Haggard and Hypocrisy
Jason Kuznicki on Nov 4th 2006 01:50 am |
One of the most interesting responses to the Ted Haggard debacle comes from Joshua Claybourn. Some of it, and my replies, are below the fold.
Haggard. . . has since admitted to some guilt, though not to all of the accusations. Why and how would this affect the election? It seems to be an all too common case of hypocrisy, but hypocrisy within the church and far away from any compaign. Haggard is not on any ballot, but his accuser has allegedly been open and vocal about politics being his motivation for coming forward. Even those trying to deny Haggard’s sins point to politics as the reason it’s being disseminated.
It seems clear why Haggard’s supporters would say the whole thing was political. Meanwhile, it seems equally clear that it really is political. There’s the predictable denial, which no one believes, and — if the evidence is sound — we’ll probably get the all-too-predictable pretend apology in a few weeks’ time. All of this is very, very political.
Not that there is anything wrong with merging the spiritual and the political. After all, Haggard himself has repeatedly done so. He should not be surprised, then, when people treat him like a political figure (which in the United States means “with a salutary contempt”). It may be hard to believe, but the greatest hypocrisy here is not about sex-and-lies at all. It’s about a guy who gets neck-deep in American politics — and then complains when someone exposes his personal life. Well, duh.
Claybourn continues:
Yet the implication among far too many journalists and pundits is that the evangelical community sees the Republican party and church leadership as one in the same. If church leadership is corrupt, the thinking goes, then evangelicals will also hold the GOP responsible. Such thinking is not only erroneous, but also insulting.
This implication is not insulting at all. It is a simple statement of fact. Consider Tom De Lay’s famous quote:
Sides are being chosen, and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will. . . . It is for us then to do as our heroes have always done and put our faith in the perfect redeeming love of Jesus Christ.
Lie down with the dogs, get up with the fleas: If you want a faithful politics, you will get a politicized faith.
Claybourn’s conclusion troubles me as well. He writes, “My point is simply that the hypocrisy of others is not a legitimate ground to reject the truth that the hypocrite is advocating. Determine your belief in Christianity on its own merits, and not on the misdeeds of your fellow man.”
All of this is true enough. Yet the problem here is not mere hypocrisy. It’s that Haggard’s “truth” is fatally flawed: Being gay is not the problem. No, the closet is the problem. Shall we judge Christianity on its own merits, and not on the acts of hypocrites? Very well: I judge that evangelical Christianity’s treatment of gays and lesbians is in itself the problem, because it offers us nothing beyond the closet.
Openly gay people stumble probably no more and no less than straight people. Closeted people stumble all the time. Constantly. Their whole life is just one gigantic stumble. This is why open gays and lesbians want to do all that we can to help others come out. No one should have to live like that, whatever their faith may be.
We reject both the hypocrisy and the standard to which Haggard held himself. We know not only that Haggard was a hypocrite, but also that he was a follower, however imperfect, of a blinkered, immoral ideal, one whose final destination was not love, but loneliness.
Claybourn used the following analogy to describe Haggard’s problems:
Imagine Subway’s famous Jared. . . going around the country trumpeting healthier Subway sandwhiches. Should he be spotted ordering an oh-so-tempting double quarter pounder with cheese meal at McDonald’s, it shouldn’t detract from the truth of his ad campaigns. Subway sandwhiches really are healthier, no matter how often Jared may steal a bite from McDonald’s.
Claybourn acknowledges that the comparison isn’t perfect, so let me offer another one: Consider a man who sold milk products to Asians — even while he knew, from painful personal experience, that most Asians are lactose intolerant. “Drink milk,” he would insist. “It’s healthy for you!” Some things are healthy for some people. Other things are healthy for others. Lying is healthy for no one.
Haggard has constantly aided and encouraged the closet, even with drooling medieval nonsense like this, which came from a member of his congregation:
Linda had seen with her own eyes the sex demons that make homosexuals rebel against God, and she said they are gruesome; but she did not name them, for she would not “give demons glory.”
. . .She reached across the table and touched my hand. “I have to tell you, the spiritual battle is very real.” We are surrounded by demons, she explained, reciting the lessons she had learned in her small-group studies at New Life. The demons are cold, they need bodies, they long to come inside. People let them in in two different ways. One is to be sinned against. “Molested,” suggested Linda. The other is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You could walk by sin—a murder, a homosexual act—and a demon will leap onto your bones.
I trust that this is not what Claybourn means by Haggard’s “truth.” I’ve known Mr. Claybourn for far too long to think for even a moment that he subscribes to these hateful superstitions. But what, then, is the Christian truth for us?
I don’t know the answer to this question, but I submit that whatever it may be, Haggard has no real truth: He has only fear and contempt of gays and lesbians. He has sinned, not just in his private conduct, which was morally wrong for a supposedly monogamous married man, but also in how he has literally demonized his neighbors. This, and not hypocrisy, is his real moral failing.
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A lesson of the closet
Does Haggard think we are stupid? He has ‘admitted’ to buying drugs…
In some ways I think that the moral failings of the religious boil down to a failure of intellect and a misfiring of imagination. I’m sure that most of them are perfectly capable of rational thought, yet they choose to fall back on the “known” moralities of their religious traditions. This is a fall back, especially in a pluralist democracy, because they are constantly exposed to the public dialogues about morality, but willfully choose to ignore the knowledge of their society in favor of ready-made moralities. It is further a failure of intellect in its simplicity: Religious morality is, more often than not, devoid of all complexity, seeing the world in stark binary terms. There are no difficult moral questions or conundrums, because all is obvious. I like to think of this as a perceived “moral clarity”. I see it often in my students who, in their late teens and early 20s, see the world in these terms. But part of the joy of being a professor is watching the students over the course of a few years come to shatter that clarity and see the world in its complexity and to choose to follow the more difficult paths of moral reasoning that the real world demands. In Christians, this moral clarity is a failure of intellect, a failure to deal with the world as it is and to use their reason to discern moral choices in the world they actually live in, as opposed to the world of their imaginations.
But it is also a failure of imagination. Surely, evangelicals have vivd imaginations, with their horrifying demons jumping into their bones by merely walking by an immoral act. But here the failure is an imagination gone awry, an imagination that, rather than being employed to discover solutions to real problems in the world, has been set on autopilot, to see things that aren’t there. The marvelous result of human brain evolution is that our minds are able to project into the future and imagine a different world than the one we’re in and fix our own world. This mechanism is harnessed and constrained by religious imagination, which says the world as it is is an inevitability, and the solution is obvious and given (e.g., in the sacred text). The religious imagination can no longer practice basic human empathy, because it is no longer capable of taking the role of the Other, because the Other is already known through the religion. That is to say, the religious world has already told them what the Other is, so there is no way to actually employ their imaginations to experience empathy or compassion, which is already clouded by their religious imagination.
Because they choose to ignore their reason and choose to run away from the real world, they are unable either to see homosexuality for what it is (a mere part of human variation (and in my opinion, very likely biological in origin)) nor to see the homosexual as they experience life (the costs of the ‘closet’ and of regular suppression of their basic freedoms). The religious are unable to see or understand the effects that their faulty reasoning and broken imaginations have on their fellow human beings, and so continue to perpetuate a violence, for which they take no responsibility, because they perceive their actions as being Moral and Good, regardless of their consequences.
[...] [Note: I wrote this as a riff on morality after reading a post about Haggard’s hypocrisy over on Positive Liberty, a great libertarian blog. Yes, I read a libertarian blog. I have a great respect for conservatives who are intellectually honest and who work in good faith to make a better, freer democracy. I usually agree with most of their civil liberties arguments—we just part ways on their interpretation of property rights and their view of the purpose of a government.] [...]
Incidentally, Jason, I was wondering if you’d read Kenji Yoshino’s book _Covering_? It’s got some great analyses of the closet that bring some of the more obtuse arguments of queer theory into real democratic practice.
Todd –
First off, welcome to the Positive Liberty commentariat! New commenters all pass through human moderation to prevent spam, but from now on you should be able to post on most subjects moderation-free. (Just don’t try selling us any penis enlargment pills or whatever…) In turn, I look forward to reading your site and commenting as well.
You make some very good points above regarding the failure of imagination and of moral reasoning. It’s exactly what I was trying to get at when I asked evangelicals what truth they might have for gay people outside the closet (and the frankly silly ex-gay movement, which I don’t think that even they believe in sincerely).
They’ll have to find a place for us, eventually, if their claims to being a universal human faith are going to hold up. Moderates and liberals in the Christian tradition are grappling with the issue right now, and conservatives will have to do so in time, too. In particular I wanted to challenge Joshua Claybourn — one of the smartest conservatives I know — to get to work on this pressing moral question.
As to Yoshino’s book, I don’t know it. I’m about halfway through Andrew Sullivan’s most recent, and I’ve got several others I need to tackle in the next few weeks (see the sidebar). But I’m intrigued, and I will have to add it to my list. Bookish as I am, I’ll be sure to read it soon.
I just read via Drudge that the accuser hoped to sway the election for understandable reasons, which I think just goes to further support Jason’s point of the political nature of this story. This will look for bad for the GOP, but mainly to the people who were against ‘em to begin with. It may strengthen the libertarian hand in the party, who tired of the traps and tricks which come with mixing religion & faith, can push for a more “govt hands off” approach.
Todd O: I’d love for you to juxtapose that against the reasons for the moral failings of atheists, because I find this statement “The religious imagination can no longer practice basic human empathy” just appallingly stupid. Perhaps you should update your “rational thought” matrix to include some real-world news. Your arguement against simplicity and clarity is suprisingly…simple, it seems you are still in that intellectual phase where you fascinated by the non-descript “complexity” of everything.
That being said I think you may have a point on part of the Imagination thing (i.e. I’ve always had trouble with CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, the thought of demons constantly planting thoughts in mind and obstacles in life is enough to drive a person crazy). I can see how the religious mindset of Christians can lead to a lack of empathy, I think this is the most popular way that the Media represents Christianity, as a bunch of mean boobs. Many of the churches I’ve been too struggle with the ideas of stigma and compassion.
As to the point of the failure of Christian imagination in accepting out-of-the-closet gays, I don’t think that will ever happen and yet am not sure if I will call that a failure, but I am curious to hear much smarter replies than mine. I just didn’t like the blanket statement made against religious imagination and basic human empathy…
If I may attempt here to speak for Todd, I think what he means by the failure of the religious imagination is really what Andrew Sullivan, in his latest book, terms the fundamentalist approach to religion. Sullivan’s definition of fundamentalism is a bit eccentric; for him it is a question of how “easy” our solutions are to the big questions of life. To the degree that we may answer all challenges with automatic, formulaic answers, we become fundamentalists (whether Christian, Muslim, atheist, or whatever). Sullivan would agree with you, Scof, that it’s wrong to characterize all religious people this way, and I accept that caution here.
So… If the simple, formulaic answer is that gay people are non-entities, that homosexuality is a mere temptation or aberration on the part of people who are “really” heterosexual… well, what’s the better, less pat and formulaic answer? What can a compassionate, decent, humane Christian morality say to gays and lesbians? Any answers?
All I can say is that is an excellent question (Christian imagination and openly gay people) and that my first post was a bit sloppy (I just woke up!) I can’t give a textbook answer to that, but perhaps what I do personally can help illuminate a way forward? As an intellectually conservative Christian, I can say I employ my imagination with quite a bit of friendship, which is so much better than empathy. Hallow’s eve was spent having a beer with a gay friend, and regular episodes of Lost are watched with another, and my love life is shared at times with a lesbian friend, all for the simple enjoyment of their friendship in return. Perhaps the problem with religious imagination is that many more are focused on propogating this imagination rather than applying it themselves. I like the sentiment expressed here:
Scof,
I did paint religion with a broad brush in my original post, namely because I see religion as a particular kind of social system that includes contradictory parts. So Jason is probably right in narrowing my focus down to conservative religious thought, which comes with ready-made moral conclusions about other human beings, so no thought is necessary. You always already know the moral worth of other human beings made on your religious rubric, and no empathetic move on your part is necessary. Indeed, I would argue that in its extreme form, this allows for the dehumanization of the other, such that violence against the other is not only acceptable but expected (extreme examples: muslims pulling down walls on homosexuals; or christians killing ob-gyns).
By empathy, I mean the more narrowly construed cognitive ability to ‘role take’ that allows humans to imagine the world from the perspective of an other. When you already know what the world is supposed to look like, you no longer need to empathize (in that sense) with the other, because they are already wrong.
Of course liberal and moderate religious thinkers are often deeply ethical and focus all of their attention on the ethical move. But this is not a necessary outcome of religious thinking, just one of the possible outcomes of religious thought. The problem I’m seeing is more accurately attributed to conservative religious thought, but I think the seeds for moral clarity are present in all religious thought, because of its presumption of supernatural origins of truth, which can always potentially point the believer away from the world as it is.
Per atheist morality, I would certainly say they are forms of atheist nihilism and anarchism that become deeply immoral, but I would argue they do so from a different failure of imagination and of intellect than the religious failures. As I considered your question, I would say the failure comes not from having moral clarity, but from transforming their view of humanity to an instrumentality, where humans become means rather than ends. But I’d have to think on it more. But as with religion, this is only one possible outcome of atheist thought; and i think that the possibility of a rational and continually “present” encounter with the world-as-it-is is much more likely to render moral results than a meaning-system that always points the practitioner away from the world and toward a transcendent end which does not exist, but which believers believe they must enact.
Per complexity, I would argue first that you don’t know my own thought well enough to make a judgment about whether or not I’m ’stuck’ in a fetishization of complexity. Perhaps in further interactions we can revisit the issue. I would say here that I was making a much more narrow argument which was that the moral simplicity afforded by (conservative) religious belief is a dramatic truncation of the actual moral complexities of the lived world, and lends itself to easy moral answers that are as likely to have immoral consequences as moral ones.
that’s much better :)