitution and is repeating this falsehood innocently rather than intentionally – and thus while he’s wrong and mistaken and misleading, he’s not actually lying.
You may be right. I gave him credit for being brighter than that, but maybe not. While this point of constitutional law may not be quite as simple as ‘name the three branches of the federal government’, I’d thought that this part of it was pretty simple and straightforward. So I’ll agree that he may simply be repeating this falsehood out of laziness and ignorance rather than knowingly.
Your final argument seems to be that the constitution is vague: why did it take almost 200 years to evict the practice of prayer in schools. Once again let me point out that we’re not talking about evicting prayer, we’re talking about eliminating compulsory prayer enforced by the state’s police power. In other words, it’s both and establishment issue and a free exercise issue.
I don’t know why it hasn’t been settled long since, unless it has something to do with some religious folks being unwilling to accept the constitutional principle.
I hold in my hand a list of communists employed – - oops, wrong speech. I hold in my hand the first page of Harper’s Weekly from September 27, 1873. It has a cartoon showing a Bishop holding a sign saying “We as Catholics demand a part of the school fund” and the figure of Uncle Sam sitting on a locked box labeled “School fund” next to a sign saying “The constitution of the US recognizes no creed, sect or society”. We’re still arguing about that, too.
Or it may be that repetition of the mischaracterization that Gladwell echoes has kept too many people in ignorance or mistake. Or it may be that our understanding of constitutional principles changes with changed times and circumstances. But by now the principle should be both well settled and clear, at least at it heart, even if there’s some room for dispute at the fringes.
I surely do hope I close all those tags right.
December 27, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Martin G.
Oh, goodness, where do I start with the double entendres? There’s the Brokeback mountain stuff, there’s references to riding on the “back” part of the saddle, there’s the whole peeling the saddle back and riding bareback entendre. This whole scandal has me all a-titters. Obama set this whole scandal up for a laugh-off, I’m sure.
December 27, 2008 at 6:32 pm
jeffbowers
The deed is done, and we should get over it and move on. Other commenters are spot on that continued controversy over the Warren invocation pick only increases the pastor’s influence. Whatever reason Obama had for choosing Warren — a political payback, building bridges with the fundies, or just thumbing his nose at us all and letting us know he will never be told again which spiritual advisers he can hobnob with — he is aware of the consequences and is apparently willing to take the heat. The real test will be his comportment in office, not his choice of prayer-meister at the inauguration.
December 27, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Michael H Schneider
he will never be told again which spiritual advisers he can hobnob with
It’s not a question of with whom he may hobnob, for me. He can hobnob with whomever he likes, as often as he likes, in whatever manner he likes, as long as he does it on his own time. He can talk to, or listen to, or seek advice from, or whatever, from anyone at any time.
The inauguration, however, is a political ceremony, an important piece of our law, a public performance of a political and legal event. Obama is saying that anyone who wants to observe or be present for this entirely secular ritual must listen to a prayer from Rick Warren. That’s what I think is over the line, and it’s not over until the fat preacher has prayed on 1/20 (so to speak, meaning no disrespect to the corpulent).
December 27, 2008 at 8:22 pm
jeffbowers
Michael- It’s not that I take issue with your disgust at the choice of Warren due to his clear stance against equality for gays. I just think this is a losing battle. We should conserve our indignation for when it may do some good, particularly if it can help change actual policy as opposed to merely altering the symbolism of the inaugural event. Someone said it before, but the shitstorm that would ensue if somehow Warren were to be cut out of the inauguration would dwarf our displeasure at the current state of things. This is not the battle for flexing our muscles or leveraging the goodwill from the Prop 8 buyers’ remorse.
December 27, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Michael Turner
Apparently you thought I was saying that Gladwell is an evangelical.
No, read what I wrote. I pointed out that, if anybody was confused by your phrasing, that they’d be wrong in jumping to the conclusion that Gladwell was an evangelical. As you had expressed it, I felt it was ambiguous enough for some here to (reasonably) conclude such a thing, under the (reasonable) assumption that someone with such strong opinions about Malcolm Gladwell would actually know a thing or two about him.
You might reacquaint yourself with “Excluded Middle, Fallacy of”, if it’s been awhile.
I gave [Gladwell] credit for being brighter than that . . .
It’s not a question of intelligence, it’s a question of interest and knowledge. For example, you’re not sufficiently interested in Gladwell, or knowledgeable enough about him, to have noted a pretty good reason why he’d be hazy on the exact nature of school prayer issues in the U.S. I don’t see that we’ve got a problem here with your intelligence because of that. I’d say you’re mainly a little overconfident in your opinions, and should check facts a little more. OK: a lot more.
Once again let me point out that we’re not talking about evicting prayer, we’re talking about eliminating compulsory prayer enforced by the state’s police power.
I see. So if (as seems to have been the case in the incident in a Canadian school I mention above) some students in one classroom decide to openly recite a prayer every day, and the voluntary practice spreads to other classrooms, would you say that’s not a case of “compulsory prayer enforced by the state’s police power”? Obviously it isn’t. However, I believe Supreme Court justices have nevertheless ruled that such organized student religiosity in the classroom, when class is in session, might infringe the rights of other students (of minority religions, or of no religion), even if it is not directed or mandated by the teacher or the school.
It’s not as simple as the threat of cops filing into the classroom to make sure everybody in a school recites the prayers of a particular religion (though that is a delightfully paranoiac image and I see why you cling to it so ardently.) I don’t think it ever has been that simple. It’s also a matter of time and place, mode and manner, and protecting students from peer pressure to participate, not just protecting them from public school authorities trying to force participation. To some extent, this actually means placing curbs on the practice of prayer in publics schools — curbs that amount to an eviction of the practice, at least as seen against the backdrop of two centuries of history during which it was virtually universal.
Or it may be that our understanding of constitutional principles changes with changed times and circumstances.
Ya think? I mean, it wasn’t until the early 1960s (Engele v. Vitale and Abington School District v. Schempp) that the Supreme Court ruled solidly against school-sponsored prayer and reading of religious texts. If it’s all so blindingly obvious just from a glancing acquaintance with the relevant parts of the Constitution, I wonder why Justice William Brennan felt it necessary to support his concurrence in the latter case with a 73-page opinion?
It might be intuitively obvious to you, now, that the practice of prayer in school is constitutionally problematic. However, it really did take about 200 years to really starting changing Americans’ minds about this. Actually, until the 14th Amendment (1868), there wasn’t much legal basis for challenging a state, couinty or city law that might have required prayer in public schools.
Obama is saying that anyone who wants to observe or be present for this entirely secular ritual must listen to a prayer from Rick Warren.
Perhaps they’ll be handing out earplugs at the inaugural. If not, consider bringing your own. Fingertips can work pretty well in a pinch. I think headphone music is best, though.
Actually, while Obama took personal responsibility for the decision, the choice of Rick Warren was officially the decision of a Senate committee in charge of invitations to the inauguration ceremonial events (a committee chaired by Senator Feinstein, former city council member and mayor of San Francisco, if you can handle the irony.) The Constitution says “Congress shall make no law . . . .”, but an invitation from some senators to give a prayer isn’t legislation, and people attending or watching are not being forced to practice a particular religion just because the person giving the prayer happens to be of a particular religion.
The only part of the proceedings with any legal force are the parts where the president and vice-president are sworn in. However, with a hand on the Bible, and the words “so help me God” (optional, but all presidents since Lincoln seem to have taken that option), I suppose that part is not entirely secular either.
So go ahead, seethe about how all this somehow violates your rights. Constitutionally, I don’t think you have a leg to stand on. In the absence of any threat of actual force being applied to make you practice a particular religion, your objection amounts to, simply, “I don’t like it.” Well, you know what? I don’t like it either. I just know better than to wrap my objections in simplistic, specious arguments. I also know that, when Warren (and later, Lowery) take the stage, I can just put on the headphones and crank up Marilyn Manson, because I have a constitutional right to do so. (Actually, it’ll be Iggy Pop. Call me old-fashioned. But consider that it also took about two centuries of re-interpreting the First Amendment to make both of them possible.)
December 28, 2008 at 11:07 am
Michael H Schneider
We have a disagreement about the place of religion in schools under the US Constitution. Here are the divergent opinion:
Gladwell, above: “Evangelicals want children to have the right to pray in school,…”
Turner, above: “… placing curbs on the practice of prayer in publics schools — curbs that amount to an eviction of the practice, …” [qualifiers omitted, see original above]
My opinion, from an earlier comment: “Children are allowed to pray in school, wherever and whenever and however they (subject to the usual limitations on animal or human sacrifice, talking out of turn, etc.)…. Forcing children to pray in school – … – that’s the issue.”
I Googled ‘school prayer’ and the first page of results included a site from the US government intended to help public schools when they make the required certification that they’re not depriving students of the 1st amendment rights (URL below). It says
… teachers and other public school officials may not lead their classes in prayer, devotional readings from the Bible, or other religious activities. [ 4 ] Nor may school officials attempt to persuade or compel students to participate in prayer or other religious activities. …
… “nothing in the Constitution … prohibits any public school student from voluntarily praying at any time before, during, or after the school day,” [ 12 ] and students may pray with fellow students during the school day on the same terms and conditions that they may engage in other conversation or speech. … “
While I’m not an expert in the area, I think the government explanation is good enough for government work (so to speak). If that adds up to eviction of religion, or that students have no right to pray in school, well, we don’t share a common language.
It’s important because many people are confused or ignorant about the issue, and reptition of mistaken characterizations reinforces that ignorance or mistake.
An innauguration is not like a public school, but it is an official government sponsored political and legal event. I’m suggesting that a similar standard should apply to both schools and innaugurations. That is, that there shouldn’t be any leading of the attendees in prayer, nor any compulsion to participate in religious activity.
I know that the Democratic Party of New Mexico is *not* the State of New Mexico, and isn’t restricted by the 1st amendment, but I am offended when I’m told to stand, bow my head, and pray in the name of Jesus before I’m allowed to cast my vote for members of the State Central Committee. I would like the Democratic party to have enough respect for religious diversity to refrain from such a mixing of church and party, and suggest that the party, too, should abide by the same principles as public schools.
Those are the crucial issues as I understand them. A number of other questions have been raised, and I’m going to ignore them. These include:
- did I mislead anyone by failing to mention the Gladwell is Canadian, or that he’s not an evangelical?
- do we all know what the fallacy of the excluded middle is?
- am I ‘a little overconfident in my opinions, and should check facts a little more’? do i ‘seethe’? did I ever claim that it’s ‘all so blindingly obvious just from a glancing acquaintance with the relevant parts of the Constitution’ or merely that ‘by now the principle should be both well settled and clear, at least at it heart’?
- why did Justice William Brennan feel it necessary to support his concurrence in the latter case with a 73-page opinion?
- what’s the law in Canada, and how does it apply to a particular Canadian incident?
- who are Iggy Pop and Marilyn Manson, and is either a Canadian or an evangelical?
Finally:
We should conserve our indignation for when it may do some good, particularly if it can help change actual policy as opposed to merely altering the symbolism of the inaugural event.
Yes, maybe so.
However, I hope we’ve all seen the articles reporting the studies suggesting that repetition of falsehoods, even when the hearer has seen and been persuaded by the refutation, makes people more likely to believe the falsehood.
I think the falsehood that US Supreme Court has forbidden children to pray in school is way too common, is believed by far too many people, and is causing a lot of political damage. If you believe that only by electing Republicans will children be allowed to pray in school, even reasonable people might vote republican.
I also believe that the separation of church and state needs constant re-inscription. Someone should stand up and object when government events become mixed with religious events, lest everyone become too complacent about the mixing. It’s a slippery slope thing. If no one else will object, I figure that I should.
While indignation must be conserved in these times of indignation scarcity, I happen to have stockpiled amounts which I trust are, as a practical matter, inexhaustable.
http://www.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/religionandschools/prayer_guidance.html
December 28, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Michael Turner
I love cherry-picked quotations, but never more so than when the source quoted actually works against the argument the quote supposedly supports. I also love how little effort most people put into study when they don’t have somebody pushing them.
Eventually, however, I start to hate doing people’s homework for them. So this is likely to be my last post on this school prayer tangent.
Michael Schneider quotes Dept. of Ed. guidelines, from what seems to be his very first attempt in this thread to do some actual research on the issues he so confidently pontificates on:
“. . . nothing in the Constitution . . . prohibits any public school student from voluntarily praying at any time before, during, or after the school day,” [12] and students may pray with fellow students during the school day on the same terms and conditions that they may engage in other conversation or speech . . . .”
Interestingly, [12] refers to Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe 2000, in which it was decided that students voting on the content of announcements at a school football game did not include the right to vote for the recitation of a prayer over the PA.
From that decision:
“Such system encourages divisiveness along religious lines and threatens the imposition of coercion upon those students not desiring to participate in a religious exercise. Simply by establishing
the school-related procedure, which entrusts the inherently nongovernmental subject of religion to a majoritarian vote, a constitutional violation has occurred.”
Schools operate in loco parentis, and it’s rare for student speech to not be regulated in one way or another when school is in session or during school sponsored extracurricular activities. Compulsory education means that you can only opt out by resorting to some private school, or perhaps homeschooling, in which case the student might be looking at even more draconian regulations on his or her speech. The “terms and conditions” are not those of adults in the public sphere; actually, anyone who has attended a public school (or any pre-tertiary school at all) should be painfully aware that the “terms and conditions” of speech are ordinarily very restricted.
Moreover, with compulsory education, the potential for power abuse doesn’t end with formal governmental authority. Anyone who has ever been subject to peer pressure, teasing or bullying in school should be aware of how difficult it is to appeal to what should be “majoritarian” student sentiment against such behavior, either to teachers or fellow students. It doesn’t even take “majoritarian” rule, sometimes — toughest gang in school can make life hell for many students, so long as they take even the most elementary precautions to avoid administrative scrutiny.
You can talk all you want about how muslim students are free to roll prayer rugs out on the playground and pray several times a day, during recess and before lunch. However, in many parts of the U.S., that would be an invitation to bullying and other abuse, not easily prevented by school authorities. Could school authorities try to mitigate such abuse by setting aside relatively private spaces for such prayers at scheduled times throughout the school day, specifically to accommodate muslim students? That might run afoul of the Establishment clause.
The fact is, given how closely prayer is tied to group social rituals in most religions, once you relegate it to the sphere of “conversation or speech” subject to some governmental authority’s “terms and conditions”, where that authority is not allowed to materially support the practice, you have circumscribed the social ritual aspect of prayer in such a way as to push it to the social margins. Once it’s at the margins, peer pressure can take hold and push it over the edge.
The “moment of silence” idea might be seen as an inspired attempt at compromise (even though it entered under more suspicious circumstances, as noted in Wallace v. Jaffree): setting aside class time within which all students were equally free to silently pray, meditate, or perhaps studiously contemplate Mary Sue’s visible panty line. Everybody’s doing it, because everybody has to do it, nobody who’s doing it is behaving any differently from anybody else who’s doing it, so there’s no basis for peer discrimination. You can call this whatever you want, but it’s not freedom of speech, it’s enforced silence; it’s not freedom of association, it’s non-association; and it’s not even “free exercise thereof” if your religion actually requires giving voice to the prayer for it to be effective.
There is “nothing in the Constitution [that] prohibits any public school student from voluntarily praying at any time before, during, or after the school day,” because there’s nothing in the Constitution about public schools. I don’t think it was foreseen that the government would ever have such a big role in the shaping of citizens before they reached adulthood.
Frankly, I’d prefer slicing the Gordian Knot. I’d prefer that prayer not be allowed in schools at all, and that parents who want their kids to be allowed to pray in school be given “conscientious objection” vouchers for private school tuition or to offset the costs of homeschooling. But we’re a long way from that day. After all, it took a long time for the system to recognize that freedom of worhip applied to more than just the freedom to choose among different Christian sects. (I believe the first court test of this was in the 1930s.) Culture changes only very slowly, and law can’t move very far or very fast out in front of culture without delegitimizing itself in the eyes of the governed.
(Iggy Pop? You want somebody to google “Iggy Pop” for you? Wow, school’s really out for you, isn’t it?)
December 28, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Michael H Schneider
You seem to be arguing that the Department of Education’s official guidelines are wrong because they misunderstand what the Court said in Santa Fe. Okey dokey. If you wish to believe that you and Gladwell are correct and the DoE and I are wrong, go for it. As a practical matter, I’d bet that most school administrators would choose to hew as closely as possible to the DoE guidelines, so they give a good indication of whether religion has been evicted in actual practice.
I love cherry-picked quotations, … Michael Schneider quotes Dept. of Ed. guidelines, from what seems to be his very first attempt in this thread to do some actual research on the issues he so confidently pontificates on:
I love you, too. But I really don’t wanna play “my post-graduate degree is bigger than your post-graduate degree.” Too boring.
December 28, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Michael Turner
To get a little more on-topic, in the TAPPED blog entry eric links to above, Serwer approvingly quotes Ann Friedman (in part):
“Culture” implies we are comfortable with different parts of our country and different groups of people seeing this issue differently. It implies that there is no absolute right or wrong — just two sparring factions — and that we’ll simply have to wait for the rest of the country to come around.
Well, maybe that’s what “culture” implies to Ann Friedman, but that’s not what it implies to me. Someone should ask Ann Friedman if “cultural difference” implies “it’s all good” when the practice in question is, say, female genital mutilation in Africa, or honor killings in Pakistan.
Calling something a “cultural difference” doesn’t make it significantly more comfortable. I have to face that fact daily. I live in a very different culture (Japan’s) than the one I was brought up in (Berkeley, CA), and, believe me, discomfort goes with the territory. My standard line about this: “My cultural adjustment to Japan became much easier on the day I realized it was impossible.”
Nor do I believe that “cultural difference” morally legitimizes every such difference. I cringed when I saw children born left-handed being “reprogrammed” to use their right hands, here in Japan. I thought it was child abuse then, and I still think so. Increasingly, however, Japanese parents are realizing that this is a mistake. This change goes hand-in-hand with general cultural changes in the direction of accommodating (not merely “tolerating”) individual differences in a society that had hitherto been much more conformist. Also, in researching the issues of left-handedness, I discovered that the southpaw-accommodating America I’d grown up in was, in fact, pretty recent; just a decade before I started school, forcing left-handed kids to use their right hands instead was the normal practice. Some educators decided to look at the issue scientifically, and in the light of their findings, pushed schools (and parents) for change. That’s probably how things changed here in Japan as well — decades later, but that’s typical of the Japanese.
Which gets to a final objection I have to Ann Friedman’s line of argument: you don’t have to wait, you shouldn’t wait. You should still push. But you should push bearing in mind that things don’t move instantly or easily; that there can be reversals; that cultures do feature massive inertia; that cultures host a body of law only to the extent that the law is recognized as legitimate, and that legitimacy is a malleable and not entirely rational criteron subject to distortion through cultural lenses.
At the same time, however, recognize cultural inertia can work both ways. With acceptance of change, freedom, growing equality as a cultural value, liberation becomes something that requires actual effort to stymie. To give an example: when Clinton was getting bashed from all sides with “don’t-ask-don’t-tell”, only about 45% of Americans were willing to say that gays should be allowed to serve openly in the U.S. military. Today, that figure is about 80%. To me, that’s a dramatic shift. What happened? Well, among other things, a lot of recruiters didn’t ask, a lot of gay wannabe soldiers didn’t tell, and by simply highlighting the fact, everybody had to acknowledge that gays were in there, fighting alongside everybody else. Over time, even the disgruntled were forced to admit that the world hadn’t come to an end as a result.
Sometimes the best push is the one that gives the change its own momentum. I believe marriage equality has already gotten that push, and that even the reactions against it that we’re seeing now are some evidence of progress. The culture wars are real in part because the cultural differences are real. You won’t get anywhere pretending they aren’t real, just as you won’t get anywhere using those differences as an excuse for giving up. But there’s another, very unfortunate, reason why the culture wars are real: there are culture warriors with a vested interest in perpetuating those wars, on all sides. That’s a feature of the conflict that I don’t think helps at all.
December 28, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Michael Turner
“You seem to be arguing that the Department of Education’s official guidelines are wrong because they misunderstand what the Court said in Santa Fe.”
No, I’m arguing that you cherry-picked a quote, to support your opinion that “[c]hildren are allowed to pray in school, wherever and whenever and however they [want] (subject to the usual limitations on animal or human sacrifice, talking out of turn, etc.) . . . .”
If I interpret your opinion correctly, you’d have no problem with the student body voting for a student chaplain to give a student-selected reading at a voluntary-attendance extracurricular event on school grounds. Well, the U.S. Supreme Court did have a problem with exactly that, so what’s your explanation? Is that exception somehow covered under that rigorously precise “etc.” you use?
As with any free speech issue, the real question is: what’s constitutionally protected speech? It turns out, it’s not whatever students think it is. It’s limited. Students cannot pray however and whenever they want.
But I really don’t wanna play “my post-graduate degree is bigger than your post-graduate degree.”
What’s this? I don’t even have a bachelor’s degree. I just have a central nervous system capable of something more than reflex responses to issues, and decided to make use of it. You might try it sometime.
December 28, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Michael H Schneider
No, I’m arguing that you cherry-picked a quote …
If you think the guidelines say something else than represented by the part I quoted, quote or point to where, because I surely don’t see it.
If I interpret your opinion correctly, you’d have no problem with the student body voting for a student chaplain to give a student-selected reading at a voluntary-attendance extracurricular event on school grounds. Well, the U.S. Supreme Court did have a problem with exactly that, so what’s your explanation? Is that exception somehow covered under that rigorously precise “etc.” you use?
I take it you’re talking about Santa Fe again. The opinion is at http://supreme.justia.com/us/530/290/case.html
You are mistaken about the case. From the opinion:
The delivery of a message such as the invocation here-on school property, at school-sponsored events, over the school’s public address system, by a speaker representing the student body, under the supervision of school faculty, and pursuant to a school policy that explicitly and implicitly encourages public prayer-is not properly characterized as “private” speech. … The District simply does not evince an intent to open its ceremony to indiscriminate use by the student body generally, … but, rather, allows only one student, the same student for the entire season, to give the invocation, which is subject to particular regulations that confine the content and topic of the student’s message. … Indeed, the only type of message expressly endorsed in the policy is an “invocation,” a term which primarily describes an appeal for divine assistance and, as used in the past at Santa Fe High School, has always entailed a focused religious message.”
So you’ve got a school policy that practically requires a religious message over the PA system before school football games. If you don’t see that as being in line with what I described as “Forcing children to pray in school – … to force children to pray as part of their school activites …” and as the school endorsing religion, well, again we apparently don’t share acommon language.
I stand by my claim that I and the DoE guidelines are correct in claiming that prayer has not been evicted from schools – that the issue is not prayer but compulsion and endorsement (endorsement is a subset of compusion, and I probably should have made it more explicit)..
December 28, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Michael H Schneider
The quote above is from the reporter’s synopsis, not the court’s opinion. I should have made that clearer. If you want to argue that the reporter misstated the opinion, go for it.
December 29, 2008 at 12:58 am
Michael Turner
I should have made that clearer.
You mean, “I should have noticed that.” You described it twice as the Court’s opinion. You obviously thought it was the Court’s opinion.
Too bad, because I was going to give that effort a C-. For improved effort. Instead, well . . . . those cherries you’re picking can look pretty similar in the dark, I guess. Turn on the light and you’ll see that several issues got conflated in that case, and the Court sorted them out and addressed them carefuly. To return to the issue that matters for this (branch of the) thread:
Turning the process of choice over the students did not, the Court said, turn “public speech” into “private speech.” Note that it was Catholics and Mormons suing the school district, that they were in the minority in that district, and public speech requires equal protection. Government authority sanction of majority rule in public expression was a clear constitutional violation. In that respect, the decision had nothing to do with the fact that school authorities regulated the use of the PA at the game, and very much to do with the fact that all taxpayers — including the Mormons and Catholics, who got short shrift — were funding the activity. It didn’t matter whether the prayer was speech freely chosen by some students, and spoken by an elected student. Those students, in making what might otherwise have seemed constitutionally protected choices, could still be violating the rights of other students.
We’ve probably got a problem of perspective here. Maybe it’s time to clear it up. For the first 6.5 years of my schooling, I was forced to pray in class. After about the first 1.5 years of my schooling, I started to hate it. I finally got myself kicked out of Catholic school in the middle of 5th grade for voicing anti-religious opinions that, however quiet, were deemed . . . well, I never found out exactly what they were deemed. I just know the nuns spoke to my parents and my parents asked me if I might be happier in a public school.
My first morning in public school was a breath of fresh air. I mean, I still had to say “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance (and still hated it), and maybe some of my classmates said grace in the cafeteria, but as far as I was concerned, I had evicted school prayer from my life, and I was in a school where prayer had no real place. (Perhaps I should also point out that, being more on the landlord than the renter side of the equation now, for me, “eviction” has come to have connotations of “unpleasant process, but with a feeling of relief afterward.”)
And there was no mandatory hour of religion every day! No midweek Mass! I was in heaven. (Er, so to speak.) It’s not out of any love of school prayer that I write any of this, quite the contrary.
Then there’s where Gladwell was coming from. When Malcom Gladwell spoke loosely of the “right” to pray in school, he was probably speaking of some such right from the point of view of evangelicals, while not himself committing to that interpretation because, well, that’s not what his article was about, and probably doesn’t give two shits what most Americans think on this issue anyway. If you’ve followed the discussion above (or were already acquainted with all the constitutional arcana), you can see that perception is a big factor in all of this. If you’ve followed what I’ve been saying, you might have noticed that I don’t believe in the right to pray in public school at all. Silently, in the corner, in the schoolyard before the first bell — out with it all! However, unlike Michael Schneider, I know better than to think my interpretations of the Constitution really matter, and I know better than to think that my expressions of indignation are likely to change anybody’s mind.
In my experience, your only real shot at changing anybody’s mind is to be an example. Or, as it was put so pithily this year, Become the Change You Seek. Rick Warren, in first reaching out to Obama four years ago, was an example. Barack Obama is himself exemplary in many ways, and however much I disagree with Rick Warren, I still think Obama’s choice of Warren in this matter was setting a good example.
To paraphrase a Christian concept of which I approve: you can hate the opposition culture, but that doesn’t mean you have to hate people of that culture, or even its culture warriors. And we need to see more examples of choosing not to hate The Other. Sometimes progress depends on conflict, but more usually progress depends on peace, on finding common ground, however difficult. You can’t please everybody, but you can try to be as fair as an unfair world permits. And that’s the kind of effort that gets a grade of A from me, and from most people.
Michael Schneider isn’t trying to be fair, here. He’s not even really trying. He’s just reacting. (And sloppily at that.) Mere reaction isn’t going to get us anywhere.
December 29, 2008 at 8:13 am
Walt
Michael H Schneider, I recommend to you that you contemplate the wisdom of the Uncle Remus story about punching the tar baby.
December 29, 2008 at 8:13 am
grackle
Gosh, Michael Turner, an ugly tone, acres of verbiage, an unassailable
set of opinionsintellect. How fortunate that you found this site. The ever-gracious hosts must be grateful to have been blessed with your bounty.December 29, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Charlieford
This is like some mutant kudzu vine, and someone needs to spray Round-up on it before it smothers the whole blog.
December 29, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Michael H Schneider
Okay. I’ll surrender to the collective wisdom.
Except. (saw that coming, didn’t we?) For those who don’t often read court opinions, I’d like to make one thing perfectly clear.
You described it twice as the Court’s opinion. You obviously thought it was the Court’s opinion.
The first description was correct. The second wasn’t.
At that URL I provided you’ll find an html version of the official report of the case, which is officially published in a series of books called “U.S.Reports” (or US Reporter, I can’t remember). This official report is put together by an official who (IIRC) works under the direction and control of the court itself. The report includes the caption, the names of the attorneys for the parties, entities submitting amicus briefs and their attorneys, as well as the opinion of the court (if any), dissent (if any) concurrences and partial concurrences, as well as a synopsis or syllabus or precis of the case from this official reporter. Citations to the complete case, to the report of the decision, are to the first page – in this instance volume 530 page 290. (530 US 290)
Citations to quotes from the decision should cite the page of the official bound version where the quote appears. That’s why the HTML version has those lines and numbers – the lines indicate a page break in the bound version, and the number on the left below the line is the page number. The court’s opinion begins at page 294 with the words “Prior to 1995″ (530 US at 294).
If I cited the synopsis in a brief I’d expect to get admonished, if not santioned, but this is a blog comment so I took the shortcut and got sloppy. But it’s not like I quoted a journalist, and the court’s opinion is indeed found at the URL I provided, right there for anyone who cares to read it.