Reacting to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church (my church) and to what has been written about its actions and accomplishments has caused me to reflect on two concerns that have been part of my thinking since I was in my teens. I am now nearing my seventy-fifth birthday, so I am talking about a reasonably long lifetime of thinking. My two concerns can be framed as questions: 1) what is the nature of the faith I practice? and 2) what does it mean that I am free to practice it?

I ask these things today in light of my church’s decision to approve development of liturgies for the blessing of same-sex unions. I strongly support this action by General Convention; though it has been assailed by many outside the Episcopal Church and by some within. Indeed the delegation from South Carolina was so strongly opposed that its members officially walked out of Convention to protest the vote.

We in the Episcopal Church are accused by some of our more moderate detractors of putting a civil rights agenda ahead of the clear command of scripture. We are accused of apostasy, of heresy, of profaning the natural law, of allowing our polity to be determined by a decadent culture—all these by more serious detractors both outside the Church and within it. In general we are accused of being morally and theologically liberal, a bad thing indeed in these times.

I plead guilty to these charges. I am a serious liberal theologically, and certainly I am otherwise a liberal. I am in sympathy with the program and the work of the Jesus Seminar. I don’t doubt that there was a historical Jesus, but my view of that person more or less coincides with that of John Dominic Crossan.¹ This means that I am bound to think of the scriptures, creeds and formulations of Christianity as human constructions, as indeed I do think of them.

I have characterized myself as a Christian humanist, by which I mean to claim solidarity with the long tradition of the written faith in scripture, commentary, ritual, liturgy, and literature. As Crossan has written, the process of creating the Christian faith began with the gospel writers, or perhaps earlier. As James Carroll has written, that process likely began in a healing circle of disciples shortly after Jesus’ death.² And my humanism runs two ways, striving to attend to voices and writings that have been silenced and/or obliterated as the tradition has written its way from ancient times.

This means to me that the Christian faith is a certain history, not transcendent but rather embedded in the larger history of humans and of this planet. It may be that this history is the work of the Holy Spirit as well as of human hands, but even if that is true we are given no warrant to favor one part of it over others. Indeed, if society were to try to respect the claims to primacy of all the various Christian groups claiming it, not to mention the claims made by other religions competing for primacy, we should very soon overdraw our deposit of respect.

So why do I continue to practice this faith? What do I mean when I utter its formularies? Many of my coreligionists will already consider that I am not a Christian, will think me an apostate or a blasphemer at worst, a mere cultural Christian at best. Why do I care? And more than that, why is it important to me that my Church embrace evolving conceptions of human rights? Before I try to answer these questions I need to digress for a bit and speak to another issue.

I have lately been reading Professor Stanley Fish’s useful book, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech . . . and It’s a Good Thing Too.³ In a chapter entitled “Liberalism Doesn’t Exist,” Professor Fish attacks Stephen Carter’s call for a “softened liberal politics” that would “acknowledge and genuinely cherish the religious beliefs that for many Americans provide their fundamental worldview.”⁴ Fish additionally attacks liberalism’s “faith” in the primacy of reason and makes this broad claim, which I quote at length.

[L]iberalism is informed by a faith (a word deliberately chosen) in reason as a faculty that operates independently of any particular world view. It is therefore committed at once to allowing competing world views equal access to its deliberative arena, and to disallowing the claims of any one of them to be supreme, unless of course it is demonstrated to be at all points compatible with the principles of reason. It follows then that liberalism can only “cherish” religion as something under its protection; to take it seriously would be to regard it as it demands to be regarded, as a claimant to the adjudicative authority already deeded in liberal thought to reason. This liberalism cannot do because, as Carter points out, if you take away the “primacy of reason” liberal thought loses its integrity, has nothing at its center, becomes just one more competing ideology rather than a procedure (and it is in procedure or process that liberalism puts its faith) that outflanks or transcends ideology. The one thing liberalism cannot do is put reason inside the battle where it would have to contend with other adjudicative principles and where it could not succeed merely by invoking itself because its own status would be what was at issue.

I make the following observations about this claim. Just as Fish agrees with Carter but for one point, I agree with Fish’s analysis but not with his conclusion. It seems perfectly possible to me that we should conceive of public reason (a term employed by Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls) as the creation of liberal polity. That, it seems to me, is actually the case; and it seems further to be the case that public reason is instantiated in the institutions of liberal polity, spread as it is across the territories of what we used to call the free world and emerging, not without strife and struggle, in other places as well, in Eastern Europe, in Modern Israel, in south Africa, in post-colonial India, and elsewhere. There isn’t anything mystical about pubic reason; it has a history and a substance. I’m quite sure Professor Fish doesn’t mean to deny its existence, since he is one of its more able practitioners

But public reason and its sister, public knowledge, as we know them in the western liberal democracies, are secular; and there are good reasons why they must be so. We require these non-parochial establishments just as we require systems of roads, health care, and national defense. But this is why religious conservatives, including Catholics such as Robert Neuhaus, have argued that the United States is a Christian nation. If the United States is a secular polity, then all religions must operate as clients of the secular establishment. Professor Fish makes this pretty clear, but he and Professor Carter both seem to think that the client status under which religions must operate is onerous and perhaps even immoral. I do not think so, and I do not relish the thought of religions exercising adjudicative authority in the public sphere. Indeed I fear it.

I have already cited the difficulty of the proposition that a liberal society could “cherish” all religions’ claims of primacy. I add to that observation now the further observation that many religions make claims of fact which they seem to intend to place before the bar of public reason. Let’s just take one such claim, the claim of some Christian Biblical literalists that our planet is about six thousand years old. The claim here isn’t that reason is fallible but rather that faith provides evidence more compelling than empirical evidence. St. Paul made a similar claim when he wrote that faith was the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. And the Creation Museum in Petersburg Kentucky is the visible church of this view of things.

I think both Professor Fish and Professor Carter may not have given sufficient thought to the fact that Biblical literalists would have us teach Creation Science (so called) as a paradigm that competes with the Darwinian paradigm in scientific discourse. As a way of clearing a path to this desideratum, among others, the legislature of my state has placed a constitutional amendment on the August ballot that will “legalize” prayer in schools and also permit any student to refuse to complete any assignment the student believes is in conflict with her personal beliefs. The exemption demanded here is of a piece with that demanded by the Catholic bishops about which I’ve written in earlier posts. The claim of the amendment is that it will protect students’ religious freedom. I fear it will pass. Its language is disengenuous, and the Governor can’t veto it because it’s a constitutional amendment. So, from now on students who do not believe in science, or do not accept some scientific formulations, will not be troubled to learn about science at all—in Missouri. That this legislation will result in a diminution of public knowledge (and of academic freedom) ought to be plain.

I am arguing that religious freedom is a secular, indeed a liberal guarantee, not a religious license, certainly not a license for the religious to restrict or suppress the freedom of others. Indeed religious freedom cannot be anything but a secular guarantee, as the pages of The Immanent Frame amply illustrate.⁵ As one writer puts it in one of the many essays that appear there in a collection entitled “The Politics of Religious Freedom”

[I]n the context of the US bishops’ expression of a deep commitment to the notion of religious freedom, it might be a worthwhile imaginative exercise to ponder the following question: What would a defense of religious freedom look like, if the LCWR [an organization that represents 80% of Catholic nuns in the United States, presently accused by the Vatican of rejecting the faith] were considered “religion” in this case and the Vatican were considered “the state”?

This writer’s conclusion is that “the actions of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [do] not pass a simple smell test.”

I view Christianity as a “way,” as a set of practices or pieties, not as a body of dogma. Indeed my reading of the news of the day leads me to believe that dogmatism is the chief enemy of civilization abroad in our present world. In my mind the expressions Christian faith and Christian community are synonymous. I might have used the expression Eucharistic community, but I’ve not laid any groundwork for that and it’s not my purpose to do so here. My point is that I continue in the way. I was born to it and baptized into it. I have evolved in it, and I continue. My mind is full of its language. It gives me many of my fundamental categories. We, none of us, stand outside our history. The tension between my thinking and the creeds is something I have lived with most of my life. It now feels like a comfortable old shirt.

Maybe I’ll talk about God another time. The deepest and most serious belief I have is in the reality and persistence of grace. I think grace is palpable. Children play with it. Women find it in the street. I do not think grace is necessarily characteristic of religious life; nor is grace the exclusive property of religious folk. I think it operates in the wind, in the thousand ordinary acts of kind and conscientious persons, in the movements of music, in great poetry and sometimes in ordinary poetry. I believe it is grace that characterizes things that work, from levers and bridges to vaccines. Sometimes we have too much of it, sometimes not enough. The thought that the secular culture is leading the struggle for gay rights doesn’t trouble me. I think secular movements and organizations are just as likely sites for the action of grace as any other phenomena.

And I’m proud of my church. Present controversy in Britain now pits some bishops and the Archbishop of Canterbury against a secular establishment that has legalized civil partnerships and may soon legalize gay marriage. Most churches in this country are on the wrong side of this issue, just as many were on the wrong side of the controversy over slavery and on the wrong side during the civil rights movement. The one thing that might make me think about leaving my church would be a refusal to do the right thing about gay rights. And when some other codger tells me that I am not a Christian or rants at me abut the authority of scripture, I think of Jesus before the grand inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s novel. I’d kiss the old bird on the lips, but he’d likely misunderstand.

Notes

¹Crossan’s Monumental work is The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (New York: Harpercollins, 1992). Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (New York: Harpercollins, 1994) is perhaps more readable.
²See Conatantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001, passim.
³ New York: Oxford, 1994, 134-135.
⁴Fish references the quotation as follows: Duke Law Journal, December 1987, 977–996.
⁵A blog maintained by the Social Science Research Council.