Clean Monday: Straightening Out Alaska

Normally my Clean Monday thoughts tend more toward the devotional side. (I've already had some lagana this morning, have you?) But as I was perusing news from the Orthodox world, this little tidbit struck me as too delicious not to share.

US President Barack Obama must have known that his support of gay marriage would bring him trouble. But of all possible repercussions, a demand to roll back Alaska’s 1867 sale to the United States was one he was unlikely to have seen coming.

And yet that was the very claim that an ultraconservative religious group made in a Moscow arbitrage court, citing the need to protect fellow Christians from sin.

Obama’s alleged plans to legalize the “so-called same-sex marriage” threaten the freedom of religion of Alaska’s Orthodox Christians, who “would never accept sin for normal behavior,” the nongovernmental group Pchyolki (“Bees”) said.

“We see it as our duty to protect their right to freely practice their religion, which allows no tolerance to sin,” the group said in a statement on their website.

The groups charges that the contract for the sale of Alaska is null and void because of a technicality about the method of payment. Ironically, this lawsuit is only coming to light now because of the group's own inability to abide by the legal technicalities of their own system.

Something tells me this isn't the kind of cleanliness Clean Monday is supposed to be about. It's a shame that Lent starts so much later for the Orthodox this year than for Catholics and Protestants--my preference would always be to observe them simultaneously--but, if nothing else, let those observing the Western fast season allow today serve as a reminder of the purity you committed yourself to back in February. Your Orthodox brothers and sisters around the world join you today in offering themselves as living sacrifices. If only for two weeks, Christians everywhere will be united in a period of self-reflection, purification, and anticipation of the resurrection.

A Southern Nation of Speechifiers: Heyrman and Eastman in Conversation

University of Chicago Press

Christine Leigh Heyrman’s Southern Cross makes a wonderful companion piece to Carolyn Eastman’s A Nation of Speechifiers. More precisely, Heyrman preemptively corrects a historical oversight in Eastman’s much more recent work. Both authors are concerned with identifying the relationships of nonelites to structures of power in the early national period. Both argue that the changes which took place after the turn of the century were not the rosy picture of democratization which has been the academic orthodoxy for politics, society, and religion for some time. Both excellently demonstrate their cases. Yet, while Heyrman treats her subject comprehensively within her limits, Eastman claims a broader scope than she is ultimately able to encompass.

In Nation of Speechifiers, Eastman argues that far from a great triumph of democratization that once dominated thinking on Jacksonian politics or even the perpetual repression of nonelites that has dominated some feminist and minority histories, the period immediately after the Revolution was one of profound cultural negotiation in which nonelites were able to seize access to public participation in limited but meaningful ways. She looks at politics, education, voluntary associations, trade organizations, publishing, and professional oratory to see the ways that women, children, and racial minorities had a public voice prior to 1810. After that, however, culture shifted as the nation solidified. A war won, a peaceful party transition, and a new vision of suffrage for white men all functioned to close the previously permeable borders of public participation and exclude nonelites.

Yet Eastman glaringly omits religion as an arena in which women, children, and racial minorities had a public voice, a curious oversight particularly in view of Eastman’s stress on oratory as a means of public power. The omission might have made a good avenue for further research had not Heyrman perfectly tackled the question more than a decade earlier. Heyrman takes the same period Eastman considers, treats the same nonelites that Eastman does, but focuses narrowly on religion in the South. The conclusions she draws are largely the same. A newly formed (at least in the South) evangelicalism is initially open to the public voice and at least informal authority of women, children, and racial minorities. After the turn of the century, however, Heyrman exhaustively and convincingly traces the restriction of power into the hands of older white males. She concludes, much as Eastman does, by attacking facile notions of democratization by asking the question democratization for whom.

Eastman’s omission of religion—and of the South and transmontane America almost in their entirety—clearly could have been corrected by reading Heyrman, and the failure to do so borders on inexcusable. Yet readers of Heyrman can benefit from consulting Eastman as well. Heyrman explains the changes in evangelicalism largely as evangelistic necessities. “To put the matter bluntly, evangelicals could not rest content with a religion that was the faith of women, children, and slaves” (193). Growth required appeasing and then appealing to white men, in whose hands all temporal power rested. Eastman suggests there is something more at work in the culture at large here. Eastman’s exclusion of the South from her study may throw this observation into doubt for the arena of Heryman’s work, but nevertheless the question must be raised whether or not evangelistic necessity adequately explains the need for a more male-oriented, “traditional” religious structure. Even if it does, do the broader cultural changes charted by Eastman explain what is driving this evangelistic need? In Heyrman, essentially, evangelicals hit a glass ceiling above which a movement of women could no longer ascend. The early nineteenth century as the period of transition is incidental; it is just when the need for change outweighed the inertia of convention. Eastman’s work suggests there is something more happening in the period.

Both books are supremely readable, and Heyrman in particular has a literary flourish rarely seen among historians. Though my interests and preferences tend toward Heyrman's work, I confidently recommend either for general reading. Eastman's more theoretical framework may scare off non-academics, but anyone who has even a hobbyists interest in the period will be more than amply rewarded by putting in the effort to understand her argument. Together, these two works give a picture of early national American democracy that will challenge the narrative taught in most colleges not to long ago and still, consequently, taught in most grade schools.

Dorothy Day, the Anarchist

I began this study of Day by admitting that my interest in, and therefore my knowledge of, her had always been limited to my focus on the history and thought of Christian anarchism. That narrow-mindedness has been corrected to such a degree that I am ashamed of many of the uninformed musings I have blithely made about Day in the past. Yet, for all that, I return now to Day and her place in Christian anarchism, though my intent is less to stand as ideological judge than it is to situate her within the broader realm of my thought. I find that I have has as much to learn from Day as a Christian anarchist as I have learned from her simply as a Christian. Some of this has just been to put a more gifted voice than I possess to common thoughts that ought to inspire all Christians, particularly those of us reading (or writing) this comfortably in our middle-class affluence:

I recall this tiny incident [where she slapped a man who made a pass at her] now because it illustrates a point that has since come up many times in our work with others. Our desire for justice for ourselves and for others often complicates the issue, builds up factions and quarrels. Worldly justice and unworldly justice are quite different things. The supernatural approach when understood is to turn the other cheek, to give up what one has, willingly, gladly, with no spirit of martyrdom, to rejoice in being the least, to be unrecognized, the slighted.

Other times, Day brought new dimensions to my thoughts as a Christian anarchists. Growing up in the deeply Baconian Stone-Campbell Restoration, my thoughts on power and on evil have always been more rational than emotional, tinged though they more than occasionally are by Orthodox mysticism. Day reminded me, however, that there is an emotive side to anarchism, one that may form the basis for more pragmatic cooperation between me and my ilk and those who either do not know or do not care to class themselves as anarchists.

Anarchism has been called an emotional state of mind, denouncing injustice and extolling freedom, rather than a movement.

Even so, I came away knowing that somewhere in our thinking Day and I diverge. At some point she conceives of power, and the violence inherent in exercising it, differently than I do.

The spiritual works of mercy include enlightening the ignorant, rebuking the sinner, consoling the afflicted, as well as bearing wrongs patiently, and we have always classed picket lines and the distribution of literature among these works.

The most dramatic change for me, however, is to read that now and see more our spiritual affinity than our categorical difference. I hope that Day is recognized as a saint by the Catholic church, but, for my part, I can rest easy in the knowledge that, as a Protestant, I am empowered by the hubris that mine is the only judgment that matters when it comes to seeking profound spiritual guidance from the holy departed.

A Creational Worship Experience

As I watch this video of a three day old Mouflon (proto-sheep) exploring for the first time, all I can think is, "Who lets their newborn play near a cactus?"

Maybe I can adopt her, rescuing her from that clearly unsafe home environment.

Animal Advocacy in North Stonington

Todd Caswell is still on the loose, but animal rights advocates are seizing the Angel shooting as an opportunity to improve the system of justice for cows, among others.

A bipartisan group of legislators, including state Rep. Diana Urban (D-North Stonington), is introducing a bill that would allow court-appointed advocates for animals during legal proceedings that concern the animals’ welfare or custody.

It a logical extension of the near universal practice in the US judicial system of appointing advocates for those without a voice, and it will almost certainly be a big step forward in animal rights law (one they've already taken in Rhode Island). Unfortunately, we still only care about violence against animals as an indicator of future violence against humans.

Urban cited data, which she noted has been available since 1971, that point to animal abuse as an early indicator of violence against humans. She has already authored legislation, now a law, that requires cross reporting of animal-abuse and domestic-violence cases. About 80 percent of school shooters were once animal abusers, she said.

“I just want society to take this seriously,” she said.

It's too bad society won't take seriously shooting a cow in the face, fatally wounding her, just for thrills and then conspiring to conceal your crime unless it can be shown to somehow threaten human well being. Baby steps, I guess.

Dorothy Day, the Activist

Having reflected on the the false tension between Catholicism and social justice from the perspective of Day as a Catholic, it is time now to turn to that more familiar persona of Day as an advocate for social justice. That Day should be an powerful voice for the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized should by no means surprise anyone. But as I read The Long Loneliness, I was struck by the emotional depth and theological richness of her conviction as she narrated the very painful and very personal journey from a child who understood only the impossible gap between what was real and what was right to a woman who could blur those lines so that even what was possible would come in to doubt. Whatever the success or the validity of her methods as they began to express themselves practically, the acute connection that Day shared to society's outcasts crafted in her a moving ethos in which the active pursuit of social justice was central. Writing of time she spent imprisoned with other activists, Day said:

I lost all feeling of my own identity. I reflected on the desolation of poverty, of destitution, of sickness and sin. That I would be free after thirty days meant nothing to me. I would never be free again, never free when I knew that behind bars all over the world there were women and men, young girls and boys, suffering constraint, punishment, isolation and hardship for crimes of which all of us were guilty. The mother who had murdered her child, the drug addict—who were the mad and who the sane? Why were prostitutes prosecuted in some cases and in others respected and fawned on? People sold themselves for jobs, for the pay check, and if they only received a high enough price, they were honored. If their cheating, their theft, their lie, were of colossal proportions, if it were successful, they met with praise, not blame. Why were some caught, not others? Why were some termed criminals and others good businessmen? What was right and wrong? What was good and evil? I lay there in utter confusion and misery.

What is striking here is just how profoundly Day the activist differs from both traditional evangelical activists and from contemporary left-wing activists. Unlike the conventional evangelical rendering of social ills, Day could not see poverty, prostitution, murder, greed, and the host of other evils merely as problems of sin in individuals. She recognized the truth which is attested in the most antique Christian tradition's reflection on sin: it is everywhere. Beyond the individual, sin perverts institutions, cultures, and even the physical world itself. Preaching repentance to sinners and charity to saints would never be enough to combat an all-pervading sin like this.

I had an ugly sense of the futility of human effort, man’s helpless misery, the triumph of might. Man’s dignity was but a word and a lie. Evil triumphed. I was a petty creature, filled with self-deception, self-importance, unreal, false, and so, rightly scorned and punished.

The solution advocated by so many activists now, activists who have laid hold to Dorothy Day as a patron saint, is institutional reform. That can never be the essence of Day's activism though because, like all Christian anarchists, she realizes that sinful people cannot employ sinful means to redeem sinful institutions. Instead, she recommends a different path, one that can all too easily be misconstrued--in the decontextualized form I offer it--to be just another admonition to charitable works. To interpret it this way is to admit a complete ignorance of the Catholic Worker movement and of Day's life, an ignorance I was supremely guilty of before starting this project. What Day advocates here is not charity (in the sense of material benevolence) but empathy. It is an actual, existential participation in the life of the oppressed. It is Christ eating with prostitutes and publicans. It is a living out of the radical equality which has been reduced to rhetoric in our sanitized relationship to the "least of these" Christians exist to serve.

Going to the people is the purest and best act in Christian tradition and revolutionary tradition and is the beginning of world brotherhood.

Brigham Young on English

Speaking specifically of politicians communicating with their constituents, Brigham Young made this observation about the English language:

Among its other capabilities, the English language is better adapted than any other in existence to the using of thousands of words without conveying an idea.