Christian Missions: Cultural Imperialism?

Back in December, one of my frequent e-mail correspondents sent me a link to a post on the Via Meadia blog, “The Missionaries Win: Christianity Becomes Global Religious Superpower”, in which Walter Russell Mead comments on a report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which looks at the growth of the world’s Christian population over the past century. I forwarded the link to a few friends with a special interest in Christian missions, including Brad, a missionary with Wycliffe Bible Translators. A lively discussion was sparked by one reader, Micha, who posted a comment equating proselytism with cultural imperialism. I liked Brad’s response so much that I asked if I could re-post it here.


Micha: I’d like to make a couple of points in reply to your post:

1. You seem to hold the view, like a lot of people, that no one “religion” is better than another, but they are just a personal choice, influenced largely by culture. Under that view it is “rude” to try to get someone to change their religion. It’s like fans of one sports team trying to get fans of other teams to switch to their team. That can be okay if done politely, but it can also get bothersome, sometimes even rude or violent. But most people, even avid sports fans, would agree that it ultimately just doesn’t matter. Cardinals fans are not going to convert Cubs fans, Yankees fans are not going to convert Red Sox fans, and it doesn’t really matter. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is how you view religion.

The reason you are not understanding posters coming from a Christian perspective is that we see religion differently. We see it as a statement or set of beliefs about reality, not just an opinion. So to us, there really is one right answer. The statement “Christians don’t believe that non-Christian religion has as much value to people as Christianity does.” is offensive to you in the same way that the statement “Being a Cubs fan does not have as much value as being a Cardinals fan” would be to a Cubs fan. The bottom line is that there is no underlying reality, it is just a matter of opinion.

But what if someone were to say “Cancer treatment X has more value than cancer treatment Y”? That would be a question of immense importance to cancer sufferers. This is the way Christians, Muslims, and other religious people see the question of religion. It is crucial to get it right. It’s okay to say “I’m right and you’re wrong.” We do it all the time about medicine (and lots of other subjects, of course). But if we do it about religion we are labeled “intolerant.”

2. At worst, your low opinion of missionary efforts has some basis in reality. You see it as “cultural imperialism.” Sadly, it has been that in some cases. But the vast majority of Christian mission organizations today (I can’t speak for Islam or others) are much more aware of cross-cultural issues than they were in the past. Specifically, they strive to separate the religious reality from its cultural baggage. This is known as the “contextualization of theology” and will make no sense to you if I have correctly described the way you view religion in pt 1 above (sports fan analogy). You will see religion as inseparable from culture. But for the Christian the two are separable. Of course, there is no simple formula for separating the theological “non-negotiables” from the cultural trappings. That’s why mission organizations today send not only evangelists (as well as doctors, teachers, etc), but also anthropologists, linguists, sociolinguists, ethnomusicologists, ethnographers, etc. We don’t always get it right, but we are trying to bring our message in a way that values the local culture. Our view is that all cultures, including our own, have aspects that are good and aspects that are bad. All cultures need to be examined in light of our religious beliefs. Again, this will make no sense if religion is just an opinion that doesn’t really matter. I think the global success of Christianity in the past 100 years, as noted by Mead’s article, is at least in part a result of this new wave of missionaries trying to get it right.

3. On cultural imperialism, you need to read Spirit of the Rainforest by Ritchie. It is a mind-blowing account told by the Yanomamo people of Brazil/Venezuala. This is the group that anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon wrote about. The traditional Yanomamo culture is heavily steeped in revenge killing, rape, and slavery, encouraged by the spirit world of their religious system. The book documents the coming of secular anthropologists as well as missionaries. The missionaries came to teach love and forgiveness, and also brought modern medical techniques, literacy, etc. The anthropologists just came to study the people. One village wanted a “white person” to come because they had heard of the good things that missionaries brought. But to their eventual disappointment, they got a (non-religious) athropologist. They took a sick child to this anthropologist, and he told them to treat the child their traditional way. He took notes. The child got worse. He took notes. The child died. He took notes.

Eventually, when a number of Yanomamo had become Christians, they founded a village. This village refused to participate in revenge killings. Other villages fought against them in one of their traditional ways – two by two with clubs. The Christian village was able to defend itself in this, well not “non-violent,” but at least “non-deadly” way. Eventually, due to good medical care and the absence of revenge killing, this villge grew strong enough that no other villages dared attack it. It became a place of refuge, healing and forgiveness for those seeking safety. Yet, the secular anthropologists were enraged by the “cultural imperialism” of Christians. They wanted people to hang on to their killings, rape, wife-beating and inadequate medical care so they could be studied. This is the point at which anthropology becomes imperialistic, wanting to keep people in a sort of “cultural zoo” so they can be studied.

Note that the cancer treatment analogy I made above is actually not totally metaphorical. It is a metaphor for how we see religion, but it also has literal examples in how some people have been denied life-saving treatment in the name of “cultural sensitivity.” What if a culture had a cure for cancer, but didn’t give it to us because the way we treat cancer was so fascinating that they wanted to study it? Would we thank them for their cultural sensitivity?

The other fascinating thing about this book is how the Yanomamo spiritual beliefs dovetailed with the teachings of Christianity. They discovered that the spirits they were following were evil and leading them into more and more suffering. Nothing conflicted with their traditional belief system, but they switched their allegiance to a different set of spirits, and ultimately the “greatest spirit” whom they formerly called the “enemy spirit.” I obviously can’t do the book justice here. You’ll just have to read it.

4. You may be wanting to say “Lots of conflicts would be avoided if only nobody held religion as a statement about reality.” That is undoubtedly true, but does not bear on the question. Religion is either a statement about reality or it isn’t. Either/Or. If something is true, we should not disbelieve it just because we don’t like the consequences of believing it. All religious people need to interact in love and respect with adherents of other religions.

I hope some of this resonates with you. I probably haven’t changed your mind, but I hope you can understand a bit better why we feel religion is worth spreading. Sorry for such a long post. Thanks for reading, and have a happy new year.

Same-Sex Marriage vs. Religious Freedom

It now appears that the Maryland legislature is likely, in coming weeks, to legalize same-sex marriage in the state. Coming from a notoriously liberal state that just elected Barbara Mikulski to her fifth term in the Senate, this will not surprise anybody. Still, it might constitute a milestone for the gay marriage movement because Maryland was the first state in the US to ban same-sex marriage by law. Under the Family Law Act of 1973, "only a marriage between a man and a woman is valid in this State." Before that, marriage in the US was regulated by common law, not by statute. By 1994, in the face of increasing activism by same-sex couples seeking marriage, 45 states had passed marriage laws that defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited the federal government from recognising same-sex marriages or any other kind of same-sex union. This turned out to be the high-water mark for the effort to prevent same-sex marriage.

The following year, the Supreme Court of Hawaii became the first to find prohibition of same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Hawaiians responded by voting, by a margin of 69% to 31%, to amend the state constitution to relieve the state courts of jurisdiction over marriage. In late 1999, Vermont's Supreme Court issued a similar ruling, and in 2000 the Vermont legislature acquiesced by recognizing same-sex civil unions. This established the pattern that has been followed for the past decade: activist courts imposed legal recognition of same-sex relationships contrary to the will of democratic majorities, who sometimes succeeded in reversing the courts' radical reinterpretations of marriage and sometimes failed.

The reasoning of same-sex marriage proponents is invariably based on an absolutist form of individualism, which recognizes no criterion of justice besides the equal treatment of all competent adults. Other criteria, such as the impact on families and children, public morals, social stability, and religious freedom, are ignored or dismissed. Some courts have gone so far as to state that hatred of homosexuals is the only possible reason why anyone would want to differentiate between same-sex and opposite-sex couples. Thus, they wield their liberal prejudices as a preemptive ad hominem attack to dismiss all opposing arguments before they are even enunciated.

Wherever same-sex marriage is enacted, conflicts with religious liberty inevitably emerge. In Canada, Catholic clergy have faced hate-crime investigations by human rights commissions for simply reiterating Catholic teaching on homosexuality. In Massachusetts, Catholic Charities was forced out of the adoption business because it could not agree to place children with same-sex couples. In California, doctors may not refuse to artificially inseminate lesbians on religious grounds. And in a number of cases in both Canada and the US, photographers have been fined for discrimination after they declined to photograph gay weddings. The most extreme views have been put forth by EEOC Commissioner Chai Feldblum, who states, "There can be a conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty, but in almost all cases the sexual liberty should win because that's the only way that the dignity of gay people can be affirmed in any realistic manner."

Feldblum is unusual only in her candor. The primary agenda of the ACLU for the past two decades has had a similar point: to transpose the traditional places of sex and religion in our culture. Where religion was once expected to be a person's primary public affiliation, source of identity, and basis of social behavior, sexual expression was expected to be conducted discreetly in private between two consenting adults. A presumption of privacy in matters related to sex and reproduction was the basis of the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. But liberal activists now despise privacy in sexual matters, holding that insistence on privacy facilitates shame and demeans sexual identity. Rather, sexual identity is to be proclaimed, celebrated, and lived publicly. Where the sexual innocence of children was once protected by social consensus, now their sex education might begin before they learn the multiplication tables. In short, sex is being pushed out of the closet.

Meanwhile, secularists are trying to shove religion into the closet. They portray even the mildest public display of religion as inherently offensive to anyone not of that religion. They increasingly substitute "freedom of worship" for "freedom of religion" in an effort to redefine religious liberty as nothing more than the freedom to do whatever you want in the privacy of your own church, synagogue, temple, or mosque. Many educators now take it as part of their job to counteract the religious upbringing of their pupils. Some would even prohibit all religious indoctrination of children, calling it a form of child abuse. In short, secularists are working to reduce religion to a private recreational activity that consenting adults may engage in discreetly behind closed doors.

The American public has little patience for this sort of anti-religious activism. But same-sex marriage and the cluster of gay rights that always accompany it into law have become a way for activist courts to circumvent American religious sensibilities. Can there be any doubt that secularists will continue to use same-sex marriage laws as a bludgeon against religious liberty?

According to The Washington Post, my own state senator, Jim Rosapepe, endorsed Maryland's same-sex marriage bill only after the "conscience clause" was strengthened, which would make it clear that religious organizations do not have to participate in ceremonies that violate their beliefs. But I'm not sure why we should trust courts that have overturned previous marriage laws to respect a conscience clause whose effect is to permit discrimination against same-sex couples. In any case, the conscience clause appears to cover only religious organizations, not religious individuals like wedding photographers or fertility doctors. I can't help feeling that the Maryland I will return to in a few months will be less free than the one I left two years ago.

Homosexuality Reading List

In recent weeks I have received a barrage of interesting articles on homosexuality and related issues such as same-sex marriage. As a possible explanation of why so much anti-gay material is now finding its way around the intellectual marketplace of the internet, I would hypothesize that, in the wake of the pro-gay blitzkrieg we have seen in the past three years in the media and the courts, the conservative counter-reaction is finally getting organized. I harbor no illusion that these arguments will be seriously entertained by the mainstream media or the government in the age of Barack Obama and his buddy Gene Robinson, but that tide could turn quickly.

In "What About the Children?", Canadian writer Tom McFeely discusses the disadvantages faced by children raised in homosexual households. The article's hook was the new position statement of the American College of Pediatricians, which reversed a 2002 endorsement of same-sex parenting: "Given the current body of research, the American College of Pediatricians believes it is inappropriate, potentially hazardous to children, and dangerously irresponsible to change the age-old prohibition on homosexual parenting, whether by adoption, foster care, or by reproductive manipulation. This position is rooted in the best available science."

The mission of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) is to "uphold the rights of individuals with unwanted homosexual attraction to receive effective psychological care and the right of professionals to offer that care." LifeSiteNews covered NARTH's publication of a study that examined over a century of professional and scientific literature, which refutes the claims of some factions of the American Psychological Association, who assert that homosexuality is immutable and that attempts to treat it therapeutically are harmful. Blogger David Virtue interviewed Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, the head of NARTH, at the Sex and the City Conference in London. According to Nicolosi, "the three great pioneers of psychoanalysis, Freud, Jung, and Adler, all saw homosexuality as disordered." In his practice, Nicolosi finds that most of his patients experience significant diminishment of same-sex attractions. Those who do not improve are mostly the ones who are not motivated – teen-agers dragged in by their parents, or husbands pressured into treatment by their wives or pastors.

Dennis Prager, a Jewish theologian and radio talk show host, makes the bold assertion, "When Judaism demanded that all sexual activity be channeled into marriage, it changed the world. The Torah's prohibition of non-marital sex quite simply made the creation of Western civilization possible." His article, "Judaism's Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism Rejected Homosexuality," supports his thesis persuasively. Prager shows us how radically Judaism departed from the sexual practices of its pagan neighbors. The Jewish condemnation of non-marital sex was, no doubt, a key motivation for the ancient hatred of the Jews. (It should be noted that Prager, in passing, also repeats the Jewish view that male celibacy is a sin: a man who is unmarried is incomplete.)

In "Answering Advocates of Gay Marriage," Canadian scholars Katherine Young and Paul Nathanson enumerate 20 different claims (not all of them consistent) made by advocates of same-sex marriage, and they systematically demolish them. They begin by assuring readers that they are not opposed to gay persons or gay relationships, but only to gay marriage. They describe their approach as comparative and dialogical: "One of us is a man, the other a woman; one is Jewish, the other Gentile; one is gay, the other straight; one specializes in Western civilization, the other in Eastern civilization; and so on. As a result of our collaboration, we have been able to gather a great deal of evidence, both historical and cross-cultural, to support our answers to the claims made by advocates of gay marriage." They argue against the shallow, individualistic understandings of sex and marriage implicit in most current discussions. Instead, they argue that heterosexual bonding is fundamental to civilization, and that it must be deliberately fostered by a supportive culture. In particular, they argue that culture and its institutions must bind men to their families, lest men become a toxic force with no stake in their society. Their own country, unfortunately, ignored their wisdom, proceeding with the "massive human experiment" of same-sex marriage.

Finally, British journalist Melanie Phillips reports that the Conservative Party is expected to unveil a new policy to shore up marriage. It will be based on a report, expected to be released this month, which recommends "a sweeping overhaul of the law to strengthen marriage, including moves to make divorce more difficult and promote marriage preparation classes and 'family relationship centres', as well as tax breaks for married couples." Phillips laments that the Tories cannot see that their support for marriage will ultimately be undermined by their support for gay rights.

After reading all of the above articles and pondering them, I conclude that Western society's current thrust for the abolition of heterosexuality as a norm grows out of a larger underlying problem: Our society is already corrupted with the ideology foisted on us by Baby Boomers, which tells us that the world exists for the immediate pleasure of competent adult individuals, and anything that interferes with this in any way is unacceptable. We have no debt to the past, no obligation to the future; no stake in the culture we inherit and pass on; no responsibility for weaker members of our society, including children (except, perhaps, those we "choose"). The gay rights lobby is so immersed in this self-indulgent, individualistic ideology that it cannot imagine a contrary reality. But this does not distinguish it from most other special interest groups of 21st century America.

We will never reverse the onslaught of gay rights – or, more generally, "rights" associated with sexual identity – if we do not reform our society's entire view of sex and marriage. Barring the once-in-a-millennium true leader, this will not happen through the political process. We can no longer count on a self-serving mainstream media to confront us with hard questions and harder answers. For the most part, the academic world has insulated itself from reality by wrapping itself in ideology. Only a religious revival is likely to save our civilization from being consumed by a culture of self-indulgence. Otherwise, we can start reading Brave New World as a roadmap of the near future (though I think Huxley was rather optimistic).

Political Parties

In my last post, I recommended Jonathan Haidt’s essay, “What Makes People Vote Republican?” Haidt took it for granted that Republican equates to conservative – i.e., that Republicans value loyalty, authority, and purity, while Democrats do not. This comports with the commonly agreed upon usage of the major media and party leaders today, but a little history will show that there is nothing inherently conservative about the Republican Party.

A century ago, the Republicans were the progressive party. They stood for three things: 1) Negro rights, 2) individual liberty, and 3) corporate profits. They were the party of the educated urban elite – and those who aspired to that status. They wanted to reform society to free individuals from the stultifying effects of the old boy networks that controlled local governments, community and family life, and American culture in general. The Democrats, by contrast, as the beneficiaries of those old boy networks, generally favored maintaining the status quo. They advocated what we in the 21st century might charitably call family values and strong communities. All in all, we might go so far as to say the Republicans were liberal and the Democrats were conservative. (If we wanted to stereotype them in the most negative way, we might depict the Republican as a portly banker in a frock coat who takes glee in foreclosing on mortgages; and the Democrat as a southern sherriff putting away his sheet after a night of cross-burning.)

So how did the parties get switched around? Well, in some respects they didn’t. The Republican Party’s advocacy of low taxes and limited government follows logically from its historic mission. There is really nothing conservative about these policies – they are essential elements of classical liberalism in the tradition of John Stuart Mill. Among the Founding Fathers, these same policies were advocated by the “liberal” Jefferson against the “conservative” Hamilton. The Democrats’ concern for the welfare of the working classes, meanwhile, is in continuity with their historic concern for immigrants in the north and farmers in the south.

But, starting with FDR, the Democrats embarked upon a slow march to the left throughout the 20th century. To deal with the Great Depression, President Roosevelt borrowed some ideas from the German and Russian totalitarians – it looked like the wave of the future, and it was widely thought to be a necessary evil at the time. The growth and centralization of federal government power created its own constituency for extending that growth still further. The Democrats became quasi-socialist in practice, if not in name. Because they were imposing major changes on society, they labeled themselves “liberal,” which was seen as a good thing; and they branded all of their various opponents as “conservative,” which was commonly understood as a bad thing. Those who opposed socialism at home and communism abroad began drifting Republican, and the GOP began to live up to its new conservative billing in some respects.

Still, in Haidt’s moral dimensions, the Republicans were probably no more conservative than the Democrats. As late as the 1960s, Democrats were uniformly opposed to abortion (Jesse Jackson called abortion “genocide against the black race”), while the individualistic Republicans were divided on this issue, to the extent that they cared about it at all. It was not until Roe vs. Wade and George McGovern’s nomination for President that the Democrats made their decisive obeisance to social liberalism, which alienated much of their conservative working-class constituency.

Meanwhile, the Republicans had been reorganizing and redefining themselves. William F. Buckley, Jr., made conservatism intellectually respectable, and Barry Goldwater’s candidacy for President brought it out of the closet. But it took Ronald Reagan to make it politically viable. He welded together all of the disparate groups that the “liberal” Democrats had derided as “conservative.” By this time, the label "conservative" was no longer seen as derogatory (except by liberals, who were increasingly out of touch with the electorate), so Reagan encouraged everyone who had been labelled as “conservative” to wear the label with pride and unite against those who called themselves “liberal.” The economic conservatives who opposed big government and excessive regulation could join with the social conservatives who opposed indecency and abortion because they both opposed communist imperialism abroad. It was in the Reagan era that the Republican Party became truly conservative.

And that was probably the high-water mark of conservatism in the GOP. Apart from judicial appointments, there is nothing particularly conservative about the Bush administration. Haidt’s moral conservatives are a captive minority in the Republican Party. Many of them are uncomfortable with party leaders who have reverted to the old-fashioned Republicanism of individualism and big business. Some of them might even long for the return of the old pre-McGovern Democrats.

Today, neither major political party is ideologically coherent. The Democrats pose as friends of the poor and working classes while capitulating to the demands of their corrupt, wealthy backers and pandering to every special interest they can fit into the party tent. They have compromised on every issue but one – a woman’s right to abort her baby whenever and however she wishes – much to the consternation of many an old-line liberal Democrat. The Republicans, meanwhile, trumpet family values while facilitating the efforts of Madison Avenue to undermine those values in favor of an exploitive, individualistic consumer culture.

While Jonathan Haidt’s article gives valuable insight into the phenomenon of moral conservatism, I’m not sure how far it goes in answering the question its title poses. It might explain why some people vote Republican, but Republicans of that sort have declined in influence and waned in their loyalty to the party. In their view (or perhaps I should say our view), the Republicans might still represent the lesser evil, but in the era of Bush and Cheney, not always by much.

Common Human Nature

On Friday in the Times of London, religion correspondent Ruth Gledhill’s headline was “Archbishop of Armagh invokes scripture in defence of homosexuality.” While that was a bit more sensationalistic than necessary, the Most Rev’d Alan Harper, Primate of the Church of Ireland, actually did begin to lay the groundwork for a theological, rather than merely political, rationalization of the acceptance of homosexual relationships by the Church. But his theological argument, in turn, rests on his anticipation of future scientific developments.

In a speech to the annual conference of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Archbishop Harper pointed to Richard Hooker as the source of the Anglican method of interpreting Scripture through the application of Tradition and Reason. He also recalled the importance that Anglicans place on science and knowledge. For illustration, he applied this method to the first chapter of Romans, where St. Paul writes, “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another . . .”

The archbishop conceded that science had not yet rendered a final verdict on whether or not people are born homosexual, but he believed (in Gledhill’s words) “that it seemed increasingly likely that they had no choice in the matter.” He concluded that if this were the case, then the Church would have to revisit the question of whether homosexual relations were really unnatural, rather than natural: “If such comes to be shown, it will be necessary to acknowledge the full implications of that new aspect of the truth, and that insight applied to establish and acknowledge what may be a new status for homosexual relationships within the life of the Church.”

Here is the flaw in the archbishop’s reasoning: It implicitly denies the existence of a common human nature. Instead, it imputes a different nature to homosexuals than to heterosexuals, such that they are subject to differing moral standards, based on their differing nature. As if homosexuals were a different species.

But why stop there? Some progressives of a more gnostic orientation go much further, essentially classifying each person as a sui generis being. Every individual is so distinct that there is no human nature. The concept of species, if it is valid at all, does not apply to us so-called “humans.”

Others, who call themselves transhumanists, do not assert that this is now the case, but they long for the day when technology will make it so. Through a combination of eugenics, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, cyborg implants, and other things we have not yet imagined, mankind will “take control of its own evolution.” Unless mankind came to an agreement on the direction this development was to take and enforced it rigorously, it would obviously lead to a branching of humanity in many directions away from its original nature.

If there were really no common human nature, what would be the implications?

1. If we do not share a common nature, there is no basis of a common morality. If homosexuals are a different species with a distinct nature, then they could have an entirely different natural law. In addition, they would not automatically be able to make claims based on human rights.

2. Anyone who does not share the human nature is not saved by Christ. As the Cappadocian Fathers taught, what is not assumed by Christ is not saved. In the Incarnation, Christ assumed our human nature in order to rescue and heal mankind. Those who do not share in this nature do not share in the salvation. Moreover, if you abolish human nature entirely, as the radicals do, then the Incarnation becomes meaningless or moot.

3. If there were no human nature at all, it would obviate the applicability of Darwinian evolution to mankind. Evolution is all about the origin of species. If we are not a species, then the question of our evolution is moot. (Note: It would be inconsistent for anyone to invoke Darwin at any stage of an argument against universal human nature. Some of the leading exponents of evolution have occasionally fallen into this trap.)

How, then, should one who takes the existence of human nature as given (whether from an Incarnational or a Darwinian basis) respond to Archbishop Harper? I think he is right to think about how the Church ought to respond to the likely reality that at least some instances of homosexuality have a biological basis. But I think he is wrong to proceed based on the inference that homosexuality is therefore “natural” for some people. On the one hand, this would separate homosexuals from other humans. On the other hand, it would seem to lump all homosexuals into the same category with each other. In short, it would herd homosexuals into a conceptual ghetto.

I would propose that it works better to think of homosexuality as a minor congenital anomaly. (The older term, birth defect, seems a bit too harsh, so I’ll eschew it here.) Few of us are born perfect. I have a couple of minor congenital anomalies myself – so minor that I was not even aware of them until well into my teen years, and they have no effect on my day-to-day life. Following the archbishop’s logic, I might say that these are not actually anomalies, but rather characteristics that make me a different sort of creature – and a perfect example of that sort of creature, to boot. Perhaps the only instance of that sort of creature in existence.

The more traditional approach is to say that these anomalies are unnatural, and I am therefore an imperfect manifestation of human nature. My anomalies do not make me my own species. They do not subject me to a different morality. They might sometimes make living as a human more challenging than would be the case for a more perfect human, but they do not separate me from the common human nature.

Archbishop Rowan and Sharia

Yesterday, Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered the first lecture in a series of discussions, "Islam in English Law," as part of the 2008 Temple Festival, at the Royal Courts of Justice. Entitled, "Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective," it was a long, academic think piece of the sort Abp. Rowan is known for. His topic was how and whether the legal system should accommodate the religious identities and motivations of its citizens. In keeping with the theme of day, he focused primarily on the example of Islamic sharia law, but in this increasingly secular age the topic is obviously of as much interest to Christians as to Muslims. The Anglican Communion News Service summarizes his lecture here, followed by the full text. Here is Abp. Rowan's own statement of the problem he is addressing:

There is a recognition that our social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging – even if one of those sets is regarded as relating to the most fundamental and non-negotiable level of reality, as established by a 'covenant' between the divine and the human (as in Jewish and Christian thinking; once again, we are not talking about an exclusively Muslim problem). The danger arises not only when there is an assumption on the religious side that membership of the community (belonging to the umma or the Church or whatever) is the only significant category, so that participation in other kinds of socio-political arrangement is a kind of betrayal. It also occurs when secular government assumes a monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity.

Abp. Rowan's overarching concern in this lecture is how traditional religious identity and morality might be accommodated in the face of a post-Enlightenment secular legal system that often regards religious loyalties as irrelevant or alien. He certainly realizes the difficulties and dangers that might be entailed by accommodating sharia, and his thoughtful discussion of these difficulties accounts for much of the lecture's length. His examples of legal accommodation of religion went beyond Islam, with references to Orthodox Judaism and Catholicism.

Before the lecture, he was interviewed by BBC Radio 4. In that interview he said, "It seems unavoidable and indeed is a matter of fact that certain provisions of sharia are already recognized in our society and under our law." The news site thisislondon twisted this one sentence, taken out of context, into the misleading headline, "Adoption of Islamic Sharia law in Britain is 'unavoidable'," and trumped up the dire implications of sharia while burying his caveats several paragraphs into the article. (I have not included a link to the original article because it is no longer available. Thisislondon continually revises and updates its articles to keep them current – and perhaps to bury their tracks. Here is the BBC version.) This sensationalism elicited the predictable Pavlovian response from the populace, and within a day the archbishop's enemies and detractors on both the left and the right, in both the church and the government, were calling for his resignation. It is clear from their intemperate, uninformed responses that they had neither read the lecture nor heard the interview, and probably had not even read the on-line articles beneath the sensationalistic headlines. Ignorance, unfortunately, is not a bar against political and religious posturing.

Abp. Rowan's statement that sharia is already present in Britain is hard to dispute. This article from the Evening Standard tells of an instance where a group of Somali youths who stabbed another teenager was released by the police to face justice in a sharia law court. (Their families ended up having to compensate the victim.) The article also mentioned that sharia courts in Britain already hear thousands of divorce cases every year.

What is really going on here? Rowan Williams is being borked. All of his enemies see a weakness that they hope they can exploit if they are quick enough and loud enough. They assume – probably correctly – that like Robert Bork before him, Abp. Rowan's thoughts are too lengthy and too complex to interest the average citizen, and that he can therefore easily be mischaracterized in the media without penalty.

O LORD, watch over us and save us from this generation for ever. (Psalm 12:7)

Reading List

After recently posting five times in two weeks, I have returned to a slower pace. To tide you over until I find the time and inspiration to write something new, I'll point you to some things I have been reading.

On his blog, Catholic in the Third Millennium, Dan Dunlap has been writing an interesting and informative series, "The Christological Divide that Anticipated Chalcedon." He explores the theological controversies of the fifth century that led up to Chalcedon's definition of the two natures of Christ.

In The Wall Street Journal Online, Alexandra Alter looks at "the toll one man's virtual marriage is taking on his real one and what researchers are discovering about the surprising power of synthetic identity." The man who is the subject of her article "Is This Man Cheating on His Wife?" spends much of his time in his on-line persona in Second Life, an internet-based virtual world. For a Christian, this article raise questions about the quasi-gnostic implications of technology that allows us increasingly to withdraw from the real, material world and live in an imaginary world.

The theme of the latest issue of AGAIN magazine is "Faith of Our Fathers: The Encounter of Orthodoxy and Anglicanism." Three members of my parish, all former Anglicans, are featured in the issue. Meanwhile, in The New Republic, Jason Zengerle writes about the steady flow of Evangelicals into the Orthodox Church over the past 30 years in his article, "The Iconoclasts." (Rod Dreher mentioned the article on his blog, Crunchy Con, and my friend Colin also forwarded it to me.)

OpinionJournal reprinted "Don Putin," a Wall Street Journal editorial by Garry Kasparov, in which he compared Russian President Vladimir Putin to the Godfather. Mr. Kasparov is the former world chess champion and a leader of Russia's democratic opposition. I think his analysis and criticism of Putin's corrupt, self-serving rule of Russia is right on target. Given the Moscow Patriarchate's longstanding entanglement with the Soviet/Russian government, I fear it will be hard for the Russian Orthodox Church not to be tainted by this corruption. (Thanks to Stephen for sending me this article.)

I'll leave you with this especially amusing "Pearls Before Swine" strip.

Archbishop Rowan on Moral Vision and Politics

On Tuesday, the Most Rev’d Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered the William Wilberforce Lecture in the city of Hull, the birthplace of the English reformer whose efforts led to the abolition of the slave trade. Websites that one would normally expect to be authoritative anticipated his subject variously as “Wilberforce and His Legacy”; “Moral vision should be at the heart of politics”; and “Freedom and Slavery.” The Telegraph titled its preview of the lecture, “Archbishop attacks 'erosion of Christian values',” while The Sunday Times called its extract of the speech, “Down with godless government.”

When the full lecture was published on the official website of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the title was “Freedom and Slavery.”

Archbishop Rowan is often described as a “liberal” — in fact he describes himself as such. But in this age when the terms liberal and conservative are used in numerous, mutually inconsistent ways, that label alone tells us little. Two short passages from the Times extract of his lecture should make it clear that, as an outspoken opponent of both individualism and relativism, he's the sort of liberal who often upsets other self-described liberals.

Wilberforce and his circle believed that if a sinful system existed and its sinfulness implicated them as well as others, they were under an obligation to end it. There is no simple gulf between personal and public morality; and Christian morality is not about “keeping yourself unspotted from the world” in any sense that implies withdrawing or ignoring public wrongs.

But if the state enacts or perpetuates in the corporate life of the nation what is directly contrary to the Christian understanding of God’s purpose, then Christian activism in respect of changing the law is justified, primarily when the state is responsible for — so to speak — compromising the morality of all its citizens.

This is at the heart of what Wilberforce was concerned about. He is not campaigning for the state to impose a personal morality, and would probably have agreed that such a policy would take away the essential aspect of personal liberty in choices about one’s own life. But he is campaigning for a moral state — that is, for a state that does not compromise its citizens, and that recognises wider considerations than those of immediate profit and security.

This makes sense, though, only if it is possible to convince those who run things in the public sphere that there are human values and ethical norms to which an entire society is answerable. In our relativist climate, this is very difficult. What tends to happen is that nothing much is left as a substantive moral basis for public life except a poorly defined principle of tolerance or avoidance of mutual harm. The idea that you can give substance to a common social ethic, something to which society as a whole can be held accountable, is unfashionable and unwelcome. Even from the point of view of many who have no religious commitment, there is a recognition that this is a thin diet.

I believe that it is possible for a state to have a moral basis without thereby becoming confessional or theocratic. It involves a state being ready to recognise its own history; to say that its horizons and assumptions are indeed grounded in a set of particular beliefs, and to embody in its political practice ways of allowing those foundational commitments to be heard in public debate.

The establishment of the Church of England, as it has evolved in the past century or so, has turned out to be such a mechanism — a rather awkward one. But if the church were to be disestablished, the question would still be there in an acute form: how does the state properly expose itself to argument about its collective moral status?

One important point came through more clearly in the full lecture than in the Times extract: Criticism of slavery and the slave trade in the 18th century came only from Christians who were motivated by their religion; the theoretical egalitarianism of Enlightenment rationalism, for instance, was never translated into opposition to slavery.

Towards the end of his speech, Archbishop Rowan raised the issue of reparations for slavery, and, in the academic way he is known for, he hashed through various aspects of the issue without coming to a clear conclusion, bringing the speech to a rather weak and muddled ending. I can only hope it will not obscure his overarching theme of restoring moral vision to the vocation of politics.

The Return of Judas

This week saw the publication of the new book by Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King, Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity. With predictable regularity, the media are revving up their annual round of sensationalistic stories calling into question the foundations of Christianity, just as we head into the holiest time of the year. Last year it was the last hurrah of The Da Vinci Code, combined with the unveiling of The Gospel of Judas. This year Judas is back, together with The Jesus Family Tomb.

In National Geographic's article on the Gospel of Judas, Stefan Lovgren wrote:

In the key passage Jesus tells Judas, "‘you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.'"

Kasser, the translation-project leader, offers an interpretation: "Jesus says it is necessary for someone to free him finally from his human body, and he prefers that this liberation be done by a friend rather than by an enemy."

This is indeed the key passage. It shows just how radically different is the Gnosticism of the Judas author from Christianity. The Gnostics believed that the material world was evil and the body was a prison from which the soul must be freed. Christianity, by contrast, affirms the goodness of material creation, as well as the essential unity of body and soul.

This passage from the Gospel of Judas reminds me of the Heaven's Gate UFO cult, which committed suicide en masse in 1997 to depart their bodies and "progress to the next level." The cult's leader said that human bodies are only "the temporary containers of the soul . . . The final act of metamorphosis or separation from the human kingdom is the ‘disconnect' or separation from the human physical container or body in order to be released from the human environment." More info on Heaven's Gate can be found here.

Not all Gnostic sects were as weird as UFO suicide cults, but many of them were. A sect that read the Gospel of Judas and then asked, "What would Jesus do?" might very well go the way of Heaven's Gate.

Stability

This is my contribution to a conversation on loneliness and transience in the modern world begun by Fr. Stephen and continued by Trevor.



I think the natural state of man is to live in an organic community, complete with a fully integrated culture and religion. And it's all given, not chosen - that's really the key.

But the project of modernism was to undermine the patriarchal institutions that embody culture - the family, the church, and the community - in order to establish a new order based on individual freedom. All power was pushed to the extreme ends of the spectrum - to the central government at one end and the lone individual at the other end. The values of this new "culture" (to use the term loosely) - wealth, sex, power, and freedom - are diametrically opposed to the Benedictine vows of poverty, chastity, obedience and stability. Without community, there is no discipline.

The minions of Satan on Madison Avenue have joined the founding radicals in promoting the modern lifestyle of individualism and alienation because it creates new marketing opportunities. A culture of people living disciplined Benedictine lives, on the other hand, would be the bane of modern consumerism. (I said something similar in a letter to First Things a decade ago.)

Today churches find themselves in the unnatural position of having to exist without being integrated into a local culture or community. Many churches - especially Orthodox and Anglo-Catholic parishes - respond by creating a community coterminous with the church and maintaining a culture (preferably inherited, but in convert parishes more likely created) within the church.

In the same way that Benedictine monasteries preserved the remnants of ancient culture within their walls through the Dark Ages, perhaps the churches must now preserve the remnants of community until our culture recovers from the devastation of the Modern Age.

Technology and Ethics in the 21st Century

On Monday 19 November 2001, I attended a panel discussion at Washington National Cathedral: "Are We Becoming an Endangered Species? Technology and Ethics in the 21st Century." I will attempt to capture the flow of the discussion between the four panelists and then offer some comments of my own on the important topics that were raised.

Judy Woodruff, anchor and senior correspondent at CNN, served as moderator. In addition to daily reporting, Woodruff anchors "Inside Politics," and she moderated several Republican presidential debates for CNN's Election 2000 coverage. She introduced the four panel members:

Bill Joy is co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a pioneer in development of the Internet. He entered this debate with his article, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," in the April 2000 issue of Wired.

Ray Kurzweil invented the first flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, and "pattern recognition" designed to teach computers how to recognize the abstract patterns that dominate human thinking. He is the author of The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Kurzweil came prepared with a briefing paper.

Anne Foerst is visiting professor for Theology and Computer Science at St. Bonaventure University. She recently served as a research scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and a theological advisor on MIT's projects to develop embodied, autonomous robots.

Bill McKibben, a former staff writer for The New Yorker, is author of The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience about global warming, as well as The Age of Missing Information. (He also has the distinction of being classified as an "environmental wacko" by Rush Limbaugh.)

Woodruff introduced the topic by referring to Bill Joy's article: "It is most of all the power of destructive self-replication in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) that should give us pause." Such technology makes for cheap production of goods, but an accident could destroy the world. It could also be used for warfare. It does not reproduce by means of succeeding generations – its memory lives forever, making for an inhuman intelligence. Meanwhile, dangerous information is widely available on the internet – a boon to science, but also a threat through availability to terrorists. Are we an endangered species?

Bill Joy: Yes, we are becoming an endangered species. Technology poses the danger of catastrophe. For example, research is currently under way to combine genetic material from the AIDS and Ebola viruses. Can we construct technological fixes to technological dangers? Defense is difficult – for instance, bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. We cannot look to technology to save us from technology.

Ray Kurzweil: Perhaps we should relinquish certain kinds of technology, on the grounds that we already have enough. If we had told people of the 18th century what the 20th century would look like, they would have said, "Let's not go there." But there were also advantages to technology – it has relieved suffering and extended life spans. There is still suffering that technology can relieve. And I cannot agree that defensive technology is necessarily weaker than the dangers.

Anne Foerst: We are created in God's image. When we are creative, we partake of God's mark in us. We cannot forbid technology. It is our nature to want to know things. Forbidding it would just push it underground, where it would no longer be subject to public scrutiny. Technology is often seen as "other" – as our opponent. But it is really an extension of us. The end of paradise came when man began judging what was good and evil – our knowledge is limited, unlike God's.

Bill McKibben: Are we at a moment that is in continuity with past development? Or are we, rather, at a special moment of discontinuity? [McKibben argues for the latter.] We have let technology grow too large, to the point where we can interfere with nature at the macro level. Theologians are now talking about a "trans-human" or "post-human" future. This marks the current moment as special – different from every moment since the world began.

(From here on, a paragraph might jump from one point to another, as a panelist responds in order to various comments by the other panelists, and my hurried notes do not provide much introductory and transitional material.)

Joy: If crazed individuals can determine the future, this is undemocratic – it gives us no say in our future. The Enlightenment had a moral basis in the relief of suffering, but now we have new gadgets just for convenience. The moral foundation of science is now absent.

Kurzweil: We cannot relinquish nanotechnology, without relinquishing all technology. Miniaturization is an ongoing trend in all technological fields, not a distinct field in itself. Banning technology would condemn billions to suffering. The fact that we have kept software viruses to a minor nuisance level shows that technological defense can work. We must increase the resources we devote to expansion of defensive technologies.

McKibben: Let's look at some concrete examples. Genetic manipulation can let us raise the intelligence or the height of our offspring. Nanotechnology that allows the construction of anything from carbon can produce technology more intelligent than humans. We are not philosophically equipped to come out on the other side of this looking anything like human beings – some tech advocates are quite candid about this. It is time for human beings to mature in a way that we have not done previously.

Kurzweil: The future will not be post-human, but post-biological.

Foerst: I bring perspectives from two fields – MIT robotics and theology. We as humans are part of nature – we eat, and drink, and die like all other animals. But we are distinct, in that we have cognition and intelligence. Experiments have shown that our cognition is embodied – that's what it means to be human. Our bodies are a means towards the end of community – we cannot download our intelligence and be disembodied humans. If we are in the image of God, we are relational – i.e., partners. We try to build machines that are partners, and they will be suitable partners, more like us than current machines, with built-in ("embedded") feelings and ethics. Even the most advanced current technology cannot match the embeddedness of insects. We cannot merge with technology, but we can interact with it, as we do with chimps and dolphins. In creating a new species of robots in our own image, we will fulfilling our own being in God's image.

Joy [citing as an example of hubris someone whose name I did not catch]: He wants to find that part of us that makes us believe in God – but only in order to decide whether to keep it or not. Why are we still doing research on anthrax? Vaccines already exist. (But malaria became worse as a result of having to resist vaccines.) We must see the world as it really is – not an idealized world of unlimited scientific progress.

Kurzweil: We are already close to breakthroughs versus disease. We need to have laws and ethics to limit and direct scientific research. We are seeing the next step of evolutionary progress – increasing complexity freeing thinking from the limitations of biological form is a spiritual quest. It would be immoral not to allow technological progress. We are the only species that uses language and whose technology progresses.

McKibben: The lust for technological development is a glib exercise in spiritual development. Humans have long tried to decide how to limit ourselves. Invention is not what makes us human, but the ability to decide not to do something that we are capable of.

After this, there was a period for questions from the audience.

A member of Friends of the Earth: We want to stop genetic engineering, cloning, and designer babies. Joy responds: The advice, "Think twice before doing something dangerous," is, unfortunately, not in the American spirit. Foerst responds: There was recently an ad in Ivy League magazines advertising for an egg from a woman who meets particular requirements for $50,000. The problem is that our society has an ideal type and punishes those who do not meet it.

Another environmentalist: Animals do not have the option of developing technological defenses to survive. Joy responds: Alfred Nobel wanted to improve the world, but killed his brother. We can't afford progress because we can't afford the budget for defense against it. We can't even fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Perhaps we need a market mechanism to make labs take out insurance against terrorist use of their experimental materials. Kurzweil responds: We are scared of the duality of our own nature. There are both good and bad sides of technology.

A progressive: Progress is not only technological development, but also improving equity in the social system – in this case, greater access to the benefits of technology. Foerst responds: The "world-wide web" is a misnomer – it is not world-wide. It promises a sort of Kingdom of God that it cannot deliver. Communities are more inclusive – we have learned to accept that people are different from us. People from other cultures are offended by the strength of Western values, which displace other value systems. Kurzweil responds: Technological advances reduce prices. The lagging edge of technology also moves ahead, even if it remains behind the leading edge.

A literature professor, whose class was reading Frankenstein: When humans begin to create life, is this the ultimate evil? Foerst responds: I interpret the story differently. It is not about hubris and a monster, but about denying a creature's personhood because of external criteria.

A questioner asked about the Kyoto Treaty. McKibben responds: It is not good that we were the only country to opt out of this and other treaties. There is no need to create of a race of robots to interact with – we have 6 million people to interact with. We are now breeding super-salmon that are four times as big as natural salmon, and they are already escaping and interbreeding with wild salmon. This is just one more example of our re-making the world according to our own self-serving criteria.

A final questioner: What needs to happen in the education system to bring about the moral decision-making required? Foerst responds: We need more interdisciplinarity. Science and the humanities need to learn from each other. We need to stop teaching current science as objective truth and teach the history and philosophy of science with it. This will make for more responsible citizens.


My comments

When Ray Kurzweil says, "The future will not be post-human, but post-biological," he reveals quite candidly the heresy that he is advocating: Gnosticism. The notion that our humanity is separable from our biology is irreconcilable with the incarnational principle that lies at the heart of Christianity – and of reality itself. A non-biological being, by definition, cannot be human (though perhaps it could be a person).

But others, with better semantic grounding than Kurzweil, are just as Gnostic in explicitly advocating a post-human future. Here is where hard technology meets the soft New Age – in the notion that we must "evolve" to a "higher level," shedding our obsolete humanity along the way. (This use of "evolve" has nothing to do with the more familiar use of the term in biology, but those who advocate post-humanity enjoy at least sounding like they are being scientific.) This is just another statement of Gnostic religion.

As always, Gnostic religion is opposed by Incarnational religion. For Christians, our humanity is not something to outgrow and discard, but something to fulfill, perfect, and glorify, by the grace of God. Gnosticism relies on the obvious but false premise that divinity and humanity are mutually exclusive and, moreover, mutually antagonistic. For the Gnostic, in order to become more divine one must become less human. But we look to the example of Christ, who was fully human and fully divine. In him, we see that it is only by fulfilling our God-given human nature that we can hope to become divine.

Kurzweil also expresses the modern notion that suffering is the ultimate (only?) evil, and that the alleviation of suffering trumps every other concern. I suppose that downloading our brains into machines would eliminate all physical suffering. But suffering is part of being human. While we ought to work to relieve the suffering of our brothers and sisters, we must not sacrifice our humanity or theirs in pursuit of this goal. Rather, we must remember that Christ, who shared our humanity, also shared our suffering.

The other panelists all opposed Kurzweil's gospel of technological salvation, at least some of the time in some ways. McKibben showed particular awareness of the importance of defending and preserving our humanity in the face of technological threats. Joy warned against the amorality and hubris that always seem to accompany modernity and technology. And Foerst emphasized the incarnate nature of our humanity and of community.

On the other hand, I think Foerst is naive in her vision of a future race of robot buddies for mankind. She says this creative urge is just evidence that we are made in God's image. I would suggest it is evidence that we are still falling for the serpent's lie that we can become like God by satisfying our curiosity.

Expectation and Hope

I originally posted this essay to the Christ Talk board, which succeeded UCMPage after the latter board's implosion.


Perhaps I am too comfortably post-Constantinian in my churchmanship, but I'm not sure those early Christians who expected the imminent return of Christ were best examples of Christians in their generation – even if they were in the majority in some places at some times. It reminds me too much of the cults whose members sell all their worldly goods and retreat to await the end of the world.

Instead of forming expectations about Christ's return and then living our lives contingent upon our expectations, should we not be prepared for all possible contingencies? Christ has this habit of not conforming himself to our expectations . . . Perhaps the only thing we should count on is that he will surprise us.

I think St. Paul exemplified such an approach, in a different context, when he said, "Whether I live or whether I die, then, I am Christ's."

However, I think the key question is neither expectation nor preparation, but hope: Do we truly hope for Christ's return? Do we join the early Christians in crying, "Maranatha"? When we pray, "Thy kingdom come," do we mean it?

It is hard for us to wish for Christ's return. The prophets warned that the day of reckoning would not be what their hearers wished or expected – that they would suffer – that one has to be pretty bad off before he can count on his condition being improved by God's judgment. Christ himself often said, "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first." Given our comfortable American lives, we might reasonably fear Christ's coming, rather than hope for it.

But most Americans look to Christ's coming with neither hope nor fear. This is exactly the sort of question that our consumer culture does its best to keep us from facing. The Establishment wants to keep the drones on their treadmills, working and consuming without thinking too much about what it means (or should mean) to be human beings subject to divine judgment.

American business has mastered the tactic of transmuting our spiritual longings into new sales opportunities. This not only makes a buck for someone, it also cons us into thinking that we have "made a statement" by the way we have spent our money. Thus, every sector of our consumer economy now has a special niche where the adjective "Christian" precedes the name of every product. We can now practice our religion by simply buying products bearing our own union label.

Eventually, however, the commercial anesthetic will wear off, and American Christians might then realize that they no longer have a stake in this culture of spiritual death. Then perhaps they will wake up and take up the Revelator's cry, "Come, Lord Jesus."

Culture and Religion

I originally posted this essay to the old UCMPage message board. Most of the participants were United Methodist clergy of a high-church (i.e., sacramental and apostolic) orientation. Popular topics on the board included incarnational theology, eschatology, ecumenism, Calvinist-bashing, and baseball. My two favorite UCMPage participants have moved on, respectively, to the Byzantine Catholic Church and the Anglican Mission in America.


We have the misfortune, unique in human history, to live in a society totally devoid of culture – a post-cultural society. We throw around the term culture a lot, but we are always using it in a metaphoric sense (e.g., "corporate culture"), not in a literal sense (unless we are talking about times and places other than our own).

It is our nature as human beings to live in a culture. A culture ties together a people or nation in much the same way as a language. It provides norms that govern individual behavior, interpersonal relations, and collective action. It serves as a reservoir of common stories, images, and metaphors that make communication and community possible. We inherit a culture that embodies the wisdom of our ancestors, and we pass it on to our descendants. In a lot of ways, it similar to the concept of Tradition in Orthodox Christianity.

But our society has jettisoned culture. In the U.S., the ACLU seems to believe that every remnant of culture is an offense against the Constitution, to be stamped out. Each generation assumes as its birthright the privilege of rejecting everything bequeathed by the previous generation and reinventing everything from scratch. Madison Avenue does its best to squash any carry-over from the past in order to preclude competition for whatever it is selling this week. The establishment seeks to "free" us from culture in order to enslave us to its petty thrills and keep us on the treadmill. All of this is especially true of the Baby Boom generation.

A proper religion must be part of a functional culture. That's what real religion is – the part of culture that addresses the eternal part of our human nature. Some (not all) Protestant churches – and these days even some American Catholic churches – however, have yielded to the surrounding anti-culture. They offer a "religion" that is little more than a hobby or personal idiosyncracy, which does nothing to reconcile us to our ancestors and descendants, our neighbors and enemies, and our own human nature.

But many churches – especially the Orthodox, but also many ethnic Catholics, Lutherans, and Anglicans (not to mention the Amish and the Old Believers) – respond in a different way to the disappearance of their culture. Since they are no longer surrounded by a functional culture, to which their religion can become enculturated, they simply preserve the culture they inherited. This culture is, unfortunately, not consistent with the anti-culture that dominates the rest of their lives, so it requires a bit of double-think. But real religion must be embodied in a real culture, and a slightly old-fashioned or old-country culture is better than none.

This is not to say that there is one true (or best) Christian culture, and that Christianity must always take a given form. But Christianity must always take some particular cultural form – it must be incarnated in a particular way among each particular people. It should not be surprising if different peoples, with their different languages, histories, and economic/geographic milieus, would diverge in religious expression and practice as they do in other aspects of culture.

I think the Eastern Churches have, for the most part, done a good job of preserving the proper understanding of the relationship between religion and culture. When we of the West visit an Eastern church, therefore, we must overcome two hurdles: 1) We must suppress our perverse modern Western tendency towards anti-culturalism and accept the culture-laden religious expressions of Eastern liturgy and theology; and 2) we must learn to operate in the particular culture of the people whose church we are visiting.

I think the latter problem is perfectly understandable. It is only natural to feel more at home in one's own native culture, just as one prefers to speak one's own language. Until you learn through long practice to operate in another culture (or language), you must spend a lot of energy in translation, and then you still wonder if you aren't missing something important. But eventually, you do learn to function in the new culture, and the added perspective you bring from your native culture can even enrich the experience by suggesting parallels or contrasts to meditate on.

I suspect the former hurdle, however, is more problematic for most Americans – not the particular cultures of the Eastern churches (Greek, Arabic, Slavic, etc.), but the very fact of the importance of culture, which entails an implicit rejection of modern American anti-culture.

I am privileged to be part of an Anglo-Catholic parish that rivals the most ethnic of Orthodox parishes in its preservation of culture and customs from the Old Country. In our case, however, the Old Country is England, so we can have a full cultural embodiment of our religion without having to learn a totally foreign culture.

At the same time, as Orthodox Churches in the U.S. draw American converts and come to be dominated by American-born members rather than immigrants, they face both an opportunity and a danger. The opportunity is to preserve their traditional connection between culture and religion, while adapting to their new cultural environment. The danger is that, as they become Americanized, they will adapt to the anti-culture and forfeit the treasure they have preserved. I have seen examples of both tendencies among the Orthodox in this country.