Religion

Hewitt defends Vitter against charges of hypocrisy: [click to continue…]

Just wanted to take note of a felicitous typo from Andrew Sullivan:

But it could give the neocons a new leash on life, a way to invigorate their exhausted ideological engines.

Quite unrelatedly, I was amused to read:

It is debatable whether paganism is a religion, per say.

I’m not sure whether he misspelled ‘per se’ or was, rather, reaching for ‘so to speak’, as one might grope for the bottle.

The piece reminded me of Kieran’s post about how ‘atheism’ was, originally, a charge lodged against Christians. It’s interesting to find predicates that have wandered so comprehensively.

One of my students, herself surprised to discover the left-wing of Christianity, lent me Shane Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution to find out what I thought. I read it on a flight into Philadelphia, for a short stay in which I knew every minute of my time was booked, and became increasingly frustrated that I couldn’t take some time out to go and visit the Simple Way community, just to tell them how much I liked the book. And, although I know that it is impractical to demand as much of most people as Shane Claiborne and his community demand of themselves, and that there is a place for many different roles in the world, the book was deeply humbling, at least for me at this stage in my life.

It’s so hard to write about the book mainly because it is not written for me or, I guess, for most CT readers. Claiborne is not bringing us atheists the good news about Christ, but bringing the not-so-good news about what Christianity demands to his fellow Christians. I’ve looked all over the place at blog posts and reviews, and almost all are by Christians (and, interestingly, almost all are positive)

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One of the perks of refereeing books for university presses is that you get to pick some books in lieu of money. I try to get stuff that I can’t really justify buying, such as interesting but expensive scholarly books from well outside my field. Which explains why I’ve been reading G.E.M de Ste. Croix’s Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy, a posthumously edited collection of papers. (Ste. Croix’s Big Red Book, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, is terrific, by the way, and rather cheaper.) One of the essays is a classic paper from 1963 on Christian persecution under the Romans. From it, I learned this:
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On the whole, ethnic stuff in English churches tends to consist of displays celebrating multiculturalism and interfaith understanding etc. So it was with some surprise that, when visiting Lichfield’s magnificent medieval cathedral I stumbled on this war memorial in the south transept. This in-your-face bit of Africa dates from just after the “Anglo-Zulu War of 1879”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Zulu_War (think Rorke’s Drift, think Michael Caine) and is just a teeny bit incongruous amidst the gothic widows and vaulted ceilings.

The whole Cathedral is magnificent by the way — there are other photos in my Flickr stream — and this isn’t the only cultural surprise. A memorial to Erasmus Darwin has the words:

“His speculations were directed towards problems which were afterwards more successfully solved by his Grandson, Charles Darwin, an inheritor of many of his characteristics.”

In a follow-up to John’s post asserting that a minority of Americans are Christians, Lindsey (a young evangelical Christian) at Regardant les nuages elaborates the specifically Christian case against patriotism. Her understanding from the inside accords pretty much with mine (and John’s) from the outside, which is nice to know! An excerpt:

while I love the gifts that I’ve received in virtue of living here, I must realize that they are by no means my own. I am obligated to use them to benefit everyone, and everyone is not limited to my American neighbors. So while I may love this country, I don’t love it in the sense that I’m proud to be American instead of Canadian, French or Japanese. My love is merely an appreciation of the opportunities afforded to me by growing up here. The real problem with love of country is that, while innocent enough on its own, it is often accompanied by neglect of other countries. God did not call us to love and serve America alone. We are here to make an impact on the world. We are called to bring justice, peace, love, and kindness to all peoples.

Comment there (esp colleen, who might like what she finds).

In the most recent issue of the Journal of Religious Ethics, Eric Gregory (a Religion professor at Princeton) has an article (abstract here) discussing John Rawls’s senior undergraduate thesis. Gregory is properly cautious, pointing out: “Few people, I suspect, would welcome the thought of being held accountable to claims made in graduate seminar papers, let alone undergraduate theses.” True enough. And it’s worth remembering what Sam Freeman writes in the preface to Rawls’s Collected Papers: “Rawls has often said that he sees these papers as experimental works, opportunities to try out ideas that later may be developed, revised, or abandoned in his books. For this reason he has long been reluctant to permit the publication of his collected papers in book form.” One can only imagine what he would have thought about a published analysis of his undergraduate thesis.
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Rightwing bloggers are making a big fuss about a poll in which 47 per cent of US Muslims stated that they thought of themselves first as Muslim, and only 28 per cent as Americans first (18 per cent volunteered “Both” and 7 per cent Don’t Know). By contrast, for self-described US Christians, the results were 48 per cent for American first, and only 42 per cent for Christian first, with 7 per cent saying “Both” and 3 per cent Don’t Know.

The only possible reading of this data is that less than half of all Americans are in fact Christians in the religious, as opposed to the cultural/tribal, sense of the term. Galatians 3:28 is pretty clear on the subject, but more importantly, it’s obvious that you can’t seriously believe in, and worship, an Almighty God if your allegiance to an earthly power comes first, or equal, or if you don’t even know.It might be useful in discussion of US exceptionalism as regards religion to note the preponderance of nominal believers revealed by this question.

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Megan McArdle’s dog, Finnegan, contracted an infection and had to be put to sleep. She posted about it. I thought: soon, some gobshite will show up in the comments, deriding the way she felt at four in the morning the night her dog died. And sure enough. Gotta love the intertubes.

Meanwhile, Jerry Falwell has died, too. In terms of net good brought into the world during their respective lives, Megan’s dog is probably ahead of Falwell. The conjunction of events reminded me of Oliver Goldsmith on morality, dogs and men.
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I can’t resist following Conservapedia, the Tlön version of Wikipedia, in which the liberal, anti-American bias of the Earth version is replaced with virtue and apple pie. But where did this bias come from, and how is it so deeply rooted in our culture? The answer, it turns out is the Bible, not of course the true version held in the vaults of Uqbar, but the liberal Earth Bible known by such as names as the King James Version.

In the Uqbar version, as explained at Conservapedia, all sorts of politically correct liberalism is eliminated or glossed out of existence. Uqbar scholars have discovered that the soft-on-crime John 8:7 ‘”If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone” was inserted by time-travelling liberals some time around the 4th century. Naturally, Conservapedia says, Wikipedia sticks to the Earth version, though a check of the actual site suggests that the annoying liberal habit of looking at all the evidence is at work here as well.

Conservapedia has able assistance from other conservative sources. All that class warfare stuff about the rich not getting into heaven (Matthew 19:21-24) turns out to mean that if you want money, you should cut God (or his earthly representatives) a good share in advance. Other kinds of warfare are fine with the Prince of Peace, though. As for turning the other cheek ((Luke 6:27-31), it’s No More Christian Nice Guy.

Home sales are down a long ways. But why?

Sales of existing homes *plunged in March by the largest amount in nearly two decades*, reflecting *bad weather* and increasing problems in the subprime mortgage market, a real estate trade group reported today. … David Lereah, chief economist at the Realtors, attributed the big drop in part to *bad weather in February*, which *discouraged shoppers* and meant that sales that closed in March would be lower. … There was weakness in every part of the country in March. Sales fell by 10.9 percent in the Midwest. They were down 9.1 percent in the West, 8.2 percent in the Northeast and 6.2 percent in the South.

Clearly, the 9.1 percent sales drop in the West is directly attributable to the weather. Here in Arizona, it’s been a brutal mid-70s and sunny for about two months now. I can’t speak to the devastating effects of the moderate early morning shower we had last Saturday here in Tucson, though. The fact that the drop in the West was one percentage point larger than the drop in the Northeast is also obviously weather-related. The guys who get quoted in reports like this should just own up and change their job title from “Chief Economist” to “Chief Shaman for Rationalizing the Juju.”

Another “bloggingheads.tv”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=247 with Will Wilkinson is up; among other things we talk about bad culturalist arguments and my sad yet inexorable decline into “Goldberg Derangement Syndrome”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2007/04/goldberg_derangement_syndrome/. I suggest that overly determinist cultural arguments aren’t very convincing, especially when they try to explain gross differences between societies. Good cultural explanations need to identify the specific mechanisms that make for cultural stability and change. Coincidentally, I was involved in discussion today over an interesting-sounding new piece from Steve Pfaff, an University of Washington sociologist, forthcoming in Jeff Kopstein and Sven Steinmo’s new volume on divergence between the EU and US. It’s notorious that far fewer Europeans report going to church than Americans – this is often presented, especially in the pop-lit, as evidence of profound and lasting cultural divergence between the two. There’s good sociological reason to suggest that it is nothing of the sort – a key causal factor is the degree of marketplace competition.

In many European countries, churches are established and have official state support, so that they don’t have enormous need to tout for churchgoers. They’re monopolists, and as Albert Hirschman suggests, monopolists tend to be lazy. In the US, in contrast, the legal institution of church-state separation means that churches have to tout actively for business, often through means that appear crassly commercial to Europeans (megachurches and the like). Because they’ll disappear if they don’t attract adherents, they have good incentive to succeed rather better than their European counterparts in putting bums on seats. Apparently, there is a striking negative correlation between church establishment and church attendance across West European countries. Now this presumably isn’t the only causal factor – but it is an important one – and one which suggests that an apparently gross cultural divergence between the US and Europe is to a large extent rooted in the quite particular institutions governing church-state relations (you could perhaps claim that these institutions are themselves manifestations of broad cultural differences, but this would be to miss out on the quite specific historical reasons why they came into being).

Tyler Cowen asks,

bq. So why *are* women more religious than men? Is it just greater risk-aversion?

According to my colleague Louise Roth, in an article from the current ASR co-authored with Jeff Kroll, the answer to the second question is, “No.” Here’s the abstract:

bq. Scholars of religion have long known that women are more religious than men, but they disagree about the reasons underlying this difference. Risk preference theory suggests that gender gaps in religiosity are a consequence of men’s greater propensity to take risks, and that irreligiosity is analogous to other high-risk behaviors typically associated with young men. Yet, research using risk preference theory has not effectively distinguished those who perceive a risk to irreligiousness from those who do not. In this article, we evaluate risk preference theory. We differentiate those who believe in an afterlife, who perceive a risk to irreligiousness, from nonbelievers who perceive no risk associated with the judgment after death. Using General Social Survey and World Values Survey data, multivariate models test the effects of gender and belief on religiousness. In most religions and nations the gender gap is larger for those who do not believe in an afterlife than for those who do, contradicting the predictions of risk preference theory. The results clearly demonstrate that the risk preference thesis is not a compelling explanation of women’s greater average religiosity.

Russell has a long, and typically thoughtful, piece explaining his attitude both to abortion and to regulation of abortion. A teaser:

I’ve probably called myself “pro-life” in the past, maybe way back when I was in high school or an undergraduate. But I have no specific memory of doing so, and I wouldn’t today. Part of this is, simply, because I’m not the hardline, simplistic, killing-a-fetus-is-murder opponent of abortion that I was raised to be. (Reading The Cider House Rules will do that to a person.) Do I still want to deter abortion, including–but not limited to–limiting abortion rights where I think best? Yes, definitely; the revulsion I feel towards the concept is still there. When I first learned about what an “abortion” was as a child, the mental image in my (ten-year-old, perhaps?) mind was of that of doctor wielding a butcher knife, stabbing a baby within a mother’s womb…and frankly, the straightforward medical facts of what an abortion involves don’t lead me to feel that that disturbing image is in any principled way flawed.

But while I would insist that is both impossible and irresponsible to pretend that such sentiments and feelings either could or should be excluded from political discussions, I also acknowledge that you have to be able to at least provide some reasoned account of the roots and parameters of one’s revulsions for political purposes; standing alone, they provide few details and fewer answers.

Go read it, and comment there.