RSSRace, Gender, Sexual Orientation and Religion
We used to have the trinity of race, class and gender in the social sciences. Somewhere along the way we dropped class and added sexual orientation. The idea was that these aspects of human existence are essential to one’s identity — everything you see as a woman is colored by estrogen or something like that.
And then came the religious right and Christian world viewism. Evangelicals saw that a way to acquire a place at the proverbial table was to claim that their faith was as essential to their identity as race is to African Americans, gender to women, and sexual orientation to gays. As one of my non-believing friends likes to ask of this strategy, did evangelicals really want to jump in the bed of identity politics with gay activists?
One way out of this predicament is to ask whether Christianity’s claims on the believer are as totalizing as modern gender or race or queer studies have it. (Even more, is faith merely on the order of race, gender or sexual preference?) Yes, God commands us to love him with all of our being. And in the next breath, Christ adds that we are to love — as if we had any love left — our neighbors as ourselves. Could it be that Christianity’s claims are not nearly as total as modern understandings of human identity construe it? If we have duties as Christians, neighbors, husbands, elders, magistrates, fathers, sons — the list could go on — maybe Christians are called to a vocational life of juggling. And at the level of church-state matters, Christians clearly have to wrestle with their identities as resident aliens — they are citizens of two kingdoms and need to negotiate rival claims and responsibilities all the time.
This leads me to think that the tactic of identity politics was a huge mistake for the religious right and that the only way out of it is to recognize how fundamentally hyphenated the Christian life is.
stevez
April 18th, 2007 at 11:40 am
of course, i agree.
i have always found it odd that evangelicals want to become yet another sub-group amongst many, another clanging voice amongst presumed equals, yet, at the same time, want to maintain the absolute claims of christianity. and it makes it extra snarky to chide “political-correctness” when you yourself have let it in the back door and whine about how nobody sees it your way and that the world is out to get your particular group an dthat you need to “stand up for yourself,” et cetera and so forth and so on and on and on.
where are they getting their pastries? i want to have my cake and eat it, too. i love cake.
zrim
tolleblogge
April 18th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
So… are you assuming a sharp distinction here between what you call religious right “worldviewism” and Orr, Kuyper, Van Til, etc., or are you claiming that bad moves by Ralph Reed somehow invalidates all the Christian worldview thinking that went on decades prior to Reed’s birth?
D Hart
April 19th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Sorry to say, I’m increasingly underwhelmed by worldviews of all kinds. The claims on their behalf are inspiring, but the results are usually ho hum at best. Sure, Kuyper may have practiced it better than Ralph Reed, though is that really a fair fight? But worldview-philia is to my mind an odd construction of 19th-century Hegelianism, not something necessarily encouraged or practiced by saints prior to modern times.
Caleb Stegall
April 19th, 2007 at 10:26 am
Fr. Jape on worldviewism:
The ancients taught us that there are two minds: one which loves wisdom (philosopher) and one which loves opinion (philodoxer). Philodoxie is not bad, per se. It serves a useful function. Aristotle classified the various philodoxies as topoi, or categories of thought that are not real things, but exist only on the level of existential rhetoric. The topoi are “values systems†which create a consensus of belief within a group of people bounded by ethnicity or geography or religious myth or statehood or what have you. But they do not penetrate to reality, or to the true experiences that engender the various values systematized. During periods of relative historical stability, the topoi tend to rigidify and the group enters what Aristotle called stasis, or dogmatomachy—the rule of opinions. Dogmatomachy fosters a degraded human spirit that is closed to the real problems of human existence because those problems have been concealed by wide agreement (or disagreement) over the topoi. According to the philosopher Eric Voegelin … those who enter the foray are limited to a discussion of existing institutions and an apology for their principles, which quickly devolves into a mere defense of the powers that be. The very act of putting a subject in the public’s eye under the reign of dogmatomachy, is, in the words of Walter Baghot, “a clear admission that that subject is in no degree settled by established rule, and that men are free to choose it. It is an admission too that there is no sacred authority—no one transcendent and divinely appointed man whom in that matter the community is bound to obey. … Once effectually submit a subject to that ordeal and you can never withdraw it again; you can never again clothe it with mystery, or fence it by consecration; it remains for ever open to free choice, and exposed to profane deliberation.†As a remedy to the rule of opinion, at least as it pertains to men’s souls, if not their society, is a recovery of the classic experience of reason. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Voegelin classified Weltanschauungen (or “worldviewâ€) as one of Aristotle’s topoi. I tend to agree with him. … Having a “Christian worldview†gives parochial-and-anxious-about-it Evangelicals and various attenuated Protestants an ersatz catholicity and depth which they need for a variety of reasons—both to meet their honest and well-placed desires for membership, proper beginnings, and to keep the Times from lumping them in with Pat Robertson. Christians are urged to “articulat[e] a Christian worldview [of] … ‘comprehensive and far-reaching power.’†(That is Nancy Pearcey quoting Abraham Kuyper.)
Worldview, like all the topoi, is an identity tool. Its talk is all about the group and its characteristics and principles—a classic dogmatomachy. It is a game of self-fashioning. Here stands A. Gelical Prufrock before the mirror. Do I dare approve the worldview that elects President Bush? Do I dare admit the worldview that permits gay marriage? Do I dare, do I dare?
I am being mean now, as I am wont, but it need not be taken so. Every group does this in one way or another. But it is necessary to health and good order and right reason to be able to recognize the pathetic Prufrock.
Worldview studies suffer additionally from being both a child of, and a reaction against, the Enlightenment and especially its dominant epistemology of positivism. Worldview understandings are thoroughly corrupted with subject-object language. Worldview is both something “out there†which can be “possessed†by exposure to the right sources (witness the proliferation of Worldview studies programs at CCCU institutions) as well as something “in here†that can only be had by a personalist and subjective experience of conversion which brings a new “capacity†with it (witness chapter nine of [David] Naugle’s book [Worldview, the History of a Concept (Erdmans, 2002)], cited in his essay, which details the necessity of this kind of conversion for a proper worldview). Naugle exemplifies how a worldview theorist, especially a Christian worldview theorist, becomes quickly boxed in, when he writes, “Therefore, what a person understands a worldview to be is, interestingly enough, dependent upon that person’s worldview! For this reason, I … unpack the implications of biblical faith on the concept of worldview.â€
The positivist tale of conversion which entails the adoption of a certain opinion and requires none of the rigor and hard-to-swallow classical marks such as submission to an institutional order and denial of self is an inherently schismatic and liberalizing force which devolves into mere choice (of dogma), as noted by Baghot above. In response, Naugle insists in his book that “‘worldview’ must shed its relativist and subjectivist clothing and assume new objectivist attire,†but only “within the framework of the Bible.â€
This is hopeless! It is this kind of circular, rationalist literal hermeneutic which creates the very crises of philodoxa which, as Mark Noll puts it, “only bullets, not arguments†can resolve. Setting an inherently liberalizing, rationalist view of scripture—fortified by a mechanical understanding of conversion as the only timber against criticisms that worldview analysis is relativistic—necessitates, in turn, the “worldview arms race†being escalated by philodoxers at Worldview Weekend and the Nehemiah Institute (and many other places) as they create an ever rigidifying dogmatomachy to act as herbicide against the “postmodern†and liberalizing weed.
The whole house is of cards. Either get out the rubber cement, or watch it all blow away.