Wherefore Religious Fundamentalism?

By now it should be obvious from this blog and two others of mine, Beyond Darwin and Old-Style Liberal Blog, that I'm a religious liberal, and, politically, I'm a center-left moderate: an "old-style liberal" who thinks a lot of the doctrine of the secular left today — e.g. arrant multiculturalism, knee-jerk political correctness, unlimited support for abortion rights — is wrong.

In other words, I have a worldview which, though it evolves over time, keeps me at odds with both leftists and rightists. Even so, what I seek most of all is a sense of solidarity with the rest of the world, taken in toto. Yes, indeed, I admit it ... it's a contradiction! Being at odds with those I disagree with is a strange way to promote solidarity.

At any rate ... in the religious sphere, I'd say, the leftists are the atheists, the agnostics, and to a certain extent the apathetic ones who simply wish religion would fade into the background. The rightists are the fundamentalists, many evangelicals, many religious conservatives, the creationists. (I'm speaking of these categories in Christian terms, though of course similar categories exist in other religions.)

In politics and secular ideology, the leftists and rightists are not as easy to label, except with reference to their positions on specific topics. We no longer can speak of leftists as communists, socialists, or fellow travelers, to be sure, and there are so many versions of political conservatism, so-called "neo-conservatism" being just one of them.

A simple rule, then, is this: in secular ideology, a leftist or "liberal" is anyone whom a self-styled "conservative" excoriates. And a rightist or "conservative" is anyone whom a self-styled "progressive" (the L-word now being a dirty one) excoriates.

Perhaps uncoincidentally, there seems to be a strong correlation between where one is on the religious spectrum and where one is on the political/ideological spectrum. There aren't a whole lot of atheists on the political right, nor do many religious conservatives flock to the political left.


The way I see it, there seems to be, in both the religious sphere and the secular one, a dynamic in which the leftists and rightists who manifestly abhor one another still manage through their respective shows of assertiveness and counterassertiveness to keep the other side in business. They feed off each other. They alienate the middle.

If I had my druthers, I'd like both wings to go away, in both religious and secular versions, leaving people in the middle to debate whether to be center-left or center-right.

But the wing the I find most offensive is, I admit, the religious-conservative one. In particular, it is "the face of evangelical Christianity," which Timothy K. Beal, in Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith, says he has "come to distrust" (p. 68).

Beal, raised as a conservative evangelical in (I believe) the Southern Baptist tradition, is now alienated from his childhood faith. As a professor of religion at a major university — and a religious liberal — he still wrestles with what he does and does not believe. This was why he took himself and his family on an extended road trip to visit places like Holy Land USA and Golgotha Fun Park, travel destinations that appeal mostly to that face of American religion that he is now skeptical of. He wants to understand their appeal, even if he can't fully get with the program anymore.

Evangelical Christianity, he says, "always inclines itself toward theological fundamentalism. It's the face that is turned on by the dream of an ideological system that is total, lock-tight, free of all logical contradiction. In this sort of theological answer machine, there is no room for doubts, uncertainties, questions" (p. 68). Beal finds that unwillingness to entertain doubts and tensions frankly repellent. So do I.


Another way to put it is that I like a big tent. I'd like to get us all into the same huge tent, in fact, where we can carry on our remaining conversations and debates with civility.

I'm a Catholic by choice and conversion, though I was raised by a mother who was a lapsed Southern Baptist and a father who was a lapsed Methodist. I spent my youth unchurched, at best only a token believer in God. In midlife I found that I was a believing Christian after all, and so I found my way to the style of Episcopalian faith termed Anglo-Catholicism ... which is akin to what Anglicans in the Church of England call the "high church."

Next, the Anglo-Catholic emphasis on elaborate liturgies and sacraments as signs of divine grace made it just a hop, skip, and jump for me to shift to Roman Catholicism, when certain aspects of Episcopalianism began to grate. It certainly helped, also, that I had many Catholic friends, and that I had been (and still am) quite enthusiastic about the Jesuit education I received as a youth at Georgetown University.

Clearly, the Catholic Church aims (with how much success is a matter of debate) to be a big tent; the word "catholic" means "universal."

The Church of England and its around-the-world projection, the Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church in this country is a part, is another would-be big-tent faith. It houses "high church" people who call themselves Catholics — though not Roman Catholics — and "low church" people who pride themselves on their Protestantism, as well as "broad church" folks who (I gather) are somewhere in between.

If I may gloss rather improbably over the tension that has existed historically between Roman Catholics and Anglicans — thanks to you, Henry VIII — I must say I think of these two flavors of Christian belief as being much more truly "conservative" than anything we tend to speak of as "conservative" today.

Which means, roughly speaking, that their general outlook (though one is Protestant and the other Catholic) precedes the fundamentalism that in the early 20th century grew out of an adverse reaction to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, first appearing some decades prior to the fin de siècle but becoming scientific orthodoxy only at about that time.


Protestant fundamentalism is historically separatist in outlook, according to a recent Peter J. Boyer article in The New Yorker: "The Big Tent: Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, and the transformation of American evangelicalism" (not available online?) in the August 22, 2005, issue.

"The Fundamentals," says Boyer, was "an influential series of books ... published between 1910 and 1915 [that] laid out the case for Christian orthodoxy." It strongly opposed the "modernist" theology that held that, in view of Darwinian evolution, "the divine will of God could be seen in the progress of man on earth [inasmuch as] mankind was essentially good and wholly perfectible, and would eventually progress to the achievement of God's kingdom on earth."

That liberal, progressive, modernist outlook tended to look upon the founder of the Christian faith as the "historical Jesus." The Bible was said to be the work of men, not God. That update to traditional theology was found patently offensive by such Protestant luminaries as J. Gresham Machen, who "argued that a theology that denied Christ's divinity and doubted the Bible wasn't Christianity at all but, rather, a distinct and separate religion."

Thus was born a tendency to separatism which splintered American Evangelical Protestantism until the advent of Billy Graham in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The slightest deviation from fundamentalist orthodoxy was met with tar and feathers. Billy Graham changed all that over the course of many decades, as he promoted a unique sort of big-tent salvation, but now the torch has been passed to his son Franklin, who shows signs of reinstating the old orthodoxy:

... Franklin [writes Boyer] is quite willing to voice what he deems harsh truths. Just that morning, he had told me that the United Nations will fail, because it is a godless enterprise. Abortion is murder, he said, and homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God. After the attacks of September 11th, Franklin declared that as a relgion Islam was "wicked, violent, and not of the same God" — an assertion from which he has hardly retreated.


How sad, say I. It is exactly the opposite of what Jesus preached, when he railed against the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, and all the other "parties" which splintered the Jewish people in his day, making it virtually certain, Jesus prophesied, that Rome would crush the life out of Israel and destroy the Jerusalem Temple, if Jews did not repent of their internal separatism and come together in faith.

The history books show Jesus was right. Israel did not heal its internal wounds, and the Temple in Jerusalem was lost only a few decades after the crucifixion.

How's that for the "historical Jesus"?

Today, in America, the ideological heirs of the Jewish "parties" of Jesus's day are — in the name of Jesus! — sowing the same kind of calumny as did the Pharisees and Sadducees. Take the subject of abortion. If abortion is "murder," then how does the woman who has one different from the adulteress who appears in John, chapter 8:

The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."

Stoning to death was, of course, a ritual form of execution performed by Jewish scribes or "teachers of the law" in Jesus's day.

No, I don't think most abortions are moral ... but there's no need to call them "murder" and thereby tar-and-feather (or, metaphorically, stone to death, since being cast out of community is effectively a spiritual death sentence) anyone who has one.

Nor is there any constructive value in calling the U.N. "godless." Nor in saying homosexuality is "a sin in the eyes of God" — presumably, even if it's just an orientation and not an actual practice.


It all leads me to ask the possibly unanswerable question, wherefore religious fundamentalism? Where does the conviction that God wants us to dissociate ourselves from those who don't believe as we do come from?

I am put in mind of something that happened to me when I was 13. Though I had spent precious little time in church until then, I was spending the summer with relatives who were regular attendees at the local Southern Baptist church. My cousin Susan took me to Sunday School one time, where as a guest I was given first crack at the question of the day: Now that you are getting old enough to go out on dates, should you have dates with members of other faiths?

I said, "Yes, since it's a good way to learn about other kinds of people."

Wrong!

The teacher asked the others in the class to set me straight: No dates with Methodists or Presbyterians, much less Catholics or Jews, because what would happen if you fell in love and wanted to get married?

That was when I decided at a tender age that I didn't want to have anything to do with religion!

If religion drives people apart, I knew almost instinctively, then what good is it? We need to be brought together more, not driven further apart.


But fundamentalists, obviously, disagree ... as do a lot of evangelicals, even post-Billy Graham.

In fact, I would posit a rule: the more a religious system of thought is "total, lock-tight, free of all logical contradiction" (in Timothy Beal's words above), the more fundamentalist it is, and the more it promotes splintering and separatism ... which is exactly the opposite of the true Christian message.

The New Chastity

In Color Me Confused ... I opined that we ought to be teaching our kids not just abstinence but good old-fashioned chastity. My commitment to chastity, however, was tempered by my intuition that the old-fashioned rules of sexual morality as set forth in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (which I am a proud member of) overly glorify, idolize, and even fetishize women's unique capacity to conceive and bear children.

That traditional estimation, in turn, paves the way for what has been called a "new Catholic feminism." It seems to be based on the postulate of a "unique dignity and vocation of women." (See my comments on this topic, as brought up in a recent column by George Weigel, in Confronting Theological and Ideological Tensions.)

I am suspicious of this thrust among today's conservative Catholics. I don't want to give up on the "old feminism," which holds that women's dignity and vocation is not radically distinct from men's. And so this idea has just occurred to me: we ought to endorse gay marriage as a way around linking chastity too firmly to the mystique of female reproductive capacity.

When I say "gay marriage," I mean, of course, same-sex unions, whether between two men or two women.

Now, I am not gay, and as my previous post reveals I am not terribly happy about the recent finding of the National Survey of Family Growth that almost 11% of girls 15 to 19 admit to at least one same-sex encounter. But I consider that statistic revealing not so much of an inclination toward being gay as one toward being unchaste.

Gay sex does not necessarily equal unchaste sex ... but it too often does. I'd say the rules of chastity are, or ought to be, the same for gays and lesbians as for heterosexuals. But "no sex outside marriage" can't be the rule for gays if gays can't marry.

If gays and lesbians were allowed to practice chastity within holy wedlock, we could teach our kids a form of chastity that does not turn female childbearing capacity back into a mystique and women accordingly back into slaves to their own reproductive selves. Such a framework for the "new chastity" would put the brakes on rates of unwanted pregnancy and abortion ... just as would the "old chastity" framework, I readily admit. But the "new chastity" would actually be feminism-friendly, and it would open the door to tolerance for gays and lesbians.

I like the sound of that.

Color Me Confused ...

OK, I'll admit it. I'm confused about what I ought to believe as a human being and as a practicing Catholic about the morality of sex in all its ramifications.

My confusion surfaced again this past week when I read "Parents need to dispel kids' myths about sex habits," a column by Susan Reimer that appeared in my local newspaper, The Baltimore Sun. Then I read "A Teen Twist on Sex" in TIME Magazine.

Both articles were about the just-released National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), a survey made by a U.S government agency (the National Center for Health Statistics) in 2002 of the sexual habits of over 15,000 Americans ages 15 to 44 ... including over 2,200 teenage boys and girls ages 15 to 19.

The NSFG found, per TIME:

More than half the adolescents surveyed ... said they had engaged in oral sex ... That proportion was about the same among boys and girls. And although you may assume that girls mostly perform and boys receive, the numbers show the give and take is again about equal.

And this:

... about 11% of girls 15 to 19 say they have had at least one same-sex encounter — the same percentage that was found in women 18 to 44.

In other words, over one in 10 teenage girls 15 or older has presumably had oral sex with another girl!

Susan Reimer is alarmed about these statistics mainly because engaging in practices of oral gratification carries risks of sexually transmitted disease. Her article and the one in TIME both suggest this is happening because teens have heard the message that they'd better abstain from sexual intercourse, at least when unprotected by birth control ... so (they reason) why not avoid the issue of STDs and unwanted pregnancies entirely by resorting to oral sex.

That STDs can be passed also through oral sex has apparently not been impressed on them.


I find all this troubling because I have grave doubts about those who, like Susan Reimer, advocate teaching teens anything more permissive than good old-fashioned chastity. I don't think they can iron out all the internal inconsistencies in their position.

I say "chastity," not "abstinence," because the latter word suggests going against the presumed norm of teens having sexual partners at a young age and outside marriage. In other words, to tell a teen to "abstain" is to admit that most of his or her fellow teens are having sex, and then to say, in effect, "Be an exception." Chastity, on the other hand, purports to be the norm per se, such that those who have too-young or premarital relations are cast as the exception to the rule.

As for the inconsistencies, I feel it is contradictory to advocate strong parental input into teens' choices on sex, on the one hand, and to oppose parental notification laws on the other. Again, I have doubts about urging teens to choose condoms over abstinence. Even if condoms are OK for married couples, that doesn't mean parents ought to acquiesce in their children's sexual activity by recommending condoms to high-schoolers. That invites the response, "If condoms are OK, why not oral sex?" After all, condoms sometimes fail and leave users exposed to STDs.


Whether you call it chastity or abstinence, it pretty much means having a sex life of the type recommended in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Basically, no sex outside heterosexual marriage. No abortion. No gay or lesbian sex.

No artificial birth control is another mandate ... though it's one I'm really dubious about, personally. (Read one Catholic theologian's argument against the church position on birth control here.)

As far as I can tell, the Catechism is not down on oral sex in the marital boudoir, somewhat surprisingly, as long as it is not done as a clever way to skirt intercourse and possible pregnancy.


I find myself strangely drawn to this old-fashioned, now-countercultural view of sex and marriage ... with one major reservation.

The reservation stems from my (admittedly intuitive) belief that the central organizing principle of all Catholic sexual morality is the glorification of a woman's fertility — of her ability to conceive and bear children.

As I wrote in Confronting Theological and Ideological Tensions, conservative Catholics extol a "new Catholic feminism" based on "the unique dignity and vocation of women." What is the basis for this "unique dignity and vocation" if not the fact that women, but not men, can conceive?

Conceiving, bearing, and raising children is the core idea of our much-vaunted family values. Since sex is traditionally required to initiate pregnancy, sexual relations must be confined to heterosexual marriage. Whatever the husband and wife do in the bedroom must be open to conception. And so on. Just about every Catholic teaching on sex, marriage, and reproduction derives from an urge to glorify — idolize? fetishize? — women's unique reproductive status.


Imagine an alternate world where all people are hermaphroditic beings with male and female reproductive parts. Any person of the proper age could impregnate any other. Marriages might not exist at all, or they might not be restricted to precisely two adults. The concept of separate gender roles would be meaningless. So would the concept of same-sex sex ... since, in a way, all sex would be same-sex sex.

Would such a world even care about "the sancity of marriage"? The rules for creating and nurturing succeeding generations would be wholly practical and entirely utilitarian.

Furthermore, it would be hard to imagine any basis whatever for designating one class of beings as having "unique dignity and vocation."


In other words, I don't see any coherent basis in our world for recovering old-fashioned values of chastity and sexual abstinence while still upholding feminist assertions of a woman's vocation as identical to a man's. The "unique dignity and vocation" view and the pro-chastity view seem joined at the hip, in our non-hermaphroditic world.

That's why you can color me confused. I don't want to acquiesce in a "new feminism" which validates women's "unique dignity and vocation" and thereby undercuts "old feminism." Yet I feel in my bones that, if we want to avoid taking internally contradictory positions about sexuality, we need to be teaching our kids good old-fashioned chastity.

Confronting Theological and Ideological Tensions

Father Ron Rolheiser's recent column "On Carrying Ecclesial Tension" was carried in my local Catholic newspaper, The Catholic Review, as "Accepting tensions within the church." It struck a chord with me. The column took up the difficult question of how conservatives and liberals within the church ought to conceptualize their differences.

Before concluding that "we need to carry both, the conservative and the liberal understanding of things," Rolheiser anatomizes the conflict this way:

... if I'm a conservative, my sense will be that things are clear, but get confused because false freedom sets itself against truth and community. My itch will be to resolve tension and differences by appealing to authority, dogma, tradition, law, and rubrics, but without an equal appeal to the complexity of life and individual freedom.

Conversely, if I'm a liberal, my approach to understanding things will be to start from life's ambiguity rather than from its clarity. My worry will be that complexity and private conscience are not being sufficiently respected and my itch (suffered in the name of conscience, freedom, and the spirit) will be to resolve issues without an equal appeal to tradition, dogma, authority, and law.

To me, that's profound. In this corner, wearing red trunks, says Rolheiser, are tradition, authority, law, dogma, rubrics, community values etched in bedrock certainties ... and the generally conservative worldview which enshrines them all. In the other corner, wearing blue trunks, are complexity, private conscience, an itch for freedom which is potentially but not necessarily false, and a spirit of truth-seeking which begins, relativistically, by holding "life's ambiguity" up for inspection, and not with a statement of clear and certain absolutes.


Coincidentally, on the same page in The Catholic Review as Rolheiser's column is one by well-known conservative voice George Weigel, "How a nun built global TV empire," available online under a different title here. Weigel views the example of Mother Angelica, founder of the Eternal Word Television Network, through the lens of Raymond Arroyo's recent biography of her.

In something of an understatement Weigel says, "EWTN's style of Catholic piety may not be universally appreciated." Got that right, George! I for one would rather spend time viewing a test pattern than watching EWTN. Part of the reason is that, to me, the "extreme" reverence on view at ETWN patterns with what seems an outmoded view of women ... even if, though a woman, Mother Angelica has become something of a media mogul in her own inimitable "dumpling" way.

As Weigel puts it:

There’s ... food for thought here [in Mother Angelica's story] as Catholics of both sexes ponder the meaning of John Paul the Great’s [i.e., Pope John Paul II's] Catholic feminism. The most beloved figure in contemporary Catholicism was a woman — Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The most powerful and successful Catholic media mogul of our time is a woman — Mother Angelica. What does it mean for the future that neither Mother Teresa nor Mother Angelica had much use for “Catholic feminism” as it’s usually defined, and that both were completely devoted to John Paul II’s understanding of the unique dignity and vocation of women?

"The unique dignity and vocation of women": if that phrase means anything, it means a lot. It means that women are called to radically different lives than men are, and so they must be radically different. There must accordingly be an ontological, metaphysical distinction between how God "sees" men and how God "sees" women — since the Creator's "sight" establishes what things (and people) really are.

The people who insist that women and men have fundamentally different dignities and vocations are, in my analogy, the ones wearing the red trunks. The boxers in the blue trunks insist that there's no good reason why, for instance, women can't be priests.


Some days I wear blue trunks, and on other days my boxing trunks are red. I really can't decide about what women, if radically distinct from men, fundamentally are. Nor can I decide once and for all about whether there's anything basically wrong with (say) gay and lesbian love, or premarital sex, or masturbation, or birth control. These are among the many theologically hot-button issues which vex me.

At a much deeper level, I am truly torn between honoring complexity and kowtowing to certainty ... between extolling insouciant creativity and insisting on rigid order ... between wanting to move forward toward progressive desiderata and wishing to move backward to shore up old values, now crumbling like a levee in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

I think my dedication of this blog to "solidarity" must be a way of externalizing and then trying to heal the inner tension in my own gut.


The one thing I can say with great certainty is that I want and need to understand these issues, these tensions, much more deeply than I do now.

Here, I'm taking my cue from something I have just read in Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling book Blink. It's a book about harnessing the "adaptive unconscious" to make spot-on-target snap judgments.

Gladwell shows that we each have a vast potential for looking at new information or a new situation which we feel called on to judge and within the blink of an eye intuiting what is most important, most telling about the situation. We derive therefrom what is very often a spot-on evaluation before we've even had time to clear our throats to say why.

And that's the funny thing about what Gladwell calls "thin-slicing," this ability to instantly detect the essence of something — what really counts about that something — without pausing for reflection. To wit, if we do pause to analyze, reflect, and try to say why we think what we do think, we're apt to mess up our thin-slicing. We're likely to screw up our spur-of-the-moment judgment-making capacity super-royally.

For, Gladwell shows, that capacity exists in our unconscious mind, and when we try to make its declarations conscious, they get garbled. Except — and here's the key thing — if we have studied with diligence and passion, for a very long time, the field of knowledge which provides the context for our snap judgments. Then and only then can we claim to be experts ... experts being folks whose vast store of "knowledge gives their first impressions resiliency" (p. 322, large-print edition). In other words, experts are people whose intense study of a field allows their conscious rationales to mirror and explain their unconscious snap judgments in that field.


More quotes from Gladwell on this subject include:

" ... it is really only experts who are able to reliably account for their reactions." (p. 310)

"... with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret — and decode — what lies behind our snap judgments and first impresssions." (p. 316)

"This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and expertise, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren't grounded in real understanding." (p. 318)

This last quote points up the idea that even experts in field A are prone to shallow reactions in field B, an area they haven't studied intensively.

I suspect I'm in that very position of having shallow reactions with respect to the hot-button issues that confront my church and society today and divide conservatives and liberals. When one of these issues pops into view, I immediately climb into either my blue boxing trunks or my red boxing trunks, depending (I suppose) on how I'm feeling that day. But I admit that my gut reactions — whether they happen to be right or wrong — are shallow and easily disrupted. Next time the same issue comes up, you may well find me wearing a different set of trunks.


So I would say to Ron Rolheiser that we have to do more than simply accept the tensions within our church, and by extension within the larger society. We have to go deeper than that. We have to do what all experts do: tunnel through the "locked door" behind which Malcolm Gladwell says our adaptive unconscious carries out its functions. We must learn to justify our reflexes, not just to ourselves but to one another.

If we prefer (to take a quotidian analogy Gladwell employs) Coke to Pepsi, we must discover how the reasons for our judgments relate to objectively discernible aspects of the reality we are judging. We each have to get our reasoning mind and our adaptive unconscious singing from the same hymn book. Only then can we begin to have meaningful discussions amongst ourselves by means of which to heal the tensions we are dutifully accepting.

Embracing Society's Most Vulnerable

John Crabtree-Ireland, a writer, actor and documentary filmmaker who lives in Los Angeles, writes in "Tightening the noose on young American gays," that the campaign on the part of many American parents to extirpate gayness when it shows up in their children is having disastrous consequences. Such strategies as "reparative therapy" and "transformational ministry," Crabtree-Ireland writes in this opinion column appearing in The Baltimore Sun of Sept. 1, 2005, have destroyed many gay adolescents' self-esteem to the point where "gay kids constitute nearly one-third of successful youth suicides."

If that weren't bad enough, Crabtree-Ireland continues, "Religiously affiliated groups in California recently drafted a ballot initiative that the state's attorney general has titled 'Elimination of Domestic Partner Rights.' ... Under such a law, even the lesser protection afforded by current domestic partner status would be stripped away: no rights to hospital visitation, adoption of children, insurance benefits or inheritance."

Despite the openness of their assault on gays and lesbians in America, Crabtree-Ireland says the promulgators of such strategies as "reparative therapy" and such public laws as the "Elimination of Domestic Partner Rights" ballot initiative are just as bad as the "hooded officials" in Iran who in the name of religious purity recently hanged a 14-year-old boy and a 16-year-old boy for having consensual gay sex.

Crabtree-Ireland closes:

As the pendulum swings further toward eroding civil liberties in our country, we should all take a moment to assess how much we have lost and where we are heading. If gay people are legislated into second-class citizen status, those who would do them harm will surely take it as a cue.

Only when we extract religious dogma from all three branches of government can we begin to reclaim the promise of our democracy for all, embracing society's most vulnerable. By doing so, we can gently loosen the noose that imperils their future.



But, wait! Embracing society's most vulnerable is exactly the message Jesus preached, is it not?

At least, so says Albert Nolan in Jesus before Christianity. Jesus was confronted with a situation in which the various parties of "haves" in 1st-century Israel — the Pharisees, Sadducees, etc. — tried to outdo one another in their punctilious observance of "the law and the prophets," forgetting the most important thing of all, compassion for the poor, the demon-afflicted, and the so-called sinners — all of whom constituted the "have nots."

The people who would vote yes on an "Elimination of Domestic Partner Rights" ballot initiative are the Pharisees of our day.

The problem is not that we need to "extract religious dogma from all three branches of government."

The problem is that what so many of us religious believers erroneously take to be "correct" dogma goes 180° against what Jesus taught!

"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone ... " (John 8:7). That ought to be the starting point for any dogma we might call truly Christian.