Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Politics

  • Moderate Thinking

    Since starting the Moderate Christian Blog Aggregator, I’ve gotten a few comments on what it means to be moderate. One very reasonable question is how I can combine the words “moderate” and “passionate,” as in “passionate moderate.” It seems like a contradiction in terms. And I do do intend the two words to convey a certain amount of tension. Nonetheless I don’t think they’re entirely contradictory.

    “Moderate” isn’t an ideological or party label. It’s a general description that some people are comfortable with. So what I’m about to discuss applies only to me. It may apply to other people. Many people I have run into who self-identify as moderate would be comfortable with most of what I’m saying, at least what I’m saying about the process of thinking, though not necessarily about the specific positions I have come to. I use my own specific conclusions simply as an illustration. It’s quite possible, and indeed likely, for those who identify themselves as moderates to disagree.

    There are people who espouse a form of moderation from apathy. They don’t care to make a decision so they generally find a center point, effectively a point of least conflict among those they have to live with. Another group may well find it difficult to make decisions and end up in the center through lack of concern. I’m not talking about these groups, but rather those who are active and committed and yet take a moderate approach.

    Here are the keys to what I think of as moderate thinking.

    1. Never improperly excluding a middle position

    Improperly excluding middles is a standard practice in both politics and religion. You are either a laissez faire capitalist or you’re a communist. You’re left wing or right wing. You accept Biblical inerrancy, or you don’t believe in the Bible at all. You’re a fundamentalist or an atheist. Each of these pairs ignores many positions between, and some of them ignore additional positions that are more extreme.

    2. Finding the actual extremes

    Very often politicians and theologians want to place their opponents on the extremes. Moderate thinking avoids this by looking for the actual extremes and finding the range of opinions. As an example, Ned Lamont, Democratic senatorial candidate in Connecticut, is called an extremist, and his election is supposed to mean that the Democratic party is turning far to the left. But Lamont, who wants to withdraw troops from Iraq over a period of six months is hardly an extremist. His position is probably held by a majority of the voters of his state, though they may vote for another candidate for other reasons. The extreme position would be a pacifist position that stated that we should not employ force against terrorists, but should turn the other cheek (figuratively) to them.

    On the other hand, Democrats try to paint Bush as an extreme right winger. But a few miles from me we have a Baptist pastor who was a Vice-Presidential candidate for a minor party in the last election and who thinks Bush is a liberal. That doesn’t make Bush right, any more than agreeing with a majority of Connecticut voters makes Lamont right, but it does mean that he’s not the extreme.

    3. Setting relative values on issues and positions

    This third point simply means that in general moderates are not one issue people. Many people have numerous litmus test issues. For example, they will not vote for a candidate who differs with their position on abortion, or on the war in Iraq, or on taxes, or on any of a number of other issues. I don’t do litmus test issues. There are certain positions I find very hard to stomach, but in choosing a candidate to vote for, I have to deal with a range of issues, and generally no issue is absolute.

    Application

    Much of our political and religious discourse is conducted with excluded options. Let me just take a few examples.

    Gun in the House

    I have made a decision not to have a gun in my house. I have had all kinds of reactions to that decision. I have been congratulated on my high moral stance against gun control. I have been condemned for not believing people should be permitted to defend themselves. But gun control advocates should not take comfort from my stance, and homeowners who wish to protect their property with a weapon should not be concerned. I’ll be voting for candidates who will uphold your right to self-defense.

    So then why do I not have a gun? I have simply made a calculation that my own level of alertness, my normal reaction time, and my decisiveness under the appropriate circumstances are not quite good enough to make the gun a good idea for me. I’m not bad with one on the range, or at least I wasn’t a few years ago when I last tried. I have decent aim. But I don’t believe the odds are good that I’m more likely to get the weapon from a safe place, locate a target, and use it effectively, than I am to have it stolen and used to shoot me, for just one example. And to those who have told me I should darn well get that good, I say, “You get that good. I’ll do what I think best.”

    I have no moral qualms about shooting an intruder. If I can get the guy with a baseball bat, I will. But that is where I think that I am safest. The extremes here are a complete refusal to use violence on the one hand, and a “guns blazing” approach on the other. I ask what will make my family safer.

    War in Iraq

    I oppose the war in Iraq. Again, there are those who respond to my high moral stand against war, and there are those who think I’m a wimpy pacifist (no, I’m not calling all pacifists wimps). But neither are dealing with my own reasoning. The question is one of strategy. What is the best way to use force? Here I see the extremes as pacifism, in which we do not respond violently to terrorists, and the parking lot view, which suggests we make countries that support terrorists into parking lots. I look for the action that is going to result in a better state of affairs after it has been accomplished. I cannot see how the Iraq war can end in a better state than things were before the war, and thus I regard it (and did so before it was launched) as a bad strategy.

    Historical Jesus

    This is a topic on which it’s easy to get Christians confused, because most simply don’t know all the various options, and in fact, very few probably need to know all of them. To identify the extremes, however, we have on the one hand a historical Jesus who is precisely as a harmony of the gosples would make him, and on the other hand we have the belief that Jesus was made up, that he is not a historical figure, or even a historical figure around which some myths have grown, but that he never existed at all. There is quite a lot of ground between those two positions.

    I would like to see us recognize the many possibilities between “every detail of the gospels are historically true without even normal eyewitness variations” and “most of the gospel record is false. For example, one can assume that certain details such as how many times the cock crowed and how many times Peter denied Jesus may have been remembered differently by different people. Even more substantively, one can wonder whether there were, in fact, multiple feedings of 5,000 people and then 4,000 people, and can do so without doubting the entire story of Jesus.

    I recall an online written debate in which I undertood in a series of messages to defend Jesus as a real, historical figure. I came up with six points that I would defend and began the debate. A number of Christians observing these posts told me that I had already given up Christianity because I was not defending the virgin birth or the resurrection. But I had not denied either of those doctrines; I had merely taken on a more limited task–demonstrating that Jesus was, at least, a historical fiction, and not totally a construction of his followers.

    Passionate Moderation

    How can one be a passionate moderate? I see no reason why one cannot be passionate about one’s beliefs just because they are not extreme. In other words, I don’t see the problem here. Let me give a quick example. On the topic of evangelism and missionary effort I get pegged both as evangelical and as liberal. Why?

    First, I believe passionately that Christians are to be witnesses for Jesus. We are not to be ashamed of who we are, and we are to testify of what Jesus has done for and in us.

    Second, I believe passionately that it is the Holy Spirit who convicts and converts, and that our witness is never to be forceful, intrusive, emotionally manipulative, or offensive. (Note that I did not say that the gospel itself would not offend; our witness to the gospel should not offend.)

    The first of these points gets me called evangelical; the second gets me called liberal. And if you were to hear and see me carrying out those statements, independently of one another, you might agree. But together, they seem to me to be the “Jesus” way of evangelism. The combination seems moderate to many people, but I simply think it is right, and I’m passionate about it.

    Conclusion

    That, to me, is the essence of being a passionate moderate. Your mileage will probably vary–moderately, I hope!

  • Reacting to a Gay Candidate

    One of the many things that annoys me about sports broadcasters is their tendency to create a trend out of every slight turn of the game. My stepson is a professional pitcher, and if he throws a strike the announcer is sure to start talking about the strong performance and how if he just keeps pitching that way, the game is in hand. If he throws a ball, that too becomes a trend and we’re about to walk the opposing side.

    This entry isn’t about sports but it is about overreaction and the things that tend to help us overreact. It starts with a news item from Agape Press, titled Sweet Home Alabama. The story begins in a more or less straightforward manner, with a close election, in which Patricia Todd won by 59 votes over Gaynell Hendricks. The district is predominantly black, and Todd is white. But in addition, she is a Lesbian.

    The district committee voted to disqualify Todd, and also Henricks for that matter, because they had failed to file a financial statement to the party. The state part overturned that and restored Todd’s candidacy. It’s interesting to note that the Agape Press story fails to mention the fact that the financial statement requirement hadn’t been enforced in Alabama since 1988 because state financial disclosure requirements had taken its place. Compare their story to this one from the Montgomery Advertiser: Win OK’d for Gay Candidate.

    Now here’s the comment from Joe Murray of Agape Press:

    What happened next is what exposed the deep divisions in the Democratic Party and the power of the gay lobby.

    Huh? Just where did he get that. A gay candidate is nearly removed and survives by a very narrow margin at the state level and it shows the power of the gay lobby? I’d suggest instead that the gay lobby, such as it is in Alabama, barely managed to keep the candidate on the ballot. And the key thing here is that she won! I’m sure there’s something wrong somewhere with lobbyists trying to get the candidate who wins the primary election on the general election ballot, but I can’t quite think what that would be!

    The claim, of course, is that African-American voters are being displaced in favor of Gay and Lesbian candidates. But in a majority black district, one would have to assume that some African-American voters also voted for the winning candidate. Despite all efforts at gerrymandering, and I think our politicians in both parties should be ashamed of their district drawing efforts, the bottom line is people voting, and in this case they voted for Patricia Todd, who is white and a Lesbian.

    Joe Murray continues:

    Understand this — the homosexual lobby is on a quest to raise its rainbow flag over every state house in the Union. Blacks in the South are now learning this lesson, for their party is on the receiving end of a forcible makeover. Make no mistake, Todd was a trophy candidate; a candidate funded by the gay lobby, and her victory signals the Democratic wind is blowing in a new direction. Gays in, blacks out.

    This makes me curious as to just what Murray believes Gay and Lesbian lobbying groups should be trying to do. It seems to me that the natural activity for a lobbying group is to try to get its candidates elected and its issues noticed and supported. Murray makes it sound as though attempting to win an election is some kind of dirty deed. But of course we know that if a candidate were a “trophy candidate” of the Christian right that would be OK. The sole problem here is that Todd is a Lesbian. The rest is just rhetoric to make perfectly normal, perfectly legal activity sound like some kind of conspiracy to commit fraud.

    But then we have the reason I brought up my sports reporting analogy: How on earth does this mean “Gays in, blacks out?” Does Patricia Todd not have the right to run in a majority black district? Would a black candidate be wrong to run in a majority white district? That would result in no minority candidates at the national level, and is obviously silly. What all this comes down to is simple: The Lesbian candidate won the election. There’s nothing illegal about it.

    The rhetoric that Murray is using in his article is very simply aimed at creating a split between African-American Democrats and Gays and Lesbians. “You can’t both have a place at the Democratic table, so come to us,” say the Republicans.

    Somehow I just can’t see this kind of deceptive, divisive practice as appropriate Christian behavior. Let the winner win, whether we like her or not. And come to think of it, I haven’t heard anyone challenge her on any grounds other than that she’s white and Lesbian, and those are neither qualifications nor disqualifications. They don’t tell us what kind of legislator she will be.

  • Religious Freedom and the Schools

    The Christian Alliance for Progress has been reporting a particularly egregious case of religious intolerance in the school system. There is now a petition drive, and you can get involved here.

    To be honest, I’m not terribly optimistic about the value of this type of petition campaign, but I would imagine it can’t hurt.

  • Uninformed Opinions

    Duane Smith has an excellent post over on Abnormal Interests called Evidence, Who Needs Any Evidence. I think this relates closely to my earlier post, A Poll Too Far, in which I discussed people providing opinions on topics concerning which they simply cannot be well-informed.

    The further question is why does the media buy into this, by asking people’s opinion? I would suggest that the media prints this information for the same reason they print everything else–it gets their viewers to watch or read, in this case by making them feel more important than they are. But the feeling of importance is a false one.

    One further note: Ever since I found out about Abnormal Interests, I’ve been watching Duane’s posts, and I have found that almost all of them interest me, whether I have time to comment or not, so if you think your interests coincide with mine at all, go check it out.

  • Technology is Just Technology

    Over and over I’ve heard the refrain, “The invention of the _________ is causing the deterioration of society because it _______.” The technology may be rapid transport, from the steam driven train to the airplane, or communications from radio to television to the internet, or any other form of technology.

    The internet is a favorite target these days. Child pornography, predators, bad ideas, unreliable information, crackpot theories, even though policing are blamed somehow on the internet. Now Jason Lanier, in an essay on Edge.org, calls the polling and other “mob” aspects of the internet “Digital Maoism” and refers to the result as the “hive mind.” Some of us who think Wikipedia is somewhat less than reliable are nonetheless hardly likely to equate it with the mobs of the cultural revolution in China. I discovered his essay via MSNBC.com, in an article by Steven Levy titled Poking a Stick Into the ‘Hive Mind’.

    Now my problem is not precisely with the problems that Lanier points out, nor even with some of the counterpoints quoted by Mr. Levy. In his final paragraph he makes an excellent point:

    [Author Kevin] Kelly’s point is well taken

  • Does Fear Favor the Republicans?

    George McGovern isn’t my very most favorite person, but he is quoted in Newsweek saying this:

    Reached by NEWSWEEK on vacation, McGovern offered Democrats a warning. “For 50 years, [Republicans] used the fear of communism to beat Democrats,” he said. “I hope we don’t have 50 years of terrorism for them to do the same thing.”

    The article, titled Campaign 2006: A Hawk Stays Aloft, is about a boost for Lieberman’s campaign because of the recent hijacking scare.

    But simply admonishing people not to vote out of fear is not enough. If you vote for a candidate because his opponent doesn’t have a plan to deal with a major threat, then are you voting out of fear, or out of prudence? And that’s where I, as an independent, am not seeing what I would like to see out of the democrats thus far. What is the positive plan to make things better? I like what I read in the referenced article about Lamont planning to redeploy troops he would withdraw from Iraq, placing them elsewhere in the Middle East. That’s a good start.

    But we need some other specifics. I know politicians are afraid of specifics. But we have choices to make about screening technology, profiling, or other approaches to airport security. We have choices to make about searches and seizures domestically and what is the appropriate legal strategy. I’m fairly sure from the rumblings that there are both Democrats and Republicans out there with a variety of ideas. Perhaps it is simply the media that is stuck at the simplest level, keeping its focus on the war in Iraq, yes or no.

    I personally would oppose a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, but I think we need to set a realistic set of goals and a realistic strategy to attain them, and withdraw as soon as those goals are accomplished. The following statement, quoted from the same article, frightens me with its naivete:

    “If you have Lamont Democrats who say, ‘Bring ’em home, turn away and it will all be over’ … the American people say, ‘You’re kidding yourself’ … The only way you walk away from war is as a victor,” said a senior administration official who asked for anonymity speaking about the politics of national security.

    The problem is with definition. What is victory? If we intend to leave a country that is friendly to the United States, a full ally in the war on terror, has a stable government, and is prepared to stand up to neighbors such as Iran, then we are deluding ourselves. It’s not going to happen. We need realistic goals–and most of the realistic ones have already been accomplished–and then we need to move on. We don’t have unlimited resources.

  • Security, Convenience, and Freedom

    We’ve just seen another terrorist plot stopped, perhaps at a very late stage, and suddenly we have new security restrictions. The question is, are these new security measures adequate? More importantly, are they all that likely to do any good?

    I was thinking of writing about this, and I looked around on MSNBC, and found an interview with someone who has said most of the things I wanted to say, and also added some points from his expertise that I wouldn’t know. The interview is by Jennifer Barrett and is with Douglas Laird, a security expert.

    He ended with the point I want to start with:

    The problem is that we respond to what happened yesterday today. Richard Reid shows up with a shoe bomb and we start making people take off their shoes, which was silly. Reid was not a bright bulb, but these guys out there today know what they’re doing. Remember: it wasn’t the checkpoint that caught them, but the intelligence work done by the Brits. The real game is played in the intelligence arena, not at the checkpoint. If these guys make it to the checkpoint, you have a much greater challenge.

    He’s absolutely right. If we continue to respond after the fact, it’s only a matter of time until one of these attacks succeeds. There were previous incidents with liquid explosives, and yet security measures are first taken against such explosives after this latest plot was revealed. And it is questionable whether the security measures that have now been taken would necessarily have prevented this attack, had not good intelligence work done so.

    I think we need to pick up on another lesson from this attack. It was not based on the soil of a terrorist nation, but rather in Great Britain and in Pakistan. Simply dealing with countries that sponsor terrorists will not stop their attacks. I believe that our strategic thinking about terrorism is too dependent on a bureaucratic picture of what it would take to accomplish a particular mission. These guys don’t think like bureaucrats. They are not stopped by inconveniences or by the limits of bureaucratic thinking. They think outside the box. It’s good to deal with state sponsors of terrorism and to get at their money. But we should not be complacent about the safetry provided by such things.

    We need to make some decisions as to what we’re willing to put up with in order to be secure. If we don’t make conscious decisions we’re simply going to slide into massive inconvenience and still lack security. For example, commenting on how one might still get banned items onto an aircraft, Laird said:

    But saying, “Take no liquids on board

  • Connecticut Senate Race: Good Thing

    I like following the elections nationwide, and one of the means I use to do it is CQPolitics.com and their e-mail notifications. This morning, I was reading commentary on the Senate race in Connecticut, Conn. Senate Race Still Likely to Have a Democratic Winner. Of course, that prediction is not terribly difficult to make, assuming one grants that Lieberman is still a Democrat.

    I have to say, however, that I don’t like the commentary from either of the major parties, which should be no surprise to those who know me, because I rarely make it a secret that I loathe the parties themselves. I’m registered as an independent not because I don’t care to choose between them, but because I can’t stand being identified with either of them.

    So I really don’t care what this primary election does to the Democratic plans for the fall, nor what Republicans think they can spin out of it. I must mention that the Republican spin on this thing is unusually ridiculous, and that’s saying something. Lamont isn’t some kind of odd extremist. He opposes the war in Iraq and thinks his part should take a stand and take action. In this position, he’s with the majority of the American people. I have to note, however, that there are at least a good number of the American people who somehow were dim enough to think the war was going to go better than it has, but that’s the nature of democracy, and one of the best arguments for a representative form of government. The current U. S. congress is one of the best arguments against representative government, but I digress.

    But look at the following, from CQPolitics.com:

    Lamont’s win came amid strong voter turnout. State Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo said 43 percent of eligible Democrats participated in the state’s first August primary

  • Non-Expert Comments

    In a post titled A Very Inconvenient Truth, Ben Witherington throws his weight behind global warming and our need to do something about it. I’m glad he has chosen to do so, and not just because I consider his commentary on Revelation to be one of the best available.

    And therein seems to lie the problem for some people. One commenter on his blog has called him to account for commenting on something in which he is not an expert. That is a charge that could also be frequently aimed at me, because I comment on many things. In fact, I see my call and mission as a popularizer, so I am almost always reporting things I have found in the works of the actual experts. I’m not terribly comfortable with being an expert. At one time I discovered that there were people at my church who were saying simply that if I could read Hebrew and Greek, and I believed the Bible, then they could too. Of course that bypasses the issue of what, precisely, I believe about the Bible, and of whether one person’s belief or lack of it is an adequate foundation for one’s faith.

    But on global warming and a host of other issues the people ultimately making the decisions are going to be non-experts. In our republican system of government, we elect people who make the decisions, but we generally choose those people based on their view on particular issues, as well as our general impression of them as people.

    But why should a person like Dr. Witherington, who is clearly expert in New Testament Studies, give his weight to one side of an issue on which he is not at all expert? I think there are several excellent reasons:

    1. There are others, equally inexpert who are making it a matter of faith not to act with regard to global warming.
    2. His voice at a minimum provides cover for conservative Christians who want to take action about global warming, but are pressured by others who suggest it’s some sort of liberal conspiracy
    3. He is very well placed to hear other expert opinion and to give a Christian view on the issue

    We should not decide what position to take based on opinions by people who are not experts. But such people often help deal with peripheral issues.

    Dr. Witherington says:

    The changing of the minds of many conservative Christians is perhaps a clear ensign that we are nearly to the point of recognizing we are dealing with an undeniable truth. Christians are sadly often the last to get religion about worldly things that have been obvious to others for many years. I say this to our shame.

    Because some conservative Christians have been in opposition to most actions related to global warming, Dr. Witherington, a conservative Christian himself is well placed to challenge that view. Perhaps Christians are often the last to get the word, but Christian leaders need to be ready to stand out from the crowd and say, “We have been wrong, and we need to take action.” At a minimum, we need to realize that the global warming debate is about facts and the strategies to deal with them, and is one on which Christians can disagree.

    But there are some principles at stake. Dr. Witherington asks a series of questions:

    What if there will be no escape from the problems of this world for the foreseeable future because Jesus told us to first evangelize all the language groups before the second coming? What if God expects us to properly tend and care for his good and beautiful garden-like creation until his Son comes back? What if when he returns instead he finds us sticking our heads in the sand, and ignoring the many ways we have bruised and abused the earth he created for our eco-system? What if our otherworldly redemption theology involves a gross distortion of the Biblical creation theology?

    I suggest you go to his article to see his answers. Those are all topics on which is is expert.

  • Feingold on the Elections

    MSNBC has an interview with Senator Russ Feingold in which he makes some excellent points. There are many things I disagree with Senator Feingold about, but he is right on target on a number of others. For example he says:

    People in Wisconsin, and everywhere for that matter, want their elected officials to stand up for what they believe. Democrats aren’t going to win in November simply by running out the clock. We need to show the American people that we stand for things like guaranteed health care for all Americans, bringing the troops home from Iraq, and defending the rule of law.

    I’m just going to speak as an independent here. I give my vote to various candidates. I’m not much concerned about party labels, and I also don’t have any single issue that drives my vote. I can disagree with a candidate on a number of issues if I believe he or she has integrity and some good sense. Democrats won’t get my vote simply by not being Republicans (or the reverse); they have to have their own strategy, their own vision for the country, and a willingness to stand up for those things. That’s probably a great deal to expect of a politician, but that’s what I’m looking for.

    This is where the Democratic Party has to catch up with its own supporters. There is a populist movement, a desire for the party to stand for populist positions and strong positions, both international and domestically. All over the country, people are saying the same thing to me. And it is out there in a way I have ever seen before. If the Democratic Party doesn’t have the sense to catch this wave, we may pay for it.

    Precisely! You can’t continually win elections and hold onto power simply by not offending people. You have to challenge them, engage their interest, and earn (not get, earn) their confidence. I think John Kerry would be President of the United States right now if he had simply managed to convince the American people that he had some sort of plan. The problem was that he was sort of not-Bush, and then not all that sure what positive content being not-Bush was supposed to have.

    People voted for the positive plan.

    I agree with Senator Feingold that we will have quite a few surprising results, but that’s not much of a prediction. The question I have is whether there is a politician or group of politicians left out there who can catch the attention of the American people in a positive way. I’m watching for such a group and ready to be active. Right now neither the Republican nor the Democratic parties are looking all that good.