My problem with Sullivanism

Last month, Andrew Sullivan wrote one of the less intellectually honest pieces of rhetoric I've come across in some time. He called it "My Problem with Christianism." It is wholly lacking in historical perspective, and written from a faulty- though common- frame of reference not only about the nature of religion, but also about its relationship with public policy. And it simply doesn't play fair with the position of those he disagrees with.

Sullivan's essay is an instance of what I think of as "Humpty-Dumptyism-" the notion, expressed by Lewis Carroll's character, that "when I use a word, it means precisely what I want it to mean, nothing more or less." In Sullivan's case, he reserves the right to private definition of words like "Christian" and "Catholic." And it just doesn't work. Not if your purpose in writing is to convey meaning, anyway.

Sullivan seeks to distinguish "Christianity-" which he says is "simply a faith" (apparently without inherent content- and most especially content which might influence one's attitudes toward matters of public policy) from "Christianism," which he suggests is the notion that "religion is so important that it needs to have a precise political agenda." But the notion that Christianity has- or needs to have- a political agenda isn't the issue. The issue is the notion that Christianity has objective content; that one cannot faithfully subscribe to that content while refusing to allow it to inform his or views on social and political policy; and that to reject the inherent content of Christianity is, in fact, to reject Christianity itself.

Sullivan's essay contains this remarkable passage:

The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is many. There are evangelical Protestants who believe strongly that Christianity should not get too close to the corrupting allure of government power. There are lay Catholics who, while personally devout, are socially liberal on issues like contraception, gay rights, women's equality and a multi-faith society. There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is. They have no problem living next to an atheist or a gay couple or a single mother or people whose views on the meaning of life are utterly alien to them--and respecting their neighbors' choices. That doesn't threaten their faith. Sometimes the contrast helps them understand their own faith better.

And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God's real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple? Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one's beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else.

Wow. Where to begin? Does Christianity therefore have nothing to say to tyranny, to mass murder, to the abuse of power? What does "the corrupting influence of power" have to do with the implication of ideas, as opposed to the involvement of institutions? How is it that a Catholic who rejects his church's teachings can be said to be "personally devout-" and to what extent can a person who rejects the teachings of the magesterium claim to be a faithful Catholic?

This last is a matter of particular relevance to Sullivan, an open homosexual who considers himself a Catholic believer. The closest he comes to addressing it is his implicit endorsement of the highly un-Catholic idea that faith is a purely personal matter, between oneself and God, wholly lacking a horizontal dimension.

But to adopt that position has consequences which go beyond failing to allow one's faith to inform one's politics. It also rules the Golden Rule out of court, as well as all of Christ's teachings regarding interpersonal love and decent treatment of the other. Sullivan can't have it both ways. If some of revelation is going to be made into a purely private, internal matter, with no implication beyond one's personal psyche and soul, one must consistently argue that none of it has such implications. Unfortunately for Sullivan, Christ does not leave us that option. And neither does Christianity. Of any kind.

The business about freedom of conscience and a multi-faith society is a cheap shot by which Sullivan tries to equate disagreement with his own political agenda with intolerance. As for "respecting the choices" of those who engage in lifestyles one believes to be immoral (and in some cases are demonstrably harmful to self or others), how does one "respect" what what regards as immoral? And surely it is obvious that the people described in the second paragraph- those who, in principle, reject the possibility of revelation- cannot consistently be Christians at all; in Christian belief, Jesus Himself is the self-disclosure of an infinite God on precisely the level of human finitiude. Hard to be a Christian while implicitly denying the Incarnation itself!

Sullivan's entire case rests upon the idea that one can be a Christian without heeding the teachings of Christianity (as defined by Christianity, rather than by oneself)- or, more precisely, that one may be a "cafeteria Christian," rejecting the content of one's religion while retaining full rights to the name. That his view on this matter is held by a majority of those who consider themselves "believers" and even "Christians" in our society may or may not be accurate; whatever the number, that position remains just as intellectually dishonest.

Words mean things- and that principle also applies to adjectives like "Catholic" and "Christian" and "believer." And religions and churches get to decide for themselves what they, as an entity, believe- and to establish the grounds upon which individuals may or may not continue to consider themselves their adherents, as well as what it takes to remain adherents in good standing. People have every right to reject the teachings of any religion. What they may not honestly do is to continue to claim to be its followers after having done so, or- having done so- to place their own personal opinions on the same level as the church's self-defined teachings as a measure of their standing as faithful church members.

Sullivan even fails to adequately parse an assertion which he gets right. In responding to the activities of the religious right- which he somehow identifies exclusively with conservative Christianity, as if it did not also encompass Jews like Dennis Prager and Bernard Nathanson and members of other religious traditions who share the same concerns- Sullivan writes:

The worst response, I think, would be to construct something called the religious left. Many of us who are Christians and not supportive of the religious right are not on the left either. In fact, we are opposed to any politicization of the Gospels by any party, Democratic or Republican, by partisan black churches or partisan white ones. "My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus insisted. What part of that do we not understand?

Let us leave aside Sullivan's inexplicable failure to recognize that there has been a powerful religious left in this country for a very long time, embodied by the National Council of Churches and consisting pretty much of the entirety of institutional mainline Protestantism. Post-millennialism and the "social gospel" were phenomena of the left, not of the right. So, largely, were the civil rights movement, the abolitionist movement, and the various peace movements of our history. Sullivan shares my support for the war in Iraq (though neither of us are happy with the way it has been waged). But neither of us, I'm sure, really wants to question the legitimacy of Quakers and Mennonites marching against it!

Let us pass by his failure to notice that the claims it makes for its "socially progressive" agenda are made every bit as much on the ground of a claimed divine mandate as those of the religious right- and that there is a very strong tradition of politically activist and ideologically dogmatic leftism in his own Roman Catholic tradition as well, not only in the United States but abroad. Instead, let's begin by giving the man his due: Sullivan is right in saying that there is no such thing as a specifically Christian political program, even though his argument in support of that position is a red herring.

It's true that certain modern Calvinists, like the Puritans before them, have flatly made the erection of a New Jerusalem here in the United States to varying degrees a part of their agenda. The Christian leftists of the Social Gospel movement were among them; some groups belonging to the religious right are others. The theological buzz word for the regrettable- and mistaken- notion that divine law should be enacted as civil law is "theonomy." It's precisely the idea that God's revelation in Scripture provides us with a blueprint for a theocratic political order for whose advent Christians are obligated to work. The vision is the same, whether pursued by the more extreme adherents of the religious right or by the much older and historically much more vocal and influential religious left.

But theonomy is a position held by only a small minority even of Calvinists. It has never been an accurate reflection of the beliefs of the overwhelming majority of even Christian social conservatives, or of the "religious right." On the other hand, it has clearly always been the position of nearly the entire religious left- of the overwhelming majority of those "people of faith" who are social liberals in any sense!

Yet words like "theocracy" are blithely- and falsely- thrown about by those who disagree with social conservatives as if all of us- or even most of us- were theonomists, who really do advocate making sectarian religious dogma into public law. That seems to be the underlying premise of Sullivan's essay, and it's utter nonsense. And it's worth noting that the notion is never applied to those who deserve it more- the adherents of the essentially Marxist Liberation Theology which has succeed the Social Gospel as the only thing of substance mainline Protestantism really stands for.

Theonomy is a different proposition from the notion that religious beliefs- including sectarian religious beliefs- play a perfectly valid role in informing a person's participation in the public square. The abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement, and the peace movements of both the 'Sixties and today are illustrations of private religious beliefs finding quite appropriate expression in the public arena. So, too, are the activities of at least some in the gay rights movement. I don't think Sullivan means to indict any of these.

Yet his criticism of the religious right, for the most part, is no more apt than it would be if applied to them. Both simply allow their religious convictions to inform their participation in the public square. Neither tries to make sectarian dogma, per se, into secular law. And again, that a position maybe held and even advocated on the same terms by people of various religious traditions, and none, tends to refute the notion that it represents sectarian dogma.

Thoughtless elments within "Evangelicalism" have sometimes spoken of a "Christian America," even citing the odd quote (sometimes even genuine) from the Founding Fathers or a court decision as support. When the context of those quotations is examined, though, it soon becomes clear that what is meant by "Christian" is in fact merely the general ethical tradition of the Western world, which is- whether Sullivan likes it or not- derived in no small measure from the content of the Old and New Testaments. The use of the word "Christian" in this connection is, of course, inappropriate, and confuses the less theologically sophisticated on the religious right as well as those of Sullivan's persuasion.

Sullivan erects a straw man when he writes that

...the term "people of faith" has been co-opted almost entirely in our discourse by those who see Christianity as compatible with only one political party, the Republicans, and believe that their religious doctrines should determine public policy for everyone.

We should note, in passing, that the agreement of Republican platforms and politicians with the concerns of the social conservatives, and the antagonism of the Democrats toward them, does not make party membership per se the issue- and it's silly of Sullivan to imply that it does. But here is a crucial point, and it is absolutely necessary to understand it: "religious doctrines" are simply not the issue, either- for the same reason that what the Founding Fathers and even the courts in their more careless moments called "Christianity" is no such thing. The issue is ethical beliefs which merely have their origin in religion, which is a very different matter.

A person who says, "We need to have sodomy laws because the Old Testament mandates them" is a very poor exegete; he is also out of line on both theological and constitutional grounds. Whatever might have been true of ancient Israel, God does not mandate a theocracy for us. And the First Amendment makes it clear that we do not have one. That misguided individual, however, is also likely to be harmless; as long as most of us- right or left, Christian or not- reject theonomy, it is difficult to conceive of an argument likely to be heard as persuasive by any appreciable number of people, in or out of power. The very diversity of our society guarantees that even in the comparatively rare cases in which someone does advocate the establishment of a sectarian religious teaching as law simply on religious grounds are doomed to instant marginalization and failure.

But we are a society in which all parties are free to bring their philosophical concerns to the table in proposing public policy. That includes concerns which are religious in origin. We do not do so as Christians or as Jews or as atheists; we do so as citizens. True, our positions in the public square are informed by our religious beliefs; how could they be otherwise? Sullivan's attempt to suggest that religion is a purely private and personal matter with no implications for one's public life is a less than thoughtful one which indicts gay rights activists, abolitionists, civil rights activists, opponents of capital punishment, and all those whose religious convictions bring them to the opposite conclusions from those reached by the religious right, too. I don't think he really wants to do that.

A person who privately believes- on the basis of Scripture or otherwise- that homosexual behavior is morally wrong, and who argues on secular grounds that the redefinition of marriage to accommodate homosexuality is bad public policy, is doing two seperate things- both completely appropriate. Those beliefs do not make him or her a bigot. They do not imply that he or she believes that gay people should be treated by the government in any way different than anyone else- and permitted to marry a person of the opposite sex, the only sort of person it is possible, by the very definition of the word, to marry. He or she is playing strictly by the rules of a pluralistic society. The same is true of the person who opposes abortion, whether in the first trimester or thereafter, on the same grounds and in the same fashion.

One would indeed be intolerant if one sought to reimpose sodomy laws; sexual behavior (within limits of age, consent, and other such matters) is a private affair which Christianity does not require be civilly illegal. But Sullivan to the contrary, even a first-trimester abortion involves a second party, the fetus. It is not "the cops," but the party most concerned where abortion is concerned- even more concerned than the mother- whose concerns most urgently deserve a voice here, and the objection of the pro-lifer is precisely that he or she is denied one.

And a person who opposes gay "marriage" or Roe v. Wade is simply not advocating a religious doctrine. He or she is advocating a public policy position agreed with by individuals of various religious convictions, and none. One may agree with it or not. But one may not seek to discredit it or dismiss it from the public square because it reflects the private religious convictions of the person who advocates it! And make no mistake: that is precisely what Sullivan is doing.

"Christianism" is a red herring, a code word for the notion that Christianity has inherent content; that its content has specific implications for public policy; and that those implications are legitimate material for legislation when considered, not as religious dogma at all, but precisely as proposals of public policy espoused on grounds of secular societal interest. "Sullivanism," to coin a phrase, is the attempt to forbid those who disagree with Andrew Sullivan on matters of public policy access to the public square on the basis of a red herring.

Of the two, I have no doubt that the latter is the greater threat both to genuine pluralism and to honest dialog about the issues involved.

"Christianity" is about redemption, not governance. In Lutheran terms, it is only in the "Kingdom of the Right Hand-" in the proclamation of the Gospel- that the population is exclusively Christian. The "Kingdom of the Left-" the arena of governance and compulsion, including that of government- is the realm of common sense, in which people of all faiths- and none- hold common citizenship. "Better to be ruled by a smart Turk than a dumb Christian," one of my seminiary professors once paraphrased Luther as saying. And the involvement of Jews, agnostics, atheists and others in the pro-life movement and the resistence to gay "marriage" ought to be pervasive evidence that it is not sectarian dogma that is at issue here. It is a concern which stems from an ethical tradition which is very much informed by the biblical tradition, it's true. But not everything espoused by sectarian believers is therefore sectarian, as convenient for Sullivan's argument as it would be if it were.

It is one thing for Sullivan to honestly argue the case for gay "marriage," for abortion on demand, or whatever else he may want to advocate. But it is quite another to seek to disqualify those who disagree with him from the public square either by arguing that their position does not represent the objective content of Christian revelation, on one hand, or that their case is a matter of seeking to make sectarian dogma into civil law on the other.

Both arguments are simply dishonest.