Multiculturalization or Immigrant Renewal?

Yesterday I heard encouraging reports about the future of Christianity in the Netherlands, and indeed in all the secularizing lands of Europe. A team at the Free University of Amsterdam, led by Hijme Stoffels and Mechteld Jansen, have been studying Christian immigrants in the Netherlands. Most European countries have been very attentive to immigration lately, but primarily from deep anxiety about Muslim immigrant communities. However, the immigrant stream brings hundreds of thousands of Christians, as well. Many of the immigrants are zealous, pious, and eager to share their faith with the people of Europe. One of the organizations we heard about is GATE - The Gift of Africa to Europe. From the immigrants' perspective, they are engaging in "reverse mission."

The research team is faced with the question of what to call the effect of these Christian immigrants from all over the world on Dutch Christianity. They leaned toward "multiculturalization" as a term and concept. Still, they were not satisfied with it. The problem that emerged with this conceptualization is that it doesn't really capture the religious effects. Moreover, multiculturalization seems to me to be a temporary, transitional phenomenon. All churches now existing have multiple cultural roots; most have succeeded in blending them together into a new culture.

The ISSRC did not settle the question of how to think about Christian immigrants in European Christianity. We were left, though, considering the idea of "immigrant renewal." The advantage of this way of looking at the issue is that it puts the religious effect front and center. There are, to be sure, many other cultural effects of the immigrant churches – Mechteld Jansen began her talk on Indonesian Christian immigrants by handing out cloves, a wonderful reminder of one of the most distinctive smells of Indonesian life. But the main effect of mixing two streams of the same faith ought to be in the faith itself. If nothing else, immigrant zeal may enliven the learned practice of the culturally established church.

The old churches of Europe are in a very parlous state. They desperately need renewal. Hundreds of thousands of zealous Christian immigrants are arriving – perhaps just in time – to help renew the faith and practice of the old, if only the European churches will let them.

Immigrant renewal of existing institutions, even more than their introducing new cultures, could be the great silver lining of Europe's demographic globalization.

The Dutch Future

Nearly half of this conference of the International Society for the Study of Reformed Communities considers Dutch and Dutch-American questions. In the opening paper of the conference, George Harinck, of the Free University of Amsterdam, argued that the Netherlands, as a nation composed of minorities, had historically been held together by the strong sub-group loyalties of Dutch people. In the early 20th century Abraham Kuyper, the great Dutch politician and churchman (and something of the patron saint of this society) set in motion the reorganization of Dutch society that, by mid-century, had organized everyone into one religious/ideological pillar or another. The Dutch "nation" was the sum of these pillars. Their national identity was composed of mutually tolerant minorities.

And then the Sixties happened. Television brought everyone awareness of life in the other pillars, and in the non-pillarized world beyond. Individualism as the dominant ideology throughout the West created heroic movements of individuals asserting their identity against the pillar, against the church, school, state, and any other institution that established a group identity. In the headiest days of the revolt, families, too were rejected as too confining. The pillars were dismantled. The welfare state was reconfigured to subsidize individualism.

The problem with this kind of anti-establishment identity, though, is that it becomes hollow when the establishment gets demolished. It is a negative identity, which requires a substantial Other to define itself against. Barring invasion, there is little to make a "Dutch" identity with.

And then the invasion came. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants, in a country of but 16 million, arrived from the Sixties on – arriving exactly as the old identity-making institutions were dissolving. The immigrant communities do have strong identities, sometimes overwhelmingly strong. The groups that have gotten the most attention are Muslim, with their strong sense of faith, and honor, and a restricted place for women. Yet there have also been hundreds of thousands of non-Muslim immigrants, especially Christians from the ghostly remnants of the Dutch colonial empire. They, too, have strong identities and strong institutions.

The United States has a muscular tradition of assimilating immigrants through Americanization. Some of the more relativist elites in this country now shrink from anything so forceful, but most Americans, and most immigrants, do strongly identify with the American dream and the American Project. We still do make Americans out of all the world's people, just as we do with each new generation born here.

There is no parallel tradition of "Dutchification" in the Netherlands. The Dutch Project was defined negatively as the culture that tolerated all groups of Dutch people. What made them Dutch people, though, was just assumed. Harinck argued that devotion to the royal House of Orange, a seeming anachronism to American ears, became one of the few unifying symbols of 20th century Dutch identity. He did not say that there is a concerted effort to "orangize" the new immigrants.

The Netherlands is not America. They are not even on the same scale of comparison. The analogy that occurred to me is that the Netherlands is the Rhode Island of Europe. Rhode Island cherishes its identity as the place where the refugees from the surrounding strong religious cultures could be free. When Quakers were being hanged on Boston Common, they were freely practicing the faith in Rhode Island. Yet Rhode Island, like every other state, became absorbed in the strong and absorbent identity of the United States. True believers in Europe are trying to forge a strong European identity, and it is possible that the residents of the Low Country will become strong Europeans in the future. So far, though, there is not enough to "Europe" to make a real identity, and the Dutch have proven skeptical of the European Union anyway.

The Dutch future is a negative space waiting to be filled by a positive identity. This is a mission opportunity for a revitalized Reformed Church. Or it is an invitation to conquest by a stronger outside identity.

Does Globalization Do Anything Good for Reformed Christianity?

I will be writing for the next few days from the International Society for the Study of Reformed Communities, meeting at Princeton, NJ. My particular contribution is a paper on the Peace, Unity, and Purity Task Force report of the Presbyterian Church. Most of the contributors here, though, are from the Dutch Reformed stream, rather than the Presbyterian stream, of worldwide Calvinism. The general theme of the conference is a consideration of globalization and pluralism in relation to the Reformed churches.

Globalization is an encouraging theme for the church as a whole. Whenever I get mired in the decline of the mainline church in America, or the near disappearance of Christianity in Europe, I am lifted up by the sheer exuberance, and massive growth, of Christianity in the global South. Philip Jenkins makes a forceful case in The Next Christendom that the center of gravity in the church has already shifted south of the equator. Jenkins, an English Catholic working in America, is particularly good on documenting Anglican, Catholic, and Pentecostal growth in the (former) Third World. Reading his book as a Presbyterian, though, I was struck with his near silence on how the Reformed churches were doing. I was, thus, particularly looking forward to this conference.

So far, though, the papers are pretty gloomy. Everyone knows about the huge significance of the Calvinist tradition in shaping the modern world in the first place (thank you, Max Weber). Few of our papers, though, report great vitality in the Reformed churches worldwide today. Globalization, in our consideration thus far, comes as a dissolving, even secularizing force to the Presbyterian and Reformed churches. The most encouraging reports have merely documented ways to slow the Calvinist church's decline in the face of globalization.

Globalization today has been good for heart religions, like Pentecostalism, and those streams of Christianity with a strong place for a religion of feeling. Calvinists, though, are the headiest of Protestants. So far, this current wave of globalization has not played to Reformed strengths.

Is the Virgin Birth Essential?

The Presbyterian Church is faced, once again, with a serious question about what are the essential tenets of Reformed faith and practice. We have always had to decide these questions in examining officers of the church. Lately, though, the question has been on the back burner. The recent adoption of the Peace, Unity, and Purity (PUP) report has, however, moved the question of essential tenets front and center.

The recent Theological Task Force of 2001, which produced the PUP report, was modeled on the Special Commission of 1925, which was also charged with finding a way forward through the endemic conflicts that wracked the church in those days.

The particular conflict that called the Special Commission into being was this question: is belief in the virgin birth of Christ an essential tenet of the Reformed faith? Nearly all Presbyterians in those days took it for granted that it was. To believe otherwise was to undermine the authority of the Bible. Believing in the authority of the Bible was certainly an essential tenet of the Reformed faith.

Two young candidates for ordination, recent graduates of Union Theological Seminary in New York, however, were not convinced of the virgin birth. New York Presbytery, always one of the most liberal in the denomination, was willing to ordain them. A minority protested, and brought their case the General Assembly. When the General Assembly of 1925 created the Special Commission, they handed the virgin birth question, along with others, to the Commission.

The Special Commission held that doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ is indeed true, and obligatory for Presbyterian ministers. They also held, though, that if some potential ministers, who were otherwise sound in the faith, were "insufficiently clear" in their understanding of the doctrine of the virgin birth, a presbytery could legitimately ordain them. The fledgling ministers were obliged to continue to wrestle with the doctrine. The Special Commission, though, understood that an ordination decision is a complex whole, based on all the beliefs, practices, and character of a potential church officer. They affirmed that the church depends on the presbyteries and sessions to make those judgment calls – guided, of course, by the constitution, but not more bound by one particular doctrine than they are by the whole.

The Special Commission report was adopted overwhelmingly.

So here is the standard of judgment that I read from the work of the Special Commission of 1925, and the similar achievement of the Task Force of 2001:

If a candidate for office in the church said "I know the Bible says X, but I by my own judgment don't believe X, and therefore I reject the authority of the Bible," that person should not become a minister, elder, or deacon of the Presbyterian Church.

If, instead, a candidate for office in the church said "I know the Bible says X, but I have not been able to wrap my mind around that idea yet, though I continue to wrestle with it," that person may become a minister, elder, or deacon of the Presbyterian Church if the presbytery or session regards them as called and qualifiable in other respects.

Teasing Boys

A heroic colleague has been Resident Assistant for the soccer camp on campus this week. Wrangling a pack of young teen boys puts him on the front lines of civilization. Each morning has brought new first-hand accounts of primatology. I thought his hilarious account of finding them stripped to their boxers, which they had rolled into thongs, sumo wrestling, would be the best story. I was wrong.

On the last night of camp, the two boys who had been waiting at the curb for the pizza came thundering into the dorm to call all the other guys. Girls! In a car! And one of them FLASHED HER BOOBS!

Instantly, pizza forgotten, the whole horde raced to the street. The girls were gone, but the boys lined the curb, standing on tiptoe, peering up the street, in case the sirens returned. And they did.

The car drifted along the curb. On girl held her hand out, calling to the boys to come and touch her. The line of boys turned into a swarm, each eager for the proffered hand. Each time the boy-mass approached, the driver would scoot the car a little further down the street, teasingly. The swarm followed. This went on for half a block, then the car drove away. A couple of the boys ran after it, until reigned in by the RA.

Did they go inside and laugh about it? Did they turn to the pizza? Did they settle down to discuss Shakespeare? All equally unlikely scenarios.

No, they waited at the curb in case the girls came back. One of those who had been closest to the car noted that it reeked of alcohol. Excitement rose. The RA realized that he had no control over the primal horde. In fact, their brains seemed to be secreting a hormone that blocked out the sound of his voice.

The girls came back a third time. This time they stopped, and one of them started to get out of the car. My colleague realized that the time for intervention had come, before he had a hormone riot on his hands. He firmly suggested to the young ladies that they should move on; the police would be happy to assist them in that resolve, should that be necessary. In one fluid motion, the lead temptress eased back into the car while it sped off.

He sent the boys back to wrestling. And cold showers.

Barak Obama vs. Paris Hilton

Sen. Barak Obama has made another superb speech on the critical role of faith in public life. He rebuked the secular wing of the Democratic Party – his party and mine – for it self-defeating paranoia about faith. He put it more nicely than I did.

Just to give a sample of the speech, he said

But what I am suggesting is this - secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Obama then went on to take a couple of examples of how faithful people, not just Christians, make better public policy when the act on their faith -- fighting AIDS, lifting Third World debt, stopping genocide.

One example surprised me as not usually on the faith-based list. Sen. Obama contends that

And by the way, we need Christians on Capitol Hill, Jews on Capitol Hill and Muslims on Capitol Hill talking about the estate tax. When you've got an estate tax debate that proposes a trillion dollars being taken out of social programs to go to a handful of folks who don't need and weren't even asking for it, you know that we need an injection of morality in our political debate.

I have long thought that the estate tax is a serious moral issue, and a political issue that Democrats can and should win. Yet Republican opponents of the estate tax have been winning the argument – no, not the argument, just the rhetorical competition – through the brilliant trick of always referring to the estate tax as the "death tax." George Lakoff cites this as one of the best examples of how Republicans have been winning the political competition by reframing the terms of the debate, without changing the substance of the debate.

I believe that whenever someone says "end the death tax," Democrats should say "strengthen the Paris Hilton tax." If we really had an estate tax in this country, Paris Hilton would have to look for honest work (and no, porn star doesn't count).

Obama has raised my sights in this debate. The estate tax is not only good for the character of rich kids. It is a just way to fund some social programs for the poor. Starting with Paris.

"Taste is a matchmaker"

So says Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction. The most fruitful idea to come to me so far from our sojourn in Bourdieu's great study is the notion of taste endogamy.

It is well known that people with similar backgrounds are more likely to marry one another. The normal sociological standards for measuring background are rather blunt instruments, though. We run across thousands of people with similar backgrounds who we would not think of marrying. The subtler connector is shared taste. Taste is, certainly, connected with background – that is one of the main points of the book. But taste is also more individual than just a shared class measure. Taste is individual enough to bring two people together.

And then, as Bourdieu notes, we often see "the astonishing harmony of ordinary couples who … progressively match each other by a sort of mutual acculturation." This is, I think, what Max Weber means by "elective affinity." I can testify to this in my own marriage in many ways. My favorite, which is delightful for its sheer mystery, is that my wife and I, having started out with different favorite colors, now have grown to share a passion for yellow. Neither of us could say why this is so, but it does make decorating together easier.

Sociologists are accustomed to measuring similarities of education and occupation between parents and children. What the idea of taste endogamy suggests is that we should be just as interested in comparing parents-in-law and children-in-law. At the least, we should measure similarities in education and occupation between a man and his father-in-law and a woman and her mother-in-law. Deeper than that, though, we should look for similarities of taste within those pairs. If is woman sees a similarity in taste between her father and her potential husband, it would go a long way toward explaining their attraction and marital success.

As Bourdieu observes,

"Two people can give each other no better proof of the affinity of their tastes than the taste they have for each other."

Marriage Education Works

Someday I want to study to alumni of my family life class to see how their marriages turn out. My guess is that they will turn out to have a divorce rate less than half that of the rest of the college. More than a guess, that is an objective. I know that students who take such a class might be more marriage-minded than the average, so they might have a lower divorce rate even if the class itself had no effect. Students tell me, though, that one of the biggest eye-openers for them is to study the many benefits that marriage brings to married people and to society as a whole. In all their prior education, no one had made that case, or even talked about marriage as other than a loss of freedom.

Now Scott Stanley, one of the national leaders in marriage education, and his colleagues have shown that marriage education is likely to reduce the risk of divorce by up to a third. Their article, "Premarital Education, Marital Quality, and Marital Stability: Findings From a Large, Random Household Survey," by Stanley, Paul Amato, Christine Johnson, and Howard Markman, is in the current Journal of Family Psychology. Marriage education means group courses, not premarital counseling for a couple. The marriage education reported in the survey ranges from full courses to two-hour workshops. Many churches offer marriage education, and some require it. Marriage education is a popular topic of adult education, as well. Few of those in the survey were thinking of their college family sociology courses.

Which is a shame. Colleges are full of people who want to be married, and will be married, someday. They are the very people who are most prone to learn from their studies. If every college made marriage education a regular part of the curriculum, and offered it enough to reach all who wanted it, I am sure we would see a significant reduction in the divorce rate – and a rise in the marriage rate, instead of cohabitation – in a decade.

Because marriage education works.

Have a Gruntled Fourth

A thought for Independence Day: married people and their children have the greatest freedom to do what they want, because what they normally want to do is support one another.

Knowledge Class Marriage

I am starting a new project that will occupy me for the next few years, if not decades. I want to compare marriage and family life in the knowledge class versus the corporate class. I will explain what I mean by this over the next series of posts.

We are starting with some of the foundational theory of the knowledge class. This week we are working through Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. For my money Bourdieu was the best French sociologist until his death a few years ago.

Bourdieu says that in looking at the class structure of society we need to examine three components of class for any given group:
1) the volume of capital;
2) the composition of capital; and
3) the trajectory of the class over time.

Volume is what we usually think of as "class" – how much stuff your group has. Composition, though, introduces an important nuance of the different kinds of capital. In addition to economic capital – which is basically how much wealth you have – Bourdieu also looks at cultural capital, made up of the kinds of knowledge and understanding that make for social status. Cultural capital comes from two main sources – what you learn in school, and what you learn at home.

The great advantage that people from higher classes have is not only that they start with money. Just as important, they learn the kinds of high culture most esteemed in society by growing up with it. Smart poor kids can learn school culture in school, but it is harder to pick up these more subtle kinds of family-based culture, of taste, of distinction, on your own. It can be done, but it is harder. It is particularly difficult to learn extra-curricular culture because people from low-status families don't even know it exists, and people from high-status families don't know that they are passing on to their kids a kind of capital just by their lifestyle.

Bourdieu was, therefore, concerned with the effects of families in transmitting capital. He did not, though, give much attention to exactly how families produced these effects, nor to what difference different approaches to marriage and children would make for transmitting cultural capital.

It has become more obvious in the generation since Distinction was written that the knowledge class is the class most likely to never marry, or to never have children. The cultural capital that knowledge class individuals accumulate is more likely to die with them than is other kinds of capital, or in other classes.

A class will only pass on its capital to the next generation if it has a next generation. One hypothesis that we are exploring is that knowledge class life makes it less likely that you will produce a next generation.

More Candor on PUP, Please

The Office of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) released an FAQ on what it means now that the church has adopted the Peace, Unity, and Purity task force's report. On most questions, and in the other FAQs that they released after the General Assembly, the OGA has been candid and straightforward. On the controversial question of ordaining unrepentant homosexuals, however, my friends at the OGA tried to soften their answer with slipperiness. I think this will backfire.

Here is the Q and A:

Will gays and lesbians now be ordained?

Presbyteries and sessions have been reminded of their historical responsibility to examine candidates for ordination and decide, on a case-by-case basis, about a person’s qualifications for ministry. The constitutional standard in the Book of Order (G-6.0106b) requiring “fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman” or “chastity in singleness” remains in place.

Each governing body will be required to decide if a departure from a standard of faith or practice represents a violation of an “essential” of the faith. Governing bodies have been encouraged to strive to honor one another’s ordination decisions. Still, these decisions continue to be subject to review by higher governing bodies.

Sigh.

What the OGA says here is absolutely true. It is important. But it is clearly an inadequate answer to the question they themselves posed.

So as a public service, let me insert a couple of new paragraphs to this answer, keeping the rest of the answer the OGA gave after that.

Will gays and lesbians now be ordained?

YES. Gays and lesbians – men and women with a homosexual orientation – have always been ordained in the Presbyterian Church. That will not change under the new Authoritative Interpretation. Some ministers do engage in sexual practices, both heterosexual and homosexual, which the confessions call sin and which the Book of Order forbids as unchaste. That has always been true in the Presbyterian Church, and will likely continue. These sins are cause for repentance and seeking God's grace.

Some would-be officers of the church have declared a scruple about the constitutional requirement that all officers live in “fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman” or “chastity in singleness.” This scruple has been declared by people of all sexual orientations. It is the duty and responsibility of the ordaining and examining body to decide whether such a scruple touches an essential tenet of Reformed faith and practice. If the ordaining and examining body's decision were challenged, it would be the duty and responsibility of the higher governing bodies to review that decision to see if the lower body acted correctly. That review includes both the substance and the procedure of the lower body's decision. Whether a scruple is acceptable or not has nothing do to with the sexual orientation or practice of the would-be officer.

I would be inclined to add a further sentence, though this might seem to the OGA to be overstepping its bounds:

The words of the Book of Order in G 6.0106b are clear. It is difficult to see how an ordaining and examining body, or any higher body reviewing the decision of a lower one, could decide that rejecting G 6.0106b was a legitimate scruple.

Three Mochas

Yesterday I had a rich range of experience in New York, shaped by three symbolic mochas.

The first came from a Starbucks on Broadway at the head of Wall Street. The long line of people in suits (ok, besides me) was handled with brisk competence by the young baristas, who would face hours of serving the fuel of commerce. Venti, no whipped [cream]. To go, of course.

The second came at the end of the day at Ninth Street Espresso. When the workshop ended I hoofed it to the eastern edge of Greenwich Village, where Ninth Street meets Avenue C, to get to what was reputed to be the best-made espresso in town. I got there just as the owners were starting to close. They did not, shall we say, pour on the charm, but then New York has different charm standards than Kentucky to begin with. But they did make one superb mocha. I enjoyed it while watching the East Village street scene unfold on a summer's Friday evening.

The third came from the Café Orlin, a storied literary hangout on St. Mark's Place in Greenwich Village proper. The mocha came as dessert after a fine dinner, which I began much later than is customary in Kentucky, but was clearly early for the New York crowd. I nursed it through a couple of hours, while reading Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction. All around me were conversations about the book's very subject, the making of cultural distinctions as a tool of class struggle. The waitstaff, a cosmopolitan group, were curious about the book from its title, and the fact that I sat amidst their busy swirl with it for hours. They wrote down the reference, to read later. I went to the hotel, and was abed by midnight.

And so home.

Posse Marriages?

E. Digby Baltzell, the late sociologist of the WASP Establishment and a personal influence on my thinking, said that the crucial difference between the elite and the establishment (or an aristocracy in the true sense of that word) is that an elite is made of individuals, but an establishment is made of families. In well-functioning societies, the leadership class continuously replenishes itself and the leadership of society by absorbing rising individuals from the various power pyramids of society. The danger that the establishment always faces is that it will become a closed caste. It is easier and more comfortable for established ruling families to only marry their own kind. But a closed caste is bad for society. The talented individuals from outsider groups are excluded from power and status, the establishment becomes rigid and then sclerotic, and society's leadership class falls to fighting with itself.

I see in the work of the Posse Foundation, which I wrote about yesterday, a powerful lubricant for diversifying the leadership class by the very mechanism Baltzell identifies. Promising individuals, usually from outsider groups, are educated together with the children of the establishment. The Posse schools are, for the most part, elite liberal arts colleges. The Posse scholars are standout young people from families outside – often way outside – the establishment, usually from a different region of the country. Centre College, for example, has long mixed the children of the already powerful with outstanding kids from the sticks, the hollers, and the working classes of Kentucky and surrounding states. Now to this mix we will add some very promising young people from Boston.

I have no data on Posse marriages, and it is not the sort of thing the Foundation would collect. I believe, though, that one of the long-term effects of the Posse program will be to diversify the families that run America, as a by-product of diversifying elite colleges.

The Posse Foundation is Reshaping the Leadership Class, One Campus at a Time

I am in New York for "mentor boot camp" for the Posse Foundation. Posse is a scholarship program for kids from urban public schools with great leadership skills who nonetheless might be overlooked by traditional college admissions methods.

Posse matches specific colleges with specific cities. The foundation staff in that city solicit nominations from school counselors and hundreds of community groups, which yields thousands of leadership kids. The foundation and the college do the very labor-intensive work of winnowing those thousands down to a group of ten young people. The kids are committed to that school and the school is committed to those kids.

The genius of the Posse Foundation is that it then takes those kids and spends the eight months before the academic year begins molding them into an intensely committed support group – a posse. (As the foundation now says, that term may have seemed cooler when they thought it up in the late '80s).

The posse is paired with a mentor, who will meet with them as a group each week, and with each of them individually each fortnight, during their first two years of college. I have the privilege of being mentor to Centre Posse 1. They will be followed each year by Centre Posses 2, 3, and 4, and, if all goes well, many more.

What the college gives is a full-tuition scholarship to each student in the posse and a commitment to stick with them to graduation. What the college gets is a diverse group of students who roughly match the ethnic profile of their home city. However, Posse is not a minority scholarship or a need-based scholarship. The aim is to get overlooked leaders. Nearly all the colleges are liberal arts schools far from the Posse cities. In our case, the distance, physically and culturally, is from Kentucky to Boston. What the posse-ness of the posse assures is that they will support one another through the culture shock and normal academic and social difficulties of going to a tough school far from home.

Posse has a graduation rate about 90% -- higher than the graduation rate of all but a handful of colleges in America.

Posse also has the support of some of the central Establishment corporations in America. The national office, where the "boot camp" is held is at an iconic Wall Street address, on a floor shared with Morgan Stanley. Ten percent of the 400 Posse alumni work for Lehman Brothers, almost all of them having proven themselves in summer internships while in college. These leading corporations, and professional firms and non-profits, know that the Posse Foundation system, hugely expensive and intensive though it is, is about the only way to truly diversify the leadership class of America.

Posse mobilizes two powerful forces – peer pressure and institutional self-interest – to do a great and necessary thing for the future of America.

Harvard's Hissy Fit Costs Them $115 Million

Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle and one of the richest men in the world, was going to give Harvard $115 to establish the Ellison Institute for World Health. He had worked out the idea with Harvard president Larry Summers some months ago. But Summers was forced to resign earlier this year. He had made some enemies within the university by trying to change its culture – which is, in fairness, what he was hired to do. No doubt inside politics was a significant factor in his resignation.

The public side of Summers' resignation, though, was the fallout from his speculation that one of the reasons that women did not make up half the science and engineering departments at the top research universities was that at the highest level of ability, there were probably more men than women to begin with. This is, as I have argued before, a testable claim. Moreover, the people who have tested it think it is true.

Nonetheless, many at Harvard and environs had a hissy fit, including a number of alleged elite scientists who one might have thought would be interested in testing an empirical claim before they drew a conclusion. The controversy crippled Harvard's efforts to understand the problem, and crippled Summers' ability to do his job. In February, he resigned.

And today the other shoe dropped. Ellison withdrew the offered gift, which would have been the largest single gift Harvard ever received. No commitment to scientific investigation of testable but politically incorrect hypotheses means no new scientific research center from Larry Ellison. Maybe Utah resident Ellison would find Brigham Young more committed to science?

Suits and Seniors Dance

In our summer study group we were considering Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's Why There Are No Good Men Left. She looks at the rising age of marriage for college-educated men and women, and concludes that they are waiting so long after college to look for mates that their college connections get cold. As I often tell students, college is the best marriage market they will ever be in. I encourage them not to waste it.

The problem, as a recently graduated woman in the group noted, is that the men are not ready to get serious about marriage in college, even though most of the women are. Men usually start to get more serious a couple of years out of school, but this does the mature college women no good.

Until now.

We came up with a wonderful idea: a Homecoming dance that would pair senior women with men a couple of years out of college. The guys would have spent those couple of years working and supporting themselves. They would know how to get up in the morning, clean and feed themselves, stick to a task, not destroy themselves on weekends, pay the bills, and start thinking a little about the future with a longer time horizon. And they would start to notice that living alone is kind of lonely. They would finally be as mature as the women were in college.

Thus, the Suits and Seniors Dance.

The women would benefit from more mature men. The men would benefit from smart women. They would still have the advantage of the college marriage market, without the disadvantage of all living within the college bubble. Real-world courtship could begin.

My wife immediately saw another consequence of regularly mixing the senior women with graduates: it would raise the bar for the senior men. Nothing gets a set of men to shape up faster than competition from another group of men for the attention of women. Besuited young men with serious intentions would be stiff competition, indeed, for scruffy college boys who still put off thinking about family until a vague tomorrow.

Shoot, just threatening to organize such a dance might get some of the college men off the dime.

"Brokeback Mountain" is a Great Movie About Two Men

Ang Lee has made a superb, spare Western. The two stars, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, did a fine job – Ledger, in particular, deserves every award they give for his Ennis Del Mar. The rest of the cast was excellent, and excellently chosen. The filming – sets, locations, cinematography – are what Lee does best.

There has, of course, been some controversy about a "gay cowboy" movie. Part of the motivation for the movie was, no doubt, to take the iconic man's man figure of the cowboy and queer it, including a Matthew Shepard-like twist. Beyond the high concept, though, is still a story of two realistic men, who go beyond the rough sociological categories that we all need to use most of the time.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago on Michelle Wolkomir's interesting book Be Not Deceived: The Sacred and Sexual Struggles of Gay and Ex-Gay Christian Men. Wolkomir reported that the key factor for most of the ex-gay men in the study was that they loved their wives and wanted to keep the vows they had made to their wives and to God. The gay Christians, on the other hand, had decided that their sexual orientation made their marriages impossible, and therefore were working on reconciling a homosexual identity with conservative Christianity.

Applying this helpful distinction to the two well-realized men in "Brokeback Mountain," I reached this conclusion: Jack was gay; Ennis was not. Jack was always attracted to men, and never stopped seeking men, Ennis among them. Ennis, on the other hand, did love his wife and daughters, and wanted to be with them. He also loved Jack. Not men in general, just Jack. He did not reconcile his two loves, and there really was no way he could. This is what makes the film a tragedy.

But "Brokeback Mountain" is not simply a movie about "gay cowboys." It is a tragedy about two men, one of whom is gay.

Overall, GA 2006 Was a Centrist Assembly

From the Moderator's election to the final "amen," the Presbyterian General Assembly of 2006 was largely a triumph for the loyalist center.

I know that publicly some conservatives are saying the Assembly broke trust with Presbyterianism, and the newspapers claim that now congregations can ordain gay ministers if they wish. And I am sure that privately some liberals are lamenting that they didn't get "chastity and fidelity" out of the constitution and God the Mother in. But, overall, I would say that the center of the church rose to the occasion of both kinds of challenges and chose a path that would best preserve the Presbyterian Church.

All of the moderator candidates ran as centrists, and the winner, our Moderator Joan Gray, is an ambivalent conservative who stands on the constitution. That might be a summary of where most Presbyterians stand.

The traditional language of the Trinity was affirmed, and the Assembly made it mandatory in baptism.

The Assembly overwhelmingly turned back an attempt to take G 6.0106b, the chastity and fidelity provision, out of the constitution.

The GA came out for the birth of all viable babies, and promoted material as well as pastoral support for them and their mothers.

The GA came out against torture and suicide bombing (I am surprised that there were any negative votes on this one, but at least the center clearly held).

The church corrected an imbalanced critique of businesses supporting violence and oppression in Israel and Palestine.

Most importantly, the General Assembly adopted the Peace, Unity, and Purity report. This means that we should all trust the locals more to apply the constitution – without changing the constitution. The ban on unrepentant homosexual practitioners is still there, along with the ban on unrepentant adulterers and usurers and all the other kinds of sinners named by the confessions. And where the original report was unclear that the higher governing bodies could review both the procedure and the substance of ordination examinations, the Assembly fixed the language.

The sound constitution of the church was preserved and strengthened by the 2006 General Assembly meeting in Birmingham. Now we need to apply it.

A Blogger's Delight: Meeting Other Bloggers

An unexpected benefit of the General Assembly for me was meeting other Presbyterian bloggers whose work I had been reading.

Along the edge of each meeting room sprang up an informal "laptop row" as we congregated around the electrical outlets. The Office of the General Assembly had thoughtfully placed a set of power strips among the end seats. This made for a mutually helpful community among the compulsive typists – as well as some strange ideological bedfellows.

There was not an internet connection in the convention center, though there was an intranet to LES, the Assembly's business tracking system. This was a good idea, as there would no doubt have been a great deal of distracting emailing going back and forth across committee rooms and even the assembly hall itself otherwise. There was wifi across the street at the Sheraton, though, so at every break a troop of laptoppers would head over to the hotel lobby.

At once such email-checking break I was sitting in lobby when one of the advocacy group leaders came by with another fellow in tow. I started bantering with the group leader, who mentioned to the stranger that I was blogging the Assembly. The following dialogue ensued, beginning with the other guy.

"I am blogging the Assembly, too."
"Oh great – who are you?"
"Eagle and Child, glad to meet you." [Hand extended.]
"Gruntled Center." [Handshake returned with a smile.]
"You're Gruntled Center? I have been following your stuff!"

We then settled in to talk for an hour, which led to pulling out laptops and emailing stuff to one another as we talked.

I met several other bloggers in the course of the Assembly – in the hotel lobby, sitting in front of me in church, even sitting next to me in Assembly meetings writing the next day's blog. We did not all agree, certainly, but we did form a noticeable community – one that had some impact on the course of the Assembly and, I hope, future church discussions.

Eagle and Child, by the way, is a fine blog, part of the Presbyterian Bloggers Ring listed at the bottom of my blogroll. I commend that site, and ring, to all.

Schism is Wrong

The normal state of the church is a competition of the left and right for the loyalist center. Sometimes that competition breaks down, and one side or the other talks about splitting the church. When the Presbyterian Church recovered from one of these schisms, the Old Side/New Side split of the early 18th century, it wisely adopted the standard for dissent that we have to this day. The standard of 1758 reads:

That when any matter is determined by a major vote, every member shall either actively concur with, or passively submit to, such determination; or if his conscience permit him to do neither, he shall, after sufficient liberty modestly to reason and remonstrate, peaceably withdraw from our communion without attempting to make any schism. Provided always, that this shall be understood to extend only to such determinations as the body shall judge indispensable in doctrine and Presbyterian government.

In the months ahead, there will be calls for schism, some in anger, some under the name of "gracious separation." Our polity does not allow for either, and our officers have vowed to uphold the standard of modest remonstration and, if necessary, peaceable withdrawal.

I do firmly believe that the church can return to civil competition under the PUP standard, which is our good old Adopting Act standard. But if some of our brothers and sisters, of the left and the right, feel it necessary to leave, let them do so in the decent and orderly way that our church has wisely upheld for a quarter millennium.

Loyalists, Step Up: Volunteer for Examination Committees

Now that the Peace, Unity, and Purity report has passed, the burden shifts to sessions and presbyteries to really examine – and re-examine – officers of the church. Too often we let these examinations become perfunctory. We get to know someone as a decent person and an active member of the congregation, and let that substitute for a serious judgment of whether they are really suited to be a Ruling Elder of the church. When it comes to potential ministers in our presbytery, we are more likely to rely on their seminary credential to assure us that a candidate would be a sound minister.

Now that the application of national standards has been returned to the local ordaining and examining bodies, those of us who live and pray in those local congregations and presbyteries must do our part to make those national standards real. PUP can help promote the peace and unity of the church at the national level. But this will only work if we have the will to promote purity at the local level.

Seriously examining someone else's vocation face to face is a very hard thing to do. It is much easier for the perennial critics in the church to attack other people from a distance. Loyalists, though, are loyal to their actual local church.

Therefore, loyalists need to take up the burden of judgment and discrimination, in the highest sense of those terms, in order for there to be purity, unity, and, in the long run, peace in the church.

PUP Passes – Let the Local Application Begin

The Report of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church was debated by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) last night. After a serious, civil debate, the report passed, 57% to 43%.

The debate was all about conservative attempts to prevent the Authoritative Interpretation from taking effect. There were no liberal efforts to stop the two-year moratorium on amending the constitution. Indeed, an overture to delete the chastity and fidelity provision of the constitution was rejected later in the evening by 81% of the Assembly.

By my reading, the PUP report marks a return to the great centrist principle of the Adopting Act of 1729. This is the standard the church has returned to again and again after major conflicts. The Adopting Act requires all officers to subscribe to the church's standards, explaining any "scruples" they might have about particular parts of the constitution. If the ordaining body judges that those scruples do not touch essential matters, then the officer is ok. This judgment by the locals is subject to review by the higher bodies. But everyone is better off if, in the words of the PUP report, all parts of the church "outdo one another in honoring" the judgments of the other parts of the church. The Authoritative Interpretation says that the church does not have to change its constitution to adopt this standard of judgment, because it has been there in the constitution all along.

The PUP report says that it will promote "local application" of national standards. Opponents say that the AI will lead to "local option" or, in more heated moments, "local license," in which the locals will simply make up their own standards.

I believe that the PUP report is a centrist measure. Restoring the Adopting Act rule will take a little doing – we don’t have one confession any more, and we don't have the same track record about how scrupling applies to the rules of order as it does to the confession of faith. Nonetheless, I am hopeful that the effect of the PUP report will be to promote the peace of the church.

To do that, though, we need to have the locals apply the national standards justly. Nearly all presbyteries and sessions will be just and honorable. A few, though, have already demonstrated their determination to simply defy the constitution and the rest of the church. Most of this open defiance has been on the left, especially about gay ordination. A few conservative congregations, though, have long resisted ordaining women, in defiance of the very clear standards of the church. And one or two conservative presbyteries have come close to threatening defiance if the PUP report were adopted.

To make local application work, the national church will have to clearly discipline defiance on the right and the left. It will only take a few judicial cases, or a few public rebukes, and maybe a few firings. The church as a whole can only trust that the standards are really standards if they are enforced in egregious cases. They have the rules – all the church leaders need is the will.

Misstep on the Minority Report

The opponents of the PUP report have made a mistake, I think, in the minority report from the Ecclesiology Committee. In the committee, there was a long debate over deleting recommendation 5, the Authoritative Interpretation.

That failed, 23-37.

They then tried to have 5 and 6 (the moratorium on changing the existing constitution) sent to the presbyteries for comment before final action by the General Assembly.

That failed 26-38.

The conclusion I would draw from this vote, and the debate that preceded it, was that there was more support for getting systematic input from the presbyteries on the two core ideas of the Peace, Unity, and Purity report than there is for killing the Authoritative Interpretation outright.

Instead, the report's opponents went for the whole victory the first time. The minority report reads, in its entirety:

In place of Item 06-01, Recommendations 5, 6, and 7, we move the following recommendations:

1. That Item 06-01, Recommendation 5, be disapproved.

2. That Item 06-01, Recommendations 6 and 7 be approved.

The minority report was filed by 17 commissioners and youth advisory delegates.

I have no doubt that the minority report will fail in this morning's debate. The minority may then try to send 5 and 6 to the presbyteries for comment. If this is proposed after they tried to kill 5 altogether, I think the Assembly is less likely to consider the proposal on its merits, and more likely to see it merely a delaying tactic.

I believe PUP will pass this morning.

The Center is Holding

On the first day of committee work at the Presbyterian General Assembly, they rejected an attempt to make the definition of marriage more restrictive or to oppose government recognition of gay unions. That set a limit on the right side.

On the second day of committee work, they rejected an attempt to undo the rule that officers of the church must be chaste in singleness or faithful in marriage (of one man and one woman, in case anyone were confused). That set a limit on the left side.

Last night the Ecclesiology Committee finally approved the Peace, Unity, and Purity report, 41 to 22. They had made a couple of minor changes, but basically passed it as the Task Force wrote it. The one real addition that the committee made to the report strengthens its centrist character. Listening to the hours of debate, what struck me as the weakest point of the report was the language about judicial review. The relevant section of recommendation 5 reads:

Ordaining and installing bodies, acting as corporate expressions of the church, have the responsibility to determine their membership by applying these standards to those elected to office. These determinations include:

d. Whether the ordaining/installing body has conducted its examination reasonably, responsibly, prayerfully, and deliberately in deciding to ordain a candidate for church office is subject to review by higher governing bodies.

This last point has disturbed some people, who read section d as limiting judicial review of local decisions to the process that the locals used, but not the substance of the decision. If, for example, a presbytery ordained an atheist, the General Assembly's Permanent Judicial Commission (the "supreme court") could only look at whether the presbytery used proper process, but not stop the ordination because the candidate was an atheist.

The Task Force, and the representative of the church's Advisory Committee on the Constitution, were repeatedly questioned on this point. In their reading, "reasonably" and "responsibly" covers the substance, as well as the process, of an examination. The ACC representative said that this language was taken from judicial decisions of the church courts, which have already interpreted this standard to include substantive judicial review.

Nonetheless, the plain words do invite misunderstanding, at least. So the Ecclesiology Committee amended section d. It now reads:

d. Whether the examination complies with the Constitution of the PCUSA, and whether the ordaining/installing body has conducted its examination reasonably, responsibly, prayerfully, and deliberately in deciding to ordain a candidate for church office is subject to review by higher governing bodies.

Three committee actions, all strengthening the loyalist understanding of how the church should work.

Let the plenary begin.

You Heard it Here: PUP Will Pass

At 5:10 p.m. yesterday, Birmingham time, the Ecclesiology Committee of the Presbyterian General Assembly took its first vote on the most disputed section of the Peace, Unity, and Purity report, and the report survived.

The most contested recommendation of the PUP report is #5, the Authoritative Interpretation of the Constitution. The AI proposes to revive the church's custom, dating from the Adopting Act of 1729, of trusting the local governing bodies to make sure that church officers stay within the essential tenets and practices of the Reformed faith. The higher governing bodies can still review the decisions of the lower ones. Unless the locals screw up royally or utterly defy the constitution, the higher bodies will defer to the locals. The locals, after all, know the candidate best, and have to live with him or her.

Conservatives have opposed 5 from the outset. They think it would mean that national standards will not be binding, but will only be suggestions. They disagree with the Task Force that the AI would allow judicial review on the substance, as well as the process, of decisions made by lower governing bodies. Several overtures to the Assembly called for deleting 5, and the overture advocates spoke to the committee in support of this position.

When the committee got to the consideration of recommendation 5 on Saturday afternoon, a member proposed deleting the AI altogether. And the competition was on. The committee spoke, civilly, for hours. Nearly every member of the group spoke, some of them several times. Finally, the vote came.

The motion to delete 5 failed, 23 –37.

The committee continued to debate into the night. A substitute motion, which would have gutted 5, was also proposed, and the long process of considering it, instead of the main motion to pass the rest of the Task Force report, dragged on into the night. Votes on various amendments showed the same split, with roughly a third opposed to the core of the report, and the other two thirds ready to pass it.

At 10:25 p.m. approval of the whole PUP report, with only a few changes, was in sight. However, the last busses back to the hotels were about to leave, and they were exhausted. They recessed, to resume this afternoon.

I believe the writing is on the wall. The Ecclesiology Committee will pass the PUP report by a vote of about 2 – 1. It appears that the conservatives will file a minority report. Both reports will go to the whole Assembly tomorrow. Nothing is certain, of course, but if the whole Assembly is like the committee, I think they will also pass the Peace, Unity, and Purity Task Force report by at least a 2 – 1 margin.

Every Presbytery is Purple

On any given vote, each presbytery comes out red or blue. Within each presbytery, though, all shades of opinion are represented. Every presbytery, in each part of the country, has a dissenting minority. The whole presbytery is well served by being civil in their disagreements. Civility is a virtue in itself. And in the good American tradition of understanding that our self-interest is best served by helping society, smart competitors realize that today's victorious majority can become tomorrow's dissenting minority.

The Ecclesiology committee considered the PUP report all day Friday. The most hopeful word came from people in divided presbyteries who reported that their arguments became more civil and less hurtful after they adopted some of the discernment, consensus, and simple listening methods that Task Force members had brought to them.

San Francisco is one the most liberal presbyteries, especially on the homosexual ordination issue, yet that body has a strong conservative minority which threatens to bolt. Cincinnati Presbytery, on the other hand, had a well-known case in the church of a dissident liberal congregation that had to be disciplined by the presbytery for defying the constitution. Both were places where feelings were running high. In both cases, people who were strong partisans on the contested issues nonetheless came to thank the Task Force for helping them stay together and argue more civilly.

There do, of course, need to be serious limits to dissent and opposition on both sides. But a broad middle that is committed to staying together in order to perpetually compete is the only viable future for the denomination.

The whole church is purple, and is going to stay that way.

Who Won the Moderator's Race? Centrism

Last night the General Assembly elected a new Moderator for the Presbyterian Church (USA). This is usually an exciting and well-attended event. The Birmingham convention center was packed through the hours of speeches and Q & A. The event did not disappoint, either – the candidates were evenly matched, and the election really did turn on the answers the candidates gave to questions from ordinary voters. This was a fine moment for democracy.

Moderator candidates are nominated by their presbyteries months before the GA. These days they have low-key campaigns, too – standing in front of booths, naming vice-moderator running mates, handing out sticker, tee-shirts, and, in the case of one candidate this year, cookies. The pattern in recent years has been to have three candidates, one clearly liberal, one clearly conservative, and the third aiming for the middle.

This year, there were four candidates. On paper, one might read Deborah Block as the liberal – a pastor from Milwaukee Presbytery, a board member of the liberal umbrella group the Covenant Network. Likewise, Tim Halverson looked like the main conservative – pastor of a Florida megachurch, father of seven kids. Joan Gray, an Atlanta interim minister and the author of a well-known polity book, would therefore be left with the center. The wild card was Kerry Carson. He is the pastor of a little church in Iowa.

Yet all of them ran as centrists. Block's pitch was as a sensitive bridge builder. Carson, as a pastoral uniter. Gray? A healing leader. Tim Halverson, in his published platform, said "in a left-right world, we have forgotten the center." In his speech he even said that if elected he would "lead from the center" – very gratifying to this author.

Each candidate was given a nominating speech, then had five minutes to make a pitch to the commissioners. Then followed an hour of questions from the commissioners and advisory delegates. These ran mostly in familiar channels. My summary notes of the questions mostly needed only a word or two to identify which particular chestnut we were dealing with -- Youth? Multiculti? Jesus the way? Gay ordination? Church's greatest challenge? Reconciliation after GA? Favorite Scripture for hope? Global South evangelizing us? PUP recommendation 5? Church in 5 years?

The decisive question, in my view, was bluntly put by a youth delegate: do you favor the ordination of practicing homosexuals? Block said yes, Carson said no. Halverson said no, but said he dreamed of a day when the church would judge officers by the content of their characters, not their sexual orientation. Joan Gray gave one of the few unexpected answers of the night: she respects gays and lesbians who want to serve, but that she had "not been able to get my mind around the idea that homosexuality is God's intention." The Moderator, she went on, is an officer of church, and stands on the constitution. As Moderator, she would fully support the constitution, and would only consider changing her position if the Holy Spirit moved the church as a whole to change the constitution.

In my opinion, Joan Gray ultimately won election with that answer.

The voting itself was fascinating. Here are the percentages won by each candidate on the first, second, and third ballots:

Block..........28.....32.....31
Carson........22.....14.......4
Gray...........28.....41.....62
Halverson.22......14.......4

The center of the church has spoken. Centrism won.

The National Church Sets Standards; the Local Governing Body Applies Them to Individuals

The national Presbyterian Church sets standards for the whole denomination. It is local presbyteries, though, which examine and ordain ministers, and even more local sessions (congregational governors) which examine and ordain elders. The locals apply the national standards to individuals. But every individual is a mixture of virtues and vices. No one meets all the national standards perfectly, so every ordination involves judgment about whether a particular person's quirks, even defects, touch any essential tenet of the Reformed faith.

The national standards are not themselves essential tenets. Depending on the locals to rightly sort out how closely the church's officers fit within the essential tenets – without specifying for all times and places what those tenets are – is part of the genius of the American Presbyterian system.

Some people want the national church to define the essential tenets. The church could do this, but it is a long and complicated process. Thus far, in its three centuries in America, the Presbyterian Church has not thought that defining essential tenets was a good idea. It is clear that no one part of the church could define these national standards by itself.

Faced with these obstacles to defining national essential tenets, some people want to do the same thing at the local level. They want presbyteries to draw up lists of essential tenets that they, at least, will use in examining candidates for office.

And this brings us to the interesting point that the first day of discussion of the Peace, Unity, and Purity Task Force report brought out: the locals cannot define local standards of what are the essential tenets. Only the national church can set categorical standards that apply to everyone. The local church must examine each case on its own merit, in relation to those national standards.

"No Torture" is Good Stewardship

I have often written about stewardship of society as one of the central virtues of Presbyterians. A fine example of this is the new ad, being placed in papers all over the country, against torture. The ad has been signed by a wide range of religious leaders, from Jimmy Carter on down. The text was drafted by George Hunsinger, a Presbyterian and a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. The ad reads, in part:

Torture violates the basic dignity of the human person that all religions, in their highest ideals, hold dear. It degrades everyone involved - policy-makers, perpetrators and victims. It contradicts our nation's most cherished ideals. Any policies that permit torture and inhumane treatment are shocking and morally intolerable.

Nothing less is at stake in the torture abuse crisis than the soul of our nation. What does it signify if torture is condemned in word but allowed in deed? Let America abolish torture now - without exceptions.

Good going, George and the other signers. Good stewardship.

Trust the Locals, But Verify

The Presbyterian Church is a middle polity. The main seat of authority is not the local congregation, nor the top of the hierarchy. The presbytery is the main decision making body. It is made up of clergy and elder representatives of the congregations. The presbyteries send clergy and elder representatives to the higher bodies, including to the national General Assembly. The Presbyterian Church is organized like the federal system of the United States (though I think the influence runs more the other way).

Ministers are examined, ordained, and belong to a presbytery. The rest of the church trusts the presbyteries to examine and choose well. BUT, the higher bodies can review the decisions of the presbytery, including ordination decisions.

How much to trust the locals is the core issue in the debate over the Peace, Unity, and Purity Task Force report at the General Assembly. The shorthand is that the debate is over "local option." This is not quite right. Here is a way to think about the alternatives before the church:

1) Local option: local governing bodies are allowed to set their own standards
2) Local application: local governing bodies apply the national standards
3) Local license: local governing bodies may overlook violations of the standards

I believe that what the broad middle of the church wants is the second option, local application. Local application is what the Task Force calls for. The Task Force does call on the church to trust the locals. Indeed, they call on all units of the church to outdo one another in trusting one another. Still, the Task Force, and common sense, clearly tell us that the central church sometimes just has to review that decisions of the locals and, if necessary, reign them in.

Local application of national standards is the traditional Presbyterian way to have peace and unity in a varied national church. And in those rare cases when the locals go off the rails, the national church, reluctantly but firmly, acts to bring them back into line.

The Big Picture of the Presbyterian Church (USA)

For most of the next two weeks I will be an observer at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA). My particular task will be to follow the ups and downs of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. I have written about this report on a number of Sundays so far. For the next two weeks, the PC (USA) will fill the weekdays of this blog, as well.

Today I want outline what I think are three fundamental starting points in considering the Big Picture of the mainline Presbyterian Church.

1) The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) must be a biblical church.
We should read the Bible richly and with some sophistication, but we should never let that sophistication lead us to reject the Bible because it is culturally inconvenient. Some churches rest more on the church's tradition of reasoning about the faith, while other churches depend more on the continuing witness of the Holy Spirit. I think that the whole ecology of the capital-C Church depends on having all of them, in spirited competition with one another. But the Presbyterian Church must aim to act biblically in order to be true to our essence.

2) The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) must be a responsible steward of society.
Responsibility is built into our DNA. We do not have the option of sectarian withdrawal from society. We do not even have the option of being just decent ordinary folks, while someone else takes care of social order. The Presbyterian Church, and even more so individual Presbyterians, can't stand aside from the major cultural issues of society. We have to avoid pride as a deadly sin, and avoid hubris as a ridiculous foible. But the Presbyterian Church must aim to act responsibly in order to be true to our essence.

3) The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) must be a respectful competitor in a free society.
While we are trying to be responsible biblical stewards of society we know that other churches and other citizens who are not churched at all have an equal right and responsibility to try to shape society. We are competing to convince other free citizens, not to coerce even if we could. The Presbyterian Church must be especially careful in its relation to the civil government, to avoid improperly using or being used by government power. But the Presbyterian Church must aim to act competitively in order to be true to our essence.

Trust and Consequences

The Presbyterian Church (USA)'s General Assembly begins later this week, and yours truly will be enjoying every minute of it, no doubt, in lovely Birmingham. My job will be to follow the ins and outs of the debate over the final report of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. I will keep you posted about the PUP report.

The main proposal of the report is that Presbyterians, at all our many institutional levels and forms, need to outdo one another in honoring each other's decisions. To be sure, there are still checks and balances. But the main thrust of the report is that we should trust one another more to make just decisions for the church. If one presbytery says that someone is good to ordain as a minister, then the other presbyteries should try mightily to believe that they are right.

I fully support this proposal.

However, the church, like any other human institution, needs to enforce its own rules sometimes, or all that trust will erode. Nearly all the time, in nearly every case, presbyteries do make good decisions in who they ordain and how they judge their officers' subsequent actions. But in those rare cases when a potential officer, or even an already ordained one, openly defies the rules of the church in order to defy them, then the church has to try 'em and toss 'em.

The worst instance of this kind of defiance is the case of Jane Spahr, lesbian evangelist, who finally got someone to try her for conducting same-sex marriages. As she well knows, Presbyterian ministers may not perform same-sex marriages. She opposes that rule, and has been breaking it publicly in order to get a trial. But it is not Spahr's defiance that is the real problem. The real problem is that, by a 6 –1 vote, the judicial commission of Redwoods Presbytery ruled that Spahr did nothing wrong in openly violating clear church rules.

Redwoods Presbytery as a whole has responded to this breach of trust by its own judicial commission by appealing the decision to the synod, which in turn will no doubt be appealed to the General Assembly's judicial commission. The worry here is that the church's top court will evade the open defiance of church rules on a technicality. In this case, that would be very bad. The church is a voluntary institution. No one has to belong. If you deeply disagree with a church's confession and rules, go join another one. It is a very free country when it comes to religion.

The best way to build trust in the church nearly all the time is to have real consequences for the untrustworthy – no, the openly destructive – in those exceptional times.

The Great American Brass Band Festival: Americana at its Best

Today is one of my favorite Saturdays of the year: the Great American Brass Band Festival in Danville, KY. Every year on this weekend the town spiffs up, the stage is built on the Centre College quad, and ten thousand plus come to enjoy our Norman Rockwell town and hear the best brass bands in the world. For free.

This weekend the weather is gorgeous – seventies and dry. Last night, at the gallery hop (featuring the work of junior Gruntled #2), the streets were lined with folks just milling and talking, eating strawberries, drinking lemonade, and enjoying some pretty good local art.

As I write, the coffee house is full. Soon there will be a parade down Main Street, led, as always, by the Olympia Brass Band from New Orleans. All day long, bands will fill the stage, and crowds will fill the college lawn. Groups of friends rent picnic tables decorated to a theme. Sunday morning the Salvation Army band will provide the music for an ecumenical church service.

One of the nicest features of the Brass Band Festival is how kid-friendly it is. On the college lawn there is a low spot in the middle where the little kids play, surrounded by ramparts of adults watching them, and watching out for them. The bigger kids just roam the town with their friends, buying funnel cakes and curly fries and other high-tone food. Parents stake out a spot with blankets and chairs, making a base for the kids to return to.

This year, or some year, come on down to Danville.

Gay vs. Ex-Gay Christians 3: What is Success?

More than 3/4ths of gay men and lesbians who wanted to change through sexual reorientation therapies "satisfied the criteria for good heterosexual functioning." That is the conclusion of Robert Spitzer, the Columbia University psychologist who led the movement to delist homosexuality as a psychological disorder, an expert who no one would call a homophobe. Michelle Wolkomir, in Be Not Deceived, does not have a comparable study of the specific ex-gay ministry she studied, but the director estimated that perhaps a third gave up and returned to homosexual activity.

75%-plus seems like a pretty good success rate to me. Yet until reading this study, I had seen the routine summary that sexual reorientation or reparation therapies and ministries work with only a small percentage of people.

I think the gap between these two assessments depends on whether the aim of such programs is to change gays' and lesbians' orientation, or to help them get control of their behavior. Spitzer reports that for gay men, only 11% reported that they had changed their orientation, while 37% of the women changed theirs. However, an additional 66% of the men, and 44% of the women were functioning well as heterosexuals.

So, what is the right measure of success – changed orientation, or changed behavior?

The analogy that occurs to me is Alcoholics Anonymous. They do not aim to help people stop desiring alcohol. No matter how many days or years a member has been sober, they still introduce themselves as, "Hello, my name is Bill, and I am an alcoholic." Success for AA is helping people stop drinking.

Groups like "Expell," the ex-gay ministry that Wolkomir studied, are for people who are trying to resist temptations that they don't want to give in to. If most of them succeed in reaching that goal, that would seem like a successful ministry to me.

Gay vs. Ex-Gay Christians 2: What Wives Do

The most interesting feature to me of Michelle Wolkomir's Be Not Deceived is the role of the ex-gay men's wives. The gay men, many of whom had been married, left their wives and girlfriends when they decided to accept being gay as a defining identity. For most of the ex-gay men, on the other hand, what motivated them to continue to struggle against their homosexual desires was that they loved their wives and wanted to stay married to them.

Wolkomir's initial study worked just with the men in gay and ex-gay support ministries. When she realized how important the wives were to the ex-gay men, she wanted to interview the women, too. To her surprise, though, the leader of the ex-gay group was very reluctant to connect Wolkomir with the wives of the men in that group, and the women themselves, when the leader asked them, did not want to be interviewed. I think I understand this. For all of these women, the fact that their husbands sexually desired other men – and often did not have much sexual desire for their wives – was a shocking discovery and a painful ongoing fact of their lives. Talking to another woman who probably knew their husband's sexual experiences and desires even better than the wives knew it themselves would be, I think, more than most people would want to bear.

Fortunately for us, Wolkomir was resourceful and persistent. Eventually, through an internet query to a national network of ex-gay men's wives, she was able to interview 15 of them.

Here is the crucial thing these wives said: they stayed committed to their husbands because they were first committed to God. They did love their husbands, and did work with them in dealing with the men's struggles and inevitable setbacks. But their marriage was not simply for their own satisfaction, or even for their kids' sake. The ex-gay men and their wives regarded their marriage as part of their commitment to God.

Setting their struggle within their larger, deeper, and prior commitment to God made the struggle seem winnable, and really did strengthen them to succeed.

Gay vs. Ex-Gay Christians 1: Defending Christianity

Gay Christians defend their faith against other Christians, who think the Bible condemns homosexuality as a sin. No surprise. But ex-gay Christians also defend their faith against other Christians who think the Bible condemns homosexuality as a worse sin than other sins. Men in both kinds of ministries support one another as they share the work of making a place for themselves in the church.

This is the interesting finding of Michelle Wolkomir, a sociologist at Centenary College, in Be Not Deceived: The Sacred and Sexual Struggles of Gay and Ex-Gay Christian Men. She spent several years as an observer and, where possible, participant in two parallel ministries for gay men, one with the pro-gay Metropolitan Community Church, the other with the ex-gay Exodus International ministry. Wolkomir describes herself as a married non-religious Jewish woman, so it is a real testimony to her skills as an ethnographer that she was accepted and trusted in both groups.

Wolkomir shows how strongly similar the two groups of men are. Likewise, both ministries are strikingly parallel in helping these men bond by re-interpreting their Christian experience. Both the Metropolitan Community Church and Exodus International are conservative Protestant ministries – a point not always appreciated about the MCC even by its secular allies. The men in both groups are trying to be faithful, Bible-believing Christians, while wrestling with homosexual desires. Many in both groups are or were married, and have children. These are not the gay men who reject the Bible and Christianity as oppressive; instead, they are arguing with their fellow conservative Christians about how their homosexual desires should be understood and dealt with.

The gay Christians interpret their homosexual desires as something that God made them with, which they should therefore accept. The ex-gay Christians interpret their homosexual desires as the result of bad experiences – molestation, or unloving fathers, or the like – which they should seek God's help in resisting and healing.

The crucial question for Wolkomir is, why do some of these men choose a gay ministry, and others an ex-gay ministry? Her answer is that they join these ministries for the same reasons they joined the church in the first place. The gay Christians tend to be men who were raised conservative Christians. They are trying to find a way to stay in the church they have always known. The ex-gay Christians tend to be men who were isolated from others, by their homosexuality and for other reasons. They are trying to find a community that will accept them and help them wrestle with their particular sins.

I find this pattern to be parallel to what I have found in studying the Presbyterian Church, which I am sure is true for all mainline churches. Most members in the vast middle of the church are converts. They chose to join because they accept the traditional beliefs of the church, as they sometimes hazily understand them, and are looking to find a community that they want to fit into. The Presbyterians who describe themselves as "extremely liberal," on the other hand, are much more likely to have been raised in the church. They assume that they are Presbyterians almost by definition, and are trying to change the church to be more like them.

For all of these folks, their life in the church is more about what group they want to belong to than it is about their theological beliefs.

Washing Out the Jewishness of "The Squid and the Whale"

One advantage of coming to a film late is that the DVD has extras. In a straight fictional film I just skip these parts – I want to see the finished work, not the rough drafts. In documentaries, though, the extras are often interesting, adding further detail to the reality of the subject, not just to the craft of moviemaking. "The Squid and the Whale" is in between fact and fiction. It is clearly based on the writer/director Noah Baumbach's real life, and the mess made by his parents' divorce. The interesting extra on the DVD is an interview of Baumbach by Philip Lopate.

In the film and in real life, the parents are both writers living in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn in the mid-'80s. They think of themselves as intellectuals and live a somewhat bohemian life – bohemian for married people with kids and a house and cars. The father contrasts what he wants his sons to be with "philistines," which he defines as "people who aren't interested in books and interesting movies." In the film, the parents, Bernard and Joan Beckman, are excellentlyl played by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney. As the IMDB review put it, casting Jeff Daniels as the aging, and declining, writer will make many viewers see his character through the lens of Flap Horton, the hapless, adulterous English professor that Daniels played in "Terms of Endearment."

Lopate, though, who knows Noah Baumbach's real father, noted that Jonathan Baumbach said everything in "double inverted commas." He would make the kind of pompous pronouncements that Bernard Beckman says, but at the same time he would have a knowing critical detachment from them. Lopate asks if Noah Baumbach meant to take the "Jewishness" out of the family? In the interview, Baumbach was taken by surprise by this question. It seemed to me that, in the director's mind, the most salient fact about his family was not Jewishness, but intellectuality. He says that all families think of themselves as superior to others. He means that in class terms – as intellectuals and writers, his family is above the normal rules.

I think Lopate reads "Jewishness" as meaning the same thing that Baumbach means by "intellectual." Lopate, a noted writer himself, opens the interview by announcing to the audience that "all writers are bastards." He is certainly not saying that all Jews are bastards. He is suggesting, I think, that secular Jewish intellectuals are really above the rules of normal bourgeois life, but they do so knowing that that superiority is itself a cliché. Played by Daniels and Linney, the parents come off as hapless WASPs, not fully aware of the effect they are having on the children. The movie would feel different if the director had cast toward the ethnic reality behind the movie. I imagine that another layer of meaning would have been added if Baumbach had cast, say, Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, the real parents of Owen Kline, who plays the younger son in the film; or Jennifer Jason Leigh, the director's wife, who played Dorothy Parker [Dorothy Rothschild] so well in "Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle"; or any of the literally dozens of well-known Jewish actors from New York.

As "The Squid and the Whale" itself shows, divorced kids want to keep points of connection with their parents, even if they criticize the divorce itself. I read Noah Baumbach as making this film as a "Brooklyn intellectual," just like his parents, without fully seeing that Brooklyn intellectual is a more specific and distinctive ethnic and class location than he knows.

College Reunion for the Married

We spent the weekend at Mrs. Gruntled's college reunion. This is always a happy time – we see old friends, walk the gorgeous campus, hear how much better the student body has become over the years, and eat cheesesteaks (one of the very few important deficiencies of central Kentucky). I also get to engage in the sociologist's favorite pastime: finding patterns in groups.

Two strong patterns stood out. First, no one smoked. In our college days, a fifth of the class smoked some, maybe even a fourth. This weekend, I did not see smoking by anyone in the class, and indeed almost none by alumni in any class. Mostly, I think, we grow up and put away adolescent things. But it is also likely that the smokers are just less likely to come back. The people who seemed most alienated from the college at the time were also very likely to be heavy smokers.

The second strong pattern was how married the returnees were. Now, most college graduates get married, so it is not surprising that a college reunion is mostly a gathering of married people. But this group was almost completely married. In fact, nearly all (approaching 90%) were married parents, and kids' schooling was the default topic of conversation.

I can see a two opposing factor that would make reunions disproportionately married. Reunions draw pro-institutional people; so does marriage. This goes double for people who marry classmates or college-mates like the Gruntleds – their marriage loyalty reinforces their alumni loyalty. The opposite force comes from divorce, especially for those divorced from classmates. There are happy exceptions – we ate with a woman who had served as "best man" at her ex's second marriage. At the same table were her ex and her new husband, all swapping stories.

Next year is my reunion. I do want to see my married classmates. I want to see the others, too. I guess I had better volunteer for the committee, to encourage everyone to come.

Off to Reunion

The Gruntleds are off to alma mater for a 25th reunion, so I will take a couple of days off from the blog. We will return with family tales on Monday.

"The Squid and the Whale" is a Harrowing Divorce Movie

I know I am six months behind on this discussion, but one of the very few drawbacks of living in a small town is that we get to movies a bit late. This one, though, is not a blockbuster that defines a season. It is not a general-audience movie. It is a film for people who need to think about and chew over how divorce works on kids.

When the film came out it coincided with Elizabeth Marquardt's book Between Two Worlds, and much of the discussion on the Family Scholars Blog, which Marquardt is part of, turned on how well the film depicted the very thing she wrote about.

Noah Baumbach has written a nearly autobiographical fiction about his own parents' divorce, through the eyes of a Noah-like teenager and his little brother. As I wrote on the Family Scholars Blog, I thought it was a richly made movie of selfish parents destroying their children. Baumbach's parents are living, as are most of their friends. He was quoted as saying that when they saw the film for the first time, he looked back at them when it ended; they looked as if they had been flattened by G-forces.

Yet Baumbach was actually fairly gentle with the parents. He shows the mother as doting on her sons, and the father still having some tenderness toward his ex. In interviews Baumbach has been careful not to condemn his parents, or divorce in general. The tagline of the movie is "joint custody blows." The strongest critique he offers is of the tug-of-war between the parents that pulls the kids apart. These fictional parents are much better about that than many real parents manage to be.

Still, the older son is already on the road to emulating his father. He dumps his nice girlfriend because, in his father's estimation, the boy can "do better." At the same time, we see the father getting booted by his third wife and taking up with a woman half his age – who, just to make it worse, is his own student. The little brother is even more scarred – especially after both parents forget him and go away with their new paramours for a weekend. He is about ten, and cries when his parents have the "family meeting" to announce their divorce. He hardens, though, turning to drinking, public sex, and an extremely foul mouth. It is hard not to fear much worse in his future.

As a film, "The Squid and the Whale" is a bit rough around the edges. It has some unfinished parts that show a young director. More importantly, there are parts of the parents' relationship which simply can't be brought into focus when the director is working so close to his own life. Still, this is a rich movie for thinking about the effects of divorce and, therefore, of marriage, on kids.

Three is the New Two

A new story in the Boston Globe reports the happy news that among educated marrieds, there has been a slight return to replacement-level families. Married people need to have a bit more than two kids per couple merely to replace the population. In recent years, though, the whole country has not been having enough kids to keep up. Among married people – those in the best position to care for kids on their own – the birth rate has dropped well below replacement level, and among educated marrieds the birth rate has fallen alarmingly. Even among educated married people who do have kids, there has some sense for the past generation that two was the maximum responsible number.

As I have argued for some time, though, it is precisely among educated marrieds - those people most likely to consider the impact of their family size on the world - that we need a few more kids. So it is encouraging that there has been a small but real uptick in the number of third-or-more births, from 26% in 1995 to 28% in 2004, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. This statistic includes unmarried as well as married women, so is not exactly what this doctor ordered. But it is a movement in the right direction.

At a time when Russia and much of the former Second World is trying desperately to keep their population from collapsing, it is encouraging to see that more Americans vote for the future with a third child.

Loose Ends of the British Divorce Ruling

The Law Lords, Britain's highest court, upped the ante in two large divorce cases. They awarded much larger settlements than had been given in the past to two divorcing women. One couple had a childless short marriage; in the other, she had given up a career to raise the couple's children. Both involved significant amounts of money.

The principle at issue, though, is that both members of the marriage are entitled to part of the wealth and the future earnings that the marriage helped make possible. This seems to me eminently fair and long overdue. The buzz has been that now rich men will be less likely to marry at all, or to marry only with pre-nups. That would be sad. But what that really means is that up until now men, especially rich or high-earning men, have been more willing to marry because they knew they could dump their wives and still keep most of the marital assets. That is at least as sad.

There were two loose ends of this story, though, that have had me pondering. One is fault. The other is kids.

One of the divorces in the British case involved a couple who had been married for three years and had no kids. During the marriage, the husband had made a fortune as a fund manager, and would likely make even more in the future. The report of the decision cast the whole question as one of her share of his past and future earnings. As an aside, the reports mention that the marriage broke up because he had an affair. Now, the basic justice of the case is that she did contribute to his fortune by letting him invest in his career while she did everything else. But it seems to me that she is also entitled to something additional – Hazardous S.O.B. Pay, perhaps – for being cheated on, too.

The other issue is the role of custody in who initiates divorce. I have been convinced by Margaret Brinig's studies, which I have written about before, that women are more likely to file for divorce in jurisdictions in which they are almost automatically awarded custody of the children. It seems to me that justice would lead one to make custody awards on a case-by-case basis, so neither party would assume that they would get the kids.

SO, if kids are awarded based on what is good for kids, and money is awarded based on just contributions. This may make for more just divorces. Now if only we could find a way to make fewer divorces.

The Harvard-Yale Study at 20: Still Missing the Point

Twenty years ago this week Newsweek's cover story, "The Marriage Crunch," reported the dire prospects for educated women who had not married by their mid-thirties. The most notorious line in the article – which did not come from the original report – was that a 40-year-old unmarried woman with a B.A. was "more likely to be killed by a terrorist" than ever to marry. This report was unlikely at the time, but the "Harvard-Yale Study" became notorious, attacked by marriage-ambivalent feminists and striking fear into the hearts of unmarried educated women everywhere. This story was particularly important to the Gruntleds because we were graduate students at Yale when that report was written, and one of the co-authors, Trisha Craig, was a college as well as a graduate school classmate of ours.

This week the magazine is running a follow-up story to show how silly the fears they fomented before were. Most of the single and worried women they interviewed in the story subsequently got married and stayed that way. The old rules, Newsweek intones, don't apply any more. Educated men want to marry educated women, and artificial reproductive technology means that women can have babies indefinitely.

The new story is a silly as the old one was. Yes, educated women are marrying later, and their marriages are more likely to last than those of less educated women. Yes, there are all kinds of expensive miracle treatments that extend fertility for a few years for some women. But biology has not been repealed, nor sociobiology. And Newsweek did not report that, ironically, Craig herself is unmarried (though she does not report that as a tragedy).

The main point, though, is that the "Harvard-Yale" demographers did not set out to study the marital chances of educated women, but of uneducated welfare mothers. Those were, and still are, slim. For comparison, they included numbers on the marital chances of educated women of different ages. But Newsweek isn't aimed at welfare mothers, and neither are the thousand and one women's magazines that picked up the story. For their readers, the footnote was the story. And Newsweek, like most news organizations, usually finds a way to turn every story into something readers can fear.

The good news is that educated women do have a good chance of marrying.
The bad news is that uneducated welfare mothers don't. And that is something that we as a society should be concerned about.