Treating Falsehood with Complaisance

If this were a higher-traffic blog, I'd hesitate to link to the site I'm about to discuss (linkage is currency in the Intertoobz), but what the hell. This webpage, which claims that a rite of "same-sex marriage" was officially celebrated in Eastern Christianity, has been linked on Facebook by two gay Christian friends of mine in the past week. It's a disorganized mishmash of claims, mixing "same sex marriage" with "same sex unions" more or less at random, and it only really cites one source: the late John Boswell's Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (Villard, 1994).

I wrote comments to both my friends, pointing out that, while some of the criticism of Boswell's thesis was motivated by homophobia, some also came from gay and gay-friendly scholars. The bigots can be dismissed; the latter group must be engaged. I have my own criticisms of the late Alan Bray's The Friend (Chicago, 2003), but Bray was a gay Roman Catholic historian, so anyone interested in this subject should read The Friend as well as Boswell's book. (Of course neither of my friends has read Boswell, even though one of them is just a few years younger than I am and must have heard about the controversy when Same-Sex Unions was published more than fifteen years ago. As the gay Roman Catholic scholar Mark D. Jordan wrote a few years ago, "[Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality] and, to a lesser extent, [Same-Sex Unions] are talismans more than books. People own them much more often than they read them, because mere possession is enough to allow one to benefit from the results" ["'Both as a Christian and as a Historian': On Boswell's Ministry", 101]).

Jordan's The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (Chicago, 2000) contains a lot of useful discussion of issues other than marriage, but I think it would be almost as disturbing to most lay gay Christians as it is to homophobic gay Catholics. His essay on Boswell, which I just quoted, comes from Matthew Kuefler, editor, The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago, 2006).

One giveaway in the linked webpage was its quotation from the Secret Gospel of Mark:

"... in the evening the youth came to him [Jesus], wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan." —The Secret Gospel of Mark, The Other Bible, Willis Barnstone, Editor, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1984, pp. 339-342.

The Secret Gospel, you may remember, survives only in a few brief quotations in a fragment of a letter by the early church father Clement of Alexandria, a copy of which Morton Smith discovered in a Greek Orthodox near Bethlehem in 1958. Even if you believe that it depicts a gay Jesus (which I don't, for reasons I've gone into at length before), I don't see what it has to do with same-sex marriage. Oddly, the writer of this material calls himself ThosPayne, after the great eighteenth-century rationalist and skeptic; but Thomas Paine would probably have regarded a sodomitical Jesus as further evidence of the corruption of religion -- "The Christian system of religion is an outrage on common sense," he once wrote -- not as a model for modern Christians.

I haven't read Boswell's Same-Sex Unions since it was first published over fifteen years ago, but as I remember it he left a lot of questions open, questions ThosPayne treats as closed. Was the rite he discussed a marriage rite, for example, or something else? Could a person who'd made these vows then marry heterosexually? If so, that would indicate that it was not a marriage, Christian marriage being monogamous. ThosPayne claims that one version of their martyrdom calls St. Sergius "the sweet companion and lover" of Bacchus; but even in English "lover" doesn't always mean "sex partner" -- read Shakespeare, for example, or consider phrases like "a lover of good food." What (Greek?) word was translated as "lover" in that text ThosPayne doesn't say, though he does claim that "the oldest text of their martyrology, written in New Testament Greek describes them as 'erastai,' or 'lovers'." That doesn't help, because in Greek you don't have two erastai, you have an erastes or lover and an eromenos or beloved. It's hard to know for sure, because according to James Barr, the connotations of Greek verbs related to eros changed over the centuries, and agape, which is popularly thought now to mean spiritual, nonsexual love, could be used in the Greek Bible for love in such relations as husband and wife. And according to Bray, "wed" means "vow"; so if you find an older English text which refers to "a wedded brother" it doesn't mean that a marriage has taken place between them, it means that they have sworn brotherhood and friendship, which is a very old rite found around the world, and is definitely not same-sex marriage, though it's not less valuable or meaningful for that.

But it doesn't really matter, because none of these modes of relationship are suitable as models for us today. When I've run into gay people who claimed that they wanted a "traditional" marriage, I would point out that "traditional" marriage means a division of roles and labor between husband and wife, and a sexual double standard too. It also means considerable loss of legal personhood for the wife. They usually back down as it becomes clear that what they are imagining isn't "traditional" at all; at best it's an idealized child's-eye picture of their parents' marriage, about which they don't know a lot. Some gay-marriage advocates are quick to assert that they don't want traditional marriage, they want a modern, more egalitarian contract. Fine, but in that case there's no point in wondering whether the brotherhood rite Boswell wrote about constitutes marriage; they wouldn't want it if it did. To quote Mark Jordan again, from the same article:

Even if Boswell's reading of Byzantine liturgy had been unassailable (and it is not), anyone familiar with Vatican responses to rebellious claims could have predicted that official or quasi-official responses would be denials, either by thunder or by condescending silence.

Boswell's imaginary dialogue with the pope looks like another instance of willed naiveté. It is not true, for example, that the undisputed existence of a rite binds present teaching of worship. In the prevailing Roman Catholic theology, the meaning of rites – like the meaning of the Scriptures -- is determined by church authority, not historical scholarship....

Boswell must have known that the role of historical evidence in theology has been a neuralgic point for Catholic thought during the whole of the modern period, but especially since the middle of the nineteenth century. To stake a historical claim is not the end of a conversation about Catholic tradition. It is barely the beginning -- and a stigmatized beginning, at that [94-95].

Let me stress again that Jordan is a Christian, still Roman Catholic I believe despite his conflicts with the hierarchy, and gay. One of the friends who shared ThosPayne's article wrote about "secular" responses to Christianity, and I pointed out that all the resources I recommended to him were by Christian scholars. My friend, who's evidently still struggling with Christianity, had swallowed conservative Christian polemic and took for granted that anyone who differed with entrenched church positions must be a secularist. But there's a wide range of positions within Christianity; it's not an atheist like me, but Christians who want you to suppose otherwise. What I'm doing here is pointing out the range of options among Christians; for an atheist like me, these questions are almost literally academic.

"It is an affront to treat falsehood with complaisance," ThosPayne quotes Paine in his web profile. I agree. As I've said before, gay people should not spread misinformation about us: that's what bigots are paid to do.

The Great Churn of Being

I was going to write about faith, especially about David Fergusson's Faith and Its Critics: A Conversation (Oxford, 2009), but my mind is still chewing its cud, as it were, over what I want to say. Besides, reading Fergusson sent me back to the great scholar James Barr's 1977 book Fundamentalism (Westminster Press), which had a great influence on me when I first read it in the early 1980s. For one thing, I'm pretty sure it was from Barr that I learned (or realized) that fundamentalists do not read the Bible literally. Fundamentalism is a big book, 340-odd pages of smallish type plus endnotes and bibliography, but for me it is fascinating, fun to read, and endlessly quotable. Here are some samples from the last chapter. Some of what he wrote is dated, but all too much of it is still relevant, more than thirty years later.

It is often argued by theologians that modern man cannot understand Christianity except where it is re-expressed in a form that takes account of the modern tendencies of modern thought. Fundamentalism shows clearly that this is not so. On the contrary, it is perfectly possible to form a version of Christianity which rejects or ignores large areas of modern thought and knowledge, but which works reasonably well for large numbers of people and is also reasonably stable. The decision between the two options is not at all a matter of inevitability: rather, it is a choice [314].

Barr also dismissed the idea, still popular among some of the New Atheists, that

one cannot listen to the radio or use the telephone and at the same time believe in miracles like Balaam's ass or the journey of Jonah in the belly of the whale[. It] is quite erroneous; thousands of people combine both of these things without the slightest difficulty [314].

I'd say, though Barr didn't, that this is the flip side of the reactionary Christian claim that atheists with moral values are unfairly and dishonestly piggybacking on religion.

This next passage has some bearing on the Atheist Bus campaign:

People say, for instance, that fundamentalism depends basically upon an attitude of fear, a sense of insecurity that demands something absolute and infallible to hold on to. This is said not only by critics of fundamentalism, but also by highly conservative people. … But, whether this is so or not, the position in this book does not depend upon it. I do not doubt that fundamentalism can be a reaction of fear, and that resistance to change can follow from fear of change. But I do not think that this is necessarily the case, and I do not see why fundamentalist convictions should not be found allied with a courageous and cheerful psychological constitution. The emphasis in this book falls not on the psychological states, but on the logical and methodological perceptions which go to form fundamentalism. This is surely a better approach, if only because it has a chance of doing some good; little is achieved by saying that such and such a religious trend is motivated by fear, except to irritate those concerned; the psychological argument is often paralyzing and useless. It is my opinion that fundamentalism can and often does go with a quite stable and balanced personality, and this fits with the point I have already made about the stability of fundamentalist ideology. I do think that fundamentalism is a pathological condition of Christianity; but that does not mean that it is psychologically pathological ... [317-18]

This immediately leads us to state a further reason why I have not in this book developed the ‘psychological’ sort of criticisms often made against fundamentalism: in so far as these criticisms are valid, they have to be levelled not only against fundamentalists but also against many other currents within Christianity. The idea that religious behaviour is motivated through fear rather than love or faith is one that could be quite broadly spread, as a criticism of the most diverse Christian traditions; the accusation of individualism has also been made on all sides; and as for pathological attitudes about sex and other matters of life-style, the less said anywhere in Christianity the better. In so far as these are difficulties for fundamentalism, they are difficulties that it shares with a variety of currents, especially minority currents and extreme currents, within diverse segments of Christianity [331-32].

On "extremism":

As with some other comparable social movements, there is always a position more extreme than the one you are talking with at any particular moment. A person whom an average mainstream Christian will regard as a rabid fundamentalist will often be found to consider himself rather moderate; beyond him there lie, it appears, whole tracts of belief that are much more intransigent and uncompromising. The fundamentalist polemicist thus puzzles people by assuming a pose of moderation. He affects to suppose, at least at times, that his is in fact a central position within Christianity. One the one side you have the severe distortions of Roman Catholicism, on the other you have the utter perversions of liberalism, and in the middle you have the sound, central and moderate position of his own conservative evangelicalism. There may indeed be persons who push the conservative evangelical position to unnecessary extremes, it is admitted, but the average sound conservative (i.e., the one you are talking to at the moment) occupies middle ground. It is thus not uncommon to find a person who holds absolutely all the tenets of fundamentalist belief, … but who nevertheless uses the term ‘fundamentalist’ not for himself but for some shadowy group of people who hold a yet more extreme position.

On human sexuality. This part probably will seem the most problematic to people who are concerned with contemporary anti-gay crusades by conservative Christians, or with abusive neo-patriarchal sects within fundamentalism. Even so, from my own observations (and books such as Heather Hendershot's excellent Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture [Chicago, 2004]), I'd say that Barr is still basically right:

In the matter of sexual relationships, the literature of central conservative groups gives little basis for the idea of a pathological prurience. My own criticism would be the opposite, that the material is childishly naïve in a pre-1914 schoolboy-idealistic manner, culminating perhaps in the immortal piece of advice, “To share a common interest in Sunday School work is not, in itself, a decisive indicator that you should get married.” This was published in 1964! At least as far as one can nudge from the published literature, the conservative evangelical view of sex and marriage, far from being haunted by sin and guilt, is light and superficial. What the conservative student gets from his reading matter is advice of a prudential kind about the unwisdom of playing with other people’s affections, holding hands unless one is serious, kissing before becoming engaged and, most of all, getting married hastily on the basis of a common devotion to the work of the Lord. All these are indeed not matters without any importance: but as an ethical implication of the (supposedly earth-shaking) gospel they are just laughably negligible in comparison with the perception of ethical issues in theologians in mainstream theology. I suspect that relations between men and women in fundamentalist groups are commonly quite happy and wholesome, but for this no thanks are due to the mediocre guidance on ethical questions handed out by the group. More can be ascribed to the common sense of purpose and neglect of self in common devotion to the work of the Lord [331].

The gay-marriage movement, I suspect, is partially driven by similar attitudes to human sexuality by younger GLBT Christians.

Finally, on quasi-fundamentalism among mainstream Christians:

The point is that many people in the church, though rejecting fundamentalism, continue to treat some biblical passages, or some sections of the Bible, in a manner that seems to be close to the fundamentalist understanding. This is quite a serious matter. People do not think, with fundamentalism, that everything is accurate, and they consider some passages, perhaps in the Old Testament, to have no value for the church today or otherwise not to be the Word of God; but when they come to the passages that are important for them they use them as if they were a direct transcript of the actual words of Jesus, or as if they were in the fullest sense the Word of God. Is there not therefore something that might be called a selective fundamentalism in the mind of moderate Christians? … It is quite doubtful, however, whether the cachet “selective fundamentalism” is deserved. … Nevertheless there is some cause for disquiet about this phenomenon [333-34].

Compare, for example, some of my posts on gay Christians and their use of the Bible.

It may seem odd -- it does to me, a little -- for me to be talking so favorably about a Christian writer, an elderly heterosexual one at that. (He died just a couple of years ago, and I very much regret that I never wrote to him to thank him for his work.) I should stress that Barr was on his own account conservative theologically, and I don't claim or believe that he would approve of my positions on these issues.

But he was also an enthusiastic controversialist. His first book, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford, 1961), threw down the gauntlet against the apologetic use of the dictionary by mainstream biblical scholars, and he often returned to the theme, as in Biblical Words for Time (SCM, 1969). Several of his books, like Beyond Fundamentalism (Westminster, 1984) and The Bible in the Modern World (SCM, 1973), were intended for a general audience. The Times obituary says that "For one who was so critical and sharp with his pen he was strangely reluctant to engage in serious oral debate and discussion, either on the details of his own work or on matters of academic concern in general," but according to the Independent, "When Barr debated the matter [of fundamentalism] openly with his opponents one evening in Oxford at All Saints' Church, not surprisingly the meeting was well attended." And do I need to tell you how gratified I was to read this footnote (page 51, note 17) in Barr's Gifford Lectures, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Clarendon Press, 1993)?

It seems necessary to say this, if only to notice and to counter the suggestions of John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), who thinks, for example, that St Paul 'never suggested that there was any historical or legal reason to oppose homosexual behaviour: if he did object to it, it was purely on the basis of functional, contemporary moral standards' (p. 106) -- especially since his work includes some discussion of Paul's use of 'nature' in our passage. Interesting as his work is in its gathering of material from the later history, in its handling of biblical texts and above all in its arguments from specific biblical words I can only say that I find it to be staggering in the degree of its misjudgment.

(The full text of the lectures is available online.)

I'd had a good many doubts about Boswell's discussion of the biblical material in Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, but lacking all Greek and Hebrew I couldn't confirm them, so it was very gratifying to find that an expert like Barr felt the same way I did. For the same reason I was also pleased to find that Barr's discussion of the anti-homosexual passage Romans 1:26-28 agreed at key points with the conclusions I'd already reached on my own. And as far as I can tell from Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, Barr's criticism of Boswell was not based on homophobia, as so many conservative scholars' critiques were. That's notable and impressive for a conservative Christian of Barr's generation.

According to another obituary, "it is typical of him that to the very end he was looking for new projects. Left on his desk was the beginning of a major work about prophecy." I wish he could have finished it; Barr was one of those writers whose ideas and opinions I'm always interested to read.