Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Politics

  • Public Policy and Prophecy

    John has an interesting post over at Locusts and Honey titled The Bible, Politics, and Pseudoprophecy. Though there have clearly been some extended exchanges, I haven’t followed them closely, so I’m not 100% certain what John means by Pseudoprophecy, but I think he makes a number of good points. I’d like to comment a bit further.

    First, prophecy is a term that gets used in various contexts. The prophets of Old Testament times often spoke of social justice and challenged the authorities over that. As a result, voices that call for justice against the prevailing view in society are labeled “prophetic” and this activity is called “prophecy.”

    But while words do commonly get used in different contexts, if one tries to apply the definition appropriate to one context in a different one, one will simply get confused. There are many aspects of Biblical prophecy, and also of the type of ongoing prophecy that takes place in Charismatic and Pentecostal churches. One of those aspects is a call for social justice. But nobody in Biblical times would have accepted “a person who cries out for social justice” as a good definition of a prophet. A prophet was someone who spoke for God, and a prophecy was a message spoken for God, most commonly in words that were attributed to God. The key to the identity of a prophet was the “ne’um YHWH,” the message of YHWH, and not the content of the message.

    So not every person who calls for something good is speaking prophetically. They may well be speaking correctly, they may be giving an important message, but the critical element is whether they are giving a message that comes from God to apply to that situation.

    Now if we look at the public policy situation, we can ask just how the prophetic word applies to the particular political situation. There is where one can easily get into trouble. Jonathan comments that we should preach it if it is Biblical. But this doesn’t respond, in my view, to John’s original problem. The Bible doesn’t say that much about public policy directly. We can look at Israelite policy, but at a minimum we must admit that Israel’s circumstances were substantially different than ours, and thus we must look for the principles and apply them to our current situation.

    For example, if we look at Israel’s immigration policy (Leviticus 19:33-34), we also have to look at their welfare policy (Deuteronomy 24:17-22). We can only create a coherent replication of the intent of those two policies by seeing how they apply under our circumstances. (Note that I do not intend to present my two references as an exhaustive study of the particular policies, just as a general directional arrow.)

    When we try to apply these principles we get into much larger debates. We can generally agree that murder is bad, though we disagree on the definition. Is abortion murder? Is it murder if you kill someone who is robbing your house? Then we further get into differences of opinion on how best one prevents murder. Is the death penalty appropriate? In my experience both death penalty proponents and opponents claim to respect life. I honestly believe they both do. They just believe in different policies for accomplishing their goal.

    We all agree, I think, that Jesus wants us to care for the poor. Do we do that by supporting public welfare programs or through private efforts? Is it possibly some combination?

    In Ben Witherington’s post on gun control he asks:

    My question is— are their ethical teachings in the New Testament that have a bearing as to whether Christians, as private citizens, should be bearing arms?

    I would say that yes, there are ethical teachings. But do you notice the gap here? Witherington’s answer will be that we should not be bearing arms. But I can still see quite a difference between the ethical imperative for me, as a Christian, and the public policy issue. I personally do not own a gun. I am capable of firing one with substantially above average accuracy, but I would hardly be called a sharpshooter. But I don’t believe that my ability to make a decision to use a firearm in an emergency situation would be accurate enough to make me safe. So I’ve got a couple of reasons not to own a weapon. But is there an automatic link to public policy? I don’t see it. Personally, I think the idea that anyone can own any weapon is silly (not immoral, silly), and that substantial controls over the use of dangerous devices such as firearms is appropriate and necessary. But those who disagree with me–and in my area that’s a substantial number–do not do so because they think murder is good.

    It’s easy to agree on the idea that if it’s Biblical we’ll preach it. But the further one goes into public policy, the less clear it is just what is Biblical. I see a huge amount of proof texting in this whole area. If we can draw principles for Israelite policy, then surely we should support the death penalty, executed in a public and painful way. Yet most of us do not. But if we support one Biblical idea, how is it that we can oppose another? Actually, it’s very easy. There’s the context, the time, the place, and all other circumstances.

    I believe that Christian principles can inform public policy, and that as Christians we should be implementing those principles when we engage in public policy. What I don’t see is any way in which the Bible clearly sets the specific public policy position we need to take. Gun control, death penalty, pacifism, social welfare, and other issues must be argued on on a basis other than proof texts.

  • Responding to Tragedy

    Many of us right now are thinking about and praying for the folks at Virginia Tech. Others closer to the scene are responding as their duty calls them. But it’s an ill wind that blows no one good, and there are two groups of people who thrive on this sort of thing: The news media, and political activists.

    One can’t blame the media for thriving on disaster, because so many of us glue our eyes to the TV during an event like this, just looking for the latest tidbit of information that they can dig up. Our tendency is to criticize the media for overplaying the situation, finding everyone who may have heard a gunshot and interviewing them, and bringing in commentators to make lengthy comments on things they cannot possibly no. The media provides it because we watch it. They even got me for about 15 minutes, but after that I moved on, and I’ll keep up with written stories on the internet (MSNBC story).

    For political activists a tragedy like this is a godsend. People’s emotions are stirred up. They want a solution and are less anxious to spend time considering how effective a course of action will be. If it looks good, they’re liking to jump on board. So for people with pet projects, this is the time to get out there and pitch them if there is any possibility that someone might think they’re related to the cause of the tragedy.

    Whether it’s gun control, or increased gun ownership, censorship of violent movies or video games, greater police presence, less restrictions on police monitoring of citizens, increased education, drug legalization or greater drug enforcement, restriction or increase of immigration, or whatever it is, people will [immoderate metaphor stricken with apologies, see comments-HN] quickly appear on television/radio with their pet projects. I’m sure there are readers for whom many of these things are pet issues, and they may well be offended at my list. I’m not sure it is balanced between conservative and liberal causes, but it could be if I thought some more.

    What the rest of us need to do is demand that as actions are taken they are carefully chosen for their effectiveness. Just because something looks like it will doesn’t mean that it will. Politicians will be glad to pass legislation that will make their constituents feel better. It’s quite irrelevant whether it actually works. In fact, it’s very difficult to get government projects tested for their efficacy. Generally we assume that if the government has an Office for Making Everyone Safer, that office will actually make everyone safer.

    So let the sympathy flow to the families, but keep your other emotions under control. Check out what is and isn’t done and check out just how effective it is. After all just because there are violent video games and there are violent people doesn’t mean that one caused the other. It’s a connection that has to be checked.

  • Freedom of Speech and People’s Feelings

    It appears a couple are threatened with offending Hindu sensibilities for their wedding, according to this story from the Evening Standard (London). (HT: Dispatches from the Culture Wars.) This is an Indian case, and due to the fame of one of the participants there is some indication India won’t pursue it.

    Those who approve of laws against “hate speech” or various similar restrictions on freedom of speech should be warned, however, that no matter what your views, this could be you.

    This is a serious danger to freedom, especially in cases of religion. When a government makes “offending” any class of religious people a legal offense, there is virtually no barrier before any speech whatsoever can be banned. What can I possibly say that will not blaspheme somebody’s religion. I do not believe Mohammed was a prophet. I’ve offended Muslims. That belief should be no surprise, however. I’m a Christian. I don’t think cartoons or art mocking Islam should be illegal, no matter how offensive Muslims find them. But note that at the same time I don’t think cartoons or art mocking Christianity, Christians, or major Christian figures should be illegal either. That’s freedom of speech. If you’re easy to offend, get used to being offended.

    Of course many non-Christians will agree with me on that point, but I again let me extend that further. Hate speech laws that target conservative Christian criticism of other religions or homosexuality, for example, are also anti-freedom. I often really don’t like the categories of speech they forbid, but that’s not the point.

    Let freedom of speech reign, and let’s all learn to be less offended by it.

  • Added John H Armstrong to my Blogroll

    Based on some links passed to me by a friend in e-mail, I’m adding John H Armstrong to my blogroll. (Note that this is the blogroll for this site, not the Moderate Christian Blogroll. There were three posts that led to this:

    • Trinity United Church of Christ: Obama’s Home Church
      This post looks at some of the criticisms of Barack Obama based on faith. I find it particularly helpful, because it is written by someone who is not inclined to be a political apologist for Obama, but is interested in the truth. I have been concerned with the attacks on Obama, which tend to make a lie out of the phrase “person of faith.” Many of those who claim to be looking for “people of faith” in government have come to reject Obama’s faith because it doesn’t look precisely like their own.
    • The Day the Christian Right Redefined the Meaning of “Christian”
      This discusses Dr. James Dobson’s comment that Fred Thompson was not a Christian. It makes some very good points. Again, the author comes from a more conservative viewpoint than mine, but that just gives him a greater right to comment on conservative issues. It’s an excellent post.
    • The Ecumenism I Promote
      This is just a plain good, short article on ecumenism and what it is, and should be, about.

    This all looks like good, thoughtful material that deserves reading and consideration. This one goes on my blogroll!

  • Unimpressed and Clueless

    That seems to be a good description of the voters in response to the current Democratic congress. I’m amazed at these numbers–well, no, that’s a lie. I’m depressingly unsurprised by these numbers. From a CQPolitics report of a Pew poll:

    Yet the Pew survey, conducted before the budget action, found that American voters appear unimpressed with the Democratic majority’s legislative achievements thus far. Nearly seven out of 10 people could not name anything important that the new Congress has accomplished.

    . . . and . . . [snip a couple of paragraphs]

    But the poll found a silver lining for Democrats: While respondents were hard pressed to point to any of the “Six in ‘06” legislative goals the Democrats set prior to the midterm election, the party’s leaders have made striking gains over the GOP leadership in public perceptions.

    Forty-one percent of respondents said the Democratic Party had stronger leaders versus 36 percent for the Republican leadership, a reversal from the GOP’s 27 percentage-point lead last April. Democrats also ran ahead in terms of having “better” leaders (44 percent to 29 percent), more ability to manage the government (47 percent to 31 percent) and being more honest and ethical (43 percent to 25 percent).

    Summary? We don’t know what they’re doing, but we trust them a little bit more than the previous crowd, though we didn’t know what they were doing either.

    And we trust ourselves to elect a government! 🙁

  • Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007

    I received an e-mail alert from the Traditional Values Coalition regarding this bill, H. R. 1592. It took me a little bit of time to find the actual bill, because, silly me, I thought there would be a link to it on one or another press releases. However, you can find that link here.

    The TVC alert, which you can find here (PDF), tells me:

    Without your action, this anti -Christian legislation will pass — under the guise of hate-crime prevention — and accomplish
    the following homosexual goals:

    • Silence the Bible-believing Churches, Pastors and Christians
    • Criminalize so-called “hate speech,” – which is any speech that is critical of homosexuality or cross -dressing
      behaviors. The suppression of free speech will be justified by the claim that such speech “incites” individuals to
      commit violence against homosexuals, cross -dressers etc. Any remarks about homosexuality, such as reading
      Bible passages, preaching on these passages, telling a person they can come out of the homosexual lifestyle, etc.
      will be deemed critical remarks and will be ruled to be outside the bounds of First Amendment protections for
      pastors, business owners and individuals.
    • Elevate homosexuality and cross -dressing behaviors such as drag queens, transsexualism, she -males, etc. to the
      status of federally-protected minorities. These behaviors will be considered equal to race under the federal law.
    • Interfere with local law enforcement by elevating every alleged incident of “hate” against a homosexual or
      cross-dresser into a federal crime.
    • Fund anti-Christian curriculum for children K-12, through the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice to
      promote homosexuality and cross -dressing as normal behaviors.

    In addition, you can reference the House Judiciary Committee release on this here, presumably largely from the chairman, John Conyers, who introduced the bill.

    Now it’s interesting to observe the difference between the language of the alert, and the language of the bill itself. First, the bill refers to acts of violence, rather than to speech or thought. I fail to see precisely how this is going to impact Christian pastors, even fundamentalist Christian pastors, and what they preach from the pulpit, unless that preaching manages to amount to incitement to violence, and interesting possibility.

    I tend to be suspicious of hate crimes legislation, nonetheless, because it seems to me that the actual violence is a sufficient reason for action, and if that violence gets out of hand, then one can increase the law enforcement. This should occur no matter what the motivation for the violence is. Further, there seems to be a bit of a stretching effort here to justify federal involvement in these crimes.

    I’m especially suspicious when hate speech gets involved, but I’m not seeing that here. “Speech codes” strike me as both unliberal and unconservative–just plain unsound and dangerous.

    That said, I simply do not see where the TVC gets their alert from the text of this bill. I would think it would be a clear, Christian duty to oppose violence against people irrespective of what we think of their lifestyle, character, sexual orientation, or anything else. The sole debate should be one of strategy. How do we best protect people from violence?

    It may well be that this bill is not the best strategy, and as I said it raises certain questions with me. I would like to know just how much accomplishment we expect from the grants that will be given and the use of federal resources, and how such success would be measured. Will we revisit this particular item of spending after a period of time and see if it has accomplished its goals? You see, I’m not at all certain that it will accomplish those goals, or that it is the best way, and our representatives in Washington have this interesting way of making the spending look good, but leaving out the measurement of success.

    One option that occurs to me for dealing with violence is increasing law enforcement generally, not so that we can have big brother looking in every window, but so that we can give every crime of violence due attention, and pay professional police officers the wages due their professionalism, and hire new ones where officers fail to live up to that standard. Perhaps some reprioritizing might be useful, for example, from prosecuting minor drug offenses and in favor of dealing with more serious, violent crimes.

    But what is most clear to me is that the TVC response is not so much about the bill as about their own agenda. Let me ask this: How will holders of “traditional” values (as defined by the TVC) deal with violence against gays, lesbians, cross-dressers, and so forth? Or is that not an important issue to you?

  • Learning the Answer or How to Find It

    Joe Carter provides some thoughtful suggestions on sex education. He suggests that it is more important to teach children how to make moral decisions than it is to indoctrinate them into the particular solution you want them to accept.

    If forced to choose I would be firmly on the abstinence only side. But I believe the debate is rooted in a misguided focus on a false dilemma. Both approaches are primarily concerned with indoctrination toward a particular viewpoint and inoculation against the effects of certain behavior. Neither is concerned with providing an “education”, in the truest sense of the term. The abstinence advocates, for example, want teens to “just say no” while the comprehensive crowd want students to “just wear a condom.” Both are more concerned about “effectiveness” than with teaching teens how to think for themselves about human sexuality.

    I couldn’t agree more. I do, however, have one bone to pick. Why do certain conservatives have to find in practically everything a reason to attack the theory of evolution? Under heading Teleology Carter asks:

    . . . Is sex a gift from a benevolent Creator or merely evolution’s way of tricking us into passing on our genetic material? . . .

    Perhaps we might instead ask whether my responsibility to deal responsibly with what I have is dependent on the precise process by which I got it. Is my responsibility to be sexually responsible diminished if I am the product of evolution? I don’t think so, and I wonder about the “responsibility circuits” of those who think it is.

    To add a slightly different angle to this, I wonder why it is that Christians so often talk negatively about sex. By this I don’t mean that suggesting abstinence or fidelity is a negative way of talking. In fact, I believe that we have in Christianity fine ways to talk about joy and sexual fulfilment in a positive relationship. I think we would accomplish more by extolling the joys of committed relationships rather than railing against the evils of promiscuity. And note, again, that I do regard promiscuity as harmful.

    Let me ramble around one more corner. In an article titled Uganda’s Early Gains Against HIV Eroding, the Washington Post reports that early efforts against AIDS in Uganda were very successful, but that success has begun to erode. What were the characteristics of the early anti-HIV programs? At a concert shortly before he died, singer Philly Lutaaya performed a farewell concert and . . .

    [b]etween songs, he warned the stunned crowd that having several sex partners was a sure way to die in the age of AIDS, echoing pleas also made by political and religious leaders of the time.

    This fidelity, in the case of Uganda included asking polygamous families to remain with their circle of wives. The spread of AIDS was reduced by sticking to fidelity. Surely this is a message that Christians could get ahold of.

  • Science Fiction gets Further Behind

    It’s amazing to see things like this during my lifetime. New Mexico is considering a small local tax to develop a spaceport. More power to them if they can draw this strong new potential business to their region.

    I can still recall being taken to a neighbor’s house to watch the moon landings, and my father, who passed away less than a year ago, saw the introduction of the automobile and electricity to his home town. (Note that’s not the invention of either, but their introduction into a small town in Canada.

    It seems to me that change is still accelerating. What will the world look like in another decade?

  • New Conservative Group Challenges Expansion of Executive Power

    The American Freedom Agenda sounds like a very interesting new group with a positive agenda, in my view. Many of the principals have fine, long-term credentials in American conservative politics.

    Their material is worth a look.

    HT: Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

  • Protecting Rights and Fighting Terrorism

    In a comment on her blog, Laura of Pursuing Holiness drew my attention to this story in the New York Times about the posse comitatus and related material about the insurrection act of 1807.

    First let me note that I consider the posse comitatus to be a good idea, but my primary point in posting about it is not to argue that point. Go ahead and read the article and study that one out for yourself.

    But the thing that worries me primarily about all of these actions is the way that we allow freedoms to be eroded without due consideration in the face of danger. There is a strong potential for trouble in both directions. If those on the libertarian side simply argue in favor of civil liberties without looking at safety issues, then eventually safety concerns will get out of hand, and popular support for certain stronger–and potentially dangerous–measures will continue to grow. We’d like to think that we can somehow get the people of the country to stand on principle though the heavens fall, but in reality, many people will give up a great deal of freedom in exchange for security.

    Amongst those who are not so libertarian (and there are people in both these groups on the left and the right), there is often a tendency to take hold of any rule that looks like it makes the law tougher and imagine that it will, in fact, increase safety. That is also very dangerous. If you pass a tough law, and safety doesn’t result, then there’s an automatic drive to get tougher and tougher until it works. I think this is part of the reasonw why we have in the United States one of the toughest criminal justice systems in the free world, and yet we also have one of the highest crime rates.

    The question, I think, is one of effectiveness. We are coming to believe our own spin. If someone on TV says that a certain action will improve our security enough times, then we become convinced that it will. If a law has a title like “Law to Increase the Security of Air Travel” or “Law to Make Everyone Smarter” we assume that each law will accomplish its goal. But when we look into those laws we may find that very little of the bill actually has to do with the topic.

    One way these things happen is when various projects are offered to particular districts in order to secure votes on some other issue. Such things are happening right now in the Iraq war vote, as Laura notes in another post. (You can follow her links to the source stories.) You might like to think that primarily your congressman is deciding whether to support or oppose a bill on principle, but that is often not the case. Why are congressmen susceptible to such pressure? Primarily because that’s what we, the people, will vote for. The key to having a strong hold on your district is bringing home the bacon, or to be more direct, the pork.

    Now I went on that detour to make this point: Because of this complex system of dealing, and because bills are often passed with many unrleated provisions attached, it is very difficult to tell in detail just what a congressman supports. Voters guides can often be accused of partisanship precisely because they have to pick and choose so carefully. John Kerry got on the wrong side of this one with his “I voted for it before I voted against it” issue on body armor. The issue gets very tangled because of the combinations of provisions.

    It was in just such a way that the provisions that weaken civil liberties in a dangerous way were tucked into a defense appropriations bill, and passed without making congressmen stand up and be counted on the specific issue. Even opponents sometimes give up on such amendments, letting them ride through because you don’t want to hold up a big bill such as defense appropriations over a minor issue. But we elect our congressmen to do just that kind of watching.

    One of the reforms that I support in connection with this issue is the Read the Bills Act (RTBA). You can find a good blog post on the reason for this bill and its intent here. This is not my central point, although it would make it considerably easier to do the things I’m about to suggest. (Hat tip on the prior post to Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

    (more…)