Hiding the Flag?

For the first time ever, I wondered if any of my neighbors would look askance at the thirteen star flag I hang every Fourth of July.  

This flag, for me, as well as any version of the American flag (I have 48 and 50 star versions), stands for the ideals of the American Republic—to pursue “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for “all.” 

But this year, Nike famously withdrew its 13 star flag shoes because Colin Kaepernick said the first flag of the Republic flew over, and therefore “represented,” a slave-owning nation. I am not ignorant of the ways in which American understandings of what “all men” means were shamefully limited at the beginning. But more generous understandings, with laws to bolster them, have advanced since then precisely because of those founding words. 

Is the Betsy Ross flag now to be linked with Confederate general statues erected specifically to celebrate the triumph of Jim Crow in the South? What about the 48 star flag that flew over the Jim Crow South, or the 50 star flag that flies today over a nation still struggling to fulfill its promise—a promise that has grown in meaning and scope over our nation’s nearly 250 years?  

Growing Understandings

I know that “all men are created equal” didn’t really apply to black slaves kidnapped from Africa in 1776, (or to women!) but I also know that there were many people, even then, that saw the contradiction. I’ve learned that John Quincy Adams used the phrase in the successful argument before the Supreme Court that freed the Amistad slave ship captives. The phrase has inspired the aspirations of African-Americans for generations, who have demanded, as did Martin Luther King, Jr., that America live up to its promise. The flag is a symbol of that promise, not just a begrimed reminder of our national faults and failures. 

That is why I am disturbed by all too many “progressive” people who seem to be ceding the American flag to the Right, which is happy to claim it for its meaner vision of the “real” America. Why should they be allowed to co-opt this national symbol? 

And yet, I’ve had more than one progressive friend, though the ages, look askance as they come up my front walk, if I have a flag hanging on the porch, as I do on national holidays: the 13  star for July 4, the 48 for D-Day and Flag Day, the 50 for Memorial Day, Labor Day and Veteran’s Day. More than one has said that “they don’t like the current associations,” or that they don’t believe in such displays of “patriotism,” as if love of one’s country and its ideals belongs to the Right.

The Way Forward: Affirmation not Denial

The way forward in this national struggle is not to cede patriotism to one political slice of the population, but to affirm its original and continuing power to signify the best of the nation’s founding values, however flawed our realization of them may be in any era. 

In the run up to the national disaster of the 2016 presidential election, our most right-wing neighbor heard a group of us lamenting the increasing popularity of Donald Trump. “It’s clear,” she said, “who the people that love America are on the street—we fly the flag.”  One of my fellow progressive neighbors muttered that he wouldn’t fly the flag because it now “stands for people like her.”  

I challenged him: “How can you let people like her claim the flag for themselves?” A discussion ensued, and the next day a tiny, hand-held American flag appeared, stuck in a flower pot, on his porch—the only flag he had. (A larger one was to follow).  Since then, I’ve heard more than one anti-Rightist citizen talk about “that Constitution of ours” as a barrier to progress, rather than the launching pad of revised understandings and social progress through the years. I grow uneasy.

As the 20th century historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote, “The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it; invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.” We will not realize a more generous America by denigrating our Founding Story, but by building on it. 

If Progressives cannot, or will not, root their vision of “America” in the “creed of equality” proclaimed by our Founders, flawed as they were; if they do not seek to “mend its flaws” by appeals to their daring promise, I fear we will not prevail in the struggle against those who would shrink that vision to some smaller, meaner version.

Jesus, the   Resurrection, 

and Earth’s Hope

All God’s promises 

receive their Yes

and Amen in Christ.  

St. Paul, 2 Corinthians 1:20

Just a few weeks ago, a woman in my class shared “the newest dystopian sentiment going around” — that humanity is doomed to extinction, but “this will be good for the planet.”  Actually, I’ve been hearing this for some time from relatives (“the animals would be better off without us”) and friends (“the earth will survive, but we may not, and that may be a good thing!”).  One common tag line to this imagined scenario is, “Serves us right.”

I suspect embattled whales and threatened elephants might heartily agree. After all, what many environmental scientists see as the “Sixth Great Planetary Death” of species is well advanced, largely due to the impact of humans, the currently over-successful species. But I can’t join in the “better off without us” sentiment: I am a captive to hope, in large part because of the biblical Story of God’s “humanity project”—God’s promises to humanity, and through us to earth itself.

The narrative you choose to live in matters. People of biblical faith have a Story available to them which says that the Creative Love that birthed the world cares about its fate, and ours as a part of it. This can give people of faith courage and hope that fly in the face of dystopian discouragement. The more you think we’re doomed, the less fire in the belly you’ll have to work toward a better outcome for earth and all its creatures.

Almost a century ago, the French Jesuit Pierre Thielhad de Chardin anticipated our current moment in Building the Earth: 

“The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth . . . It is too easy to find an excuse for inaction by pleading the decadence of civilization, or even the imminent end of the world. This defeatism, whether it be innate or acquired, or a mere affectation, seems to me the besetting temptation of our time.”  

A Reappraisal of the Biblical Narrative

Every new era sees a different dimension of Scripture. One of the great reappraisals of Scripture in our time highlight s how important the earth itself is in the overarching Narrative. What begins in a Garden ends with the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem to a purified and revitalized earth. In this scenario, the resurrection of Jesus is the first act in a redemptive drama that culminates in the resurrection, transfiguration, and restoration of earth itself. The resurrection of Christ isn’t simply an assurance the faithful will have eternal life, but the first step toward the “restoration of all things.” (Acts 3:19-21).  All God’s promises find a rousing Yes! in the crucified, risen Christ, including the continuation of “seedtime and harvest” (Genesis 8:22).

The first humans were given a set of Primate Mandates as earth’s guardian species: to “keep/watch/preserve and cultivate/serve/reverence the earth,” (Genesis 2:15), to relate with respect to the other species, and to create communities in alignment both with the created order and with the will of heaven. Human injustice and evil was seen in biblical culture (as in most ancient cultures) as throwing creation itself out of whack. In the Story, Christ is the Second Adam, born to initiate a process of setting things right in soul, society and human activity. When the Apostles proclaim the Resurrection, they link it to the ultimate renewal and transfiguration of the planet, not just to the narrower hope of persons living forever beyond death. 

Such interpretations are not mine alone, but part of a reappraisal of the Biblical story along a wide continuum, from Chardin to Matthew Fox’s Creation Spirituality to Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si on the environment.

One is not obliged to take all this eschatological imagery literally to take it seriously as an affirmation of humanity’s vital link to the well-being of the planet. The way the Story captures my heart, imagination and dedication means that, in spite of the looming threats to humanity, I cannot choose to write off humanity as a major evolutionary blunder. This would be a sin against biblical hope. The Story calls us to preserve and serve Creation as God’s gift to all species, not humanity’s exclusive larder.

What is Salvation For?

Souls need to be saved, yes; but for what? The Prime Mandates in the Creation story anticipate to an amazing, and alarming, degree the way in which we have become such a pivotal primate species on the planet, lording it over everything else in delusional and destructive ways. Our souls, our human psyches, need to be redeemed from their slavery to self-serving ends—saved for loving and serving Creator and creation not just ourselves. The Scriptures assure us that if we fulfill the mandates of our humanity, our eternal destiny will take care of itself,

Those who rejected and crucified the Prophet, and more than a prophet, Jesus represent the universal human tendency to rebel against the Good, to undermine our own long-term well-being, to hide our eyes from the “things that make for peace” (Luke 19:42). From the Cross, Jesus tells us that “we know not what we do.”  We didn’t mean to set off the current Great Death, but our heedless assault on nature provoked this die-off.

Choosing Hope

The times are genuinely apocalyptic on many fronts: destructive climate change, the bristling threat of nuclear devastation, the fragmentation of the post-war international order, the rise of terrorist assault on civilization. But we can change; we can repent; we can save the life of many species still remaining, including our own. This is what the God of the biblical Narrative hopes, desires and believes about us: “you can change. Choose life, not death.”  The Scriptures, and the ancient Jewish midrashic stories that surround it, picture the Creator gambling that this species will end up bringing earth and all its life to a new level of flourishing. 

“Earth would be better off without us,” however understandable such a sentiment might be, is a counsel of despair—unless it is a dawning realization that change must happen. We have been so bedazzled by the Myth of Progress that when “progress” falters, or its aims turn out to he flawed, secular faith in humanity falters easily. The the Scriptural Saga says that God believes in the Humanity Project.   

Our progress toward the Good is often touch and go, but we can and must learn from our mistakes. We live in an era where massive realization, repentance and amendment of life, personally and socially, is mandatory. 

Maybe you think the story the Humanity Project and oJesus’ resurrection are a fantastic fable. Then call it a dream, a motivating mythos planted in many human hearts over the time of the biblical narrative’s development and carried on in the heart of Christianity, sometimes hidden in the shadows. But the earth-oriented reappraisal of the Story can help Christians join the growing multitudes of people who realize that the human species has, quite literally, been born out of the earth-process itself, and morally owes its mother better treatment—to say nothing of our own survival.  

Whatever your animating Story, if you work to help turn this all-too-destructive, profit-at-any-cost marketplace civilization away from the brink, you’ll be part of the Resurrection Brigade.

America on the Fourth: Rival Visions

“All men are created equal” seems central to the American Dream. America not only possesses a huge land-mass, but is possessed by aspirations, dreams, beliefs in a land of opportunity and fairness, "with liberty and justice for all." Yet "who is all" has been a work in progress.

Only White Persons May Apply?

In 1922, the Supreme Court rejected the application of a Japanese resident, Takao Osawa, to become a citizen because he was “not of the Caucasian race.” A year later, the same Court rejected an Indian immigrant,  Bhagat Singh Thind, who pleaded that he, as a Caucasian, deserved citizenship. Abandoning their reliance on the pseudo-scientific “races of Man” scheme, the same justices ruled that the “common understanding of race among ordinary white citizens" excluded such dark-skinned people. (1)

Only “free and white” persons could become citizens the 1906 Naturalization Act had declared—the legal outcome of a century of widespread belief that the U.S. was meant to be the home of the racially superior “Anglo-Saxon Civilization.” Rooted in ethno-centric prejudice, a "science of race" developed that confirmed it. When Hitler's Aryan superiority myth led to horrifying results, that prevailing American white supremacist belief retreated to fester in marginal groups.

The African-American writer Ta-Nahisis Coates asserts that the “American Dream," is maintained by an “obligatory historical amnesia” — a cultural habit of forgetting the ugly parts of our past (2). But no ugly past stays silent in the past, returning in forms both old and new. America is currently faced with a resurgent, and somewhat disguised, version of that old exclusionary vision. 

America: A Creedal Nation

The United States is a visionary country, a creedal nation—the first creedal nation in the world’s history, inaugurated by a Declaration and Constitution embodying its tenets. The American Creed sets forth a humanistic vision of a community commited to certain “inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Over time, the application of those rights has extended beyond the original northern European population to all other European immigrants, women, African Americans, and, finally, to the likes of Takao Osawa and Bhagat Singh Thind. 

Our history involves the same process of “new light breaking forth” from the words of our founding Creed as do the evolving interpretations of religious scriptures. As the Old Testament scholar Margaret Barks observed, religions consist of symbols, rituals, creeds and customs the meaning of which “the followers disagree about repeatedly.” The primal DNA of the American Creed, "all are equal," has eluded all our attempts to bind it into narrow ethnic or racial boxes. 

The past: veto of the future or foundation for it?

Our current, fractional Presidential campaign embodies these creedal disagreements amply. Competing visions of America clash, partly obscured by a level of personal venom and invective seldom seen since the 19th century. Lurking behind the crippling stalemate of Republican and Democratic establishments, overlapping visions of involvement in a multinational world and marketplace thrives. Outside those establishments the regressive vision of America for “us, free of foreign contamination and entanglement" rises again, the very spirit of the Courts 1922-23 decisions. 

Neither political establishment, Right or Left, has adequately addressed the dislocations thrust upon America by that changing world culture and a global marketplace, leading to the discontent fanned by the resurgent Regressives. We are in an in-between moment, searching for the next embodiment of the American Vision—a moment rife with new ways people are excluded from equal access to the "pursuit of happiness." The vision we choose for our future will have lasting consequences. Creeds can lock us into to our past or can also inspire us to live into the further implications of their values. 

This fourth of July is not a time to gloat in how "great" we are or were, but to ponder how great we may yet become if we take our creedal DNA seriously.  

____

1.  See Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_Thind   and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozawa_v._United_States

2.  See Ta-Nahisi Coates Between the World and Me—a piercing account of the Black experience in America. 

Talking to Opponents—Actually Talking!

Ah, political “con-versation” in America today:

My neighbor’s late night email howled: “How am I supposed to answer this pile of misinformation and lies?”

Miles, a Democrat, somewhat further Left than I, had gotten an article from his conservative Republican relative Bart about reasons to support Donald Trump. Miles had already fired off a fiery repost, reacting to assertions that Obama was “deliberately engineering decline of the military,” fomenting a “war on cops” and “flouting the will of the people,” to mention but a few.

So Miles had fired back: “You people have a twisted view of the world, and if you want to live in constant fear of ‘the other,’ be my guest . . .I can't understand how any reasonable human would allow this egotistical, manipulative, bully, con artist to get anywhere near the White House.”

Miles’s repost had the inevitable result: a still more incendiary email from Bart’s conservative Christian brother about Miles’s “godlessness," with a sharp turn into transgender bathroom issues—what passes for "debate" in contemporary America..

Incendiary Rhetoric

Thus raged the current polarized non-conversation between disagreeing Americans, each side hurling potshots at each other: fire and smoke, verbal grenades and harsh words—anything other than what once passed as debate and dialogue. 

Let me be clear: I agreed with Miles that the original article had some real misinformation (even disinformation) in it, and much distorted rhetoric. But underneath all that right-wing bramble were real feelings and some genuine concerns. Miles’s “answer” had been full of Liberal invective, not an engagement with the underlying issues. His email bristled with phrases like “You people” and the clear accusation that Trump supporters are simply “unreasonable.” 

Is there no alternative to this family-diving, friendship threatening barrage of words? Miles and I spent the next two days debating how to engage the debate in more constructive ways, like this:

Better Rules of the Road

1.  Start with agreements, if possible. If not, at least with recognition of the other’s concerns. “I can agree that frustration with our deadlocked national Establishment has generated much of power of the Trump campaign.” 

2.  Ask for further clarification: What makes you think this way? What led you to these conclusions? What reasons do you have for accepting these positions? 

3.  Then, and only then, question what you consider misrepresentations, exaggerations, disinformation or outright untruths. If possible, share concern over the issue at dispute. I can’t agree that Obama is trashing the Constitution with Executive Orders because other Presidents like Bush, Lincoln, and Jackson have set many precedents for such decrees. But I do agree that this area of Presidential power is very undefined and controversial. 

4.  State the way you see the situation, and why you see it that way. From my standpoint, Trump has made a number of extreme statements that imply a more serious disregard for the Constitution than any previous President or candidate—and give specific examples. 

5.  Avoid the comforting exhilaration of declaring the opposition ignorant, stupid, or immoral. Recognize that real people have real concerns, however poorly, in your opinion, they are expressed, or even how much factual error surrounds them. 

Communicating rather than winning

The above suggestions are not intended to “settle” arguments, but to encourage communication. This isn't just about being "nice" (though nice is usually better than nasty). Such rules of engagement open the possibility, difficult as may be, for challenging, communicating, and questioning. 

At this perilous point in our history, both Liberals and Conservatives (to use inadequate and clumsy labels) largely feel the other side is ignorant, misinformed, or immoral—or all three. This leads to the luxury of retreating into our own tribalistic echo chamber and congratulating our moral superiority and superior intelligence to each other. Our self-selected media outlets reinforce this. Moral superiority over the benighted other rules the day, in all directions. 

There are better ways to live. Better ways to have a political conversation. Better ways to be America.

And someone might actual be provoked to rethink something they believe. 

Brutal Toughness Arises

Donald Trump says he will abolish gun-free zones around schools and elsewhere his first day in office. He's not the only Tough Guy on the prowl:

The president elect of the Philippines promises to “fill Manila Bay with bodies” in a crackdown on crime. Gunmen patrol the perimeters of mosques in the South. Putin plays the strong man in Russia, Erdogan in Turkey, Netanyahu in Israel. Hillary Clinton, the first woman to find herself within hailing distance of the U.S. Presidency finds herself attacked from the Right by a verbally brutal man and on the Left by an increasingly belligerent one.  And that’s not to mention the thousands of young men raised in the West who desert to fight against the liberal, Enlightenment democracies they grew up in. Primitive warrior belligerence seem to be on the rise.

"What Rough Beast?" 

Psychiatrist Carl G. Jung was alarmed, in 1930, to hear, from every one of his German analysands dreams about the ancient Teutonic berserker warriors.  On this basis he published an essay, Wotan, which chillingly predicts the triumph of the brutal Nazi regime. The berserker didn't appear to me in anybody's dreams, but in some films of the late 70s and early 80s—films like the uber-macho Rambo series and even in the masterfully crafted Lord Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan (1984). As Sylvester Stallone emerges bloodied but alive after one of the Rambo series frequent blood-baths, I felt the same archetypal chill.  To quote Yeats' "Second Coming" (1919): What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

I seem to have an inner sense (I jokingly call this "Cassandra" after the Trojan princess who accurately spotted trouble ahead). My Cassandra has a disturbing ability to notice dark clouds arising on far away horizons, and watching these films chillingly reminded me of Jung's observations. In the outer world, the "voodoo economics" of Reagan were taking over, and the GOP's dog-whistle racism was in full swing. The country was moving away from the New Deal's "we're in this all together" spirit and headed toward the "every man for himself" mentality we see today on the Right.

My chills do not a prediction make. Donald Trump does not bring Hitler to mind for me, but he is the latest in a long, intensifying line of men (and a few women like Sarah Palin) for whom belligerence is a value, civility, reason and facts the signs of the “loser.” And he joins the rising company of those strong men who praise “shooting from the hip, “usually phrased as “telling it like it is,” which really means “putting some words to the frustrations I feel." Meanwhile, the Enlightenment dream of the free exchange of ideas in civil discourse is threatened on the Left by an often rigid “politically correct” moralism. Allergic to any disagreements, it reacts with moral outrage rather than "say more about why you think that."

Can the Center hold?

The long-term consequences of all this are uncertain, but the effects so far amount to a major assault on the foundational principles of Enlightenment civilization: our sense of a common humanity over against ethnic prejudice; what the 18th century public thinkers called sentiment, or fellow-feeling that opposes brutality and hard-heartedness; the values of tolerance and civility vs. trash-talk and gleeful prejudice; and reasoned debate based on facts and evidence as a more productive way to truth than passionate belief.

Such values form the moderating "center" which fostered the pluralistic, democratic Western world we inhabit—and even significantly disarmed the population. But now it seems as if The Center cannot hold/ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity. (1)

What can anyone do?  Hold the Center!  Refuse to give in to the current polarization. Try to understand where others are coming from, even as you disagree with them. Avoid the dangerous luxury of moral outrage so enjoyed by the "righteous" on Left and Right. This country is in the midst of an extended struggle at a crossroads of its history.  These are bulwark against a rising belligerence that may well lead to the blood-dimmed tide Yeats feared in 1919.  Is that what we see already in the smaller incidents, both Left and Right?

My inner Cassandra is worried. 

_____________

1. W.B.Yeats, The Second Coming.  See http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html

At the heart of reality, life-out-of-death.

The Paschal Mystery is at the heart of Christianity because it is at the heart of the world’s life. What happens on Calvary is many things, including the vivid glimpse of how Things work. 

At the heart of life death dwells, but life springs from that dark heart. The very elements making up our bodies,  the cosmos as a whole, were forged in dying stars,  the first to flare forth. Dying yields life. The very ground under our feet, the fruit of myriad deaths becomes the grist for greenly springing new life that yields, in turn, life which soon becomes earth.

So is it strange that Jesus dying, as he does upon the rough wood of the cross, was seen, by some, as an ikon, an image, a glimpse of a cosmic "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world”? What is revealed on Calvary is the timeless reality of the Crucified God—a God crucified and rising again to continue loving and blessing, creating and re-creating. 

What do I mean?  Quite simply, that God is present at the heart of this dying-into-new life process, not remote, not watching it from a distance, but in it, with us, beside us, around us. God is Emmanuel, God-with-us, before, during and after the earthly life of Christ. We don’t talk this way, but the saga of the Scriptures is the saga of the crucifixion of God, of how God’s loving purposes, again and again, are frustrated by human sin.  Both in parables like the story of the first Parents in Eden and the Tower of Babel and in the saga of Israel’s history interpreted by the faith of the writers,

human beings violate the fabric of God’s goodness in each other, in society, in creation itself.

Cain kills Abel, the brothers sell Joseph into slavery, the children of Israel resist their own freedom,

David murders his captain Uriah to cover up his adultery, the ancient Kingdom of Israel wanders away from God’s path, God’s plan to bless the very ones who keep themselves from the blessing.

This is our story, the story of civilization, ours and every other. There is much good, of course, much human courage and creativity and kindness, but again and again the human race tears at the fabric of God’s goodness, God’s very presence in the world, in creation itself. God is here, God is wounded in us. God is wounded for us.

As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his poem God’s Grandeur.

     Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

        And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;

        And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

     Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

     And for all this, nature is never spent;

        There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

And for all this, God’s grace is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things—God’s constant love which has long since determined not to abandon us, whatever we do. Even on the Cross, God remains Emmanuel. Christ, as the Messenger of God, accepts the reality of all human sin dumped upon him, yet keeps on coming among us, determined to help our better angels defeat our worst. Christ on Calvary represents all human suffering, and presents it to God. He represents God’s participation in it all: the homeless, the diseased, the victims.

But he also represents the God who continues to invite us all into his loving embrace. His resurrection declares that new life can come out of suffering and death.  The dearest freshness deep down things flows forth in “Father forgive them.” And on Easter he will stand among us saying “Peace be with you.”

From the death of the first generation of stars and the rebirth of the cosmos to the death of Christ and his reappearance in transfigured form, God is life-out-of-death.  Which is why this day was, of old, “God’s Friday” and is now called “Good Friday.”  Both are true, more than we can ever know. 

Civilizational Divides and Church Disciplines

Inevitable; it was always almost inevitable.

It took a decade and more in coming—the vote by a majority of Anglican Primates to “discipline” (not “suspend”) the U.S. Episcopal Church (TEC) for blessing same-sex unions and “changing” the meaning of marriage. (1)

I stand firmly and joyfully in support of the Episcopal Church’s decisions, but we need to recognize, soberly, that these dynamics far transcend religion itself.

The cracks in the Anglican Communion’s foundations simply reflect growing the civilizational divide between the post-Christian West and much of the rest of the world. While the legalization of same-sex marriage has grown apace in countries like in the British Isles, the Scandinavian countries, France, Portugal, Spain, Argentina, Canada, Brazil and the United States (to mention but a few), countries more deeply tied to conservative sexual sensibilities have dug in their heels in reaction: Nigeria, Uganda, India, with Russia trying to become leader of a moral coalition against alleged Western “decadence.”

The more progress, the more resistance

The more the West asserts its changed moral convictions, the stronger the opposition becomes. For Westerners accustomed to leading the “advance of civilizations” this is a rude awakening. As the conservative African bishops remind us constantly, the colonial era is over. Like it or not, the West is now only one part of a competitive collection of civilizational blocks outlined in Huntington’s prescient The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

A world-wide fellowship of Churches like the Anglican Communion cannot escape the consequences of such divergent civilizational developments. That ecclesiastic and political leaders (like Putin, for example) would play on this divergence for various secondary gains was also inevitable, humanity being what it is. A good deal of capital can be made out of a sense of moral superiority, resistance to the influence of former colonial powers, or promoting a sometimes simplistic version of “our” moral past.  

Both sides are deeply part of their own cultural context. The different focus of their polarized moral arousal cannot be separated from this fact.

One of the early advocates of LGBT full inclusion, retired Bishop John Spong, saw this inevitability in a New York Times op-ed piece as long ago as 1998. The Primates' very carefully worded (aka 'Anglican') statement, may well the last attempt to re-form the Communion as a ‘loose fellowship of churches' that actually continues to stay in some relationship—a family—however impaired. 

Moral arousal or moral outrage?

So, each side feels morally superior, and believes they are right. As the U.S. Primate Michael Curry states clearly, the TEC feels this is a matter of fidelity to Gospel values, as the Spirit leads the church into deeper realizations of truth. In the past two decades TEC has declined to abide by the declarations of the last two Lambeth Conferences about marriage, for human rights reasons seen as spiritually compelling.

Meanwhile, moral arousal does not have to become moral outrage, however tempting that is or how enjoyable it feels. I know where I stand, and why. You probably do, too. But Jesus warned us about the dangers of arousal becoming outrage. (3) We know that outrage increases a dangerously blinding, either/or, us/them view of reality that can be destructive. 

Arousal can, on the other hand, lead to grace and steadfastness in the face of opposition—and holding firm to the practice of seeing opponents as real human beings with real concerns, however divergent.

_____

1.  See the actual text of the Primates Statement at http://www.primates2016.org/articles/2016/01/14/statement-primates-2016/

2. See Thomas Friedman, "The Age of Protest" at
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/opinion/the-age-of-protest.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fthomas-l-friedman&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection

3.  "Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you." (Matthew 5:44). Love here, of course is agape, an intention for their ultimate well-being, not fond feelings. See previous blog on the Paris attacks on this website.