Here's an Idea, Don't Vote: Politics and Christian PR

There's an election tomorrow. Have you heard? This will come as a shock to no one who has ever visited this site, but I will not be voting this year. I also didn't vote four years ago. Or four years before that. Or...you get the drift. As a committed old, tried and true Christian anarchist, I have watched the campaign season very closely, the way I might watch a really interesting football game, or a Spike "world's most unbelievable car crashes" marathon. Politics--infinitely more than contact sports and traffic accidents--has proves itself again and again to be irredeemably violent. Beyond that basically standard pacifist complaint, however, I would like to offer three reasons why I, as a Christian, am not voting and, wait for it, why I encourage other Christians not to vote either. If you're not a Christian, you should vote; it'd be a shame if you didn't. (Not nearly as big a shame as it is that you're not a Christian, of course.) In any case...

The following argument will strike many as trivial, which is precisely why I have sandwiched it between what I believe are two more essential points. Nevertheless, having disposed of the notion that Christians are obligated to construct a moral society through legislation, it is important to look at the consequences of continuing to attempt to achieve such political ends. Admittedly there is a real sense in which Scripture acknowledges that that to be a Christian means to open yourself up to ridicule. Paul even accept that the world will always look down on the wisdom of God, ironically labeling it folly. Nevertheless, it is important to distinguish between opening ourselves up to be mocked and causing God to be mocked.

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.

Jesus and Paul agree here on what ought to be a self-evident truth: people are watching Christians and what they see determines what they believe. Christians individually probably are not to keen on the notion that their lives are under a microscope, and why should they be? God is more than fully aware that we all still sin. Christ is the image of the perfect human, not me. Nevertheless, the corporate behavior of Christianity speaks volumes to the world, particularly given how loudly we shout about certain issues. Unfortunately, what we're shouting about isn't meekness, poverty, righteousness, purity, peace, and mercy as in the Beatitudes--which precede the first quote--nor are is the public face of Christianity brotherly love, quiet living, and industriousness as in the passage from 1 Thessalonians. What are the loudest messages about God instead?

And if that seems like an extreme example to you, there are certainly others. Look at the now infamous statements of Richard Mourdock: "Even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something that God intended to happen." Frankly, I don't find that sentiment all that appalling, not because I agree with it but because I know it represents a large and historic branch of Christian theology. The popular media and the vocal critics of Christianity are less philosophical about it. It is sentiments like these given voice only because they are attached to political power: constitutionally challenged and protected protests or theology spilling into public policy. Meanwhile, I could walk into work tomorrow morning and proudly declare that I believe therapeutic abortion (i.e. abortion to save the life of the mother) is wrong--and I do believe that--and no one would bat an eye. They know that I have no interest in launching Christian ethics into the public sphere and so derision is replaced with apathy.

Meanwhile, regardless of what I believe about abortion--which is made largely irrelevant by my theoretical lack of a uterus--I would hope that when people describe me it is in terms more personal and therefore more sympathetic than the way most people choose to describe Mourdock or the Westboro Baptists. Those groups exist only as their public faces, only insofar as their behavior has consequences on a political scale. Yet when people interacted with Jesus, he specifically rejected any reduction of himself into a political persona. He was a healer of the sick, a feeder of the hungry, and a forgiver of sinners--not to mention a man of indisputably impeccable character himself. Richard Mourdock may very well donate to food drives. He may volunteer at hospitals. He may forgive any and everyone, even rape victims who get abortions. It's irrelevant. He will always be that Christian who thinks God is a rapist and wants to write laws on the basis of that belief.

It is time for Christians to take a long, hard look at just how extensively our involvement in democratic politics has opened us and, much more importantly, God to ceaseless ridicule. By allowing the public presence of the Christian faith to be reduced to its political manifestation--either is moralistic bigotry or socialistic coerced charity--we have transformed God the Father, Son, and Spirit from persons to partisans. There is no rehabilitating Christianity's political image. It is not possible to offer to the world a kinder, gentler, truer Christianity that will make the faith politically palatable. God makes radical ethical demands of His followers, and libertines are never going to be okay with that. God makes radical social justice demands of his followers, and aristocrats are never going to be okay with that. As long as the faith is married to political agendas, it will never be anything more than a caricature of the truth which Jesus came to impart, a revolutionary practical, ethical truth. In the meantime, more people are likely to disassociate with Christianity in favor of some vague notion of "spirituality" because to be in church means to be Richard Mourdock, et. al.

[Reason 1; Reason 3]

Obama Brings Rape into the 21st Century

And gets a gold star from me for doing it. After more than eighty years of the federal government inadequately defining "rape," the Obama administration has updated the definition. Under the old understanding, rape was the "carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will." The new and improved definition is much more expansive:

Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.

Why is this better? The most glaringly obvious improvement is that the FBI now recognizes that men can be the victims of rape, which has been one of the most dastardly oversights in the decades old dispute over equal rights for the sexes. By removing the specification that a rape victim must be "female," the government finally acknowledges what should have been self-evident all along: it is possible to sexually violate a male. Additionally, the new definition expands rape to include the variety of sexual acts which, in our perverse excellence, we have perfected in modern times, including object rape, vaginal or anal penetration with body parts other than the penis, and forced fellatio.

It is important to remember, however, that this change does not affect penal codes--state or federal--in anyway, though thankfully most already included the full range of offenses in their rape and sexual assault laws. It does, however, bring the statistical analysis of rape into the 21st century, which is an important step. Many state and local organizations use the official rape statistics put out by the FBI to assign funds and other resources to rape prevention and awareness programs as well as victims' services. The greatest victory, however, may still be the moral one. It is encouraging to know that our government is still nimble enough to change patently absurd conceptions of crime, even if it takes eighty-five years to do it.

Causality vs. Moral Culpability

The issue of causality vs. moral culpability has been weighing on my mind for months now. The more I mull it over, the more I am startled by our culture's unwillingness to make any effort to change its behaviors and perceptions for fear that it will somehow be an admission of guilt. It is as if, in ignorance, we have collectively walked into a bear cave and been mauled, but rather than agreeing that we should avoid bear caves in the future we keep walking foolishly into them because to stop would be a tacit admission that we were somehow guilty of our own mauling. It’s nonsense, plain and simple.

In conjunction with my reflections on The Obedient Wives Club, I promised to give a fuller discussion of this problem. This is it. My thoughts on this coalesced in response to a story that broke back in March, and I wrote the below then. If facts have changed in the particular case in question, there may be some factual inaccuracies or at least some strokes imprecisely brushed. The point, however, remains the same.

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There is a difference between causality and moral culpability that is critical for the construction and preservation of a healthy society. Unfortunately, this distinction is not only not acknowledge but is feared, with the ultimate consequence being that in an effort to empower victims, we actually ensure a sort of universal victimization. Let me explain.

For every moral event, there is both a morally neutral set of causes which brings about the event and a moral actor who is the cause of the event itself. Moral culpability necessarily resides in the latter, but, with the exception of omniscient and omnipotent beings, the moral actor cannot have exhaustive power over the former category. While the emphasis of my point will be on negative moral actions, let me illustrate this principle first with a positive example. Let us imagine that your spouse needs you to go to the grocery store on a stormy day. When you arrive, you are forced to park at the back of the parking lot. There you see a woman without an umbrella carrying a baby. You go to her and offer to share your umbrella.

From a deterministic perspective, we can posit an infinite causal catena or, if you prefer, an immense chain of cause and effect which stretches back to the beginning of the universe (be it in God or in natural causation) leading to any particular interchange, including the one described above. For practical purposes, however, let us admit a number of more direct and evident causes. First, had it not been raining, there would have been no need either for you to have your umbrella or for you to offer it to the woman. Furthermore, had the woman not forgotten her umbrella, you never would have acted virtuously in offering yours to her. Finally, had your spouse not needed you to go to the store, you would never have encountered the woman.

All of the above, I hope, is entirely self-evident. I hope it is equally obvious that any moral culpability (and here, I intend both positive and negative moral value) belong to you alone as the moral actor. The fact that an obvious causal connection can be seen between your spouse needing groceries and your moral action does not lead you automatically to impute moral virtue to your spouse. Even more nonsensical would be to suggest that the woman with the baby is morally virtuous because had she not been there without an umbrella you never would have behaved virtuously. The recognition of causality has essentially no bearing on moral culpability.

With the principles thus laid out--hopefully in a way that is totally uncontroversial--I will shift to address negative moral action, first in a hypothetical case and then in the actual case that has spawned this musing. Let us take the same inoffensive logic that recognized causality but imputed moral virtue only to the moral agent at the grocery store and apply it to a touchier subject. Imagine now that you asked your spouse to go to the grocery store on a stormy night, New Years Eve to be precise. While driving to the store, your spouse’s is engaged in a fatal collision with a drunk driver. Looking once again at the obvious and direct causes, we can say that had you not needed groceries, it is likely that your spouse would be alive. Had it not been stormy, it is likely that your spouse would be alive. While there may be some impulse in us to blame God for making it rain or yourself for needing the errand run, ultimately we know that moral culpability for the death is on the moral actor alone: the drunk driver.

Let me go a step further, however, and point out that neutral moral causality is not entirely out of our hands. While it may be psychologically dangerous to dwell on this in the actual instance of tragedy, for the purposes of our hypothetical let us admit that we can make a reasonable assumption about the danger of driving on New Year’s Eve (when drunk drivers abound) in stormy weather. Had we been thinking with a level head about the dangers of driving when compared with the pressing need for groceries, we may very well have concluded that it would be better to wait rather than risk grievous injury. We make these kind of decisions all the time, trying to control or predict insofar as is possible for us the various morally neutral causes which may come to bear on our lives. If you don’t want to get mugged, don’t walk down a dark alley at night. It is common sense.

I imagine at this point, if you have bothered to read that interminable build up, that you may be wondering if anything of any real substance will be said, anything which runs against the grain. In truth, I agree that all of the above seems totally innocuous. There has been, however, outrage over a recent story about a young girl who was gang raped by nearly twenty men. More to the point, there has been outrage over some of the coverage of the story which quotes members of the girl’s community describing her dress and behavior as promiscuous. The culprit in question is the New York Times which reported:

Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.

“Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record. “How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?”

I am sure that we would all agree that the act perpetrated by these men is truly despicable and that they alone are responsible for it. It would, in fact, be wrong to try to defer any blame for what happened onto this girl or her parents. None of that is in question, and frankly none of that is truly addressed by the quotes which the New York Times reported. It would appear, at first blush, that the members of the community of Cleveland cannot totally ignore causality. It is something which we ought to be able to recognize, perhaps even intuitively and particularly those causes which are within the realm of our control. Certainly, anyone can be raped, and there is nothing to say that an Amish woman locked in an isolated country home with a state of the art security system (if you can even imagine such a thing) still couldn’t be raped. In theory. From the perspective of our experience though, we know that if you go jogging alone at night, you are at risk. We know that if you let a stranger mix your drinks, you’re at risk. And if you let your eleven year old daughter present herself to the public as an object of sexual desire, dressed immodestly and surrounding herself with older males, then you can imagine that she is at risk. Not at fault, mind you, but at risk.

And why shouldn’t we notice that with relation to this story? We tell women never to go jogging alone at night. We tell women not to let strangers mix their drinks. It is that same logic which ought to permit us to say, “Look! Our culture creates permissive parents and children who think that promiscuity will lead to happiness. Maybe that has something to do with a world where twenty men can gang rape a child.” There is nothing in that which says, “She got what she deserved,” nothing which tries to mitigate the legal or moral responsibility of the rapists. It only recognizes causality and suggests a preventative.

In a perfect world, we could behave in ways which are morally neutral without any thought of evil. I could send my wife to the store and would only need to worry about events which were truly accidents. People would stop at stop signs, never drink and drive, and never take advantage of opportunities for sin. Shocking as this may be for the more delicate among you, however, we do not live in such a world. In the treacherous endeavor of navigating through life, it is pragmatic (if not always encouraging) to remember that humanity is a base, degenerate group of semi-rational beasts. For every saint who offers an umbrella to a drenched mother there is a vicious, nasty, brutish scoundrel who cares only for himself. If you don’t want your wives and daughters raped, then don’t send them out on the street in clothing which invites sexual objectification. It is no guarantee, but it is a cause which is within our limited sphere of control. You are all welcome to defend parents rights to be as negligent as they please and a person’s right to be as reckless as he or she pleases, but I dare say that it would be more constructive for us as a society to take instances like these as nauseating object lessons in the necessity of living shrewdly but innocently in a world which demands both.