RELIGION AND THE SITTING DUCK SYNDROME

Jerry Harkins

Ambrose Bierce, known to his contemporaries as Bitter Bierce, defined religion as, “A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.”  His cynicism, however, masks the much more important truth that people need religion precisely because it does address the unknowable, the ineffable, the great mysteries of life and death, good and evil, self and other and, yes, hope and fear.  This is the reason that every culture we know about has developed an elaborate mythology of the supernatural and a coordinated set of dogmas and rituals.  Most elements of these myths serve a profound metaphoric purpose helping us cope with the existential issues:  who we are, how and why we got here and how we should live to achieve our destiny.  Most also are logically absurd and require a “suspension of disbelief” on the part of the initiate. [1] Once given, the suspension of disbelief sets like concrete and imparts to belief a persistence that insulates it from doubt.  We accept religion without careful scrutiny because life sometimes seems intolerable without it.

Karl Marx caught this poignancy is his famous aphorism which, however, must not be truncated as it usually is.  “Religion,” he wrote, “is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.  It is the opium of the people.”  He went on to argue that to ask people to give up their religious illusions is to ask them to ignore their oppression which requires illusions as a coping mechanism.  For most of history, this was probably a fair assessment but the advent of modernism began to change peoples’ psychological perspective.  Modernism means many things but essentially it shifts the traditional foundational idea of human society that individuals owe allegiance to hierarchical institutions to the opposite belief that institutions are the creatures and servants of the people.  The Catholic Church has always seen this sea change as a grave threat to its spiritual hegemony.

Traditionally, Christians have been taught that Jesus founded his church on the “rock” of Saint Peter and that may have been what he intended.  But today’s Christian enterprise is almost entirely the work of Paul—Saul of Tarsus.  Almost everything we know about Christ’s ministry and the hundred years or so after his death comes from sources written by Paul or his followers including the authors of the synoptic gospels.  Theirs is a sin-centered theology (1 Corinthians 15:21).   Paul was the first to suggest that the sin of Adam marked the entire human race as children of evil, a theory that was vastly expanded in a direct line from Paul to Augustine to Thomas Aquinas to Pius IX to John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  There is no difference between the theology of original sin and the various heresies that sprang from Manichaeism. [2]

As the sin/redemption narrative evolved, so too did the power assumed by the hierarchy which claimed to have the exclusive power to forgive sin and open the gates of heaven.  Dogma became increasingly complex and moral theology was often based on a degree of sophistry that would make the Red Queen blush.  Pius IX’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors was a tipping point, initiating a mass defection of the educated from the church.  This spread to a vast number of ordinary Catholics following Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae forbidding the use of “artificial” contraception.  Jesus himself had preached a conservative sexual morality, claiming for example that looking lustfully at a woman was adultery, but for his successors sex became a bête noire.  When Catholics rejected Humanae Vitae, the hierarchs stood their ground with progressively more clamorous proclamations and less persuasive logic.  And so it came to pass that people began to ignore the bishops. 

The mythology persists but, at the beginning of the third millennium, only the most gullible among us insist that the myths must be literally true.  Most believers are content to like the myths which make them feel comfortable and included.  Singing about the Battle of Jericho is life-enhancing and joyous and it is irrelevant that Joshua’s trumpets did not cause the walls to tumble down.  Jesus did not walk on water, he did not turn water into wine or wine into his own blood.  Paul never went to heaven for a meeting with Jesus.  Nor did Jesus share with him the “real” gospel in order to correct the theological mistakes made by the uneducated apostles in Jerusalem.  Actually, most Christians have never encountered Paul’s coy story about his trip to heaven which he tells in the third person (2 Corinthians 12:1-10).  Moreover, the remaining true believers who do know the story do not care that it is preposterous. Their will to believe overrides logic, evidence and experience.  This makes them vulnerable to victimization.  When the flock believes you have the power to send them to heaven or hell, the sheep become sitting ducks.

Most hierarchs of course do not think of what they do as victimization.  They are themselves true believers.  Thus, when Cardinal Dolan makes the irrational claim that Obamacare is a threat to first amendment religious freedom, he is not being a hypocrite but merely an autocrat making a last stand. [3] He certainly realizes that there will always be limits on the exercise of spiritual power.  The government, for example, can and should outlaw the liturgical practice of human sacrifice without injury to the constitution.  He probably even approves of the ban on polygamy in spite of its challenge to Mormon fundamentalism.  We do not know how he felt about the 1995 decision of the Minnesota Court of Appeals in the case of a Christian Scientist mother who withheld medical treatment from her eleven year old son who then died of diabetes.  The Court sensibly said, “Although one is free to believe what one will, religious freedom ends when one's conduct offends the law by, for example, endangering a child's life.” [4] Cardinal Dolan, of course, strongly supports the right to life of even an hour-old zygote, so he might agree with the McKown decision.  Maybe not, however.  The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis joined with a bizarre coalition of religious institutions in a brief supporting the Christian Scientists. [5] It included the Church of the Nazarene, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, the Orthodox Church in America, and the United House of Prayer for All People of the Church on the Rock of the Apostolic Faith.  The latter denomination was founded by Bishop Charles Manuel "Sweet Daddy" Grace who is said to have taught, “Salvation is by Grace only.  Grace has given God a vacation, and since He is on vacation, don't worry about Him.  If you sin against God, Grace can save you, but if you sin against Grace, God cannot save you.”

There is a long and often bloody history of the relationship between God and Caesar.  When squabbling among the bishops began to threaten the unity of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, it was the Emperor, Constantine the Great, who convened the Council of Nicaea and managed it through his puppet bishops. Pope Sylvester [6] stayed away but gave his assent to its actions perhaps because Constantine threatened to exile anyone who did not. [7] For the entire history of the Holy Roman Empire (962-1806), the papacy and the emperors fought bitterly for control of both sacred and secular functions.  Similar struggles took place between the popes and France and, famously, England.  Wars were fought over who had the right to appoint bishops, a power with important economic implications.  When King Henry II appointed Thomas Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas was his Chancellor and principal tax collector.  Before he could be installed as Archbishop, he had to be ordained to the priesthood. [8] He very soon switched sides and denied the king’s right to make such appointments.  In the nineteenth century, the church struggled fiercely against Italian unification (the Risorgimento), a protracted campaign that ended with the dissolution of the Papal States.  As recently as 1903, the College of Cardinals was prepared to elect Mariano Rampolla as the successor to Leo XIII.  But Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria vetoed the election to the outrage of the assembled cardinals who nonetheless were forced to elect Giuseppe Sarto who became Pope, later Saint Pius X.

Before the nineteenth century, Popes had always asserted enormous secular powers which were routinely contested by the kings and emperors.  The so-called Investiture Controversy of the eleventh century was the most operatic of these conflicts.  Popes Gregory VII  and Paschal II excommunicated Emperor Henry IV four different times while the Emperor deposed Gregory at least twice.  Less than a century later, Pope Adrian IV “conveyed” Ireland to England [9] and in 1494, the Pope divided South America between Spain and Portugal.  A dispute had arisen over which European power had the right to claim what they and the Pope thought was India.  Different popes had issued different proclamations before 1492 and Alexander VI, a Spaniard, tried to impose a solution that favored Spain.  This was ultimately overruled by his successor and enemy Pope Julius II who agreed that India should belong to Portugal in recognition of its “discovery” by Vasco de Gama in 1498. [10] There was no moral principle involved but, had there been, it would be “finders keepers.”

In our own time, church-state disputes, at least those involving Christian sects, have become less bloody but perhaps more interesting.  In the United States, several politicians have been excommunicated for supporting a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. [11] A number of bishops have threatened to excommunicate anyone who votes for a politician they oppose.  Others have said they will close Catholic hospitals rather than allow them to provide birth control to their employees.  Many bishops denounced the University of Notre Dame for inviting President Obama to be its 2009 commencement speaker because of his positions on abortion and stem cell research. 

The church does not generally involve itself in disputes over evolution but the Thomas More Law Center, founded and operated mostly by Catholic lay people, acted as counsel for the defendants in Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. (400 F. Supp. 2d 707, Docket no. 4cv2688) which sought to require the teaching of intelligent design in biology classes as an alternative to Darwinian evolution.  The Judge properly characterized the school board’s mandate as one of “breathtaking inanity.”  But other cases pose profound questions about social values and where society should draw lines.  Do the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses have to salute the flag during public school morning exercises?  (No.)  May Quakers refuse alternative service in lieu of the military draft? (No.)   Do neo-Nazis have the right to parade through the streets of Skokie, Illinois, a largely Jewish suburb of Chicago with many Holocaust survivors? (Yes.)  May a state ban the showing of a film deemed sacrilegious by the National Legion of Decency?  (No.)  More recently, may a private company refuse to provide its employees with federally mandated benefits that offend the owner’s religious beliefs?  (Yes.) [12] For seven years, Americans grappled with the agonizing case of Terri Schiavo which was played out before her family, federal and state courts, the President and the Congress of the United States.  Catholic bishops denounced any idea of allowing her to die peacefully but the Vatican withheld comment until two years after her death when it too expressed its agreement with the bishops.   In the national debate leading up to the Eighteenth Amendment (1920), the Catholic Church was the leading voice for the “Wets.”  But in the 1960’s, the Catholic hierarchy led by Cardinal Spellman of New York became the most vociferous defender of Sunday Blue Laws.  In both cases, mainstream Protestant sects were the principal opponents.

An interesting case emerged recently from the bankruptcy filing of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.  When he was its Archbishop Cardinal Dolan moved $57 million dollars from the general account to a trust established for the perpetual care of cemeteries.  He said the money had always been intended for that purpose but he also told the Vatican that his action would shield it from creditors in the event of bankruptcy stemming from the sexual abuse litigation.  He wrote, “I foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.”  The Creditors Committee sued and in the summer of 2013 the federal district court ruled that Catholic belief in the resurrection of the body is a sufficient basis to shield the archdiocese from laws that would ordinarily prohibit such transfers of funds in anticipation of bankruptcy.*  The court was making a dubious theological point about the meaning of the church’s teaching about the resurrection of the body as it might relate to caring for cemetery grounds.  As important as the resurrection doctrine is, the physical condition of a grave would seem to have little relevance.  The same logic would apply to almost any kind of expenditure the church might make.  But these cases are almost always more complex than they seem.

Should American currency refer to God?  Should religious institutions be tax exempt?  May states erect monuments to the ten commandments?  May towns allow crèches in public spaces? [13] Can Arizona require a loyalty oath invoking “So help me God” as a condition of receiving a high school diploma?  May public high school students pray in public before a football game?  Did the United States and Canada have the right to suppress the Native American ceremony of the potlatch festival or the sun dance because both were considered pagan and uncivilized?  What is the difference between allowing members of the Native American Church to use peyote for sacramental purposes but not allowing members of The Religion of Jesus to use marijuana? [14]

No survey of church-state relations would be complete without reference to the United States v. Moon.  In 1982, the founder and self-proclaimed Messiah of the Unification Church, Sun Myung Moon, was convicted on twelve counts of failing to report $150,000 in income from 1973 to 1975.  What he had done was a common practice among start-up religions but no other leader had ever been challenged by the government.  The problem was that, because of Rev. Moon’s flamboyant theology, the Unification Church was widely regarded as a cult and its adherents were referred to as “Moonies.”  Ultimately, he served thirteen months of an eighteen month sentence.

Around the world, the church-state issue is no less bewildering.  In militantly secular France, the government prohibits the wearing of “conspicuous” religious symbols by students in public schools, a ban widely assumed to be aimed primarily at the Islamic khimar or headscarf.  In theocratic Iran, on the other hand, the same students could be flogged in public for not wearing such a garment.  The Israeli government, beset by deadly sworn enemies on all sides, spends vast amounts of time on deciding what further accommodations to make to the ultra orthodox who drain its resources without accepting its legitimacy.  It allows grown men with huge families to collect welfare so they can study Torah all day every day.  In Haredi neighborhoods, women ride in the back of public busses while, at the Western Wall, they are pelted with insults and assaulted with human waste by Yeshiva boys.  In Great Britain, the Church of England is the official religion and the monarch is its Supreme Governor.  This, however, has little practical meaning.  The church receives no direct support from the state and the Queen’s role is entirely ceremonial.  Less than 2% of the population attends weekly services and only 30% attend as often as once a year.  The real dominant force in the Anglican Communion today consists of a half dozen super conservative African Primates at least one of whom supports the idea of stoning homosexuals to death in accordance with Leviticus 20:13.

If we were to place Cardinal Dolan on a political philosophy spectrum between the French and the Ayatollahs, he would wind up rubbing shoulders with the latter.  He would never admit it of course but you can be sure he believes he would make a much better president than Barack Obama whom he regards as the Antichrist incarnate.  The reason is simple.  He would base his decisions on biblical mythology, not literally perhaps, but as interpreted by him and his friends in Rome.  It could be worse.  Unlike the Rev. Pat Robertson or Saint Paul, Dolan has never reported receiving instructions directly from God.  But he certainly agrees with Robertson about the manifest failures of American democracy.  This, too, he will deny.  He is not burdened with a great reverence for the truth when it comes to the interests of the hierarchy.  Thus, for example, when he writes, “Respect for religious freedom rooted in basic human dignity is a core Catholic teaching,” [15] he is fibbing.  He believes the government should prohibit the use of what he defines as “artificial” contraceptives, always and everywhere, regardless of the religious beliefs of its citizens.  He believes divorce should be illegal—for almost everyone. [16]

As recently as the nineteenth century, the church consistently denounced the separation of church and state.  In 1791, Pius VI condemned the French Declaration of Human Rights  specifically because it advocated religious freedom.  In 1895, Pope Leo XIII expressed satisfaction that the church was free in many countries but said it would be even better if, “…she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority.”  In other words, the church should have access to both the police power and the treasury of the state.

As any five-year old will be happy to tell you, it’s a free country.  Popes and prelates can think, say and write pretty much anything they want.  They can even electioneer from the pulpit although, if they do, in theory they will lose their tax-exempt status.  But this is extremely rare.  The first time the IRS revoked a church’s tax-exempt status was in 1992 when a New York church ran an ad four days before the presidential election urging citizens to vote against then-Governor Bill Clinton for his anti-Christian positions.  This would seem to be an egregious violation of an unambiguous law but even so the courts treaded lightly.  The church was allowed to avoid taxes on contributions it had received during the litigation.

When free speech is not an issue, the results have been more restrictive.  In 1983, the Supreme Court upheld the revocation of the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its policy prohibiting interracial dating (461 U.S. 574).  The University argued that, “God intended segregation of the races and that the Scriptures forbid interracial marriage.”  When it lost, it simply paid its back taxes and agreed to continue doing so until the law changed.  It also suffered a 13% decline in contributions. [17]

Freedom of Speech and its corollaries Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Religion are complex ideas that have inspired some of the most closely argued and most densely intellectual litigation in American history.  Sadly, Cardinal Dolan and those who agree with him are not even part of that discussion.  They could be.  The substance of their case—that those who oppose contraception on religious grounds should be exempt from paying for it for their employees—is not without merit.  But to claim that it is a mortal threat to the first amendment is to reduce it to an absurdity.  It is rhetorical extremism, unworthy of a moral person never mind an educated one.  But it is the standard operating procedure of the Roman Catholic Church and, indeed, of almost all religions.

When Pope Pius IX proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility, Lord Acton, a devout Catholic, was led to his famous remark, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” [18] Beginning no later than the reign of Pope Gregory I (590-604), virtually all popes have sought to expand their power and influence over both the sacred and the secular.  With a few notable exceptions, all have presided over an earthly kingdom of ever-increasing deceit and corruption.  They are by no means alone.  Self-aggrandizement  is in the nature of religion—perhaps in the nature of all institutions.  Today we are witnessing this will to power among many religious leaders in the Muslim world, among the ultraorthodox in Israel and even among Buddhists in Myanmar.  In Russia, the Orthodox Church has entered into an unholy alliance with the corrupt government of Vladimir Putin.  In each case, the message is the same:  do as we say because we represent the divine;  we are the owners of the myths.

As the Catholic Church has become increasingly isolated and irrelevant, it has become desperate to hang onto whatever power it can.  John Paul II and Benedict XVI together invented a category of teachings called “definitive” that are perhaps slightly less than infallible but still mandatory.  Among these is the contention that the church has no power to ordain women.  This, of course, contradicts one of their favorite biblical quotations, “Whatsoever thou shall bind upon earth shall be bound also in heaven.”

We are at the beginning of a new papacy.  In much of the world, hope has been reborn.  Francis is as different from his recent predecessors as could possibly be expected.  He recalls the charisma of John XXIII.  He has yet to change anything substantive but the hierarchs who work for him would do well to notice how much a smile can accomplish, how quickly an institution can renew itself with a little humility.  But he is faced with the daunting challenge of rescinding the foolishness of the last fifty years and the fifteen hundred years before that.  The cynical among us remember that young Catholics greeted John Paul II with the same enthusiasm their successors lavished on Francis in Rio.  We recall how the crowds at John Paul’s funeral chanted their demand for an immediate declaration of his sainthood.  We wonder whether any Pope could risk the schism that would surely follow a decision to ordain women priests.  The new pope might begin modestly by reminding Cardinal Dolan and his American colleagues that Barack Obama is a lot more faithful to the Beatitudes than they appear to be.  He could insist that they cease their ignorant blitherings about sexual morality and instead carry the good news of God’s implacable love to the entire world.  He could encourage them to stop preaching the myths as if they were facts and instead explain why we think of Mary as a virgin, why Jesus chose to be born in a manger and why the tomb was said to be empty on Easter morning.  I suspect Cardinal Dolan does not know the answers and thinks it unnecessary to speculate about them.

*Subsequent Event:  On March 9, 2015 The United States Court of Appeals ruled that Timmy’s tricky transfer of $57 million from the general fund of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee to a newly created cemetery trust fund to protect it from being used to pay pedophile victims was not protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  Presumably, then, said transfer will be subject to scrutiny under federal and state laws regarding fraud. 

Notes

1.  The phrase “suspension of disbelief” was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his 1817 autobiography.  He was making the point that a little human interest and/or a little element of truth in a narrative would encourage the reader to ignore even the most flagrant implausibility of the storyline.  Later critics modified the concept to stress the willingness and desire of the audience to overlook the limitations of media.  This is an active process unlike the passivity implied by the word faith.

2. Orthodox Christian theologians will deny this vigorously and point to the differences between their beliefs and those of the European Gnostics.  But the Egyptian Christian Gnostics treated Paul as one of their own and Augustine was a “hearer” of Manichaeism well into his 30’s.  Original sin is a direct expression of the basic Gnostic belief in the absolute evil of the material world.

3. Before exonerating Cardinal Dolan entirely of hypocrisy, it should be noted that until Vatican II adopted Dignitatis Humanae, the church had always regarded religious freedom as anathema.  Indeed it is one of the “errors” Pope Pius IX cited in his Syllabus of Errors, which reads that it is wrong to think that, “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.”

4. McKown v Lundman, Minnesota Court of Appeals No 95-355, April 4, 1995.  The decision was appealed to the United States Supreme Court which declined to hear it.

5. The case developed late in the tenure of John R. Roach, Archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis.  A former President of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Roach was a much-beloved moderate who was, like all of us, not without sin.  He struggled successfully against Demon Rum and against his own tendency to be lenient toward abusive priests. 

6. Saint Sylvester was the Bishop of Rome from 314 to 335.  There was, as yet, no such thing as a Pope who ruled over the entire Christian world.  Sylvester is best known for  killing a dragon who had been eating 300 Roman citizens every day.  He said Saint Peter had helped him.

7. The Council of Nicaea was the most important Episcopal meeting of the Roman era, noted for writing the first draft of the Nicene Creed still recited today.  It also established the precedent for Emperors to convene councils.  The Council of Chalcedon, arguably the second most important of the ancient church was called by the Emperor Marcian with the reluctant acquiescence of Pope Leo I (Leo the Great) in 451.

8. Thomas did spend nine years as Archdeacon of Canterbury, a lucrative post he originally intended to keep while also serving as Chancellor.  Most but not all archdeacons were ordained priests.  Thomas was almost certainly in minor orders although that does not explain how he became an archdeacon which is not minor.

9. Pope Adrian IV’s legal basis for giving Ireland to England was the “Donation of Constantine” which gave popes temporal power over much of the Western Roman Empire and direct control over all European islands.  The Donation was a forgery commissioned by Pope Stephen II in the eighth century when Constantine had been dead for 400 years.  Adrian is remembered as the only English pope and the only pope who died of tonsillitis.

10. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) which finalized the line of demarcation and reversed the decision of Alexander VI was negotiated without the knowledge or consent of Pope Julius II who, however, accepted it.

11. The usual formulation of this penalty has it that the offender “may already have incurred automatic excommunication” and the usual the penalty itself takes the form of withholding communion or suggesting that the offender refrain from its reception.

12. The answers given in parentheses are consistent with current case law which has changed many times over the years and is subject to further change.

13. In a 1985 case, the Supreme Court ruled that nativity scenes on public lands violate the separation of church and state unless they comply with what came to be called the Reindeer Rule , which provides for equal opportunity for non-religious symbols, such as reindeer.

14. The answer,  it seems, is that peyote is very much an acquired taste and therefore does not have a major recreational market.  Also when the Supreme Court did threaten its legality, Congress passed an amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act declaring it lawful.  The Religion of Jesus, on the other hand, is seen as “a humorous, personal, idiosyncratic religion” which presumably makes it a non-religion.  (See:  “As a Religion, Marijuana-Infused Faith Pushes Commonly Held Limits” by Mark Oppenheimer, New York Times, July 20, 2013, p. A14.)

15. See the Cardinal’s op ed piece, “Go to the barricades for religious liberty,” in the New York Daily News, June 28, 2013.

16. As usual, the church makes exceptions for kings and other favored classes including converts whose spouses desire separation.  This deviation was invented by St. Paul (1 Corinthians 7:10-15) in clear contradiction to Jesus’ mandate (Matthew 5:31).

17. Seventeen years later, the University changed its mind and announced than henceforth it would permit interracial dating.  Stephen Jones, its then President, said, “I've never been more proud of my dad than the night he...lifted that policy.”  He did not comment on whether God and the Scriptures had also changed their position.

18. The sentence following the famous aphorism is, “Great men are almost always bad men.”  John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902) was an English historian and politician and a towering intellect of the Victorian era.  He campaigned vigorously against the unbridled power of the papacy and might have been excommunicated had he not been such a influential figure.