Diana Butler Bass: May 2009 Archives

My young daughter is a dedicated fan of the TLC program Jon and Kate Plus Eight, a reality show of a wholesome family with a set of twins and a set of sextuplets.  Over the weekend, TLC ran a marathon of four seasons of the show leading up to the beginning of its fifth season on Monday night.  I confess--I spent a good number of hours watching the reruns with her. 

Rather unbelievably, the fourth season ended with parents Jon and Kate Gosselin renewing their wedding vows and--within just a few weeks--a tabloid explosion of scandalous rumors of the couple's marriage failing apart amid allegations of affairs.  In the world of reality TV, news doesn't get much bigger than this.  For months, fans, bloggers, and the tabloid press have been speculating:  How would season five open?  Would Jon and Kate stay together?  Would they get divorced? 

The scandal is exacerbated by the fact that Jon and Kate are evangelical Christians.  The Gosselins are folk heroes in the evangelical community--their sextuplets were the result of infertility treatments during which they refused selective abortion and carried all six babies to term.  TLC downplays the religious aspects of the show, but legions of conservative church-going fans delighted in Kate's stern discipline, cheered Jon wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Bible verses, and devoured the couple's Christian parenting books.  The show is something strangely compelling--the cute little kids and the endlessly cranky parents trying hard to make a good Christian family. 

The new season's opening episode recorded a familial train wreck.  Indeed, Jon barely participated in his sextuplet's fifth birthday while an emotionally drained Kate struggled alone to pull of the party.   In individual interviews, the couple talked about how hard their relationship is--how they've become "different" people--and how divorce was a distinct possibility.

As I watched, I recalled another show--An American Family--the original family reality show that PBS aired in 1973.  Conceived as a video diary of a liberal middle-class American family, the Louds of Santa Barbara, the program quickly devolved into the chronicle of crisis--complete with boundary-pushing teens and the wife confronting her philandering husband and demanding a divorce.  The Louds made big news--including the cover of Newsweek on the breakdown of the American family.

Which, of course, brings us back to Jon and Kate.  If the Loud saga depicted the crisis of the liberal 1970s family, what does Jon and Kate's tale reveal about the state of the evangelical family?  Is this where their politics of "family values" have taken conservative evangelicals?  Are the Gosselins the Louds of the Christian right?  

In Jon and Kate's case, evangelical gender expectations seem to be the root of their troubles: they reversed the parental roles.  After a couple of seasons, Jon decided to stay at home and Kate went on the road to promote the show and their books.  The choice made Jon increasingly sullen and Kate happier and began to wear at their relationship.   For evangelicals, this is an unusual arrangement that leaves the husband open to charges of "feminization" and the wife of being difficult.  The Gosselin's tensions demonstrate how unsuccessfully conservative religious groups have been dealing with gender--and how when a woman like Kate Gosselin breaks with tradition in order to pursue what she loves--even when her business is family and motherhood--she gets both blamed and punished for problems in her relationships. 

Kate kept saying, "it is so complex; it is so difficult," unable to stop her tears.  In a way, she embodies many evangelical women who struggle between the role of homemaker that their churches assign them and of finding interesting and creative work in the world.   Kate, despite all her pretentions to tradition, is actually a very contemporary woman with feminist inclinations--one who is figuring out that her theology is at odds with the way life works out.  She often violates the mores of a nice evangelical mom (which I think is part of the appeal; she is, in many ways, an evangelical fantasy mother).  She clearly likes travel, Oprah interviews, and book signings.  Staying at home with eight kids can be a drag, so she left her husband with them only to find out that there may have been a girlfriend, too.  Success, good children, happy marriage--are they all possible within her theological framework?  "I have a lot of anger," she said on Monday's program.  I bet. 

How dreary it is to watch a relationship implode on national television.  In some measure, the failure is theirs.  But the conservative evangelical community shares some of that failure, too.  The religious world to which Jon and Kate belong never successfully navigated the gender changes of the last three decades, insisting that happiness can still be found in hierarchical roles of male superiority and female submission.  Having rejected feminist theology, evangelicals can't really navigate contemporary marriage issues like those facing Jon and Kate.  They made celebrities of the Gosselins for being traditionalists, yet that success eroded the very basis of the traditionalism on which their family was based.  Now, the woman is criticized for that same success by an increasingly cruel media and tabloid press.   I just wonder if all those church people will turn on you next.   

You are right, Kate.  It is complex and difficult.  It makes me angry for you.

In 2004, a little book appeared that made quite a splash among dispirited Democrats:  George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant.  In it, Lakoff argued that Republicans and Democrats worked out of two different "framing" stories--frames are "mental structures that shape the way we see the world."  Republicans frame their politics in the terms of "a strict father family," while Democrats frame theirs on the ideal of a "nurturant parent family."  According to Lakoff, the party with the most compelling storyline often "wins" in public discourse.

Yesterday, in the dueling national security speeches of former Vice-President Cheney and President Obama, the two storylines stood in stark contrast--a visible demonstration of the difference between political approaches.

On one hand, Vice-President Cheney enacted the part of the strict father.  He chided Obama as a parent might correct an erring child--delivering a verbal conservative spanking to the young upstart who (according to Cheney) doesn't understand the ways of the real world.  He protected the traditions of the older generation, applauding himself for his own wisdom and insight--all the while reassuring the rest of the fearful family that his way is the right way.  Stay on the course of the Fathers (Cheney and Bush) and all will be well. 

And it was implicitly religious in the style of a Puritan jeremiad.  Cheney chastised the new administration for the sin of departing from the true path and threatened hellfire and damnation would result.  He insisted Obama repent and return.  Only then can the nation be saved.  It was a narrative masterwork of the old Republican frame--brilliant, scary, intimidating, and bizarrely reassuring all at the same time.

In contrast, President Obama's speech embodied many of the characteristics of nurturing parent politics--he empathized with people's worries about terrorism, and reiterated his commitment to national security (thus allowing for maximum human happiness).  He brought themes of freedom, fairness, community-building, trust, and open communication to the discussion--all of which are the nurturing values of progressive politics. 

However, Obama turned the prism of nurturing parent politics in an interesting and unexpected way.  Historically, progressives have said, "I empathize with you" (as did Bill Clinton), "These policies empathize with you" (as did Jimmy Carter), or "The government empathizes with you" (as did FDR).  But President Obama essentially said, "The law empathizes with you."  The entire speech, delivered at the National Archives (the building that houses our most cherished legal documents), argued that the closest possible attention to the traditions of the law would both protect us from harm and save our national soul.  The nurturing parent is not an individual, policies, or government.  In Obama's progressive politics, the law nurtures the American family with its hopes for happiness, fairness, community, and justice. 

This emphasis on the law-as-nurturing parent helps explain Obama's own coolheaded and dispassionate nature--he is able to stand alongside an issue and analyze it through the lens of legal traditions.  And it also explains his remark on wanting an "empathetic" Supreme Court justice.  He wants someone who shares this vision of the nurturant law as his legacy on the Court.

It is also a profoundly Judeo-Christian vision.  The law--as summed up in the injunction to love God and love one's neighbor--saves.  The law is not a set of rules to be adhered to in every circumstance (as some people misinterpret it); rather, the law is a summary of divine wisdom of how to shape a community in both devotion and ethics.  As rabbis, ministers, and theologians know, the law both instructs and empathizes.  According to Jewish and Christian scriptures, the law delights; the law forms the soul; the law teaches; the law nourishes; the law guides; the law frees; the law protects.  The law establishes Israel; Jesus reaffirmed the grace-filled power of the law in his own teaching:  The law is life.

Obama isn't trying to mediate between liberals and conservatives as Dick Cheney charged.  The President is trying to create an entirely new vision of progressive politics--one based deeply in American law, and one anchored in the wisdom traditions of Judaism and Christianity.  A progressive revival--both secular and sacred--of American community through the Law.

Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.  They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither.  In all that they do, they prosper.  Psalms 1:1-3.

In 1899, Pope Leo condemned "Americanism" as a heresy.  Americanism, a theological development in American Roman Catholicism, was a complex of progressive ideals regarding freedom, separation of church and state, historical criticism and scientific inquiry that attempted to reconcile traditional Christian teachings with what historians call, "the spirit of the age." 

A crisis at the University of Notre Dame occasioned the Pope's condemnation.  In 1896, Notre Dame professor John Zahm published a book entitled Evolution and Dogma arguing that church teaching, the Bible, and evolution did not conflict.  Within two years, it was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books and Zahm was forced to recant its publication.  

According to historian George Marsden (recently retired from Notre Dame), this controversy ended in a sort of intellectual stalemate:  "The Roman Catholic Church in America was thus forced to retain its identity and its distinctiveness, but at the price of accepting Roman authoritarianism and severe restraints on its intellectual life."  And he further notes that, in the first decades of the twentieth century, "permissible Catholic inquiry became increasingly restricted," whereby Catholic conservatives essentially rejected the "rubric of 'progress.'"  Again, according to Marsden, Catholic authorities "questioned whether philosophies that constantly celebrated innovation, openness, and individual choice could in fact provide a moral basis for a higher civilization."

In 2008, a little more than a century later, a majority of American Catholics threw their electoral lot with an avowedly "progressive" political candidate--Barack Obama.  And, one of their leading universities responded by issuing him an invitation to speak at graduation.  In that simple act of hospitality, history is replaying itself:  Has the ideal of  "progress" encroached too far into the American Catholic community?  What are the limits on creativity, inquiry, and conscience in relation to Catholic magisterial teaching?

But it isn't simply 1896 repeated.  The events at Notre Dame are a little like watching the recent Star Trek movie--history is rebooting itself.  A century ago, the Vatican and the Pope intervened from afar to stop the Americanizing spirit; many bishops actually promoted Americanism; and the Catholic laity seemed to generally approve of the Americanization of their tradition. 

Now, it is the reverse: right-wing Catholic laity and local priests have besieged the University; about 20% of the bishops have condemned Notre Dame for inviting the President (and no doubt, more considered doing so); and the Vatican has basically absented itself from the controversy.   The protest against progressive Catholicism is coming from (at least some of) the pews.  Evidently, the authority structure of the Roman Catholic Church has inverted itself in America--despite the election of a conservative Pope (who spent his week with Muslims and Jews in the Middle East) and overwhelming conservative American Catholic bishops.  The laity thinks it is their job to tell the University of Notre Dame what to do.

I don't understand all of the spiritual and political dimensions of this--but it does reveal how successfully grassroots conservative political groups have communicated their message in some Catholic circles.  Many of those protesting the President's speech have taken rhetoric about abortion as "murder" to heart, thereby neglecting other aspects of Catholic moral teaching--including the idea that individual conscience is a mark of human dignity and that human beings even have the right to exercise conscience when it causes them to err.  So, despite the Vatican's own deep horror of abortion, most Roman Catholic leaders have not taken to the streets with bloodied baby dolls.  They, instead, rest in the uneasy tensions of witnessing to a Catholic moral ideal of no abortion in relation to the equally Catholic moral ideal of the free exercise of conscience.

That lay Catholics are leading the charge against President Obama at Notre Dame doesn't seem like a positive development in American Catholic life.  With sixty percent supporting Obama and forty percent not supporting him, are we looking at a Catholic Church as fractious as other American faith communities?  Maybe it only shows that despite all European attempts to the contrary, the American church was "Americanized"--in some unexpected ways--after all.

The whole episode reveals some ugly results of long-term politicization in the Catholic community--and a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole vision of Catholic moral teaching. 

Notre Dame is probably trying to make that very point by not rescinding its invitation to President Obama--and it may be trying to correct the very old injustice of the Zahm case.  I'm afraid, however, the point has been lost in the shouting.

Last Friday, my family went to see the new Star Trek movie.  We really enjoyed the renewed adventures of Captain Kirk and the starship Enterprise.  We weren't alone.  The audience in the nearly full theater loved the film.  And it proved a happy surprise for Paramount--Star Trek pulled in twice as much in opening weekend box-office sales than the studio had predicted.  Indeed, the new movie wound up having the strongest opening in the venerable series' history.

The next day, two CNN anchors discussed the movie's successful release--but insisting how they weren't "trekkies," ad infinitum.  One of them said, "I just don't get it.  I've never understood the popularity of Star Trek."  The co-anchor agreed.  Then, unbelievably, the male anchor invited people to twitter him to "explain" the appeal of Star Trek.

I hope his Twitter account didn't crash.

I have to confess:  Although I'm not a complete trekkie, I once played Nurse Sistine Chapel in a homemade Star Trek flick.  But you don't have to be a hard-core trekker to love Star Trek and "get" it.  There are probably about a million answers to the anchor's question to the "why" of Star Trek. 

My "why" relates to--perhaps not unsurprisingly to my readers--theology.   And it doesn't fit in a tweet.  When I was growing up in Baltimore in the 1960s, the world was falling apart, people divided, anger in the streets, riots ripping through neighborhoods.  Yet, every week, my mother would sit my brother, sister, and me on a blanket in the living room to watch Star Trek.  There, on the screen of our new color TV (with twelve channels!), an unfailingly optimistic view of the universe unfolded in front of us.  Unlike the world we knew, full of fear and worries of atomic holocaust, Kirk and Spock took us to a place where few dared to go in the mid-1960s--a hopeful future.

A hopeful future has always been central to progressive faith.  "Progress" implies that there exists a future worth working for--the world can and will be better than the world we now inhabit.  Over the course of the twentieth century, it has been harder and harder to hold onto the belief in a hope-filled future, an optimistic vision of history.  So much poverty, so much violence, so much environmental degradation.  The once-proud doctrine of "progress" in relation to history fell into popular disrepute--leaving theological space for darker visions of an apocalyptic future and visions of end-times politics.

Of course, the original series had a corny view of human progress.  Nevertheless, Star Trek opened my young imagination to ideas of pluralism, racial acceptance, inclusive community, and universal peace.  Perhaps my older cousins encountered these things in the politics and utopian movements of the 1960s, but I found them first in a television series where they were embodied in stories of a white guy from Iowa, a Vulcan, a Swahili woman, a Russian, and an Asian gay man. 

My church talked about a hopeful future, too.  But we weren't very good acting on that vision--unable, for whatever reason, to walk our talk.  We had the right words about a human future of inclusive community of universal peace, but never really pulled it together when it came to turning words into living practices of faith.  I always think that is why mainline churches struggled so much in the 1960s.  We had the right theological stuff, but somehow failed to translate it into the world.  We spoke about a hopeful future, but secretly had begun to doubt its power to transform human lives.  The energy of hope moved away from the progressive religious communities that had seeded much of the twentieth century with optimism--and, as a result, mainline churches became increasingly irrelevant to a world still pining for positive future.

The new Star Trek still presents a progressive future, but one tempered by the fact that optimism is often born by a realistic engagement with human loss and suffering--that the road to the future is sometimes paved with fear and mistakes.  But--and this is an important but--we still get there.  In the new Star Trek, Kirk and Spock still save the universe (at least most of it), still embrace the "other" (despite racial tensions), and still make peace (especially on their own ship).  They are shaped by the lessons of the twentieth century as they move bravely into the twenty-third.  In the process, the future looks pretty good and worth working for.

A hopeful future is the place I pray that our faith communities can finally--and boldly--go.  

And, hey trekkers, don't get too irritated with me:  I'm a theologian, not a movie critic.  

Most people think of Mother's Day as a quaint and conservative holiday honoring 1950s values, a sort of historical throw back to traditional notions of hearth and home.

Let's correct that impression by saying:  Happy Progressive Mother's Day.

In May 1907, Anna Jarvis, a member of a Methodist congregation in Grafton, West Virginia, passed out 500 white carnations in church to commemorate the life of her mother.   One year later, the same Methodist church created a special service to honor mothers.   Many progressive Christian organizations--like the YMCA and the World Sunday School Association--picked up the cause and lobbied Congress to make Mother's Day a national holiday.  And, in 1914, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson made it official and signed Mother's Day into law.  Thus began the modern celebration of Mother's Day in the United States.  

Anna Jarvis intended the new holiday to honor all mothers beginning with her own--Anna Reeves Jarvis, who had died in 1905.  Although now largely forgotten, Anna Reeves Jarvis was a social activist and community organizer.  In 1858, Anna Reeves Jarvis organized poor women in West Virginia into "Mothers' Work Day Clubs" to raise the issue of clean water and sanitation in relation to the lives of women and children.  She also worked for universal access to medicine for the poor.  Reeves Jarvis was a pacifist who served both sides in the Civil War by working for camp sanitation and medical care for soldiers of the North and the South.  In short, Mother's Day was founded to celebrate a radical community organizer who favored universal health care and was a pacifist.

The first Mother's Day wasn't sentimental or old-fashioned at all.  It was about work, motherhood, health care, peace, and politics--and making the world a better place for women and their children.

Happy Progressive Mother's Day!  And give some radical women in your life a hug today.