The Bible, Racism, and Homosexuality

GetReligion takes note of the changes underway in some conservative religious institutions in regards to their understanding of reading cultural mores into the Bible. At Bob Jones University:

The private fundamentalist Christian school that was founded in 1927 said its rules on race were shaped by culture instead of the Bible, according to a statement posted Thursday on the university’s Web site.

The university in northwestern South Carolina, with about 5,000 students, didn’t begin admitting black students until nearly 20 years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling found public segregated schools were unconstitutional.

“We failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves. For these failures we are profoundly sorry. Though no known antagonism toward minorities or expressions of racism on a personal level have ever been tolerated on our campus, we allowed institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful,” the statement said.

From Furnam University:

Vaughn CroweTipton, Furman University chaplain, said there has been a long debate about whether the Bible condones slavery or discrimination. Most communities, he said, have decided biblical references to slavery were a reflection of contemporary culture.

“We can say ‘No, that was for them and not for us,’” CroweTipton said. Scholars and the faithful, CroweTipton said, are having a similar debate about the role of women in society. “We struggle to understand which of the texts we read are culturally bound.”

The school had used the Bible to justify discrimination in the past, such as in a 1998 letter to a writer who questioned the school’s ban on interracial dating. Then, school officials noted that God had created oceans to keep men apart, as well as ethnic, cultural and language barriers.

Little by little the circle of God's love becomes more open. For this we can be grateful. Is it not painfully obvious that the biblical passages that talk about homosexuality need to be seen in the same light? There is more biblical justification for slavery in the Bible than there is condemnation of homosexuality. Both views reflected cultural understandings of the day.

Conservative Christians can admit cultural biases regarding slavery and racism today. Thankfully. Let's pray for the day when they "get it" about homosexuality. Sometimes it just amazes me that they don't see the connection.

Not Going to the Back of the Bus

Donna Brazile isn't. This morning, the New Yorker video from "If I Were Running This Campaign," the Saturday morning panel featuring NY'er staff writer/moderator Jeffrey Toobin along with some of his CNN colleagues, including Ed Rollins, Alex Castellanos, and Donna Brazile. As the 80-minute discussion wound down, Toobin raised the specter of race in the campaign, and Brazile, 48, let loose with an impassioned exhortation. It was inspiring and moving. Video here.

Obama and his Former Church

Steven Waldman of Beliefnet.com has an excellent post in today's Wall Street Journal about Obama's challenging relationship with Trinity United Church of Christ and its former pastor, Jeremiah Wright:

There’s a tremendous irony in all this for Sen. Obama. Mr. Wright scared voters in Kentucky, West Virginia and elsewhere into thinking Sen. Obama was a strident, anti-white radical who would misunderstand, or harm, white families. (In West Virginia, 51% of voters believed he shares the views of Mr. Wright.)

This misses the one fact about Barack Obama that is both stunningly obvious and yet still profoundly ignored: Sen. Obama is a black man raised by a white family. His African father was absent; he was reared by a white mom, white grandmother and white grandfather. When Sen. Obama looked across the breakfast table in the morning, he saw the same skin colors that the Clinton voters in Kentucky do.

Sen. Obama’s choice of church was tied up in his lifelong quest to balance the reality of his white family and his black skin. In “Dreams from My Father,” he writes, “Away from my mother, away from my grandparents, I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle,” recalling his early journeys away from home. “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.”

This was not a binary choice between “acting white” or “acting black.” Each community he had a foot in had substrata, and for him, integrating the different communities became a crucial goal – almost as if to make himself whole he wanted an environment that integrated diverse personalities and ideologies.

Sen. Obama notes that Chicago’s black churches provided “an example of segregation’s hidden blessings, the way it forced the lawyer and the doctor to live and worship right next to the maid and the laborer. Like a great pumping heart, the church had circulated goods, information, values, and ideas back and forth and back again, between rich and poor, learned and unlearned, sinner and saved.”

He quietly opposed but deeply understood the views of the black nationalists in his community. “A steady attack on the white race, the constant recitation of black people’s brutal experience in this country, served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair…..It contradicted the morality my mother had taught me, a morality of subtle distinctions – between individuals of goodwill and those who wished me ill.”

Sen. Obama’s claims to the contrary not withstanding, he was quite aware of Mr. Wright’s appeal to, and encouragement of, this separationist view – he quotes a sermon in which Mr. Wright declares “white folks’ greed runs a world in need.” But Sen. Obama was less concerned with the substance of it than the preacher’s ability to bridge many communities. Describing his first encounter with Mr. Wright, he writes: “It was this capacious talent of his—this ability to hold together, if not reconcile, the conflicting strains of black experience—upon which Trinity’s success had ultimately been built.”

I suspect that part of Sen. Obama’s reluctance to separate from the views he clearly disagreed with was a simple cost-benefit calculation: the destructiveness of the ideology was outweighed by the value of Mr. Wright’s ability to pull together the “conflicting strains of black experience.”

In that sense, neither Obama-the-candidate nor his critics have fully articulated the real reason Sen. Obama stayed with the church as long as he did. It was not because he’s a secret Black Panther (he’s not), and if anything he gravitated to Trinity because of his own fears that he was too white. It’s also not because he was shocked – shocked! – to learn of the church’s radicalism (he wasn’t). It’s that Sen. Obama treasures unity above other values, and marveled at Trinity’s capacity to tie together disparate, often hostile groups into a single community.

What has changed is that Sen. Obama is now focused on a different, larger community. Whereas Mr. Wright was a unifying figure in one community, he and Trinity Church are powerfully divisive in the much larger community.

A More Perfect Union

Via Dunker Journal, a conservative COB blogger, I came upon this post by UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge. If you want to see a text-book example of proof-texting, cherry-picking a quote to prove a point while taking the quote completely out of context, this is it. Proof-texting is usually done by people who quote passages of the Bible out of context, but in this case Professor Bainbridge does it with a speech by Barack Obama. Here is the cherry-picked quote from the speech:

I believe in our ability to perfect this union because it’s the only reason I’m standing here today.

This is from a speech delivered by Obama after the most recent primaries where Obama won in North Carolina and Hillary won in Indiana.

Bainbridge uses this quote to launch into a commentary about the imperfectibility of humanity because of the biblical doctrine of "the fall." Nowhere is this more true, he says, than when we are talking about the appropriate role of government; government should not be in the business of perfecting humanity:

The Framers therefore created a system of government replete with checks and balances designed to ensure not that our nation was eventually perfected, but that it would survive the imperfections of its leaders and people...

Finally, all too many people who talk about perfecting a society strive to do so through the vehicle of government. Personally, I do not believe the government can make people, institutions, or societies better—let alone perfect. After all, government is itself comprised of fallen men and women whose imperfections are precisely the reason good government is shackled with checks and balances. Unconstrained, government attempts to create a “Great Society” destroy communities, disintegrate the little platoons that inculcate virtue, atrophy both man’s ability and desire to control their own destiny, and limit choice.

But wait a minute. What did Obama really say in the speech? Read it yourself. Here are a few addition quotes not mentioned by Bainbridge:

The people I've met in small towns and big cities across this country understand that government can't solve all our problems – and we don't expect it to. We believe in hard work. We believe in personal responsibility and self-reliance...

I trust the American people to realize that while we don't need big government, we do need a government that stands up for families who are being tricked out of their homes by Wall Street predators; a government that stands up for the middle-class by giving them a tax break; a government that ensures that no American will ever lose their life savings just because their child gets sick. Security and opportunity; compassion and prosperity aren't liberal values or conservative values – they're American values...

Does Obama see value in a larger role for government than the professor? Undoubtedly. But the professor completely ignores the more nuanced argument that Obama makes in this speech about the role of government. He finds a quote that suits his purposes and runs with it. Context be damned.

It is worse than that. Obama has been using the phrase "a more perfect union" in many of his speeches, particularly his race speech given in response to the Jeremiah Wright controversy. His use of the phrase in this latest speech - without the "more" - needs to be seen in the context of the overall narrative of his campaign where he has been using the phrase repeatedly. Obama is really not arguing that government can make us perfect.

And as the professor certainly knows Obama is simply drawing on the words from the preamble of the US Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Apparently the founders the professor refers to in his blog post seemed to think it was a pretty good choice of words to use to introduce the founding document of our government. Again, context is important.

I also want to take issue with this quote from his post:

As a Christian, Obama should be aware of the full implications of The Fall. He should know that government is not a vehicle for perfecting humanity or human institutions, but rather a vehicle for ensuring that the baser elements of human nature are restrained. If government does that, it has done all that we can expect of it.

First of all, the professor might want to consult Calvin or Zwingli about this sentiment. There have been plenty of Christian thinkers who took seriously the doctrine of "the fall" and who also had much more confidence than did someone like Luther in the appropriate role of government. There has never been one simple take-away about what "the fall" means for the role of government.

Secondly, the professor ignores an event in recent American history that proves that government can be a vehicle for perfecting ( as in moving towards a more perfect) humanity, the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960's (Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965). Prior to the passage of these bills the practice of segregation was the law of the land in the south. Behind the practice of legal segregation was institutional racism, fear and hatred of blacks codified into law, justified on religious grounds, naturally.

The Civil Rights movement raised the consciousness of the nation about the immorality of racism and segregation, but the legislation signed into law by LBJ forced an end to segregation in the schools and at the ballot box. Of course, you can force a person to do something against their will without it having an effect on their heart and mind. And there is no doubt this was the case for some whites who remained, and remain to this day, racists. But can any serious argument be made that on the whole this legislation, forced unwillingly on people, led to a change of hearts for many. Government was most certainly the vehicle for bringing about a more perfect union. Thanks to this law many people stopped being racists; a change forced by law led to a willing change of heart. Just ask former Alabama Governor George Wallace (OK he's dead but he is exhibit A).

Finally, just a word about the awful attempts to create a "Great Society" mentioned by the professor that "destroy communities, disintegrate the little platoons that inculcate virtue, atrophy both man’s ability and desire to control their own destiny, and limit choice."

It is a common refrain of the right that the LBJ's Great Society was bad for America. But for whom? Ask the blacks who were enfranchised by the Voting Rights Act, which was part of the Great Society. Ask the millions of seniors who are guaranteed basic medical coverage under Medicare. Ask the millions of Americans who breathed cleaner air and drank cleaner water thanks to environmental legislation passed as part of Johnson's Great Society.

Was it perfect? Of course not. The War on Poverty did not end poverty. It created its own problems, including in some cases dependency on government. But as one of Johnson's aides, Joseph A. Califano, Jr., has countered, "from 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century."

For many millions of American's the Great Society made it possible for them to more fully exercise their individual freedoms, by addressing one of the most pernicious aspects of "the fall," the human tendency to ignore the suffering of fellow humans or worse, to justify it on the grounds of racism or Social Darwinism. Government leveled the playing field.

No, government cannot perfect us (and I don't see anyone saying it can) but it most certainly can help us form a more perfect union.

Interracial Marriage Pioneer Dead

The Washington Post reports that Mildred Jeter Loving died on Friday. Loving's marriage and name is associated with a famous Supreme Court Case:

Today, according to the Census Bureau, there are 4.3 million interracial couples in the nation.

That wasn't true in 1958, when then-17-year-old Mildred Jeter and her childhood sweetheart, Richard Loving, a 23-year-old white construction worker,drove 90 miles north to marry in the District. Pretty and slender, she was known by her nickname, "Bean," and she was already pregnant with the first of their three children.

Loving later said she didn't realize that it was illegal for a black woman and a white man to wed, although her husband might have. "I think he thought [if] we were married, they couldn't bother us," she said.

Nevertheless, when they returned to Central Point, Va., between
Richmond and Spotsylvania, to set up their home, someone called the law.

Caroline County Sheriff R. Garnett Brooks rousted them from their bed at 2 a.m. in July 1958 and told them the District's marriage certificate was no good in Virginia. He took them to jail and charged them with unlawful cohabitation. They pleaded guilty, and Caroline County Circuit Court Judge Leon M. Bazile sentenced them to a year's imprisonment, to be suspended if they left the state for the next 25 years...

The Lovings moved to Washington in 1959 and lived with one of her cousins on Neale Street NE. They didn't like urban life and yearned to return to their rural roots.

Five years later, while visiting her mother, they were arrested again for traveling together. Loving, who had been following the 1964 civil rights legislation, wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to find out if the new law would allow the couple to travel freely. The couple was referred to the American Civil Liberties Union and assigned an attorney, Bernard S. Cohen. "It was a terrible time in America," said Cohen, who was at Loving's home when she died. "Racism was ripe and this was the last de jure vestige of racism -- there was a lot of de facto racism, but this law was . . . the last on-the-books manifestation of slavery in America."

With fellow attorney Philip J. Hirschkop, Cohen took the case to the high court. Cohen said the couple didn't understand the importance of the case to anyone other than themselves. "When I told them I thought the case was going all the way to the Supreme Court, [Richard Loving's] jaw dropped. He didn't understand why I didn't go to Judge Bazile and tell him they loved each other and they should be allowed to live where they wished," said Cohen, now a retired state delegate from Alexandria.

On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared: "There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. . . . There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause."

It is worth noting what the circuit court judge said when he sentenced them to jail:

"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix," Bazile ruled.

Some day we will look back on the comments some Christians make today about what God has to say about the "evils" of gay marriage with the same sense of unbelief. They really said that?