"Providing Religious Cover for Moral Squalor"

Once more, Michael Gerson had added his voice to the ongoing discussion about the relationship between right-wing religion and Donald Trump's presidency and its long-term consequences for American religion in general, what he fittingly labels "providing religious cover for moral squalor". (See "the Last Temptation," The Atlantic April 2018 - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-last-temptation/554066/)

A life-long Evangelical himself, Gerson recognizes the shocking incongruity between right-wing religion's past attitudes toward licentious language and behavior and right-wing religion's current embrace of President Trump. But he quickly moves on to the heart of the problem: "Trump's unapologetic materialism - his equation of financial and social success with human achievement and worth - is a negation of Christian teaching." Once there, however, we are really no longer speaking solely of Trump (however extreme an example he may be) but of the essential project of the Republican party (an institution to which Gerson still has a historical attachment).

That said, Gerson's portrayal of the statements and behavior of one-time opponents of cultural and moral decay, now turned court chaplains, their supposed moral convictions corrupted by partisan identification hits home. "Blinded by political tribalism and hatred for their political opponents, these leaders can't see how they are undermining the causes to which they once dedicated their lives. Little remains of a distinctly Christian public witness."

Gerson recalls (in lengthy detail) the familiar history of American evangelicalism's "fall from a  great height" and how the resulting defensive stance against contemporary culture "was happily exploited by the modern GOP." Interestingly, he contrast evangelicalism's "lack of a model or ideal of political engagement - an organizing theory of social action" - with Catholicism's "coherent, comprehensive tradition of social and political reflection." Of course, Gerson well knows, "American Catholics routinely ignore Catholic social thought. But at least they have it. Evangelicals lack a similar tradition of their own to disregard."

In contrast, Gerson stresses how wholly "reactive" the evangelical political agenda has been. His own experience suggests the real potential for evangelical social engagement, but laments how "such concerns find limited collective political expression" in part, he argues, because of "the relative ethnic and racial insularity of  many white evangelicals." Here he makes another unfavorable comparison with the heavily Hispanic Catholic Church.

One result of this highly reactive dynamic has been an apocalyptic self-perception as "a mistreated minority, in need of a defender who plays by worldly rules." In this understanding,  "protecting Christianity" has become "a job for a bully." By giving political considerations "pride of place," evangelicals, Gerson argues, "have ceased to be moral leaders in any meaningful sense."

He is particularly troubled that Trump supporters' decision "that racism is not a moral disqualification" for the presidency "is something more than a political compromise. It is a revelation of moral priorities." Acknowledging the presence of counter-examples in the evangelical orbit and the growing disenchantment of younger evangelicals with political negativity, Gerson remains, however, highly anxious for the future - for the evangelical religious tradition and - "because, religion, properly viewed and applied, is essential to the country's public life" - for America. he concludes by calling on evangelicals "to rescue their faith from its worst leaders."

It is edifying that Gerson remains inspired by his faith and motivated to recall it to a more positive relationship with civil society. Christian history, however, offers abundant examples of opportunities missed, with catastrophic consequences - for example, the amputation of a once vibrantly Christian North Africa and a thousand years later the religious partition of Europe, both of which weakened the Church for centuries and continue to do so today. It remains to be seen what will be the long-term legacy of the unholy alliance between right-wing religion and an unapologetically materialist partisan project.  

The Brigadoon Election

Pennsylvania's 18th Congressional District - partly rural, partly suburban - has comically been called the "Brigadoon" district, because it will literally disappear at the end of this year. (The 1954 musical Brigadoon was about a Scottish village that magically reappears every hundred years, only to disappear again after a single day.) Yet, although this seat will only be occupied for just a few more months, the competition for it has garnered national interest - and tons of outside money, the sure measure of significance in politics. 

Donald Trump carried the district in 2016, as did Mitt Romney before him. For four years in the early 1990s it was represented by Rick Santorum; and since 2003 it was represented by another Republican, Tim Murphy. It was his resignation last October which triggered this special election in what had come to be viewed as a reliably Republican constituency..

(Last fall, Murphy's hometown newspaper reported that an early 2017 text message from the woman he was having an extra-marital affair with revealed that the pro-life politician had asked her to have an abortion during what turned out to be an unfounded pregnancy scare. The paper also reported staff allegations of "hostile, erratic, unstable, aggressive and abusive behavior." Hence his resignation and the ensuing vacancy.)

Then along came Conor Lamb as the Democratic candidate. More precisely, along came the Trump presidency; and the existential threat that Republican party dominance poses produced an energized and enthused Democratic electorate apparently willing actually to turn out and vote in a special election! That may well make the difference in Brigadoon!

As I write this, the election is still too close to call. Conor Lamb is leading by 641 votes. If he wins, it obviously won't be a landslide. But, compared with previous Republican wins in the district (which Trump carried by 20 percentage points), for what it says about electoral prospects in November nationwide, it might just as well be a Democratic landslide - even if Lamb loses closely in the final count! Given the district's imminent evaporation and the existing Republican domination in the current Congress, this election was always more about symbolism than any immediate effect on public policy - symbolism that may be prophetic, however, for the November election and the real political changes that could conceivably flow from that.

Kennedys and Popes

Such is our persistent fascination with the Kennedy family that, 50 years after Robert Kennedy's assassination, CNN has produced yet another series on the famous family. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that once again we have another scandalously rich, overly privileged and entitled, pseudo-royal family in the White House. Where John Kennedy had Bobby, Donald Trump now has Jared and Ivanka!

Most of those in that famous November 9, 1960, AP Photo (above) of the family on the morning after JFK's election are gone, but the fascination remains. While it is hard to imagine what new could possibly be revealed about this most famous of American families, this new series does a good job of retelling this old, familiar, but forever evocative story. Narrated by actor Martin Sheen, it includes commentary from some younger Kennedys as well as from various historians and family biographers.

Sunday’s first episode - appropriately titled "The Power of Wealth" - focused on President Kennedy’s (in)famous father, Joseph Kennedy, who apparently once wanted to be president himself – an unlikely ambition, which his disastrous performance as American. Ambassador in London before and during the first part of World War II put a well-deserved end to. The episode highlights the whole tragic pathology that followed from his feeling of not being appropriately appreciated as an Irish Catholic in Protestant America  and his lifelong need to compensate, which eventually took the form of his ambitions for his sons. In the process, we cover the familiar ground of the family's wartime tragedies - Joe's tragic decision to "cure" his daughter Rosemary with a surgery that backfired so terribly that it ruined her life, Jack's near-loss in the Pacific (cleverly repackaged and publicized to make  him a war hero), Joe Jr.'s death as a casualty of war, and Kathleen's marriage outside the faith and her later tragic death in a plane crash. The episode ends with only Jack left of the older children - a sickly war hero newly elected to Congress. (Regrettably, while focusing on the role of the Kennedy money in Jack's political ascent, the program ignores the importance of Rose's family political connections.)

Given the woefully inadequate state of many contemporaries' historical awareness, a well done series such as this at least has the advantage of situating its story in the actual historical context and thus hopefully expanding its audience's historical knowledge.

That same can less confidently be claimed about the other historical series that CNN premiered last night, Pope: The Most Powerful Man in History. The first episode of The Kennedys covered actually only about a decade of recent, 20th-century history. In the same amount of broadcast time, the first episode of Pope  tries to cover almost 12 centuries! So it is inevitably somewhat superficial. Still, someone with little or no knowledge of the subject would learn something from this rushed and inevitably simplified survey of the first half of the Church's history.

That said, the series starts well.  The first episode, "The Rise of the Pope," starts, appropriately enough, with Saint Peter himself, emphasizing the Pope's position as successor of Saint Peter. Without serious challenge, the program rightly recognizes the papacy as the link to and the inheritor of the apostolic generation - and also fully accepts the link between Peter and Rome. It highlights the significance of Peter's martyrdom and the early Church's hierarchical organization.

Just as the Church's fortunes changed after Constantine, so does the pace of the presentation - rushing from Nicaea and the division of the empire into eastern and western halves through the familiar account of western empire's decline and the Pope's emergence as the only source of stable, civil governance in Rome. (There is some silly commentary about how neither Constantine nor the popes believed in separation of church and state - as if that uniquely contemporary concept would have even been comprehensible to people in other times!) Meanwhile, the papacy's struggle to survive in a context of almost constant conflict quickly causes it to ally with a new Constantine, Charlemagne. Then it is the threat of Islam that endangers the Church, causing the Crusades. The program presents the background of the Crusades correctly as a consequence of Islamic conquest of Christian lands, although it soon starts to get bogged down in familiar, "politically correct" lamentation over the violence of the Crusaders and a perhaps overly enthusiastic embrace of Saladin.

Even so, the story is largely fairly told, but so much is inevitably omitted. Perhaps the next episode will backtrack, but there is nothing about what actually became of Catholic Europe in those centuries - nothing, for example, about what was probably the most significantly influential institution (both religiously and culturally) in medieval Catholic Europe, namely monasticism. 

All in all, however, for all its superficiality, it is not a bad rendition of the Church's story! Whether the Pope is really best described as "The Most Powerful Man in History" may be arguable, but it is certainly an interesting story that is being presented - more interesting even than that of the Kennedys! 

God's Handiwork

God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes I him might not perish but might have eternal life [John 3:16]. Thanks to televised sporting events, this sentence became for a while one of the best known in the entire New Testament. I guess that’s good publicity for the Gospel! God loved the world so much, he gave the world his only son, so that everyone who believes might have eternal life. The grammar of the sentence suggests cause and effect. So much does God love the world that this is what he has done for it!

Of course, it should hardly come as a complete surprise that God loves the world. He is the one who created it, after all! On the other hand, we may easily enough be tempted to forget just how much God loves the  world, when we see so much that seems so wrong with our world. Left to itself, the world can seem to be a dreadful place at times. With all the world’s natural calamities, to which must be added all the misery directly attributable to human behavior, the world must seem a horrible place indeed - if left to itself. 

Listening to today’s 1st reading [2 Chronicles 36:14-16,19-23], we sense how little seems to have changed in the world. The point of the story – certainly the point of including it in the Lenten liturgy – is to remind us of the long legacy of human sinfulness, which has been long and loud, and to remind us that the one piece of good news is that God has not left the world to itself. God’s compassion on his people and his dwelling place, led him to inspire Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, to let the Jews return to Jerusalem. That same divine compassion ultimately led him to send us his Son – because, as Saint Paul assures us [Ephesians 2:4], he is rich in mercy 

Yet how easily tempted are we to escape from the burdens and responsibilities of this messed-up world which God loves so much? How many sects and cults have tempted people to try to avoid the messy, complicated burdens of society, work, and citizenship, the human burdens that define our life in the world – rather than accepting, healing, and renewing our relationships with others and with the created world [Cf. Placuit Deo, 2]?

In classical mythology, when Pandora opened the box that released so many evils into the world, she closed it just in time to trap hope in the box - thus effectively leaving the world to itself. The book of Chronicles, in contrast, highlights how the long cycle of human misbehavior and its consequences was broken by God’s not leaving the world to itself, by his surprising choice of Cyrus to be a beacon of hope in the midst of so much misery and wickedness.

The Good news of the Gospel is the hope God has offered us in Jesus his Son, who, far from leaving the world to itself, has become part of it. The hope he offers is thus not a license to abandon the world but a challenge to move forward with the task of living and working in the world. This Good news – which the Church is in the world as part of the world in order to proclaim to the world – is the hope offered us in Jesus in whom we have been transformed into agents of God’s grace for the transformation of the world which God loves so much.

For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in him [Ephesians 2:10].

Homily for the 4th Sunday of Lent (Laetare Sunday), Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, March 11, 2018.

Daylight Saving Time

In the 2001 British mystery and comedy of manners movie Gosford Park, there is a scene in which Maggie Smith (as Countess Constance Trentham), while dressing for some typically aristocratic outdoor activity, laments, "Why do we have to do these things? Of course, the fact that pretentious, overly rich people have to do certain things as part of the rich pretense that is their life is a presumption of the film, one which the audience presumably understands.  But there are a lot of things we all do in life which also merit Maggie's penetrating question. For example, why do we have to move our clocks forward an hour and so have to drive to work next week in deep darkness? 

In a capitalist society, the default presumption must be that some moneyed interest benefits from this absurd practice. One theory that I have heard is that it was stores that pushed for Daylight Saving Time, on the theory that with more afternoon daylight people would stay outside and shop on their way home from work. I don't know how true that is, but it is at least intuitively plausible. Of course, nowadays when more and more people shop online anyway, what difference does the extra afternoon daylight make, especially when one can now shop all day on Sundays and holidays even in stores? And the growing number of stores that are open late or even all night suggests that darkness is no longer such an obstacle to shopping, if it ever really was.

But Daylight Saving Time continues as part of the commercial capitalist pretense of our contemporary life. In fact Daylight Saving Time has expanded its reach, When I was a child, it began on the last Sunday of April and ended on the last Sunday in September. Now it starts on the 2nd Sunday in March and ends on the 1st Sunday of November! In the spirit of Constance Trentham, I guess it is just one of those things we just have to do!