on the abuse of labels in the recent contraception blowup
Whatever else the recent blowup over the ACA contraception mandate might have shown, it's that Americans need a better epistemology. The news story has interested me on many levels and will probably pop up in blog posts from time to time. But one philosophical idea kept seeming to float to the forefront, at least in my mind as I read the different ( Read more... )
What I was reacting against is this argument I see made time and again by liberals dealing with this issue: to find out the "Catholic" position you should simply take a headcount of how many Catholics approve the use of birth control (measured by whether they personally chose to do it) and that determines the Catholic position on whether using birth control is immoral. That's a quite different case than the one are pointing to: that Catholic tradition is actually quite varied - as are most religions'! - and that people can fight over the tradition and shape it even if they aren't wearing the pointy hats.
I find this point offensive and troubling because I grew up in a religious tradition that went too much the other direction. I've heard some crazy things professed in the name of Christianity and the Bible by Protestants (evangelicals mainly but even there mainline brethren on occasion). For example, I have heard several Christians - though a minority - say that the melting of the polar ice caps isn't a real problem because God has promised he won't ever destroy the planet with a flood again. I find this dangerous and crazy theology, to say nothing of bad theology. But its sister view, that God will not allow the earth to become uninhabitable until history plays out, is more widespread and IMO equally wrongheaded. I would hate to think that if 51% or even 98% of Protestant Christians accepted either of those views, that would make it the authentic view of Protestantism.
None of that means you can't have a debate of a different kind. Protestants have church discipline councils, not entirely unlike the Catholic church hierarchy though not nearly as organized and influential, and I would hate to think that if the Methodist council agreed God would not allow global warming to destroy the earth, that would be the end of the story for my denomination. And I don't mind people asking what bearing Catholic dogma represents if it isn't representing the views of actual Catholics. But that's not the discussion that's happening. Every time liberals bring up the 98% statistic, they seem to be saying that the church position is determined by popular vote, which just seems wrongheaded and dangerous to me.
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The RCC, like all religious institutions represents its tradition, not the current view of all its members; and the members get to vote by agreeing to be a part of it or not.
This is the sentence that basically pushes me to respond as I do. I'm not seeing an unclear expression, I'm seeing one that's pretty clear. It's just that I cannot see a way of interpreting that other than by saying that if I want to be RCC, I can only do that by accepting that tradition as it is currently formulated by the religious institution - specifically, by the bishops who "represent" us. The tie you made here between the bishops and the tradition was simply too strong, and the position assigned to the laity is simply too congruent with the bishopric's self- understanding of its institutional position in relation to lay Catholics.
Going on to the critique of liberals' critique of Catholicism, though, I think the problem here is that the interpretation of what is Catholic is political, and we expect it to be... not that. We can politicize the RCC one way by saying saying that the Catholic position is represented by how many Catholics violate the reproductive decrees of bishops; we can politicize it another by saying that Catholicism is determined by "the tradition," as represented by the clerical hierarchy, not a popular vote. However, unless the latter critique is attached to some kind of actionable agenda in this context, in order to make that latter position something we can actually use against the power elite of this country, and that's both significantly different from either of the major positions in the debate already, I see the critique of liberalism as defaulting us to a political non-obstacle.
That I think makes it far more useful to the forces of reaction than to the forces in favor of a more humane hermeneutic and society, and that I just can't take, given that the Church hierarchy is already committed to dragging its members down with them into a reactionary tailspin. The best defense of the plurality of the RCC as a tradition is not contesting the liberal view of the representative function of the Church hierarchy, it's spurring the many Catholics who don't accept Church teaching on birth control to find some way to act on their non-acceptance.
I say this because I think there's a reasonable case to be made that one can articulate all the decrees one wants and say they constitute the institutional identity, but what a majority of believers *are actually doing* can be as valid a way of determining what is "Catholic" (or Jewish, or Methodist, or American, or atheist, or whatever) as the self-articulated self-understanding of an institutional representative, or a minority body. There are contexts when it is appropriate to argue in that way about identity. Critique is often that appropriate context - when one tries to shake a group or a person out of complacent self-definition, or out of bad faith self-definition.
Now as I said, to the degree that secularizing democratic liberals simply appropriate that split among clerical hierarchy and a large number of lay people without urging the latter to make their failure to comply politically relevant by explaining why it is appropriate as a Catholic to disagree with the hierarchy, then yes, there's a problem; but I contend it's still the lesser sin than Catholics failing to counter in action their Church hierarchy.
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