Same-sex Marriage

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Here's a very fluid take on evangelicalism: New York Times obituary of a progressive pioneer

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Penelope Green’s recent New York Times obituary of Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is noteworthy to anyone who has followed churches’ long 20th-century debates about same-sex relationships and marriage. Mollenkott was far ahead of the curve in bringing a progressive, liberationist perspective to the evangelical Christian subculture.

The book “Is the Homosexual My Neighbor: Another Christian View”, which she wrote with Letha Scanzoni, was one of the central texts cited by The Other Side magazine and others on the sexual-revolution left.

As a video of Mollenkott’s address at Harvard Divinity School in 2002 shows, she was a captivating speaker, combining a native Philadelphian’s self-assurance with pleas to her sister feminists not simply to dismiss the Bible in their efforts to root out all traces of patriarchy.

Mollenkott stressed that wrestling with the contents of the Bible was key, along with the writing of John Milton, in her stepping away from the Plymouth Brethren theology in which she grew up.

If a reader leaves it there, it becomes easier to take the Times at its word that Mollenkott remained an “evangelical,” but in this case that would be to treat an adjective as a noun.

The Times links to a page on Mollenkott’s website in which the longtime professor and activist gave her own explanation of what she was “evangelical” about:

John Milton was a 17th century Puritan who loved Scripture. From studying his interpretive method, being challenged by feminist thinkers, and interpreting my dreams, I gradually began to trust my own experience. And I began to read the Bible with attention to literary formats, historical context, what words meant at the time the text was written, the use of imagery, analogy, symbol, and so forth. The text was transformed by these standard interpretive methods, and I in turn was radicalized by the Bible. I am now a member of the evangelical left, working with other Christian feminists toward a world in which all people are respected and cherished as made in God’s image, and in which the natural environment is respected and cherished as being created and sustained by one Great Spirit. I guess you could call me and Evangelical Universalist.


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Thinking about Georgia, while looking at some 2020 religion numbers from Ryan Burge

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Did you enjoy a day or two away from political Twitter? Me neither.

So let’s move on to Georgia, where voters in greater Atlanta and then the rest of Georgia are going to be hearing the voice of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) quite a bit in the next few weeks.

All together now, here is that Schumer quote from a celebratory street party in New York City: “Now we take Georgia, then we change America!”

Because of its unique election rules requiring a 50% win in key contests, Georgia currently has two open U.S. Senate seats — which means that Schumer and his colleagues can control the next U.S. Senate (with the tie-breaking vote of soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris) by taking both of them. Thus, Georgia is suddenly on everyone’s mind.

That includes folks at the New York Times political desk, who are asking the obvious question: What is causing Georgia to move from the forces of darkness to the world of love and light? Trust me, that’s pretty much the tone of this analysis feature that is not labeled an analysis feature. The overture is spot-on perfect, from a New York-centric point of view:

MARIETTA, Ga. — It took a lifetime for Angie Jones to become a Democrat.

As a young woman, she was the proud daughter of a conservative family active in Republican politics. Ten years ago, after a friend’s son came out as gay, Ms. Jones became an independent, though one who watched Fox News. After the 2016 election, Ms. Jones, a stay-at-home mother in Johns Creek, a pristine wealthy suburb north of Atlanta, became frustrated with her conservative friends defending President Trump through scandal after scandal.

And this year, she voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr., after spending months phone banking, canvassing and organizing for Democratic candidates with a group of suburban women across Atlanta.

“I feel like the Republican Party left me,” said Ms. Jones, 54. “It very much created an existential crisis for me.”

I have family in Georgia and I’ve paid close attention to politics there since the mid-1970s (and almost moved there, from Illinois, in the early 1980s). The bottom line: Georgia may be turning into Illinois, a rural state dominated by a super-city and its suburbs (and the corporations and media therein).

Now, there is a crucial question missing from that Times overture, a question that millions of Georgians — Black and White — would spot instantly. The anecdote doesn’t tell us (a) where this woman goes to church, (b) where her conservative family went to church in the past or (c) where she is now refusing to go to church. If she has changed churches, that would be crucial.


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Religious liberty and foster care: five key numbers as SCOTUS weighs dogma and LGBTQ rights

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We voted.

Then we waited. And fretted over the outcome. And waited some more.

While we did, perhaps some of us missed Wednesday’s arguments in the latest U.S. Supreme Court case pitting religious freedom vs. gay rights and the Sexual Revolution.

The dispute involves the city of Philadelphia ending its foster care contract with Catholic Social Services over the faith-based agency’s refusal to place children with same-sex parents.

Here are five key numbers that stood out to me:

5,000 CHILDREN IN CUSTODY

NPR’s Nina Totenberg’s reported:

On one side is the city of Philadelphia, which has custody of about 5,000 abused and neglected children, and contracts with 30 private agencies to provide foster care in group homes and for the certification, placement, and care of children in individual private foster care homes.

Reuters’ Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung asked a city official about the potential impact if the Supreme Court rules in favor of Catholic Society Services:

A ruling against Philadelphia could make it easier for people to cite religious beliefs when seeking exemptions from widely applicable laws such as anti-discrimination statutes.

“If individual organizations can begin to choose to discriminate against whom they want to serve, then it does begin to set an unfortunate precedent,” said Cynthia Figueroa, Philadelphia’s deputy mayor for children and families.

ZERO SAME-SEX PARENTS DENIED

Robert Barnes of The Washington Post quoted Lori Windham:

“Zero” was the answer from Windham, a lawyer for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, when asked how many same-sex couples had been denied the opportunity to be foster parents because of CSS policy. She said if ever approached, the agency would refer the couple to one of the more than two dozen agencies that have no issue with same-sex marriage.


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2020 was an election year in which many Christians felt torn and politically homeless

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2020 was an election year in which many Christians felt torn and politically homeless

Conservative patriarch Edmund Burke died in 1797 in Beaconsfield, England.

This didn't prevent columnist Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, a Catholic conservative, from making Burke her write-in choice in the 2020 White House race. She wasn't the only voter who felt politically homeless, due to religious and moral convictions that clashed with the political and personal choices of President Donald Trump and, the odds appear good, president-elect Joe Biden.

Once again, there was no way to ignore issues linked to faith, morality and, yes, character. This was especially true with Catholic voters who frequent church pews.

Considering Trump, Noonan stressed the coronavirus crisis, where the president finally "met a problem he couldn't talk his way out of. I believe that's what happened: He played down the pandemic, lied, made uninformed claims at briefings that serious people were struggling to keep useful. He produced chaos. The country can't afford any of that in a crisis that is sudden and severe."

What about the Democrat, a lifelong Catholic? Noonan predicted Biden would be a "hapless and reluctant conductor" on a "runaway train," especially on moral and cultural issues.

"The progressive left," she argued, "endorses and pushes for the identity politics that is killing us, an abortion regime way beyond anything that could be called reasonable or civilized and on which it will make no compromise; it opposes charter schools and other forms of public school liberation; it sees the police as the enemy, it demonstrates no distinct fidelity to freedom of speech and, most recently, its declared hopes range from court packing to doing away with the Electoral College and adding states to the union.”

The bottom line: The political realities of 2020 left many Catholics and other active religious believers torn between political options that no longer seemed acceptable.


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Pope Francis' same-sex union media storm opens another front in a Catholic civil war

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If you think about it, journalism is about conflict. A news story is generally about an issue and how two sides (or more) view said issue. The top of the story, known as the lede, is about something someone said or did. The rest is information to support that new information.

In 2020, of course, all that is easier said than done. The fast-paced nature of news in the Internet age, the concept of objectivity being questioned by some mainstream journalists and this desperate need by some to highlight one side over another has made for some murky waters in the news.

Case in point: Pope Francis’ bold proclamation released on October 21 that he endorsed civil same-sex unions. Clearly, this announcement represented some kind of turning point for the Roman Catholic church, a change in tradition on LGBTQ rights and the dawn of a new, more loving era.

Well, that’s what the mainstream press said. Here’s how The New York Times opened its report:

Pope Francis expressed support for same-sex civil unions in remarks revealed in a documentary film that premiered on Wednesday, a significant break from his predecessors that staked out new ground for the church in its recognition of gay people.

The remarks, coming from the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, had the potential to shift debates about the legal status of same-sex couples in nations around the globe and unsettle bishops worried that the unions threaten what the church considers traditional marriage — between one man and one woman.

“What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered,” Francis said in the documentary, “Francesco,” which debuted at the Rome Film Festival, reiterating his view that gay people are children of God. “I stood up for that.”

Clearly, the pope — as head of the church — had in three sentences changed Catholicism forever.

Not so fast, said numerous on-the-record voices in the world of Catholicism.

This was typical Francis, who is known for his off-the-cuff comments (as the Times story noted) that often come into direct conflict with doctrine or they appear to do so. The key is that they produce a tsunami of headlines and news reports.

I have found that the news media isn’t so great at parsing Francis’ statements on deadline. Whenever they do, it is often to highlight Francis as a progressive who heads an evolving church.

It is also crucial that some major Catholic voices tend to be overlooked in the coverage. For example, did you hear what the Archdiocese of New York said, in response to these Pope Francis comments?


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Today's Associated Press: Why cover both sides of an important Amy Coney Barrett story?

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Dear editors at the Associated Press:

Let’s discuss a few issues behind your recent feature that was sent to newspapers everywhere with this headline: “Barrett was trustee at private school with anti-gay policies.”

The key, of course, is “policies” — a vague term that way too many mainstream journalists consistently use in place of the simple word “doctrines.”

Yes, of course, traditional Catholic schools have “policies” that affect students, faculty and staff. However, these policies are almost always attempts to teach and defend the doctrines of the church. It’s significant that the word “doctrine” does not appear anywhere in this long AP piece and the same goes for the word “catechism.” Also, “scripture” is used once — by a progressive Catholic stressing that conservative Catholics are “literalists” when reading the Bible.

Anyone who has covered Catholic education for a decade or two knows what is going on here. Yes, Democrats are furious about Amy Coney Barrett’s arrival on the high court. But this Associated Press story is built on divisions inside the American Catholic church, both on moral theology linked to LGBTQ issues and fights over the goals of Catholic education in colleges, universities, seminaries and private schools such as the ones linked to Barrett and People of Praise.

With that in mind, let’s add two other factors to this case that are ignored (or all but ignored) by AP.

First of all, once upon a time there was a man named St. Pope John Paul II. In 1990, this pope issued a document entitled “Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church)” focusing on issues in Catholic education. You could tell that it was a controversial document (a) because it said Catholic doctrines should be taught and defended in Catholic schools, (b) progressive Catholics, speaking through the press, went ballistic and (c) it took almost a decade of fighting for American Catholic church leaders to act (sort of) on the pope’s guidelines.

This fight was primarily about colleges and universities, but the principals in Ex Corde are relevant to fights, these days, about classroom and student-life issues in Catholic schools at all levels. So what was John Paul II saying?


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That (overlooked) 2020 Al Smith dinner served up blunt appeals to Catholic swing voters

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That (overlooked) 2020 Al Smith dinner served up blunt appeals to Catholic swing voters

During a normal White House race, the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner allows the candidates to don formal attire, fire snappy one-liners and make subtle appeals to Catholic voters.

But nothing is normal in 2020. Thus, Joe Biden and President Donald Trump used this year's virtual dinner to preach to Catholic voters in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida. The event produced few headlines, coming a mere six hours before Trump announced his positive test for COVID-19.

Saluting Catholic progressive, Biden offered a litany about the pandemic, race, the recession and climate change. He warned that many Americans have lost faith "in one another, in truth, in science and reason."

The current pope, Biden stressed, embraced him during a 2013 White House visit, offering comfort shortly after brain cancer took his son Beau's life.

"Pope Francis took the time to meet with my entire family to help us see the light through the darkness," said Biden. "I live in an amazing country … where an Irish Catholic kid like me from Scranton, Pennsylvania, would one day befriend a Jesuit pope. But that's who we are as a country -- where anything is possible when we care for one another, when we look out for one another, when we keep the faith."

While stressing that he is guided "by the tenets of Catholic social doctrine" -- helping the "least of these" -- Biden didn't mention his vow to codify Roe v. Wade if the Supreme Court overturns that decision or his promise to reinstate policies requiring the Little Sisters of the Poor to cooperate in providing birth control and abortifacients to staff. He didn't mention his decision to officiate at the same-sex wedding of two White House colleagues, an action clashing with church doctrine.

It was logical for Biden to avoid providing fresh ammunition for critics. But the speech, once again, trumpeted his Catholic credentials.

"Joe Biden's choice to run explicitly on the claim that he is a faithful Catholic squarely places on the table his claim to be a faithful Catholic," stressed legal scholar Robert P. George of Princeton University, writing on Facebook. He is a Catholic conservative who has also been a consistent critic of Trump.

“No way out of this, folks," he added. "It's not, or not just, Biden's critics who have raised the issue. It's the Biden campaign. …


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'Culture wars' are about demographics: Thus, fertility is now a hot-button topic in news

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'Culture wars' are about demographics: Thus, fertility is now a hot-button topic in news

It was one of those happy social-media pictures, only this time the pregnant mother was celebrating with her nine children.

Los Angeles comedian and actor Kai Choyce was not amused and tweeted the photo with this comment: "this is environmental terrorism. … In the year 2020 literally no one should have ten kids."

The result was a long chain of sweet or snarky comments, as well as photos of large families. One tweet quoted a Swedish study claiming that having "one fewer child per family" can save an average of 58.6 tons of "CO2-equivalent emissions per year."

Debates about fertility often veer into fights about religion and other ultimate questions, such as the fate of the planet.

Parents with two-plus children are often making a statement about the role of religious faith in their lives. People on the other side of this debate have frequently rejected traditional forms of religion.

"What we call 'culture wars' are wars about demographics, but we have trouble discussing that," said historian Philip Jenkins, who is best known for decades of research into global religious trends, while teaching at Pennsylvania State and Baylor University. His latest book is "Fertility and Faith: The Demographic Revolution and the Transformation of World Religions."

In the 1970s, researchers thought the link between secularization and falling birth rates was a "Protestant thing" in Europe, but then this trend spread into Catholic cultures in Europe and in Latin America, he said. Fertility rates are now collapsing in Iran and some Islamic cultures. Meanwhile, Orthodox Jews and traditional Catholics continue to have larger families than liberal believers in those ancient faiths.

America's 2019 birth rate fell to 1.71, its lowest level in three decades, and well under the replacement rate of 2.1. This took place before the coronavirus pandemic and the Brookings Institute recently predicted a "COVID baby bust" next year, resulting in up to half a million fewer births.

Researchers frequently argue about which comes first -- secularization or declining fertility.

"I'm not sure that really matters because these two trends are so clearly related that they just march along together," said Jenkins.


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Words or deeds? Catholics will be discussing Joe Biden's actions during fall campaign

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Words or deeds? Catholics will be discussing Joe Biden's actions during fall campaign

In the summer of 2016, two White House staffers -- Brian Mosteller and Joe Mahshie -- tied the knot in a rite led by one of America's most prominent Catholics.

The officiant was Vice President Joe Biden, who later proclaimed on Twitter: "Proud to marry Brian and Joe at my house. Couldn't be happier … two great guys."

Leaders of familiar Catholic armies then debated whether Biden's actions attacked this Catholic Catechism teaching: "The marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman form with each other an intimate communion of life and love, has been founded and endowed with its own special laws by the Creator. … Christ the Lord raised marriage between the baptized to the dignity of a sacrament."

Conflicts between bishops, clergy and laity will loom in the background as Biden seeks to become America's second Catholic president. Combatants will be returning to territory explored in a famous 1984 address by the late Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York, entitled "Religious Belief and Public Morality."

Speaking at the University of Notre Dame, he said: "As a Catholic, I have accepted certain answers as the right ones for myself and my family, and because I have, they have influenced me in special ways, as Matilda's husband, as a father of five children, as a son who stood next to his own father's death bed trying to decide if the tubes and needles no longer served a purpose.

"As a governor, however, I am involved in defining policies that determine other people's rights in these same areas of life and death. Abortion is one of these issues, and while it is one issue among many, it is one of the most controversial and affects me in a special way as a Catholic public official."

It would be wrong to make abortion policies the "exclusive litmus test of Catholic loyalty," he said. After all, the "Catholic church has come of age in America" and it's time for bishops to recognize that Catholic politicians have to be realistic negotiators in a pluralistic land.

Cuomo also noted polls indicating that American Catholics "support the right to abortion in equal proportion to the rest of the population. … We Catholics apparently believe -- and perhaps act -- little differently from those who don't share our commitment. Are we asking government to make criminal what we believe to be sinful because we ourselves can't stop committing the sin?"


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