Here's one of my least favorite evergreen internet donnybrooks:
Person A: So-and-so isn't a real Christian [or insert identity here]. Real Christians care about the poor/don't commit adultery/aren't racist [or insert other "good" qualities here].
Person B: I've got bad news for you: lots of real Christians are greedy/adulterous/racist etc.. Stop trying to bowdlerize the reputation of Christianity by pretending the bad parts don't exist!
The reason I hate this is that both "sides" are not just attempting to do wholly salutary things, but they often know the salutary point the other side is trying to make and just pretend not to.
Person B is certainly right in trying to check against an illicit cleansing of Christianity's moral reputation. There are lots of people who are and are recognized as Christians who do bad things, and one can't wave that history away by playing games with definitions.
But Person A is also right in that the public meaning and understanding of Christianity is a perpetually contested concept, and it is a good thing when people try to align that concept with other good qualities. It is good when people who are Christian understand that identity to encompass good things. It is a constant push-pull struggle, and Person A is fighting the good fight in trying to push "Christianity" in a positive direction.
So yes, it would be bad if we just collectively glaze over the bad attributes of various identity/ideologies in a misplaced desire to define ourselves into innocence. But it would also be bad if we sabotaged efforts to present alternative and more salubrious accounts of these identities by acting as if they're forms of cheating.
In theory, a bit of nuance lets these positions coexist. One important lodestone I'd turn to here is Richard Rorty's maxim that "there is nothing deep down inside us what we have put there ourselves." The inherent nature of Christianity (or again, fill in your favored blank) is not homophobia, nor is it LGBT-inclusion. There's nothing deep down inside the concept save what we put there ourselves. If we put in homophobia, then its homophobic. If we take out homophobia and replace it with LGBT inclusion, then its LGBT inclusive. It is not definitionally wrong when people put in homophobia, nor is it cheating when people try to take out homophobia.
In the field, I think a good rule of thumb is to ask what the speaker is reacting to. If someone is criticizing Donald Trump by saying he's "a bad Christian", I'm not convinced it's helpful to swoop in and say "actually, Christians can be bad." If someone is criticizing Donald Trump for imposing Christian nationalism upon the population, I'm not convinced it's helpful to swoop in and say "what he's doing isn't really 'Christian' at all."
Likewise, I don't have a lot of patience for people who try to deny the real strands of homophobia in Christianity by simply saying "that's not real Christianity". That is, to borrow from Bonhoeffer, "cheap grace"; it takes work to excise those strands, it's not something that can be accomplished by proclamation alone. But I also don't have much patience for people who pooh-pooh the notion of doing that work at all because they insist homophobia is inherent to Christianity and anyone who tries to dislodge that attribute is lying -- and importantly, standing up and presenting a different vision of Christianity is an important form of doing the work. Indeed, there aren't many other ways.
I think the debate gets the way we arrive at positions backward. People aren't homophobic because they're Christians; they're using their Christianity to justify their homophobia. I'd say the same thing the other way; someone doesn't choose to be accepting because they're Christian; they choose their interpretation of Christianity because it fits with their ideal of acceptance.
ReplyDeleteSo I don't think contesting the definition is going to change any minds. The right approach is probably just to point out that if someone's values are rotten, it's because of them, not because of their ostensible belief system.
Sometimes that's true, but I actually think it's true less often than one thinks. I suspect that while your account may be true regarding a relatively narrow bucket of core ideological values, for many others we adopt a much more go-along-get-along approach where people rather passively adapt the beliefs and values of the communities they are a part of and identify with. One hint this is so is in the behavior of "youstabees" ("I used to be a Democrat, but after 9/11 I'm outraged by Chappaquiddick!"). Youstabees might be prompted to switch parties because of a misalignment on a particularly high salience issue area, but once they make the switch they often rapidly adopt the other parties' political stances even on issues that seem wholly unrelated. Likewise, while I doubt that a committed homophobe will change their views on LGBT rights even if "Christianity" becomes associated with pro-gay positions (they're more likely to drop being Christian); for many more people for whom the issue is less salient the changed ambiance would I think exert a significant effect.
ReplyDeleteHmmm, that's a good point, and you may be right. Question is whether that's the tail wagging the dog. The counterexample, I think, is that even when there's realignment as to group membership, the group is the entity that's changing rather than the values. Take political parties-- Republicans love to yell about how it was Democrats that were pro-slavery in the 19th century, and Lincoln was a Republican and yadda yadda yadda.
DeleteBut that was always in bad faith-- Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms didn't become egalitarian champions when they switched their party registration from D to R; they just found that R's just aligned with their underlying racism.
So I take your point, but I'm still on the fence...
"The inherent nature of Christianity (or again, fill in your favored blank) is not homophobia, nor is it LGBT-inclusion"
ReplyDeleteI get what you're saying, but I don't think it's so simple. Christianity does have some pre-existing content which makes anti-homophobic activism more difficult than it could be. It can be seen clearer if you go down to more specific sub-divisions. Can you say the same thing about Catholicism, for instance?
Sure, but again, the point isn't that people privilege group affinity over their deeply-held values. It's that group affinity often drives beliefs in circumstances where the beliefs are relatively weakly held. And for most people, most beliefs are weakly held, so those group cues can have outsized impacts.
ReplyDelete