My Advice to Conservative Presbyterians: Stay and Compete

All this week I will be blogging on the Presbyterian General Assembly.

The General Assembly approved three out of four liberal measures on sex. They voted to amend the constitution to drop the "chastity and fidelity" requirement of church officers. They voted to replace the previous "authoritative interpretations" of the constitution that prohibited acknowledged, active homosexuals from being officers of the church. They voted to retranslate one of the confessions so that it no longer condemns "the homosexual perversion." Late last night they stopped short of redefining marriage away from "one man and one woman."

The coalition of conservative groups sent out a very disheartened message. A dozen congregations were dismissed to other denominations last year, mostly to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, and there were some harsh words about the EPC at the Assembly. One of the last things that happened at the end of last night's grueling session was a proposal to deal with pastoral kindness with congregations that want to leave the denomination. It passed overwhelmingly. "Good bye and good luck," seems to be the liberal strategy, which is matched by the conservative mood.

I say to conservatives: stay and compete. The vast majority of Presbyterians do themselves believe the essential tenets of the Reformed faith. Almost all the growing congregations in the PC(USA) are conservative. Conservatives are more likely to marry, have kids, and be optimistic about the future. There aren't really many liberals in the church. What we see in the Assembly year after year are majorities of commissioners who personally have a traditional faith, but also believe in tolerating deviants (in both directions from the center). The future is actually pretty bright for traditional Presbyterian faith. It is just the rules that are getting loosened, not so many of the people.

So stay and compete. How people vote with their feet matters the most in the end.

FOG Goes to the Hustings

All this week I will be blogging on the Presbyterian General Assembly.

As expected, the General Assembly sent the new Form of Government to the presbyteries for discussion. They fended off several attempts to mess with it, including an anarchic proposal to let everyone suggest their own new FOG.

I have volunteered to my General Presbyter to help organize our presbytery's discussion. I think that a concerted effort should be made to get the ministers and elders most involved in the life of the presbytery to get together at a special meeting to hash it out. I am hoping for food, serious homework, and an outcome.

I urge all readers of this blog in a position to do so to volunteer for similar service. By my estimate, perhaps two dozen people really understand what nFOG says, and I am not counting myself in that number. The only way to get informed enough to have a real opinion is to read the thing and talk it over with other informed, concerned people.

That, I believe, is to build up the denomination from the grass tops.

Belhar: Good Confession, Bad Constitution

All this week I will be blogging on the Presbyterian General Assembly.

The Theological Issues and Institutions Committee recommended that the Belhar Confession be studied for possible inclusion in the Book of Confessions. The Belhar Confession is one of the great anti-apartheid documents in South Africa. It should be read and studied by Reformed Christians.

But it does not belong in the Book of Confessions.

My concern is not with the specific substance of the confession. It makes as much sense to put Belhar in the compendium of great confessions as it does Barmen. They should be understood and honored.

The Book of Confessions is supposed to be the first part of the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). It is supposed to be the answer to the question "what do Presbyterians believe?" For ministers and elders, it is supposed to be the legal standard of belief in the church.

Instead, the Book of Confessions has become The Museum of Pretty Words That We Honor Whenever it is Convenient. We don't confess the confessions. We have literally turned them into banners. Their names function as symbols, but their contents are not in any way binding. Indeed, most officers of the church could not even name all the confessions -- go ahead, ask some.

Adding the Belhar Confession to the Book of Confessions will just add to the erosion of the confessions from working rule to wallpaper.

Schism Acceleration Act of 2008 Passes Committee

All this week I will be blogging the Presbyterian General Assembly.

The Church Orders Committee voted to delete the "chastity and fidelity" amendment from the Book of Order.

In its place the committee proposes this new standard:

Those who are called to ordained service in the church, by their assent to the constitutional questions for ordination and installation (W-4.4003), pledge themselves to live lives obedient to Jesus Christ the Head of the Church, striving to follow where he leads through the witness of the Scriptures, and to understand the Scriptures through the instruction of the Confessions. In so doing, they declare their fidelity to the standards of the church. Each governing body charged with examination for ordination and/or installation (G-14.0240 and G-14.0450) establishes the candidate’s sincere efforts to adhere to these standards.

The vote was 41 - 11. Many on the losing conservative side did not return after dinner for the voting.

Liberals have tried to delete the chastity and fidelity standard twice before. One of the liberal proponents of this current deletion attempt, Rev. Sue Fisher, said “One day this will be deleted,if not today then some day and I want to give the Assembly the opportunity to determine if this is the day.”

I have found that many liberals have a sense that history is on their side. At the same time, they are more pessimistic about the future of the church than the conservatives tend to be.

There may come a time when the presbyteries trust one another to judge justly enough, without having to spell out a national standard. That time has clearly not come. I think the only effect of yet another attempt to delete the sexual behavior standard from the constitution will be to drive out more congregations that are sick of having to re-fight this fight.

Heidelberg Revisions

All this week I will be blogging on the Presbyterian General Assembly.

Last night the Committee on Theological Issues and Institutions voted 33 - 26 to change the Heidelberg Catechism in our Book of Confessions so that it no longer would condemn "homosexual perversion."

Question 87 now reads:

Q. 87. Can those who do not turn to God from their ungrateful,
impenitent life be saved?
A. Certainly not! Scripture says, “Surely you know that the unjust will never come into possession of the kingdom of God. Make no mistake: no fornicator or idolater, none who are guilty either of adultery or of homosexual perversion, no thieves or grabbers or drunkards or slanderers or swindlers, will possess the kingdom of God.”

This translation from German was made in 1962, and was adopted along with many other documents into the Book of Confessions in 1967. It is the only place in the church's constitution in which homosexuality is mentioned. People who want to change the translation (that is, the winning side in last night's committee vote) say it is a bad translation. People who want to leave it the way it is say it is a better representation of the intent of the catechism, and of current church understanding, since it more directly quotes scripture. Specifically, in the King James Version, I Cor. 6: 9-10 reads:

9Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,

10Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

I don't know enough German to speak to the merits of the translation question.

I can say, though, that the only time I have ever heard this passage discussed is in debates like this one. That is, in all the debates about homosexual orientation, homosexual practice, gay ordination, and same-sex marriage in the Presbyterian Church -- a debate I have followed pretty closely -- I cannot recall anyone saying that their position on this issue was swayed by what the Heidelberg Catechism said. All discussions about Question 87 have been pre-emptive attempts to change/preserve the wording of the current translation in case someone wanted to make something of it later.

And yet, no one does make anything serious of what the Heidelberg Catechism says, or pretty much what anything in the Book of Confessions says. We have made all the confessions merely advisory, and ignore them at will. That is, we do not confess the confessions.

The whole Heidelberg translation issue is not really about changing a serious or effective part of the Presbyterian constitution. It is a symbolic feint in the ideological struggle over normalizing homosexual practice.

What the church really needs is a confession it actually confesses. Then we can have a serious discussion of how, exactly, it is worded.

Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment

On this slow day of the GA, let me introduce my latest contribution to building up the Presbyterian Church. My pamphlet, Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment, has just been published by the Re-Forming Ministry project of the church. You can download the pamphlet here, or order a hardcopy (with a nice, stained-glass cover) from the same site. There is also a Facebook group to sponsor discussion of the pamphlet here.

In a nutshell, I think that the Presbyterian Church used to have an establishment of leading pastors and elders who we honored and trusted. This was a great asset in times of conflict. The Special Commission of 1925 was such an establishment group. The church turned to them to settle the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the 1920s. However, in "the Sixties," we deliberately unmade our establishment in the church, as in society at large, and made structural changes to prevent a new establishment from arising. And now when we need one, we don't have one.

I expect that most of the people most interested in my analysis are tied up with the General Assembly now. I had thought that the discussion of the Presbyterian Establishment idea will begin in earnest after the dust settles from the GA.

I was gratified to see, though, that there are two commissioner's resolutions that seem to promote two structural changes I also support. One would grant presbytery staff advisory vote. This has been referred to committee. Another would phase out the advisory committees. This one was declined. Still, I believe in incremental change, and these proposals seem a step in the right direction.

"Presbyterian 2.0 has been seriously unleashed"

These are the words of Bruce Reyes-Chow, the newly elected Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA). He won on the second ballot. He almost won outright on the first ballot, in which he had 48% in a field of four. Bill Teng, the most conservative candidate, showed a respectable second with 36%. (As an aside, it is a great day for a church when the serious race is between a Reyes-Chow and a Teng. Come on, honey-colored nation!)

I do not read this election as primarily liberal vs. conservative, though Reyes-Chow is clearly left of center in the church. What he really is is a full-on Gen-X. And what I really like about Gen-X is that they like to get things done. Boomers tend to talk about "I'll fight for you" or "I'll push for change." Xers just do it. Reyes-Chow is actually building a new church in San Francisco, one of the most secular cities in America, and he is doing it with other under-40s.

He pushes my buttons on a personal level too. He blogs everything. He and his wife have three little kids, who figure prominently in the narrative. He describes himself on his personal blog as "pastor/geek/dad/follower of Christ." He describes his blog as "Just an idiot with a Mac." The disclaimer frees his church, family, pet, imaginary friend, and "Rufus, the thirteenth disciple" from responsibility (the Gruntleds are big "Dogma" fans). My kind of guy.

Several years ago, when some well-meaning but ineffectual Boomer was gassing on about our good intentions in church, I turned to Mrs. G. and asked (quietly), "Can't we just pay the Xers to take over now?"

I believe the General Assembly has answered that question in the affirmative.

GA: Form of Government is the Primary Issue

The proposed new Form of Government (FOG) is the single most important issue before the Presbyterian General Assembly. The idea behind the proposed revision is to make the government section of the Book of Order less of a regulatory manual and more of a constitution made of basic principles. More choice and responsibility would be shifted to the presbyteries and congregations, less set by the church's central bodies. The main motivation, I think, was to keep the General Assembly from becoming a continuous constitutional convention, with each Assembly producing new constitutional amendments.

I applaud the idea behind the new FOG and most of their suggested revisions. However, I am a polity wonk. Few other people are, nor should they be. So it is normal for most commissioners to the Assembly to feel unprepared to decide about a whole new form of government.

It is possible that the committee charged with FOG will feel that they are masters of the situation after a few days of testimony and discussion. It is possible that the Assembly will trust the committee's judgment. But it is not likely.

The more likely outcome is delay for study. This would not be terrible, but it increases the odds that Nothing Will Happen.

One interesting idea on the table is a proposal from Detroit Presbytery to authorize six presbyteries to try out the new FOG for two years and report back to the next GA. This proposal is the brainchild of Ed Koster, the most serious challenger for the Stated Clerk's job. I would favor this over sheer delay.

One of the main reasons for the general ambivalence about the new FOG is sheer distrust of all the central institutions of the denomination. The nFOG Task Force did not, I think, deserve this mistrust, and it isn't really directed at then. Even critics of the proposal have generally praised the task force. The mistrust comes from a fear that if presbyteries and congregations are given more freedom, more local option in applying general church principles, some of them (especially the most liberal) will use this freedom as license to evade the standards of the church's majority.

Some safeguards have been built in to prevent local option on the most contentious issues. The property trust and chastity and fidelity provisions of the current Book of Order were specifically preserved by order of the previous GA. And there is good reason for this mistrust, as the recent PJC decision in the Spahr case demonstrates.

Still, I think the revised Form of Government proposal is a good one. I hope the Assembly gives it the attention it deserves, and that it is not overshadowed by lesser issues.

10 Days of G.A.

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) begins on Saturday in San Jose. In our house, though, GA began today. Gruntled Child #2, the wonderful Endub, is a Youth Advisory Delegate, a YAD. YADs represent each of the 175 or so presbyteries. They have pretty big job -- they have voice and vote in committees, and voice in the plenary sessions of the Assembly, where they also give an advisory vote.

I have been on record for some time that YADs are a bad idea, a '70s democratization that should be undone as soon as possible. Nonetheless, I believe that if we are going to have YADs, we should have good ones. Thus, Endub, a well-informed daughter of the church, flew off to California early this morning. The YADs get a few days of intensive training before the Assembly.

I will be blogging on the Assembly each day for the next week and a half. I know this is not everyone's cup of tea, so if you have already had your fill of internal Presbyterian politics, enjoy your summer vacation :-)

Obama's Fathers' Day Sermon

Barack Obama gave a great sermon on Fathers' Day calling fathers to responsibility for their children. He aimed at black fathers especially, for whom this problem is particularly acute. All fathers, though, were the subject of his comments. Some have read this argument, and his calls for personal responsibility along with government programs, as an attempt to appeal to white religious conservatives.

I hope Obama does appeal to religious people, conservative and otherwise, of all races. I believe that the message that fathers should be responsible for their children is not especially conservative. Parental responsibility is about as centrist a message as they come, being a subset of "mom, the flag, and apple pie."

What I would like to see is for Sen. Obama, and others promoting responsible fatherhood, to ground that message in the larger understanding that marriage is the most effective, most natural, happiest, and easiest way for fathers to be responsible for and to their children.

Not Selfish Genes

Bodies are not just instruments for carrying genes around; genes are recipes for making bodies. Bodies are the point. Genes are the tools.

This is the upshot of a fine lecture by Oxford theologian Keith Ward. I have thought something like this as a rebuttal to the "selfish genes" view, but he put it much better. This lecture is available from the Gresham College online service. (For that matter, I highly commend Gresham College, an ancient adult education foundation in London.)

Golf Is Gone

Senator McCain has apparently given up his attempt to prove that he is a country club Republican. Last week his website looked like this:


Now on his website, "Golf Gear" has given way to the more prosaic "Strategy."


(Thanks to Talking Points Memo for the screen capture of the old website.)

Hurrah! Habeas Corpus is Back!

The Supreme Court made a very welcome and long-overdue decision yesterday restoring the most fundamental legal right to all American prisoners. I have felt that the worst scandal of the lawlessness of the past few years has been the way our government has imprisoned people they don't like without charge or trial for years and years. These prisons were deliberately placed where American lawyers could not get, to prevent them from even meeting with their clients or petitioning for a charge. And U.S. citizens were tossed in along with foreigners, with no more protection than Soviet prisoners used to have.

To my mind this is a disgrace worse than our tortures, and that is saying a great deal.

A majority of the court had the legal sense and the courage to make the right call. The fact that the Supreme Court of the United States has to have courage to defend habeas corpus is a sorry commentary on how low things have sunk.

Let the healing begin.

Evangelical Centrists

Michael Luo's politics blog The Caucus carried an interesting story about a new group, Matthew 25, working to connect Obama to evangelicals. This is an interesting and, I think, very worthwhile effort. The official Democratic Party tends to be a bit paranoid about doing anything official with evangelicals, so it makes sense to have a semi-independent group making the connections.

What interested me especially in this story was a report from John Green, one of the best quantitative religion-and-politics scholars in the country, on the specific kind of evangelical that the Obama campaign could reach.

Green estimates that of the quarter of Americans who are evangelicals, perhaps 10% are on the left, and about 40% are of the Religious Right that has been tied to the Republican Party for a generation. In the middle, though, are a centrist group making up about half the total. This is a group that has often been politically uninvolved in the past. Now, though, centrist evangelicals have been becoming more active in a new range of social issues, especially AIDS, global warming, and, most importantly, global poverty. These issues are a natural path to Democratic candidates.

Green says the centrist evangelical group is growing.

The Core Business of Social Science

C. Wright Mills, in his classic introduction to sociology, The Sociological Imagination, makes this fascinating aside: The social science movement was born in the mid-19th century to “turn the troubles of lower-class people into issues for middle-class publics” (84).

Social science was invented by middle class reformers as a tool to convince other middle class people of the need for reform. The problems they wanted to reform were not primarily middle class problems, and definitely not upper class problems. The middle class wanted to reform the lower class. The instruments of social science were devised to give a name and a number to these problems, and to give reformers tools to fix them.

Each of the social sciences had developed more general theories, general tools, and some capacity to examine other classes and facts that are just facts without being problems.

The bread and butter of the social sciences, especially sociology, though, remains finding middle-class solutions to poor-peoples' problems.

Upper-Middle-Brow Television Show

Fareed Zakaria is a pretty smart guy. His new show, "Global Public Square" on CNN, brings together a pretty smart bunch of people who know about the rest of the world. In the second half, he interviews someone who makes things happen in the rest of the world. This is very encouraging. On the first show he interview Tony Blair. Today, on the second, he had Henry Kissenger. The panel this week consisted of CNN foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour, former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda, former Israeli deputy prime minister Natan Sharansky, and a Muslim woman working in Canada whose name I missed (help here would be welcome).

I have argued before that TV is a middle-brow medium at best. This show pushes the bar up a bit. I predict that it will have only a tiny American audience, even among political junkies. Nonetheless, if CNN can stick with it, I think they will be performing a public service.

Hillary's Checkers Speech

Hillary Clinton gave the gracious, positive, upbuilding endorsement speech today that was needed to help heal the Democratic Party.

This speech, like Nixon's "Checkers" speech, will also save her place as a valued leader in the future of the party and the government.

Whatever Obama and Clinton talked about at Senator Feinstein's house, it worked.

Kumbaya.

Let's build.

McCain, Clinton, Obama: Three Forms of Authority

Laurie Fendrich, a Hofstra art professor, has blogged for the Chronicle of Higher Education about the three main presidential candidates of the moment representing Max Weber's three forms of legitimate authority. As a sociologist, I am obliged to work Max Weber into all conversations, and am glad for this opening.

Weber argued that for most of human history, the main form of legitimate authority in society has been tradition -- that is, the fact that "our ancestors did it" and "we have always done it this way" was the best reason to act one way rather than another. He noted, though, that the main achievement of the political economy of modern societies was to develop a quite different theory of legitimate authority, the rational/legal. Society was supposed to act upon laws that applied to all, which were created by a rational process of elections and executed by a rationally administered bureaucracy. The other kind of authority is the wild card of the charismatic leader. Weber thought a charismatic leader, or prophet, was the main way traditional societies changed; Weber also thought that the periodic appearance of a charismatic leader could save modern rational societies from stultifying into an iron cage of bureaucracy.

Fendrich, and her colleague sociologist Mark Landis, saw the three candidates as representing the three types of authority:
McCain represent tradition;
Clinton represents rational bureaucracy;
Obama represents charisma.

The impending McCain/Obama race will represent a straight competition between tradition and charisma.

I think there is something to this idea. Obama is clearly charismatic, and McCain is clearly the most past-oriented of the three. And Clinton's strength has, more or less, been in her mastery of the machinery of government execution.

Still, Weber himself argued that the United States was born a rational/legal country, without an established traditional authority. All serious American politicians are vying to lead a rational, bureaucratic legal machinery. This is the foundation of the great stability of American government.

That said, I can see the value in seeing the upcoming election as a contest between two rational, legal, bureaucracy-respecting Senators. One wants to lead by continuing the (recent) traditions of his party; the other by transcending the recent divisions of the parties by using his personal charisma to inspire others to act in untraditional ways.

French Annul Fake Virgin's Marriage, Then Regret It.

A French judge annulled a marriage because the bride lied about being a virgin. The annulment happened two months ago. When the story recently came out in a legal journal, the French Justice Minister shrugged it off. No big deal. This is to be expected if marriage is just a private contract. One party lies in a contract, the court can abrogate the agreement.

And then the details came out. The bride and groom are Muslims. The wedding reception was still going on in the immigrant neighborhood when the groom came back downstairs to announce that the bride had not bloodied the sheets.

The hue and cry has been enormous. The Justice Minister, herself the daughter of North African immigrants, was forced to reverse her initial reaction and appeal the annulment.

The French, like many Western Europeans, want marriage to be a private choice if the couple uses secular and middle class standards of who can be involved, of what sexes, for how long, perhaps how many to include. On the other hand, they want marriage to be publicly regulated if the couple uses religious or working class standards of what makes a proper marriage.

Marriage became a public institution when the church and the state regulated and celebrated the couple's vow to one another, their children, their community, and, for the vast majority of people on earth, to God. Marriage became a public institution to protect the vulnerable -- usually the woman, often the poor, always the children. It is a great civilizational step forward that marriage is a public institution. Society rediscovers this when the state is asked to back a private marriage contract that undermines that protection.

President Obama Will Make Black Republicans Possible

In 1964, E. Digby Baltzell saw that

Kennedy’s victory in 1960 will, in the long run, serve to bring many affluent and capable Catholic leaders in this country into the conservative ranks of the Republican establishment. (The Protestant Establishment, p. 315)

Baltzell saw that once the caste exclusions of Catholics were broken, they would be free to sort into their natural class affiliations. Richer people, other things equal, tend to become Republicans. Events have proven Baltzell right, and today Catholics tend to sort along class lines when they vote. There is no "Catholic vote."

Today there is a "black vote." African Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. In fact, African Americans are more reliable Democratic voters than registered Democrats are. The vast majority of black elected officials are Democrats. Rich African Americans - including billionaire Oprah Winfrey - are strong Democrats.

I believe that the 2008 presidential election will resemble the 1960 election in many ways. Many people have drawn the parallel between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy, not least the members of the Kennedy family. I think the election will be a squeaker either way, and I am not predicting an Obama victory.

I think the parallel can be drawn in the way Baltzell suggests:
An Obama victory in 2008 would, in the long run, serve to bring many affluent and capable black leaders in this country into the conservative ranks of the Republican establishment.