Ethical? That Depends...
go4tli
Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and Hank
Williams, Jr., singer and entertainer, have in common?
No, that's not the setup to a joke. I'm serious.
The answer, sadly, is very little.
Consider what happened to Hank Williams, Jr., alternately known as
"Bocephus". He had a pretty sweet gig making sure viewers of ESPN
were ready for some football on Monday nights. But he ended up losing
his job with that network after saying on a talk show that Barack
Obama and Joe Biden are "the enemy", comparing them to "Hitler".
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/10/06/141112853/hank-williams-jr-and-monday-night-football-part-ways
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201110030001
That's a shame, but the fact of the matter is that he failed to live
up to the standards of decency and honesty ESPN requires. Fans liked
him, but if the ratings are any indication, they seem to have
understood that it was a regrettable but necessary decision. (The
ratings didn't decline at all.)
Contrast that with Richard Land. *He* compared Obama and company to
the Nazis, using the long-debunked lie about "death panels" to attempt
to induce fear.
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"I want to put it to you bluntly. What they are attempting to do in
healthcare, particularly in treating the elderly, is not something
like what the Nazis did. It is precisely what the Nazis did," said
Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty
Commission.
Land was the keynote speaker for the 20th anniversary "God and Country
Banquet" of the Christian Coalition of Florida.
"Let's remember," Land added, "the first 10,000 victims of the
Holocaust were not Jews, they were mentally handicapped German
children who were gassed and burned in ovens because they were
considered to have ... lives unworthy of life," citing the Nazi
ideology used to rationalize the Holocaust. ...
Land said he has bestowed on Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the president's
chief healthcare advisor, the "Dr. Josef Mengele Award" for his
advocacy of healthcare rationing. Mengele was the German SS officer
and medical doctor dubbed the "Angel of Death" for his role in the
Holocaust.
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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/land-obama-and-company-are-literally-nazis
Yet, despite using lies to induce fear and calling a respected Jewish
scholar "Mengele", despite never having apologized and never having
been disciplined, he remains a respected expert on ethics in the SBC
(and in the Evangelical Christian community generally).
Consider that for a moment. Bocephus is an *entertainer* -- he
doesn't head the ethics commission of *anything*. He was never in the
position of being a spiritual role model. He was on ESPN to warm
audiences up for sporting events. But he failed to meet even the
minimal ethical standards of Monday Night Football, so he was ejected.
By contrast, Richard Land's *job* is to promote ethics on behalf of
the largest Protestant denomination in the United States of America.
His ethical violations (this statement about "death panels" was not
his first demonstrable falsehood -- if you're curious, check the
footnote) exceed Hank Williams, Jr.'s, but he remains secure in his
job, as he has for the past twenty years.
The most straightforward way to interpret this is that football fans,
as a group, have higher ethical standards than American Evangelical
Christians. A corollary would be that someone who hopes to become
ethical would be better off watching Monday Night Football than
attending Sunday morning church service.
But the real tragedy of this is that what I've just said there would
cause a great many Christians to stop reading and stop thinking.
Because the unpardonable sin in American Evangelical Christianity is
to tell the truth about the wrong thing.
Calvin College professor John Schneider was pushed into "early
retirement" for questioning the idea of a "historical" Adam and Eve.
Activists and media figures have encouraged Grove City College to
rethink its employment of psychology professor Warren Throckmorton due
to his refusal to deny the science disproving their belief in
religious "reparative therapy" for gays. The same cast of characters
has questioned Eastern Nazarene College's continued support for Karl
Giberson, a physicist who teaches actual physics, and Randall J.
Stephens, a historian who teaches actual history. Their so-called
"offense" was, again, arguing that Christians should stick to the
facts. The activists and self-proclaimed parachurch leaders upset
with all of these professors urge wealthy conservative donors to all
of those colleges to pressure the schools to silence or remove such
unacceptably truthful professors.
http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2011/08/calvin_college_adam_and_eve_co.html
http://americansfortruth.com/2011/11/01/labarbera-asks-grove-city-college-professor-warren-throckmorton-to-apologize-for-pro-homosexual-advocacy/#more-10250
http://wthrockmorton.com/2011/11/04/a-new-test-of-orthodoxy/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/opinion/the-evangelical-rejection-of-reason.html?_r=2&ref=opinion
This would seem like an ugly pattern. Speaking outrageous, trivially-
demonstrable lies do nothing to diminish your job security or your
respected standing as an expert on ethics. Speaking the truth is
"controversial" and can get you in a lot of trouble. Outright
falsehoods -- about science, about politics, about the poor, about
homosexuals, about other faiths, about women who have abortions, about
history, about far too many things -- are not at all troubling; some
have been repeated so many times that they've become part of what it's
*expected* that you will assent to as an American Evangelical
Christian. A *refusal* to lie is seen as making waves, and can put
your job in jeopardy.
How did we get to this point? How did it come to be in Evangelical
Christianity that lying is *expected* and *required*? How many wrong
turns, how many bad decisions, did we have to make to see someone's
desire to remain responsible to the available facts as dangerous,
compromised, or threatening?
And what are we going to do about it now?
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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/land-oprah-unimaginably-dangerous-world
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/dadt-repealed-america-can-expect-gods-judgment
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/land-gay-activists-seek-full-blown-sexual-paganization-society
Richard
Staggering comments that I wouldn't know where to start......
I think a comment from Bill Graham could be appropriate. "Billy Graham
refused to join Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in 1979, saying: "I'm for
morality, but morality goes beyond sex to human freedom and social
justice.""
I am too busy at work to go into this in detail, but, I think suffice to say
we live in a screwed up world if were giving everyone a fair crack at health
care is equated to Mengele and Hitler....
-Richard
Matthew Funke
I think a comment from Bill Graham could be appropriate. "Billy Graham refused to join Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in 1979, saying: "I'm for morality, but morality goes beyond sex to human freedom and social justice.""
I find myself in agreement. Regardless of one's convictions about certain issues, one should at least have the decency to *tell the truth* about them.
For example, I personally oppose abortion under most circumstances. But I cannot fathom why some of my Evangelical brethren would attempt to gain traction on the issue by claiming that organizations like Planned Parenthood only seek to keep abortions legal because they make more money from government grants that way. It's demonstrably untrue.
When people find out that Christians have lied to them in order to give their arguments the appearance of more weight, they tend to distance themselves from the faith. (Not to mention the crisis of faith for Christians who trusted the teachers who told them these things.)
And frankly, I see things that Jesus emphasized in Matthew 23 -- justice, mercy, and faithfulness -- to be more important than certain political issues. But that's another rant.
I am too busy at work to go into this in detail, but, I think suffice to say we live in a screwed up world if were giving everyone a fair crack at health care is equated to Mengele and Hitler....
I have to agree. I mean, I could understand it *in principle* if people objected to a particular implementation of health care. But to claim that it's an evil on the level of the worst murderers in Nazi Germany... well, it's staggering, frankly. ("We want to take care of you when you're sick, and here's how we plan to do it." "No! ... You Nazi!")
I've begun to think that for a large number of people, words have no actual *definitions*. They don't have meanings -- only vague emotional attachments. Therefore, some political pundits can get away with claiming that Obama is a Kenyan Marxist Nazi Muslim Atheistic Socialist without even the most minimal perception of any kind of contradiction. It's more of a declaration of who's on whose side, and that "I feel good" or "I feel bad", with no deeper meaning than that.
Granted, my point here was more ethical than political, but I also think that this sort of political undertone is a driving force behind the abandonment of ethics in American Evangelical Christendom, and why liars are encouraged while truth-tellers are disparaged. We have exchanged our vindication through Christ for a political vilification of our philosophical opponents, and exchanged Being Forgiven for Being Right. (I trust you can see that there is sometimes a difference between Being Right and telling the truth.)
It's still a bit mysterious to me why American Evangelicals have determined that the *particular* opponents they've chosen are to be fought. I think some of the choices are deeply misguided or outright mistaken. But regardless of how we got here, we seem to be in a very bad place, calling good evil and evil good (Isaiah 5:18-23).
go4tli
ashamed that we have appointed him as *the* ethical leader of our
country's largest denomination.
He responded to Hillary Clinton's speech on human rights. You can
find Ms. Clinton's speech here:
http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2011/12/178368.htm
... and Richard Land's response here:
http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctpolitics/2011/12/obama_clinton_e.html
Let me just highlight something that caught my eye:
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I certainly don't believe homosexuals or anyone else should be flogged
or put to death for their sexual sins. However...
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Okay, Mr. Land, I'm going to advise that you Stop. Right. There.
Is "however" really what you want to say there? Regardless of how you
view "homosexuals or anyone else", do you really want to *qualify* the
flogging or execution of these people? Do you really want to express
that you have *reservations* about that sort of thing? Wouldn't it be
much better as, you know, the head of the Southern Baptist
Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission to just go on the
record as being against beating people to death, no hemming, no
hawing, no wiggle room?
Why should there be caveats and loopholes when it comes to *beating
people to death*? Is this something we should worry that people might
become a little too opposed to?
I honestly can't think of any good reason for that "however" to be
there(1). You could either use it as a qualifier, which should
obviously be reprehensible, or you're about to follow it with a non
sequitur, which would be kind of silly and would demolish your
credibility on this issue. But let me go into what he actually
*said*.
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I certainly don't believe homosexuals or anyone else should be flogged
or put to death for their sexual sins. However, I don't believe
homosexuals should receive special treatment over and above anyone
else either.
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Okay. So he's decided to go for the reprehensible *and* the silly.
Since when have homosexuals demanded "special treatment"? The thing
that seems to make certain people squirrelly is that they want *the
same things* as other people (e.g., equal rights of possession under
the law, or equal ability to get married). If they *do* get any
"special treatment", it tends to come in the form of courts ruling
that anti-bullying laws don't apply to people who attack them
(specifically citing religious conviction as a reason).
And, again, even if they *were* demanding special treatment, why is
the only alternative beating them to death? Are we really saying that
it's a special right *not to be murdered*?
Just to show that this gets worse and worse as we add more and more
context:
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I certainly don't believe homosexuals or anyone else should be flogged
or put to death for their sexual sins. However, I don't believe
homosexuals should receive special treatment over and above anyone
else either. Secretary Clinton's remarks were more than likely a
painless way for the Obama administration to placate the homosexual
community in the U.S.
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So whether or not people are being beaten to death is not about how
valuable human life is -- it's about *politics*? Really?
It's hard to find a good way to read this. Honestly, it's hard not to
read it as a tribalistic, coded message to the Right Kind Of
Christian. But I'm open to suggestions. (And, even if we can find
such a way, wouldn't it be fair to insist that the head of an ethics
committee should be able to choose his words better?)
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(1) I thought of one good "however" after I'd been writing for a
while.
"However, it has come to my attention that Christian charities I have
donated money to in good faith have been using their influence to
support acts like these. Words cannot express my contrition, sorrow,
and grief. So that my fellow Christians will not be misled as I was,
I call on the following charities to demonstrate that they will no
longer support such heinous acts: ..."
But warning people against fraud doesn't seem to be a virtue anymore.
Not even if you're the head of an ethics committee.